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.