North of Hope (23 page)

The first Saturday back in Seattle after Dad and Kathy’s funeral, I called the answering machine of a neighborhood Episcopal church. I wrote down the service time. I set my alarm clock. I woke on Sunday morning, dressed, and drove to the little stone church. I sat in back. While in Alaska, I’d gone to St. Mary’s for church on Sundays, and every time, the tears let loose like flash floods in a desert, always around the Eucharist. Each time, the deluge surprised me into fright and relief.

As I sat in the hard pew toward the rear of the Seattle church, the words and patterns of the liturgy emerged in a new way, as though someone were running a magnifying glass over the pages of the
Book of Common Prayer
. Words I had seen and read and prayed so many times jumped out: “communion of saints,” “have mercy on us.” I walked up the aisle to the communion rail finally understanding. I was relieved, amazed, and bewildered. The communion of saints: the line between life and death isn’t much of a line at all.

As beautiful as Esetuk Creek was, I didn’t feel the same delight Dad and Kathy had. Too much hung on this trip.

We pushed the raft from shore, felt it release from rock and sand, and moved forward into the river.

We were entering the canyon.

From the moment we left the shore, the water surged and sped around the bend where we had perched, diving toward the canyon wall on the other side.

“Paddle both, paddle left!” I yelled. The side of the blue rubber raft came within inches of the canyon wall when the force generated from our paddling pushed it back into the current. We sailed down and through a hole, and the raft popped exuberantly out the other side.

Then a rock: “Paddle right!” A furious slashing of paddles, partly in air, partly in water, as the force of the river bounced the raft forward. The river was alive. She strained and roared and sped. We were at her mercy.

The river was hard and fast beneath the raft, hard and fast and furious and angry and rushing and swirling and crashing and smashing, and we stayed in the raft only by will and gritted teeth and flexed quads and the grace of God. On either side, the canyon walls, undercut by the current, blurred by, unappreciated in our focus on the complexities of the raging current as we paddled and leaned and yelled and paddled, paddled, riding out the wave trains and diving through the holes, soaked by spray and waves, hands slippery on the plastic paddles, until finally the river relaxed just a little and we relaxed with her, and she widened out and the water was more shallow and we scraped on gravel bars. Now we could see the tundra on both sides, and the rocks in the current, and the willows growing, and the pink wild sweet pea and the white moss campion and the green coastal plain stretching out ahead and the mountains soaring behind us, and ahead of us the blue sky that, just beyond the horizon, we knew touched the dark polar seas just recently free of coastal ice.

“I lost it!”

Another paddle jetted away in the current. I wasn’t sure whether to scream or to cry.

“Eddy on the left!” I yelled. Ned paddled forward, hacking at the water. I pulled hard, back-paddled, and we stopped to regroup.

“Well, we don’t have another paddle,” I said. I couldn’t look at Sally.

“We’re just going to have to get out and scout each rapid carefully,” Ned said. “It’s a big raft. It’s going to be hard going with two paddles.” None of us made eye contact.

“That other group is just behind us, isn’t it?” Sally asked.

“They probably want to hang on to their own spares,” I said shortly.

“I’m going to check out what’s around the bend,” Ned said.

I followed. Thick clouds of mosquitoes hung in the air. I waved them away from my face, feeling the physicality of the swarm with each swipe. Walking along the willows, I yelled, “Hey bear, hey bear, we’re out here! Don’t worry about a thing! Hey bear!”

Past the bend, we saw only a set of innocuous rock gardens.

“Looks like we want to stay left starting about there,” I said, pointing at the tongue of river pouring through two boulders at the top.

“Yep.”

“Hey, what’s the deal with Sally?” I couldn’t help myself. “I’d think someone coming on a trip like this would have a little better understanding of where we are. We aren’t on a day trip where there’s extra gear in the car.”

“I know,” he said.

“This trip is to honor Dad and Kathy. I’m mortified that she wants to ask someone else for a paddle. We should be able to make this trip ourselves. But I don’t know if we can get down the river with just two.”

“I agree.”

“Okay, well, I’m not interested in being the one that does the asking,” I said. I set my jaw and bit my lip.

We walked back to the boat, balancing on rocks and swatting mosquitoes.

“We’ll ask Karen when we get farther downriver,” Ned said. “We can pull over for dinner and wait till they float by.”

“Sure!” Sally said cheerily.

“When you ask her, Sally,” I said thinly, “make sure you acknowledge that we understand this is the wilderness—and that the ethic out here is to be self-sufficient, to take care of yourself. I think that’s really important.” I measured each word carefully and then released it slowly.

“Okay,” Sally said. I still couldn’t make eye contact with her.

Something inside of me cringed, believing this crisis reflective of my own failure to plan, my shortsightedness in agreeing to our small party, my foolishness in even having considered such a trip in the first place. I was worried as much about being up to the challenge as about being able to complete the trip, about being good enough to have undertaken such a journey. Dostoyevsky’s words rang in my ears with excruciating clarity: “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.”

“Let’s get going.” We jumped into the raft, and Ned and I paddled back into the current. It was hard work. By the time we’d bounced through the rock gardens and stopped to check the next rapid, Ned and I both were exhausted.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” he said. I was alarmed by his statement, though I was happy that the next section looked benign.

“Hang in there. We’ll get through it,” I said.

“No, this one looks tricky. I think we should line it.” He spoke flatly.

“Really?” I looked at him hard. His face was set, impassive.

“Yeah. I don’t know if I can do it with just two of us.”

“Okay, let’s line it,” I said, aware of a current more dangerous than the river.

We attached the line to the raft and walked it through the rapids from the bank, stepping through willows, eyes on the water, eyes on the boat. My disappointment over not paddling this short piece of water paled next to the prickling sensation of danger, the pressing in of emotional and physical exhaustion. It is, or should be, the unspoken rule to go with the most conservative opinion in the wilderness. So our decision to line the boat had been the right one, but it had let in a glimpse of something untoward.

We had left the mountains. Now the river flowed through a series of plateaus with deep cuts. After a dinner stop and the gift of a paddle from Karen’s group, we made our way down smooth water, looking for camp close to 8:00 p.m. We had been on the water for ten hours.

I watched the shoreline. I gazed across the plain on either side, still as watchful, still as worried. The raft glided downriver under the soft angle of the sun. And then, looking back at the mountains, my breath caught. The mountains sat solidly and with a great gentleness, the foothills draped like fabric over the land, exquisite fringes of willow on the riverbanks, wet rocks glistening in the midevening sun. Just here was pure abundance.

It was not the landscape that held me, though. I was transfixed by the light. It poured over me, filled the corners of the land. It was as eternal as time and as fleeting as days, as infinite as God and as finite as the eyes beholding it. I was immersed and filled up all at once. It lived, it had a being, that light. There was peace in it. There was gentleness and assurance. Its essence was music.

Though I claw at empty air and feel

nothing, no embrace
,

I have not plummeted
.

—Denise Levertov, “Suspended”

T
hough the Mozart Requiem is commonly performed, I have never sung it before this performance. It is not the monumental aspect of the piece that intimidates me as much as my aching need to sing it, an ache approaching pain. And I do not want to just sing it; even if I’m only a member of a large choir, I want to sing it well, to sing it for my dad, and for Kathy. The Mass for the Dead, or Missa pro defunctis, has been set to music many times, though Mozart’s setting is perhaps the best known. There is much conjecture about the composition of the Requiem, but most historians agree that it was an opportunity for Mozart to find a new direction and depth in his music. As he began working full time on the Requiem in October of 1791, Mozart had premonitions that he was composing the Requiem for his own death. Immersing himself with fervor into his work, he fell gravely ill, and he died in December, his Requiem unfinished. His colleague, Franz Xaver Sussmayr, had to finish it for
him. Even the best among us die with unfinished business. Even the least among us, I hope, have someone who will try to finish it for them. That, at least, is how I understand it.

The primacy of the chorus in the Mozart Requiem gives us more time to rehearse with Maestro Perlman than we might have had with another work. He rolls into our first rehearsal in his wheelchair, and I am astounded. Hearing Perlman play in numerous recordings, I have been awed by his utter mastery of the music, the passion of his performance. I had not known he was disabled. That man who conveyed the depths of passion in his work had been struck with polio at age four. And yet the energy and vigor he brings into the room exceeds that of an athlete.

Rehearsals for me are another mountain ascent. I go in with my red water bottle, feeling the grains of fine Hulahula sand in my teeth and questioning my sanity at trying to connect with Dad and Kathy through music and sand from the river. The powerful harmonies nestle into my head and heart and voice, pull me again and again through Latin liturgy, straighten the paths of my grief, soothe the inflammation of my soul.

Music philosopher Peter Kivy admits failure in explaining the importance of music. But he sees the performance of music as a ritual of community, “the sense of cooperatively wresting order from chaos.”
⁷
The performance of music “literally makes one able to hear what to others is inaudible.”
⁸

Maybe it is the communal nature of the performance of universal harmonies that I so yearn for. The sense of community in grief coming from all of humanity’s worship of the divine. The connection to all of humankind in our shared belief that there is meaning, and that there is something more. This connection reminds me that I am alive. It is the reason I cannot sit at my piano alone, but need to stand and sing the Requiem, one of many voices singing, to access a sense of hope in myself I cannot otherwise express. Though I cannot find the quiet spaces of my heart to hear God, singing gives
me a structure to reach for that connection to him, to feel I am one of many voices working together, inadequate alone but important as a part. The doing and the discipline have a place. They have a place when the quiet places elude us. They have a place in bringing us back to silence, to the symphony of the universe.

Dad’s older sister, Aunt Georgia, comes to visit from Arizona the weekend of the concert, along with my cousins Jamie, Leslie, and Shelby. George and Joanne come over from Port Ludlow as well. I hope Dad and Kathy know somehow that all of us pray the Requiem in whatever way we can.

Perlman’s direction combines the ferocity of a blizzard with the precision of a surgeon. The care he takes and the inspiration he brings to the performance pull me in like a vortex. There is a depth in him I have not experienced with other conductors. But his eyes also hold a deep kindness, a true love for the music, a love for those performing it with him. I follow him with all I have. I look to him as I looked to my father when I was a small child. I look to him as I look to God. I look to him for salvation. It is never good to put this much on a person, even on a master. We expect too much.

Would that it were so easy to find
the sacred in the massacred.

—Stephen Cushman, “Dark Meat”

I
woke to warm sun on the walls of the tent. Seemingly from nowhere, the melody of “Sunrise, Sunset” from
Fiddler on the Roof
moved through me as though it were playing outside my tent. Dad had sung this song, among others from
Fiddler on the Roof
, on our way up to the cabin as I was growing up. Sometimes he mixed in the blues and spirituals too. I blinked at the clarity of each note moving through me.
“Wasn’t it yesterday …”
A cool breeze kept the heat of the day and the mosquitoes at bay. “Hi, Dad,” I whispered to the breeze.

Ned and Sally were making eggs, but I opted to stick with my usual oatmeal and a mug of Market Spice tea. The weather was easy and almost comforting. Ahead of us the coastal plain descended out and away from the mountains toward the sea. I marveled at their courage. I did not want to leave those mountains, sitting behind us so solidly, peacefully. I looked back at them with longing. Already they were shrinking behind the foothills.

I was starting to realize that the reason I had stepped into the raft in the first place was less to find Dad and Kathy than it was to face the beast—and not the bear on the tundra but the lashing
beast of grief within myself. Leaving the safety of the mountains, I was exposed. We were coming closer.

Dad and Kathy’s journal stopped after they reached the spot we would visit today. The pages were blank. Their last entries recorded that they’d had clear cold weather, the kind that invigorates more than it chills. They had time to rest, to look at flowers, and to walk in the hills. A chance to talk to the guided group on the river. The rare visit of a wolf. Enjoyment of a good meal. They were on river time. Their rhythms were river rhythms. They were happy.