| OCR Text |
Show and it was on Jerry's lifelist to return; because Alaska is enormous and unknown, a land with a history that trembles on the page, and, therefore, a place worthy of reckoning; because Jerry was sick and his time spent on trails and in tents was becoming limited; and, I imagine, because Alaska hovered like a dream from their childhood when they would spend long afternoons in the hayloft listening to the mice scurry along the floorboards while they scanned the reaches of the landlocked plains and considered what lay beyond. Written first on a legal pad in thin blue lines of ink that run like waves across the page then later transferred to the computer, the journal my dad made of the trip, composed on the flight back, begins: Jerry and I met in St. Louis to begin our incredible journey. He then moves quickly to describe those few hours-not even twenty four-when everything was still okay. Arriving in Fairbanks, flying to the hinterlands, renting gear from the outfitter, he names the few people that they met, the meals they ate, the conversations they had with the taxi driver. I imagine his pen pausing for lengths of time as he begins the story, nursing the drink the flight attendant had given him moments before, staring into the clouds, and willing himself to recall more of what would typically pass unnoticed, not wanting to set out on what he knows will lead to pain. I imagine he clung to these moments the way he will later cling to their raft and is frightened when he must leave them behind. Yet he begins. By the second page of his journal, the ordinary fades like fog at the rising sun. Well into the morning of their first day in the Alaskan wilderness, long after the bush pilot has left them at Summit Lake, he writes that Jerry fell while trying to fish. It is the 237 |
