North of Hope

by Shannon Polson

  Trea and I both shot and hit pretty close to center mass.

  “Not bad!” he said with a smile. “Shotgun?” He picked up the heavy metal gun. “You ready to hit a bear with one of these things?” he asked.

  “Hopefully we won’t have to,” I said, parroting what I knew I should say. “It would be rare. They generally stay away from people and usually don’t cause any trouble. I really don’t want to have to shoot at anything.” As I said it, I believed it, or most of me did, and yet I realized how ludicrous it would sound to anyone who knew what had happened last year.

  The manager nodded. “Well, don’t tell anyone,” he said. “We’re not really supposed to do this, but here’s slugs, here’s the shot. You gonna carry this, you need to be ready to shoot it.”

  The pistol-grip shotgun had an eighteen-inch barrel, the shortest legal length. It had been a gift to Dad from his friend George in the army. George and his sons were hunters, and this was widely considered a standard bear gun in Alaska.

  I tried it first. The gun weighed heavy in my arms, requiring commitment and intention. Holding the pump and the pistol grip, I aimed at the target. The percussion echoed down the lane. My shot demolished the top quarter of the paper target.

  “You’ve got to aim it lower than you think,” the manager said. “You’ll naturally pull up, so get it lower.” I tried again. Center mass, a huge hole ripped from the target. Trea followed suit, hitting center mass on her first try. The explosions reverberated in the emptiness inside me.

  A bolt. A bullet. A chamber. The 45-70 had been found lying next to Dad on the sands of that Arctic beach. He had actioned the lever, but never had the chance to fire. The gun was the last thing he had touched.

  Years before, I’d visited my grandma in Phoenix. Before I left, she asked how my brothers were doing.

  “Fine, I think, Grandma,” I said. “They’re boys. They don’t say much.”

  “Last time Ned was here,” she said, “I took him to the airport when he left. He gave the agent his ticket, and as he started to walk down the jetway, I said, ‘Keep the faith, Ned!’ He turned around and yelled back at me, ‘No!’ And then he kept going.” She shook her head slowly. “I just hope he’s okay.”

  “I don’t know, Grandma. We don’t really talk about those things.”

  I remembered that conversation as Ned, Sally, and I each took care of our gear, getting ready for the night. Ned was so sensitive that he couldn’t take the tiniest disruption, arming himself with anger for protection. I didn’t remember him that way in childhood, only since our parents’ divorce, though I supposed he had experienced additional stresses as an adopted sibling that I would never understand. I watched the care he took with everything, appreciating his attention to detail, worrying about the precision he seemed to demand and what might fail to live up to his expectations on this trip. I shook off the thought and headed to my tent. Not something I could solve. I had my own problems.

  Sally took the first shift to watch for bear. I had the second. I wiggled into my sleeping bag, wadding up my raincoat for a pillow and pulling a T-shirt over my eyes to keep out the light.

  At 11:00 p.m. I awoke to Sally’s tapping on the nylon vestibule of my tent, waking me for bear watch. The tapping came thin and soft, a reminder of how little stood between me and this wilderness.

  I crawled out of my tent into the middle of a watercolor painting, the water, tinted and glistening, still moist on the paper. The brightness of the Arctic summer sun had lessened as the sun swung closer to the horizon, letting soft shadows from the west stretch gently across the tundra, and the watery light of rain showers in the mountains smoothed the edges of the limestone and shale while illuminating the mountainsides with a yellow glow. As the wind died, I shed my clothing down to my long underwear, though the quick clustering of mosquitoes forced me just as quickly back into my rain gear and a mosquito head net. Resting the shotgun against a piece of driftwood, I sat with the journal, a book of Mary Oliver poetry, and the oversized can of bear spray and let the landscape saturate my eyes and soul.

  This was our first night on the river. One year ago exactly, it had been Dad and Kathy’s last night on earth. The pain of the past year returned like the twisting of a blade.

  One night at home in my Seattle apartment, only weeks after returning from Alaska, I sat on the overstuffed denim couch, tucked under a quilt, reading. I looked up from my book—my concentration was so poor!—and my eye caught the leather briefcase of Dad’s I had placed under the coffee table. I put my book down carefully. I slid down to sit on the floor and pulled the briefcase toward me. The thick brown leather bore scratches and dents from decades of use, the brass latch marred from years of protecting and releasing its contents. Inside were the newspaper articles from the summer, the funeral service bulletins, sympathy cards, death certificates. I looked over the articles, which still didn’t register to me as real. Then the crisp blue-and-white death certificate, with the raised imprint of the coroner. “Cause of death: 1. Massive blunt force injuries, 2. Bear mauling.” Did the coroner write this same thing after every bear attack? Or had he really done an examination?

  In the back of the briefcase was a manila envelope, taped shut. I replaced the articles, the bulletin, the certificate. I pulled out the envelope.

  One corner of the envelope was creased into a fold. I smoothed it back with my thumb, as though I could flatten it, make it right. Then, with some masochistic sense of resolve, I slid my finger under the flap of the envelope and tore it open. The unedited police report slid out, a neat stapled packet. I read through each page, slowly. My stomach tightened. Bile rose in my throat. The mirage that is our days and hours evaporated, hurling me back to the phone call, to a gruesome event I’d only imagined and now understood through the detailed report of its aftermath. The report described me as having blond hair and green eyes, and said I was several years older than I was and living in Oregon. I was momentarily angered by this misidentification and then amused, as though my neurons no longer knew how to react. And then, reading further, I was offended: Dad and Kathy were bodies. The body of a man. The body of a woman.

  I read the report like an addict who had abstained too long and now pushed the needle into her vein.

  I should have recognized the signal, should have understood what it meant: I was whirling in the winds of the vortex still, believing in the power of information. Still believing that I could change the outcome.

  I clutched at the couch with one hand. With the other I dug my fingers into my rib cage as though to keep my body from spinning apart. I rolled onto my side. The harsh light of the reading lamp’s bare bulb shone into my pupils, but all I could see was darkness, dimensionless, interminable, and terrifying. I lay curled and helpless, focusing on how to take each breath, my arms clutching my sides with tightly curled fingers as though only the tension in my body could hold my life in one piece. Any doubts I may have had about the effect that violence in our souls has on our bodies evaporated in the pain of clarity.

  I blinked to force my senses to readjust to the scene, the soft gurgle of the current against the shore, the light soft on the mountains. I was on the river where they’d made their final journey. It was my last attempt at understanding. I whispered aloud, to God, to the bears, to Dad. “Come on, bears, give us a break out here, won’t you?” I was scared, in part because of the bears, but also because the nightmare that everyone has who loses a loved one was coming true: I had a hard time remembering Dad, the specifics of his face and his voice. And worse: I couldn’t stop thinking about the image of him and Kathy screaming in a tent being ripped down around them. I prayed to understand, and I prayed for help—what kind of understanding or what kind of help, I’m not sure I knew, or know even now. “Help me, God. Help me, God,” was all I could say. And then: “Come on, Dad. Can you show yourself, just for a minute? Come say hi? Come give me a hug?” Some small part of me thought maybe he was here. That he and Kathy would walk up with smiles on their f
aces and everything would be okay. The breeze carried my whispers off and away along the lines of the landscape.

  An hour after midnight, the sun swung behind the mountains, but did not set. It would not set at all this far north and this close to solstice. Its low angle bathed the tundra and the mountains on either side in lambent yellow light. Gray tendrils of rain washed detail from ridgelines. Golden light shimmering on water suspended in the air soaked the land in an ethereal luminance. The muted glow on the elegant outlines of mountains was that of an old fire on company gathered round, illumining the essence of things.

  Have you ever watched something so beautiful for so long that for just a minute you became a part of it? I watched until I was a part of that light, part of the land. A part of creation and creator. What shocked me was not my dissolution but the relief it brought. It was like a quiet rising of water. It was not erasure; it was inclusion, a connection so complete it mingled molecules. I was here, and I was part of the Arctic, and it was part of me.

  The wind died, and the night air lay balmy on my skin. And then south down the wide river valley a rainbow appeared against the mountain to the east, curving out over the valley. It brightened, extended its arc, and then disappeared. Then another appeared farther down the valley. Then another, claiming the valley and all that was in it. And then a double rainbow!

  The previous summer in Anchorage, during the week of the funeral, dark clouds built each afternoon, releasing furious torrents. Our priest told me after the funeral that he had seen eight rainbows that week. I had only noticed the storms.

  I could not restrain myself from laughing out loud, just laughing in the Arctic night. Just as quickly I felt foolish, and I knew definitively that I was not alone.

  Requiem

  Tuba Mirum

  The canticle [can be called] the “sword of the spirit,” because it provides a weapon for those who virtuously fight against the invisible spirits; for the word of God, taking possession of the spirit when sung or spoken, has power to drive away demons.

  —Quaestiones et responsiones ad Orthodoxos 107 (PG 6.1354)

  I hear the voices around me. I am swallowed up in them. I close my eyes and sink into the sound slowly, like a sigh.

  Every Monday night beginning in September, two months after the funeral, I come to the rehearsal hall, sit in the hard folding chair. I bring water in a heavy red plastic bottle Dad and Kathy had with them on the river. It is scratched from use and still has sand around its rim from the river. I refuse to wash it. The first rehearsal, I sit next to Deb, who is only a few years older than me, with stylishly graying hair in long, thick curls. We had both gone to business school, both loved to sing. She doesn’t have a car, so I drive her home after rehearsals. We become fast choir friends.

  The ancient idea of koinonia, unity in diversity. Propter chorum, say the monks. For the sake of the choir. Surely each of us here has a grief for which they sing, whether or not they know it. I need this unity, a connection to others, something that tells me I am present. But I am singing selfishly, for myself, hoping for a way out of this pain.

  I want there to be a reason that I am here, a sign that proves this is good and right.

  The night of my audition, the rain had just stopped when I arrived home to my apartment in a quiet neighborhood in the city. I walked up the dark sidewalk, a path bordered by a towering spruce tree and thick rhododendrons. The faint light filtering from neighboring windows lit the slick surface of the flagstones, shiny from the September rain, just enough to see my way to the door. As I made my way up the gentle curve of stairs, my mind back at the audition, a sudden whoosh startled me out of my skin. The whoosh came again and I jumped back just in front of the outstretched wings of an enormous owl. The friction of feathers snatched the air, decelerating his body, and the owl landed, suddenly silent, on the electrical pole just on the edge of the sidewalk. My heart raced and my skin felt cool. I had never seen an owl anywhere in the city, and certainly nowhere close to my apartment. I stood transfixed, saturated in the silence, the silhouette, the sound of the pounding of my heart in my neck. When I finally turned to walk to my door, his stare was as palpable as the movement of air beneath his wings.

  A week later, an emailed acceptance appeared in my in-box. Relief and exhilaration rushed into my muddled brain, cooling water over coals of grief. I would be able to sing Mozart’s Requiem. I had something I could do for Dad and Kathy. This was my Kaddish; this was the structure for my grief.

  Deb is the first person to whom I confess the events of the summer and the reason for my joining the chorale. I am surprised at her lack of surprise. We are a month into rehearsals, and as the director works with the men on a section, I whisper to her, a flood of information draining from me in desperation.

  “This bottle is from their trip.” She nods at me. “And this sand? It’s still here from the river, from the beach where they died. I haven’t washed it off. Think that makes me crazy?” I laugh nervously, appalled that I have admitted my neurosis, exposed weakness and oddity and an indication that I am seriously screwed.

  She shrugs. “Not really,” she says.

  I take a drink. The fine sand crunches lightly between my teeth.

  The conductor looks back in our direction. “Okay, altos, sopranos—join us, top of forty, measure three.”

  I flee my anxiety, diving deeper into the black notes on the white page, the sounds of sorrow and hope and pleading, submersing myself in the music, feeling it close over me like water.

  CHAPTER 7

  A PRECARIOUS LIFE

  No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

  —C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

  [Man] can do nothing by natural instinct except weep! … To man alone in the animal kingdom is granted the capacity for sorrow … to no animal is assigned a more precarious life.

  —Pliny, Natural History

  A picture shows my father in front of a U.S. Forest Service log cabin in the woods of Alaska, tall, lean, handsome, with thick black hair and an optimistic grin untainted by tragedy or other devastation, the stance of a young and virile man who has stepped firmly into his place in the world of accomplishment and adventure well beyond his origins. He holds me, an infant just five months old. The photo is dated August 1972. It is thirteen years after Alaska became the forty-ninth state, a year before the oil crisis of 1973 prompted construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. I am the first child and daughter of an army JAG captain and his wife sent at the last minute to Alaska instead of Vietnam. We were just one family among many compelled to move to Alaska because of oil industry employ or military service, and one of the many who, once acquainted with Alaska’s remote beauty, decided to stay.

  I was actually the second child; an older brother was stillborn at seven months and buried in the Fort Richardson cemetery. Perhaps that is why I was baptized within a week of birth in the post chapel, wearing a gown, booties, and cap my mother crocheted of fine ivory yarn and run through with pink ribbon. I was not a docile child; one story goes that I screamed so loudly in the hospital nursery that I was always fed first. My baby book notes that I logged more than one hundred miles of backpacking around Alaska in my first year, including a crossing of the Resurrection Trail. When I was nine months old, my parents and close friends bundled me up and strapped me to their backs and cross-country skied among the deep tracks of moose and the marks of scurrying porcupine into another Forest Service cabin for my first Christmas. The story goes that I woke up screaming in the subzero temperatures in the dark of night because I was too hot, and my father bumped his head on the upper bunk jumping up to tend to me.

  I was born on the Ring of Fire. Anchorage, Alaska, sits in the middle of the long, horseshoe-shaped series of oceanic trenches, volcanic arcs, volcanic belts, and plate movements circling the Pacific. There were nights I woke to the lurching and shuddering of the earth, the sudden subterranean slide of the coastline away from the steadily moving Pacific Plate. Dad would round us up
to stand beneath the downstairs doorways until the quake passed. Eight years before I was born, the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 crippled the state. The Pacific Plate shifted suddenly under the Northwest Plate, the earth buckled and cracked, and houses and buildings were ripped in two, some falling into the sea. Buildings shook as far away as Seattle, and the earth in Houston temporarily surged four inches. Geologists say that for weeks, long period-waves traveled the earth, with seiches—sloshing water as in a bathtub, but on an oceanic scale—reported as far away as South Africa, and that aftershocks from this quake continued for a year. After I was born, other than the odd object falling off a shelf, earthquakes never caused harm.

  But perhaps I should have seen the signs. I was born on the Ring of Fire. I had always thought of myself as born in Alaska. This distinction makes a difference.

  I started life with two parts of me in conflict: the part that drew rainbows and unicorns, and the part that wanted the carpentry sets Max and Ned received when Sam was born instead of the tea set I was given. We moved from the military base to a midcentury split-level house in the foothills of the Chugach Mountains when I was only a year old. The walls were decorated with Alaskan art, and a large gold velvet sofa sat in the living room. Our meals were made of the more limited provisions available in Alaska: frozen vegetables and powdered milk and Tang and otherwise heavy but not epicurean Midwestern-inspired fare. I remember one egg casserole made with Spam. My mom decorated my room in orange and green. As a toddler and a young child, I could sit for hours drawing on paper without other entertainment, something that must have proved handy for my parents. I started music lessons when I was three and studied piano for a decade. My mom taught my brothers and me to read chapter books before we were five, and read us Greek myths and history for fun between hauling us to piano lessons and soccer games. We were allowed little TV, if any, as children, only occasionally watching Mister Rogers or The Electric Company on a tiny black-and-white television in the kitchen. Later we watched Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom as a family once a week. I remember an occasional episode of Gilligan’s Island well after it was syndicated, and sneaking out to watch over the balcony when my parents bought a small color TV to watch the miniseries Shogun and The Winds of War.