The Carry Home (21 page)

THE WILD WE'VE FORGOTTEN

W
hat was it that left America so incredibly eager to eat up the antics of Joe Knowles—the guy who in 1913 stripped down to a G-string and ran off to live for two months as a wild man? What cravings launched a land-preservation movement the likes of which the world had never seen, creating a flurry of outdoor youth groups from coast to coast, from the Sons of Daniel Boone to the Boy Pioneers? Igniting a profusion of school gardens, and stoking into full-blown holiday status a celebration started in the 1890s called Bird Day, uncannily similar to today's Earth Day?

Beyond the Puritans, who mostly saw the devil behind every tree, a lot of newcomers arriving to the continent in the 1600s rushed into wild America with open arms, mythologizing it at every turn. Part of their enthusiasm had to do with a renaissance going on in both Europe and Great Britain, a casting off of a church-driven orthodoxy that had held nature at arm's length, making it malicious and malevolent for a thousand years. For centuries the Catholic Church had offered a loosely woven tale about earth having been created in a kind of smooth symmetry, what was sometimes called a “mundane egg.” Then humans sinned, the story went, the flood came, and when the water receded again, there were all sorts of irregular landforms—crumpled mountains, rugged coastlines. All of which were said to serve as reminders that humans are inherently evil.

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, fresh air had started to blow across the Western world. It came from poets like Milton and Denham. And from science, too, where guys like Galileo were making all kinds of fascinating discoveries about the natural world (including the fact that there were mountains on the moon, which left pundits wondering why God would plant reminders of our evil natures in places where no one could even see them). For many merchants and traders, coming to North America felt like crawling out into the bright sunlight, after having spent a very long time in a dimly lit cave.

French trappers, for instance, traded story images with nearby tribes the way beads got swapped for beaver pelts. The newcomers routinely borrowed pieces of indigenous creation
stories, especially those with mysterious nature spirits, weaving them into hybrid tales of their own. Early in the nineteenth century, poet Rodman Drake penned a long verse called
The Culprit Fay
, said to be the first great work of American literature—a work
American Monthly Magazine
called “one of the most exquisite productions in the English language.” The tale was crafted around the Iroquois “Pukwudgies,” or little vanishers, setting them against a curious mix of Arthurian legend and Celtic mysticism.

And that was just the beginning. By the mid-1700s, wild nature was being called “the great equalizer,” a homage to the fact that it handed out its blessings and risks equally, no matter the money in your pocket or the blue in your blood. Which explains why nature was the stewpot of choice for gathering symbols of an emerging democracy. In one of the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War, off the coast of Maine, the townspeople of Machias took off after a British Navy crew commandeering a shipload of pine, chased it down, captured it, decorated it with pine boughs, and called it Liberty. We Americans pretty much always saw ourselves in terms of nature—plastering it on our state flags, stamping it into our coins, sewing it across panels of the quilts we pulled over us to keep warm at night.

Some predicted the United States would produce more artists, more creative people of every stripe, simply because we were spending so much time rubbing elbows with the woods. Later, nineteenth-century superstar pundit Henry George told his readers that “The free, independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness
that have marked our people are not causes, but results. They have sprung from unfenced land. Public domain has given a consciousness of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been a wellspring of hope even to those who have never thought of taking refuge upon it.” Never mind if you didn't actually make it to the big wilds. Just knowing they were out there would engender a “consciousness of freedom.”
Scientific American
editor Gerard Peil was still ringing the same bell in the 1950s, claiming the highest value of wilderness was to “remind us of a just society.”

There'd also been a deep, abiding grassroots movement in the country to link unfettered landscapes to spirituality. The Hudson River School artists—arguably the most influential artistic movement in our history—turned first to the unsullied landscapes of New England and later to the West, promoting the idea that such places allowed nothing less than the direct experience of God.

“We may not go to church as often as our forefathers,” celebrated naturalist John Burroughs said. “But we go to the woods much more.”

This too, then, is where we've come from. Who we are. And no amount of hating wolves or pushing to sell off the public lands by the Sagebrush Rebels, no amount of weary disillusionment or forgetting by the baby boomers, can ever take it away.

THE CARRY HOME

A
t around fourteen I started keeping a record of sorts, a journal, scribbling into spiral notebooks I got for 59¢ at Brite-Way, the same ones our parents bought my brother and me every fall for school. A couple years after Jane died, I pulled them out again. The thing I noticed was one big theme spilling across those narrow-ruled lines—an attempt to shore up this barely controlled passion I had for moving into the bigger world, out into nature. Maybe it was anxious hunger to be gone from the house in the face of the beatings. Or maybe it was some kind of defense against kids who thought me strange, poking fun at me in the school newspaper for this great plan I'd blabbed to
someone about riding my bike 1,500 miles to the mountains of Colorado. I had a primal knot in my stomach whenever I read some line like Thoreau's “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” or Oliver Wendell Holmes talking about “those that never sing, but die with all their music in them.” I missed no chance to add my own thoughts on the topic, writing insipid little poems, like this one, penned at fourteen with a blue ballpoint:

       
The old man's eyes were tearful
,

       
As he journeyed back the years

       
A once hopeful life now silenced, from decades filled with fears
.

       
The island that he sailed for, is the same we all must reach
,

       
But in the journey lies the treasure, and not upon the beach
.

I wrote lots of pep talks to myself. And most curious of all is that so much of that encouragement held the feeling that at some point in the future, I would find myself lost. I'd be in great need of ferocious trust. “Never lose sight of this fire!” I wrote. And “The passion will save you!”

And sure enough, that last week of May in 2005, when our Old Town canoe flipped in the Kopka and Jane was gone forever, much of my passion went with her, to the bottom of that cold river. For a long time I was pretty sure I'd never trust again. But things were beginning to stir. Back home again from that canoe trip with Doug to the Thelon River, I was seeing things again: Canada geese dropping onto the waters of Rock Creek after a thousand miles of flying. Thousand-pound moose easing through
the aspen trees without a sound. Life was flashing again—fresh, coming and going on the in-betweens.

O
NE DAY IN
M
ARCH 2009,
I
WAS TEN MILES UP THE CANYON AT
a certain mountain spring we locals are especially fond of—beside the tiny flow pipe, I tipped a metal cup to my lips and swallowed the frost of it. Standing there, smelling conifer sap in the air, thinking really of nothing at all, I was suddenly struck by a thought that the time had come to make the final two scatterings. Furthermore, that they'd consist of a single trek by foot: walking just over sixty miles from the front door of my house into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, where I'd make the first scattering at a favorite alpine lake, and then on for forty miles more, for the final ceremony, in a spectacular valley in the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park. The certainty of that idea, the way it arrived fully formed in my mind, points to a curious quality of grief journeys. The initial shock and terror of losing Jane were followed by a sense of the world being completely shattered, busted to pieces. Coming back to life required a kind of reassembly. Which was a task that took a good deal more focus, more attention, than I tended to give to daily life. In that attentive state, free of distractions, I got quiet enough to hear my intuition. And more often than not, it was remarkably reliable.

I drove home from the spring, pulled out the appropriate topo maps, spread them out on the dining room table, started
figuring the route. The journey would start with a sharp ascent, climbing more than five thousand feet to Line Creek Plateau, and from there head southeast for two days toward the high, wild edges of northwest Wyoming. That part of the trek, at least, would be a carbon copy of a 140-mile hike I had made to write
Hawks Rest
, living for three months in what geographers consider the most remote location in the lower 48. On that journey I'd left my front door with sixty-eight-year-old LaVoy Tolbert, the former education director at the wilderness therapy program I'd written about.

Lavoy and I departed just a couple months after Jane had called it quits at both Outward Bound and the Park Service, trading in her backpack and ranger duds to help start the fresh food café in Red Lodge. After a decade being away six months a year, either on the trail or in Yellowstone, she wanted to spend time closer to home. Yet for all her enthusiasm—and for Jane, enthusiasm was never in short supply—it was anything but easy to go from earning a living in some of the wildest places in America to showing up each day at a restaurant at five in the morning to serve cage-free eggs. Plain and simple, she was missing wild country. To quench her thirst, she decided to come along with LaVoy and me for a while, joining us for four days of our eleven-day walk to Hawks Rest, hiking with us for about sixty miles, from the Clarks Fork Valley to Yellowstone Lake.

We'd crossed a remote stream called Papoose Creek, and shortly afterward the trail began to braid, winding up the canyon across increasingly steep slopes of crumbling soil, finally
petering out altogether. From then on we had to make our way west by means of spotty elk trails, steering toward a saddle at the east edge of the national park, some three miles away. In time, though, even the elk trails deteriorated, most washed away by floods, leaving us to head upstream along high, steep banks of loose volcanic soil, capped by rugged cliffs. LaVoy and I decided to stay lower down, moving ahead like a couple of over-the-hill Tarzans, literally swinging forward in the worst places by grabbing onto branches of lodgepole pines. Jane, meanwhile, sought a route higher up the slope. Halfway across she found herself trapped, stuck high above the creek on a two-inch ledge of rock. Unable to move in either direction, she freed herself of her pack, letting it slide down the slope into a downed log, where I scrambled to retrieve it.

No sooner had I reached the pack when out of the corner of my eye, I caught sight of her sliding down the hill at terrific speed, careening toward a giant fallen log spiked its entire length with stout, broken branches. I lunged to catch her, but there was no time. By some miracle, her slide ended in one of the very few spots on the trunk free of broken branches; there were cuts on her hands and arms, a nasty bruise on her thigh, but nothing worse. We were all shaken, knowing full well she'd nearly suffered a serious, even fatal puncture wound. She stood for a while by the creek, alone, running it all through her head, being hard on herself. She could've waded the creek or gone higher, onto the more solid footing of the upper cliffs.

When we finally got to Boot Jack Gap that night, we were
exhausted. Over dinner, the sour taste of Jane's slide almost washed away, she turned philosophical.

“I just figured out why it's so important for me to be out here again,” she told us. “I need to feel vulnerable.”

She said her life had become safe, and as far as she was concerned, her best days had always been at the edge of her comfort zone. Not that she thought the accident was a good thing. But it pushed her across a threshold of sorts. It left her with an intense sense of presence. The kind she used to tell me was a part of feeling alive.