MARCH by Mary Odden
for Norman Wilkins
Who am I in relation to the things that don’t need me?
The stillness of early March is an illusion. It is the stillness of runners poised in their stocks at the starting line, waiting for the gun. When some tipping point of sun and instinct is reached, chickadees and grosbeaks and redpolls will suddenly be joined by sparrows and juncos, nuthatches and restless clouds of white snow buntings. Owls will call for mates in the night. Resident ravens will be annoyed by returning eagles. Swans will pass overhead on their way to the opening mouths of lakes. Even the trees will start to breathe. In this month we go from 10 to 14 hours of sunlight, confusing our bodies and waking our memories of green.
March is a cusp, an edge, a phase change in the odd physics of living in Alaska. Landscape that in summer seems impassable, wet, and brushy miles away gradually becomes accessible to us over the course of the winter by the miracle of ice and snow. By December even the surface of a big lake is solid enough to traverse. By midwinter, the cushion of white is deep enough over the rough holes and brush that we can ride on it with skis or snowmachines, follow the straight lines of seismic exploration trails cut out in the 1950s or the curvy hand-cut trails of earlier trappers and travelers through the country. In March, we open our coats and switch heavy mitts for leather gloves, drink the air that flows around us when we travel. We can ascend the frozen overflow of creeks and little valleys to the summits. With time enough, we could travel over the white top of the earth.
There’s more country out here than we see from a road or a house. Just on the other side of my garden is the lake, and just on the other side of the lake is a mountain. But get on the snow and start traveling to that mountain and you will find yourself crossing wide benches full of poplar groves, alder tangles and stands of spruce. At the top of each ascent are high lakes you never knew existed. It takes an hour to reach a ridge you thought was right in front of you. The mountain, when you finally get there, is several mountains, with valleys and lakes in between. Beavers live up here, and moose. Big bears have left scratch marks high on the trees. Wolf tracks are on every trail, twice the size of a dog track. Every mile you travel has a vertical dimension deep with detail to draw your attention. The distance you were hungry to cross gives way to looking at this tree, that marten track.
In March, you can still cross even the widest lake right across its middle, but if you are crossing the river on its ice, you’d better follow a moose track. The channel is running somewhere beneath you, too muffled to hear, wearing your bridge of ice too thin. Be careful. Travel for hours, and you are deep in the folds of country where you are a guest, not an owner. Relationships swing to a normal which is unfamiliar. In this cold air like flavorless water, I’m just another animal, admitted by the season and the snow to my animal life. Only my kind of watching makes clear the kind of animal I am.
In March, I know I’d better enjoy these strange privileges, because they are about to melt away. The easy admission will be over and we will be locked out. It starts with deep snowless holes at the bases of the trees, then the trails go away and all this country expands away from us again, becoming a distance we can cross only with great effort. It will dissolve into water that cannot hold us up. Danger from precipitous surfaces, bears, swamps and stranding will return. It will be a different country entirely, in spite of what the map says. Beauty, now spread wide and quiet over a pastel palette, will bloom into greens and the noise of birds. The land will smell like hot Labrador tea plants and mud. Little rips in the mossy fabric will reflect the sky. In summer, I won’t be here.
On a March day on the top of Slide Mountain, I looked at four distant mountain ranges, each with its own storms. High enough to experience the perspective of a tilted map, I could see lakes and valleys I knew about but had never seen together at the same time. Looking down at my house, that little toy, I remembered a recurring dream about a small lake and a steep hill curled in my sleep below our actual hill and above our actual lake. The view of us from the mountain showed me it wasn’t there and I couldn’t get there, didn’t have to take care of that other life.
Fifty miles north and decades ago in March, traveling with Norman Wilkins, hundreds of caribou are coming through the eleven-mile trail. We sit on the snowmachines and watch the animals cross into the black spruce, a continuous stream of mostly cows and calves for long minutes. Norman calls it a “caribou carousel,” says the animals are just making a big circle down on Hole Lake and coming around again. A bunch of youngsters trots and jumps across the trail just a few feet in front of us, heads thrown back, noses in the air.
Jim says, “Looks like school’s been let out.”
We are not hunting, just along with Norman as he sets his traps for the last time this winter. My husband and Norman are thrilled to be standing on this last white edge of the season, and I am along to watch them. I am a young wife, but with my Jim in the woods I’ve always reverted to a role I like even better than wife: I’m a kid playing house in the wild country, following a dad or older brother and making jokes and small trouble even as I learn to drive, walk softly through brush, hold a gun and shoot it. When I was a dozen years old, I was the .410 to their 12-gauges, the .22 to their 30.06s.
Jim and I hunted grouse along a road in Montana before we were married and I shot one I shouldn’t have from the roadway, just as a pickup truck came along to see me do it. I kept my head down and stood in the barrow pit alongside the road, the dead grouse in my hand. The driver pulled up next to Jim, rolled down the window and, laughing, said, “That’s okay. I like to see a kid get a bird.” Jim of the gigantic red beard and blue eyes held his mirth until the truck was out of sight, then came over and lifted me off the ground like I was that kid.
I have some terrible stories, too. Another new deer hunter and I shot white tail deer from too far away then had to find them and kill them. The ruined face of a fawn struggled up at me as I cut its throat because, horrified already at what I had done, I’d left my gun down the hillside when I had come running. And I once shot a moose I couldn’t find. A friend of that trip said, “It’s good for the ravens. They got no knives.” But those tragedies have risen through all the clean kills of my life until I’m not much interested in pulling the trigger anymore. My mother once walked across a corn field with the safety off, distracted by my small brother she had in tow. That moment scared her so badly she would never again pick up a gun or go hunting. Like her, I can imagine being the agent of awful harm.
But I love the shape-shock of seeing a big animal. When Jim or a hunting companion kills an animal, I like knowing that it has died with a smaller suffering than ends most lives out here. After its death, I’ll thank the animal for its meat, slit the skin up the belly to roll out the guts, help to take off the shoulders and legs and ribs, get my gloves and pant legs bloody kneeling in the moss. This is the blood that brings forth life, the kind of blood I know. We play by the rules as we understand them, and bring everything home that we have been taught how to use. Nothing is ours, so we are grateful. I believe in give and take. I believe in liver and onions.
With Jim and Norman I ride a sled towed behind one of the two old sno-gos. I enjoy watching these two at the pursuits they’ve loved since they were boys. We are a ragtag trio, lots of wool and stained Carhartts and a scarcity of haircuts. Once in a while I feel a tinge of jealousy or exclusion when they dive into some farming or trapping subject, but mostly I am wordlessly included. As I hang on to the hoop of the sled, I watch the frozen land go by as if the land was moving and not me. I accept that these two want to do most of the navigating, deciding, chopping, even most of the cooking while we are out here. All I have to do is reach out for a big cup of coffee or cocoa when Norman hands it to me. There won’t always be these big broken-knuckled hands, I know this even then.
Just tens of miles from the roads, we feel like the only people on earth and at the same time we bask in the luxury of our unimportance. There aren’t any phones in our pockets yet.
The Ahtna people were here first, for thousands of years. Morrie and Joe Secondchief were still living here when we came. Morrie was born at Tazlina Lake and her husband Joe came from Tyone Village north of here. He was the last of the Secondchief brothers. Morrie and Joe trapped here all of their lives. They took a lot of beaver and otter out of this water-soaked country.
One time, Morrie traced the otter’s circle through the country in the air for me, a map for my imagination. She said the otters hunted all the lakes and creeks for beaver and muskrats, travelled from Snowshoe Lake down Cache Creek to the Nelchina River. The otters went down the Nelchina and around Tazlina Lake, then traveled up Mendeltna Creek and over to Old Man Lake and up into Mendeltna Springs where the Old Man Lake water comes from. From there they went over to the lakes above Snowshoe and came down to Snowshoe again. It was over 70 miles, that circle. This revised what I’d thought of as Otter Disneyland, all those little squiggles in the trails and down the banks. With Morrie’s story, I realized it wasn’t an amusement park after all, but a big serious commute. I asked Morrie if she thought the otters had any fun. “Oh yeah,” she said. “They have fun.”
Morrie had me clean her cabin for her and carry boards and tubs around the yard, things she and Joe couldn’t do anymore. She told me I was strong, but when she felt my hands for calluses she mock-frowned at me. “Too many books,” I told her.
When we start up the machines again, we are going so slow that we don’t startle the caribou cows still trickling cross the trail, jogging their calf-big bodies. From behind, their ballooned bellies have an exaggerated swaying and their huge angled hocks and hooves flail out sideways.
Unaffected by our presence, they stop to paw the snow for lichens and a few lie down next to the trail without even glancing our way. Perhaps because we are not wolves or bears, they don’t recognize us as beings from up the food chain. But we are, and even though we are not hunting I pick out one without antlers, which in March means it is probably a dry cow or a bull. I silently tell it, “I could eat you if I needed to,” practicing that. In another layer of this moment is the beauty of the animal. And in another is the animal in its own life, unknowable by me. Sometimes I wonder how long this wildness can exist, and when it ends how long it will have been without us.
Norman is at home on a March trail. Before he moved north he was a Minnesota dairy farmer, important to his peers for innovations in milk barns and handy with all things mechanical. He’s from the generation in front of Jim and me, and served in the army with the U.S. occupation forces in Italy after the Second World War. He met Sylvia there, a young woman who had walked through lines of Nazi soldiers on her way out of Slovenia. Norman promised to return to Italy and bring her to the states. Sylvia’s family told her he wouldn’t keep his promise, but he did. They raised a family together and picked stones off of rocky Midwest farms. She couldn’t believe it when they’d finally built all that and then he wanted to give it up to come north and live in a cabin. But she came, too, and eventually they built a house and filled the role of parents for us and our neighbors. Just down the road with cookies on the table, they were grandparents to our children.
“Stormin’ Norman” his friends called him, for his temper and his partying, but the storms receded. Today on the Blue Lake trail he’s quick to smile, full of droll humor, though he can still be a booming baritone when he’s excited. When we were trying to get him out the door of his house for this trip he was grabbing and swinging gear, ducking back inside for items he’d forgotten. He stormed and thundered, whined like a braking train.
One time I met a British fellow who had ridden his bicycle all the way from Patagonia to Nelchina. He’d blown a tire in front of our driveway; I found him there fixing it. We talked for long enough for him to share his wonky theory that English people were quiet and reserved, Australians were louder, and Americans were way too loud. I tried to argue with him about that, but Norman came by in his truck and pulled over to join the conversation: “MAN ARE YOU EVER ON AN ADVENTURE!” I had to concede the argument.
Norman settles down in the woods. He usually traps and travels alone, but today he shares his familiar routines with us. At noon it is time to pack snow into a beat-up aluminum coffee pot with the guts taken out. He says, “A guy needs a little coffee and a cookie.” We break some of the dry widow wood off the bottoms of the black spruce where the March sun has already shrunk the snow away from the trunks. In an open spot we dig down through the snow to the evergreen cranberry and pale lichens and make a little fire. Sylvia has packed gigantic cookies for us, full of coconut and chocolate chips and nuts. After we eat and warm up with the coffee, we’ll close our eyes for a little while in the sun.
We start up again at the same pace, going very slowly, staying on the one trail, making only the same mark through the snow that Norman started in November. I have a strong impulse, after miles and miles of this, to want the machines to throttle up, pull off the trail and carve fresh snow. But there is something to learn from following an already used path, this slow deliberate looking, and I am here to learn it.
Farther on, or “fuh-ther” in the midwestern speak of Jim and Norman, we come to the scattered bones of a moose, one of its thickest leg bones crunched open by a wolf’s jaw. Bits of hair, patches of blood, and the tracks tell a detailed story of how the moose died—if you are a student of this language. Jim tells me how many wolves there were and how big they were, which also indicates age or gender, and he says they must have been hungry, judging by how they ate on the carcass. I can’t see this for myself, but Norman and Jim talk about it for several minutes without rancor or politics. This is just life and death out here. Wolves don’t always eat what they kill, especially if they are teaching the pups to hunt. Other creatures—ravens and foxes and weasels on down to the tiniest creatures—will clean the wolves’ plates for them, and in doing so will survive in their turn.
Norman often asks Jim a question he already knows the answer to, just to keep a small exchange going: “Looks like that calf got away,” or “Think this was an old break in this rib? Look how it’s healed over.” The signifiers of this gracious exchange still confuse me, because I am a westerner. “No, that’s right” is an affirmation that begins with a negative. “Yes,” with a pause after it that is not followed by “but,” can precede a dissenting opinion, of course rendered gentle with that peace-making “yes.”
Here’s an example: I say, “That looks like a fresh moose track.” Jim says, “Yes, maybe a week ago or so.”
There are shallow lakes of every size, curiously held up on top of a plateau. There are no creeks in or out of them, just rends in the cloth of moss and black spruce, ragged basins held aloft by permafrost. Look west to the Talkeetnas, north to the Alaska Range, south to the Chugach, and east to the Wrangells. Mt. Drum stands out from its companions, although at 12,400 feet it is smaller than Mt. Wrangell and Mt. Sanford behind it. In the cold clear air it looms gigantic in front of them, like a fish held out towards the camera at arm’s length.
This section of the trail is a high flat frozen sponge, cupped in a wide circle of those mountains, etched by crazy little trees with growth rings no bigger than the grooves on a vinyl record. I think these off-putting trees protect this country in the way that dryness protected the west until cities spilled onto them. This homely ground, happily for itself, is not a human paradise. If trees are the memory of the earth, these memories are old, twisted by frost and fire, and inscrutable.
Up on top along the eleven-mile trail is where Norman looks for muskrats to trap. In the spring the snow settles down around the ‘push-ups,’ frozen bumps of dark roughage the muskrats have dredged up from the bottom and pushed through the surface of the lake during the winter, making comfortable little sitting rooms for themselves above water level. The caribou paw some of them up for dinner salads and then the muskrats have to build them all over again.
The white expanse of Bear Lake is dotted with a few push-ups, not enough for Jim and Norman to get excited about making sets, skinning and stretching only a few muskrats for all that work. They say they’ll wait for a muskrat bonanza some other March. It’s pretty clear they are just taking an inventory of everything they can notice, storing it up for stories when we get home.
By this time of year, fur on the land animals “singes,” changes color because of the lengthening exposure to sun, and the animals feel itchy in their too-warm winter clothes. They begin to rub their fur off along their sides. Because of this, trapping season for marten and fox and wolf closes at the end of February, and it is only these swimmers left to trap, the water mammals who slide in and out of the tea-colored creeks and lakes beneath the ice. Those movies with the trappers walking around with furs in the middle of summer are a bunch of hooey, and so are Disney’s trappers with their lust for blood.
Sylvia and I both sew some fur, warm hats and mitts for our families and a few extra hats to sell. Word of mouth brings business enough for the few items we make, and neither one of us can stand to charge enough to make the long handwork profitable. I think of Morrie Secondchief long ago making beaver blankets to sell for people’s beds. She told me she charged just $30 for an entire blanket, the product of weeks of hand-sewing thick hides together. I think of her poor arthritic hands when she was old.
After we go explore some new creeks we’ll go to Norman’s little cabin. Jim and Norman will find some paper that hasn’t been used on both sides, which they’ll employ for scribbled drawings of tree sets and cubby sets. Plans for the future are properly made in a cabin, the jumping-off-place to the wild, where the chores of water and wood are basic, where your feet are cold and your head is hot as you sit at a piece-of-plywood table and look at a map in the dim light, sipping coffee and drawing.
When he says his bones are tired, Norman leads us to the cabin. It’s up here on top, next to where the high wet land drops off to a lower and oddly drier geography. The cabin is hidden from the people who don’t know about it already, built away from handy water and off any established trail. It is made of the trees and moss the country will soon eat up again, spitting out the rusty log spikes when it has finished its meal.
To build a cabin in this country, most people look for trees straight enough and thick enough to stand upright for the walls, 7 to 8 feet high, palisade style. The trees have so much taper here; you can’t find many that will give you more than one log. Two-sided with a chain saw mill or just eye-balled with the saw, the way Norman sliced these sides, logs are spiked together and set into a sill log at the base with 60-penny nails. By the time you get three logs set up this way, you already have the start of a firm wall. Spike your logs together around a corner and not even the wind can bring them down—not yet. Old cabins stand until the rot comes up from the sill where it touches the ground or the roof fails and moisture gets in from the top. A generation or two of people use a cabin, then the people and the cabins crumble into the earth. In a crowded world, this is a rare balance.
To converse with curious grizzlies, Norman nailed an exceptionally sweaty T-shirt onto the cabin door. We see that so far his claim has held—no torn-off door, no mess inside. He says, “I guess the bear must be disgusted with me for that T-shirt,” and grins at us.
He tells me, “I used my drill on this,” pointing to the hole where the rope runs through the door to lift the bolt on the inside. I know he’s still joking around, because he’s got no power and no generator out here to run a drill, and battery drills were not in our world. “My drill was a 3/8 log spike and a vise grips,” he says, and tells us how he heated the spike red hot on a Coleman stove then quickly pressed it against the 3-inch spruce of the door. He walked back and forth doing that over and over for half a day, burning the point into the wood and scraping the soft black ash out with his pocket knife, happy with himself.
After supper the coffee pot comes out again. Miraculously, the coffee and the warm fire make us sleepy. I get the narrow top bunk because I am smaller and still the kid; Norman takes the bottom bunk, and Jim rolls out a sleeping pad and bag next to the stove. I go to sleep in the hottest layer of dark, listening to them talk.
I’ve been drawing pictures of cabins all my life. By the time my best friend and I taught ourselves the Russian alphabet so that we could pass secret notes in our high school social studies class, my cabin habit was full blown. I told my typing teacher that I didn’t need to learn to type on an electric machine because I didn’t plan to have electricity when I grew up. “What are you going to do,” he said while wrinkling up his nose, “live in a cabin in the woods?”
One time I stayed in a cabin out on the east fork of the Owyhee that was made of juniper, those corkscrewed desert trees. It was woven more than stacked, and every twist that led to a gap outside had to be chinked by its builder. When I lay down to sleep there, it felt like hands were clasped around me.
When Jim and I came to Nelchina, it was forty years after the road came through, several years past the Alaska pipeline boom times. Norman and Sylvia didn’t even know us yet but they brought us a load of firewood and a bag of fresh cookies.
We hadn’t had electricity in Montana, so we didn’t know the power worked when we got to the half-built cabin that would eventually be our house. We burned half of a five-gallon can of Pearl kerosene before accidentally flipping a switch that turned on the lights.
Just before we came up here, we’d made a journey back in time to try and find one of Jim’s family homes in Sweden. We started at our little cabin in the Montana woods and traveled through London and Paris and Frankfurt and Copenhagen in search of relatives who had been lost to the rest of the family since Jim’s grandfather Carl Erickson was killed in a Wisconsin car accident in 1935. We had three words on a piece of stationery, towns or place names—we didn’t know which—from Jim’s mom, who had gotten them from her mother but didn’t know what or where they were. We found one of the words on a map, finally, after criss-crossing Varmland on successively smaller and smaller trains, until we were on a train that was just one car that could drive either way. It brought us to “Arjang,” the town. In Arjang, we asked about “Silarud,” and found someone who knew it was a parish church, 17 klicks away on a dirt road. We pedaled old rental bikes deep into a spruce forest very much like the one we’d come from on the other side of the world. We found the church and a caretaker named Gunnar digging graves. He knew Jim’s grandfather’s name—it was in the church book. He pointed us to an even smaller road that led deeper into the woods. He told us that the word we had not been able to find, “Intaka,” meant “taken from the forest.” The small road led us into a thicker, darker forest that opened up a mile or two farther into a small clearing with a house, Jim’s grandfather’s childhood house. There was a spring, covered with old planks. We reached down into its darkness for handfuls of cold water. The little one-story house looked modestly lived in but no one was home. It was “Intaka,” an in-taking for us. No other Swede we’ve asked has ever known that word.
Later we made Jim’s parents a sign that said “Intaka” and they hung it on their house in Wisconsin. They travelled back to Sweden a few years later and met Manne, the elderly relative who lived in the clearing we’d found. We tried the name Intaka on our Montana cabin, and later on the cabin we built at Boot Lake with Norman’s help. It would as well fit on our Nelchina house, land carved out by someone else and with a house eventually finished by us. The word fits everywhere we have ever lived, which is probably why it never stuck anywhere. Of course this is the forest; of course what we have has all been taken from something else. It’s just our turn to have it for a little while.
Norman helped all of us with our houses, clambering around on the rafters as if he wasn’t a quarter century older than the rest of us. And when we all got tired of building houses, we took off into the woods to build cabins. When Norman and Darrel Gerry went to stake remote land, we followed them to check it out. The enterprise was full of high excitement and ill-conceived notions, for example the release of a male and female Chinese pheasant. After we let them out of their little cage, the pheasants did not seem very wild or very romantically inclined. They hung out around the fire with us as we were having coffee, and were still standing there when we went home. Some fox probably ate them as soon as we were out of sight.
The next March, we staked our Boot Lake cabin land next to Norman’s. Sighting down our arms towards the flagging hung on distant trees, we cut lines across the hilly spruce and birch knobs. We located our cabin site scenically on a lake too small to be of much interest to pilots. This would be a winter place, accessible by its trail. I was aware during every moment of the measuring, sighting, cutting and sweating that there was deep privilege and deep disruption in what I was doing. We were turning the un-owned into the owned. We called the lake “Boot Lake” because of its shape, like a Puss in Boots seven-league boot. Immortalized now in the notes for the state survey of our properties, the name is not on any map and may outlive us or be lost. The lake is deep enough that it won’t become a meadow in our lifetimes.
Before Nelchina and Boot Lake, we’d already spent summer work seasons in Alaskan places where people remembered the “firsts”: first white guys, first English, first talk of Jesus, first miners, first roads, first airplanes. In the Kobuk Valley, we knew people who had talked to those who had talked to those who knew Maneuluk the prophet. Inupiat elder Louise Wood’s grandfather had met the first missionaries. We gratefully felt the past through these first-hand voices, even got to experience one ambiguous first of our own: we were there when television arrived in the Kobuk villages in 1980. On that day “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” gathered a circle of schoolgirls around the TV in postmaster Guy Moyer’s house.
The Copper Basin felt different. We weren’t suffering under the illusion that we were the first of anything, and our stubborn white person chauvinism had been knocked about enough by then that we knew we were also strangers, a new migration overlaying older lives. Thousands of years of Ahtnas and 200 years of white guys had done it better, deeper, and more, walking all over this place in all seasons and laying down names with every pass. Just before us, Lloyd Ronning and Al Lee and Don Deering and Rick Houston had flown in and out of more lakes and river bars than we could ever count. Rick and Sharley lived in the Honeymoon Cabin at Tazlina Lake in the 1940s. Junior Hunt had trapped before Norman, and the Secondchiefs long before him, Johnny Tyone before the Secondchiefs. If we claimed our lives here, no matter how far or large we reached it would be a subdivision of prior accomplishments. So “first” couldn’t be the point.
We weren’t looking for the nobility that comes from isolation either. There was plenty of chicanery around the solitary wilderness myth even by the time we got here, decades before legislature-subsidized Alaska “reality shows” would turn every discerning stomach. We knew several actual ideologue fathers who had taken their brain-washed wives and unfortunate broods into isolation in order to control them. These guys existed before Papa Pilgrim made it popular. Even in our short tenure, tens of examples present themselves that a solitary existence is just as likely to make people weird as it is to make them hardy and wise. Pretty much, what you get from living in the woods is a more intense version of what you brought in there. We’d also watched the trade-offs that the remote settlers had to make for their goods, their kids’ education, their medical care. Those could be hundreds of miles round trip to adjust braces or buy a chainsaw, a trip maybe involving a trail and a boat and an airplane. Romantic certainly, difficult always.
Our compromise was to willingly put ourselves under the spell of the rural, close to a road but far from a town. Jim wanted the access to the animals and the wild, woods and a little homestead cabin. I wanted plenty of trees around me but neighbors and a garden, too—some of the simplicity I associated with the past, thanks to my parents and Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Big Woods. I never understood why Pa moved them to the prairie.
At times, my mom and dad seemed heartbroken about the loss of the promising world they occupied in their young adulthoods. Never mind the Great Depression and then the stateside hardships of raising young children during the Second World War. Their heyday was a western America with empty land and undiscovered fishing holes, opportunities to build farms and businesses and families. Although my parents were unhappy when we moved our household goods to Alaska, instead of just working here for a few years then coming home with the stories and setting up a regular life, my mom visited us often and told me our little gatherings of people and music were like her western Idaho picnics 50 years before.
Jim’s dad, Lester, often told us how his parents, first-generation Americans from Norway, farmed in northwestern Wisconsin to eat and raise their family and not to make money. At the start they logged the white spruce, then burned the stumps to make farms, and then they “farmed to live.” While the memory of those fires hung over them like smoke, their part of Barron County was called “Brunland,” the burnt land. Increasingly, there was cash in that system from the milking, but the garden and other livestock were still crucial. Lester and Lois raised everything they could eat, but public health scares over tuberculosis and brucellosis banished pigs and chickens from the Grade A dairy farms, an unhappy day Jim remembers from his childhood.
Lester always wanted to be a farmer. On the eve of the Second World War, and after he’d finished his farmer’s course down in Madison, the farms in his part of Wisconsin weren’t supporting the families so he traveled out west and down the coast looking for a job. He got turned down for job after job, then finally had to give in and lie about his work experience, which people had been advising him to do. It makes me grin to think of Lester Odden consciously lying—he always exuded honesty and plain speech. It must have turned him inside out to tell the Consolidated Aircraft Company that he could read aircraft blueprints. Lester had never seen an aircraft blueprint, but he got the job. He made parts for experimental airplanes during the war, a protected industry that kept him working and stateside. As soon as he could, though, he came home to farm.
Lester’s stories helped give us permission to fling ourselves far, find a place where “to live” was the idea. In the early 1980s, we’d been coming up to Alaska in the summers to fight wildfires. Wanting more, a place of our own in the woods, we caught the tail end of our generation’s homesteader migrations and started looking for land.
When I’m cynical about what people do, how people poison everywhere they live, I think of our house and gardens and the cabins we’ve thrown out beyond the houses. They are like spores of civilization, for good and for ill. In this northern place, you often see places where people have reached out too far, their dreams overshooting and collapsing finally into an overgrown place when they are gone, leaving tangles of fallen grey logs. I should be grateful to be reclaimed by moss, but it is a lonely thought. While Jim and Norman are at the table following a lynx track between the salt and the butter, I stretch out on my back in the bunk, wondering if the season at this altitude is too short to grow carrots.
Recently, I opened a magazine to photos of the refugee camps in Turkey where Kurdish families have fled from ISIS raids. Rows and rows of tan rubber Quonsets stretched across the desert and there was no green plant in sight except for in front of one of the Quonsets. In that photo there was a patch of green grass the size of a dinner table, a canopy of flowering vine, and blooming pots of flowers. At this tiny outpost of human hope, a man on his knees was cutting the grass with a pair of scissors. That man is my brother.
I see root cellars and gardens and I leave straight lines, squares and rectangles wherever I go. Carried to my logical conclusion, I am kin to the bulldozer. Homesteaders bring cleared land, tractors, schools. The animals have a smaller piece of the diminishing earth.
I even feel this for the squirrels. They are little acrobats, jumping so far from tree to tree they only catch themselves by a claw, swinging wildly beneath a branch that bends perilously down towards a waiting dog. They chase each other, chatter warnings and nonsense and destroy our insulation, our wooden doors and window frames, our cabin logs. They are far from gentle seed eaters. They eat the baby birds alive in whatever nest they can scramble to. Sometimes there is a resident squirrel who acts like a guardian, keeping the others out of his area and out of trouble with us. If he does not also feel the need to destroy buildings we let him live. At times there are no squirrels around, never because we’ve done them all in with the .22, because we can’t, but because of some mysterious shifting of the invisible populations around us. When they aren’t here the birds do not miss them, but I do. Our little community of grosbeaks, chickadees, redpolls, summer sparrows and voles and all the larger predators those bring—the shrikes, the goshawks and eagles, foxes and ermine—are incomplete without the scamper and chatter of red squirrels.
I don’t have to shoot squirrels because I am quite sure I am already slowly killing them: the sheer numbers of me, a species escaped from all constraint, released by myself from any restraint. Breathing, shitting, building our middens, puking our poisons. The poison drifts north, salting the fish in the lakes and changing winter. I am a northern “me” now—endangered as I also endanger. I bless what moves and chatters and flies around me; these are not just words, but it is only my one heart, not so important or true as I want it to be.
The swans and loons seem gracious to come back here, though their imperative is not for us humans. A bit earlier this year? I am afraid to count. The swans trumpeting in the night are music. How many more years will they come? Each summer they can only stay so long, teaching the cygnets to fly as they turn grey to white. Was it a bit later this October? And then they take their youngsters south to a country where changes come even faster. You, swan, might find your lake has gone. You didn’t keep the title or the deed.
All the summer birds will go somewhere, but I trust that they still exist when I don’t see them. The squirrel stays in winter, along with the grey jays and grosbeaks and the tiny vole under the snow. I stay too and I value them as companions even while I betray them with my industry and privilege. I am the Judas of this world and its witness too. The raven with the white wing feather visits the unfinished top of our airplane hangar and the dogs bark at him, seem to hate him for knowing all about their good-deal contract with humans. I try to speak to him in his own language – Caw! Caw! or Coke! I am an occasional source of embarrassment to humans and always an amusement to ravens. I am sure of both those things.
Great horned owls roost in the rafters when the voles and rabbits are high, and shit wads down on our old airplane wings. One footfall on the porch, the click of our front door, and the owl departs nearly silently to the trees on the other side of the runway—just the whoooooooooooo whoooooooooo of her giant wings pushing air and then she’s sheltered by the dappled coat of invisibility.
I don’t know where any of them are when they’re not here. When any of them are here, even a spider now, I try to say “yes you can build the world back without me. Invent someone new, take two or three of the billions of years before all of this is eaten by the sun; make someone who can watch and love but not invent the wheel.”
Beyond the culpable house is the cabin, like a question. For some people, our log house is already teetering on the edge of nowhere. They will say, “Jim and Mary’s cabin,” which is funny because where we live is definitely a house. A house is a place where there are too many buckets, too many tools, too many pictures to hang on the wall, too many cups, and too many things to do. The house is a staging area for all of our work and clutter, but a cabin is a leap away from the familiar—harder to arrive at and more spare. Where do we think we are going?
Scandinavians understand the concept of a separate cabin without question. A person needs a “hitte,” a place to go. For Jim, it’s a place he could trap or hunt from, a place with animal tracks and a wood stove. For me it is a place to play house in the woods and make coffee, read and write. I know where I’d put a garden out at the cabin—there where the land slopes a bit to the south, sheltered from the prevailing weather by that long ridge — but I never start digging. For both of us it feels so good to be reminded how little it takes to live, how little we really have to think about in order to live.
The cabin narrows us down. What we hear on the wind-up radio, who wins the game of cribbage, what we had for supper—if it happens at the cabin, we will pay attention to it while it is happening and remember it longer. The cabin wakes us up. The cabin has matches and a jar to keep them dry, some old clothes and sleeping bags, and my favorite hat that says ERA, given to me by a helicopter pilot in McGrath. Even though it is just the name of an aviation company, it makes me think of the Equal Rights Amendment which never passed. This disappointment is important to me, a caution about the bone-deep reluctance in both men and women to allow women to conduct their own lives or to lead men and women. In spite of everything we are still a prey species with our backward glancing eyes, our parenthetical speech. So I hang the hat on a peg and look at it every March, in the cabin where I enjoy my great luck and my great loves. I never want that hat to wear out.
We built the Boot Lake cabin in two separate Marches in the 1980s, living in a wall tent. We arrived at the beginning of the first March with sleds full of tools and camping gear. It was late when we pulled up to the bottom of the little hill, getting dark, and the temperatures were hard winter, far below zero. A friend with a Super Cub on skis had arranged to fly in and camp with us for a week. He arrived just a few minutes after we did, and what he saw was a pile of bundles and boxes in the deep snow, surrounded by “the land of little sticks,” as he has always called our part of the country. Seeing no tent up and no warmth in sight, he made quick apologies, got back in his Baldy Bird and flew home to Palmer. We still laugh with him about this. It did feel grim and cold for a few hours more after he left, until we got the snow shoveled away, tent poles cut, the tent stretched up, and the little air-tight stove steaming away a square section of winter.
Living in a wall tent is intense fun, with spruce boughs spread on the ground and the fresh smell of pitch each time the cabin warms, with hot food in a pot on the stove, dogs to play with and work to do every day. We hauled and cut logs for a 12 x14-foot foundation, then shorter ones for the walls. We bathed in a bucket, made nightly forays out of the tent to pee and to admire how the light glowed orange through the canvas, like a big Chinese lantern nestled in dark blue snow.
The second March, when we got to the point of actually putting up the cabin logs and building the roof, Norman came out to help us. Jim and Norman milled two or three flat sides on the logs, depending on where they were going to go, then I peeled the remaining round sides almost as fast as they could nail the logs in place. Log-peeling takes an IQ of 25, but you never have to wonder what you’ve been doing all day. After a couple of weeks it makes your arms tough as tree limbs. Even better, Norman once boomed out, “Hey Jim, I wouldn’t mess with her by the time she gets done with that pile of logs.”
Some years in this country, we can’t remember seeing a cloud in March. We worked in bright hot sun with the snow disappearing around us and went to bed exhausted every night. Roof on, we travelled the sno-go trail home at the very last minute the snow would hold us up. The remnant of the trail was just a white line through a brown forest, about to vanish into summer. There are only two seasons in Alaska.
Boot Lake is a good place to go in the winter, best in March, although we have walked around the little lakes and slogged through the swamps to get there in the summer too. A “hitte bok,” cabin book, hangs on the wall and documents 30 years of trips with brilliant creative writing by ten-year-olds, snarky cartoons by ten-year-olds turned into teenagers, journal entries obligatory for all visitors, with most of the notes lovingly addressed to the cabin itself. There are only a few rules at the cabin: keep it clean, bring in some wood, and write in the book. Because we document our life carefully at the cabin, we know that the winters since 2000 have been warmer, and that March is beginning to feel like April. We may have to start March earlier in the coming years.
When we go out to Boot Lake, we’ll take the chainsaw to re-stock the wood pile. We’ll take cookies in case we have a visitor. By March, we have become eager to be lonely enough that the sound of a sno-go coming along our trail draws an exclamation of pleasure. We’ll put the coffee on.
For several years we and a few neighbors volunteered as first responders for the Copper River emergency medical service. When there were vehicle accidents at our end of the highway, and there were many in those years, we would go to the scene to try to stabilize the victims until the ambulance arrived, usually 45 minutes to an hour behind our arrival. Those minutes were long and terrifying. A man who had been thrown from his pickup died in spite of our CPR. We stood there in a ripped-open morning in March. After the ambulance and trooper arrived and the medical detritus was cleaned up, we three couples unanimously decided to go to Boot Lake for the rest of the day. We took tools but never used them, just rode out to the cabin and drank coffee, sat around in the sun all afternoon. We spent the time talking about how we felt: harmed and d i s s a t i s f i e d b e f o r e w e g o t t h e r e , w h o l e a g a i n b y t h e t i m e w e l e f t. W h a t e v e r t h a t i s , i s a l s o w h a t a c a b i n i s f o r .
Norman doesn’t live here any more. He and Sylvia moved back to Minnesota in 2004 and he had some sweet time with his kids and grandchildren down there, and deer hunting in those woods again. Now he’s lost his memory, though he is still living and we spend many of our hours remembering him.
Norman loved trapping, and the woods barely knew he was in them. I am conscious when I write the words “killing trap” that a reader will not find “humane” in those words. But however you visualize a wild animal’s last hours, or our last hours, when the trapper is gone, the land is still here. There is no net loss for the animals until the land falls to some other kind of human hammer—not the snare but a road, a house. Trapping does not remove forests, drain wetlands, encourage human “improvements.” Ours is the first American generation to find “improvements” ironic—contemporaries of Mark Twain found him just cynical. Trappers like Norman thrive in the health of wet and rough and wild places. People who trap well learn something every day from the animals. Their human tracks mix with those of the wolf and the fox and disappear at the end of March.
There is some wild margin we need, that has us in it only barely. The trappers I know would not trap along a road or anywhere close to houses or where anyone else was trapping. I think Norman would say there is no point in having a trapline next to people. To be a trapper means visiting, participating in an extravagant and fascinating universe that thrives without us. I heard on the radio that there is a town in Greece famous as a processed fur capital, selling fur clothing to Russians and Europeans. But those furs come from North America—the U.S. and Canada. Our emptiness, our wild land, is the actual valuable and rare commodity.
There are many places in Alaska that can take your breath away with their absence of us. You can follow a trail to the headwaters of the Delta until there is no trail. The one time we were there we stood in an ankle-deep sea of blueberries and cranberries on a hillside and watched beams of light pour through a hole in the clouds down into the canyon miles below, a “Jesus hole.” Albert Bierstadt would have painted it just as we saw it. Fly over McCarthy and the Kennicott Glacier is just as big as if you were standing at the foot of it. There are plains flooded with caribou. Why do we want to be there when it is so good without us?
It is a relief to walk in places where the world has survived us and grown back. In the far north a cabin or a farm or a mine can lose its way and disappear. The wilderness is most visible when seen against the broken outline of a gold mine or around the square pit of a trapper’s cabin. Our hopes have lived in such places, in ghostly gardens we planned or we made—in our old trams and railroad tunnels, in our poisonous mistakes.
The old trappers talk about falling under the spell of the country. By the second day with Norman, it feels like we have moved off the edge of the map. We leave a few things at the cabin and start down his trails, following creeks and clearings and not survey lines.
Almost immediately, we drop into land with gravity so strong it sucked the water out from under the ice of this lake, so that the ice is bent down like the inside of a spoon. We swing around the smooth margins with the machines, carefully, watching for empty air below us.
Down on Hole Lake, with the steep banks all around, I feel like I’ve been dropped into the bottom of a white sack. It is ten degrees colder down here and the snow is deep, making it impossible to find this beaver’s food piles. We look for silhouettes of a lodge, for a likely slope of bank, for aspen or at least alder and willow—any non-spruce treat he’d have munched on. Finding willow, we cut a hole in the ice and send some debarked willow sticks down the hole attached to the Conibear 330, a large square killing trap. These stripped sticks will attract by their brightness. Beavers swim with their eyes open, their noses closed. In March, the holes stay open and won’t freeze your traps and the fur is still sleek and thick and dark.
Here, too, there are a few caribou, and they seem curious, as if we were the Alaska Trapper Repertory Theatre performing for their benefit. The amphitheatre shape of this place adds to the effect. As we finish the set they turn and file slowly up and over the ridge—a sedate audience retiring after the matinee performance.
We pick our way down the drainage, following the trail Norman cut with an ax years ago, finding some open spots in the tiny creek and one lovely otter hole, shiny with slick ice but small. We optimistically place a Conibear over the opening, but there is no way to interrupt the visual outline of the device. It remains hopelessly square and unlike tree or stone or ice. In the deep layered cold of the creek bottom I raise my beaver mitt to my face and brush the silky loft of beaver onto my eyes and nose and mouth, feel the instant warmth that blooms back against my skin.
We leave the trap fixed as well as we can fix it, but I can see that it is as square as a cellar door. Norman says “I sure hope that’s the otter’s back door and not the front.”
Next we come to a place where the freezing flow has swelled up like the back side of the spoon, a laminated mound of frozen overflow. At the top, the highest circle, the hump is cracked, and you can look down into the book of days this creek has kept on itself—a fat edition this year. When we look at the spruce on either side of us, we see we are standing half-way up their thirty-foot trunks. This is a winter show of muscle: see this teeny little trickle of tea-colored water lift a hundred tons of ice over its head!
At this far end of Norman’s trapping circle, we are in a hidden country distinguished mostly by Norman’s eagerness as he leads the way along the creek. Suddenly we are in big trees—white spruce. The annual wildfires started by lightning haven’t gotten down into these drainages, and the permafrost lenses haven’t stopped the roots or held up water to drown the trees from below. The size and numbers of the tall trunks here are all the more surprising because of the sparse country around them.
Norman stops us when the trees open around the small lake he calls “Pristine,” a lake he could have built his cabin on, but didn’t. That’s all he will say about that, like Forrest Gump, so that means he had reasons wide and deep for not building here. Norman is like that, quiet when the thing is hard to explain, and if you wait long enough you might learn what went unsaid. Or not. The lake doesn’t have any name on the map, so “Pristine” it is for us. A hundred years ago there were trappers and travelers out in this country. Jim and Norman have read and listened to every story they can find, but mostly the stories died with the people.
A lone bull caribou is out on the ice and he makes several great leaps while we are watching, his forelegs tucked up and all of him pushed muscularly through a high arc by his back legs. He lands to look around—we are now the audience—then does it again. Norman names him “Prancer the Dancer of Pristine Lake.” Other caribou in the trees stare placidly at us and at their very own performer, a prophet in his own country.
On the far side of the lake, on a bench above the shoreline, we walk around in big trees that have a sanctuary feeling. The place is quieter than the quiet land around it, and the settled incense of spruce needles and Labrador tea rises through the shallow snow the canopy has allowed to fall. We find a square hole in the ground and the remains of cabin logs. Digging around in a likely eruption of moss reveals old bottles and tins, garbage gone to artifact, stories gone to silence.
On the way home we visit Mendeltna Springs above Old Man Lake, where pressurized groundwater has percolated up into the layers of ice and snow all winter, making crazy pale blue and tan layers, some squishy and some hard as glass. We stop the machines away from the creek and pick our way along the solid meanderings of overflow above the creek channels, until Jim finds an otter hole that looks like it’s been in use all winter. “Look at this,” he says to me and I cautiously peek over the edge into a translucent cavern. I ask Jim if he will hold my legs so that I can get my head down under the several inches of ice and have a look at the otter’s universe. There is a foot and a half of air between the undersurface of the ice, which forms a green sky, with a black riffled sea below it. The sea is this branch of the creek on its way down to Old Man Lake, tinkling like crystal through stones. I look upstream and down this musical, half-lit cathedral highway of otters. Strange and unknowable, fluid as the days of March, the wild cradles us. And when it’s gone, it’s us we will miss.
“March” is Mary Odden’s first published essay.