The Carry Home (2 page)

C
URIOUSLY, THIRTY YEARS BEFORE WE WERE BORN, ANOTHER
Hoosier from South Bend, a young Beat poet named Kenneth Rexroth, took a good look around the Midwest and shook his head. There was nothing left in the way of mythology, he grumbled. Nothing to take the place “of the gods and goddesses and heroes and demigods of the ancient world.” With the curl and
whim of that gone from our lives, Rexroth suggested, what we were mostly left with was a conspicuous, gnawing hunger to consume. What's more, he said, if imagination was ever to really flower again, if we wanted stories powerful enough to keep us awake, it would mean reimagining our connections to nature.

R
EXROTH WASN'T TRYING TO BRING BACK
A
POLLO AND
Hermes and Dionysus; he was just pushing for the return of minds big enough, boisterous and generous and unruly enough to imagine them in the first place. Minds intrigued enough to midwife new versions of everything from technology to art, scholarship to love.

Rexroth would leave Indiana as a young adult, rolling west. He first came to rest in the Rocky Mountains, then the Pacific Northwest, and finally California, there climbing the Coast Range and the Sierras and writing poetry and drinking red wine into the wee hours with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. An accomplished poet himself, in time he became known far and wide as “the father of the Beats.” He was happiest when moving: rolling down blue highways, huffing up mountain trails, moseying along lonely stretches of Pacific shoreline.

“See life steadily,” he advised. “See it whole.” Let the years be paced by the comings and goings of the seasons. What's more, learn to see that each of these seasons lives in all the others—winter in the blooms of summer, spring in the fading leaves of fall.

As it happened, my first chance to “see life steadily, see it whole,” would come in the summer Jane and I married, working
for the Forest Service, living in a tiny rust-red cabin not three hundred feet square on the bank of the Salmon River, in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. The doorjambs and floorboards of the little cottage had gone crooked as a coyote's hind leg from sixty years of frost heaves. Out front was a tiny weathered porch, so tilted that the owner of the place—a seventy-five-year-old former sheepherder and aspiring Rube Goldberg impersonator named Stan Jenkins—cut short the two side legs of a chair to make it possible to sit without tipping over. Pleased with that success, he next set about fitting the two lone kitchen cabinets with screen-door hook-and-eye devices to keep the doors from swinging open.

The place had no sink, no running water. Dishes and other washing, beyond daily plunges in the river, we managed out of a large metal pan hung from a ten-penny nail on the kitchen wall. The toilet was forty yards away, in the corner of an off-kilter mouse-gray barn. Directly above the open rear tank of the commode, a faucet and pipe dropped from a large metal drum balanced in the rafters, which was filled by a hundred feet of garden hose attached to a small electric pump submerged at the edge of the river. Toilet visits were anxious, as we were always looking up, trying to gauge the general soundness of the cracked sheet of plywood Stan used to hold the drum.

Inside the cabin, without getting up from the edge of the old iron bed, we could reach the table, door, closet, and 1950 Frigidaire. A cracked Formica dining table drooped under the west window, where we ate bean burritos and looked out onto the
river, not fifteen feet away, and beyond that to the rugged face of the Sawtooths shouting at the sky. Across the room, under the one other window, I cobbled together a desk from scraps of wood lying about the ranch, where I sat in the dim light of evening and wrote about the day.

Something good was in play for us along that wild river. Something in the sky, in meadows lit with paintbrush and prairie smoke and cinquefoil. It was an incomprehensibly big, soaring backdrop, and not a day went by when it didn't throw off sparks. We were opened up in that open country, suddenly able to think beyond corn and rust, navigating our days by following whatever whims of curiosity the land ignited.

And yet ours was never a story about the two of us all alone in the great wide open. There was deep community in that middle of nowhere, a knitting together of both old timers and newcomers, as animated as the land itself: endless potlucks and midnight fires; endless nights making music and days with friends riding inner tubes down the river or trekking up trails into the heart of the mountains. All of us out there riding on the backs of some earnest, footloose search for something striking, something beautiful. We romped without structure or intent, jumping into lakes and climbing rocks and sliding down snowfields on clean impulse. Kid play, really. Tasty as chocolate pudding.

A mile away from our little cabin, on a dirt street in the heart of Stanley, Idaho, was the Casino Club, where every August dozens of young singles planning to stay the winter in that frigid
valley came together to kick off what was known as the mating season. With every passing week, they'd drink and dance across the gritty hardwood floors with growing urgency, more desperate as the month wore on to find a tolerable partner to help split wood and warm the sheets without driving each other crazy before spring broke the following May. Often it didn't work out that way—I mean the part about not driving each other crazy—and on the summer nights that followed, we'd sit drinking beer in the hot springs along the Salmon River, listening to those who'd spent the cold months tell of fiery breakups and cabin swaps; of forty-below nights when cars froze up outside Casanova Jacks, leaving everyone to sleep on the floor of the bar on a bed of beer cans and peanut shells. Or tales about the day the sheriff—said to be wrestling with relationship troubles of his own—high-centered his snow machine on a lodgepole pine behind the ranger station, then, in a fit of rage, pulled out his pistol and shot the tree in half.

It wasn't life out of balance but, rather, life brilliantly off balance. Those big lands—and just as important, what such places did to the people who lived there—helped us realize that we'd likely never really know what made either people or places tick. We were all wild, all mysterious, all worth a closer look.

At the time, Jane and I might've described ourselves as an eager teacher and an impatient science writer, both hungry for open ground. But in those mountains, we came to understand that the edges and overlays of people's lives, including our own, would be forever changing—sometimes slowly, like the seasons,
and sometimes like May flood or August fire. Freedom, and we had freedom in spades, came from not needing to know what was next.

Following our time in the Sawtooths, the characters kept on coming: at a cowboy line camp we took care of deep in the aspen woods of northern Arizona; at the feet of the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado; and finally, in the last place we called home, on the ragged, rugged edges of greater Yellowstone. There was the brilliant, prodigal mountain town pianist, sitting in his tiny apartment fondling the keys of a grand piano like some poor man's Horowitz through the long days of winter, wearing fingerless gloves and nipping brandy because he had no money for heat. There were ski bums from L.A. or Chicago living in coal sheds and working three jobs, hoping one day to buy a fixer-upper shotgun house at the foot of the mountains for under fifteen grand. There were long-haired carpenters taking accordion lessons from eighty-year-old Croatian miners. And in every place, an endless string of guitar players, just short of broke, sang in pine-paneled bars about rivers and snowstorms and cigarettes.

Most of the newcomers hung out for a summer or two and then moved on; others kept meaning to leave, but never did. They'd be all ready to go, and then summer would come on—unbridling the mountains and rivers, tossing the world with wildflowers. And pretty soon they'd fallen right back in love again, with all thoughts of leaving slipping away.

In the end, of course, most everyone moved on—going off to be lawyers or computer programmers or carpenters or teachers.
Jane and I closed the screen door on that little shack on the Salmon River in the spring of 1981. We left in the face of big changes in the country at large. By then, Joni Mitchell's “Big Yellow Taxi” had disappeared with her old man down some dark alley, yielding the stage to an appliance repairman's wet dream about making money for nothin' and getting chicks for free. Over in the Cineplex, the cameras had abandoned East Sixty-sixth Street in Manhattan, where they'd once fawned over those earnest neurotics of Annie Hall, instead moving south, to Wall Street, where Gordon Gekko reassured us that greed was good, that greed would save the country. The simple thoughts Jane and I had in our late teens, figuring boomers would keep reaching out, keep making connections, keep leaping and then looking for nets, seemed awfully naive. But we carried on, blowing new fires from the embers that nature had ignited years before.

K
ENNETH
R
EXROTH WAS FOND OF TELLING A TALE FROM
childhood, when he befriended a ninety-year-old Native American man named Billy Sunlight, living in a chicken coop at the edge of a woodlot near Rexroth's grandmother's home on the Elkhart River. The old man took a shine to the boy, guiding him on outings to watch otters swimming in the river, gathering herbs, teaching him the Potawatomie names of animals and birds and woodland flowers. One day he came calling on Billy, only to open the door to his chicken coop and find the old man dead in
his bunk, his hands crossed over his chest and a “luminous” look on his face. Rexroth later wrote that he wasn't afraid, that Billy had talked about his death with him, and it seemed just as it should be. Even so, as the weeks and months went by, sometimes Rexroth got terribly lonely, ended up crying for his old friend. “But not because he was dead, really. Only because he was gone from me and from the woods we loved.”

He was about seven then—a boy who'd lost a summer friend, one who'd made it all the way to ninety. I was a middle-aged man, one who'd lost my wife and best friend of twenty-five years to a cold, dark river not two weeks past her fiftieth birthday. And yet from where I stand now, the difference seems one of degree. For me, as for that little boy, the lingering nut of the ache was in the fact that she was gone not just from me, but from the wild country we came to love.

My redemption would come in the form of a last request Jane had made years before, asking me if she died, to scatter her ashes in her five favorite wilderness areas. And so I did. Five treks to five unshackled landscapes. At first, the journeys broke my heart. Later they helped me piece it together again. In the end these trips would bring me back to nature again, to wilderness. To the lilting beauty of unkempt places—places powerful enough to woo the hearts not only of the young but of anyone willing to put down the search for meaning for a little while and just float in the sensations of being alive.