The Carry Home (16 page)

Returning to the cabin, I gathered the vase from where I'd placed it the night before, in front of an east-facing window, pulled the silver spoon out of my backpack, went outside, and made my way around to the back of the cabin. Though it was probably ten o'clock in the morning, the air was still cold, sharp against my nose, smelling like winter. Maybe it was because I knew this would be the last scattering for a while, probably for months, that I stood for a long time out there in the snow, taking in every detail, trying to drive it into memory. But what registered wasn't so much details of the surroundings as a simple feeling of ease, contentment. As if, other than just being there under that cold November sun, standing calf-deep in the snow, there was nothing I needed to do.

After a time I moved up the hill, took out the spoon, and cast some of Jane's ashes on that east-facing slope. They fell without a sound, drifting like a thousand tiny feathers into the hollows of that bobcat's footprints.

WATER TO STONE, FOUR

I
know that if Jane has any strength left at all, she'll do exactly the right thing to stay alive. Having worked for years as an EMT on search-and-rescue teams, not to mention teaching dozens of Outward Bound courses, she knows well matters of survival. She only has to be conscious. From the beach I can hear the search plane droning in the distance, going up and down and up and down the river canyon.

Late in the evening comes the thudding of another engine: a helicopter, dispatched 150 miles to the south from a hospital in Thunder Bay. It's come to carry me away. The paramedics carefully load me onto a gurney, lift it across the loose sand, and place
me into the cargo bay, strap me in. Incredibly, the pilot offers to fly the river canyon a few times so we can all look for Jane. Because I'm lying on my back, good views are hard to come by, but by raising on one elbow and twisting hard, I can peer out the side window, glimpsing the dark, broken conifer forest along the edges of the river. After three passes the pilot apologizes, says that with the light fading we have to make for the hospital. Jane will be spending the night out. It's getting cold. It's starting to rain.

We reach the hospital around 11:00 pm. There are X-rays, after which the doctor comes in to explain the nature of my broken bones; then a nurse shows up, fashions a temporary cast to stabilize things until I can undergo surgery back in Montana. Having heard the story of the accident, everyone is gentle, sympathetic, and I'm gulping the kindness. Around midnight a detective with the Ontario Provincial Police named Brad McCallum appears next to my bed. He's soft-spoken, courteous, even while explaining that for the time being, the accident has to be treated as a potential crime. He asks if there's anything I need from the van before his men seal it to protect evidence. We spend the next hour together, me giving him not only details of the wreck, but dozens of facts about Jane's habits and personality. The search team will use the information to create a psychological profile of her, in hopes of anticipating her movements, her behavior.

We finish around one thirty in the morning, and the detective offers to take me to a hotel. I've got no money or credit cards with me, but he thinks maybe the place we stayed before heading
out to the Kopka will still have my info on file. I've got no clothes to wear, most of them having been cut off by the doctors; before long, a nurse shows up with a baggy pair of sweat pants, a dark green pair of underwear, white socks, and black tennis shoes. A pair of crutches. When I'm finally dressed, I catch sight of myself in a mirror on the wall of the hospital room. There's an old man staring back.

At the hotel, McCallum takes a business card out of his wallet, writes his home number on the back, and hands it to me, tells me to try to get some rest, to call if there's anything I need. But rest isn't an option. I lie on the bed, crutches propped up in the corner of the room, feeling a panic rolling through me like nothing I've ever known. Little bits of hope rise now and then, only to be devoured by images of her cold and bent and broken. Or worse still, and this despite fierce efforts against it, a picture of her at the bottom of that goddamned river—then the whole world shrinking, groaning, the color leaking out of it like blood from a bad wound, everything going to gray. My plan is to not call anyone for twenty-four hours, not wanting to set off a chain of unnecessary worry. Thinking mindless television might calm me down, or at least distract me, I find the remote, and the TV comes on to Country Music Television. A video is just beginning to play. It shows a handsome young man, a performer I don't recognize, singing a mournful song in front of a lakeside cottage. A story unfolds about a wife, or maybe a girlfriend, who one day was apparently out at the end of the pier when something went wrong. She drowns in the lake.

By the next afternoon Jane's still missing, and I can't bear the load any longer. First I call her brother Tom in Indiana and tell him what's happened, having to repeat several things because my fast breathing is making me hard to understand. Then I call Martha, in Montana. Both say they'll catch the first plane to Thunder Bay. When people at the café Jane helped start with Martha hear the news, they take up a collection to pay for Martha's airplane ticket.

I'm getting regular updates from Detective McCallum, as well as from the search coordinator, a thoughtful, serious man named Greg Brown. We dig around a little on the motel Internet, learn that the Ontario Provincial Police Search Team has one of the best track records of any search team on the continent. Besides aircraft, there are three ground teams, including one with dogs—struggling up and down the riverbanks looking for her. Someone finds her paddle. Another searcher finds one of her gloves. They know Jane was a search-and-rescue worker. To my great comfort, they keep asking me for more information, for any ideas I might have about how she'd behave if badly injured. Greg says his men and women are motivated. He tells us as far as he and his team are concerned, they're looking for one of their own.

THE GREAT WIDE OPEN

T
wenty-two years after Jane first came into that enchanted maze of canyons in southern Utah, beginning there her long waltz with Outward Bound, I had my own chance to see firsthand what country like this could do for the restless and broken. In my case, the lessons came by way of a bunch of highly intelligent, beaten-down, drug-addicted teens. In 1995, deep in the stacks of the University of Colorado library, I'd stumbled across early research showing that compassionate wilderness therapy (as opposed to punitive boot camps) was twice as effective for treating teen drug addiction as traditional twenty-eight-day lockdown. It was one thing to think of wild places as being
powerful for those who sought them out. It was another to think they might also help kids who, at least on first arriving, would've rather been any place else on earth.

Hugely curious, I began writing a book on wilderness therapy in the spring of 1998. Among other things, it involved going through staff training at the Aspen Achievement Academy, located just west of Capitol Reef, then spending three months in the backcountry with so-called “at risk” teens, toggling back and forth between a group of fourteen- to seventeen-year-old girls and a group of similarly aged boys.

The kids had therapy sessions twice a week, which on the surface might not seem much different from how things happened for them back home. But out there, the therapist hiked in two or three or four miles to sit with kids under juniper trees. More remarkable still, she stayed with each one as long as it took, sometimes for hours. She was with us on the trail, climbing hills and tromping across washes. She ate her food out of a tin cup. Got smoke in her eyes. Huddled against the rain.

The field staff, meanwhile, included former instructors from Outward Bound. But there were also history majors, former addicts and alcoholics, musicians, even a chemist. Their modest wages aside, several told me they were here because they needed to work for a time at a job where they could give something back. Many had seen more than their share of struggle, often with addictions, and in the end decided the best way to anchor what they'd learned was to pass it on. Passing it on in the wilderness, they told me, brought a powerful sense of ceremony to the giving.
Not that they were wise or benevolent in everything, of course—no more so than a lot of other twenty- and thirty-somethings would be. But that desire to give back—that shining urge that seems to wait at the end of so many heartbreaking journeys—this they had in spades.

My first week in the field, I landed with a group of smudged, sweat-stained fourteen- to seventeen-year-old girls. Kids wrestling with crank and speed and crystal meth, late-night trips to the police stations, to the streets, to the suicide wards. With girlfriends at school, in the toilets, throwing up lunch.

Like Nancy, who, among other things, was struggling with bulimia. One afternoon, we were walking down a dusty trail together, no one else within earshot.

“How could I deal with things if I didn't throw up?” she asked me, her voice almost pleading. “What else is there in my life I can control?”

She was at a level of the program known as coyote; one day I asked her why she thought they'd named a part of the wilderness experience for that particular animal.

“Coyotes are survivors,” she said, and we walked on for a long time, much of it in silence.

Later, before bed, beside the fire she started rapping on the bottom of one of the tin cans we used to cook in. And then someone else started in with thumbs against the bottom of her blue porcelain cup. Then three more cups and a pair of wooden spoons. Until there was this heady thrum drifting out across the desert—in some minutes disjointed, in others, perfect. Right in
the middle of it, a coyote came up to the edge of the bench that ran along our camp to the south, gave three bright barks, turned, and walked away. All of us just sat there, looking at one another, amazed. Never slowing the rhythm, though, never stopping that drumming.

“That coyote,” Nancy said the next morning over breakfast, as if only then was it proper to talk of it. “It was awesome.” She slipped that memory into her pocket and she walked with it, all across the empty desert. Drinking from it like a spring, smiling over it when the weight of her pack, when the long, black nights, started pressing on her shoulders.

Now it was I who was broken, and in the years following Jane's death, Nancy and the rest of that little wilderness tribe seemed as close as I had to heroes. One spring I decided to get in touch with them again, some ten years after they'd made their final walks out of canyon country. One was working as an accountant, another a history professor. There were two nurses, a chef. Also an oil-rig foreman, an advertising executive, a furniture builder, a financial planner. They said things that Jane used to say. Seven of the nine told me their time in the wilds was still the most important experience of their lives. They asked me to remember how, out in the wild, everyone had needed each other. And thanks to that alone, for the first time in their lives, they had started thinking what they did might really matter.

Susan, a pediatric nurse, reminded me about how she came out of the canyons knowing it was okay to be different. I asked her if she remembered a certain biology lesson when we were in
the backcountry together—ten of us in a circle under a cluster of willows at the edge of the Red Desert, the lesson offered up by a quiet, brilliant, sinewy sixty-one-year-old teacher named LaVoy Tolbert. Of course she remembered, she told me.

“Does everyone recall those big mushrooms we ran across earlier today?” LaVoy asked.

“Puffballs,” Jenna said.

“That's right. Puffballs. And remember how we talked about them being a kind of life form that reproduces by spores—millions of spores, every one exactly alike?” At which point he slowly drew out their thoughts about the limits of such a life strategy.

“They're all vulnerable to the same diseases,” said Jenna.

“If it's too dry,” added Susan, “none of them survive.”

LaVoy smiled, nodded. “So if I'm understanding you right, the only chance a puffball spore has is to land in exactly the right environment. Basically, the same conditions as the parent plant.”

Then more discussion, with the girls acknowledging that most life doesn't clone itself like that at all, but reproduces sexually. A strategy offering nearly limitless potential for variety. And that with variety comes the chance to flourish in changing circumstances.

“It sounds like what you're really saying,” LaVoy offered, going slowly, looking each girl in the eye, “is that nature loves diversity.”

In the days that followed I watched girls who just the week before were bleeding from the jagged edges of all that had broken in their lives—the addiction and the fear, the violence and
the abuse—staring out past the ponderosa onto the red rock of Capitol Reef, letting out breath, gathering up the pieces. Not unlike Jane, I suppose, out there on those cold November days in 1975, trying to shore up her riddled sense of self, struggling against the thought that not fitting in was a fatal flaw.