Then, a kind of switch gets thrown. My mind suddenly goes totally, fiercely rational. At one point I start thinking something’s wrong with me because I can’t connect any more with the panic that’s been rumbling in my gut since the wreck. Back at the flush pond I tie up the canoe—so if Jane shows up, she’ll know I’m okay—grab a bottle of water and a couple of energy bars, a white plastic bag to signal for help. I splint the broken leg with a straight piece of balsam wood and two Velcro straps, fashion a crude crutch out of a paddle, and begin the three-mile trek out. But the entire landscape is blocked by chest-high downed timber. So mostly I crawl.
I’m 150 yards along when all of a sudden two loons back at the flush pond begin making the strangest, most outrageous commotion—a cacophony of titter and echo so far beyond the usual loon delirium it stops me in my tracks. Shreds all my rational thinking. For reasons I can’t begin to fathom, I spin around on the makeshift crutch and hobble back, feeling all over again the muddle of dread and hope and terror.
It’s hard to express what happens at the pond. The two loons are there, sitting together on the upstream side of the flat water near the foot of the rapids. At my approach they go silent. Leaning on the paddle, I’m suddenly overwhelmed by two ideas, two images. Not thoughts—not like whispers overheard in another room. Something deeper, speaking not to the ears, but to the bones. A second or two later I shut it out, muster all my energy against it. The message is lovely beyond imagining, heartbreaking beyond belief. The message is “Beautiful. Goodbye.”
IN THE SWEET MIDDLE OF NOWHERE
With Jane’s death, I decided to cancel almost everything, at least for a few months—speaking and teaching events, writing projects. During my entire career, choosing subject matter to write about was easy; the whole world, especially the wild world, was like a candy shop, with far more threads to follow than there was time for following. But all that was driven by a sense of wonder. And for now the wonder was out of reach. Not that nature was absent. On most any given day, certainly back here in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, all I had to do was open my eyes to see it everywhere. But it was hard to feel the mystery of those wild places. I could see some of the brilliant ways things functioned here, sense the overwhelming complexity of it all. But none of that carried enough heat to spark the poet fire.
At the same time, the world at large seemed irascible, edgy. In August, more than 1,800 people died in Hurricane Katrina—the disaster putting a spotlight on an even bigger disaster, having to do with being poor and black in America. Car bombs were going off all over Iraq. Arnold Schwarzenegger was grating his veto pen across a same-sex marriage act. The Environmental Protection Agency was caught blacklisting scientists said to pose threats to pro-business ideology.
Closer to home, the first wolf hunts were getting under way. Not satisfied dispatching the animals with bullets, some politicians were pushing to allow the use of poison gas for killing wolf pups in their dens. Others, not so well versed in the Constitution, called for the nullification of the federal Endangered Species Act. And despite the fact that in all of North America only two people had been killed by wolves in over 150 years, Oregon politicians were rallying the troops for an outright war, calling it “a battle for the safety of our families and communities.” So it was good to be back in Stanley for a while. In part to escape, I suppose. But also, hopefully, to wake up.
After the first scattering, I’d planned to spend the night in the backcountry. Instead, I walked out. After a summer in a cast, I felt like moving, pushing through the discomfort of my broken foot twisting and turning and finally swelling against the trail, opting for pain over the damnable numbness. Then again, maybe it was just too hard to be out in the wilds, when the wilds seemed so much less than they’d been the year before.
So I drove out Valley Creek, instead, to the meadows where we were married. Some sixty people had come for the wedding, two-thirds of them friends and family from faraway places, standing among the flowers and staring open-mouthed at the snow-covered peaks jutting into the June sky. Jane’s five-year-old niece, Vanessa, was the flower girl, stealing the show prancing around the meadow in her pink dress, filling out her bouquet by plucking camas and sego lilies and buttercups and shooting stars. Jane’s father, meanwhile, seemed remarkably happy to find cow patties lying in the grass; we guessed they reminded him of his beloved Angus cattle, back home in Indiana.
I’d intended to ask Gilman for his daughter’s hand in marriage all proper like, but I never got the chance. On getting out of the car in their driveway for the first time, Jane swanned over to her parents, gave them big hugs, and by way of introductions told them, “Mom and Dad, this is Gary. He’s asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”
I stammered and blushed like a Hoosier tomato.
“If it’s okay with you, that is.”
She was “Janey” to her father, able to coax out his boyish mischief in a way no one else ever could. When they came together after months apart his whole body seemed to exhale, as if with her there, it was okay to stand down a little, indulge his weariness. Gilman treated me with enormous kindness, which I always thought generous, given how hard it must have been to watch me climb behind the wheel of the Chevy van and motor off to the Wild West with his precious daughter. But then, he’d been there with her when she was in such terrible pain during her high school years. Now she seemed happy. And I think for that reason alone, he could let her go.
On the night of our wedding, with pieces of rice clinging to our hair, surrounded by smiling family and friends, I slid open the side door of the van, picked Jane up in my arms, and, with her giggling loudly, carefully placed her across the threshold. Years later I wondered if such a move might have been alarming as hell to her father and mother. But if it was, they never showed it.
My own father, meanwhile, was gathering his courage to deliver a toast at the reception dinner. He’d been a major player in our adventure, helping us back in northern Indiana through the bitter cold of January and February to convert Moby the van into what in all seriousness was the eighty-square-foot home of our dreams. He was a soft-spoken man, generous, incredibly talented but at times oddly unsure of himself. Definitely not a maker of toasts or speeches. The night of the wedding, though, he pushed his chair back from the head table, rose to his feet, slid his gray glasses against the bridge of his nose, and with a nervous smile raised a glass of mead to the bride and groom.
“Some marriages are made in heaven,” he said. “This one was made in Idaho.” And then he sat down.
Later my mother gave him grief, thinking the comment simple. Jane and I thought it was the coolest thing we’d ever heard.
It was in that summer when we made our first real journey in the big blue van: with curtains she’d made on her mother’s 1935 Singer sewing machine, a Hudson Bay blanket from her childhood bed, a scatter of family photos tacked onto a cork board. At the end of the second day of driving, when we were surely and truly West, we stopped late afternoon near the mouth of the Yampa River Canyon, outside Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument. From there we climbed up and away from a lonely dirt road into a toss of slickrock, took off our clothes, and lay down beside each other on the warm rocks. It felt like coming to rest in the middle of a Gary Snyder poem.
Sixteen months later, in October, my mother called—sounding choked and out of breath. My father had been doing sheet metal work on the roof of an eight-story courthouse in Plymouth, Indiana. The night before was cold, below freezing, so when morning came, it was decided someone from the crew should test the metal roof for frost, make sure it was safe to work on. He volunteered.
Suddenly he was dead, broken to pieces from an eighty-foot fall. For years afterward Jane and I would lie on the bed of the van and stare at panel and trim pieces and stowage lockers—intricate puzzles of layout and cutting and assembly he’d solved, one and then another, almost without thinking. I still wonder now and then what it would be like to meet up with him again. We’d final
ly make up for that stubborn habit of men in the Midwest, of never talking much. I’d apologize for not fully appreciating his extraordinary patience. Tell him he was right when he stood in the bedroom door one night when I was eleven and told me that change of habit comes slowly, an inch at a time. Ask him why, in the face of my mother swinging that studded belt against my bare skin, he couldn’t see his way through to protect me. Tell him how I wish he’d lived long enough to talk to me about the things that made him afraid.
LEAVING VALLEY CREEK IN A WASH OF ALPENGLOW, THE SKY reddened by smoke, I parked the van along the Salmon River and settled in, then pulled out a small cardboard box from under the bed. Inside were the road and trail journals Jane and I had created over twenty-five years. They began in the summer of 1980, two and a half months after we were married in that meadow, so filled with camas lilies that from a distance it looked like standing water. Jane was busy working up ideas for her first natural history book for kids, which would be published the following year. I was typing out stories for small magazines, jumping on any idea that promised a few bucks and a trip down a dirt path or lonely highway. Somewhere along the way we hatched a plan to further stoke the romance with a 300-mile bicycle ride—from the Canadian border around the fine green edges of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. One afternoon in August, though, sitting on the ground in a patch of yarrow with a road atlas spread out in front of her—in a tone so casual she could’ve been reciting a grocery list—she said that while we were at it, maybe we should just go ahead and ride the entire West Coast. Three weeks later we climbed onto our skinny leather bike seats in the town of Blaine, Washington, the bikes sluggish with cameras and camping gear, making for Rosarito, Mexico, six weeks and 1,700 miles to the south.
She wrote every evening in the campgrounds. Again in the morning over breakfast, noting everything from chainsaw carvings at the Wild and Woody West in Oregon to massive platters of pancakes and eggs and biscuits at the Samoa Cookhouse in northern California. She wrote of fearing for our lives in the snarl of the San Jose freeways, of thousands of monarch butterflies fluttering all around us at Pismo Beach, having flown there for winter from the cold places of Canada and the high West. She told how the buzz and clutter of Tijuana melted into a quiet Baja seacoast highway, thick with barrel cactus and ice plants and chaparral.
And there were a lot more notebooks in the years that followed. Snapshots from hundreds of meanderings—recording weather and plants and bears and bugs and tourist traps and story ideas and stray conversations. And while most of the entries are matter-of-fact, between the lines is a headstrong, busty affirmation of the one sure thing each of us brought into the marriage: that to the extent there was such a thing as deliverance—from too little money or too much worry, too little patience or too much snow and mud—it would come, and without strings, from the heart of some unbridled land waiting down the road. Within a few years we’d be off to write stories at Glacier and Chaco Canyon and Acadia, in the Grand Canyon, the Smoky Mountains, even the Arctic. Always returning to the home woods. Breathing in, breathing out.
In the early days, those stories were written in longhand on legal pads. Getting them ready to mail off to editors meant first entering them into a computer, then printing them—tasks that required spending a few days in private campgrounds with electrical hookups. We’d pull into some KOA, or Happy Joe’s, or Bear Hollow, or Prairie Dog Village, then run one extension cord from outlets under the picnic shelters to our forty-pound Kaypro computer and another one to a massive thimble printer.
It was in those private campgrounds that we learned to work against distractions—televisions, generators, shuffleboard, bridge parties. In July of 1987, we spent a week writing at the KOA in Missoula, setting up next to a family living in the campground for the entire summer, the husband driving away from their tiny trailer early each morning for a construction job, leaving behind a wife, three kids, and a boisterous parrot. The problem was the parrot. Starting around eight thirty in the morning, it liked nothing better than to squawk out scoldings to the kids:
“Stop that, Mike!”
“Lucas, don’t you dare!”
“I’m not telling you kids again!”
So it went, day after day, off and on through the late afternoon.
WE GATHERED OUR NEWS IN THOSE DAYS FROM NEWSPAPERS and AM radio stations, and sometimes, whenever reception allowed, from National Public Radio. On rare occasions a line about current events would make it into the journals: when Sandra Day O’Connor became the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court; when the catastrophe in Bhopal, India, happened, courtesy of a gas leak at a Union Carbide plant, killing five thousand people; when El Niño was wreaking havoc, spurring a fresh round of suspicions among scientists about the effects of greenhouse gasses. We made a couple comments about Ronald Reagan, too, mostly having to do with environmental matters, questioning if he’d been AWOL for junior high science class, having claimed on two separate occasions that living trees were causing more pollution than humans—giving off not oxygen, which of course is what trees really do, but carbon dioxide.
After the big bike ride down the West Coast, we signed on to caretake a small ranch in the bitter heart of a Sawtooth Mountain. That February, the thermometer stuck crazy close to forty below. Leaving at the end of the job on a trek to Texas to do a magazine story about cactus thieves in Big Bend National Park, we passed through Phoenix. It was warm. The sun was shining. You couldn’t find a snow bank if your life depended on it. Six weeks later, we drove into the Valley of the Sun in a van filled with six cubic feet of worldly goods, planning to stay for a year or two. We shut off the engine just after noon. It was 114 degrees.
Jane was quick to land a job teaching at a day care center; two weeks into it she planned a special treat for the kids that involved me dressing up in a Smokey the Bear outfit borrowed from the local Forest Service office. I climbed into the van—a van without air conditioning—the thermometer at 119 degrees, wearing a fuzzy brown wool suit, pushing through heavy traffic and the occasional wave of nausea for five miles before reaching the school. Panting in the parking lot, I paused to gather my strength, slipped on the Smokey Bear head, and walked into class. At which point every kid in the room screamed like someone just tossed scalding water on them, then ran off to find someone to hug, or lacking that, to hide in the coat room or the art closet or the bathroom. Several made for the door. The director asked me to leave.
We lasted in Phoenix for seven weeks. And even that was accomplished only by driving every weekend three hours north to the ponderosa forests around Flagstaff, crawling out of the van door on Saturday mornings and almost falling to our knees with how delicious the air smelled, scents like vanilla and butterscotch leaking from the bark of the trees mingled with the lemon and pepper of pine needles on the forest floor. By June we were asking for caretaking jobs in the more remote northern portions of the state. Anything to get back to the woods. Finally, at a bar outside Flagstaff, a middle-aged man listened to our tale of woe and told us to go to the Mormon Lake Lodge, ask for Fat Jack.
Pausing from his work at the bar restocking bottles of George Dickel and Jack Daniels, Fat Jack listened to our story. Satisfied we were determined, or at least rightly desperate, he told us to get ahold of a guy who owned a remote cowboy line camp twenty miles south of the Mormon Lake Lodge. Then he scribbled a name and phone number on an order ticket, pushed it across the bar.
“He might be looking for someone to keep an eye on the place through the winter.”
The following weekend, in a meeting at a Denny’s over a stupid amount of weak coffee, forty-year-old Joe Lockett sized us up as only Western ranchers can, then got friendly, then got to the point.
“There’s no electricity,” he said, mouth turned down under a thick mustache. “And once freeze-up happens in December, there’ll be no running water. You’d have to use the spring tank, ’bout three hundred yards from the old cookhouse.”
The cookhouse was the onl
y building inhabitable, he added, though not by much. The nearest neighbor was seven miles away. In exchange for watching the place, we could live rent free. We told him it sounded perfect.
So another notebook was added to the road notes and the trail journals, this one to chronicle the cold, bright days at Lockett Ranch. We would stay there from the fall of 1980 to the spring of 1981. As I read the pages today, they seem over-played, loaded with all the gush and giddy-up that comes from being in your twenties out living under open skies: Describing long ski treks at midnight through the aspen woods, the white trunks of the trees shimmering in the moonlight. Or cooking cornbread and beans and potato soup and chili and pots of spaghetti on top of a sheet-iron woodstove. Being under the blankets on an old wrought-iron bed from 1936 and listening to Bruce Williams from Talknet Radio on KOMA—eight hundred miles to the east, in Oklahoma City—with a battery-powered radio. There are even notes about the outhouse, covered floor to ceiling with horse pictures from a 1950 issue of The Quarter Horse Journal—35¢ a copy, three bucks a year.
Just before the snows came, while out on a morning walk near the cabin, a beautiful little calico Manx cat wandered up out of nowhere, apparently abandoned by her owners. By the end of the day she’d decided to move in, trading nights in the woods, which were growing colder by the week, for a little company, a down quilt, and the occasional bite of cheese. For her part she sent the cabin’s rats packing, flushing them from the attic in a single day, when I’d been trying and failing to scare them out for weeks. One morning, long after winter came in, for some reason she started shaking, trembling. Not knowing what to do, we decided to seek help from a vet. So we carefully wrapped her in a laundry bag and climbed on the snow machine, only to have her at the end of the first mile let go a pint of piss all over Jane’s lap, which in little time turned to yellow ice. The vet said the cat was fine.
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