USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 1

Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them.

Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

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I was 26 and I thought I was expired and I knew that was irrational, but I also wondered if there was a reason I was still alive and I just hadn’t figured it out yet.

I said it wasn’t a big deal when a guy apologized from the window of his pale Isuzu Trooper for running down the pathetic estate sale sign I’d just pitched. That was before I realized I was talking to Pete.

As soon as I heard a vehicle approaching, I had turned my back and tried to walk away from the sign, hellbent on avoiding attention from anybody who might recognize me. I had neglected to consider Pete in that calculus even though I knew he was on his way to Challis. Of course, I’d immediately recognized the whole maneuver as futile. I couldn’t go unnoticed out there; I was the one upright thing with a pulse in the dry brush for miles around. I had always felt self-conscious about looking like I was deliberately trying to avoid contact, but not as self-conscious as I was about looking like I was second-guessing myself. So I tend to commit at whatever cost, a predilection that’s plagued me to this day. In that instance, I pretended to busy myself with some nearby ground and vegetation, which basically meant looking down intently and combing the stalks of the tallest plants with my fingers. When I heard the vehicle coming closer, I turned around just in time to watch it run over the estate sale sign. It was a slow-burn—more bulldoze than collision.

An estate sale sign calls enough attention to itself without a person next to it, and I didn’t much enjoy being that person. I just felt like the optics made it pretty plain that I was connected to the decedent. I was the only one out there. I hadn’t driven. A passerby could’ve put it together that I was the acting custodian of a dead person’s house—unless there was a precedent for people putting estate sale signs up for strangers. Surely, I thought, people died all the time without any friends or family to speak of. Who put their estate sale signs out? In the years since this episode, I still haven’t learned the protocol in such exceptional cases and wonder sometimes if a stranger will be charged with settling my affairs. In hindsight, the whole inquiry was probably moot in Dad’s case; even if there were customs around such things, he wouldn’t have adhered to them.

It really wasn’t a big deal that the sign had been razed. But something about the notion of a felled estate sale sign seemed significant, albeit in a way that I didn’t have the wherewithal or desire to name. In Aldo Callahan-speak, naming something gave it context. Bison bison: an ungulate, North America’s most massive land mammal, closely related to cows, can breed with domestic cattle. Or can they? Wasn’t that question at the center of the brucellosis transmissibility debate? Dad had never drilled us on herd mammals.

I realized that I probably looked like a special kind of space cadet staring at the damn ground and eventually trained my attention on the person who’d emerged from the parked Trooper, who I eventually noticed was Pete.

“You alright, Kenz?” It was a name that only three people ever called me. Dad and Elliott were the two others.

I impulse-sighed and stared at the felled sign. “I am. That sign’s going to need some rehab though.” Seeing where I was looking, Pete reached for the sign and stood beside me, holding it so the writing faced us both. “Maybe out here is a stupid place for it,” I said, sounding truly sorry for the sign. I was a long way off from extending anything resembling that kind of care toward myself.

I hadn’t lived near my hometown of Challis for a few years, but I visited regularly enough for summer work and school breaks when I was in undergrad, then for holidays more recently. This was the first time I had been called back for death. Even so, I should’ve remembered that this pullout at the crossroads was where service got spotty. If it hadn’t been Pete stopping, somebody else would’ve come along, overlooked the sign, and run it down. People pulled off at this point all the time before crossing the threshold into one existence or the other—in or out of cell service. Our house was on the outside. I had grown up without—an existence that seemed both more elusive now, and way more appealing. I would come to ascribe that to the fact that feeling an inherent sense of worth was far easier away from developed society than in it.

“I don’t know that it’s bad. The sign’s just short,” Pete said. “Did you walk out here?” He looked up the road in the direction of the house when he asked, confirming that there wasn’t another vehicle nearby that he had missed. I told him I had.

“Well, let’s get this back up.” I was thankful that he was taking the reins. If it was grief I was feeling, it resembled only what I recognized as paralysis and heightened confusion. Not pain or loss. I wondered if that made me a sociopath. It’s the kind of thing that, when it crossed my mind, made me wonder if I’d been better off in a different century or place where I would be promptly executed or lobotomized at earliest indication that I was not neurotypical. I still didn’t understand why I existed if my beat was just to feel chronically purposeless and pedestrian at best.

But alas, I was just another lifelong chaotic white girl living with a cocktail of personality and mood disorders in the 21st century according to the DSM, as diagnosed by the one therapist I’d worked with. It took about all of the first quarter-century of my life before I ripped the band-aid off and finally gave professional help a whirl. It had been a good call, if an overdue one. I thought having names for what I thought were the deterministic particulars of my fucked up brain would make me feel like less of a phony. It did for a while. But for all the useful context around my behaviors and attitudes, I didn’t feel any more of a right to the bleak outlook and chronic suicidality I’d known for more than two-thirds of my life. In my mind, nothing objectively tragic or traumatic had ever happened to me. Had it been otherwise, wouldn’t I have felt like less of a phony?

I’d worked it out in my mind that something concrete to point to was what I needed. Dad’s death admittedly fit that bill. And maybe it would’ve done away with my imposter syndrome if I hadn’t been riddled with a sense of guilt that I had somehow manifested this outcome just by previously imagining the scenario and deciding it was the worst one imaginable. I suppose there was this to be said for death: at least people don’t question your mood when someone close to you dies. It’s when your resting state is morose that people get uncomfortable.

Whole minutes and hours were passing, and I was conscious for all of it, but I didn’t feel awake, certainly not sentient. If not a version of mania, I wondered if what I was experiencing qualified as somnambulism. It wasn’t quite noon when I’d walked out of the house. It felt like five hours could’ve passed, but the sun’s position suggested otherwise. Not much time could have lapsed. Then again, time had been harder to gauge since Dad’s death. Since his suicide. I remember fixating on the word standing next to Pete as he opened the back of his rig. Even if I’d grown more dubious by the day about the practical value of naming something, I felt like assigning a taxonomy to Dad’s cause of death was doing obeisance to him in a way. Maybe to myself, too—like his fate was just my own mental state, externalized, reflected back at me.

Always prepared, Pete kept a sleeping bag, tent, and camp stove in-tow at all times. He also, I could see, kept some tree limbs on hand, most likely for fire-ready fuel. He had misgivings about economically-sanctioned ways of acquiring firewood, so he had a habit of picking up scraps as he came upon them. “Do you think this one’s good?” he asked, pulling out a smooth gray number, its bark chipped. It was three times the length of the current post connected to the estate sale sign. The word estate, already bizarre-sounding, suffers as most words do in the province of legalese, or really any situation that occasions its repetition. Still, in modern parlance, the word seems like it should be reserved for an austere multi-story mansion on the English Riviera with a fetching landscaping concept. The Callahan outpost outside of Challis, Idaho wasn’t fetching at all. And it was a fact that none of our forebears had been. Dad had said the Callahans had been peat miners before they immigrated. And his German mother’s parents were tailors by trade. Neither origin story in my paternal line was fetching. I do think we had the austerity part down though.

Mom had died in labor with me. So, our household size had maxed at three in my lifetime. Two once Elliott moved to the East Coast and, before that, often just one, me, during the week when dad was teaching in Moscow. The novelty of that arrangement didn’t strike me until I was in Virginia for undergrad. Apparently, the affluent suburbs of the Mid-Atlantic states teemed with parents who were involved somewhat obsessively in their children’s lives. Perhaps that was healthy? I never was sure.

Most people seemed to have more strained adult relationships with their parents than I ever had with my dad, so maybe there was something to be said for a hands-off approach to parenting. Anyway, I don’t know if it was superstition or an involuntary extension of the laws of conservation of mass and energy or both, but Dad kept everything in the house staged as if four people lived there at all times. Once we had all lived, something about us could not be created or destroyed as far as he was concerned—our essence, our memory, whatever it was. I’d always thought of my dad as a pretty rigid materialist, but this detail has since made me suspect he had a more spiritualist bent than I’d given him credit for. In any event, if not for me, the house would’ve never been so empty. I had always harbored guilt that my birth had effectively killed my mother.

That Dad had saved space for Mom long after getting rid of her belongings felt certifiably austere. Dad would’ve probably welcomed her ghost, even if she’d returned looking like the Crypt Keeper—skeletal, partially decomposed, hairline thoroughly receded, the whole bit.

Pete handed the limb off to me while he grabbed a spool of fishing line. I guessed at his plan for the sign upgrade and grabbed its predecessor from where he’d leaned it against the rear tire. I held the post firmly against the slightly narrower end of the limb Pete had. He did the honors of wrapping it in the fishing line, the spooled section stretching a full inch or two of the new post when he’d finished. He pulled the line tight, knotted it, and did the same on the other end of the original post.

The line that fish can’t see. From a young age, I remember seeing those words on a spool, the likes of which were never in short supply at the house. Elliott and I quickly learned the monofilament line was more or less invisible to unsuspecting humans as well. We used to tape single dollar bills to one end of the line and lay them out in plain sight when we had friends over. One of us would hide holding the other end of the line, then pull the bill away when anyone would reach for it. It was all charming until I learned as an adult about DuPont’s role in spawning an environmental and public health tailspin, with fishing line as just one of many fluorocarbon-based products they championed.

I walked back to the front of Pete’s Trooper, prepared to stake estate sale sign 2.0 into the ground a few feet out from the indentation left by my first attempt to pitch the sign. There had been a thunderstorm the previous night and the ground, still moistened, was softer than usual. I plunged the new sign several inches with a little pressure.

“Back in business?” Pete asked.

“I think so,” I said, wiping some of the sediment from the longer limb onto the side of my leg as I walked back.

Pete was one of my dad’s oldest friends, and a close collaborator in his wolverine research. We had grown up visiting him and his spouse Ayla on the Olympic Peninsula every summer. They’d all met long before I was born, when my anthropologist mother was working at a museum in British Columbia.

Pete asked when I had gotten into Challis and I told him late the day before as he closed up the back of his Trooper, which I remembered he’d named Mindy. I leaned against the rear doors and slid down until I was squatted on the bumper, facing a familiar patchwork of the Lost Rivers. They still held snow, but I noticed they’d been getting bare earlier and earlier in the summer every year. The central Idaho terrain above 10,000 feet used to hold snow year-round. Someday, all the snow would be melted before the solstice.

I knew time was just an interval. Nobody was aging any faster, the years weren’t any shorter or longer. The snow was melting earlier on account of our choices, changing the average temperature, incrementally, fractions of a degree each year. It was one of those psychic mindfucks that wasn’t so much of mindfuck because, well, science: We had ample warning and chose not to listen. I thought of my dad, not just because that sounded like something he would say, but because the same could be said of his suicide: I had ample warning and had chosen not to listen. Or, at least I hadn’t forced the issue at the first sign of defiance. At this point, I wasn’t really considering how he’d deflected help. As with all things, my reflex was to blame myself.

Pete was the one who’d called me with the news. I’d been posting up with friends who were guiding boats on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River in Montana for a few days before I was due on the Olympic Peninsula for a summer gig. The drive from West Glacier to Challis took just over five hours. It was light when I left and dark when I arrived. The indicators that time had passed were clear enough. The sun had moved. The miles on the highway signs counted down. The miles on Gertie’s odometer counted up. But it was all condensed. Just a moment on the road. Shouldn’t it have been the inverse? Shouldn’t that have felt like the longest five hours of my life? Had I just been that prepared for Dad to finally throw in the towel? Adding to my overwhelming sense that I’d somehow willed his death prematurely, I had been thinking about calling Dad before I’d gotten Pete’s call.

“I haven’t gone through anything yet,” I told Pete. “He left stuff very organized.”

“Of course he did,” Pete said.

Pete and I climbed into his car. I might’ve opted out of the ride if the place we were headed was any further away. Life felt better outside of closed quarters, and cars had become tough since learning Dad had shot himself in one. Then again, I often found enclosed spaces stifling. I would say that’s what I got for growing up in Idaho, but crowded quarters hadn’t seemed to bother Elliott in New York.

“Is Elliott coming back for any of this?” Pete asked it before I’d said anything about my brother out loud. But it was right on cue. This was something he’d done for as long as I could remember—inquiring specifically about what I’d been thinking. I’d told him of this peculiar gift of his before, but didn’t say anything about it this time. He hadn’t made a big deal about it when I brought it up in the past. But then, a few years back, he said his ancestor had been a shaman. I took the answer at face value for about a day and then realized he was fucking with me, but in an instructive way.

I somehow got the idea that he’d intended it as a commentary on the dominant culture’s tendency to assign intuition and ESP to the realm of the fantastical. When I got up the courage to ask him if that’s what it was about, he said he was glad but unsurprised that I figured it out on my own. He said he was also unsurprised that I used some of the most obfuscating language available to ask about it. We laughed it off then, but I still felt like a jackass for taking the shaman bait for a solid 24 hours or so.

The drive from the crossroads to the house had taken all of a minute. Pete and I got out of Mindy and crossed what might’ve been considered a lawn if it had ever been irrigated. Dad taught us to pull noxious weeds and non-native plants that were bad for pollinators. Beyond that, none of us cared what the area immediately surrounding our house looked like. Even if we had, it abutted federal land, so we could only get so creative.

When we got inside the house, I wondered if Pete was surprised that the view upon entering was probably the same as the last time he’d been over. I felt awkward having nothing to put down, take off, or hang up. It seemed odd going right upstairs, but it felt like all there was to do.

“The stuff’s all upstairs. I know you’ve been on the road, so if you need to regroup for a minute, do whatever you need to do.”

“It’s okay. I was in Tacoma when I got the call. It was just as fast to take I-90, so I stayed over in Missoula last night. I had a shorter drive today.”

At his insistence, we walked upstairs to Dad’s room, which I’d always had a hard time imagining as a room he’d ever shared. Elliott’s about three years older than me, so who knows if he could remember such a thing, but he claims Dad stopped sleeping in his room the first year or so after I was born. If true, I’d made a refugee of the guy in his own home before I’d said my first word.

The west-facing wall in my dad’s room was more window than wall. Smart construction. It allowed plenty of light, but didn’t get direct sunlight until late in the day. It kept the upstairs from overheating. Challis was dry and only climbed into the high 90s a few days a year, but the window position was one of a few structural touches that had spared us from ever having to invest in air conditioning.

The room was inauspicious—smaller than mine or Elliott’s. Under ordinary circumstances, there was enough clear space for somebody to pace nervously without hitting furniture or a wall. I wondered if Dad had paced before driving to the river access parking. I wondered, also, where he had gotten the gun.

That might’ve been the first time I noticed just how much of the shit in our house was made of wood. All our bed frames, dressers, and floors were made of real wood. While my graduate education in the natural sciences should have, in theory, given me an edge in identifying exactly which kind composed each object, I was just as hopeless as the next post-industrial brute in such matters. Synthetic materials, cheaper and more common by the year, had so thoroughly distanced us from where our creature comforts came from.

The only space in Dad’s room was a narrow passage around the perimeter of the three sides of the bed not adjacent to a wall. Even then, the gap was only a few feet wide, just enough for something like me or Pete to move through. I tried to imagine an alpaca or a gorilla walking through. When I couldn’t, I felt affirmed on those grounds that I could describe the room as packed. Not that it made a difference. Anything that Pete wanted to take was his. The leftovers would either go back to the university archives with the rest of Dad’s papers and correspondence, or be destroyed if they decided they didn’t want them. For reasons that were then opaque to me, the university was being cagey about a critical mass of the material.

When Pete called to tell me Dad had shot himself and he mentioned the situation with his papers, I asked if it was unusual for a university to do a purge of material already housed in their archives. He didn’t really answer at first, but when I pressed him, he confessed that he had “never heard of anything like it.” Pete’s characteristically careful word choice, in this case and others, was not lost on me. But it didn’t do much in the way of clarifying what he was getting at.

Pete reached for the lid of one of the boxes that held Dad’s physical documents and paused before removing it. “Have you looked through these?”

I shook my head. If I’d been alone at the house for another day, I might have. But my curiosity hadn’t yet gotten the best of me.

“Aldo had some unusual material in here, Kenz.” Pete had withdrawn his hands, and after a split second where he looked like he was deciding what to do with them, he crossed his arms.

“Because of the rare mammal stuff?” I asked.

He dropped his arms and looked at me then. If he’d worn his emotions as visibly as most, he might have narrowed his eyes as he asked the follow-up question. But his expression was unaltered. “What rare mammal stuff?”

I tried to parse if he’d given any of those four words more emphasis than the others. To this day, Pete may be the only person I know who casually listens and speaks with an acuity usually reserved for poetry. Indeed, if he was more cryptic, more often, I could make the case that everything that comes out of the guy’s mouth is poetry. His words often work on multiple levels, always more than I can process on the spot. It’s not for everyone. But I dig it. Pete is a rare type who resists simple literalisms and binaries. At the same time, I think Pete routinely gives me too much credit. I doubt that I’m ever as advanced as he thinks.

“The wolverine stuff?” I finally asked.

He seemed to relax a little over this.

“But that’s not the rare mammal stuff you thought I was talking about, huh?”

At this, he finally took the top off a box—one of dozens in the room stacked three-high. Most of the stacks came up to our waists. 

“Do you remember those Kwakiutl stories about Dzunuḵ̓wa, Kenz?”

I didn’t. Not at first.

But when Pete stayed quiet long enough, I took it as a signal that he was throwing his line somewhere strange, out far enough that he wanted to tread lightly.

Then I knew where he was going.

Before Pete showed me what the actual word for the Kwakiutl basket ogress looked like when I was a kid, I spelled it out the way it sounded to me: Joon-uh-kwa. Of the Wakashan and Coast Salish folklore Pete had shared with us when we were little, Elliott and I took an early shine to Dzunuḵ̓wa, Thla’thla, Seatco, and the various wild-man figures that teemed the tales of Indigenous nations up and down the North American west coast.

“Wild woman of the woods?” I said out loud. Sometime in my adult life, I had happened upon the broad Coast Salish word for the elusive wild-man beings, Sasq’ets, the basis for the word Sasquatch. The folklore of the First Nations of the north and central coast of British Columbia often cast them as female—a gendering Pete had always defaulted to. He, Ayla, Mom, and Dad had all met while collaborating primarily with those coastal communities.

Pete thumbed through the contents of the box he had opened, apparently enough to feel affirmed that he’d already found what he was looking for. He gripped opposite sides of the box and walked it over to the bed, which Dad had left made. That felt emblematic of the terrifying drive for tidiness he’d inherited from his German mother.

Pete started removing some contents—old newspaper clippings, sketches, typewritten papers, small handwritten pages presumably torn out from field journals. There weren’t many visuals, but those that I caught glimpses of as I joined Pete on the bed all had the same subject. And they weren’t wolverines, nor were they any kind of quadruped. I figured I could try to save Pete some trouble by synthesizing his hints.

“Yesterday, when I asked if it was unusual for a university to return something already in their archives, and you said you had never heard of anything like it…” I grabbed the print he’d just excavated from the box and placed atop the growing pile of documents. “It’s because there’s no academically sanctioned precedent for this, huh?” I stared at the print after I asked and recognized the image. The still was a print of the iconic frame 352 from the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, the most popular known footage of an alleged Sasquatch in Humboldt County, California, later presumed female on account of her “large, pendulous breasts,” then later yet known informally as Patty.

“When Aldo decided to make a life out of studying rare mammals, he took the ‘rare’ part very seriously.”

“No shit,” I laughed a little. “So, this is why he lost his tenure.” There was no way I could field that as a question. Of course it took an absurd scenario I could’ve never made up for the events surrounding Dad’s withdrawal and suicide to cohere. “How many people know?”

“Inside the university? I thought only one, but that guy’s dead now.”

“Jesus. Did you knock him or something?”

“No, Kenz, he was like 90 and smoked through a breathing stoma until the day he died.”

“Anybody else then?”

“Your mom and me. But stoma guy must’ve tipped somebody off before he died. I don’t know how else they would know to even question what was in here unless somebody had gone through it themselves. Or unless Aldo left them a note.”

“Damn, Pete.” It was one of those moments when you can’t help but be overwhelmed that the adults in your life had will and autonomy and a long trail of indiscretions that antedated you. This Sasquatch stuff, according to Pete, had been in Aldo Callahan’s life since before I was a thought.

“Wild. Isn’t it?”

I sighed, placing the still of Patty aside. It was one of my signature impulse-sighs again.

I grabbed the latest paper Pete had unearthed and added to the pile. It had handwritten notes, scrawled in a fever by the looks of it, on lined paper. It wasn’t illegible, but there was almost no white space. It had been written by somebody consumed. Dad’s death was fresh, but this was written by a guy that hadn’t been around for years. What was unclear was who had tipped the school off, but I suspected it had been Dad himself, which I suppose added a twist foregrounding the events that transpired in the 48 hours before Pete and I were in Challis together.