It’s a common Hollywood trope: people are transformed when
they go back to nature. Think of the number of movies in which, while traipsing
through the wilderness, protagonists discover their innermost selves, or
confront their fundamental fears, or make peace with their haunted past. From
the last decade alone, I can name several such films, all of them based on true
stories of present-day Americans who—after a trip deep into nature—will never
again be the same. There is, for instance, 127
Hours, in which James Franco, portraying the impetuous Aron Ralston,
discovers the inner strength it will take to free himself after being pinned
down by a boulder. In 2007’s Into the
Wild, a young man played by Emile Hirsch journeys all the way to Alaska
before realizing that his need for human contact is even greater than his obsession
with the out-of-doors. And in 2014’s Wild,
a recent divorcee named Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) hits the road,
hiking from the Mojave Desert to the border of Washington State, in search of
self-redemption and relief from the memories of her mother’s fatal illness.
Strayed’s journey up the Pacific Crest Trail spotlights how
ill-equipped she is at the start of her trek. Gary Ferguson’s wilderness
journey is quite, quite different, but equally compelling. Though at its core
is an intense grief, the story he tells in The Carry Home: Lessons from the American Wilderness builds to an unexpectedly upbeat
ending. Ferguson, an award-winning essayist and science writer, was married for
25 years to a fellow Indianan named Jane. As Ferguson puts it in his beautifully
lyrical prose, “We’d been restless children, destined to become restless
adults. Proud members of the last generation to soothe the anger of youth not
with Ritalin, but with road trips.”
The couple, bonding over a mutual love of nature, spent
their lives both working and playing in the great outdoors. While Gary pursued
his writing career from their Montana home base, Jane introduced young people
to the beauties of Yellowstone National Park, and also served on
search-and-rescue teams. For fun they hiked, skied, and canoed. It was a
springtime canoe trip on Canada’s Kopka River, “when the leaves of the north
country were washed in that impossible shade of lemonade green,” that the end
came for Jane. After a tragic spill, Gary crawled away with a badly broken leg,
but the waters claimed Jane’s life.
Gary explains what happened next, after Jane’s body was
recovered and the local authorities dismissed their first assumption that the
drowning involved foul play: “My redemption would come in the form of a last
request Jane had made years before, asking me if she died, to scatter her ashes
in her five favorite wilderness areas. And so I did. Five trips to five
unshackled landscapes. At first, the journeys broke my heart. Later they helped
me piece it together again.” His book cuts between a step-by-step accounting of
that last fatal day on the river and a travelogue of the journeys he took,
first alone and then with others, to return what was left of Jane to the
wilderness that had claimed her life. We feel his emotions evolving, helped
along by the passage of time and by some Native American wisdom that allowed
him to slowly absorb the fact of her death into his own ongoing existence.
Early in The Carry Home , Ferguson
speaks of a “life lived as though nature were both wings and nest.” At the
book’s end, having survived a tragic loss, he can again look to nature for
inspiration and for solace.
Here’s a link to Thomas Curwen’s deeply-felt Los Angeles Times story about the end of Gary
Ferguson’s grief journey. Curwen was a participant in that last hike.
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