The Great Alone

by Kristin Hannah

it’s 1974. I have a job. I make money. And a woman can’t get a credit card without a man’s signature.

Klondike Gold Rush. The RCMP wouldn’t let anyone cross the Chilkoot Trail unless they carried a stove with them. Carried. On their backs. But most of the miners who came up paid Indians to carry their supplies.”

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

“Nuclear war. A pandemic. An electromagnetic pulse. Earthquake. Tidal wave. Tornado. Mount Redoubt blowing up, or Mount Rainer. In 1908 there was an explosion in Siberia that was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

WWII. Alaska was the only state invaded by Japanese.

On the morning of June sixth, 1942, five hundred Japanese soldiers invaded Kiska Island, in the Aleutian chain. It is the only battle of that war fought on American soil. Many people have forgotten it, but…”

This grief was unlike any emotion she’d experienced before, suffocating, weighty. It pulled the color from everything.