Then I remembered the Dead Letter Office. A few weeks ago — or a decade, it seemed — my class had gone on a field trip to the local post office. It had been dull, in the particular way that forced visits to government institutions are always dull. Rooms filled with filing cabinets. A sweaty tour guide in a blue uniform, armed with cue cards and a litany of groan-worthy puns. Long hallways. No break for snacks. The Dead Letter Office was where the mail ended up if it could not be delivered. Our tour guide had shown us around proudly. The place was special, he said. The large, grand Dead Letter Office in New York City had even been featured in a Christmas movie once, since all the wish lists that were addressed to Santa, North Pole amassed there during the holidays, heaped like an indoor snowdrift.
Alone in my bedroom, I hurried to my desk. I grabbed up a pen — with a spray of feathers in place of an eraser, as I recall — and a sheaf of paper. Then I wrote for ten pages, front and back, without stopping. Aunt Kim’s necklace at the funeral would have made you laugh — she has no taste — Aunt Janine wore flats because of her bunions — it was so strange to see them there without you — two instead of three — everyone was chatting and having coffee, the whole family wandering all over and giving each other hugs — but the twins kept stopping and looking around — like they were waiting for you— I was barely conscious. My hand moved across the page, and words followed. They made you wear an awful dress at the funeral — I thought you should have your jeans on, but Aunt Kim said No Way — I put a package of gum in the coffin — I don’t believe in heaven, but you sure do — maybe the gum will help your ears pop on the way up—
Finally it was over. The letter was done, folded into an envelope. I crept downstairs. Moving quietly so as not to rouse my father, I collected a stamp. On the envelope, I wrote just one word: mom. Then I threw on a coat and hurried down the street to the mailbox.
THERE ARE ENVELOPES for you in every state I have ever visited. For nearly two decades, I have written to you. Perhaps it is strange that I still have so much to say. I often find myself turning to you, reflexively, a question on my lips; I still engage in imaginary quarrels with you. I store up the memories I have left — the ones that have not fallen by the wayside — and run them through my hands, examining them. The raucous cackle of your laugh. The honey-and-lavender odor of your hair. Your habit of humming on long car trips. Your penchant for linen skirts. I still experience that surge of bottomless sorrow. Even now, this can only be alleviated by a few minutes spent at my desk, scribbling away, head bent over the page.
The whole matter has been complicated, of course, by my continuous traveling. For my work, I have circumnavigated the globe. As a rule, a nature photographer never stays anywhere too long. Straight out of college, I took a job capturing images of desert animals, rambling across the horn of Africa over a period of weeks. In my father’s words, I “caught the travel bug.” Since then, I have hiked up mountainsides and gone spelunking through caves. I have broiled red in tropical climates and slept in makeshift igloos. I have set foot on every continent. I have swum in nearly every ocean.
I once spent a grueling month in Kenya — always breathless from the altitude, always hot, right down to my bones. I once spent a week photographing the blind dolphins of the Indus River. (Centuries of living in such murky water had rendered their eyes moot.) I once flew to Australia for a three-week photographic bonanza, snapping every inch and angle of the baobab trees, their improbable silhouettes, as fat and waxy as candles.
In many of these places, there has been no Dead Letter Office. There has sometimes been no postal system at all. I could not turn to the guide who had steered me out into the glimmering stream of the Indus River, pass him an envelope — addressed simply mom—and tell him, “Take care of this for me, would you?” I could not toss my letters into the recycling bin or the gutter, either. I would never degrade them to that extent.
Instead, I have tucked them under boulders and tree roots. I have crammed them into the chinks of brick walls. I have stapled them to telephone poles alongside posters for missing dogs and ads for music lessons. I have pinned them to the clotheslines of strangers. I have made kites out of them, letting them soar on gusty days, then releasing my hold, watching the wind carry them away.
3
YOU WOULD HATE the Farallon Islands. I can tell you this in no uncertain terms. Of all the places I have traveled, this one is the wildest, the most remote. There is no respite from the howl of the wind and the pounding of the waves. Mick — the nice one — has assured me that I will become inured to the noise, but it seems more likely that I will go off the deep end first. I am chilly all the time. I go around buried beneath so many layers of clothing that I have taken on the shape of a snowman. I arrived a week ago, but time moves strangely here. It is easy to lose track of it, to lose track of oneself. I already feel as though I have been on the islands forever.
In other places I have visited, I have been able to photograph everything I needed in a month or so. But this archipelago is something else. The islets are the central stars in a galaxy of marine life. The birds and seals are the inner constellations — permanent residents who eat, mate, and raise their young on the rough-hewn granite. There are great white sharks, periodic visitors, pulled out of their mysterious orbits to linger offshore. Whales, like far-flung comets, pass by in search of krill. There are tufted puffins. Sea otters. Comb jellies. I am slated to be on the islands for a full year. I will need all that time to capture this end-of-the-world spot.
At any hour of the day, I can watch seals on the shore. I can watch birds wafting across the sky. I can watch a bank of clouds looming in the west like a new continent in the process of forming. The occasional airplane — glinting silver in the distance, an emissary from the civilized world — strikes an incongruous note.
Then there is the cabin. The kitchen sink broke on my very first night, and to my great amazement, I found myself on my knees beneath the counter, wrench in hand, following directions as Mick shone a flashlight in my eyes. The toilet cannot be flushed very often. The television has a screen so infused with static that it is basically a large, boxy radio, offering audio only. The cabin is the sort of structure in which every single board creaks audibly whenever someone passes up or down the stairs. Food, photographic equipment, and clothes have to be stored in plastic tubs to keep out the rodents, the bird lice, and the damp.
The past week has been a bit like going back in time. There is no cell tower on the islands, no Internet, no landline. There is just a radiophone, clearly marked: For emergencies only. Mick, this means you!!! To communicate with anyone on the mainland, I will have to write a letter. I will have to write it by hand, since the computer is iffy at best, and the printer, old and battered, is in a perpetual state of low ink, paper jams, or some sort of complex wiring dysfunction due to the damp. Once my letter has been stamped and addressed, I will have to wait for the ferry. Days will pass without any sign of it, during which everything I have written will gradually become obsolete. When Captain Joe finally turns up, he will transport my envelope to the continent, slipping it into a mailbox for me. Apparently it can take a month or more to send a message and receive a response.
While I am on the Farallon Islands, I will have to hang on to my letters to you. I cannot in good conscience give them to Captain Joe, asking him to transport them over miles of ocean and mail them, at the cost of considerable time and effort, to no one. I can’t even bury or burn them; we do not taint the environment by putting anything into the earth, and fires are a waste of precious wood and paper. I will have to stash my letters to you under my mattress, like porn.