THEY MET IN A CAMPING EQUIPMENT STORE, WHERE HE was working as a clerk and she had come to rent a pair of climbing shoes. The store was a block from the university where she taught composition in the Department of English. She was adjunct faculty there, though she referred to her status as abject. She made less than the graduate students, after all: $2,700 for each ten-week class. No health insurance, no benefits. On her salary she could not afford therapy, not even sliding scale; she could not scale it at all, she’d told the receptionist who’d quoted her prices by phone the week before, $80 to $100 an hour—“That’s a scale I’d slide right off,” she said; the receptionist asked if she’d like to make an appointment; “No, thanks,” she said. “Maybe next crisis.”
Instead, she signed up for a women’s rappelling class, part of the low-cost stress-management program they were promoting at the campus health clinic. They offered yoga, they offered meditation, they offered people the chance to throw themselves off cliffs. She opted for this last, though she could not see the sense of sending anxious people to the brink of a bluff to cure them, but it was something she could afford and of all the options on offer only it had the cast of a vacation. According to the promotional flyer, they would travel on three consecutive Saturday mornings by bus to Taylors Falls, an hour north of the Twin Cities, a state park known for its waterfalls and scenic rock formations, hidden caves and high cliffs. The lemon-yellow flyer was optimistic, urging its readers to “confront your fears and practice techniques for self-esteem and stress management through this fun, recreational, noncompetitive sport.”
She was standing in the aisle across from the cash register looking at camping equipment—at the water bottle holders made of colorful nylon and netting, at the shapely stainless steel objects (espresso makers, pots and pans), at all the many things she could not, for the most part, identify or afford but which she picked up and inspected anyway, knowing all along that she was wrong to admire them for their color and shape, ignorant of and indifferent to their uses but liking nonetheless the fleece, the nylon in neon orange and teal and violet. She pondered the nature lover’s ironic predilection for wildly unnatural colors and synthetics, trying all the while to get up the nerve to ask where they kept the shoes (store clerks terrified her; she preferred to shop from catalogs, whose models did not watch her as if she might be pilfering the goods)—when she heard his voice beside her.
“Can I help you find something?”
She looked up into the sort of face that, as a general rule, scared her—huge and German. He possessed an unnatural breadth and height, as if he were another species. She was embarrassed to be caught fingering the goods, as though she’d been found inspecting dildos in a sex shop, though a dildo she could’ve justified perusing as a cultural critic. Here there was no excuse.
“I need to rent some shoes,” she said, “for climbing.”
He was not handsome, but he held her interest the way beauty did, or ugliness, though he was neither. His eyes were pale as a wolf’s, and he had a large square head that seemed carved from balsa. He looked too old for her, she thought, though this was a casual unconsidered thought, the way, as casually, she would undress an attractive stranger walking toward her on the street or unthinkingly catch the scents of things—exhaust, burning rubber, baking bread, coffee. Deep grooves bracketed his mouth. A slight muscular pouch bulged at the curve of his jaw; he had a cleft chin. He looked like he should be advertising stew.
“For rappelling?” His voice was soft, in contrast to his size.
“Yes,” she said. His name tag said Ben. Big Ben, she thought. Gentle Ben. A clock, a bear. He was huge as a wall; she wondered idly what size shirt he’d wear.
“Size?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Shoe size?”
“Five.”
Delicate, she thought she heard him say, as he turned away.
“Excuse me?” she said again.
He turned to her. “I said, ‘It’ll be a minute.’ That okay?”
While she waited, she perused a bulletin board that hung on the wall beside the wrap desk. There were notices for climbing clubs and hiking clubs and even archery; there were ads for adventure tours in Costa Rica and Belize; there were posters exhorting students to row crew and drive a Subaru. There were hand-written index cards printed with neat inked lettering, offering a kayak, a canoe, a six-person tent, a backpack with internal frame. Wanted and unwanted things.
And then she saw the warning signs. Tacked to the board in neat sheaves were Xeroxed flyers warning campers how to protect themselves from bears, how to treat poison ivy and oak, how not to freeze. Her life was full of information that had no practical application, so she liked that all this did. There were never postings like this in libraries; they did not offer warnings and survival tips to their habitués, though perhaps, she thought, they should. But the flyers reminded her too that venturing out into the world was a risk and that she could get hurt out there.
The flyer on how not to freeze described hypothermia and listed its signs and steps to take. Among the Warning Signs were Racing thoughts and/or mental confusion. Lack of coordination. Mood swings. Unrealistic expectations. Marked indifference to physical circumstances. By such standards, most of the people in her department were in imminent danger of dying of hypothermia. The Danger Signs were more precise: chills, disorientation, drowsiness, loss of appetite. Under the heading How Not to Freeze were four simple steps.
“You said size five, right?” he said.
“That’s right,” she said.
She tore the flyer from the bulletin board, figuring she’d read the four steps later. You never knew what you might need to know, especially in Minnesota in winter, and lately, despite all her education, she felt clueless. She folded the flyer in half and went to pay at the register.
“Don’t I need to try them on?” she asked, as he rang up the shoes.
“One size fits all,” he winked. “Don’t worry. The leather’s soft. They’ll stretch.”
She wondered if he meant anything by the wink, but decided he probably didn’t. She hated to get her hopes up. Pessimists, a Harvard study had found, had a far more realistic view of life.
While he bagged her shoes she rambled irrelevantly, nervously confiding: She told him that she was teaching English at the university, that she didn’t know squat about rocks.
He handed her the bag. “You’ll learn,” he said. “Doing’s the best way to learn.”
“You know what they say,” she said. “Those who can’t do—”
“And those that want to learn need teachers.” He had a nice smile.
She stuffed the colored flyer into the bag with her receipt and shoes.
“Have a safe trip,” he said.
She said, “You, too.” Then hated herself for sounding dumb, all the way out of the store.
In her apartment, she tried on the rented shoes. They were like ballet slippers made for hoboes, a patchwork of red and green and beige suede panels. Tight and unshapely, like foot condoms. She was very particular about shoes. She was very particular. This much she knew about herself. In the mirror, inspecting the shoes, she saw how she must look to others, to all the people who were not her.
She could see that she was pretty, rail thin and frail as china, austere, and slightly awkward; she liked order in her appearance and in her place. She kept her cuticles trimmed, her eyebrows plucked, her Oriental carpets (inherited from her grandmother) vacuumed; ivory lace curtains hung in front of her windows. She could never live with anyone; it was too late for that. Her half brother had a family, a brood; she was the smart one, the one with the PhD (which she insisted meant Perfectly Hopeless Degree), a shoe collection, tea pots and plates in bone-colored glaze; on weekends she refurbished furniture, collected cheap antiques; her one-bedroom apartment was elegant and orderly, color-coordinated in sea foam and bone. She had a four-poster bed she’d bought secondhand and a down comforter she’d gotten on sale; flannel and linen sheets with a ruffle draped over the box spring.
She had made a beautiful life, a comfortable life she shared with no one. Her hair was straight and chestnut brown, blunt cut at her shoulders like a young girl’s, the same hair cut she’d had since fourth grade. She had good bones and no breasts to speak of. She joked that she was the only person she knew who had to go to a tailor to have darts put into her bra. She had the hungry lines fashionable in Kate Moss, the ethereal frame of the heroin addict, the fair translucent skin of the English, which she just might be.
Truth was, she didn’t know whose kin she was, and she thought about it only at such moments as this when she faced herself in a mirror and wondered who it was she might resemble. She looked nothing like her mom or dad or half brother. Of her biological parents, she knew only this: that her mother had been a graduate student and unmarried, Caucasian, Protestant, when she’d given her daughter up for adoption at a hospital in 1968. She had no real interest in knowing more. But sometimes, at conferences, when distinguished lady lecturers took to the podium, their graying hair pulled up in a chignon or cut neat and short, she sometimes wondered, Is that she?
When she went to stuff the shoe bag under the sink, in the bag of bags she kept there beside the recycling, she heard the crunch of paper and remembered the warning signs. She took out the flyer. She considered throwing it out but instead clipped it with a magnet to the fridge, beside a picture of herself holding a snowball in one hand, like a trophy.
She liked the ironic juxtaposition—a flyer on hypothermia tacked to her freezer door. As a scholar, it was her job to see things in relationship to other things; the only thing she couldn’t see in a relationship was herself. In her mind’s eye—as in the photo on the fridge and the birth certificate that bore her name and no one else’s—she was always and forever alone.
On Saturday morning, she got up early to drive to campus and catch the charter bus that would take her with the others to Taylors Falls. The October air looked thin and blue, and she wondered if she was making a terrible mistake. The program was called Wild Women, a title that seemed to underscore just how tame they really were. As she merged onto 94, heading east to campus, she imagined what the others would be like. Because it was sponsored by university health services, they would be students mostly. The undergraduates would be shy, ungainly girls with unhealthy interests in medieval lit and crushes on their bald and aging mentors; they would dress badly, in tight turtlenecks that hugged the shelves of their large breasts and ample waists; they would tack up posters of Virginia Woolf in their apartments and name their cats Tristan and Cassandra; they would subscribe to the New York Review of Books and use the word vexed when they meant pissed off. These girls would have long hair and fragile glasses. They would be named Eden and Astoria by parents who’d raised them in communes and later become real estate agents; the girls’ impractical abstraction would be their understated revenge. Then again, they might be anorectic grad students with a nicotine pallor and breakable bones; disdainful of conversation, they would remain miserable and silent at the back of the bus, staring longingly out the window. The grad students would study Gramsci and Walter Benjamin and feel a kinship with suffering genius; they too suffered for scholarship. The faculty—assistant, associate, tenured, and abject—would be merely out of shape and embarrassed to be here. Prozac would seem like a good option to them after this. That or a quart of Scotch.
When she arrived at Coffman Union, a sporty twenty-year-old handed her a waiver to sign, with which she promised to hold no one but herself responsible for her injury or death. It asked for her next of kin, a question that depressed her. It was humiliating to write her mother’s or her father’s name. She would have to admit they were her parents after all, since the adjacent blank requested Relationship to You. Instead she named her brother, whose phone number she could not now recall. She made one up. It broke her heart. She was thirty-three and her closest kin were just that, kin.
In thirty-three years on this earth, she had found no one to love, no one love made hers. She was not involved with anyone and hadn’t been for longer than she cared to consider. (The last time she’d heard from a beau on Valentine’s, it was an ex- who called to ask if she was seeing anyone. She told him no. “Perhaps you should seek professional help,” he said.) Truth was, she had dated boys in high school, men in college, grad school, here, but it never took. She seemed vaccinated against passion. The men she dated were friendly, good companions; they discussed the subaltern and structuralism; they went to movies; they went to bed, but somehow nothing ever grew from this. No feeling blossomed in the thin soil of the mind; though they talked endlessly about sex as a performative category, the performance was only so-so. Love somehow got left behind, defied their reasoning. These relationships ended as they began, cordially, in corridors and seminar rooms, on e-mail, collegially. Without hard feelings, or soft.
She had an MLA, an APA, a Chicago Manual of Style. She had tomes on rhetoric and comp, on modernism, postmodernism, feminist essentialism, the structuralists, post-structuralists, and post-coloniality, but none of them could tell her the first thing about love. And where could you get instruction in that?
Ben was not working on Monday, when she returned the climbing shoes to the camping store, but the following week she seemed to see him everywhere—getting off a bus at Nicolett and Fourth, drinking frothy cappuccino in a café on Lake. But it was never him she saw when she looked closer. She decided that it was simply Minnesota, land of ten thousand blondes, and that a lot of guys here wore jeans like his, work boots, red-and-black wool hunting jackets; a lot of guys were huge and blond with giant freckled heads and pony tails (in Minnesota it was still and forever 1975). She was crossing the pedestrian bridge over the Mississippi, connecting the East Bank of the campus to the West, on her way to teach her Friday class, and thinking this, when she realized that, shit, it was him, walking toward her. He seemed as surprised as she, and as delighted.
“I’m just heading to lunch,” he said. “You wanna grab some Vietnamese? You have time?”
“Sure,” she lied and cut her own class. Her students did it all the time, after all.
Later he would tell her that he’d walked that bridge every day that week—sometimes two, three times a day—hoping to run into her. He’d been ready to give up when they finally met.
“I’m glad you didn’t give up,” she said.
“So am I.”
For the first two weeks, he was an anecdote she told to friends. A punchline. A subject heading in her e-mail. She called the time they spent together “weird dates.” There was the boat show at the Convention Center. There was the polka fest in New Ulm. Miniature golf. The Laurel and Hardy film festival. A canoe trip by moonlight. Bowling, without irony. They saw each other almost every night. He was eager to get involved and made no bones about it. His divorce, he told her, had been finalized a month ago, though it had been in the hands of lawyers for a year. He was tired of being alone. He was forty-two. He had no children and no pets. He wanted some.
“Which?” she asked.
“Both,” he said.
“Do you have a breed in mind?”
On her third and final Saturday among the Wild Women, she threw out her back and had an intimation of what it would be like to be old. She called her friends from bed and told them that she wanted to die young. “Too late,” they said and laughed. “Ha ha,” she said. She lay in bed, too uncomfortable to read, too awake to sleep. She hadn’t had a chance to clean the apartment, and it hurt when she sneezed. To pee, she rolled to the edge of the bed, bent her legs over the side, and let the painful weight of gravity pull her upright, pinching a nerve as she made her way to the bathroom. To catch the phone when it rang, she charged the kitchen wall bent over.
If he hadn’t called her that Saturday night to ask how the climbing trip went, if he hadn’t come and nursed her when she told him that she’d pulled a muscle in her back, if he hadn’t been there that whole weekend, it would have been a misery. But he was. He came over straight away. He brought a brown paper sack with a bottle of Jim Beam, three fat lemons, and a jar of honey in it.
He made himself at home. He put on music (“What the heck is this?” he asked, coming on her Suicide Commandos CD and the Sex Pistols. He opted for Bach pieces played by Yo Yo Ma) and settled into the kitchen. She could hear him among her pots and pans. When he came back into her room, he had a steaming mug in one hand and a tumbler of whiskey and ice in the other.
“What’s this?” she asked, accepting the mug.
“Hot toddy,” he said.
“I strained my back,” she said. “I didn’t catch a cold.”
“An ounce of prevention,” he said, and sipped his drink.
He helped her to turn over, face down, then rubbed her neck. He massaged Tiger Balm into the muscles of her ass, working his thumbs down the knots that ran the length of her spine. He sat cross-legged at the end of the bed and took her left foot in his lap and began to massage the arch, working to the toes, then back to the heel and the ankle. Then he did the other foot. Growing old, she realized, would not be half bad if she had someone to grow old with—if she had him.
At the end of their first month together, he cooked her dinner at his place in St. Paul—a one-bedroom with a redwood deck and a garden share out back. He served her things he’d killed himself: wild duck in morel sauce; lettuce from his garden with pansies and tomatoes and dandelion greens mixed in; pumpkin soup from pumpkins he’d grown here. He took her into the bathroom so that she could see out the one window that overlooked the backyard. He pointed out the pumpkin patch below where green vines snaked across black soil. Proud as a papa.
Sometimes their dates seemed like a send-up of romance, but she knew that he was not being ironic. She liked him for this, and it gave her the creeps, his earnestness. And then, sometimes, just as she was about to write him off, he would surprise her with what he knew—star constellations and opera plots, a passion for Haydn, a fluency in French—things, it turned out, he’d learned from his ex-wife, who, it turned out, was a concert pianist and an associate professor of music at Augsburg College in town.
He didn’t talk about his ex-wife much, but he said enough.
They spent the deepest part of winter together, then together headed into spring. For the first time in ten years she had a Valentine in February. He stopped by her office hours with a hokey card (a heart framed by white lace) and a small rectangular box, maybe four inches long, an inch wide, too large to be a ring, thank God. Still, the box was weighty, and she worried that she’d be obliged by this somehow.
They’d reached that unnerving stage in romance when gifts become significant. To circumvent this, she had bought him a heart-shaped tin of chocolates with a photo of Elvis printed on the lid, each foil-wrapped chocolate shaped like a tiny guitar, and a card, which she signed Yours. He laughed at the gift and kissed her.
She shook the box he gave her, afraid to look.
“Open it,” he said.
“What’s in it?” she asked.
“You have to open it and see.”
When she unwrapped the red foil paper, she found a Swiss Army knife inside.
“It’s red, isn’t it?” he said, obviously pleased with himself. “More use than flowers.”
It was still early in their relationship and his practicality charmed her. It did not yet grate; it did not yet seem tasteless and desiccated, like freeze-dried beef. She opened each spidery arm of the knife—blade, blade, toothpick, scissors, corkscrew, blade, fork—lovingly touching each stainless steel arm.
Then he wrapped her in his arms; beneath his soap and shampoo smell, he smelled faintly of kerosene and moth balls and wet wool and sweat. She loved the way he smelled.
In the course of their relationship thus far, he’d taught her many useful things. He’d taught her how to snowshoe and ice fish, how to orienteer and winter camp. He’d taught her to stay upright on cross-country skis and how to gut a walleye. He had useful information to impart, and he was generous with it. He told her these were things to know, things that came in handy—a word he used a lot and without irony—so that you didn’t have to stay indoors all winter, not knowing that she was someone who preferred to stay indoors all summer too. He taught her how to gather morels in oak forests in spring. He taught her how to tie a fly and unzip his with her teeth.
She was grateful to him and told herself that gratitude approximated love. She craved useful information, and he had it. His hands were large and calloused; he looked wrong in anything other than flannel or cotton tees and jeans. He had to shave twice a day or his cheeks abraded her.
By June they were talking about moving in together, although she had not lived with anyone since her freshman year of college at U Mass, and he was—she knew—a slob. Moving in together was his idea, not hers. They compromised and decided to go camping instead, as a sort of trial run, a ten-day trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a vast chain of lakes that stretched along the border between Canada and the United States, the largest water wilderness preserve in the world, he said.
He was a slob, but he was also a control freak, so she knew it was a sign of nearly matrimonial faith that he offered to let her plan and pack the food. It was an act of trust and love. He’d pull together the equipment, he said, check the tent for holes and patch them, get packs and maps and compasses, arrange the permits, take down the canoe from the shed. They were a team after all, he said. They could depend on one another.
She thought hard about what to bring, spent hours perusing the little foil-packaged, freeze-dried meals, as if she were doing textual analysis. She visited various camping stores to check out their offerings; she read the labels, considered ingredients, weighed protein against carbs. She chose carefully. She chose snacks for them to eat on moonlight canoe trips; she designed the menus for three-course candlelight dinners (complete with candles, matches, tiny linen tablecloth, and two very carefully packed china plates). “My ex-wife was always surprising me,” he’d said. She wanted to surprise him too, and to impress him. So she asked him for the army packs, and he brought them by. And then she half filled one with her sleeping roll and clothes, as he’d instructed, and the other one she filled entirely with food. Freeze-dried fettuccine Alfredo; freeze-dried chicken and dried tomato sauce and herbs; freeze-dried stroganoff; powdered milk and half-and-half; gorp and couscous and pilaf and raisins and pumpkins seeds and dried apples and beef jerky and oatmeal and margarine in a tub. A corkscrew. Pancake mix and pasta.
He picked her up before dawn, a little after five in the morning, when the sky was still a deep and sleepy midnight blue, and Jupiter and Mars glowed in the city sky alongside the Pleiades. She carried the food pack on her shoulder to the car, and he carried the other, after adding his sleeping roll and clothes. He cinched the army packs’ belts tight. They loaded the two packs into the trunk, slammed it shut in the quiet chilly air.
The drive up was lovely, the roads nearly empty, and they made good time, reaching Cloquet before nine. They had agreed to stop there to see the world’s only Frank Lloyd Wright–designed gas station, which she had read about in the guidebook to northern Minnesota and wanted to see. They took the exit west to Cloquet and drove along a wide boulevard toward town. When they saw it on the right—unmistakable—they pulled in and parked beside the pumps. No one seemed to be working, so they got out to look from different angles. The station was two stories tall and looked like one quarter of a pyramid turned upside down, so that the pyramid balanced on its apex, a single pointy corner thrust out like an arrow pointing west. The ground floor was of poured concrete, in austere angles; the second story was a sort of waiting room observation deck composed of glass that thrust out over the gas pumps like a giant beak. The whole structure looked unstable, as if it might tip into the parking lot and shatter.
“It looks like the Guggenheim with pumps,” she said.
He smiled at her vaguely, and she realized the name Guggenheim meant nothing to him; for all he knew, it could be a brand of beer.
“It’s a museum in New York City,” she said, “that Wright designed.”
He squinted at her like she’d gone blurry and he was having to fight to see her there. “I know what the Guggenheim is,” he said. “I lived in New York, after college. That’s where I met my wife.”
“Your ex-wife,” she said. “I never knew that.”
He shrugged. “I never told you.”
They had a permit to put in at a lake on the Gunflint Trail, but they drove on past the turnoff and up to Grand Portage, near the border with Canada, so that they could have breakfast at a place he loved, a log cabin restaurant that overlooked Lake Superior and served, he guaranteed, the best hot cakes she would ever eat. The pancakes were flecked with wild rice and came with thick salty pads of butter and real maple syrup, corky and sweet, and he was right. Watching the gulls arc above the lake outside the window, she thought about how close they were to the border; if they kept going, they could cross into another country. She recognized the thought as childish, but it thrilled her nevertheless to know they were that close, to know that they could leave this territory behind and together find some new and foreign ground, even if it was only Canada.
He’d told her that the Gunflint Trail would be scenic, but it was torn up and mostly mud, overrun with logging trucks carrying out huge limbless trees. There was a traffic jam and long delays, even though they could count fewer than ten cars on the road. Still the construction crews stopped them with the rest of the incoming traffic and made them wait behind handheld stop signs, flagged them on, with palms raised, meaning slow. It took them an hour to travel fifteen miles, and he was monosyllabic by the time they pulled into the gravel lot, where they would leave the car. They unloaded the gear from the trunk, and she helped him lift the canoe down from its rack on the roof. Then they each took a pack and walked down to the dock, which was run by an outfitter who charged a modest fee to let equipment and to allow people to park and put in here.
“Been a while,” the outfitter said.
“It has,” Ben said, and then he put a credit card down on the counter and said he’d leave that till they got back.
She carried the army packs down to the dock while he went back for the canoe. She could see him from the dock, heading across the grassy lawn toward the lake, the aluminum canoe worn like a long silver hat, pulled down past his ears, obscuring his head.
The lake where they put in was small and round and weedy and edged by summer cottages, more like a suburban pond than wilderness; she felt disappointment settle over her like a private fog, but she tried not to show it. As they canoed across it, they dodged motor boat waves and he told her that there wouldn’t be any motorized vehicles once they reached the Boundary Waters. She nodded, like she’d known this all along, and paddled on, relieved.
Some things, she realized, it was better not to know. It was better that she hadn’t known that—before they reached the Boundary Waters wilderness—they would have to paddle through three boggy ponds, short uninspired crossings that ended in muddy banks and mosquito-infested forests through which they’d have to trek, bearing on their backs all that they’d need to sustain them for ten days. It was better that she hadn’t heard of portaging. Portages—in which you carried the canoe from lake to lake—were, in theory, a pleasant change from sitting and paddling. But this was true in theory more than in fact. In truth, in fact, the novelty wore off fast.
By the third portage they were no longer speaking. They trudged with mute determination from one end of the trail, where they beached and left the canoe, to the other with their packs. Then they trudged back to retrieve the canoe, which he then carried through the woods on his head. She followed behind him, helping him up steep embankments, holding the tip up when the trail required climbing up a six-foot wall of rock or down steep stairs.
Halfway through the third portage, he asked her if she wanted to give it a try.
“Sure,” she said.
He tilted the canoe against a tree and ducked out from under it.
“It’s easier than it looks,” he said. “You’ll be surprised.”
She was small and not very strong and thought that maybe he would be the one who’d be surprised. But she walked under the overturned canoe as he’d instructed her to, and let him settle the yoke onto her shoulders, delicately, like a shawl, before she unhooked the bow from the tree and stood up so that the boat lifted, its weight resting solely on her. She was scared at first, and then she was amazed. The burden was surprisingly easy to bear, eighty pounds on your neck seemed light, if balanced properly. She took a few giddy steps, amazed by what he could teach her and by what she had it in her to carry. She did a little Irish jig, touching her left toe over her right foot, then right over left. She smiled at him, full of what she knew was love.
“Be careful,” he said, smiling back. “Don’t turn your ankle, Bud.” No one in the history of the world had ever called her Bud. She felt like a six-pack at the MLA. She felt great.
And then they were in wilderness. She knew they were because they passed a sign that said so, posted to the right of the trail three-quarters of the way along the portage. She hadn’t noticed it when they’d come this way before, carrying the army packs. But she saw it now, from under the brim of the canoe. Welcome to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. If there were warnings against bears or other dangers on that sign, she didn’t notice them. She noticed the hollow resonant gong as the stern knocked birches along the trail; she noticed the fingernail scrape of twigs along the metal belly of the boat. Each root and stone she had to step around. It was slow going, but she didn’t mind it. She could hear him whistling behind her on the trail. It was nice to walk through the woods with him. It was a nice change from paddling, and the woods were lovely—patches of blue sky overhead, a tunnel of green, swamp and forest, moss and wintergreen, dense and leafy along the trail. It was midday, but in here the air was cool and sweet.
They were paddling for the last portage of the day, the fourth and final one that would bring them to the lake at which—he promised—they’d set up camp and rest, when she noticed that he’d stopped whistling sometime back. She heard only the sound of water rushing off the bow, the slow steady dip of the paddles, the haunting song of a white-throated sparrow, high and eerie. They beached the canoe, just the sound of sand against the belly of the boat. She stepped out and grabbed the rope and pulled the bow onto shore as he had shown her, scraping the canoe on rocks a little as she hauled. He grimaced. “Careful,” he said—before tying the rope to a branch. Then he got out and began to hand her things. He hefted the food pack onto his shoulder and said, “What the hell’s in here. Rocks?” He pretended he was joking, but she knew better. She knew that he was thinking that she was the burden. Dead weight.
A hundred yards up the path, he stumbled on a root and swore, “Jesus H.,” and dropped the army pack into the muddy path where it fell over into a bed of wintergreen and sumac. There was a tinselly sound of glass striking glass, a fragile, breakable chiming.
“What in the fuck is in there?” he said.
“Food,” she said. “It’s the food pack.”
“I know it’s the food pack. What the hell did you bring?”
Without waiting for her to answer, he crouched by the side of the trail and undid the belts that cinched it closed and began to pull out things. At first he pulled out the usual items: freeze-dried this and freeze-dried that and gorp. And then, deeper down, he found the special things, the ones she’d wanted to be a surprise. He pulled out the bottle of chardonnay that she’d stowed for the romantic candlelight dinner she’d planned; he pulled out a plastic bottle of half-and-half for coffee; maple syrup; cranberry juice (in case she got a bladder infection); Jim Beam; candles and two china plates wrapped in a linen cloth, buffered from breaking by individual packets of Quaker Oats.
“For Christ’s sake,” he said, shaking his head slowly, like this was for the record books. He stood up and looked at the stuff he’d hauled out, the stuff scattered now by the side of the trail. She was afraid he’d abandon it there, all that she had planned for them to share.
“I gotta take a leak,” he said and walked into the woods, breaking twigs as he went. A cloud of gnats encircled her; she waved them off, feeling water rise in her eyes. If she could, she’d have walked away and left him there, but she knew it was too late, they’d come too far. When he got back he crouched by the trail and began to jam the containers back into the pack any which way.
“I don’t believe this,” he said, holding up the wine. “How could you be so—?” and then maybe because he turned and saw her face and saw that it was red and scrunched like an old Kleenex, he said, gently, “It’s just not practical, Buddy. Stuff like this is too heavy. It won’t last out here.”
She nodded, but she couldn’t say a thing without the risk of tears.
They didn’t talk much after that. She had a lot of time to think about what he’d said as they walked through the mosquito-infested woods, as each glistening green branch thwacked her face and made her think of ticks. The radiant red leaves at her ankles, which she’d thought were early turning sumac, she realized were probably poison ivy. It’s just not practical, Buddy. Love was impractical, she thought. It was a heavy thing to carry, like the army pack on her back, which would flip her like a turtle and leave her flailing were she to fall.
The only sounds were the scratch of aluminum on rocks as they eased the Grumman into the shallow water; the splash of water against the gunnels as they loaded in the packs and then stepped into the boat; the slap of her paddle as it entered the water; the draw of it; the rain of drops onto the boat as she lifted the paddle free of the water and brought it forward, to begin again.
The camping site on the far side of the big blue lake was beautiful, on a smooth granite shelf overlooking the water. He docked from the stern and got out first to secure the boat; then he took her hand and helped her up onto the rock. It was marvelously quiet. Even if she strained she couldn’t hear the stutter of an outboard motor or a prop plane, the rush of traffic that seemed to be a part of the breeze everywhere but here.
“I want to show you something,” he said, and folded her hand into the crook of his arm. He took her to the edge of the woods that surrounded the campsite and pointed to a ring of bushes studded with raspberries and blueberries tight and small as buds.
“Are they edible?” she asked.
“Better than Lunds’,” he said, naming her favorite grocery store, known for gourmet food.
While he set up the tent, she walked the woods gathering dry twigs and snapping them into bundles for kindling, separating these from the larger branches they’d burn. When they finished, they ate lunch—cheese sandwiches she’d packed for each of them, cheddar with arugula and English chutney. (“This is great,” he said, “what’s in here?” But she was ashamed to tell him, afraid that he’d laugh at her expensive tastes, the imported and impractical foods she loved.) Then he proposed they take a swim.
They had the lake to themselves, so they left their clothes on the rocks and dived right in. The water was cold but clear, and she could hear loons calling and see cormorants gathered on a little stone island two hundred yards out into the lake. They swam farther and farther out. And then she noticed something dark swimming toward her, popping up out of the water, then going down, then coming up again. She started to swim toward shore.
“Hold still,” he called, in stage whisper.
“What is it?” she said.
“A loon.”
“That’s a loon?”
“Stay still,” he said. “See how close it will come.”
“I don’t want to see how close it will come,” she said.
“I do.”
“I think it thinks your head’s a potential mate. It thinks your head’s a loon.”
The bird approached her, swimming on the surface now, bobbing in the slight waves, tacking back and forth on its approach. It had a haunting cry, that quaver. How could it be so dumb, so ignorant of its own kind, so easily tricked into thinking it had found a mate when they weren’t even the same species? Cormorants. Coots. Loons. Her. Him.
“Those birds are stupid,” she said, when they were back on land.
“They’re friendly,” he said.
“No wonder there’s a duck season,” she said.
“People don’t hunt loons.”
“They should.”
They gathered raspberries and blueberries, then together they built a fire, and then he started dinner. He was quiet as he pulled foods from the army pack. There hadn’t been much to say since their fight on the trail, though they both were trying, she knew. He put a pan of water on to boil for pasta and sat on a log facing the fire. The first faint stars were just beginning to come out, and she felt sorry for them both, lonely in all this beauty. She walked up behind him and began to massage his neck. The cords of muscle were thick and tense.
“You okay?” she asked. She didn’t expect an answer, but it seemed like the right question.
“This is where we spent our honeymoon,” he said.
Her hands froze. She felt a weird tingling on her palms, the sudden sickening sense of vertigo she’d felt on the cliff that day months ago and hoped never to feel again.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she said. She let her hands fall from his neck, palms tingling.
He shrugged. “Didn’t seem important.”
“Which part?” she said. “Telling me or your honeymoon?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This was probably a bad idea. I didn’t think it would get to me. All that.”
When the water boiled, making a plunking sound of bubbles against the thin tin pot, he tore open a cellophane bag of corkscrew noodles (they were noodles, he insisted, not pasta; before the 1980s no one had heard of pasta, let alone eaten it; they ate noodles, he said, and they liked them) and poured them in and covered the pot.
She took a seat across the fire from him on a thick log set there for that purpose. At night they would have to haul the food pack into midair, suspend it by a rope from a tree limb to avoid attracting bears, but right now it was beside her, behind the log, and she dug among the contents and pulled out the bottle of Jim Beam.
“We ought to drink this,” she said, “if we don’t want to carry it.”
“Probably,” he said.
He patted the pocket of his shirt and drew out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and offered her one. She took it and then took a swig from the bottle and then passed the bottle to him. She had two glass tumblers stowed somewhere in the pack, but she didn’t bother get them; they’d been meant to be a happy surprise, part of a celebration she’d imagined they’d be having out here together and now knew they would not. Instead they drank straight from the bottle, handing it back and forth.
They watched the fire and ate the pasta when it was done. And drank some more. The sky emptied of light. The loons called and quieted. The moon rose. They tossed resinous twigs on the flames to watch them crackle; she watched him across the flames, his face orange lit, distorted by shadow, until the wind changed, and he coughed from the smoke and batted his arms as if to clear the ashy plumes and then gave up and came over to her side and put his hand on her thigh.
The front of her jeans was scalding hot where she faced the fire, and her shins hurt, but she left them there, did not draw back, and when he asked her if she knew any songs, she said she wasn’t sure, maybe, and after a moment, she began to sing, her voice wavering and reedy. “Amazing grace, How sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me.” On the second verse he joined her with an off-key harmony and they sang like that for awhile, their shoulders leaned into one another, close enough that she smelled beneath the wood smoke the flinty scent of moth balls from his coat and the cologne she’d given him for his birthday last month and whiskey and the pond smell off the lake. They sang there together, starting new songs as they remembered them, joining in where they could, harmonizing until the moon was risen high overhead and the fire died down and he buried it in sand and took her hand and led her to the tent, where he undressed her snap by snap, Velcro strip by Velcro strip.
In the morning, she woke alone and looked up at leaf shadows shifting on the blue nylon roof of the tent; the tent smelled of sweat and pine needles, and the door flap was unzipped and peeled back, revealing through the mosquito netting a white blur of sky. A cardinal cried out, and a white-throated sparrow called tee-doe-tee-tee-tee-tee-tee-tee. When she sat up, she saw Ben through the netting.
“Hey,” she called.
“Hey,” he said.
She let the sleeping bag fall from her breasts; the day was warm and delicious. It would be a scorcher. Rare here, he’d said. He was crouched by the fire grate, but he stood up and brought over a cup of coffee in a blue, white-speckled tin cup.
“Breakfast is ready,” he said, handing her the cup. “You want to eat in bed?”
She nodded.
“Be right back,” he said.
He’d made pancakes with fresh blueberries and raspberries in the batter, and he kissed her gently on the mouth before he handed her her plate. He brushed the hair back from her forehead with his huge freckled hand. He sat outside the tent, cross-legged on the sun-warmed dirt. He was cheerful and gentle and talked about places they could go today, day trips they might take, and as she listened to him and chewed, she thought it possible that she loved him more than she’d loved anyone before, but she knew too it would be over between them when they got home. Though her body still turned heliotropically toward him, she knew that what they had was done; it had ended here.
This had been a test of sorts, a proving ground, to see if new love could assuage old pain, and they had failed it, that test. She felt as she imagined her students must, those who each term protested their Bs as if an A weren’t earned but an entitlement, as if she’d gypped them somehow, gypped them as she felt he had her, though there was no logic to it, she knew. He owed her nothing. No one did. You found love or you didn’t. There were no guarantees. Not ever. Not with anyone.
He tapped his fork against his plate and cleared his throat like he was preparing to make an announcement, and when she looked over, he looked down at her plate. She looked too. He’d served their breakfast on the china she had brought, the real china, blue willow pattern, inherited from the grandmother who was not really kin to her by blood. Seeing the pattern beneath the glossy syrup, she remembered how her mother had kept a giant serving platter from this same set atop the mantle when she was growing up. “It’s the pride of the collection and worth a lot,” her mother said. They’d used the thing for holidays, for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner, when they used the set. And then one afternoon, when her mother was dusting, the platter had fallen from the wooden rack where her mother kept it on display. They’d gathered the pieces and chips from the floor and kept them, and later they sat at the table and glued them back together with ceramic glue, as their words this morning were trying to do. But she felt now as she did then the futility of the effort, that once something had been shattered, it could never be restored. They’d put the platter back up, but the cracks still showed, and it couldn’t be used. It became another pretty, useless thing, as perhaps he would think of her now, after this.
She was wrong, but only partly. They stayed together for another four months after that, before his ex-wife called him up at Halloween to tell him that she missed his pumpkin soup and ask if he missed her and for a second chance, and he gave it to her. He hadn’t moved in, so he didn’t need to move out, but over the months he had left a lot of his things at her place, and so he’d called last week to say that he’d be coming by on Saturday, if that was okay, to get his things, and so, because it was Saturday today, she was gathering them into the bag at her side for him.
She had not been a pack rat before she met him, but now she was amazed by all the junk of his she had, all that had accumulated between them. There were stubs from movies they had seen and photographs of them she did not want to see again and a Xeroxed article on distinguishing morels from false morels, which were poisonous. She wondered about giving back the Swiss Army knife, but she knew that if she did, she would regret it. She wanted the knife, with all its weird appendages, as she still wanted him. She found the cards he’d given her and the notes he’d left on her office door, and she found the flyer she’d picked up the day that they first met, folded and faded but legible still. She was amazed that such things last, how such things stuck to a life when little else did; when she died, she knew, they’d find among her books and socks and earrings a host of such scraps—ATM receipts and credit card carbons, flyers she’d picked up somewhere and departmental memos announcing gatherings long past—the residue of living that accumulated in her rooms as love had not, that clung more surely than people ever did.
She read again the four steps for how not to freeze. After Warning Signs and Danger Signs, she read the Steps to Take. Keep the victim awake. Keep the person warm. Administer hot liquids. She knew the last and final step by heart; it had been a joke between them months ago, when she’d kept the flyer on her fridge, before she took it down and put it here. The best hope for saving a person from freezing was to do the opposite of what logic taught. The best way not to freeze was to strip—to get naked with another naked body, lie there skin to skin inside a sleeping bag or under blankets. Body to body contact could save your life, they used to joke. It was the only hope for survival, the best way not to freeze.
When she heard him knock at the door, it occurred to her to pretend she was not home. But she realized that was impractical. He’d only come back later, call again, or come on in (he still had a key). So she ran into the bathroom, stopped up the tub, and turned the hot water tap on full, leaving him to find his own way in. She heard him open the door and call her name.
“I’m in the tub,” she yelled. “Come on in. Your stuff’s in the hall. Feel free to look around, make sure you haven’t left anything behind.” She heard him opening closet doors, checking drawers for things he wouldn’t want to leave. She heard him in the hall outside. She heard him knocking quietly on the bathroom door. She heard him call her name.
“I wanted to say good-bye,” he said. “Can I come in?”
She heard him try the doorknob, was glad she’d thought to lock it.
“I can’t hear you,” she yelled above the water. “Did you find your stuff?”
“I’m sorry,” he said, to the door. “I’m going.”
“Call me, sometime,” she yelled. “Let me know how you are.”
When she heard the front door close, she shut off the water. She heard him turn the lock and shove the key under the door, and then she stripped and stepped into the scalding tub, amazed that she could feel so much pain. Her skin was red beneath the water and felt like it might peel off, the way a green chili’s shiny skin will when you roast it over an open fire as he had shown her how to do. But she was shivering, too, there in the tub; her legs and arms were shaking and would not stop. She tried to hold her hands over her face, but she couldn’t get them to rise from the water to her cheeks, and she remembered having felt this once before, this quaking fear, her limbs heavy and rubbery, as if exhausted from a long exertion, and then she realized when it was she’d felt this: it was when she’d climbed the cliff at Taylors Falls.
She had been among the first to climb the cliff face above the river. They had spent the day clambering over boulders and learning knots, and she’d felt a confidence she hadn’t felt since she was a kid, a faith that her body would back her up, do her bidding. She had felt agile and young. She had started up the cliff, taking the harder route to the left, and then, half way up, out of nowhere, she’d frozen with fear. The fear was less a feeling that a physical force, a weight, like a sandbag suddenly dropped into her arms. It pressed her chest, made her breath shallow. Her legs shivered. She stopped dead and hung on, clinging by her fingertips to the cliff, not far from the top, too far from the bottom, unable to move. “Are you all right?” someone yelled up to her. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I can’t seem to locate my arms and legs.” There was friendly laughter from below. “It happens,” someone said. They told her where her body was—“You’re about twenty feet from the top, to the left of the big crack”—but she could not feel her limbs. Or rather, she could not seem to connect her thoughts to her muscles. Somewhere a connection had been severed. Her mind said, Move. Her muscles would have none of it. Her arms ached. Her left leg—the leg she was balanced on—began to quiver and shake. They tried to cheer her up with jokes: “Hey Elvis, what’s with the leg?” A few of them sang, “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog.” Someone yelled, “Breathe.” Someone yelled, “Relax.” She yelled, “Help me,” pleading now. “I’m scared.” “What did she say?” “She’s scared.” She knew she was humiliating herself, but what choice did she have? She was not equipped for this. She was unprepared. This was not where she’d expected to be at thirty-three, alone, clinging to a sheer rock face where nothing grew, with nothing to hold on to, just shallow handholds, cold and dark, just narrow ledges. “Make a move,” the instructor yelled. “Just make a move.” “I can’t,” she said into the rock. “You can.” She didn’t know what to reach for. They told her: “There’s an outcropping of rock just to your right, about a foot over from your right foot. Slide your leg over to it.” But she couldn’t. Information could not help her now. She lacked more than knowledge. Her mind and body were not on speaking terms. “I can’t feel my hands,” she yelled. “I don’t think I can hold on much longer.” “Hold on,” they said. “We’ll help you.” “What’s going on?” she heard someone ask. “She needs help,” someone said. “She freaked.” “She’s frozen.” “Can we lower her down on belay?” “She could flip, hit her head.” “Look where she is.” “Besides, the rope could snap if we ran it on the rocks.” She listened to them deliberate on whether to climb up or rappel down. She had come too far to go back now. Her eyes were blurry with tears when someone overhead yelled, “I’m coming, hold on,” and so she did. She flashed on the waiver she had signed, the one acknowledging that her injury, her death would be on her own hands. Her fingertips prickled with numbness, stinging as if from cold; her legs shook uncontrollably, but she held on to the rock face and to the idea that someone was coming, keeping her mind occupied, free of the fear that could make you fall, concentrating on the knowledge that someone was coming, would arrive soon, any minute now, confident then, as she could not be now, that help was on its way, that someone would show up any minute to show her—if she could hold on just a little while longer—how to move again.