Geography of Water

by Mary Emerick

  Despite this, I suddenly felt like time had never passed. I was ten years old again, a little girl hiding behind her bangs. At any moment I expected Uncle Dean to taxi up to the dock, clients steaming up the windows of his plane, their doughy faces pressed up to the Plexiglas. I expected to see bear skins hanging off the rail of the boat, ready for sealing, hear loud laughter of the men and feel the damp closeness of the nightfall around us. I expected to feel the same seesaw of emotions, the fear of what would come next. Standing here now I felt that the past was coming up behind me like an old cloak. It would shrug itself on over my shoulders and I would never be able to get free.

  There was an awkward pause. I could hear the kitchen clock ticking in the silence.

  “Treated you all right down coast?” he asked. “I knew they would. We fell out years ago, but their hearts are good down there.”

  “I love them,” I said, feeling strangely disloyal. It was a different kind of love than I had ever known, a subtle drip of water from a hidden seep instead of a torrent. The words hung in the air and for a moment nobody spoke.

  “No pedestals on the coast,” my father said finally. I could see a hint of what I thought was old anger in his face, or maybe hurt. “Those boys have just as much history as the rest of us. All of us came here looking for something or running from something. Sometimes it’s both.”

  I knew he was right; ghosts chased Isaiah and Birdman. They had lived five decades and their pasts sometimes haunted them, sneaking up unaware as we drank coffee. At those times they cleared their throats and shuffled out to the dock, their backs rounded against whatever burdens they carried.

  “Well,” he said, “you’re back now. Just in time. I need your help.”

  “So where is she?” I asked. I looked at my father, upright in his chair, studying me as closely as I was looking at him. Did you do something to her? Something bad? I wasn’t brave enough to say it aloud, not here, not yet. I didn’t want to believe it either, and saying it would make it a possibility. And there was this: how could he have hurt my mother? Look at him, his legs like sticks under the blanket.

  She had started hiking a few weeks ago, he told me. At first, he said, she only disappeared for an hour, then two, then a whole day. “At first she only went to the bluff,” he told me. “The next day she started going farther, up to the muskeg and just where the cedar flats begin. Soon she was gone for most of the day. But she always came back.”

  She brought him stories like gifts. The way the lichens hung like blonde women’s hair off the trees, silver drops of rain caught in a spider’s web. Early spring bear tracks in the snow, crossing over the pass. She brought things back too, placing them in his cupped hands. A shredded balloon, found tangled in devil’s club, blown in from who knew where. The first shoot of swamp cabbage. An antler. “She knew how much I missed being out there,” he said. “She told me she was bringing the forest back to me.”

  I could see her doing this, her arms full of gifts, hoping each one would make him better.

  “I told him that maybe she crossed the island to town,” Sam said. “I mean, Roy, you have to consider the possibility that maybe she left and doesn’t want to come back.”

  “Nobody’s ever crossed the island and made it alive,” my father answered. “There are five-thousand-foot peaks to get over. You’d have to cross the Despair River. Swim, probably, this time of year, with all the snowmelt. The alder is such a thick mat that you’d never even touch the ground. Devil’s club higher than your head. Waterfalls taller than God. It’s impossible country up there. Dean and I flew it a million times, enough to know what it’s like. No, I think she is in trouble. The longer we spend talking about it, the less time we have to find her.”

  In the silence that followed I heard only the rain. It dripped off the rotting wood shingles and rolled down the windows, splashing into the moss on the stairs. It seemed insistent, worming its way through the weak places of the house.

  “Where are the other boats?” I asked.

  Sam said, “Sold. Broken. Gone. She didn’t leave by sea.”

  If my mother had left by land, she must have meant to come back. She hadn’t been leaving for good. Like my father had said, nobody could walk across the island. It had been tried before, a couple times. Both times, the men—and they had all been men, adventurers from somewhere else—had vanished, an extensive air search locating nothing but the remains of a tent wrapped around a tree. Ernie brought us those grim tales, and we had all secretly thought that those men had gotten what they deserved. Who were they to challenge a wilderness that was older than time? My mother would not walk across the island, I thought. She would remember the stories. Where had she gone?

  Not the muskeg. She had been there a hundred times. Although you could fall in the muskeg, pinned under the weight of your pack in a bottomless pool, drowning in only a few feet of water, she knew the muskeg and where to walk in it. Instead, she was gathering up her courage to go farther and farther. Perhaps she wanted to bring my father more elaborate gifts each time: stones that used to live at the bottom of a river, bark from a thousand-year-old tree. Something that would work.

  What was past the muskeg? I knew that there was a wall of cedar, too thick for us ever to penetrate. Beyond that, there was only a blank space on the map I carried in my head. I thought there might have been a river, the source of one of the many streams that bubbled out into the bay. Where did the river come from?

  A memory emerged. I knew where my mother had gone.

  I went to the cabinet that had always held the topographic maps. They were still there, tightly rolled in cracking elastic bands, neatly labeled in my mother’s cramped handwriting. I pulled out the right one and unfolded it on the table. Age and humidity curled the edges, and I anchored those using copies of the Coast Pilot.

  “It’s called the Lake of the Fallen Moon,” I told Sam. “See it here, just above the red cliffs and below the divide? This waterfall must come from the lake. Uncle Dean used to talk about this lake. What if she went there?”

  At ten years old I had liked to think of Uncle Dean at Lake of the Fallen Moon. Maybe he had changed his mind partway around the island, made a U-turn, and headed there, deciding to transform his life, to start over.

  “What do you think Uncle Dean’s doing now?” I would ask, starting the story.

  My mother would think for a moment. Her eyes were sad. “Picking blueberries. He’ll make a pie. And ice cream, from snow.”

  “He’s probably built a cabin by now,” I guessed. “Maybe he’s made a canoe.”

  Deep down I knew that Uncle Dean was really under two hundred feet of water, his plane tumbling along the bottom of the ocean in the restless current, but it was easier to imagine him at Lake of the Fallen Moon instead.

  Sam had been leaning over the map. Now he stood up, rubbing his eyes. He had never taken up much space, but now I noticed that his Carhartts hung looser on his hips than they ever had. He looked as though he had not slept in days. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “It isn’t far past the red cliffs. One night at the most, maybe two days’ walk. It doesn’t seem like much to go on, just a hunch. I mean, you were a little girl then. What do you think, Roy?”

  Sam had never been a forceful person, not like the series of headstrong assistant guides that had preceded him. He could be talked into a lot of things: leaving shore in the remnants of a gale, climbing higher into rain-soaked creeks. It was a quality that my father liked. “Finally got a keeper,” he told us. Now I wondered if Sam had also been chosen because he would never speak out; the secrets of our bay would be held close to his chest like a hand of cards.

  My father stabbed a finger at the contours on the map. “Look at how steep it is. She couldn’t have made it up there. I’ve been up on those cliffs. The rock crumbles off in your hands. I saw Jesus a time or two on those cliffs.”

  I leaned in and tried to make sense of the map. I only knew how to read charts, the language of the sea. Sometimes th
e charts showed the blue outline of interior lakes or significant features like the red cliffs, but for the most part the land itself wasn’t what we studied. We had kept a full set of topographic maps just in case a wounded bear had left the beach fringe and climbed high, but we had hardly ever used them. Back then, the only geography that was important to know was that of water.

  Thin brown lines bracketed the tiny bowl where the lake sat. Close together, so close that there was barely any white space. Steep. Too steep, my father proclaimed. Only birds could get there, he said.

  He had always forbidden us from climbing the red cliffs. Dangerous rocks, he said, the same kind that beat near the earth’s core. Compasses spun wildly there and strange plants found nowhere else clustered in tiny crevices. It was not a place for us to go. Better to stay by the sea, where he could make sure we were safe.

  My mother had agreed quickly. She was cautious of the land. She had ticked off all the ways that water had tried to kill her, but she still preferred the sea. Riptides, following sea, your foot caught in a rope, she had said. I’ll take those over what the land might serve up.

  “Looks like a hell of a climb,” Sam said. Worry scribbled across his face. He had always hung on my father’s heels like the Labs. He had never taken a trip alone. I had never been farther than the muskeg.

  Birdman lingered behind us, studying the bay. Now he stepped inside the lodge. I watched a storm play out on my father’s face and braced myself, but then he looked resigned. “You brought him. Best tracker in Alaska. I would have done the same.”

  “Long time, Roy,” Birdman said. “I see you’ve gotten yourself into a spot of trouble.”

  To my surprise my father laughed, throwing his head back. For a minute he was the man I remembered, teeth a flash of white in his dark face, eyes snapping. “Always had a way with words,” he said. “Come to save the day, have you?”

  “Lake of the Fallen Moon,” Sam cut in. “But there’s the red cliffs. We don’t know about the red cliffs.”

  “There’s a way around those cliffs,” Birdman said calmly. “I studied them for a bit, the way they come down through the cedars up high. We’ll still have some climbing to do, but we can sneak up on them through the muskeg and the cedar. I think we can make it to that lake, if that’s where you’re wanting to go.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He nodded, not even glancing at the map.

  “Everything I know, I learned from Birdman,” my father said, surprising me again. I had never thought of my father as a student. It always seemed he was born knowing the coast, but now I realized he must have had a teacher. Had he walked through the same valleys with Birdman that I had, learning the stories in the sand? Had they stood back to back, trusting each other with their lives? How had he answered the one question that Birdman always asked?

  “You can go up the cliffs that way, if he says you can,” my father said. “I’ve never tried it that way. Always did it the hard way, from the water, and a guy has got to have more guts than any of you have. But Birdman can read the country like nobody else I’ve ever known. The lake, though, I’d advise against it. Nothing good can come out of going there.”

  Birdman’s gaze was steady. “What is it about the lake you are afraid of, Roy?”

  My father’s eyes dropped first. I had never seen that before, not ever, even with the sturdiest, most demanding client.

  “I’m only allowing it because I want you to find her,” he said. “Go on to the lake then. Find whatever you’re going to find there. I still think it’s a dangerous endeavor.”

  With his grudging approval, hope galvanized me. My mother was perhaps only a day’s walk away. A pile of gear grew around us as Sam carried armfuls from the closet. What would we need to climb so high? Each piece of gear carried a memory with it. The tiny stove had brewed up coffee during our driftwood gathering expeditions. I had slid inside one of these sleeping bags when my mother and I camped on the Trader Islands to dive for abalone. We had walked toward each other and away in a kind of dance, folding up a tarp like the ones I sorted through now.

  “It will be what it has to be,” my father said. “You leave as soon as you are ready.” He rose to his feet, holding the back of the chair behind him, wavering slightly. I remembered the way he used to be, strong muscles working under the rough fabric of his shirt as he lifted the anchor, a ground-eating stride that could leave anyone in his wake. Now he shuffled, uncertain. He was suddenly old, bent like a comma. He didn’t stand for long before he dropped back into the chair.

  I knew he was recalling days gone by and after a minute he said, “Remember, Winnie, the old days? When we would gather around the charts and talk about the weather and which bays to anchor in? Remember all the wives, and how they couldn’t decide whether to go along or stay here in the lodge? Carrying all of their stuff, duffels and duffels of it, down to the boat while they watched us? Remember how it was?”

  “How could I forget?” Through it all we had, all of us—the clients, my mother, myself—spun around my father like planets to a sun.

  My father went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “It took hours but we would fire up the boat and the clients would be huddled up there in the pilothouse with their binocs, sharp smell of nervous sweat so bad I made them go out on the deck. When we got back after the hunt, they would jump off the boat and they were different men then. Conquerors. Kissing the wives like returning heroes. It was something to see. And I made that happen for them.”

  His knobby hands were folded in his lap as the rest of us picked through gear. “You know, this was always a hardscrabble operation. Close to the edge. Everything was fixed with duct tape and baling wire. Things barely ran. We were always out there in the rain and saltwater fixing something. But the clients, they never saw that. The trips changed them forever,” he said. “Remember, Winnie?”

  I remembered. I watched him covertly as I divided up the gear into three old frame backpacks and gave Birdman and Sam their share. Something flickered across his face that I could not understand. I might have called it regret, if my father had been that kind of man.

  I had imagined that if I ever went home that things would have gone very differently. There would have been old hurts to navigate, storms to weather. Doors might have slammed, words tossed like anchors through hallways. This was almost worse. Regret hung around the lodge, thick as fog.

  I turned my back on him and went in search of food we could carry. Slipping through the door into the walk-in pantry, more like a room than a closet, I stifled a gasp. The pantry had been the heart of the house. It had been stuffed full with jars of every color like floating jewels. There had been the translucent pink of canned salmon and flaky white halibut. There were the deep purple of beets and orange globes of peaches. We had made elaborate meals for the clients, biscuits with rosemary and sage, whole salmon marinated in lemon, pitchers of sweet tea. We ordered boxes and boxes of groceries each week, puffing up the ramp with the carts. We gathered the best salmonberries and the ripest blueberries for pies and had stewed young venison for hours in a big cast-iron pot. Nobody ever went hungry at Never Summer Lodge. Now there were only a few suspect apples and boxes of instant oatmeal and spaghetti.

  Sam followed me, pulling the pantry door shut behind him. He saw me looking at the empty shelves. “Ernie still came in now and then,” he said. “He dropped off what food we could afford. I chipped in what I could. We weren’t starving, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Why didn’t they leave? They could have gone someplace else, started over where nobody knew him.”

  “Leave how?”

  “There was the barge. Ernie would have taken them out.”

  “You really think he would leave here?”

  Sam was right. My father wouldn’t ever leave, I knew, no matter how bad things got. I couldn’t picture him anywhere else, especially not in a place where pavement replaced the ocean and buildings blocked out the sky. He would never survive.

  Kitc
hen light spilled through the door slats, painting Sam’s face in stripes of darkness and gold.

  I leaned toward him like a plant seeking sun. Something drew me closer, something I could not name but which felt familiar as air. It was the same feeling as the tickle of ferns on bare skin and the shiver of cold water down my throat. I knew next to nothing about him, but I knew I was different than the women in the pictures he had sent us from Panama over the winter. They had glossy hair caught in buns, smooth bodies bursting out of scraps of fabric. My hair was snarled and wild down my back, and I wore someone else’s clothes. Even the women’s eyes looked wiser than mine would ever be.

  I imagined how he talked about me. There was this kid. I don’t know, fifteen? Seventeen tops. Had a crush on me. Followed me around all the time. Couldn’t shake her.

  One of the women would run a fingernail down his bare back. “Sweet,” she would say. “What was her name?”

  And he would tell her, and she would giggle. “Named after a rifle? What kind of people are they out there in Alaska?”

  Still, I thought that he might lean closer, meet me halfway. There was that sense I had as a younger girl, a sense of understanding between us, something unexplainable but as real as the jar in my hands. I thought that he might close the distance between us without saying a single word.

  Sam leaned back against the wall. The spell was broken. He was not going to kiss me. “Tell me everything,” he said. “We are risking our lives out there, and I need to know everything that you know.”

  What stopped him? I glanced over my shoulder.

  My father and Birdman sat in the room behind us, amber glasses full of liquid at their elbows. They spoke so low that I couldn’t hear, maps spread out before them. Old wars seemed forgotten, only lost years between them now. I knew they watched our shadows through the slats of the pantry door.