by Nick Neely
Boom. It was afternoon, and it was a crackling boom, like a cannon shot tearing through the timber. It was the kind of boom that should have raised starlings had there been any to speak of in the remote Rogue Canyon. Sarah and I turned and looked at each other. That was a big one, we said. That was one that might always echo in memory.
I found the culprit and the body off the Corral Trail: a legacy Doug fir, one of the largest around, with a trunk six or seven feet in diameter. One of the granddaddies we had admired, with hanging gardens for limbs. It had convulsed downhill and made a clearing for its saplings. The upper trunk lay disarticulated like the spine of a deer carcass, and, scrambling up, I walked and then hopped its length wondering if I might discover bird nests. The trunk was the only clear path. The surroundings were an impassable mess of splinter and needle. The smell, a Christmas tree lot. This was the size of the firs that had stood around the meadow until the sixties, that are still cut daily across the Northwest. The lumber in this tree was a house in and of itself.
Another afternoon, as I was returning to the cabin from the Rogue, I ran into Sarah striding down the trail. Her eyes were wide, her face flush and shaken. She couldn’t wait to tell me, so she had taken off downhill: A mammoth snag, a skeletal fir, had fallen directly beside the cabin, but spared it and her. In retrospect, this bleached mast was one of several danger trees behind the cabin; we should have known after we watched two pileated woodpeckers, crow-sized and mockish, at work there one morning, chipping away. Their red crests are both an attractant and a warning. Had that tree fallen twenty feet to the right, this would be another story, so strange to me.
Later I bucked up the downhill portion of this tree, the crown, with the aid of an adventurous friend, Dave, who kayaked the river from Grave Creek to visit us. Red ants poured out one rotted section and ran across our paused blade. We wheelbarrowed the uninfested rounds to level ground near the woodshed. As Red Keller said about a cabin site, “What you need is a good big dead snag you can fall.” But not too close.
We were to replace all the firewood we consumed, and in the fall we used our share. The cabin was lightly insulated, the woodstove a comforting hum. Fir and pine sizzled and popped with pitch, and translated more smoke, while fine-grained madrone and oak burned clean and swift. One afternoon, I spotted a fresh madrone just off the driveway and threw on my protective chaps. There may have been more convenient trees to saw, but this girthy madrone, its carnal interior, fixed itself in my mind; I am not a woodsman, but if I were, aesthetics would sway me, as I’m sure it does for many. Sarah helped me carry the rounds to the Jeep, and I could feel all those circular years, that healthy Oregon rain, in my own spine. All those red berries and band-tailed pigeons in the rafters. Bradley had told us that you lift a whole tree seven times from forest to fireplace, something to think about as our logs counted the days.
We left this deciduous redwood to dry in the early fall sun; to cure, as if it were a hock of meat. Later, I spent hours splitting, gradually becoming a more precise and confident shot with the steel maul. Early on, I often would miss my mark, but then metal on metal—maul on wedge—became the rhythm. You have to tighten your arc before letting it out again. Self-control is strength. Gradually, the shed began to refill. These new billets would house mice and lizards. They would warm next year’s resident, and then he or she would have to decide which trees to haul and give to others. I drove the wedge into the rounds, and when the ring and split was clean, it was as satisfying as knowing just the right way to finish a paragraph.
We used and split no more than several modest trees; we had no plans to face the winter. But it became clear that what we pulled up in our hands, fresh from its papery husk, and what had made the Rogue woods and air quake, for an instant, and had nearly knifed through the cabin onto Sarah, was also what warmed us and boiled our tea. This tension is what housed us. It encapsulated the homestead. The paradox of fire we came to understand similarly: Fire had provided the meadow and, eventually, it would reclaim it for an afternoon and extend its boundaries, maybe for miles. The very thing that made our life here worrisome also made it possible and worth living.
It was only after the Rogue Wars that the first homesteaders moved into the canyon. Individual miners like Dutch Henry or teams of them traveled west of Grave Creek and built ephemeral cabins in the perennial shade along the river, but our stretch, the upstream end of the canyon, is especially ravined and, for a while, would remain the territory of miners. The earliest homesteaders settled twenty-five miles downstream of us, where today the Rogue River Trail finishes.
They came from California, from the Klamath River just over the border. They were “mixed” couples in the vernacular of the time, unions between miners and Karuk women. Marriages born out of necessity, but often dying in respect and even love, from what I’ve read. These were the Billingses and the Frys, names that now dominate the middle Rogue. John Billings left Missouri for California and, like Dutch Henry, mined and packed supplies. In 1861, he paid a Karuk woman gold and mules for her daughter, Krum-ket-tika, “flower growing in any place.” Her father had been killed by early miners, and afterward she and her mother drifted up the Klamath to a Karuk village in what is today the town of Happy Camp, where her chin was tattooed black with an obsidian blade. John Billings renamed her Adeline. He was thirty-five, she nineteen. Those miners who planned to stay in the hills desired wives; dislocated Native women needed security. Less than ten years after the gold rush’s initial violence, some enemies began to knit together.
After seven years of marriage, John and Adeline decided to try the Rogue. Gold had grown scarcer on the Klamath and, as miners left, the pack business dwindled as well. The Billingses made the journey with James and Abraham Fry, who likewise had Karuk wives. For a month, their party broke trail and linked others together: north up Indian Creek and into Oregon, two years before statehood; west across the Smith River, then north again across the Chetco. They settled at the confluence of the Rogue and its largest tributary, the Illinois River. This would be home. John and Adeline tidied an abandoned miner’s cabin. She wove a net, and they caught and dried enough salmon to last the winter.
The Billingses didn’t have claim to this land, however, so they moved upriver, finally settling for good at Big Meadows, the counterpart to our Little ones, which are five miles farther upstream. In 1888, they earned title to 320 acres, where they built a log cabin. John tried to run sheep on his homestead, but he lost them to predators. “He used to tell about how he tried to kill them coyotes,” one friend, Leo Frye, remembered in Illahe. “He said they were smarter than he was.” John would bury three eggs, one filled with the poison found in nightshade. But Coyote—or pihne-fic, as Adeline called him in Karuk—would eat two and leave the dud for John.
Apparently John didn’t have much of a sense of humor. “A bear’s sweet-natured alongside of him,” another neighbor recalled. But he was respected. “He was just a good old man,” Leo Frye maintained. “His family never went hungry for anything.” Adeline outlived him, her whole life making traditional baskets from hazel root that she sold or gifted. She also bore ten children.
From the Curry County probate records, the names of John Billings’s mules and horse:
Jim Mule
16 years old
Flossie Mare
14 years old
Jermie Mule
12 years old
Pete Mule
10 years old
Jack Mule
10 years old
Johnnie Mule
8 years old
Cy Mule
8 years old
Hussie Mule
7 years old
Pearly Mule
4 years old
Millie Mule
3 years old
Always the day is ahead or behind in a forest, as if night both recedes into and emerges from trees, gathering above hollow trunks the way swifts gather to roost. As Bradley had told us, during that last hour we coul
d keep time by the orange climbing Rattlesnake Ridge. Down at the river, I’d linger, wait until that line of rising alpenglow was all but gone, before hitting the trail, where the gloam was easy, refreshing, broken sometimes by shades of salmon through the trees overhead. I’d turn my fly rod around in my hand and let the tip follow me home, so as not to lance it into the ground or tangle with the trees.
Crossing our home creek one evening, I saw the shape of a bat swoop and graze the water, leaving a ripple, and I thought of the water strider alive in its mouth, those thread-thin legs splayed across its gums. Occasionally a deer would startle and bound away through the drowned branches. Rarely, at dusk, we heard a saw-whet owl, as if a lumberjack was still out there, intent on felling a tree the old-fashioned way. Otherwise there was only the almost-silence of scattered birds, of chickadees and vireos. If the trees weren’t roaring.
The meadow announced itself from a few hundred feet out: the expanse always bright, even late. Twilight clings to grass. First, the black oak below the barn twisted into my view; then the slumping pole-and-shake barn, which, especially at this hour, would make a Rogue hiker imagine he’d stumbled onto a miner’s acre; and finally the A of the lower cabin, its one solar panel and sliding glass door reflecting the empty ceiling over Rattlesnake Ridge. And inside, Sarah.
Then the meadow was a black lake. For weeks, at night we heard an anonymous shriek, brief and high-pitched. I wondered: Other residents had seen cougar at the homestead, and later in the season I would find the lobed impressions of a mother and her cub in the damp sand along the river. Several times, I stood on the porch with a flashlight trying to spotlight the sound, my shadow thrown long across the meadow like a fallen tree. Finally I beamed the fox, silvery and embered on the road, and that particular mystery flickered and went out. But it never could entirely.
As soon as we turned on a lamp in the cabin, we were shut in. The Rogue swallowed us so completely we didn’t know it was there. We were in a forested crevasse, a crevice of the world. In addition to those LED lights, the cabin was lit by propane lanterns, copper wire snaking to globes above the sinks, the kitchen table, the couch, and our bed. Push the lever in and down and you would hear the hiss. We set the lighter’s flame under the wicket’s ash hive, which gave form to those exploding molecules. Where the gas had come from besides our robin’s egg tank and Grants Pass, I don’t know.
“For light I was usin’ a cake of grease,” Red Keller said. “Take a piece of string, and wrap it around, put a piece of bailin’ wire over it to make a groove, and that knot in there works just like a candle. You just light that and the wick will draw the grease up. You can use bear grease, but I never monkeyed around much with bear unless I just had to.” I can’t quite picture how Red rigged his grease from these words, but I imagine his gestures, his sure hands.
If we touched the cold wicket of a lamp, it crumbled and sifted to the floor or the seam of our palms, just ash. Several times a moth careered into a lit one to their mutual demise. They were expensive, ten or fifteen dollars each. Bradley had cautioned us to handle them carefully. Whenever one broke, I would set another in its base like a thief, making sure it hung level and firm. Then we would kindle the new, stiff basket until it caught, and watch the orange line crawl and smoke up its side. It needed to be burned before it was ready for use, and afterward it was more fragile than a spiderweb.
Mice run as wires: along and through walls. They are as electric in their obscurity. They seem to recognize a cabin no matter how far it is from town. Part of me had imagined them aloof in the meadow, felling one stalk of grass at time for the seed like little lumberjacks, but they preferred our Tostitos shards. I remember dropping to my knees once to look under our half-sized oven with a flashlight and discover the hulking shape of an avocado pit—and a mouse, the same size and brown, twitching behind in the cobwebs. But more often we would only sense movement.
One mouse we heard make a trail: behind the couch, past the sliding porch doors, into the corner to explore, over and over, the box of recycling underneath the sink. A solitary clink, a vitreous or aluminum scurry. But we did nothing. We had rinsed each can; the mouse would soon have nothing to lick. The sound was almost reassuring: At least someone around here was being productive tonight. I don’t mind a mouse, but you wouldn’t want two shacking up in a love grove under your watch. Bradley had told us to poison them with the cartons of pellets in the shed, and eventually we set one out. Which I regret, since that poison then runs out the door into the clutches of owls. A clean snap is more upstanding, if you have to.
Sitting in the rocker one evening, I heard a whispering in the rusted smoker that sat in the porch’s corner beside the specimen table. With a flashlight, Sarah and I peered through one of its vents and, there, on an enormous mattress woven of our couch’s stuffing, a petite mouse was settled with cool blue sparks for eyes. This mouse, we realized, was squeezing through a gap between the screen door and its frame. We laughed and fawned over it as we poured light through its steel window. It had built its home in a bundle of apple-branch kindling.
Every few weeks, we drove to Grants Pass for errands, and sometimes to discover monumental news like the death of Michael Jackson. We took the recycling with us and carried it rattling into Safeway’s recycling annex. You can deposit your bottles and cans for five cents a pop and receive a coupon for redemption inside the store. One day, at the bottom of our modest box, inside an hourglass salsa jar, we found a madcap cache of lime-green pellets: a winter’s larder of poison.
The first time a bear hit the fence in the dark, I thought of a certain well-known dinosaur movie. All was lost, clearly, all those runty vegetables. The metal rattled fiercely amid grunts not out of proportion with the darkness of the Rogue. From the porch, I swept a thousand-candle flashlight through the garden, searching the barbwire perimeter and the leaning trees clear across the meadow as if from a tower.
In the morning, we assessed the damage: The far side of the garden fence sagged like the idle, half-strung guitar I had brought to the homestead hoping to learn. The electric wire was pulled from its runners. The fence we’d so diligently pounded into the ground had been yanked hard, so that little peaks of wire, handfuls, rose like waves. But it held. No bear ever barged in, so far as we know. I think the fox walked right in, though, and pilfered our dwarf cantaloupe to make sweet milk for her kits.
When Bradley was fourteen, he and his mother arrived at the Horseshoe Bend cabin one summer to find a bear had beaten them there and had a “good thrash,” to employ one of Bradley’s favorite phrases. It had strewn things about, dug into the flour and left ghostly muzzle and paw prints across the walls. So Red Keller hung a side of bacon from a nearby tree and set the jaws in the leaves. In the night, the canyon was summoned by that inhuman bawling, and Bradley was recruited to end it. He aimed Red’s gun at that moving misfortune, that burly spotlit figure, and pulled the trigger. But another man on hand fired the kill shot.
“I always had a dog for the bear,” Red Keller said. “Three years straight I had bears break into my cabin. One year they cleaned me clear out of groceries. Broke right through the windows. I got each bear. They’ll just tear everything up.” Those words stay with me: I got each bear. Maybe Red Keller did get them in another sense as well, understood them as they can be, as animals that live a solitary life of abiding hunger. He shot or trapped them when they forced his hand, and only ate them when he joined Bill Graiff at the homestead for dinner. It was better Graiff’s way, Red Keller said: boiled and canned.
The upper cabin had a swath of bright tan shingles above the porch, where a wall had been patched; where one winter, a bear tried to tear through. When they arrived in the spring, Bradley and Frank discovered what was so irresistible: a can of smoked oysters. It had rusted through and leaked into the boards. The Boydens hired a trapper to capture that troublemaker and, in this age, simply relocate it. The trapper trucked in a steel cage on a trailer and parked it on the road near the upper cabin.
Inside, on the trip lever, he placed a single mini marshmallow and scattered a few more. They got that bear.
I began to feel guilty about keeping the bears out of the garden, because by September it was a glut of apples, most of which we let rot. We could consume only so many in Sarah’s pies, and we didn’t have the wherewithal, the mindfulness, to can them, or we might be eating them still. Now that drives home how little she and I were actually homesteading; makes it clear that life in the woods, with a car and no intention of wintering, is not exactly life in the woods.
Old-timers in the Rogue Canyon went so far as to jar their game. “You could hunt deer in the winter and can it,” said Red Keller. “You have jars and just boil it. You bone it, cut it, and pack it in the jars. Put your lids on and let it come to a boil. Just so it’s boilin’ for three hours. Then it’s done and it’ll keep forever.” “I like cooking for myself,” he added. The Takelma and Shasta Costa dried salmon and venison, cached acorns and camas flour. Dutch Henry spent days mule-packing his apples over the drainages to market, on the road we drove impatiently in an hour and a half. We never even bothered to make apple butter. We relied on Safeway’s bounty.
But some of the apples we sliced and lay on the screen trays of the dehydrator. It was located in the middle of the garden, to avoid trouble, a freestanding cupboard with a glass ceiling slanted to the south. Each time I unlatched its door, a blue-bellied western fence lizard would scurry out on its long-nailed toes, or along the box’s edge—such a warm, aromatic home. Though I later found one, maybe the same, withered like dried fruit on the dehydrator’s floor. We filled empty half-gallon nut containers with gummy rings and ate them by the handful until they molded.