Having Everything Right (15 page)

The road is a frozen river that never thaws.

When I stand on the overpass bridge and look down, I can see how water designed the freeway road. Six lanes follow a canyon water carved, a canyon aimed east, then north toward the Willamette River. On-ramps join the road and thicken it, like generous tributaries in spate. There is a tidal ebb in the commuter rush at dawn downstream toward the city, then noon slack, and then flood-tide dusk, when the lit eyes of the silversides fight their way back up-canyon, sniffing for the exact small pool where they shall spawn. Where north- and southbound lanes divide, an island hides in the road with pines and a deep thicket of blackberry. From above, I can see where drifters have built their campfire and slept on cardboard.

I've found the equivalent of beach-drift on that road bank: lengths of stovewood bounced from a truck, exotic weeds sprung from gravel, skidded ears of corn, greasy wrappers glittering like fish bones. One day I slowed for a great blue heron poised by the median ditch. Birds haunt the road, hawks on posts, starlings billowing. Do high geese follow the freeway north, now that it runs as geographic ribbon brighter than the river? My cousin saw the long column of migrating butterflies flickering above that road, bound south for Mexico. All day, they clogged the grilles of cars.

Driving the freeway south one winter day, I pulled over where a woman stood with her thumb in the wind. She was an old hand at this, I saw at once, as she stepped in front of my Malibu to hold me still while
she checked me out through the windshield. Then she opened the door.

“How far?” she said, wanting the tone of my voice to tell if I was dangerous.

“I'm going to Salem—forty miles.”

“Okay for a start.” She climbed in, sandals on her feet, feathers in her hair. We set out. I waited for the story that is a hitchhiker's ticket. Ten miles passed in silence. As we cruised out over the freeway bridge, crossing the Willamette, she spoke.

“Wow. This river has probably been here a long time.”

“Yeah,” I said. “A while.”

“Do you think,” she said, “it's been here two hundred years?” I studied her face for a smile. None. At Salem, she stepped out without a word.

One fog-night I slept on an island in the river: watersound and cold. I snuggled deep in my bag and dreamed. In my dream was a wizard wearing a five-pronged bronze ring. He called it “the perfect ring of beauty and evil.” Whoever wore the ring could see into another as God sees, could see that soul as a perfect ring—shining, flawed, forgiven. There was dance, set to the pentameter chant of a hunting song that named the animals. It stopped. I struggled for the ring—it was on my finger. I turned to my partner: eyes and hair of a naked soul, luminous hands raised up, her heart wild with pleasure and grief.

Watersound woke me. Dark. I was ready to lie there season by season, to die from my life, or to live as the river lives, to climb with salmon and fall away from that final loving work like rain, to tumble headlong, to flicker away silver with light, powered by moon and sun.

D
ANCING
B
EAR OF THE
S
IUSLAW

Why so many stories about bear? When I was little, my brother came home from summer-camp and told me. They ran a bear down with dogs, he said, shot it, dragged it to camp, skinned it out while a ring of children looked on. A skinned bear looks most like a man, my brother said. He lay there at the hub of their silent circle, the ragged disguise of his blood-matted fur bundled away. He was a man.

That's the heart of it. Bear is our silent partner in the wilderness. In this century of our ways, bear keeps an honesty. Since President Teddy, our children carry small, furry souls to bed. Far from home, I dreamed of the marriage of bear and woman, and I was comforted. The sun was hot, the grass was wet: “Will you be my love today?” she said. “Will you be my love today?” Waking from that was sweet. Something had been
healed. If I lived alone, I believe I would gradually take on the mossy costume of bear, the rank scent and ungainly grace of that dancer standing to sip wind. They tell me that an Eskimo, exiled for education to the state of Washington, tramped into the mountains seeking something to teach him respect. Books had it not, nor wise teachers. The city was tinsel. He sought bear.

When I did oral history in the Siuslaw Valley on the central Oregon coast, bear kept weaseling into stories.

“You know,” said bachelor Charlie Camp, “they used to wrestle bear, down here at the service station in Mapleton. I worked on the railroad, tamping ballast and driving spikes. It was real boring work, but I got used to it, I guess. Night in town was for bear. It was a switch from days. Right there at the north end of the covered bridge they kept him muzzled, with a kind of boxing mittens of rawhide covering his claws. He was chained, too, so he had enough handicap to even things out. These big loggers used to bet heavy they could pin him before the clock ran out. Thing was, he wouldn't stand. If he'd stand, they could usually knock him down. But he'd hunch tight and they rode him, then he'd roll and the boys would really squall.”

Crickets chirped in Charlie's house, and a log truck thundered past. The clock worked a while in solitude. “A few guys beat him, but a lot got broken bones. That bear learned to get a turn of his chain around a guy's body, and then he won every time. So they decided to turn him loose inside the garage for a night match. That bear steamed in his pen, and when the first challenger stepped up, they pulled the trap door open. Trouble was, he'd lost all fear of man. Went on a rampage and right away the lights got knocked out and everybody went to growling and clubbing each other on the fur-top thinking it was bear. Somebody got the door open, and he was gone. They found a mitten down by the cannery but never saw the bear again. A little afterward, we got a movie theater, and had little socials and things. Somehow, nothing was quite fun like bear.”

Charlie glanced out the window at his pet cow. A tire hung from a maple tree for the cow to scratch its back on. Inside, gray underwear festooned the furniture.

“I'm a bachelor,” he said, “and I live like a bachelor.”

Another old-timer down the road, Dan Miles, trapped his first bear when he was eight. The trap itself was so big, he couldn't carry it alone. Bear lard, he said, made the best pie crust in the world. He remembered skinning out bear in the fall with fat so thick you could bury your hand in it, and he still kept a jar of the finer grease to keep rust off his saws.

“I chased a swing donkey one winter,” he said, “when we had a pole-road up in that Luckiamute country. Pole-road's a chute for running logs down off a hill into water. You fasten two big logs on the sides, and two little ones in the trough—run that chute half a mile down the slope sometimes. Lay your logs in at the top and they skid the trough clean to the river.

“There was a man—I guess it was the truth, because he brought a whole lot of his crew down and they all claimed it—said they shot a bear with one of them logs. It was when they had their lunch down at the foot of their pole-road. And that old bear knew to come around after lunch to clean up the scraps. That's when they always managed to leave enough scraps for the bear. Well, they get up top, and they turn in these whole bunch of toots on the whistle, so that bear could know to get out of the way. That bear started across the foot of the pole-road just as they turn in this whole bunch of toots. Thought he could make her across, but he never made her. That log went through just like a bullet.

“And sometimes the logs went so fast they had to drive marlin spikes in the trough to slow them down. Logs ran so fast, the shavings flew twenty feet high, chiseling out of the heads of them spikes.”

Dan eased back and was done. I didn't have to believe. I knew the story was true, we got such a quiet joy from it. His wife came in from making applesauce.

“That's not right,” she said. “Tell about your schooling.” But he would not. His first wife had been killed by a logging truck. Her first husband died falling from a spar tree. They had married within the week of both events, being well in the habit of living with someone.

“Got so damn lonely,” as Dan said. Friends complained, but they two knew how it was. Death helps tell you how to live.

Another logger killed a sow bear by the bad luck of falling a tree on her. Bucking out the log, he found her sprawled under it, and twin cubs burrowing in to suckle her still. This made him think of his own daughter. He carried the cubs home, wrapped warm in the skin of their mother. One died, one lived chained in the yard. That logger's daughter was the natural envy of her friends, until the bear began to grow. That's the old story then, some wild maturity the world can't handle. That morning came when her bear hugged her hard, would not let go, she screamed, her mother came with an iron frying pan and killed the bear with one blow.

Bear stories always seem to be about two things, about bear and a partner. It may be a dream partner of some meaning. For Charlie, bear was counterpart to the sheer boredom of railroad work. For Dan, bear was partner to the marvel of traveling logs. For the logger, cub was brother to his daughter. The brotherhood of bear and self came most clearly from the mouth of Martin Christensen, trapper at eighty-three on Tsiltcoos Lake.

“I used to hunt bear too,” he said. “Killed my share. But once, you know how the old loggers left stumps fifteen, twenty foot high? They'd springboard up, and saw clean through. Left that kinky wood in the butt-swell stand, and just hauled the straight trunk to the mill. They came back later and harvested the stumps, once they figured how to use them. Anyway, I used to sit up on one of them stumps where I could see along a bear trail, and I'd wait. At berry time, bear walks almost drunk, rambling in a fog of his own pleasure. That's the time to kill them, I thought. Kill 'em happy, fat. Fellow has a family, kids. You get to thinking that way.

“Foggy morning early, I was sitting on my stump. My hunting buddy had gone on into the swamp to a stand of his own. Just a pinch of sun came through, and I sat still, with my gun cradled across my knees. I'd seen bear sign all along that run—pretty open ground for a hundred yards each way. You know, hunting's like prayer when you live it right. You get to expect something so strong, it comes to you. And I just expected that bear out through a young stand of hemlock. He came ambling down the trail to me, dew on his ears, salal on his mind. He'd have been humming if he was a man.

“Up on my stump, I was a good fifteen foot off the ground, and that baffled my scent. When the bear came close he found something in the wind and stood up. First he turned slow to look back down the trail. Then he swiveled around, his eyes squinted shut to give his nose more play, kissing the wind and blowing steam. I hadn't moved, but he found me, sitting high as a damn totem pole. He opened his eyes and we looked at each other. The sun burned through, and his face fur glistened. I knew I ought to raise my gun and shoot him. He knew he ought to drop and run. But we held. We held there. I was looking into something. I was looking into the face of a man. Maybe he saw bear in me, bear with a little stink of gunmetal. He finally eased down and went on. Fog closed in behind him. When I heard a shot from way off in the swamp, I felt a chill to my back as if that bullet grazed me.

“I been hunting a lot of years. I still trap some. But my days hunting bear, they're done.”

When the Indians were mostly gone from the Siuslaw, bear became the truest local citizen. When bear dwindled, pioneers come too late had to invent Sasquatch to act that necessary part of the wild one. Charlie, Dan, Martin had no need for Sasquatch. Bear was the mask of their own souls got loose in the woods. The lore of Sasquatch is thin gruel to the hot old food of bear stories. One night someone brought a Sasquatch
movie to the Siuslaw. We crowded the school gym, hoping to be terrified, but the film made us laugh. It was all a dark blur of underexposed night shots—faces glittering with sweat by the flicker-light of campfires as something screamed from the forest and actors tried to act afraid.

True bear stories are otherwise. A true story rises irrepressible from the place itself. I learned this from a book and from a mouth. I can't remember the face around the mouth, or the name of the teller. Only the story the book brought back to mind. First, the book, a linguist's text:
Siuslawan
, the fortieth volume in the
Handbook of American Indian Languages
.

In March of 1911, Leo Frachtenberg, a student of Franz Boas, came to the Oregon coast to study the language of the Siuslaw Indians. He didn't go to the Siuslaw Valley itself, where Charlie and Dan and Martin lived then young, because most of the original tribe had been moved north to the Siletz Reservation. As Frachtenberg reports, “besides the four individuals who served as my informants [at Siletz], and the two or three Siuslaw Indians said to be living near Florence, Lane County, there are no other members living; and since these people no longer converse in their native tongue, the Siuslaw family may be looked upon as an extinct linguistic stock.” At Siletz, Frachtenberg laboriously wrote out two original texts from the speaking of Louisa Smith, an old woman nearly deaf. One is an invocation for rain. The other is the story of the dancing bear of the Siuslaw.

It begins, in Frachtenberg's literal translation, “Long ago. Very bad long ago world. Everywhere thus it started long ago. A bad person was devouring them. Grizzly Bear was devouring them long ago. When a man went out hunting, he would kill and devour him. People came together and desired to fix his disposition, to kill him always.”

Since this bear could not be killed with arrows, the people decided to invite him to dance. While he danced, they might kill him. If he would dance until fatigue felled him, he might be killed. They sent a
messenger to invite him, but he would not come without a gift. A gift is a promise. They promised a knife. The shrewd messenger said to him, “You are my relative. Why don't you want to go?”

“I am wise, that's why I don't want to go. It seems to me I am simply wanted there to be killed. That's why I am wise.” But at last Bear said, “All right, I will go. I don't care, even if I die.”

At the dancing, he was still suspicious. The people crowded around him with promises: “Friend, don't sleep. We will play. Don't sleep, O friend! Not for that purpose we asked you to come.” But Bear grew sleepy, sitting by the great fire to watch the dancing.

“Don't sleep. Look on! For that purpose we invited you. We have abandoned all our hatred.” They said, “Move away from the fire, you may get burned!”

But Grizzly Bear said, “Leave me alone. I intend to sleep a while.”

Then a man stood over Grizzly Bear and took hold of the burning pitch. Bear lay sleeping.

“Better pour it into his mouth!” And as Grizzly Bear burned, the people danced. As he died, smoke rose.

“Here the story ends,” said Louisa Smith. “If Grizzly Bear had not been killed, this would have been a very bad place. Thus that man was killed. Such was the custom of people living long ago. Here at last it ends.”

In the city library, I was a hundred miles and seventy years from Siletz. But under the hum of fluorescent light, tasting the words of Louisa in my mouth—
sqak wàn smîtu
, “here it ends”—I danced with the people and died with Bear. The smoke of that death bit thick. I reached out for those few Siuslaw people Frachtenberg never met, the remnants of that tribe the old settlers of Florence had told me about.

A white woman nearly slain with senility had said to me, “Oh, Indians, yes. I remember old Indian Dan, Indian Jeff. We named our dogs Dan and Jeff. They were wonderful dogs.” The casual wander of the feeble mind had this terror to it: their story is done, as mine is nearly done.

But then in the library, I had to wonder if it really ends.
Sqak wàn smîtu?
Like Martin Christensen, I waited on a stump to know. Like the bear, I looked toward light with dim eyes. I remembered another story from the mouth whose name I could not remember. It was a story told about the people who drove Louisa Smith and her tribe from home ground. It was a story rising irrepressible from that ground. It went like this: