by Peter Geye
He let go of Gus’s shoulder and stood beneath the painting for several minutes more, still nodding slowly, until he heard the water come on in the bathroom around the corner.
He turned his attention to his son’s wondering eyes and smiled. “You should eat your breakfast and shower up. Make it a hot one. It’ll be your last for some time.” He checked his watch. “We’ll leave in an hour.”
—
Later that morning Gus watched his father loading the canoes. Mist rose off the river. His mother came onto the deck, set her coffee on the deck railing, and lit a cigarette.
A moment passed before she said, “You don’t have to go.”
“Why wouldn’t I go?”
“I guess there are about a hundred reasons. You know most of them.” She took a sip of her coffee. “For God’s sake, how’s he going to survive up there? He walks like an old man now.”
“He walks like a man who’s been bent over the side of a boat all his life.”
“Bent over a barrel, you mean.” She looked over to the river for a long time. “He walks as if he’s given up.”
“Or been beaten.”
“You always were his great defender.”
Gus looked out across the clearing and blinked slowly three times. “I thought you’d be happy we’re leaving.”
She said nothing, just stood there staring at her husband, first through the ribbons of cigarette smoke, then through the cloud of fog over the clearing between their house and the river. She stubbed her cigarette and dropped the butt in her empty coffee cup. “Whatever happened to your father was a long time ago. Before you were born. Even before he met me.”
Gus wanted to slap her. Instead, he said, “I know what happened to him. Everyone does.”
“You might think you do.” Again she stared across the clearing. When she looked back at Gus she had tears in her eyes.
“Oh, please,” he said.
“You need to go to college, Gus. The world’s not about to wait on your father’s shenanigans. You read the newspaper. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket. Don’t be a fool.”
“I’m not afraid of what’s going on.”
She wiped her tears, which looked even more fake now that they were gone. “And you think playing around in the woods with him will be good practice? That he can teach you everything you need from his own vast experience?”
Gus just shook his head.
“My God, you are his son, aren’t you? The two of you won’t see the ice come in up there.” She kissed him on the forehead. “You’ll be back in a week, that’s what I think.” She turned and walked into the house.
Gus heard the radio come on inside and his mother tuning the dial, looking for the music station. It took a clear morning for that, though, and after a minute or so she turned the radio off.
—
On that morning, Gus was eighteen years old and a summer removed from high school graduation. As broad-shouldered as his father.
Harry watched him walk across the clearing and said, once he got to the canoes, “Where’d the kid you used to be go?”
Gus still felt his mother’s stinging words. “We all set?”
Harry squatted, grabbed a handful of pebbles from the shore, and let them sift through his big hand. “I should give you one more chance to balk. There are plenty of excuses to stay here.”
“I’m not balking.”
Harry pointed up at the house. “Head back up there and call one of those colleges that accepted you. Quit this place for good. Farther than you can paddle and walk, leastways.”
“I’m not balking. Besides, who would sing you those songs? Who’d catch you your fish?”
“All right, then. You got your compass? Matches?”
Gus patted the hip pocket of his army pants.
“Said goodbye to your mother?”
“Something like that.”
“Is your sister awake?”
“I told her goodbye last night.”
“Me, too.”
Gus looked into the canoes. “Everything loaded?”
Harry stepped beside him and they stared into them. Each held two number-four Duluth packs. In Gus’s the extra paddle and Remington were tied under the thwarts, as were the fishing rods and the ax and pick handles and saws in his father’s canoe. In both, cross-country skis and poles were strapped to the tumblehome. Snowshoes hung from two of the packs.
“I think so,” Harry said, then looked at the house, upriver, and at his wristwatch in quick, quiet succession. “Gus, buddy, where we’re going, well, better men than you or I have gotten lost there.”
The waters alongshore were still, the trees coming to light with the morning. Gus was full of fear, because he knew not only what sort of wilderness lay beyond the oxbow in the river, but also that they were risking something else, and that they were leaving something unspoken behind. Despite this fear, he looked back at his father’s waiting face and felt almost nothing but a boy’s excitement. “If we get lost,” he said, “then we’ll be doing it together, right?”
Harry’s smile was wide. He took a pinch from his tobacco pouch and pushed his canoe into the river.
—
It wasn’t more than a half hour before they reached the lower falls. During the hot summer months, Gus had spent countless hours in these pools, dropping dry flies in the lee waters, swimming with his friends. But when he and Harry stepped out into the shallows now, the water felt as though it had fallen from the moon. That’s how cold it was.
They portaged the falls. First the packs, then the canoes yoked over their shoulders. When they put back in above, Harry said, “We might’ve packed a little lighter.”
Gus could see his father’s chest heaving under his flannel shirt. Harry worked the snuff loose from his lip and spit it out.
“We could dump your shaving kit,” Gus said.
“And live like animals? How about we ditch your little guitar?”
“It’s a mandolin.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Or you could just bear up,” Gus said.
Harry smiled broadly again and nudged Gus’s canoe with the tip of his paddle. “That I could.”
Not another half hour passed before they reached the Devil’s Maw, where the Burnt Wood split atop the falls. One chute rushed through a jagged stone trough forty feet long before it churned back on itself with a force equal to its own falling. The other ran water into the maw itself. For generations it had been a place of lore and legend that was regarded as being as holy as Immanuel Lutheran. They were still downstream, holding their canoes into the current.
“It’s been a while since I’ve been up this far,” Harry said, looking left and right at the gorge walls rising sheer above them.
“She’s running light,” Gus said. “We were fishing up here this spring and couldn’t get close to the falls.”
“Fish make it past the lower falls?”
“The big ones do.”
“The big ones? Hope your braggadocio don’t come back to bite us on the ass. We’ll need some big fish, come the months ahead.”
Harry rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and then stared back up at the falls, maybe wondering if something about them would change. He shook his head. “Who could ever imagine this water might be tamed? Look at it.” Even with the slow, autumn flow it was deafening. “Does that look like water that wants to be dammed? Like there’s enough dynamite in the world to widen those stone walls? And for what purpose?” He shook his head again. “Men like Charlie are never satisfied until they have more. And then they’re still not satisfied.” Now he looked at Gus. “Don’t matter. He’ll have bigger problems than how to dam this river when he wakes up tomorrow.”
Gus had of course heard about this nonsense. We all had. Damming not just the Burnt Wood, but half a dozen others leading up into the borderlands. The plans had been whispered about for years. The promise of more iron ore and lumber and copper, lately of hydroelectricity.
Harry had long been among the townsfolk who went to meetings to shout about it. Charlie Aas was always shouting back.
“This’ll be more work than the lower falls,” Harry said.
“I’ve been up these falls a hundred times.”
“With eighty pounds on your back?” Harry surveyed the options. “You want to take the long way around or split the chutes?”
“It’ll take half an hour to go around.”
“In the scheme of things, that won’t amount to much.” Harry looked up at the falls again. “One misstep and our adventure’s over.”
“I know it,” Gus said.
“And our lives.” Harry studied the clearing in the woods and the bottom of the trail that led up and around the falls. That would have been the prudent route, and they both knew it. “But we’re fresh, eh?”
Harry dug his paddle into the current and steered for the slick talus between the pool at the bottom of the chute and the maw. Gus fell in line, and by the time they’d nosed their canoes onto the shelf they were both damp with brume. Harry stepped out, pulled his boat out of the water, and heaved a Duluth pack over his shoulders, then turned back to Gus. “Stay to the right, bud.”
“Like I need to be told that?”
Harry scrabbled up the steep rock steps, using his hands and arms as much as his legs. Gus followed behind, his face at his father’s bootheels. Midway up at the Devil’s Maw, Gus paused and gaped into the precipice, feeling its cold, sharp exhalation, a breeze with a metallic tang. Suddenly dizzied, he gripped the rocks and pulled himself up and away. The footing was of course chancy and the water hauling over the falls thunderous, so loud that he couldn’t hear his own heavy breathing. But as they neared the top, the water quieted beneath them and he heard his father singing.
At first he mistook it for some alien sound coming off the water or out of the earth, some whistling from the treetops up on the ridges. But the longer they climbed the more certain Harry’s voice became. Deep and loud, as if he’d just found it along their route. Words of a song Gus had never heard, sung in a language he’d spent four years of high school learning and only one short summer forgetting: “À la claire fontaine m’en allant promener, / J’ai trouvé l’eau si belle que je m’y suis baigné. / Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, / Jamais je ne t’oublierai….”
—
They made camp on the shore of Borealis Lake that evening. They’d been ten hours paddling up the Burnt Wood with only those few short portages and a half hour for lunch ashore. When Harry unfolded himself from his canoe he was stiff as a jackknife. He cracked his back slowly and turned to Gus. “Not a bad first day’s paddle, eh?”
“If they’re all that easy, I’ll be disappointed,” Gus said. He meant it, too.
Harry gave him a sly smile. “Oh, you won’t be disappointed.” He cracked his back again. “How was your boat?”
Gus stroked the smooth cedar gunwale. “Stalwart,” he said, because that had been Harry’s mantra and prediction for all the months they’d spent building them.
“Stalwart. Indeed, sonny boy.”
He hadn’t seen his father so at peace for some time and hadn’t expected to now, given how many years it had been since he’d last been in a camp anywhere. Gus knew something was off, because that kind of easiness had so rarely been part of Harry’s constitution. It made Gus nervous. “We’d better tend to our camp,” he said.
“Righto.”
As would become their custom, Gus got a line in the water while Harry gathered firewood and started a pot of rice. Two pike fillets were boiled and salted before the rice was done, and they ate off tin plates, the sun setting over the trees behind them. They were silent, as they’d been most of the day, and when they finished eating, Gus scrubbed the pots and plates and stoked the fire before he took his mandolin from its case.
While he fingered a few chords into that beautiful gloaming, his father pulled a length of birchwood from the pile beside the fire and cut it to a length of a foot and a half. The hatchet—like the canoes and sleeping sacks and paddles and damn near half their outfit—was something Harry had made. In a furnace he’d built, he melted the old Buda motor from his own father’s retired fishing boat. He cast the hatchets and knives in clay molds, hammered the edges on an anvil, honed them with files, then his belt sander, and finally with emery paper and the sharpening stone. He’d stacked leather for the grips and cut moose hide for the sheaths, and now here he was, on the shore of Borealis Lake, trimming a birch stick by the fire.
He worked, as he always did, as though he were completely free of thought, his hands obeying instinct rather than the instructions of his own mind. Before Gus finished the first song, he’d already cut all the bark from the birch.
Gus stopped playing. “What are you making there?”
Harry sighted the birch up and down, looked across the fire, and said, “Play me another ditty, would you?”
Gus strummed the mandolin only once before repeating the question.
“I guess,” Harry said, “it’s going to be a calendar. We can notch all our days on it.” He nodded, satisfied, and said, “Now play me that song again, eh?”
So Gus did. He played until the stars jumped out.
—
For two days they paddled against the Burnt Wood’s weakening current, portaging the saults, making lunches over fires on the river’s edge, pitching their canvas each night in clearings. Already each was growing used to the silence of the other’s company. And to the strange beckonings from the wilderness.
Here the river was narrowing even as the trees on shore grew more distant. On either side they could touch the tall and browning cattails with the blades of their paddles, the boggy water beyond seeping toward the jack pines ashore. Every thirty strokes or so they came upon matted shoreline where moose had come to forage.
As they paddled Harry sang full-voiced: “Le fils du roi s’en va chassant, / En roulant ma boule. / Avec son grand fusil d’argent, rouli,-roulant, ma boule roulant…”
“What’s with the love songs?” Gus said.
“They’re chansons. Voyageur songs.”
“Why holler about it?”
“You want to surprise some bull along this tight stretch of river? With nowhere to turn? They’re hornier than you are right now. We come on one unannounced and you’ll have an antler up your ass faster than you could squeal about it.” Harry smiled and started singing again. They paddled on.
An hour later, the river and muskeg funneled into a narrow watercourse no more than two feet deep and six feet wide. Their paddles struck the rocky riverbed, sending sharp reverberations into their hands. After a few minutes, Harry stepped from his canoe and unpacked a length of rope. Gus did as Harry did. They knotted their lines to the bows, shouldered and tied off the line, and started dragging their boats single-file up what was left of the river. When the trees closed above them, they had to bend and then crawl through the canopy of boughs and branches.
“I hope this means we’re near Burnt Wood Lake,” Harry said. “We ought to be.”
The river was frigid and already Gus’s hands were numb. “Were you expecting this?”
“I wasn’t expecting anything. I will not.” Harry looked over his shoulder, down the starboard side of his canoe, and fixed Gus with his stare. He remembered that stare, Gus did. All these years later, he recognized it as a warning. For Harry knew, sure as Gus did himself, that asking if he’d been anticipating a tangle of trees and shallow water was his son’s first complaint. And them only three days into a trip that would last months.
Gus had not questioned their planning much, but he had wondered—on the night before they departed—why they didn’t just drive up to the public access on Burnt Wood Lake and put in there. It would have taken less than an hour from their front door, saved them a lot of unnecessary effort, and spared them this cloying mess of trees.
The reason, Harry had told him, was that since the “voyageurs of yore” didn’t have the benefit of being t
owed up to the public access, neither should he and Gus. This notion sounded noble to Gus, and of course it was in the spirit of their adventure. But clambering on hands and knees to tow his canoe like some blind and stubborn horse, he was unable to check himself. Gus said, “This water is freezing.”
“I suppose we’ll run into our share of cold water between now and then,” Harry said, still staring down the length of his canoe.
“I thought this was a river,” Gus said, rolling now.
Harry got up on one knee, cupped his hand into the water, and brought it up to his mouth. “Gus, bud, there’s gonna be stretches that’re tougher than others. We’re gonna get wet and we’re gonna get cold. I’ll save you the trouble of discovery on those accounts. Let’s not piss in our soup, eh?”
Gus didn’t say anything, only pulled his canoe past his father and tunneled farther up the river.
—
“You have to wonder why we were there,” Gus said that November morning he got to talking. “Not just on that stretch of river, but heading into the wilderness beyond. It was so incredibly reckless. To leave at that time of year, for starters. With our provisions? With his miscarriage of a plan? My God.” He paused. “And of course I should’ve been in college. Should have been running to college. But I didn’t even think of it. Can you imagine that? What mess of bent and secret lives was leading us into this? How much anger and grief?”
“Folks always chase their sadness around. Into the woods. Up to the attic. Out onto the ice.”
Gus closed his eyes. “I guess they do.”
“You’re chasing yours.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe it’s chasing me.”
“Could be.”
“But why was I being petulant three days in? Had he overestimated me? Was I still just a kid? A little boy?” He moved his head like he was nodding yes and shaking no at the same time. “Or were we just in over our heads? Who can say? I only know that when the trees above me lifted and I got off my knees and shook like a wet dog, Burnt Wood Lake opened up right before me. I looked back at my father, still a hundred yards behind, and do you know what I felt?”