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  67. 3:46 a.m.

“A hundred miles,” I say to the river.

If I had all day to traverse the distance, I could do it in a week. I ran eight miles an hour on a treadmill, but I’d be lucky to cover four miles an hour in this terrain. It would take me a day to recover each hour I’d been on the river.

Twenty-three days.

I check my watch.

It is 3:04 a.m.

The sun will be rising in the next few minutes, and I realize I am freezing.

Hopefully, it will be another hot one.

::::

The river is waist-high. I bite my lip and wade through the freezing water, holding the canoe with my right hand. The water recedes to my thighs, then my knees. I trudge to the sand and pull off my still half-soaked sweatshirt and my fully-soaked sweatpants, shoes, and socks and throw them on the coarse sand. I am shivering, nearly convulsing, and I force myself to do two hundred jumping jacks. By the time I’m done, the sun has poked its head out from behind the rolling mountains.

I catch my breath and start to think.

What are my chances of rescue?

I’m sure the skies were full of airplanes and helicopters the past day — from the Red Cross to FEMA, even the National Guard — as they delivered medical equipment, supplies, soldiers, food, and water to the disaster site. Local and national news choppers would be hovering over the wreckage twenty-four hours a day. The chances of one of these planes or helicopters flying over me — from the lightening sky and the flow of the river, I guess I am a hundred miles west of Fairbanks — is slim to none.

As for rescue by water, I give myself a slightly better chance. Summer is the peak season on the water, and a boat, kayak, or canoe could float past at any moment. Most of these tourists, or enthusiasts, would stay, or live, in Fairbanks, and they were either dead, grieving, helping, or had caught the first plane back to Tampa. I also needed to factor in that the river might be impassable. There had to be mountains of debris all over the place, making it difficult, if not impossible, to navigate.

The only person looking for me would be Ingrid. And even if Ingrid did survive, if she didn’t find me in the next hour, she would lose all hope. I imagine her frantically explaining to rescue workers that I could be asleep anywhere.

“What’s Henry Bins?” they would utter incredulously. “Never heard of it,” they would say. And she would have to explain her boyfriend’s mysterious condition where he was only awake for one hour a day and that they had traveled three thousand miles so he could see the sun.

Right.