T. Boyle - Drop City

Yes. That was what he'd said: Alaska. He repeated it for her, the whole long strung-together Normed-out sentence that ended with the noun that hit her like a body blow, the name of that alien, icebound afterthought of a place that had no deeper association for anyone in the room than _Sergeant Preston of the Yukon,__ and the Yukon wasn't even in Alaska, was it? No matter. Norm had the stage, Norm was their leader and guru and though he'd never led them before, he was leading them now, his feet dancing and his arms beating time to the silken swoosh of the suede fringe, and he was selling Alaska as if he owned it. “No rules,” he shouted, “no zoning laws, no taxes, no county dicks and ordinances. You want to build, you build. You want to take down some trees and put up a cabin by the most righteous far-out turned-on little lake in the world, you go right ahead and do it and you don't have to go groveling for anybody's permission because there's no-fucking-body there-do you hear me, people? Nobody. You can live like Daniel Boone, live like the original hippies, like our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers-off the land, man, doing your own thing, no apologies. Do you dig what I'm telling you?”

Silence, stunned silence. Everybody was seeing sled dogs and tracts of rippled snow. They were seeing-what? — king crab, bears, Eskimos, Mount McKinley rising up out of a wall calendar like a white planet tearing loose from its moorings. He was joking. He had to be.

“Are you fucking crazy?” Star turned her head and Mendocino Bill was right there beside her, tottering on his swollen white feet, his beard draining the color from his face. “Are you out of your fucking mind? Alaska? It's like sixty below up there. What are we going to do, make igloos like Nanook? Eat snow and icicles and what, seal blubber?”

“Longest day, man,” Norm said. “The sun won't set up there tonight. I've seen it. For three years I saw it. And you know what that means? That means strawberries the size of apples, that means tomatoes like watermelons and zucchini you could hollow out and _live__ in. And this”-he reached into his jacket pocket and produced another communal joint, gaudily rolled in red-white-and-blue-striped papers-"this shit grows like giant redwoods up there, like sequoias, I mean, get me to the _lumber__ mill, man.

“My uncle Roy-and I don't know how many of you know this, I mean, you do, Alfredo, and probably you, Verbie-he's got a place up there, just outside of Boynton, on the Yukon River, farthest place you can drive to in the continental U. S., the last place, I'm telling you, the last frontier, and what's the whole town built out of? Logs. You know what I'm saying? _Logs!__ I lived there three years after I dropped out of high school in my junior year because I couldn't take the plastic bourgeois capitalist fucking bullshit _brainwashing__ anymore, and I know what I'm talking about.” He flipped off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve and clapped them back on again, and then he was shaking out a folded piece of lined yellow paper and holding it up to the light.

“You see this, people? See it? This is a letter from my uncle. From Uncle Roy himself, dated two months ago, and I've been carrying it around ever since. You know what it says?” He paused to look out over the room. “It says he's in Seattle, living with my other uncle, Uncle Norm-my namesake-because he's seventy-two fucking years old and he's got arthritis so bad he can hardly wrap his fingers around the pen. He's not going back, not ever, and you know what that means? That means the cabin is ours, people, fully stocked and ready to go, traps, guns, snowshoes, six cords of wood stacked up outside the door, pots and pans and homemade furniture and all the rest, and it's going to be an adventure, it is. We're going to take down some _trees,__ because that's the way you do it-lumber is free up there, can you dig that, _free__-and we're going to build four more cabins and a meeting house and we're going to build right on down to the river because the salmon are running up that river even as we speak and they're running in the _millions.__ You dig smoked salmon? Anybody here dig smoked salmon? And the blueberries. The cranberries. You never saw anything like it. You want to know what we're going to eat? We're going to _eat the land__ because it's one big smorgasbord. And there's nobody-I mean _nobody__-to stop us.”

Everyone in the room was on their feet now, and it was like a rally, like a concert, and Star was thinking about the time she'd seen the Velvet Underground live in a downtown loft that was wall-to-wall people-there was that kind of excitement, that kind of energy. A current was burning through the room, and it was burning through her too, and never mind the headache, never mind the bulldozers, this was something new, outrageous, beyond anybody's capacity to imagine or envision, and when Norm scrambled down from the table they buried him in an avalanche of hands and shoulders and hair, and the questions never stopped. When? Where? How? That was what they wanted to know, and so many people were talking at once they might as well have been speaking different languages entirely. Verbie was right there at his shoulder, and Jiminy wedged in beside her, his eyes shining. Even Reba looked upbeat.

“Details!” Norm cried over the tumult. “Petty details, people.” He was already in motion, dismissing every rational fear and practical concern with a casual swipe of his hand. He had Premstar by the arm and he was leading her through the crush and into the kitchen, and through the kitchen and out into the darkened yard, shouting over his shoulder like an agitator leaving the arena: “The bonfire! On to the bonfire!”

“Man, has he lost it or what?” somebody said, and Star felt herself jostled from behind. “I mean, do you believe this shit?”

She looked to Marco, only to him, and he was watching her out of hooded eyes as they moved toward the door and the scent of the damp night air. He met her gaze and then he grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “You know,” he said, and he put his arm round her shoulders and locked his hip to hers, “I've always wanted to see the northern lights.”

Later, as the flames leapfrogged into the black vault of the sky and the hiss of Alaska sizzled up from the coals-_Alaska, Alaska,__ the only word anybody needed to know tonight, the touchstone, the future-Star relaxed into the grip of whatever it was that was happening to her. She sipped at a fruit jar of Spañada and stood at the edge of the fire, watching the tracers rise up into the night. She felt calm, centered, as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders, the way she always felt when she came to a decision. Like with Ronnie. She remembered leaving home with him, books and records and brown bleeding bags of food piled up in the backseat, sleeping bags, kitchen things, the only home she'd known for three-quarters of her life receding in the rearview mirror, and then her mother raging barefoot down the street shouting out for the world to hear that she was throwing her life away. Her mother's face hung there in the window even after they'd reached the end of the block, and she could see it now, the wet sheen of her eyes and all the gouges and wrinkles of a long day and a long week mobilized in grief-_Paulette! You're throwing your life away, your life away!__-but she was calm that day too. She'd made up her mind to go, and that was it.

The sweet cold wine massaged her throat and condensed her headache till it was a hard black little India rubber ball come to rest somewhere in the backcourt of her mind. She was standing in a knot of people-Marco, Norm, Alfredo, Reba, Harmony, Deuce, all of them talking at once, talking logistics, talking _Alaska__-and she closed her eyes and rode the wave of exuberance that was washing over Drop City even now, even as Druid Day became something else-the day after Druid Day-and that was a holiday too. Sure it was. Didn't they have a bonfire? Didn't they have drugs, wine, beer? And weren't they going to dance till they dropped?