Temperance Creek. Pamela Royes

to feel her way.

       part two

       no country for fools

       Wallowa Country

       “What you seek is seeking you.”

      —RUMI

      I drove toward Minam feeling like a dog let off its chain. The further east I got from Eugene, the bigger the mountains, the deeper the snow, the smaller the communities, and the wider the distance between them. People wore cowboy hats and drove pickup trucks with stock racks loaded with saddled horses. Barking black-and-white dogs paced truck beds, possessive and territorial.

      I stopped in a small-town dry-goods/grocery store to purchase a wool stocking hat. “How far to the town of Minam?” I asked the clerk. She paused before answering, “It’s there at the bridge, I guess, once you get over the top.” She looked me up, she looked me down, and she turned to the next customer. Back in the bug, I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror. Nope, nothing weird. Just a girl with long brown hair, brown eyes, and a green wool hat, traveling further and further from home.

      Chuck’s ancestors had settled in this remote corner of Oregon during the mill boom of the early 1900s. Once it had been a large logging community boasting its own hotel and dancehall, but now, nothing much remained. He’d inherited property there, and he and Annie were living in the original schoolhouse at the edge of a forest, trapping packrats and attempting to preserve a little history. I thought it noble.

      When Chuck had told me stories of the Minam River, the canyon, and its people, my throat had clenched in longing. Women tree-planters and coed trail crews, working in the wilderness, living “off the land.” Living big. Chuck spoke hauntingly of the Native Americans and their sacred places, speaking musical names from an unknown tongue. Wallowa, Imnaha, Wenaha. I’d repeated them slowly, inhaling and exhaling like a woman fighting for consciousness. The homeland of the Nez Perce, the Nimi’ipuu, or The People.

      There was fresh snow. The roads were bare in places, icy in others as I drove off the high open prairie into the deepening canyons. I hugged the centerline. Far below, I glimpsed a river snaking its way in from the south, wondering if that might be Chuck’s Minam River. The sun, so bright across the top, disappeared behind the high ridges as I descended into their shadows.

      Leaving the farms and ranches behind, I entered the intimacy of a narrow canyon and remembered the previous night’s dream. Of traveling a dark road, my hands gripping a locked steering wheel, as I searched for a familiar landmark. Of a crow that flew beside my window, fixing his black eye upon me. I recalled a crazy conversation held in my Eugene studio apartment during that last round of exams. How I’d jokingly told the med student I was dating, “I’m going to quit school and herd sheep.” And we’d laughed.

      Dipping, the road crossed a low bridge spanning the convergence of two clear, icy rivers. Steep basalt cliffs timbered with large ponderosa and Douglas fir rose from the forest floor and covered the sides of the canyon, and I suddenly realized I hadn’t met another car for quite some time. Pulling over, I stepped out, inhaling the sharp, piney air, waiting for my hearing to adjust to the quiet. So quiet, I mused, listening for oncoming traffic. Only the sound of water.

      I missed the Minam turnoff and drove another ten miles into the town of Wallowa before realizing my error. I consulted Chuck’s paper-napkin map. Turning around and approaching from the opposite direction, I could see where the Minam and Wallowa rivers met, the glinting metal roof of a building on the hillside. I pulled off the highway and parked beside a dilapidated pickup. A faint track led up. I gathered my shoulder bag and suitcase, locked the car, and was taking the first hesitant step when, from above me, I heard singing. A woman, dressed in rumpled wool clothing, calf-high leather work boots, and a faded felt hat with a couple of feathers tucked into her hatband was hiking off the hill toward me. Merrily, she cried, “Whoo, whoo,” her voice high and owl-like. Her brown shoulder-length hair was braided and bound with beaded leather thongs, her cheeks bright as a fall apple.

      This apparition—earthy, fierce, and authentic—epitomized the kind of identity I’d been searching for. I stopped, gaping up at her.

      “You must be Pam,” she said, moving to extend her hand. “They call me Canyons. We’ve been expecting you.”

      We were a loose collection of adventurers gathered in the Minam schoolhouse that afternoon. College dropouts, college graduates, history seekers, and those simply taking a look around on their way to somewhere else, jettisoned like flood survivors against the solid trunk of the Wallowas. Besides Chuck, the ethereal Annie, and the radiant Canyons, I was introduced to Glen-boy, a lean, rafter-brushing man with a startling halo of nearly white hair. He wore suspenders, a wool shirt, and high-cut wool pants, and when he stood, he swayed gently above me, putting me in mind of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ents. His ready laugh and unhasty manner helped me feel welcome, and I delighted in watching him fill his plate again and again with the rustic bread and venison stew steaming on top of the woodstove, like a man who’d known hunger and never made peace with it.

      After dinner—following a boisterous, informal jam session where instruments from squeaky fiddles to silver spoons were plucked, bowed, thumped, then swapped—talk turned to the outdoors. In celebration of my arrival they agreed, after much tea and more whiskey, that we needed a camping trip into “the canyons.”

      Wrapped in my flannel-lined sleeping bag that night, I started worrying about camping in the snow. It didn’t seem like a good idea. People on the great American prairie shared an acute awareness of the weather born of experience and story. From the handed-down history of the “Great Blizzard” of 1886 that killed a hundred thousand cattle and the “Children’s Blizzard” of 1888 that killed hundreds of children trudging home from school, we learned the unpredictability of life on the last frontier. Blessed with the dubious distinction of having the worst weather in the world, North Dakotans went about the daily business of living with one eye on the sky and the other on the weatherman. We boasted about tornados, floods, and blizzards as part of our staunch Midwest fortitude, like merits of achievement, remembering a certain storm, or twister, and where we were when it hit as we took to our basements for safety.

      Because of this moody and fickle meteorological relationship, I’d become a lifelong student of the clouds, forerunners of change and the ever-shifting seasons. Stratus—Latin for sheet—solid strokes of gray on gray. The fleecy cirrus, moving high and fast. Cumulus, my favorites, resembled puffy tufts of wool, serene and benign. But when they piled up against one another, bumping and jostling like a heated argument, building ever higher and higher, there might be trouble. Maybe thunderstorms, maybe hail. My dad said when the clouds took on the looks of bruises, pinks and yellows overlaying violet blues, there’d be a twister coming. You could sense the violent storms before you could see them. Pressing down on the skin, the big elms shading the streets, a children’s late-afternoon game of freeze tag. When the air turned still, saturated and stifling, like Great-Aunt Regina’s kitchen on an August afternoon, the Monarch wood stove filled with pies, and when that stillness was accompanied by an almost imperceptible hum, like a bumblebee trapped in a mason jar, we paid attention.

      “Stay close to the house,” mothers warned, the weatherman’s voice blaring from the transistor radio inside.

      Outside the loft window of the Minam schoolhouse, the snow sparkled like diamonds beneath the glow of a three-quarter moon, and as I listened to the whispers and sputters of an unfamiliar place, I fell asleep.

      The next morning as the crew discussed gear and provisions, I continued to tell myself not to worry. They’d probably checked the weather report. And lots of people had never backpacked—it couldn’t be that difficult. Unfortunately, my upbringing hadn’t included hiking—or camping, let alone backpacking where miles of prairie were pulled taut under immense skies of rapidly changing and unpredictable weather. The Dakota