A short scene I cut from my memoir, I Promised Him a River, set during my first winter away from Alaska:
As the plane ascended from the East Coast, the temperature dropped and the frost made patterns on the window. I used my fingernail to trace its lines. They were the same shape as a braided river, making its constant advance against gravel and stone and sand. I stared at the back of my hand and the veins that crisscrossed it. Like a river, my veins had headwaters and then tributaries that faded to nothing. I pressed my palm against the window. It melted the frost, and the river etched across it.
The Clearwater was thousands of miles away but I longed for it with everything I had. It had been imprinted on me in the same way it made my mother’s fingers deft and capable when cleaning the flesh of a grayling; it was engraved within me too, through four generations of Alaskan women who had knelt next to it. I pressed my finger against the window. The chill of the glass helped me remember: my body was no different from the repentant oxbow lakes left behind by the bends of the Clearwater, and they too would always long for the forgotten clarity and unerring direction of the river that had made them.
