The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  “We know a great place to drop you off,” said the woman. “A really good hitching spot.”

  The spot was a gas station about ten miles out of town, at a lonely highway intersection. I realized, too late, that the gas station was closed. The doors were boarded up, snowdrifts piled against the pump. Long Live, said the letters on a signboard outside the entrance. I raised my thumb and then dropped it again. There was no traffic. Curtains of dust-fine snow swirled across the empty highway. The world was white and devoid of life—white forest, white road, white sky. It felt like it was ten degrees below zero, or colder. I jumped up and down in the squeaky snow to stop my shivering. All I had, still, were thin wool gloves, and I stuffed my numb hands into my pockets. Fuck.

  Twenty minutes later a car approached. I waved my hands in the air, like the kid in Hatchet when he sees a plane and wants to be rescued. The driver slowed down and smiled at me, standing there on the desolate roadside bundled up with my scarf over my face and desperation in my eyes, and then he blew past, blasting me with bits of ice and snow. The cold wind pummeled me. Fuck! Fuck fuck. My toes were going numb one by one, and I could no longer make a fist with my hand. Across the highway, set back into the trees a bit, was a cabin. I stomped through the deep snow to reach it. The front door and windows were boarded up, but the sheet of plywood on one of the windows was loose, and I pried at it—if I could only get inside, I could start a fire in the woodstove and get warm. My hands wouldn’t work well enough to grip the wood, though, and I started to cry. Tears froze to my eyelashes, sticking them together. Fuck!

  A small hatchback approached, headed in the direction from which I’d come. I stuck out my thumb and the car rolled to a stop.

  I squeezed into the backseat, pushing aside trash to make a space for my luggage. A small, bug-eyed dog cowered on the floorboards. The driver and his passenger each had an open beer and the car stank of stale cigarette smoke. My eyes itched from the heater. I pulled off the wool gloves and tried, unsuccessfully, to uncurl my pinky finger. I petted the dog with my numb, cold hands.

  “Thanks for stopping,” I said. The men lifted their beers in cheers and then continued their conversation, ignoring me.

  There was an open gas station in Destruction Bay, a big gleaming log structure that was also a diner and a motel. It shone like a mirage in the middle of the great, frozen world. I piled my things at one of the tables and ordered a chili cheeseburger. In the bathroom I ran my hands under warm water until they felt normal again.

  I hitched from the inside of the gas station, this time, approaching people and asking if they were driving to Alaska and if they had space for me. Eventually a fleece-wearing couple headed to Alaska said yeah, they could take me along, and I hoisted myself into the warm leather world of their shiny new pickup, aglow with gratitude. We pulled out, headed west with the heater all the way up (and heated seats!) just as the bright winter sun broke through the haze, setting the mountains on fire. In the valley below us I could see a herd of caribou. A red fox darted across the road. An audiobook droned softly in the car, a low-voiced person pontificating on the hero’s journey. According to the book, there were three different ways the hero character could manifest: as a person who died and was born again, as a person who defeated some great evil, and as a person who was a vehicle for the energy of life itself. We stopped to take pictures at an overlook and startled a flock of ravens who were eating the eyes from a caribou head.

  My kind drivers were headed to Anchorage, not Fairbanks, where I would meet Tara, so at Tok Junction, where the highway split, they bought me a room in a low, dark wooden motel. I was more grateful than I knew how to express, as they had spared me a night in the freezing snowbanks, one that I couldn’t have survived. I ate a can of black beans and washed my shirts in the sink, plunging them up and down in the warm gray water.

  * * *

  —

  The truck driver drops me in the empty parking lot of a mall in North Pole, Alaska, and rumbles away. He’s headed to the North Slope on the Dalton Highway—he was kind enough to pick me up this morning in Tok Junction. The mall is flanked by closed-up strip malls, and once inside I see that many of the stores here are closed as well—a locked crafts store, a framing shop gone dark. There is only a JCPenney and the soft jazz music that wafts from the sound system. Tara and I agreed to meet here—North Pole is just outside of Fairbanks, and Tara’s land is two hours from there. I sit on a bench in the empty mall with my pack between my legs, waiting. Then there’s the swoosh of insulated Carhartt coveralls and Tara appears at the end of the long corridor.

  It is so strange to see her here in the physical realm. A real live person in a heavy winter coat and plastic bunny boots, the military kind that inflate against the cold. She is tall, and her face is round and pale. We hug, and space and time ripple all around me, illusions and realities whispering against each other, worlds swirling together and apart, like braids in a river. Her hair is curly and fine, and her eyes are shining dark stones in the round flesh of her face. She smells of smoked fish.

  “Shall we go to the cabin?” she says. Her voice is delicate and high.

  * * *

  —

  The walls inside Tara’s cabin are a white that’s aged to pale yellow from wood smoke. There’s a window that looks out at the slough, which is a flat current of water that cuts through the snowy forest. Yesterday, after Tara picked me up, we walked across the frozen, wind-blasted river, which is a quarter of a mile wide. We parked Tara’s van on one side, at a pullout in the trees, after driving two hours from Fairbanks. And then we walked across the river. The snow squelched beneath our feet; the sky was an empty blue. We dragged plastic sleds by ropes that were strung around our hips. In the sleds were four cabbages, several pounds of carrots, dried pinto beans, red lentils, brown rice, cans of coconut milk, cumin powder, cooking oil, bacon, a huge sack of apples, and my luggage. We’d picked up the supplies in Fairbanks. Once across the river, we pulled the sleds a quarter mile through a forest of birch trees to the cabin, struggling in the deep snow.

  Tara’s cabin is a small rectangle, one room, the outside sided in honey-colored spruce. The window trim is a cheery green. There is no running water, just a plastic bucket that Tara uses to haul snow from the yard to the huge pot on top of the woodstove, where it is melted and becomes drinking water, dishwater, water for the dog, a border collie who lies on the bed, chewing huge moose bones he’s dragged from the woods. There is no plumbing, just a little outhouse that smells of plywood and has a view of the forest. A small iron gadget called a thermopile sits on top of the woodstove and creates just enough electricity to charge a cellphone. At night there are candles and oil lamps for light.

  This morning, my first morning waking up in the cabin, we used the sleds to haul rounds of wood from the forest, which Tara had cut from downed trees with a borrowed chain saw. The wood was a half mile away and we tromped back and forth, the sleds tied to our hips as though we were ponies. We split the rounds with the maul on the stump in front of the house and stacked the chunks next to the woodstove to last through the next few nights. March is bright sun and clear days, but the world is still mostly frozen here, and the daily low is fifteen below zero.

  Next to the cabin is a shed where whitefish, pulled from the river in warmer seasons, are stacked on a table like kindling, frozen solid. There are also chunks of roadkill moose wrapped in butcher paper. Now, Tara takes an ax and hacks a fish from the pile and brings it inside, adding it to the pot on the woodstove, which holds remnants of last night’s stew. To the whitefish she adds potatoes, carrots, onions, and green curry paste. The floor of the cabin is littered with broken eggshells and sacks of fish eggs, pulled from the bellies of whitefish and dropped there for the dog to eat. Tara has been fermenting teff flour with water in a glass bowl next to the woodstove, and we’ll fry up some of this for an approximation of injera and dip it into the stew. We are f
amished from hauling and chopping wood in the cold.

  Tara has a thermos of tea to which she adds new herbs whenever the flavor gets faint, mugwort and lavender fading into raspberry leaf and comfrey, all of it steeped in melted snow water. I drink this tea from a mason jar, watching the birch seeds swirl in the water, tiny kites that have been tossed on the wind. It tastes like wintertime, cold and milky and distilled.

  After dinner we wash our dishes in a chipped enamel bowl on a white table beneath the window that lets in the best light. A little water, a little sopping with the dishrag—the dishes are never really clean. Having to work so hard to get water—a full bucket of snow takes forever to melt, and makes just a few inches of liquid—leaves Tara much less inclined to do an extraneous wiping down. There is a broom, and I use it to sweep the cabin floor, shooing the broken eggshells and dog hair out the door, where they mar the pure white snow.

  When darkness comes, we light the candles and oil lamps and I sit in the rocking chair next to the woodstove while Tara lies on the bed, one arm around the dog. She has been reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek too—we’ve been emailing back and forth about the book for months—and we take turns reading aloud from the battered paperback copy that Finch gave me years ago. The cabin creaks and pops as the cold settles in, and I get up every now and then to feed more logs into the glowing woodstove. I lose track of time and look up, and Tara is asleep. I close the draw on the woodstove and crawl into the top bunk, pulling a stained quilt over myself. The bed smells like a limp feather pillow that’s never been washed. The smell is deeply comforting to me.

  In the morning the window that faces the slough is sparkling with frost. I step outside in the biting air to pee in the snow, and then walk a few paces farther to fill the snow bucket. The snow is a flat plane of light from which birch trees spring, blond striped pillars that cut the light into bars, make a sort of grid to measure space. The birch trees make sheets of paper that I peel off with my bare hands, which are red and wet from scooping snow.

  I like being here, with Tara, in this land outside of time. The forest and the snow and the frozen river are made new every day, and the heavy questions of existence that dogged me in Portland seem irrelevant now. Tara feels like family, even though I only just met her. I wonder if the ghosts can even find me here, in this wild land. Maybe they can’t. And maybe, one of these nights, talking with Tara in the yellow light from the oil lamp, we’ll stumble upon answers; answers to the riddles that are stuck like thorns into the darkest parts of our hearts.

  In the afternoon, once we’ve finished hauling and chopping wood again, Tara tells me stories from her own childhood in a one-room cabin made of spruce poles on the banks of the Coleen River. In the dark mornings, her father would depart with the dog team to check his traplines. Her mother sewed winter parkas for Tara and her baby sister from caribou hides that she had tanned herself. Her father sold the pelts of the animals he trapped for money to buy flour, salt, and gas for their boat. As Tara relates these tales of connectedness with the land, of learning to dog mush when she was small and the darkness of those early winters, she also weaves in anecdotes of her father’s sadistic abuse. He is a violent man, and throughout her childhood she was his primary victim. So these stories, which contain so much wonder and beauty, are also suffused with deep grief.

  Tara’s two rifles lean, at the ready, next to the cabin door. She takes me outside and we stand in the snow in the bright, cold afternoon and she teaches me how to shoot. She has a plywood nativity scene that she found in the shed when she first bought this land. We prop one of the Wise Men up in the snow. “We don’t want your frankincense,” we tell him. Bang. “We don’t want your myrrh.”

  In the clearing behind the house, we build an altar to Durga, the Indian goddess of vengeance. We say that in a different time, in a different world, we would be assassins. We would live short, violent lives avenging the wrongs that had been committed by child abusers. We would chop their dicks off and set the men on fire, drag them through the main street of the village while tossing money to the poor.

  When she was a kid, everyone said Tara’s father was a brilliant pianist. In the summer, when the river was high and before the salmon ran, they’d go to town and he’d play piano in the bar. The other drunk musicians who had come to Alaska in converted school buses with their bohemian dreams spoke worshipfully of him. All the men played music together and everyone was on acid and no one took care of the babies. The sun never set, freeing them from the constructs of time. Their babies cried from hunger and shit themselves and sometimes fell into the river and drowned.

  One day men on snow machines appear at our cabin, having crossed the river from the nearest village, and they offer us oily strips of dried salmon. We stand in the snow eating the sweet red fish, chewing it like candy, as they eye us up and down and take in the cabin, the chopping block, the Wise Man full of bullet holes.

  “Do you have guns?” they ask Tara.

  “Yes,” she says. They ask her if she needs more guns. Guns to shoot bears, rapists, ghosts. We don’t worry about the bears—there are only black bears on this part of the river, no grizzlies. Tara says that every springtime, a mother black bear wanders through with her cubs and gnaws the door latch of the shed where the frozen fish are kept. Tara wants to shoot a black bear to get a bucket of bear fat, which would last a long time.

  Tara tried to run away a few times when she was thirteen years old and they were spending the summer in Fairbanks. She kept a backpack with her birth certificate, important photos, and a change of clothes and she would slip out of the house when her dad was sleeping and run to the road and stick out her thumb. Her father would find her and convince her to come home, promise her that things would be different. They never were, though, and she would run away again. She lived on the streets and was in and out of foster care for a few years. She did sex work and found that her clients were more helpful and caring than social workers. Finally, at sixteen, she escaped Alaska, going first to Texas and then moving every few months, running from various fucked-up situations until she paid cash for a double-wide in Pennsylvania and enrolled in college with the money she’d made sucking dick.

  Tara graduated with a degree in psychology and bought a Chevy Astro minivan, which she converted into a camper. She pulled the seats out, added a cot from the military surplus store and a sleeping bag so fluffy she could sleep in it anywhere, even in the wintertime. Under the bed went crates to store her belongings—canning jars, cooking oil, weathered books, four-inch Lucite heels. She drove to North Dakota, where there were scores of lonely men working in the oil fields. The men had nothing to do on the weekends but drink in the bars, and she danced until money rained from the sky and she could gather it up and save it for her future. She drove all over the country, washed herself in gas station bathrooms and danced in dive-bar strip clubs. She brushed her long hair and dabbed coconut oil on her eyelashes. She’d dance in any one place for a week at a time, and sleep a dreamless sleep each night safe in her sleeping bag, the stars winking companionably above her. In the bright daylight before work, she’d snare rabbits and walk through fields of dry grass, gathering medicinal plants, which she stuffed into mason jars full of grain alcohol, distilling them into tinctures. She sold the little blue tincture bottles online—medicine for menstrual cramps, for sleeplessness, for winter colds.

  Tara was happy. She read books by headlamp—Audre Lorde, Phoolan Devi. She roasted the rabbits she snared over a crackling fire in the dark and listened to the earth humming all around her. After several years she saved up enough money to buy this piece of land.

  Her father still lives in Alaska. He still plays piano in the bars with the drunk people who adore him. He’s found a new woman to beat and he beats his sled dogs and has a violent assault conviction and multiple restraining orders on his public record, but everyone ignores this because he’s such a good musician, and a man.

/>   One day I go out walking on the frozen river alone. The ice is still solid, it seems, although I am no expert in this arena. The wind stings and burns and I wrap my face in gray herringbone wool and put on every layer that I have. Tara’s life is beautiful, and the stories about her father fill me with rage—a rage that warms my core, a rage as familiar as my own skin. A rage that has nowhere to go. I want to loose this rage onto something bigger than myself, so I go to the frozen river. The snow on the ice has been sculpted into drifts by the wind, and these drifts have a hard crust just thick enough to hold me. In some spots my boots punch through but there is only more snow underneath, and I imagine the river to be a clear brittle mass, frozen all the way to the bottom, fish trapped in place, suspended mid-swim. I’m looking for a cabin upriver that an old man in the village told me about. He drew me a map with a ballpoint pen when I was doing sudoku at the community center, waiting for Tara to finish filling out some paperwork. The old man wore suspenders and offered me soda and pretzels from a big plastic barrel. When I declined the pretzels, he told me about the cabin, drawing his map on a scrap of newspaper—one line for the river, one line for the creek, a box for the wee house. Now I want to find it, but the sucking gray wind is discouraging me. The wind wants to dry up my lungs, freeze their moisture into food for its cruel, hungry heart. The whole earth, it seems to me, has a cruel, hungry heart. How sad is a single life, though, if this is true? I don’t want this to be true, but the facts that I’ve collected along my way seem to say that it is. I scramble up the steep riverbank, floundering around in the deep loose stuff, prick my mittened fingers on the bare wild rosebushes. When I get back to the cabin, Tara tells me that it can be dangerous to go walking on the river in March just for fun. Where we cross to get to the road to the village is solid, but in other places there are warm springs that run from the creek, with fast-moving water that never freezes. She says that soon the whole river will melt, nearly all at once, and it will crack and scream and flood, and for a week or two the world will be a mosh pit of ice floes and you’re stuck on either this side of the river or that one. When the ice is gone, Tara has a little metal motorboat we can use to cross; the engine is old and dies mid-stroke but she only has to set the spark plugs on fire and it works again.