The water was dark from tamarack swamps far upstream and sometimes hid rocks beneath its surface. The river wound through pine forests with a few small rapids where the river stepped down between sun-bleached boulders. In a reversal of our usual roles, I took the stern seat to steer our course while my brother sat up front in the bow and fished. I’d just bought a canoe, a beautiful old wooden one with varnished cedar ribs, and invited Craig on a camping trip to try it out. The past I have in mind was a hazy summer day several years before my brother disappeared under the radar.
There is only one way to resurrect the dead that I know, and that’s to travel back into the past and meet them there. A last phone call would have been nice or maybe a letter or even a short email instead of an empty house that smelled terrible. I envied my sister’s ability to turn her sorrow into movement, something I found impossible because what I was feeling wasn’t grief but anger. Her grief was so deeply private that people filing past didn’t stare or make rude comments.
I mean, where’s the boardwalk in Detroit? As the band cranked out the song, my sister did a free-form dance in the aisle, just standing there and swaying to the beat at first, then slowly moving her arms outward, smiling as tears ran down her face. The only song in their repertoire was “Under the Boardwalk” by The Drifters, a tune of my brother’s era but hardly indicative of his city. While the rest of us studied our menus, my sister walked over to the house band and asked if they knew any Motown. It was an upscale place, more like a big city watering hole than a Western tavern, and packed so we ended upstairs in a booth across from the second-floor bar. Our final night in Boise, my sister and Willis and I took some of my brother’s friends to a downtown restaurant to thank them for helping with the house.