Authors: Kim Barnes
In the Wilderness
In consideration of their privacy, the names of some of the people appearing in this text have been changed.
An earlier version of Chapter Four was originally published in
The Georgia Review
.
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people without whose support I would never have found my way back: Mary Clearman Blew, who shared with me her vision; Claire Davis and Dennis Held, who offered friendship no matter the season; and Robert Johnson, upon whose quiet belief and confidence I could always depend. Thanks to Robert Wrigley for seeing me through; it is my hope that our children—Philip, Jordan and Jace—will add to this story their own. I would also like to thank Keith and Shirley Browning, Margaret Bremer, Ripley Schemm, Annick Smith, Bill Kittredge, Judy Blunt, Julia Watson, Dee McNamer, Renée Wayne Golden, Bruce Tracy, and all the others who offered their encouragement and direction. Thanks, too, to the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the PEN/Jerard Fund.
I am also grateful to those who have dedicated their time to uncovering and retelling much of the local history, which might otherwise have been lost. Among many upon whose knowledge and research I depended were Lalia Boone, Cort Conley, Ladd Hamilton, Louise Shadduck, Ralph Space, Sandra Taylor, and Johnny Johnson.
In attempting to acknowledge the inevitable disparities between my recollection and that of those who might tell this story otherwise, I recall a line attributed to Barbara Kingsolver: “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.”
For my husband, Robert Wrigley,
my saving grace
In memory of Nan,
whose wisdom and courage
continue to sustain me
And for my parents
Willows never forget how it feels
to be young
.
Do you remember where you came from?
Gravel remembers
.
Even the upper end of the river
believes in the ocean
.
Exactly at midnight
yesterday sighs away
.
What I believe is,
all animals have one soul
.
Over the land they love
they crisscross forever
.
—W
ILLIAM
S
TAFFORD
“C
LIMBING
A
LONG THE
R
IVER
”
Until the spirit be poured
upon us from on high, and the wilderness
be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field
be counted for a forest. Then
judgment shall dwell in the wilderness…
.
—I
SAIAH
32:15,16
HAPTER
O
NE
Past the Clearwater Timber Protection Association and the “Fire Danger” board, across the creek and before the dump, the small house squatted in a pocket of red fir and pine, not visible from the road. The locals called the hollow Dogpatch. The Joneses lived nearby, and Gerty Buck and her son, who owned a motorcycle, and someone else across the way who had two German shepherds chained to a clothesline. The dogs were the first things my younger brother, Greg, and I saw when we stepped off the bus after school. They barked ferociously, racing back and forth between the two T-shaped poles, until we disappeared down the steep path leading past the woodshed and root cellar to a small piece of flat ground surrounded by trees.
Beside our house, painted the same umber red as other
shacks built by local loggers on company land, flowed the spring, and from its constant source we took our water. Each day the train, pulling its load of logs, ran the route from Headquarters to the mill at Lewiston and back, and my brother and I, feeling the tremor of its coming before we heard the engine’s rumble, ran to the rear of the house and through the trees to wave at the brakeman and engineer. When not in school, we filled our days exploring the near woods, digging after ground squirrels, amassing piles of found treasure: feathers blue as river water, bones of deer, old buckets and chains, nests stitched through with colorful bits of moss.
A narrow footbridge crossed the spring to the path leading to the outhouse. Several years before his death, one of my great-uncles, Ed Swanson, had added a small bathroom off the kitchen, but the pipes froze in winter and clogged in summer. The outdoor privy seemed familiar, made comfortable by a tightly closing door and a genuine toilet seat. Behind the outhouse the trees grew dense, and the little building seemed the last safe place before the forest closed in. It was a corner boundary for my brother and me—home base for hide-and-seek, our secret meeting place where we could be hidden from our mothers eyes.
On the other side of the spring, the root cellar squatted deep in the bank beneath its cowl of sod. It had begun its service as a bomb shelter, dug out in one day by Uncle Ed during the Cuban missile crisis. I cannot imagine why the shy Swede believed Castro might target him and his family deep in the wilds of Idaho, but his panic and furious excavating became the stuff of family legend. He leveled the dirt floor, built the walls and roof of rough-cut cedar and hung a door so heavy the hinges shrieked when it opened. He filled the shelter with tins of food and brown Purex bottles of water. Finally,
he cut a hole in one wall and added a large crank air vent. It reminded me of the meat grinder my mother used to make sausage, and when my brother and I together turned the handle the wind sang in fresh and cold.
By the time we came to live in the hollow, the shelter had become a catchall for old clothes and empty boxes. We hauled case after case of pop bottles over the hill to Headquarters, pulling our wagon along the one-mile stretch of road, stopping each time a logging truck geared for the rise. When we gave a high, imaginary tug, the driver let loose a brawling blast from his air horn and we’d howl with pleasure. In Headquarters, the store saved its outdated comic books, covers torn away, in a pile behind the fishing gear. With the dimes from our turned-in bottles we could each head home with two comics and a chocolate cone, our wagon rattling empty behind us.
Across the track was the dump with its brown corked bottles, the bits of metal and porcelain we carried home like booty. The deer bed was there, fragrant grass crushed beneath an overhanging branch of yellow pine. We would lie down and smell the musk, pick tufts of hair from the needles, imagine the warmth of a fawn nestled tight in the curve of its mother’s flank. We hunted the grouse that roosted near the house. Sometimes my brother and I would find them huddled in the woodshed. “Fool hens!” we’d shout, pumping our pellet guns, shooting them near the shed, where their wings beat against the metal siding.
We fished no matter the season, first testing our luck in the shallow spring, then in Reeds Creek, cutting through the meadow a half mile south. We knew each shadowed pool and the fish that stilled themselves there: many times we jerked them free of the water, only to see them sail from our hooks like silvery kites. Always, we knew, they would return to their
favorite bend, where grasses hung down and fat grasshoppers fell.
The meadow spread out from the creek on either side, a marsh, really, spongy and thick with cattails. Deer fed at its edges and once, just as the big rainbow I had caught and lost five times before gave in to my patience and took the worm I let drift one last time by its hole, from the corner of my eye I saw the ground shift and settle. In a nesting of dry fern lay a fawn, curled against itself and nearly invisible. The rod jumped in my hands but I could not look from that spot. I was afraid the shape might disappear, my sight might deceive me, though the fawn huddled so close I might cast my line across its dappled back. As still as it was I could see the body tremble, the nostrils flare with the scent of me.
I knew I’d lost the fish. The tension in the line was gone, and the rod no longer quivered as though it held life of its own. I backed away, looking up the trail toward home only after I had lost the white spots and dark eyes to the tall grasses. There was a secret there, more mysterious than the fish sleeping without air in beds of gravel. I wanted it to stay.
I remember the late autumn evening my brother did not come home, the snow beginning to fall, my mother standing in the yard, hands cupped to her mouth, his name echoing back, all the love and fear in her voice repeated again and again. We knew better than to try and find him in the dark and could only wait, shivering in the cold, for my father to come home.
I think of us there, a woman of twenty-nine, a girl of eleven, both imagining a life without this other—son, brother—both believing that the one who could save him would arrive at any moment, bringing with him his strength and sense of the woods. My father, we believed, might see through the
blackness, his eyes so blue they seemed clairvoyant. We believed he might feel in the air my brother’s lost breath, trace with his fingers the heat left by his body. If only he’d come,
now, now
.
But by the time he came home Greg was stumbling from the trees, clutching the scruff of our dog’s neck, nearly deaf from the cold. He screamed as my mother rubbed his fingers into life, her prayers and scoldings a constant chorus. I stood ready with warmed blankets, feeling outside something dark slip away, taking with it its hunger.
I recall my father’s absence in that place more than his presence, the sound of logging—his saw, the clanking choker—more than the tenor of his voice. So much had changed since the first years of my life spent living in the woods, years when we moved from one logging site to another, my father and uncles hitching our wooden trailers to the backs of self-loaders and surplus jeeps, filling the cars with cardboard boxes, stashing our treasure like gypsies. Those were the years when my parents seemed happy to live hand-to-mouth as long as the hand that held the food, as long as the mouth that received it, was that of the other. I think of their traditional wedding pose—my father eighteen, my mother sixteen—each holding to the other’s lips the sweetly frosted cake.
The year we spent living in the hollow, the year I turned twelve, was the last year we would live in the woods, the last year I would sleep beneath the soft brush of pine against the tin roof, the last year I would remember our family as somehow whole. From that house we would take nothing that did not fit into the trunk of our car and make our final trip down the river road to town.
My life would change in ways I could no more dream than a far-off soldier might imagine an enemy hidden in a shelter beneath the mounded forest floor, or a young girl, fishing the
shallow stream, might for a moment believe a heart other than her own beat in the meadow’s thick grass. Who is that girl, the rod still quivering in her hands, rapturously balanced between two worlds? I sometimes think that if I could go back, follow the driveway down, past the woodshed and out into the meadow, I might find her—I might find what I have lost. Like my brother wandering in the wilderness, I might find home.