Dirt Work (4 page)

Still, I dreaded having to chop something in front of Max, the brawny West Lakes crew leader whose physical strength and grace gave him mythic status, or the Middle Fork guys, twentysomethings from ranches or farms who seemed to have been born with tools in their hands. I was grateful that only Reba saw my early efforts. It was for me then, and remained for years, easier to take lessons from women. The majority of us were not raised to perform the skills we were being paid for, some even shielded from labor by college prep classes (not shop!) and brothers mowing the lawn. Perhaps some women in manual-labor trades bond because of an inherent sorority among men, but I think what deeply unites us is the fact that most of us have so recently been beginners. In the labor world, women more often remember what it felt like to not know, to be expected not to know, to be taught, and then later, to teach. The expertise we have feels earned, not inherited. We are grateful for the times someone chose not to make us feel foolish.

I eventually got very good at swinging an axe, often chopping out a tree just for the satisfaction. In Missoula, where Gabe and I spent winters, I volunteered on a playground project at a city park. A large tree root impeded a posthole and I offered to whack the thing loose. The axe was sharp, and in three clean and perfect swings, the root came free. “Wow,” said one middle-aged volunteer to his friend. “She can chop.” He could not have known what a long, tortured pageant his tiny comment gestured toward. My turned face concealed what would have been the sure blush of pride.

I'm ashamed to admit, however, that for me, prowess doesn't always go hand in hand with the easy and generous humility I admire in others. I've often been in Reba's position since my first day with the axe, standing by while someone young or inexperienced or just not very strong whaled, fruitless, at a tree. I hate to admit that I laughed at them, but sometimes, I did. Especially the men. With women I was quicker to demonstrate the right technique first, or to step in and help before they sunk the axe into a kneecap. With girls, I'd confide, “You should have seen the first time I tried to chop a tree,” rolling my eyes, subverting present competence. But the cocky first-year laborer who could pick me up with one arm and toss me off the trail if he chose, who wanted to put him at ease? I let those boys flail. I smirked on the sidelines before asking if they wanted a hand. (They usually didn't.) One know-it-all Sierra Club volunteer “chopped” at a tree for five minutes, causing only a dent in the bark before throwing down the tool with a withering “This axe is too dull.” Nothing subtle about the way I picked it up, inspected the sharp edge of the blade with my finger, and chopped the tree through in ten neat swings. I could see John Henry's demise in my single-minded vigor to show that man up. “Not that dull,” I said as I handed the axe back to him.

I've seen those I work with negotiate the same tension, women and men. Some are insufferable, quick to lecture and correct, covering insecurities with the chest-thumping bravado that hopes to keep the reek of unknowing at a distance. Others are so self-effacing you have to twist their arms to get them to teach you anything, its own kind of arrogance. Most, like me, are somewhere in between. I like to think I've gotten better at the dance of the old hand, the delicate riff between modesty and expertise, the ability to give what I know as an offering, not a weapon, and to keep learning, eager for the many tasks I haven't mastered. I like it far better when I can be the gracious mentor, not the know-it-all. Too bad there's still that occasional thrill of seeing someone else stumbling along and thinking, relieved,
This time, it's me who knows.

My pitfalls this obvious, you'd think they'd be easier to avoid.

The North Fork in July explodes with flowers: arrowleaf balsamroot, fireweed, trillium, arnica, columbine, lupine, gentian, Indian paintbrush, clematis, larkspur. Spoken, they bloom again.

Polebridge, Montana: town site established in 1911 by a loner from back east who built a homestead cabin on the edge of nowhere, and in the yard planted the first known beech tree west of the Continental Divide. Now, the cabin is a saloon, the only watering hole in the North Fork's only human enclave, where long wooden picnic tables rest in the shade of the beech. The Northern Lights Saloon is more than twenty miles from the nearest town, and in rock-tossing distance of wilderness, you can get most drinks, except a slushy margarita—no blender. But local beer on tap, a shot of Jack, an elk burger? Put it on the tab.

After four o'clock, dusty trucks line the dirt strip out front. The vista from the porch spans a twenty-five-year-old burn, dead trees in front of the mountains beyond, and the foreground props include two ancient gas pumps whose numbers scroll by like a slot machine, a rusty fire engine, two dogs, and a horse foraging the sand pits behind the Mercantile. A hand-lettered sign nailed to a utility pole reads, “SLOW DOWN, People Breathing.” Even years after the 1988 fire, char tints the air, mingled with the smell of burnt sugar, from the Mercantile Bakery's daily special. A cardboard sign nailed to the saloon's porch warns, “Unleashed Dogs Will Be Eaten.” Under the sign sleeps Sasha, a three-legged Karelian bear dog. She is black, with a dirty-white fur apron. She lies unleashed with her head on outstretched paws, ready to enforce the local rules.

Dirt is an old word, an earthy word. It inhabits its meaning as it sits on your tongue when you speak it, onomatopoeia made flesh. “Dirt” never came out of Caesar's mouth; it can't be declined in a lyrical list. There is nothing fancy or trilling about the sound of dirt. It's not dressed up like “excrement” or “detritus,” unlike “organic matter” or even “humus.” From Old Norse, it made its way into Middle English as
drit
—the filth that collected on the soles of Chaucer's travelers' shoes. Dirt stands alone, underneath everything, hidden in the creases of our skin, blowing in the air. It's solid and unglamorous.
Old.

Perhaps because of its permanence, dirt is a comfort. It comes from the purest elements: rain, rock, ice, wind. Glaciers form and move slowly, carving rock and mineral thrust up from Earth's core; ice melts into rivers, coursing through the path of least resistance, forcing incremental change. When rivers and air meet, condensation forms. Weather results, and weather makes dirt. Water from the sky—snow, sleet, downpours, sprinkles—impacts the surface of the Earth in small drops and wide puddles and rushing currents. Wind blows across it all, urging dirt and water onward, to drift and finally come to rest in a distant place. There are molecules of dirt on Boulder Pass that blew in from Egypt's pyramids; the mud caked in my boot treads may have once cradled the bones of some delicate, gossamer wing.

The North Fork is the only place in the Lower 48 I've seen a wolf. Driving south down the road, back to West Glacier, long past dark on an October night. We'd had a few beers, a big dinner at the saloon, and I leaned my head back against the seat in the drowse between wake and sleep, listening to soft pedal-steel on the radio, washboard ruts vibrating my thighs. The truck lurched as Gabe tapped his foot on the brake and stuck his arm out in front of me, an instinctive gesture. “Look,” he whispered, “wolf.” I opened my eyes. Gabe turned the wheel slightly, casting headlights toward the shoulder. Twenty feet ahead, it stood just off the road in profile, as still as if zapped in midstride.

If you've ever seen a coyote and wondered,
Could that be a wolf?
it wasn't. I've seen a coyote and wondered the same thing. Seeing a wolf, I did not wonder. Even if I hadn't known anything about how large wolves are, how long their snouts, their legs, I think I would have known. The world seemed to close in around the edges of my perception until
it was only me and the wolf, our eyes locked, some ancient knowledge passing
—stop. Did I think this? Please. That wolf cared nothing for ancient knowledge, and in any case, I had little of it to give. To the wolf, I was neither augur nor soul mate, only an obstacle in the terrain, an odd creature that inched close. Its eyes were distinct, its gaze forward. We sat that way for a minute, probably less. The wolf walked slow, out of the beam of our lights and along the length of the passenger side of the truck, five, eight feet away. Gabe switched off the lights. My window was rolled down a third. It was too dark to see well but I could hear it outside the window. The night's noise went on around us, I'm sure, the squeak of a far-off rusted fence gate, a wind chime clattering in the eaves of an abandoned barn, but I remember those moments as if the world were muted, as if the wolf and I were the only things passing before a set stage. No Gabe. No truck. When it reached the tailgate, the wolf cut across the road and trotted down into the ditch line and up again, vanished into the woods between the river and us. Gabe and I sat in the truck in the dark. No talk. No touch. For a minute, just dark.

Of all the animals I've seen over the years, all the brief glimpses and long stares, I remember the wolf more clearly than many. Not so much the motions of it, not where the wolf walked and how long it took and what I thought when it disappeared. But I remember its eyes reflecting light, how the shoulder muscles undulated beneath the thick beginnings of its winter coat. I remember that it didn't run. It never seemed wary, or curious. Not canny, smart, devious, or fierce. We crossed its path and it regarded us briefly before making its way toward pups in a den, a deer kill buried in a hole, or miles more hungry walking under the slim moon. That night, whether because of culture or nature, my wishful tilt toward wildness or an evolutionary hunch, I felt the borders of physicality and transcendence shift until one allowed the other in, and when the wolf slipped into the woods, I wanted to follow it. I wanted to dip my face to the river to drink, tear flesh with my teeth, flatten myself a bed of needles with a circling pace before sleeping. Never mind the blood on my face. Never mind the cold.

When it's clear in the North Fork and you're having a beer at a picnic table outside the saloon, you can see east across the river valley to the mountains, twenty miles away. Long Knife, Kintla, Rainbow, Bowman, Vulture, Nashukin. Beyond those, more, and beyond those, still more, over the divide to the east side of the park, the rain shadow where red talus slopes run into prairie's edge. Gunsight, Bearhat, Two Medicine, Sentinel, Apikuni, Rain Shadow, Bad Marriage. Animal names, Native names, white men's names—mountain names. Rainbow Peak's name nods to three snowy couloirs on the south face that mimic, in monochrome, the spooned arcs of refracted sun.
Kintla
is the Kootenai word for sack: the drainage that leads up to that peak is like a loose bag, wide at the bottom, drawn tight at the top where the creek rockets down off the cliffs through a tapered gap. The summit ridge of Gunsight looks like the notch on the muzzle of a shotgun, from such height the world a target below.

Most peaks have other names, too, names that aren't on the map, the ones chosen by those who have slept and played and traveled and worked in them.
Cabin mountain; the peak where the snow stays year round. Thirsty Pass. The blond bear's mountain, the ridge I climbed in a hailstorm, the one where you left a shovel lying in the thimbleberries, the summit where two old friends died.
Names are our most condensed narrative, the one-, two-, three-word stories we tell ourselves about places we know, or wish to.

The mountains in the North Fork, as in all of the park, were formed by the creative force of tectonic upheaval and glacial revisions. Near a large body of water, an open meadow, or above tree line where the view is unobstructed, geology's alchemy is evident. Eras ago, through compression and uplift and carving, dirt and rock, water and ice turned into mountains. And since then, over centuries, the process reverses. A hard rain, hot summer sun, the freeze and thaw of the darkest days. A forest fire, the warming Arctic's winds. Mountains revert again to dirt and rock, water and ice.

From the high peaks, or the passes below them, you can see glaciers hanging shiny gray in the sun, scant remnants of the ones that shaped this land. Some of them are named, too: Agassiz, Weasel-Collar, Harris, Thunderbird, Two-Oceans. They look impressive, but not vast; small, really, in the context of the world's great ice fields. It's hard to believe these little patches of ice could have once dominated the faces that tower above them. Earth's constant scientific lesson: size is never the whole story. A new reality has emerged in the years since I first discovered Glacier. If I have children, and if they do, those kids won't see a glacier in the park. Like the grizzly bear on California's state flag, the story in Glacier's name will be a nod to something gone, the fact of language no longer matched to the truth of place. How startling, that a world I knew so well could vanish. And that despite my loving it,
in
my loving it, I helped it disappear.

What is
wild?
To Henry David Thoreau, it's “the thrill of savage delight” at a woodchuck in his path, and the urge to sink his teeth in; it's “the preservation of the world.” Gary Snyder says the wild is the process and essence of nature, an ordering of impermanence. Annie Dillard gives a lyric: a cat's bloody paws on a pillowcase, things whole and things broken. To Edward Abbey, wild is the one true place, and there are many of them. Wallace Stegner says wilderness is “the geography of hope.”

In margins, bedrooms, maps, and minds, wild hovers, lingers, skulks.

Morel mushrooms are hard to cultivate. Once domesticated, certain wild plants—huckleberries, too—do not thrive absent the indigenous chemistry of the places where they grow on their own. Musky and sweet, morel caps look like tiny cone-shaped brains, rutted with grooves and wrinkles. They grow all over the Northwest, dotting especially the understory of a forest recently burned. The first growing season after a fire, the woods burst with both the mushrooms and the camo-clad foragers who crawl on the ground after them. Morels are the North Fork's midsummer currency, bringing in fifteen bucks a pound in the height of the season, and pickers come from all over to fill buckets, pockets, trucks. Picking mushrooms is illegal within the boundaries of the national park except for immediate consumption, so commercial traffic clusters on the dirt road leading north to Polebridge, with limitless access to national forest land on both sides. Mushroom buyers' camps sprout up in response to the supply, huge tents in fields off the dirt road, and the atmosphere is all backwoods Wall Street, people throwing elbows and eyeing the competition, trying to unload their crop before the word comes from buyers' headquarters in Portland that the price has dropped. By late summer the frenzy dies down as pickers migrate to the next seasonal hot spot; locals are left with morels overlooked, the ones hoarded, dried, or stashed in a brown bag under the basement stairs to keep them cool. In late October, when even Indian summer's long gone and the fall rains have begun, morel gravy on mashed potatoes tastes nothing like the distant commerce, only like a chewy mouthful of summer dirt sweetened by fire.