Beyond the Bear Read Free Page B

Lumpur, class outings required leech-proof socks, and included kayaking down the Perak River and jungle trekking in the company of flying snakes, monitor lizards, and other fanged hazards.
    Amber, whose family hadn’t strayed far from the Boundary Waters area for three generations, grew up in the small town of Eveleth, Minnesota, home of the world’s largest free-standing hockey stick, where blasts at the local open-pit mines sometimes rattled her school. Good times in Amber’s childhood included cookouts, jet skiing, and attending an annual basketball match that pitted local firemen against the cops while riding on the backs of donkeys.
    Besides that, I played guitar.
    Amber played tuba.
    For different reasons, we both rebelled against our upbringings, answered the call of the road, and found what we were looking for not far from where that road dead-ends at the northernmost edge of the continent.It wasn’t long after I landed in Girdwood that Amber caught my attention. Once she did, I started keeping an eye out for her whenever I was out and about on the town. I took note of her on the sly, leaning behind a friend’s back as she tossed horseshoes in the backyard at Max’s. I checked her out from afar as she gyroscoped inside a purple hula-hoop to Grateful Dead tunes at the Jerry Garcia Pig Roast in Fairbanks. At that same festival, with me in a camp chair and her in a halter top and long, flowy skirt, I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she cleaned and organized her Volkswagen van. She was a free spirit for sure, but not one of those cosmo-la-la types who think that if we all just embrace the magical power of crystals everything will work out fine. She struck me as the kind who could bake bread and change her own timing belt.
    Amber may not have been up for skiing down chutes or hiking to the top of Max’s Mountain at midnight, but as I’d later learn, she was actually ballsier than me. While pursuing a major in anthropology at the University of Minnesota, she’d boarded a plane to Kenya not long after a series of bombs at American Embassy buildings killed hundreds and wounded thousands. There, she lived with the Maasai, a semi-nomadic herding tribe that practiced polygamy and female circumcision, and traditionally offered its dead to the hyenas. While living in Malaysia in a gated house I’d felt brave eating shark-fin soup. While living in Kenya in a cow-dung hut, Amber ate what the Maasai ate and drank what the Maasai drank, which upon occasion meant taking a polite sip of blood from the throat of a slaughtered goat.
    Once I learned through mutual friends that Amber had lived in one of the storied, off-the-grid cabins way up Girdwood’s Crow Creek Road—in winter—she couldn’t have been more appealing had she shown up on my doorstep in a nightie. The access alone, a gravel road winding its way up the valley along steep mountain slopes and across several avalanche paths, was enough of a moat to weed out most. Amber, her best friend, Rebecca “Bekkie” Volino, and their two dogs had moved into a tiny cabin up there in February, 2002. Although workers living at the gold mine above kept the road reasonably plowed, Amber was driving a low-rider Oldsmobile with summer tires that would sometimes lose traction and start sliding backward like a spooked horse. She’d have to back down, get a running start, and gun it. She’d then pull over at a spot a person might pick who wanted to wander off and never be found. She’d hoist her pack onto her back, walk into the woods, and head down a trail to a bluff so steep there were fixed ropes for lowering herself down.
    The cabin, hunkered at the bottom next to Crow Creek, was about as spacious as a lunchbox, with as many amenities. No electricity. No phone. Not even cell phone coverage. Amber and Bekkie had to share the only sleeping space, a double mattress atop a sheet of plywood propped up off the floor on five-gallon buckets. They used a Coleman lantern for light