USFS 2019 — Part 1, Chapter 5 – Jacqueline Brennan

I hadn’t managed to figure out if Elliott was up on Dad’s Sasquatch dealings before we left the Borah trailhead for the house. When I asked Pete who else knew, he hadn’t mentioned Elliott. But since Elliott and Dad’s last conversation seemed to have covered everything under the sun, it didn’t seem entirely improbable that the detail had come out then. Nonetheless, Pete had packed away the Sasquatch files before Elliott and I got back.

Pete was in the house once I’d come in from checking the garage for Dad’s material and I didn’t know if I should initiate conversation about it. It was feeling less likely by the hour that Elliott was going to cut and run, and unless he did, he’d be around at least until Pete and I set off for the Peninsula. I didn’t know when Pete planned to head back, but the check-in date for my season was in just a few days. Though Pete technically had a desk at the interagency area that I’d be reporting to and living at, most of his work was in the field. Plus, he and Ayla lived in Moclips on the western side of the Peninsula, almost three hours from where I’d be. It could be days or even weeks before we converged.

“I moved the stuff they sent down from Moscow outside. Figured I could start loading it into my rig once you both got back.” Pete had said it as Elliott was coming down the stairs. If this was all a ruse to discreetly get it out in the open, he was far smoother than I could ever hope to be.

“They sent down stuff from Moscow?” Elliott asked, continuing toward the door to get his daypack out of Mindy.

I watched Elliott’s progress toward the door, then looked at Pete, unsure what nonverbal information I hoped to get from him. “Yeah,” Pete said. “The university sent back some of Aldo’s material from their archives.”

If Elliott had keyed in that this was an odd development, he didn’t show it at all. “Oh, cool. Are you keeping it then?” He stopped at the door and shifted to face us without turning his whole body around. It seemed noncommittal, like maybe he wasn’t too invested. But maybe I was also just projecting. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to care or not.

“Unless either of you two want it.” Pete looked at me first when he said it.

“I think you should keep it, Pete,” Elliott said. “I mean, unless Kenz wants it.”

They were both looking at me then.

“No,” I said, looking at Pete. “That stuff’s probably as much yours as Dad’s anyway, yeah?”

“Cool.” I heard Elliott say it from behind me before Pete could answer. Then I heard the door close behind him. Unless Elliott knew and truly didn’t give a damn, I felt pretty certain then that he had no idea why the material had been rejected.

Pete walked to the kitchen sink and started to wash his hands. I guessed then that he must have finished moving the dusty boxes with Dad’s materials just as we had pulled in. I wondered if that meant he was heading back to the Peninsula before I would be taking off in that direction. When I asked, he said not necessarily, but that he didn’t mind hauling the boxes around in the meantime. I decided to interpret that as Pete trying to conceal the contents from Elliott. Pete then said he had a question for me and suggested we sit down. I pulled up a chair diagonal from him at the rectangular table. I noticed ink stains on the top that had been there for years. I had been told all my life that I was responsible for them, though the exact circumstances seemed to conveniently escape people’s memory whenever I asked how I had managed it. Once I’d settled, Pete asked if I was planning on seeing anybody out on the Peninsula. Once I jokingly clarified that he’d meant for therapy and not escort services, I said I honestly hadn’t thought about it.

“Well, would you consider it if I connected you to someone?”

“I’ll have to think about it. Like, I appreciate where you’re coming from. I get that it’s a sensible time and place to get back on that wave.”

Pete asked why I was hesitant, and I listed the practical reasons first. I suspected providers would be spread out, which Pete admitted was true and would make for a time commitment. I mentioned that cost was always a factor, and he reminded me about the life insurance situation—a detail that Dad had, I guess, briefed everyone but the primary beneficiary on before he died. I conceded that the unforeseen resources did affect the calculus, even opening up the possibility of seeing out-of-network providers. But I ultimately explained the biggest reasons I was still reticent.

“Look, I had a positive experience in my first rodeo with therapy. And that feels like kind of a miracle in a space as colonized as Western medicine. I think it’d be unfair to take those expectations into a new dynamic, but also impossible not to. You know? Plus, I’m diagnosed now. I told you that, right?”

“You did.”

“I know that’s not a great reason to think that might be all there was to learn there for me. And look, I think that I have a pretty bad brain, and I know that fabled ‘will to live’ thing—if it’s real—has totally eluded me. So, I want to know why the fuck I’m alive. I really do. I don’t think a doctor can give me that. I don’t think anyone can.” I turned my head to the adjacent room where there had been couches the day before. The material contents of the room were down to two mismatched chairs, a coffee table, a desk with a lamp where Dad tied flies, and Jasper.

I was passively aware that all life was carbon-based, implying that the matter corresponding to the ego and physical traits people recognized as me might’ve existed as something more like Jasper in a different millennium. I didn’t yet have the mind to appreciate the privilege baked into existing as a human being—if only for a premature, exhausted moment in the grander scope. I only had a mind to recognize the pain, and wonder how I’d made it so long without a clear sense of why I even existed. Raison d’être was another subject primary education routinely skirted—as if differential calculus, a white-washed version of history, and reductive takes on books written by reductive white dudes were a sufficient stand-in.

Elliott had just come back in. In other families, the topic of the discussion at-hand might’ve alarmed the person who just walked in. Something I took for granted about Elliott, I realized, was that even if we weren’t close in the traditional sense, he never made me feel like a freak for being morose, if a little nihilistic. In fact, as with the mortician comment on Borah, he often encouraged my time-honored affinity for darkness. It stood out in stark relief against the patronizing way most people were taught to show concern toward talk of suicide and depression. Elliott had always been somewhat ahead of the curve when it came to normalizing shit and I wished people would just get on his level. Pete and I had inadvertently gotten silent while Elliott walked over to the garbage can to start emptying his pack. He then facetiously asked if he had interrupted something.

“Sorry,” I said. “No. We were just talking about why I’m hesitant to start therapy again once I’m on the Peninsula.”

“Oh yeah? Why’s that? I thought you liked the last person you worked with. Didn’t you say he was like a Black Mister Rogers?”

“I mean, yeah. But I just told Pete that I think I’m looking for something else at this point. I don’t think it’s anything I can expect to get from another human being.”

“Did I tell you last night that I think you could get into astrology?” Elliott asked.

“Yeah, you said that. Why?”

“Look, Kenz,” he said, putting his pack down and facing us now. “You’re a grown-ass adult and I can’t tell you how to live your life. And I know if I throw the word should out there, you’ll stop listening to anything else I say. So, I’ll just say don’t write astrology off, and cede the floor.”

“Funny you should say that, Elliott,” Pete said. “Tully’s also an astrologer.”

“Who’s Tully?” I asked.

“She’s the therapist based in Hadlock I was going to offer to put you in touch with.”

“Is that legal?”

“What? Pete putting you in touch with a therapist?” Elliott asked, removing the bag that had held Dad’s ashes from his pack.

“No, providing astrology—uh, services—and carrying a license to practice medicine?”

“Well, one’s not regulated by law, so, there’s not really any grounds,” Pete said.

“Though you know what they say?” Elliott said, carrying the empty ashbag with him to the table and taking the chair next to me.

“What’s that?”

Still, it would be hard to know what gigantic portion of human life is spent in this same ratio of years under water on legs to one premature, exhausted moment on wings.
Norman Maclean

The first 96 hours of my life coincided with the four shortest days of the year for the Northern Hemisphere. I’m sure there’s no science or cosmology to support this, but I sometimes wonder if that portended my primal attachment to the longest days of the year—like somehow, being a winter solstice baby born into darkness has induced in me a desperate relationship to summer solstice.

But there are other things about the latter days of June that I feel hardwired to. I’ll never know if it owes anything to the particulars of my birth, but I do think the seasonal rhythms of my hometown of Gardiner, Montana are at least partly to blame.

The Yellowstone River is the longest free-flowing river in the contiguous U.S., and it runs through Gardiner. The river’s salmonfly hatch is the stuff of legend, and while its exact timing every summer varies by section and hinges on temperature, the hatch on the Gardiner stretch typically follows close behind the solstice.

For the uninitiated, the type of salmonly I grew up seeing each summer is a three-inch long stonefly—specifically the adult giant salmonfly (Pteronarcys californica). By the time it’s an adult, it’s rapidly on its way out. Once it emerges from water and its wings dry, the remaining days of its life are devoted to mating and laying eggs. The eggs conceived during the week or so of the hatch constitute the cohort of nymphs that will live underwater for the next three to four years before they emerge.

With only three phases in its lifecycle, the salmonfly is the simplest of all aquatic insects. It’s the simplest and yet I don’t know of any organism—aquatic or otherwise—whose death and rebirth patterns I identify more closely with. As far as I know, Norman Maclean is the only person who has transposed that analogy.

My witching hour tends to arrive in three- to four-year intervals. It usually involves a drastic transition, and feels like a passage from one life to another every time. If I was surprised to see that theme coming to bear on what eventually became USFS 2019, the surprise dissipated early in 2020 when I became conscious of the Maclean of it all. The man was as sensitive as anybody to the number of deaths and rebirths that can transpire in a single material lifetime.

JTB
August 2020
__________

Fun fact: In its 130-year history, University of Chicago Press has published a work of original fiction only four times. Maclean’s A River Runs Through It and Other Stories became the first in 1976, and you can always find the latest edition in stock at UCP. Although Maclean is not a Sagittarius, he is the next best thing: a December child born on the Sagittarius-Capricorn cusp.

“There’s no accounting for witch hunts.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, dead-panning sarcasm. “That old chestnut.”

“So, are you going to see her?” Elliott had positioned the ashbag over his left hand, ashen-side in, like a hand puppet. I was a little surprised he hadn’t insisted on personifying the bag and talking through it as if it were one. I doubted there was a sanitation issue in handling an object that was dusty from somebody’s ashes, but it felt somehow insensitive. I looked at Pete to gauge if I was the only person uncomfortable with it and that seemed to be the case. Pete looked nonplussed. I got distracted looking at him for a second when I noticed his glass eye. One of Pete’s signature one-liners was “it’s all fun and games until somebody gets their eye poked out.” I was in my teens when it finally occurred to me to ask why he had a David Bowie eye thing going on. Only then did I learn that the line was inspired by personal experience.

“Sorry,” I said, acknowledging my pause by shaking my head. “Pete, I always forget you have a damn glass eye.”

“Only since I was twelve,” he said, clearly amused that I still managed to forget.

“Kenz, how old were you again when you finally realized Pete had a glass eye?”

“Sixteen,” I said sheepishly.

“Yeah, you’re never going to live that down,” Elliott said, pointing at me through the dusty bag. “But, we’ve digressed. You still haven’t answered the damn question.”

I said I would take the therapist/astrologer’s information from Pete and think about it, which seemed to make Elliott happy. He stood up and asked what we thought he should do with the ashbag. Although I didn’t know what else to call the thing, I remarked that the word sounded dirty. Then, effectively reaffirming what I’d observed about the sophistication level of our bits taking a sharp downward turn any time Elliott and I spent several hours together, he began making a point to use the word ashbag in every sentence to mess with me.

“Should we go back to the funeral home and ask if they’d like to reuse this ashbag for someone else’s ashes?” Elliott asked.

“If they did that, do you think they’d have to start differentiating between single origins and blends with their ashbags like coffee beans?”

“Jesus Christ, Kenz. Have some respect.” I think Elliott meant it and fully recognized the sadism of the proposition, but that was the hardest I’d seen him laugh in recent memory. It was the kind of laughter that often preceded Elliott imploring me to donate my brain to science. Pete had excused himself from the table. It would turn out that he’d just gone to look up Tully’s information, but I was almost positive he felt like he was condoning our degeneracy in standing by without comment. I would come to empathize with this feeling entirely in the company of the coworkers I would meet for the first time just a few days later. However, in my rulebook, Elliott always got a pass for low-brow behavior I otherwise frowned upon. In fact, with Elliott, I even behaved in ways I fancied myself too high-minded for in most other circumstances.

Elliott asked Pete if he’d ever heard of anybody using swing action to empty an ashbag, which prompted a dismayed head-shake from our late father’s best friend. At that point, I noticed Elliott hadn’t yet discarded the ashbag, which was still positioned over his left hand. “Alright, serious talk, now,” Elliott said. “I still don’t know what the fuck to do with this thing.”

“Just throw it away, man,” said Pete.

I expected Elliott to make some dramatic performance of discarding the ashbag, but he seemed resigned when he finally did. He’d already divulged all the information I’d ever get about his last interaction with our father. I still didn’t know, or even believe, that necessarily precluded the possibility that he knew the full scope of Dad’s cryptozoological interests. But that wasn’t what I was thinking about when Elliott threw the ashbag away. I was more wrapped up in trying to see my brother in perspective. Maybe I was already vaguely suspicious that this was just the last passage in an extended exercise in release for him. And while I have no reason to believe that Dad’s exit had been so calculated, I would continue to wonder privately if he’d deliberately tried to accommodate our adaptive strengths as individuals—my brother getting the slow release treatment, me getting a taste of the Irish exit I thought I wanted for myself.

Though frequently billed as the wayward sibling, Elliott had a sage way of processing death—something American society writ large had drilled us to dread and avoid—with reverence. I had as yet no idea how I’d come to see death and life, among other binaries, for what they were: names for concepts that were in fact indistinguishable, with one always beginning where the other ends.