Geography of Water

by Mary Emerick

I imagined myself in the alder tunnels, a rifle clutched in sweaty hands. The screams of the cruisers were a tinny echo in comparison to my father’s cries. The bear saw me and hesitated. Only moments stood between us and the crunch of bone. The urge for self-preservation was strong, stronger than blood.

  Would I have run?

  “I might have run,” I said. I stared into the fire so that I would not have to meet Birdman’s eyes. But he said, “I might have run too.”

  “You would never run. You’re never afraid.”

  I could feel him thinking for a moment, making a decision. “I did run,” he said. “I ran, plain and simple, from Angela. Never paid a dime to her mother. I know all about the wilderness but not so much about keeping promises.”

  His eyes were brimming full in the firelight. It could have been the smoke. It could have been something else.

  “After we get home, I am going to look for her. I really will this time. I’ll find her and make things right. You think she’ll slam the door in my face?”

  “She won’t,” I said, although I was not sure.

  “I ran one other time,” Birdman said. His voice was so low I had to strain to hear it. “Back there, in that place. It was a calm day, it had been quiet for days, not the spooky kind of quiet that meant they were sneaking around looking for us, but real quiet like we were the only ones out there. I almost believed it, that we were safe, the worst was over. We were all kind of trash talking, joking, not thinking. We walked right into an ambush because I hadn’t been looking for sign like I was supposed to. I got too used to it, that quiet. I felt pretty good that day, and there were lots of birds, not like in some of the places where the planes were spraying. Flat missed the signs, looking at birds. Then all hell broke loose, guys were being mowed down and all I could think was, how the hell can I get out of here and stay alive? So I ran. In the confusion nobody saw. There were guys running all over the place anyway. Plenty of places to hide, maybe some other guys did it too, I don’t know. After it got quiet again I crept back out of my hiding place back there in the tules and found all the guys dead or close to, all except Isaiah, and he was barely alive. I heard the chopper coming and I crawled in that mess like I had been there all along. Just got lucky, I told the medics, a bunch of the guys fell on me and I didn’t get a scratch. They all believed me, why would I make that up? That’s the real story. That’s what really happened. My fault, those deaths heavy on my heart, all of these years. I can remember all of them, Joey and Wild Bill and Harper, faces just as clear as yours is now.”

  “You didn’t mean for them to die,” I whispered.

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, the end was the same.”

  “Does Isaiah know?”

  “I guess he does. I started to talk about it once, years ago, and he made me stop. Said it didn’t matter what had happened in that place. We were friends then and would always be friends.”

  The fire chewed its way through the wood of trees older than either of us put together. The silence between us was different now. It settled around us like an old, comfortable blanket.

  “All of us carry something we’re not proud of,” Birdman said finally. “You, me, Sam. Roy too. Live long enough, you’re bound to be carrying something.”

  I reached out and gathered Birdman’s hands in mine for just a second, as long as he would allow. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “It’s been years since I’ve talked about this,” he said, pulling his coat tighter against the chill. “Last thing I want is to be one of those guys who have their feet planted in the past. Better to hold this deep in the gut where it can’t come out.” He indicated Sam, heading back to us. “Keep this under your hat. Don’t need the world knowing my secrets. You, I trust with them.”

  Sam sat down beside me, close enough to touch if I wanted. He held his hands out over the fire. “Water’s the coldest I ever felt,” he said. “Burned me, almost, it’s that cold.”

  “Look,” I said. In the sliver of lake without ice, the reflection of a perfect full moon glistened in the black depths.

  “Lake of the Fallen Moon,” I whispered.

  It was beautiful.

  “Won’t be a good night,” Birdman said in a gruff voice. “Moon’s no good for sleeping.” I could see that he thought he had gone too far in his telling, and he had to retreat for a while. I knew that something other than the moon would keep him awake. He rose stiffly to his feet and limped over to his bedroll. I knew he wasn’t going to be sleeping—from the light of the fire, flickering on his face, I could see his eyes, wide open.

  Sam looked at me and away again quickly. “After we climb down from here you may never want to see me again. If that happens, I can charter a plane and be on my way. Just say the word.”

  When I thought about watching Sam step on a floatplane and fly out of the bay, my heart ached a little bit. He was nothing like the man my mother would have chosen for me. He had none of the confidence and swagger that had propelled my father through life. He did not have the woods sense of Birdman or the cheerful glow that Isaiah had. With Sam, there was only the sense of slipping deep into a hot springs pool, my body unclenching like a closed fist. That had to add up to something worth trying.

  “Don’t go right away,” I said. “Stay one season at least. Stay until the whales come back.” I was about to add one more word: Promise. I caught it before it left my lips. There had been enough promises.

  “We might still find her,” he said. “Alaska’s like that. You don’t see people for years and they suddenly pop up again. Happens every day.”

  He could be right, but in my heart I knew that my mother belonged out here, somewhere in this fragile and beautiful country. Not for her a sore-footed life working at a diner, cleaning fish on a slime line. Her hair cut short, her heart broken. Maybe it was better for her to disappear into this place, let it wrap its arms around her forever.

  “I’m alone,” I said, the idea sinking in for the first time. We had been so busy setting up our camp and gathering firewood that it had stayed at bay, something lurking out there in the darkness. Now it moved in on me, bottomless as the lake. Both of my parents were gone. I was alone without a map to guide me.

  Sam reached over with one hand and let it rest for a moment on mine before he moved it away. “You know I thought about you. Every day that you were gone I thought about you. But I didn’t want to just be your escape route. That’s why I didn’t show up in Floathouse Bay the year you left. I was waiting for you to come back on your own. I was waiting for you to choose me.”

  “I had to choose myself first,” I said, and I realized it was true. To break free of the currents that trapped me in Never Summer, I had to go and learn that there were other ways to live. I had to make my own way instead of stepping in to someone else’s footprints.

  “Fair enough.” But Sam still looked troubled. He fidgeted, pushing his hair off his face, carefully piling another load of branches on the fire. For a moment the smoke obscured the space between us.

  “Is anything possible between us, after what I told you?” he asked me at last.

  Here was where I got to choose. I could hold on to my sorrow the way my mother had, turning her life into a web of half-truths. I could let it spiral out into a forever anger the way my father had done. Or I could do something different.

  “Look at where we are,” I said. The moon reflecting on the lake, the silent mountains overhead. Could I have dreamed this up only a day ago? “Isn’t it easy to think that anything’s possible?”

  When I looked at him I did not see the man I had first loved, someone I had been drawn to because he was slow like a river past snowmelt, water I could see through clear to the sand beneath. I loved him then because he was not like my father. I was beginning to love him now for a different reason, for the real man I was starting to know. His shoulders were slumped with weariness and he had long ago lost any spark he once had as a younger man, but sometimes I could see it in his eyes, a coal waiting to
be kindled. What else was left for me to know?

  In the morning, frost coated our sleeping bags and painted the long grass as silver as an old woman’s hair. A fine, light snow the consistency of sugar had fallen late in the night, so late that none of us had seen it.

  The fire steamed and hissed in the chilly air. My breath was a cloudburst. The calendar had clicked over to spring, but it was forever winter here. Nobody could stay up here for long. It was time to go lower, where real people could live.

  “Sam?” I said, and he came to sit on his heels beside me, handing over coffee. “Tell me about the whales.”

  “What about them?”

  “You said that they didn’t sing the same songs. How did you know that?”

  He dropped down to sit cross-legged next to me, bringing his own cup from near the fire. “Spent a lot of time reading books on anchor watch. Not a lot else to do, just listen to the slap of water on the hull, clients snoring. This one book I read said that there are three different kinds of whales in the ocean. They call them the transients, those are the kinds that just pass through, and then there’s the residents, the ones we used to see feeding in Never Summer all the time. And there’s this other kind, a kind nobody knows much about, called the offshores. You wouldn’t know it by looking at them, but none of the three kinds cross each other’s lines, and they don’t speak the same language.”

  “I never knew,” I said. For years my mother and I watched the rounded backs of whales as they passed by our bay. We had seen them hunt off the far shores. The whales almost seemed like they were somehow related to us, familiar cousins we saw once a year. There had been no mystery about them.

  “Sam?” I asked. “Do you think anybody ever knows all there is to know?” As I said it I knew I sounded less like a woman and more like a child, but the words slipped out anyway.

  Sam didn’t laugh. He blew on his cup of coffee even though mine had cooled enough to sip. “I think you can know an awful lot about some things,” he said. His wave indicated Birdman, who was puttering around the edge of our campsite, shoving his sleeping bag into his pack. “Birdman knows all about tracks and who left them and sometimes why. The rest of him is locked up tight someplace. Roy knew a lot about the ocean, and about bears. But everything? No. I think you have to pick and choose what you want to know. That has to be enough.”

  I wasn’t sure if that would ever be enough. It seemed to me that if you knew all the secrets, you would never pick the wrong path. But then I realized people were not the same as salmon, or even whales. Even if there were a map to show us where to go, a foolproof route that would get us home, some of us would not follow it. We would be seduced into other rivers. We would chase flashier fish into different waters. We would spin elaborate tales to make up for the gaps in our lives.

  “Sam?” I asked again. “How do I know, if we’re in the desert or in the mountains, or anywhere, and things go wrong, that you won’t run?”

  Sam clutched his mug, fingers gone white. He had forgotten his gloves somewhere, I thought. “Well, Winnie, I don’t know. I’ve been a nomad all my life. I can try to nail my feet to one place. I can try my best. I can promise you that.”

  Promises. Would I ever be able to hear that word again without remembering? But then coffee as warm as love trickled down my throat. I could feel it spread through all of the veins and arteries of my body. Bitter grounds caught in my teeth like grains of sand and I laughed.

  Sam looked at me, puzzled. “This coffee is terrible,” I said. “You didn’t learn that from my father. His was high octane, to get everyone moving, remember? He did that on purpose. I used to think he ran on coffee, that and cigars. At least tell me you’ll try to make better coffee.”

  He laughed too. “Coffee. Okay, we can start with that.” It was good to see him throw back his head, grinning, and the smile lines around his eyes, seen too seldom. I was right: there was a spark there after all. Maybe I could be the one to bring that fire back to life. Maybe it would be a different kind of fire than the one my father had burned with, maybe the kind of enduring flame that did not blow out in a capricious wind. In the end there were many kinds of fire, just as there were many kinds of tide and many kinds of people. I felt a little bubble of excitement at the thought. There was still so much to find out.

  We gathered up our camp, stopping often to blow on chapped fingers. The cold knifed its way through my coat and I hurried, punching the contents of my pack down so I could close it. Winter hovered over us like a fourth person in our group, icing up our tarp lines and freezing the water in our canteens to a solid block.

  Birdman always packed up in a set of fluid movements, much faster than we could. He had a system of where everything went in his pack, unlike Sam and me, and he was shifting from foot to foot as we finished stuffing items away.

  “It’s time to get back to the ocean where we belong,” he said. “We could go on from here, try to walk into town, but I don’t think we’ll find anything, if we’ve seen nothing here. I would do it though, for you.”

  I looked across the snowfield, unbroken by any tracks save the bear’s. “Which way would we go?”

  He waved an arm to the east. “Over there, around the lake, where it drops off. Posthole through the snow and traverse to the cliff you can barely see. We’d climb down the place where the water’s carved a trough in the stone, and follow that to the cedar flats below. From there, we could find deer trails that would take us to town. Two days, three, tops.”

  I felt the route tug at me. Maybe we could keep walking after all. We could be the people who made it. We might find more ribbons swaying on the trees farther below. We might find tracks in the sands of the lower valleys, the ashes of campfires in the trees. At the same time, I knew we would be risking our lives. We would run short of food and time, a stack of bones scattered by animals, our hair bound up in birds’ nests. Disappearing forever, just like so many had done before us. I knew my mother would not wish that for me. I knew, too, that she was really and truly gone.

  “We’ll do whatever you want,” Sam said. I could tell by the way he stood, poised beside his pack, that he wanted to go back the way that was familiar. Despite the cabin in the aspens he had talked of, he would always be a man who felt safer in the landscape he knew. That he offered to travel a path that was unknown said more about him than any words of repentance or love ever could.

  For a brief moment I was reminded of standing in a swaying boat, ready to pull the starter cord, my mother waiting for me to choose. Moments like this crept up on a person without warning. You were never prepared to make the choices that could change your life forever.

  “I want to go back,” I said, and I realized it was true. “I want to go back to Never Summer Bay.”

  Sam and Birdman shouldered their packs. They began to walk across the basin but stopped when they saw that I had not moved.

  “I’ll catch up,” I told them. “Just give me a minute.”

  Birdman nodded, understanding this more than anyone. He marched away across the hanging valley to stay out of sight. I knew he would hunker down to give his knees a break and that when I walked up to find him, he would show me the best way to go home.

  “I’ll give you all the time you need,” Sam said. “I’ll just wait over in the trees. I’ll wait a long time, if I have to.”

  I knew he was talking about more than just the minute that I stood here with the lake at my back. I knew that he meant some approximation of forever. I leaned into his warm body for a second, long enough to let him know that every trouble could be unraveled and smoothed out with enough time. Then I walked closer to the lake and looked in.

  In the night a light skin of ice had formed over the lake. Soon it would look like nobody had ever been there. The ashes of our fire would sink into the soil. Our footprints would fill with rain and snow, becoming mere suggestions of tracks. Soon, more snow would fall, heavy and deep, covering everything.

  “Lake of the Fallen Moon,” I whispere
d. For my mother and me, it had been a different sort of place, a holy grail where life was easy and men landed gently in airplanes. It was something my mother had clung to all the lonely years since Dean had disappeared. Had she really believed he was here all along? Or had she known, deep inside, that his story would never have a happy ending?

  My knee throbbed. Something swam up to a conscious thought.

  I walked over to where I had fallen the day before. Under the skiff of snow a piece of moss was pulled back from my boot heel striking it. Something hard was under there. Something silver. Something that didn’t belong.

  Kneeling, I tore off wet moss in handfuls, exposing what lay beneath.

  It was the long curve of an airplane wing.

  None of it really made sense to me. In the ocean, the gray bodies of whales foraged under a clouded sun. They drew up their prey in a net of bubbles. The salmon followed an unwritten map back to their home stream. The bears slept in day beds among the big trees. It was all an endless circle, all of us bound together in a knot that could never really be untied. All we had to count on was what we carried with us, our memories and our hopes for the future. This land was constantly changing, evolving, growing, the same as we were. We had to balance that load between the two, the past and the present, and hope that it was enough.

  I had always followed someone else. I followed the thread of her stories, wanting to believe. I followed my father through the estuaries and up the salmon streams. I followed in the steps of bears and along the trails that deer punched through the beach fringe. I never before dared to make my own prints. It always seemed so precarious, each step a walk out onto an uncertain land.

  I stood up and took a deep breath that I could feel all the way down to my bones. Then I turned to face a distant sun and headed back home, making my own tracks.

  Fourteen

  Sam and I have lived in Never Summer Bay for years now, a lifetime. We have grown into each other like moss. He still talks about the desert, the open road, especially on those days when the rain blows sideways, a curtain separating us from any other place in the world. He looks through maps; he paces in long strides across the room. But he never goes. I have begun to believe that he never will.