Dirt Work (14 page)

In the years since I knew Dwight in Glacier, I've learned that addictions of any kind—work, sex, the private ones we don't even admit to ourselves—have, in many cases, less to do with genes and race than with a thing broken and the urge to mend. Add to that very ordinary pathology the distinct wounds of genocide and its parody, the guilt-built pedestal, and brokenness becomes tragically explicable. A Tlingit writer I know said to me once, “History has done its work and left us here, and sometimes it seems like such a great divide.” Like many western whites, I wish I could undo history. Like many humans, I wish I could return to a time I did someone wrong, meet that person again, and make it right. I am not even a footnote in Dwight's biography, I know. I make too much of myself, thinking about it this long. Why? In part because, as that same writer, large of heart, said next, “The only way we can go on is together.” I want to believe her. I want to be believed.

How can we go on together, Dwight? You could tell me the jokes about white people: there must be a book full. I could say I'm sorry for laughing at a joke that did you wrong. You could make me foolish, as I have done to you. We could mock the tourists instead, those hapless wankers who think I can't carry the saw because I'm a woman and you must know Chief Joseph because you look like their postcards. I want us to laugh at it together, this stupid script that neither of us wrote but both of us star in. I want us a fucking standing ovation.

That's what I want, but here's all I know: Dwight drank too much, had a great laugh, and was a hell of a sawyer. I get it. He was not then, and is not now, my Indian. And neither of us needs any applause.

Sierra Club volunteers came to the park every summer to do trailwork service trips. Predominantly men and women in their forties and fifties, middle- to upper-class, these dedicated conservationists pay hundreds of dollars to visit the park and do some good, and they usually got sent to do good in the Middle Fork, which always needed charity. Twelve volunteers per trip, they came with their own crew leader and a cook. They were good citizens, many of them interesting folks with golden intentions. But none of them, even the leaders, could do trailwork without serious guidance. So the park placed a pro crew on the project, to model the pace and the standards and do QC.

It wasn't kind, but we always complained about working with the Clubbers. From a distance, they could be a little eager, almost embarrassing in their earnestness. Some admired us too cheerily, claiming that ours was “real work.” A few were insufferable, arrogant do-gooders with a sense of urban entitlement out of synch with woods culture. We were grunts, they thought, and they could easily master our trade in no time flat. Any dummy could dig, after all, and they were architects, psychologists, engineers. To be fair, to them, I'm sure we seemed unkempt and young, cocky and woodsier-than-thou.

But, over the course of a hitch, the work usually schooled us in each other's real ways. We let down our guard and grew to like some of them, the ones who could laugh and cuss, who ribbed us and didn't take things so seriously, and they began to like us, even our crass mouths and bravado. We shared pride in the job we were doing, grounded in our bodies made tired by work. We traded trivia on trips back and forth from the fill pit, surprised at what we knew in common (Battle of Normandy, Johnny Cash's first hit single, how many digits of pi). We asked them questions over dinner about their cases and clients, about living in San Francisco, Chicago, their pets, their kids. They asked us if we'd gone to college (some yes, some no), what we did in the winters (ski, travel, serve coffee, more trailwork, write). We plowed through our usual gut-bomb dinners, and they delighted in their forsaken city diets, packing food in like they'd earned it.

One volunteer per trip managed to preserve his disgruntled superiority, bemoaning the work, the weather, the bugs. The biggest jerk I've ever met in my life was on a Sierra Club trip, a type-A hedge fund guy from L.A. who thought so highly of himself I'm not sure what tempted him into service at all. He disdained advice, did things wrong just to do it his own way, patronized the women, had a short temper, broke things. After my first few olive branches got snapped and handed back, I turned cold out of spite. I gave him tedious jobs and my evilest eye. On the opposite end of the spectrum was a delightful older woman—a veterinarian, I think—and her grown daughter, both of them proud of their blisters, the fact that by the end of the week they could tell pulaski from mattock and chisel from adze. I cheered their prowess and told them our jokes (not too dirty). The woman and her daughter, and that unhappy man, stand out in my mind as clear reminders—there are all kinds of people in all kinds of places. No archetypes, villains from the city, saints from the woods. Flagging a cab or chopping a log, it's pretty simple: sometimes we like each other, sometimes we don't.

Justin, Kent, Gabe, Sam, Max, and I had been clearing every day for a week. We'd drive to the trailhead listening to eighties rock on B-98 (“the Flathead's best rock-and-roll!”) and then load tools onto our packs, three saw teams to cut the epic downfall left by the past winter's winds that blew hard through a burn. We shed our morning fleece by 9 a.m., sweating long before the day found its heated center. At lunch on the last day of that week, every one of us fell asleep. We woke in a collective rustle twenty minutes after break should have been over, tripping over ourselves to hustle, one guy with a puddle of drool on his sweatshirt, my backpack buckle imprinted on my cheek. It's the only time I remember Max spending a second over thirty minutes on a lunch break.

Few trails jobs kicked my ass like long days logging out trails. We hiked, depending on the density of downfall, sometimes four miles, sometimes twenty. The weight of the saw, the work of cutting, and the focus it took made for profound weariness. I loved those days, even in the early weeks of the season, out of shape and vying not to be last in line, even at the end of the season, burnt out and stiff, even in the rain, even in a burn when the bark was compressed powder and cutting made us cough, left a thin film of ash on our skin. I loved those days. I loved them because I loved running a chainsaw, and I loved them because I felt free. Free to work hard and talk shit and eat huge lunches, free to laugh with the guys, even those I had nothing in common with after 5:30, free to be confident and at the same time have so much left to learn. Free to run a saw without being “a woman who can run a saw.”

The knife edge of work flayed off the silly posturing, the eyeball and swagger between men and women in the regular world, where a girl unloading a chainsaw from the back of a truck elicits a leering whistle, when entering an engine repair shop brings on the size-up from the shop tech that men do not get, the one that says,
How much does she know?
When you're cutting with a partner, swapping back and forth all day, breakneck, and then, when you're both exhausted and there's still the hike out to the truck, and the miles seem long but bring 'em on, there is no energy for
Isn't a girl with a chainsaw sexy
or
Does he think I'm competent?
There is energy only for the necessary:
Did he drop the rakers
or
I wonder if she has any water left
or
Take this thing, please, it's killing me.

The packer Greg refused to walk more than the distance from the barn to the stock truck or the string to the hitch rail. He rarely led the mules on foot. “Walkin'? Hurts too damn much,” he said. He couldn't touch his stiff knees, let alone his feet. He complained cheerfully, thumped his melon-belly with both hands: “It's hard work draggin' this pup around.” Once, Reba asked, “Greg, you ever try yoga?” He looked at her, cocked a bushy eyebrow. “Nah, I don't eat that stuff. Too sour.”

By late summer, the Middle Fork is clogged with vegetation. The long drainages (Park, Nyack) spend 15 to 20 miles in the trees before trail pops into the open alpine. Every so often there's a burn, an old-growth clearing, or open spots along rivers with cottonwoods, but mostly, miles and miles of lodgepole, Doug-fir, spruce, larch, pine. In July, brush takes over the lowlands: blueberry and mountain maple, devil's club and cow parsnip, alder and willow and yew tangled in a cat's cradle. A trail that's been neglected more than five years turns from pathway to tunnel. Head off the trail two feet to take a piss and you could be gone a while, searching for cut log ends or that brighter swath of light to guide you back on trail. Whoever first said, “Can't see the forest for the trees” had surely been lost in woods like these, knew this about the big picture: perspective is critical, and easily obscured.

When a crew brushes a trail, we cut vegetation back five or six feet off each side, and when the job's done, the mess raked up and dragged away, we hike back through the swath with saws and brushers over our shoulders, sticky and satisfied, the itch of cow parsnip on our forearms, devil's club spines embedded in our fingers. Yet, despite the open view of the trail snaking into the distance, the weary muscles that tell us we've made a dent, we can feel the greenery sneaking back in as we pass, a sinister behind-the-back enemy: too slow to catch in the act, too fast to feel we've conquered anything.

On September 11, 2001, we were up Harrison Creek working on a bridge, a bunch of remnants from different crews assembled for the late-season project. It was clear and cool with starry nights, elk rutting, and the trees turning their seasonal stunts, the kind of weather and place in which you just feel lucky to be alive. On September 12, Sam and Mitch hiked in to join us, and we looked forward to their arrival—the paper, extra chocolate, new jokes. They showed while we were having lunch in the sun, one gabion abutment finished, the log stringers ready to be hauled across the span. Sam pulled the paper out of his pack. Mitch said
bomb
and
plane
and
terrorists
and
dead
and
New York.
The rest of us looked at each other: are they screwing with us? This remote, so easy to play
War of the Worlds
, to invent some disturbing news we couldn't disprove until we got out in a week. Those guys were jokers. We wouldn't put such a caper past them. But there was the headline in the
Daily Interlake
, not prone to reporting beyond the region. There was the color photo, mostly smoke, and the headlines in large type. It looked real.

Like every American, I have a memory of 9/11, a flash my mind returns to. Mine isn't of the towers, not the first collapse on live TV, or the second, or the hundredth. I didn't come out of the woods for another week, and then to our TV-less cabin, buffered from media and spin. To this day I have never seen the live footage of the falling towers. I've heard stories from friends, some of them New Yorkers who were on the N train or the Brooklyn Bridge when the planes hit. But I did not experience the news, raw and then, instantly, mediated. I was insulated from the unrelenting aftermath. In a defining cultural moment, an odd one out.

My days following 9/11 were full of sensory experiences incongruous with national trauma. The feel of water flooding my waders as we set the footings for the bridge. The sharp sound of the rut. Late-summer sun warming my flannel. The strange experience of peace amid larger turmoil. The disparity was garish. How could those worlds—the one of steel and force and hate, and the one of antlers and dirt and camaraderie—be the same world? How was I so protected from the abject horror of the New Yorker, or the desperate loathing of the extremist? To what stroke of fate or luck or karma or blessing did I owe the fact that my memories of 9/11/2001 were of an unbombed world, inured from all but the ordinary harm of storms, food chain, flood?

I am thankful for that positioning, not to bury my head in wilderness at the expense of the human, but because that dichotomy—steadiness in the face of mayhem—reminds me that peace is possible. Reminds me that even amid terror and silencing, aggression and defense, there are pockets of life indelibly sublime, and that we can remember them, bring them to the fore, not to escape the reality of violence, but to counter it, to temper hopelessness and despair with wind, water, light.

Later, when I lived in a city and was consumed by the frantic marches for peace, letters to the editor, petitions, and arguments, I'd think back on that week at Harrison Creek often. It was a less tangible response than diplomacy or activism, but even years later, those moments outdoors in a world not of my making were both antidote and balm.

Over the course of that hitch, during brief moments of downtime between cutting and pounding and digging and cooking and sleep, I mulled over villainy and victims. I thought about people hating people, and terrorism, a distant but far more haunting menace than the grizzly bears that passed by our camp in the trees. War, the idea of it, filled every blank space in my mind. I wondered if it would happen, where it would happen, when. If we were on the cusp of something big.

By the time the hitch was over and we'd mannied our loads for the packers, the news was a week old. The world beyond Harrison Creek was moving from shock and mourning to analysis and revenge. Fall had blown in on a stiff wind, ice skiffed the creek's edges at night and sleet fell sideways on the hike out, coating the mules' hides with hoar. The bridge was finished. We left it to weather winter's snow load and next spring's melt. The elk remained, intent on mating.

We are always on the cusp of something big.