Alexis Smith - Marrow Island

Carey doesn’t know that I go to the lookout, though he could track me, if he wanted. I’m reckless. I bring only enough food and drink to satisfy my afternoon appetite. I make balls of peanut butter and crunched-up cereal — Grape Nuts on the outside keep the balls from sticking together in the baggie, a trick one of the rangers’ wives taught me. I pack a thermos of tea and the metal water canister I found when I was up at the lookout one day. Some previous tenant left it there; his family name was written in faded black marker on the side: Goodkind . A providential name. Or maybe it’s just a reminder to only drink the right water. The good kind . I pack the tablets to kill the protozoa when I fill it up in the stream.

Carey takes me on day hikes through the forest on his days off. Out to the lookout and back down the other side of the ridge, nearer the river, and back up to the logging road. We did this several times, until I was familiar enough to take the trail by myself when Carey was at the station. Carey knew I was going out, but he didn’t know how often I became disoriented. ( Lost . Say it. Lost .) The first time was after a night of late-season snowfall, in March. I sat on a mossy stump in a clearing drawing a map in the snow, trying to visualize myself from above, high in the clouds, see the whole forest and the river, the logging roads, the stone chimney and whitewashed clapboard of the decommissioned guard station we were living in, the red roof of the ranger station miles away, where Carey was probably heating up leftovers in the microwave for his lunch. There seemed to be three trails, all headed into three plausibly familiar clusters of trees, though I knew that there was only one trail, really. Only one was actually the path that looped back to the logging road, then back down to the Forest Service lane just up from our cabin. When creative visualization failed, I stood and headed up one path, thinking it must be the one, only to trudge into deeper and deeper snow until I was waist-high in a wintering thicket of huckleberry. I followed my footsteps back to the clearing, and by then it was late afternoon and the light was faint behind gathering clouds. I realized I would have to follow my footprints to get back to the cabin. So I did. It seemed so simple, really, just going back the way I came. Following my own footprints is still the most reliable way back home.

Carey said once that taking the same trail in the opposite direction is like walking on the other side of time. Everything looks different on the way back. Same trees, same stobs and snags. Same switchbacks and curves; same vistas, same fallen tree bridge across the creek. But going back the way you came, it’s just as easy to lose your footing, but it’s harder to get lost. The light shines on things you didn’t notice on the way there. The path back, it’s the story you tell yourself, afterward.

The fire lookout has windows on all sides. Built by the WPA in 1937, the hand-hewn log cabin keeps watch at 6,013 feet elevation in the Malheur Range. The cast-iron wood stove still works, but now there are also solar panels on the roof. It’s not plumbed, and there are strict rules about bodily waste and food, because of the wildlife. Black bears and bobcats, mostly, but wolves have been reintroduced on the other side of the range, and the occasional solitary males and females will split off and wander, looking for mates, looking to start their own packs. I’ve heard they don’t live long alone.

I feel safe here away from people, though I probably have plenty to fear. There’s a CB radio I don’t really know how to use and an air rifle for sounding the alarm, which makes me feel like I’m in a movie about the apocalypse. Lying on the cot, I let my mind go to the place where mushroom clouds sprout from the distant horizon. And just like that, I’m back on Marrow Island. Sister Janet leading prayer before supper. We all hold hands and bow our heads. It’s not a prayer I recognize, but it’s lilting like a song. It’s about letting go; it’s about rebirth. I open my eyes and steal glances at the others. Their cheeks are rosy from cold, damp work outdoors all morning. They look content; stoic. I close my eyes again. I smell the rich, earthy stew steaming in our bowls. The hands in mine are rough and light, like driftwood.

ORWELL ISLAND, WASHINGTON

OCTOBER 9, 2014

THE LAMP UPSTAIRS still glowed from the window of Rookwood when I set out for the village, so I walked across the lane and up the drive to introduce myself. No one answered my knocks and there wasn’t a sound from the house.

Julia Swenson died when I was in high school, and a nephew had taken over her estate for the rest of the Swenson clan, who were in Boston or New York, somewhere back east. If I had ever met the nephew, I couldn’t recall. My mother had once called him “an odd one”—some friends staying at the cottage had reported a run-in with him; he had been friendly but extremely drunk.

The curtains were drawn in all the windows along the porch. I walked around the house. There wasn’t a car in the drive, so I took my time, looking over the place. I peeked in the door of the carriage house — a half-barn, half-garage structure beyond the house. There was a small car parked inside, covered in dirty tarpaulins, though a faded red corner of the rear gleamed in the dim space. At the back door, I noticed something strange: what looked like a piece of cloth, stuck in the crack. I peered in the window: the door had been closed in haste and caught the edge of a raincoat hanging from a hook on the mudroom wall. I tried the knob — it was barely latched; the door swung open with a nudge.

Having come this far, I knocked on the door and called inside. “Hello? Mr. Swenson?” There was no response. I put one foot inside and half my body, craning my neck to see up the stairs and into the kitchen. There was a distinct odor of kitchen trash, rotting food. I pulled back, carefully closing the door.

He must have been out of town. Bachelors weren’t known for their housekeeping. Something struck me as off, but I brushed it aside. Julia was gone; it had been so many years.

I walked back down the lane to my car, feeling the house watching me with one bright eye.

Some people always left a light on when they left home, to ward off thieves.

I drove the long way round the island to the village. If Orwell Island had a primary artery, it would be Hornsea Road, which breaks off from the village’s main thoroughfare, Anchorage Street, and circles the island’s perimeter almost completely. Almost. Hornsea doesn’t actually go all the way around the island. It dead-ends by a small county park with a turnabout. But if you drive on, about twenty yards past the turnabout, the pavement gives out to pitted gravel.

Locals know that after a quarter mile of increasingly rutted road along the shore, there is an unmarked, abrupt left turn into the trees, and a hard-pack gravel road that turns into asphalt just out of sight. Up the slope the fir trees become denser, the woodland changing from straggler pines and madrones to hardy fir and hemlock and Western red cedar. The road continues for almost four miles, where it eventually meets Anchorage Street at the south end of Orwell Village with a rusted sign that says NO OUTLET. The road is old, but the asphalt is younger than I am. It follows a track that ran around the island before Orwell was even a town, back when it was a trading post for the Coast Salish people and the Europeans who came after Vancouver’s expedition. It was our shortcut, those of us who lived on that side.