empireofspruces-blog

[empireofspruces-blog]

Chapter 1

He was born out of time.

That’s what he told me that first time we met. I had just flown into Fairbanks, Alaska, my ankles still shaky, and I was sipping on a chocolate malt milkshake, double the malt. And time was all I could think about.

The modern world is not for everyone. Yes, there is excitement, temptation and comfort to be found in it. But what else do we have in this life if not the need to connect with the divine? And tell me, what is more divine than nature?

That’s what I was thinking about as I looked across the table at Gael, a man exactly twice my age but with an aura that exuded something like the tender years of boyhood. Gael, wilderness guide, follower of dreams, keeper of whiskey-jacks, master of rivers, writer of poetry and the love of my life. Although I had no idea at the time. We had just met. I had travelled all the way from Vancouver to meet him.  

I was twenty-nine, full of anxiety about the future, already tired and looking for something with a little bit of certainty. Maybe I was having a quarter-life crisis. I don’t know. I think I was. What else would persuade a semi-suburban girl to venture all the way to the middle of nowhere, Alaska to meet a man twenty-nine years her senior?

It was 2006 and I was in the midst of trying to finish a Ph.D. in English Literature at Simon Fraser University. I say trying because a thing like that never feels like doing, it always feels like trying. Never do a Ph.D. Really, I mean it. It is a spectacular cause of existential suffering and amounts to nothing more than the fulfilment of a fanciful wish.

Maybe I was just bored…but there was this feeling inside of me like I was searching for something big. And I really can’t say why but all I could think about was going North. I was born in the North, in the small town of Smithers, British Columbia. But I hadn’t lived there since I was two-years-old and I wanted to be in a place that felt more extreme, that had something to offer me that nowhere else could. A place that made me feel whole.

I’ve since learned that Alaska is a place that collects broken people. I don’t mean weak, just broken by someone or something that was impossible to overcome anywhere else but here. Alaska is not a place for the frail, and those that come here broken are mended by the humility that it takes to survive in one of the harshest and wildest places on the planet. Just coming here says something about a person’s fortitude and those that stay become the best kinds of people.

This is how I met Gael, in my search for humility and fortitude. It was fall, October, and I was teaching a course at the university while working on my thesis. I kept thinking about Alaska. I’d applied for a couple of jobs there with no luck and I kept wondering how I could get there. I thought maybe there was someone like me out there who was looking for something too. A man.

I’m a researcher. It’s easy for me to search for and find information within any medium, but online was the best place to meet people that were far away. I started by searching “meet Alaskan men” in Google. I know, admitting all this really hurts my credibility but it is the honest truth about how this all happened. Googling something like that seems like an act of desperation. But really, I was just an outlier searching for another outlier and where else do outliers meet than in unlikely places?

The first thing I found in my search were all these statistics about how the number of men far outweigh the number of women in Alaska. I instantly had this image in my mind of the real Frontier days, when lonely men would post an ad in the local newspaper: Seeking Wife on Remote Homestead. Well, Alaska is The Last Frontier and men still post ads seeking wives, except they do it on Craigslist instead of in print. I wondered if I was even capable of entering into that kind of arrangement…I was an unlikely foreign bride. But I thought…maybe I was capable. If things didn’t work out, I could always just go home to Canada. I had nothing to lose.  

The men I found on Craigslist were mostly broken men in the Lower 48, looking to steal away to Alaska, woefully unprepared to face the reality of living in the wilderness. In most cases, they didn’t seem to have a single ounce of experience living outside of the city environment. This made me uneasy. I myself, although I had spent my fair share of time camping in the backcountry, had limited knowledge of things like harvesting firewood, organic gardening, off-grid power systems, not to mention the countless minor details that you have to be aware of to have a functioning homestead…like knowing where to pee as to not attract bears. If I was going to live out in the bush, I needed someone who had knowledge to share.

So, I swallowed my pride and my reservations and I posted my own advertisement. I don’t remember now exactly what it said. It was something along the lines of “Seeking Husband for Wilderness Living”. How funny is that? But you know what? I got hundreds (hundreds!) of replies. Men from all over Alaska: farmers, trappers, pilots, labourers, students, salesmen…all envisioning a future with me.

But the only one that stood out to me was Gael: the man born out of time. It was his way with words. He bequeathed romance into every syllable. I didn’t even need to look at him to know that we were kindred spirits. And so there I was, after three months of correspondence, sitting in front of a man that I knew meant the world to me, yet I barely knew him at all.

I want to tell you our story, because I think it’s a beautiful one. It’s the kind of story that you hear about all the time but because you can’t see it happening right in front of you it is impossible to accept as more than a fantasy. But this is one story that I have lived and I have only one true motivation for sharing it with you:

This is the place where all our hopes about life come from, from the stories about love that sometimes do happen. And it is in these hopes that we find all the meaning that we can manage. It is this meaning precisely that allows us to be carried forward into dreams that are made reality. 

Copyright: Leroux, March 10, 2018.