The Sunset Route

by Carrot Quinn

  “In the meantime, just be careful,” she says. “If it seems sketchy one day but you really need to cross, cut a long pole and carry the pole horizontally like you’re walking a tightrope. That way, if you fall through the ice, the pole will catch you. And if you fall in, you’ll need to throw yourself up onto the bank. You can’t really pull yourself up. Just think of a seal, and throw yourself up onto the ice.”

  I lie on the bed in the smoky cabin interior and ask Tara if she thinks that the earth has a cruel, hungry heart. And if it does, what’s the point of being alive?

  “I don’t know,” says Tara. “Things can be beautiful sometimes. I’m trying to figure that one out.”

  We drive a few hours in to Fairbanks to buy more supplies. Produce is wilted and expensive and we place it in the cart carefully, as though it is gold. On the drive back to the cabin, Tara tells me about eating the crispy fat of beaver tails when she was a kid, about her mother washing diapers in snow she had melted and boiled. In the evenings they dipped Strike Anywhere matches in candlewax by the light of a kerosene lantern to waterproof them. They had film canisters of these matches in everything, said Tara—their coat pockets, the dogsled, the bag they took trapping. In case they fell through the ice and needed to make a fire after climbing out, soaked and cold.

  “You should always have one in your pocket,” she says. “So you can build a fire no matter what.”

  * * *

  —

  I’ve been staying with Tara for two weeks when my money runs out completely. I have no more dollars for cabbage, or pinto beans, or cooking oil. Tara’s mother, Sandra, who left her father years ago, is remarried and now lives in a tiny village in the boreal forest about fifty miles to the south. She works as the special education teacher in the small K–12 school there.

  Tara uses Sandra’s washer and dryer for laundry and Sandra watches Tara’s dog when she’s traveling, sometimes for months at a time. “We never talk about my father.”

  Sandra needs an aide, but so far the school hasn’t been able to find one for her—the village, called Andrews, is too remote to attract many residents; it consists of a few dozen plywood-sided houses in a tilted bit of forest far from any river or mountain, a dark, frozen land that becomes a wet mosquito bog in the summer. Andrews was built to serve a nearby military base, which is locked and gated and whose secretive operations have spawned numerous conspiracy theories over the years: Laser guns? A huge mind-control satellite dish? The people who live in Andrews either work at the military base, and are poor, or moved there when the State of Alaska was giving away land parcels in the town in an attempt to keep the population large enough to warrant funding for the school, which needs thirty students to stay open. There was one caveat for the folks, also poor, who came for the free land: they had to stay for at least two years, or the land went back to the state. Some of these families stayed, mostly the ones like Tara’s, with paranoid, addict fathers who thought they were messiahs and wanted to raise their children on fear and the Bible alone. Their daughters wear only dresses and their sons wear only camo. They eat Top Ramen, mostly, and moose and salmon in their seasons.

  It is the first week of April. Sandra interviews me on the phone and decides that I’ll do just fine as her aide until the school year is up, in June. Sandra has an empty room in her house; I can stay there. Her husband lives in another village, and works as an engineer in the uranium mine there—I won’t be seeing much of him. On weekends I can come back to Tara’s land. My pay will be fifteen dollars an hour, and I start in a week.

  I have a job until the end of May now. It’s not full-time but it’s enough to get me thinking about things I can do with the money when I have it—buy a car off Craigslist, an old Subaru with a red body and a blue hood, maybe, or something I can live in, although where I want to live is here, in this cabin with Tara, with the woodstove and the dog and the paperback books, and our long evenings talking in circles trying to puzzle out the tangles of existence. I’m tired of leaving. I’m tired of anxiety creeping up every three months like an alarm in my brain I can’t turn off. I feel like I’ve been playing the same level in a video game over and over, and at the end I keep dying. Maybe this time, if I stay, my character won’t die. Maybe I’ll beat the final boss, the dark mass of tar around my own heart.

  We add more ingredients to the stew pot for dinner. Bits of the roadkill moose that I will be too scared to eat—esophagus, spinal cord, a femur full of marrow. Turnips and purple cabbage and soft, dirty carrots from the galvanized tub on the floor of the shed. There’s one last whitefish in the shed, lying frozen on the plywood table in the dusty light from the window. We’ve got to eat it all up, says Tara, before the world thaws. I can’t wait for the snow to recede so I can see all the junk that’s lying behind the cabin, the old wooden boxes and metal tubs and cracked plastic buckets. I can’t wait to see the forest floor, the leaves on the birch trees. I can’t wait to see summer come hot and fast like a woodstove fire of dry spruce wood with the damper and the flue wide open.

  * * *

  —

  I love my job. Sandra’s classroom is filled with books, educational materials, sunshine, and toys. There are a couple of short tables with child-sized chairs. The children, who are between the ages of six and ten, trickle in throughout the day and we do activities with them; we look at books, answer questions on worksheets, build things with blocks. The children have ADHD, or fetal alcohol syndrome, or brain damage from being shaken as babies. We have lunch in the cafeteria and play basketball in the gym. At recess, the kids fling themselves from the tops of the playground equipment, push each other into the snow, pump their legs recklessly on the swings. I’ve never done any work like this. It is deeply gratifying.

  After my workday ends, I walk back to Sandra’s place, past the unfinished houses of the villagers, sided in Tyvek, mostly, smoke pumping from the stovepipes, ATVs parked askew in the snow. There are plenty of abandoned houses too. These are the people who came for the free land but didn’t stay. They built their humble houses and stacked their cordwood but they didn’t stay. Now the doors are open to the elements, the window glass shattered, plaster moldering in the spring warmth. I go inside some of these houses, walk their empty rooms. There are old children’s toys, shirts still hang in the closet. Hidden among the trees are derelict converted school buses. I climb into one bus, stepping over the shattered glass. I touch the rusted bedsteads, pull open the dresser drawers, and imagine the hippies arriving here in the seventies, the same time my parents came to Anchorage. How many children lived in this bus? I picture their tattered layers of clothing, the babies crying.

  Most nights Sandra works late and I am alone in the house. I eat ice cream and watch cable TV and consider my loneliness. Sandra has a parrot that waddles back and forth on top of its tall cage in the corner of the room, periodically letting out loud shrieks. The sun stays up late too, and I can hear the neighborhood kids outside, screaming as they tool around on their ATVs. When I’m finally tired, I sleep, pulling a dark shirt over my eyes to block the sun, which is still bright at ten p.m.

  * * *

  —

  On Saturday after my first week at Sandra’s, I’m back at Tara’s cabin, lying in bed reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek aloud while she washes the dinner dishes with a rag and an amber glass of snow water. It’s an old copy of the book that Tara got on interlibrary loan, and on the inside of the dust jacket is a picture of young Annie Dillard, with all the wisdom of her twenty-five years, lips parted, looking out at the world like a vessel shot through with light, a conduit to God, which she defines, in the book, as Nature.

  We read Pilgrim until the light is gone completely in the four-paned window, although the snow is still glowing outside when I squat to pee, and I can make out the shapes of the shed and the chopping block. It’s nearly eleven o’clock! There is an abundance of daylight now. A cornucopia of sunshine. I fee
l like the richest person on earth.

  I do not mind that it’s April and the world has not yet thawed. The icicles glint like crystals in the doorway, and sounds are incredibly clear, like the air, and fresh, like the water in the creek. The snow is bluish with light and the shadows, bright shadows, are more bluish still. The sky is endless from six a.m. until ten and it bleeds into the night a little more each day. And you can start to smell the earth, where it softens beneath the snow. I can’t believe it will eventually be summer here, hot good dry summer, with a pounding sun and an empty sky, and dust. The rivers will unstick themselves and flow, and salmon will swim up from the sea to spawn. People in the villages have built fish wheels, and the current of the river turns the wheel, and the baskets scoop the fish, and the people cut the fish and hang them to dry on wooden racks, with the smoke of green poplar to keep the flies from laying maggots.

  I like so much about this quiet life, in this cabin with Tara. I like the herbs hanging to dry in the dusty corners, and the white-painted table where we wash the dishes. I like the way Tara subsists on potatoes and fish, and then finally, with a sigh, grows weary of them. I like how she tucks her .45 into the back of her pants when we walk to the village, the careful way she crosses the frozen river, the way she brushes her hair with rosemary oil, and the way the smell of rosemary lingers for the rest of the day.

  * * *

  —

  One weekend we drive south to visit a friend of Tara’s, in Anchorage. It’s icy in the city and the skies are leaden and the air smells of the sea. I sit on the broken curb in front of Tara’s friend’s house and listen to the ai ai ai of the seagulls. The Pacific Ocean is close, I know, dark and full of secrets, crashing itself against the mudflats. I shut my eyes and can smell spring, growth waiting beneath the snow. I think of the time, six years ago, when I hitchhiked up here to find my father. I haven’t seen him since. I wanted a relationship, but you can’t wish a father into existence. My ideas of him had been pure fantasy, and when, even after meeting him, I still had no father, I was heartbroken. Now he is no one to me, and I am no one to him. He is a stranger again. I think of my mother. She’s here in Anchorage, somewhere, as well. But where? The memories come back and I shut my eyes. I’m a kid again, I’m hungry, I’m wandering the streets in desperation. Everything is closed off to me, no magic tickets to open doors, no hot soup to eat. I’m gazing in the windows of restaurants and wondering how anyone anywhere is rich enough to eat in restaurants, to pay that many dollars for a little meal and to sit in the warmth, with the condiments in their orderly metal stands, the sugars and Sweet’N Lows so tidy, everything so calm around them. How is anyone in the world rich enough for that?

  I haven’t seen my mother in twelve years. I remember when I last talked to her on the phone a few years ago, when I was in Greensboro, North Carolina. She was living indoors then. But where? A halfway house? Where do schizophrenic homeless people live in Anchorage, when they’re not on the streets? She told me I should’ve died when I was a baby. A few phrases of lucid conversation—she acted as though I was still a child, but at least her words made sense—and then she was gone. I should’ve died when I was a baby. I had the devil inside me, and she should’ve let me die.

  I open my eyes and look at the broken concrete of the driveway. My mouth tastes like metal, and I’ve started to shake, so I focus on the smell of the sea, imagining the mud beach, the flat gray water. The ridgelines of volcanoes in the distance. Being in Anchorage always makes me feel this way. Darkness, creeping in at the edges. Threatening to subsume me.

  I have never tried to find my mother. Seeing her, I think, would crumble this fragile scaffolding I’ve managed to build, this perception of reality on which I’ve hung my version of a life. I’m balancing on thin wood, telling myself I’m okay, I’m not in danger, everything is going to be okay. Seeing Barbara would destroy everything. I would fall, reeling, into the dark hole in which she dwells, like a gremlin. My first world. What still feels, in my bones, like the truest world.

  But the shaking doesn’t stop, so I think about the volcanoes across the water. When I was seven years old, one of the volcanoes, Mount Redoubt, erupted. The skies turned dark and for days ash fell like fine, dirty snow. A man on a bicycle saw me collecting the ash in a pickle jar and he handed me his paper dust mask.

  A little kid rides by on a pink bicycle. She’s riding in the gutter, rowing the ground with her feet. I remember when I was her age and I lived just down the road, in a neighborhood like this, with potholed asphalt and trash in the street. I’d walk the silty sidewalks with my paper bag of cheeseburgers from Burger King, and at the traffic light I’d hit the metal button, pong pong, and stand, head down against the wind, bare hands cold around the paper sack, waiting for the light to change. Sometimes it’s raining, in my memory, and the rain is all the loneliness and isolation that exists in the whole world, and this rain hits the dirty snowbanks, whose gravelly crusts are sprinkled with straw wrappers, crushed drink cups, and Cheetos bags. I walked for miles on those sidewalks. This walking is what I always remember first. Head down, hungry, lonely, nothing in my pockets. Not wanting to go home. Looking for a dumpster of chalky old candy bars or a dollar for a cheeseburger, or a warm place to get out of the cold.

  And yet, it’s amazing, sitting here on Tara’s friend’s front stoop, what I also remember. The good. I remember the hope I would feel in the springtime, when the world was opening up. I had a fierce belief, even then, in the godlike power of springtime. The seasons were each a god, I was sure, the passage of time, a god, the sea was a god, the trampoline of moss in the forest was a god. I was in awe of all of it, and it would make me drunk, and I would fall down into it, the idea that this could be, in the end, the truest core of everything. Beneath the sadness and disappointment and grief. You fall and you fall and this is what finally catches you—this loamy forest floor, this soft light that’s filtered through the spruce boughs. What was flaking paint, despair, secondhand smoke? What was hunger? It was nothing in the face of the forests and the tide, the flowers in the springtime, the howling of wolves in the high mountains, the glittering white snowbanks in the dark of winter.

  Tara and I spend the night curled together on the narrow bed in her van. We forgot to bring warm blankets, which is hilarious, and we laugh about it. To pass the cold hours, we read aloud from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. In the morning we eat sausage and hash browns from the grocery store deli and split an organic cucumber and then drive around town, running errands. It’s late afternoon when we pull onto the highway headed back north, toward Tara’s cabin, and dark when we see the antlers silhouetted in the headlights, on the side of the highway outside Denali National Park.

  We pull off the road and walk toward the fallen creature, put our hands in its wind-blown fur. The caribou is still warm. It lies on the concrete shoulder in a dark pool of its own blood. Tara tells me that it’s against the law to take home roadkill in Alaska. You’re supposed to call a hotline, and someone in a nearby village will pick up the dead animal and take it to a family in need. What if we took this caribou, though? We could eat it. We would put it to good use. But how? How does one process an animal this large?

  “My mom will know what to do,” says Tara.

  It’s four a.m. when we reach Sandra’s house in Andrews. It took us a long time to get the caribou into the van—it was far too large for us to lift on our own, so we waited in the dark until we saw headlights on the lonely highway, and flagged down a pickup truck. The driver helped us hoist the caribou into the back of the van, where it rested on the floor next to the bed, and then he drove away without asking any questions. I think he understood.

  Sandra is awake, waiting for us in the empty garage, a blue tarpaulin spread across the floor. In her fists are several rusty kitchen knives. White plastic buckets are arranged at the end of the tarp. We’ve woken her before she would normally get up for work, but she doesn’t compla
in. She helps us pull the caribou out of the van and across the ground, onto the tarp.

  “These knives are dull,” Sandra tells us as we arrange the caribou belly-up on the floor. “Dull knives are best for skinning. That way you’re less likely to cut into the skin, or the membrane between the skin and the muscles.”

  Tara opens the animal down the belly slowly, so as not to damage any of the organs. The three of us grasp the edges of the skin and work the dull knives underneath it, pulling it back inch by inch. There are circles of white, here and there, on the underside of the skin, which I recognize from the Farley Mowat books I’ve read—Farley Mowat was a Canadian biologist who spent decades in the Arctic in the first half of the twentieth century, working with caribou, among other creatures. Botflies. These are botflies. I cut open one of these white lumps and my fears are confirmed—there’s a fat larva in there, the size of a walnut, wriggling back and forth. I drop my knife and take a few steps back, feeling like I might throw up.

  The botflies are, interestingly, the only part of this process that overwhelms me, which makes me feel proud. Since I eat meat, I want to be able to face the truth of a dead animal. After the skin with its terrible wriggling larvae is off, the rest of the work is not so bad. The inside of the caribou is steaming—this is why, says Sandra, you’ve got to gut an animal right away after it dies; otherwise, the hot organs will cause the carcass to ferment. It’s beautiful, inside the caribou, a whole galaxy of complex organs, and nutrient-rich blood that was so recently pumping around. I think about the full life this caribou lived, out in the wild. Eating lichen and migrating over the land, watching storms. Weathering winter, exalting in the brief flush of summer. The tundra is made of lichen—the caribou have found a way to metabolize the lichen, and everything else eats the caribou. Caribou are the creatures that tether so much other life to this huge, wild land.