Читать книгу Sarah/Sara - Jacob Marperger Paul - Страница 6

July 17

It’s easy to keep up with a journal when there’s no one around and nothing to do. Something I learned today: Love for my father may have led me to finish the boat, but love’s no substitute for skill (or maybe his ability to transform love into craft was better, more desperate, an advanced alchemy. He claimed this boat was his monument, and it lives up to that on the water). But the pontoons I built to balance the sail do not cut, do not break, do not grace the way his hull does. Here’s to you, Abba, what you built works wonderfully. This wooden boat blows the fiberglass shells we used on Long Island Sound out of the water, no pun intended (do you think Abba in Shamaim cares about puns, Sarah?). Anyway, this boat belongs to the water. And, I can feel my arms adapting to the current of rowing whole days—if you can call them days without sunrise, without sunset, undemarcated, obtuse contusions of time I enforce with a waterproof wristwatch I look to as a sole lifeline to civilization.

As if it is civil, as if it is civilization. No. Not again this evening. I don’t want to go there tonight. Tonight, I don’t want to stop writing only to find myself so full of depressed energy that I end up pacing the pebble beach chucking stones at driftwood and the stray rusted out oil drum in an exhausted stupor until I drift off outside of my tent. Bears do respect structure. They do not respect slight twenty-five-year-olds who’ve already broken into their whiskey supply and conked out in the open. Not to mention the dangers of musk-oxen and caribou and wolves and whatever else lurks along these shores. Got to be smart.

This place is full of danger. That much is clear already. It’s cold enough that I have to put a fleece on as soon as I stop rowing, way too cold to warm up after a dunk in the water without a real fire. And who’s going to make a fire for me if I capsize and can’t pull an Eskimo roll and after an emergency exit the kayak drifts from me and I have to swim to shore, the zero degree water ripping away heat faster than a polar bear could tear off my limbs? And if I did make it to shore, my fingers numb, white, frozen, my mind wandering in elliptical fantasies of warmth, would I be able to make a fire, take the necessary steps, assemble wood, kindling, light matches, shelter the first flames, fan them, generate heat, make hot drinks, place warm water bottles in my crotch and arm-pits? (How many other orthodox women think about putting warm water bottles in their crotch?) And that’s only one thing to fear. There are bears, Polar bears that can out-swim a kayaker pulling hard, though the Inuit and my father both swear that only the white bears of mythology eat people. And then there is time, also a rabid and uncaring demon, ready to subtract itself without notice, without warning, and hasten the return of ice. And all the little things, a twisted ankle, a bruised wrist, a lost dry bag full of food, a failed stove that can either singly or incrementally damn me to a slow starvation stranded on a shore only briefly forgiven winter’s cloak of snow, of darkness. But more than anything I fear the grizzlies. Hungry, angry picked-on bears; these are not the grizzlies of the lower forty-eight, intelligent masters of their ecosystems, appropriately skittish around people. These bears get picked on by their big white cousins and act like cranky children with claws and teeth and a top land speed close to sixty miles an hour. I’m smaller than them and even if I don’t smell like my food, my bags sure do.

I see the barren ground grizzlies from the kayak and paddle out further, or tack out if I’ve got the sail up. They look at me and they’re not scared, chasing their berries or ground moles or whatever else they feed on up here. They’re also limited to three months or so, a quarter of a year, to throw on enough fat to sleep cozily through winter. And then there’s all the wildlife I don’t know and don’t understand, the grounded molting geese and small shadow animals that flit between tufts of tundra. Tufts, they sound so innocuous. And they are, unless, of course, you don’t carefully watch every step as you walk across them and end up with that twisted ankle. Yes, most of all, I’m afraid of what I don’t know about this place. And it shocks me that I don’t know everything about everything that lives up here.

My father bored us all to tears over umpteen dinners as he planned and replanned and then planned again his retirement trip, this trip. And unlike my mother, I wanted to go. She would chide him, tease him, say, “Henry, by the time they let you out of that job you’ll be too old to go out in any boat that doesn’t have shuffleboard, blackjack and a swimming pool as standard features.” Well, Henry, at least you’ll never find yourself courting the West Palm Beach set at swing dancing for seniors on the QE2. I wanted to go with him. His knock’s promise of a silent sunrise viewed level with the water was the only thing that ever got me up early during high school. Perhaps Eeema was right, but after I left he swore that when he finished this boat he was done with Morgan Stanley.

That was his way, not rushing the boat to get out of the job, but not dragging it out either. I know that he loved his job, and especially the camaraderie of his coworkers, nearly as much as he loved the water. He filled his office with kayaking photos, many of which featured me. Half the joy he derived from kayaking was earning the respect of his coworkers by doing something truly different. He largely measured his accomplishments by their ability to inspire awe and raise eyebrows at work. But that had all changed; all of his photos and memorabilia were lost with the building. Like me, he believed he could channel everything into building the boat, and that it would then free him on this trip: a memorial equal parts object and action. He would have left within the year, I think. He’d nearly finished the boat.

The tundra amazes me. It’s a forest, willow and pine. Just a really, really short forest. I’m walking on plants a thousand years old, walking on them. It reminds me of Jerusalem. There it’s all manmade stuff, but equally old. When I go back, I’ll walk down streets Solomon’s city planners laid out, pray at the temple he built. Here it’s nature’s antiquity. And that’s the beauty of our time, the other use for explosive energy. I can go to these places. They’re available. I will go to these places, just as I will wake up after six hours of sleep and will make breakfast and will get in the kayak, set up its pontoons, hoist its sail, and set further off along my unbreakable itinerary.