By Kent Nelson
Featured Art: “Close Up – Spatial Neighborhoods” by Alex Brice

Henry shoved his drift boat from the trailer into the river, unhitched the winch line, and wedged the anchor into a crack in the cement ramp. He drove his Tundra and boat trailer up the ramp to the parking lot. He’d already loaded his gear into the boat—fishing rod, all-time favorite foods, stove, lantern, camping crap. He put his parking permit on the dash, locked the cab, and pocketed the key—no sense letting people steal what his daughter could use. He’d sent Catherine the spare key and a note that said the truck was at the Spring Creek put-in on the South Fork of the Snake River, which, given his habits, wonts, and desires, was the place he loved most in the world.

The note went out in the mail Wednesday morning, August 17th, from Idaho Falls. Catherine wouldn’t get it in L.A. until at least Friday or Saturday, if she checked her mail, but probably Monday. The truck wasn’t going anywhere without a driver.

The river was flowing at 8500 cfs—this according to Jimmy at the fly shop in Idaho Falls. Jimmy had claimed he’d taken clients out the weekend before, and they’d done well on hoppers, sparkle duns, and PMD emergers, all of which Henry purchased. He wasn’t the expert or con man Jimmy was, but he knew which end of the fly rod to put the reel on, and trout liked him or he was lucky, which he’d considered himself until April, when Estelle had left him.

He balanced on his knees on the edge of the boat, maneuvered into the center seat, and raised the anchor. The oars were fitted, so all he had to do was take hold of them and pull himself into the current. The drift boat was fourteen feet long, four wide in the middle, and had an extra seat in the bow, occupied by the beer cooler, Woodford bourbon, and a fifty-dollar bottle of Cabernet. In a few seconds, he was floating under the bridge of U.S. 26.

Henry was seventy-one, and Estelle sixty-eight. They’d been together eighteen years. They’d agreed to staying with each other to the end, and their ashes were to be buried together. They’d planned to make last trips to Peru and Tanzania, do a backpack in the Cascades, and think about Samoa. They talked on the phone three times a day. He’d had prostate cancer, and she’d stuck with him through that, which he’d taken as a final promise. He lived on Lopez Island, and whenever she went back to her house in Portland, he lamented her departure and looked for the note of affection she’d left under his pillow.

She’d had two marriages, two daughters, and four granddaughters; he had five children with three different women, two of them ex-wives. Negotiating the terrain of another person’s family was never easy, but Estelle was cheerful and helpful, so his kids liked her. He was more suspect to her children, though in Portland he went to the granddaughters’ lacrosse games, swim meets, and track events. Birthday and holidays were tougher because the ex-husband was included—a man who used aftershave, wore tasseled loafers or cowboy boots, and drove a Lexus.

Lopez Island was six hours from Portland. He was alone there, but he made violins, so he was of the quiet so he could concentrate on what he was doing. The island was farmland, dark wet forests, and rugged spots along the coast. His house had a view of San Juan Island and the Olympic Range. In summer, when Estelle came for longer, she helped in the garden, walked ten thousand steps on her Fit-Bit, and canned fruit. She painted the rooms the colors she liked; she cooked.

Henry wasn’t Amati or Guerneri, but he was good enough to be sought after. A violin wasn’t manufactured like a car. The wood had to come from the better side of a maple or spruce tree taken at the proper time of year, and every detail had to be calibrated—the ribs, the bouts, the top and back, the sound posts. It couldn’t be tested for quality as it was being made. His intelligence, coordination, and attention to nuance, his muscle and bone and blood were in each instrument, so he was allied with the composers of the music, the directors of the orchestras, and especially with the musicians who held his violins in their hands. As Henry thought of it, he set the instruments free. 

For the first mile, the river meandered, split apart, and came back together. Jimmy advised the wider channel, but Henry preferred the braid farthest from the highway, though he still heard trucks not far off straining up the grade of a hill.

He came on this trip alone to observe closely what passed by. Now, for instance, he focused on the patterns of light and shadow, the way the lowering sun came through the cottonwoods along the river and the pines higher up, and the myriads of swallows gliding over the water. Clouds swept across a sky narrowed by the canyon the river flowed into. He had provisions for two nights, three if he caught a good cutthroat, which would get him downstream into the canyon of unknown water.

A little before five, he found a riffle at the edge of a rocky bar. He tied the dory to a patch of willows, stepped out into the cold water, and slopped along in the shallows toward the point. His fly line was rigged with an elk-hair caddis, and he caught several ten-inch cutthroats and a rainbow. Catching small trout wasn’t luck. Luck was hooking a “hog,” as Jimmy called them, which the Snake was famous for—a cutthroat of twenty inches or more. That was unlikely—Henry had never caught one.

Campsites were designated with unobtrusive, vertical signs, and he rowed to Pine Creek, which was unoccupied. The temperature was in the seventies, but the sun was gone from the river, and the air cooled. Up along the inlet creek, Henry heard Sandhill Cranes squawking, and on the river an eagle flew by.

He toted his river bag up the bank to the site, put his cot together—on a clear night, no need for the tent—and assembled his camp table and stove. Fetching his chair and cooler was another trip to the boat and back. He folded out the chair, rattled ice into a glass—why use plastic at this time of his life?—and poured in Woodford. He set his .38 pistol on the table and sat down.

He wasn’t sorry for himself, and, though darkness was coming, he was sure of what he was doing. He’d made a pact with himself—float the river, fish, drink, eat well. Goodbye. So what if he’d hyped his circumstances? He was old. To know that he was about to eat his last lobster, taste his last chocolate, and that he was running this river for the last time—no one knew that except him.

He drank his Woodford. The river in front of him was a recurring dream, churning around boulders, roiling through deep channels, chopping up in the shallows. It was two hundred yards to the far bank. The shadow of the hill behind him had passed over the water, but a last tinge of sunlight lit the tops of the cottonwoods.

Two other boats floated past—guided trips, not campers—that were probably taking out at the Cottonwood ramp, not too far down. Other rivers were wilder—the Salmon—and the Green and the Colorado had more beautiful stretches of sandstone, but the South Fork of the Snake was part of Henry’s life-truth. He’d caught a hundred trout here, seen miraculous sunsets, watched moose fifty feet away drinking in the shallows. On a few trips, Estelle had come along, and shared camp meals, hiked up the side venues, and they had made love anchored in the drift boat at twilight.

Henry sipped his bourbon. A filet mignon was in the cooler, scalloped potatoes were ready to heat up, and he had a salad of lettuce, spinach, yellow peppers, avocado, and home-grown tomatoes, with a dressing of balsamic vinegar, olive oil, and sugar he’d make himself. The light winnowed. The river turned gray, but still flowed in its constant patterns.

Eighteen years ago, Henry attended a Beethoven program at the Seattle Symphony—two of his violins were in the orchestra. During one of the movements, Tobias Knahn had played a solo, and Henry had been transported back to making that violin—the measuring millimeters, cutting, sanding, gluing, then purfling and varnishing. Knahn was a virtuoso, and Henry had felt like one.

During intermission, he overheard a conversation: a woman had been corresponding with Knahn for an essay on the history of the violin in literature. The woman glanced at Henry, as he was listening in. The lights in the lobby dimmed, brightened, and dimmed again.

“I didn’t mean to over hear—well, of course I did—I’d like to read your article. I’m a luthier.”

The woman held out her hand. “Estelle Latham,” she said. “I’m in the English Department in Eugene.”

“I didn’t mean. . .”

“I noticed you, too, though, I should tell you I’m married.”

It was her second marriage, but Estelle was ready for it to end. At that time, Henry had been divorced ten years, but several women friends visited him on Lopez Island. They didn’t stay more than a couple of days. He assumed these women derived a similar short-term pleasure from him as he did from them. He told them, always, he was working.

He and Estelle exchanged emails, talked on the phone, and met a couple of times, once for a day’s excursion to the Columbia Gorge and another time in Astoria, where they reserved separate rooms at a hotel, but slept in the same bed. Not long after that, Estelle separated from her husband.

Their sex was sweet learning. Estelle, who’d been married thirty years, wasn’t experienced in what Henry was adept at. She was jealous of what he knew, but also glad. Henry didn’t care to know of Estelle’s history, but her emotions about him ranged from thrill to suspicion. He offered the standard explanation—what had happened before was past. His earlier sins—were they sins?—were irrelevant. All they could do was go forward, live in the present, and plan for a future together. Each of them had earlier spouses and children, and it was six hours between Portland and Lopez Island.

When they were together—on Lopez or in Portland—they napped in the afternoons, had martinis in the evenings, and slept in each other’s arms at night. If they were apart, they phoned. He recited what he’d done in his shop, and she blathered about what her grandchild did that day. In this way, he thought, they were acknowledging their togetherness and goodwill.

They connected through music in their hearts and minds. She taught classes in the crossover between music and writing. They made love to Schumann and Mozart, grieved to Mahler for the unknown lost, and, in the midst of Beethoven’s Fifth, discussed whether the soul existed. Music was their passage to old age.

He dreamed of his daughter, Catherine, sick with evil, but in the background was Leonard Cohen’s voice singing, “There ain’t no cure for love.” That dream segued to another with an image of Estelle’s passport picture, though without the smile that had made her so many friends, and beyond to Peru, where they were being robbed. He woke when the sun angled onto his cot.

The sleeping bag was rimed with frost, but he hadn’t been cold. He gazed into the sunlit leaves above him. Their morning routine was he woke early, made coffee, and turned up the heat in his studio. Back inside, he poured coffee into her insulated cup and carried it upstairs, where she was reading in bed or talking on the phone to one of her daughters. He put a knee to the floor, bowed his head, and gave her the cup.

Six pelicans flew over. Their routine was gone, as was figuring out a solution to the problem violin he was working on. Estelle’s call to breakfast was gone, dinners she made, holding hands when they walked in Lopez Village, Portland, Paris, or New York. The lovemaking was gone—the immersion of their spirits, the brief flurry of physical joy, and the long embrace afterward.

He sat up on his cot, pulled on a fleece, and found the same pants he’d had on the night before.

To steer he pulled on one oar or held it against the current. Where he was the river was deep and wide, and the sun was on the cliffs. The sky had serrated edges. Trees on the canyon walls grew straight from rock. Here and there were deep caves where he imagined mountain lions lived. If there were music in nature, beyond birds’ singing, it was in light, which Henry thought was music in visible translation.

The day warmed up. The boat swirled in the current. Henry took off his fleece, his shirt. He took off his pants. He loved the sun on his skin. He took off his underwear. Ahead was an island with willows, and he remembered it had fishable backwater pools. He steered the boat over till the bottom cracked on stone.

Henry stepped out naked except for his ankle-high boots with Vibram soles that gripped the slippery rocks. He hoisted the boat several paces up onto the dry stones. Another drift boat passed, and Henry waved. The three guys in the other boat cheered him, Henry assumed, because he was naked.

Henry strapped on a waist pack with flies, leaders, tippet, fingernail clippers, a magnifying glass, and fly duster. On the far side of the island were pebble shelves that ran sideways into deep water, and Henry stalked the edge of one of these, positioned himself so the willows wouldn’t interfere with his backcast, and threaded his line into the air. He had on one of the pink gems Jimmy liked, and the fly got a quick rise.

In half an hour, he’d caught and released four small cutthroats. The big ones weren’t feeding yet, or weren’t here, so he reeled in, hooked his fly on the rod, and glanced across the pebble flow. The brush and trees on the bank were wavy from his staring into the current, but he couldn’t mistake a moose—a bull with wide antlers waded into the water.

Henry couldn’t guess what the moose saw, but it splashed toward him on a beeline. Henry backed off, but willows were at his back. The moose closed fast—fifty yards, thirty, twenty. Henry leveled his fly rod at the moose, and, as if ordered, the animal stopped ten yards away. The moose snorted. They gazed at each other. Henry couldn’t say they communicated, but he never looked away from the moose’s dark eyes. He’d never been face-to-face with a moose, and he suspected the moose hadn’t been ten yards from a human being, either. After a few seconds that seemed like minutes, the moose slued around and ambled upstream.

Estelle had thick blond hair, a perfect nose, and a firecracker smile. Her figure had melted with age but was recognizable—breasts, waist, hips. Henry was old, but he responded. After Estelle retired, they lived together in Astoria in a house she bought, and he set up his work in the garage there. He didn’t have his lathe, his workbench with ten vises, or his standing jigsaw, but he could glue and clamp, carve, and hand sand. Every few weeks he went back to Lopez to do the work he couldn’t do in Astoria.

During these times—sometimes a month or longer— he had women visitors. He liked their admiration for his craft; he liked the pleasure. He saw no harm in making temporary love that had nothing to do with Estelle, but Estelle had a different view. She found out because, when he was in Astoria, she snooped in his wallet and opened his emails. Henry thought her transgressions were as bad as infidelity, but how could he argue with her when he was guilty? Estelle interpreted his wanting other women as evidence of her own lack. Henry apologized, assured her he loved her, made promises. But she sold the house in Astoria and bought a condo close to her daughters in Portland.

They spent a year apart but regrouped and repledged. They traveled to music venues—heard Aida in the Baths of Caracalla, went to La Boheme in Paris, and to three concerts in Vienna. They slept in sweetness and woke to the days ahead of them. Suspicion and blame slipped into the past. So Henry thought.

Henry had trained his children to be independent, fend for themselves, and expect little help from their parents. But no matter where she was, Estelle talked on the phone with or emailed her daughters, and often her granddaughters, too. When texting became trendy, she did that. Texting spawned their worst arguments. One time on Lopez, they were driving down island to Shark Reef, Henry at the wheel, when the clink of an incoming text sounded on Estelle’s phone. She read and responded; a few seconds later came another clink. “If you’d call,” Henry said, “I could at least hear half the conversation.”

“Get over it,” Estelle answered. She clicked the keys on her phone.

Instead of seeing the sun’s piercing through the canopy and hearing birds along the roadside, instead of being with him, Estelle was pressing the precious, fucking keys on her phone. It wasn’t the first time and wasn’t going to be the last. Henry turned around before they got to the trailhead for Shark Reef. She called him temperamental. He called her rude.

Estelle also picked at him for letting his hair get too long, for not taking a shower everyday, for holding a grudge against his greedy brother. These were recent complaints. Henry had thought they’d reached an equilibrium of acceptance with each other’s minor flaws, but Estelle, unbeknownst to him, was tallying up her grievances. His being silent when she criticized him was another of what she called his little murders.

When she’d reached whatever threshold she’d determined, she was gone.

By three-thirty, Henry was sunburned on his back and legs and had made it several miles downriver. He’d anchored a couple of times and fished with several different flies. He’d caught two miniature cutties and three whitefish, but nothing to satisfy his ego.

He put on a shirt and long pants and cracked open a beer. He lazed past a few islands.

He was privileged to have been born into freedom, blessed with a sufficient intelligence to maneuver through the obstacles in his path, and had earned enough money to reach a respectable age. He hadn’t been maimed in a car crash, shot by an irate husband, or wasted by Alzheimer’s. He’d once broken a tibia playing soccer, had surgery on his rotator cuff, and endured prostate cancer, but he was healthy now, except for dying of grief.   

To catch a big cutthroat he should have fished late, but by five he was tired, sunbitten, and wanting a Kentucky Mule. He found a vacant camp in a clump of cottonwoods on the west side of the river. Setting up was carrying his gear up the slope, putting together the cot, table, and making a drink. A Mule was Woodford, ginger beer, and fresh-squeezed lime juice poured over ice. That night for dinner he had lobster, rice, and homemade coleslaw, but first came alcohol and the other bliss. He faced his chair away from the river—other boaters were scarce, but Henry was self-conscious. He put his pistol on the table.

Liquor was a direct means of pleasure, but he’d brought also the medieval contraption the doctor prescribed after his prostate surgery. He and Estelle had laughed about it and had made love anyway—a lesser version—right until the end. The penis pump was a foot-long plastic tube, three inches in diameter, with an AA-battery pack at one end. He stretched a constriction ring around the top, lowered his jeans, and fit the tube over his flaccid cock. The battery hummed; the dead awakened. He took a sip of his Mule.

In minutes he was hard. Estelle came to mind for a few seconds, but Henry quickly substituted Wendy Alford, with whom, years ago, he’d had torrid sex. He imagined his first love, Alene Armstrong, his first blowjob from Miranda Foster, and the slow, helpless sex with Teresa Buchanan. These memories, together with his own ministrations, made him shout into the trees.

After that, he made another Kentucky Mule and got the water boiling for the lobster.

The morning was cloudy, but daylight came. It had come before and would come again for as many days, months, and years the Earth lasted. But not for him. Henry hadn’t decided the exact moment he was going to die, but he wanted to be in swirling water, scared in the joy of being alive, with a pistol in his hand.

The knowledge accumulated in his brain, the experience he’d gained making violins, the miraculous synapses of memory of the past would cease to exist. These treasures vanished not only from the body but, as well, from the future of the Earth. What was left behind were the violins he’d created, the property he’d acquired, and the children whose existence he’d determined, even as overcrowding was the planet’s doom. His children were smart enough, meant well, and voted as he did. Still, his progeny were of debatable social worth. Had they ever helped anyone else?

By ten-thirty he was on the river. He dawdled and cast his line toward the bank, had a couple of rises, and one good strike, for which he was too slow on the uptake. Toward noon he anchored at the point of an island and made a sandwich with bacon fried that morning, a garden tomato, and mayo. The clouds stayed low, but the rain held off.

After lunch he fished the deep current on the far side of the island. Trout were rising, and he floated his fly out over the smooth current. Whatever the fish were feeding on wasn’t close to what he had on his tippet. He had not a nibble or a look-see. One big fish, though, on the other side of the seam, came up, sipped something from the surface, and sank back to being a shadow at the bottom of the pool.

Henry tried a caddis; he floated a nymph right over the fish; Jimmy’s pink gem elicited no response. He tried a hopper. Each time he changed flies, the fish came up for something Henry couldn’t see. He stood in the water, bifocals low on his nose, and tied on another experiment—an emerger that resembled a stage of a stonefly. Given the low clouds, and the temperature of the air, it was a life form that might be evolving in the river. He threaded the line through the eye, tied the angler’s knot, snipped the spare tippet. He looped the emerger out into the current and drew it back above the trout. Without a hesitation, the dark form swooped up and took the fly.

Henry responded, and the fish was hooked. It dived, came up, splashed at the surface, zinged line from the reel. It was a dream fish. Henry kept stress on the line but let it run. Catch-and-release was joy for the angler, no harm to the fish, but what was one fish out of the whole river when he needed supper?

The fish leapt from the water, struggled against the line, and lay in the deepest part of the pool. Henry’s strategy was to keep the fish engaged. His own best quality, as he interpreted his life, was persistence. He’d been, in one phase, a not-very-fast marathoner, but he’d put in hours of training to be able to run that far. Making violins, too, required trying, failing, and trying again, until he had learned to make rib molds, the ribs, upper and lower bouts, the tops and bottoms. He loved the textures of the wood, the sanding, the smells of the glues, the challenge of carving. By perseverance, he’d solved problems few others in the world knew existed.

A half-dozen times the fish squealed line from the reel, and each time Henry wound it back. A half-hour went by. He wondered what time meant to the fish, what it knew. Several times he reeled the trout to within fifteen feet, close enough to see how big it was, a fish to remember, though what an irony it was that his memory of it would last only a few more hours, and no one on the planet would know what had happened.

He reeled the fish in close, and, as if seeing Henry were its last frightening image, it made a short burst away. But the struggle was over. The fish splashed right in front of him. Henry pressed the rod away in his left hand and leaned down with the net in his right. That was when his fly rod broke in half.

Henry held the weightless handle, tossed the net onto the bank, and caught hold of the line. Henry’s hands, though, didn’t have the resilience of the rod, and when he pulled on the line, the fish broke the leader and was gone.

Henry gazed up into the clouds, but there was neither sunlight nor god above him.

Most of his differences with Estelle were mundane—whose cell plan was better, which of several bad-for-your-health selections to order from a dinner menu, whether or not to stay in a franchise motel or a local one. Other decisions were of greater importance, but not divisive—whether to see Tosca in New York or in Los Angeles, which surgeon to consult for his prostate removal, whether to fly to Melbourne or Sydney. He debated what to give her for birthdays and Christmas, because she didn’t need anything, so he bought a week’s time-share in Cabo San Lucas, a trip to Sun Valley, and a Napa Valley wine tour. Other decisions were non-choices—what safe car to buy, what wood to use for a new violin, and how to vote.

The decision to die was his last one, and though Estelle was its cause, he hadn’t told her. The joy of their common experiences, the lovemaking, and her beautiful presence had vanished. She’d left without explaining or discussing, and, in the wake of her absence, darkness had descended. All he knew was in April, she’d arranged for them to tour the Olympic Peninsula with a couple from Portland—camping on the beach, a hike into the rain forest, a night at a lodge in Forks. A few issues had arisen between them. She’d not come to Lopez as she’d promised, because her granddaughters had swim meets and band concerts, but how many of those had she been to? And then, driving to the coast, she’d texted for fifty miles. Still, at the beach, they’d walked with their arms around each other and admired the seastacks burnished with the last sun.

Her leaving had so undermined his confidence that he hadn’t been able to work on violins.

Without a rod he couldn’t fish, so mid-afternoon he drifted past the Kingfisher Ramp at Byington. Beyond that take-out, the river was unfamiliar to him, though he’d read about boulders and log jams—strainers, the locals called them—and the big trout that were there. Jimmy had said to take ropes and a chain saw.

Before the canyon was a lone campsite, and Henry steered toward the narrow sandy beach. Thunder sounded beyond the hills. Rough stairs were cut into the steep bank, and he lugged his gear to a bare spot on the ridge. He had no trout to fry, but he had the sausage he was saving for breakfast, leftover coleslaw, and a couple of apples. He had bourbon, too, which he poured straightaway over the last ice in his cooler.

In an hour, the rain clouds dissipated into a collage of gray, white, and blue, and it got ten degrees colder. Henry put on a fleece and perched himself on the rock a few feet up the ridge above his tent. From downriver came a low-level roar of water, but the sound was white noise, like a fan in the background. His skin still hummed from sunburn, which, along with the bourbon, gave him an odd satisfaction.

The sun came out and lit up the leaves in the high canopy across the river. An Osprey flew upstream, hovered, and dived into an eddy. For a few seconds, the bird thrashed in the water, but with a few strokes of its wings, was aloft again in the air, dangling a trout in its talons. Henry stood and clapped.

At the same time, below him, two kayaks appeared, one red and one blue, paddling toward his drift boat. The woman in the closer boat rested her paddle. “No need to applaud,” she said.

“I was clapping for the Osprey,” Henry said.

“Spectacular, eh?” said the man behind in the blue kayak. “Sorry we have to camp here. It’s the only place.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Henry said. “It used to be a free country.”

Their names were Darcy and Will, mid-twenties, both with ponytails, hers blond, his red. They’d driven from Pocatello, put in at Byington, and wanted a night together on the river. They hadn’t expected him to be camped here, anymore than he’d expected them to show up. They had a minimum of gear—a two-man tent, sleeping bags, down jackets. Fires weren’t allowed on the river, so they’d brought a cold dinner.

Henry offered wine. “A good bottle,” he said, “and I have sausage.”

“We can share mac salad,” Darcy said, “and ham steak. We have two Hershey bars we can split three ways.”

Darcy didn’t want wine, but, while they set up their camp, Will sipped some from a tin cup. Darcy spread a space blanket on the ground and put their food out. Henry drank wine while he fried the sausage and heated their ham on the stove.

Darcy and Will had met at Eastern Washington in Spokane, which was where they’d got into kayaking big rivers. She taught Pilates, and Will worked for his mother arranging events in Pocatello and Boise—concerts, conventions, family reunions, benefits. That was what Henry learned in the fading light during dinner. The wine was gone.

“So,” Henry said, “you’ve done this river section before?”

“Oh, sure,” Darcy said. “You haven’t?”

“I’ve studied it,” Henry said.

“In a drift boat, you’re in for trouble,” Will said. “The river rewrites itself every year, so you don’t know what’s coming next. The rule is to keep to the biggest channel and don’t get sucked down a dead-end braid.”

“I want thrill,” Henry said.

“Strainers aren’t thrills,” Will said. “They’re disasters.”

“Good luck,” Darcy said.

Henry ate half a dark Callebaut bar—his last chocolate—and did the dishes. Darcy and Will folded their space blanket, gave their trash to Henry to carry out for them, and walked down the steps to the river. Henry saw only the beacon from their flashlight in the dark.

He carried the last of his bourbon, glass and bottle, to the rock outcrop where he’d sat before. The river was dark, but the glow of the moon, not yet risen, lit the horizon trees with silver. Below, judging from the splashing and an occasional swear word, Darcy and Will were having sex on one of the kayaks. Henry couldn’t tell whether Darcy was saying “god,” or “Jesus,” or “fuck,” but maybe it was all three.

Henry woke in the night to a snuffling along the edge of his tent. He thought it was a bear. Dishes clattered on the camp table, and Henry peered out of the tent along the beam of his lantern. A porcupine lumbered around the table. It was an odd-shaped pincushion, slow-moving, and, after a few minutes, it sidled away into the dark.

But Henry lay awake. It was two-forty, his last morning on Earth, so he scrambled from his tent in his underwear, wrapped himself in his sleeping bag, and sat in his chair. The moon had passed across the canyon, and, in its wake the stars were wild in the sky. He picked out Leo, Cassiopeia’s Chair, Ursa Major and Minor, Polaris. He could have saved other people trouble by shooting himself now, so they wouldn’t have to look for his body, but he didn’t want to burden Darcy and Will. Besides, he’d read Hawking, Feynman, and the current astronomers’ theories of black holes and other galaxies, so the concept of eternity arose in his mind. He conjured up James Joyce’s description of the bird’s carrying away a grain of sand every million years from a mountain as big as the Earth, multiplied by the numbers of feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals. Even after the bird had carried away that enormous pile of sand, only an instant of eternity could be said to have passed.

Joyce had been describing a priest’s threat of hell to a sinner schoolboy, but, for Henry, eternity would be stillness—no sight, no smell, no taste, no feeling, no sound. When he’d spent his life making violins, how he bear no sound?

To make a violin required tedious love and the right equipment. He had jig and bandsaws, files of every grade, and dozens of glues. To Henry, glue was man’s greatest invention after the wheel, the ball-point pen, and the salad spinner. In college, he’d studied chemistry, so he concocted his own varnishes from ketones, egg whites, and crushed laurel leaves. In nature, distances were perfect, but he’d fashioned his own calipers to measure micro-distances. He learned patience, guile, and how to heed his own moods. He accustomed himself to tap tones to detect when strings were slightly off; he did minor adjustments many times over. Through his work, at least as he saw it, he had become a good man.

The stars eased away, and the sun threw up a first light onto the canyon wall. Henry, to avoid Darcy and Will, went back to his tent.

When he woke, his tent was warm from the sun, and the kayaks were gone. Breakfast was corn tortillas heated in the skillet, eggs without sausage, and salsa. He took his time loading the boat. Cranes called upriver, and swallows whirled over the water. He’d already imagined the aftermath—someone would find his empty boat turned over against the bank and would call the sheriff. His children would be informed, a search conducted, his various notes found in his studio. He’d documented the violin he had in progress and had written an apology to the purchaser. Each of his children would get a separate message of love, concern, and instruction. He’d written these notes so Estelle wouldn’t be blamed.

He balanced his gear in the boat. He had very little food left, a sack of empty bottles and beer cans, though he’d saved a few beers in cold water at the bottom of the cooler. He sat in the center seat, wrapped the pistol in his fleece, and put it at his feet.

He sat for a few minutes. The river flowed in its even, perfect rhythm, the sun illuminated the trees, and a solitaire whispered a few notes of its song. The encounter with the moose, the Osprey’s catching the trout, and the porcupine were each part of his vanishing life.

He tugged the anchor rope and floated away from the beach, untethered from the world.

In the first half-mile the river was wide, calm, and easy. But ahead was the convergence of cliffs, and the sky diminished to a funnel of blue. He heard the faster-moving water and watched a few high clouds drift above him.

The river dropped away; the canyon walls closed in. Henry worked harder on the oars. He engaged a boulder on his left, a strainer on the right, where the current plunged under a pile of logs. He pulled on one oar, let off on the other, and maneuvered through a gauntlet of rocks and logs in the midst of tons of water. Once he backpaddled furiously but got turned sideways, then backward, so he was looking upstream into the wider sky. In a five-second interval, using the power of the river, he slued the boat around but confronted, straight on, a log jam the size of a house. He yanked his left oar and was lucky to slide by.

“Good luck,” Darcy had said, but what was luck? Henry thought it was what you were left with when things turned out in your favor.

Beyond the huge boulder was a stretch of slack water that gave him a few moments’ respite, and he unwrapped the pistol and set it in his lap. But his mind was dull and blank, except for the violin he hadn’t finished—one of his best, but he said that about each of them.

The river quickened again, and the new whitewater required his full attention. The drift boat surged around boulders, bounced in the froth, cracked into a rock under the surface. The hull banged hard. Henry jerked sideways in his seat, but the boat slid around that boulder and dropped into a trough. He let go of the right oar and took hold of the pistol, but the bow hit another submerged rock, and the boat flew up at an angle into the sky.

The boat twisted in the air, and Henry fell out.

In the wild moment after, he let go of the pistol and flailed with both arms to get to the surface and to keep his head above water. The boat hadn’t turned over, but it was downriver, far beyond his reach.

He had on shorts and no shoes, so he was as light in the water as he could be. The current dragged him under and lifted him up. His legs collided with boulders under the surface. If he saw them in time, he pushed away with his hands or feet, but he couldn’t see many of them. He was underwater in a downwell, then on his back seeing the sky, then bludgeoned by a log so hard he was sure his shoulder was dislocated. He jettisoned himself away from one boulder only to crash into another.

Several times he laughed. He’d lost his pistol and was alive—what kind of joke was that? And he was struggling to stay alive. The power of the river had erased the goodbyes to his children, his resignation to leaving a good-enough life, even the darkness Estelle had left him with. Ahead was his drift boat caught sideways on a tangle of logs. He swam across the current and caught hold of the anchor rope trailing behind the boat.

***

Henry had lost his oars, but he floated in the drift boat out of the canyon. Will and Darcy were lounging at the take-out at the Heise Bridge, and Will paddled out in his kayak, but when he caught up to Henry they were past the boat ramp. Henry was hypothermic but lucid.

Darcy had called 911. The EMTs from Rigby came upriver in a motorboat. Within an hour, an ambulance took him to the hospital in Idaho Falls.

That evening, Catherine appeared. Henry was on an IV drip, sitting up and resting. Catherine hugged him and kissed his forehead. “So,” she said, “I got your note. I’m glad you didn’t do it.”

“I did do it,” Henry said, “but here I am.”

“How do you feel?”

“I don’t know. Surprised.”

The doctor said you have multiple contusions, a broken clavicle, and alcohol in your system.”

“I had my last filet, my last lobster, my last piece of chocolate.”

“I understand about Estelle,” Catherine said, “but you can’t decide . . . I mean, how is it any different now?”

“I’m older,” Henry said, “by three days.”

“When you’re more coherent, we need to talk.”

“I have to get my truck.”

“You need to relax,” Catherine said. “I have the key. I can get a ride up there.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Catherine said. “I called everyone. We all are.”

Henry drove onto the ferry at Anacortes, pulling his boat and trailer, and parked in the hold. The ferry ride was one he hadn’t expected to take again. At the start of his river trip, he’d felt as he did getting on an airplane—the future didn’t exist, that whatever he had to do later disappeared. Time stopped. But when the plane landed, the present was revived, and his projects and obligations resumed.

He locked the truck, climbed the stairs to the first deck, and, as the ferry’s engines churned out of the dock, made his way to the bow.

The San Juan Islands materialized from a gray sky like sea serpents emerging from the deep, though they had trees, hills, and rocks as the skin on their backs. Alcids skidded off the water in front of the boat, and gulls flew each way across the bow of the ferry. In the morning, at home, he’d look across at the familiar shapes on San Juan Island—the knobs of rock, trees, the horizon of land and sky. He’d flick on the coffeemaker and go out to his studio, where he had a violin to finish and set free.

---

Kent Nelson’s collection, The Spirit Bird, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and his stories have twice been included in The Best American Short Stories and twice in The Best American Mystery Stories. His novel, Language in the Blood won the Edward Abbey Prize for Ecofiction. He has identified 771 species of birds in North America and has run the Pikes Peak Marathon twice. He lives in Ouray, Colorado. His website is KentNelsonWriter.com.