Excerpt from Water Mask: Interpreting Frozen Ground

In Water Mask, Devine skis woodland trails with her baby on her back, navigates sea ice with whalers and whirls two thousand feet above the tundra with a rookie bush pilot. She negotiates the death of her father, and the near loss of her family’s cabin on the Copper River. Reflections on family, place, memory, work, perception and culture are woven into a seductive tapestry…in a land that both beguiles and rejects.

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Excerpt from Water Mask: Interpreting Frozen Ground

As poet Elizabeth Bishop 0nce said, “When we travel anywhere, we are driving to the interior.” I think she meant we follow the abiding voice within and walk the path to where that voice leads us. Moving to the Interior of Alaska, a boundless stretch of land that is mostly wilderness wasn’t solely a matter of geography, though the wilderness played a huge role in choosing where I would live. It was also a matter of simply trusting that initial voice of curiosity.

In 1978 with a freshly acquired master’s degree in Speech and Language Pathology, I applied for a job in three states: Montana, Wyoming and Alaska. All of them generous with daunting sweeps of land and formidable wind chill factors. I was looking for a place I could get lost in, a land of wide-open spaces that had the potential to ladle up a sense of adventure and possibility. Maybe even freedom from the repetitive nature of adult life I’d observed growing up.

Following my instincts, I left home and fell in love with the freshness, the freedom, and the far-ness of the north. Then stirred the question: What is this place all about and what kind of people live here?  

Laid bare was a place where engaging experiences were part of the norm; a place where anything was deemed possible, where you could follow a dream and with hard work realize that dream. Here was a place where women developed the skills to build their own houses and fly their own airplanes. These are roles I’d never seen played out by women in my secure suburban upbringing. Fresh from university on the heels of the women’s rights movement, I knew more compelling lifestyles were possible, even probable in the right time and place.

On one of my first work trips as an itinerant speech therapist, I traveled to a remote Alaskan village along the Kuskokwim River. There I met a classroom teacher extraordinaire who earned the title “official resident baby catcher.” But that wasn’t all. A confident upbeat guy, he was also a bush pilot, a house builder, a businessman, a computer technician, a kid counselor and if that wasn’t enough, this father of five was a jack-of-all-trades who could fix your plumbing, grow his own food or bake you a cake. Self-reliance born out of sheer need and necessity defined him, and so many others I’d yet to meet.

You learn what you have to do by doing it, and without an owner’s manual. When forced to solve a problem or confront a life-or-death imperative, you have to resist over-thinking a solution and steer clear of panic. The kind of stuff you don’t learn in school, but in life.

One aviator friend tells the story of a guy he met at the local airport while he was busy tying down his own plane one chilly afternoon. A Super Cub flew over, banked and landed, bouncing up and down as it rolled along the pitted runway. The thin wafer door flew open and out stepped a man wearing only shoes, socks, and underwear. Where in the world were his clothes?

At his previous destination, a gravel bar on the Koyukuk River, he inspected his plane before take-off and took note of a flat tire. Super Cubs are infamous for their ability to take off and land in short distances. Their large balloon tires absorb impacts and can keep a plane afloat on uneven surfaces, like stretches of tundra and gravel bars.

Isolated with no immediate aircraft services or sources of compressed air, he did what any intelligent thinking person would do: he rolled up his pants, shirt, jacket, sleeping bag, a towel, rags…anything soft on hand, and stuffed them into the ailing tire. Forced to take a risky chance, through guts and pure genius he took off and landed safely at his destination.

I was born and raised in Michigan. There is winter in my bones. But I never understood the meaning of true north until living at extreme northern latitude. Upon my arrival in Fairbanks, the temperature minus the wind-chill was 33 degrees below zero. I stepped off the jet and into a frosted land of gently rolling hills accented by stands of puny black spruce trees. The buildings were covered in a bristly white icing and the frigid air sparkled with diamond dust. Dry snow squeaked beneath my boots and the hair in my nostrils froze.

That year’s paralyzing cold snap lasted three consecutive weeks. I pushed back initial doubts during those dim lit days and sought to interpret the frozen ground as best I could. I enjoyed the exercise of chopping wood, hauling water and working outside in all manner of weather at my tiny cabin in the woods. Heating water for cooking and washing dishes forced me to slow down and live more conscientiously, to pay attention to simple everyday activities for my survival. Though hard wrought, the experience gave me confidence in my abilities to live alone. Not to mention a shot of memorable romanticism: On wintry nights, I walked a narrow trail to the outhouse, a flashlight beam lighting my way. On those tomb-still nights when the drapery of a neon green aurora staggered across the sky, I’d snap off my flashlight and stand watching for as long as I could muster, wrapped in the pleasure of a golden silence I’d never known before.

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Monica Devine is the author of Water Mask, a collection of essays reflecting on family, place, culture, perception, and memory set against the background of her home in Alaska. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a first-place winner of the Alaska State Poetry Contest, and her piece On The Edge of Ice won first place in creative nonfiction with New Letters journal. View her writing and artwork at monicadevine.com

Follow her on Twitter @MonicaDevine3

WATER MASK (The Alaska Literary Series)

We all hold up a mirror to ourselves to make sense of the past, examine our present and develop dreams for the future. In Water Mask, Monica Devine maps out a life in Alaska that explores issues of the human heart: fear, spiritual longing, memory, perception, loss and wonder. She skis woodland trails with her baby on her back, navigates sea ice with Beaufort Sea whalers, and flies close to the ground in rogue weather with a rookie bush pilot. She negotiates the death of her father and the near loss of her cabin on the shape-shifting Copper River. In these captivating stories, Monica reflects on family, the importance of place, her work in Alaska Native villages, and more….all told against the background of a cold northern landscape that both rejects and beguiles.

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing