Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube

by Blair Braverman

  Over the next weeks I talked to Arild almost every day, frustrated and proud as I pieced together what was going on. When Henning returned from England, Arild confronted him with Odd Jonny as a witness, meeting Henning in the doorway of Johannes Kristoffersen’s Descendants and chasing him back out again. Then he began the slow process of rebuilding the shop, budgeting carefully, luring back those customers who had drifted away. They came willingly. As one woman put it, “It’s Arild who gets people to come together.”

  Henning and his family did not leave Mortenhals. They retreated into the Old House, drawing all the curtains closed. Since he was now shut out of both his apartment and his house, Arild continued to live in the shop’s dank basement, in a small cement room that he furnished with a rocking chair and a television; at night, with a slab of lefse or a can of Pringles, he could sit back and watch TV shows about farmers finding love. Once I referred to the room as his “bunker,” and Arild adopted the term with amusement. “I have endured enough difficulty in my life that I am not easily broken,” he often reassured me, or maybe himself. He bought a red motorcycle from a folk school student. He thought about getting a sheepdog. It was a lemming year, and the yellow rodents left crisscross tracks on the new snow.

  “If you poke a lemming with a stick, it pops,” Arild told me over the phone, proud to offer this bit of trivia. I said that didn’t sound right, and he admitted that he’d never tried it himself.

  With Henning gone, Anne Lill returned to the shop daily, mopping the floors and rearranging the displays of food and magazines to be more symmetrical. She swatted flies and cleaned coffee mugs and retired at night to her candlelit childhood home in the mountain village. When her back ached, Arild brought her groceries and installed white cabinets in her empty kitchen. He’d retrieved the cabinets years ago from a half-burned house in Tromsø, and kept them in his boathouse ever since, certain that they would one day be useful. His thrift pleased both of them.

  In November, the first week that I was well enough to travel, I flew to Norway for a short visit. It was dark, but the shop glowed with light and people, men lounging in half-zipped snowsuits, children eating ice cream with their mittens on. There was no room for me in Arild’s bunker, so he arranged for me to sleep in Camping Nils’s trailer, which sat empty in the campground. The trailer was cozy, but I didn’t like walking by the Old House to get there; I felt that Henning’s face might suddenly appear in a darkened window. Someone had put a life-size cutout of Justin Bieber in one of the upstairs windows, and it startled me every time I passed.

  That week, Arild and I drove. We drove to Finland, to the Meat Hall just over the border that sold cheap reindeer and beef and pork and venison, and where a traveling choir performed songs about Jesus. We drove to Tromsø for pizza and brownies. We drove to Finnsnes for no reason at all. And on Sunday, the day the shop was closed and we could leave early, we drove to Kaldfjord—Cold Fjord—where, the Northern Light reported, the water was boiling with four hundred minke whales, who had followed herring farther north than ever before. Everyone at the shop was talking about the whales, and Arild was determined that we should see them with our own eyes.

  The road by Kaldfjord, normally as still as that in Mortenhals, was packed with minivans and bicycles. Children ran on the ice-glazed beach and slid on frozen tide pools, fathers in expensive parkas sipped from thermoses and glanced at their watches, couples reclined on reindeer skins. Kayakers and fishing boats dotted the fjord. The noontime sunset cast the water in shadow but lit the mountaintops gold.

  Arild had a new car, a twenty-year-old Subaru, and it inched through traffic, past a paraglider landing in a mess of cloth and ropes, past a handwritten sign promising COFFEE, CAKE, AND A CHRISTMAS ATMOSPHERE. But so far, the water was smooth—it looked hard, impermeable. Trying to cover his disappointment, Arild handed me a pair of binoculars, urging me to watch for a few more minutes. Surely something would happen. Something exclusive.

  I turned the binoculars toward the beach, to a child fixing his shoe. “Do you think they’re enjoying themselves?” Meaning the people.

  “Of course they are,” said Arild. “They’re out in the fresh air, in the country. They’re not staring at screens.”

  He had pulled over, but neither of us made a move to leave the car, for which I was grateful. It was enough to look out the window, to sit together in the warmth. We waited ten minutes, half an hour, enough time to eat sweet rolls and licorice and listen to the radio news: a murder in Bergen, protests in the United States. Finally, as the last beams of daylight faded, something splashed, quick and typical—spout, head, that last curling tail. The people on shore crowded together, pointing at where the whale had been.

  “Huh,” said Arild, handing me the last sweet roll. “We’ll say at the shop there were at least two hundred.”

  I took the roll and agreed.

  AFTERWORD

  TWO WEEKS AFTER LEAVING MORTENHALS, two days before Thanksgiving, I got an e-mail from one of my old coworkers in Alaska. Mike and I had never talked much—he was quiet—but I’d always thought of him as one of the kindest souls on the glacier, committed to his wife and his dogs. He was an accomplished racer from a legendary mushing family; the other guides held him in high esteem. Now Mike had moved to Wisconsin, and his wife had just had a baby, so they were downsizing the kennel. He wanted to sell a small team of dogs, trained and ready, a mix of yearlings and veterans. A turnkey operation, he called it.

  Quince and I had been talking about getting our own dogs, had even set up a dog yard in the garden, but so far we hadn’t taken the plunge; and yet here it was, a sign from the universe, a team of good young dogs just waiting for us. We drove four hours northwest to Mike’s kennel to check them out. The dogs were beautiful and generic: three yellow dogs, one light brown, one dark brown, one black. They were fast. I didn’t know anything about them. Mike named an affordable price. Quince and I bought all six and drove home, parking in the barn, where the dogs staunchly refused to get out of the truck. Later I realized that they’d never been inside a building before.

  I wanted to give the dogs good lives. I wanted to spend all my time with them. I learned who liked meat and who liked kibble, who enjoyed learning complex commands and who would rather keep their lessons simple. The dogs formed friendships and rivalries just like any group of creatures, and their relationships evolved with time. The shyest dog became less shy. The youngest showed the most promise as a leader. My favorite thing was to sit in the middle of the yard while the dogs ran loose around me, playing and sniffing and sprinting wild, half-airborne laps around the edge of the garden, crowding around me and slithering onto my lap, where I’d wrap them up in my arms and kiss their sweet grinning faces. I didn’t have to go anywhere. They always came to me.

  It was different, dogsledding with no boss, no Tallak or Noah or Dan to grant or withhold their approval. Quince threw his full support into the team, building doghouses out of barrels and lumber scraps, organizing fund-raisers, and researching strategy in the small hours of the morning when insomnia kept him on the couch. With his horse and cold-weather experience, plus a certain physical daring, he took to mushing more quickly than anyone I’d seen. Our neighbor, a carpenter, repaired used dogsleds that we found on Craigslist; the local butcher donated hundreds of pounds of deer carcasses; the taxidermist gave us fish meat and bear fat; local kids stopped by to learn the basics. Arild mailed me a pair of seal-fur boots, so that I might stay warm on the trail. I gave rides to neighbors and kids, teaching everyone who wanted to learn; the more people who loved the dogs, the happier I became. But despite the community that formed around the team, the fact that remained—that, at times, astonished me—was that I knew more about dogsledding than anyone else around. When trouble came, I had to be my own authority. And as weeks went by, I came to recognize the obvious: that dogsledding, the life of a musher, had no gatekeeper. In fact, I was doing it. This life was as real as that of any musher I’d admired.

  T
en years after leaving Lillehammer, eight years after attending folk school, I made my own north.

  This is my life, for now: waking up in a house that was built by the man I love, against a field smooth with snow, in a town of eight hundred at the edge of the Northwoods. Looking out the window at my dogs, stretching their delicate legs as they climb from their houses in the garden. Roosters and guinea hens calling the hour. Wisconsin will never be northern Norway, but here are Quince’s roots, and here, for now, are mine. A place where I can be as tough as I want, but I don’t need to be.

  I entered small races, to start. Twenty, thirty miles with six-dog teams—races that would qualify me for longer ones, one or two hundred or a thousand miles a few years out. The last race of the season was the hardest. Forty-two miles in the dark, and a good pool of mushers. My parents flew out from their new home in Oregon to cheer me on.

  That night, I decided to run a new leader, a yearling. Jenga was my shyest dog, scared of everything—people and snowmobiles and strange noises, lumps in the snow and moving shadows: she flinched and hissed and crawled behind my legs. But something happened, I had noticed, when I put her in lead. She stood tall; she paid attention. She never glanced back. In the starting chute, as my countdown began, I jogged up to her, kissed the dark stripe above her nose, kissed Quince good-bye. With three seconds left, I ran back to my sled. The dogs leaped against their lines, and when I yanked my snowhook we took off at a sprint, through the bundled, cheering crowds of downtown Calumet and, a minute after turning off the main road, into the silence of the woods.

  Jenga set a quick pace, and the trail was packed hard, so the first turns were tricky, slick and careening. I had a new sled, light and wobbly, responsive to the slightest lean, and I threw my whole weight into the turns, sending up sheets of snow each time I skidded around a corner. My headlamp lit a ring on the dogs and the snow just ahead of them, so for a while—half an hour, maybe—I saw each turn as it came and had only moments to prepare for it. Then a light through the trees ahead—another dog team, musher silhouetted against the glow he cast onto the trail. When I came up beside him our dogs looked at each other, two teams sizing each other up at a run, twelve tongues bouncing, and then I called to my dogs and their legs churned harder and we were alone again. The sky through the trees was lit with stars.

  We crossed roads, sliding through rows of silent volunteers who crouched in unison like football players preparing to tackle. We passed what seemed to be a lake, with hard wind blowing across it, so the dogs had to lower their heads into the gusts. We passed another team, and another, and then we passed two teams that were running close together, and just as we came around the second one, we fell into a pit.

  I saw it coming. We all did, the dogs and I: the right half of the trail fell away into darkness, and for a moment we were all scrambling, the dogs leaping away, me wresting the sled to the left, but it was too late. The dogs slipped first and I sailed over the top of them, landing with the sled in the middle of the team. For a sick, horrible moment I thought I had crushed a dog, and I flailed in the powder, feeling around beneath me. My headlamp had been knocked sideways, and I pulled it forward again and counted my dogs. They were knotted together, neck deep in snow. Six grinning faces. Six wagging tails. I didn’t know how I’d untangle us, or get back onto the trail, but it didn’t matter: we were okay.

  One of the teams I’d overtaken stopped beside us. A woman’s voice, the glare of a headlamp shining from above. “Do you need help?”

  I squinted up. “Um,” I said. “No, I don’t think so. Thank you.”

  She took off again.

  A logic puzzle: you have six dogs, ten feet of rope, a knife, a ski pole, a snowhook, a handful of zip ties, and a bag of bear fat. Now: how do you get out of the pit? The powder was so deep that righting the sled was nearly impossible. As soon as I wrestled it upright, it rolled over again and slid forward, leaving me swimming on my stomach through the drift. I tried to set the snowhook, but it wouldn’t hold. I’d worn two parkas for warmth, which made it hard to move, and in wrestling the sled I had already sweat through my long underwear. I willed myself to radiate confidence; the last thing I needed was for the dogs to see me anxious. The thing to do, I figured, was get the sled somehow steady, then move my way along the team, untangling the dogs and checking for injuries. Then, finally, I would work on the challenge of getting us all out. Maybe I could lift the dogs one by one. Figure out somewhere to tie them so they wouldn’t run off while I reassembled the team.

  “Ready?” I said. This was the usual command for the dogs to pull their lines straight, to prepare to run. It was a long shot; given how tangled they must be, they probably couldn’t do much. But the dogs’ ears perked up, and, miraculously, they bounded into position. Three perfect pairs, poised to run, stuck at the bottom of a pit.

  The lip of the trail was about six feet above us, the wall steep and soft. But the dogs were ready to go. I stared at them, then wrapped my hands very tightly around the handlebar.

  “Ready?” I said quietly. “All right.”

  I’m telling you, it defies physics. But as soon as I said “All right,” the dogs ran straight up the wall, their little feet catching hold faster than the snow could collapse around them. And as they reached the packed trail they dug into the ground and leaned into their harnesses and pulled me out, too. And by the time I’d scrambled onto the runners and caught my breath we were running again, not a tangle among us. And they were so happy, every muscle in their bodies bounding with excitement, smiles wide, not wolves at all—they were sled dogs, and it was a perfect ten below, and there was nothing in the whole world as fun as running and racing and tumbling into pits and getting out of them again.

  “We’re okay, aren’t we?” I said to the dogs as we careened down a frozen logging road, the sled rattling over bumps in the ice, sending shudders up my bones. “We’re doing just fine.”

  We skidded around a corner, scraping a tree, and nearly ran into another team that was stopped at the side of the trail. Their musher had crashed hard into a rock; her sled was twisted, and her ski pole had snapped in half. “You okay?” I asked, but she waved me on with a grin. When I looked back, her team was running again. She crouched low on the runners, pedaling furiously with her half-a-ski-pole.

  The last ten miles were tricky. Lots of road crossings, and spectators, which threw off the rhythm of the long hours. Crowds and campfires emerged from the darkness and fell away again. At one crossing, I heard my parents cheer my name. At another point, somebody had lined a stretch of trail with paper lanterns, which cast flickering, snowflake shadows on the snow. A corridor of light.

  We took the last mile at a full sprint, and as we crossed the finish line, in fourth place out of twenty-five, I thought, Wait—too soon. We didn’t belong here, with the people and trucks and lights. We belonged back on the trail, running. We should turn around. The dogs, of course, knew better. Finishing a run meant time to eat, and finishing a race meant especially good food, bear fat and beaver meat from the taxidermist, plus hot kibble soup to wash it all down.

  I took off their harnesses and they leaned into me, tails thumping against my thighs. Quince scooped their food into metal dishes. The dogs settled in to eat. Their warm bodies steamed in the night.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  IN NORWAY, WHEN STORIES ARE LOST, people say that they’ve gone into glemmeboka, The Book of Forgetting. The Old Store is a book of remembering, and so is this one. It has come to be with the help of many advisors, experts, and friends. Thank you to Kathy Anderson, agent and dreamer extraordinaire, and to Dan Halpern, Libby Edelson, and Hilary Redmon at Ecco. In particular, thank you to Emma Janaskie, who took on this project with grace and skill.

  I want to thank Adrian Nicole LeBlanc for her wisdom and guidance, and Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes for knowing what I was writing long before I did. Jeff Sharlet challenged and sharpened my journalism. Handler Chrissie distracted me when I needed it most. Danica Novgorodoff se
rved as reader and muse. The brilliant Alice Truax served as guardian angel.

  I started this book at the Blue Mountain Center and finished it at the MacDowell Colony four years later. That is not a coincidence. The space and energy offered by these residencies is what allowed this project to find its shape. Thank you also to the students and faculty at the University of Iowa, who inspired me and supported my work.

  The customers at Johannes Kristofferson’s Descendants gave me their time, their welcome, and their friendship. It has been a great privilege to be part of their community. Thank you Christiane, Ragnar, Camilla, Odd Arne, Odd Helge, Marita, Natasha, Torstein, Roald, Leif (both of you!), Geir (all three of you!), Eilif Idar, Elisabeth, Ellinor, Anne-Marit, Anniken, Olav, Walter, Merethe, Bjørn Tormod, Bjorn Arne, Roger, Espen, Håvard, Jan Børre, Katja, Angelina, and Helge Jensen, as well as Gunnhild, Kaia, Lea, Jan, and Christer at 69°Nord. Thank you to Anne for your spinning lessons, Åse for your mittens, and Atle for your wonderful lies. Maria and Anita, thank you for letting me into your family. Anne Lill Gaare, thank you for your warmth, your conviction, and your humor. I think you’re the coolest.

  Rune died in his home on December 7, 2015. He was 53 years old. I don’t know how to thank him.

  Historian Arne Pedersen told me hours of stories over many long nights and tiny cups of coffee. Pål Faerøvrig, Bjorn Tore Nøkleby, and Vidar Løkeng shared blazing insights into folk schools and northlanders. Principal Jens Rindal astonished me when I was 18 and still does today. Every student who crosses his path is lucky.