Safe from the Sea Read Online Free PDF

him, puzzled. “Research?”
    “At the library. Up in Gunflint.”
    “The library? Dad, if you’re sick enough to die, you’ve got to go see someone. You’ve got to get help.”
    Olaf put his hands palm down on the table and cleared his throat. “I want you to listen to me,” he said patiently. “I know what I’m doing. I know what I want. I’m not going to the doctor and the reasons are simple: I’m sick, I’m going to die. Whether it’s tomorrow or six months from now hardly seems important. What is important is that I don’t prolong my misery, don’t hold on and end up in a nursing home with a bunch of old ladies reeking of Listerine and playing goddamn bingo. This is going to happen on my terms, understand?”
    Noah buried his face in his hands. “Who said anything about a nursing home? All I’m saying is you need to see a doctor. You’re in no position to diagnose yourself, even if you’ve read every book in the library. Is there still a hospital up in Gunflint?”
    Olaf stood heavily and looked Noah squarely in the eyes. “I will say it one more time—I am not going to the doctor. It’s final. Now, I’d like nothing better than to have you help me get the place ready for winter, but I will not be lectured.”
    He lumbered into his bedroom, closing the door behind him.
    Noah’s first impulse was to anger. But as he sat there alone, the seriousness of his father’s health now a certainty, his anger subsided, was replaced instead with an unnatural calm. There was a new light cast on his being there, one that complicated even as it made clearer.
    Noah walked to the door and looked out into the yard, now being swallowed by the gloaming. Thinking to call Natalie, he took his cell phone from his pocket. But there was no signal, there hadn’t been since he was twenty minutes north of Duluth.
    So now what? he thought as rain began to fall.

TWO
    The next morning Noah woke early and headed toward the lake. The overgrown trees dripped rainwater. The giant bedrock boulders shouldering the path were covered with feathermoss and skirted with bunchberry bushes. Mushrooms and reindeer lichen grew among the duff and deadfall on the trailside.
    At the lake Noah turned left and walked along the water’s edge. A hundred feet up the beach he came to the clearing in the woods, a clearing he’d all but forgotten in the many years since he’d last seen it.
    When Noah turned five years old his father and grandfather built a ski jump on the top of the hill just east of the house. They cleared a landing hill on the slope that flattened at the beach. Back in Norway Noah’s Grandpa Torr had been a promising young skier. He had even competed at the Holmenkollen. When he immigrated to the States, he became a Duluth ski-club booster and helped build the jump at Chester Bowl, where Olaf himself twice won the junior championship.
    Each Christmas Eve morning Noah’s grandpa and father would boot-pack the snow on the landing hill and scaffold before groomingit with garden rakes. On Christmas morning they would sidestep the landing hill with their own skis and set tracks for Noah. Olaf would stick pine boughs in the landing hill every ten feet after eighty, and by the time Noah turned nine he was jumping beyond the last of them, a hundred twenty or a hundred twenty-five feet.
    Looking up at the jump he remembered the cold on his cheeks, his fingers forever numb, his toes, too, the exultation of the speed and flight. And his skis, the navy-blue Klongsbergs, their camber and their yellow bases and the bindings his grandfather mail-ordered from a friend still in Bergen. They were the first skis his father bought for him, the first not handed down. He remembered the way his sweater smelled when wet and the way it made his wrists itch in that inch of flesh between the end of his mittens and the turtleneck he wore underneath it.
    But most of all he remembered the camaraderie and the lessons and the pride felt by each of them—son,