Becoming Frozen

by Jill Homer

  I just wondered whether she understood that she had so many years of this ahead of her —years where responsibilities trapped her behind the curtain of life’s proverbial stage. That all of her hard work would simply fade into the selective pages of memory. That even as her blood, sweat and tears poured into the audiences’ consciousness, they’d still be distracted with the detritus of their own lives. Ultimately, this was another thing to be forgotten. And despite her hard work and best intentions, the future was always uncertain. She might think she had it all figured out — sprinting through college, racking up good grades, being offered good jobs, getting accepted to law school. And after all that, she might just reject this path entirely, and instead travel for a while, move somewhere far away, take a low-paying newspaper job, buy a bicycle …

  But of course I couldn’t include any of these wild speculations in my article, so instead I quoted the gushing teacher and wrote about the “fun” costumes and “colorful” set. Sean and Emily shuffled into the office just after 8 a.m., and without more than a few words joined me in a keyboard-tapping frenzy. Layton showed up at 9:25 with a case of bed head, oblivious to my icy glare.

  “You would not believe what happened at city council meeting,” he said. “Not sure I can fit it into my story, though. Kind of off-topic, but hilarious.”

  “Are you serious?” I growled. “You haven’t written your city council story yet? Layton, it’s 9:30. I was planning to put it on the front page. I need to have everything out by noon.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll have it for you,” he grinned.

  “It’s not like city council is a breaking story,” I said. “Why didn’t you write it last night?”

  “I was … busy,” Layton said sheepishly. Sean turned to me with a raised eyebrow and a knowing smirk.

  “Whatever,” I said. “I need it by 11 at the latest. Seriously, if 11 comes and you’re still writing, I’m killing the story. I’ll wedge my Nutcracker fluff piece in that spot if I have to.”

  “Okay, okay, no worries,” he said. “I’ll get it done.”

  Being the default boss was worse than being a real boss. I had twice the responsibilities and none of the power. Even as I fumed about Layton’s tardiness, Sean turned to me and said, “I need to finish writing my column. Do you mind editing the basketball story for me?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I guess,” I said. “But don’t expect anything thorough. I still have to edit all of Layton’s stuff, plug in the ads and then write an editorial. What message are we going for this week? That it’s the most wonderful time of the year?”

  Sean laughed. “Hardly,” he said. “But that will work if you desperately need a topic. Write about how important it is to give, not receive.” Again, he said this with a knowing smirk.

  I sighed, because I knew I would likely pick this easy “opinion” because it wouldn’t inspire any wrath from Jane, or take up more time that I did not have. A newspaper editorial was a great platform, and there was so much I had to say. I could write about the city’s lack of a recycling program, or its push to fund tourism infrastructure while locals drove on potholed streets and went to decaying schools. I could write about residents’ efforts to keep a big box store, Fred Meyer, out of the community, or about the large numbers of residents who drove to Kenai, eighty miles north, to shop at Wal-mart on a regular basis. I could write about highway crews’ lazy snow-removal tactics, pushing snow and ice onto the sidewalks and forcing schoolchildren and pedestrians to walk on the street. I could even write about this supposed hilarious incident that happened at the city council meeting if Layton ever revealed it to me. This was community news after all, and the opinion page was meant to be the home of thoughtful commentary on local happenings.

  But instead, I was going to write some pallid piece about holiday cheer. I had temporary control of a newspaper, and yet I lacked the courage to create anything of value. It was the worst kind of powerlessness — impotency masked as power. An image of the teenage actress’s tired eyes appeared in my mind, reflecting my own frustrations.

  In the midst of these typing frenzies, it was easy to imagine another kind of apocalyptic world. My co-workers’ faces were frozen and featureless, locked on glowing screens. The indoor air was still and cold, and the fluorescent lights flickered dully. My blood pressure rose to a boil as I grappled with the futility of my efforts, and my mind churned frantically until every thought had been whipped to a dull mush.

  Some people conduct their whole lives in these clouds of stress, until years of gray days finally erased all memories of the sun. There is relief, freedom even, when enough time had passed, and they could no longer remember the way the sunrise used to cast crimson light over the mountains. They no longer missed the sensation of cold wind on their face. These were relics of childhood.

  Life does deal some stormy days, but most of us knowingly walked into the fog. We embraced it. We called it reality; we called it life. The clarity of childhood was reconstructed as naivety; tunnel-minded ambition became virtue. The most driven among us seem to be jockeying for a position near the top of the clouds — a place where we can lift our heads above the gray pall and see the sunshine again, if only for a few beautiful moments. But the sunlight was there all along. Even during the shortest days of winter, hidden by closed blinds, it was always there.

  By the time I uploaded all of the finished newspaper pages to our printer, transferred the articles to the Web site, updated the classifieds and archived everything, the sun had already set for the day. We had missed our deadline by an hour, and Jane spent ten minutes lecturing me about why this wasn’t acceptable. Despite the vocal beating, I clung to my conviction that I deserved a medal for assembling an entire ten-thousand-piece puzzle only one hour later than expected. Standing quietly and pretending to listen to complaints proved to be the most relaxed twenty minutes of my workday, which is really just another way of saying that the other ten and a half hours were comparatively unbearable.

  Strips of red light still clung to distant mountains in the west as I pedaled home, but the sky overhead was a deep violet. I’d been at work for eleven hours, but it felt like days had passed since the morning commute. Thoughts were washed in gray; muscles were tight from stress. Anxiety still felt like sharp bits of metal in my gut. Those who don’t believe office work is an endurance sport in its own right have probably never tried endurance sports.

  My bike’s headlight was dim from too-cold batteries. I removed the batteries and warmed them in my cupped hands until my fingers were numb, then placed them back in the compartment. The light flickered for several seconds but did cast a dull beam onto the snow.

  Clouds obstructed the stars overhead, and the evening air felt considerably colder than morning. I shivered as I pedaled along Main Street, not really working up any body heat until I started climbing West Hill. Steady breathing replaced anxious thoughts, and I pedaled up the snow-covered road in a mental fog. Soon, real fog closed in around me. Familiar landmarks blurred, so I had to sharpen my focus. Swirling particles of ice reflected the beam of my headlight until I was blinded by the light, so I switched it off. The pulsing red taillight illuminated the cloud in an equally distracting way, so I killed it too. Cars would not be able to see me, but I felt confident I would see or hear them and dive off the road before anything catastrophic happened. Anyway, there didn’t seem to be another soul moving through the fog. The loneliness had returned.

  New hoarfrost had collected on pine boughs and alder branches. Through the fog, these silver-tinted silhouettes of trees appeared as ghosts materializing from air. Amid the featureless gray, they seemed to levitate in an expanse that contained nothing else. If my morning commute had been a glimpse of the end of the world, evening revealed the beginning — an era when the whole universe was just vapor and light.

  I pedaled with growing uneasiness about the unfamiliarity of the landscape. I was less than a mile from home, but it
seemed much farther than that, as though I’d jumped light years through space and time. My fingers and toes felt numb, my mind was fractured by fatigue, and I was frightened, genuinely frightened. But a deeper part of me longed to explore this uncharted galaxy.

  I bypassed my driveway and climbed another mile up the road to the beginning of the Homestead Trail. The snowmobile-groomed track was coated in a thin layer of ice, which crackled and popped beneath my studded tires. The ghost trees closed in. Some were hunched like old women beneath a shawl of snow, others were draped in a silky lace of frost. The trail veered down the hill, and I accelerated until the spooky trees were nothing more to me than a blur of white. I briefly plunged beneath the cloud, caught a glimpse of the black hole that was Kachemak Bay, and climbed back into the fog.

  I never bothered to switch on my headlight. Even at night, faint reflections of ambient light off the snow and fog allowed me to discern shapes and depth. Blasts of cold wind scrubbed away stress, and hard pedaling purged any lingering fatigue. The last thing to disappear was fear, released in curls of breath. I was exhilarated and emancipated — a ghost flying through a ghost world, a vapor of energy at the beginning of time. As my spirit floated free, my legs seemed to move effortlessly. I arrived at the crest of the trail with a sense that I had reached a higher state of being.

  Of course, I was still human. My bones were still attached to my muscles, which were shivering in the cold. My brain was still battling fear about the dangers that lurked in the night. I still had the stressful job to return to the following day, and a partner at home who was probably worried about me. But for a few peaceful seconds, these unsettling thoughts didn’t register. My body was just part of the world, which was ultimately just a conglomeration of energy — trillions upon trillions of particles floating in space. Everything I interpreted as myself was simply a reflection of particles that were forever converging and diverging. Who I was in that moment — a cyclist in the mist — would change in an instant, and never be exactly the same again.

  I stopped so I could absorb the experience. By capturing this moment in a memory, I embraced the impermanence of all things. Shortly after I started pedaling again, the trail crossed an open meadow, and the ghost trees retreated into the fog. All visual and audible stimuli disappeared into the gray infinity. After a few more minutes of seeing and hearing nothing, I noticed a small break in the clouds. Through that window I could see a tiny patch of real sky, dotted with stars and laced with a ribbon of green light.

  “Northern Lights?” I wondered. It had to be. Green light on the northern horizon. Anchorage was two hundred miles away, too far to generate light pollution. What else could it be? I squinted at the sky for several more seconds until the clouds closed back together, and I was again alone in the fog.

  A shiver rippled down my spine — a startling sensation amid the sensory deprivation of the fog. If those had been the Northern Lights, it was the first time I had seen them in Alaska. Even if I could never be certain, the fog break seemed significant — the point where the ghostly world of the past opened into the infinite universe of the future. And this was the kind of future that rippled with surreal green light. Alaska. Never before had I felt so certain about my place amid the vastness of the world. All of the particles that needed to collide to bring me here were astronomically unlikely, and yet here I was. Alaska — the right place at the right time.

  _____

  Orphan

  December 24, 2005

  Here I am in Palmer, Christmas Eve, 250 miles from my bike and 3,000 miles from home. I went for a 90-minute run along the Matanuska River this morning that felt amazing. The last time I was here — Thanksgiving — I definitely was not in the kind of shape to run for 90 minutes straight. And now I am. How quickly my body has responded to relatively casual conditioning really surprised me. I felt strong, in charge. I was tearing off layers like it wasn’t 8 degrees out, feeling the crisp air on actual skin, sprinting, sweating, gliding across the windswept ice.

  I eventually came home because it was 11 a.m. and the sun hadn’t yet crawled above the mountains. It felt like a good idea at the time, but now it’s high noon and the sun still hasn’t made it up (my friend Craig informed me that this time of year, it never does); I’ve eaten a bowl of Special K and two salmon-shaped Christmas cookies, and all I want to do is head back out. All I can think about is taking off down the river, running harder, faster, colder, until I don’t have to think anymore about how homesick I’m feeling today; about how much I miss wearing my Christmas jammies; about what I would give right now to eat an ice cream sundae while watching “Christmas Story” and playing Scrabble with my sisters. This year is my first year as an orphan. I thought I was prepared for it, but it’s hard. It’s harder than I thought it would be. In comparison, running is effortless.

  *****

  Shortly after winter set in, Geoff landed part-time work in construction. His boss said it was difficult to keep warm bodies on job sites that time of year, so a willingness to work a nail gun beneath floodlights in sub-zero darkness was all the experience he required. Geoff received ten dollars an hour under the table, and worked as many shifts as he could squeeze out of his boss — usually twenty to thirty hours a week. He purchased his own tool belt, a few rudimentary tools such as a hammer and screwdrivers, and insulated leather work gloves. His coworkers taught him the basics of framing houses and pouring cement. This contractor didn’t deal in remodeling or home improvement projects — comfortable work that could be done inside heated buildings. No, they were building new homes from the ground up. Summer construction season is so short in Alaska that some contractors opt to work year-round — after all, snow and ice in December isn’t more difficult to work around than snow and ice in May.

  Geoff frequently returned with harrowing tales about his day. Mornings were often spent removing piles of snow dumped by overnight storms. He wielded a powerful nail gun while wearing bulky gloves, which were charred on the fingertips where he tried to warm his hands near the blue flame of a propane torch. Metal tools became searingly cold, as did ladders. An inexperienced craftsman, he usually took off his gloves when a job demanded finer dexterity, and soon sustained frostbite blisters on his fingers. His toes were always numb, even when he ran up and down the job site to boost circulation. His boss’s latest project was up on Diamond Ridge, where the weather was often extreme. Snow flurries developed into blinding blizzards before the workers could even put their tools down and seek shelter under the skeleton roof of the building. Unexpected gusts of wind sometimes toppled entire walls. Freezing rain resulted in everyone being sent home in the morning without pay.

  The more brutal Geoff’s working environment became, the more envious I felt. His job featured real-world excitement that my office was decidedly lacking. I pictured him straddling a scaffold high above the snow-covered ground, wearing his Carhartt jacket and wool neck warmer. I could almost hear the chorus of hammers muffled by a howling wind, men yelling over gales, frost forming on their tools. Of course it was just house construction, but during Alaska’s December, even this simple work contained a beautiful element of life-and-death struggle. I couldn’t explain nor admit why I’d prefer Geoff’s arduous job to my own — sitting all day in the relative safety of a partially heated office — but I believed I did.

  And because Geoff wasn’t an official employee, his employer had no choice but to grant him a few weeks off so he could fly to upstate New York to visit his family over Christmas. I had no such luxury at the Homer Tribune, which was still falling further behind deadlines even after Carey returned from Hawaii. Jane made it clear that I couldn’t take any extra time off during the holidays, and I couldn’t afford a plane ticket to Utah anyway.

  I anticipated a grim and lonely holiday alone. However, Geoff needed a ride to the airport in Anchorage, and the Tribune did grant two days off work. Craig’s wife was still in Utah, so he proposed I come visit Palmer for
his “orphan Christmas.”

  How I met Craig is its own funny story. During my sophomore year at the University of Utah, I decided to join the student-run environmental club, Terra Firma. Like many 19-year-olds, I was more interested in the social functions of a club than in its context — but planting trees, protesting highway projects, and camping in the desert appealed to my predominant passions at the time. Craig was the club’s president. I remember walking into the crowded meeting room and developing an instant crush on him — he was tall and wiry, with chiseled facial features and a bushy beard that screamed “fun-loving dirtbag.” He announced that the club needed more volunteers for a fundraiser that night, manning a concession booth during a Mannheim Steamroller concert. My hand shot up. I was so excited that I didn’t even notice the shy boy with curly brunette hair across from me, raising his hand as well.

  The boy’s name was Mike. Craig drove both of us to the stadium in his clunky Subaru sedan. The entire drive, Mike and I were quiet while Craig regaled us with tales of derring do, such as the time he contracted hypothermia in the San Rafael Swell. At the concert, our assigned concession was the Dipping Dots cart, selling a gimmicky dessert made of globules of ice cream. Synthesized Christmas music in December isn’t exactly the best venue for overpriced ice cream beads, and we didn’t get much business. Craig disappeared for a while and I started chatting with Mike, who was an anthropology student from Idaho.

  As these things often go, Mike turned out to be the guy who asked me out, and Mike was the one with whom I entered a serious relationship. After he graduated the following summer, Mike moved to El Salvador to volunteer with the Peace Corps. We established a long-distance relationship based entirely on hand-written letters and infrequent e-mails. As these things often go, we’d both moved on long before either of us admitted it, but I continued to grasp the fraying strands of this relationship even after Geoff entered the picture. Craig and I became good friends in the interim, but drifted apart after Craig graduated from law school, married, and moved to Alaska. Now that we were reunited in the Frozen North, I amused myself with daydreams about what all of our lives might look like if things had turned out just a little differently at that Mannheim Steamroller concert.