Having never been married, I was accustomed to living alone, but I’d not experienced this grade of utter abandonment.

I was homeless, hunted, and lonely.

It was no way to live.

In December, two nomadic years after my escape from the snowbound Wyoming desert, I took a bus to Vancouver, bought a plane ticket, and flew to Whitehorse, Yukon, a thousand miles north.

I rented a car and drove the Alaska Highway one hundred fifty kilometers west to the village of Haines Junction at the foot of the St. Elias Mountains.  I’d researched the village for a book I never wrote.  It seemed like a quiet isolated place to die.

I pulled off the highway outside of town, a vast coniferous forest extending in every direction, great white mountains looming in the west.  The temperature held at minus thirty.  The sky was gray, dusky, the subarctic sun a halfhearted presence over the distant peaks.  The dashboard clock read 1:47 p.m.  I would simply walk into the woods, sit down against a tree, and freeze to death.  It seemed a peaceful way to go.  Vaguely romantic.  I thought of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.”  I looked forward to that warm euphoric stillness that would come near the end.

Wearing only a T-shirt, I opened the door and stepped out of the car into crusty snow.  The cold was beyond comprehension.  My eyes burned.

I walked a ways into the woods, chose a leafless aspen, and sat down with my back against the silver bark.  I waited.  I began to shiver.  My stomach rumbled.  I thought, Why die hungry?  I got up, walked back to the car, and drove into the village, home to eight hundred residents though far fewer in these bleak winter months.  I parked downtown in front of a diner called Bill’s, the street decorated for Christmas.  I reached to open the car door but stopped.

I put my head on the steering wheel.

Wept.

But those dark times rarely haunted me.  I’d lived in the woods outside of Haines Junction now for five years and it was sweet and essential to be this other man.

To the community my name was Vincent Carmichael and I’d become a full-fledged resident.  The townsfolk might’ve described me as quiet but friendly.  I was the American with long brown hair and an untamed beard.  Everyone’s acquaintance.  No one’s friend.  But that was okay here.  People came to this remote northwest corner of Canada to escape things.  Haines Junction was a lodestone for damaged people.

During the tourist season, I worked as a chef in the kitchen of The Lantern, one of two fine-dining establishments in the village.  There I earned enough money to live through the winter months, October to April, when there was no work and little to do but stay indoors near a fire.