Snowblind (27 page)

“To Leo,” Dane said.

“To Leo.”

“He should have stayed away,” Dane said. “I wish he had. He had no business up there.”

“He should have left it for sick fucks like you and me,” Asa said.

“But he didn't. He came back.”

“That's right. I told you, climbers come here. Can't help themselves. Like flies to meat.” Asa threw his last glass against the wall keeping Ozdon out of the room, and Baxter threw them out into the rain.

COWARDS RUN

H
ERE'S WHAT A seventeen-year-old will do: he'll come into class one day with a leather jacket or a moustache or the key to a '78 Power Wagon on its second engine and act like he's scratching the world's balls. For Skim, it was the day after he acquired his uncle's boat, a nineteen-foot sloop named
Coward's Run
. “First thing I did,” Skim drawled out from a tipped-back chair in zero period, an octave lower and twice as slow as I'd ever heard him talk before, “was paint out that damned apostrophe.” I'd never heard him concern himself with punctuation. What next? I braced for poetry. He had a dangerous look to him.

Now, “sloop” might sound handsome to you. It did to me, until I hunted up
Simpson's Nautical
in the Gustavus public library and found out that a hog trough with a single mast through its middle and two sails would qualify, and that's about what it looked like Skim's uncle had given him. But Skim was ready to navigate the high seas. He wanted to smuggle in bales of weed from British Columbia or invade North Korea and bring justice to the commies. He bragged
about the boat's—
his
boat's—shallow draft and lift-up centerboard. He could land it on a beach in the middle of the night and no one would be a gnat's fart wiser.

Wasn't I seventeen, too? I listened to him rhapsodize about beach landings while we hunted and pecked through keyboard drills, then interrupted to ask the question which had been burning my mind for at least ten minutes: “Yo, Skim, why don't we sail north, land your cockleshell in Lituya Bay, and climb Mount Fairweather from tidewater?” I watched his wheels spin like a four-wheeler in mud month—then he got traction, and we talked about nothing else till summer.

We grew up four houses apart on the old Strawberry Point, at the mouth of Glacier Bay. Skim's dad taught him fishing and sea ballads; my parents gave me geology and Homer. We got on well with each other and our place in the world. Two hundred years ago, the present-day glaciers were all tributaries, and the Bay was the trunk of a honkin' ice river. Strawberry Point was nothing more than the outflow plain of sand and gravel where the big glacier crapped out all the crushed-up mountain it had digested. When the big glacier absconded to join the mastodons and brontosaurs, the ocean filled in, and Strawberry Point became beachfront. To the south, we had waves and whales and cruise ships, the latter sliding by like alien rockets with no time for the natives. To the north was rain, snow, and mountains. Skim and I, we headed north when we could. We'd just walk out of town with our backpacks on, step into the woods, go uphill till we hit snow and ridgelines and summits.

The school and library were sidelong to the airstrip, and in summers, guys with carefully packed North Face duffels would land,
hire ski-planes, and fly off to Fairweather or Mount Crillon. So we knew that there were bigger mountains around us, the kind that people from other states and countries would travel around the world to climb. But buying time in a ski-plane was a luxury beyond us. Money slipped by on the cruise ships, like seeing Los Angeles on TV. Folks in town went out to work the water, catching fish or tourist dollars as they could, but we were a stagnant little eddy outside the global currents. Besides, as I said to Skim one day on a practice run in the Icy Strait while we were disentangling the mainsheet in a rain squall that was about one degree too warm to be a blizzard, a ski-plane is a damned inelegant thing. Once you flew a plane to a mountain, what kept you from landing higher? Why not land a hundred feet below the summit? But a boat! No boat would float you higher than sea level.

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.