God, I’m tired.
I fold up my jacket and stuff it between the seat and the window, lean my head against it, and try to think about other things, or to sleep. I’ve been up a day and a half already but can’t seem to keep my eyes closed long enough to nod off. We are headed into evening, but the sun hasn’t even come close to setting. We’ll follow the river farther and farther east, and it will still be light at nine o’clock, and at ten. I had forgotten, almost, how it goes up here in the summers: twilights lasting hours, skies the deepest, most ridiculous blue, horizons absurdly far off. It is like the ocean, in a sense, except that it really, absolutely, is not like the ocean at all. Not anymore it isn’t.
After some in-between time spent simultaneously beckoning and fighting sleep, I give up and turn to the girl next to me, who has been changing CDs every once in a while and is now listening with her eyes closed, fingers still picking away.
“You know,” I say to her, “all this used to be underwater.”
The girl blinks at me, takes off the headphones. “What?”
“Water,” I say again, pointing out the window. “All this used to be underwater.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“How much water?”
As the girl listens, wide-eyed at the sudden dissertation, I explain about the ancient glacial lake, the one that once covered a whole corner of Montana and then some. Lake Missoula. Every few hundred years, it would fill enough to float the two-thousand-foot-tall ice dam that held it back, in what would someday be (and still is) the northern Idaho panhandle we are heading for — home to old hippies, tweakers, skinheads and wolves, or so the papers say.
“They say that about us too.” The girl sounds disappointed, but I can’t be sure if it is with the reporters or the people they write about.
“Us?”
“Oregon. The parts that aren’t Portland or Ashland or Bend. That leaves a whole lot of spots to park your little meth lab in. Your pot farm. Or your gun rack full of semiautomatics. For Bambi.”
“You think they’re right?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I never did ever see a wolf, though.”
“Maybe we’ll see one in Montana.”
“When do we get there?”
“Early tomorrow morning. And all day to cross it. I’m supposed to get off about halfway.”
“Supposed to?”
“Going to.”
She nods, tentatively, but keeps looking at me with something that could be mistaken for attentiveness, so I go on talking about the ice dam. When it started to float, I tell her, it would break down a little bit at a time, and eventually all the water would come crashing through, the whole lake draining in a few days. Billions of gallons, carving out new channels in the land, or widening and deepening old ones, every time it happened.
“Sounds crazy,” she says, but there is no detectable disbelief in her voice, just a familiar and painful wonder. Of course it was Mick who told me this story, among a million others, as I sat at his feet with that very expression on my face.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, not missing more than a single beat. “That’s where this entire river came from, and this gorge, and smaller canyons, lakes, ponds — everything we can see. They’ve found pieces of Montana all the way at the Pacific Ocean.”
I consider the broken and fused-back-together landscape. Chunky, ash-colored rock and scrubby brush, more gray than green; buttes and huge potholes that must sometimes hold water but are all dried up now, cracked earth the predominant decorating scheme. Evidence of calamity is all around, if you know what to look for.
“Does it have a name?”
“Scablands,” I say.
“Like scabs you pick.” The girl raises one sermonizing finger. “And make them bleed. And if you do it too many times, you get scars.” The words sound ingrained, as if she has been admonished for the very thing on more than one occasion but still has to do it, just to prove to herself that some things will always hold true.
“Exactly.”
The train tracks hug the river; they are so close that sometimes I can see only water even if I press my forehead to the glass and look straight down. No more than a few stops between Portland and Spokane, because there isn’t much out here to stop for. Unless you want a closer look at the geology — how all the different pieces fit — and I would very much like that, if the train would only stop moving, if only for a little while. It is a place Mick would have loved, and maybe once came to — digging holes and pocketing treasures, dusting off the debris of past lives.
I visited him in Missoula once, in 1967, his sophomore (and last) year in college. He showed me, on the mountains surrounding town, the high-water marks, which in a particular sort of late-afternoon light looked almost drawn there, penciled in by some disembodied hand. I imagined the town and buildings already in place at the bottom of the lake bed, twelve thousand years before. Imagined swimming deep underwater down Railroad Street, Higgins and Front, past the train depot and the Oxford Saloon, Eddie’s Stud Club and the old hotels, looking through the windows at the people playing poker and drinking beer, fighting, stomping out chain-smoked cigarettes on sawdust-covered floors. I was eleven and hadn’t yet learned how to swim, but nevertheless had no difficulty seeing myself as a fish or some other meandering water creature. Aside from my fascination with all things aquatic, I tended to live an existence not wholly hitched to reality anyway. Mick called me Dolphin Girl sometimes, or Miss Fish Lips.
Aside from the skinny on the lake, the rocks, and the rivers, he filled my malleable young brain with countless other miracles. Then left it to me to figure out how much of it he’d simply made up. The time he told me about water coming from stars, for example, seemed like an easy one — completely not true — but years later I found out it did happen, sometimes, through an intricate, tandem process involving explosions and compression of intergalactic gas and dust. I didn’t understand it enough to explain to someone else, but was still suitably impressed by the magic of the process itself, the fact that Mick knew about it, and the even more astonishing fact that he was not bullshitting me.
The part about coming back, though — that part had been pure bunk. Dead or alive, he said, like it was some kind of gangster-movie joke. A joke with the worst punch line ever. I have still not come to terms with how old old is, but I know how gone gone is. Dead-end-tunnel gone. No exit through the gift shop.
And now my father is preparing to slip away too, or so his letter said. I have no reason not to believe him. If he had his heart set on something so ordinary as luring his transient daughter home, he probably would have tried it a long time ago, and a lot more directly. My mother — in postcards and letters, during rare phone conversations and that one time the three of us met in the middle — has deliberately avoided asking, or even hinting. It is as if they have both always understood that whatever inexplicable trajectory I was on would lead me home in its own good time. Or wouldn’t. And maybe that was not an outcome they’d ever been waiting for anyway; maybe it was for the best that I left and stayed gone, since my presence would only have reminded them every day of their other kid. Maybe they didn’t want to be reminded. There is really no good way around it, though, except maybe to go and stay gone. Exhibit A: how well that has worked out. Exhibit B: not so perfectly, but.