In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [104]
“You won’t always have the sun, or even stars. You have to make your own map. Memorize it.” He rises, unhurried, lifts the Winchester to his shoulder and begins to walk us out.
• • •
In the late heat of August, I stand with my mother at her kitchen window, watching my father mowing their lawn. He is nearly sixty now and paces himself, pausing to pull a cigarette from his pocket before pushing toward the next turn. My mother worries about his heart, but I still believe he could march for miles. When he stops to empty the bag, he sees me and nods, the distance between us only a few yards—a distance we still cannot cross.
I think of that hunting trip, the dark way back, without horizon, without stars, the bead of my father’s cigarette our only light, his face luminously floating. I could barely lift my feet as I shuffled through downed limbs and stumbled over rocks, yet he moved through the night as though his life depended on silence. I wonder if he would remember the walk out as I do, those places where he slowed so that we might rest: beside the antler-stripped alder; along the bank of a creek rimed with ice; beneath the drapery of a single cedar missed by the sawyer or left to seed, a tree so large the tips of our fingers would not touch had we measured its girth. During the silent drive home, the road a dark ribbon unfurling before us, we drank the still-warm tea, sweetest at the last. If he had touched me then, reached across and patted my knee or squeezed my arm, the wall between us might have fallen, his rigid authority and my bitterness dissolve into the shared and necessary experience of the elder and his charge. I might have come away from that trek in the wilderness believing my father’s instruction a map I could follow. I might have believed the hand that held fire could heal any wound.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
One early spring day in 1971, a year after our move from the woods to Lewiston, my great-aunt Edith pulled her new Buick into my grandmother’s driveway. I stood waiting on the porch in the short-sleeved blouse and pedal-pushers Nan had bought me, feeling shy at the bareness of my skin.
We were going a few miles upriver, to Spalding, where I had often seen the Nez Perce boys climbing the bridge to get to the high, arching top from which they’d make their graceful dives. This outing, however, was not to watch the divers but to witness the end of the log drive on the Clearwater River.
Every spring for forty-three years the loggers and mill-hands who worked for Potlatch had gathered at the headwaters of the North Fork to begin the arduous task of running herd on the logs as they were pushed into the river. In the early years, an extensive network of wooden flumes carried the logs, but new equipment and roads had replaced the primitive system. The operation had come to include motor-powered boats and a floating cook shack and bunkhouse called the wanigan, but the work—the snagging and gathering of the mill-bound timber, the dynamiting of water-soaked deadheads—belonged to the men willing to risk their lives for the adventure if not for the company.
They worked in their calked boots and woollies topped by canvas, stepping catlike across islands of logs nested tight in the eddies. The dangers were inherent and well known: a log could roll, pinning the man or sending him into the high and icy rapids. A greater fear was having a jam break loose with little warning, crushing the lumberjack, burying him beneath a solid raft of timber.
My father never worked the drive because he did not work for the company, but my great-aunt’s husband, my uncle Ed, who was killed in the woods, had. For her, watching the drive was something to be done in remembrance of her husband, but that was not our only reason for being there: this would be the last of the log drives, the last in the entire country. Dworshak Dam was almost complete. There would no longer be clear passage for the river or the logs it carried.
I watched the familiar shapes of the boats appear and waved as the men went by. They rode the wanigan like old cowhands,