In the Midst of Winter
In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
— ALBERT CAMUS
MICHAEL MAWHINNEY toyed with his food. There was a pile of grilled prawns before him, which he pushed around in circles on his plate.
“I’ve been dreading your arrival,” he said, looking up at me. Shaking his head, he asked, “How did you find me here?”
Here was Anchorage, Alaska, in the middle of winter.
During the winter in Anchorage, it is light out for roughly six hours a day, and that light is surreal. Dim and yellow-green, it resembles neither day nor night, neither waking nor dreaming. Other things felt strange, too, like the moose that strolled down the sidewalk outside my hotel on my first morning in town.
Indeed, Alaska is a very different place than anywhere else in the “Lower 48,” as locals call the contiguous United States. It is vast, covering 586,000 square miles. That’s more than twice the size of Texas. There are more than 70 active volcanoes and 100,000 glaciers in Alaska, the largest of which are the size of Rhode Island.
Fifty separate rock masses make up Alaska, most of which traveled north “on a rock conveyor belt” from hundreds or thousands of miles to the south and collided with the northwestern corner of North America, according to A Naturalist’s Guide to Chugach State Park, an illustrated guidebook I picked up at the Anchorage Museum.
Even Alaska ran away to become Alaska.
I had last seen Michael in Pittsburgh, nine years earlier, when he was twenty. I was a law student then, clerking in the Child Abuse unit of the Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office. Commonwealth v. Gerald Mawhinney—Michael’s father—was one of the most horrific cases I had worked on. Michael had been the prosecution’s lead witness in the trial.
Almost a decade later, I wanted to know how Michael’s life had turned out. More broadly, I wanted to know how victims of childhood trauma tend to fare later in life. I had worked with many as a law clerk and later as a prosecutor, and I wondered about their fate. Were they destined to develop mental illness and other problems? My
