Yukon River

It's mostly drunk Indians where I'm working at the moment. Better than mostly white guys. Indians just drink. White guys, it's got to be you look like somebody.

One night this guy Len shows up; he's stopping in Seattle to get some last supplies before heading to Alaska. He's going to settle on land he bought out in the bush, way up the Yukon River. He doesn't think I look like anybody, but he wants me to come with him.

Every night he waits for me in the Doughnut Hole two doors down. It's a dump, and nobody's ever there but him and a bum lady, Irene. Irene tells Len things she has learned from messages coded into license plates of cars that go by on First Avenue. She tells him he was burned at the stake in a previous life so not to worry about that again. He should watch out for green death rays, though. Don't worry about the other colors. Len frowns, listening carefully so Irene won't feel bad.

In the dead white light of the Hole, Irene looks like she's a hundred. But if you look close, you see she's not all that old. Forty, maybe. Maybe less. Maybe a beat-up thirty-five, even. I'm twenty-nine, so I probably look about sixty there.

Len, though, with his clear, bright eyes and his long, soft, gently waving hair, is always beautiful, no matter the light. My first thought was: he's too good for me. My second thought: I know him from somewhere. My third thought: he looks exactly like the picture of Jesus Grandma used to keep on the piano.

Len is beautiful despite no-good parents and bad foster homes and even a while in prison. In fact, it was on a top bunk in the never-ending roar of the California State Prison at Folsom that he started reading about Alaska, going every night into its immense and perfect silence. He read everything there was on Alaska. Then he got an idea. Go there really. Go someplace where you can make up your own life. Where nothing is ugly. Where there's nobody else to screw things up. Go someplace that's the opposite of prison.

When he got out he did a few big but careful drug deals to fund the Alaska trip. Once he had the money, he read advertisements and found somebody with land to sell. He had enough left over for a truck and a lot of other gear. Now he's finished with all that drug stuff forever. He won't need it anymore.

He looks at me, wide-eyed with wonder and belief.

It was the final drug deals that sold me on going along with him; I'm not sure why. Just, I guess, it's not all magic.

"What will we do," I ask, "once we are out there?"

Len can tell me because he knows everything about subsistence in the bush. He knows how we'll pull salmon out of the river, cut them in strips, brine them and dry them. How those pickled salmon strips will eat like candy all winter. He knows how we'll collect berries in the hills around our place—blueberries, blackberries, salmonberries, all in unbelievable abundance—and make them into jam and pies and berry bread. In the summer we'll float the gleaming river at midnight, and in the winter we'll sleep tight and warm as goslings in our good-to-fifty-below goose-down bags.

He knows how we'll build a log sauna, and how we'll sit there together, glowing and cleansing during even the longest and darkest nights.

He knows, too, that this isn't really my question.

"What do you do anywhere?" he asks back, looking so deeply into me that I shiver. "What do you do here?"

We leave Seattle and drive up to the Alcan Highway in the big pickup truck Len has outfitted for the Arctic. He's from California; I'm from...