Few city people have any idea just how quiet the world can be off the grid. More accurately, what they do not understand is how noisy their urban surroundings are. In the quiet of the small cabins and houses of this deeply forested paradise, there is no hum of electricity, no buzz of fluorescent lights, no whir of computer terminals. No television noise or constant droning of traffic. No human chatter or incessant scraping of people walking the streets all hours of the day and night.
The only sounds are the natural sounds of life, of the living world. When a person relaxes enough, the wilderness comes alive with the light tick of a bird’s bony toes as it walks on a fence, or the muffled snort of a moose snuffling at a willow branch fifty feet away. At times, one can hear the crackling of a leaf falling off a branch and drifting to the ground.
That’s why most of the residents of the forest stayed here. That’s why Marcus came back to his hometown after twenty years of service in the military. He returned to a town and lifestyle where he could actually live reasonably well on the modest pension of a Marine Corps Master Sergeant.
No more noise. No more crowds. No more looking over his shoulder. No more war. He was glad to be home.
Marcus rose from the comfortably thick Lazy-Boy recliner next to the woodstove and again stretched his aching muscles. He had been chopping firewood all afternoon, until it got too dark to continue. Although Marcus had only been out of the Corps, and daily physical fitness training, about six months, he found the work of splitting wood to be exhausting. Maybe his friend Linus was right — military life had made him soft, at least as far as the Alaska bush was concerned.
He crossed the main room of the small cabin and looked in the mirror that hung on the wall above an old-fashioned washbasin. After twenty years of hard living his medium brown skin was still smooth and wrinkle-free. Few people properly guessed his real age of thirty-seven. They usually dropped ten or more years and assumed him to be in his mid-twenties. Large, deep brown eyes with almond-shaped lids belied the genetics of his Athabaskan mother. Tight, black curls of closely cropped hair atop a high forehead matched those of his father. While his skin and hair were that of a black man, an angular jaw, pointed nose, and high forehead revealed his grandfather’s quarter-Puerto Rican ancestry.
Marcus was born and raised in Salt Jacket. He had been gone with the Marines for nearly all of his adult life, serving in Force Recon for most of that time, the “Elite of the Elite”. He would never have imagined being so tired after swinging an axe for a few hours. Not a person who was typically prone to perspiring, he was surprised by how much water there was in his clothes by the time he was done.
The two-hour nap by the woodstove had both revived him and dried him out. Upon waking, he had a taste for some hot coffee, soup, and a fresh sandwich down at the store. He put on some relatively clean jeans, a fresh undershirt, and a flannel shirt. He narrowed the vent and turned down the damper on the woodstove and then slid into his tan Carhartt insulated coveralls and jacket and drew a black knit cap over his head. In the center of the room, he rotated the knob on the Coleman white gas lamp suspended on a chain that hung from the log beam that supported the roof, where it lit the main area of the cabin. He picked up his black and silver snowmobile helmet and headed out the door of the small cabin on his fifty acres of paradise deep in the quiet Arctic forest.
He hopped on the snowmobile parked in front of his cabin and pulled on the helmet. It squeezed his head snugly. The padding was warm against his ears and cheeks from the heat it had absorbed in the cabin. He started the engine and headed for the snow-covered trail that ran parallel to and slightly below the road to make the ten-mile run to the store that sat alongside the Richardson Highway.
As he pulled out of his property, he noticed that the Hamilton’s farm was dark. Usually the light on their porch lit up the end of their driveway. There were no lights on in the house, either.
Hmm. That’s strange. Must be a power outage. Oh, well at least that’s something I don’t have to worry about. When you’ve got no power, power outages won’t do you no harm.
A quarter of a mile down the road, the lights of an oncoming vehicle reflected around the bend. The trail beside the road rose where it intersected with a farmer’s driveway. As Marcus came up the incline and drew level with the road, he sensed something large and fast come up behind him. Surprised by the abrupt motion, he turned his head and saw a rapidly moving pickup truck bearing down on him. It moved entirely too fast for the icy conditions. The truck veered onto the shoulder and headed straight for Marcus. He gunned the snowmobile up and onto the driveway and yanked the handle bar to the right, then put distance between himself and the truck.
Marcus saw the driver of the truck suddenly look up from whatever had distracted him and lurch the steering wheel to the left and back onto the road. The driver over-corrected and crossed the centerline of Johnson Road as he headed into the bend. Fifty yards ahead, it nearly collided head-on with the truck coming from the other direction and again lurched to the right.
Marcus sat on the snowmobile in the farmer’s driveway and shook his head as he saw, in the light of the headlamps, the Tanana Valley Electrical Cooperative emblem on the side of both trucks.
“Crazy,” he whispered to himself. “Someone’s going to catch hell for that near miss.”
The two trucks disappeared into the distance. Marcus continued until he came to the Richardson Highway and turned left on the trail that followed alongside it. A few minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot of the Salt Jacket General Store. The lights were on in the building and at the gas pump. The outage had apparently been repaired in the time it took him get there.
Marcus stopped the snowmobile in front of the store and took off his helmet as he rose to enter. A few yards away sat the electric company truck that had almost hit Marcus and the other truck. He noted the number on the side — forty-eight. He would call TVEC and lodge a complaint. Folks from the city seemed to think they could drive like idiots in the country, with immunity. They acted like they didn’t realize people actually lived out there. For all the driver of that truck knew, Marcus’s snowmobile could just as easily have been a child riding to a friend’s house. The other truck could have been a mom returning from hockey practice with a vanload of kids. He shook his head in disgust and mounted the wooden steps to the entrance.
A bell suspended on a flat metal spring jangled noisily as Marcus opened the door. Once inside, he was greeted by the luscious odors of rich beef stew and hot apple pie. The smiling face of Linus Balsen beamed at him from behind the cash register, where he sat on a tall, padded bar stool just inside the door. Marcus’s tension eased at the sight. He and Linus had been very close friends throughout their lives, growing up together as playmates and continuing into adulthood as close as brothers.
Joseph Balsen, a locally famous scientist and inventor, had started the Salt Jacket General Store in a metal Quonset building in 1954. Originally called Swede’s Café, it primarily served to finance his never-ending research into “Arctic Thermo-Engineering”. Over the years, it grew in successive renovations from its original postage stamp of a building to over 6000 square feet of grocery, dry goods, and hardware. While his inventions never made him wealthy, the store did pretty well on its own. Linus was the third generation of his family to run it.
They still served homemade soup, sandwiches, and pies to local residents, road workers, airmen, soldiers, and tourists who often filled the long diner bar that stretched past the register counter. Six booths provided more seating in a small, square room at the back half of the original Quonset building. Black-and-white pictures of the community’s past hung from the curved walls, evoking nostalgic memories of the region’s history.