Читать книгу Temperance Creek - Pamela Royes - Страница 19

Wallowa Country

“What you seek is seeking you.”

—RUMI

I drove toward Minam feeling like a dog let off its chain. The further east I got from Eugene, the bigger the mountains, the deeper the snow, the smaller the communities, and the wider the distance between them. People wore cowboy hats and drove pickup trucks with stock racks loaded with saddled horses. Barking black-and-white dogs paced truck beds, possessive and territorial.

I stopped in a small-town dry-goods/grocery store to purchase a wool stocking hat. “How far to the town of Minam?” I asked the clerk. She paused before answering, “It’s there at the bridge, I guess, once you get over the top.” She looked me up, she looked me down, and she turned to the next customer. Back in the bug, I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror. Nope, nothing weird. Just a girl with long brown hair, brown eyes, and a green wool hat, traveling further and further from home.

Chuck’s ancestors had settled in this remote corner of Oregon during the mill boom of the early 1900s. Once it had been a large logging community boasting its own hotel and dancehall, but now, nothing much remained. He’d inherited property there, and he and Annie were living in the original schoolhouse at the edge of a forest, trapping packrats and attempting to preserve a little history. I thought it noble.

When Chuck had told me stories of the Minam River, the canyon, and its people, my throat had clenched in longing. Women tree-planters and coed trail crews, working in the wilderness, living “off the land.” Living big. Chuck spoke hauntingly of the Native Americans and their sacred places, speaking musical names from an unknown tongue. Wallowa, Imnaha, Wenaha. I’d repeated them slowly, inhaling and exhaling like a woman fighting for consciousness. The homeland of the Nez Perce, the Nimi’ipuu, or The People.

There was fresh snow. The roads were bare in places, icy in others as I drove off the high open prairie into the deepening canyons. I hugged the centerline. Far below, I glimpsed a river snaking its way in from the south, wondering if that might be Chuck’s Minam River. The sun, so bright across the top, disappeared behind the high ridges as I descended into their shadows.

Leaving the farms and ranches behind, I entered the intimacy of a narrow canyon and remembered the previous night’s dream. Of traveling a dark road, my hands gripping a locked steering wheel, as I searched for a familiar landmark. Of a crow that flew beside my window, fixing his black eye upon me. I recalled a crazy conversation held in my Eugene studio apartment during that last round of exams. How I’d jokingly told the med student I was dating, “I’m going to quit school and herd sheep.” And we’d laughed.

Dipping, the road crossed a low bridge spanning the convergence of two clear, icy rivers. Steep basalt cliffs timbered with large ponderosa and Douglas fir rose from the forest floor and covered the sides of the canyon, and I suddenly realized I hadn’t met another car for quite some time. Pulling over, I stepped out, inhaling the sharp, piney air, waiting for my hearing to adjust to the quiet. So quiet, I mused, listening for oncoming traffic. Only the sound of water.

I missed the Minam turnoff and drove another ten miles into the town of Wallowa before realizing my error. I consulted Chuck’s paper-napkin map. Turning around and approaching from the opposite direction, I could see where the Minam and Wallowa rivers met, the glinting metal roof of a building on the hillside. I pulled off the highway and parked beside a dilapidated pickup. A faint track led up. I gathered my shoulder bag and suitcase, locked the car, and was taking the first hesitant step when, from above me, I heard singing. A woman, dressed in rumpled wool clothing, calf-high leather work boots, and a faded felt hat with a couple of feathers tucked into her hatband was hiking off the hill toward me. Merrily, she cried, “Whoo, whoo,” her voice high and owl-like. Her brown shoulder-length hair was braided and bound with beaded leather thongs, her cheeks bright as a fall apple.

This apparition—earthy, fierce, and authentic—epitomized the kind of identity I’d been searching for. I stopped, gaping up at her.

“You must be Pam,” she said, moving to extend her hand. “They call me Canyons. We’ve been expecting you.”

We were a loose collection of adventurers gathered in the Minam schoolhouse that afternoon. College dropouts, college graduates, history seekers, and those simply taking a look around on their way to somewhere else, jettisoned like flood survivors against the solid trunk of the Wallowas. Besides Chuck, the ethereal Annie, and the radiant Canyons, I was introduced to Glen-boy, a lean, rafter-brushing man with a startling halo of nearly white hair. He wore suspenders, a wool shirt, and high-cut wool pants, and when he stood, he swayed gently above me, putting me in mind of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ents. His ready laugh and unhasty manner helped me feel welcome, and I delighted in watching him fill his plate again and again with the rustic bread and venison stew steaming on top of the woodstove, like a man who’d known hunger and never made peace with it.

After dinner—following a boisterous, informal jam session where instruments from squeaky fiddles to silver spoons were plucked, bowed, thumped, then swapped—talk turned to the outdoors. In celebration of my arrival they agreed, after much tea and more whiskey, that we needed a camping trip into “the canyons.”

Wrapped in my flannel-lined sleeping bag that night, I started worrying about camping in the snow. It didn’t seem like a good idea. People on the great American prairie shared an acute awareness of the weather born of experience and story. From the handed-down history of the “Great Blizzard” of 1886 that killed a hundred thousand cattle and the “Children’s Blizzard” of 1888 that killed hundreds of children trudging home from school, we learned the unpredictability of life on the last frontier. Blessed with the dubious distinction of having the worst weather in the world, North Dakotans went about the daily business of living with one eye on the sky and the other on the weatherman. We boasted about tornados, floods, and blizzards as part of our staunch Midwest fortitude, like merits of achievement, remembering a certain storm, or twister, and where we were when it hit as we took to our basements for safety.

Because of this moody and fickle meteorological relationship, I’d become a lifelong student of the clouds, forerunners of change and the ever-shifting seasons. Stratus—Latin for sheet—solid strokes of gray on gray. The fleecy cirrus, moving high and fast. Cumulus, my favorites, resembled puffy tufts of wool, serene and benign. But when they piled up against one another, bumping and jostling like a heated argument, building ever higher and higher, there might be trouble. Maybe thunderstorms, maybe hail. My dad said when the clouds took on the looks of bruises, pinks and yellows overlaying violet blues, there’d be a twister coming. You could sense the violent storms before you could see them. Pressing down on the skin, the big elms shading the streets, a children’s late-afternoon game of freeze tag. When the air turned still, saturated and stifling, like Great-Aunt Regina’s kitchen on an August afternoon, the Monarch wood stove filled with pies, and when that stillness was accompanied by an almost imperceptible hum, like a bumblebee trapped in a mason jar, we paid attention.

“Stay close to the house,” mothers warned, the weatherman’s voice blaring from the transistor radio inside.

Outside the loft window of the Minam schoolhouse, the snow sparkled like diamonds beneath the glow of a three-quarter moon, and as I listened to the whispers and sputters of an unfamiliar place, I fell asleep.

The next morning as the crew discussed gear and provisions, I continued to tell myself not to worry. They’d probably checked the weather report. And lots of people had never backpacked—it couldn’t be that difficult. Unfortunately, my upbringing hadn’t included hiking—or camping, let alone backpacking where miles of prairie were pulled taut under immense skies of rapidly changing and unpredictable weather. The Dakota prairies were a place where, although one might wander, no one hiked, unless their car broke down or they were stuck in a snowdrift. Where would you go and what would you do when you arrived that was different from where you’d been?

My sleeping bag weighed easily fifty pounds, but I had a decent pair of boots, and the rest of the necessary equipment materialized from dusty closets and sheds.

We rendezvoused outside of Enterprise, the county seat, on the snowy slope of a mountain, taking on two new passengers, Cougan and Raven, plus their gear and a couple of dogs. I’d felt proud of the pack-load designated to me. Pouches of dried fruits and vegetables, cooking oil, rice, tin plates, mugs, a few clothes, and a borrowed sleeping bag. But when I surreptitiously hoisted first Annie’s, then Raven’s, much heavier packs, I was embarrassed, indignant, and finally resigned.

Eventually, mid-afternoon, Glen-boy and I crawled into the back of a small canopied pickup with two slobbering black Labs. Using a spare tire for a seat, we leaned against our backpacks and tried to make ourselves comfortable.

“If you get cold tonight, you can share my pad and sleeping bag,” Glen said, noticing my red nose, blue lips, and rigid posture.

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” I said, hastily adding (in the event that my survival might depend upon it), “but thanks.” Forewarned by Annie that women were scarce, “three to one,” I didn’t want to plant any false hopes in Glen’s direction. I liked Glen. But I didn’t want to complicate things with a relationship. I’d had other offers, from other men. Frenchmen and college men and men with boats and men with beards and men with proposals of marriage. Men I’d hurt, loved, rejected, or been rejected by, and left behind.

Over the rattle of the truck I listened to Glen-boy ramble and watched the high peaks of the Wallowas, snowbound and distant, disappear from the rear window of the pickup canopy. Before the pavement ran out and conversation became difficult, Glen managed to give me a short geology lesson.

“From here to Imnaha the elevation drops two thousand feet. It will be warmer in the canyons.”

“How much warmer, do you think?” I said, trying to gauge the temperature rating of my borrowed sleeping bag.

“Well, there shouldn’t be any snow.”

“Good to know.”

From the slopes of the nearly ten-thousand-foot Eagle Cap Mountains to the rugged Snake River Canyon (our destination), the boundaries of Wallowa County formed a rough circle of about three thousand square miles. It was these geological differences, Glen noted, that combined to protect and isolate the county from exploration and settlement until the mid- to late 1800s.

“You’ve heard about Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce?” Glen asked.

“Yeah, I remember his story.” The fate of Joseph and his Wallowa band of Nez Perce were one classroom history lesson I hadn’t forgotten.

“We’ll be camping in their old wintering grounds tonight.”

I thought how only one hundred years, or the life span of a long-lived woman, had passed since they began their desperate march to Canada hoping to find freedom from persecution, prejudice, and the right to their own ways.

An hour later we felt the bump of the wheels leaving the pavement, and Glen-boy said that meant we’d reached Fence Creek; it was just a little further now. A ridiculous amount of time later, over what felt like a run up a dry riverbed—the windows fogged over from the Labs’ heavy panting, and conversation impossible—the pickup came to a stop. The canopy opened, the dogs bounded out, and, half-sick, we shoved our gear toward the tailgate and unfolded our cramped legs. Straightening, I stepped away from the pickup, spinning slowly in a circle.

Annie, watching me, said, “Enchanting, isn’t it?”

I nodded, speechless.

Steeply jutting rocky bluffs stood stacked one upon another in towering layers of color. Buff tans and charcoal browns accented with lichen and deep greens, adobe reds, and overhead, lake-blue skies. Far above us I could see ridgetops dusted with snow, but here, at Cow Creek, the early cheatgrass sprouted green and luminous among the wheat-colored tufts of native grasses. Small stands of ponderosa balanced on sloping, grassy hillsides. Cottonwoods, alders, and a brilliant red-twigged bush hugged the banks of the Imnaha River and its tributary draws, which, like the pleats of a woman’s skirt, ran down from the ridges, each varying from the other in depth and broadness, shrouded in wooded mystery.

I stood in the wintering grounds of the original pioneers, massacred and exiled, never to return. It was impossible to imagine their grief.

When I was eight, Mom and I had ridden the train to Oregon to visit my mom’s mom, Grandma Pearl. One evening, paging through a family photo album of stiffly posed black-and-white figures, one stood out. An Indian woman. I studied the picture. Small and dark with a kerchief wrapped and knotted beneath her chin, she stared back at me.

“Grandma, who is this?” I’d asked, only to have her gently close the book.

“Delilah Bullock, a Cherokee Indian. Nobody important.”

“But why is she in the book? Am I related to her?”

Grandma Pearl was a Baggett from Tennessee, blue-eyed and fair skinned, no trace of Indian. But from someone, I’d inherited brown eyes and high cheekbones, and at eight, being part Indian felt important. I’d also known with an eight-year-old sureness that my family was ashamed of Delilah, though I couldn’t have told you why. It was not the kind of shame that came with handmade dresses or homemade bread. It was darker and deeper. And they wouldn’t talk about Delilah Bullock, same as Grandpa Severson and Great-Aunt Regina wouldn’t talk Norwegian in my presence, saying it was the “old ways, old thinking, not for children.” Same as Aunt Regina refused to let me use the privy behind the farmhouse.

Somehow, I would later learn that Delilah, a full-blood Cherokee, was my great-great-great-grandma on my mother’s side. That she came from a family of weavers. That she was born in 1807 and died in 1894 and was buried beside her husband James in Buzzard Roost Cemetery, Big Lick, Tennessee.

In single file we struck a loud and lively pace, the trail narrow but well defined. The dogs barked and wove among us, scaring up a skunk, which disappeared back into the brush. Then, our group grew quiet. Beside us sang the lovely Imnaha River. I was on my first backpacking trip and entering the wilderness under a darkening sky. And like the dream, it felt like somebody else’s hands were on the wheel.

By the time we left the confines of the narrow Imnaha canyon, the light was all but gone. My shoulders were aching from the weight and strain of the backpack, and I felt ready to accuse someone of chucking boulders into it from behind. But when I reached the Snake River and saw its heaving, roiling, shimmering water, my fatigue gave way to awe. At last, we stopped to rest, and I gratefully shed my leaden load, collapsing against it on the grassy hillside.

The remainder of the long night passed in shadowed images, silhouettes, bits of conversation, laughter, and the moon rising silver from behind a high ridge. I heard the sucking sound of Boston Brown Bread pulled from a one-pound coffee can, and when someone placed a slice in my hand, I savored it, molasses-fragrant and raisin-sweet. Two more moonlit miles to Knight Creek, they said. We re-buckled our packs and stopped only briefly to sip water from canteens, to retie boot laces, to adjust packs, then went on, following cloven-hoofed tracks in the half-light.

From the open hillside, I followed the others up an unyielding creek bed. Occasionally we would rip through the undergrowth, breaking free to the hillside, only to be marooned on the edge of a precipice and forced back. By slow and painful increments, I’d lost my place in the center of the pack and was now in last position, placing one disembodied boot in front of the other. I stopped to pull a twig from my hair and hitch up my pack. All around me, silence. I realized I hadn’t seen or heard from anyone else for what seemed a very long time. How I longed at that moment to be out front, or at least in the middle. Grimly, I considered my options. Sit down and have a good cry, start yelling, or forge on ahead. I heard the brush crackle above me and looked up to see the angelic, cheerful visage of my Knight Creek savior, Glen-boy.

“How is it going back here? Need a hand?”