I want my students to fall madly in love with Rosalind. She’s my favorite of all Shakespeare’s heroines, I tell them, pressing my hand to my heart, pretending to swoon.
I start lucky. Two friends in Southeast Alaska have a permit and a boat and invite me to join them as a deckhand, gillnetting. For three summers, we share a bunk and work within a few feet of each other, coming back to Juneau most weekends, grilling and playing ping-pong. We don’t get rich, which is fine.
By Gregory McNamee, Illustrations by Lauren Simkin Berke
December 3, 2020
“Hope is the thing with feathers,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “that perches in the soul.” The avian image is both lovely and apposite, for as a bird goes winging off at the first loud noise or sight of a predator, so hope—an aspect of desire, a wish that something, and usually something good, will happen—typically flies out the window as often as it lands on one’s shoulder. If something isn’t outright impossible, it’s possible to hope for it, though the likelihood of its happening lessens the closer to impossible it comes: living to one hundred, let’s say, following a life of three packs of smokes and a porterhouse every day.
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