Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

by Blair Braverman

  He the Rich One frowned. “You’re not going to leave her here alone.”

  “Why not?” Of course I could handle the shop by myself.

  He the Rich One leaned on his elbows. “You know what happens,” he said, “is that six Romanians come and ransack the whole store. One of them takes care of pia and the rest just steal whatever they want. You’ll be helpless to do anything. You just sit there and watch—if you’re lucky.”

  “That doesn’t happen,” I said.

  “Yes,” said He the Rich One. “It happens often. I had jo a shop myself, remember? I know.”

  While we argued, Arild stood and walked out. I heard an engine start. In a minute, he passed by the window in his van. Then He the Rich One gathered his potatoes and cheese.

  “Hold on,” I said. “You’re not leaving now.”

  “Of course I am,” he said. “I have things to do. Don’t worry about me, sweetie. I’ll pay later once there’s milk in this place.”

  I didn’t think He the Rich One was right about the Romanians. That was silly. I’d been here a month and had never heard anything of the sort. I swiped a licorice coil from the candy bin and walked over to the counter, unwinding the coil with my teeth. I sat down in Arild’s chair. It smelled like the tobacco that he kept behind the counter, hidden under a black garbage bag. I lifted the garbage bag to take a look. We were low on snus tobacco.

  It was Monday, a quiet day in the shop. A few flies buzzed around the window. I flipped through Northern Light: Microsoft was building an office in downtown Tromsø. A Sami psychic offered her services at a discount.

  The Sailor stopped by for a dozen beers. I wrote his debt in the book.

  Some folk school students bought ramen, tobacco, and chocolate milk.

  A woman walked in, clicking in high-heeled boots, her sweater unzipped to reveal ample cleavage and a shirt that read I Hope There’s Room on the Red Carpet for My Tractor. Jeanette was one of the only young women around, tough and flirtatious. She had moved in with her boyfriend at sixteen, when he was thirty-seven; now, ten years later, the two had settled into each other with an ease that made them one of the most enviable couples on the peninsula. “She’s a year older than you,” Arild had once helpfully pointed out, “and she’s got a man, three kids, two horses, six goats, and her own farm.” But Jeanette was having a bad year. The kindergarten had reported her children to child protective services on the claim that she beat them. Jeanette and her boyfriend were fighting to reunite their family, but the going was slow. They split their days between driving from town to town to visit the divided children one by one. She was exhausted, but how could you rest when your children weren’t home? Jeanette met my eyes, but she didn’t sit down. She bought an energy drink and an ice-cream cone and left to eat them in the car.

  The enthusiastic German organist, who had been recruited to the country with her husband as an employee of the church, stopped by for a bag of unsalted almonds. She had recently begun exploring a raw food diet, and she felt fantastic.

  Then nobody came in for a while. I glanced at the clock: 12:00. Anne Lill would be back in an hour. I made some fresh coffee and rearranged the shoes on their shelves: high heels on top, work boots on the bottom. Arild sold them all for 200 kroner each, though some of the pairs were worth ten times that. I wrote down some fake prices—1,550, 2,100—and taped them to the soles of the nicer shoes, so they would seem like a better deal. Then I ate a yogurt.

  It seemed like Romanians weren’t what the shop had to worry about. Arild believed that his sister was out to run him into the ground.

  The whole thing had started when he’d been running the shop with his son, Henning, a decade earlier. He and Henning had both been driving trucks on the side, and he supposed they hadn’t kept track of the books, because money grew scarcer and scarcer. Finally, desperate, he’d asked his sister Ingeborg for a loan. “But she wanted, instead, that I should write the shop over to her so it couldn’t be seized if we went bankrupt. She was my sister, you understand—I didn’t know. She kept asking and asking. I wrote the land over but not the shop. Just to quiet her.” Now they were embroiled in a years-long lawsuit: Ingeborg wanted to use the shop as her vacation home, and Arild wanted to keep running it. He said he would gladly share the property with her, and the profits, but he found her tactics disturbing; she had once, in a fury, tried to nail the door of the shop closed, and he also believed she had forged legal papers. The whole thing struck him as tragic, and he steeled himself with thoughts of tradition. Ingeborg might have been firstborn, but Arild was the firstborn son. Mortenhals was his land and his life, the only thing he had to defend.

  On Midsummer, it rained. There were no bonfires, no late nights, save a few hooded figures using the cover of St. Hans to burn their trash illegally on the beach. But at least the villagers had milk for their rice porridge, a proper festive meal for the longest day of the year.

  In Alaska, we’d celebrated Midsummer for a different reason: it meant winter was on its way back. That was one of the rules: dogsledders’ lives revolve around winter, and the glacier, for all its snow, was just a stopgap until fall. Of course, we told the tourists that the summer season was vital training for next spring’s races. That enough tours could practically prepare a team for the Iditarod. The tourists liked to think that their participation was useful.

  This was an excursion for which tourists paid $500 each—plus a fuel surcharge for those who weighed over 240 pounds. Most of the guides’ earnings came from tips: twenties, fifties, or the occasional hundred folded tight and slipped into our jacket cuffs as we shook hands at tour’s end. Our goal was to provide a luxury experience, a taste of Real Alaska! with absolutely no discomfort, either physical or mental. For instance, we were not supposed to reprimand the dogs when tourists were present. We were discouraged from acknowledging climate change, even as the glacier melted away beneath us. We cleaned the kennel constantly so that tourists were spared the sight of a single piece of shit, and we raked up dog hair that collected on the snow, piling it in the Woolly Mammoth, an enormous mound hidden behind the tents. Our job was to provide the unspoken reassurance that everything was totally, 100 percent under control at all times.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize the falsity of the pretense. Those of us who lived on the glacier learned to expect nothing from the landscape, to adjust to its changes without question. We no longer jumped at the gunshot crack of avalanches on a sun-warmed afternoon. Turquoise lakes a half mile wide formed and vanished overnight. As the surface snow melted, the foundation under our camp sank steadily away, and we’d wake to find our tents, which were on skis, perched atop pedestals of hardened snow. The glacier was a closed cycle: if we ate cherries at lunch, we’d be picking their pits from the outhouse pump two days later—and getting a lecture from our manager about not swallowing the pits in the first place. On a bad day we called it the Goddamn Ice Cube. On a good day Summer Camp on the Moon.

  One evening a storm came in, fast and hard, thunder booming from black clouds that swept low above our heads. Common knowledge had it that electrical storms rarely hit the icefield—I’d been told that in its ten-year history, the glacier camp had never seen one—but as we rushed for the community tent, a flame of lightning lit the south tongue of the glacier. Crouched on the tent’s plywood floor, dripping and steaming, the staff realized, as one, that none of us knew if ice conducted electricity. Here we were, the tallest thing on the icefield, trapped—perhaps—on a conductor the size of Rhode Island. Lightning cracked again, closer, illuminating the tent walls with a flash of brilliant white. We stared at each other. Then—“Dogs,” somebody said. The musher nearest the door flap jumped to his feet and ran into the wall of rain, but before anyone else could follow, the manager blocked the way. “No way,” he said. “Nobody else is setting foot in that snow.” I felt nauseous. Surely the dogs were in their plastic houses. Maybe plastic was better than plywood. We crouched there, eleven of us, listening, as the storm pa
ssed overhead. Twenty minutes later the sky opened pale blue.

  The icefield, I decided, was hardly real, a snow globe repeatedly shaken so that everything was chaotic and everything was the same. The tours repeated themselves, the days repeated themselves, the weekends off-glacier came and went. My face and hands darkened. I grew muscles I’d never had.

  It wasn’t long before Dan and I were together. Of course we were. The relationship seemed to happen on its own, as natural a course of events as the avalanches tumbling from the mountains around us. Dan had an easy confidence that suggested he belonged here, on the ice, in a place where no one could truly belong. He had a sardonic humor and a handsome, boyish face, and seemed to me indiscriminately older, experienced and wise, though in fact we were only six years apart. Off-glacier, he invited me to restaurants or for walks on foggy beaches. On one of our first dates, he laid out his shirt for me to sit on, then sat beside me on the sand as the tide slipped in and the pearly cruise ships rolled from port and shrank into the gray distance. He was talking about his favorite lead dog; his fingers brushed mine, then lingered, and my skin burned where we touched. His hands were smaller than mine, smooth and compact, which only endeared him to me more. “Sometimes I’m not very good at saying things,” he admitted, and took a breath. “Like right now. What I want to say is that you’re beautiful, and I feel incredibly lucky to be here with you, and I like you a lot.” Later we took a drive down the coastal road. Dan wanted to take some photos for his mother, so we stopped at an overlook with a few other tourists. When they left, I tipped up his cap and kissed him as if I’d been doing it for years, and his arms closed around my back and pulled me in against him.

  Alaska! I liked Alaska.

  I soon realized another benefit of being with Dan. Though there were a few female mushers, the men on the glacier dominated social life; their authority came with an edge of sexism that seemed at once inevitable and disconcerting. In my first weeks, men flicked their gaze down my body, then caught my eye and smiled. Someone walked behind me in the snow, and when I slowed to walk beside him, he urged me forward: “We don’t get this kind of view much around here.” I overheard muttered jokes about catching me alone on the trail. I shed the comments with a teenager’s optimism, and was bothered mostly to the extent that they framed me as different, suggesting, with a smirk, that I didn’t belong and was therefore unfit for glacier life. But I already loved the glacier—loved the absurdity of it all, the drama of helicopters and mountains and howling dogs, the way the endless bright, bare space made me feel at once strong and important. Standing on the ice, I felt like the beating heart of the whole glacier. And there were comments; so what?

  But the murmur of violence that had colored my first weeks on the ice dissolved instantly with Dan’s arm around my waist. Suddenly I counted: mushers held tent flaps open for me, laughed at my jokes, took my feedback into account as they discussed problems with their dog teams or tourists. If I felt, privately, that Dan’s approval proved I belonged on the ice, that sentiment was only reinforced by the ways in which others seemed to believe it, too. And sure, we had a few off moments, Dan and I: comments he made that seemed to edge into disrespect, the language men use to set women apart. But in the moment, I thrilled at the prospect of my first real, grown-up boyfriend. Dan and I wrote each other notes and passed them back and forth in dog booties; during a rare free hour he helped me build a snow bear by the kitchen tent, with bleeding M&M eyes, that lasted until someone drove a snowmobile through it two days later. On days off, Dan drove me to get groceries, took me hiking on rainforest trails, and packed picnics for private beaches. “You’re the nicest girl I ever met,” he’d tell me, winking at me between tours, mouthing my name over the roar of the helicopter, squeezing my hand as he kissed me good night. “How did I get a girl so nice?”

  “I’m not nice,” I’d say. I wouldn’t have minded; it just didn’t seem particularly true, not in this world of ice and dogs and work and men. But Dan would just laugh. He knew all about me, he said. He saw things that even I didn’t know.

  One weekend Dan bought a cheap tent so we could go camping on our days off, far from the dingy, gender-segregated apartments in Juneau that the company provided. What he meant, I knew, was that we could have sex. I’d never had sex before, and the prospect daunted me: How would I know what to do? What if it hurt? For a while I avoided the outing, maintaining that the last thing I wanted was to spend my days off in another tent. But after a few weeks I figured that I’d exhausted my reasonable waiting period, and so I finally agreed. I was nervous, but sex seemed like a good thing to check off my list, a logical extension of the adult world in which I found myself. I liked that Dan wanted me, and I liked what we had done together—making out in hidden corners, his hand trailing shivers up and down my ribs. He had a way of just barely kissing me that sent heat through my whole body. That restraint from—what? Desire was as foreign a world to me as the glacier, and Dan seemed a worthy guide. He had played baseball and hockey, and though his muscles held the memory of training, solid and strong, he was gentle when he held me, brushed the hair from my face.

  We left Juneau at 9 P.M.—night, although it wouldn’t be dark for another hour—and drove to a campground across a lake from the Mendenhall Glacier. We didn’t really talk in the car. At one point we passed a porcupine on the side of the road, and Dan pulled over to take a look. The porcupine was fat and yellowish, its quills like a halo. Dan said a few words about taking off his shirt and tossing it onto the porcupine, a trick that Chad, another musher, had told us about. The idea was that the porcupine would expel a few quills into the shirt, then wander away, leaving both shirt and quills behind. Then you had quills to keep. Chad had five or six, which he’d shown us over dinner one night. They were smooth and striped and I wanted Dan to get some for me, but he waited too long, and the porcupine waddled into a drainage pipe and was gone.

  We didn’t really talk in the tent, either. “It’s not supposed to feel good the first time,” Dan explained, though I hadn’t expected it to. I lay back and waited. The sex was a strange feeling, like a fist had reached inside my gut and started punching. Dan was sweating, and drops fell on my stomach and arms. After a while his body got stiff, which meant he was done. “Don’t worry, it’s not supposed to feel good yet,” he said again, and then he kissed my forehead and fell asleep beside me.

  For being so cheap, the tent was pretty nice. A breeze ruffled the fly but the sides were taut, the dome high. It was darker here than on the glacier. I could see the shape of Dan’s face pressed into the pillow we were sharing and I sat up and looked down at him and tried to figure out how I felt post-virginity.

  He looked so defenseless, sleeping. It repulsed me slightly.

  Mostly I felt blank, or faintly amused. So that was sex, and now I had tried it. I pretended to sleep, lying very still so as not to wake Dan, and opened my eyes after forever, when the shapes around me were a little easier to see. My fleece and pants were bunched at the foot of the tent. They were not the clothes I’d brought to Alaska, but rather men’s clothes that I’d gotten at the Salvation Army on my first day off, after realizing that femininity wasn’t doing me any favors. I knew how the men watched me. So I had bought men’s Carhartts, button-up shirts, vests to cover the shape of my breasts, a sports bra to flatten them. Anything that might help me fit in. Dan said the new clothes made me look like a lesbian, but that he didn’t mind.

  Now I was grateful for their bagginess. I pulled on my pants an inch at a time. My sneakers were outside. I unzipped the door slowly and stepped out. The campsite, the fire pit and picnic table and Dan’s car, everything was moon-bright and dewy. The air felt solid in my throat. The ground was hard; for once I stood without sinking. It was suddenly very nice to be standing there alone.

  A trail passed the back of the campsite, and I followed it through the woods. My hips felt loose in their sockets. Mist rose off a marsh and drifted through the trees, and in the mist a white swan float
ed like a paper cutout. It seemed unreal. I squinted: still a swan. It lifted its neck.

  Then the trail opened onto a beach. Across the lake, the Mendenhall Glacier lay like a dropped towel. Even on this side, clumps of ice bobbed in the water and bumped against the shore. Most were small, but there was one about ten feet out that looked big enough to be interesting. I took off my sneakers and stuffed my socks into the heels, dipped my right foot into the water. It burned cold; a chill rose through my body. My hips ached. White mist flowed from behind me and faded as it passed over the water’s surface.

  I unzipped my pants, stepped out of them, and walked in. Walked until my sore hips were submerged and began to numb. The worst thing about cold water was the shock. The best thing was that it prepared you for future cold.

  On the ice the next day, I felt myself walking funny, and hoped that it wasn’t noticeable to my colleagues. But the truth was that my hips were the least of it. The glacier was hard on bodies, both human and canine, and over the weeks it constantly found new ways to wear us down. First was the sun—stronger than I had ever felt it, reflecting off the ice so that it shone equally from above and below. On my second day, I had developed a blistering sunburn on the insides of my nostrils. Dan had assured me that everyone burned their nostrils in the first week. There wasn’t much to do about it, he said, except wait until I built up a nostril tan. Besides, it was nothing compared to the armpit burns that resulted from sunlight shining up the sleeves of a T-shirt, or the sunburns that male dogs got on their balls, in anticipation of which I smoothed on a layer of diaper rash cream—lick-proof sunscreen—several times a day. When rain came, it brought its own problems—days of downpour, fast-melting snow, puffy waterlogged skin, mild trench foot. Sometimes a fog rolled in, so thick and fast that one could get lost in the snow between the dog yard and the tents. Out of all the glacier conditions, the fog was perhaps the strangest; it felt like being suspended in a Ping-Pong ball. Objects invisible from ten feet away would loom suddenly from the pale darkness. Then helicopters couldn’t fly. We spent the days probing for crevasses with steel poles, working a tight grid through the veiled camp until our palms blistered and our muscles burned.