South Pole Station

“No,” the guy said, even more quietly this time. “I’m just saying.”

Billie put the baggie back in her pocket and walked down the ramp, leaving Maui Jim gaping after them. The big guy had set the canoe on the launch point, and held it steady as Cooper stepped in, and when she did she felt like she was stepping off the edge of the earth.

Later, when the men’s voices had faded to silence and the only sound was the whisper of the paddles whirlpooling the water, Cooper remembered how the tangled mass of streams and rivers on the navigation map became a single ribbon of clear water. You took it on faith that on the other side of the granite islands, with their forests of spruce looming over the clearings, another waterway, another lake, another body, lay glinting like steel in sunshine. Maps were promises.

They paddled across the lake in silence, except for Billie’s occasional call to switch, or to draw left or right. Billie favored her left stroke, and they were continually listing east. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the extent of the damage from the 1999 blowdown was laid bare. Cooper had heard that Ogishkemuncie and Seagull lakes had gotten the worst of it, nearly every mature tree felled by the wind. The patches of flattened forest made Cooper fearful; the open, endless horizon seemed to her like death.

But, still, the route was so familiar, it was like walking around the block. This was their circuit, the Gosling circuit, their route, their road, the only place David was ever truly serene. The annual trip where, invariably, all was quiet, even his brain, an electrified reef teeming with strange thoughts. All around the canoe, the yellow grass in the channels waved in the breeze like flickering candles, bright against the black remains of the charred trees.

It had been Billie’s idea to pull a permit and go back a month after the first attempt with Bill, when Cooper hadn’t been able to navigate to Lake Gray, when David’s ashes rode back to the launch point in a wet pack wedged in the center of the canoe. Billie had prepped everything herself, even spirited away the We-no-nah without Bill noticing. This time, Billie had the compass—not the antique compass that had failed Cooper, but a plastic one purchased at REI. On it, north was north.

Later, after they’d camped and eaten, and after Billie had climbed into the hammock, Cooper walked into the woods that fringed the campsite, the baggie in her hand. A few yards past the latrine, she fumbled in her jacket pocket for the empty travel-size vial of Tylenol that she’d hidden in her backpack before she and Billie had left Minneapolis. She opened the child-safety lid with her teeth and, using a birch leaf as a funnel, poured a teaspoon’s worth of her brother’s ashes into the vial. She wasn’t asking for much, she told herself—just a fragment. Lake Gray could have the rest of him, but these motes, these particles. These were hers.

That night, she and Billie walked together to the outcropping on Lake Gray and tossed David’s ashes into the water without ceremony. Billie went back to the tent alone but Cooper sat at the fire, feeding it until the sky began to lighten with the dawn, occasionally touching the vial in her jacket pocket. Veils of mist hung above the water, as if waiting to reveal someone. And, indeed, Cooper saw a yellow We-no-nah gliding soundlessly through them. She went knee-deep into the lake, her eyes straining to catch another glimpse. In a moment, the canoe emerged from the fog, revealing a faceless man, and a Husky wearing a lifejacket. The man waved and continued on, and was once again enveloped by the mist.

Cooper climbed back up the sloping granite outcropping and looked down at her feet, at the bones of the continent. It seemed as if everything around her—the spiny arms of the pines bent over the water, the crackle of the fire she hadn’t let die in the night, even the persimmon clouds of dawn—had receded completely. The silence was crystalline. Then, all at once, the sun emerged from the horizon, an undulating smear of orange. Cooper closed her eyes against the light.

When she opened them now, she was surrounded by snow.

*

As Cooper approached their site, she heard a bright, resonant male voice singing “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Pavano’s voice quavered for a moment as it glided over the notes in the line she was nobody’s wife, then fell silent. Cooper coughed loudly before unzipping the tent door.

Inside, Pavano was lying prone and tending a camp stove.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“It looks exactly like Pole,” Cooper replied.

Pavano readjusted the Sterno canned heat with his mitten, and leaned back on his elbow. The expression on his wind-chapped face startled Cooper; peering out at her from the shadows, he looked almost macabre. His clear eyes took everything in, but betrayed nothing. Cooper felt something stir in her—possibly an idea. It was in Pavano’s face; Cooper saw it in his strange eyes, in his angular features. As she gazed at him, committing each feature to memory, a noise issued from his mouth. It took Cooper a moment to recognize it as a laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“I was just thinking that it’s been a long time since I’ve had company,” Pavano replied. “I’m a loner, if you haven’t noticed. Not always by choice. I’m afraid I have forgotten how to make small talk.”

“No small talk necessary,” Cooper replied. “When do we get to work? Do we get to work?”

“In time. I’m waiting for a piece of equipment.”

“I thought you were going to talk to the site manager.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“Well, let me know when I can help,” Cooper said.

“I should mention that if the site manager refuses to budge on your approval status, any help you give me will likely land you in hot water.”

Cooper shrugged. “I’ve already got a flag on my file. What’s another one?”

She sat back against her canvas pack and pulled her sketchpad from the outer pocket. Across the camp stove, Pavano watched her remove her mittens in order to retrieve her pencil. She laid her sketchpad across her knees and rolled the pencil between her fingers as she considered Pavano. She could sense an artifice about him, but couldn’t pinpoint it. Maybe it was the way his eccentricities could come and go: Pavano couldn’t meet her eyes in the galley but here on the Divide he could stare at her unblinking for whole minutes. At the station he skulked; here he lounged.

She turned back to her sketchpad. Started. Erased. The shape of his eyes was hard to reproduce—they were wide-set, but also deep in his face. She tried again, and, once more, erased the beginnings. On the bruised paper, she drew an outline of a penguin, but it looked morbidly obese, and she erased it, too. She tried a rendering of the Empire State Building with arms, but it looked like a Transformer.

“Problems?” Pavano asked.

“I’ve given up on you. You’re hard to sketch.”

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