EVEN THE LANDSCAPE HAS CHANGED in the meantime. Not the biggest things--Saskatoon still rises out of the flats, and a green river still runs through it, and the prairie sky still swallows up the land in the same big hopeful blue. But since Duncan MacPherson went away, the leaves have turned color fourteen times. And the grain elevators that sat on the horizon have been toppled one by one, landmarks gone to tumble and felled like trees.
There's also a statue downtown that he wouldn't recognize, at the corner of First Avenue and Twentieth Street, across from Sears and down from Joe's Lunch. It's a bronze of the badlands hero Gordie Howe, capturing him in his Motor City prime: helmetless, elbows up, and carrying a straight-bladed stick, old school. It was dedicated in 1993, according to the accompanying plaque, "for his outstanding contribution to the sport of hockey." Here in Saskatchewan, when winter blows in and there isn't much light to go by, that's reason enough for a vanishing man to be remembered.
Fewer people remember that MacPherson played hockey the way Howe played hockey, mostly in the corners and in front of the net, elbows up, and carrying a straight-bladed stick. He'd played it tough enough to lose his front teeth and well enough for the New York Islanders to pick him in the first round of the 1984 NHL draft. (He never made it to the big club.) Then, in 1989, he disappeared while traveling in Europe and never made it home.
It took him until last summer to surface. Even the landscape had changed in the meantime. But while the leaves had continued turning and Gordie Howe made the long, slow transition from man to monument, Duncan MacPherson had achieved the impossible. He'd remained forever what he was.
WHAT HE WAS TO BECOME was decided when he was just a kid, growing into his big hands and strong chin. He had a gift for delivering open-ice hits, one of the game's lost farm-boy arts, and he was accelerated through hockey's apprentice ranks until he earned a spot on the junior Saskatoon Blades, all possibility and hope. That's where he lost those teeth of his and cut open his knuckles and got stitches in his lip and blew out his ankle and kept right on dreaming. That's why he became a pillar in the Islanders' master plan. He was promise. He was the one who was chosen to be packed off to the proving grounds of the American Hockey League, in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he taped up his wrists to keep them from buckling when gloves got dropped.
Springfield was home to the Indians then, but times have changed, and they're called the Falcons now. For whatever you want to call them, MacPherson cleared out the crease. He also left parts of himself scattered up and down the eastern seaboard, his own outstanding contribution to the sport of hockey: ligaments from both his knees, a shoulder cuff, and the blood that ran from a cut across his right eye, courtesy of Kelly Buchberger's skate. It left some kind of scar.
He played on. But for all his heart, he never got closer to the National Hockey League than he did one spring when he was called up to replace the hobbled defenseman Gord Dineen. MacPherson dressed and carved circles into the ice to find his legs before Dineen decided that he could play and that MacPherson could watch from the stands. Sitting there in his suit and tie, he started coming to terms with the inevitable: Some fate other than fame awaited him. His dreams weren't as big as they used to be. For the first time in his life, his future was a mystery.
He told his family, almost as an aside, that the CIA had contacted him, hoping to recruit him as a spy--he was big and strong and had a knack for warming up cold shoulders, a nice way about him--but he wasn't ready to leave his old identity behind and become someone new. He could feel, already, that abandoning hockey might make him ache worse than his joints, and before he was able to make firm his inkling to retire at twenty-three, he was offered a job in Scotland, coaching and playing for the Dundee Tigers. He had some gut doubt about it; the team's owner, a Canadian businessman named Ron Dixon, gave him the wrong kind of shivers. But he figured on one last adventure before settling into civilian life.
On August 2, 1989, he took a train from Saskatoon to Edmonton, flew to London, to Frankfurt, and then took another train to Nuremberg, arriving two days after he'd left. He called his family from the home of a longtime friend, George Pesut, who'd landed a roster spot on a team in Germany. One last time he expressed uneasiness about Dixon and Scotland, but he was already a long way from Saskatchewan, and it was too late for him to turn back now.
When Pesut left for training camp on August 7, he tossed his friend the keys to his red Opel Corsa. MacPherson drove south to Füssen, Germany, and overnighted with a former teammate, Roger Kortko, before leaving a little after noon the next day, just for a bit of a wander. He found his way to Innsbruck, Austria, checked into the youth hostel, and on the morning of August 9, he stepped back out into the sunshine.
From that moment on, Duncan MacPherson assumed his usual role as an object of imagination, albeit in other people's nightmares rather than in his own dreams.
IT'S HARD TO EXPLAIN why sometimes it's the little things that last. Duncan MacPherson's parents, Bob and Lynda, live in the same house where they've always lived, on a quiet street in the north end of Saskatoon, not far from the green river. In the garden out front, there's an old length of rusted logging chain that Duncan and his younger brother, Derrick, found as children during a family trip to British Columbia and insisted on dragging home. It's sat there since.
Duncan was supposed to check in here, same as he always did, on August 12, 1989, the date his flight arrived in Scotland--without him, we now know. By the fourteenth, Lynda started to worry, the way mothers always have. On the seventeenth, she finally reached George Pesut. He'd just come home from camp to find his driveway empty and Duncan's hockey bag still in his living room.
"My heart hit the floor," Lynda says now, sitting at her dining-room table, a picture of Duncan behind her, a paper trail laid out in front. "And then it was, you know . . ."
She doesn't finish as many sentences as she once did.
The MacPhersons are good people with an enduring love for their boys. Bob was a small-plane pilot; Lynda was a teacher. They both wear glasses, which obscure somewhat the lines around their eyes, the sort that come when sleep makes way for too much thinking. It doesn't take much to push Lynda back into things, pulling away and poring over police reports and photographs. Bob's tried to cultivate a bit more distance from it, losing himself in the building of a log cabin up north, past the height of land, on a rise over the water. He likes it best up there in winter, when the snow falls in perfect blankets and the lake is a smooth white sheet.
Fourteen years ago, staring down a different expanse, the MacPhersons first called the bank to find out when Duncan had last cashed a traveler's check. The bank told them that it had been ten days earlier, on August 7, when he'd left George Pesut's in Nuremberg. Hearts hit the floor again. The MacPhersons reported their son missing to the police, who told them that adults who disappear usually mean to. Then, on August 27, after printing two thousand missing posters in German, Italian, and English, they headed for Europe to smoke out Duncan themselves. A search of hotel registries got them to the front door of the youth hostel in Innsbruck, but there the trail grew cold. They drove throughout the Alps, choosing roads at random, putting up posters, and searching for signs. Nothing.
By September 19, the MacPhersons had gone long past desperate. They bypassed the police, went to the offices of the Austrian public-television network ORF, and begged the producers to ask viewers to phone in if they'd seen the car. The MacPhersons got a call the next night. For forty-two days, a red Opel Corsa had been sitting in the parking lot at the bottom of Austria's Stubai Glacier, a year-round skiing and snowboarding resort not far from Innsbruck. Employees had been cutting the grass around it.
The MacPhersons, whose continuing hunt had taken them from the television studios to Munich, drove through the night to the glacier that had been so close. While they were checking into a nearby hotel, a man named Walter walked past their rented car, which had one of the missing posters taped in the rear window. ("Pure chance," Bob says of the crossing of paths.) Walter stopped, took a closer look at the photograph, had a rush of recognition, and told the MacPhersons a story, the last new one they'd hear about Duncan for fourteen years.
Walter worked as an instructor at the Stubai Glacier. On the morning of August 9, he gave Duncan, who'd already rented a black Duret snowboard and white boots from the resort, a two-hour lesson. Midway through their session, Walter remembered, Duncan had soaked through his sweater, which Lynda had given him the previous Christmas. He took a break, bought a purple sweatshirt from the gift shop, changed, and hung up his sweater to dry in the resort office before returning to the slopes. He was finding his legs on them. Duncan told Walter that after snowboarding for a while longer, he might hike one of the trails in the mountains that cradle the glacier. It was a beautiful day. They shook hands and said goodbye.
Night fell, and Walter, packing up, saw Duncan's sweater still hanging in the office. Walter assumed that he'd forgotten it and took it home in case Duncan came back for it. He didn't, but Walter kept the sweater anyway, because you never know when someone might turn up out of the blue.
BEFORE GPS AND satellite radios and search-and-rescue helicopters, Irish fishermen would head out to sea and be swallowed by the fog. Most of them wore white wool sweaters that had been knitted by their wives or girlfriends. Each had a particular pattern, like a fingerprint, and the women who'd waited too long for their men to come home would walk the rain-swept beaches, now waiting for the sweaters to wash ashore. That's what got them out of bed each morning: When they'd found their man's sweater wet on the sand, they'd found their man, and they could put him and their own hearts to rest.
It wasn't so easy for the MacPhersons. They'd found the artifacts of Duncan's life: the car he drove and the things he carried in it--his passport, his overnight bag, a map to the glacier drawn in someone else's hand--and his sweater. But that, for them, wasn't enough.
"Even though we knew in our hearts that he probably wasn't alive, you always think there's some chance," Bob says now. "That's what made us want to keep going. It's amazing how much you hang on to that thread, the tiniest bit of hope."
Duncan had been the same way, but his destination had been clearer. The resort had told the MacPhersons that Duncan had returned the snowboard and boots, which greatly expanded their search area. It meant, maybe, that Duncan had disappeared on his hike in the mountains, a theory supported by an anonymous eyewitness who said he'd seen a man on the afternoon of August 9 standing alone near a waterfall over the next ridge. In the end, the MacPhersons would take seven separate trips into the Alps and spend more than 250 days walking through the valleys and over the mountains that surround the Stubai Glacier, yearning. It didn't take nearly as long for their minds to go wandering, too, pushed every so often in some new direction by fiction and fate.
In 1994, after the fourth of their fruitless trips, they got a phone call from Canadian Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. A few weeks after Duncan had disappeared, a man had staggered out of the forest near Villach, Austria, not knowing who he was, his past lost to him like some forgotten love. He was held by police and then placed in a hospital, and then he was finally allowed to begin a new life. But five years after the man walked out of the woods, the police were still trying to lift his identity out of the ether.
This is what they knew: The man, who had assumed the first name Mark, which he liked the sound of, and the last name Schöffman, which was the name of a girl he liked from the hospital, spoke North American English had been wearing North American jeans, had crowns on his front teeth and surgical scars on his knees, and now, in a belated effort to find out whether he might be the missing Canadian named Duncan MacPherson, had been asked about his abilities on the ice. Did he skate? He did, easily and powerfully, as though he had done it all his life, and through official channels, hopes were raised as far as Saskatoon.
The MacPhersons hung up the phone and picked it up again, asking yet another former teammate of Duncan's now playing in Europe, Emmanuel Viveiros, to drive over and take a look at Mark Schöffman. In one of those short, very long whiles, Viveiros called back the Macphersons and spoke with a sag in his voice. Mark Schöffman was someone's missing someone, but he wasn't Duncan MacPherson, that was for sure.
Another phone call came in 2002, when the Canadian investigative TV program The Fifth Estate had begun looking into the buccaneer history of Ron Dixon, who had just been killed in a car accident in Mexico. Did the MacPhersons know that Dixon had a history of shady deals — the Dundee Tigers had been something of a financial mirage after all — and dark connections? And did they ever suspect him in Duncan's disappearance?
Yes. No. Well, not really. Not until then. ("It's amazing where your mind goes," Lynda says.) Until then, Lynda, having stumbled on a newspaper article titled CIA LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD SPIES, had been sifting through her memories of that long-ago conversation in which Duncan had mentioned so casually that the CIA was knocking at his door.
"That sounds exciting," she'd said to him.
"You just don't get it, Mom, do you?" he'd replied. "I'd have to disappear. I couldn't tell anybody what I was or where I was going. Not you. Not Dad. Not anybody. You'd never see or hear from me again."
And they hadn't, until the phone rang once again, at three o'clock in the morning one day last July.
Even the landscape had changed in the meantime. Drip by drip, the Stubai Glacier had re-created itself, advancing and retreating and lifting and folding, all of it so slowly that you might not notice unless you had been gone for a while and come back to it and stared hard into the ice, where this past summer's heat wave had floated a red glove up to the surface. And then a young man behind it.
A skier picking his way down the slopes was the first person to see Duncan in fourteen years, but he was unmistakable. He was still big and strong, still wearing a purple sweatshirt bought from the gift shop, and still had a supposedly returned black Duret snowboard at his side, now long past due.
His dark hair was still thick, too. His right eye still carried its scar. His chest was still broad. His digital watch was still tight on his left wrist, and his blue Ocean Pacific wallet was still zipped in the pocket of his bright-yellow jacket. It still contained the SaskTel phone card Duncan had used to call his parents from Nuremberg, his health card, his social-insurance card, and his long-expired international driver's license, for which he'd had his picture taken two days before he left. His birth certificate indicated that he was thirty-seven years old. When they found him, he looked more like he was twenty-three.
He wasn't alone. There was the eighteen-year-old-boy who said goodbye to his girlfriend and newborn baby in 1949 and came up for air last summer not long after Duncan did, his blond hair still matted down on his forehead and two wedding rings still in his pack. And there was the German hiker missing since 1971. And several years ago, there were the two climbers who had remained roped together for more than thirty years, their black leather boots still tied tight to their feet, their wooden skis still waxed and strapped to their backs. It's become part of the Alpine summer routine, watching a couple of faces lift out of the melt. Always, the people who have been taken in by these mountains are somehow different from the rest of us, different even from others who have gone missing or died. Different even from the landscape.
The rink where Duncan played for the Saskatoon Blades is gone now, demolished and replaced by a big new arena out past the airport. Boys from across the prairies are drawn to it all the same, playing out their young hearts and holding on to a fantasy almost as old as midwestern life, that they might follow Wendel Clark and Brian Skrudland and Gordie Howe off the farm and onto Long Island or, now, to Phoenix or Anaheim or Nashville or Dallas. They throw themselves against the Red Deer Rebels and the Brandon Wheat Kings, and you can see in their big hopeful eyes that they are imagining what it will feel like when they get their chance to go away and carve their own circles into the ice, immortal.
They look an awful lot like he looked, these kids, when he left and when he came home.
You would have needed to know Duncan to see that anything about him was the least bit different, to see that he hadn't just fallen asleep and been dreaming dreams so good that he'd decided not to wake up, just as you would have needed to know the glacier to see the crack in its smooth white sheet, hidden by the glare and a perfect blanket of snow. It swallowed him the way the sky still swallows the land, and then he was buried and frozen in time, probably by a snow-grooming machine and probably alive. Two long, unbroken lines, two histories — a man's and a mountain's — had intersected. And there, in the way that every second of every day for every one of us is some kind of horizon, one of those lines had reached its vanishing point, and hundreds more had begun.
Bob and Lynda MacPherson would spend their days remembering and their nights awake, and they would receive hundreds of letters and cards from strangers and friends, telling them more stories about their son that they'd never heard before. George Pesut would retire from hockey, move back to Canada, name his first son Lucas Duncan, and make his living in the stock market. Roger Kortko would follow him home and become a real estate agent and later sell RVs. Mark Schöffman would get a job at an architectural firm and look toward the future, because he didn't have a past. Ron Dixon would die in that car crash in Mexico and have all his schemes unravel. Gordie Howe would turn silver, then bronze.
And underneath every last bit was Duncan MacPherson, all possibility and hope, just waiting to be discovered for a second time in his life.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK570qmmq6yjZK5yhJJuZp6roWV%2BcYCMo5inZZeWuqZ7