Another North
BY JENNIFER BRICE
Winter solstice, 2014. Alaska Airlines 145 carves through ice fog on final descent into Fairbanks, thunks onto frozen tarmac. The woman in 10E checks her iPhone: 2:20 a.m., forty-four below zero. She looks out the window at a world simplified to grayscale, like a grainy sixties home movie. A stranger seeing this landscape for the first time might find it austere and otherworldly, even lunar-esque. She finds it beautiful—attuned, in the words of Scott Russell Sanders, to her “most profound sense of how things ought to be.”
As the jet bleeds off speed, this woman—middle-aged, a middling writer, no longer beautiful (if she ever was)—presses her forehead to the window, scanning the runway shoulder. She’s looking for a sign. It’s not a metaphor, this sign, but a solid object of aluminum and steel. She’s seen it hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. She knows what to expect: no words, just numbers, three to be exact, the second two set off from the first by a dash. To interpret these numbers requires a working knowledge of aeronautical charts. The woman in 10E—a gray-haired professor of English at an East Coast college (is she coming into focus yet?)—has a working knowledge of aeronautical charts, a fact about which she is ridiculously vain. Soon, soon, the sign she’s looking for will flash by. When it does, she will be really, truly home.
Her story could begin anywhere. Let’s say the summer of 1961, when the woman who will become our protagonist’s mother, says goodbye to New York City, goodbye to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, goodbye to the medical student who recently flew her to Texas to meet his socialite mother and, afterward, regretfully asked her to return his diamond ring. Fresh out of nurse’s training, Carol Ann Heeks had applied for exactly two jobs, the first on the Good Ship Hope, the second in Fairbanks, Alaska. She vowed she’d take the first offer. After two weeks of driving all day, then camping at night alongside her dusty Plymouth Valiant, Carol Ann pulls into a gas station along the Richardson Highway, about a hundred miles north of Delta Junction, in the geographic center of the state. What does the attendant see? A young woman in her early twenties with Irish coloring—cap of brown hair, bright blue eyes—and a confused expression.
“How do I get to Fairbanks from here?” she asks. “Lady,” the guy says, “you just drove through it.”
The sign I’m looking for is meant to say “1-19.” Pronounced out loud, it’s “one-dash-one-nine.” These numbers—“one” and “one-nine”—have been the identifiers (yes, plural) of the main runway of the Fairbanks airport ever since it was built in the early fifties. What the runway is called, at any given moment, depends on the direction one is traveling. Northbound traffic uses runway one; southbound, one-nine. The one and the one-nine correspond to the azimuth of the runway’s two possible headings, expressed in deca-degrees (meaning, 19 rather than 190; 1 rather than 10). Based on wind speed and direction, and sometimes, in the wee hours, the desire to be considerate of slumbering city-dwellers, the air traffic controllers decide which runway should be in use. They broadcast this information over something called the Automated Terminal Information Service (ATIS) to pilots preparing for takeoff or landing. On first contact with the tower, the pilots are duty-bound to declare they’ve “got” the ATIS.
If you think assigning two different names to one single runway seems needlessly complicated, picture a two-hundred-ton object hurtling 250 miles an hour down a one-way street in rush-hour traffic.
Now picture it going in the wrong direction.
Head pressed up against the germy window, I see the sign right where I expect it to be, close to where the runway intersects with the taxiway. Everything about it is right—size, shape, color—except for the numbers. These are completely wrong: 2-20. Whoa! How can this be? Where am I, if not home?
When the terminal trundles into view, it turns out to be the one from my childhood. I gather my things—purse, computer bag, Patagonia puffer coat—and prepare to disembark, that familiar drill. But everything feels strange. How am I supposed to interpret a sign that tells me my hometown is literally not in the same place I left it the last time I visited? I feel like weeping from the mixture of disorientation, weariness, and loss. This new sign has set me to wobbling like a compass needle, like my mother’s murky memory, my father’s fibrillating heart. This particular case of wobbliness is just one more sign of how unsettled I feel most of the time these days in the new state of in-betweenness that is late middle age.
Why didn’t anyone warn me?
A July day in 1962—high cirrus clouds, winds aloft out of the north, five to ten knots—a young man, Carol Ann’s husband of just a few months, takes off southbound from the Fairbanks airport in his Aeronca Champ. It’s a two-passenger taildragger equipped with a 65-horsepower engine, a compass, and an altimeter. For his first solo flight, he turns toward the east, then tools out over the Tanana Flats. He carves a few S-turns to get used to the new center of gravity—first time with no instructor in the backseat—then, half an hour later, heads back to the airport. With no radio onboard, he waggles his wings at the tower. A controller flashes a green light: permission to land. On the first try of his first solo fight, Alba Brice sets the Champ down as gently as the baby—me, who will be born eight months hence—on runway one-nine.
When we talk about our love for certain places, we tend to talk as if the love flows in only one direction. It’s easy to forget that places are capable of loving us back. “They give us continuity,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “something to return to.”
Early summer now, 1964, the northern air peppery with fresh paint and wild roses. Wearing plaid pedal pushers and a sleeveless blouse, Carol Ann propels my pram down Fairbanks’s Second Avenue. Chitina, our Husky, trots off leash at her side. Outside the Co-op, Carol Ann sets the stroller’s the brake and tells Chitina to stay. “Mind the baby,” she says, then shoulders her pocketbook and heads inside. To pass the time while she’s shopping, Chitina and I swap stories out on the sidewalk.
Fast forward to August 1967, the end of the rainiest summer on record, a low-ceilinged apartment on the westernmost edge of town. It sits at roughly the same elevation as the airport, 434 feet above sea level. Carol Ann is now taking care of three toddlers and Chitina. She’s been on her own with us for the past several months while my father’s company builds a runway near the village of Wainwright on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. Even if he wanted to fly himself home in his new Bellanca, he couldn’t: the Fairbanks airport is under a flood watch. Only big jets from the Lower 48 (“heavies,” they’re called) are permitted to land.
On the day I’m thinking of, my mother seems not quite herself. There’s a small playground in the center of our C-shaped apartment complex. Instead of standing at the bottom of the slide to catch me, she huddles in conversation with the other mothers. At one point, to emphasize something she’s been saying, she sweeps her right arm in a wide arc, as if taking in the whole complex, the unpaved road that runs past it, and our whole town beyond that.
As we head home for lunch, my favorite bouncy ball slips through my fingers. I try to slither free of Mom’s vise grip, but she won’t let me go. “Forget it,” she says. “It’s dangerous.”
Why is my ball dangerous? I don’t ask this out loud. I am a tractable child, so I do as I am told. I eat my peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich, then go down for my nap.
An hour or so later, I wake in the arms of our upstairs neighbor, Mr. M. He’s wearing hip waders, which is a good thing, because café-au-lait water is now lapping at our stoop. He passes me, still wrapped in my green blanket and clinging to Baby Dear, to a man I don’t recognize, a stranger struggling to stand in a canoe. My mother is already in the bow, cradling my two-year-old sister in one arm and clutching my three-year-old brother with the other. The stranger settles me on the bench in the middle, then picks up his paddle. “Hold on,” Mr. M shouts. Chitina is flailing in his arms. He dumps her in the canoe, nearly tipping it over. I grab the gunnels, the stranger swears, then the dog curls up in a ball at my feet, as if she knows she’s there on sufferance.
The canoe ride is short, just a few hundred yards to the base of a nearby hill. There, National Guardsmen lift us into the back of a troop carrier that transports us to the KUAC radio station, a couple of miles north of town. Next, my mother finagles a ride to my grandparents’ eighty-acre farm in the hills a few miles farther north. The word “lark” isn’t in my vocabulary yet, but that’s what this feels like: a frolic, a spree, or (in the earliest meaning of the word) “rough play in the rigging of a ship.”
For the next two weeks, the farm and its outbuildings overflow with refugees: aunts and cousins and friends, but also the friends of friends who are strangers to me. Because my father, his brothers, and their father are all working in Wainwright, nearly all the grownups are women. Looking back, I wonder how on earth my grandmother found the resources to feed and shelter so many of us. But my four-year-old self was unconcerned with such prosaic things. Instead, I reveled in the romance of being uprooted, playing outside all day, keeping watch for the man on the motorcycle—yet another stranger—who roared down the half-mile-long driveway every evening, milk bottles rattling in his panniers.
After the flood, we return to an apartment made moldy by floodwaters. Two more years pass. I attend first grade at a school roughly a third of a mile away. I walk there and back every day, along a route that traverses the shoulder of a secondary road. I’m a dreamy child, a reader of fairy tales who likes to fantasize she’s really a princess fallen into the hands of coarse commoners who force her to eat liver and brussels sprouts, and who sometimes swat her for forgetting to pick up her toys or look after her siblings. I pretend that someday my true parents, who are kind and beautiful and omnipresent, and who fix me my favorite combination of pork chops and lima beans for dinner every night, will claim me. Together, we’ll ascend the stairs to the first-class section of a Pan Am 747, which will fly us home, to a castle just like the one in the opening credits of Wonderful World of Disney.
I’m halfway home one day when the sky starts pelting me with rain. Probably I’m wearing my pink slicker and rubber boots. I might even have an umbrella. I don’t remember. One thing I do remember is how a dun-colored Ford Granada just like my grandfather’s swims up alongside me and stops. Two middle-aged white men sit in the front seat. Strangers. The passenger rolls down his window, asks how old I am and where I live. I tell him. Then the driver leans over and opens the back door for me. I get in.
Dear Fairbanks: You know I had to leave you, right? Had to leave the same way every girl has to leave her mother to see the possibilities for her own self. It took me nearly forty years—half the total number in my account, if I’m lucky—to achieve exit velocity.
When the next big thing comes along, I’m still in elementary school. Unlike the earthquake of ’64—9.2 on the Richter scale, still the strongest tremor ever registered in North America—and the flood of ’67, the trans-Alaska pipeline seems like something we might all survive.
Fairbanks smartens itself up for the men in cowboy boots who stagger out of the Hideaway Bar in the wee hours, windmilling on ice or howling at the midnight sun. For men who leave fifty-dollar tips on three-dollar meals at the Co-op lunch counter. The Fairbanks airport gives itself a middle name: “International.” A popular bumper sticker reads, “Happiness is 10,000 Texans headed south with an Okie under each arm.” In truth, the happiest people are the ones headed north, to Prudhoe Bay. Everywhere you look, the mood is giddy. Some of my friends have older brothers, and these boys drop out of high school on their sixteenth birthday to sign on with Bechtel or Alyeska. Why break your brain with algebra when you can work in the oil field for union scale?
It’s 1980 now, the summer before our senior year of high school. Dana and I cruise Airport Way in her orange VW Bug, hair blowing in the wind, blasting the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” I have a wild crush on Dana’s long-haired, much-older brother who plays the drums in a rock band. My actual boyfriend is a year younger than me, a member of the cross-country ski team. He doesn’t have his driver’s license yet. For a while, Dana was dating an older boy with a job and a car. Then one afternoon, he tried to change the cassette in his car stereo while navigating rush-hour traffic. Now Dana doesn’t have a date for the senior prom.
The prom (theme: Stairway to Heaven) is held on a sixty-below night in January. Ice fog so thick you can practically cup it in your hands. Tires square up at these temperatures, thwacking like helicopter blades for the first few minutes until they heat up. Fan belts freeze and fly into the roadway, like a biblical plague of black snakes.
The actual entrance to the Elks Lodge or the Masonic Temple lies at the base of a staircase. Dana and I waft in on a cloud of ice fog. She wears a white off-the-shoulder Grecian gown, sewn by her mother. The zipper on my floral chiffon sundress broke when I was changing, so my mother stitched me into it. We’re both wearing spike-heeled sandals.
We Alaskans dress for the occasion, not the weather.
After graduation, I spend four homesick years at an East Coast women’s college (nothing to see here, reader), then take a job answering phones and writing obituaries for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. The first place I move after leaving my parents’ house is a one-room cabin in the woods. It has no electricity or indoor plumbing. I work long hours, then come home in the dark, chop wood, build a fire, cook pasta on the propane stove. For a while, I’m happy. At least, I think I’m happy. At the very least, I’m home.
The late eighties bring a fresh bumper sticker: “Dear God, please give us another oil boom. We promise not to piss this one away.” The Woolworth’s on Second Avenue closes, then the Co-op. Nordstrom decamps for more moneyed pastures, followed shortly by JCPenney.
What happened to Lori King, my best friend before Dana, when we were in sixth grade, is front-page news for a while. She, too, accepted a ride from a stranger.
My strangers, the two men in the Ford Granada who offered me a lift on a rainy day years earlier, when I was just a child, drove me straight home. When I walked in the door, my mother turned away from the sink so sharply that soap bubbles flew from her yellow gloves.
“How did you get here so quickly?” she asked.
“I got a ride,” I said.
“From who?”
“I don’t know.”
The color drained from her face, and she gripped the counter behind her as if might keep her from sinking to the floor. In a low, dangerous voice, she said, “I am going to spank you into next week, and then I am going to call you father so you can tell him exactly what you did.”
A quarter-century after my father’s first solo flight, I take off southbound from the small-plane ramp of the Fairbanks airport in an Arctic Tern equipped with a 165-horsepower engine, compass, altimeter, and voice-activated two-way radio, along with more instruments than I will ever have the knowledge or occasion to use. I am learning to fly in order to prove something to myself, though it’s not yet clear just what that might be— maybe that I’m smart in the ways a person needs to be to survive and thrive in this place.
On this particular day, I’m flying light, with no instructor in the back seat. I putter around the Tanana Flats for half an hour or so, sketching a few wobby S’s, then head for home. Two miles from the airport, I radio the tower on 118.3, tell them I’ve got the ATIS, and request permission to land on runway one-nine. The permission is granted.
I try three times to land but keep bouncing (Not a lark!) back into the sky. On my fourth go-round, the controller warns me he’s about to switch runways. An electrical storm is muscling in, and the wind has swung around to the north. If I stay up any longer, I’m going to have to execute the aerial equivalent of a U-turn.
I grit my teeth and stick my next landing.
A June evening on the deck at Pike’s Landing, a restaurant so close to the airport it’s practically in the slipstream of arriving jets. My husband and I are having burgers and beer with his aunt and uncle. They’ve just flown in from Nebraska or Kansas or Oklahoma. They strike me as midwestern staid. Tonight, I’m up for anything though, what with the solstice sun warming the back of my neck, a Corona sweating in my hand. Instead of looking at each other, the four of watch the Chena River, tamed by a flood-control project upstream, flow sedately by, silt rustling like silk underskirts. In just a few years, my marriage will founder, and I’ll head south down the Richardson Highway at the helm of a U-Haul, bound for a new life in Virginia with three toddlers in tow. But on this evening, I am in love with my life, in love with this place.
“So what do you think of Fairbanks so far?” I ask my husband’s uncle. “Trashy little burg, isn’t it?” he replies.
Dear Fairbanks, when I was young, I never saw you as beautiful. Like my mother, you just were. Sometimes on winter nights, she’d wake me from sound slumber, wrap me in a scratchy blanket, and tug me out the backdoor. By then, we were living in a three-bedroom house five miles from town. It was so big it had a back porch into which we dug a network of snow tunnels every winter. On the nights I’m thinking of, Carol Ann would place me in front of her, then tilt my sleep-tousled head toward the sky. “Look up,” she’d say, in her gentlest, most rapt voice, the one she usually reserved for church. Streamers of green and pink unfurled soundlessly across the star-studded sky. “It’s the northern lights. They’re dancing. Isn’t it wonderful?”
To see something as wonderful—literally, as a miracle, a mystery, a prodigy of nature—you must also see it as strange. Because I was born here, I’ve never been able to see Alaska through a stranger’s eyes. When I was a child, and everything seemed new, nothing ever surprised me either—nothing, I should say, but the sight of my no-nonsense, loafers-wearing, public health nurse mother undone by the prodigal beauty of her chosen home. To please her, I looked up.
And fell into the sky.
“I assure you that this region is so far north that the Pole Star is left behind towards the south,” writes Marco Polo in The Road to Cathay. His I assure you gives him away, of course. As his editor, R. E. Latham notes, drily, “A more learned writer might have avoided Polo’s gaffe about travelling farther north than the Pole Star.” I don’t blame him for exaggerating: Marco Polo was an explorer, not a cartographer, and he was pursuing a truth more abstract than longitude or latitude. True north has always been a figment of mapmakers’ imaginations, a fixed point on the globe that doesn’t correspond to any real place on earth. It’s like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow: the closer you get, the farther it recedes. The romantic in me will always be seduced by that phrase, true north (also: magnetic azimuth, pole star), especially as a metaphor for the companion of one’s heart. The practical side of me knows where the compass needle points instead: toward plain-old magnetic north. The magnet is earth’s fiery core. Fluctuations in its temperature mean that magnetic variation—meaning, the compass gap between true north and magnetic north—is most extreme at literally the most extreme places on earth: the North and South Poles.
This has been a long peregrination. Let me return to the place where I started, with the sign that gave me such a turn on that December night nearly a decade ago. By the time I got around to asking my father for an explanation, I’d already begun to work it out for myself. In 2014 the Fairbanks runway was nearly seventy years old. Over the decades, magnetic variation had done what an earthquake, a flood, and time alone could not: shifted its compass heading roughly ten degrees.
Bewildered is the word for what I feel, on realizing this—literally stumbling around in a wilderness of not-knowing. Dislocated and estranged not just from my home but from myself. I’m like a drunk who’s careened out of the bar after a few martinis, only to discover her front door two blocks west of where she left it. The external world no longer aligns with my inner compass.
Here, in a place simultaneously home/not home, is where I find myself at fifty-one. The same age as Clarissa Dalloway in her narrowing bed. The same age as my grandmother when she rescued my family from the flood. Three numbers on a runway sign have cleaved my life, in both senses of the word: there has been a sundering as well as a sticking.
A few days after the new year, in the unilluminated hours of early morning, a Seattle-bound fight will lift off from Fairbanks runway two-dash-two-zero. I will be on board. I will be unmoored.
