Becoming Frozen Read online

  *****

  “So what brought you here?” the raspy-voiced man said into the phone, turning the questioning toward me. I had been interviewing a local author for an article, and so far he was even more entertaining than I expected. He arrived in Alaska in the late 1940s and lived on a homestead, hauling in halibut and shooting black bears for years before Alaska became a state. He mused about an old railroad of which I had never seen any remnants, and remembered the 1964 earthquake as “the day the spit sank most of the way into the bay.” He turned to writing when state and federal bureaucracy made it more difficult to glean a living from the land, and specialized in books that showcased the awe and terror of life in Alaska. He’d had some success as an author, and combined with enviable old-timer Alaskan credibility, was an instant hero to me.

  “To Homer?” I replied.

  “To Alaska. What brought you to Alaska?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. There was a lot the author knew about Homer that I did not, and I felt a need apologize for my status as an extreme newcomer. In Alaska, prolonged residency is more respected than wealth. If you haven’t yet even survived a full winter, you might as well hold up a cardboard sign that says “Cheechako: Yes. Contempt: Noted.” But this old-timer seemed friendly enough.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “To live in Alaska, I guess.”

  “Is that right?”

  I drew a breath. It didn’t sound right, but it was the best vocalization of the truth that I had. Yes, I was here to pursue a relationship, and yes, I was actively searching. For what? It was difficult to define. But in two months, Alaska had taken on an appeal wholly separate from Geoff, my job, adventure prospects, or any single entity that drew me here initially. The attraction was almost chemical, manifested by the way my pulse fluttered every time I glanced toward the bay on my way home from work, or the way my heart raced as I pedaled beside towering hemlock trees and imagined lurking mysteries. Similar to making eye contact with a handsome stranger on the other side of a bar, I didn’t yet understand why Alaska’s rugged beauty and mysterious character tugged so firmly at my heart. I only knew that I wanted Alaska, and wanted to be with Alaska, in any way I could.

  “Yeah, a lot more coming up here from Outside these days,” the old-timer continued without waiting for me to expand my explanation. “Just trying to get away from something they left behind.”

  “I suppose so,” I trailed off, and let a few seconds of silence bring the conversation back to the author and his books. After we hung up, I leaned against my desk and considered the old-timer’s question. Was I running away from something? That was often the excuse non-Alaskans presented when they tried to comprehend why anyone would choose to reside in the Far North, displaced from more civilized society, and barely scraping a living from the harsh landscape. Anyone who wasn’t native to Alaska had to be hiding something, or perhaps just couldn’t find a way to fit in anywhere else. Why else would anyone willfully choose to live in the ice and snow?

  I believed this was an unfair generalization. Even the old-timer had moved here from somewhere else, back when Alaska really was a frontier, for his own reasons. We all have to be outsiders somewhere, at some point. I viewed myself as running toward the future, not away from the past. But the author’s question left me searching. Something about his assumption rang true.

  It’s true I’d grown weary of the person I’d become in Idaho. That version of myself worked as a copy editor at a daily newspaper, laying out pages and checking grammar and spelling rather than writing or planning the stories herself. The job was neither stressful nor intellectually stimulating. She went out with her co-workers nearly every weeknight, often lingering late into the night at bars or house parties thrown by strangers. She slept through the morning hours and then hit the gym for a half hour every day before going into work at two in the afternoon. She fretted over her eating habits and carefully measured portions of rice and vegetables at home, while regularly going out to binge on big meals at restaurants with her friends. She started making more time for spin classes and strength training, and began to lose weight. The gym made weight loss easy, and that ease soon overshadowed her desire to seek beauty and adventure in the outdoors. She rarely rode her bicycle; she stopped going hiking. She used her weekends to drive three hours south to Salt Lake City to visit Geoff. Sometimes they would go camping in the desert and it would be like old times. Other weekends, they would sit on the couch, chatting away idle hours with Geoff’s roommates.

  Then summer came, and Geoff went to Alaska. The person — the person I’d been just four months earlier — still traveled to Salt Lake every weekend to visit her family and hang out with friends at the house Geoff no longer occupied. Now all they did was chat away idle hours. They never went camping. She was growing tired of the couch. Back in Idaho, she continued to party with her co-workers. Although she had all but shunned alcohol before she moved to Idaho Falls, there drinking had become a nightly activity. She guzzled cocktails, danced at clubs, and played poker until dawn. She only occasionally talked on the phone with Geoff. As their long-distance relationship slipped into limbo, she flirted with strangers and started casually dating a co-worker.

  Then, on an unseasonably cool morning in early August, she woke up dazed on the linoleum of her own kitchen floor. She had no idea how she got home, why she was on the floor, or where she had been for most of the night. The following day, she was so sick with alcohol poisoning that she could scarcely lift herself out of bed, and had to use her kitchen trash can as a vomit container. She called in sick to the newspaper, knowing her co-workers understood exactly why she couldn’t work that day. The shame was so deep that she couldn’t ask them what she desperately wanted to know: What happened? Where was I all night? Who drove me home? For her, it was all a flicker of half-memories and dark space, and she was terrified of unknowns that were now in her past. This incident was a harsh wake-up call, and she quit drinking cold turkey. She began to reassess this unwanted version of herself and her life.

  Two weeks later, Geoff showed up at the door, holding the promise of change, of new life, of Alaska. I had no desire to go back to any time before that moment. I never wanted to be that version of myself again.

  *****

  “Were you happy in Utah?” I asked Geoff one evening as he served up another elaborate dinner spread. He set a pot of chili on the table and looked at me.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “We knew some great people there. And I already miss the desert. I doesn’t matter where I am, the desert is still my favorite place.”

  It occurred to me that I too might begin to feel homesick for the desert. I grew up with its sculpted canyons in my backyard. My family hauled my two younger sisters and me along on weekend camping trips in Zion National Park or Moab. We weren’t the kind of family who went sightseeing in our car. From a young age I hiked with my parents, sometimes veering off trail to play on rolling mounds of sandstone. Even during my surliest teenage years, I could stand beneath the canopy of Delicate Arch and lose myself to the vastness of time. The desert had a way of reducing my human problems to shadows, flickering and fading on walls of ancient rock. I loved sandstone arches for the way they framed the landscape, refocusing miles of incomprehensible geology.

  Alaska, conversely, offered no well-defined edges. Alaska was simply a human title for an incomprehensible amount of space — from the frozen tundra of the northwest to the moss-carpeted rain forests of the southeast. When I thought about the Aleutian volcanoes, the wind-battered villages of the Yukon Delta, and the snowbound peaks of Denali, I felt regret for all of the spaces I was never going to know. At least in the desert I could look through the eyelet of an arch and convince myself that I almost understood the beauty of the world. Rivers sectioned the Colorado Plateau into explorable pieces. Canyon walls housed an intimate world of colorful rock and cottonwood trees. I learned to recognize sedimentary layers and could d
iscern their geological era. I often picked up shards of sandstone and pictured the floor of a primordial sea. I liked imagining the contrast between a teeming coral reef and the parched conglomeration of minerals it had become. Plant biodiversity was minimal in the desert; it didn’t take me long to learn names and uses for many of the prominent flowers and brush. This knowledge allowed me to believe I understood the desert. Alaska, indefinable as it was, offered no such assurances.

  “So why did you decide to leave Utah?” I asked Geoff. “What was it about Alaska that drew you away?”

  “I’ve traveled up here so many times and every time it just feels right, like it’s the place I want to be,” Geoff said. “I could spend my whole life here and not even do a fraction of the things I want to do. So far it’s been fun, don’t you think?”

  “Well yeah. I love it here. But I wondered if you missed everyone there. Chris, Bryan, Jen … pretty much all of our friends still live in Utah.”

  “Of course I do,” Geoff said. “But we can always go back. For now, I’m really enjoying myself — working, traveling, skiing. It’s a good balance.” He paused. “And I am really glad you decided to move here, too. I wasn’t stoked about Homer at first, but it’s growing on me.”

  I nodded. “It’s strange how this place seems to fit me so well. Maybe not strange, seeing as it’s Homer,” I said, and cracked a grin at my bad pun. “But I still feel like an outsider here. Like I’m still searching for my place.”

  “Well, would you ever go back to Idaho?” Geoff asked. “Were you happy there?”

  I raised my eyes to meet his. “No, I wasn’t. I was just thinking about that today. I wasn’t happy at all.” I paused. “I mean, you know I moved there because I was having a difficult time in Utah. I didn’t like working full-time and living with all those people like we were still freshmen in college, setting couches on fire in the back yard for fun. But when I moved to Idaho it was even worse. I was alone out there even when I wasn’t. I missed you. You didn’t really seem to care.” I shrugged and scanned Geoff’s expression for hints of remorse.

  “I did care,” Geoff countered in a wounded tone. “You seemed so dead-set on leaving and I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t going to move to Idaho.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But I told you even before I took a new job that I was willing to get our own place in Salt Lake. You didn’t even seem remotely interested in that. You thought it was great living with all your friends and paying a hundred-twenty-five a month for rent.”

  “There was no reason to pay more,” Geoff said, clearly frustrated. “It was an ideal situation. You were the one who wanted to leave.”

  “We shared a house with six other people!” I said, unintentionally raising my voice. “They threw obnoxious parties every weekend and we all squabbled like children over the dishes and stolen food and other stupid crap. I was getting too old for that.”

  “But you weren’t too old,” Geoff said. “You were what — twenty four? See, this is the main issue. You’re always too focused on the future to just live in the moment.”

  I leaned back in my chair as Geoff began dishing up chili. “Maybe,” I said. “I only knew that I felt like I was suffocating. I was losing my mind.”

  “I know,” Geoff said.

  “But having my own space didn’t end up working either. In Idaho, the suffocation only got worse. I guess I just needed space to figure out that’s not what I wanted. I’m grateful I came here. I really am. I’m sorry if you felt like maybe I never appreciated living with you just because it didn’t work out the first time.”

  Geoff and I had rehashed this before — the reasons why I moved away from Salt Lake. We spent comparatively little time discussing the discontinuity in our relationship. Even as Geoff tried to talk me into following him to Alaska, the fact that we had been effectively separated for nine months only rarely came up in conversation. I think we were both reluctant to call it what it was — a breakup — because we were both afraid of what it might mean to not have the other person in our lives. We had been friends first, and ending our relationship would dually fracture what for both of us had been an empowering friendship. Geoff taught me to trust myself, to take chances, to be brave. I fostered his compassion and desire to explore. But these individual advancements didn’t trump the devotion we felt for each other. Our love was subtle but sincere.

  After dinner, Geoff decided he wanted to go cross-country skiing by moonlight. He had been going out for snowshoe hikes or ski explorations almost daily since the snow started to accumulate on the ground. He stomped his own trail from our backyard, descending a steep embankment into the creek drainage, where he weaved through alder branches and spruce trees until he reached the Homestead Trail. Snowfall regularly obliterated his tracks, so he’d go out the next day to cut the trail again. Geoff was proud of his work and vowed to put his own trail system in place by the middle of winter — trails that could potentially take us from our cabin to all of the hidden pockets of Homer’s backcountry.

  I liked the idea of having trails out our back door, but had yet to explore any of Geoff’s routes myself. I reasoned that I was always working during the day, and still felt reluctant about going out at night when moose lurked behind alders and I might stumble into the winter den of the resident grizzly bear family. Geoff did most of his workouts during the daylight hours, and preferred to spend his evenings unwinding with a New Yorker magazine and a mug of mint tea. I was still riding my bike to work, but the buildup of ice and snow was becoming too precarious even for my knobby mountain bike tires. Late sunrises and early sunsets meant even my bike commutes required riding with a weak headlamp in the dark.

  I was looking into the expensive proposition of a gym membership so I could at least stay active through months of shorter days and cold weather. I also was awaiting a pair of used cross-country skis I’d purchased on eBay. Until they arrived, my only means of snow travel was a clunky pair of snowshoes, which punched holes into smooth ski trails. That night, citing exhaustion that was likely more emotional than physical, I declined Geoff’s invitation to join him on a moonlight outing.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “There probably won’t be any other skiers on the trails this time of night. I doubt anyone will care that you’re on snowshoes anyway.”

  “No, I really am pretty tired,” I said. “Plus, I need to e-mail my parents. It’s been a while since I wrote home.”

  I stood at the landscape windows and watched Geoff’s headlamp beam disappear into the purple shadows of the forest, then climbed the creaky stairs and sat down at his aging Hewlett Packard computer. The hand-built desk was strewn with cardboard boxes, paper, and tape. Piles of load bars, rack towers, trays, and bicycle components were neatly stacked in the corner of the loft. I glanced at a notepad scribbled with indecipherable handwriting — Geoff’s version of accounting — and felt a rush of affection. For whatever Geoff and I had been, and whatever our future would be, I knew that I loved him in that moment, and that was enough. The future was an illusion anyway. The past was locked in memory. This desk, built of junkyard lumber and covered in the debris of Geoff’s livelihood, was all I had in the immediate present. It was all that I needed.

  I fired off an e-mail to my mother and started on my regular “newsletter” to friends who were now scattered all over the country. Because it was difficult to write them all individually, I had developed a habit of sending mass-e-mails to everyone I knew. Instead of rambling on about a bland list of news items, I spent quite a bit of time crafting stories that emphasized the more unique sides of our life in Alaska — such as the grizzly bear in our backyard or the October snow. I attached digital images of our snow-blanketed cabin with the Kenai Mountains in the background, sunset over Kachemak Bay, and moose grazing on fireweed stalks. My intention was to spark maximum envy in hopes of enticing a few friends to visit. But these e-mails also indulged the cathartic pleasure I deri
ved from telling stories. When one of my friends made an off-handed joke about clogging up her inbox, I began to wonder if I should just expand this satisfying hobby to a wider audience rather than continue to burden my friends.

  I was already an avid journal keeper, with notebooks about my life stretching all the way back to the third grade. But it’s difficult to devote the mental energy to descriptive writing if you don’t think anyone is ever going to read it, and I soon fell into the trap of journal entries that said little more than “Today sucked. It was boring. Nothing happened.” During Geoff’s and my road trip across Alaska and cross-country bike tour, I updated a Web site that gained a small following. But hosting the site was expensive and I soon resented paying twenty dollars a month to maintain an old trip journal that even Geoff only occasionally browsed. I took it down and returned to my paper journals. In the next two years, personal Web site opportunities advanced to the point where anyone could launch their own blog, complete with image hosting, free of cost. For several weeks I toyed with the idea of starting a blog about life in Homer.

  “If everyone is so annoyed by me clogging up their inbox, they can go online to see Alaska awesomeness,” I thought. I Googled the word “blog” and scanned hosting services. It seemed simple enough. I pondered a name for my blog and immediately thought about a pop song that helped inspire my move to Alaska, “Grey Ice Water” by Modest Mouse. The lyrics included a long refrain about life “On the Arctic Blast.” I checked the Web address “arcticblast,” which was taken. I remembered when I first heard the song, I thought the lyric was “On the Arctic Glass.” The phrase always brought to mind sheets of blue ice floating in the open sea, and this tranquil image still appeared every time I heard the song, even after I learned the truth. “Arctic Glass” was a beautiful description for Alaska, and for a blog.