ESTUARIES/TRIBUTARIES/GULFS

(a triptych)

Part Three:

He received a letter and a postcard in the mail from his mother. Both were sent from Seward, Alaska. The town of Seward sits at the bottom of Mt. Marathon next to Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Peninsula. The view was spectacular. Two mountains rose up behind and dwarfed the town. The sky was clear and blue. Evergreens forested the first quarter of the mountains. Beyond that, the rock was covered almost entirely with snow.

The postcard itself was blank. The letter was intimate:

Dear Ralph,

Last night I dreamt I was the river. I pushed my way down across the Minnesota-Wisconsin border from Lake Itasca, down along the entire length of Illinois from Galena to Cairo, where the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers meet, down through New Madrid and Osceola to Memphis. As I pushed my way along, I took back everything I ever had taken from me: uprooted trees, every stone left carelessly along the shore, your father's hands, and my very own heart, which I grabbed off the banks at Memphis where it had been buried in the ground. My burden of love now lighter, I wound my way through Arkansas and Louisiana down in

to the bay. I closed my eyes and let go of everything I held in my arms. Some of it sank, some of it floated off into the ocean. The land pulled itself together and the bay closed up behind me, Memphis, now gone to me for good.

Everything here is beautiful. I am amazed at the things we have seen: a whale, sea lions, the mountains, sunshine nearly all day. It is all so exciting. So new. Wish you could see it all, too.

The letter came to him after he had just returned from Duluth. The trip was very much still with him: the brick roads through downtown; the steep hills the side streets had to climb up every day to get to the top; the sense of things staying the same just behind every door he walked through in every store; and the smell and feel of the lake in the air every direction he turned.

He spent an entire day along the lakefront. The sun was warm. The breeze off the lake was cool. He skipped stones, read, wrote, and sat and watched the lake push up against the shore and retreat to gather up its strength, again and again.

Late in the afternoon, when the sun had begun its descent over the edge of the horizon, casting long dark shadows behind everything and away from shore, Ralph stopped to watch some boys playing in the water. They were swimming out to a structure about twenty yards off the shore. It was the remains of a loading bin that was destroyed during a brutal winter storm around the turn of the century. The structure was left there as a reminder of the power of the lake that rested so calmly on days like this, when the only waves that scarred the surface were made by people in their boats.

The boys were climbing on the inside to the top of the bin that stood a good twenty feet above the water. From the top, they were jumping out into the air and disappearing into the lake. Each time a boy jumped, they all let out a whoop like a battle cry.

There was sudden silence among the boys when he climbed up from the inside of the bin and stood up against the breeze. The light around them was a pale pink. The lake could be heard below, lapping the iron sides. Ralph looked into each of their faces and they parted before him, the wide expanse of the water all he could see.

Their battle cries echoed off the hills. Their fists pushed up into the sky. The air was empty and the lake wrapped its arms around him.