The carved fish in Nome is like Bart, the guitar player I met on the train who got off in Laramie, leaving me to continue on to Sacramento with my little daughter and my fiction that had she not been there, I’d have gone with him. When he got off the train, he might have said “Bye” but he didn’t look back.

The carved fish hung on the wall in the gift shop on Front St. in Nome. There were two of them – a lighter one and a darker one – both carved out of whalebone by a local Yupik artist. They were both lovely and large, heavy in my hands like a real fish would be, and I decided I needed to own at least one of them. I decided it would be the lighter one, cream colored with shadows of pink.

Then I saw the price and…