North of Hope (22 page)

Resting next to Grandma in the semidarkness of her room, the hallway light leaking in through her door, I was poignantly aware that this was the thing I would never be able to do for Dad. And yet stroking her hair, I smoothed back Dad’s hair. Staying with her in her pain, I was with Dad in his.

Grandma slept more soundly as the drugs took effect, and the cool night sizzled into the heat of another scorching day. In the afternoon, I drove to Aunt Georgia’s house a mile away to take a nap. At 4:30 I bolted awake. A minute later my cell phone rang, and Sam urged me to come back to Grandma’s apartment. I sped through the wide, sunbaked streets to her building and sprinted up the stairs. I think I knew already that she had left us.

Requiem aeternam
. Grant them eternal rest.

I am bound, I am bound, for a distant shore,
By a lonely isle, by a far Azore,
There it is, there it is, the treasure I seek,
On the barren sands of a desolate creek.

—Henry David Thoreau,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

We slept hard that night after visiting the Father’s Day Camp. We were still two days away from Dad and Kathy’s final campsite. When we woke, it felt as if the sun had abandoned summer mid-stride. A freezing wind lashed at our faces. I hunched into my dry suit and PFD. The wind bullied our raft as we tried to maneuver around rocks and through rapids. We strained against the paddles, against the wind, trying to stay in the current.

Dad and Kathy’s journal indicated a rough trip last year, constantly working against the wind, and a part of me was thankful for the shared experience. I was excited to come to the place they found so beautiful, to share their frustrations as well as their joys. But first we had to share the fighting of the wind.

“Come on, paddle hard!” someone yelled. The wind whipped against us and the raft ignored our struggles.

“Get it away from that rock!”

“I’m trying!”

All three of us paddled with all of our strength. The raft lurched, just skirting the rock, and then: “Left! Paddle hard!”

Our bodies were the paddles, pulling, begging.

“Dammit!” Sally yelled, and I saw her blue plastic paddle shooting downriver, even as her round body teetered over the side of the
raft and toward the water. Clenching my paddle, I jumped up and over, grabbing her dry suit as Ned did the same. She rolled back into the boat, and the moment we knew she was in, we were back at our stations paddling.

“We’ve got another one. We’ve got to pull over!” I yelled, biting down hard as though my teeth might somehow steady our raft. “Paddle right!” Ned paddled from the bow and I put my body into it from the stern.

“Paddle hard! Back-paddle … we’re in!” The raft slid neatly into the eddy, and I was momentarily surprised that anything could pull us out of that terrible wind. I exhaled forcefully. “This is brutal!” The tension in my jaw became its own discomfort, building each moment.

“Yeah,” Sally said. I waited for her to say more, but nothing came.

With quick, sharp movements, Ned began loosening the straps holding down the bags so we could access the spare paddle. I felt privately furious that Sally had made no admission of culpability, no apology, no guarantee of future caution, no discussion of the necessity of maintaining our gear in the wilderness. I was glad we had a spare. From this point forward, though, there was no reserve. And we hadn’t even hit the canyon yet.

We wiggled the paddle out from its spot in the bottom of the raft and handed it to Sally.

“Well, it will be nice to get to Esetuk Creek,” I said, trying to fill the gap in conversation. No one responded.

“Let’s go,” Ned said, and we pushed off from our resting place into the teeth of the wind.

Back in the river, as we fought the wind and the current through a succession of rock gardens, steep bluffs appeared on both sides and stark mountains rose behind them. Snow traced the ridges and cuts of the mountains like a crown.

Birds hung in the air, easily defying forces of air and gravity.

The Inuit look at birds as spirit, and I remember growing up seeing birds and animals as special. I read through the James Herriot books quickly and jumped at the chance to volunteer at a local veterinary clinic which specialized in wild birds. Once a week I took the bus from school and helped with cleaning cages and holding wiggly animals for exams, progressing to giving subcutaneous shots.

The worst cages to clean were those of the wild birds. Occasionally a menacing bird of prey perched in the kennel at the end of the row in the large dog area, contained by a plywood board set over the kennel. The head veterinarian was the only one who touched those birds, but they watched me with even and intent eyes as I worked across from them. I had little doubt they would rip out my throat given half a chance. I cleaned the cages of the less threatening seagulls and ducks. Before working at the clinic, I had liked seagulls, watching them from a distance ride the wind and the sea in white drifts. My perspective changed working with them in proximity. I fed them dog food moistened with water, and either the cuisine or the accommodations must have caused offense, because as soon as I delivered food to the clean cages, the seagulls stepped in their bowls, defecated, flapped their wings, and spread the mess onto every square inch of the kennels. I reeled at the stink.

Ducks recoiled from me, backing into a corner and hissing, and snapped at me with their rubbery beaks. I could see the fear in their eyes, felt sorry that this wildness was caged. Growing up with so many wild animals around us, I understood freedom to be as vital as oxygen.

One weekend I brought home a nest of baby birds someone had dropped off at the clinic. Well-meaning people often brought nests to the clinic, not realizing that the mother bird was likely only away from the nest gathering food. The chicks always died. But we took them home anyway, feeding them a thin gruel of dog
food and water through a syringe. My nest of fuzzy gray chicks, all beak and fluff, didn’t last the weekend.

Birds gave life to the boughs all around our house. Because our glass windows rose two stories, reflecting the birch and spruce forest, birds basking in the brightness of a summer day frequently flew into the windows and died.

One day, the thud of a bird against the sliding glass door startled me out of my immersion in a book. Outside, the feet of a tiny sparrow reached up at me, clutching at a life already gone.

Another similar bird perched on the bird feeder. I walked carefully over. The bird did not fly away. I put my hand up to it, slowly. Still it did not fly away. When I nestled my finger under its tail, it stumbled slightly and I felt the light clutch of its claws. I felt guilty; I knew touching wild animals could cause them harm. I put it gently back on the bird feeder, where it continued to sit, dazed. I picked up the warm body of its friend, walked it down to the woods just past our lawn, and gave it a burial from the Episcopal prayer book, marking its grave with a white granite rock flecked with black biotite and hornblende. When I walked back to the porch, the little bird on the feeder looked at me and flew away.

There was never any question in my mind that all creatures were part of a divine creation, and that all of us were here together to do the best we could. Understanding and honoring death was part of that effort. Perhaps that is the wisdom of a child. The world has a way of throwing us against that bright, hard reflection of life and knocking the simple vision of truth right out of us. If we are lucky, or careful, or daring, our lives are all about coming back to our senses. So the wild birds of the Hulahula, keeping their distance, dancing in the hard wind, looked, to me, wise and capable and free.

From the raft, I watched the landscape as the banks on both sides of the river steepened. On the west side of the river was
Kikiktak Mountain, what geologists call an anticline, a geologically young structure of folded earth and rock. Because of its newness, erosion had not yet done its work, and the ridge was susceptible to the deep cutting of the river. This cutting created the bluff on the east side of the river and the steep green embankments rising sharply on each side. Based on this terrain, I assumed we were close to Esetuk Creek, and the GPS concurred. We paddled for the point and pulled the raft into the eddy off the inside of the curve.

We were immediately upriver of Esetuk Creek, a frolicking and joyous dance of clear mountain water bursting through a small canyon down to the river. Making sure the boat was secure, I took the shotgun and hiked up the hillside, a perfect succession of green and flower-covered plateaus spilling into one another like the creek below, just as joyous in its traverse. The hanging gardens of Babylon made manifest in the Arctic.

I sat and identified flowers nestled into the plateaus, purple lousewort and white mountain avens. Perhaps we are only here to name. But I was here for more. I wanted to name, and be named. I wanted to be healed. I picked up an old Dall sheep horn, shed many years before, slowly falling apart, its curve still evident and perfect in simplicity. Layers peeled away like flakes of skin, thin pieces of paper, a message lost in time. Its beauty signified death and a reminder that blood spilled and stilled was a part of what lived, and the wilderness claimed the pain of that death in a way the world did not. By claiming the pain, it bore also the beauty, and that message was not lost.

The month after the ground was piled on top of Dad’s and Kathy’s coffins, I walked back up to the cemetery and ran into Shorty there, his pickup loaded with watering jugs he had brought for the flowers on the grave.

“Do you ever think you see him?” I asked. I knew I was reaching.

“Oh, sure, I talk to him on the river all the time,” Shorty answered, unloading the water from his truck.

I raised my eyebrows. “Does he answer?”

“Sure, sure,” Shorty said. “We talk.”

I wanted to ask, What does he say? Does he remember me, on the other side of life, wherever he is now? But I restrained myself.

Shorty paused at the side of the grave. “The older I get, the more I understand that the line between the living and the dead isn’t much of a line at all.” I see now his gracious handling, in the midst of his own grief, of my questions reaching for a truth that cannot be attained, and my reaching too for a father who was gone and who, despite my repeated unconscious efforts with people and questions, could never be replaced.

Walking to the edge of one of the plateaus, I looked down into Esetuk Creek. It was as clear as the mountain air, defined only by the foam of its vivacious descent. The sound of the shallow creek didn’t carry the depth of the river’s song, but its playfulness imbued joy into the Arctic air.

Dad wrote:

Kathy had written:

Ned made tea to go with our Clif Bars, almonds, and raisins. Lunch was short. The canyon waited for us. But I did not want to leave Esetuk Creek. I wanted to sit with the curve of the river holding happy memories from last year as though they might change the tenor of history, change the course of both trips, but the river wasn’t stopping. Our job was to stay on the river.

Over the past year, I’d read a pile of books on death and grief and losing parents. Most of the books did nothing for me; my tendency to read for understanding wasn’t working. Answers slipped away like mist.

Two were noteworthy. The first was
A Grace Disguised
by Jerry Sittser, who wrote about recovering from the traumatic deaths of his wife, mother, and child. I remember from that book the idea of a strong oak in a garden, struck down by lightning. Though the oak is dead, the gardener’s job is to make the garden around the remains of the oak beautiful. The other book I immersed myself in was Leon Wieseltier’s
Kaddish
, written by a man who found strength in learning about and practicing the Jewish ritual of saying Kaddish in synagogue after his father’s death. Though Wieseltier was a nonpracticing Jew, for eleven months he said Kaddish three times a day at synagogue, drawing strength from community, from study, from this prescription of prayer. I was amazed at the words of the Kaddish, which never reference death or grief but rather exalt God. It turns out that the Kaddish is not a unique prayer for the dead at all, but is said at many points in any given service, with one recitation reserved for mourners, as though to recognize grief, while retraining minds and souls sunk in despair to a life of praise and hope, as though to revive the bereaved. I longed for a similar prescription, a revival, a ritual to lend structure and meaning to my grief and remind me that I was alive. I craved direction, rules, structure. Without the discipline, without
the practice, everything I thought I was looked at death and felt the gaping chasm of human impotence.