The Carry Home

by Gary Ferguson

  The second quality showing up in those stories was community—not just among humans, but with every aspect of creation. A sense of deep belonging—one that carries us out of the little room where loneliness lives into a wide world of ever-present embrace. Of sunlight in our bones and rivers in our blood.

  The third had to do with the need to cultivate an appreciation for mystery, welcoming places or situations where the world seems utterly unfathomable. Not as some first step in figuring things out, but as the first step in giving up trying. It’s a call to accept the fact that a great many curiosities about this life will never be answered, and further, that real peace is reserved for those happy to live day after day in the questions.

  In that first winter after Jane died, I started rereading those tales I’d found: Butterflies Teach Children to Walk, given to me by an old Ojibwa woman; an ancient tale from Java called The Forest and the Tiger; and from West Africa, The Birds Find Their Homes. In recalling those three essential qualities needed to live well in the world, by making them what I thought about when I woke up and again when I went to sleep at night, I started to understand just what it was I’d lost touch with in the underworld of grief.

  “Our stories hold life’s lessons,” said the Ojibwa elder who’d given me the butterfly story. “Bad things always get worse when you forget the lessons.”

  SOME TWENTY YEARS AGO, JANE AND I WERE FINISHING UP THE last piece of trail from a five-hundred-mile walk around greater Yellowstone, part of a book called Walking Down the Wild. In the last hours of the day, pushing toward home down the Line Creek Plateau, we started talking about the most striking experiences we’d had in nature, not so much as a couple, but as individuals. The times that shaped us. First our minds drifted back to childhood. She recalled tents made out of sheets erected at the edge of her family’s corn fields; I described how one summer when I was about ten, my brother and I had saved up our allowance to buy two pairs of green rubber boots, which we used in a patch of woods in northern Indiana, meandering up and down a tiny creek so small it didn’t even have a name.

  In the end, though, I told Jane the most striking experience I’d had in nature was in my late twenties, several years after we’d met, in the days when my mother was bedridden, dying of cancer. Having for a month been too weak to even hold her head up, she told me one morning she wanted to go outside. So I carefully gathered her up in my arms and carried her through the front door and out into the yard. Around we went for what must have been twenty minutes—first so she could smell the flowers on her lilac bushes, then so she could look through the woods above the bird feeder for the flash of a certain cardinal’s wings. And finally, so she could run through her fingers the supple young leaves of the maples and dogwoods.

  I’d never forgotten the solace my mother gained from that small journey around the yard, the last time I saw her alive. Having over the months watched disease whittle her soft, round body into something sharp and breakable, having seen the light in her eyes fade behind a wall of morphine, I found it hard to buy the claims I’d heard from Crow and Sioux people in the northern Rockies and plains who told me a person is never more powerful than when she’s about to die. But on that day, she was powerful. By some special grace, she managed to harness the mystery floating through that quarter-acre yard and use it to light the dark place closing in around her. That afternoon, the pain she’d worn for so long began draining from her face, replaced by a look of serenity I’d never seen in her, even when she was young and healthy. The next morning she told my sister-in-law to stop all the painkillers, despite having been on massive doses of Percocet and morphine for several months. A few days later, in the still hours of the night, she drifted away.

  The flash of that cardinal, the soft green leaves of the maples and dogwoods—they were small hints of the wild tapestry that once circled the earth, remnants of the patterns and paradigms that first breathed meaning into human existence. Hints that helped my mother transcend the tumult of daily life, offering her some slim measure of miracle, a hint of wholeness in her severed world. I too had been hunting for such inklings every time I’d gone to the wilderness. And most amazing of all was that I never once failed to find them.

  I couldn’t have spent the past thirty years watching saplings sprout from the ruin of fallen trees, seeing entire forests burn and then new ones rise from the ashes, watching the skies above Montana empty of birds in November and fill again in April, seeing its mountains pried apart by ice into boulders, the boulders into rocks, and the rocks into gravel and sand, without also surrendering to the fact that nothing we set eyes on, nothing we put our arms around, ever stays exactly the same. About this, the nature myths I’d collected from around the world were very clear. Of course there is a sadness in accepting that. But now there were days when it was a sweet, even comforting sadness. The kind of sadness that lies along the far edges of every love.

  DURING OUR YEARS IN MONTANA, WE’D MADE DOZENS OF SKI trips into small Forest Service guard stations and field cabins. And the one we visited most was a couple hours south of Red Lodge, in the southern Absarokas of Wyoming—two miles by trail up a remote river valley, cradled by Engelmann spruce and Douglas fir. We spent seven Thanksgivings there, each time arriving with backpacks topped with bags of turkey cooked the night before, mashed potatoes and canned oysters and cranberry sauce and red wine and cheese and salami and olives and French bread. And always too, ingredients for the one cocktail Jane was especially fond of on winter trips: the snowshoe, her version being a mix of Jack Daniels and a high-octane peppermint schnapps called Rumple Minze, poured into a Sierra Cup, chilled with icicles plucked from the roof.

  Known as the Wood River cabin, this too was on the list of the places she wanted her ashes scattered.

  I’d left in early winter of that first year, on a sun-drenched Thanksgiving morning, six months to the day following her death. Over the phone one of the locals told me there was no snow, not to bother bringing skis. But I arrived to find a good ten inches on the ground; with no skis or snowshoes, that would mean two miles of post-holing. Soon after leaving the parking lot and crossing the river on a steel footbridge, though, I crossed a lone set of prints from a big wolf. He was going south, the same direction as me, and the travel was made easy by placing my feet in the deep dents made by his paws. Except for a couple of short side trips, his route was unwavering. While at first I had to focus to match his gait, by the time I reached the big timber, maybe a half mile in, I could do it without even looking, stepping past the same downed trees and ice-covered rock faces he’d passed an hour or so earlier. When his tracks finally left the trail and drifted east across the frozen river, I was only forty yards from the cabin.

  The place looked the same: A one-room cabin, twelve feet by twenty, the walls made of small, unstained pine logs bleached by the sun. Along one outside wall was a pile of spruce and aspen wood taken from the surrounding forest, split and stacked, ready for the woodstove. Out in the yard was the same old freestanding sign board, meant to hold a forest map, but as usual, holding no map at all, which made weirdly profound the words carved into the bottom post of the empty frame: You Are Here.

  Inside the single twelve-foot-square room were three wooden chairs and a small sink with no running water. Shelves too, with extras of everything from matches to lamp wicks, tampons to toilet paper. And on a flat board braced to the wall in the back of the room, several feet of books: Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and Bradford Angier’s How to Stay Alive in the Woods; The Virginian by Owen Wister, a couple field guides, a fistful of Daily Bread booklets for those hungry for morsels from the Lord. And on the very end, Jack London’s White Fang. The previous Thanksgiving, with the Coleman lantern burning, it would be the last book I ever read aloud to her.

  What I was most interested in was the cabin journal, which Jane carried in on our first visit, making a gift of it to those who followed. Dozens of visitors used it, mostly families, many who like us ended up adopting th
e little cottage, caring for it by bringing in everything from rugs to stuffed chairs, lanterns to sauce pans. Though none of us ever met, across the years we came to know a little something about each other through the pages of the journal: Who catches fish and who snores. Who’s good at spotting moose. Who trekked to the outhouse in the middle of a frigid winter night, looked up, and saw God staring back from the stars. I left a few new lines, letting everyone know that Jane had died.

  Setting about the usual chores—filtering water, carrying firewood—as the last of the daylight leaked out of the sky, out behind the cabin I caught a glimpse of shadowy movement. Not fifteen feet away was a beautiful bobcat, her coat the color of dried grass. She walked slowly out from behind a juniper, coming toward me. Then she stopped and just stood there, staring into my eyes.

  It was uncanny behavior, and once again I heard myself saying out loud, “Jane?” She considered me for what seemed close to five minutes—calm, blinking, swishing her tail. Then she turned and walked up the slope, disappearing into a loose stand of timber.

  I didn’t bother spinning theories about why one of the shyest creatures on the continent decided to give me such a long and careful look. I didn’t sit in the snow and reconsider reincarnation. There was only the beauty of it. After the cat wandered off, I headed inside, poured myself a Scotch, raised the glass, and wished it well.

  The next day dawned clear and cold. I heated up a little water on the Coleman stove, threw a teabag into a travel mug, put on a coat and hat and gloves, and walked down to the Wood River, and there began tracking the wolf I’d followed the day before. Still more ice had formed in the night, fanning out in teardrop shapes from the downstream edges of half-submerged granite boulders. The wolf had continued upstream, walking in a straight line, staying close to the water, finally veering off after a couple miles to begin a sharp climb into the gnarled foothills of Standard Peak. I could’ve followed his tracks all day, leaned hard into the effort, and I would never have come close to catching him.

  Returning to the cabin, I gathered the vase from where I’d placed it the night before, in front of an east-facing window, pulled the silver spoon out of my backpack, went outside, and made my way around to the back of the cabin. Though it was probably ten o’clock in the morning, the air was still cold, sharp against my nose, smelling like winter. Maybe it was because I knew this would be the last scattering for a while, probably for months, that I stood for a long time out there in the snow, taking in every detail, trying to drive it into memory. But what registered wasn’t so much details of the surroundings as a simple feeling of ease, contentment. As if, other than just being there under that cold November sun, standing calf-deep in the snow, there was nothing I needed to do.

  After a time I moved up the hill, took out the spoon, and cast some of Jane’s ashes on that east-facing slope. They fell without a sound, drifting like a thousand tiny feathers into the hollows of that bobcat’s footprints.

  WATER TO STONE, FOUR

  I know that if Jane has any strength left at all, she’ll do exactly the right thing to stay alive. Having worked for years as an EMT on search-and-rescue teams, not to mention teaching dozens of Outward Bound courses, she knows well matters of survival. She only has to be conscious. From the beach I can hear the search plane droning in the distance, going up and down and up and down the river canyon.

  Late in the evening comes the thudding of another engine: a helicopter, dispatched 150 miles to the south from a hospital in Thunder Bay. It’s come to carry me away. The paramedics carefully load me onto a gurney, lift it across the loose sand, and place me into the cargo bay, strap me in. Incredibly, the pilot offers to fly the river canyon a few times so we can all look for Jane. Because I’m lying on my back, good views are hard to come by, but by raising on one elbow and twisting hard, I can peer out the side window, glimpsing the dark, broken conifer forest along the edges of the river. After three passes the pilot apologizes, says that with the light fading we have to make for the hospital. Jane will be spending the night out. It’s getting cold. It’s starting to rain.

  We reach the hospital around 11:00 pm. There are X-rays, after which the doctor comes in to explain the nature of my broken bones; then a nurse shows up, fashions a temporary cast to stabilize things until I can undergo surgery back in Montana. Having heard the story of the accident, everyone is gentle, sympathetic, and I’m gulping the kindness. Around midnight a detective with the Ontario Provincial Police named Brad McCallum appears next to my bed. He’s soft-spoken, courteous, even while explaining that for the time being, the accident has to be treated as a potential crime. He asks if there’s anything I need from the van before his men seal it to protect evidence. We spend the next hour together, me giving him not only details of the wreck, but dozens of facts about Jane’s habits and personality. The search team will use the information to create a psychological profile of her, in hopes of anticipating her movements, her behavior.

  We finish around one thirty in the morning, and the detective offers to take me to a hotel. I’ve got no money or credit cards with me, but he thinks maybe the place we stayed before heading out to the Kopka will still have my info on file. I’ve got no clothes to wear, most of them having been cut off by the doctors; before long, a nurse shows up with a baggy pair of sweat pants, a dark green pair of underwear, white socks, and black tennis shoes. A pair of crutches. When I’m finally dressed, I catch sight of myself in a mirror on the wall of the hospital room. There’s an old man staring back.

  At the hotel, McCallum takes a business card out of his wallet, writes his home number on the back, and hands it to me, tells me to try to get some rest, to call if there’s anything I need. But rest isn’t an option. I lie on the bed, crutches propped up in the corner of the room, feeling a panic rolling through me like nothing I’ve ever known. Little bits of hope rise now and then, only to be devoured by images of her cold and bent and broken. Or worse still, and this despite fierce efforts against it, a picture of her at the bottom of that goddamned river—then the whole world shrinking, groaning, the color leaking out of it like blood from a bad wound, everything going to gray. My plan is to not call anyone for twenty-four hours, not wanting to set off a chain of unnecessary worry. Thinking mindless television might calm me down, or at least distract me, I find the remote, and the TV comes on to Country Music Television. A video is just beginning to play. It shows a handsome young man, a performer I don’t recognize, singing a mournful song in front of a lakeside cottage. A story unfolds about a wife, or maybe a girlfriend, who one day was apparently out at the end of the pier when something went wrong. She drowns in the lake.

  By the next afternoon Jane’s still missing, and I can’t bear the load any longer. First I call her brother Tom in Indiana and tell him what’s happened, having to repeat several things because my fast breathing is making me hard to understand. Then I call Martha, in Montana. Both say they’ll catch the first plane to Thunder Bay. When people at the café Jane helped start with Martha hear the news, they take up a collection to pay for Martha’s airplane ticket.

  I’m getting regular updates from Detective McCallum, as well as from the search coordinator, a thoughtful, serious man named Greg Brown. We dig around a little on the motel Internet, learn that the Ontario Provincial Police Search Team has one of the best track records of any search team on the continent. Besides aircraft, there are three ground teams, including one with dogs—struggling up and down the riverbanks looking for her. Someone finds her paddle. Another searcher finds one of her gloves. They know Jane was a search-and-rescue worker. To my great comfort, they keep asking me for more information, for any ideas I might have about how she’d behave if badly injured. Greg says his men and women are motivated. He tells us as far as he and his team are concerned, they’re looking for one of their own.

  THE GREAT WIDE OPEN

  Twenty-two years after Jane first came into that enchanted maze of canyons in southern Utah, beginning there her long waltz with Outwar
d Bound, I had my own chance to see firsthand what country like this could do for the restless and broken. In my case, the lessons came by way of a bunch of highly intelligent, beaten-down, drug-addicted teens. In 1995, deep in the stacks of the University of Colorado library, I’d stumbled across early research showing that compassionate wilderness therapy (as opposed to punitive boot camps) was twice as effective for treating teen drug addiction as traditional twenty-eight-day lockdown. It was one thing to think of wild places as being powerful for those who sought them out. It was another to think they might also help kids who, at least on first arriving, would’ve rather been any place else on earth.

  Hugely curious, I began writing a book on wilderness therapy in the spring of 1998. Among other things, it involved going through staff training at the Aspen Achievement Academy, located just west of Capitol Reef, then spending three months in the backcountry with so-called “at risk” teens, toggling back and forth between a group of fourteen- to seventeen-year-old girls and a group of similarly aged boys.

  The kids had therapy sessions twice a week, which on the surface might not seem much different from how things happened for them back home. But out there, the therapist hiked in two or three or four miles to sit with kids under juniper trees. More remarkable still, she stayed with each one as long as it took, sometimes for hours. She was with us on the trail, climbing hills and tromping across washes. She ate her food out of a tin cup. Got smoke in her eyes. Huddled against the rain.

  The field staff, meanwhile, included former instructors from Outward Bound. But there were also history majors, former addicts and alcoholics, musicians, even a chemist. Their modest wages aside, several told me they were here because they needed to work for a time at a job where they could give something back. Many had seen more than their share of struggle, often with addictions, and in the end decided the best way to anchor what they’d learned was to pass it on. Passing it on in the wilderness, they told me, brought a powerful sense of ceremony to the giving. Not that they were wise or benevolent in everything, of course—no more so than a lot of other twenty- and thirty-somethings would be. But that desire to give back—that shining urge that seems to wait at the end of so many heartbreaking journeys—this they had in spades.