Boundary waters

16

In the afternoon, a wind rose up, not strong but steady, and it fought her as she tried to work the canoe across the lake. She was making for a big island with a tall gray cliff along the southern edge and pines over it all, thinking she would stop there awhile and rest. It didn’t seem far, but the wind made everything a struggle.

In the house in Malibu, she had a weight room. She worked out every day, paid a trainer to guide her toward a perfect body. She did it for business, so that before she went onstage, she could slide into clothing that fit her like a surgical glove. In the Boundary Waters, she didn’t worry about how she looked. She hiked. She swam. She cut wood. She didn’t think of it as exercise, something she had to build into her schedule. The feeling it gave her was different-better-than any workout she’d ever done.

But she was tired now. She’d been on the lake for hours. The steady wind slapped the water against the bow, and she fought to keep the canoe moving straight. Her arms ached, and she felt blisters rising on her hands. Still, the big island got no closer.

She remembered crossing the lake with Wendell many weeks before. He’d given her the stern, told her to take them across. The wind had been against them then, too.

“Yield a little,” Wendell had counseled. “Don’t fight a losing battle. Give in to the wind.” They’d come around and moved with the wind until they reached the lee of an island and used its protection to reset their course.

She gave up battling, chose a small gathering of rocks to the north, and let the wind help her there. She dragged the canoe half out of the water and lay down on sun-warmed rocks. The wind, no longer an enemy, cooled her. She stared up into the sky and marveled at all the unnoticed elements of the air that drifted by-a long gossamer thread spun and cast by a spider, bits of milkweed fluff, the yellow dust of pollen. After a while, she took a granola bar from her pack and ate it, then drank from her water bottle. She wished she had her guitar. In the hidden cabin, she’d fallen in love again with her music.

When she was young, especially after her mother had died, she’d used music to grieve. It had flowed out of her like tears. Willie Raye had seen this and encouraged her. Those days were good between the two of them. Later, they fought, often and hard. Willie claimed she was ungrateful and wrongheaded, and maybe she was. But she didn’t see it that way. He sent her away, to boarding schools where she learned to use her music to rebel. At fifteen, she had her own band. Angry punk rock lyrics from a girl who sang with a Tennessee drawl. She didn’t like the music, but it was a formidable weapon. Eventually, Willie Raye offered her a grudging compromise: tone down her music, return to her country roots, and he’d produce her work.

She was in love again with the music she made and so were those who bought her first CD. It had gone platinum. For a while, she and Willie Raye felt almost like a family again. As near to a family as they’d ever been, anyway. But as always, Willie had to run the show. Eventually, they ended up back at the place where they’d started, on opposite sides of angry words, she screaming that he was not her real father and had no business controlling her life, he hauling up a wretched refrain that was always a variation on ungrateful. At eighteen, with her platinum CD propelling her, she put together her own show and left for Branson, Missouri. And, oh God, did they love her there.

After Branson, she’d gone to L.A. The heavy drinking and the up-and-down ride on a carousel of drugs had started then. She moved away from her heart, away from the place where her music flowed up like the cool, pure springs of the Boundary Waters. She could write a song in a drugged haze. Her producer would take it, graft on harmonics and instrumentation, give it grit, and she would grind it out for the business, make a video she’d slide through like a snake. Her music sold, sold big, but she hadn’t loved it for a long time. It was like living with a man she loathed but couldn’t leave because he paid the bills.

She studied the glittering blue of the lake, worked her cramped hands, rolled her aching shoulders. Pulling the map out of her pack, she looked at it a long time, and at the lake, and after a while she began to understand a thing or two. She found the big island with the cliff on the south, found the small protrusion of rocks where she was. She had drifted north of the arrows Wendell had drawn across the lake. The wind would make it hard to get back on line. But if she yielded, if she let the wind help her to the eastern shore, she could hug the shoulder of the land as she worked her way south, to the blue line called the Deertail River that, according to the map, would be her way off the lake.

She’d grown chilled as she sat idle and she put her jean jacket back on. There was also a chill to the wind itself. She looked up at the sky. High cloud wisps were caught on the sky like down feathers on a blue blanket. Something about the sky disturbed her, although she couldn’t say what, and she drew herself up and moved back to the canoe.

On the water, she paused a moment. Every part of her body hurt, but there was no help for that now. There was work to be done, and no other to do it but her. She took a breath, shoved down the pain, and dug her paddle into the lake.