Surviving Bear Island (5 page)

At the north end of the beach, the place I'd come down off the cliffs, I turned and retraced my steps.

“Where are you?” I said. “What do you want me to do?”

What would he do if he'd found my vest and nothing more?

And then it hit me. I needed to leave a sign. I hadn't left one where I'd washed ashore, but I'd leave one here. Something so he'd know I was alive. Something big.

I STARTED
carrying rocks up the beach and stacking them on top of a huge fallen tree just beyond the beach grass. No tide could touch what I was making. I tried to block everything else out and just get the job done, but that image of my dad bobbing in the water kept invading my brain. I slammed a rock onto the ground in front of the fallen tree. Then I picked up another and did the same thing. I took a breath, felt the heat behind my eyes. The accident was my fault. Just like my mom's accident.

If I would've gone on that bike ride with her we would've stayed on our road because the whole loop was too long for me back then. But I'd said no.

“I want to keep shooting my arrows at the target,” I said.

“Are you sure you don't want to go, Tom? It'll be fun.” Mom said.

“No, Mom. I don't want to go. Just let me be.”

The school counselor told me it wasn't my fault. After a while I agreed with him so he'd shut up and quit talking about it. And sometimes I really believed that I had nothing to do with her dying. But deep down, I still felt responsible. I still felt the ache in my gut. A burning ache.

Just before sunset, as I gathered wood for a fire, I discovered fresh bear scat spotted with whole blueberries.

This place is full of bears.

I turned around and peered into the forest. “Dad,” I said. “Dad? Is that you?”

His voice boomed in my brain. I didn't understand it. It's not like I was thinking about what Dad thinks—his words were just popping in there and echoing around whenever they pleased. But maybe it was a sign. A sign that he was out here. Somewhere.

“Sorry, Dad.” I hesitated. “Sorry I didn't do my part.” I waited. Sort of hoping he'd answer, but heard nothing.

I faced the water and saw a couple of sea lions surface and then dive. I kicked at the ground and then bowed my head. Apologizing didn't make me feel any better, but what more could I say? And what difference would it make?

I stomped off into the forest and collected more wood and ate blueberries as I found them. As the sun set, I watched the high clouds, which had moved in, turn red and orange.

Using dead hemlock twigs and splinters of driftwood, I tried to build a little teepee of dry sticks to start my fire but my hands kept shaking and I couldn't place a stick without knocking over what was already there.

“This is all your fault, Dad.” I yelled. “Coming out here was your idea. Not mine.”

I grabbed a fire-starter stick and fed it small dry wood and got a fire going even though I wanted to save them for when I didn't have dry wood.

By the firelight, I looked at what I had:

2 emergency blankets

2 lighters

2 small boxes of waterproof matches (40 total)

4 pixie fishing lures with treble hooks

fishing line (two small bundles)

2 lock-blade pocket knives with four-inch blades

12 small pieces of rope

2 small pieces of flint

4 two-inch fire starter sticks

In addition to my own clothing I had Dad's life vest.

But no tent, no sleeping bag, no food—except for the Meal Pack bars, but those were for my dad.

I waited for his voice to come, but it didn't. I hoped for a sign, any sign that would give me a clue to where he was, or what I should do, but none came. I stared into the fire. Faces came and went as the flames curled around fat sticks. Not faces I recognized, just blurry images that kept appearing and disappearing, one fading into another.

As my possessions lay before me in the flickering firelight full of faces, I battled with the thought that no matter how much I wished things were
different, I was alone, all alone, and with what supplies I had lay in front of me. And wherever my dad was, right now, he was alone too.

I glanced down the beach to where a small, rocky point jutted out into the water. At the base of the point, where I'd collected some of my firewood, were two enormous trees.

Trees, I remembered. Big trees. “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

And now I knew where I had to go if I wanted to have any chance of getting off this island alive. It's the place my dad would go to, too. The Sentinels.

Long red rays from the sun stretched across the water as we paddled into the protected cove on the southern tip of Bear Island. We'd just made a five-mile crossing from the main land.

“Good job on the crossing,” Dad said. “You were strong. Didn't die.”

“Thanks,” I said. We'd been out for over a week and even though my arms were sore, I was getting stronger from the daily paddling, just like Dad said I would.

It was quiet in the cove. Like it was part of a different planet where the only sounds that existed were our voices and the sound of our paddles slicing through the flat water. The cove was U-shaped, about a mile deep with a half-circle of small forested islands protecting the entrance.

Gigantic hemlock and spruce trees dotted the spit we were paddling along, the tips of their lowest branches in the water at the tide line. We beached the kayak, got out and stretched.

“Your mom loved this spot,” Dad said. “The farthest from civilization she'd ever been. Let's walk around before we unload. We've got a little time.”

“The trees,” I said. “They're huge.”

“Your mom, she said the trees were like Sentinels.”

“Sentinels?” I asked.

“A Sentinel is a guard. A protector. Something that ensures safety.”

“Cool,” I said, thinking of my mom and the way she saw the world. “It kind of feels like they're watching over the place.”

These trees, over a dozen of them, and twice as wide as my arm-span, towered above us, growing right out of the beach gravel and all on this
narrow spit of land at the back of the cove. And there was almost nothing growing under them. Maybe I'd write a song about this place. For Mom.

“I'm glad we made it here together. Not just for your mom, but for us.”

I nodded. Mom. Sometimes at home it felt like she was in the next room or out in the garden. And here, I almost believed she'd appear under the trees. I could feel her. I wished she would 'cause I knew she really loved me, really wanted me.

“We were gonna tell you together. Really, your mom was, but since she's gone…”

“What, Dad?” I said. “What is it?” I mean, he was springing back to life but was still quiet, and soft-spoken and there was no telling when he'd just shut back down again and it'd be like I didn't exist. If he had more to tell me about Mom I wanted to hear it. I had some of her song lyrics memorized, and I'd started playing her guitar, and I'd read her stories over and over, but I wanted every scrap of information to help keep her alive in my mind.

Dad looked at me, then put his eyes on the ground. “This is the place where we first talked about building a family.”

I took a breath. “Did you even want to have a kid?”

Dad turned toward me. “I'm not the kind of guy that would just go out and adopt on my own. But with your mother there was nothing I wanted more than to be a parent with her, to have our own. To have you. I know I haven't been acting like much of a father, but that's gonna change. I promise.”

Then he gave me a big hug, the kind of hug my mom used to give me. And yeah, he was acting more like he used to before Mom died, but only since we'd been out here. The real test would be when we got home and I wanted rides into town to go to the movies, or to guitar lessons if he let me start them, or over to Billy's house, or maybe to meet a girl if I was that lucky. And to teach me how to drive. Could my dad drag himself out of bed or off the couch for me instead of just driving into town once every two weeks to buy groceries, 'cause I'd go nuts if all I did was spend time at home outside of school with someone who'd barely speak to me.

After we unloaded the boat and set up camp, Dad was taking me to our water source, this trickle of a stream spilling down a steep bank, when I saw something and said, “Dad, what's that, back in the trees?” I pointed with one hand and walked toward it.

Dad fell into step beside me. “Used to be a sauna way back when—”

“A sauna? It's just a pile of junk.” I pointed to the pile of rotting, moss-covered boards and a few plastic five-gallon buckets that lay in a heap.

“The Forest Service was supposed to haul the rest of that junk out of here, but then gas prices shot up and they cut way back on travel, just like the rest of us. Must be a pretty low priority right now. So few people come way out here. A few kayakers in the summer. Occasionally a hunter motors out in the late fall, or early winter. Someone who's willing to spend the money on gas.”

I grabbed the end of a two-by-four and it crumbled in my hand, like scrambled eggs.

“Twenty years ago you'd get a handful of people out here in the summer, and during hunting season. Not anymore. And where we're headed from here, it's even more remote. New territory for me. The exposed side of Bear Island. No one goes out there, but after that crossing, I think you're ready.”

THE NEXT
day I walked south along the coast—the salty smell settling into my nose—with my dad's vest slung over one shoulder. The rocky beach turned into a cliff and I had no choice but to head inland if I wanted to continue south toward the Sentinels.

I glanced back at the fallen tree with the ten-foot-long rock arrow I'd made on top of it pointing south. And just behind it, a seven-foot-tall stick I'd dug into the ground, piled rocks around its base, and then attached the yellow spray skirt at the top.

“Dad. You'll see the arrow, right? You'll know what it means, right?”

But if he didn't see it, at least I'd tried. I mean, I'd searched to the north, and then I'd found his vest to the south. I couldn't just wait here, hoping. I had to go and just hope he was going in the same direction. He could've kept swimming around this cliff and then came ashore.

But here I was—with or without him—stuck on this island. At home with my zombie dad I'd felt isolated, but this was true isolation. Just me and the rocks, the trees, and the rain. No town just ten miles down the road. No school to go to five days a week where I could see people. No phone. No food. No people. No nothing.

I don't think my dad really cared if he ever saw people, but me, the main thing I'd been looking forward to after the first week of the trip was seeing people. That, and taking a shower.

I turned, and clawed my way through the belt of alders that separated the forest from the beach. Stiff branches crisscrossed every which way. It was like working your way through a web of steel cables. But once I broke through, I was in the old growth. My dad loved that phrase. Old
growth. To me it sounded kind of nasty. Made me think of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Harper, who never clipped her fingernails. They were long and grayish. My back used to crawl, like an army of spiders were moving up my spine, every time she'd set one of her hands on my desk.

But in the forest, old growth meant big. And green. And wet. Like you were in a giant terrarium. I recognized skunk cabbage, and the palm-shaped leaves of devil's club springing from their thorny stems, two of my dad's favorite plants. And blueberry bushes. But the rest of the plants, I didn't have a clue about. Maybe there were more things to eat, there had to be, but I didn't know. There was so much I didn't know.

I knew the names of the trees towering above me. Mostly Sitka spruce and Western hemlock.

Spruce have square needles and hemlock have flat ones.

And from some of the tree branches this light green-yellow, lacy stuff hung, draped like tinsel on Christmas trees. Strands of it two and three feet long.

The northernmost rainforest. The jungle of the north, that's what Dad called this place.

We'd vanished—that's what it'd look like. I don't even know if Dad had told anyone where we were going. He put the chain across the driveway with the no trespassing sign on it when we left. And after the four hundred mile drive to Whittier, Dad hid the truck in an abandoned boat yard to avoid paying the hundred bucks it cost to park in the lot. And instead of using the boat dock—didn't want to pay for that either—we hauled all our gear down this steep bank to a mud-hole of a beach and launched. That's what he and mom used to do. Great plan if you're planning on disappearing.

In some spots the devil's club and skunk cabbage grew so thick you could hide an army tank in it. I kicked at some moss concealing a decaying log. It'd be easy to disappear in the rainforest. Thick green moss covered everything on the ground. Hopefully it wouldn't cover me.