North of Hope (9 page)

“45-70 Copilot and a pistol-grip shotgun,” I said, feigning confidence and suppressing a laugh at the clash of what I’d come to understand as city life in Seattle and large caliber weaponry.

The manager raised his eyebrows. “What you gonna do with those?” The condescension disappeared from his voice.

“Protection from bear in Alaska,” I said.

“So you’ll be using slugs in the shotgun, right?”

I nodded.

“Slugs are too big for this range,” he said, then hesitated for a minute. “Come on back.” He grabbed headphones and ammunition.

We followed hopefully into the narrow hallway of firing lanes smelling of gunpowder and metal.

“Okay, you ever shot this before?” he asked, sighting down the barrel of the 45-70.

“No, but we’ve both shot other rifles—M16s, M60s,” I said.

His eyebrows raised again, then relaxed into a smile. “Who woulda guessed? Okay, well, this is gonna kick a lot more than those. See, those have recoil built into them. These don’t. You want to really jam it into your shoulder, like this,” he demonstrated, pulling the butt of the rifle firmly into the pocket where his shoulder connected to his arm. “And you know you don’t want to anticipate the shot. Just take it from there.”

He dropped a cartridge into the chamber, moved the lever down and back to the stock, sighted down the barrel easily, and fired. A paper target down the lane took his shot dead center. He handed me the rifle. I pulled the heavy wooden stock into my shoulder. Breathe-relax-aim-squeeze-shoot. Wait for the pause after you exhale to pull the trigger. My training flowed easily back, and the stock slammed into my body. I concentrated on the target. Breathe-relax-aim-squeeze-shoot and
wham!
Another slam into my shoulder.

Trea and I both shot and hit pretty close to center mass.

“Not bad!” he said with a smile. “Shotgun?” He picked up the heavy metal gun. “You ready to hit a bear with one of these things?” he asked.

“Hopefully we won’t have to,” I said, parroting what I knew I should say. “It would be rare. They generally stay away from people and usually don’t cause any trouble. I really don’t want to have to shoot at anything.” As I said it, I believed it, or most of me did, and yet I realized how ludicrous it would sound to anyone who knew what had happened last year.

The manager nodded. “Well, don’t tell anyone,” he said. “We’re not really supposed to do this, but here’s slugs, here’s the shot. You gonna carry this, you need to be ready to shoot it.”

The pistol-grip shotgun had an eighteen-inch barrel, the shortest legal length. It had been a gift to Dad from his friend George in the army. George and his sons were hunters, and this was widely considered a standard bear gun in Alaska.

I tried it first. The gun weighed heavy in my arms, requiring commitment and intention. Holding the pump and the pistol grip, I aimed at the target. The percussion echoed down the lane. My shot demolished the top quarter of the paper target.

“You’ve got to aim it lower than you think,” the manager said. “You’ll naturally pull up, so get it lower.” I tried again. Center mass, a huge hole ripped from the target. Trea followed suit, hitting center mass on her first try. The explosions reverberated in the emptiness inside me.

A bolt. A bullet. A chamber. The 45-70 had been found lying next to Dad on the sands of that Arctic beach. He had actioned the lever, but never had the chance to fire. The gun was the last thing he had touched.

Years before, I’d visited my grandma in Phoenix. Before I left, she asked how my brothers were doing.

“Fine, I think, Grandma,” I said. “They’re boys. They don’t say much.”

“Last time Ned was here,” she said, “I took him to the airport when he left. He gave the agent his ticket, and as he started to walk down the jetway, I said, ‘Keep the faith, Ned!’ He turned around and yelled back at me, ‘No!’ And then he kept going.” She shook her head slowly. “I just hope he’s okay.”

“I don’t know, Grandma. We don’t really talk about those things.”

I remembered that conversation as Ned, Sally, and I each took care of our gear, getting ready for the night. Ned was so sensitive that he couldn’t take the tiniest disruption, arming himself with
anger for protection. I didn’t remember him that way in childhood, only since our parents’ divorce, though I supposed he had experienced additional stresses as an adopted sibling that I would never understand. I watched the care he took with everything, appreciating his attention to detail, worrying about the precision he seemed to demand and what might fail to live up to his expectations on this trip. I shook off the thought and headed to my tent. Not something I could solve. I had my own problems.

Sally took the first shift to watch for bear. I had the second. I wiggled into my sleeping bag, wadding up my raincoat for a pillow and pulling a T-shirt over my eyes to keep out the light.

At 11:00 p.m. I awoke to Sally’s tapping on the nylon vestibule of my tent, waking me for bear watch. The tapping came thin and soft, a reminder of how little stood between me and this wilderness.

I crawled out of my tent into the middle of a watercolor painting, the water, tinted and glistening, still moist on the paper. The brightness of the Arctic summer sun had lessened as the sun swung closer to the horizon, letting soft shadows from the west stretch gently across the tundra, and the watery light of rain showers in the mountains smoothed the edges of the limestone and shale while illuminating the mountainsides with a yellow glow. As the wind died, I shed my clothing down to my long underwear, though the quick clustering of mosquitoes forced me just as quickly back into my rain gear and a mosquito head net. Resting the shotgun against a piece of driftwood, I sat with the journal, a book of Mary Oliver poetry, and the oversized can of bear spray and let the landscape saturate my eyes and soul.

This was our first night on the river. One year ago exactly, it had been Dad and Kathy’s last night on earth. The pain of the past year returned like the twisting of a blade.

One night at home in my Seattle apartment, only weeks after returning from Alaska, I sat on the overstuffed denim couch,
tucked under a quilt, reading. I looked up from my book—my concentration was so poor!—and my eye caught the leather briefcase of Dad’s I had placed under the coffee table. I put my book down carefully. I slid down to sit on the floor and pulled the briefcase toward me. The thick brown leather bore scratches and dents from decades of use, the brass latch marred from years of protecting and releasing its contents. Inside were the newspaper articles from the summer, the funeral service bulletins, sympathy cards, death certificates. I looked over the articles, which still didn’t register to me as real. Then the crisp blue-and-white death certificate, with the raised imprint of the coroner. “Cause of death: 1. Massive blunt force injuries, 2. Bear mauling.” Did the coroner write this same thing after every bear attack? Or had he really done an examination?

In the back of the briefcase was a manila envelope, taped shut. I replaced the articles, the bulletin, the certificate. I pulled out the envelope.

One corner of the envelope was creased into a fold. I smoothed it back with my thumb, as though I could flatten it, make it right. Then, with some masochistic sense of resolve, I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. The unedited police report slid out, a neat stapled packet. I read through each page, slowly. My stomach tightened. Bile rose in my throat. The mirage that is our days and hours evaporated, hurling me back to the phone call, to a gruesome event I’d only imagined and now understood through the detailed report of its aftermath. The report described me as having blond hair and green eyes, and said I was several years older than I was and living in Oregon. I was momentarily angered by this misidentification and then amused, as though my neurons no longer knew how to react. And then, reading further, I was offended: Dad and Kathy were bodies. The body of a man. The body of a woman.

I read the report like an addict who had abstained too long and now pushed the needle into her vein.

I should have recognized the signal, should have understood what it meant: I was whirling in the winds of the vortex still, believing in the power of information. Still believing that I could change the outcome.

I clutched at the couch with one hand. With the other I dug my fingers into my rib cage as though to keep my body from spinning apart. I rolled onto my side. The harsh light of the reading lamp’s bare bulb shone into my pupils, but all I could see was darkness, dimensionless, interminable, and terrifying. I lay curled and helpless, focusing on how to take each breath, my arms clutching my sides with tightly curled fingers as though only the tension in my body could hold my life in one piece. Any doubts I may have had about the effect that violence in our souls has on our bodies evaporated in the pain of clarity.

I blinked to force my senses to readjust to the scene, the soft gurgle of the current against the shore, the light soft on the mountains. I was on the river where they’d made their final journey. It was my last attempt at understanding. I whispered aloud, to God, to the bears, to Dad. “Come on, bears, give us a break out here, won’t you?” I was scared, in part because of the bears, but also because the nightmare that everyone has who loses a loved one was coming true: I had a hard time remembering Dad, the specifics of his face and his voice. And worse: I couldn’t stop thinking about the image of him and Kathy screaming in a tent being ripped down around them. I prayed to understand, and I prayed for help—what kind of understanding or what kind of help, I’m not sure I knew, or know even now. “Help me, God. Help me, God,” was all I could say. And then: “Come on, Dad. Can you show yourself, just for a minute? Come say hi? Come give me a hug?” Some small part of me thought maybe he was here. That he and Kathy would walk up with smiles on their faces and everything would be okay. The breeze carried my whispers off and away along the lines of the landscape.

An hour after midnight, the sun swung behind the mountains, but did not set. It would not set at all this far north and this close to solstice. Its low angle bathed the tundra and the mountains on either side in lambent yellow light. Gray tendrils of rain washed detail from ridgelines. Golden light shimmering on water suspended in the air soaked the land in an ethereal luminance. The muted glow on the elegant outlines of mountains was that of an old fire on company gathered round, illumining the essence of things.

Have you ever watched something so beautiful for so long that for just a minute you became a part of it? I watched until I was a part of that light, part of the land. A part of creation and creator. What shocked me was not my dissolution but the relief it brought. It was like a quiet rising of water. It was not erasure; it was inclusion, a connection so complete it mingled molecules. I was here, and I was part of the Arctic, and it was part of me.

The wind died, and the night air lay balmy on my skin. And then south down the wide river valley a rainbow appeared against the mountain to the east, curving out over the valley. It brightened, extended its arc, and then disappeared. Then another appeared farther down the valley. Then another, claiming the valley and all that was in it. And then a double rainbow!

The previous summer in Anchorage, during the week of the funeral, dark clouds built each afternoon, releasing furious torrents. Our priest told me after the funeral that he had seen eight rainbows that week. I had only noticed the storms.

I could not restrain myself from laughing out loud, just laughing in the Arctic night. Just as quickly I felt foolish, and I knew definitively that I was not alone.

The canticle [can be called] the “sword of the spirit,” because it provides a weapon for those who virtuously fight against the invisible spirits; for the word of God, taking possession of the spirit when sung or spoken, has power to drive away demons
.

—Quaestiones et responsiones ad Orthodoxos
107 (PG 6.1354)

I
hear the voices around me. I am swallowed up in them. I close my eyes and sink into the sound slowly, like a sigh.

Every Monday night beginning in September, two months after the funeral, I come to the rehearsal hall, sit in the hard folding chair. I bring water in a heavy red plastic bottle Dad and Kathy had with them on the river. It is scratched from use and still has sand around its rim from the river. I refuse to wash it. The first rehearsal, I sit next to Deb, who is only a few years older than me, with stylishly graying hair in long, thick curls. We had both gone to business school, both loved to sing. She doesn’t have a car, so I drive her home after rehearsals. We become fast choir friends.

The ancient idea of
koinonia
, unity in diversity.
Propter chorum
, say the monks. For the sake of the choir. Surely each of us here has a grief for which they sing, whether or not they
know it. I need this unity, a connection to others, something that tells me I am present. But I am singing selfishly, for myself, hoping for a way out of this pain.

I want there to be a reason that I am here, a sign that proves this is good and right.

The night of my audition, the rain had just stopped when I arrived home to my apartment in a quiet neighborhood in the city. I walked up the dark sidewalk, a path bordered by a towering spruce tree and thick rhododendrons. The faint light filtering from neighboring windows lit the slick surface of the flagstones, shiny from the September rain, just enough to see my way to the door. As I made my way up the gentle curve of stairs, my mind back at the audition, a sudden
whoosh
startled me out of my skin. The
whoosh
came again and I jumped back just in front of the outstretched wings of an enormous owl. The friction of feathers snatched the air, decelerating his body, and the owl landed, suddenly silent, on the electrical pole just on the edge of the sidewalk. My heart raced and my skin felt cool. I had never seen an owl anywhere in the city, and certainly nowhere close to my apartment. I stood transfixed, saturated in the silence, the silhouette, the sound of the pounding of my heart in my neck. When I finally turned to walk to my door, his stare was as palpable as the movement of air beneath his wings.