North of Hope

by Shannon Polson

  I suppressed the urge to reach out and hold onto them. I wanted to bring them back. I watched in horror as they were lowered unevenly, awkwardly, awfully, to final stillness, side by side in the Alaskan soil. What was in those boxes? Bodies, mangled human flesh and bone, no more. But it was physical evidence of the people I loved the most. I would never touch their cheeks again. They would never meet the husband I might have. Never know my children, their grandchildren. “I can’t wait until the day we call to wish you a happy Mother’s Day!” said Kathy when I called from Korea on Mother’s Day one year. It annoyed me then. Now I felt the loss of its possibility. I could not sit with them in their old age, telling and retelling stories, hearing final words of wisdom, walking next to them as their own deaths approached, learning from them how to die as they had taught me how to live. This never should have happened. It was an accident. It was done. It could not be undone. There was nothing to do.

  Father Jack dipped a spruce bough in a bowl of water from the Nenana River and shook the bough toward the chasm in the earth. Three times, three sprays of the life of the river, the life of water: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” I didn’t know what to do. I threw in a handful of dirt. It scattered with a light knock on the hard, hollow surface below.

  A few people threw in sprigs of lupine picked from the tundra. The men picked up shovels. The first thuds of dirt. The echos. A spot of blue sky. Clouds. I felt kicked in the gut. I gagged. The strength of the shoveling belied things none of us could express. Singing voices mixed with wind and wide-open space. All strands of a rope that, even as I strangled against its fibers, formed the net binding us together, holding us up.

  Most burials in the twenty-first century in the Western world are sterile. Astroturf covers the open grave. The casket sits quietly nearby while there is a short tribute. No one sees the casket descend, the machine-assisted descent. No one sees it covered up.

  A rural funeral is different. It is raw, an open wound. It is like what is left of skin after sliding across asphalt at high speed. There was no way to make what was happening prettier. There was no way to make it less painful. And because it was exactly what it was meant to be, the intensity of the beauty, too, overwhelmed me, sharpening the blade of pain to an impossible severity. It cut me to the bone.

  Peter and I drove back to the cemetery after light sustenance at the church. Shorty had finished filling in the grave. Flowers people had brought from Anchorage covered the even and neatly raked dirt and gravel. Peter held back. I walked over to sit next to the grave. A single sunflower. Its cheerfulness startled me. I thought that Grandma would like to know that Kansas, where Dad was born and reared, had been represented. I touched the flower. A firm stem, soft petals. Something solid, but it was a lie. What was here was not solid. What was here could not be explained. It was over. It had only begun.

  That week was the beginning of a journey I still did not see the end of. I did not hear the river and the Arctic calling to me. The only thing I think I already knew was that this journey does not have an end.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE WEIGHT OF DAYS

  Alas, what pointless and ignorant precision! We are counting the days when it is their weight we are seeking!

  —Pliny, Natural History

  At the end of our second day on the Hulahula, we swung the raft into a tiny eddy in a tertiary channel on the east side. From the river, an area of undulating tundra made up of wet tussocks spread the length of several football fields before the mountains rose steeply. We’d have plenty of warning if anything larger than a ground squirrel decided to visit our campground.

  We found a moderately dry and flat place for our sleeping area. I walked the area looking for any animal sign, telltale grizzly scat or digging, but other than a couple of ground squirrel holes and caribou tracks, I didn’t notice much. About fifty yards to the south, a broken dogsled sank into the tundra, its wood weathered and cracked. I looked with annoyance at a well-trod trail along the river; had humanity encroached so much on this faraway place it had to leave sign of its presence? Just as quickly, I was embarrassed. Noting the tracks left in the soft ground, I realized this was clearly a game trail, worn not by humans but by caribou, wolf, fox, bear. My city tendencies were quick to label and criticize, slow to listen and understand. I wasn’t sure whether I’d come to this wild space to find myself or to lose myself, or whether I had the capacity for either.

  My walk along the game trail reminded me of looking for tracks during my schoolgirl days, before I knew what I was hoping to find. Now I knew that my younger self was looking for clues to understand my world and myself in that world. It was a profitable search in the winter woods around our home in Alaska. The heavy narrow legs of moose dragged deep snow after them, their tracks disappearing onto a plowed road and turning up again on the other side. Sets of four footprints showed the movement of rabbits among the trees, the two large prints in back from their large hind feet. The wandering track of a wolverine on the side of a mountain. The light pencil-sketched tracks of birds scurrying for bits the trees dropped on the snow. In the mountains, the occasional imprint of a sheep’s hoof and clustering of white wool where the group had stopped to rest. Tracks were adumbrations of the energy of life all about us, the recent history book of wilderness. I imagined the air quivering where the leaver of tracks had passed.

  As we started to put up the tents, a guided group passed us and pulled in a hundred yards or so downriver. I watched them with a mix of frustration and relief. I wanted this to be my journey, not just one of several recreation trips. I wanted solitude, time and space to think, time and space to try to understand the memory held by this land that I didn’t know but that was intimate to me. At the same time, the groups’ proximity offered some comfort; statistically, bear attacks on groups larger than six are much more rare.

  “I’ll make dinner tonight,” offered Sally.

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  “You can clean up,” she said. “We’ll all get our turns.”

  Sally fired up the hissing Coleman stove Ned had brought. It was strange to be here with two people I either didn’t know or wasn’t close to. Part of me wanted to debrief the day, what it had meant, and missed the trust required for that kind of conversation. I looked forward to my journal each night to make my own notes. Perhaps it was a reflection of grief; there is a long stretch of road that has to be traveled alone.

  “I can’t remember the last time I used anything more than a Whisper Lite for camp meals,” I said, searching for something to talk about in the present and recalling years of backpacking and mountain climbing trips. “A stove like this is luxury!”

  “Welcome to the world of boaters,” Sally smiled. “We don’t have to worry about weight as much as you backpackers.”

  “Sure makes it easier to cook,” I said. “Two burners too.”

  Suddenly we heard a yell. “The boat!” It was Ned.

  The channel that had been running evenly several hours earlier now gushed with silty water, the current flowing deep and strong against and around the raft, almost separating it from camp. We pulled our dry suits up midstep, sprinting to the boat and the rushing water. Ned took the upstream side. I splashed in just below the boat and felt the heavy push of water at my waist, grabbed the chicken line to steady myself and jerked at it to move the raft back onto shore, but felt the boat turn with the water like a creature under its own power. The water shoved and yanked at my legs, shocking me with its force. I pulled against the line with all of my strength, pulled and prayed and screamed.

  “Can you hold it?” I had to scream to be heard over the torrent.

  “Trying!” Ned pulled at the boat with furrowed eyebrows and a scowl.

  Sally had joined us, pulling on the landward side of the raft. “Try to walk it back onto the bank!” I yelled. She stepped backward toward the bank and pulled with great enthusiasm but little effect. Ned and I pushed with everything we had, steadying our
selves against the force of the river.

  “Together!” I yelled. “Ready? One, two, three!” A shove and the raft inched onto the tundra.

  “Again! One, two, three!” The raft lurched onto higher ground in a sudden release from the water. I heard the tundra vegetation scrape against the taut rubber. Staggering against the rushing water, I grabbed a willow branch to pull myself from the river. The three of us collapsed onto the tundra.

  “Let’s tie it off,” I suggested, after we’d caught our breaths. “I don’t think the river’s going to get any higher, but you never know. Hard to raft without a boat.”

  “Good idea! Glad we got it!” chirped Sally.

  “Nice job,” I said, letting my voice carry the tension out of me and into the wind. I patted Sally on the back out of relief rather than congratulations

  Ned grabbed the front line and tied it off to willows on two sides. It perched well above the new, higher water level with an annoying nonchalance.

  But my pulse didn’t stop pounding. How could we not have anticipated this danger? Of course the waters ran higher in the afternoon. The warmth of the day increases glacial melt upriver. We should have thought of this. Fear of the consequences of an error in such a remote place heightened my frustration. We had come here under the assumption, and with an unspoken agreement, that we would take care both of ourselves and of the places we traveled. If something went wrong here, it wasn’t a question of sending someone down the road a mile to pick up an extra gallon of gasoline. People come to the wilderness with what they need, or they put others at risk or expense to compensate for their failures. We’d been lucky. Instead of disaster, we had another opportunity to know and understand this wilderness we were in. She had been gracious to us. We could not expect such grace to continue. I wondered again about the wisdom of our journey. But too late. We were committed.

  We headed back to our kitchen area. Energy drained out of my body with each step.

  “What are we having?” Ned asked.

  “Cheese tortellini with spinach, pine nuts, and marinara. How’s that sound?” asked Sally, pulling plastic bags out of one of the bear barrels.

  “Incredible,” I said, meaning it. “I’ve only had a Clif Bar all day.”

  “Water’s ready for tea,” Sally said, and poured from the kettle into the mugs we held out.

  We sat around the stove, peeling off our dry suits and donning fleece. I dropped a teabag of Market Spice, my favorite Seattle tea loaded with cinnamon and orange, into my mug and closed my eyes, inhaling the aroma of comfort.

  “Did you guys do much on rivers with your dad and Kathy?” Sally asked, checking the tortellini.

  “Ned did,” I said. “I went out on the Nenana with them once, but other than trips as a kid and sea kayaking in college, not much more.” I regretted this. Dad and Kathy had talked about doing family trips, and Dad had written in his journal of wanting to take the family down the Colorado in the Grand Canyon, but I hadn’t thought I needed any more hobbies.

  “I did a few trips with them, and Dad and I would go out and play in the whitewater sometimes too,” Ned said.

  “What about you, Sally?” I asked.

  “I got into it with my boyfriend just a couple of years ago,” she said. “But we just do day trips.”

  “And you guys both go with the same group of people?”

  “Yeah,” Ned said. “We have, what …” he began.

  “Maybe six or seven now,” said Sally. “You guys want to hand me your bowls?”

  She began serving the pasta, steam from the serving spoon curling into the cool air.

  “Yeah,” Ned said, “somewhere between five and ten people that get together on Saturdays to paddle.”

  “That’s how you guys met?”

  Sally nodded. “And then we found out we work in different parts of the same firm,” she said. “Ned helped me carry my boat to the river the first day I came. He can be quite a gentleman.”

  “Really?” I smiled. “You hide these things well from some of the rest of us, Ned.”

  Ned smiled back.

  “And even though you know Ned just from your kayaking group, you were willing to come along on a random trip in the middle of nowhere?” I asked Sally.

  “I thought it would be fun!” Sally said.

  “That’s brave,” I said. That’s crazy, I thought. And brave.

  “No one else was willing to go,” said Ned.

  “Gee, wonder why,” I said. “Let’s see, it’s remote. And it’s dangerous. And our reasons for choosing this stretch of river—well …” I heard the doubt in my voice. Brave for Sally, foolish for me. Risking a river was one thing, but how was I going to handle arriving at Dad and Kathy’s campsite? What did I think I could discover there?

  After dinner I walked to the river to rinse our dishes. Crouching by the shore, I pulled up a handful of the rough tundra foliage to scour our bowls. Wild and wandering cries of birds accompanied the noise of the river, but I saw the birds at flight and from a distance. I wished I could identify them. Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that perhaps we are here only to name things. But I couldn’t even accomplish that. I held one plastic dish in the river, letting the water fill it and spill over, again and again. I listened and watched for noticeable bird characteristics, something to identify them by. Several tiny birds flew with erratic modulations, and something that looked like a duck skimmed the surface of the river. All were too distant to see markings. Maybe it was better not to classify them, not to attempt to put them into a box, but simply to appreciate their presence out here in the gusty winds.

  The water ran cold over my hands, and my fingers started to feel numb. I brought the dishes back to the kitchen. Sally and Ned were over at the sleeping tents.

  The wind shifted and the temperature dropped. I added a layer of clothing and pulled on my wool hat, one that Peter’s sister had given me two years ago for Christmas. Despite the chill, I was thankful for the fewer mosquitoes. The song and three-note trill of birds floated on the breeze, a melody of ABCA, and I recalled that ancient Jewish tradition says you can hear God in the songs of birds. If I could sit still enough to listen, maybe I could hear God too. Or at least take comfort in knowing that God was there, in that song, even if I didn’t know how to understand. That part I believed.

  After dinner, we walked down to say hello to the group downriver. Longtime Alaska guide Karen Jettmar and her assistant guide, Jamie, who was in his midtwenties, guided the group. Karen’s pretty face, short hair, and cheerful but strict sense of order reminded me of Kathy. Dad and Kathy would have enjoyed talking with her. Ten clients clustered in a mosquito-netted eating tent. Jamie walked down to the bank of the river with us, and I compared my notes on flowers against his naturalist training.

  I pulled out my journal and pointed out flowers on the tundra. “I have this as Eskimo potato,” indicating a small sprig of purple flowers, “and this as mountain avens,” indicating a small, white-petaled flower, “and this as woolly lousewort.”

  “Sure, mountain avens, shy maiden, Arctic lousewort, and elegant paintbrush for sure. That one is wild sweet pea, though, not Eskimo potato. They look similar, but you can see the difference in the leaves there.”

  “Right. I see. It’s everywhere!” The focus on beauty salved my scorched soul. But could he tell? I grasped at meaning when I could find none. The flowers gave me something to look for, something to draw and make notes about, something to identify in a book with pictures.

  “It is. Beautiful time of year for wildflowers.”

  “I can’t believe how many there are! In some ways the limestone looks so plain, but then you come across these amazing flowers in the middle of it all.”

  “It’s true, the Arctic is pretty special that way.”

  Kathy had identified the flowers on their river trips, and Dad had painted them on notecards when they returned. I loved Dad and Kathy more learning the same landscape they had loved, its wonders large and small. But despite, or p
erhaps because of, my determination, my connection to them felt shaky at best, and my attempts to find that connection awkward. It was the gossamer strand of the smallest spider’s web, the final fragment of mist in a valley, a fragile dream of one-time meaning.

  “How’s your trip so far?” Jamie asked, his question intended for all three of us.

  “Fine, fine,” said Ned, not making eye contact.

  “Just beautiful,” I said. “We can’t believe how warm it is!” Did I seem brave?

  “I can’t believe we’re here without any beer!” Sally exclaimed cheerfully. “First time I’ve done something like that!”

  “I’m tired enough, I’d be asleep halfway though one beer,” I said. Sally’s buoyant enthusiasm struck me as foreign as a Disney character in a cemetery, but I was happy to have it, countering the gravity of the trip and the tension with Ned.

  We shared a bit of our story with Jamie. The guides knew, of course, about the attack last year.

  “You’re on a sacred journey,” he said. “When tragedy comes into your life, the most beautiful thing you can do is to keep moving forward.”

  I smiled at him, grateful for his recognition of the importance of this odyssey. In my determination to get on the river, I hadn’t realized how much I needed this validation.

  It was a sacred journey. A pilgrimage. But surely it was not only about a river. The river flowed by, running, always running. I wanted it to stop. I wanted it to flow in reverse. I wanted there to be a dam in the river somewhere far back in the mountains, a lake to catch the water and keep it safe for swimming, for drinking, for watching sunlight dancing on the surface of still waters. But the water flowed mercilessly north. There was healing in the tyranny, and tyranny in the healing.