The Sea Runners - Ivan Doig [3]
As for this crew in evening dawdle all around him, they nested here idle as—Abruptly Melander stood up, a process like staves suddenly framing themselves together into a very large scarecrow. Amid a card game several bunks away a shipwright from Karlskrona flicked a nervous glimpse his way.
Grinning at so easy a giveaway, Melander awarded a mocking nod to his derider and in galumphing strides went from the barracks. Outside held another sort of confinement, but at least airier than in. Melander as ever glanced up, the way lie might have checked a topgallant sail, at the peak that thrust over all their lives at New Archangel, ungainly Verstovia, Its summit a triangle of rough rock atop a vaster triangle of forested slope, Verstovia presided up there broad and becrowned, the first presence each morning, the last at every dusk. And farther, snowier crags attended Verstovia on both sides. A threefold Jericho, this place New Archangel, walled first by the stockade, next by these tremendous mountains, and last, the distances to anywhere else of the world.
Odd, the deceit of distance. How it was that men would brave the miles to a new place, the very total of those miles seeming to promise a higher life than the old, and then find the work dull, the wage never quite totting up to what it should, the food worse than ever—the longing to be elsewhere now pivoted straight around. Yes, that was the way for a seven-year man, distance played these tricks as if a spyglass had spun end-for-end in his hands.
Melander moved off toward the central street of the settlement and encountered one of the company clerks, no doubt on his way to the governor's hill garden. Many of the Castle Russians strolled such a constitutional at evening, any custom of home being paced through more devoutly here than in Muscovy itself. Melander considered that the man was wasting footsteps. More than beds of pansies and fuchsias were required to sweeten the soul of any Russian. Nonetheless—
"Drostia," the lanky Swede offered with a civil nod and was greeted in turn. Perhaps a Melander could not rise at New Archangel, but at least he could invest some care to stay level.
This was one of the lengthening evenings of summer of 1858, the moment of year when darkness seemed not to care to come and New Archangel's dusk took advantage to dawdle on and on. Before the season turned, eventide would stretch until close onto midnight. The long light copied Swedish summer. Which meant that while this slow vesper of the Alaskan day was the time Melander liked best, it also cast all the remindful shadows of what he had become absented from. His birthland. The sea. And his chosen livelihood. Triple tines of exile. Much to be prodded by.
Only because the route afforded the most distance for his restless boots, Melander roved on west through the narrow shoreline crescent of settlement. Past log building after log building, bakery, joinery, warehouses, officers' quarters, smithy; if bulk of timbering were the standard of civilization, New Archangel could have preened grand as Stockholm. Sea drifter lie was, Melander had never got used to tins hefty clamped into-the-wilderness feel of the port town. "Log barns and sawdust heads," the style of Russian America was summed by Melander.
In about four hundred paces from his barracks departure Melander's traipse necessarily ended, the high timbered stockade with its closed sally port here stoppering Xew Archangel until morning.
Melander still needed motion. And so changed course to the north. Rapidly passed the gate watchman yawning within his hut. Climbed the short knoll where the first of the stockade's blockhouses overlooked the gate. In long pulls clambered up the ladder to the catwalk beside the blockhouse. Here met the quizzing glance of the Russian sentry and muttered: "The damned Finns are singing in the barracks again.