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The Solace of Stones
Finding a Way Through Wilderness
By Julie Riddle UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Julie Riddle
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7686-4
CHAPTER 1
Tucson
My mother packs the last boxes in our apartment. Tucson, Arizona, 1971, a September evening, still hot. She pulls shirts from hangers, folds them with efficient intent, and stacks them on a bed beside my father's slacks and jeans. As she works she answers a string of questions posed by her three-year-old son vrroooming a toy truck across the shag carpet. She worries she'll stunt his development if she doesn't offer thoughtful replies to his patter; she doesn't consider that she wouldn't feel as drained if, now and then, she let his burgeoning vocabulary pass over her like the singsong burble of a distant stream. She glances up often to check on me, her toddler girl asleep in a playpen at the foot of the bed, chubby arms and legs splayed. A floor fan ticks and whirs, arcs a breeze across the room that cools my mother's damp forehead, flutters collars and hems, her children's towhead bangs, the flaps of cardboard boxes.
She lowers folded clothes into the boxes, rips strapping tape from a fat roll, and seals their lids, writes "Doug/Hildy — clothes" on their sides with a black marker. Earlier that day my father worked his last shift with the Tucson Police Department, and tonight he shuttles our belongings from the apartment to a U-Haul truck parked in front of the small apartment complex. Soon he will put my brother and me to bed while my mother drives to the grocery store to buy food for the road. We are moving north, to Montana. Big Sky Country. The Last, Best Place.
At the store my mother shops for whole-wheat bread, peanut butter, raisins, apples, juice — nourishing food that travels easy. She wears a yellow top, sleeveless and scoop necked, matching shorts, and her favorite toe-ring sandals. She is twenty-seven years old, petite and slim, her brunette hair bobbed and held beneath a red paisley scarf knotted at the nape of her neck. A touch of coral brightens her lips.
A grocery clerk fills two sacks and escorts my mother to the parking lot. He is around her age, maybe a little older. He passes her a bag, and she lowers it onto the backseat of a tan Plymouth Satellite sedan. It is late, around ten o'clock, the night air still warm and thick. She straightens and swivels toward the clerk, reaches for the next bag. Her hands full, his hands now free, he reaches and pinches my mother's breast.
Four months earlier, on a sticky June night as my parents read in bed, my brother and I asleep in an adjoining room, my mother heard a brush of footsteps on the gravel bordering the bedroom's open window. She whispered to my father, who slipped from bed, pulled on jeans and tennis shoes, grabbed his badge from the dresser, eased out the front door, and snuck around the side of the apartment building, where he startled a man pressed against the shadowed wall. The man bolted, and my father, thirty-two, just shy of six feet tall, athlete-strong and police-academy fit, gave chase to the end of the block, yelled at the man to stop, and he did. My father flashed his badge, demanded the man's driver's license, and reported him the next morning. The prowler was a habitual offender, a pervert who lurked near bedroom windows hoping for a show, waited, watched, and did his thing.
Later that summer, in August, my mother shepherded a handful of children to a nearby park to celebrate my brother's third birthday. She carried a loaded .38 handgun stashed in her purse. My father had given her the gun before he left for his shift. He knew what went on in Tucson and couldn't join the party to protect his family.
My father had taken the job with the Tucson Police Department because of the climate (my parents had scoped out the city during the winter: Colorado, where we lived at the time, was locked in a 20-degree freeze, while oranges bowed tree branches in Tucson); because of his sister's influence ("We've got a great department here, an outfit you'd be proud to join. Wouldn't it be nice to live closer to family?"); because the pay was good; and because he was itching for action. When he graduated from the Colorado Highway Patrol Academy he had been assigned to a one-man post in Fort Garland. A year later, a new post opened in South Fork, a tiny junction town high in the San Juan Mountains. He put in for the remote location, and even though he had little seniority he got it. No one else had wanted to work Wolf Creek Pass, a treacherous two-lane highway that country-western singer C. W. McCall memorialized as "thirty-seven miles of hell ... way up on the Great Divide." My father was one of two patrolmen in the state who were issued one hundred yards of rope and crampons to rappel down cliffs to reach accident scenes. He patrolled the pass six days a week, issuing citations, arresting drunk drivers, and investigating accidents. On his day off he polished his belt and boots and filled out reports. A rare car chase got his blood pumping and broke up the routine of the road, but after four years he had grown bored and restless, and he craved to test his academy-honed mettle.
Six months after my family moved to Tucson the city's verdant midwinter appeal began to wither in summertime's 110-degree heat. Within ten months my parents' vision of urban living had died altogether, as my father's desire for on-the-job action collided with simmering racial tension and rampant crime and the stress of racing his wailing patrol car through teeming, eight-lane boulevards. Tucson was unsafe for his wife and children, and the city was nothing but nerve-grinding noise and skin-blistering sun, loud-mouthed people, short-tempered people, people crowding sidewalks and checkout lanes, people sitting stalled in jammed traffic. My father had also fallen out with his sister, their sibling relationship souring as it did whenever the two lived in proximity to each other.
My parents had made a big mistake.
One afternoon as they strolled the University of Arizona campus they browsed the bookstore and came across a new book, How to Live in the Woods on Pennies a Day, by the wilderness survivalist Bradford Angier. They bought it and sought shelter at a shaded picnic table, pulling their heat-hushed children onto their laps. As my parents pored over the book's can-do instructions on making the break — how to locate land, build a log cabin by hand, find peace in simplicity, the pages peppered with sketches of abundant elk and moose to hunt, wild mustard and strawberries to gather — the forgotten language of a once-shared dream rose and broke the stillness of that muted afternoon. My parents leaned close and spoke with animated fluency, their sudden current of remembered words cool and quenching, beckoning this way, this way.
My mother grips the grocery sack and stares in shock as the clerk strolls back to the store and disappears among its air-conditioned aisles. She can't tell my father — he'll freak out. But when she walks into the apartment and sees him she bursts into tears and spills her story, answers his clipped questions about the man's features, his clothing. My father doesn't reach to console her; he reaches for his badge and keys and lets the screen door slam as he strides to his Jeep.
It is closing time, and he finds the clerk in the parking lot, gathering shopping carts. My father confronts the man, and at first he is all denial. But he matches the description my mother gave. No doubt about it, this is the guy. My father grabs the clerk's necktie and punches him in the face. The man collapses, his skull knocking pavement. How strange that as my father drew back his fist to gather strength the clerk didn't resist or cower, didn't raise his arms in self-protection, just left them hanging limp by his sides, like he knew he had it coming or something, like a whipped dog.
The clerk, sprawled at my father's feet, palm cradling his jaw, cries, "I'm gonna call the police! I'm gonna call the police!" My father thrusts his badge at the man and says, "I am the police, you asshole." He could report the clerk to the store manager, could press to have him fired, but he doesn't have the time. My father leaves the clerk rocking on asphalt, revs his Jeep, and peels out of the lot.
Early the next morning, he loads the last of the boxes into the back of the U-Haul, tugs knotted ropes and winched straps, and double-checks taillight wiring while my mother returns the apartment keys to the landlord and collects the rent deposit. We leave then, my father driving the U-Haul, his son bouncing beside him on the bench seat, the Jeep hitched behind. My mother follows in the Plymouth, towing a camp trailer. I sit close by, my arms wrapped around a stuffed brown bear my mother had sewn, with corduroy paws and a red rickrack smile. She trails the Jeep's blinking brake lights, maintains a measured pace, scoots through a yellow traffic light to keep up as my father pulls into the police department's parking lot. We wait while he turns in his badge, signs paperwork, shakes a few hands, says final good-byes.
Our caravan merges once more with rush-hour traffic and wends toward the Interstate 10 on-ramp. My father glances in the rearview mirror, signals right, stomps the stiff clutch, shifts down, and presses his foot on the gas pedal; the truck engine growls, greased axles churn, wheels gather speed, my mother follows close behind. This is the road that will lead our young family to clean air, clear vistas, tranquil mountains, a safe community.
It's high time to get the hell out of Tucson.
CHAPTER 2
Lighting Out
There is a mystique about Montana that draws people to it. People yearn for an alternative lifestyle somewhere else, always somewhere else.
Hildy Johnson
Wants
Her: I just didn't want a life like my parents had, a very predictable life in the suburbs, where everyone got on the bus and went to work. It wasn't horrible, but I thought I would want something more exotic and unusual.
Him: Something with a little challenge to it.
When my parents decided to leave Tucson, they made sure my father had a job before they pulled up stakes. He mailed inquiry letters to more than twenty-five sporting-goods stores and gun shops across Montana, detailing his training and experience in gunsmithing. He landed a job with Phil Judd Sporting Goods, in Butte. Phil, in his early seventies, had run the business for forty years and planned to retire soon. He told my father that he could gradually move into a management position, with increases in pay. But after a year and a half the increases hadn't come, and my father could see that Phil was married to the business. He would only leave carried out feet first.
My mother saw an ad in the newspaper for a floor manager at Plaza OK Hardware, and my father applied and got the job. Six months later, when the store's original co-owner wanted out, my parents bought his share for the same price he had paid to open the franchise with his partner. My parents got in just as the store began to break even. My father worked long days with little time off; my mother worked part-time at the store. During the next four years they put their children in two successive day cares. The second was in a modest home near the grade school, its location convenient, the wife pleasant and welcoming. Come in, come in. But all was not as it appeared.
The hardware grew to gross the second-largest profit out of six hundred franchise locations in the chain, but the business partnership frayed: my father caught his partner stealing from the till, and the partner began treating Mom poorly (she balanced the books and had noted recurring accounting discrepancies). He had grown bitter because my parents were reaping the benefits of his hard work establishing the business. The mounting acrimony prompted my parents to sell their stake. Tucson had been a bust and now Butte, too. It was time to grab their postponed dream. They would use their profits to buy land and build a log house. They would work for themselves and live in the woods on pennies a day.
When my parents began searching for land in the spring of 1977, they sought property that was close enough to a town where my brother, Joel, and I could attend school but remote enough that the region wouldn't be overrun with people in thirty years. Their quest drew them away from industrious Butte, with its open-pit copper mine and boomtown economy, and from Missoula and Bozeman, cities anchored by state universities. My parents considered acreage around Kalispell, where a friend of theirs had moved, but moneyed people eager to enjoy the area's ski resort and ample lakes had begun swelling the population. Someone in Kalispell recommended Libby, nearly ninety miles west. Mom liked Libby, which sat nestled in the Kootenai Valley, hugged by the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness to the west and Purcell Mountains to the north. But Dad thought the town, which was the seat of Lincoln County and had a population of about three thousand people, was too big.
My parents pressed on, winding west along Highway 2, a narrow, two-lane road pinched between steep mountains and sheer rock cliffs to the south and, to the north, a train track, the Kootenai River, and more steep mountains. The Kootenai, a major tributary of the Columbia River, originates in the glacial Canadian Rockies and passes from British Columbia into northwestern Montana. Twelve miles out of Libby the river gathers momentum and surges into China Rapids, then plunges over Kootenai Falls, dropping ninety feet in less than a mile, before entering a canyon gorge. The falls and gorge are a scenic attraction that visitors view from a "swinging" cable bridge, which the Civilian Conservation Corps first built across the river during the Great Depression.
The falls was a sacred site to the Kootenai Indian tribe, the region's first inhabitants, who lived along the river for hundreds of years. Tribe members portaged their canoes around the falls via a trail that ran parallel to the river along a talus slope. In the summer of 1845 the Jesuit missionary Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet, returning from a journey to the Columbia River, recorded his perilous passage along the trail in his journal:
At a place called the Portage, the river crosses a defile of mountains, or rather of precipitous and frightful rocks, and the traveler is compelled ... to risk his life at every step and brave obstacles that appear at first sight insuperable. ... Whatever can be imagined appalling seems here combined to terrify the heart ... livid gashes of ravines and precipices, giant peakes [sic] and unfathomable chasms filled with the sound of ever-precipitating waters; lone, sloping and narrow banks, which must be alternately ascended, and many times have I been obliged to take the attitude of a quadruped. ... Amid these stern, heaven-built walls of rock the water has forced its way in varied forms, and we find cataracts and whirlpools engulfing crags and trees beneath their angry sway.
My mother remembers that when we passed Kootenai Falls that day, driving farther west in search of land, she thought, "This is it." She loved the giant peaks, the unfathomable chasms, the heaven-built walls of rock. (Later, on nights when she drove home from Libby, with Joel and me in the backseat, groceries in the trunk, when rain slashed the windshield and sheened and sheeted the narrow, winding highway, and a black train barreled down the tracks beside us, and the passage's chasms yawned, and peaks loomed over the glinting slick of river, the appalling elements combined to terrify my mother's heart. She would cry out and pull to the side of the road, idling the car until the train's thundering bluster faded and her chest unclenched, her children, perched behind her, wide-eyed and silent, the windshield wipers smacking blurred glass.)
Eighteen miles beyond Libby we hit Troy, a speck of a town in the northwestern corner of Montana. If my father had continued driving fourteen miles west, we would have crossed the state line into Idaho; if he had turned north and driven fifty-three miles, we would have landed in Canada. But my parents called off their search for a new life at Troy, the Gateway to Montana, the last gas stop before leaving the state. Embedded in the Kootenai National Forest, Troy is the smallest of Lincoln County's three towns, with a population of 950 give or take, depending on the flux of loggers and miners and seasonal drifters following the tide of available jobs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Solace of Stones by Julie Riddle. Copyright © 2016 Julie Riddle. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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