To the Bright Edge of the World

by Eowyn Ivey

This last bit was a pleasant surprise—a glint of an independent, thinking spirit! I decided I would be candid. I told her of the surgeon’s refusing to lend me a book. Instantly, and for the first time that I can recall, I had her complete attention. Not lend a book! The pompous old so-and-so. She would complain to her aunt and uncle on my behalf… but no, they would likely side with the doctor. There’s a book shop in Portland—they have very little on their shelves, but perhaps they might order it from San Francisco. It could take weeks, months even! “What is the topic of the book?” she thought to ask, then without a breath, “But no, it doesn’t matter, does it? Would he deny the same to a man? I should think not!” And here she stood up dramatically and raised a finger in the air. “We should take it!”

The fog and blood have left us, yet I cannot wipe them from my eyes. They seep from me, the remains of massacres. The shots echo in the valley still. If only I could shed tears as pure and clear as those of this solitary prospector who mourns his lost love, Love for God’s sake mourned, at his rough-hewn table. If I could shed tears like those, then perhaps my grief would not sicken me so. Bathed in such tears, I would have the strength to cut out my own half-frozen heart, dripping in the blood of a caribou, & hand it to the Lord, if there was such a Lord and He would have such a heart.

There was something diminishing about the conversation, too, as if suddenly we had become only, collectively, and forever Mothers, with no room for an entire individual.

Why, in our efforts to understand and observe life, must we so often snuff it out?

Yet would it be better to live in ignorance, to be coddled like a feeble-minded child? Isn’t knowledge in and of itself always good?

There you were: lovely, brave, & oblivious to me. I think it only served to kindle my affection.

We soon came to understand that the Old Man joined the Indians as they set south downriver. The scoundrel told them that we were trying to steal the very light of dawn, that we had hidden it in the crate to take back to our own land so we could have two suns. He prodded them to open it & release the light.

That’s how it goes when you get to be my age. Makes me see that there might be some sense to having children after all, just so your entire life and all your family’s contributions aren’t relegated to Goodwill in the end.

There is a mythical element to our childhood, it seems, that stays with us always. When we are young, we consume the world in great gulps, and it consumes us, and everything is mysterious and alive and fills us with desire and wonder, fear, and guilt. With the passing of the years, however, those memories become distant and malleable, and we shape them into the stories of who we are. We are brave, or we are cowardly. We are loving, or we are cruel.

—So, he said,—a woman from a rib you’ll have, but not from a goose?

“You’ll have all of the labor, Mrs Forrester, and none of the sweetness.

It is remarkable how we go on. All that we come to know and witness and endure, yet our hearts keep beating, our faith persists.

What is it that causes us to fall in love? We are met with those first, initial glimpses—a kind of curiosity, a longing for that which is both familiar and unknown in the other. And then comes the surprise of discovery; we share certain aspirations, certain appreciations, and that which is different excites us. Before each other, we are moved to bravery and we come to reveal more and more of ourselves, and when we do, those very traits that caused us some embarrassment or shame become beautiful in ways we did not understand before, and the entire world becomes more beautiful for it. There are, too, those intimate and nearly primitive stirrings, the scent at the neck, the delicious tremble of skin and breath.

Yet for all their pleasures, they are as tenuous as light and air, and demand no fidelity.

And then there is this: Does not love depend on some belief in the future, some expectation beyond the delight of the moment? We fall in love because we imagine a certain life together. We will marry. We will laugh and dance together. We will have chil...

Everywhere, even in the blackest abyss, he believed one might witness the divine. The shadows and contrast—absence itself—as important as the light and marble, for one cannot exist without the other.

men don’t leave home unless they are after something.

the truth is, Mrs Forrester, a camera is nothing more than a shrinking box with a glass lens. All the difference comes from the eye that looks through it.”

It fascinates me how an object so small and everyday can be transporting, the way it brings you into direct contact with the past.

Sounds like Matanuska Lake.

It is tough here, in a lot of ways—the weather, the people, the history, but somehow that’s why I love it so much.

It is a paradox, though. Where can we go to learn about Alaska’s people, how they lived and worshiped and dressed and spoke before living memory? The explorers are witnesses to the before. The Colonel’s diaries, like the writings of Meriwether Lewis and Captain Cook, are a kind of cursed treasure. I have to say, when I read the Colonel’s description of the men’s copper earrings and the red dye on the faces of the women, it was an incredibly moving experience. It’s ironic that such details would be preserved by the very man who would set off so much change.

But what makes the question of cultural loss the most uncomfortable, and difficult for me to address, are the inherent definitions built into it. If a group of people is described as existing in a state of loss, it is necessarily therefore lesser, and those that took greater. It’s such a limiting and two-dimensional idea. Who defines wealth and success? How can we say this person is valued less or more, is better or worse, because they are a part of one culture or another, and why would we want to?

It seems that her husband was away again on his mission work, so she faced the tragedy alone.

Like how Col. Allen left Sophie alone to deal with things.

An expression of what we wish we could be. There is hope in our wanting to be something better, even if we never manage it. Maybe that is what I can hold to. The wanting.

Sophie, it is our loss together, this child & all others that might have been born in our future, but it surely is not all that binds us together?

We walk by the river. Not the same words. Not the same [—] We walk beside the river. My friend, my [—] My friend I cry to you. [—] in the mountains where kay’egay spirits walk & sing

I go to look for you. Will you walk out of the clouds? My friend, my [—] I cry to you. [—] in the mountains. That kay’egay place. I come to look for you. I cry to you. I come to you.

Mr. Troyer offered up his thoughts on death & mourning, how we suffer more because we have done away with the rituals that might otherwise comfort us.

It is all too easy to love a thing you’ve never had to live with.

Never are the people here allowed to forget that each of us is alive only by a small thread.

for it is not the photograph itself as much as the impression it leaves upon me.

When I look upon it, this bend of bone and feather and sunlight, a tender place in my heart is healed even as it is torn, again and again a thousand times over.

It seems to me now that such a moment requires a kind of trinity: you and I and the thing itself.