North of Hope (27 page)

I felt shame for the girl I was, the cruelty I was told I had inflicted on Ned as a child. I felt anger. Why had affection seemed a limited commodity in our family? Dad had controlled Ned’s outbursts in the past. Why had he not done something to help correct them, to heal the hurts? Why had our family refused to acknowledge and address abusive behavior? I could see, dimly, that the missing acknowledgment also sprang from pain, pain carried from the scars of previous generations.

At the same time, I understood that compassion might exist without connection. I was strong enough to draw those boundaries. Whatever else Dad had or had not done, he had taught me that I was strong enough to create my own life. Each of us had to take responsibility for who we were, and how we reacted to the stones and boulders in our way.

Several years later, looking back at Ned and myself on that raft through the prism of time, I see in Ned the violence of pain in a soul ill-equipped to handle it. I feel a greater sadness than I knew to feel then.

Then, I simply watched the water. The current curling toward the shore, cutting across to the next bend in the river. It parted around rocks, poured over rocks, a transparent force, sometimes glistening, sometimes dark, carrying earth, carrying dreams. I had no control over any part of this, other than how I responded. To death, to anger, to sadness, to joy. That is what the water taught me. I had the right and the responsibility to release abuse from my life. I could not fix the pain. I could not change the anger. This was an unexpected new sadness, a new loss of relationship. But I could choose gratitude over grief. I could choose joy over pain. I could choose healing over abuse. Perhaps for the first time, perhaps prompted by greater losses, I could let go.

In the silence we kept during the rest of the day, I sat on the back of the raft with the current. All you can do to work through the twisted channels of grief is to use the experiences of your life like tools, seeing what might be effective in straightening a board, pounding a nail, aligning the railing of a new reality. And so sitting on that raft moving down the end of that Arctic river, I recalled a Eurail trip in college on which I’d spent three days in Rome, and one day in the red-roofed city of Florence. At the time, I’d planned to double-major in English and art history and, like any good student, had studied Italian art. My love of art had begun long before, rapidly developing beyond the Alaskan artifacts of our local museum. I read about Leonardo in junior high school and started writing all of my journals backward, as he had done, which was easier to do as a left-handed writer. I read everything I could about Bernini in ninth grade.

In Rome, I beelined to Bernini’s
Ecstasy of St. Theresa
, tucked away in the tiny Cornaro Chapel. I was surprised by how small the sculpture was; its power for me in photographs had been monumental. Bernini uses a hidden window above the sculpture, allowing natural light to indicate the entrance of the divine, represented by an angel looking down on St. Theresa in a pose of exquisite pain or pleasure. The natural light is enhanced by gilded beams of light behind the statue, further concentrating the understanding of divinity.

But the artwork I remember most had not been one of my favorites from class; the plates in an art history book could not begin to do it justice. And I had to view it through encumbrances protecting a renovation of the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. The piece was
Baptism of the Neophytes
by Masaccio. This fresco, created using a medium of water and paint rendered on a wet surface and relying on the artist’s skill in using the fleeting moments before evaporation, was delicate and damaged. From its delicacy
emanated a power and a profundity that were only enhanced by its fragility. A neophyte, wearing only a cloth around his waist, kneels in a river, supposed to be the Appelline Arno. St. Peter, shaking in his participation in the sacrament, pours water over the man’s bowed head. In water, in light, the entrance of the divine.

Water as the basis of life. Seventy-one percent of the earth is covered by water. A baby’s body is born seventy-eight percent water, that percentage falling to fifty-five to sixty as the baby grows to adulthood. Even as adults, our lungs are ninety percent water, our blood eighty percent, our brains seventy percent. In this Arctic desert, water formed the basis of the earth, frozen in permafrost. It created patterns and monuments, surging into cracks to freeze and create polygons, pushing up mounds called pingos, coursing down rivers, moving mountains.

“Over water the Holy Spirit moved.” In the Greek lexicon,
pho-tismos
, an ancient word for baptism, means “the act of enlightenment, illumination” or “a bright light.” In this enlightenment was mystery. I saw the light on the water, but was only beginning to see the light around me. The coastal plain extended in all directions. When I paid attention, seeing things at just the right angle, the walls I’d built over a lifetime deliquesced in the purity of true wilderness and endless light. The river’s rubato lengthened these fleeting moments of wide-eyed wonder into the beginnings of a new reality. I could not create this. I could only accept it as gift, and hope I could learn to see it. The acceptance was the particular slant, the perspective I needed to learn to see. With it, a ray of light cut through the darkness as in a Caravaggio painting, illuminating the beautiful.

In the Requiem, we pray and beg for mercy, clutching at known structures and histories of faith while struggling to find meaning and reassurance in gutting realities. Or rather, that is what the text of the Requiem does—wrestling with darkness to find hope. Praying the Requiem, we are in the mouth of the beast, in the
flames of woe, in endless darkness entreating deliverance. That there are words at all which suggest something other than this terror is our only hope. The music allows us to pray words that, at the time, are rocks on the edge of a chasm. Our bodies dangle from the edge, threatening at any moment to fall, to careen wildly against sharp boulders in a descent to the terrible blackness. We claw desperately at the lip of the abyss, clinging to the rocks, even as they crumble. The music is what catches us just as we think we must let go.

In the course of Mozart’s illness as he composed the Requiem, he wrote to his father, “Death, when we consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence…. I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity … of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness…. I never lie down at night without reflecting that I may not live to see another day.” It is the kind of note one could only write knowing of impending death.

Dad had written in his journal what he learned through death, as well: “Family deaths—a stillborn child, a father, a marriage. I think I have learned a lot from these deaths as I struggle in coping with the aching that such loss brings.” And from living through Dad’s death, I know that these thoughts must have led him to consider his own death as well.

I felt the raft underneath me, moving easily in the narrow current. Occasionally the scrape of gravel beneath the raft pulled me from my thoughts. I moved the paddle to steer almost unconsciously. Birds flew over us—jaegers, terns, ducks, in ones, then in pairs.

The river branched again. Getting out to pull the raft was tiring, and yet finding the right path seemed impossible. If we’d been able to view the river from above, as we had on the flight in, we’d have been able to see the strands of the river weaving gently in and out; we’d have been able to choose the best route. From
river level, the path was not as clear. But I was starting to believe that somehow it all made sense. Somehow there were patterns here to show a way.

I’ve looked since then at ways to find new slants, new rays of light on dark paths.

I wanted to be angry that this had happened, this attack of a bear, this strange thing, this terrible offense, this attack of nature on my life and my heart. I wanted to say, “My God! I don’t deserve this!” But deserving had nothing whatsoever to do with it. I was not unique. I was not alone. This is the human condition, this pain, this loss, and even this violence. Around the world, people lost whole families and friends every day to war, disease, starvation, or circumstance. This pain—and the search for meaning in its wake—is what it is to be human. Realizing this did not assuage my pain, but it did tell me that I was not alone.

Out of the expanse of tundra, river, and sky, sea ice loomed ahead. It was not physically there; it did not actually occur for another couple of miles, and yet there it was. Rays of light bent and inflected, and the mirage of ice shimmered beyond us. It was very real, and yet it was not at all real. More real at least than the refractory lens of memory, more real than the lens of life. The mirage shivered in the air of high latitude, shaking in unseen currents of air. Perhaps the ice was not where I saw it. But I did see it. The laws of physics explained that I saw it. But it was not where I looked. And yet I felt the chilled air blowing over its surface, cooling my skin.

I coveted the mirage. I coveted the seeing, the feeling, even the blurred edges, when all I could see was inky darkness, blinding light, or, worse, nothingness. Not blackness. Not light. Just nothing. Nowhere on earth—or in the soul—is there nothingness. But there is nothingness in the frozen fear of forgetting, the coveting of hard grief, the first kind, the most painful kind, the kind that says that you are alive, and the people now gone were real and are
real if only in memory and in some other kind of time than that in which we live each day.

So to see through nothingness, I focused. I focused on the details around the void. I focused on the far horizon and the mirage. I focused on nearby flowers. Slowly, the real of the world, the real of the soul, emerged as substance, taste, and texture, something complex and fresh and sweet, and nothingness faded away.

We came to the pickup point—a day early. There was a day—a whole day—to sit on the tundra and wait.

No one … can doubt for long that the path ahead, seen from a tall enough height, will form at least a compelling figure, a clear intentional design, of use to others.

—Reynolds Price,
A Whole New Life

I
sat alone on the tundra. Gear selected to help me stay overnight if weather came in lay around me partly packed: a small tent, food in a bear canister, and the shotgun, loaded. The buzz of the Cessna, shuttling Ned, Sally, and the bulk of our gear, had been swallowed by the breeze the moment the wheels left the tundra. The wind off the polar ice to my north blew gently across the flat coastal plain to my tiny camp. I listened for the low hum I had read about in various Arctic accounts, but heard only the quiet sweep of wind, birdsong, and the buzz of mosquitoes.

A caribou appeared just east of me, stopping to stare with wide brown eyes for a long minute. Like the caribou early in our trip, he simply materialized, a momentary visitation, manufactured by Arctic air. Every part of him, from flank to felt-covered antler, quivered with alertness. He stood for only a minute before trotting off, seeming to dissolve back into the air.

The plain was far from the barren stretches I had imagined I saw during the flight in. In the past year—and the past week on
the river—what had been merely a backdrop, an abstract concept of wildness, revealed itself. The land breathed. The wilderness gave, and it took away. It could wound, and it could heal. I had not before understood its complexities. Its loneliness mirrored my loneliness, and invited mine in to sit, and to be, and to understand. To wait and to witness.

Were their last moments blessedly short? Seconds of terror, as I surmised? Or terrible and prolonged? What mattered was that they were gone. No, what mattered was that they had lived. What mattered was that I still lived, even for a moment. What mattered was what I made of this moment.

I looked across the expanse of plain to the mountains beyond, my gaze resting along the gentle contours. I wondered if the low hum I’d heard described was instead the understanding of an intricately choreographed natural dance, too fine to see, too complex to comprehend. The epic land, aerial, and marine migrations to this remote wilderness to birth young, sometimes to die, to continue the cycle, flowed with the rhythms of life itself. There was death, and rebirth. Instead of an end to my journey, a linear picture of progress, each time I looked for conclusion, I came back to circles, loops, cycles. Despite myself, I felt the wind as restorative, life-giving. And I began to accept that this was not betrayal, that this recognition of life in the face of death was the point. This acceptance was how I would honor them. This was how I would live.

I got up to stretch my legs, to do something. But there was nothing left to be done, nowhere to go.

This acceptance I was beginning to feel, like the movement of air from a wing, had something to do with surrender. It had something to do with endurance. It had something to do with faith. The line between the living and the dead may not be much of a line at all, but the terrain is not for the weak of heart. It is treacherous going.

Dad, I’ve got a concert next month if you want to come. Dad?

I sat back down on the tundra. I watched the line of the riverbank for a long time. Recognizing mystery brought peace, even if it still eluded my understanding. Staying true to that hope and my faith was the map. Endurance. Tenacity. “I continue to notice how much success has to do with staying the course,” Dad had written. “You just have to keep on keepin’ on,” said my grandma.

I would not see Ned again after this, except for very occasional meetings at a family wedding, a family funeral. I learned on this river to set a boundary against abuse, whatever its cause, in spite of its sadness. I learned about the corrosive acidity of anger. I learned to love through separation and separateness. Learning to be strong, from my dad, from a river, was about choosing beauty in a world of pain.

“I can only encourage you to live your own life,” wrote Dad.