Day Two: "Where The Wild Things Are (Still)"

Day Two:

Ian and I saw Spike Jonze's film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's children's book, Where The Wild Things Are, two weeks before I flew up here to Fairbanks. By the time the runaway boy had arrived, in the movie, at the wild island, after rowing all night under the stars, and had come upon the large beast, Carroll, smashing the dwelling-places to sticks and twigs, I was both inside the story's spectacle and outside of it.

How could I not have seen it before? Wasn't there something about those shaggy beasts, something about the horns, the large brows, the untamable nature of the beasts, something still a bit wild and undomesticated in how they looked at the boy, something in them that reminded me why I'd stayed, what it was that had drawn me to a mysterious place this far-removed from my own comfortable little piece of America, something that reminded me of what had sealed the deal I made with the university in Fairbanks ten years ago, something which reminded me yet-again of just what had driven me to hand over my soul to that particular devil.

~

In February 1999, I flew to Fairbanks to interview for a job teaching creative writing and literature in the English Department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, a writing program which proudly billed itself as "The Farthest North MFA Program in America." It was -35 degrees Fahrenheit the night I first stepped from the warm, well-lit airline terminal into the night air. When I took a breath, I felt the little hairs freeze in my nose. My eyes stung and blurred. My skin tingled. My fingers throbbed with the cold, then slowly numbed, inside my gloves. And my "heavy" wool coat was, clearly, not heavy enough.

What am I doing? I thought in a panic. Then, as I was raised to do, I lifted the façade into place again and smiled back at the two people who had come to pick me up at midnight – a faculty fiction writer and one of the graduate student writers – and, for some reason I still can't fathom, despite my growing panic I let them carry me off into that starry, below-zero arctic night in a battered blue station wagon whose windshield had wide cracks running across the width of the glass. Three shotgun shell casings, strung together with twine, dangled from the car's rearview mirror. The floorboard was littered with old candy papers, gum wrappers, and crumpled cigarette packages. The car had been sitting in the airport parking lot for half an hour and the engine had gotten so cold the heater was blowing cold air, instead of warm air, from the vents and, sitting in front of the vents was a bit like sitting in front of an open refrigerator door. From the front of the car's grille, a thick blue electrical cord snaked its way up the hood and was wound around the driver's side-view mirror where it blew in the wind and tapped erratically against the side of the car's door as we drove. The car slid over black ice as it took the curves and moved over the iced streets.

Where are the lane markers on the streets?

No yellow lines. No white lines. No turn lanes. Just a dirt-riddled sheet of ice and snow. There were stop-lights and streetlights and yield signs and it seemed to me, just then, as if "yield" was all one could do on these streets – or in this cold country. Yield to your destiny. Or your undoing. The only way to tell the streets from the rest of the ground was by the occasional rise of a roadside curb. When the curbing disappeared, it was all luck or misfortune for anyone who was driving late night. It was a bit like playing some Fairbanks version of "Russian Roulette:" road or roadside ditch? It was anybody's good guess where you'd end up. What might have been little more than an inconvenience elsewhere was a fatal mistake here in the arctic: at -35, late at night on a road scarcely-traveled, it could be your final night. Freezing to death, alone in a snowbank was not one of the ways I'd imagined I might go out.

Strike one.

In the car, I smiled and hunched further down into my coat, trying not to shudder, trying to warm my frozen fingers with my own body heat. My hosts merrily chatted about how they'd looked at every passenger who de-planed, trying to figure out which one was their candidate. They said they were so glad it turned out to be me. It was true: they had seemed unusually glad to see me, shaking my hand vigorously and smiling widely, saying again and again how good it was to meet me, introducing themselves and making excuses for the department head who hadn't been able to meet me as arranged because his team was having a sudden-death volleyball play-off at the gym.

Volleyball? Sudden death? Who are these people?

I was trying to imagine any department head I'd ever known suiting up in sweatpants and a team t-shirt for a game of late-late-night volleyball in the university gym. My hosts were laughing about how, moments before I entered the gate area, they'd seen another well-dressed woman in the terminal who'd frowned at them sternly and how worried they'd been that she was the interview candidate they'd been sent to retrieve. No wonder they had seemed so glad to see me standing there in the gate area in my rumpled skirt and sweater, my thick tights sagging at the ankles, a suitcase in each hand, a woman looking lost and daffy and jet-lagged, my hair squished flat and unneatly-parted against the back of my head where I'd fidgeted against the uncomfortable, too-tall headrest all the way across the continent.

The stars were out, they told me, a clear sky meant maybe I'd get to see the Northern Lights too. The only lights I wanted to see, at that point, were the lights of the campus guest house so I could shower and put on warm pajamas and get some sleep. But I kept that to myself.

At the edge of town, the car slipped left and climbed the steep drive to the guest lodging. The student, Dean, helped me get my bags from the back seat and we said our farewells and thank yous at the door. As soon as they were well down the drive again, I stumbled through the arctic entryway and into the warm front room of the guest lodge where a fire was burning down to embers and no one else was in sight. The room was spare and cold-looking, one of the most unappealing rooms I have ever entered. Except for a few pieces of contemporary Scandinavian furniture and an odd mix of throw pillows, there wasn't much to entice any guest to sit and read or rest in this room. There were books on the built-in shelf but they were all books in other languages. On a low shelf, I spotted one glossy magazine touting new discussions of wave particle dualities and an article titled "The Mathematics of Wishful Thinking." Not exactly appealing late-night reading. It occurred to me that only in a scholarly academic mindset would someone put "Wishful Thinking" in the same title as "The Mathematics of" and not be, simultaneously, employing deep irony.

Three days and nights. I can do anything for three days and nights.

The lodging was sufficient, though, as lodging goes in the far north: there was an upper-floor attic bedroom with several baggy mattresses thrown over two mismatched twin beds. Maple beds like my sons used to sleep in when they were boys, beds like you see now at any Saturday morning flea market. Two thin blue plaid blankets were folded at the foot of each. Clean ill-fitting sheets with an industrial-looking blue watermark that read, "Fairbanks Memorial Hospital." One thin feather pillow tucked inside an oversized pillowslip. A wooden chair. No closet. No dresser. And a small wall mirror on which the tin had worn so thin that my face looked back at me faintly, gray and spotted, like a woman in an old tin-type.

The only bathroom in the house was on the main floor and was to be shared among the guests who happened, that week, to be me and a visiting anthropologist who I stumbled upon in the kitchen and who kept hinting that he had a hot tub downstairs in his "suite" and wouldn't I like to join him in a hot soak later in the evening. When I said I hadn't brought along a bathing suit, he guffawed and then leered at me – or that was how it seemed to me – and said something about how people up here don't use bathing suits, they use their "birthday suits."

Oh dear Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.

So the far north-country also had its perverts.

Strike two.

I excused myself and settled for a lukewarm shower in the main hallway bathroom and I locked the door behind me and prayed the lock on the rickety doorknob would hold fast.

The plumbing in the main bathroom was "interesting," as my people are wont to say. Because much of the house had been built over a field of permafrost, the pipes were prone to freezing so the taps had to be left dripping all winter. Turn off that drip and you'd end up with frozen pipes and a flooded basement. Given the man who was inhabiting that space at the moment, I admit to having entertained the notion of turning off the dripping tap, to letting his bedroom and his hot tub fill with the water from the frozen and burst pipes. It was just a thought. No harm in that, I told myself. No harm at all.

The bathroom sink had permanent rust stains where the water continued to drip and the toilet bowl was orange with its crusty circumference of rust. The water level in the bowl was perilously low, low enough that I wondered if it would flush without backing up all over the floor.

The linoleum flooring must have been there since the late 60s or early 70s: the edges had come unglued and were curling up along the walls (there were no baseboards to hold them in place once the adhesive gave way) and, along the length of the tub, the plywood sub-flooring was exposed. Around the tub's tiled wall, what little caulking remained was spotty with black mildew. But someone had taken pains to fold several fresh towels and washcloths over the back of the toilet tank and there was a rather sturdy-looking cake of lavender-scented soap on the edge of the tub.

By the time I crawled under the covers, I was almost too weary and chilled to really appreciate that the little bed had been carefully placed right underneath the only window in the small attic room, a window which looked out over the snowy woods and how, when lying prone on it, I could shiver myself to sleep looking up at the clearest night sky I had seen in many years. I watched the moon set off across the sky and I saw the constellations I had known from childhood, only now they seemed to be in a different place in relation to the earth's surface. Or maybe it was I who was in a different latitude and longitude, one where I could see them and not burden them with the old stories, the ancient tragic myths. Maybe, I thought to myself, drifting off, maybe some of those stars are long-dead but, for now, they've set their small torches against this far darkness and the frozen night and I am strangely grateful for their company.

Comfort: zero. Room with a view: one.

Where The Wild Things Are (Still)

Time & temperature sign at the Airport Way Fred Meyer,

November 2009: -7 degrees F. at 5:10 p.m.

Note: I'll be posting every day this week, adding new installments each day from the "Alaska Diaries" which I wrote this past winter during my most recent trip back to Fairbanks, Alaska. This first posting is an introduction to the adventure. Day One begins tomorrow with the long and sordid tale of how I came to live in the far arctic and some of what drew me there. There'll be photos all week too: of people, of the landscape, of the muskox.

Some of these entries and photos were first published on The Best American Poetry blog and are archived there. You'll love the BAP site and its writers and photographers and artists - check it out at:

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/

All best to you,

Anne

Fairbanks, Alaska

Introduction

Everyone who visits the Alaskan Interior and chooses to stay has a story to tell about the why of that decision to remain in one of the harshest climates in the country. For some, it's in the long stretches of unmarred wilderness, the larger-than-life landscape, the fierce rivers and the mountains that are forever adjusting and readjusting the human sense of scope and importance; for others, it's the appeal of living in solitude in the "last frontier," on one's own, "off the grid," those end-of-the-roaders tucked away in tiny cabins somewhere in the most remote valleys and meadows, eking out a subsistence life, living off the land, by their wits and stern will – hunting and fishing, trapping, perhaps gardening a little in the summer, often tending a secret "cash crop" among the vegetable furrows. Others came to live purposefully in the land, among its greater and lesser beasts, to study them, to experience them in their natural habitat rather than studying them in laboratories or at a safe distance beyond the wire fencing at a city zoo. Some, like myself, came here for the adventure AND the decent living wage that a writer or researcher can earn here while working with students, where it is also still possible to carve out a little time for contemplation, for solitude, for writing.

I'd told myself I was coming here to teach, to write, to study, to live in a way that meant I was constantly being confronted by the age-old questions that have troubled humans for centuries: Who am I? Why Am I here? Where am I going? I'd told myself it would be good to be among others of my "tribe" – writers, scholars, researchers: those who are most comfortable in the periphery of things rather than at the center of them.

I am no different – no more remarkable nor any less so – than anyone else who traveled north and fell hard for something almost-unknowable and then wanted to stay in its company. I have returned here every year since I moved from Fairbanks four years ago, circling back again and again to what I first loved, to what I've lost – or what I've, perhaps, given away. Isn't that the subtext, after all, of all the great love stories and travel adventures of our literature: the hero's journey, Campbell called it. My story, though, is less than heroic and it gets all tangled up with a creature that looks as if it lumbered out of the Ice Age one gray twilit morning and stumbled right into modern history.

And so I return, again, deep winter, to the far-off place that set its indelible mark upon me and helped to shape me into the woman and the writer I am today. When I arrive, my daughter, Kelly, and my granddaughter, Sarah, are waiting by the baggage carousel, waving wildly, both of them, with that bright toothy smile they inherited from me. Sarah tells me it is warm outside tonight, almost 10 above. And there are stars, she says, still in awe of what is beyond her, still amazed at her good fortune in being this very child in this very place. It is good to come home.

In Memoriam

Lucille Clifton

1936 - 2010

         Lucas Wooster

    1977 - 2009

My Town

There is no end to the sudden interest people take in me when they see me getting out of the black Land Rover I drive which is still tagged with Alaska license plates. Locals stop me in parking lots or on the sidewalks to ask me if I know Sarah Palin, if I think she'll make a run for the presidency in the next elections, or to tell me how much they love our governor. My favorite waitress at Friendly's always wants to know the temperature and weather in Anchorage on that particular day. . .and why, "seeing as how you're from the arctic and all," I always act as if I'm about to freeze half to death here in the east. I think the post office clerk is growing suspicious of all those fragrant boxes I mail out to Alaska every week. When he asks me now if there is "anything fragile, liquid, or perishable" in the packages, he always asks me twice, as if I might be a bit "slow." Last Monday, he looked me straight in the eye and suggested that food is perishable, even fruits like lemons and limes and peaches. I assured him I'd heard that before too but, no, there wasn't any food in the boxes. And then, when he had his back to me – ostensibly to place the boxes into the bin - I saw him sniff the box. Trust is a hard-won commodity in this town.

At the small rural open-air farm market a few miles up the road from where I live, the women who work there have seen me often enough now to no longer act as if I might be dangerously pathological – though the obvious "disconnect" between my far-north license plates and my lingering Alabama accent still baffles them. Last fall, three of them corralled me at the cucumber bin to ask me about that gigantic Alaskan squash they saw a few years back in the local newspapers: the blue-ribbon squash from the Tanana Valley Fair. Specifically, they wanted to know if we Alaskans use manure as a fertilizer. . .and they pronounced it "mah-nyoor" much to my delight. They scoffed openly when I said it probably wasn't the fertilizer so much as the good long hours of summer daylight that contributed to such a beast of a squash. Clearly, they think I am toying with them and now they feel obliged to mess with me too: when I comment on how red and fat the tomatoes are this year, they smile wryly and say, Yes, we've had some good daylight lately.

All in good fun.

And though the players at the Lebanon Bingo Hall don't yet know that I've recently moved here from Alaska, they watch me with a kind of growing interest now too because, three times out of the four times I have gone there to play Bingo with my daughter-in-law Jenny, I have won the drawing for the Tasty Meat Tray. They aren't sure what kind of black magic I am employing in order to win so many meat platters, and they keep their distance for the most part, but I think they are starting to sort of tolerate me now because they're pretty certain that weird magic doesn't work as well for the big cash winnings as it does for the meat platters. The first time my number was pulled, I thought the drawing monitor was just pulling my leg about me going to the refrigerated case in the back of the room and choosing the "tasty meat tray" I wanted (out of the three to be given away that evening in drawings). When I asked if she was serious about the prize being a tray of uncooked meats, she looked at me with what my grandmother Fleecy would have called disdain and told me the Tasty Meat Trays were no joking matter.

No, Ma'am.

For the first time in my life, I haven't quite managed to stay safely "under the radar," to blend in, to move easily among the locals as if I've lived here for many, many years - though no one here yet knows that I am a professor who teaches in Alaska or that I am a writer with two published books, desperately working on another. To them, I am someone who obsessively scribbles things down on whatever is at hand. To them, I am a rather odd but ordinary-looking newcomer slogging about town and the rural countryside in jeans and boots and baggy sweaters which are fraying at the sleeves. My straight, thin hair is inevitably flying about in the infamously-wicked Pennsylvania wind despite the toothy banana clip and the super hold hair spray I liberally apply each morning. To most of the good people of this town, I am a middle-aged woman in big glasses at the grocery store squinting at the price labels and checking her newspaper coupons for a few cents off of whatever she's buying that day, the clumsy woman who juggles cardboard boxes - and not very well - each morning as she tries to move the newest stack of boxes from the car to the post office counter. Once, I swore loudly when the door - which isn't one of those new-fangled automatic doors in modern buildings - slammed me hard in the backside sending the stack of boxes scattering over the speckled linoleum floor. I fear, if I don't stop swearing when something doesn't go my way, I will soon be a woman with a reputation for having a filthy mouth.

I could be a lot like everyone else here in this small town except for the odd diphthongs of my speech and the lingering Southern proclivities I still have that give me away as a newcomer to town: things like squeezing the produce at the local market (rude, rude, rude in their books) and hauling my flea-market finds around in a recyclable "green" bag which, as the clerk pointed out loudly, is a flowered bag and isn't green at all so why in God's name would someone have put the word GREEN on it?

I am learning, in this small town life, to love the odd character of an old farmhouse even as I work to restore it, nudging it towards respectability again with fresh paint and wallpaper. I am learning that the cheap climbing roses from Ollie's Bargain Outlet cover a multitude of sins when it comes to landscaping around a summer porch where old concrete steps were buried in place decades ago, and that prim white trellises hold even the wildest of roses in check. I am learning which local "greasy spoons" will let me linger over a cup of coffee, who will let me stay a while to read or scribble without getting all huffy about the booth space I'm taking up. I am learning the waitresses' names and listening to stories about their children and grandchildren, about the pit bulldog that chews through every good sofa that comes through the door, about the old Pontiac that died in place after 30 years and the fake Christmas tree that nearly burned the house down this winter. I am also learning from them who the stingy tippers are among their regulars and pleased to hear I am not on that list.

In other words, I am learning to let my hair down now, windy or not, to keep my lips zipped lest all that loose hair blow into my mouth, to get to the door fast as I can when the UPS guy rings the bell, even if it means I'm wearing my polka-dot socks and my sauce-stained apron, because it could be days before he can get back to redeliver whatever-it-is that he's trying to deliver. I'm learning to go casual, to go "mental" as one of the elderly women from the Palmyra Interfaith Assisted Living Home said in my direction last week in the bank. According to her, I ought to put on a little make-up and have my hair done. She has a theory: that a lot of smart women retire to small towns like this where they immediately "go mental." And going mental here seems to be loosely connected to one's coiffure and make-up and attire. In my new hometown, I am clearly going a little "mental." Or, at least, going in that general direction.

It Gets Me To Thinking. . .

My good friend, Grace Cavalieri, who loves the Savannah's Rose soaps I make, sent me a book for my Christmas stocking. It was a new book published by Mendez Publications, written by a woman named Birdie - Birdie Jaworski - who had been, for many years, an Avon representative. It's called Don't Shoot! I'm Just The Avon Lady!, and it is one of the most delightful tales I've read in a long time. I couldn't put it down. Is it "high literature?" No, probably not, but it is one delightful, hang-on-for-dear-life ride into the mind and extraordinarily adventurous life of one of the most creative women I've heard about in a long, long time.

The book is about more than Birdie's selling of Avon, of course: it's about her life as a mother of two young boys, her life as a woman hitting middle-age and not being married and in love with a man. It's about her life in California among the rich-and-famous, her life as someone who sells beauty products and barely makes sufficient money each "campaign" to cover her living costs. It's about living in the shadow of the beautiful people of wealth and means, about rubbing skinned elbows with those who live (within eyeshot of her own neighborhood) in luxury.

Birdie has a fine eye for the world and, because of this, her readers also get to see the ragged seam that separates the glittering backside of a California life and the underbelly of it that few could bear to look at day after day, much less to live in it - unless they have that magnificent eye Birdie has and also her sense of humor-AND-despair pointing the way as she chatters along merrily, introducing everyone she meets, from the woman who wants wrinkle cream for her monkey, to the mysterious and handsome celebrity "Kevin" who wants to know what she wears under her kilt, to the Oscar Wilde look-alike she peeps at with another stranger one afternoon, to her competitor at Avon who plays dirty and takes home all the awards who she calls "Huge Hair," to her good friend Shanna who, though independent enough to do her own tile-work, manages to fall in heat and love with a young rocker Birdie calls "True Love Mullet Boytoy." It is a fortunate thing that, along the way, we have such good traveling companions as her two boys, Louie and Marty, her Turkish gentleman friend Ulak, a white labrador name Suzie, and a pot-bellied pig named Frankie Bacon.

It's a fine tale and I recommend it to you with one big caveat: if you have home-improvement projects to get done, or soap-making, or cooking and baking to do, or groceries to buy, or beds to make, you'll not get them done because you'll make every excuse you can just to sit a while longer and listen to Birdie tell her stories, from the first chapter ("Baby's Got A Bad, Bad Zit") to "Balls To The Wall" through to "Wherein I Test A Product On An Animal," through to "Grand Slam High Noon At The Denny's," on down to "Jesus Marches On," and on to the final chapter, "Accidental Joy."

But Birdie's story has got me to thinking again about how the making a business of what you do creatively can suck the life-blood joy out of the doing of it. Granted, Birdie doesn't "make" Avon but she's trying to make a living for her and her boys by selling beauty products to everyone she can - and she is one of the MOST creative marketers I have ever encountered, no exceptions. In one chapter of the book, after a week of having lugged her over-stuffed shoulder pack filled with books and skin-care samples and lipstick smudge samples and fragrance bottles up and down the foothills of her California, the usually high-spirited Birdie proclaims miserably that she doesn't even like the stuff anymore.

I've known too many creative women who were happily making soaps, hand-painting old pots, sewing aprons, embroidering and smocking baby clothes, baking delicious desserts - whatever the joy of their heart was - who then set out to build a business of it and, eventually, became overwhelmed, frustrated at the endless bookkeeping required for taxes, weary of standing in lines at the local post office to mail boxes out, weary of managing websites and blogsites no one read or looked at, managing the cost of printing business cards: talented women who finally walked away from it, whatever the "it" was.

There is something about the industrialization of creativity that sucks joy from the doing of it. It's sly, how that happens. One day you're excited because you have your first order come in and, the next day you're scouring the local library for those how-to books about turning your hobby into a profitable business. Months later, you suddenly hear yourself snapping at the cats because they're underfoot mewling and leaving little trails of white cat hair along your pants-legs, bothering you for food just as you're in the middle of a project at the kitchen counter. Sometime later, you absently make a mental note to yourself that troubles you because you see suddenly how you have moved from a part-time hobby into meeting deadlines just like at work, see that you are sacrificing your evenings to "catch up" on orders or book-keeping or updating the website. And your husband, usually so enthusiastic and easy-going and supportive of you, sighs and asks where you want to have dinner out and at what ungodly hour. And then, one morning you wake and lying there all head-achey and dreading leaving the warm bed for another day of "work," you wonder how you got there.

One friend wrote to me last month and said she was taking down her website, yard-saling away her impressive collection of baker's supplies, and giving it all up after having just finished her third year of being in the black. She wrote: "I didn't have time anymore to bake and decorate those holiday cookies that everyone in my family loved because I had to become a production line for months in advance of Christmas just to fill all the pre-holiday orders that were coming in. It was exhausting. I baked night and day, and when I wasn't baking and decorating, I was rushing into town to buy 25-pound bags of organic flour and sugar I could barely carry. Or I was haggling with the egg-man at the corner stand because his temperamental free-range hens had only provided six dozen eggs that morning instead of the twelve dozen eggs I needed for the day's baking. Sure, the business was successful, as far as making money goes. But I didn't love it anymore. I was downright sick of it. I dreaded getting up in the mornings because my back ached from carrying the flour bags and the packages and standing in lines. I went from being a morning person to being an I-hate-morning person. And the very reason I had started making and designing the cookies - because my family loved them and they'd become my trademark addition to the Christmas dessert menu - fell by the wayside: my family had no cookies this year for the holidays. Zero. I threw together a stupid boxed cake mix before I dressed for Christmas dinner and slapped on some pink frosting just before we walked out the door for Mom and Dad's house. No cookies this year for the nieces and nephews. No cookies for Grammy who gummed them into soggy crumbs every holiday since she'd fallen and broken her dentures and who happily proclaimed each Christmas that I made the best danged cookies in the world. They had none this year. Heck, they barely had me, I was so exhausted. I was like the walking dead by Christmas dinner."

Her story isn't an unusual story - it might even have been my story had I not stepped back, fast, from where I saw I was headed in trying to make a "business" out of what I designed and created. This is a cautionary tale. One that's not unusual or new though because, by now, I've heard a dozen or so stories just like hers from ambitious, hard-working women who were "succeeding." Only the small specific details differ from story to story. The frustration is the same, as is the loss of joy in doing what she'd been happily designing and making for years.

I don't know. Maybe, as creative women, we have bought into the Industrial Age hype too quickly, hearing the success stories of others who have made of their creative efforts some thriving cottage industries, or watching the parade of entrepreneurs on Shark Tank each week, and maybe we have done that to what could be called a certain kind of loss of spirit, even when it's all been to our financial gain. Maybe we have believed too easily the hype about "getting rich" from what we do because the people who hawk that kind of riches are only talking about one kind of wealth. (Maybe old Judas wasn't the only one who sold out cheaply for those forty pieces of silver.) Maybe we swam right up to that bright old hook-and-line story about getting rich and we opened our mouths and took it into our gullet. No wonder we are stunned when its sharp little barbs hang in us and we feel like we're about to be reeled in and served up as the entree du jour.