I feel like I have to write this or I won’t be able to sleep. I was writing before and I saw a grizzly on a tuft about forty feet from my camp. I spoke loudly and calmly, but he didn’t move. I know, don’t run. But pack up your stuff really fast. I got the tent down faster than I ever have. He was huge. He turned his head and looked at me with one eye. And I did the same cause I know that’s a sign of non-aggression—but you try believing that when an animal the size of a cow, but with teeth and claws and a bit less ground-clearance paces the distance across Broadway away from you. I couldn’t leave stuff behind, but I just shoved it all together into the boat, never taking my eyes off the bear. It took me about five minutes to get my stuff down and in. During that time, he completed a slow semicircle around my campsite. I kept speaking, trying to keep my voice level. Hey, bear. How you doing, bear? Just packing my stuff up here, going to put it in the boat. I don’t know why I didn’t say Shemah. I think I usually would’ve said Shemah. It’s what you’re supposed to say in danger, that or tehillim, but tehillim are really more prophylactic, meant to be said in advance of danger. Often, you say them to protect someone else. If you think you might die, Shemah is the ticket. It’s a bit like a Catholic’s last confession. I got the stuff in the boat and pushed it down the short embankment. Baruch Hashem the boat was beached fairly close to the water line! When I got close to the water, I was pretty much running, and he began loping towards me, not running, certainly not charging, but nonetheless heading towards me, downhill, his mouth hung open. I was in the water and I swung my feet into the boat and started paddling and then it was all over, a grizzly won’t catch a paddler. His water skills don’t touch the polar bear’s. Why is danger always a he?
It isn’t going to be easy to sleep. I keep shouting things out, little warnings, words. I want any bears that might be around to know that I’m here too, that this is my territory, back off. It won’t be easy to sleep but I have to. And besides, it’ll be safer inside the tent, right.
July 22
I don’t think the writing’s helping.
Tonight I will not write about:
Bears, grizzly or polar
My father
My mother
Terrorism
Fear
Loneliness
Hashem
Orthodoxy (why I was ba’al t’shuvah to it, and why I am able
to keep with it despite everything)
September 11
Monotony of kayaking
My campsite, or,
The Midnight Sun
But I don’t think I can go to bed just yet either, and I don’t want to break into the whiskey supply, and I don’t want to lay in the tent not asleep, so I think I will write about the mosquitoes. Yes, in fact, this diary would be incomplete without writing about the mosquitoes. It doesn’t help that the special sun-block I still have to apply attracts them. The doctors insisted that I spread it over any exposed skin because otherwise all the tediously sewn microscopic stitches would become irritated and blossom into a patchwork of scars. There’s nothing quite like mosquito bites on new skin.
Abba used to talk about the mosquitoes at dinner. He said he’d read a book that documented cases of Inuit babies literally sucked dry of their blood, dying, on account of the mosquitoes. This is hard to believe. After all, these people apparently survived multiple millennium, from the time of the Tower of Babel (which is when I presume they arrived) to the completion of the Alaskan Pipeline, without Off, DDT or any other insecticide spray. So they must have done something good about it, but I don’t know what. All the North-Alaskan’s I’ve seen (the few on the way up here) clouded themselves in a mist of the most toxic stuff available. When I was in summer camp, years and years ago, the boys, Jerry Moskowitz in particular, would spray Off on their pants crotches and light them on fire. Blue flames dancing, they would run around the swimming pool separating the boys’ and girls’ bunks chanting, “Dicks of fire, dicks of fire,” over and over. And people say I don’t know what I’m missing by rejecting the American dating ritual. The mosquitoes are, in fact, horrendous. Ben’s non-toxic spray works, no question about it, but it doesn’t last. Yes, I could also measure time in reapplications of bug spray.
In my random wonderings, which I am especially and progressively prone to here, I often wonder why mosquitoes, in season, get worse the further north one is, yet, all major mosquito borne diseases are associated with the tropics. It doesn’t make sense to me.
It is fatiguing, no enervating, no debilitating to avoid the questions of one’s existence when all alone with nothing but the questions of one’s existence. And my questions—shattered glass, dead parents, luck run out, Hashem—And yet my ruminations, my mulling of these issues, has led me into an ever worsening cycle. I come off the water, usually refreshed, and begin with easy questions; soon I’ve lost sense of where I am. I bounce between ghost-worlds that trump the pacific niceness of my current surroundings, and soon lose grip of myself entirely. (True, last night, the bear wasn’t altogether pacific. But out here, so long as you’re not moving, you can truly see danger at a hundred paces). I get worked up and can’t sleep. I write. I cry. I sing. I shout at my mother and father. I pray. I talk to Hashem. I drink. I assess myself and find that I stick out of the ranks of Orthodox women I’ve joined like a chancre; I find myself lacking. I can’t sleep. At some point I pass out. I try to make a point of passing out in my tent. Then I wake up late, hung-over, though not so much from booze as from emotional trauma. I row all day instead of sail, though it’s slower, though I lose more time still rowing, because it cleans me; it holds my focus hostage until all other contenders for my mental attention fade, recede, are forgotten. But then I arrive and it begins again, the cycle, but worse, because I’m not answering anything. So I think I need to not write about it tonight, not stir it up. Maybe I’m not looking at the problem properly. Perhaps I need to instead ask why I am here.
And I can answer that. I can occupy myself with that. I am here because I want to become something. What will I become? What do I will myself to become? I will become always Sara, not Sarah, for one. I will adopt my Hebrew name entirely, do away with the dual farces of Anglicization and integration. I will be Sara when I return to Yerushalaim.
I will return to Yerushalaim and I will live in a new apartment and I will belong to myself again. I will have meaning. What will my Sara’s apartment be like? I will want to be in a religious neighborhood, but not necessarily the old city anymore. No, no more reason to live there. Sara’s new apartment will be in Bait viGan, yes, and if it is there it will probably be in a building that predates Israeli independence, which means colonial Palestine, which had a strict building code. Therefore, I will live in a six-story apartment building with a stone façade and a red roof. Sara’s salary will, in these recessed (not yet depressed) times allow her to afford a one bedroom with a study (NYC realtors would list it as a prewar two bedroom. Lrge. Snny. EIK. Dng Rm). Sara will find something on a high floor with tall ceilings and expansive views, something on a hill. There will be terraces off the dining room, kitchen and bedroom. I’ll fill the study with my father’s books and with the framed photographs from our father-daughter paddling trips growing up. Basically, Sarah, you’re saying that you’ll move your father’s study from Northport, from Long Island, to Jerusalem, to Israel. Yes, closer to his bones, and Eema’s, where the government buried them while I lay unconscious.
Yes, I will move a lot of the stuff from the house out there. Not everything, there isn’t room. And it won’t be the only stuff—I want to be able to touch the past, not dwell in it. I’ll buy new stuff as well. I’ll bring the beautiful old oak dining table and the shaker chairs but leave behind the breakfront, the buffet and the curtains. Instead, I’ll buy the rosewood stereo bench Yaakov was selling in the office. No one else will have bought it. And of course I’ll hang my own curtains, blue silk from the Sook with rosewood valences. And I’ll paint the walls myself; or have them painted myself, in my own colors, a sponged orange. But I won’t hire Avram again. Last time he sent some Palestinian