17

RESURRECTION

In a moment of insanity, I joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and took a job as a news director at a radio station in Nome.

Nome, Alaska, a few miles from Siberia. The station was called KNOM—monk spelled backward.

I had waited too long to leave. Far too long. It was as if I had been sitting on a springboard at The Jersey Journal. The longer I stayed and the more pressure I felt, the farther the spring was bent back. When the board finally let loose, in the summer of 1992, I was flung to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Nome seemed the opposite of Hudson County: no people, no decay, no corruption; just lots of snow and ice. Clean, cool, and empty. I went there sight unseen. I should have done a little research first.

There was crime and corruption in Nome. Since its population was only three thousand, there were fewer crimes, but per capita it probably worked out to be about the same as Hudson County. Alcoholism was rampant. Suicide was common. And worst of all, it was butt-ugly. It was the only place in Alaska that was as ugly as Jersey City.

There were rusted water tanks at the edge of town. And only three seasons: Snow, Mud, and Dust. The streets were not paved. There was a saloon on every corner. No mountain view. And there were no trees. It was so cold in Nome that there were no trees. I couldn’t believe I had chosen a place that had less foliage than Jersey City. I didn’t think such a place existed. But it did. And I was now a resident.

I tried to look on the bright side. When I first got there, I figured I’d be helping people through KNOM, maybe doing some kind of Chris-tian outreach to try and make the world a better place. But the extent of our religious duty at the radio station was popping in a tape of the rosary at night, to lull the northern masses to sleep. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind.

So I picked up where I had left off at The Jersey Journal and wrote stories about an Eskimo guy accused of stealing windows from a HUD-funded project and the state investigation into a local nursing home for native elders. There were reports of mutated walruses washing up on the shores of Eskimo villages because of the nuclear waste the Russians had dumped into the ocean. It was worse than the Jersey City chromium problem. Instead of the politics at city council meetings, I covered the politics at walrus-commission meetings.

After a few weeks of chasing stories like a madwoman, I looked around me and noticed everyone else was traveling about half my speed. Then I remembered why I was here. I had moved to Alaska to sit things out.

I put on my news blinders and decided to write only happy stories for a while, stories about sled-dog races and skating rink openings.

I tried to keep abreast of what was happening in the real world. While at KNOM, I read about the World Trade Center bombing on the AP wire. I remembered my old fear of the Twin Towers falling across the river and crushing my house. I couldn’t believe it had almost happened. I was glad I wasn’t there for it.

I was not surprised to learn that the bombers lived in Jersey City. I could picture them staring day after day across the river, hating those towering symbols of American capitalism, of progress, hating them enough to actually blow them up. One of the nation’s biggest urban disasters was caused by a group of maniacs who felt they had something important to say but were powerless to say it—three guys from Jersey City. The place could drive you crazy if you didn’t escape in time.

I was glad I did, as ugly as Nome was. I joined a bowling league, sang in a Christmas choir, and went on long walks along the town’s beach, where gold prospectors still set up raggedy tents and panning equipment in summer. I wrote in a journal that cousin Gerri gave me as a going-away present and composed long letters to Wendell, who was now breaking stories about the World Trade Center bombing. At night, I put on my fur ruff and watched the aurora borealis light up the Nome sky.

Whenever I could, whenever the weather permitted, I got out of town and headed to the country. Just a short drive outside ugly Nome, you could find yourself in the middle of nowhere. Cool, clean nowhere.

After an eleven-mile drive or bike ride, it was a three-mile hike to Tom’s Cabin, an old miner’s cabin. A former Jesuit volunteer named Tom had discovered it and fixed it up a few years earlier. We current volunteers helped maintain it on our hikes out, chopping wood, sweeping the crooked floor, and restocking the canned food and first-aid supplies. There was a dirt road that led to Tom’s, though driving was pretty rough going. Most visitors to Tom’s Cabin walked it or biked it or snow-machined it, depending on the season.

Most people would stay out for the day and then hike back in and hitch a ride to town. Some spent the night. But it was sometimes tricky. Just because it was a nice day on the hike out didn’t necessarily mean it would be a nice day on the hike in. If there was a blizzard, you could be trapped at Tom’s for several days. And in the spring and summer there were bears. Everyone in Nome had heard about the group of volunteers who hiked out to find a bloody, broken window at Tom’s—from the bear who broke in to steal the Dinty Moore stew left inside.

My bowling partners, Eric and Johnny O—short for John O’Gorman—decided to hike out to the cabin Easter weekend. And Johnny O couldn’t wait to tell me.

“We’re going out to the cabin on Saturday,” John said, poking me in the arm on Holy Thursday. Johnny O was a big guy, so when he poked you, it hurt.

I rolled my eyes and punched him back, but negative reinforcement never worked with Johnny O. He’d poke you again the next chance he got. Besides, he was such a sweet guy, I’d always feel a little guilty after hitting him. He wasn’t even aware he was hurting me.

“You should come with us,” he said, his voice cracking a little in his nervous excitement. It was hard to feel enthusiastic around Johnny O. Any excitement usually paled in comparison to his. But sometimes it was contagious, like the June day he decided we should jump into the Grand Central River in our underwear.

He stripped right there on the road, and seconds later I was sitting on the metal railing in my panties and long-johns top, counting down to the plunge. The water was about thirty feet below, turquoise blue, deep, and clear right to the bottom. It was June, but there was still ice on the edges of the river. We looked at each other and laughed. “On three,” he said. Together we counted, “One, two, three.” And slipped off into the unknowable as everyone around us cheered.

Most people have never felt water that cold on their bodies. There’s the quick ice cube down the back of the shirt now and then from the practical joker friend. But the water in the Grand Central that day was as cold as water gets without freezing. It was like a tub filled with ice cubes. That was the Grand Central in summer.

As soon as I hit the ice-cold water, the only thing on my mind was that I had to get out as soon as I possibly could. I pushed my way up to the surface and swam faster than I’d ever swum, crunched over the ice with my bare feet and ran up the embankment to my dry, warm clothes. All in five seconds flat. I thought it was a stupid thing to have done. But as the day wore on, the sun not setting that long summer’s day, I was glad Johnny O had been so contagious. My body tingled for the next twelve hours. I felt more alive that day, physically, than I’d ever felt. The jolt woke me up and permanently removed the twenty-seven years of crud that had settled on my brain while in Hudson County.

Johnny O, one of my many friends and saviors in Nome, was now convincing me to take the hike out to Tom’s in the snow. I wasn’t very enthusiastic about snowshoes, and I didn’t think I could keep up with Eric’s cross-country skiing. He’d been all the way to the edge of the Bering Sea ice in storm conditions.

“I’ll just slow you down,” I whined.

But Eric and Johnny O insisted I come along.

On the Saturday before Easter, I took a hike out to Tom’s with them. The bears were still sleeping and spring breakup, the time of year the ice on the sea cracks and floats out to sea, was just a few weeks away. There wasn’t much danger of a snowstorm or a bear attack. Eric skied, Johnny O snowshoed, and, because I weighed just under a hundred pounds, my lightest since high school, I walked. Very lightly.

Traveling with two men also guaranteed a light pack. Hanging out with boys still had its benefits. Eric carried most of the water; Johnny O, most of the food. Eric, a fellow Jesuit Volunteer from Colorado, was convinced the Nome water was contaminated with nuclear waste from the Russian Far East. Johnny O, a former Volunteer, liked food even more than we did, so he carried most of it.

I tried the snowshoes for a few minutes. But they were uncomfortable and almost impossible to walk in. I had to walk with my legs far apart but keep them pointing straight or else the wooden backs would cross each other and I would trip. I traveled about fifteen feet in them, then decided I’d take my chances walking without them and tied them on the back of my pack. Though it was warm, in the forties, the snow hadn’t melted in most places yet. There was a layer of ice on top of about two feet of powder. The melted snow that had frozen over in a slippery coating formed a thin but resistant shell.

One hundred pounds was just about all it could bear. Every ten minutes or so, my boot would plunge through, the white crust sucking in my entire leg. I’d struggle up out of the small hole I’d made, then push myself up with my mittened hands. That first step after a fall would plunge me right back into the snow. Once I fell in, it was as if the ice knew I was wary of falling in again. I fell in again and again, until I finally got my footing. In some spots where ice had collapsed, I’d tiptoe. Or pretend I was a deer, scurrying across the tundra. I wished myself lighter, held my breath. Where the ice looked sturdy, I’d hurry across. Where it looked like it might give, I slid slowly forward. It was not an easy way to travel three miles, but it looked a lot easier than the snowshoes Johnny O was wearing.

Most of the day, I walked in Johnny O’s path. The flattened snow left by his snowshoes was packed hard and wide. Johnny O wasn’t following any path. In the summer, there was a marked trail that hikers could follow out to Tom’s Cabin. But in winter, everything looked the same, and I was more than a little worried we wouldn’t find the cabin and would wander off in the wrong direction. Eric, meanwhile, danced and swerved around us, made circles in our paths, and served as an annoying reminder that we should have brought cross-country skis. To punish him, I placed my Walkman at the top of his backpack and set up mini-speakers right below his shoulders. Eric was our home-away-from-home entertainment center. While we struggled along, he played tunes from his back. But after a while Eric yelled for me to remove the speakers. We could hear him loud and clear, but he had no idea what we were saying behind his back. The music was too loud.

Within the first hour of the trip, distant pops could be heard from the Nome firing range a few miles away. Because the willows were still covered in snow, there were no birds yet. So once we got out of earshot of the shooting range and turned off the Walkman and stood still, there was silence. Complete silence.

I had never known complete silence. There was always traffic, always an ambulance coming or going, someone screaming outside my window, a clock ticking, a baby crying, the heat rising in the radiator, muffled sounds of the next-door neighbor’s home entertainment system, a family story being told. In Nome, there had been dogs howling, drunks singing, the station humming, and snow machines roaring. Silence was something completely new to my ears. Something that took getting used to.

I had once heard near silence on the side of a road on a trip with Wendell. During one of our vacations from work, we pulled off the side of the highway in Northern California to take a look at the Milky Way. It was the middle of the night, so there were no other cars. Just some crickets. It was so quiet that we were scared, scared of the immensity of the heavens, of the possibility of an ax murderer lurking in the redwoods.

Wendell and I were scared of the silence and what might fill that void suddenly, violently. We jumped back into the rent-a-car and turned the radio up loud. That night, with the crickets cricketing and the road lights buzzing, we hadn’t even heard total silence. But it seemed to me that no one but the people here, the people living above the tree line, had ever heard total silence.

In the isolated spots in the Midwest, in the South, and in the rest of Alaska, there were birds singing, the wind blowing through leaves and branches. The wind rustling against something. Whistling through canyons. Past cows or moose. But out on the road to Tom’s, there was nothing to rustle. Nothing to whistle past. Nothing to sing, unless we did the singing. Just smooth, aerodynamic, wind-resistant hills of ice and snow. The hard-packed white outlines cutting across the blue sky were silent for miles. White and blue, the colors of winter, didn’t make a peep.

We knew we were close when we heard the sound of icicles dripping in the distance.

Eric was the first to reach the cabin, so he dug the piled-up snow from the doorway. On our fourth and last hour of hiking, I’d grown tired. But now I was charged by the sight of the one-room shack and the lengthened hours of sunlight still shining on us. Like children let out of school early on a snow day, we dropped our gear inside the wooden door, grabbed three garbage bags, and headed for the hills.

Sledding above the tree line was a special treat, since there’s nothing to hit for hundreds of miles in each direction. I felt like Santa Claus riding on the electric razor in that television commercial, the one where he goes gliding up and down, up and down, into TV infinity. As we gained more confidence, we approached steeper and steeper hills, until Eric and Johnny O decided to try the kamikaze hill, the vertical drop. I just sat back on my garbage bag and watched and laughed as their bags left the surface and they entered free falls and then landed in the soft powder below.

While the boys frolicked, I climbed to the top of an adjacent hill and crawled into a narrow, ice-blue crevice, where a line of noisy icicles hung. I leaned my head out far enough to place my mouth beneath them and drink in the cold water dripping from their tips.

That night we dined on Dinty Moore stew and ramen-noodle soup cooked over the stove that warmed the cabin. Eric got the fire so dangerously hot that it glowed red through the black cast iron. For dessert we had popcorn, Gummi Bears, and an entire box of rosé wine. For shipping purposes, most of Nome’s wine came in big boxes rather than in bottles. We smoked from Eric’s pipe and danced until 2 A.M. to the music from the tiny Walkman speakers, which were now placed on a rickety wooden shelf. I joked that we should keep it down. The neighbors might complain.

We finally turned the music off and set up our sleeping bags. But before I climbed in, I decided to take a look outside.

I walked out into the dark, cool night. The blue sky was now ink-black. The only light came from the stars and moon, far above the cabin’s tin roof. I felt small and very far away from anywhere—closer to the moon than to the rest of the world. There was a peacefulness here that I hadn’t felt on the highway with Wendell, and surely had never felt in Hudson County. This time the vastness of the night sky and the silence didn’t send me hurrying back to the safety inside. It was the cold, finally, that chased me back to Tom’s Cabin.

We slept long and hard, rising on Easter Sunday to the silence. It was the most solemn religious holiday I’d ever experienced. More holy than a visit to St. Peter’s. More beautiful than midnight mass at OLC. Instead of incense, we breathed in the smoke from the chimney. The white snow was purer than the Easter lilies I had been forced to carry each year in Holy Thursday procession. There were no lily pots for me this Holy Week. Just empty cans of Dinty Moore to carry back home. To Nome.