USFS 2019 — Part 3, Chapter 5 – Jacqueline Brennan

Beginning the first full week of August, our assessment schedule dropped from weekly to a bi-weekly. From that point in the season forward, all our assessments were conducted in pairs until the trailhead we used to access the second-growth area opened to wider public permit use in early October. After Ian took a turn in mid-July, Bridger had taken the week after to give me one more week off from backcountry duty after my three-week bender of assessments. So my last solo assessment of the summer fell on a week that began in July and ran into the first days of August.

The morning of that assessment was like most early mornings on the Peninsula—dark as hell. But it was also exceptionally dewey, which made me suspect that a nice summer day was on tap—a beautiful day in the Neighborhood of Hood Canal, as it were.

Though it technically wasn’t even the halfway point of my own season, my last rodeo alone in the second-growth area felt like the end of an era. And as a sucker for observing beginnings and endings with uncharacteristic sentimentality, it was hard not to use that trip to take some stock. I found myself reflecting on a lot of things, but particularly on a marked difference between Idaho and Washington that had recently crystallized for me. It was the kind of thing I’d never have put together if I hadn’t had an extended stay in Washington—a state I used to write off for its darkness and overabundance of trees and fog. My youth in Idaho had acclimated me to clear days and visibility for miles. As a consequence, I had never bothered to look at the ground in forested areas. It was so easy to admire views of peaks from miles away—the Lemhis, the Lost Rivers, the Sawtooths.

Washington had clear days—more than forecasts and popular media would have us believe. Some miles up from the Neighborhood of Hood Canal, in the northeast section of the Peninsula, that meant pristine views of the Salish Sea, Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier, the Cascades, and all the different layers of relief in the comparatively gentle east face of the Olympic Range—all at once. I came to appreciate the infrequency of those days that summer. Though easy on the eyes, those days distracted us from some of the hardcore wizardry going on below. That’s where the fungi was at work, keeping us all from becoming part of an undecomposed landfill.

In the Neighborhood of Hood Canal, the outsized sampling of darker days had forced me to look down, to glimpse on the shit that was doing what it had been doing for millennia—metabolizing carbon, feeding us, healing us, killing us, getting us high. Illustrating Ben’s point the night of the now-infamous unfinished euchre game, my reflection was precisely the type of thing I could never share without being accused of being high, wasted, crazy, or all three.

On the way to the cabin, I heard a crunch and craned my head so that my headlamp shone a little further down the trail to reveal what looked like a housecat, which spooked me until the creature stood on its hindlegs. Though a drastic upgrade from the degenerate status of housecat, it was still a fucking raccoon. We spent a long moment sizing each other up before it got back down on all fours and scurried along. Exactly five more raccoons followed it across the trail, which seemed odd. Raccoons were bold and industrious and I thought the ones on the Peninsula kept close to developed areas, where they fared like kings, subsisting on garbage they managed to salvage despite what I considered some the most herculean waste-securing measures attempted in modern society.

Once certain the gaggle of raccoons had safely passed, I pressed on and thought again about society’s lack of tolerance for powerful experiences. As somebody with a history of repressed intuition who also gravitated toward novel experiences out of a primal need to feel, it’s no wonder that I was a habitual self-isolator. There was no way to talk about novel experiences without having to relitigate plausibility even with myself. It was an exhausting beat. Then again, there felt like a double-standard in it all.

If powerful experiences were dismissed as a kind of fabrication, why was it that other fabrications were legitimized and consequential? I immediately thought of my grandmother. She grew up speaking French, Dutch, and German, but her nationality—based on arbitrary political boundaries—was still German. And that was a point of contention when she immigrated to the U.S. Americans quick to ostracize all German citizens based on the race hygiene atrocities of the Third Reich seemed to conveniently overlook the U.S. eugenic sterilization laws that had been the model for the policies of Nazi Germany.

Although Anglocentrism became this draconian measuring stick for my grandmother’s assimilation, her trauma strangely hadn’t translated in her sunset years into empathy for similarly maligned exiles of the modern era. Her posterity rested on the fact that she had immigrated, but I learned early in my adult life to avoid trying to discuss contemporary immigration issues with her.

The more I thought about it, constructed shit like race and nationality didn’t seem so different from my latest obsession, ego. None were real in the material sense, but they all had real-life consequences. Some expressions of each were condoned or actively rewarded, others were punished or criminalized. For two things so central to the mechanics and rewards systems of capitalism and positional authority outside of the Neighborhood of Hood Canal, it all seemed laughably made-up and synthetic as I walked on ground that had once played host to fir, cedar, and hemlock stands rivaling the height of 20-story buildings.

In what had been my last conversation with Tully before she disappeared, she had joked that everything I said was like existentialism with a laugh-track. Nobody had ever put it that way, but she had a point. It’s right there in my tendencies. For example, it was hard, whenever I became conscious of the scale of the second-growth area, not to think about the extreme fates that could befall me if I seriously decided to vie for a Darwin Awards bid. If I wanted to, I could ingest a poisonous LBM and shit myself to death. I could also tote a raw steak in an attempt to lure in one of the fabled cougars of the Peninsula. If one took a swipe at me but failed to finish me off, maybe I’d have to explain for the rest of my life how I’d been permanently paralyzed by a glorified housecat.

I had been on the trail for more than an hour when it started to brighten all at once. It might’ve surprised me how quickly it had gone from dark to light if not for how loud the birds had gotten minutes before. Noticing that reminded me of that anecdote I’d read about the sinister silence ahead of the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake. While I doubted I possessed the clairvoyance to evade anything similar, I wondered if all the time alone with the second-growth and Glorified G had sharpened my senses and I was finally getting better at Pete’s brand of listening.

Though it had almost fallen into the obscurity of the surroundings, what with the dawn uptick in avifauna activity, I spotted something unusual. Two ravens on the ground were pecking at something. The part of my brain inclined to project horror tropes onto real life would have me believe that closer inspection would’ve invited certain doom. But there was another part—perhaps nostalgically recalling my dad’s impromptu anatomy lessons. Thanks mostly to my unusual limbic system, morbid curiosity always wins out with me, as it did in that case.

The ravens reluctantly scattered as I came up on the scene. I didn’t know what I was looking at right away, but my mind went back to the organ piles that periodically showed up in front of our Challis house. The prevailing quality of those entrails was hard to describe. Yes, they were carnal and warm. But even in varying states of dismemberment, from my own education and years of my dad’s interpretive commentaries, they were also easy to imagine as parts of an intact living organism—beautiful, even. What was in front of me was hardly dismembered. In fact, it was perfectly intact, save for evidence that it had already been scavenged by the birds. It didn’t look warm though—not as though it had recently been alive.

Maybe it hadn’t. Maybe it had never breathed on its own since seeing the light of day. These were things I considered later, with a quiet reverence I didn’t think myself capable of. It was in that later thinking that I understood what I had seen with utter clarity. It was a stillborn. And though it was perhaps dead in the material sense as a particular organism, it was still a living part of the larger organism—the living world. It would almost certainly biodegrade and emerge in a different guise, with a different name assigned to it by a human being like me.

What I did know then was that I was looking at an immature hominid. That much was obvious since it was so thoroughly intact. The possibility that I was looking at a would-be Sasquatch crossed my mind, but mattered less to me than what it was evidence of: something that had lived and reproduced and lost maybe the only thing for miles around that resembled it. Sure, it would’ve had to mate, but plenty of male mammals, humans included, operated quite consistently on a fuck-and-run program. I learned that one early on in life from Liz Phair. The point is that at some point in that space between empathizing with whatever had lost offspring and understanding that whatever had been lost wasn’t exclusively dead, I had to deal with where I fit. And all natural order seemed to bear out that I was perhaps not as dead as I’d always presumed—ill, maybe, but not dead.

Being alive was a tough beat. It was tough enough as a human—the dominant predator. But we had it easy in a lot of ways. And we supposedly outnumbered every other mammal on the planet. And yet, if what I saw on that last assessment was one of the storied wild-man beings of coastal forestland legends, that was evidence of something that had managed to elude us.

I walked away, probably not any more quietly than before. But I knew to feel respect for what I was leaving behind. If nothing disturbed the carcass, the mysterious, ancient processes going on in the mycelia network below ground would break it all down and reroute nutrients from the decomposition process to keep fortifying all the damn trees. Maybe the fruiting bodies of some mushrooms would sprout up in its place someday. Maybe even psilocybin for Glorified G. Just like it had for time immemorial. Same as it ever was.

“Let’s hear it for the woods,” I said quietly as I pressed on for the cabin.

Well, I am ill, but I’m not dead
And I don’t know which of those I prefer
Scott Hutchison

For those unfamiliar with the band Frightened Rabbit, their 2010 record The Midnight Organ Fight is a document that has taken on different valence since songwriter Scott Hutchison’s suicide in 2018. It’s impossible to overstate how admired Hutchison was by songwriters. Many of his friends and collaborators were tapped to contribute to a record of covers in 2019 to benefit Tiny Changes, the Scottish mental health charity founded in memory of Hutchison. As often happens with great covers, the Tiny Changes project deepened my relationship to the original songs, and “The Modern Leper” in particular.

I don’t know a document that captures the vagaries of living with a primarily invisible disease quite like “The Modern Leper.” That alone would be commendable. But what’s most radical to me is that the song also represents what survival looks like against exacting odds. It sounds corny, but for some of us, it just takes one person who: a.) refuses to give up on us, and b.) has the constitution to traffic freely between our own askew microclimate and the hostile climes of society at-large.

There are a few peculiar things about being neurodivergent that are hard but important to unpack to stress why “The Modern Leper” is such a BFD. Here goes: First, having a brain that runs differently makes you feel unfit for society to such an extreme that it’s tempting to believe you’re either a mistake or a ghost. Second—and this is strictly speaking as a white lady—I’ve noticed that even if you don’t trigger the implicit bias-level reactions that would keep you out of certain spaces, a weird thing happens once you’re in. You’re not told you don’t belong based on how you look, but you are eventually told you’re wrong based on what you say or do. It makes the world feel like a minefield. It’s not a matter of if, but when and where you’ll feel wrong and alien.

When you live with that paranoia, it seems unreasonable to think anybody besides a masochist would take up the cause of being your friend. We know this feeling and Hutchison was brave enough to write about it.

The masochist designation is of course subjective. It’s the type of thing that, had I used it in front of my old therapist, would’ve prompted them to ask, “Is there a different way to frame that?” And of course there is. It’s always possible that nobody sees us quite as broken, dangerous, unapproachable, or leprous as we fancy ourselves. In “The Modern Leper,” the presumed masochist knows that normal is a sliding scale, and the leper picks up the signal. In the outro, Hutchison’s leper says: “And you’re not ill, and I’m not dead / Doesn’t that make us the perfect pair?”

I don’t know how it works or why. But it seems like the trick rests in convincing modern lepers that we’re not being compared to a narrow and flawed standard of normalcy. Whatever it is, a lot of us are still here because of it. It’s hard not to wish some of that sorcery had come to Hutchison’s aid in 2018. But it’s impossible to hear “The Modern Leper” and think he hadn’t experienced that radical kind of friendship.

JTB
August 2020
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Whether or not you’re a fan of Scott’s songwriting, if you feel inclined to support the charity founded in his honor, you can head over to the Tiny Changes website to learn more and donate. You can also support the charity by purchasing that The Midnight Organ Fight tribute record I referenced above. I can also recommend getting familiar with Frightened Rabbit’s discography in general. Whenever you’re on your last leg, Scott’s words will get you through some shit.