"Marking Progress"

MARKING PROGRESS

Winter 2011-12
Cold snow had fallen throughout the windless night, allowing for an even distribution of crystals. A cold snow produces pinpoint flakes that blanket the ground with almost as much air as ice—like Styrofoam beads in a cardboard box—and, between the berms, the snow had smoothly filled our narrow gravel driveway. Now, as I backed my mid-size car from its warm, lighted garage into the darkness of a sub-zero, post-precipitation morning, my headlights revealed a canvas undisturbed. At the edges of the moving cone of light I could see spruce trees, their limbs layered with tiers of snow, and clumps of willow and alder, their distinctions blurred into white abstractions. It was 6 a.m., my teen-age son already snoozing in the passenger seat, his headphones on, a world away, oblivious to our travels, even to my existence. I was taking him to catch a bus at his high school for an overnight ski trip, and he was working on his powers of relaxation.

Here at the end of the road, we were the first creatures to move after the passage of the storm. Here, even the denizens of night had hunkered down.

My high beams knifed down the driveway and aimed toward the main homestead road. I looked for some sign of life, and around the first sweeping turn I spotted the deep, hoof-dragging tracks of a single browsing moose forming roughly a straight line perpendicular to the road, from ditch to ditch. They were marks of determination and purpose: Keep the belly full, the energy up. The winter is long and cold, and the casualties are high. My headlights revealed this segment of time, and brushed on by.

Again, a stretch of untrammeled roadway lay ahead like carpet. Then the careless track of an exploring snowshoe hare intruded—infiltrated the road bed, its long back legs and short front paws scratching distinctive hieroglyphics furtively into the open, then ambling back to the comfort of the low black spruce. Just beyond those tracks lay a streak of bounding prints, another hare, bursting from cover and leaping low and lean across the road—dot, dot, dot with clusters of tracks, the two forelegs neatly tucked between the back legs—and then off the road and gone—a swift, successful passage.

And then empty road again for another hundred yards, where we drove by our nearest neighbor’s house more than a quarter-mile from our home. There, the delivery man had driven in, flung the blue-plastic-wrapped morning newspaper into the yellow plastic box, performed a quick three-point turn, and departed, following precisely his entry tracks, into which I now comfortably slid as we motored on out of our private road and onto the borough-maintained thoroughfare, untouched thus far by the blade of any plow, all of which were likely roaring down the Sterling Highway, scraping clean the blacktopped lanes for early morning commuters. Down the road I traveled in the twin tracks of the delivery man, who veered from his headlong path only to sidle up to another paper box. Straight, narrow, parallel tracks plunging ahead into the darkness—now marred by the cloven crossing of another moose and, a couple hundred yards later, another, and then more hares. Suddenly a great grey owl was illuminated in the bare branches of a quaking aspen. It dipped a wing and seemed to fall in a downward arc as it wheeled away and angled deep into the forest and was gone.

Another driveway met the main road, but this one brought with it the tracks of a second vehicle, wider than the first. Then more driveways, more drivers. The tracks of moose and hares diminished , replaced by cars and dogs, the double back wheels of a school bus—accoutrements of a population burgeoning as the highway neared. Along the roadway sat homes with the lights on now and people on the move. A car warmed itself in a driveway exhaust roiling from a tailpipe. Through a living room window I glimpsed the moving figures on a large flat-screen television. A shadowy human figure passed before a curtain.

On the road, the undisturbed snow diminished to less than half of the total. And then I came to the highway intersection, where dark vehicles with bright eyes skimmed past on the ice, and I awaited my turn to enter the slipstream and swim for the city.

For nearly my entire life, I have lived at the end of this same three-mile road. For most of my life, it was gravel from start to finish; now the first mile from the highway has been blacktopped, and the vast majority of the road’s residents live along this stretch. When I was a child, the last names of all the families living on the road were placed on a large wooden sign near the highway; now the families are so numerous that no sign could hold their names, unless the print was too small to read. Until 15 years ago, our nearest neighbor on the road lived one full mile away; now it is one-fourth of that distance. Someday, maybe, when I am the last of the Fairs living on this isolated high bluff above the Kenai River valley, perhaps unable to afford to keep all the land—and without siblings interested in moving back here from Anchorage and Wasilla—the field and the forest and at least one of the homesites will have to be sold, and the people living at the end of the road will suddenly multiply. And with that multiplication will come even fewer blank canvases, or canvases that remain unmarked for long.

Feb. 9, 2012