Coast Range

by Nick Neely

  I see it’s ull de perdiu in Catalonian: partridge eye.

  As for “shanty,” it comes from the Canadian French chantier: “a lumberjack’s cabin,” “logging camp,” “the headquarters at which the woodcutters assemble after a day’s work.”

  “Since you have been here,” Melville wrote to a friend, and perhaps an unrequited love, “I have been building some shanties of houses (connected with the old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays. I have been plowing and sowing and raising and painting and printing and praying . . .”

  These days, I walk carefully through the woods, tiptoeing across the soft ground. Hopping like a wren from log to log. Knowing that I compress, year by year, making it more difficult for mushrooms to spring up.

  A season without chanterelle is a season of terrible drought.

  But in a really good year, drive to Kmart and buy an electric dehydrator for $29.99.

  Dried, they are still divine, to my mind. You can also simply lay the slices flat on a cookie sheet. Slide them onto the middle rack, bake at a low temperature. The caps will shrivel and brown to a handful of spiced petals.

  Fragrant potpourri: “rotten pot,” a stew of miscellaneous meat.

  Always keep a jar in the pantry. Twist off the lid and inhale the desiccated year.

  An hour in a bowl of warm water is all that’s needed. Then stir into risotto. Add to cream, pour over pasta. The flavor is condensed, but the bites can sometimes be chewy.

  Season slowly. Eat light.

  The Kurgan nomads take their name from the tumuli or burial mounds, the “kurgans,” that they left in their wake. It’s a Russian word from a Turkic origin that means “castle.”

  Crenellation on amber ramparts. Projectiles whistling down. Tumulus, from Teu-: to swell. Tuber and truffle, tomb and thumb.

  When chanterelles first emerge, they mound the leaf litter, pushing up the earth and sometimes through. Rake your hands across these hillocks to find the color.

  Yet another derivative of chanterelle’s root, Kemb-: the Germanic “hump.”

  In their kurgans, the ancient pastoralists buried cinerary urns; it’s believed that, seasonally, they disinterred their recent dead to cremate them and rebury their ancestors in these ceremonial earthworks that, even today, interrupt the endless plains.

  Just as a fungus recycles and lifts skyward. Saprophyte: the Greek sapros, “putrid” and phuton, “a plant.”

  From phuein, “come into being.”

  “He that lay in a golden Urne eminently above the Earth, was not likely to finde the quiet of these bones,” Sir Thomas Browne observed. “Where profit hath prompted, no age hath wanted such miners.”

  In Europe, you may find the ashen chanterelle, Cantharellus cinereus, with a hymenium that is deeply folded, gray, thick with veins.

  Not a chanticleer then, but a phoenix.

  In North America, a black chanterelle also rises like a slender finger of soil: Craterellus cornucopioides. It proves difficult to spot, blending in with the gloom. Horn of plenty, it’s called, along the Pacific Coast. Trompette-de-la-mort in France.

  Shadow flower, I might like to name it.

  The proto-Indo-European Ker-: horn, head. Giving rise to cornea, cornet. Hornet. Corn on the cob, on the foot. The antler-like carrot and its carotene. Cranium, carat. Cervid and hart.

  The Germans also imagine it a rehfüsshen, deer’s foot. And it’s true: chanterelle does often grow just beside, or even on, their narrow, wandering trails.

  Hidalgo, Mexico: corneta.

  What this horn plays is winter, is water percolating through loam, is the inevitability of driest summer and empty hands.

  Is our need to carry on and play.

  Keats again: “Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: / Fair youth, beneath the trees, though canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever those trees be bare . . .”

  Chanterelles pour into us: beta-carotene and other carotenoids, their orange, from which vitamin A is made. They’re also a source of vitamin D that is second only to cod liver oil.

  Chinese herbalists prescribe chanterelle to treat night blindness.

  Pull off a leaf, once wet and now plastered tight to the cap, and a pale silhouette remains like an imprint on skin, just before the blood returns.

  Mãozinhas: baby hands, Portuguese.

  It’s thought that the carotenoids of a golden chanterelle help the mushroom grope toward light. Toward open space, new edges: those treefall gaps where saplings will themselves.

  Only recently, my native chanterelle was recognized as its own species, and so given a new name: Cantharellus californicus, “the oak chanterelle.” It’s the largest in the world, as it turns out, and I’d say the most delicious.

  Probably it tastes like the San Andreas Fault.

  “When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations,” wrote Carl Jung, “we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

  Thus it begins, in a wet moment: The spore’s wall becomes permeable. The cell absorbs. A “germ tube” forms, enlarging with protoplasm, sending the first hypha into the matrix in search of an association. Some rootlet to coil around.

  Homestead

  When we peeled back the tarps in the garden, snakes slithered in every direction: a large gopher snake, garters, a fast racer. The earth was clayey, hard-caked, and Sarah and I would need to turn it over if our starters and seeds from Grant Pass were to have a chance. We revved up the aged rototiller, and I churned the largest bed, more or less, before it quit on us and stood there for several days, under one of those same tarps, a heavy monument shrouded in black. What would Bradley do, we always said. What we did was roll it into the barn, for good, another casualty of time and probably misuse. Fat chance I would be able to fix it.

  The other beds we tilled with a shovel, and I even dug a new one, cutting the sod and tossing it to the side. They looked like the unmarked graves of giants. Brussels sprouts and basil, rows of carrots, beets, onions. Tomatoes and broccoli. In the corner nearest the tall fir and walnut tree, we planted lettuce, where it would receive a few extra hours of natural shade, and I made a diaphanous canopy from dowels and spare bug netting to help keep them cool. We made little craters with mounds at their center, as if, in red clay, sculpting the mountain that gave birth to the Rogue, and planted our squash starters, our melon and cucumber and zucchini. We filled them with cold water and watched as it sank away, headed for our plates or the river.

  The meadow lay like a leaf fallen in the forest. It was about five acres, sweeping down a southeast-facing slope on a diagonal, absorbing the harsh summer light of the Rogue River Canyon, a couple of hours’ drive west of Grants Pass and the nearest grocery store. It was known as the Dutch Henry Homestead, and before that, as one of the Little Meadows. The cabins were perched on its upslope edge, the Boydens’ and ours, the residents’.

  I had been selected for a six-month writing residency off the grid in the backcountry of southern Oregon. Sarah and I had visited in the fall to see what we were getting into and meet Bradley and Frank Boyden, the brothers who owned this remote and ideal property. We had stayed at the upper cabin then, the Boydens’ original with cedar shake siding, and absorbed the impressive seesaw view across the conifer to Rattlesnake Ridge, the unseen Rogue below, and Big Windy Mountain in the distance. The canyon was starkly V-shaped, velvet with forest, three thousand feet from the ridgetop to the river, which runs over two hundred miles from the shield of Crater Lake to the town of Gold Beach on the Pacific.

  Downhill from the upper cabin’s deck was Dutch Henry’s original apple orchard: small trees more than a hundred years old, askew and gnarled, ravaged to gnomes by wind and the bears. Knee-high ferns crept out from the woods just there, in the shadow of the forest’s edge, green when we arrived, then frittered to brown and rust red as the year b
urned. Young firs had grown unnoticed among the fronds, but now peeked above this spore-filled canopy. The meadow was an old fire scar, and this is how a meadow closes in: everyone in turn taking cover in each other’s shade, then outgrowing it, ad infinitum.

  Other people had lived on the homestead before us. Other people had broken and tended this ground. The Takelma and Shasta Costa tribes made their home along the Rogue River until 1856, when they were routed and marched to coastal reservations. Dutch Henry, a hardscrabble miner, had been the first to hole up permanently on this meadow in the 1880s, and a man by the name of Bill Graiff had continued on after him. The Boydens had bought the homestead from Graiff’s heirs in 1968 and, for a long time, hired summer caretakers, some of them liabilities, until in 1992 they began the residency program. I was the eighteenth recipient of this backcountry stay.

  The homestead was an inholding in the federally designated Wild and Scenic corridor of the Rogue. To find it, we drove west from Grants Pass to Galice, which was once a mining outpost and is now a resort, gas pump, and raft launch. We crossed the Rogue on the concrete bridge at Grave Creek, where Martha Leland Crowley, a daughter of early settlers, was buried under a lone oak along the stream in 1846. Here the Wild and Scenic portion of the river began, as the road’s steep grade essentially declared. You began to wind up the canyon’s precarious north slope, under blasted rock and spiraled, leaning madrone. The drop was sheer and ended in the single thread, frayed with white, that was the Rogue held in its greenstone.

  The pavement relinquished to gravel. We turned north, away from the Rogue to a pass at thirty-eight hundred feet; then down another ridge, back to the river, on a road Dutch Henry had pioneered as a mule trail to Glendale, where he took his orchard fruit for sale. The Rogue journeys through the Siskiyou Mountains, in a region known as the Klamath Knot that straddles the California-Oregon border. This unforgiving territory is one of the most ancient and complex places in Oregon, or anywhere: It is, in fact, a collection of island arcs and continental fragments—ocean-drifting mountains, like Japan—that collided with North America between four hundred and two hundred million years ago. Driving into the homestead, I always felt as if I were tracing one strand of the knot to its fossil core.

  Bradley Boyden had “installed” us over the course of a few days in early June. A biology teacher in Portland, he is the youngest of the Boyden brothers, gregarious and jovial, bald and mustached. He showed us how to unlock the BLM gate, how to solder a copper pipe, how to screw up slightly less. He walked us through the wood’s dry madrone leaves to follow the spring-fed water and irrigation system he had built. He demonstrated that it was perfectly acceptable, preferable even, to use a fishing exclamation for life in general: “Good action!” He told stories to put the fear of the Rogue in us, and reminded us how to play cribbage late at night with whiskey, in the glow of kerosene.

  Bradley showed us the trails, including the route to Horseshoe Bend, a famous turn in the Rogue, a near circle. On the hike, I tried to make it look as though I knew how to carry a chainsaw over my shoulder; a few trees were down, nothing huge, and Bradley showed us how to saw through safely and chaperoned as we took our requisite whirl. Horseshoe Bend was a beaut: The river wraps around a durable volcanic intrusion, a conical hill of madrone and oak. Someday the Rogue will punch through and leave it an island, but for now the river swings reluctantly through a stone channel painted with faded waterlines, bathtub rings in the wilderness.

  Bradley showed us the site of the tiny cabin, on an old mining claim beside Horseshoe Bend, that his family had leased summers when he was a boy. He and his brothers would boat twenty-five miles downriver from Galice with their mother, Margery, and on weekends their father, Allen, a surgeon in Portland, would fly in on a bush plane and land at Black Bar. The Boydens were soon woven into the canyon’s rough-hewn and self-reliant community. Once, for example, Bradley’s father was called upon when a fisherman took a double hook through his eye on a backcast. With another doctor, he stayed up all night to practice extracting the curved steel from an apple by lamplight. I picture him picking the redolent fruit, an eye, and tossing it lightly in his hand with that leaden calm in his stomach. In the morning, he performed the surgery. The angler kept his eye.

  These were the stories that echoed, though now the cabin clearing held nothing but warped and splintered planks, tins, a rusted and off-kilter bed frame. The Boydens had to give up this summer home when the canyon was labeled “Wild and Scenic” and much of the evidence of its former use was erased. The Forest Service burned many of the old miners’ cabins. It was then that the homestead came into their picture, and so into ours.

  The Boydens befriended a trapper and miner, Red Keller, who lived in the canyon, and they enlisted him to watch over the Horseshoe Bend cabin when they were away, and to show the kids how one might properly explore and survive off the land. How to fish, and track, and roll a cigarette with the translucent, auburn curls of madrone bark, which peel from the tree like shavings under a lathe. The brothers used to shoot the invasive bullfrogs in the algal ponds behind the Bend for marksmanship. They would simply explode, said Bradley. As the youngest, it was his job to swim out and bring their legs home for supper. It was also here that Bradley shot and dressed his first and only deer, and hung it up to cure in the cabin above their cots, where the bears couldn’t get it. But the flies could.

  On a bookshelf in our cabin was a volume of local and oral history, Illahe, the name of a town further down the Rogue and a word that, in the Chinook language, means “land,” “home,” “the place where one resides.” From its pages, the Rogue’s turn-of-the-century inhabitants spoke to us. We learned about Dutch Henry, and we found Red Keller there, too. In a photograph, he peered out at us as if through a cabin window: wisps of white hair on either side of his bald pate, a wide nose, and a forehead with wrinkles like the crevices in which he hunted gold. In his seventies, he is shirtless and standing before a wall of fir poles, some cabin of his.

  Red hiked into the Rogue in 1934 when he was twenty-five, one year older than us when we were given the keys to the homestead’s gates. He never left, scraping out a living from the river. There were a few homesteads like ours in the hills, but Red stayed low in the canyon, moving along the river according to his whim and luck in mining. He wasn’t a homesteader, in this sense, but he knew this stretch. It was his home, his stead. I imagine his smoker’s voice as having the quality of the Rogue’s immense shade.

  “First thing I look for in a cabin site is whether I can get water close,” said Red in Illahe. “Then pick the site high enough. I have to pick it where I know I can get wood. . . . What you need is a good big dead snag you can fall. I like my site where I can get the sun. That’s what I like about Horseshoe Bend. You don’t get the sun real early, but you get all the late sun. Winter, if there was any sun, you got it.” Early miners built cabins swiftly and moved between them like water in a flood. Often they resided in them for just one season. That described us.

  We kept the mowers and shovels under the porch. Like the upper cabin, the lower was stilted: Digging a true foundation in this wilderness would be quite the chore. After the long road in, we steered the Jeep up a short, final driveway, tall with grass when we arrived, and parked in front of a green woodshed. The cabin was somewhat mongrel, added onto in stages, with a gabled, A-shaped roof. Bradley had spent a summer building the cabin’s core in the eighties. You entered the annex kitchen through an anteroom clogged with garden equipment and a defunct hand-cranked laundry machine. We would take our clothes to town when we drove out every two weeks.

  In the main room, a green-and-white topographic map, the Horseshoe Bend quadrangle, was tacked above our local library: three shelves. There was a cinnamon couch, an orange chest for a coffee table and footrest, and a La-Z-Boy. A sliding glass door opened with a slurp to the porch, and beside it was the worn kitchen table where I sometimes wrote in a retired office chair. The chair was hidden under a patterned slip cloth
that gave the seat its name: the Route 66 Distinguished Chair in Creative Writing. Every resident had leaned back in it.

  For energy, we had a solar panel that fed two car batteries nestled behind the couch, which were wired to several LEDs and a power strip. When the column of indicator lights fell from green, to yellow, to red, reminding us of the traffic lights we had left far behind, we would desist to avoid harming the battery. If it was sunny, we had mountains of energy. If it was overcast, we rationed, fell deeper into the valley. Sometimes we had none, but then there were propane and kerosene lamps to read by. Our solar panel also powered a radiophone. We were far too gone for cables. The entire Rogue Canyon shared one frequency and, if you picked up the receiver, you could listen in on the distant end of the conversation, which we enjoyed on Father’s Day: You’re the greatest, Dad. Over.

  Our bedroom was in the rear, with a low skylight that caused us to dream wildly in the morning. The back eave was flush to the hillside, and I often imagined a mountain lion looking in on us, or just its silhouette in the stars. That first month, the moon. Then I dragged a tarp from the garden and covered us like the weeds that would need to be suppressed before next season. We slept much better. Maybe too well. There was another window along the bank, a diorama lush with forbs and tiny ferns. One morning, I remember waking to find a ripe strawberry dangling there, the size of a jellybean.

  But to dwell on the cabin is to describe the lesser part of our experience. The cabin was cozy if utilitarian, but it opened to the Rogue. Those sliding glass doors were an irresistible invitation to the outside, as all sliding glass doors are. Beyond the garden, the meadow swelled upslope, foreshortened, silky, and cut with stands of bramble, before it fell into the trees that fell into the creek that was our home drainage. If the wind was subdued, you could hear the Rogue in its own long-traveled bed, way down. Evenings, the receding light on Rattlesnake Ridge looked like an orange eyelid of night gradually opening.