Locked Doors

5

I woke Saturday in the Yukon dawn, donned a fleece pullover, and stepped into a pair of cold Vasque Sundowners to save my sockfeet from the frozen floorboards. The Nalgene water bottle on my bedside table was capped with ice. I looked over at the hearth, saw that the fire had reduced itself to a pile of warm fine ash.

I walked out to the woodpile I’d chopped in September. It was stacked seven feet high and stretched for twenty feet between two rampike poplars that had been cooked by lightning last spring. The cold stung. My fingers tingled even through the leather gloves.

I gathered an armload of wood as the sun angled through the spruce branches and thawed the forest floor. The thermometer on the front porch read eight above.

As I reached for the door, something snapped behind me. I froze, turned slowly around, scanned the trees. Twenty yards away an enormous bull moose emerged from the spruce thicket, the branches catching in his giant rack. He walked leisurely behind the woodpile, probably headed for the pond.

Inside I placed a handful of kindling on the metal grate and stacked the logs on end around the twigs in a teepee arrangement. Then I balled up several sheets of the St. Elias Echo and stuffed these beneath the grate. There was a hot coal or two left. These ignited the newspaper which in turn lit the kindling and soon the young flames were tonguing the logs, steaming off the latent moisture, boiling the fragrant resin within.

As the quiet pandemonium of the fire filled the cabin, I walked into the kitchen and rinsed the old coffee grounds from the French press. Then I started a pot of water on the gas stove and ground a handful of French roasted coffee beans in the burr mill. While my coffee steeped, filling the cabin with the smokyrich perfume of the beans, I sat down on the hearth and read over the ten pages I’d revised last night. The new book was coming along nicely. It was the first autobiographical piece I’d ever attempted, a work of confession and catharsis, the true story of my fall from successful writer to suspected murderer. Just last night I’d found the perfect title. If I continued working at this pace I’d have this second draft completed by Thanksgiving. And though it’d be a gangly mess, I had all winter-those days of frozen darkness-to shine it up.

It felt good and strange to be writing again, like many many lives ago.

After breakfast I drove my CJ-5 into Haines Junction, a fifteen minute trip down the primitive Borealis Road. On the outskirts of the village I passed through a stand of aspens. They’d shed their leaves a month ago and I wondered if this stretch of forest had then resembled a flake of gold from the air when the saffron leaves were peaked and still hanging from the boughs.

I didn’t need anything from Madley’s Store this week so I parked at the Raven Hotel and started down the empty sidewalk of Kluane Boulevard.

In the summer months the village bustled with tourists. They came for the mountains that swept up out of the forest just five miles west. Ecotourism was the end result of the three inns, five restaurants, two outfitters, art gallery, and numerous First Nations craft stores. But by October, when the days had begun to shorten and fresh snow overspread the high country, the tourists were gone, the inns and most of the restaurants correspondingly closed, and a hundred people, including me, had lost their day jobs for the long winter.

I stopped under the awning of The Lantern. A thin cloudbank had moved in during the last hour, now a vaporous film diluting the flare of the sun. The air smelled like snow and though I hadn’t even seen a forecast I’d have wagered the paycheck I was about to collect that a storm was blowing in from the Pacific.

I entered The Lantern. Julie, the diminutive Aishihik woman who’d opened the restaurant six years ago, was vacuuming the small dining room. This place had the look and feel of the best restaurant in a remote Yukon outpost: the dim lighting, white paper tablecloths, plastic flowers, and opulent wine list-red and white. To work here with a good heart I’d been forced to smother the snob in me.

When Julie saw me standing by the hostess podium she turned off the vacuum cleaner and said, “Your paycheck’s in the back. I’ll get it for you.”

She walked through the swinging doors into the kitchen and returned a moment later with my last paycheck of the season.

“What’s going on here tonight?” I asked.

“Lions Club is having a banquet. Could’ve used you, Vince, but since you don’t have a phone it’s a lot easier to call Doug than drive six miles out to your place.” She handed me the envelope. “Come see me next spring if you want the job again. You know it’s yours.”

“I appreciate that, Julie. I’ll probably see you around this winter.”

I went outside and crossed the street. Since it was only 10:30, Bill’s was empty. But the hair and tanning salons (Curl Up amp; Dye and Tan Your Hide) that sandwiched the diner had customers aplenty.

I stepped into Bill’s and ordered one of his homemade bearclaws and a tall cup of black coffee. Bill was a Floridian who’d moved up to Haines Junction more than twenty-five years ago. I’d heard somewhere that he was a Vietnam vet but he never mentioned the war so I never mentioned it to him. And even though he was an American, he didn’t do the predictable patriotic things most expats did such as flying Old Glory and exploding fireworks on the Fourth of July. In fact the only time I even heard him reference his native country occurred last winter. Something scandalous had happened in Washington and even the locals up here were intrigued. The Champagne man who owned the ATV and snowmobile dealership just down the street had asked Bill what he thought of the state of affairs in his country.

Bill had been wiping down the counter but he stopped and stared at the man sitting on the stool before him. With his wooly white beard and scarred face, Bill bore the likeness of a jaded Santa Claus.

“I didn’t move into heaven to keep tabs on hell,” he said. Then Bill slammed his fists on the counter and grabbed everyone’s attention. I’d been sitting alone in a booth, working on a bowl of black bear chili. “Listen up!” Bill hollered. “If you want to discuss current events in the United States, do it elsewhere. I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to listen to it in my diner.”

But on this quiet morning Bill was friendly and sedate. Bach filled his diner and I noticed that he’d been writing in a journal.

He handed over my change and asked me whether I reckoned it was going to snow. I told him I hoped so and he smiled, said he did too.

I sometimes wondered if Bill suspected me. There was this kindred energy whenever we locked eyes. But I didn’t worry about Bill. Different circumstances might have guided us to Haines Junction but we both desired the same thing. And we were getting it too. I think we sensed the repose in one another.

Gathering my cup of coffee and pastry, I left Bill’s and headed toward the last building on this side of the street, a two-story structure that more resembled a ski lodge than a public library. But it was appropriate architecture for this bucolic community.

As I walked the clouds continued to thicken.

It grew cold and still.

I wanted to be home before the snow began to fall.

The first floor of the library comprised a book collection that was almost endearing in its degree of deficiency. But I hadn’t come to check out books.

I passed by the front desk and climbed the spiral staircase to the second floor which consisted of a study room, the periodical archives, and a computer lab that provided the only dial-up internet access in all of Haines Junction.

I entered the lab and sat down at one of the three unoccupied workstations.

The connection was laggard.

I unwrapped my warm bearclaw and pried the plastic top from my cup of coffee, praying the mean librarian wouldn’t see me with my contraband.

First I checked my email. I had several messages from my Live Journal friends so I spent the next hour reading the new mail and responding.

Years ago I’d have done myself in for even considering making online friends. I thought it to be the telltale sign of a lonely pathetic existence. But I embraced it now as my only channel for meaningful interaction with real human beings.

Because I was in hiding I was forced to keep a distance from my neighbors. No matter how well I liked someone in the village, if I were to form a bond of any sort I’d be jeopardizing my freedom. So in the five years I’d resided in Haines Junction, no one had ever been invited to my cabin for dinner and I’d never accepted an invitation to anyone else’s home. I would’ve loved to have spent Christmas or Thanksgiving with some of the interesting people I’d met while living here but it was too risky. Loneliness was the price of my freedom.

But to my Live Journal community I could bare my heart-albeit cryptically-and they could lay open their souls before me. Their companionship brought me tremendous comfort. I was no longer ashamed of myself and it disheartened me that I ever was.

When I’d sent my last email of the day, I glanced through the window at my back. Though I couldn’t distinguish them from the buildings across the street, the haze of snowflakes was apparent against the distant backdrop of evergreens.

I smiled.

The first snowfall of the season still excited that southern boy in me who’d spent most of his winters in North Carolina where snowstorms are a rarity.

Before leaving I visited the webpage of a local news station in Charlotte, North Carolina. I browsed the website each time I came to this computer lab. It was my only method of checking in on Elizabeth, John David, and Jenna Lancing, the family I’d deprived of a husband and father.

Even if something were to happen to them I’d probably never know or have the chance to prevent it. But it eased my mind to peruse the news of Charlotte and its suburbs, if only for the symbolic gesture of me watching after my best friend’s wife and children.

Once I’d seen that the headlines didn’t reference the Lancings (and they never did) I entered Beth and Jenna and John David’s name into a search engine. Nothing came up. The only successful search I ever conducted concerned Jenna who had turned thirteen in August.

Last winter she’d won the hundred meter freestyle in a middle school swim meet and I stumbled upon the results which had been posted on her school’s webpage. I’d been tempted to send her a congratulatory card. The Lancings still lived in the same house on Lake Norman. But for all I knew, Beth believed that I’d murdered her husband. So I’d settled for merely printing out the swim meet results and highlighting Jenna’s name.

A dogsled magnet still held that page to my refrigerator door.

When I stepped out of the library it was midday and the snowfall had frosted Kluane Boulevard, parked cars, the woods, and rooftops in a delicate inch of powder. I buttoned my vest, pulled a black toboggan down over my ears, and strolled back up the sidewalk toward my Jeep.

The village was so quiet.

I could almost hear the snow collecting like a subconscious whisper.

I anticipated being home and the fire I would build and the peaceful hours I’d spend in its warmth, writing while the forest filled with snow.

God, I loved my life.