No Way to Say Goodbye
We are standing on the downstream bank of the Selway River on the border between Montana and Idaho. Monday morning, July 26th, 2019. Two hours earlier, we awoke at Paradise Campground, a mile or so away, in Montana. What was supposed to be a hot night was clear and cold, and several times I wrestled with my sleeping bag and the dogs as they pinned down one corner or another of it, leaving my shoulders or feet exposed. Your head was next to mine on the pillow, asleep minutes after you put it there. As is usual, I took upwards of an hour to fall asleep and gazed through the back window of the truck’s camper shell at stars so abundant I had to put my glasses back on to be sure I wasn’t seeing double.
Your oldest friend, Joe, and his brother, Chris, had scored a late season pass to float the Selway, and though you wrestled with whether or not to go, you finally agreed. The river was low, leading to a slow trip. The planning seemed rushed, and there was the question of logistics. I offered to provide a shuttle, and the trip was on. I want to believe part of your hesitation was due to my history with rivers and kayaks, that you remembered the words I said to you at another put in, a different river.
Please don’t die.
I have a practiced speech I will give you and your friends, no booze and boating, no fucking around, make good choices. Instead, while you each pack your boats, I say, “Caleb, don’t be too proud to portage.” I do not tell you to have fun or to take lots of pictures.
While you continue to pack, I walk to the sign at the trailhead that follows the river for 47 seven miles to Selway Falls, where I will meet you in three days. On the message board, alongside a poster of Smokey Bear, photos of noxious weeds, and a reminder to pack it in/pack it out, is a picture of two brothers. It reads: Missing Since May 2018.
I had seen the picture of the brother’s months earlier driving to Moscow, Idaho, along the Clearwater River. They grin from a billboard, almost laughing. They are shoulder to shoulder, both in camouflage. The tip of an antler is showing near one brother’s knee. They have no idea that in a matter of months or days, I do not know when the picture was taken, they will be in a truck that slides off the same road we drove to get here, just a short way upstream of where we stand, end up in Deep Creek, and eventually the Selway. Two men will escape and swim to safety, two more will drown in the truck, and the brothers will remain unfound for what is now fourteen months.
We talked about the accident as we drove to our campsite at Paradise. We wondered where the vehicle slid from the road, how high the river was on that late May morning, how it would happen that both brothers would have gotten lost in the water, together, and how they could remain unfound.
Returning to the put in, I say to you, the fish biologist who has packed snorkeling gear, “I think you might find them.” The river is low. You are on the search and rescue team in our home county, and I am trying to soothe myself with the words. I am trying to change the story. My story. You smile at me, believing it possible. The water is very low—no rain for weeks. The snow is mostly down from Trapper Peak and the other high mountains that feed the river.
Flippantly, to the group, I say, “Look for bones.”
Joe tilts his head, laughingly says, “That’s pretty awful.”
“Those families need closure,” I say.
In my mind, I see a log jam with a tear of camouflage fabric. I see a candle next to a photo of a young but not old man. Beside it sits a wife wanting to bury something other than her face in her hands. She is done believing that they escaped. She wants to put herself and that body to rest. Let a little dust come to the silver frame.
Then I see a yellow helmet in a spring river. The Clark’s Fork. Wyoming. Fifteen years earlier. The helmet seems empty, the way it bobs up and down in the rapids, but it’s not. “He was monkeyed up on a rock,” Jim, Randy’s boating partner, said. I thought that meant sitting on top of it. I thought that meant alive. No, you would tell me later. It meant the water had forced Randy up against a rock, a rock I have never seen. Still, I imagined it as a boulder the size of an armchair, black with lichen, gray on top because it is dry, dry enough for Randy, on June 26th, 2004, to put his bare hands on and pull himself up.
I pushed Jim. I yelled, “How could you leave him?” We were standing on the road near Painter’s Bridge. I had gone into the store across the highway to buy snacks or beer or maybe to use the bathroom. I was going to meet Randy at the takeout. We’d brought salmon for supper. But a woman ran in just as I was checking out. Said that someone had fallen into the river. I said to the cashier, “My husband is a medivac pilot. He will save them.” But monkeyed up didn’t mean safe. You will tell me that by the time Jim saw Randy against that rock, Randy was probably dead.
Yesterday you and I walked into the Selway. We felt the cool of the water on our feet, then ankles. Only when I neared a debris jam did it get as high as my knees. I reached both hands down and pulled up my skirt, laughing. This is how I forgive rivers. This is how I count coup with rivers—standing in their middles, my feet solid on their bottoms, laughing. It is how I take my story back. I waded downriver to you and pointed to a stonefly the color of fall grass. Long, delicate. Antennae searching in the wind. I reached down to pick it up and asked if it would bite. No, you tell me, it is only the exoskeleton. I take it from the rock and hold it in my palm and wonder how something so lifelike can be hollow. A breeze lifts it from my hand and carries it to the river. I watched it ride the riffles until it disappeared.
You once said to me that water is unforgiving. You take long runs and backpack alone into the forest, into the Frank Church Wilderness whose boundary is near our home. “If I break a leg, or get heat exhaustion, I have a pretty good chance of making it.” I imagine I am lying next to you in bed as you are telling me this, but it is just as likely that we are standing in the kitchen or driving or you are giving me an argument as to why you won’t wear a Spot, don’t need to check in. You tell me the packraft is more stable than a kayak, that you don’t run rapids in it. “Give me at least 24 hours,” you say, “before you call for help.”
In the first years of our relationship, just as in the first weeks after Randy’s death, I would pace the length of the living room, angry at what feels like a personal affront. I would go to bed, get up, eat ice cream, drink wine, lie down again, then take Nyquil or Advil PM so that I will sleep. When sleep did not come or could not be forced, I yelled into the night. Fuck you. Fuck you both. And fuck me, I would scream, hurling words at my reflection in the night window. Fuck me for choosing men whose play was could be so deadly. Men who take chances with not only their lives but mine. Do you even think of what it might be like for me should you not come back? Should I have to call another mother and tell her that her son is dead? Should I have to look back in ten more years, just when I am at the edge of forgetting and see that day again, that girl crumpled at the side of a stream or the side of a trail and think, oh my god, that poor woman, and then realize that woman is me?
When finally you do come home, I am just awake enough to ask you to take a shower before getting in bed. I will then roll over, my put back to you, and go to sleep hugging my pillow, swearing tomorrow I will tell you to find someone new. Someone for whom loss would be novel. I am not strong enough. But In the morning, you will touch my face with your fingers, and your arms will be dark with tan. Your eyes open and studying me, and I will ask only about the scenery; I’ll ask if you saw any animals. If what you saw was beautiful.
The morning before Randy drowned in the Clark’s Fork River near Painter’s Bridge in Wyoming, he and I went for a walk. When we reached the top of a small ridge, Randy sat on a boulder, looked toward the river, and I snapped a picture. He is wearing a light blue polo, jeans, a ball cap, and his favorite sunglasses. This would be the last picture ever taken of him. He is looking away from me. Or so it seems, but perhaps the dark lenses hide his true gaze. For years, I will wonder if he is saying goodbye. His hands were shaking at breakfast. He said he was nervous but did not know why. I do not remember having the film developed or the other photos I took. But it must have been hard for me to open that envelope of pictures. To see him again, alive and sitting on that rock. His absence was so fresh that surely, I traced the outline of his jaw with my finger, maybe brought the image to my lips. The picture sits on my desk in a brown frame made to look like natural wood.
At the put in, on the concrete ramp that leads into the Selway, I watch you slide easily into the pack raft you bought earlier this year. This will be your second and longest trip in the new boat. You do the same hop and scoot I watched Randy do so many times. First bow, then the hull, touches the water, and soon the whole boat is lifted from the rocks, and you are floating away. I bring my camera to my eye and find you. I click and hear the mechanical shutter sound. I click again. And again. You pivot your boat around and wave. I take three more pictures. Zoom in as far as I can to see you, take another, then climb up the bank to your truck. I told you I planned to hike down the trail along the river for a few miles. I lied.
Randy had blown kisses. He was on the other side of the Clark’s Fork the last time I saw him. I don’t remember if I waited for him and Jim to put their boats back in the water or turned and left, limping back to the truck. I was recovering from a broken ankle. An accident had on the unfinished steps at our house, when I turned to laugh at something Randy said, caught my foot between the open space between step and riser, and spun around on what once was a very stable joint. It was a week before we were to leave on our honeymoon. My ankle was broken. Shattered. There would be surgery and no honeymoon. I hobbled away from the river, and I never saw Randy alive again. I wish I remember what Randy had said that caused me to turn around.
Leaning against your truck, I rehearse the postures I will assume when the sheriff meets me at the take out. Or when I finally get to cell service, and there is a call, maybe it is Joe’s wife or your mother. Maybe there will be a crowd gathered at the Selway Falls and a coroners van, and I will overhear someone say, “They haven’t found the body,” or “he is pinned under a log, and it’ll be a while before we can get him out,” or “They left his body by the trail. The search and rescue guys are hiking in to get him.” I tell myself that when I hear these words, I will know it is you. It will not be someone else they are talking about. I will stand very still. After telling the sheriff, “I am his partner. I will do what he and the crowd expect me to do. I have practiced. My hands go to my face to cover my mouth in that cliched way, I’ll scream, but inside, I will be working out my escape. I will let the tears fall until some brave person approaches me, and then I will ask to see you. Ask where you are.
In my mind, I will be packing up the house, deciding what needs to go. I will be dumping every ounce of liquor from the cabinet. Giving away house plants and turning off the water. I will stay in McCall only as long as your funeral, and the whole time I am there, I will pack. I will pack and pack and throw things away, and I will not answer the phone or the eyes of friends and family who will be asking how could this happen to her again. I will put your things in boxes I’ll leave at the thrift store. I’ll burn my old journals and your letters and bury the ashes where we once had a garden. I will believe that I am cursed. I will let this be the excuse not to fall in love again.
I will not be drunk at your funeral. When people say to me, “Don’t worry, you will find someone new,” I will not tell them to go to hell. I will not forsake my dogs, or sleep in the closet, or throw your mother's china to the floor just to break the goddamned silence that you leave me. I will tell my friends that I am fine. No, they needn’t come to stay with me. I always knew this day would come. I will not squander your money. I will not live on a diet of hot dogs and mayonnaise, nor will I take all the Xanax they prescribe me with all the scotch in the house and tell myself it is just to help me sleep.
What I will not have control over are the dreams. Dreams of us together in some bright meadow as we are now most days in the summer. Dreams of you and me on a boat or a train, as I was with Randy for years after he died. Dream dates, I call them. I will not be able to say, “my dead husband,” as I do now when I talk about Randy. I will have to say, my first dead husband, or my latest. And I will laugh a little afterward, and when people get home to their spouses, they will whisper, “I think she might have gone crazy,”; but I will not be crazy.
I get in the truck and wait to start the motor. I want you to believe that I am going to hike along the river. I want you to think that if you were to get out of your boat and touch the trail, you would be touching me. But what I want is to get away from the river. I tell myself I need ice. I want a real cup of coffee to make up for the instant you gave me a couple of hours ago. Just the ice, and I will head back with the dogs to the woods where books and a fine campsite next to Lake Como or Painted Rocks Lake would hold me still. I will back the truck up to the water and stare across it until the sun sets and try to imagine you and Chris and Joe camped fifteen or so miles from where I am leaving you.
Before the coroner left with Randy’s body, I asked to see him. She opened one of the van's two back doors, the one with the letters NER on it, and I climbed inside. I unzipped the bag very slowly; I did not want to catch Randy’s hair, scrape his nose. I cannot remember if his eyes were open or closed-- only that they were blue. I remember his brown hair still wet with river water. His lips dry from where mine had been. I tried to hug him. I wanted to pull out his hand, to hold it. I think I remember his lips slightly smiling. Or was his mouth open? That night I would make my mind’s eye go over every inch of his body again and again. I would memorize it. Make it mine again. I would forget the coroner reaching in before rezipping the bag and running her fingers through his hair, saying, “He had such great hair.”
Two days have passed, and I am at the little convenience store across the bridge that goes over the Lochsa where it joins the Selway. I ask the cashier if there have been any reports of drownings. I thumb through shirts on a rack, act like he must get this question all of the time. When he says no, I tell him my first husband died kayaking, and my current partner is on the water. He avoids my eyes as I hand him my credit card, and I smile at this slight feeling of power.
The road along the Selway is not as thin as that we drove along Deep Creek. It would take a massive flood or some bad choices to put a truck in the river here. I stop once to pull plums from a roadside tree. The air conditioner is at max, and still, the dogs pant in the seat behind me.
Despite having a map, I make a wrong turn. It takes me fifteen minutes to find a place to turn around, and then I find the beach where you said you would meet me. I back the truck up to the river and open the tailgate. The sand is too hot for the dogs' paws, so they get into the bed and take comfort in the canopy’s shade. They lap greedily at iced down water I give them. I watch the river for your helmet, for your green packraft. I am ready.
Friends, when they lose their spouses, ask me how to get through the first night? I want to tell them you don’t get through it. Or over it. You get used to it. Instead, I ask them to surround themselves with friends. Loved ones. I tell them the pain will come in waves, and eventually, the time between the waves will become longer. In those times, they will sleep. One day, I say, just as you start to forget, you will catch a scent or see the way a certain man walks down the sidewalk, the cut of his hair, his profile, and you reach to them, and just as you are about to say their name you realize, no.
No. It cannot be. And the pain returns to its place in your body, and you remember your story.
How many things can end so finally as they do when the bow of a boat touches the bank of a river after days of riding its current? One minute the water is carrying you, and the next, you are rising to meet me. You pull off your black helmet, kneel on the bank and stand. The cool water falls to your shoulders, runs down your body, and goes back into the Selway. From here, it will travel to the Clearwater, the Columbia, and on to the Pacific.
About the author
CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) and co-editor of Native Voices (Tupelo 2019). She has published poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals including Emergence Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat a Journal of the Arts, Whitefish Review, Broadsided Press, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, as well as several anthologies. CMarie is a regular columnist for the Inlander, the Translations Editor for Broadsided Press, Non Fiction Editor for High Desert Journal, and Director of the Elk River Writers Conference. She resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho.