Chatter

    The day I turned seventeen I hopped aboard a truck bound north and never looked back. My childhood town of two hundred on the Aleutians had always felt too crowded. I longed for the Arctic, where only the strangest breeds, what psychiatrists would call “mentally insane”, could survive.

    I spent the next few years of my life bouncing around from place to place, but everywhere I went never quite felt right. Too many people, too much noise. The farther north my wandering took me, the lower the population counts dropped at each little village I came across. But they never quite felt low enough.

    After a season of working aboard a crabbing ship, I was approached by a close friend of mine. He was a bush pilot, an adrenaline junkie in the purest sense and the most unstable of all the Arctic dwellers; who had the task of flying between towns no road ever dared to reach for. Mail, food, medicine, people; whatever was needed, he would fly it there. He had come with a proposition.

“It’s an airfield. Army oversees it, calls it Landing Strip CM-13.”

“Where at?”

“It’s near the coast, up on the Beaufort,” he paused to spit a syrupy wad of tobacco juice in the snow. “About three hundred miles west of Prudhoe Bay.”

“Kinda defies all reason.”

“There’re a couple of smaller towns out there, further west, between there and Barrow. No roads reach them. All you’d haveta’ do is make sure the runway’s clear, listen to the radio, work air traffic. Nothing too difficult. There’re only a couple of planes flying over every week. Is your contract up?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay good, because they’ll be needing you as quickly as possible. Last guy shot himself Monday.”

After several increasingly rough, and increasingly nerve-wracking, bush flights, I had arrived at CM-13. The entire facility was confined to only three structures: a small two-story traffic control tower which doubled as living quarters, a shed to store the CAT and plow, and a modestly insulated outhouse. The landing strip itself was nearly indistinguishable from the infinitely barren tundra which stretched to the horizon in all directions; slowly fading from a nearly fluorescent white to soft grey where it finally met the sky.  

I was given a brief tour by a haggard looking Army corporal, instructed on how to run the equipment, lectured on standard operating procedure, then directed to sign a contract (which doubled as a waiver), before watching the corporal gleefully take my seat in the plane and take off back the way I’d come. I watched the craft shake and shudder in the wind before vanishing in the clouds, leaving me with nothing but the howling wind as company.

The weeks passed, slowly at first. I soon found myself in the same daily grind. I would wake up at dawn, and work for several hours in the dark clearing the runway. I would then make myself breakfast, check the flight schedules for the day, and listen to the radio. If the wind was bad or it started snowing (of which it did frequently), I’d hop back on the CAT and clear the strip again. I’d listen to the radio some more, make myself some dinner around six, and then head to bed.

Planes would land every couple of days and I’d help them refuel. None of the pilots spoke much. They were of the same stock as me; they chose their career paths to escape civilization, not embrace it. They rarely stayed more than fifteen minutes before they were back in the air, and would usually land again on the flight home the next day. They weren’t frequent. The sun was only up for a few hours at a time, and that combined with wind off the Beaufort Sea made navigation tricky.

With each pilot who left my strip, the less at ease I felt. Maddening hours were spent in the dark, and when light finally came, there was nothing but white void to replace it. Some nights, when I had forgotten to top off the generator, it would go out, leaving me in silence as the mechanical roaring would utter its last gasps. The only thing which reminded me, as I lay in my narrow bunk, that I had not been swallowed up by some great monster was the sound of my own shallow breathing.

Sometimes I could feel the ghost of my predecessor watching me from the corner, his inaudible woes dripping in regret when he saw that his effort to escape this nightmare had been in vain.  

When there was nothing to do and the day was slow, I began to pass the time by tuning the radio to different frequencies and listening to the senseless chatter.

It picked up all kinds of voices, though not always perfectly. At first, it all sounded like nonsensical fuzz as the signals reflected off the atmosphere, dispersing and scrambling. However, as I listened more I began to be able to discern meaning from the auditory stew.

Sober Air Force operators uttering NATO callsigns like cold automatons. Animated DJs desperately seeking glory from their half-conscious listeners in the wee hours of the morning. Soviets speaking in hushed tones somewhere deep in the pearly snows of Kamchatka. Wrathful preachers spouting their doom and hellfire onto the weak and paranoid. The lonely twang of sorrowful country singers, echoing wide and low across the tundra.

Soon, my daily routine shifted to surround not the maintenance of the strip, but to sifting through the static. I soon became pretty good at isolating signals, letting the distant voices fill the tower.

“… morning Juneau! The local time is 6:34, and we’re looking at relatively… -y skies today. Big surprise, I know. But for your… some great programming. But first…”

“Yeah we’ve got it too. Tracking, please standby. Coming in on heading… moving at approximately… knots. Please advise. Roger…”

“And the wicked will beg for mercy yet none will come. For… is not a merciful god. And all… will be punished. His judgement… repent lest your souls…”

“…I didn't hold you all those lonely, lonely times… I'm so happy that you're mine… little things I should have said and done I just never took the time…”

 Most nights I would fall asleep to the hissing voices, letting them sprawl across the tundra and dance underneath the melodic glow of the aurora borealis.

One morning, I woke to silence. Not silence, exactly, but rather the soft growling of the Arctic wind which I had only too recently forgotten.

Realizing the generator must have gone out in the night, I reached for my tableside lamp only for it to click obediently to life. I lept from my cot, covering the breadth of the room in two steps and put my ear against the radio.

Nothing but static.

I turned the dial madly, scanning the airwaves and searching for a single voice. Not one spoke up.

I did my best to push it from my mind. All sorts of issues could be at the root of the problem. Damage to the antenna, or an approaching storm, perhaps. I conducted my daily tasks and went to bed that night in silence.

When I awoke the next day, nothing had changed. Straining my ears brought up nothing but the drumming hiss of static feedback. But still, I remained optimistic. I again finished my chores, and fell asleep hopeful.

By the end of the week my confidence began to falter. I first suspected damage to the antenna, but I soon found this to be wrong with a brief inspection. I made a note to myself to send in a request to cancel my contract with the next pilot that came through. I was done.

No pilot ever arrived. Dozens of scheduled landings, plotted weeks in advance, all failed to appear.

The days bled together as the months pushed long into summer and the sun began to circle the sky. I never slackened though. Every day, I would rise, check the radio, then clear the runway. I stopped using the CAT to preserve gas for the generator, and instead shoveled the strip by hand. The work broke me in half and my hands would bleed into the snow, but I refused to give up hope. I knew one day, I would again hear that Juneau DJ cackling at the crack of dawn or see one of those maniacal bush pilots battling the Arctic wind on the edge of the horizon.

The gas lasted through the following winter, but by early spring, as the sun began to venture back into the sky, I ran out. The generator died, and with it: the radio. The shovel didn’t last much longer. The old rusted blade finally snapped on me, and I buried it as deep and far away I could manage.

The months ran into years, and I watched the tundra slowly reclaim CM-13. The runway was quickly swallowed up with no one to care for it, and the corrugated tin garage which held the CAT collapsed in a storm.

I was down to just a few weeks of food remaining when I got sick. At first, it was nothing more than a cough, but within three days I had degenerated to the point of being permanently bedridden. Rolling onto my side to wretch blood onto the frosted floor was a struggle. I didn’t yet know what would kill me first between the cold or the cough. At that point, I didn’t care. The tundra could have me if it wanted, I just wanted it all to be over.

I don’t know how many days I was like this before I heard it. It was almost too soft be heard over my throbbing feverish brain and shallow, ragged breaths. But it was still there. It brought me back to the world like a bucket of ice water to the face.

I forced myself onto my elbow, straining my ear. Yes, it was there. Standing was not an option. I dragged myself down from the bed, taking my sheets with me, and through the frost on the floor. I cut my exposed skin on the splintering wood, but I hardly noticed.

I pressed my ear to the speaker of the radio. It was faint, yet there. A wave of pure ecstasy washed over me, and for a moment I was okay.

There was no static, no feedback, no impurities. I couldn’t understand the words but I understood the meaning.

It was a woman’s voice, sacred and divine; singing to me in deep, operatic tones.  

I laughed, in spite of everything, and wiped the freezing tears from my face.