Fuel and the Lack of It

The cabin belonged to nobody. It sat at the edge of a gravel bar on the Donjek River in the southwest Yukon, built by someone who had needed four walls and a stovepipe and had not needed permission. The logs were silvered with age and the chinking had been replaced at least twice, most recently with some industrial caulk that had yellowed to the colour of old teeth. There was a woodstove that drew well, a plank table, two benches, and a cot with no mattress. Someone had left a tin of condensed milk on a shelf. The tin was rusted shut and I did not try to open it.

I had built a fire in the stove two hours before they arrived. London came first — or rather, London was simply there when I looked up from the stove, standing in the doorway with snow on his shoulders, studying the cabin the way you study a room you have lived in before but cannot quite place. He was younger than I expected. Broader. His hands were large and roughened and he held them slightly away from his body, the way men hold their hands when they are accustomed to needing them quickly.

“Adequate,” he said, looking at the stove. He did not say hello.

Markham arrived twenty minutes later, on foot, from a direction I had not been watching. She wore a canvas jacket and boots that had seen real use, and she moved with an economy that made London’s entrance look theatrical by comparison. She looked at the cabin. She looked at the fire through the open stove door. She looked at me.

“You’re the one writing it,” she said.

“I am.”

She sat on one of the benches and stretched her legs toward the stove. “Then you should know that a fire this size in a stove this small will burn through your wood in three hours. And I don’t see much stacked outside.”

London laughed. It was a short, appreciative sound, and he sat on the opposite bench and looked at Markham with the frank appraisal of one professional sizing up another. “She’s right. You built a comfort fire. A working fire is smaller.”

I adjusted the damper. They watched me do it. I felt, not for the first time, that I was being assessed by people who had spent their lives in rooms — and in places far from rooms — where competence was the only currency that mattered, and that I was coming up short.

“So,” London said. He put his forearms on the table. “A walking story. People walk out of a wreck into country that does not care whether they arrive anywhere. The group thins. The land remains. You want to write this.”

“I do.”

“Why?”

I had prepared for this question and my preparation was useless. The honest answer — that the combination of his sensibility and Markham’s seemed to me to contain a productive friction, that the structural logic of attrition appealed to me, that the themes of romantic wilderness versus actual wilderness felt urgent — was true but also dead on the page, the kind of answer you give in a grant application. So I said something else.

“Because I want to write a woman who is competent and who the prose does not make a fuss about.”

Markham looked at me. “Go on.”

“Not a woman who proves herself. Not a woman who earns the respect of the men around her. A woman who already has the skills and the prose simply — reports that. The way your prose reports what you can do, Mrs. Markham. Without apology or explanation.”

“Beryl,” she said. “And the word you want is not ‘reports.’ A report is what a bureaucrat files. What I wrote in West with the Night was closer to — testimony. But testimony given to an empty courtroom. You say what happened. Whether anyone is listening is not your concern.”

London shifted on his bench. “The walking story has a problem and you should hear it before you waste three thousand words discovering it.”

“Tell me.”

“The walking story is monotonous. Deliberately monotonous. That is its power and its risk. A group walks. The landscape does not change, or changes so slowly that the change is imperceptible from inside. The drama is internal — the body failing, the will contesting the body’s failure, the slow thinning of the group as the weak fall away. This is what Rawicz understood. This is what I understood in the Klondike. The problem is that monotony on the page is still monotony. You can write it brilliantly and the reader will still feel the drag. The question is whether you mean the drag to be the point.”

“I think I do.”

“Then you have to earn it. Every paragraph of that drag has to contain something the reader cannot get from the paragraph before it. Not incident — not a bear or a river crossing or someone finding a berry bush. That is the adventure writer’s cheat, dropping incident into monotony like sugar into medicine. I mean a sentence-level density. Each paragraph of walking has to teach the reader something new about what walking costs.”

Markham shook her head. Not in disagreement — more like a horse refusing a direction. “You are describing a physiology lesson. The body costs this, then it costs that, then it costs more. That is your mode, Jack, and it has its power, but it is not the only mode. The walking story can also be about what you see when you are reduced to walking. The landscape opens differently when you are in extremity. I have landed a plane with a failing engine in the Rift Valley and I can tell you that the thornbush and red soil I saw from fifty feet up, when I was looking for a place to put down, was not the same thornbush and red soil I had flown over a hundred times. Fear makes the eye specific. Exhaustion makes it more specific still.”

“So the landscape changes because the walker changes.”

“The landscape was always there. The walker finally has the poverty of attention to see it.”

London considered this. He rubbed one of his large hands across his jaw, a gesture that looked habitual and unconscious. “Fine. The eye sharpens. But the body still fails. And the body failing is the engine of the thing — without physical deterioration the walking story is a nature essay with legs.”

“I did not say omit the body. I said the body is not the only instrument.” Markham’s voice was cool and precise and carried the faint, worn authority of someone who had been underestimated by men for decades and had stopped caring about it. “Your man To Build a Fire dies because his body fails. He also dies because he is a fool who went out in temperatures that no person of experience would have walked in. The story is as much about stupidity as about cold.”

“It is about the specific stupidity of the civilized man in uncivilized conditions. Which is the point.”

“And my point is that you have always been more interested in the fool than in the person who survives. Your stories are graveyards. The competent figure, the one who reads the conditions correctly and acts accordingly — you give that figure to the dog. Or to an Indigenous man who appears for two paragraphs and vanishes. The survivor is a silhouette. The fool is your protagonist.”

The cabin was quiet. The stove ticked. Outside, the river made its sound, which was the sound of water that had been making its way to the Bering Sea for longer than either of these writers had been alive or dead.

London said, “You may be right about that.”

It cost him something. I could see it cost him something.

“I want the survivor to be the protagonist,” I said. “A woman. A backcountry guide. Tlingit and Scottish. She’s not the fool and she’s not the romantic. She’s the one who has walked the country before and knows what it is.”

“What is it?” London asked.

“Conditions. Just conditions. Not a test, not a cathedral, not a teacher. A set of physical facts that you meet or you don’t.”

Markham smiled. It was a small smile, directed mostly at the stove. “That is the correct answer. But it is also easy to say and very difficult to dramatize. If your protagonist already knows the country, already has the skills, already understands the terms — where is the story? Competence is not dramatic. Competence is the absence of drama. That is what makes it beautiful and also what makes it nearly impossible to write.”

“You wrote it.”

“I wrote it about myself, which is cheating. I knew what the competence felt like from inside — the texture of it, the small satisfactions and the large tediums. You are going to have to invent that texture. And if you get it wrong, if you make competence look like heroism or — God forbid — like humility, you will have written a greeting card.”

London leaned forward. “Give her a fool. That’s the structure. The competent woman and the fool, walking together. The fool carries the romantic notions. The fool thinks the wilderness is a church. The fool is the reader’s surrogate — the person who believes what the reader believes and is disabused of it, step by step, by the country and by the woman who knows the country. Rawicz had this. The group thins and the ones who remain are the ones who understood the terms from the beginning.”

“And the fool?” I said. “Does the fool die?”

“The fool doesn’t have to die. The fool has to lose something. The romantic notion has to die. The person can walk out carrying the husk of it.”

Markham stood and went to the stove and opened the door and looked at the fire. She fed it a single piece of split spruce with the precision of someone who understood that a fire is a tool and you use a tool with economy.

“I want to say something about the difference between running from and running toward,” she said, still looking at the fire. “Because that is the question your walking story has to answer, or refuse to answer. Every person who goes into wilderness is doing one or the other. Every person who flies solo across an ocean is doing one or the other. People assume — men in particular assume — that I flew to Newfoundland because I was running toward something. An achievement. A record. A first. But the truth is that I was neither running from nor running toward. I was simply going. The going was the thing. Not the departure and not the arrival.”

“That is a luxury,” London said. “The going-as-the-thing. Your walkers will not have that luxury. They are walking because they will die if they do not walk. That is not going. That is fleeing — fleeing stasis, fleeing the wreck, fleeing the arithmetic of dwindling calories. There is no purity in it.”

“I did not say it was pure. I said it was the thing. And your protagonist — ” Markham turned to me. “Your guide, your competent woman — she has to walk somewhere between those positions. She is not fleeing and she is not going. She is working. The walk is her job. People romanticize the wilderness guide as someone who loves the wild. Some do. Most are people who are good at a job that happens to take place outdoors. The love, if it exists, is the love of a craftsman for the material, not the love of a pilgrim for a shrine.”

I said, “So the walk is work.”

“The walk is work. And work does not need to be justified or explained or elevated into metaphor. Work is sufficient. You set snares because the body needs fuel. You read the terrain because the route needs finding. You keep walking because the alternative is not walking, and not walking is dying. This is not bleak. This is honest.”

London drummed his fingers on the plank table. “You’re describing something very close to what I believe, Beryl, and I am not sure I like hearing it in your voice rather than mine.”

“Perhaps because I arrived at it without the detour through Social Darwinism.”

The silence that followed was not comfortable. London’s face did something complicated — anger, then recognition, then a willed setting-aside that was not forgiveness but was something adjacent to it.

“That’s fair,” he said. “I earned that.”

I waited. The stove ticked. The river spoke. After a while, I said, “There is something I cannot resolve. The story — this walking story — it has to do something with the idea of voluntary suffering. People who go into wilderness voluntarily versus the people we’re writing about, who are there by accident. Into the Wild is about a boy who chose the wild and the wild killed him. My protagonist did not choose this particular walk. She chose the career, the country, the life — but not this emergency. Does that matter?”

London said, “It matters enormously. The voluntary sufferer is a mystic or a fool. The involuntary sufferer is an animal. I am interested in the animal.”

Markham said, “And I am interested in neither. I am interested in the professional. The person for whom the emergency is a variant of Tuesday. Not routine — an emergency is never routine — but within the range of conditions she has trained for and expected. The fear is real. The competence is also real. They coexist.”

“Can you write fear and competence in the same body without one undercutting the other?” I asked.

“That is the entire challenge,” Markham said. “And I am not certain you can. But I think the attempt is worth more than succeeding at something easier.”

London stood. He went to the door of the cabin and opened it and looked at the river, or at the mountains behind the river, or at the sky above the mountains — I could not tell what he was looking at, only that he was looking at something and that the looking had weight.

“One more thing,” he said, without turning around. “The ending. Do not redeem anyone. Do not transform anyone. The woman walks out. She is the same woman who walked in — competent, quiet, employed. The fool has learned that the wilderness is not a church. But learning is not transformation. He will go back to his life and carry a small hard stone of knowledge that he cannot show anyone and that changes nothing about his daily conduct. That is what survival gives you. Not wisdom. A stone.”

“That’s very grim, Jack.”

“It is accurate. And accuracy is not grim. Beryl just said that.”

Markham pulled her jacket tighter. The fire had burned lower — she had been right about the wood — and the cabin was cooling at its edges, the warmth contracting toward the stove the way warmth does in northern shelters, slowly, by degrees, until the habitable zone is the size of your body and no larger.

“I did say that,” she said. “But I will add one thing. The woman walks out and she goes back to work. She guides another party into the mountains the following spring. She carries her pack the same way. This — the sameness — is not grim either. It is the continuation. The walk did not break her because she was not fragile, and it did not enlighten her because she was not ignorant. She did a hard thing and then she did the next thing. That is what competence looks like from the outside. From the inside — ” She paused. “From the inside it looks like Tuesday.”

“So the ending is Tuesday.”

“The ending is Tuesday. And the reader who understands why Tuesday is enough will understand everything. And the reader who wanted redemption will be disappointed. And that disappointment is not your problem.”

London closed the door. The latch was a wooden toggle, hand-carved, and it seated with a sound that was small and definite, like a period at the end of a sentence.

“Write it,” he said to me. “And do not waste the monotony. Every step of that walk should cost the reader something. If they arrive at the highway without blisters, you have failed.”

I nodded. The fire was nearly out. The tin of condensed milk sat on its shelf, rusted shut, offering nothing to anyone. Outside, the Donjek ran cold and fast over its gravel, and the mountains stood in their positions, and the light was the long amber light of a northern afternoon that would last for hours and illuminate nothing that had not already been illuminated, and did not care whether anyone was watching.