New Years Day 2005.

My mom got up to go to work at the Native American Health Service hospital in Kotzebue, Alaska, where she is a nurse. As she looked outside, a blizzard was heaping snow into mountains, whiting out the sky and land into one milky blur. She pulled tight her parka and began to walk across the drifts to the hospital. The weight of the snow pushed on her legs, her pelvis. After 30 minutes on a normally 5 minute walk, she arrived at the hospital. She began to spot, just a bit. Then, that night she woke up wet and red. Uterine cancer, they ultimately told her. Stage 3. Aggressive.

When I first heard this, I thought, “It will be the easy kind. You know, the kind that they operate on and goes away.”

Well, she had the surgery, but it was still there, inside her, silently growing and destroying.

She got on a plane less than two weeks after the operation, flew across a continent, and moved into my house. She faces 6 months of chemo, four weeks off, then six weeks of radiation. I don’t have the luxury of believe it will be the easy kind any more.

***


I followed Mom through the forest, placing my feet carefully to avoid getting stuck in the mud. Mom and her dog walked ahead with the bear gun while I tried to keep up. I could hear her singing to warn the bears of our approach. I had run out of breath to sing. My pack was biting into my shoulders. The gun holster pulled me slightly off balance. A 357 Magnum, I learned, is a very heavy gun. I had learned to shoot a gun by the time I was 10 years old. I could ride a bucking horse, hike long mountain trials and make my way home in the dark, find clean drinking water in the middle of nowhere, but I could not, right then, keep up with my mother. Though I had followed her through many forests, down many rivers, across many fields, she now walked with a confidence, a solidness, I had never seen in her.

Her life in the lower 48 was like most people’s lives—a bit quirky, but recognizable. When the last child left the house when she was 49 years old, she sold almost everything she had, stored the rest, and hopped a plane to Alaska. She went to live her dream. She became a person I didn’t know.

When she wasn't out working a contract, she lived in a log cabin nearly two miles from the nearest road. Across a river. Off the grid. Off the water supply. Off toward the edge of the civilized world. Behind her land, stood the wide open spaces of Denali National Park. I was getting tired of the grandness of it all and wanted to sit.

She turned to me, “Doing ok, city girl?”

I nodded, resentful but knowing she was exactly right. I had become a city girl. Our experiences had grown far apart, and what she was learning she hadn’t been able to teach to me.

We got to the creek, and we could see mom’s cabin up on the bluff across the water. She grabbed the boat, directed me to sit in it, and began rowing us as I sat there, uselessly.

“I have to start here so that I can angle the boat just right to hit my landing spot,” she explained to me. “At least the water is down,” she continued, “but that was not the way it was a few weeks ago. We had some melt off and rain flood it, and I saw something I thought I would never see. I heard all this thunder, and when I went outside to look, I saw the sound was the boulders rolling. I never thought I would see something so large move like that.”

I looked at the truck size boulders. “You didn’t have to cross it, did you?” I said in awe.

“Well, only once,” she replied. “And that is something I don’t want to do everyday. I didn’t know if I was going to make it. Some day, this creek is gonna get me. When I go, it will probably be right here.”

As I watched the sure way she guided the boat, I thought to myself, “Never." We landed and hauled ourselves and our gear up to the cabin.

Once we were settled, mom took a good look at me, and said, “You need a bath.” Not one to argue with the chance to have a bath after three days of not having one, I offered to haul the water.

Warm water hit the back of my head and ran down my face. I took a deep breath and then it came again. I watched the suds from my hair drip off my naked feet and through the wide spaced in the floorboards. I knew the weeds under the sauna were surprised at getting so well watered. My mother, I am sure, usually didn’t use this much water because hauling it makes it too dear. But this was a special day. She was washing my hair.

The eldest woman washing the hair of the newcomer or guest of honor has a long tradition among Yupic women. A few Yupic women whom my mother helped through labor once invited her to join them for a sweat. And this was the way they honored her, the eldest washing the hair of the healer. And it was how my mother now honored me, a daughter returned from far away places. I stood perfectly still, not wanting the moment to end.

Afterwards, we sat on the porch, rocking and drinking Tang. The sun moved toward the tops of the mountains in the distance, getting ready to rest just below the horizon for a few hours before coming up again, creating the longest sunset/sunrise I would ever see. Here, at the top of the world, daylight ruled the summer, and darkness was pushed into small moments. The animals would come out to hunt for food under the cover of the long twilight, working swiftly against the coming of the light. We were safe, there on the porch.

Now, as cancer stalks us, and I think back on her life in Alaska, I wonder how can she be ill? How can she die? Ever?

***

The room is filled with recliners—filled with people in hats and scarves—people who are getting filled up with poisons meant to save them. Light flows in from the floor to ceiling wall of windows, reflecting off the polished hardwood floors. Clean. Bright.

My mom has a seat by the windows, looking out a collection of trees left behind by surrounding development. A small, untouched wild area. A creek runs through the small valley, and hardwood trees branches make shadows on the fallen leaves on the ground. Mom is sitting back in her recliner, watching the dark on light.

“Do you need anything?” I ask in my perpetual attempt to do something. Anything.

She reaches out her hand to stroke mine, and seems satisfied with the touch as she smiles her “No.”

Read the rest of the story (revised version) in the book Single State of the Union.