The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves. —JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.

She was used to her dad’s sadness, his frustration. He stopped sentences halfway through all the time, as if he were afraid of giving voice to scary or depressing thoughts. Leni knew about that reticence and understood it; lots of times it was better to stay silent.

His smile reawakened her in a way, reminded her that there was more to life than work. He taught her something new about friendship: it picked right back up where you’d left off, as if you hadn’t been apart at all.

“The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.

When she did finally fall asleep, she landed in a dreamscape on fire, a place full of danger—a world at war, animals being slaughtered, girls being kidnapped, men screaming and pointing guns. She screamed for Matthew, but no one could hear one girl’s voice in a falling-apart world.

She had a heart as big as Alaska.” He paused, sighed. “Our Gen. She was a woman who knew how to love. We don’t quite know whose wife she was at the end, but that doesn’t matter. We all loved her.”

Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should. In real life, she saw, it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.

A girl was like a kite; without her mother’s strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.

Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst? Was it better not to hope at all, to prepare? Wasn’t that what her father’s lesson always was? Prepare for the worst.

You were supposed to be safe in your own home, with your parents. They were supposed to protect you from the dangers outside.

All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.

“I love him. You love him.” It was true, but was it the right answer?

Maybe what she’d always said was true, maybe she couldn’t breathe without him, maybe she’d wilt like a flower without the sunshine of his adoration.

His voice dropped to a whisper. “She’s my heroin. You know that.” Leni knew it wasn’t a good thing, not a normal mom-and-dad thing, to compare your love to a drug that could hollow your body and fry your brain and leave you for dead. But they said it to each other all the time.

Any life that could be imagined could be lived up here.

“There’s something wrong with me,” she said slowly. “Sometimes it feels like a strength and sometimes like a weakness, but I don’t know how to stop loving him.”

They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.

Mama could never leave Dad, and Leni would never leave Mama. And Dad could never let them go. In this toxic knot that was their family, there was no escape for any of them.

And then she’d get a glimpse of him with tears in his eyes and the rage would turn soft and slide into something like forgiveness. She didn’t know how to corral or change either of these emotions; her love for him was all tangled up in hate. Right now she felt both emotions crowding in on her, each jostling for the lead.

water ran everywhere in Alaska, revealed things that should stay hidden.

Dad drew back finally, looked at him, and love took shape in the air around them, a regret- and memory-filled version, maybe, sad around the edges, but love.

I never really knew the weight of sorrow before, how it stretches you out like an old, wet sweater.

Leni thought maybe that he would haunt her. Not just him, but the idea of him, the sad and scary truth that you could love and hate the same person at the same time, that you could feel a deep and abiding loss and shame for your own weakness and still be glad that this awful thing had been done.

we try to knit our lives together, dropped stitches and all. Maybe that’s what love is.

life—and the law—is hard on women. Sometimes doing the right thing is no help at all.”

This state, this place, is like no other. It is beauty and horror; savior and destroyer. Here, where survival is a choice that must be made over and over, in the wildest place in America, on the edge of civilization, where water in all its forms can kill you, you learn who you are. Not who you dream of being, not who you imagined you were, not who you were raised to be. All of that will be torn away in the months of icy darkness, when frost on the windows blurs your view and the world gets very small and you stumble into the truth of your existence. You learn what you will do to survive. That lesson, that revelation, as my mother once told me about love, is Alaska’s great and terrible gift. Those who come for beauty alone, or for some imaginary life, or those who seek safety, will fail. In the vast expanse of this unpredictable wilderness, you will either become your best self and flourish, or you will run away, screaming, from the dark and the cold and the hardship. There is no middle ground, no safe place; not here, in the Great Alone. For we few, the sturdy, the strong, the dreamers, Alaska is home, always and forever, the song you hear when the world is still and quiet. You either belong here, wild and untamed yourself, or you don’t. I belong.