Lava Falls Read online

  Praise for Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s other books published by the University of Wisconsin Press

  A Thin Bright Line: A Novel

  • Lambda Literary Award Finalist

  • Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award Finalist

  “Triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances.”

  New York Times Book Review

  “Empowering and bold. . . . Bledsoe injects life and dimension through her often stunning dialogue.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Bledsoe’s novel is an absolute wonder. Combining a McCullers-like facility in letting her settings tell half the story with characterization and dialogue worthy of Harper Lee, Bledsoe dives deep into the life of her protagonist.”

  New York Journal of Books

  “Berkeley author Lucy Jane Bledsoe shows the sexy side of the 1950s in her new novel.”

  San Francisco Chronicle

  “Author Lucy Jane Bledsoe is an impressively gifted novelist who in the pages of her latest epic, A Thin Bright Line, is able to consistently engage her readers’ rapt and total attention from cover to cover.”

  Midwest Book Review

  “A stirring and deeply felt story.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “Deftly weaves closeted sexuality, Cold War politics, and a mysterious death that haunts the author to this day.”

  San Jose Mercury News

  “Gripping historical fiction about queer life at the height of the Cold War and the civil rights movement, and its grounding in fact really makes it sing.”

  Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home

  The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica

  • Lambda Literary Award Finalist

  • Publishing Triangle Ferro-Grumley Award Finalist

  • Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, Fiction Award Finalist

  “Captures the deadly beauty of the southernmost continent.”

  Kirkus Reviews

  “Bledsoe uses the locale’s incredible beauty and high potential for drama, danger, and self-discovery for insights small and great.”

  Booklist

  “In the collision of art and science that is the novel, Bledsoe—part novelist, part science writer, and part intrepid adventurer—shows off a finely honed imagination and sensibility that, along with her deep passion for the wild places of the earth, inspire as they uplift.”

  Edge magazine

  “A beautiful novel about living in that extreme space, vivid and suspenseful.”

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic

  “Guaranteed to give armchair naturalists and travelers a glorious ride from Alaska to Antarctica.”

  Library Journal

  “An exhilarating read. . . . There’s an aching beauty to her tales of travel.”

  Passport

  “An honest—at times wrenchingly so—exploration of a personal relationship with wilderness, adrenaline and endorphins.”

  Portsmouth Herald

  “A longing for spiritual release Bledsoe can find only in the wilderness is woven through these thoughtful essays.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Layered, literary, and unflinchingly honest.”

  World Hum: Travel Dispatches from a Shrinking Planet

  Also by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  Fiction

  The Evolution of Love

  A Thin Bright Line

  The Big Bang Symphony: A Novel of Antarctica

  Biting the Apple

  This Wild Silence

  Working Parts

  Sweat: Stories and a Novella

  Nonfiction

  The Ice Cave: A Woman’s Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic

  Childrens

  How to Survive in Antarctica

  The Antarctic Scoop

  Hoop Girlz

  Cougar Canyon

  Tracks in the Snow

  The Big Bike Race

  LAVA FALLS

  LUCY JANE BLEDSOE

  THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor

  Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059

  uwpress.wisc.edu

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  London WCE 8LU, United Kingdom

  eurospanbookstore.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any format or by any means—digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Rights inquiries should be directed to [email protected].

  Printed in the United States of America

  This book may be available in a digital edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Bledsoe, Lucy Jane, author.

  Title: Lava Falls / Lucy Jane Bledsoe.

  Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018011132 | ISBN 9780299318505 (cloth: alk. paper)

  Subjects: | LCGFT: Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.L418 L38 2018 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011132

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience and research, names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-299-31858-1 (electronic)

  For

  Patricia

  Contents

  Girl with Boat

  Life Drawing

  Poker

  Wildcat

  Skylark

  The Found Child

  The Antarctic

  My Beautiful Awakening

  Wolf

  The End of Jesus

  Lava Falls

  The We of Me

  Acknowledgments

  Girl with Boat

  So far as I know, they’re all dead. I left in late autumn, four months after my mother died and a few days before the river froze up. I don’t see how they could have continued on without her, though the twins were practically men by then. We all had depended so completely on her. Father was the dreamer, the one who launched our life up here, but she was the one who figured out how to till the frozen soil so we could plant early, how to dry berries so they didn’t mold in the winter, how to stanch the flow of blood the time Derek sliced through his ankle with the axe. Father hadn’t wanted to bring books with us. He said primitive men hadn’t had books. He said the fun part was figuring out things for ourselves.

  I am paddling upriver. I am returning after an absence of thirty-three years. I don’t know what I’ll find.

  We moved to our inlet here on Sweet Creek, in eastern Alaska, when I was seven and the boys were five. Father and Mother must have been in their early thirties. He had a degree in political science and she in education. Until we left New England for the arctic, he worked construction and she taught junior high. I don’t remember anything about the planning stages. My first memory of our Alaskan life is driving to the airport in the middle of the night.

  Mother’s enthusiasm held through the flight to Fairbanks but foundered as soon as she boarded the four-seater bush plane. We three children were left with the bush pilot’s wife while they flew north on reconnaissance. Father cited the primacy of local knowledge as his rationale for letting the p
ilot choose the location for the rest of our lives. In hindsight, I have to admit that was wise. Had Father made the choice, I would probably be dead, too. He’d never been a practical man. I remember our night in the pilot’s small home in Fairbanks as he and Father pored over maps. Father couldn’t focus, didn’t want to look, used his hands to wave away specifics. Over and over again, he repeated our requirements: a gentle creek, a flat place to build, good hunting, and complete isolation, a site where we would not encounter other people. The pilot would nod impatiently and try to draw Father’s attention back to the map.

  I also remember my extreme relief, the prospect of enormous grief sloughing away, when the pilot’s wife drove me and my brothers to the airstrip. She said our parents had found the spot, and her husband would fly us there. Unlike my mother, I was all too glad to board that plane. Reunion with my parents was all that mattered back then.

  I sat up front with the pilot and looked down at the frozen rivers and snowy forests. It was May, many weeks before the thaw. As we landed in a frosty meadow, the plane’s skis sliding to a stop, I saw Mother and Father standing on the edge, next to heavy conifers, she hugging herself tightly, he filling his lungs with arctic air, as if he were breathing for the first time in his life.

  I’ve resisted romanticizing my childhood. I’ve refused to use the stories to gain attention. I’ve kept my survivalist past—it’s difficult even now as I paddle toward it to use that harsh word—hidden even from lovers. I don’t know if I’m protecting myself or my father. The hold of a spiritual inheritance, a man’s dream, especially when it’s so fierce, can surprise you. Even if you see it as wrongheaded. I could hardly bring myself to tell my guides the location of the cabin. It was our family secret. Our security. Our only hope. Father’s Eden. He had asked the bush pilot to not tell us the name of our creek, if it had one, so that we could never tell anyone where we were. After the pilot dropped me and my brothers off, we all watched him bank his plane toward the west, and then Father said, “Sweet Creek.” And that was it.

  Later I would learn that when we paddled downstream we reached another river with a name we also refused, merely calling it Big River. Another couple of long days’ float down that and we came to the mighty Yukon. Once a year Father made this journey to Fort Yukon where he bought a few supplies. He’d return from these trips in a strange mood of combined elation and depression, as if the view of the outside world both greatly excited and deeply disappointed him. He felt weakened by our need to buy oats and nails and even boots. When the boys got older, they begged to be allowed to go along to Fort Yukon, but he never let them, claiming that there wouldn’t be room in the boat for all the supplies. This wasn’t true. He didn’t want them to learn the way out.

  It has taken me decades to realize that I never really did get out. From age seven to seventeen I lived here in isolation, with my mother and father and twin brothers, a girl growing up with the bear and river and aspen. I have sometimes wished I could find a way to tell my story. It’s highly romantic. It could win me much. But it is both the heart of my loneliness and also my heart. It is my lifelong isolation. I am afraid that if I told it, I would be gutted, left with nothing at all.

  Today, to make my return bearable, I tell myself that I am paddling up this river to visit my mother’s grave. That’s what I told my guides, too. It is the only way I can let myself come. Each paddle stroke brings me closer to that spot in the upper meadow, where she once flagged down a bush pilot to rescue her and where she is now buried. But I am coming back for so much more than a visit to my mother’s grave. Now, just a couple of miles away, I realize that I am hoping that by visiting this mythic place I can release myself from its grip.

  My guides, Gregory and Stuart, help in ways they don’t know. They are sweet and young and handsome. So well meaning. They make me feel safe. It is true that they can’t hide their admiration for my father. Their lust for his risk is fixed in their eyes, hangs in their open mouths. I am grateful for this and resentful of it. I don’t break the spell by telling them how different they are from him. They have read many, many books on plants, mountains, rivers, and survival. They know how to tie dozens of knots, build good fires, roll a kayak. I am greatly comforted by their skills. Furthermore, they have evolved far past simple survival. They enjoy sipping scotch at dusk, the warmth of their expedition-weight sleeping bags, spinning long tales of their adventures. They make me want to tell my story at last. In fact, they make me want to start my love life over, to meet boys like them who might understand. Thirty-three years ago I delivered myself from this wilderness, but had I known how, had I known boys like Gregory and Stuart, I might have delivered myself too from the emotional thicket in which I’ve spent my life roaming. Had I known not only how to tell my story but also why I must.

  Please don’t misunderstand. I’ve lived a happy life with good friends, fulfilling work, and lots of lovers. I couldn’t ask for more. Yet I’m aware that I long for an intensity I wish I didn’t long for. My early years gave me a wildness of heart that I have never been able to move beyond.

  Mother wanted to leave even before the first snow fell. Over the years her requests took different forms. Begging. Demanding. Withholding sex, which we all knew about because we lived in one big room. There was a period, for about three years, starting when I was nine and the boys were seven, when she seemed to have finally given in. My parents were the happiest they’d ever been in those three years. There was lots of laughing. The weather was good. We lived like a family of bear.

  Then she snapped, I guess. Or maybe the happiness had been faked all along. In late August of my twelfth year, she made a big SOS out of logs in the upper meadow. A pilot bringing in caribou hunters landed and found our cabin. That night Father hit mother. It was the only time. She lived another five years. Then, a high fever, from what we don’t know, and she was gone in a matter of three days.

  After she died that June, things went about how you’d expect. There was grief, enormous amounts of grief. Father expressed his philosophically. The few times he spoke of her death, he mentioned the life cycle. He said her body was returning to the earth. As if she were compost. The twins expressed theirs physically. They felled trees and shot moose. They built an outbuilding for themselves, leaving me to sleep alone with my father in the cabin.

  So far as I know, I was the only one who cried. My grief tore at me. At times I felt as if my flesh were being ripped from my bones. This is not hyperbole. It is what I felt. Other times it was as if the grief were a hand holding me underwater. Drowning in our own inlet where the water temperature is killer cold. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t get warm.

  I imagined her everywhere. I saw her spirit in the retreating tracks of snowshoe hare, in eastward drifting clouds, in the Dopplered wails of wolves. I took these departures as messages from her, requests that I too leave. But I was seventeen years old and didn’t want to die. I didn’t know any other kind of leave-taking.

  It took me four months. I didn’t let myself think the word abandon. I couldn’t have thought it and still left. Instead, I noted how the boys were already man-sized. I told myself that they didn’t need me anymore. In fact, I went a few steps further. I let myself hate the boys. The way they trailed Father, helping, relentlessly helping. Derek still limping all those years later, and yet swinging that axe above his head, flying it down into the heart of a log. Dash better with a skinning knife than any of us, scraping the moose hide clean, working with such concentration you’d think he was painting a masterpiece. That’s how I remembered him all these years, the skinning knife in his hand, straddling a great bloody kill, engrossed in the stench of moose blood, his eyes glazed with the work of survival.

  It was Derek who heaped the dirt onto my mother, great shovelfuls of soil laced with bits of spring flowers. He worked with such strength and speed, as if he were afraid he might jump into the grave with her if he didn’t fill the hole fast enough. In those months after her death, I did my best to ignore the t
races of tenderness in Derek. He sometimes took my hand when walking. He paused in the course of his days, to watch bear cubs play or to listen to the papery rustle of aspen leaves. He taught himself to cook that summer, a hint of nurturance in his wild dishes. As if we didn’t all hurt, I wanted to scream at him. As if there is time for staring at rain pelting the window glass. When I saw his pain, I became my father. I wanted to work. I wanted to make sense of things. I wanted to survive.

  It was Mother who had secured my means for escaping, on a hot August afternoon, years earlier when I was ten. I like to think she knew what she was doing. The boys were off hunting with Father. Mother had sent me to get some water. It was a beautiful afternoon, the light making millions of diamond sparkles on the pale green water of our inlet. The bay was shaped like a rounded wave, and I liked to stand on the shore inside its curl. The main current of Sweet Creek was a good fifteen yards out from our beach.

  The bright blue wooden kayak drifted languidly down the creek toward me. I almost shouted my excitement. Only rarely did we have visitors, adventurers who happened onto our stream, into our inlet. They’d all been young men who stared in awe at our cabin, our clothes, our homemade rowboat, our life. They would stop to talk, and every one of them openly expressed his desire to be us. Though Father had told our bush pilot that he wanted complete isolation, he liked these visits. They validated him. He was doing what these other men could only play at on their two-week escapades. He always used that word, escapade, emphasizing their circus act lives compared to our tooth-and-bone existence. When talking to these young men, he exaggerated our success, pretending that the meat and berries were plentiful, that the weather was ideal, that we enjoyed one another’s company.

  As the pretty blue boat drew closer, an eddy caught its bow and spun it around. The swirling bright blue on clear green, the prospect of outsiders, mesmerized me. Until I realized there was no one inside the kayak. I ran to get Mother.

  She surprised me. I expected her to send me off to find Father and the boys. I assumed we’d launch a search for the missing kayaker. I was only ten, but I knew that a kayak without a paddler was bad news.