Coast Range

by Nick Neely

  One tree in the garden was so bowed with apples that finally several branches snapped, and we felt like terrible caretakers for having failed to prop them up with the fir poles that littered the woods. We had slung a hammock in this garden grove, which added a welcome stroke of artificial color to the view; Sarah made a painting of it, a crescent of red and blue in the dapple. I remember lying in the hammock in late August as the bees and yellow jackets cruised the bruised and melting spoils below, their drone filling me, my ears. They prodded the craters in these golden planets, all tumbled together in a mass extinction, and carried samples to their underground colonies.

  Another day I discovered a mouse dead on the road between the cabins. Hard to say what killed it—not a car, and we hadn’t stepped on it. We wondered if this was our friend from the porch’s smoker, who had disappeared. It was a body untouched, still plump with water. Then the yellow jackets arrived, one by one, and began to saw, peeling the fur, taking the inner wreckage away piecemeal to a nest, some old burrow along the edges of the meadow lined with papery walls. Eventually the mouse was reduced to a husk. In this way, it was demonstrated that the difference between a mouse and an apple is minimal.

  We found the yellow jackets’ nest only as we pulled saplings one afternoon beyond the garden, just where a dead snag had fallen, given in, to the meadow. Sarah found it, rather. Suddenly she shrieked and threw her shovel aside and her hands up in the hot air as she leaped sideways through the grass. There were jackets swirling around her, and at least one was trapped in her clothes. “Take your shirt off!” I yelled, several times. She was modest even alone in the woods, miles from anyone. Finally she stood there in her purple bra, cringing and sobbing a little, her shovel in the grass. I rubbed her shoulders. This was their home, too, their field.

  Now I wonder if it was poison they had whisked away.

  Sarah and I often would make a simple dinner of couscous and pork chop with sautéed garden apples and carry it in old yogurt containers, along with a couple of beers, to the upper cabin’s porch, where the view was to Big Windy. We’d unlock the front door and slip through the stale and dusty air, listening to the bats quivering in the walls as the afternoon sun turned their roost behind the shingles into a hothouse. Then out the sliding glass door. We’d unfold the plastic chairs leaned against the walls. Having one porch was deeply satisfying; having another for our use with such an expansive, undulating prospect was an utter luxury we tried not to waste. The light climbing Rattlesnake Ridge was a dying wildfire that never died.

  In August, the bears finally came out of the Rogue’s green curtain and went up into Dutch Henry’s doddering apple trees, such broken figures, especially after the bears. More than once, a mother and two cubs emerged—one black, the other cinnamon—and climbed as a family. She was teaching them local conveniences; these cubs would teach theirs as future residents looked on. Another evening, a large male, the biggest bear we saw, swaggered through the ferns as we held our forks in the air, and he rose up on his hind legs to shake each tree, with his pale gray testicles hanging low. He was so big he didn’t need to climb. His reach was enough.

  If there were no bears below the upper cabin, there were deer. They would walk cautiously, on stilts, from the tan oaks, pausing every few steps in case of an audience. But on the porch, we were behind a curtain, somehow. We were deck furniture. Come fall, the bucks emerged with blood-velvet peeling from their antlers like bark from madrone. They honed their points on Dutch Henry’s orchard trees, and later racked them against each other, though more often feuds were settled with a brief, ritualized chase, the dominant buck on the heels of the upstart. Then they harassed the does, who trotted off, wanting only grass.

  Red Keller described his way of fishing, the preferred method for rainbows up the Rogue’s tributary creeks: “Take a willow pole and put a line on it. Take a leader and use a piece of bacon for bait. Down there in lots of places you can’t get worms. You pull the eye out of the first one you catch and use that. They’ll like it because it shines.”

  We would lash a wet fly, a one-inch streamer, into the Rogue and, inexplicably, sometimes a half-pounder would scintillate and hit it. Then the game of telephone: The only time you feel the whole life force of a fish is before you finally wrap your hands around its exhausted body; the only time is through synthetic twine. A half-pounder is a steelhead, or an oceangoing trout, that has returned to its natal river after less than a year in the Pacific, when normally they spend several, growing to eight or ten pounds before running home to breed. No one knows why, exactly. But these were strong for their size, and sometimes I would let them run out again, just to continue to feel their energy. When they disappeared, dove into the blackness, it was as if I had the river.

  Often I would have to climb down from a boulder, sometimes a fair ways, to land a fish. I would dip my hand in anticipation and study the lithe steelhead as it approached to see if it had a clipped fin. If so, it was a hatchery fish. I must have caught thirty or so half-pounders that fall, and only two were wild. Which isn’t a good sign, though probably wild fish are savvier. But all of them had beaten the odds and explored the ocean, and now as then, I’m not convinced that being conceived in a steel tank makes it any less so.

  Some of those clipped half-pounders I let free. Others I would withdraw like a sword and thwack on the stone so that I could feel and hear the crack of the skull: any memory, the intuition of life in water—of the Pacific—rattled and gone. It was the last season, for now, that I would kill a fish. Sometimes I cleaned them there on the riverbank with my Swiss Army knife, turning the tip inside its stomach to unseal and scrape the bloodline, and left the viscera for the water. Their flesh was a gentle pink, partway to salmon, a sign of the sea, of great clouds of krill. I’d drag them to rinse the cavity. One last swim.

  We grilled the fish on the porch in our Weber, laying fresh apple twigs on the coals for the tartness of smoke. Head and all, in the skin. Their eyes metamorphosed to quartz. It felt right to eat something that we had caught and to an extent lived with. Fish bones near the cabin or in the compost would never do, on account of the bears, so we wrapped the remainders in plastic and, the next time we were in Grants Pass, covertly dumped them with all the rest of our trash into a random dumpster. That’s one way to deal with your waste when you reside in the backcountry. But if I were to do it all over again, I’d bring each fish back to the river.

  In the height of summer, we camped by the Rogue on just a tarp and pads, but later in the fall, with mist in the air, we pitched a dome tent on Horseshoe Bar, the leading edge of Horseshoe Bend. Sarah stayed to read or paint while I fished the curve, where I had caught a number of half-pounders. I had been so bold as to suggest that we might roast one on a river-tooth fire. But taking a step to reposition myself, I misjudged an angle on a slick rock and fell backward, straight back. As I went, I understood my head was unprotected and my skull was about to crack on the sable stone, and the lights would go out.

  My arms flung down and back with the rod still in my hand. My backside slammed, and I heard and felt the sharp metallic of the reel striking rock. I stared at the sky where I fell: a marine layer marbled with seams. The wind had been knocked out of my canyon; I felt dizzy, nauseous, gut-punched. But after a minute, it passed. My head was fine. Only my shoulder and gluteus maximus were bruised and beginning to tighten. I rolled off the rock into a wet triangle of sand with willow shoots and knelt there, hands on my thighs, contemplating these results. Seemed fair. I gave up the evening and limped home, to the cobble. My butt cheek turned the color of crushed blackberries, then the yellow and brown of an apple mushed on the ground.

  I remember reading one evening on the upper cabin’s porch from Hayden Carruth’s Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems. A copy was floating around because Frank Boyden, an artist, had done the cover detail. Inside was an elegy that Carruth wrote for his daughter, Martha, the day after she died of cancer in her forties: “She who became a painter
and who now is / the painter forever, / of these images of earthly splendor and fascination / on our walls, / from here to California.” He had stayed up all night to write the poem and chronicle the changes of the light out his upstate New York window. I remember reading that aloud to Sarah and having my mouth go dry.

  Then water came to our eyes. It wasn’t only the beer, but the layered view that was heaviest at certain late, but always changing, moments. It was our isolation, our vulnerable age, our firm but tenuous hold on each other. Looking out, with these words in the air, we sensed that. We sensed that it could only ever be. In “Dearest M—”, Carruth describes a deer under an apple tree rising up on her hind legs to grasp an apple with her teeth. “But she cannot.” We’d seen them do exactly this, and manage it, from the porch. Their forelegs lift to their chests and their hooves dangle as if vestigial. They look like different animals entirely.

  We felt then a small wave, call it sadness. It was about what all people know so intensely as those they love or know disappear, which could include a place or time. It felt as bright as the orange crawling up Rattlesnake Ridge. Most days, this landscape was a playground, an inspiration to us. But an apple tree can just as easily be a somber form, a broken hip. It can signal a lost homeland. It can be all these things, and it can also be a way forward. Lou Martin, another miner on the Rogue, had come from Maine, as far as the continent would allow, following the flu epidemic of 1918: “After my wife and baby died, I went into the hills. I don’t know how to express it. I can put it this way. If you’re busy, if you are working, your mind is occupied and you don’t miss the other party. That’s the way it is in the hills. Most of the fellows that stayed in the hills felt the same way.” That’s also what to homestead can mean.

  When Sarah’s parents arrived for a visit in September, their first time in Oregon, we tapped nails lightly into some of the love grove’s trees and hung a selection of her paintings for a one-day-only gallery, a plein air surprise. She needed no other structure, no track lighting or frames. To a fir, I stapled an announcement of the retrospective; weeks later, that paper would melt off the tree in the rain. At the opening, we opened the beer cache to find Solo cups and a bottle of chardonnay, chilled by the Rogue earth. The show was trees on trees, the way the world still is in many places, trees on trees without misgiving. As it should be. Fallen giants become “nurse logs,” giving their nutrients, all of them, to the feathery saplings that grow off their backs.

  We walked around the grove with our hands on our hips and admired her foliation of color, how she’d managed so cleanly to show the messiness of the meadow’s border. This was Sarah’s love, its full expression, though she felt she hadn’t fully expressed it. She had slung the hammock red-and-blue in the garden. She had entwined maple and the dim of the creek. There were deer in her paintings, some below the apple trees, grazing or watchful, their ears cocked. The deer walked through our lives so much that we began to forget them and seeing them on her canvases was a reminder. They were there. They watched us.

  My own parents brought the dogs: a handsome mutt, Dama, rescued from New Orleans, sleek and tawny as a young mountain lion; and two chihuahuas, surprising hikers, but ridiculous in the backcountry. No match for a lion or a squirrel. We trekked to Kelsey Creek and left the heat in the runoff still gathering from snow that, most years, keeps people out of the homestead by car until May. When one of the chihuahuas fell in, she paddled like a merganser to the bank with furious eyes. Meanwhile, Dama raced ahead and behind on trails of air, as she always does, bothering the chipmunks. As we lingered by Kelsey, she emerged from the brush with a long, straight bone. We joked nervously that it might be human, some victim of the Rogue Wars. Probably it was a deer femur.

  On the way back, Dama found another treasure. “Come here, Dama, what do you have?” I stopped her on the trail, pulled it from her warm and dripping gums: It was two shriveled fingers, still connected. A half-curled fragment of a hand. We gaped; there seemed no point in recoiling from what was impossible. Here were the missing digits of Mr. William Black more than a century later. Here was evidence of a humanlike creature unknown to us. But they appeared, in fact, to be a desiccated bear paw, just as queer and grisly: long claws, coarse sooty bristles, the cured and peeling skin of a hairless pad.

  I carried this relic home in my own right hand and left it on the porch table, beside the weathered dictionary and the lifeless hummingbird, the beaver skull and the .22 shells, the ponderosa cone and a river tooth. This was something all residents should examine, and I wonder, now, if it is still there to see. All summer and fall that dilapidated plywood table gathered our experience, like an eddy. Some of it. It was an open-air curiosity cabinet that allowed us to hold the landscape we had found, to remember its many inhabitants and habitats, even if it was only a partial distillation, an impoverished theater of the Rogue. It was easy, for me, to gather natural history, more difficult to conjure the human.

  We celebrated Sarah’s twenty-fifth birthday the night before she left. Bradley and Lang, the homestead’s second resident—the intrepid mountain biker who had survived and named Rattlesnake Ridge—drove in for their annual fall visit, the homestead’s closure. But I was staying on; I was eager to try a month of solitude, and Sarah was happy to go back east and join her family for the holidays, to give me that experiment. She would pilot the Jeep to the Bay Area with our stuff, and in a month, I would walk out of the Rogue on the trail with what I could carry. The pass might be snowbound.

  We grilled that night at the upper cabin, and I mixed up a Funfetti cake, Sarah’s request. We drank Bradley’s whiskey and lost at cribbage. The next afternoon, she and I drove out behind them. They turned for Portland, and we spent one last night in Grants Pass in our grand and plain motel, the Knights Inn, where we had stayed several times: for a Halloween out on the town, and when we had too many errands. I stayed up far too late revising an essay on sudden notice so I could send it off and then slid into bed beside her. The next morning, she dropped me back off at Grave Creek, and I started up the rocky stretch before the trail turns out of sight, where I waved and blew a kiss.

  The Rogue River Trail runs forty miles, but I was going only fifteen. She and I had hiked it midsummer, camping one night on a sandbar, on a blue crinkled tarp, but now I walked it in five hours, stepping over the river’s tributaries, sometimes on wooden bridges: After Grave Creek came China Gulch, where a team of Chinese miners, whom we tend to forget, had toiled before the turn of the century. Then Whiskey Creek, Rum Creek, Doe Creek. Alder and Booze, Hayward and Bronco. Big Windy, Bunker, Little Windy, Jenny, Copsey, Cowley, and Meadow. Each with a sordid or sad or simple story that’s mostly washed out with the gold and the rain.

  Later in his life, Red Keller preferred winters in the canyon, when the steelhead were running and the rafters weren’t. Mere visitors like us were a distraction. “When you’re down that way you’ll read an awful lot,” said Red. “I wouldn’t live in town. Just nothin’ for me to do. There I can be just as happy running along the river and foolin’ around. Lookin’ out the window when it’s snowin’ hard, read a little bit, wonder how long it’s going to last, and how deep it is. Then first thing in the morning, I get up and take off and see the different fresh tracks in the snow.” During my month alone, flakes the size of feathers shrouded the meadow just once. Gone by afternoon.

  But another morning the meadow began as an unexpected porcelain, a frost so complete that each stalk of grass lay thickly glazed. It was the kind of frost that, when you see it, seems to send fractals into your lungs and suppress your breath without notice or discomfort. No sound. I stepped onto the porch, into this transformation. The night before, the meadow had been in fog, and it had left another version of itself. Walking up the road, the spiderwebs sagged in lucid imperfection, like the garden fence after the bear. They would snap back to shape only as they became invisible. The meadow again dripped to normal by midday, and it pained me that no one else, especially Sarah, had seen it.


  Darkness entered the forest early that last month, though I hadn’t reset my watch with the end of daylight savings. No need. I did read many hours on the cinnamon couch, as much as I ever had: Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. I remember reading As I Lay Dying for the first time, in the murmuring company of the woodstove, and reimagining those saw-whet owls we had heard as Cash Bundren prepared to bevel his mother’s final home, while she listened from her sickbed through their cabin window. Faulkner, it turns out, visited the Rogue in the 1940s.

  It was a tradition for each resident to leave at least one recommended read on the cabin’s three-shelf library, and I donated a few: Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, on the creative spirit, which my sister had given to me and in which I first read about the Northwest’s tribal salmon ceremonies, how the bones and skin of a sacred fish are returned to the river to ensure they will come again. And a how-to-prospect-for-gold book, in which I inscribed an inspirational note and cheekily taped a flake of gold, a small one I had panned out of the river (the others I kept). Some residents had left the books they had written, and I imagined someday returning to put mine on the shelf for others to browse or use as a coaster on the porch. These were the quiet days of December.

  In Sarah’s absence, I took a few more ambitious hikes to pass the time and see farther corners. There was Zane Grey’s fishing cabin to finally visit, just past Battle Bar. The log house was locked, but I pressed my nose to the wavering glass and, nearby, found elk tracks and pellets in the vigorous winter grass. And on another cloudless morning in December, I started for the top of Rattlesnake Ridge. We had stared at its raw face so much I had to climb.