Four Quarters of Light (11 page)

‘Okay, Pat, we want you to steer us back before you have a coronary,' Mary shouted. Nevertheless, she continued trying to explain to me just how hot a potato the pipeline was with everyone in Alaska.

‘Yes, and with a lot of know-nothings who don't live here,' Pat injected, refusing to allow the subject to be put to bed. But neither his wife nor I was prepared to pursue the matter. Permafrost, global warming and a devious but all-powerful oildollar were bigger issues than the three of us could resolve. The river course was, in any case, bringing us into Fairbanks again.

Chena riverside land is prime real estate, and the size and flamboyance of the homes confirmed it. Many of them had their own small jetties, and the others, not to be outdone, had small floatplanes moored at the end of their properties. It was an astonishing change from only an hour ago in the wilderness, where everything was so sensual and mysterious. Here, the senses became cluttered with mundane things such as the backyards of these solid but sumptuous homes.

As we paddled on into the heart of the city Mary confessed that she was a writer herself and had penned several short stories but was now working on a novel. I was keen to know what an Alaskan writer has to write about, and asked her. Her best story was the tale of an old Indian woman looking back on her life. The
novel, which Mary was still working on, had as its overall theme the emergence from loneliness and finding a new sense of purpose. Listening to Mary and quietly comparing my own limited experience of Alaska, I could well understand how a reflection on a life lived, loneliness, and finding renewal and redemption in a new, unexpected relationship were themes that seemed somehow synonymous with the expanding emptiness outside the townships and the cities.

But in another way they also seemed close to Mary's own personal experience. I suppose all writers consciously write out of their own life as a way of fixing it or loosening the hold of the past to renew and secure the future. I was sure it was so with Mary. But the thought caused me to ask of myself what I might be writing had I lived here as long as Mary. I was sensing the smallness of the huge place. In winter, especially, it physically forces you to live a confined life. Eight months of darkness must take its toll on one's emotional growth. People are forced together as a survival strategy, but if they had no well-developed cultural code and relationship with the living environment as the indigenous peoples had, then existing here could be precarious indeed.

I took the moment to ask Mary, ‘If it was possible, how would you sum up Alaska?'

She turned to me, paused for a moment, then said, ‘Everything survives and exists here on a very thin foundation.' Her eloquence was profound, yet I knew it wasn't a phrase learned from some book. There was a ring of quiet authenticity about it.

That night, with the kids in bed and our cabin humming with heat from the great log fire, Audrey and I discussed my trip down the Chena. Audrey had been spending much of her time playing fetch and carry back and forth to the town with the boys while I was off on my excursions. We had not had a lot of time to talk until now, but I wanted to keep her filled in. I spoke about the trip and my companions, explaining what a pleasantly odd couple they were, the scientist and the writer. Inevitably we moved on to discuss the bush, particularly my feeling that something other than the trees existed there and that you could feel its presence.
Surprisingly, Audrey concurred with me. ‘Sometimes I hate this place,' she said. ‘It's those black spruce. They're creepy. There's something very deathly about them. They remind me of that horrible part of
Sleeping Beauty
where the castle is surrounded by an impenetrable wall of vicious black thorns. But it's not just that you don't know what's out there watching you – a bear, a wolf, a bull moose, anything. It's like you're always looking over your shoulder. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.'

Without mentioning it, I picked up on her sense of being watched. ‘Do you think it's only animals that might be watching you?' I asked.

Audrey returned my question with one of her own. ‘What else are you thinking of, weirdo ghosts?'

I wasn't sure how to answer. I didn't mean a ghost, but I did mean something else, beyond empirical definition. Audrey was curious and pushed me on the subject. As I wasn't sure of the ground I was standing on I began by explaining how the native peoples believed that the natural world and the supernatural world were one, and that they had a set of beliefs and concepts for explaining the supernatural world and even manipulating it. Men could form a partnership with these spiritual forces.

‘What are you trying to say, Brian?'

I confessed again that I wasn't sure, but emphasized that these same beliefs were logical, consistent and powerful. ‘Maybe I mean it's that power our cultural upbringing denies that we sense out there,' I said. ‘And we are apprehensive because we don't know how to respond to it.' I knew I wasn't unearthing the answers we were both looking for. For a moment I related how Pat had talked to me full of facts, figures, scientific data and logical projections. Pat's world was explained through rationalist and scientific means. He had been paddling the backwaters of the outback for years but he had no concept of the mystery of the prying eyes that make your hair stand on the back of your neck, and if he had it didn't seem to have expanded his scientific mindset. ‘I'm not saying he was wrong, he simply understands differently. But his logic doesn't have the power that the native believes in and chooses to co-operate with.'

My mind was still turning over its impressions of the boreal forest from my aluminium canoe. My innocence and optimism about tracking down the ghost of Jack London had so far only provoked an encounter with some other kind of ghost, which I had weakly described as some kind of powerful presence. Perhaps I was learning my first lesson about Alaska, that things are not always what you have chosen to see. The problem with trying to encounter a place vicariously, through the artistic impressions of someone else, is that you sometimes discover that their imagination creates an articulate world, all neatly mortised together in their fiction. The reality is always less well finished. Mary's statement about things in Alaska existing and surviving on a very thin foundation was echoing in my head. Expectation, I resolved, was a dangerous thing.

That night I went to sleep expecting to dream of monsters in fairyland and those deformed black spruce trees with skeletal boughs and gorgon-like black limbs constantly pointing me in the wrong direction and whispering all sorts of curses and ill omens on me. But it didn't happen. I slept dreamlessly. The forest, it seemed, had not turned against me but smothered me in the lullaby of its embrace.

Whatever trepidations and dangers I had avoided in my sleep Jack brought to me in the morning. ‘Dad, are we going on a bear hunt?' he repeated as he jerked me out of my forest of the night. I had read Helen Oxenbury's story
We're Going on a Bear Hunt
to him many times in preparation for our departure to Alaska, hinting that we too were going on our special kind of bear hunt. Jack adored the story, but by now I was utterly tired of the book's journey to discover the bear with the shiny wet nose, big furry ears and two goggly eyes, and then having to do the whole trip in reverse with the bear tearing after us. But I had always insisted that the bear was not a scary bear. In fact, the bear had pursued the family not to frighten but to befriend them. Because they allowed themselves to be frightened they didn't understand
the bear. The closing illustration in the storybook reveals a lonely bear walking dejectedly along a dim foreshore with the midnight sun creating a shimmering path out into the sea and the waves lapping like liquid silver around the creature's feet. I had become weary of the book, but reading it yet again now to Jack as we both curled up on the big settee, it came alive, for we were in the land of the bear and the midnight sun. Soon we too would be traipsing through all kinds of wilderness, searching for something as benign as a mystical bear just waiting to become our friend. Already I was beginning to believe that
We're Going on a Bear Hunt
had become our totem story. I wanted to think that for Jack it had a similar significance as
The Call of the Wild
had for me. Certainly I could see it now as an extended fairy-tale metaphor of Jack London's man-killing Chilkoot Pass, which had to be conquered through a terrifying ordeal before Alaska could be felt and understood.

After breakfast we got ready to go into town, climbing into the
Pequod
and rolling down into Fairbanks. Audrey was going to drop me off and we agreed to meet up back home. As I got up to leave, I explained to the boys that I was going to meet a friend and would see them later.

‘When are we going to find the bears?' Jack asked.

‘Soon,' I said. ‘We'll begin our bear hunt very soon.'

‘In the car-house?' Jack quizzed.

I smiled at Audrey. ‘Yes, we're going on a bear hunt very, very soon . . . in the car-house.'

While walking towards the restaurant where I planned to meet Debra, my guide into the far north, I thought over how my son's innocent lack of vocabulary had rechristened the
Pequod
, erasing all its dramatic and portentous import. It struck me then how his young instincts received the world as it was, without overloading it with all kinds of imaginary clutter. Something in me told me that Jack and Cal would not be as apprehensive about the wilderness as both Audrey and I were, though we only hinted at it to each other.

Debra drove me to a restaurant outside the city on the banks of the Chena. I sat and watched the heavy mass of water,
remembering how our canoe had moved in it, dreamy and idle. I thought of Baudelaire's contemplative lines, ‘When shall we set sail for happiness'. Yet the moment the lines came into my head I rejected happiness as totally inappropriate to my sense of what was waiting out there.

As strangers do at a first (proper) meeting, Debra and I exchanged banal conversations about books and travel and writing, and obviously about Alaska. I confessed I wasn't exactly sure what I expected from this place. I had a head full of halfbaked notions that were pressure-cooking away inside me. She had spent many years working in hospital and community health projects in the north of the country and expressed a real affection for the Eskimo people and their way of life. She spoke without a hint of romanticism or naivety. I studied her as she spoke.

Her face was round and her colouring sallow. Her skin was smooth and unmarked and showed no signs of the years she had spent in the outback of Alaska. Her voice was soft by nature, I thought, rather than disposition. But another part of me suspected that she lived a life less hectic than others and therefore didn't have to project her personality on to the world. I found it very difficult to put an age on Debra, but her mane of ravenblack hair, flowing straight and shiny over her shoulders and down her back, compelled me to wonder if she herself was part Inuit or had some indigenous Indian blood in her. I didn't ask if it was so, and I'm not sure why. There was something mysterious about her, something hidden or perhaps withheld, that intrigued me. I didn't know what it was so I couldn't address it either with myself or with her. It was as if a memory of something or someone was surfacing and submerging as our conversation evolved.

‘We will have to cross the Kotzebue Sound then snake in and out of the sloughs and inlets along the Bering Sea coast towards the Chukchi Sea until we find Lena and Charlie, the old Eskimo shaman we shall be staying with,' Debra informed me. ‘It would be hopeless to try this on our own.'

Suddenly I was drowning in the strangeness of the places she mentioned, their extreme remoteness and isolation, the fact that
I would be living at close quarters with people I knew nothing about and whose world was so utterly alien to my own. My unspoken panic must have signalled itself to my guide, and she threw me a lifeline. ‘It's a very different life than that which most of us are used to, but after what you've been through things shouldn't bother you.'

I grasped the lifeline quickly, and nodded, full of mock macho indifference. ‘I suppose not!'

Before I could take a breath she asked simply, ‘What is it you're looking for anyway, Brian?'

Maybe it was the way she used my Christian name, combined with the starkness of the question, but her words caught me completely off-guard. I looked at her coppery face and her placid dark eyes. There was neither animation nor a hint of a question in her eyes. It was as if she hadn't asked it, as if it had come from somewhere else, or maybe it wasn't a question but rather a statement. In any case she had caught me adrift and I answered like a stranger in a strange town who has been asked for directions. ‘I don't really know!' I spluttered. Then, to cover my confusion, I stumbled through my lexicon of interests, finally homing in on the world of the Eskimo and the Alaskan landscape, with its mercurial climate, its vast emptiness, its eternal beauty and its ever-present silence. It must all lead to a contemplation of something other than the world we saw with our eyes. How closely did the lifestyle of the Eskimo relate to their spiritual understanding? She informed me that native peoples rarely talk with outsiders of such things, partly because they feel outsiders would not understand and they do not want to offend, but mainly because the spirit world is an everyday reality directing and informing their lives. ‘Anyway,' she said, definitively moving the discussion on, ‘the spirit world is something you find for yourself and you share with them if you can, and if they will.' I listened, spooked by how intuitively she had honed in on what I was stumbling around.