Geography of Water Read online

  “Where do you think it came from?” she asked. This was another game we played, guessing where the tides had been. This piece had been pummeled by the waves for so long that its sharp edges were smoothed over. It had been changed into something else completely.

  When I did not answer, she said, “England, maybe, the white cliffs of Dover. A lonely woman in a long red scarf, writing a message in a bottle for someone to find, only the bottle is lost in a storm. This is all that is left.”

  She waited for my answer. Always before I had given her one.

  “We can take the skiff and go down to Floathouse Bay,” I told her, finally saying it aloud. “They’ll help us get away. We could go anywhere.”

  We looked out toward the ocean. Whitecaps marched in a solid line, big rollers fighting the flood tide. Out there it was what we called a confused sea, waves colliding from all four directions. I knew what that felt like because I felt it too, love and hate mixed up in a ball, rolling around loose inside my skin.

  “Nobody’s going anywhere,” my mother said. But she hesitated; there was a crack in her armor.

  “I know how to run the boat,” I insisted. “We’ll hug the shore. We have maps, and we have time.”

  She said nothing. She never did. This was a game too; we had played out the steps a million times. “I don’t want to leave you,” I said. “But I will. You know he won’t ever change, no matter how often he promises us.”

  She had heard this before. Always before I chose her.

  At the dock the skiff bounced in the chop. It was our oldest one, a Lund that was tippy and leaking. It had an unreliable motor and a bad gas line. Water pooled on its flat bottom and moss coated the railings. But it was a way out.

  I pulled the starter cord and the motor rumbled into life. “Are you coming?” I held my breath. There were so many ways it could go.

  I wanted to see it like this: My mother sitting up near the bow, looking for rocks. I would have one hand on the tiller, steering up and over the breakers. The five miles we had to travel would pass like a dream. The point that signaled Floathouse Bay would loom ahead, freedom and safety all in one.

  Waiting, I looked across the bay. In the stream, the bears moved like the tides, a complex hierarchy of aggression and avoidance. The little ones were being chased out now. They moved back into the trees, the forest zipping them up.

  My mother had already started back up the dock. She waited, her hood pulled up, hiding her face. “Come on, Winnie,” she called.

  I stood there, one foot in the boat, the other on the dock. Then I closed my eyes and chose.

  Two

  I had always thought that anger ran through all men like a slender thread, but if it was there in Isaiah and Birdman, I could not find it. From the first day I arrived in Floathouse Bay I hunted for that anger in them. I knew it had to be there, a red pulse waiting below the surface. I even tested it sometimes, just to finish the waiting for it, because the waiting was always worse. I tried leaving the shovel out to rust or sending the coffee cascading over the cup, little things that had sometimes caused my father to slam his fist down on the countertop.

  If they knew they were being tested, neither man said so. Birdman placed the shovel back under the eaves; Isaiah mopped up the spill with a rag, humming. “Someone’s got her head in the clouds today,” he said, winking.

  Finally I had to know. I thought of the volcano I had heard of way up north. People called it Redoubt, a hulk of what looked like lifeless stone but it was waiting, smoldering below the surface. Every lifetime it seemed to shake off sleep and belch out smoke and fire. Each time it caught people off guard, as if they had forgotten what lay beneath. Maybe Isaiah and Birdman were like that, a slow burn instead of a flame.

  “Is it true that all men are angry?” I asked.

  “Left all of my angry back in ’Nam,” Isaiah said. He fussed with a set of marten traps on the dock. The only jeans I ever saw him wear were blotched with fish blood and held up by a section of parachute cord and a pair of suspenders. A logger’s striped shirt, made for a slimmer man, stretched tight across his belly. His face was round as a moon, fringed by a wispy goatee the color of ginger. From the first, I thought I could see all of him down to a sweet core.

  “Some men just have fault lines closer to the surface,” he said, and I knew without asking that he meant my father was one of those men. “Some of us never have them at all.”

  I was coming to understand that there were different kinds of men in the world. Isaiah was as transparent as my father had been opaque. He bumbled through life in an eternal good-natured fog, misplacing his cheater glasses, forgetting to put back parts in the generator as he fixed it. He laughed with his whole body. It was hard to remember what anger was when I was around Isaiah.

  Birdman was harder for me to read. Stooped in eternal pain, his body a coiled muscle, he guarded himself against me. For the first month I lived in Floathouse Bay, he did not say more than a handful of words, only sizing me up the way I had so often sized up the sea. His eyes missed nothing, not the tears I disguised as salt spray or the way I sometimes watched the path out to the ocean, waiting for someone who never came.

  A line of cormorants sometimes perched on the floathouse docks, spreading their wings like ragged capes. I knew that they were underwater hunters, diving deep under the sea for food. After they came up from two hundred feet below the surface, they had to dry their wings before they could fly again. My mother used to call them the birds that swim.

  “It’s the best of both worlds,” she used to say. “To be able to fly and to swim both.” Watching them with her, I used to believe that they were luckier than we were, because they had two easy ways to escape.

  Like the cormorants I was waiting for a sign. Floathouse Bay was born for waiting. You could wait all your life here because nothing ever changed. A tiny dimple in the coast that opened into a slender, dangerous throat, it gathered up the flood tide in its mouth and spit it back out every twelve hours. The Coast Pilot, the bible my father had followed like a religion, warned that a prudent mariner should give it a wide berth. Sucked almost dry in low tide, it was a place everyone left alone, everyone but the desperate.

  It was a place that was made for me.

  The tiny bay inside was peppered with saw-toothed rocks that submerged and reappeared with the pulse of the ocean, as deep and drawn out as one long sigh. Gulls worried the sea for the scraps of fish the men threw out in long arcs, squabbling and shrieking among themselves, rising up in indignant feathery clouds and then settling again a few feet away. Sometimes a sea lion broke the surface, a chunk of salmon in its jaws.

  On the long, unending days, Isaiah worked to repair wide lacy nets to the beat of sixties rock tunes scratchily emerging from a transistor radio. Birdman tended plants in the greenhouse, its materials salvaged from the sea. Above everything the mountains marched in an endless cloak of green to sky the color of pavement.

  In Floathouse Bay it was easy to believe that you could wait forever. When I looked into the mirror that the last woman to stay here had left, I was surprised to see that my hair had not turned silver, that wrinkles had not made a road map on my face. It seemed that long that I waited.

  I was waiting too for the mosquito buzz of a boat, my mother’s skiff rounding the cliffs that separated the bay from the ocean outside. Sometimes I could feel an invisible rope stretching through the miles and islands and bays that were between us. Throughout the long days ticking into dubious half nights at Floathouse Bay—the sun only a wrinkle on the horizon, barely setting at all—I listened for the sound of a motor, the sight of a kayak.

  I waited, but nobody came. I knew that my mother had learned where I was. Ernie, who piloted the supply barge, was our coastal telegraph, and Isaiah had lived here long enough to know that a young woman staying with two older men in an isolated bay was unusual, even for this area where people kept to their own business. People would find out. People would talk. Ernie himself would car
ry the story all the way to Cape Deception, the far edge of land where two sides of the island came together in a splash of foam and tide.

  Isaiah went out to meet the barge when I first came. He spent an hour with Ernie, floating in the chop, alluding to why I was there. I knew that he did not need to explain, but if he didn’t give Ernie a story, Ernie would make up his own. Ernie knew what went on in Never Summer, the same way he knew when the couple at the fish weir split the sheets but were forced to stay on in a small hut until a floatplane could retrieve one of them in summer. He absorbed trouble like the air and later told everyone else about it, gossip his only reward for long days beaten up in the kidneys pushing the barge north.

  At the same time, Ernie never took sides and quickly scooted away before being pulled in to the fight. He had told us in Never Summer once that the isolation of the coast turned people strange. They even looked different after enough months spent out here in the company of only a few others.

  Down the coast near Split Point, he said, a crew at the archeological site ran and hid, bush-fevered, when he pulled in after many months gone, only creeping out to retrieve the groceries after the barge had pulled away. The man and wife at the cannery instead desperately waved him in and plied him with muffins in an attempt to hear a new voice. Children with only parents for company were old souls, and the adults themselves either turned inward or had a streak of crazy. You never knew, Ernie said, which direction that isolation will make you swing.

  So I knew that everyone in Never Summer Bay realized where I was. Maybe they thought I was waiting out the winter and would be back when the sedges poked their early heads up in the estuary. Spring was when everything came back to the coast. Even hope came back; hope that this season would be better than the last. When spring came, I thought, I would decide.

  Stay or go? Staying was the easy course, and I was finding that I liked easy. The two old men moved in and out of the floathouse, letting me choose my own direction. “Whatever melts your butter. It don’t hurt my feelings either way,” Isaiah said with a grin, pulling on his floppy cowboy hat. Birdman stood hip deep in plants, snipping off leaves with long-handled scissors, nodding silently as I came to watch him work in the greenhouse. They both seemed to understand what I needed without me saying a word.

  The men had called a group conference when it became clear that I was staying for more than a week. They set a few rules: I was to study each day using their motley collection of books. I was to get the papers to qualify for a high school diploma. And anytime I wanted to go back to Never Summer Bay, I could. The same rules held for moving on, hitching a ride with a passing long-liner to try my luck up north. If I got a wild hair to do that, Isaiah said, no worries. They wouldn’t stop me.

  This was a way station, they said, a place for the unlucky and the heartbroken. “The lonely hearts floathouse,” Isaiah liked to call it with a gap-toothed grin. “It’s a place to lick your wounds for a spell. Gather your courage and your strength.” They would, he said, never ask me for my story unless I wanted to tell it. They would never have me make promises I could not keep.

  The two men I found here living in a decrepit floathouse called themselves Isaiah and Birdman, but those were not their real names. What those were they wouldn’t say. A rickety sailboat a woman had brought in years earlier was barnacled in at the shallow end of the bay and wouldn’t move, and a flat-bottomed boat barely did. When they got liquored up they laughed big instead of hollering. They pole-vaulted over the campfire, their toes barely escaping the flames. They challenged each other to swim across the bay, their flaccid bodies turned to poetry as they dove and sliced through the water as smoothly as fish. They tended a still and a half dozen marijuana plants, thick-trunked as trees.

  After they were used to me, they told stories late at night as the whiskey drained from their jam jars. The stories were of things that I could not understand: night running onto a tropical beach to slit sleeping throats and slipping back again, unnoticed. About the unbearable heaviness of the swampy air, the one crazy-eyed guy who grabbed a coral snake as a joke and then froze in fear with it dangling off his fingers, about mushroom-like rot festering between their sticky toes, about smoke from a thousand cigarettes. About collecting rainwater in cups and canteens and whatever else they had because they were always thirsty, chugging it down, not knowing then that they were drinking poison that had come from orange barrels. About seeing the blossom of red on friends’ chests, losing the luck of the draw, as if it was all one big card game and they had picked the wrong suit. Buying the farm. Kicking the bucket. Biting the dust. Pushing daisies. Taking a dirt nap. They were rough cut and leather skinned, men who had lived hard lives and had the worn faces to prove it. They got their firewood from beach logs, their food from the land and sea, and never went to town, not ever.

  They collected what they needed from the flotsam that washed up on the beaches. Every day they charted the weather, determining when the big spring tides would be, the extreme lows of fall, and planned out where to go to find the best bounty.

  “You can get anything here, it’s like a store,” Isaiah liked to say. He showed me what he had found: glass fishing floats from Japan, Nike sneakers, and a flotilla of plastic bath toys. Each object was useful. Isaiah knew all about ocean currents. He once found an old globe, and he drew lines on it with his fingers to show me what would happen if a container fell off of a ship en route from Japan. “International date line, Alaska, Bering Sea,” he said, tracing a path. “Years and years at sea, finally washing up here on the outer coast of Floathouse Bay.”

  I spent hours squatting on my heels watching him as he repaired marten traps. Unlike the lazy trappers farther down the coast, he said with disdain, the ones who used white plastic buckets that you could see for miles, he did it the old way, the better way. He tramped through the woods, sizing up the country. This could take hours, days of looking. He had all the time in the world. Finally he came to a halt at a place that was no different than any of the others we had passed by. “Here,” he said, letting me hold the wooden box level while he nailed it to a spruce.

  “Watch yourself,” he warned me, setting the trip wire that would snap the animal’s head instantly when it came to investigate the fish heads he left in the box.

  I trailed behind him as we climbed higher to the muskeg. He stood tall and filled his lungs. “This is my homeland,” he said, even though I knew he had been born in Arkansas. “Every day is a good day when I’m on the right side of the grass.”

  We stood for a moment looking over the wide expanse. More like river than land, a muskeg was a living sponge. Channels of murky water pulsed through its center, forming deep pools of brown-tinged water. My feet sank deep into a swampy yellow-and-green carpet of sphagnum moss and sedges. I recognized some of the plants that my mother had taught me: Labrador tea, Alaska cotton. Stunted lodgepole pines were taking over this meadow in a bloodless advance, slowly rooting into the wet soil and sucking up the moisture. In a hundred years it would be a forest. There would be no trace of what had been.

  “I take it you aren’t going back,” Isaiah said. He took one of the marten traps from my arms. “Maybe could come up with some cash to send you north. Fairbanks, Delta. Almost eighteen, am I right? You could make a go of it up there.”

  In the open muskeg, I could see for miles. An unbroken carpet of musky-smelling green stretched toward the horizon, dozens of swamp plants woven together into a loose carpet. Distant, snow-covered mountains, the Fairweather Range, floated on the horizon. Far below I could even see the ocean and on it a toy-sized tugboat pushing a barge way out in the main channel.

  Every time I thought about leaving this southeast coast, my mind seized up and I was unable to choose. I had read enough about the rest of Alaska to know that the interior of it lay like an enormous frozen sea caught in mid-curl. Tundra instead of tide, it was barren and empty and unsheltered from the wind that blew across it in great sheets. Fire raced through the twisted blac
k spruce and deep snows fell in winter. It was a land of extremes, not moderated by our meandering Japanese current. Up there, there would be no sanctuary in the forest. Up there, you would be completely exposed.

  Going down to the Lower 48, the place my father had always dismissed as “America,” was even more precarious. I had heard from Ernie that you spent half your life in a car, staring at the tail-lights ahead of you, freeways in a spaghetti tangle. There were buildings that blocked out the sky and gardens tortured into tame shapes. There were smokestacks belching mustard-colored clouds that stained the sky. There were people everywhere, hurrying down the streets, shouldering you aside in their haste.

  In the shiny magazines Ernie had sometimes brought me from town, women in America wore filmy skirts that wouldn’t last a minute in Never Summer Bay. They painted their lips with sticky gloss the color of blood. They didn’t wear stained Carhartts and pile their hair into a messy braid. Their hands, I was sure, were not dotted with hard calluses and scars from devil’s club punctures, their feet not colorless from constant exposure to salt. In the pictures they strode down the street in heels stacked high, never needing a place to hide.

  Even getting away from Alaska was a complicated web of boats and planes that seemed impossible to figure out. It was like the state wanted to hold us fast in its fist.

  And there was this: leaving the coast meant leaving my mother behind.

  Waiting in Floathouse Bay, I felt suspended in time and space. I floated in a bubble where the days were long and seamless.

  “How come you want to hang out here with old guys like us?” Isaiah sometimes asked me. “We’ve used ourselves up, and you’re still shiny new, like a penny that nobody’s spent yet. Don’t hide here forever, Winnie. There’s a big world beyond this coast.”

  I knew there was. I studied the curve of the horizon stretching past what I knew. I saw the waves in one long train, coming from a place where people spoke an entirely different language. I whispered the names of bays I had only seen on the charts, names like one long poem: Kiksadi, Haida, Forgotten. Somewhere out there other people lived, people who didn’t know my story. I could be anyone out there. The possibility made me dizzy. It was almost too much for me to comprehend. Better to stay and let the seasons make the decision for me.