North of Hope (4 page)

Three times the bear moved toward the front of the bone pile and in our direction. Soon he lost interest in the remains and,
thankfully, in us. He slipped smoothly into the dark water, gliding up onto a piece of ice, back into the water, and up onto another ice floe. And then, in the ethereal glow of Arctic midnight, he disappeared.

Our proximity to this creature awakened something in me ancient and deep and wild. It did not rouse in me any acute feelings of fear; instead it validated my reason for coming to this edge of the world, this margin of place and time. It served as both warning and welcome. I had arrived in the wilderness.

Morning came with clear skies for travel. Because of the combined weight of our gear and bodies, the Cessna made two trips. The first load with Sally, Ned, and our raft took off for Grasser’s Airstrip.

Sitting alone in the tattered surrounds of Waldo Arms, I waited for the crackling voice from the radio to announce that the Cessna had returned for me—alone, where only a year ago Dad had sat in khaki river pants and black fleece coat, next to Kathy in her matching khaki pants and light-blue fleece, the same fleece I wore on this trip, though it was a size too big. I held their yellow journal in my hands, the same one I’d read through so many times in the past year. I opened it:

I was beginning the same trip they had started a year before. But while the geography and mode of travel were identical, nothing else about this trip was similar. This was not simply a trip into the wilderness, though that would be challenge and adventure enough. This was a journey over the jagged edge of loss. Despite the maps I had carefully marked and folded and stored in plastic cases, it was a trip into uncharted territory. The emptiness of the Quonset hut enveloped me, and I could not escape the awareness of much bigger voids.

The radio crackled again.

Merilyn came out of the office. “Okay, you’re up!” she said. “He’ll be here in a minute.”

“Thanks!”

She paused. “I still feel them here, you know.”

“You do?”

“Sure. My mother stayed around for several years after she died. I think sometimes they’ll do that until they’re ready to go to the next place.”

“That makes sense,” I said, willing to believe it. Nothing else made sense to me anymore, and I wanted to feel Dad and Kathy too.

I put their journal into the waterproof map case with my empty journal, the maps, and the book on Alaskan wildflowers, stood up and collected my bags, and walked out into the wind.

Lord, suffer me to sing
these wounds by which I am made
and marred

—Christian Wiman, “Lord Is Not a Word”

I
do not know if song came before prayer, or prayer before song, but I do know that together they are magnified and soar as they cannot do alone. Hebrew and Greek have no separate word for music, nor does the language of the Inupiat; the boundary between singing and speech wavers like a mirage.
³
I come to song to help me pray, and I come to prayer to help me sing. Sitting in a rehearsal room in a hard metal folding chair every Monday in Seattle after Dad and Kathy’s funeral, I start to sing. I start to pray. I do not know yet that music will lead me to a river.

The chorale director stands in front of plate glass windows overlooking Lake Union and the headlights of I-5, slicing through the dark night. Rehearsal is a torrent of voices, each part channeling and eddying, rising to a frenzied pitch. The words are not hard. There are only three: “Kyrie eleison.
Christe eleison.” Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. The music carries the words. The words carry the music.

My score of Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor is well used. I wonder if the singers who wore the pages to this petal softness held it with as much hope as I do, opened it with such expectation laced with trepidation and desire. It is a holy book, this score, this pathway to prayer. I sit and I sing and I feel lucky to be here, doing the only new thing I’ve been able to take on since I came back from Alaska after the funeral and selling my childhood home; it’s the thing I needed to do, though I could not have said that myself.

It had happened in a slow, quiet way, my getting to that hard metal folding chair. In the midst of grief’s restlessness and languor, I’d opened a flyer that came in the mail from the Seattle Symphony, advertising a performance of the Mozart Requiem conducted by Itzhak Perlman five months hence. I pulled up the Symphony Chorale page online and looked at audition schedules. They were two weeks away. I signed up.

The word
requiem
comes from the Latin, meaning “to rest,” and the Requiem Mass is a service for the dead in the Christian tradition. It is a structure of prayers that has varied over the ages, depending on the history of the church and the intention of the composer, and it has been set to music many times, perhaps most famously by Mozart.

A gentle introduction and the Kyrie begin the Requiem Mass: “Lord have mercy upon us.” From there it moves into the terror of the Dies Irae, or Day of Wrath. This part of the Requiem departs from the standard Mass sequence and was first added in the fourteenth century because of its vivid imagery, a nod to the inability of our daily prayers to fully express our grief. The Domine Jesu asks God to bless those we have lost. The Sanctus and Benedictus praise God, and the Agnus Dei begs God’s mercy. The Lux Aeterna pleads for everlasting light to shine on the dead.

Singing the Requiem for Dad and Kathy could be the ritual I
thought I was missing.
If
I could get into the Symphony Chorale. The thing was, I had a hard time concentrating on much. My mind floated listlessly, as though in a mountain fog. How could I start something new when I could barely put one foot in front of the other?

Perhaps it had not been slow and quiet after all. Perhaps it happened fiercely, a propulsion of pain. Who’s to say how these things happen? But the flyer I received, and the audition that followed, lined up as though orchestrated from another place, by a bigger hand, in the careful way that even when you do not feel him, God moves gently in your life.

The conductor rehearses the men through a section. I sit and listen. The folding chairs around me are full of people, most of whom I don’t know, some of whom might consider the words they are singing, some of whose only interest in the words is their proper pronunciation, the intonation of vowels. Some are Christian, some Jewish, some atheist, and, I imagine, others are of different beliefs yet. Some are here for the music, and some are here for prayer. I am here for both. I need the music to pierce me, the prayer to bleed me. I am here because I don’t know what to say, how to ask, how to address this God I’ve known for so long when parts of me are dead. I know only that I need to pray. And I need the music to do it for me. I need the music to pull me into the time called
kairos
, unbound by clocks and calendars, to give me courage to stay with the pain and help me pray this ancient prayer.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison
.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

—Psalm 23:4

T
he Cessna’s wheels broke from the gravel strip, leaping into the arms of a blue sky. We swung in a sweeping circle over Kaktovik. The change in perspective lent elegance to the meager cluster of dwellings surrounded by dark water and white ice, the Arctic Coastal Plain reaching out to the south, and beyond it, the mountains beckoning. Rising at last from the ground should have been a relief, an escape, but I felt nothing. Every time wheels left the ground in the years I flew helicopters, or rode in a small plane, I’d felt a surge of possibility; this time my eyes glazed over and my chest felt as frozen as the permafrost below, that layer of frozen soil that never thaws, that prevents roots from going deep, so that the only vegetation is close to the surface.

From our take-off point, we flew west to the delta of the Hulahula River, then turned and followed it south, overflying the route my two companions and I would be floating. I looked down at the gentle weave of watery channels that had already submerged me, already rolled me across their boulders.

Tom scanned the landscape with his keen eyes, the eyes of a
pilot who has looked into years of sky and can see a prophecy in a wisp of cloud. He made light conversation. He was looking for weather; I was trying to see the future, while traveling to the past. I bantered back more stodgily, feeling an acidic tightening in my stomach. The sky revealed nothing to me.

My family, especially on Dad’s side, had not received the news of this trip happily. None of our family living in Kansas and Arizona understood the Alaskan—or the outdoors—mentality. As far as they were concerned, any trip away from the comforts of home was a dance on the knife-edge of fate. “Now honey, you’d better be safe,” my aunt said, not so much a plea as a demand. “You do everything you need to do to be sure you come back.” I had every intention of coming back. But of course, flying in a year ago, so had Dad and Kathy.

I have always been told I take after my dad, and I have been proud of it. But that similarity also meant we clashed as I was growing up. As with most first children, especially first children who are girls, I was given more rules to follow than my brothers, who came after me. One evening I came home an hour after curfew on what had been a particularly difficult day at school. Though I was staying at my mom’s house—my parents had divorced a few years before—Dad sat waiting for me on the couch. I was in high school long before cell phones, and there had been no way to find me. After hearing in detail how he had spent his last hour—driving roads searching for me, calling the police, checking hospitals—I went to bed tired and chastened, and saw him a short four hours later when I was awakened to go to work with him. I nodded off over filing cabinets and struggled to stay awake changing out the supplements of law journals. The intention of the punishment was instructive—to understand the impact of my actions on others.

Dad didn’t reveal his concern after my sophomore year of college, when I announced that I would climb Denali, the tallest mountain in North America and an adventure that turned out to
be a three-week expedition on her icy flanks, or when I told him that I would get my commission in the army along with my English degree from Duke and fly attack helicopters. He sometimes wrote me on yellow legal paper in a hand only his secretary could read reliably—and his family, most of the time. In those letters he offered any number of exhortations: to be honest, to act ethically, to dress classically, to keep up with an exercise routine.

When I was climbing Denali, Dad asked our pilot, Lowell Thomas, whom we knew from church, to fly around the mountain and report on our team’s status. Or perhaps Lowell had volunteered. Either way, he checked on us during our three weeks on the glacier and called in the all-okay to Dad.

At home in Alaska for Christmas after I returned from an army deployment to Bosnia, Lowell greeted me as he always did after the midnight service and said, “You know, your father was really worried about you when you were over there.”

The gravity in Lowell’s voice, the intentness of his eyes, surprised me. Dad never mentioned being worried when I called on the sat phone from the tactical operations center at Tuzla West. Hearing that Dad had worried meant the world to me.

My last year in the army, Dad came to visit me in the border town of El Paso, Texas, where I was stationed developing doctrine for Theater Missile Defense Joint Forces Targeting. Dad had been stationed in El Paso briefly himself and remembered it with no affection, but I loved the desert mountains and training for triathlons with a group of civilian friends. Dad and I went for hikes in the mountain valleys and visited Hueco Tanks to see the ancient petroglyphs. We tried Mexican restaurants around town.

One evening, we drove a long windy road up one side of the Franklin Mountains while the heat of the day settled onto the desert horizon red like blood and a towering bank of clouds galloped over the ridgeline like a herd of wild horses. “I’ve always hoped you kids would go to graduate school,” he said, his eyes on the road
ahead of us, and I recognized in his voice his small-town Kansas insecurities. Even as a successful attorney thousands of miles and tens of years away, he still spoke in the voice of post-Depression Midwest fear, in the voice of hope for his children, in the voice of judgment on himself as a parent. If there is one legacy parents are destined to pass on to their children, no matter their intentions, it is their insecurities.

Dad’s message was one I had already internalized. A month later I received my acceptance letter to the Tuck School at Dartmouth, where I’d sent my application from Kuwait. My application packet had arrived in Hanover the last day of the last round of admissions. I called Dad the moment I got back to my apartment. He left a meeting to take my call, as he had when I’d called after my first jump at Airborne School ten years before. “Dad, I got in!” I remember saying.