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Girl With Boat

                                                           by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

            So far as I know, they’re all dead.  I left in late autumn, four months after my mother died, and a few days before the river froze up.  I don’t see how they could have continued on without her, though the twins were practically men by then.  We all had depended so completely on her.  Father was the dreamer, the one who launched our life up here, but she was the one who figured out how to till the frozen soil so we could plant early, how to dry berries so that they didn’t mold in the winter, how to staunch the flow of blood the time Derek sliced through his ankle with the axe.  Father hadn’t wanted to bring books with us.  He said primitive men hadn’t had books.  He said the fun part was figuring out things for ourselves. 

            I am paddling upriver.  I am returning after an absence of 33 years.  I don’t know what I’ll find.

            We moved to our inlet here on Sweet Creek, in eastern Alaska, when I was seven and the boys were five.  Father and Mother must have been in their early thirties.  He had a degree in political science and she in education.  Until we left New England for the arctic, he worked construction and she taught junior high.  I don’t remember anything about the planning stages.  My first memory of our Alaskan life is driving to the airport in the middle of the night.

Mother’s enthusiasm held through the flight to Fairbanks, but foundered as soon as she boarded the four-seater bush plane.  We three children were left with the bush pilot’s wife while they flew north on reconnaissance.  Father cited the primacy of local knowledge as his rationale for letting the pilot choose the location for the rest of our lives.  In hindsight, I have to admit that was wise.  Had Father made the choice, I would probably be dead, too.  He’d never been a practical man.  I remember our night in the pilot’s small home in Fairbanks as he and Father pored over maps.  Father couldn’t focus, didn’t want to look, used his hands to wave away specifics.  Over and over again, he repeated our requirements:  a gentle creek, a flat place to build, good hunting, and complete isolation, a site where we would not encounter other people.  The pilot would nod impatiently and try draw Father’s attention back to the map.

I also remember my extreme relief, the prospect of enormous grief sloughing away, when the pilot’s wife drove me and my brothers to the airstrip.  She said our parents had found the spot, and her husband would fly us there.  Unlike my mother, I was all too glad to board that plane.  Reunion with my parents was all that mattered back then. 

I sat up front with the pilot and looked down at the frozen rivers and snowy forests.  It was May, many weeks before the thaw.  As we landed in a frosty meadow, I saw Mother and Father standing on the edge, next to heavy conifers, she hugging herself tightly, he filling his lungs with arctic air, as if he were breathing for the first time in his life. 

            I’ve resisted romanticizing my childhood.  I’ve refused to use the stories to gain attention.  I’ve kept my survivalist past – it’s difficult even now as I paddle toward it, to use those harsh words – hidden even from lovers.  I don’t know if I’m protecting myself or my father.  The hold of a spiritual inheritance, a man’s dream, especially when it’s so fierce, can surprise you.  Even if you see it as wrong-headed.  I could hardly bring myself to tell my guides the location of the cabin.  It was our secret.  Our security.  Our only hope.  Father’s Eden.  He had asked the bush pilot to not tell us the name of our creek, if it had one, so that we could never tell anyone where we were.  After the pilot dropped me and my brothers off, we all watched him bank his plane toward the west, and then Father said, “Sweet Creek.”  And that was it. 

Later I would learn that when we paddled downstream we reached another river with a name we also refused, merely calling it Big River.  Another couple long days’ float down that and we came to the mighty Yukon.  Once a year Father made this journey to Fort Yukon where he bought a few supplies.  He’d return from these trips in a strange mood of combined elation and depression, as if the view of the outside world excited and relieved him, while at the same time those feelings disappointed him in himself.  He felt weakened by our need to buy oats and nails and even boots.  When the boys got older, they begged to be allowed to go along to Fort Yukon, but he never let them, claiming that there wouldn’t be room in the boat for all the supplies.  This wasn’t true.  He didn’t want them to learn the way out. 

            It has taken me decades to realize that I never really did get out.  From age 7 to age 17 I lived here in isolation, with my mother and father and twin little brothers, a girl growing up with the bear and river and aspen.  I have sometimes wished I could find a way to tell my story.  It’s highly romantic.  It could win me much.  But it is both the heart of my loneliness and also my heart.  It is my lifelong isolation.  I am afraid that if I told it, I would be gutted, left with nothing at all.

Today, to make my return bearable, I tell myself that I am paddling up this river to visit my mother’s grave.  That’s what I told my guides, too.  It is the only way I can let myself come.  Each paddle stroke brings me closer to that spot in the upper meadow, where she once flagged down a bush pilot to rescue her and where she is now buried.  But I am coming back for so much more than a visit to my mother’s grave.  Now, just a couple of miles away, I realize that I am hoping that by visiting this mythic place I can release myself from its grip. 

            My guides, Ross and Stuart, help in ways they don’t know.  They are so sweet and young and handsome.  So well-meaning.  They make me feel safe.  It is true that they can’t hide their admiration for my father.  Their lust for his risk is fixed in their eyes, hangs in their open mouths.  I am grateful for this and resentful of it, both.  I don’t break the spell by telling them how different they are from him.  They have read many, many books on plants, mountains, rivers, and survival.  They know how to tie dozens of knots, build good fires, roll a kayak.  I am greatly comforted by their skills.  Furthermore, they have evolved far past simple survival.  They enjoy sipping Scotch at dusk, the warmth of their expedition-weight sleeping bags, spinning long tales of their adventures.  They make me want to tell my story at last.  In fact, they make me want to start my love life over, to meet boys like them who might understand.  Thirty-three years ago, I delivered myself from this wilderness, but had I known how, had I known boys like Ross and Stuart, I might too have delivered myself from the emotional thicket in which I’ve spent my life roaming.  Had I known not only how to tell my story but also why I must.

            Please don’t misunderstand.  I’ve lived a happy life with good friends, fulfilling work, and lots of lovers.  I couldn’t ask for more.  Yet I’m aware that I long for an intensity I wish I didn’t long for.  My early years gave me a wildness of heart that I have never been able to move beyond.

Mother wanted to leave even before the first snow fell.  Over the years her requests took different forms.  Begging.  Demanding.  Withholding sex, which we all knew about because we lived in one big room.  There was a period, for about three years, starting when I was nine and the boys were seven, when she seemed to have not only given in but started to take to the arctic.  My parents were the happiest they’d ever been in those three years.  There was lots of laughing.  The weather was good.  We lived like a family of bear.        

            Then she snapped, I guess.  Or maybe the happiness had been faked all along.  In late August of my 12th year, she made a big SOS out of logs in the upper meadow.  A pilot bringing in caribou hunters landed and found our cabin.  That night Father hit mother.  It was the only time.  She lived another five years.  Then, a high fever, from what we don’t know, and she was gone in a matter of three days.

            After she died that June, things went about how you’d expect.  There was grief, enormous amounts of grief.  Father expressed his philosophically.  The few times he spoke of her death, he mentioned the life cycle.  He said her body was returning to the earth.  As if she were compost.  The twins expressed theirs physically.  They felled trees and shot moose.  They built an outbuilding for themselves, leaving me to sleep alone with my father in the cabin. 

So far as I knew, I was the only one who cried.  My grief tore at me.  At times I felt as if my flesh were being ripped from my bones.  This is not hyperbole.  It is what I felt.  Other times it was as if the grief were a hand holding me underwater.  Drowning in our own inlet where the water temperature is killer cold.  I couldn’t breathe.  I couldn’t get warm. 

I imagined her everywhere.  I saw her spirit in the retreating tracks of snowshoe hare, in eastward drifting clouds, in the Dopplered wails of wolves.  I took these departures as messages from her, requests that I too leave.  But I was 17 years old and didn’t want to die.  I didn’t know any other kind of leave-taking. 

It took me four months.  I didn’t let myself think the word abandon.  I couldn’t have thought it and still left.  Instead, I noted how the boys were already man-sized.  I told myself that they didn’t need me anymore.  In fact, I went a few steps further.  I let myself hate the boys.  The way they trailed Father, helping, relentlessly helping.  Derek still limping all these years later, and yet swinging that axe above his head, flying it down into the heart of a log.  Dash better with a skinning knife than any of us, scraping the moose hide clean, working with such concentration you’d think he was painting a masterpiece.  That’s how I remembered him all these years, the skinning knife in his hand, straddling a great bloody kill, engrossed in the stench of moose blood, his eyes glazed with the work of survival. 

            It was Derek who heaped the dirt onto my mother, great shovelfuls of soil laced with bits of spring flowers.  He worked with such strength and speed, as if he were afraid he might jump into the grave with her if he didn’t fill the hole fast enough.  In those months after her death, I did my best to ignore the traces of tenderness in Derek.  He sometimes took my hand when walking.  He paused in the course of his days, to watch bear cubs play or to listen to the papery rustle of aspen leaves.  He taught himself to cook that summer, a hint of nurturance in his wild dishes.  As if we didn’t all hurt, I wanted to scream at him.  As if there is time for staring at rain pelting the window glass.  When I saw his pain, I became my father.  I wanted to work.  I wanted to make sense of things.  I wanted to survive.

            It was Mother who secured my means for escaping.  I like to think she knew what she was doing.  I was 10 years old that August.  The boys were off hunting with Father.  Mother had sent me to get some water.  It was a beautiful afternoon, the light making millions of diamond sparkles on the pale green water of our inlet.  The bay was shaped like a rounded wave, and I liked to stand on the shore inside its curl.  The main current of Sweet Creek was a good fifty yards out from our beach. 

The wooden kayak was painted bright blue and it drifted languidly down the creek toward me.  I almost shouted my excitement.  Only rarely did we have visitors, adventurers who happened onto our stream, into our inlet.  They’d all been young men who stared in awe at our cabin, our clothes, our homemade rowboat, our life.  They would stop to talk, and every one of them openly expressed his desire to be us.  Though Father had told our bush pilot that he wanted complete isolation, he liked these visits.  They validated him.  He was doing what these other men could only play at on their two-week escapades.  He always used that word, escapade, emphasizing their circus act lives compared to our tooth-and-bone existence.  When talking to these young men, he exaggerated our success, pretending that the meat and berries were plentiful, that the weather was ideal, that we enjoyed one another’s company. 

As the pretty blue boat drew closer, an eddy caught its bow and spun it around.  The swirling bright blue on clear green, the prospect of outsiders, mesmerized me.  Until I realized that there was no one inside the kayak.  I ran to get Mother. 

She surprised me.  I expected her to send me off to find Father and the boys.  I assumed we’d launch a search for the missing kayaker.  I was only 10, but I did know that a kayak without a paddler was bad news. 

Mother saw it differently.     

            “Honey,” she said.  “Let’s get it.”

            I glanced quickly up at her face.  Her gaze was riveted on the still spinning boat, her thoughts a complete mystery to me at the time.  That gaze, the sight of her determination, is my best memory of her.  Even in midsummer, the water was numbingly cold.  Yet Mother stripped off all her clothes and plunged in.  Her hips swaying and her arms waving above the surface of the water, she waded out until she was navel deep, and then she swam.  When she got halfway to the kayak, it bucked out of the eddy and started drifting downstream again.  Tears swelled my chest as I watched her change course, begin stroking toward the boat.  I didn’t think she’d make it.  But she kicked harder and wind-milled her arms, moving faster than the current.  When she reached the boat, she hooked her arms over the cockpit’s lip and rested for as long as she dared, given that most of her body was still in the hypothermic creek.  Then she hauled the boat back to shore, awkwardly holding it with one arm and fiercely kicking her legs, a very long, hard swim.  I’ve often wondered how she survived that feat.  It was a desperate act, and I like to think, one of prescience.  I like to think she risked her life for me, that she loved me that much.

            I can still see the sparkling gems of green creek water dripping off the ends of her nipples, the aching red of her pale skin, the way she held her mouth as she pulled the kayak up on our beach.  I kept expecting her to say something about the boat’s rightful owner, or at least express concern about him, but she never did.  It was ours now.  It would eventually be mine.

            I ran up the hill ahead of her and built a fire in the stove.  I put on a kettle and, when she came in the door, wrapped her in blankets.  I rubbed her wet head with a towel and dried her feet.  She was too numb to dress herself, and so I did.  Then, once she warmed up, we returned to our day’s work.

            I didn’t know how Father would react to the kayak sitting on our beach.  I watched for him all afternoon and caught him coming out of the woods, the boys trailing a few yards behind.  They had no game.  Father strode right to the boat and examined it with his hands on his hips.  Then he broke into a run up to the cabin, as if Mother and I were in danger.  He assumed we had a visitor.

 Father entered the cabin brusquely.  Mother didn’t tell him about her swim.  She said the kayak had drifted to shore.  He looked around suspiciously and then bolted back outside.  I watched from the window, afraid that he’d shove the boat back into the current.  He stood on the beach and looked at it for a long time.  I wish I could guess what Father was thinking, but I never knew.  Concern about the missing paddler?  Paranoia about the same?  Anxiety about any kind of input from the outside?  Maybe he thought that keeping the boat was cheating.

In the morning, as soon as I got up, I ran outside and saw the pretty blue vessel still tipped on our beach.  That very day Father began carving a paddle, and soon he and the boys used it regularly for fishing, alongside the crude rowboat Father had built himself.   

This morning I left Ross and Stuart in our camp on Sweet Creek.  They promised, with much reluctance, to give me a full four hours lead time.  I wanted to arrive alone.  They tried citing last night’s snowfall and my inexperience as reasons for not allowing this.  I laughed at that.  My inexperience!  They laughed too, admitted the irony.  But the truth is, Stuart pointed out very gently, I’d lived in San Francisco for decades now.  I hadn’t slept outside since leaving Alaska.  I liked nice restaurants and comfortable hotels.  Stuart went so far as to point out that I wasn’t a spring chicken.  I laughed some more and told them both I’d be fine. 

I am fine.  The kayak I am paddling is much more comfortable than the one I made my escape in.  It’s plastic, so I don’t have to worry about cracking its hull on rocks, and it’s fitted out with a padded seat and backrest.  It also has a rudder I control with foot pedals, so I don’t waste lots of energy trying to stay on course.  In fact, I surprise myself by feeling downright happy.  The green-black trees look so familiar, as if I had been here last week.  The sight of hard sunlight on glassy water jolts my heart.  Even the dull pulse of working muscles feels like home. 

Though my real home now includes a small white dog named Winston, a cappuccino maker, central heating, and walls lined with art prints.  It seems like months ago that I left my flat, although it was only two weeks.  I flew to Fairbanks on a commercial flight, arriving two days before Ross and Stuart.  I wanted time to find the diner, if it still existed.  It does.  I had breakfast there both mornings.  Harold is long gone.  The present owner had never heard of him.  On the third day, I flew with Ross and Stuart to Fort Yukon.  I braced myself, thinking the sight of that muddy sprawl of a village would kick me in the stomach.  Instead, it twisted my heart.  I guess the place had become a part of me.  I couldn’t hate it any more than I can hate my own spleen.  I walked out the mud road to find the plywood and tarpaper house where I had stayed with Ben and Susie.  It was gone.  Not a trace.  Just dirt and grass. 

            My guides rented one double and one single kayak, and we floated down the Yukon River to the mouth of what my family called Big River.  There we began paddling upstream, against the current, and it took us six long, hard days to reach the beginning of  Sweet Creek.  We camped there at the convergence, and then paddled one more day to reach last night’s camp.  I’m within range now, a couple more hours.  My arms and back have strengthened.  The boys have shown me how to use my core, my abdomen muscles, to get more power.  I am paddling upstream.

I’ve grown quite fond of Ross and Stuart.  At first I told them only the bare bones of my story.  I showed them on a map where the cabin was.  I asked them to take care of all the travel details.  They did try asking questions, first over single-malt scotches that first night in Fairbanks.  Then, tentatively, again in our camp at the meeting of Sweet Creek and Big River.  Finally, last night, I relented.

They had surprised me by staging a celebration.  They knew, even without having all the details, how important this journey was for me.  As a light, early autumn snow fell, they built a big fire and seared steaks.  Ross made his signature camp chocolate pudding cake.  Stuart collected edible greens, but I spat out the first bite, saying edible was a subjective term.  We passed around a bottle of cabernet. 

I savored the lacy cold flakes, knowing that they didn’t threaten my life, that I was safe.  The baying of wolves came to my ears like a complex, rich music.  I hadn’t known that I missed their voices.  The boys kept adding logs to the fire, long before it needed them. 

Both are handsome in their own ways.  Ross is a bit hobbit-like with a puggish nose and rosy cheeks.  He wears a full black beard, usually with bits of oatmeal or drips of hot chocolate in it.  His hair is self-cut, black, and pelt-like.  Stuart is pale with full and childish red lips.  His dark blond hair curls slightly at the ends.  His hands are expressive and I imagine him to be a sensitive if awkward lover.  He smiles every time I meet eyes with him.  Both are conciliatory and try very hard.  They are fascinated by my story.

I told them everything.  About the bush pilot setting us down in the meadow, felling the trees and building our cabin, bear visitations, and even Mother’s fever.  I told them how Father had said he was grateful she’d died in the spring, after the thaw, so that we were able to bury her.  I told them how I couldn’t stop thinking, after he said that, about what it would have been like had she died in the winter, how we’d have had to store her body in the woodshed, frozen solid, her hair breaking off and the fear in her eyes permanent, until the spring thaw.  I told them about Mother’s swim.  Finally, about me leaving.

In early October of my 17th year, while the men were off hunting, I sat in the pebbles on our beach and stared at the blue kayak.  For the millionth time I saw the look of determination in my mother’s eyes as she watched it spin in the bottle green eddy.  That day, it sat next to me, landlocked, idle, ready.  The river would freeze up soon.

A single gunshot released me.  They had gotten another moose.  It was the fourth this fall.  They had food, far more than they needed.  I could go.  I knew they’d be several hours bringing the moose back, and then another few hours processing it.  They would notice I was gone, but they wouldn’t worry, wouldn’t miss me, until dark.  I could get far in that time.

I ran to our cabin and grabbed as much dried meat as I could carry.  I stuffed this under the deck of the kayak and went back for more.  I gathered up all my clothes, too, and what I didn’t wear, I shoved under the deck with the meat.  I dragged the boat to the water’s edge, climbed in, and launched.

I paddled down Sweet Creek, the current speeding me along, and when I came to Big River, I pushed hard down that, too.  I knew I had to beat the freeze, which could come instantly, any night now.  I also knew that I was most likely racing my father.  I was pretty sure he’d try to come after me, but he’d be in the much slower rowboat.  So I paddled by starlight, late into the nights, and slept only briefly, when I absolutely had to, lying close to the kayak and shore so I could shove off quickly, if needed.  I ate the meat and drank the river water.  I was not unhappy. 

It took me only four days to reach the Yukon River, which I recognized by its sheer size.  There was plenty of boat traffic and I waited for a vessel to come close enough for me to ask questions.  I learned that Fort Yukon was about 25 miles upstream.  But now I’d be paddling against the current.  My father would be able to hitch a ride with a faster vessel and overtake me.  I needed to find a hideaway for a few days, until the freeze, or until he gave up.

After paddling for a few hours along the Yukon’s bank, I saw a plume of smoke coming out of the trees.  I landed the boat and pulled it deep into the brush, well out of sight from the river.  Then I hiked up a small trail to a clearing and a cabin.  I knocked on the door. 

The woman who answered reminded me of Mother.  She wasn’t as pretty and didn’t look as capable.  But she had that hard-eyed look, suspicious and tired and resourceful, all at once.  A man, jaunty and wiry, came to the door behind her.  His whole body smiled. 

“Who are you?” he asked.

I didn’t know.  I didn’t have an answer to that question.  I thought of Mother and Father.  Of our cabin and the twins.  I had left all that behind. 

“I need work,” I said.  “For a few days.”  And then I made up a name.

The man didn’t stop grinning.  Behind him, two children started crying.

“No.”  The woman spoke quickly to beat her husband’s yes.  “We don’t need anything.”

“Sure,” the man said.  “Come on in.”

 “I said no,” the woman repeated, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me into the cabin.  Three children – two, three, and five years old – sat on the rough floorboards.  The five-year-old got up and ran behind his mother. 

For four days I was a nanny and all-around maid.  I changed diapers and played peek-a-boo.  I fried eggs and boiled coffee.  I put up berries and mended clothes.  I scrubbed the floor and shook out rugs.  The woman hated me.  Every hour I considered running back down the hill to my boat, but the prospect of being found, of being returned to the cabin on upper Sweet Creek, was an option I couldn’t face.  So I slept alone and cold in a tiny outbuilding.  I got up before sunrise and followed orders.  The man had had much less hunting luck than my father and brothers that year, and he left in a foul mood every morning in search of meat for the winter.  In the evenings, he ricocheted between nervous energy, when he’d bounce one of the children too hard on his knee or take things apart so he could put them back together, and passive sullenness, when he’d stare at the black stove for long stretches of time, barely blinking.  I scurried with the wife to please him, bringing coffee and stoking the fire and keeping the children quiet.  I prayed the freeze would come so I could travel again.  I would walk the remaining miles to Fort Yukon.

On the fifth day, the man said I should come hunting with him, that he could use the help.  The woman said no, that she needed me, but he tossed me a canteen and I followed him outside.  We hiked for miles, the man who’d been silent every night in the cabin now talking, talking, talking.  I remember nothing of what he told me.  I concentrated on containment, keeping myself in as small and compact a package as I could.  He didn’t touch me.

But, though I had no experience in such things, I knew he would soon.

That night the temperature dropped and I knew the inland streams would freeze.  Slush had already started forming in the Yukon.  Small-engine boats could no longer navigate the icy water.  I got up hours before dawn and crept down to the shore.  I dragged my blue kayak out of the brush and pushed it into the crusted water.  I began paddling upstream, ice crystals tinkling against my paddle and hull.  Animals had eaten the last of my meat, stored in my kayak, and I had no food.

Yet a strange contentment came over me.  I knew my father wouldn’t risk getting caught away from the cabin and my brothers at freeze-up.  I knew I was free.  I began to consider the man’s question, Who are you?  I was a hungry girl with sore muscles.  A grieving girl with nothing left of her mother but the memory of a steely gaze and a fierce swim.  I was something very simple, alive, moving freely.  I was a girl with boat.

A day and a half later, weak and dizzy and raw, I arrived at the mostly native town of Fort Yukon.  To avoid drawing attention to myself, I pulled my hat with earflaps down as far as I could and stayed on the outskirts.  I knocked on the door of the first cabin I came to and found an Inuit woman, Susie.  I liked how she looked, so I told her my whole story, and that I needed to get to Fairbanks.  Soon her husband Ben came home.  They fed me and let me sleep on the floor of their front room, wrapped in blankets.  In the morning, they showed me where I was, pulling out maps and using a finger to trace the Yukon River’s 2,000-mile route.  The headwaters are in British Columbia, and from there the river travels northwest, crossing the border into Alaska.  At Fort Yukon, it turns west and runs all the way to the Bering Sea.  I was only about 75 miles north of Fairbanks, as the crow flies. 

Ben and Susie asked me lots of questions about my journey and the number of hours I had been paddling.  They figured out the exact location of our cabin and knew the name of our creek.  Ben, who sat on the town’s tribal council, argued that I should return to my father and brothers.  Susie said that I was an adult at 17 and should be able to make my own choices.  In the end, they paid a bush pilot to fly me to Fairbanks.

I stayed in the big city, living in a boarding house and working at Harold’s diner, until I had paid Susie and Ben back for the flight.  Each week I walked to the home of the bush pilot and gave him what cash I had.  He made frequent trips to Fort Yukon and he delivered the money to Ben and Susie. 

Then I kept working, saving for a plane ticket out of the state.  But I didn’t leave for another couple of years.  I lost the fear of my father.  Even if he found me there, he couldn’t make me leave Fairbanks.  Anyway, I met Sergey and thought about marrying him.  I eventually figured out that he didn’t think about marrying me, and that’s when I started saving for real.  It was 1977, and I liked what I read in the papers about San Francisco.  When I had enough money for the ticket, I flew there and stayed.           

            Having heard my story, my guides wanted more than anything to witness my return.  I could see it in their eyes.  They were expecting something like Into the Wild, and frankly, so was I.  Bleached human bones.  Thirty-year-old tins of chili.  An open journal on the kitchen table scrawled with a few last desperate words.  It would be a sight.  I felt bad depriving them of it.  But I had to do this alone.

            So this morning they did a safety check on my kayak, more for show than anything else.  They mopped up the water cradled in the cockpit seat.  They stuffed the hatches with food and warm clothes.  They reviewed with me the route about six times until I laughed and pointed out that it was matter of paddling up the river, which by now was awfully narrow.  It’d be difficult to get lost.  They shifted their weight from one leg to the other, watched me carefully.  What if I capsized, they wanted to know.  What if I stopped for lunch and a brown bear approached.  I believe they’d grown fond of me, too.  Both waded into the icy river to launch me.  Sweet Stuart actually kissed me on the cheek.

            “We’ll see you in a few hours,” Ross said.  He tapped his chest.  “You have your radio?”

            “I do.”  I tried to smile for their sake, although by now they’d worn me down with their worries, and I wanted more than anything to be at home in San Francisco, about to go out for a coffee and pain au chocolate with a friend.  I wanted to be walking Winston on a city sidewalk.  I wanted to be reading a magazine on my couch with a fleece comforter across my lap. 

            I didn’t look back, just dug in the paddle and pushed aside the first load of water.  Paddling upstream is hard work, but the boys have taught me to stay near the shore where there is often a countercurrent.  Up here, the danger of bears is minimal, as long as I stay in my boat.  They tell me it can be bad in more touristed areas, like Glacier Bay, where the brown bear have come to learn that kayaks mean human food.  They tell stories of massive cinnamon-colored grizzlies swimming behind their boats, hoping to tip them and harvest the dried apricots and salami logs.  Up here, as long as I stay on the water, I should be fine. 

            In any case, I don’t intend to stop this morning.  Using their GPS gadgets, the boys said that the cabin should be exactly 9.4 miles from our camp.  The river’s flow this far up, and this late in the season, is weak.  I will be there in no time.  A light snow, like last night’s, fell for the first hour.  But then the clouds flew west and the sky opened up blue.

            As I draw close, I try to prepare myself for the possibilities.  Maybe my brothers had found bush wives.  For all I know, they’d sent for mail-order brides.  I might find a thriving little community.  The boys would be 48 years old.  They might have grandchildren running around the little inlet.  The one cabin might have blossomed into fifteen cabins. 

            On the other hand, the winter following the October I left was a particularly hard one.  Break-up came very late that spring.  In spite of having four moose, they could have all perished.  Wolves could have gotten the meat or it could have rotted.  A bear attack.  Poisonous berries.  Anything could have killed them.  Bones, picked clean by scavengers,  scattered about a rotting cabin.

I am paddling upstream, alone.  Once again, a girl with boat.  I am returning for the first time since I left when I was 17 years old.  I am not unhappy.  The fireweed stalks are hot pink against the hard blue sky.  Glaciated peaks soften the horizon in the far distance.  I’m finding the paddling easier, despite my middle age, than it ever was then.  Perhaps that’s my willingness.  I am, I realize, even eager.

            I come around the last bend and see the cabin.  It is whole and upright.  Sunlight glints off the window.  As I draw closer, the front door opens.  A scrawny old man comes out holding a plate of food.  He has white hair and a white beard, both crudely trimmed, as if with pruning shears.  He sits on the same stump we put there our first season.  He stabs the meat on his plate and takes a bite, chews.  Then he looks downriver and sees me. 

            The old man doesn’t even rise to his feet.  He hardly squints.  Later I’ll learn that interlopers have become much more common than they were in our first years.  Several parties of adventure-seekers come through every summer and dozens of pilots fly hunters in for the fall season.  I am nothing unusual, or so he thinks in that moment.  He continues to concentrate on his meal until I start to land the boat on our beach.  Then he sets the plate on the ground next to his stump and walks slowly toward me.  He is bent and moves stiffly.

            It is, of course, Father.

            I can’t bring myself to call him that, so instead I speak his Christian name.

            That stops him.  He looks about in confusion.  I feel as if I have trapped him, caught him out, at long last.  As if he’s waited his entire life for someone to find him, and now someone has.  But who?

            He takes a step closer.  Now he does squint.  He speaks my mother’s name.  And that’s when my heart breaks. 

            “No,” I say.  It’s all I can say. 

            His knees buckle and he sits on the beach, legs splayed, eyes on me.  I crawl out of the kayak and stand next to it, unable to move closer. 

            He struggles back to his feet, embarrassed by his weakness, and so now I make myself walk toward him.  I stop a few feet away.  Tears wet his whole face.  He sits again, and so do I, there on the pebbled beach in the sun. 

            I speak first, telling him the short version of my life these past decades.  I don’t apologize for leaving.  He listens, nodding as I speak.

            Then I ask about the boys.

            He looks across the river, across the trees, maybe even beyond the mountains.  He says, “I don’t know.”

            “You don’t know?”

            “They left two years after you.”

            “Did they take the rowboat?”  It is sitting on the beach, not 10 yards away.  He shakes his head.

            “They left on foot?”

            “Must have.”

            I am stunned that the boys left, got out, and yet didn’t ever try to contact me stateside.  Maybe they hated me for leaving them.  Or maybe they had only left here, the cabin on Sweet Creek.  They could be anywhere in this wild state.  Mother, Father, the twins, me, we are all devastatingly self-sufficient. 

            But, I know all too well, that doesn’t mean not lonely.

            I see in Father what I couldn’t see as a girl.  Grief.  Huge rolling waves of it.  As big as Alaska.  As long as the Yukon.  As far flung as the arctic terns.  He sits on his beach, the one he’s called home for over 40 years, and tries to rest his eyes on his inlet.  There is no rest.  This place had not supported his family, after all.  It has only supported him, one lonely man with an even lonelier dream.

            Father rallies a bit that night in the cabin as he tells Ross and Stuart stories about storms and hunger and wolves.  They are rapt listeners.  They nod in complete agreement when Father tells them that Alaska has been ruined, has become one big playground.  He says he has no peace.  The intruders arrive by boatloads and planeloads.  Some come on foot.  He claims to want nothing from them.  But I can see that they have been keeping him alive.  Surely he doesn’t have the strength to hunt anymore.  And all about his cabin are signs of the intruders’ generosity:  canned foods, a Gortex jacket, a high-tech pair of snowshoes, even bags of chips.  I easily picture these people coming upon the old man in his cabin and giving him everything they can spare. 

            We all sleep in the cabin that night.  In the morning I take Ross aside and tell him to call his contact in Fairbanks. 

“Are you sure?” he asks.  I may imagine it, but I think I see the accusation of betrayal in his eyes.

I nod.  “I’m sure.”

Then I tell Father to gather up anything he wants to take with him.  The boys brace themselves, hands behind their backs, feet spread, watching the two of us, expecting his resistance, an outburst. 

Father says, “I don’t need anything.”

“The plane will be here in an hour,” I say.

Stuart actually tears up.

I ask my guides if they can handle the double kayak without me.  I had been looking forward to drifting back down the rivers, the ease of leaving.  It hadn’t occurred to me that I would leave with more than an emotional souvenir, that my visiting Sweet Creek would be the beginning of a new, even more complex journey. 

            The plane lands in the upper meadow.  A ruddy redheaded pilot announces that he has another job, is doing us a favor by fitting in our run, and asks us to hurry.  Ross and Stuart stand on the edge of the meadow, just as Mother and Father had done when I first landed here.  Father sits up front and the pilot helps him with his seatbelt.  I press my forehead against the window and, as we fly away, take in the lay of the land from above.  Our cabin quickly diminishes to a dark spot.  Sweet Creek nothing more than a silvery ribbon.  Big River the muscle of our geography, the attachment to the civilized Yukon, and then our life is gone.

            Already I see Fairbanks.  It had always been this close.  I reach forward and take Father’s hand off his thigh.  I hold it against my cheek.  He can’t hear me over the roar of the plane’s engine, but I say, “I’m sorry.”