USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 2

We cached Dad’s Sasquatch trove in the garage, deciding that was the best spot to stage it so Pete didn’t have to haul it around in Mindy until he was headed back out to the Peninsula. Though there was plenty of daylight left after migrating the boxes downstairs, Pete and I called it a day soon after. We tried to battle furniture for a while, but didn’t last long on that detail. We’d gotten as far as inventorying all items that would be a two-man job and thought momentarily about moving those bulkier pieces toward the door, but lost motivation before we could execute. I did, however, notice that I had managed to get quite filthy from the process of moving boxes to the garage and decided it was in everyone’s interest that I shower before anybody could come around the next day. It was in precisely the small interval I was in the shower that I missed a call from Elliott.

Though there was nothing preventing Elliott from trying to call a second time, it wasn’t like him to try more than once. That is, unless you were a source. He seemed to be very responsive in general when it came to his life as a reporter. I guess he reserved his leftovers for folks in his personal life. So from my point of view, he’d always called when he wanted to, and if nobody picked up, nobody would hear from him until he felt like calling again, which could be weeks or months later. While I wasn’t surprised that he immediately knew to call Pete after me to get a hold of somebody at the house, I was surprised that he actually did. Still more surprising, Elliott told Pete he was on his way, already in Chicago for a long layover en route to Missoula, where he was due early the next morning.

Pete volunteered to go and get him. As far as humans went, I liked having Pete around in general. But I was glad for the opportunity to mind the fort alone, as I really didn’t like being around other people when I was actively processing shit that also affected them. I’m almost certain that it’s technically healthy and advised to gravitate towards community rather than isolation under duress, but it’s never been in my nature and I wasn’t up for anything like that in the days immediately following Dad’s suicide.

It was understood that Elliott would be fine fending for himself in Missoula through the morning. If anything, he’d probably welcome the chance to hunker down briefly instead of getting off a plane only to drive three-and-a-half hours to Challis. It was also understood that between Pete and me, neither of us needed to be up at the asscrack of dawn to head back in the direction we’d both come from in the last 48 hours. But as perennially restless types, Pete and I would probably both be up early anyway.

And indeed, the next morning, an idle one for the likes of Pete and me, would’ve passed as an early start by most rational estimations. I remember eating more fried eggs and toast than either of us cared for, mostly out of obligation. At that point, we assumed anything we couldn’t polish off over the next few days would just go to waste. That was another thing that was just understood, but we did actually discuss it for a bit. I didn’t go as far as saying everything I thought about that because it felt too macabre. But it did occur to me that there was really nothing like a dead man’s full fridge to underscore the confounding proximity of life and death. Dad had had at least a week’s worth of food in his kitchen—months if you counted the salmon in the garage freezer.

We revisited the garage to size up the Sasquatch files again before Pete headed out. Though we did nothing else with the boxes, we did get some passive inspiration to organize the hardware and garden equipment that was in there. The effort was more performative than truly productive and we abandoned it soon after starting. Pete got on the road before 11 and I was alone at the house for the rest of the day.

A few people who saw the estate sale sign came by. I recognized none of them, which was a relief. The trickle of people was steady enough to keep me occupied. Most visitors were just perusing the spread and weren’t prepared to haul anything out. So, I did feel a somewhat pronounced sense of achievement when, at some ripe hour before Pete had made it back with Elliott, we had a taker for all the sofas. On a normal day, I might’ve been more suspicious toward the kind of people who came to estate sales ready to haul out full-ass couches. But I’ve since come to appreciate that motives start to feel immaterial when you’re charged with offloading a bunch of a dead person’s stuff at once, most of which has little sentimental value to yourself.

Like most folks who caught the ecologist bug, Dad had tried obsessively to cover his tracks and leave little trace of himself when he was alive. It had never occurred to me to resent how much easier it was to do that in the backcountry—where you carried so little in and out with you relative to what you had in the developed world. As soon as you’d lived on this side—the side with services or at least near them—it was all less simple. Even if you could destroy all your belongings, traces of your DNA would survive you. You’d leave behind relatives, probably a name on some public records, people who loved you if you were lucky, people who hated you if you weren’t, and maybe some mangled remains if you were really hardcore.

I knew that permanently erasing Dad in the material sense wasn’t possible. The same was true of Mom; I’d learned that at an early age, and that was a woman I’d never even met. During the process of parting with Dad’s material possessions, I was struck by how strange it is to be responsible for the traces of somebody else’s material existence—their property, their records. Weirder, still, is contending with traces that existed entirely outside of commerce: memories, impressions, feelings—things we all give each other even if we don’t mean or want to. It seemed like an unfair burden to me then—if a familiar one. I’d known folks who’d killed themselves, but none as well as I knew my dad. I suspect suicide has a singular effect on those of us who have to live with the aftermath because the same person who gave us traces of their spirit withdraws their material existence. Maybe it’s just more complicated when the same person perpetrates the giving and taking and that’s why it stings when it’s not even somebody close to you.

The couple who hauled out the couches were sweet. The man was monosyllabic and wore a tan button-down tucked into his jeans and an R.L. Winston Rod Company hat, which I found incredibly wholesome. The woman wore a lavender tunic over pants made out of some material that looked like canvas, but I could tell it was supposed to be more tasteful. I couldn’t tell if she was wearing transition sunglasses and just hadn’t been indoors long enough for me to see them transition to clear, or if she just insisted on wearing sunglasses the whole time she was inside. They seemed like an odd pair, but then that was most people in the West. Remoteness has a way of forging unexpected connections—something I was soon to relearn, a few times over, through firsthand experience on the Peninsula in the weeks that followed.

The woman ended most of her sentences with unnecessary but audible mmhmms and yeps, a habit I probably wouldn’t have noticed if not for the fact that it reminded me of a vocal tic of Fred Rogers, one of many astute touchstones from my dad’s Pittsburgh upbringing that he’d made a point to familiarize us with from a young age. I’d taken a new interest in the guy in my adult life. As I had gotten context around my own strain of neurodivergence, I’d developed a fascination with high-profile figures—living and deceased—who I could tell were so plainly neurodivergent. I think I was mostly taken with how people like Fred Rogers had found a significant way to participate in a society that’s so alienating and tough on the deviant folks.

In the end, that couple insisted on overpaying for the couches. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Part of me wondered if some of Dad’s shit had value heretofore unknown to me. Maybe that pair knew they were getting a steal and inflated the offer because they felt bad for me.

A few people drifted in and out asking about dad’s wolverine mount, which I had to say wasn’t for sale. I felt stupid for not thinking to conceal Jasper, one of two brothers my dad had nursed in captivity when their mother was killed by a poacher. I didn’t want to normalize the notion of a taxidermied wolverine as personal property. So many people acquired those through illegal means. Jasper and Banff’s mother, for instance, was probably on display in some financial advisor’s multi-million-dollar home in Vail or Big Sky. I tried to convince Dad to put a disclaimer up with the thing explaining that he bottle-fed this wolverine as a kit, collared him and his brother when they were old enough to fend for themselves, and tracked their GPS location every day of their adult lives. He hadn’t paid money so he could own the dead wolverine to show off. He wanted Jasper and Banff to be healthy adults who could contribute to the genetic diversity of a species with dwindling habitat. Jasper had been caught in a trap and died when he was three and, in rare form, game authorities offered to turn the body over to my dad and have him stuffed and mounted for us. Banff lived to a good old age before hunkering down to ride the big one in a den during my first year of grad school.

After the third consecutive person to stop in inquired about Jasper, I’d decided that was enough for the day. I walked down the road to cover the estate sale sign, a contraption that already looked shabbier than I remembered. It’s a wonder that anybody stopped in at all. I would’ve thought it was a prank based on the appearance of the sign. I also began to question my decision to leave the times on the sign ambiguous. As it was, I’d written “Monday – ???, 9am – ???” I’m sure there was some social science explanation of why this was a bad call and how specific times were essential for instilling a sense of urgency. But if urgency was paramount, Pete and I could’ve pooled our resources to hire a sign-twirler and enlist the EVERYTHING MUST GO! messaging liquor stores used for closeout sales in downtown areas on the East Coast. Then and now, I’ve never seen the point in vapid gimmicks. And I sure as hell don’t see the point in lying, least of all to manipulate people. I put a sack over the sign, walked back to the house and, for the second day in a row, was utterly uninspired to do much else in the way of getting Dad’s other shit buttoned up. But I also wasn’t interested in lazing around the house.

Nobody ever talks about the aimlessness and waiting that accompany death. It’s the kind of thing that reminds me of the irritating failings of primary education. How many of us learned things in school we’ve either forgotten or spent years trying to unlearn just to function? Loss, trauma, heartbreak—there’s no shortage of shit we have to go through like total amateurs every time around. Why doesn’t public school curriculum cover any of that? I appreciate that most of it has to be experienced and can’t be taught. But still, it seems like we should be better prepared for the basics after all that time. Where was the field trip to a funeral home? Or a psychiatrist’s office? Or the career talk from a life insurance agent or estate lawyer? We have no reservations about teaching school children financial literacy. But we give them no tools for triangulating a sense of inherent worth in a society steeped in economic pressure. Is it such a surprise that people resort to suicide?

Of course, Dad’s death made it impossible to not reflect on my own relationship with suicidality, which had always been nuanced. It was a brutal approximation, but I believe the closest term for it in popular use was passive suicidality. That is, I’d long maintained that it would be preferable to disappear and not have to be alive if it were possible to invoke such an option at will. The key would be to go out in a way that wouldn’t upset people—an Irish exit of sorts. The one complication with it, I recognized even then, was there was no way to make everyone forget you, no way to bow out without hurting others. I respected the design of the living world, but this seemed like a glaring flaw in it. None of us had chosen to be alive in the first place. At least, that was how I saw it then.

I always had a flair for restlessness and anxious thinking. For as long as I could remember, I had been a chronic visualizer and a champion at obsessively imagining every catastrophic scenario I could think up. I’d somehow worked up this idea that anything I could imagine, good or bad, would never manifest. I’d always go out of my way to envision the most awful outcome so that what ended up happening in real life was mild in comparison, even if it still sucked by objective measures.

Dad’s death was the first time one of those imagined scenarios had borne out. In addition to the guilt that I had somehow brought it on, I felt guilt that I hadn’t taken more aggressive steps to intervene once I sensed the magnitude of his struggle. As I’d thought the day before: I’d had ample warning, but I hadn’t listened. Maybe that was the kind of listening that Pete was always talking about. But that was really just paying attention and acting, wasn’t it? I’m sure Pete can make the case quite eloquently that these things are no different.