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Show After dinner, we sat around the fire talking about successes and failures, investment strategies, future trips, hopes for our children and life in general. It was a very good evening, but it was also the first time he mentioned the third member of our group (Cynde) and why she wasn't with us. When I said, "Cynde did not come on this trip." He responded, "I know, I just forgot." Crystal clear in thought only forty-eight hours ago, Jerry now confuses white rocks for sand dollars and imagines people who aren't there. Reeling my mother, Cynde, into the story, my uncle's mind takes refuge in the familiar as she typically accompanied them on their trips. In fact she was on their last trip to Alaska when the same river, the Alatna, had pulled her under with its giant river arms, leaving her bruised and sore but not broken. Reading this as a warning, she chose not go on this trip-the cold, the mosquitoes, the lack of dry land. We all find excuses; mine has something to do with a porch that needs to be painted and a new dog that can't be left alone. When we learn that Jerry is dead, when we learn that my dad has, by himself, paddled the body of his dead brother for nearly a hundred miles in search of help, we will wonder, with Jerry, why we weren't there. Jerry, though, refuses to allow us to remain outside the warmth of the campfire and brings us into the story-first my mother then, the following day, his daughter, his wife, his son, and others-weaving us into the landscape. Perhaps he imagines my mother gone for a minute to the tent to put on a layer of fleece, or his daughter down by the river watching for eagles, or his son on a night hike, waiting for stars that will never appear. For Jerry, it seems, we are all there in Alaska, poking a stick at the coals in the campfire as the night declines to come to an end and the sun lingers forever on the horizon. 240 |