The Carry Home

by Gary Ferguson

  After forty years traveling by canoe, Hall had his systems down: packing, portaging, cooking, setting up camp. He declined every one of our offers to help with chores—not because we were guests, but because after four decades of outfitting, he knew damn well it took less energy to do things himself. Which left us just one task we could pour our team spirit into—portaging. And in that we shined. Everyone tackled the job with gusto, hauling canoes and paddles and heavy Duluth packs out of one watershed and into the next, sometimes a mile or more away, one trip over and back and then another, then still another. Maybe because he’d had plenty of guests who were all too happy to leave the heavy lifting to him, on most days he complimented us on a job well done. It left us feeling like little kids who’d just pleased the teacher.

  On the first afternoon, as we were going through the dry run of setting up the tents he’d supplied, Doug and I managed to break a framing pole. Right away we got panicked looks on our faces, wondering which one of us would draw the short straw and go confess. I lost. Later in the day, when food bags were being handed out to individual boats, we got the heaviest one of all, which we named “the pig.” Each of the bags was numbered according to which one was opened on a particular day, and the pig had the highest number of all. Which meant we’d be portaging it every day until the end of the trip. We told each other it wasn’t any sort of punishment for busting the tent pole. Just a sign of how tough Alex thought we were.

  During one of our walkabouts outside camp, I happened to hear Alex and Monte Hummel talking about cloudberries, a ground fruit found only on the world’s northern tundra. Monte thought it tasted like a cross between a strawberry and an apricot, talking about it with that dreamy look people have when they’re recalling the best meal of their lives. “There could be a few left,” Alex said, then he described what to look for. “But it’s probably too late in the year.”

  From that day on I became consumed by thoughts of finding cloudberries. Tasting cloudberries. Though I looked every day, at every lunch stop and at every camp, I couldn’t find even one. And I started thinking I’d have to come back just for this.

  I’D WONDERED MANY TIMES WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE TO SLIP into a canoe and start paddling again. The feel of my fingers around the shaft of the paddle, the smell of lake water—would all that be a comfort or a trigger, hurtling me back to that awful morning on the Kopka? Maybe because I was doing it with a good friend, maybe because of the wild thrum of the north country, maybe because I knew Jane would want me here, it felt exactly right. Like the unclenching of fists after a bout of anger, like a long, slow exhale. We started on open water stirred by a mild breeze, which kept noodling soothing rhythms of waves against the hull. Doug and I chatted as we paddled, speculating about the weather, pulling out binoculars every few minutes, pointing them toward distant sharp-shinned hawks and Arctic terns and horned grebes and eiders and canvasbacks and buffleheads.

  The second day ushered in an unbroken string of foul weather, wind and cold and heavy rain across most of eleven days, drearier than even Alex Hall had ever seen. At one point, at the edge of an enormous lake, our group ended up huddled on a high promontory against a ferocious wind, maps splattered across the rocks, trying to gauge whether we could make a safe crossing on a big stretch of water churning with whitecaps. In the end we decided to go for it, hugging the shore hour after hour, all the while buckets of cold spray piling over the bow of the boat and wetting my face and hands. Even then, as well as under every leaden sky still to come, I was more deeply content than I’d been in a long while. I missed Jane. Wished she were there with me on that cold water, afloat in that boundless world. But there were no flashbacks of the Kopka. No thought that I shouldn’t be paddling again, no wish to be anywhere else. I couldn’t know if Jane was somehow privy to the touch and smell and throttle of that rain and wind, as those old Aboriginal stories suggested. What mattered is that I’d taken the chance to offer it. By imagining that I was opening up for her benefit, giving her access to smell and sound and taste and feeling, what I’d done was allow my own reentry into the physical world.

  As was true years before, on the Hood River, the evenings were priceless—most of them spent along some beautiful stretch of sand esker—massive blond dunes that stretch across much of the Far North. After setting up our tent, Doug and I would split from the group for an hour or so, measure out our allotted drams of the Scotch we’d packed in, fire up cigars, and talk. Talk about being with Jane on the Hood River. About how early on, Doug had taught her to chew tobacco—and how to his astonishment she had gone with it, sharing pinches of Skoal with him down a hundred miles of river. We talked about how she liked to get up early in the morning and pass out strong coffee. How at the end of the trip we’d all stripped off our clothes and run nearly naked into the cold waters of the Arctic Sound.

  During one such conversation, far out on the water, began the first of what became many days of loon song. I told Doug that for me, the bird was forever linked to the Kopka. I told how, not long after Jane’s death, still baffled by the pair of loons appearing on the flush pond below the rapids—overcome by the message “beautiful” and “goodbye”—I started poking through stories told of the birds by the Ojibwa people residing in that part of Canada. They describe them as couriers between earth and the hereafter, assigned the job of passing messages between the living and the dead. What I didn’t say is that now, whenever one lets loose in the northern twilight, when a pair starts trading yodels across the cold waters of some unnamed lake, I listen with all my might. But there are no more messages. Just the usual wild cacophony—that strange, rolling peal of crying and laughing.

  OUR FINAL CAMP OF THE TRIP WAS A SUN-SPLASHED EVENING along the edge of an enormous sand esker, uncurling into lake water the color of the tropics. Everyone joined Alex on a long ramble across the tundra, looking for a certain wolf den he knew about, then climbing the high ridges and glassing for caribou. In mid-afternoon a small herd of musk oxen appeared in a draw some two miles away, and the group decided to hike over for a closer look.

  Doug and I made a circuitous amble back to camp, there settling in for a long nap on the thick mats of caribou lichen that blanketed the spruce forest. All day long I’d been noticing how odd the plant growth is in the Barren Lands. The same basic species that in Montana or Colorado are spread across thousands of vertical feet, on the tundra get squeezed into a few yards. Here we could stand in a moist, lush pocket of heather, and in three steps up a tiny rise find ourselves in a world populated by lichens, the undisputed masters of earth’s driest lands.

  Then, close to camp, I saw it: the fabled cloudberry. Though a little past prime, the fruits—roughly the color of peach jam—were still swollen with juice. I popped a couple in my mouth. There it was, the promised nectar of strawberries and apricots. With the sky washed in the final breath of summer, once again Doug and I split from the group, poured our final drams of Scotch, and talked of big things. I told him about those old story prompts: beauty, community, and mystery. Also about how the kids in wilderness therapy, knowing nothing about any of that, listed the very same things as part of what allowed them to finally kick heroin, quit stealing, stop cutting themselves. It had been beauty, community, and mystery that opened them to the really important things in their lives—things that had been stuck inside, desperate to come out.

  “So look,” he said. “What if society’s moving too fast? What if we’re too distracted for any of that—the beauty and the mystery?”

  Then he took his last swallow of Scotch, snubbed out his cigar in the sand.

  “And if we’ve really forgotten, what could make us remember?”

  WATER TO STONE, SIX

  The memorial service was held on June 10, three days after the surgery on my broken leg, in the Catholic church in Red Lodge. Other than the Civic Center, it was the building in town that held the most people. I lurched through the side door of the church on my crutches, my brother at my side—him looking nervous, as if
he thought I was about to do a head plant. Inside the sanctuary, some six hundred people were waiting, friends and family from all over the country. The mere sight of them started me blubbering.

  I’d asked for room in the service for people to tell stories, and they came in good measure. Funny tales. Lovely ones, too. When it was my turn, I explained how Jane often remarked that when it came her time to go, she hoped the end would come in a wild place, doing what she loved. And so it did. Somehow though, I said, I imagined the end being decades away. Maybe with her as an old woman out on some last camping trip, snugged in a down bag, staring out the door flap of the tent into a sky riddled with stars.

  I told them too about how a week before the accident, on a lonely highway in southern Canada, in the middle of a game we sometimes played where we tried to imagine what it would be like to live in other places, Jane had said finding another community no longer seemed an option. “I couldn’t quit the people.”

  Two musician friends agreed to sing a song for the service. It was Judy Collins’s “Since You’ve Asked”—the tune I first played for her driving through the Sawtooth Valley in my ’64 Pontiac Tempest, and later, the one I had that musician play for her in Michigan, on the day I asked her to marry me.

  The Red Lodge Fire Department, which included most of Jane’s fellow EMT and search-and-rescue workers, had parked their biggest fire truck outside the church, the ladder raised in tribute. Near the end of the service the dispatcher issued a so-called “final page”—an honor given to those who have died in the line of duty, or who have made significant contributions to the community.

  The radio crackled: “Red Lodge Fire and Rescue, Dispatch.” Then a few long seconds of quiet, a gentle woosh of static.

  “This is a final page for Jane Ferguson. She died in the wilderness, doing what she loved. Her dedication and compassion for her fellow citizens will not soon be forgotten.”

  And then, “Dispatch clear.” For about a minute afterward it was completely quiet; the whole place seemed ready to collapse into sobs.

  Jane’s brother Tom had an idea to give away young trees to the mourners. So after returning from Canada we contacted the state nursery in Missoula, bought 350 little blue spruce trees, then handed them out to people as they left the church. Even now I’m stopped on the sidewalk once or twice a month by someone wanting to update me on the current height and general well-being of their “Jane tree.” One of her search-and-rescue partners, on moving to a new house two years after her death, dug up his Jane tree and replanted it in the yard of his new home. Another friend looked me up in December 2011, eager to tell me that his Jane tree was finally big enough to hold a string of Christmas lights.

  Long before the accident, Jane wrote in her will that on her death, she wanted a party. So after the service, several hundred of us walked the five blocks from the Catholic church to the backyard of the café. The local brewer was there with his beer trailer, and for the next several hours people from all over the country spilled into the gardens with glasses of ale, talking and laughing and crying, telling story after story, a lot of them ones I’d never heard. I tried hard to hold on to those stories, wanting so badly to remember. But most of them lingered just for a minute or two, then slipped away on the June breeze.

  THE WILD WE’VE FORGOTTEN

  What was it that left America so incredibly eager to eat up the antics of Joe Knowles—the guy who in 1913 stripped down to a G-string and ran off to live for two months as a wild man? What cravings launched a land-preservation movement the likes of which the world had never seen, creating a flurry of outdoor youth groups from coast to coast, from the Sons of Daniel Boone to the Boy Pioneers? Igniting a profusion of school gardens, and stoking into full-blown holiday status a celebration started in the 1890s called Bird Day, uncannily similar to today’s Earth Day?

  Beyond the Puritans, who mostly saw the devil behind every tree, a lot of newcomers arriving to the continent in the 1600s rushed into wild America with open arms, mythologizing it at every turn. Part of their enthusiasm had to do with a renaissance going on in both Europe and Great Britain, a casting off of a church-driven orthodoxy that had held nature at arm’s length, making it malicious and malevolent for a thousand years. For centuries the Catholic Church had offered a loosely woven tale about earth having been created in a kind of smooth symmetry, what was sometimes called a “mundane egg.” Then humans sinned, the story went, the flood came, and when the water receded again, there were all sorts of irregular landforms—crumpled mountains, rugged coastlines. All of which were said to serve as reminders that humans are inherently evil.

  By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, fresh air had started to blow across the Western world. It came from poets like Milton and Denham. And from science, too, where guys like Galileo were making all kinds of fascinating discoveries about the natural world (including the fact that there were mountains on the moon, which left pundits wondering why God would plant reminders of our evil natures in places where no one could even see them). For many merchants and traders, coming to North America felt like crawling out into the bright sunlight, after having spent a very long time in a dimly lit cave.

  French trappers, for instance, traded story images with nearby tribes the way beads got swapped for beaver pelts. The newcomers routinely borrowed pieces of indigenous creation stories, especially those with mysterious nature spirits, weaving them into hybrid tales of their own. Early in the nineteenth century, poet Rodman Drake penned a long verse called The Culprit Fay, said to be the first great work of American literature—a work American Monthly Magazine called “one of the most exquisite productions in the English language.” The tale was crafted around the Iroquois “Pukwudgies,” or little vanishers, setting them against a curious mix of Arthurian legend and Celtic mysticism.

  And that was just the beginning. By the mid-1700s, wild nature was being called “the great equalizer,” a homage to the fact that it handed out its blessings and risks equally, no matter the money in your pocket or the blue in your blood. Which explains why nature was the stewpot of choice for gathering symbols of an emerging democracy. In one of the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War, off the coast of Maine, the townspeople of Machias took off after a British Navy crew commandeering a shipload of pine, chased it down, captured it, decorated it with pine boughs, and called it Liberty. We Americans pretty much always saw ourselves in terms of nature—plastering it on our state flags, stamping it into our coins, sewing it across panels of the quilts we pulled over us to keep warm at night.

  Some predicted the United States would produce more artists, more creative people of every stripe, simply because we were spending so much time rubbing elbows with the woods. Later, nineteenth-century superstar pundit Henry George told his readers that “The free, independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness that have marked our people are not causes, but results. They have sprung from unfenced land. Public domain has given a consciousness of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been a wellspring of hope even to those who have never thought of taking refuge upon it.” Never mind if you didn’t actually make it to the big wilds. Just knowing they were out there would engender a “consciousness of freedom.” Scientific American editor Gerard Peil was still ringing the same bell in the 1950s, claiming the highest value of wilderness was to “remind us of a just society.”

  There’d also been a deep, abiding grassroots movement in the country to link unfettered landscapes to spirituality. The Hudson River School artists—arguably the most influential artistic movement in our history—turned first to the unsullied landscapes of New England and later to the West, promoting the idea that such places allowed nothing less than the direct experience of God.

  “We may not go to church as often as our forefathers,” celebrated naturalist John Burroughs said. “But we go to the woods much more.”

  This too, then, is where we’ve come from. Who we are. And no amount of hating wolves or pushing to sell off
the public lands by the Sagebrush Rebels, no amount of weary disillusionment or forgetting by the baby boomers, can ever take it away.

  THE CARRY HOME

  At around fourteen I started keeping a record of sorts, a journal, scribbling into spiral notebooks I got for 59¢ at Brite-Way, the same ones our parents bought my brother and me every fall for school. A couple years after Jane died, I pulled them out again. The thing I noticed was one big theme spilling across those narrow-ruled lines—an attempt to shore up this barely controlled passion I had for moving into the bigger world, out into nature. Maybe it was anxious hunger to be gone from the house in the face of the beatings. Or maybe it was some kind of defense against kids who thought me strange, poking fun at me in the school newspaper for this great plan I’d blabbed to someone about riding my bike 1,500 miles to the mountains of Colorado. I had a primal knot in my stomach whenever I read some line like Thoreau’s “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” or Oliver Wendell Holmes talking about “those that never sing, but die with all their music in them.” I missed no chance to add my own thoughts on the topic, writing insipid little poems, like this one, penned at fourteen with a blue ballpoint:

  The old man’s eyes were tearful,

  As he journeyed back the years