A Land of Gold and Loneliness

The airport is quiet, sterile. This early in the morning, the few people in the terminal are lost in predawn slumber, and I am lost too. I’ve been traveling for thirteen hours. Three thousand miles. I settle on the floor in front of the tall glass windows as Alaska wakes up to another day with scarce sunlight. I watch planes taxi to and from the runways.

In the reflection of the window, a young girl stares at me. She sits a few seats down, her dress bright against the darkness outside and the gray of the terminal. Although she can’t be more than eight or nine, even younger than my brother, I don’t see anyone with her. The traveler to her left rests his head against his backpack, but he keeps shifting, as if in a restless sleep. An elderly couple reads a day-old newspaper. And the girl’s eyes meet mine.

She holds a handful of flowers in front of her green dress. The petals are a familiar magenta, and she picks them off one at a time.

Salmonberries don’t grow here, not at an airport on the outskirts of a city. They’re not the kind of flower you’d find at a florist’s shop, and they certainly don’t bloom in January. The girl holds flowers that shouldn’t be. From this distance, I shouldn’t be able to hear what she’s saying either, but I do, as clearly as if she were standing next to me.

Endless day, endless night, come to set your heart alight.

With each cadence, she plucks off another petal.

At the end of her tune, she smiles.

My heart stutters. I clamber to my feet and turn to get a better look at her. But the waiting area is nearly empty. I spot the backpacker. The elderly couple. A family with twin boys. There’s no sign of the girl, as if she’d only existed in the window’s reflection.

Except that flower petals lie scattered across the floor, and her voice still swirls around me, singing the song that Kyra sang to me first.

Endless night, endless day, come to steal your soul away.

• • •

The fifth and final leg of the trip gets me going. I cling to my coffee, the deception of daylight, and a combination of restlessness and homesickness. I transfer to a small floatplane that will fly me northwest, to Lost Creek, where I’ll stay for the next five days, until another plane can bring me back here. Cramming my backpack into the seat next to me, I buckle up behind the pilot. I nod to him, but from the moment we take off, my forehead is glued to the window.

The lights of Fairbanks International Airport glimmer below us. To the east, the city glows electric and yellow under a blanket of clouds. At the start of the year, Fairbanks sees fewer than four hours of sunlight a day, and Lost Creek fewer still.

Kyra loved coming to Fairbanks. She thought Lost was claustrophobic. She wanted to travel. She wanted to study and explore. But the city never called to me. It always felt too large, too anonymous. Life may be softer here, the winters less threatening, but back home in Lost, people looked out for one another. In our tight-knit community, surrounded by nothing for miles, we had each other and the deep blue of twilight. To me, Lost felt safe.

Even now, I’m more at ease at St. James’s small boarding school in Dauphin than I am in the large house Mom bought in Winnipeg. She calls the neighborhood affluent and prosperous, though people never leave the confines of their own yards. Mom is rarely there to notice because she works long days at the children’s hospital. At least at school I have a community, friends, teammates. Still, we may have made our home in Canada, but I left my heart in Lost.

The plane leans north, and Fairbanks disappears behind us. We fly to an otherworldly place, one that does not play by the same rules. The evergreens wear an armor of snow. The air shimmers with cold. Lost Creek is godforsaken, with winters that feel cruel and permanent, and we are proud of our resilience. The journey to Lost is a rush of turbulence through snow and memories, and the refrain of those same awful words: Endless night, endless day. Come to steal your soul away.

By the time Lost comes into view, I’m spread thin by exhaustion and fear. Time flies like we do, and I’m not ready. I’m not ready to face that Kyra won’t be waiting for me, and I’m not sure I ever will be. I’m torn between homesickness so deep it aches and the debilitating uncertainty of what lies ahead, of not understanding what happened to my best friend.

I push my nails deep into the palms of my hands and keep my eyes on the landscape as we prepare to land. To the left are the camping grounds where a handful of tourists spend their summers fishing on the lake and hunting bears in the woods. The cabins are abandoned in winter, groaning under their blanket of snow.

To the right are the old mining works. Gold is still rumored to lie beneath the hills—or heavy metals, perhaps—but the easily accessible ores were all exhausted decades ago. Mining deeper would be expensive, and our mine is too small to be profitable. What lies under the land may hold promises of riches, but for Lost Creek, those promises are empty, and people know better than to rush now. Our community has grown to depend on itself and the carefully cultivated land, not on the unpredictable nature.

Our community. Lost Creek, established in 1898, population 247.

I breathe. Two hundred forty-six.

Bordered by its eponymous river, Lost Creek stands against the elements. Our small, narrow, gold-rush town has a police station, a combined elementary and high school, an office for the doctor with whom Mom often worked, a moderately well-stocked grocery store, a bakery, a sole café/pub, a post office/tourist center, and an abandoned spa with hot springs, which sits outside the borders of town. The spa is a dash of color on the bleak horizon. The first time Kyra and I went there, we thought it was a superhero headquarters.

The landing gear hits the ground with a jolt and my seat belt strains against my lap from the force. We bump to a stop. This runway and the single road through the interior are the only paths that connect Lost Creek to civilization. These two connections to the outside world used to be all we needed to survive. Nothing could harm us within these borders. Within this community, we stood together. All of Lost against the rest of the world.

All of us.

All of us except one. All of us except Kyra, who never felt like she belonged. She never cared for hunting or camping. Like her grandfather, Kyra wanted to study storytelling. She collected the town’s myths and legends, and she was always curious about what lay beyond. But Lost is a town that thrives on secrets, and in Kyra, all of Lost’s secrets lay exposed.