The allure of a glacier is that it's not merely beautiful, but overwhelming and potentially dangerous. A glacier is best understood if you stand silently and listen to its creaking, groaning heart. Its beauty is the result of intense pressure. A glacier forms when the weight of tons of snow forces the snow beneath it to compress into ice. The pressure is so extreme it heats up the molecules and turns them to liquid, in the instant before they form ice. That is why a glacier flows. However cold and forbidding it may appear, there is a place inside that burns.

It was Joe who took me to see my first Alaskan glacier up close. Juneau's Mendenhall Glacier undulated toward the lake like an icy tidal wave, thrusting its way through the surrounding mountains, carving valleys in its powerful wake. I stared in neophyte awe at the wall of deep blue-upon-white, tortured and lovely, monstrous in size, frightening to consider, with man-eating crevasses lurking across its expanse.

Joe told me he'd once hiked across a glacier and fallen into a crevasse. "That may have been the scariest moment of my entire life. I had no idea how far I was going to fall. Some of those crevasses can go down more than a hundred feet." He didn't fall that far. A fellow hiker pulled him out.

He handed me his camera and taught me how to take better photos. He stood at my shoulder, and his soft-spoken words tickled my ear, "If you want less camera shake, take a deep breath... then, as you press the shutter, exhale slowly." Ironic, that this advice came from a man who I remember most vividly from the moments when he was unsteady and swaying.

He was not gentle and quiet then.

Those were the times when he attacked my professional worth: "Why don't you become a real journalist instead of a TV reporter? Are you afraid of coming up with sentences that have more than three words? Afraid to expose how little you really understand?"

Sometimes his comments didn't make sense, things like, "If I wazh a sailor I'd drink the ocean. But you wouldn't unerstan' 'cause you don't know what it's like to sail."

"What are you talking about?"

"You know exackly what I'm talking aboud. Don't pull that lunatic crap on me! You're just like my fugging family."

"Joe, have you been drinking?"

"What does that have to do with your ignorance?"

The next day a tormented Joe would whisper a tender apology, still sounding confused. I think he often didn't remember what he was apologizing for.

Of course I thought about telling him to take a hike. But Joe was my guide as I fell in love with the Last Frontier. He seduced me by drugging me with his passion for Alaska.

One night as we lay awake on his boat, rocked by gentle waves, Joe said, "I love you, Cara."

I was silent.

He turned my face to the moonlight to confirm the tears swimming in my eyes. "That's supposed to make you happy. It's not supposed to make you cry."

I knew the usual response was supposed to be, "I love you, too." But I wasn't there yet. Still, I felt a mournful tenderness for this man who walked out of step with the rest of the world, so I came up with the oblique response, "Except for time, I'm already in love with you." In the manner of a man in love, he did not question this inane line of crap.

I knew that falling in love with Joe was likely to get me into trouble. I knew we were done for, and only partly because I was leaving to start a new job in the big city, which locals jokingly referred to as Los Anchorage.


At Thanksgiving, Joe flew to Anchorage for a visit. The fate I'd foreseen flew with him. He arrived stumbling drunk. The moment he stepped off the plane he began bowing deeply to total strangers, waving his Russian-style fur hat with a flourish and loudly pretending to speak Russian. We went out to dinner, where I begged him to take off the hat and stop drinking.

"You need to pull your head out of your ass and have some fun," he said.

In the morning he apologized again, kneeling beside my bed like a penitent child. His apology was vague, referring only to "last night" and his "behavior." It was clear that, once again, he had no real recollection of what he'd done.

On Thanksgiving Day he drank a fifth of alcohol, whiskey I think. He was so drunk I refused to let him help me shop for the meal. I wouldn't let him help me in the kitchen either.

"You're treating me like a little kid," he said.

"It's just that I can't concentrate if anyone else is in the kitchen," I lied.

He wasn't fooled, but he gave up and retreated to the living room to drink and sulk.

Luckily, I'd invited my roommate Max and one of his friends to join us, and they soon came out of Max's smoke-filled room to socialize. They seemed oblivious to the tension in the air, probably thanks to the generous appetizer of marijuana they'd inhaled.

At the time, possession of an ounce of marijuana for "personal use" was still legal under Alaska law, thanks to the state constitution's strong stand on the right to privacy. There were still laws against buying and selling it, so how anyone was supposed to obtain this supposedly "legal" dope was a mystery.

During my first few months in Anchorage, Alaskans debated the ballot issue that would make marijuana possession illegal in the state. When the measure passed, I said goodbye to my roommate. He was a sweet guy, docile as a kitten. But I was a reporter with higher ambitions, and I didn't want to risk being linked to someone engaged in illegal activity, no matter how legal it had been a week before. Besides, his room was kind of scary, and the smell of dope was slowly permeating the entire apartment.

But, on that Thanksgiving, I was grateful that Max, his friend, and their dope were all present to mellow out the rough edges of the drunk I'd invited to stay. By mealtime, I'd had a couple of glasses of wine myself, in the spirit of assimilation and in the hope of picking up the strange rhythm of the sporadic conversation. Joe talked politics, which regularly reminded Max and his buddy of some sophomoric movie that had made them "fall on their asses laughing."

The dinner turned out perfectly. The two men with the raging munchies showered me with compliments, until even Joe had to at least admit the turkey was delicious. Triptophane perpetuated everyone's dull stupor late into the evening, and gave me the one thing I was most thankful for that Thanksgiving: the moment when Joe passed out.

The next day, Joe and I went cross-country skiing in Russian Jack Springs Park, and stopped to watch several moose munch on birch bark just off the trail.

As we continued down the trail, he said, "If you have to live in Anchorage, I can see how this greenbelt would be a compensation. Too bad you can still hear the traffic, though."

"You really do hate Anchorage, don't you?"

"It's just that it's not really like living in Alaska. I mean, if you want to live in a city, why not go to Los Angeles?"

He was scheduled to stay for four days. He left after three. I barely stopped the car long enough to let him out at the airport, and drove away without looking back.

If I'd known that moment at the airport was the end of our relationship, I might have come up with a scathing tongue-lashing, or at least burned rubber as I drove off. However, a few months later I was grateful I'd refrained from saying anything I might regret.

It was while ripping Associated Press wire copy in our newsroom that I first learned what happened to Joe. According to the AP, he was found unconscious and bleeding in an out-of-the-way corner outside a building in Juneau. Muggers had stabbed him in the neck and left him to die. He was drunk, which might be why they'd targeted him.

I called Cheryl. She told me what the AP didn't say: that Joe was so drunk the surgeons were sure he would die, because it was too risky to give him anesthesia for the surgery he needed. They feared the combination of alcohol and anesthetics might put him under forever. "They finally operated, and he came through it. But he's still not out of the woods," Cheryl said.

I wanted to cry, but instead launched into irate invective, "I'm sorry, but this whole thing really pisses me off at Joe. It was his own stupid fault. If he hadn't been drinking they probably wouldn't have attacked him. He might as well have slit his own throat."

Cheryl warned me against that kind of talk. "That's just a way of re-victimizing the victim. However drunk Joe was, the animals who stabbed him and left him to die were to blame, not him."

When he regained consciousness, she called me back. "I went to visit him. He looked so terrible it was hard not to cry. You know, hardly anyone has gone to see him. A lot of people are talking like he deserved it. Even his family didn't come. You should call him."

So I did. His voice was as hoarse as a tonsillectomy patient's, and he didn't say much, except to repeat how glad he was I called. I told him I was grateful he was OK. I refrained from telling him I was furious with him for almost getting himself killed. He's the one who said it: "I know if I hadn't been drinking this might not have happened. I know I have to change or I'm going to die, even if no one ever attacks me again. I know I'm killing myself."

His words filled me with pity. But I resisted the urge to hop a plane to see him. It wasn't that hard to resist. I knew Joe found pity annoying. I knew we'd ultimately find each other annoying. I knew our different visions of Alaska were taking us down different paths, and I was already gone.

TO BE CONTINUED...