Peter Geye: Wintering

He turned his attention to his son’s wondering eyes and smiled. “You should eat your breakfast and shower up. Make it a hot one. It’ll be your last for some time.” He checked his watch. “We’ll leave in an hour.”

—

Later that morning Gus watched his father loading the canoes. Mist rose off the river. His mother came onto the deck, set her coffee on the deck railing, and lit a cigarette.

A moment passed before she said, “You don’t have to go.”

“Why wouldn’t I go?”

“I guess there are about a hundred reasons. You know most of them.” She took a sip of her coffee. “For God’s sake, how’s he going to survive up there? He walks like an old man now.”

“He walks like a man who’s been bent over the side of a boat all his life.”

“Bent over a barrel, you mean.” She looked over to the river for a long time. “He walks as if he’s given up.”

“Or been beaten.”

“You always were his great defender.”

Gus looked out across the clearing and blinked slowly three times. “I thought you’d be happy we’re leaving.”

She said nothing, just stood there staring at her husband, first through the ribbons of cigarette smoke, then through the cloud of fog over the clearing between their house and the river. She stubbed her cigarette and dropped the butt in her empty coffee cup. “Whatever happened to your father was a long time ago. Before you were born. Even before he met me.”

Gus wanted to slap her. Instead, he said, “I know what happened to him. Everyone does.”

“You might think you do.” Again she stared across the clearing. When she looked back at Gus she had tears in her eyes.

“Oh, please,” he said.

“You need to go to college, Gus. The world’s not about to wait on your father’s shenanigans. You read the newspaper. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket. Don’t be a fool.”

“I’m not afraid of what’s going on.”

She wiped her tears, which looked even more fake now that they were gone. “And you think playing around in the woods with him will be good practice? That he can teach you everything you need from his own vast experience?”

Gus just shook his head.

“My God, you are his son, aren’t you? The two of you won’t see the ice come in up there.” She kissed him on the forehead. “You’ll be back in a week, that’s what I think.” She turned and walked into the house.

Gus heard the radio come on inside and his mother tuning the dial, looking for the music station. It took a clear morning for that, though, and after a minute or so she turned the radio off.

—

On that morning, Gus was eighteen years old and a summer removed from high school graduation. As broad-shouldered as his father.

Harry watched him walk across the clearing and said, once he got to the canoes, “Where’d the kid you used to be go?”

Gus still felt his mother’s stinging words. “We all set?”

Harry squatted, grabbed a handful of pebbles from the shore, and let them sift through his big hand. “I should give you one more chance to balk. There are plenty of excuses to stay here.”

“I’m not balking.”

Harry pointed up at the house. “Head back up there and call one of those colleges that accepted you. Quit this place for good. Farther than you can paddle and walk, leastways.”

“I’m not balking. Besides, who would sing you those songs? Who’d catch you your fish?”

“All right, then. You got your compass? Matches?”

Gus patted the hip pocket of his army pants.

“Said goodbye to your mother?”

“Something like that.”

“Is your sister awake?”

“I told her goodbye last night.”

“Me, too.”

Gus looked into the canoes. “Everything loaded?”

Harry stepped beside him and they stared into them. Each held two number-four Duluth packs. In Gus’s the extra paddle and Remington were tied under the thwarts, as were the fishing rods and the ax and pick handles and saws in his father’s canoe. In both, cross-country skis and poles were strapped to the tumblehome. Snowshoes hung from two of the packs.

“I think so,” Harry said, then looked at the house, upriver, and at his wristwatch in quick, quiet succession. “Gus, buddy, where we’re going, well, better men than you or I have gotten lost there.”

The waters alongshore were still, the trees coming to light with the morning. Gus was full of fear, because he knew not only what sort of wilderness lay beyond the oxbow in the river, but also that they were risking something else, and that they were leaving something unspoken behind. Despite this fear, he looked back at his father’s waiting face and felt almost nothing but a boy’s excitement. “If we get lost,” he said, “then we’ll be doing it together, right?”

Harry’s smile was wide. He took a pinch from his tobacco pouch and pushed his canoe into the river.

—

It wasn’t more than a half hour before they reached the lower falls. During the hot summer months, Gus had spent countless hours in these pools, dropping dry flies in the lee waters, swimming with his friends. But when he and Harry stepped out into the shallows now, the water felt as though it had fallen from the moon. That’s how cold it was.

They portaged the falls. First the packs, then the canoes yoked over their shoulders. When they put back in above, Harry said, “We might’ve packed a little lighter.”

Gus could see his father’s chest heaving under his flannel shirt. Harry worked the snuff loose from his lip and spit it out.

“We could dump your shaving kit,” Gus said.

“And live like animals? How about we ditch your little guitar?”

“It’s a mandolin.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Or you could just bear up,” Gus said.

Harry smiled broadly again and nudged Gus’s canoe with the tip of his paddle. “That I could.”

Not another half hour passed before they reached the Devil’s Maw, where the Burnt Wood split atop the falls. One chute rushed through a jagged stone trough forty feet long before it churned back on itself with a force equal to its own falling. The other ran water into the maw itself. For generations it had been a place of lore and legend that was regarded as being as holy as Immanuel Lutheran. They were still downstream, holding their canoes into the current.

“It’s been a while since I’ve been up this far,” Harry said, looking left and right at the gorge walls rising sheer above them.

“She’s running light,” Gus said. “We were fishing up here this spring and couldn’t get close to the falls.”

“Fish make it past the lower falls?”

“The big ones do.”

“The big ones? Hope your braggadocio don’t come back to bite us on the ass. We’ll need some big fish, come the months ahead.”

Harry rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and then stared back up at the falls, maybe wondering if something about them would change. He shook his head. “Who could ever imagine this water might be tamed? Look at it.” Even with the slow, autumn flow it was deafening. “Does that look like water that wants to be dammed? Like there’s enough dynamite in the world to widen those stone walls? And for what purpose?” He shook his head again. “Men like Charlie are never satisfied until they have more. And then they’re still not satisfied.” Now he looked at Gus. “Don’t matter. He’ll have bigger problems than how to dam this river when he wakes up tomorrow.”

Gus had of course heard about this nonsense. We all had. Damming not just the Burnt Wood, but half a dozen others leading up into the borderlands. The plans had been whispered about for years. The promise of more iron ore and lumber and copper, lately of hydroelectricity. Harry had long been among the townsfolk who went to meetings to shout about it. Charlie Aas was always shouting back.