North of Hope (20 page)

The company I accepted an offer from sent me to Seattle after graduation. Peter was a Seattle native who was also returning to work in his native city and recommended great neighborhoods to look for apartments. Halfway into my first year in Seattle, I told a good friend, “I know this sounds crazy, since we aren’t even dating, but I think I’m going to marry Peter.”

A year after moving to Seattle, both of us still single, we started dating. I had never before met someone I thought I’d marry. I was smitten.

We had a good time, but not good enough. Things were fine, but not better than fine. It wasn’t what either of us wanted for our lives. No matter, I thought. We’ll figure it out. We are meant to be together.

Coming back from the hike on Father’s Day, I called Peter to let him know I was on my way. Then I checked my voicemail.

“Hi, Shannon, it’s Dad and Kathy,” the message said. “Sorry we missed you today! We’ll try you later if we get a chance. We love you!” I was frustrated that they had called early. I didn’t want to miss my chance to talk to them. Before they left on these trips, Kathy would email and remind us that they’d be on the river over Father’s Day in case we wanted to send a card early, addressed to her, so she could bring it along as a surprise. I’d sent my card out in time, but had planned to put pictures in a travel mug to send along as well and hadn’t finished the mug.

Back in Seattle, Peter grilled salmon on the deck under the wisteria. His parents, as well as his sister and her family, joined us around the picnic table in the easy summer air. I had my phone next to me in case Dad and Kathy called again, feeling guilty for being tied to technology during a family dinner, but not wanting to miss a call. We finished dinner, and still they hadn’t called. I felt
just a bit desperate. I couldn’t call the sat phone, since they turned it off when not in use to save batteries and kept it in a watertight case. We cleared the table. Peter’s family left.

Minutes later, the phone rang. “Hi, Shannon?” The phone crackled just a bit, but was surprisingly clear for satellite connection.

“Hi, Dad!” I said. I grinned with selfish relief. “How are you doing up there?”

“Oh, we’re just having a great trip,” he said, a satisfied chuckle in his voice. “How are you?”

“We’re great. Just had grilled salmon with Peter’s family. Happy Father’s Day, by the way!”

“Thanks! You have a good hiking trip?” Dad was always asking us about our lives, and I wanted to hear about their trip!

“It was great, Dad, really pretty. How’s the river?”

He laughed his deep, belly laugh. “We’re having a great time! Let me put Kathy on!”

“Hi, Kathy! How’s the trip?”

“It’s just beautiful. Your dad had a spill today, but everything was okay.”

“What happened?” I was concerned. They were a long way from help.

“Oh, a piece of aufeis broke off and the wave flipped his kayak. He was just fine though.”

“Well, that’s good. What did you guys have for your Father’s Day dinner?”

“Black beans and lentils. It was perfect!”

“That sounds great,” I said. I smiled. It was good to hear their voices.

“Well, I’ll put your dad back on,” Kathy said.

“Great, good to talk to you. Have a great trip! I love you!”

“Love you too.”

A brief pause as the sat phone was passed from one canvas chair to the other.

“Shan?”

“Hi, Dad. Sounds like you’re having fun, though you left out flipping your kayak!”

He laughed again. “Oh, it all turned out okay. Nothing even got wet.”

“Well, be careful up there,” I said, feeling wistful, wishing I could give him a hug on this day honoring him.

“Did we tell you we saw a wolf?” His voice was easy, relaxed, and intensely happy.

“Really?”

“Actually, we saw two—a gray wolf our first day out, and a white wolf just this morning.”

“That’s amazing!”

“Just beautiful. Well, better let you go; this is two dollars a minute,” he said.

“Okay, Dad. Happy Father’s Day. I love you!”

“Love you too, kiddo.”

That had been it, a quick call of only a few minutes. The river in the background, sand in their water bottles, life in their voices.

How do you know what word will be the last word? How do you know you should hold onto it, lock it away?

Three days later Peter and I broke up. Two days after that, I got the phone call from Kaktovik. Now a year had passed. Peter and I were friends; he had come with me to the funeral and supported me through the darkest year of my life. I invited him on the raft trip, hoping he would come, knowing he was the only one who could really understand, but he declined.

The call from the police had trumped what had been a traumatic breakup. After a few awkward adjustments to intimacy, finding ways to connect while not dating, we slowly found a more cautious comfort in our friendship. Now, on the river, for the first time, I missed having Peter next to me. This place was holy, and it was empty, and I stood on that gravel bar very much alone.

What did it mean when people said things like, “They are
always with us”? That we remember them? It was a platitude, tinny, the chatter of a child’s toy meant to entertain. Where precisely was the “heavenly home”? I wanted GPS coordinates. I wanted a precise understanding.

And what I wanted was inconsequential. I understood that faith requires believing without seeing, accepting mystery, and that was fine as far as believing in God was concerned. But I didn’t want mystery here. I wanted clarity.

The void opened in front of me again. Dad had been reading
Where the Sea Breaks Its Back
, an account of Alaska’s first naturalist, Georg Steller. The bookmark and receipt were still tucked in the pages when it appeared in the box of personal effects left from Dad and Kathy’s campsite. Dad had bought it at Title Wave Used Books in Anchorage four years before his trip. I can see him walking the aisles, perusing the shelves, picking up his copy, putting it under his arm, not quite getting to it, rediscovering it on his own bookshelf, packing it in a plastic bag for the trip. When he and Kathy called, I imagined them as I’d seen them in pictures of their trips—books at their sides, tea in their mugs, sitting in canvas camp chairs with the brick of a sat phone, facing the river, the perfect Arctic light on their faces, looking across with meditative satisfaction to the spot where I sat now.

I wonder what those mountains behind them might tell me, what advice they would give, if they could talk. What they would tell me about love, and about loss, and about how this wild place could heal as naturally as it could kill? But I was trying too hard. This kind of wisdom comes slowly, if it comes at all, and of its own accord.

Ned walked up behind me. I startled, but kept my gaze on the water.

“It’s not okay,” he said tersely, as though to the river. I kept a guard up, but his pain washed through me. I felt it like a shudder.

I was accustomed to his violence, and he to my sarcastic
comments holding him at a distance. The threat I felt from him constrained my compassion. One time this barrier had cracked temporarily. Years ago in the army, my phone had rung at a late hour. I was already in bed, and I rolled over to pick up the phone, squinting into the darkness of my bedroom to find the receiver. The sounds of a party popped and snapped. “Hello?” I said groggily. “Hello?” I don’t know why I didn’t hang up immediately. The undertone of a voice gurgled against the background of raucous laughs and yells. “Hello?”

I was about to hang up when I heard, “Shannon?” in a cracked, low voice.

“Hey.” I woke up partly, shocked at the call, recognizing Ned’s voice. He was studying for his PhD on the East Coast. I hadn’t talked to him in months.

There was more crackling, gurgling. “I love you,” he said, a quiet statement, almost like a sob.

I blinked into the blackness of my room. “I love you too,” I said, letting each word out with care.

No response. Only the sounds of the party.

It was midnight. “Okay, I’m going to hang up now,” I said into the receiver. I hung up and rolled over to my cat, who was curled up next to me under the covers. “What do you think that was about?” I asked her. She purred a little in her sleep, and I nestled in next to her, burying my fingers in the fur at her throat.

That had been many years ago. Our relationship never changed. I still regarded him with suspicion, maintaining a defensive posture against his abusiveness, interwoven with threads of persistent hope and tempered by sadness recognizing the fragility beneath his spiny surface. It was not that we were so different; it was that we were so much the same. I assumed he had likely grown past much of his anger, but enough indicators persisted that I still didn’t feel safe around him. Dad would have liked it if we could have leaned on each other. But it wasn’t up to Dad anymore. Maybe it never had been.

“No, it’s not okay,” I said slowly. “This trip won’t make it okay. It’s never going to be okay.” I watched the late afternoon sun on the empty beach across the river. “It’s not supposed to be okay.”

We both stood looking across at the empty beach for what felt like a long time.

Holy holy holy
.

I
look forward to Monday nights this first fall back from Alaska, after the funeral, after clearing out the house, anxious for the weekend to end and to begin the week and rehearsal. I keep my score on the piano in my small apartment, where I will be reminded with a glance: Mozart. It is assurance and challenge.

There are rehearsals that make me squirm, but most tap into an undefined place inside where body, heart, and soul come together, a place I can feel between my forehead and my stomach, a place I stroke by inhaling and exhaling, bringing in air, releasing it on melodies and harmonies deep and sweet, complex and beautiful.

This music that has been washing over me is beginning to sink in. I am starting to hear the melodies again, to appreciate the harmony, to hear the dissonances come and then resolve. I am beginning to learn beauty again.

Now, in late fall, most of our rehearsals include the whole choir, men and women in concert, singing the parts each group has been learning for the past several weeks. At first it is like
holding a hand, this coming together, and then like a small rain shower, and then a gathering storm—the rain and the wind, clouds moving and darkening and the slick smell of water, and trickles and torrents. It is the storm abating, the clouds breaking, the first rays of light, the rainbow. It is pleading and angry, terrified and consoling, all of these different voices coming together and making this music that brings us out of ourselves, out of that rehearsal hall, out of the hard metal folding chairs looking across at I-5, into a force beyond any one or even all of us, into something terrible and beautiful and ultimately redemptive. Or this is what I hope. This is what I’m counting on.

Each light, each life, put out, lies down within us.

—Galway Kinnell, “When the Towers Fell”

S
ix weeks before departing for the Arctic, with the trip scheduled and gear in place, if not quite packed, I found myself landing in Phoenix after an urgent call from Aunt Marcia. Grandma had collapsed, and despite beating the odds so many times in previous years, this time she wasn’t going to make it.

Speeding west on I-10 from the Phoenix airport to Sun City, I grasped the steering wheel hard, squinting into a too-bright day with a sickening sense of repetition. A phone call. Events from far away, important events, with no warning and limitless implications. In my selfish interpretation of what was happening, I drove toward news of losing a key piece of my identity and my foundation, a piece I’d leaned on more heavily in Dad’s absence. The tiny reserve of strength I had been collecting over the past ten months drained away like water through a sieve. In the past, I would have leaned on Dad for strength, even as I would have wanted to be there for him in his pain. Now, even as I felt my energies ebbing, I also felt a sense of responsibility, a sense that I needed to be there especially because Dad could not be. I wanted to be there for Grandma. I had to be there for Dad.

My knowledge of my grandma was limited to that of a granddaughter, but this let me spin her story as heroic. She’d been
an only child in Axtell, Kansas, a tiny town on the border with Nebraska. She had dark hair and flashing brown eyes. In high school she played basketball, and she eloped at sixteen with the boy she loved. Her father refused to speak to her for nearly a year, and she continued to live at home, keeping the marriage a secret from everyone outside of family so that she could finish high school, since students were not allowed to stay in school if they were married. My aunt Georgia was born two years later.

When Georgia was six months old, Grandma’s husband was killed in a car accident. She was a widow at nineteen. In what she described as a heartrending decision, she left Georgia with her parents and went back to college at Kansas State, where she met my grandpa, a quarterback on the football team in the years of leather helmets. Grandpa had a quick smile, liked to play practical jokes, and went to church as often as she did. After they married, Dad was born, and then Dad’s youngest sister, Marcia, and finally Tom.

In her twenties, Grandma learned to fly a small plane. I still can’t understand how a woman from a tiny Midwestern town had either the idea or the guts to do this, but it makes me proud, and I like to claim a bit of that spunk. Shortly after she began her lessons, though, episodes of vertigo stopped her short of earning her license. Later, doctors found a benign brain tumor they opted to leave in place. She raised her family and supported her church in small Kansas towns with joyful Midwestern efficiency, bringing other families who were down on their luck into her home and running the youth group for years. Grandma’s favorite thing was having family gathered around her dining room table, eating off her china at holidays or any occasion for celebration. She loved to decorate with pretty things—candles with sparkles and trains of gold-leaf ivy draped over a mantle or a shelf for Christmas.