The Source of All Things

by Tracy Ross

  When I arrived in McCarthy, Jim Miller was digging a leach field, and Jeannie was decorating the restaurant to appear as an old-fashioned tailor shop. The plan was that once the restaurant opened, I’d wait tables, serving dense, floury pies to gold miners and mountaineers while black bears picked through the garbage. Until the restaurant opened, however, I was free to roam.

  Sometimes roaming meant walking the five-mile road between McCarthy and Kennicott three times a day, listening to the Root Glacier creak and moan off in the distance. Other times it meant running up Fourth of July Creek, past the old copper miners’ houses on Silk Stocking Row and behind the dilapidated Kennicott Copper Corporation hospital and mine. When it was sunny, I hiked up the rock-covered moraine of the glacier, still afraid to venture onto the ice because of the bottomless crevasses and slick, blue wormholes called moulins. You can’t rescue a person who falls into a moulin, though someday a hundred years from now you might find the sole of a boot, a rusty ski pole, or a chunk of leathery, ice-preserved flesh.

  On days when I wasn’t exploring, I weeded the Millers’ garden with Jeannie. She was small but built of bricks. We crawled through the greasy black soil, pulling dandelion weeds from her rows of baby lettuce and bok choy. In the greenhouse, she showed me how to swab a squash flower with a paintbrush, manually pollinating the surrounding blooms. I followed her directions and watched baby squash balloon to life on the dense, mineral-rich earth.

  Jim and Jeannie worked as fast as they could to open the pizza parlor before the summer rush ended, but there were permits to be signed, inspectors to placate, and loans to be applied for, granted, and deposited in downtown Anchorage banks. I followed Matthew and Aaron around, steering them clear of skinny-dippers and rescuing them from the silt pools we swam in when they stood up and became stuck in the mud.

  When I wasn’t swimming, I rode Matthew’s bike up and down the five-mile dirt throughway, standing on the pedals to power up hills. I felt myself become stronger every day. I ate next to nothing—no breakfast, rarely lunch, sometimes dinner—which allowed me more time to roam. I’d been practicing this near non-eating for years, swearing off fat, which stores things like carcinogens and cancers as well as sorrow and shame. But in McCarthy, I saw a new body emerging, not anorexic but 99 percent lean. Sometimes I fantasized about the things my new body would do, once it was fully realized. It would climb to the top of Alaska’s tallest mountain. It would build a warm, cozy cabin. It would cut the eyes out of any man who stared too long at little girls.

  At night, after my various jobs ended, I sat at the McCarthy Lodge bar, enjoying the feeling of glacial silt and garden mud on my skin. Young guys bought me beers, and old guys asked me to dance, and I took full advantage of the attention, gyrating back and forth across a creaky wooden floor. A dozen men watched my and other girls’ shirts inch up our bellies. We danced close to them and sometimes away so they could get a better look. I was careful to keep their attention and more careful still to seem unavailable when it was time to go home. The only person I wanted to go home with was Matt.

  Matt was Thea’s part-time lover, or occasional ex, or something like that. She told me to find him when I got to McCarthy, after her mother called her to say she had cancer and needed Thea to spend the summer in Anchorage, helping her try to survive. I didn’t know it was Matt when I saw him, but I recognized something hungry in his eyes. He looked at me, I looked at him, he looked at me, and we looked down.

  I knew Matt wanted to hike up the glacier, to feel the cold creep into his boots and to peer into the frightening ice chasms. And I knew he wanted to go there with me. The St. Elias Range looms beyond Kennicott, swathed in enormous sheets of ice and towering over the clouds and the birds and most bush planes at eighteen thousand feet high. It’s big enough to create its own weather, and mountaineers have come back from three-week trips with stories of white-outs and avalanches when it’s still summer in McCarthy.

  One day, as Matt and I stood at the bar smashing blood-bloated mosquitoes onto our forearms, I asked him on a date.

  “Would you want to go backpacking with me?” I said.

  “With you?” He thought about it. “Hmmmm.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, Hmmm.”

  “Oh, ha-ha, I thought you said ‘yum.’”

  We laughed at this, because it was absurd and silly and close to the truth, and then we searched our beers for something floating in the foam. The bartender played “Scarlet Begonias,” and all the drinkers started swaying. Someone shouted Matt’s name, and he went to investigate. When he returned, his eyes took up where they’d left off, looking at me like I was a caramel apple and he was a diabetic.

  “Yeah,” he finally answered. “I’ll go backpacking with you.”

  “Okay … When?”

  “I don’t know, maybe this weekend?”

  Three days later, we met at the edge of the glacier, far from the bar and in broad daylight, which made us feel different, more formal and stiff. While he fiddled with his pack straps, I waited, anxious to leave and worried I’d have nothing to say. But once we started walking, the words fell into place. We talked about books and music and girlfriends and boyfriends we’d loved but wanted to throw off of cliffs. We discussed the virtues of Idaho and Virginia and argued for why ours was the better state.

  “Virginia, totally,” said Matt. “What’s Idaho? The potato state?”

  “Yes, potatoes. They’re only, like, the staff of life.”

  “Uh, you might want to look that one up.”

  We kept walking until we reached the glacier proper, where we stopped to scan it for the crevasses and deadly moulins.

  “What do you think?” said Matt. “Should we go for it?”

  “Not sure. We don’t have crampons or a rope.”

  “We’ll be fine. You lead. Just pick your way carefully and we’ll be all right.”

  Matt and I shared a healthy respect for glaciers, which crack and cleave, masticating the earth like Rototillers in garden mulch. We had heard how they heaved, surging and retreating several feet at a time, and we both knew stories of climbers who had fallen into crevasses headfirst, plunging forward as if diving until the walls closed around them. The lucky ones lost consciousness before they became stuck. Others were able to wiggle back out, assisted by ropes and pulleys. But the most horrifying accounts involved those who fell gently, slowed by the friction in those narrow shafts. I have often imagined their moment of reckoning, the terror welling up inside them when they realized that the glacier would become their coffin, and that they would wait there to die until their blood vessels ruptured, while their friends called down from the surface It’s okay. I love you. Close your eyes.

  I don’t know how, but I saw a route through the crevasses and followed it on faith. Because it was summer, the death traps were obvious; we could walk up one side and look for a narrow spot to jump across. Guiding wasn’t so hard when it came down to it; I just followed my instinct and looked a few steps ahead to make sure I didn’t walk us into a trap.

  We zigzagged down the ice, until sometime around late evening, when we made our way to a small lake hemmed in on one side by the glacier and on the other by land. Climbing across the moraine, we set up camp in a meadow of lupine blooms. A raven rode a thermal, circling up and swooping down. And the silence was a calling to pay attention to the moment at hand.

  To the north we looked at Mount Blackburn with its stairways of ice. To the south, we saw nothing but glacier, and beyond it, raw wilderness with no end. Matt said he loved Thea; I told him I loved my dogs. It took us a long time to make dinner or to do anything but sit next to each other with the hair on our forearms touching.

  At some point, gauzy blue turned to rose quartz, and a star burned itself into view. We watched it until the air grew cool, and then we went to bed, each longing for the other but each in our own sleeping bag. I lay there for a long time after Matt fell asleep, listening to the wind on the glacier and fe
eling grateful that two people could burn for each other without going up in flames.

  The next morning, Matt slipped off his clothes, walked to the edge of the lake, and dove in. I watched him, trying to enjoy the sight of his body without thinking that I was a Peeping Tom. He splashed for a few short seconds and then came out, goosebumps beading the water on his slick, pale skin.

  Then he wanted to watch me skinny dip too. I stood up, resisting the urge to laugh hysterically or jump around like a freak. Being naked in front of men would never feel normal to me, and I was strict about who saw me nude and when. Mainly, I did not want it to happen—at least in daylight—under any circumstance. I changed clothes in bathroom stalls, even when it was just girls. I avoided hot springs and massages and always had sex in the dark. I had never skinny-dipped in broad daylight before. And yet, I wanted to take off my shorts, walk to the lake, and dive in. I wanted to feel beautiful in front of my new friend.

  Matt tried to help relax me. “There’s no one watching but me,” he said. He grinned and raised his eyebrows, jutting his chin toward the lake. I stood there stupidly for several minutes and then made myself slip off my T-shirt and step out of my shorts.

  When I was naked, I felt two things: a flicker of fear, reminiscent of every time I’d ever been naked with a man, and the electricity of the moment. I fought again to stay in one place, and when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I jumped into the glacier-encased lake.

  After our swim, we walked up the glacier, jumping across the tiny blue rivers etched into the ice. At an arbitrary point we turned around and started walking back, hot, sticky, and ready for something to eat. We talked about our families and how we felt separate from them. And when we got back to our campsite, we both knew that something had changed.

  It was the lake. Or rather, the surface of the lake.

  It was not where we had left it. It had dropped two feet.

  Later, we would discover that scientists have an explanation for this disappearing act. Something about equilibrium and water pressure causing the glacier to lift. At a given point all the water rushes from its icy prison, flooding the river plain and tearing out bridges downstream.

  We watched the lake recede for what felt like several hours, then made ourselves go to bed. In the morning, a giant bowl remained where the lake had been, and we slid into the basin, turning up dirt and inhaling the last thousand years. A wall of ice rose before us, fifty feet high and an entire valley wide. We crawled on our hands and knees, digging our fingers into the rich black ground and throwing the silt-heavy mud toward the sun. Matt found a shaft of bamboo, the remnants of an ageless ski pole. For the moment we were like children, called into the gleaming blue hallways of the glacier and its haunting, frozen vaults.

  17

  Father-Daughter Road Trip

  Matt and I saw each other just a few more times that summer. He was still in love with Thea, and I had gotten restless. A friend talked me into doing a wilderness EMT course in Crested Butte, Colorado. It sounded perfect; I felt like I could spend the rest of my life exploring Alaska, but the whole town of McCarthy shuts down at the end of summer. Since my friend’s job ended later than mine, we’d get to Seattle each on our own and then drive the rest of the way to Colorado together.

  Our arrangement meant that I would have to drive all 1,400 miles of the Alcan alone, something that sounded as enticing as eating nails. I made a flyer requesting a travel partner and pinned it to the McCarthy Lodge, the old warehouse, and the hangar where St. Elias Alpine Guides outfitted tourists to ice climb on the glacier. When, after two weeks, no one had responded, I once again found myself in need of my family. I called my mom, who promptly passed me to my dad. “Heck, yeah,” he said. “I’d love to drive the Alcan. Give me a few weeks to find a cheap flight, and I’ll meet you at the airport in Anchorage.”

  Dad and I departed Anchorage in late August 1993. I met him at the airport and loaded his gear into my Subaru Justy. I didn’t say it, but Dad seemed tired beyond his years. It had been months since we’d seen each other and, for some reason, as I reconnected with nature, I projected that he was doing the same. Maybe it was irrational, but I expected some version of my old dad to roll into Anchorage, stirred to life by the freedom of the road, the cool air, and the bright white glaciers, visible from the window seat of the airplane, in the Chugach Mountains. The man in front of me looked like he was carrying twenty-pound rocks in both of his pockets. We climbed into my Justy and started driving.

  A soft breeze blew through the windows, smelling of rocks and minerals. Dad kept his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker, even though it must have been seventy degrees. I took off my sandals, and drove in bare feet.

  You have to go north to go south when you’re leaving Alaska, so Dad and I drove the Glenn Highway, heading back toward the McCarthy cutoff. We passed moose in swamps, with algae hanging off their racks, and bald eagles sitting on nests perched atop telephone poles. In Glenallen, Dad was hungry, so we stopped at a gas station and stuffed ourselves on Slim Jims and Hostess Chocodiles before pressing on to Tok Junction. To the east, we could see the Wrangell Mountains, and to the west, 20,320 foot Mount McKinley. It looked so dense and massive, I thought it created an indentation on the horizon.

  I could tell my dad was loving the adventure. He chatted up the waitresses at every roadhouse where we stopped. He loitered around guys with big, bushy beards and stared at the cuts—from fishing knives and motorcycle wrenches—on their blackened, gnarled hands. In another lifetime, or under different circumstances, my dad would have thrived in Alaska, where your outdoor skill set—from how accurately you can fire a pistol to how quickly you can change a carburetor—mattered more than things like reading and writing. A part of me wished we could go to McCarthy, so I could show him the glacier, the frothing Copper River, and, near Kennicott, the old angle station, where a friend once fired his rifle over my head to warn me that a black bear was following me. But I hadn’t suggested turning when we came to the cutoff, because I didn’t want to jeopardize the magic I’d felt living there. Yet even without my personal discoveries, my dad could barely contain his excitement. He ooohed and aaahed over every mountain that appeared in our windshield, and screamed “Stop the car!” when we saw a black bear or moose. In British Columbia, we followed two gangly caribou down the center of the road for what must have been fifteen minutes. Dad couldn’t decide if he wanted to shoot them or take their picture. When I reminded him that he didn’t have a gun, he settled on a photo. The road lurched up and down, aggravated by frostheaves, and the needles on the million-strong spruce trees smelled wholly different than the spruce-scented car freshener dangling from my rearview mirror.

  On it went for hours. Wild animals materializing out of the brush as if put there purely for the sake of making our drive more entertaining. In one thirty-mile stretch we counted four black bears, three more caribou, a moose, and a golden eagle. Dad stared at the miles of wilderness surrounding us and said, “There’s just no end to it, is there?”

  “No end and no beginning,” I answered.

  Mostly what we did on that long drive, though, was sit together in silence. And during those times I’d start to get antsy, despite the arresting power of the landscape. I still wanted my dad to tell me the truth about what he’d done to me during my adolescence, but, at the same time, I didn’t want to be the one to bring it up. When I got cranky from sitting in the car, I’d scootch against the window, glare out at a million acres of black spruce, and conjure up imaginary conversations.

  I realize now just how much of my life I’d spent bringing enjoyment to my family. And how sick I was of shouldering the burden of making us whole and healthy. I constantly had to remind myself that I was the victim. I was the one who needed saving. After so many wrongs, it was up to my family to make things right for me.

  Looking back, I know I felt too conflicted to tell my dad how I truly felt. At twenty-two, some deep, dependent need made me continue accommodating my dad.
Why didn’t I call someone else when it was time to drive the Alcan, or wait a few extra weeks until the summer officially ended? I knew college kids who needed rides back to schools in the Lower 48. But instead of waiting, or searching broader or wider, I defaulted to what was familiar, to what I wanted so desperately to be innocent.

  We spent most nights on the drive down the Alcan sleeping in gravel by the side of the road. Clouds of mosquitoes drained us of blood, and the rain came down in heavy brown sheets. Anyone else—my mom, Chris, and every friend except maybe Ladan—would have wanted to rip my head off if I put them through such a “vacation.” But every time I looked at my dad, he was smiling. I couldn’t help but smile back.

  In the end, Dad and I never found the words to say what we were feeling. Not on that whole drive from Alaska to Seattle. We sat in our separate worlds, staring out our separate windows. Knowing my dad had once—maybe still—craved me made me want to reach across the car seats and punch him. But the moment would pass, and I’d feel sorry for him again. I even thought that maybe I was just as sick as he was. But the soft part of my heart felt that he deserved another chance. I knew the day would come when I’d be strong—and hard-hearted—enough to finally force him to fess up to every last one of his abuses. That knowledge—and the fact that I still wanted easy, palatable answers—is what allowed me to sit next to him for twenty-five hundred miles and say next to nothing.