In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [17]
Snow drifted against the windows, filtering the winter light to charcoal. The circle became a wheel with shoveled spokes leading from its center to each trailer door. As the days grew shorter the snow deepened until the pathways became corridors rising several feet above our heads.
My mother rose early enough to pack my lunch and send me off to catch the bus, but my father often slept past noon. On weekends, I watched them linger over their coffee before beginning their daily chores. While my father split and stacked another days firewood, my mother prepared her share of the communal meal—mixing flour and shortening into pie dough, filling the shells with syrupy fruit, or sorting the beans as bacon browned in the bottom of the soup pot.
Those winter afternoons, the aunts and cousins arrived first, bringing with them the smells of woodsmoke and freshly baked bread. By the time the men had gathered in, slapping their hats against their knees, the snow on their backs already melting, the plates were laid out and the bread cut. The other children and I ate where we wanted—on the couch or cross-legged on the floor—and no one cared that we coaxed out thick wedges of pie with our fingers. Miraculously set free of baths and bedtime, we whispered secrets, shielded from our parents’ view by a makeshift tepee of wool blankets. As long as we kept our quarrels to ourselves and minded the general rules of the household, we were blissfully ignored.
While the women cleared and washed the dishes, the men leaned back in their chairs, sucking on toothpicks. After the dishes were done and another pot of coffee put on to perk, the adults scooted their chairs closer around the table and began their game of poker or pinochle that would last long into the night. The snow and below-zero temperatures meant little more to them than inches and degrees: no matter how bad the blizzard, no matter how low the thermometer dropped, we were safe in the circle, with enough food and fuel to keep us for weeks, the gift of land to sustain us—wood to burn, package after package of frozen venison, spring water cold and plentiful running pure beneath a crystalline crust of ice.
Uncle Clyde had known what Idaho offered to people made poor by Oklahoma dust, and we were blessed to be there. What went on in the rest of the world—whatever wars raged in the jungles of foreign countries, whatever prices rose and fell—could not affect us. Our days were made of ourselves. There was little to pull us outside that circle.
I realize now that my mother and aunts were some of the first women to reside in the camps. Before, without the machinery needed to punch through roads, the men left their families at home. Only men manned the cookstoves and loaders, made the coffee and skidded the poles. The closest women were town whores, who hung from upstairs windows and called sweet things to the loggers in their cleated boots, wages heavy in their pockets.
During the mid-fifties and early sixties, logging equipment became more advanced and efficient, capable of reaching into the deepest pockets of virgin timber. New roads crosshatched the mountainsides, and existing roads were improved to allow easier passage of the machinery. With the improvement in access, most of the camps were abandoned altogether, and those that remained served only as temporary shelter for the loggers, who arrived in town late Friday evening, spent weekends with family, and left hours before dawn Monday morning to begin the week’s work. Pole Camp was a compromise, close enough for the men to make their daily commutes, but isolated enough to make us believe the wilderness still touched us.
Like my mother, my aunts were beautiful women. Dorothy, Ronnie’s wife, had deep auburn hair, which she combed into an elegant chignon before breakfast. She was from Tennessee, and she carried herself with all the elegance of a horsewoman born to Southern aristocracy.