At long last I heave onto the bank, rest just long enough to drink water and choke down an energy bar. From there it’s back to crawling and stumbling over downfall toward the Armstrong Highway. In thirty minutes I manage only a few hundred yards. Then a sound. Faint, but growing. The thin drone of a boat motor, somewhere near the east end of the lake. Filled with hope, I lurch to the shore, practically falling into the water in my rushed attempt to get out beyond the overhanging tree branches to a place I can be seen. Sure enough, in the distance is a speedboat, and it’s coming my way. Several figures are visible. Fishing rods are sticking up along the gunwales.
When the boat gets a couple hundred yards from shore, I slip the white plastic bag I’ve brought over the canoe paddle and begin waving it frantically, all the while shouting at the top of my lungs. No sign they see me. Next I put the paddle under my arm, and with two fingers in my mouth let out the loudest, shrillest whistles I can muster, followed by still more shouting and paddle waving. The boat never slows, never varies its course. Just keeps skimming westward at full throttle. I damn near weep.
Just as I’m about to step out of the lake and start moving again, I hear the boat’s motor slow, see the fishermen pull in toward shore on the far side of the Kopka River, maybe a half mile away. I wait until they cut the engine and then begin frantically whistling, shouting, and waving all over again.
After ten minutes of this they start heading toward me, slowly at first then picking up speed. The men are clutching bottles of beer, and when I finally get the chance to sputter out what’s just happened, they offer to take me back to their camp along the highway. When I hand my paddle to the guy in the bow of the boat, I can see he’s pretty loaded, though that hardly makes him less appealing. At least not until he grabs the shoulders of my life jacket to pull me over the bow and slams my nuts into the hull. I lay on the foredeck in fetal position, hands clasped between my thighs, writhing. The guys think it has something to do with my broken leg.
They’re paramedics, on a holiday fishing trip. Back in camp they prop me in a lawn chair on the beach, give me a blanket and a beer and a Darvocet for the pain, cut away my wet suit, and ice the broken leg. For some reason their satellite phone isn’t working, and after several failed attempts, one of them runs up to the highway to flag down a car. The first driver spots him and speeds by, eyes straight ahead. Ten minutes later comes another one. This time the lone woman driver stops, makes a call to the Ontario Provincial Police.
The pain is coming on strong now. Not just in my leg, but in my back, too, which I’ll later discover is covered with massive bruises and abrasions from being slammed into rocks in the Kopka rapids. My chest is heaving like the chest of a little kid trying not to cry. I sit in that lawn chair for the next hour watching the sky until a small plane appears overhead, a search plane. Shortly after that comes an ambulance. The emergency team is extremely kind, and that calms me some. I even find myself starting to hope. But it’s the hope of a desperate man.
FLOWERS IN THE DUST
Of all the wild places we imagined going when we were young, it was in the northern Rockies that we gained our first sense of the kind of creative bedlam long gone from the land of corn and clipped lawns and Putt-Putt golf. Snowstorms showed up in the Sawtooth Mountains even in July, and in late summer, wind squalls powerful enough to knock down hundreds of acres of trees in a single breath. In spring came the thunder of landslides ripping loose from the upper shoulders of the high country; later, normally modest creeks turned treacherous with melting snow. All of which helped forge personalities in the locals more expectant, matter-of-fact, outrageous. Even the kids seemed like ungentled horses, full of themselves. Local historian Dick D’Easum tells of a Christmas party in a Stanley store where a seven-year-old boy dashing about on his new bike ended up running at high speed into the branch of a massive decorated tree, nearly breaking his neck. D’Easum said the kid didn’t even cry. Just picked himself up, turned around, and shouted to the crowd: “That’s one hell of a place to put a Christmas tree!”
Our own oddball behavior—oddball by Indiana measures, anyway—had mostly to do with me writing stories gushing about the outdoors, and with Jane squatting in the sagebrush with kids, helping them figure out why snakes went into holes, imagining how a red-tailed hawk could look down from five hundred feet up in the sky and see the twitch of a mouse half the size of a Twinkie. In the early years after we came to Idaho, our more traditional neighbors, many of them ranchers and loggers, didn’t always understand what we were doing. But they were always long on encouragement—wishing us well, saying they hoped it worked out.
Of all the people we met over the years who marched to a different drummer, none played a bigger role in our lives than our Forest Service boss in Stanley, Chuck Ebersole—a former career Navy officer, brilliant and effusive and ornery. If the Sawtooths and the White Cloud Peaks were our classroom, the place we got our footing as naturalists, Chuck was the blustery headmaster. Before mailing me the paperwork for my summer job in college, he scrawled excited notes all over the margins. On the last page of the employment package, under the signature of the forest manager, he penned in big letters with a red felt-tipped marker: “This is a Western flavored, pioneer-mining-cattle-ranching-homesteading-but-now-infiltrated-with-tourists area of the Old West. You’re gonna love it.”
Chuck had the face of a Pennsylvania Dutchman, strong nose and jaw, softened some by his habit of standing with one leg forward and slightly bent, sort of like a rock hero might do, absent the guitar riding sidesaddle on his hip. When in a good mood his habit was to whistle, always the same refrain, thirteen notes long, over and over. In my first month on the job, speeding down the highway with Chuck behind the wheel, he’d routinely look out the side window of our government-green Chevy Vega, slam on the brakes, and leap out of the car to run off into a nearby ditch or meadow or patch of forest. The sort of frantic behavior most people reserve for spotting bags of money or dead bodies.
But what he was reacting to were the smallest charms of nature. One time it was a patch of penstemon flowers, where with barely contained excitement he proceeded to point out the flower’s one sterile hairy stamen, an adaptation that likely allowed bees visiting the plant to deposit more of the pollen they carried on their bodies onto the stigma of the flower. Another day it was a stream bank full of horsetail, prompting him to spin images of how the plant had been around some hundred million years, dominating the understory of the ancient Paleozoic forest. By the end of these lessons his hands and teeth were clenched in a kind of quivering euphoria, until finally he’d smack his palm hard against his green twill pants and gush.
“Jeeesus kee-rist, Gary, isn’t that great?! I mean, that is goddamned really something!”
When he was in the Navy, at sea for months at a time, Chuck would roll out of his bunk every morning at three thirty to study for college correspondence courses, in the end finishing twice the number of hours he needed for a degree. He waded ashore with the Marines at Guadalcanal. While out in the Pacific, he learned of a problem with the B-24 aircraft, a design flaw that made it impossible for rear gunners to escape in the event of fire. Using parts scavenged from a ruined machine gun, he fashioned emergency window releases. The day after the invention was installed, it saved the lives of five men in a brutal crash landing. Next he busied himself creating a retractable camera-mounting system for the B-24, complete with a makeshift dark room in an adjacent bomb bay, turning the airship into a photographic reconnaissance plane. He walked out of the Navy in 1964 with eight bronze stars, a silver star, and a breast full of commendation medals.
When he landed in the Sawtooths after getting his PhD, his unbridled eagerness led him not only to learn nearly every plant and animal and bird and geologic feature you could shake a stick at, but also a boatload of regional history. In the early 1970s, he and his wife, Brady, hiked much of what would later become the River of No Return Wilderness, carrying a tape recorder, interviewing the last of
the hermits still living off the major drainages of the Middle Fork. Guys who would normally run off anyone at the point of a gun would talk with Chuck for hours. He was astonishingly curious, no less so than the average ten-year-old, and often envious of the hermits’ calm, ingenious ways: their mule-powered washing machines, their water-driven grinding wheels, their newfangled bear traps.
From Chuck we heard historic tales from the old times: about Whiskey Bob the mailman, who each week made a three-day snowshoe trek from Ketchum over Galena Pass and across Scrapper Flat to Obsidian carrying fifty pounds of mail; done with that, he schussed fifteen more miles into Stanley for a few games of poker. The next morning it was back over the pass, often at thirty below, and on to Ketchum to pick up another load. Every week, all through the brutal months of winter. We learned too about a former owner of the Sawtooth Restaurant named Harry Giese who in 1882 had a greenhorn customer order the cod ball special and then not eat it. Incensed, Giese let loose with a stern lecture about how the food was perfectly good, and that by the way, ingredients were damned hard to get in these parts. When the customer still refused to eat the meal, Giese did what few restaurateurs would consider proper: he pulled out a gun and shot him in the leg. A jury later found Giese not guilty, reckoning that a man has a right to force customers to eat codfish balls if they ask for them.
With Jane and me, Chuck was walking, always walking—on Forest Service trails, in the tilted sage fields behind the ranger station, out at the ranch on Valley Creek he and Brady took care of. He talked about getting out of the Navy and hiking the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail nonstop with his eldest son, Johnny—incredibly, repeating the feat twice more, once with his youngest son, Mike. And on very rare occasions, in a voice so quiet we had to lean in to hear, he told of the day Johnny, a biologist for the National Park Service, was doing bighorn sheep counts over southern Utah when the plane crashed, killing him. It was the only tale he told where his eagerness, the usual piss and vinegar, drained away, leaving him looking like an old man with a broken heart. We sat next to him staring at the ground, not knowing what to say, hoping he’d find his way back.
The first assignment Chuck handed me—which he later handed to Jane—was to read and discuss at length Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. When the discussion part happened, over lunch at the ranger station, it was spiked with such fits of howling laughter that he finally had to get up and shut the office door to satisfy complaints from the receptionist at the front desk. Being a novel about a ragtag group of wilderness lovers in the Southwest driven to blow up that great engineering scourge of the twentieth century, the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, it was hardly official government reading. But Chuck had a lot of Ed Abbey in him, including his outrage over wild country being pillaged for profit. Sometimes it angered him to tears.
To a couple of fresh-faced Hoosiers like Jane and me, such behavior was incredible, though of course at age twenty we could hardly appreciate the cost. That someone could be absolutely brilliant at his job and at the same time buck an institution he thought gun-shy in the face of its own values—to us that was foreign stuff. It was one thing to meet an older guy who’d been able to keep his passions burning. It was another to watch him do so when it meant pissing off the people who signed his paychecks.
When they learned Chuck was about to retire, the Forest Service Supervisor’s Office in Ketchum—long hostile over his general impudence—suddenly panicked, realizing they were about to lose a treasure trove of original knowledge, none of which had ever been recorded. Shortly before he left, they mailed him a blank cassette tape with instructions to lay down all the things he thought future naturalists should know. On the day the tape came, I followed him out to the parking lot of the ranger station, where he placed the recorder in the gravel next to his cowboy boot, turned it on, then started grinding his heel as hard and loud as he could right next to the microphone. He kept this up for thirty minutes. An entire side of a cassette. Beneath the anger flashing in his eyes was an almost beatific smile, something a little kid might wear when peeing in the swimming pool.
“Let’s see what the sons-a-bitches do with that.”
I MISS CHUCK EBERSOLE. I MISS HIM FOR THE WAY HE NEVER stopped to think before taking his curiosity off leash, letting it whoop and holler and run around anywhere it wanted, no matter how silly it looked. I miss him tilting at environmental windmills, knowing full well that’s what he was doing, but caring less about outcome than about the earthy gladness that came from shouting against atrocities. I miss him because he was fierce in his belief that “the other”—in this case, elk and deer and bears and osprey and mink and moose—deserved the chance to live out their potential.
He used to tell us how the natural world had taught him a lot about critical thinking, that it helped him build an “ecology of mind.” Nature was unimaginably complicated, he said; just rubbing elbows with it encouraged fresh, diverse thinking. Nature taught people to be comfortable living with questions. And that, he told us, was in turn a good remedy for our tendency to oversimplify the world.
In his later years, mythologist Joseph Campbell—who like Rexroth lamented the trading away of story for illusions of security, of constancy—was asked if he thought America might ever again embrace some useful body of myth. Yes, he said. It would look much like an image of earth as the astronauts see it—a precious, fragile ball of life hurtling through space, undivided by political boundaries. Entire. Irreducible. Gloriously inconceivable.
Campbell would’ve loved Chuck Ebersole.
I RETURNED HOME FROM IDAHO TO AN EMPTY HOUSE. EMPTY but for the two cats, that is, Abby and Ruby, who at least brought a little comfort simply by needing me to feed them and scratch behind their ears. The sun was far to the south now; around ten in the morning it spilled over the tops of the aspen forest and through the living room windows, bathing the interior of the house with honey-colored light. In some ways, the place had never looked better.
It took a couple of days to dial down from the road trip, to get used to the idea of not moving. I missed the sound of the tires on the pavement, the blur of wet ditches filled with cattails, the sight of the full moon on clear nights pouring through the windshield. I missed seeing kids playing in their front yards, and young men standing on the shoulders of the highways, thumbs out and smiling for rides. Back at home, I had to figure out how to be at rest again. After the sun went down, I read—James Hillman, and Joan Didion, too, who advised that we all had to “pick the places we don’t walk away from.” I read Tolstoy and Bukowski and Joyce Carol Oates and Jess Walter and Rollo May. I wasn’t looking for answers. Just hoping to feel something stir.
A few weeks after I returned from Idaho, something big happened. Since Jane’s death I’d been swimming against a noxious sense of betrayal. As if the wilds had done me wrong. Not that we both didn’t fully understand the risk of being in the outback. We’d canoed together for twenty years, from Florida to the Arctic Circle. We were certified in swiftwater rescue. She was both an Outward Bound instructor and a wilderness EMT—jobs that in every season brought sobering reminders of the risk of wilderness. Still, having always been fed by the wilds, encouraged by them even on brutal days, it was incredibly hard to think of them as the stage for her death.
The change came utterly without effort, while sitting on a stump outside my house near the swing I’d made for her, under a canopy of autumn leaves. At one point my eyes came to rest on a dying old cottonwood tree on the other side of the creek. And in that moment, I began surrendering to the inevitability of the end of things. To the fact that not one of the trees in front of me, not the grasses underfoot or the chickadees flitting through the aspen, not the ravens circling overhead, could’ve arisen in the world without being tied to that same conclusion. Just as up in the north country, beside the Kopka River, balsam fir would keep growing old and tumbling into the currents, whitetail deer and coyote and woodpeckers would drop to the ground and have their bones picked clean and crumbl
e into soil.
Grace seems to show itself more readily in the wake of grief, slipping into the room like a late-arriving lover and easing between the sheets. Who knows, maybe paying such close attention during that first scattering of Jane’s ashes, mustering the focus it seemed to require, left me somehow ready for grace, better able to grasp some essential sliver of understanding. All I can say is, in what proved the first easy thing since the accident, I got off that stump and walked back to the house and through the kitchen door. And never again did I think of nature betraying me.
THANKSGIVING
Twenty years before our disaster on the Kopka, I’d been asked by a publisher in New York to gather a collection of nature myths from around the world—small, bite-sized stories about the making of earth’s wonders. I talked to storytellers. Listened to old recordings by anthropologists. I went again and again into the stacks of major university folklore collections, combing through more than a thousand tales from every continent. Three months into the research it dawned on me that without fail, every story was holding up one or more of three qualities essential to living well in the world.
The first of those qualities was a relationship with beauty. The sort of relationship that grows out of quiet, intensely focused moments. Not shutting out the rest of the world; instead, being present enough to see the world through the shine of whatever beautiful thing is in front of you. The stories suggest that, while beauty may be fleeting, there is great reliability to it—a reliability so unerring, in fact, that it can pull the imagination to higher callings, to the outer edges of the eternal. Beauty is the moon Neruda wrote about, “living in the lining of your skin.”
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