Been here a week now. Nineteen days into the new year, nothing written. Which can’t hold a candle to the latter half of last year’s lack of production—a year characterized by my own dazzling passage into the symbolic order as a taxpayer-subject. Since which reluctant decision I’ve been smothered in the embrace of a terseness that is half the fetter of exigency and half bitter self-lacerating ripening-through-silence gagged by an overlay of stoic physical culture. Many thoughts have rushed past the broken weir of my pen and my facility for scribbling with it, most of them rubbishy, some worth preserving, all irrecoverably downstream of where I stand now.
But to be alone for 40 days in a snowbound cabin nudging the hocks of a fine northerly articulation of the Rocky Mountains calls for mending the weir, if only on the strength of the regret I anticipate feeling should I fail to, ahem, capitalize on the situation. Without further ado then, I will marshal my lobes and extract from them what intellectual labor I can menace forth.
The cabin sits 16 miles to the east of the Nez Percé Pass on the way into Idaho. My mail is postmarked to the town of Darby, 20 miles away. I have registered for rural delivery at the Darby Post Office, and they deliver. To get here, you turn onto West Fork Road 4 miles south of Darby and follow it for 14 miles, then turn onto Nez Percé Road. After a mile or so you’ll round a rising bend and see a rank of mailboxes come into view at the head of an old logging road. I am making my home for the winter just a few twists up the hill. The house sits near the top of what is neither a neighborhood nor a village, but a small cluster of homes that happen to have been built in an upland wilderness because of the road and whatever constellation of history and property rights and concessions and dreams--and follies. The road cleaves in two what would be the largest contiguous wilderness area in the country if it were not for the road itself. As it is, the area north of the road is administered as the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, and that to the south as the Frank Church River of no Return Wilderness. Auspiciously, I live and have so far conducted all my wilderness activity to the north of the road.
Let’s unpack the term cabin, as used by me, above, by way of framing. The house, in reality, is an artfully masked and modified trailer home. I like to think of it as a bird: The trailer forms the original flightless body or fuselage, while the master bedroom and garage were added on to elevate the fowl (originally a foul fowl because flightless, formless, low to the dirt and scum) into the realm of airborne squiredom. I, who rent, am a mere apprentice to the squire’s idle craft, but the cabin is attractive and would not look out of place in a rustic lifestyle-hawking magazine aimed at those who like to think they have or are thought of as having done well for themselves. The bird’s plumage of hewn log-halves is quite attractive too. There are a number of mills and workshops along the main road that specialize in log homes, and presumably they also provide log siding that can be used to make a structure resemble a log home. Please note that I wrote the above with a forward view to your tacit agreement to the disclaimer that I in no way wish to actually deride those who dwell in trailers, nor in actual log homes, but that the above was penned merely in the way of harmless mirth.
The cabin is well appointed inside and I feel that I lack for nothing: There is a full kitchen, three bedrooms (two in the fuselage, one in the north wing), a living area that is contiguous with the kitchen and which centers around a bulkyblack hole of a wood-burning stove, and two bathrooms. I inhabit the bedroom in the wing, also known as the master bedroom, which I should mention is a bit malapropos since I can’t seem to consistently warm it to the point where I feel properly masterful. Nothing thwarts a man’s authority quite as much as having to mince around the bedroom in the morning, fumbling for socks, shivering, groaning and cursing with dread. I do have a roommate: Darren. He is going to be gone for the next several weeks, so I hereby eviscerate his link from the narrative-depictive sausage chain. On the authority, if you should ask, of absolute proclamation. More on him below, in other words.
What is essential to this situation is not the living alone; it is the immediate proximity to wilderness. If you were to step across the creek in the backyard and continue walking in a straight line, you would go for weeks before hitting a road or built structure. Given current conditions, it may in fact be impossible to surmount or circumvent even the first crag without ice climbing equipment and a considerable amount of gall, or desperation. And it is on this essential element, the element of the vast forest-clad spine of snow-seized mountain, that I will focus. In the weeks and months to follow, I will tell of treks, forays, follies, furies, chases and strolls--all in and through the element of the forest. I am approaching the wilderness in the fashion of an enthusiastic amateur. I make no warrants regarding the prudence of my own activities, nor about the competence with which they are undertaken. I mean for the following installments to bring you no utility whatsoever, unless it be an aesthetic or life and wisdom-living one. And who can take the measure of utility like that?
Before mentioning any concrete outdoor undertakings, a word on weather: Impressions, evolution, forecast, uncertainty, dread. More than a word, then: When I first got to the cabin in late December, the weather was cataclysmic. The 7-hour drive from Bozeman was snowy nearly the entire way, nowhere more so than on the roads approaching the cabin. It was the first time I’d had to engage the 4-wheel drive mode on Nystrom’s Pride. The driveway would have been impassable with only two spinning wheels.
Between Christmas and the 7th of January or so, the area was pummeled by a daily barrage of snow--almost a foot a day, I heard--with low temperatures to boot. Since my return on the 11th, however, most days at the cabin have climbed above freezing, and there has been no new snow. The consecutive suns arrayed on the online weather forecast have had me feeling fairly confident about mucking around in the woods until now, but the clement days will soon turn, giving way, lo, to days of howling storm and driving snow and frozen fogs. It is generally true that the winter weather here is milder than in Bozemen. Being west of the Continental Divide confers on the person so situated the moderating effects of Pacific weathers.
But let’s escape these murky abstract waters and swim! Swim, swim, swim--toward the light of the real, toward lived experience, toward living, breathing animals who’ve run afoul of one of my snares…
(To be continued)
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