Through the Woods

by Gary Ferguson

  While the official kickoff was scheduled for Saturday night, a lot of people got there on Friday. Two thousand of them, with more on the way, some traveling from as far away as Florida. By that evening there were an awful lot of drunk people shivering in the cold out on Main Street, and some of them decided to build an enormous bonfire, using wood from a nearby building. When the volunteer fire department arrived, some of the kids thought to take the hose into Lucky’s Bar—to wash the place out a little, they said, which some swear was a reaction to the guys who’d leased Lucky’s suddenly deciding to raise the price of beer to fifty cents a can. Another bar, the Lignite, was completely trashed later that night. In the end, the police threw up their hands—some even joined the party—and the fire truck drove away and let the bonfire burn.

  By dawn on Saturday, the good citizens of Zap had had enough, and the mayor placed a call to the National Guard. It was just after six o’clock in the morning on May 10 when Norman Fuchs walked out in front of a line of guardsmen with rifles and bayonets and officially retracted his welcome. The students, almost three thousand strong now, scattered across the bleak countryside into neighboring small towns and were eventually chased by State Police and the National Guard all the way to Bismarck. A few, though, managed to find silver linings. Sandy Huseby, for one, who also served a stint as editor of The Spectrum, went to Washington shortly after the fiasco, said she funded her trip and an entire month of living expenses just by selling Zip-to-Zap T-shirts. “Who knows?” she mused. “This might have been the inspiration for Woodstock.”

  Today, Zap is decidedly calmer. In fact, there’s only one person visible when I arrive, an elderly woman crossing the street on her way to the post office. There’s a tiny market, a hair salon, the Lignite and Shooters bars, one church, and the Union State Bank, which is housed in a trailer. The coal mine in Beulah closed down two years ago, and that, I’m told, has made this quiet town even quieter than before.

  I sit on a stool at a cherry-colored bar in the Lignite with Carol, the bartender (the booths that were trashed in 1969 have never been replaced). I’m the only customer. I sip at a can of Bud; Carol flips her dark hair away from her glasses, settles behind the bar on a high chair, tells me she’s going into the hospital in a couple of weeks so the doctors can treat her anemia, an event she says she’s really looking forward to so she can finally get some rest, what with farming full-time in addition to this bartending job. I find out that she was one of those at the original Zip-to-Zap, which of course forces me to order another beer and ask her what it was like.

  “Well,” she says, lighting up a fresh cigarette, wincing a little, “people were just fornicating everywhere you looked. Every side street, every corner. Other stuff, too. Disgusting. I remember one guy sitting on top of the dance hall—right here next to the bar—taking a crap down onto the street below. The stoops right out here were a foot deep in beer cans.”

  Remarkably, despite all that disgusting stuff, the little town of Zap doesn’t exactly seem eager to forget. The walls of the trailer that houses the Union State Bank also serve as repository for all things having to do with the event, and when I go over there later, I’m amazed to find them covered with newspaper stories. Included in the collection are articles from a 1989 twenty-year “community remembrance” of the Zap-in, which featured a dance, barbecue, and ceremony, all meant to show appreciation to the original attendees for putting Zap on the map. And then there was the twenty-fifth anniversary party, held this past May. Evidently nobody wanted to spend tax dollars on police for the thing, but all in all it came off great—some three thousand people, and everyone well-behaved. Zip-to-Zap even has a full page dedicated to it in the town’s Diamond Jubilee historical book, published in 1988, a copy of which I buy from Carol the bartender for twelve dollars. Back out in the van, I open it and on the very first page this is what it says: “We wish to welcome everyone to Zap and hope that through our efforts to give you the best entertainment, you will have a pleasant time and a lifelong memory.”

  And Michael Moore says there’s nothing to do in North Dakota.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE OLD CHEVY VAN IS empty again. Free of backpacks and canoe paddles, life jacket and river sandals and moonshine, buckeyes and pennyroyal and boxes of books, cameras and maps and field guides, rice and blueberries from Charlie and Connie, grape jam and beets and butter beans from Pearl. There are thirty hours of taped conversations stacked on my desk, along with two spirals full of notes, the pages on one warped and the ink smudged by the Minnesota rain. The birch-bark basket from Amelia Legarde is sitting in my living room next to the rocking chair, half-filled with pinecones of ponderosa and spruce and whitebark, keepsakes from other journeys, other woods.

  You’d think it might be a big deal for me to be in my own bed again, but two nights after I got back I parked the van in the woods beside the house and slept there instead. I’ve been home for almost a month now, and there are still mornings when I wake up at dawn and have to think over where I am, catch myself trying to figure out what forest I’ll be wandering through today. But it’s the home woods that matter now: this loose weave of aspen and cottonwood falling from the toes of the Beartooth Mountains, down the granite belly of the valley, past every door and window of our house and on north through town, thinning out, in the end able to claim only the creek banks, clinging to them all the way to Yellowstone.

  Of course it’s nowhere near as diverse as the forests of Tennessee. Not even close. The autumn colors pale in comparison to the riotous shows in New England, and anyone searching for the perfect load of cabinet logs, or even for firewood, would take one look and keep on going. Yet this is the forest that carries the seasons that measure my life. These are the trees that play the songs I know best.

  When Jane and I first started living in this house six years ago I spent a lot of time upstairs, looking south out of the second-story windows toward the distant mountains. These days I seem to be more of a downstairs sort, content to peer out the kitchen windows and watch chickadees feeding in the cottonwoods, dippers plunging into stream eddies, fishing for insects. Now that fall’s here we lie in bed at night and wait for a certain neighbor of ours, a black bear named Spot, who likes to clomp across the deck and look in the sliding door of our bedroom. Jane says he’s trying to get me to put the bird feeder back up, the one he smashes to pieces at every chance for a few lousy bites of sunflower seed. And if not Spot, then moose out there tugging on the branches of young aspen, whitetails tearing at clover, the occasional raccoon.

  I’ve been trying to keep my head in the dirt. On Saturday mornings a friend stops by and we drive his pickup into the Pryor Mountains and spend the day cutting firewood, sit on the tailgate in late afternoon, full of sawdust, sharpening the chains on the saws, trying to figure how much more we need until we have enough. And once in a while I drive over to Absarokee, to a willow-framed sweat lodge a guy built on a bank of the West Rosebud River, crawl in for three or four rounds of good heat, break each one with a bucket of cold water poured over my head. I fish with my friends who love to fish, and give more thanks for the ones we catch and eat than I used to. Now and then I pluck a couple of rose hips and dry a little yarrow for tea, quit the office early and walk down to the creek just to count the number of trees the beaver have cut down. I watch elk massing on the refuge outside of town and wonder how they’ll fare in the coming winter, stand outside on the porch in the last light of evening and wait for a glimpse of southbound Canada geese, feeling even now how fine it will be to have them dropping back again out of the blustery skies of spring.

  The myths of long ago speak of a powerful courage to change that can ignite in anyone who leaves the familiar and enters the woods, either by accident or by design. That was the whole point of the original, pre-moralized versions of Red Riding Hood and Snow White, not to mention the hundreds of hero tales from Britain and Germany and ancient Greece. These characters went into the forest because it was impossible to beco
me who they were meant to be without first going someplace where they could become utterly lost. Cut loose for a time from who they were and where they came from. Drifting clueless, facing both the beauty and the fear that awaits at the heart of every life transition, be it adolescence or marriage, divorce or sickness or old age. Were we to have forests sprawling across this country completely unused for anything other than to remind us of that, we would have a lot.

  For those who drift into the trees hoping for something beyond aesthetic beauty, there seems to be a catch. A paradox. It has to do with the fact that the only way to engender deep kinship to place is to stop struggling for it, to stop always seeking insight and be content to busy yourself in ways that insight might one day find you. Maybe this year, maybe next. Out there, bent over with your kindling box in hand, scooping up branches; out there, walking by the river with your fishing pole or raspberry bucket, kneeling in the meadow with your flower press. Out there, practicing the woods.

  Acknowledgments

  My sincere thanks go to the splendid librarians and researchers at Yale University, Boston Public Library, Maine State Historical Collections, the University of Tennessee, Indiana University Folklore Collections, Northern Michigan University, and American Forests. Also to Bev Twillman, a wise and wonderful storyteller, and to the generous, caring directors of the Montana, East Tennessee, Minnesota, and Maine Community Foundations.

  And last but by no means least, thanks to all the people of the woods. It’s through their lives that I again found the joy of wild places.

  About Gary Ferguson

  Award-winning writer Gary Ferguson has worked for a variety of publications, including Vanity Fair and the Los Angeles Times, and is the author of twenty-two books on nature and science. His latest book, a wilderness memoir titled The Carry Home, was published in November 2014 by Counterpoint Press. Ferguson is a member of the National Geographic Lecture Series. In addition, he was the 2002 Seigle Scholar at Washington University, St. Louis, served as the William Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana, and was a Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Idaho. He is currently on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

  About Torrey House Press

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