Sarah/Sara. Jacob Marperger Paul
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And then there is time, also a rabid and uncaring demon, ready to subtract itself without notice, without warning, and hasten the return of ice. And all the little things, a twisted ankle, a bruised wrist, a lost dry bag full of food, a failed stove that can either singly or incrementally damn me to a slow starvation stranded on a shore only briefly forgiven winter’s cloak of snow, of darkness. But more than anything I fear the grizzlies. Hungry, angry picked-on bears; these are not the grizzlies of the lower forty-eight, intelligent masters of their ecosystems, appropriately skittish around people. These bears get picked on by their big white cousins and act like cranky children with claws and teeth and a top land speed close to sixty miles an hour. I’m smaller than them and even if I don’t smell like my food, my bags sure do.
I see the barren ground grizzlies from the kayak and paddle out further, or tack out if I’ve got the sail up. They look at me and they’re not scared, chasing their berries or ground moles or whatever else they feed on up here. They’re also limited to three months or so, a quarter of a year, to throw on enough fat to sleep cozily through winter. And then there’s all the wildlife I don’t know and don’t understand, the grounded molting geese and small shadow animals that flit between tufts of tundra. Tufts, they sound so innocuous. And they are, unless, of course, you don’t carefully watch every step as you walk across them and end up with that twisted ankle. Yes, most of all, I’m afraid of what I don’t know about this place. And it shocks me that I don’t know everything about everything that lives up here.
My father bored us all to tears over umpteen dinners as he planned and replanned and then planned again his retirement trip, this trip. And unlike my mother, I wanted to go. She would chide him, tease him, say, “Henry, by the time they let you out of that job you’ll be too old to go out in any boat that doesn’t have shuffleboard, blackjack and a swimming pool as standard features.” Well, Henry, at least you’ll never find yourself courting the West Palm Beach set at swing dancing for seniors on the QE2. I wanted to go with him. His knock’s promise of a silent sunrise viewed level with the water was the only thing that ever got me up early during high school. Perhaps Eeema was right, but after I left he swore that when he finished this boat he was done with Morgan Stanley.
That was his way, not rushing the boat to get out of the job, but not dragging it out either. I know that he loved his job, and especially the camaraderie of his coworkers, nearly as much as he loved the water. He filled his office with kayaking photos, many of which featured me. Half the joy he derived from kayaking was earning the respect of his coworkers by doing something truly different. He largely measured his accomplishments by their ability to inspire awe and raise eyebrows at work. But that had all changed; all of his photos and memorabilia were lost with the building. Like me, he believed he could channel everything into building the boat, and that it would then free him on this trip: a memorial equal parts object and action. He would have left within the year, I think. He’d nearly finished the boat.
The tundra amazes me. It’s a forest, willow and pine. Just a really, really short forest. I’m walking on plants a thousand years old, walking on them. It reminds me of Jerusalem. There it’s all manmade stuff, but equally old. When I go back, I’ll walk down streets Solomon’s city planners laid out, pray at the temple he built. Here it’s nature’s antiquity. And that’s the beauty of our time, the other use for explosive energy. I can go to these places. They’re available. I will go to these places, just as I will wake up after six hours of sleep and will make breakfast and will get in the kayak, set up its pontoons, hoist its sail, and set further off along my unbreakable itinerary.
July 18
I haven’t da’avened since I got here. Perhaps tomorrow, on Shabbat. I can’t do anything anyway, can’t cook, can’t row. Certainly, it’s the most important day that I pray. I took Shabbat into account when planning my itinerary. I figured I’d need a rest day each week anyhow. But I should be praying every day. I can’t make this trip without Hashem.
Really, I haven’t said Shemah, Shemonah Esrai, any of the prayers. I mean I figured I’d immediately give up on tznios; it’s not as if anyone here will see whether I’m immodest or not anyway. It’s not practical to wear a long skirt and long sleeves while pushing a boat into the waves, while paddling. And there’s no issue with shomrei n’giah. I have no one to touch, certainly no man to tempt me into any illicit behavior. I remember going to Rabbi Shem Tov sophomore year of college after a date and blushing when he asked whether kissing a boy made any of my life better. “Sara,” he said, “All of us have taivah’s, but they only bring us the illusion of pleasure in this life. The beauty of Yiddishkeite is that we’re not sacrificing the pleasures of this world for the pleasures of the next. We are discovering the true pleasures of this world that we may have them in the next as well.”
I blushed happily, so happily, because it wasn’t any fun competing for something I didn’t want, a date with some guy, I think his name might have been Jeremy or Rodger, I don’t remember, and then playing a cat and mouse game, and marking success in terms of what I was willing to give, what he earned taking. Give and take. The language of compromise, of negotiated treaties only kept out of fear, out of need, should not define love, the relationship between genders.
So why haven’t I been da’avening? Why haven’t I been praying? It makes no sense to shirk the pleasure of prayer. I’m not sure what’s changed, I made a point of at a minimum saying Shemah every day right up until the float plane dropped me off in the surf. There were those who said I’d lose faith after what happened, but clearly, I kept mine. I’ll start da’avening again tomorrow. I promise.
As soon as Eema would let him back into the city, Abba began volunteering at the rescue workers’ relief station in what had been Liberty Square. He would take the Long Island Railroad into Penn Station where he’d catch the IRT down to Fulton Street. From there, he’d walk up Broadway, forcing him to go past Trinity Church which had become a nexus for the tourists who began steaming downtown almost before building 5, Borders Books, gutted by flame but not collapsed, was torn down. This was well before the fire of a million burning computers had subsided. Large banners signed by well-wishing church groups and third-grade classrooms hung both inside and outside the colonial church. Apparently, they mounted a giant piece of poster board on the metal gates of their small graveyard whose center-piece declared “God Bless America’s Heroes.” Abba told me it was a zoo. Middle Americans with aw-shucks sensibilities posed for snapshots with death-weary firemen who were on their way to long sessions of alcoholic self-medication. The Baptists had prayer stations manned by out-of-state cheerleaders dressed in red T-shirts that said “Prayer Helps” and eagerly converted those open to suggestion and the power of larger than life experience.
What I have is more than that.
He called me every day, even the days that I called him, and wailed and railed that first of all, he wasn’t any fucking hero; he was as passive as a slaughterhouse cow. The worst part about everything was forced participation in an iconoclastic struggle between faiths he reviled. “And, Sarah, these bastard prayer stations with their cheery-eyed teenage Christ-wannabes. I could knock their blocks off for them. They’re like those bastard Mormons posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims, or like those Polish nuns who’ve set up a monastery at Auschwitz to pray for the Jews who died there. Fuck you and your insulting prayers.”
Of course I agreed with him about the Auschwitz nunnery and the Mormon baptismal project for Shoah victims, but at the same time I tried to point out that these were responses to Hashem’s chosen people. Prayer does help. And that now, more than ever he should turn back to the faith of his forefathers, as I had. He got nasty. “I forgot that I was talking to my own personal God-Freak, my recidivist daughter who’d like to trade in hundreds of years of progress for medieval customs, a veil, a head covering and second class status.” But I did not get angry back. It isn’t easy to see the world confront your comfortable, convenient beliefs with airliners full of jet fuel, businessmen exhaled by subexplosions a thousand feet up in the air and a massacre of firemen. He told me about the bodies cascading in clean lines against a back drop of shiny steel rails. He tried not to tell me what happens to a person when they impact on cement. But I know, already, I’ve seen it. And exploding bodies are simply that, exploding bodies.