The Age of Miracles

27

My grandfather once had an uncle who disappeared in Alaska. It was 1970, early summer near the Arctic Circle, twenty-two hours of daylight per day. This uncle was a fisherman who had come to Alaska from Norway three decades earlier and had become a legend along a certain stretch of coastline, renowned for his ability to predict where the salmon ran thickest as they spawned. He lived alone on a tiny island a few miles off the coast. He was frugal. He slept in a one-room cabin with no electricity or running water, and he buried the money he made in a secret location on the island. My grandfather spent two salmon seasons working for him, and for decades afterward, my grandfather kept a small photograph of him, dressed in waders and a black knit cap, a tangled net draped over thick knuckles.

One day this uncle set out alone on his fishing boat. It was a short trip from the port to the island. The sky was clear. The sea was calm. He was never seen again.

“It was June,” my grandfather used to say, as if he’d been there on that day. By 1970 my grandfather was living in California again, but whenever he told this story, he made a sweeping gesture with the palm of his hand to indicate the flatness of the ocean on the day his uncle vanished.

“The weather was perfect,” he’d say. “Not a shred of wind.”

His uncle was presumed lost at sea. But my grandfather never believed it. Several searches of his property failed to unearth his fortune.

“Rolf could handle anything on the water,” he would often say. “There’s no way that boat sank.”

Fifteen years passed. No one heard from the uncle.

And then my grandparents took a trip to Norway—this was years before I was born. They were riding a bus in the northern part of the country, where my grandfather’s relatives lived. When the bus stopped in a small fishing village, an old man boarded the bus.

“I knew it was him as soon as I saw him,” my grandfather used to tell me.

At this moment in the story, he would shake his head slowly, close his eyes, and whistle slightly, satisfied by the proof in flesh of a truth long sensed.

“I always knew he was alive,” he would say. “I always knew.”

My grandfather once lost his wedding ring—it flew off his finger and into an Alaskan snow bank—but he found it months later, in the spring. The snow had melted. The gold ring was lying in the dirt. Finger was reunited with band. My grandfather liked any story in which the unlikely turned out to be true.

“But why did Rolf disappear in the first place?” I always asked. For my grandfather, this was not a key part of the story. Or perhaps the reasons for a man to leave his life were too obvious for him to name.

“I know he recognized me on that bus,” my grandfather would say. “But he didn’t say anything. At the next stop, he just stood up and got off. Didn’t even look back.”

His uncle disappeared into the woods on the side of the road. My grandfather never saw him again.

“That would be just like Rolf,” my grandfather used to say with a certain admiration crackling in his voice. “Just like him.”

It was after midnight when we got home from Circadia. Our street was bright and quiet, almost everyone asleep. It was the lifeless middle of a bright white night. Our cul-de-sac looked evacuated. Not even Sylvia was out. The slamming of our car doors echoed against the stucco. A pair of clouds scudded westward on the breeze. The only sign of life was a skinny Siamese cat squinting in the sunshine as it traipsed across the Petersons’ artificial lawn.

My parents stayed up all night, calling hospitals.

I pulled my curtains and tried to sleep. Cracks of sunlight streaked the carpet. My alarm clock ticked on my dresser, and I was newly aware of its swiftness: the ticking, ticking, ticking. Minutes zoomed. Hours flew. I slept little. I dreamed unsettling dreams. Days, months, years, whole lives—everything was rushing toward its end. At the appointed hour, my alarm clock exploded; it was time to get up for school. I woke with a racing heart, out of breath and sweaty in my sheets.

Later that morning, the police called with a report of an elderly man who had been found wandering, disoriented, in a nearby grocery store. My father drove down to the police station to confirm what we already knew: It wasn’t him.