The ferry had just left Petersburg for Juneau and was heading up the bar range toward Frederick Sound. It drew twenty feet of water and required almost five hundred feet of turning radius and it made the fishing boats in the harbor look toylike and fragile. A broad expanse of the channel was ahead: far reaching, dark blue. Beyond the water was a forested hill and beyond the hill was a vast expanse of snow-capped mountains. It was mid August. Cool. A gentle wind blew. The shore of Sasby Island, muck-brown and dense with kelp, slid past as the ferry turned north, departing on the ebb. It gave a long slow whistle, like a sigh.

In the solarium a young woman and a drowsing man were reclining near each other on lawn chairs. She was somewhere in her mid-twenties, about his age, set up at the edge of the overhanging roof where the heat lamps glowed. There, you could feel the warmth of the lamps and the coolness of the wind at once. She watched the town of Petersburg diminish beyond the wake at the stern. Near her feet, a tall blue backpack designed for hiking sat beside a small yellow drybag. Both were marked with scuffs. The man had a larger gray drybag you could wear like a backpack and beside it an empty cloth grocery bag. He had brought and already eaten a small wedge of cheese, a bag of pretzels, an apple. It would be a full twenty four hours before they arrived. He worked as a fisherman and his end of season check had still not come. He was hungry, living off meager savings, fearful of what lay ahead.

He looked at the woman again.

She wore brown neoprene boots flecked with salmon scales, the same as his.

“How was your season?” he nodded toward her boots.

“Long,” she said. “Yours?”

“Long,” he said.

They talked about Juneau, how the woman had a PO box near Auke Bay. She said she had a few friends in town but was going to head back to the lower forty-eight before the full onset of fall. “I’m thinking about Austin, Texas,” she said. The man said he lived in Tacoma, Washington but was considering giving Juneau a try. Left out the part about how, even though he’d booked this ferry ride, he couldn’t yet afford a plane ticket back home.

It was a halting, semi-formal conversation, yet neither seemed to want to leave it. Without being aware of it, they both had the relief of finding a curious audience and common ground, a relief felt deeply after a fishing season, where tasks interrupt. They traded names of mutual friends in Petersburg. They talked about the Juneau Brew Fest and the rising cost of living. The sun went down behind Kupreanof Island. Colder winds blew. But they were clean winds and visibility was high and the land, rising and falling, expanded vast either side of the channel. The ferry moved with no hurry, as if it meant to linger in these last long days of summer.

Then the woman said, “Are you coming back next season?”

The man looked at her and she perhaps saw his deep exhaustion: deep creases beside his eyes, the lids drooped a third of the way down. “Who knows?” he said. “You?”

“I’m pretty committed,” she said. “My uncle has a gillnet permit and some halibut PFQ. You know the Tionesta?”

The man’s eyelids raised a fraction. He sort of smiled.

“Bill Corbis?”

She nodded.

“How is that bastard? We shot some pool at the Harbor Bar a few weeks ago and he took me for thirty bucks.”

“He’s in the hospital,” she said.

“Oh.”

“It was a palpitation issue,” she said. “He’s okay for now. But they told him he’ll need to quit the fishing and drinking life if he wants to make it past sixty. So I may be skipper next season. I fish the line hard, so watch out.”

The man smiled. But he could not think ahead to the next season, much less the next few weeks. He didn’t have enough to cover rent on a new place. He needed time to recover, to sleep in a room without the fear of being kicked out, but there was no one he thought he could call when the ferry docked. He lived an itinerant life. Still, that life was his.

Soon they were in the blue evening light that saturates the Alaskan summers, gentle light that can linger across vast distances into the next day. The solarium lamps emitted a soft vermillion glow. The woman closed her eyes, let her mind hone on the persistent engine whir and the hiss and churn of water off the stern. Soon she was asleep.

The man grew agitated from thinking ahead, could not rest. He got up and walked out to the rail and breathed in. The water below him churned. He felt constricted inside himself, eager to move across vast distances, yet somewhat dreading the world ahead. He stretched the tendons in his wrists and hoisted one leg up on the rail at a time and leaned forward until he felt the strain of his blood on the move. The air on his skin grew cold. He went down the walkway that ran down the length of the boat and went in a door and stepped onto beige buffed tiles, facing the cafeteria, a thick reek of grease and starch filling the room. Diners sat at little formica tables, large-backed couples in sweatshirts and jeans, scattered loners with wind-chapped faces and skicaps. Inert strangers. He bought a boiled egg from the cooler, ate it outside strolling the walkway. The wind blew even colder on his skin.

When he returned to the solarium the woman was just waking up. She lay very still with her hands bunched at her chest. He noticed her wince. Back at his chair he saw both sets of her fingers had curled inward like claws.

“You ever get this way?” she said.

“I have.”

“My carpal tunnel was bad this season. Severe. My uncle’s kind of a slipper skipper but he didn’t want to hire a second deckhand. He wanted me to be a machine. ‘You don’t have any mystical special properties,’ he’d say while he fed me aspirin like candy. But the ache was always there. I don’t think this cold air helps.”

The man watched her bring her pointer finger up, hook the digit on her chin, then turn her head to extend the finger outward, stretching it, exhaling long with a sigh. Then she started on the next one. He began digging in his drybag. He pulled out an old pair of jeans. He dug down farther past a knife and his toothbrush.

“What are you doing?” she said.

His hand came up with a small circular tin. “A friend of mine made this,” he said. “It’s arnica rub. A salve. There’s beeswax in it. Olive oil. Some cocoa butter and peppermint. And of course the arnica flowers themselves.” He unscrewed the top and held it out.

She leaned in. Her nostrils flared as she sniffed at it. “Smells kind of like mint chocolate,” she said. “It smells kind of good.”

“Do you want some?”

The blue evening light had dimmed and the breadth of the night had widened over the channel and the land. “That seems kind of special,” the woman said. “I don’t want to put you out.” She looked down at her claws. “But these things do hurt pretty good.”

“I can get more,” the man said. “Try some. If you like it, you can have the whole thing.”

The woman, still holding her gnarled fingers at her chest, looked at it with interest and unease. “Maybe you could help me try it,” she said and held out the hand with two fingers partly uncurled.

“Sure,” the man said. “Yeah,” he said, “Sure, I can do that.” He pulled his lawnchair closer to hers. He sat at the edge of the ribbed plastic and she draped her wrist over the plastic armrest and he scooped out a thimbleful of the waxy yellow paste onto his thumb and rubbed it across his fingers. “Let me know if this hurts,” he said and began to work the salve into the skin of her still clawed hand.

♧

He went up and down the fingers gently, holding them carefully, rubbing with his thumb until they began to straighten out. Then he set to work on the palm, making firm circles with both his thumbs pressing in. “That’s just great,” she said. “Damn,” she said. “Wow.” He moved over calluses and ridges of bone. He worked on the knob of muscle at the base of her thumb. All the while he looked out beyond her and the solarium and the railing toward Hobart Bay. They were coming up the widest stretch of Stephen’s Passage. From here, the waterway would narrow up toward Gastineau Channel and Juneau, the end.

“Have you ever been to the glacier in Hobert Bay?” she said.

“I’ve moored in the harbor there between openers,” he said. “But I’ve never done any kind of hike.”

“It’s lovely,” she said.

“Ready for the other one?” he asked.

“Hell yes.”

He applied more salve and started on the other hand. They watched the deeply forested land slide past. He took her other hand in his and applied more balm that he worked from his skin to hers and soon these fingers straightened out too. “I feel like I have more blood,” she said. “Everything’s tingling.” She opened and closed her fingers. She wiggled them. “Thank you,” she said.

The man screwed the cap back on the tin and set in on the arm of her chair. “Yours,” he said.

“This is about as good as I’ve felt all summer,” she said.

The man moved his chair away from hers.

“There’s more dope in that salve,” she said, “than twenty hits of aspirin. My wife is going to love it.”

He sat back in his lawnchair with his feet up, trying to steady his breathing before he spoke. His heart was hammering. He could hear it. She said something else, something about the scenery, but it did not register. He listened to his own quickened pulse and—afraid the thing alive inside him might diminish—he did not speak to her for a moment that felt long and pure, their destination a mere rumor there on the deck of the ferry in this blue twilight on the channel.

♧

July 7, 2025