Country of Strangers
Seward Meridian, Alaska, 1950s
A coin tossed on a table top in Bisbee, Arizona. Heads or tails, my buddy said. Panama or Alaska? I wasn’t looking for meaning. Just putting distance between me and the copper mines, their bitter underground. You don’t worship anything here, just outrun the echoes following you. In Alaska 160 acres of homestead land is free. An ax, a field. A rifle, meat. Trees string their green over the landscape. It comes off on your skin. I met a woman at the Lido Hotel bar who looked like a movie star. Her green eyes held a history I thought I could talk her out of. A man and a woman make a duet. People pay for potatoes we grow, gravel and peat we dig. I’m not planning to come up empty. That dot in the forest is our cabin, lumber piled under tarps. Our daughter watches swallows swoop and dive above our clearing. She says they turn the air violet-green with their wings.
—Linda Schandelmeier
—found in Coming Out of Nowhere: Alaska Homestead Poems (2018)