Last Ride of the Mic-Mic Men

The Beast was the gangsta-earthmother of the drive-by smile. In fact, she changed everything.

In the depths of the endless Fairbanks winter I wore the shroud of despair, creeping from my car where it idled in the parking lot of the Boatel, ducking into the all-day/all-night bar to meet the others who had momentarily stepped down from the train-wrecks of poor thinking to cloak themselves in the evanescent veneer of drink.

The Boatel itself arrived along the side of the Chena River much as we had, throttling along the current without a rudder, beaching on the rocks never to float again, re-opening instead as a round-the-clock tavern that appeared suddenly through the ice-fog like a ghost ship afloat on the vapor cast by idling trucks and cars that yanked aside into the parking lot as if by the steady autopilot of false remedy to the shoulder along Airport Way and stopped, with only the deep, black imprints of heavy boots leading from their doors to the port-holed hatchway to the Boatel.

From the back deck, you could hop up and down in your coat and fur hat to keep warm while you drank a toast to the aurora that streamed from the heavens, day and night, steaming through a black night that ached to the marrow, then blurred to a dull, steady pain the shape of everyday life.

By November, you couldn't tell the curbs and sidewalks from the center lane of the highway; the landscape was undifferentiated, where every color was a shade of white, and the roads, houses, hills, and dangerous gullies were all mixed in a flowing glaze, with the occasional raven hunched in the snow.

So to the Boatel we fled when we weren't writing, which became habit, leaving our engines running so that even a drunk could spin off into all that white without having to jump-start the car. It was bad enough that your tires flattened against the snow and when you pulled out they would thump altogether toward disaster until the air warmed and spread itself out again.

I was six feet and well over 260 pounds and Brian had played tackle for Bo Schembechler at Michigan. In the Boatel, we cornered a spot at the pool table and Brian kept us playing, or we sat wherever we wanted and military guys would come over, thinking we were specialists.

"You guys are 50 mic-mic men, aren't you?" some guy said while we were shooting eightball. He didn't add up to much of a threat.

"Sure," Brian said.
"We are," I said.
And later we'd ask each other, what the hell.

Later, after the Boatel died down, we'd drive over to Frank's Place, a biker bar over on the side of town that served the military: used car dealerships, gun shops, liquor stores, and strip bars where the new frontier met the edge of corporate brute instinct, spinning into view through the ice-fog as we drove along the misfiring beer signs and check cashing signs and signs that would never light again, driving slow and carefully until we got to Frank's, a biker bar that closed at 5 am and reopened an hour later.

We'd find a spot over by the roaring fireplace -- a visiting professor of English and a graduate student of writing-- looking a lot like 50 mic-mic men in layered underwear and plaid shirts and woolly caps, liquored up, and at just about 2 am, the strippers from across the way would thunder in to do some drinking on their tip money.

On any particular night at Frank's, you could count on collateral violence. I never got in a scrape, but I once witnessed the royal spat between two strippers slugging it out over a John. In the end, there were clumps of hair and ice-blood on the steps of Frank's Place.

One morning at five, after leaving for pancakes and single-malt scotch, we went for a light ski in 10-degree weather, Brian and I, although neither of us was really prepared. I wore trendy woolen gloves with the fingers cut out and after a half hour of skating cross-country through the woods off the Steece Highway, I had no feeling in them at all. I thought of the two- or three-fingered natives that wandered forlorn along the downtown streets in springtime.

But the mic-mic man pushed me up the trail while I warmed my hands under my armpits. And when my fingers were warm again, we went back to Frank's.

And so it went, night into day, never-ending winter of aurora storms from horizon-to-horizon, the noon-day-sun the tease of everlasting dopamine, or hope, then more weeks of students sleeping at their desks in the afternoon science-writing class, being arctic hibernation season, despite my endless rants about Berryman and Rilke and Hugo, claiming that, as poets, we had no allegiance to any syllabus. The examination of spacial narratives and confessional strings of meter outweigh all considerations of clock and date and sobriety.

Then sometime in the mid-winter we went to the outhouse races north of town, and on another weekend, drive north on the Steece toward the Arctic Circle to view the running of the Yukon Quest. Brian and his girlfriend and I drove White Pass, where highway stauntions stuck precariously from the drifts, designating chaos, and the road disappeared into the dim white soup of everything.

We found the turnoff to the race where deep ruts slashed away from the main road into a forest of permafrost pines. Spectators sat in folding chairs along the sled-track. At the first sight of the pack, they put down their mugs of coffee, stood and whooped as the dogs yanked their sleds into the firelight.

The huskies knew it was a stop because they pulled in-place, staked to the ground on beds of hay so the sleds could not be moved. There were bowls of hot gruel and fresh water for the dogs, and the drivers sipped coffee. And once the dogs had eaten, the driver aligned the sled, unpinned the stakes and the sled lurched off, blending into the horizon as a drying dab of paint.

In a photo from the day, I'm framed in the center of the image, shaped by a red patch of jacket, black snow-machine boots, black muffler and fur cap, suspended as if I had been parted out from construction paper and glued into a white backdrop.

My memory of the entire winter is blurred-- by alcohol, by infinite dark, by 68-below temperatures, by the occasional stump of caribou or moose left on the side of road where it had wandered into a snowplow, or spotting things you only thought you saw as you drove along the steady road that folded into the fog.

And yet, and yet, two weeks before Christmas and quite out of the white of everythingness, the Beast parked beside me in the lot at Khalsa's and flashed the drive-by smile. The I'm on-your-side-even-if-you-don't-think-you-have-one smile.

One time we had coffee. Another time we ran errands.

"Alaska," she said that afternoon when we had parked in the woods in search of a Christmas tree and she hopped out with her chain saw. "Alaska. Where men are men...and so are the women."

Before she disappeared into the snow and trees, the Beast threw another grin. It was a grin for traveling, a bolt you could tuck in just about anywhere, especially if you hoped to blend into the wood panels and cigar smoke and the furious, spinning wagonwheels of beer signs down at Frank's and still feel the faint pulse of spring, somewhere, some day.

And in the fading sun of an otherwise stingy afternoon, at the end of a year that faded out as if bent to the machinery of some cosmic dimmer switch, despite it all, etc., the smaller 50 mic-mic man opened like a late-year afterthought of bloom, white-upon-white against the biggest flurry of of the year, a Christmas universe of flakes streaming laterally along Farmer's Loop road so that you accelerated through snowy constellations toward the life that lay waiting, on the other side of the Earth maybe, where it was already dawn.

My Eskimo

Many summers ago I set out on a hell-bent drive through the Yukon Territory which brought me in no small measure humility and faith. All of this is true. Most of it. The parts I remember, anyway.

First I need to tell you a story that goes around in Alaska taverns about the Eskimo. You’ve may have heard it: an explorer is stranded on a sheet of polar ice. He's surely doomed. In wild desperation he prays to God, actually gets on his knees and asks God to save him. He's not given to prayer, especially not given to belief, but now he's ready to try anything. "Dear God," he says, "if you save me just this time I'll always believe." Time passes. The polar nights are cold and the days are pretty cold, too. And as he's shivering on his sheet of ice he sees this black speck in the distant rime of Arctic air heading straight for him. It's an Eskimo, and this native fellow climbs the ice sheet, puts a blanket around the explorer, feeds him some dried salmon and high-bush cranberries, and spirits him by canoe back to Barrow. Not much later the explorer is rifling down shots in the tavern and bragging how he didn't need God at all since there had been an Eskimo nearby. A typical bar tale told under the canopy of northern lights.

In my story, I had two days to make the Haines ferry -- almost seven hundred miles from the Alaskan interior -- and I was certain to arrive on time for the sailing. Yet, that first morning I was so filled with dread of missing it, that I whipped out of a friend’s driveway and plunged into a culvert. Three hours later, the tow truck arrived. Already behind schedule, I sped angrily down the Al-Can highway, only to be stopped in the road by a forest fire which raged near the town of Tok. Furious and frazzled, by the time I crossed into Canada, near dusk, I resolved to drive through the night.

Hundreds, thousands of jackrabbits lazed along the shoulder of the road, taking the last of the low-flung Yukon sun, scampering for cover as I sped past. Every so often, one shot across the highway.

The only driver on that hundred-mile stretch, I played dodge-the-hare until I finally misjudged one, or it misjudged the car -- either way, the hare slipped under the front tire with a loud whap, and then the car began to list dangerously to port.

I stopped, crept under with a flashlight, and found blood and bones packed around the brake drum. After dislodging most of the remains, I resumed driving madly south, but the wheel banged and scraped, and the car canted left and slowed to a crawl. According to the map (which now had fissures in it), the nearest service station was in Burwash Landing: twenty miles.

When I finally arrived, the station stood under the arc of a weak floodlamp. The only other building at the edge of the wilderness was an adjacent cafe, its neon light flickering in the dark. The mechanic had already gone home. I suppose I’d hoped to find an earnest, all-night Canadian wrench junkie. But my best plans had nothing to do with the over-arching scheme of things.

I pulled off the highway into an open field and parked. I pitched my tent, lighting up the site with my headlights. I crossed the street to the cafe where, through the window, I watched a grizzly bear raid the dumpster out back. “We don’t usually get them here,” said the waitress. “Glad I’m not sleeping in a tent.” You might say I slept fitfully.

In the morning I drove across the field to the apron of the gas station. A young man in a red baseball cap sat behind the desk at the service station. He had terrible acne and a gap between his teeth, but looked fresh, like he'd slept pretty well without worrying about bears.

“Can’t look at it today,” he said, leaning back in the chair and propping his feet on the desk. He was not the mechanic, he said. The mechanic was home sleeping. But there was more than a day’s work lined up ahead of him whenever he made his entrance.

I sat in the car and waited, drumming my hands on the steering wheel. It was nearly noon when the mechanic showed and set to work. I could see his legs dangling out from under a blue pickup in the bay.

Whenever the mechanic stood, I waved at him and smiled. The first few times he grinned back, then he flat-out ignored me. I watched him roll in and out on that little sled that they use to creep under cars. There was something else, at the edge of my vision, a dark blur in the bright sunlight just below the nose of the car.

It was a furry tail, whipping side to side in the glare. I was transfixed a moment before I climbed out and walked around the hood.

A dog lay under the engine, pawing away at my tire. He was a heavy-set Lab with dirt-clumped fur. The dog glanced up, hare bits and suet on his muzzle, and then he went back to work, yanking away and twisting his head side to side.

Five minutes later he was snoozing under the shade of the service station awning: my Eskimo. And he hadn’t spun a wrench.

I backed the car out of the station, and the wheel grooved steadily, quietly, effortlessly along the road. I drove toward Haines. Moderately, you could say, buoyantly.

Something had shifted as I thought about my luck. I pulled off the road for a rest stop at Sheep Mountain and watched the white flecks of Dall sheep as they grazed on the green eastern slope. The air was sweet with the smell of fireweed and sage and a faint tinge of campfires. I stopped at Boutillier Summit for a last look down the Kluane Basin and the glimmer of blue light on the glaciers. I paused to listen to the wind as it rifled down the pass at Dezadeash Lake. I sat on the hood of the car and gazed at bald eagles as they wheeled above the fir trees along the Chilkat River.

Finally in Haines, I parked at the wharf. Lights danced over the water in the harbor and the peaks threw tall shadows against the starry sky. I gave thanks. And that night, I slept quite well before a toasty fireplace in a waterfront lodge. I missed the morning ferry by choice.