In the Wilderness Read Online Free

Clearwater, Lochsa and Selway, from Oregon and Washington to Montana. With hard work, guts and ingenuity, a man could feed his family and make money besides.
    He had begun working for his brother at Waha, sending logs out by train north to Lewiston. He saved his money, took extra odd jobs, asked the markets for their old produce and bread, scavenged from garbage bins. Every fall, he shot one elk, one deer. Every summer, he and Daisy fished, filling milk cartons with rainbow trout, freezing them in solid blocks of ice. They harvested blackcaps, huckleberries, plums, cherries, apples, apricots, anything and everything they could gather or glean. With some of the fruit, she made pies and sold them to the cafes.
    For one winter and one winter only, Clyde worked for Potlatch Forests Incorporated, mushing into the isolated logging camps along the North Fork of the Clearwater River with Daisy and their daughter, Peggy, bundled tight in the dogsled. The only women in the camps were prostitutes, whom Daisy, in her role as head cook, immediately put to work as flunkies serving three meals a day to long tables ofhungry men, washing stacks of dishes, wringing from the plaid wool shirts and denim pants gallon after gallon of ambered water.
    Clyde bought used and broken equipment, military surplus he rigged with booms and hitches. He was a genius with tools, gears and ratchets. What parts he couldn’t buy, he made. He knew that his small wages were nothing compared with the profit gained by the company, and when after that first year he came out owing them money, he was determined to strike out on his own, to become what the loggers called a gyppo, independent of corporate ties. With a good crew he could do it.
    By the time my father and his family came to live in the Clearwater National Forest, Clyde had cleared a site along Orofino Creek, within fifteen miles of Pierce, a town (population five hundred to one thousand, depending on the season) located ninety miles east and slightly north of Lewiston. He gave my grandmother her own shack, put the boys in another. For eight bits an hour, they cut and skidded, dodged wind-snapped crowns and barber-chaired fir, kicked-back saws and heart-rotted cedar. They spent the evenings gathered in the narrow room, laughing at how bad the injury might have been, how narrow the escape, how close Death got before they poked Him in the eye with a peavey, stomped His toe with spiked boots, buried Him beneath tons of piss pine. They laughed at their own foolishness, eight bits an hour while the old man got rich.
    My father laughed loudest. When his brothers fought a frozen saw, cursed and kicked a jammed winch, my father laughed. He laughed as they tumbled over stumps, madder at him than the machinery. When he stripped a gear, knotted cable, caught an ankle while decking logs, he reacted calmly, taking one last drag off his Camel before bending to surveythe damage, to undo what needed to be undone. There was nothing he couldn’t make sense of, no breakdown or injury that couldn’t be learned from.
    “People kill the things they most love,” said A. B. Guthrie, who knew as much as anybody about love of land. Day after day my father sawed, fell, limbed, skidded and burned what he lived for. The money, what little he earned, meant nothing. The woods, he said, had gotten in his blood.
    In 1956, when my father called his high school sweetheart and asked her to marry him, the logging camps lay surrounded by hundreds of miles of uncut forest. The sites themselves consisted of five or six eight-by-twenty-foot clapboard trailers circled like a wagon train amid the new stumps and slash piles. Each trailer held a bed, woodstove, table, and two straight-back chairs. A few were equipped with primitive plumbing—a single sink that drained onto the dirt below.
    When my mother came to Idaho, she was a young and lovely woman making her own escape into the wilderness. She told her grandmother with whom she lived that she