Ships Passing in the Night
Colin Clancy
My
dad broke his neck diving from a cliff into the Dead River in Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula. Every summer day dozens of
people leap from that spot, but that day a log from upriver had lodged itself
under the cliff, just below the frothing whitewater. I was ten, standing on the rocks above,
barefoot, in swim trunks, waiting for Dad to resurface so I could jump.
I don’t remember much after that except for my mom screaming. The only word she said was, “no.” I saw men climbing down the rock, and the next thing I remember is sitting, confused, in the passenger seat of a pickup truck belonging to one of the volunteer firemen. The cab smelled funny, and later, in college, when a buddy offered me a pinch of Skoal chewing tobacco, I felt a rush in my stomach of the sick, panicked confusion I had felt sitting in that truck as the firemen fished my dad’s body from the water.
After he died, Mom moved us from the U.P. downstate to suburban Detroit where she had grown up. She didn’t talk about him much, not at all really, and none of us had been back up here until now.
I sat in a booth by myself. It was the restaurant where my parents had met, though I didn’t know it at the time. I sipped coffee and watched the little red light blinking on my cell phone. I knew it was a voicemail from my sister, Kathy, wondering if I had arrived. She’d called three times during the eight-hour drive, and I was glad when I got to the Upper Peninsula and my phone’s signal cut out.
Kathy had been playing at a friend’s house the day Dad died, and though she never said it, I knew she had always felt bad for not being with the family. She was supposed to be here with me on this trip, but she bailed at the last minute, scared to leave her husband and two baby girls home alone for the first time.
I lit a cigarette, though I didn’t usually smoke. I’d had an urge to buy a pack at the gas station in St. Ignace after I crossed the Mackinac Bridge, and I asked the attendant for a pack of Camels because I remembered the cartoon animal in the leather jacket from my youth.
Crossing the bridge, the five-mile span connecting Michigan’s peninsulas, I had looked down into the Straits of Mackinac and saw a freighter powering west toward Lake Michigan. Dad had worked on one of these boats while he dated my mom. He’d been a porter, an assistant to the cook in the galley of the ship as it hauled iron ore from Marquette and Duluth, through the Soo Locks, down to places like Chicago and Conneaut and Gary.
Now I studied the black and white photographs covering the restaurant’s wall: the massive iron ore dock in lower harbor, a group of people standing on an unpaved Washington Street admiring a taxidermy bear standing on its hind legs, and a team of sled dogs, their musher standing in fur boots in the foreground, staring into the camera. This man with dark piercing eyes looked more alive than anyone I’ve ever seen. I wondered if the pictures I had been sent up here to take would have even a fraction of that resonance.
I picked up my phone and dialed Kathy.
“Where are you?” she answered.
“I’m here.”
“Good. Mom will be glad to know. You starting tonight?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It was a long drive. I’ll start in the morning.”
She wished me luck then hung up. I pulled the folded piece of paper out of my pocket and spread it out on the table, struggling to read my mother’s scribbled handwriting.
Mom got sick a few months ago: pneumonia. The doctors said she’d be fine. They said she was young, said she’d pull through, but she still hadn’t gotten any better, and I think she got scared. I sat in the hospital room one night watching the Tiger game while she slept. She woke up startled and scribbled the list. I knew the places she had written – remembered them from my childhood – ships in the ore dock out by Presque Isle, our old house on Front Street, the Anchor Inn, Hogsback Mountain where we used to hike as a family. Kathy always got tired on those hikes and she and Mom would turn around and head back to the car. Dad and I raced to the top. The last thing on the list was Dead River Falls.
“What’s this?” I’d asked.
“Places.”
“I know. They’re places in Marquette. Why?”
“They’re places that were important,” she’d said, her speech quiet and slow. “To me and your father. I’ve spent so much time trying to forget that now I can’t remember.
“Well wasn’t that the point?”
She didn’t speak for a minute, just shook her head, tears on her cheeks.
“I want to remember,” she had said. “I want the memories back.”
I wanted them too. All I had ever gotten from my mom when I mentioned Dad was silence, and I wanted him to be something more to us than some forbidden subject. I resented her for that, but she was my mom, and she was sick, so I reached out and held her hand.
Then she sent me on this mission, sent me back to the U.P. to take photographs of places she wanted to remember.
I paid my tab and drove to the hotel. I’d wanted to camp to save money, but Mom insisted on getting me a room. She’d had Kathy reserve one at a nice hotel downtown, overlooking Lake Superior. I clicked on the T.V. and flipped it to the Tiger game. They were playing in Cleveland, wearing their gray uniforms with the script Detroit across the chest, the grays from a time when teams on the road couldn’t wash their jerseys between games. Gray showed less dirt.
I felt antsy sitting there on the hotel bed watching the game, and by the fifth inning I had to get out of the room. I shut off the television and took the elevator down to the bar. There were plenty of empty barstools, but I opted for a booth, not wanting to deal with small talk.
I ordered a beer. The waitress looked familiar. I knew that she had been one of my classmates, a friend; I was sure of that. But I couldn’t remember the name of the third grade girl this woman had once been.
She set the beer on the table. “You’re Dillon Feathers, aren’t you?”
Her voice triggered my memory. It was different, older, but something in it was the same. “Constance Welliver,” I said. She had been my neighbor, her family two houses down from my own. She had a younger brother and a tree fort in the yard, and I used to walk with Kathy over there to play.
She sat down across from me. “You just left,” she said. “Here in August, gone in September.”
“Yeah,” I said, “we moved pretty quick.”
“I remember. That must have been hard.”
I knew she meant my dad’s death. It must have been big news up here.
“What brings you back?” she asked.
I didn’t want to explain the whole photo thing, mostly because I wasn’t sure that I really understood it. “Just visiting,” I said.
“You’re visiting? Sitting alone at a bar?”
“Good point.” It was nice having this familiar face, this friend, across the table, and I was afraid that I seemed rude.
“Actually I just wanted to see the place again. My sister was supposed to come with. She backed out, so I came alone.” I took a drink. “What’s new with you?” It was a stupid question. We hadn’t seen each other since we were ten years old. Everything was new.
“Oh you know – went to college down in Lansing for a year, lived in Chicago for a bit, then New Mexico. I almost stayed there.”
“New Mexico?”
“Albuquerque.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“I missed it here, missed the lake. It’s beautiful out there, but it’s not Michigan.”
“Do your parents still live there on Front Street?”
“They sold the house after they divorced. Mom and my stepdad have a house out by the casino, and my real dad lives out west somewhere.” She looked around the restaurant then turned back to me. “What about you? A job? A wife? Kids?”
“No wife. No kids. I work at a real estate office in Detroit.”
“Selling houses?”
“Filing papers.”
An old couple across the restaurant had finished eating. They looked around for Constance, and she stood up. “I get off in a bit. If you’re still here we’ll have a drink together.”
“Sounds great,” I said.
The Tigers were up to bat in the ninth inning, the score tied, and I didn’t want the game to be over.
I always hoped for extra innings; not just a tenth, but an eleventh, a twelfth, a sixteenth. And sometimes I wondered how long the umpires would let it go if the tie was never broken, if no one scored, or if in the bottom of every inning the home team matched, run for run, what the visitors had put up in the top. Once every pitcher in both bullpens had thrown his share, would the right fielders be called to the mound? Sure, I always wanted the Tigers to win, but when they manufactured a run in the top of the ninth – a bloop single from the leadoff man, a stolen second base, a bunt to get him to third, and a sac fly to score him, I hoped the Indians would score one too, but they didn’t.
Constance set a full beer in front of me with a smile, but she still had tables. I continued to stare at the TV, seeing the game recap without really paying attention to it. When the baseball broadcast was over I pulled my mom’s list from my pocket, unfolded it, and laid it out on the table, smoothing it flat with my palm.
“What’s that?” Constance asked as she sat down, a beer in each hand.
“This is why I’m here,” I said, spinning the paper around to face her. She read it.
“I don’t get it.”
I explained my mom’s mission to her. “That’s cool,” she said.
“It is?”
“Yeah. That she wants to remember that stuff.”
“I suppose. I don’t even remember how to get to half these places, though.”
She reread the list. “I know all this stuff. I don’t work tomorrow. Maybe I could go with you. Show you around a bit.”
The offer pleased me, not just because it would make the project easier, but because there was something comforting in this girl. She’d been part of my childhood, and now she sat across from me like there hadn’t been an eighteen year gap in our friendship. We finished our drinks and agreed to meet in the hotel lobby at nine o’clock the next morning.
I slept well and woke early as the rising sun from the eastern end of Lake Superior hit the window. I showered then headed downstairs well before I was supposed to meet Constance. I sat in an overstuffed leather couch in the hotel lobby and sipped coffee. Constance showed up early and poured herself a cup. She wore a tank top instead of her work polo, and rather than the pony tail she had had last night, her light brown hair fell long and straight to her shoulders. She looked like the young girl I’d known, pretty and tan from a summer spent by the lake.
“I thought we could take a look at the old house,” I said, “then maybe hike Hogsback. I remember the hike but don’t remember how to get there.”
“Perfect.”
“I don’t want you to feel like a tour guide, though.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s my pleasure.”
In the car we talked about our elementary school teachers, most of whom I’d forgotten. I felt strange driving through this town that I had known as a kid. It seemed smaller watching it pass through the windshield instead of over handlebars. I knew exactly where the house was, just up the road from our hotel. As we passed Constance’s old house she glanced out the window but didn’t say anything. The yellow paint of my own family’s house had been painted baby blue, but I still recognized it.
I parked in the driveway and stepped out of the car, not really feeling any emotion. It was just a house. I imagined Kathy, though, walking around the yard in silence, running her fingers through the leaves of the trees in the side yard.
“I came to your birthday party here once,” Constance said. “I remember playing games in the backyard. And you had a slip and slide.”
“Mom got so mad at my dad for buying me that,” I said. “She always thought I’d break my leg or something playing on it.”
We walked around the side of the house and into the tiny backyard.
“You opened presents right back there.” She motioned to where a picnic table had once been. “I got you a Ninja Turtles costume.”
“Michelangelo,” I said. It had been an orange mask with a big green nose and plastic nunchucks. It got lost in the move.
I stood in the grass a minute, picturing the cake and balloons and kids in swimsuits and my father underhanding us wiffleballs. Then we walked back to the car and I opened the door to get back in, forgetting the real reason we came here until I saw the camera sitting on the dashboard. Mom had bought one of those cardboard disposables even though I had a digital. I took two pictures of the house from different angles. Then Constance took one of me standing in front. I hoped the current residents were gone and not inside, wondering what the hell we were doing in their yard.
Back in the car Constance directed us to 550 where we drove north out of town. We stopped at a railroad crossing where a slow moving train hauled pellets of taconite iron ore out toward the lake. The road passed the houses on the outskirts of town and then curved through woods along the shoreline, which we could see in the gaps between trees. We drove past Sugarloaf Mountain with its wooden sign and parking lot. We’d hiked there sometimes as kids, but it never seemed like real hiking to me because of the crowds of people and the stairs built on the steeper sections of the trail. This drive always felt like it took forever, but we pulled off the road into the unmarked Hogsback trailhead only ten minutes after leaving town.
Constance put the water bottle she had been holding into a small backpack and draped it over her shoulders. I followed her into the woods, the trail at first well-worn, making the blue dots spray painted on occasional tree trunks unnecessary.
The flat first section wound into thickening trees, and for a moment I felt like I had as a boy, like we were on some grand adventure. Then I realized the notion was silly, that a twenty-eight year old man walking up some hill in northern Michigan, not even a mountain really, was nothing special.
Constance walked in long strides with athletic hops over rocks that jutted from the ground. I admired the way she seemed so natural, so at ease. I stayed a few steps behind as droplets of sweat formed and trickled down my lower back until the cotton of my soaked t-shirt clung to my skin. We crossed a small wooden bridge over a creek bed, the creek now, in late summer, just a trickle. Then we came to a wide slab of rock, unshaded from the August sun so that it felt hot under the soles of my shoes. Without the trees, though, the mountain’s peak appeared in the distance, still several hundred vertical feet above us. We stopped for a moment as I took the camera and bottle from her pack and snapped a photo.
“You seem to know what you’re doing out here,” I said as Constance unscrewed the lid of the bottle and sipped. She handed it to me.
“This is sort of my place,” she said. “It sounds dumb, but I come out here by myself a lot, just to walk and think and pretend the world’s not there.”
“Not dumb,” I said, and I wished that I’d had this my whole life, nature rather than endless suburbia, where ten minutes of driving could get me out here. Now all it got me was into traffic on I-94.
Constance walked slower but still with the same control. The trail steepened through a forest of large pines, their trunks spread out so that the trail became wider and less worn. The trees stood so wide and tall that they blocked out the sun, cooling the air and making the midday look like dusk. The blue dots on the trees were now necessary and spaced at intervals a minute’s walk apart, so that I kept wondering if we’d veered in the wrong direction. I trusted Constance, though, and believed that if anyone knew the way, she did.
Ahead, she stepped carefully, using tree roots and rocks as steps and grabbing trunks with one hand to swing herself around. The trail steepened again. I tried hard to keep from breathing heavy, I guess to make Constance think that I did this sort of thing every day.
I heard running water up ahead. Constance stopped next to a bend in the creek where the water made a tight turn, crashing over itself, then splitting to either side of a log blocking its path. I leaned against a tree, feeling my lungs burning, and I wished I had kept myself in better shape.
She turned her back to me. I unzipped her pack and took out the water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and handed it to her. She drank, and then I did.
“Bring back any memories?” she asked.
I nodded. My dad and I were always the first ones to the creek. We’d sit here and wait for my mom and sister. They were always content making it this far, and this is where they’d turn around. As for my dad, though, and for me, we weren’t happy until we were standing on the summit, on the highest bump of the peak, above the trees and above the birds that sometimes soared over the treetops like they were surveying their territory, so that only the clouds were above us.
We followed the rushing creek for a ways and then parted from it, catching our first view of Lake Superior far below in the gaps between the trees. I knew, remembered, that we were almost to the top. We scrambled up a steep rocky section, using hands and feet to keep balance then ran up the last, smooth, rock face in a few long strides.
Constance put her arm around me, a sort of congratulations for making it to the top, though I knew it was no big feat. We sat on a pinnacle of rock with our feet dangling off into nothingness, the way I had done with my dad years before. I felt dizzy, out of breath, exhausted, but that soon faded, and I felt good again, felt like I had accomplished something.
The solid mass of water looked so calm hundreds of feet below, a single ship out on the water, coming or going I couldn’t tell. In the distance I could see the town of Marquette: the hospital, the wooden dome football stadium at the college, and the smoke stacks down by the ore dock, their white clouds billowing into the blue sky, drifting for miles in the breeze. Out there to the west, away from town, beyond the green treetops blanketed below, stood several smaller peaks, then a blue ridge, and behind that more ridges, each one lighter shades of blue then gray as they faded to the horizon.
Constance handed me the disposable camera and I stood to take the pictures, first taking one of the lake. The I turned a little and took another and another until all three hundred sixty degrees had been photographed, knowing though that four by six photos could never do the view justice. Constance took one of me with the lake in the background, then, even though it was my mom’s camera, I took one of her.
“Why do you think my mom wants pictures from here?” I asked. “I mean, she never climbed all the way to the top. She always turned around with Kathy.”
“You don’t think she ever came up here with your dad? I mean before they had you?”
I guessed that she probably had, and I felt something like guilt in forgetting that my parents had lives before me, that maybe she would have loved to climb all the way to the top, but turned around to be a good mother to Kathy or to let me and my father have the summit, just us boys.
I dropped Constance off with plans to pick her up for dinner that evening at the Anchor Inn, another of the places on Mom’s list, though I didn’t know its significance. I parked in the hotel lot, but rather than go up to my room, I walked down to the lake. I knew a rocky little cove between the breakwall and the Coast Guard station. The herds of sunbathers, now in August just beginning to tan, would be further down, where the beach was sandy.
I stripped down to my boxer shorts and stepped into the lake, the frigid water numbing my feet and legs as I waded further in, avoiding the black rocks that poked through the surface. The water remained shallow for a long ways, and my stomach muscles tensed as it neared my groin.
In up to my waist, I pushed off of the now sandy bottom and dove. The cold enveloped me, and I let it take over. I opened my eyes and could see bottom in the transparent water. I stroked, strong and deliberate, my chest grazing the sand. Then I took several more strokes, pulling myself below the surface out toward open water until my lungs burned for air.
Back in my room I flipped on the TV to the last game of the Detroit - Cleveland series, the Tigers down by a run in the second inning. Dad took me to my first game on my tenth birthday, about a month before he died. He took a photo of me standing on the corner of Michigan and Trumble with the old Tiger Stadium’s baby blue façade in the background. The picture is still on an end table in my mom’s house, me with skinny, tanned legs and a huge smile and a baseball mitt way too big.
I’d watched so many games on television, or listened to them on the radio, but walking into that stadium was different, so huge with grass so perfectly green and the crack of bats resonating as the team took batting practice.
Dad was going to buy tickets at the gate, but as we walked to the stadium some guy with season tickets told us he couldn’t make it to the game and gave us his. Dad tried to pay him, but he wouldn’t take the money.
The seats were on the third base line, front row. We set our hotdogs and Cokes on top of the dugout and could hear the players talking inside. Between innings some of the players came out to talk to fans, but I was too nervous. Dad went up to Cecil and got him to sign our program. I tacked that program on the wall next to my bed, another thing that got lost in the move.
On my cell phone, still plugged into the wall, the red light blinked, and I looked to see two missed calls and a voicemail from Kathy. I didn’t bother to listen to the message, but called her back, not really wanting to talk, but knowing that she would keep calling until I answered.
“Where were you?” she asked after the first ring, not even a greeting.
“Taking pictures. Went for a swim.”
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“I didn’t have my phone.”
“Oh,” she said, “you should have had it on you.”
“Sorry. It wouldn’t have had service.”
“Well, how’s it going anyway?”
I told her it was fine, that I’d gotten pictures of the house and of Hogsback. I didn’t mention Constance.
“Do you remember it at all?” she asked, “The town? The house?”
I told her I did.
“Really?”
“Of course I remember,” I said. “I lived here for ten years.”
She paused, didn’t say anything, but I could hear her breathing, and I wondered if she felt guilty, if she felt like she should be here after all. “Well anyway,” she said, “Mom wants you to call her. She’s been bugging me to know how you’re doing.”
When I hung up Cleveland had the bases loaded with one out, and the Tigs had just called in a relief pitcher. The game cut to a commercial and I dialed Mom’s hospital room.
She answered quickly too. I told her where I’d been so far, and she said, “oh?” like there was more for me to say.
“Yeah,” I said. “The house is blue now. I almost didn’t recognize it.”
“Blue? That sounds nice. I always meant to paint over that ugly yellow. How’s my ivy?”
“Your ivy?”
“Around the sugar maples out front. I planted it just before, well just before we moved. It must be all the way up the trunks by now.”
“Yeah,” I said, “all the way,” though I hadn’t noticed any ivy. I hoped it would be visible in the pictures. “So what’s this Anchor Inn place? I’m going there tonight.”
“It’s that restaurant on Washington Street. We used to take you kids there all the time.”
“Yeah, I remember it, but why’s it on the list?”
“That’s where your father and I met,” she said. “I waitressed there in college and one winter Dad worked as a line cook on the weekends. He asked me out on the first night we worked together. I said no.”
This was the first time I had heard this story, and was surprised that they’d never told it on any of the Friday dinners we had there as kids. Or more likely they had talked about it, and I hadn’t paid attention. This was also the first time I could remember my mom just calling him Dad. It had always been, “your dad,” or “your father.”
“Why’d you say no?” I asked.
“I didn’t know him yet. He worked on the boats, so I thought he must have a girl in every port or something. But he was persistent. We went out together a few times as friends with people from the restaurant. Then eventually I told him I wanted to be more than friends.” She paused for a minute. “I begged him not to go back to the boat that spring, but he said that the money was good, that he’d be back soon enough. I never thought it was about the money, though. I think he thought of it as some big adventure.”
“But you guys stayed together? Even after he left?”
“We did,” she said, taking a deep breath. “We’d write letters back and forth, and spend a few hours at a time together whenever he was in town waiting for the boat to be loaded. He’d have a few weeks off in the summer where we’d be together nonstop. Sometimes I drove to the Soo to spend an hour with him as his boat locked through. Once I drove home and met him for a baseball game.” She paused for a minute, and neither of us said anything. This was the deepest conversation I’d ever had with her about my dad, about anything really. I wanted her to keep going. Then she broke the silence, “We dated like that for three years, seeing each other in sporadic bursts. When he asked me to marry him, I said only if we could really be together. He said of course, and he didn’t go back to the boat the next spring.”
I thought she might mention Dead River Falls, but she didn’t, and I was kind of glad for that. Before we hung up, I asked her how she was feeling. She said better.
I watched the rest of the game even though the Tigers were down by five, then left to pick up Constance. On the way to the restaurant I told her the story of how my parents had met, which she said was cute.
The Anchor Inn somehow seemed different knowing my parents’ story, not just some restaurant with old pictures on the wall, but something almost sacred. Constance was cheerful, and I felt that way too, like there was some kind of purpose to this trip. I ordered a beer and Constance got a glass of wine. The waiter brought my bottle and a frosted mug. I poured then clanked my glass against hers.
“Here’s to your parents,” she said. “And to this mission of yours.”
“This mission is almost over,” I said, “just the ore dock tonight and the river tomorrow. Are you coming with me to the falls?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes I do.”
“Of course I’ll come. How do you think your little Toyota’s going to make it back there, anyway? We’ll take my Jeep.”
I smiled at her, trying to make it appear as sincere as I felt. I’d never been able to make a real looking smile. I knew she wanted me to say something about going to the place of my father’s death, to say how I felt about it, but I really didn’t know how to feel; whether I should be nervous, whether tomorrow should be sad or joyful, or if it should just be me being a dutiful son by completing the task on which my mother had sent me.
I looked at the wall, studying a color photo of the Edmund Fitzgerald floating in a harbor’s calm waters. Then I turned back to Constance. “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”
“Of course,” she said.
After dinner I got out the camera and, from the doorway, took one picture of the restaurant’s interior, getting strange looks from the other patrons. Outside, I took one of the hanging anchor-shaped sign, and Constance took one of the front of the building, me standing next to the wooden door with it’s porthole window.
We drove north of town, following the lakeshore, toward the Presque Isle ore dock where an immense freighter floated in the still water. Tourists parked in a paved lot next to the dock, watching the ship and taking pictures, but instead we parked a half-mile away and walked out onto the beach.
A few families spread out on blankets in the sand, but the sun was low in the sky behind us, so no one was left in the water. The group closest to us began to pack up just as we got there, and as we walked the damp stretch where the water met the sand, ripples lapping at our toes, the few remaining families got up and left, and the lights of the ship and the dock burned into the dusk. On the ship’s deck a crewman walked, in silhouette, along the railing.
“The crew of Dad’s boat came to the funeral,” I said. Constance reached over and touched my hand. I held hers. “Afterwards, they all shook my hand and told me they were sorry, that my dad had been a great man. I’d never had men shake my hand before that, and I remember how strong and big their hands felt.”
The sky darkened as we approached the ship. I took out the camera and snapped several photos, the cardboard camera’s small flash bursting, but illuminating nothing but air. I didn’t know if the photos would turn out but didn’t really care. I’d buy a postcard.
We followed the shore as close as we could to the dock, until only the Dead River separated us, flat and calm here as it bled into Superior. We were close enough now that we could hear the grind of railroad cars on top of the dock and the tons of taconite pellets spilling down iron chutes into the ship’s belly.
We sat down on the beach and watched the ship as the sky darkened to navy. A blinking red light at the end of the breakwall mirrored on the glass water, as did the crescent moon.
Constance rested her head on my shoulder, and her hair, floating in the gentle breeze, tickled my face. I hummed the melody of a song my Dad used to sing, remembering the lyrics in my head: I see the moon and the moon sees me. The moon sees someone that I would like to see. So God bless the moon and God bless me, and God bless the someone that I would like to see.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve travelled quite a bit; out west, Costa Rica, Australia.”
“You’ve been to Australia?”
“I dated a guy from there. Went to visit him. It didn’t last long, but it was a pretty place; different, you know?”
I nodded, but I didn’t know. Travel for me had been the two hour drive to Cedar Point to ride the roller coasters. I hadn’t even made the effort to come up here, the same state even, to where I had grown up. I regretted that.
“As awesome and exotic and foreign as those places where,” she said, “when I was there, I always thought about this. About home.”
Then we sat there without speaking for a long time, looking out at the lake and at the ship until its horn blasted and the massive boat began to back from the dock. It slowly turned and picked up speed as it passed the breakwall and moved out to open water. I watched the lights of the ship become smaller and smaller out in the blackness, and an hour later, when they were just shimmering specks that I suspected were creations of my mind, I looked at Constance and didn’t know how long she had been asleep.
I lay down on the sand, guiding her sleeping body down with me. She woke at the movement, kissed me on the cheek, then fell asleep again.
I woke to the sound of gulls and the first trace of morning light. We lay on our sides, facing each other, limbs intertwined. A cool breeze coated us in loose sand, and I shivered as I sat up and looked out at the lake. No sliver of sun yet broke the horizon, but the sky to the east held a faint glow and the lights of an approaching ship sparkled on the water. I wondered how closely the two vessels had passed and if the sailors aboard last night’s ship had seen the lights of this one out there in all that darkness.
I paced the hotel lobby waiting for Constance to pick me up for the ride to the falls. I’d been to the Dead River a few times as a kid, but the only time I really remember was the last. I didn’t know if the spot had held any other significance to my parents, or if my mom just wanted photos of the place my dad spent his final moments, the rocks on which he had taken is last steps out to the overhanging cliff, and the frothing water that sucked his life away. I hadn’t asked, but I hoped for my mom’s sake that Dead River Falls had been the first place they’d gone together with friends from the restaurant, or the location of their first kiss, or where my dad had proposed, instead of just where he died.
I didn’t know what to wear. I put on a t-shirt and a pair of board shorts, but given the circumstances, I thought that funeral attire might have been more appropriate. I climbed into the Jeep, a black Wrangler with no top or doors. Constance sat in the driver’s seat wearing a sundress over a bikini top.
“Ready?” she asked, reaching over and grabbing my hand.
“As ready as I’m gonna be.”
She drove north toward the ore dock then west on Wright Street, paralleling the river, though we couldn’t see it through the trees. I hoped that it would just be us at the falls, but I knew that on an August afternoon it would probably be crowded.
We turned off into Forestville on a dirt road that crossed the tracks and climbed through trees to a power-line clearing that overlooked the distant lake. Then we turned off onto a two-track blocked by large boulders. The Jeep was small enough, though, that Constance managed to fit between the rocks, leaving an inch or so on either side. She shifted into four-wheel-drive and climbed the sandy power-line trail, keeping speed so that with each bump I floated above the seat, held close by the seatbelt.
She stopped at a rocky incline and we got out to scout the way. I stood in the tall grass beside the trail, guiding Constance as she slowly drove up the rock. I got back in the Jeep for more sand and a blast through a deep puddle that sprayed water up and over the Jeep, some of it splashing in through the vehicle’s doorless sides. The wiper blades smeared the mud for a few swipes before the washer fluid cut through the mess.
She parked at the top of a hill at the edge of the woods next to a lifted pickup. The section of river that we could see was more like a pond, flat and calm and wide, the only sign of movement being a patch of foam slowly swirling in an eddy on the opposite bank. I could hear the falls, though, through the pines, a dull tinny roar, like a bottom of the ninth crowd in a pennant race game spilling out of our old black and white TV in the basement of the Front Street house.
I took her hand and followed the noise. The falls were smaller than I remembered, not the one straight plunge that I had in my memory, but a series of smaller drops and pillowed churning water.
The jumping rock was at the bottom of the falls, overhanging the foaming spot where the last of the whitewater spilled into the river. Four college boys stood, dripping, in a line on the rock while two girls in bikinis sat on beach towels away from the edge. The girls sipped cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, watching the boys, egging them on. The first one jumped feet first off the rock, and then too soon, not a second later, I heard his splash over the roar of the water. The drop was not big, maybe ten feet, closer to the water than the tallest diving platform at the Y. I had sometimes thought that maybe Dad had been reckless that day, but he wasn’t. That fallen driftwood log was just an unlucky turn of events, a freak accident.
The girls cheered as the second boy took three steps of a running start and hurled himself off the rock in a front flip, then they laughed as the last kid in line pushed the second-to-last off the edge and jumped in himself. I stood back with Constance, watching but not getting too close. The screams of the boys carried from below where they sat on rocks half-submerged in the water, the current holding them to their seats. They yelled at the girls to jump, and one of them did, holding her bikini top to keep it from falling as she leapt, screaming, off the edge.
We sat in the shade of a large pine as the kids jumped a few more times, finally getting the last girl to her feet out on the rock. She stood there a long time inching closer to the edge. We were too far away to see her trembling, but I imagined that she was. The boys cheered her on for a while, and the girl said, “It’s not that bad. It’s fun.” But they grew bored at her fear. As they grabbed their towels and empties, I thought she would come back from the edge, but she jumped, and we heard her laughter from below when she resurfaced.
The group followed a trail downriver to a taller cliff, one I had heard of as a kid, but that my father had never taken me to, and Constance and I were alone. I stood up and walked out onto the rock. Constance followed. I took off my shoes and felt the rough texture on my feet and gripped the ridges of stone with my toes. I stepped to the edge and looked down into the white froth and I felt Constance behind me. We didn’t speak but I knew she was there. I sensed her, and that comforted me.
I imagined Dad standing here. I pictured him looking down at the water, then at me and saying, “Don’t be scared, buddy. Just watch me and do what I do,” then glancing back at my mom and pushing off, not feet first, but a head first dive because Mom was watching, and like the boys we had just seen, he was trying to impress. I pictured him taking a final breath, a deep gasp, like he knew it would be his last. Then I watched him on his way down, arms out, falling.
I don’t remember much after that except for my mom screaming. The only word she said was, “no.” I saw men climbing down the rock, and the next thing I remember is sitting, confused, in the passenger seat of a pickup truck belonging to one of the volunteer firemen. The cab smelled funny, and later, in college, when a buddy offered me a pinch of Skoal chewing tobacco, I felt a rush in my stomach of the sick, panicked confusion I had felt sitting in that truck as the firemen fished my dad’s body from the water.
After he died, Mom moved us from the U.P. downstate to suburban Detroit where she had grown up. She didn’t talk about him much, not at all really, and none of us had been back up here until now.
I sat in a booth by myself. It was the restaurant where my parents had met, though I didn’t know it at the time. I sipped coffee and watched the little red light blinking on my cell phone. I knew it was a voicemail from my sister, Kathy, wondering if I had arrived. She’d called three times during the eight-hour drive, and I was glad when I got to the Upper Peninsula and my phone’s signal cut out.
Kathy had been playing at a friend’s house the day Dad died, and though she never said it, I knew she had always felt bad for not being with the family. She was supposed to be here with me on this trip, but she bailed at the last minute, scared to leave her husband and two baby girls home alone for the first time.
I lit a cigarette, though I didn’t usually smoke. I’d had an urge to buy a pack at the gas station in St. Ignace after I crossed the Mackinac Bridge, and I asked the attendant for a pack of Camels because I remembered the cartoon animal in the leather jacket from my youth.
Crossing the bridge, the five-mile span connecting Michigan’s peninsulas, I had looked down into the Straits of Mackinac and saw a freighter powering west toward Lake Michigan. Dad had worked on one of these boats while he dated my mom. He’d been a porter, an assistant to the cook in the galley of the ship as it hauled iron ore from Marquette and Duluth, through the Soo Locks, down to places like Chicago and Conneaut and Gary.
Now I studied the black and white photographs covering the restaurant’s wall: the massive iron ore dock in lower harbor, a group of people standing on an unpaved Washington Street admiring a taxidermy bear standing on its hind legs, and a team of sled dogs, their musher standing in fur boots in the foreground, staring into the camera. This man with dark piercing eyes looked more alive than anyone I’ve ever seen. I wondered if the pictures I had been sent up here to take would have even a fraction of that resonance.
I picked up my phone and dialed Kathy.
“Where are you?” she answered.
“I’m here.”
“Good. Mom will be glad to know. You starting tonight?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “It was a long drive. I’ll start in the morning.”
She wished me luck then hung up. I pulled the folded piece of paper out of my pocket and spread it out on the table, struggling to read my mother’s scribbled handwriting.
Mom got sick a few months ago: pneumonia. The doctors said she’d be fine. They said she was young, said she’d pull through, but she still hadn’t gotten any better, and I think she got scared. I sat in the hospital room one night watching the Tiger game while she slept. She woke up startled and scribbled the list. I knew the places she had written – remembered them from my childhood – ships in the ore dock out by Presque Isle, our old house on Front Street, the Anchor Inn, Hogsback Mountain where we used to hike as a family. Kathy always got tired on those hikes and she and Mom would turn around and head back to the car. Dad and I raced to the top. The last thing on the list was Dead River Falls.
“What’s this?” I’d asked.
“Places.”
“I know. They’re places in Marquette. Why?”
“They’re places that were important,” she’d said, her speech quiet and slow. “To me and your father. I’ve spent so much time trying to forget that now I can’t remember.
“Well wasn’t that the point?”
She didn’t speak for a minute, just shook her head, tears on her cheeks.
“I want to remember,” she had said. “I want the memories back.”
I wanted them too. All I had ever gotten from my mom when I mentioned Dad was silence, and I wanted him to be something more to us than some forbidden subject. I resented her for that, but she was my mom, and she was sick, so I reached out and held her hand.
Then she sent me on this mission, sent me back to the U.P. to take photographs of places she wanted to remember.
I paid my tab and drove to the hotel. I’d wanted to camp to save money, but Mom insisted on getting me a room. She’d had Kathy reserve one at a nice hotel downtown, overlooking Lake Superior. I clicked on the T.V. and flipped it to the Tiger game. They were playing in Cleveland, wearing their gray uniforms with the script Detroit across the chest, the grays from a time when teams on the road couldn’t wash their jerseys between games. Gray showed less dirt.
I felt antsy sitting there on the hotel bed watching the game, and by the fifth inning I had to get out of the room. I shut off the television and took the elevator down to the bar. There were plenty of empty barstools, but I opted for a booth, not wanting to deal with small talk.
I ordered a beer. The waitress looked familiar. I knew that she had been one of my classmates, a friend; I was sure of that. But I couldn’t remember the name of the third grade girl this woman had once been.
She set the beer on the table. “You’re Dillon Feathers, aren’t you?”
Her voice triggered my memory. It was different, older, but something in it was the same. “Constance Welliver,” I said. She had been my neighbor, her family two houses down from my own. She had a younger brother and a tree fort in the yard, and I used to walk with Kathy over there to play.
She sat down across from me. “You just left,” she said. “Here in August, gone in September.”
“Yeah,” I said, “we moved pretty quick.”
“I remember. That must have been hard.”
I knew she meant my dad’s death. It must have been big news up here.
“What brings you back?” she asked.
I didn’t want to explain the whole photo thing, mostly because I wasn’t sure that I really understood it. “Just visiting,” I said.
“You’re visiting? Sitting alone at a bar?”
“Good point.” It was nice having this familiar face, this friend, across the table, and I was afraid that I seemed rude.
“Actually I just wanted to see the place again. My sister was supposed to come with. She backed out, so I came alone.” I took a drink. “What’s new with you?” It was a stupid question. We hadn’t seen each other since we were ten years old. Everything was new.
“Oh you know – went to college down in Lansing for a year, lived in Chicago for a bit, then New Mexico. I almost stayed there.”
“New Mexico?”
“Albuquerque.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“I missed it here, missed the lake. It’s beautiful out there, but it’s not Michigan.”
“Do your parents still live there on Front Street?”
“They sold the house after they divorced. Mom and my stepdad have a house out by the casino, and my real dad lives out west somewhere.” She looked around the restaurant then turned back to me. “What about you? A job? A wife? Kids?”
“No wife. No kids. I work at a real estate office in Detroit.”
“Selling houses?”
“Filing papers.”
An old couple across the restaurant had finished eating. They looked around for Constance, and she stood up. “I get off in a bit. If you’re still here we’ll have a drink together.”
“Sounds great,” I said.
The Tigers were up to bat in the ninth inning, the score tied, and I didn’t want the game to be over.
I always hoped for extra innings; not just a tenth, but an eleventh, a twelfth, a sixteenth. And sometimes I wondered how long the umpires would let it go if the tie was never broken, if no one scored, or if in the bottom of every inning the home team matched, run for run, what the visitors had put up in the top. Once every pitcher in both bullpens had thrown his share, would the right fielders be called to the mound? Sure, I always wanted the Tigers to win, but when they manufactured a run in the top of the ninth – a bloop single from the leadoff man, a stolen second base, a bunt to get him to third, and a sac fly to score him, I hoped the Indians would score one too, but they didn’t.
Constance set a full beer in front of me with a smile, but she still had tables. I continued to stare at the TV, seeing the game recap without really paying attention to it. When the baseball broadcast was over I pulled my mom’s list from my pocket, unfolded it, and laid it out on the table, smoothing it flat with my palm.
“What’s that?” Constance asked as she sat down, a beer in each hand.
“This is why I’m here,” I said, spinning the paper around to face her. She read it.
“I don’t get it.”
I explained my mom’s mission to her. “That’s cool,” she said.
“It is?”
“Yeah. That she wants to remember that stuff.”
“I suppose. I don’t even remember how to get to half these places, though.”
She reread the list. “I know all this stuff. I don’t work tomorrow. Maybe I could go with you. Show you around a bit.”
The offer pleased me, not just because it would make the project easier, but because there was something comforting in this girl. She’d been part of my childhood, and now she sat across from me like there hadn’t been an eighteen year gap in our friendship. We finished our drinks and agreed to meet in the hotel lobby at nine o’clock the next morning.
I slept well and woke early as the rising sun from the eastern end of Lake Superior hit the window. I showered then headed downstairs well before I was supposed to meet Constance. I sat in an overstuffed leather couch in the hotel lobby and sipped coffee. Constance showed up early and poured herself a cup. She wore a tank top instead of her work polo, and rather than the pony tail she had had last night, her light brown hair fell long and straight to her shoulders. She looked like the young girl I’d known, pretty and tan from a summer spent by the lake.
“I thought we could take a look at the old house,” I said, “then maybe hike Hogsback. I remember the hike but don’t remember how to get there.”
“Perfect.”
“I don’t want you to feel like a tour guide, though.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s my pleasure.”
In the car we talked about our elementary school teachers, most of whom I’d forgotten. I felt strange driving through this town that I had known as a kid. It seemed smaller watching it pass through the windshield instead of over handlebars. I knew exactly where the house was, just up the road from our hotel. As we passed Constance’s old house she glanced out the window but didn’t say anything. The yellow paint of my own family’s house had been painted baby blue, but I still recognized it.
I parked in the driveway and stepped out of the car, not really feeling any emotion. It was just a house. I imagined Kathy, though, walking around the yard in silence, running her fingers through the leaves of the trees in the side yard.
“I came to your birthday party here once,” Constance said. “I remember playing games in the backyard. And you had a slip and slide.”
“Mom got so mad at my dad for buying me that,” I said. “She always thought I’d break my leg or something playing on it.”
We walked around the side of the house and into the tiny backyard.
“You opened presents right back there.” She motioned to where a picnic table had once been. “I got you a Ninja Turtles costume.”
“Michelangelo,” I said. It had been an orange mask with a big green nose and plastic nunchucks. It got lost in the move.
I stood in the grass a minute, picturing the cake and balloons and kids in swimsuits and my father underhanding us wiffleballs. Then we walked back to the car and I opened the door to get back in, forgetting the real reason we came here until I saw the camera sitting on the dashboard. Mom had bought one of those cardboard disposables even though I had a digital. I took two pictures of the house from different angles. Then Constance took one of me standing in front. I hoped the current residents were gone and not inside, wondering what the hell we were doing in their yard.
Back in the car Constance directed us to 550 where we drove north out of town. We stopped at a railroad crossing where a slow moving train hauled pellets of taconite iron ore out toward the lake. The road passed the houses on the outskirts of town and then curved through woods along the shoreline, which we could see in the gaps between trees. We drove past Sugarloaf Mountain with its wooden sign and parking lot. We’d hiked there sometimes as kids, but it never seemed like real hiking to me because of the crowds of people and the stairs built on the steeper sections of the trail. This drive always felt like it took forever, but we pulled off the road into the unmarked Hogsback trailhead only ten minutes after leaving town.
Constance put the water bottle she had been holding into a small backpack and draped it over her shoulders. I followed her into the woods, the trail at first well-worn, making the blue dots spray painted on occasional tree trunks unnecessary.
The flat first section wound into thickening trees, and for a moment I felt like I had as a boy, like we were on some grand adventure. Then I realized the notion was silly, that a twenty-eight year old man walking up some hill in northern Michigan, not even a mountain really, was nothing special.
Constance walked in long strides with athletic hops over rocks that jutted from the ground. I admired the way she seemed so natural, so at ease. I stayed a few steps behind as droplets of sweat formed and trickled down my lower back until the cotton of my soaked t-shirt clung to my skin. We crossed a small wooden bridge over a creek bed, the creek now, in late summer, just a trickle. Then we came to a wide slab of rock, unshaded from the August sun so that it felt hot under the soles of my shoes. Without the trees, though, the mountain’s peak appeared in the distance, still several hundred vertical feet above us. We stopped for a moment as I took the camera and bottle from her pack and snapped a photo.
“You seem to know what you’re doing out here,” I said as Constance unscrewed the lid of the bottle and sipped. She handed it to me.
“This is sort of my place,” she said. “It sounds dumb, but I come out here by myself a lot, just to walk and think and pretend the world’s not there.”
“Not dumb,” I said, and I wished that I’d had this my whole life, nature rather than endless suburbia, where ten minutes of driving could get me out here. Now all it got me was into traffic on I-94.
Constance walked slower but still with the same control. The trail steepened through a forest of large pines, their trunks spread out so that the trail became wider and less worn. The trees stood so wide and tall that they blocked out the sun, cooling the air and making the midday look like dusk. The blue dots on the trees were now necessary and spaced at intervals a minute’s walk apart, so that I kept wondering if we’d veered in the wrong direction. I trusted Constance, though, and believed that if anyone knew the way, she did.
Ahead, she stepped carefully, using tree roots and rocks as steps and grabbing trunks with one hand to swing herself around. The trail steepened again. I tried hard to keep from breathing heavy, I guess to make Constance think that I did this sort of thing every day.
I heard running water up ahead. Constance stopped next to a bend in the creek where the water made a tight turn, crashing over itself, then splitting to either side of a log blocking its path. I leaned against a tree, feeling my lungs burning, and I wished I had kept myself in better shape.
She turned her back to me. I unzipped her pack and took out the water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and handed it to her. She drank, and then I did.
“Bring back any memories?” she asked.
I nodded. My dad and I were always the first ones to the creek. We’d sit here and wait for my mom and sister. They were always content making it this far, and this is where they’d turn around. As for my dad, though, and for me, we weren’t happy until we were standing on the summit, on the highest bump of the peak, above the trees and above the birds that sometimes soared over the treetops like they were surveying their territory, so that only the clouds were above us.
We followed the rushing creek for a ways and then parted from it, catching our first view of Lake Superior far below in the gaps between the trees. I knew, remembered, that we were almost to the top. We scrambled up a steep rocky section, using hands and feet to keep balance then ran up the last, smooth, rock face in a few long strides.
Constance put her arm around me, a sort of congratulations for making it to the top, though I knew it was no big feat. We sat on a pinnacle of rock with our feet dangling off into nothingness, the way I had done with my dad years before. I felt dizzy, out of breath, exhausted, but that soon faded, and I felt good again, felt like I had accomplished something.
The solid mass of water looked so calm hundreds of feet below, a single ship out on the water, coming or going I couldn’t tell. In the distance I could see the town of Marquette: the hospital, the wooden dome football stadium at the college, and the smoke stacks down by the ore dock, their white clouds billowing into the blue sky, drifting for miles in the breeze. Out there to the west, away from town, beyond the green treetops blanketed below, stood several smaller peaks, then a blue ridge, and behind that more ridges, each one lighter shades of blue then gray as they faded to the horizon.
Constance handed me the disposable camera and I stood to take the pictures, first taking one of the lake. The I turned a little and took another and another until all three hundred sixty degrees had been photographed, knowing though that four by six photos could never do the view justice. Constance took one of me with the lake in the background, then, even though it was my mom’s camera, I took one of her.
“Why do you think my mom wants pictures from here?” I asked. “I mean, she never climbed all the way to the top. She always turned around with Kathy.”
“You don’t think she ever came up here with your dad? I mean before they had you?”
I guessed that she probably had, and I felt something like guilt in forgetting that my parents had lives before me, that maybe she would have loved to climb all the way to the top, but turned around to be a good mother to Kathy or to let me and my father have the summit, just us boys.
I dropped Constance off with plans to pick her up for dinner that evening at the Anchor Inn, another of the places on Mom’s list, though I didn’t know its significance. I parked in the hotel lot, but rather than go up to my room, I walked down to the lake. I knew a rocky little cove between the breakwall and the Coast Guard station. The herds of sunbathers, now in August just beginning to tan, would be further down, where the beach was sandy.
I stripped down to my boxer shorts and stepped into the lake, the frigid water numbing my feet and legs as I waded further in, avoiding the black rocks that poked through the surface. The water remained shallow for a long ways, and my stomach muscles tensed as it neared my groin.
In up to my waist, I pushed off of the now sandy bottom and dove. The cold enveloped me, and I let it take over. I opened my eyes and could see bottom in the transparent water. I stroked, strong and deliberate, my chest grazing the sand. Then I took several more strokes, pulling myself below the surface out toward open water until my lungs burned for air.
Back in my room I flipped on the TV to the last game of the Detroit - Cleveland series, the Tigers down by a run in the second inning. Dad took me to my first game on my tenth birthday, about a month before he died. He took a photo of me standing on the corner of Michigan and Trumble with the old Tiger Stadium’s baby blue façade in the background. The picture is still on an end table in my mom’s house, me with skinny, tanned legs and a huge smile and a baseball mitt way too big.
I’d watched so many games on television, or listened to them on the radio, but walking into that stadium was different, so huge with grass so perfectly green and the crack of bats resonating as the team took batting practice.
Dad was going to buy tickets at the gate, but as we walked to the stadium some guy with season tickets told us he couldn’t make it to the game and gave us his. Dad tried to pay him, but he wouldn’t take the money.
The seats were on the third base line, front row. We set our hotdogs and Cokes on top of the dugout and could hear the players talking inside. Between innings some of the players came out to talk to fans, but I was too nervous. Dad went up to Cecil and got him to sign our program. I tacked that program on the wall next to my bed, another thing that got lost in the move.
On my cell phone, still plugged into the wall, the red light blinked, and I looked to see two missed calls and a voicemail from Kathy. I didn’t bother to listen to the message, but called her back, not really wanting to talk, but knowing that she would keep calling until I answered.
“Where were you?” she asked after the first ring, not even a greeting.
“Taking pictures. Went for a swim.”
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
“I didn’t have my phone.”
“Oh,” she said, “you should have had it on you.”
“Sorry. It wouldn’t have had service.”
“Well, how’s it going anyway?”
I told her it was fine, that I’d gotten pictures of the house and of Hogsback. I didn’t mention Constance.
“Do you remember it at all?” she asked, “The town? The house?”
I told her I did.
“Really?”
“Of course I remember,” I said. “I lived here for ten years.”
She paused, didn’t say anything, but I could hear her breathing, and I wondered if she felt guilty, if she felt like she should be here after all. “Well anyway,” she said, “Mom wants you to call her. She’s been bugging me to know how you’re doing.”
When I hung up Cleveland had the bases loaded with one out, and the Tigs had just called in a relief pitcher. The game cut to a commercial and I dialed Mom’s hospital room.
She answered quickly too. I told her where I’d been so far, and she said, “oh?” like there was more for me to say.
“Yeah,” I said. “The house is blue now. I almost didn’t recognize it.”
“Blue? That sounds nice. I always meant to paint over that ugly yellow. How’s my ivy?”
“Your ivy?”
“Around the sugar maples out front. I planted it just before, well just before we moved. It must be all the way up the trunks by now.”
“Yeah,” I said, “all the way,” though I hadn’t noticed any ivy. I hoped it would be visible in the pictures. “So what’s this Anchor Inn place? I’m going there tonight.”
“It’s that restaurant on Washington Street. We used to take you kids there all the time.”
“Yeah, I remember it, but why’s it on the list?”
“That’s where your father and I met,” she said. “I waitressed there in college and one winter Dad worked as a line cook on the weekends. He asked me out on the first night we worked together. I said no.”
This was the first time I had heard this story, and was surprised that they’d never told it on any of the Friday dinners we had there as kids. Or more likely they had talked about it, and I hadn’t paid attention. This was also the first time I could remember my mom just calling him Dad. It had always been, “your dad,” or “your father.”
“Why’d you say no?” I asked.
“I didn’t know him yet. He worked on the boats, so I thought he must have a girl in every port or something. But he was persistent. We went out together a few times as friends with people from the restaurant. Then eventually I told him I wanted to be more than friends.” She paused for a minute. “I begged him not to go back to the boat that spring, but he said that the money was good, that he’d be back soon enough. I never thought it was about the money, though. I think he thought of it as some big adventure.”
“But you guys stayed together? Even after he left?”
“We did,” she said, taking a deep breath. “We’d write letters back and forth, and spend a few hours at a time together whenever he was in town waiting for the boat to be loaded. He’d have a few weeks off in the summer where we’d be together nonstop. Sometimes I drove to the Soo to spend an hour with him as his boat locked through. Once I drove home and met him for a baseball game.” She paused for a minute, and neither of us said anything. This was the deepest conversation I’d ever had with her about my dad, about anything really. I wanted her to keep going. Then she broke the silence, “We dated like that for three years, seeing each other in sporadic bursts. When he asked me to marry him, I said only if we could really be together. He said of course, and he didn’t go back to the boat the next spring.”
I thought she might mention Dead River Falls, but she didn’t, and I was kind of glad for that. Before we hung up, I asked her how she was feeling. She said better.
I watched the rest of the game even though the Tigers were down by five, then left to pick up Constance. On the way to the restaurant I told her the story of how my parents had met, which she said was cute.
The Anchor Inn somehow seemed different knowing my parents’ story, not just some restaurant with old pictures on the wall, but something almost sacred. Constance was cheerful, and I felt that way too, like there was some kind of purpose to this trip. I ordered a beer and Constance got a glass of wine. The waiter brought my bottle and a frosted mug. I poured then clanked my glass against hers.
“Here’s to your parents,” she said. “And to this mission of yours.”
“This mission is almost over,” I said, “just the ore dock tonight and the river tomorrow. Are you coming with me to the falls?”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes I do.”
“Of course I’ll come. How do you think your little Toyota’s going to make it back there, anyway? We’ll take my Jeep.”
I smiled at her, trying to make it appear as sincere as I felt. I’d never been able to make a real looking smile. I knew she wanted me to say something about going to the place of my father’s death, to say how I felt about it, but I really didn’t know how to feel; whether I should be nervous, whether tomorrow should be sad or joyful, or if it should just be me being a dutiful son by completing the task on which my mother had sent me.
I looked at the wall, studying a color photo of the Edmund Fitzgerald floating in a harbor’s calm waters. Then I turned back to Constance. “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”
“Of course,” she said.
After dinner I got out the camera and, from the doorway, took one picture of the restaurant’s interior, getting strange looks from the other patrons. Outside, I took one of the hanging anchor-shaped sign, and Constance took one of the front of the building, me standing next to the wooden door with it’s porthole window.
We drove north of town, following the lakeshore, toward the Presque Isle ore dock where an immense freighter floated in the still water. Tourists parked in a paved lot next to the dock, watching the ship and taking pictures, but instead we parked a half-mile away and walked out onto the beach.
A few families spread out on blankets in the sand, but the sun was low in the sky behind us, so no one was left in the water. The group closest to us began to pack up just as we got there, and as we walked the damp stretch where the water met the sand, ripples lapping at our toes, the few remaining families got up and left, and the lights of the ship and the dock burned into the dusk. On the ship’s deck a crewman walked, in silhouette, along the railing.
“The crew of Dad’s boat came to the funeral,” I said. Constance reached over and touched my hand. I held hers. “Afterwards, they all shook my hand and told me they were sorry, that my dad had been a great man. I’d never had men shake my hand before that, and I remember how strong and big their hands felt.”
The sky darkened as we approached the ship. I took out the camera and snapped several photos, the cardboard camera’s small flash bursting, but illuminating nothing but air. I didn’t know if the photos would turn out but didn’t really care. I’d buy a postcard.
We followed the shore as close as we could to the dock, until only the Dead River separated us, flat and calm here as it bled into Superior. We were close enough now that we could hear the grind of railroad cars on top of the dock and the tons of taconite pellets spilling down iron chutes into the ship’s belly.
We sat down on the beach and watched the ship as the sky darkened to navy. A blinking red light at the end of the breakwall mirrored on the glass water, as did the crescent moon.
Constance rested her head on my shoulder, and her hair, floating in the gentle breeze, tickled my face. I hummed the melody of a song my Dad used to sing, remembering the lyrics in my head: I see the moon and the moon sees me. The moon sees someone that I would like to see. So God bless the moon and God bless me, and God bless the someone that I would like to see.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve travelled quite a bit; out west, Costa Rica, Australia.”
“You’ve been to Australia?”
“I dated a guy from there. Went to visit him. It didn’t last long, but it was a pretty place; different, you know?”
I nodded, but I didn’t know. Travel for me had been the two hour drive to Cedar Point to ride the roller coasters. I hadn’t even made the effort to come up here, the same state even, to where I had grown up. I regretted that.
“As awesome and exotic and foreign as those places where,” she said, “when I was there, I always thought about this. About home.”
Then we sat there without speaking for a long time, looking out at the lake and at the ship until its horn blasted and the massive boat began to back from the dock. It slowly turned and picked up speed as it passed the breakwall and moved out to open water. I watched the lights of the ship become smaller and smaller out in the blackness, and an hour later, when they were just shimmering specks that I suspected were creations of my mind, I looked at Constance and didn’t know how long she had been asleep.
I lay down on the sand, guiding her sleeping body down with me. She woke at the movement, kissed me on the cheek, then fell asleep again.
I woke to the sound of gulls and the first trace of morning light. We lay on our sides, facing each other, limbs intertwined. A cool breeze coated us in loose sand, and I shivered as I sat up and looked out at the lake. No sliver of sun yet broke the horizon, but the sky to the east held a faint glow and the lights of an approaching ship sparkled on the water. I wondered how closely the two vessels had passed and if the sailors aboard last night’s ship had seen the lights of this one out there in all that darkness.
I paced the hotel lobby waiting for Constance to pick me up for the ride to the falls. I’d been to the Dead River a few times as a kid, but the only time I really remember was the last. I didn’t know if the spot had held any other significance to my parents, or if my mom just wanted photos of the place my dad spent his final moments, the rocks on which he had taken is last steps out to the overhanging cliff, and the frothing water that sucked his life away. I hadn’t asked, but I hoped for my mom’s sake that Dead River Falls had been the first place they’d gone together with friends from the restaurant, or the location of their first kiss, or where my dad had proposed, instead of just where he died.
I didn’t know what to wear. I put on a t-shirt and a pair of board shorts, but given the circumstances, I thought that funeral attire might have been more appropriate. I climbed into the Jeep, a black Wrangler with no top or doors. Constance sat in the driver’s seat wearing a sundress over a bikini top.
“Ready?” she asked, reaching over and grabbing my hand.
“As ready as I’m gonna be.”
She drove north toward the ore dock then west on Wright Street, paralleling the river, though we couldn’t see it through the trees. I hoped that it would just be us at the falls, but I knew that on an August afternoon it would probably be crowded.
We turned off into Forestville on a dirt road that crossed the tracks and climbed through trees to a power-line clearing that overlooked the distant lake. Then we turned off onto a two-track blocked by large boulders. The Jeep was small enough, though, that Constance managed to fit between the rocks, leaving an inch or so on either side. She shifted into four-wheel-drive and climbed the sandy power-line trail, keeping speed so that with each bump I floated above the seat, held close by the seatbelt.
She stopped at a rocky incline and we got out to scout the way. I stood in the tall grass beside the trail, guiding Constance as she slowly drove up the rock. I got back in the Jeep for more sand and a blast through a deep puddle that sprayed water up and over the Jeep, some of it splashing in through the vehicle’s doorless sides. The wiper blades smeared the mud for a few swipes before the washer fluid cut through the mess.
She parked at the top of a hill at the edge of the woods next to a lifted pickup. The section of river that we could see was more like a pond, flat and calm and wide, the only sign of movement being a patch of foam slowly swirling in an eddy on the opposite bank. I could hear the falls, though, through the pines, a dull tinny roar, like a bottom of the ninth crowd in a pennant race game spilling out of our old black and white TV in the basement of the Front Street house.
I took her hand and followed the noise. The falls were smaller than I remembered, not the one straight plunge that I had in my memory, but a series of smaller drops and pillowed churning water.
The jumping rock was at the bottom of the falls, overhanging the foaming spot where the last of the whitewater spilled into the river. Four college boys stood, dripping, in a line on the rock while two girls in bikinis sat on beach towels away from the edge. The girls sipped cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, watching the boys, egging them on. The first one jumped feet first off the rock, and then too soon, not a second later, I heard his splash over the roar of the water. The drop was not big, maybe ten feet, closer to the water than the tallest diving platform at the Y. I had sometimes thought that maybe Dad had been reckless that day, but he wasn’t. That fallen driftwood log was just an unlucky turn of events, a freak accident.
The girls cheered as the second boy took three steps of a running start and hurled himself off the rock in a front flip, then they laughed as the last kid in line pushed the second-to-last off the edge and jumped in himself. I stood back with Constance, watching but not getting too close. The screams of the boys carried from below where they sat on rocks half-submerged in the water, the current holding them to their seats. They yelled at the girls to jump, and one of them did, holding her bikini top to keep it from falling as she leapt, screaming, off the edge.
We sat in the shade of a large pine as the kids jumped a few more times, finally getting the last girl to her feet out on the rock. She stood there a long time inching closer to the edge. We were too far away to see her trembling, but I imagined that she was. The boys cheered her on for a while, and the girl said, “It’s not that bad. It’s fun.” But they grew bored at her fear. As they grabbed their towels and empties, I thought she would come back from the edge, but she jumped, and we heard her laughter from below when she resurfaced.
The group followed a trail downriver to a taller cliff, one I had heard of as a kid, but that my father had never taken me to, and Constance and I were alone. I stood up and walked out onto the rock. Constance followed. I took off my shoes and felt the rough texture on my feet and gripped the ridges of stone with my toes. I stepped to the edge and looked down into the white froth and I felt Constance behind me. We didn’t speak but I knew she was there. I sensed her, and that comforted me.
I imagined Dad standing here. I pictured him looking down at the water, then at me and saying, “Don’t be scared, buddy. Just watch me and do what I do,” then glancing back at my mom and pushing off, not feet first, but a head first dive because Mom was watching, and like the boys we had just seen, he was trying to impress. I pictured him taking a final breath, a deep gasp, like he knew it would be his last. Then I watched him on his way down, arms out, falling.
