The Carry Home (6 page)

It was a fixation that pushed me close as I've ever come to losing my mind. Late in the evening, when the last of the alpenglow was fading above the conifer ridges of Towne Mountain, I was often on the edge of panic. One dark night in early July, hyperventilating, I called my friend Mark, and he hustled over in his black Toyota truck to sit across from me in the living room while I muttered and clutched my chest. “She always said when it came her time to go,” I told him again, “she wanted to be in the wilds, doing what she loved.” And also, about how less than a minute before the wreck, two loons—among her favorite creatures—swam up to the canoe on a lake dappled with sunlight, and she laid her paddle on her lap and looked up at the sky, shouting what were very nearly her last words:

“Thank you, Universe!”

I told him there should be some comfort in that. And one more time, right on cue, he nodded as if it were true.

WATER TO STONE, ONE

I
t was hard for us to keep up with all the ways the boomers were hugging the remote corners of the American wild. By ski and backpack, horse and raft and mountain bike, in harness on the faces of mountains, dangling from climbing ropes. And while we tried most all of it, canoeing had a special place in our hearts. It was a good-sense way of traveling in the American West, a region where everything kneels at the river: elk and deer and grizzly and eagle and osprey, raccoon and wolverine and mountain lion, kingfishers and dippers and giant rafts of chattering ducks and geese. To be quietly afloat was to brush against secrets, where you saw things other creatures never meant for you to see.

When we were backpacking, we were two people sharing a single journey. But in a canoe, we danced: the person in the back of the boat setting the general course, the one in the front refining it, especially in whitewater, cueing the rear paddler to obstacles by her choice of draw stroke or sweep or pry. Early in our marriage we'd been to Audubon Camp of the West outside Dubois, Wyoming; one evening, we saw a couple in their eighties canoeing down the Wind River. Their paddling was magic, as graceful and efficient as humans are allowed to be, getting down the river with almost no strokes at all. Only occasionally would the old man's wooden paddle flash in the stern—a slight, quick movement at just the right moment, matched exactly to the choices made by the old woman sitting in the bow. Jane and I turned to each other and smiled. We wanted to be like them some day.

T
HE TRIP ON THE
K
OPKA WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A FLOAT IN THE
park. Two hours paddling through easy Class II rapids and across two lakes, broken by one long portage around an unrunnable stretch of whitewater. We were playful, picking hard routes. The sun blinked in and out of clouds heavy with rain, casting long shafts of spring light.

It was three weeks before our twenty-fifth anniversary. On the flat water of Kopka Lake, with paddles rising and falling, we told each other how good it had been.

“Another twenty-five?” I called out from the stern of the boat.

Jane twisted her head to the side so I could hear better. “Why not!”

Two days earlier, we'd finished five generous days at a renowned paddling school in eastern Ontario, where students came from all over North America to hang out with some of the best kayakers and canoeists on the continent. When the course ended, the instructors passed out handwritten evaluations, ours coming from a hearty twenty-five-year-old named Judy. Jane was eager to read it, pulling it from the envelope before we were even out of the parking lot. It began with a personal note:

I think I'd first like to comment on your communication. It was amazing. I've never seen a couple work through the tricky moments as smoothly as you two. You guys have taught me what I'd like my communication to be like in a long-term tandem relationship. As I truly believe strong communication is integral to tandem paddlers, you two have a very solid base for all paddling adventures
.

Four hours after reading Judy's comments, on the outskirts of Algonquin Park, Jane read them out loud again. She did the same thing the next morning, outside Sudbury. Like she found Judy's comments reassuring, a portent of all the good things still to come. There'd been times at that paddling school when we were really in the sweet spot—lit up by this sense of clasping hands with the river, holding not too tight, not too loose.

That morning, when we finally got across Kopka Lake and reached the portage pullout, the trail was blocked by a chest-high jumble of blown-down timber, the result of a massive ice storm three years earlier. We scouted alternatives, in the end deciding we could safely take out closer to the head of the rapids.

When we got there in the boat, though, a strange hydraulic flow from near-record rains sucked us toward the teeth of the rapids. Unable to run for shore because of a fallen tree jutting from the bank into the river, in a matter of seconds we were in the thick of things, devoured by a fury of whitewater. On each side of the riverbank were dozens more fallen trees, half in and half out of the water. Known as “strainers,” they're the kiss of disaster, routinely flipping boats and pinning paddlers against the underwater branches. Nor could we maneuver into eddies, calm pools formed on the downstream side of large rocks. High water had obliterated all trace of them.

Waves of cold water crashed over the bow, soaking Jane, leaving gallon after gallon in the bottom of the boat. For that reason alone—sixty pounds of water, then eighty, then a hundred pounds, sloshing and rocking the canoe and exposing the gunnels to the river—we knew there'd be no getting through. Still, we were on our knees, paddling with everything. I took my cues from Jane, watching as she cut hard draw strokes on the right side of the boat and then crossed to draw on the other side, here and there a desperate pry—everything to keep us from hurtling into some toothy lump of granite I couldn't even see. But by then the boat was too heavy, impossible to steer.

We made it about 100 yards.

The end came at the top of a rock-strewn cascade. When the boat finally rolled, I spent the first ten seconds under water, freeing myself from the Velcro straps we used for stability when paddling on our knees. I could hear the grinding and thudding of the canoe as it slammed into one rock then another—sounds I can still hear to this day, booming in my ears in the middle of the night. Back up on the surface again, I got into swiftwater rescue position—butt up, feet forward, facing downstream—all to keep my feet from being snared in rock jumbles on the river-bed. I couldn't see Jane. But the water was incredibly heavy. She could've been five feet from me and I'd have never known it.

Like most whitewater boaters, I'd taken swims in rapids. But I'd never been so totally helpless. Out of control. Screaming curses as the river slammed me into boulders, tearing and pummeling my backside. Even with a life jacket on, I was twice pinned to the bottom of recirculation pools, inhaling water, close to drowning. But then I made it out again, back into the roar. Near the end of the rapid, I catapulted over a four-foot waterfall, my right leg driving hard into a rock crevice, snapping like a twig. Coughed out at last into the quiet of a flush pond, I swam over to the canoe and clung to the side, stood on my good leg, and waited for Jane. Waited some more.

HUNGER SEASON

O
ur long dance with rivers had reached a high point five years earlier, in the so-called Barren Lands of the Canadian far north—twice the size of Texas, sprawling across half a million square miles, one of the biggest tracts of wilderness in the world. We'd first journeyed there in 2000, embarking by canoe with four friends along the Hood River, just inside the Arctic Circle. The floatplane touched down after three hours of northbound flight from Yellowknife; with the weather souring, we hustled to unload gear, then confirmed with the pilot a pickup sixteen days later, upstream from where the Hood makes a final exhale into the Arctic Sound. He was anxious to be off,
drawing in the anchor lines from the floats, climbing into the cockpit. After taxiing back out into the lake, he took off with a roar, drawing a wide arc toward the south and finally fading from sight, then from sound, leaving us to the wind-shorn tundra. We didn't so much feel alone as vulnerable. That vulnerability, in turn, brought alertness. And just by being alert, we were able to catch a kid-sized feeling of having stumbled into Eden.

Jane and I stood together in that far country and watched gyrfalcons streak out of bony canyons; hiked tundra heaved by frost into mounds and hummocks; sat open-mouthed as caribou danced across the humped ground like trotter ponies on a groomed track. By day we drifted past musk oxen grunting over patches of sedge along the riverbanks, wolverines scuttling up the hills like angry little bears. Once, a pair of wolves appeared across the river, a white male and black female, playing with their pups so enthusiastically they sent thick clouds of dust drifting through the air. Then the adults spotted us and went into action, squirreling the young into a den. As we pushed off, the male trotted alongside on the top of a small ridge, howling, anxious for us to be away.

And then there was the light. Sun hovering above the treeless horizon even at midnight, as if stuck in flight, soaking the fireweed and tufts of cotton grass in dark honey. And of course there were mosquitoes, great clouds of them swarming every evening outside our screened-in dinner tent, hungry for a bite of these strange warm-bloods that chattered on past midnight, raising cups of whiskey and smoking foul-smelling cigars. Later
on, in our sleeping tents, absent a hearty wind, the little blood-suckers careened into the nylon walls with the insistent patter of a good rain.

Late one afternoon after camp was set, out walking the tundra we spotted on a distant ridge a long line of piled rocks—so-called “stone men,” erected centuries ago by indigenous people. Mistaking the rocks for humans, migrating caribou would avoid them, walking instead toward hunters lying in wait.

Without a word Jane and I sat down side by side, just staring at the stones. Trying to fathom what such lives were like. Imagining families, entire villages, moving by foot across hundreds of miles of tundra, shadowing the caribou herds—hopscotching the rough ground with kids and babies in tow, steering around an endless reach of bogs and quags.

“There would've been few second chances,” Jane finally said. “I wonder how that affects people—I mean, when they know how thin the thread is that keeps them alive.”

I told her that having danger so close at hand, day after day, season after season, might make a person worry more.

“I don't know,” she said. “With life and death in your face like that, maybe worry would seem useless. A silly indulgence.”

Even in that great wild north country, one of the last great wildernesses in the world, we were aware during our visit that big changes were coming. An energy boom was on the horizon, with some forty thousand square miles already slated for drilling. Diamond mines, too, stoking what would soon become a frenzy of roads and bulldozers and sheet metal towns. For the
time being, though, the land was still in control. The Inuit living here, who possess an untethered cosmology, believe there are no divine mother or father figures steering the cosmos. No gods of sun or wind or snow. Nor are there any eternal punishments in the hereafter, as there are no such punishments in the here and now. Life and prayer and dreams are calved from the sense that here, everything—from money to creed—is sooner or later broken by ice and swept to the sea. Their biggest priority is the present moment, focusing on it to a degree most of us would be hard-pressed to match. The essence of life, they say—the essential truths of the universe—is found not in some past glory, not in some future accomplishment, but right now, in experiencing a deep relationship with what's around us.

If only our generation could've kept looking, could've kept living a while longer with the questions. If we hadn't ended up frozen in notions of the outback formed the last time we imagined it, when its greatest value seemed to be as a testing ground for the muscle of youth. Not that Jane and I didn't see it that way, too. But early on, in the midst of some hard teen years, nature had also sparked in us the idea that we had some kind of place in the order of things. It kept us eager for moments having nothing to do with hustling cereal or soap or self-improvement, for that part of the world that never expected us to be anything but what we were, never encouraged us to ask for anything we didn't already have.

THE FIRST GOODBYE