The Carry Home

by Gary Ferguson

  Nine months after Jane’s hospitalization, an older cousin with some strong back-to-the-land urges of her own happened to mention a program she’d heard about called Outward Bound. Jane liked the sound of it, sent off for a brochure. Among the saturated Kodachrome photos from the various courses the school offered were shots of southern Utah. She said it looked distant and outlandish beyond imagining. Bereft of any trace of the world where people measured each other by the straightness of their corn rows; absent, for that matter, every single ingredient she’d ever been told went into the making of a worthwhile landscape.

  Years later I read to her something Daniel Webster said in the middle of the nineteenth century about that region, part of his argument against expanding railroads into the West. What could anyone possibly want, he growled to Congress, of that vast and worthless area? “That region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and whirling winds, of dust, of cactus and prairie dogs?”

  She flashed a smile, then shot right back:

  “The answer’s in the question.”

  I REACHED IDAHO ON THE BACK SIDE OF A WESTERN FIRE storm, rolling into the remote Stanley Basin two days past a burn that had already swallowed some forty thousand acres. The day before my arrival, though, some relief—an early season snow, laying down the smoke and ash to reveal brilliant views of the Sawtooths. With every passing hour, the smell of charred wood gave way to the peppery scent of live lodgepole and to the sad, sweet fragrance of wheatgrass curing in the meadows along Valley Creek, the stalks brown and still in the September sun.

  Nearly all the tourists had been sent packing or were warned away. Except for the morning and evening comings and goings of firefighters, the tiny village of Stanley hovered just above a ghost town. Closed signs hung in the windows of our old haunts: The Sawtooth Hotel, where we ate our first forkfuls of sourdough pancakes. The Rod and Gun Club, where on summer evenings in the late 1970s, Casanova Jack belted back whiskey, climbed onto an old wooden stage at the back of the bar, and, bedecked in a white jumpsuit, became Elvis, or at least Elvis on Quaaludes.

  I’d barely heard of these mountains when, desperate to find some kind of outdoor job during summers in college, I spotted on the campus of Indiana University a poster by the Student Conservation Association—a fresh, feisty little nonprofit dedicated to matching young people to conservation jobs in parks and forests across the country. Having sent away for summer listings for 1977, I squeezed into a tiny coffee shop in Bloomington on Kirkwood Avenue one afternoon to study the possibilities. The job I ended up with, listed in a section covering the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, promised the duties of a naturalist: taking tourists on nature and history walks, entertaining them at night around the campfire. Still, as good as all that sounded, other places had similar offerings. So that evening, I unfolded all the appropriate western-state maps on the kitchen table in my apartment—maps I’d started collecting when I was ten—analyzing which job locations had the fewest number of paved roads nearby. The Sawtooths, with a single major north–south highway squeezed between two wilderness areas and one other similarly twisted piece of pavement heading west, this one closed in winter, by those standards seemed about as good as it gets.

  The following summer I rolled west, hurtling out of the corn belt behind the wheel of a ’64 Pontiac Tempest I’d named Stickeen, after John Muir’s dog. Near the end of the first day of driving, on a sweltering afternoon near the outskirts of Kansas City, in the middle of rush hour, the car let out a few short coughs and died in the middle of the west-bound lane of Interstate 80, leaving me to muscle it onto the shoulder. A couple minutes later, with the car on the roadside dead as a post, I looked in the rearview mirror to see behind me a semitrailer losing traction around the curve, the trailer actually sliding akimbo down the shoulder some two hundred yards away and closing fast. I lay down on the blue vinyl bench seat of the Pontiac, cradled my head between my arms, and stared out the driver-side window, waiting for impact. But it never came. The trailer slipped by six inches from my outside rearview mirror.

  I grabbed my wallet from the glove box, slipped out the door, and started hitchhiking, finally finding a mechanic’s garage where a couple grinning red-haired teenaged boys towed me in and set about happily chewing their fingers on the carburetor and distributor. Well into the evening, and four test-drives later, they were no closer to a cure. The real mechanic, they finally confessed—a guy named George—wouldn’t be in until the following day. And with that they hauled out a twelve-pack of Budweiser and invited me along for a fast twilight drive in a rusted brown Impala down a maze of county roads, the two of them taking turns seeing how many gophers they could run over during a single song on the radio. John got four during Thelma Houston’s “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” while Mike, even with the benefit of something longer—I’m thinking it was the theme song from Rocky—managed only two. George came in the next day and fixed the car all right, but it took most of my cash. If it hadn’t been for an odd east wind across Nebraska and Wyoming, I probably would’ve run out of gas money long before reaching the mountains of Idaho.

  The next morning, in the middle of Wyoming, there came a kind of epiphany. It happened right before dawn, the light so weak I could barely make out the sagebrush and pronghorn and sagging lines of barbed wire unrolling along the highway, the pieces sharpening then blurring, a final smear of doubt before the world began to flare again in the June sun. Pulling off at a nameless ranch exit to piss out the latest cup of truck stop coffee, I found myself enlivened by new smells—this bright, bitter tang of alkali and sage. Gone was all trace of home: the lemony grease of furniture polish, the baked meatloaf with ketchup glaze and chicken casseroles floating in mushroom soup. Gone was the smell of ripe garbage and bags of grass clippings waiting in the alley for pickup on Tuesday mornings; the sour whiffs of rubber drifting through the neighborhood from the Uniroyal factory some thirty blocks away. In that empty reach of Wyoming, smells were no longer in service of unlocking the past, as Proust would have it. Instead, they made a strong case for kicking the past out the door and speeding the hell away.

  I was neck deep in one of the most reliable of American seductions, the hunger for escape, which by the 1960s and ’70s had reached religious proportions. One way people answered these siren songs was to move to places where they could drive up some gravel road, shoulder a Gerry Pack, and head up long twists of mountain trail. Like a lot of generations before them, they often carried a fervent, misguided hope that just by coming to a new place, they could turn into someone new. But even so, they were falling in love with the American landscape. And their love affairs led to an explosion of wilderness preservation, giving protection to more than thirty million acres of unfettered land in the ’70s alone.

  Unfortunately, the relationships weren’t always strong enough to last. Maybe it’s like falling for someone solely for his or her good looks, the love firing but then fizzling like a bottle rocket. Too often we forgot about those people in Gary, Indiana, at the edge of the steel mills, or those along the chemical alleys of Louisiana and New Jersey, too poor or otherwise disenfranchised to leave. Our blunder wasn’t blowing off the environment. It was in failing to cultivate a dream big enough to include environmental justice. We never really grew the windy stories of our youth into something more substantial, more suitable to adulthood—something with a greater measure of relationship. And because of that botch, we lost the chance to gain millions of urban allies.

  WHEN I AT LAST ROLLED OFF INTERSTATE 80 IN THAT SUMMER of 1977, heading toward the hot-lava plains of southern Idaho, I couldn’t imagine the great upheavals of earth waiting for me three hours to the north. I crested Galena Summit in late afternoon, some thirty miles from the ranger station where I’d be working, pulling the old Pontiac off to the side of the road and walking out to the lip of a knee-buckling ocean of mountain peaks. A land fresh out of creation. Pink and gray granites pushed through ancient seabeds in massive upwellings, fractured
along vertical lines into what appeared like the deep, rugged teeth of a crosscut saw. And then the handiwork of great tongues of glacial ice, beginning some fifteen thousand years ago, carving a fantasy land of high-mountain-lake basins, hanging waterfalls, and steep arêtes.

  Jane would come two summers later, heading out from Indiana to spend the summer with me before starting work on her master’s degree. We’d met on campus at the last possible minute, in the final three weeks of undergraduate work, the two of us teaming up with another young woman for a class project. Jane had noticed me before that, though, she said later. But only because of the ridiculously loud ticking of my pocket watch.

  “I thought maybe you were going to explode.”

  She told us she was longing to get back West—was thinking of checking out California. Maybe you should try Idaho, I offered. Her plan was to direct a YWCA camp in Indiana for the first half of the summer; then, later in the fall, she’d begin a post-graduate internship in Michigan. Come out to Stanley in August, I said, promising to help her get a job for the last month of the summer, to pay her rent.

  In early June, a week after I landed back in Stanley, I got a call at the ranger station.

  “Is that offer still good to help me find a job?” she asked, going on to explain that the summer camp she was supposed to direct was abruptly canceled.

  “It’s still good,” I assured her. Then after work, I headed down to talk to a woman who’d been advertising for a hostess at the Mountain View Café. I called Jane back, told her the job was hers if she wanted it. And in what she later swore was the first spontaneous thing she’d done in her adult life, she took her savings and bought a ticket and the next day headed west.

  IT WAS HARD TO MISS THAT STANLEY WAS HAPPILY BEHIND the times. Much of what was most appealing about the boomers’ early love blast for nature was still simmering in modest little towns all up and down the Rockies. The poorer the place, the more inclined it was to welcome coveys of young drifters with a little money in their pockets—many who, like us, ended up as seasonal workers in the adjacent national forests. For a few golden years, ending in the 1980s, there was a kind of sweet camaraderie between the newcomers and the old-timers, prompted in part by how much the boomers needed older residents to help them figure out how to live. Especially in winter, in what were still fairly primitive conditions: Where to get firewood. When to plant a garden. How the hell to keep a truck—or, God forbid, a Volkswagen—running at forty below.

  An old friend of ours tells of being stuck in Crested Butte, Colorado, when the water pump on his old Dodge van gave out. He says he knew he was home when a group of complete strangers hailed him off a neighborhood street and invited him to a backyard barbecue hosted by a family of Croatian miners, complete with accordions and tambourines.

  “Here were these hippies and old-timers all mixed together,” he said. “I’d never seen that before.” It took about a week to replace the water pump on his van. He finally rolled out of town seven years later.

  Stanley, too, was that kind of place.

  There were few televisions in the Sawtooths. No private phones or computers or movie houses or bowling alleys or game rooms. By night, Jane and I were either out in the backcountry or in bars drinking Rainier and dancing to a stereo blaring out Hot Tuna and New Riders of the Purple Sage. On days off, we floated the river or, more often, hiked the mountains. We came to know each other at three miles an hour. Up Slate Creek, or across Railroad Ridge in one week, off to Baron and Alice and Twin lakes the next. We listened to each other’s stories about home. And at every turn, we confessed a need to forge a life that would keep wild ground always underfoot.

  IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON WHEN I PARKED THE VAN AT IRON Creek and brought out a small, chocolate-brown earthen vase, maybe six inches by four with a ceramic cap, hand-thrown years ago by a friend who’s an amateur potter. Into that I spooned a measure of Jane’s ashes from the wooden box, taped the lid shut, slipped it into the top of my loaded backpack, and began to walk. From the dirt parking area, the trail rose toward a granite basin hidden in the high peaks—the first place in the wilderness the two of us ever visited together. That time, there was ice still floating in the lake, and Jane dared me to jump in. Which of course I had to do. Which of course left her obliged to follow suit.

  But now my trek was playing out to a soundtrack of red squirrels and Clark’s nutcrackers, flitting and chattering and squawking, frantic to build storehouses of pine seed for the coming winter. A whitetail doe spooked from a patch of fireweed, breaking the limbs off a fallen tree as she disappeared into the forest. By the time I reached the lake, though, after nearly two hours of steady climbing, the world had gone strangely quiet, no buzz or chirp or scurry. I sat on the shore for a while, thinking about early mornings with Jane still asleep in the tent, catching brook trout for her from these very waters and frying them up with grits and eggs. At one point I’d told her this was one of the places I wanted my ashes scattered, too.

  The lake was just like I remembered it. A jewel.

  On two sides, steep walls of broken granite rose eight hundred feet from great piles of talus—places too raw and unsettled to support much in the way of life other than patches of lichen, the occasional clump of fireweed. But on the other shorelines were clusters of lodgepole pine, straight and handsome, the toes of their roots curling through thin soil just a few feet from the water’s edge. Where the forest opened, patches of brown grass fluttered, along with the dried stalks of what a few weeks ago were gardens of wildflower blooms. And from those gardens came the voices of two streams: the inlet to the lake, arriving in big cartwheels out of the jumbles of rock, then the outlet on the other side, harder to hear, in less of a hurry, easing over a loose scatter of stones and then on through thick mats of sedge and rush and horsetail.

  I’d never scattered a loved one’s ashes before. And in the long minutes before actually doing it, there seemed a clatter of meaning and uncertainty greater than any heart could bear. In one minute my breath was running ragged, heaving up sobs every time I had the thought that this would be it, the final proof she was gone forever. Never again would her fingers touch my shoulder. No more embrace. No more rolls of laughter. No more smell of campfire smoke in her long brown hair.

  But beyond the sadness, I was frightened, too, aware that while I was seeing and hearing and smelling the lake and the grass and the trees, I had no real comprehension of them. No joy, no story. Like a man waking up without memory or understanding, unable to differentiate a smile from a frown, an embrace from a slap, a laugh from a cry for help.

  And yet every now and then I broke free, climbing above the sadness and the fear to become ennobled—by the five-hundred-mile drive, by this walk into the high mountains, supremely honored that it was I who’d been chosen to carry out this precious woman’s last request. It was in one of those times, with that particular feeling on the rise, that I slipped into the jar a silver serving spoon from my late mother’s one treasure—a table setting given her on the day of her wedding by the aunt who finally agreed to raise her when she was orphaned at thirteen—and stepped to the very edge of the lake. Then it began. The sight of a fine mist of ash floating in slow motion down the shore, across the fireweed, and finally brushing the cold cheek of the lake. Also, the faint sounds of a patter of tiny bone chips hitting the water and fluttering through the shallows, shards of oyster white, disappearing at last against an embroidery of granite stones. The sun was a gift, warm on my face. And yet there was an old, familiar sadness too, knowing the winds of October were on their way—soon to churn the waters of the lake, soon to fasten the water with a layer of ice that would last all the way to the following June.

  A friend in southern Utah has for years managed great comfort from the thought that on his own death and cremation, the molecules of his body will be released, taken up by hundreds of other life forms. “That’s immortality, brother!” he once told me. On the shore of that lake, I wanted to believe I could see it too.
Maybe next spring, some infinitesimal iota of Jane’s ashes would be taken by a freshwater shrimp, snapped up a week later to become the fin of a brook trout. Then maybe the trout would get plucked from the water, becoming the feather of an osprey; the osprey passing too in time, and with its demise that same jot of matter washing down Iron Creek to the Salmon River and on to the Pacific. And maybe in some autumn far away the same molecule would rise as rain, drifting eastward in the belly of a cumulous cloud until the Sawtooths pushed it up and cooled it into snow. There it would rest until the following summer, when the June sun would melt it, sending it tumbling back into the belly of the lake.

  Hydrogen and oxygen, fueling the alchemy of forever.

  Despite my best efforts, though, it would be a long time until any of that brought comfort, when I could see as beautiful the fact that hidden within the passage of Jane’s remains were the forces of life itself. For the time being, that was little more than background. Like gravity, or the sunrise, or a thousand other things going on without me.

  Just as I finished the scattering, a perfect feather the color of cottonwood bark drifted down, shed by a Clark’s nutcracker circling overhead.

  “Is that you, Jane?” Which brought an immediate response from the bird—the usual squawking, like an old lady who smokes too much, clearing her throat.

  I lifted my head and called back. “I miss you. A lot.”

  WATER TO STONE, TWO

  I stumble with my broken leg up to the rim of the cliff ledge that brackets the rapids, some forty feet above the river. Looking until my eyes ache, yelling her name into the roar of the rapids. Twice I step on what seems like solid ground only to fall through carpets of moss—once slipping over the lip of the cliff, grabbing the branches of a small conifer to haul myself up again. Of course the busted leg isn’t much use. But the pain isn’t registering. It takes me nearly an hour to make the two hundred yards to the point where we flipped and then back again. As usual we’ve made a safety plan, this time with the guy shuttling our van. If he doesn’t get our telephone call by nine tonight, he’ll alert the authorities. But it’s ten thirty in the morning. And I’m not about to wait ten hours for help.