Dirt Work (15 page)

Autumn. Late season. Seven a.m. is cold. We huddle in the shop too long, shifting in our boots while the rigs warm up in the dark. By eight thirty, the truck's parked riverside and we're wading, legs wet below the knees. In morning light, larch trees blaze gold, lit hills roll into deep fall. Traffic sound fades, summer folk long gone home, the river now low enough to ford for the first time in months. Sharp nights, earlier stars, a new bluish-black tint to midnight, the color that expects dark dreams.

The current's strong here, midriver water low over rock. Tools heavy on the shoulder. Shoulder heavy in the socket. Air comes in the mouth cold.

Summer has worn out. The saws need work (sharpen chain, grease the bearings, carburetor's running lean). The body's hinges rust, quiet. Thoughts turn to winter's tasks. The mind balances between the work of now and the preparing for soon.

Ten yards away the far bank waits. Beneath our feet, rocks slip against each other and demand a patient step, a sure foot, each of us focused on this lurching pace unchanged by what will later come. Autumn's balance is preserved in this: the wide-legged stance midriver, then a turning.

On the last day of my last season in Glacier, I turned in my keys, signed out at headquarters. Tools clean, trail reports written, evaluations over. I swung by the barn to say goodbye to the packers. They don't hold much truck with ceremony, you can imagine. The hope for closure was mine, more likely to end in awkward foot-shuffling than the hearty hugs and good wishes even the most stoic of my crewmates could provide. So near quitting time, I found the packers hidden in the dark barn, sitting on stumps in the tack room. Greg raised a Mountain Dew: “Wish it were an Oly!” Sheldon crossed his legs, picked at the tooling on his boots.

These guys had known me for six seasons, and by strictest traildog standards you had to put in seven before you even got your “dog year.” (Less than that earned you the derisive label “hobbyist.”) But I'd stuck around, and they knew me, first as “that skinny girl,” then as “the one who goes with Cassie” and finally by various mangled versions of my given name. Still, without the salve of task, no mules to load or miles to cover, there wasn't much to say. I made a few lame stabs about the fall weather when Slim interrupted:
So I heard ya ain't comin' back, that's what they all say. Yer not back when it's next year and you ain't here! Kent says yer leavin' to go to school, go write gaddam books?
I smiled. That's the hope, I shrugged, but who knows? Grad school was, from this vantage, a destination odder than the moon. To the crew, I'd joked that MFA stood for “My Fucking Art.” It seemed most gracious to suggest that my leave-taking could just as likely result in failure—silly me and my dreams. But Slim wasn't finished:
I'll tell ya what I wanna know, whattina hell ya needa go ta school da write books for? Ima write me a book, call it
Switchbacks and Cocksuckers
!

Any awkwardness in the room evaporated like spilt white gas and we cackled at the thought of Slim writing a book at all (the picture of him hunched over a desk in his black hat a “true crack-up,” as Cassie would say), and then, what title could be more perfect than the one he'd chosen?
Switchbacks and Cocksuckers
, my God! Who knew how long he'd been thinking of that, waiting to try it out loud? We laughed a while, all four of us, even Slim, who usually didn't care for a joke on himself. Then he got serious:
Yer district looks all right this year, see who fucks it up when yer gone. Anyway, we got work to do, them new mules getting' shoed in Kalispell, Greg's gotta pick 'em up and the stock truck shit the bed. You'll prolly be back next year like the rest of 'em, I been trying to leave this crappy joint for years.

On my way out, I passed through the paddock to pat my favorite animals, and Greg shouted at my back, “Well, you been around long enough, maybe we'll name a mule after you!” Slim laughed, getting my name wrong one last time: “A mule named Christy! Put that in your gaddam book, why dontcha?”

Such tenderness! With my back to them, I blushed. In a field where transience is a given, where short-timers' faces are quickly forgotten from one season to the next, a mule named for me was sweeter praise than any “good luck.” I've never checked back to see if they actually did it. It was enough, for those minutes, just to think they might, to be considered, to belong so completely to a world I was leaving behind.

Every cut has a kerf. Picture a sawhorse, a two-by-four across it, the saw partway through. The line where the wood will split in two is the kerf. A log across the trail, the saw dogged in, a chain-width gap: that's kerf. When the cut is complete, the kerf disappears. Writer Thomas Glynn describes the kerf as “the channel in the wood the saw rides in”; while Richard Manning writes “that's the path the saw makes into sawdust—the path is waste, not lumber, so some of the strength of the original tree dies on a sawdust pile.” It's a pragmatic point, but how can kerf be waste? Kerf is the critical negative space of wood, as present in every severance as water is present in air or a pause is present in a line. Kerf is no commodity. It cannot be sold, held, or used. If Derrida were a carpenter, kerf would be the
trace
of sawing, the invisible evidence of what has passed. To the builder, kerf is a shorter board, a penny tax on every cut. To a student of Zen, kerf is the path that disappears behind you as you walk on it, the way you can only see by not looking. It's the between of the before and the after, this thing and the next. To the wood, kerf is gone.

Two days before I got on a plane for grad school in Anchorage, I hiked in to visit Gabe and his crew hitched out at Harrison Lake. I forded the Middle Fork alone and ran into Gabe on the north side, heading for me. We hugged where the river met the woods, then hiked back to camp for dinner with the crew. The next morning, Gabe got up early for work and I slept until the sun hit the tent, drank a leisurely cup of tea. I lay on my back on fir needles and held in their smell until I had to gasp breath. I made Gabe's lunch for the trail, spreading peanut butter on both pieces of bread to keep the jam from soaking through. I moved slow, then fast, then slow again. Holding on, letting go.

Two weeks earlier, Gabe and I had gotten married in Polebridge, up the North Fork. By then we'd been together eight years (common-law married in Montana), six of them working trails. We fell in love in college amid stacks of books and late-night conversations about art and ethics, but we stayed in love in the woods. We made a life together of hitches and birthdays in tents in the pouring rain, and conversations, while hiking, about ethics and art. Glacier seemed the only place we could make vows worth keeping.

Under the kitchen tarp at Harrison Lake, the wedding seemed far off, already grafted into other memories of the North Fork, twined in with fourteen-hour workdays and weather to remember. Before the ceremony, my friend Rochelle knelt at my feet painting my toenails. A hasty ritual; as always, we were running late. The day before, I hiked out of an eight-day hitch in filthy clothes to a yard full of wedding guests in tents. Half an hour before, I was cruising the gravel road in my pickup, tending to the last details of a rural wedding—generator, weed whacker, extra fuel. I thought I was to be the only bride this century who didn't bathe before her vows. But I squeezed in a quick shower in the one cabin with plumbing, the water pressure too weak to blast the larch sap from my forearms. I sat in my chair before Rochelle, trying not to fidget. The guests waited in a half circle down by the river in the cottonwood grove. My sister braided my damp hair with wildflowers from the meadow in front of the cabin—a daisy, a sprig of valerian. I twisted in my seat and Rochelle slapped my knee.

“Stop wiggling,” she said, stabbing the air with the wet brush. “I'll get it on your dress.” I hiked the skirt above my knees and closed my eyes, felt her fingers on my toes, gentle over the bruised big toenail, the callouses. By the time Gabe and I entered the wedding circle, ushered within the cluster of our families, the polish was dry and we were ten minutes late. My fingernails remained pale, unpainted. My hands were not the soft, gloved hands of magazine weddings. Veins pushed up against the skin. A swollen sliver in the thumb. Creased knuckles faintly brown.

Just above the flood plain of the North Fork, beneath the faces of the mountains we'd called home, Gabe said his vows to me. I told him mine. The peaks to the northeast were as much witnesses as the guests shifting on their slab log benches—Numa Lookout, family, Rainbow Peak, fellow traildogs, old friends, Brown's Pass. I looked down at our feet, both sets in sandals. My toes were already dusty, the nails pink. I wiggled them, flashed their ceremonial shimmer. I was thinking what you'd imagine: there's this man I love, these people I love, witnessing our covenant. And something more: these mountains I love, the dirt under my nails. Some echo of
I trust myself.

After the wedding, Gabe and I left on separate hitches, and this stolen overnight at Harrison Lake was the closest we'd get to a honeymoon. I'd head to Alaska the next evening. “Our life is a honeymoon,” we'd joked at the wedding. We were kidding at some level, but sitting on a stump around the fire at night, it felt a little true. Like a honeymoon, our Glacier days were charged with feeling, rife with tenderness and laughter, and also little spats and lost chances and the sense, sometimes, that we could be missing something. The novelty of “married,” put off for so many years, felt unmistakable, and it struck me at odd times—at lunch with the crew trading riddles, standing shin-deep in a lateral, wiping mud from my eyes. I watched Gabe in his suspenders and logging boots, same dear face, reddish beard, smile lines around the eyes, and tried the word:
husband.

Midafternoon the next day, Gabe lined out the crew. He'd leave to take me to the airport for my evening flight, then hike back in to camp for the rest of the hitch. We had to hurry; I hadn't even packed yet. We forded the Middle Fork together, the slow water up to my thighs, a burned-out chainsaw heading back to the shop on my shoulder. The familiar view from midriver was wide-open, and Heraclites, rarely considered since college days, came to mind. “You can't step in the same river twice” hit me hard as I realized I would never return to this—to Montana in my twenties, the life I accidentally made here and loved, this steadiness in moving water with tools on my back. This exact balance of what I knew and what I did not know.

Hours later I'd pack my bags, by nightfall I'd be on a plane from Kalispell to Anchorage, the next day in a fiction workshop. That day, I would be outside less than an hour, riding my bike to the university on asphalt trail. Smelling like shampoo, not saw mix. My muscles, used to moving, urgent and sore. No one there would know about packers, or how to sharpen a saw.
Get over it,
I told myself.
You're a student again.
As if I hadn't been one for years.

So I threw myself in, and it felt right. Still, in the midst of class discussion about the elements of fiction (character, setting, tense), a discussion I had craved, I would nonetheless be struck wistful by how quickly things go from present to past. I'd think of Gabe, who would join me in a month when the season finished, for now still hitched out at Harrison Lake, his tent a heap of damp clothes, dirty boots. The way the larch would smell if the morning was warm. Startled, how that place—my
here
for so long—had turned overnight to
there.

BOAT

Commute
   In forests and mountains, you get to the trailhead by truck, to the job site with boots and mules. But if the trails are surrounded by water, not land? If you are in Southcentral Alaska, where the Copper River Delta and Prince William Sound entwine so that land appears to float? No more trucks, boots, stock. Steady yourself, crouch low. Step into a boat.

Ocean Craft
   The seventeen-foot Boston Whaler is known as “the unsinkable legend.” A flat-bottomed utility boat built for fishing, day research, and hauling tools or crews, the stripped-down Whaler is as ubiquitous seaside as Subarus in ski towns. It's not a luxurious boat, but a Whaler rides seas of three to four feet, is tough to tip, light and sturdy, and tucks trailered in a corner of the yard. Pair it with a ninety-horse Evinrude and cruise semiprotected waters, even if you've hardly driven a boat before. It's a ship for fools.

River Raft
   Rubber inflatable, all grown-up bath toy. With puffy gunnels, dry bags wedged between coolers and seats, a raft bobs on river waves like an optimist. A finger
thwack
to the rubber tubes will bruise a nail but leave no imprint. On long trips, it swallows the extra gas can, a box of cheap wine. Durable, buoyant, chubby yet sleek. Like a grade school buddy: unflappable, in primary-colored clothes.

Vocabulary
   Hull, gunnels, rudder, ballast, tiller, keel, paddle. Double letters mimic the symmetry necessary for flotation. Boat words, as with many words for work, sound deliberate. Saxonic. Deck, motor, oar, bow, stern, davit, fore, aft, transom, cockpit. The emphatic syllables, the grit of language distilled to convey essence—grunt, heave, float. Latinate words, too—navigate, triangulation—describing action more than thing. How many words for boat are there? Vessel, raft, ship, dinghy, craft, skiff, barge, dory, punt, ketch, shell, launch. The current or the tides a propellant they share, inescapable momentum, water as surface, as engine, as fuel.

Measurement
   The sea's maps are charts, showing depths and shoals, cliffs and islands, shipwrecks, beaches, buoys, and harbors. Measure waves in feet, bottom of trough to top of crest. Wind and boats both travel in knots: one knot, a nautical mile, is 1.15 miles per hour. Do seasoned boaters convert highway speed-limit signs in their heads?
Forty-five miles per hour, how many knots?
When traveling on water, your own speed matters as well as the speed of the medium, an extra dimension. On ocean, neither water nor vessel is still—always the rise and plunge, wave in, tide out. On rivers, current flows in cubic feet per second, the volume of water traveling past a point at a certain time. Sometimes it seems that the raft stays put and, beneath, the water moves.

History
   The Eyak have lived at the mouth of the Copper for ten thousand years. Today, Alaska's smallest Native tribe numbers fewer than two hundred members, the old Eyak village incorporated into the town of Cordova. These indigenous residents of the Sound were kayakers, the palindrome
kayak
an Aleut word, related to the Inuit
qayak,
meaning “hunter's boat.”
Baidarkas
and
umiaks
, too, one double cockpit, one wide and open like a canoe. All used for fishing, hunting, and hauling passengers and cargo between land sites. Like the axe handle, each kayak was built to fit the user's body, the width of cockpit based on the hips, the length on the span of outstretched arms. Though open skin-hulled boats no longer troll the Sound for salmon or seals, every modern paddler and her kayak—fiberglass, plastic, or wood—pays homage to the Eyak, a people who befriended the sea.