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A Human History in the WildernessAN ESSAYBY D. J. LEEI HAD MADE AN APPOINTMENT?with the Nez Perce National Forest archaeologist in Grangeville, Idaho, two hours east of my house, a direction I didn’t want to go: the roads were narrow and winding, and the dusty little towns were few and far between. I arrived at a one-story, bungalow-style building that I would come to know as standard Forest Service architecture. Inside, the offices had low ceilings, industrial-blue carpeting, gray linoleum, and laminate desks. Men and women strolled around in jeans and fleece vests. Cindy, the archaeologist who met me, wore a Forest Service khaki uniform with a gold name badge. She kept her head bowed and didn’t smile. I wasn’t sure if she was cross with me for taking up her time, or just introverted.I followed her into a cubicle, where she leaned against a desk, and we stood eye to eye. I am a smallish person, and I rarely meet adults who are as short as I am. Cindy and I were about the same age too, in our early forties.She handed me a packet of papers held together by a single paper clip at the corner. I flipped through and found a grazing report from 1925; a booklet about early pack animals and mule skinners; and the original homestead applications made by the handful of people—including my grandfather—who had tried to make the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness their home in the early 1900s.“What’s in those?” I tipped my head toward a wall of beige file cabinets. I hoped for stacks of documents I could burrow into over weeks.“This is it.” She pointed to the packet. I was disappointed, but even those few items offered more than I knew about my grandparents’ wilderness lives.My grandmother had died?a few months before my visit with Cindy. As my mother was boxing up my grandmother’s kitchen, an old cookie tin tumbled open and out fell an old black-and-white photo of a log cabin. Behind the cabin rose a tree-covered mountain in the Bitterroot Range. On the back of the photo my grandmother had written in a loose scrawl:?Moose Creek Ranger Station, where I spent many miserable years married to a man I didn’t love and who didn’t love me.?That line sent me on a mission: What had made her so unhappy? INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET ? ?Moose Creek Ranger Station, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho,? ? ? ? 1930.Other clues might have existed in a bulging photo album that my grandmother kept from her Moose Creek years, but now no one could find the album.“I think she threw it away,” my mother speculated. “Or burned it.”“Why would she do that?” I asked.“It represented bad memories. Or what she thought were bad memories. But, you know, her mind wasn’t right.”My grandfather had committed my grandmother to a mental asylum before I was born. The story my mother tells is that the three of them made the all-day trip from St. Maries to Orofino, Idaho, over a mountain pass and along a road lined with granite bluffs on one side and the Clearwater River on the other. Somewhere along the way my grandmother threw her shoe out the window. They got to the asylum, and when my grandfather saw her bare foot and questioned her, she admitted to tossing the shoe. “We’d better go back,” said my mother, who was fourteen at the time. “We can’t let her go in there like that.” So they drove back and retrieved the shoe. I have often wondered if my grandmother saw the irony—a lone piece of footwear in the ditch, a thing without its mate and therefore of no use, an emblem of what she had become.But I was never convinced she was crazy. She was the sanest adult I knew. Yes, she was unconventional, never remarrying after my grandfather died but living with a number of different men. And she refused to pay taxes because, she said, “I’ve paid enough.” Yet she was the one adult who actually listened to people, especially to me, and all through my teenage years and well into my thirties, I believed she was the only one who understood my restlessness. When I was nineteen she funded my escape from my parents to a tiny school in the bleak Canadian tundra of Saskatchewan and later, after I was married, she funded another escape to graduate school in the Arizona desert.I thought Cindy?might have the album, but she didn’t. Before I left, I handed her my card. “If you run across anything else, I’d love to know about it.”She rested her hands on her belt buckle. “You should get in touch with Dick Walker,” she said. “He lives in the mountains above Peck. He has a bunch of historical stuff, but he’s protective.” I asked what she meant. “He doesn’t give it to people and barely lets anyone see it.” She jotted down his contact information. “But it might be different with you. You should try.”I didn’t call Dick Walker right away. I was afraid he’d brush me off. I worried that I’d drive up a lonely mountain road, arrive at his place, and see him swagger out with a loaded shotgun and a crazed look in his eyes, saying, “What d’you want?” Maybe I hesitated because I’m shy when approaching people for information. I’m a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature. I work on old manuscripts in rare book rooms at private universities and national libraries, and I rarely gather research materials from living people. In any event, I put off contacting Dick Walker until I came to a dead end in researching my grandparents.When I finally called, a year after my meeting with Cindy, I was surprised that Dick’s voice wasn’t that of a western outlaw but of a southern gentleman. “Well,?heeeeello,?ma’am,” he said after I introduced myself. I asked if I could pay him a visit. “From what I’ve heard, you embody the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.”On the other end of the line, I heard a?well?and a?hum?and an?ah.?Dick didn’t know what his plans were for the next few weeks, he said, and planning things didn’t seem to be his strong suit. He was helping the Advocates for the West gather materials for a hearing on caribou habitat. He had a dentist appointment. And he had to haul brush out of his yard. That would take half a day. He had to fix a doorknob. His dog needed shots.“My grandfather was George Case,” I said. “He was a wilderness photographer and a Moose Creek ranger in the twenties and thirties.” That piqued Dick’s interest for reasons I learned only later: Dick himself was a wilderness photographer and had been a Moose Creek ranger.On the phone there was a brief pause. “Do you have a good car?” Dick asked, by which he meant a four-wheel-drive pickup.“Yeah,” I lied. I actually had a small sedan.He gave me a series of intricate directions that involved crossing a one-lane bridge and turning at the third large pine tree on the left after a Boulder Creek Outfitters sign on a steep gravel road. I should come the next day, Dick said, and while I was at it, could I bring him some kale slaw from the local co-op?When I arrived, Dick, a man of seventy, sauntered out of his log cabin wearing blue jeans and a flannel shirt. His graying hair was truly impressive, thick and wavy and brushed back in a Jackie O style. His eyes, the color of damp earth, narrowed as he sized me up. He was wary of me. I’d worn cowboy boots to impress him. He was in flip-flops.We shook hands and, instead of inviting me in for tea, he stood on the porch telling me that if I needed to “widdle” I should go outside in the pines and aspen around his cabin. If I needed to “squat,” he said, I was to use the composting toilet. He marched me into the bathhouse, another timber-frame building on the property, and showed me how to scoop sawdust into the toilet and start a machine that sucked noxious gas out a ceiling vent. When I think back on it now, it seems characteristic of Dick that our introductions were uttered over a toilet, but at the time I was nonplussed. “I don’t know if I can do this,” I said. I couldn’t tell then if Dick’s knitted eyebrows and pursed lips meant that he was being stern or earnest. Even now, after knowing him for years, I have trouble reading his moods.Back in his kitchen, I handed Dick the two pounds of kale slaw and a fifth of Bombay Sapphire I’d thrown in. “You want some?” he asked, holding up the bottle.“It’s ten in the morning.”“Why not?” He poured the gin over fresh lemons and led me to a table piled with dozens of three-ring binders filled with sepia-toned photos. As I drank, he flipped through the pages, showing images of elk, moose, and deer, log cabins, men on mules, and women standing in front of cook stoves. I kept an eye out for my grandparents.He continued to turn pages, and I let the images pull me in, especially those of people I didn’t recognize but felt, strangely, that I should. I put my hand out and laid it on a page where a woman was standing in front of a rickety backwoods cabin. Maybe I had seen this woman, or one like her, in the books about the early West that I was reading.“That’s Violet Johnson,” Dick said. The doorway she stood in front of was so small that she would have had to duck to come through it. “That’s the Little Trapper’s Cabin up at Three Links Creek. It’s gone now.”“She looks miserable,” I said. Her dark hair was matted to her head, and she wore a dirty apron.“Her husband died back there, and she married someone else.” Dick turned toward the window, a gesture I would later come to recognize as an unwillingness to speculate about a past no one could know.“At least it gives me an idea of how my grandmother might have looked,” I said. Dick turned the page. A mobile made of feathers and shells, dangling from the top lip of the windowsill, shivered.As a child?I seemed to have a stronger need to pursue my ambitions than to stay out of trouble, which led to epic fights with my mother in our tiny north Seattle house. Things grew worse when I got my driver’s license and a job as a busgirl at a restaurant on Aurora Avenue. One summer night when I was sixteen, I stayed after work to drink whiskey in the parking lot with other employees. In the morning I didn’t return home to babysit my little brother as I had promised. Instead I went with one of the black cooks to the Longacres Race Track, where we gambled and drank and ran wild.I came home the following day, and my mother drove me straight to the Greyhound bus station. Twelve hours and 350 miles later, I was in St. Maries eating a dinner of fresh tomatoes with my grandmother, sitting under the walnut tree in her front yard. The next day I put on my bikini and lay in the sun, and my grandmother called, “You come in here. It’s no good for you to burn your skin like that.” I was an urban kid from Seattle, and in Idaho I was as far from the values of a big city as I could be, and I resented it. I looked into my grandmother’s face, at the heavy-lidded eyes and sharp brow, and saw that there was no way I was going to get away with my delinquent habits, the way I had with my parents. She made me dress and then thrust a basket in my hands and scooted me out the door to harvest vegetables. All summer she kept me busy gardening, canning, sewing, delivering food to shut-ins, and sorting through junk at the thrift store that she ran. But by the time I left, I had embraced her, and I’ve carried that summer with me all my life.Dick made another drink,?and I walked around his cabin. I’d never seen such interesting clutter. The house was multigenre, serving as office, photo lab, art gallery, experiment in energy-efficiency housing, and—ever so sparingly—living space. Five or six desks, tucked into corners or sitting along walls, held stacks of black-and-white contact sheets, camera equipment, maps, and audiotapes. His sofas were not for sitting on but for displaying his printed, framed photos. They stood like actors waiting for an audition. There were shots of mountain peaks, bears, birds, and forests as seen from the cockpit of an airplane, all matted in purples, browns, grays, and blues.“A lot of times when I take a photograph in the wilderness, I can’t help it,” he said from where he was sitting at the table. “If there’s something that grabs me by the short hairs, I gotta capture it. I have winter photos of white-barked pine up on Fenn Mountain. I have photos where the ptarmigan are bursting out of the snow.” He waved his hands in the air, eyes wide and head cocked forward. “And then they go under the snow and they’re warm, see. So you’re skiing along, and all of a sudden,?pooooof!” As I would come to understand, Dick didn’t have what most of us think of as memories. He had photos. Whenever he was talking about the past, he’d preface it by saying, “I have a photo.” He rarely showed me the actual photograph but instead described it as if it was a scene taking place in the present.The rest of the day, we ate and drank and walked the half mile straight down his property to Little Canyon Creek, him following me and catching my arm now and then to make sure I didn’t stumble. I learned that Dick had spent the past thirty years collecting photographs, oral stories, and documents in preparation for writing a PhD thesis about human history in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. The PhD never came to pass, and so Dick had turned his house, and himself, into an archive. The archive told the history of the place, but my grandparents’ part in that history remained opaque.As I began packing my bag to go, Dick disappeared down the hall and came back with a leather-bound book. “Have you seen these?” He held the book open and turned the pages slowly. I gasped, because there were my grandparents standing in front of Moose Creek Ranger Station, deep in the Selway-Bitterroot, my grandmother tall and thin in a gingham cotton dress with a white broadcloth collar, and my grandfather, shorter than she by a foot, in jodhpurs, black boots, and a Smokey the Bear hat. The two of them filled page after page: him on skis along a snowy mountainside trail; her by a vegetable garden holding a baby; him feeding an elk by hand in the snow; her bathing a child in a metal washtub; and him standing on a tree stump holding a bearskin in one hand and a rifle in the other. INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET ? ?Moose Creek airfield, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho, 1934: (from? ? ? ? left to right): two elk hunters, names unknown; Barbara Case; George? ? ? ? Case; Esther Case; unknown woman. INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET ? ?Wounded Doe area, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho, 1928:? ? ? ? George Case. INCLUDEPICTURE "" \* MERGEFORMATINET ? ?Bear Creek area, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho, 1928:? ? ? ? George Case“Where’d you get these?” I asked.Dick brushed his hair back with his hand. “They’re mine.”I hadn’t even realized it, but I had taken the book from him and was turning the pages. Not only did my grandmother not burn the photos, but she actually looked?happy?in many of them, leading a child on a horse in one, smiling with her head relaxed and cocked sideways in another, as if she was in a place that she loved, not hated. The images seemed to suggest that someone had put a perfectly sane woman in a mental hospital. And that maybe her scribble on the one photo my mother owned,?Moose Creek Ranger Station, where I spent many miserable years married to a man I didn’t love and who didn’t love me,?was the product of a moment, not a lifetime.“These are our family photos.” I closed the book, looking at Dick now perhaps a bit harder than I meant to. “We thought my grandmother burned them. We thought she hated the wilderness. Or went crazy there.”“Oh,” was all Dick said, and I read surprise in his eyes.I wasn’t sure what to do next. I was suspicious. I wanted to know how he had come to possess the photos, which I felt were rightfully mine. But being with Dick suddenly seemed more important than having them. He was the closest I had ever been to knowing my grandparents in the wilderness.“Thanks.” I handed the book back to him, and we made plans for me to visit the following week.D. J. Lee?is the author of three scholarly works on the literature and history of the nineteenth century, including?Romantic Liars: Obscure Women Who Became Impostors and Challenged an Empire.?A recipient of the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship from Texas A&M University’s Center for Humanities Research, she also holds a PhD from the University of Arizona and an MFA from Bennington College. She divides her time between Chicago and Moscow, Idaho ................
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