by Mary Emerick
“That never works,” Sam said. “The boats don’t get that close because of the rocks. You know how hard it is to see someone on shore? I’ve had a hell of a time just in one bay trying to find the clients after a stalk sometimes.”
He shrugged his coat back on. “I thought about it the first year. Just quitting this place for good. Hiking out to the red cliffs and waving down a long-liner. Leaving you all high and dry.”
“I never knew,” I whispered. Sam had not been one of us. He never joined us in the evenings when the clients sprawled large and loose limbed on the sofas, their boots propped on the coffee table. The bottles emptied and the voices getting louder, Sam had faded away to his room above the boathouse. Assistant guides were a rung lower than everyone else, and nobody invited him to stay either except for an occasional client’s wife, tipsy on fresh air and white wine. None of us, especially Sam, took those offers seriously. The wives were like frosting on a cake, fluffy pretty things, but not important.
On the afternoons we had stood side by side with fillet knives, I thought that I knew him, but now I realized that he listened to me talk about whales and salmon and everything else I thought I knew, but I had never thought to ask. Caught in my own world, I never even wondered about his.
“You have to know this about me, Winnie. I’m not an educated guy. Barely made it through high school, D grades all the way, and nobody thought I would amount to much. Where I’m from, a guy either went for the sugar beet factory or the marines. Had a bunch of kids, held down a stool at the local pub, and called it good. Kind of felt like drowning to me. I could tell that Roy was waiting for me to give up like all of the other guides before me. That’s what kept me from walking the coast. Damn it, I was going to prove him wrong. But every day I woke up with a knot in my stomach. There’s so many ways to get it wrong out here.”
I knew what he meant. There was a thin line between life and death. I imagined it to be much thicker in other places, where the land’s belly was flat and safe and warm instead of cloaked in greasy deer cabbage and puncturing devil’s club. There were places where you could wear shorts and sandals all day long and tan your skin to a golden bronze. I was used to the way it was here; I knew nothing else. But Sam, coming from somewhere soft, would not be.
“I’ve been everywhere, it seems like,” he said. “Tried my hand at a bunch of different things. Walked steel. Drove truck. Fought fire. I always quit them, thinking there was something better, something fresher. Know what I mean? Guess you don’t. People like you, you’re glued to a place and can’t imagine leaving it. There were all those little towns I drove though—Alpine, Texas; Baker, Nevada—just dots on a map, lights on in the houses, and I’d get this kind of lonely feeling as I went through, like I envied them on one hand but thought I was the luckiest guy in the world on the other because I could keep on driving. It got old, you know? I just kept on looking to find that place that said home to me. Where I could stop moving. Sometimes I thought I had left it too long, that I’d be some old guy driving forever. When I saw that newspaper ad Roy put in the paper, I was couch surfing in Seattle, waiting for my luck to turn, down to my last hundred dollars. It was a lifesaver, I thought. Do you remember the day I showed up?”
I did remember. I was fifteen, poised on an invisible brink between child and woman. We had gone out to meet the plane, stuffed with clients and enormous duffel bags. Sam climbed out last, a fringe of blond hair a little too long, his eyes brimming with excitement. Looking at him, I had felt a little fizz of possibility.
“Miles and miles of mountains,” Sam recalled. “We flew straight over the island and all I could see were lakes still frozen, rivers so big that nobody could cross them. Places where people have never set foot. Then we fly into this little bay, taking that downwind turn sharp, and land on the water, and there you three are, like people from another world. Rifles over your shoulders, all three of you, like you were defending the place, I didn’t know then that was how you did it on the coast. Nothing domesticated about any of you three. I had never seen a girl before who looked like you, hair almost silver, eyes blue but with ice in them like the lakes we had flown over. You looked like you had grown out of this place. This is it, I told myself. This is where it will all work out for me.
“Now Roy’s gone and it just feels like I’m adrift in the ocean. What will we do without him?”
I knew so much about my father that Sam did not. He had seen only what he wanted to see—a volatile and vibrant man, leaning out over the bow of a boat, binoculars in one hand. But Sam was right. Despite what I knew as the truth, there was still an unbridgeable gap that my father had used to fill with his presence. Never Summer Bay had been so much about him that he and the bay had often seemed to be one thing. Now it would be an entirely different place.
“Back home,” Sam said, “the same guys on the same bar stools. They can’t even switch it up, move to a different seat. Slap me on the back, buy me a round, say things like they wish they could go out west, start over. You can, I tell them, you just need a set of keys and a map, but they just say they can’t. Mortgage, wife, got to pay for the boat and the ATV. And then I wonder, what the hell made me different, why that life is enough for them and not enough for me.”
“What about your parents?” I asked. “What are they like?”
Sam palmed his water bottle. “My father, he likes to say that he’s never spent a night outside of his house in twenty years. Slept in the same bed for twenty years, he says. Kissed only one woman, owned the same set of wheels. He goes three places: the bowling alley, the gas station to bitch over coffee with the other laid-off factory guys, and to the grain store to buy new Carhartts. He and my mom, they just don’t dream very big. They think I’ll be back. Everybody thinks I’ll be back.”
“Will you ever go back?”
“There was this one time,” Sam said, “we were stuck in Kiksadi Bay, waiting out a gale. Even Roy wouldn’t risk it, the wind was howling, the seas fifteen feet or more. Nothing to do but drink and sit. Roy was liquored up, you know how his eyes were so deep and black you thought there was no bottom to them? He had us, me and the hunter, in some kind of spell. He told us that everyone was afraid, even him. That what he did was think himself big, the way you do when a bear is bluffing you. You know how a bear turns to the side when it sees you, shows you the biggest part of its body? You do that, he said. Take out all the tools, he said, your courage, your hammer, your ax. Bluff this country right back, and sooner or later you won’t be afraid anymore. What shit have they been feeding you all your life, he said. You can do anything, he said, don’t let anyone tell you different. How could I go back home, Winnie?”
Sam seemed to shake himself out of the memory with physical effort, picking up his canteen and taking another long drink. “She didn’t walk the coast,” he said. “Do you still want to turn back?”
I regarded what lay ahead of us. Looking carefully, I could see the places where someone slim and unsubstantial could weave through the branches like a ghost, leaving no trace of her presence. That hope allowed me to pull myself to my feet. Birdman hooted far ahead of us, and we hollered back.
“So we go on,” Sam said. He shoved the canteen back in his pack. “I’ll be right beside you. You can count on that.”
But he was wrong. Soon we were forced apart by the trees. I lost him in the dark woods and did not see him again for hours.
Eleven
I arrived at the red cliffs at the moment when the sun decided to slip below the horizon. Darkness spilled over the rock face and into the clearing. The eyes of little animals traced fiery patterns through the dusk as they scattered for shelter.
The others came from the forest after me one by one, looking as if they had been in a fierce clash with the woods. We stood taking inventory of each other. Already everyone bore battle scars: Birdman limped more than usual, and a lump slowly rose on Sam’s forehead where a stout branch had kicked back against his face. My legs were scraped, my hair a t
angled mass down my back.
“We made it,” Sam said, dropping his pack and windmilling his arms. I knew what he was thinking. Nobody would go through the cedar forest on purpose. Nobody except the hopeless or the very determined.
We set up camp in the muskeg, unwilling to go on at night into an unexplored country. Though we carried headlamps, it would be easy to bypass something important, a clue. A small footprint pressed into the mud. A scrap of clothing, caught by the arms of a passing bush. Even the easiest way to pass through the landscape. Instead we settled in for the night, building a small fire and tying the ends of a tarp to the trees.
Huddled up next to a small slice of muskeg, the cliffs glowed with a strange light. This was ultramafic rock, Birdman told us, placing his hand on a slab. Volcanic intrusions, brimming with iron that stained the rock red. This type of rock was as substantial as we could hope for. Our feet would stick to it even at a dangerous angle, but in places the weather was slowly crumbling the rock into tiny pebbles. We would have to be careful. We would have to respect the rock.
“We live in a ring of fire,” he explained, drawing a map in the ashes of our own fire. The map circled up toward Redoubt in the north, the most famous volcano of all, and down through the archipelago toward the lights of Seattle. It was a wide, sprawling circle of earthquakes and volcanoes, the tectonic plates moving uneasily beneath the surface. North of here, flaky ash from an eruption hundreds of years ago made up one layer of the soil, a lighter-colored band in a dark cake.
This was a dynamic land, he went on, the strange light from the cliffs falling on his face. It shifted always under the pressures of rock and sea. Years ago an earthquake had caused a massive landslide, a whole section of cliff buckling into the water. He had seen the scar of the resulting wave, seventeen hundred feet up a mountain, scraped bald and treeless.
This was the most I had heard Birdman say at one time, and the effort seemed to drain him. He hunched down on his heels to stir a pot of rice and beans and said no more for a while.
Sam and I sat by the fire. It was the closest I had ever been to him besides the time in the pantry when I thought that I could feel the heat from his body radiating out toward me. Probably it was just the fire, a trick of the cliffs and the wind conspiring together, but I found that I was warm for the first time since I had come back to Never Summer Bay.
“Why did you go, Winnie?” Sam asked. “I woke up that day and you were gone.”
Sam’s room above the boathouse had been barely big enough to fit him. It was an afterthought, cobbled together with scraps of plywood and reached by an uncertain set of wobbly stairs. The only sounds he could hear from his one window were the slap of water on the dock and the gentle nudges of boats against buoys. Down at the boathouse, you could pretend not to know anything. Instead you could whistle your way through each night, concerned only with the way the wind howled through the bay, the old trees straining with each blow. The only way to know what was happening up at the lodge was for someone to tell.
I searched for words. It wasn’t just the two of them and their unending dance that I had tried to escape. I realized now that I had needed to leave to decide what kind of woman I would be. Would I be like the bear hunters’ wives, forever one step behind their husbands, burdened with the responsibility of staying beautiful, or would I become a woman who let a man carve his way into her body and mind? I wanted to be neither, but I had no others to choose from in Never Summer Bay.
“My father was a dangerous man,” I told him finally. “Surely you knew that.”
“Roy taught me everything about this coast,” Sam said. “I can still see him, floppy salt-stained hat on his head, showing me how to tie a bowline. Took me forever to get it right, but he wouldn’t give up on me. If you can’t tie knots, tie a lot, he used to say. He saw something in me that nobody else ever had. I liked it, that he believed in me. I knew he wasn’t even keel, but I didn’t want to know what else might be going on at night after I closed my door.”
“Nobody wanted to know.”
“There was one time,” Sam said. “Someone hadn’t tied a boat up tight enough, and it was driving me crazy, banging against the dock. I knew I would get chewed out for it in the morning, so I went out to fix it. Althea was out there with an ice pack from the freezer. She had built a little fire on the beach and was tending it. Her eyes were bright as stars. I don’t know where you were that night. An accident, she said, fell down the stairs. I knew she wasn’t telling the truth, but she made me promise not to do anything. Promise me, she kept saying. It will be all right, it always is, she said.”
He sighed. “I’ve often asked myself one question,” he said. “Why did I let myself get so tangled up in your family? And I keep coming back to that first day. You three belonged here, just like the salmon and the bears. It’s what I’ve been looking for, seems like forever. Being here was like learning a whole new language, one you three already knew.”
He watched me rebraid my hair, the long strands slipping out of my fingers before I could capture them. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but even though I could sense something wasn’t right over there in the lodge, I thought if I told anyone then it all would change for me. I’d be out of a job, back on the street again. Back on that same damn bar stool that they were saving for me. Heading back home to people who told me I would be back within a month because I didn’t have what it took to make it up here.”
I was silent. To me, how we lived was how everyone lived. The clients brought their own stories of trees that changed color and buildings that shut out the sky, but those things never seemed real to me. “You’re so lucky to get to live here,” they would say sometimes, strapping their Rolexes and worried expressions back on as the plane came in to bring them back to their lives. Even though they said it, I sensed that they would not want to stay, that they were ready to leave us behind.
“You have to understand, to me this place is pure magic. Roy was magic. I didn’t want it ever to end.”
I understood. I remembered the afternoons where it felt like I had been dreaming awake, following my mother down the beach under a rain so light it was like something else, rain and not quite.
“When the hunts were done for the season and I’d be down guiding in Panama, I’d lie on that boat sweating and dreaming of the coast,” Sam went on. “Each year I both couldn’t wait to come back and was afraid to come back, but in the end this place always won out.”
“Why did you keep coming back if you were afraid?”
Now the rain had crept up on us without us noticing. It scrabbled on the tarp like tiny claws. Birdman dished up a plate and retreated far beneath the tarp, chewing in silence. His eyes were half closed, but I knew he missed nothing.
“It’s like this,” Sam said. He had not touched his food. “There were minutes, hours even, when everything just clicked into place. The boat would be humming along, no rocks in sight, no kelp to foul the prop, water pancake flat. Roy let me take the wheel and he took a nap on the bow, trusting me. Those minutes would add up into days, I thought, until it could last for the whole season. Then the next day the fog would come in, a whole night of it, we’d run aground because I screwed up with the depth finder, and things would go to hell. That’s the way it always was. Hell and heaven all in one day.”
Something he said sparked a memory. The night of the fog. I had forgotten it up until now, but I suddenly remembered the piece of paper, hidden in the pocket of my jacket. It wasn’t my mother’s handwriting, or my father’s either. Who had written it and what did it mean?
Hundreds of clients had passed through the lodge, hundreds of people with their own tragedies and dreams. Pillows got moved around all the time; each spring we had aired them out during a hint of sun to keep the mold at bay. It was entirely possible that some lonely wife had carried a love letter with her to Alaska and hidden it there at some point, pushed it deep into the feathers where it would never be found. Or maybe some of the couples that came t
ogether on bear hunts were entwined more than their respective spouses knew. There were all sorts of secrets in the world.
I thought of the secret that Sam carried.
“Tell me what happened to him. With the bear. How did it happen?”
The silence between us went on for so long that I thought he wasn’t going to speak. I thought that I could hear my own heart beating over the lazy flap of the tarp. How could Sam not hear it? How was I still sitting here anchored to the earth, just a sliver of darkness separating the two of us? Enchantment Bay was a place that I had held in my heart for years. Each time my father had raised his voice, I let myself slip back to that time. It was the best memory I had of my father.
Finally Sam said, “We were between clients. Just the three of us in the lodge. Ernie came by one night with the barge. He stopped in for a beer. We talked a little about what he had seen going on up and down the coast, you know, like he does. This time he told us that the word in town was that there was going to be a timber sale in Enchantment Bay. The cruisers were in there, marking the trees with blue paint. Life and death, they got to choose.”
I could imagine my father sitting at the table, simmering with a stew of frustration and rage. I could see him pacing, his body seized with the need to do something, anything.
“So Roy, he thought he should go there to see what was happening. He never hunted the alder tunnels. He left those bears alone. He respected them. They were the oldest, smartest bears, he used to say. Bears that were so smart they turned nocturnal so that they could have nothing to do with us. We have to do something, he said. The bears need us to do something.
“What can we do, I asked him. I knew we couldn’t fight it. Just let it go, I said. It’s only one bay. There’s plenty of others. The bears will adapt. They’ll move.”
He sighed. “You know, he yelled at me a lot. Yelled when I wasn’t quick enough with the net. Yelled when I spooked a bear. I was used to it, the yelling. He always calmed down eventually, it blew over, he acted like it never happened. He didn’t yell this time though. He just looked real sad and said, ‘What happens to those trees happens to all of us.’”