The Carry Home (13 page)

I
N 1982, WHILE READYING FOR A BACKPACKING TRIP INTO THE
San Juan Mountains, Jane and I got word that seventy-six-year-old Kenneth Rexroth had died. He would be buried in Santa Barbara Cemetery—his grave the only one to face not inland, but toward the sea. His own words were etched into the granite of his tombstone:

       
As the full moon rises

       
The swan sings in sleep

       
On the lake of the mind

So on the evening before departing on that backpacking trek, we paused long enough to read out loud to each other a little of his poetry. A small tribute to our fellow Hoosier. One verse especially, I still read every now and then:

       
Our campfire is a single light

       
Amongst a hundred peaks and waterfalls
.

       
The manifold voices of falling water

       
Talk all night
.

       
Wrapped in your down bag

       
Starlight on your cheeks and eyelids

       
Your breath comes and goes

       
In a tiny cloud in the frosty night
.

       
Ten thousand birds sing in the sunrise
.

       
Ten thousand years revolve without change
.

       
All this will never be again
.

T
HE FIRST SCATTERING COMPLETE
, I
LEFT
S
TANLEY HEADING
north along the Salmon River, passing the site of that crooked little rust-red cabin that served as our first home after we married. I could almost see Jane walking out of the screen door across the sloping porch with a pan of blond brownies in her hand for the elderly landlords; how the first time she made them she forgot to consider the big lean of the floor, and so the batter slumped, making one side thicker than the other.

“It's perfect!” she told me. “People who like chewy eat from this side. Those who like crunchy eat from the other.”

Five miles on, I pulled into a small turnout and walked down a steep bank to the edge of the river, to Cove Hot Springs, where I stripped naked and settled back into the steaming water, silky with minerals. Sitting in that hot pot, in a small way it felt like the scattering of Jane's ashes had released the Sawtooths back to me. Of course there was a lot of stumbling and lurching and bleeding in the bushes still to come. But after Stanley, I could begin to see a few of those things that outlast even the longest life. Some indigenous cultures of the world hold sacred certain corners of the land—never going there casually, reserving visits only for rites of passage. From then on, the Sawtooths would be like that for me.

Downriver some 115 miles was the town of Salmon, for decades a redneck-meets-river-runner place, serving up a kindly if sharp-edged brand of hospitality. During our first summer together in Stanley, Jane and I ran shuttle for river-rafting parties, driving their rigs from Salmon to a takeout on the river at Corn Creek. Our second gig involved shuttling a pair of Olympic gymnastic coaches from Salt Lake City who each year ran the river, then spent a drunken night at the Owl Supper Club. Afterward, for reasons we never understood, they bedded down in sleeping bags for the night—as did we—on the fifty-yard line of the Salmon High School football field.

For old times' sake, I parked the van and walked over to the Owl, sidled up to the bar, and ordered a beer. The place was
quiet, just one other customer—a sixty-year-old man named George, sporting a gray ponytail down his back, humming to the country music feed on the television while flipping through a copy of the
Salmon Recorder Herald
. George wanted to talk. Before my glass was empty, he'd invited me to come back on Sunday to watch football.

“I cook up a bunch of chili—enough for everyone. People come and go all day, eleven in the morning till nine at night. You should check it out.”

Salmon was for a long time less gentrified than other mountain towns, having for years had the good fortune of ranking lower on the groovy scale. There'd been less of an onslaught by well-meaning folks who move to beautiful places and set about trying to make them a little “nicer”; maybe pushing to get rid of the trailer park at the edge of town, for example, never understanding that such housing is all some locals can afford. But then Salmon was also more than happy to irritate the refined by spitting and pulling out guns at the mere rumor of wolves. Or environmentalists. Or any other commie scum predator lurking at the edges of town.

When Bill the bartender heard what I'd been doing up in Stanley, he turned and poured himself a beer, pulled up a stool behind the bar, and sat down to face me. Five years ago yesterday, he told me, he had lost his own wife. Her name was Jamie.

“A vein ruptured near her heart. The medical team didn't do the right diagnostics. Just never picked it up. She was forty-eight.”

He took a pull on his beer and turned his head, and the look
of pain on his face seemed fresher than five years would allow. Sitting there, just me and Bill and George the chili cook, some dozen blocks from the football field where Jane and I and the gymnasts had fallen asleep after way too much tequila, I began to realize how long a man's wounds can bleed.

The scattering journey in the Sawtooths was powerful, a right action of sorts, an honoring that suggested my life still mattered. But it wasn't long before holes started showing up, letting in feelings that everything was still busted to pieces. One of those holes tore open during that encounter with Bill at the Owl Bar. Earlier in the day I'd been going along thinking I was getting back to some sort of mental fitness, reclaiming what I'd learned from storytellers, psychologists, seekers of one sort or another. I could see myself getting on with recovery, confident I was coming out of the ditch, steering back into life. But as I left the Owl Bar and was heading north on Highway 12, making for Lost Trail Pass, it seemed that was just wishful thinking. Mind play. And minds never could fathom the real consequences of a broken heart.

WATER TO STONE, THREE

I
'm moving down the west bank of the Kopka again. Even with a bib wet suit on, I'm starting to chill; pulse and breath are getting faster, shallower, making me think about shock. The nearest highway is a long hike to the east, and reaching it will mean swimming the river. Yet in the canyon below the flush pond, the far bank is almost vertical, impossible to navigate on two legs, let alone one. So I keep pushing downstream toward the mouth of the river, finally reaching the place where it empties into Obonga Lake. Slightly up from the mouth is a small island. After weighing the options, I decide to jump into the river upstream and float on my back to the island; from there I should
be able to haul out and recover a bit, before tackling the second half of the channel. Everything goes well. Then, less than ten yards from the island, I'm sucked into a circling current. It carries me right back to where I started.

The shivering and shallow breathing are getting worse.

Resting a couple minutes to steel my courage, I jump this time into the river downstream from the island, which means making the entire crossing without a break. The water is fast and deep, the current much too strong for me to hold my place by swimming. Sure enough, even before the halfway point, the current catches like a train and hauls me far out into the lake. I'm exhausted. Just as that outbound journey comes to an end, a pair of loons surfaces not ten feet away. They eye me for a few seconds, then let loose with a brilliant run of yodels. Given how cautious loons are around humans, even in my troubled state it's not lost on me how strange this is. What I do with it is set my jaw and take a couple fast breaths, blowing them out like a man angry, like a man trying to convince himself there's still something left. I roll onto my back under the gray sky, lay the paddle on my chest, and start backstroking, pulling hard for shore.

At long last I heave onto the bank, rest just long enough to drink water and choke down an energy bar. From there it's back to crawling and stumbling over downfall toward the Armstrong Highway. In thirty minutes I manage only a few hundred yards. Then a sound. Faint, but growing. The thin drone of a boat motor, somewhere near the east end of the lake. Filled with hope, I lurch to the shore, practically falling into the water in my rushed
attempt to get out beyond the overhanging tree branches to a place I can be seen. Sure enough, in the distance is a speedboat, and it's coming my way. Several figures are visible. Fishing rods are sticking up along the gunwales.

When the boat gets a couple hundred yards from shore, I slip the white plastic bag I've brought over the canoe paddle and begin waving it frantically, all the while shouting at the top of my lungs. No sign they see me. Next I put the paddle under my arm, and with two fingers in my mouth let out the loudest, shrillest whistles I can muster, followed by still more shouting and paddle waving. The boat never slows, never varies its course. Just keeps skimming westward at full throttle. I damn near weep.

Just as I'm about to step out of the lake and start moving again, I hear the boat's motor slow, see the fishermen pull in toward shore on the far side of the Kopka River, maybe a half mile away. I wait until they cut the engine and then begin frantically whistling, shouting, and waving all over again.

After ten minutes of this they start heading toward me, slowly at first then picking up speed. The men are clutching bottles of beer, and when I finally get the chance to sputter out what's just happened, they offer to take me back to their camp along the highway. When I hand my paddle to the guy in the bow of the boat, I can see he's pretty loaded, though that hardly makes him less appealing. At least not until he grabs the shoulders of my life jacket to pull me over the bow and slams my nuts into the hull. I lay on the foredeck in fetal position, hands clasped
between my thighs, writhing. The guys think it has something to do with my broken leg.

They're paramedics, on a holiday fishing trip. Back in camp they prop me in a lawn chair on the beach, give me a blanket and a beer and a Darvocet for the pain, cut away my wet suit, and ice the broken leg. For some reason their satellite phone isn't working, and after several failed attempts, one of them runs up to the highway to flag down a car. The first driver spots him and speeds by, eyes straight ahead. Ten minutes later comes another one. This time the lone woman driver stops, makes a call to the Ontario Provincial Police.

The pain is coming on strong now. Not just in my leg, but in my back, too, which I'll later discover is covered with massive bruises and abrasions from being slammed into rocks in the Kopka rapids. My chest is heaving like the chest of a little kid trying not to cry. I sit in that lawn chair for the next hour watching the sky until a small plane appears overhead, a search plane. Shortly after that comes an ambulance. The emergency team is extremely kind, and that calms me some. I even find myself starting to hope. But it's the hope of a desperate man.

FLOWERS IN THE DUST

O
f all the wild places we imagined going when we were young, it was in the northern Rockies that we gained our first sense of the kind of creative bedlam long gone from the land of corn and clipped lawns and Putt-Putt golf. Snowstorms showed up in the Sawtooth Mountains even in July, and in late summer, wind squalls powerful enough to knock down hundreds of acres of trees in a single breath. In spring came the thunder of landslides ripping loose from the upper shoulders of the high country; later, normally modest creeks turned treacherous with melting snow. All of which helped forge personalities in the locals more expectant, matter-of-fact, outrageous. Even the kids
seemed like ungentled horses, full of themselves. Local historian Dick D'Easum tells of a Christmas party in a Stanley store where a seven-year-old boy dashing about on his new bike ended up running at high speed into the branch of a massive decorated tree, nearly breaking his neck. D'Easum said the kid didn't even cry. Just picked himself up, turned around, and shouted to the crowd: “That's one hell of a place to put a Christmas tree!”

Our own oddball behavior—oddball by Indiana measures, anyway—had mostly to do with me writing stories gushing about the outdoors, and with Jane squatting in the sagebrush with kids, helping them figure out why snakes went into holes, imagining how a red-tailed hawk could look down from five hundred feet up in the sky and see the twitch of a mouse half the size of a Twinkie. In the early years after we came to Idaho, our more traditional neighbors, many of them ranchers and loggers, didn't always understand what we were doing. But they were always long on encouragement—wishing us well, saying they hoped it worked out.