An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World (23 page)

I smiled.

“So,” said Erica, “I command you to be happy!”

By this time I had separated Erica into two personalities: Erica Bright, who was sweet, playful and girlish (and who liked me), and Erica Green-Eyes, who could best be described as
prowling
and
competent
. Green-Eyes was the one whom I continually offended; and it was Green-Eyes who made my first thoughts so filled with dread as I lay beside her in the small hours of a sunny morning, knowing that in minutes she’d awake and hustle me along to another river crossing, snapping at me,
glaring at me, shoving me because I was slow and we had to cross before the glaciers began their morning melt. It maddened Green-Eyes that I continued to lose tent stakes, that I had no sense of balance, that I was a poor map reader. —“Come on!” Erica said as we canoed up Moose River. “
Hard
, deep strokes! Dig into that water! Come on; there’s a tribe of hostile Indians behind us and we have to
stroke
for our lives! They’re going to catch us at this rate!
Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! Hard
, deep strokes! They’re coming closer; they’re cocking their bows; let’s see you put yourself into your
stroke
! Dig in!
Bend
at the waist,
move
your shoulders; STROKE!” —As we went farther upriver, my stroke actually began to get smoother and better. Erica was happy, believing that maybe I’d actually learned something. I paddled us around for a little while as she lay back and watched the clouds. Presently we felt an impulse to piracy, so we tied up at a private dock, tiptoed into somebody’s garden, and stole a handful of strawberries. —“Now stroke…,” said Erica very sleepily, laughing and yawning in the sun, and the sunbeams danced on the water and a faint breeze stirred her hair. —Going back downriver, I also stroked creditably. We had a good time until we reached the landing. I jumped out to pull the canoe up onto shore. Still inside, Erica giggled as it wobbled, thinking that I was playing, and as I summoned my energies for a return smile I stumbled, tipping it and her into the water… “God
damn
it,” she said… —In general, no matter whether I did or did not learn things from Green-Eyes (and I do remember a few occasions where she nodded at me in a satisfied way, and once because I had located our position so accurately she gave me the McGonagall Pass topo map for my own), the lessons were neither easy nor pleasant. I would look down at the ground, apologizing for my latest stupidity and feeling a strange tightness in my chest which I thought then was pure self-loathing (but which I now suspect was anger, too); and Erica threw her head back despairingly, reached to me, and cried,
“Think!”
Then she would feel a pitying impulse to rally me, would make herself smile and say, “Your river crossings are a hundred times better than at the start.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Once when we were hitchhiking, Erica Bright stood on the empty road, ready to play the pretty part (even when it was cold she kept her sweater off so that the drivers would see that she had breasts). She was singing a song by Jacques Brel. Her face was young and clear. She combed her hair, sang a song in Spanish (she knew eight languages); got impatient and sprang upside down, walking on her hands in the middle of the highway, smiling and singing. Then Green-Eyes decided to make me exercise, and she was yelling because I couldn’t twist my neck and arms in the way she wanted. —“You move like a robot!” she cried after half an hour. “There’s no use trying to get you to do anything, is there? You might as well sit down.” —She cheered up, though, a moment later, when I tied a perfect knot (Erica was always making me practice things).… “Good,” she said to me. “Very good.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You’re being sarcastic,” said Bright. Her feelings were hurt.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are,” said Green-Eyes. “That really bothers me about you, that you’ll never admit it when you’re being sarcastic.”

“What are you doing with your knife?” said Erica.

“Not much.”

I got up and started walking. It was my plan at that moment to walk into the woods until I died. Erica called my name, tentatively. I kept walking.

“Come back!” cried Bright.

I stopped.

“Let’s just try and enjoy each other,” she said. “Okay?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m not thinking anything.”

Ten days later we were climbing the side of a steep ravine in the mountains, with a frozen stream below and the dusk-blue wall of a glacier above, and it was snowing but we both felt hot.

“Let me carry your sweater,” Erica said.

“No, that’s all right.”

“Come on, we’ll go faster if I have it. Just give it to me.”

“All right. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said Erica, smiling at me.

Erica carried my sweater. What did I do for anyone in Afghanistan? Well, once I brought a few armloads of wood for a fire. Somehow this should be worth as much as Erica carrying my sweater, in terms of mass carried over a distance for a utilitarian purpose; and somehow it seems to me that in Afghanistan I never did a goddamned thing.

One night we camped in a boggy, grassy place by the highway near Anchorage. It was finally starting to get dark late at night, because we had achieved the month of August, and the tent, which hung loosely on its poles in the soft grass, took on a primeval quality, the walls seeming like shaggy, wrinkled skins in the dusk and the thick grass beneath our bodies feeling like them; and reeds whispered all around us, reddened through the back window of the tent by the alpenglow. Erica’s features, hard and shadowy and strong, were in relief as she lay beside me. Her sweater looked like mail. She lay still with her eyes closed. We slept late; there were no more river crossings to make. The next morning was a happy one, a relapse in the progress of Green-Eyes’s contempt
for me. She talked to me a little, and even smiled at me. She said she’d make breakfast beside the railroad tracks across the highway. When she’d gone I got up and struck camp, shaking the tent fly clean of slugs, pulled my pack on and hiked over. Erica was just fixing my breakfast: a big dish of granola, heaped with brown sugar and beautiful raspberries that she had picked for me.

It was four-thirty in the morning when we struck the tent and left the wooded sandbar. Green-Eyes hustled me along. It was very warm and sunny; the water level was rising fast. Our boots filled up with cold water and gravel in the first channel. Within a few minutes my feet were completely numb. —“Listen,” Green-Eyes told me as we ran through toe-deep streams and gravel beds. “No, don’t slow up, just listen. You hear that noise like thunder coming from the east? That’s the ice beginning to break up for the day. Look, the water’s getting higher! Can you hear how it sounds different?”

We had reached the first of the difficult channels. Green-Eyes tied a bowline around my waist and showed me how to step
into
the rope to pay it out across my hip.
—
“
Watch
for me as I go across!” she said. “Be ready to pull me in if I fall. If you can’t do it, you’ll have to throw off your pack and run for me. Give me slack when I call for it.”

“Right.”

“Now, remember, you have to pay attention!”

“I will.”

She undid her hip belt and started across. The gray water was rising very quickly now. The stump on the sandbar behind us, which had been dry a quarter hour before, was now almost entirely underwater.

“Tension!”
Erica screamed from the middle of the river channel. I could barely hear her. The water roared.

“All right,” I said, pulling in rope.

Erica stumbled in the current. —“No! Slack, goddamnit; give me slack! I tell you to
pay attention
and you pull in rope!”

“Sorry,” I said. She couldn’t hear me.

I paid out rope, and Erica crossed the channel. —“Come on!” she called. “Hurry!” I started into the water, remembered to unbuckle my hip belt, and crossed slowly, carefully, thinking only
left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot
so that I would not be thinking about where I was, and I did not look around me more than I had to. Green-Eyes pulled in the rope from her side of the channel. The water was waist-deep. It pushed at me, trying to knock me down. I missed my footing for a moment, aborted the step, and reached with the other toe until I found a rock. Carefully, my arms outstretched in proper Outward Bound fashion, I made the crossing and pulled myself up onto Erica’s gravel bank. I was numb from the waist down.

“You’re going to have to go faster than that,” Erica said.

“That’s true,” I said. “I can see that.” —We went to the next channel at a run. I was terrified. The water was somewhat deeper here, and Erica crossed with difficulty. I could see the look of complete concentration on her faraway face.

“Okay—come on!” she called faintly.

I stepped into the water, my open hip belt swinging loose against my thighs. My pack did not feel properly balanced. The current was very strong. I took another step, and another. The bottom dropped away suddenly, and the water was above my belly. The pack twisted on my shoulders as the river shoved me back and forth.
—“Erica!”
I screamed from the middle of the channel. I was falling; I fell; the current was pulling me down, and my heavy pack held me underwater, trapping the back of my head against the hard frame so that I could not reach air. The world sang in my ears. I could not get up, and the cold, cold water was paralyzing me. I thrashed stupidly. Then Erica was pulling the rope tight and calling something to me in a firm voice. I couldn’t understand her, but I knew that I had to get up. The water was very cold. My arms and legs still responded somewhat, and I floundered forward, clawing at the rope, until at last the channel was only knee-deep again and I got to my feet.

“Good recovery!” Erica called encouragingly.

“Thank you,” I said.

I waded up onto the sandbar, shivering, and stood beside her, looking at the next channel. The water was gray and swollen; it was quick and calm and deep. As soon as I saw it, I knew that I was going to fall.

“Let’s go,” said Erica. “We’ve got to get across soon. The water’s rising faster.”

“All right.”

“Watch me! Be ready to run for me! Pay attention!”

“All right.”

The water was already up to her hips. As I watched, she staggered and righted herself. Carefully I paid out rope. Then she was across and looking anxiously at me. —“Okay!” she called. “Come on!”

“This doesn’t look too bad,” I said across the channel to her, knowing that she couldn’t hear. I stepped into the water. For the first time that day I allowed myself to look ahead, and saw that the other side of the river was a long distance away. We were less than halfway to it. The bank became a green ridge of tundra that met the horizon, topped by the squat white shape of Mount McKinley thrusting into the blue sky.

“Come on!” Erica called through cupped hands.

I wasn’t frightened anymore. I felt doomed. I started stumbling when the water was only calf-deep. Arms spread wide, I kept on. The current pushed at me rhythmically with each step. The cold water was up to my knees. The only noise I could hear was the gravel churning in the water. My legs were numb. I decided to hurry to get it over with. Paying no attention to my footing, I bolted toward Erica. I looked up at her on that distant sandbar ahead of me; she was pulling in rope complacently. She was pleased, no doubt, that I had finally gotten the knack of river crossings and could perform them with all deliberate speed—when actually, of course, I was rushing through the water in a panic. My pack slammed into my back; I felt relief when I finally fell. The river slugged me, chilly, strong and hateful, and ground me into the rocks. I was shooting downstream, scraping across the rocks as I went. I was breathing in water. I didn’t even try to raise my head. I considered myself dead.

Then I stopped moving with a jerk. Erica had thrown herself down
to the ground and began to haul me in. I felt myself being hauled, but I could not help her. Slowly, slowly she dragged me out of the river. I could hear her grunting with the effort. At last I was lying in only three or four inches of icy water. I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. My body was without feeling, and my pack was heavy with water. I undid one shoulder strap, pulled myself slowly out of the other, and dragged myself and my pack very slowly along through the wet stones, as if I were a snail.

“Come on!” Erica was calling. “Get up!”

I tried to keep moving.

“You can do it! You’ve got to do it! Get up!”

Erica called my name again, breathlessly.

…We were on another big sandbar. Erica Bright was pulling off my shoes and my torn, bloody blue jeans; she was unrolling my sleeping bag, which had stayed dry in its double stuff sack; she was holding me tight. My legs and face were bloody. —“Hurry up and get into your bag,” Erica Green-Eyes said. “You have hypothermia.”

“Erica …” I said. It took all my effort to say her name.

“My heart really went out to you, too,” she said. “Now get in.”

For a long time I shivered in the sun. Erica sat beside me all afternoon. —“You know,” she said finally, “I’m starting to get fond of you.”

I smiled up at her.

The next day we crossed the McKinley all the way. In the last channel, Erica fell. We were side by side in the water, holding on to each other by my belt. There was a heavy clank as Erica hit the rocks with her pack, and then a grinding. I was pulled down.

“Get up!” I shouted in my best Green-Eyes manner. I pulled her up; she slipped off her pack. We were in calm, shallow water. I helped her to her feet, and the two of us dragged her pack onto the final sandbank. She looked at me, wet and smiling, and threw her arms around me and kissed my cheek.