True North
By: Camille Cusumano
Tags: Bachelor, Travel, Alaska, Wild Woman, Wilderness

I entered the VFW hall where the auction began at 8 p.m. sharp. The men were already strutting their stuff on a floodlit stage, stepping nervously up to the limelight to merciless shouts:

“Take off your shirt.”

“Lift up your tails!”

“Show me your tits!”

Some men spiritedly complied with the brash commands and stripped down to bikini bathing suits. Others expressed artistic talent. Burly, bearded John “Dancing Bear” Saily, his head hugged by a wolf pelt, ignored the crass requests and played dulcet notes on his Native American flute.

The auction rules allow the highest bidding women (must be 21 or older) to procure one drink and a dance from their bachelors (“anything else is strictly up to the parties involved”). Past years’ events, a resident told me, have resulted in everything from a 12-year marriage (ended in amicable divorce) to a love child, now an 8-year-old boy.

As I pushed through the hot crowd, I noticed a lot of older women who had not attended the Wilderness Woman Contest earlier in the day. I remembered what Darrell had told me earlier in the bar, “What’s a gold mine in Alaska? A woman with a job.” I watched as many of them quietly paid out the highest bids — $200 and more — and disappeared with their bachelors, not to be seen the rest of the evening.

I shot some photos of the men onstage, then took a seat next to a bleached-blond woman who was impatiently flipping through the Male Order Catalogue.

“That guy sounds promising,” I remarked to her, pointing to a man posed with his rifle and bush plane. He was one of the few that was clean shaven, which I favor over facial hair (preferences for metaphorically hairy men aside). He wanted someone “physically fit and with a sense of humor.”

“Him!” she sneered, “you gotta be kidding; he’s a legend in his own mind.” She tempered my cluelessness by explaining, “Look, I was a waitress for two years over at the Latitude Motel. I know too much, Hon.”

She turned her attention to the stage and hooted. The emcee, a short, heavy woman in men’s tux, was rubbing up behind the next guy as she introduced him. “Hold me back,” breathed the blond to her friend. “He looks like Harry Connick, Jr.”

He did. Sort of. He had perfect pectoral muscles and Paul-Newman bright eyes. So had Matthew.

“Hold up your thumbs and tell us your shoe size!” the blond shouted and proceeded to outbid everyone else. She got Harry for $150.

The auction began to wind down and the odds didn’t seem so unfavorable for men. Even auctioneer Robert Forgit, the handsome former weather anchor for KTUV TV in Anchorage, brought in $300, the evening’s highest bid.

I decided to buy a man named Sandy. He was slight of frame, had attractive chiseled features and no whiskers. He might have been a professor. But I watched wistfully as the teacher from Minnesota, Jean, claimed Sandy. (An ironic footnote: Three months later, I would run into Sandy at the start of the Iditarod in Anchorage. I would not remember where I knew him from, but as we hugged he would remind me.)

Darrell, my coach for the Wilderness Woman contest

The men were going, going, almost gone — I had to have one. I slowly raised my hand and got the next to the last of the batch, Pete Reilly, a mellow 33-year-old, who was looking for “one who is going to stay in Alaska.” He was big and barrel shaped with a groomed goatee. He handed me a carnation whose long-stem all but vanished in his paw. Someone snapped a Polaroid of us and pasted it to an official document that certified that I was “in apparent possession of all faculties” when I made my purchase.

We joined the revelers who packed the Fairview for the ball.

“What would you like to drink?” Pete asked.

“Brandy’ll be fine,” I said. He was gone a long time. I stared at an indistinguishable mass of flesh in the corner with two heads. I recognized the face of the bartender who worked at my lodge. Then a song inspired the woman to pull away, stand up, and undulate her hefty bare midriff in a solo dance for him. She had paid more than $100, I recalled — it was impossible to have missed her determined bidding.

Woody, a twentysomething man who had seen me taking photos of him as he preened on stage naked from the waist up, approached.

“Hey, do me a favor — don’t let those photos anywhere near Utah. I don’t want my mother to see them,” he pleaded.

“I won’t,” I promised, touched by his display of vulnerability. “I don’t go near Utah, if I can help it,” I teased.

I met 34-year-old John, a landscaper. He winced as he recalled the shouts from women to bare some flesh, though he had complied.

“I felt like a piece of meat,” he said. But he was proud to have brought in one of the high bids, $165.

“You’re worth a lot more,” I said.

Pete came back with my drink. “It’s a Remy Martin.”

“To Alaska,” I toasted.

We made boilerplate talk — what we did, where we were from — both of us guarded and wondering what the other expected from this transaction. He was originally from California he said. He loved fishing and stalking wild game. He thought he had brought in only $65.

“Oh no, I paid seventy bucks for you, but you’d have gone for a lot more if you weren’t near the end when women were out of money.” He smiled.

“When you going hunting again?” I asked, trying to loosen up the conversation.

“I don’t know, I’m having trouble with my feet — fallen arches.”

“Try yoga,” I suggested. Matthew did yoga with me. He shadowed me everywhere.

“Yes. There’s a woman in town who teaches it.”

I asked Pete for my dance. He delivered it and another drink. The band, Nervis Rex, had a fine brass section for swing dancing, which I loved and which was not good for Pete’s arches. Although he was a dozen years my junior, I knew he could never keep up with my energy and the things I loved to do — in life, not necessarily in bed. The air was moist with sex, whether for one night or longer. For Pete and me it was not even a faint scent on a distant trail.

Amid the bacchanalian atmosphere, we drifted apart without really getting to know each other. Charlie, also of the burly set and in overalls with a salt and pepper ponytail, was a great dancer and people cleared out of our way as he twirled me. I enjoyed rebounding off the cuddly spare tire that was his middle. There was Darrell, too, whose flattery was not unwelcome, though there was not the right tension between us. And I got some offers, I could refuse — like Charlie’s suggestion that we head to his place in the backcountry.

After midnight, the party segued over to the Roadhouse for biscuits and gravy and sourdough pancakes. I headed to my bed.

I awoke before 9 a.m. when it was still dark, in time to catch sunrise bleeding down the snowy crown of Denali. From the birch deck of my lodge, I had an unimpeded view of the mountain as it rises dramatically from the flat tundra. It’s more often than not shrouded in cloud. But this winter day it was out in all its glory as the sun rose in concert with the setting of the full moon. I felt like howling. A man on the deck with me said, “I live here and I never get to see McKinley like that.”

Moon setting as sunrise bleeds over Denali in December

I live here, too, I thought, irrationally for a moment.

After Matthew had taken over my computer, my apartment, and a significant portion of my checking account, he wanted to marry me. I said yes, then I said no. In the end, he never got my name, or my pen. Ours was a relationship that could have gone everywhere inside the organic comfort of bear skins, but nowhere outside that archetypal space. Yet, its craziness gave me my bearings, my sense of true north, in life and romance, and there is this sweet, unconditional love for a place like Alaska. For years, for reasons unclear, I had held onto the 14-karat gold band he didn’t want back. Every few years I would take it out of its brown velvet box and bemuse over its telling roller-coast cleft. Finally, I asked a Buenos Aires jeweler skilled in the dying art of “lost wax” to melt that ring down and fashion it into one tango shoe to wear around my neck, reflecting that passion. I loved the recycled symbol of the tiny gold shoe and what it symbolizes.

I have not been back to a bachelor auction. But I did go on to discover what many women know, that in motion hidden powers emerge.