Grief Map by Sarah Hahn Campbell

Author:Sarah Hahn Campbell [Campbell, Sarah Hahn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: grief, memoir, lgbtqia+, lesbian, romance, death, essays, poetry, hybrid
Publisher: Brain Mill Press LLC
Published: 2017-06-13T05:00:00+00:00

Dream: The Yukon

I am on a trail that winds in a gentle curve through a meadow of Alaska cotton, white tufts moving in the wind. A soft light in the long grasses, Yukon summer evening. With my fingertips, I touch seedpods, green blades. Just beyond the meadow, the mudflats bend toward the vast braided Slims River.

When I study the mud, I know I might find the overlapping footprints she and I left here in 2005. Overlapping because we often paused to kiss each other on the trail. Maybe I’ll see the grizzly who ambled toward us when we stopped for lunch there on those boulders. His muscle memory contains a small human with black curly hair who stood up and shouted, “Hey, bear!” while her taller companion laughed happily. Here in this air our laughter and our words exist, still. Here are the descendants of the same plants—lupine, penstemon, fireweed—we flattened with our steps, touched with our fingertips, picked for each other’s hair. Here is the same grove of aspens, grown a little taller, and the same spruce forest. Far down the valley, the Kaskawulsh Glacier still pours down from the mountains toward the headwaters of the Slims River. For the glacier, eight years has been barely a blink. Above me, the blue sky. Blue, blue sky, and sun. My skin feels warm. When I pull the photographs of the two of us from my backpack, I see I stand in the same place we took turns posing that June day. She wears a long-sleeved blue hiking shirt, khaki shorts. I wear my long-sleeved silver hiking shirt, pants. She always got warm more quickly than I did.

It is so pleasant here. I know I’ll find her, so I hike more quickly. Making noise to deter the bears seems unnecessary in this broad open meadow, and besides, harm seems impossible here.

The rush and tumble of Bullion Creek startles me when I round a bend in the trail. Memory: we talked about the semantics of the word “creek,” how ill-named are these glacial, perilous water veins. When we crossed Bullion together, I gave her instructions in my most confident backpack guide voice, reminding her to unbuckle her pack in case she slipped on a rock in the thigh-deep water. We wore our sandals, tied our hiking boots to our packs, prepared. But she crossed boldly while I trembled in the creek’s center. She had to pull me across with her voice.

Today, I have to cross alone.

The trail curves away from the mudflats up toward the scree slopes and bluffs, and it is in the side of a scree slope that I find the door. It is not a large door, but it must have served the miners’ purpose of keeping secure their holdings in their absence. It is merely several boards of wood hammered together, a loop of metal for a handle. Cold air billows toward me through the cracks in the door. I know I must, so I pull the handle toward me, half-expecting it to break off in my hands.

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