In other words: same old same old.
Among the nearly five hundred email messages waiting in Jace’s mailbox was a notification of a friend request on Facebook from someone named Crissy Lou. Who was Crissy Lou? The name rang a bell, but he couldn’t place it. The tiny profile photo didn’t help. It depicted a mountain scene, not a person’s face.
Then it struck him — he knew that mountain. It was the iconic Stubborn Mountain.
So Jace clicked through to the Crissy Lou profile, where he found precious little additional information. No About or Likes. A timeline that began that very day. The few photos showed only unpeopled winter landscapes from around the Stubborn Mountain Mine site and Prophecy compound. Crissy Lou wanted to be friends. He didn’t know the names of all the young people in the family, but he couldn’t see how Crissy Lou was of biblical origin the way the other names seemed to be.
Something was fishy. Even if the old patriarch permitted his children to browse the internet, which Jace doubted, they didn’t have service out there, let alone computers. Did they?
Was this a trick? Was someone pranking him? But prank or not, there was no scenario in which Jace could ignore this friend request. So he swallowed his doubts and tapped Accept.
Before Jace could surf away from the profile, the little chat window popped up:
u there ranger?
Crissy Lou was online and logged in and wanted to chat with him. Jace began to freak. Could this possibly be her? With equal measures of excitement and doubt, he typed, “Hi.”
hi yerself ranger. are u saved?
Whoa, talk about getting right down to business. This could be the shortest chat ever. “Maybe. Who’s Crissy Lou?”
dog barked at you near rabbit hutch wehn surveyers were here.
Well, as far as he knew, Deut was the only person who had witnessed that encounter. “Okay. And who are you?”
who u think?
“Deuteronomy?”
woof!
“Prove it.”
how?
“How do I know this isn’t one of your crazy brothers?”
arf arf my crazy bros would sooner shoot u than chat with u : O)
That was true, and they probably wouldn’t use emoticons. “So how come you have internet out there? The mountain must block it?”
same way 2-way radio back when mine operation long copper cable antena through tunnel and out vent hole on town side. reception fine but only near antena
“You got a cell?”
no only poppy
“But you have a computer?”
no its my bros
“And they let you use it?”
no : O)
“How do I know you’re not one of your sisters?”
because they think your the devil. are you the devil?
“I can honestly say I’m not the devil.”
prove it
“Is that an order?”
yes
Back to the matter of faith and his total lack thereof. Could they get beyond it? “Sorry, I can’t prove I’m not a devil because you can’t prove a negative.”
?????
“I’d love to discuss my faith with you sometime in person.”
ME TOO!!!
Reading this, Jace let out a whoop and jumped off the couch. This wasn’t happening. This was unreal. “Can you come into town? I live on Lucky Strike Lane.”
are u crazy ranger?
“Then where? When?”
: O)
[Crissy Lou has logged off chat.]
Jace stared at the screen. She’d logged off before arranging a time or place to meet. Had he scared her away with his enthusiasm? Was she toying with him? Or maybe someone had interrupted her? It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she obviously liked him! This was the start of something big!
Caw Caw
CC1 1.0
[Following is a storyboard script for an animated epilog.]
Panel 1: The silhouette of a young man in the window of a small dilapidated house at night during winter.
Panel 2: Our POV rises to take in the roof of the house and neighboring houses on an empty, snow-covered street.
Panel 3: POV rises high enough to encompass all of McHardy, its surrounding countryside, and the peak of Stubborn Mountain.
Panels 4-5: We continue to zoom out, see the outline of Alaska and the Pacific Arctic.
Panel 6: We see the whole Earth, moon, and sun.
Panel 7: We see the entire Solar system.
Panel 8: An alien planet suddenly pops into existence on the far side of Neptune.
—End of Book 1—
Sidebar: Ghost Town with Footbridge
GT1 1.0
MCHARDY AND ITS sister town of Caldecott had both sprung up overnight in 1910. Located five miles (8 km) apart, they were cultural symbiotes. That is, Caldecott was the copper syndicate’s company town: prim, sober, and virtuous by decree. McHardy, on the other hand, was whorish, boozy, and predatory. They were born together, and they perished together on the same day in 1938, when monied interests in far-off New York and Chicago, having exhausted the copper deposits, ordered the mines to close. Trains that over the course of a quarter century had transported six hundred tons of copper (544 metric tonnes) and nine million ounces of silver (255 metric tonnes) suddenly stopped running. The last train to depart transported only people and what they could carry in their arms. Residents were forced to abandon their clothes, furniture, machinery, cutlery, tools, toys, books, gramophone recordings, hand-crank telephones, automobiles, and everything else they possessed.
A handful of oddballs missed the last train out. They rather preferred living where they were and saw no need to leave just because society did. For the next thirty years, they and a few newcomers had the entire region to themselves. They scratched out meager lives in total oblivion, which was how they liked it. Some of them worked small placer gold claims on outlying creeks or, like Dupré, trapped fur-bearing animals. Most of them were fugitives from something or other, at least in their own minds.
The Caldecott River served as the town’s moat against the world. Back in 1942, the Alaska territorial government commissioned a project to salvage the iron rails of the abandoned railway to help in the war effort. Salvagers started at the mill in Caldecott and worked backward one hundred twenty miles (193 km) to the deepwater docks of Cordova, lifting rails as they went. The operation left behind a bare wooden trestle over the Caldecott River as the only overland means of reaching McHardy and Caldecott.
The few stragglers haunting the towns at the time disapproved of the trestle. They could have paved its surface with boards, making an automobile bridge out of it, but they were afraid that a bridge might be an open invitation to curious motorists on the territory’s primitive road system. So they cut up the trestle and hauled it away for building material and firewood, further isolating themselves.
For their own access, McHardy residents scrounged wire cable, pulleys, and scrap iron from the mine and constructed a hand-operated tramway system. If you wanted to get into town, you had to pull the two-passenger tram car across the river by hand, risking crushed fingers and steel splinters and the possibility of not being able to muscle the tram out of the sag in the middle. McHardyites kept their own highway vehicles on a rocky parking lot on the Chitina side of the river and used them only once or twice a year on supply runs to Anchorage. Everything they brought to McHardy had to fit in the tram car. Otherwise, they left it with the vehicles until winter when they could drive the last mile into town over the frozen river. (The town’s civic motto: “You can’t get here from there.”)
McHardy suffered a revival of sorts in the 1970s when it was rediscovered by a new generation of social misfits who were drawn north by the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. They bought up town lots and launched the decades-long task of restoring the town. This was when Orion Beehymer, flush with pipeline wages, began his climb to the status of local land baron. And one of his first purchase
s was the rocky lot next to the river where everyone parked their vehicles.
In the 1970s, the state Department of Transportation was lousy with oil money, and it turned its attention to the McHardy Road, the fifty-nine-mile (95 km) single-lane pioneer road built on top of the old gravel railbed. DOT proposed tearing down the treacherous McHardy tramway and replacing it with a steel bridge. McHardy residents, old timers and recent arrivals alike, took up their pitchforks to shout down the plan.
Then, one morning in December, 1980, McHardyites woke up to discover that they were living smack dab in the middle of the newest and largest National Park and Preserve in the United States. They became prisoners of the very bureaucracy they had worked so hard to escape.
The first thing the National Park Service wanted to do in its new domain was to buy up the mill town of Caldecott, restore it, and turn it into a National Historical Landmark and first-class tourist destination. Naturally, the success of the plan relied on tourists not having to risk losing fingers on a tramway. But despite the emergence of a pro-bridge faction in town, McHardy residents stubbornly thwarted the government’s plans and stymied progress for another decade.
Eventually, the government won out, as it always did, and before the new millennium arrived, the state finalized plans to condemn the tramway as a public safety hazard.
Still, the isolationist community fought on, with itself as much as with state and federal agencies. Out of the turmoil, a compromise with modernity emerged: there would be a bridge, but it would be a footbridge, a bridge too narrow to permit any vehicle wider than an ATV to cross. No cars, trucks, vans, RVs, campers, or buses allowed. McHardy Road terminated abruptly at its abutment. You could drive to McHardy, but you had to hike the final mile.
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Sidebar: Sex on a Glacier
SG1 1.0
JACE FILLED OUT the paperwork for submitting his newly purchased McHardy property to the National Registry of Historic Places and looked into the state restoration grant. He maybe should have done these things before forking over the money to Beehymer. It was a much more complicated and much less automatic process than the old shark had made it out to be. Moreover, Jace had never built a structure bigger than a birdhouse before, let alone restore a historical building that needed to stay true to its 1910 floorpan, materials, and character.
Jace abandoned the historic landmark project and moved into the shed for the rest of the season. There he successfully bedded a shuttle van driver from Albuquerque, an interpretive ranger from Philadelphia, and a lodge hostess from Topeka. In October, when tourism dried up and Jace’s park service contract ended for the year, he locked up the shed, drove to Anchorage, and caught a flight to Menominee, Michigan. That fall and winter he held down two jobs for two different uncles in order to begin paying back his house loan.
In December, while assembling Christmas bicycles at the Menominee Sports Emporium, Jace received an unexpected email from Danielle in Paris. She briefly reminisced about their meeting and asked if his chalet invitation was still open. She said she was trying to decide whether or not to take an offer she’d received to join an international NGO doing humanitarian work in Niger. Or another from a women’s collective in Indonesia where she would foster the use of birth control in Muslim communities. If his invitation was still open, she had two weeks free in June she’d love to spend with him in his “chalet in the park,” as long as he promised to keep the bears at bay.
“That would be très cool,” he emailed right back, meanwhile asking himself, What chalet? He’d forgotten he’d made such an offer. Still, if that was what it took to entice Danielle to McHardy, a chalet it would be. The following spring he convinced his cousin, a master carpenter, to return to Alaska with him. Together they brought up a trailer load of building material and spent four weeks fixing the worst of the structure’s flaws. By the time his cousin returned to Michigan in May, the Lucky Strike Lane house was as inhabitable as it would ever be.
SG2 1.0
DANIELLE ARRIVED ON time at Ted Stevens Anchorage International after an exhausting twenty-four-plus hours of travel with multiple layovers. She and Jace spent the night at the home of one of Jace’s Anchorage friends and set out early the next morning on the day-long drive to McHardy. Jace was due back at work the following day.
Danielle ooh-la-la’ed at the epic scenery for the first couple of hours. The Glenn Highway followed the Matanuska River between two spectacular ranges of mountains. When they passed the grand Matanuska Glacier, glittering in the sun, Danielle asked him to pull over.
They used the public telescopes at the Mile 101 rest area to gaze at the ancient blue ice. Danielle so effused about the beauty, the splendor, and the grandeur of the sight that Jace said, “If you like that one, just wait till you see Caldecott Glacier. This one’s nothing compared to the Caldecott.”
He didn’t want to tell her yet, but ever since their memorable hookup at the Captain Cook Hotel last year, he’d been entertaining a little fantasy in his head in which she played a central role. It was called “Sex on a Glacier.”
Jace gassed up in Glennallen and turned south. The Wrangell Mountains were out, but Danielle had fallen asleep and missed one of the most spectacular parts of the trip, their descent into the grand Copper River Valley.
She awoke seventy miles (113 km) later in Chitina, another ghost town resurrected by historical preservation (civic motto: “Where the Hell is Chitina?”). There they bid adieu to blacktop, crossed the Copper River, and began the final leg of their journey, the 59-mile (95-km) McHardy Road to the heart of the park.
Despite her nap, Danielle seemed less and less enthusiastic with each passing mile. She didn’t complain exactly, but she set her jaw in a grim look of forbearance, as though counting the minutes till the ride was over. She looked straight ahead, not turning to look even when he pointed out astonishing views and vistas.
After ten weary hours of travel, they arrived at the private parking lot at the end of the McHardy Road. To Jace’s surprise and relief, the parking booth was manned by Drew Reed, a local man. The odd pioneer family and their encampment were gone. Good riddance. Their school bus was still parked in the lot, but it seemed to be vacant. Drew told him that Orion Beehymer had offered the family another of his lots to camp out on until they found something more permanent.
“More permanent?” Jace said. “They’re planning on staying in the area?”
“I guess. Pappy Prophecy — that’s the old dude — says that God sent them here to multiply and prosper.”
“But haven’t they multiplied enough already?”
Danielle asked Jace if something was wrong. Jace parked in his old spot at the end of the lot and replied, “No worries.” Danielle drew a blank, and he rephrased, “There’s nothing wrong. Everything is good.”
He shouldered his duffel and hoisted two of her suitcases.
“We walk?” she said, looking around the stony lot.
“Yes, a little ways.”
They set off for McHardy, and when they reached the footbridge, Danielle stopped short, appalled by what lay before her. Or rather, by what sprawled beneath her feet — the churning, foaming, thundering Caldecott River, which was swollen with the summer melt of three separate glaciers. Jace tried to reassure her. The bridge is sound. The bridge is strong. An army tank could drive across it, if it was a particularly narrow tank. He demonstrated by jumping up and down on the steel grating.
Then Danielle asked an odd question, one that must have been on her mind for a while: how far away was the nearest hospital? Confused by the question, Jace had to admit that the nearest medical facility of any kind was the urgent care clinic located in Glennallen, where they had gassed up four and a half hours earlier. The nearest hospital was the Providence Valdez Medical Center, even further away. “But don’t worry,” he said, trying to reassure her, “if there’s an emergency, we can always medevac out.”
“What is this medevac?”
When at last they’d
hiked through town and turned the corner onto Lucky Strike Lane, Jace thought they were home free. He was wrong. The vacant lot that Beehymer had loaned the Prophecy clan turned out to be the brush-choked one next to his own. The crazy family had become his new next door neighbors! And like a family of land beavers, they had already cleared the lot of willow and aspen brush and piled it next to the street. The pile was so large it spilled over into Jace’s driveway. In the center of the lot, tents and lean-tos surrounded an open fire pit. Dozens of children played in a yard already worn down to bare dirt. Older children tended goats in a makeshift pen or hauled water in plastic jerry jugs or helped prepare dinner at the fire pit. Woodsmoke permeated the area. They might have been camping there for weeks instead of just the two days he’d been away.
Danielle, in her gorgeous accent, asked, “What does it mean?”
Upon This Rock Page 39