The Old Man at the Edge of the World

I know an old man who lives at the edge of the world, in Alaska, a town called Bethel. The first people arrived via ice bridge. Now we fly on planes.

The old man lives with an old woman, his wife. He built the house they live in. He builds other things too, boats, furniture, whatever he likes. The house is brown, or a sort of a gray, some noncolor. Retired fishnets hang over the kitchen windows and the windows in the dining nook, floats gnawed, corklines cracking. Outside the ground disappears under the willows. In concert, these details evoke the sense of being not in a house but on a boat.

The old man and the old woman have two trucks. One is called Mary’s truck because the old woman is Mary and the truck is hers, and one is called Red because it’s red. They drive these trucks to the grocery, to friends’ houses, to the surrounding villages in winter when the river is a frozen road.

On their property: a half-finished shop, a shipping container for materials and tools, a woodpile, a shack by the tree line. On their property: a dog yard, the dogs in it wild, each spinning on a post, waiting to run.

The old man hunts moose. The old man hunts ptarmigan, a small half-flighted bird, its plumage shifting with the seasons, white in winter, ruddy brown to match the mud in spring. The old man fishes, sets nets under the ice, casts on the open water after the thaw. The river gives in all seasons, feeds the old man and Mary, feeds the dogs.

The old man’s dogs are sled dogs, for camping, for racing. He builds the sleds they pull, bending the wood in a steam pipe, securing its shape with a waxed cord. The sleds sit parked in a cluster at the edge of the yard, gridded shadows cutting across the snow as the light goes long in the evenings.

The old man and the old woman are not exclusively old-world. They are learning to use the iPad. They have recently purchased a low-flow dishwasher. One afternoon they watch a documentary about Bob Marley. They do not have the internet but use CDs and DVDs to consume media, which they do with less frequency but no less enthusiasm than other people who live in other places.

Throughout the day, allotments of time are reserved for reading: in the morning, over the first several cups of coffee; in the afternoon, preceding a nap; at night, preceding sleep. During these times, there is no talking. They read novels, memoirs, biographies. To the house come three regular periodicals: Harper’s, The Sun, and the Anchorage Sunday paper.

Past the foot of their bed, a large picture window spans most of the wall. It frames the dog yard. Every morning the old man and Mary wake up to the dogs, who stretch and yowl and shiver. Beyond are the willow thickets, and beyond that is a great country of snow or a great country of mud and blooming turf, depending on the season, the outside made inside via the window in a single wide glance. From the rooms of the house to their nested routines to the gentle nudge with which the old man and Mary pass each other on their way for more coffee, there is a consistency to what they have made, the whole of it a perfect fit for itself. There is no door to the bedroom, only a corner to walk around. It is all one life.

In Bethel if you are from where I am from (anywhere not Bethel), walking is different and eating is different and dressing is different and sleeping is different. There is a need always, in Bethel, to consider utility. Even the smallest activities are too difficult to tolerate waste, although that difficulty differs depending on the season—in winter, to traverse: snow, ice, wind, cold; in spring, to traverse: mud, open water, potholes; in summer, to avoid (impossible): mosquitoes, sleep deprivation; in fall, to traverse: same as spring, but the list in reverse. The effort required to go to the grocery store or visit a friend is on average much greater than in other places. What results is a kind of space, a breadth, a span in Bethel that elsewhere is occupied by social propriety, the practice of manners, some deference to overture (read: bullshit). What fills that space is the only thing left, which is to say in Bethel what fills the space is you. In Bethel you are forced into your own company, a side effect of which is that in Bethel there is a better chance than in other places of becoming whoever it is that you are.

Mary and the old man have lived in Bethel nearly fifty years. I have come to see them in the midst of a complicated love. My love is a young man, elsewhere, nowhere near Bethel.

When I get off the plane, the old man is waiting, his wrinkled face more wrinkled than last I saw it, his head more head than hair.

“Hey, ace,” he says.

He smells the same, mud and fish and shit, which is to say he smells like Bethel.

In Bethel, in the old man and Mary’s house, tap water is conserved when possible, a pitcher next to the sink. Boots are not allowed in the house, left instead on an inner porch, a kind of dressing room, the near wall lined with shelves. Opposite the shelves is a window, and beneath the window is a swing-top freezer, and past the freezer is a toilet behind a curtain, the second toilet in the house, in which toilet paper does not go. Toilet paper goes in the trash because Mary and the old man are on a septic tank. Most roads are unpaved. There are no sidewalks. Meals are home cooked. The meat Mary makes is often alive the same day she serves it at her table for dinner.

Meat is a measure, to “get meat” meaning to hunt but also to acquire it by whatever means: gift, prey, or purchase. To have meat or to not have meat, a dichotomous marker of condition, as in “I heard they don’t have any meat,” or “I’m going to get meat,” or “If we didn’t have meat, someone would come by.” This last one the old man offers by way of explaining what would happen if he and Mary ran out of food, which is to say they wouldn’t.

Mary and the old man fall into a certain category: homesteaders, country people. When I am with them in their life, this is hard to remember. Their life doesn’t feel akin to anything else but exclusively theirs, singular and individual, any resemblance to lives other people lead in other places a mere happenstance.

This is to say: the fact that the caribou on my plate was kicking yesterday is only remarkable if I remember so while I am eating it, which I am too busy eating to do. As it is with all utility in Bethel, dinner spares no space for intellectual considerations, if there are any. Intellectualism is reserved for reading time or for the hard-mouthed, wide-armed debates, which if they do happen, happen after dinner, when the old man brings out the whiskey.

Later, after I have stepped out of time with Mary and the old man, I will try to pick out what characteristic sets them apart, some aspect that makes Bethel most Bethel, and Mary and the old man most themselves. I comb through recollections, look for that fitting detail, a singular image on which the whole concept might at once hang and be encompassed, served up like a tennis ball and with a mighty vocal thwack shot to the other side of the court. I try, but no such one thing arrives.

The closest I come are the dogs.

The old man and I are driving upriver to visit a musher friend, a few hours there, a few hours back. We are making a day of it.

“Do you have a good sense of direction?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“That’s good,” he says. “Not me. I need landmarks.”

I nod. We discuss it. Either way works, we decide, as long as you pay attention.

We are driving on the river. I think about the water beneath the pack ice only when we come to a spot of overflow, and when we come to a spot of overflow, the water is all I think about. We are not on a road as I understand the word. There is never pavement or dirt beneath the truck, only snow or slick ice. There are nets everywhere, strung invisible under us, branches that mark them sticking up like canted crosses in a scattered cemetery. Near the banks are more sticks, circles this time, slim alders set to mark patches of open water. I think about transitional states of matter. I wonder at what point in the shifting seasons the alders are set, and who does the setting, and how they do it without drowning or freezing or being swept away in the current.

Besides these things, it is easy to forget we are on a river.

The old man is full of stories, from a long time ago and from yesterday. The musher we are going to visit is a longtime friend, so the stories of the day are about mushing, mushers, the fine art of rearing and running dogs. The old man speaks of another musher, dead now, a giant of a man, and somehow by way of explaining his size explains that the man had two wives.

“At the same time?”

“Ya,” the old man says, the end of the word a glottal stop. “I can’t remember if the second one had a bum husband or if the husband died, but she was the sister of the first one. And I don’t know if there was pokey or what, but he’d go to Swanson’s with both of them. We’d see them shopping, all three.”

The musher with two wives provided for people, the old man says, not just the two wives but whole communities.

“There was a village once that just couldn’t get any meat. And so him and some friends went out and trapped a bunch and then took it and hid it under some thickets in the forest. They went to the village and told the men, and the men went out and came back with the meat like they’d gotten it. Nobody had to say anything. Everybody knew. But nobody told.”

I nod. I pour us coffee from the thermos in the center console.

“He knew how to support people,” the old man says.

The old man does not mean support as in money or some favor. He means how Mary has cooked him dinner every night for decades. He means how he has checked the net for fish and brought the fish home, so dinner might be made. He means a mutual participation, what might be created when such commitment is agreed upon, expected, and met. He means support not as a burden but a treasure, counted among the things that make them lucky.

“Nobody does it alone,” he will tell me later. I will smile and turn my head and wonder what it is that I am doing.

I am cooking in Mary’s kitchen. Together we are reading a recipe for red beans, anticipating the process so she might show me where each thing is, for later when I’ll need it. The counters are deep blue, the cupboard faces wooden, handles matte from decades of grease particulate fixed in an accumulated patina. This is Mary in her kitchen, hair wisping over her face, cheeks cut through with red thread-thin veins and burst vessels, her pale, fine-boned hand reaching to indicate a cast iron behind the corner cabinet.

“No soap, never wash that,” she says and closes the cabinet, leaves her hand for a moment on the knob.

Most of what is required of the dish is that it be left to simmer. It is not a difficult meal, just a long meal, and one the old man and a few friends are planning to eat. I chop and measure and season and bring to a boil. An hour later the beans have begun to thicken, turned to a red-brown stew in the heavy-lidded pot, exactly as they are supposed to. It is a while before people will be ready to eat. Mary comes around the corner, lifts the lid, and smells.

“It’s early,” I say.

“No, it’s good,” she says. She nods. “Now is after the cooking. Now . . .”

She pauses, holds her hands in front of her chest, a gesture she makes all the time, palms up and bouncing gently, like there is something full and important she is holding, and holding, over and over. She stops, drops her hands, pats my back.

“Now is time for becoming,” she says.

On the road, when the old man is finished telling about mushers, he tells about Mary.

“I was still with Pamela,” he says, and although I have known the old man several years, it is not until this conversation that I learn he has been previously married. “And yeah . . . I saw Mary in a bar. I mean, I knew her. There weren’t too many people then, so everybody knew everybody. But I met her that night, really. And . . .”

He smiles, tipping his head back and forth on his neck, the thing he does when what he is about to say is either dirty or sensitive. He leans across the center console, stares me down over his glasses, takes them off and waggles his eyebrows.

“Without specifics, ace, let’s just say, it was a night. A night! I told her I’d come back for her. And she told me she’d wait. And I went and took care of the other thing. And Mary did wait. And I did come back, and . . . that was it.”

He says it like we have solved something, like the story is a hard-won answer to a difficult riddle. I nod.

“With Mary, I could become who I was,” he says. He squints out the windshield, the river glaring up at us, rivulets under the tires sloshing as we drive.

He closes his lips tight together like he won’t speak again, but then he does.

“It was Mary who did that.”

I tell the old man about the young man I know. I have plans to see him after Bethel. I’ve known him since we were both children, in California.

I tell the old man that I think they would like each other, that the young man camps, hikes, dives for abalone, hunts for mushrooms. I tell the old man that the only problem with the young man is the drinking.

“Ach,” the old man says and waves his hand away, like it is no problem at all.

We sit on the porch, drinking ourselves, whiskey in small shot glasses, which we do not shoot but sip, as has always been the custom here.

I explain that the young man’s drinking is not like other drinking I have seen, not an everyday sloppiness or regular dependency, but rather long stretches of tense sobriety punctuated by incapacitating binges, once a month, once every three, lasting days, sometimes weeks, the young man disappearing into his house and emerging only after some obliteration he does not remember. I have come to cast the drinking, correctly or not, as the single element standing in the way of my riding happily into the sunset with the young man.

“Do you love him?” the old man asks.

I do not answer.

The old man nods.

Grosbeaks flit from the trees to the feeders and back again. The light cuts long through the willows, the span between them and the house slitted with shadow and a bright, rich gold that I associate with Bethel, with Alaska, with the pronouncement of impossible seasons. The clock says ten in the evening, and this is the world.

I know Mary used to drink. I know she does not drink anymore.

“So what,” the old man says, “so we deal with him on the binge every few months? So what. So we deal with that.”

In the fifteen years I have known the young man, I have never considered this.

“Can he build you a house?” the old man asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“Does he have land?”

“No,” I say.

The old man shakes his head. He pours us each another.

“I’ve seen too many good women go down taking care of fuckers,” he says, and I open my mouth to protest, what exactly I’m not sure, but he holds up a finger, hand still gripping his glass. “No,” he says, “you’ve got to have land.”

We stay up. The old man pours. I get too wrapped up in men, I tell him. I’m tired of taking care of other people.

“No, no,” the old man says. “I know what you’re saying, ace, but no.”

He stands, some declaration coming, gestures widely with his arms.

The grosbeaks all fly away.

“You’ve got a light in you,” he says, “and I don’t want to tell you what’s what, but remember, just because something has fucked you over before doesn’t mean it’s a bad about you.”

I say nothing.

“What I mean to say, ace, is it’s not wrong to feed a dog. It’s just, you’ve got to make sure he’s a good dog.”

He points the finger at my chest.

“You make sure he’s a dog worth feeding.”

To conceptualize Alaska is to grapple with the compulsion to orient, to note observations of, truths about, and methods by which to deal with the differences of life there. Always, the metrics are of another place.

Bethel is snowy; Bethel is cold; Bethel is remote; Bethel is poor; Bethel is expensive; Bethel is ____. By what measure is Bethel these things? I do not want to conceptualize Bethel on a relational map, but to arrive in Bethel is to necessitate a choice of projection, one that concedes the exact shape of the world so that we might better parse the relationship between its pieces. Never is the bird’s-eye perfect, but we fudge the edge to grasp its breadth, to get our heads around a perspective on the exact spot our feet are planted even as we plant them there. It is about cartography, about which determination I will depend on, about whether the mapmaker would be wise to chart a course using the work of his own hand.

The old man and I get home from our day on the river. Mary has dinner waiting. Some friends come over. We talk about camping, which in Bethel means any activity wherein you do not return home at the end of the day: logging, hunting, trips with dogs.

“Spruce boughs,” he says, explaining that they are to be spread in the footprint of the tent, that if you do this correctly, they will make a surface softer than any camping pad or, for that matter, any bed you might buy in a store. The old man is a skeptic when it comes to things like God, but I imagine this is what it would look like if he were to pray, face still, words precious, finite. He looks at me, and every moment of his life in which he has laid down a spruce bough crashes over him in a single wash. He spreads his hands wide over an imaginary mattress, closes his eyes.

One of the friends at dinner tells of news from upriver, that it was warm today, too warm. Pack ice is safe for vehicles at three feet, the friend says. Measures taken near a village we passed showed twenty-six inches.

The old man nods, says nothing, looks at me. I also say nothing. We two, survivors of twenty-six inches, say nothing and look out the netted windows and think about trees so soft they might be feather beds.

“Spruce boughs,” the old man says, to no one.

The old man asks if I would like to take the dogs out. He has offered this only once before, several years ago, the first winter I met him. That day was colder than this day. That day we rode almost two hours. The old man still had one original hip. I was planning a move south, planning to go to school, planning to bring my fiancé with me and eventually marry him.

Today both the old man’s hips are artificial. He is seventy-four. I am the proud owner of an advanced degree. The fiancé is not a fiancé anymore, and I am still unmarried.

The dogs are out on the line, yipping for us. The job of riding in the basket is not difficult but involves distinct details. I am responsible for the pick, a sharp two-pronged claw that the old man stomps into the ice when we stop, an emergency hold if something were to go wrong. I will cradle it while we ride, prongs like sabered teeth shining in my lap, the steel skull of some prehistoric cat.

The old man gestures to the sled. I sit down. He pulls the pick.

“Ready, dogs,” he says, and he is not so much asking as telling them, alerting us all to what is coming.

The dogs hold in a tight line.

“All right,” he says, the permissive as command, a final word that it is time to move forward. The dogs haul out into the tundra.

The trail opens onto the river, divides into a series of sloughs and cutaways. The old man maneuvers as he ducks us into an alder forest, the trees above a triangular tunnel. It is an intentional shape, he will tell me later, one that he and Mary and some friends maintain, a day or two of hacking each season to keep it in usable form.

Mushing is a quiet mode. There is no motor. The wind is low through the alders. When my attention should turn to something, the old man pats my shoulder or leans forward, into my field, and points.

Shapes emerge, obscure but hard cornered, different than the trees. At first I think they are buildings.

“Steamboats,” the old man says and slows to show me.

The barges are wrecked, each we pass canted at its own particular angle, beached here in what was a river, is now a forest, the land transformed since the sleeping giants chugged into Bethel a final time. The once-bright paint is dull on the steel, skin punctuated with rusting rivets, mottled in varying stages of decay. Any names the ships had are gone. The old man edges us on, and the boats get older, pushing a hundred, turning from steel to wood. Alders tilt around what is left of the hulls, moss spilling over the decks, whole groves of saplings thrust up through the pilothouses, everything bleached the same brown-gray as the forest, as the old man’s house, as the sheds and outbuildings. The barges swell, emerge, recede, forms fixed midporpoise, as if someone had snapped the shutter to take a still at exactly the moment they crashed. Any larger portion is hidden below the snow line, and I think it is not so incorrect to imagine them as photographed, as artifact, the frozen wreckage of another world.

The alders end, forest falling away. The flat tundra stings, bright, and a hard wind chaps the open parts of me. The dogs pick up speed. In front of us stretches another lake, or river, or what body of water exactly I don’t know, form obscured under a wide swath of white.

The old man calls a stop. I hold up the pick, but he doesn’t take it.

“We’ll trade,” he says.

It isn’t a choice or an instruction but rather him noting what is about to happen, like he knows, like he’s sure even though it hasn’t happened yet. For this reason or maybe another, I do not immediately understand.

“Up, ace,” he says.

I stand. He points to the brake, tells me to put myself on it. He tells me to watch him for signals. He takes the pick, sits down in the sled he’s built, behind the dog team he’s bred and raised and trained. He fastens his hat under his chin.

Rare: the dog worth feeding, the path that leads to him, some hazy cartography stretching into a future I cannot see. The old man has promised me signals, but I recognize no details across the tundra in front of us. Instead there is a sense, a pull toward the left, a general belief that after we crest the rise the land will reveal itself, the yard and the shed and Mary, the whole of it unfurling from the flat expanse, house like a boat, grosbeaks at their feeders. It has taken them decades to build, a day at a time, a choice at a time, deceptively simple, which is not to say easy. Long before I knew them, and before much of the map had been drawn, Mary and the old man agreed to take its course.

I wrap both hands around the handle of the sled. The dogs twitch, a mass of lurching muscle, a long-cultivated wild temper.

“Ready, dogs,” the old man calls, and they hold, the line taut, chests heaving hot clouds into the air.

I step onto the runners. Behind us is the track we have cut, evidence of where we have gone and how, the choices we have made. Before us—and a funny word, before, a temporal doublespeak specified only by context, able to indicate both what has already happened and what is laid out ahead, a future, the yet—before us is the uncharted, the empty, the cold, white wild.

The old man does not ask if I am ready.

“All right,” he says, and the dogs begin to pull.

Read more from Issue 17.2.