Do you remember, Abba, how before all that, long ago, when I asked you about death, about God, when I was just a little girl? Instead of answering, you took me on my first kayaking trip. There’s something strange, now, about my days paddling. I mean, yeah, sure, I was on the sound every day for a month before heading up to Washington, and then on Puget Sound every day for three more weeks; and I didn’t use the sail. Now, I’ve got the sail up, and yet every day, all three of them, I’m worried about having the will to make it through. It’s all I can do to not turn around and head back. Though here’s the thing. There is no back. If I arrived at the float plane drop off, I’d still be nowhere. In a sense, I’m racing home. And I love it—but. Maybe it’s the sun, which I’m getting used to now, always there, hovering, doing nothing, maybe it’s the absolute solitude. I’ve been in solitude before, but this is a whole new level. Me, you, Eema, Hashem and the animals, we’re all that’s here, but I’m the only one who speaks.
July 20
Shabbat came and went. I observed (no cooking, rowing, writing, burning) but I did not da’aven. I went for a short jog along the shore, figured I might as well give my legs a bit of exercise. And besides, this prolonged a stretch of sand beach is pretty rare. I don’t know when I’ll get to go on a real run again. But that all digresses from the point that I’m shocked and scared that even yesterday, when there was pretty much nothing else to do, and nothing more important, I didn’t pray. But I don’t want to think about it too much, either. And I have other things to be worried about.
I forgot to bring the camera bag on the plane. In the long run, doing without binoculars, a guide to North American birds and my Canon won’t kill me. But ill-preparedness will, and two things already happened today to make me feel even that inconsequential bag’s absence. First, about 10:30 in the morning, right after I’d started off for the day (more about missing half the morning later) I went by a tiny island and all of these round orange birds rose up out of tundra. It would’ve thrilled you, Abba. You probably would’ve identified them off the top of your head as some rare species, a once in a lifetime sighting. They weren’t large but they were exceedingly round, visibly so even a good hundred feet off. They didn’t rise up to fly away but instead created this squawking chaotic mass, the way seagulls do, blanketing the little island. I hadn’t intended to stop there anyway, but after that, it was simply out of the question. I don’t want to die in some Hitchcockian rerun. But, and this was a welcome change from the anxiety that plagues me, my curiosity about the birds occupied at least as much mental territory as my unease about their angry, unprecedented eruption.
But, no bird book, no binoculars; I worry because I don’t think you’d forget something like that, what with your elaborate and redundant checklists. I worry that if I can make little mistakes, I can make big mistakes, that if I’m noticing some things I’ve forgotten to do in preparation, then there are other, worse things I’m also forgetting, neglecting, overlooking.
Perhaps I’d do better to be concerned about my gradual drift in time. Each day, I’ve set out slightly later. I mean, I’m still getting my same eight to ten hours in each day; I’m getting to where I’m supposed to be on the topo map before stopping each night, and it’s always light out. So what does it matter? I don’t know. It strikes me as a gradual erosion of discipline, an acceleration of the time lost traveling west to east, not that time zones are relevant or practical here. I don’t know if or when I’ll need that time back.
You can jump at your own shadows out here.
I meant to da’aven today. I didn’t. I don’t know what that means either.
I wished for my binoculars most after lunch. I had the sail up. There was a good wind and the freedom of not paddling, not tacking, made me strangely giddy. I found myself craning in different directions, stir-crazy, half out of the cockpit, looking behind me, shading my eyes. I think I may have shouted out once or twice. That’s one of the strangest things about moving swiftly under sail: no sense of wind. You’re moving in the wind at the speed of the wind; the water slips past you and you feel like you should feel speed; there is no feeling of speed. I wanted to feel in a way that matched my energy. Dazzling white, breakaway chunks of pack-ice drifted past to the north on my left, occasionally escorting the odd blue iceberg, a lost traveler from the great glacial snouts of western Alaska, or errant wanderers long strayed from Greenland. One stood out, oddly crescent, like the moon of Islam, like a sickle, like the shadow of a hood, pirouetting. I was frantic beneath my spray skirt, feet twitching, knees banging against the wooden hull; I shrieked a series of panting rhythmic whoops and shook my head violently. I was under sail; I grew chilly. I pulled the skirt up after all and felt underneath me for my trusty, fuzzy orange fleece. No dice. It was in the rear bulkhead. You can access the rear bulkhead while under sail as long as the pontoons are out. It’s risky though. I decided to lower the sail somewhat, slow pace, and then go for it. I lay my body across the smooth rear deck, its convex crease pressing into my breast bone and carefully, like a precariously perched lookout edging from the forecastle out onto a twisting spar high above the deck, I slid out to the bulkhead. I keep everything tied on one way or another, so I didn’t have to worry about balancing the bulkhead cap, just the boat. The fleece was there sure enough, right on top. I grabbed it, and then looked up. And I could see it, sort of, behind me, a swift white floe, about four feet of it above water, moving toward me. It was far away and at first I thought I was seeing a mirage of dry miraculously splayed across the water. It disappeared in a twist of sun and wave. My giddiness departed as if it never had been. My legs no longer dreamed of speed in staccato hull drumming. I gingerly retreated to the cockpit as fast as I could. That’s not a paradox; I did it. I got back to the cockpit; and gripping the fleece in my knees, I hoisted the sail and picked up some speed. I looked back and a little closer a crest of white topped a roll in the water and was gone but maybe only to reappear again. I pulled the fleece on and grabbed my paddle, started rowing. But that didn’t really add much. The sail’s efficient; all I was doing was adding nervous energy to the mix. I decided to head directly with the wind, take it for all it was worth; it took me north. I looked back: nothing. I pulled the spray skirt around the cockpit lip and looked back: something, yes, something but what? The boat lurched uneasily and I realized I’d hit a small wave funny, not a problem, per se, but I was headed towards a chunk of ice. I tacked and then looked back again: yes, something, almost certainly, but something indeterminate, something at roughly my speed, something I could’ve identified with binoculars.
Uncertain hours last a long, long time. When the waters are with you, when the boat’s running as it should, you can simply hang on and watch the ever-changing shore, sloping ridges like long dirt fingers suddenly broken by rifts of rock. The ever-present Brooks Range, defining the southern border of sight, changes as well. For much of this morning its reaches were covered in fog and then the fog dissipated and grey erupted into sun-blessed white peaks. But hours of peeking back, seeing and then not seeing, defining, imagining, dissuading, dwelling, those hours are static, long and damning. But I will not let the lack of a set of binoculars kill me. Even if it was a bear, a polar bear, I doubt if it wanted much with me. I am danger.
But then we are all fear and danger. Once, Eema told me that the terrorists acted out of fear. Abba, you weren’t home yet, and so I got her on the phone. “Yeah, they’re cowards, Eema.”
“Mother or Mom, Sarah, no Eema for me.”
“Well then it’s Sara, please.”
“I bore you, I named you, I’ll call you Sarah; you can have your friends call you what they like.” I wasn’t going to keep arguing with her. “Sarah, the issue isn’t cowardice; it’s fear.”
I let her go on, not understanding, not really caring, waiting for you to get home and take the phone. “The issue is that these men and women, these people, are so terrorized by fear, by anxiety, by uncertainty that they have to share it any way they can. Those men who almost killed your father; they were so crazed with fear that the only thing they could think to do was share it somehow, perpetrate this horrible terror with planes and fire.” Right, Mom. “That’s why your Sharon’s policies in the occupied territories will never