Four Quarters of Light

by Brian Keenan

  I enjoyed the man’s garrulous conversation and was intrigued by how everywhere else was simply referred to as ‘outside’. For Alaskans, I later learned, everywhere that is not Alaska is ‘outside’. In part it perhaps explained why he never went home, for as creatures we are seldom drawn in great length to what is ‘outside’ our experience. ‘Outside’ hints at something that is alien to our experience, and I was beginning to feel that ‘outside’ was a place you should only visit once. So what was I doing here? Was this my ‘outside’? And would once be enough?

  As suddenly as the question arose it dissolved, and I asked the driver, ‘Just how cold does it get?’

  ‘Well,’ he replied, ‘it’s been known to hit minus fifty and more here. And when you come out of a big cold like that, there’s usually less people around.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Some die, some take off, some freak out completely. The freak ones you have to watch out for. At first they seem normal as they always were, then one day they start acting funny, doing things and saying things that ain’t like them. Then they’re back to normal again as if nothing happened. You forget it once, maybe even twice, but when it gets more reg’lar than that, you know they’re gone and the old dark cold has got them. They’ll be gone for ever, or enough so’s they don’t make much use anyway. It’s always the loners that go first. Man needs a woman in the wintertime. Beg your pardon, mam!’ he suddenly interjected, realizing finally that Audrey and the boys were in the car.

  Perhaps all the winters he had spent there had numbed a little bit of him, but I liked him and his rickety old taxi, which as I looked closely seemed to have more duct tape holding it together than I thought possible. Our antiquated transport with its curious driver and his talk about ‘outsiders’ and people going crazy seemed to add to my otherworldly apprehension of the place as we passed through it. I had the feeling of being washed up there, or having been uncovered in a snow slide. Fairbanks is Alaska’s second city but has the feel of a dormitory encampment in the process of being abandoned. Maybe it was the greyness of the snow against a sleepy blue sky, or maybe it was me – and I was tired – but it had already impressed itself on me as a place not yet ready for human habitation. Everything hung in a murky, opaque gloom, eerily lit by wearily flashing neon. A last flickering heartbeat.

  We had decided to stay the first few days in a hotel to sort ourselves out and allow the kids to get used to the place. We had been travelling for thirty-two hours on four different aircraft and we needed breathing space between our arrival and whatever departure we would determine on. The hotel was on the outskirts of the town, but as Fairbanks is so diffuse there weren’t really any outskirts as such. The place was constructed entirely of pine log and heavy pine beams.

  The Chena River ran alongside the hotel and made for an excellent playground. I was assured that the last of the snow had fallen, unless I intended travelling much further north. Though the snow was still lying stained and sullied on the ground, making it look like a painter’s drip sheet, I was informed that summer could happen tomorrow. I believed what I was told. I had heard enough about the sudden arrival of summer in Alaska. Still, the cold seemed to be hanging in the air. It didn’t really penetrate you physically but it did get under your skin, metaphorically. Its invisible presence seemed to erase the normal preoccupations that fill a day. At first it’s fun – this is Alaskan snow, I told myself. This is the petticoat frill of the Arctic underskirts. This is the powder crust of the icebound heart of this great Arctic frontier. The novelty of it made me giddy, like my children playing in it. But after a few days the novelty was gone. The soft, uneven coverlet that had looked so picturesque now seemed to creep up as if to smother you. I was already trying to imagine myself living out there in the cold and dark. It was not inviting.

  My first days in Fairbanks were full of this exotic contradiction. I was at the centre of this northern world. Further north would be another even colder and even more enclosed world. But I was also at the between point of things. Winter was on its last legs and summer, even if I couldn’t see it, was waiting out there. Maybe this accounted for my irresoluteness, but then, as I struggled with my notebook trying to find the right words to convey this place, I remembered something I had read about hypothermia. It causes numbness and irrational and sometimes violent behaviour. Sometimes sufferers seem withdrawn and intense. Muscle cramps produce a morbid, introspective lethargy, and at other times bursts of ecstatic energy. I could understand how this place could cause such mercurial responses, but I wanted to believe that my own vacillation was more down to the impending summer, the life that was quietly burgeoning under the earth and in the heavens. I watched my family wrapped up against the elements, looking like Michelin men. They were enjoying the snow in the spruce woods, laughing when it slid off the branches and showered them as they charged between trees. I forgot my anxiety about bringing them here. I was glad they were with me. They were a safety net. For a man alone could lose himself utterly in this vast, cold region without having moved too far from the city. I thought about it for a while. Yes, my taxi driver was more than a cabbie. He was also a prophet!

  I spent my mornings with Pat Walsh, planning and finalizing what I wanted to do, and more importantly what we couldn’t do as a family. I had met her when I’d first visited Fairbanks several years ago. She had her own specialized tour business and what she didn’t know about Alaska wasn’t worth knowing. There were some trips it would be foolish to attempt as a family. Months before our arrival I had enlisted Pat’s help to arrange a stay with the Eskimos on the Bering Sea coast. She had assured me that Eskimos adore children, especially blond-haired blue-eyed ones, but life was very, very basic and very, very hard. There was nothing in the way of luxury or entertainment for a four-year-old and a not yet two-year-old from Dublin’s suburbs. When she mentioned that sanitation would be crude in the extreme and that washing or showering, if it was at all possible, was normally a communal affair, my problems resolved themselves. Even if I wanted her to and pleaded and promised eternal, undying love, would Audrey follow me into the Arctic North under such conditions? Once the subject of native cuisine was discussed I knew there wasn’t a heathen’s hope in hell of my wife warming my igloo for me. Seal blubber, moose, caribou, musk ox and raw fish washed down with boiled snow was, quite simply, not on.

  In preparation for our trip, Audrey had been reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, the true story of a young man’s fascination with the wilderness and his ultimate renunciation of ‘normal’ life, which occurred in 1992. Chris McCandless, about whom the story was written, seemed a driven man. He had handed over the entire balance of his account – some $24,000 – to charity, abandoned his car and possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet and simply walked off into the Alaskan wilderness alone. Such is the action of a madman, but this young man was anything but mad, at least to all outward appearances. He came from an affluent Virginian family and graduated with honours from an Ivy League university, where he was an elite athlete. ‘Given a few years or so and with a few minor adjustments here and there, he could be you,’ my wife quipped as she outlined the bare bones of the story. I disagreed, but she continued, ‘You’re so bloody stubborn, you keep too many things to yourself. You’re worse than Greta Garbo sometimes with your “I want to be alone”!’ I could only smile, but I felt the ghost of Chris McCandless closer than I care to admit. When Audrey remarked that a piece of wood carved with the words ‘Jack London is King’ was found at the side of the young man’s corpse, I was profoundly intrigued and not a little disturbed.

  Chris McCandless’s last words to the world were written on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol. Audrey read it to me: ‘SOS. I need your help. I am injured, near death and too weak to hike out of here. I am alone. This is no joke. In the name of God, please remain to save me. I am collecting berries close by and shall return into the evening. Thank you, Chris McCandless, August?’ She remarked on how tragic and pathetically sad i
t was that he had died so young and so helplessly alone. The sadness of the young man’s words struck me too, but I didn’t want to show it. Instead I responded by saying that a loving wife should not be telling her husband ghost stories about people dying in the Alaskan wilderness just before he was about to disappear into it himself. My humour was lost on her. She replied pointedly, ‘But it’s not a ghost story, it’s real, and that’s why I’m telling you about it!’ I was unsure what to say, and to fill the silence I suggested I might read the book after her. ‘I’m not sure I’ll let you,’ she declared adamantly.

  ‘What, not let me read the book?’

  ‘No, not let you go!’

  It was the same stern voice, but this time I thought it coldly authoritative, not wanting any argument or humour from me.

  That night I thought about McCandless and his fatal exile in the wilderness. He was a highly intelligent and committed young man inspired by Jack London and the great nineteenth-century Russian writers Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Gogol. Asceticism and moral rigour would certainly have been principal psychological characteristics of a young man steeped in such literature, and such qualities could, to a mind so disposed, be perfectly suited to the wilderness landscape. The lure of such a place could become irresistible, and if the young man were such an athlete then the challenge would be doubly hypnotic.

  As a young man I suppose I had drunk from the same cup as young McCandless, but I was older now, if not wiser, and I had brought my bonds of love and affection with me. I had burned no bridges in the fires of renunciation – quite the reverse. I hadn’t intended to leave Audrey, Jack and Cal for any longer than I had to. But at the same time I’m sure I both sensed and was looking for what McCandless was seeking – self-affirmation, a new compass bearing from which to set out on life, something profoundly fulfilling and maybe even life-altering.

  The Alaskan wilderness is just another desert, and like the desert it is an environment of extremes. In substance and in form it is alien and austere, inimical to human presence. In such a wilderness the mind expands in new vistas of light and space. The northern sky is enormous, awesome and threatening, yet intoxicating. The architecture of the earth and the expansive heaven diminishes you, yet allows you to see further than is possible for the human eye. In this landscape you may discern more clearly that map imprinted on your nervous system. In such places men can be caught up in strange rhapsodies, and may be transformed. Such places have spawned the leaders of great religions. But, I told myself, those who choose the wilderness retreat do so not to escape reality but to find it. I think it was Dostoevsky who wrote that to fall into the hands of the living god was a powerful and dreadful thing, and maybe that is what happened to Chris McCandless. For had he kept his eyes firmly on reality, however flawed, he might have made the journey back, for that is the important one!

  I thought again of the words carved on the scrap of wood, the word ‘King’ underlined, and wondered what that meant. It was an exuberant statement from such a well-trained and disciplined mind. What did he mean? Was London the king because he understood the dreadful nature of the world he had entered into? In White Fang he wrote:

  Dark spruce forest groaned on either side of the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, into the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was desolation, lifeless, without movement, so alone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a tinge of laughter, but laughter more terrible than any sadness. A laughter cold as the frost, and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort to life. It was the wild, the savage, frozenhearted Northland Wild.

  That dark spruce forest remains on the hills around Fairbanks, and even in the first days of summer there was nothing pretty about it. It was old and unsightly, and the trees looked more dead than alive. They could have been fifty or sixty years old, but they looked like saplings. Because the ground they grow out of is permanently frozen there are insufficient nutrients to allow them to gain any real bulk or to spread. I was told that only the black spruce can grow on such ground, and as I looked at them their blackness was pleasant enough against the late snow, but nearer the town, where they aged long before their time, they were antagonistically ugly.

  Then again, as we drove around Fairbanks trying to make purchases for our excursion Audrey and I agreed that the town was a contradiction in terms. The word Fairbanks suggests a pleasantly situated environment along the banks of the Chena. But this is far from the truth. The banks of the river are built up with offices and small factories long since closed up with the decline in gold-mining. In the outskirts private homes are built in a variety of styles and materials and many of them have their own private floatplane moored on the water at the end of their wellmanicured lawns.

  Overall, the town would not score any points for architectural or cultural merit. It is constructed on a grid system so typical of Middle America, and such simple expediency does not encourage artistic evolution. But even with this ordered constraint, the town seemed to be thrown together the way boom-and-bust frontier towns of necessity usually are. The charm of Fairbanks has its origins firmly in that era, for Fairbanks is indisputably a blue-collar town. It may be the second city in the state, yet it has the feel of a town. The people here are open and friendly in the extreme. All the airs and graces of a cultured European capital would find no place here.

  The atmosphere of a frontier town still hung in the air. This was a place where people came to work out dreams and found they had to spend nine months of the year simply trying to survive. The winters here favour no one person above another and everybody ultimately depends on everyone else. Just to underline the fact, there were no designer shops of any description. Wind- and weatherproofing are essential elements of clothes design in Fairbanks; colour, texture and cut are only meaningful if they enhance these first priorities. Men and women alike dressed like lumberjacks in flannel shirts, workmen’s overalls and sturdy boots. ‘Dressing’ to go anywhere meant no more than exchanging one pair of jeans for another, or a pair of boots that hadn’t been clean for months for clean ones. Still, you knew that nobody would bat an eyelid if you walked into an opera performance at the university in full bush gear, caked with mud, wet with snow, smelling of the great outdoors and perfumed with perspiration, blood and offal from the moose you have just finished skinning.

  In the grey morning light and half light at dusk, Fairbanks looked like an expansive container yard with acre upon acre of rectangular clapboard buildings and square, rough-hewn log cabins. It is down-in-the-mouth stubborn, and persistent. It hangs on like grim death against all the odds. In the afternoon, while walking downtown where every other building was once either a bar, a brothel or a gambling parlour but was now boarded up, empty or demolished, you sensed that the winter winds had blown the place clean of this sordid but ebullient lifestyle. In the daylight the buildings seemed impregnated with amnesia about the past, as if they had forgotten why they were there in the first place. The bars that remained were rank with the smell of stale beer, tobacco and urine. There were a few native people in them too sick to drink any more. Their eyes were full of anger and emptiness. It was not a pretty place, and the reality factor was cauterizing my romantic imagination. The men who stared at us with their ghoulish eyes were indeed ghosts. This was their land, by birthright and inheritance. They were born into it, were taught about it, understood its ways, yet here they were washed up in these soulless back streets existing on a daily round of alcohol, vomit and the sleep of stupor.

  During the day I kept most such thoughts to myself, allowing Alaska to pose its own questions, which I might or might not find the answer for. But it was early days yet. We were still busy planning, shopping for clothes and equipment and making occasional forays into the bush before the p
lagues of mosquitoes and no-see-ums made it impossible. In the meantime my friend Pat had arranged for us to have the use of a log cabin in the hills above the town. We had been to view it a few days previously, and to me it seemed idyllic. It was set well back off the road a good half-mile and nestled snugly under its own growth of white spruce and birch; thankfully, the gloomy black spruce was not in great abundance in this particular area. All around us were stands of aspen and poplar. Pat informed us that Russians had a name for this type of woodland – ‘taiga’, meaning ‘little sticks’, because the trees, which were maybe more than a hundred years old, rarely attain more than a few inches’ girth. The nearest cabin to our new home was a few hundred yards through dense scrub and alder thickets.