LIGHT TRAFFIC

The frontyard © Carolyne Weldon

I left Alaska a month ago, almost day for day. It was late October and Fairbanks was beginning its slow decent into deep-dark winter. The sun, which I’d seen pull effortless all-nighters in early August, was starting to get lazy, never showing much before 9:30 AM. It was getting cold, too, but not insane cold. Temperatures seesawed around freezing. It was chilly enough to make it hard to take photographs or smoke with naked hands, but warm enough that the fancy frost kaleidoscopes crawling up windshields and windowpanes had disappeared by noon.

On my last night at the cabin, we brought home two bottles of champagne. (“We’ll have failed miserably if we don’t get completely belligerent by the end of the evening,” he said with a grin.) There was a salad, too, which should’ve been good – in theory – full of healthy spinach, blue cheese, toasted pecans and sliced pear, but it somehow got drenched in way too much balsamic dressing (my bad… I think), and before we knew it the notion of proper nutrition was being tossed out the window, helped along by another camping-cupful of Brut Impérial. I didn’t sleep a wink that night. As the man and the dog snored away in unison, inside their picture-perfect 8×10 cabin, I sat on the porch in the pitch-black night and reflected on the end of what had been a truly great Alaskan Adventure.

The next morning, after polishing off Champagne Bottle No. 2, which had spent the night outside, half-full, its lip covered by a scrap of foil, I blew a kiss to the good ole homestead and slid into the truck, quiet as a ninja.

Mine was an early flight out, so we drove through Fairbanks in the dark, the dog hunched in the backseat, blissfully oblivious of the fact the nice girl that gave him a little breakfast (as opposed to just dinner) and actually played fetch with him once in a while (as opposed to throwing his stick in the fire pit, like most of the boys), was leaving for good. Dangling from the rearview mirror, the FM-converter played ironic hip-hop ballads. A hug later, they were gone. Back to the cabin and back to bed, probably. I stood there for a while, light-headed and stunned, staring at my lone suitcase. I didn’t cry.

As soon as we landed in Anchorage, I dashed outside to catch a lungful of Alaskan wind. The sun was up, by then, and there was something about the way the mountains stood, right there in front of the terminal doors, that calmed me right down. Sitting down, I realized it felt like swarms of locusts had somehow wandered inside my brain and got stuck there. And they were pissed. I walked over to some construction workers who were loading plywood sheets in the back of a truck and asked whether they happened to carry Advil. “Champagne hangover,” I offered, dimly.

Laughing, they apologized and said they only had a pocketful of oxys (i.e. oxycontin, hardcore opiate painkillers.) I sighed. After some thought, the shorter one suggested I head over to the bar and order myself a drink. “She makes a mean Caesar,” he said. I thanked them and walked back to the ledge where I’d been sitting, meditating on the comparative permanence of hangovers and glaciers.

I was getting up to head back through security when the workers came up to me and placed two packets of individually-wrapped Aspirin in my hand. “Here babe. Found those. Hope you feel better,” they said. “And easy on the champagne next time.”  I waved goodbye and smiled. He couldn’t know there wouldn’t be a next time.

Two layovers and a surreal drinking-at-the-Legion-with-novelists night in Vancouver later, I was back home, back in Montreal, rosy-cheeked with the afterglow of four months of amazing travel. And I mean, amazing travel. From uptown Montreal to the mighty Yukon, shimmying down to a rockabilly band in Dawson City’s Snake Pit, high on midnight sun; to picnicking in Newfoundland, in the long, windswept grass at the feet of a lighthouse; to living and loving in a cabin at the end of a dirt road in Interior Alaska; to shooting the breeze, perched in a sacred oak, in the sunny, fragrant forests of Northern California, and back full-circle to Montreal, with a smile and a lingering champagne hangover.

A swift look at the calendar will confirm the impression that homecoming left me perfectly speechless. A whole month and not a peep. About that, all I’ll say is that sometimes, life just is too rich to simultaneously feel and make sense of. But fear not. I never stay quiet for long. That’s why I’d like to invite you to drop by more often. There is the slight risk I’ll be pestering you with strange Alaskan stories for a little while longer, but I promise to switch back to more normal, and hopefully more useful topics real soon. Because I must tell you, reader. I do enjoy your company, and in my mind, there are many more things we should be talking about.