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By Root 254 0

yard. One day, he planned, he would turn it into a snow-roving rig again, complete with cab, heat, and tunes, and set up to haul broken-down snowmachines out of the backcountry, or at least he would salvage its steel frame. The Double Eagle, a sixty-five-foot wooden boat built out of cypress and used off the Gulf Coast as a shrimper was brought up during the Exxon Valdez oil spill to assist with cleanup efforts and afterward, sat in the boatyard for a decade peeling paint. People said it had been used as a brothel during the cleanup, when hundreds of men lined up for high-paying jobs doing work that was too little, too late. The big boat was a reminder of our clumsiness, wastefulness, and constant hunger.

Our middens exposed us—the clamshells we tossed under a shrub in the yard, the refuse we left at the dump: In the future, these would tell stories about us. Someday, they would be sorted through, decoded. I was afraid of what they would say. These accumulations of things tied us down. Sometimes they remembered too much. Sometimes we needed to break away, to cast off and start afresh. Each year, we watched it happen before our eyes: Trees dropped their leaves to save up for new ones; ducks molted their flight feathers and waited flightless for new primaries; the bay scraped its beaches clean and started over. Sometimes I wanted to do the same: swipe every last stone and shell from the windowsills and chuck them into the yard; toss every knickknack that was some relic of the past; take off through the front door with a backpack and just walk away alone. But it was easier to stay put; there was comfort in the clutter. On the days when the ugly mess of our daily lives grew too much, the view across the water was a necessary distraction. We oriented ourselves to the south.

THE FLOOR HAD been built about three feet off the ground and was completely buried by snow. John had already begun to dig along the structure’s north side, and we shoveled together quickly until we hit the pocket of snowlessness beneath the structure so we could get a look at the boats. John put the headlamp on, lay on his belly on the snow, and stuck his head through. “My boat’s totaled,” he said calmly. “I don’t know about yours.” We continued to dig until we were up to our middles in a trench along the north side of the platform, and then we crawled below the edge of the sunken structure. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness beneath the floor; the snow made everything bright everywhere else. But then what lay below the failed structure came into focus: A floor joist had fallen through the deck of my kayak, splitting it like taut skin. The gash was ragged, the torn edge raw and unfinished. The two-by-twelve supporting beam that held up the edge of the floor had cracked around the bolt that held it in place. A collection of fissures below the bolt formed the perfect outline of a horse’s head in the wood. I couldn’t remember what my boat had looked like before. My memory of its perfectly gleaming deck was instantly erased.

John’s boat, too, had been broken in half; a joist pierced its white hull. It looked like a compound fracture. We were wading through the silent wreckage of it all as the snow slowly melted around the edge of the floor. The collapse could have happened weeks ago; we would never know. Now, there was only the still scene of disaster: varnished plywood—millimeters thin—punctured; joists snapped; pressboard failed. It was such a waste.

There was nothing to do with the boats but burn them. We slid the kayaks out of storage through the hole we dug in the snow, then we threw them onto a pile of spruce stumps in the yard, poured some gasoline on top, and set it alight. I had to watch. I stood on the snow in the yard staring at the air watery with heat and the stream of smoke being bullied about by switching breezes. The smell of burning gas lingered; the fire warmed my face, chest, the fronts of my legs. As the flames gathered around the remains of my boat, a sheet of silvery white fiberglass cloth, which had covered