Becoming Frozen

by Jill Homer

  Six years later, Craig was still tall and thin with a bushy beard, which these days screamed “freedom-loving Alaskan” more than tree-hugging hippie. I also hadn’t changed much; newspaper work allowed me to dress like a college student — albeit a northern version that incorporated six layers of fleece pullovers and hats. Watching Craig putter around his kitchen as snow swirled outside the window made me think that our lives wouldn’t have turned out dramatically different in any case.

  Craig planned Christmas Eve dinner for me and two law clerks from Palmer. Similar to his Thanksgiving menu, he served three different variations of Mormon funeral potatoes — a cornflake-coated, cheese-and-potato casserole that, as its name indicates, is a popular side dish for Mormons to serve at funerals — and a pre-cooked turkey breast. We dined on the carbohydrate-laden meal, and I joked that funeral potatoes would be great fuel for an endurance race.

  Craig shook his head and smiled. “So are you still thinking about doing that bike race? What was it?”

  “The Susitna 100,” I grinned. “Sign-ups go until New Year’s Eve and I’m planning to send my entry in as soon as I get home. I actually raised enough money from my blog. I put up this silly challenge that I would ride a mile for every dollar donated, and people actually contributed to my cause. I rode 289 miles but actually made nearly 400 dollars. I’m giving the extra money to the Livestrong Foundation.”

  “People actually paid you to ride your bike?” Craig shook his head. “That’s like the ultimate grubber move.”

  “It was a fundraiser,” I shot back. “The gimmick was riding my bike in frigid Alaska weather and blogging about it. Anyway, it was not exactly easy money.”

  “Is Geoff going as well?”

  “Geoff is going to run the Little Su. It’s a fifty-kilometer version of the same race. He thinks the hundred-mile race is crazy.”

  “It is,” Craig said. “I never pictured you as the type for extreme sports.”

  “Why, because I backed out of a few of those scary canyoneering trips in Utah? Because I cried in Quandary Canyon?”

  “No, it’s just … you never struck me as a competitive type.”

  “I guess I’m not,” I said. “I mean, I’ve never competed in any race before. Not even a 5K. The Susitna 100 will be my first race. But that’s the appeal of such a huge and impossible-seeming thing — it’s not a competition with other people. It’s a competition with myself. I missed out on too many cool trips because I was scared. I’m getting tired of being that kind of person — one who won’t take chances. I moved to Alaska; that was a big leap. This is the next.”

  “So you think you can finish it?” Craig asked.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “My longest ride so far was thirty-four miles, and it was mostly on pavement, and even that was really hard. I got home and I was wasted; spent the rest of the night curled up on the couch in a blanket, eating Fruit Loops out of the box. So three times that? On snow? Yeah, it seems impossible. That’s pretty much the point.”

  Craig grinned. “Well, better you than me.”

  “That’s what Geoff said, too,” I said. “But thirty-one miles on foot isn’t exactly going to be a pleasure cruise.”

  “Sure, but Geoff … well I can see him doing something like that,” Craig said.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, I get it. I’m not an athlete. I guess we’ll see. You probably didn’t think I’d ever end up in Alaska, either.”

  “No I did not,” Craig grinned. “When Geoff was here over the summer, we thought it was over between you two.”

  I smiled. “It was over at the time. But life’s funny like that. One day you finally embrace being single in Idaho Falls, and the next you’re training to ride a bicycle a hundred miles across frozen Alaska.”

  ******

  My gut was still heavy with funeral potatoes when I ventured out at first light, just before 10 a.m. The air was a brisk eight degrees, cold enough to bite the tips of my earlobes where they poked out of a yellow wool beanie my mother knitted for me. Strips of pink light stretched over Pioneer Peak, towering six thousand feet over my head. Stuffing myself with turkey and frozen cookie dough (Craig offered to bake the cookies, but all of us declined) left a shrill pounding in my head. I could have killed for a cup of coffee, but Craig didn’t drink the stuff and Christmas Day business closures left me without other options. The streets of Palmer were empty, and the morning so quiet that I could hear the crunching steps of unseen animals walking through the snow.

  It was my first Christmas Day without my family, without the rustling of wrapping paper, laughter with my sisters, and the aroma of Dad’s waffles wafting through the house. I thought that at age twenty-six these traditions would be a remnant of my childhood, easy to leave behind. Instead, the thought of familiar sounds and smells still taking place some three thousand miles away made me feel even more lonely. Palmer was cold and quiet, a place where I couldn’t even count on the one thing you can always count on — that the sun will come up.

  I tightened the laces on the New Balance road running shoes that Geoff talked me into buying at a bargain basement outlet store three years earlier. We went for all of two runs together before the first snowfall that year. When spring came, I packed them in a box to stow away while Geoff and I joined two friends on a road trip to Alaska. I hadn’t seen them since, and wasn’t even sure how they managed to survive the three relocations that had happened in the interim. But when I unpacked my Geo Prism in Homer, there they were, smashed into a corner of the trunk.

  “I should take up running again,” I’d said to Geoff as I carried them into the cabin.

  “I thought you hated running,” he replied.

  “I do.”

  But I couldn’t haul my bicycle up to Palmer, and I wasn’t about to permit myself five days of sloth amid this most important period of Susitna 100 training. So with my snowboarding coat and fleece pullover, liner gloves, and two pairs of cotton socks stuffed into my neglected shoes, I took off down the street at a stiff lope. This enthusiastic stride quickly deteriorated into a skittering shuffle as I slipped along ice-coated pavement. I veered into the snow bank, which only served to slow my pace even more while filling my shoes with cold powder.

  “Running is crap,” I thought. But at least this pathetic effort didn’t hurt too badly. After one slow mile, I reached the edge of the neighborhood. Lurching like a wounded deer through shin-deep snow, I followed a narrow trail through the woods, which ended at the Matanuska River. Wind had scoured the shoreline of snow. Hoarfrost feathers coated an intricate braid of gravel and glare ice.

  Unlike the skating-rink road, the river ice was rough thanks to the sand-like texture of hoarfrost. Traction set me free. I kicked up my knees and breathed in a rush of cold air as my speed soared — at least that was the sensation of accelerating from a slow shuffle to something marginally higher. Icy mist swirled around my ankles, and pink light reflected off the ribbons of ice. It was like running in the sky, like when you look out an airplane window at 30,000 feet and imagine what it would be like to traverse the carpet of clouds below.

  “This is what running is about,” I thought with a smile.

  I could have run that way all day, until I reached the mouth of the river, where it emptied into the churning, icy waters of the Knik Arm. But after forty-five minutes, my knees ached and my fingers were numb. I’d been running so hard that sweat had already soaked the fleece pullover beneath my coat. An all-too-familiar fear of the cold clamped down, filling my mind with the same panicked conclusions: “I need to go home. I don’t want to die out here.”

  Fear coaxed me to turn around, but I rebelled by increasing my pace to outrun the clammy chill. Despite my awkward gait, I was amazed how well my body was handling this foreign motion. Maybe all the biking I was doing really was paying dividends, by strengthening my muscles and increasing my endurance. That was the point, of course. But li
ke the reluctantly religious trying to emulate the faithful, I wasn’t ready to accept fitness until I could see proof of its existence.

  When I loped back into Craig’s driveway, I realized I hadn’t felt lonely for ninety minutes. I didn’t think about my parents and sisters back home and all the hot chocolate they were enjoying, and I didn’t dwell on the uncomfortable notion that Geoff had left me alone over the holidays just because he could. Although I could appreciate that he missed his family just as much as I missed mine, he never discussed his plans with me or checked to see whether I could join him. I came home from work a few weeks prior, and he already had a plane ticket. This was the way things had always been between Geoff and me— he did whatever he wanted, and I either genuinely didn’t mind, or pretended I didn’t mind and quietly stewed about it. Complaining was futile; he didn’t understand why I wouldn’t want him to have the things he wanted. And yet, I had hoped that as we forged this new life in Alaska, some aspects of our separate-yet-together attitudes would change. That somehow our individual longings would fuse together.

  I stopped short of Craig’s front door to untie my laces, which had become soaked and re-frozen to a hard knot.

  “At least I’ll always have this,” I thought.

  “This” was the ability to put on a pair of shoes or mount the saddle of a bicycle and use my own body to move through the world. It was simple enough to do anywhere at any time, and yet demanding enough to clear my overcrowded head of everything save for my body’s most immediate needs — energy, motion, and warmth. All I needed to do was go for a run or a ride, and for those isolated moments, every difficult emotion would dissipate. I wouldn’t feel anxious about my job, stressed about my financial situation, or sad about the absence of people I love. Of course, I couldn’t run away from fatigue, fear, or pain — and yet, even these feelings seemed preferable to the Christmas loneliness that started settling back in before I’d even removed my icy shoes.

  Craig was awake by the time I returned to the warmth of the house. The television was tuned to a generic football game and he was eating what looked like a bowl of leftover funeral potatoes. He waved vigorously as I hobbled up the stairs with already-stiff knees. Craig wasn’t quite the right person to fill the void I was feeling, but he was a friendly face and I was thrilled to see him.

  “Did you go for a run?” he asked.

  “A short one,” I replied. “But it was nice.”

  *****

  On New Years Eve, the Tribune assigned me coverage of the Edible Arts Extravaganza, an end-of-year gala at the Bunnell Street Gallery, which featured arty sculptures built entirely out of food. In order to blend in at the event, I dug through my closet until I found my nicest dress. It was black, sleeveless, and fell elegantly away from my hips. It wasn’t exactly high fashion, but it was better than the other dressy thing I owned, which was a brown peasant skirt. Since this was Homer, the best way to complete the ensemble would have been a pair of XtraTufs. The mud-colored rubber boots are often worn at formal events as a point of quirky local fashion rather than necessity — although any Homerite will remind you that there will always be mud, everywhere, at all times. I didn’t yet own his accessory footwear (almost as an act of rebellion, because XtraTufs were so ubiquitous that they qualified as trendy, and a Cheechako trying to establish her individuality as an Alaskan does not blindly embrace trends.) So instead I put on a pair of black flats that were most certainly going to become swamped with slush before I entered the gallery.

  I fed our cats a celebratory can of tuna-flavored Fancy Feast that I’d been promising them all week (because I’d been home alone long enough that I’d taken to talking to the cats and bribing them for affection). Outside, temperatures had recently warmed to just above freezing, and slushy puddles covered the driveway. My Geo Prism balked at repeated attempts to turn the ignition, and then the wheels spun uselessly atop a sheet of ice. I briefly considered riding my bike to the downtown gala, but I was in a dress and didn’t even have XtraTufs to stave off the slush spray. Finally, after I stopped flooring the gas pedal and instead employed a light tapping technique, the sedan pried itself away from the slush bog.

  The Edible Arts Extravaganza was exactly what I expected — a plastic-table display of artfully arranged foods. There was a cake shaped like the volcanoes of the Cook Inlet, a sculpture of a cat made out of processed cheese, an abstract art vegetable tray, and a leaning tower of cookies. I followed the line of viewers along each table and snapped photos for the Tribune. The shutter kept sticking and I wondered if there was some way to more artfully photograph these perishable masterpieces than simply flooding them with flash. I never told the Tribune I was a photographer. In fact, before I moved to Alaska I didn’t even own a camera. I purchased a two-megapixel point-and-shoot for $139 just a few months prior so I could document my life in Alaska. Since I started my blog, a desire to illustrate each post sparked a new interest in photography. But I had yet to take a photo more complicated than my bike propped against a snow bank with the sunset in the background. When it came to art photography, I had no idea how to frame still objects, and the Tribune’s bulky Canon DSLR was still foreign to me. I hoped Carey didn’t expect professional images.

  As the event wound down, the artists started cutting into their creations and serving little bites of art that was not only beautiful, but delicious. I was both horrified and intrigued — it seemed a shame to unceremoniously destroy what had no doubt taken hours to create, but I also hadn’t realized there was going to be free food at the Edible Arts Extravaganza. I tried the volcano cake — slightly doughy and stale — and moved on to the piece I spent the most time trying to photograph well — the Sushi Gown. For this piece, the artist took the torso of a mannequin and applied pieces of nori in the shape of a hip-length, emerald gown. She took scissors to the nori to create an elegant lacy trim, and then accessorized the ensemble with sushi rolls. Sushi was my favorite food and I hadn’t yet found any place to eat it in Alaska. This was the one piece of art whose demise didn’t make me feel bad; I dived into the plate with shameless abandon.

  After the all-I-could-eat gala, I stashed the Tribune’s camera in the trunk of my car and waddled over to Duggan’s Pub for a New Year’s Eve concert. I had little interest in going out by myself, but it seemed a shame to spend such a celebratory holiday holed up in my cabin with my cats. I held this glimmer of hope that I’d see at least one of the six people I knew in town at Duggan’s. And anyway, The Whipsaws were playing. The Whipsaws were a twangy rock band from Anchorage. They sent the Tribune a CD and press release ahead of their New Year’s concert, and Carey gave it to me to review. I’d listened to the album every day since, spinning “Ten Day Bender” on a Discman that attached to a garbled tape deck in my car. I enjoyed their gritty alternative country, and decided that, if nothing else, I’d be able to squeeze a concert review for the newspaper out of this solo outing.

  Inside Duggan’s the air was smoky and stale. Booming bass from poorly arranged speakers was drowning out all of the melody from the Whipsaws’ set, and the pub was still half empty at 10:30. I sat down at the bar to order a Diet Coke, and almost as soon as I did, my stomach started lurching. If it wasn’t for speakers on full volume, everyone around me would have heard the gurgling and moaning. It was a full gastrointestinal rebellion, with sharp pains and a wide-eyed sense of urgency. Of course I instantly knew the culprit. I could only guess at how many hours or days earlier that Sushi Gown had been constructed, not to mention fermented under hot lights in a crowded room.

  I slumped over the bar and rushed outside as fast as I could waddle, knowing that the situation was about to become dire and I still had to drive home. At least I brought my car. Twenty minutes later, I ran into my house and nearly tripped over one of the cats as I hit the answering machine button on my way to the bathroom. A three-hour-old message from Geoff wished me a Happy New Year and told me he’d just celebrated the East Coast occasion wi
th his friends in upstate New York. He sounded like he was having all the fun and I was stuck in Alaska, working on New Year’s Eve, and dealing with the consequences of poor food choices before the clock even struck midnight in this part of the world.

  “Aw, screw him,” were the only words I could form before I dived into a long and painful purging of perishable art.

  _____

  Ashes to Ashes

  January 11, 2006

  Somewhere, hidden deep within a shroud of fog and the forgotten hours of the morning, Augustine coughed up an explosion. Unseen, unheard, almost as if it never existed — except for the five-mile-high ash cloud that is now probably drifting over Denali National Park.

  The volcano began what is expected to be a series of escalating eruptions at 4:44 a.m. It was enough to raise the concern level to code red and keep people glued to their radios after raiding stores for face masks and Spam — but didn’t really do much else. The ash headed north and east and pretty much away from Homer, Anchorage and any relatively populated area of Alaska. The fog stayed, blocking anxious eyes from any view of the rumbling mountain, and gripping the town in an eerie sort of silence.

  My editor rushed into the office first thing this morning to update the Web site. In the great irony of weekly newspapers, our current issue — published yesterday and released two hours after the volcano blew — ran with the headline “Scientists say eruption not imminent.” Our ad rep won the office poll with an exact guess of Jan. 11 — but in the great irony of advertising executives didn’t even take the opportunity to gloat. We just typed quietly and waited for a glimpse of ash or a phone call from a panicked resident — anything — but all we did was wait. “Something is just off about today,” my co-worker said. Maybe it was because a volcano 70 miles from here erupted. Or maybe it was because a volcano 70 miles from here erupted and nothing happened.