Later I bragged about that story, proud of Dad’s challenge to me. Kathy gasped in disappointment. “Rich! I can’t believe you’d say something like that!” Dad, embarrassed, denied it.
Boxes of paperback books—to Goodwill.
In another box, I found a Farm Bureau Insurance hat and a couple of magic tricks from Grandpa Huffman from one of our visits to my grandparents in Topeka, Kansas. A small case with a black ball that seemed to disappear and a small wooden replica of an outhouse rigged with a mousetrap so that the walls exploded when you opened the door. I remember learning on those visits to Kansas that in case of tornado, we should go to the basement. The sky would get yellow, I heard. The funnel of a tornado twisted and curved and destroyed everything in its path. The idea terrified me. We didn’t have tornadoes in Alaska. (“We don’t have bears in Kansas is all I know,” said my aunt.) The hat went into the Goodwill box. I kept the magic tricks. At this point I would take any magic I could get.
Boxes of elementary school papers and certificates, labeled with my name and put aside.
One day in the attic, I sat sorting books, my old school notebooks, files. I came across boxes of my diaries and boxes of correspondence. The idea of going through them seemed impossible. I put them in the Keep pile. There would be time later to sort these things.
In one instant the attic walls pressed in on me, the air stuffy, hot, oppressive. I set down the box I was working on and got up so quickly I had to steady myself against the wall, bumping my head on the angled ceiling. Still holding the wall, I walked out to Sam’s room. The world wavered back into focus in the daylight and fresh air. I took a long, deep breath. I couldn’t get enough air. I walked into my room. That little corner room used to make me feel so safe, both enclosing me and connecting me to the outdoors. But even the familiar had moved on. Now soulless brown boxes sat open, vacuous, restless, needing to be filled, needing to be closed, needing to be moved. I swallowed against a throat that had petrified.
I walked across to Ned’s room, where Sam was working. The upstairs loft was open to the first floor on two sides and framed with windows, looking out at trees. The trees helped me breathe. Ned’s room had few boxes left. Other than the furniture, it sat empty. The walls were bare. The bed was stripped. Sam pulled the last box off the walk-in closet shelf and set it by the bed. The only things left hanging in the closet were Dad’s button-up shirts, a rod full of them. Sam reached for a handful of hangers.
“Can you—can you leave that for now?” I asked. My voice startled me. The question seemed to have come of its own accord. Sam removed his hand wordlessly. “Just leave them,” I said. “I’ll take care of the rest of the closet. Just … let them be.”
“Sure,” Sam said. “I need to take a load down to Goodwill anyway.” He picked up the remaining boxes and walked downstairs. I heard the garage door squeak open and slam shut behind him. A rumble from a diesel engine, fading away as the truck pulled out of the driveway. The house was silent. Through the open sliding glass door blew the scent of pine and the scattered chirps of chickadees on the cool afternoon air. I walked back out to the family room. Boxes of books sat mute in front of empty bookcases. Then I walked back to the closet of shirts.
Walking into the closet, I tried to sneak past any threatening memories. My hand reached out of its own accord. I felt the soft cotton. The rows of shirts were silent. Blue, white, and blue-and-white-striped shirts. The quietness seemed to echo, muffled in those shirts, murmuring memories.
I put my face in among them. I breathed in as deeply as I could, embarrassed, even though alone. I suppose they smelled like shirts. Laundered. Or dry-cleaned. Perhaps worn once or twice. They were memories. They were casings. They were shrouds. They were straightjackets. They were vestments. They were relics. They were the certitude of each day of my life before June 25. They had housed expectations. They were embraces. How many of those shirts had hugged me after I’d come home? How many of those long sleeves had circled me at five years old after playing the piano, at twelve after a swim meet, at nineteen coming home from college, at twenty-four coming home from the army? I grabbed the cloth in my hands, and it crumpled softly in my fists. Silence surrounded and scared me. This touching, this smelling of shirts. I did this for a half hour, maybe more.
Then with some resolve born of need and necessity, from some place deeper than I knew, I took an armful of shirts. A huge armful, too many to handle. I wiggled the hangers off of the rod with my body against them. I walked slowly out of the room.
The vortex started. I was nowhere close to a basement. There was nowhere to take shelter.
I made it two steps. Stumbling, I leaned against the balcony trying to breathe, my throat constricting. I held onto those shirts with both arms, tightly, and closed my eyes, and breathed, deeply, slowly. I opened my eyes and focused on the birch tree just outside the window, on the white papery bark peeling back in a graceful curve. The leaves were darkening to their summer greens. The sky was a blue so gentle it might have been a comfort. I took another breath and walked down the first flight of stairs. Just to where they turned to finish the journey to the first floor. And then my legs gave way and I slid, hard and slow, down the corner where the walls met. With the armful of shirts in my lap, I sat and cried. I cried like I cried when I watched the coffins descend. I cried like I can’t remember ever crying since. My arms lost their strength, and I leaned into those shirts. I screamed, again and again and again until my voice stopped and the shirts took each of those screams into their softness.
I graduated college around the time of the advent of email, so letters and the occasional phone call still served as primary forms of communication. I am grateful for this now, the physical substance and weight of letters, even if the physicality of cards is a sad surrogate for touching a hand. I think of how our atoms must intermingle, the sender and receiver, how there is an intimacy in this paper, and then I think how I put too much on things. The birthday cards included notes and greetings from both Dad and Kathy; letters came mostly from Dad. Each show early attempts at connecting with a child in evolving stages of life and increasing independence, attempts that even then sometimes felt awkward and yet which I appreciated and stored for the earnest and loving gestures they were. Some of these efforts seem silly now: “Are you following the NBA playoffs at all?” (I never had.) Mention of work he and Kathy were doing around the house or at church. (“We cleaned the windows at church yesterday. They were really nice. You can help this summer.”) Several included cautionary comments on finances (“Our resources are low”), and all included some praise and admonition and sometimes points of edification. Most were followed by a P.S. (“What do you think about the Wellesley women protesting the invitation to Barbara Bush to speak? I’ll be interested in your thoughts.”)
On my first trip away from home to a music camp in Colorado when I was twelve, Dad wrote with concern that he’d forgotten to tell me how to get my bags from baggage claim. College letters ranged from three sides of a notecard to ten pages of yellow legal paper. On one he left a pink Post-it Note “P.S. word of the day: efficacious. Look it up! Or … (over)” and he included the definition on the back. On another he drew out the settings on the table and described table etiquette.
While I was in the army’s Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia, after my freshman year of college, he wrote, “Don’t worry about the screamers—that’s what they get paid to do. But you’d better respond smartly—that’s what you get paid to do!”
One letter he began on a Friday and finished on Monday morning: “I just started a new book by William Dean Howell … I am quite taken by his writing.” He updated me on the boys and the weekend’s plans, then finished his letter Monday morning from a table at Kaladi Brothers Coffee, where he’d driven to pay for Kathy’s coffee because she had forgotten her purse. He described all he had to do at the office, then reflected:
After doing this for twenty-three years, I continue to like it and continue to be amazed
how much of success depends on just keeping it together—when one person falters, giving encouragement and support or connection; when another falters doing the same and so on. In other words, it is not brilliance (though that would be nice) that counts as much as it is tenacity and a certain “chutzpah,” assuming, of course, at least better than average material to work with. I would add, I think creativity and flashes of brilliance can be—are—helpful but they are useless without the consistent, high degree of excellence displayed in everyday, year-after-year follow-through…. Incidentally, isn’t it amazing what is happening in what is now the Union of Soviet States?
He continued for another page. Like most of his letters, it felt like conversation. Those conversations were sometimes easy, other times difficult.
“I am very excited for you and your opportunity to climb Mount McKinley,” he wrote in a note he handed to me to take on the mountain.
This is a chance for you to get a really good idea of what you’re made of (I already know!) and to understand human relationships, different reactions of people when you’re all pushed to the limit … keep your wits on the most humdrum details. Where your clothes are, where you are, whether you’re roped up, drinking water, etc. Paying attention to the drudgery and the details makes for safety—yours and the others’. You are younger but you’ve got a good mind and good instincts. Trust them where safety is concerned. Never hurry!! Drink water and eat. Stay on the rope. Keep your clothes dry!! We love you and are thrilled for you.
There were the hard times too, as I mentioned. In one letter when I was at college, Dad wrote, “I’ve been worrying that I haven’t been telling you how proud I am of you … I worry about the fact that you and I always seem to get in a shouting match … I suppose it’s partly to do with the fact that we’re both strong personalities, partly my reluctance to let go, as a parent, and partly your natural tendency to become more independent. Whatever, it does not reflect on my basic trust and respect for you.”
After our Christmas argument about the photo on the counter:
I want to thank you for the gift of frankness which you gave to me … I love you dearly, daughter. I hope you always remember that. I remember your birth, your infancy, your childhood, adolescence, teen years—so well…. You are at your core, a fine woman. You are blessed with God-given talent.
Shannon, I can only encourage you to live your life fully. Live it within the restraints that are essential, tidiness, financial order, most of all, live it in a moral and loving manner. If you fail, start over and do better! Don’t give up on yourself. There will be failures—every one of us has them, but don’t give up on yourself or lose respect for yourself. Make your life one of high principles and high standards and strive to uphold them.
Each letter was written with an abiding awareness of things he’d wished he’d known, but hadn’t, of life’s fragility, of his desire to spare me the worst of it, as though he was suddenly, fiercely aware of the passage of time and how much more he wanted to impart. As though he hadn’t been ready to let go, even while he encouraged me to fly.
This was my foundation. This was my guidance. This was my light. And now it was gone.
CHAPTER 11
BITTER RIVER
Return, return to your chalice of snow, bitter river,
return, return to your chalice of spacious frost …!
—Pablo Neruda, Canto General
I flattened the map against a rock with one hand and held my bowl of oatmeal in the other. A mug of Market Spice tea balanced on a rock next to me. It was ten o’clock. We were lagging far behind the sun’s steep ascent into the day. Dark curtains of rain still hung heavily over the mountains and in the valleys, but it was dry on the river. Looking at the markings I’d made on the map, I determined that today we would make it to the Father’s Day camp, the camp where Dad and Kathy had talked and laughed with me on the sat phone last year, the last time I heard their voices. Today was also June 25th, the day the police declared Dad and Kathy dead.
In the Jewish tradition, today would end a year of mourning. There is a time to mourn, and there is a time to rejoin life. I was supposed to be past the mourning period. It didn’t feel that simple. I suppose it never is. I’d had the Requiem. And I had this trip. I had to understand that nothing would ever be enough. The idea of a Kaddish is a prayer glorifying God. In the midst of life. In the midst of pain. All of us who believe in God are supposed to do this impossible thing: to praise in the midst of crippling sorrow.
We pushed the raft into the water, and then Sally and Ned took their places in the bow and I took mine as captain in the stern, an arrangement we had been finding worked well. The river started to braid, but we stayed easily in the main channel. The mountains on either side began to look less dramatic, older, with softer edges. It was another warm day, and I tied the top of the dry suit around my waist, now wearing just a black tank top under my purple PFD, which had been Kathy’s.
It struck me then, as it had so many times before and since, how little I knew this place. Our childhood exposure to Wild Kingdom introduced us to oceans and African savannas, but this great wild space in our own state was still mostly unknown then. I’d backpacked and camped around the world. But even today, only a few extreme adventurers and hunters venture this far in Alaska’s wilderness. Now I was swallowed up by the landscape. The sweeping grandeur of Alaska’s Arctic is partly a function of scale. But more, its expansiveness is all encompassing. The root of the word nature is nascis, meaning “to be born.” In the Arctic, for the first time in my life, I was thrust into the beginnings of creation.
“There’s our first aufeis!” I announced. Aufeis (German for “ice on top”) was entirely new to me; I’d only read about it in Dad and Kathy’s journals and briefly in books. As we’d prepared for the trip, aufeis was a looming and unknown quantity, unfamiliar to me from other outdoor travel and adventures I’d had. As with so much in life, its greatest terror lay in its mystery. The temperatures this year were warmer than those Dad and Kathy had encountered last year, and our first aufeis had already melted to only a thin ridge of horizontal ice overhanging the water on one side of the river; the rest of it, several feet thick, sat harmlessly on a gravel bank. We pulled over to investigate.
In the sun, water drained off the ice, in some places a slow drip, and in others a steady stream, as the ice changed form to join forces with the river. Horizontal blue stripes on the ice indicated each layer of freeze, and a blue glow shone from beneath the ice sitting resigned on the gravel bar. Now that we’d actually come upon this unknown, our apprehension drained away, and we were able to see its beauty too.
Two sandpipers on the river’s edge moved on their long legs with a desperate determination and feather-light jerkiness. Their goofy movements made me smile; the birds were so small against the backdrop of slabs of ice, the river, the mountains. They brought comic relief from the focus that was starting to take its toll, seeming to want to remind me that however grand the stage, life suggests a sense of humor.
We launched the raft back into the river. Multiple channels opened up as the valley widened. Many times it was hard to tell which was the primary channel; they all seemed similar. The way was not clear.
In a gentle section of river, the raft crunched to a stop on a gravel bar, a smooth and quiet arrest, but just as final. Ned and Sally jumped out and grabbed the rope around the top of the raft. I sat in the back, smiling at the sight of two people walking in the middle of a river, pulling a raft meant to float. By the third time that we ran aground, and all of us had to pull, it was less amusing, but there was nothing else to be done. Floating a large, heavy raft on this river, shallow even at high water, required creativity in both navigation and propulsion. I took some comfort in knowing that the guided group had similar rafts and would have to pull theirs too, and I tried to enjoy my first time walking in the middle of an Arctic river.
“Isn’t it strange we haven’t seen much wildlife?” Sally asked.
�
��I don’t think so. The wildlife here have such extensive ranges, there’s no way to tell whether you’ll see something or not,” Ned said.
“Even if we haven’t seen much, you can be sure there are animals watching us,” I said.
We pulled the raft back into the current as the river deepened again, though never without an abundance of rocks either just submerged or protruding from the river. While their visibility varied, their threat to the raft was similar. The rocks we couldn’t see posed the biggest threat.
“Looks like a rapid ahead!” Sally said.
“Let’s get out and scout,” suggested Ned.
“Take out on the left?” I asked. “Paddle right!”
We paddled strong strokes toward the shore and I did a strong back-paddle to turn the boat upriver. Ned jumped out and pulled the raft onto the shore.
The three of us walked downriver, surveying the rapid.
“Not bad,” Sally said. “Maybe a two, two plus?”
“Probably,” Ned said. “We’re going to head straight through the rocks in the middle of the river,” he said, pointing, “and then go right. Looks like there’s a hole just in the middle.”
“Great,” I said. “Looks like fun!”
“You know, you could name this rapids after your dad,” Sally suggested. “I mean, it’s the first real rapids we’ve hit.”
“I like it. How do you do that?”
“Just write down the GPS coordinates at the top and bottom and a description, and then try to get it used commonly,” she said.
“I’ll get the top coordinates,” Ned said.
We got back in the boat and pushed off. “We’re going to want some speed,” Ned warned.
“Paddle both!” I yelled.
Ned and Sally both dug in with their paddles. I paddled from the stern, alternating sides and using my whole back to pull on the paddle. “Keep it up!”
North of Hope Page 14