by Tracy Ross
It just so happened, though, that Mayz, the angel from Twin Falls, was coming through Las Vegas. For years, she had sent me cards, bought me presents, and prayed for my well-being. We’d kept in touch through letters while I went to Interlochen and Cornish; Mayz kept all of mine in an extra-wide Manila envelope, which she eventually sent me. Now she was coming to visit, and I had to tell her about my wedding.
Never was a marriage undertaken with less hope but more fatalism. Mayz knew something was wrong the second I answered my parents’ phone. Her husband, Steve, was attending a conference, and she said she wanted to see me. We agreed to rendezvous at a Catholic church near the strip, with sculptures on the outside that looked like Power Rangers. Neither of us thought I should bring Colin.
Just seeing Mayz always made me want to crawl into her lap and start bawling like a little baby. She was the one person I believed wanted only good things for me. I knew when I told her about Colin she’d be shocked. She’d met him—and disliked him—before we went to Scotland. The second I sat down next to her, a water main burst behind my eyelids.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Mayz stared at me, surprised.
“Sorry for what, honey? You have nothing to apologize to me about.”
“Yes, I do. Because I didn’t tell you about the wedding.”
“What wedding?”
“My wedding,” I continued. “Colin and I are getting married.”
Mayz stared at me for a good long while, slowly shaking her head. She looked at the cross of Jesus at the front of the church, suspended over a bright gold tabernacle. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded grave and serious. “I know you, Tracy,” she said. “You don’t seem happy. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”
“I have to,” I said. “Colin’s counting on me.”
But Mayz didn’t agree that I couldn’t get out of my marriage. Holding my hand, she looked into my face with her beautiful nut-brown eyes. “Please tell me that you won’t go through with this if you don’t want to,” she said. “Because you don’t have to, Tracy. You don’t.”
“Why not?” I cried.
“Because no one can make you do something if you don’t want it. Not if you don’t give them power over you.”
“But Colin does have power over me,” I said. “He’s counting on me. He’ll kill me if I back out of the wedding now.”
Mayz put one arm around my shoulder. She grabbed my hand in her free hand. I sobbed quietly, tried to keep my hiccuping to a minimum in case other people were praying. As she held me, she whispered, “Colin can’t kill you, honey. No one can. If you do this it has to be because you want to. You count for something, Trace. I want you to believe that.”
Because I didn’t believe her, I had nothing to say.
Mayz continued. “I want you to tell me one thing, Tracy. Let it be the first thing that comes to your mind. What do you want? Try hard and tell me if you can see it.”
I closed my eyes and waited for a picture to form in the oxbows of my grey matter. It wasn’t hard, because I’d often dreamed this dream. What I wanted was so simple anyone could have had it.
“All I want … is to live in the mountains. With a dog, and a job that lets me do things. I could work at a health food store. And ride my bike, all the time. I’ll ride through meadows full of wildflowers. And I’ll write poetry. I doubt it’ll ever happen, but it’d also be nice to find someone who actually loved me.”
I wish Mayz would have called my mom right that minute and told her to come get me. The two of them could have packed me up and Mayz could have taken me back to Twin Falls. But I believed that I’d gotten myself into another mess that I couldn’t possibly get out of. There were too many people counting on me. My mom had already bought me a $50 dress from the Gap.
Two months after the wedding, Colin and I moved back to Alaska. This time we went to the town of Talkeetna, which had four hundred year-round residents but swelled to five times that in the summer, when climbers from around the world congregated there to climb 20,320-foot Mount McKinley. I got a job in a small liquor shop-slash-grocery store, Nagley’s, and Colin found work as a raft guide. We spent our first several weeks camping in a tiny, two-person mountaineering tent at the end of the town airstrip. While Colin kept busy showing our new neighbors—climbing guides, commercial fishermen, and Denali National Park rangers—how to do things they’d been doing for decades, I got to know the local color.
One of them in particular stood out. He was a soft-spoken raft guide with scraggly brown hair and eyes the color of blue glass. He looked to be twenty-two or twenty-three to my twenty-six years on the planet. When he walked into Nagley’s, he instantly gave me a spark. He introduced himself—Shawn Edmondson—and said he worked with Colin at Talkeetna River Guides. He and his giant black malamute, Tank, had driven up the Alcan from the University of Montana, but he had no intention of returning to school at the end of the summer. Once the snow flew, he and Tank would head to the ski slopes of Colorado.
The boy with the cobalt eyes lodged in my mind and wouldn’t leave me. He continued dropping by Nagley’s, where he’d reward himself after a long day of guiding with a freezer-cold bottle of beer. If we were alone in the store, we’d stand in front of the cooler with the doors swung wide and let the icy air cool our bodies. Shawn told me he’d grown up ski-racing in Connecticut and that he’d been raised solely by women, including his mom, grandmother, and two sisters, Courtney and Shannon. The way he spoke of them—half smiling, half complaining, but with obvious respect—made me instantly trust him. When he talked about the one thing in his life that was missing—a girl who loved the mountains and skiing as much as he did—I wanted to reach across the counter where the cash register sat and grab him. “I’m that girl,” I wanted to shout. “Say the word and I’ll run away with you!” But we never made it that far in our conversations. We’d talk until the glass on his beer bottle started to sweat and then, brushing fingertips against palms in the exchange of money for a buzz, smile and say, “Good-bye, take care, I’ll see you again sometime.”
During my days off, I rode my bike, picked blueberries, and stood on the banks of the Susitna River, staring at Mount McKinley and dreaming of the day I might climb it. But every night I had to go home to Colin. Even though we were newlyweds, he treated me like I was going to run off on him any second. I might have sent the subliminal signals; in a vague, uncertain way, I was already planning my escape.
In October, with money from my parents, we bought two acres of birch- and spruce-studded property outside of Talkeetna and built a tiny cabin on it. I helped with the construction and cared for our growing team of huskies. Though we could barely afford to feed ourselves, Colin was collecting dogs like another person might collect expensive shoes or foreign money. On my days off from Nagley’s I pounded nails and swept the job site until one day, when I was having trouble hammering together a two-by-four, Colin screamed—driving all interest in helping out of me.
“Need a hand?” he said. He was standing behind me, watching my progress.
“I think I’m okay,” I answered.
“Fucking hell, woman. I didn’t ask if you were okay. I asked if you need a hand.”
My ears burned. I slowly put down the hammer and took off on my bike.
But from that point on, Colin’s temper started flaring up so often and unexpectedly that I began constantly guarding myself against it. A friend who knew me then says she thought of me as two different people inhabiting one body. She says when I was alone, I was gregarious, creative, and joyful, but when Colin came near me, I became visibly smaller and constricted. She was right on both counts: my new neighbors brought out the best in me, but when Colin’s shadow came over me, I withdrew into myself. Once the cabin was built, I did everything I could to stay away from the tiny confinement, overpowered by Colin’s emotionally demanding presence. I worked back-to-back shifts at Nagley’s, built a small network of women friends, and started teaching yoga at
the Talkeetna Community Center.
I only knew what I’d learned in my book Yoga for Runners, but in those days in Talkeetna, it didn’t matter if you were an expert. My students came to me needing an antidote to the poundings their bodies took while chopping wood, wrenching on Cessnas, and hauling tons of live crab out of Cook Inlet’s marathon commercial netting sessions. I led the hardened men and women through carefully planned asanas, teaching them simple poses like Mountain, Triangle, and Warrior. Afterward, I relaxed their minds and bodies with soft-spoken guided meditations. I was never paid for my time, but my students more than reimbursed me with gifts from their various trades. They brought me grocery bags stuffed with two-foot-long king crab legs, mittens knitted with homespun husky fur, and, from the famous bush pilot and musician Doug Geeting, huge jars of cantaloupe juice that tasted better than any milkshake I’d ever sipped.
My yoga practice was also helping me. Moving in the heat of my wood stove, I’d bend and flow while the sweat of a million bad memories dripped from my pores and onto the floor. The slow, meditative movement calmed me; it allowed me to drop in to my feelings for the first time ever. Always before, I’d run, climbed, hiked, and skied away my fears. With yoga, I found a way to experience my emotions.
And what I felt was that old, profound sadness that lived in each of my cells. It was dense and heavy, like mercury or chocolate pudding. But what surprised me was how much I liked my sorrow, which seemed like the single most important thing about me. Few people I knew had been to places as dark as I had. I figured my journey to hell had made me better able to empathize with others’ suffering.
It extended beyond me, to a neighbor named Krista Maciolek, who, in January of 1997, asked me to help her train her sled dogs for the 1,161-mile Iditarod race. Krista was brave and afraid; her boyfriend, Pecos, was dying of cancer. To deal with it, she was preparing herself for the second-toughest race on earth; I recognized that, like me, she was pushing herself to the physical extreme in order to process her anguish. I helped by feeding her dogs, stringing them on the gangline in front of her sled, and handling for her at races. Occasionally, during training runs, I mushed my own team of dogs behind her.
In order to qualify for the Iditarod, Krista had to prove herself competitive in two separate races. In mid-January, we agreed to meet at the start of the Kuskokwim 300, near the town of Big Lake. The second I saw her pull into the parking lot, I could tell she’d been crying. It was 30 below zero—without figuring in a wind-chill factor. She kept crying as we unloaded her huskies from their dog boxes and led them to the start line. She cried as we hooked them up and booted their paws. She was still crying when she thanked me for helping her, before unhooking her sled and yelling “Get up!” to her string of yapping, screaming huskies. She was beginning a three-hundred-mile round-trip journey to the Kuskokwim River, where the temperature would drop another 10 degrees to 40 below zero. I knew she was crying not only because of the terror that must come when you set off on a race that will last between twenty-four and forty-eight hours. She was also crying because a few days earlier, she’d been told that Pecos had only a few months to live.
So moved was I by the five-foot-two-inch Talkeetna librarian that I went home and wrote a story about her on the back of a grocery bag. Colin and I were so poor at the time that it was the only blank paper I had. Scribbling the scene that still held in my imagination, I burned the last of our white gas writing by the light of a Coleman lantern. When the lantern light died, I turned on my headlamp and wrote until I’d completed the story. In the morning, I took it to the local radio station, where I read it over the airwaves.
The tale of the dog-mushing librarian wasn’t great, but it was honest. And in the weeks after it aired, dozens of people congratulated me on its humor and compassion. Not only did my neighbors in Talkeetna love it, Alaska Public Radio Network picked it up and aired it two weeks later, on the start of the Iditarod, which in Alaska is akin to Super Bowl Sunday.
That’s when I realized, for the first time in my adult life, that I might have a gift for writing.
Krista and I went to Anchorage, where dozens of mushers were milling around 4th Avenue, loading their sled bags with all the required provisions for the long, strenuous trek. I tended to Krista’s dogs’ feet, while she fed them a final prerace snack. As I smeared each paw with an ointment of eucalyptus and wax, I heard the sound of mukluks padding across snow behind me. They belonged to a native Alaskan woman who said she lived in the village of Unalakleet, several hundred miles to the west. She told Krista about a story she’d heard on the radio that featured her and her dog team. It was so good, the lady said, she knew she’d remember it forever.
Bent over booting a dog paw, I closed my eyes and listened to the praise being bestowed upon me. I had reached someone. I’d made a difference.
19
The Great Escape
If only that story could have been the true beginning of the life I was about to encounter. The good life, with nice people, heartfelt love, and grand, amazing adventures. But there was one more obstacle I had to overcome. And it had to do with Colin.
The winter of 1997, Colin’s violence escalated to the point where I feared he’d physically hurt me. We’d argue, and he’d scream until his face was flaming. One fight was so bad, I ran out of the cabin in my stocking feet and spent the next several hours shivering in our broken-down Subaru. I sulked back to my now-calm husband only when I realized that if I didn’t, I might have died of hypothermia.
From then on, I started seriously looking for ways out. Big escape plans, like saving my money and disappearing to a yoga colony somewhere in Hawaii or Costa Rica. When I realized that I wasn’t going to save a penny while caring for Colin and feeding our (now twenty-five) sled dogs, I began secretly exploring different options with my neighbors.
A woman named Bonnie-Ann told me about a ranger job in Denali. She said I’d be perfect for it and that I should apply. The job would require that I move to the park for the whole summer. Family housing didn’t exist; there’d be no place for Colin. Not only that, but I would get to spend seven to ten days at a time “patrolling” Denali’s six-million-acre park. Patrolling meant hiking over passes and into pristine river valleys, making sure people were storing their food in portable containers impenetrable by grizzlies. I swooned at the thought of living and working in a place where, for most of the year, lynx, wolves, and wolverines outnumbered humans. In early March, I told Colin I was going on an all-day yoga retreat with Bonnie-Ann and then drove two hundred miles with her to Denali.
By the time we were done visiting Bonnie-Ann’s friends at Denali headquarters, I knew I had to be a backcountry ranger. I applied, right on the spot. People who live in Alaska year-round have priority for ranger jobs with the park service, so I figured I had a good chance of getting one and of banking the big bucks ($11/hour!) that came with it.
The only trouble was, Colin would never let me go. I decided I’d wait until I had a job offer to tell him. Bonnie-Ann and I agreed to put her PO box as the return address on my application. When the letter came, either offering me a job or denying me one, she’d signal to me by sending a message on the local radio station’s Denali Echoes program, which sent messages to bush dwellers who didn’t have phones.
On the day the letter came, Bonnie-Ann sent me an Echo. Just like we’d planned, she kept it short and coded. “To Tracy in Freedom Hills from Bonnie-Ann. The rabbit has left the water.” Colin heard it too, but when he asked what it meant, I told him it was Bonnie-Ann’s way of informing me that a date she’d gone on went well. I knew he didn’t believe me, but I didn’t care. I was going to work in Denali.
The question, though, was how. I knew when Colin found out about the offer, he’d threaten to call the park service and tell them I’d lied on my application. He’d say I was too stupid to be a ranger, that my sense of direction was always off (which would have been honest), and that I couldn’t start a fire even if someone handed me a Duraflame log
and a can of jet fuel. I knew he’d grind down my confidence until I gave up completely. So Bonnie-Ann, another friend named Cheri, and I planned my great escape. They would come to my house on the day I told Colin I was going to Denali. Cheri would drive her car, because she was rich and had a good one. She and Bonnie-Ann would stand at the end of my path and make sure Colin didn’t come after me. All of us were so scared of what might happen, Cheri offered to bring a gun.
On the big day, Cheri and Bonnie-Ann sent another Echo that said they’d be over at eleven. I walked the snow-covered road in front of my house until I saw Cheri’s bright red truck. She and Bonnie-Ann hopped out, gave me quick hugs, and told me to be brave. I breathed in their smells of woodsmoke and rose water before going into the dog yard, where I found Colin shoveling poop.
I picked up a shovel and started digging with him.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? About what?”
“Oh, you know. Things.”
“What kind of things? Things I’ll like or things I won’t like?”
I paused, because I knew that I was about to say it. Flexing my muscles under my raincoat, I reminded myself that it was now or never. “I want to tell you something important,” I said. “Let’s go make some tea.”
I probably shouldn’t have said the tea thing, because we usually made each other tea after a huge argument. I waited for Colin to signal that he was on to me, but he didn’t act the least bit suspicious.
“Tea, huh? Okay, I’ll be in in a minute.”
I went inside and made some tea. Orange pekoe for him, Earl Grey for me. As our bags steeped, I peeked through the door and saw that my day pack was where I’d hidden it, sitting behind a tree and loaded with essentials. I’d filled it with everything I’d need if Colin went crazy and tried to kill me.