Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

“What about the plane?” Liam said.

“Leave it,” she shouted back. “Those alders are probably better than a tie-down in this wind. Come on.”

He paused, looking up.

“What?” she shouted.

“Did you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

He stared over her shoulder. “Nothing.” Any sensible bird out in this wouldn’t waste time croaking out hellos, he’d be keeping his beak shut and his head down.

They staggered down the strip, bent double into the wind. It wasn’t very cold, Wy thought dimly, and noticed that the four inches of snow that had fallen overnight had almost completely melted away. “Chinook?” she yelled.

“It feels like it,” he yelled back. “Did the forecast call for it?”

“No.”

“Figures.”

The runway ended in a small berm overgrown with more alders and salmonberry and raspberry bushes. The red and yellow fruits seemed almost incongruous on such a day, hanging in fat succulent clumps from stalks bowed beneath their weight. Bears, Wy thought suddenly. “Bears,” she said out loud.

“Shit! Where?”

“Berries,” she said, pointing. It was hard to get words out, the wind snatched her breath away.

“Oh. Yeah. Right. Where’s the dock?”

“Over the berm.”

They found the path and struggled down it. It terminated in a dock, a rectangular pier surfaced with one-by-twelve wooden planks. There was no boat.

“Shit!”

“Well, great,” Liam said, more tired than annoyed. “What do we do now?”

“There has to be a boat, there has to be. It’s September, there’s nobody left on this part of the river except Moses.” She turned and let the wind blow her ashore.

“Where are you going? Wy, wait, wait for me!” He lumbered after her, to find her wading through the brush along the river. “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for a boat,” she said. There was a crash of brush ten feet to her right, a hasty scramble of feet and big body, a panicked breaking of branches; Wy didn’t even look around. Liam never did see what creature’s hiding place they disturbed. “There has to be one, Liam, a lot of people with fish camps leave their boats here over the winter. They pull them up on the bank and-” She stopped, so suddenly that he ran into her.

He looked over her shoulder, and there was an old wooden skiff, about twelve feet long, he estimated, lying hull up on a trampled patch of ground.

Wy was already bending down and hooking her hands beneath the gunnel. He moved forward to stand next to her. “Ready? One, two, heave!”

The boat was heavy and went over reluctantly, but Wy was determined and over it went, landing with a thump and rocking a little on its rounded hull before coming to a rest. She went to the bow and found the bowline threaded through a crossbar nailed inside the prow. “Come on,” she said, and started hauling.

He picked up the pair of oars that had been lying on the ground beneath the boat and tossed them in. He pushed from the stern, going knee deep into mud. Great, there went his uniform pants. It wasn’t twenty feet to the edge of the river and the boat slid easily into the water.

The surface of the river was choppy, and the current was strong. They began drifting downstream immediately. Oarlocks dangled from twine and Liam slipped them into their respective holes. The oars went in. “Do you know how to row?”

“No,” Wy said, the wind ripping the words out of her mouth almost before they were said. “It can’t be that hard, though.” She sat down on the thwart and grabbed both oars, pushing forward. The blades dipped in the water, skimmed the surface, splashed a lot of water around and didn’t provide any thrust. She looked up, surprised.

For the first time in days Liam felt like smiling. “Here,” he said. “Let me try.”

“No,” she said. “I’ll get it, I just need to-”

“Wy. Get up.”

Something in his voice made her comply. He remained standing, face forward, and the oars dipped, rose, dipped, rose. The chop hit the bow with regular taps as they moved smoothly forward.

“You’ve done this before,” she said.

“I like boats,” he said.

“Better than planes.”

“A whole hell of a lot better than planes.”

“I’m going to teach Tim how to fly,” she said.

“Are you? Good.”

Wavelets slapped at the hull. Liam felt a coldness around his feet and looked down to see that they were taking on water. Not a lot, and not very fast, but there was some in the bottom of the boat that hadn’t been there when they shoved off from the airstrip. “Wy?”

“Oh great.” She found a bailing can cut from a Clorox bottle wedged beneath the bow thwart and started scooping up water and emptying it over the side. A log thudded into the skiff and they both held their breath, waiting for a hole to open up and the leak to become a gush. It didn’t happen. Cold sweat trickled into Liam’s eyes and he wiped his forehead against his arm. The wind took the opportunity to gust hard against the port side and push the stern halfway around, so that the bow was headed toward the south shore of the river. Liam battled it back, shoulder and arm muscles straining as he pushed hard on the port oar, the starboard oar horizontal and motionless above the surface, water dripping from the blade. “How far is the fish camp from the airstrip, again?” he said when they were straightened out and headed downstream once more. He was proud that his voice remained level.

“About four miles,” she said. “Why don’t I teach you, too? Make it a family affair? If you understand it, if you can control it, it won’t frighten you as much.”

“Do you have any idea how fast this river runs?”

She sighed. “No. Why?”

He rested the oars to check his watch. “We went into the water twenty minutes ago. I’m trying to figure when we’ll make the fish camp.”

“It’s the first dock on the north shore of the river after Portage Creek.”

The wind roared overhead and snatched the words from her mouth so that he could barely hear them. “So we hug the right bank and hope we bump into it.”

“Yeah.”

Hopeless, he thought, and as if to underline the thought, there was a gust of wind so hard it spun the skiff around like a top. Wy was thrown against the side and lost her grip on the bailer, which went over the side. “Are you okay?” Liam said when they stopped spinning.

“Yeah,” she said, straightening. “I lost the bailer.”

“I saw.” He looked around, eyes tearing from the wind. They seemed to be in the center of the river, no bank, no trees to guide them. “Which way is downstream?”

She looked left, right. “I don’t know.”

It was so dark and the surface was so choppy that it was impossible to tell which way the current was going, and the wind was blowing so hard that it negated the current anyway.

Then there was a brief, tantalizing lull in the wind and he heard a sound, a creaking branch, or maybe the k-kk-kkrak of a raven.

What the hell. He rowed toward it. Trees, shaken roughly in a giant’s hand, loomed up out of the darkness. He put the starboard side parallel to them and began to row again.

Liam bent his head and rowed into the wind and the darkness. Push, lift, swing forward, dip, push. Push, push hard, push the water under them, behind them, away, away, along the wide Nushagak. Didn’t quite have the ring of the Missouri, he thought dimly. Push, lift, swing, dip, push. His shoulders were aching, his arms numb. If only he could row with his legs, his tai chi-conditioned legs. His thighs were like iron, his calves like steel. From the waist down he’d never been in such good shape.

A high chair bolted to the thwart. Like a dentist’s chair, only not as heavy. Stirrups on the oar handles. Sit in the chair, put your feet in the stirrups and push, lift, swing, dip, push. If he got out of this alive, he’d patent the son of a bitch.