An Empty Freezer: McGrath, 2024

Here’s how it goes.

The sky clears as you fly north, but not in time to reveal more than the tops of Foraker and Denali—sharp white teeth above a blanket of gray. Your parents aren’t at the hangar when you land, which is a surprise, because they usually have time to make the drive after hearing the plane fly over the house.

The outdoor freezer lost power last year and your parents’ meat spoiled. This is “home home,” and you hope to help refill the freezer. It is moose hunting season. You shared the flight with two hunters and a woman in scrubs who probably works at the clinic.

Your mom takes the middle bench seat and Francis starts the Ford Ranger with a homemade switch that bypasses the ignition. Even so, the truck is an upgrade to the snowmachines and three-wheelers of your childhood. Francis drives to the other end of the airstrip so you can fill out paperwork as a proxy hunter for your mom. This is mostly a formality because you all know that Francis is a better shot, even at 87 years old. Or because he is 87 years old.

The McGrath house consists of 12′ x 24′ and 12′ x 16′ rooms stitched together and four other structures used for storage and projects. You mention to JoAnne that you forgot to bring work pants and she finds a pair of 36×34 Dockers that would never have fit any family members. A receipt in the pocket is from a clearance sale in Missoula, Montana, 1981. This is only slightly more impressive than the raspberry jam jar that is relabelled for sugar but actually has pickles.

Your folks spend most of their time at the cabin, which is seven miles from McGrath in a straight line, but nineteen miles following the meandering Takotna and Nixon rivers. The rivers are smooth and brown, with trails of yellow birch leaves and small ripples where the water catches the wind.

The trip takes forty-five minutes powered by a forty-five-horsepower engine that only Francis can start. He designed and welded the boat in 1992 with a school shop class and teacher after you had left McGrath to attend high school in Anchorage. JoAnne tosses a yellow rubber ducky in the nearest neighbor’s boat when we pass their homestead. A yellow duck indicates that we are going upriver; a pink duck indicates that we are going downriver.

The ‘cabin’ is larger than the house in McGrath, but both are rustic and without running water. Solar panels and a generator power a refrigerator and Starlink internet connection.

We pack for an overnight trip to a trapping cabin a few hours farther upriver. Francis points out landmarks as we approach the bend in the river where you dock the boat and hike or paddle 15 minutes to the cabin.

Francis expects this to be his last hunt this far upriver. As his risk tolerance decreases, so does the distance he is comfortable traveling from McGrath. Rightly so. The things that have gone wrong up here include a swamped boat, collapsed roof, and bear break-ins. The only surprises this time are five dead goldeneye ducks that flew down the stove pipe to nest.

The hunt is unlikely to be successful so early in the season, but Francis uses a birch bark cone to amplify grunts intended to lure bull moose to the cabin. You climb the lookout tree and scan the marshes to the north.

Dinner, canned chili, was forgot at the lower cabin, but Francis finds cans of Dinty Moore beef stew.

You casually hunt your way back down the river. You scramble up steep and slick banks, the mud threatening to suction the boots from your feet. An open forest lies above the mud, mostly white spruce and birch. Gaps in the trees reveal a nearly continuous network of oxbow lakes, which Francis describes as “moosey.” Francis stays in the boat and drifts down to a meet-up point. You don’t see any moose.

You spend the rest of the week hunting from the cabin, clearing trails, stocking the wood box, refilling buckets with drinking water, and reading. JoAnne and Francis debate whether the Dinty Moore stew wasn’t chunky because it was very old or relatively new. The new Dinty Moore doesn’t maintain its texture after a single freeze/thaw cycle.

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As the youngest of the family, you were never very involved with hunting or the other village-life chores. You weren’t particularly hardy. Hunting season was always scary—overdue parents, death, bloody viscera, the chance that a bear might join while butchering. Your few contributions as an adult involved standing in the rain waiting for moose to be drawn toward Francis’ grunts, and carrying meat when that strategy worked.

The hope is always that the moose will simply show up at the cabin, which they have done. One came in response to an early-morning trip to the outhouse—a tight fit between the door and sill emitted a grunt with each opening and closing.

But without Francis, you are left to walk the woods alone, which is a better fit for your skillset and temperament anyway. You enjoy the license to move slowly, quietly, and search for the best walking. The goal is to cover ground, not to cover it quickly. But you doubt that you could actually sneak close enough to a bull for a shot, or aim well enough to kill. You don’t get the chance to try.

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Back at the cabin, you propose cutting an ATV loop that Francis can drive when his legs aren’t up for the hike. You master a ratcheting lopper and move logs as Francis clears them with the chainsaw. JoAnne flags a hand-cut trail along the river for when she feels more adventurous.

This was your longest and easiest time back home in recent years. The weather helped—no rain or bugs. But the real cause is that you are grieving the loss of a lifestyle. Eighty-seven. An unbelievably capable eighty-seven, but village life leaves little margin for error. You can’t imagine Francis without this land or this land without Francis. But he sees it coming, and that fills you with sadness and makes it easier to follow his lead. You would do some things differently, and when you were younger, you would be more attached to being right. But that’s not why you are here. You are here to support Francis as his relationship evolves with the land that he loves.

Your parents remain continually awed by the natural world and find new ways to celebrate it. Francis takes a photo of a spider with a smiling face pattern on its back. Later, JoAnne invites you to see a tiny web sparkling in the morning dew, the size of a thumbprint. Francis marks the location with wood scraps so that we don’t accidentally step on it. They use a stack of bird books to identify the ducks that were in the stove and a raptor with a white stripe across its tail.

And then they turn on the generator to connect to the world via Starlink. JoAnne manages her 101-year-old mother’s transition to a nursing home. Francis orders antenna and snowmachine parts from Amazon, then sends highlights from his news or email feed to his kids. Today’s missive: Reflections on stacking hay in Montana in the 1950s. You are reminded that this is only one of many transitions in his life.

The freezer remains empty as you fly home to Anchorage. JoAnne will follow a few weeks later to visit her mom in California. Francis will spend another month in McGrath, but not hunting, and not at the cabin, in case the river ices up early. You plan to return next year to finish the ATV loop and walk the river bank looking for moose. It feels more important than ever to support your parents in this place while you can all be there.