The Carry Home

by Gary Ferguson

  My redemption would come in the form of a last request Jane had made years before, asking me if she died, to scatter her ashes in her five favorite wilderness areas. And so I did. Five treks to five unshackled landscapes. At first, the journeys broke my heart. Later they helped me piece it together again. In the end these trips would bring me back to nature again, to wilderness. To the lilting beauty of unkempt places—places powerful enough to woo the hearts not only of the young but of anyone willing to put down the search for meaning for a little while and just float in the sensations of being alive.

  YET AS I STAGGERED BACK TO LIFE AGAIN, DOING SO IN CLUMSY fits and starts, I found something unsettling—something I hadn’t counted on: another kind of sorrow, a cultural one, a steady seep of loss and anger spreading across the northern Rockies. Several hours west of my home, people in the little town of Libby, Montana, were dying by the dozens from asbestos poisoning, courtesy of a vermiculite mine hosted by that pillar of corporate bad behavior, W.R. Grace. What had been just another quaint blue-collar mountain town was, a year after Jane’s death, being called the deadliest Superfund site in America. Not a church service or wedding or family reunion happened in Libby that didn’t include a heart-wrenching parade of winded men and women dragging IV hangers and oxygen bottles up and down the aisles.

  Elsewhere, a fresh pack of angry white men were kicking off a new crusade against the federal government—against the national parks and forests, against too many goddamned regulations. And always, without fail, against wolves. Wolves as the “Bin Laden of the animal world,” and as “God’s great mistake.” Pickup trucks from the Snake River to the North Dakota line sped down the highways with a fresh plaster of bumper stickers: “Wolves: Canadian Terrorists,” and “Wolves: Smoke a Pack a Day.”

  Local newspapers carried photos of proud, grinning men with dead wolves hoisted in their arms, many having run the animals to exhaustion across twenty or thirty miles with snow machines, then pulling alongside to put a bullet in their heaving bodies. The grins never seemed so much about accomplishment, what with such kills taking about as much skill as hitting a deer with a car. The looks seemed more about release. That long-prized, almost impenetrable American fantasy of the rugged individual—long a theme song here—seemed to be dying out.

  People from other places had the audacity to point out that, per capita, the West was receiving more federal dollars in subsidies than anywhere else in the country—for everything from agriculture to energy to timber production. Various groups were lining up to demand their public lands be managed not just for grazing and mining, but for recreation and wildlife. Meanwhile local paychecks were being rerouted through service industries—economies serving not just tourists, but retirees and second-home owners, the latter moving in with no particular allegiance to the rugged individualism that defined the code of the West. For many of the old guard, killing a wolf, especially a government wolf, was a shot glass of power in a river of gloom.

  Outside the region, the news wasn’t much better. Ice in the Arctic was melting faster than anyone had predicted. Wildfires were raging. In the year Jane died, some 5 million acres burned in Alaska alone; the following year, 3.7 million acres of Texas went up in smoke. Charges were leveled at the Bush administration for censoring government climate scientists, including the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose research showed striking connections between global warming and hurricane intensity.

  Of course such problems weren’t really new. But what made them harder to swallow was the fact that in my own generation especially, we seemed to be meeting them with less mettle, less audacity than we’d once laid claim to. The injustices we’d tried to face down when we were young, including giving good weight to matters of the earth, had wound down to little more than a wheezing sadness about how overwhelming it all was. Important issues like climate change were being tossed in the closet, stuffed into a box marked things too hard to bear. As if we’d traded away our spectacular naivety about changing the world for something smaller, safer, poorer.

  In the wake of Jane’s death, my reactions were probably more prickly than usual. I’d just lost the person most precious to me. To watch people selling the wolf as the devil, to hear others barking about how people shouldn’t bitch about a little poison if it comes with a paycheck—all of it felt like a slight to life itself.

  I ended up stuck off and on for years in that murky underworld of rage and blow. Only slowly, and with no end of stumbling, did I finally start embracing another truth. A truth that arose from the simple, unassailable fact that there are right now a fair number of people out there still trying to live as if the planet mattered. Indigenous people—more powerful today than they’ve been in years—are pushing sovereignty in a heroic effort to protect the air and water of tribal lands, steering toward a future that many of the rest of us still lack the courage to even imagine. At the same time, men and women in dozens of countries, from every walk of life—and of all ages, though a great many are young—are discovering yet again that a relationship with nature is one way to a riper, more expanded sense of life. They’re stewards of bigheartedness. Their efforts are tonic for sorrowful times.

  If such paths are difficult, and they always are, they can at least be said to offer unspeakable tenderness, astonishing beauty. Just like the path Jane and I set out on more than thirty years ago, when we headed off in Rexroth’s footsteps, out onto open land, heads up and looking—looking at everything—angling for some new way of dreaming up the world.

  TOWARD A SETTING SUN

  Somewhere on the far side of Winnipeg, in a town I haven’t so much forgotten as never knew, Martha pulls the van to the curb, gets out without a word, crosses the street into some stranger’s yard, and starts pilfering flowers. I sit in the passenger seat with my broken leg jammed against the windshield, craning my neck to look up and down the neat rows of little boxy houses, white and blue and pink, half expecting some little old lady to fling open the screen door and loose a pair of schnauzers on her. But soon she’s back, climbing behind the wheel to lay a fistful of lilac and pear blossoms on the dashboard, nesting them against the cardboard box that holds the ashes. A hundred or so miles down the road, as the flowers begin to pale, we slow down, lower the windows, and with no small feeling of ceremony cast them to the prairie. Then another stop in some other little farm town to swipe more flowers. So it goes, two thousand miles across the north country. A sluggish, one-car memorial procession and petty crime spree, from Mr. Blake’s funeral home on Fourth Street in Thunder Bay, home again, to the faraway uplands of Montana.

  IT’S TAKEN THE BETTER PART OF A DAY TO GET TO THE Canadian prairie—that hazy line of longitude where seven hundred miles of balsam and birch finally begin to yield, replaced by roadsides of bluestem and wild rye. Out beyond the loose scatter of towns this is lonely country—wind and sky and fruitless thoughts. I recall years ago being near here on an even smaller road, tucked tight against the highline of North Dakota; through the windshields of cars going in the other direction were lone drivers with newspapers propped against the steering wheels, reading. This is that kind of place. The sort of landscape that makes people edgy, their patience finally failing against these plates of sky, these endless oceans of wheat.

  It’s been four days since I lost my wife. Since then, the whole region has descended into raucous, lumbering rain. Water fills the potholes and hollows on dirt roads adjacent to the highway, lies in the parking lots of grocery stores and across the bays of gas stations, churned to ripples by a relentless wind. In the ditches along the roads, the grass and sunflowers have come on so fast that mowing crews can’t keep up with them. It leaves the two-lane we’re traveling—already a miracle of understatement—looking tenuous, like something from the ’60s, when a long drive on an open highway seemed like some sort of escapade.

  An hour from the border, Martha wipes her eyes and straightens in the seat—startles me with a smack of her palm against the steering
wheel.

  “We’ve gotta get some carrot juice,” she sniffs. “The border’s coming. Carrots’ll ground us.”

  I applaud the idea, however strange. Out here on the prairie, though, we might as well be digging for truffles. At one point we spend ten minutes leafing through phone books looking for a health-food store, finding nothing, until finally it dawns on us that we could get all the benefits of carrot juice simply by eating carrots. A few miles up the road, I spot a produce sign at the lone business in the town of Elm Creek, a gas station and quick stop, and I hobble inside to find a single rotting bunch of celery and seven apples. The owner is a bulky man, smiling from under a blond mustache as he hauls baskets of chicken parts from a vat of hot oil. When I ask about carrots, he gets a concerned look—not so much like he thinks I’m nuts, but as if he can sense the depth of my troubles. Without a word he goes back into his apartment, pulls a bag of carrots from his own refrigerator, sells it for almost nothing.

  “Good luck,” he calls out after me.

  So we roll out of Canada with wilting flowers on the dashboard and mealy pieces of carrot between our teeth. On hearing of the accident, the border patrolman stumbles, goes on to tell us how some friends were trying to get him to take a rafting trip on the Russian River in California but water scares him and he’s nervous about the whole idea. He stops short, blinks—as if suddenly realizing he’s blathering. Then he’s back to business, taking a haphazard look around the inside of the van, opening a box or two. Clearly relieved, he waves us on, arm outstretched, a lone finger pointing toward the empty fields of North Dakota.

  From here nearly to home the roads are mapped precisely to the cardinal points of a compass. Strung first with little wheat towns, then, as we move farther west, with little Hereford and Angus towns. In every community flags are waving, proud even as plywood boards are being screwed across the windows of the downtown storefronts. Over the past decade, the region has lost thousands of residents, some areas now claiming fewer people than 175 years ago, in the glory days of the Sioux. Beyond the open windows we catch fluty snippets of meadowlark from random fence posts—and from wet ditches, the whir and twitter of red-winged blackbirds, hanging sideways from cattails and swaying in the wind.

  My doctors in Thunder Bay were troubled when I said I was going home by road, worried I might develop blood clots. With that in mind I mostly ride shotgun, perched in a captain’s chair with my broken leg propped up and pointed down the highway. Still, every few hours, I tell Martha I want to trade off, yank the leg down and hobble around to the other side, crawl in, and drive for a hundred miles or so with my left foot. Friends who hear I’ve been behind the wheel will cast dubious looks at Martha, as if as a guardian she leaves something to be desired.

  “I never got the sense it was up for discussion,” she’ll tell them.

  In truth this westward journey is the only obsession left for me. A forlorn mission to carry home that box on the dashboard, at a pace no faster than a ’79 Chevy van can manage against a prairie wind.

  EVER SINCE THE HIGHWAY OPENED UP, I CAN’T STOP FIDDLING with the tape deck—fast-forward and then rewind, a little more then a little less, playing one song and then yanking the tape to find another. Intentionally picking music that stabs me in the heart. First it’s Bonnie Raitt, in a sort of aw-shucks version of “Your Sweet and Shiny Eyes,” a song that recalls two old friends down on the Mexican border clanking glasses to one of their birthdays, drinking salty margaritas with a stranger named Fernando. For twenty years Jane and I played that song to each other on every birthday—including two weeks ago, on her fiftieth, rolling down U.S. 2 through the jack pines of northern Michigan. “Young and wild,” croons Bonnie as the blue flax rolls by, “we drove 900 miles of Texas highway, to the Mexican border, as the day was comin’ on.”

  Another tank of gas in Carlyle, then Kate Wolf: “I’ve been walkin’ in my sleep, countin’ troubles ’stead of countin’ sheep.” And on Highway 12, within a stone’s throw of the Montana line, Jackson Browne, “Running on Empty.”

  Now and then I turn to stare over my left shoulder, above a small counter in the center of the van, to a cork bulletin board crowded with faded photographs: The two of us clutching a bottle of champagne on the Lochsa River in northern Idaho at the end of two thousand miles of trail. Thanksgiving in the Chisos Mountains of West Texas. Three shots of Abby the traveling cat. Another of us in late August on the rounded shoulders of the Berkshires, all soft and green and sweating in the summer sun.

  Beside the photos is a wire basket holding one of the journals Jane kept filled with notes from our research trips: Trail descriptions. Perfect campsites. Random thoughts from late in the evening, parked out in the woods somewhere, halfway through our second beer. Notes from the redwoods and Point Reyes in California, from Padre Island in southern Texas, the dark hills of North Carolina, the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona. From the Dakota Badlands and Florida’s Juniper River. Notes from the Utah desert, when the big blue van gained air during a heroic, ill-fated attempt to cross a washed-out arroyo after a rainstorm. From times spent poking along Edward Abbey’s favorite jeep roads in West Texas. From a cowboy line camp in northern Arizona. Squatting in the sand on a beach in Mexico. And of course notes from the Rockies, up and down that particular spill of mountains too many times to count.

  She was five foot five with straight brown hair, managing to always seem younger than her age in part by the enthusiasm of her smile. Much like her father, a salt-of-the-earth seed corn farmer from Indiana, walking down the street she made it a point to engage the gaze of strangers, believing it good to make connections even when it probably wasn’t. Her laugh was sudden, a little rowdy, the first note exploding in a spurt of holler followed by a quick hand to her mouth, as if she was as surprised as anyone by such outbursts. Most days she rose at the crack of dawn with the trace of a grin already showing at the corners of her mouth.

  She’d been an outdoor educator her entire adult life, working from the canyons of the Southwest, north to Yellowstone; in her off-hours she wrote letters to family, called from pay phones the people we knew just to say hi, did aerobics in the living room with Jane Fonda while the snow fell, made cookies and gave most of them away. She performed magic tricks for small kids—mostly tricks her dad taught her—and if anyone in her audience was so inclined, she was happy to go jump into piles of leaves or build snow forts in somebody’s backyard or roll down some grassy hill for the sole purpose of getting dizzy.

  We’d been restless children, destined to become restless adults. Proud members of the last generation to soothe the angst of youth not with Ritalin, but with road trips. What started with the Beats of the ’40s and ’50s—twenty-somethings from the Midwest and East Coast, pushing west in Ramblers and Roadmasters, Nomads and Bel Airs—ended with quixotic Pollyannas like us, westering in Volkswagens and Impalas and Ford Econolines. Long before I could even drive, I lay in my bed on spring nights in South Bend, Indiana, listening to the groan of freight trains two blocks away, rumbling west toward Chicago on the Grand Trunk line, wanting nothing more than to go. At seventeen I made it, hopping into those boxcars on Friday and Saturday nights, rolling away past crumbling brick warehouses that circled the edges of the city out into a land of fields and woodlots and pot-holed county roads leading to who knows where.

  Jane too started young, making tents out of bedsheets at the edges of her family’s cornfields. Sweating through the firefly summers, lulled to sleep by the smell of dirt, thrilled, she once told me, by the fact that from the middle of July all the way to harvest, those sprawling cornfields held at least a modest chance to leave the known world. Disappear. Get lost. Nine months after we met, each of us sold our cars and on a cold December day laid down the money for the slightly used blue Chevy van Martha and I are riding in now, having found it on a car lot in the tiny town of Syracuse, Indiana. With my father’s help, through five months of sanding and sawing and nailing and wiring, we turned it into a sixteen-foot rol
ling home called Moby. In the spring of 1980 we busted a bottle of cheap champagne across the front bumper, then pushed out of the heartland on a journey stretching across twenty-five years and some 350,000 miles.

  TEN DAYS AGO, DRIVING THROUGH THE OUTSKIRTS OF Sudbury, Ontario, Jane turned to me, and in the first such conversation we’d had in more than a decade, asked if I remembered how if something ever happened to her, she wanted her ashes scattered in her favorite places. Five of them in all, from the red rock of southern Utah to the foothills of Wyoming’s Absaroka Range; from the granite domes of central Idaho to the Beartooths of south-central Montana, to a certain high valley in northeast Yellowstone.

  Of course I remember, I told her.

  Now, wrapped in this impossible fog of grief, I have only one thought about the future: That after my leg heals, when neighbors are no longer bringing over covered dishes, when friends are no longer stopping by to mow my lawn and vacuum my house, no longer driving me to the mountains so I can sleep under the stars—probably sometime in early fall—I’ll make up the bed in the back of the van, stock the tiny fridge, pick just the right music, and drive away. Beside me will be a jar, a beautiful jar. One last time for the two of us, outward bound, into the West.

  THE RELICS OF HOME

  As best I recall, I started leaving the ordinary around age seven, escaping by ascension—going up twelve feet, sometimes fifteen—sitting in the crook of maples or oaks and hugging the trunks, curtains of big green leaves wound up in the wind, making noises like rivers running through the sky. Kid-style adventure, mostly. But on some days—days when my mother’s rage was running, when she’d been at me with that studded belt she kept hung behind the bedroom door, spinning me around until my bare butt and thighs were covered in a splatter of welts—on those days, the trees were sanctuary. On those days, I’d squirm higher still, to the uppermost branches big enough to hold my weight. And I’d sit there, sometimes for an hour or more, way above everything, halfway to the sky.