The Carry Home (18 page)

Outward Bound was founded in England during the onset of World War II, created by noted educator Kurt Hahn as a way to help sailors build the physical and mental skills they needed to increase their chances of survival if stranded at sea. It was hugely successful. Following the war, the program expanded to the United States, where it fell in fast with an idea popular off and on since the 1880s, which held that learning to be comfortable in unfamiliar, unpredictable environments did wonders for young people's self-esteem. Teens suffering from self-doubt, anger, or frustration, the thinking went, needed only to take the step of preparing themselves to be safe and comfortable in the wilderness. The wilderness would do the rest.

One of the things that shifted for Jane in Utah, something she never lost, was discovering that she had a talent for handling
hardship. It was a quality underscored by a short quote mailed out to students before they even left for the course—three lines from
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert Pirsig. A guy, Jane reminded me, who had his own troubles with the whole sanity thing. “Physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong,” she recited. “Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn't mean much.”

What others saw as chores, or even as causes for anxiety—lumbering up steep inclines, setting up tarps in advance of fast-moving weather, cooking dinner on open fires—she treated with whispers of ceremony. As it happened, the presence required for Pirsig's “right mood” was what nature had been encouraging in Jane since her days as a Girl Scout leader: to be alert, to pay attention to changing circumstances. In Outward Bound she enjoyed an even bigger dose of the perspective she was learning to use to help with control issues—with the jagged disquiet that had driven her anorexia. In truth, she would never completely leave behind the unease she felt about what life might put in her lap, or in the laps of those she loved. For all her enchanting playfulness, she never wanted to be far from a plan, from a sense of structure. And yet what the wilderness kept giving her—part of the measure of sanity it offered—was the assurance that she could be strong in the face of random weather.

I
LAID THE BROWN POTTERY VASE IN THE TOP OF MY DAY PACK
and started walking from a set of corrals near the Notom Road—heading west, toward Sheets Gulch and the stark, fluted edges of the Waterpocket Fold. A cluster of cottonwoods was leafing out along the wash, dripping with Jane's fleeting, electric green of April. The skies were mostly clear, though in the west was a long train of dark clouds, dragging their tails along the tops of the red rock divide. Nature moves fast here, often violently, with storms entirely out of sight sending walls of water pushing down slot canyons, tearing boulders loose and ravaging the cottonwoods. Yet another good reason to pay attention.

Fluttering on the ground that day were clusters of Apache plume and rabbit brush, and along the damp edges of coulees, the jointed stems of horsetail poked from the earth like bony stalks of asparagus. The magpies were out in force, rising and falling in ten- or twelve-foot dips, toying with the wind. I looked halfheartedly for small landforms near big landforms, as per the advice of the Hopi man, but had no real instinct for it. Still, in the end I found myself on top of a small butte at the eastern edge of the national park. The view whispered of a time scale so grand as to be inconceivable: old swamps in what is now the tumble of the Chinle Formation; massive desert dunes locked away in Navajo Sandstone; the hiss of shallow seas, frozen in layers of Mancos Shale.

The puffs of ash I spooned into the sky held together for a long time on that strangely windless afternoon, drifting slowly to the north against a reach of rust-colored sandstone. I placed the
spoon and jar in the sand at my feet. Then I lowered my body to the ground, laid my cheek against a warm slab of rock. A lone, pumpkin-shaped cloud drifted overhead, and dissolved. A hummingbird flew by on her way to grab lunch from a patch of star lilies, passing so close to my head that I could hear the whir of her wings. Just as happened in the Sawtooths, and again at that cabin in the southern Absarokas, for a precious few minutes there came a sense of putting the burden down. Like the hole in my life was getting smaller, a smear of black in a bigger world of sky and slickrock and morning glories. As if the magpies were carrying off some of the loss. As though the tiger beetles had loaded it onto their varnished backsides and were walking it out across the trackless sand.

T
HE OLD PEOPLE OF THIS PLACE, THE
P
AIUTE, THOUGHT IT
perfectly normal for beauty and chaos to stand together like this, hand in hand. Paiute creation myth tells how long ago, the earth was danced by two brothers, Coyote and Wolf. Wolf with his perfect, wholesome vision of the world, a creator who never wanted anything more than an abundant life for the people, a life free of anguish, free even of death. And the younger Coyote—spoiled, mischievous, a glib talker who time and again pulled his older brother away from any plans of perfection. After a time, Wolf went away, leaving the world to unfold according to the imaginations of Coyote. We cast our fate with Coyote, said the
Paiute. And so our lives are driven by this strange mix of sunlight and shadow, loveliness and fear.

When revisiting those kids from the wilderness therapy program I'd written about, I was heartened to find them mostly happy, content. With every one of them, I asked a question I'd asked ten years before: Why did that program work, when all the other interventions had failed? Their most frequent response was “It's the first place where what I did mattered.”

The second most common remark: “It's where I finally experienced something beautiful.”

The third: “It's the first time I ever felt spiritual,” or “felt God,” or “felt like I was a part of something bigger than just me.”

Community. Beauty. Mystery.

WATER TO STONE, FIVE

F
riday night, May 27. Search director Greg Brown calls to let us know they've found Jane's life jacket, sitting high and dry on a beach along the north shore of Obonga Lake, a half mile from the site of the wreck. A flash of hope. I tell Greg she'd be likely to sit on it, resting; in fact I'd seen her do it plenty of times, insulating herself from cold ground. Maybe she's hypothermic, I offer—some of the first signs of hypothermia being confusion and disorientation. Simply got up and walked away. The next morning, Tom, Martha, and I sit picking at plates of eggs in the hotel restaurant, weaving other scenarios, other flights of fancy that make her still alive.

Sensing we're going stir-crazy, Brad McCallum arranges for one of his officers to drive us back north, to the search site, figuring it will help us feel more connected to the rescue effort. When we arrive, Brown wastes no time pulling out maps and laptops, reviewing with us everything the search team has done over the past two and a half days. It strikes me that Jane would totally admire how organized he is, how capable. After an hour or so, the officer who drove us up from Thunder Bay asks if we'd like to get some lunch in Armstrong, about thirty miles north. It was where Jane and I had our last meal together: pizza in a well-lit little tavern on the main street of town. There was a television hanging from the ceiling above the bar, playing reruns of
America's Funniest Home Videos
.

We're out on the highway, ten miles north of the search command site, when a call comes over the radio. It's not an explicit exchange, and after signing off, the officer tells us Greg is asking us to return. It doesn't take two seconds for me to be swept into that maelstrom of dread I've been trying so hard to contain, ever since I stood at the flush pond and felt the wash of beautiful and goodbye. Everything's coming apart now. Back at the command center, I can see Greg Brown through the window of the car. The look on his face tells the end of the story.

“I'm afraid I have bad news,” he says.

The next time I look up, having fallen to my knees in the sand, I see he's crying.

T
HE SEARCHERS HAD COMBED THE BANKS OF THE
K
OPKA
seven times in all. On the last try, one of the dogs stopped and pointed toward the river. The handler and his assistant looked, looked some more, but couldn't see anything in the dark, tannin-colored water. Just as they were about to move on, the assistant caught sight of something. They moved in closer, trying to study it from every angle; in the end, they decided it was fabric. Assembling the rest of the team, uncoiling rescue ropes, they managed a technical foray into the rapids. Finally, nearly three days to the hour after Jane disappeared, her body was pulled from the river.

W
HEN WORD GETS BACK TO THE CAFÉ IN
R
ED
L
ODGE, THE
head cook, Nancy, takes a piece of chalk and writes a message on the blackboard that announces the daily specials, then hangs it so it faces the street:
We'll miss you, Sweet Jane
.

Word spreads fast. Soon after the café closes, at two in the afternoon, dozens of people start showing up at the restaurant, bringing heaping bowls of food, beginning a potluck that goes on late into the evening. So many stop Nancy and ask her what they can do to help that she has to invent tasks for them, the most common being to go pick flowers. By Sunday the place is all but covered in vases of daisies and roses and flag iris—filling the tables in the dining room, spilling across the window-sills and onto the tops of the reach-in coolers. For the next several
days, every morning when the crew arrives to open the restaurant, they'll find more bouquets, more cards and prayer flags laid against the front door.