Lake of Two Rivers
Water streams down the paddle and drops a cool kiss onto my knees as I set it across the bow and roll my aching shoulders. I reach behind me for the fleece I had shed earlier and slip it on. The day is warm for late September, but the cooler air in the shadows tells me the night will be a cold one. Tendrils of mist curl up, wrapping around the skeletons of trees that spike the channel.
A shower of icy drops hits the back of my neck. “Dan!”
“You're letting me do all the work!”
“Okay, okay!” I pick up my paddle. “But don't do it again, or I'll make sure we're both soaking wet!”
I dig the blade into the water and watch the water swirl behind the paddle as I pull. Branches arch overhead, brushing my hair. The river curves left, then widens into a bay studded with boulders.
“Watch the depth,” Dan murmurs, reluctant to disturb the silence that settles around us, broken only by an occasional bird call and the scamper of small feet on a dry forest floor. We weave between the rocks, getting out once to guide the canoe through the shallows.
As we enter Lake of Two Rivers, our destination rises ahead of us, an island crowned by pines, their boughs etched with gold. The cooling air heightens the autumn forest odours, the tang of pine sap and the musk of leaves melting into soil. The slanted sunshine turns the fiery maples crimson.
On shore, oblivious to the lichen, Dan perches on a boulder and takes out his trip log to enter the details of that day’s leg: the wildlife we saw, the difficulty (easy, as he has me along), and our waypoints, with latitude and longitude.
“Why do you do that?” I tease, although I keep a careful journal myself.
The look of surprise on his face tells me he's never considered doing it any other way. After a pause, he responds: “For memory's sake, I guess.” At his apartment, where other people keep photo albums, Dan fills shelves with logs that cover every leg of every camping trip he has taken. At sixteen, when I first met him, his ambition was to hike or canoe all of Canada's parks, from Pacific Rim to the East Coast Trail. Twenty years later, he must be almost done. I’ve gone with him sometimes, if we're both between partners, flying to meet him at the next destination. Thanks to Dan, I’ve seen humpbacked whales in the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Straits of Labrador, waded next to seals in Cordova Bay, fled from blackflies on a beach in Labrador, and hidden in the brush in Gros Morne, Newfoundland, while a young bull moose explored our tent.
While Dan writes, I scour the ground for fodder for that evening's campfire, which will cook our dinner and ward off any lingering mosquitoes. Then I clear away pebbles to make a comfortable place to sleep. This is the heart of Canadian shield country, where the landscape shows its bones and only a skim of earth and pine needles blankets the rock. The clear sky and light air mean we can sleep under the stars, so I spread the ground sheet and leave the tent packed in the canoe. At last, I strip off my clothes and wade slowly into the frigid water, reaching longer than usual for a few strokes to stretch out my cramped shoulders. Nearby, a startled animal dives with an indignant splash. I flip over and float, gaze up at the darkening sky. The first faint stars glow above me in the haze the moon casts upon rising. My skin tingles with cold.
As I clamber out over the rocks, Dan tosses me a towel with the flashing grin I fell in love with in that first incandescent moment, before our many partings and convergences, a grin that has become even sweeter with time. The fire is blazing, and as soon as I’ve pulled on my clothes, I huddle in front of it.
A pan of stew nestles in the coals. Dan gives it a quick stir, then tosses me one of our few remaining beers. He sits beside me on the fallen log. “Cheers,” he says, touching his can to mine. His smile is wistful. “Last night,” he remarks. Tomorrow morning, we will reach base camp, load up our gear, and drive off in opposite directions once again.
The reconstituted freeze-dried stew tastes surprisingly good, redolent of wood smoke. We mop up the gravy with the last of the bread, and Dan scrubs the pan out with sand and water, then sets it on the fire ring to dry. The light is nearly gone by the time we slip into our sleeping bags, our feet toward the fire.
“Where’s Jupiter?” Dan asks me just as I'm drifting off. He’s looking up, only half-covered by his sleeping bag. He is never cold and has never been bothered by mosquitoes, which has always irritated me, as if Dan is genetically more suited to wilderness than I am.
I roll onto my back and look. “I’m lying on a rock,” I announce plaintively. Dan grabs my sleeping bag and pulls me toward him.
“Is that it?” He points upward and I sight along his outstretched finger, the black sky fringed by waving pines. A column of smoke blurs the stars. Dry leaves ticktick on branches.
The light from the embers is making it hard to see the stars, so I shrug off my sleeping bag and move to a boulder by the water’s edge to get a better view of the sky. “No,” I tell him. “That's Venus. And the little glow next to it is Antares, over 550 light years away.”
“What about Jupiter?”
“It's not up yet.”
“Then what's that?”
“Fomalhaut,” I whisper. The solitary star.
“What?”
“Fomalhaut. They call it the lonely star, but it's really two or three stars. According to the astronomers, there's a planet forming around it. It's beyond our galaxy.”
“Wow,” Dan says, and pulls out his trip log.
“I’m cold,” I tell him. Dan puts his arm around me, and I lean into him, nestling the back of my head into the hollow of his shoulder. Our bodies fit together perfectly, as always.
“What about that one?”
“What?”
“Jupiter.” Dan points.
The moon is well up now, and a small glow counterpoints the big one. “No.”
A loon calls out, haunting and forlorn. A leaf eddies close to shore, tugged this way and that by the rippling water.
I look up at him. “Will you be back soon?” I want to ask, even though I already know the answer.
He reads the question in my eyes, then leans over and kisses the top of my head, his arms tightening around me as his breath eases out in a hushed sigh. I watch the sprinkles of light on the horizon intensify.
Based in Montreal, Canada, Alison Newall is a freelance writer, editor and translator. She has degrees in English Literature from McGill University, and is now working on her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her poetry and stories have appeared in Canadian Woman Studies, Hejira, carte blanche, and in a short story collection, The Female Complaint. When not writing, she is an avid boater, gardener, and dog walker.
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