The Carry Home (10 page)

“Here were these hippies and old-timers all mixed together,” he said. “I'd never seen that before.” It took about a week to replace the water pump on his van. He finally rolled out of town seven years later.

Stanley, too, was that kind of place.

There were few televisions in the Sawtooths. No private phones or computers or movie houses or bowling alleys or game rooms. By night, Jane and I were either out in the backcountry or in bars drinking Rainier and dancing to a stereo blaring out Hot Tuna and New Riders of the Purple Sage. On days off, we floated the river or, more often, hiked the mountains. We came to know each other at three miles an hour. Up Slate Creek, or across Railroad Ridge in one week, off to Baron and Alice and Twin lakes the next. We listened to each other's stories about home. And at every turn, we confessed a need to forge a life that would keep wild ground always underfoot.

I
T WAS EARLY AFTERNOON WHEN
I
PARKED THE VAN AT
I
RON
Creek and brought out a small, chocolate-brown earthen vase, maybe six inches by four with a ceramic cap, hand-thrown years ago by a friend who's an amateur potter. Into that I spooned a
measure of Jane's ashes from the wooden box, taped the lid shut, slipped it into the top of my loaded backpack, and began to walk. From the dirt parking area, the trail rose toward a granite basin hidden in the high peaks—the first place in the wilderness the two of us ever visited together. That time, there was ice still floating in the lake, and Jane dared me to jump in. Which of course I had to do. Which of course left her obliged to follow suit.

But now my trek was playing out to a soundtrack of red squirrels and Clark's nutcrackers, flitting and chattering and squawking, frantic to build storehouses of pine seed for the coming winter. A whitetail doe spooked from a patch of fireweed, breaking the limbs off a fallen tree as she disappeared into the forest. By the time I reached the lake, though, after nearly two hours of steady climbing, the world had gone strangely quiet, no buzz or chirp or scurry. I sat on the shore for a while, thinking about early mornings with Jane still asleep in the tent, catching brook trout for her from these very waters and frying them up with grits and eggs. At one point I'd told her this was one of the places I wanted my ashes scattered, too.

The lake was just like I remembered it. A jewel.

On two sides, steep walls of broken granite rose eight hundred feet from great piles of talus—places too raw and unsettled to support much in the way of life other than patches of lichen, the occasional clump of fireweed. But on the other shorelines were clusters of lodgepole pine, straight and handsome, the toes of their roots curling through thin soil just a few feet from the water's edge. Where the forest opened, patches of brown grass
fluttered, along with the dried stalks of what a few weeks ago were gardens of wildflower blooms. And from those gardens came the voices of two streams: the inlet to the lake, arriving in big cartwheels out of the jumbles of rock, then the outlet on the other side, harder to hear, in less of a hurry, easing over a loose scatter of stones and then on through thick mats of sedge and rush and horsetail.

I'd never scattered a loved one's ashes before. And in the long minutes before actually doing it, there seemed a clatter of meaning and uncertainty greater than any heart could bear. In one minute my breath was running ragged, heaving up sobs every time I had the thought that this would be it, the final proof she was gone forever. Never again would her fingers touch my shoulder. No more embrace. No more rolls of laughter. No more smell of campfire smoke in her long brown hair.

But beyond the sadness, I was frightened, too, aware that while I was seeing and hearing and smelling the lake and the grass and the trees, I had no real comprehension of them. No joy, no story. Like a man waking up without memory or understanding, unable to differentiate a smile from a frown, an embrace from a slap, a laugh from a cry for help.

And yet every now and then I broke free, climbing above the sadness and the fear to become ennobled—by the five-hundred-mile drive, by this walk into the high mountains, supremely honored that it was I who'd been chosen to carry out this precious woman's last request. It was in one of those times, with that particular feeling on the rise, that I slipped into the jar a silver serving
spoon from my late mother's one treasure—a table setting given her on the day of her wedding by the aunt who finally agreed to raise her when she was orphaned at thirteen—and stepped to the very edge of the lake. Then it began. The sight of a fine mist of ash floating in slow motion down the shore, across the fireweed, and finally brushing the cold cheek of the lake. Also, the faint sounds of a patter of tiny bone chips hitting the water and fluttering through the shallows, shards of oyster white, disappearing at last against an embroidery of granite stones. The sun was a gift, warm on my face. And yet there was an old, familiar sadness too, knowing the winds of October were on their way—soon to churn the waters of the lake, soon to fasten the water with a layer of ice that would last all the way to the following June.

A friend in southern Utah has for years managed great comfort from the thought that on his own death and cremation, the molecules of his body will be released, taken up by hundreds of other life forms. “That's immortality, brother!” he once told me. On the shore of that lake, I wanted to believe I could see it too. Maybe next spring, some infinitesimal iota of Jane's ashes would be taken by a freshwater shrimp, snapped up a week later to become the fin of a brook trout. Then maybe the trout would get plucked from the water, becoming the feather of an osprey; the osprey passing too in time, and with its demise that same jot of matter washing down Iron Creek to the Salmon River and on to the Pacific. And maybe in some autumn far away the same molecule would rise as rain, drifting eastward in the belly of a cumulous cloud until the Sawtooths pushed it up and cooled it
into snow. There it would rest until the following summer, when the June sun would melt it, sending it tumbling back into the belly of the lake.

Hydrogen and oxygen, fueling the alchemy of forever.

Despite my best efforts, though, it would be a long time until any of that brought comfort, when I could see as beautiful the fact that hidden within the passage of Jane's remains were the forces of life itself. For the time being, that was little more than background. Like gravity, or the sunrise, or a thousand other things going on without me.

Just as I finished the scattering, a perfect feather the color of cottonwood bark drifted down, shed by a Clark's nutcracker circling overhead.

“Is that you, Jane?” Which brought an immediate response from the bird—the usual squawking, like an old lady who smokes too much, clearing her throat.

I lifted my head and called back. “I miss you. A lot.”

WATER TO STONE, TWO

I
stumble with my broken leg up to the rim of the cliff ledge that brackets the rapids, some forty feet above the river. Looking until my eyes ache, yelling her name into the roar of the rapids. Twice I step on what seems like solid ground only to fall through carpets of moss—once slipping over the lip of the cliff, grabbing the branches of a small conifer to haul myself up again. Of course the busted leg isn't much use. But the pain isn't registering. It takes me nearly an hour to make the two hundred yards to the point where we flipped and then back again. As usual we've made a safety plan, this time with the guy shuttling our van. If he doesn't get our telephone call by nine tonight, he'll
alert the authorities. But it's ten thirty in the morning. And I'm not about to wait ten hours for help.

Then, a kind of switch gets thrown. My mind suddenly goes totally, fiercely rational. At one point I start thinking something's wrong with me because I can't connect any more with the panic that's been rumbling in my gut since the wreck. Back at the flush pond I tie up the canoe—so if Jane shows up, she'll know I'm okay—grab a bottle of water and a couple of energy bars, a white plastic bag to signal for help. I splint the broken leg with a straight piece of balsam wood and two Velcro straps, fashion a crude crutch out of a paddle, and begin the three-mile trek out. But the entire landscape is blocked by chest-high downed timber. So mostly I crawl.

I'm 150 yards along when all of a sudden two loons back at the flush pond begin making the strangest, most outrageous commotion—a cacophony of titter and echo so far beyond the usual loon delirium it stops me in my tracks. Shreds all my rational thinking. For reasons I can't begin to fathom, I spin around on the makeshift crutch and hobble back, feeling all over again the muddle of dread and hope and terror.

It's hard to express what happens at the pond. The two loons are there, sitting together on the upstream side of the flat water near the foot of the rapids. At my approach they go silent. Leaning on the paddle, I'm suddenly overwhelmed by two ideas, two images. Not thoughts—not like whispers overheard in another room. Something deeper, speaking not to the ears, but to the bones. A second or two later I shut it
out, muster all my energy against it. The message is lovely beyond imagining, heartbreaking beyond belief. The message is “Beautiful. Goodbye.”

IN THE SWEET MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

W
ith Jane's death, I decided to cancel almost everything, at least for a few months—speaking and teaching events, writing projects. During my entire career, choosing subject matter to write about was easy; the whole world, especially the wild world, was like a candy shop, with far more threads to follow than there was time for following. But all that was driven by a sense of wonder. And for now the wonder was out of reach. Not that nature was absent. On most any given day, certainly back here in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, all I had to do was open my eyes to see it everywhere. But it was hard to feel the mystery of
those wild places. I could see some of the brilliant ways things functioned here, sense the overwhelming complexity of it all. But none of that carried enough heat to spark the poet fire.

At the same time, the world at large seemed irascible, edgy. In August, more than 1,800 people died in Hurricane Katrina—the disaster putting a spotlight on an even bigger disaster, having to do with being poor and black in America. Car bombs were going off all over Iraq. Arnold Schwarzenegger was grating his veto pen across a same-sex marriage act. The Environmental Protection Agency was caught blacklisting scientists said to pose threats to pro-business ideology.

Closer to home, the first wolf hunts were getting under way. Not satisfied dispatching the animals with bullets, some politicians were pushing to allow the use of poison gas for killing wolf pups in their dens. Others, not so well versed in the Constitution, called for the nullification of the federal Endangered Species Act. And despite the fact that in all of North America only two people had been killed by wolves in over 150 years, Oregon politicians were rallying the troops for an outright war, calling it “a battle for the safety of our families and communities.” So it was good to be back in Stanley for a while. In part to escape, I suppose. But also, hopefully, to wake up.

After the first scattering, I'd planned to spend the night in the backcountry. Instead, I walked out. After a summer in a cast, I felt like moving, pushing through the discomfort of my broken foot twisting and turning and finally swelling against the trail, opting for pain over the damnable numbness. Then again, maybe
it was just too hard to be out in the wilds, when the wilds seemed so much less than they'd been the year before.

So I drove out Valley Creek, instead, to the meadows where we were married. Some sixty people had come for the wedding, two-thirds of them friends and family from faraway places, standing among the flowers and staring open-mouthed at the snow-covered peaks jutting into the June sky. Jane's five-year-old niece, Vanessa, was the flower girl, stealing the show prancing around the meadow in her pink dress, filling out her bouquet by plucking camas and sego lilies and buttercups and shooting stars. Jane's father, meanwhile, seemed remarkably happy to find cow patties lying in the grass; we guessed they reminded him of his beloved Angus cattle, back home in Indiana.

I'd intended to ask Gilman for his daughter's hand in marriage all proper like, but I never got the chance. On getting out of the car in their driveway for the first time, Jane swanned over to her parents, gave them big hugs, and by way of introductions told them, “Mom and Dad, this is Gary. He's asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

I stammered and blushed like a Hoosier tomato.