Driving on the Rim (15 page)

The sun was just up. I got into my down coat before I crawled entirely out of the sleeping bag, then rolled the bag and stuffed it in its sack. This I managed to get into the waterproof river duffel, and all was as orderly as the helicopter pilot could wish. I scoured face and teeth at the river, put the last items away, and using the duffel as a backrest, stretched out, hands inside my sleeves, to wait for my ride.

The helicopter never came.

I spent the day pacing up and down the riverbank, pausing hopefully at every sound, and in the end I unpacked my sleeping bag for the night. I had eaten of the fish three times, and now it was gone. I never looked at the glacier.

For the last ten days, I had lain in my sleeping bag and listened to the wolves as I fell asleep. Their songs assured me that this was no place like
home, that no sensible wolf would sing with such majestic assurance without owning the place. Now I found them disquieting and eerie. I was sure they knew about me.

At last I faced the fact that no one was going to pick me up, that the arrangements I had made and paid for in advance were not to be followed. I tried blaming it on my declining the various added services the pilot offered. He may well have been disgruntled at my not electing side trips to see petroglyphs, totem poles, or grizzly bears, to fly to Mesachie Nose or Jump Across, requesting only a ride in and, at the appointed hour, a ride out. But he took the money. He should have picked me up.

More to the point, the food was nearly gone. I knew I had to walk out and take with me what I could wear. I had no backpack, and my attempt to adapt the wire grill I cooked on failed. I stuffed my pockets with snack bars, of which I had plenty, took my slicker, and left everything else, including my sleeping bag, behind. That was hard. Anyone who’s spent time in wild places loves his sleeping bag beyond its actual utility. The mummy shape, the loft of the down, the neatly sewn gussets had their aesthetic attraction. My bag was twenty years old and yet I could still remember the exact moment I’d bought it in Seattle, the salesman’s face, the weather, spreading it out on the floor of my hotel, looking at it as I brushed my teeth and as the expanding down inside it slowly pulled its fabric taut.

I left it behind. It was pale green and when I looked back to where it lay at the base of a huge cedar whose dew fell like rain, an odd feeling passed over me. I wasn’t heading into the unknown, but I did have before me a two-day walk on river cobbles. The water was safe to drink, and the fruit bars that bulged in my coat were enough nutrition. Moderate alertness would keep me from unpleasantly surprising bears, and with the equinoctial storms a week or so away, one night sleeping in my clothes was nothing to worry about. It might be that a chopper picking up goat hunters or another angler would see me, but realistically I hadn’t heard any aircraft in a couple of days. A walk it would be. There was a road-head and a native settlement, cars. I had credit cards and a bit of cash, among the things I took instead of the sleeping bag. For the first few miles, I thought of ways I could go back for it. I still pictured myself bent over and running under the blades of the helicopter.

What beautiful weather for a walk! Each time the river bent, the world before me changed completely, divided, rushed, shrugged off the old forest, spread before narrowing, always mindful of the sea. The few bears I saw departed at the sight of me, and at sundown I found myself in a canyon, a primeval wilderness crowned high above by a star-filled sky. I was tired enough that sleeping on the ground was not an issue, and my belief that I could smell salt water was part of what swept me to the next morning.

I walked into an Indian settlement in midafternoon under a beautiful blue North Pacific sky and could smell the ocean. I saw no one around but heard native radio blaring from one house, the theme song from
Welcome Back, Kotter
, then AC/DC “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap,” my favorite song for waking up and getting going. I thought that was a good sign. When I knocked on the door, the music stopped; an old native man in overalls and a worn Irish tweed cap appeared and asked what he could do to help me. I told him I’d been dropped above the forks on the first of September and that my ride had never come back for me. I told him I’d left my stuff in the bush, maybe somebody would want it.

He said nothing was flying and when I seemed not to understand, he said nothing was flying anywhere, not here or anywhere in the world. I don’t think he understood, at least at first, that I knew nothing of the attack in New York. I thought I was listening to some aborigine’s mumbo jumbo about how nothing really flies, how we are earthbound, how flight was an illusion. I was well along this cul-de-sac when he patiently told me what had happened.

“The bus runs from Hagensborg to Vancouver,” he said. “You’ll be halfway to your house.”

I got pretty well filled in by the passengers on the way down—forest, rivers, town, the smell of salmon everywhere, once in a while the northern ocean. Several passengers had watched the news on television and tried to describe the scene but gave up. They watched me gauge its effect, as though this had happened to us as Americans, of which I was the specimen. I would have thought it was a bit more general, but it hadn’t happened to Canadians, it had happened to us. All very odd because whatever it was, I couldn’t picture it. This was well before everyone fought to own it. To judge by the other passengers, half of whom were Indians, all agreed that things would never be the same.

In Vancouver I felt the strangeness of the flightless skies; and at the airport, where my futile hopes for a ride home led me, the sight of what looked like every airplane from round the Pacific Rim, a jumble of towering aluminum tails and cheery logos, finally persuaded me that all was indeed arrested. A van was hauling water to a queue of Chinese families winding out of the terminal to the parking lot. I was told they’d been there for four days. Old people slept on the tile.

I bought a twenty-year-old Oldsmobile Starfire 88 from a used-car salesman with a pencil-thin moustache. In my numerology, 88 is big: the tank traveling in front of my father’s had been destroyed by a German self-propelled 88, a big gun on rails, operated by civilians—two men, two women, and a priest. My father’s tank captured it, and in his crew were men from the Deep South who had a special view of war: they executed the gun crew. Others in my father’s division, suffering from various kinds of battle trauma, were given pills called 88s and sent back into combat. The Oldsmobile 88 is a discontinued car.

When the car salesman in Canada learned I needed to get home, he marked it down two hundred dollars. That I was dirty and unshaven seemed not to matter. I gave him a check, and he said he didn’t need the identification I offered. When the deal was done, he said, “I’m sorry.” As I had not yet understood the situation, I could only shake my head ambivalently. I was still trying to absorb the event the bus passengers claimed to have seen on television. An old Indian woman used both her hands to represent the aircraft while she stared into my eyes. That didn’t work either.

The car went on operating all the way across BC to the Washington border, when it first gave signs of giving up the ghost. I was taking in nothing, not the scenery, no time but the passage of miles toward home, where I meant to look for myself at all the pictures and listen to all the surmises of friends, family, and talking heads. For now all I could do was drive the car. When I hit rain south of Penticton I started singing “Maybellene,” trying to imitate Chuck Berry’s voice as I roared the lines, “The rain blowin’ all under my hood, I know that I was doin’ my motor good.” I needed some luck getting into America, and the 88 felt like it was choking on its own fuel.

There wasn’t much to entering the U.S., an extraordinary informality, more especially in that I had a jalopy with Canadian dealer tags. On the
American side, I made little attempt at explanation except to say that I’d been away when it all went down and assumed everyone just wanted to go home. The customs agent looked at me sadly, said, “No shit,” and waved me on. I found a pay phone in the middle of a hundred square miles of rolling wheat and learned that a limited number of planes would be flying from Spokane. I booked a seat and pushed the choking Olds south, feathering the accelerator to keep the engine alive as I trained a worried eye on the temperature gauge. It grazed red-line as mountains began to show in the east.

I abandoned the car in short-term parking and we boarded on schedule. Every seat was filled and the plane was silent. An hour passed, and with it our departure time for Salt Lake City passed, yet there was no word from the cockpit. Indeed the door had never been open and there was no way for us to be sure that it contained pilots. There were no stewardesses, but hardly a murmur emerged from the crowd of faces.

I sat in the exit row and had room to almost sprawl. Not only was the legroom extended but the middle seat was occupied by an Igloo ice chest, strapped in as though it was a passenger, and at the window, I assumed, its owner. From time to time, he turned in my direction, but no expression crossed his face, a face that seemed not quite his own. The only way to let the air out of this thing was to strike up a conversation.

I rested my hand on the cooler. “Is this yours?”

“Don’t touch it, please.”

I withdrew my hand. He looked out the window. I looked past him to the field: there was no one out there. I could see the parking lot but not the 88. My seatmate wore a short-sleeved shirt in the kind of broad plaid you don’t see anymore, a pattern to be found at Sears some years back but not even there now. His arms were very white and hairless, and he rested his hands in his lap, corresponding fingers of each touching at their tips. He sighed.

Perhaps I felt rebuffed at being asked not to touch the cooler and wanted to provoke him a little. In any case, when he returned his gaze to the back of the seat in front of us, I said, “What’s in it?”

He turned and looked straight into my eyes. “It’s a miracle on ice.”

At that moment, the pilot made an announcement. It was quite startling to hear the intercom come alive, having had no prior assurance
there was anyone in the cockpit. “The original cabin crew is not going to join us on today’s flight. I’m sure all of you will understand. FAA regulations require us to have cabin crew before we fly. We’re waiting now for new cabin crew. When further information is available, you will be informed. I’m sure you understand.”

My seatmate, looking out the window, said, “Nice.”

The passengers were extraordinarily docile. You would expect some sort of outcry, sarcastic remarks about skipping the peanuts and flying the plane, the perennial expressions of dissatisfaction, but today: silence. It made the passengers appear, when I looked back, like a sea of disembodied souls. I had not yet entered their world, but I knew that soon I would. I was afraid of it.

An hour passed.

“When you say the cooler contains a miracle on ice, what do you mean by that?”

“You couldn’t stand it, could you?”

After a moment, I said, “The cooler has its own seat.”

“Yes? Well, that’s how we do it.”

“That’s how you do what?” I said sharply.

“That’s how we transport a human heart.” I had nothing to say and little to feel beyond a general sense of my impertinence. I must have communicated that because my seatmate softened immediately. I suppose he required some show of respect from me. “Let me correct myself”—yes, it was conciliatory—“This is how we
used
to do it before the cryonic shippers, the nitrogen drums, and so on. But things aren’t like they
used
to be.”

“I’m finding that out.”

He looked at me oddly. “We have less time is what I’m trying to tell you. There’s no pre-alert for the pickup in Salt Lake. I’m supposed to get this door-to-door. It wasn’t a good day for the stewardesses to sleep in.”

I suppressed an urge to say something.

“You harvest the heart, let the family decide if they want an open-casket funeral or not. You get through the elimination of blood, the rapid cooling, the packing, and the trip to the airport. It goes well, the heart’s in a viable state. It’s one hour to Salt Lake, the patient is on the table with
his chest propped open, you’ve got a four-hour window from harvest to transplant, no ifs ands or buts, and the stewardesses slept in.”

“I don’t think it’s that they slept—”

“I got it! Look, this thing has another hour left and it’s getting to me.”

“I understand.”

I’m not sure I did, but that’s what I said. The outburst from my seatmate was over and he fell silent again. So did I. Time now had a terrible weight. We heard nothing from the cockpit for an interminable period, then the door opened and the pilot appeared to tell us directly that we weren’t going. He got off the plane. The copilot appeared and looked at the passengers with perplexity, unable to identify what species we belonged to, and he got off the plane. I turned and spoke to the back of my seatmate’s head.

“What’s going to happen now?” He seemed not to have heard me. I wondered if he would just ignore my question, and in fact he never looked back my way but continued to gaze at the empty runway.

He said, “What do you think happens when the heart dies?”

I drove toward the mountains. It didn’t matter that the Oldsmobile barely ran. I was glad to be in it. It was an 88.

W
HEN YOU IRRADIATED A PLACE
as we did Nagasaki it didn’t come back in quite the same way as a failed homestead, whose proprietors could move on to other hopes—unlike the pedestrians of that Asian city, who perhaps melted. I faced up to this being a different world and to the fact that we were ill equipped to absorb some of the newer differences. The New York catastrophe that greeted my return from fishing was one such alteration to our view of life. As a doctor, I had been kept aware of the changing threats to our health, which seemed to be macro adjustments to our environment—greenhouse gases, holes in the ozone layer—to which we made reasoned response—use sunblock, turn down the thermostat, etc. The destruction of the World Trade Center seemed akin to this; it was an environmental change of the kind that few understood but most could not stop talking about. Our exemption from the cyclone of world forces was over. As they said in Mexico, “We have seen the tips of the wolf’s ears.”