The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  Stan was not interested in any of this. I asked him if he had read White Fang. He said yes, he did not like that one as much. I pointed out that in White Fang, White Fang domesticated himself because he realised that hanging out with people was easier than living in the wild (symbiosis). Dogs live with humans for mutual aid too. There were obvious inconsistencies to Stan’s dog-lore logic.

  The original bona fide Mountain Men were self-sufficient trapper/explorer types who lived alone in the North American wilderness. Their numbers were highest in the 1800s during the period of western expansion and homesteading and they were mainly found in the Rockies. They were drawn to the western wild by its virgin lands and the good old challenge to their manliness. They traded with the natives and often took native wives. This was pre-Jack London.

  They are thought of as honourable and chivalrous loners with a high moral code. When the fur trade began to fail, owing to over-trapping and the silk trade, many Mountain Men had to get jobs as army scouts, guides and settlers, bringing the crowds of homesteaders into the wild land they had opened up through the Emigrant Trails they had established. They initiated the corrosion of their precious wilderness. A memory of Mountain Men still lingers in the portrait of the Real Modern American Man: resourceful, masculine, hardy, provider and free.

  My driver Ron told me that the modern Mountain Men living on the frontiers now, in cabins standing on the wilderness, get annoyed at other wilderness stander-on-ers, but they make the money they need to live as Mountain Men by working a few months a year on the pipeline. Really it does not matter if the pipeline fucks the future eventually, as long as the Mountain Men can live their lives alone in a pristine wilderness. They rely on machines like guns and snowploughs. But they pride themselves on their otherwise completely and utterly and totally unadulterated independence.

  Stan is what you might call an environmental chauvinist. Like he thinks it is his job to open the door for nature. And when he becomes the warden he will become the benevolent King of Denali. Stan is a Real Modern American Man. But if running into the wild is so often a wounded retreat from societal constraints and oppressions, then shouldn’t anyone but straight white men be doing it more?

  BUT HE’S A HIPPY, HOW CAN HE ALSO BE A MISOGYNIST?

  I have had to rein in the indignant feelings I have towards Stan because, as much as I hate to admit it, I need him. Maybe sometimes symbiosis is taken up reluctantly, calculatedly. I keep him sweet by acting dumb and playing up to his idea of himself. There are ways to have covert fun with him, though. For example, I had been thinking about all the parallels between him and Chris McCandless and about what Ron had said about that phenomenon. So I told Stan he reminded me of Chris McCandless.

  ‘Chris McCandless? Fucking Chris McCandless?’

  ‘The guy that died in the bus?’

  ‘I know who fucking Chris McCandless is. You think I could work in Denali and not know who Chris McCandless is? Why do you think I remind you of him?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Only slightly. Just, you know, coming to Alaska from the lower forty-eight and being all resourceful and everything?’

  ‘Chris McCandless was a suicidal idiot. A fucking greenhorn. Any true survivalist would have known to take a map and not go into the bush without knowledge. He died because of his own stupidity. And now his little cult wastes my uncle’s time, they waste Alaskan taxes, and the little piece of “wild” he went into is now a well-trodden mecca. Kids drown trying to cross the river to get there. Broken kids with stupid fantasies about how the wild will complete them.’

  Stan is not even Alaskan. The main difference between Stan and Chris McCandless is that Stan has had the luck to not have died yet. I wonder what the Athabaskans and the Eskimos have to say about guys like Stan.

  Stan is also a lesser Mountain Man; he is a wannabe. He lives in a house! Made from bricks! In a town! There is a post office! And a health centre! The ratio in his fridge of shop-bought convenience over foraged/killed is 9:1! There are degrees, and more evolved Mountain Men get points for living in a house they built themselves in a place where, if their appendix burst, they would die.

  I have made a list and am sourcing equipment for my trip from the outdoors shops in the town. Stan saw my list and tutted and added some things to it and I let him explain the particular merit of these items to me. I have to nurture his ego because he found me a cabin and he said he will lend me a gun and not tell his uncle that I am out there without a permit. Part of me wonders why he wants to help me when he does not seem to like me. The fact seems to be that he revels so much in his superior authority that he will subject me to the challenge he imagines me so unfit for, sadistically, just to prove himself right. He seems to find me amusing. He wants to see me fail.

  I need to make my pack as light as it can be so I will remove all unnecessary items and leave them at Stan’s, seeing as I have to come back to return the gun anyway. He is taking my things hostage as a kind of deposit on the gun.

  REGRET IN RATS, ALTRUISM IN BONOBOS

  Before casting out I had to begin neatening up all of my frayed edges in order to disengage smoothly. I have told my parents that I am going to volunteer on a community project in an Eskimo village with no phone signal or internet for a few weeks because I do not know how else to put it to them. I sent them a link to a website that organises such excursions to make it more believable.

  Then I Skyped Larus to tell him bye for now and to vent some of my pent-up frustration at Stan, but he took things in a very different direction and now I wish I had not at all. He was worrying about how we had not spoken in a while again. Then he got all strange about why he thought that was.

  ‘Does Sam not approve of our little chats? My girlfriend doesn’t like me talking to you so much either.’

  It was the way he said this, like so nail-pickingly nonchalant as to be glaringly pointed. I suppose I realised the conversation was going to go one of two ways from there. I guess part of me had known without wanting to all along that this had been building, like a bird sidling over for crumbs so slowly you don’t even notice until, oh, it is there.

  ‘Your girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes, my American girlfriend Jose.’

  I involuntarily said that he kept that one quiet.

  ‘I’m just surprised, that’s all. That we’ve been talking for so long and I didn’t know that about you.’

  ‘There are lots of things you don’t know about me.’

  This made my legs twitch because I did not know what to do with myself. I turned off the webcam so he could not see me flapping my hands. Neither of us said anything for an uncomfortably long time. I was unsure how to navigate my way back out of it, before anything said became an answer I did not want to hear to a question I had not even asked.

  ‘She finds it strange that I talk so much to a girl young enough to be my daughter.’

  Please stop talking. I could not think of anything to say. He waited, then carried on.

  ‘I explain to her that you’re a very interesting young lady and that I enjoy helping you with your project.’

  I want to cry. I try to make light. From here, maybe, I could back-paddle. I ask if she knows I am a friend of Urla’s and pointedly call him Uncle Larus.

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s just weird, don’t you think?’

  I don’t dare ask why some more. I tell him I have to go because Stan is on his way through the door. I tried to make it convincing but do not remember what I said. As he hangs up the camera freezes and lingers on his face for three seconds. His left eye, no, right for him, left for me, is half closed where he got caught off guard.

  I realised that it had been instinct twinging all along whenever I thought of Urla, and the way she changed so totally when we were the three of us, and how she emailed less and less. I had ignored it because I was stubborn to prove that it did not have to be like that, that two people can span a gender gap and a generationa
l gap and have a level of understanding without any funny business, like a kind of apprenticeship arrangement.

  And how Sam had put it, giving me a look like ‘yeah, really’ when he asked what Larus had to do with anything. And I got pissed at him for insinuating that I was being stupid and naive and that a person I held to be a friend and mentor was not just that. And Larus doing the same of him, the two of them like male narwhals clashing their horns together, telepathically. And it is like that but grosser still because he is old enough to be my old dad or even almost my very young grandfather. I got annoyed at Sam for denying me platonic camaraderie in such a reductive way, but god, he was right after all.

  And thinking of Sam and how I got angry at him, well, it makes my stomach flip and it also makes me squirm, like if I think of being back there and the last day and our plain shunning of each other I feel shit and I might have done a shit thing by behaving like that but so did he and I do not want to think about it, best really just to forget about it all. It’s not like we will ever see each other again anyway.

  And I am trying hard not to but if I do think about it, I can’t quite get my head around why it got so suddenly weird. It was after he tried to get me to stay and I did not because of course I had to carry on. As though he was hurt that I wanted to leave and carry on without him.

  Left behind during the Apollo missions were all of the astronauts’ wives and children. This is perhaps more significant during the Apollo missions than on modern-day missions because they were so rushed what with the race on, all the nationalistic pressure, and so much could go wrong so easily. So the wives left behind had to go to lift-off with all their children in tow and smile for the media cameras and wave and say WE ARE PROUD, THRILLED AND HAPPY and watch their husbands and their children’s fathers and their monetary means of living shoot up into the sky in a hunk of aluminium and disappear into a dimension they might not have even been completely sure existed, maybe thought of in a very abstract way like my mum does.

  And if I had been an Apollo wife I would probably have thought fuck you in a lot of ways. Fuck you, husband, for wanting to risk giving up on our marriage bed and the beautiful faces of our children and my great cooking and our cosy life and our vows to stay together and try to see out this one life to its fullest, for some idea of eternal glory, and yeah, you will be remembered for all of history but the most you will remember of me is how I stopped sleeping at night and started getting craggy and how you eventually left me for a young fan girl and I had to spend the rest of the one life I have on this planet angry at another planet for taking you away. And maybe I would have liked to have gone up there with you too but I was just not allowed and on some level I am just jealous that you get the chance to abandon it all and be seen as a selfless hero and not a selfish egomaniac, and I do not, will not ever, I have to stay here and dress all our children for school.

  Most of the marriages of the moonwalkers did not last through the strain of fame and affairs and, probably, some feeling of comedown on the part of the astronauts, a feeling of life having peaked and all nuclear-family-life-events paled in comparison; the births and the first words and the graduations and the first grandchildren, all the prototypical life-milestones. You would think they could have sent up bachelors to be fair to all the future absent-fathered children, but of course the astronauts had to be role models, they had to be figureheads of nice productive nuclear families. Even if there were other more suitable candidates (single and childless females included).

  So not to say that Sam is like my sore wife but that maybe in a very small way, on a very micro level, he felt a similar kind of anger-at-abandonment. And I get that. But historically it is women that have to deal with chronic desertion (I see you, Linda Salzman) and this is exactly what I am working against so Sam can just deal with it. I am doing this for all the bitter left-behind wives of history! (Close relatives of the commonly found dragged-around woman.)

  Online a little envelope flashed at me from him. Maybe I miss him and maybe I wish he had made an effort to come with me or something but ha-ha! that would not do. He did not take me seriously. Neither does Stan and even Larus didn’t in the end, all that interest just feigned for an interest in something else. But it is my whole reason for being right now. And if I get disheartened then they all win and I let down all of the left-behind wives of history.

  ATLAS SHRUGGED

  The more I think about the deal with Larus the more frustrated I get and the less I blame myself. I had come to see us as a kind of master and student, this is a well-established trope, and none of those guys ever had problems with sexual dynamics. Like Plato and Socrates, Harry and Dumbledore, Yoda and Skywalker. I thought Larus was in on this too.

  I can’t tell if I am noticing weirdness in retrospect because I am on to him or if I am seeing things where they were not because he has taken on a new face for me. Sigmund Freud, the phallusobsessed psychoanalyst, said people cannot hear or see things that do not fit with the way they see the world or themselves. Anyway, it is going to make this disappearing into the wilderness thing all the more easy to throw myself into.

  The park centre that Stan works in is Denali National Park, and within it is the Denali Wilderness Area. At the far north-east corner of this is the trail that McCandless took and where the bus he died in still is now, actually on the border of parklands. I will not be anywhere near it but it is strange to think of it existing across the tundra from where I plan to stay. As much as Stan despises him I feel a bit of a kinship with him. Like we are both allied idealists. We differ on a lot of things; for example, I will not be sending out overdramatic maybe-forever-goodbyes by postcard and phone call. I have not even told my parents what I am going to be doing because I know it would worry them sick. I do not intend to be stupid with my life either but I have read my Thoreau too, well, some anyway, and I get what McCandless was trying to find by going out there. It was a claiming of autonomy and a rite of passage that I want to go through too and I bet he died happy doing it.

  The area I will go to is trail-less. I can get a lift to the visitors’ centre with Stan, where I can catch a bus to drop me on the road that leads through the park. Then I can hike out from the road for a long day and hopefully arrive at the cabin that Stan has earmarked on the map for me by late evening.

  Part of me says you can’t trust Stan not to tell and another part says you can trust his obsession to see how far you can be pushed, to see you fail and a small part of me says is this a girlfriend test and if I pass I become worthy in his eyes of his tolerance which for him equates to kinship? If so, gross.

  When he dropped me he said, ‘So I’ll see you in around three days’ time, then,’ grinning in a way that was almost flirty. I laughed sweetly and he said, ‘No, really, what’s the limit past which if you haven’t turned up on my doorstep to bring the gun back I send the search parties out after you?’

  ‘Five weeks, please.’

  ‘Okay, so honestly, why are you doing this? Did something bad happen to you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, usually that’s why people do things like this, they are running away.’

  ‘Why do you go camping, Stan? Did something bad happen to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But like, you don’t even come from a place that would prepare you for this. You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

  ‘I thought you said you came from Florida?’

  ‘You know bears in Denali maul twenty people to death every year, right?’

  Then I smiled at him and passed him my Collected Works of Jack London with all of the feminist and socialist stories and passages earmarked and annotated for his consideration. I know he is lying about the bear statistic because I already looked it up.

  What happened to me? Nothing. I think that that is the point. I need to experience something visceral to placate the hunger. And I am sick of the men that want to keep it from me. Maybe yo
u could say patriarchy happened to me. So like a dog cast out into the rain maybe I do leave, to go cry myself a big fat fucking two-hearted river. To sleep in an open field! To travel west! To walk freely at night!

  INTO THE WILDNESS

  GOING FERAL

  She stood out vivid and present in the temperature-controlled half-light of her glass coffin, upright and at full human stature, her cloak hung to give the impression of a human figure underneath. She radiated epiphany. She filled the room with a smell like the seal-fur blankets Naaja’s mother gave us and an undertone of perhaps honey. It was strangely familiar and pleasant, not at all sickly. Her staff with the two-pronged antlers, still velvety with fur, sashed to it. On little fronds she had tiny bird skulls and shells. If she weren’t so very still they would click together like a cartoon skeleton falling to pieces. Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.

  In the park centre where I waited for the bus, there were displays on the natural and cultural history of the park. I floated around the room; there was movement from nothing but me. Time had stopped, looking exactly about to happen. There were irides-cent wings clamped open, feigning flight, above italicised names I could not get my tongue around. There were eyes, but we had taken the real ones out to put glass ones in and they stared from inside mounted skins, on placarded walls, from under glass domes, contorted majestically on rocks, on wooden plates, in awkward glory. There were tiny mottled eggs in counterfeit nests that looked as though they were about to burst out into life. And there were Dall sheep horns, a grizzly’s paw pad, skulls which though dry had all once held tiny brains, capillaries and veins.

  There were artefacts of the original human inhabitants too: Athabaskan shawls, pipes and pottery. A model of a traditional toboggan and a crusty, worn dog harness. Grainy photographs of vacant-looking Eskimo men and women stood limpidly side by side with priests in robes. The plaque said missionaries won their trust with magical gifts of tobacco and medicine.