Holding onto our holiday tradition

As Joan Didion wrote, “I have already lost touch with a couple of the people I used to be.”

It’s unsettling to realize I’ve been doing this for nearly two decades: Venturing into the frozen Alaska wilderness with a parcel of items I can’t lose if I want to survive. It is grueling and dangerous, and I do it for no reason other than it feels like exactly what I need to do. How strange it was then. How much stranger it is now. Jill, age 26, believed she came to Alaska to find herself, but Jill, age 45, no longer holds that delusion. There is no discovery at the end of the trail. There is no end to the trail. There is only the horizon stretching out infinitely.

Over the holidays, Beat and I returned to Alaska for what … the 20th time? I’ve long lost track. Every year since we moved in together in 2011, our visits happen on average twice a year, sometimes one more or one less for various reasons. But we haven’t missed a year, not even during the grief-stricken pandemic year of 2021, or when I was ill with Graves Disease in 2017. I moved to Alaska to find myself and then I left Alaska only to find Beat, but Alaska is what brought us together. Bonding over this most strange of endeavors — Venturing into the frozen Alaska wilderness with a parcel of items we can’t lose if we want to survive — cemented our love.

Still, how much longer will … can … we do this? It’s so physically taxing. More so for me than for Beat. Even though I have “youth” on my side, I don’t have health on my side. I wonder how much longer my asthma/autoimmune tendencies will allow me to grasp this line I’ve held onto desperately for two decades. Jill, age 26, believed she could do anything she set her mind to. Jill, age 45, no longer holds that delusion.

The trip we had planned through the White Mountains for Dec. 20-24 did not look difficult on paper. It involved 80 miles of walking between four different cabins in five days, with 1,300 to 1,600 feet of climbing each day, good trail conditions, and “mild” winter temperatures. (As you can see from my frosty selfies, “mild” still means spending a reasonable amount of time at 18 below zero. But old-school Fairbanksians remember the winters when 40 below went on for weeks and will remind you every chance they get that 0F is downright tropical.)

The Bureau of Land Management recently completed a new cabin that Beat was eager to visit, since its name, “Yeager’s,” is a homonym of the first two syllables of Beat’s last name, so he says, it’s “my cabin.” Our friends Corrine and Eric — who we’ve spent so many Christmases with that they have become a second family — reserved the cabin for two nights surrounding the Solstice. Joining them meant a tight turnover for us. We arrived at the Fairbanks airport after 1 a.m. Dec. 20 and hit the trail from Wickersham Dome fewer than 10 hours later.

The morning was cloudy but skies cleared up in the evening, granting us a cold night with occasional views of the Northern Lights. Cabin life with our friends is fun and so very different from plodding through the subfreezing forest and contemplating the universe. Eric always spends several hours gathering and sawing a week’s worth of firewood to “appease the cabin gods.” Corrine samples everybody’s freeze-dried dinners and other questionable food choices (I brought a bunch of Kachava powder for a nutritious addition to my trail snacks. As it turns out, “Hot Kachava” is a synonym for “tasteless cement.”) Beat won’t admit to being tired but still dozes off on his bunk while the rest of us argue the merits of weird videos I posted on the Internet when I was in a weird mood one night.

The following day was the Winter Solstice. Corrine had reserved Yeager’s again, so we decided to hang with them rather than march to our reserved cabin, Borealis. But none of us is the sit-still type (maybe Eric won’t mind a relaxing day in a rustic cabin, but I think he also doesn’t want to waste firewood by sitting inside all day.) Corrine and Eric set out for a ride while Beat and I loaded up light sleds and did a 16-mile hike out the Big Bend Trail and back.

This trail reminds me of Boulder’s Table Mesa under fresh snow, with Flatirons-like rock formations jutting out of the valley. Only here, the trees are tiny and especially spindly, and on this particular Solstice afternoon, it was 18 below. I was feeling contemplative, straining to push my body through the present while my mind drifted into the past — mostly to Homer, Alaska, circa 2006, when I’d set out in the evening darkness for training rides in woefully inadequate gear and return home with white toes that kept me paralyzed in pain while they turned purple then blue and then finally pink again. Back when I thought this sort of pain was necessary to get stronger, necessary to grow. And not pain that could simply be prevented by trading out too many pairs of cotton socks for a better solution.

Beat proposed a turnaround eight miles in. This jolted me back to the present. The hike had felt like floating so far, but beyond my reveries, my legs had become deeply fatigued. It was going to be a long haul back. We lounged on the sleds in a spot only partially protected from the deep subzero windchill, sharing hot drinks. I relished the moment, observing Beat in his happy place. He won’t be returning to the Iditarod Trail this year. It’s the first time he hasn’t lined up for the ITI — save for COVID year 2021 — since his first trip in 2012. It’s strange to imagine Beat without a trip to Nome on his horizon. He says he needed a break this year, and that he’s content. And I get it; I burned out on the ITI several years before I “retired” (and I remain a never-say-never person, so I may not be permanently retired, but right now my interest in racing the Iditarod Trail is a fraction of a percent. Return to the trail, yes. Race, no.) Still, I remain skeptical that Beat is content not to be there because when I see him out here, I see contentedness.

We were treated to one more Aurora show at Yeager’s as we greeted the longest night of the year. It’s interesting revisiting these photos. In my memory, now just a couple of weeks past this trip, it had been cloudy the entire time. The photos betray that story I’ve been telling myself. There was lots of color and plenty of open sky. It goes to show the dubious reliability of memory. The low light at 65 degrees North, which I love so much, can still fool me into believing the sun never shines on winter-bound Alaska.

On Dec. 22, we said goodbye to Corrine and Eric and continued west toward the Fossil Creek Valley. A mile and a half from the cabin, I realized I’d left my phone behind. Beat was already too far ahead to call out to him. I could see his headlamp, so I dropped my sled and started running toward him, but Beat only seemed to pull farther away. Damn my weak little legs. I decided to let him go and return up the hill for my phone, knowing that tacking on three bonus miles would put me far behind. Today, I’d be wholly alone.

I did see three other humans that day. The first was a solo cyclist from Fairbanks, training to ride to Nome. Then two snowmachines passed in a narrow willow tunnel before the Beaver Creek crossing. I stepped as far off the trail as I could, sinking to my hip with one leg as the first driver crept past me. He was as careful as possible, but the wide trailer he was hauling snagged my sled. I was already close to ground level with my hip in the deep snow, so my body lurched around before I realized what was happening. My legs became tangled in the sled pole as the driver unknowingly dragged my sled with my body in tow. I was too confused and bemused to shout, but luckily his partner called out before he sped up. The first driver rushed to my aid and helped me untwist myself from the pole and harness. He was profusely apologetic, but I was unhurt, and anyway, it wasn’t his fault. I should have flagged him to stop before he passed so I could unhook my harness and lift my sled off the trail. There wasn’t enough room for both on the narrow passage.

It’s the first time I’ve ever been “run over” by a snowmachine in 19 years, though. So that’s something.

The rest of the day was uneventful. I became lost in early Alaska daydreams once again. I caught myself thinking hard, as though I was trying to manifest the memory into something tangible. I was trying to connect with the person who stumbled into this endeavor all of those years ago, the person who thrilled at the cold wind and darkness, who could experience the depths of such beauty with fresh eyes. The person who in so many other ways is a stranger to me now. The person I used to be.

Beat and I spent the night at Caribou Bluff cabin, a small 10-foot-by-12-foot structure high on a narrow limestone ridge above Fossil Creek. It was cloudy again, but for a half hour before bedtime, a small sucker hole opened to the north, and we caught a third night of Northern Lights.

Day four was our longest day, 19 miles back to Wickersham Creek and Eleazar’s cabin. We woke to two inches of fresh snow, and flurries continued throughout the day. The light was flat and uninspiring. I could no longer derive entertainment from old memories, so I returned to audiobooks. On this day, I listened to “Everything is F*cked” by Mark Manson. The book, described as a “bold and unfiltered look at the concept of hope in a world that often feels chaotic,” is itself all over the place and reasonably chaotic. But in my fatigue, many of Mark’s insights resonated. I found myself breathing out a labored “yes,” to sentences such as: “Perhaps then, we will not only realize but finally embrace The Uncomfortable Truth: that we imagined our own importance, we invented our purpose, and we were, and still are, nothing.”

Here is The Uncomfortable Truth, according to Mark Manson:

“You and I and everyone we know will die, and little to nothing that we do will ever matter on a cosmic scale. And while some people fear that this truth will liberate them from all responsibility, that they’ll go snort an eight ball of cocaine and play in traffic, the reality is that this truth scares them because it liberates them to responsibility. It means that there’s no reason to not love ourselves and one another. That there’s no reason to not treat ourselves and our planet with respect. That there’s no reason to not live every moment of our lives as though it were to be lived in eternal recurrence."

Eternal recurrence. What a beautiful and terrifying concept. It’s an idea that originated with the Stoics and was later embraced by Nietzche, postulating that time repeats itself in an infinite loop, and that the same events will continue to occur in the same way, over and over again, for eternity. Whether or not it’s true, wouldn’t we all live our lives differently if we believed it to be true? If we knew there was no escape from the cycle of death and rebirth, no heaven, no Nirvana, only what is here, now, at this very moment?

Mark Manson’s brand of pop philosophy is a new spin on existentialism, the idea that life is absurd and the only way to escape chaos and meaninglessness is to embrace free will and create our own purpose. I can’t pretend that marching through the frozen Alaska wilderness has a transactional purpose or tangible meaning. But if I were to choose an eternal recurrence, a single moment to experience again and again? It would probably be this.

Our night at Eleazar’s cabin was warm and windy, and we got an early start so we’d arrive back in Fairbanks with enough time to complete our holiday and second cabin trip shopping before stores closed on Christmas Eve. I listened to the rest of Mark’s book and grew increasingly agitated and angry as he evangelized a future led by AI overlords. I don’t want a future that will “optimize” humanity or whatever comes after humanity. I want a future for this, for the lynx and moose and gray jays, the chickadees flitting through the spruce and ptarmigan balancing on tiny willow branches. I want a future for the boreal forest and frozen swamps and weeks of 40 below.

I want a future in the past.

I suppose this is what I will cling to as my purpose. I want to be one who sees beauty. I want to be one who remembers. Writing this, I’m caught by a quote from a wonderful essay I just came across today by Substack writer Catherine Shannon:

“We all know that life does not hand out bouquets. Flowers do not just appear in the world. The same is true for a life of meaning. Both are grown, over time, from the tiniest seeds. You have to cultivate meaning in your life. You need to do the hard work of tilling the soil and nurturing the seeds. No one can do it for you. Grow your own flowers and give them away to everyone you meet. You’re right: the earth is not very fertile, people are not always grateful, flowers eventually die. But do you still see the point of it all? Do you see the beauty of the gesture?”

Do you see?