Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  4. THE DARK PYRAMID

  “Okay, uh … 985–Whiskey Flight, radio check.”

  “Two.”

  “Four.”

  “Okay, uh … three? Do we have three?”

  (Conspicuous silence.)

  “Bernard, you there?”

  (Sustained, heavy silence.)

  “Okay, Steve, is he still on one-two-two-niner, you want to jump over and check?”

  “Two … Yeah, Dad, I’m not getting him.”

  “Okay, uh … push to common. Repeat: 985-Whiskey, push to common, that’s one-two-three-four-seven-five. Bernard?”

  (Silence so profound it seems almost passive-aggressive.)

  “Well, puke.”

  I don’t know what it was about the Frenchmen and their planes. Actually, I know exactly what it was; it was that their planes broke down every time Bernard and Christophe so much as glanced at them. Nugget never gave us a peep of trouble, as Jay put it; Bernard could be sitting at dinner visualizing a button in his Cub and it would pong off in a spume of fire. I don’t know what caused it. You could trace this subtle tension throughout 985-Whiskey’s whole existence. The Alaskans thought the French guys were careless about maintenance, that in France “the pilot just shows up and ‘Oh, here’s a cup of coffee, sir’ and some other poor scrub does all the work.” The French guys—well, Christophe was pretty chill on the whole, but I know Bernard thought he’d been handed inferior equipment. As he saw it, this whole expedition was at least 30 percent (fart sound).

  One problem in particular we couldn’t shake. The radio in Bernard’s Cub cut out every time Bernard—but only Bernard—tried to use it. Steve would test it and it worked great, tallyho; then Bernard would take charge, we’d get airborne, and within a couple of minutes we’d be looking down the long cold barrel of a no-joy situation. We lost hours to this. Mechanics at tiny nowhere airstrips would say they’d locked down a problem with the electrical system. Then the next day the glitch would migrate somewhere else. I didn’t follow it all, but apparently the logic was Gordian. We started making jokes that the flight was haunted, talking about “the ghost.” Did the ghost bring his luggage. Was the ghost angry today. Had the ghost been eating my trail mix.

  Things got weird after Takotna. We flew into a blizzard, for one. The world just disappeared. It was Thursday afternoon. We’d been trying to find a route through the Nulato Hills, west of the Yukon River, on our way to Unalakleet, an Inupiaq village on the coast of Norton Sound. We’d planned to spend a few nights in a bear-hunting cabin about eight miles from the village. We’d be well ahead of the dog teams, and we could use the cabin as a base, flying out on day trips to track the mushers as they made their way north to the sea. But we couldn’t get to Unalakleet. Up in the hills every pass we flew into would dead-end in this huge gray wall. Then the wall was all around us. Thanks to the ghost, we had no radio contact with Bernard’s plane; if we got separated in the hills, we’d have no way to find each other again.

  Jay scanned for a place to land. We were over the Anvik, one of a snarl of small rivers running down from the hills to the Yukon. He’d glimpse a stretch of seemingly unobstructed river and we’d dive-bomb it, no fooling around now, doing urgent arcs, and we’d get to within six feet of touching down and only then be able to see the up-thrust broken ice that would rip the planes’ skis off. Finally we found a spot. To pack down the snow, we had to go into trail formation and do multiple passes where we’d touch down at full speed and instantly take off again, veering off at crazy angles to come back around as quickly as possible. Somehow Bernard knew to follow. I was not in peak shape, stomach-wise. I’d like to say I was grateful for the nausea because it kept me from being terrified, but the thing about nausea is that it sucks and you hate it. I did little breathey-county exercises while Jay focused on the less immediately urgent work of keeping the plane from crashing.

  We tumbled out of the cockpit onto the river. The air stung. Huge wet flying flakes of snow. If you stepped carefully you’d sink up to your shin before the snow compressed enough to hold you; if you stepped a little harder you’d break through up to your thigh. Along the riverbank there were these spindly collections of upraised sticks. They looked like scrawny bushes but were in fact the tops of trees.

  I felt oddly light. I congratulated myself for not having thrown up, and also for, as I thought, not freaking out, for keeping a cool head in the crisis. I had it together, I thought, as I slipped out my iPhone, in the middle of the blizzard, to check what was happening on Twitter. I could tell weather jokes, maybe post a picture. I was disappointed—saddened—to see the “No Service” message here, untold miles from the nearest human infrastructure, but I wasn’t exactly surprised. I was far too collected to be surprised. Verizon wasn’t as together as I was, that was all.

  We put on snowshoes and took the shovels out of our planes’ belly pods. Getting out of the wind was the first priority. We dug a sort of recessed shelter in the snow and made a bivouac out of one of Nugget’s wing covers. Jay pegged the temperature at -15°F. Wind at 35 knots. I had no idea what a knot was. I ate trail mix.

  At first we thought we might be able to make a quick escape, that the storm was bound to blow over. But an hour went past, and if anything the snowfall intensified.

  Here was a problem: 985-Whiskey wasn’t equipped to fly after dark. We had about a three-hour window to get out before we’d be forced to dig a snow cave and spend the night.

  On the map Jay pointed out the peak of a hill a mile off, with a higher peak a mile or so behind it. It’d be safe to take off when we could see both peaks. We kept getting these fleeting, torn-curtain glimpses of the first; the second might as well not have been there. Another hour and we started scouting downriver for a place to dig the cave.

  We would have been fine. Uncomfortable, but we’d have survived. We had plenty of food and water, and we’d brought Arctic-grade sleeping bags. We’d have spent a claustrophobic night and left the next day when the storm passed. Fully alive, one big memory. But about twenty minutes before our takeoff window closed, Steve jumped up. “I see the far hill! Dad! Dad, look!”

  So we made it out. But my lasting memory of that time on the river is not the crazy, elated scramble to strip the blankets off the planes and take off. It’s from about an hour earlier, when Jay, I guess to keep our morale up, suddenly started talking about poetry.

  “You guys ever hear of a writer called Robert Service?” he asked.

  I said sure, but I didn’t know his work well, and Jay went on: “To my mind—in my opinion—Robert Service is by some measure the greatest poet who’s ever graced the English language. Why, compared to Bob Service, Shakespeare is a piker. And OH BY THE WAY … it’s beautiful how he captured the soul of the Arctic.”

  And he broke into “The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill.” “Recited” is too flimsy a word; he performed it, in a wild sea-captain brogue, eyes bulging under the beaver hat with the dangling earflaps. In the blowing snow in the middle of the Anvik River, waving his arms all around. Here’s how it goes. Bill MacKie (rhymes with “die”) is a gold-rush type who’s scared he’ll meet his end in the Klondike with no one to bury him. So he slips this other gold-rush guy some money in exchange for the promise that when the time comes, the other guy will find his body and put it in the ground. Well, sure enough, Bill dies, and when word reaches the burial guy (who’s narrating the poem), B.G. bundles himself up and sets out to look for the remote hut where the body is waiting. And Jay goes,

  You know what it’s like in the Yukon wild when it’s sixty-nine below;

  When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow;

  When the pine-trees crack like little guns in the silence of the wood,

  And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka hood;

  When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off, and the sky is weirdly lit,

  And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a red-hot spit;

 
When the mercury is a frozen ball, and the frost-fiend stalks to kill—

  Well, it was just like that that day when I set out to look for Bill.

  He finds the hut. Bill’s corpse is there. Mission accomplished, except for one problem: Bill’s frozen solid. And he’s managed to die “with his arms and legs outspread,” so he won’t fit into the coffin that our by this point extremely cold and downcast speaker has hauled here for him.

  Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole,

  With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can’t control?

  Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin,

  And that seems to say: “You may try all day, but you’ll never jam me in”?

  Well, he’s not a quitter, our B.G., so he takes the obvious next step. He builds a fire and tries to thaw Bill out. But after days by the stove, Bill’s still a star-shaped icicle. So B.G. does the only thing he can think of. He takes out a saw, hacks Bill into pieces, and lays the pieces in the coffin. Boom, contract fulfilled. In his later and more contemplative years, B.G. tells us, his mind sometimes drifts backs to that day:

  And as I sit and the parson talks, expounding of the Law,

  I often think of poor old Bill—and how hard he was to saw.

  Jay—what an endlessly surprising person. We were laughing and clapping on the ice. I asked him if he knew Rudyard Kipling’s poems—I think I described Kipling as “pretty much the Robert Service of British India,” which isn’t going to win me tenure at Berkeley, but it was cold out—and he said, oh, sure, he’d read Kipling. Actually grew up in Vermont near the house where Kipling lived for a while, where he wrote The Jungle Book. Got hired one summer to clean the first floor. He had spent a day of his childhood vacuuming Rudyard Kipling’s carpets.

  * * *

  We learned later, from the radio, that Martin Buser had taken the lead that same day, at Iditarod, and extended it as the mushers started their grueling two-hundred-mile run up the Yukon River. Conditions on the trail were getting worse; dogs were struggling through mashed-potato snow, falling into overflow holes where fresh water had broken through a solid surface of ice. Freezing water slopped over into the sleds. Ice gnarled the mustaches of the men pulling in to checkpoints.

  My old friend the Mushin’ Mortician had been the first to scratch, at Rainy Pass on the second day of the race. Now more started calling it quits. Lance Mackey, who’d made a push around Takotna, stayed in, but he fell off the pace.

  It rained on the Yukon, in heavy slashing lines. The trail there runs down the middle of the river, which is perfectly flat, half a mile wide in places, leaving the mushers no cover from the wind. The cold and the unchanging blank landscape make it one of the most brutal stretches of the race, a place where sleep-deprived mushers regularly hallucinate. “While I had taken thirty, even forty below and some wind,” Gary Paulsen writes in Winterdance, “and had even become something close to cocksure about my ability to handle winter, I had absolutely no goddamn idea what was about to hit me. The Yukon River defines that which is cold.”

  Slowly, the teams fought their way forward. Buser’s dogs, forced to break trail for the chasing pack, and with their daylong rest a memory, finally wore out. They needed nine hours to get from Grayling to Eagle Island; Buser’s five-hour lead shrank to three. And this was where the strategy he’d spent eight months perfecting, began to come unraveled. “Felt like I was going backwards,” he told reporters. “No trail. Lots of wind. No bottom. Lots of water.” Then his dogs got diarrhea from slurping groundwater, a constant problem in long-distance mushing. They lost weight. They went slower.

  On Saturday, Aliy and Mitch passed him around Kaltag, as did a handful of others. He never led again.

  Slowly up the river, days and nights of rain. At the cabin near Unalakleet, where we’d finally landed safely after our close call on the Anvik, heavy snow kept us grounded for two days. We sat around the radio, listening for updates every hour as the mushers made their way toward us. Finally, Jay and I managed a solo flight down the Yukon, to Grayling and Eagle Island. We saw mushers on the river, words in a font too small to read. Miles separated them. We spotted a team we thought might be Linwood’s, so Jay—it’s a signal they have—rocked Nugget’s yellow wings back and forth. Whoever was down there waved back like someone hailing help from the deck of a sinking ship.

  On our second day at the cabin I walked in to find a woman covered in blood.

  The cabin was wood paneled and lined with hunting photos, dozens of them, frame after frame of kneeling tourists grinning with their rifles. The owner was a bear-hunting guide named Vance, a big friendly fist of a guy who normally used the cabin as a staging area. The hide of a huge grizzly (face attached) sprawled across one wall, next to the head of a big bull musk ox. No running water; instead, there was a pot for melting snow on top of the cast-iron woodstove.

  Vance’s daughter Andri was the one holding the knife. Actually it was only her hands that were bloody; she’d looked bloodier at first because of the soupy bowlful of dark-red organs on the coffee table in front of her.

  She was dismembering the ptarmigan, fifteen of them, that she and Steve had shot that afternoon.

  “Bro,” Steve said. “It was incredible. These birds are so dumb! I missed one from twenty feet and it reacted by walking toward me.”

  Since the snow was keeping me from following the race, and Jay was busy taking the Frenchmen’s Cub apart to try to chase down the ghost, I’d decided earlier that day to hike into Unalakleet, eight miles down the Iditarod Trail, hoping thereby to experience something of the isolation amid mind-annihilating beauty that the mushers encountered every day. But Bernard and Christophe came with me, which sort of defeated the purpose. Christophe hung back half a mile or so to take pictures, but Bernard, after days of being marginalized in fast-paced English conversations, most of which barely even touched on French tax policy, was delighted to have a captive listener. He went nonstop the whole way, his chest thrust out like the chest of a singing bird.

  No one wanted to work—that was the problem with French society. Now, did they want money? They did. But they wanted it given to them. Given by the government, just for being born. And taxes. Oh la la. Taxes in France were a (fart sound)–level absurdity. (Here on the river the Iditarod Trail was a snow-machine track. Teepee-shaped wooden markers stood beside the track, spaced every two or three hundred yards.) People thought the Revolution had been fought so they could have a paid vacation every August. Bernard had worked hard, flying a big, big jet from Paris to Tahiti, and now he was retired, but still the government wanted more. The blacks and the Arabs—don’t get him started on the blacks and the Arabs. (Seriously, don’t.) Give Bernard the Corsicans any day. (Every now and then at a particularly long bend in the river the trail would run up onto the bank and cut across the forest. After a few miles the forest stopped, and then the trail would cut across tundra.) A special people, the Corsicans. Ancient. He could introduce you to one Corsican innkeeper, Pierre—eighty years old, and was he taking it easy? Never. Ridiculous. (The sun glinted off the snow.) But the French government made it harder and harder to work. France had its cathedrals and nothing else. Europe was, how do you say, destructing.

  Where the little pools had frozen, there were flats of turquoise ice. Old-god hills in the distance.

  “A lot of people who come to Alaska say they come here to feel free,” I ventured.

  “Ah, oui,” he breathed, taking in the landscape with a gesture. “Fweedom! Alaska is fweedom.”

  We were standing in the open. All of a sudden I felt … but I don’t want to overstate it; it wasn’t despair or anything, just melancholy, just a rush of forlornness. A strange kind of loneliness for history. Alaska has its own past: the murderous flaming wreck of the Russian colonies, the gold madness, the deep-time traditions of the indigenous peoples. But it doesn’t saturate the landscape. In the Lower 48, you carry around a sense that the human environme
nt has been molded by people who went before—this battle on this hill and so on. There’s a texture that you, too, are part of, even when it’s bloody or frightening, a texture within which your life can assume some kind of meaning. You have references. And that, of course, can be its own nightmare, but in remote Alaska the nightmare is It’s not there. There are no prewritten meanings. A fella can do just about anything he’s big enough to do. One strong gust of wind could blow the whole edifice of human habitation away.

  So we reached Unalakleet. Pastel siding, jumble of metal roofs. Boats buried in snow on the coast of a frozen sea.

  * * *

  I had a long talk with Andri after she’d finished gutting the ptarmigan. It turned out that she was a graphic designer who’d earned an MFA in San Francisco. She had declined a coveted spot at the Rhode Island School of Design and come back to Unalakleet, where—the bear guide’s daughter—she kept a shotgun in her car in case she happened to run across dinner. Recently she’d won a small-business grant to make uluit, a type of traditional knife, and sell them online. She was obsessed with the occult mysteries of Alaska. Late one night she’d been out with a friend when an unexplained semicircle of light appeared on the horizon. It started out small and expanded for several minutes, holding the same proportions, a mathematically perfect half circle or half spheroid of soft white light, until it covered half the sky. Then it faded away. X-Files stuff, nothing like the northern lights. She’d sent the pictures she took to a physicist and an astronomer at the university in Anchorage. They’d confirmed that it wasn’t a celestial or known phenomenon. It looked like the pulse of a futuristic weapon. But it had been absolutely silent. I saw her pictures. Did you know that there are military installations hidden all over Alaska? Relics of the Cold War, abandoned. Underground bunkers. Empty Quonset huts. White Alice sites, some of them are called. Ruins of a once-sophisticated communications relay. The phrase “White Alice” made me shiver. Folks who snuck in came back talking about unexplained voices. About visions. There were stories about ghosts.