USFS 2019 — Part 3, Chapter 6
I was against being seen in public with my coworkers when alcohol was involved for one obvious reason: They were animals. At the Rain Shadow, the lack of propriety felt acceptable, but I wondered how much of that owed to the backdrop of dense coastal forests that constantly gave it the effect of an extended camping trip. In the end, Bridger and Ben somehow convinced me that venturing into society would only be embarrassing until Ian got kicked out of a place. They promised that witnessing that would make everything up that point worth it. I wasn’t sold, but I humored them. After all, it was an occasion—our last chance to observe the end of Bridger’s season before he left us to start grad school in northern California. Even Russ decided to join. I determined that if Russ could make an appearance in the wild with a pack of ferals, I could rally. Plus, Russ only agreed to join on the condition that we go to a roadside oyster bar 30 minutes south of us toward Olympia, which I thought sounded tamer than some of the alternatives.
“Callahan, serious question for you,” Ian said from the passenger seat of Cheryl. Bridger, my only other passenger, sat in the middle seat behind us, intermittently craning toward the center console as his interest in the conversation spiked. He was leaning toward us before Ian had even asked the question, which made me suspect that: a.) he and Ian had already consulted about it offline, b.) he had a vested interest in my response, c.) he knew it would make me uncomfortable, or d.) some combo of those three suspicions was true.
To my dismay, Ian and Bridger had renewed interest in resolving whether I was a volcel or hicel. I objected, reminding them that I felt those names were incomplete, if not entirely misleading because they attributed something complicated to something quite limited. They seemed satisfied and prepared to drop the subject, but then I made the mistake of admitting that I had been in love before—exactly once when I was 21. Then they wouldn’t let it go. They had to know where that person was now. At first, I thought it was like a stand-in for an authentication question. But it quickly became clear that they were maybe more than passively interested in tracking the person down. By their estimation, anybody I was into had to be “an elite human.”
Until Bridger and Ian had pressed me, I hadn’t thought much about the fact that I didn’t know where that person was. I ventured a guess that he was smokejumping in the summers, based out of god-knows-where, and racking up hazard pay and overtime to dirtbag all winter in Utah. But not knowing if that was the case didn’t bother me.
I think I’d been exposed to enough transient culture in my life that I had built up a greater tolerance for missed connections than most. Not until Ian asked if it was a dude did I realize I hadn’t disclosed anything about the person’s gender. I said I had only ever had feelings for men and I could tell he was dubious about squaring that with what I said when he’d come on to me in June about most people not being all the way gay or hetero. Neither of them pressed me to explain that the two facts weren’t mutually exclusive. But when Ian still looked puzzled, I shrugged and said there’s a difference between attraction and feelings. I refrained from adding that people trick themselves all the time into thinking the two coincide even though they seldom do.
“Besides, in my experience, the most formative connections are always ephemeral,” I said.
Bridger and Ian allowed a bit of a pause. It was Bridger who spoke next. I could see in the rearview that he was leaning back and looking out the window on my side. “Still doesn’t mean you won’t see those people again.”
“What makes you say that?”
He shrugged and then made eye contact with me in the rearview. “You’ve seen them once before, haven’t you? Why not again?”
The logic—or maybe the lack thereof—was compelling. Outside of Mercury retrogrades, it was in conflict with everything I’d become convinced of. Things and people, especially the good ones, didn’t reappear. Exceptions to that rule made me nervous.
“Okay,” Ian finally spoke back up after an even longer silence. “But none of that explains your suspicious lack of libido, Callahan.”
My laugh came out something like a choke. I was glad my brother wasn’t around to make another joke about deep-throating the air cock. “Okay, number one: How does that follow from what we were just talking about? Number two: Is the logic here just that, because I don’t jump on any dude who comes on to me, I must not have a healthy sex drive? Because I don’t think that adds up. And number three: Am I the only person on the planet whose fear of intimacy outweighs my need for it?”
“I don’t think you’re the only person who’s that way,” Bridger said. “I think you’re just more honest about it.”
I sighed. It was one of those full-body sighs, the likes of which I don’t think I’d expelled since I was in Challis in June. “I guess it gets harder to lie the more you know the truth.” As I said it, it struck me that Bridger had made my honesty sound like a virtue. I couldn’t in good conscience see it that way because it had always felt like a responsibility and not a choice.
“You’re kind of anti-children, too. Aren’t you?” Ian said.
“The moratorium on child-bearing is one of your four, like, proposed UN ordinances. Isn’t it?” Bridger asked. “It’s like that and destroying guns, meat, and Amazon.”
“Those are basically right, yeah,” I said. “I think there’s one legit caveat though.”
“You’re not going soft on us, are you, Callahan?”
“I don’t know. But I think it’s still fair to say people shouldn’t have kids unless they’re committed to raising people who will take better care of the shitshow on this planet that we made.”
“Damn. What brought that on?”
“I don’t know. I think there’s something to be said for being able to trick yourself into thinking that life is long and look at a material lifetime as a responsibility, not a curse.” That my thoughts came out that way was another one of those unforeseen Mufasa moments, but of course it was connected to things I had been thinking about all summer. I had started to believe that trying to figure out why I was alive was a dead end. A mounting sense of obligation to decide how I wanted to live based on the mere fact that I existed had taken the place of the infernal question of why I existed.
I recognized the particular stretch of shore in view and thought we might be getting close to Russ’ oyster spot when Ian broke another long silence.
“So, do you service yourself like 10 times a day? Is that what I’m supposed to get from all that?”
“Jesus, Ian. I would jump out of this moving car right now if I didn’t know that was a Zoolander reference”
“MacKenzie, a more practical question, if you will,” Bridger said.
“What’s that?”
““How do you expect to bring honor to your family—many of whom I understand are dead or on their way out—if you never find a suitable mate?” Bridger asked it in his best patrozning BBC period drama voice.
“I suppose I shall have to die a spinster.” I had been distracted by some movement on the road ahead of us and what I said came out flat.
“Come on, Callahan. You didn’t even try with that one,” Ian said.
“Sorry, I think Russ’ spot is coming up here on the left. I don’t want to cruise past it.”
“Speaking of Russ, do you think he never hangs with us because he finds our pop culture references exhausting?” Bridger asked.
“For that reason and others, yeah, I think he definitely finds us insufferable,” I said.
“How much would you bet that MC’s been secretly writing a book based entirely on the pop culture references we’ve recycled in every conversation this summer?” Bridger asked.
“Yeah, nobody would read that shit,” I said. “I mean, I would read a love letter to pop culture any day, but I’m definitely a niche market. If there’s anything worth adapting here for a public audience, I think it’d be like immersion journalism into a real-life version of Old School, but in the woods.”
“So you’ve thought about this?” Ian said. “You know a good immersion journalist would’ve gone streaking with us that one time.”
“You even said you had a history of streaking,” Bridger said.
“Callahan? A serial streaker?” Ian asked, dumbfounded in a way that made me think of the laugh lines on Weekend Update where a guest sprays un-swallowed liquid into an anchor’s face.
“Ascendent Gem energy,” I said.
“Huh?” Ian asked as the shoreside outdoor canopies of the oyster place came into view.
“Another birth chart joke. Come on, Ian.”
“You know, that’s funny because I was legit going to ask if you were blaming Mercury retrograde,” Ian said.
“Very funny, but the next one of those isn’t until October, dipshit. Also, I’ve never heard of Mercury having a meaningful effect on streaking plans and I was menstruating. It’s not streaking if I’m the only one wearing a menstrual cup.”
“Oh, sure, deploy the biological excuse to get out of streaking,” Bridger said. “But deflect the mating questions. Classic.”
“I mean, alright, if you’re still hung up on that, let’s try this. There is such a thing as roughstock. What if I’m permanently that? Is that a deflection?” I parked and rolled up Cheryl’s windows, maybe optimistically hoping that shutting her down right away might inspire Ian and Bridger to switch gears and abandon the conversation before we stepped outside.
“Like rodeo roughstock?” Bridger asked. “That sounds more like incel status. I don’t know about that.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Ian said. “Like, you have to believe that there are people who are into that. I actually think it makes a lot of sense that Callahan attracted a smokejumper if we’re going off of this premise. Those people are bananas. That would be more like an extreme version of hicel. What would that be? Excel? Roughcel?”
“This suggests an intriguing question indeed,” Bridger said, reverting back slightly to the BBC style, but now more whodunnit Poirot than period drama governess. “I know you can be roughstock. And I know you can have a stiffy. But can you ever have a roughstock stiffy?”
“I think you can in Australia,” I said, before stepping out of the car and walking toward where I saw Ben and Russ under the canopies. Even with Bridger leaving in less than a week, I already suspected that wasn’t the last time I’d be asked to comment on the plausibility of a roughstock stiffy. I also suspected that wasn’t the last time I’d be invoked as the token spokesperson for different terms for internet-based niche celibacy communities, which I felt like I understood less and less with every conversation. When Bridger and Ian brought the range of cels up again on that drive, I was tempted to ask if hicel was not just millennial internet-ese for people who were compared to big fish in a previous era for having standards and resisting ploys. But, hoping to avoid another 20-minute inquisition, I refrained.
There were probably two dozen other people already scattered about in groups of three to five, shucking oysters and not yet trying to talk over one another. We’d deliberately gotten there early for that reason. The perk of rolling with people who’d spent no shortage of time in quiet, isolated places is that we all found overstimulation highly taxing. I remembered a time earlier in the summer when several seasonals from other locations had been jammed into our ambulance bay for an EMT training. Ian and I didn’t know it was going on and went in to grab some supplies to restock our field first aid kits right as they began an activity that involved a bunch of yelling. Without discussing it, we took what we needed to finish the job outside, probably looking like two elderly women fleeing a hold-up as we stumbled out, trembling slightly.
Based on reports of Ian’s characteristically delinquent behavior in the wild, I was surprised to see him being markedly genial—chipper, even, when he spotted somebody he knew. I didn’t recognize who he was approaching until the person saw me over Ian’s shoulder and waved. It was Aldo, but sheared—beardless.
I got the sense from a conversation I’d overheard after Ian’s mid-July hitch that the guy had hit it off with the Squatchers and was developing more a lucid interest in the object of their efforts. It was one of the rare days Pete was in the government area and they were chatting on the porch outside the office when I went in to submit a timesheet. Through the open window, I heard Ian mention the ground nests the Squatchers were trying to get DNA samples from, which prompted Pete to cite a little bit of trivia about other near-human species that occupied ground nests. African silverback gorillas had been considered mythical for centuries. Until a French explorer had “discovered” some in 1856, the name the natives in that area had assigned the creature translated to “wild man of the woods.” Pete had recounted this for Elliott and me probably half a dozen times. After a certain point in our lives, he didn’t have to explain that the wild-man designation in Africa mirrored the Indigenous names for the storied hominid of the North American west coast, including the Coast Salish word that Sasquatch came from.
“Who’s that?” Ben asked, referring to Ian’s companion.
“That’s one of the Squatchers that we ran into out in the field.” I mentioned that he was an affable dude, not at all the type I would’ve pegged Ian to take a shine to or vice versa. But there they were. “I’m actually going to check in with those two. I’ll be right back.”
It took a special strain of serendipity for me to reconcile the material and immaterial parts of our existence, which often seemed at odds. I suspected Ian was coming around to his own grasp of that and if he and Squatcher Aldo were on the same page, I had something to offer them that I had no use for. At some point in my adult life, I had decided that dreams—notably a completely immaterial thing—were the only things humans could claim to own. And it made sense to me that the primary incentive to cultivate a healthy relationship to an ego was to get better at discerning what to hold onto and what to let go of. Under that logic, it made sense to me to apply a catch and release policy when it came to the stuff of my dad’s dreams. It didn’t belong to me. It also didn’t belong in obscurity. It had been one person’s undoing, but didn’t have to be for the next guy.
“Hey, MacKenzie, the other day in the office, did you hear Pete and me talking about the ground nests that they found? They’re massive,” Ian said.
“I caught the tail end. I’m not going to linger, I just wanted to give you something,” I said looking at Aldo.
“Me?”
“Yeah. This guy, Pete, that Ian was just talking about—he has some cool stuff you might be into. He’s based in Moclips. I’ll give you his phone number. I know that’s a hike from here, but if you can get out there, I think you’ll be happy you did. Just tell him your name’s Aldo and that I sent you.”
Aldo looked perplexed then looked at Ian for validation.
“She’s right. Just do it,” Ian said.
I read off Pete’s number for Aldo, then left him and Ian to finish out their conversation and rejoined our coworkers. “In rare form, it seems an Ian in the wild has found an unlikely ally with the Ginger.” I went for Attenborough as I pointed to the scene behind me, but it quickly morphed into something more in the neighborhood of Fiona Ritchie.
I often thought about something Pete told me a while back before I’d ever done any independent reading on psychedelics. He’d said the best-known mycologist on the Peninsula was self-taught—an amateur. In that conversation, he asked me if I could name an iconic scientist who’d also been an amateur. I pulled a guess out of my ass that turned out to be right: Charles Darwin, the godfather of modern evolutionary studies. It felt like a validation of Pete’s time-honored talking point that it was often the untrained who excelled at that unpopular brand of acute listening. It seems they had less, if anything, to unlearn than most of us.
I’d never doubted that Pete was onto something. But I wondered if listening was what we existed to do. It seemed like lapsed star matter should have better shit to do, but maybe we didn’t. After all, if we weren’t here this way, we’d be here some other way, somewhere, maybe with some other brain. Or maybe it was all just a cosmic joke and the benefit of listening is that you were in on it—the existentialism with a laugh track.
“Hey, MacKenzie, if this oyster could talk, what do you think it would say if I said it was cute?” Bridger asked.
“Aw, shucks,” I said.
Tired of explaining his intolerance for puns, Ben silently walked away. Bridger and I laughed, not at the joke itself, but at Ben’s flight reaction, then poor Russ’ reaction to his and our reaction, which was to walk to the bar and down a shot.
Ian finally made his way back to find our forces reduced to me and Bridger, who had now committed ourselves to getting enough of a grip to not repel Ben and Russ once they circled back with oysters. Ian insisted on footing the drink bill for Bridger and me. The kindness was an annual tradition known as the Rain Shadow rookie beer scholarship, wherein the eldest seasonal funded the alchemical exploits for the first-time seasonals at the end of their seasons. Under ordinary circumstances, I think Bridger should’ve technically been the only one eligible that day since my season ran through October, but Ian insisted that he owed me for bringing him the keys back in July.
“Hey, Callahan,” Ian said as the three of us made our initial sojourn to the bar at the edge of the canopies that abbutted the indoor kitchen space. “I meant to ask in the car, but if the next Mercury retrograde isn’t until October, is this a good time to make travel plans?”
“Travel plans?” Bridger asked.
“Ian, are you outing yourself for being aware that Mercury governs travel?” I didn’t need to ask if Pete had given him psychedelics. I already assumed that much. I had never considered whether Mercury’s power over ‘travel’ extended to voyages in consciousness, but could think of no reason to believe it didn’t—I even thought it unexpectedly wise of Ian to ask.
“Look,” Ian said. “If the risks of a bad trip are lower when Mercury’s not in transit, I’m inclined to work with it.”
“You have three seasons on us and you’re just now sounding like a forty-cent piece,” I said.
“Seriously, what took you so long?” Bridger added.
We shored up at a quiet section of the bar, maybe an indication that none of us were in a hurry to stop mulling over Ian’s question about travel plans. Or maybe I was the only one contemplating it seriously, and Bridger and Ian could care less about whether the valence of all my dead star matter missives that summer rested more in the province of materialism, imagination, superstition, or something unknowable altogether.
I was content to ascribe the same significance to all of them. I doubted that it would always be the case, but it was liberating while it lasted. For a moment, I had tricked myself into believing that life was long.
…in 1986 when literary theorists and postmodern philosophers were looking ahead to the “end of meaning” and the “desert of the real,” DeMarinis wrote a Montana novel set in what feels like the early 1960s to prove we were already there. All of which sounds pretty grim and depressing until you read the novel and find yourself laughing out loud. It’s existentialism with a laugh track.
Aaron Parrett
I associate my introduction to Rick DeMarinis’ work with the feeling of being grossly overestimated. It was the summer of 2014, and I was based in the Yellowstone interior, but on weekends made frequent sojourns to the outside world —most often to my hometown of Gardiner just outside the park boundary. I returned from one trip back to civilization with a copy of The Coming Triumph of the Free World, a loan from my friend’s dad. I fancied myself a discerning reader (I wasn’t and I’m still not) and remember being determined to take it seriously because it was recommended and loaned to me by somebody with impeccable taste. When I didn’t connect with it, I was disappointed—mostly in myself.
I think most people resent being overlooked or underestimated, but I personally have a harder time with being overestimated. I’m very big on managing expectations, largely because I take it really hard when I sense that I’ve let somebody down. The beauty of being underestimated, you see, is that we can only exceed people’s expectations. Or so goes the logic I’ve operated under most of my life.
In retrospect, I think there was something else going on in what I resented as unrealistic expectations. In the first 22 years of my life, there were always one or two more seasoned folks who thought more of me than I did of myself. What was overestimation by my estimation was just somebody trying to get me to live up to what they knew I was capable of (tl;dr version of that: “Shamieka said I had potential”).
Rick DeMarinis came back into my life in late 2019 in the form of The Burning Women of Far Cry. And while I’m still convinced 80% or more of what’s on offer in the novel went right over my head, what did land, landed with force. I know that because much of what I hoped to get into USFS 2019 is also endemic to The Burning Women of Far Cry. Explaining what I mean by that would be difficult if Aaron Parrett hadn’t done it already in an afterword to a 2018 edition of the novel by summarizing the DeMarinis effect as “existentialism with a laugh track.”
I kind of take it as a great compliment, and an even greater act of faith, that this was something an adult with impeccable taste thought 21-year-old Jackie capable of grasping. DeMarinis himself had signed the copy of that short story collection I borrowed six years ago, and I remember the personal note to my friend’s parents deftly declaring them “good people.” My opinion on them—old friends, Tom and Eleanor of Gardiner—lines up entirely with that of DeMarinis on that count. While I didn’t deliberately emulate DeMarinis’ signature preoccupation with the existential in USFS 2019, I did very intentionally try to include some nods to those grown folks who take an interest in us when we’re young and have no idea what we’re capable of.
JTB
August 2020
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The Burning Women of Far Cry isn’t the easiest text to track down because it’s a bit of a deep cut. As such, I’d be remiss to not mention the pains Drumlummon Institute in Helena is making to give often out-of-print, quintessential Montana texts like this one a second life. You can support that work by buying the 2018 edition of the book that includes the Aaron Parrett afterword mentioned above.
