The Past Is A Feeling, Not A Place

Photo by Bob Hosea. This is the view of the drainage from the top of the bluff. See more of Bob’s fine photos of the North Fork Trail here.

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The Recovering Academic

is a series of essays, interviews, and craft resources. For the past two months, I’ve been guiding readers through Willa Cather’s My Ántonia on Fridays and occasionally sharing Tuesday posts that flow from those discussions.

At the end of Book III in My Ántonia, Jim Burden leaves the University of Nebraska for Harvard. We know from the introduction that he will marry a wealthy New Yorker and spend the rest of his life traveling the West, never quite able to come home. His story reminds me of Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory and Tara Westover’s Educated. Indeed, there are echoes of Jim’s story in my own memoir, Down from the Mountaintop.

Today’s essay first appeared in slightly different form in Ascent.

The Past Is A Feeling, Not A Place

There may be no road home, no trail branching from the present to the dim lane of the past, but a few of the landmarks remain. A glacial lake. A rock face towering over a valley. A cascade flanked by black stones. The images surface in my thoughts like points on a mountaineer’s map. I am always climbing in these reveries, groping between footholds that time has nearly erased.

Even in crowds, I often wander among the shadows and angles of the Cabinet Mountains in northwestern Montana, recalling those peaks rising like a prehistoric spine over Libby and the Bull River valley. The alpine lakes are no more than a day hike from the highway, yet it is remote country. The dirt roads leading to the trailheads are pocked with potholes and ruts. A truck must crawl over exposed rocks, and a small car must weave among them to avoid piercing its underside. The trails begin in creek bottoms shaded by cedar and fir. Thickets of alder brush and devil’s club thrive in the dark hollows, where streams tumble through rocky channels and pools.

The North Fork of the Bull River is the landscape of my childhood, where small things have accumulated weight over the years. A wriggling fish may leap into memory as an image of delight, or I might recall the chatter of the creek at night and recognize it as one of my totems of peace. But I also remember my father creeping into the trees one day and hiding himself as I watched my red lure glittering along the bottom of a pool. Suddenly I felt his absence. The panic of that day is with me still, my thudding pulse and the sudden shout I raised in alarm. I shouted because I felt tricked, the way an onlooker leaps back from the magician’s table when he is baffled by the game.

My father laughed as he emerged from the brush, one of his many pranks. I learned to keep him in sight at all times and never give myself wholly over to dreams, lest I miss out on the crackling fire, the crisping fish, and the warmth of my mummy bag as the creek rumbled outside. As I lay in the moldy tent that night, my head at my father’s feet, I listened to the water as a hunter waits for the snap of a branch.

—

The North Fork trail climbs out of the creek bottom for several miles, running along the shore then angling a hundred feet up the bank to skirt thickets of brush. Needles and ferns carpet the forest floor beneath the cedar canopy. Mossy rockslides turn emerald among the springs.

As the trail winds up the drainage, it occasionally breaks out of the trees onto an open hillside, where the sun feels hot and the air is harder to breathe. Ephemeral streams trickle across the path. Boulders rest at odd angles on the slope.

Soon the trail opens onto a granite shelf sloping down to a pool. A waterfall drums upon the water. On the far side, the slope is a wreckage of black stones. Fir trees grow thick there on the edge of the high country, as if they know they will grow gnarled and sparse farther along. Downstream, the current tumbles through a shallow groove in the rock, where a boy can plant a hand on either side of the creek and lower himself to drink.

The path runs a few hundred yards above the waterfall through a field of tall grass and monk’s hood flowers to a fork marked by two wooden signs. One points north. The other indicates the way to Snowshoe Lake along the western drainage. At this point the route becomes a dashed line on the map. Jackpots of fallen trees litter the last three miles. Often the path disappears altogether or merges with game trails that fade among the thimbleberry bushes.

The land does not grow wilder here. It seems so only because no one has trimmed the brush or cleared the trees. A hiker can step away from the tread anywhere along the creek bottom to discover that the chaos at the end of the trail has been there all along.

—

I was twelve or thirteen when my father led our first family outing to Snowshoe Lake. He had heard that many seasoned hikers turned back before reaching the lake, discouraged by the overgrown trail. Those who persevered through the brush and nettles sometimes lost heart at the foot of a cliff that rose hundreds of feet above the drainage.

I was weary and sore when we reached the cliff. It towered above me, the creek tumbling over the rim like a strand of white hair. We climbed slowly, discovering that the rock was not sheer, stopping often to rest our burning thighs. Then we broke over the edge, wound our way through a dense stand of alpine fir, and sank down on the bank of Snowshoe Lake.

My father had decided that we would hike the round trip in one day to avoid packing tents and additional food, so we ate a hasty lunch and set about catching our limit of golden trout. He inflated a collapsible raft that he had stuffed into his pack and spent the next hour hauling fish after fish from the middle of the lake.

My sister and I thrashed along the bank, flinging our catches back into the trees. One of us would chase the fish as it danced over the rocks, and the other would retrieve the line from the branches. Our fish eluded us until they were plastered with leaves and dirt, gasping as they waited for us to finish the job.

My father’s fish met a much better end. They flew into his rubber raft, where they scarcely had time to kick before he had seized them and freed the hook. Then he knocked their heads on his knuckles until they shivered and lay still.

After a few hours, it was done. We zipped up our packs, eased our way down the rock face, and trudged the eight miles back to the car parked in the creek bottom. We told the story triumphantly for weeks.

—

The heat of conquest is not easily forgotten, and I often retraced my steps with friends as if leading them to treasure. We reduced the path to a science. I no longer stopped at the waterfall to drink. The last three miles became an annoying hack through the brush. My memory of these hikes has shrunk to the space before my feet, the next handhold on the rock face, the next fish on the stringer.

One summer before returning to college, I hiked to Snowshoe Lake for what I thought might be the last time. Three friends came along. Jamie was the eldest in her family, a girl with thick brown braids who had gained a reputation for toughness on the Forest Service timber crew. Her brother Sam was a friendly sort whose laughter often seemed apologetic. Les, the youngest, was a mischievous kid whom I liked. He was restless and sometimes fell in with smokers who loitered at the picnic tables at school.¹

We passed several parties on our hike through the creek bottom, nylon tents littering the ground. Some campers had pitched their tents so close to others that they must have heard the scrape of each other’s nylon bags in the night, as neighbors hear creaking bedsprings through apartment walls. We felt that something had been stolen from us, though we had no right to claim possession of a place open to all. The more important sadness, as I see it now, was our sense that the wilderness spell had been broken. We ought to have recognized that all of us were once children camped in the creek bottom, discovering new touchstones for wonder.

Jamie led us on to the rock face, where we picked our way up the slope and crept through the trees fearing what we would find. Three groups remained camped along the north shore. Pocketknife graffiti scarred many trees. We skirted the campers and found a site on the east end of the lake below a glacial basin. The night was clear, and we fluffed our bags beneath a dome of stars.

The next day we explored the slope above the lake, sliding over the glacier and peppering each other with snowballs. Jamie wandered off on her own, flitting among the rocks like a pica. At midday Sam and I worked up the nerve for a swim. Les sat on a ledge, tossing pebbles on us. We gasped in the frigid water and cursed him as he laughed. Over lunch we debated about climbing the peak and staying one more night. But the crowd had deflated our spirits, and we decided to hike out that afternoon. When we reached the car, I felt that I would never return. Part of the lake had died in my imagination, and I wished only to mourn.

Our trip did not deter Les from returning to scale the peak. He lost his footing on a snowfield above the lake and slid into a crevasse, where he lay all night before a helicopter crew could reach him. He survived for many years, bedridden, his wrists twisted upon his chest. When I saw his curled fingers, I grieved for the memory of a boy crouched on a ledge above the water with pebbles in his hands.²

—

The last leg of the North Fork trail runs beneath a heavy fir canopy. The path is so hard to find among the fallen trees that hikers walk this final stretch with their heads to the ground and an arm shielding their faces. After struggling through the undergrowth for nearly an hour, a break rises among the trees. The rock walls narrow as the cliff looms ahead.

A clear path emerges at the edge of the treeline, winding through a field of fireweed and nettles to the base of the bluff. This is the turning point for some hikers. The mountain face is too steep for horses. There is no sign of Snowshoe Lake, and the crags looming over the valley promise a hard passage. The stakes are higher here. It is the moment when the hike becomes a serious climb, when wandering must turn to searching.

—

I woke to torrential rain on the morning of my last return. It had been a cool summer for eastern Nebraska with many thunderstorms and constant cloud cover. The heavy skies intensified my yearning for the mountains. I longed for the open road, the familiar stretch through the Black Hills, the first mountain pass above Butte, and the foothills outside Missoula.

Rain drummed against the windows, jarring me awake. Propped on one elbow, I could see the asphalt glistening beneath a streetlight. My partner Barbara slept by my side, her face hidden beneath her raven hair. In a few moments I would wake her, and we would dress in the dark before dashing out to the car. On the northbound interstate she would turn to me, her crescent earrings glinting like the pavement, and say that she had a bad feeling about this. I would reply that omens only came true if we let them linger in our thoughts. She would turn toward the window and pretend to sleep as the tires hissed over the road.

Two days later, after rushing through the family hellos, we set out for the North Fork trail. It was late July and mild. The cedars cast long shadows over the car as we rolled up to the trailhead. The grass around the cul-de-sac looked undisturbed, as if no one had parked there for some time. The creek churned in the distance.

I joked with Barbara about her premonition the day we left. “So you only believe in good omens?” she asked, and I had no reply.

My pack held a tent, our two mummy bags, and food enough for three days. Barbara carried her camera and the water filter, snapping photos as she went. We wandered through the creek bottom, stepping through the ruins of the ephemeral channels, lingering among the springs. At the waterfall near the trail’s end, we filled our bottles and sat for many minutes in the sun.

I kissed her then in the joy of sharing the place. She was lying on the sun-baked rock as I bent over her with the pounding waterfall at my back. We would have to fight through the brush farther on, and I wanted to remember this.

Silence between two people is like the land that surrounds them — sometimes as bright as the alpenglow, other times as cold as stone. Somewhere beneath our silence at the edge of the North Fork trail lay Barbara’s bad premonition, the millstone that had been sinking through our chests for the entire trip. As I lay for a moment beside her, thinking of my stolen memory, I wondered if we could simply camp along the trail before the creek became wilderness. I could gather lupine and paintbrush from the hills, wave the flowers before her, and exorcise the doubt. We could set the timer on her camera and pose before the waterfall like everyone else did. We could make our own omens. Everyone has a threshold for uneven ground, a tolerance for chaos that must finally break. I wondered if pushing on up to the lake would carry us over.

Before long, we stood and continued on our way. I let my hands trail through the grass and monk’s hood as we neared the fork to Snowshoe Lake, and then we crossed the boundary where the path turns to dashes on the map. Barbara knew about this stretch, so it was no surprise when I stopped to peer in all directions for a break in the brush. She began to look for the tread herself, sometimes wading into the thimbleberry bushes and calling out to me as she stumbled upon it. The berries bled on our hands as we ate them. I wiped a streak across Barbara’s cheek. She made a fist at me and laughed.

We stopped to roll down our sleeves at the edge of the nettle field. The bluff menaced ahead. I glanced at Barbara and saw that she was afraid. “Why don’t you lead the way?” I said. “We’ll follow your pace.”

It was slow going. Barbara stopped often to catch her breath. The pack straps bit into my shoulders, and I was glad of the rest. Barbara stood with her back to me and spoke no more of her fear as we climbed out of the valley. We gained the rimrock in silence, wandering through the alpine fir to the edge of Snowshoe Lake.

I had not realized how desperate I was to return until I sank down on the bank and looked out over the water. The sky was clear, as it had been when I first dashed around the shore with my sister, chasing fish through the underbrush. My mother had struggled up the cliff with us that day, and I remembered that she had waited for us here, on the outcropping where I sat, with her jeans rolled up to her knees. She rested while we fished, gazing up at the crags. I realized that I was now doing the same. I wondered if my mother had found an answer there among the ridges and the talus slope of the basin, or if she was simply content with the quiet.

Barbara was delighted with the lake. She shrieked as she dipped her feet into the water, plunging in up to her knees. I undressed and chased her through the shallows. We soon lay on the rocks, our chests heaving and the chill of snowmelt echoing in our feet as we drifted off to sleep.

The temperature dropped below freezing the first night as we huddled in our bags. A herd of mountain sheep crept up to the tent, waited silently until one of us stirred, then thundered away over the rocks. Our hearts raced for minutes afterward. We groped for one another in the dark, slipping our frigid hands beneath our undergarments. Even with two thermal layers apiece, our noses and toes remained cold. We made love like a glacier sliding over scree.

At dawn I built a roaring fire and brewed coffee. We split an avocado, spooning the flesh from its wrinkled skin. Our spirits lifted as day broke over the crags, and we spent the morning wandering among the snowfields above the lake. I discovered later than Barbara snapped several shots of me while my back was turned.

The mountain sheep regarded us from the rim of the basin. A pica surfaced among the rocks, holding its paws in tiny fists against its chest before diving back into a crevice. Buttercups and shooting stars dotted the talus in little islands of soil. We followed one of the feeder streams to its source, where the water bubbled out as if Moses had struck the rocks with his staff.

By noon we had scaled the ridge and could see the mountain sheep leaping down along a granite wall. The land fell away from us in waves. We slathered our faces with sunscreen and napped for an hour on the summit, three hundred yards from the crevasse where Les’s head was battered by his fall. I imagined him lying there all night, bloodied in the throat of the mountain. I wondered if the part of him that no longer looked out at me from the vacant pools of his eyes had vanished here or somewhere overhead as the helicopter sped off to Spokane at sunrise. I sat up suddenly, as if gravel might fall from the sky, the way it had as Sam and I swam beneath the ledge where Les sat with his handful of stones.

Drawing my knees up to my chest, I looked down on the lake. I could make out the silhouettes of boulders below the surface and the muted edge of the peninsula angling into the depths like a great sternum.

Barbara lay nearby, stroking my back. As I turned and stretched out beside her, we gazed at one another like flies through our shades. Her camera sat between us with its stolen memories. We would lie like this again after nightfall as the mountain sheep stepped cautiously up to our tent and crashed away through the brush. We would caress each other to the sound of cracking sticks, our bodies shielded by layers of underclothes. But now we lingered for a few more moments on the spine of the Cabinets, the sky wheeling overhead as we prepared for the descent. A breeze cooled our cheeks and sank over the ridge like the thought of our love slipping away.

—

Some mornings, my head still heavy with sleep, I imagine my chest as a granite basin and my head a lone crag cloaked by a misting rain. Down there among the boulders is all I have lost along the North Fork trail. There also lies my fate and the end of these days.

But time brightens as I wake. Even in the slow decline of autumn, I might happen upon a pile of burning leaves, catch a hint of the campfire there, and feel a sudden rush of happiness, like a man who has just broken out of the trees at the water’s edge.

Photo of Snowshoe Lake by Bob Hosea.

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1. I have changed the names of my friends — and, later, my partner — to protect their privacy.

2. Les died a few years ago and is now buried in a forest graveyard just a few hours’ walk from the Canadian border. As his obituary reads, he was “laid to rest in Boyd Hill Cemetery, under his beloved NW Montana sky, amongst a stand of beautiful old-growth Yaak larch.”