Caribou River

I was a high school school girl in 2015 so you know I’ve taken a lot of Buzzfeed quizzes. There was the one about my inner spud (tater tot), the one about which possible Illuminati member I am (Bill Gates), the one about which Disney Prince is my soulmate (Prince Naveen), and the one about water. That’s the one I was trying to remember. It might sound dumb, sitting around at twenty-eight years old thinking about Buzzfeed quizzes, but you’d be surprised at the sheer range of what you think about when your cell phone has no internet connection and your car is stopped in front of an unbroken stream of migrating caribou.

When I first took the Alaska assignment, I researched the animals native to the region, like any self-respecting scientist would. I know all about salinity levels and sea temperatures but literally jack shit about bears, and it turns out there’s a lot of bears in Alaska. Brown bears, polar bears, black bears, and I wouldn’t describe myself as scared of bears exactly but you should see these videos they’ve posted of tourists just getting absolutely snapped up by a grizzly. So I admit I went down a bit of a rabbithole about bears and sure, I looked at pictures of caribou and marveled at the sheer size of their horns and did you know they can swim? But I didn’t spend enough time reading about migration. I didn’t know how many of them travel at once, hundreds or even thousands, and according to the director of our research project it seems like I have found one of those megaherds that forms when the insects are particularly bad.

“You’re joking,” Bill said when I called him on my satellite phone. “Right over the road?”

“Right over the road,” I confirmed. “And it’s not like there’s an exit right behind me, you know? I’m stuck.”

He chuckled. “Tough luck, kid. But I thought you’d be used to this, coming from California. I heard the traffic is terrible over there.”

“Bill," I hissed, dodging reflexively as one giant bug zoomed away from hundreds of flickering ears and smacked into my windshield. "Traffic and caribou are not the same!"

I swear I could almost hear him shrug through the phone. “Same result. You just sitting there.”

“For how long?” I said. “I think it’s been, like, ten minutes already!”

This time the chuckle bloomed into a deep, grunting laugh. “Ten minutes? Oh, honey. Settle in. You’ve got some time.”

“But you asked me to be there at nine! I’m going to miss the briefing!”

“Lucky for you I’m running the briefing,” Bill said. “Look, Maddie. Just get here when you can, ok? In the meantime, kick back and relax. Don’t do anything stupid like getting out of your car unless you want to get eaten alive by mosquitos. Or worse. I’ll catch you up when you arrive.”

And just like that, my only option for external entertainment had hung up. Fortunately I’m a girl who has had some practice entertaining herself.

First I dug through the center console, hoping maybe someone had stashed a joint there, but it turns out those car rental companies really do clean in between drivers. I read my whole rental agreement, then timed myself reading it again with just my left eye, then a third time with just my right eye. My left eye won. I sang out loud: Whitney Houston, Cyndi Lauper, The Spice Girls. I swapped the lyrics, singing girls just wanna drive their cars without hitting caribou and if you wanna be my lover, you gotta get me off this road. I used the rearview mirror to practice making my tongue into a clover shape, and made no progress. (I’ve read that it’s a genetic thing, but maybe the people who said that just don't want to do it as badly as I do.) Eventually I leaned by seat back and stared down my nose at the caribou herd, letting my eyes unfocus until the distinct lumbering shapes melted together into a river, brown water rushing past, their antlers like sticks poking out from the riverbed, and I was twelve years old reaching reaching reaching -

I yanked the lever so my seat jerked back up and that’s when I started to think about the Buzzfeed quizzes.

Most of those quizzes were kind of like Myers-Briggs on mushrooms, if I remember correctly, so it was probably “Which body of water are you?” Of course anyone could take a Buzzfeed quiz, but at my cliche high school it always just seemed to be the girls, and somehow it seemed like the answers were written accordingly. Lakes would be the nice girls, probably, the ones who would give you an extra tampon without giggling and who were weirdly good at soccer. Pools would be the girls who wore false eyelashes to tenth grade Biology and always seemed to possess an accessory that perfectly matched their scrunchies. Oceans would be the girls who had multiple tarot card packs and smoked weed with the guys in the parking lot. And rivers? Rivers would have to be me: unpredictable, moving fast, alone.

I wouldn’t say I had no friends as a kid. No siblings, so no built-in protection from bullies and no company when my dad worked late. But I had an imaginary friend, a fish named Sparkles because of the book Rainbow Fish. I held onto the idea of Sparkles for a long time, probably well after it was cute. Sparkles helped me climb on chairs in order to reach the cereal boxes, and then sat with me while I ate two bowls of Cocoa Puffs for dinner. Sparkles joined me at the Nut-Free table at lunch and suggested that the Uncrustables the other kids were eating probably tasted like old chewing gum. And ok, maybe it was the presence of Sparkles that kept me from joining kickball games with the boys or hand-clapping games with the girls, but in class I sat next to other kids and we talked. Some of them even invited me over to their houses after school, but my dad was never around to drive me, and I was too embarrassed to tell them that they couldn’t come to my house because there would be no grownups there. They would ask where my mom was, which was not a question I knew the answer to, and then they would ask where my dad was and explaining that he had Very Important Work To Do would probably not satisfy them any more than it satisfied me. So I said no to the playdates and walked home by myself, close to the river.

Once you’re established as a loner it’s easy to just stay that way and that's what I did. I took a lot of Buzzfeed quizzes, obviously. But I also spent a lot of time outside, digging in the dirt, watching the animals, and noticing how my world was changing: the meadow behind my house paved into a parking lot, the birdsong getting quieter as the lawns around me grew more uniformly green, the river water getting warmer and darker and taking on a weird, sour scent. I watched An Inconvenient Truth. I checked out books from the library about water quality. The nights my dad came home, I told him about the river, and he would smile and tell me all about toxicity levels and pollution. We should go sample it sometime, he suggested - but not this week, honey. And that was the answer I got week after week after week, until I decided - with no small amount of petulance - to go by myself.

I went on a Saturday, sneaking out while he was on the phone. I waded in the river up to my knees, careful to move deliberately. I knew the river was full of unexpected pits and currents, and that I wasn’t supposed to get in very far, especially since I had only reached Junior Dolphin level in swim lessons when my mom left. But you can know all of those things and think you’re being careful and all it takes is one step.

It happened so fast I didn’t know I was underwater until I tried to breathe. Water rushed in, burning the bridge of my nose and then lighting a cold path of fire down into my lungs. I flailed my arms, trying to propel forward, but it was dark. I couldn’t tell which way was up. I kicked wildly, hoping to touch the sandy bottom, but there was nothing. I was panicking, and more water was coming in. Daddy, I thought, even though I hadn’t called him that in years, Daddy, Daddy, wherever you are, help.

When my hand smacked something hard I twisted in that direction, wrapping my fingers around it and following the arc up and out of the water. He found me, I thought wildly, he's really here, he's going to pull me out. My head broke the surface and I coughed up surge after surge of water, shaking my vision clear, ready to see him standing before me: worried, mad at me, loving me. But when I unwrapped my fingers to see what I gripping I saw it was not a rope thrown by my rescuer but a branch, half-submerged in the current. I was alone.

When I got back home, bedraggled and blue-lipped, my dad was still closed up in his office. I took a shower, threw my wet clothes in the washer, and never told.

My satellite phone rang in my lap, startling me out of the memory. I was relieved to be able to focus on the immediacy of answering Bill’s questions: no, the caribou hadn’t cleared yet; no, I blessedly didn’t need to pee; yes, I was bored but mostly fine. As he talked I gazed at the caribou, their horns improbably huge against their heads, and the dark swarms of bugs around them they kept shaking off. It must be getting close to mating season. I asked Bill.

“Oh, sure,” he said easily. “That’s probably why you have a such big group here. They like to calve in this one particular spot, over on the coast.”

“They go back to the same place to calve every year?” I asked. “Why?”

“Nutritious food, fewer bugs because of the winds, fewer predators. It’s hard, you know, to keep those calves safe. Wolves and bears always prowling. They still lose some out there on the coastal plain. But they come a real long way, just to give those babies a better chance.”

“They still lose some,” I repeated. One of the caribou had broken off a little from the herd and had turned its head in the direction of my car. I looked back it at dumbly, dragging my eyes past the chandelier-level-complexity of its antlers towards the white roll of fur at its neck, the lighter spots along its back.

“Well, sure,” Bill said. “That’s just parenting.”

I squinted at the herd, all of them marching steadily forward except for the one who was gazing at me with eyes so dark and deep you really could believe that one wrong step would send you underwater. “Maybe it is,” I said. “Can I call you back?”

“Sure. Hang in there.” He hung up.

I dialed the number I’d memorized when I turned five, before I went to kindergarten. “This is in case you get lost,” he’d told me in his most serious voice, squatting down to look directly in my eyes. “If you ever need to find me, you ask a grownup to call this number.”

I held my breath, ready for it to go to voicemail, but it was only on the third ring when he answered. “Hello?”

I let my breath out in a rush. “Dad,” I said, watching the lone caribou turn to rejoin the others, “you just wouldn’t believe what I’m looking at.”