When they reached Alaska intact, as improbable as that might have seemed when they set out, the bus still rolling over its ten wheels and the Studebaker and Bug flagging on behind, everybody singing, sandwich-fed and hopeful, they pulled off to the side of the road and sat in a circle, hands clasped, while Reba and Tom Krishna led them in a chant. This was in a place called Northway Junction, forty-two miles from the border and the customs agents who wore flannel shirts, sipped coffee out of styrofoam cups and waved everybody on through, good morning and welcome to the U. S. of A. Reba's kids strung up God's eyes they'd made of yarn and strips of wood and Alfredo drew a big mandala in the dirt with a crooked stick, working back and forth over the pattern like a dowser looking for water until it showed dark against the pale duff of the forest floor. People lit candles and incense and circulated one of Harmony's big ceramic bongs.
The air was heavy with the smell of rain-soaked vegetation, of berries run riot and a sun that soaked up the moisture and gave it back again, day after day. It was a smell that brought Marco back to his childhood on the east coast, and he realized that this wasn't the west anymore, this wasn't California or Oregon-this was the same sort of environment he'd grown up in, the rolling boreal forest of the northeast extended all the way out here as the globe narrowed toward the pole. He remembered reading Thoreau's _The Maine Woods__ in college and marveling over the fact that there had been caribou in Maine no more than a century ago, right out there amongst the spruce and hardwoods-and now here he was in a place where there were caribou still, the chain yet unbroken. Staggered by the thought, he wandered up the road a hundred yards, half-expecting to see a herd of them just off the shoulder, but there was nothing to see but the dust of the road flung up into the trees and ladled a quarter inch thick over the weeds. He ambled back to the sound of a truck straining up the grade and took his place in the circle.
He'd been there no more than a minute or two, accepting the bong from Maya, taking a dutiful hit and passing it on, when Star came out of the clearing behind them with an armful of wildflowers, flushed and smiling; he watched her dance round the group, dispensing flowers, and then she settled in beside him, a lavender spray of fireweed tucked behind each ear, and what was that song that made him grit his teeth every time he heard it-something about going to San Francisco with flowers in your hair? Whatever hack was responsible for that drivel should have seen Star in that moment and he might have learned something about flowers and hair.
She was in a blue-and-white granny dress that brought out the color of her eyes, and the material strained against her knees and the long smooth slope of her thighs as she eased herself down. He put his arm around her to pull her in close, and as he did-in that exact moment-there was a flurry overhead and a quick-beating outsized bird that might have been an emperor goose or maybe an eagle, shot low through the trees and vanished so quickly nobody could be sure they'd seen it, and maybe none of them had, since just about everybody had their eyes closed. He let out a low exclamation. “Did you see that?” he said.
She turned to him as if for a kiss, her hair soft against his face. “Yes!” she said. “Yes! Wasn't it amazing? What was it-a hawk?”
“I don't know, but it's a good omen, don't you think?”
Tom Krishna was leading a chant. Everybody clasped hands and she leaned away a moment to take hold of the person on her left-it was Weird George, with chicken bones knotted in his hair and a string of garlic cloves slung round his neck to ward off vampires-and then came back to him and intertwined her fingers with his. “I'm so happy,” she said. “I never knew I could be this happy, never even suspected it. Aren't you happy too? Couldn't you just die for it?”
He told her he was. And he could.
In Fairbanks, Norm pulled the bus up in front of a diner, and they all filed out, everybody, the whole family, including the dogs, while the goats bleated from their ramshackle pen and Che and Sunshine shot up and down the sidewalk like guided missiles. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. Cars stopped dead in the middle of the street. People came out of stores, the barbershop, town hall. And Drop City, arrayed in all its finery, went into the diner in shifts and ate them out of milk shakes, ice cream, grilled cheese, hamburgers, tuna salad, lettuce, lemon meringue pie and soup of the day, and all of it at triple the price they would have paid in California because every mouthful had to be shipped up from the lower forty-eight. Marco counted out his share and he paid for Star, too, but he sank into his denim jacket and pulled the collar up as if he could lose himself in it-he hadn't seen a salmon yet. Or a caribou. A bear. Even a rabbit.
“Don't worry about the money,” Star told him, tucking the shining ropes of her hair behind her ears. She hadn't washed it in a week. Nobody had washed, but for the odd splash under the faucet at a truck stop or gas station, and Norm refused to stop for a communal scrub-down or swim or anything else though they passed a thousand glittering streams and rivers and lakes so clear they weren't even lakes but a kind of subset of the air. Keep it rolling, twenty-four hours a day, that was Norm's motto.
“I'm not worried,” Marco said, but he was.
Star leaned across the table and took hold of his wrists. “This is America up here, that's the beauty of it. We can get food stamps, unemployment, welfare, just like anyplace else.” Behind her, outside on the street where the sun raked at their sloping brows and kinked their hair and brought the angles of their cheekbones and noses into unblunted relief, three squared-up middle-aged women in flower-print dresses gaped through the window as if they were at the zoo. If he were in a lighter mood, Marco would have waved to them or maybe skewed his tongue in the corner of his mouth and scratched at his armpits, _er-er-er.__ As it was, he just dropped his eyes. “Besides,” she said, lowering her voice, “I have a few bucks put away. For emergencies. And you're definitely an emergency, you know that?”
He didn't know what to say to this, and he was irritated, impatient, tired of the whole dog and pony show. Where were the trees to cut and peel and notch, where was the river, where were the postcard vistas, the fish, the game, nature red in tooth and claw and just crying out to be manipulated and subdued-and enjoyed? What about enjoyment? Where was that on the schedule? He was wrung-out. Depressed. His throat was sore. In his pocket there were sixteen dollars and eighty-seven cents, and when that was gone, there'd be a long precious wait for food stamps and welfare and whatever else the all-giving and Great Society wanted to dole out-and how would the checks even get to them out in the bush? Was there mail delivery up the Yukon? Parcel post? Carrier pigeon? “I'm not worried,” he repeated.
Across the room, too wrought up even to sit, Norm swayed over the Formica-topped tables, forking up the macaroni and cheese special with a side of Waldorf salad, his eyes sucked back into his head with fatigue, exhorting them to eat up, get with it, _mobilize.__ “A hundred sixty more miles,” he rasped, too depleted to shout. “An inch and a half on the map. That's all, people-we're already home. Can you smell it? Smell that river?”
Nobody could smell anything. Their jaws worked, their smiles glistened. It was a festive moment, presided over by a shell-shocked cook and a dazed waitress in a pleated skirt and a blouse with rodeo figures embroidered on the collar. And so what if Fairbanks was exactly like a half-mile strip torn out of any industrial city anywhere in America, like Detroit or Albany or Akron, like the very burgs they'd all escaped from in the first place? They were here. They were in Alaska. The end was in sight.