“But not this place?” I interjected.
“No.” All the scouts nodded agreement with my husband. “This is not the place we’re called to.”
I wondered why I felt such a calling here, and yet I was obviously the only one. Why did what I see differ from these men?
“You will have to enjoy your stay here, Emma, for a few more weeks, and then we will all load up, pack what we can carry on our backs and our new mules we’ve purchased. We’ll make a new Bethel.”
I nodded agreement. What more could I do?
When the men left in early June, I took a long walk into the cedar trees, Andrew on my back. I prided myself entering the dense trees and finding my way back. I remembered the tree with the moss patch on it that looked like a long, open wound, or the thick bark that had a design in it that resembled a face. My feet made no sounds in the wet woodland. Pap had made a pair of moccasins for me, much more practical than slippers, though I could still feel small cones when I stepped on them at the arch of my foot. I crawled under a new blow-down, careful to push Andrew in his board before me, located the game trail again, and this time walked farther than I ever had before. I made sure of my bearings, then continued on, not sure what I was looking for or how I’d know when I found it.
But I did. Deep into the trees I saw a shaft of sunlight making its way through the denseness. I walked toward it, chattering to Andy as I did, until there it was, taking my breath away.
A meadow. A wide, lush prairie filled with white flowers and pink dots of color. Deer nibbled at the tree line, and overhead large birds called out. It smelled earthy and fresh. I turned around and around, arms outstretched. “This is beautiful,” I told Andy. I’d thought this whole country was nothing but trees where rivers cut through them on their way to the sea. All the small towns lick Puget Sound’s shoreline. In all our traveling up the Cowlitz, I hadn’t seen such wide meadows, such vast prairies. I took this discovery as a sign. There were clearings already prepared for us. We needed to pick one of those and not a place where we’d have to bring down tall, massive trees.
“This could be the land we farm and settle on,” I told Andy. It would be the best of both worlds: dark earth easily plowed but isolated and yet close to the sea. And it was right here in a climate we’d already been introduced to, the land that Andy inhaled first. My heart pounded and I sat in the tall grasses, chewed on one long strand that smelled of onion.
I’d been led here, I was sure of it. No matter what the challenge, one just had to keep pushing through dark timbered places, trusting there’d be clearings in the light beyond.
I began my trek back, buoyed by my seeking and discovery, as hopeful as … as Eve when she first ate of her fruit.
18
The Winding Willapa
Something isn’t right. It is hailing inside our tent. White rocks the size of Andy’s fists pelt us. Christian scrambles to repair the torn canvas first, shoving me and Andy toward the back of the lean-to. I lay with my body arched over my son, oddly able to see Christian working frantically as the ice begins to melt and turns to torrents of water filling up our little place, and yet I can see my son beneath me, smiling up. The rain pours down now, and my baby is lifted by the torrent, torn away from me while I grasp, shouting for Christian to stop worrying about the holes in the tent and see what’s happening to his family instead. “Christian, help!” I scream, but my words fall on deaf ears while my son floats beyond my reach. I grope! We’ve camped too close to a river, and now we are a part of. The landscape’s chosen us, picked us out to die. Now we’re in a craft, a small troubling craft taking on water. I know we have to go under the water to get where we need to be. “Christian, do you know how to get there safely?” He shouts back, “No! I don’t have a compass.” Andrew cries, and I feel pain in my shoulders.
“No compass? No compass?”
“Emma, you will wake the others.”
I opened my eyes, gasping. My husband is arched over me. “You have bad dreams, ja?”
My body shook while I reached for Andy, held him close to my chest, slowing my breathing. Then I came fully awake to a storm wailing around us. Wind mostly, not rain. What sounded like hail on top of our canvas tent must’ve been branches and needles torn loose. Puffs of wind pushed the walls of the tent out like a bloated frog, then sucked them back in. We heard roars like the steam engine at Shelbina. “The trees …?”
“This is an odd storm for August,” Christian told me. “The man, Swan, said the weather stayed mild through the summer. High winds didn’t come before October maybe. I think we’ll be all right.” I couldn’t stop shaking from the dream. I kept kissing Andy’s forehead, and then I remembered Opal, the goat. “Is the goat still tethered?” I asked. Maybe that’s what the dream meant, that I’d lose my son because the food he needed had torn loose in the night. Or maybe it meant we didn’t really know where we were going, and the weight of this journey would sink us in the end.
The goat bleated then, and Christian lit a lantern, though the wind blew out the light as soon as he opened the flap. “Verdammt!” he said, the first curse I’d ever heard from my husband’s mouth.
“I find her, Emma. Don’t worry,” and with that he stepped out into the darkness.
I rocked my son, back and forth. Christian had discounted my grand prairie plan; instead, he and the scouts went west and found what they said was the perfect place. We’d said our good-byes to Steilacoom ten days before, now here we were, in the densest of forests.
Opal’s bleating came closer, and then as though the Lord Himself acted as shepherd that night, the goat nearly ran Christian over, pushing back into the tent. It shook its tail of the wet and the wind, its little bell tinkling.
Christian relit the lantern. “I need to make a casing for this light,” he said. “To keep the wind from having its way with the oil.”
“We need a shelter,” I said. “A casing for us. A real home with walls.” I stroked the goat with one hand, rocking Andy on my knees. He slept now, and I marveled at his comfort in the midst of chaos. “We’ll need a root cellar to hide in if these kinds of storms happen often.”
“I tell you, they won’t. This is a freak storm, Emma. Don’t worry now. Where we go, this will not be so bad. Swan’s been here three years. He says the climate is mild not hostile. We’ll be all right, and see, the goat finds its own way to safety.”
I gripped the goat’s rope collar with its tiny bell still dangling from it. “We’ll have to hold his collar as his rope’s been torn,” I said.
“Ja,” Christian said. “I’ll hold him until daylight, when we can salvage the tether and then move on. “It will be well. You’ll see. The place we chose is perfect.”
I felt powerless to calm the rush of wind which, as I listened to it, probably wasn’t any worse than a rainstorm in Missouri. The dream had heightened my fright.
I held tight to Christian’s words. The scouts’ unanimity of choice gave me comfort. How could every last scout—save one, me—favor the landscape unless God Himself had spoken to their hearts?
“You rest now, Liebchen. With sunlight, the day will be better. We are almost home.”
He patted my knee and lay back down under the tarp. He fell instantly asleep, leaving me to grab for the gray goat’s collar before it bolted out of the tent opening. It bleated until I spoke to it of the home I imagined in my mind, the words like prayers taking me through the darkness and residue of dreams into a morning calm.
My husband was right. Sunlight made life better.
I stepped outside to see little had changed in the landscape. I saw timbers split and felled months before like some giant hand had flicked its fingers against the forest. Tall firs leaned against others still standing; more crashed to the ground, their root balls like crones’ hands struggling out of forest graves. I squinted. The root balls looked old. The trees that leaned against each other already had moss growing where they met. These trees hadn’t blown down in the past night’s storm. T
hey’d been down a long time; I just hadn’t noticed them when we’d made our evening camp.
“See how the Lord looked over us,” my husband said, standing behind me. “Everyone slept well.” We watched as the Knights and Michael Sr. and the Stauffers moved from their tents. The only real damage was a tarp with a tear that John Genger set about repairing with the paraffin he carried with him, but I remembered that tear had been there before, too.
I filled Andy’s tin cup, fortunately only partway as he batted my hand and whined, letting me know he wanted to do it himself. We spilled less when I’d fed him through the fingertip of a leather glove. I’d poked a hole in the glove to manage the flow. He slapped at my wrist as he reached for it. It had been nearly a year since I’d fallen on that wrist, and still at times it shot pains through my arm. Our son, however, didn’t notice. I wondered if every mother experienced pain as we stretched to learn new things, to do things by ourselves. Maybe pain rode before a lesson.
We set out again carrying large packs on our backs as well as on our mules. I carried Andy on my back and walked, draping a bag of items hung by a rope over my shoulders and around my neck. I tugged at the goat, too, as we followed what Christian said was the trail the scouts had cut through this land earlier that spring. I did see evidence of their chopping, but even in the short time since they’d been through here, young shrubs and vines won back the trail. Trees newly fallen across it made us have to choose to either take a day to chop and saw the trees to make an opening or try to go around and make a different trail.
Would we find such signs of effort where we headed? Would one log consume a day to get it where we needed? We’d built brick houses in Bethel. I saw no evidence of material for such here. I couldn’t imagine how the wagons coming out from Bethel would make it through here, but I didn’t say a word. The scouts chose this. Even practical John Genger and the wise Adam Schuele claimed that God had chosen this site for them all. They could see through these tree-falls and a landscape so big we were all ants in a field of grasses pushing our way through.
Ferns shot up from the forest soil, their fronds edged with tiny dots that looked like perfect black knots of thread. They reminded me of stitching, and I wondered if I’d ever have time for such pleasant needlework again.
This landscape was such a contrast to the meadow outside of Steilacoom that was so open, so easily plowed. But Christian had not even walked there with me, saying he’d been all around, and nothing in that area appealed until this place we were heading to.
Rustling sounds in the distance made the goat pull back on her tether. “Bears,” Christian said over his shoulder.
I looked around for bears as I followed him. A new danger.
“We’re making good noise, so I don’t think they bother. I can hardly wait for you to see this new land, Liebchen.”
As we walked, I wondered if Moses felt this way leading his people through the desert, sure of the destination but uncertain of the people’s readiness for what goodness and trials lay beyond. I thought to mention this perspective to Christian but abstained. He seemed so happy even as the sweat dripped from him and tiny gnats pushed at his face.
“This is a land worthy of God’s work,” he said as we chewed on hard biscuits when we nooned.
What was one woman’s cautious voice against such enthusiasms? I had nothing to say. The scouts’ confidence carried me along on this craft without a compass.
Twelve days after leaving Steilacoom, we reached the Willapa River. We approached the stream from the east near a bend, so at first it looked tame enough and not particularly swift. A flat spread out from the water’s edge, and with sweeping arms, Christian told me, “Here’s where we’ll make our mark then.”
“Right on this bend? This river?”
Narrow meadows, what was once the river’s bed, no doubt, lined the river, bearing tall grass and purple flowers. The land we could cultivate at least. The soil looked black when I kicked at a clump of the grass to smell and taste the earth.
“And see, there are plenty of trees to log, for building houses. All we need is here,” Christian said.
I looked up at the tops of the trees, nearly stumbling backward. Some stood more than two hundred feet high, making my neck ache as I gazed at their tops. Our tiny saws and axes would be but mosquito bites to the tough, long arms of the trunks that rose before us.
“And this river goes right to the sea, maybe fifteen or twenty miles west at most. We can float logs down, dig for clams at the ocean, have plenty of seafood to add to game. This river lures fish in during the season, Swan tells us. The bounty God has led us to …” Christian stood teary-eyed.
He’s in love with this landscape, this formidable, dark, dense landscape.
Christian had no doubts, and the man Swan was spoken of as someone wiser than Moses had been. When we made our way toward a small clearing cut back into timber around the bend, my doubts lessened a little as well. For there rose a sturdy log house almost as large as the surgeon’s quarters at the fort. Best of all, a woman holding a bucket in her hand stood before it.
Her name was Sarah Woodard. She was but a child, maybe fifteen, with hair the color of pale butter and eyes such a deep blue they looked black at times. Her muscled arms reflected hard work. Sarah and her husband invited us to stay with them at this river crossing for the night. Christian hesitated. In German he said, “We should not get too close to those around here.” But Adam said accepting generosity was a kindness in return. I rejoiced. Here lay a feather tick to lie on. We herded the goat in with the Woodard cow and its calf. They own a cow!
“We brought it up from California, put onto a ship, and here it is,” Sarah’s husband said when I commented about the animal. “A brute bred her back so we have another increase next year. We get to keep what we raise, not like those folks who worked for Hudson’s Bay Company.”
I vowed to have Christian order a cow from California for us. If he intended to send products out on the tide, then south by ship, then we could get them north to ease our lives too. I never thought I’d say it, but travel by ship would be so much easier than what we’d been through overland on what Christian called our “Dutch Trail.”
“Why didn’t you propose to have the Bethel Colony come out by ship?” I asked Christian. We leaned against a tree at Woodard’s Landing, as the place was known. Andy played with the Woodards’ dog. The pup brought sticks to him that Andy threw, the makeshift toy landing not far beyond his toes. I shooed the dog back when it started to lick Andy’s hair as he sat. “It would be so much easier than to come overland with wagons and stock.” I hesitated, then said, “I wonder how the wagons will come through that trail we made. At the first windstorm, you’ll have to go back and reopen it.”
“You worry over much,” he told me. “We’ll bring them up the Cowlitz River, as we came in canoes, but only as far north as the Chehalis River. Then it’s a short portage onto the Willapa, and they’ll be right here, just as we need them to be.” I still didn’t see how the wagons would come up that Cowlitz trail, but Christian’s tone suggested little patience for my questions.
I changed my son’s diaper. At least the area offered an abundance of moss for his diaper. I walked to the river and rinsed the cloth, then laid it over a blackberry bramble to dry, checking the ripeness of the berries as I did. It was August. They were ripe enough for pies.
“They’ll have no need for wagons here,” Christian said when I came back. He’d been thinking of our conversation. He used his preacher voice. “Indeed. All produce and people will go by water to market. Wilhelm’s group can sell their wagons in Portland. It will mean more money to purchase grain and other things needed to tide us through the winter.”
“But if we’ve no need for wagons, why not tell the colony to come by ship?”
“Too expensive. Besides, we can use the plows and other personal items they bring. The returning scouts will tell them what we need. Axes, saws, hammers, plows, scythes, seeds.”
I wondered if someone would bring out trunks of clothing for us and the other scouts who remained here. Or perhaps we will return. That thought proved fleeting as I watched my husband scan this landscape, take some measure of contentment that he had found what he considered the perfect place for the colony.
Whichever scouts returned would have to start back soon in order to be in Missouri before the snow fell. I wanted to talk about that but instead I asked, “And what will the wagon makers do here when they arrive?”
I thought of my brother Jonathan apprenticing as a wagon maker. That had been his plan, to make wagons and sell them to those coming west, his contribution to the colony an important one.
“Maybe they’ll build boats,” Christian said, his annoyance obvious in his tone. “Or furniture. Each house will need furniture. We adapt in the colony, Liebchen.”
Would wintering with the Woodards be an adaptation? We surely couldn’t work through the wind and rains of winter to build. But if I said that now, he’d think I coveted comfort. I didn’t want any suggestion of weakness, or Christian might consider sending Andy and me back with the scouts—without him.
Living in Bethel I knew most everyone. Maybe due to my father’s influence, or perhaps because I paid attention to new babies born and did what I could to help at the harvests, adapted, and went where I was told. They were like a family, each willing to help the other no matter what. We were asked to be in service to others, to be ready on Judgment Day to face our Maker and say we had tended to widows and orphans and brought in new sheep to the flock.
Since we’d left Bethel, I’d met dozens of people, some with names I now couldn’t remember and some on the wagon trains we briefly joined. We might have nooned with them, listened to their stories and then moved on. The names and faces ran together for me like birds along a rock fence. Maybe our journey intrigued them; maybe they found sojourners in the Lord’s vineyard to be of interest. I didn’t feel a part of any community with them because we didn’t stay in one place together, we didn’t share both hardships and joys. A community, even a colony, needed those shared times to bind it together.
A Clearing in the Wild Page 19