The River

by Peter Heller

  They needed to paddle out of there in the cold and they did not have neoprene gloves and for the first time they said it out loud: they were fools.

  “We’re fools,” Jack said.

  Wynn was carving the knot of driftwood he’d found at the last lake camp. He cupped it tightly in his left hand and poked and worried the wood with the point of his clip knife as if he were using a chisel. “Why didn’t we? Bring paddling gloves? Not much fabric for a whole lot of insurance.”

  “Because we’re fools?”

  “Right.”

  “Because we’re minimalists. Which is a synonym for idiots.”

  “Right,” Wynn said.

  “Because you’re a minimalist.”

  “Hold on a sec.”

  “I suggested we bring pogies, remember.” They were tubes of neoprene that Velcroed around the paddle shafts like gauntlets and protected the hands. “And you said it was August.” Wynn winced.

  “What’re you making?” Jack said.

  Wynn shrugged. “Not sure.”

  Jack narrowed his eyes. “How do you work on something and not be sure?” He was razzing him. In truth, it was one of the things he admired about Wynn: how often he started a piece of art—with stones, with wood, even with paints—and had no idea.

  Wynn looked up. “It’s like cooking. You have a pile of ingredients and you start cooking and don’t have a clue what you’re making. Haven’t you ever done that before?”

  “No. Anyway, it’s not like that. If you have a pile of ingredients and cook it it’s going to be food. One way or another. That thing—it’s a bird, or an elephant, or a boat. If you don’t know what it is, how can you carve? You’ll end up with a pile of shavings.” That seemed to really bother Jack.

  Wynn smiled. He held up a finger and said, “Ah, Grasshopper.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’ve been saying that a lot lately.”

  “I’ve been meaning it.”

  Wynn smiled and continued to carve whatever. He turned sideways a bit more to the fire to cast more light on the wood, and as he did the wind also shifted and blew the smoke crossways into the trees and they heard the surf. Crashing surf far off, buffeted and torn by wind. They both sat up, turned their heads. The surf surged and sifted back like breathing. They listened hard and could hear that it was punctuated with explosions like the crash of larger waves on rocks. And beneath it was a groan. A deep groan at a frequency lower almost than their ears could register, like something geologic. Like layers of bedrock rumbling over each other.

  “Holy fuck,” Jack whispered.

  They could still see nothing, no change in the pallor of the night, which seemed, now that they stared, faintly illuminated by more than starlight. Maybe not. And then they heard a crack. Out of the roar of distant waves a shot like the spar of a giant ship breaking.

  Jack cocked his ears as if he were receiving some alien broadcast. “The big ones,” he said, “they talk. That’s what my cousin said, the hotshot firefighter in Idaho.”

  “Talk?”

  “The biggest fires. They talk, just like this. Listen.”

  They listened. Who knew how far off. Not close enough yet to crown the wall of woods with light. There were other sounds: turbines and the sudden shear of a strafing plane, a thousand thumping hooves in cavalcade, the clamor and thud of shields clashing, the swelling applause of multitudes drowned out as if by gusts of rain. Rain. Downpours. Washing through a valley and funneling over a pass. Crackling through woods and sodding over the tundra. Wynn closed his eyes and could swear he heard the sweep of a coming rainstorm. As if the fire in its fury could speak in tongues, could speak the language of every enemy. And sing, too. Over the rush, very faint, was a high-pitched thrum, a humming of air that rose and fell almost in melody.

  Wynn walked to the water. He peered into the dark. Between the tall trees on either bank was a swath of stars, a river of constellations that flowed heedless and unperturbed. Between the brightest, needling the arm of Orion and the head of the Bull, were distances of fainter stars that formed, as Wynn stared, a deep current, uninterrupted, as infused with bubbles of light as the aerated water of a rapid. Except that he could see into it and through it and it held fathomless dimensions that were as void of emotion as they were infinite. And if that river flowed, that firmament, it flowed with a majestic stillness. Nothing had ever been so still. Could spirit live there? In such a cold and silent purity of distance? Maybe it wasn’t silent at all. Maybe in the fires that consumed those stars were decibeled cyclones and trumpets and applause.

  As in our own. Our very own voluble fire.

  He looked straight across at the wall of trees: dark. A solid reassuring darkness. Not that reassuring. The rolling pops of trucks dumping gravel, the cracks of artillery, they were unnerving. How could they not see it? How could the sound travel and not the light?

  What they didn’t realize is that it had. It had traveled. The entire sky was so suffused with firelight that the billion stars were as faint as they would have been under the dominion of the fullest moon.

  * * *

  Which had not yet risen.

  Wynn walked back.

  “We’re sitting ducks. Here. It’s too narrow. The fire’ll jump the river in a flash.” He sat next to Jack by the campfire. “All those animals. Those single birds. Nest-sitters, right? The last to leave.”

  “What I was thinking.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  Jack said, “Seems like if we just sit here, we’ll die.”

  They listened. The measly pops of their campfire seemed to be puling to the greater roar. Jack said, “Like falling asleep in the snow. Feels like that. Like if we camp, it’ll come.”

  Wynn said, “I was looking at the map. The river must’ve changed a lot since they surveyed it. It’s been wider where I thought it’d be narrow, and there’s those wide coves that aren’t on the map.”

  “Nineteen fifty-nine. Says beneath the legend. The survey’s sixty years old.”

  “Rivers change every year. Maybe—”

  “Don’t count on it. We’d need half a mile of river to even stand a chance of staying out of the fire.”

  “Yeah.”

  Jack said, “Lemme see what you’ve been carving.”

  Wynn worked three fingers into the pocket of his work pants and pulled out the chunk of wood and handed it to Jack. Just small enough to fit in the palm: a canoe. What else. The exact shape of their own—the exaggerated beam dead center, the sharply tapered bow and stern, the faintest rocker along her length. He had just begun carving out the shell—the outlines of the seats and thwarts were there in bare relief. Jack ran his fingers over the whittled planes of the hull and the pads of his fingertips seemed to relish the coarse rendering, the snags and chiseled edges. He handed it back.

  “Is it a sex toy?”

  “Fuck off.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Do we have a choice?”

  “No.” Jack pulled out his tin of Skoal and took a sizable dip. It’s what he often did when they were about to put in. He spat in the fire. “Ready?”

  Jack walked over the stepped rock to the boat and began strapping stuff down as tight as he could while Wynn gently woke her up.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  This time they all three wore the life vests. They put her in Jack’s rain jacket and added more boughs to her seat to try to keep her out of the bilge water, but once they got into any kind of real rapids or even a feisty riffle she would get soaked. Not ideal, but then there was everything about the night that was not ideal. They did not bother dousing their fire: a tip of the hat, almost an acknowledgment of respect to the coming onslaught. They helped her into the canoe and launched. This time, without discussing it, they both got low. They were both on their knees, but
ts against the edge of the seats, and they picked up their paddles and stroked easily upstream to the top of the eddy and out into the main current and let the river send the bow around in a wide accelerating peel-out, and then they were heading downstream, paddling in tandem, steady, not fast, and they stared ahead intently at the unbroken surface until it seemed their eyes ached, and listened hard for a rush and sift that was of water not fire. The river between the phalanxed woods, the black bulwarks of forest, was something metallic, faintly luminous, and they each wished it would stay that way and knew that it wouldn’t.

  * * *

  The cracks were the scariest. The sounds with no apparent flames. They paddled through an S-turn to staggered gunshots grown closer like an advancing front, which were the bigger trees exploding, and almost immediately they hit a long rapid. They could see the whitewater ahead like the thin line of distant surf, but it was much closer than it seemed and before they could scout a line or intuit one they each felt the waft of cold air and the rush came with it and the bow rocked up into a breaking wave and Jack braced the blade of his paddle into the froth and they were in it. Smack in the middle of the whitewater. They took water over the right side in the first wave but not much, but when they hit the second they took more, the gunwale gulped and she was awash in a couple of inches of ice water. They were heading left, they accelerated. They’d both seen and heard the gnash of a large hydraulic almost straight off the bow, a cresting pale hump that thumped and hissed in a lower register—the trough would be behind it—and they sprinted now, both, Wynn setting the left angle, not in unison, each paddling madly for enough speed to make it past the sucking hole. Wynn thought of nothing but speed, but he watched, amazed, as Maia reached for the cookpot clipped to the strap of the dry bag behind her and freed it and began to bail. She scooped and threw water over the side with her one good arm, with almost professional speed. Damn.

  The stern just cleared it. The current accelerated at the left edge of the hydraulic and Wynn ruddered hard off the right side to straighten the boat and swing the stern away and around and even in the dark he looked down into a deep gnashing trough. They were in what they knew to be a ramping rock garden whelmed with whitewater, and the rush was so loud it went silent and they braced to hit a sleeper, the thud of a boulder barely underwater, and the sudden sideways upending, the flip and maybe the awful crunch of Kevlar as the boat wrapped and buckled around the rock…

  And then they were by. The fast current and chop funneled down the middle of the river and the gradient seemed to level and they knew without looking that they were in a wave train, a rolling succession of breaking haystacks, and they did look and they could see the pale froth at the tops of the standing crests like whitecaps, and the crashing of water diminished to the discreet song of each single wave, and then the waves were smooth rollers, and then they were released: into the calm flat water of the pool, the metallic sheen of river stretching ahead again, almost placid, an uncertain respite.

  She had bailed. Throughout the length of the rapid, and she bailed with one arm now as the current spun them into the flat. Must be feeling a lot better, Jack thought. He turned and said, “Phew.” Loud enough they both could hear. Then: “Hand me the bailer, would ya?” She did. He reached for the soaked shirt stuffed with blueberries and untied a sleeve and funneled the pot full and handed it back. “Fuel,” he said. “We might need it for the next one.”

  * * *

  They let themselves drift, for now. Tugged northward. On their left rose a continuous muffled roar as of storm and turbines punctuated by the pitched whine and pops of pressure cookers as they explode. Nothing to see, still, but a thickening haze. Jack thought it was eerie—the chorus of harsh instruments that should never commingle—and every now and then rose a thin scream exactly like someone being squeezed to death. Squeezed and sizzled to a last tortured hiss and then maybe the crack of a spirit being loosed to the heavens. It was terrible. The wind had backed west-northwest and it brought the bedlam along with rolling smoke that stung their eyes and made them cough. The water was swift and flat for now, at least there was that. Without talking the two picked up their paddles and began pulling the boat forward.

  In the last couple of miles the river had widened, it was maybe a hundred and fifty yards across, and almost instinctually they hugged the right bank, away from the fire. Their hands were stiff with cold. Motionless tall trees on either side, still dense with darkness, except over the left treetops now fluttered a glow not bright but bright enough to erase the lowest tiers of stars. Jack held up his hand and Wynn rested. They listened. The jet roar was no longer muffled but rose and fell as if buffeted. Almost as if breathing.

  Their throats burned. Jack almost had to yell. “It should lay down at night, but it’s not. That’s weird. It’s plenty cold.”

  They drifted. Jack said, “If anything, the wind is stiffer.”

  They waited. Both knew he wasn’t done, and both sensed he himself wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. That was almost scarier than the sense of a mega-giant beast thumping closer beyond the wall of trees. Wynn thought of Jurassic Park. He said, “What rough beast…?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “It happens,” Jack called. “A fire disobeys every rule. Anyway, it’s close. No sparks yet or flying shit, there’s that.” Pause. Then: “The river isn’t wide enough.”

  He’d said it. With a fire this big, the river wouldn’t act as a firebreak. Nobody had to ask what he meant.

  “You can hear it. It’s just big as shit, the biggest fucking forest fire on earth. Right now that’s a fact.” He shook his head, trying to clear it maybe of the truth. “So it’s coming across and the heat makes these crazy swirling gusts and it’ll make its own weather. Little cyclones and windstorms. That’s maybe the gusts we’re feeling now. The head of it. The smoke will get thicker and that’s gas and it’ll roll across the river and if it ignites…well.”

  “We’re toast.”

  “It’s a flashover. But.”

  “But what?”

  “I dunno.” Jack had to make himself breathe steadily. He coughed. “I dunno. You know how sometimes a fire runs over some neighborhood and half a block of houses’ll burn and then there’ll be two that stand untouched, and then another block burned down to cinders?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s uneven. It’s not predictable. That’s all I’m saying.”

  Wynn lifted his voice. “You’re saying we better be those two houses.”

  * * *

  The smoke did thicken. They hugged the right bank, the main current just along the eddy lines close to shore, and the smoke rolled, so dense the black mirror of the river ahead was clouded as in fog, and then the wind picked up and the smoke was peppered with flying sparks. Sparks first, then shreds like leaves but embered and glowing, then torn rags of bark laced with fire. Wynn thought of strips of burning skin. They flew across in the smoke and they spread and folded and tumbled as they blew and the boat plowed through them. Over the trees—they could still see the wall of trees through smoke like fog—the glow was a fierce and general radiance that pulsed with a redder breathing. It was loud. Whatever turbines roared were just beyond the trees and now they were cut by a sudden whoosh and pop, and then the terrible hissing squeal that Jack knew was a tree’s sap, its lifeblood boiling and pressurized and squeezed through the very pores of the wood.

  The sparks and flying tatters were hitting their backs and shoulders now. Wynn dumped the blueberries out of the pot and yelled at Maia to pull up her hood, she did, and he dipped the pan and doused her with water and then himself and he yelled and tossed the pot to Jack.

  They needed to get to the bank. It was low along here, it was the shadow of a wall, a cut bank running to three or four feet above the water, running down to water’s edge and rising again like a moldering stone fence. The fire was coming fast and
they needed to get against the dirt down low maybe in the water and get their heads in moss or roots, he didn’t know what. As he thought that, he heard another rush beneath the fire: the current was picking up. Holy fuck. The current was gathering speed, and the rush he was hearing had a wholly different key, something whiter, ancient, a violent register but now of water—it too was growing in strength, they were being sucked into the V’d current of another rapid. Jack peered into and through the smoke and flying debris—there were small sticks flying, burning sticks, that couldn’t be good, some not that small—and he could barely see and feel that they were ramping into a rapid and it was a left-hand bend. Fuckin’ A, at least that. A left-turning bend would pull the current to the outside of the turn, to the right bank, away from the blaze. At least that. Jack yelled, “Rapid!”

  They grabbed paddles and stroked into the first breaking waves.

  All they could do was keep it straight. Let the river pull them to the outside, right, and keep the canoe straight to the current, parallel, so anything they hit they’d hit dead on. Less chance of a flip. Not much to do, but something. They paddled and the first waves lapped over, and in the rolling plumes they strained to see the dark surface—it was broken by pale crashings but not everywhere, they needed to stay out of the holes. They were being sucked to the right, to the turning bank, and the bow reared and bucked and crashed down and they took on more water and she was bailing and if someone, anyone, was yelling they didn’t hear it, it was subsumed in the general roar. And then the burst, ballistic, of a tree exploding, and beyond the scrim of trees, which was only a scrim now, the spruce were backlit and spindled as if by molten sun; beyond them, over the tops, they saw a jet of fire erupt skyward and heard the whoosh and saw a white billow as of steam against a sky no longer dark and then a whoosh and another tree exploded and the tops of the trees along the bank began to burn. It was crowning. Maybe it was awe. The awe of the earth burning to cinders—they could not not look and they missed seeing the hole and the bow reared and plunged into a deep backward-crashing trough. The stem of the canoe half reared again, wildly, clawing out of it, and the seething backwash flung them sideways and it was all water. Water pummeling, the roar gone strangely mute, and Jack tried to grab the boat, any piece of it, and was torn free, he held to the paddle and was shoved and beaten to the bottom. What a hole does: takes you under. Maybe it was deep but his knee struck stone and he was tumbling, knew he was free of the hydraulic, had the paddle, he buoyed up bursting for breath and came clear into a chop of boiling waves but no boulders, good, and the first thing he saw was the trees all along the riverbank catching fire, crown to crown.