Northern Light
By Greg Schaber
{prologue}The broken sunlight spatters Joe Enzweiler’s log cabin with splotches of yellow-gold. It’s February, and on recent nights the temperature here near Fairbanks, Alaska, has dipped to 40-below zero. The morning air—in other months rich with the scent of alder, spruce or high-bush cranberries—simply smells cold.
Inside, by the light of two double windows, Enzweiler is feverishly typing on a computer. The author of
five books of poetry, the 1972 physics graduate typically composes in longhand on paper. But today, he’s revising his first serious work of prose, a memoir, and the computer, which belonged to his girlfriend’s late father, makes the task easier. The strong aroma of coffee mingles with the pervasive scent of wood burning in the stove. Three cats lounge nearby, taking refuge in the warmth.
In a life that follows the arc of a great North American adventure, this is one of the quiet moments. “I like being on the road and experiencing things,” Enzweiler says. “Not that I live life in order to write about it. I live life. Then I write about it.”
{Interlude}
“Writing is a very moral art. It can save people, and it can kill them.”The American Dream is built on our freedom to author the lives we imagine. Most of us choose the safe route. We stay close to home. We are responsible. We don’t risk much. Some of us, fearing responsibility, choose a well-traveled path and come to sad ends. Then there are those who follow a road less traveled out of a sense of responsibility. They live, they think, they help connect the dots of meaning, and they send back reports to those who stay behind.
Enzweiler’s best work is rich in the kind of emotional power inherent in even the smallest of human experiences—the sound of windshield wipers in the dark, the pattern of light filtering through nighttime blinds, blinking neon, a face looking back through a bus window. He seems to remember everything, and his memories, condensed into evocative verse, have garnered their share of admirers. Among those is the celebrated writer and radio host Garrison Keillor, who has twice read Enzweiler’s poems on NPR’s “Writer’s Almanac.” Most recently, on Dec. 12, Keillor read “Christmas 1963,” from Enzweiler’s book,
The Man Who Ordered Perch.
{act one}
“When you inhaled, you could feel the grit in your teeth.”On the evening of Aug. 22, 1975, a light mist was falling over British Columbia. Enzweiler was roughly 2,700 miles from Cincinnati and exactly 1,530 miles from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where he had been accepted into the graduate program in physics. Past the grain elevators on the outskirts of Dawson Creek, the first mile of the Alaska Highway came into view as a straight, northward stretch punctuated with puddles. It was the beginning of the last American frontier.
Enzweiler steered his silver 1973 Chevrolet Vega into a Texaco station. Filled up the tank. Checked the oil. He picked up the black hat reserved for special occasions and pulled it down over his thick, sandy hair. He fliped on the headlights, turned on the windshield wipers, puffed a Canadian cigarette, opened a tin of sardines and pulled out of the Texaco into the uncertain darkness with visions of Klondike gold miners in his head.
It was a new boom era in Fairbanks. Rather than miners in tents, Enzweiler found people living in cars, hoping for work on the Alaska pipeline. The town was abuzz with newfound prosperity. A divide was developing between the city’s fundamentally religious folk and the Friday bars and rowdy nightlife along Second Avenue. Into that divide strode an army of cowboy-booted, silver-belt-buckled, Stetson clad engineers, welders and pipefitters looking for high wages and good times.
Some were not disappointed.
{act two}
“I was here when I wanted, gone when I needed to be.”The urge to go had been growing for years, and childhood dreams of the American West remained large. Following graduation, Enzweiler enrolled in graduate school at Xavier. But it was short-lived. “I really had wanderlust, and Xavier had quietly dropped its graduate physics program.”
It was the spring of 1973, the time of the Arab oil embargo, and wanderlust was expensive. Mindful of economy, Enzweiler purchased the first of only two cars he’s ever owned—the Vega—for $1,875, without a radio. “It was one of Life magazine’s three worst cars ever,” he says with a laugh.
Momentarily secure in his new car, caught up in the spirit of the times and armed with AAA maps, Enzweiler set out to explore the west—and find himself. On the second or third night out, he stopped in Chamberlain, S.D., on the Missouri River. “It really is where the west begins,” he says. “It was there I discovered games of eight-ball and beautiful Indian maidens. It was right next to two reservations. I’d sit in the high grass across the river, camp and write poetry and dream about the arc of American history.”
Deeper into the west, he crossed the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations. The land was pulsing with anger—it was the summer of Leonard Peltier, when two F.B.I. agents died in a firefight with Native Americans. Somehow, Enzweiler doesn’t recall feeling afraid. He hit Montana and Calgary, but eventually made a U-turn and headed home to Cincinnati. On the way, he stopped at Barat College, a now-defunct school in Chicago. He stayed there two months, living in his sleeping bag on a dormitory roof, reading “everything I could find.”
It took two unfulfilling jobs and one more trip west before he left Cincinnati for good.
(continued)
