by Pam Houston
The berg was beautiful in the low arctic light, a blue crystal five miles square, beaten translucent by sun and waves, so massive that rivers poured off its top and into the sea on all sides of it, carving giant spouts—a whiter blue than the rest of the surface—every several hundred feet.
I was face-to-face with my familiar koan: how to be with the incandescent beauty of the iceberg without grieving the loss of polar bear habitat its appearance implied. How to grieve the polar bear without loving it any less. How to let the sight of such a strange and beautiful thing as this floating jewel make me happy, as wild and surprising things have always done, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. How to hang on to that full-body joy I knew I was capable of and still understand it as elegy.
Each day we heard lectures on the flora, fauna, geology and history of the region. We made friends with the scientists, who were closer to Tami and me in temperament and age than most of the paying passengers, a group that seemed to spend a lot of time in their rooms. Arctic expeditions are mostly free of the nonsense that infects cruises down south but one night about halfway through the trip, Alex announced there would be a costume party where we were to come as our favorite arctic character. The most innovative costumes would receive prizes. This was especially fun, Alex went on to say, because he knew none of us would have thought to bring costumes, and we would have to make do with whatever we could find on the ship.
Once back in our room, Tami said, “Okay. If we’re going to enter this thing, we are damn sure gonna win it.” Which may tell you something about our sisterhood. Tami first suggested we dress as Alex’s five-year plan and his ten-year plan, an idea that sent us into hysterics until we realized the only two people who would be laughing would be us. So we made a headless and armless man out of our rubber boots and personal man-overboard equipment, talked the chef out of a few ketchup and mustard bottles to hang on strings around our necks, smeared a bunch of red stage makeup we borrowed from a crew member around our mouths, carried forks and knives in our hands, and went as a couple of Franklin’s cannibals. We tied for first in the costume competition with a woman who had dressed up as Sedna, the sea goddess in Inuit mythology, and more excitingly, Tami beat out a sweet British karate black belt in a game where you had to bend from the waist and pick up an ever shrinking barf bag with your teeth.
By day ten of the trip, we had made our way down the coast of Baffin Island and into the depths of Sam Ford Fjord, a place that was making the geologists nutty with excitement. Still trying to appease the Captains of Industry, Alex told us in his morning briefing that we had seen more wildlife in the fjords than we ever would have in Fury and Hecla. We’d had bears nearly every day, walrus twice, a humpback, a couple of fin whales, three pods of orcas and the musk ox.
“Now, all that’s left is a narwhal!” was the running joke on the boat, because nobody ever saw narwhal, except for the Inuit fishermen, who, it was said, always knew where they were. Thought to be the origin of the unicorn myth, narwhal (Monodon monoceros from the Greek, or one-toothed unicorn) are medium-sized whales that have a large “tusk,” which is actually an elongated and protruding canine tooth. Narwhal can live up to fifty years; they travel in pods and communicate in clicks, whistles and knocks. The narwhal are listed as “near endangered,” but some scientists believe they are even more threatened by the rapid melt of sea ice than the polar bear, because the narwhal depend on the sea ice to provide them fishing grounds with no competition. The number of narwhal left in the world is almost impossible to confirm because they are so hard to find. Few of the scientists we had befriended had ever seen one, and they had been working in the Arctic for anywhere from seven to fifteen years.
Sam Ford Fjord was the last day for the kayaks—according to Alex we would have to make real time heading south from there on out. Only four people, besides Tami and me—all of them women—had signed up for daily kayaking at the start of the trip, though Val the guide had said she had space for twelve. Our hours kayaking were the very best of the trip, and by week’s end the six of us trusted Val so completely that when she suggested, as we were being towed en masse back to the ship by one of the Zodiacs, that we all take the kayakers’ polar plunge together, we were overboard and into the 33 degree water before the Zodiac driver even had time to raise his camera.
By the time we were showered and redressed in our sixteen layers plus parkas, we were nearly out of San Ford Fjord and ready to burn it south toward Iqaluit. Most of us were on deck, shooting the afternoon light on the hanging glaciers, when Alex’s voice came over the loudspeaker.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon.” (It was Alex’s habit to always greet us twice.) “The captain believes he has spotted narwhal about a mile off the bow of the boat. Get your cameras and come out on deck, and I will be back with you soon with more information.”
The energy on deck crackled as if someone had sprayed a fine cocaine mist into the air. The biologists couldn’t wipe the smiles off their faces. In five minutes Alex was back on the loudspeaker, “Ladies and gentlemen,” and this time we could hear the heavy emotion in his voice, “the captain believes there are between six and eight hundred animals a hundred yards in front of the ship. It seems our detour has taken us directly into the path of the annual narwhal migration. Ladies and gentlemen, please be clear this is not a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This is once in a hundred lifetimes.”
We spent the next five hours running into the sunset alongside six to eight hundred narwhal. If a group of narwhal is a blessing, this was a whole damn conversion. Narwhal are not showy, like humpbacks, or huge and lightning-fast, like fin whales, or finned with that improbable black blade, like orcas. They don’t even show their tusks very much, especially when they are on the move, which they definitely were, having not much trouble keeping up with our powerful engines. But here they were, by the hundreds, their black bodies thick enough in places to walk across the sea, shining in the late sun, moving toward wherever they would find food next, every now and then giving us a quick glimpse of the tusk that gave them their name.
To run with them that day was as magical a thing as will happen to me in my lifetime. I watched the sun roll toward the horizon and across the glaciers of the entirely unpopulated Bylot Island, the seventy-first largest island in the world, a place the Canadian government has protected almost entirely with the designation of Sirmilik National Park.
All that day I felt perfectly cared for, rocked by the boat and the beauty and the strange-toothed tour guides surrounding us. I stayed on deck until there was only an occasional straggler in the water, well into evening, long after the cold had chased everyone else inside, some new knowledge of my place in the earth’s natural order keeping me warm from within.
How many nights had the ocean rocked me to sleep? How many times had I lain on the ground and felt its sustenance? How many times had I turned my face to the sky and borrowed its power? I had been born to two humans who wanted me not at all, but maybe that didn’t matter so much. I would always be a child of the wilderness.
Ranch Almanac: Almanac
It’s as beautiful a thing as I have ever known, living inside the ranch’s almanac. How the weather shapes and dictates our lives, not just during a blizzard but in every season. How the Leonids always follow the Perseids. How the monsoon always follows fire season. How wood follows hay, and lambs follow the draining of the pasture. How lupine follows paintbrush, which follows flox, which follows iris, which follows the arrival of the bluebirds, which follows the last day of below zero cold.
There’s the way the sun warms the house, right after sunrise through the east-facing kitchen windows. There’s the smell of 250 bales of fresh hay in the barn on a warm September afternoon and the colors in the sky over Bristol Head at dusk. A good bed of coals in the woodstove; a pot of Hungarian mushroom soup on the range. The fuchsia blooms of the skyrocket on either side of the driveway. A coyote pausing, one foot in the air, crossing my pasture f
eet deep in snow. The smell of lanolin rising off the sheep. Five elk beds near the creek in the back acreage, still holding warmth from the vacated elk. The tiny tracks of mice in the snow. Roany, impatient for carrots, staring me down through the kitchen window on a frigid January morning. Orion, so bright and close outside my bedroom window in February, it is as if he’s waiting for an invitation. The barn—always the barn—and its roofline against the blue of the mountain. The Milky Way—appearing nightly, and milky above me. Moonglow on Pinckley’s cabin, on the barn roof, on the snow in the pasture on a midnight cross-country ski. The screech of a redtail, the hoot of a barn owl, the high singing of a coyote, the bugle of an elk, or some other wild thing calling. A silence so big I can hear my own silence inside it. These are only a few of the ways the ranch mothers me.
PART FIVE
Deep Creek
Deep Creek
Deep Creek, Shallow Creek, Middle Creek, Fern Creek. West Willow, East Willow, Antelope Park. These are the place-names that have dominated my lexicon for twenty-five years, the places that surround and abut and verge upon my 120 acres of high mountain meadow.
Miners Creek, Ivy Creek, Ute Creek, Rat Creek. The places I have walked up and down, again and again, with friends and lovers and generations of wolfhounds. I call the Shallow Creek hike Dante’s favorite, because my very first wolfhound could still make it all the way to the aspen meadow at the trail’s end during the last three years of his life, which he spent on three legs, after bone cancer. Coyote Rock got its name because once, when Rose was in heat, a coyote flirted with her up there for a good forty-five minutes until I finally got scared for both of them and chased him off.
San Luis Peak, Bristol Head, Red Mountain, Snow Mesa. Where I have skidded down a scree field to escape lightning bolts, and run from a cow elk who thought Dante got too close to her calf. Emily’s Summit is a lesser peak, adjacent to 14,000-foot San Luis Peak, which we named for a writer named Emily Bernard, who came out to visit and took the first real hike of her life.
Copper Creek, Farmers Creek, Clear Creek Falls, Phoenix Park. Where I have picked wild raspberries and strawberries and more chanterelles than one person ought to be entitled to, and where, on several occasions, I have caught enough brook trout for a meal. Where I have encountered Basque shepherds mounted on compact, recently tamed mustangs, driving hundreds of domesticated sheep in their yearly circuit around the West.
Lime Creek, Spring Creek, the Snowshoe, Wason Park. Where mountainsides of aspen trees burst into tequila-sunrise tapestries in mid-September, and glow an almost alien green in June. Where the summer meadows uncover their treasures one at a time, first late May’s wild iris, and then the blue flax in mid-June. The silvery lupine and the Indian paintbrush pop up all at once and usually together in mid-July, followed by the skyrocket and the blue penstemon, and those delicate purple harebells that, when the sun hits them from a certain angle, seem to be filled with light.
Deep Creek, Shallow Creek, Middle Creek, Fern Creek
Robert Pinckley’s cabin is more than a hundred years old now. It has leaned to the west a bit ever since I’ve owned it, but last summer the ground underneath it seemed to be rising up from under the floorboards and if I didn’t address it, the cabin was going to split in the center like an overbaked cupcake.
I have never had enough savings to restore the cabin. And even if I maxed out my credit cards to do it, I’d face difficult questions about how true to the original to be. Did I have any use for a cabin with a ceiling so low it caused the short man who built it to walk bent in half for fifty years of his life?
Creede, Colorado, is not Concord, Massachusetts. There wouldn’t be a preservation society that cared how much I did or did not honor Pinckley’s original plan. But I cared: about his memory, and about any feelings his ghost might have on the subject. If all I wanted was a dedicated writing studio, I could have knocked it down years ago and saved a bunch of money by starting from scratch.
Then I met RJ Mann, a young contractor in Creede who loves the town’s old buildings and has made it his life’s work to honor the spirit of the past within them, while making them functional here and now. First, RJ lifted the cabin and put a new foundation under it. He did that in trade for my 1964 Ford F-100 with three on the tree.
Belted kingfishers have always been my favorite bird, no contest. It goes back to my river-guiding days, when I interpreted the appearance of a kingfisher flitting along the banks above a particularly gnarly set of rapids as a sign that I would maneuver my raft through safely, without killing any of my passengers or myself. We have kingfishers along the Rio Grande—I see them occasionally when I’m walking the dogs there in summer, but kingfishers find me everywhere I go, from Florida to Cape Cod to the Puget Sound and Alaska. With their bright eyes, powdery blue backs, Eraserhead top-do, and jaunty white necktie, I’ve spent my life thinking of kingfishers as personal guardian angels whether I’m on foot, on a paddleboard, on my bike, in a car or on my raft.
In the process of pulling up the old rotted floor of the cabin, RJ found many of Bob Pinckley’s belongings. Mousetraps, rat traps, pieces of a harmonica, a pipe, a pair of scissors, a pocket watch, empty tins of tobacco, newspapers so putrid with animal urine they were impossible to read. There was a well-preserved insert from a package of Super Anahist antihistamine cough syrup with vitamin C, several yellowed card stock receipts from a company in Minneapolis where Pinckley shipped the furs from his trapping business (including one for the sale of a house cat), a label from Prince Albert Crimp Cut in a can, and two beautifully rendered drawings of belted kingfishers, one that had graced a 25-yard container of Martin’s Highest Quality Enameled Fishing Line (test 21 pounds), and the other a “collectible” insert from a box of Arm & Hammer baking soda. Other than the 1940s cartoon physician on the cough-syrup insert, and fat Prince Albert of “in a can” fame, the only two pieces of what one might call visual art that Pinckley intentionally saved were images of my favorite birds. After that discovery, I was determined to save his cabin, even if it meant cutting into savings I didn’t exactly have.
“The first thing we want to do is raise the roof,” RJ said. “We have to put a new roof on it anyhow. I mean we can make the roof look old—for about a thousand bucks extra we can get you a roof that’ll only take one summer to rust. While we’re at it we could put a sleeping loft up there so the whole downstairs could be your writing room.”
“That sounds good,” I said.
“I want to try to save this old window,” RJ said. It was the one Pinckley shot rabbits out of and it was a beauty. A rectangle divided four ways, made of thick beveled glass, it opened out and downward, as if it had been designed for serving milk shakes out of. “And I think we ought to try to replace those smaller broken windows with something that resembles this one in style. None of that will be cheap.” He laughed. “You have to pay big money for things that look old. I can probably use the lumber from the roof as wainscoting, depending on what shape it’s in, and then we can seal the logs real good inside and out. We’ll build a porch, front and back so you can listen to the creek, maybe a French door to the south for sun. I’ve got a beautiful piece of bristlecone pine that might make a perfect kitchen counter. . . .”
“How much money are we talking?” I asked. “Roughly, I mean. Top to bottom, to get it to the point where I can walk right in here and sit down to write.”
“Thirty thousand,” he said. “Could be a little less.”
“And it will be rat proof?” I asked.
“If you leave food out here I can’t make any promises,” he said, “but they sure won’t be running right in between the logs like they are now.”
I wanted to do it. I wanted RJ to do it. I didn’t have thirty thousand dollars, unless you counted my father’s money.
In 2003, a few months after his ninetieth birthday, my mother already ten years in the ground, my father called to say, “You know, I was just getting ready to write my monthly check to the life insu
rance people, and it occurred to me, there’s no scenario in which I’m going to benefit from the $225 I am putting into this fund every month. So if you want the thirty grand after I’m dead, you’re going to have to start making the payments.”
I said, “That seems a little like betting against my own team in the Super Bowl, just because I think the other guys have a better defense.”
I wasn’t surprised in the least by the proposition, but I was stunned that someone (my mother?) had talked my father into buying life insurance at all.
“Well, it’s up to you,” he said. “I’ve probably put about nine thousand in there already. That ought to be enough to get me in the ground.”
“Let’s call that good then,” I said, smiling. There was a purity to my father’s love of money that approached a kind of perfection. Like always, he hung up without saying goodbye.
A couple of years later, my father ran his “spend out and die plan” past me, which included several cruises he’d signed up for during what would be his ninety-third year.
“It’s cleaner this way,” he said, sounding for all the world like one of the Corleone brothers, though he was not even a little bit Italian. “You don’t gain anything, but you also don’t have to spend.”
I pictured my father collapsing on the foredeck of a fifteen-story wedding cake of a boat as it pulled into Miami harbor. “If you like it, I like it,” I said. The last thing I wanted was to take whatever was left of my father’s money. Some part of me believed he would never actually die.
My father cruised to Italy, Turkey and the Caribbean that year and died instantly of a massive heart attack with a nice tan and about $40,000 in assets to his name. After nearly losing the ranch to Dani and her grandfather, I had made sure every dollar I put toward my mortgage I earned through writing, speaking or teaching, afraid that anything else might jinx it. I left my father’s money in the investment account where he’d had it, and barely noticed when it lost half its value in 2008–09, or as it slowly gained itself back. My money, Drew had always insisted I call it during our therapy sessions, but I didn’t, ever, at least not inside my own head.