The Sacred Elders, II

A Short Story
By Hilding Lindquist
Copyright © 2004 by Hilding Lindquist

I remember as a kid, sitting around listening to old people talk about their operations and illnesses. I used to feel sorry for them, if that was all they had to talk about. Now Fred and I were doing the same thing, sitting in the heart of Manhattan. Was this madness or what? Wasn’t there something we could be doing? I figured I’d better change the subject.

“You know, most of the 80’s when I was living in Seattle, I thought if I never left the Pacific Northwest, that would be all right with me,” I said. “Now look at me, sitting here in Times Square on Manhattan in New York City. I’ve come a long way, baby.”

“Yah, so?,” Fred responded with his typical jovial sarcasm. “If you like this shit so much, how come you always said you loved the wilderness of Alaska so much?”

“I never told you the story of my getting there? My life transforming journey?”

“Yah, right. You told me something about driving a friend’s car up from Seattle and falling in love with Interior Alaska. Tell me again. It’s gotta beat listening to you tell me about heart attacks and hernias. I would have thought you knew what you were getting into after being up there for the pipeline in the 70’s.”

“I never said anything about a hernia, and I didn’t have a heart attack. I was just worried about some symptoms. And in the 70’s I never was sober long enough in Alaska to know anything.”

“Yah, well, tell me how you got to Fairbanks for the winter of 95.”

“OK, it’s like this, back in the summer of 95 as you know I’d been living in Seattle—let’s see you and I went there in 97 when Gene had his operation. In 95 I’d been there for over twenty years working my way up through accounting systems—in the mid-seventies I did that freight discharge system for that barge company out of Seattle for the sealift at Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope, that’s when the three of us met in Fairbanks when I was passing through."

“I know all that,” Fred said impatiently.

“I’m putting it in perspective here. This is how I’m telling this story. You want to hear it?”

“So tell it, why don’t you?”

“That’s what I’m doing. Anyway, I’d gone from accounting to computer programming to System Analyst bullshit and I had sort of retired from my computer stuff because I was dead-assed tired of fixing Bill Gates bugs in his operating systems, making all our DOS stuff work in Windows 95. Don’t get me wrong, there was damn good money in it because there were a lot of bugs, but it wasn’t creative, not like the early days when I first got started in PC’s and Jobs still hadn’t built his first Apple computer in his garage or wherever that was. And some young guys were back-engineering CP/M in a little electronics shop on Third Avenue. Ah, if the truth were known! Voilà, Microsoft blossoms in Redmond.”

I took a deep breath to let that sink in. Fred nodded and I continued.

“So anyway I’ve told everybody, ‘I am outta here!’ I packed up my shit, gave up my studio apartment as of the end of that July, and made plans to go down to the Oregon Coast, mid-coast around Lincoln City, Newport. I really, really loved the Oregon Coast. I was going to sit on the beach and write the great American novel.”

Fred nodded his agreement. “I remember when you told me you were moving to Oregon, then bingo, you’re ringing my doorbell in Fairbanks,” he said.

I nodded in turn and continued. “So a friend of mine called me. We’d worked together on some social awareness issues out of the Pike Market Senior Center. She was staff at the time and I was a volunteer, doing my ‘good deeds for humanity’ bit. Anyway she didn’t work there any more but we kept in touch and she knew I was leaving town. So she calls me up and tells me her husband has gotten a call out of his union hall to take a job at the Fort Knox Gold Mine in Fairbanks, Alaska, and he has to report for work the next Monday—this being Tuesday, I think, maybe Wednesday. And if I could take care of packing up their apartment and putting everything in storage, then she could drive up with him and all would be just fine and my karma would be pumped up several notches or whatever, and they would pay me, and I could stay in their apartment because the rent had been paid until the end of September. And if I did all this for her she would love me forever and ask her kids to name a grandchild after me. Whatever.”

“And you fell for it,” Fred interjected.

“Yes, I fell for it. What are friends for, Fred? Actually, I enjoyed doing it. Strange, maybe, but true.”

I paused briefly, took a big swig of coffee, and gathered my thoughts. “Are you sure I haven’t told you all this before?”

“Sounds like new stuff to me.”

“OK. I’m packing stuff, shipping some things and putting the rest in storage. They’re calling me everyday and things are progressing rather nicely. In the meantime they’ve left their Suburu Justy, a little 3-cylinder, 3-door hatchback for me to drive around in with the plan being that I would put that in storage for them also. So they call me up and ask if I thought I could find someone who would be willing to drive it to Fairbanks. They had figured out that they needed two cars, and it now was early September, winter was coming. Anyway, I volunteered—mostly because I knew you were there also—and they were ever so grateful. I could stay with them a couple of weeks and get to see Interior Alaska and look you up. That sounded fine to me, so at the end of September I stuffed the Justy full of Alaska essentials and took off, driving from Seattle to the Canadian border, up through Canada, then to Fairbanks. That trip is a story all in itself.”

“Some other time,” Fred responded. “So you got to Fairbanks at the end of September, winter is closing in. You stayed. Like I said, I know you drove a friend’s car up and you fell in love with the winters, but I don’t remember you ever telling me that story behind you driving their car up.”

"Maybe not. Guess I was too awestruck by getting to put my boots on the ground up there, sober. I fell in love with the winters, the place, and the people. Before getting there in 95 I didn’t think a place like Interior Alaska still existed on this earth.”

“I tried to tell you quite a few times.”

“I know, I know. But it didn’t sink in. Living something is a whole lot different than hearing or reading about it."