Juneau: Wisdom Tree 4 by Nick Earls

4
    JUNEAU

    M y father has both hands on the wet railing, bracing himself against the depthless view. He is in his walking boots already, rubber soles steady on the humming steel deck.
    There is fog in the Gastineau Channel. I can just make out the boxy shapes of houses, outlines on the dark hillside. A single car makes its way along a street, only its headlights visible, moving faster than us, but not much. The ship’s foghorn sounds a long metallic note that fills the air, as if it’s a reverberation from the entire channel, from the mountains themselves.
    I ask my father what he hopes to find, and he says, ‘Something.’ He keeps his eyes on the fog, checking it for details, anything to measure against the Alaska of his imagination. Anything to begin this day. ‘The truth. Some sign of him. Why he never came home.’
    His jacket is zipped up against the cold and his hair is still damp from his shower, parted and slicked against his head, white curls starting to lift away from the back of his neck, finding their own shape again.
    â€˜I don’t expect I’ll get all that,’ he says. ‘I’d settle for something.’
    I know Thomas Chandler from one photograph only, a family portrait taken at the gate of their Dorset farm when he was a teenager approaching his father’s height. Thomas and my great-grandfather, Edward—his older brother—are standing at opposite ends of the group, with their father and two young sisters between them.Edward is immediately to his father’s left, his shoulders drawn back like a soldier on parade. He is the tallest of them all, though it might just be his posture. Their mother sits in front on a wooden chair, nursing a baby.
    It is tempting to say Thomas looks haunted, but they all do. They are keeping as still as they can, their eyes wide and fixed on the camera box. It’s a portrait from around 1890 and all family portraits from 1890 look like that, lean people in their best dark clothes, staring down death.
    Thomas was gone from Dorset by 1893. In 1895, he wrote a letter from Alaska, from a hospital in Juneau.
    My father fumbles his swipe card as he pushes it back into his bumbag. Every passenger has to swipe on and off the ship—all two-and-a-halfthousand of us. The card clips the zip, flips from his hand and drops to the deck. A crew member bends to pick it up, and his head and my father’s almost meet. My father reaches for the table edge and straightens up again, leaving it to the much younger man to make it all the way to the floor.
    â€˜There we go, sir,’ he says in his West Indian baritone, placing the card back in my father’s hand.
    This time, my father tucks the card away successfully.
    â€˜You have a great day in Juneau, folks.’
    My father’s hand is still guarding the bumbag as he thanks him, keeping the card trapped, but the crew member is already turning to the passengers behind us with their arms full of coats and bags and cameras fresh off the scanner. This is any day in port for him, and it’s his mission to keep the elderly and their possessions united through the security checks and onto land.
    Lauren is ahead of us, with Sam and Hannah, the three of them already in daylight, clunking down the ramp to the wharf. The sun has burnt the fog away.
    My father looks up at the sky as he steps out. It’s bright blue now, a few high clouds blowing by. With his attention no longer on his feet, his next step is less steady, and another crew member reaches for his elbow. The crew are lined up at every turn, every uneven surface. After a few more steps, my father stops and peers across the wharf, past the huge timber welcome sign, past the neat curved garden bed behind it and the nearby row of ticket booths. He’s looking at the buildings on the far side, all of them shops now.
    I have had a lifetime of reading my father’s silences. The people passing us just see an old guy sizing