The Carry Home

by Gary Ferguson

  Mine were cast along the lake, over a patch of cherry-colored monkey flowers. During our summer forays in the high country, monkey flowers were always with us, wrapping alpine streams and lakeshores with ribbons of pink and yellow and scarlet—first in the Sawtooths of Idaho, then up and down the Rockies from New Mexico to Montana. A brilliant little flower thriving in the harshest of climates, a plant that botanical healers have long used to treat sadness and depression, claiming it brings joy to troubled hearts.

  RESCUE

  The next morning, three members of our group packed up and headed for home; the rest of us moved north. Janet and Rand were planning to carry on with us for the next three days, covering a portion of the remaining sixty miles to Yellowstone, parting company at the western edge of the Beartooths. The weather continued to improve, finally exhaling into one of those perfect days in the mountains that leave you wanting for nothing. It began what would be the finest weather of the summer.

  From Becker on, I was finally, fully back in the mountains. The great German philosopher Friedrich Schiller was right to claim—as Jane too liked to say—that people are only completely human when they play. And playing is something I’d done precious little of in the past few years. But now I was playing. Rand, who has a long history of wandering this country, was busy taking stock of things: noting the size of the snowfields at Jasper Lake compared to when he had seen them just two years earlier, calculating the likely geological composition of a high ridge flashing in the afternoon light. Janet, meanwhile, was simply grinning. Smiling at the feel of a warm breeze at nine thousand feet, smiling at the scent of the bluebell and monkey flower gardens that wrapped every stream.

  But in mid-afternoon, the talk turned melancholy. The permanent snowfields and glaciers we’d come to know in this area over the years were disappearing, and fast. More significant still, on the high ridges to the south we could see old familiar tufts of whitebark pine, huddled like old women telling stories—no longer green, though, instead turning brown. Dying due to infestations of pine bark beetles, an insect able to survive at these upper elevations thanks to warming temperatures—part of the biggest insect blight ever to hit North America. One that’ll probably wipe out the whitebark of greater Yellowstone in the next twenty years.

  The Clark’s nutcrackers of the region had used these trees for centuries, each bird burying as many as twenty thousand seeds in shallow caches to feed on through the winter. What’s more, the tree’s nuts remain among the most important foods for grizzly bears; during years of abundant seed crops, a bear may get half her calories from them. It was even more troubling that these grizzly meals were disappearing at exactly the same time another one—spawning cutthroat trout—was dwindling too, the result of the region’s streams being blown dry by drought.

  I knew then that I was going to miss the whitebarks. Even the kindest months in this country can bring great fits of sleet and hail and snow; on more than one occasion I’d found myself with only one refuge, under the branches of those silvery-barked conifers. Even John Muir, famous for climbing hundred-foot-high Douglas fir trees during windstorms for the chance at a sway ride, found himself on plenty of occasions on his belly under whitebark, peering out through their ropy branches at some outburst of raging weather in the high Sierras.

  Beyond gratitude at being able to play again, then, that glum reality was also part of our trek to Yellowstone: the feeling of life shifting, unraveling before it reassembled into something new. Of course the snowfields and the whitebark were only the beginning. The little pika, or rock rabbit, which in summer cuts and dries piles of grass on the high-elevation flats of boulder piles—sometimes enough to fill a bushel basket—was seeing his usual summer crops taken over by less nutritional plants, ones more able to thrive in this warming climate. Soon the pika, too, will disappear from here. Meanwhile to the southwest of where we were walking, on the northern range of the national park, the wet places were drying out—taking with them the Columbia spotted frog. The blotched tiger salamander. The boreal chorus frog.

  The question is asked often these days about what future generations will think of us for not doing enough in the face of climate change. But right now it feels like the only thing worse than not doing enough is pretending not even to notice. So the five of us are noticing. Trying to be loyal to some vague feeling that calls us to at least witness the losses—and for me, to promise to miss these things when they’re gone.

  Maybe the first step in solving climate change is being courageous enough to face our reactions to the mere mention of it—these feelings of being overwhelmed, this rush of sadness and frustration at the thought of something that seems way too complicated to solve. Maybe if we could face all that, if we could grieve, we’d find our way on to what’s next.

  In the months before this trek, I’d been spending a fair amount of time with twenty-somethings. A couple living with their new baby in a tiny yurt out in Luther—no electricity, not even running water—making their money spring through fall by marshaling a herd of goats across people’s property, the goats being magnificent at eating down the noxious weeds that flourish in this warming, drying climate. And then this brilliant Yale-trained architect, who a year after graduation had turned his back on his celebrated New York employer to become a cowboy on the Lazy E L Ranch. And also the daughter of an old fly-fishing friend, gathering organic vegetables from greenhouse growers, carting them in her biodiesel truck to high-end restaurants.

  I’ve often thought these young people were somehow different from the splendid longhairs of my own generation. For one thing, their efforts on behalf of the planet seem less a massive party with an open bar than a modest, slightly buzzed late-night dinner with friends. I imagine them being less prone to the awkward hangover that came to the baby boomers, in that season when we woke up to find the whole world wasn’t on board, then tucked our tails between our legs, put on dark glasses, and slipped off into Ronald Reagan’s morning in America.

  “I think maybe we don’t separate things so much,” the young man living in the yurt with his wife and baby told me one day. “The wilderness and the city—we don’t tend to put them in different boxes.”

  I told him that made it sound like he and his peers were living their ecologies, trying to make them real instead of just weaving ideas about them. I told him that to people my age, environmental issues can seem like spectator sports—the believers fistfighting with the deniers, and the rest of us convinced we’re doing something just by cheering for the right team. He stopped, turned to me, and grinned, ran his hand up across his forehead into his thick black hair.

  “Hey, your generation stood on somebody’s shoulders, just like mine stands on yours. Maybe you guys lost your way. And yeah, when you did, the whole world suffered. But look around. The dream goes on.”

  THE ONLY TRAILS IN THIS PART OF THE MOUNTAINS, WHEN there are trails at all, are those etched into the tundra by elk and mountain goats and bighorn sheep, their paths as often as not disappearing at the foot of some rocky cliff where humans never go. In some places, mostly along the shores of lakes set in the necks of narrow canyons, there isn’t even that; travel there is by virtue of that grand dance backpackers fondly refer to as boulder hopping. While the five of us were past the age of extreme hopping, barely knowing where our feet would land before the need to land them, there were nonetheless moments when a clear path revealed itself across the rocky chaos and we cranked up the pace. At the east end of Otter Lake, Tom was very nearly stranded on a twenty-foot-long ledge. He looked panicked, his eyes darting and flashing, struggling to get control of his breathing. At last he managed it, made it across.

  By the west end of Otter Lake, we’d grown fatigued, began picking our steps with extra care. Then it happened. Somewhere behind me I heard a gasp, turned to see Janet sitting in a jumble of rocks with her hand on her ankle and a terrible grimace on her face. By the time I made my way back to her, Rand was unlacing her boots. Even while soaking the ankle in th
e cold water of the lake, we could see it swelling before our eyes. We were seventeen miles from a trailhead, much of it over tough terrain. There was no cell phone service. Soon it became obvious—we were going to need a rescue. After about an hour or so of resting, Janet told us she was ready to move toward Mariane Lake, a half mile to the west, the first ground flat enough to set up a camp. She insisted on making it under her own power, so we forged a crutch; then Rand started shuttling packs while Brian walked behind her, ready to catch her if she stumbled.

  Tom and I, meanwhile, made a fast, steep climb up some four hundred feet of mountain to a high ridge on the slim chance that his cell phone might be able to pull a signal from either Cooke City or the Clark’s Fork Valley. After thirty minutes we reached a pinnacle of granite jutting out high above a loose knit of forest, offering views to the south and west that, even in the midst of those dire circumstances, made us catch our breath. In the distance were Index and Pilot peaks, the latter named by trappers who used it as a landmark on their way to the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone. Far to the south lay the awesome, ragged line of the Absarokas, tearing into the sky along the eastern border of the national park. And slightly east of the Absarokas was the wild neck of the Clark’s Fork Valley. Tom tried his cell phone several times, holding it over his head and turning it this way and that. Nothing.

  On the way down off the ridge, I started plotting the next move. I’d leave Rand with Janet and hike out the seventeen miles to a trailhead east of Cooke City, where Rand’s truck was parked, then drive into town and rustle a helicopter. Given the late hour, I imagined I could make eight or nine miles that night, then get up at dawn and walk the remaining distance to the truck, making it to Cooke City by eight or nine in the morning. I told Tom the plan, said that he and Brian could either come along or stay the night at Mariane Lake. He didn’t hesitate, telling me that he and Brian would make the fast trip out with me.

  Approaching the east shore of Mariane Lake, we found Janet sitting on the bank of a small inlet stream, soaking her ankle. Rand, a former smoke jumper and fire boss for the Forest Service, knew intimately the needs of helicopters and was busy setting camp near a good landing spot. When I told them my plan to go out for help, they resisted, deeply troubled by the thought of me being pulled off this sacred journey. I reminded them that this part of the Beartooths was where Jane often came while volunteering for search and rescue, helping people like Janet, injured in the middle of nowhere. I gave Janet a big hug and whispered in her ear:

  “What do you think Jane would want me to do?”

  She smiled through her tears, and that was the end of it.

  We filled water bottles, offered a quick round of hugs, then Tom, Brian, and I were off, crossing the southern boundary of the lake to begin a steep drop of some five hundred feet through a great jumble of blowdown, heading for the thick woods cradling Russell Creek. It proved a brutal descent, with all sign of the trail obliterated, and so it was a great relief to finally level out in the lodgepole forest south of Russell Lake. By then, it was twilight. This is dense grizzly country, and because we were traveling at such a fast clip it became all too easy to spot rocks and broken conifer stumps hovering in the murky woods and turn them into bears. The good news, I said to the boys, is that grizzlies almost never mess with parties of three or more. By the time we came to rest, it was after dark. We used headlamps to put up the tents in a patch of ghost forest burned in the 1988 fires, covered in blankets of tall brown grass. Then we hung the food bags and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  WE MANAGED TO BE MOVING AGAIN BY DAWN, FINALLY REACHING a pay phone at the Cooke City Exxon station around eight fifteen. We informed the local dispatcher where we were going for breakfast, and at the very moment the omelets were set on the table, a young man came up and asked me to follow him to the fire hall. There an old friend waited, a search-and-rescue volunteer named John Odemeyer. After getting all the details, he called in a helicopter. We headed off in Rand’s truck to the landing pad at Pilot Creek to wait for Janet’s arrival, eating the rest of our breakfast off our laps out of Styrofoam platters with plastic silverware. Thirty minutes later, we heard the unmistakable drum of helicopter blades. When Janet hobbled out, helped by still another old friend, an EMT from Red Lodge named Blake Chartier, she took us by surprise with the big grin on her face.

  “My God!” she exclaimed. “You wouldn’t believe how beautiful that country is from the air!”

  They climbed into the truck, and Rand drove us back to Cooke City, then turned his red Dodge around to make for Billings, for the hospital, 120 miles away. A few hours later, I telephoned Janet. She told me the ligament that attaches to the outside of her foot was so torqued when her ankle turned that it broke the bone.

  I slept lousy that night in Cooke City, unhappy to be in a motel room. Still, it’d been an enormous pleasure to lend help to my friend Janet. The day we arrived in Cooke City, John Odemeyer had made a generous offer to drive us back into the mountains so we could resume our journey, so the next morning, he picked us up in his Bronco, and after loading our gear began winding up the jeep roads over Lulu and Daisy passes—several miles from where we had hiked out along Russell Creek. And off we went again, bound for Yellowstone. For the final leg of my journey.

  BACK ON FOOT, CROSSING WOLVERINE PASS ON THE NORTHEAST corner of Yellowstone, drifting through still more burned forest, we stumbled into a land silly with wildflowers. Entire meadows blushing with fireweed and bedstraw, fringed by thick patches of sticky geranium and lupine and paintbrush. From camp I drifted down a perfect swimming hole on Wolverine Creek, plunging in and then drying myself in the warm sun atop a fallen log. Dinner was split-pea soup and bread and hummus, and afterward, we climbed a high ridge to the north in the last of the light to glass for wildlife. Eagles and hawks were overhead, eyeing carefully a landscape once useless to them because of the tree cover, now opened by fire into a hunting ground filled with mice and ground squirrels. Woodpeckers hung from the charred trees and dug out insects with their hammer drills.

  Later, lying in the tents in the dark, I told Tom about a trip Jane and I had made down this drainage back in 1990, having come by means of a forty-mile hike from the Stillwater River on the northern flank of the Beartooths. We were with good friends, Jim and Nancy Coates, and the night before reaching the valley, we’d settled into a beautiful camp near Lake Abundance. The conversation was golden. The sky was riddled with stars. At one point Jim surprised us with a bottle of Jose Cuervo, and with a little salt and lime it actually tasted great. Which of course is never a good thing when drinking tequila. I overindulged, ending up the next morning greeting the dawn by retching in the willows. “I saw you over there on your knees,” Jim told me later. “Hell, I thought you were meditating!”

  When I finally donned my pack that morning I was barely running on one cylinder, dreading the thought of walking fourteen miles in eighty-degree heat. To make matters worse, Jane, despite having a good thousand miles on the boots she was wearing, developed a bizarre set of blisters. She moved down the trail like someone walking on hot coals. Together we looked like something a grizzly might drag out of a snowbank in the April thaw.

  Jim and Nancy agreed, given our sluggish pace, to make a quick sprint to the trailhead, where they’d take our car to retrieve their van, then return with both vehicles to pick us up. An hour or so after they left us, the manager of the Silver Tip guest ranch drove up in a horse-drawn wagon, heading the other direction. Next to us he halted.

  “Are you the two people dying on the trail?”

  We hit the trailhead just as darkness was falling, weary as hell but in high spirits. We’d just taken off our packs and settled into lounge mode, when Jane said she thought it would be really funny if I mooned Jim and Nancy as they returned with the vehicles. I thought it was a great idea.

  After about twenty minutes, Jane pegged the lights coming up the road as those of our car. Right according to plan, I turned and dropped my hiking shorts, ben
ding over and waiting for the horn to honk and the laughter to begin. The next thing I heard was a window being rolled down, then a strange woman’s voice: “Nice cleavage. But do I know you?” It was two women from Colorado pulling over to ask if we knew of any camping sites nearby. Of course my standing as a source of reliable information was compromised. After mumbling an apology, I offered what I knew as far as campgrounds and prayed they’d leave quickly, which they did. Jane found the episode incredibly funny—hilarious, really, judging by the fits of laughter I could hear coming from her the entire time I was struggling to dispense campground information. For years afterward she could pull herself out of a bad mood just by thinking about it.

  AT REST IN YELLOWSTONE

  The journey was winding down. Just one more night in the backcountry. With every passing hour, I found myself wishing it wasn’t coming to an end. I wanted to keep going, keep walking through Yellowstone for another week or two or three, until the snows of autumn pushed me home. Tom asked if I had any worries about reaching this point, about reaching the end. But by then I’d had a strong glimpse of the life I knew Jane would want for me. I was at the point, I told him, where maybe it was less important to imagine my eyes and ears and nose and skin as portals for her to experience the world, as I did in northern Canada, than to see them as doorways for making my own way back among the living.

  The national park’s nature school, known as Expedition: Yellowstone!, was Jane’s favorite teaching job—a nearly perfect fit, where kids came brilliantly uncorked by a land beyond their wildest imaginings. It was also a serious classroom. Fourth, fifth, and sixth graders from schools around the country spent months back home learning about the park, and then they boarded busses and rolled off for Yellowstone to see it for themselves. Their experiences were grounded in the latest research of bird and wolf and bear and bison biologists, geologists and volcanologists, plant scientists, historians.