In the darkness of the Northern Lights Saloon it was hard to know what I was really thinking.  My mind was always full of thoughts of love and darkness is a cover where common sense and reality can hide.  I can always find a way to excuse the beginning of things.  The storm blowing outside and the tequila burning my throat, shaking up my head.  The problem is explaining the continuance.  Maybe it’s biological to choose a man destined to disappoint.  Maybe it’s deliberate.  

I met Harrison up in this outpost bar in the middle of nowhere near the Canadian border on a sub-zero night.  He was tending bar and the wood stove and serving hot soup and rolls he’d baked himself. 

Harrison had long curly hair, dark and soft, and broad shoulders, muscled like a lumberjack.  When I think about him now I remember him climbing into bed with me, curling his body around mine, and the soft fur of his chest against my back.  His muscles held his clothes up off his body.  His forehead was too high.  His chin was dimpled and he had an overbite and a crooked smile.  His fingers were thick as sausages and hardly looked like they could bend.  

The wind was howling outside and it was too cold to snow.  Icy chunks were whipping against the windows.  Popping under the door. 

I was up here with my friends to cross country ski, but it was too cold even to be outside so we hunkered down by the stove and swapped stories.  We’d been in here all day drinking tequila and black russians and spicy cups of beer cheese soup.

The whole bar was the size of a large bedroom and we were the only ones there.  Harrison joined us at the table.  He brought the bottle of Cuervo Gold with him.

“What are you guys doing up here anyway,” he asked?

Malcolm nudged the bottle and Harrison poured him a shot.

“Besides getting soused.”

“That’s about it, man,”  Malcolm said desperately.  It killed him if he couldn’t be outside doing something wild every day.  “That’s about it,” he downed his shot.

“We were supposed to ski up to Bowman Lake,” Janie said.

“Nice day for it,” Harrison laughed.  “This is about the coldest day we’ve had up here so far this year.”

“What do you do up here all winter,” she asked?

“Someone’s gotta tend the bar,”  he laughed again and poured tequila into all the empty glasses.

I sat there watching him, unable to join in the chatter.  I could feel the familiar block in my throat, the faint flicker of desire.  I couldn’t trust myself to speak.  I had to listen.  If I spoke now I would shatter the whole scene and we would be back in Lakeside in warm houses.  Janie and Malcolm would be curled up on their couch and I would be alone.

Even with the wood stove going it was cold in the bar.  The windows and doors did not fit their casements, as if they were intended for another building altogether.

“You cold?” Harrison asked me, putting a hand on my hunched shoulder.

I nodded.

“Coldest day yet,” he said, and put another log on the stove.  “I’ll put some water on for hot toddies.  Here, move your chair closer,”  he grabbed the seat of my chair and slid me right next to the stove.  I was burning hot.

Harrison told us about the grizzly bears in town all fall.  How one sheared open a tipi with his claw while a couple from Switzerland woke up screaming, and the resident Karelian bear dog chased it away.  Funny that he called this a town - this saloon, the mercantile next door, the cabins clustered around, and then the solitary houses spaced like checkers close by and then scattered, each one dotting a piece of land meant for wilderness.  But there’s mail delivery here, twice a week, so it’s a town.

   He conceded, with evident glee, that we were off the map here, so to speak.  We were in border land.  No man’s land.  Ringed with rugged mountains, the roads in and out brutal and rustic and almost non-existent.  It’s survival country.  Especially in winter.  Generator for electricity, wells, pumps.

Wild west America 50, 80 years ago.  There were pockets of it left in places like this and the people who lived here liked it that way.

People in the cities joke about cowboys in outback places like Wyoming and Idaho and Montana.  They like to imagine they still exist, archetypal males.  Archetypal land.  People take to wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots in the city streets, to emulate them.  Refer back.

But up here the reality is more like good old boys in pick-up trucks with baseball caps all summer, black wool skull caps the rest of the time.

These guys know how to fix a Ford.  A Chevy.  They plow roads and cut down huge old trees and buck them up for firewood or lumber.  They have cattle, some of them, a few head maybe.  And they butcher them and sell off the meat and keep some themselves.  But they herd them with 4x4’s  They all have snowmobiles.

Harrison was telling us about a canoe trip he took just a month ago.

He  went upriver to the Canadian border about 30 miles east and north of Polebridge.  He went overland on an old logging road they keep plowed all winter.  He got a ride from a guy who lived even further up the roadless road.

He had his canoe and his dog Che, a beautiful Alaskan Husky with some Malamute in him which mellowed him out and made him very smart. 

Harrison and Che put in at the river.  They loaded up the canoe. It was a clear day and the river was running low.  There would have been no cause for worry or over preparedness.  I would have dry bagged but Harrison was a risk-taker.   

They started heading down-river.  The mountains were all snow covered, the granite etched and glistening.  Everything was a lustrous white.  Every surface mirrored a reflection in snow.  An outline of even the smallest detail.  Weightless, and loaded.

Harrison paddled.  The water was lazy and blue.  It was cold.  Maybe 20 degrees.  The eddies were shallow and slow moving and Harrison didn’t paddle much but drifted and drank shots of whiskey from a pint bottle he carried and oared himself straight and smoked some dope.

I can’t remember what flipped them.  Isn’t that funny?  Because that’s the most exciting part of the story really. At least it was when Harrison told it.  All the high drama.  But that isn’t what stuck in my head.  

Somehow, they flipped.  The gear headed off downriver and sunk.  Harrison made it to shore only half soaked because the river was low.  The canoe wrapped around a rock.  Che was fine of course and shook off and romped around but Harrison was freezing and wet, in the middle of nowhere, with no way to get home.

First thing out of the river he stripped off his wet clothes.  He had polypro pants on and wrung them out, twisting them up with a stick to get all the water out, then he put them back on.  He did the same with his wool socks and emptied his shoes out.

His top half was pretty dry and he’d managed to grab his backpack which had a flashlight and his camera and some other stuff, Power Bar, first aid kit.

He started walking right away.  It was late in the day already.  Probably two or three and in the winter this far north that doesn’t leave much daylight.

He headed down along the river towards where he thought the road should be.  He was pretty tired by now and even though he was moving, he wasn’t warming up and he was hungry.  It started to dusk out around him and to snow lightly, a wet snow, fat watery flakes.  Pretty soon he was wringing out his wool cap.

He was far from the river and still not at the road and then he passed a gnarled blackened chair-shaped stump of an old cedar tree that he had passed an hour ago and had remarked in his mind how beautiful it was.  

Now he didn’t think it was so beautiful and he sat down beside it and wept for a moment, a few choking sobs.

“You really cried,” Janie asked? She was an authenticator, and was impressed by a detail like that.

“Sure I cried.  Shit, I was about to die out there.”

She nodded gravely.  He grinned, and continued.

He put down his pack and Che trotted over with a stick in his mouth and Harrison rubbed his hands deep into Che’s coat for a while, warming them in the dogs fur and taking comfort in his company.

He took Che’s stick and dug around for some semi-dry wood to build a fire.  He found a birch tree and peeled off some bark.  His lighter was still dry from his smoke kit, inside pocket, but the tree bark was slick from the snow and wouldn’t start.

He was moving clumsily and starting to lose patience.  Then he remembered his camera and popped it open, exposing his carefully timed shots of the mountains and lit the film on fire.  It sparked and caught instantly and he fed it with bits of tissue and gum wrappers from his coat and then some bark caught on and slowly, by protecting the flame in the lee of a rock and his body, he fanned a teeny smoking fire up and then finally a stick caught and then another and he had it.

It was small but right next to it he could be warm and it offered the friendly protection of light in the darkening wild night.  

Che curled up a little away from the fire, offering no warmth but also requiring no care and providing somewhat of a guard.

Harrison opened the Power Bar and began gnawing on the semi-frozen leatheriness.  He worked his jaw for a while and freed a mouth-sized chunk and laughed at how satisfying it was and rather tasty too, this end of the world foodstuff.

He’d been eating snow for a while when he remembered some story he’d heard.  It takes so much energy for the body to melt snow into water that to eat it actually dehydrates you.

So this is what he did.  He made a big snowball and found a stick and skewered it.  Then he held the snowball over the fire and melted the outside into itself.  He’d take it out of the fire and suck all the melted water out of the snow.  Then he’d put it back on the fire and do it again until he drank the snowball dry.

This big bear of a man, lost and cold and tired, hunched over a teeny fire, drinking snowballs.  It clung to my minds eye, permanently, long after everything else was done.

Not much later, although it had to be because a streaky grey was tipping up the eastern sky, someone snowmobiled into camp.  Harrison woke up even though he’d been trying to keep himself awake so he wouldn’t die of hypothermia and thought he’d been doing a pretty good job.

‘You Harrison,’ the guy asked?

‘Yup.’

‘Been looking for you half the night since a call patched up you didn’t show home.’

‘Sorry, sir,’ Harrison said.  With his brain and his mouth near frozen it sounded like, ‘awlee tha.’

The man had to half carry him, half push him onto the snowmobile.  Harrison was a pretty big guy and he had to be bungied down because his legs were so frozen he couldn’t hold on.

Che ran beside them the whole way home, diving in and out of snow banks and burying himself.  Rubbing upside down on his back in joyous abandon before leaping back and racing ahead of the machine which moved slow in the deep snow.

Harrison kept his eyes closed against the wind and listened to the grisly two stroke motor skip up to his heartbeat.

Harrison finished the story, laughing and poured us another round of tequila shots and then threw a couple of logs on and stoked the fire.

“Were you scared.” Janie asked him?

“No,” he said, without even thinking.

“Not even a little bit?  Not even for Che?”

“Che was way better off than I was, I’ll tell you that.  I wasn’t scared, I was just kicking myself for being so stupid.  But what the hell.  I’m still here. Bottoms up.”

He tossed his shot back and we all drank ours a little slower.  I was still thinking of the melted snowballs.  But even so, he had lost against nature, hadn’t he?  I mean he had won, because he was alive, but he hadn’t done any conquering.  He was rescued.  

I walked outside to clear my head and get money from my car to pay him.  The storm had passed.  You could still see it far away over the eastern mountains, but the rest of the sky had cleared.  Had just opened up, the way it does around here.  Late afternoons and at night.  Storms liked to happen during the day here.  Or in the early evenings.  Even in the middle of a huge system, three or four days long, it was rare not to have little breaks.

But this was a clearing.  Everything was still and the high air was whistling softly.

There’s no electricity up in Polebridge and the houses recede away and are like nothing under the dome of sky.  Its got depth to it, the sky, and span, horizon to craggy mountained horizon.  It’s black as absence and filled with light.  Not pinpoints of light like they call stars in town.  But rips of light.  Huge holes and twinkling, lined-up galaxies.  When you are just standing up underneath it on your way out to your car to get your wallet, you are in it.  You become a part of it because the sky reaches down to the earth, it’s part of that too, it comes low, and fills in all the crevices.  There aren’t stars down here but there’s something else.  A beautiful clarity.  A certain safety in being surrounded and held up by all this clear empty night air, with the promise of morning and heat hidden together under its perfect hemline.

I couldn’t open my car door.  It was frozen shut and caked with ice from the storm.  I was pulling at the handle, pressing the lever, but it wouldn’t budge and then Harrison came out from the saloon and walked over.  

“Trouble,” he asked?  

I admitted that it was and let go of the door.

“I’ll help you in a sec,” he said and walked away a few feet next to a Pine tree and turned his back and took a leak into the snow.  I watched his silhouette. Then he came over and took a look at the car door.  He pressed on the handle and pushed the lever to no avail and he pulled out some tools from his pocket.  A wrench that flipped out and one of those torch butane lighters that are guaranteed to light in a twenty-mile-an-hour wind.  I wondered if that was the sort of lighter you needed for the snowball sucking trick.

He started torching and wrenching and working and I stepped away a little bit and let him and went back to looking at the stars which seemed huger now and brighter.

I could see the outline of whole mountain ranges, from North to South and the flats way down at the end of them.  As I was looking up at the sky and Harrison was bent over the car door, I saw a shooting star.  You know how shooting stars are.  You almost always catch them out of your peripheral vision. By the time your mind registers what’s happened they’re gone.  

This one was different but how was I to know.  It started from the far left of the horizon, and it was decent sized, not a speck star dying, but a good baseball sized star.  It started across the sky and slightly up and it was so beautiful that I opened my mouth to say, Oh my god, there’s a beautiful shooting star.   But I thought that as soon as I said that it would be gone anyway.  Harrison wouldn’t have time to look up and see it because he was working, so I thought I won’t say anything.  I’ll keep this little gift to myself.  

Then the star kept going.  It was streaking across the sky, still, it was moving a long way.  

I had time to think again, I should tell Harrison to look up, it’s a record, going so long.  But I thought since it’s been going so long it has to end now and he won’t get to see it anyway, so why gloat?

I had time to think this whole thought through one more time,  the star streaked for that long.  From one whole end of the horizon to the other, and I just stood there gaping, my eyes wide, unblinking.

When it finally burnt out I gasped and jolted forward a step and realized I’d been holding my breath and standing up on my toes and I laughed now, giddy.

“There.  Got it,” Harrison said.  I looked down, my eyes refocused and my car door was open.

“Cars don’t like this temperature,” he said.  “I’m gonna get some more wood.”

He walked off.  Graceful, he moved, held his shoulders wide and let his hips sway, comfortable in his body.

I watched him walk away and felt some outer part of myself melt to the inside like the snowball.  It felt like moments, hours, entire days had been lost while he opened the door.  I could imagine myself walking beside Harrison, his graceful walk, my own lope, our hands linked.  I could see a strange whole life with him all the way to the last, inevitable, horrible fights, the shreds of dignity spat at each other.  My old V-Dub taking me home after we’d lost the magic. 

I shivered in the cold clear night and felt my eyes burn and the stars start to double and blur.

I was sad for this beautiful man-boy who I might have but who would never be mine.  I was sad that he hadn’t seen the star and I had, and that I didn’t tell him about it and never would.  How he opened the car door with the tools he just happened to have in his pocket.  How beautiful it was when he peed in the snow.  He could do things but I knew it wasn’t enough and would never work and that we were doomed to love each other anyway or I was doomed to love him and to learn that you have to be much more careful than to love with abandon.  That is, you can love, with abandon, but you can’t just love anyone.

Later that night he kissed me, standing outside the cabins, toe to toe.  For a while.  Eye to eye.  Not talking, just looking at each other and occasionally away.  He kissed me and it was softer than I expected.  He kissed me for a long time like that.  Very soft.  Sweet boy kisses.  I knew I was falling in love with him a little bit here and that I would more.  And that it would end and that there would be pain, both for myself and for him.  And that I wouldn’t stop it anyway.

After a while I opened my mouth up to his and he stopped kissing with sweet soft boy kisses and let his tongue meet mine.  But it was already too late.