Deep Creek

by Pam Houston

  I’m still frustrated by the things I don’t know, the things I do wrong, the things I can’t fix. I still feel stupid and helpless out here some of the time. But another thing the ranch is teaching me—maybe something I needed to learn more than how to use a band saw—is that it’s not so awful to have to sometimes rely on others. I’d be lost without the handymen, horsemen, farriers, shearers and especially Doc, continually bailing me out.

  I’ve also gotten better at choosing ranchsitters. Jessica was one of four guides on a five-day all-women’s float/writing workshop on the San Juan River where I’d been asked to guest teach. Uncowed by rapids, bad weather or the mansplainer who was her superior on the trip, Jessica was well read, deeply competent and apparently tireless, and by the second day I had already asked her what she did with her winters. That I met her on the very same river where I had guided for six years seemed like part of the magic; I couldn’t shake the fact that I was being taken down the river by my twenty-five-year-old self. Jess and I spent the next three winters trading off the ranch duties and during those winters I was as close as I ever get to worry-free.

  When I got home after the month and a half Josh Weil watched the ranch, I could tell all the animals were relaxed and happy.

  “One thing,” Josh said, “I didn’t pick up your mail.”

  When I told him it was no problem he said, “Honestly, I never actually made it into town. In fact, I never even made it out the driveway. The dogs and I took our walks, I tended the animals—I couldn’t think of a reason to go anywhere.”

  “What did you eat?” I asked him.

  “Oh,” he said, “you had lots of expired food in that pantry. I’m an excellent forager.”

  Last summer I traded weeks with a young man named Dustin whom I’d met on a three-day visit to the M.F.A. program at Louisana’s McNeese State. Every time I came home between gigs I could feel how the ranch was getting under his skin. The way he’d get up, just after sunrise, and top off all the water troughs as an excuse to be out in the pasture in the first blush of dawn. The way Livie followed him around all day, mooning up at him like he was her boyfriend. The way he’d disappear suddenly after dinner, and thirty minutes later the moonlight would catch him standing in the driveway, listening to the coyotes, looking up at the sky.

  I knew right from the beginning that, as much as I love my solitude, I was never meant to keep the ranch all to myself. Now my coming and goings make space for other people to work in this quiet beauty for a while.

  Another March comes to an end and it’s time to load the dogs up in the 4Runner and head out to Davis for the teaching quarter. “We get to come home in ten short weeks,” I tell the dogs, by which I mean, myself. I have promised us all a weekly hike up in the Sierras. I am ready for sushi and Thai food and movie theaters. I am eager to be back in the classroom, and excited to work with the grad students on their theses. I am determined—because hope never dies—to try once more to find a place to run the dogs in the Davis area where we won’t get shot at or arrested or poisoned. But I am never quite ready to leave this leashless paradise, this wild heaven, that is, at the very moment I write these words, bathed in the clearest, finest, late-in-the-day high-altitude light.

  San Luis Peak, Bristol Head, Red Mountain, Snow Mesa

  When I told my friends I went off to California to teach for ten weeks trusting RJ’s vision for the cabin more than my own, they all said I was crazy. But my friends live mostly in cities, and have had their run-ins with urban contractors. I consoled myself by saying they didn’t understand Creede and they didn’t know RJ. “He really seems to care about the old buildings,” I said, which turned out to be the understatement of the century.

  After ten long weeks and a late-night drive home from the Denver airport, I rose after only a few hours’ sleep and went out to feed the horses. Standing in the corral, my hands full of carrots and apples, was the first time I saw the renovated cabin in person, its old logs freshly caulked, its much taller roof already rusting, its new pine porches shining in the morning sun. Looking harder, I saw that the east window, the beautiful rectangle with the hinged wooden door, was throwing some kind of strange shadows. I squinted my eyes to make sense of what I was seeing: forks and spoons and combs and church keys. I gave Roany the last of the apples all in one mouthful and walked toward the cabin. Friends of RJ—John and Allie—had made me one of their signature windows, but unlike the ones I had seen at their gallery in town, everything that was embedded in the glass of this window came from under the floor of the cabin. Pinckley’s pipe, his harmonica, a mousetrap, a bullet casing, a tin with two ladies dancing, a file, half of a safety pin, a few gears and several padlocks with the key still in the lock. I stared at it amazed for a few minutes. Then I stepped inside the cabin.

  RJ did use the wood from the old roof for the wainscoting, his piece of bristlecone pine for the backsplash, a slice of redwood for the counter where the sink would eventually go, and barn wood that had been laying around my yard to trim out the windows. Jesse Albright, who grew up right on the other side of the cattle guard, made me a pair of maple French doors that look out on the creek and Red Mountain. Even the threshold beneath those doors is an art piece, a rectangle of maple, with a spiral of darker wood grain, sanded so when the sunlight hits it, it shines. Even the ladder to the sleeping loft is beautiful, a split log for the handrails, and tiger-striped pine for the steps.

  I have never before had a room of my own in which to write. I understand in a world where so many are suffering, this does not make the very longest hardship list. But I have one now, still full of that cranky old homesteader’s energy, but made new, made beautiful, by the hands of RJ, his sidekick Jess Biernat and my neighbor Jesse Albright.

  Standing in the umber glow of 9,000-foot sunshine hitting the golden pine walls, it’s easy to believe I have done the right thing, on behalf of Pinckley’s ghost and on behalf of my writing. There’s another part of me that believes just as strongly I ought to have given all of the money to the Wilderness Society or the NRDC. I reckon guilt is just part of the equation, here on the brink of the empire’s fall. I can’t drive a car, get on a plane, waste a bit of food, use a noncompostable paper plate—or even a compostable paper plate—without being acutely aware I’m part of the problem. Perhaps this is exactly how it should be. Perhaps this is how it should have been all along.

  “Being in here makes me feel loved,” I blurt to RJ, making him blush, later that day when he comes out to gray the porch pine. It’s true, and even though I don’t know RJ nearly well enough to say such a thing, there’s something to this idea that makes me want to chase it. There is love in these old logs and in RJ’s workmanship and I can feel it every time I walk inside. We call such a limited number of relationships love in our lives, but there is always love around us—it’s as ubiquitous as oxygen. It lives in the houses where we’ve slept, the kitchens where we’ve cooked, in the food we’ve prepared for the people we love and in the walls we have shaped with our hands.

  “I’m just glad you’re happy,” RJ says.

  “I’m so happy,” I say. “I’m so happy I haven’t even caught up to how happy I am.”

  Copper Creek, Farmers Creek, Clear Creek Falls, Phoenix Park

  I walk up into the burn today for the first time this summer. The dogs and I follow the trail as it drops off sharply into the Trout Creek drainage, and then starts to climb, gradually toward the burn. There’s that not-quite-right smell again, getting stronger the closer we get to the burn line: retardant and char and seared earth. I’ve been walking in the burn for four years now, with enough frequency that the smell has become a part of me. I can smell it in hotel rooms in Alaska or New Jersey when I open my suitcase and pull out my hiking boots.

  The year after the fire the burn was full of woodpeckers, and last summer I heard peepers in the wetland well inside the line, but today, other than flies, no wildlife is stirring. This could be a function of my timing; it is just about high noon. I
round the corner where there used to be a creek crossing the dogs liked to drink from, only to find the bed dry as a bone. We’ve had our predictable monsoonal moisture every day for the last ten, so this stream didn’t dry up due to drought. A mudslide higher up on the fire scar must have diverted the flow. I pause to listen and in the midday stillness I can hear the place where the creek has shifted: flowing water a hundred yards ahead.

  We enter the burn, and I startle at the size of the new aspens. They have exploded since last summer and the entire hillside is thick with them. Trunks about the diameter of a dime, stringy limbs that reach taller than the dogs and in some places taller than me. It still looks like a burn in here: there are still the charcoaled stumps sculpted into goblin shapes, the proliferation of fuchsia-blooming fireweed, still ash on the ground. But now the dominant landscape is a miniature, wildly cluttered aspen grove, a million sets of roots entwining to form one giant root structure, reaching down into the newly replenished earth.

  Many of the dead trees have fallen, and many more—the sign back at the trailhead warned me—are poised to fall: THIS IS YOUR DECISION POINT! say the giant red letters. All of the fugitive color from the retardant drops on the standing unburnt trees has washed away in the snow and rain. What was here before was mostly subalpine forest, predominantly Engelmann spruce, and there are a few young trees tucked here and there among the aspen, but this particular piece of the burn will spend the next fifty to seventy-five years of its life as an aspen grove. When the aspens get old and start to fall, the spruce will take back over. Depending on climate change. Depending on how our priorities shift.

  Lime Creek, Spring Creek, the Snowshoe, Wason Park

  This book has taken me nearly five years to write, a long time, even by my own molasses standards. When I started, I was attempting to express my love for a piece of land that has defined the largest portion—by far—of my life. Somewhere along the way I came to understand that to write a book about my little parcel of take-your-breath beauty, sitting up here, as it does, in one of the last valleys in North America that will go under water when the oceans start to rise in earnest, to write a book about loving this particular pristine acreage, when so many millions of acres are being destroyed at an unprecedented rate, would be a kind of heresy. Somewhere in the process I started writing toward an answer to the question I wake up with every morning and go to bed with every night. How do I find hope on a dying planet, and if there is no hope to be found, how do I live in its absence? In what state of being? Respect? Tenderness? Unmitigated love? The rich and sometimes deeply clarifying dreamscape of vast inconsolable grief?

  In her book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit calls for us to redefine hope as “an accounting of complexities and uncertainties, with openings.” Is there an opening before us big enough to save the planet? And if so, is there an opening big enough to save the planet that does not necessitate the annihilation of us? E. O. Wilson says we could take the earth all the way down to the microbes, and she would still find a way to recover. Even now, evidence of the earth’s ability to heal herself is all around us, a daily astonishment. Every day the Everglades purify stream water by filtering out agricultural toxins, mycelia mushrooms filter radioactivity from the ground around Chernobyl, earthworms are still cleaning all that DDT we put in the soil in decades past. We won’t know until the ninth inning what she’ll do in her last at bat.

  This book has been an effort to write my way to an understanding of how to be alive in the meantime, in the final days, if not of the earth, then at least of the earth as I’ve known her. Because it has only been in knowing her that I’ve come to know myself.

  Deep Creek, Shallow Creek, Middle Creek, Fern Creek

  In early October, my friends Byron and Seth come to spend the night. Byron is Diné and has that gentle Diné worldview that makes it feel as though the sun is always out around him. Seth, his husband, commands a fair amount of wonder on his own.

  I offer them the cabin rather than the guest room because I am hoping a little Byron magic might rub off in there, that I might get wiser in my writing because of whatever he might leave behind in his sleep. We laugh our way through dinner, I light the cabin’s brand-new pellet stove and send them to bed, telling them nothing about the cabin except that it’s where the original homesteader lived.

  “So who’s the old guy?” Seth says to me, first thing, when they come inside for breakfast. “Little guy, skinny. Walks all bent over?”

  The skin on my scalp prickles. “That’s Bob Pinckley,” I say. “It’s his cabin.”

  “I wondered . . . ,” Seth says. “I figured.”

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Oh, at first he tried to scare me a little,” Seth says, “but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. I went out for a bedtime smoke and he wanted to stand on the porch with me. I think what he really wanted was to get near my cigarette. Seemed he’d been missing them kinda bad.”

  In the fall of 2015, Pittsburgh Kyle and her canine copilot Apacha had come to housesit, and the morning after they arrived Kyle came to breakfast with her head still full of a dream she’d had where a man, who said his name was Bob, asked her if he could get into bed with her. He was cold, he said, and lonely, but Kyle could tell there was nothing salacious about it, and he meant her no harm. She asked him flat out, if it was his intention to hurt or try to scare her, and Bob said it wasn’t, so she let him cuddle up to her. The dream scared Kyle, only after waking, because she’d left a friend behind in Pittsburgh—an elderly gentleman named Bob, whom she had been looking after. After breakfast she called the assisted living home where her Bob lived to make sure he was okay, and he was. “This Bob didn’t look like my Bob, though,” Kyle said. “This guy wasn’t even as big as me.”

  I worried, through the entire cabin renovation, that I might disturb or disappoint or enrage Bob Pinckley. It was right after RJ put the new foundation under it that Pinckley appeared to Kyle in her dream. I worried there was too much of me in the cabin now: the shiny red Enviro stove, the sandstone sink, the giant cushy chair perfect for writing. To say nothing of the T3-R Triple High Impact mouse brain scrambler, which had been emitting its little whirrs and beeps since August in an attempt to convince the rodents that have inhabited Pinckley’s cabin since the 1960s that they needed to find another place to live.

  “I don’t think he has any problem with you,” Seth says. “I think if he did, you would know.”

  I’ve seen five or six ghosts in my life, so I don’t know whether to feel relieved or a little hurt that I have not seen Pinckley. Maybe now that I’ll be spending more time in the cabin that will change.

  “What do you know about the little girl who died in there?” Seth asks me later. “Terribly sick, breathless, drowning in her own blood.”

  “That was Ada,” I say, “Bob’s sister. She died when they were children. Of heart failure.”

  West Willow, East Willow, Antelope Park

  Today I am sitting inside Bob Pinckley’s restored cabin. My cabin, restored using my money. The cabin where Pinckley lived simply for fifty years and then died. The place I will finish this book.

  I’m looking out the same window he did, listening to Lime Creek as it falls through the beaver ponds, watching the young aspen leaves quake in the breeze, watching this year’s lambs—Hillary, Clark and Myrtle—play something that for all the world looks like red rover in their newly expanded enclosure, which runs all the way to the creek. Soon I will get Bob’s kingfishers framed and put up in here, though the wood is too pretty to want to cover it with anything more than that.

  Livie comes barreling into the cabin with her wet and muddy paws—she’s been down at the creek—and tracks up the floors that are so glorious right now, fresh from their second coat of urethane, nobody ought to be allowed to walk on them ever.

  This is a cabin, I remind myself, a cabin in the mountains where you live with your beloved dogs.

  Greg and I parted ways last year, mostly amicably. Th
ere are a million possible expanations, but one is that he loves living in California, and I love living at the ranch. I remain grateful to him for so many things from the years we spent together, most especially how he took care of William when I was in the Great Bear Rainforest, and how he tended the ranch while the forest burned.

  Half a year ago, I met a Taoist national forest ranger and landscape photographer named Mike Blakeman, a man who has loved these particular mountains, this particular river valley, for even more years than I have. Forty to be exact.

  “Phoenix Peak is my stupa and the willows, wind, elk, and creeks my sangha,” he wrote in one of our first emails, “I hear the voices of miners and woodsmen in the babble of the creeks in Phoenix and Wason parks.” He went on to describe his day up on the mountain, letting the scree fields and the snow squalls and the willows talk to him, asking the mountain questions about our potential, listening hard for its response. “I hope you don’t think I am too wacko after reading this email, but if so it is who I am and I thought you should know . . . if this doesn’t scare you away, well then . . . let’s just see what happens.”

  These days we spend a lot of time walking in these mountains together. We take every opportunity we can to sleep on the ground. We are seeing what happens. But our feelings for each other are inextricable from our feelings for these rocks and trees and rivers. In the classroom I always tell my students: trust the metaphor because it knows more than you do. I look across the river toward Bristol Head, and it tells me everything I need to know.