The Source of All Things

by Tracy Ross

  15

  Search and Rescue

  When the last pink petals of the fireweed plants dried up and fell onto the frost heaves, I knew it was time to leave Wyoming. Ladan went back to Seattle, and I was going to a small liberal arts school called St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The entire curriculum was based on the great books of Western civilization; every student started as a freshman, no matter how many credits they had from other colleges. To learn geometry, they studied Euclid. They translated the Bible from Ancient Greek into English.

  On paper, as I filled out my application, I loved St. John’s. In reality, it took less than a month to realize choosing to go there had been a mistake. The academics were too rigorous, and I felt small and stupid. It seemed to me that every other student had been genetically endowed with a pre-existing understanding of Plato’s cave allegory and Copernicus’s retrograde motion. I sweated through three layers of cotton trying to explain the parts of a point in Euclidean geometry. (Hint: A point is that which has no part.) When the pressure to perform became too great, I reverted to my partying ways.

  But the kids I partied with at St. John’s didn’t just party. They partied their brains out. A girl overdosed on heroin on my bed. (I was away, spending the night with a boyfriend.) Another friend got drunk on the top of a cliff, fell fifty feet, and broke his back. I escaped real injury but had my own near misses. My first year, a friend and I became stranded in a snowstorm on the way to San Francisco. We took two hits of acid and spent the night splitting a case of beer in a cheap hotel room. Jumping between the double beds like kids on trampolines, I convinced myself—without falling or tweaking my body in any way—that I dislocated my thumb and needed to go to the emergency room. My friend fish-tailed through the snow-clogged streets until she found a clerk at a 7-Eleven who directed us to the Indian hospital on the Zuni reservation. When it was my turn to be treated, an annoyed physician’s assistant took one look at my quarter-size pupils and said, “You’re not hurt, you’re high. Now get out of here and let me go back to helping people who really need me. You don’t need a doctor; you need to get your act together.”

  I continued my descent in San Francisco, where I took a hit of ecstasy, went to a rave, and met a man who took me home to his apartment-cum-motorcycle-repair-shop in the Mission District. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, we had unprotected sex. When I returned to St. John’s, the dread in my stomach manifested in painful sores all over my body. Too afraid to ask for help, I avoided going to the school nurse for a week and instead wandered the aisles of the new health food store with new-age music pumped through ceiling speakers. I had no money, so I couldn’t buy the soothing salves and magical tinctures that promised to heal my body. I hovered around the bottles of Arnica, Rescue Remedy, and Weleda rose misting spray, hoping that the love I believed went into creating them would seep out of their containers and help me.

  It didn’t, and eventually I went to the nurse. She looked at my sores and told me they weren’t even herpes. The lesions turned out to be relatively benign: impetigo—horrifically painful but curable.

  Was a part of me disappointed to find out I wasn’t dying? I have to believe so, for I kept trying to kill myself by other indirect methods. But as I put myself through treatment over the coming months, three things happened that taught me critical lessons about life and death. As I lay in my bed, I knew in my heart that no one could help me before I was able to help myself. Psychiatrists and antidepressants were out of the question, along with any kind of talk therapy. Prozac, Klonopin, and Zoloft—those “uppers” reminded me too much of my mother. Besides, I knew the one thing that could lift me out of my depression. It took a week for the life to return to my body. When it did, I got up, dabbed the pus off my cheeks, and went back into the mountains. Only this time I went with a mission. St. John’s had a search-and-rescue team, and I was eager to sign up. Induction required baptism by fire. If a student went to more than one meeting, that meant he or she immediately became a searcher. I went to meeting after meeting, acquiring an entirely new skill set within weeks: everything from map-and-compass navigation to basic first aid, CPR, and simple hiker psychology. On Wednesday nights my teammates and I practiced base-camp and radio operations. I could barely complete a Euclid assignment on time, but on St. John’s SAR, I was learning how to coordinate a search with the Civil Air Patrol and state police. At night, I placed my backpack, along with my hiking boots and clothes, next to the door of my dorm room so that I would always be ready.

  The year I joined the SAR team, 1991, was a bad year for hikers in New Mexico. During my first two months, we responded to what seemed like a half dozen searches. Not once did we make a “live find.” Most of the time, we arrived on the scene after a hiker had been pronounced dead, or we were stopped midsearch when another team found a missing person’s body. This didn’t mean that we were bad searchers; it just meant we were lucky to be in the wrong place at the right time.

  But our good luck ended one day in the early winter of 1992. A call came in for a family that had crashed their airplane in a meadow near Taos ski resort. Riding in the bed of the rescue truck, I saw the contents of the Cessna scattered over the ground: cassette tapes and books, winter hats and warm coats. Those things were fine. That debris said “adults.” But as we drove closer I saw stuffed animals and picture books, at which point I realized I was coming to rescue little girls and little boys.

  Someone told me to help a nurse who was treating a burning five-year-old boy. I ran to her but was stopped short by the smell of charred flesh and baby lotion. Flakes of skin floated above the child. I would dream I held his ashes in my hands, in an ornate ashtray, for weeks afterward. “Don’t just stand there,” a triage nurse scolded. “Get me some gauze.” I jumped-to, collecting rolls of white tape, a CPR mask, and water for the little boy to sip. But there would be no sipping. He was too broken, too burned. I stared as the nurse tried to keep his heart pumping. I watched her realize it was too late.

  That year I not only saw the burning family but searched several times for people who turned up dead. It was always eerie—and thrilling—leaving school in the middle of the night and hiking into the rugged lower Sangre de Cristo Mountains looking for lost souls. On one of my most memorable searches, we departed a trailhead in the middle of the night and hunted for a pair of young Italian brothers who’d rented a plane and crashed it in the mountains. The emergency locator on their aircraft gave us a good idea of their location. The moon was full and mist rose off the meadows.

  As we began to hike, everyone talked and joked—something we always did to lighten such heavy situations. And as we always did, everyone eventually fell into a quiet rhythm. We all knew that if we found the missing plane, it could tax us in ways we’d never experienced. I think we were always preparing ourselves for the worst.

  The moon was blazing, so I didn’t need to wear a headlamp. On the horizon I saw something that looked like a woman dressed in a nineteenth-century nightgown. Her long, silver hair flew behind her in the moonlight. I couldn’t hear her, but I could tell by the way her hands were raised to her white, skeletal face that she was screaming.

  I stopped in my tracks asking, “Did anyone see that?” But no one else had. I kept hiking, but then I saw her again. This time I stopped the group and asked them to wait for the third return of the apparition.

  I must have drawn too much attention, because she didn’t show herself again. “Just wait! She’s coming,” I said. But someone told me to be quiet so we could hear if one of our victims was calling for help. I shut up and continued hiking.

  We continued our search for the missing pilots, who had crashed their plane in a dense part of the forest. Another team found them, but we heard about what their bodies looked like after the fact. They weren’t dismembered or even all that bloody. But the way the plane had crashed left one of them smashed up against a tree, in a position that made it look like he was hugging it.

  I never forgot about the
ghost. The experience had been so intense that when I returned to the St. John’s campus, I couldn’t talk for days. Over time, I stopped fixating on her and went back to studying Euclid, Ptolemy, and Plato. But the following summer, while working on a trail crew in Bridger-Teton National Forest, I told the story to a native New Mexican kid who knew exactly what I had seen.

  Or rather, who. He said it was the ghost of La Llorona, who has haunted the arroyos of New Mexico since as early as the late 1500s. He said several versions of the legend existed, but that in the New Mexico version she mourns the death of her two sons, who drowned in the Rio Grande River.

  The ancient Celts believed that “thin places” exist in the wilderness, where it’s easier to hear God, or where the dead can more easily visit the living. When I heard about La Llorona, I thought of my own biological father and all the times I’d felt his presence while I was out hiking or skiing or sitting perfectly still and watching rain collect in the indentation of a leaf. For the first time, I knew that the few occasions when I thought I had felt him were real, and that his presence was as true as if he had still been living.

  By the end of my freshman year at St. John’s, I had become a certified mountain junkie. So in June, I signed up for a program called the Student Conservation Association, which places young, strapping kids with land agencies to do things like restore wetlands and clean up forests after wildfires. Pay was minimal, but I scored a coveted spot on a three-person work crew, rebuilding trails damaged by the 1988 fire on the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park.

  Traveling with two horses, my crew hiked for ten days at a time, camping in dewy meadows and using two-person handsaws to cut through pine trees that obstructed the trails. It was backbreaking work—and just the thing I needed to continue exorcising the demons of my past. I loved that summer because of its simplicity. Life was pared down to its most basic elements: rise at dawn, feed the horses, eat, work, eat, hobble the horses, sleep. Whether hiking or digging trenches with my pulaski, my mind wandered forward and back. Sometimes, when I was sun-cooked and dehydrated from heavy lifting, I’d pretend I was digging a grave, into which I fantasized I was burying every bad memory, terrified shudder, confusion, and emotion surrounding Dad. Other times, on a particularly cool evening, say, or when the sun shone through the woods at a certain slant, I would feel only tenderness for the man I had once deemed king of my world.

  The summer flew by, and at the end, when I looked in the mirror, I barely recognized myself. A few months shy of my twenty-second birthday, I was tan and freckled, with sun-bleached hair and lucid, bright green eyes. For the first time ever, I saw beauty in my own reflection: strong shoulders, lean biceps, lightly browned legs. I still preferred not looking, but I’d leapt a huge hurdle over that summer and was now closer by half to self-acceptance.

  By late August, I had completed my last backcountry hitch, and, basking in overblown confidence, I decided to hike out from my trail crew and back to civilization alone. The Thorofare Region, where we worked, consists of a confusing network of Forest Service, horse packer, and hiker’s trails, and at some point I became lost, wandering up a faint game path where I was nearly trampled by a deer. It occurred to me that the deer must have been more scared of something above it than me to come so close to a human, but I continued hiking, oblivious to a 300-pound grizzly working itself into a lather a few hundred yards up the path.

  I knew a creature was lurking—and he wasn’t far—and I began to sweat in anticipation of a run-in. I imagined a cougar; the buff-colored mountain lions were known to live there, though they were shy. The lions were fast, efficient predators and, I would be the first to point out, humans were invading their land.

  Thinking, “Man, I hope bear spray works on mountain lions,” I took the safety off my pepper spray, which was still attached to my backpack, and continued walking.

  I knew I was lost, and could hear branches crunching ahead of me. Sensing an animal’s presence, but unclear if it was a mountain lion or bear, I continued moving toward it. In a vain effort to protect myself, I started yelling: “Hey motherf…! Watch out! It’s not just me, Tracy Ross, but whole group of me! Whatever you do, don’t f… with us! Cuz we’re big, and rowdy, and we like to cuss!” Then I’d rattle off the longest, most vile string of swear words I could think of.

  Apparently grizzlies are immune to profanities, because I climbed to the top a little knoll, looked down, and saw a medium size, dark brown grizzly walking out of a tree stand. It looked up to where I was now waving my arms and shouting. It stopped and turned to face me.

  I’d learned a few things about bear encounters, both from my Forest Service supervisor and from a book I was reading called Bear Attacks by Stephen Herrero. So when the bear turned to face me, I turned my profile to it. I couldn’t remember if I’d read or just thought that my backpack would make me look bigger—and more menacing. I started to wave my arms and continued cussing.

  But the bear wasn’t in any rush to get going. I was the visitor in its home, a potential threat to its food source. It stood still for a few seconds; then began pounding the ground. The pounding turned into jumping, and then the jumping turned into charging—straight at me. The grizzly lunged three times, stopping short—but not that short—of my quivering body. I knew too well all the tales of hikers who had ended up being ripped apart and devoured, to be retrieved only as “stomach contents.” Standing before the bear, it was too easy to envision my own death.

  The grizzly stopped some thirty yards away, then proceeded to bluff charge me again. Only this time I was too petrified to continue standing my ground. Going against everything I’d learned about bear safety, I dropped to my knees, buried my head in my arms, and started singing Yellow Submarine.

  I kept my head down, waiting. If I was going to die, I didn’t want to see my killer approaching. I wanted it to lunge, chomp, and kill me quickly, so that when the pain came it was a shock to my system. I thought of my parents, probably sitting in front of the TV in Las Vegas; my brother, somewhere in Georgia; and my real dad, who I hoped was still hanging around, watching over me.

  He must have been, because the bear came within feet of my body, circled around me, and left without so much as taking a lick of my sunscreen. I kept singing until I could no longer hear claws crunching across the ground cover. Then I stood up and started running. I lapped a ridge above me several times before finding the trail I’d come in on and linking it back to my trail crew. When my trail crew supervisor saw me sprinting beneath weight of a full backpack, he knew exactly what had happened.

  Laughing, and pointing to my sweat-soaked shirt, he said, “Welcome to Wyoming. Where even little hippie girls get charged by grizzlies.”

  That fall I went back for one more year at St. John’s. But I knew before my first Monday night seminar was over that I was finished hanging out with “society.” I knew that, for me, wilderness could provide the perfect meditation, analgesic, escape. I knew any relationship with my parents would plunge me back into the darkness, so the following spring, after two years at St. John’s, I packed my car, and headed to a place where, during the summer at least, the light shines all day and all night.

  16

  Disappearing Act

  Alaska. I went there after a friend told me that people in the forty-ninth state partied till dawn in the endless gloaming of the Arctic summer. My plan was to hike up glaciers and hang out on the banks of rivers loaded with salmon as big as small dogs. I might work; I might not. The town I was headed to, McCarthy, didn’t have phone service and was accessible during the winter only by plane.

  In May, I dropped a load of boxes in storage, picked up a friend named Dan, and drove out of New Mexico, kicking up dust. Dan and I had dated at St. John’s, but we both knew that we’d go our separate ways when we reached McCarthy. An entire continent passed beneath our wheels as we drove across the United States and then Canada. As gas stations became roadhouses, milky-skinned waitresses served Kokanee beer and pancakes for
breakfast. I ate a lot of pancakes, sizing myself up against brawny men and women with two-stroke oil stained into their pants. I also drank a lot of Kokanee, but usually not until after lunch.

  At Tok we turned south. At Glenallen, east. The road became dirt, and we followed it, grinding low gears for another three hours until we reached a dead end and a river surging with ice-melt and silt. A cluster of battered trucks and station wagons rusted on cinder blocks. A small sign pointed to a tram strung across the rapids on two-inch-thick pulley cable. In my memory, it says: WELCOME TO THE END OF THE ROAD. WEAR GLOVES. AND DON’T FALL IN.

  Across the river, a narrow trail snaked through a dense alder thicket, abuzz with mosquitoes and birds. It was Sunday-afternoon quiet on a Tuesday—except for the shriek of a distant chainsaw and a little kid hooting in the woods. I broke out of the bushes and saw a cluster of log buildings with wildflowers blooming between the timbers: town square. Standing on the edge of the last civilization for ten million acres, I realized what most people realize when they enter the cultural hub of Wrangell–St. Elias National Park: McCarthy is a place separate from and in addition to the rest of the world.

  I took to Alaska like I was born there. By June, I was living in a twelve-by-twelve-foot cabin at the edge of a massive glacier that flowed out of the mountains and into McCarthy. My friend Thea, who I’d met at St. John’s, had arranged it so that I could live there in exchange for working for a family called the Millers. I would help Jeannie Miller in her garden, act as a de facto babysitter for the youngest Millers, Matthew (thirteen), and Aaron (seven), and wait tables at a pizza parlor the Millers were opening in town.

  Jim and Jeannie had moved to McCarthy in the 1970s, after Jim was sprayed with Agent Orange in Vietnam. It turned out the Millers were famous in Alaska—in part because of their red Ford truck, which Sylvester Stallone commissioned for $500 and then drove off a bridge in the movie Cliffhanger, but more so because they had survived the day, in 1983, when a man named Lou Hastings set fire to the biggest, nicest lodge in McCarthy’s sister town, Kennicott, and then gunned down six of McCarthy’s twelve year-round residents. The shootout had started in a laid-back fashion, with Lou knocking on the Millers’ neighbor Chris Richards’s door and saying he had to kill him. A fight ensued, and Chris ended up with gunshot wounds to his eye and forearm. Chris survived, but Lou torched the lodge and proceeded to kill a half dozen of Chris’s neighbors. Chris told me this story at a party on one of the first nights I was in McCarthy. The gory details were overshadowed by the message I heard in the story: that life beyond trauma continues, and where the blood pours into the ground, patches of fireweed later bloom.