In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [105]
The house in the hollow is gone now, torn down by the company, the yard a pasture for pack mules. Headquarters—the store and saw shop, the log-lined swimming pool where I took my first lessons and nearly drowned beneath the panicked body of Janet Gardner—is a ghost town, boarded up and then burned. Only a few of the circled houses and the company’s shop building remain. The forest has taken the rest of it, granted it a covering of meadow grass. Elk graze where children once waited in snow to their elbows for the school bus, the chains on its tires clanking so loudly they could hear it coming over the rise a mile away.
My father says that even the deepest pockets of the forest are not the same anymore. He says that no one who wasn’t there can imagine the wilderness as it once was. Even as he moved through the draws and worked his way down the ridges, leaving space like an open wound behind him, he felt the loss. “It was just gone,” he says: the joy he once felt following the deer to their beds, the pleasure of pulling from a cold stream trout deep-bellied and prone to fight. Even the logging became little more than a day’s work.
I wonder when it died for him. I wonder what forces it took to kill it.
During the eighteen years since leaving home, I have made my way through a maze of jobs: bank teller, pharmaceuticals technician, secretary. I’ve sold life insurance and served cocktails. In 1979, three years after graduating from high school, I started taking courses at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, where I met my husband, the poet Robert Wrigley. He reminded me of my love for language, and as I read the books he gave me—the poems of Richard Hugo, William Kittredge’s short stories, Ivan Doig and Guthrie, Westerners defining for me a life I recognized—I began to believe I might once again feel at home in the world.
Where we live with our children, above the Clearwater River at Lenore, the land is dry and barren, scoured by canyon winds. In the fall, in the big eddy below our house, steelhead rest in deep pools. They have threaded their way from the mouth of the Columbia, the ocean a dream of salty warmth. Patches of white algae inflame their sides; their backs are mottled with it. Between them and their home beds is the dam, rising up from the river like the blank face of an indifferent god. Those that escape the hooks and nets are taken at the hatchery, their bellies slit, eggs and milt mixed in stainless-steel tanks. The eggs hatch, the fry are released and begin their journey back.
Before the dam, people here judged their lives and land by how close the water came: to the fence, above the track, over the road. It found its own sweet way, slowly filling the school well, rising just enough to catch the postmistress’s milk cow by its hind legs. Fishing boats were pulled higher up the bank. Children were double-warned. Those made desperate by the hard winters cold took to the eddies, leaning far out over their gunnels to snag a sodden log. Bucked up, stacked in the kiln of July and August, it would steam and crack into free, burnable wood.
I miss the river’s sudden, animal heaving, waiting to see how high it might come. High as ’48? Higher than the year early thaw sent snow melt crashing down Big Canyon, knocking the supports from under Peck Bridge, toppling it into the stew of barn boards and fencing? I sometimes long for the dam to collapse into the churning water, to sink into the ancient flood plain. I long for