State by State

by Matt Weiland

  When I give it a go, I am extremely conscious of her staring at me. In this subsistence environment I am trying to fillet as close to the bone as possible. Laurie frowns at what I’ve done and takes the ulok away from me.

  “Too much meat,” she says.

  “I was trying not to waste.”

  “Too much meat,” she repeats.

  “That one’s pretty good, isn’t it?” I say, holding up my second fish.

  “It’ll dry,” she says. She stares down at the pink-orange mess of meat and bones that has accumulated at our feet. We are literally up to our ankles in lox.

  “In the old days,” Laurie says, “nothing went to waste. We used to dry the heads and feed ‘em to the sled dogs in winter.” She looks at me struggling with my third salmon and softens. “My mother tried to teach me how to make boots out of seal skin. She used whale muscle to make the thread. It took forever. I told her I wasn’t going to do it! And she said, ‘If you don’t learn, your children will never have boots!’” Laurie lets out a big laugh. Her teeth are speckled with gold fillings. “I never did learn,” she says.

  We continue cutting in silence. As we’re getting ready to go up to dinner, a skiff pulls up to the dock. A woman is at the wheel and she wears a bright red-and-white Grant Aviation jacket. Laurie’s mouth drops open as she rises and waves.

  “Oh, thank God,” she says, half to herself.

  The new arrival comes down the gangplank to the fish camp. The Waskas’ youngest daughter, Roberta, is a big-shouldered girl, with a loud and pleasant laugh. The Waskas seem to give her a wide berth.

  Inside the neat blue house, a wood stove burning, we all sit down to the salmon Ray Waska, Sr., has grilled. He has used a native recipe that involves a fair amount of Lowry’s Seasoning Salt. Ketchup is served with the meal. Roberta squeezes in next to me on the bench.

  A beer would go well with the meal. But it’s illegal to possess alcohol of any kind in Yup’ik territory. A fifth of Jack Daniel’s goes for $150 on the black market. With no toast possible to mark the presence of a guest from far away, Ray Sr. talks in general terms.

  “We’re happy to have you here, Paul. It’s a shame you can’t stay longer. See more of our people.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Next time you come,” Ray Sr. says, “you need to go up river a way. See the real Eskimos. We’re all mixed blood around here. But up there you’ll see the real classic Eskimo look. Little nose, round face.”

  I look at Ray Sr. and see a man with a little nose and a round face.

  “But all people are the same,” he says. “That’s what I believe, anyway.”

  The conversation continues along these lines. Differences are described between peoples. I am told how the dog Romanoff got his name—he was born in the village of Romanoff, a settlement founded and abandoned by Russians. Finally, Roberta, bored by the conversation she’s heard too many times, turns to me.

  “Wanna go outside and see my brother’s grave?” she says.

  “Okay.”

  Roberta lights up a cigarette and blows smoke out of the corner of her mouth. Her big Grant Aviation jacket makes her look like a pilot and makes me feel like a stewardess. She stubs out the cigarette and I follow her into the woods. There is a tidy grave with a cross in an arrangement that reminds me of the graves of the rural Orthodox in provincial Russia. She lights up another cigarette.

  “So are you working for Grant Aviation?”

  “Naw,” Roberta says. “I mean, I used to.”

  “Got tired of it?”

  A pause, a foot shuffle, and then, “Actually, I just got out of being incarcerated.”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, over in Bethel.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. A girl started a fight with me and I had to finish it.”

  “At least you won.”

  She gives me a wink. “Also, my friend got caught selling alcohol.”

  Crises are shared in the Yup’ik Nation, and while I was out at the Waskas a pickup truck in the town of St. Mary’s went off the road and two of the teenagers inside were killed.

  “Now there’s gonna be eight suicides,” Jac Gadwill told me the day after I’d returned from the fish camp. He looked as if he had not slept. It was unclear if it was the deaths that had kept him up or the Arctic summer sun, pouring in the windows of the bunkhouse all night long. “It’s true,” Jac said. “You’ll see.”

  We are seated aboard a tiny airplane, clouds gathering in the sky above. The same pilot I had peed off the back stoop with starts up the plane. The readout on the navigation system says, no USABLE POSITION. DEAD RECKONING ON.

  As soon as the plane leaves the ground, Jac falls asleep. En route to comfort the parents of the dead teenagers in St. Mary’s, we stop in the village of Kotlik, one of Kwikpak’s smaller satellite fishing stations. Jac awakes and sprints out of the plane the moment we come to a halt. We hop on two waiting ATVs. Jac has instituted an electronic time card system that he believes will make paying the Yup’ik more efficient. But the people in Kotlik haven’t been able to get the system going, and our visit is evidently going to be a bit of a dressing down.

  Kotlik is even more isolated than Emmonak, but you can see where this roadless outpost could soon become Emmonak-sized with all its associated traffic problems. Bare heating pipes that lead off a central generator sprout into prongs along a tundra boardwalk that edges each house. Some of the prongs dead end and are clearly meant to one day connect to houses that have not yet been built. My ATV driver, just back from Iraq (he liked it a lot!) remembers that when he was a child, berries could be gathered in springtime off the side of the boardwalk. Now, the town has grown beyond his recognition and a haul of many miles into the bush is required if berries are to be gathered in any number.

  We pull up to a new loading dock at the side of the river. Jac points to an older, dilapidated dock nearby. “I built that one out of scraps a few years ago. Got weathered in for three days while I was doing it. Slept on the floor of that trailer. No food.”

  He looks around and squints toward a field in the distance. “Now we got it so we can get a Herc in here and fly it out to Seattle with twenty thousand pounds of fresh kings. Get it to New York in a day.”

  Soon we are back on the airplane headed toward St. Mary’s. The cloud ceiling has fallen considerably, and Jac peers through the windscreen at the dull landscape ahead.

  “We ain’t gonna make it,” he says.

  “We might make it,” the pilot says, and dips the plane down into a patch of smoother air.

  Jac lowers his head and mutters, “We ain’t gonna make it.”

  Suddenly he looks inexpressibly tired. A tiredness that seems to seep out of his bones and into mine. For a while Jac thought he was in his mid to late fifties, but recently, at the Boston Seafood Show, a colleague who had known him for most of his many years as an Alaska fish trader added things up and pointed out that he must be sixty.

  “Do you really need to do all this?” I ask him.

  “I tell ya,” Jac says, “I made a million dollars in a day once. Other times, I say I came to Alaska with $600 in my pocket and it’s taken me twenty years to make back my $600.” Then a pause. “But no, I guess I did all right in the end. I guess I’m kind of doing it for this,” he says pointing at his heart. “See, I’m a Catholic and I kinda think that people when they end their life should have done something worthwhile.” He grows silent and looks out the window, and then mutters, “But this thing is all-consuming.”

  “I’m sorry, folks,” the pilot says. “We aren’t gonna make it.”

  “Knew it,” Jac says under his breath.

  The plane banks low and hard. We sit in silence until the now-familiar town of Emmonak comes back into view. “Better to be here than halfway from there,” Jac says.

  Back in the airport shed the Grant Aviation flight schedule has been completely upended and we learn that my flight to Anchorage left hours before it was suppo
sed to. But after a quick conversation, and a wink from Jac, the platinum blond dispatcher reroutes me via Bethel.

  I gather up my bags and make my way toward a waiting airplane. Jac reaches out and unexpectedly gives me a massive hug.

  “Damn, I tell you, Paul,” he says, shaking his head, “you look good here. You could make the cut. I could mentor you.”

  I feel a strange flutter in my heart and laugh. I shake Jac’s hand and climb aboard the plane. We take off abruptly, as all small planes do—a comforting feeling of control you don’t have aboard the big jets. A feeling that makes me think, as we pass over the harsh rock mountains that separate the Yukon flood plain from the civilization to the south, In a pinch, I could do it. I could fly this plane.

  ARIZONA

  CAPITAL Phoenix

  ENTERED UNION 1912 (48th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME Possibly from the O’odham Indian word for “little spring”

  NICKNAME Grand Canyon State

  MOTTO DitatDeus (“God enriches”)

  RESIDENTS Arizonan or Arizonian

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 8

  STATE BIRD cactuswren

  STATE FLOWER flower of saguaro cactus

  STATE TREE paloverde

  STATE SONG “Arizona”

  LAND AREA 113,635 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Yavapai Co., 55 mi. ESE of Prescott

  POPULATION 5,939,292

  WHITE 75.5%

  BLACK 3.1%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 5.0%

  ASIAN 1.8%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 25.3%

  UNDER 18 26.6%

  65 AND OVER 13.0%

  MEDIAN AGE 34.2

  ARIZONA

  Lydia Millet

  I was living in the West Village, walking to work in the Flatiron building, and a couple of months past my thirtieth birthday when I decided, almost overnight, to quit my comfortable job and leave New York City for the desert.

  At first I hedged my bets, both claiming and believing I planned to return a couple of months later after a brief hiatus. I had lived in the Southwest for a short time after college and felt enchanted by the landscape; Tucson was home to my favorite conservation group, a rabble-rousing, litigious bunch whose activist founder would shortly be written up in The New Yorker as a cross between St. Francis of Assisi and Jesse James. I figured I’d volunteer there.

  It would be a temporary stint; my boyfriend of seven years was still in our shared apartment on 11th Street, a couple of blocks from the Hudson River, and I loved him. New York was a city I knew well and was fond of. Most of my closest friends lived there—all those who didn’t live in LA, anyway—as well as, seemingly, ninety-five percent of the writers in America and their agents and publishers and the momentous, entertaining hubbub of a driven, self-important arts culture. I had worked hard throughout my twenties, even back to my teens, to become a novelist who was part of that culture.

  But just a few days after I got to the desert, on impulse, I bought a house.

  Enormous, thirty-foot saguaro cacti stood guard around the house with their multiple skyward-pointing arms and noisy bird holes; there were washes where small rivers ran through the sand in monsoon season, groves of palo verde trees with velvety green bark and shimmering yellow flowers, prickly pear and barrel cactus, creosote bushes. To the west, east, and south were jagged mountain ranges called the Sky Islands, sharp, purple-red volcanic peaks with the white domes of massive observatory telescopes glittering in the sun. The valley was called Avra and was dotted with ancient petroglyph sites, many still unstudied by archaeologists; it had been lived in by Indians for millennia and was still home to reservations. Foxes, coyotes, and roadrunners wandered beneath my windows, wild boar-like animals called javelinas came through the yard in herds at dusk and dawn, and there was an occasional bobcat sighting. Florid sunsets with towering clouds were inscribed on a vast and open sky, and at night the absence of city light made visible hundreds of thousands of stars.

  The house itself, though I saw potential in it, was a scar on the face of the land. Built of army-surplus plywood, riddled with termites, floored in wretched, peeling linoleum the color of dried blood, and inhabited by pack rats, bark scorpions, black widows, and even Western diamondback rattlesnakes, it was not a standard impulse-buy for a city girl who could barely stand to plunge her own toilet. It lay forty minutes from Tucson on the edge of a national park; set well back from a dirt road, it was a kind of slapdash shack on a fifteen-acre parcel of lush Sonoran desert.

  The insult to the land that was my house was replicated and magnified throughout the rest of the manmade environs, whose other dwellings were often even more derelict and ugly, mostly single- or doublewide trailers. Some functioned as meth labs, others housed Harley drivers and off-roading enthusiasts who kept rusting buses and Airstreams in their yards and revved their engines ceaselessly on weekend afternoons, then drove around in circles on barren lots littered with trash. Mailboxes were painted in camouflage, bashed in on the sides, or housed in cinderblock fortifications, possibly suggesting a reluctance on the part of my neighbors to open their arms to the outside world. Driveways were marked with No TRESPASSING or KEEP OUT! signs, guarded by barking or even vicious dogs, and hung with chains.

  The only place to buy food without making the half-hour drive through the rolling hills of the park to the city’s outskirts was an establishment called the Minit Market, a convenience store/gas station about five minutes’ drive away that sells cigarettes, Wonder Bread, Twinkies, energy drinks, and a small refrigerator’s worth of wilting iceberg lettuce. It is frequented by crowds of emaciated, sun-worn guys in jacked-up trucks, their acid-wash girlfriends, and snaggletooth kids with half-open mouths and scarily vacant faces—some, and sometimes all, of the above smelling from afar of nicotine or alcohol. Almost exclusively, the clientele was rough, ragged, dissipated, and incurious. Once, on a smoking jag, I tried to buy cigarettes from a cashier who couldn’t read enough to tell the difference between Camel and Marlboro.

  I was no stranger to small towns; I had lived in small-town Georgia, small-town North Carolina, small towns in southern Germany and France. This wasn’t a small-town thing, and it wasn’t just poverty either: The valley’s median income is only a couple of thousand dollars below the national average. It was something else, I felt, something more: an exaggeration. It was the canteen from Star Wars, minus diversity.

  Yet nearly a decade later I still live in that house. I’m married to that activist. And I never want to leave.

  This is a place where the horrible meets the divine. In that way it seems more American than any of the progressive, multicultural cities I’ve called home in the past—America being, to me, an outrageous collision of beauty and tawdriness, willful ignorance and avid exploration, boundless permission and angry violation.

  Where I live is less than an hour from the border with Mexico, in a sage-green desert studded with dramatic peaks and valleys, but Arizona is far more varied than this. It’s also high Alpine meadows with tundra, vast forests of ponderosa pine, the canyon cliff dwellings of the Anasazi, the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, and the stark, Mars-evoking red buttes of Monument Valley in the Navajo Nation that occupies the northeast corner of the state, where so many SUV commercials are set. It’s rivers like the San Pedro, sometime home to almost half the bird species in the country, and grasslands like those at Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, where the last of the North American jaguars have recently been seen.

  But no litany of sights can get to why I feel compelled to live here. I was never a nature girl, growing up, though I always loved animals; I didn’t hike or camp until very recently. I always lived in cities. And I’m not a hermit either, in fact I’m an extrovert who actively misses her absent friends. Yet despite this I choose to make my life in the middle of what my closest friends and siblings think is nowhere. When they visit, some of them are indifferent to the landscape, others like or even love it, but in the end they’re either bored or
depressed by the situation’s ruralness. I have to admit: many times, even in Tucson itself—a city of over half a million with plenty going on—I feel at a loss for the dense intellectual cover of places like New York, Boston, or Chicago.

  And on a practical level the isolation of the valley is inconvenient. Every weekday, for instance, I have to drive my little girl through the national park, over a steep mountain pass, and into town for preschool, because there’s nothing out here. By the time we get back, at least in the so-called winter months, the sun is low in the sky, and as I drive along the meandering, hilly park roads I have to swerve to avoid centipedes, desert tortoises, ringtails, and other animals that emerge from their burrows in the day’s waning hours and seem to offer themselves as roadkill.

  This commute will likely continue for the next fifteen years.

  There’s also the strange distress I feel when I go to the gas station. Because it’s the only place around to buy stuff, locals flock there, and the Minit Market begins to play the role of social hub. The society it depicts is grim. All the clichés of hell apply; it’s a blight of a place. Hard to say whether it’s the Fifth Circle, full of the sullen, the slothful, and those tormented by rage, or the Seventh, where dwell the violent against man and blasphemers of God. (It’s definitely not the Sixth: No one here seems passionate enough to be a heretic.) It’s not that the customers are uniformly poor—many drive rigs worth sixty or seventy thousand dollars, tricked-out, enormous trucks I could never afford even if I cared to—but there’s no denying that those Valley residents who are poor do tend to show up here. The Minit selects out for those who won’t or can’t make the drive into town, where superior shopping options are available. And there’s a certain texture to the custom, a quality both miserable and self-righteous, brimming with pent-up aggression and hostility while at the same time passive and despairing. And white. Very, very white. Tucson itself is more than 40 percent Latino, but out where we live there’s hardly anyone Hispanic.