Geography of Water
Page 18
We have rebuilt parts of the lodge, but mostly we have let the forest have what it wants. It seems better that way, to melt into the trees rather than the way we always did it before.
We have talked deep into the night about babies, little girls with hair almost silver, and someday we may decide. If it happens, we won’t name her after a rifle, or the river, or the mountains. She’ll have a name she can live up to, something solid yet something that can bend.
I never changed my own name. I meant to, but after a few years it seemed like I needed to hold on to one thing that belonged to the past. Old ghosts can be good ones, after enough time has passed. Sam calls me Win now, and that is close enough.
We never found my mother. Maybe we were wrong in turning back by Lake of the Fallen Moon. Maybe we should have continued on, down to the place where the avalanches roared in spring, drinking from the sweet chill of all the waterfalls, cutting steps in the shrinking glaciers, and finally reaching town. Maybe we could have done it, despite all the odds stacked against us. Maybe that is what she did, although if anyone in town knows her, they aren’t saying.
There is one thing I would like to ask her. Sometimes, late at night when I lean against Sam’s back, love like a slow current of a deep river passing between us, I wonder if her leaving was her final gift to my father. Though it is difficult to imagine, she must have known that he could not survive in a world without big trees, and even more, a world in which he was not the same man he wanted himself to be. I wonder if she left because she knew that her vanishing was the only way he would have the courage to release the brake on the chair.
I will never know the answer.
Our lodge is a happy place where families come in by floatplane, chubby toddlers and wide-eyed parents, all hoping to see bears. They are from places like Indiana and New Jersey, and as far removed from the old bear hunting clients as they can possibly be.
They tiptoe through this strange place instead of trying to own it. We teach them about the circle of life, salmon and bears and trees, and we hope that some of it sticks.
Birdman sometimes comes over for a few days and shows them tracks pressed firmly into damp sand, and the kids all love him and cry when he leaves. They call him the Alaska Santa because of his big beard, and I think he likes the name.
His gaze sometimes lingers on the little girls with cinnamon-colored hair. Angela has never come to Floathouse Bay, and he does not look for her. “Someday,” he says, but with each year that goes by he says it less and less.
Isaiah never comes to our bay. He says that the memories are too hard for him to work his way through. He likes his peace in Floathouse Bay and says the only way he will leave is when he is carried out feet first. Instead Sam and I travel the distance between us and him often, piloting our boat past all of God’s cargo pockets. We sit on the dock and sip liquid that burns all the way down our throats, and we talk about the old days and the days to come. Sometimes we swim, though I never open my eyes underwater. I don’t want to know what lies beneath.
The coast seems smaller now than it ever was. We are part of a loose network of people who have chosen to live here for our own reasons, and we talk back and forth by radio telephone and on the marine channels. We share everything now. The new couple at the fish weir sends slabs of salmon to us; we bundle up our old magazines and newspapers that our clients leave with us for them. We share fuel and food and bodies to help search for the missing. It is a better way to live.
If anyone speaks of my father now it is filtered through years of forgetting. They talk about how he ran a boat as though it was part of his body rather than a man-made piece of fiberglass and steel. They talk about the storms he taunted and the narrow escapes he made. They raise their glasses in salute. He is a legend now, just the way he would have liked it. Nobody mentions the other side of him anymore.
There is only one reason why I cannot forget that side of him, and that reason is all tangled up in Enchantment Bay. What was begun in Enchantment Bay is a story that is not yet finished. It is a story involving wood and desire and what some people call progress.
Ernie tells us that the loggers are on their way. Sometimes I think I can hear the whine of their saws, although Sam tells me it is only the wind. It will be years before they get here, he tells me, and by then we will be dead and buried under the muskeg. I want to believe him, I really do.
Sometimes we sit on the dock in summer, and I can feel the red cliffs breathing above us. I try not to look too deep into the water for fear of what I might see. Instead I look across the sparkling surface, watching only what lies above.
I remember one thing that I had long since forgotten. Days Uncle Dean disappeared, my father went out alone searching. Did he go to the red cliffs? He never told us if he climbed to the lake, or if he found pieces of a silver plane. I often wonder if he did. Sitting on the dock that last night, the ashes of a fire swallowed by tide, did he realize that I would soon discover what had been left behind? I have so many questions I would like to ask him, but that is the one I hold closest to my heart.
On other nights I think of Lake of the Fallen Moon and what secrets it still holds. I think of the salmon circling in the ocean, following their own map home, and of all the things that I don’t know and never will know.
I listen for the whales and wait for them to come back to our bay. The ones who pass through might be the unpredictable transients, trying out new bays as they travel the coast. They might be the residents, seeking the familiar and the safe. They might be the elusive offshores, about which little is known. There is no way to tell, so I listen for them all. I try to learn what it is that they want me to know.