The Carry Home

by Gary Ferguson

  I LAID THE BROWN POTTERY VASE IN THE TOP OF MY DAY PACK and started walking from a set of corrals near the Notom Road—heading west, toward Sheets Gulch and the stark, fluted edges of the Waterpocket Fold. A cluster of cottonwoods was leafing out along the wash, dripping with Jane’s fleeting, electric green of April. The skies were mostly clear, though in the west was a long train of dark clouds, dragging their tails along the tops of the red rock divide. Nature moves fast here, often violently, with storms entirely out of sight sending walls of water pushing down slot canyons, tearing boulders loose and ravaging the cottonwoods. Yet another good reason to pay attention.

  Fluttering on the ground that day were clusters of Apache plume and rabbit brush, and along the damp edges of coulees, the jointed stems of horsetail poked from the earth like bony stalks of asparagus. The magpies were out in force, rising and falling in ten- or twelve-foot dips, toying with the wind. I looked halfheartedly for small landforms near big landforms, as per the advice of the Hopi man, but had no real instinct for it. Still, in the end I found myself on top of a small butte at the eastern edge of the national park. The view whispered of a time scale so grand as to be inconceivable: old swamps in what is now the tumble of the Chinle Formation; massive desert dunes locked away in Navajo Sandstone; the hiss of shallow seas, frozen in layers of Mancos Shale.

  The puffs of ash I spooned into the sky held together for a long time on that strangely windless afternoon, drifting slowly to the north against a reach of rust-colored sandstone. I placed the spoon and jar in the sand at my feet. Then I lowered my body to the ground, laid my cheek against a warm slab of rock. A lone, pumpkin-shaped cloud drifted overhead, and dissolved. A hummingbird flew by on her way to grab lunch from a patch of star lilies, passing so close to my head that I could hear the whir of her wings. Just as happened in the Sawtooths, and again at that cabin in the southern Absarokas, for a precious few minutes there came a sense of putting the burden down. Like the hole in my life was getting smaller, a smear of black in a bigger world of sky and slickrock and morning glories. As if the magpies were carrying off some of the loss. As though the tiger beetles had loaded it onto their varnished backsides and were walking it out across the trackless sand.

  THE OLD PEOPLE OF THIS PLACE, THE PAIUTE, THOUGHT IT perfectly normal for beauty and chaos to stand together like this, hand in hand. Paiute creation myth tells how long ago, the earth was danced by two brothers, Coyote and Wolf. Wolf with his perfect, wholesome vision of the world, a creator who never wanted anything more than an abundant life for the people, a life free of anguish, free even of death. And the younger Coyote—spoiled, mischievous, a glib talker who time and again pulled his older brother away from any plans of perfection. After a time, Wolf went away, leaving the world to unfold according to the imaginations of Coyote. We cast our fate with Coyote, said the Paiute. And so our lives are driven by this strange mix of sunlight and shadow, loveliness and fear.

  When revisiting those kids from the wilderness therapy program I’d written about, I was heartened to find them mostly happy, content. With every one of them, I asked a question I’d asked ten years before: Why did that program work, when all the other interventions had failed? Their most frequent response was “It’s the first place where what I did mattered.”

  The second most common remark: “It’s where I finally experienced something beautiful.”

  The third: “It’s the first time I ever felt spiritual,” or “felt God,” or “felt like I was a part of something bigger than just me.”

  Community. Beauty. Mystery.

  WATER TO STONE, FIVE

  Friday night, May 27. Search director Greg Brown calls to let us know they’ve found Jane’s life jacket, sitting high and dry on a beach along the north shore of Obonga Lake, a half mile from the site of the wreck. A flash of hope. I tell Greg she’d be likely to sit on it, resting; in fact I’d seen her do it plenty of times, insulating herself from cold ground. Maybe she’s hypothermic, I offer—some of the first signs of hypothermia being confusion and disorientation. Simply got up and walked away. The next morning, Tom, Martha, and I sit picking at plates of eggs in the hotel restaurant, weaving other scenarios, other flights of fancy that make her still alive.

  Sensing we’re going stir-crazy, Brad McCallum arranges for one of his officers to drive us back north, to the search site, figuring it will help us feel more connected to the rescue effort. When we arrive, Brown wastes no time pulling out maps and laptops, reviewing with us everything the search team has done over the past two and a half days. It strikes me that Jane would totally admire how organized he is, how capable. After an hour or so, the officer who drove us up from Thunder Bay asks if we’d like to get some lunch in Armstrong, about thirty miles north. It was where Jane and I had our last meal together: pizza in a well-lit little tavern on the main street of town. There was a television hanging from the ceiling above the bar, playing reruns of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

  We’re out on the highway, ten miles north of the search command site, when a call comes over the radio. It’s not an explicit exchange, and after signing off, the officer tells us Greg is asking us to return. It doesn’t take two seconds for me to be swept into that maelstrom of dread I’ve been trying so hard to contain, ever since I stood at the flush pond and felt the wash of beautiful and goodbye. Everything’s coming apart now. Back at the command center, I can see Greg Brown through the window of the car. The look on his face tells the end of the story.

  “I’m afraid I have bad news,” he says.

  The next time I look up, having fallen to my knees in the sand, I see he’s crying.

  THE SEARCHERS HAD COMBED THE BANKS OF THE KOPKA seven times in all. On the last try, one of the dogs stopped and pointed toward the river. The handler and his assistant looked, looked some more, but couldn’t see anything in the dark, tannin-colored water. Just as they were about to move on, the assistant caught sight of something. They moved in closer, trying to study it from every angle; in the end, they decided it was fabric. Assembling the rest of the team, uncoiling rescue ropes, they managed a technical foray into the rapids. Finally, nearly three days to the hour after Jane disappeared, her body was pulled from the river.

  WHEN WORD GETS BACK TO THE CAFÉ IN RED LODGE, THE head cook, Nancy, takes a piece of chalk and writes a message on the blackboard that announces the daily specials, then hangs it so it faces the street: We’ll miss you, Sweet Jane.

  Word spreads fast. Soon after the café closes, at two in the afternoon, dozens of people start showing up at the restaurant, bringing heaping bowls of food, beginning a potluck that goes on late into the evening. So many stop Nancy and ask her what they can do to help that she has to invent tasks for them, the most common being to go pick flowers. By Sunday the place is all but covered in vases of daisies and roses and flag iris—filling the tables in the dining room, spilling across the window-sills and onto the tops of the reach-in coolers. For the next several days, every morning when the crew arrives to open the restaurant, they’ll find more bouquets, more cards and prayer flags laid against the front door.

  BACK IN THUNDER BAY, SUNDAY IS A BLUR. THE ONLY POINT OF certainty was my obsession to drive Jane’s ashes home in the van. To that end, Martha has been on the phone since just past dawn, calling the local officials who’ve been good enough to give us their home phone numbers. The coroner, for one, who as the last act of what began as a potential crime investigation will have to perform an autopsy. He offers to do this on his day off. The funeral director, Phil Medhurst, swings into action and makes arrangements for the cremation to happen the next morning.

  Early Monday morning, I get out of bed and go knock on the door of Martha’s room. When she opens it, I catch my breath. She’s taken her long, thick brown hair, which for years had hung nearly to her waist, and cut it off in a ragged line at the top of her neck, using a pair of scissors borrowed from the hotel clerk in the middle of the night.

  Tom leaves for the airport, to head bac
k to Indiana, while Martha and I wait for the ashes to arrive at Blake’s Funeral Home. We talk it over, decide to go down to the shore of Lake Superior for a parting ceremony—to Mariner Park, where the waters once held by the Kopka River pause for a time in the big lake before running on to the sea. The force of what’s happened keeps growing, getting stronger, filling every muscle and fiber, making me weak in the knees, sick to my stomach. I know things are going to be this way for a long time. Like an avalanche that keeps running and running down the mountain, never exhausting itself, an endless, bitter cascade of ice and snow.

  Down on the shore of Lake Superior I take the sock and sandal from my good foot and plant it in the lake, then lean over to wash my hands and face. Next I bring out a pack of Kool cigarettes that for years was stuffed into one of the food canisters in the van—a single cigarette being a small indulgence Jane enjoyed five or six times a year. Though neither Martha nor I smoke, we light one and pass it back and forth for several rounds, extinguish it, and then spread the remaining tobacco on the shore. Then Martha takes a paper towel from her daypack, unfolds it to reveal the hair she cut off back at the hotel in the middle of the night, bends over, and carefully lays it on the surface of the lake. It spreads out slowly, fanned by gentle waves, curling and twisting and then drifting out of sight.

  On the way back to the van, Martha starts picking up every piece of trash she sees on the grounds of Mariner Park—something Jane did all the time. I hobble behind on my crutches, eager to help, snatching up bits of paper and cloth and the occasional cigarette butt and tossing them into nearby trash cans. When I crawl back into the passenger seat of the van, I notice wet spots on the chest of my shirt, from crying. Martha starts the engine. We both give a final look to the shore, and we drive away.

  TO THE LAND OF BEAR AND WOLF

  Kenneth Rexroth, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell—all of them bemoaned the loss of big myth in America, claiming it left us with withered imaginations. And that, in turn, caused a certain restless hunger—one that as often as not we ended up trying to stuff with consumer goods. Jung went so far as to claim there’d be no need for psychotherapy had we not turned our backs on story. I’d heard it all before. But by the second anniversary of Jane’s death, I was also coming to believe that the power of those stories came largely from them putting us in touch with beauty, community, and mystery. And conversely, from tossing out hints about what can happen when such things disappear from our lives.

  If I was going to have any chance of healing—if any of us were going to heal—we’d have to lay claim to a fresh trove of stories.

  They’d have to be courageous stories—strong enough not only to help us see that the notion of being in control is the grandest of illusions, but at the same time teach us something about how to find calm in the eye of a storm. They’d have to be generous stories, compassionate enough to allow some measure of dignity toward “the other,” be it the wolf hater or the wolf. And whatever tales we might spin about beauty would need to point back to the original Greek meaning of that word, which was to be of one’s hour—be it the hour of a budding plant, as in youth, or the hour of the ripened fruit. And they’d have to be bold, audacious enough to remind us that when you’re free from the feeling that something’s lacking in your life, if instead you have real gratitude for what’s actually there, then there’s really no need to scour the countryside looking for hope.

  WITH YET ANOTHER SPRING RISING IN THE FOOTHILLS OF THE Rockies, I found myself putting out the welcome mat for an old desire: to get back to wilderness. Get back for real, not just for the scattering journeys. Jane herself would’ve no doubt prescribed for me a couple weeks out on open ground, waking up in some honest-to-goodness middle of nowhere. I hooked up with a great friend, biologist Doug Smith, who’d gone to the Arctic with Jane and me on that canoe trip down the Hood River years before. He was happy to hear my cravings were coming back, happier still to stoke the fire. So we got down to plotting a trip back to the north country—this time to explore the remote lakes and streams near the headwaters of the mighty Thelon River in the Northwest Territories. Land of the bear and the wolf. We’d be just upwind from the magnificent twenty-thousand-square-mile Thelon Game Sanctuary, which among other things is homeland for the northern-most population of tundra-dwelling moose. And it was moose, said animal storytellers across thousands of years, which held clues to the mysterious fabric that binds life and death.

  It was going to be the first time I’d been in a canoe since the wreck.

  In the months before leaving, I was drawn to a curious perspective—a kind of psychic looking glass—one that I’d heard about years before when studying Aboriginal myths. The idea is that those of us who are still here, still walking around, are windows by which the ones who’ve passed on can still see, hear, taste, touch, and smell life on earth. Clearly, I had no foundation for such belief. Still, I decided to go back to the Far North determined to act like it was true. At one point, Doug offered that we could trade off between the bow and the stern of the boat, both of us typically being stern paddlers. I said I’d be okay in the bow, where Jane sat. Told him I wanted to feel the rivers and lakes the way she felt them: water parting around the hull in an easy hiss, the spray of breaking waves on my face and arms, the boat thudding under me as it drops hard into the troughs.

  Unlike other trips to the Barren Lands, this was the first time we’d be going with a guide. But not just any guide. We’d be going with Alex Hall, a man who’d spent more days in the remote Canadian wilderness with a paddle than anyone alive. Joining us was a married pair of middle-aged biologists from New Hampshire, as well as Alex’s oldest son, who in truth would’ve rather been wandering the Edmonton Mall than out in the wilderness. With us too was Monte Hummel of the World Wildlife Fund—arguably among the most capable, effective conservationists on the continent. Like us, Hummel wasn’t there just to canoe. He was there to canoe with Alex Hall.

  In 1971, with a freshly signed master’s degree in wildlife biology in his pocket, Hall and a buddy had left Ontario for the heart of nowhere, driving more than three thousand miles to the farflung outpost of Yellowknife. From there they’d hopped on a floatplane with a canoe strapped on it and begun a thirty-seven-day trip down the Thelon and Hanbury rivers to Baker Lake, becoming only the eleventh recreational party to make that journey.

  Later, finding himself going stir-crazy at a desk job in Ottawa as an environmental consultant, he had decided to go west for good, to create his own business as a canoe guide in the Barren Lands. The next summer he was back on the tundra with boat and paddle, launching an eleven-week, 1,150-mile canoe odyssey across the mainland Northwest Territories on seven different rivers, from the Saskatchewan border to the Arctic coast.

  The government officials in Yellowknife in charge of issuing business permits had been skeptical of the guiding idea. With good reason. The whole of the summer of 1974, Hall had one client. The following year, he had another one.

  “I’m stubborn,” he told me. “I kept the faith.”

  He’d also kept paddling, along the way becoming the first human to float a long list of rivers and watersheds. To this day, some of the routes he discovered remain known only to him, making him very protective of the region. By 1979 his trips were fully booked. Which has pretty much been the case for thirty years.

  WE NEEDED TWO FLOATPLANES OUT OF FORT SMITH, EACH loaded with meticulous attention to detail: Duluth packs and tents and paddles and cook stoves precisely placed, the center thwarts of the canoes removed so the shells of the boats could be nestled like cups and strapped to the floats of the planes. Bush planes are noisy, not good for conversation, so on the outbound journey we mostly stared out the windows—looking at landscapes vast and empty beyond imagining. The clusters of birch and spruce trees near Fort Smith grew smaller and smaller, then all but faded, yielding thousands of square miles of open tundra broken by lakes and ponds, by chains of side channels and bogs flashing in the sun. And then the polygons: my
sterious earthen clusters of perfect geometric-shaped pockets fifty to seventy feet across, each framed by high walls of earth pushed up by the underlying ice, joined to the others in what from the air look like massive honeycombs. And at the bottom of each one, a pocket of cold water the color of sky.

  Touching down on Lake Terry around eleven in the morning, the pilots maneuvered the leading edges of the floats onto a sandy beach, and we hurried to off-load equipment. When the planes took off again, the drones of their engines finally fading to the south, all eyes tuned to Alex. He stood tall and lanky—dressed mostly in wool, looking a lot like a guy from a 1960s issue of Outdoor Life. There was the obligatory bathroom talk, reviewing the dos and don’ts of crapping on the tundra. He brought out different pieces of equipment, then launched us in a practice session setting up his tents. He struck me as looking much younger than his sixty-seven years, in part because of the economy of his movement, smooth and efficient in that way of men and women who spend big blocks of time traveling through wild places. Even his conversations were economical, measuring out his points and opinions, even his stories, in a manner simple and steady and clear.

  Now and then there came the trace of a smile to Hall’s face, mostly when he was off alone, pausing with hand on hip, staring across the tundra. It’s hard to fathom the memories he carried: Climbing some high hill, untold miles from anyone, and finding caribou as far as the eye can see—a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand animals—moving past hour after hour, for the better part of a day. Or the countless encounters he’d had with tundra wolves. Or the dozens of times he’d slipped silently past eight-hundred-pound grizzlies feeding on the shore.