West of Here (24 page)

Mather wanted to believe this — indeed, he used to believe it — but the truth was, he no longer held it to be true. On the contrary, the further he put things behind him, the smaller they seemed; his boyhood, the mighty Mackenzie, Eva. His most bitter grudges of the past were all but forgotten, his greatest sorrows and triumphs stirred but the weakest of flames. Only
now,
Mather knew, in the immediate, did
the mountains
truly
look big, and the river run wide, only now could one feel their bigness and wideness, now, while your heart beat in your chest, and the hairs of your arms stood at attention, and death was the enemy.

That night, for the first time in twenty years, James Mather prayed — something neither the Indian Wars nor the perils of the tundra had ever inspired him to do. He prayed for clear skies and discovery, for danger and heartache and laughter, for a life beyond fear, a life that got bigger, really got bigger, as it receded. And after he prayed, he slept.

The temperature dropped overnight. The haze lifted. The skies cleared. Haywood was first to emerge from the tent shortly after dawn and taste the cold brittle air. Before he could enjoy three breaths of it, however, he spotted something on a high ridge several miles in advance of the expedition that nearly took his breath away.

22 February 1890
The silver light of morning revealed a most extraordinary and completely unanticipated spectacle on the ridge some two or three miles in advance of the party to the southwest: a thin blue ribbon of smoke curling its way toward heaven, from what appeared to be a rather sizable cooking fire. Needless to say, the party was at a collective loss as to the identity of who might be cooking over such a fire, having left all vestiges of human settlement behind weeks ago. Each speculation proved more unsettling than the last, from hostile natives (indeed, more than one Port Bonita Indian made mention of a tribe of “giant” Indians of a volatile disposition dwelling in these higher elevations) to the far more troubling possibility of a competing expedition. It was this latter possibility that saw us break camp with great haste and proceed directly to the source of the smoke.

What we found were natives, a hunting party of perhaps two dozen. There was a large store of elk meat being made ready for curing and a half-dozen hides in various states of preparation. The natives were clothed in hide outfits consisting of a pointed
hood, shirt, leggings, mittens, and moccasins, and they were all in possession of snowshoes. We soon ascertained they were friendly and versed in the pijin Chinook, the implications of which were most humbling indeed, as we believed we had ventured where no man had ventured before, only to find a tribe of traders and hunters thriving amid this rugged terrain. They soon brought to our attention an ancient trail at the foot of the next ridge that led over the Devil’s Backbone to — and I must pause here to confess that my translation may be imprecise — the place of no more. In any event, they made it sufficiently clear that they did not venture beyond that point.

We were treated to a feast by the natives, who exhibited a predilection for raw elk meat, a delicacy that we were all strongly encouraged to partake of but gracefully declined with the exception of our fearless leader, who ate ravenously, with no regard for the blood streaming down his face. He continues to exhibit curious and troubling behavior. On any given day of late, he oscillates between despondency and the sort of carefree eastern bravado that fails to convince. Moreover, he is reckless in a way I’ve never known him to be, both on the trail and with his words. Throughout the feast, he made merry, but his eyes darted about the proceedings like a man with designs. I find it increasingly difficult to trust his judgment. I’m not at all certain that the natives trusted it. These natives of the upper Elwha were altogether more primitive than their Port Bonita counterparts. They were in possession of a number of trivial artifacts from the civilized world, which were treated as objects of some reverence, including a brass key, and an L-shaped metal instrument with a wooden handle, which Cunningham soon identified as a cauterizer.

Well nourished, though admittedly a little discouraged by our encounter, and in Jim’s case suffering from a mild gastric disturbance no doubt caused by the copious consumption of raw elk, we set off in the early afternoon in search of the ancient trail to the Devil’s Backbone.

JULY
2006

When Timmon Tillman set off from the Crooked Thumb trailhead, fully outfitted for the backwoods to the tune of $614, not to mention an additional $800 in stolen merchandise, five stolen library books (including the Olympic journals of Charles Haywood), an aluminum skillet, along with modest stores of jerky, rice, and Snickers bars, he had no intention of ever returning to civilization. His GoLite frameless backpack was anything but light. He had never fired a crossbow. He was on his second Snickers by the time he reached the dam. Never in his thirty-one years had he ever felt so free. At last, he was afoot and light-hearted with his path before him, his slumbering passions awakened, creamy nougat betwixt his teeth.

Having skipped his parole meeting, Timmon knew that Frank Bell was shitting bricks, just as sure as the district court had already issued a bench warrant with the name Tillman on it. If they ever caught up with him, he was fucked. But nothing, it seemed, could temper his optimism as he paused to marvel at the last vestige of civilization he would ever lay eyes upon, or so he hoped. Hooking his fingers through the chain-link fence above the spillway, he watched the frothing white water pound the river a hundred feet below. He found the low rumbling of the turbines unsettling.

Suddenly, there came the shrill laughter and frantic mirth of children from the parking slab behind him. Twenty of them, at least, which he figured for third-graders with a few adults in their midst, flooding out of a dingy yellow school bus and gathering in a chaotic scrum in the parking lot; frenetic, full of life, bouncing off of each other like dirty-faced electrons, clutching brown bags, bonking each other on the head with them. How long before life put the fear in
them, the real fear, not the dark-closet-boogeyman fear, but the rational kind, the everyday kind, the kind based on facts and observations and the cold hard mechanics of the world? How long until they clutched their brown bags tighter and stopped bouncing off of each other? Timmon wanted a cigarette but resisted the urge.

The big people herded the kids in a squiggly line toward the viewing area, where they jostled for places along the fence, clutching the hexagonal links in their grubby fingers, tugging at the mesh, kicking it until it rung like shattering icicles, clambering up it despite the protestations of their chaperones.

The calmest child of the bunch, a saucer-eyed girl in red rubber boots and an unseasonably warm jacket, gravitated toward Timmon immediately and took her place beside him along the fence, a few feet removed from the others, where she peered alternately at the spillway and the sluice gate, sneaking frequent glances at Timmon’s tattooed hand. He did his best to ignore her. But something about the dirty fur lining of her coat, something about those three long feet separating her from the others, would not allow him to.

One of the adults began issuing various edicts and instructions as to the occupation of their hands and feet during the presentation before she began reading from her blue factoid sheet, projecting her voice over the roar of the spillway.

“The Thornburgh Dam, which is over one hundred and twenty feet tall and produced over six thousand kilowatts of hydraulic power in its heyday with its twin turbines. It is named after Ethan Thornburgh and was completed in 1896
— Trevor, give Charlie his lunch back this instant!
— the same year that saw the opening of the Sons of Peoria sawmill at the base of Ediz Spit —
Trevor, I mean it
— which became the county’s largest employer for the next four decades until its closure in …”

“Psst. What’s that blob on your hand?” the little girl said.

“Nothing,” he said, looking straight ahead.

“Mm.” She bit her lower lip and tilted her head a bit to one side. “It looks like the Liberty Bell, sorta. With angel wings.”

Timmon had to look at her. Something in her voice melted him, and hearing it, a little cloud of regret passed over him, but did not linger. “Yeah, well, it ain’t.”

“Oh,” she said.

Timmon could feel the persistent eyes of the girl on him again and tried in vain to ignore her curiosity. Sneaking a sidelong glance at her, he could see the downy blonde hair of her face glistening in the sunlight. It was a good face, honest. Not cute, just unsullied by disappointment. And that alone was enough to make her beautiful. But her beauty was fading. Give her a year. Wait till next summer when she was still wearing that jacket, and began to see herself from outside of herself, and three feet was no longer a big enough buffer against the rest of the world.

“What about that one?” she whispered. “What does
omward
mean?”

Timmon gave a little sigh. Loosening his grip on the fence, his manner softened somewhat. “
On
ward, dummy. Not omward.”

“Oh. Well, what does it mean?”

“It means just keep going.”

“Hm,” she said, biting her lower lip once more. “Going where?”

Timmon gripped the fence tighter. He thought he’d just let the question pass, thought he’d just ignore her altogether. But then she tugged at the dangling strap of his backpack.

“Well,” she whispered. “If you’re going to keep going you’ve got to be going somewhere, because going isn’t a place.”

“Wherever,” he sighed.

The girl furrowed her brow and scrunched up her mouth and set to work on the information.

“… in nineteen ninety-two the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act was passed to fully restore the ecosystem and native fish habitats by allowing reservoir sediments to naturally erode downstream. The act called for the removal of the dam by the year two thousand seven. However, in recent years the act has …”

“Wherever isn’t a place, either,” the girl whispered, finally. Timmon fished a Camel out his GoLite and sparked it up. “Wherever
like wherever,” he said. “Like out there, like everywhere, anywhere, wherever, just onward.”

The girl knitted her brow.

Timmon’s voice, or perhaps it was his cigarette, attracted the attention of one of the chaperones, a stern little woman, squat and gray as a government building, who shot Timmon an icy glare and a frown as she took the girl by the shoulders and shepherded her away.

The girl looked over her shoulder, her little forehead still wrinkled. Timmon released his grip on the fence, hefted his pack, and took leave of the dam with a sense of relief. For a hundred yards he could feel the girl’s eyes stuck to him.

The trail ran along a low bluff on the west side of Lake Thornburgh for a half mile, until it diverged in a southwesterly direction and began to gain elevation, switchbacking up the western slope of the valley. Clear-cutting had mottled the low foothill country in a checkerboard pattern and cut huge swathes into the steep higher elevations. Timmon passed no one along his way. By the time he stopped for his third Snickers at the top of the ridge, he’d put all thoughts of the little girl and civilization behind him. He sat on a downed tree and loosened his right boot, which was chafing his heel, and smoked a cigarette and looked out over the lake and beyond the valley, where he could see a series of rugged spurs spread out in a wide arc from the north to the east, some of them scarred by landslides on their steep faces. Surely, somewhere out there, on the banks of some nameless stream, at the foot of some nameless mountain, was a home for Timmon Tillman, two-time loser; a sun-dappled place where he could pass his days unencumbered by the existential hell of other people, a place to be left alone, a place so remote that the smoke of a campfire would not betray his existence. No more offices, no more leering desk clerks, no more meaningless toiling in body shops or clam factories. No more Gooch, no more walls, no more cells. Just wide-open spaces and bountiful wilderness, a place where he could engage the circle of life, no matter how grueling the business of survival might prove to be.

Crumpling his Snickers wrapper, he threw it on the forest floor and got to his feet. Spurred by a burning impatience, he trudged onward,
down the ridge and over the saddle and through the next gap, where the trail leveled out in a narrow thickly wooded valley and rejoined the river along a low bank. The water flashed silver and white in the sunlight, and the roar of it was even greater than the roar of the spillway had been. Now and again as he plodded along the rutty path, he came upon horizontal blazes hatched deeply into the bark of trees at eye level, to which he gave little thought, until later, when reading Haywood’s journal, he would come to realize the significance of these blazes.

Where to stop? Where to begin his new life? Onward! Onward through the broad-shouldered foothills and into treeless high country and over the divide until Timmon Tillman ceased to exist, until the past and the future ceased to exist and all that remained was the difference between life and death. By late afternoon, he was exhausted. A blister had formed on his heel. He stopped where the river emerged boiling from the mouth of a gray canyon, and sat on a massive rock, and unburdened himself of his GoLite bag with the clink of carabiners and the thud of his empty thermos, and smoked the last cigarette of his life.

He chose a small sandy clearing along the bank in the shadow of the canyon to set up camp. He spent twenty minutes wrestling his camo-spotted bivouac tent into shape. He gathered firewood and started a smoky fire. He ate jerky and another Snickers bar and wished he had another cigarette. Taking up Haywood’s journal, he read distractedly for a few minutes until the sun began to set, whereupon he decided it was time. He fished the pint of Smirnoff out of his GoLite and uncapped it, then held it out in front of him and took a long hard look at its contents before braving a tentative sip. The old familiar sensations visited him at once; the icy-hot sting on his tongue, the shiver, the welling of giddy anticipation in his chest, as though he were standing on the edge of a precipice and couldn’t wait to jump. The second sip was less tentative. On the third sip, he took the leap.