The Carry Home by Gary Ferguson Read Free Book Online Page A

alive.”
    I told her that having danger so close at hand, day after day, season after season, might make a person worry more.
    â€œI don’t know,” she said. “With life and death in your face like that, maybe worry would seem useless. A silly indulgence.”
    Even in that great wild north country, one of the last great wildernesses in the world, we were aware during our visit that big changes were coming. An energy boom was on the horizon, with some forty thousand square miles already slated for drilling. Diamond mines, too, stoking what would soon become a frenzy of roads and bulldozers and sheet metal towns. For thetime being, though, the land was still in control. The Inuit living here, who possess an untethered cosmology, believe there are no divine mother or father figures steering the cosmos. No gods of sun or wind or snow. Nor are there any eternal punishments in the hereafter, as there are no such punishments in the here and now. Life and prayer and dreams are calved from the sense that here, everything—from money to creed—is sooner or later broken by ice and swept to the sea. Their biggest priority is the present moment, focusing on it to a degree most of us would be hard-pressed to match. The essence of life, they say—the essential truths of the universe—is found not in some past glory, not in some future accomplishment, but right now, in experiencing a deep relationship with what’s around us.
    If only our generation could’ve kept looking, could’ve kept living a while longer with the questions. If we hadn’t ended up frozen in notions of the outback formed the last time we imagined it, when its greatest value seemed to be as a testing ground for the muscle of youth. Not that Jane and I didn’t see it that way, too. But early on, in the midst of some hard teen years, nature had also sparked in us the idea that we had some kind of place in the order of things. It kept us eager for moments having nothing to do with hustling cereal or soap or self-improvement, for that part of the world that never expected us to be anything but what we were, never encouraged us to ask for anything we didn’t already have.

THE FIRST GOODBYE
    L ong ago, cartographers from the land of mental health erected signposts for journeys through the blackness of loss. At least he’s moved out of denial , friends and family might have been saying to one another. Around the next bend would be anger. Then bargaining. Then the crumbling backstreets of depression. Finally would come a return home—an “acceptance”—at which point flowers would bloom again and light would shine in the windows. Whatever. In that first autumn, it made no more sense to hope for a normal life than it would for a man who’s lost his leg to expect to wake up one morning and find a new one growing in its place.
    It was barely past Labor Day when I decided to make the first scattering of Jane’s ashes. That time of year when the coats of the whitetail deer are thickening, turning from the reddish brown of midsummer to the color of wet sand. The time of sandhill cranes gathering into small groups, chortling to one another about the old urge for going. That time when the color of the sky deepens from powder to cobalt blue. Free of the cast on my leg, I was desperate for movement, and the movement I wanted most was something having to do with honoring Jane’s wishes.
    Effort with purpose.
    Years later, when I was talking about all this with a good friend, he’d confess to thinking how terrible the first scattering journeys must have been. I’d said that other than breaking apart and collapsing, my muddling forward, this moving deeper into grief, was the only thing to do.
    Of the five places she wanted her ashes scattered, she never said anything about which one should come first. It probably didn’t matter. But it mattered to me. There was the canyon country of southern