The Carry Home (20 page)

After forty years traveling by canoe, Hall had his systems down: packing, portaging, cooking, setting up camp. He declined every one of our offers to help with chores—not because we were guests, but because after four decades of outfitting, he knew damn well it took less energy to do things himself. Which left us just one task we could pour our team spirit into—portaging. And in that we shined. Everyone tackled the job with gusto, hauling canoes and paddles and heavy Duluth packs out of one watershed and into the next, sometimes a mile or more away, one trip over and back and then another, then still another. Maybe because he'd had plenty of guests who were all too happy to leave the heavy lifting to him, on most days he complimented us on a job well done. It left us feeling like little kids who'd just pleased the teacher.

On the first afternoon, as we were going through the dry run of setting up the tents he'd supplied, Doug and I managed to break a framing pole. Right away we got panicked looks on our faces, wondering which one of us would draw the short straw and go confess. I lost. Later in the day, when food bags were being handed out to individual boats, we got the heaviest one of all, which we named “the pig.” Each of the bags was numbered according to which one was opened on a particular day, and the pig had the highest number of all. Which meant we'd
be portaging it every day until the end of the trip. We told each other it wasn't any sort of punishment for busting the tent pole. Just a sign of how tough Alex thought we were.

During one of our walkabouts outside camp, I happened to hear Alex and Monte Hummel talking about cloudberries, a ground fruit found only on the world's northern tundra. Monte thought it tasted like a cross between a strawberry and an apricot, talking about it with that dreamy look people have when they're recalling the best meal of their lives. “There could be a few left,” Alex said, then he described what to look for. “But it's probably too late in the year.”

From that day on I became consumed by thoughts of finding cloudberries. Tasting cloudberries. Though I looked every day, at every lunch stop and at every camp, I couldn't find even one. And I started thinking I'd have to come back just for this.

I
'D WONDERED MANY TIMES WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO SLIP
into a canoe and start paddling again. The feel of my fingers around the shaft of the paddle, the smell of lake water—would all that be a comfort or a trigger, hurtling me back to that awful morning on the Kopka? Maybe because I was doing it with a good friend, maybe because of the wild thrum of the north country, maybe because I knew Jane would want me here, it felt exactly right. Like the unclenching of fists after a bout of anger, like a long, slow exhale. We started on open water stirred by a mild
breeze, which kept noodling soothing rhythms of waves against the hull. Doug and I chatted as we paddled, speculating about the weather, pulling out binoculars every few minutes, pointing them toward distant sharp-shinned hawks and Arctic terns and horned grebes and eiders and canvasbacks and buffleheads.

The second day ushered in an unbroken string of foul weather, wind and cold and heavy rain across most of eleven days, drearier than even Alex Hall had ever seen. At one point, at the edge of an enormous lake, our group ended up huddled on a high promontory against a ferocious wind, maps splattered across the rocks, trying to gauge whether we could make a safe crossing on a big stretch of water churning with whitecaps. In the end we decided to go for it, hugging the shore hour after hour, all the while buckets of cold spray piling over the bow of the boat and wetting my face and hands. Even then, as well as under every leaden sky still to come, I was more deeply content than I'd been in a long while. I missed Jane. Wished she were there with me on that cold water, afloat in that boundless world. But there were no flashbacks of the Kopka. No thought that I shouldn't be paddling again, no wish to be anywhere else. I couldn't know if Jane was somehow privy to the touch and smell and throttle of that rain and wind, as those old Aboriginal stories suggested. What mattered is that I'd taken the chance to offer it. By imagining that I was opening up for her benefit, giving her access to smell and sound and taste and feeling, what I'd done was allow my own reentry into the physical world.

As was true years before, on the Hood River, the evenings
were priceless—most of them spent along some beautiful stretch of sand esker—massive blond dunes that stretch across much of the Far North. After setting up our tent, Doug and I would split from the group for an hour or so, measure out our allotted drams of the Scotch we'd packed in, fire up cigars, and talk. Talk about being with Jane on the Hood River. About how early on, Doug had taught her to chew tobacco—and how to his astonishment she had gone with it, sharing pinches of Skoal with him down a hundred miles of river. We talked about how she liked to get up early in the morning and pass out strong coffee. How at the end of the trip we'd all stripped off our clothes and run nearly naked into the cold waters of the Arctic Sound.

During one such conversation, far out on the water, began the first of what became many days of loon song. I told Doug that for me, the bird was forever linked to the Kopka. I told how, not long after Jane's death, still baffled by the pair of loons appearing on the flush pond below the rapids—overcome by the message “beautiful” and “goodbye”—I started poking through stories told of the birds by the Ojibwa people residing in that part of Canada. They describe them as couriers between earth and the hereafter, assigned the job of passing messages between the living and the dead. What I didn't say is that now, whenever one lets loose in the northern twilight, when a pair starts trading yodels across the cold waters of some unnamed lake, I listen with all my might. But there are no more messages. Just the usual wild cacophony—that strange, rolling peal of crying and laughing.

O
UR FINAL CAMP OF THE TRIP WAS A SUN-SPLASHED EVENING
along the edge of an enormous sand esker, uncurling into lake water the color of the tropics. Everyone joined Alex on a long ramble across the tundra, looking for a certain wolf den he knew about, then climbing the high ridges and glassing for caribou. In mid-afternoon a small herd of musk oxen appeared in a draw some two miles away, and the group decided to hike over for a closer look.

Doug and I made a circuitous amble back to camp, there settling in for a long nap on the thick mats of caribou lichen that blanketed the spruce forest. All day long I'd been noticing how odd the plant growth is in the Barren Lands. The same basic species that in Montana or Colorado are spread across thousands of vertical feet, on the tundra get squeezed into a few yards. Here we could stand in a moist, lush pocket of heather, and in three steps up a tiny rise find ourselves in a world populated by lichens, the undisputed masters of earth's driest lands.

Then, close to camp, I saw it: the fabled cloudberry. Though a little past prime, the fruits—roughly the color of peach jam—were still swollen with juice. I popped a couple in my mouth. There it was, the promised nectar of strawberries and apricots. With the sky washed in the final breath of summer, once again Doug and I split from the group, poured our final drams of Scotch, and talked of big things. I told him about those old story prompts: beauty, community, and mystery. Also about how
the kids in wilderness therapy, knowing nothing about any of that, listed the very same things as part of what allowed them to finally kick heroin, quit stealing, stop cutting themselves. It had been beauty, community, and mystery that opened them to the really important things in their lives—things that had been stuck inside, desperate to come out.

“So look,” he said. “What if society's moving too fast? What if we're too distracted for any of that—the beauty and the mystery?”

Then he took his last swallow of Scotch, snubbed out his cigar in the sand.

“And if we've really forgotten, what could make us remember?”

WATER TO STONE, SIX

T
he memorial service was held on June 10, three days after the surgery on my broken leg, in the Catholic church in Red Lodge. Other than the Civic Center, it was the building in town that held the most people. I lurched through the side door of the church on my crutches, my brother at my side—him looking nervous, as if he thought I was about to do a head plant. Inside the sanctuary, some six hundred people were waiting, friends and family from all over the country. The mere sight of them started me blubbering.

I'd asked for room in the service for people to tell stories, and they came in good measure. Funny tales. Lovely ones, too.
When it was my turn, I explained how Jane often remarked that when it came her time to go, she hoped the end would come in a wild place, doing what she loved. And so it did. Somehow though, I said, I imagined the end being decades away. Maybe with her as an old woman out on some last camping trip, snugged in a down bag, staring out the door flap of the tent into a sky riddled with stars.

I told them too about how a week before the accident, on a lonely highway in southern Canada, in the middle of a game we sometimes played where we tried to imagine what it would be like to live in other places, Jane had said finding another community no longer seemed an option. “I couldn't quit the people.”

Two musician friends agreed to sing a song for the service. It was Judy Collins's “Since You've Asked”—the tune I first played for her driving through the Sawtooth Valley in my '64 Pontiac Tempest, and later, the one I had that musician play for her in Michigan, on the day I asked her to marry me.

The Red Lodge Fire Department, which included most of Jane's fellow EMT and search-and-rescue workers, had parked their biggest fire truck outside the church, the ladder raised in tribute. Near the end of the service the dispatcher issued a so-called “final page”—an honor given to those who have died in the line of duty, or who have made significant contributions to the community.

The radio crackled: “Red Lodge Fire and Rescue, Dispatch.” Then a few long seconds of quiet, a gentle woosh of static.

“This is a final page for Jane Ferguson. She died in the
wilderness, doing what she loved. Her dedication and compassion for her fellow citizens will not soon be forgotten.”

And then, “Dispatch clear.” For about a minute afterward it was completely quiet; the whole place seemed ready to collapse into sobs.

Jane's brother Tom had an idea to give away young trees to the mourners. So after returning from Canada we contacted the state nursery in Missoula, bought 350 little blue spruce trees, then handed them out to people as they left the church. Even now I'm stopped on the sidewalk once or twice a month by someone wanting to update me on the current height and general well-being of their “Jane tree.” One of her search-and-rescue partners, on moving to a new house two years after her death, dug up his Jane tree and replanted it in the yard of his new home. Another friend looked me up in December 2011, eager to tell me that his Jane tree was finally big enough to hold a string of Christmas lights.

Long before the accident, Jane wrote in her will that on her death, she wanted a party. So after the service, several hundred of us walked the five blocks from the Catholic church to the backyard of the café. The local brewer was there with his beer trailer, and for the next several hours people from all over the country spilled into the gardens with glasses of ale, talking and laughing and crying, telling story after story, a lot of them ones I'd never heard. I tried hard to hold on to those stories, wanting so badly to remember. But most of them lingered just for a minute or two, then slipped away on the June breeze.