Alaskan: Stories From the Great Land. John Smelcer
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this subject of disillusion. They are not meant to point out ugliness, failures, or fault. They are meant only as cautionary tales, as a window into our world as a wolf-fur-trimmed mirror in which we Alaskans may better see ourselves as those we have become. The scene beyond the window, as well as the reflection, can change.
Sunday Drive
“You stay inside with the kids,” Bassili George told his wife. “This shouldn’t take too long.”
Before opening the car door and climbing out, the old man smiled at his two grandchildren sitting in the back seat, and then he glanced at the gas gauge. The needle pointed at the quarter-tank mark, more than enough fuel to make it the twenty-or-so miles back to the gas station at the junction where the road joined the highway.
He stepped out of the car and closed the door quickly to keep winter from entering.
The old man paused to look at the white world that lay before him, a world indifferent to the living. Winter clutched the world in its fists, held it close to its boney chest. The sun was already dipping behind the mountains. It had been up for only a little more than two hours, several minutes longer than just the day before. In the slant northern light, everything appeared the same—white and treeless, clear to the jagged peaks marking the edge of the seeable world. The heavy blanket of snow buried everything and softened harsh edges, making the world smooth and without definition or shadows. Road and tundra blended into sameness. Only occasional markers distinguished the winding road from the tundra. Judging by the sun’s position on the teeth of the world, Bassili knew it would be dark within fifteen minutes. If he was to labor in light, he would have to do it now.
A slight breeze dragged ribbons of snow across the road. Where the sliding ribbons caught against edges, drifts formed, like the one the car was stuck in. The old man hadn’t seen the dune-like drift until it was too late. Now the car was high-centered a dozen feet or more into the hard-packed snow, which was waist-deep in places.
The front tires didn’t even touch the road.
It was around fifty or sixty degrees below zero. The green jacket the old man was wearing offered little protection against the cold. It was one of those promotional jackets that the tribe handed out to elders with the tribe’s name embroidered in gold thread on the front, thin-lined, good for spring or fall but not for the unforgiving cold of January. He hadn’t brought his parka, figuring it was just a Sunday drive after church, something he and his wife did occasionally to spend time with the grandchildren. He hadn’t planned to be outside much, just long enough to buy some gas and a cup of coffee for him and his wife and hot chocolate for the kids. His gloves were equally useless. He should have brought the thick mittens he wore when he rode his snowmobile on his trap line. He should have thought to keep a small shovel in the car, just in case.
He knew better.
Like most Alaskans, he usually kept a large black, plastic garbage bag stuffed full of old blankets and gloves and hats in the trunk. But he had taken it out earlier in the week to make room for groceries. He had forgotten to put it back. Now the bag sat uselessly on the floor of his heated garage.
Bassili kicked away snow from around the tires and from behind the car, trying to clear a path to back up. He had no tools, no proper gear of any kind, but he had no choice. Fortunately, there was only a slight wind; otherwise the temperature might easily plummet to minus seventy or eighty degrees.
The hard work temporarily warmed him.
While their grandfather labored outside, the grandchildren sat in the back seat of the warm, idling car drawing and coloring with the new box of crayons their grandparents had bought them for the trip. The boy named Jimmy drew a picture of himself and his grandfather in their boat in the summer on a blue river surrounded by green hills with green trees and a high yellow sun smiling down at them. His sister, Nelly, almost two years younger at four, drew stick-like figures of the four of them all holding hands around a campfire roasting marshmallows. The figure representing her grandfather was enormous in comparison to the others. A happy giant. Her picture featured the same smiling, yellow sun as her brother’s drawing, except that her coloring fell outside the lines.
Nelly’s parents had named her after the black bear, which in their language is nel’ii, pronounced a lot like the English name. Almost no one had names the way they did in the old days. Nelly was special that way. Even her grandfather’s name was a remnant of the period when Russia owned the land, although Russians had never been this far into the interior, had never set foot on this blanketed valley. More than a hundred words had come from Russian into their language, mostly the names of goods that would have been traded for furs—goods like tea and tea kettles, cooking pots and pans, and western clothes.
Bassili stopped working for a moment, rubbed his hands together, trying to warm his fingers. His ears hurt. He hadn’t brought a hat, either. While he clasped his thin-gloved hands to his ears, he saw his wife looking at him through the frosted window. He motioned for her to roll down her window, just a crack.
“It’s pretty cold out here,” he said bending close, still cupping his ears.
“Want my gloves?” his wife asked, holding them up. They weren’t any better than those Bassili was wearing.
“No. I’m alright,” he replied. “Just a few more minutes.”
The couple had been married forty-two years and had only one child, a son. The grandchildren were his, from his second marriage. Bassili and his wife had lived in the region all their lives, and the old man knew this country well. He had hunted caribou in these mountains with his father and uncles during the fall ever since he was a boy. Every year, like clockwork, tens of thousands of the animals migrated through the valleys, crossing glacial rivers and mountains, following ancient routes stamped into the tundra by their ancestors. It was such an intricate history—this connection of hunter and hunted—that a clan was even named after the great herd: Udzisyu, pronounced you-jee-shoo, after the word for caribou.
Moreover, the old man knew that no one drove this dangerous road in winter. He hadn’t planned on taking it when he had set out in the morning. But when he passed the road, it looked clear enough, so he turned around and decided to take a little side trip. Neither had he planned to drive so far down the road. But the white hills and valleys were so beautiful and inviting that he kept driving further and further. Several times on the drive down the untracked road his wife had voiced her concern, saying that they should turn back, that they had gone far enough.
“Don’t worry,” he had told her. “The road is fine.”
And then, the unseen snowdrift snared the car.
Nelly tapped on her window, smiled, and waved at her grandfather, who smiled and returned a wave. While he went back to moving snow, the little girl went back to work on her picture, shading the cloudless sky a deep blue.
After a few minutes, Bassili jumped into the car, flung his gloves off and held his hands over the defroster vent.
“Damn, it’s cold out there!”
When his hands warmed, the old man pressed the clutch, shifted the gear into reverse, and tried to break free of the drift’s grip. Though he could hear the tires whine as they spun freely, the car didn’t move. He tried to rock the car, shifting quickly from first to reverse, but the high-centered car didn’t budge. His wife looked on in anticipation, the way someone with a bet on a game eagerly awaits the outcome of a last minute effort to win. When the car didn’t break free, her look of anticipation turned to worry.
“Try it again,” she said.
But after a nearly a dozen attempts, Bassili knew he’d have to try to pull snow out from beneath the car, not just from around it or from behind it. By now the sun was down and darkness was swallowing the white-pillowed hills. Stars twinkled in the darkening sky that Nelly had colored blue. The old man looked at the gas gauge. This time the needle was a little lower, leaning toward empty. He wondered how much longer the engine could idle before the little red light flashed. He put his gloves on again, zipped his too-thin jacket as far as it would go, and stepped outside.
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