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Show glasses, hat gone. He had been looking for my mother in the cottongrass. She has been gone so long. Time bends like the river. Now and then, here and there, near and far move closer together. I am at home writing in my journal an entry that will forever root me to this day long after the day has passed, the egg that will become my son knits into my body either to grow or to perish, and over a campfire the night before, my dad and his brother bring us onto the river in the stories they tell. Though he only admits "real concern" at this point, there must be terror for my father who is two hundred miles away from a city of any size with a brother who is gradually leaving him. He searches for the missing gloves and hat and then abandons the search. Who knows what the river might have taken. Is it at this point, I wonder, with so much missing and surrounded by acres of tundra, that he remembers a conversation he had with Jerry shortly after his Parkinson's diagnosis. Knowing that the disease would leave him bedridden and imprisoned in a body that at one point could bushwhack through the Rockies for miles without rest, Jerry asked his younger brother to make sure he died in the natural world. When the time came, help him find a cliff, a valley, a bottomless river, a final ceiling out of sky. Using the raft to steady Jerry's failing body and guiding both down a river that is no longer shallow but has grown steadily in the rain and the lower elevation, perhaps my father turns to the now clear sky and considers what he is being asked to do. They set up camp, my dad erecting Jerry's tent, and eat a cold dinner. The lighters and the waterproof matches were soaked during the day's struggles and would not light. Somehow the plastic bag had been left open. My dad does not have to say that Jerry was in charge of these things. More than ten years of backpacking with my 244 |
