Two Days before Flight to AK

Next Monday, February 1, 2021, I will board a plane forAlaska. Despite winter and Covid 19, I’m going. There, I’m creating my own writing retreat, my villa in Tuscany of sorts, except it’s a cabin in McGrath. 

It’s a solo venture to cloister myself from interruption and scrutiny. Stimulus will be low. Deprivation high. 

“Life is found when you’re closer to the ground.” This is not Thoreau but rather from a Dominique Fraissard song. Itcaptures my sentiments. 

My days should be simple in the cabin. It’s in town, I was told. I visited McGrath twice twenty years ago when I was teaching in Graying an even smaller village on the Yukon River. McGrath seemed like the city. It was the District office of the Iditarod School District covering an area the size of Ohio with 7 small school in small villages. But now, with only a dim twenty-year-old memory, I think I remember a couple of places, but not the idea of what we consider a town. This is what I always love about going somewhere or doing something new, how will if be different from what I imagine? I started thinking about this plan in November when I called McGrath’s City offices to see if there was someplace to rent. They gave me a phone number of a guy who owns two rentals. One was a cabin. I have a picture of the cabin and everything else I know about this place is constructed by me.

When I arrive, I will quarantine for 14 days. That should be easy in a village of 304 strangers, 350 miles from the road system. 

My siren landscape is the arctic region. For over twenty-five years, I have dreamed of going to Baffin Island, Nunavut, Elsmere Island, Greenland, Anaktuvuk Pass, Yellow Knife . . . If you’ve visited any of these places, please tell me what you found. 

The idea of running, hiking, snowshoeing and X-county skiing across a bare landscape calls me. I plan to bundle up every day and go out. I expect not to see anyone on my forays. I expect that the Kuskokwim River will have a snow machine-packed road running near the bank. A team from Anchorage will probably be out on snow machines, a mere 350 jaunt, to smooth the trail for the upcoming Iron Dog Snow Machine race. Eventually maybe I’ll make it to the neighboring village by skis that Terry will bring in March. Before he arrives, my hope is to Snowshoe far enough to see Denali. 

While my sirens called me to McGrath instead of Amalfi, Ihave the same goal. I plan to finish the mystery novel I started writing in 2016 and stopped writing in 2016. That year, I wanted to attend the Catamaran Literary Reader’s Writing Conference in Pebble Beach, CA to participate in a workshop with John Straley an Alaska poet and mystery writer. Before I was accepted, I needed to submit twenty pages of writing. I thought it probably should be a mystery—something I’d never considered. 

The conference was inspiring enough for me to continue writing the mystery. Two months in and ninety pages later, I realized my fool’s errand. I knew nothing about policing, investigating, sleuthing, weapons, murder. Nor had I read about any of this. So, I enrolled in the Santa Cruz Citizens’Police Academy. Ten weeks of fun, but not enlightening for my ignorance. I was working at the time, and I soon lost steam and never went back to finish the novel. Now I think the Novel Coronavirus maybe will assist me. It’s given me the time. I haven’t worked since mid-March, yet I’ve only succeeded in painting rocks. I’ve set the bar low.