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The first thing I notice is the overflow. Just a glimpse through my husband’s window as we drive by of orangey-brown slush covering a stretch of milky-smooth aquamarine ice. Already I’m balking at the thought of a snowmachine crossing that deceptive surface.

We’re out for the day, visiting the hot springs and looking at some land we’d like to buy. We’re thinking about taking that leap so familiar to Alaskans, claiming a chunk of property and building a cabin. Creating a wilderness home not so far from our real one.

I’ve been reading a book about Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich. In this Danish-Inuit hybrid of a country, people don’t actually own land. They can apply for the right to build, but it has to pass the community’s approval first.

If our potential neighbors had any say, I wonder whether they’d agree to our presence. When we drive our truck over the first part of the unmaintained road, parking on solid ground so we can unload our gear, one of them comes out on his porch in his robe.

“What are you doing,” he yells, trying to protect the fragile trail from city folks who’d tear it up in exchange for easy snowmachine access. When we tell him, he relaxes, maybe even smiles, but he’s too far away for me to know for sure.

We meet another resident cutting logs a few miles down the trail. After a pleasant chat, she asks us to remind her if we bump into each other again. “I meet so many people who come out here with big plans,” she says. “I don’t even bother getting to know them unless they’ve stuck around for a while.”

That’s how it was in Galena. When I moved to the Yukon River village almost 15 years ago, people were friendly, but not especially warm. Once I reached the first year anniversary, everything changed. Invitations to dinner and to join the local women’s basketball team flooded in. I became someone worth investing in.

If they only knew how much of a wimp I really am. That image of overflow keeps surfacing in my mind. At our hot springs retreat, over fresh greenhouse salads and the best Bloody Mary in a hundred mile radius, I tell my friend about the forbidding stretch of ice at the beginning of the trail. “I don’t understand how people can tell if it’s dangerous, whether to cross it or not,” I say, biting my fingers. She understands.

A man sitting nearby can’t help but overhear, eager to share his own overflow story. He tells us about getting stuck in ocean slush outside Kotzebue. There along the coast, water can rise with the force of the tide, sucking a snowmachine right out from under an unsuspecting rider.

“A few days later, all I could see were the handlebars sticking out above the ice,” he says with a smile as wide as the swatch of overflow he paints in the air with his hands. “It took two or three snowmachines to pull it out.”

I can’t get a clear image of what overflow really is. I’ve read columns by more experienced Alaskans, even literary accounts of how historical figures managed to get through. My husband assures me that river ice is different from ocean ice. That you can tell when it’s strong enough to support the weight of a snowmachine.

It’s been years since I rode on one. In the village, I used the frozen river and sloughs like a highway, treating my purple-trimmed Polaris like a car. When we stopped for a rest under impossibly starry skies, I heard nothing but the earth’s own sound. And maybe the rest of our party catching up with us on the trail.

I’m not sure I want to risk this overflow, if my first glimpse of our land needs to happen right now. I make plans to stay with the truck and knit, letting my husband explore on his own. He’s discouraged, wondering if we should skip the whole thing. Just stay at home.

It doesn’t matter. A fiery spark of curiosity has already caught in my mind, igniting the glowing embers of the picture of a life well-lived, not resting on the laurels of what I’ve already done. Soon I’m climbing on the snowmachine behind him.

This seems like the start of so many tragedies, a happy family making their way under a mild sky, light snow falling. We even make a video — my son laughing as he rolls around in a moose track trail, me answering my husband’s “Say something, hon,” with a cheesy, “Something, hon.”

There’s no danger, though. The ice is still thick. The overflow just surface slush, not a sucking morass intent on dunking us in freezing water. What we get instead is an ordinary moment, or maybe a series of ordinary moments.

It could be when I catch sight of the spot where we’ll build our cabin, right beyond a stand of trees, at the foot of our mountain (we’re already calling it that), illuminated by the quick burning rays of the setting sun. Or maybe it’s a whiff of fresh-cut spruce. Or the vision of a raven floating overhead, providing a lookout for our party.

For that one moment, I’m really here and nothing else matters.