Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
I had been looking up at the outcrop on top of Anvil Mountain ever since we arrived in Nome. It really does look like an anvil. Somebody must have carved it and set it up there, right? I’ll bet some miners hauled it up there as a gag. Maybe it was Balto’s grave! Was it another relic from the load of stuff brought to Nome for World War II? Maybe I’d better get up there to investigate before those IT guys clear it off or something! All that was going through my mind one drizzly evening as we piled into the truck and turned up Bering Street. I was finally going to see Anvil Rock.
Rocks spit out from our wheels as we climbed Anvil Mountain past humps of tundra and tall, tangled patches of willow. Swaying scarves of cloud trailed down from the huge fog bank like ghosts drifting along the tundra, calling, “Come up! Come up!” It was irresistible. We climbed higher into the gray soup. How different things looked. I was sure we’d see a huge gray bear (the “Spirit Bear of Anvil Creek”?) or at least ghosts of the miners of ’98. I wanted to take photos. My sons pleaded with my husband the Engineer to let them out to run through the fog. And as any doting husband and father of an adoring wife and children will do when he hears the heartfelt requests of his passengers to stop, the Engineer kept driving.
As we pulled up to a rocky crest of Anvil Mountain, huge overhanging rectangular objects suddenly loomed out of the mist like bent cereal boxes at a giant’s breakfast table. Maybe we’d happened upon the graveyard for drive-in movie screens. There should have been scary music as we slowly drove between them. Our sons were very quiet. “What are those things?” my youngest asked. The Engineer explained about the Cold War Soviets and listening to radio signals and why the towers were up there. “It’s the White Alice site,” he said. As we crept up another road, a lone dark mass appeared from out of the gray. It was a house-sized outcrop sitting right on top of the mountain, its rough black horizontal slabs resemble a huge lopsided slate layer cake. It was Anvil Rock.
The boys clambered freely all over the nooks, cliffs, and hollows. Wind pushed them into the leeward crannies but adventure pulled them back out into the cold gusts. The magic of the rock, the quiet, and the fog–held us there for hours. Vulcan could have hammered huge horseshoes up here! The gray cloud surrounded us. Nome had disappeared, Sledge Island was gone, and the sea had vanished. We were alone on the mountain top, marooned on high ground, at play in the workshop of Vulcan’s mighty forge.
As I look up at Anvil Mountain now, I can see that granite outcrop clearly. But when the next big fog rolls in, I’m going to ask to return to Anvil Rock and the giant drive-in movie screens. There’s magic up there.
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