KAITLYN BURD
Nature with You in It
You buy in hard to the idea of a small life. Twenty-one, you meet the daughter of your mother’s old friend one afternoon in Istanbul. The daughter has been living there and takes you back to her Westernized apartment, where you make Turkish coffee and hand-rolled cigarettes. This is the moment you fall in love with littleness, sitting with a girl in a saffron room with plastic jugs of water lining the hall. Before that, you’d been a child trying to grow into a life larger than what you find yourself to be, but when you drink the silty coffee with the cardamom sprinkled in, you see that this too is sufficient. You’d used water from the jugs to make the coffee because the water from the tap is no good, and though you were slightly appalled to realize that it was one man’s job to carry all those heavy bottles up the, what, four flights of stairs, you are also attracted to it. To live in a place where even the most basic things require the labor of someone with a name. It has a tenderness, a nobility to it. And it gets you thinking that you could be just such a person—a person who could be anyone.
*
“But what will you do?” your mother demands when you tell her of your plans to move to Alaska.
“I’ll work on a permaculture settlement,” you explain.
“A what?” — from your father.
“It’s a cabin by a lake in the mountains that sustains itself,” you say. “Like a farm.”
Your mother is not from here. She was an immigrant, and she has poured her lifeblood into robust, American institutions like PTA and Vacation Bible School and field hockey in the hope that, with her in them, these organizations would rise up to be a larger, more American — and therefore more unimpeachable — mother to you. Now you say you will leave all this.
Your father is an American and therefore sees you as American too. So his concerns have more to do with your 401K.
“It sounds like an adventure,” he tells you, “but it seems more like a vacation than a career path to me. I mean, why do you want to work on a farm when you’ve got an education?”
You are, as it turns out, educated. This, you have learned, is the prerequisite for your decisions to be met with any sort of respect. Yet, you have not been educated enough nor are you applying your education enough in this decision-making process to avoid your parents’ hand-wringing. No radical stance against capitalism or against a technologically-alienated age, your desire to move to Alaska comes from the recognition that, of most things in life, you simply do not care.
“But you won’t stay like this forever,” your mother quickly points out. “Your body will get older, and you won’t be able to do physical labor, and without health insurance what will you do then? Choosing poverty won’t keep you from the degradation of it.”
She is trying to wake you up to the fear of survival, regrets that she had not, for all these years, said more.
You point out that she is being a little shrill.
Your mother does not care. She takes pride in being a woman with a child, but she has learned long ago that such pride does not come from self-aggrandizement.
“You don’t have to yell. I’m right here,” you remind her.
Your mother sits back in her chair, wondering if you mean to make her more of a mother with the way you behave. Because how can she keep from saying the most motherly of things?
“You’re here now, but you won’t be.”
*
Somewhere between Istanbul and the online ad to work in Alaska, you had cultivated a love for period Western movies of isolated men living out on the desert or at the foot of some mountain. These men always have names that are monosyllabic like Hank or John or Jack or Ben, any larger name whittled away long ago. You have done the same with yours.
These men always have faded blue jeans, drink black coffee, and stand staring out at views that look like they were first art and only briefly, impulsively, decided to visit reality.
Watching the men watch the views, even as these real men pretend to be characters, you feel yourself called, called back, to some life that has never been your own. You consider that maybe the mountains are your vocation.
When you go looking for a livelihood in them, a part of you wants to work for just such a person. Only, the trouble with the lone mountain men is that they don’t look for help by posting ads on Craigslist. Instead, you settle for the next best thing: living alone with a woman.
*
Her name is Heather, and to get to her cabin, you must take four flights. In the last, a cobalt-colored float plane, you sit copilot because there is no other seat for you. You do not touch anything. Hands in your lap, you leave them relaxed, refusing to show how much love and terror now lines your intestines. You refuse to show as much even to yourself. The turbulence is spectacular: not only up and down but side to side in what Heather had said is the result of a tailwind. Your body raises from the seat, straining against the seat belt, and then it slams back into the cushion as the plane completes another brief free-fall.
You, not one for truisms, aphorisms, or any type of mantra, finds yourself repeating, I am a kite buffeting in the wind. I put my trust in metal and this woman.
Heather, sitting beside you, tries to squash the fly that has made it into the airplane. She succeeds by pinning it under her bare finger.
Older than you had expected her to be, Heather has gray hair pulled back in a high ponytail, and she is beautiful with the beauty that never takes the time to notice itself.
When you had emailed with Heather about the ad to work at the settlement, you had entertained the concern that you were enlisting yourself in some eco-evangelical operation. You feared the type of person who wears very expensive shoes and drinks almond milk even though the gallon of water it takes to grow every nut is sucking the Salinas Valley dry. You take issue with such a person, your idea of that person, not so much because of the contradictions in the belief system—what belief system isn’t contradictory?—but for how such a person threatens your idea of your own life. You do not want to be taken in as apostle. Yours is not an ideological stake to the land.
But you see that Heather is looking for no such thing, in any case. So far, all she has told you that you could not take your forty-five dollar canister of bear spray on the plane.
“It will blind us if it goes off, and then we will both die,” she’d stated. “If you go out where the bears are heavy, you can carry a gun. Can you shoot a gun?”
You had admitted that you had never tried.
Before the flight, when you still have internet and cell service, you had researched the lake you will be living alongside of, and you had found that it is fed by glacial melt. So, when you see what is left of the glacier, rising white, glaring like God, you know you must be close.
“Here we go,” Heather says, tilting the plane sideways and tracing a circle in the sky so that, through the window, you can see it: the only place for a hundred miles where some semblance of civilization lies.
*
It takes Heather most of the way through your nearly silent dinner to ask why you wanted to move to Alaska, and by that point you still haven’t come up with an answer you feel is worth sharing.
Trying to be the enthusiastic employee, you are smiling more than usual and — for the first time in three years — eating meat. With caribou flesh wadded around your morals, you say imprecise things about self-sufficiency.
“It sounds like you want to hide from the world,” Heather says around a bite of stew.
“Or maybe just its people,” you try to joke, but Heather does not laugh. She swallows her stew.
“Here, you will only be exposed.”
You, who had been debriefed on fire safety, water safety, worksite safety, bear and moose safety and then shown the grave of a woman who had been decapitated by the propeller of a plane during your afternoon tour, consider that Heather might have a point.
“And why did you move to Alaska?” you ask in what you hope is an affable, not challenging, tone.
“I’ve always lived here,” Heather answers, and you think she will not say more, but she adds, “My husband and I used to live in Anchorage. We were both ecologically minded because you have to be an idiot not to be around here. We both recycled, rode bicycles instead of cars, made cute little efforts. Then, one night, he was taken off the back of his bicycle and stabbed to death. Whoever it was that murdered him didn’t take his wallet, so I still haven’t figured out why the person did it. Anyway, this place was his dream for us. I figured at least I could live to see it.”
You, in this moment, want to love Heather in the best way you can. You want to say that you are sorry and recognize that those words are inadequate. You think that she is stronger than words like that. You say all of this. You feel shy afterwards and also moved to see that she is human.
But you learn anew that she is different from you because, after you finish speaking, Heather takes a gulp of water and responds, “I didn’t bring you out here for sympathy. I brought you out here because the glacier dust gives me asthma and makes it harder for me to breathe.”
“What’s glacier dust?”
“Stone particles lifted off from the evaporating ice,” Heather says. “It’s collecting in my lungs.”
*
You learn the next day that you have not been brought here to farm. You had packed out images of root vegetables, still filthy, in your hands. You had expectations of black dirt so moist it would change your idea of what filth was. But no. Filth remains filth. You have been brought here to build a sauna.
For the first week, you hoe the ground alongside the greenhouse and remove ancient root systems, rocks. You collect pea gravel from the shore and ferry it to the upturned ground. Always with a level by the second week, you tamp soil and try to lay it flat. Then, with the level again, you pour your gravel down. To lay the foundation takes longer than you would expect and longer that Heather had too, it seems. You worry that she is not impressed with you as an employee. You worry that she sees you as incompetent, tedious.
With chest-high waders on, you carry cinderblocks from the float plane to where the sauna will go. Back and forth, back and forth, you make the trek with arms growing weaker, arms getting stronger. Your back hurts, your legs hurt, your hands are covered in scrapes. You cover them in gardening gloves, aware that if you felt any more comfortable here, you would already have stopped working.
Meanwhile, Heather chops trees down and uses wedges to crack them into beams, impatient to make walls from the wood.
You had not thought a sauna an essential part of a permaculture settlement, but Heather explains that, alongside the greenhouse, it will extend the growing season.
“Just wait till winter,” she says, though usually she does not talk.
She works in her wood shop on the beams and her endlessly changing diagrams while you keep shifting piles of pebbles, tamp, tamp.
And ceaselessly, from seven in the morning through the afternoon, the radio blares. Classic rock, pop, opera, folk, whatever racket — it does not matter. Heather says the noise keeps the bears away, though, maybe, the bears are still sleeping.
Through this work, you learn that Heather is not an organized woman. She makes her own models and her own calculations, and often she changes them. You tell yourself you should take comfort in this — that you are both learning — but when she makes you shift the piers you’ve sunk three inches closer in on all sides, you do not take comfort. You resent Heather. You resent saunas and cement and every godforsaken measurable thing.
You move the piers three inches.
She leaves her tools lying around. Some of them you are reluctant to touch, though you are near none of them the first time you seriously hurt yourself.
The first time you get seriously hurt, you are carrying a beam down to the foundation of the sauna and somehow you trip against one of the cinderblocks you’ve lined up to make the bottom of the wall. You’ve gotten your foot caught in the well, and as you pitch forward, you splinter the beam. Your ankle turns in an odd angle, and you fall. For a moment there is relief in being brought to ground because you can lie there. This gives you the sense of knowing where you are.
“If you hurt yourself, you’re fired,” Heather says when she comes out of the wood shop. Then she sees the splintered beam and says, “Fuel for the fire.” When she notices the ankle: “Can you move it?”
You can — sort of.
Wordlessly, she wraps your ankle in a soft cloth bandage and puts ice to it. For longer than that takes, she sets up your new work station.
“The side of the greenhouse needs to be re-plastered in any case,” she explains, setting a chair before a bin facing the lake. She pours sand, pours straw, sprinkles powder, pours water. Your task is to stir.
To elevate your ankle, she leaves you with a rusted-out gasoline can.
Bending over the contents of the bin with a shovel, your abdomen strains, but you do not mind because muscles that have been keening for weeks are now allowed to rest.
The radio is louder here than near the greenhouse, especially when Heather shuts off the table saw and goes to chop down another tree. Hardly thinking, you feel the noise move through you like heat through a wire. It’s not an energy you can keep. You listen to a poem of a spider and old songs and new electronic ones, surprised by the diversity of a station run only by Native Alaskans. As to what you had been expecting, you can’t now say, except maybe less proficiency with the Theremin.
Already, Heather has told you that Native Alaskans do not believe it is polite to look someone in the eye. Speaking out in a crowd showed excessive pride.
“They care more for community than for carving out a name for themselves,” she’d explained. So already, you admire them. But, of course, the voices that stream through the radio are distinct.
You stir. You stir. You stir until, eventually, the consistency changes. Straw snaps, coated in gray that you at first thought ugly but now take pleasure in. The mixture grows increasingly smooth, never quite loamy but earthy enough to remind you of old stories of creation. You think that this is what the giants of the world were made of.
And you?
You set down the shovel you’ve been laboring with and stick your fingers in the mixture.
You forget the sensation of constantly expecting something to happen. So it does.
*
By the time you wake up to find all the beams you’d set with Heather toppled, you are painlessly back on your feet. Only frustrated because you did not know there were regular earthquakes in Alaska. You had not even woken in the night to feel it, though Heather tells you it was a 4.2.
Picking up and resetting the beams, you rush because you have already completed this work once before. You hold the beams and screw the beams. You make sure the brackets are well anchored on the foundation’s frame.
By afternoon, you are taking a sledgehammer to the rebar, which Heather wants driven through the wells in the cinderblocks to ensure that, when another earthquake comes, the walls can withstand it.
You hammer through underground rock, the impact of your own force reverberating through steel and handle until you can feel it in your elbows. You hammer doggedly, working like a dog until, suddenly, some feet into the soil, you drive the steel so that it splits the stone. This is wondrous, how the rebar sinks, and for an instant you are flush with victory. But, without the rebar to catch it, the sledgehammer sails clear-through so that gravity and your own strength drive it straight the edge of the cinderblock, catching your curled right ring finger between the two — hammer and cement. The collision rips off the skin.
And you surprise yourself because, instead of screaming or swearing, you sing out something near a B-flat. Nerve-stricken hand unable to hold the hammer any longer, you release it and see through the blood to your finger’s pulped bone.
“I thought I said if you hurt yourself you’re fired,” Heather comes over to have a look, and looking says, “Oh, fuck.”
You do not cry, though the pain is terrific. You watch the blood go fast down your hand and suddenly feel this is something you must survive. You are light-headed but do not faint. There is clarity to this, the raising of your exposed-bone hand over your head. You even consider that it is because you’d been working so vigorously that the blood comes quickly and tickles in its descent down your wrist.
Heather turns toward the woods, comes back a minute later.
“Chew this.”
You chew and swallow the leaves she gives you.
“Did you just eat them?” she asks.
You, tasting the dirt, nod.
“Wasn’t I supposed to?” you don’t have to ask because Heather tells you it is fine. She goes off for more leaves, and when she comes back she says, “Chew and spit it on your finger. It helps slow the bleeding.”
You do not ask questions, and they do some good, the leaves. The bleeding slows, the ragged skin around your wound turning green.
You might think, I’m a leaf.
*
Because Heather can think of no task for you to complete with a destroyed finger and mild blood loss, she gives you the afternoon off.
You, trying not to blame her for every pain that has been nailed into your body these past weeks, decide to go off on a hike, but quickly, you give the idea up. When you had first tried to go for a hike here, you had asked Heather which trails were best, and that was one of the few times you’d seen Heather laugh. Once she’d stopped, she’d asked, “Who would make trails here?”
You wait until you have made it out of sight of the cabin, and then you choose a rock to sit on near the edge of the lake. Perched, you look out at the water, thinking you have not trained yourself to appreciate beauty like this — beauty spoiled by postcards, beauty too picturesque to seem part of your life, here. Your finger throbs with a certain delirium. You worry about the bone, which you can never unsee.
Sitting on the rock makes your spine hurt, so you drape your torso over the table of your legs, head dangling between your knees. You let your arms go uselessly down over the side of the rock, blood pulsing in the wound, but you don’t move it yet because the release of your shoulder blades feels good.
You consider that, with this injury, Heather might ask you to go home. You consider that maybe this would be the best thing. Yet, you do not think about what you would do if you left this place. You can’t because you are distracted by the clomp clomp clomp of stones moving on the beach.
Heather?
You know enough to move slowly as you check, not raising you head but ducking it under your leg to see.
Here you have a bear.
Big and gold, it too seems too postcard-perfect to be in your life. But only for an instant because everything is quickly made close and real by the primordial fear of this creature that could kill you, that in killing you would go first for your head and then eat your organs out from your stomach.
Of course a bear would come to this bank and the scent of your silently seeping blood.
It keeps eyes on you as it walks nearer, and you have never been at such a loss for what to do. All of your instincts feel wrong. You want to hide, to flee from it.
You have no bear spray, still have not learned how to fire a gun.
The last thing you want is confrontation, and it’s for that you decide to rise.
Slowly, carefully, you shift your body to stand atop the rock while the bear pauses its approach, watching.
It has a luster to its brown coat, though the fur is shaggy, the skin sagging from where former fat has not been eaten back into the body. A hungry frame. It has dark eyes that meet yours and feel almost human. No, more than human but still related to you. You can smell the bear’s stench of wood, water, maybe urine, and you know this means the bear can smell you too.
Heather had said they don’t like the human scent, and you hope Heather is right as you stand there in all your sweat, soap, and blood.
Because it hurts, you elevate your throbbing finger over your head first. Then the other arm, stretching out wide. You make yourself as big as you can.
And because Heather had said they don’t like noise, you speak loudly, not sparing the attention to think of what you say. You repeat, “Stay here. Stay here. Stay here.”
The bear, standing on four paws, ducks its head slightly and makes to charge.
You had not decided to sit on the rock to have higher ground in the event of a bear attack, but you will later feel gratitude for this position. It is because of your elevation that you have nowhere to run, do not even have strong enough footing to allow for flinching.
Instead, as the bear starts its charge, you hold still, shouting, “Don’t run, don’t run, don’t run.”
A false charge. A test. Such stillness tells the bear that you are a serious opponent that does not mean to fight, but could.
The bear falls back on its paws. He — or maybe she, you don’t know — shifts its weight back. It lowers and raises a back paw, rests a moment before swinging wide to walk away.
You can hear the drowsy huff of its breath, not breathing yourself.
You know it will not return, but you hold your position for a long time. You stand until the blood leaves you fingers, your arms, your shoulders. Raggedly, you exhale, breathe in, looking out at the lake in its turquoise from the glacier melt. There are salmon eggs in this water — translucent, scarlet pearls. And behind the lake there are mountains, teeming, teeming with life. How have you never noticed that the peaks together make a profile, either gorilla or George Washington, depending on whether you view it from east to west or west to east? Or that your face is a mountain range? Denali peak your bones. Your body is a salmon spawning lake. You thought you were stocked with bear food, and you are. So too you are nesting ground. Also living. You will be eaten and made home.
When you finally step off of the rock, pinpricks run up and down the lengths of your arms. The feeling is just coming back when you return to the cabin. You find Heather on the porch, shelling peas— that crisp plant snap and the undercurrent of her asthmatic wheeze.
“I saw a bear by the water,” you announce as you come to face her.
Heather, not looking up, seems not to need to confirm whether or not you are okay. She rips the spine from a pea pod, saying, “Sounds about right.”
*
“But what will you do?” your mother demands when you tell her of your plans to move to Alaska.
“I’ll work on a permaculture settlement,” you explain.
“A what?” — from your father.
“It’s a cabin by a lake in the mountains that sustains itself,” you say. “Like a farm.”
Your mother is not from here. She was an immigrant, and she has poured her lifeblood into robust, American institutions like PTA and Vacation Bible School and field hockey in the hope that, with her in them, these organizations would rise up to be a larger, more American — and therefore more unimpeachable — mother to you. Now you say you will leave all this.
Your father is an American and therefore sees you as American too. So his concerns have more to do with your 401K.
“It sounds like an adventure,” he tells you, “but it seems more like a vacation than a career path to me. I mean, why do you want to work on a farm when you’ve got an education?”
You are, as it turns out, educated. This, you have learned, is the prerequisite for your decisions to be met with any sort of respect. Yet, you have not been educated enough nor are you applying your education enough in this decision-making process to avoid your parents’ hand-wringing. No radical stance against capitalism or against a technologically-alienated age, your desire to move to Alaska comes from the recognition that, of most things in life, you simply do not care.
“But you won’t stay like this forever,” your mother quickly points out. “Your body will get older, and you won’t be able to do physical labor, and without health insurance what will you do then? Choosing poverty won’t keep you from the degradation of it.”
She is trying to wake you up to the fear of survival, regrets that she had not, for all these years, said more.
You point out that she is being a little shrill.
Your mother does not care. She takes pride in being a woman with a child, but she has learned long ago that such pride does not come from self-aggrandizement.
“You don’t have to yell. I’m right here,” you remind her.
Your mother sits back in her chair, wondering if you mean to make her more of a mother with the way you behave. Because how can she keep from saying the most motherly of things?
“You’re here now, but you won’t be.”
*
Somewhere between Istanbul and the online ad to work in Alaska, you had cultivated a love for period Western movies of isolated men living out on the desert or at the foot of some mountain. These men always have names that are monosyllabic like Hank or John or Jack or Ben, any larger name whittled away long ago. You have done the same with yours.
These men always have faded blue jeans, drink black coffee, and stand staring out at views that look like they were first art and only briefly, impulsively, decided to visit reality.
Watching the men watch the views, even as these real men pretend to be characters, you feel yourself called, called back, to some life that has never been your own. You consider that maybe the mountains are your vocation.
When you go looking for a livelihood in them, a part of you wants to work for just such a person. Only, the trouble with the lone mountain men is that they don’t look for help by posting ads on Craigslist. Instead, you settle for the next best thing: living alone with a woman.
*
Her name is Heather, and to get to her cabin, you must take four flights. In the last, a cobalt-colored float plane, you sit copilot because there is no other seat for you. You do not touch anything. Hands in your lap, you leave them relaxed, refusing to show how much love and terror now lines your intestines. You refuse to show as much even to yourself. The turbulence is spectacular: not only up and down but side to side in what Heather had said is the result of a tailwind. Your body raises from the seat, straining against the seat belt, and then it slams back into the cushion as the plane completes another brief free-fall.
You, not one for truisms, aphorisms, or any type of mantra, finds yourself repeating, I am a kite buffeting in the wind. I put my trust in metal and this woman.
Heather, sitting beside you, tries to squash the fly that has made it into the airplane. She succeeds by pinning it under her bare finger.
Older than you had expected her to be, Heather has gray hair pulled back in a high ponytail, and she is beautiful with the beauty that never takes the time to notice itself.
When you had emailed with Heather about the ad to work at the settlement, you had entertained the concern that you were enlisting yourself in some eco-evangelical operation. You feared the type of person who wears very expensive shoes and drinks almond milk even though the gallon of water it takes to grow every nut is sucking the Salinas Valley dry. You take issue with such a person, your idea of that person, not so much because of the contradictions in the belief system—what belief system isn’t contradictory?—but for how such a person threatens your idea of your own life. You do not want to be taken in as apostle. Yours is not an ideological stake to the land.
But you see that Heather is looking for no such thing, in any case. So far, all she has told you that you could not take your forty-five dollar canister of bear spray on the plane.
“It will blind us if it goes off, and then we will both die,” she’d stated. “If you go out where the bears are heavy, you can carry a gun. Can you shoot a gun?”
You had admitted that you had never tried.
Before the flight, when you still have internet and cell service, you had researched the lake you will be living alongside of, and you had found that it is fed by glacial melt. So, when you see what is left of the glacier, rising white, glaring like God, you know you must be close.
“Here we go,” Heather says, tilting the plane sideways and tracing a circle in the sky so that, through the window, you can see it: the only place for a hundred miles where some semblance of civilization lies.
*
It takes Heather most of the way through your nearly silent dinner to ask why you wanted to move to Alaska, and by that point you still haven’t come up with an answer you feel is worth sharing.
Trying to be the enthusiastic employee, you are smiling more than usual and — for the first time in three years — eating meat. With caribou flesh wadded around your morals, you say imprecise things about self-sufficiency.
“It sounds like you want to hide from the world,” Heather says around a bite of stew.
“Or maybe just its people,” you try to joke, but Heather does not laugh. She swallows her stew.
“Here, you will only be exposed.”
You, who had been debriefed on fire safety, water safety, worksite safety, bear and moose safety and then shown the grave of a woman who had been decapitated by the propeller of a plane during your afternoon tour, consider that Heather might have a point.
“And why did you move to Alaska?” you ask in what you hope is an affable, not challenging, tone.
“I’ve always lived here,” Heather answers, and you think she will not say more, but she adds, “My husband and I used to live in Anchorage. We were both ecologically minded because you have to be an idiot not to be around here. We both recycled, rode bicycles instead of cars, made cute little efforts. Then, one night, he was taken off the back of his bicycle and stabbed to death. Whoever it was that murdered him didn’t take his wallet, so I still haven’t figured out why the person did it. Anyway, this place was his dream for us. I figured at least I could live to see it.”
You, in this moment, want to love Heather in the best way you can. You want to say that you are sorry and recognize that those words are inadequate. You think that she is stronger than words like that. You say all of this. You feel shy afterwards and also moved to see that she is human.
But you learn anew that she is different from you because, after you finish speaking, Heather takes a gulp of water and responds, “I didn’t bring you out here for sympathy. I brought you out here because the glacier dust gives me asthma and makes it harder for me to breathe.”
“What’s glacier dust?”
“Stone particles lifted off from the evaporating ice,” Heather says. “It’s collecting in my lungs.”
*
You learn the next day that you have not been brought here to farm. You had packed out images of root vegetables, still filthy, in your hands. You had expectations of black dirt so moist it would change your idea of what filth was. But no. Filth remains filth. You have been brought here to build a sauna.
For the first week, you hoe the ground alongside the greenhouse and remove ancient root systems, rocks. You collect pea gravel from the shore and ferry it to the upturned ground. Always with a level by the second week, you tamp soil and try to lay it flat. Then, with the level again, you pour your gravel down. To lay the foundation takes longer than you would expect and longer that Heather had too, it seems. You worry that she is not impressed with you as an employee. You worry that she sees you as incompetent, tedious.
With chest-high waders on, you carry cinderblocks from the float plane to where the sauna will go. Back and forth, back and forth, you make the trek with arms growing weaker, arms getting stronger. Your back hurts, your legs hurt, your hands are covered in scrapes. You cover them in gardening gloves, aware that if you felt any more comfortable here, you would already have stopped working.
Meanwhile, Heather chops trees down and uses wedges to crack them into beams, impatient to make walls from the wood.
You had not thought a sauna an essential part of a permaculture settlement, but Heather explains that, alongside the greenhouse, it will extend the growing season.
“Just wait till winter,” she says, though usually she does not talk.
She works in her wood shop on the beams and her endlessly changing diagrams while you keep shifting piles of pebbles, tamp, tamp.
And ceaselessly, from seven in the morning through the afternoon, the radio blares. Classic rock, pop, opera, folk, whatever racket — it does not matter. Heather says the noise keeps the bears away, though, maybe, the bears are still sleeping.
Through this work, you learn that Heather is not an organized woman. She makes her own models and her own calculations, and often she changes them. You tell yourself you should take comfort in this — that you are both learning — but when she makes you shift the piers you’ve sunk three inches closer in on all sides, you do not take comfort. You resent Heather. You resent saunas and cement and every godforsaken measurable thing.
You move the piers three inches.
She leaves her tools lying around. Some of them you are reluctant to touch, though you are near none of them the first time you seriously hurt yourself.
The first time you get seriously hurt, you are carrying a beam down to the foundation of the sauna and somehow you trip against one of the cinderblocks you’ve lined up to make the bottom of the wall. You’ve gotten your foot caught in the well, and as you pitch forward, you splinter the beam. Your ankle turns in an odd angle, and you fall. For a moment there is relief in being brought to ground because you can lie there. This gives you the sense of knowing where you are.
“If you hurt yourself, you’re fired,” Heather says when she comes out of the wood shop. Then she sees the splintered beam and says, “Fuel for the fire.” When she notices the ankle: “Can you move it?”
You can — sort of.
Wordlessly, she wraps your ankle in a soft cloth bandage and puts ice to it. For longer than that takes, she sets up your new work station.
“The side of the greenhouse needs to be re-plastered in any case,” she explains, setting a chair before a bin facing the lake. She pours sand, pours straw, sprinkles powder, pours water. Your task is to stir.
To elevate your ankle, she leaves you with a rusted-out gasoline can.
Bending over the contents of the bin with a shovel, your abdomen strains, but you do not mind because muscles that have been keening for weeks are now allowed to rest.
The radio is louder here than near the greenhouse, especially when Heather shuts off the table saw and goes to chop down another tree. Hardly thinking, you feel the noise move through you like heat through a wire. It’s not an energy you can keep. You listen to a poem of a spider and old songs and new electronic ones, surprised by the diversity of a station run only by Native Alaskans. As to what you had been expecting, you can’t now say, except maybe less proficiency with the Theremin.
Already, Heather has told you that Native Alaskans do not believe it is polite to look someone in the eye. Speaking out in a crowd showed excessive pride.
“They care more for community than for carving out a name for themselves,” she’d explained. So already, you admire them. But, of course, the voices that stream through the radio are distinct.
You stir. You stir. You stir until, eventually, the consistency changes. Straw snaps, coated in gray that you at first thought ugly but now take pleasure in. The mixture grows increasingly smooth, never quite loamy but earthy enough to remind you of old stories of creation. You think that this is what the giants of the world were made of.
And you?
You set down the shovel you’ve been laboring with and stick your fingers in the mixture.
You forget the sensation of constantly expecting something to happen. So it does.
*
By the time you wake up to find all the beams you’d set with Heather toppled, you are painlessly back on your feet. Only frustrated because you did not know there were regular earthquakes in Alaska. You had not even woken in the night to feel it, though Heather tells you it was a 4.2.
Picking up and resetting the beams, you rush because you have already completed this work once before. You hold the beams and screw the beams. You make sure the brackets are well anchored on the foundation’s frame.
By afternoon, you are taking a sledgehammer to the rebar, which Heather wants driven through the wells in the cinderblocks to ensure that, when another earthquake comes, the walls can withstand it.
You hammer through underground rock, the impact of your own force reverberating through steel and handle until you can feel it in your elbows. You hammer doggedly, working like a dog until, suddenly, some feet into the soil, you drive the steel so that it splits the stone. This is wondrous, how the rebar sinks, and for an instant you are flush with victory. But, without the rebar to catch it, the sledgehammer sails clear-through so that gravity and your own strength drive it straight the edge of the cinderblock, catching your curled right ring finger between the two — hammer and cement. The collision rips off the skin.
And you surprise yourself because, instead of screaming or swearing, you sing out something near a B-flat. Nerve-stricken hand unable to hold the hammer any longer, you release it and see through the blood to your finger’s pulped bone.
“I thought I said if you hurt yourself you’re fired,” Heather comes over to have a look, and looking says, “Oh, fuck.”
You do not cry, though the pain is terrific. You watch the blood go fast down your hand and suddenly feel this is something you must survive. You are light-headed but do not faint. There is clarity to this, the raising of your exposed-bone hand over your head. You even consider that it is because you’d been working so vigorously that the blood comes quickly and tickles in its descent down your wrist.
Heather turns toward the woods, comes back a minute later.
“Chew this.”
You chew and swallow the leaves she gives you.
“Did you just eat them?” she asks.
You, tasting the dirt, nod.
“Wasn’t I supposed to?” you don’t have to ask because Heather tells you it is fine. She goes off for more leaves, and when she comes back she says, “Chew and spit it on your finger. It helps slow the bleeding.”
You do not ask questions, and they do some good, the leaves. The bleeding slows, the ragged skin around your wound turning green.
You might think, I’m a leaf.
*
Because Heather can think of no task for you to complete with a destroyed finger and mild blood loss, she gives you the afternoon off.
You, trying not to blame her for every pain that has been nailed into your body these past weeks, decide to go off on a hike, but quickly, you give the idea up. When you had first tried to go for a hike here, you had asked Heather which trails were best, and that was one of the few times you’d seen Heather laugh. Once she’d stopped, she’d asked, “Who would make trails here?”
You wait until you have made it out of sight of the cabin, and then you choose a rock to sit on near the edge of the lake. Perched, you look out at the water, thinking you have not trained yourself to appreciate beauty like this — beauty spoiled by postcards, beauty too picturesque to seem part of your life, here. Your finger throbs with a certain delirium. You worry about the bone, which you can never unsee.
Sitting on the rock makes your spine hurt, so you drape your torso over the table of your legs, head dangling between your knees. You let your arms go uselessly down over the side of the rock, blood pulsing in the wound, but you don’t move it yet because the release of your shoulder blades feels good.
You consider that, with this injury, Heather might ask you to go home. You consider that maybe this would be the best thing. Yet, you do not think about what you would do if you left this place. You can’t because you are distracted by the clomp clomp clomp of stones moving on the beach.
Heather?
You know enough to move slowly as you check, not raising you head but ducking it under your leg to see.
Here you have a bear.
Big and gold, it too seems too postcard-perfect to be in your life. But only for an instant because everything is quickly made close and real by the primordial fear of this creature that could kill you, that in killing you would go first for your head and then eat your organs out from your stomach.
Of course a bear would come to this bank and the scent of your silently seeping blood.
It keeps eyes on you as it walks nearer, and you have never been at such a loss for what to do. All of your instincts feel wrong. You want to hide, to flee from it.
You have no bear spray, still have not learned how to fire a gun.
The last thing you want is confrontation, and it’s for that you decide to rise.
Slowly, carefully, you shift your body to stand atop the rock while the bear pauses its approach, watching.
It has a luster to its brown coat, though the fur is shaggy, the skin sagging from where former fat has not been eaten back into the body. A hungry frame. It has dark eyes that meet yours and feel almost human. No, more than human but still related to you. You can smell the bear’s stench of wood, water, maybe urine, and you know this means the bear can smell you too.
Heather had said they don’t like the human scent, and you hope Heather is right as you stand there in all your sweat, soap, and blood.
Because it hurts, you elevate your throbbing finger over your head first. Then the other arm, stretching out wide. You make yourself as big as you can.
And because Heather had said they don’t like noise, you speak loudly, not sparing the attention to think of what you say. You repeat, “Stay here. Stay here. Stay here.”
The bear, standing on four paws, ducks its head slightly and makes to charge.
You had not decided to sit on the rock to have higher ground in the event of a bear attack, but you will later feel gratitude for this position. It is because of your elevation that you have nowhere to run, do not even have strong enough footing to allow for flinching.
Instead, as the bear starts its charge, you hold still, shouting, “Don’t run, don’t run, don’t run.”
A false charge. A test. Such stillness tells the bear that you are a serious opponent that does not mean to fight, but could.
The bear falls back on its paws. He — or maybe she, you don’t know — shifts its weight back. It lowers and raises a back paw, rests a moment before swinging wide to walk away.
You can hear the drowsy huff of its breath, not breathing yourself.
You know it will not return, but you hold your position for a long time. You stand until the blood leaves you fingers, your arms, your shoulders. Raggedly, you exhale, breathe in, looking out at the lake in its turquoise from the glacier melt. There are salmon eggs in this water — translucent, scarlet pearls. And behind the lake there are mountains, teeming, teeming with life. How have you never noticed that the peaks together make a profile, either gorilla or George Washington, depending on whether you view it from east to west or west to east? Or that your face is a mountain range? Denali peak your bones. Your body is a salmon spawning lake. You thought you were stocked with bear food, and you are. So too you are nesting ground. Also living. You will be eaten and made home.
When you finally step off of the rock, pinpricks run up and down the lengths of your arms. The feeling is just coming back when you return to the cabin. You find Heather on the porch, shelling peas— that crisp plant snap and the undercurrent of her asthmatic wheeze.
“I saw a bear by the water,” you announce as you come to face her.
Heather, not looking up, seems not to need to confirm whether or not you are okay. She rips the spine from a pea pod, saying, “Sounds about right.”
Copyright © Nov 2017 Map Literary and Kaitlyn Burd
Kaitlyn Burd is originally from Louisville, Kentucky but now lives on the southern coast of Spain. Her work has been featured in Clockhouse Review, Cleaver Magazine, Atticus Review, and elsewhere. She has also worked on the staff of Paper Darts Magazine. Currently, she is at work on a novel.
