Travel Writing

by Peter Ferry

  Later there was even time to fish and canoe to some nearby Indian pictographs. We read and wrote by the fire. Someone shouted in celebration of a patch of blue sky. We ate a huge, hearty, awful dinner of turkey supreme, green beans, and pineapple cheesecake. The west was pink. I predicted the next day would be wonderful.

  Day Five, June 10:

  Through the wet early days, we said many times, “At least it isn’t cold.” The next morning it was raining, and it was cold.

  It was easy now to understand why people who live outside have often worshiped nature. At home if it rained, I closed the door and turned on the tube. Here, so much depended on the weather that was rolling across the sky. Everything. If only because there was no place to escape it. It may seem silly since it was nearly summer, but the question of survival had already arisen. It did again this day.

  We packed up and ate a cold, quick breakfast in near silence. Then we paddled away. Our long portage was difficult, sometimes through muck that was waist deep. It took most of the morning. The long paddle that followed was just as hard. The temperature was around fifty, and we were all wet. Lake Kahshahpiwi was choppy, and it continued to rain.

  We were looking for an abandoned fire watchtower high on the hills above. Mike claimed that he did not know there was an abandoned ranger station there as well, but in retrospect, I was not so sure.

  Anyway, we rounded a bend and someone said, “A house!” We all repeated the word. It was a little white cottage. It had been four days since we had seen a house, a car, any sign of civilization but those we carried; anything but water, trees, and rocks.

  Mike approached tentatively, read something on the door, turned the handle, and went in, was back in a second, shouting, “Come on up!” We cheered and suddenly we were very cold. We could barely grip the packs to carry them. Inside we struggled awkwardly with knots and buttons.

  There were three rooms, and right in the middle, a wood-burning stove. Soon we had a fire blazing and clothes drying. We cooked up chicken-noodle soup and a huge batch of grilled-cheese sandwiches.

  The sign on the door read, “Please replace what you use with something else. Leave the place clean.” It had many reciprocating messages: “Saved from the rain. Dorth of the North,” “Replenished wood supply. Thanks, The Wassons,” and, incongruously, “Où est le boeuf?”

  The rain stopped. By late afternoon there was a line of blue across the northwest. Then slowly the clouds were rolled away above us like the lid of a sardine tin, and it was lovely again. Mike, I thought, felt a little guilty about staying over here. The rest of us enjoyed it thoroughly. I tried not to think what we would have done had this place not come around the bend.

  We had made our long detour in search of fish, but it was here that we found them. We were out in the canoes and on the little dock until well after dark. One of us caught a twenty-two-inch lake trout.

  Day Six, June 11:

  The day we had been waiting for. We were up early and were instantly busy like the Seven Dwarves whistling, cooking, sweeping, cleaning, sawing, and drying. We replenished the cottage’s wood box and its larder with macaroni and cheese, dehydrated fruit, and some encouraging words.

  Each of us polished off four pieces of French toast and syrup, and then we were off into this cool morning of pure, bright colors. I am a practical person. I do not consider billboards the ultimate proof of society’s decadence, nor moderate air pollution a threat to my life. I am willing to put up with some of the trade-offs that modern times demand. I think that people who care more about baby seals and sperm whales than other people are just a little warped. And if the wilderness is sacred to me, it is so in the lower case. After all, none of us will ever really live in it again unless all of us do, and I know that we would not want that. Quetico is a laboratory. Still, I should note that in six days, I had not seen one discarded can or gum wrapper, one cigarette butt, one old matchbook, used condom, or pop-top. And when the sun shined, you had to blink your eyes because so much beauty seemed impossible. And the whole country smelled like Christmas.

  We traveled all day through half a dozen lakes, across nine portages. It never got hot, but the sun was warm. Finally there were the McIntyre Falls, sharp, bubbling cascades, and the long, winding McIntyre River, beaver territory with one dam after another. We walked our canoes down it in sometimes-chest-deep water, just like Bogart in The African Queen, and if the setting wasn’t as exotic, the mosquitoes were certainly as big.

  But by evening, the sky had clouded. It began to rain as we fixed dinner, and we went to bed feeling fairly defeated, despite the day.

  Day Seven, June 12:

  Rain again. It had rained each day. We found it tiresome and oppressive, but I would have thought it impossible. It was not. It was only uncomfortable.

  Like most people, I make fun of weather forecasters. It was only in the absence of their prognostications that I realized how much attention I paid to them. There were times this week when a good forecast would have given us much-needed hope, and a bad one would have crushed us.

  In addition to weather forecasts, we had now spent a full week without each of these for almost the first time in our lives: any broadcast, any recorded message, a newspaper, a phone call, a shower, any electrical appliance except for flashlights and cameras, a toilet, a mirror, a letter, a roof (save one), and a spigot. Around midday we passed two fishermen and paused to exchange a few words. They were the first people other than ourselves whom we had seen in over four days.

  We had become fairly competent paddlers. Today we glided single file and in near silence down the wooded, grassy Tuck River hoping to surprise a moose. There was a great crash in the bush that may have been one, but no one saw it. Nonetheless, we felt proud and serious about our quest.

  Evenings had become our best times. Most had been clear and peaceful. Tonight we camped above Basswood Falls, the prototype for rapids everywhere. We swam and washed, ate more mush and pretty good lemon pie, watching the clouds lighten and finally flee. There was a seagull nesting on a rock just out in our lake, and one of us went off to photograph it. Two other canoes drifted about on the still water carrying solitary readers and writers. Others of us fished up and down the rapids. And all of us watched the huge moon coming up and adding its bright yellow reflection to the deepening colors of the dusk. If it were always like this, I would never go home.

  Day Eight, June 13:

  Some time after midnight, I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a violent thunderstorm. There was suddenly so much water in the tent that we almost needed snorkels. It was evidence of our fatigue and resignation that no one even bothered to get up. When the lightning passed, we went back to sleep in puddles.

  I had been intending to write a cute little piece about all the wildlife I had not seen on this trip, but today ruined it. Coming down Pipestone Bay, we spotted two black-bear cubs on the shore. Then just beside us there was a loud confrontation between a giant seagull and a bald eagle. Interestingly, the seagull was the aggressor with many swoops, dives, and squawks. In truth we had seen half a dozen eagles, though none as close. And we had seen various hawks, many elegant and dignified blue herons, and always the loon, which seemed so much more at home beneath the water than above it, and whose self-pitying warble is Quetico’s sound track.

  Again we had a long paddle on a cold gray day, and again the sky cleared late in the afternoon. Our campsite was beside Pipestone Falls in thick woods. We made blueberry pancakes and laid our bags and ourselves out on the grass to dry. A couple of us fell sound asleep.

  Later I crossed the bay to walk beside the rapids. I turned a corner and was close enough to a beautiful big doe to touch her. I started, she bolted. But moments later I saw her again and froze. She was fifty feet away, and when she saw me, she came as close as thirty feet. She pawed the ground as a bull might and even feinted in my direction once or twice. Perhaps she had a fawn nearby. This lasted half a minute, and then she was gone noiselessly into the heavy bush.
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br />   I had seen, touched, even hand-fed many deer in zoos and parks, but it was thrilling to meet one where it was at home, and I was not.

  Day Nine, June 14:

  We came back to base camp, to beds, saunas, and late-night glasses of Drambuie with new friends, people who do the remarkable routinely. Someone offered me a cigarette and, at least for the moment, I didn’t want it.

  Sometime that summer some other men-children and I would make our annual visit to Great America to ride the roller coasters. We would dare and tempt each other. We would keep track of the rides we went on as if they were accomplishments. We would pretend that the danger was not illusionary, that there were not backup systems on backup systems, that someone’s finger was not always on the stop button.

  I realized now that the only reason we paddled off three days from anything was to find a place where we couldn’t dial 911, signal time-out, or cry uncle, where the only backup systems were within ourselves. Back in the city, several people would ask, “Did you have a good time?” They did not know—as I did not know before—that the question was irrelevant. In fact, I think I asked it of Tom Maury not so many weeks ago. And now I understood his answer: “It’s the only thing I’ve ever done that wasn’t overrated.”

  The last day paddling home, the sky was clear, and the sun was warm. There was no threat of rain.

  9

  …

  Finding Peter

  IN A CHILI’S IN DULUTH, squeezed into a booth with a bunch of fart-joke-telling, elbow-wielding teenagers, I ate a rib-eye steak, mashed potatoes, and a Caesar salad, and I drank a tall, cold Weissbier with a slice of lemon. This was one of the three or four best meals of my life. It was, in fact, so good that it seemed to demand a cigarette afterward, and I stood for a long time looking at packs of them in a convenience store before not buying any.

  I got back on the bus, reclined my seat, and slept through the rest of Minnesota and a good bit of Wisconsin. When I woke up, there was a videotaped movie on the monitor above my head. I watched it drowsily; it was shot in Chicago. A car pulled up and the driver talked to a man on a bicycle. The shot was over the bicyclist’s shoulder framing the driver’s face in the open window. Lisa Kim was sitting in the passenger seat. She said, “We’re going to be late.” Good God. For the first time, I felt that I couldn’t escape this woman even if I wanted to. Later there was an interior shot. Two girls were talking in the foreground, and Lisa Kim was sitting on the couch painting her toenails in the background. She leaned over one raised knee to do it. She seemed oblivious to the conversation and to the camera. I watched the credits at the end of the movie: Third roommate—Lisa Kim.

  Out in the wilderness, I had thought a good bit about Lisa Kim’s death and my own; it’s an easy thing to do when you are two or three days’ paddle from a phone and another half day from an emergency room.

  I looked out the bus window and thought about the Mallory and Irvine story Gene had told me. I liked it. I enjoy subtle lessons in direction and misdirection; sailing west to go east, the kid who looked at the ground while everyone else was looking at the sky. But if we were looking in the wrong place, where in the world could the right place be? Perhaps this wasn’t about Lisa Kim at all; perhaps it had nothing to do with her. Maybe it was about Lydia and me and how we may have wasted our lives waiting for something that might never happen. Or had happened and wasn’t much to write home about. It was difficult to believe that this person who had been the human being I felt closest to for most of twelve years might one day stop speaking to me, at least in an unguarded way, might never whisper in my ear or laugh spontaneously at something I said. Or maybe it was all about me: early-onset midlife crisis. There had been times in the last year or two when I could not make my job not boring. Or maybe it was about my father’s death; I had been thinking about him a lot. Or maybe Lisa Kim was like a grain of something that gets in your eye and scratches it, and feels like it’s still there, so that you think you have to rub it long after it’s been teared away or flushed out.

  “How are things with Lydia?” asked Gene.

  “I haven’t talked to her.”

  “Why not?”

  I told him that when I went by to pick up the dogs, she wasn’t there, and I was relieved. I was no longer as angry, but I thought I might be feeling guilty.

  “Is guilt a feeling you’ve had often before?”

  “Sure. I believe in guilt. I think it’s good in small doses. Reminds me of the consequences of the stupid things I do.”

  “Tell me about one of the stupid things you’ve done. Tell me about one you’ve felt guilty about for a long time.”

  I told him about a kid who showed up on the beach one summer whom we called Joe Cavalier. He was nerdy, but we treated him like he was the most popular kid around. It was a conspiracy, and I knew it was wrong, but I was a sheep. I went along with it. And then one day he figured it out, and he went in his aunt’s cottage and didn’t come out again the whole rest of the summer. I’d always felt bad about that.

  I told him about a quiet girl who had a crush on me. She asked me to dance out of the blue and then pressed against me real hard. I took her under the bleachers and felt her up. She let me. She wanted me to. Afterward I lied and said I had to go home right away because I didn’t know what to do with her, or maybe I was embarrassed to be seen with her when they turned the lights on. Later I was with a bunch of guys on a street corner, and she went by in her father’s car. I’d always remembered the look on her face.

  “Did you ever apologize to her?” he asked.

  “No, I never said anything.”

  “Are you still feeling guilty about Lisa Kim?”

  I told Gene that what I was feeling was more like anxiety. It was more like there was something I still had to do, but I didn’t know what it was. When I woke up in the morning, I knew right away that I had to do it. I’d be in the middle of something, completely absorbed, and I’d know suddenly that there was something I had to do. It was like a dream in which you know you’re supposed to be somewhere or do something, take a test or do something important, and you just can’t get there and do it. You’re missing a class, and the semester’s going by day after day; you know you have to go, and you can’t. You never do. You always remember too late. You never get there, and you just keep getting in deeper and deeper shit. “It’s like that,” I said, “but in this case I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to do. Can anxiety drive you crazy?”

  “Well, anxiety can be a foundation for some compulsions. And so can guilt.” Gene smiled at me as if he were admitting something. “Which is why we’ve been talking about guilt.”

  “Do I have a compulsion?”

  “You are compelled, but I don’t think you’re exhibiting enough symptoms to qualify as a full-blown case of OCD. Sorry.” He smiled again. “And yet something is still bothering you, something that we haven’t been able to uncover.” We both smiled. I was beginning to feel that we were regular smiling fools that day.

  “Do you still think hypnosis might help us find this thing?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It could.”

  I had expected to have time to myself on the canoe trip, but of course I didn’t; when you are in real wilderness, you huddle together for safety and warmth. If you do go away for a moment’s solitude, you hurry right back. Where I finally found myself alone was, not surprisingly, in the middle of the city, in Carolyn’s bright, airy condo that occupied the top floor of a brownstone three-flat. It had skylights, a big bed, a comfortable couch, and a little back deck with flowerpots on which I sat in the mornings with the dogs to read the paper or write and sometimes in the evenings to think, drink a beer, listen to the crowd noises, and look at the lights from Wrigley Field two blocks away. Her home became a place where I didn’t feel anxious, where I made all the rules and decisions, and I made good ones. I didn’t eat out of cans over the sink, I did my dishes before going to bed, at least at first, and I never got very drunk. I planned meals, gri
lled lots of chicken and fish, used Tidy Bowl and bed linens, and when I got lonely I called someone, but never after nine.

  I’d never really lived alone, except on the road. Some years before I’d begun traveling alone sometimes simply because I’d get assignments or opportunities when Lydia or my other friends weren’t free. I dreaded the first of these trips, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that I enjoyed my own company. Now I have a whole catalog of memories that I share with no one: bullfights, public baths in Budapest, riding a bike along the Danube River or beside the North Sea in Zeeland, a particularly tasty meal of ginger crab and Tiger beer in an open-air restaurant on a rickety pier at the end of a Star Ferry run in Hong Kong. The truth is, if you want to write anything, you can’t mind being alone, and I was writing a lot. I was writing the story of Lisa Kim that I had started in the spring. I was just getting caught up to the moment, and I was about to have a lot more to write.

  “I want you to hold out your arm in front of you,” Gene said. “Make a circle with your thumb and index finger. Now I want you to relax. Your arm is going to begin to tire. You can probably feel it tiring already, feel it getting heavier. As it does, let it slowly sink toward your lap. Getting tired. When it touches your lap, then you’ll be completely relaxed. You’ll be very, very relaxed. You’ll be aware of your own breathing. Feel your breathing. Your arm’s getting more and more tired. It’s heavier and heavier. It’s sinking. Your eyes are closing. There. Now, as I ask you questions, it may be that your subconscious will remember something that your conscious doesn’t. If that happens, if that were to happen, your right index finger will rise, will go up. And if that happens, then I’ll try to help you go back and find out what your subconscious wants you to know. Okay?”