USFS 2019 — Part 2, Chapter 3

Bridger and I were the novices, so our respective first four-day assessment trips out to the second-growth area were accompanied by Ian, who was tasked with showing each of us the ropes. Those ropes, from what I gathered about an hour into the drive to our trailhead on my first hitch, consisted mostly of the sacred art of shooting the proverbial shit. That notion felt unspoken until there was enough daylight that I could see a sun-stained note taped to the glove compartment in the cab of the government rig, a 1999 Tacoma. It simply read, “GO EASY DON’T FIGHT IT” with no punctuation. As somebody who grew up near federal land and had worked summers as a hired hand for both the Forest Service and Park Service, I knew this kept with a tradition in public lands work that predated even my dad’s accounts of his first summers in the western United States.

My latent vitriol over the previous day’s competence comment aside, I found an easy sense of goodwill with Ian. It was likely aided by the fact that the conditions of that first morning trip in our dinosaur of a field rig were so miserable as to be comic. I didn’t say anything at first because I wasn’t sure what was typical for the Olympics in late June, but Ian twice remarked that the morning sleet was unseasonable.

At first, it even seemed that the Tacoma’s wipers were entirely unserviceable, so the windshield was more or less useless until the precip stopped and the sun started peeping through the cloud formations. That, however, happened about an hour into the drive and felt hardly worth celebrating because we had about 30 minutes of motorized travel left.

There were fragments of presumably stale corn chip flakes on the floor of the truck and the sliding window between the cab and the uncovered bed didn’t close all the way. I’d capitulated after the first 20 minutes of intermittent slobber from the window, removing my rainfly from my pack behind us and rigging it up to seal off the gap. It was about then that we gave the truck the grand name Old Taco. Ian had no alibi for why it hadn’t been christened already, and I lectured him briefly about how it was indecent to drive a vehicle without a name. I noticed that the wipers started working shortly after the Old Taco moniker was on the books and debated remarking on it out loud but ultimately decided against it. The wiper and rear window situation weren’t the last of the rig’s quirks.

“These shocks are fucked,” Ian declared. Going forward, we ended up recycling that statement to highlight other temperamental aspects of Old Taco’s nature. We attempted it in different accents after we’d decided it sounded more ceremonious that way.

We had slowed to an excruciating crawl, traveling a max of 10 miles per hour over the washed-out gravel road. Moments prior on a smoother stretch, we had driven over a steel grate going 20, and we got enough air bouncing from our seats that our heads touched the roof of the Old Taco’s cab. When we lost the signal from KEXP, I volunteered “this radio is fucked” in my best Schwarzenegger Terminator impersonation. I switched the playback over to the CD player, wondering what new surprise laid in wait for us there. Playback immediately began on the fourth track of Pearl Jam’s Vs. After it repeated once, we tried unsuccessfully to change the track and eject the disc before concluding that it had probably been stuck there since the 90s. That was fucked too. Ian took that one in a Scottish accent.

We listened to the song “Glorified G” no less than 11 times in a row before arriving at the trailhead. According to Ian, that harrowing journey took about twice the typical transit time. Because I had learned he was originally from Southern California, I wanted to ask if the inflated transit time had more to do with his inexperience driving in any real weather than the weather itself. But I caught myself and decided it was unfair to prematurely write him off based on one demographic detail. That turned out to be an indiscretion on my part, as Ian’s Orange County origins would turn out to be pretty predictive.

Besides us, the pullout was empty when we parked. Though this section of road had opened to public access for the summer season at the beginning of June, a public citizen had to be a special kind of idiot to want to be out at this time, in this weather.

Ian and I each took a turn using the one vault toilet at the trailhead before loading our packs. The level 12-mile trek to the site of the backcountry cabin we’d be sleeping at passed without incident until the cabin was in view, at which time I saw a goat in an enclosure and thought I was surely hallucinating. I didn’t say anything, at first waiting for Ian to explain.

“So, about the animal…” I finally said as we got closer to the cabin.

“The goat?”

“Yeah.” I had a tendency to say one-syllable words in a faux drawl like Aldo Raine in Inglorious Basterds, and could hear myself doing it then.

“It’s been out here as long as I’ve been doing assessments,” Ian said.

I stayed quiet, waiting again for him to elaborate without solicitation, only to again be disappointed. “And, that’s all she wrote?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody has once thought to say that it’s strange that the federal government: a.) owns a goat on the Olympic Peninsula, and b.) keeps their goat on the Olympic Peninsula in a random enclosure this far from a developed area?”

“I guess not.”

How enchanting it must have been to be a person with no detectable ability to question why things are as they are. It was the kind of quality I envied but didn’t admire. Though I knew that being as apathetic as Ian was about the goat would be an impoverished way to live, I did often feel like my instinctive distrust of the status quo was an unreasonable burden on top of the already grueling task of being sentient in a cruel world. Some people seemed blissfully able to opt out of questioning their conditions.

“You’re shitting me…” I said it, picking up my pace toward the cabin as I’d gotten a better view of the goat.

“What?” Ian had stopped somewhere behind me, perhaps puzzled by my sudden urgency.

“You know what kind of goat that is, right?” I stopped and looked back at him. He still hadn’t moved a step further.

“One with hooves?” He sounded insulted, like he thought I was subjecting him to a riddle.

“That’s an angora goat,” I said, facing him but pointing behind me. I was about midway between him and the goat’s enclosure at that point. I could tell from his silence that the significance was lost on him, and explained that the goat was the same breed as the one on the cover art for the PJ record in Old Taco.

“Callahan, you’ve thrown some weird shit down. But that’s maybe the most obscure piece of trivia I’ve ever heard.” He held his hands in front of him, palms down, then swiped outward when he got to “the most.” It looked like an audition for a sad umpire calling a runner safe.

“Does it have a name?” I asked, intentionally shifting the focus back to the goat. At some point in my life, I’d managed to get self-conscious about the amount of random trivia I’d managed to cache in my brain. I often walked away from conversations feeling insecure that I’d come off as a pretentious asshole or a serial one-upper every time I inserted any niche information into a conversation. People didn’t always comment on it, but the ever-present prospect that my intentions were out of sync with how I came across always stung.

“The goat? Or all the weird shit you throw down?” Ian asked.

I didn’t say anything in response, but was almost to the edge of the enclosure. The goat was approaching, by all appearances intent on meeting me at the fence.

“Glorified G.”

“What?”

“That’s its name. If it didn’t have one, it does now.”

I could tell Ian, yet again, wasn’t making the connection. That he wasn’t fluent enough in PJ’s discography to get the reference without additional hand-holding was a blackmark. I knew then that, despite the ease with which our alliance formed, a wholesale meeting of the minds was not to be. And though I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt that he wasn’t a total philistine, it was against my better judgment.

My intermountain upbringing had conditioned me to be deeply suspicious of interlopers from Southern California. I could hear my dad reciting Paul Maclean’s objection in A River Runs Through It any time somebody came out as being from the place: “I won’t fish with him. He comes from the West Coast and he fishes with worms.” I would later learn this exact stereotype held up in Ian’s case when he confessed he’d only ever fished with live bait.

I asked Ian if we knew Glorified G’s gender and he said he didn’t and had always referred to the goat as an it. I took issue with that and, mainly because I knew it would make Ian bristle, deliberately used they/them pronouns to refer to the goat on that hitch. When we’d gone home a few days later and I was able to look up the breed’s characteristics, I learned the goat was male. Glorified G was easily larger than any of the seasonals, and mature male angoras supposedly weighed around 200 pounds, which was about twice the size of female angoras. 

I slung my pack in front of me and opened it to rummage for an apple. If Glorified G was all I’d have for company when I came out for solo assessments, I wanted to be in good standing with the goat. On a more implicit level though, I think the reflex owed to the kindness I had managed to extend other beings, but not yet other humans, much less myself. I knew that for most people, the reverse was true. A few things were going on with me there, some of which could be explained as symptoms of avoidant personality disorder. For one, while my brain predisposed me to seeing myself as a lesser caste even among human beings, I think enough of that self-loathing had leached into my feeling toward my own species that I saw humanity as a whole as a parasitic underclass in the living order. For two, I’d always suffered an extreme lack of trust and deep fear of manipulation. I thought often of wisdom credited to a zen master that fish, unlike humans, weren’t ignorant of each other’s intentions. I still frequently bemoan the fact that the adaptive challenge of my life hasn’t been to grow gills and take up residence in watery depths, but to force myself to trust people in a world that seldom condones or rewards honesty.

When I’d finally found an apple, I held it out for Glorified G, who at first bumped it with his nose and looked past it dispassionately for several seconds before taking it whole. Foamy juice leaked from the corners of his mouth as he looked at me. When he tilted his head upward, his teeth were partially exposed, giving the impression of a stoned grin, made all the more striking by the lustrous gray mohair that veiled his eyes entirely at that angle.

“You’re wasting an apple on the goat? You know those things will eat anything, right?”

I pulled my hand away and turned around to flash Ian an over-the-top grin. “Don’t you think it behooves me to be on the goat’s good side?”

“Wow. Hi, dad,” Ian said, walking past me toward the door of the cabin, removing keys from the pocket of his waterproof jacket.

I abstained from following that up with a second dad joke about something getting his goat. I decided it was better to pace myself since I had another three days alone with Ian and a goat in a coastal forest.

***

“Let’s hear it for the woods!” Ian began to yell that out in response to my intermittent handclaps.

“Wow. Hi, dad,” I said, deliberately parroting Ian from the first day of the hitch.

“Did you think I wasn’t complicit in the journeyman trade of dad jokes?”

“As a lifelong smartass, I know better than to assume that I have a receptive audience.” When we weren’t talking, the soundscape was drowned out by the swish of our government-issued, all-weather pants as we strode through the brush and a running whitenoise of birds and the occasional spasm of a squirrel in some saturated leaves. I had looked up a landbird monitoring study dated about ten years prior to see which birds were most common on the Olympic Peninsula. If I hadn’t already thought I was out of my element, that was enough to convince me that I’d be hopeless at identifying species on sound alone. Those temperate forests weren’t home to the montane and subalpine fauna I knew.

It was still morning and the fog hung low enough that we couldn’t see the tops of the tree stands around us—which is to say the fog wasn’t all that low. Some growth on the Peninsula was more than 200 years old. What remained of the lowland Doug fir/western hemlock forests that was true old-growth rivaled the height of 20-story buildings. It was a safe bet that any remaining big boys were on Park Service land. But I was surprised to learn that even with the long history of timber harvest up to 1993, the tallest recorded Doug fir and Sitka spruce trees on the Peninsula had been found on USFS land, albeit a section more than 50 miles southwest of the second-growth treatment area. Still, even the comparatively modest stands we worked in dwarfed the softwood forests of Idaho, most of which had been logged multiple times since white settlement and had few trees over 100 feet tall. 

Although I knew the growth was cavernous, fog had always made me skittish and I never felt particularly relaxed below treeline at any altitude. Every nerve in my body preferred exposure. This was yet another trait that I recognized as a reversal of most people’s temperament. I also knew that there was an evolutionary basis for what was normal. Exposure, the wisdom goes, should activate a fear response in a healthy human brain because our species associate exposure with the risk of a fall. Such an aversion to exposure had eluded me. From my earliest visits to Pete out this way with Dad and Elliott, the dense coverage and fog of coastal forests had always made me restless.

“Callahan, is something chasing you? Jesus…” Ian said. I heard him knick his boot on an exposed root somewhere behind me laughing to himself, amused by my urgency.

“Sorry,” I said instinctively, though of course I didn’t know why I was apologizing before answering the question. “It’s a habit.” That was a comment on the unnatural pace I kept, but could have also applied to my reflex to apologize. So many of my instincts were predicated on my guilt for simply existing.

I slowed my pace, which prompted Ian to comment that he had been worried until that point that I only had one speed, which would’ve complicated his tutelage in the art of taking it easy. I asked if it was more important to take it easy or kill time, and said I could easily kill time with bonus hiking, a statement that Ian incisively identified as another dad joke. That one hadn’t been intentional. We briefly entertained the prospect of a Freudian slip a la dad joke before I insisted that the conversation that had started as a comment on my pace had gone too far. All I had been trying to say was that as a habitually anxious person, it was unlikely that I’d be any good at taking it easy, but that I had alternative methods if killing time was the paramount objective.

Returning to the periodic “hi, dads” we’d continue to use throughout the summer to acknowledge each other’s puns, Ian surprised me by asking if I remembered The Goofy Movie—a question I immediately recognized as a reference to the Hi Dad Soup designation given to alphabet soup in the movie.

“Let me tell you a bit of Callahan family history, Ian,” I said. “My dad was an avowed crusader against processed food, but my brother and I more than once conned him into buying us canned alphabet soup.” Outside of the alphabet gimmick, I’m not sure that canned soup manufacturers would have much of a market if everyone had access to healthy food. I hadn’t tried eating canned soup in my adult life and, mindful of the dubious chemical makeup of the stuff, wondered if my body would reject it.

“I always think about how they use that cigarette lighter to heat it.”

“Unforgettable,” I said.

“You know what else was unforgettable in that movie?”

“The second-greatest Sasquatch cameo to grace pop culture in the 90s, obviously,” I said.

That spawned a friendly argument about whether The Goofy Movie or Harry and the Hendersons contained a superior Sasquatch performance. My contention was that although Sasquatch in The Goofy Movie did a lot with little screen time, there was really no contest because the creature was disproportionately central to Harry and the Hendersons. In the parlance of The Rewatchables, Sasquatch won the Dion Waiters Heat Check Award in The Goofy Movie, but Harry won the movie in Harry and the Hendersons. That logic seemed to bring Ian around. After that, I detailed my strange attachment to the movie as a kid.

“Whenever I saw anybody go by in one of the behemoth Buick Roadmaster wagons that the Hendersons had, I thought it was them,” I said. “My dad said I even cried once because I wanted to meet Harry. He politely reminded me that they sent him back to his family in the end and that he was no longer with the Hendersons.”

“Never mind that the people driving the Roadmaster probably weren’t the Hendersons.”

“I know. Dad chose his battles.” I had been forthcoming with coworkers about what had happened in the days before I was out on the Peninsula. I didn’t feel closeted about my dad. But I hadn’t yet reflected on how discreet he had managed to remain about his Sasquatch dealings. Even in those moments where I’d spotted a Roadmaster, he hadn’t been cagey. I guess I gave him credit for being able to fly under the radar and protect something he was obviously passionate about. Maybe there was something to be said for being covert if you really believed in what you were doing, but knew it was taboo. But sustained duplicity never sat great with me.

Ian said he was sorry about my dad. I could tell he felt bad that he had come up. I assured him it wasn’t a big deal and reminded him that I was the one who’d brought him up. He was on my mind. How could he not be? I don’t know if he did it to preempt my asking—I’d be impressed if he did—but Ian said that he hadn’t ever lost anybody close to him. I said I wasn’t sure if I envied him for that. He asked why.

“I don’t think this is based in hard science,” I said. “But I would guess that loss is probably tougher when you know more of the opposite. I don’t know if I mentioned this already, but my mom died in labor with me.”

“Damn,” Ian said.

“Yeah. It was a strange thing. My dad and my brother felt the absence, but I had no reference for anything different. Anyway, Dad dying in my adult life is a completely different thing. And because it was a suicide, I don’t know, it’s hard not to reexamine every memory and conversation.” Even in that moment, I thought to connect the statement to what Tully had correctly identified as my obsession with the question of why I existed. But it seemed universally true that humans became preoccupied with questions of why relative to death. Had I always just seen myself as dead already? I remember thinking that before Ian spoke again.

“I know this is a stupid comparison, but that kind of sounds like a breakup to me,” Ian said.

I allowed that, if human intimacy was your thing, sure, that made sense and could be construed as a version of death. Our dynamics with other human beings were organisms unto themselves. I’ve since come to understand that the same is true of our dynamics with ourselves. At best, our relationships to our own ego are subject to the same cycle of death and rebirth that governs the rest of the living world.

I hadn’t engaged anything else Ian had said before noticing the fog had thinned and it had started to rain. It was a drizzle at first, but not for long. Even beneath the dense evergreen canopy, it was obvious that it was starting to fall hard.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, looking around and spotting a formation created by an old fir stand that had collapsed inward, meeting at a central axis. There was an opening beneath the snags. “Let’s wait it out over there,” I said pointing briefly before hustling toward it.

“Get to da choppa!” I heard Ian yell from behind me as we closed in on the shelter. The clearance wasn’t particularly high compared to the height of the snags around it, but there was more covered space than was apparent from where we had been standing.

I hunched over, and positioned myself as comfortably as I could just inside the hollow section. The inside was as dry as any place I’d ever been under the coverage of a synthetic material. It was a lucky break. Waterproof clothing was functional up to a point. But there was a degree of saturation where even the most impermeable material couldn’t stop water from running off into socks, boots, and base layers—all of which would need to be hung to dry back at the cabin if we didn’t want to smell and feel like decomposing rodent carcasses for the next three days. Ian clambered past, burrowing as deep in the hollow section as he could.

“Damn, this goes on forever.” Something shifted in his tone about then, not 30 seconds after the feral Dutch impersonation. I’d known him for little more than a week at that point, but even then, I would’ve already characterized him as uncalculated—not in a way that made him mean or buffoonish. He was just literal and didn’t overthink what he said. As somebody who put a high premium on straight-shooters, I appreciated it and I think it’s why Ian and I got along without ever having to bond over anything on a deep level. Because of that, though, it was easy to notice when the straightforward ease was gone. He ditched his daypack and laid facing me, propping himself up with his elbows—the same position he’d assumed the day before on my bed next to Bridger.

I knew what was coming and could hear Mr. Morgan from 10 Things I Hate About You in my head saying, “Lord, here we go,” bracing for impact when Kat Stratford volunteers to read her sonnet out loud to the class.

“Come back here,” Ian said.

“Hard pass.”

“Why?” He laughed quietly.

I rolled my eyes and sighed as what I’d correctly predicted as an incoming proposition made landfall. “I don’t want to.”

“Yes, you do,” he was even quieter now.

“Jesus Christ, Ian. Look, I know dudes are trained super poorly or whatever, and there is this whole fucked up heteronormative shtick where you have to come on to the one girl in the place. But that doesn’t give you a pass for thinking you can change somebody’s mind when they’re not into it.”

He was quiet for a long moment. All the white noise of the forest that had soundtracked our trek so far was subsumed by the downfall now. “Sorry,” Ian finally said.

“Just don’t do it again, please. That kind of shit makes me want to pretend I’m all the way gay around hetero-cis dudes.”

“All the way gay?”

I wanted a camera or face to look at with an expression that said, “Do I really have to explain this to this guy?” But alas, the trees were my only witnesses. “Ian, most people aren’t 100% gay or hetero,” I said. I also wanted to say that that was just science, but was leery about what kind of pushback I might get. I thought again about the zen saying that fish weren’t ignorant of each other’s intentions. Some fish species, I remembered, could also change their sex for reasons thought to be related to evolutionary fitness. I know it’s tenuous to suggest the concept translates to human sexuality, but I often wonder if the planet would be less taxed if world societies had long ago considered that idea over the patriarchal insistence that baby-making was exclusively what half our population was fit for. I decided to spare Ian the TED talk on the manifold failings of binaries when it came to sex and gender norms and just told him to not assume that anybody liked to be hit on. Most people didn’t.

We were quiet again until the rain finally let up.

“Ready to get back out there?” I asked.

He nodded and resituated himself to start climbing out from the back of the hollow. When I stepped out and stood up straight, I heard him behind me. “Hey, Callahan?”

“What?” I said, not looking back at him. I might have been making an effort to put some distance between us out of latent paranoia that he was neither earnestly remorseful, nor above resorting to force. Wanting to die of natural causes was one thing, but being attacked didn’t have the same appeal, and I certainly didn’t feel like being assaulted on my first hitch of the season.

“I am sorry. Really. About everything.” The ease hadn’t returned to his voice and that bit even sounded like legit shame.

“Yeah,” I said, channeling Aldo Raine again as I drew it out. “Life sucks and you can make it easier or harder for people. I just don’t want to be objectified. Nobody does. It’s that simple.” I still don’t know where that wave of didactic Mufasa energy came from, but I think it was as much for me as Ian. I hadn’t exactly made life easier for myself.

Ian still hadn’t made it out from the hollow and I looked back.

“You’re right,” he said, looking at the ground and nodding.

I put my hands in my pants pockets, kicked at the ground, then looked ahead. “Shall we?”

“If I can dislodge myself, yeah, we can get back to it.”

“Whoa, whoa. Just to put this into perspective—”

“You don’t have to.”

“You just got stuck under a pile of fallen trees coming on to your coworker.”

“Yeah, yeah. Karma doesn’t fuck around. I know I’ll never live this down.”

Ian saying that reminded me of my conversation with Elliott on Borah about the kind of things you can and can’t live down. “Good luck getting out of there, pal,” I said, slowly finding my way back to the section of trail we’d detoured from. I listened to him struggle behind me for a bit longer. When I could tell he had made it out and was on his feet again, I removed the government radio from my holster. Without turning it on, I held it to my face and began aping an exchange, “Nine Oscar Two Nine, this is Three Six. Are you in range?”

“What?” Ian said.

I looked at his face, his belt, then his face again. With the handheld still in front of my face, I said, “Three Six to Two Nine. Are you on today?”

“Callahan, what the fuck?”

“It’s a psychological distancing exercise. Just take out the damn handheld, please.”

He looked concerned and reluctantly removed his own handheld and brought it up to his face without turning it on. “Three Six, this is Two Nine. What’s up?”

“Two Nine, I’m not violent by nature, but I will cut you if you come onto me again. Over.”

“Jesus Christ, Callahan.” He looked both terrified and amused.

I held my handheld to my ear and made like I was straining to hear him.

“Oh my god,” he said before pretending to talk through his handheld again. “I copy, Three Six. Is that all?”

“Yeah. That’s all. Three Six to Two Nine. Clear.”

I replaced the handheld in my holster. Ian did the same. “Psychological distancing?” he asked, clearly not sold.

“Yeah, it’s a trick Pete’s partner Ayla taught me and Elliott when we were little. We had some intense fights and I had a temper. I pushed him off a bigass rock once and underestimated my own strength. It wasn’t looking good for him and Dad was afraid I had done some lasting damage, so he asked Ayla to teach us how to start using our adult words.”

“Lasting damage? My god.”

I nodded. “I was really mean. Anyway, that was the last time we really fought. Ayla convinced us to start trying to communicate through these stuffed pine martens Dad had.”

Ian asked if I meant toys and I just said “sort of,” not really wanting to get into the fact that we had grown up sometimes using Dad’s study subjects in their posthumous taxidermied form as stand-ins for puppets.

“Anyway, I don’t want to cut you. Being hit on makes me feel like garbage, though, so I just had to get that out there.”

I think Ian was still too overwhelmed to say much more, but he would surprise me later in the summer with how much from that conversation he retained. I put my hands in my pockets and found a nearby tree root to scuff at with my boot. “Alright, Captain Jack, where to next?”

“At that fork just beyond you, we’ll hang a right.” He closed the distance between us with just a few strides, visibly more relaxed again. He did, however, hesitate when he’d caught up with me before leading the way again.