A thin wire cable was looped under the stern seat and around the nearest cross-arm, its ends connected by a padlock. He pulled out his wire-cutters and cut the cable in a single snip. A sound startled him and he froze; it sounded like a woman’s voice, calling cheerfully to someone nearby. He laid the wire-cutters down and stood up, turning slowly in place to survey the gravel lot and the area around the lock, but heard and saw nothing. He crouched to pull the cable free, then stood up and looked again – nothing.
Now it was time to appear deliberate and unconcerned. He reached an arm over the canoe at its mid-point and stepped back to lift it. Once clear of the rack, he elevated the bow, ducked inside, adjusted his grip, and started across the lot. I could just drag it down to the river, he thought; that’s probably how a lot of people treat these canoes. But this way I look like I know what I’m doing. Let’s hope I know what I’m doing. He portaged across the apron to the dirt pitch and slid the canoe down the bank to the landing.
If the river was already rising, the landing would be underwater, he thought. He looked out past the eddy line and the current toward Gladys Island. Most of the channel was only chest-deep and the sunlit shoulders of scattered rocks still broke the surface, as they had for most of the summer. Not for much longer. He scrambled down the bank, slid his paddle and shovel into the canoe, stepped in with one foot and pushed off.
It felt strange sitting in the bow seat and paddling the canoe stern first, which was how you piloted a two-man canoe by yourself. All of his recent outings had been with Nicky. He stroked on alternate sides to gain momentum, then aimed upstream as he crossed the eddy line. He set a narrow ferry angle and paddled hard on his left to keep the current from swinging the bow downstream. If that happened he’d be swept down past the island. Away from shore, an army of evanescent wave crests bobbed toward him, stretching into the distance upriver. When an occasional slap of chop swung the canoe straight into the current, he reset the angle with a sweep to starboard. The light breeze and the sound of waves sliding under the hull made it seem like the boat was moving faster than it really was. From the perspective of someone watching from the shore, he was moving steadily across the river and slipping slowly downstream.
The current diminished as he approached the rocky tail of Gladys Island. When he closed within a few boat lengths, he back-paddled on port to spin the canoe. The bank was a steep mud pitch that rose six feet from the water before flattening out on the island’s wooded terrain. He paddled down along it until he found a spot where three rocks protruded from a small inlet. Probably a miniature drainage for the island. He maneuvered the canoe until it was lightly grounded between the rocks and nudging the cut dirt bank. There was no way to climb out without submerging his feet in deep silt at the water’s edge, but he’d worn his old running shoes for that reason. He pulled the canoe further up the cut, then grabbed the shovel and studied his landing area. A light sweat dotted his torso and his t-shirt clung to his back. He caught his breath, squinting into the darkening thicket.
The nearest trees were box elders and oaks interspersed with thigh-high vines and ferns. He beat his way in from the bank, avoiding clusters of poison ivy, ducking under wet branches, using the shovel as a machete to bat pricker bushes aside. Scattered large flat rocks and fallen trees created open spaces. He took a dozen steps inland and turned toward the head of the island, occasionally scouting the branches overhead for open sky that would signify a clearing. The first sycamore emerged on his left. Its scaling bark fell away to pale wood halfway up the trunk and its highest branches fanned out sixty feet above him. But it wasn’t part of Lee Fisher’s trinity.
He left it behind, proceeding past the broad waist of the island. A young sycamore, and then a massive one, extending a thick arm out over the river, appeared on each side as the island’s curving profile pushed him leftward. The upstream end was shaped like a fish-head and defined by a narrow channel separating it from the broken tail of Watkins Island. He knew he was near it when the sky closed in from both sides. It was past sunset now; orange waves in the western sky were fading to crimson, purple, and gray.
When he concluded there was no triad of sycamores near the head of the island, he thrashed the shovel through vines and picked his way toward the Virginia side before turning to head back downstream. On this route he found evidence of prior travelers scattered through the brush: rusted beer cans, a tangle of fishing line, the remnants of a wooden stepladder. He crossed a fern-infested gully and stumbled into an old campsite with a fire ring of blackened stones under a canopy of branches. This must have been a fisherman’s camp, he guessed; the Virginia-facing bank had shelves of broken rocks reaching out into the river – better than the Maryland-facing bank for launching small boats. There were no sycamores around the campsite, though it was getting harder to identify trees in the failing light.
He pushed on through the brush, detouring around a fallen trunk. The face of his watch was unreadable, so he pushed the backlight button – seven forty-five. He twisted his headlamp on and stretched the straps over his head. Twilight was yielding to ambient light from the open sky over the river. He swung the shovel in frustration against shadowy foliage as his silt-stained legs stung from their encounters with vines and his shirt clung to his chest and back.
Why am I looking, he asked himself, for Lee Fisher’s “truth?” Why search for something that nobody else – except possibly Kelsey Ainge – knows or cares about… if it even exists? It’s Friday night, he thought, and Nicky is coming home at the end of a long work-week. Right now we should be slicing up a baguette and cheese, eating olives, pouring red wine. What missing thing from that sure-footed surface-world has led me here, to hack through dark, dripping woods in the middle of an untamed and rising river? He resisted framing the answer in words because he knew it was an inexorcisable aspect of himself – the part that wanted to believe there was something mysterious and valuable hidden close at hand, something others couldn't see. The trait that in childhood had him imagining rough gemstones imprisoned in the rocks on a hillside, or gold dust stirred into the sand beneath his feet.
He ducked under the branches of a box elder and stepped onto a furrowed rock that only extended an inch or two from the ground. It was part of a cluster of low rocks that thinned the woods. Before him was a tree with scaling bark, maybe a river birch. He bypassed it on the stepping-stone rocks, using the shovel as a walking stick, then saw two forgettable trees in his path… and beyond them the silhouette of an enormous trunk. He stopped in place and his heart beat faster as he lifted his eyes to the treetops. Soaring above the clutter of neighboring branches, the arching, bone-white arms of a tall sycamore stretched into the darkness in all directions. He took a deep breath and exhaled, then pulled off his headlamp and swept back his hair. He put the lamp back on and aimed its beam at the base of the tree. It was the largest sycamore he had ever seen.
There was open space behind it – a clearing. As he drew near, his headlamp found a dark seam that rose from the ground to a few feet overhead. Above it the trunk split into arms of an elongated V. He smiled and slid his hand to the balance point of the shovel, then clocked around the sycamore and into the clearing. Moss and thin grass over flat rocks, and the third conjoined trunk emerged. A soft breeze stirred the clearing as drying sweat chilled his arms. He looked up and saw a dark carpet of shifting leaves against the sky, held aloft by swaying branches that conjured a forest of fallen antlers. He lowered the shovel blade to the moss-covered rock and rested against it, hands on the shaft, smiling involuntarily and wagging his head in admiration. After almost a year of futility and false starts, he had found Lee Fisher’s joined sycamores. For reasons he couldn’t explain, his eyes momentarily teared with gratitude. He recited the last half of Lee’s note to himself as thoughtlessly as a familiar prayer.