USFS 2019 — Part 2, Chapter 6
Aside from Glorified G’s disappearance, the remaining days of my first solo assessment had been uninteresting. I got back in early enough on the last Friday of June and considered using that weekend to explore a different part of the Peninsula. But I knew that on Monday I would be going straight back to the second-growth treatment area for the second of three consecutive weeks. It would’ve ordinarily been Bridger’s week since he and I were set to alternate field weeks until his season ended in August, at which point Ian would be taking over Bridger’s trips until the proper end of the season in October. But for that first week of July, Ian, Bridger, and I agreed to tag-team on an express-style assessment so that we could all enjoy the paid July 4th holiday without blowing off a week of field data. Our direct supervisor was extremely hands-off about the whole thing and okayed it without hesitation. I thought it was odd, but then again, we got our work done and that was probably all he cared about. I think that because I’ve always had a hard time seeing myself as a grown-ass adult, I still expect people to see my peers and me as delinquents when they have no reason to.
Bridger offered to swap weeks with me after the group assessment at the beginning of July, but I told him I honestly preferred being in the field and didn’t mind doing it three weeks in a row. At that point I believed the more time I spent off the grid, the better. If at any point in the summer, I became truly eager to venture beyond the Neighborhood of Hood Canal, I’d take it as a sign that my detox had been successful. But outside of occasional visits to Pete in Moclips and Tully on Marrowstone, I was in no rush to leave the world of few accommodations and even fewer people. Because the alternative was to go three weeks without any formal check-in on my emotional state, I had scheduled time to meet with Tully on a Saturday, but otherwise planned to keep close to the Rain Shadow for the weekend.
Because I had left for my last hitch so abruptly after replacing Gertie, I hadn’t sorted through some of the odds and ends I’d extracted from her, one of which was an unopened package from my paternal grandmother that I’d warehoused in Gertie for several months. Elliott had offloaded it onto me over the most recent winter holidays—and that after he’d warehoused it for something like a year. I had given our grandmother my residential address when I relocated to Syracuse in 2017 for grad school, but she ended up mailing the package to my brother to pass on to me. Elliott had had the same Greenpoint address for most of his time in New York, and he suspected that because her short-term memory was starting to deteriorate, she just found it easier to entrust it to the Callahan sibling who looked more consistent and reliable on paper. To her, I just looked like I moved every two or three years, which had been largely true since I left Challis.
Finding the package in Gertie made me realize I’d forgotten about my paternal grandmother altogether. She hadn’t come up in any of my conversations with Elliott or Pete in Challis. I didn’t even know if anybody had called to tell her about Dad, but suspected Pete had, which ended up being the case. I wasn’t sure how it would land with her. She’d already had one of her middle-aged children die. That was my Aunt Karen in 2016. I’d never met her. I’d learned she and my dad had been born less than 12 months apart—Irish twins, they called them. Dad had been distant from his immediate family for as long as I remembered, so I heard the news from his youngest sister, who I’d managed to connect with after I finished high school. Karen had died during one of the years I was working on the East Coast right after undergrad. I had no sense how the news went over with Dad, nor did he ever bring it up after. But it had inspired me to reach out to my dad’s oldest sister and start visiting her during periodic sojourns to Pittsburgh—a place I knew my dad still had ample affection for even though he hadn’t returned in my lifetime.
In my adult life, whenever people asked if I was close to my family and I said I wasn’t, I realized they got a false impression. I had to explain that it wasn’t that we didn’t get along, which was the truth. We weren’t actively feuding. We just weren’t in each others’ lives. Like having a post office box for a permanent address, I learned this was also atypical. People had a hard time getting their heads around a family that didn’t fit into society’s scripted binary of close or dysfunctional. I had to believe that our family wasn’t the only one on the planet that existed somewhere else on a spectrum, but nobody else seemed to talk about their family that way.
I grabbed the sealed package from under my bed and tried unsuccessfully to break the tape by just pulling the flaps. I struggled like that before finally giving up and using my Leatherman to cut the clear packing tape. A bright yellow towel was all that was visible initially, but in the process of removing it, it was clear that there was something else wrapped inside. Given that Grandma had sent this package long before Dad died, I wasn’t sure if any of the contents should’ve surprised me. On color alone, I immediately suspected the towel was a Terrible Towel. It was. What I had felt inside the towel was a photo of my grandmother as a toddler with her parents. In the process of separating it from the towel, a third and final item fell onto my bed, where I had moved the contents for inspection. It was a Honus Wagner baseball card. I recognized it from a story about a rare card that had gone for a record amount of money at auction. In what was actually the last text message I had from Dad, he’d sent me a link to an article about the card and said he’d had a replica of it growing up. This must have been it. I knew Wagner was considered one of the GOATs, but why Dad had a thing for him of all Pirates players seemed odd. He hadn’t been alive for his playing career. Neither had my grandmother, though the German connection between the card and the photo she’d packed in the towel was right there.
My grandmother had moved to Texas when she divorced my grandfather. I had visited her exactly once, and she’d shown me the print then. In the photo, my biological great grandfather Oskar is outfitted with a tricot overcoat and what I assume was an ornamental sword reserved for photo ops. I remembered her saying off the cuff that swords like his often turned up in pawn shops. I confess that for shits I’d kept an eye out in second-hand stores ever since. I remember her looking at the date and realizing that it had been taken months before her father had been sent to the Russian front, where—her mother had been told—he had died in March 1943. All my great grandmother Auguste could find out about the circumstances was speculation that the Third Reich had quietly sent away all officers who’d refused to kill women and children. I once found Gussie’s obit in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette archives online and noticed that she learned she was a widow on what would’ve been her second wedding anniversary. She was 27 then, a year older than I was that summer on the Peninsula.
I had never known until I’d first seen the photo at my grandmother’s house in Texas that my dad was a spitting image of his maternal grandfather. Dad had never repped his German lineage as hard as the Celtic piece. But, particularly now with the photo and Wagner card side-by-side, I could see that his angular germanic facial features were uncanny.
Besides not really seeing her when Elliott and I were little, I think there was a bigger reason I had felt disconnected from my grandmother. People ordinarily felt a healthy sense of gratitude toward ancestors who’d fled wars and authoritarian regimes and survived. Feeling like I wanted to die from a young age made that hard for me. I’d eventually come around, not because of interactions with my grandmother, but by taking myself out of the equation and empathizing with her dispassionately as a human being. Unlike her, I’d had a chance to know my father as an adult. Also unlike her, I hadn’t had two children die before me. Even if she had been born with an astute will to live that had eluded me, her life hadn’t been without pain.
I thought to try calling Elliott to tell him I’d finally opened the damn package. It had become something of a joke between us that the package was a consistent afterthought, remembered at the end of one conversation only to be neglected until the next. It had gone on for a long enough period that I wondered at what point a forgotten package became a time capsule.
I was stunned when Elliott picked up the phone right away. I joked that if I had thought I’d get a hold of him, I would’ve prepared something to say. I got the sense that he felt like the joke was fair because he neither engaged nor deflected it before asking what was up. I told him about the package, and he quickly suggested I call Christa Kraut—Dad’s nickname for our grandmother that Elliott had also adopted. I was dumbfounded.
“Elliott, since when are you the well-adjusted one encouraging me to do all the healthy shit with my life?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
I said nevermind, but saw the suggestion that I call our grandmother on the same plane as the suggestion that I start looking into astrology. I asked him when he had last talked to Grandma and he said it had been the week before.
“She said she’s been trying to get a hold of you for several weeks.”
“Several weeks? How? Homing pigeon? She has my number and email address.”
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger. She has a new number. I’ll send it to you.”
“She’s the one with the new number and she’s salty that she hasn’t been able to get in touch with me? Alright. I know I’m a Luddite, but she is a fogey in a deeper sense.”
“Jesus Christ, Kenz. Give her a break. She’s old.”
I took his point and said I felt like a thorough asshole for reaffirming America’s reprehensible ageism just then. We inquired about each other in more general terms after that and I asked him if his plans to stay in Challis had changed at all. He said they hadn’t. Around then, I heard creaking from either end of the hall, followed by doors opening and closing, then two people faintly singing a melody I again recognized as the intro to “Space Oddity.” Without anything else to say, Elliott and I ended our call then so I could tend to my window, which had been open. Because my bedroom was conveniently situated midway between the two bathrooms, I truly had the best seat in the house for what I then realized was a morning constitutional-themed parody. Bridger and Ian traded lines, listening for each other from the open windows of each bathroom.
“Bowel control to Major Tom.” Presuming they were occupying the bathrooms closest to their respective rooms, I could safely assume that the voice for that line was Ian.
“Bowel control to Major Tom,” Bridger’s voice intoned from the opposite side of the house.
I closed my own window before listening longer. Not necessarily because I was repulsed by it, but because I thought the Walt Whitman energy of two grown men sharing a song over a bowel movement was irrefutable. And maybe I was wrong, but it still felt invasive. So often, and particularly on public lands, I’d noticed intimacy between males was repressed because of ridiculous standards of heteronormativity. I had a theory that bodily humor was a socially sanctioned outlet for it, and if Ian and Bridger were having a moment, I wanted to respect it.
