North of Hope (28 page)

But I don’t know how. I don’t know if I can do it well, if I can make you proud, Dad
. There was so much I didn’t understand. Quarrtsiluni, say the Inuit. Sing of beauty. Wait. Witness.

What I had seen only a week before, a barrenness in the simplicity of quiet lines of landscape, now pulsed with life and possibility, a living heartbeat, wild and fragile. We were separate. We were the same. I felt a physical thrill, like an electric current through my body. I was learning to see. I had seen: in landscape and light. I was learning to hear. I had heard: in the breeze, in music, in worship, in silence. The prickly toughness of tiny tundra plants crunched under me as I shifted to sit cross-legged, eyes, ears, and heart open to a different world.

Ninety-five percent of plant life in the Arctic is below the surface of the earth. Only five percent is visible. If I couldn’t see it in myself, I could see this regeneration in the Arctic. It had, and will always have, a lot to teach me. I see so little. So much of what I know of Dad, of Kathy—so much of what I know of myself, and this world and the world to come—is hidden. Any discovery will always be only the beginning of knowledge. Mystery reigns. Without the
extensive and unseen root and rhizome systems of Arctic vegetation, the tiny plants and flowers would die. What is known might sometimes sustain us, but what is unknown will save us.

This is what I learned then and realized later. That it was not about finishing a trip. It was only about living in the midst of what cannot be understood. Learning to see. Learning to hear. Bearing witness. Trusting that what is hidden is beautiful.

A constant overflight of jaegers and songbirds moved through the Arctic air, their cries and songs coming and going in crescendos and decrescendos along lines of breeze, written on a score of fog at the ocean shore, the patterns of tundra polygons, mountains rising to the south. The animals that made this place their home: the elusive musk ox, the fox upriver, the wolves who had perhaps watched me, even if I had not seen them. The bears keeping a respectful distance—grizzly bear, polar bear, black bear. A hundred thousand caribou following mysterious rhythms along ancient migratory paths. The Arctic not only pulsed with the world’s heartbeat; it was the heart. And with it all—under, above, and around it all—flowed the river. I breathed slowly, deeply, and the tundra seemed to breathe too, and our breath was one breath, our heartbeat one heartbeat. For this short time, I belonged.

Dies irae
… I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I walk through the valley. I walk through. Through. The valley ends. The mountains become holy hills, and the valley opens to the plain. In Adam all die, but all shall be made alive.
Dies irae … lux aeterna
.

Even under cloudy skies, the light lay warm and comfortable across the plain. The kind of light that dissolves shadow, dissolves bristling tooth and claw. The kind of light that shows the transparency of things. Once, in a choir, I’d sung Herbert Howell’s Requiem singing words by John Donne: “Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening,” we sang, “into the house and gate of heaven … no noise, no silence, but one perfect music, no darkness nor dazzling,
but one perfect light.” On the other side of a symphony, on the other side of a scream, is silence, the one perfect music. On the other side of darkness, on the other side of shadow, is one perfect light. In witness is worship. Worship despite tragedy. Worship because of tragedy. A Kaddish.

I wondered then—and I have wondered many times since—why I haven’t had the same kind of dream with Dad as I had with Kathy. I am certain, as certain as I am of gravity and air, that Kathy and I were together when I had that dream. But Dad hasn’t come to me the same way. I’ve wondered about this for years with a sense of dread and sadness. But I have come to believe that he was always with me. That whatever was unsaid or unresolved was never there to begin with, dissolved instantly in that kind of love only a parent knows for a child. I know this looking at my own children. And this is something that was hidden to me then, that kind of love. For anyone who has experienced it, how do we not walk around awed by hope that so much love can exist in one physical place?

Dad, I don’t know what else to do. It feels like there should be more. This is all I can figure out. This is the best I have
.

Shannon, it is enough. You are enough. I love you, kiddo. Live your life
.

I unzipped my fleece to feel the wind against my skin. My time here was short;
chronos
time imposed itself without mercy on the river time of the last week. I had come to honor my father, to honor Kathy, to mourn, to grieve, to acknowledge that place where they had left this world. Or that is how I’d defined it, a thin mask for going to the ends of the earth to try to find them. To see if there was a way to bring them back. But in coming to honor them, I had begun to learn from this place that honoring a life is honoring the wide open space of wilderness and unknowing where the sacred dwells.

In Dad’s journals, he had mused, “No one could draw a picture of this place and what it has meant to me, but when I think of Alaska
I think of sun and light and earth and trees. Although it’s entirely different … the outdoors reminds me of my youth in Kansas. There as a 10-year-old we wandered through endless fields … floating small streams.” Alaska gave him life and took it away. But after leaving home to travel so far, it was in Alaska, in a land of lines and light, that Dad finally was able to come home.

If the response to pain is beauty, beauty must win. I don’t think I could have articulated this back then. But I had needed to do something. I had needed to do something beautiful. In that beauty was hope. In that hope was healing. Even if it took a lifetime. To wait and watch is to witness. To witness is to see the sacred in the massacred.

I wish you could have been at the concert in February, Dad. We sang Mozart’s Requiem. I sang it for you
.

I was there, Shannon. I always am
.

The drone of the Cessna arrived a moment before the plane appeared, a tiny spot swelling imminently, crudely interrupting the rhythms of wilderness, the timelessness in which I sat suspended. Tundra air blew over the river and the wind felt to me like sadness. I had finished Dad and Kathy’s trip. This part of my journey had ended. I had done what needed to be done. I had put one foot in front of the other, dipped the oar back into the water. Grief would weave itself among the strands of love and life and hope, and I was starting to believe that what came of it all would still one day be beautiful.

Do not be afraid, says the angel. Don’t be afraid, said Sam Fathers. Looking out over the tundra, I was still scared. But I was no longer afraid.

Requiem aeternam
. Grant them rest eternal. Perhaps it is not for the dead that we should pray; they rest eternally already. Perhaps it is our own poor souls that need these prayers.

Back in Seattle, just off the shore of Lake Washington, two eagles fly together, their flight twisting and turning, circling and coiling, ascending higher and higher, an exquisitely intimate and primal dance. One flies underneath the other, its back to the lake as they soar into the sky, higher and higher. Their talons clasp and they fall, hurtling toward earth, the flat plane of the lake, and then they break off, each pair of wings snatching the air, pulling their bodies back into the slipstream, and they fly out of sight.

It is the mountains again, always the mountains. The sky is blue, a blue that makes me imagine anything is possible, and it sets off the white-and-blue hanging glaciers of Mount Shuksan against dark greenschist rock. I stand next to Dad’s army friend George, waiting, laughing nervously, more nervous each minute. A few close friends are clustered around me, each in a knee-length, cranberry-colored silk dress of her own choosing, the warm sun drawing strong shadows under collarbones and cheeks. My dress is white, a simple lean design made of raw silk with a champagne-colored sash hanging to the ground in back below a row of tiny covered buttons.

The details are in place. I hadn’t worried too much about them, and things had arranged themselves in all the right ways. Two small bouquets of flowers have been placed on chairs in honor of Dad and Kathy, and a special note to them included in the bulletin. There is a picture of them at the lodge where we will hold the reception. We are standing in the perfect mountain meadow. There is a band that will play “Brown Eyed Girl.” I’d splurged on flowers. I wonder if I should be thinking more of them, but it is a momentary wonder. I am where I am supposed to be, waiting to walk to the person with whom I will spend the rest of my life, without whom I can’t imagine spending another day.

“It will just be a few minutes, I think,” someone tells me.

I know we have arrived on time and am not worried, but the delay seems to stretch like a lazy cat well after sunrise.

“What is it?” I ask.

“They’re just trying to get people seated,” a second person says. But the delay is longer than something like that would require.

“Seems like it’s taking a while,” I say to break the awkward pause, to calm my own nerves.

The two who’ve been talking glance at each other; something uneasy passes between them. Then there’s a pause.

“There’s a bear that’s come into the meadow,” someone says gently. “It’s not a problem. He’s just eating grass, but we’re trying to get him to move. He’s right in the path where you girls are about to walk.”

The sky flashes blue. The glacier winks. The spruce trees are suddenly the deepest green.

“A bear,” I say quietly. “With all those people in the meadow. Wow.”

I look at George, and we both smile small easy smiles. I think I see George’s eyes glistening. Of course there is a bear.

“It’s okay,” someone says, quickly. “We’re trying to get him to move along. He just doesn’t seem to be in a hurry.”

It is a half hour later when we finally walk down the hill toward the meadow, the girls in their silk dresses and the guys in tuxedos, and finally George holding his arm firmly under mine. I walk down the small hill, where there is no longer any evidence of bear, and toward the meadow, and up between the chairs, where I had thought I would feel self-conscious, but I look at my husband-to-be ahead of me, the man who will be the father of our children, of Dad and Kathy’s grandchildren. I see Peter’s smile and the tears in his eyes. And a world and a life that are deep and complex and full of wonder.

This story took place in 2006. In 2007, the Arctic lost more sea ice than ever in recorded history, and the trend continues.

The wild coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge remains threatened by development, despite its fragility and criticality as breeding grounds for large numbers of animals from air, land, and sea, ever-decreasing estimates of oil, and a deteriorating pipeline system putting at risk not only the transport of oil but national security. I traveled to the Arctic mourning a loss as open as this wilderness, my family crushed under the weight of a bear’s nature; this unforgiving landscape is as susceptible to human actions.

The killing nature comes from instinct. Human threat is born of premeditation. There was no way to stop the deaths of my dad and Kathy. There is a way to prevent the destruction of the Arctic. While climate change continues to loom as the Arctic’s biggest threat, the immediate threat of widespread development presses further. Developers claim they need only two thousand acres to develop the Arctic Coastal Plain; they do not explain that those two thousand acres will pepper the plains like a checkerboard, requiring roads and helipads and other destructive infrastructure on tundra
perfectly suited for the cruelty of an Arctic winter, and utterly unable to withstand human development.

We are an oil-based society, but there is important work being done to reduce our dependence through conservation and alternative energy sources, and this is where our resources and attention should be given. The Alaska Wilderness League is doing important environmental protection work for our northernmost public lands in Alaska’s Arctic. The bipartisan Rocky Mountain Institute is doing important work to develop alternative energy and conservation-based solutions for our country. Conservation is our way out. Conservation is the only responsible path, for the sake of the environment, our national security, our way of life, and creation itself.