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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 Jung. About the collective unconscious. The idea, as Jim understood it and retranslated it for anyone within earshot, which at The Brick is most of the town, was that beneath all of us there is a layer of shared experience, shared symbols, shared dreaming, old as the species itself. Archetypes, Jim said, with the authority of a man who had learned the word that morning. Things we all carry without being told to carry them. The shadow. The elder. The trickster.

Bob listened to this from his booth with the expression he uses for things he has known for a long time.

Wilma rang up a tin of coffee and a bag of pilot bread and said she supposed that would explain a few things.

What things, Skinny Larry asked, because he had come in for a bolt and was now going to be there longer.

A few things, Wilma said, and let that settle.

Darlene, who had stopped in on her lunch break, said she thought the unconscious was well and good but somebody still needed to be conscious enough to file the water district permits, and she had been waiting on those since October, and she named the official she was waiting on, and added his name to the notepad in her head, which by now is very thick.

Reverend Brown happened to be in that week, which was good timing or grace, depending on your theology. He sat at the counter with his hands around a mug and said that in his experience, most of what people called the unconscious was just things they already knew and weren't ready to say out loud, and that Jung and the Gospels had more in common than either camp would be comfortable with, and Sycamore Jim said that was a very interesting point, and the Reverend said thank you, and Jim said he was going to disagree with it, and the Reverend said of course you are.

Linnea had been thinking about it differently, though she didn't say so until Thursday, when she brought it up during the older kids' unit on mythology, which she had been building toward the collective unconscious without knowing she was doing it. She had them write down, privately, the first image that came to mind when she said the word home. Then the word dark. Then the word fire.

She collected the papers and read them at her kitchen table that evening. Every child had written something different. And underneath all the different somethings was a shape she recognized. Not the same word. The same direction. She sat there a long time with that.

Out at the shed near the airstrip, Johnny Tumbleweed put on a record by an artist who died thirty years before he was born, in a tradition that formed five hundred miles from where his own people came from, and he didn't know why it made the hair on his arms stand up, but it did every time. Emmylou sat on the record sleeve and regarded him without opinion.

Greta flew a supply run to the far-side families and coming back banked low over the ridge where the old growth comes right down to the road, and below her in the trees she saw a moose standing absolutely still in a clearing, looking up at the plane the way animals sometimes do, which is to say without fear but with attention, as if they are noting your passage and filing it somewhere.

She thought about what Jim had said, relayed secondhand through Bob, which was the only way she received most news she trusted. The idea that we are all carrying the same old shapes. That the story of the person before you is also in some deep room the story of yourself.

She banked east toward Cicely and the radio crackled and went quiet.

Vera, that Friday, had one of the beers. Alma was feeling a cold coming on. They split it anyway, because some habits are not logistical.

Vera said she thought the collective unconscious was just a fancy name for memory. Not your own memory, she said. Before that. The older kind. The kind that is in the hands before the mind catches up.

Alma said that was exactly what it was and she had been about to say that.

Vera said she was eleven minutes older and would keep on saying things first.

Alma drank her half of the beer.

Outside, the spruce went on making their sound, the one that is older than the wind and possibly the same age as whatever Jim had been reading about. The light did something interesting with the clouds for a moment, gold and gray in layers, and then it went back to what it was.

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.