19

 

The one thing I had promised myself, and had followed through on, was the decision to take my dad on a fishing trip. I had gotten an e-mail from this website I look at all the time, and it talked about a trip up to Alaska, so I clicked on the link and checked it out and thought, wow, that would just be a lot of fun. It was on the Nushagak River. You can get all the Pacific salmon up there—king, coho, sockeye, chum. The best are the king salmon, which run from about the middle of June to the middle of July. The place I decided we’d stay was a lodge called King Salmon, in fact. I talked to Willy, who had just finished his first year at the community college, and told him I thought it would be great if he came with us, and I didn’t have to ask him twice.

I talked to my dad, and his first reaction was, “Your mother would never go for it.” He was right about that one. But there’s a story he always told about a survey ship he was once on in Alaska, and he always ended that story—the way parents always repeat themselves when they tell stories, even when they don’t have Alzheimer’s—saying, “I’d love to go back up there one day.”

So I said, “Dad, just tell me, do you want to go?”

“Sure I do,” he said.

“Well then, I’m gonna make it happen.”

My mom, as expected, was dead set against it. She kept reminding me of how he’d wandered off down the trail under the power lines. If we can’t keep track of him right there at home, she kept saying, how the heck are you going to take care of him when he’s got all of Alaska to wander off in? He can’t even put on his shoes by himself. How are you going to manage?

I just stuck to my guns and told her that I could take care of him, and that Willy would be there to help me. I’m not sure why I was so gung-ho about this trip. I guess I wanted us to all have one big, lasting memory. But on top of that, I just didn’t want to see my dad sitting around all day. I think that’s another tendency we have, when people get sick. We want them to just sit in a dark room, quietly, and preserve their energy and strength, and keep them out of trouble. That’s just fine for some; for others it’s a death sentence, a way of pulling pages off the calendar until you get to the one with the big black mark on it. My dad was always such an active guy, so interested in things, and he loved the water so much. I remembered him steering that boat, a million years ago, and the look on his face when he was out on the water—and I could imagine the look on my face as I admired him—and I thought he deserved at least one more moment like that. To be honest, I was kind of nervous about the whole thing—I mean, my mother did have a point—but I wasn’t going to let anyone know that.

When I finished off the elevators in the mall, that was my last day on the job. I was lucky enough to have another one lined up, so I didn’t even take a day off in between. You’d think you’d have a big celebration when a job like building a mall is completed, but work is work, and the very next day I was down south in Milton, where I’d been asked to take over a large project. It was an assisted-living facility sitting on 23 acres. Once again, I was struck by the irony of the situation; of being asked to build one, after two years of trying to keep an old lady out of them.

We had scheduled the fishing trip for the end of June. A few weeks before we left, I was talking to one of the painters on the new job. It somehow came out that we were both fishermen—no big surprise when you get a couple of Washington boys together—but when I mentioned to him that in a month and a half I was headed up to the Nushagak, his eyebrows kind of went up. “Really? Where are you staying?” he asked me.

I told him we were going to the King Salmon, and his eyebrows went up again.

“No kidding,” he said. “I used to own that.”

Turns out he and a couple of his partners had just sold the place. This was the first year he wasn’t going up in as long as he could remember. They had a deal to run the place for two more years. “One of my partners is up there right now,” he told me.

I couldn’t believe my luck. I explained about my dad, and told the painter that I was bringing him along, but I was a little nervous because he had Alzheimer’s, and I could probably use a little help in watching out for him.

The guy made sure his partners up in Alaska knew who we were, so before we even set foot on Alaskan soil, they were ready to lend a hand.

It was such a lucky turn of events; before my whole experience with Edith, I would have just sloughed it off as a coincidence, but now I wasn’t so sure. I felt, deep in my bones, that somebody up there was watching out for me.

If you know what I mean.

*   *   *

Mom brought my dad over on Sunday around noon, so we could get all our stuff together and consolidate our gear. He showed up with two army duffel bags, one with his clothes all packed, the other pretty much empty, for hauling our gear. I saw him standing there in the doorway, wearing a pair of sweats, a green knit shirt, and a baseball cap. Not to mention the biggest grin on his face I’d seen in years. He was just raring to go.

We got up at oh-dark-thirty the next morning. Dad managed to dress himself, although I had to help him get his belt through the loops, and we all piled into my Ford F-350 Turbo Diesel and hit the road. It felt so right, to be with my son and my father.

I had had a talk with Willy, that one of us had to keep an eye on Grandpa at all times. Willy understood that my dad was having issues—we’d been pretty open and honest with him—and seemed ready to step up and help. We all wanted this to be a great memory, and Willy understood that he had to play his part to make that happen.

Dad sat by the window on the first flight, up to Anchorage, and he was like a little kid, commenting on everything as the scenery slow-dissolved to the mountains and glaciers of Alaska. “Willy, look at that volcano down there,” he said, patting Willy on the arm. “Is that something or is that something?”

We had a short layover in Anchorage, which was something of a trip in and of itself, because they’ve got these big glass cases with stuffed grizzlies and polar bears and wolves—most of them are world record animals, so you can get kind of lost gawking at the stuff. And sure enough, I went to the bathroom, and when I came out I found Willy staring up at a big Kodiak bear—and no sign of Dad.

I panicked, and started running down the hall. A little ways along I found my father. He had a strange look on his face, like he wasn’t quite sure what was going on. I started to get angry, but then I took a moment to catch my breath. In that moment I saw him, walking slowly, alone, and I tried to imagine the world from his point of view—how it was turning and twisting a little, like a Rubik’s cube, and he was just having trouble keeping up with it. It made me sad, but it also made me proud, how well he was hanging on, how game he was to take this trip.

“Hey, Dad,” I finally said to him, “What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “You know the life span of these Kodiaks isn’t much more than a dog’s, isn’t that something?”

I steered him back over to our gate, and found Willy. Out of Dad’s earshot I reminded him that one of us had to keep an eye on him at every second. You don’t have to hold him down, you just have to know where he’s headed. Willy was very apologetic, but I told him that we were lucky it had happened now, to help us remember what we had to do. That seemed to go down well with him.

Our next flight got us up to Dillingham, just about an hour and a half’s flight, and one of the most beautiful you could ever take. I looked out the window, and saw the tundra and the rivers. The land is so flat that the waters just meander; some of the switchbacks aren’t more than a hundred yards apart. If you’re looking for a place that will make you turn off your sense of always trying to move forward in one direction, this is about as good as any.

In Dillingham, we caught a little twelve-seat float plane, and pretty soon we were flying over the camp. You could see that it was basically a collection of little canvas Quonset huts. We landed right on the river, and they sent little boats out to get us. Friendly folks, and solid—you felt secure right away when you met these people, they so clearly knew what they were doing. Sure enough, one of the fellows noticed that my dad was moving kind of slow; I don’t know if he’d already been alerted that we were coming today (or, if he had, that he had figured out Dad was the one my painter friend had called about), but he made a beeline for my dad and offered him a ride up the hill in a little six-wheel dune buggy they had for running around the camp. I was already starting to feel more assured—but oddly, it wasn’t like they were tamping down some great fear I had. Even though I was way off in the Alaskan wilderness with a man capable of wandering off at the sight of a stuffed bear, I had the strongest sense that I really, really could handle this. I know I kept telling my mom that, to calm her down—but I didn’t have to keep telling myself that. Somehow, I knew it already.

They took us up to show us the cabins, and it was basically two people to a cabin, so my dad and I grabbed one and Willy grabbed another with a fellow we’d met on the plane. The cabins were all named after different kinds of salmon; ours was Chinook.

They showed us how to fire up the propane heater in our hut; it wasn’t that cold, considering, but our guide said, “Trust me, you’ll need this. It can get pretty chilly at night.”

It was getting on to lunchtime, so they took us up to the main cabin, gave us some lunch, and assigned us our guide. Finally, it was time to get in some fishing.

Dad had trouble working the reel, which was hard for me to see because it was something he’d been doing his whole life. Not that his hands wouldn’t work, more like he just couldn’t figure out how to operate the thing. I resisted the urge to grab it out of his hands and do it for him.

We were fishing maybe five minutes when Willy got the first salmon. Big one, too. A few minutes later, Dad got one on the line. I could tell he was struggling with it—he didn’t have his sea legs, and with the arthritis it was hard for him to grip the rod. He seemed a little confused, too. At one point, the fish was running and Dad got his hands in the way of the line, and the line was going across his hand and I knew it would cut him, so this time I did grab the reel from him for a moment to get him right. He didn’t seem too upset about it, just kind of confused, but I didn’t make a big deal about it. Once I got the fish a little closer in, I gave the rod back to him and let him finish it off, but I was thinking, man, this is going to be a long trip.

But the second fish he got on the line, well, that was my dad, all the way. He jumped right up, and I could see that he had it under control, like it was ten years ago. Like it was fifty years ago. I looked over at Willy, and for a second it was me who had just graduated high school, and I’m watching my dad, the pro, the master, bring in a king salmon, and all is right with the world.

You need four to fill a boat, in addition to the guide, so along with me, Dad, and Willy, there was Helmut, a nice guy who owned a glass company. He spoke German; his English was broken but good enough that we could figure each other out. It was another amazing coincidence—remember those two Schindler elevators we were waiting on to finish the mall project? They were glass elevators, and it turns out that the glass for those elevators came from Helmut’s company. And here I run into him next to me in a boat in the middle of Alaska. Go figure.

Helmut may have run a good company, but he couldn’t catch a fish to save his life. Nice enough fellow to have in the boat, though. Generally, when you go out, there’s one side of the boat where the fishing’s better. Or seems to be, anyway. So for the first couple of days, we’re banging ’em one after another, and Helmut’s just sitting there with his pole in the water, looking kind of wistful. These salmon are running like 25 or 30 pounds, and the days are going by and Helmut hasn’t had a chance to fight one of them. So the third or fourth time this happens, we switch Helmut over to the side where everybody’s catching salmon—and, wouldn’t you know it, suddenly he’s on the cold side again, with us sitting where he’d been, still banging ’em one after another. Sometimes, fishing will break your heart just because it can.

We were scheduled to be there for six days; it never really gets dark, that far north at that time of the year, it just kind of hits twilight and stays that way. You get a little fouled up because you’re not quite sure when to go to sleep, and to tell you the truth I could have fished twenty-four hours a day for six days and not known the difference. But like with anything else, you get into a kind of routine, you have breakfast, go out in the morning, back for lunch, and then out again. Dad handled it pretty well, the first day or two. There were some moments—like the first morning, when we got up, and I looked over, and Dad had his shirt on upside down and backwards.

I didn’t make a big deal of it, I didn’t get upset, and I certainly didn’t go over and dress my father like he was a two-year-old. I just tried to make light of it, and Dad chuckled when I pointed it out. I showed him how to get himself straightened out, and then walked out of the tent and gave him a minute to get the shirt on correctly by himself. When I came in, he was all fixed up. I knew that everything wasn’t perfect, but I also knew that for the most part, Dad was handling this trip okay.

But on the third day, we were coming out after lunch, and there’s a little set of six or eight stairs going out from the deck down to the ground. Dad was fussing with his glasses as he was walking, and he can’t really multitask anymore, and sure enough—I saw it coming a split second before it happened, but couldn’t react fast enough—boom, down he goes, rolling down the stairs and onto the ground.

Oh, God, I thought. Here we go.

A couple of guys came running over, and I ran over, and Dad was on the ground, and before anyone could say anything—I could see the panic in their eyes—I spoke first, making light of the moment as much as I could, given that my heart was about in my throat.

“Hey, Dad, what the heck are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m okay,” he says. “You know, this was part of being a paratrooper. They teach you how to fall. Did you see that tuck and roll? That’s what I’ve been trying to teach you. About time you saw somebody do it right.”

Sure enough, once you thought about it, he had fallen perfectly—a movie stuntman couldn’t have done it better. The people who’d gathered around smiled at each other—you could see them all kind of take a collective deep breath—and they helped Dad to his feet.

“I think I’ll head back down to our unit,” Dad said. I told him I’d be right behind him. I ducked back into the main cabin to use the bathroom, then double-timed back to our cabin. He wasn’t there, so I figured he’d stopped next door at Willy’s unit.

He wasn’t there, either.

I was kicking myself—I couldn’t believe I’d let him out of my sight. I guess after he came through that fall so well, I just wanted to believe he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself for a few minutes. You think there are moments of lucidity and moments of confusion, and there are, but the lines between those states aren’t clear. They come and go in a second and you have to be there to notice the change.

And I wasn’t there.

I ran down to the riverbank, and then back to Willy’s. “Willy, we’ve got to go find Grandpa. I don’t know where the hell he’s at.”

He threw his boots on and we ran out. I was afraid Dad would get lost in the woods behind the camp, so we headed in that direction. I was thankful that it was never going to get dark, but that was about all I was thankful for.

We were passing the last of the Quonset huts when the door swung open. And there, walking slowly out into the fading light, was Dad.

“What the heck—” I heard my voice, angry and frustrated, and took a breath and started again. “Hey, what the heck are you doing in there, Dad?”

“Well, I’m not really sure,” he said.

I was shaking, literally, from the adrenaline draining out of my arms and legs. I put my arm around Dad’s shoulder and headed him back toward our cabin. “We’re over here, in Chinook, Dad,” I said. “Remember Chinook.”

“Chinook,” he said, his voice childlike and quiet. I think he understood that he’d gotten lost; I think he maybe even understood that, unlike the previous times, somebody was covering for him—no one was going to yell at him like a child. I hoped, somewhere deep down, that he got that. And that he appreciated it. I think it meant a lot to him.

I hope it did. In the end we are old-school men. We are not going to sit around a circle and talk about our feelings and link arms and sing “Kumbaya.” We just do what we have to do. I wasn’t about to ask him what was going through his mind, or his heart, any more than he was about to ask me the same. I just walked him back to our cabin, and we sat down and talked about fish; who had caught what that day, and what we thought we might go after tomorrow.

Willy wandered by, and I pulled him outside the cabin, and made sure he knew this wasn’t his fault, that it was all mine, but that we needed to double down on keeping track of Grandpa. We had gotten away with this twice—once in the airport and once today—so we really shouldn’t test the theory that the third time’s the charm.

The lessons I learned from Edith came back, again and again, as I went through the week with my dad. The next night, Dad was eating a bowl of shrimp and asked me if I’d get him a cup of coffee. I said I would, but must have gotten distracted, because the next thing I knew he had walked over to the coffee urn and carefully poured coffee directly into his bowl of shrimp. Once again, I started to react badly—the “What the heck are you doing!” and “Why don’t you just wait for me to do that for you!” rose up in me—but I just took a deep breath.

I sidled up to my father and asked, “Whatcha got goin’ on there, Dad?”

He looked down at his plate and seemed confused. “I don’t exactly know,” he said, a little sadly.

“Can I give you a hand with that?” I asked.

“No, I can take care of it,” he said.

I wasn’t at all sure that he could—but I was sure that it was his decision. “Okay, I’ll be over there if you need me,” I said, and walked away. I tried not to let him see me watching his every move; but somehow he managed to get himself a new plate of shrimp, and a new cup of coffee, and keep them separate. He was struggling with it, but it was his struggle.

That’s what I brought to the trip with me, the gift that Edith had given me: the understanding that, even though it might be easier to treat him like a child, my father is not a child. He is a man with all the pride that a man of that age, and that experience, carries with him. There were moments, like when I’d be putting sunblock on my dad’s face, making sure to get it on the sides of his neck and behind his ears, that I flashed back to doing that for my kids when they were little. And in those moments, I realized that yes, I was treating my father like a child just then, but this was a necessary task, and when this task was over, I had to put those feelings away, had to let him return to being a man, to the pride that his age owns, and needs, and demands, because in many ways it is the one thing that holds him in place while the world is starting to crumble and turn around him.

*   *   *

The last day we were there was just a half-day; we went out in the morning, but were going to leave that afternoon. We went down to a hole they call the Swallow’s Nest, and put in our lines. That day we were running plugs—a plug is a little plastic thing that dives and wiggles in the water, pulling against the current. You just drop it down near the bottom, and wiggle it in the salmon’s face. It drives them crazy, and they grab for it.

Well, I don’t think we were out five minutes when Dad got a hit, and you could tell right away it was a big one. A huge bronze bruiser, and it was fighting like you’d called its mother a bad name.

Willy’s rod went off at the same time, so the two of them were there, fighting away, and it was one of the great moments of the trip. I tried to press it into my memory, to freeze that moment and keep it, my son and my dad, side by side, wailing away at some kick-ass salmon.

I was dying to help my dad out, and forcing myself not to. For a moment, it looked like the rod was going to fly right out of his hands. I thought, If he loses this one, it’ll be just terrible. He’ll be so upset. Maybe I should make sure he gets it.

Or maybe not.

He was working that baby like a maestro. He got the salmon up close to the boat, and we couldn’t believe it. The biggest one I’d taken all trip weighed 32.5 pounds—and this one made it look like a teener. It was easily 40 pounds if it was an ounce.

I knew he was trying not to make a big deal of it—but he was smiling so wide you’d think the top of his head would have come off at the hinges. My dad, it became apparent, had just caught the biggest fish of the trip.

Willy was going nuts—“You got it, Grandpa! That’s the biggest one!” and Dad, in that old-guy way, just put his head down and said, “Well, I don’t really know. Maybe so.”

“Maybe so, Dad,” I said. “Maybe so.”

As we headed back I thought about my mom, and how she didn’t want us to make the trip. How she said, well, you won’t know what to expect.

And that’s the truth. I certainly didn’t expect this.

We headed back for the camp, with Willy still all worked up over my dad catching the biggest fish. Dad had a little grin on his face.

On the way back, we saw a big old moose swimming across the river, so we took a little detour to watch it for a while. It made shore and climbed out of the water; you couldn’t tell when it was swimming, but it had to be the biggest moose in all of creation. You could probably stand and walk under it.

The boat was quiet now. We cut the motor and just sat, looking at the world around us, the woods, the water, that big elegant moose staring back at us. It was a moment, frozen in time, frozen in place, like a diorama you’d make in a shoe box for a school project when you were a kid, and for just a moment, I felt like I was outside of the shoe box, outside of the scene, looking down on it.

And just for a moment, I felt Edith’s presence next to me. I hadn’t thought of her much during this trip, other than noticing a hundred times over that the things I was doing with my dad, the patience I felt, all came from her. But in this moment, I did feel her presence.

I started to feel sad, but I pushed the feeling away. This wasn’t the moment for that. This was a moment to just be with my dad and my son. I just let Edith’s presence be there with me, with all of us, as we sat in that moment in the sun.

After a little while the moose moved slowly away, and we headed back to camp, and got ready for the boat that would ferry us out to the seaplane.

The sun was unusually hot for Alaska, even at that time of year, so I asked Dad if I could put a little more sunscreen on him. He said sure, go ahead. And as I was rubbing it on, behind his ears and on the sides of his neck, and across the bridge of his nose, he said, “Thanks for taking care of me”; I guess he was just talking about the sunscreen, but you could kind of see in his face that maybe, in his own way, he was talking about a little more than that.

*   *   *

I tried to spend more time with Kelsey and Willy after I got back. It’s never easy, with kids their age—there’s always something they’re running off to, some plan they’ve made that they’ve forgotten to tell you about. We tried instituting our family dinner again, and were pretty regular about that, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d lost a little something over the last year. I think every parent feels like their kids are moving away from them, a little more every day, as they get older. But I think I was feeling it more than most. I wondered whether I’d sped up that process more than I hoped to.

A while later I asked my daughter to write down some of what she was feeling about all this—I pretended it was to help me write this book, but really, if you want the truth, I wanted to hear it straight from her, in a way that I knew I could never get by talking to her face to face. She e-mailed it to me the next day, as I was driving downtown. I pulled over to look at it, and it’s a good thing I did, because if I’d even glanced at it, I would have driven right off the side of the road.

I guess she couldn’t decide if she was writing to me or about me—but in the end, I wouldn’t change a word.

At first when i found out that my dad was taking care of a little old lady that literally lived on your job site, I was proud, to say the least. and as the days went by my pride for my father only grew stronger. I thought that it was so cool that he was taking the little time that you had to yourself and putting it towards something that had more meaning. i have to say that when i found out about Edith for the first time i was anything but surprised. that was just like my dad to open his heart and help any and everybody in any way that he could. As time went on, i got to see more and more what my mother saw in him … his heart. as time went by, edith became sicker and sicker, she slowly began to lose her ability to function. Every function that she lost, was another function that my dad had to pick up.

After about a year it became clear that edith was slowly deteriorating. so my father became more and more involved in everything that edith did. It was really hard on our family because my dad was always gone. he would leave for work around four in the morning and then he would get off work at around five or six at night but instead of coming home to us, he would then go to her house where he would feed her, do her laundry, drive her to every single appointment. towards the end of this journey he even had to bathe her. she became completely dependent on him and in a ironic way he became dependent on her for her friendship. if my dad was able to come home it wasn’t until 1 or 2 in the morning and then he was gone again at four. i wanted to try to lighten my father’s load and i also really wanted to help edith. so i started to come and clean her house for her with my mother on weekends. we would also feed, bathe and watch over her. the thing that i missed most about having my dad around was his input. my dad will always be right there to put in his two cents and everything and let me tell you, it’s a good two cents lol:) my dad committed a completely selfless act for nearly three years, that’s more than most of us do in a life time. my dad stood by ediths side and guided her to her final resting place with god, and for that i am forever proud to call him my father.

i love you dad. dont ever forget that

your daughter

Sometimes people ask me why I did what I did.

Now they have their answer.

You do what you have to do because it’s the right thing to do. And you hope that your children understand, and learn.

And there’s no greater reward than finding out that, lo and behold, just when you thought they weren’t paying attention to anything you said or did, it turned out that they were listening, and learning, all the time.

You don’t get any luckier in life than that.

*   *   *

When the guy who bought Edith’s house told me what he had in mind for it, I was grinning from ear to ear.

It wasn’t in the contract or anything, so he could change his mind, but if he’s true to his word, he’s going to do something I never heard of anyone doing before.

Get this.

He told me he was going to keep Edith’s house intact, but raise it up, twenty feet off the ground. He wasn’t going to tie balloons to it like the little house in Up, but he was going to get it up there. And the space under the house he was going to enclose, to make a little public vestibule, which he was going to call Credo Square, in Edith’s honor, because he felt like she lived up to her own particular credo. And for a small price, anyone who wants to can have their own personal credo etched into a tile, and that tile will be put up on the wall for all to see, from now until forever, or, as Edith would have been the first to point out, until someone takes down the mall and the house and builds some other silly thing, because that’s the way of the world.

I hear the plans have changed a bit since we talked—they may not be lifting the building, at least not at first—but there’s still going to be that Credo Square aspect to the thing. Which I think is nice.

I haven’t decided if I’m going to put a tile up in Credo Square, or if I do, what that tile will say. Maybe I’ll just say, Thanks, Edith, for all the stories. Maybe I’ll crib one of those lines from her famous friends, like what Spencer Tracy wrote—

I’ll put my thought way down in here

tucked away beneath the pages

and then I know that you will call me

On down through the ages.

That would be nice, because in a way, I know Edith will, indeed, keep calling on me, on down through the ages. It’s a comforting thought. I loved that woman, and love her still, and in my heart I know that she loves me as well, and that nothing, not even that calendar page with the big black mark on it, can change that.

Or maybe, just for the heck of it, it’ll say:

Dear Edith,

By the living God that made you

You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

Love, Barry