The Carry Home (15 page)

Grace seems to show itself more readily in the wake of grief, slipping into the room like a late-arriving lover and easing between the sheets. Who knows, maybe paying such close attention during that first scattering of Jane's ashes, mustering the focus it seemed to require, left me somehow ready for grace, better able to grasp some essential sliver of understanding. All I can say is, in what proved the first easy thing since the accident, I got off that stump and walked back to the house and through the kitchen door. And never again did I think of nature betraying me.

THANKSGIVING

T
wenty years before our disaster on the Kopka, I'd been asked by a publisher in New York to gather a collection of nature myths from around the world—small, bite-sized stories about the making of earth's wonders. I talked to storytellers. Listened to old recordings by anthropologists. I went again and again into the stacks of major university folklore collections, combing through more than a thousand tales from every continent. Three months into the research it dawned on me that without fail, every story was holding up one or more of three qualities essential to living well in the world.

The first of those qualities was a relationship with beauty. The sort of relationship that grows out of quiet, intensely focused moments. Not shutting out the rest of the world; instead, being present enough to see the world through the shine of whatever beautiful thing is in front of you. The stories suggest that, while beauty may be fleeting, there is great reliability to it—a reliability so unerring, in fact, that it can pull the imagination to higher callings, to the outer edges of the eternal. Beauty is the moon Neruda wrote about, “living in the lining of your skin.”

The second quality showing up in those stories was community—not just among humans, but with every aspect of creation. A sense of deep belonging—one that carries us out of the little room where loneliness lives into a wide world of ever-present embrace. Of sunlight in our bones and rivers in our blood.

The third had to do with the need to cultivate an appreciation for mystery, welcoming places or situations where the world seems utterly unfathomable. Not as some first step in figuring things out, but as the first step in giving up trying. It's a call to accept the fact that a great many curiosities about this life will never be answered, and further, that real peace is reserved for those happy to live day after day in the questions.

In that first winter after Jane died, I started rereading those tales I'd found:
Butterflies Teach Children to Walk
, given to me by an old Ojibwa woman; an ancient tale from Java called
The Forest and the Tiger
; and from West Africa,
The Birds Find Their Homes
. In recalling those three essential qualities needed to live well in the world, by making them what I thought about when I woke up
and again when I went to sleep at night, I started to understand just what it was I'd lost touch with in the underworld of grief.

“Our stories hold life's lessons,” said the Ojibwa elder who'd given me the butterfly story. “Bad things always get worse when you forget the lessons.”

S
OME TWENTY YEARS AGO,
J
ANE AND
I
WERE FINISHING UP THE
last piece of trail from a five-hundred-mile walk around greater Yellowstone, part of a book called
Walking Down the Wild
. In the last hours of the day, pushing toward home down the Line Creek Plateau, we started talking about the most striking experiences we'd had in nature, not so much as a couple, but as individuals. The times that shaped us. First our minds drifted back to childhood. She recalled tents made out of sheets erected at the edge of her family's corn fields; I described how one summer when I was about ten, my brother and I had saved up our allowance to buy two pairs of green rubber boots, which we used in a patch of woods in northern Indiana, meandering up and down a tiny creek so small it didn't even have a name.

In the end, though, I told Jane the most striking experience I'd had in nature was in my late twenties, several years after we'd met, in the days when my mother was bedridden, dying of cancer. Having for a month been too weak to even hold her head up, she told me one morning she wanted to go outside. So I carefully gathered her up in my arms and carried her through the front
door and out into the yard. Around we went for what must have been twenty minutes—first so she could smell the flowers on her lilac bushes, then so she could look through the woods above the bird feeder for the flash of a certain cardinal's wings. And finally, so she could run through her fingers the supple young leaves of the maples and dogwoods.

I'd never forgotten the solace my mother gained from that small journey around the yard, the last time I saw her alive. Having over the months watched disease whittle her soft, round body into something sharp and breakable, having seen the light in her eyes fade behind a wall of morphine, I found it hard to buy the claims I'd heard from Crow and Sioux people in the northern Rockies and plains who told me a person is never more powerful than when she's about to die. But on that day, she
was
powerful. By some special grace, she managed to harness the mystery floating through that quarter-acre yard and use it to light the dark place closing in around her. That afternoon, the pain she'd worn for so long began draining from her face, replaced by a look of serenity I'd never seen in her, even when she was young and healthy. The next morning she told my sister-in-law to stop all the painkillers, despite having been on massive doses of Percocet and morphine for several months. A few days later, in the still hours of the night, she drifted away.

The flash of that cardinal, the soft green leaves of the maples and dogwoods—they were small hints of the wild tapestry that once circled the earth, remnants of the patterns and paradigms that first breathed meaning into human existence. Hints that
helped my mother transcend the tumult of daily life, offering her some slim measure of miracle, a hint of wholeness in her severed world. I too had been hunting for such inklings every time I'd gone to the wilderness. And most amazing of all was that I never once failed to find them.

I couldn't have spent the past thirty years watching saplings sprout from the ruin of fallen trees, seeing entire forests burn and then new ones rise from the ashes, watching the skies above Montana empty of birds in November and fill again in April, seeing its mountains pried apart by ice into boulders, the boulders into rocks, and the rocks into gravel and sand, without also surrendering to the fact that nothing we set eyes on, nothing we put our arms around, ever stays exactly the same. About this, the nature myths I'd collected from around the world were very clear. Of course there is a sadness in accepting that. But now there were days when it was a sweet, even comforting sadness. The kind of sadness that lies along the far edges of every love.

D
URING OUR YEARS IN
M
ONTANA, WE'D MADE DOZENS OF SKI
trips into small Forest Service guard stations and field cabins. And the one we visited most was a couple hours south of Red Lodge, in the southern Absarokas of Wyoming—two miles by trail up a remote river valley, cradled by Engelmann spruce and Douglas fir. We spent seven Thanksgivings there, each time arriving with backpacks topped with bags of turkey cooked the night before,
mashed potatoes and canned oysters and cranberry sauce and red wine and cheese and salami and olives and French bread. And always too, ingredients for the one cocktail Jane was especially fond of on winter trips: the snowshoe, her version being a mix of Jack Daniels and a high-octane peppermint schnapps called Rumple Minze, poured into a Sierra Cup, chilled with icicles plucked from the roof.

Known as the Wood River cabin, this too was on the list of the places she wanted her ashes scattered.

I'd left in early winter of that first year, on a sun-drenched Thanksgiving morning, six months to the day following her death. Over the phone one of the locals told me there was no snow, not to bother bringing skis. But I arrived to find a good ten inches on the ground; with no skis or snowshoes, that would mean two miles of post-holing. Soon after leaving the parking lot and crossing the river on a steel footbridge, though, I crossed a lone set of prints from a big wolf. He was going south, the same direction as me, and the travel was made easy by placing my feet in the deep dents made by his paws. Except for a couple of short side trips, his route was unwavering. While at first I had to focus to match his gait, by the time I reached the big timber, maybe a half mile in, I could do it without even looking, stepping past the same downed trees and ice-covered rock faces he'd passed an hour or so earlier. When his tracks finally left the trail and drifted east across the frozen river, I was only forty yards from the cabin.

The place looked the same: A one-room cabin, twelve feet
by twenty, the walls made of small, unstained pine logs bleached by the sun. Along one outside wall was a pile of spruce and aspen wood taken from the surrounding forest, split and stacked, ready for the woodstove. Out in the yard was the same old freestanding sign board, meant to hold a forest map, but as usual, holding no map at all, which made weirdly profound the words carved into the bottom post of the empty frame:
You Are Here
.

Inside the single twelve-foot-square room were three wooden chairs and a small sink with no running water. Shelves too, with extras of everything from matches to lamp wicks, tampons to toilet paper. And on a flat board braced to the wall in the back of the room, several feet of books: Gretel Ehrlich's
The Solace of Open Spaces
and Bradford Angier's
How to Stay Alive in the Woods
;
The Virginian
by Owen Wister, a couple field guides, a fistful of
Daily Bread
booklets for those hungry for morsels from the Lord. And on the very end, Jack London's
White Fang
. The previous Thanksgiving, with the Coleman lantern burning, it would be the last book I ever read aloud to her.

What I was most interested in was the cabin journal, which Jane carried in on our first visit, making a gift of it to those who followed. Dozens of visitors used it, mostly families, many who like us ended up adopting the little cottage, caring for it by bringing in everything from rugs to stuffed chairs, lanterns to sauce pans. Though none of us ever met, across the years we came to know a little something about each other through the pages of the journal: Who catches fish and who snores. Who's good at spotting moose. Who trekked to the outhouse in the
middle of a frigid winter night, looked up, and saw God staring back from the stars. I left a few new lines, letting everyone know that Jane had died.

Setting about the usual chores—filtering water, carrying firewood—as the last of the daylight leaked out of the sky, out behind the cabin I caught a glimpse of shadowy movement. Not fifteen feet away was a beautiful bobcat, her coat the color of dried grass. She walked slowly out from behind a juniper, coming toward me. Then she stopped and just stood there, staring into my eyes.

It was uncanny behavior, and once again I heard myself saying out loud, “Jane?” She considered me for what seemed close to five minutes—calm, blinking, swishing her tail. Then she turned and walked up the slope, disappearing into a loose stand of timber.

I didn't bother spinning theories about why one of the shyest creatures on the continent decided to give me such a long and careful look. I didn't sit in the snow and reconsider reincarnation. There was only the beauty of it. After the cat wandered off, I headed inside, poured myself a Scotch, raised the glass, and wished it well.

The next day dawned clear and cold. I heated up a little water on the Coleman stove, threw a teabag into a travel mug, put on a coat and hat and gloves, and walked down to the Wood River, and there began tracking the wolf I'd followed the day before. Still more ice had formed in the night, fanning out in teardrop shapes from the downstream edges of half-submerged
granite boulders. The wolf had continued upstream, walking in a straight line, staying close to the water, finally veering off after a couple miles to begin a sharp climb into the gnarled foothills of Standard Peak. I could've followed his tracks all day, leaned hard into the effort, and I would never have come close to catching him.