Only Kayak by Kim Heacox

Author:Kim Heacox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2020-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Deep Time

IT STARTS as a pillow fight and escalates into a wrestling match. Michio and I against Hannah and Ben. I’ve just turned forty; Michio is about to. Hannah is eight, Ben a toddler. Yes, Michio and I have size and strength. But Hannah has grit. Ben has a pacifier. They know the terrain.

They are the children of Roy and Kim Corral, who live in a small apartment in downtown Anchorage near Roy’s office, where he works as photography editor at Alaska magazine. Martial arts expert that I am, or imagine myself to be, I pin Ben to the floor. Michio struggles against Hannah, a natural athlete, and loses. She’s quick and soon has him pinned. He begs for mercy as she sits on his chest and demands that I release her little brother. We call it a draw and launch into a gallon of ice cream.

That night Michio and I sleep on the living room floor while Roy, Kim, Hannah, and Ben retire to their bedrooms. “Do you think I’m old?” Michio asks me.

We’ve been over this before, but I decide not to remind him. Michio worries that life is passing him by. To be honest, so do I.

If fifty is the youth of old age, then forty is the old age of youth. We’re there. The round earth rolls, John Muir said, and takes us with it, like it or not. It’s not always easy to know where your worry comes from, unless you sit on a sofa and listen to your prostate grow. Part of my ailment arises from the four years in the late 1980s when Melanie and I lived in Anchorage. After a handful of memorable summers in Glacier Bay, Melanie landed a permanent position with the National Park Service as an assistant manager of a public lands information center, located downtown on Fourth Avenue. It’s not her long-sought-after goal of being a full-time naturalist in a national park, but it gives her the “permanent status” she needs to apply for those places. With its congestion and crime, Anchorage is as far as you can get from Alaska without leaving it. Every spring when the thrushes sing and early-June light slices through pale green leaves, my heart aches to be in Glacier Bay.

Then one dark winter day in December 1990, the phone rings. It’s Denali National Park asking Melanie if she’d like to be the west district naturalist on the Toklat River. We would live not far from where Adolf Murie, the famous wildlife biologist, lived with his family while doing research on wolves for three summers from 1939 to 1941. She says yes in a West Anchorage minute. The next day Kenai Fjords National Park calls from Seward and offers Melanie the position of chief naturalist. We can’t believe it. She says no, thank you, and explains to me that night, “I’m more park than park service.” She’d rather take a cut in pay and live in a park (Denali) than get a raise and live in a bustling town outside a park (Seward).

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