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Show resentful, feelings as familiar and worn as my favorite shoes. I would not learn for several days of their ordeal. When I do, I will, at the age of thirty-four, believe that I am somehow to blame for the accident because I failed to call. My dad and Jerry spend that afternoon falling as they struggle in inch-deep water and use ropes to line, or drag, the raft down the shallow headwaters of the Alatna. It is hard work, lining a boat. I say this not from experience but from the way my father's hands looked when he returned from Alaska. Swollen and scabbed, the waters of the Alatna seemed to have pooled in his body. In fact, his hands were so bloated that my mother had to type the initial draft of his journal. The keys on the keyboard were too tiny. His hands betrayed the difficulty of the trip in a way his words never will, their stretched skin remaining with me later when he will suggest that he did nothing at all. Others had been asked to come along on the trip, including Michael and me. Being in the backcountry was something my extended family did together, like others might see a movie or eat out. Every summer we backpacked in the Rockies, choosing wilderness areas over national parks or forests in hopes that the additional work of getting there would mean having part of the planet to ourselves. While a dozen people from three generations around a campfire in the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness was not unusual, only two in the central Brooks Range was. That evening Jerry admits to my father that he had to lie to his doctor about coming on this trip. His prostate cancer and Parkinson's were becoming more complicated and he had, just days before, been placed on new medication that is giving him trouble. My dad writes: 239 |
