The Letters (12 page)

I’m sending this to the most recent address you gave me—Laika Star—and don’t know when you’ll get it. Be careful, Sam. Life is dangerous.

Hadley

Hadley—

I’m back. Does that surprise you? Time is different for people when they are separated. I am back and I am safe and I have been to Paul’s last moment. I have a great deal to report.

I am not feeling well, Hadley. I considered not telling you, but I know how you would be if you found out I kept it from you. I have pneumonia by most accounts. I guess it settled into my lungs on the trip and I was not well for the return. I made it, though. We have been snowed in since just after we arrived back, so I have not been able to see a doctor. Gus, believe it or not, worked as a mortuary assistant for some years in Florida and he did the diagnosis. It may simply be a bad cold, though I admit it doesn’t feel like that right now. I cough and I am running a fever. Gus has been extremely attentive, so you have no worries. As soon as conditions improve, Cindy has promised to fly in and whisk me away to Anchorage.

I promise I will tell you if I don’t improve rapidly. Promise me that you won’t worry overmuch.

The last three-quarters of the trip—from the point, really, where I sent my last batch of letters—was no picnic. Even Martha, who is unflappable and as unyielding to her body as any human I have ever met, had difficulty. We got hit by two whiteouts, where the snow came so thick and so fast that dogs swirled around you and then disappeared, only to reemerge from a different angle. Every sight and sound seemed reinvented a moment after you saw or heard it. I can’t describe it adequately. It is nearly worse than having no sight—it is a shredded vision, and it lends a nightmarish quality to even the smallest movements.

I have to sleep. My hands still feel frozen. They have thawed, I’m sure, but they don’t feel as if they have. I am taking aspirin and drinking plenty of fluids. Starve a fever, feed a cold? Or is it the other way around? I can never remember.

I’ll write again later. I know you are impatient to hear about Paul…

Sam

Hadley—

I am still sorting my emotions about the trip. And what I saw. And what I felt. It was more than you can imagine, and less in some way, too.

The trip: We ran into three hunters out on snowmobiles. They call them simply “sleds” or “machines” but never snowmobiles. Native Americans. Inuit. I’m not sure what the proper name is, but Martha knew them, and they had the appearance of Native Americans. You have never met three more taciturn men in all your days. They each wore a blue parka, each wore fur-lined pants, and each wore the most massive pair of boots imaginable. They never took off their goggles, so something both modern and otherworldly lingered about them. They carried large rifles in holsters attached to their sleds. These were cowboys—or Indians, I suppose—on twenty-first-century horses, riding the last plains. They stopped when they saw us. One had a thermos full of coffee and brandy and he gave us a small sip. Very strong and sugary, and delicious. They liked Martha, she said later, because she ran dogs. They see machines as inevitable, and necessary, but machines break down and cost money, while dogs, she said, fill the heart.

They had a butchered caribou attached to the back sled, pulled behind on an empty toboggan-type rig. The caribou had been quartered and was frozen rigid. They had kept the head, the antlers strapped under a bungee, and you know how these things appear: bright black eyes dulled with frost. They thought it peculiar that I wanted to examine the carcass, but how many times, I asked them, does someone from the lower forty-eight get to see a caribou? Anyway, the dogs pulled to get closer to it, and it became a bit of a mess with the dogs straining and reacting to the smell of the body, and the men finding the whole thing amusing.

Martha told me to give my letters to the smallest of the three. His name was Abe. I had already addressed the letters on the possibility of running into someone. I gave him twenty dollars for postage and a tip. Abe had a hard time understanding why a man in the middle of a dogsled journey needed to mail a letter. I told him it was an electric bill, but he didn’t think it was funny. He took the letters and stuffed them in his pocket.

We talked for a while about the weather. They predicted a change, more snow, dropping temperature. That concurred with the last report Martha had from her sources. Then we spent a while showing them Martha’s GPS. They liked that technology and asked how much it cost. Our exchange struck me as two boats encountering each other on the sea, but we inhabited a solid ocean, a landscape of whiteness and wind and humpy veins of earth and grass. That’s all. The conversation proved notable by its utility. We traded information, even mail, then cast off.

They pulled away in three putrid puffs of gasoline. I was glad to be back with the dogs, but I couldn’t help again asking Martha if I could have taken a snowmobile to Paul’s wreckage.

“No,” she said, “we couldn’t get there on a sled.”

“Why not?”

“We have to bushwhack and we have to go across water. You can’t bushwhack with a sled. You’d have to hike three or four miles in difficult country. Don’t worry. You’re using the right approach.”

I felt better knowing that I hadn’t turned a day’s outing into a ten-day dogsled trip just for aesthetic reasons. So we mushed on. We did not cross another snowmobile trail for the rest of the trip, nor did we see another human.

Soup break. I promise I will get to the whole thing after a nap. I’m sorry, I am still feeling a little tired. Gus insists I eat to keep up my strength. He’s an old broody hen.

Okay, back. Full of vim and vigor. What is vim, anyway? All right, I won’t get sidetracked. My mind is chasing rabbits a little, though. Medicine and fatigue, I guess.

So, after the three hunters left, Martha and I began the final push into the crash site. We tacked north. What had been a sort of snowmobile trail in places now gave way to full bush. We slowed and picked our way along. It didn’t take long for me to understand why we had to approach on dogsled. Any number of times we bogged down into drifts, or had to circle slowly around blowdowns, and the dogs showed their tenacity and strength. More than once they went right into my heart—a little corny, but true. On one occasion we came to a small mound covered by saplings and thornbushes. It didn’t look like much until we realized the snow had drifted against it, pushing up to nearly ten feet high. The dogs couldn’t get a purchase; it wasn’t frozen and it wasn’t soft enough for them to chest through. Martha yelled “On-by” as loud as she could and the dogs heaved and pushed and waded. At times they actually went under the snow. Imagine it—ten dogs burrowing and pulling and nothing of them visible except now and then a tip of the tail. They might have carried the sled down into the earth, for all anyone would know, but they yanked and pulled, and banged the sled against the saplings, and Martha shoved the sled handles this way and that, still yelling, and then little by little the dogs emerged. Magnificent, I promise you, sweetheart. At one point the sled tipped nearly vertical, and Martha almost fell back with it, but instead she grabbed the crossbar and yelled “Get up” and the dogs put their shoulders into it and dragged the sled up and over. They did it for her. It seemed to me that this was a fulfillment of a pact between them—that she would do anything for them, and they for her.

We camped that evening (or afternoon…there is little daylight left) one day’s journey from Paul’s site. It was the last clear night we had, and the northern lights came out and began dancing as you can only see them in picture books or a nature program. I don’t know what to think of the northern lights. I watched them for a long time, checking them as we set up tents, fed the dogs, and so on. I understand the phenomenon a little, and know it comes from magnetic waves, but I can never make myself believe such a thing exists. Nothing so dramatic, so vivid, can result from the collision of atoms or ions or whatever it is that waves and glows. But it does, of course. Green bands, and curtains of phosphorescent gold. Everything moving. A door to heaven, really, and right beyond it the thing we seek, whatever it is.

I want you to know this, darling. I wandered off for a few minutes by myself. I don’t know why, but I knelt down and watched the northern lights pulse and dance and I sent my soul to Paul. I don’t believe in God. I can’t. But I believed in our son. I told him that I was here, that I loved him, that his mother could barely go on without him, that if I pushed him too hard to come on this adventure that I was sorry. So sorry. That I would give anything—limb, life—to have him back. I told him that he had been the best of both of us, that if such a thing proved possible in the afterlife, we would not rest until we reunited with him. I said that his parents loved him. I said his leaving had broken our hearts. And then I said goodbye to him.

I don’t know what any of this means, or if it means anything at all. I teeter between finding it enormously important one moment and insignificant the next. But for what it’s worth, Hadley, I felt connected to our son in that instant. No great miraculous change in my heart, or new understanding resulted, I’m afraid. I merely felt that I had put something in order, arranged it properly, and that perhaps was sufficient.

Later that night, snow began to fall. It had been falling off and on for a while, brief flurries, but suddenly the world became still and you could hear the slightest movement from the dogs. Then the hiss of the stove became louder, and the tent ceased flapping, and it began to storm. At first it felt welcome. I hadn’t been conscious of how intently I had been listening to the wind. But then the snow increased, and Martha sat up and looked around, and her restlessness affected me.

“We’ll be digging out tomorrow morning,” she said.

“How much?”

“Hard to know.”

“Will it prevent us from getting there?”

“No,” she said. “We’ll get there but we won’t stay long, if that’s okay. We should head back unless we want to bivouac for a week or so.”

“Okay, we’ll make it quick,” I said.

“I don’t want to rush you. We’re not in danger. We are just going to be slowed considerably.”

“I understand.”

“The danger is always in between. Pushing when you shouldn’t push. Staying when you shouldn’t stay.”

The next morning we woke to more snow. Snow covered the tent. The dogs had made a small warren of deep burrows where they had slept. They shook their coats free as we gave them a morning meal. Martha performed everything evenly, but without her usual enthusiasm. What had been a short, cumbersome trip had transformed into a more risky proposition. I nearly said we could turn back, that I had what I wanted, but that would have been insane. For better or worse, I could not come so close and then leave without seeing the site.

It was hard going, as the adventure books always describe these things. We lost all semblance of trail. I followed Martha. She waded behind the sled and kept one hand tied by a short length of rope to the handlebar. We didn’t run so much as slog. It was exhausting—for us, for the dogs, for everything. The snow did not relent, but came in pants of intensity, occasionally bursting so hard from behind the mountains that we had to stop and wait for it to allow us to proceed. We crossed a dozen swampy gunnels of mud and muck and snow, each one bordered by hummocks of knotty grass. Moose country. Puckerbrush.

I also began to cough on this day. A cold, I figured. But it burned in my veins and several times Martha asked if I was all right. I didn’t feel all right exactly, but there was little point in complaining. In late morning Martha jammed her snow hook into the ground and walked back to me. Nothing unusual in that, except this time she held out her GPS and said, “We’re here, Sam.”

I looked at it. The coordinates matched what we knew from police records. This place, this acre, this was where he died.

What can I tell you that will soothe your heart, Hadley? It was not a pretty place, nor a horrible place. Moose country, as I said. In summer, a bog. Few trees of any size, although a boreal forest seemed to begin a few miles to the east. A valley, really, but a valley on an Alaskan scale. I am not sure what I expected to see. Had any trace remained of the deaths associated with the accident—which was unlikely in the extreme—snow had already covered it. The land did not appear gouged or disfigured by the plane. The heat of whatever had happened has long since cooled.

The plane exists, Hadley. I saw it. Snow had covered most of it, and the nose had broken away. The wings had sheared off, but the mute aluminum tube still resembled an airplane. A strut of the right wing remained intact. A red stripe—I don’t know why, but it transfixed me—ran down the top of the fuselage. I walked to the plane and placed my hand on it. Then I turned away.

Martha busied herself turning the sleds. The snow intensified. I did not cry, Hadley. I’m not sure what I felt. Loss, and sadness and love. I left the picture of our family beside the plane. I kissed it, said goodbye again to Paul, and put the picture under a few handfuls of snow. He is not there, sweetheart. He is gone. You knew that already, but I didn’t somehow. I am glad I saw the spot, but it is just a windy knob in a bog no one will visit again for many decades. I felt Paul more clearly, more resolutely, the previous night when the northern lights flickered and danced and snow hung just beyond the horizon. Oh, my son.