The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  The wooden gate to the yard creaks and my boyfriend, Joe, pushes his cruiser inside. Joe is a kind dude, with long blond hair and a septum ring, intellectual blackwork tattoos on his forearms. He’s into seventies soul records, tofu, and anarchist theory. He’s got a huge cock. I don’t love Joe, but I feel safe with him, and that counts for a lot.

  Joe sits down next to me and offers up a greasy paper bag.

  “Vegan banana bread?” he says. “I made it this morning.”

  “Hitchhike to Alaska with me,” I say.

  Joe breaks off a piece of banana bread and chews it thoughtfully. “Well,” he says, after a moment, “that sounds terrible. Isn’t Alaska really far?”

  “It’ll be okay,” I say. “Just come with me. Please?”

  I haven’t been back to Alaska since I left at fourteen. What if, as soon as I step foot on the trash-strewn streets of Anchorage, my childhood rises up like a sleeping dragon and swallows me? What if I am transported from this new reality in which I am free back into the horror movie of that first place, the original place? Joe is planted squarely in this world. He doesn’t even know that the other world exists. If Joe comes with me, he can keep me tethered to this earth.

  Realistically, flying to Alaska would be the most efficient way to get there, but Joe and I don’t have any money. I’ve been working just enough to get by. Mostly I’ve been making zines, screen-printing patches, riding my bike late at night to the tea dumpster, and volunteering with Food Not Bombs. I have a lot of interests, but making money is not one of them. So, as a result, the only way I can get to Alaska is to hitchhike.

  I have a scrap of paper with my father’s address. I do not know what he looks like. I’m not even entirely sure if the man at this address is him—what if there are two men of the same age with the same unique name living in Anchorage? But I mean to hitchhike to Alaska, knock on his door, and find out.

  * * *

  —

  It’s summertime, and the roadsides of the Pacific Northwest are hot and a little humid, not an awesome place to stand for hours on end with a cardboard sign that says, simply, Alaska. It takes us half the day, bent under the weight of our backpacks, just to reach the outskirts of Portland, that golden bit of countryside between cities that bakes in the strong July sun. And then we are north of Seattle, and then we’re across the U.S.-Canadian border, and then we’re in British Columbia. Canada! Vancouver overwhelms us with its skyscrapers and fast trains and so many different languages, and then we are north of the city, among the white-capped mountains and cool forested valleys and small towns forgotten by time. Suddenly there’s the long light of the Great North, and something wakes inside me. This long light is an old song I haven’t heard in years. It brings tears to my eyes. Joe and I catch rides from weathered men in pickup trucks who grip the wheel with one hand and hold a fifth of vodka in the other. Their hearts are broken from solitude and they swerve on the empty two-lane highway and drop us off in front of roadhouses built from old boards where dusty bags of potato chips are the only sustenance we can find. We eat our potato chips and look at the taxidermy on the walls, spin the racks of postcards. The proprietors stare at our tattoos.

  And then the mountains recede and we reach the boreal forest. The boreal forest rings the top of the planet in a great band. It is a circumpolar forest. Thousands of miles of flat, boggy land, clogged with tilted, spindly spruce trees and glinting with millions of little lakes. This monotonous forest, also known as the taiga, stretches across Alaska, Canada, Iceland, Siberia, northern Kazakhstan, northern Mongolia, and northern Japan. The taiga is hot in the summers, and the mosquitoes rise up in great suffocating clouds. The forest floor is a trampoline of damp moss; the light that filters through the trees is feathery and soft. As soon as we reach the boreal forest and I see that sharp skyline against a pale blue sky, I am overwhelmed with a feeling of home.

  We are far enough north on the Alaska Highway, now, that traffic has slowed to a trickle. This trickle consists of one RV every forty-five minutes, mostly, and it soon becomes very difficult to get a ride at all. We’re sunburned and covered in mosquito bites and a tad malnourished and our feet ache from standing on the paved shoulder of the highway. The RVs don’t even slow for us—they blow past, spitting up gravel, and I take to throwing rocks at them, which Joe doesn’t like. I start bickering with Joe because I’m bored and because I can’t stand myself any longer.

  Since it’s summertime in the North, the sun doesn’t set, or it sets so late and for such a short period of time that one is never really aware of the darkness. At first we take this as an opportunity to hitch at night, but soon discover that after eight p.m., every driver that stops for us is intoxicated to the point of incoherence and we will be swerving back and forth across the long empty highway while beer cans rattle around our feet. Out of sheer terror, we are forced to ask a number of rides to drop us off again. So we resign ourselves to an eight p.m. cutoff time, after which we will camp. “Camp” is anywhere in the unpopulated forest that stretches on forever on both sides of the highway. We push our way through the trees wherever our last ride for the night leaves us, battling with the undergrowth and the wet, convoluted ground until we find a clearing large enough for our two-person tent, which we pitch on the soft moss. Joe reads me Rumi while the mosquitoes fling themselves against the mesh of our tent and I listen for bears. Now and then a bear passes close by. They always rush past and disappear quickly, but my heart flings itself into my throat anyway. Eventually we fall asleep.

  “If you’re on your period,” says one of our rides, just sober enough to stay on the right side of the road, as we hurtle down the highway in the morning, “I wouldn’t camp in these woods. The bears, they can smell it. Last summer, two women were camped out here—”

  “Stop!” I say. “Please stop!”

  I run out of reading material and buy a book of bear-attack stories at one of the small markets along the highway. This is, and will continue to be, one of the worst decisions I have ever made in my life. After I read this book, my nighttime tent-terror gets so bad that each night I lie in my sleeping bag panicking for hours as Joe snores softly next to me. In the morning I can never remember actually falling asleep. It will take me almost a decade to let go of the unreasonable fear this book instills in me, and to come to understand that bears are predictable creatures whose habits one can come to know and who, like most members of the animal kingdom, are not actively looking for a fight.

  We arrive in Anchorage nine days after setting out from Portland. Anchorage is exactly as I remember it—wide, traffic-filled streets, shuttered strip malls, and ragged apartment buildings, trash in the gutters. A dour blanket of clouds hangs low.

  There is beauty in the sprawl, though. The greenbelts are still there, the wild stretches of forest that wend their way through the city. In these forests are lakes, and secret sunlit clearings, and creeks where the salmon spawn, and moose and black bears and grizzlies. Beyond the city rise the Chugach Mountains, where my parents had their little house, never finished, when they were together during the first few years of my life. And on the other edge of the city is the sea. The sea is what hits me harder than anything, the smell and sound of it like a heavy warm weight on my chest. The damp salt air, the cries of the seagulls, the feeling that one has reached the end of the world.

  The end of the world. Joe and I stand on the mudflats and look out at the inlet. Across the steely gray water is a string of white volcanoes. And beyond that? The roiling Pacific with all its secrets. We’re sharing a takeout container of french fries, and my blood is pounding. It has been pounding for days. I wonder if it will ever stop. I’m in Anchorage, and I’m not a child anymore. The city is no longer a thing to which I lack all magic tickets—although poor, I’m now poor in a different way. I can work, I can get magic tickets if I want them. I am in control of my own destiny. I am an adult.

  We walk
the greenbelts past the cold lakes I used to swim in, to the apartment complex where I lived before Jordan went to juvie. The dingy buildings seem unchanged. Who lives in our apartment now? Are they happy? Are the walls freshly painted and white? Are the cupboards filled with food? Are there ghosts?

  I do not cry. We leave the bike path for the woods and pitch our tent in a clearing in the trees. Joe reads me Rumi, and although there are bears here, I am not afraid of them. This is the place that I know.

  Tomorrow, we find my father.

  * * *

  —

  The house is one in a row of condos that are all exactly the same, on a cul-de-sac off Northern Lights Boulevard. An American flag swings on a flagpole above the garage, and there are some potted pansies on the windowsills. I knock on the door and wait. Joe is standing behind me. I’ve instructed him not to speak. “Don’t say anything!” I said to him this morning. “Not one thing!”

  The door opens. A man is standing there, my height, rounded, with a soft head of hair. He looks like no one. Like any man. Or every man, maybe?

  “Hi,” I say. “I think I’m your daughter?” I watch him looking at me and am suddenly aware of my tattoos, my half-shaved hair tucked under my trucker cap, my camo-printed cargo shorts and unshaven legs.

  “I figured you’d show up eventually,” he says, fixing me with an odd smile. “Why don’t you come inside?”

  A football game plays on a big-screen TV. The man picks up a remote and mutes the game, but does not turn it off. We sit in front of the TV on a long leather sofa. A woman stands in the kitchen with her hands folded. The man tells us that she is his wife. She offers us orange juice, but she does not smile.

  “No, thank you,” I say. She offers a few more times. Joe takes some juice.

  “So,” says the man. “Where do you live?” I begin to monologue, my words tumbling over each other. The man grips his glass of juice. The odd smile is unwavering, as though his lips are pinned in place.

  There’s a rushing between my ears and the room fades out, and then back again. The man is staring at me. Did he just ask me another question?

  “I don’t know,” I say. A few beats pass with the four of us looking at each other, silent. I expected to recognize myself in this man’s face, but there’s nothing there. Football players run down the field on the huge television.

  “What do you do for a living?” I ask the man.

  “I have a computer business,” he says. Another few beats of silence. I turn and look at the television. I’ve never understood the appeal of football.

  “You never paid child support,” I say. “You were living just down the street this whole time.”

  “I gave up my parental rights,” he says. His smile is still there, but his eyes are flat, as though made of glass. The woman in the kitchen wets a dishrag and runs it over the counter.

  “Does that mean you didn’t have to pay child support?” I say.

  “I have the paperwork all right here if you’d like to see it,” he says.

  “No, that’s okay,” I say. I look at my hands. I wait for the man to ask more questions, but he simply sits, holding his glass of juice, looking at me. “I should probably go,” I say.

  “I can give you a ride to wherever you’re staying,” says the man. I think of our tent, pitched in the woods. Our peaceful tent, bathed in gentle forest light.

  “No,” I say. “No thanks.”

  Outside, the bright Alaskan evening sun casts the world in long bands of light, and Joe and I walk down the busy boulevard, alongside the blowing traffic. I’m crying now. Joe has his arm around me. I’m crying like a bike tire deflating, all my fears and expectations leaking out through a small hole. Psssss.

  * * *

  —

  The customs official at the Alaska-Canada border won’t let us back into Canada.

  “How much money do you have in the bank?” he asks.

  “A hundred dollars?” I say. They’ve separated me and Joe, and they’ve got me in a little room. Joe is being interrogated somewhere else.

  The man sighs.

  “And you’re not married?”

  “No!” I say. “No, we’re not married.”

  “But what if he leaves you?” asks the man, looking at me softly. “What will you do then?”

  “Continue hitchhiking back to the Lower 48?”

  The man stares at me.

  “You don’t have money and you’re not married,” he says. “I can’t let you into the country.”

  I call my father, Bill, from a payphone. His voice is fake-cheery when he picks up.

  “They won’t let us back into Canada,” I say. “And we don’t have enough money to fly.”

  Bill meets us for Chinese food in Anchorage and hands us a paper envelope that contains five one-hundred-dollar bills, enough for both our plane tickets. He laughs in a forced way. I feel ugly and small. On the flight out of Anchorage, I look out the window at the receding mountains, the Pacific Ocean. Was that parenting? Is this what being parented feels like?

  1993

  The Christmas tree in the mall is bristling and festive and taller than a house. I am eleven years old, wearing my pink winter coat with the tear at the elbow and my snow boots that are a size too small and I am touching the boughs of the tree, which is hung with white paper tags in the shape of Christmas ornaments. The base of the tree is crowded with fake gifts wrapped in shining foil paper, and “The Little Drummer Boy” is playing on the mall’s sound system. Our finest gifts we bring, pa rum pum pum pum. I upend a giant Pixy Stix and shake the last of the candy into my mouth. There’s a comic book shop on the second floor of the mall that sells them for twenty-five cents, and I’m eating them for dinner a lot these days. The sugar makes me feel speedy and leaves me tired after, but it’s better than nothing. The gifts under the tree wink in the light and looking at them makes my mouth water. I want to crawl under the tree and unwrap them all, even though I know that they are fake, just Styrofoam squares wrapped in glittering paper. What if a real gift has been put under the tree, though, by mistake? I wish I could at least shake the boxes to know for sure.

  The paper ornaments on the tree have names written on them—poor kids who need gifts. If you’re shopping in the mall, you can grab a tag, buy the gift on the tag, and then deposit it in one of the barrels at the store exits. Jordan and I are somewhere on the tree, I know. The counselor at school called us into the office and had us fill out a sheet with what we wanted for Christmas. I listed three things: a new pair of jeans, a Discman, and Alanis Morissette’s album Jagged Little Pill.

  Barbara is lying on the living room couch when I return home, a comforter pulled over her, her black hair splayed on a dirty pillow. It’s quiet in the apartment. I still have “The Little Drummer Boy” in my head as I push open the door to her bedroom, careful not to let the hinges squeak. Barbara doesn’t want me in here but I come all the time, to lie on her bed and smell the pillow or rifle through her drawers, touching her things and reworking a memory from when I was very small and she would hold me on her lap while she rocked me in a rocking chair. What rocking chair? I wonder, as I look at the room, with its piles of dirty laundry and single bright overhead light. Where has the rocking chair gone? She sang to me then, off-key. You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. Today I’m not here for that, though. I’m here for the contents of her closet. I slide the folding door on its track and peer into the darkness. I find the cord for the light and yank, but nothing happens. There’s no light. Standing on the bed, I can just barely reach the overhead light fixture and I unscrew it, and then the lightbulb, which is too hot to hold and falls from my fingers, onto the mattress. A moment later there is at last light in the closet. In the closet are wire shelves, and these shelves are piled with items: fabric remnants, cheap cologne still in its packaging, bags of ex
pired ribbon candy that has hardened into bricks, a stack of identical, plain gray sweatshirts. Each of these items was on deep discount at the mall, and Barbara bought the whole lot and stuffed it here for some reason that only she understands. I often eat the ribbon candy, prying the bricks apart and sucking the shards, and I am slowly making my way through the stack of plain gray sweatshirts—they have become my school uniform. One can only wear so much Exclamation cologne, though.

  Behind the wire racks is a cardboard barrel and I drag this out of the closet and down the hall, into the living room. Barbara is still on the couch, the splay of her hair undisturbed, the subtle rise and fall of the comforter the only sign of life. The lid of the barrel is tricky—a metal latch that has to be pulled on with a lot of force to loosen it. When I was smaller, it took me days of effort to loosen this latch, but this year I get it on the third try. Inside are Christmas ornaments, Christmas lights, and a small folded tree.

  Bah rump a bum bum, I sing to myself, as I gently unfold each bough of the tree. I wrap the lights around the tree and then open the box of ornaments. Sitting on the floor, I lift out the small figures that I have known for as long as I have known myself. There’s the little wooden horse with the red body and the white feet, the nutcracker with the jaw that opens and closes, the sparkling glass icicle with the missing tip. The girl with the shawl and the songbook, the green and white satin balls with the loose threads, the foil folding star. The God’s eye I made in school from Popsicle sticks and yarn and the cloth-stuffed candy cane. The wooden manger scene, which is missing two of the Wise Men. Tangled strings of plastic beads and, finally, the angel, a blond figurine in a voluminous white gown holding a small bulb that lights up when you plug her in. The bottom of the box is filled with strands of loose tinsel and the shards of glass bulbs. There were more ornaments, once, but a few are broken or lost each year, and there is nothing to replace them with.