Читать книгу Against the Wind - Jim Tilley - Страница 8

The details are not unusual. He collapsed during the meeting; the paramedics arrived. They carried him on a stretcher down the freight elevator, gave him some nitroglycerin. Making it to the hospital on time without getting stuck in New York City traffic—that was a bit unusual. It turned out to be a minor heart attack. He stayed in the hospital less than a week recovering from a routine procedure to install stents in two obstructed arteries. It’s the longest he’s ever spent confined to a room.

It gave him time to think. That part is also unusual. Ralph has led a hard-charging life that has given him little time to think about anything other than work. Little time that he’s chosen to take because he knows the answers to his important questions are not what he wants to tell himself. It was easier to focus on the court cases at hand. The notion of a bucket list had never entered Ralph’s mind until the episode with his heart. But lying in bed all day with only the occasional stroll down overlit hallways, he imagined the upcoming canoe trip, a reunion of old camp friends. They’d been hard to find after more than forty-five years, and sadly, harder to convince.

The past three months brought another reunion. This one by chance, although, reflecting on it in the hospital, Ralph suspected it was bound to have happened, three onetime grade school friends coming together again, he and Lynn, high school sweethearts, he and Dieter, high school rivals, Dieter the loser in the battle for Lynn’s affections. Thrown together in a fight over wind farms in the county where Lynn now lives.

All in all, the unfinished business of past lives brought forward and played out, offering opportunities to put things right.

Mark, Ralph’s second-in-command at the office, visited the hospital only once. When he started to talk business, Ralph told him to carry on running the office without him, much as he has done for the past year. Ralph’s sharp-tongued assistant, Mary Ann, came to the hospital every day. On one visit she caught him flirting with a nurse, an attractive woman, a good twenty years younger.

“So you had to have a heart attack to rejuvenate your love life?” Mary Ann said, looking directly at the nurse, not Ralph. The embarrassed nurse excused herself.

“You’re such a positive influence. She probably thinks you’re my wife.”

“I know you too well.”

That nurse reminded him of Lynn. The short brown hair, the way she had it pushed back behind her ears, her grayish eyes, and especially her small, thin lips. When Mary Ann left, he lay back and let his head sink into the pillow, closed his eyes, took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Thought back to a dinner with Lynn three months earlier after not seeing her for more than twenty-five years. Thought back to the twentieth high school reunion. Back to the days in high school. The run-ins with Dieter. The time at summer camp. Canoe trips.

Ralph remembers Lynn’s statement word for word. I’m dying to hear the story of how the boy who couldn’t get enough of the outdoors turned into a lawyer representing big energy companies. She called him out and he had no answer. A week after their dinner at Café Boulud, three months before the heart attack he didn’t expect, he still has no compelling answer. Lying back in the recliner watching the trees in the park wrestle with the heavy wind, he muses on the consequences of bad weather on canoe trips and in life.

He eases himself out of the recliner. Standing on a step stool in the guest bedroom, he retrieves a box from the top shelf in the closet and rummages through its contents, setting aside the blue ribbons for winning grade school races, newspaper clippings his mother saved religiously, Boy Scout merit badges, and his Sunday school bible. He digs until he finds the prize-winning essay from his junior year in high school, a piece the judges thought was fiction and mistakenly moved into the story category. He removes the rusted clip from a sheaf of yellowed papers.

TRIUMPH OF THE RIVIÈRE ROUGE

by Ralph MackenzieOctober 18, 1965

All five of us—Jack, Steve, Bill, Maarten, and me—had been camp friends for years, returning to Kiamika summer after summer. We were experienced canoe trippers. Each of us had earned the Voyageur Award. The mission of our last trip as campers was to complete a circuit that hadn’t been attempted in ten years, a seven-day route beginning at Lac Rouge, looping north and west, then south and back east to end at the nearby Lac-de-la-Maison-de-Pierre in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec right outside the boundaries of Parc du Mont-Tremblant. We were led by two counselors, Frank and Geoff, both twenty-two, also experienced canoe trippers. Our prospects were good; though no previous trip had made it around the circuit in years, we expected to. We would find the lost portage and clear it, for ourselves and for others who would follow us. It was a trip with a mission.

Day one it poured. After paddling three miles from the drop-off point up Lac Rouge and Petit Lac Rouge, everyone was drenched right through his rain suit. The canoes were carrying two inches of water. Two short portages and five more miles paddling and we’d all had enough for the day. Instead of pitching camp, Frank and Geoff decided to force the rusted lock on a weatherworn fishing cabin and spend the night under a roof that wasn’t made of canvas . . .

Ralph remembers the heat of the fire they were able to get going in the cast-iron stove, so hot they couldn’t stand anywhere near it and had to open the door to the cabin to let cooler air in. It was a fire started from and kept alive with the wood that he and Steve had cut, mostly him because Steve managed to let his ax glance off the slippery bark of the maple he was chopping down and plant itself in his leg.

Frank cleaned and disinfected the deep cut and fashioned butterfly stitches from several strips of tape. He considered using a sterilized fishhook to sew the cut closed properly, but backed off when Steve refused to go along. Maarten, still chilled from the day, piled logs on the fire in the stove. “Easy,” said Frank. “It has to last all night— Hey guys, we have a problem. Steve’s going to need real stitches soon and the nearest village is L’Ascension. That’s at least thirty-five miles by dirt road. In his condition he can’t make that hike. None of us want to carry packs or canoes that far.” He unfolded the 1:50,000-scale government-issued topographical map and placed it on the cabin’s table. He ran his finger along the meandering curve of the Rouge River, muttering his thoughts as he traced the route to L’Ascension. With the elevation difference between the river’s source and the village, there were bound to be several series of rapids around which they’d have to portage. No cleared trails. “I think it’s too dangerous to take the river,” he said . . .

Pity Frank hadn’t gone with that thought. Pity he’d let Geoff sound a countervailing note, encourage Maarten’s bravado, build a group consensus. Pity he’d finally caved. Long-forgotten images turn out not to have been forgotten, merely tucked away beneath layers of intervening life. Imagine thinking that a night’s sleep would somehow change the factors affecting the critical decision. True, by next morning the sky had cleared and the fog was lifting from the lake. As if the improved weather superseded the sum of everything else, Frank turned optimistic and changed his mind. Maarten let out a whoop. “Piece of cake.” Ralph felt like asking whether it had chocolate frosting.

And that was that. That’s what counselors are for. They lead. They didn’t change the lineup in the canoes. Steve continued to ride in Frank’s, only three of them. With no one between Jack in the bow and Steve sitting on a pack in front of the stern thwart ahead of Frank, Steve could extend his injured leg over the portage thwart and keep it slightly elevated. “Best if you don’t try to paddle,” said Frank. “The current will carry us along fast enough.”

Geoff’s canoe, with four paddlers to only two in Frank’s, took the lead. After an initial meandering stretch, the river straightened out and began to run faster. We negotiated a short section of light chop easily. The river leveled out again. “This isn’t bad,” said Geoff. “At this rate we’ll be there by late afternoon. Or earlier— ” he shouted as our canoe rounded a bend and he spotted churning water ahead. “Take the channel on the right.” We entered the surge. In the bow, Bill paddled hard to avoid rocks and keep the canoe tracking the route Geoff had chosen. We handled the first set of rapids without getting wet. Then around a mild curve in the river, our canoe plunged into a three-foot drop between a pair of boulders. The bow broke the surface and the canoe took on water. Geoff looked for a place to draw to shore, but the canoe’s momentum drove it forward. We hit a barely submerged, jagged rock head on. It ripped through the canvas ahead of the stern thwart and the canoe turned sideways . . .

Only one other time has Ralph found himself lying on his stomach belching water. Coincidentally, that was also on the Rouge River, the Lower Rouge many years later on a rafting trip during his twentieth high school reunion. It was his onetime rival, Dieter, who hauled Ralph from the river and kept reminding him all day long how he’d saved his life. Still, it was good fortune. Then, and years before on the Upper Rouge. On that canoe trip, fate simply would not allow an innocent fifteen-year-old to pay the price for the counselors’ atrocious decisions. A beaten-up, rusted-out truck driven by a local who spoke a wholly unintelligible French-Canadian patois was heading along the road toward L’Ascension and stopped to help. Ralph would have liked to think that his French, limited as it was, was adequate to describe their predicament. More likely, it took one look at Steve’s wound for the man to understand.

Ralph re-clips the sheaf of papers, sets the essay on the floor, and boots up his laptop. He is back amidst elegant white birches at Kiamika, standing outside the Nature Cabin, waiting to catch a glimpse of Jack’s sister, Joan, on her way to pick up her family’s lunch at the Dining Hall. He’s chopping down small maples for tent poles; he’s building a lean-to, making a mattress from boughs of balsam. He’s baking a blueberry pie in a reflector oven by a hardwood fire . . .

He is writing a letter.

October 25, 2012

Dear Jack, Steve, Bill, and Maarten:

It’s been nearly fifty years since we took our last canoe trip together, the one on which Steve tried to cut down his leg instead of a tree. I’m writing to entice all of you into a repeat performance. Well, not exactly—this time, there will be no axes in legs, no Rouge River debacle. I’m willing to let that river’s victory stand, but I don’t want to say goodbye to this life without completing the originally intended trip. I need all of you to help me to accomplish that.

I’m about to contact Camp Kiamika’s director to ask if they’ll sponsor our expedition. Do you remember the camp’s founder? He was still taking canoe trips late into his seventies. So I don’t expect any excuses from any of you regarding your age.

Please mark your calendars from late June into early July next year. I’m thinking that we’ll assemble at Kiamika on Sunday, June 23^rd and return to camp on Wednesday, July 3^rd. If you’re not like Jack, who’s probably already in shape for this, you have almost eight months to prepare. This is a “save the dates” notice and a call for RSVP, no regrets accepted. I’ll write you again in the new year after I’ve had a chance to speak with the camp director and make arrangements. Meanwhile, an early Christmas greeting to you and your families.

Best wishes,Ralph Mackenzie