Objects In Mirror Are Larger Than They Appear
by Rod Nibbe
Regan's father objected to her reckless proposition: "You've not even lived on your own for God's sake. How do you propose to survive Alaska?" Her mother could not disagree. But when she conceded that this adult - as Regan had reminded them she was - was going to Alaska to export YOUNG's (Youth Opposed to UNsustainable Growth) crusade, she supplemented the thousand dollars Regan had with a few hundred more, kissed her cheek, hugged her like she was performing the Heimlich, and insisted she call often. Regan sold a few meager belongings at a garage sale: a rusted VW Golf, a collection of Vegan cookbooks, recipe cards, various references on grass-roots activism, her emerald-eyed tabby "Greenie," and a pastiche of other accumulations. There was one last thing to do. Tell Garth - fellow crusader and boyfriend of one year.
They were snuggled in the back booth at Vegatropolis, happy; they sipped fruit smoothies from red-striped straws. It was summer in Chicago, Garth had spent the previous night in jail. Two days earlier he dangled like a spider from a hemp rope, sixteen stories up the Amoco tower with Noel, who had lowered himself from the roof on a window washer's scaffold. They unfurled a ten by thirty foot banner that had been seen by millions on channels 6, 11, and 14 and a host of local news feeds. They broadcast the message to every corner of Illinois and beyond : STOP THE MADNESS AMOCO. Regan was giddy over how helpless and ravaged the oil-soaked sea lions she'd drawn had appeared.
When Garth heard she was going to Alaska, the mood in Vegatropolis drooped like fern fronds in the rain. To Garth's watery-eyed plea, Regan said, "You heard what Derek said, Garth. You heard what's happening up there. They're drilling like mad. The place is a pin cushion. The government's leasing every speck of land. There'll be nothing left if someone doesn't act." Derek Rolfsen, a YOUNG crusader, sallow-skinned, waves of orange hair, with a leviathan voice of fire and brimstone, had just returned from Fairbanks with a litany of depredations to report.
Garth was blue. Wells of tears overflowed onto his tie-dye pullover and hemp pajama pants. He slumped in the booth like an invertebrate.
Six weeks later Regan found herself rooming at the youth hostel in Valdez, Alaska. She'd been stranded there two weeks. The ferry had broken down, and by road Anchorage seemed as distant as Chicago. It was November, the air outside was as cold as a meat locker. She was sitting inside the Black Gold coffee house, inquiring of a hoary old man wearing a cook's apron if any dairy had been used to make the banana muffins, when a puissant, six foot Athabascan native, brushing snow from his soiled tan coveralls sat down on the stool next to her.
His Athabascan name was Ten Fingers. There was a deep tremolo in his voice, like Kissenger, as he regaled Regan with Athabascan legends. She fixed on him like a child listening to nursery rhyme. He did all the talking, and when he offered her a ride to Anchorage she jumped at the opportunity. At the youth hostel, she stuffed her backpack and duffel, ran outside, and jumped up beside him in a three-quarter ton Dodge pickup that rumbled like thunder as they ascended a snow laden road to Thompson Pass. They were held up an hour at the summit behind the behemoth claws of snow removal machines that pushed, plowed, and blew snow so high the road was but a tunnel. And it was still falling, like filings to a magnet.
"My god, is it like this every winter?" Regan said.
"Yes. And much of Spring, too," Ten Fingers said. And with that he cleared his throat and spat a fetid ball of tobacco-brown phlegm at the falling snow, then rolled up his window. It was rising Karma that led her to Ten Fingers, she thought, this pleasant Athabascan native. Finally, someone in this oil-stained town whose native lifestyle surely has taught him the intrinsic value of all things natural. She was glad to be leaving Valdez, the fumes of black death at the port made her sick, that steel pipe gushing more money for the Robber Barons. And for what? So they can export their rapacious greed to the Ecuadorian rain forests! The fragile archipelago of Indonesia! The already ravaged Russia! Yes, Ten Fingers was a man she could relate to. And his name, so charming, she'd told him back at Black Gold.
He had an elder sister, renamed One Hand at an early age after a whaling accident pinched her left wrist between a rope and a gunwale on his father's skiff. Then, his mother, Tornarssuk (literally, The Bear), howled for a week of nights under the Aurora after Ten Fingers's brother, Seven Fingers - who was looking pretty normal as the Athabascan midwife pulled him into the world - finally popped out, short three digits on his right hand. "When I was born," - he had held up all ten fingers and flashed her a smile - "well - you get it." But I prefer Ben," Ten Fingers told her.
They cleared the summit, and if Ben had any more stories to tell, she never heard them. He'd become suddenly quiet as Regan rambled on about everything she learned reading Thoreau, Muir, Abbey, and Terry Tempest Williams. She waxed proud retelling her involvement in anti-road protests.
"It was awesome, fifty of us had chains around us like belts, then we padlocked ourselves together. The bulldozers were helpless. We got a lot of press." And more : abrogation of Indian rights in the Midwest, strip mine tailings in the southwest, the speckled snail darter, the spotted owls, the ring-necked eider; the swelling populations in China, India, Asia, Korea. "It just can't continue, Ben," she said, her voice rising two apocalyptic octaves. He never said a word, just kept rolling a bulge of Skoal back and forth inside his upper lip.
"That's why I'm here," she said. "These oil companies are messing everything up. They come, strip the resources, and leave. Greed, that's all it is, greed. And for what? So we can burn more oil? Pollute more of the planet? Killmore ecosystems? It can't be sustained Ben, you know that?" The narrow road was littered with ruts and potholes, the Dodge bucked and struggled through them. Ben was stoic and kept driving.
"Alaska's so special, Ben. We need to stop the oil companies. You know what I mean?" She looked over at him, spilling with entreaty. "Ben?"
"Get out." It was 3 PM, the sun was yawning, pulling down a shade of empyrean blue as it rested behind distant mountains, and here she was, seated in a Dodge pickup, idling on a mountain road, maybe two hundred miles from Anchorage -- she hadn't a clue - and Ben was telling her to get out? He glared at her, his jaw set like hardened clay, soiled Carharts, bunny boots, and that thick pustule of Skoal clotted under his lip.
"I don't understand, Ben. What's this all about?" He flicked his head, indicating the direction he wanted her to go, and adjusted the Skoal with his tongue, "You heard me."
"You can't be serious. It's cold out there, it's ... Jesus, you can't be serious?" He flicked his head again and she followed his stare, holding him in her peripheral vision, frightened. She saw three cabins, one larger than the others with a puddle of yellow light in a small window.
"She winters up here. You ain't going to freeze."
"But what did I say? What the hell is this all about!"
"Out." Obediently, she reached over the bench seat, grabbed her pack and duffel, and stepped out into the freeze. She stood roadside, like a waif, the Doppler drone of truck gears receding into the waning light, a sharp Boreal wind biting at the thin hemp pullover Garth had bought her in Durango. She pulled the drawstrings tight, lifted her pack and duffel, and marched toward the cabin's light.
"What an asshole," she mumbled.
She woke the next morning, her mouth so bereft a trace of moisture, she might have swallowed the Sonoran desert. "You poor thing," the fragile old lady had said the night before, inviting Regan inside. Not five feet tall, a wizened face and an arched back, a pleasant old woman - and yes, Ben was right, she did live there year round, had for over twenty years.
Regan heard a spoon clank in a bowl, the crackle of something frying in the kitchen wafted into the bedroom. Ick, she thought. She got no sleep on the hammock-shaped cot, the caribou hide and two afghans were no help against the frigid, dry air that bled through the chinked logs and numbed her like frozen meat. She got up, dressed, and trundled into the kitchen.
"Glenallen, dear," the old lady answered when Regan asked where the hell she was.
"You got a long road to Anchorage, honey. Ain't a pinch of goodness in some people - dumping you on a road like that. Don't you worry your young heart, my grandson Kyle is traveling back to Anchorage today. He visits every so often, brings me supplies from Anchorage, you're welcome to ride in with him." The old lady scuffed out the back door for wood to fuel the stove. Regan scraped the carnage on her plate - reindeer sausage and scrambled eggs - into the mouth of an emaciated Husky named Tok.
Just then a wiry six foot man, grizzled and unkempt, wearing an un-tucked plaid wool shirt, looking like he'd just woke from hibernation, threw open the cabin door, stomping snow from his boots.
"Name's Kyle." His hand was callused and icy, he squeezed Regan's unaware of his own strength. "Ma told me the story early this morning. Big black Dodge pickup? Said his name was Ben?"
"Right, right, do you know him?"
"Yea. He comes through here quite a bit. An Athabascan guy. They get a real edge when they're liquored up. Hard to predict. Works the pipeline, TAPS, a troubleshooter." The pipeline? He was one of them? She slumped in the kitchen chair, pissed at her character misjudgment, glum from self-betrayal.
"You must have really pissed him off," Kyle said, running to help his mother with her armful of wood.
"No. I mean, we were just talking and - " she cut herself short. She was exhausted, had a pounding headache, an empty stomach, and she needed to get to Anchorage. Kyle held the ticket; she couldn't afford to piss him off, too.
"I mean, yea, you're probably right. I think he was pretty drunk," Regan said. And so what, she thought, I'm twenty years old, maybe a little naive, I misjudged Ben, so what? I'm not totally stupid. I'm not dead or anything. Outside, she waited for Kyle to bring a dilapidated Ford pickup to life. It was ten thirty, not a breath of wind, maddeningly cold; the sun, a tired orange stain, leaned on a distant mountain peak.
Kyle navigated the wheezing Ford over a snow packed, sinuous mountain road, tapping his finger on the wheel, keeping time with some country music on a tape that sounded like it'd been recorded in a shower stall. The fan blew heat on high, wind whistled in from a half dozen places. He was traveling pretty fast for conditions, Regan thought; the Ford fish-tailed in turns. She clutched the weathered door handle and steered her attention away from the mountain that fell away into a snowy abyss not ten feet from her door. She'd look at Kyle then, he back at her with an insouciant grin and a wink, and then he'd continue that incessant thumping on the wheel.
About seventy five miles from some place called Palmer, the Ford started it's slide. They were descending a steep stretch of slippery road, too fast Regan was sure, and found an orphaned patch of ice. The Ford pitched back and forth a couple of times, she looked out she saw the bridge ahead - fifty, maybe seventy feet long, spanning a gouge in the mountain. The Ford schussed right at it. Regan lunged across the bench seat, fighting against her seat belt, and clung to Kyle like talons on a salmon; she shut her eyes and imagined the worse. They smacked a pile of snow plowed high against the right bridge abutment. Her seat belt cinched tight against her ribs, her fingers gripped Kyle's biceps like she were kneading dough. The Ford coughed and died. Regan looked out the passenger door and there was nothing but air, the Ford was pitched, leaning against a mound of snow, it was all that kept it from falling into the gaped mouth of the gorge.
Ever so slowly, Kyle opened his door and climbed out of the truck, Regan didn't move. In every direction she could feel the mountain falling away from her, chasms, bottomless canyons, endless distances of snowy space. She was perspiring, trembling. She thought she felt the Ford teetering, one move and she'd be falling,falling. Kyle was outside gesturing for her to climb out his door.
"No fucking way," she blurted. She sat as if frozen by the frigid air seeping into the truck.
"Woa, little girl, you're petrified," Kyle said, holding open the driver side door.
"You sit tight, I'll dig us out. It's looks worse than it is. The left wheels are still on pavement." He let the door slam and pulled a shovel form the Ford's bed. Regan felt the whole world shake beneath her. He dug, chiseled, and swore for a half hour freeing the right front wheel, tossed the shovel like a javelin into a pile of snow in the bed, and hopped back into the Ford. It balked for a minute then sputtered to life. Tires whirred, the Ford rocked back and forth, Regan was pinned against Kyle like she were sewn to his jacket, then all at once they were free of the rut and moving over the bridge.
Regan didn't thaw until well past Palmer. There the road was flat and safe, like the roads at home in Chicago. Framed in the square side view mirror, a lavender alpenglow swept the mountains, receding from view as they drove southwest into the feeble afternoon light. The jagged peaks appeared to Regan as canines in the gaped mouth of some looming giant. She misread CLOSER as LARGER noting the faint caution etched on the mirror : OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.
"No shit," she cringed.
Jan Haugmeister was a godsend. He'd heard of YOUNG in Norway, his home base of protest for nuclear accidents in Kiev, dwindling yellow sea lion populations offshore Spain, and the plunder of nationalized oil and gas in the North Sea. Regan met Jan at the International Youth Hostel in Anchorage (AYH), where Kyle had dropped her a month earlier. "Good luck," he'd said, and good riddance, she thought, learning he was one of them, too - another resource raper at a place called the North Slope. And now, here was Jan, a foreigner no less, and a brother in the crusade. They spent the ever-brightening days of February and March together licking envelopes, picketing offices, holding rallies and planning for a summer of activism to protest drilling in the Beaufort Sea. Late one March evening, after sharing a delicious order of tofu quiche, peppered corn meal, and a twice baked potato with a dollop of fresh avocado, topped off with jellied rice cakes and a shot of wheat grass for desert at the Enzyme Express, Regan and Jan made love like Adam and Eve and began sharing a room at AYH. April came and went. Wet. May arrived with summer in tow. The days were warm.
"I feel like shit, Jan," Regan said, removing her polar bear headdress. She and Jan were outside the British Petroleum office tower, chained together with four other crusaders they'd recruited at AYH, all of them chained to the bicycle rack along with a cassette player that blared the ululating bellows of a distressed pod of killer whales. El Nino had turned up the heat to seventy-four degrees. Regan was perspiring like a flu victim inside her blood-stained polar bear costume; Jan's face, arms and chest were painted orca black and white.
"I know vhat you mean, Regan," Jan said, passing her a rice cake, "Dis sux." Outside a few snide comments and censorious sneers from lunch-goers, the three hour protest had received little attention. Then the idea hit her like an apple on the head.
Back at AYH, some Germans donated the climbing ropes, harnesses and carabineers, the Swedish newlyweds helped with the banner, and everyone at AYH chipped in to come up with the five hundred bucks that Jan's friend's friend who owned the helicopter touring outfit said he'd want for the crazy stunt they were proposing.Regan and Jan barely got everything out of the helicopter before the pilot left them stranded like two spies on the roof of the British Petroleum office tower. They huddled together beneath a tarp like frightened children; clouds hung like the distended belly of a sated carnivore over Anchorage. They waited for morning.
Neither one of them got a wink of sleep. Jan checked his watch, 8 am, the clouds had cleared, the sun had begun to dry the air. He fastened the cleats to the roof, rigged up a leather saddle, one each for he and Regan that they'd sit in while unfurling the banner, secured each one in a loop at one end of both ropes, then knotted the other ends to the cleats. He wrapped the saddle around his waist, secured the one hundred feet of rope in a loop on the harness, clipped on the carabineers and helped Regan do he same.
"Don't forget. Go over backvards," Jan said, then he kissed her, cradled the banner under his left arm, double checked the rope tension and disappeared over the north lip of the roof. He yelled to her two or three times before she finally did it. She tried to repel like Jan instructed her, but terror took over. She shut her eyes and slid against the glass and steel, the rope burning her bare hands, jerking through the caribeeners. Her eyes were still closed when she stopped one hundred feet later, pressed against the smoke glass panes of the fourteenth floor offices.
"You did it!", Jan yelled. She dangled from the swing like a child on a playground.
"I'm going to throw you the banner rope. Are you ready?" She opened her eyes now, careful to avoid the ground, kept them pinned on Jan who was hanging about twenty feet from her, a dot against a backdrop of dark mountains. The rope flew like a drunk snake, she caught the slack and began pulling it toward her; a knot cinched against the corner eyelet of the banner. It began to unfurl.
It was upside down, which made the belly-up Orca she'd drawn floating next to an oil platform seem pretty contented. But it got the attention they were after. They weren't up there more than ten minutes when people started congregating on the lawn. Then channel 2 news arrived, the police right behind them.
As the cops reeled her and Jan back to the roof, she peered down at the crowd and spotted him - leaning against the black Dodge, curbside, his arms folded to his chest, rolling the knot of tobacco back and forth under his upper lip. He was peering back at her, shaking his head like a disappointed father - it was Ten Fingers. He was mocking her, Regan thought. Athabascan native, huh! he was an apostate. She beamed at him like a determined pugilist and thrust a salutatory middle finger high into the air.
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