As they flew in, Roy watched the yellow plane’s reflection darting across larger reflections of green-black mountain and blue sky. He saw the trees coming closer on either side, and then they hit and the spray flew up. Roy’s father stuck his head out the side window, grinning, excited. Roy felt for a moment as if he were coming into an enchanted land, a place that couldn’t be real.
And then the work began. They had as much gear as the plane could carry. His father inflated the Zodiac with the foot pump down on one pontoon, and Roy helped the pilot lower the Johnson six-horse outboard over the transom, where it dangled, waiting, until the boat was fully inflated. Then they attached it, lowered the gas can and the extra jerry cans, and that was the first trip. His father went in alone, Roy waiting anxiously inside the plane while the pilot couldn’t stop talking.
Up near Haines, that was where I tried.
I haven’t been there, Roy said.
Well, like I was saying, you got your salmon and your fresh bear and a lot of things other people will never have, but then that’s all you got, including no other people.
Roy didn’t answer.
It’s peculiar, is all. Most don’t bring their kids with them. And most bring some food.
They had brought food, at least for the first week or two, and then the staples they wouldn’t want to do without: flour and beans, salt and sugar, brown sugar for smoking. Some canned fruit. But mostly they were going to eat off the land. That was the plan. They would have fresh salmon, Dolly Varden, clams, crab, and whatever they hunted: deer, bear, sheep, goat, moose. They had brought two rifles and a shotgun and a pistol.
You’ll be all right, the pilot said.
Yeah, Roy said.
And I’ll come and check on you now and again.
When Roy’s father returned, he was grinning and trying not to grin, not looking directly at Roy as they loaded the radio equipment in a watertight box, then the guns in waterproof cases and the fishing gear and tools, the first of the canned goods in cases. Then it was listening to the pilot again as his father curved away, leaving a small wake behind him that was white just behind the transom but smoothed out into dark ridges, as if they could disrupt only this small part and at the edge this place would swallow itself again in moments. The water was very clear but deep enough even just this far out that Roy couldn’t see bottom. In close along shore, though, at the edges of reflection, he could make out the glassy shapes beneath of wood and rock.
His father wore a red flannel hunting shirt and gray pants. He wasn’t wearing a hat, though the air was cooler than Roy had imagined. The sun was bright on his father’s head, shining in his thin hair even from a distance. His father squinted against the morning glare, but still one side of his mouth was turned up in his grin. Roy wanted to join him, to get to land and their new home, but there were two more trips before he could go. They had packs filled with clothing in garbage bags and rain gear and boots, blankets, two lamps, more food, and books. Roy had a box of books just for school. It would be a year of home schooling: math, English, geography, social studies, history, grammar, and eighth grade science, which he didn’t know how they’d do since it had experiments and they didn’t have any of the equipment. His mother had asked his father about this, and his father had not given a clear answer. Roy missed his mother and sister suddenly and his eyes teared up, but then he saw his father pushing off the gravel beach and returning again and he made himself stop.
When he finally crawled into the boat and let go of the pontoon, the starkness hit him. It was nothing they had now, and as he watched the plane behind them taxi in a tight circle, then grind up loud and take off spraying over the water, he felt how long time might be, as if it could be made of air and could press in and stop itself.
Welcome to your new home, his father said, and put his hand on top of Roy’s head, then his shoulder.
By the time the plane was out of earshot, they had bumped the dark, rocky beach and Roy’s father was out in his hip boots pulling at the bow. Roy got out and reached back for a box.
Leave that for now, his father said. Let’s just tie off and take a look around.
Nothing will get into the boxes?
No. Come here.
They walked through shin-high grass, bright green in the sun, and up a path through a small stand of cedars to the cabin. It was weathered and gray but not very old. Its roof was steeply peaked to keep off the snow and the entire cabin and its front porch were raised six feet off the ground. It had only a narrow door and two small windows. Roy looked at the stovepipe jutting out and hoped that it was a fireplace, too.
His father didn’t take him into the cabin but skirted it on a small trail that continued farther up the hill.
The outhouse, his father said.
It was the size of a closet and raised up, with steps. It was less than a hundred feet from the cabin, but they would be using it in the cold, in winter snow. His father continued on.
There’s a nice view up here, he said.
They came to a rise through nettles and berry, the earth breaking beneath their feet, grown over since it had last been traveled. His father had come here four months earlier to see it once before buying it. Then he’d convinced Roy and Roy’s mother and the school. He’d sold his practice and his house, made his plans, and bought their gear.
The top of the hillock was overgrown to the point that Roy wasn’t tall enough for a clear view on all sides, but he could see the inlet like a shiny tooth sprung out of the rougher water outside and the extension beyond to another distant island or shore and the horizon, the air very clear and bright and the distances impossible to know. He could see the top of their roof close below him, and around the inlet the grass and lowland extending no more than a hundred feet at any point, the steepness of the mountain behind them disappearing at its very top in cloud.
No one else for miles around, his father said. Our closest neighbor as far as I know is about twenty miles from here, a small group of three cabins on a similar inlet. But they’re on a different island, and I can’t remember right now which one it is.
Roy didn’t know what to say so he didn’t say anything. He didn’t know how anything would be.
They hiked back down to the cabin then, through a sweet and bitter smell coming from one of the plants, a smell that reminded Roy of his childhood in Ketchikan. In California he had thought all the time of Ketchikan and rain forest and had formed an image in his imaginings and in his boastings to his friends of a wild and mysterious place. But put back into it, the air was colder and the plants were lush but still only plants and he wondered how they would pass the time. Everything was sharply itself and nothing else.
They clunked up onto the porch in their boots. His father opened the lock on the door, swung it wide for Roy to step in first. Roy when he went in smelled cedar and wetness and dirt and smoke and it took a few minutes for his eyes to adjust properly to see more than the windows and begin to see the beams above and how high the ceiling went and the rough look of the planks for the walls and floor with their sawed-through knot-holes but the smooth feel of them nonetheless.