Contents May Have Shifted

by Pam Houston

  Most people are glad to be rid of the jinxed plane, and I can see that logic, but any bookie would tell you our odds have to be worse on the heretofore-untroubled Los Angeles plane.

  An hour and a half out of Sydney, the pilot’s voice comes over the loudspeaker just as we start to feel the first bumps. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he says, “I know I am the last person you want to hear from right now, but we are getting reports of extremely severe turbulence over the equator. Planes a few hours ahead of us are reporting turbulence so severe that two flight attendants have been injured. One plane is making an emergency landing in Guam. I am going to have to ask the flight attendants to take their seats for the next several hours, in-flight service stops now, and will resume only when conditions allow. In five minutes I will turn the seat belt sign back on, and from that point forward you are on the honor system to remain seated, with your seat belt securely fastened. Your safety and the safety of those around you depend on it.”

  There is the predictable rush to the bathrooms. “Honor system,” Sister’s Wedding Guy mumbles, closing his eyes, and letting his head fall to the window.

  It gets turbulent. I would even say it gets very turbulent. A few overhead bins rattle open, a couple of teenage girls find it difficult to hold back a scream. But after sixty full minutes of hurtling through the air in double time, contemplating the phrase fuel system failure, a little equatorial roller coaster doesn’t seem like that big a deal.

  When the meal finally comes it has the consistency of rubber, so I go for the salad, take a bite, look down, and see half a fat earthworm wriggling between the cucumber slice and the carrot.

  “Look at that,” I say, to Sister’s Wedding Guy. “That worm had to have been cut in half in some airport kitchen like ten hours ago, and it is still wriggling.”

  Sister’s Wedding Guy looks at me with pity in his eyes.

  “Unless . . .” I say, but it is too late. I have already swallowed.

  When Mr. Greyhound comes back I say, “I know this would make me queen in some countries . . .” and show him the half earthworm, and that is enough to get us free drinks for the rest of the flight.

  When we land at SFO, only twenty-four plus four hours late, the purser has something resembling joy in her voice when she welcomes us to San Francisco. “I probably don’t need to tell you all to open those overhead bins with caution,” she says. “If your contents haven’t shifted, you must be carrying lead weights.”

  Our crew of tall, blond, and blue-eyed pilots strides past us in customs, the sixty-something captain, the fortyish copilot, the thirty-something third officer, and this time the ovation is unanimous and loud.

  “Nice work,” I say, to the aging captain when we wind up in line side by side.

  “Oh,” he says, “I didn’t do anything except turn a plane around.”

  “I think,” I say, “you did a bit more than that.”

  “That is one hell of a smart airplane,” he says, and I hear his voice catch. “It’s going to be a sad day for everybody when they take those big birds out of the sky.”

  121. Quirpon Island, Newfoundland

  In the eighteenth century, it was the last safe harbor for leaky, overweighted schooners to snug into, if the Labrador Straits were choked with ice. You could try for Little Quirpon Harbour at the southern end of the island, and if you missed it (most of the fishing boats even into the twentieth century were powered by sail alone) you could try for Ron Galet’s Bay. Your last chance was the tickle at Colombier Cove. After that you were on your way to Labrador.

  We’ve been told in an email to meet the ferry in the minuscule mainland town of Quirpon, and when we get there it is 35 degrees with 50-mile-per-hour winds from the east and the rain is coming in sheets, sideways. A rugged little man in wool pants and a green slicker comes to our car window and speaks in the heaviest Newfoundlandese so far, a beautiful song-of-a-paragraph that sounds less like words and more like a turkey gobbling. When he repeats himself the third time we get the gist of it. The open sea is too rough for the ferry to take us to the lighthouse side of the island. The skipper will drop us off in Cod Cove, a forty-minute walk along a cliffside to the inn, if he can make the landing. Our luggage will go to some other, more distant landing, where this man has parked a quad. Dress warm, pack light, be ready to go in five minutes.

  We have driven a day and a half through this storm past outports with names like St. Jones Within and Come By Chance, speculating about the size of the ferry. The marquee at the Miracle Temple in Gambo said simply, Why Burn? But the rain came down so hard all day burning seemed impossible. Near the Happy Gang 50+ Club, a dozen lobstermen were checking their traps in boats that looked so tiny against the giant waves it seemed like lunacy. “Little boat,” I said, “Great Big Sea,” because of course we’d been listening to them on the car stereo, mermaid’s tails and whale bones and fifteen children to every house, drinking screech and dinking Molly two times daily.

  We repack and layer and when the ferry pulls up it is half the size of the lobster boats, fifteen feet of shiny aluminum, already loaded and listing with groceries. Then we are over the edge of the dock and bouncing the bottom hard and fast off the glassy rollers and the wind is in my face and I finally feel like I am somewhere. The fog is so thick we can’t see five feet off the bow, but the skipper points out the islands as if we can: Salt, Nobles, and Grandmother.

  “There’s icebergs all around ya’s, right?” he says, slowing his elocution markedly. “Shame you can’t sees ’em.”

  Quirpon is officially in Iceberg Alley. After a berg breaks off the Greenland Ice Shield it takes two years for it to get this far. Bergs are classified as large, medium, and small, bergy bits and growlers. The largest berg ever recorded off this coast was 208 miles long and 61 miles wide, making it slightly bigger than Belgium. The farthest south one ever got before melting was Bermuda, meaning it traveled a distance of 2,500 miles.

  When we get to Cod Cove, the urgent talk between the Skipper and Mr. Green Slicker about which boulders to nose the boat against has the quality of an African language, clicks included, and we understand not one word. The sea heaves the little boat and at the skipper’s signal we scramble onto the wet rocks and he says, “Mind your fingers or you’ll lose ’em.”

  “Give us a wave when you’re to the top that you’ve seen the pegs ’n’ can follow ’em,” Green Slicker says, though it takes me the whole hill climb to turn the sounds he made into actual words that might apply to this situation. At the top, wooden stakes slashed with red head off across the tundra between tarns, bogs, and fins of upthrust granite. The fog, if possible, is thicker now, the rain harder, the storm so low and close it feels like dusk. I wave and the skipper twirls the little boat back into the breakers and down the coast, and we take off after the pegs.

  “It’s a cold wind,” Rick shouts, “but at least it’s wet.”

  Long before we can see the lighthouse, we hear the foghorn, every fifteen seconds it moans out into the gray. The trail follows the high spine on the west side of the island. Far below us the sea crashes and thunks into cracks and inlets, every now and then we get a glimpse through the fog of foam or wave. We are soaked through three layers of what passes in the Rockies for waterproof gear. The air smells clean and tastes good in my lungs.

  We crest a hill, and the greenish white beam from the lighthouse burns one ghostly flash through the fog, and then the house itself emerges. Freshly painted red and white, it has stood on this hill in unimaginable weather since 1920.

  Inside is a woman named, of all things, Madonna, who shows us to our rooms while a woman named Doris makes us tea and dries our clothes and calls us my dears and my darlings. Madonna and Doris whip up pan-fried cod and potatoes for dinner. Doris puts a hunk of ice from a growler into the pitcher of drinking water, says, “My darlings, this is as close as ye are going to get to seeing an iceberg tonight.”

  The foghorn calls all night and at five I am awakened by its sudden absence. I
get up and go outside in my fleece and flip-flops to see the sun rising over the Sea of Labrador, the wind howling now from the north, dozens of icebergs in every direction as far as the eye can see.

  “ ’Tis a lazy wind,” Doris calls from the porch behind me. “It won’t go around you, it would rather go through you.” At the sound of her voice, a shaggy fox with serious black eyes springs up the path, rolls in the grass, and runs in circles like it wants to play. This must be another of Doris’s darlings. The wind dies for a moment, and just that fast the fog is back, swallowing the bergs, the sea, the top of the lighthouse, and finally the fox. I wait to hear the first call of the foghorn before I go inside.

  122. Barcelona, Spain

  Rick and I are charging through the massive subway station at Catalunya Place on our way to Montjuïc, on our last full day in Barcelona. In the round room near the La Ramblas exit there is a young man, skinny, big hunk of dark hair hanging over his eyes, playing the first chords of “With or Without You,” and however we might feel about U2 intellectually, there is something about hearing those chords, played in that perfectly shaped space, that makes us stop to listen.

  He is a fantastic musician—CD quality—says Rick. He has a very heavy Catalan accent, so heavy sometimes it seems he might not even know exactly what words he is saying, but it doesn’t matter, the music is so sweet and true, the acoustics so fine in the circular room, tiled with pictures of trains and trees, birds and planes, dirigibles and sailing ships, this soulful young man knocking off Bono as well as he can be knocked off for the commuters.

  We have seen plenty of street musicians in Barcelona, all of them good. The Afro-Cuban combo making everybody happy in Port Vell with the lead singer in the white hat who had the world’s highest dose of charisma per cubic centimeter; the gypsy woman on acoustic guitar and the giantess on stand-up bass; the trio near the cathedral on clarinet, kora, and hang.

  Rick says, “Nobody’s paying attention,” but he’s wrong. All around us body language is changing, some people sing along, some smile and pick up their step. A few walk all the way into the tunnel toward the L1 or the L3 before realizing exactly how good the guy is and then they come back—a middle aged nurse, a tall woman in sweats, a smart-dressed business man—to lean against the wall and listen.

  Three years before he killed himself, David Foster Wallace said the next twenty years would be the very best time to be alive on this planet.

  The first time I saw Janine after the terrible mediation, she took both my hands, said, “Pam, really, what made you think you had to stay in that room?”

  The boy in the subway plays “Where the Streets Have No Name,” and “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “One.” When Rick reaches for his wallet the singer grabs his arm, tells him kindly to watch out for pickpockets. As the boy plays the first chords of “Running to Stand Still,” a seventy-five-year-old Catalan woman with perfect posture, beehive hair, and an Armani suit retraces her steps across the vestibule to throw a handful of euros into his open case.

  123. Taylor Fork, Colorado

  When I get in the car just before daylight, the outside temp says 33 degrees, as sure a sign as any that this will be the last mushing trip of the year. One of Hinsdale County’s finest lets me off with a warning ten miles south of Lake City, 48 in a 40, a stretch where the speed limit changes so many times even a local can’t keep track.

  We take off in Becky’s smallest sled, across slush that is getting ready to thaw but hasn’t yet, Becky all bundled up in the sled bag, rattling on about oatmeal cookies and astrological forecasts, and man the sled is squirrelly. Every time I touch the soft brake with my foot the nose of it wobbles thirty degrees to the left or right. The dogs are more het up than usual, more in shape and getting used less often. It takes less than a mile for me to dump the sled, the first time all year, though we had a near miss last week at the hard right turn in Tin Cup. That time I went down hard but managed to hold on, my shin grinding into the metal brake as I made the corner, and righted myself again. I’ve got a hematoma the size of a lemon to prove it.

  This time, though, I get pitched clear of the sled, hit the downhill side of an ice bank nose-first, and Becky goes sailing too, though her knee catches in the sled bag, just long enough to tweak it. I knock the snow off my sunglasses and posthole over to her.

  “You okay?” I say.

  “I’m upside down,” she says, and it’s true, and she’s making no attempt to right herself. It is the first time I’ve seen her look less than invincible, this Annie Lennox of dog mushing, and I reach out and let her use me as an anchor to spin herself around.

  The dogs run on, of course, after Matt’s sled, and while I help Becky hobble along the growing distance between them and us, we watch them close in on Matt at the top of the next hill. “He doesn’t know yet,” I say, “he doesn’t know yet,” as Pisces and Bella begin to nudge the back of his knees. “Now,” I say, “he knows.”

  From our distance of more than a mile it looks effortless, though it can’t be. Matt, straddling two sleds, trying to get on both hard brakes simultaneously like some kind of mad charioteer, twenty well-seasoned four-legged athletes pulling for all they are worth.

  He leaves his passenger, whose name is Irene, in charge of one team and comes charging back to get us with the other. “Our hero,” Becky says. Then Shredder knocks Becky over and her knee starts to hurt for real.

  I don’t want hurt Becky in the small sled I can’t control, so Matt and I trade. The trail has been so hammered by spring snowmobilers hundred-yard stretches of it are solid speed bumps. Deep ruts alternate with ice slicks so that even in Matt’s big sled I never feel far enough from the edge. Irene and I tip over once, but nothing serious, and then the runner on Becky’s sled cracks and Matt has to go one-footed, and the sky gets all steely and the predicted 45-mile-per-hour winds start and that is when we decide that for three people who pride themselves on being able to read the signs, we’ve waited pretty long to turn around.

  On the way back we go around the big hill, and I keep Matt in my virtual rearview mirror to make sure the broken runner hasn’t snapped off entirely.

  Back at the truck I have Irene stand on the hard brake so I can attach the gang line to the truck’s bumper, and I am just snugging it down and giving Pema and Angelina pets for being such smart lead dogs when Irene says, “What’s with Roja?”

  I turn to see her in mid-seizure, on her side, tongue out, gasping for breath, getting none. I drop my gloves and leap over six dogs to get to her just in time to see the life fall right out of her eyes as if somebody has turned a switch. I unhook her neckline and tug line, and her head lolls to the side. I can see Matt’s lead dogs rounding the last corner.

  “Matt,” I scream, “Roja’s coding!”

  “CPR!” Matt yells.

  I flip her over and thump on her heart with both hands. Wait a half second, thump again.

  “Harder!” Becky screams, one foot already rising from Matt’s sled. Two more hard thumps and I feel a tiny half breath. All of a sudden she is back behind her eyes. It is like on a cartoon, the change is so dramatic and complete.

  “Again!” Becky shouts, and I thump twice more. Then Matt is there, covering Roja’s whole snout with his mouth, breathing for her. He pulls back and she takes another small breath on her own.

  “I love you, Roja,” he says. “I love you, Roja, come on back.” She breathes again. Her tongue is still hanging out of her mouth like a dead dog, but she is here now, when a minute ago she was not.

  Becky limps to the truck and Matt sits in the snow with Roja on his lap while Irene and I feed, water, and unharness both teams. After a while he sticks her tongue back into her mouth for her. He squeezes a packet of honey between her lips and she obediently swallows. By the time we have all the equipment put away, he has convinced her to eat some chicken.

  124. South Berwick, Maine

  There are eighteen live lobsters in Sloan’s refrigerator, and our t
ask is to make five cookbook-worthy recipes using them. She’s the boss and I am happy to sit at her big butcher-block counter in her state-of-the-art kitchen and do what I am told: peel mango, slice avocado, dice onion, shuck corn.

  Earlier today I threw the ball for her lab Chloe into their environmentally friendly saline pool at least fifty-five times, just for the pleasure of watching Chloe launch herself off the insurance-approved diving rock (no boards allowed) with all four legs tucked tight tight to her body, watching her hit the water and grab the ball in one motion, and then snort and fuss over to the cement stairs where she would rise, and shake, and bring the ball back to my hand.

  Last week, in Provincetown, Sloan and I walked the length of the breakwater, and then swam all the way around Long Point just in time to catch the last water taxi of the day, which arrived like magic as the current swept us into the harbor, no planning on our part, no knowledge of the schedule, nowhere near enough daylight to make the five-mile walk back. A seal had popped his head up to look at us every so often while we were swimming, and the next morning, out on the Dolphin V, an adolescent humpback exhibited every behavior of an adolescent humpback, breeching, fin flaps, tail flaps, barrel rolls, as if he believed he was the star of his own National Geographic video, though there was no one there to watch him but us.

  Last year, on that same long walk across the breakwater, Willow left behind first her sweatshirt, then her shoes and eventually even her giant purse, which contained six hundred dollars cash and her brand-new VAIO computer, which is the exact effect P-town is designed to have on anybody who is willing to let it.

  Sloan asks if I think a Bahamian goat pepper would work in the lobster, avocado, and corn salad. Watching her use her knives on vegetables is like watching an aficionado play a complicated string instrument, a harp or a hammer dulcimer. Even the way she lays the chopped pepper into the bowl is less like cooking and more like dance.