Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [85]
As John labored on optimistically, I began to doubt whether I could hack it. The amount of work we put in didn’t translate readily into results. The cabin no longer seemed like our perfect homestead, but a dark, close space. As we nailed down tongue and groove spruce flooring in the sleeping loft, I stopped being able to picture myself lying on the futon there next to John. Instead of the property making me feel closer to him, I felt acres apart.
After a weekend spent in my grubbiest clothes, I started wearing lipstick to work during the week. That fall, my skin turned colorless like the terrain outside—washed out, as fall always was. On the weekends, I strained to imagine how John and I would fix up the cabin—where a small fridge and a wood stove would go; how we’d build kitchen countertops and shelves; how we’d rig up a simple bath; what we’d plant in garden beds next to the house. Come Monday, I marked the movements through my office window of the yellow truck owned by a shy crab fisherman I barely knew. Somewhere along there—in the muddle of pry bars, rusty nails, the smell of old fiberglass insulation, rotting spruce posts, and sinkholes in the yard that we thought might hold twenty-year-old sewage—part of me had wandered off.
Figuring out—and fixing—what’s broken is so much harder than building anew. At the ready we had level, chalk line, and square. Our measurements were clean and we knew that as the ground shifted beneath the skids on which the cabin sat, we would have to shim the corners to make it right. But I had no shims to prop up myself. Despite our six acres, and the neighboring eighty we believed the moose would willingly share, the boundary of our ownership became a string of impossibilities to me: impossible to have the freedom I wanted, the space I craved. I felt monstrously cruel and couldn’t find the words to describe what was wrong: I want my own desk was all I could manage to say. In the two-room cabin we’d devised, there wasn’t space.
I wanted to freeze time. I wanted to stop the mushrooming of our to-do list out on the property. I thought if the clock paused, I could make sense of everything. Instead, winter smothered fall and one night, huddled near the heater at our rental place, the words were choking me. I need to go. John went in to the bathroom and closed the door. When he came out, he lay on the bed. I wanted to lie down next to him; we were each other’s comfort.
“Please leave,” he said.
Four years had whittled down to this: Words stuck in the throat. A desire to cling to the very thing I was running from. An inability to say what I really felt, because I didn’t yet know how to describe it. I had hurt John beyond measure and I hated myself for it. But a quiet wave of relief washed over me.
In the weeks that followed, I emptied our place of my things. It wasn’t hard to figure out which stuff belonged to me; I realized in my mind, my things had remained separate all along. My old red station wagon proved a second home; it could carry everything I needed and it always started up. Friends helped carry my piano across the snow. I hadn’t realized that, called to provide a little muscle, they’d witness this unraveling. I didn’t want to see them again for a while. In the winter air, the instrument’s soundboard shrank. But it kept tune enough. I clung to the keyboard, to Chopin nocturnes, Bach preludes, and those ponderously melodic pieces of Russian Romantics. Now there was something immensely practical in the lacy scores that had gathered dust for months.
FOR A LITTLE while, I’d had what I thought I’d always wanted: a little piece of Alaska. But that January, I took off. This was a tenet of the modern back-to-the-land lifestyle: You could abandon it. The land, the project had been a choice. I realized I was done with it: the sense of idleness