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 came up the last grade and met the worst of it about a mile and a half short of town. It went sideways, which is not the worst thing a car can do here. Then it went still, which sometimes is. The driver got out, looked at his car, looked at the road, looked back at his car, and then started walking. He had a duffel bag on his shoulder and a navy blue watch cap pulled low, and he was the youngest person to walk into The Brick on a Tuesday in some time.

He ordered coffee. The kid behind the bar gave it to him on the house, which is not a tradition exactly, but is a thing that happens more often than the books would suggest. The young man sat at the end of the bar and didn't say much, the way people don't when they have just come a long way and are not yet sure why.

Coop heard about the car. Coop hears about cars the way Bob hears about boats, by some quiet animal sense that does not require a phone call. He came in around three and said he could pull it out of the ditch, but probably not until Thursday, which is Coop standard time and means somewhere between Thursday and the first hard freeze. The young man nodded as though this was reasonable, which suggested he was going to fit in fine.

His name was Daniel. He was twenty-six. He was on his way to Anchorage, to start a job he was no longer entirely sure he wanted. Cicely had been a detour. Now Cicely was a delay. And the difference between those two things is sometimes the difference between the rest of a life and the one you thought you were going to have.

This is how it happens, mostly. People come through. The road is long, and the country between Anchorage and Fairbanks is unforgiving in a way that does not announce itself. The small green cars with the out-of-state plates pull off in Cicely because they need gas, or coffee, or a bathroom, or a reason. Most of them keep going. We watch them go.

Darlene, at the post office, can recite a small catalog of them. The woman in the Volvo who wanted directions to Talkeetna and got them. The family from Saskatchewan whose camper threw a rod outside the airstrip, who sang in the back booth at The Brick for two nights running, in three-part harmony, while the part was being shipped. The two college girls from Davis who were doing something for credit and had an enthusiasm that made everyone tired. They came, they had pie, they left. The road goes both ways, or appears to.

But some don't go.

Skinny Larry came through eleven years ago, after a divorce and a wrong turn outside Fairbanks. He is still here. There is no real explanation for it, except that he sat down to eat one evening at The Brick and was still sitting there at closing. Bob had told him, without much ceremony, that there was a shed behind the woodworking shop he could use until he got himself sorted. He never got himself sorted. That was the trick.

Wilma came through to help her cousin Ruth-Ann for a season, and stayed. She is still here, four years and counting. Wilma will tell you it is because the store needs her, which is true. She will not tell you the other thing: that she has stopped looking for the moment when the store will not need her, because she has come to suspect that the looking and the staying are the same thing.

Johnny Tumbleweed (and we say his name now as though he had always been called that, which he has not) came through from Elko, Nevada, seven Septembers back. He was on his way to somewhere he never quite specified. He is still telling people he is just passing through. He does the afternoon shift on this very station, between two and six, and plays the high lonesome music of a man who knows what it is to be from one place and to live in another. The cat that lives with him is named Emmylou. The records take up more of his house than the bed does. He has not been home in seven years. Home is a word he has stopped using out loud.

Cicely, you understand, is not so much a town as a kind of weather system. It does not collect people. It does not advertise. It does not even, really, hold them. It just is what it is. Some people walk into it and walk out. Some walk into it and discover that the walking-out part has quietly stopped happening, and there is no ceremony for that. Larry didn't have one. Wilma didn't. Johnny didn't. The town does not make announcements about its citizens, the way some towns do. It simply rearranges itself around them, until no one remembers when they weren't there.

What I am saying is that strangers come and go, except when they don't. And the ones who don't are not different, particularly, from the ones who do. They were going somewhere else. They had a plan. The plan stopped being interesting at some point. Cicely was where it stopped. That is about as much as anyone can tell you. Greta, who has flown nearly everyone in the territory at one point or another, says it has to do with the light. Bob, when he says anything about it, says nothing. Sycamore Jim has a theory involving the magnetism of certain rock formations, which is not a serious theory, but he holds it seriously, which is most of what theories are made of.

Daniel left on Friday. Coop got the car out on Thursday afternoon, after the third try and a winch arrangement that Skinny Larry came over to consult on, free of charge, because that is what Larry does. Daniel paid his bill at The Brick, shook a few hands, took a phone number from Linnea for a friend of hers in Anchorage who does the same kind of work, and got back in his green car. He drove south. Wilma watched him go from the window of the store. She did not say anything about it. There was not much to say.

We will see if he comes back. Sometimes they do. The ones who come back the second time have made a decision they did not know they made the first time, and the second visit is, in a way that nobody points out, the visit when they move here, even though they don't know it yet either. We see it before they do. We have learned to. We say nothing about it. It is rude, in Cicely, to know things about people before they know them themselves.

That's the news from Cicely, Alaska, where the light does what it wants, the road does what it can, and the people do the best they know how.

KBHR 570 · Broadcasting from Cicely, Alaska