Cold Mountain Path The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska by Tom Kizzia

Author:Tom Kizzia
Format: epub

About mid-­way into the winter I found that I was crying a lot and that I was overwhelmed, feeling like I’d bit off more than I could chew, and yet I felt really committed to this project. It was going so slowly and it was so hard I felt like I was really starting to lose it. I remember thinking that I’d go over and visit Maxine Edwards and take the day off. So I made a thermos and took a little rucksack and I had bunny boots. I remember walking across the Kennicott and I didn’t know much about ice then, or crossing ice, or how to read ice with running rivers under it, and I went through slush ice along the side and got a little wet and had water in my boots. It was pretty cold in January and the days were really short, so it would have taken the whole day to walk over there. I’d have to spend the night and then come back the next day. It was a two-­day journey because we had such short days—not like it is in the summer.

So I get over there and I was wet, tired, and cold and ragged out anyway, and I got over there and their house had a sense of order, where you thought it was always like that. I had no idea they started with brown chore gloves in a big alder grove and cleared it and built it. So I walk into this nice home and I remember there was this big three-­decker chocolate cake sitting on this glass cake plate with a glass lid and Maxine asked, “Do you want a piece of cake?”

I’d been cooking on a Coleman stove so I said of course, I’d love a piece of cake. And I felt I was too dirty to sit in any of their furniture. And she served it on a little china plate with a little china tea-­cup and she could kinda see my state. So I had the piece of cake and I looked up at her and I said, “Maxine, when you first came out here, did you ever cry?” She looked me right in the eye and she said, “Cry? I couldn’t stop crying for five years after I realized what I’d gotten myself into.”

I sort of burst out crying and laughing and thinking how I was getting this big lump in my throat and the tears just started pouring out and I said, “Oh, I thought there was something wrong with me.”

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