USFS 2019 — Part 2, Chapter 8

“Callahan, you’re quiet today,” Ian said from somewhere behind me.

He wasn’t wrong. I’d gotten back to sleep eventually during the night, but woke at such frequent intervals that it hadn’t felt like I slept. I’d been looking down through our entire walk back to the trailhead. We were probably half-way along. I explained that I’d slept like shit and felt nasty.

“Yo, you slept like shit, too?” Bridger asked, audibly bounding to where I was.

“Yeah, did you?” I stopped to face my coworkers behind me. Bridger had gotten a little carried away and was face to face with me by the time I turned around. “Jesus Christ, dude,” I said, redoubling back, probably looking like I’d just looked at a flood light head-on.

Bridger apologized and said he also slept poorly and thought he had a funky dream that he didn’t remember. “I blame Ian,” he called back to the other member of our party, who was still taking his time to catch up.

Of course I wanted to ask if Bridger’s own insomnia involved any hand-clapping. But a bigass loophole to my compulsive honesty problem was that I was habitually afraid of appearing too eager to bring something up. So I was a champion at repressing shit that I sorely wanted to discuss. It was the primary reason that I knew my radical candor did not equate vulnerability. I think I had developed a superstition at a young age that to bring something up was to expose my interest in it. And to expose my interest in it was to jinx my ability to access it. Even if any such principle existed, I knew it couldn’t be enforced on any objective level. But I’d made it out that the universe had a right to be rigged against me. I think this is why the idea of original sin registered with a visceral familiarity when I’d taken a John Milton class in undergrad. I understood it as a principle that applied just to me though, and for some reason, not other people. It had taken more than the first quarter-century of my life to learn that that whole system of thinking could be attributed to the indomitable self-loathing of avoidant personality disorder.

Up to that point in my life, Elliott had been the only person I knew who’d figured out that patterns of omitted mention was the Rosetta Stone to understanding what was going on in my mind. My lone wolf tendencies had proliferated such in my adult life that Elliott was the only person who’d spent enough time around me to pick up on this behavior. I never ended up asking Ian why he’d commented that I was quiet that day, but honestly wondered then if he suspected what my brother had known for years about me.

We stayed quiet until Ian had caught up with us, at which point he pompously declared that he had slept great.

“Dude, were those mushrooms you gave me yesterday psilocybin?” Bridger asked Ian.

“What?” I asked, thrown off by Bridger’s question. I had been trying to appraise his expression with some discretion to see if he shared any of my suspicion about Ian’s culpability in our sleepless night. With the mushroom question, I’m sure I just looked openly incredulous.

“I honestly don’t know,” Ian said, walking past both of us.

 “You gave Bridger mushrooms you found out here, and you don’t know what they were.”

“He’s fine.”

“And you’re an idiot. You know how many kinds of mushrooms grow out here?”

“Do you?”

I said I didn’t, but only after fighting back the urge to say “an accurate number would be difficult to gauge.” The fact was that a decent subset of any ecosystem’s mushrooms can fucking kill people. And many such species poisonous to human beings are, like psychedelics, little and brown. I didn’t have to explain this to Ian. He knew all this. But he didn’t say anything at first.

I looked at him and Bridger and shook my head. “Y’all are dumbasses. Let’s just go.”

Ian had stopped a bit ahead of us. He apologized, albeit softly, once Bridger and I had caught up to him. We carried on quietly for a while.

I looked up once we were walking in a line with Ian back at the front and was immediately startled when I thought I saw some movement out ahead of him in the trees. I kept quiet until I was sure I had seen something again. Upright bipedal movement. With gear. “Do you see those people up there?” I asked.

“Huh?” Ian said, looking around to figure out what I’d spotted. “Oh, shit. They’re not supposed to be out here. Are they?”

“Unless they have a permit, not in this quadrant of USFS land, no,” I said, loosening the velcro that secured the government handheld to my hip.

“Squatchers,” Bridger said from behind me. He had said it so casually that I thought he was joking. But his silence suggested that the guess was earnest, and the evidence visible as we got closer suggested it was dead on.

Through the coverage, it looked like an indiscriminate yard sale of backcountry tracking gear. I guess I wrongly assumed that organized groups of Bigfoot hunters specialized in a single tracing technique. That party in the second-growth area seemed to deploy everything and the kitchen sink. More of that “everything” became visible as we closed in—spindly radio equipment, large plastic bags with samples of woodland flora, traps, and inexplicably, something else that looked like an actual kitchen sink. I had a tendency to overlook most aspects of setting on the way to and from the cabin throughout that summer, but I could never forget the appearance of the traps the contingent of Squatchers had brought out with them. They looked more like medieval torture devices. There’s no way those could be engaged without doing significant damage to even the largest land mammal. It’s jaw and teeth looked big enough to split a grown deer in half, Darth Maul style. Worst of all, the three sets I could make out were all obviously rusty.

“Hey,” I called out when we’d stopped at a safe distance. “We’re with the Forest Service.”

“Oh, sorry to bother you all!” I heard a wily-looking creature call out from somewhere beneath a cloud of auburn facial hair. From my vantage point, his head just looked like a ball of coarse fluff on his shoulders. He reminded me of Yukon Cornelius. “We thought we’d be staying out of your way if we came in close to the Fourth. Figured you’d all have the government holiday off.”

“Not yet,” I said to the man. Never mind that we weren’t supposed to issue permits for days there wouldn’t be anybody in the field to check them. I turned toward Ian and Bridger, expecting them to be close behind to inspect the permit with me, but they showed no signs of life. The curse of having the personality of a reluctant leader with two adult males was that I always got the bad cop beat. I then reminded my listless companions that we had to check their permit.

“Right,” Ian said quietly. He was uncharacteristically withdrawn now. Perhaps the whole ‘shroom scuffle had thrown him off his game. He was typically quick to try to save face by taking back control. Now he was just resigned, deferential.

“About the traps,” I called back to Yukon Cornelius through the trees.

“Oh. Prudent question to ask. You’re clear if you need to approach.”

“If you’d grab your permit for us, we can just take a quick look and be on our way.” I don’t know why I insisted on rolling with the royal we even though it was eminently clear that Bridger and Ian would be no help.

“Of course. Have it right here.”

The traps were even more upsetting at close range. They reminded me of a rusty saw my foot had slid under once when I was a kid. It was a miracle that I’d gotten to keep my big toe after that incident. It had happened on a weekend and the closest hospital was an hour away in Salmon. It’s the kind of incident folks like to cite to illustrate “the vagaries of rural healthcare”—a notion I took issue with because it uses that broad term “rural,” which somehow applies to both remote backcountry and places with a few thousand residents.

I ambled past the trees quietly toward Yukon Cornelius. Facial sinuses were gradually discernable beneath his auburn puff as I drew close enough to grab the paper from his outstretched arm. I was oddly relieved when I saw that it was valid. I didn’t know how to report trespassers, and if Ian did, I suspected he’d be minimally helpful at this stage. The permit was valid for some time—several days yet. Long enough that they’d overlap with the next time I’d be out there alone.

“Ten days, huh?”

“That’s something, isn’t it? They keep this area pretty sealed up. It took some arm-twisting to get this itinerary approved.”

“I’ll bet,” I said. He seemed not to hear but continued talking.

“Figured we’d pull out all the stops while we had the chance,” he said, pointing to the whose-its-and-whats-its galore strewn about.

“I see,” I said, giving the yard sale one last survey before looking back at Yukon Cornelius. I noticed then that he looked a lot younger than his facial hair situation let on. “Well, we’re headed back into the frontcountry, but I’ll be back out here after a few days off, so we might be seeing each other again. I’m MacKenzie,” I said, handing his permit back in place of offering a handshake. I always felt weird giving strangers my name, but knew it was in my interest to share basic identifying details in a setting where I could conceivably vanish.

“Al,” he said. “Short for Aldo. People seem to have a hard time remembering the unique name though, so you can call me Al.”

“You can call me Betty,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I had a close relative named Aldo.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah. My dad’s name, actually. So, I think I’m going to have an easier time remembering Aldo. Anyway, I might see you around. So long.”

“10-4,” he called out as I started walking back to where Bridger and Ian stood.

“Dude has a ten-day permit,” I said to them once I was close enough that they could hear me talking at a conversational volume.

“Damn, how’d he manage that?” Ian asked.

“Who knows? He mentioned ‘arm-twisting.’ Let’s ask Russ tonight if he joins us.”

“Little-known fact: Russ is an animal,” Ian said.

“Quiet Russ?” Bridger asked as we started back down the trail.

“In what way?” I asked.

“Nocturnal Russ doesn’t come out often, but when he does—if you have booze and a good card game going—he doesn’t mess around. He’ll drink us all under the table and still have life to spare. I guarantee it.”

“Codswallop,” Bridger said.

“There’s no more faith in thee than a stewed prune,” I said. Inserting obscure Shakespeare lines where they had no business being had become one of my standbys for messing with Ian. Obviously, he knew nothing of the title, context, or dialogue connected to anything I said. But the archaic diction called enough attention to itself that he usually caught it and promptly felt self-conscious that I was implying more than he could parse without the aid of the internet. I knew he was out of it because he didn’t give me shit about that one.

“No, man! It’s true. Russ is old-school! Like ‘cleaning out the town’ vintage,” Ian said.

“That had to have been before he was a smokejumper,” Bridger said.

“Russ was a smokejumper?” Ian and I couldn’t have said it with more weary, but obvious synchronicity if we’d rehearsed it.

“That’s what he told me,” Bridger said, innocently.

“That Russ is a real marvel,” I said.

Ian insisted that we needed to get him hammered out of his gourd that night. I didn’t want to actively thwart the scheme, but also felt the need to qualify it. As a child of the Intermountain West, I knew that excessive drinking on public lands was par for the course. But I couldn’t necessarily condone it for myself as I’d gotten older. As somebody who perpetually felt like I was living on borrowed time, I’d grown to dread the inevitable mood destabilization and surgical recovery time that followed binge drinking. Why I took issue with that and not other forms of self-sabotage had never made a lot of sense to me. My faulty brain circuitry had always shown greater destructive potential on its own than it ever had with the aid of alcohol.