The Last Layer of the Ocean: Kayaking through Love and Loss on Alaska’s Wild Coast by Mary Emerick (review)

Living the transient lifestyle so familiar to many US Forest Service wildland firefighters and natural resource professionals, Mary Emerick has spent her adult life hopscotching across the country, shifting jobs with the season and pushing limits physically and, as a woman, often socially as well.

After a long and adventurous career in fire, Emerick finds herself still yearning for the wildness and freedom of the outdoors, ready to leave a ladder-climbing desk job for a ranger position in Alaska. As with all her previous moves, Emerick takes only the essentials and heads to Sitka, where she will be responsible for the monitoring and protection of two vast and rugged wilderness areas. Unlike her other moves, however, this time she is determined to find what she considers “home,” a final place that she will commit to for the rest of her life.

At first intimidated by the vast wilderness areas for which she is responsible, Emerick again pushes limits by initiating the first kayak ranger patrol in the district. A recreational kayaker at the start, Emerick trains with a professional and learns the skills needed to successfully navigate the tides and hundreds of miles of shoreline she must patrol. As she learns, she likens each stroke to various aspects of life and begins to find her way out of a destructive pattern of self-doubt, uncertainty, and unwillingness to rely on others.

Learning navigational charts and paddling strokes, Emerick finds a stride and ease in the wilderness that she is unable to find at home. She discovers, in the indifferent ocean, a place that does not judge, where her internal negative voice quiets to make room for the vigilance required to paddle a finicky sea.

Life in town is different, however, and the reader soon finds herself riding alongside Emerick through endless waves of hope and disappointment. On the crests we see the beauty of the Alaskan terrain, learn the history of the land and people, and feel the hope that comes from a fleeting sun breaking through heavy skies. The waves are steep though, and descending into the trough time and time again, we feel the disappointment and pain that comes from marriage to a man who makes Emerick feel as though she has “slipped below the surface of the sea without a sound” (49). We plead to her, for our own sake, to recognize this is not the relationship in which to learn “to stick,” that “growing up” does not simply mean learning to settle, and that, in fact, this will not be “the last man [she] might ever find” (24).

Emerick, however, has spent twenty-plus years doing hard things to prove her critical inner voice wrong, and it seems her fear of failure is greater than her ability to accept the path or helping hand that might make life more pleasant. Convinced the world is against her, she is determined to fight her way through.

Her approach to life can be seen through her metaphors with paddle strokes. While many paddlers might describe “ferrying” in a kayak as working with the current or wind to let it help take you where you want to go, for Emerick ferrying is a trick, a battle against the water, a fight that could be easily lost with even the slightest mistake.

But perhaps, through her training and time in Alaska, she will learn that life does not have to be a battle, that acceptance of failure can equal freedom, and that allowing help from others does not equal weakness.

Even on calm days like this one, the ocean was still a muscle, current and tide combining to an insistent shove under my boat. I had always thought that the right way was to be stronger than the water. I had always forced my way through things, asserting my right to be there in a...