The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (29 page)

In the evenings, we worked on the much more pleasurable task of learning to navigate the labyrinthine networks of straits and fjords and islands that stretched for watery miles away from our place. Initially, we stayed inside an area known as Skowl Arm; we were afraid to cross into the treacherous waters beyond, known as Clarence Strait, because of a nautical chart that someone had nailed to the wall of the shack with the words
Do Not Go
written across the entrance to the strait in red marker. But of course our curiosity overrode our caution, and one night we found ourselves out there in a 16-foot open-bowed skiff with a stalled engine and no radio. We were drifting so fast on the outgoing tide that it felt like we could pull a skier. Just as I began calculating how long the 10-pound halibut in the bottom of the boat would stave off starvation as we drifted toward death on the open sea, the engine popped to life with a puff of black smoke and we beelined for the safety of sheltered water. At the end of that month, when the floatplane finally picked us up for the trip back to Ketchikan, we circled around and passed over the shack. I looked down at it like a rodeo rider might view a bull that had just bruised him up. He knows it's a lot of trouble and that it doesn't make a lick of sense, but he's already planning another ride.

 

When I started dating Katie, I would try to impress her with stories of the cabin. I promised to take her up there and get her hooked into a halibut that was so big we'd have to sink it with a harpoon in order to drag it into the boat. She now admits that the bravado kind of turned her on, though she has a hard time explaining how my stories resulted in her mistaken impression of the shack as some kind of classy Aspen-style retreat where you stroll out to the hot tub in a white robe with a wineglass dangling between your fingers.

In reality, the hot tub that we rigged up prior to Katie's first visit was a livestock watering tank that we had shipped up on a barge from Seattle and then set out on some rocks by the stream. It was powered by an ingenious woodstove that circulated water through a heating box by means of its own convection currents.

Other improvements over the years included an adjoining workshop to store boat engines and tools. This freed up space in the shack's sleeping area so that it could actually be used for sleeping. Also, we'd worked out the problems in our plumbing system, which meant you could more reliably take warm showers using water that was diverted from the creek and heated with a propane burner.

In fact, the place had gotten so comfortable that my two brothers figured it would be a perfect time to introduce their significant others to the shack as well—along with Danny's three-year-old daughter. And in case things weren't quite cozy enough with seven people sharing three bunk beds and well under 500 square feet of space, we extended an invitation to our friend Brandt and his new girlfriend.

I was a tad worried about the crowding issue, but in hindsight I should have been much more concerned that it was midwinter. The area gets an average of 160 inches of precipitation per year, about four times as much as Seattle, and the bulk of that seemed to fall during Katie's stay. On her trip out to the cabin, she got stuck in a Ketchikan hotel because of the weather. When it finally cleared enough for her to get to the shack, it promptly turned shitty again once she landed. For days, the wind howled and snow dumped. We got out in the boat only a few times. Once, when we took a ride to set crab traps and ran out of daylight about two miles from home, the engine hit a submerged log with such ferocity that the bow of the boat dipped below the surface and scooped out a wave's worth of water, which flooded through the vessel like a tsunami. We bailed it out with a solemnness that came from knowing that we were maybe just a few gallons away from a capsized boat and possible death by hypothermia.

Another outing in the boat occurred during a storm surge that pushed the high tide up over the porch, and we had to chase down all the gear and food that had been swept into the ocean. The surge also caused a temporary shutdown of what so far had been the trip's one salvation, the hot tub. Its creekside location offered scenic views plus a handy source for changing the water. But when the high tide backed up the creek, all you could see of the tub was the top of the chimney. When the tide fell we moved the tub to higher ground and filled it with water siphoned from the creek with a long hose. Then the improperly drained hose froze and ruptured, so we were unable to change the water when it became soiled with dirt and spruce needles and the general funk caused by nine human inhabitants and a spilled White Russian that gave the water a milky tint. The tub's popularity waned significantly after that, though not as badly as my own after announcing that I'd miscalculated the kerosene usage and we'd soon have no way to heat the shack.

 

One of the best things about life is that now and then, when we're lucky, the reality of a situation rises up to meet our hopeful expectations. I thought of this a couple of summers ago, when Danny and his significant other, Corrina, got married on a grassy beach across the cove from our shack under sunny summer skies. Well over a dozen friends and family were gathered for the celebration. Salmon rolled in the stream mouth and flashed spectacularly during the ceremony. A bear sow and her two young cubs appeared down the shore and seemed to pose, as though Steve Irwin had been resurrected as a wedding planner. In the evening we gathered on the deck, drinking beer and boiling crabs and expecting at any minute the deck to finally collapse beneath the weight of all our friends.

It held firm and was still standing strong in the morning as the guests packed up their sleeping bags and tents and boarded planes headed to Ketchikan. Later that day, I took Katie out on the water and fulfilled at least part of my seductive promise. Although the halibut she caught wasn't big enough to require a harpoon, it was her first nonetheless. That night, she glowed with pride as we grilled a fillet of the fish. I served it with leftover boxed wine poured from the liner bag that someone had thoughtfully pinned under a rock beneath the creek's surface. After dinner, we went down to the shoreline and watched the light fade. We'd been married a year at that point. Something about the experience—maybe the air, maybe the wine, maybe the residue of hopefulness left over from a day of fishing—caused her to say that she was ready to have a baby so long as I was up for it. We were leaning against the gunwale of a beached skiff, and we just stood there for a while in silence. There was a mountain empty of people behind us, an ocean full of fish in front of us, and at our side a cabin in the slow and steady process of accumulating memories. And in that moment I could see clearly why I'd bought a place that was so hard to get to: even if I had to leave right then, I couldn't.

FROM
The New Yorker

 

I
N LATE MAY
of this year, a few weeks shy of her 50th birthday, my youngest sister, Tiffany, committed suicide. She was living in a room in a beat-up house on the hard side of Somerville, Massachusetts, and had been dead, the coroner guessed, for at least five days before her door was battered down. I was given the news over a white courtesy phone while at the Dallas airport. Then, because my plane to Baton Rouge was boarding and I wasn't sure what else to do, I got on it. The following morning, I boarded another plane, this one to Atlanta, and the day after that I flew to Nashville, thinking all the while about my ever-shrinking family. A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I'd lost the identity I'd enjoyed since 1968, when my younger brother was born.

“Six kids!” people would say. “How do your poor folks manage?”

There were a lot of big families in the neighborhood I grew up in. Every other house was a fiefdom, so I never gave it much thought until I became an adult, and my friends started having children. One or two seemed reasonable, but anything beyond that struck me as outrageous. A couple Hugh and I knew in Normandy would occasionally come to dinner with their wrecking crew of three, and when they'd leave, several hours later, every last part of me would feel violated.

Take those kids, double them, and subtract the cable TV: that's what my parents had to deal with. Now, though, there weren't six, only five. “And you can't really say, ‘There
used
to be six,'” I told my sister Lisa. “It just makes people uncomfortable.”

I recalled a father and son I'd met in California a few years back. “So are there other children?” I asked.

“There are,” the man said. “Three who are living and a daughter, Chloe, who died before she was born, eighteen years ago.”

That's not fair, I remember thinking. Because, I mean, what's a person supposed to do with
that?

 

Compared with most 49-year-olds, or even most 49-
month
-olds, Tiffany didn't have much. She did leave a will, though. In it, she decreed that we, her family, could not have her body or attend her memorial service.

“So put
that
in your pipe and smoke it,” our mother would have said.

A few days after getting the news, my sister Amy drove to Somerville with a friend and collected two boxes of things from Tiffany's room: family photographs, many of which had been ripped into pieces, comment cards from a neighborhood grocery store, notebooks, receipts. The bed, a mattress on the floor, had been taken away and a large industrial fan had been set up. Amy snapped some pictures while she was there, and, individually and in groups, those of us left studied them for clues: a paper plate on a dresser that had several drawers missing, a phone number written on a wall, a collection of mop handles, each one a different color, arranged like cattails in a barrel painted green.

 

Six months before our sister killed herself, I made plans for us all to gather at a beach house on Emerald Isle, off the coast of North Carolina. My family used to vacation there every summer, but after my mother died we stopped going, not because we lost interest but because it was she who always made the arrangements and, more important, paid for it. The place I found with the help of my sister-in-law, Kathy, had six bedrooms and a small swimming pool. Our weeklong rental period began on Saturday, June 8, and we arrived to find a delivery woman standing in the driveway with seven pounds of seafood, a sympathy gift sent by friends. “They's slaw in there, too,” she said, handing over the bags.

In the past, when my family rented a cottage my sisters and I would crowd the door like puppies around a food dish. Our father would unlock it, and we'd tear through the house claiming rooms. I always picked the biggest one facing the ocean, and just as I'd start to unpack, my parents would enter and tell me that this was
theirs.
“I mean, just who the hell do you think you are?” my father would ask. He and my mother would move in, and I would get booted to what was called “the maid's room.” It was always on the ground level, a kind of dank shed next to where the car was parked. There was never an interior stairway leading to the upper floor. Instead, I had to take the outside steps and, more often than not, knock on the locked front door, like a beggar hoping to be invited in.

“What do
you
want?” my sisters would ask.

“I want to come inside.”

“That's funny,” Lisa, the eldest, would say to the others, who were gathered like disciples around her. “Did you hear something, a little whining sound? What is it that makes a noise like that? A hermit crab? A little sea slug?” Normally, there was a social divide between the three eldest and the three youngest children in my family. Lisa, Gretchen, and I treated the others like servants and did very well for ourselves. At the beach, though, all bets were off, and it was just upstairs against downstairs, meaning everyone against me.

This time, because I was paying, I got to choose the best room. Amy moved in next door, and my brother, Paul, his wife, and their 10-year-old daughter, Maddy, took the spot next to her. That was it for oceanfront. The others arrived later and had to take the leftovers. Lisa's room faced the street, as did my father's. Gretchen's faced the street and was intended for someone who was paralyzed. Hanging from the ceiling were electric pulleys designed to lift a harnessed body into and out of bed.

Unlike the cottages of our youth, this one did not have a maid's room. It was too new and fancy for that, as were the homes that surrounded it. Traditionally, all the island houses were on stilts, but more and more often now the ground floors are filled in. They all have beachy names and are painted beachy colors, but most of those built after Hurricane Fran hit the coast, in 1996, are three stories tall and look almost suburban. This place was vast and airy. The kitchen table sat 12, and there were not one but
two
dishwashers. All the pictures were ocean-related: seascapes and lighthouses, all with the airborne Vs that are shorthand for seagull. A sampler on the living-room wall read
Old Shellers Never Die, They Simply Conch Out.
On the round clock beside it, the numbers lay in an indecipherable heap, as if they'd come unglued. Just above them were printed the words
Who cares?

This was what we found ourselves saying whenever anyone asked the time.

“Who cares?”

 

The day before we arrived at the beach, Tiffany's obituary ran in the
Raleigh News & Observer.
It was submitted by Gretchen, who stated that our sister had passed away peacefully at her home. This made it sound as if she were very old, and had a house. But what else could you do? People were leaving responses on the paper's website, and one fellow wrote that Tiffany used to come into the video store where he worked in Somerville. When his glasses broke, she offered him a pair she had found while foraging for art supplies in somebody's trash can. He said that she also gave him a
Playboy
magazine from the 1960s that included a photo spread titled “The Ass Menagerie.”