Ten

Hitting the Trail

The morning on which Wayne heads into the hills is one of excitement and organized chaos. The stock truck comes at 7:00 a.m., and the guests and the wranglers pitch in with loading the horses, the saddles, tack and panniers. Meanwhile I’m in the house cleaning up from breakfast, packing up the night’s dinner, checking to see if the irrigation is turned off, if anything is plugged in that shouldn’t be, noting the ball cap and phone charger left behind by one of the guests, making sure the cats haven’t been locked inside a room. When the stock trailer leaves, everyone, including me, who will go up to help with the send-off, needs to be ready to follow. Emilie has offered to take care of Comet until I return.

This year the trailhead is the dilapidated parking lot of the Summit Lake Lodge, 392 miles up the Alaska Highway. Fifty years ago, when the roads weren’t paved and vehicles were less fuel efficient, there were lodges like this one all along the highway. Cinnamon buns and coffee were their claim to fame. Today the main building of the Summit Lake Lodge and all of the accompanying cabins, once painted a bright turquoise, have been abandoned, the paint faded and peeled, most of the windows smashed.

By the time we arrive, it’s late afternoon. The stock trailer is there, the horses inside loose but separated by gates according to who gets along with whom. They’ve been inside for nearly eight hours. They’re restless, jostling for position, the clattering of their shod feet against the metal floor amplifying the size of their bodies. Terry, the stock truck driver, opens the back door and he and Wayne, armed with halters, slip inside, then shut the door behind them. The clattering accentuates. It is as though Wayne and Terry are magicians going into a secret vault, the noise a kind of mysterious shuffling of a metallic deck, and then voila, the door opens, and one by one the horses leap out.

Please give me Hazel, is what I would pray those first few years. Please don’t give me Gataga or Tuchodi—they are humongous and way too spirited! We grab the lead ropes of the horses’ halters as they jump from the stock truck. We lead them toward a patch of trees and tie them up. Their nostrils widen, taut as rubber sealing rings, as they breathe in their new surroundings, glad to be out of the trailer but nervous, filled with a bristling energy.

After a few years, something in me said, Okay, I can do this. Gataga, I know you, and what I know is that at heart, you are a kind soul. But the act of leading a horse still feels like a trick to me, even at times a sort of showing off: See how I can handle the more energetic horses? Isn’t it something, the way they trust me? When all of the horses are out of the trailer and tied to the trunks of the aspen and spruce, we loosen their lead ropes so their heads can reach the ground to eat the flakes of hay that we break from the square bales we’ve brought. As we disburse the food, the horses whinny—Over here, over here! I’m starving!

We pitch our tents and spend the night in the old campground area, but sleep is restless. Wayne gets up several times to check the horses. Sometime near dawn—I’ve been dreaming so can’t be sure—I wake to Wayne’s hand on my thigh. It feels warm and solid, full of attention and hope, a kind of comfort edged with relief. We have not been spending time together, or, when we have, it’s been to balance books or cook dinner for the guests who’ve flowed in and out of our home.

“I wish you were coming with me,” Wayne will say, but after seven years, we both know, or should, that it’s not true. Who would stay home to keep the lawn mowed, the flowers watered and weeded? Who would relay the messages back and forth between Wayne and his clients? Who would host and feed those clients on their way up then back down the highway?

While the first leg of each summer’s expeditions has the added logistics of getting the horses—this year there are twenty-one—and their gear to the trailhead, getting guests in and out of each subsequent leg is like trying to solve a distance/time/speed problem. For example, two weeks from now, on a Thursday, Mary will drive into Rolla in her own vehicle. On Friday, John and Eric will fly into Fort St. John (45 minutes north of Rolla). On Saturday, Mary will head north to Fort St. John and pick up John and Eric at the Northern Grand. The three will travel two hours farther north to Sasquatch Crossing where they will pick up Melodie’s vehicle, which was left in the dusty parking lot two weeks prior from when the first set of guests rode in off the highway. John will drive Melodie’s vehicle and the three will convoy to Fort Nelson. On Sunday, these three, along with three more who have flown directly into Fort Nelson, will fly by bush plane into the head of the Prophet River for the second leg of the expedition. The guests from the first leg will fly out, including Melodie, and together they will drive Melodie’s and Mary’s vehicles back to Fort St. John. How will Mary’s vehicle get back to Fort Nelson?

The answer? Wayne needs me more in Rolla than on the trail.

But it isn’t just the yard and the expediting and the hosting and now Comet that keep me home. My father isn’t well. He hasn’t been for some time, but lately he seems to be getting worse.

A few years ago, the pain in my father’s hip became too much to bear, which must have been significant, because (a) my father rarely complained, and (b) he hated to go to the doctor. He finally did go, and the doctor discovered that my dad, at seventy-six, needed a hip replacement. They also discovered that his blood pressure was through the roof, and that it had likely been that way for a very long time. So along with the worn-out hip, my father had acquired congestive heart failure. In a matter of a few months he had a hip replacement and a pacemaker. These operations did not go well, and life as he’d known it—a life spent outdoors, farming and roaming the woods nearby—was over.

As soon as my father came out of his hip surgery, we could see a change. At first it was minor confusions, getting names of people mixed up. We put it down to the anaesthetic. With time, we told ourselves, he would improve. Then there were moments when he’d stop in his tracks as if he’d forgotten where he was. It happened swiftly. In what seemed a matter of weeks, he’d gone from sitting at my kitchen table, talking about politics and railroad subsidies, to forgetting how to fix a tire on his tractor. He’d always said, “Donna, if I ever get so I don’t know who I am, put a pillow over my face.”

By the summer of Comet’s wound, at the age of eighty-two, my dad was in full-blown dementia. It was getting harder for my mom to care for him. I hated to be away for more than a few days at a time. Doctors had done brain scans and confirmed that my father had, over the past few years, been having small strokes—TIAs, transient ischemic attacks—and with each one, he diminished a little more.

I lie there in the pre-dawn light, half asleep, listening to Wayne breathe, trying to imprint this moment of calm in my brain, hoping for it to become a memory that will sustain me for the next few months. I think back to our first summer together on the trail. I think of my family. I think too of the wounded horse.

It takes several hours to pack up in the morning, a slow building up to the moment when Wayne and his crew will ride off. After breakfast, the coffee cups and dishes are washed, stacked just so in the dish basin, the kettle and grills slipped into their respective storage bags, then put into the panniers. Tents and sleeping gear are laid out on tarps that will be turned into soft packs for the horses to carry. The horses are saddled, stirrups adjusted for their riders, adjusted again, demos here, demos there, the bridles put on. People make their lunches, then stow them along with cameras and binoculars in their saddlebags; they tie their rain gear and warm coats behind their saddles. With each passing day, this moving becomes more efficient. On the first day of the trail, the takeoff time is always near noon, but by the end of each expedition, the time will have shortened by several hours.

The string is packed in a particular order, having to do with which horse gets the heavier load as well as with how well behaved they are. The trick is to keep them all together, to not have one striking out before it is time. The less compliant pack horses are kept tied to trees until the end, but the others are free to mill around, their cargo swaying back and forth as they wait for Wayne to get on Bonus, to hear him say—drawing out the L—“Let’s go.” When the last horse is being packed, everyone needs to be in his or her saddle. Here is when someone might realize they need to pee or they can’t find their hat. Urgency rises.

“There’s a lot of moving parts,” Wayne says. And all those moving parts have to coalesce and move as one unit. If there’s a misstep—Wait! Kylo is still tied up!—and things pause, some of the horses will start off on their own and often in the wrong direction.

There is no time for a proper goodbye; that should have been done hours ago. Instead, it’s a quick wave and “I love you!” shouted over the backs of the horses and riders as they trot away. I watch them disappear into the trees. It takes a few moments for the quiet to descend, but when it does its weight is palpable. So much movement and so much energy and now all of it gone. The pack string and the riders are off on their adventure where, on each travel day, they will cover an average of ten miles, where even now they are discovering the trail, bonding together without me.

I stand in the empty campsite like a returnee from Oz, the place gone back to abandoned. I walk around, looking for anything that might have been left in the flurry of the pack string’s leaving. I get in the Blazer, the back seat filled with a jumble of coolers and backpacks and water bottles and the unwashed pot from last night’s chili. I turn the key in the ignition and head back home.