Out of This World

winds could be life threatening, where time seemed to be measured in terms of pre- and postvolcanic eruption, judging by all the articles I’d read.

Good God. Volcanic eruption…

“Somehow it all seemed far less threatening from inside my apartment,” I said, “surrounded by four walls and electricity, with the comforting sounds of traffic coming in my window.”

“No traffic here.” Kellan leaned over me and glanced out the window, his bony shoulder poking me. “Unless you count the four-legged variety.”

“Oh God.” This was a whole new horror I hadn’t considered. I looked down at my pink ruffled top and Capri jeans. Not much protection against wild animals. “You think there’ll be wolves?”

“I was thinking even bigger.”

“Moose,” I said. Were moose friends or foes?

“No, not moose.” His face gave little away, which was exactly the problem with Kellan, because I could never quite tell when he was kidding. “Bears.”

“Bears?”

“Yep, bears. And maybe mountain cats, too.” He had these intense baby blue eyes, which always seemed slightly magnified behind his glasses, eyes that were amused now, at my expense.

“Well, that settles it,” I said, only half-kidding. “We have to turn around.”

He smiled, pushing up his glasses again. “You wanted to come out here, Lucy.”

As if I’d forgotten that this was completely of my own doing. Or that my nickname was I-Love-Lucy, due to my uncanny ability to land myself in outrageous situations without even trying.

Welcome to my most outrageous situation yet.

“In fact,” he went on, still amusing himself, “I think your exact words were ‘I want to broaden my horizons, Kel. I want to take my adventures to a whole new level.’”

“I did not say that.”

“Yes, you did. You said Alaska was going to be a good start on the rest of your life. A change from the dull and mundane.”

Okay, I’d actually said that, but it hadn’t sounded so cheesy at the time. “Thanks for throwing my own words back in my face.”

His knowing smile said “any time,” and I rolled my eyes and stared out the window again, at the sharp, craggy precipices and dizzying valleys coming up to greet us at stomach-shrinking speed as we came in for a landing.

Nerves hit me like a one-two punch, knocking the air out of my lungs. I didn’t need a restart, I thought hastily. My life was just fine! But unfortunately, they weren’t kidding when they said “starving artists.” And though I wasn’t exactly starving (in fact, I was stuffed into my Capris with some overflow), I wasn’t exactly flush with cash either.

Truth was, I barely scraped by each month.

Being broke wasn’t anything new to me, but this B &B hadn’t come with a college fund. So really, I had no choice but to come here and check it out, to decide what to do with it before-I don’t know-someone got stepped on by a moose and sued me.

“Hard to believe that just yesterday I was hanging off the CFS building,” I said, “painting a forty-five-foot mural of a seascape, while ten thousand cars passed by on the 405 during rush hour.”

“Nice dolphin on the far right, by the way,” Kellan said. “I caught it yesterday while stuck behind that two-car pileup.”

I managed a smile, sidetracked by the praise. “It was harder to do than I thought.”

“No, you got the dorsal fin just right.”

If I’d gotten it right, it was because he’d hounded me about it night and day since he’d learned I’d be painting it, sending me e-mails, faxes, pictures. “Thanks.”

“You’re really good.”

“He said, sounding so amazed.”

A grin split his face, and he went back to his notes, his too-long hair falling over his forehead and into his eyes. He wore his usual faded Levi’s, athletic shoes that looked as if they’d been on their last legs for a while now and a T-shirt that invited the general public to KEEP THE OCEAN BLUE.

He was, undoubtedly, a complete geek, but he was my geek, and I was very fond of him.

The plane dipped again. Just beneath us, I could see treetops, dense undergrowth and narrow canyons, which challenged the contents of my stomach, and I clutched Kellan’s big, warm hand. “Should we say our last rites? Admit our sins?”

“Oh, you don’t have time for that,” he said. “We’re going down.”

I think I squeaked.

“Down as in landing. It’s going to be fine, Rach. An adventure, remember?”

Right. An adventure to the land of snow and moose and mountain men.

Sounded good.

Really.

And it wasn’t as if I had something else to do. Long-term planning was not a strong suit of mine, much to my perpetually exasperated mother’s frustration. She’d long ago given up trying to coax me into a “real” career, or a marriage, for that matter.

I love painting, and I don’t intend to give it up. A man, however, that might be nice. But I’ve been through quite a few, and I’ve learned a few lessons.

Such as that a good thing never lasts.

The nose of the plane took a sharp dip. Oh God, oh God. Just descending, I told myself. As if I couldn’t tell by the way my eyeballs pressed back into my head.

Finally the wheels touched down. Actually “slammed down” would be more accurate, so hard I nearly ate my own teeth, and I reminded myself I’d done this out of curiosity, which was a good thing, a healthy thing, and I’d make the best of it.

Then I remembered something else: Curiosity was all well and fine, but it’d also killed the cat.

We switched planes in Anchorage, and now we sat in a tiny tin can, a butt-squeaker of a float plane.

“Oh. My. God.” I gripped Kellan’s hand, and stared at the lake below, racing past us at a dizzying speed. We’d been on the float plane for only five minutes.

A lifetime.

The wind made tears stream out of my eyes, and I think I had a bug in my teeth. “Kellan!”

“You’re going to break my fingers.” He tried to free his hand from mine, but that wasn’t going to happen. I had a death grip on him, and the only way he was getting free was to chew free.

Supposedly this “air taxi” could handle both water and air, though as near as I could tell, we hadn’t left the water more than a foot or two below us. The top was open, like that of a biplane, the noise incredible.

The landscape whipped by so fast, I couldn’t catch more than a brown-green-blue blur, the only constant being Jack, the pilot. He sat behind the controls yelling “Woo hoo!” at the top of his lungs as he dodged trees like we were playing some sort of Xbox game with our lives.

Jack looked the mountain-man part: long hair held back by a leather string, the mass flying out behind him. He wore aviator sunglasses, beige cargo pants whose every pocket was filled with God-knew-what and a long-sleeved shirt open over a T-shirt that said FLY MY FRIENDLY SKIES-PLEASE.

The light in his eyes as he flew the plane said he was either very good at what he did or he was thoroughly, one-hundred-percent insane. I was betting on the former, while praying it wasn’t the latter. In spite of the way I had led my life-that is, without much precaution or a single thought-out plan-I was not reckless.

And yet, here I was, on a plane I could have parked in my bathroom, with a man who might have smoked a crack pipe for lunch, flying over the wilds of Alaska.

I’m telling you, the crazy streets of Los Angeles were tame compared to this. Here, there were peaks on peaks, each bigger than the last, layers upon layers, stabbing up into the sky to heights I’d never imagined.

“Seriously, Rach”-this from Kellan, at my side-“I need my fingers back.”

We made another heart-stopping turn at the speed of light, following the river below. Ignoring Kellan, I closed my eyes, then felt my stomach leap into my eyeballs. Whoops. Definitely not a good way to fight vertigo, so I opened them again. “Are we almost there yet?”