by Mary Emerick
Sometimes I started a letter to my mother: Is everything still the same? Should I come home? I discarded each one. She knew where I was. Because she did not send for me, she must be telling me something. Stay where it is safe. Wait for a sign.
Maybe my brother had taken my place. Maybe he was the one now who found the eggs the cormorants left in the cliffs. Maybe he was the one now who listened to the stories of the Vancouver expedition, men in tall ships years from home, who had climbed our bluffs to leave rock cairns there. Maybe he was the one who had broken the red thread, and peace had come to Never Summer Bay. I knew that I could find out by asking Ernie, who never backed down from answering a question, but in the end I did not want to know.
“Where would I go?” I asked. I wanted Isaiah to point me on a way that was easy and true. I wanted him to pull out a map and run his stout fingers down a black line. Instead his eyes avoided mine. His own path here had been crooked, a zigzag line across the country. He had barely made it here, he told me, arriving with a carpenter’s belt and little else, escaping where he had come from by the skin of his teeth. There were states that wanted him; women who cursed him. He would not help me choose.
“Not that we want you to go,” he said. “Kind of getting used to having you around, honest truth. But you know, others have come here before you. You won’t be the last one to come. Only difference will be what you leave behind.”
I knew about leaving things behind. Because I had left everything in Never Summer Bay, I wore the clothes of a woman named Honey. In her rush to get somewhere else, she had left piles of clothes behind. She was just a story now; Isaiah had no idea where she had gone or where she had come from before piloting the sailboat into Floathouse Bay. She had told a nearly unbelievable tale about waking in the night, her husband missing from the boat. Of driving in circles under a night sky prickled with stars, calling out his name. When she bargained for a ride on Ernie’s barge and a hitch to Anchorage, she left the sailboat and all of her old life behind.
People left things behind all the time. My mother and I had found entire houses sometimes in other bays down the coast, hastily built hovels of driftwood and baling wire. They were listing and roofless, wind blowing tattered curtains in open windows. Drawn by a strand of gold pushing through marble, they had dug adits and built tracks for hauling carts down to the shoreline. They dynamited through rock and tunneled deep inside, far past where the sun could ever reach. At one time, my father had said, there were hundreds of people scratching out a living on this coast.
I had always wondered what happened to those people. Where had they gone? The gold they had worked so hard for dried up about midcentury; it was too tough to work and many must have drifted on to other places where life was easier. “Couldn’t hack it,” my father had dismissed them, rowing out to the deeper water where he could start the engine. “Not like us. We’ll be here forever.”
Whenever I pulled on Honey’s clothes, I wondered where she was now. Did she dream of this place? Did she ever think of what she had left behind?
I thought also of her husband, a careless slip on a wet deck, standing unharnessed near the edge, the concrete of the water coming to meet him as he fell. How long had he treaded water, his veins turning to ice?
What Isaiah didn’t know was that I left Floathouse Bay once when he and Birdman were on a walkabout. They did that sometimes, a rifle slung across Birdman’s shoulder, a walking staff in his other hand, climbing out of sight into the muskeg and beyond. They only left for a short while, long enough for the morning fog to dissolve. Whatever they talked about, they did not say, but I imagined they went back to the small, humid country where they were young men, metal necklaces burning like fire around their necks.
On one of those days the sereneness of Floathouse Bay was not enough to hold me back. I had been alone with my thoughts too long, the book on tanning hides not enough to keep my attention. The pull of home was too strong. It was easy to forget the bad and remember only the good.
The Lund fired up like magic, and I held onto the tiller, unzipping the water of the bay. Racing the flood tide, the boat moved ten, twenty knots as the bulge of water pushed me out into the strait. My hair flew behind me like a flag, and my eyes watered from the kiss of the salt spray. This was the first time I had been out in the ocean for weeks and its immenseness frightened me at first. Islands with trees like crowded teeth in a stranger’s mouth were all that kept me from being the only dot in a field of blue. The fishing fleet was nowhere in sight, holed up somewhere down the coast. A pod of dolphins kept me company instead, playing in my wake.
I had headed north, past all the small cuts in the coast that the Coast Pilot had named variations of the same theme. Gods Pocket. Lords Pocket. “God must wear cargo pants,” Uncle Dean had joked once, pointing at the chart with a stubby finger, half of it mangled from an accident with kelp in the prop, years ago when he didn’t know better. The southern swell rolled mercilessly into those pockets, washing the beaches high into the trees and rolling the same driftwood logs over and over on the cobbles and off. No place to seek long-term refuge, these were places of last resort where indeed you might pray for deliverance.
I knew this section of coast only from the nautical charts because we never had gone this far south. My father had drawn a line on this section of map, telling us it was dangerous to go farther. Better to stick close to what we knew, he had said. I had studied what lay below the line often, trying to translate the terse words: “Awash at LW” and “Sh” were places to avoid, barely submerged rocks and shoals. Lines of breakers were marked on the charts; places where water slammed into rock shelves with enough force to flip a boat.
There was a whole set of descriptions for the sea floor: rock, mud, sand, or gravel. Numbers marched up and down the page, the depth you had before the bottom came up to meet a boat. Someone had figured all this out once by trial and error. Still, there were wrecks. We had seen them on the beaches, abandoned pilothouses shoved far into the sand by tides, scattered metal rusting across the rocks.
I could study the charts for hours, but the ocean was far from being completely known. Around the shallow edges of each small bay, silver-lined throats of eddies churned, boat-snatchers. Sticky mud filled shallow estuaries. In an open boat, I had to pick the safest line and the charts could not always tell me which one to choose.
As I passed by one of the cargo pockets, the engine cut out with a sigh. The boat bobbed in the swell, pushed toward the sharp rock line. In minutes it could be tossed like driftwood, a hundred pieces washing up on an isolated shore. When I scrambled to pull the starter cord, the engine bumbled along in the way that meant there was water in the fuel. I blamed that for the reason I turned back, that and the dark brow of a storm far out to sea, blowing in my direction. I knew those were not the only reasons.
Maybe Isaiah did know. Maybe he heard the ticking of a cooling engine as he and Birdman strolled back along the bay. Maybe he saw me, my hair slick with saltwater as I hurried to drop back into my chair. But he said nothing about any of those things, only stamping his boots to loosen the mud from the estuary. “Looks like someone could use a hot cup of cowboy coffee,” he said heartily. I loved him in that moment, both for what he said and did not say. Pretending to read words blurred on the page, I thought about how little the two men had and how much they had given me.
If I had said that out loud, they would have thought I meant prawns from the pot, eaten half raw, pungent venison fried up in a pan. I knew it was more than that, something intangible, sweet as the unexpected taste of sugar on my lips. I might have called it hope.
Three
When I was ten years old, there was a time when things had been good for the longest I could remember. There were no voices knifing the night, no slammed doors. He had changed, my mother whispered in the kitchen. He had promised that things would always be this way. The days, she said, would melt into each other, smooth and sweet like butter.
It was noon, Sept
ember. The best month of all. The rain cleared out some of the time, leaving us with days baked crisp, each one a sunny hedge against the winter to come. A good month to forget what had been and what would be. The blueberry bushes had been turning blood red on the avalanche slopes. The days were shortening, entire minutes given over to night. At the estuary, the place where briny water mixed with fresh, the tide fell slowly, reluctantly, the way it always did after midpoint.
My father had set the anchor on the bow of the boat, holding on to one end of the line he had attached to it. Then he shoved the boat hard out into the water. When it was as far as it would go, he yanked on the rope tied to the anchor and it splashed into the sea. He wound the end of the line around a rock far up on the shore, tying it off with a bowline knot.
“They call this an Indian anchor,” he told me. “You have to do it right or else you have to swim for the boat later on. Either that or you’re high and dry when you get back. You remember what that’s like. This isn’t a good place to be after dark, either way.”
In the river, the salmon were dying as they swam. Driven by an invisible force, they pushed upstream, bumping against my boots with sightless, milky eyes. They pooled in the stagnant eddies, their backs humped, mold growing over them in a fine green film. The bears had been eating them, gulping chunks of belly meat and leaving the rest for the birds.
The bodies of fish lay everywhere, dead and dying, their smell sinking into my clothes and hair. It was a smell that clung to us long after we had scrubbed everything down. It was something we had to just wait out. A raft of red-lipped gulls floated as close as they dared, squabbling over scraps. A dozen eagles perched in the trees, also waiting it out.
“Where are the bears?” I asked.
“Watching us from the woods,” my father answered. “Don’t you feel them?”
I had shivered a little with terror and delight, looking around. I had imagined that I could feel them, curled up in their day beds just out of sight. I thought that I could smell them too. I knew that bears generally left people alone, but sometimes they did not. Ernie brought us the news of times when they did not. A blueberry picker on the mainland had grappled with a sow briefly in head-high brush. A pair of backpackers on the other side of the island had been scratched on the legs by a bear investigating their tent, pitched unwisely next to a bear highway. It happens, my father always said when Ernie told his stories. He shrugged. Not to us, he said.
We had left the river and walked through the tidal flat, pushing through grass taller than our heads. I lost sight of him once and all I could see was grass moving as if pushed by an invisible wind. Mud sucked at my boots and I hurried to keep up, taking two steps to his one.
This was not quite sea, not quite land, my father had told me. It was not a place you could count on. Not solid like land, not supple like sea. The best thing to do was to hurry through places like this, he said, the places in between.
At the edge of the tidal flat we paused. We had come to an alder thicket. It grew high up on the avalanche slopes and down through the valley, a solid mass of impenetrable brush.
My father beckoned. “This way,” he said, and I followed him into a tunnel that wormed through the alder. The curved passage was just high enough to stand in, just wide enough for our bodies. Over our heads the branches formed a ceiling, a thick woven mat that blocked out the light.
“What is this?” I asked. My father stepped in the same places the bears did, and I copied him, setting my boots carefully in the muddy depressions.
“The bear tunnels,” he said. “The bears made these. This is how they get from their day beds to the salmon stream. They’ve been walking this way for hundreds of years.”
I stayed on his heels. Going in felt to me like being swallowed down a bear’s throat. It stunk of bears, of decaying fish and something else, a scent I could not name but that only belonged to bears. Icy water dripped off the branches, running under my collar and down my back. The tunnel creaked and groaned as the alders moved in the wind. Anything could be in there. Anything at all.
I did not ask him what would happen if a bear was coming the opposite way. I could only imagine it, a blur of claws and teeth, and I shivered, sticking close to him.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, we had walked out into a giant forest. The spruce trees that grew here were bigger than I had ever seen, their bases fat globes, their tops hundreds of feet into the sky. Moss hung in sodden clumps from the branches, higher than I could climb, thicker around than my father’s arms. In some places, masses of plants grew like hair from the trunks, plants my father called epiphytes, plants that feed on only air.
These trees were older than time, he told me. They had been here before any of us were born, before Vancouver sailed past here on his way north. This place was never crushed under the weight of the glaciers like the rest of the island, he said. It had remained ice free, becoming a refuge for the bears, isolating them from their inland cousins. They waited out the ice here, slowly becoming their own species, their fur turning a deeper, darker brown. The bears here were more closely related to polar bears than grizzlies, he said as we walked under the big trees.
It was as dark as evening under the canopy. The rain never reached the ground. Nothing moved, but I could feel the shadows of bears.
“This place belongs to the bears,” my father said. His dark eyes shone.
“The first time I found this place, I was seventeen. I had just come to Alaska, come up from California with Dean. Bought an old boat for a song, and we stumbled in here by accident seeking a good place to anchor. We ended up beaching the boat by accident, a pair of rookies, so we had hours to kill before the tide. Let’s go walk around, I said, see what there is to see here, and Dean said hell no, but I knew if I went, he had to come too, couldn’t show he was afraid. We walked straight across the estuary like you and I just did. We just kept walking, like we were being pulled in. We found the tunnels and dared each other to walk through them. Once we got to this forest I saw ten bears in here eating grass like a herd of cows. We found trees that we could climb and stayed so quiet I didn’t even breathe, and we watched their eyes. It got dark while I sat up there, but I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to watch them all night. Their eyes were like little campfires in the dark, and we could hear them as they moved through the tall grass. Dean was scared to death. Shook like a willow the whole time, shook the whole tree, even though he tried to hide it from me.”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
He laughed. “Some,” he said. “It was crazy not to be afraid. But nobody ever goes back here. The Coast Pilot warns against it. Too narrow, too sandy to hold an anchor. Nobody even knows these trees are here. The bears guard this place. We have a truce here, the bears and me. An understanding. They protect the trees, I protect them.”
It hadn’t really made sense at the time. Bears could travel hundreds of miles. My schoolbooks had told me so. The bears here in Enchantment Bay could be the bears his clients shot several bays down the coast. But looking at my father, I had known he truly believed in what he was saying. Because he believed it, I had decided to believe it too.
Now I wondered if everything I had believed was untrue. My father had always said that the bears were our bread and butter. The bears were the reason we could stay here. Nobody could stay here without killing, he had said. Killing was necessary. “I wouldn’t survive living anywhere else,” he had told us. “And you won’t either. Think you would like living in an apartment building listening to strangers breathe?”
Birdman and Isaiah lived here without killing bears. Instead they bent over the grass flats, painstakingly pulling the tips of fiddleheads and boiling up a fishy-smelling green stew. They collected beach pea, nori algae, and sea lettuce. They filled up bowls with salmonberries. They trapped, but only in small numbers to supplement their disability checks. Birdman hunted for deer, but one animal could sustain them for months.
I studied them as they moved from floathous
e dock to boat, from boat to land, one elastic limbed and giant, the other short and elfin. Isaiah and Birdman reminded me of the way water squirmed through layers of stone, probing for weakness. They blended into the country in a way my father never had. For the first time I realized that I could slip inside the skin of a place without tearing it open.
Four
Isaiah and I took a breather in the muskeg, working the traps, our feet sinking deeper as though we were growing there. He picked up our conversation from a few days ago as if it had been just minutes. “You aren’t the first of your family to live here. The three of them stayed here,” he said. “Althea, Roy, and Dean. Did you know that? Dean and Roy first, for a couple of years, and then the three of them after she came. It was the last winter they were all together, the winter before Dean up and moved to town. Boy howdy, we lit up this bay, us and the Hudson boys.”
My mother had lived here? I had seen no signs of her. The floathouse brimmed with things others had left behind and which Isaiah insisted on storing in case they came back. Besides Honey’s clothes, a chalky white whale’s pelvis gathered green mold in the corner of the outhouse. A mask someone had brought back from India and abandoned hung askew in the front room. Even an entire mink coat, ragged from mice’s meals, lay puffy and sodden with humidity in the mud room. These were all things that had meant something to somebody at one time. I had not thought to look for souvenirs of my family.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “They never told me.”
My father had always told me that going to Floathouse Bay meant entering a boiling pot of crazy. The people there were twisted by the war, he said, knotted up like a rope gone bad from too much saltwater and wind. Friends once, he had said, but no more. He never said why, and I had always known not to ask. Something dark lurked there, something impossible to breach.