It was the first time I ever had to call them to make sure everyone was ok. My father could never break his habit of dialing me every time a Reuter’s alert scrolled across the bottom of his screen announcing yet another martyrdom operation, yet another bus peeled back, another café disemboweled. He would call whether it was a shop in Tel Aviv, a bus in Jerusalem or a shooting attack in Hebron. Like an allergy sufferer whose compulsive sneezes she wishes were ignored, not blessed, I came to dread those calls and the subtle nagging plea to abandon my aliyah, return to Northport. “A father shouldn’t have to fly around the world to see his daughter,” he’d say. (My mother didn’t pull her punches. She took my aliyah personally, “So you think your father and I are going to hell because we’re secular?” No I never thought you were going to gayhenom. I loved you, love you still, and pray that Hashem takes my mitzvoth and applies them to your account, increases your share of heaven).
Then that day came along, and there I was, dialing back home as fast I could, trying to beat the busy signals, find an open line, get through. I’d just come back in from a late lunch and was looking out on Ben Yehudah square from my office window —people had just started shopping again after violence’s latest cycle—when Ari ran into my office and turned on Army Radio. It was my turn to call you. Baruch Hashem, you were all right. You’d just gotten through to Eema, and she said you’d called her from what must’ve been the only working payphone for miles but that you were safe.
Then one thing leads to another thing. You began working on the kayak in earnest; enough so that when the time came, I could not easily dismiss its call. And now Abba, I have also made a journey. Because you had to walk those hundred odd blocks, I have made a journey to take another journey, a trip to take a trip. I set out from far south of downtown Manhattan, far south and far east, and like you, traveled north, north and west. Now, I’ve been on the coast a full day, in which I only paddled four hours out of what I hope to eventually be a daily eleven.
The sun nods over the mountains behind me. It’s always in the same place, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, but hardly at all. In my head, I thought it would be more like a buzzard circling. I thought the midnight sun would resemble that of a spaghetti western, permanently overhead, beating down. It isn’t. I don’t even think it’s related to its high-noon cousin. Instead, a near dusk spurs all this ancient plant life into a frenzied bloom, a spurt of almost growth, and me too. Me too, I’m also locked into a desperate burst of action, racing in the segue between ice and ice along this pebbled arctic shore. Like these stunted willows’ growing season, I have only so much time. Six weeks to safely paddle, paddle and sail really, from my drop-off just east of Dead-horse and Prudhoe to the McKenzie River, to Aklivuk.
I know I’m tired, and I know I need to sleep, but after the mechanical actions of the day are finished, rowing, dragging the kayak up the pebble beach to this night’s camp (night, always night and never night), after that, and pitching tent above the highest possibility of tide and spraying everything against mosquitoes and making dinner: Lipton’s risotto with dehydrated turkey cooked over a Whisperlite stove, and after sealing every final bit of food in a bear canister, after everything, the sun’s still up and I’m still awake. Just me and this journal. Just the kayak my father almost finished building and me and my journal.
I’ve never kept a journal before. I’m not sure how to begin, what exactly to write in it, to what end I’m keeping it at all. I suppose that the proper protocol would be to log the day’s events (for whatever reason):
At around two in the morning (bright daylight), the outfitter, who my Seattle-based trainer, Nancy, had hired, flew me out of Fairbanks in a twin-prop water-plane with my kayak tied to the struts. To not throw the plane off balance, all the gear I would normally stow in the kayak had to be packed into the plane. All of which stretched the limits of the plane’s weight capacity. After a beautiful flight over the mountains, and then on across the plains stretching down to the sea, he landed in the cove Nancy had designated, and helped me bring all my supplies to shore. I spent the morning organizing and inventorying my stores, constantly vigilant for bears. Having quite such a bounty out and about unnerved me. Finally, I packed up the boat, ate the first meal of my trip, and set off. There, I guess that’s more journal-like. Though I’m not sure that’s what I intend.
The trip is really meant for you, Abba, and I guess you too, Eema. I’m finishing your dreams for you. I have to believe you can see that. I cannot believe that this is anything else. But do you need a written account to know that I’m speaking to you? I’m rambling, aimless, using up useful hours whose energy should be, must be, directed, focused, concentrated on getting from here to there while I can, while the Arctic is open and before the grey Brooks Range turns from scenic backdrop, its foothills as lush as the African Savannah, to a massive backboard, concentrating, focusing and directing a barrage of furious weather.
Afterwards, Abba, after that day, you were a lot better about me being in Israel. You said, “It’s just as dangerous here, so why come home?” You convinced mother for me, took my side. Not that I would’ve returned to the states. When you came to visit, yes, she was a little tight-lipped, a little jumpy, but I blamed it on her newfound fear of flying, who would’ve thought that—Well—This aimless writing isn’t necessarily the best thing. Not if I’m to heal myself and go back to Jerusalem; I will go back to Jerusalem. L’shanah ha’bah, b’yerushalaim. Yes, this is my exodus. I’ve got to get myself to go to sleep. I’m going to go to bed.
July 17
It’s easy to keep up with a journal when there’s no one around and nothing to do. Something I learned today: Love for my father may have led me to finish the boat, but love’s no substitute for skill (or maybe his ability to transform love into craft was better, more desperate, an advanced alchemy. He claimed this boat was his monument, and it lives up to that on the water). But the pontoons I built to balance the sail do not cut, do not break, do not grace the way his hull does. Here’s to you, Abba, what you built works wonderfully. This wooden boat blows the fiberglass shells we used on Long Island Sound out of the water, no pun intended (do you think Abba in Shamaim cares about puns, Sarah?). Anyway, this boat belongs to the water. And, I can feel my arms adapting to the current of rowing whole days—if you can call them days without sunrise, without sunset, undemarcated, obtuse contusions of time I enforce with a waterproof wristwatch I look to as a sole lifeline to civilization.
As if it is civil, as if it is civilization. No. Not again this evening. I don’t want to go there tonight. Tonight, I don’t want to stop writing only to find myself so full of depressed energy that I end up pacing the pebble beach chucking stones at driftwood and the stray rusted out oil drum in an exhausted stupor until I drift off outside of my tent. Bears do respect structure. They do not respect slight twenty-five-year-olds who’ve already broken into their whiskey supply and conked out in the open. Not to mention the dangers of musk-oxen and caribou and wolves and whatever else lurks along these shores. Got to be smart.
This place is full of danger. That much is clear already. It’s cold enough that I have to put a fleece on as soon as I stop rowing, way too cold to warm up after a dunk in the water without a real fire. And who’s going to make a fire for me if I capsize and can’t pull an Eskimo roll and after an emergency exit the kayak drifts from me and I have to swim to shore, the zero degree water ripping away heat faster than a polar bear could tear off my limbs? And if I did make it to shore, my fingers numb, white, frozen, my mind wandering in elliptical fantasies of warmth, would I be able to make a fire, take the necessary steps, assemble wood, kindling, light matches, shelter the first flames, fan them, generate heat, make hot drinks, place warm water bottles in my crotch and arm-pits? (How many other orthodox women think about putting warm water bottles in their crotch?) And that’s only one thing to fear.