In the Wilderness

by Kim Barnes

  No matter how carefully I step over twigs and loose rock, my presence is betrayed by the thud of my boots, the crack of dry limbs echoing through the quiet. A raven flies before us, calling its disgruntled warning. I watch its blackness against the sky and see the head pivot to follow our movement. He knows something we don’t, I think. I think that ravens are our attendants through the forest—dusky harbingers, impartial jurors, marking our progress, patient as fate.

  I see my father’s back, the straight shoulders, the way he moves: in the swing of his legs the hint of a swagger. I sense the rhythm of his stride and begin to hear its song, its smooth cadence. I bring the rifle around to rest behind my neck and drape my arms across its barrel and stock, like a woman carrying water.

  Only a few miles into our hike and already I want to stop for a drink of tea. I want to rest. I try to discern the hour by the muted light of clouds. I hum out ragged bits of old songs—“Going to the Chapel of Love” and “I’ll Fly Away” and something by Bobby Goldsboro.

  My father’s sudden stop startles me. I nearly run, thinking we’ve surprised a cougar or bear. He points to me, freezes me in my tracks, motions me to his side. My eyes follow his to a dense jumble of slash and tall brush.

  Even with his direction, at first I cannot see the light-dappled back of a deer, motionless in the frosted undergrowth. My father’s hand is a brushstroke through air as he silently traces the hidden head and legs. I nod, finally able to see the doe where she stands fluid as mercury.

  I step back to give him room, but he shakes his head. He has given me the shot. I should be grateful, but instead I feel patronized, instantly aware of his expectation, his judgment of my every motion. This will be his test of me, his way of making me prove up. The action, which normally comes easy—snug the butt of the rifle tight against your shoulder, elbow up and out—seems awkward as I lay my cheek to the stock. The deer raises its head and I think she has sensed us, but she dips again, browsing in fern and the shriveled leaves of mullen.

  I aim for the killing spot, just behind the shoulder, a point at which I know the bullet might puncture the lungs or pierce the heart, but now I’m not sure I want to kill the doe. We’re not here for meat; we’re here because a daughter and her father can speak to each other only in a code made up of action and reaction. The forest, the trail, the deer are backdrop and props for the little war we wage, and if only a few hours ago I believed our outing an innocuous attempt at reconciliation, I feel our roles settling upon us: the powerful father, the willful daughter, each intent on gaining some edge over the other, even here, in the wilderness, in this ritual of blood.

  The shot echoes across the ridge. I lever in another cartridge and aim again, waiting for leaves to move, for shadows to separate. What I see is the deer’s white flag of a tail disappear into the thick undergrowth. I turn to my father pulling smoke deep into his lungs. He looks at me above the still-lit match and raises one eyebrow. I glance at my brother, who is studying his boots.

  Before I can protest, my father turns and moves away. Greg shrugs his shoulders and follows him. I want to tell them I meant to miss, or that anyone can miss a shot. I think, Quit walking, listen, but the distance between us lengthens until I fall far behind.

  I hate my weakening legs, my slow finger against the trigger. I hate the doe, who believed us trees solidly planted in the bank, and I hate that I made of her some symbol of resistance. I think I might hate the man in front of me, my father, who carries his burden so easily, as if it were nothing, the rifle slung over his shoulder. I wonder what he is thinking, and as has always been the case between my father and me, I think he can discern the reason for my every action. He wanted me to shoot the deer, and because he wanted me to, I wouldn’t. But it was you who started it—I want to say—you’re the one who insisted I take the shot It wasn’t a gift, it was a test, a trial.

  By the time we crest the ridge, I’m somewhere between tears and fury, both unacceptable shows of emotion. I swear silently that I’ll never subject myself to this again. My father slows, then stops. He pulls a cigarette from his pocket with two fingers, lights it, scans the ridge. I long for a cigarette of my own, but I cannot imagine smoking in front of my father. I kick mud from my boots, glad for the moment’s rest, already planning a hot bath when I get back to my apartment, where I can be free of my father’s reckoning.

  He turns his gaze on me. “Now,” he says, “you lead.”

  For a moment I feel between us the steel-blue shock of recognition: he is the father, I, the daughter. His job is to teach, mine to be taught. No matter how many years pass, no matter what conciliatory gestures I make, nothing will change. I look to my brother, who shakes his head and looks away.

  I hate this, this lesson.

  It was I who had thought to save him, to rescue him from his television and easy chair, to remind him of the life he had left behind. I wanted him to remember what his life was like before his all-night runs hauling wood chips from one mill to another; before his stride of open country turned to the cramped steps of a man shuffling from bed to table, from the door of his house to the door of his truck, between the close boundaries of manicured hedges, back and forth, cutting the same swath so it might be watered and grow to be cut again.

  But now it is I who must walk for hours toward what I think might be our beginning. The men follow me, my father half-smiling, my brother wary and observant, knowing that he might be called upon to take my place. If there are deer, I do not see them. The air darkens. How long will he let this go on? “Learning the hard way,” he’d say, “makes them remember.”

  What I learn is this: I am lost, and he will not lead me out.

  We could walk for miles, spend the night shivering in our clothes beside a fire of pine branches, more smoke than warmth. He’d let us, I think, just to prove …

  I want to spit my anger at him. I want to cry and sink to the ground. I want him to gather me up in the circle of his arms and carry me to a place of comfort, as he did when I was a child. I stop, close my eyes, take a deep breath: “I don’t know where we are,” I say.

  He settles onto a log and unwraps a chocolate bar, breaks it into thirds. I crouch on my heels, unwilling to give in to exhaustion, to let him see me beaten. Greg walks a little ways off to pee, an excuse, I think, to give us all the room he can. My own bladder is full, but I can’t bear the thought of fighting my way off the trail and into the brush to gain the privacy I would need to squat.

  “You haven’t been watching,” my father says. “The treadmarks on the road run a certain way. Notice that.”

  I nod, tired beyond remembering. I let the chocolate melt on my tongue. He crosses his legs and points, his cigarette deep in the V between two fingers.

  “See the ridge? That tallest snag? Tamarack. Been there long as I can remember.” The dusky horizon seems a solid wash of trees, none distinguishable from the other.

  “You look down too much. You’ve got to see it all, forward, backward, sides. You get lost in here, it’ll be a long time before someone finds you.”

  You could, I think, but I keep my eyes on the blank sky and say nothing.

  “You won’t always have the sun, or even stars. You have to make your own map. Memorize it.” He rises, unhurried, lifts the Winchester to his shoulder and begins to walk us out.

  • • •

  In the late heat of August, I stand with my mother at her kitchen window, watching my father mowing their lawn. He is nearly sixty now and paces himself, pausing to pull a cigarette from his pocket before pushing toward the next turn. My mother worries about his heart, but I still believe he could march for miles. When he stops to empty the bag, he sees me and nods, the distance between us only a few yards—a distance we still cannot cross.

  I think of that hunting trip, the dark way back, without horizon, without stars, the bead of my father’s cigarette our only light, his face luminously floating. I could barely lift my feet as I shuffled through downed limbs and stumbled over rocks
, yet he moved through the night as though his life depended on silence. I wonder if he would remember the walk out as I do, those places where he slowed so that we might rest: beside the antler-stripped alder; along the bank of a creek rimed with ice; beneath the drapery of a single cedar missed by the sawyer or left to seed, a tree so large the tips of our fingers would not touch had we measured its girth. During the silent drive home, the road a dark ribbon unfurling before us, we drank the still-warm tea, sweetest at the last. If he had touched me then, reached across and patted my knee or squeezed my arm, the wall between us might have fallen, his rigid authority and my bitterness dissolve into the shared and necessary experience of the elder and his charge. I might have come away from that trek in the wilderness believing my father’s instruction a map I could follow. I might have believed the hand that held fire could heal any wound.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  One early spring day in 1971, a year after our move from the woods to Lewiston, my great-aunt Edith pulled her new Buick into my grandmother’s driveway. I stood waiting on the porch in the short-sleeved blouse and pedal-pushers Nan had bought me, feeling shy at the bareness of my skin.

  We were going a few miles upriver, to Spalding, where I had often seen the Nez Perce boys climbing the bridge to get to the high, arching top from which they’d make their graceful dives. This outing, however, was not to watch the divers but to witness the end of the log drive on the Clearwater River.

  Every spring for forty-three years the loggers and mill-hands who worked for Potlatch had gathered at the headwaters of the North Fork to begin the arduous task of running herd on the logs as they were pushed into the river. In the early years, an extensive network of wooden flumes carried the logs, but new equipment and roads had replaced the primitive system. The operation had come to include motor-powered boats and a floating cook shack and bunkhouse called the wanigan, but the work—the snagging and gathering of the mill-bound timber, the dynamiting of water-soaked deadheads—belonged to the men willing to risk their lives for the adventure if not for the company.

  They worked in their calked boots and woollies topped by canvas, stepping catlike across islands of logs nested tight in the eddies. The dangers were inherent and well known: a log could roll, pinning the man or sending him into the high and icy rapids. A greater fear was having a jam break loose with little warning, crushing the lumberjack, burying him beneath a solid raft of timber.

  My father never worked the drive because he did not work for the company, but my great-aunt’s husband, my uncle Ed, who was killed in the woods, had. For her, watching the drive was something to be done in remembrance of her husband, but that was not our only reason for being there: this would be the last of the log drives, the last in the entire country. Dworshak Dam was almost complete. There would no longer be clear passage for the river or the logs it carried.

  I watched the familiar shapes of the boats appear and waved as the men went by. They rode the wanigan like old cowhands, legs braced wide, cleats sunk like spurs into the tough wood floor. I might have felt a pang of nostalgia at witnessing the death of yet another part of the life I knew, but what I remember most is the sun on my face and bare shoulders and the way the warm breeze wafted easily across my newly shaven legs. I remember the powdery perfume of the two women I stood between and how I felt happy in their company. They seldom talked sin and treated me as though I were just a normal girl, taller than some, given to slouching, but little different from the others my age who crowded the banks of the Clearwater.

  The house in the hollow is gone now, torn down by the company, the yard a pasture for pack mules. Headquarters—the store and saw shop, the log-lined swimming pool where I took my first lessons and nearly drowned beneath the panicked body of Janet Gardner—is a ghost town, boarded up and then burned. Only a few of the circled houses and the company’s shop building remain. The forest has taken the rest of it, granted it a covering of meadow grass. Elk graze where children once waited in snow to their elbows for the school bus, the chains on its tires clanking so loudly they could hear it coming over the rise a mile away.

  My father says that even the deepest pockets of the forest are not the same anymore. He says that no one who wasn’t there can imagine the wilderness as it once was. Even as he moved through the draws and worked his way down the ridges, leaving space like an open wound behind him, he felt the loss. “It was just gone,” he says: the joy he once felt following the deer to their beds, the pleasure of pulling from a cold stream trout deep-bellied and prone to fight. Even the logging became little more than a day’s work.

  I wonder when it died for him. I wonder what forces it took to kill it.

  During the eighteen years since leaving home, I have made my way through a maze of jobs: bank teller, pharmaceuticals technician, secretary. I’ve sold life insurance and served cocktails. In 1979, three years after graduating from high school, I started taking courses at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, where I met my husband, the poet Robert Wrigley. He reminded me of my love for language, and as I read the books he gave me—the poems of Richard Hugo, William Kittredge’s short stories, Ivan Doig and Guthrie, Westerners defining for me a life I recognized—I began to believe I might once again feel at home in the world.

  Where we live with our children, above the Clearwater River at Lenore, the land is dry and barren, scoured by canyon winds. In the fall, in the big eddy below our house, steelhead rest in deep pools. They have threaded their way from the mouth of the Columbia, the ocean a dream of salty warmth. Patches of white algae inflame their sides; their backs are mottled with it. Between them and their home beds is the dam, rising up from the river like the blank face of an indifferent god. Those that escape the hooks and nets are taken at the hatchery, their bellies slit, eggs and milt mixed in stainless-steel tanks. The eggs hatch, the fry are released and begin their journey back.

  Before the dam, people here judged their lives and land by how close the water came: to the fence, above the track, over the road. It found its own sweet way, slowly filling the school well, rising just enough to catch the postmistress’s milk cow by its hind legs. Fishing boats were pulled higher up the bank. Children were double-warned. Those made desperate by the hard winters cold took to the eddies, leaning far out over their gunnels to snag a sodden log. Bucked up, stacked in the kiln of July and August, it would steam and crack into free, burnable wood.

  I miss the river’s sudden, animal heaving, waiting to see how high it might come. High as ’48? Higher than the year early thaw sent snow melt crashing down Big Canyon, knocking the supports from under Peck Bridge, toppling it into the stew of barn boards and fencing? I sometimes long for the dam to collapse into the churning water, to sink into the ancient flood plain. I long for the river and its course to be as they once were, the way I remember before the dam, when my life seemed bounded only by the sawtoothed horizon.

  I think of how long we search to find that place we might call ours, where we might feel we have found a home: the perfect house in the perfect town; the secret hollow; that place in the heart we call love; that state of grace we call salvation. Yet it is easy for me to intellectualize my parents’ quest for a new life, to cast my father as the villainous male, an extension of the patriarchy that doomed my mother to victimization. I know that they will tell me it was nothing but the call of God, nothing but the Truth, that drew them to the church. And I remember that call. I have felt the purging and radiating calm of being born again. I have spoken in tongues, have healed and been healed. I have seen demons cast out and watched a man live forty days without food. I saw the paleness of my father’s face that morning after the demon had found him. I remember these things without doubt, beyond reason, just as I remember my mother’s hair, her movie-star beauty and the way my father looked at her when he came from his work of cutting and falling, taking only the best trees, the ones he could sell and keep his soul alive.

  Even now, more than two decades later, I can see the Langs as though t
hey sat beside me. That summer when I chose their house as my cell, I came to believe myself saved, that they had pulled me from the brink of hell. Did some part of me also believe as they did that I had brought the demons that lurked beneath the stairwell?

  What was it that sometimes swept over me, knocked me to the floor and caused me to sing out in another voice? Even now, if I close my eyes and listen hard enough, the rhythms come back to me, the surge and lilt of vowels and consonants: glossolalia—“an ecstatic utterance.” In the woods above our canyon, Nez Perce once went alone to fast and pray, to have their visions. There are times I long to search out their weyakins, their sacred places, to hear the dry rattle of snakes and feel the bloodletting vines of berries, to be purged, to dream in the tongues of animals.

  I watch my children at Halloween as they carve their jack-o’-lanterns and crayon the green skin of witches. I haven’t yet told them of their grandfather’s demon, nor of my own night fears—how sometimes I wake and believe I see in the doorway red eyes winking. Voices whisper damnation, promise salvation, voices of angels or devils or perhaps only the past. My husband comforts me, saying, “It is only the light of a candle, only the wind in the mouths of pumpkins that you hear.”

  I sometimes believe I can excise the past from my soul, consider it as my father once considered a stand of timber—test each memory for soundness, recognize the true ring of unbroken, concentric circles. I could say my father only imagined the demon roaming our house; I could say that the words I spoke in tongues were the unintelligible mutterings of exhaustion. I could say that no memory is more or less sound, no story more true than the one before: my father loved the land and his wife, his family and his god; my father feared the chaos of his own nature and delivered us from the wilderness into a life I am still aswirl in.