An hour before, when they had beached to put on the spray skirt, they had landed hard. Wynn was heavier and having his weight in front had helped in the wind, but then they had surfed a wave into shore and thwomped onto the rocks, which thankfully were smooth; if the beach had been limestone shale they would have broken the boat. It was a dangerous maneuver.
They could not make out the words, but the woman sounded furious and the man did not sound menacing, just outraged. Jack shook his head. A couple might expect privacy in their home, why shouldn’t they be granted the same in the middle of nowhere? They could not see the figures or even the shore, but now and then there was an intimation of trees, just a shadow in the tearing fog, a dark wall which they knew was the edge of the forest, and they paddled on.
CHAPTER ONE
The two of them loved paddling in storm. With the spray deck sealing the canoe they felt safe as long as they did not broach sideways, and they struck out away from the shadows and sounds of shore. The compass heading was redundant as long as they kept the breaking waves on the port quarter. They could take heavy water but a capsize away from land would kill them, so they were very careful to power through the whitecaps at an angle. They both paddled on their knees to keep the center of gravity low. It was exhausting. Then the wind died all at once as if throttled and in less than half an hour the lake glassed off and they felt suspended in fog. They moved within a moving nimbus in which only a few yards of black water were visible in any direction, and the pale fog drifted in tatters like stubborn smoke. The water whispered along the hull and it had a silver sheen that reminded Wynn of rayon. All of it was dreamlike; he thought of a Poe novel he had read in which the castaways are pulled toward the South Pole and the current they are riding gets warmer and calmer as they go.
Wynn stopped paddling. As the bowman today he set the pace and so Jack quit paddling too and they glided. The boat was sleek Kevlar, nineteen feet, and with a V’d hull in bow and stern it glided straight. There was something satisfying in a cessation of paddling on smooth water. It was like watching a flock of ducks all stop beating at once and sail over a bank of trees on extended wings.
“That was weird,” Jack said.
“Fucking A. Which part?”
“I can tick them off,” Jack said. He set the paddle across the spray deck and pried a tin of Skoal out of his shirt’s breast pocket. He was soaked from spray, but Jack never wore a rain jacket when he was paddling because he said he got just as wet from sweat, even in the breathable stuff. He also didn’t use bug dope, on principle. He tucked a pinch into his lip. “Let’s see: Wind and fog together, that’s a first. Oh yeah, and frost. The sudden calm. The shouts. And this. This is kinda weird.”
Wynn didn’t say anything. They were still gliding and something about the near silence was like a sacrament. He stuck a finger in the dark water and it was still cold, probably near forty degrees, and he watched his finger cut a small V-wake. It was the only sure sign of motion. “I was thinking of that story by Poe,” he said finally. “Arthur Gordon Pym.”
“Yeah, right?” Jack spat. “I wonder who they were. It sounded like a couple.”
“Maybe we’ll see them again.”
“I hope not. All morning I’ve been wondering if we should’ve stopped.”
“To tell them about the fire?”
“Yeah.”
“It would’ve been dicey,” Wynn said. He meant to surf in—and what if the beach had been broken limestone? They called any open shoreline that ran smoothly to the water a beach.
Jack said, “I was thinking maybe we should have stopped and tried to hail them.”
They drifted. “Want some lunch?” Wynn said.
“Okay. I guess we’re good with the deck.”
They unbuttoned the spray deck from its cleats and Jack rummaged in the day bag and pulled out a brick of sharp cheddar, a dry summer sausage, and a Ziploc full of half-broken Triscuits. He sat up on the cane seat. There was a small cutting board in the bag, too, and Jack flipped open his clip knife and set the board on his knees and sliced the cheese and sausage.
* * *
They were best friends at Dartmouth who had decided to take the summer and fall quarters off. They had worked as wilderness instructors for an outdoor program in the Adirondacks all June and July, and they decided to blow half their savings on the flights in and out of the river in the old Otter floatplane. Neither was attached. Jack had broken up with his high school sweetheart in the spring. She lived in the Fraser valley of Colorado, near Granby, where Jack’s family had their small ranch.
Wynn had not had a girl since junior year at the Putney School in Vermont. It was kind of a fancy boarding school, but his family lived three miles away and he was a day student. He’d dated the daughter of a movie star, who’d found him exotic and rustic, and he told Jack he had known it wouldn’t work when he went home with her to Malibu during spring break and they’d all gone out to brunch on a weekday and the star mother and the daughter ordered eggs Florentine and he’d asked what it was and both their heads swiveled and the mother said, “Wynn, it’s like Benedict but with spinach instead of Canadian bacon.” She’d adjusted her glasses. “Benedict?” she’d said. “Yes? No?” and they’d both burst out laughing and Keri had reached over and patted him on the shoulder. He knew what eggs Benedict was. He said the pat burned like a brand and that afternoon he’d changed his flight and flown home. It was sugaring season anyway, one of his favorite times, and he helped his father boil in the little sugar shack along Sawyer Brook.
Sometimes they boiled all night. At dawn the sun washed the patchy snow in a rose light, and the daybreak wind rattled the dried leaves of the oaks and the bare branches of the maples, and he heard the rush of the snowmelt brook, the songs of the nuthatch. The fire crackled under the long pan of clear sap and he and his dad didn’t say much, but he was aware enough—he’d read enough fiction, he guessed—to realize that these might be the best hours he and his father ever spent together.
He also came to see in the long hours of trying to work through his heartache that maybe he had been just as ruthlessly shallow and opportunistic as she had been: she’d wanted to indulge in a local boy who wore flannel shirts and could fish and cut wood and was as at home sleeping under the stars as she was in a five-star suite, and he’d wanted to date the daughter of a star who moved through the world like a different species. But really she was just a young girl who was far from home and probably scared, and he was much more cultured than he let on and had spent more hours in the art museums of Boston and New York than he cared to admit. He just had never had eggs Florentine.
He came to the conclusion one morning walking the sugarbush of Dusty Ridge that he and Keri had never really been friends and that they had rarely laughed. That was sad.
Jack’s story was simpler. He had known Cheryl since second grade, when her father came to the valley to take over as police chief, and they were best friends, and now she wanted to get married and have kids and he realized that she was the best kind of woman and that he was already bored. He’d written her the Dear Jill letter in May, and when he’d said he hoped they remained friends forever he meant it.
So both Jack and Wynn had digested their share of bewilderment, and maybe there was a heavy place like a stone inside each of them. Wynn would never admit that he’d been in love and that Keri’s scorn had been a gut punch. Or that maybe he hadn’t dated in the first two years of college because he was gun-shy.
They drifted. Jack kept slicing the cheese and the sausage until there was none left. They ate like wolves. The good thing about a canoe trip is that they didn’t have to be shy about provisions. They had two three-foot plastic barrels stuffed with enough food probably to get by even if they never caught another fish.