The Carry Home

Copyright © 2014 Gary Ferguson

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ferguson, Gary, 1956-

The Carry Home / Gary Ferguson.

pages cm

1.
  
Nature—Psychological aspects. 2.
  
Grief. 3.
  
Bereavement. I. Title.

BF353.5.N37F47 2014

818'.5403—dc23

[B]

2014014428

eBook ISBN 9781619024021

Cover design by Gerilyn Attebery

Interior design by Domini Dragoone

Counterpoint Press

2560 9th St, Ste 318,

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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1

Wild geese fly over head
.

They wrench my heart
.

They were our friends in the old days
.

—Li Ch'ing Chao, translated by Kenneth Rexroth

TABLE OF CONTENTS

A
T
F
IRST

T
OWARD A
S
ETTING
S
UN

T
HE
R
ELICS OF
H
OME

W
ATER TO
S
TONE
, O
NE

H
UNGER
S
EASON

T
HE
F
IRST
G
OODBYE

W
ATER TO
S
TONE
, T
WO

I
N THE
S
WEET
M
IDDLE OF
N
OWHERE

W
ATER TO
S
TONE
, T
HREE

F
LOWERS IN THE
D
UST

T
HANKSGIVING

W
ATER TO
S
TONE
, F
OUR

T
HE
G
REAT
W
IDE
O
PEN

S
LICKROCK
W
ILDERNESS

W
ATER TO
S
TONE
, F
IVE

T
O THE
L
AND OF
B
EAR AND
W
OLF

W
ATER TO
S
TONE
, S
IX

T
HE
W
ILD
W
E'VE
F
ORGOTTEN

T
HE
C
ARRY
H
OME

R
ESCUE

A
T
R
EST IN
Y
ELLOWSTONE

E
PILOGUE

THE CARRY HOME

AT FIRST

T
he end came for Jane, and so for us, at the edge of spring, when the leaves of the north country were washed in that impossible shade of lemonade green. A color she said always reminded her of a certain crayon in the old Crayola 64 boxes she had as a kid—one labeled simply “yellow green”—a clumsy name with no hint of the promise it held, which was like an early thought of summer before summer gets quickened by the sun. I was struck by how easily, how routinely she made such connections, coupling little shards of nature she found as an adult to some encounter when she was young. For her, then, wild country was a way in—a means of inciting the sweet startle of childhood.

Over our twenty-five years together, I came to learn such magic, too.

But with her death on the Kopka River, I was suddenly senseless, trying to remember how it all works. I'd find myself in some early memory of my own, when nature was first nudging my heart. But the memory was brittle, like a great creature gone extinct, surviving only in some museum exhibit—a Javan tiger, an Atlas bear. Something formerly amazing, but now just a stiff swatch of fur propped up behind a pane of glass. And I doubted the world could spin out something so compelling ever again.

W
E WERE BORN AT THE BACK FORTY OF THE BABY BOOM, IN THE
corn and the rust; Jane in the farm country of southern Indiana, me in the blue-collar bricks and smokestacks of the North. Like a million other kids, we ended up squeezing our halcyon days out of loose meanderings through flutters of nature—city parks and stray wood lots, cattail marshes and hedgerows and creek banks. Living spring through fall with wind-tossed hair and dirty feet.

Only later did we come to realize the extent to which we'd been wandering in jagged, reckless times—times when nature was going to ruin. As I was climbing up sugar maples along the sidewalks of South Bend, Indiana, forty-five minutes to the west, near the town of Gary, U.S. Steel was every day dumping seventy-five tons of oil, ammonia, mercury, phenols, and cyanide into the Calumet River. Before long, it started catching fire. Women
living near that river, mostly poor African-American women, were in the 1960s and '70s giving birth to babies deformed by mercury poisoning. Meanwhile their husbands and brothers and fathers and sons were coming home every day from working at the steel plants, stopping in some worn patch of grass outside the back door to spit dark spatters of coke dust.

By 1964 my brother and I could be found knotting hickory sticks into toy boats with pieces of string, then tossing them into lines of ditch water sheeted with DDT. To this day I can recall that certain sweet, heavy tang that hung in the air every spring—the smell of dioxin and phenols—some of it coming from the corn fields around town, more still oozing from the boat channels to the southeast, where we sometimes went swimming. Meanwhile, north of where we lived, at a Dow plant in Midland, Michigan, those same chemicals were being mixed with jet fuel, poured into fifty-five-gallon drums, and shipped to Vietnam as Agent Orange.

Down in the southern part of the state, where Jane lived, nature wasn't faring all that much better. During her senior year of high school, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz arrived at her family's farm, announcing to the Stewarts and their neighbors that the time had come to plant “fence row to fence row.” It would take just two years for the last corners of mystery and modest disorder in that part of rural Indiana—those fabled Midwestern hedgerows, final holdouts for the fox and hooded warbler and raccoon—to all but disappear, plowed under to make way for still more corn and soybeans. One day out with Jane's dad on a slow
drive around the farm, I listened to him tell how the wildlife he'd hunted as a boy to put food on the table had nearly vanished. Turkeys, opossums, game birds. Mostly gone.

“Get big,” Earl Butz said to him in 1973. “Or get out.”

F
OREMOST ON OUR MINDS IN THOSE YEARS WAS THE HOPE
that the last of America's big, unfettered landscapes might help us sustain the openheartedness of youth; that encounters with the wild might yield some measure of light we could use to clarify a path through adulthood. We figured there were still lots of places where such things could happen: in the hickory hills of the Appalachians, or the jack pine of the North Woods. In the ice-blasted granite crags of northern New England, or the big redwoods of the West Coast. And if not there, then surely in the sagebrush deserts and aspen forests, the fast-dancing rivers and wind-blasted peaks of the Rockies.

A lot of our optimism was fed by the fact that, despite the brutal assault on nature going on when we were young—indeed, maybe because of it—there'd come on its heels an unqualified explosion of green reverie. We were eight years old when Congress passed the Wilderness Act—enshrining the hugely radical idea that land had intrinsic worth beyond what humans could extract from it—doing so with a unanimous vote in the Senate and only a single dissent in the House. Six years later, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson unfurled Earth Day, drawing some
twenty million people into the nation's streets and parks to show a little love for the home planet. Soon Richard Nixon would establish the Environmental Protection Agency, and not long afterward, he'd put his signing pen to the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Protection Act.

By the time we entered high school in 1970, the outdoor education movement was exploding, along with hundreds of adventure programs like the National Outdoor Leadership School and Outward Bound. And from Oregon to North Carolina, California to Tennessee, thousands of young back-to-the-landers were running for the hills with copies of the
Whole Earth Catalog
or Bradford Angier's
We Like it Wild
stuffed into their packs, about to run out a stupendously naive, utterly spectacular quest to find some way to live closer to ground. All of it playing against a soundtrack of Canned Heat's “Going Up the Country,” Marvin Gaye, with his melancholy lament for the state of the planet in “Mercy Mercy Me,” Neil Young, droning in that eerie falsetto about mother nature being on the run in the 1970s.