At about the same time, Jane was doing her own version of leaving the ordinary, mostly in a loose toss of woods at the edge of her family’s farm. A modest patch of mild disorder where foxes did half gainers through the air, landing with front paws pinned to unsuspecting mice and voles. Where raccoons waddled up to the creek and washed their faces—looking, she said, like overfed hoodlums cleaning up after a hard night of stealing. In time those encounters led her to join the Girl Scouts, and later to take a job as a counselor at the Kentuckiana Girl Scout Camp in northern Kentucky. Nicknamed Calamity Jane, she kept the sash from her uniform hung in our closet for years, festooned with twenty embroidered merit badges: among them “Outdoor Cook,” “Drawing and Painting,” “First Aid,” “Reader,” “World Knowledge,” and “Adventurer.” I always thought it strange there was no “Rambler” badge, though for all her urge to wander, her chance wouldn’t come until later, long after the uniforms had been put away.
It was the best of luck for us to have come under the spell of trees and foxes and hedgerows at a time when millions of other Americans were falling in love with nature, too—in city parks and urban wetlands, along the Appalachian Trail, the California redwoods, at Yellowstone and Yosemite, Rocky Mountain and Great Smoky Mountains and Acadia national parks. Mostly the travelers were young, not ten years older than us, keen to be slipping into that now and then silly, now and then profound attraction that rolls across this country every forty or fifty years. A drive not unrelated to one that exploded in America in the 1780s. And again in the 1830s. And again in the 1870s. Then still again in the first two decades of the twentieth century—a time so full of fire that journalists described it as a movement like no other in the world. A time when the best-selling books were nature books. When naturalists like John Burroughs and Ernest Thompson Seton were rock stars.
In 1913, a pot-bellied, beer-swigging part-time illustrator from New England named Joe Knowles sidled up to his friends in a Boston bar and ordered up pints. As usual, they joked, ribbed one another. Argued politics. But eventually the talk drifted to nature, to wilderness. And that was hardly unusual for the times. Any American over thirty had memories of the official closing of the frontier—the frontier being defined as a line “out west,” beyond which population densities were less than two people per square mile. For a nation long convinced that its best qualities had arisen from life along that shifting line, such a closing was a big deal. Indeed, for decades afterward, people debated and generally worried about the effects of that milestone on everything from individual character to national identity.
Beyond that, those same years saw no end of outrage against the unbridled pillaging of nature by the robber barons. And also against the fact that young boys and girls who’d been raised on farms were working seventy-hour weeks in the mills, some dying in fires, others crippled by lung disease. Senator William Borah, of Idaho, introduced a bill to oversee general health conditions for working kids, asking the government to do for them what it’d done long before for calves and pigs.
And all that fed into that scene in that Boston bar, when late in the evening after God knows how much beer, Joe Knowles stood up and puffed out his chest.
“I’ve half a mind to strip naked and run off into the woods for two or three months, live as a wild man. Just to prove Americans still have sap in their veins.”
Everyone was impressed. The next morning, a Boston reporter named Michael McCeough knocked on Joe’s door, probably rousing him from a hangover.
“Remember that thing you said last night?” asked McCeough. “The thing about running off naked to live as a wild man?”
Who knows if Knowles recalled. But he was a proud man.
“Well,” the reporter went on, “my editor thinks it’d be a great circulation gimmick. We’d like to sponsor you.”
Which is how in August 1913, on the far shore of King and Bartlett Lake in western Maine, it came to pass that Joe Knowles stood in a light drizzle wearing something like a G-string, explaining the mission to a bewildered group of reporters, telling them about the need for us all to remember we still have sap in our veins. The idea, he went on, had come from a dream he’d had of being lost in the woods, alone and naked, with little hope of getting out.
“Not much of a dream. But a damn real one.”
It would be one of the greatest publicity stunts of all time. Knowles emerged from the woods two months later a full-blown hero—not just in New England, but coast to coast. A book of his adventures sold more than 250,000 copies. On emerging from the woods, some twenty thousand people turned out to see him, including thousands on the Boston Common alone. The chief physician at Harvard pronounced him to be the fittest human specimen he’d ever seen. He went on to tour vaudeville for two and a half years with top billing.
“Behold a sermon two months long for the people of the United States!” cried Herbert Johnson, celebrated pastor of Boston’s Warren Avenue Church, shortly after Knowles stumbled out of the woods. Pastor Johnson went on to say how he wished those who worshipped gold could understand the underlying spirit of the wilderness, that what Knowles did would make men and women across the country go into the woods. And in the woods they would stop and think. And the more they thought, the longer the flag would wave.
The boomers who ended up carrying that same water, refloating yet another round of slightly wacky, American-style craving for nature in the 1960s and ’70s, were by sheer numbers a force to reckon with. And their quick, big embrace of the last untrammeled places was for Jane and me a fine alternative to the straight roads of Indiana—the straight lawns and straight furrows of corn, the straight lines of kids waiting outside the schoolhouse door. It’s true that by the time we hit our teen years, Indiana was already lidded and torn. But here and there, even in the Hoosier state, there were enough pieces left for us to feel like part of the movement, the celebration. What was left of those unkempt lands felt to us a lot like the way Thomas Wolfe described nature: places where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time. Bees still hovered over sky-blue flax blossoms, then flew away to points unknown. Lightning bugs lit up the summer nights. Cardinals appeared blood red against the snow, magically plucking out tiny seeds hidden deep inside the drifts.
THE OLD CHEVY VAN CAME TO REST IN EARLY JUNE, PARKED beside the house in the gravel driveway, under the branches of a towering Douglas fir. I sat outside, crumpled in a plastic lawn chair, my broken leg on a lodgepole stump while my friend John unloaded the van, carrying to the garage bits and pieces of our ill-fated journey. At one point he stopped and sighed, squatted down and told me I didn’t have to thank him every time he gathered up another load. Abby the traveling cat, eighteen at the time, as well as a younger gray tabby named Ruby knew something wasn’t right. Normally off messing around in the woods, they wouldn’t leave my side—waiting and watching under my chair, trading off lying against my stomach. Nervously watching as John pulled out yellow and green river bags, a pair of canoe paddles, lifejackets, maps, nature guides, rain gear. A torn, tattered black and blue wet suit the paramedics had cut off me after my rescue.
The early months after my return—June through August, which in the Rockies are almost always brilliant—were in the year 2005 filled with cold and bluster and rain. Things were being over-watered, growing through the early weeks of the season not gently, as usually happens, but in tangles, heavy snarls of fescue and bluebells and saplings. “Stupidly fertile,” as author Rinda West once put it. One day midsummer, desperate for elbow room, for a sense of order, I tied my gas-powered Weed Eater onto one of my crutches with a short length of cotton rope then stumbled out to the edges of the yard and started cutting back the bluestem and Oregon grape, the low-lying shrubs. It wasn’t pretty: lurching forward a step with the crutches clenched under my armpits, swinging the machine in a wide arc in front of me, stopping there long enough to cut what I could reach, then moving on. A close friend overheard someone talking about my psychotic yard work and phoned f
or an explanation. “Oh, crutch!” she said after I started to explain. “The way I heard it, you’d tied a Weed Eater to your crotch.”
We were together in these aspen woods, on this creek, for more than fourteen years. We knew the moose that ate the landscaping, and the black bear that liked to saunter across the deck and stare at us through the bedroom window, painting the glass with slobber. The ferocious little mink, too, scurrying up and down the island every June with a bad case of the munchies. We could show you the fallen trees where male grouse drummed, calling for mates. Tell you which of the ice bridges whitetail deer used to cross the creek in the heart of winter, predict the days in March when the Canada geese would return, dropping out of sheets of snow.
We could mosey with you through the aspen to where the tipi stood, recounting what it sounded like from the inside on summer nights, when rain drummed against the canvas. Point to the place on the deck where in warm months we laid out the mattress from the van, drifting off to sleep to the sounds of the creek pushing north to the Yellowstone River, and every now and then, to hollow strains of great horned owls calling from the cottonwoods.
We knew the stages by which pockets of forest turned gold in the fall, the places where buttercups first opened in the spring. We could point to a line of grass-covered notches on the east horizon, marking where the sun rose in any given month. Show you the path of the moon across the winter sky.
The house itself had been a kind of fruiting of our relationship. Designed long before we even owned property, the rooms appeared in various daydreams while living on the road for seven months in the van, part of a rambling pair of writing projects in the Pacific Northwest. One morning over breakfast in a café in Lincoln, Montana, Jane plucked a white napkin from the stainless dispenser sitting on the Formica table, spread it open halfway, fished a stubby pencil out of her day pack.
“What room should we start with?”
“I’m thinking kitchen,” I said, eyeing the room full of ranchers and loggers drinking coffee and eating buttermilk pancakes, trying to imagine the right size. “Not too big. But big enough for people to hang out.”
“Done!” Then she drew another, smaller rectangle on the napkin. “I’d like a place for a washer and dryer. Maybe a laundry tub. With dried plants hanging from the ceiling.”
On it went through the good months of summer, the drawing expanding with the passing days. We talked of an east-facing window in the bedroom to let in morning light. A garage for the van. Parked deep in the forest at the end of the day, she’d carefully unfold the napkin in the last of the light, study it without a word for twenty or thirty minutes, then refold it, pressing it like a flower between the pages of the road notes.
“It’ll be good for us to have a home base,” she liked to say. For all her love of wandering she was keen on being anchored to a place—not so much for comfort, but for a certain common sense she found in the rooms and the yards and the main streets that scribed her life.
In the wake of her death, friends dropped by to pay their respects, bringing soups and pastas and casseroles and salads and cakes. Some walked through the house and caught their breath, as if seized by the thought that these very things—the wall hangings and photos on the old piano, the dried plants that did in fact end up hanging from the logs in the laundry room, just as she imagined—had in the blink of an eye become prompts for grief. They laid their offerings on the counter and hugged me. We’d cry for a minute or two. Then they’d let themselves out and drive away.
And I’d go back to the photos—spilling out of bowls and baskets, some held on the refrigerator door by little fruit-shaped magnets, others in frames, hung on the walls of the living room and bedroom and bathroom and hallway. One in particular, taped to the side of a metal filing cabinet in her office, I went back to over and over again: a shot of her on a swing I’d made for her birthday out of a slab of barn wood, which with a little reckless behavior I managed to fasten to the high branches of a cottonwood tree outside the back door with forty-foot lengths of rope. In the photo she’s wearing brown pants and a long-sleeved shirt the color of spring sky, caught swooping past the camera on her way to the edge of the creek bank, legs out straight and leaning backward from the waist, grinning at the camera. Swinging the way self-assured little girls swing on warm mornings before the start of school. Of the various gifts I gave her over the years—flowers for anniversaries, the skis and backpacks and other outdoor gear she always wanted for Christmas—that swing, which she’d asked for on her forty-eighth birthday, made her especially happy.
The next morning I rose to find her at the window, looking out at the swing being pushed through a graceful sweep by a steady breeze.
“Look! It even works without us.”
“The world’s first perpetual-motion swing,” I suggested.
She nodded, then pointed at Abby the traveling cat, sitting at the edge of the woods in front of the swing, her head rolling back and forth with the movement of the ropes.
“And a giant cat toy.”
The previous year, she’d worked her last season as a ranger in Yellowstone, the end of seven years teaching at the park’s brilliant nature school for junior high kids, ending what was probably the best job of her life for the chance to spend time closer to home. She was apprehensive about leaving, troubled by the hole in her life she knew would be there when she was no longer teaching. Still, in the photo, she’s wearing the giddy, slightly silly look she could muster even in the face of worry. As if putting on the look of happy took her halfway to being there.
There were other mementos in the house, of course—mostly bits of nature gathered from other places: baskets filled with pinecones—Digger and Coulter plucked from trails in the Sierras, lodgepole and ponderosa and whitebark from the Rockies, jack and eastern white pine from New Hampshire. Her climbing harness dangled from a hook in the corner of her office, above a small table set with binoculars, field guides, a small hand lens. And beside the table was a stack of homemade plant presses, each fashioned from two pieces of fiberboard filled with sheets of newspaper and bound tight with pack straps, used across years of research we did for a series of nature guides. One morning after returning from Canada, I unclipped the straps and leafed through the layers of newspaper, finding marsh fern fronds from Pennsylvania and wiregrass from Wyoming; red fir branches from the northern Sierras, golden heather from the coast of Maine. And in the middle of the press, a pair of mayflowers from New England, their ivory blooms faded now to a ghostly, translucent pale.
The mayflowers had come from a deep woodland in western Connecticut, the one journey we ever made where her boundless enthusiasm proved unfortunate. She’d been out faithfully keying plants, when all of a sudden she spotted in the distance an elderly man bending down under a cluster of beech trees. He too, evidently, was taking pleasure in some exquisite patch of blooms—a last show of wildflowers before the killing frost. Hurrying over to share in the find, she suddenly stopped in her tracks, having discovered the guy not studying plants at all, but partially disrobed, squatting over a freshly dug hole trying to do his business. “Guess you caught me with my pants down,” he offered sheepishly. She muttered a fast apology and scurried away.
These remnants, the flowers and pinecones and photographs and binoculars and dog-eared field guides, were the trappings of life lived as though nature were both wings and nest. Touchstones to places where wounds got tended. Juniper berries from southern Utah, gathered during a sad, weeklong meander following my father’s sudden death. White quartz from Montana’s Line Creek Plateau, found after a hard trip to Indiana, when we’d sat with Jane’s mother in the Alzheimer’s ward and held her hand and told her all manner of news we knew she didn’t understand, fed her and rubbed lotion on the dry places of her face, then kissed her cheek and gone away.
SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER JANE’S DEATH ON THE KOPKA, SORTING through remnants of her life, I stumbled across a box of letters she’d written to my mother. Most held the usual chatty new
s—birthday wishes, notes from some adventure. One of them, though, written in the fall of 1982, slammed the breath right out of me.
“One of my biggest fears,” she’d written, “is to drown in murky water—in a place where you can’t see the bottom.”
Which was an exact description of the Kopka River, stained the color of weak tea by tannins leached from the spruce forest. I struggled for days after that, thinking all over again how we could’ve just as easily gone backpacking. Taken a bike trip. Stayed at home and laid in the hammock and read books and drunk margaritas. Cleaned the fucking garage.
There’s this obscure rule in science, in physics, called deterministic chaos. Look it up in a college textbook and you might find this example: Toss a leaf into a stream at the head of a current and see where it comes out at the end of the flow. Place another leaf in the exact same location, oriented precisely the same way, and because of tiny chaotic forces beyond our ability to measure, it will come out at the bottom of the current somewhere else entirely.
If we hadn’t stopped at that canoe shop so Jane could buy me that new flotation bag for my birthday, we would’ve headed home to Montana without ever hearing of the Kopka River. If we’d slept another ten minutes before departing. If we’d been in a boat a foot longer or a foot shorter. If at the head of the rapid the canoe had been one foot, one inch over to the left or right. If I’d given a somewhat lighter or harder draw stroke . . . Then maybe she would’ve lived, would’ve kept from hitting her head and being knocked unconscious when the boat finally flipped, pitching us into that screaming water.
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