Snowblind (28 page)

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 wind 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.

We turned back south and changed skippers. For a kid who claimed to know nothing beyond the next turn of the earth, Skim piloted the boat like he could see the next ten seconds clear as now, like he knew what the wind was going to do before it did it. Wind gusts punched hard, but Skim had already pushed back with the tiller before they arrived, so that
Cowards Run
never even quivered. He did all of that while asking me how Captain Cook kept his men from
becoming rotting bags of scurvy (sauerkraut) and what the crew did between shifts (I wasn't sure, but I imagined it had something to do with the three thousand gallons of wine and the drummer Cook took onboard at his last European port). Skim seemed to be adding my answers to his mental file, another few pages between how to raise a barn and what to eat on the tundra. His talents were wasted on the present. He should have been off discovering new islands in a square-rigged log raft.

There was nothing for it but to wait until the wind and slack tide lined up right for us to slip into Lituya Bay. We paced back and forth outside the entrance through waves like movable mountains and the gale, which kept trying to plow us under. The earth finished another quarter turn under the moon, and we had our first chance at the passage through the neck, but we were out of position, and by the time we had
Cowards Run
's nose pointed down the hourglass, the water poured against the rocks, raising white caps and recirculation holes bigger than our boat. So we went back to pacing, waiting for the heavenly clockwork to align. We'd gotten so numb to the wind we barely heard it or anything else anymore. Our ears shut down, and we talked through signs. The wind pinned
Cowards Run
at a permanent slant. We forgot about flat ground. It was a blue-sky storm, everything sparking and flashing in the lowering sun.

High tide returned after our daily dose of twilight, and we nailed the slack water perfectly. We passed Scylla on the left, Charybdis on the right. Skim had the tiller, and he was masterful, bending our little arrow of fiberglass through the rocks,
Cowards Run
zipping happily between the wet teeth all around her. Skim hooted and slapped
Coward Run
's side. “I've got the wind in a bag!” he said. And I believed he did—that right there, he could have put his finger in the air and pirouetted
Cowards Run
with a twirl of the rudder. We squirted through the opening, and that's when the crosswind jumped out from behind the rocks and hit us sideways across the mouth of the bay, flicking us over into the stone teeth on the other side.

The first rock we hit tore the bottom out of the boat. Spun around with its tail to the wind,
Cowards Run
's boom thrashed back and forth, the sail convulsed, the main sheets cracked against their blocks. The boat was dying under me, and then I was in the water and crushed by the cold. I couldn't move, couldn't breathe. Frozen brine went in my eyes and up my nose and down my veins. I wrestled out of my jacket and boots and kicked for the rocks. At least I must have, because when my thinking self rebooted, I was in sweater and socks and water up to my ears, clutching a peninsula of stone with my forearms because my fingers were solid wax. Upright shelves lifted out of the water above me, but they slid out of my grip. I had no grip. The wind drove the water over my head. Saltwater pushed down my throat. I thought:
numb hands gonna kill me
. I made my elbows do the work instead, hooking and arching and spluttering and kicking. I hung my middle over a spine of rock and puked out saltwater till I could breathe.

I crawled along the spine to a solid ledge eight feet above the waves. The point of
Cowards Run
's bow jutted out of the water a hundred feet from my rocks. The mast veered off vertical and rocked side to side. Water and stone, mountains and forest, plus that splinter of broken boat—that's what I could see. A monster stab of loneliness
pinned me there. No boat, no partner, not even my hands, which were still blocks. I was outcast, exiled. I got up to look for Skim because I realized I'd even take the company of his corpse. I found him half in the water and half out where he'd lodged himself headfirst in a sheltered angle in the rock. He was breathing and shivering and barely knew I was there.

I hooked my wrists under his armpits and hauled him up out of the water. We leaned against each other, and he shook his head side to side. We stumbled across ribs of rock together, over to where the arm of land that separated the bay from the ocean became a wide spit with sand and trees to the east and rock on the west. Skim's legs didn't work so well. I forced him to take steps while half dragging him. I found a wind-sheltered patch of sun and peeled off our saturated clothes, then marched us back and forth until Skim could stand on his own.