Nonfiction by Susan Pope
Nothing but white. Walls, comforter, window shades, pale light leaking around the edges. Am I awake or dreaming? Is it night or day? I’ve lost all tethers.
The fury that delivered us here to Iceland spun out. In the calm, bird song. I slip from the warmth of my husband’s side, fumble for hat, coat, gloves, binoculars, and gently open the door.
“Where are you going?”
My eighteen-year-old grandson lifts his head from a pillow in the next bed.
“For a walk.”
“At 4:30 in the morning?”
He, at least, has come to rest on local time, while my body hovers between oceans and continents, time zones and eras. We pause between our home in Alaska and our destination, Paris, where we’ll join the rest of the family for a grand tour of Europe.
Moist air skims my cheeks as I hike a worn path to the lake. Steam lifts from the shore, drifting up from thick black mud. No other humans stir, but the birds sing, each in its own language. In the distance, whooper swans trumpet to each other, surely bowing and weaving their long, elegant necks in a courtship dance. Close by, Arctic terns, bodies sleek and silver in the luminous light, hover, swoop, snatch fish from the smooth water, and hum their raspy tunes.
I imagine a tall, sturdy Viking woman walking this same path. She’s slipped out of her sod hut, leaving her husband and children tucked beneath their sheepskin robes, on her way to fish for Arctic char or steal eggs from bird nests along the shore. She feeds her family.
By contrast, here I am, a small, American grandmother in a blue and purple hat, wandering with no other purpose than to spy on birds and guess their names.
This extravagant journey was my idea, a gathering of three generations before my teenaged grandchildren flee my grown daughter’s nest. I hope that a glimpse of the wider world will be my legacy to them. But, more honestly, the trip is a gift to me, as I turn seventy. If I can just hold my family close one more time…. What? They will love me? Remember me? Thank me?
Eric Erickson, the developmental psychologist, believed that the task of the last phase of life is to reconcile integrity with despair. If we look back on our lives and feel a sense of accomplishment, then we will feel complete, that our life had value. If we look back and feel guilty that we have not met our goals, then we will feel hopeless. The ultimate goal in this phase is wisdom. But, I feel neither wise nor hopeless, nor ready to declare this the final chapter of my life.
I reach a small clearing beside the lake. A weathered sign proclaims this ground—heated from the earth’s molten core—a sacred place. People once traveled here for healing. Now, it’s overgrown and neglected. Perhaps no one needs to make a healing pilgrimage anymore. I move to the center of the weeds and wait for a tingle of enlightenment. Instead, I feel only the warm ground at my feet and cool breeze on my face.
My mother turned seventy the year my daughter turned twenty-one. Their birthdays were two days apart, so we held a double celebration, my daughter reaching adulthood, my mother, wisdom, or at least longevity. I discounted my mother’s life then. I tried my best to be nothing like her. She had no interest in education, career, travel, or anything broader than taking care of husband and family. By contrast, I layered my life with diplomas, careers, and travel to exotic places. It was never quite enough.
I turn back, heading up the hill to the old school turned tourist hostel. Just as I fumble for my key, the night clerk rushes to open the door for me. He must have been watching the crazy woman roaming among the birds.
When I enter our room, it smells of sweat and damp clothes. Old man and boy man. I slide off my coat and shoes and slip back into the cocoon for a few more minutes, close to my men with their soft snores and grunts.
I don’t know if my mother felt wise when she died twelve years after her seventieth birthday. I do know that she was content to fiercely love the small cluster of people she kept close to her. Maybe that’s enough of a legacy for anyone to leave.
Susan Pope writes about nature, travel, and family. Her work has appeared in Pilgrimage, Under the Sun, Cirque: A Literary Journal of the Pacific Rim, Hippocampus, Burrow Press Review, BioStories, and Alaska Magazine, among others. Her writing reflects intimate ties to the North and a restless pursuit of faraway places.
