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Show After getting my uncle's body into the Avon, my dad pushes off from the shore. For sixty miles, he would be thrown from the raft some thirty or forty times, each instance fearing he would lose the raft, his brother's body, his only way home. Sand bars would catch him and roll his body across their stretches, wearing holes in his neoprene waders and gloves and plunging him repeatedly into ice cold water. A night and a day would pass. Finally, after wandering for miles in the woods, he would find the cabin with the satellite phone. About pushing off from the site where Jerry died, my dad writes, By luck, not by plan, Jerry was facing me for the rest of the trip. With no one else to talk to and a river that seemed to wish them gone, my father turns one last time to his brother for support and begins to talk. For close to two days, he paddles, swims, climbs, falls, and tells stories. Perhaps, he recalls moments from their childhood, throwing rocks over the barn, swimming in the irrigation ditch, the taste of tomatoes fresh from the vine. Perhaps, he thanks Jerry for going to college and showing his siblings another way of being in the world, for giving my father a different life than he had ever imagined while inoculating pigs and driving the tractor through corn. Perhaps, he describes the scenery as they move from tundra into boreal forests, into the winking greens of the white and black spruce. I know he sang songs, and I know my father well enough to know that when he forgot the words to "Tom Dooley" or "John Henry," he made them up, fanciful songs about heroes and lovers and trains that go all night. I know my father told Jerry he loved him. In his journal he writes, we talked, blurring once again the boundary between here and there. And for this I am grateful. Because when I think of what my father went 252 |