KBHR570 Group

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. Bob heard the radio call from his shop. He put down the carburetor he was cleaning and stood at the window for a while. Then he picked the carburetor back up. There was nothing to be done about the bridge from the window, and the carburetor still needed cleaning.

Darlene called the state office in Anchorage at seven forty-five, which is the earliest she will call, on the principle that calling before eight suggests desperation and the state should not have that information. She was told someone would look into it. She wrote the name down. She called again at noon. Different name. She wrote that one down too. The notepad next to her phone is getting thick.

Wilma took inventory Thursday morning, the way you take inventory when you are not going to say anything alarming but you want to know where you stand. Coffee, fine. Flour, fine. She is watching the propane. She is watching it the way you watch something you are not worried about yet but intend to be ready to worry about, which in Cicely passes for optimism. She let Earl run his tab up another thirty dollars without mentioning it. She restocked the pilot bread. She put two extra cases of Spam in the back where she could see them and did not explain why, because explaining why does not help anyone and Wilma is in the business of helping people.

Skinny Larry drove out to look at what was left of the bridge on Thursday afternoon. He stood at the bank with his hands in his pockets for a long time, the way you look at something you cannot fix but feel you owe the looking to. Then he drove back and built a sign for the detour route, which adds forty-one miles to the trip into Anchorage and involves a stretch of gravel road that Greta refers to as aspirational and that the state refers to as Route 7, which is generous. The sign is well made. It will outlast the detour.

Greta has been flying supplies to the three families on the far side of the creek. She has not said what she is charging. No one has asked. There is a code in Cicely around this kind of thing, which is that when Greta does not say what she is charging, she has decided it is not the time to charge what she would charge, and that is between her and her accounts, and the accounts are her business.

Reverend Brown was due through on his circuit Friday. He called Darlene from a gas station sixty miles out to say he had heard about the bridge and was coming anyway, by the long way, because two families had asked for him and he had not missed a circuit in eleven years and did not intend to start now. He arrived at dusk, mud up to the wheel wells, with the cheerful expression of a man who has made peace with the road and found the peace durable. Darlene made him coffee. He drank it without complaining about anything, which is its own form of grace.

Vera and Alma walked to The Brick on Friday afternoon. The road by the creek had gone soft and Alma's hip has been talking to her since October in a language that says slow down, which Alma acknowledges and does not fully comply with. They ordered their one beer and sat and Vera said the state would have the bridge sorted by July and Alma said October and neither of them was asking for a third opinion. Bob, in the back booth, did not offer one. Sycamore Jim offered several. Nobody wrote them down.

The creek is still running high. The detour is what it is. The state has the situation on its list, which is a long list, and Cicely is patient, which it has had to be, which is not the same as being resigned, though from a distance the two can look similar.

What you notice, if you are paying attention, is that the bridge being out has not stopped much. Greta flies. Skinny Larry builds signs. Wilma watches the propane. Darlene writes down names. The Brick stays open. Bob eats his Tuesday lunch. Sycamore Jim holds forth from his stool on the nature of bridges and rivers and the relationship between the two, which is, he says, philosophical, and which nobody argues with, because arguing with Jim about philosophy is like arguing with the creek about the bridge. The creek has already made its point.

Outside, the water keeps moving, the way water does, with complete indifference to anyone's schedule. Inside, the people of Cicely do what they do, which is live their lives with a stubbornness that looks, from a certain angle, a great deal like grace.

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.