Strangers Come and Go

Mud season brings a green car with Idaho plates, a young man with a duffel bag, and the question Cicely never quite asks out loud.

By DJ VVolf · KBHR 570

Well, it's been a quiet week in Cicely, Alaska. The road was the road again on Tuesday, more or less, which is to say the snow had given up its claim to it and the mud had taken over the dispute. That's a different kind of disagreement entirely. Breakup does what it does. The state will come through with the grader in another two weeks, and until then everyone drives the road in the way you drive a road in May, which is the way you walk through a barn in your good shoes. Carefully. With apologies.

It was on Tuesday, in the middle of all that, that a small green car with Idaho plates…

Well, it's been a quiet week in Cicely, Alaska, where the light has been coming in at that late-April angle that hits the spruce trees just below the crown and sets them glowing like they know something.

Johnny Tumbleweed has been playing records.

This is not, in itself, unusual. Johnny plays records every afternoon from two to six, which is what he does and what the town depends on him to do. But this week he went to a crate he doesn't get to often, a crate that lives behind the couch and underneath a stack of old Alaska Sportsman magazines he found in the shed and hasn't read, and he pulled out a run of records that nobody in Cicely had heard in a good long while. Or maybe had never heard. Or maybe had heard once, a long time ago, and had stopped hearing in the way you…

NEWS FROM CICELY

Well, it's been a quiet week in Cicely, Alaska, though quiet is a relative term in a place where the spruce are always making that low sound in the cold and you're never entirely sure whether it's the wind or something older than the wind having a thought.

It started, as things often do in Cicely, at The Brick, on a Tuesday afternoon in the particular gray light that descends in early spring when the snow has given up committing to anything. Sycamore Jim had been reading. This alone was cause for remark, because Jim usually just talks, but someone had left a paperback on the bar, face down, the way people do when they intend to come back and don't, and Jim had picked it up and read the back and then the first page, and by Tuesday he had opinions.

The book was about Carl…

Well, it's been a quiet week in Cicely, Alaska. Quieter than usual, and not in the good way.

The bridge went out on Wednesday.

Not all at once. It thought about it for a while first. Sycamore Jim, who had been watching the creek from the window of The Brick since Tuesday morning with the focused attention of a man who has nothing better to do and knows it, said he could see it thinking. Nobody asked him what he meant by that. In Cicely, when the creek is high and Jim is watching it, you generally know what he means.

By four in the morning on Wednesday the thinking was done. Greta flew over at first light and radioed back that there was nothing there but water and two concrete footings standing in it like a pair of boots whose owner had stepped out and was not coming back.…