Leaving Russell’s early, I make a bewildering number of wrong turns in the fog. And though Erin’s still roused by the maelstrom she encountered in Russell, the mist appears to have brought back some of her self-doubt. Few fires can burn as hot as Russell’s forever. I think it’s for this reason that I am so hungry for my aging mentors. I know how they did it when they were young. But how have they managed to keep burning later into life? I want to peer at them closely, to take in the center of the fuel they are feeding into that fire.
We’re headed north to see Barry Lopez, whom I’ve known since I started writing. Where do I begin, with Barry? I don’t want to start at the beginning—him being a theology student at Notre Dame. I don’t even want to start with his books—River Notes and Desert Notes, which influenced an early work of mine, Oil Notes; nor with his classic, Arctic Dreams, the National Book Award winner, about time spent in the far north, nor another classic, Of Wolves and Men. I want instead to begin with the woman he’s married to, his second wife, Debra, one of my best friends.
I met her at a writers’ conference, the first I ever went to, Writers at Work, in Park City, Utah. Debra, like me, was a student. She was living in Arizona with her young family. She was Elizabeth’s and my age, twenty-nine, but already had four daughters: Amanda, nine; Stephanie, seven; Mary, five; and Molly, three. She had brought them to the conference, these four cherubs, each of them with her bright blond hair.
It was 1987, Elizabeth’s and my third year at the conference. We had just moved to Montana. We had grown up some, because we were no longer camping as we had when we drove out to the conference the first time, but instead had a hotel room there. This was before Park City became what it is now. When I think of Park City I instead always think of camping in the mountains, getting up early to make a campfire, cooking breakfast in that clear early cold with the sound of the creek nearby, bacon in the skillet, coffee steaming, Elizabeth wearing her big coat, and a whole life before us, none of it known.
One bright sun-filled day at the conference, Debra came up to introduce herself. She told us she felt compelled to share with us the most wonderful dream she’d had the night before, in which she and her daughters came up to visit us in Montana, and were riding horses bareback, there with us, in a green summer field.
Elizabeth and I had seen the girls racing pell-mell, four brilliant paragons of exultant childhood, splashing and shrieking in the hotel pool. These were the children who first began to make real our hopes for making a family of our own.
Well, we told Debra, you’ll have to bring them up.
The next June, Debra and her husband, Bruce, and the girls showed up in Montana, books spilling out of the van, and we hiked and camped and swam in the lake, cooked the fish we caught and swung on tire swings, played in the garden and stayed up late reading stories and talking about books. We fed horses carrots and sat the girls up on those horses, just as they had been in Debra’s dream.
How long did they stay? I have no idea. It felt like the whole summer. I watched intently the way Debra was with the girls, communicating her love to them, and the delight she took in each of them without fawning. I saw her working to strengthen them at each little opportunity. I saw her making sure they knew in every moment of their childhood they were loved, and that there was a right and a wrong. I saw her giving love and moral compass. She always put them first, and she was fed by that, fortified.
Such is the nature of the best love: inspiriting, not fatiguing. She was a wonderful mother, and we loved the girls and they loved us. Living in a fairy-tale manor, the old hunting lodge back in the dark forest, we were as exotic to them as they were to us. From that summer, I have one indelible image: a meadow, the grass already tall. There’s an explosion of daisies in the field, and whatever previous pandemonium there had been has suddenly been distilled into quietude. The girls and Debra and Bruce and Elizabeth and I are sitting in the grass and the girls are picking daisies. I can hear the rip rip rip of each green stalk being pulled, there’s no other sound, just the heavy breathing of their focused efforts and a mild breeze, and their hair brilliant, seeming in that sun almost as bright as the white of the daisies. Back in the forest, the croak or laugh of a raven.
As Debra, Elizabeth, and the girls and I began to travel the West together, I quickly became immersed in the girls’ lives, learning and embracing the code and logic of girlhood. They each went out into the bright world of the day expectant; they were magical, confident, boisterous, loving, idealistic, fierce, at different hours every day, and I dared to hope for daughters of my own.
After Debra and Bruce divorced, she moved with her daughters up to Oregon, where she eventually met Barry and the two of them got together. When that happened, Barry sent me a note, saying how much he loved her, and the girls: this family he’d stepped into. With grace, consideration, and love, he fit himself into their lives. He had endured his own divorce after a long marriage, and now his solitude of one amplified to become six.
Erin doesn’t have any idea what’s ahead of her, meeting Barry. She knows a couple of the basics—that the girls would come and spend time with Elizabeth and me in Montana during their growing-up years—but of Debra’s and Barry’s generosity, she has no clue—and we push north, back toward home.
In a strange little Oregon town—a hybrid of European mountain village, backwoods methland, and once-upon-a-time 1950s “safe” white Americana—we sit down at a brewery to talk about the menu. Salmon, of course, with a dry rub of brown sugar, thyme, salt, and garlic. We have to serve Barry and Debra salmon. From their window they can see the McKenzie River riffling through the old cedars. Barry says there is one certain date each year in September when the spawning salmon push past their house, heading up farther into the forest, as they have always done. Several years ago he went down to the river and sat waiting as he had every year, and there were no salmon. His heartbreak was beyond despair. And he waited, and waited. Finally—three days late—a wild salmon returned; and for one more year, his world was right.
Debra has insisted that she help us with the meal, and I’m thrilled. It’s been a long time since we’ve been in the kitchen together, and it will recall many great dinners, in all seasons: Thanksgiving feasts, Christmas celebrations, winter spicy stews in Tucson, venison chili and turkey enchiladas in the Yaak, grilled trout in summer. It’ll bring back the old days, when we were young and just starting out and the girls’ heads came only to our elbows as we worked in the kitchen.
There’s a recipe for sweet-potato galettes with roasted pumpkin seeds that I couldn’t resist adding into the mix. And I’ve brought another length of elk backstrap from the Yaak. Barry’s not eating red meat, but he said he’ll have one bite for ceremony—a significant acquiescence, since it’s huge for him to bend any rule.
We pull up into sun dapple, a cabin on the slope of a hill tucked back in the trees. Barry and Debra are standing outside looking at a little generator that’s been acting up, and it’s déjà vu from Gary’s.
Seeing Debra feels just like it did thirty years ago: her brightness of spirit hasn’t changed a bit. She’s the world’s most resilient person—a striver for happiness, even in the hardest of times. Barry, too, looks good. A little pale and maybe a little worried, but happy. It’s good to see him, and while he doesn’t look his best, he doesn’t look like he’s carrying inside him what he’s carrying, either. His prostate cancer is spreading to his bones, and he’s had to be conservative in expending his energies.
There’s a nice new stack of Douglas fir logs, orange and sweet-scented, flanked by a hatchet and a few bright chips of fresh-cut kindling beside a large stump, and I want to ask Barry whether he’s well enough to be cutting and splitting his own wood—as if that’s one of the most fundamental arbiters of health there is. But I say nothing, and he and Debra take us over to her beautiful new writing studio. It looks like something from Architectural Digest: a wooden deck, glass doors and big west-facing windows, lovely blond fir floors, a desk and a little kitchen, a tiny bathroom with a tile floor, and a small bedroom. All a writer needs here is time.
In addition to teaching at a low-residency writing program in Seaside, Oregon, Debra is an award-winning journalist and author of the beautiful memoir Live Through This. And as she was and is one of the world’s best mothers, so too is she one of the best grandmothers, to two young grandchildren, who are the same age, essentially, that Debra’s daughters were when I first met them, a fact I cannot quite comprehend.
We unload the groceries and, spying the morels, Barry and Debra ask if we’d like to go up into the woods and look for some oyster mushrooms. Of course. A nature walk. We step through the emerald ferns behind Debra’s writing cabin and into the old forest. It’s like stepping through a curtain of green. The soil is blacker here than in the Yaak. Pulpy, rotting orange mulch blazes bright amid all the green and atop that black soil. We ease deeper into the woods. On our right, a silver creek rushes, small enough that a child could jump across it. Barry says forty years ago he used to sit in that creek sometimes while writing, and now the grandchildren play in it. This is the same creek in which silver salmon surge their way up with only one thought pounding in their ancient, illuminated minds: Ascend.
Debra finds the oyster mushrooms in their typical spot, growing from the side of a fallen tree. They come and go like fireflies—they’re always around here somewhere, she says. She cuts them carefully and we carry them home in cupped hands.
“I wanted to name this Debra Creek,” Barry says, “but when I petitioned the county, they said it already had a name, that it’s called No-Name Creek.” He laughs, and this is another of the things I remember about him—his easy sense of humor. As if his mind needs uncomplicated humor after laboring long hours amid the fumes of despair. I forget how boyish and enthusiastic he can be, too. I’m sometimes guilty of thinking of him only as who he is on the page—an esteemed and moral voice in matters of mankind and nature. But he also gets as excited about fun as he does about big ideas and the burning world. Not many people know that part of him. They see the passion in his thinking and his prose, or they attend a profound lecture of his and think, Holy shit, that dude is…intense.
We’ve barely gotten back from our walk when Barry asks if I’d like to see his work space. Feeling a bit like Tom Sawyer handing off the paintbrush, I make sure it’s all right with Erin and Debra, then vacate the kitchen. The small building, like Debra’s, is elegant. I think of my own rough little cabin in the woods, a trapper’s cabin from 1903 homesteaders, which I dismantled, hauled farther into the forest, and then reconstructed, log by log, at the marsh’s edge. Barry’s, however, is the office of a board retreat. A little stove. Bright orange-red flooring and walls. There’s a special map drawer. Barry opens it and shows me maps of expeditions he’s been on. There are a lot of them, and they are all neat, none folded cattywampus, as mine are, none with crude or illegible notes. Everything in its place. There is an order in his mind that is so unlike mine that I wonder if he and I are the same species. His is a life devoted to order. How strange to know someone for so long, and yet upon deeper inquiry to discover something new about him. I knew of his rigorous internal attention to order and rightness, but having never been in his office, I had not fully realized this carryover of precision into his physical world.
I feel like I shouldn’t even be in this space. As if the whirl of my asynchrony might begin to tilt the lightbulbs in their elegant overhead tracks. I believe I could ask Barry what birds he sighted on a particular river in Alaska on a particular day forty years gone by and he would need to take but two steps to a certain filing cabinet, slide open the drawer, lift a sheet of paper from a folder, and tell me.
We wander back to the house, and when we step inside we are greeted with the Thanksgiving aroma of sweet potatoes baking. We stop in the mudroom first, where Barry slides open another drawer and shows me his letter-writing kit—folders and binders with various stamps of all different denominations. The artifacts of a craftsman who composes thoughtful physical letters, typed or sometimes handwritten in elegant script, to anyone who might write him. His attention to detail carries over even into the envelope in which he posts his return missive: choosing stamps appropriate to the message.
Amanda, Debra’s oldest daughter, arrives, driving in from Ash Valley—juggling work and school and the children. I haven’t seen her in a couple of years. She’s glowing, and she leans into the kitchen chores with a grace identical to her mother’s. They work on their dishes but also look over Erin’s and my shoulders at the recipes spread everywhere, knowing what we’ll need before we can ask for it. How many meals has Debra prepared in this kitchen? She glides through the narrow space, never in a rush, but with confidence and authority. And while part of this is her disposition, I recognize that part of it is the hardwiring of deep experience from being such a great mother to so many for so long.
Barry comes back in with the day’s mail, which includes a letter from a friend whose prostate cancer, having been in remission, has returned. He asks again about Gary Snyder’s health. Debra, who’s helping Erin tear the leaves in the enormous salad, is quiet for a moment, and then says only, “Mortality has entered our home.”
In one corner, at the far end, by a window and the screen porch—as out of the way as possible, characteristically reserved and observant—Erin is now working with the morels, and then a decadent old-school ginger chocolate cake made with buttermilk, applesauce, vanilla, Dagoba chocolate, cinnamon, and a lot of ginger. The length of elk backstrap, muscular as an anaconda, sits on a plate, glinting with the light olive-oil sheen, coarse salt, and newly crushed black peppercorns that adhere to it. It will go into the cast-iron skillet last, along with some of Erin’s morels, and plenty of butter—and all around us, the unassembled pieces become something recognizable as a meal.
There’s also a spectacularly beautiful cilantro salad, which Amanda is working on: two full cups of cilantro, parsley, spinach, a full cup of tarragon, a pile of basil and arugula, and a cup of pomegranate seeds, glistening. And for my old mentor, the comfort-food standby, the jalapeño potato gratin, with sweet potatoes and cream, garlic and sage. Next to the salad, the centerpiece—sweet-potato galettes, the baked sweet potatoes perched on top of an egg white–glazed puff-pastry square, with sour cream, goat cheese, red-hot chili pepper, garlic, parsley, and toasted pumpkin seeds. Last, king salmon two ways: two giant silver-scaled slabs, one with the traditional grilling recipe, the dry rub, the second baked with a hazelnut crust, and a salsa of red bell peppers, chives, garlic, lemon, apple-cider vinegar, cucumber, a spot of Dijon, papaya, mango, red onion, red chili peppers, a splash of Thai fish sauce, sugar, and some more ginger.
The kitchen is filled with people and maybe it’s an hour too early, but a bottle of wine is opened anyway. Barry observes, delighted. From time to time he goes back to his cabin, then returns, watches the meal coming together, smells it, tastes a kale chip.
We talk about books and writers. I’m embarrassed to say here what I haven’t read. At least with Gary, there was enough obscurity involved to avoid some embarrassment—of course I haven’t read that nineteenth-century ethnobotanist—but the names I am hearing today are shamefully familiar. Some are Debra’s favorites I’ve been hearing her talk about forever. J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. And I’ve long heard Barry extol the work of Jim Crace, but have read only one of his novels. I also forgot how much Debra loves Ian McEwan. It can be wonderful but also daunting to “discover” a writer with such a broad and deep oeuvre—Do I really want to spend the rest of my life reading this writer? Erin pauses in her cake-making and takes out her notebook, writes it all down. Some, Debra and I share: James Galvin’s The Meadow, Harry Crews’s memoir, A Childhood. Larry Brown’s novel Joe.
The daylight is softening, four people now doing the work of one. As the long early-summer shadows fall, we’re almost finished. The galettes are ready for the final baking, the cake is being frosted, the salmon rubbed, the gratin waiting in its heavy dish. Stephanie, Debra’s second daughter, arrives, a box of fireworks, all big-smile dazzle and glamour, back from Mexico City and on her way to France. She and Amanda joke the way sisters do. It seems like just a moment ago I held them in the crook of each arm, carrying them across creeks in the Yaak.
The slabs of fish go on the grill. Stephanie comes out and stands in the dusk with me as the blue smoke seeps from beneath the lid. The summer evening is warm, and so dark now that all I can really see is her brilliant long hair and the horizontal white stripes on her dress. I think we make some small acknowledgment about our sorrow over the way things turned out for Elizabeth and me. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s impossible to articulate, and instead we just stand there, feeling our long love for each other, and the knotted ache of loss, and say it without saying anything at all, while the sweet smoke of the fish washes over us.
I’ve been working off a crude but complicated recipe schedule, a homemade spreadsheet, in hopes that all the dishes might stand a better chance of being ready at the same time, and the oil- and butter-spattered notebook paper has served us well. We’ve worked backward from the desired dinnertime, seven-thirty, in order to avoid keeping Barry up too late. Only the elk is left to cook, and as Erin and Amanda and Stephanie are setting the table, I heat the iron skillet and drop the backstrap into it, searing it in butter and oil. A popping mist arises, and in those splendid juices I sauté the rehydrated morels, plump little butter-sponges that they are.
I carry the elk to the long table in the dining room and it sits there on a plate, steaming, a rolled-up core of muscle, waiting to offer us its explosion of taste. First, though, Barry wants to say a prayer. We hold hands around the table while he presents his graceful thank-yous. The joined current of us circulates around the table, and then we release one another’s hands and behold the perfect meal.
Barry takes his ceremonial bite of elk, as do then the rest of us. He says he can taste the strength in it, the first red meat he’s eaten in over a year. The two salmon are also delicious, and disappear quickly. The galettes are magnificent, a big hit. We nailed it, Erin will say later, and I’ll know that it’s true.
The advice unspools. One of Barry’s concerns that evening: corporate ownership of media, and the need to work outside it. “It is the nature of most writers to have manners, but they must also have opinions,” he says. “You must have drive.” I remember being impressed by a book he did in 1991, about the legacy of Christopher Columbus, The Rediscovery of North America—an essay, really, but a statement, by its publication as a book, that the material was worthy of enduring; was more than doctor’s-office reading. Barry wrote it at the height of his acclaim—right after his National Book Award–winning Arctic Dreams—yet published it with a small press, the University of Kentucky. Not the best business advice, perhaps, but the act resonated with me as I was beginning to write and publish books that were also intentionally noncommercial.
He also talks about how collaboration has helped his imagination, as when he did a children’s book, Crow and Weasel, with the illustrator Tom Pohrt. Erin is rapt throughout, as if everything Barry is saying tonight is water in the desert of her fears and thirsts.
It’s late, finally. Like a good guest who has excused himself to give his hosts some breathing space, time returns. Erin cuts her massive chocolate cake, and we serve it with a new round of wine. We agree it’s a good time for Western writers, and all writers commited to social and environmental justice, to band together with a unified voice. We also agree it would be hard to pull off in these warp-speed days of fragmentation, and with so many of the elders aging (W. S. Merwin) or gone: Matthiessen, John Graves, and Welty, somehow long gone.
“I get what you are doing,” Barry says. “I like it.” He thanks us for the meal and, because it’s later than we’d aimed for, he says his goodnights.
After he has gone to bed, as charged and stimulated as we are, the rest of us set about the remaining work: our mountain of dishes.
I failed at my marriage. I tried as hard as I could but failed nonetheless. And the fact that the standards were high does not diminish the heart-wrenching feeling of not reaching them. I recall several lines from Cormac McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, in which the small-town sheriff who prides himself on never taking shortcuts runs up against a battle he can’t win: “He’d felt like this before but not in a long time and when he said that, then he knew what it was. It was defeat. It was being beaten. More bitter to him than death.”
But in order for something to be a gamble, you have to be prepared to lose. If there was not an element of chance involved, it would be something else. I don’t know what, exactly, but not life.
Wood rat that she is, Erin forgoes Debra’s beautiful space and sleeps out on the porch under the pinpricks of stars that find their way down through the cedars, with the creek rushing past. In the morning, Debra insists on making us breakfast, and we in turn insist on getting out of their way as quickly as possible. There is little that is more injurious to a writer than the disruption of routine. The hard-sought flow is interrupted and one can sometimes spend days recapturing the mental preparedness that dissipates with a single conversation carried on one sentence too long.
One more cup of coffee, we tell them, and then we’ll be gone. But if they feel despair at the loss of the invisible thing, they do not show it. Hugs, again, and then we’re on the road once more, for the final leg to get Erin back to Ashland. As we draw closer, she points out the hills of her home, places where she’s live-trapped—certain ridges where she has caught fishers, martens, skunks, flying squirrels, and weasels, and places where, earlier in the year, she hunted and found the morels. Erin has spent so much time setting the animal traps with enough care that her quarry will not be injured. And she lines the inside of the box traps with moss so the flying squirrels will not succumb to hypothermia.
It’s valuable for a writer to know something beyond the architecture of nouns and verbs, so she can then more easily traffic in metaphor. Knowing the logic of marten runways in the forest will help you write better sentences. Doug Peacock says that hunting is the act of organic intelligence that has most shaped us as a species.
When we arrive back in Ashland, Erin’s husband, Pat, has a pizza waiting for us. We try to tell him how it was, but become lost immediately in a sea of adjectives. We keep using the word intense. Pat stares at both of us as if we’re stoned. I can tell Erin just wants to go straight to bed and sleep for a week, but this homecoming is part of the journey too.
“May I take a picture?” I ask. I’m pleased to record the image of the two of them sitting shoulder to shoulder on the front steps of their home, an old house with a leaning picket fence, and furry Kiowa at their feet, as I once sat with Elizabeth for a hundred such pictures, with any of half a dozen of our dogs over the years.
In the old days I would have pushed on, ceaseless and indefatigable, but lately I’ve been experimenting with moderation, and so I’ve taken Pat and Erin up on their offer of a room. I sleep in Erin’s office, awakening again at four a.m. and walking out to the empty car and pushing on, navigating the dark and empty neighborhood.
I’ve got thirteen or so hours to go—up over more mountains, across more high-plains desert, and then more mountains, more forest: winding my way home, where Lowry, back from college, is holding down the fort. There’s a message from her on my voicemail, saying she has gotten me an early Father’s Day present, a kitten, to keep me company when she goes back to school. I don’t really like cats, but it’s sweet that she doesn’t want me to be alone.
I’ve already got two hundred miles behind me by the time the darkness begins to pale, the old miracle yet again. In that last light before dawn, when the road seems darker than the dim sky, a giant mountain lion sails across the road in two leaps, passing through the headlights like something imagined, here so briefly and then gone, as if it is not of this world.