USFS 2019 — Part 2, Chapter 5

If I’d felt ambivalent before, the relative post-melt bareness on Borah at the beginning of June had reinforced my cynicism about what was left of the planet’s intact ecosystems. Even Yellowstone was getting weird, with Steamboat now going off every month consistently. With luck, it was all just throat-clearing before the Supervolcano incited some biblical fucking calamity and put some of us out of our misery. Maybe that was the reason I found the occasional clear views of the Cascade Range—all dormant volcanoes—comforting when I was traveling to and from Tully’s. The threat of destruction from some molten depths of the earth was, I guess, a kind of stand-in that filled the primal void I felt over the dearth of predators.

So long as it wasn’t synthetic, wildness in the external sense had always been an anchor for me. Developing a similarly symbiotic relationship to my internal chaos—the unwieldy and unknowable aspects of my damn brain—was a work in progress. That was an emerging theme in my second conversation with Tully, which had taken place just before the solstice. While I wasn’t in the backcountry, I was able to get out to Tully’s on Marrowstone after a workday. Gertie had gotten me there and back to the government area, but that was about all she had left in her. Locating a proper predecessor and arranging her peaceful departure for her monopolized the weekend. I’d never been a great sport when it came to transitions. Why parting with Gertie had felt more tortured and final than my dad’s death was mysterious to me. And I knew it would be easier to dwell on it all at the Rain Shadow, where I was already used to having the old girl around. So, I was glad when the Monday of my first solo hitch seemed to arrive all too quickly.

Though I was less fazed about the circumstances I had left behind at the government area, I felt edgy as I’d started the hike out to the cabin. I slowly realized it had everything to do with stimuli that sounded misplaced—perhaps remotely traceable to human beings, but not characteristic of the second-growth area itself. And it was all heightened by the typical aspects of the Peninsula—the fog and the giant-ass trees—that invariably set me up for an anxious time. But I was also discovering that I couldn’t understate the effect of water as a natural amplifier. The moisture in the air intensified the ambiguous woodsy white noise much more noticeably when I was alone. And when I heard something clearly distinct from the white noise, there was no telling if its source was five feet or five miles away. The fog ruled out getting any kind of visual. I thought back to my bit with Ian in Old Taco, the application of which in that situation would’ve been: This fog is fucked.

If there was another person out there (who wasn’t supposed to be out there), with, you know, a fucking gun, and they were startled, and shot me in error…well, maybe they would be doing me a solid. But it’d be scary shit. And if my body was recovered, there’d be more than a bullet wound to clean up. That was all presuming authorities found my corpse before I could decompose or be dragged off by some cougar. Apparently, those were around. Ian liked to point that out when he gave me shit for running in the low-light hours.

I liked to remind him that cougar attacks on humans in the U.S. were extremely rare—a few a year, tops. I omitted the fact that, though rare, most of those attacks resulted in death. Cougars, apparently, went right for the spine of their prey and paralyzed them before really going to town. I wasn’t sure if the paralysis factor meant prey suffered more or less before Big Cat finished the job. I also knew that cougars were more closely related to housecats than any of the other big felines. I didn’t care for cats. They had too much guile to be trusted, and I had no tolerance for manipulation.

Pre-death suffering interval aside, I’d resolved that death by cougar attack would be among the most humiliating ways to die, just by virtue of this genetic proximity to housecats. But the likelihood of that happening in the second-growth treatment area was drastically lower than getting shot, even during the summer months when that area was technically closed to the public without a permit.

To a cougar’s credit, with the help of fungus, they would 100 times out of 100 do a better job at disposing of me than a fickle man with a gun by Leave No Trace standards. I thought of the gut piles outside the Idaho house and wondered if that’s what my leftovers would look like at first if something ever took me down the old-fashioned way. Anything that might be compelled to target me had as many advantages there as anywhere. I was out of my element and I just wanted to get through my first solo hitch without having to call in medics or become the unwitting object of a search and rescue.

I managed to complete a full loop without incident, and honestly could’ve wept with relief. Besides surreptitiously looking at the bark for evidence of pathogens or invasive species, I occupied myself through the whole loop by clapping occasionally and cycling through a few ready-made vocalizations I expelled more out of habit than necessity. Back in grizzly country in particular, the conventional wisdom was just to be deliberate about periodically making sound. As a rule, predators didn’t want encounters with human beings if they could avoid it, particularly if they didn’t have anything to defend, like their young or a kill. Or both. And why wouldn’t they go out of their way to avoid us? Even when they had no firsthand learned associations with humans, if evolutionary psychology was doing its job, all animals had probably learned that upright hominids were adept at fucking things up for them.

The effects of the overwhelming relief turned out to be short-lived once the cabin was back in view. It was then that I noticed Glorified G was gone.

When I shadowed Ian two weeks prior, of course he hadn’t covered how to report a missing goat, or any other kind of government property for that matter. I triple-checked the area surrounding before I called in. There was no trace of that goat—a sign I did derive some solace from for Glorified G’s sake. If he was truly a goner, maybe he hadn’t suffered. Even the gate to the enclosure was still locked. I felt a little guilty as I noted that. Eager to power through the first loop, I hadn’t even dropped off my overnight equipment at the cabin, thereby neglecting to give Glorified G’s enclosure a once-over before sun-up. I had no way of knowing if he’d gone missing earlier in the extended time I’d already been within range of the cabin.

Of course, I knew that I hadn’t actively done anything to bring on the goat’s disappearance. But one of the cascade effects of having self-loathing as a superpower was that I was a compulsive self-blamer. All it took was witnessing something for me to feel culpable.

To many people with
too much hardship
while plenty others
need to experience
some biblical
fucking calamity.

Chris La Tray

I feel like I can flip to any page of One-Sentence Journal and find a phrase that has in some way permanently influenced my internal commentator’s diction and concerns. Although it varies somewhat by mood and occasion, “biblical fucking calamity” might be the concept my brain cycles back to most often.

That may say more about me than the text itself or the sensibility of Chris La Tray, who can be as earnest and moving as he can be poignantly snarky. My favorite description of the style of One-Sentence Journal came from a 2019 podcast conversation in which one of the hosts described it as “haiku with a hint of cynicism.”

The idea of “biblical fucking calamity” has only aged like a fine wine since I first read the expression. And since so many things that preoccupy me have mysterious origins, I derive a lot of comfort and gratification from the rare thing that I can trace with utter clarity. It’s true of anything, but especially language. I attribute that partly to something Robin Wall Kimmerer has expressed: “Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else.”

To be clear, Kimmerer wrote that with distinct languages in mind. But as a neurodivergent person, I’m sensitive to the different ways we communicate ideas even within the constraints of a verbal language that’s as commerce-oriented and anthropocentric as English. At the risk of sounding both overly simple and perhaps overly praising, I treasure One-Sentence Journal because the language befits ideas that I don’t see elsewhere. But that’s not the only way La Tray’s perspective has come to bear on USFS 2019.

La Tray is evidence that the internet, in all its unholy rapture, is not all bad. Although I experienced the poems and essays of One-Sentence Journal in print format, as odd and millennial on my part as it is to say, my intro to La Tray was Twitter. Though the platform’s volatile reputation is certainly earned, I’ve found it to be a powerful lifeline in the past few years.

Prior to 2020, I lived most of my adult life in an environment (the East Coast) where I seldom felt like my perspective was valued or represented. For that reason, the internet was the place that offered some promise that brilliant weirdos were out there (the number increasing rapidly the closer one gets to Missoula, Montana) with feelings and values more akin to my own. It helped when nothing in my immediate environment was offering that validation.

At their best, the internet and language can bring us out of isolation, and that’s a big reason I thought USFS 2019 belonged primarily online. It feels appropriate to cite La Tray in connection with this story because his presence on the page and online has made me feel less alone.

JTB
August 2020
____________

Chris La Tray is Chippewa-Cree Métis and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Look out for his forthcoming book, Becoming Little Shell, from Milkweed Editions in 2012. You can listen to him talk about a little bit of everything on this recent episode of Mountain & Prairie, and keep up with him on Substack (and, yes, Twitter).

Protip to anybody fixing to get their own copy of One-Sentence Journal: You can always get a signed copy sent to wherever you get your mail when you order it from Missoula’s Fact and Fiction Books, whose bookseller ranks include the illustrious author himself.