USFS 2019 — Thereafter

Everything that was to happen had happened and everything that was to be seen had gone. It was now one of those moments when nothing remains but an opening in the sky and a story—and maybe something of a poem.

Norman Maclean, “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky”

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If my theory that life was existentialism with a laugh track was still an untested suspicion in August 2019, the remaining weeks of what would be my last lap as a USFS seasonal, and especially the months and years since that summer, did little to disprove it.

For starters, before my season even ended, one Maeve Tully—the Jefferson County therapist and sometime astrologer I knew simply by her last name—was found broken down near the California-Nevada stateline by way of Death Valley. A newspaper back on the Peninsula reported that she had been making her way south, intending to find a desert outpost where she could take up a low-profile residence. She may well have succeeded if she hadn’t done something in the process that inevitably invited a lot of attention. She’d stolen upwards of 20 dogs along the way.

Her reported motivation reflected an impulse I thought any dog lover could relate to, but ideally had inhibitions preventing them from ever acting on. Ostensibly, she’d just made a habit of snatching any dogs she spotted en route to Arizona that she “felt an instant connection with,” and boarded them all comfortably in the refurbished Jetstream trailer she pulled behind her Dodge Dakota. Tully had never brought up Freudian psychology in any of my talks with her between June and July of 2019. But I only thought it fitting to describe her serial dog-napping as evidence that she resembled many people’s unrestrained id. Dogs would change hands much more in the U.S., I thought, if not for our intense anglophone obsession with personal property.

Back in Challis, Elliott had started hatching a heist project of his own, but his wound up spanning multiple years. Because Elliott had been effectively absent from our lives in the years when Dad was actively tracking Banff and Jasper, he’d missed the whole backstory with their mother getting poached. But once he’d caught up, he also caught a fever and was hellbent on recovering her.

Though Elliott wouldn’t ultimately succeed until 2021, he’d made considerable progress in locating her in just the months that I was on the Peninsula. Somehow, he had located court records linking her illegal extraction to a financial advisor, just as I had passively guessed. But that’s not all I had predicted with eerie precision. It turns out the man did indeed have property in Vail that sat vacant most of the year, and Elliott had somehow located the property record for the guy, a character who went by Scooter Michaels.

What I referred to as Elliott’s “investigatory” skills must have come in handy because, somehow using just public records and a few sources willing to speak about Michaels on the condition of anonymity, he was able to ascertain that the guy had transported Jasper and Banff’s mother in an air-tight cooler as far as Colorado before having her stuffed and mounted for his Vail house. I was dubious about all of it and tried my level-best to keep my distance from all aspects of this bizarre passion project that Elliott somehow managed to sustain for several months while also preparing to launch a full-service creative agency with an old friend of his in Sandpoint in late 2020.

In 2021, Elliott’s months of tracing Jasper’s mother culminated in a plan to steal her from Michaels’ Vail house and bring her back to Idaho to be reunited with the mount of her kit. Although nobody was home at Michaels’ house, Elliott was caught on surveillance footage. One of Michaels’ children was responsible for the Vail property at that time because, it turned out, Michaels had died of a quaalude overdose shortly after the global pandemic sent the stock market into a tailspin early in 2020. As luck would have it, Michaels’ children weren’t fans of their father or his penchant for taxidermied rare animals. They were immediately sympathetic when Elliott told them about Jasper back in Challis, and they let him off the hook and sent him home with Jasper’s mother.

They intended to part with all the contents of their father’s Vail house and then sell the house itself, but nobody had made it out there to start auctioning its contents in earnest, and lockdown and travel restrictions in 2020 had further delayed the process. Elliott claims they told him he could take anything else he wanted while he was there and even offered him a place to stay and a ride to the airport to catch his flight back to Missoula the next day. He took them up on the lodging and the ride. Elliott named Jasper’s mom Alberta and had her mounted next to Jasper in the Challis house, which we ultimately kept and turned into a hybrid space that housed a hostel and the first satellite location of his creative agency, which he named Deepthroat Creative.

I was wrapping up my time on the Peninsula in 2019 with loose plans to do a bit of drifting, but not before finally making use of one of Pete’s customary psychedelic offerings. I’m glad to report I did not recall a traumatic birth experience, nor did I have a bad trip. I did, however, get a clear vision of a pawn shop in Albuquerque. Despite the lessons I should’ve retained from the summer months leading up to that trip—on giving proper consideration to anything that manifested so vividly, no matter the plane of consciousness—I dismissed it at first.

By 2021, not long after Elliott had recovered Alberta, our grandmother’s health had begun to deteriorate and I was between seasonal jobs and decided to join my brother in Albuquerque while he was “location-scouting”—presumably for a job in New Mexico with one of his clients. I saw the exact pawn shop I remembered from my 2019 trip underwritten by Pete’s psilocybin and went in. I might’ve been more dumbfounded if I hadn’t fully expected some next-level weirdness to unfold. But because I knew better, I was probably the least surprised person there when I found a sword with our great grandfather’s name, Oskar A. Rosenblatt, etched in the blade. Elliott and I bought the sword for a modest $40 and immediately made travel plans east to my grandmother’s in the Houston suburbs with her late German father’s sword in tow. Somehow, Elliott got away with expensing that detour to the client for the New Mexico job, and we got away with transporting a sword overland for a 13-hour drive in a rental car. Thankfully, Christa Kraut didn’t suffer a heart attack when we showed up at her door unannounced—with a sword, no less. It stayed with her in Texas until she bought the farm several years later.

Now, where to begin with Glorified G? Somebody or something sprang the goat from his enclosure in late May of 2020. I was quite far away from the Peninsula by the time I got word about the goat’s disappearance—which seemed like a permanent deal that time. Bridger was the one who sent me a message about it, having been the only member of our 2019 cohort who returned to the Peninsula that summer after his first year of grad school at Davis. Owing to one of the flukiest chains of events I’ve ever been at the center of, I was in St. Barts at that time.

I’d landed a gig holding down an on-deck tiki bar for a deep sea fishing outfit thanks to none other than Ginger Aldo. It turned out that he and his cadre of Squatchers were commercial fishers by trade and migrated for work seasonally. The Caribbean was one of their mainstay winter roosts.

Ian and Aldo had gotten to be good enough buds that Aldo started making periodic appearances at the Rain Shadow through the end of our season in 2019. In early October, Aldo mentioned that his outfit’s long-time bartender back in St. Barts had dropped out unexpectedly, and their overlord was desperate for a dependable person with hustle ready to report for duty at the end of that month. It was Ian who remarked I was nothing if not “a dependable person with hustle.” He stopped shy of then saying anything to the tune of, “You should do it, Callahan.” I don’t know that I would’ve dismissed the idea altogether if he had, as I may have in pretty much every other stage of my life up to that time. But I did end up jumping in, and not many months ahead of what proved to be a fundamentally raucous time the world over.

I was just over four months into the most laid-back way I’d ever lived, and certainly the easiest way I’d ever made a living, when the developed world began to shut down over what became the first global pandemic in living memory. Interestingly, Washington—where I’d been just months prior—became the earliest known hotspot in the States. But all retrospective reporting indicates the SARS-CoV-2 virus had been scouring the urban centers of the Eastern Seaboard undetected at the same time the West Coast was reporting its first cases.

I’m still peeved by how hard leadership dropped the ball on that one. For starters, virologists had long warned it was only a matter of time before the Next Big One emerged, which was their shorthand for the hypothetical pathogen capable of rendering a global pandemic. And apparently, coronaviruses had been high on watchlists of experts since the SARS outbreak of 2003. To boot, unprecedented ecological disturbance—something this generation of humans has proven quite adept at—only elevates the risk of viruses making the species jump to humans. And maybe it’s just me, but I’m surprised more ado hasn’t been made of the fact that people thought continuing to travel through the first Mercury retrograde of 2020—February 17 through March 10—was fine when there were already confirmed cases of novel coronavirus in 21 countries by the end of January. I guess hindsight’s 20/20.

Anyway, like most seasonals in the Caribbean, we were in the employ of a company that catered to the obscenely affluent. Later, I even learned that the same Scooter Michaels who’d seized Alberta had been among our clientele once upon a time. As such, the company had plenty of reserves and we were housed and paid out for a full season even though we had to close shop more than a month early. So, the tip from Aldo that landed me a job in St. Barts inexplicably landed me two months of essentially shooting the proverbial shit in St. Barts while the world was on lockdown.

During all the idle time, I attempted with measured success to write a memoir about my dad’s suicide and the strange summer on the Peninsula that unfolded. More on an unforeseen twist with that little project to follow. As for the Glorified G news, word of his disappearance came from Bridger in late May as I was preparing to return to the States, where I planned to basically sequester myself to the Challis house with Elliott for the rest of the year. I had been barefoot so consistently by that time that I only realized as I was packing up that I’d lost the one pair of shoes I had arrived with back in October. I ended up borrowing an obtrusive pair of deck boots from Aldo for my flight back, but not without him teasing that I was like Jimmy Buffett’s second coming. I was stressed in the moment and rebutted the comment unironically by declaring the premise impossible on the grounds that, besides still being alive, Jimmy Buffett was a Capricorn.

To be clear, I would’ve been skeptical but not shocked if you’d told me in 2019 that the Next Big One was nigh. But if you’d told me that 2020 would also be the year of a historic uprising against police brutality and racial capitalism in general—in the form of protests in all 50 states (including towns not much larger than Challis), in the form of my undergrad alma mater in Virginia retiring Confederate names from campus buildings, in the form of long backorders on high-demand anti-racist literature—that, THAT right there would’ve blown my wig back. However, once it was clear that was the U.S. I’d be returning to, I can’t say I was surprised when news of Glorified G’s disappearance was followed closely by the circulation of an early June 2020 Twitter video, in which a mysterious angora goat was spotted alongside Caesar the No Drama Llama at a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland. But that was just the beginning of a bizarre saga unto itself.

Thanks in part to pressure from me toward the end of my USFS tenure in 2019, the feds had sprung for a basic tracking device for Glorified G. Following his May 2020 disappearance, two weeks passed without a signal from his collar—not even during the day or days he may have been seen in Portland. Then, in late June, a helitack crew got a series of faint signals some 40 miles offshore in the Pacific. After that crew was able to interface with the Coast Guard, they’d determined that Glorified G was aboard a ferry en route to Alaska from Bellingham.

A party initially captured the goat when the ferry docked in Whittier. Understandably, they were probably more paranoid than normal just because the pandemic had laid bare the ubiquitous possibility of zoonosis. Nonetheless, while the goat underwent a 14-day quarantine, an ungulate biologist based in Anchorage came out of the woodwork with the wild theory that Glorified G was a member of a fabled line of outcast angora goats noted for: a.) exhibiting an exceptional degree of cognitive liberty, b.) utilizing manmade transportation to travel great distances, c.) having life expectancies similar to that of the oldest known sea turtles, and—I shit you not—d.) foraging for native flora with psychoactive properties. Suffice to say that biologist’s batshit theory ended up checking out on all counts.

Glorified G eventually escaped captivity in Alaska and wasn’t seen again until he was found in Russia in early 2021. He returned to the States in 2022, and appeared in what turned out to be the most popular live broadcast of 60 Minutes since the advent of the streaming era. I shed a single teardrop when I heard him identified on the program as Glorified G. All subsequent references to the goat in popular media used the name, including his Wikipedia page. Best of all, in October 2023, he appeared on the back cover of a 30th anniversary edition vinyl reissue of Vs.—the Pearl Jam record with the song that inspired his name.

Now, about my amateur attempt to document that 2019 summer…I never had any serious intention of sharing that damn memoir publicly. But as usual, Elliott complicated things. Unbeknownst to me, he found the saved manuscript using an unattended computer logged into my Google account. He read it all and proceeded to do two things without consulting me.

First, he tracked down Ben from my 2019 Neighborhood of Hood Canal cohort because he suspected it was the same Ben he’d heard of who’d launched a brand of mechanical salmon for bars—yes, like mechanical bulls, but salmon. I had no idea Ben had gone the entrepreneurial route, but it turned out it was the same guy. He’d apparently been weirdly moved by something I insinuated about his connection to fish as a Seattleite and a Pisces, and by the end of 2020, he’d decided to lean into that energy. I suspect Cassie jumped ship before he rounded that bend, but I didn’t keep in super close touch with him beyond helping Elliott make the initial connection. Deepthroat was established enough at that point that Elliott offered to do a PR campaign for Ben’s mechanical salmon pro bono. The contraption really caught on in coastal Washington and Alaska and we now have one in the Challis house-turned-Deepthroat hostel as a thank you from Ben.

The second thing Elliott started to do without my blessing was pitch my manuscript to some media contacts of his as “Milkweed Editions fanfic in the outlaw tradition of Waylon Jennings, Sagittarian tradition of Emily Dickinson, and neurotic tradition of J.D. Salinger.” I took some issue with the description, but I couldn’t say it was ultimately misleading, nor did I think it was entirely unflattering. That he’d falsely assumed I had made up all the strange happenings with the goat and the cabin and the stillborn would’ve upset me earlier in our adult lives. And sure, on general principle, I was incensed that he had hacked my Google drive and leaked the document. But, perhaps subdued from all the strangeness of the preceding months, I wasn’t so fazed that Elliott had taken the content as primarily invented, if loosely autobiographical. Still, how Elliott was able to interpret it as “fanfic” while correctly suspecting the Ben character was a real person would always strike me as odd. It’s entirely possible that Elliott suspected it was all real, but billed it as fiction knowing it’d be more likely to get picked up. If that were his strategy all along, it was a damn smart one.

Elliott heard back from a party interested in paying a handsome sum for a cocktail of print and reuse rights to the story. I ultimately capitulated to selling it on two conditions: a.) We split the money between mutual aid funds serving BIPOC communities and an organization focused on restoring wilderness corridors for wolverines and other threatened species between the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem and the Yukon territory, and b.) The original story had to be credited to the pseudonym Beetlejuice McIlhenny—yes, like the freelance bioexorcist and the tabasco sauce brand.

Besides all that, I continued to trick myself into believing life was long.