A Clearing in the Wild (27 page)

Sometimes, while Christian traveled to the surrounding towns and while Andrew slept, I’d make my way into the stand of trees, grand fir and Sitka spruce and red cedar. I learned their names. Beneath them, I found the ground soft, but not as muddy as along the meadow trails. I could hear the rain drip on leaves, push through needles, falling soft as teardrops on the forest floor. I’d find a place to sit beneath tree-falls, what Christian said the men called the large trunks pushed over by winds or age against another, or caught up in tangled branches, sometimes crisscrossing narrow trails like sticks set to build a giant fire. I
found respite in the cluster of these trees, in knowing I had a warm, dry place to return to. I prayed that Christian would find his mission here, close to Steilacoom.

A couple of the scouts went south into Oregon Territory seeking sites, but in early spring they returned, and at a meeting I was allowed to attend, they shared their news. Christian told them he’d talked to men from the Pacific coastlands who knew of a place with wide river bottoms rich for planting. Nearby, timber waited to be harvested for buildings. The logs offered pilings for shipment to San Francisco, and with the Bethel Colony bringing grist stones, there’d be water for a mill.

“Isolation, too,” he told them.

“When do we go then, to see this land?” Hans asked.

“April. When the rain stops and the trails are not so bogged down in mud and the fallen trees are more easily crossed.”

“We take axes then,” John said.

Christian nodded. “And saws. Ropes. Those are our tools.”

“When I look at these trees,” Michael Sr. said, “I wonder how many days it will take us to cut one down or try to split it.”

“When we find the right place,” Christian said, “all will fall into place.”

“We’ve looked at lots of land,” Adam Knight said. I heard annoyance in his voice.

“We must all agree on the place,” Christian said. “So far, each of us finds some fault with what we see.”

“These coastlands you hear about, are they like Ezra Meeker’s lands?”

“More isolated,” Christian said. “Unlike Steilacoom.” He looked at me. “We must not let the demands of the world encroach upon us. Here things are too easily purchased, life made too simple so we forget what we’re about.”

“Are you sure enough of the coastal site’s potential that we could
send men back now?” Adam Schuele said. “We’ve seen the terrain. Those south have too. Could we return to help prepare the rest? We’ll be three, four months getting back. That would make it July when we arrive in Missouri.”

“It’s too late for them to come out this year, and the longer you stay, the more houses we can build. If you go back in August, there will be time to prepare the Bethel Colony for departure next spring.”

“We could agree to meet here, then, in Steilacoom, and send word for you to come and get us.” This from Joe Knight. I liked this plan. Perhaps I could remain here, too, until the larger colony arrived.

“You think you’d be one to go back?” his brother said with just a hint of teasing.

“No,” Christian said, his words cutting off any jesting. “We must find the place together and all feel it is worthy before any return to Bethel. That way we’ll know that God has chosen the site, not any of us.”

“But not this place?” I interjected.

“No.” All the scouts nodded agreement with my husband. “This is not the place we’re called to.”

I wondered why I felt such a calling here, and yet I was obviously the only one. Why did what I see differ from these men?

“You will have to enjoy your stay here, Emma, for a few more weeks, and then we will all load up, pack what we can carry on our backs and our new mules we’ve purchased. We’ll make a new Bethel.”

I nodded agreement. What more could I do?

When the men left in early June, I took a long walk into the cedar trees, Andrew on my back. I prided myself entering the dense trees and finding my way back. I remembered the tree with the moss patch on it that looked like a long, open wound, or the thick bark that had a design in it that resembled a face. My feet made no sounds in the wet woodland. Pap had made a pair of moccasins for me, much more practical
than slippers, though I could still feel small cones when I stepped on them at the arch of my foot. I crawled under a new blow-down, careful to push Andrew in his board before me, located the game trail again, and this time walked farther than I ever had before. I made sure of my bearings, then continued on, not sure what I was looking for or how I’d know when I found it.

But I did. Deep into the trees I saw a shaft of sunlight making its way through the denseness. I walked toward it, chattering to Andy as I did, until there it was, taking my breath away.

A meadow. A wide, lush prairie filled with white flowers and pink dots of color. Deer nibbled at the tree line, and overhead large birds called out. It smelled earthy and fresh. I turned around and around, arms outstretched. “This is beautiful,” I told Andy. I’d thought this whole country was nothing but trees where rivers cut through them on their way to the sea. All the small towns lick Puget Sound’s shoreline. In all our traveling up the Cowlitz, I hadn’t seen such wide meadows, such vast prairies. I took this discovery as a sign. There were clearings already prepared for us. We needed to pick one of those and not a place where we’d have to bring down tall, massive trees.

“This could be the land we farm and settle on,” I told Andy. It would be the best of both worlds: dark earth easily plowed but isolated and yet close to the sea. And it was right here in a climate we’d already been introduced to, the land that Andy inhaled first. My heart pounded and I sat in the tall grasses, chewed on one long strand that smelled of onion.

I’d been led here, I was sure of it. No matter what the challenge, one just had to keep pushing through dark timbered places, trusting there’d be clearings in the light beyond.

I began my trek back, buoyed by my seeking and discovery, as hopeful as … as
Eve when she first ate of her fruit
.

Something isn’t right. It is hailing inside our tent. White rocks the size of Andy’s fists pelt us. Christian scrambles to repair the torn canvas first, shoving me and Andy toward the back of the lean-to. I lay with my body arched over my son, oddly able to see Christian working frantically as the ice begins to melt and turns to torrents of water filling up our little place, and yet I can see my son beneath me, smiling up. The rain pours down now, and my baby is lifted by the torrent, torn away from me while I grasp, shouting for Christian to stop worrying about the holes in the tent and see what’s happening to his family instead. “Christian, help!” I scream, but my words fall on deaf ears while my son floats beyond my reach. I grope! We’ve camped too close to a river, and now we are a part of. The landscape’s chosen us, picked us out to die. Now we’re in a craft, a small troubling craft taking on water. I know we have to go under the water to get where we need to be. “Christian, do you know how to get there safely?” He shouts back, “No! I don’t have a compass.” Andrew cries, and I feel pain in my shoulders.

“No compass? No compass?”

“Emma, you will wake the others.”

I opened my eyes, gasping. My husband is arched over me. “You have bad dreams,
ja?
”

My body shook while I reached for Andy, held him close to my chest, slowing my breathing. Then I came fully awake to a storm wailing
around us. Wind mostly, not rain. What sounded like hail on top of our canvas tent must’ve been branches and needles torn loose. Puffs of wind pushed the walls of the tent out like a bloated frog, then sucked them back in. We heard roars like the steam engine at Shelbina. “The trees …?”

“This is an odd storm for August,” Christian told me. “The man, Swan, said the weather stayed mild through the summer. High winds didn’t come before October maybe. I think we’ll be all right.” I couldn’t stop shaking from the dream. I kept kissing Andy’s forehead, and then I remembered Opal, the goat. “Is the goat still tethered?” I asked. Maybe that’s what the dream meant, that I’d lose my son because the food he needed had torn loose in the night. Or maybe it meant we didn’t really know where we were going, and the weight of this journey would sink us in the end.

The goat bleated then, and Christian lit a lantern, though the wind blew out the light as soon as he opened the flap. “
Verdammt!
” he said, the first curse I’d ever heard from my husband’s mouth.

“I find her, Emma. Don’t worry,” and with that he stepped out into the darkness.

I rocked my son, back and forth. Christian had discounted my grand prairie plan; instead, he and the scouts went west and found what they said was the perfect place. We’d said our good-byes to Steilacoom ten days before, now here we were, in the densest of forests.

Opal’s bleating came closer, and then as though the Lord Himself acted as shepherd that night, the goat nearly ran Christian over, pushing back into the tent. It shook its tail of the wet and the wind, its little bell tinkling.

Christian relit the lantern. “I need to make a casing for this light,” he said. “To keep the wind from having its way with the oil.”

“We need a shelter,” I said. “A casing for us. A real home with
walls.” I stroked the goat with one hand, rocking Andy on my knees. He slept now, and I marveled at his comfort in the midst of chaos. “We’ll need a root cellar to hide in if these kinds of storms happen often.”

“I tell you, they won’t. This is a freak storm, Emma. Don’t worry now. Where we go, this will not be so bad. Swan’s been here three years. He says the climate is mild not hostile. We’ll be all right, and see, the goat finds its own way to safety.”

I gripped the goat’s rope collar with its tiny bell still dangling from it. “We’ll have to hold his collar as his rope’s been torn,” I said.

“
Ja
,” Christian said. “I’ll hold him until daylight, when we can salvage the tether and then move on. “It will be well. You’ll see. The place we chose is perfect.”

I felt powerless to calm the rush of wind which, as I listened to it, probably wasn’t any worse than a rainstorm in Missouri. The dream had heightened my fright.

I held tight to Christian’s words. The scouts’ unanimity of choice gave me comfort. How could every last scout—save one, me—favor the landscape unless God Himself had spoken to their hearts?

“You rest now,
Liebchen
. With sunlight, the day will be better. We are almost home.”

He patted my knee and lay back down under the tarp. He fell instantly asleep, leaving me to grab for the gray goat’s collar before it bolted out of the tent opening. It bleated until I spoke to it of the home I imagined in my mind, the words like prayers taking me through the darkness and residue of dreams into a morning calm.

My husband was right. Sunlight made life better.

I stepped outside to see little had changed in the landscape. I saw timbers split and felled months before like some giant hand had flicked its fingers against the forest. Tall firs leaned against others still standing;
more crashed to the ground, their root balls like crones’ hands struggling out of forest graves. I squinted. The root balls looked old. The trees that leaned against each other already had moss growing where they met. These trees hadn’t blown down in the past night’s storm. They’d been down a long time; I just hadn’t noticed them when we’d made our evening camp.

“See how the Lord looked over us,” my husband said, standing behind me. “Everyone slept well.” We watched as the Knights and Michael Sr. and the Stauffers moved from their tents. The only real damage was a tarp with a tear that John Genger set about repairing with the paraffin he carried with him, but I remembered that tear had been there before, too.

I filled Andy’s tin cup, fortunately only partway as he batted my hand and whined, letting me know he wanted to do it himself. We spilled less when I’d fed him through the fingertip of a leather glove. I’d poked a hole in the glove to manage the flow. He slapped at my wrist as he reached for it. It had been nearly a year since I’d fallen on that wrist, and still at times it shot pains through my arm. Our son, however, didn’t notice. I wondered if every mother experienced pain as we stretched to learn new things, to do things by ourselves. Maybe pain rode before a lesson.

We set out again carrying large packs on our backs as well as on our mules. I carried Andy on my back and walked, draping a bag of items hung by a rope over my shoulders and around my neck. I tugged at the goat, too, as we followed what Christian said was the trail the scouts had cut through this land earlier that spring. I did see evidence of their chopping, but even in the short time since they’d been through here, young shrubs and vines won back the trail. Trees newly fallen across it made us have to choose to either take a day to chop and saw the trees to make an opening or try to go around and make a different trail.

Would we find such signs of effort where we headed? Would one log consume a day to get it where we needed? We’d built brick houses in Bethel. I saw no evidence of material for such here. I couldn’t imagine how the wagons coming out from Bethel would make it through here, but I didn’t say a word. The scouts chose this. Even practical John Genger and the wise Adam Schuele claimed that God had chosen this site for them all. They could see through these tree-falls and a landscape so big we were all ants in a field of grasses pushing our way through.

Ferns shot up from the forest soil, their fronds edged with tiny dots that looked like perfect black knots of thread. They reminded me of stitching, and I wondered if I’d ever have time for such pleasant needlework again.

This landscape was such a contrast to the meadow outside of Steilacoom that was so open, so easily plowed. But Christian had not even walked there with me, saying he’d been all around, and nothing in that area appealed until this place we were heading to.

Rustling sounds in the distance made the goat pull back on her tether. “Bears,” Christian said over his shoulder.

I looked around for bears as I followed him.
A new danger
.