North of Hope

by Shannon Polson

  “I lost it!”

  Another paddle jetted away in the current. I wasn’t sure whether to scream or to cry.

  “Eddy on the left!” I yelled. Ned paddled forward, hacking at the water. I pulled hard, back-paddled, and we stopped to regroup.

  “Well, we don’t have another paddle,” I said. I couldn’t look at Sally.

  “We’re just going to have to get out and scout each rapid carefully,” Ned said. “It’s a big raft. It’s going to be hard going with two paddles.” None of us made eye contact.

  “That other group is just behind us, isn’t it?” Sally asked.

  “They probably want to hang on to their own spares,” I said shortly.

  “I’m going to check out what’s around the bend,” Ned said.

  I followed. Thick clouds of mosquitoes hung in the air. I waved them away from my face, feeling the physicality of the swarm with each swipe. Walking along the willows, I yelled, “Hey bear, hey bear, we’re out here! Don’t worry about a thing! Hey bear!”

  Past the bend, we saw only a set of innocuous rock gardens.

  “Looks like we want to stay left starting about there,” I said, pointing at the tongue of river pouring through two boulders at the top.

  “Yep.”

  “Hey, what’s the deal with Sally?” I couldn’t help myself. “I’d think someone coming on a trip like this would have a little better understanding of where we are. We aren’t on a day trip where there’s extra gear in the car.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “This trip is to honor Dad and Kathy. I’m mortified that she wants to ask someone else for a paddle. We should be able to make this trip ourselves. But I don’t know if we can get down the river with just two.”

  “I agree.”

  “Okay, well, I’m not interested in being the one that does the asking,” I said. I set my jaw and bit my lip.

  We walked back to the boat, balancing on rocks and swatting mosquitoes.

  “We’ll ask Karen when we get farther downriver,” Ned said. “We can pull over for dinner and wait till they float by.”

  “Sure!” Sally said cheerily.

  “When you ask her, Sally,” I said thinly, “make sure you acknowledge that we understand this is the wilderness—and that the ethic out here is to be self-sufficient, to take care of yourself. I think that’s really important.” I measured each word carefully and then released it slowly.

  “Okay,” Sally said. I still couldn’t make eye contact with her.

  Something inside of me cringed, believing this crisis reflective of my own failure to plan, my shortsightedness in agreeing to our small party, my foolishness in even having considered such a trip in the first place. I was worried as much about being up to the challenge as about being able to complete the trip, about being good enough to have undertaken such a journey. Dostoyevsky’s words rang in my ears with excruciating clarity: “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

  “Let’s get going.” We jumped into the raft, and Ned and I paddled back into the current. It was hard work. By the time we’d bounced through the rock gardens and stopped to check the next rapid, Ned and I both were exhausted.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said. I was alarmed by his statement, though I was happy that the next section looked benign.

  “Hang in there. We’ll get through it,” I said.

  “No, this one looks tricky. I think we should line it.” He spoke flatly.

  “Really?” I looked at him hard. His face was set, impassive.

  “Yeah. I don’t know if I can do it with just two of us.”

  “Okay, let’s line it,” I said, aware of a current more dangerous than the river.

  We attached the line to the raft and walked it through the rapids from the bank, stepping through willows, eyes on the water, eyes on the boat. My disappointment over not paddling this short piece of water paled next to the prickling sensation of danger, the pressing in of emotional and physical exhaustion. It is, or should be, the unspoken rule to go with the most conservative opinion in the wilderness. So our decision to line the boat had been the right one, but it had let in a glimpse of something untoward.

  We had left the mountains. Now the river flowed through a series of plateaus with deep cuts. After a dinner stop and the gift of a paddle from Karen’s group, we made our way down smooth water, looking for camp close to 8:00 p.m. We had been on the water for ten hours.

  I watched the shoreline. I gazed across the plain on either side, still as watchful, still as worried. The raft glided downriver under the soft angle of the sun. And then, looking back at the mountains, my breath caught. The mountains sat solidly and with a great gentleness, the foothills draped like fabric over the land, exquisite fringes of willow on the riverbanks, wet rocks glistening in the midevening sun. Just here was pure abundance.

  It was not the landscape that held me, though. I was transfixed by the light. It poured over me, filled the corners of the land. It was as eternal as time and as fleeting as days, as infinite as God and as finite as the eyes beholding it. I was immersed and filled up all at once. It lived, it had a being, that light. There was peace in it. There was gentleness and assurance. Its essence was music.

  Requiem

  Benedictus

  Though I claw at empty air and feel

  nothing, no embrace,

  I have not plummeted.

  —Denise Levertov, “Suspended”

  Though the Mozart Requiem is commonly performed, I have never sung it before this performance. It is not the monumental aspect of the piece that intimidates me as much as my aching need to sing it, an ache approaching pain. And I do not want to just sing it; even if I’m only a member of a large choir, I want to sing it well, to sing it for my dad, and for Kathy. The Mass for the Dead, or Missa pro defunctis, has been set to music many times, though Mozart’s setting is perhaps the best known. There is much conjecture about the composition of the Requiem, but most historians agree that it was an opportunity for Mozart to find a new direction and depth in his music. As he began working full time on the Requiem in October of 1791, Mozart had premonitions that he was composing the Requiem for his own death. Immersing himself with fervor into his work, he fell gravely ill, and he died in December, his Requiem unfinished. His colleague, Franz Xaver Sussmayr, had to finish it for him. Even the best among us die with unfinished business. Even the least among us, I hope, have someone who will try to finish it for them. That, at least, is how I understand it.

  The primacy of the chorus in the Mozart Requiem gives us more time to rehearse with Maestro Perlman than we might have had with another work. He rolls into our first rehearsal in his wheelchair, and I am astounded. Hearing Perlman play in numerous recordings, I have been awed by his utter mastery of the music, the passion of his performance. I had not known he was disabled. That man who conveyed the depths of passion in his work had been struck with polio at age four. And yet the energy and vigor he brings into the room exceeds that of an athlete.

  Rehearsals for me are another mountain ascent. I go in with my red water bottle, feeling the grains of fine Hulahula sand in my teeth and questioning my sanity at trying to connect with Dad and Kathy through music and sand from the river. The powerful harmonies nestle into my head and heart and voice, pull me again and again through Latin liturgy, straighten the paths of my grief, soothe the inflammation of my soul.

  Music philosopher Peter Kivy admits failure in explaining the importance of music. But he sees the performance of music as a ritual of community, “the sense of cooperatively wresting order from chaos.”7 The performance of music “literally makes one able to hear what to others is inaudible.”8

  Maybe it is the communal nature of the performance of universal harmonies that I so yearn for. The sense of community in grief coming from all of humanity’s worship of the divine. The connection to all of humankind in our shared belief that there is meaning, and that there is something more. This
connection reminds me that I am alive. It is the reason I cannot sit at my piano alone, but need to stand and sing the Requiem, one of many voices singing, to access a sense of hope in myself I cannot otherwise express. Though I cannot find the quiet spaces of my heart to hear God, singing gives me a structure to reach for that connection to him, to feel I am one of many voices working together, inadequate alone but important as a part. The doing and the discipline have a place. They have a place when the quiet places elude us. They have a place in bringing us back to silence, to the symphony of the universe.

  Dad’s older sister, Aunt Georgia, comes to visit from Arizona the weekend of the concert, along with my cousins Jamie, Leslie, and Shelby. George and Joanne come over from Port Ludlow as well. I hope Dad and Kathy know somehow that all of us pray the Requiem in whatever way we can.

  Perlman’s direction combines the ferocity of a blizzard with the precision of a surgeon. The care he takes and the inspiration he brings to the performance pull me in like a vortex. There is a depth in him I have not experienced with other conductors. But his eyes also hold a deep kindness, a true love for the music, a love for those performing it with him. I follow him with all I have. I look to him as I looked to my father when I was a small child. I look to him as I look to God. I look to him for salvation. It is never good to put this much on a person, even on a master. We expect too much.

  CHAPTER 14

  DIES IRAE

  Would that it were so easy to find

  the sacred in the massacred.

  —Stephen Cushman, “Dark Meat”

  I woke to warm sun on the walls of the tent. Seemingly from nowhere, the melody of “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof moved through me as though it were playing outside my tent. Dad had sung this song, among others from Fiddler on the Roof, on our way up to the cabin as I was growing up. Sometimes he mixed in the blues and spirituals too. I blinked at the clarity of each note moving through me. “Wasn’t it yesterday …” A cool breeze kept the heat of the day and the mosquitoes at bay. “Hi, Dad,” I whispered to the breeze.

  Ned and Sally were making eggs, but I opted to stick with my usual oatmeal and a mug of Market Spice tea. The weather was easy and almost comforting. Ahead of us the coastal plain descended out and away from the mountains toward the sea. I marveled at their courage. I did not want to leave those mountains, sitting behind us so solidly, peacefully. I looked back at them with longing. Already they were shrinking behind the foothills.

  I was starting to realize that the reason I had stepped into the raft in the first place was less to find Dad and Kathy than it was to face the beast—and not the bear on the tundra but the lashing beast of grief within myself. Leaving the safety of the mountains, I was exposed. We were coming closer.

  Dad and Kathy’s journal stopped after they reached the spot we would visit today. The pages were blank. Their last entries recorded that they’d had clear cold weather, the kind that invigorates more than it chills. They had time to rest, to look at flowers, and to walk in the hills. A chance to talk to the guided group on the river. The rare visit of a wolf. Enjoyment of a good meal. They were on river time. Their rhythms were river rhythms. They were happy.

  6/22/05 Last night I woke to go to the bathroom and discovered the tent encrusted with snow! The boats looked frozen white; I woke up Rich, who got up, too. Then we quickly dove back into our bags. Morning revealed fresh snow on the mountains, and quickly the snow on the ground melted. Warm sun blessed our breakfast and we went on a hike into the hills. Great views and it was actually warmer away from the river. Saw lupine, mtn heather, wooly lousewort, blackened? oxytrope and lapland rosebay. Came back, had lunch and took a great nap…. Saw the rafters tonight. They get out the 25th. They reported the strip was not dried out yet. Tonight there is a very cool, cool breeze but tolerable with headgear and the warm sunshine. It’s looking like crystal clear weather tonight … probably cold, too.

  6/22/05 Today is a rest day. At 1:00 AM we got up and it had snowed! By 6:30 there was snow all around but the sun came out and it was gone by 9:00. After breakfast we took a hike up a ridge for a couple of hours—actually 3—then back for lunch. We burned trash and took a nap and worked on a faulty stove. Then it was hair-washing time. Then dinnertime. After dinner the two rafts we’d seen went past and we exchanged greetings—they appeared to be a guided group. Kathy’s identifying flowers and I just checked the maps. Our plan is to go 8 miles a day for the next couple of days and then call about the airstrip. If it’s not dry we’ll have to hoof it to the portage over to Opiklek Creek and then on to Arey Island for pickup. It’s a beautiful evening with clear skies, but still a very cold north wind! Rich

  6/23/05 69 degrees, 40’347 800’ elevation. Awoke to beautiful blue skies. Warmest day so far. Left at 10:30 and continued down the river, still expecting the Class III rapids. We went through rapid after rapid, very challenging because of rocks everywhere. You rarely can take your eyes off the river or surely a rock will be right there! … At this point the mountains seem very far away. The rocks along shore are covered with vegetation resembling seaweed over rocks by the ocean. We saw a lone gray wolf while searching for a place to set up the tent. This camp is loaded with wildlife sign: bear and caribou tracks, moose droppings, ptarmigan feathers and droppings. I called my mother and we spoke briefly at $2 a min. Was good to hear her voice—she sounds happy. The sun is very warm and the wind isn’t too strong. Still, I’m wearing everything to stay warm. This is an incredibly beautiful river and has been a challenging trip so far. Lord, thank you for our safety and guidance. Please continue to be with us in all that we do and say! Kathy

  6/23/05 Woke to brilliant sunshine and blue sky—little or no wind. Left at 10:30 and spent the day picking through rock gardens. Rapids continue to base of river it seems! We went about 8–9 miles and stopped on a river bar for night. We saw a grey wolf! No 3 for the trip. Also saw a pair of rough legged hawks and assorted songbirds and ducks. The day stayed beautiful but wind picked up. We called our moms on the satellite phone. They were well. Beef stew for dinner—yum. We will try to look at our digital photos tonight in tent. Rich

  We had passed the main rapids of the Hulahula, but today we had rapids of another sort to navigate. We didn’t talk about it, except to confirm coordinates. An hour after breakfast, the sun had ascended and burned through the light breeze. I put my PFD on over my tank top, and sunscreen on my bare arms. We pushed off into the icy water. Another song flowed into my consciousness, mingling with the running river: “Deep river,” the old Negro spiritual went, one of that canon of prayer known as sorrow songs, “my home is over Jordan. Deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground.”

  I was not sure what I was hoping to find, or what I thought might change. My growing sense of dread balanced against the understanding that this was someplace I had to be, something I had to do. The river’s sonority offered a temporary comfort against the dissonance of growing chaos, the sounds of the biggest rapids ahead, rapids that had little—and everything—to do with a river.

  The river was rolling and gentle now. The raft bounced easily through small wave trains, moving happily on the glacial water. I watched the tundra carefully. The bank rose to a low plateau on the left, obscuring what was beyond, and the plain rolled away to the horizon on the right.

  Ned stared at the GPS. “I think it’s right around here,” he said flatly.

  “No, this isn’t it,” I murmured. “It doesn’t look like this. There should be a sandy beach.” I almost hovered over the back of the raft, my legs flexed, leaning forward, watching the banks intently.

  “That’s it, on the right,” I said, as the sandy shore came into view. My throat constricted. “Paddle both, paddle left!” I pulled back hard on my paddle, and the raft swung with a strange ease into the eddy. Beach met the bottom of the raft with a sound like sandpaper. Sally and Ned jumped out and pulled the boat onto the beach. Ned took the 45-70, put it over his shoulder, and strode wordlessly off
into the tundra.

  I walked slowly along the beach from end to end. The sand was unusual; other beaches along the river had been rocks and pebbles. I walked around the green tundra behind the willow copse beyond the beach. On the tundra, the low, tenacious plants of the Arctic crunched softly under my river boots. To the south, the hieratic heights of Michelson and Chamberlin stood in sacerdotal solemnity against a clear blue sky.

  “Pretty out here, isn’t it?” Sally asked.

  I swallowed my disbelief. “Sally, I need some time by myself,” I said.

  “Sure, sure,” she said, smiling.

  There was something that bothered me those first weeks back in Seattle after the funeral. Something about needing information, even when it didn’t serve any purpose. Information that couldn’t be avoided and that came back to me now, on the beach.

  It was the information about the bodies in the police report. They were just bodies then—not my dad, not Kathy. The bear had been eating them. And why not? He was a bear and had killed his prey.

  Why had he started on Kathy? Perhaps Dad had died more quickly.

  “Could he have had a heart attack?” a friend from high school had asked me at a coffee shop that summer.

  “I guess so,” I said, having no idea. It seemed likely to me that the coroner would not have conducted an extensive autopsy. Why bother figuring out if anything had happened aside from the attack?

  In the last picture of Kathy, she is wearing a hat and a fleece coat. Behind her is visible the sand of the beach, part of her red inflatable kayak, a rock securing a corner of their tent on the sand. She smiles broadly in spite of the cold. The willow copse had shielded Dad and Kathy from the freezing northeast wind that day. Then it had hidden their bodies when the bear dragged them there—dragged the bodies, that is.

  The picture in the paper showed the brown humped hulk of the grizzly at the north end of the beach, glowering at the photographers; the collapsed tent had been pulled to the south. I looked around the willow copse and the south end of the beach for evidence of a bear digging, for animal tracks. Dessicated indentations of caribou hoofs and one large wolf track wrote a story of visits from the previous year. Bordering the beach were yellow daisies, the blooms of Eskimo potato, but nothing more auspicious. On the beach itself, the sand lay firm and untouched, a slate washed clean, healed by water and wind.