Ours was a smallish lot right on a curve. The front yard was Dad’s hope for a lawn, scruffy until he banished play to the back yard. A few towering black-barked oaks and a “please don’t strip that” beloved paper birch tree with its fascinating white curls blessed the front yard, as well as a trio of hemlocks outside my bedroom window which scattered the streetlight across my walls at night. A couple scrubby peonies and a foundation planting of juniper struggled in front of the sunroom, and oddly placed near the public sidewalk grew a clump of barberry. Within its hollow, I founded the short-lived Prickerbush Club, consisting of me and my neighbor girl, Cindy Massenger. We held meetings when John had meetings of the club he wouldn’t let us join. Since exclusivity was our raison d’être and the prickers hurt, we swiftly disbanded.
On the north, we were close enough to read the fine print on a neighbor’s cereal box. To the south was a wider shrubby side yard which protected Mr. Massenger’s dahlias from our scuffling Keds. Best of all, right across the street from our front door was an almost private wilderness: the green effusion along Minnehaha Creek. The outdoors we could never wait to get to, the outdoors that took us to school and to Mass, took me away from the clamor and chaos of six other scrambling siblings.
The funny old barn-shape of our house always embarrassed me. It was a 1924 Dutch Colonial—a perfectly acceptable architectural style—but it sure didn’t resemble the pointy-roof houses around us or in picture books. Just one of the ways our family wasn’t like others. Ours was the only mother who didn’t drive. She said she was nervous “propelling two tons of steel down an avenue,” failed her test three times, and from then on was chauffeured—by Dad, bridge club friends, the trusty yellow cab company, eventually the Olders, and subsequently the Youngers.
(The continental divide between the Olders and the Youngers was The Little One We Lost. Born prematurely, Joseph died at nine hours old, nearly taking Mom with him. Mom told us later she was mad the doctors brought her back. “It was so beautiful. I was leaping from mountaintop to mountaintop.” Her glimpse of afterlife has stayed with us all. Against her doctor’s advice, she later gave birth to John, me, Jim and Ro.)
Clad in white clapboards and dark green shutters, the house sported green and taxi-gold striped awnings in the summer, eye-pleasing till they grew tattered. One day they were gone and never replaced.
If it’s fall, Pogo and Tom are horsing around with sloppy soap and squeegees to the rise and fall of the play-by-play of the Golden Gopher college football game. While they wash and put up the tricky storm windows, we Youngers are raking, jumping in and burning the leaves, the blue-smoke smell dear and elusive, like memory itself.
No need to use the brass knocker with the little peep-door in it (The Wizard Is In!) Come in, hang your coat in the little closet. Or throw it on the couch with ours. Mom’s at a luncheon anyway.
There’s Copper Jesus, hanging on His Cross hanging on the wall. So sad. Then Palm Sunday fronds crisp like cornflakes behind Father Dudley’s house blessing. We’re lucky to have priests to help us renounce Satan, who tries to get us if he can. On the table below, monkey-pod pineapple holding rosaries, bobby pins, Monopoly top hat, and never-used keys to our never-locked doors.
This is my staircase I flew up and down. Really flew. It’s my first memory. Then again and again, which I wish I could teach you. But no one believed me. So I forgot how. Even watching Peter Pan, I never can fly to Neverland.
Montana 2014, Day One: Loading Up
My little brother Jim found his Neverland thirty years ago in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness. It’s the zenith of his year to mount a horse and head in with a son or two, a nephew, good friends and good whiskey.
After our brother John dies in February, Jim invites me and Ro to join him in July, which is how I ended up here in the parking lot of my Missoula hotel, hunk by chunk, hoisting with his boys a circus of duffels, backpacks, stuff sacks, tubs, coolers, and the deadweight of two folded hundred-pound river rafts into a rusting trailer hitched to his son Mike’s SUV.
Day after tomorrow, we’ll drop it all at the outfitters. They’ll bundle and strap it on mules, pack it thirty-two miles into “The Bob,” pile it on a distant rocky beach where we’ll retrieve it after our own day-long horseback ride. Hooves are the only way to get to the South Fork of the Flathead River. The most remote place in the lower forty-eight. My heart rate is rising from more than exertion. I’m really going to camp seven nights in wilderness? Thank heavens for both those Girl Scout overnights. Maneuver a river raft? Lucky I had that hour on an inner tube on the Delaware.
Why am I doing this? Threat holds no appeal for me. I sit out high-risk stuff—skydiving, rock climbing, downhill skiing—I had enough scares growing up, thank you. I want my life to pass before my eyes just that once, when it’s supposed to, right there at the end.
“This is not that,” Jim had assured me. He could hardly be more different than my brother John. Both railed against bullies, but Jim’s never been one. He fights them in court. Puffy-eyed and hawk-nosed from poring over depositions and briefs, building cases for the underdog—medical malpractice, workman’s comp, domestic violence—his is the kind, fervent face of a saint carved into medieval stone, and his manner could coax a cat out of a creamery.
“It’s a float, not a raft trip. River’s low, end of July. Glide through the spectacular country. Water so clear you could cry. Rock gardens. I’ll teach you fly fishing. It’s so remote the fish practically come up and shake your hand.”
Sumptuous visions of “A River Runs Through It” arise, but the real allure runs deeper. Whenever he talks about the backcountry, Jim’s eyes sparkle like wet agate. I’ll never really know my dear loquacious brother unless I go “back” with him. I’m sixty-two, he’s sixty. John died at sixty-five. If not now, when?
And consider the rest of the intrepid band: our beloved little sister Ro (love being with her), Jim’s grown sons Mike and Jack, our brother Tom’s son Don, with his two kids and their cousin—all people I want to know better. All kind hearts with good senses of humor. And everybody else has loads of wilderness experience. The beauty. The challenge. The family. Why not?
Had I known all this trip would entail—the blood, the tears, the horror—would I have said yes?
•••
In the hotel parking lot, Jim instructs me to “fine-tooth-comb” my suitcase.
Good Boomer that I am, I’ve procured the right equipment: well-made sunglasses, wicking shirts, pants that zip to shorts. Teeny travel towel. Compressible pillow. All-purpose camp soap to wash hair, self, dishes and laundry. Oh, and a tiny set of watercolors for idle hours. Only thing New York couldn’t provide was the mysterious item “bear spray.”
“Eliminate anything unnecessary. Rest goes in this dry bag,” he says, holding out one of the ostensibly waterproof nylon bags in which all belongings will be secured.
“I’ll leave my lipstick, but everything else was on your packing list. Except you forgot towels. I got this.”
I produce my handy little foldable quick-dry towel.
“We have towels, you won’t need it.”
“But it folds into nothing.”
“Nah, you don’t need it. Or that—we have plenty of bug spray. Leave the pillow, just use your sweater.”
“Oh.” My crest falls a bit. Okay. Rough it, girl.
•••
All loaded up, we breakfast at The Stone of Accord, an Irish restaurant. According to legend, ancients sealed their contracts, marriages, and other agreements by shaking hands through a hole at the top of the freestanding stone. We grip and grin through their replica.
Full of pancakes, laughter, and accord, we drive to the trailhead, where we’ll meet up with Ro, camp for the night, and head out at daybreak on horses.
Holland