true North, The

The North is the perfect place for people with secrets. For a thousand miles along the Alaska Highway, everyone knows everyone else, but personal questions are never asked. The temperature drops to forty below in winter and the mosquitoes are thick as a plague in summer. If these things do not deter you from staying, it is assumed you have your reasons.

My parents saw no reason to go that far north. They stayed where it was warm enough for fruit trees and started an intentional community. They were convinced that the rest of the world was about to destroy itself. The signs were everywhere: even the comic-strip characters were joking about war and disaster. For over twenty-five years the community has been a sanctuary, for us and for others. But I've never really wanted to be safe, and I don't approve of hiding. I live in the city now, and I never visit the community when I'm unhappy. It's too seductive: miles of forest, my old loft in the cabin--I might end up agreeing to stay.

Of course, while I was growing up I heard lots of stories about escaping the draft, the cops, school, jobs--whatever people had left behind when they showed up at our land. So I know what it's like when the escape-pattern takes hold. I recognize the warning signs: the little, preliminary escapes, the terrible images seen in the ordinary, the rapid heartbeat. In my case, first, there were the brief weekend escapes to provincial parks, camped in the truck, avoiding other people. Then the terrible images, laid out in my mind like the memory of a bad Tarot reading. I see two of the midwives I work with abandoning a woman after a grueling thirty-hour home labor. They're scared of prosecution, and they cut out right when the baby's head is showing and let her husband drive her to hospital. The next bad card is one of the leaflets I've been handing out. The words Identity, Collective, Egalitarian, Alternatives--all seem strangely distorted, as if the organization has suddenly changed typeface. The real change, though, is that the words look uglier than the actual problems, twisted and sentimental. I throw the leaflets away and walk home to Jesse. The next bad card is a billboard with a blowup of a sick child, tubes running in and out of it. Beneath the picture is an appeal for funds and the words: LIFE SHOULD BE EASIER THAN THIS. I am a nurse and a midwife, all of this is ordinary, but these images create the sensation of terror: rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath as if I'm running. So now it's happening to me. I never thought it would.

The next thing I know I'm at home, asking Jesse if I can take the truck up to Claire's. She's an old friend who lived at the community for a while; now she lives about nine hundred miles north of Vancouver. I don't know exactly when I'11 be back, I say: I've cried three times at work and they're giving me leave. He touches me with his calm fingers and says of course. He understands the gravitation toward the bush--I'm the one who doesn't like to admit it. When I stop by a river several hours out of the city, I find a big sack of beautiful oranges he's stashed in the camper for me. I peel one in the still, sunny field next to the flowing water.

Like many people who come to the North, Claire and Tom left behind a secret past. I've never known much about it, though I assume they had a bout with politics like so many others. Of course there were always rumors, and once I asked my parents what Claire and Tom had gone to prison for, down at the coast, long ago. David said he really didn't know; Linda said don't ever ask. At one point David and Linda lured Claire and Tom into the community with promises of nut trees and gardens. But our life didn't suit those two. After a few years Tom said free love was a rotten deal, since there were always more interested men an women; Claire said she was tired of having to get a group consensus every time she wanted to shit. So they left the community, drove way up the Alaska Highway, and backpacked their belongings ten miles through the muskeg to

huge flat near a lake. They put up a cabin and, for all but the winter months when they worked in town, lived unseen by anyone except the Indians who have a trapping cabin on the same flat.

As I drive further north the fat cedars of the coast give way to ponderosas, and, in late afternoon, to miles of skinny matchstick trees. Tremendous views tumble out in front of my eyes and make my heart pound with a kind of animal joy. When I pull off at rest stops the rivers are wide as lakes, rushing between tree-covered hills, all signs of human life left back along the highway. When David and Linda and I used to drive up to visit, we'd stop and roll out our down bags anywhere we felt like sleeping, as if the land were one large living room. At that time, politicians in Ottawa had a Vision of the North, which meant that Claire and Tom had only to clear ten acres over five years and the quarter-section was theirs.

Once David went up to help the with the cabin and brought back some photographs: Claire and Tom wading in the lake, both of them small, naked, very white-skinned, surrounded by the dark green forest. Although they must have been in their early thirties by then, they looked like children, babes in the huge bush.