Snowblind Page 20

  All through the spring—a local euphemism for unending grey dampness—Mount Fairweather occupied the northern horizon of our minds. Child of earthquakes, mother of snow. Glaciers crawled down its shoulders like dreadlocked snakes on a Medusa. From the summit, you could see deep Pacific waves strike the edge of North America, and the black-white wilderness of the Canadian interior, and maybe even your own soul.

  The first day of summer freedom, we had a little party on the public dock. We’d loaded Cowards Run to the gunwales with beans and rice and our tatty third-hand mountaineering gear. Skim had found a bucket hat and a straight-stemmed mahogany pipe at the church thrift. He was cousin to a stork, pale-faced and gangly, with a blue vinyl storm suit draped on him like a coat on a hat rack. He kept the brim of his new lid a half inch off his nose and worked that unlit pipe around his mouth like a stick of fossil chewing gum, grinning and muttering the refrain of “Farewell to Nova Scotia” under his breath. Skim’s dad, twice as broad as his son, a hairy ape of a crab pot fisherman, played Hawaiian airs on a slack-key guitar, looking like a spider strangling a fly. My parents sat hand in hand dockside, on a plank bench, with complicated expressions on their faces that I tried not to interpret too closely for fear of losing my outgoing tide.

  Eventually, Captain Skim swung up onto the bow and said: “Never fear, we’ll keep between the sea and the sky. And come home men.” Skim’s dad popped a loud raspberry through his fingers, and Skim added: “Thanks, Dad. I guess when men go to sea, they come back boys.” Then his dad broke a bottle of homebrew against the boat’s prow and cut his thumb, which both he and Skim interpreted as a fabulous sign. They raced back and forth along Cowards Run, pressing bloody thumbprints up and down her hull to give her a proper baptism.

  While they ritualized onboard, and our friends stood around drinking from unbroken bottles and discussing the fine points of seagoing superstition, my mom gave me a paperback copy of Captain Cook’s expedition journals. The world, my little corner of it, anyway, suddenly looked clearer. It dawned on me that my parents had been seventeen, too. I saw my dad’s proud, thunderhead beard, my mom’s long black hair twitching in the wind with the grey sea and restless Alaskan sky behind her—and I thought, maybe they still are. The book had a two-dollar bill for a bookmark. The money wouldn’t do me any good where I was going, but I understood: two-dollar bills were what they used to pay sailors when they returned home.

  I traded places with Skim’s dad and undid the dock lines. We lacked a motor, so Skim’s dad grabbed our prow and heaved us backward. Our departure was voluntary, but it looked to me like the ocean god tossing Odysseus out to sea. Skim raised the main, and I cleated the starboard jib sheet, and the south wind—fair, sweet wind we called the peach—brought us around and filled the sails. We had two months’ of food and could travel as far as the wind and our sail canvas would take us. Sure as I was that I would return, I barely looked back. We bobbed out past the mouth of Glacier Bay over two-foot waves, light as a cork.

  Rain swept across us. In June in southeast Alaska, rain is about as common as daylight. You may not be able to see the sun, but you can always see the rain. The boat slapped the Icy Strait. The rain hissed against the sea. Fat liquid berries filled the air and splattered the deck. Points of land disappeared around us until everything dissolved into water. The only sure sign we weren’t sinking was that we could still breathe.

  “Feels like weather for a skeleton ship,” I said.

  It didn’t take much to part the primeval mists around a worm-holed bowsprit, tattered sails, long-bearded phantasms groaning in Russian or Old Spanish. It occurred to me that if we blundered by some tourist’s yacht, we’d be the ghost ship. Cowards Run had been orange once upon a time, but its fiberglass had yellowed sometime in a prior decade. In the rain, it looked like a driftwood bone.

  “It’s like we’ve gone back in time,” Skim said.

  He had his hand on the tiller, his back pressed against the side deck of his boat. The rain sheeted off his slicker. He looked up at the wind cock swinging round on the masthead, looked at the floating compass above the cabin hatch. He looked cheerful. And I thought, sure, you could do it. Booky fools talk wistfully of other times, but Skim could shake off decades like a dog climbing out of a lake. He could also learn. His dad, happy sea god though he might be, had enough vision to want a future for his boy beyond the death struggle with the crabs. Too few crabs left, and each year, too many fishermen gone down to feed the survivors. Skim studied. He’d even taken up Chinese lately—though he liked to be clear: he only wanted to eavesdrop on the enemy. He had smart genes, simple needs. The kind of kid who could skin a moose while mangling a sonnet. I’d heard him do it: “Time feeds on the rarities of nature—and ain’t I the hand of time?” With red up to his triceps.

  I looked up and down the boat as it wallowed and creaked through the deluge. “You still think we could sail this tub to Asia?” I asked.

  “Why not? The Tlingits came over in canoes, didn’t they?”

  I was pretty sure they hadn’t, but that didn’t seem to be Skim’s point. The wind blew steady from the southeast, and the boat, presumably, jerked forward. I couldn’t see a single solid point to mark our progress. Experience suggested we weren’t moving fast.

  “Skim? What do we do if we can’t see land?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if we can’t see Lemesurier Island? Or the North Passage?”

  “It can’t rain this way forever.”

  That was true, but it deluged like a river in the sky for two solid days, which, under the circumstances, felt like an appreciable fraction of forever. The wind cock swung round till it pointed due east, the raven wind, right back to Gustavus. We tacked and groped through whitecaps and ropy snot rockets of cold saltwater spray. Wet, black cliffs thumped by massive waves faded in and out of view. Anytime we sighted land, we had to fall all over ourselves bringing the boat around because the rocks already stood so close. We gave up trying to recognize landmarks. Keeping the boat from getting chewed apart was about all we could manage.

  Within hours, our mental map of the Icy Strait disappeared out from under us. Our world was water and rocks, not place names, soundings, or lines of latitude. We could tell ourselves that Quartz Point, Lemesurier Island, and Point Adolphus kept us hemmed into the same pocket of water, but for all we knew with any certainty, we’d been flicked into the Bering Sea.

  We worked four-hour shifts at the tiller. When we weren’t about to run aground, one of us could handle Cowards Run on his own. In theory, the other one could sleep in a crawl space we’d left atop our tarp-wrapped provisions in the tiny forward cabin. This proved about as easy as napping on a roller coaster in an earthquake, with the added possibility that the ride might at any moment derail and sink. After the first day, the cabin, which had never been the most weather-tight space, began to flood. So while Skim sailed us back and forth, trying to keep in the open and hold our ground against the wind, I bailed shin-deep water out of the boat with a cracked one-gallon bucket I found under a seat hatch. Wading between the hemorrhaging cabin and the storm, trying to fight an ocean and the rain with a pail, panic started to squeeze in. Any little knob of me that had stayed dry up till then got drowned. I began to doubt that I ever had slept, that sleep was something humans really did.

  Near shift change, with only an inch of water left in the bilge, I took a seat next to Skim on the side deck bench. We gravitated toward each other when we could—for companionship, and also because if we pressed shoulder to shoulder, we left that much less surface area exposed to the storm. Between the wind and the waves and the boiling sound of the rain, we had to shout into each other’s faces to be heard.

  “You cold?” Skim asked.

  “No,” I said. “I’m shivering for fun. So are you.”

  “You scared?”

  “What? Of this little hurricane?”

  “I think I should be more terrified,” Skim said. “What would you
do if we flipped?”

  “I don’t know. Swim for shore.”

  “See?” he said. “I don’t think it would be that easy. I think there might be something wrong with us.”

  It was one of the things I most liked about Skim: We had to be an inch away from hypothermia, shipwreck, and drowning before he began to wonder if we were in fact a pair of goddamn fools.

  If we had one stroke of luck, it was that Cowards Run was a miracle boat. For all our care, we got ourselves buggered behind a picket fence of rocks—I mean trapped with no way out—and she popped through like a watermelon seed, like she had a nose for the space where she would fit. Huge broadside waves rushed us out of nowhere, and I thought for sure we’d be testing my swimming hypothesis. But with her wide beam and flat bottom, she just bucked up and over, a kind of jujitsu roll I never would have imagined possible for her. I noticed Skim at the tiller patting the boat with his free hand like a cowboy stroking the neck of his horse. Good girl. You’re a rockstar. You’re hell on a hull. And I started doing the same. I suppose that meant there was a corner of my mind dry enough to appreciate that we were two kids in a creaky wonder ship surviving the full kitchen-sink treatment from an Alaskan gale.

  When the rain stopped, the clouds blinked away all at once, and the sun dazzled us. What we saw when our eyes recovered was the Gustavus dock not a quarter mile away. We’d been treading water in hailing distance from where we’d started.

  For a long moment, neither of us said anything. Cowards Run drifted. In ten minutes, we could land, dry off, get hot meals in our own kitchens. There was some powerful gravity at work.

  Skim spoke first: “No, no, no. The sun’s out. North Passage is that way.”

  “If we land, we’ll never leave,” I said.

  Ceremoniously, we set our backs to the dock and put the wind to work.

  “You know,” Skim said. “I’ve never even seen Fairweather.”

  “We looked at pictures together in the book.”

  “I’ve seen pictures of Saturn and liver cells and Brooklyn Decker’s bare butt,” Skim said. “That doesn’t mean I’d sail a boat over the horizon expecting to find any of them waiting for me.”

  “So why go?”

  “Good question. Don’t know.” He’d kept his pipe through the storm. He gave it a chew, passed it from one side of his beak to the other. “Must be a pilgrimage. You don’t go on pilgrimage expecting to meet Buddha at the end. You look for Buddha on the way.”

  “You’re Buddhist now?”

  “Buddha, Jesus, Fairweather—just names.”

  “Faces of a coin?”

  “Sides of a dice.”

  We sailed through the afternoon, in the sun, in a steaming torpor, unwilling to sleep until we’d made progress. We passed through North Passage and anchored in a cove in the Inian Islands. The tide lifted us up and down. Arctic terns gloried in the sun they’d chased round the world. Sea lions barked. We slept deep as two corpses.

  When we’d stockpiled enough blackness to feel human, the sky had changed again. Ramparts of fog drifted past. One moment we could see creeping grey walls and castles, and the next we could barely see the top of the mast. We lifted the anchor and raised sail anyway—because it wasn’t raining and we had visibility at least half the time, which suddenly seemed like fine weather.

  The channels and coves in the Inian Islands were narrow, and the storm seemed to have stirred up the sea bottom and shore. We nosed Cowards Run through driftwood and kelp. A massive round cedar trunk poked through a wall of fog and floated by.

  “Perfect canoe log,” Skim said, pointing. “There’s your ghost ship. I see your mom’s great-grandfathers paddling away from home.”

  “Lacking Gore-Tex, they hunted bear instead of mountain,” I said. Then: “Lacking sense, they flipped and swam for the rocks.” We both cackled.

  “At least they could cook their bear,” Skim said. “You ever eat bear? It’s candy.”

  Emerging from the islands, we broad-reached southwest out through Cross Sound. The fog parted, and bolts of sun stabbed through low grey clouds. The western horizon slid over the curve of the earth. Breakers that had walked across the Pacific rolled under us. “The hungry ocean gained advantage on the kingdom of the shore,” Skim muttered. He looked wary, a bird hunched on a branch with a cat below. We swung north around the lighthouse on Cape Spencer and tacked up the coast.

  I was born and bred in the inside passage. Skim, too. Saltwater was a moody beast, but it was caged by interlocking islands to the west. Now the cage was off, and the ocean seemed wide and dark as space. We were out in the world. We could point the bow and go anywhere.

  “We could disappear out here, man,” Skim said.

  “Gone,” I said. “No trace.”

  While Skim held the tiller, I paged through Captain Cook’s sea journals. The man had sailed three times round the world when the map was still covered in dragons. His second voyage took three years. He and his crew went out of sight of land for months. They’d been below the Antarctic Circle and up to Tahiti and had rebuilt whole sections of their boat clawed into by storms and reefs. He’d made no breath-held plunge. He’d lived out there, suspended over the deep.

  We sailed past Graves Harbor, Murk Bay, Torch Bay, long fingers of water cut into the mountains by departed glaciers. We edged along the ocean, never far from land.

  We napped between shifts but slept little. As I recall, we didn’t need to sleep. There was too much to see, and the presence of the ocean was too disturbing. Asian waves crashed against the feet of the mountains—and we were right there, at the meeting of ocean and continent, water and snow. Skim spent hours seesawing with the ocean up on the bow, one hand wrapped around the jib yard, watching the world come to him. Besides, we had wind and weather that weren’t trying to kill us. We felt compelled to drop miles under our keel. Fairweather called us from the north. We’d come this way for a reason, for the frozen Buddha sitting pretty as a blade up in the ice and thin air. We strained for a glimpse, but the land and clouds never aligned, and the mountain remained in our heads. Skim cobbled together a ditty he tried out to different tunes, from Schooner Fare to Pink Floyd:

  South wind baby, west wind boy

  North wind for ice, fair wind for joy

  Hammer me between the mountain and mast

  Sleep me below in the cradle

  Past Icy Point, an immense glacier broke through the mountains and lowered itself into the waves. Ice blocks tumbled off its front, and seals flopped on and off the bergs. The wind spun round to the east and doubled, then doubled again. Cowards Run heeled over, and we braced our legs across the side decks to keep from pitching into the water. Moving around the boat felt like climbing across a jungle gym. We luffed Cowards Run, took in the jib, and reefed the sail until we ran out of reefs and had a napkin of sail cloth left, and still it felt like the wind would bury us in the sea. Cowards Run strained along, close hauled. Its sinews creaked and popped, shudders running down the length of the tiller and up through the fiberglass.

  The wind fueled the waves. First they were up to the boom, then half as tall as our mast, then the troughs went so deep our sail would go slack at the bottom and Cowards Run would begin to right herself, until we climbed up the next wave and the wind knocked us flat. We were afloat on a toy, a leaf—but we were afloat. Cowards Run kept the ocean below her hull, and I stroked the sunburned fiberglass with one hand and kept a death grip on the tiller with the other. The friction of the atmosphere against the boat and the waves and our own selves buried us beneath a roar that came down hard as hail. A blizzard of foam filled the air and our ship. The top of each wave crest was nothing but boiling bubbles. The diaper of sailcloth stretched between the mast and boom screamed and warped.

  The ocean became a mountain range, ten thousand white-topped peaks. We climbed their faces and skied down their backsides. On top of one gigantic wave, I realized that the wind had scattered the clouds. The sun was low and heavy over the pole. The w
ind and foam blew right through me. Cresting the next wave, I saw Fairweather. A snow giant, portentous as a comet. Fairweather stood above the sea-peaks, the glaciers, the other ice-mountains around it, and the last exploded clouds.

  I’d have looked and looked, but the moment the mountain froze me was long enough that I drifted at the tiller and the next wave nearly swamped us. I couldn’t stare. I had to keep Cowards Run lined up with the wind and weather. I had to concentrate! And probably it was just as well I had my task—it doesn’t do to make moon eyes with Medusa for too long, beautiful as she might be with her snakes and porcelain face. Turning to stone wasn’t out of the question, and I was too far away and surrounded by a good deal too much water. The mountain was there, fantastic but no figment, and that had to be enough. It would be there tomorrow. But for the comings and goings of the glaciers, Fairweather was the same as the day Captain Cook had named it on his third voyage, leaving a kind of colossal cartographic joke scribbled on the Alaska panhandle. Still, I kept sneaking peeks, like a snake-charmed rat.

  The mouth of Lituya Bay bored through the shoreline. At first it looked like a crack, not an inlet. Inside, the bay was supposed to be still water and easy living. But the tide running either direction through the hourglass neck between the rocks had killed men and sunk ships. Cenotaph Island, a mile-wide rock in the middle of the bay, was named for twenty-one drowned Frenchmen. We sailed by, and the inlet looked like a river pouring through a canyon as the ocean slopped west on an outgoing tide.