For one brief and awful year, Juno and Kregger had lived in Alaska. It was the seventies, and in America, lust was on the menu for the decade. Juno and Kregger were wet for adventure, hard for travel. They sold everything in their little studio apartment, gave their parrots and cacti away to friends, and bought two one-way tickets to Anchorage. The pull was the Wild West, and they were young enough to still want to play. When Juno remembered the cold and isolation she experienced that year, she would shiver. But back then, back in grand ol’ 1977 when they arrived at the meager airport, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline had just been completed and oil was flowing. Kregger planned to work the oil, and Juno planned on getting a job wherever they’d have her. She was working on her thesis, and Anchorage had seemed like the place to buckle down and get it done. So while Kregger worked those grueling hours, Juno shriveled in the Alaskan winter like a cock in the cold. It wasn’t at all what she’d pictured; Anchorage was a muddy little place with gambling dens, drug houses, and street walkers, as Juno’s nan called them. Half wild and half civilized. Late at night, men would shoot guns into the sky to blow off steam. She’d be so afraid on the nights Kregger was gone that she’d carry her blanket and pillow to the closet and sleep on the floor under the sweeping hems of their clothes. When summer came, things got moderately better. She was able to walk to the city center without fear of losing her nose to the cold and got a part-time job at the Piggly Wiggly.

The tired little grocery store was on Spenard Road where massage parlors lined the street all in a row like little duckies. Juno had suspected Kregger stopped by once or twice, but she never asked and felt better not knowing. Other than getting your wang wanked, there was little to do. Squalid little bars, adult bookstores, and houses of worship all shared a street just like Jesus would have preferred. There was a drive-in theater, they’d been excited to discover. They went twice in that year: the first time it had been winter and the exhaust fumes from the cars rose into the air until it was impossible to make out the actors’ faces on the screen. And they’d gone in the summer when the days were endless and night never fully arrived and found they couldn’t see a damn thing on the screen because it was too bright. They’d laughed all the way home that time.