I spent half my savings on a cabin.  Six miles west of town in a valley called the Shakwak Trench, it stood in a grove of spruce, lost in the endless forest.  From the window above my kitchen sink, a small meadow could be seen forty yards through the firs—a distant patch of green light when the sun was strong.  Lying in its grass, you could see into the Kluane Reserve and the front wall of the ice-laden St. Elias Mountains that rose from this forest just a few miles to the west.  There was even a pond a quarter mile south.  I swam in it during the fleeting warmth of summer.

I’d always cherished my solitude but never more than now, sitting alone in a rocking chair on my front porch this cold Friday evening.

Stars shone through the crowns of the trees.

The constellations were sharp.

There are no cities in the Yukon to muddy the sky with manmade light.

As I rocked, my hands shoved deep into the pockets of my down vest, I closed my eyes, resisting one of those twinges of surreal nostalgia that make you acutely aware of all the living you’ve done and how the choices you’ve made have led to this moment of introspection.  I was forty-one years old, and I couldn’t begin to stomach the totality of my life—too checkered, too sprawling.  So I tried to live safely and habitually, moment to moment.

It passed, those lethal thoughts of Walter, my mother, and the things I did in Orson’s desert now receding back into the prisons I’d built for them.

Though I had supper to make and words to write, I opted for an evening stroll.  Rising, I pulled my hair into a ponytail and stepped down off the porch.  I followed a deer run through the spruce grove, the air glutted with the spicy scent of sap, branches brushing against my vest, twigs snapping under my boots.

It was late October—ice rimmed the pond and autumn waned, the arc of the sun diminishing noticeably each day.  Even the aspens had shed the last of their heartshaped leaves.  Only the spruce held color, an ashy bluegreen, some stunted and withered from the harsh winters, others full and majestic despite existing a mere four hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle.

I reached the meadow.  Above the trees on the far side, the first peaks of the St. Elias Range towered in the west, hulking and austere, their snowpack blue beneath the stars.  These mountains stretched on for a hundred fifty miles through the southeast leg of Alaska, west to the Pacific.  They contained Canada’s highest mountain and the largest non-polar icefield in the world, a hundred mile river of ice that crept down from the slopes of the Icefield Ranges into the sea.