In the Wilderness (28 page)

I accepted my diploma, listened to the pep band play its ragged rendition of “The Way We Were,” watched the ice sculpted into an enormous red-white-and-blue “76” melt into its metal pan. The night was beautiful—full of damp-earth
smells and the high call of nighthawks. I looked around me. It was the same field where I had seen my first football game, the same lights that had dazzled me into a state of astonishment.

In five years, the only thing that had changed about the setting was me. The world went on its way whether we thought it wicked or not, impervious to our sense of its contagion. And all these people around me—teachers, friends, parents, toddlers screaming for their siblings, babies oblivious to the delirium of the day, sucking their syrup-sweetened pacifiers—did they know they were doomed? How many had sat in their places before them? Generations of Lewiston seniors had found their way to the stage without ever once fearing that the paper might disintegrate in their hands, the earth might shudder beneath them, the sky crack open, the cemetery only blocks away give up its ghosts. I wanted to believe my life might continue. I wanted to be part of a community, a family, that believed the next day or year, the next son or daughter, held the promise of something other than inherent imperfection and destruction.

My father left Lewiston that evening and drove the 120 miles to Coeur d’Alene Lake, but this was northern Idaho, on a body of water larger than some counties, and even after hours of searching, the only speeding ticket of his life flung on the seat, he never discovered the one cabin where I slept.

I knew of this only later, and I was stunned, not by fear of what might have happened but by the action itself, that I was able to elicit such a reaction from him. What would he have said to me? I could not imagine anything other than bitter confrontation, could not imagine that he would ever suggest compromise. If he had found me, would it have been as it was years before, when his eyes were enough to command me to follow?

But he did not find me, there on the shore where I sat next to John around a campfire, gagging down half a beer from the six-pack one of the boys had brought. I hated the bitter, grassy taste, but it seemed the thing to do my first night of freedom. I waited for some panic to set in, some sense of loss and sadness. But all I felt was air and space, room to move and breathe. I wasn’t even sure I missed them.

I felt a pang remembering my mothers face, and if I let myself, a twinge of guilt every time I thought of Greg coming home to find our father settled deeper into his chair, our mother brittle as rime. I wondered when I would ever see my little brother again.

My boss at the pharmacy where I worked after school needed someone forty hours a week, and I would begin looking for an apartment the minute we got back from Coeur d’Alene. I had lost all sense of the future I’d planned: to attend college and become an English teacher. I looked around at the other seniors, still bound to their parents, chained by someone else’s rules. For once in my life, their lives seemed more pathetic than my own.

I leaned against the counter, bored and restless, the feather duster loose in my hand. Children rode by on their bicycles, wild with the warmth of June. Sundays never seemed right anymore. I hadn’t been inside a church since
I’d
left home. The final, outward break from doctrine had been simultaneous with my break from family.

Still, all that time once filled with singing and prayer now seemed without purpose and threatened to expand into a feeling of loneliness. I did not want to be lonely. Lonely filled me with panic. Even at work I felt cut off, closed up in a box of glass and metal, surrounded by aspirin and splints, lotions, greeting cards and Russell Stover chocolates—everything anyone could ever need to feel better or encourage someone else to. Anymore, the only thing that made me feel better was being with John.

At first, just having my own apartment seemed like heaven. I painted the walls shell white, decorated them with pastel landscapes from K mart instead of the juvenile posters I might once have chosen, and carefully arranged in the cupboard the few pots and pans my boss and his wife had given me. On the wall across from my bed, I nailed the walnut gun rack my great-uncle Clyde had made as a gift for my graduation. In it rested my .22 rifle, my Ithaca shotgun and my father’s Winchester 30.06.

I had found the Winchester leaned in the corner of my grandmother’s closet, where it had been for years, ever since my father, still recovering from his back injury, had pawned it to his brother for a fifty-dollar loan. I loved the swirled grain of its stock, the smooth comfort of it against my cheek. Its smell of Hoppes gun-cleaning fluid brought back a run of emotions, which I let my mind sift through, discarding those images too specifically linked to my family or the Langs. I savored only the sensations of those times, warm as a tightly banked fire. If I let my mind’s eye wander, allowed myself to remember and miss what existed beyond the smells and warmth, I’d feel it in the pit of my stomach: loss, regret, an overwhelming sense of sadness and longing that would devour me from the inside out. I kept the rifle as I would a funeral token—a flag folded and tucked into a tight triangle; a clutch of crushed flowers, dry and dusted. It symbolized for me the metaphorical death of my father: I could imbue it with whatever nostalgia I chose.

When John wasn’t working as a carpenter’s apprentice, he took me into the mountains. He had promised that in the fall he would lead me to the breaks of the Salmon River, where pheasant and chukar made tunnels through thistle; we practiced
our aim on the hundreds of ground squirrels whose burrows mounded the high meadows. But he had gone camping for the weekend, and I was stuck behind a plateglass window dusting Bag Balm.

I imagined him wading the shallows of a mountain stream—the breeze still cold off the higher snow fields, the fish smell of fresh water, the pitched hum of insects waking to the sun. Nothing felt more right than being surrounded by pine and cedar, fir and spruce, the tamarack that bared its branches in winter like a common town tree.

Even better was to be with John in the woods. I loved his love of the forest, his knowledge of animals, his accuracy with a rifle. I loved pleasing him with the accuracy of my own marksmanship. I loved the way he spread his flannel shirt on a bed of needles and covered me with his body. I loved looking past his head and seeing the sky, not just a piece of blue, but the whole of it from horizon to horizon. I loved the way the ravens called as they passed over, not a warning or hoarse caw of fear, but a cry of acknowledgment:
there, there
.

Standing at the counter, longing for the presence of ravens, it came to me that I could go into the woods anyway, by myself. Tomorrow was my day off. I could go fishing, take my .22, find the squirrels and shoot them. I would cut off and bring home the wiry little tails, as John did, proof of my good eye and independence. But I wouldn’t go into the closest mountains. Instead, I would go to the Clearwater, back into that place from which I came.

The next morning, I loaded my fishing rod, tackle box and .22 into the car and drove the river road east. It felt strange at first, doing something like this without a male companion, but as I left the city I felt the uneasiness lift. I was on a road I knew well. The river, slowed by dams and straightened by dikes at Lewiston, quickened upstream. Even though the
North Fork no longer ran free, the Middle Fork still flowed in below the dam and lent to the Clearwater River a remnant of its remembered current.

As I came into Orofino, the sight of Dworshak Dam stunned me. No matter how large I remembered it, its enormity didn’t seem real. I had felt the power of the river, had seen it tear away trees and float entire buildings during spring thaw: I tried to imagine the workers detouring the water in order to pour concrete and anchor steel. It seemed an impossible task.

I crossed the bridge at Greer and wound my way up the mountain. The grade ended abruptly, spilling out onto a flat expanse of cultivated fields, already green with new wheat. In the distance the trees formed a protective circle and the hills rose even higher into dense forest and alpine meadows. Even if the river and its canyon had become something foreign, the Weippe Prairie had not.

I rolled down my window and breathed in the rich smell of damp earth and early flowers—balsam root, dog fennel, lupine and camas—that floated on the heavier perfume of pine. The tears that stung my eyes surprised me, and I let out a loud “Hah!” It was a good noise, a sound of skepticism and control. It worked. I shook my head and tried to remember the road I would follow through Weippe and on into Pierce, the series of turns I would need to take in order to reach Reeds Creek.

At first, Pierce didn’t seem much different. There was Kimball’s Drug, the Confectionery, the old Clearwater Hotel. But as I drove slowly down Main Street, I realized what I wasn’t seeing: people. No old-timers sat in the hotel window, pinging empty Folger’s cans with spit. No women stood in the doorway of Durant’s Dry Goods, testing the warm weather with bare arms and pinned-up hair.

The school, I knew, had been closed and condemned, the
children bussed to the new building, halfway between Pierce and Weippe, pledging allegiance with the Weippe Gorillas, the team we had once considered our arch rivals. But the post office—it should never be empty. Just then a dog barked and a woman bellowed for it to shut up. I relaxed my grip on the wheel.

Everyone is at work, I thought. Later, on the way home, when I come back through, it will be different. I picked up speed, heading toward the hollow, fighting the sense of urgency rising in my chest.

Pole Camp was gone. Only the shop remained, a dustier shade of red, but still standing. I pulled off the road and stared at the clearing where our circle had been. I looked closer and saw the house that Clyde and Daisy had built, the one with a genuine foundation. The forest had closed it in, but the windows were curtained, the burn barrel still upright. I searched the clearing for the stumps our trailers had rested on, the outhouse, anything that might verify that my life there had been real.

There
—behind the lightning-struck yellow pine, we had had our secret place. There my cousins and I had eaten thick butter-and-sugar sandwiches, quarreled and made up, come for solace and pity after a whipping. I wondered if at twilight the elk still came into the meadow—beyond where the wash shed had stood—to eat the marsh grass and whistle their calves in.

A few miles farther, I passed the Jaype mill, whose name I had always heard as initials—J.P.—still huffing out its smoke. A solitary loader swung its jaws over a deck of logs, lifting six or seven at a time and placing them precisely between the hard metal ribs of a rail car. The familiar activity was a comfort, and I drove on toward Cardiff, where the church and
parsonage stood skirted by a bog of mud. I did not slow to look. I wanted the woods. The creek would be there, the meadow where I had seen the fawn, the hollow with its sheltering trees. No matter what I did, no matter how many times I left, I could always come back to the woods.

I hardly noticed the clearcuts behind the stingy buffer of trees left standing along the road. The logging didn’t surprise me. I expected to see raw stumpage and slash piles, the knee-deep gouges left by skidders. This was part of the life there, the sound of saws as familiar as the wind through the trees. But this wasn’t the forest. The trees could fall but the
forest
would somehow remain, always out there, always removed and separate from what we called timber.

I turned onto the dirt road that paralleled Reeds Creek, my old Chevy chattering across ruts, working my way back to where I knew the branches shaded the deeper holes and fat trout wallowed in silt. The hollow lay just across the meadow, hidden behind the thick grove of pine. Already the sun had crested and begun its slide behind the mountain, and I knew the house would be dark and cool.

The creek seemed changed, shallower and muddier (had it ever been the strong clear flow I remembered?), and as I wound my way back, the water thickened. Within a mile the current was dead, dammed by a mass of slash.

I stared at the mound of roots and limbs, at the bulldozed wad of dirt and stumps. Fingers of water had found their way through, following the curve of branches, seeping between rock and wood. Behind the mound the ground was scraped and pitted. A sheen of oil slicked the stagnant pools.

“No, not here,” I whispered. “Please, not here.” I stepped slowly from the car. Insects skimmed the surface of the water, yet the water remained still—there were no fish to rise.

It was as though I had been hit, as though I could taste the
blood in my mouth. I reached into the backseat, loaded my rifle and shot. A small explosion of dust erupted from the slash. I shot again, then emptied the .22 as fast as I could pump. I pulled all the ammunition I had from my pockets, reloaded and shot again, pulled the maps and Kleenex from the glove compartment until I found the last box and aimed and shot until my ears rang.

I hated it. I hated the dozer that made it, the man who pushed it there, the company the man worked for. No one was innocent. I slumped against the car and cried. Something had broken—whatever thread it was that tied me to my life there. The water that had fed me, cooled me, cleansed me had been choked off, turned to sludge.

Alone in the woods, the air and sun still unchanged, the throaty trill of a meadowlark reached me, and I felt an overwhelming sadness—not just because of the creek, but because of the flood of memories and feelings that swept over me. It was as though seeing the creek this way had released all the emotions I had tamped down and buried since we left the house in the hollow.

What I mourned was the loss of myself: that girl who had fished long into the warm summer afternoons, who had believed in a world held solid by family and the encircling presence of trees. I wanted it all back: the red shack; my brother still a comrade who would accompany me into the darkest glens; my mother in her apron, bent over pies, listening for the dieseling idle of my father’s pickup; my father bringing in the cedar-scented air, a man for whom the world had made itself simple.