wharfs, the river moving along indifferently, nature turning its back on humanity.
III
In the Deep
31
Idaho
The summer before, in a wildly uncharacteristic move, Henry had bought a fairly new Suburban the size of a small school bus and filled it with sleeping bags and tents and ice chests and fishing poles, then drove his family all across the country, staying in Holiday Inns and camping in national parks once they hit the mountains. Jill learned how to cook on a Coleman stove, making blueberry pancakes on the griddle for breakfast; in the evening, they’d roast potatoes in the campfire’s coals and grill trout that Henry and Teddy caught in streams so lucid it was sometimes hard to determine where the water began. Helen was moody but enraptured by nature. She would go off by herself to read or listen to her music, which worried Jill, who didn’t want her children out of sight. Then Helen would wander back into camp with blossoms in her hair.
Beauty was everywhere, but so was danger—danger of a kind that this very urban family had never fully experienced—although that was Henry’s intention in taking them into ever more remote wilderness. He had a theory that manageable doses of hardship would build immunity to the greater challenges that life would pose. Roughing it in the Mountain West—away from Netflix and wifi and refrigerators and toilets and the props of civilization—revealed one’s inner resources. How else would you know what you were made of unless you set aside your devices and slept under the stars, “like sleeping under a Christmas tree,” Teddy had said the first night they tried it, in a little campground at the base of Uncompahgre Peak in Colorado. Helen woke up screaming when a fawn licked the salt off her face. A herd of startled deer disappeared into the woods like apparitions from another world.
Civilization can take us so far away from our true natures that we never know who we really are. At least, this was Henry’s belief. And so he spent time teaching Teddy and Helen how to whittle and tie knots and build a fire. Teddy was in Cub Scouts and already knew the basics, but Helen, four years older, caught on pretty quickly. Henry had his own fears. It was not so much the danger of a snake bite or falling from a ledge that worried him, but of leading his family to the edge of danger and then failing to protect them.
Still, he insisted on going ever deeper into the places on the map where the roads came to an end. After Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, he steered away from national parks with their nice showers and toilets and campsites that you had to reserve. Instead, he roved the logging roads in the national forests that covered so much of the West. The green patches on the map indicated public lands, which were endless and theirs to explore. Because of his disability, Henry couldn’t hike long distances, but he had a knack for discovering unmarked jeep trails that were just within the capacity of the massive Suburban to navigate. Jill fretted constantly that Henry was going to tear out the transmission or some vital piece of the undercarriage, leaving them stranded in nowheresville, but as long as there was gas in the tank Henry was unconcerned. He didn’t care about getting lost; in fact, that seemed to be his aim. Jill might be muttering in the front seat about slowing down or turning around, but suddenly they would land upon a giddying field of fireweed and golden asters. It was maddening, in a way, that Henry had such luck in discovering one spectacular spot after another, each different in its majesty, whether it was the flowers or the mountains or a glacial lake that seemed to have been just created. Everyone was exhilarated and exhausted and sleep deprived and desperately needing a bath.
It was in Idaho that Henry hit upon the idea of renting horses and packing into the Nez Perce forest. He had been studying a highway map and saw that the road ended in a place enticingly called Elk City. It was the remnant of an old mining town, with a saloon and a café and not much more—exactly what Henry had hoped. There was a Native American outfitter who agreed to guide them over a pass and drop them off in a remote spot on Meadow Creek, “the prettiest place you’ll ever see,” he promised. “Some