The Carry Home (24 page)

T
OM
, B
RIAN, AND
I
REACHED
B
ECKER
L
AKE THE MORNING
of the fourth day, having lost time when I tried an alternate route I'd heard about but couldn't find. After a night of cold and nearly constant rain—the only such weather of the trip—the wind rounded to the west and the sun broke free. As we topped a small rise at the south end of Becker, the scene took our breath away. The lake shimmered with the deep blue of glacier water, while the shore was dappled with a loose toss of conifers. Beyond the far end, at last within easy reach, was Lone Mountain—the peak we'd been staring at hour after hour on our first two days of walking, high above the Rock Creek Valley. At the best campsite was a yellow tent, which I recognized as belonging to my old friends Kent and his wife Diane. I tossed a loud whistle down the rocks, and with binoculars saw them turn and finally spot us, waving their arms overhead. Their dog Buckley was quicker on the draw. Sensing
an important mission, he was already heading toward us at a fast gallop, anxious to herd us home.

T
HE SCATTERING HAPPENED MID-AFTERNOON, JUST AS A TATTERED
sheet of overcast sky pulled apart into clusters of gray-bellied clouds floating through the summer blue. The air smelled of pine and sedge and lake water. We were an eclectic lot: an attorney and his wife, a restaurateur, a retired ranger and his wife, a fellow writer and a judge—all glad to have come for the friend they'd lost, as well as for the one who still remained.

This ceremony was the first done with other people present, as would be the last one, in Yellowstone. It wasn't that I didn't know the power of community: I'd seen it time and again, both in the months following Jane's death, but also years before—how friends, even new friends, really can in times of tragedy take a share of the burden and, in doing so, stem the bleeding of loneliness.

I'd done the first scatterings by myself because those journeys were about me claiming an intimate gift: the chance to go to wilderness on Jane's behalf. By remembering what the Sawtooths and the Wood River and the slickrock country had done for each of us, I was able to begin moving from the feeling that I'd been cheated to a recognition that nothing could take away the life we'd shared. With that gratitude, I began to discern the stepping-stones through grief. The first three scatterings had been about recovery. These last two were about celebration.

We sat in a circle under the arms of an old Engelmann spruce, and I asked if anyone had any Jane stories to share. Janet told of sipping champagne with her in the outback under the stars on New Year's Eve—a memory plucked from one of the many ski treks we'd made with her and Rand, pulling sleds filled with cheeses and game hens and wild rice and cream sauces. She said she still talked to Jane, had long conversations, especially in summer, on her almost-daily walks into the backcountry. Diane said she missed the sight of Jane skiing the two miles from our house into town at ungodly hours of the morning, on her way to work at the café.

As the stories unfolded, some of us cried. But we cried with smiles on our faces. Even all those years after the wreck on the Kopka, Jane's life was binding us to one another. Seven different versions of a good love.

As for me, I decided to tell a story. My favorite story, passed to me years ago by an Ojibwa elder in Minnesota. Since Jane's death, hardly a week passes that I don't think of it.

It was a long time ago in the land of trees. Spirit Woman had given birth to human twins. Now as it happened, it fell to the animal people to care for these babies, and they were committed to the task—doting on them, eager to meet their every need. Bear warmed them through the wee hours by hugging them to her hairy chest. Then each morning at dawn, Beaver came along, taking the babies from Bear and carrying them to the shore of a nearby lake, where she dipped
them in the water and then set them out in the meadow in the sun to dry
.

Then it was Dog's turn. Dog took his job more seriously than anyone. When flies came along and pestered the babies, Dog snapped at them to chase them away. When the twins were cranky, out of sorts with colic, he nuzzled their bellies with his cold, wet nose and made them laugh. If that didn't work, he jumped into the air and did all manner of clever tricks. Deer gave them milk throughout the day. At night the birds sang them to sleep
.

But something wasn't right. And one morning Bear got up the courage to say something about it. “We feed them and care for them like our own,” she said. “But still they don't stand. They don't run and play.” Everyone knew exactly what she was talking about. “Okay,” said Dog, already making a plan. “Nanabush, the son of the West Wind, is coming tomorrow. He's smart. He'll know what to do.”

Sure enough, the next day, Nanabush did come. Because Nanabush always comes when the animal people need him. He studied the babies out in the meadow, all the while listening, nodding his head as the animal people explained the problem. First of all, he finally told them, you've done a good job taking care of these human babies
.

“I think maybe you did too good of a job. The young of any creature don't grow by having everything done for them. They grow by reaching, by struggling for what they want.”

But as smart as Nanabush was, he was clueless about how to fix it. So as he'd done countless times in the past, he readied himself for a long journey west, to a certain high peak he knew about—maybe it was right here in the Beartooths—to ask the Great Spirit what to do
.

Nanabush left the land of the trees and began the long trek across the prairie, reaching that certain mountain after weeks of hard travel. With no small effort he climbed to the summit, and there summoned Great Spirit. And Great Spirit came. Because Great Spirit always comes when Nanabush calls. After explaining the predicament, Nanabush was told to start scouring the summit of that great mountain for a certain kind of colorful, sparkling stone. “Gather every one of them into a big pile, right here,” Great Spirit said. It was a huge job. But Nanabush had been around long enough to know there was no use trying to bargain for something easier. He started collecting, day after day after day, until finally there was an enormous pile made up of every last one of the colored stones
.

But what was he supposed to do next? Hour after hour he sat there hoping for some further instruction from Great Spirit. But no word came. Finally, out of boredom, Nanabush began tossing the stones into the air, first one at a time, then big handfuls. He invented games. He learned to juggle. Then one morning, as the sun was poking above the east horizon, he grabbed a big handful of the stones and tossed them high into the air. Only this time, they didn't come down again. This
time they changed, turning from stones into the most beautiful winged creatures Nanabush had ever seen. They were the world's first butterflies
.

Now he knew what he needed to do. He worked his way down the mountain and began the long trip back across the prairie, the whole time surrounded by a flashing, fluttering blanket of butterflies. When he finally got back to the land of the trees, back to the babies, the twins looked up from the grass and were overjoyed. Their arms went up toward the sky, and they were trying their best to catch the butterflies in their chubby hands. Of course that's no way to catch a butterfly. Pretty soon they started crawling after them. A few more weeks passed, and they were on their feet, still reaching, still trying. In time they were walking. And then not so long after that, they were running through the woods and across the meadows, trying to catch even one of those beautiful winged creatures
.

And that, say the Ojibwa, is how butterflies taught children to walk
.

I told my friends how before I left the storyteller's cottage, she'd put her hand on my shoulder and said that if I told the tale, I should understand something: that her people don't keep it alive because they need to be reminded not to give their children everything they want.

“We pretty much get that,” she told me. “We tell the story when we get stuck. When we fall into sadness or anger or lose
hope. The story tells us to first heal our relationship with beauty—that beauty will help us start moving again.”

When the circle came to an end, when no one had anything more to say, I offered up the silver spoon and the pottery jar, inviting everyone to take part in the scattering of ashes. Each person took the spoon and walked away, disappearing for a time, searching with great care—for the right view, the perfect cast of granite, a certain strength of breeze. Plucking metaphors in the quest for a perfect final resting place for their friend. The only one I actually saw was Diane, standing fifty feet above the shore on a narrow perch of granite; I caught sight of her just in time to see her let loose her measure of ashes, watched them float east and then north, toward the heart of the Beartooths, before finally disappearing.

Mine were cast along the lake, over a patch of cherry-colored monkey flowers. During our summer forays in the high country, monkey flowers were always with us, wrapping alpine streams and lakeshores with ribbons of pink and yellow and scarlet—first in the Sawtooths of Idaho, then up and down the Rockies from New Mexico to Montana. A brilliant little flower thriving in the harshest of climates, a plant that botanical healers have long used to treat sadness and depression, claiming it brings joy to troubled hearts.

RESCUE

T
he next morning, three members of our group packed up and headed for home; the rest of us moved north. Janet and Rand were planning to carry on with us for the next three days, covering a portion of the remaining sixty miles to Yellowstone, parting company at the western edge of the Beartooths. The weather continued to improve, finally exhaling into one of those perfect days in the mountains that leave you wanting for nothing. It began what would be the finest weather of the summer.

From Becker on, I was finally, fully back in the mountains. The great German philosopher Friedrich Schiller was right to claim—as Jane too liked to say—that people are only completely
human when they play. And playing is something I'd done precious little of in the past few years. But now I was playing. Rand, who has a long history of wandering this country, was busy taking stock of things: noting the size of the snowfields at Jasper Lake compared to when he had seen them just two years earlier, calculating the likely geological composition of a high ridge flashing in the afternoon light. Janet, meanwhile, was simply grinning. Smiling at the feel of a warm breeze at nine thousand feet, smiling at the scent of the bluebell and monkey flower gardens that wrapped every stream.

But in mid-afternoon, the talk turned melancholy. The permanent snowfields and glaciers we'd come to know in this area over the years were disappearing, and fast. More significant still, on the high ridges to the south we could see old familiar tufts of whitebark pine, huddled like old women telling stories—no longer green, though, instead turning brown. Dying due to infestations of pine bark beetles, an insect able to survive at these upper elevations thanks to warming temperatures—part of the biggest insect blight ever to hit North America. One that'll probably wipe out the whitebark of greater Yellowstone in the next twenty years.

The Clark's nutcrackers of the region had used these trees for centuries, each bird burying as many as twenty thousand seeds in shallow caches to feed on through the winter. What's more, the tree's nuts remain among the most important foods for grizzly bears; during years of abundant seed crops, a bear may get half her calories from them. It was even more troubling that these
grizzly meals were disappearing at exactly the same time another one—spawning cutthroat trout—was dwindling too, the result of the region's streams being blown dry by drought.

I knew then that I was going to miss the whitebarks. Even the kindest months in this country can bring great fits of sleet and hail and snow; on more than one occasion I'd found myself with only one refuge, under the branches of those silvery-barked conifers. Even John Muir, famous for climbing hundred-foot-high Douglas fir trees during windstorms for the chance at a sway ride, found himself on plenty of occasions on his belly under whitebark, peering out through their ropy branches at some outburst of raging weather in the high Sierras.

Beyond gratitude at being able to play again, then, that glum reality was also part of our trek to Yellowstone: the feeling of life shifting, unraveling before it reassembled into something new. Of course the snowfields and the whitebark were only the beginning. The little pika, or rock rabbit, which in summer cuts and dries piles of grass on the high-elevation flats of boulder piles—sometimes enough to fill a bushel basket—was seeing his usual summer crops taken over by less nutritional plants, ones more able to thrive in this warming climate. Soon the pika, too, will disappear from here. Meanwhile to the southwest of where we were walking, on the northern range of the national park, the wet places were drying out—taking with them the Columbia spotted frog. The blotched tiger salamander. The boreal chorus frog.