What happened that day that was so terrible he never hunted again after a lifetime of hunting? Something with an animal, we knew that, but when we asked our mother, she said to drop it, and the gun went away, and my father became the man in the neighborhood who had squirrels as pets.

“Ope, there’s my black one,” he’d say, getting up from his chair to go outside and hand it a peanut.

Okay, I’m drifting downstream now on what seems like an endless supply of words, memories, waiting to catch a branch. I should stop and read the Denis Johnson story that my partner keeps telling me to read before Alaska—I listened to him laughing in bed one night while he read it, and I like funny, but I loved Denis Johnson, and right now it’s too soon for everything but “Now,” which, if you don’t know it, is a Denis Johnson poem that describes soul-examining depression, triggered by hearing middle-of-the-night foghorns on the San Francisco Bay. It begins:

Whatever the foghorns are

the voices of feels terrible

tonight, just terrible, and here

by the window that looks out

on the waters but is blind, I

have been sleeping,

but I am awake now.

In the night I watch

how the little lights

of boats come out

to us and are lost again

in the fog wallowing on the sea

I used to read it to my students just to remind them that there is beauty in darkness, but now (“Now”) it just makes me think of Wesley, my beloved writer friend, standing on the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge holding a cable stretched high above the water. The fog wallowing on the sea, the fog of war that made the man step off the Kodiak cliff, carried away without his musette bag, alone. Wesley alone, trembling.

And so does my life tremble,

and when I turn from the window

and from the sea’s grief, the room

fills with a dark

lushness and foliage nobody

will ever be plucked from,

and the feelings I have

must never be given speech.

Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson.

The terrible despair, and yet he survived it, as most of us do, living to die decades later. Wesley, never plucked from the dark foliage. My father, plucked from the unit of men; the other men, the Japanese in their hospital beds on some Aleutian island—Attu or Kiska, I can’t remember—unable to fight or flee, plucking the pins from the grenades that were graciously given them during the evacuation and, as my father showed me over and over through the years, pressing them to their chests. Dying by their own hands, like Wesley. He let go and we hang on, and both are beautiful and stupid.