Arctic Daughter. Jean Aspen

safe and foolish.

      “Come on, let’s get out of the storm,” she had said warmly, ignoring my tears and drenched clothes. She put her arm about me and started for the tent. “I fired the .30-06 hoping you could hear it over the thunder.”

      I never forgot it. But now where was Phil?

      The fire glowed red in the midnight dusk. Uneasily I rose for another bundle of sticks. I listened: nothing but the faraway call of geese, the hum of insects, and the muted crackle of fire sluggishly pushing smoke into the calm air. What if he doesn’t come back? At last the thought surfaced in a black wave. What would I do? I could never find this place again if I went for help, and what good would it do anyway? I would wait here all summer if need be, but oh, please God, bring him safely back!

      I was digging out my mother’s .30-06 when Phil appeared in camp, heralded by clouds of fresh mosquitoes. He took a breath and plunged into the smoke.

      “What happened?” I asked as he propped the .22 against a log. His dirty face was scratched and his hair was matted with twigs. Gently I drew my arms about his waist and he stroked my hair. For a long moment we stood there, holding to the security of each other’s warmth.

      “Come sit down,” I said at last, taking his hand.

      “I’m sure glad I took the compass,” he admitted sheepishly. “There was a time when I was certain that the compass was wrong, but it seemed unwise to argue with it.”

      “Dinner is ready.” I placed the cooking pot between his feet and pried up the lid. Steam enveloped him, fogging his spare glasses a moment. I seated myself across from him and smiled mischievously. “Let me tell you a story,” I said.

      As the days slid by under that constant sun, we fell into a rhythm with the river: a watchful harmony, an unequal truce. On a horizon of determined water we floated timelessly toward the sea, past hundreds of sunbaked islands, dense forest, hidden channels, eddies and submerged logs, crumbling cut-banks, and sandbars. The earth and sun stood still amid vast plains of water-sky where giant islands rode slowly up to meet us, then dwindled behind into yesterday. And above the silence we could feel a careless song of power.

      That song was with us always, even as we slept, one ear tuned for the canoe. We heard it by day as we drifted beneath cutbanks where muddy water sucked at the earth and trees held desperately to one last season, their boughs weighted with cones the dying offer. A wall of earth would suddenly collapse, rending the thin carpet of roots, sending spray upward as the earth slid into the river. We felt small, a speck of flotsam adrift in time and space. The river’s song was with us, too, far from land in the whisper of silt against the canoe and the gentle swirl of the current.

      From shore came the smells of a breathing forest under a midday sun, of balsam poplar, spruce, and something akin to fresh, hot caramel candy. A solemn train of dark spruce trees slid past, interspersed with the bright green flurries of new sandbars covered with willows. A venturesome yellow butterfly lilted toward us, alighting as a splash of living butter on our silver bow.

      Drowsiness would steal upon us in the warm, still air; a trust in this big, friendly river. Then from nowhere a tremor would slam through the canoe, swinging our stern crazily sideways, shipping water as we collided with an unseen bar. In panic we would fight the current, leaping overboard into the soft, invisible sand, shocked at our speed. I would brace against the straining craft while Phil changed another shear pin. Our old outboard didn’t have a clutch, so the propeller turned as long as the engine was running. The “shear pin” was designed to break whenever the screw hit something. Once the pin was replaced, we would lead Lady Grayling into deeper water and climb aboard, gushing water from our boots, and be off again, not a visible speck of land for a mile on either side.

      One evening we camped on the head of a sandbar that had recently emerged from spring flood. Bars are new land, a gift from the river. Bedraggled willows in full leaf were knitting over the scars of breakup, healing the ice-furrowed ground in shimmering layers of green. How resilient they seemed! We sat before a driftwood fire enjoying the breeze that kept away the mosquitoes. The island clove the current, brushing aside the Yukon. This combined with the breeze to give an illusion of motion, as if the island itself were traveling upstream through the water.

      “But our civilization cuts us off from nature,” I was arguing, “and from one another. Compare your relationship with other drivers to your interaction with people walking.”

      Phil leaned contentedly against a bleached and battered stump, digging his bare toes into the warm sand. His feet, broad and flat, turned decidedly inward.

      “You can’t just throw it out,” he answered. “After all, you’ve never plowed with a stick . . .”

      “Even our play is organized,” I broke in. “There is no spontaneity. What price do we pay for our physical comfort? What is ‘quality of life’? Primitive people were able to spend more time together. They had a sense of community that we’ve lost. I’m not certain our toys are worth what we pay for them.”

      Phil was looking his old self as I watched him through the hot blaze of our fire. He was very brown, the light eyes striking in his tanned, bearded face, and looking slightly owlish behind spare glasses. His dark hair was already frosted red-gold by the sun. Mine was nearly white on top.

      I pulled off my soggy boots, summer “shoepacs” with leather uppers, rubber bottoms, and felt insoles. Thoughtfully I wiped the lint from between my toes. Good feet, they have given me faithful service and often been hard used. It felt good to let them dry and air after days of wet boots.

      Tasting my tea (saccharin-sweetened to conserve sugar), I settled the white enamel mug beside me in the sand. A few feet away, Lady Grayling rested, belly in the mud, while bright ripples of late afternoon sky and water reflected over her sides. Already a waterline two inches below the gunwale marked our loaded freeboard. Nearby, a distraught sandpiper teetered along the shoal, piping her discomfort at our presence.

      “Each generation must examine its world and choose,” I said, flashing Phil a glance. I do interrupt too much, I thought. Now he’ll give me the silent treatment. “Coyotes may adapt to the L.A. freeways, but we build them.”

      Phil was studiously pruning his ragged cuticles with a pocketknife. His nails were still grease-stained, and I wondered idly how he managed to maintain this trace of his old life as a mechanic.

      “We throw away our power as individuals for a feeling of security,” I continued. “We have somehow lost our sense of communion with the planet and with each other.”

      I stared moodily into the flames, watching sticks disintegrate under their almost invisible touch. Water had leached the driftwood, leaving it porous and brittle.

      At length he snapped his knife shut. “Finished?”

      “Yes.” I kept my eyes on the fire. A frantic colony of ants boiled from one end of a log, driven out by heat and smoke. Taking a twig, I helped the survivors to safety, knowing that an ant without its colony is dead. They are not individuals in the same way we are.

      “You cannot separate yourself from your culture,” he told me. “It’s sophomoric to propose simple solutions. What you’re talking about isn’t just a matter of technology.”

      “Maybe,” I conceded, “but I’ve had it with the artificial culture we have built. I’ve had it with forms to fill out in triplicate and rules. I would rather risk being killed than have a government restrict me for my own good.”

      “It’s more complicated than that,” he insisted. “Regulations are meant to protect others from you as well.”

      I snorted in exasperation. “I know there are good reasons behind most laws, but the result is a bleak world devoid of creativity and personal responsibility. Kids might fall out of trees and parents might