The Carry Home (19 page)

B
ACK IN
T
HUNDER
B
AY,
S
UNDAY IS A BLUR.
T
HE ONLY POINT OF
certainty was my obsession to drive Jane's ashes home in the van. To that end, Martha has been on the phone since just past dawn, calling the local officials who've been good enough to give us their home phone numbers. The coroner, for one, who as the last act of what began as a potential crime investigation will have to perform an autopsy. He offers to do this on his day off. The funeral director, Phil Medhurst, swings into action and makes arrangements for the cremation to happen the next morning.

Early Monday morning, I get out of bed and go knock on the door of Martha's room. When she opens it, I catch my breath. She's taken her long, thick brown hair, which for years had hung nearly to her waist, and cut it off in a ragged line at the top of her neck, using a pair of scissors borrowed from the hotel clerk in the middle of the night.

Tom leaves for the airport, to head back to Indiana, while Martha and I wait for the ashes to arrive at Blake's Funeral Home. We talk it over, decide to go down to the shore of Lake Superior for a parting ceremony—to Mariner Park, where the waters once held by the Kopka River pause for a time in the big lake before running on to the sea. The force of what's happened
keeps growing, getting stronger, filling every muscle and fiber, making me weak in the knees, sick to my stomach. I know things are going to be this way for a long time. Like an avalanche that keeps running and running down the mountain, never exhausting itself, an endless, bitter cascade of ice and snow.

Down on the shore of Lake Superior I take the sock and sandal from my good foot and plant it in the lake, then lean over to wash my hands and face. Next I bring out a pack of Kool cigarettes that for years was stuffed into one of the food canisters in the van—a single cigarette being a small indulgence Jane enjoyed five or six times a year. Though neither Martha nor I smoke, we light one and pass it back and forth for several rounds, extinguish it, and then spread the remaining tobacco on the shore. Then Martha takes a paper towel from her daypack, unfolds it to reveal the hair she cut off back at the hotel in the middle of the night, bends over, and carefully lays it on the surface of the lake. It spreads out slowly, fanned by gentle waves, curling and twisting and then drifting out of sight.

On the way back to the van, Martha starts picking up every piece of trash she sees on the grounds of Mariner Park—something Jane did all the time. I hobble behind on my crutches, eager to help, snatching up bits of paper and cloth and the occasional cigarette butt and tossing them into nearby trash cans. When I crawl back into the passenger seat of the van, I notice wet spots on the chest of my shirt, from crying. Martha starts the engine. We both give a final look to the shore, and we drive away.

TO THE LAND OF BEAR AND WOLF

K
enneth Rexroth, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell—all of them bemoaned the loss of big myth in America, claiming it left us with withered imaginations. And that, in turn, caused a certain restless hunger—one that as often as not we ended up trying to stuff with consumer goods. Jung went so far as to claim there'd be no need for psychotherapy had we not turned our backs on story. I'd heard it all before. But by the second anniversary of Jane's death, I was also coming to believe that the power of those stories came largely from them putting us in touch with beauty, community, and mystery. And conversely,
from tossing out hints about what can happen when such things disappear from our lives.

If I was going to have any chance of healing—if any of us were going to heal—we'd have to lay claim to a fresh trove of stories.

They'd have to be courageous stories—strong enough not only to help us see that the notion of being in control is the grandest of illusions, but at the same time teach us something about how to find calm in the eye of a storm. They'd have to be generous stories, compassionate enough to allow some measure of dignity toward “the other,” be it the wolf hater or the wolf. And whatever tales we might spin about beauty would need to point back to the original Greek meaning of that word, which was to be of one's hour—be it the hour of a budding plant, as in youth, or the hour of the ripened fruit. And they'd have to be bold, audacious enough to remind us that when you're free from the feeling that something's lacking in your life, if instead you have real gratitude for what's actually there, then there's really no need to scour the countryside looking for hope.

W
ITH YET ANOTHER SPRING RISING IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE
Rockies, I found myself putting out the welcome mat for an old desire: to get back to wilderness. Get back for real, not just for the scattering journeys. Jane herself would've no doubt prescribed for me a couple weeks out on open ground, waking up in some
honest-to-goodness middle of nowhere. I hooked up with a great friend, biologist Doug Smith, who'd gone to the Arctic with Jane and me on that canoe trip down the Hood River years before. He was happy to hear my cravings were coming back, happier still to stoke the fire. So we got down to plotting a trip back to the north country—this time to explore the remote lakes and streams near the headwaters of the mighty Thelon River in the Northwest Territories. Land of the bear and the wolf. We'd be just upwind from the magnificent twenty-thousand-square-mile Thelon Game Sanctuary, which among other things is homeland for the northern-most population of tundra-dwelling moose. And it was moose, said animal storytellers across thousands of years, which held clues to the mysterious fabric that binds life and death.

It was going to be the first time I'd been in a canoe since the wreck.

In the months before leaving, I was drawn to a curious perspective—a kind of psychic looking glass—one that I'd heard about years before when studying Aboriginal myths. The idea is that those of us who are still here, still walking around, are windows by which the ones who've passed on can still see, hear, taste, touch, and smell life on earth. Clearly, I had no foundation for such belief. Still, I decided to go back to the Far North determined to act like it was true. At one point, Doug offered that we could trade off between the bow and the stern of the boat, both of us typically being stern paddlers. I said I'd be okay in the bow, where Jane sat. Told him I wanted to feel
the rivers and lakes the way she felt them: water parting around the hull in an easy hiss, the spray of breaking waves on my face and arms, the boat thudding under me as it drops hard into the troughs.

Unlike other trips to the Barren Lands, this was the first time we'd be going with a guide. But not just any guide. We'd be going with Alex Hall, a man who'd spent more days in the remote Canadian wilderness with a paddle than anyone alive. Joining us was a married pair of middle-aged biologists from New Hampshire, as well as Alex's oldest son, who in truth would've rather been wandering the Edmonton Mall than out in the wilderness. With us too was Monte Hummel of the World Wildlife Fund—arguably among the most capable, effective conservationists on the continent. Like us, Hummel wasn't there just to canoe. He was there to canoe with Alex Hall.

In 1971, with a freshly signed master's degree in wildlife biology in his pocket, Hall and a buddy had left Ontario for the heart of nowhere, driving more than three thousand miles to the farflung outpost of Yellowknife. From there they'd hopped on a floatplane with a canoe strapped on it and begun a thirty-seven-day trip down the Thelon and Hanbury rivers to Baker Lake, becoming only the eleventh recreational party to make that journey.

Later, finding himself going stir-crazy at a desk job in Ottawa as an environmental consultant, he had decided to go west for good, to create his own business as a canoe guide in the Barren Lands. The next summer he was back on the tundra with boat and paddle, launching an eleven-week, 1,150-mile canoe
odyssey across the mainland Northwest Territories on seven different rivers, from the Saskatchewan border to the Arctic coast.

The government officials in Yellowknife in charge of issuing business permits had been skeptical of the guiding idea. With good reason. The whole of the summer of 1974, Hall had one client. The following year, he had another one.

“I'm stubborn,” he told me. “I kept the faith.”

He'd also kept paddling, along the way becoming the first human to float a long list of rivers and watersheds. To this day, some of the routes he discovered remain known only to him, making him very protective of the region. By 1979 his trips were fully booked. Which has pretty much been the case for thirty years.

W
E NEEDED TWO FLOATPLANES OUT OF
F
ORT
S
MITH, EACH
loaded with meticulous attention to detail: Duluth packs and tents and paddles and cook stoves precisely placed, the center thwarts of the canoes removed so the shells of the boats could be nestled like cups and strapped to the floats of the planes. Bush planes are noisy, not good for conversation, so on the outbound journey we mostly stared out the windows—looking at landscapes vast and empty beyond imagining. The clusters of birch and spruce trees near Fort Smith grew smaller and smaller, then all but faded, yielding thousands of square miles of open tundra broken by lakes and ponds, by chains of side channels and bogs
flashing in the sun. And then the polygons: mysterious earthen clusters of perfect geometric-shaped pockets fifty to seventy feet across, each framed by high walls of earth pushed up by the underlying ice, joined to the others in what from the air look like massive honeycombs. And at the bottom of each one, a pocket of cold water the color of sky.

Touching down on Lake Terry around eleven in the morning, the pilots maneuvered the leading edges of the floats onto a sandy beach, and we hurried to off-load equipment. When the planes took off again, the drones of their engines finally fading to the south, all eyes tuned to Alex. He stood tall and lanky—dressed mostly in wool, looking a lot like a guy from a 1960s issue of
Outdoor Life
. There was the obligatory bathroom talk, reviewing the dos and don'ts of crapping on the tundra. He brought out different pieces of equipment, then launched us in a practice session setting up his tents. He struck me as looking much younger than his sixty-seven years, in part because of the economy of his movement, smooth and efficient in that way of men and women who spend big blocks of time traveling through wild places. Even his conversations were economical, measuring out his points and opinions, even his stories, in a manner simple and steady and clear.

Now and then there came the trace of a smile to Hall's face, mostly when he was off alone, pausing with hand on hip, staring across the tundra. It's hard to fathom the memories he carried: Climbing some high hill, untold miles from anyone, and finding caribou as far as the eye can see—a hundred thousand, two
hundred thousand animals—moving past hour after hour, for the better part of a day. Or the countless encounters he'd had with tundra wolves. Or the dozens of times he'd slipped silently past eight-hundred-pound grizzlies feeding on the shore.