An Ice Road to Kushwitna
By Birgit Sarrimanolis
They both knew river ice was generally weaker than lake ice. Anna and Vincent stood on the riverbank, deliberating. This far into the Alaskan winter, three inches of ice on the Chatanika River would suffice for them to cross safely if they walked in single file, distanced from one another. Anna scanned the river nervously. Had there been a reassuring trail across the ice, a path solidified by previous footprints, free of the warming effects of insulating snow, she might have stepped out more easily. The river’s surface was blanketed evenly with the latest snowfall. She looked for the telltale signs of thinning ice, the ones Vincent had told her to caution: rising water vapor, hoarfrost on the tree branches alongside the riverbank, frost flowers in the ice. She saw none.
“They don’t call it an ice bridge for nothing,” Vincent said, tapping a willow branch onto the blue, opaque river ice. He listened for hollowness. “Let’s use it.”
He stepped out onto the ice. Anna knew to trust his sense of snow and ice. He had lived in Alaska all the winters of his life. Not like Anna, who was still gaping, months after her arrival, at the subzero temperature and the snowdrifts and the pitch-black nights. Vincent threw the willow stick and watched it slither across the river’s frozen surface. Anna waited until Vincent clambered up the opposite bank before she let out her breath. When he turned back to look at her, his smirk was almost feline.
* * *
Months earlier Vincent had approached her in school.
“Those boots will do little for you once the snow flies,” he commented, leaning against the wall next to her. Around them kids were slamming shut locker doors. A few cast an oblique glance toward Anna, curious about the newcomer. Anna stared down at her feet, fumbling for a response.
Her mother had sympathetically advised her to shop for winter clothes while they were still in the States, almost as though they needed to prepare themselves for an exile. “There may not be many stores to choose from up there.”
Despondently, Anna went to a sporting goods store to look for winter boots. Next to Canadian Ice Grippers and Kenetrek Mountain Extreme, rated for forty below zero, were a pair of Eddie Bauer faux-fur zip boots, gray and cozy-looking. Anna paid for them sullenly. She did not want to leave again. Another military base, another transfer, another motion to move when her father’s orders came. She had been uprooted so many times.
When they arrived in Moose Creek, Anna looked about her incredulously. It was a small, plodding frontier town on the fringe of a vast, inhospitable wilderness. Its main street, buckling from frost heaves, served as the main artery between the military base on the edge of town and the rest of the low, squat buildings. Anna wondered whether the town existed only because of the military base, like a barnacle clinging to the hull of a mother ship. The houses were small, huddled together as though collectively bracing themselves for the oncoming winter. Small arctic entryways, crammed with parkas and snowshoes, provided transitional spaces between the icebox outside and warm interiors. Blankets were hung across windows and stuffed into doorjambs to help thwart the cold when the temperature plummeted in the night. Peering through the afternoon gloom at her surroundings, Anna firmly decided that Alaska would be non-binding and temporary.
Anna closed her locker door more firmly than she intended.
“The boots suit me just fine,” she told Vincent moodily.
His skin was the color of light walnut, his hair jet black, his hazel eyes almond-shaped: the Athabaskan features of natives to the interior. He was not like the others. The school catered to a shifting student population in a place of few conveniences. The typical attractions for teenagers—movie theaters and reliable cell phone service and malls—were nonexistent. They were the children of petroleum engineers and miners and bush pilots, displaced to the north for the duration of a mining contract or an arctic research project. Then they returned to the lower forty-eight states. Vincent was different. He was from Alaska.
“Would you like to see my ice sculpture?” Vincent changed the subject just before the bell rang.
There was something vaguely familiar about him, about the way he kept mostly to himself, distant and pensive. When she saw him in study hall, metallic midday light falling on his furrowed brow, Anna felt a sudden urge to look over his shoulder to see what he was studying. Diffidently she retreated before he noticed her.
“Maybe,” she said hesitantly.
She longed to let her steely façade crumble, to break free of her defensive coping mechanism, perfected after countless military moves. When she walked down the hall, she turned back to smile but Vincent had already disappeared.
* * *
In the unheated shed in Vincent’s yard, Anna pulled her coat closer. Her toes felt cold in her boots, and her breath clouded the frosty air. The shed housed a haphazard collection of items needed for life in the north: shovels, gasoline containers, snowshoes, tow straps. Beyond this erratic clutter, the far end of the shed was meticulously organized. Ice-carving tools hung tidily on wall pegs, systematically organized in a neat row: chisels, hand saws, drills, etching knives, heat gun, chippers, grinders, brushes, chain saw. An ice sculptor’s toolbox. Vincent picked up a chisel. Anna followed him outside again.
The sculpture, made of ice, was larger than life. It stood in a clearing between black spruces, preserved from thawing by the subzero temperature of his outdoor studio. Even in its unfinished state, Anna could already see the finesse of the sculpting as it liberated itself from the rough ice block. The ice was translucent on the surfaces Vincent had smoothened to a finish. Anna ran her gloved finger over the coarseness of the unfinished ice block, then over the luster of the polished surfaces.
“A raven!” Anna recognized the details of the bird’s feathers, the curvature of its beak, the bulging eyes. Anna often saw the large, black birds cawing loudly as they tumbled and rolled in the winter sky. They landed near the garbage dumpsters, scavenging and spilling and scattering the refuse, spoiling the smooth blanket of snow. Anna shuddered watching them.
Vincent etched carefully at a groove between the bird’s feathers with his chisel.
“Raven returned the sun and the moon to the people,” he murmured, recounting an Athabaskan tale. “A chief stole them for his daughter and hung them in his house. When the world went dark, Raven stole the light back by disguising himself. He threw the sun and the moon back into the sky. Raven helps people. He does great deeds. But he also plays tricks and gets into trouble.”
Anna contemplated the large bird with its razor-sharp beak and glaring eyes. She saw ravens as crows, not the songbirds they were. Vincent’s tale shed them in a new light.
* * *
Sitting on a bus that rumbled down the main road, Anna peered through the thick windowpanes. Ice crystals were etched into the glass. They passed the blocky general store, the squat post office, and clustered cabins. The austere structures were stripped of any superfluous décor. Today, however, the town felt less remote to Anna, not quite so spartan and grim. When the bus bumped into a snow-filled pothole, lurching her forward, Anna barely even noticed. She didn’t pay attention to the darkness that already cloaked the town. An exquisite warmth spread through her. Vincent had invited her back to watch his progress with the raven.
The next day they walked together to the edge of the Chatanika River, Vincent’s favorite harvesting spot. The afternoon light, surrendering already, slanted through the spruces and the bare-branched birch trees, casting them golden and making the ice on the river gleam.
“Moving water freezes slowly,” Vincent told her. “It yields the clearest ice.” He assessed the bluish tinge to the ice. “And glistens in the sunlight.”
Anna tried to discern the qualities of the ice he was describing. It looked gray and nondescript to her.
When her fingers became stiff in her gloves, Vincent suggested a warming cup of coffee. The house was small and tight, a leftover from earlier gold-mining days. A pellet stove stood in the corner in front of a worn, comfortable couch. The kitchen was tidy, dishes stacked onto the drying rack. Pinned onto a corkboard was a photograph of an Athabascan couple sitting on the doorstep of a blue cabin, the tundra behind them vibrant with purple fireweed. The man, brown skin wrinkled beneath a baseball cap, smiled broadly. The woman, dressed in a brightly printed kuspuk tunic and mukluk boots, squinted against the sun.
“They are my grandparents.” Vincent followed Anna’s gaze. “In Kushwitna.”
They lived on the banks of the Yukon River in a small settlement that could only be reached by boat or air. Vincent was born there.
“Why did you leave?” Anna asked.
Vincent regarded the photograph silently.
“In the summer I will return,” he said, as though he hadn’t heard her question. “To fish and hunt for the village.”
He had learned his skills from the elders of the village, he told her with a voice that grew raspier with remembrance. It was a schooling that was far more appropriate for living in Alaska’s interior than the chemistry assignments and history reading he was subjected to. Together with the younger men from the village, he sat on spongy tundra slopes with binoculars and rifles leveled as they scanned the valleys for moose and caribou. At the village’s fish wheel, rotating slowly in the silty current of the Yukon, he counted the salmon runs—sockeye, coho, chinook, chum, pink—as the wheel’s baskets intercepted the swimming fish. In the smokehouse he dried the salmon strips so they would maintain the self-subsisting village in the long winter months ahead. He collected blueberries that grew abundantly on south-facing slopes and found high-bush cranberry patches when their distinctive, musky scent twitched in his nostrils. When the evenings grew crisper, he sat by the embers and watched his grandmother work with beads and quills, sewing at quilts and moose-hide clothing. He listened to her stories about the semi-nomadic people he was a descendant of.
Anna understood his wistful look. They were both outsiders. He was also unmoored, caught in between two worlds, just as much a nomad as she was.
* * *
Anna spent hours in the clearing with Vincent, watching him carve, marveling at his dexterity. Recognizable forms emerged from the ice blocks. A twisting salmon with puckered lips and translucent eyes, fins in sharp contour. A powerful bull moose, his hide coarse and matted, sunlight gleaming on his enormous, jagged antlers. A traditional dance mask, encompassed within a circular spirit wheel, adorned with detailed beads and feathers.
He understood the intrinsic behavior of ice, its delicate and brittle nature, its shifting qualities at different times of day. He knew exactly how much weight he could place on an outstretched part before stress broke it apart. He perceived its strength, balancing and equilibrating to stabilize the sculpture at its center. Most of all, he knew its transience. He worked against time, knowing that his was a fleeting art form that would melt and slip away. For the moment, however, the crackling air around them held their frozen world in a suspended time frame.
Anna did not mind the months of snow anymore. She made the best of short days when the sun barely crept over the Alaska Range on the horizon only to descend in its shallow arc a few hours later. She came to love the striated half-light that was cast between the snow-laden black spruce and cottonwoods. Winter gave her Vincent.
In the glittering spruce forest, Vincent pointed out the tracks of animals: the sunken curves of a moose imprint, the feathered impressions left behind by a willow ptarmigan running across the snow, the padded tracks of a lynx. On Hidden Lake, in an ice-fishing shack that had been dragged onto the ice, they huddled next to the fire stove and waited for arctic grayling, swiveling far below, to tug at the line.
“Was there a place you liked living the best?” Vincent asked, hooking bait onto the line before dropping it into the phosphorescent ice hole.
Anna thought of the half-dozen different military bases she had lived on, self-contained towns, fenced off, regulated and safe. Each move to another base had dislodged her further. It was a transitory lifestyle, detached, always shifting.
Anna shrugged and pulled her parka closer. The world at large had ceased being important. What mattered now was the quiet fishing hut and the silvery lake and his proximity.
Stars pinpricked the darkness when they emerged from the fishing hut.
“Look,” Vincent said, straightening. A light band shimmered in the blackness like a curtain of green, billowing and wavering in the winter night above the lake. Anna sucked in her breath. The light streak pulsated rhythmically, like a beating heart, sometimes stronger, sometimes more faintly. Its green shimmer was reflected on the lake’s glassy surface. Anna clutched Vincent’s hand as the pink edges of the green curtain turned to deep violet.
“Some Athabaskans believe the northern lights are the spirits of ancestors, great hunters and fishermen, looking down upon us,” Vincent said.
Once again he was back with his people. Always there was an underlying tugging from Kushwitna that drew Vincent, like the undertow of seaside waves. Anna didn’t care whether the northern lights were celestial manifestations of his dead relatives. Irked, she let go of his hand.
* * *
In the late spring, when the slow thaw caused great boulders of drifting ice on the river to jumble and crash against each other with terrific noise, a restlessness surfaced in Vincent. His eyes took on a distant look, and Anna knew it was only a matter of time before he would board a floatplane that would take him to Kushwitna.
Nettled, Anna asked him, “Why is it you don’t just live in Kushwitna year-round?”
Vincent looked at her. “Because my mother lives here.”
“Why doesn’t she go back to Kushwitna with you for the summer?” Anna prodded.
Vincent cleared his throat. “She has her work at the tailor shop.”
“Couldn’t she take a little time to go with you?” Anna persisted.
Vincent exhaled audibly. “No, she can’t.”
“Why?” Anna asked relentlessly.
“Because!” He raised his voice to her for the first time. “She had to leave. She was told to go. Because she got pregnant.”
Silence grabbed them.
After a while Vincent said, “He was a wildlife biologist. Doing research in the tundra for the summer. It wasn’t meant to happen.”
Then he turned away from her.
* * *
After Vincent left for Kushwitna, the days lengthened under the gained sunlight. The lime leaves of the birch trees shimmered, then turned to fuller green. The purple fireweed blossomed slowly up its stalk. The rivers, swollen from the thaw, flowed lazily, crowded with the first run of the red chum salmon, then the kings, and finally the silvers. The inhabitants of Moose Creek left on camping expeditions for days on end, gunning for ptarmigan and ducks, maneuvering their four-wheelers along distant ridges in search of Dall sheep and moose.
The vigor and animation of the summer months was lost on Anna. She pulled down her blackout blinds in order to sleep under the midnight sun. During the day she swatted irritably at huge, sluggish mosquitoes. June brought scorching heat, baking the patches of dirt among the straggly grass and sending dust swirls into the air when an occasional breeze arose. The smoke of distant wildfires drifted into the town, filling the air with the acrid scent of burned willow and spruce. Anna’s eyes watered. Finally the wet season of late summer doused the burning fires and brought, instead, rains that drizzled for weeks. The sodden, black forest behind Anna’s house was again amply infested with a second round of mosquitoes, smaller and swifter than their early summer counterparts. Huge mushrooms grew along the trails. Anna picked her way among muddy puddles and dodged the foul smell of stagnant bogs.
She longed for the first chill in the air and the day in the early fall when she could wait at the landing strip of the airport, eyes turned toward the horizon. He told her he would return when the leaves of the aspens started to twitch and quake in the breeze.
* * *
“An ice road!” Anna exclaimed, unable to grasp the image in her mind. She stared at Vincent. They sat in his kitchen together, not long after his return from Kushwitna. He told her about his summer in the bush, eyes shining, and now imparted this newest bit of information.
“We are going to build it as soon as it’s cold enough.” Vincent’s words were kindled with excitement. The ice road to Kushwitna would be operational for a month or two, just long enough to transport fuel and supplies to the tiny village. “It will be a road made of snow and ice rather than gravel. We are going to connect Kushwitna to the road grid.”
“But how will it be built?” Anna asked.
They would wait until February, when the temperature dipped to twenty below and there was enough snow to plane and grade the surface. An existing snowmachine trail would be widened with a road grader. Conditions needed to be assessed carefully, he told her. Temperatures had to be cold enough to thicken the snow and ice to three feet, strong enough to support a truck. They would use river water to thicken the ice and strengthen the road. There were other obstacles to consider. Too much wind could create snowdrifts. If the temperature fell below −30°F, the machinery could fail. Flat tires, stalled hydraulics, frozen pumps were all possible.
“We will have to ford several sloughs,” Vincent continued. “They’ve asked me to help build the ice bridges.”
Of course they did. Pride thickened in Anna’s throat. Vincent’s keen sense of ice was known throughout the community. Anna wrapped her arms around herself.
“Maybe I can come and see Kushwitna when it’s done,” she breathed.
But when she glanced at him, she saw that his smile had dissolved at the corners.
“There was a meeting in the community hall,” he told her quietly. “The elders spoke.”
An ice road would bind the tiny community to the road system, so dire in the relentless winter months. Fuel and food could be transported from Moose Creek. But the villagers voiced mixed emotions. Outsiders would arrive on snowmachines. Tourists would gather, like the ones who traveled north in the summer to take photos posing next to the Arctic Circle sign, dressed in bikinis and shorts. The elders worried that their fishing and hunting grounds would be overrun and disrespected. The codes and traditions that had held fast for so long would begin to unravel and scatter as the young people left the village, losing the language, forgetting the culture.
“Things will change, Anna.” Vincent’s sadness was complicated.
With the possibility of the connecting road came a rift between them, large like a glacier crevasse. The ice road would take him away from her in the winter months as well, increasing the very distance that he was working to span.
After Vincent left, Anna restlessly counted the days and listened for news about the ice road. She went to Vincent’s shed and attempted carving a fledgling ice sculpture of her own, casting the chisel aside irritably when the ice block splintered.
When she walked outside she saw the ice sculpture he had left for her at the edge of the clearing. She stared at the abstract forms. Two ice spheres, precariously balanced, were delicately fused. It looked as though any moment the bulbous forms could fall apart. Captive within the ice of the larger sphere was a purple fireweed blossom. Anna sat down carefully in the snow. The sculpture was about them, Anna realized. Vincent was telling her about their worlds. Their future together was tenuous, like an ice sculpture whose only adhesive was a seam of frozen water.
Slowly the semblance of a smile crossed Anna’s face, as though she had caught the unexpected scent of the fragrant flower. It was a northern bloom, resilient in the face of adversity, the first to reappear through the blackened and charred earth after a forest fire. The hollowness in her chest loosened its grip. All of a sudden, she was certain that they could bridge the distance. One day she would travel to Kushwitna. On a road as solid as ice.
THE END
Author Bio: Birgit Lennertz Sarrimanolis has been published in Cirque Journal and 49 Writers. Her story “April Supermoon” aired on Juneau KTOO’s Community Connections series. She was a finalist in the 2020 Pacific Northwest Writers Association literary contest and won second place in the 2021 Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition.