When I lived in Alaska, in the drifting years of my early twenties, I heard about a cabin somewhere across the bay. It was empty, but the kitchen was stocked, they said. The place had red curtains and a simple table bathed in forest light. The owners left it unlocked. All of this had been prepared for visitors, for strangers. This was the proof I was seeking, what I’d traveled thousands of miles to find—a sign that the world was magical, and giving.
I got hold of a map, drawn in pencil. In the roadless interior, beyond any paths, sat the X that showed the location of the cabin. It lay on the far side of a stream, several miles inland. A water taxi dropped me off on the beach at the nearest access point, and I set off along the trail, going east. I came to a glacial river, blue with silt, the crossing nothing more than a rope and pulley system with a dangling swingset seat. Water churned eons below my legs.
On the other side, the trail narrowed. No hikers appeared through the trees—no voices or flashes of colored jackets. I turned off the trail at the marked stream, passed near bear scat as I followed the bank inland toward the next landmark on the map, a Y-shaped tree. When I found the tree, I pulled on my waders. The forest was silent. A shiver ran up my back. I felt that I was not alone. In the middle of the stream, ice-cold water up to my hips, something brushed against me. I looked down to see the brown-and-gold rocks on the streambed resolve into salmon hovering at the depth of my knees, making a tapestry under clear water.
On the other side of the stream, where the map said the cabin would be, I found nothing but a sparse grove of trees growing up from untouched ground.
When I waded back across the stream and followed the water toward the ocean, I noticed silver ribbons draped over the roots of the trees along the bank. I realized they were the husks of salmon. What a feast, a banquet table for the bears, I thought, and as I rounded each bend of the stream I worried I’d surprise one, who’d look at me, open-jawed, and charge—I was an interloper; a giant, crashing guest in a place so vast, so intricate, I could only begin to glimpse its edges with my dim and shifting human sight.
After hiking back to the beach, I slept in the lean-to. When morning came, I sat on a driftwood log half-buried in the sand a few feet from the tideline. The bay was flat, almost forbidding in the early light. I felt that I’d made a mistake in journeying here alone. But then three seals appeared, their heads bobbing above the waves. They looked at me, their expressions curious, observant, as if they recognized me as a fellow wanderer, poised between sea and land, one place and another.
In the end, I was gone a day, a night, and a day. But I never forgot what it felt like to stand in that slow-moving water, scores of salmon so still around me, having traveled back to their birthplace to wait for death. Eventually I’d leave Alaska, move back to the Lower 48, shuck off the stubborn bite of loneliness that had spurred me to travel halfway around the globe, so far from where I’d sprung up to start with.
A life emerges and then dissolves back through the belly of the bear, but I clung tight to the kernel of heat, of warmth, that made me. It would take many years to learn from the salmon hovering in my memory, their faces and flanks whitened and gray, loose, decomposing, as if it were easy to go back where they came from.
JR Fenn’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Witness, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, and more. She’s the author of the fiction chapbook, Tiny Vessels, now available from Red Mare Press. Recognitions include the New Millennium Award for Flash Fiction, the Robert Colley Prize for Fiction, Pushcart and Best Small Fictions nominations, and appearances in the Bath, Bristol, and Oxford Award Anthologies. She lives in Western New York with her family.
Header photography and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson
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