Ex-Denverite sets mystery in Alaska
From the beginning, a sense of foreboding jumps from the pages of “Wander.” It’s there, right off the bat, in the second paragraph, introducing one of the important characters, Ren: “And he wanted to die.”
Ominous clouds continue to hang throughout, just like those that hover over North America’s tallest peak, Denali, in Alaska, where the novel is set.
And, so much for the idiom that you can’t judge a book by its cover. This one casts a mood of forewarning with the dramatic image of a bush plane flying low over water and mountains.
“Wander” is the first published novel for former Denverite Lori Tobias, a onetime newspaper and magazine writer who now lives on the Oregon coast. She also lived in Alaska for eight years, where she attended the university in Anchorage and started her journalism career.
The vast, sparsely populated state, known as “America’s Last Frontier,” transformed city girl Tobias, who had moved to Alaska from Pennsylvania. She fell in love, got married, and settled in rural Alaska, a long way from Anchorage, the state’s most populous city with around 300,000 people.
She hated it at first. But then she found out a lot about herself. “I truly was a different person than the one who had lived back East and in Anchorage,” Tobias says. “I had slowed. I was calmer, more patient, with much less need to manage everything. In a place like that, you have to be able to be happy with your own company, happy with the quiet and the solitude, but at the same time, absolutely aware of the rugged and potentially dangerous environment.”
Tobias calls “Wander” a story of love, loss and betrayal, with a touch of mystery.
The book, while fiction, plays off some real-life events, most notorious of which was the arrest and conviction of serial killer Robert Hansen in 1984. Hansen, a bush pilot and owner of a downtown Anchorage bakery, confessed to killing 17 women and raping 30, mostly strippers and prostitutes. Hansen died at age 75 in August 2014.
The story is set in the 1980s in a fictitious rural Alaska town, where the main character and narrator, Patrice “Pete” Nash, works as the news director/reporter at an oldies radio station. (Tobias worked in Alaska as a cub reporter at an oldies station.) Readers get an insight into the operations of a small radio station and also of some of the town locals.
Pete’s Alaska-bred husband, Nate, a bush pilot, water guide and an allaround outdoorsman/jackof-all trades, informs Pete that he’s been offered a job as the construction foreman on the North Slope oil fields. The job pays really well and would help the couple dig themselves out of a financial hole. But that means Pete will be left alone for almost five months during the winter in their 600-square-foot log cabin on a dirt road 2 miles from the highway and 15 miles from town, with no telephone and a wood stove for heat.
Pete isn’t happy about the prospect.
“The slope? Nate, are you serious?” “It would be temporary.” “So would our marriage,” I joked.
But off Nate goes to earn their fortune.
Meanwhile, Ren, a new guy in town who is helping out at the radio station, takes an interest in Pete. She is smitten by Harvardeducated Ren, who is totally different from Nate. Ren is a cheechako, someone unfamiliar with Alaska’s weather, terrain, culture, animals and hardships.
As the attraction builds between Ren and Pete, readers are led to wonder, does she … or doesn’t she? before her husband returns from the Slope.
If the book bogs down in the second chapter, it’s because 15 characters are introduced within 25 pages. It takes a while to keep them straight. But once over that, “Wander” — only 144 pages long — is a quick read filled with intrigue and suspense.
Those who have been to Alaska will relate to many of the quirks that residents face during the long, dark, cold winters — and which Tobias dealt with when she lived there — as described in “Wander”:
• Keeping your car plugged into an electrical socket to help prevent the engine from freezing.
• Moose that “tended to pop out of the woods and plant themselves in the glow of your headlights.”
• Meeting a huge bull moose face-to-face through the window in your house, separated by only a flimsy sheet of glass between you and the behemoth animal. “People tend to think of moose as being a dumb animal but they will stomp you to death,” says Tobias, who had such a nose-to-nose experience. “Granted, he was outside, but these are major-sized animals and that was a pretty close encounter. And it’s not at all uncommon.”
• Driving across frozen lakes as a shortcut home. “By land, home was 2 K miles of road so rutted and bumpy that your kidneys hurt; by lake it was one mile of mostly smooth ice,” Pete relates in the book. “Some lakes got so busy they put up traffic signs: Stop. Yield. 25 mph.”
And there was the time Ren was driving Pete home over the lake and started to hear the ice breaking beneath the car. Pete describes the frightening feeling in the book. “And then we heard it. A bump. Then a bigger bump. Then a drop, like falling into a pothole, the sound of ice crunching beneath the tires. I realized what was happening about the same time he did … Ren braked. The Mercedes shuddered to a stop. Panic started somewhere in the core of my being and spread through me like electricity. We couldn’t go back to the shore, the ice behind us was already broken. To the left, the bank was steep and rocky, impossible to drive over. To the right, the shore was too distant to see. Drive, Ren. Just drive, I yelled.”
Tobias said she experienced such a scare on a lake while living in Alaska.
The book even works in a subtle poke at former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who, as the vice presidential nominee, was much ridiculed for her statement that she could see Russia from Alaska.
Embarrassed that she is not as well-traveled as Ren, Pete comes up short when she tries to think of some interesting place she’s been to. Then she remembers something she had heard.
“Do you know there’s a place in Alaska where, when it freezes, you can walk across the ice to Russia?”
Mim Swartz is the former travel editor of The Denver Post. She and Tobias worked together at the now-shuttered Rocky Mountain News.