I Cheerfully Refuse

by Leif Enger

In this way Flower and I poked and drifted in idle drafts up the coast of Ontario, past the entrance to Nipigon and up the Black Bay Peninsula. The sun flared and I got down to sleeves. The keel hummed easily over depths so clear boulders forty feet down shone like pebbles you might lean over the side to pluck. The northerly breeze smelled of spruce marshes and occasionally of damp smoke, which made me feel safe and fully forgotten. We thought we were remote in Icebridge and took some pride in that, but here along the fifty-mile volcanic stone peninsula I saw neither roads nor buildings, no emblem of human ambition or discord. That night I slipped into a primeval cleft and anchored in water still as sky. Boiled a potato and ate it with salt and a little oil, then slept in the cockpit to the booming cry of a heron. In a dream this bird surfaced as a godlike sentry guarding the entrance to the Slates. In a resonant croak it allowed me to enter. And when I sailed out again, Lark was aboard smiling and took the helm without a word. With her at the tiller I took the lines and winches. This episode was as real as the gash on my chin. The pain of waking can’t be told. I sat up uttering a lament of my own that traveled over the water in a vanishing decay.