The Carry Home (4 page)

Another tank of gas in Carlyle, then Kate Wolf: “I've been
walkin' in my sleep, countin' troubles 'stead of countin' sheep.” And on Highway 12, within a stone's throw of the Montana line, Jackson Browne, “Running on Empty.”

Now and then I turn to stare over my left shoulder, above a small counter in the center of the van, to a cork bulletin board crowded with faded photographs: The two of us clutching a bottle of champagne on the Lochsa River in northern Idaho at the end of two thousand miles of trail. Thanksgiving in the Chisos Mountains of West Texas. Three shots of Abby the traveling cat. Another of us in late August on the rounded shoulders of the Berkshires, all soft and green and sweating in the summer sun.

Beside the photos is a wire basket holding one of the journals Jane kept filled with notes from our research trips: Trail descriptions. Perfect campsites. Random thoughts from late in the evening, parked out in the woods somewhere, halfway through our second beer. Notes from the redwoods and Point Reyes in California, from Padre Island in southern Texas, the dark hills of North Carolina, the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona. From the Dakota Badlands and Florida's Juniper River. Notes from the Utah desert, when the big blue van gained air during a heroic, ill-fated attempt to cross a washed-out arroyo after a rainstorm. From times spent poking along Edward Abbey's favorite jeep roads in West Texas. From a cowboy line camp in northern Arizona. Squatting in the sand on a beach in Mexico. And of course notes from the Rockies, up and down that particular spill of mountains too many times to count.

She was five foot five with straight brown hair, managing to always seem younger than her age in part by the enthusiasm of her smile. Much like her father, a salt-of-the-earth seed corn farmer from Indiana, walking down the street she made it a point to engage the gaze of strangers, believing it good to make connections even when it probably wasn't. Her laugh was sudden, a little rowdy, the first note exploding in a spurt of holler followed by a quick hand to her mouth, as if she was as surprised as anyone by such outbursts. Most days she rose at the crack of dawn with the trace of a grin already showing at the corners of her mouth.

She'd been an outdoor educator her entire adult life, working from the canyons of the Southwest, north to Yellowstone; in her off-hours she wrote letters to family, called from pay phones the people we knew just to say hi, did aerobics in the living room with Jane Fonda while the snow fell, made cookies and gave most of them away. She performed magic tricks for small kids—mostly tricks her dad taught her—and if anyone in her audience was so inclined, she was happy to go jump into piles of leaves or build snow forts in somebody's backyard or roll down some grassy hill for the sole purpose of getting dizzy.

We'd been restless children, destined to become restless adults. Proud members of the last generation to soothe the angst of youth not with Ritalin, but with road trips. What started with the Beats of the '40s and '50s—twenty-somethings from the Midwest and East Coast, pushing west in Ramblers and Roadmasters, Nomads and Bel Airs—ended with quixotic Pollyannas like us, westering in Volkswagens and Impalas and
Ford Econolines. Long before I could even drive, I lay in my bed on spring nights in South Bend, Indiana, listening to the groan of freight trains two blocks away, rumbling west toward Chicago on the Grand Trunk line, wanting nothing more than to go. At seventeen I made it, hopping into those boxcars on Friday and Saturday nights, rolling away past crumbling brick warehouses that circled the edges of the city out into a land of fields and woodlots and pot-holed county roads leading to who knows where.

Jane too started young, making tents out of bedsheets at the edges of her family's cornfields. Sweating through the firefly summers, lulled to sleep by the smell of dirt, thrilled, she once told me, by the fact that from the middle of July all the way to harvest, those sprawling cornfields held at least a modest chance to leave the known world. Disappear. Get lost. Nine months after we met, each of us sold our cars and on a cold December day laid down the money for the slightly used blue Chevy van Martha and I are riding in now, having found it on a car lot in the tiny town of Syracuse, Indiana. With my father's help, through five months of sanding and sawing and nailing and wiring, we turned it into a sixteen-foot rolling home called Moby. In the spring of 1980 we busted a bottle of cheap champagne across the front bumper, then pushed out of the heartland on a journey stretching across twenty-five years and some 350,000 miles.

T
EN DAYS AGO, DRIVING THROUGH THE OUTSKIRTS OF
Sudbury, Ontario, Jane turned to me, and in the first such conversation we'd had in more than a decade, asked if I remembered how if something ever happened to her, she wanted her ashes scattered in her favorite places. Five of them in all, from the red rock of southern Utah to the foothills of Wyoming's Absaroka Range; from the granite domes of central Idaho to the Beartooths of south-central Montana, to a certain high valley in northeast Yellowstone.

Of course I remember, I told her.

Now, wrapped in this impossible fog of grief, I have only one thought about the future: That after my leg heals, when neighbors are no longer bringing over covered dishes, when friends are no longer stopping by to mow my lawn and vacuum my house, no longer driving me to the mountains so I can sleep under the stars—probably sometime in early fall—I'll make up the bed in the back of the van, stock the tiny fridge, pick just the right music, and drive away. Beside me will be a jar, a beautiful jar. One last time for the two of us, outward bound, into the West.

THE RELICS OF HOME

A
s best I recall, I started leaving the ordinary around age seven, escaping by ascension—going up twelve feet, sometimes fifteen—sitting in the crook of maples or oaks and hugging the trunks, curtains of big green leaves wound up in the wind, making noises like rivers running through the sky. Kid-style adventure, mostly. But on some days—days when my mother's rage was running, when she'd been at me with that studded belt she kept hung behind the bedroom door, spinning me around until my bare butt and thighs were covered in a splatter of welts—on those days, the trees were sanctuary. On those days, I'd squirm higher still, to the uppermost branches big enough
to hold my weight. And I'd sit there, sometimes for an hour or more, way above everything, halfway to the sky.

At about the same time, Jane was doing her own version of leaving the ordinary, mostly in a loose toss of woods at the edge of her family's farm. A modest patch of mild disorder where foxes did half gainers through the air, landing with front paws pinned to unsuspecting mice and voles. Where raccoons waddled up to the creek and washed their faces—looking, she said, like overfed hoodlums cleaning up after a hard night of stealing. In time those encounters led her to join the Girl Scouts, and later to take a job as a counselor at the Kentuckiana Girl Scout Camp in northern Kentucky. Nicknamed Calamity Jane, she kept the sash from her uniform hung in our closet for years, festooned with twenty embroidered merit badges: among them “Outdoor Cook,” “Drawing and Painting,” “First Aid,” “Reader,” “World Knowledge,” and “Adventurer.” I always thought it strange there was no “Rambler” badge, though for all her urge to wander, her chance wouldn't come until later, long after the uniforms had been put away.

It was the best of luck for us to have come under the spell of trees and foxes and hedgerows at a time when millions of other Americans were falling in love with nature, too—in city parks and urban wetlands, along the Appalachian Trail, the California redwoods, at Yellowstone and Yosemite, Rocky Mountain and Great Smoky Mountains and Acadia national parks. Mostly the travelers were young, not ten years older than us, keen to be slipping into that now and then silly, now and then profound
attraction that rolls across this country every forty or fifty years. A drive not unrelated to one that exploded in America in the 1780s. And again in the 1830s. And again in the 1870s. Then still again in the first two decades of the twentieth century—a time so full of fire that journalists described it as a movement like no other in the world. A time when the best-selling books were nature books. When naturalists like John Burroughs and Ernest Thompson Seton were rock stars.

In 1913, a pot-bellied, beer-swigging part-time illustrator from New England named Joe Knowles sidled up to his friends in a Boston bar and ordered up pints. As usual, they joked, ribbed one another. Argued politics. But eventually the talk drifted to nature, to wilderness. And that was hardly unusual for the times. Any American over thirty had memories of the official closing of the frontier—the frontier being defined as a line “out west,” beyond which population densities were less than two people per square mile. For a nation long convinced that its best qualities had arisen from life along that shifting line, such a closing was a big deal. Indeed, for decades afterward, people debated and generally worried about the effects of that milestone on everything from individual character to national identity.

Beyond that, those same years saw no end of outrage against the unbridled pillaging of nature by the robber barons. And also against the fact that young boys and girls who'd been raised on farms were working seventy-hour weeks in the mills, some dying in fires, others crippled by lung disease. Senator William Borah, of Idaho, introduced a bill to oversee general health conditions
for working kids, asking the government to do for them what it'd done long before for calves and pigs.

And all that fed into that scene in that Boston bar, when late in the evening after God knows how much beer, Joe Knowles stood up and puffed out his chest.

“I've half a mind to strip naked and run off into the woods for two or three months, live as a wild man. Just to prove Americans still have sap in their veins.”

Everyone was impressed. The next morning, a Boston reporter named Michael McCeough knocked on Joe's door, probably rousing him from a hangover.

“Remember that thing you said last night?” asked McCeough. “The thing about running off naked to live as a wild man?”

Who knows if Knowles recalled. But he was a proud man.

“Well,” the reporter went on, “my editor thinks it'd be a great circulation gimmick. We'd like to sponsor you.”

Which is how in August 1913, on the far shore of King and Bartlett Lake in western Maine, it came to pass that Joe Knowles stood in a light drizzle wearing something like a G-string, explaining the mission to a bewildered group of reporters, telling them about the need for us all to remember we still have sap in our veins. The idea, he went on, had come from a dream he'd had of being lost in the woods, alone and naked, with little hope of getting out.

“Not much of a dream. But a damn real one.”

It would be one of the greatest publicity stunts of all time. Knowles emerged from the woods two months later a full-blown
hero—not just in New England, but coast to coast. A book of his adventures sold more than 250,000 copies. On emerging from the woods, some twenty thousand people turned out to see him, including thousands on the Boston Common alone. The chief physician at Harvard pronounced him to be the fittest human specimen he'd ever seen. He went on to tour vaudeville for two and a half years with top billing.

“Behold a sermon two months long for the people of the United States!” cried Herbert Johnson, celebrated pastor of Boston's Warren Avenue Church, shortly after Knowles stumbled out of the woods. Pastor Johnson went on to say how he wished those who worshipped gold could understand the underlying spirit of the wilderness, that what Knowles did would make men and women across the country go into the woods. And in the woods they would stop and think. And the more they thought, the longer the flag would wave.

The boomers who ended up carrying that same water, refloating yet another round of slightly wacky, American-style craving for nature in the 1960s and '70s, were by sheer numbers a force to reckon with. And their quick, big embrace of the last untrammeled places was for Jane and me a fine alternative to the straight roads of Indiana—the straight lawns and straight furrows of corn, the straight lines of kids waiting outside the schoolhouse door. It's true that by the time we hit our teen years, Indiana was already lidded and torn. But here and there, even in the Hoosier state, there were enough pieces left for us to feel like part of the movement, the celebration. What was left of those unkempt
lands felt to us a lot like the way Thomas Wolfe described nature: places where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time. Bees still hovered over sky-blue flax blossoms, then flew away to points unknown. Lightning bugs lit up the summer nights. Cardinals appeared blood red against the snow, magically plucking out tiny seeds hidden deep inside the drifts.