No, Sarah, you idiot, you forgot your camera and won’t be taking any pictures. True. Then perhaps I’ll find something at Aklivuk at the mouth of the McKenzie when I get there. I’ll find something native and dissonant, something that doesn’t fit quite right with the rest of Sara’s elegant and restrained décor, a shaman’s hat made of shells, ivory and fox hide, a carved bowl hewn from driftwood meant for storing seal-fat and whale-blubber, a bear-paw talisman, something like that. And people will ask, “Sara, why do you have this thing?” And Sara will smile, will tell them, “Nu, it’s just a thing, let it be.” But they will persist, “Really, Sara, what is it? It’s beautiful.”
And then Sara will tell them, “My father dreamed of paddling the Arctic from Prudhoe to the McKenzie. Instead he came to visit me in Yerushalaim, to see what this t’shuvah was, to see what this aliyah was, to see what had become of me. He and my mother must have been dear to Hashem because Hashem took their neshamot back while they were here, in the pastry shop under my old apartment while we were having morning tea. Which is all a long way of saying that as soon as I was well enough, I finished the boat he was building, and paddled the trip for him.” After they overcome their surprise, check to make sure they’ve heard me right, that I really was in the Heavenly Delight Café and Pastry Shop when it was bombed, after they express their condolences, offer to learn mishnaiot for my parents’ neshamot, after they’ve recovered from their awe that little demur Sara paddled solo through the arctic for six weeks, the gesture’s beauty, sacrifice, eulogy will silence them. They will realize that Sara, while most definitely an unpresuming, small, orthodox woman, is also something else, something strong, something resilient.
I will find it in Aklivuk. I will put it in on the wall in Sara’s sponge-painted dining room (maybe a flat yellow would be better?), hanging, in all likelihood, over the stereo bench. And that’s only the dining room. There’s so much more Sara must do to decorate her house. But I must go to sleep now.
I didn’t da’aven again today. I still don’t understand why.
July 23
I’m beginning to smell. I’m beginning to smell and I saw other people for the first time today. Oilmen in a Zodiac. I don’t know what they were doing. I purposely cast off far enough east of Prudhoe to avoid that kind of thing, but maybe they were on some kind of survey. We were all shocked, myself and the three oilmen, to see each other. They seemed to emerge, fairly far away, from between ice floes, heading back west under full power. Their full power is a lot faster than my kayak to say the least. I waved. They pulled close enough for me to clearly read the Exxon logo stenciled on the boat’s inflatable body, about sixty feet off, a respectful distance. Still, I covered my ear with my hand though they were far enough away that I mostly made out what they were saying by gesture: Are you ok? I gave them a thumbs-up and they were off. I would have thought they’d be eager to see a woman up here, would’ve pulled up alongside and chatted a while, but perhaps not.
Seeing men suddenly after a week is strange and visceral; it reminds me that the stunning landscape is only a backdrop largely lacking human actors, a perfectly composed, scenically set portrait, strangely devoid of the subject for which it was devised. One man sat in the rear of the boat, by the motor. The other two shared a bench though they leaned to opposite sides. All three wore orange life jackets over yellow rain slickers and orange hard-hats. It was the man on the south side of the boat, starboard at the bow, who yelled at me. From what I could tell, he looked almost exactly like Sven, the last goyishe man I dated, not even too much older than Sven would be now. He had curly blonde hair that poked out around his helmet and burnt orange stubble thick enough for me to discern even at my distance. And they were gone like that, off probably to Prudhoe, to the oil-works.
I felt empty with them gone. I’d slipped slowly into an acceptance of solitude. They ruptured it, made me realize the loss of human company, of someone to talk to. But they left, before letting me have any conversation. My father warned, once, that he’d read in Waterman’s book that in Canada, the Inuit were incredibly friendly, but the Americans at Prudhoe Bay treated everyone like a trespasser, like an attacking Green Peace boat. If they had pulled up close, it would have been very hard to keep to my shomrei n’giah. I wanted to rub the flat of my palm the wrong way against his orange stubble, anchor my hand with pulling fingertips on the wind-roughed red of his upper cheeks. I wanted to feel flesh.
Afterwards, I found myself rubbing my arms, chicken-wing style, against my sides, tracing the outlines of my eyebrows, my nose, my ears, my lips. I didn’t want to touch him sexually. I wanted to feel human contact. I wanted blood-warmth, still want blood-warmth. If we had touched, it probably would have been something more like shaking hands, his hand covering mine while we locked eyes or something silly like that, maybe his left hand on my shoulder, covertly feeling the strength of months training, and a week on the water. I must look so distant from the woman I was in Jerusalem. The past two days I’ve worn a blue coolmax tank-top and a sports-bra while rowing. My arms are all muscle and brown, my brown hair, chopped short, is undoubtedly matted and bleached by the constant sun and a week without showering. I’ve lost weight from not eating as much as from exercise. My face must be taught and brown, despite all the sun-block and the special cream. I usually wear a pair of cycling shields while I row to cut the glare off the ocean, though not always. I probably should wear a helmet but I don’t. While paddling, I wear red nylon shorts, and sometimes Tevas, if any footwear at all. My legs are almost as pale as my arms and face are brown, staying, as they do, below decks. My sea-skirt mimics the Chasid’s cloth belt which divides the mental from the visceral. Of course, only Chasidic men wear the belt to symbolize a separation of their heart and minds from their rutting gear. It’s not necessary for the women; we aren’t ruled by the need to penetrate, to fornicate.
People often suggest that we orthodox simply don’t know what we’re missing. They say that we’ve locked ourselves into a strange cloistered society and simply don’t know any better than shadchin, and chaperoned dating. But I am here by choice. What are the chances of happiness through random and competitive sexual interactions? This again goes back to what Rabbi Shem Tov was getting at, Judaism isn’t a sacrifice in this world in order to get into the next; it’s an embrace of the best way of living in this world which leads to the pleasure of olam habah. I mean, take Sven, AKA The Last Straw.
It was during what I call my dual period. Hillel was already my primary social outlet and I was going to the Chabad House for Friday night services and Shabbat dinner. Yet, outside of those activities, I continued to maintain my secular lifestyle. And so, one Spring Thursday night, I went out to a bar, McNulty’s at 105th and Broadway, with my roommate, Marie. We ordered a pitcher of cheap light beer, as flavorless as possible, and sat down at the end of a long table to get to drinking. McNulty’s ambience blends the air of a boy’s boarding school dining hall with that of an ivy-league college bar. Lot of guys in rugby shirts, no music, just the din of voices. Din of voices! Today I heard the following sounds: the ocean, the crack of sea-ice breaking apart (which startled me), a bevy of grounded molting geese warning me off, the man on the Zodiac’s muffled halloo, and of course, mosquitoes buzzing. That’s one, two, three, four, five different sounds, not counting my own voice and some tangential noises, like the kayak hull grating against the shell beach I’m pulled up on now, the wisp my lighter makes and the whump of the Whisperlite’s priming fuel igniting and then its jet-roar once it reaches cooking temperatures. Even counting all of that, I can still measure all the sounds of my day on two hands. What I’m talking about is the overwhelming din of voices, voices that drown, muffle and coddle with their blanketing fabric of sound.
A couple of guys walked over to our table, mysteriously empty excluding Marie and myself, and asked if they could sit down. Sven leaned over and commented that women drinking a pitcher was ballsass, though we certainly weren’t the only two girls with pitchers. Marie rolled her eyes and looked at me with what you would call a meaningful look, Eema, and then told them that balls and ass were a combination