My Remotest Winter

Fiction by Elisha Emerson | Issue 2.14

Cover Art: L. Erickson

I needed a break from the conveyor belt of school, boyfriend, career. That clapping song we sang as little girls: next comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby. . . . So I left the lower forty-eight for a job waiting tables at a remote truck stop in Alaska. I placed my relationship on hold. A big Hold up! on everything. I didn’t know who I’d be when I got back.

Turns out, we women, were outnumbered. The way the locals went on, it was a real problem. A skewed population, dominated by men. At first I was excited to attain the frontier, this sweeping Alaskan wild with its grizzlies, permafrost, and guns.

We issued from everywhere: Connecticut, California, Missouri, Maine. Contracted online for the winter season at a truck stop famous enough to attract tourists from around the world. We flew into Fairbanks, hitched rides with vetted strangers for the eight-hour drive further north. We watched buildings lapse into snowy field, black pine. Spruce sloped upward like a uniformed army. They furred the base of mountains and purpled the white sky. There were so many trees—we all thought it, watching them wash into a prickly sameness, one single, giant organism.

We were servers, cleaners, and wilderness guides. The oldest of us worked in the gift shop. Sixty-two and on break from her husband of forty years. The rest of us traveled through our youths as though through blizzards, straining to discern our positions. We spun between childhood and whatever lay ahead.

Mostly, we embraced the abundance of men: cooks, dishwashers, other wilderness guides, out-of-state hunters, a chafe of bearded truckers as desperate as Miss America contestants on floats for applause. They paraded story after story while we held our paunches and laughed. We poured coffee and delivered ten-dollar pieces of pie.

Above all, we valued our solitude. Still, we lived together in a caravan of trailers. A single hallway. An immobile freight train of dorms. We shared a common room with a brown corduroy couch. The same laundry room, the same cobwebbed elliptical.

Pouring sugar on lard turns it sweet, the locals said, like ice cream, and it was true. Benji, a dishwasher, fell in love with Sarah. Lewis, a line cook, pursued Chloe. I received letters from back home. None of us demurred, though I recall Chloe satirized the simple way Lewis went on about the stars.

Winter darkness never lifted in the arctic, yet we preferred walking alone. Agreed to take one of the manager’s sled dogs, lest we encounter a bear. We layered polypropylene beneath wool, beneath polyester and down. We drew face masks over smiles, over frowns. Alert and alternating, we sang paths through the dark. We’d come for the wilderness. A dry twenty below, each stroll felt like first steps.

On duty, we humored truckers their darlins and committed their preferences to memory: orange juice, cranberry. Bart, a young father, ordered oatmeal with raisins and milk. We raised their crumb-flecked platters to make space for their stories, and when they called themselves poets, cowboys of the open road, we never laughed, not even among ourselves.

—

The cold deepened. We worked up appetites. We ate elk-meat double cheeseburgers. We forwent iceberg lettuce for French fries. Even Chloe, a vegetarian, poured sugar over lard.

Come December, Japanese couples arrived to conceive beneath Northern Lights. We learned Konnichiwa, Arigato, and how to identify the oldest woman so we might serve her first. Oyasumi, we waved. Good night! From the restaurant to our trailer, we listened for the electric crackle, the violet, lime, milky blue. We thought of the couples in their rooms, the darkness transferring light.

Benji gave Sarah Into the Wild. For Chloe, Lewis played his guitar. I received another letter from home.

But at night—it was always night—we stared at our ceilings. We lifted our hands and checked our palms for changing size. Through an atmosphere of men, we passed one another until one day, static zapped our arms. Hey girl, hang out, we sang, closed doors, stretched across quilts. We discovered, indeed, we were actually desirable. Sarah’s long lashes. Chloe’s round hips. But also Emma’s voice, like molasses. And Felicity’s sarcasm had a sharp yielding edge. Even Karen, sixty-two, had a parenthesis smile. When she touched my shoulder, it crackled.

Luther complained over minestrone, “Stupid tree huggers in the lower forty-eight don’t know jack shit about the wilderness. They come from their cities in their goddamn suits and say Can’t hunt here, can’t drill here, can’t shoot this. I’ll shoot whatever I goddamn need to shoot. Rules don’t mean a damned thing out here.” We nodded. We could see how things were different.

Outside, a dark thirty below. Inside, we adjusted our thermostats. We forewent bras, wore spaghetti straps, short shorts. We drank black coffee and Everclear. Karen retired early, but the rest of us stayed up late. What did it matter when the sky was always dark and the truck stop open twenty-four seven? The ever rumble of generators, the men snoring in cabs, the hunters, the dishwashers, cooks.

We reclined, stretched legs across hips, arms, breasts, across beds. Listened to Devandra Banhart, talked Camus, Celine, Sartre. We quoted Dostoevsky, “Even science would not exist a moment without beauty.” We’re just skin, muscle, fat and hard slimy teeth, and nothing matters, anyway! Our laughter banged against each other’s teeth, the ever-dark window. Teeth banged against teeth. Chloe’s. Felicity’s. What else could we do but tiptoe and close the door on our way out? Why not, we thought, and looked at each other. Each glance felt like our first.

We took trips into town, hitched rides with Luther, the most vetted trucker, eight hours each way. We travelled in pairs and took turns sitting in the passenger seat. We empathized with why the old man gave up on us. Years ago, we’d hurt him. Left him for broke. There were too few of us. No matter how hard, God knows he tried, he just couldn’t make us happy. What did we want, anyway? Tsk. Tsk. We understood. He carried a gun for the wolves and grizzlies, but we didn’t need the explanation. This was a wild place, after all. Trees multiplied in the passenger mirror, and when the pipeline appeared, its metal scar zigzagged along the road. It was hard not to fixate on the disfigurement, how it renegotiated the open space.

Then it was the street, the sidewalk, and stores that startled us, like visitors we kept forgetting were there. We purchased gifts. Sarah humored Benji with an I went to Alaska and all I got was this lousy shirt! shirt. I mailed a letter back home. For Karen, we purchased a calling card. When we found her in the gift shop, she wept, missing her husband. She spent long hours on the phone, the antique cord twisted tighter about her thumb. From the dining room, we tried not to eavesdrop, but we heard her ask if he was eating. Did he see the dentist? Was he taking his pills?

We discovered a capacity for velvet and dark, the deep, sexy fold of one another. How soft Chloe’s stomach, how furry Emma’s legs. We took up at night. Fickle preferences, pairs. Of course, we got jealous, but eventually, we laughed it off, aware of the churn, the rumbling trucks, how the generators shook the ground. This was a country full of men, and here we were, snuggled inside it.

We covered our hickies with makeup, amused by the truckers’ appeals. So many heroes! All the offers to town. We cleaned restrooms, wiped shit splattered along toilet bowl rims, scrubbed pee from linoleum. We didn’t mind the body’s inconveniences. All was skin, muscles, and teeth.

Benji asked for a commitment from Sarah. Lewis infiltrated Chloe’s walks. I received a proposal that felt inevitable, even from the remotest frontier. Still, we lay in bed and thought of each other, the wholeness of each, the muscles, the fat.

When one of the truckers shot himself—Bart, a father—in the cab of his truck, we wept for him. We wept for his daughter and son. Such a winter, the long lonely drives. All the stories without an audience to wave back. We thought maybe we should have listened more than we did. We thought maybe they should have listened to each other. 

When sunlight feathered the horizon, we marked our last days on the calendar. We made plans. Benji and Sarah found a job in Death Valley. Chloe purchased tickets to Taiwan. Karen went home to her husband. Lewis stayed on through the summer.

Me, I arrived early to the Fairbanks airport, letters tucked in my bag. I wandered an hour before my flight beneath fluorescence and paused to admire a taxidermized grizzly. The bear hovered beneath glass, enormous, with exposed teeth and claws. Remarkable how something could look so dead yet so ferocious at the same time. 

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 Elisha Emerson's work has been published by The Masters Review, The Missouri Review, The Dalhousie Review, Solstice Magazine, Literary Mama, SBLAAM, and other places. Her nonfiction won Solstice’s 2022 Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Program and volunteers as a screener for Ploughshares.