A Widow's Journey, Part Two
The water of life.
Sometimes, in writing a story, you realize there is another story inside of it. It’s a stowaway, grown comfortable in hiding, maybe over many years. Or it blew in yesterday on a sudden gust of wind. When that second story emerges, are you obliged to disclose it, as holding back might harm the truth?
In October, I traveled north from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi. October was the month in which my husband of forty-three years was born. Had he not died of lung cancer in April, 2023, he would have been seventy-one. My mission was to scatter his ashes where the Mizi-ziipi, — Ojibwe for Great River — begins. You can read Part One here. Please do. Each mortifying anecdote is true, and some are highly instructive. As in, don’t be like me.
As in: operating a motor vehicle on public highways at high speeds, impaired by thirty hours without sleep. Nearly rolling said vehicle down a cliff to a watery grave. And the cherry on top: leaving his ashes at home, when scattering them was the purpose of the trip.
I apologize for the delay in bringing you Part Two. The second story, showing up at the last minute, asked to be told.
How hard it was to argue with this story, this secret sharer, the one in the shadows. In the end, you will see that both stories won. I hope that you, dear reader, will let every one of your stories win.
A Widow’s Journey, Part Two
Two cans of Red Bull did not stop my body from thrumming with the prime directive: coffee.
I had ground the beans, then left them at home in St. Paul, hours away from my rental cabin. Worse: I’d forgotten my husband’s ashes. The purpose of this trip was to scatter them in the headwaters of the Mississippi River. There was nothing to be done about that. But: coffee.
By noon on Saturday, the rain had ended. Around two, too agitated to work, I pulled on a hooded sweatshirt and walked over to the resort owner’s cabin. Susan — I recognized her from her photo on the rental app — looked up from the small counter where she was doing paperwork.
“Is everything okay?”
“Perfect. Except for one thing. I forgot to bring coffee.” Imagine Cookie Monster’s benign countenance with my haggard face superimposed on it. His cheerful growl, roughened with my desperation. Coffee.
“Oh, honey! I wish you’d told me when you booked. I could have bought groceries and stocked the kitchen. For only an extra twenty-five dollars.”
I’d already dropped more than four hundred for two solitary nights at a cabin that could easily have slept four, three bundles of firewood, and a six-pound bag of ice I’d be leaving behind in the freezer, unopened.
“What a shame,” I said.
“Wait a sec.” She opened a door behind the counter and disappeared, returning a minute later with a Keurig. The machine gave new meaning to the word footprint. It was as big as one of those boots you wear after breaking an ankle.
“Take this back to your cabin. Will three pods be enough? On me.”
I don’t know how a typical drug deal works. This one was painless. I’d never used a Keurig, but as they are ubiquitous, it had to be easy. I took it back to the cabin, plugged it in next to the toaster, and poured cold water into the tank.
Question:
A woman is A) alone; B) in a cabin in the woods, and C) has demonstrated breathtakingly poor judgment in more than one activity of daily living. And she is not D) Goldilocks or E) Snow White. What happens next?
Answer:
Three punched and mutilated pods later, I read the instructions on the side of the Keurig. Had I done so earlier, I would not have pushed buttons before they were ready to be pushed. I would have made and enjoyed three delicious hot beverages instead of dumping three half-filled mugs of a tepid, vile, brownish liquid into the sink.
There had to be a ritual I could perform. Some ceremony to drive away failure. What kind of idiot proves herself incapable of using the most basic of small appliances? Or comes this close to crashing her car down a rocky embankment and into a lake, because she was fool enough to listen to a GPS assistant with a BBC voice?
The mug was one I’d bought for him as a souvenir of our first camping trip, a year before we were married. Lake Itasca was written on one side, and Headwaters of the Mississippi River on the other. The words were still pristine, even though he’d used it over more than four decades.
I thought of the black plastic container, so expressive of his quiet dignity, left on the kitchen table next to a Tupperware container of coffee. I’d treated my dead husband like a box of Cocoa Puffs.
I spent the rest of the day walking along the sandy shores of Crooked Lake. My steps were weighted with some minor-key emotion I couldn’t find a word for. Somewhere between forlorn and desolate, maybe. Eighteen months of grief had tinted my view of the world in sepias and blues that ran together, forming untrustworthy boundaries.
As I took more pictures of the lake, I realized that the sunset colors meant one thing: it was about to get dark. I scrambled up the embankment. In October, at this northern latitude, night came early.
I wanted a fire.
Susan had left the bundles of wood under the cabin’s porch to keep them dry. Moisture had seeped up from the ground. The wood was damp, but not soaked. I could have a decent fire, if I could get one started.
What did I need? Kindling. I looked around. A few twigs and leaves, but they were sodden. I dug underneath, and found some that were dry. Newspaper? I went in the cabin and rummaged.
All of my reading material was on my iPad. I had notebooks, but they were for writing. Paper towels and bags would have to do. I found matches in the kitchen. The porch light was dim; I needed a flashlight to see what I was doing.
I opened every cupboard. Every drawer. Nothing. In a cabin with two flat-screen TVs with four streaming services, I could not find a flashlight.
I know, I know. You’re thinking: Mary, why didn’t you use the flashlight on your phone? And I can only offer up Because I was born in the fifties? as an excuse. When phones and flashlights were two separate things.
She knew how to build a fire. She’d been a Camp Fire Girl. But last night’s rain had seeped up through the ground. Even though they’d covered it in plastic, the wood was soaked. Still, with a few expertly placed slivers of sap-covered pine and some curls of birchbark, blowing on it just enough, she had a compact, tidy blaze. It was time to cook breakfast.
The first batch of pancakes looked like scrambled eggs.
~ from “Smoke,” my first published story.
The matchsticks snapped against the strip on the box. A twig, a leaf, a torn piece of paper bag flared up and died down. The wood smoldered. I cupped my hands and blew. Rearranged sticks. I looked at my watch. I’d been at this project for over an hour.
Suddenly, a length of wood was burning. I nudged it. Added another. It caught. I let it burn for a few minutes, reached for a stick to poke it. Hoping, hoping — no. The wood collapsed, taking the fire with it. The box of matches was empty.
Wincing from the smoke, I stood. I drank the last of my Moscow Mule and headed for the cabin steps, ready for a shot or two of aquavit and another attempt at sleep.
Then I saw it.
That white thing under the porch. I kneeled down, reached, and seized a full sixteen-ounce bottle of lighter fluid.
I arranged the rest of the wood in a tepee over the embers, doused it, and stood back. My fire blazed towards the heavens.
They’d pitched his tent in a campground near Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi. The name Itasca was cut and pasted from two Latin words, “veritas” (true) and “caput” (head): true head. At its true head, the Mississippi River was thirty-two feet across and eighteen inches deep. It was marked by a low dam of carefully placed rocks. A sign cautioned that the rocks could be slippery. They were not, until that single moment at the midpoint of crossing, where the river caught her foot.
~ “Smoke”
Two patio chairs faced the fire. I set the bottle of aquavit on one, and sat on the cold metal of the other. I filled my shot glass and sipped slowly.
Aquavit is an acquired taste. Some brands are nasty, leaving you coughing, reeling from a caraway hit, as if you’d pushed your face into a loaf of dank pumpernickel.
But this bottle came from a craft distillery near Lake Superior and was different: a light touch of caraway and dill, but also hand-gathered herbs, with notes of water-adjacent plants like sumac, cedar and spruce,
We drank a lot of this brand of aquavit. Nights by the stone firepit on the small deck that opened from our bedroom. In the Boundary Waters wilderness. In the backyard, in two matching Adirondack chairs. In the living room, in front of the fireplace. In the sauna he built in our basement, as steam rose from lava rocks. Aquavit: water of life.
“That story you wrote. ‘Smoke.’ Remember?”
He was speaking to me from his bed at the hospice. I stared out the window at the courtyard. It was dusk, the lights in his room not yet turned on. Snow was falling on bare dirt.
I waited for a long minute before I replied.
In that minute were many things I didn’t say. How I was in night school, and took a creative writing class; how my teacher loved my story and published it in the university’s new literary magazine; how I didn’t find out until you brought home a stack of copies they’d unboxed at the library where you worked. I saw my name on the cover next to the names of two famous novelists. It was my name before I got married.
You picked me up and danced me around. You’ve arrived!
I went rigid.
Why did they publish my story without asking?
The snow was falling on dirt. The dirt would become a garden. In the spring, gardeners would make it beautiful. But before they did, you died.
How had this happened?
My teacher couldn’t find me in the phone book, so he called a number listed with the same last name. My mother. To get my number. Because when I married you, I changed my name to yours.
I wanted to surprise you. I knew how excited you’d be was what my teacher said.
And my mother called me every single day for weeks, asking, begging, to read my story. When can I read your story when when when your story your story I want to read your story. And if she had read my story I would have had to kill myself because the story was about a man and a woman who weren’t married to each other sleeping together and there were two bad words in it and if I didn’t kill myself she would have prayed me to death. Your story your story your story.
And as her voice assaulted me, I shrank down into a corner, twisting my body, making it small. You saw none of this; you were at work. People congratulated you. There was planning and excitement.
The launch party. The reading. The famous novelists. It was the biggest honor of my life, and I could not go.
This was something you never understood: why I could not go.
Why I stopped writing.
The fire flared up, too suddenly. Sparks singed the air. Her eyes stung. The smoke cleared, and when she looked up, the sky was filled with stars.
~ “Smoke”
On Sunday morning, I packed up the car and drove the seventeen miles to the headwaters. At the parking lot I pulled on a jacket, tucked the bottle of aquavit underneath it, and walked down the paved trail to the place where the Great River begins.
A hundred yards downstream, the river slowed and paused amid tall grass. I crouched down and opened the bottle.
I took a small sip, and poured the rest into the small stream that would hook north, widen, and then travel south, a total of 2,340 miles, passing our home in St. Paul, to the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
And years later she would tell him that that was the moment, at the place where the river was small and he held her hand crossing it and did not let her slip, she knew that the stars were still there. That they had not gone anywhere.
~ “Smoke”
“I remember.”
I looked over at my husband, his head propped up against two pillows. He’d just finished his dinner. The nurse brought in his meds and adjusted his bed so he could sleep. When they left the room, he turned his head and looked at me.
“Write,” he said.
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I’m in love with your writing, Mary. Isn’t it wonderful how writing stories uncover more stories?
Beautifully written Mary. This is a tough time of year for many grievers, I know it is for me. I seem to have lost my words, I feel lost. Thank you for being so vulnerable. I appreciate you and your friendship so much. XO 🥰❤️