All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (21 page)

Her first offer to hang out had involved sneaking onto the University of Montana golf course at daybreak and sprinting through a round of speed golf before the clubhouse opened and the groundskeepers nabbed us for failing to pay greens fees. Her dedication to frivolity in all its forms was contagious. Telling her no just wasn’t an option. We’d kept in touch for years by letter, and she never failed to entertain with comic stories from her travels. Hers was just the face—freckled, smiling, blue eyes twinkling with mischief—I needed to see, and there she was, standing outside the Hilltop Café in T or C, New Mexico, suntanned and lean as a mountain lion from hikes to and from her lookout all summer. Also, charmingly, still a little buzzed from a night spent at Elephant Butte Lake with some rowdy, off-duty firefighters.

We stopped for groceries before we left town, then I followed her by car across the creosote flats toward the rim of the Black Range. We drove through two little foothills villages, relics of the mining boom of the 1870s, into piñon-juniper country, then up into the taller, statelier ponderosa forest with its shaggy-needled, red-barked trees, the road all the while making serpentine curves. At a pass high on the divide we turned onto a dead-end dirt road, where we parked and began a two-hour hoof to her mountain with our packs.

It was strange country, foreign to my experience, the driest time of a dry season in the driest forest I’d ever known. The grasses were sere and brittle, wildflowers few. The needles of the pines crunched underfoot. In the beginning of the walk, at a little over eight thousand feet above sea level on a south-facing slope, we passed a few alligator junipers, as well as scattered oaks of various types and the occasional yucca in bloom. Higher up the ponderosas predominated, their faint scent of vanilla sweetening the air, and then we’d round a ridge and enter the mixed conifer of the cooler north slopes, dense and dark and fragrant with resins, the bark of the trees draped in lichens. For the last mile I labored, short of breath from cigarettes and sea-level living, until we topped out in an open meadow above ten thousand feet, where a tower rose another fifty feet in the air.

We dumped our packs against the concrete footers and climbed the sixty-five steps through a staggered series of four landings, each offering a more impressive tease than the last of what awaited on top. The view from the little glass-walled room nearly made me topple from vertigo. The Black Range ran north and south, scored by deep canyons on its east side, the most rugged country I had ever seen. The crest of the divide loomed like a bulwark blocking the view to the northwest, but in every other direction the vistas stretched for sixty, eighty, a hundred miles or more—long, open expanses of desert with scattered ramparts of rock beneath sky-island peaks. I gripped the windowsill and tried to take it all in as M.J. pointed out the distant landmarks, from the dark shoulder of the Manzanos just south of Albuquerque to the Tres Hermanas, three little pyramids marking the gateway to the Mexican border, peeking over the flinty shoulder of Cookes Peak—the Matterhorn of New Mexico, M.J. said, flashing air quotes with her fingers.

Not a bad view, huh? she said.

I’ve never seen anything like it. I think I’m already in love.

Crazy thing is you can watch all day, and it never looks the same for longer than an hour or two.

And they pay you for this.

I know. Can you believe it?

The next afternoon I walked. I felt myself drawn along the trails to the north and west, into the upper headwaters canyons of the Spirit Creek, where pink bluffs rose to chiseled turrets on the ridgetops and vultures circled lazily overhead. I meandered for hours through thickets of oak and massive contiguous stands of pure aspen whose leaves shimmered in the breeze with a sound like muffled applause. I sat and rested beneath ancient firs it would have taken three of me and my wingspan to encircle. Jays chattered and squawked in the canopy. Scat of various types dotted the trail. Muddy wallows showed where bears had recently rolled, and I held in my hands mule deer bones whose edges had been chamfered by the teeth of rodents. I put one such bone in my pocket, not really knowing why.

Back on the mountain, in the last of the day’s light, we tossed a Frisbee in the meadow below the tower. M.J. cooked dinner in an iron skillet, quesadillas with thick slices of avocado and fresh pico de gallo, heavy on jalapeños and fresh-squeezed lime. At dusk we lit kindling in the bonfire circle, downwind of the cabin, and stoked the fire with limbs gathered from the wooded edges of the meadow. We squatted on the periphery of the fire’s warmth and sipped bourbon out of plastic cups.

After a couple of drinks, I told her of my time in Albuquerque and what I had learned there. She asked a number of questions, each of which I tried to answer. We spoke quietly. She came near and placed her arm around mine and held my left hand in hers, squeezing gently in the absence of words. For a long time we were silent, our eyes drawn to the mesmerizing leap and dance of the flames, friends joined in touch and tears.

What will you do now? she asked.

I told her I didn’t know. I didn’t think I could return to New York and pretend everything was unchanged, but the next move escaped me. I knew almost immediately that Emily’s revelation had put an end to my desire to learn more about his life, at least any more than was locked away in my own memory. I couldn’t bear to think there were other skeletons leering in the closet, waiting to be discovered, if only I managed to find the person with the knowledge of the secret. Perhaps there were no more secrets. One could hope.

Some of the speculations of those who had loved him had ultimately struck me as sound, or at least plausible. Depression, sure—my aunt Ruth had suspected as much, and she was about as close to him as anyone in the end. Anguish over the breakup with his girlfriend, okay. Been there myself, not good. But a secret he carried with him most of his life, a violation of the most brutal and sadistic sort? I couldn’t wrap my mind around that one. I knew that was a cliché, but that was also it exactly: I couldn’t absorb the thought, even as it leaped out as a probable cause. I couldn’t fathom what had been done to him, how he’d lived with it, how it had changed him, what it had made him. I was already well aware that I hadn’t known him the way a brother should. Now he slipped even further from reach—a failure of imagination on my part, a failure of empathy.

I knew this much: most of my prior assumptions had been called into doubt. Everything about him became infinitely more complicated. Cracks appeared in my story of who had failed him, and how, and when. The persistent notion that it was my inability to pick up the phone and call him that led to his death—my hold on that idea, already tenuous, became untenable. In the beginning, it had been as if I couldn’t stand the thought that other factors contributed to his suicide, anything other than my failure to call him the day of it. I needed that distinction. I needed to believe I was that important to him. I had clung—far longer than a rational man would have—to the notion that my call would have been answered, and that it would have swayed him. In this way, it was never about him. It was always about me. The mind of the suicide survivor tends to be haunted by the thought that the dead passed judgment on the living, and that whatever else a suicide signifies, it can’t help but contain the message that none of the living were enough of a sustaining connection to temper the allure of self-annihilation. The news that he was raped as a boy—this brought to the surface a series of hidden truths about his death, truths I had failed, somehow, to grasp. That it was, in the end, about no one but him; that it was nothing personal, at least insofar as his family was concerned. That perhaps there was nothing we could have done differently with the knowledge we possessed at the time. That he’d hidden his pain and shame so brilliantly, so capably—an acting job of unbelievable fortitude—that we never could have known him in all his complexity, no matter how hard we may have tried. No wonder he’d become a cipher in death. He’d been in hiding all his life.

Before I left her mountain, M.J. did me a favor I could never repay. She made noises about being bored in the lookout, wanting to get out on a fire, then maybe a camp crew for a hunting outfit—if only she could find a replacement on fire watch—but I suspect she secretly made it her mission to get me out of the city. She set it up as me doing her a favor, when in fact we both knew otherwise.

No one resists M.J.’s charms for long, and certainly not her boss back in district headquarters, to whom she took our plan devised by firelight and whiskey. Toby Cash Richards was born to that country, an aspiring logger turned schoolteacher and summer firefighter who’d worked his way up to become the Black Range district FMO (fire management officer) through the sheer ballsiness of letting things burn on landscape scale, in a landscape where fire was essential for a healthy forest. He was as country as country got. He knew his way around guns and was a master with a chain saw; he hunted elk with a bow and arrow, and people I came to trust eventually told me they never saw a man on a prescribed fire run drip torches with greater efficiency and zeal. If your truck was stuck in the mud or your horse had thrown you from the saddle, you wanted him alongside you. I once saw him drink a case of beer in the course of an afternoon and evening and wake the next morning at five o’clock to cook breakfast before another day in the woods, while the rest of us slumbered or moaned, at least until the smell of bacon roused us from our mummy bags. He did nothing half-assed, drinking included, and it never seemed to impinge on his capacity for work the next day, or his ability to two-step at closing time in the Pine Knot Bar.

After rehearsing her argument with me, M.J. got on the two-way radio and told Toby she needed out. She was going stir-crazy in her tower. She needed time on a crew in the woods, wanted to see the action from another angle, up close and personal on the hot, smoky edges of a fire. She told him I needed a career change and some time to think, that I was competent with maps and binoculars, and that she’d personally train me in all the idiosyncrasies of the lookout’s tools—a ten-minute job, she said, and he laughed. She talked like a raving pyromaniac, sick of looking at fire from a distance. She knew her audience. Toby, I would learn, was nothing if not keen on fire. He respected her gumption. Eventually he buckled, said fine, he’d take a chance on a greenhorn, and when could I be back and ready for duty?

Fifteen days, it was decided. I’d offer two weeks’ notice at the paper and take the earliest Saturday flight back. I’d relieve M.J. for whatever remained of the season, no guarantees on the length of my employment, rainfall and fire danger the deciding factors.

After she’d signed off the radio, M.J. stared at me with as serious a look as she could muster.

Don’t screw this up, she said.

I told her I was so grateful I would do whatever it took to earn her trust in me.

Her face contorted in laughter.

Kidding! she howled. It’s not possible to screw up as a lookout, as long as you stay awake on the job.

I gave her a bear hug and shouldered my pack, took one last long look around the mountain I would soon call home. On my way down the trail I built a cairn on a wind-whipped ridge, in a place I felt sure no one but me would ever visit—a place as wild as the feeling in my heart—and set the deer bone inside of it.

I met Paul Gigot as I got off the elevator on my second-to-last day of work at the
Journal
.

Well, it’s been a pleasure, I said.

Yes, good luck, he said.

Now you’ll be able to hire someone who’s more enthusiastic about working on the editorial page, I said.

We’ve had a change of plans, he said. Your replacement is only going to work on Leisure & Arts.

He stepped onto the elevator and threw me a little half wave, half salute.

I’d always expected I would one day be shown the door. It was some kind of miracle that I’d lasted as long as I had. Having earned my original position at the paper by means of sanitizing the truth to my advantage, I had to admire the fact that I’d been purged by my own hand. But what was I going to do about it? Rescind my resignation? Beg him to let me stay?

So long, I said, waving.

Watching over the wilderness of the Gila country, alone with the wind and the stars and the bears and the birds, day after day, night after night—eventually season after season, for more than a decade—was far from easy at first. The enforced solitude made me not just mentally but physically uncomfortable, like a snake molting its skin. All the stimulations and diversions on which I’d come to rely in the city were gone, except the whiskey I made sure to pack in on mules, with all my other supplies. Beyond that I had only myself and the landscape, nothing but time and nothing to do but watch. At long last I had a way of being in the world that didn’t feel fraudulent.

Outside was a world that dwarfed the self, and I fell hard for the country, especially those parts of it that remained wildest. The headwaters of the Gila River encompassed the first place on earth where an industrial society made a conscious decision to avoid disturbing the landscape with motorized or mechanized machines, an administrative order of the Forest Service in 1924, and it remained a harsh and forbidding landscape, unpunctured by roads, where all travel occurred by foot or by horse. Day by day the place worked its magic on me. Its harshness spoke to something harsh inside of me. Its cruelty attracted. And it was beautiful as only those pieces of the old, wild world can be, places where the ancient music of birdsong and elk bugle still plays undrowned by man and his tools. I lost myself in the manic profusion of starlight, the blinding glare of noon; I hovered in numinous mysteries, laughed like a madman at my unexpected good fortune. By staying put through all the various moods and weathers I couldn’t help but feel awe of a sort I’d previously thought unattainable, an ecstatic dissolution of the self. The place tore me down and remade me; its indifference to my cares and sorrows was magisterial and, in unexpected ways, comforting. I had believed that the streets of New York were the pinnacle of indifference to the individual human life and I had been mistaken. In the streets of New York you could always perform and at least pretend someone watched, or recede yourself into the act of watching, a necessary member of the audience for the performance all around you. Alone on a mountain there were no such luxuries.