I’m in a strait but I’m not paddling straight. Icy Strait. Looking for an island called Chichagof. Bound for Baranof. Or Kupernauf. Wanderoff. Timetofuckoff. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. I need to paddle. Wherever I’m going, it can’t be here.

It’s been 90 minutes since I left the Gustavus forelands buried in a layer of fog. I should have thought about it. Had some trepidation, fear, foreboding, one of those animal instincts that tells you this is risky.

I skipped that part.

I forgot or ignored the whisper that these seven miles of water, tide, sea lions and glacial moraine had served as a barrier to my paddling ambitions. But when your greatest fear comes true, what’s left to fear?

The closest body of land on Chichagof is Point Adolphus. But a rising easterly and an ebbing tide have other ideas. My kayak doesn’t have a rudder. While it glides across the water, maintaining a straight line for several miles can be difficult. I’m riding further east than I intend to keep the sloppy chop from nailing me broadside. It looks like I’ll miss Adolphus by more than a mile. But at least I’m getting pushed the right way. Shaving precious minutes off my 160-mile paddle to Sitka.

Icy Strait. Peril Strait. Chatham Strait. They’ve been strangers for years. Faces looking at me from the charts buried in a cabin filled with a lifetime of future memories.

I’m going to see them all.

Chichagof guards the southern end of Icy Strait and has been playing peek-a-boo with the fog for thirty minutes. The tide insists on pushing me towards Pinta Cove. I grip the paddle tight, feel the boat wobble beneath me, and push Icy Strait behind me.

What am I expecting to find? Do I plan on finding the secret to life, happiness, and recovery buried under a rock along these 160 miles of rainforest coastline? I want to feel alive. Be in control by giving up control. I don’t want to hurt. I want to paddle. Hard.

Two miles from shore, the sound of a boat engine bursts out of the fog. Ripping around the point comes a cookie-cutter catamaran laden with whale watchers. The captain dead set on taking the straightest line back to Hoonah. I am in that path.

At a quarter mile, I change course, but the flooding tide has me in its grips. Kelp, seafoam, and beach detritus swirl around me. The visibility drops. Can he see me? My legs quiver, panic rising in my throat.

200 yards. Paddle. Hard. Paddle, Dave, paddle. He’s bearing down. 100 yards. Is this how it ends? T-boned by a whale watch boat? The irony wouldn’t be lost on me.

I point my paddle skyward and shake it, feel the boat succumb to the tide, and turn broadside to the chop. The paddle helicopters above my head, anything to make my profile a little bigger. 50 yards. God, it’s huge. Do I turn towards the wake or dive out of the way? Out of ideas. Out of time. The panic explodes.

“Hey!”

He veers at the last second and I catch a glimpse of a silhouette in the wheelhouse. Without altering speed, the catamaran zooms by 20 yards to stern.

***

The kayak bumps against the shore and slides against a wall of kelp. I gingerly pry a boot free and extract myself from the cockpit. I groan when I step out of these things now. The first small vestiges of middle age are starting to creep up. The legs stay sore longer, the back hurts quicker, and the hangovers hit harder.

I turn and look back across the water. The weather has lifted, the mist is gone. And the Gustavus forelands are but a tiny bit of punctuation along the far shore. I look towards Adolphus and bark with laughter.

A rainbow runs from the point to the mouth of Glacier Bay. How poetic. Very Hollywood. It was meant to be. I am supposed to be here. Everything happens for a reason.

No. There’s no grand plan. No promised storybook ending. No magical hand promising everything will be okay. For two months I have practiced radical acceptance. Control what I can control. Let go of what I cannot. It’s terrifying to discover what I have no control over. My future, my love, my marriage.

At a youthful 34, I am finally being taught how to cope with anxiety and fear. It couldn’t be anger, with hackles raised like a cornered cat. It was with deep, slow breaths, love, and letting go of those things that I have no power over. I fail plenty.

***

Halfway down Chatham Strait is Iyoukeen Cove. A long tendril of land extends from Chichagof Island and a mile into the Strait to form the cove’s southern perimeter. At the tip is a small pocket beach with enough moss and rye grass between tide line and tree line for a tired kayak and tent.

As the sun dips to the west, I gather driftwood, grass, and spruce pitch, arranging the tinder into an orderly stack. The pitch catches at the flick of a lighter and a small blaze grows. The narrow peninsula is dotted with small caves dug into the sandstone. Not for the first time, I sense the presence of others, distant but palpable through the centuries. I am not the first paddler to seek shelter in the wind shadow of Iyoukeen. Not the first to build a fire as much for company as warmth. Not the first who looked to quiet places and open spaces for comfort and meaning.

I am scared, lost, abandoned. The seven stages of grief are a crock of shit. I feel sadness, depression, anger, bargaining, and whatever the other ones are on a rotating basis like some sort of perverted roulette wheel.

No one goes into a marriage expecting it to end. But I really didn’t expect mine to. Now… for the first time in my blessed, perfect life, I deal with tragedy, trauma, and loss. What sort of man do I want to be? Can I look back on this with pride at my response? It won’t be binary. As many shades of gray as an October atmospheric river.

The same lyrics have been playing in my head for weeks. A sort of talisman to remind of what was and what may be yet to come.

Living just comes with a bit of heartache,

Heartache comes with a bit of young faith,

Faith stays young till your hearts gets broken,

Hope grows up to become someday.

I wrap my arms around my knees and squeeze. Who was I going to be? Who was David? It was a question I hadn’t asked myself in a long time. I think about the house. Five years of sweat equity that I had entered into gladly, with love and joy. I’d started building for us. I vow to finish for me.

Because I’m proud of what those swampy 4.2 acres of Gustavus glacial outwash are turning into. The garden beds that have grown into fertile soil thanks to compost and hundreds of pounds of kelp. Dozens of mason jars packed with greens, coho, venison, and pickled goodies. Deer antlers on the hearth and a bottle of whiskey on the shelf.

We don’t always get to choose when a chapter ends. Sometimes we don’t get to be the author of our story. Just because a chapter concludes, doesn’t mean the tale is over.

The sound makes me instinctively turn. Will there ever be a day when a whale’s breath doesn’t cause my head to spin like a dog whistle? There’s a squadron of them. Big billowing plumes of breath shoot 20 feet over the water. The humpbacks move casually around the point and into the cove. One by one they dive. One fluke after another rising out of the water and high into the air.

I abandon the fire and move down the beach, following the ebbing tide. I climb onto a rock and wait. Two minutes. Three minutes. Four minutes.

They hit the surface as a single organism. Twenty mouths agape, fifteen-foot flippers hanging limply in the air. I hesitate for a moment. My shoulders ache, there’s this knot in my lower back, I just got the feeling back in my legs. But that spark in my chest has found some dry driftwood of its own. Some systems are coming back online.

I sprint up the beach, toss my life jacket into the cockpit, and shoulder the kayak. The hull plops into the water. After days of paddling with hatches full, the empty boat moves like a mustang.

The humpbacks set another bubble net and I’m in hot pursuit, paddling joyfully along the shoreline, following those plumes like the north star. I have spent half my life following these critters. Up and down this coast. I have woken in the night to their breaths, calls, and breaches. I live how I live because of them. I call this place home because I was searching for big water, bigger trees, and the biggest whales. This part of me existed long before the chapter began. It will exist long into this one.

I bob in a kelp bed and watch the group set another net, hearing their breaths and the cries of gulls echoing off the trees and caves. I have control over more than I think. My future, my love, my home are under my power. They lay before me with a following tide and gentle breeze. All I need to do is keep paddling.