Geography of Water

by Mary Emerick

  “This is private property,” my father said. His face flushed red, a danger sign that I knew well. It wasn’t directed at me, so I stayed put. “You can’t come ashore here.”

  The man adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat while, safe next to the plane, the younger one with the soul patch and clamshell necklace rolled his eyes. “I know that, sir, we have maps. But the national forest starts about a mile back from here. We thought we’d just pass through. The Forest Service told us we could.”

  “Fellows, you thought wrong.”

  The young curly haired one had gathered his courage and stepped forward. “But this is the best example of cedar decline on the island. Don’t you want to know why this is happening?” He looked right at me, blowing my cover from where I peeked out from behind the boat shed. “I bet you study this in school, little girl. It could be that the winters are getting warmer because of climate change and the roots aren’t insulated like they used to be. Or it could be something else. Nobody knows. We have a grant from a university.”

  My father lifted his right hand, until now hidden behind his back. In it he held his .375 H&H rifle by the stock. He aimed it near their feet. “Private property,” he repeated. “Winnie, go back to the house. Now.”

  Disobeying, I silently crept farther behind the boat shed, unable to stop watching. My mother was suddenly there too, clasping my hand.

  The scientists started to cinch on their packs.

  My father lifted the rifle higher. He worked the action. “Private property,” he repeated.

  Inside the plane the chubby pilot dropped his newspaper. “Jesus!” he gasped. “I told you guys this would happen!” He fired up the prop. The scientists scrambled aboard in a jumble of arms and legs. Without waiting for them to fasten their belts, the pilot step-taxied to the end of the bay and took off. Their wake rolled across the water and slurped against the pilings.

  All three of us stood together at the end of the dock. Looking up I saw their faces pressed like moons against the windows. After the sound of the plane faded, the fight went out of him like it always did, a blaze of fierce white anger that burned itself out the way my campfires did when I did not wait long enough before piling on bigger, wetter logs.

  “There used to be a herring run here, girls,” he said. “The water looked like milk for miles. Herring spawn. You could throw in a spruce branch like the Tlingit did and pick it out a day later covered with herring eggs. Salty. Delicious. And what happened? Fished out. Just like the halibut. Gone. And just skiff on up to Josephine Island and you can see the clear-cuts, all those big trees, sent on to Japan.” He deflated, collapsing on the bench, his head in his hands. His voice was muffled, as though he was on the edge of tears, though I knew that was not possible. “They take and take from this place and don’t give anything back. I’ve watched them take the trees. I’ve watched them take the fish. I’ve watched them blast the rocks, looking for gold. I won’t let it happen here.”

  Not understanding, I piped up. “But you bring bear hunters here. What’s the difference?” Behind his back, my mother shook her head, a warning. But my father’s mood had shifted already; it was safe. He smiled and sat up, running his fingers through my tangled hair. “You’re a smart girl, Winnie. But listen. I never let them shoot the sows, or the grandfather bears, the ones that are almost nocturnal. And I’ll tell you something. They haunt me, the bears. You wait, one day my ship will come in, and I’ll get out of the bear killing business. I’ve had about enough of killing.”

  He never said which ship that would be. For a long time, I thought that he meant a real ship, and I spent hours sitting on Lookout Point scanning the horizon for it. I had pictured it as a sailboat gliding in to the bay without a sound to pick him up and carry him away from us. I both wanted this and feared it.

  It had been the same way for me with the bears. I hated the swaggering with the skins, the rest of the bear tossed out into the deep woods like trash. Bear hunting paid for our roof, my mother used to tell me, though I thought I saw the same dislike in her eyes. Do you want to end up in Floathouse Bay, with nothing, my father had added, not a question but a statement. We had to be neutral, not let it get to us, my mother told me, but she got up with her plate and went to the kitchen when the stories got too loud.

  There were ghost forests in Floathouse Bay too. Birdman passed through them without comment even when the wind ran through them, making them sing. We walked single file, separately but within sight, leaning over slightly from the weight of our rain-soaked packs. Climbing above the bay, we headed east through a scattering of trees. The body of the land changed under our feet, a long slow sweep of amber belly and smooth rock taking over from the muskeg.

  Following Birdman, I walked through a basin scooped out by glaciers thousands of years ago. Mountains shouldered in on all sides, their steep granite walls blocking out all but a sliver of the sky. If it ever stopped raining long enough for the sun to show its face, light would only fall here for a few hours before it disappeared again for the night.

  An unhurried river full of glacial melt, the color of white chalk, wound through the valley floor, sprawling in long, lazy circles among the scattered hemlocks and alder. Above, a ragged hem of clouds clamped down tight, enclosing us in a cup of rain and fog.

  The walking was easier here. The river was lined with fat gravel bars made up of stones tumbled down from far up in the headwaters during the snowmelt, when I imagined that this valley must erupt in an ecstatic torrent of water and sound. Slowly the river was turning the rocks into sand. The rocks were polished from wind and rain, each one a smooth, perfect round ball.

  Sometimes we had to leave the river and travel on the side slopes when the banks became tangled with logs. In Birdman’s wake, I plodded up through low blueberry shrubs, the berries long since withered or eaten by bears. When we could, we left the cedars to their secrets and dropped back down to the river.

  There were stories in the sand if you knew how to read them. Birdman stopped to point out the animal highways. Here, the smooth hollow where a family of river otters had slid down the bank from the trees to the water. There, where an eagle had landed and captured something small and vulnerable, pockmarking the mud with its talons. There were no tracks he could not name.

  I looked back at our footprints, two wavering lines stretching back behind us. How long before the rain erased the tracks as if we had never passed through here? I shook in my damp clothes, imagining that we could be erased as easily, the country swallowing us up in one big gulp. Hypothermia. Drowning. Bears.

  We had been following a pair of bears. Birdman silently pointed out where their tracks crossed the bar here, a mother and a cub bound for the promise of still ripe blueberries farther up the valley. Their prints were sunk deep into the wet ground. The bears had crossed only hours earlier; sand had not begun to cave in their tracks.

  I spoke in a low voice. “Late for them to be this high, isn’t it? Not much to eat up here. Plenty of salmon down below.”

  “Some females never come down from the high country,” Birdman said. He didn’t say why, but I knew. The females lingered on because it was safer here. Even though there were salmon below—rich, savory food they desperately needed before the coming winter—there was danger too. Here they could hide their cubs deep in the valley and protect them from the boars who might kill them. It was a risk: stay safe and gamble on the fickle blueberry crop or venture lower and become prey.

  Looking at the prints, I realized that I had almost forgotten why I was still in Floathouse Bay. It seemed to me that I had been living here forever, that this was my life now. That there was no real destination, that I might walk through valleys like this year after year with a silent man and a rifle. That I was not a body anymore but only motion, like rivers, like wind, flowing through an unknown country.

  Birdman stopped for a reason only he knew. “Here,” he said, motioning for me to stand back to back with him. I knew why. He was hunting deer in the
most dangerous way possible. He would blow a call designed to sound like a fawn in trouble. It would draw the deer, but it could also draw a hungry bear. Hunters had been killed that way, a bear creeping up behind an unprotected back. That was why I faced the opposite direction, to look for bears.

  My father had never hunted that way. It was impossible, he said. The clients were full to the brim with bluff and swagger, barely covering up their fear with gold chains and big rings and a strut that dared anyone to question them. After they left, my father would share stories with us about the man who collapsed in a heap in the muskeg, claiming exhaustion, the temper tantrums, the fear of high places. It was better for them to see the bears coming, to lie in wait in the hush of a forest. To have the upper hand. Otherwise they would cut and run.

  I pressed my shoulders against Birdman’s back, watching. Nothing moved but the river. The deer were all waiting out the rain under the trees, invisible.

  A raw wind picked up, a down-canyon breeze, coming from somewhere we had yet to reach. As it passed through the dead trees, they rattled with a mournful wail. A whole forest was gone on these hillsides. The wood was so strong and tough that the snags would stand for years.

  Where would we all be when the trees tumbled down? Birdman was old, his body winnowed down to muscle and bone. White hair poked out of the ball cap he always wore, and he walked with an old hurt in his leg. How much longer would he be alive, him and Isaiah both? Where would I go from here if I lost them? I felt lonely pressed against his back, as if I had no home anywhere.

  I heard him clear his throat as I wiped unwanted tears away with a mitten. “Three kinds of tide,” he said. “Slack, flood, low. Which one are you?”

  It felt like a test and I wanted to get the answer right. My father, of course, was most like the high tide. Without apology it swept in to claim the beach, shrinking it by fifteen feet in hours. You could lose everything in the high tide, and our family had, mistakenly pitching the tent in the sedges, carelessly leaving guns out, or building our warming fire low enough to be swallowed. The high tide was a bully, tossing driftwood far into the beach fringe, gulping up the rocks and drowning everything in its path. If you turned your back on the high tide, you would regret it. At the same time the high tide was a magnificent floating carpet, bringing us treasures from the sea. Rafts of bulbous amber-colored bull kelp rode it and so did plastic bottles with Asian characters. It spit up sand dollars and pink-throated shells. Sometimes it brought us nothing. You just never knew with the high tide.

  I saw my mother in the way the low tide moved: gentle, reluctant, creeping away like it did not want to be noticed, gradually letting go of its hold on the land. It was easy to discount the low tide as inconsequential. But there was another side to the ebb. It could fool you into complacency like leaving a skiff high and dry because you thought there was plenty of time to anchor, or if the person left with the boat didn’t push it out into deeper water fast enough. If I stepped in the wrong place in the tide flats, the sticky mud would set up like concrete until I had to abandon my boots and crawl to safer ground. Years ago Ernie had told us that a woman died near Anchorage in Turnagain Arm when she got mired in the flats, rescuers finally giving up and handing her a straw to breathe through as the tide moved back in.

  Because I didn’t want to be like either of them, that left me with slack tide, the last of the three. Slack was the bridge between the two extremes, a suspension, a holding of breath. Slack made it possible to go places I never could at any other time. During slack I could navigate by kayak through the slinky steep-walled passage into Floathouse Bay. If I had tried that during any other tide I would be hurled out of my boat as the water poured in or out of the constricted channel. You wanted to round the points of the bays during slack because ebb or flow turned it into a washing machine. In contrast, I knew that you could let down your guard a little with slack, leave your boats untied, float. I was fine with slack.

  I felt Birdman’s body give a little. “Nothing wrong with slack tide,” he said. “I’m partial to it myself. I ask everyone who comes here that question. Tells you a lot about a person, the answer they give.”

  He shouldered his rifle. “Deer are shy today. Come on. Want to show you something.” I followed him as we walked out of the valley and into the forest.

  Ancient spruce trees surrounded us, their fluted, shaggy bases larger around than the two of us could reach. Wide legged at their bases, they spiraled upward to become thick-bodied giants.

  The forest floor was soft and yielding. Under our feet ferns fanned over the ground in a continuous feathery green plate. Sprinkled among them, the devil’s club shot upward, their stalks full of vicious spines. Skunk cabbage unfurled its thickly veined leaves. Birdman touched one of the trees reverently. “Spiky needles to protect the tree from evil thoughts, the Tlingit said.”

  We lay on our backs for a while in the moss. In the gloom the trees cast it could have been midnight or midafternoon. This was a place of perpetual shadow, the canopy entwined far overhead in a dense mat.

  It was a kind of vertigo, lying on my back gazing upward. It seemed to me that I was in motion instead of the trees, that the ground I was lying on was a ship moving along the ragged edge of the afternoon. The old trees made their own music, creaking deep in their bones, pulling water from the depths of the soil up the length of their trunks. The trees breathed out the same water far above me in cloudy breaths, water that evaporated into the atmosphere and came back down as the light touch of rain. The rain that reached the ground here soaked into the cake-like soil, pooling under the roots of the trees. A tree could drink the same water over and over again for centuries, Birdman said. They would outlast us, he said.

  The trees reminded me of the ones in Enchantment Bay. These were distant cousins, perhaps beginning their lives at the same time, sinking their roots deep in duff, that loamy mixture of seeds and dirt and decaying things that could pile up as high as my father was tall.

  I wondered where my father was now. The hunts were over, the boats stowed until spring. Sam would have left on the last plane out like he always did, promising to return come spring. Winter meant a slower pace, though there were still tasks to complete. It was when we cleaned rifles, rebuilt engines, and steeled ourselves for the darkness ahead. I pictured my mother and father moving through dim hallways without me, the rhythm of their days unchanging until the manic days of spring.

  “She chose him over me,” I said, although I had not meant to say it. “How could she choose him?”

  Birdman hauled himself upright, wincing slightly. He wrapped a piece of sedge around his fingers and studied it.

  “Some people need the sizzle,” he said after a time. “Plain old life just isn’t enough for them.”

  I probed the thought like a sore tooth. If he was right, my father was the same way. He took the boat out in twenty-foot seas just to see if he could outrun the weather. Our orange survival suits lay on the bunks below, unworn, because to put them on meant surrender.

  “I like the flat lines,” Birdman said, and I knew he was thinking of traveling as a young man through a far-off country not long before I was born. I knew from the little Isaiah told me that he and Birdman were the only ones to survive an ambush, lying flat and breathless under the bodies of their dead comrades. I knew that was why he and Isaiah were tied to Floathouse Bay and each other with a knot impossible to unravel. From the time they had been lifted out of the swamp, covered in the blood and brains of their friends, they had made a pact to watch each other’s backs. Who else could understand, Isaiah had told me. Others had tried, women, leaning in with looks of concern rippling their faces. But unless you were there, Isaiah said, to smell it and taste it and feel it, you didn’t get it, not at all.

  I guessed that I liked flat lines too, and I told Birdman so. He reached out a hand to help me up. “You fit right in here with us, then,” he said, and I knew I had passed the test.

  At night Birdman read books by the kerosene
lamp, bifocals perched on his nose. He knew just about everything I could think of to ask: How to cross a river, swollen and chalky from snowmelt. How to spot the places a glacier had been by the rocks and debris it had chewed up on its retreat. The story of the Kiksadi Tlingit survival march across the island after the bloody battles with Russian forces. We will return to our homeland when the time is right, the words sending a shiver down my spine. After a time he would stop talking and go away somewhere in his mind. I could see it coming, just like a fog bank over the ocean before it rolled in waves of suffocating cotton over the land.

  “Where does he go?” I asked Isaiah one day. We pulled crab pots from the bay, hauling up the rope by hand. It took both of us tugging to bring the dripping pots from deep in the ocean. We sorted through the keepers, throwing the rest back and watching them sink, spread eagled, into the deep blue depths.

  Isaiah reached into a bucket of salmon heads and tied two into the pot. He palmed a pair of orange rubber gloves. “Ready?”

  I nodded and grasped one end of the pot. Together we heaved it over the side where it fell, slowly turning until I could not see it anymore. All that was left was our red-and-white buoy marking the spot.

  Just when I thought that Isaiah had forgotten my question, he leaned his chin on the oar and spoke. “He goes back to the good times, I think,” he said. “Maybe back to when he was a kid, barefoot in the long grass, sun shining like it would never quit, before he knew different. He hasn’t had an easy go, and I try to make it as simple for him here as I can. You know that we are squatters here, right?” At my nod he went on. “The coast is long and stormy and the government has better things to do than to chase two old men. At least that’s what I choose to believe.”

  I could imagine what would happen to them if they were forced to go. On the few trips to town my father allowed, I had seen men like them through the greasy glass of the Hell and Gone, lined up and leaning sideways on bar stools like kelp in the tide. Smoke lay like a thick membrane over the dim interior. Their eyes, when they met mine through the window, were full of desperate hope. I never wanted that to happen to Isaiah and Birdman. They belonged out here. They were part of this place. I wanted to learn their secrets. I wanted to be just like they were, calm and unhurried, glowing with rain that fell off their jackets and beards, the taste of freedom on their lips.