Into the Woods

The First Forest

When I was eleven, my parents moved us to Arkansas so my father could do his forester internship at the Ouachita National Forest. This particular forest is the oldest national forest in the south, and covers 1.8 million acres of Arkansas and Oklahoma. I just looked it up, so I think that’s accurate. I had no idea before I sat down to write this, just as I had no idea when I was turning eleven years old and preparing to leave the prosperous Minneapolis suburb of Edina for Booneville, Arkansas.

Also, before Mom and Dad announced that he was joining the Forest Service, I had no idea that Dad had studied forestry in his college years. I don’t think he ever planned to work in the field. He attended college as an ROTC officer and meant to make a career of the Air Force. But his temperament got the best of him. He resigned from his commission as a captain before he and Mom were married, then worked several jobs and promptly left them. Dad had a temper. He could never forgo the satisfaction of telling an employer to “take this job and shove it.”

The trouble was, he’d married a woman with three kids. Within the year, they had another child coming. I believe he turned to his college major in employment desperation. His desire to work for the government coincided with his desire to adopt us, so that was accomplished before we left Minneapolis in a Ryder Rent-a-Truck to establish ourselves in Booneville, a tiny town of about 2400 people.

It sounds romantic, having a forester for a dad, but I spent very little time in the forest itself. We’d go swimming at Jack Creek, a recreation area where we had to watch out for snakes, and Dad had the inside info on spraying so we could time our dips accordingly. And I do remember cutting Christmas trees with Dad in the Ouachitas, spindly evergreens with 4-inch needles that couldn’t hold ornaments. His job was his job, the place he went every morning in his forester uniform, to do the things a dad did at a job.

We weren’t especially outdoorsy kids (this is an understatement). We eventually adjusted to the heat and went outside on the farm or walked around Booneville after we moved into town. Dad was out there in the forest constantly, especially during fire season, when he’d join the crews with flea collars around his wrists and ankles to keep off the ticks as he fought fires. We lived in Arkansas for a little less than two years before Dad accepted another position. Off we went again in another Rent-a-Truck.

The Second Forest

Our destination this time was not even a town. We moved into an actual ranger station in the Gallatin National Forest. Its name was “Squaw Creek,” which we announced with no embarrassment when people asked where we lived, because this was 1973 and even my highly liberal parents didn’t know this was a slur. It is no longer the name of the place.

At the station, we lived in a log cabin. All the buildings were log structures; the offices, garages, our cabin (a one-bedroom into which the six of us squeezed somehow because we always made clown cars of any home we had) and the ranger’s house. Once we stepped out of our home, we were in the Gallatin National Forest. Seriously.

A deep dark evergreen wilderness surrounded us. The station backed up into a granite range that loomed, Spire Rock standing gray and bare above the tree line. Below us was a large empty corral for long-ago horses. Below that, a concrete bridge spanned the churning, ice-cold Gallatin River. In the winter, it took forever for the sun to reach our house. I had to be down for the school bus by 6:50 am, even when it was well below zero. This felt brutal, especially after Arkansas, where we wore shorts on Christmas Day.

Montana’s winters were brutal, but the Spring, Summer and Fall were spectacular. My parents were not any happier in rural Montana than they were in rural Arkansas, so they drove to Bozeman often to plan their escape over cups of coffee at Sambo’s.  So long as my sister and I were around to babysit, we could get up to whatever we wanted.

What I wanted to do was roam. My older brother and sister weren’t interested, and my baby brother was just a baby. It was just me and the forest. I roamed the woods, climbed the mountains, and braved the cold plunge of that foaming, glacier-fed river. I climbed Spire Rock in a pair of moccasins on my 13^th birthday, then came home and told my parents, displaying my shredded fingernails from scrabbling to find purchase on the rock face.

While I roamed, I thought. I was lonely and angsty and full of inchoate longings. I channeled all that into my wanderings, dreaming about the time when my real life would begin, imagining what it would look like. Despite the constant birdsong, the rustling of whatever creatures passed near me, and the song of the river, there was a sacred hush in those wooded spaces, a perfect solitude for me and my own thoughts. I think every girl should come of age in a forest. I even wrote a poem about it.

Leaving Childhood

The second summer we lived there, my mother discovered the Stillman diet and put me on it. It was an all-protein diet, and my first experience with drinking eight glasses of water a day. I’d get up in the morning, boil up four hotdogs, eat them with mustard and two glasses of water, and call it breakfast. Then I’d do it again for lunch. Sometimes dinner!

It sounds ghastly, but I didn’t mind the Stillman menu, devoid as it was of anything resembling a starch, fruit, or vegetable. I didn’t much care for those things, though I did miss dairy. And I did lose weight. Mom had a goal weight for me, and I was happy to try to reach it. The problem was, after six weeks, I was weak. I went from scrambling up the mountains to barely able to make it to the river. She walked me down there every day for exercise, and I remember her holding my arm to help me along.

Mom was encouraging. I was so close to the magical threshold she’d envisioned for me, the weight at which she thought I’d be happy. Now, listen. I get tired of talking about this because whenever a person (me) tries to figure out what’s WRONG with her, she has to examine her upbringing, and that includes examining her parents. And mine were problematic, because they were imperfect human beings trying to find their own way through life. I can be so hard on her, but it’s not my intention to trash my mother. I understand my mother. She hated her weight, her build, her legs. Mom felt that she’d have been happy in life if not for the tragedy of her figure. She wanted better for me. She saw her genetics written all over my burgeoning women’s body and wanted to forestall my fate.

Yes, she was misguided but I understand what she’d been trying to do since I was seven years old with all these diets. Mom considered her own weight a lost cause (and if you know anything about lipidema, you know she was probably right). Her focus on my weight was a symptom of her own self-loathing and frustration. But even she had to see that this diet was not the right one for a girl my age. I went back to eating regular food, and as soon as I could, I headed back into the forest.

Out of the Woods

That was the summer after eighth grade. I was fourteen, and life was changing in other ways. My sister was driving (she was sixteen, that’s Montana) and we started motoring into Bozeman to drag Main. We met boys, went on the Pill, and abandoned the great outdoors for the world of boyfriends and cars and keggers. My dad resigned from the forest service in a huff, and my parents moved the family into Bozeman so they could both finish their Master’s degrees at Montana State. My days of roaming the woods and climbing mountains were over.

They didn’t have to be. My boyfriend at the time was a gearhead, but he hiked and skied and camped and climbed like a madman, too. Understandably, he was saddened by my lack of interest in both the world of automotive engineering and the Great Outdoors. We were terribly matched but you don’t generally understand that when you’re a teenager, do you. You fall in love with long hair and a fast car and decide that’s what you’ll want for the rest of your life.

I still loved the wilderness, trees and streams and paths, that awe-inspiring Montana night sky with so many stars it made me dizzy to look up at it. But experiencing these things with him and his friends took away whatever it was I’d found in the forest. Instead, I was listening to drunk teenage boys have belching contests around a campfire. Eating cold food from cans. Drinking cheap skunky beer. Having hurried, fumbling sex in zipped-together sleeping bags with icy zippers.

This not the wilderness experience I’d had on my own.

I stayed with him, but in my late teens, my pursuits became more and more intellectual. By that, I don’t mean intellectual as in highbrow and academic. I mean they all happened inside my own head. My sister and I had given up our “play” years earlier. I was starved for story. I haunted the Missoula library to read all the Jalna books. I discovered soap operas and watched three (AMC, Ryan’s Hope, TYATR) with fervor. I also read feverishly. My brother Steve would ship me boxes of fantasy and science fiction, and I’d crack a paperback and submerge myself so deeply, it was a wonder I didn’t get the bends when I had to stop.

Eventually, I started writing. I did that secretly for years until I had kids. I returned to it in my early thirties. For me, writing remains private. I’m shocked that I published my work, that I submit work as often as I do, that I share so much on this blog. I’m shocked because I associate writing with the sacred solitude that I only ever felt in the forest.

A Different Forest

I have never returned to the woods, but one aspect of those years remains. I have to look out on green to be happy. I had many different offices during my working years, and in the ones I liked, trees were outside my office window. For the last five years of my working life, I often worked from home at my dining room table, looking out on my huge unruly backyard.

I wrote most of a novel at that table while life swirled around me, including a little boy who arrived to live with us at age five and left very near the age of eight. I can write with interruptions. It’s what I’m used to, it’s how I wrote all those other books, with real life swirling around me while an imaginary story filled up my head with another life, one I simply made up.

It’s different, now. After living in this house since 1998, I have finally set up my own little office in one of the spare rooms. I chose this room because the view from the window includes my magnolia, my neighbor’s hawthorn, and a bunch of others because I live on the southern end of the Pacific Temperate Zone. Maybe you’ve heard about the trees in Oregon. We have a lot.

Even with all that green, it felt strange to relocate myself into “a room of one’s own.” Sitting down at my makeshift desk seemed alien, like I’d gone off to a writer’s retreat and now, by god, I had better sit down in a room I didn’t know very well and force myself to be productive. I asked myself why. Why? I am sixty-five years old. I have written one nonfiction book, seven novels (plus the one I’m hunting an agent for), and co-written five more novels with Shannon. During these years, I’ve also written short stories and essays and a metric ton of poetry while working full time at a day job where I also–you guessed it–WROTE for a living. I’ve written plenty. Do I have anything left to say?

But as I sit here, looking out at the urban canopy of my suburban neighborhood, I hear the woods calling. I think it’s time to listen. It’s time to start writing again.

I’ll let you know how it goes.