The Carry Home

by Gary Ferguson

  My first week in the field, I landed with a group of smudged, sweat-stained fourteen- to seventeen-year-old girls. Kids wrestling with crank and speed and crystal meth, late-night trips to the police stations, to the streets, to the suicide wards. With girlfriends at school, in the toilets, throwing up lunch.

  Like Nancy, who, among other things, was struggling with bulimia. One afternoon, we were walking down a dusty trail together, no one else within earshot.

  “How could I deal with things if I didn’t throw up?” she asked me, her voice almost pleading. “What else is there in my life I can control?”

  She was at a level of the program known as coyote; one day I asked her why she thought they’d named a part of the wilderness experience for that particular animal.

  “Coyotes are survivors,” she said, and we walked on for a long time, much of it in silence.

  Later, before bed, beside the fire she started rapping on the bottom of one of the tin cans we used to cook in. And then someone else started in with thumbs against the bottom of her blue porcelain cup. Then three more cups and a pair of wooden spoons. Until there was this heady thrum drifting out across the desert—in some minutes disjointed, in others, perfect. Right in the middle of it, a coyote came up to the edge of the bench that ran along our camp to the south, gave three bright barks, turned, and walked away. All of us just sat there, looking at one another, amazed. Never slowing the rhythm, though, never stopping that drumming.

  “That coyote,” Nancy said the next morning over breakfast, as if only then was it proper to talk of it. “It was awesome.” She slipped that memory into her pocket and she walked with it, all across the empty desert. Drinking from it like a spring, smiling over it when the weight of her pack, when the long, black nights, started pressing on her shoulders.

  Now it was I who was broken, and in the years following Jane’s death, Nancy and the rest of that little wilderness tribe seemed as close as I had to heroes. One spring I decided to get in touch with them again, some ten years after they’d made their final walks out of canyon country. One was working as an accountant, another a history professor. There were two nurses, a chef. Also an oil-rig foreman, an advertising executive, a furniture builder, a financial planner. They said things that Jane used to say. Seven of the nine told me their time in the wilds was still the most important experience of their lives. They asked me to remember how, out in the wild, everyone had needed each other. And thanks to that alone, for the first time in their lives, they had started thinking what they did might really matter.

  Susan, a pediatric nurse, reminded me about how she came out of the canyons knowing it was okay to be different. I asked her if she remembered a certain biology lesson when we were in the backcountry together—ten of us in a circle under a cluster of willows at the edge of the Red Desert, the lesson offered up by a quiet, brilliant, sinewy sixty-one-year-old teacher named LaVoy Tolbert. Of course she remembered, she told me.

  “Does everyone recall those big mushrooms we ran across earlier today?” LaVoy asked.

  “Puffballs,” Jenna said.

  “That’s right. Puffballs. And remember how we talked about them being a kind of life form that reproduces by spores—millions of spores, every one exactly alike?” At which point he slowly drew out their thoughts about the limits of such a life strategy.

  “They’re all vulnerable to the same diseases,” said Jenna.

  “If it’s too dry,” added Susan, “none of them survive.”

  LaVoy smiled, nodded. “So if I’m understanding you right, the only chance a puffball spore has is to land in exactly the right environment. Basically, the same conditions as the parent plant.”

  Then more discussion, with the girls acknowledging that most life doesn’t clone itself like that at all, but reproduces sexually. A strategy offering nearly limitless potential for variety. And that with variety comes the chance to flourish in changing circumstances.

  “It sounds like what you’re really saying,” LaVoy offered, going slowly, looking each girl in the eye, “is that nature loves diversity.”

  In the days that followed I watched girls who just the week before were bleeding from the jagged edges of all that had broken in their lives—the addiction and the fear, the violence and the abuse—staring out past the ponderosa onto the red rock of Capitol Reef, letting out breath, gathering up the pieces. Not unlike Jane, I suppose, out there on those cold November days in 1975, trying to shore up her riddled sense of self, struggling against the thought that not fitting in was a fatal flaw.

  DURING THEIR TIME IN THE BACKCOUNTRY, STUDENTS WERE expected to work toward high school credits for English and science. Though most were exceptionally bright, they tended to see themselves as almost dim-witted when it came to learning—something reinforced by their lousy grades. But that changed out there in the slickrock canyons. I watched as LaVoy turned their bodies into stand-ins for the planets and the moon and the sun, teaching them out there in the sand and the sagebrush how to spin and circle one another to mimic the patterns of the solar system. I saw them not only figure out what was happening when they twirled a sage spindle against a flat piece of wood and ended up with fire, but then go on to link the chemistry of combustion to the oxygen and hydrogen cycles in their own cells.

  People from Henry David Thoreau to John Dewey, William Hornaday to John Burroughs, complained often about how American education—especially science—was too often divorced from actual experience. “One green bud of spring,” wrote Thoreau, “one willow catkin, one faint trill from a migrating sparrow would set the world on its legs again.” Science was tastier, the thinking went, and so more likely to be savored, when served up on a creek bank, scooping tadpoles and watching them under a magnifying glass, than it was sitting in a school room making borax snowflakes.

  In the early twentieth century, Harvard and Yale actually contemplated starting “colleges of the wilderness,” in large part because untrammeled landscapes were thought to be valuable stages for developing critical-thinking skills. Likewise the school garden movement, exploding around 1910, wasn’t just about teaching kids where their food came from. It was also about taking advantage of the fact that children plunked down even in a vegetable garden were inclined to immediately start noticing things. And that, in turn, gave rise to questions: Why is that fruit red and the other one blue? How come some flowers close at night? Why do the bees disappear before a rain? How do plants know to come up in the spring?

  A hundred years before Jane took her first teaching job at a nature-based elementary school in Michigan, the incredibly popular Agassiz Association, founded by celebrated biologist Louis Agassiz, was advising teachers to not overwhelm young kids by asking them to learn scientific names of insects and parts of plants and the like. Let them instead go outside and follow their innate sense of wonder. Sophisticated learning could come later. The group had another piece of advice, too—one that would’ve seemed awfully relevant to those kids in wilderness therapy: “Whether you are four or eighty-four, be an original investigator. See things for yourself. Look into the thing, not into what has been written about the thing—what you find, not what someone tells you to find.”

  Jane liked to say that most kids got more from running a single maple leaf through their fingers than from scouring a hundred photos of trees in a textbook or on a computer screen. As outdoor education director for the Center for American Archaeology in Cortez, Colorado, she’d squatted in the sand amidst the junipers with fifth graders, helping them figure out where the best places might’ve been for ancient Anasazi to plant their squash gardens. Working as an instructor for Outward Bound, she’d knelt down next to fifty-year-old teachers and insurance agents and lawyers, picking apart piles of scat to see what the bears had been eating. And in Yellowstone, with the Park Service, she’d headed out with elementary school kids following wolf tracks, watched them tap their knuckles against petrified trees, helped them measure scalding temperatures in the hot pots and thermal pools and
then figure out how something might actually manage to live there. Time and again, kids who thought they were slow, even stupid, came away thinking otherwise.

  IN MAY OF 2006, JUST BEFORE THE ONE-YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF the accident, against the welcome simmer of life back on the land, I readied to make another trip to scatter ashes. This time it would be to southern Utah, to an especially outrageous tangle of sandstone along the eastern edge of Capitol Reef National Park. It was the landscape at the heart of Jane’s Outward Bound experience thirty years before, a special wilderness. The place, she once claimed, that had probably saved her life.

  SLICKROCK WILDERNESS

  I got a late start for canyon country, rolling south in the old blue van as far as Green River before pulling off in the wee hours for a little sleep at the back of an abandoned gas station, beside a sad toss of weeds and cracked concrete and rusted barrels. The rest of the night played out to the whine of big trucks on Interstate 70, some running for Denver, others heading west to Interstate 15 and on to California. Every twenty or thirty minutes one slowed and exited the freeway, rumbled past me there on the outskirts of town—pausing just long enough for a tank of fuel, maybe a microwaved burrito at the Gas-N-Go on West Main. Just passing through.

  By sunup I was on Highway 95, making a sweet, lonely run along the eastern edge of the San Rafael Swell. Beyond the road were dapples of locoweed and purple vetch, dropseed and cheat-grass and fescue, here and there the occasional huddle of juniper or cottonwood. We’d always loved the feel of this Utah, scoured and sunlit and ornery and wild. The hoodoos of the Swell and the sweet-smelling ponderosa on Fishtail Plateau. The Virgin River Narrows of Zion. Those perfect groves of aspen forest near Sundance. The cold, snowy woods of Bear Lake.

  Beyond its considerable enchantment, though, like a lot of places in the West, Utah has struggled mightily with the flotsam of progress. Salt Lake claims the fourth-highest toxic chemical releases in the United States; number twenty-four on the list is just thirty miles down the road, in the tiny town of Tooele. In the past fifteen years, the state lost over a million acres of farmland to development. And as I made my way toward canyon country, fundamentalist conservatives, joining their brethren in the north, were shouting at the top of their lungs about how any minute, wolves were going to start pouring over the borders and eating children.

  I pulled in at the Mesa Market near Caineville, parking beside a small white storefront at the edge of a field brimming with vegetables. Inside, the place was spartan, decorated with a few wall hangings and painted gourds. The owner, Randy—a short, swollen man with thinning blond hair—offered me a salad from organic produce he’d just plucked from the greenhouse, topped with a boiled egg and a chunk of feta and a nasturtium flower, pushed up against a slice of warm homemade bread. It may be the best thing I’ve ever tasted. We talked a bit, Randy telling me that in another life he used to sell whirlpool baths and later hot tubs (a career impossible to imagine him in), lamenting how the job taught him that people have little sense of how to be happy other than by spending money.

  “People never cared at all about how much the thing cost,” he said, looking incredulous even now. “Only how much per month.”

  One day the boss caught him discouraging a prospective customer, something he apparently did fairly often, and showed him the door.

  By local standards, even now Randy wasn’t particularly well behaved. Over several years he’d fought at various public meetings, totally outnumbered, to force the Bureau of Land Management to develop a legally required land-use plan for Factory Butte, just outside Caineville—a plan meant, among other things, to protect fragile areas from dirt bikes and four-wheelers. Here there was no one to fire him for being a rabble-rouser. Instead, off-road vehicle fans promised to slash his greenhouses and burn his business.

  When I finally told Randy why I’d come, he nodded, looking like he half expected me to say something like this.

  “The most important thing,” he said, “is to be present in the face of fear.” Then he went on to talk about a good friend, a Hopi man who’d been advising him on planning a ritual he’d soon use to mark the death of his own partner, dying of cancer.

  “My Hopi friend says helper spirits out on the land are bigger than what can be contained in human form. Actually, they’re gigantic. But mostly peaceful.”

  The elder told him how such spirits showed themselves around smaller landforms, mostly located near prominent peaks and buttes. Randy let out a long breath, turned from the counter to put a loaf of bread in the oven.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s something you can use.”

  West of Caineville the land melts into the bare bones of existence: rusted waves of sandstone peeling away with every passing storm; deep blue sky, hot and thirsty and bright. And wind, especially in the shoulder seasons, shouting down the canyons in March and April and then coming back around again in the fall, driving ice and sleet through the cold days of November. Just off the highway, pocket meadows no bigger than backyard swimming pools nestled against sweeping arcs of sandstone, tossed with the red of firecracker penstemon, the burnt orange of globe mallow. A lone juniper clinging to the east wall of Slaughter Canyon. Here at last, then, was the wind-shorn mix of rock and sky that so changed Jane, starting her on a path that turned her from a Midwest farmer’s daughter into a full-blown woman of the wilds. The Utah of old. Timeless.

  WHEN JANE ARRIVED IN SOUTHERN UTAH FOR THAT OUTWARD Bound course, it was a spectacularly naive time for American wilderness programs. Hundreds of earthy young men and women—self-described “dirt bags”—were busy creating outings intended not merely to build skills, but in these last sweeps of open space to light some fresher, stronger sense of self. And their clients were hardly confined to late-blooming hippies; Outward Bound also attracted thousands of corporate executives, as it does today. Some came with coworkers, using the challenge of wilderness to bond with colleagues. Others came alone, needing one good blast of clarity before quitting the corporate world altogether, trading it away, usually against the advice of friends and family, to become a teacher, a nurse, maybe start a health-food store or a pet shop or a coffee bar. Jane talked often about that particular group:

  “It’s hard for anyone to follow their inner voice if they can’t hear it,” she said. “The wilderness just turns up the volume of what’s most true for you.”

  Back in the 1970s, details of what constituted right and proper outdoor adventure were in flux, hard for the boomers to nail down. For starters, how could programs that promoted living off the land—a metaphor for self-reliance, which often involved eating plants and small animals—be reconciled with their own fast-emerging ethic of leaving no human trace of ever having been there?

  Then somebody got the bright idea to spare the wilderness with chickens.

  The chickens were used mostly at the end of courses like Outward Bound, when each student was asked to catch one darting about in the sagebrush, wring its neck, then pluck and cook it. This activity, it was hoped, would satisfy the goal of building self-reliance. Of course there was the not-so-minor problem of getting live chickens to the middle of nowhere in the first place. Larry Wells, at Brigham Young University, hit upon the idea of delivering the birds by air. In what has to be one of the most spectacularly woozy malfunctions ever to happen in the skies above the American Southwest, he found to his horror that when you toss Rhode Island Reds out of a small plane, well, let’s just say the windblast hammers them in the most awful way, leaving lifeless chicken bodies scattered about the sagebrush. Jane too would be invited to do the optional chicken dance at the end of her course—her birds, though, having arrived by truck instead of airmail. She politely declined.

  Outward Bound was founded in England during the onset of World War II, created by noted educator Kurt Hahn as a way to help sailors build the physical and mental skills they needed to increase their chances of survival if stranded at sea. It was hugely successful. Following the war, the program expanded to the
United States, where it fell in fast with an idea popular off and on since the 1880s, which held that learning to be comfortable in unfamiliar, unpredictable environments did wonders for young people’s self-esteem. Teens suffering from self-doubt, anger, or frustration, the thinking went, needed only to take the step of preparing themselves to be safe and comfortable in the wilderness. The wilderness would do the rest.

  One of the things that shifted for Jane in Utah, something she never lost, was discovering that she had a talent for handling hardship. It was a quality underscored by a short quote mailed out to students before they even left for the course—three lines from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. A guy, Jane reminded me, who had his own troubles with the whole sanity thing. “Physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong,” she recited. “Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.”

  What others saw as chores, or even as causes for anxiety—lumbering up steep inclines, setting up tarps in advance of fast-moving weather, cooking dinner on open fires—she treated with whispers of ceremony. As it happened, the presence required for Pirsig’s “right mood” was what nature had been encouraging in Jane since her days as a Girl Scout leader: to be alert, to pay attention to changing circumstances. In Outward Bound she enjoyed an even bigger dose of the perspective she was learning to use to help with control issues—with the jagged disquiet that had driven her anorexia. In truth, she would never completely leave behind the unease she felt about what life might put in her lap, or in the laps of those she loved. For all her enchanting playfulness, she never wanted to be far from a plan, from a sense of structure. And yet what the wilderness kept giving her—part of the measure of sanity it offered—was the assurance that she could be strong in the face of random weather.