Ester, Alaska. This was the place.
Inside, caribou burgers sizzled on an open grill, but I didn’t eat meat then. Alaska Amber was on tap, which was good because I hadn’t learned I liked whiskey yet. It was someone’s birthday. And late spring. Nearing the days that wouldn’t end, when the difference between yesterday and tomorrow would become a blurry, pink line.
Outside, it was dry, finally. Break up had passed. Forest fires burned and smoke saturated everything from our nostrils to our clothing to our sleep-deprived brains. Dogs slept on the deck. The birthday boy played his guitar and a new mother sang. It was a song he had written. The caribou was one he’d hunted. His curly hair was in tiny braids. The baby slept beside them.
Inside, I was winning at darts. I was either winning or doing very well. I’d only just learned to play, but I left the game unfinished.
Outside, I sat on the porch railing, my legs hanging. A dog sniffed the ground below me, followed one scent to another, his leash trailing across the dirt parking lot.
Inside, a first year grad student fell face first on a table and had to be carried to the bathroom. Jokes and laughter made their way through the open door to our ears.
Outside, someone who was not the birthday boy told me he was nearly ready to give up on waiting for me and all our designs on lightness. Such heavy anticipation. He flicked a cigarette, even though the grass was thirsty. I said nothing.
I went inside to the bathroom and pulled up my hair and looked in the mirror at the all-but-translucent skin on my face and the bronzed, topless woman pasted to the wall behind me.
Then, outside, he got on his bicycle and cut through the dusty lot, full of beer and pride and heartache. A recklessness I jealously celebrated.
On my way home, I drove the same route I knew he’d taken, expecting to see that he’d crashed his bicycle in the woods somewhere. Thinking I’d find him sitting drunk on the side of the highway with bloody knees. I twisted in the seat every few seconds to search. I saw no one, all the way back to my cabin.
So, he’d made it.
It was about more than a place. It was about more than a person. It was about crawling in and out of my own skin and finding the zone of contentment somewhere in between. Somewhere between day and night, wet and dry, frozen trees and forest fires.
The first time I went to the Golden Eagle Saloon I was given these directions: Drive to Ester. Turn right at the post office. Follow the bend in the road and you’re there. It was dead winter. People were probably warming their veins back to life inside with whiskey. But outside was a biting cold emptiness. No cars. Only two or three snow machines parked in the slick, frozen lot.
Communal in its desolation. I thought, this couldn’t possibly be the place.