The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  Jerry appreciated the value of the dirt in his vegetable beds, too. As a gardener, he considered dirt his most precious currency. When he pulled weeds, he shook the soil off their roots. When he rinsed his potatoes, he poured the watery sludge back into the patch. At the end of the season, he shoveled out the chicken coop and tilled this compost into the soil by hand. After four decades of devotion, the dirt in Jerry’s gardens was fine and dark, the color of possibility.

  Whenever the earth wasn’t frozen, Jerry had his hands in it. He developed growing systems for a cornucopia of vegetables—parsnips, asparagus, squash, beans, garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, and more. It was all food for the table. But Jerry spent equal time with his flowers, growing food for the eyes.

  He was always scouting for new plants. Walking along the Clark Fork River in Missoula one afternoon, he noticed a flower he liked. He stopped and pinched off part of it to plant in one of his rock gardens, where it thrived. Later, he was walking along the same trail when he noticed the original plant had died. So he returned with a clipping from his own garden and replanted it. He figured the plant wanted to be there.

  That was the sort of man he was. A naturalist friend of his taught him to put a coin in the earth whenever he took a wildflower out of the mountains. It was a measure of gratitude. Jerry spent his life searching out beauty, and when he found it he knew how to acknowledge it. He smuggled rock fig seeds across the border from Mexico. When Hilly and I lived in Cincinnati, he and Janet visited us and flew home with cuttings of mulberry and shagbark hickory wrapped in dampened paper towels. A friend gave Jerry a rosebud tree from Wisconsin and he planted it next to an oak in the backyard. Toward the end of his life, Jerry and Janet placed a conservation easement on their land to protect it from future subdivision or development, to ensure it remained the refuge that they knew it to be.

  Jerry spent so much time working this land that its geography became a sort of map of himself. To dispose of accumulated garbage—old kitchen timers, the children’s trophies, and other unwanted flotsam—he put piles of the stuff in the yard and covered it all with big, naturally sculpted, lichened rocks that he and Janet quarried in the mountains themselves. Then he filled in the gaps with soil and planted flowers. Each flower in these gardens tells a story. The gentians that bloom in June—with a blue “so deep you could fall into it and never come up again,” he told me once—also grow on one of his favorite hiking trails in the Missions. The black tulip was a gift from a long-time friend. We all urged Jerry to get out more, to come to this party or that event, but he only needed to walk his gardens to be among all the people and places he loved.

  For the rest of us, the flowers were a fireworks display in slow motion. Even when our visits were regular, the palette of his gardens was constantly changing. One week the place would be covered in delicate purple-pink daphne, thickening the spring air with its fragrance. The next week Jerry would have conjured crocuses from the dirt, grape hyacinths, and hepaticas in delicate bouquets. As spring turned to summer, peonies, coral bells, and foxgloves budded and burst. When you were interested, and sometimes even when you weren’t, Jerry would lead you to his favorites and insist that you see them, smell them, know them. If you cared about the man, you cared about his flowers and felt honored by these introductions. Like the birds, they were among his closest friends.

  During his last summer, Jerry started writing treatises about gardening, short Word documents that offer wry guidance on how he grew raspberries, potatoes, string beans, and sugar snap peas.

  In the peas treatise, he describes how he dries his peas and freezes them to kill a tiny leafcutter called a sharp shooter that would otherwise destroy his seeds. In the one on raspberries, he explains his method for catching and releasing porcupines that depredate the canes: the technique involves chasing a fleeing porcupine through the undergrowth before diving in front of it with a wire cage and a broom. Jerry caught and released half a dozen this way.

  The pole bean treatise offers haiku-like wisdom: “Don’t wear corduroy shirts in the bean patch. Leaves stick like appliqués.” He goes on to suggest picking the beans early: “Otherwise, lumpy, leather-tough beans proliferate out there like chunks of hose.”

  * * *

  The season of closure was on our minds that mid-September afternoon as Jerry led us to the orchard. We passed a rock garden where a feeble fall poppy swayed on a slender stem. Nothing much was growing now, with the exception of the strawberry patch, back by the beehives. There, in spite of the cold, shortening days, fat September strawberries spilled out beneath serrated leaves. Occasionally, when the sadness welled up inside the house and threatened to pour out the windows, I’d take my two-year-old son, Theo, out to the patch. We filled our mouths with berries and carried handfuls back to the house, depositing them on the kitchen table with red-stained fingers.

  Fruit growers prize fall strawberries, which aren’t as prolific as the spring crop but taste better because the plants are stressed. It’s as if, knowing that the winter freeze is imminent, the plants empty themselves into their final fruit, this sugary, red proof of life, this small revolt against the inevitable.

  With the spirit of a September strawberry Jerry walked to the orchard, as his hours of clarity diminished, and a small procession of his family followed closely behind.

  IV. The Subarus

  Jerry walked along the side of a rock garden and under a black walnut tree to the circular turnaround where the cars were kept. The family had always owned Subaru station wagons; they are the most fuel-efficient, snow-worthy cars that are also big enough to haul an elk during hunting season. Jerry learned their engines and dutifully changed the oil every three thousand miles.

  Of course, Jerry scarcely drove at all. He was too practical for joyrides and he walked into town every morning to collect his mail. However, every Tuesday for more than twenty years, he faithfully drove into Missoula to visit his daughters and have dinner with Janet at the home of a history professor and his wife, their long-time friends. After dinner, more friends would arrive—a lawyer, a linguist, a vet, and others—and Jerry would join these men at a circular table in the basement to take stock of each other’s lives and play poker. Jerry would go down carrying a green and white cooler filled with bottles of beer he had brewed in his bathroom, with his own hops and habaneros. He’d drive home late those nights, often drunk. Sometimes he’d eat a spoonful of mustard from the fridge before climbing the stairs to join Janet in bed.

  In the years that I knew him, his car was a sky-blue 1987 Subaru station wagon. Rust nibbled at the wheel wells, and there was a dent in the back from a day we went goose hunting and he uncharacteristically reversed into a stop sign. Whatever the car, Jerry always left it unlocked, with the key in the ignition. As I understood, this habit was partly an incentive to never own a car worth stealing. It was also a declaration of his trust in people.

  That contract wasn’t always honored. One summer day in the 1990s, Jerry walked out into the driveway to find his car missing. The car, Hilly says, was a lousy silver and brown Subaru whose sides were so rusted they looked as if they had been peppered with birdshot. The interior smelled like a dead animal, and the family called it “Rat Car.” Jerry reported its disappearance to the police.

  Six days later he got a call from a sheriff’s deputy in Pocatello, Idaho. They’d found the car. The young teenage boys who stole it had been pulled over by an officer who noticed the driver was barely tall enough to see over the steering wheel.

  The next day, Jerry boarded a bus for Idaho. He found the car in the impoundment. The attendant took one look at the car and winced. “Did you say they only had it six weeks?” he asked.

  “No, six days,” Jerry said.

  The man let out a low whistle. “They did a real number on it,” he said.

  In truth, it looked no different from when it was stolen. The boys had thrown out Jerry’s public radio recordings and left an Eazy-E cassette in the tape deck. Jerry was scandalized by the har
dcore raunch-rap as he drove the four hundred miles home.

  Jerry also drove to go hunting. During bird season, he would tie an old rubber dinghy to his car’s roof, load up his black lab, Annie, and drive out to the Flathead River to stalk pheasants and geese. In big game season, he would wake up before dawn and drive to his favorite haunts to look for deer and elk. He hunted the same places so long that every ridge and draw had a story for him. The land knew his footsteps.

  But Jerry put the bulk of the miles on his Subarus in winter, when he, Janet, the young children, and usually a black lab piled into the car and drove to Mexico. The migration suited Jerry’s personality and occupation. The bees hibernated in winter, and Jerry grew restless and gloomy amid the sunless inaction of the season. They drove down to the Sonoran Desert, where they camped along the Sea of Cortez. The family spent their days reading, painting, writing, and walking. Jerry taught the kids the constellations of the winter sky. He fished for corvina along the rocky coast. The family dug for razor clams, which they grilled over the campfire and ate with a squeeze of lime and a slash of hot sauce.

  I joined the family on one of those trips, a year after I started dating Hilly. It took three days to get there. Jerry drove the entire way, ensuring optimal fuel-efficiency by never exceeding the Carter-era fifty-five miles per hour. He stopped only for gas. We’d all rush in to use the bathroom, and Janet would heat up food in the convenience store microwave.

  Because he drank almost nothing between his morning coffee and his evening beer, Jerry seldom had to pee. He filled the tank and then sat in the car, eating sunflower seeds and tapping the steering wheel, impatient to be moving again. If we were slow, I found myself anxious that Jerry would be irritable. He was clearly the captain of these trips, and it felt important to abide by his schedule. In his family, travel happened on his terms and at his pace. I could sense that Janet and the children sometimes tired of his rigidity, but for me he was an exhilarating guide. New to the family and eager to please, I fell in line like a solicitous sailor.

  Jerry had the habit of pushing even his finest qualities to the extreme. His frugality, for example, bordered on the obsessive. I borrowed his fishing rod one day in Mexico and got snagged on a rock on the ocean bottom. I broke off the lure and walked back to camp. I frequently lose my own lures when I fish, but Jerry looked disappointed, as if I hadn’t tried hard enough to get it back, which reflected poorly on my character.

  He was passionate in a debate, which made him a colorful conversationalist but also an intimidating one if he disagreed with you. His nightly beers made him even more emphatic.

  “Jerry didn’t have opinions,” his friend Steve once said. “Jerry was just right.”

  He would wag a condescending finger at you and dismantle your logic with withering efficiency. He clung to his beliefs so tightly that arguments sometimes precipitated fallings-out with friends and even family members.

  His views of gender roles could be antiquated, too. He didn’t cook, and never changed a diaper. Later in life he expressed admiration for the way my male friends and I cared for our children, and he said he wished he’d learned to cook. As a father, he had focused on providing for his family, even if he didn’t always attend to them. He was like that at home, and he was like that on the road.

  But for me, and others, Jerry’s intentional art of living was a centrifugal force we couldn’t escape. He lived a life that was true to himself, packing twice as much living into every minute and filling his days with the things that he loved. His was a rare and alluring existence, even if it made few accommodations for anyone else—including the people who loved him the most.

  * * *

  I couldn’t tell if Jerry noticed the parked cars as we all walked past them. There would be no more trips to Mexico. At this final stage of his sickness, Jerry wasn’t driving anywhere. The narcotics had dulled his reflexes, and he didn’t have anywhere he wanted to go. He was left to walk now, which had been his preferred mode of transport since he was a kid, and so we followed this charismatic, complicated man on foot past the rusting hulks of his cars and on up the driveway, adding still more mileage to the seemingly limitless odometer of his legs.

  V. The Pit

  Beyond the clearing where the cars were kept, we came to a gate. It wasn’t much of a gate, just a length of wire fencing with a rotted log nailed to the bottom. Janet and Jerry always kept it open, even during Arlee’s summer powwow, when RVs and teepees crowded the grounds above the cabin, and campers ambled through the property to swim in the river while young lovers had trysts in the woods. The only time Jerry closed the gate was in fall, when the bears come down from the mountains to fatten up before winter. This particular fall, a black bear sow and her two yearlings had noticed the fruit trees on the property. They seemed to be circling the place, waiting for their chance.

  Beekeepers working hives in bear country have ample cause for concern; some even carry handguns to protect themselves. But Jerry respected bears more than he feared them. During summer breaks in college, he put radio collars on grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park with his mentors, the late wildlife biologists John and Frank Craighead. He watched a grizzly attack a car with filmmakers in it, shaking it like a tambourine. Once, Jerry and another biologist shot a boar grizzly with a tranquilizer dart, and then pulled a premolar from the animal’s jaw to help determine its age. The bear was surprisingly alert, but they managed to take the tooth. When they got back to the truck, they realized their dart had contained only half the required dose of tranquilizer.

  Jerry knew he’d be living alongside bears here on the river bottom. Bears use the Jocko River like a highway, and growing up Hilly and her siblings saw plenty of them in the yard. Once, when the kids were outside doing chores, Jerry set up a prank. He crept into the bushes near them and started woofing and snorting and snapping sticks like a bear. They were scared all right, and Jerry was in stitches until his eldest son, Jay, ran into the house and emerged with a rifle.

  Given a chance, the black bears would pillage the dog food, raid the chicken coop, and snap off the thin, grafted branches of his fruit trees. So in the fall Jerry hooked up an electrical line that ran along the top of his fence. Every summer, before he turned it on, he walked the fence perimeter, clawing through the thick undergrowth, to clear out any bushes or trees that would touch the line and short it out. It was an arduous task, but it kept out the bears. Best of all, the fence itself was almost invisible. Jerry never liked to draw conspicuous lines between the animals’ territory and his own.

  * * *

  On our way to the orchard, we passed through the gate and walked toward the garbage pit. Once the rock gardens were built, everything Janet and Jerry couldn’t recycle, burn, compost, or reuse ended up here, in a yawning hole beside the driveway. An old fridge is buried in there, along with broken windowpanes, a mattress, and more. Like a midden, it’s filled with the archaeology of a family’s life here.

  After Jerry learned that his cancer would kill him, he started making trips to this hole to dump the assorted documents of his life. Not wanting to leave any sorting to his survivors, he systematically organized his old stories, letters, and other papers, throwing away almost everything. Jerry said he thought about things by writing about them, and a fictional account of this end-of-life audit appears in a short story he published in the Georgia Review, “The Longing of Men.” In it, Jerry describes a woman with cancer dumping boxes of her possessions into a pit: “She was exhilarated to be free of all those self-imposed illusions about having a history, about preserving anything, about ever mattering. When she hoisted the wheelbarrow handles to let the boxes fall and bounce into the bone pit, they made sounds like animals getting the wind knocked out of them.”

  If Jerry was conflicted about erasing the paper trail of his history, he didn’t mention it. But one day at Deer Camp he did wonder aloud to me about his legacy. He had just read a review of a book called Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives, in which neurologist Dav
id Eagleman describes the three deaths we all face: the first is the moment life leaves our body, the second is when our body is consigned to the earth, and the third and final death occurs when someone speaks our name for the last time.

  This third death haunted Jerry the most. He asked me, “How much do you know about your great-grandfather?” Jerry had a nasal timbre to his voice and squinting, inquisitive eyes that made me aim to answer his questions squarely. I wanted to think a man like Jerry would always be remembered, but I had to admit to him I didn’t know much about my great-grandfather.

  “You see?” he said. “It only takes a couple generations to be forgotten.”

  In time, he seemed to come to peace with his cosmic insignificance. In his final years, he sat down with a family friend, a writer named Candice, to tell her some of his stories. She recorded these and later transcribed them, and their details helped furnish this essay. During one of those sessions, Jerry told her this:

  Camus said that Goethe would be forgotten in ten thousand years. He’ll probably be forgotten in one thousand years, maybe in a hundred. The point is we’re all going to be forgotten.

  I once wrote a book all about death, to explore it, and I read everything I could get my hands on. I learned that you can’t live like you’re going to die tomorrow and you can’t live like you’re never going to die. People who die well are people who lived well. That seems right to me. By living well, a person learns about grace, and that would have to extend to dying.

  One of the best ways to live is with despair, in which you’ve made peace with how little you can do. But that doesn’t change how hard you work. I’ve related that to having cancer. I want to get the gardens tilled and dug up. I may not be here next spring, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what you do this time of year. Like the parable about St. Francis: he was out hoeing his garden and an acolyte came to him and asked, “What would you do if you knew God was coming in an hour?” St. Francis said, “I’d hoe my garden.”