In the Wilderness (5 page)

Even though he walked with a noticeable hitch and lifting a saw made spasms ripple my father’s rib cage, when the cast was off we headed back to the woods. This time we settled into a small green house in Pierce proper. Pierce was named for Captain Elias D. Pierce, a California prospector who discovered gold there in 1860; within a year of his discovery, the
townsite had been cut and cleared, making room for the miners, gamblers and prostitutes who lived, at least for a short time, in the booming heyday of the town. Along with them came a large influx of Chinese workers, and for many of them the West and its riches also held horror: three miles southwest of Pierce is Hangmans Gulch, now a designated historical site. There, in 1885, five Chinese unjustly accused of brutally murdering a local businessman were dragged from their cells by vigilantes and hung on a makeshift gallows.

Placer mining came first, and soon the hills were pocked with lode claims and ore mining, sites with names such as the Democrat and the Mascot, the American, the Dewey, the Pioneer, the Ozark, the Crescent and the Wild Rose; the Oxford, the Klondike on French Creek, the Rosebud. Then came the dredges with their greater capacity to scoop the gold from its bed, working the waters of Canal Gulch, Rhodes Creek, the Orogrande.

My father remembers the early days in Pierce, when the road was mud in spring and dust in summer and boardwalks fronted the bars and the single hotel. Now we had the luxury of a sidewalk down both sides, which the merchants kept shoveled and salted in winter to encourage business. Rape’s Grocery Store and Meat Locker, Durant’s Dry Goods, a beauty shop, bar and the post office lined the street’s north side. Across was the Clearwater Hotel and Cafe, where old-timers sat for hours behind the large front window, still uniformed in black denim and red suspenders, spitting into Folger’s cans. Some wore hard hats. When they waved, light shone through where fingers once had been.

We settled into the boomtown gone drowsy, our rented house only slightly larger than the camp shacks. Perhaps this was done thinking that my mother would be happiest living in town, closer to stores and the company of other women, especially
since my brother had been born and she now had two children to contend with. And maybe she was happier. Maybe it is only my own feelings I remember in that house—of being closed up, kept behind doors with locking latches.

We were less isolated—neighbors often stopped by for coffee, and ready-made bread and fresh beef were as close as Rape’s store—but some part of the magic was gone. Unlike my mother and my aunts, “Pierce women” (as I heard them referred to in the coded kitchen conversation) did not live in the camps with their husbands, but took up permanent residence in town. Most were born and raised in the area and had married into other logging families. They learned to dress and order their households in deference to the mud and deep snow. They often wore their husband’s clothing, as did my mother, but I remember them differently: their shirt cuffs hung unbuttoned; their pants sagged in the seat. They cut their hair into no-nonsense bobs permed tight to their heads, and their only makeup was an occasional slash of red applied haphazardly in the pickup’s rearview. They sucked at their cigarettes like old men, eyes crinkling against the smoke.

My mother must have missed those first few years in camp, when she and her new husband slept snugged together on their single cot, never minding the thin mattress and close edges, forgetting there ever was another world. My father’s injury made her realize how easily she could be left alone, and she awaited his return each evening with growing uneasiness. She listened to the stories other women told—how the wife had opened the door, already knowing with the first knock, already disbelieving the words she had always feared to hear: the dozer rolled; the chain snapped; that one tree, the
widow-maker
, gave in to the wind it had withstood for decades and came down like a javelin. Always, they told the grieving wife, death was quick, the one belief she could hold on to as she
passed into her life like the newly blinded—feeling for thresholds, leaning heavily on the counter’s edge.

When one day our town neighbor came running across the muddy yard, fear on her face that could mean only one thing, my mother fell against the window, clutching the curtain to her breast. In those few moments before the woman burst in, half her head still in curlers, the other half sprung loose in ribbons of hair—my mother donned the shroud of a widow.

But it was not my mother the woman mourned for but Jackie Kennedy, and as we all sat before the neighborhood’s only television, my mother cried for the country, for the slain president, for the widow in her brain-spattered dress, for the long hours she herself had yet to endure, waiting for my father to come home.

There is a trileveled hierarchy in woodswork. True logging—falling, limbing, skidding and hauling timber to be made into lumber—is at the top; making shakes and shingles is at the bottom, and only those who for whatever reason cannot find work as lumberjacks split cedar. Between these two is pole-making: the cutting, skinning and hauling of cedar trees straight and uniform enough to be made into telephone and electrical poles. Uncle Clyde found that, with the help of his nephews, he could cut and skin record numbers of poles, taking advantage of an opportunity left open by the prejudice of others. Buyers were amazed by the loads hauled off the steeply pitched mountains—the long, thin trunks still whole, not cracked or snapped by carelessness—and paid my great-uncle well.

One summer, he bet my father and uncles a town dinner that they couldn’t clear the pole sale on Mockingbird Hill in a
single week. They began cutting at dawn, urging each other on, giving everything they had to beat the old man’s bet, even though they knew the smallness of his wager. They worked steadily until the light drained from the trees and their backs ached with the weight of peaveys and saws, then drove back to camp to eat and sleep, happy as they had ever been in their lives.

They won the bet. Uncle Clyde took them to Lewiston and treated them to a platter of sweet red spaghetti at Italian Gardens. My father still laughs with pleasure at the memory of them all there together—four young men, boys, really, the oldest just twenty-five—working their way through the dense underbrush, clearing and skidding with the skill of seasoned lumberjacks, at home in a land the folks back in Oklahoma could imagine only as full of bear and cougar, a wilderness so untamed a man could lose himself in broad daylight only yards from his doorstep. My father remembers how good that spaghetti tasted. He remembers a time when all that mattered to any of them was the sure strength of their arms and the direction a tree might fall.

By the time I was ready to start school, Uncle Clyde had established a more permanent camp just off the main road between Pierce and Headquarters. It was across from a pole yard, a large landing where thousands of peeled poles rose in decks stacked fifty feet high. We called our new home Pole Camp, and once again we circled and leveled the trailers, but this time they were more fixed. Uncle Clyde and Aunt Daisy built themselves a frame house and painted it green. The men erected a large, two-story garage in which they could work on machinery in the coldest weather. Some of the smaller shacks were pushed together; ours, two trailers connected to form a
T
, had an indoor toilet. We were close enough to town to have electricity. One day, Uncle Clyde ran a wire from trailer to trailer and into each of the long wooden boxes he had hung on our walls. The first time our new telephone rang, I held the black, bell-shaped receiver away from my ear, startled to hear my fathers bodiless voice.

The shortest trailers, just large enough to accommodate a bunk, stove and wash pan, went to the itinerant sawyers who hired on for the season. Each in his turn was called “Swede,” and when Aunt Daisy sent me to fetch them for dinner, the answer came from the doorway left open to air the smoke of their pipes and tightly rolled cigarettes: “Yah, um comin!” Their rounded consonants and opened vowels were a song to me, but I never worked up the courage to top the steps and pass into their secret lives: always dark, even the single square window curtained with a towel, the smell of woodsmoke and boot grease and that particular odor of old bachelors alone with their woolen underwear—sometimes, the whiskey on their breath, the heavy sharp scent of it as they came to the door, pulling up their suspenders, rubbing their teeth with rough knuckles.

My uncles each married women with children and soon brought their new families into our circle. Suddenly, my mother was rich in female companionship—women her own age to share her days with, other mothers struggling with the demands of young children. Suddenly I had cousins. My bed was no longer my own but a place where boys jumped with their dirty shoes and girls squabbled over my dolls. Aunts and uncles gathered close in our kitchen for long weekend games of pinochle and Monopoly, smoke from their cigarettes filling the air to a barroom haze.

•   •   •

In winter, after the rains when temperatures dropped far below zero and the heavy freeze set in, the loggers could continue their cutting, shoveling snow from around the trees’ base, moving equipment across the icy clearings with the help of studded tires and chains. But for the pole-makers, winter meant no work: when the slim and fragile poles began snapping like toothpicks in the crackling cold, we would pack what we could into the trunk of our car, resting our feet on boxes and paper bags, and be suddenly gone from the woods to Lewiston, where my father and uncles would work swing shift at the mill or pump gas at the Texaco until the weather moderated.

The road leading from Pierce to Lewiston is narrow and winding, descending from the Weippe Prairie (pronounced “Wee-ipe”) to the Clearwater River in a series of steep and pitching curves. The last fifty miles is river road, the part of Highway 12 now referred to as the Clearwater Canyon Scenic Byway. The entire trip took less than three hours—across flat farmland nestled between stands of timber, past Fraser Park (named after David Fraser, the man supposedly murdered by the Chinese), complete with a rough baseball diamond, a single set of warped pine bleachers and a galvanized-pipe swing set; down the grade with its switchback turns so tight the trucks with their long loads of poles took both lanes at the curves; across the bridge at Greer and past Orofino with its doctors and tiny airport said to be cursed so that all owners died in fiery crashes while trying to maneuver their single-engine planes between the highway and parallel water; alongside the widening Clearwater to its confluence with the Snake at the mouth of Hells Canyon—out of the absolute blackness of nights in the forest into a city of twenty-four-hour markets and cars lined up at the intersections ten deep.

As the years of our travel passed, Greg, four years younger,
would listen intently as I read to him from the Children’s Library of Classics our parents had purchased with the set of encyclopedias we hauled with us from one place to the next. Arabian Nights, Robinson Crusoe, King Arthur, Robin Hood, Treasure Island, Swiss Family Robinson—the worlds I fantasized were lush with exotic flowers, full of giant pythons and man-eating natives, populated by gossamer fairies, men and women who conversed in words I had never heard spoken, words I mispronounce to this day because their sounds existed only in my mind’s ear:
joust, vizier, yeoman
.

The books kept me anchored—not in the real world, but in worlds I carried with me, stacked neatly in a cardboard box I balanced on my knees as the heavy car leaned into the curves of the road. I marked the miles reciting lines from Tennyson’s “The Idylls of the King”:

The sentiment echoed that of the children’s hymns we sang when my grandmother took us to Sunday school:
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war
… Reading the tales of Arthur, I mooned over the mystery of the Silent Maid, whose throat was as white and round as the cup of a lily and who waited silently for the arrival of Perceval. I thought that if I could not be a queen I might be the Maid, who “prayed and fasted till the sun/Shone and the wind blew through her.”

My fantasies of feminine loyalty and sacrifice would be interrupted by my brother’s yell that he could see the mill as we came into Lewiston. Its towering smokestacks belched out sulfuric steam, and the fog rising from the giant settling ponds
shrouded the river and road in a foul mist. The lights seemed blinding, so bright they swallowed the stars and left nothing secret. Sometimes I’d move my box to the center of the seat and sink down to the floorboard, where I covered my head with my coat and made a night for myself: through the seams, pinpricks of light shone through and I imagined constellations of my own naming:
Avalon, Galahad, the Holy Grail
.

One winter there was no travel. Instead of heading to Lewiston, we remained circled at the edge of the meadow, where elk grazed, herds of a hundred or more filling the evening air with high-pitched whistles and barks. The men had decided to wait out the cold. They pooled their dole, and for a short time we were rich in food: canned fruit filled the cupboards; bags of beans slouched in the corners of the rooms like woozy children. The single refrigerator we all shared burgeoned with carrots and cartons of Camels, so that the air wafting from the opened Frigidaire carried the mixed incense of sweet earth and tobacco.

My father and uncles filled their deer and elk tags, and then those bought in their wives’ names. Night after night they came through the door, a haunch or back strap thrown over their shoulders, or the full body of a yearling, lean and tender. The women worked at the counter and table spread with butcher paper, trimming and boning. Whatever meat was left after the steaks and roasts were cut was fed into the hand-cranked grinder and mixed with pepper and sage for sausage.

Snow drifted against the windows, filtering the winter light to charcoal. The circle became a wheel with shoveled spokes leading from its center to each trailer door. As the days
grew shorter the snow deepened until the pathways became corridors rising several feet above our heads.