Empty Mile

CHAPTER 6

That Saturday we had a family outing. My father drove Stan and I out of Oakridge and into the hills. The forest was sparser here and ran down into gullies and small valleys. It was a hot day and the air had the dusty smell of dry pine and thirsty soil.

We parked in a clearing that was already full of 4x4s and pickups. A walking track led downhill and, carrying gold pans, a shovel, and a backpack of food, we followed it for ten minutes through land that was as much a wilderness as it had been two or three hundred years before.

Halfway along the trail Stan stopped by a fir tree and leaned against it. He reached his arms around as much of the trunk as he could and took a long slow breath through his nose.

“Stan, what are you doing?”

The annoyance in my father’s voice came more, I think, from his discomfort at Stan’s display of intimacy than from any delay to our progress. Stan didn’t answer him. He had his eyes closed.

“I can feel it, Johnny.”

“What?”

“The power. Sometimes trees can bring it across.”

I looked at my father for an explanation but he just gave an irritated shake of the head and carried on along the trail. I said to Stan, “Native Americans used to hug trees for energy when they were tired.”

“I know that.” Stan turned his head and smiled at me. “Everyone knows that.”

The Forty-Niners, after they had made the trek across the continent by wagon train, or sailed into San Francisco and then hiked to the rivers and streams inland and had at last washed their first payable amount of gold, would write to family back home that they had “seen the elephant.”

It was a description crazy enough to suit the desperate men they were and it suited the members of the Oakridge Elephant Society just as well. If you wanted a laugh, if you wanted to see the kind of whackos and crackpots that people in big cities make jokes about, then the Society was a good place to start. Oakridge had begun life in 1849 as a placer mining encampment on the banks of the Swallow River and this group of gold-prospecting enthusiasts couldn’t shake the heritage. They suffered a common addiction to the notion that somewhere, in some creek or stretch of river, there was still enough gold dust to make a man rich. All the history books said Northern California had been mined out a hundred and fifty years ago, but the members of the Elephant Society didn’t always believe what they read.

They met each week in a hall above a drugstore in Back Town. They held jobs and raised families, but on weekends they took their pans and shovels and drove out to the hills to someplace they were certain the Gold Rush had missed.

They did find gold sometimes, what they called “color” as it lay mixed with black magnetic sands at the bottom of their pans, but most of the time it was only enough to refine and seal in a glass vial and pass around as an object of interest at Society meetings.

My father had his own collection of these vials, accumulated over twenty years. They stood in a line on a shelf in our living room, a tantalizing hint of American wealth, wealth which had never yet come his way. And it was to bolster himself against a declining belief that he would ever hit the financial mother lode, I think, that he’d joined the Society a couple of years before I left Oakridge. It was a place where the dreams of others could support his own.

The recreation area the Elephant Society had chosen for its annual summer picnic bordered a level stretch of river bank that had been, as most picnic destinations around Oakridge were, the site of a Gold Rush diggings. The place was too far from town to see much use and the grass had grown long and there were small yellow flowers scattered through it.

Membership of the Society was not high and with kids and wives thrown in there were only about a hundred and fifty people in the clearing. They were grouped in separate family units but they waved to each other and went over and said hi and tossed cans of beer around. It was friendly without being invasive. I could see how a man like my father, who was anything but a social animal, could find it bearable.

He greeted several of the families as we passed them and people stood up and shook hands with him. He seemed genuinely pleased with the contact and there was something touching about the way he laughed and spoke, something a little shy and holding back, as though he felt like an impostor doing it. It made me see how thoroughly lonely he must have been, this man who had to do battle with himself each day to force the emotional responses most others took for granted.

We spread our picnic rug out and sat and ate and talked about times in the past. My father could have had any number of reasons for taking us there that day, but I saw in the anecdotes and the paper plates of food an expression of his need to reach back to the memories of other picnics, other outings like this when we had been more of a family. When life had not yet done its dirty work. What he wanted, what the three of us wanted, was confirmation that there had indeed been a shared happiness in our pasts. At least at some point.

While we were eating, Bill Prentice turned up on a quad bike he must have trailered to the parking area. He wasn’t a member of the Elephant Society, but he was on the town council and council members were elected, so smart council members made friends in every social and business organization they could. Bill had brought several crates of beer with him. After he’d unloaded them and called out for people to help themselves, he started giving kids rides on the back of his bike. My father did his best to appear disinterested.

After Stan had run over and taken a turn on the bike the three of us went panning. Many of the adults were already ranged along the edge of the river. We found a spot among them and crouched over our pans, throwing in sand then sluicing in a little water and gently rolling the mixture, over and over, until the lighter sediment had spilled off, leaving a curve of fine sand that could be made to reveal… But there was no gold in this river anymore and the Elephant Society was panning only to express its identity.

Stan and I had been panning many times with my father when we were boys so today was nothing new for us and knowing there was no chance of finding anything in this impoverished riverbed made it a pointless exercise for me. But I stayed at it, squatting there beside my father, swirling dirt and water around in a circle, because this quiet crouching together, this time that did not need too many words, was the closest we could get to each other.

Stan gave up after ten minutes and sat with his bare feet in the shallows of the river. His pan held nothing but water and he tilted it in a slow rhythm, side to side, so that its unbroken surface caught the light and threw it back across his face in a bright pulse. He was dazzling himself with the reflection and behind his glasses his eyes were unfocused and wide.

Behind us, Bill Prentice now had a girl at the end of her teens with him on the bike. She wore a tight T-shirt and a short tartan tennis skirt which flapped back over tanned thighs.

Twenty minutes later my father stopped panning and stood up. The movement snapped Stan out of his daydream.

“Can me and Johnny go exploring in the woods?”

“If John wants to; it’s too dangerous by yourself.”

Stan and I walked away from the river, back through the picnic area toward the bordering forest. The quad bike stood riderless and quiet now beneath a tree. On the other side of the grassed area my father lay down on the rug and tented a paperback novel over his face. One or two of the families were packing up to go home.

A number of narrow trails led away from the recreation area. Stan and I took the first one we came to.

“Here we go, Johnny. Lock and load.”

“Lock and load?”

“Danger lurks everywhere.”

“Really?”

Stan made a face like I was an idiot. “It’s TV, Johnny. Boy, I wish I had a costume.”

Almost immediately the forest closed about us. Stan leapt around on the trail like he was on a special forces mission. When he stopped to catch his breath I asked him what he’d meant by “power” when he’d hugged the tree earlier that afternoon.

He shrugged. “Just power.”

“Yeah, but electrical power, gas turbine power, what?”

“It’s everywhere, Johnny. It’s behind things. We can’t reach through to it, but it’s there and it comes across, like it’s just on the other side of everything we can see.”

“How’d you come up with that?”

“When I drowned. When I woke up I just knew it.”

We followed the trail for about ten minutes. It sloped gradually down into a gully then turned to the right behind an outcrop of rock. Beyond this it continued along the bed of the gully and lost itself in thickening trees that looked gloomy and vaguely threatening. What held my attention, though, as we made the turn, was not the sinister nature of the trees, but Bill Prentice’s naked buttocks, luminous in the middle of the trail about twenty yards further along. Crouched in front of him, her face hidden by his ass, was the slim girl in the tartan skirt.

Stan gave a short gasp of amazement and quickly clamped his hand over his mouth. The obvious course of action was to turn around before they realized we were there and go quietly back the way we’d come. I was just starting to do this when Stan jerked my arm sharply and pointed to the opposite slope of the gully where a black bear was padding its way between the trees. It wasn’t a large animal, about three and a half feet from foot to shoulder, but out there in the woods with no bars to keep it at a distance and make it cute it was an extraordinarily frightening sight.

The bear had seen Bill and the girl and was moving slowly down the slope toward them. For a moment Stan and I did nothing, frozen in a crazy moment where it was impossible to tell what the right thing to do was. Should we yell a warning and risk spooking the bear into attacking? Or should we stay quiet and hope it turned back into the forest?

The girl solved the dilemma for us. The black shape lolling through the trees must have tweaked her peripheral vision because she jerked her head away from Bill’s crotch and shrieked like she was in a horror movie. Bill jumped backwards, grabbing at his pants, looking wildly about for what he must have thought was the arrival of some angry parent. When he saw Stan and me he seemed puzzled, as though he couldn’t match the severity of the girl’s reaction to our presence. By then she was on her feet and racing up the trail. As she passed me she twisted her head over her shoulder and screamed one word, “Bear!”

Bill saw the animal then. He backed into a hollow of trees at the side of the trail and grabbed a fallen branch, holding it out in front of him like some sort of leafy broom. The bear was ten yards away from him now and had only a small patch of ground and the trail to cross. I started picking up rocks to use as ammunition. Stan stared at the bear as if he was trying to calculate its weight.

When I straightened again the bear had come to a stop in front of Bill just a few feet beyond the reach of his branch. Bill’s face was drained of color but he did not look weak standing there with his puny weapon. He hadn’t crumbled.

The bear wrinkled its snout and sniffed the air, moving its head through a swinging half-circle. It sat back on its haunches and raised its front paws.

The first rock I threw hit it on its flank, the second bounced off its shoulder. The animal stretched its neck forward and made a hoarse braying noise, then fell forward on all fours again. I could see the canine teeth of its lower jaw. Bill shouted at me, “Stop! You’re pissing it off.”

“It looks pretty pissed off already.”

“We gotta scare it away, not make it so mad it attacks. Get a branch. Three of us should be too much for it.”

Stan and I found a couple of long sticks at the side of the trail. For a moment I stood wondering if it was really such a good idea to go charging at an angry bear, but Stan didn’t hesitate. As soon as he had his weapon he went careening down the hill screaming and yelling and waving his arms about, 200 pounds of stout heart and soft flesh and greased-back black hair. With him on his way I had no choice but to follow.

The bear half turned to meet us, but Stan did not stop. He ran to within five feet of the animal and stood his ground, whipping his stick wildly about and shouting “Git!” and “Yah!” and “Go away, bear!” The bear, faced now with an enemy on two fronts, swung back and forth, rocking on the large pads of its forefeet, baying its anger at this sudden outnumbering. Bill, seeing the animal’s attention was split, stepped out of his hollow and began yelling and thrashing his branch about as wildly as Stan.

For a moment I thought the bear might pick one of us to attack out of sheer frustration, but after swiping once or twice at the leaves flicking in front of its face, it turned abruptly and bounded off a few paces. It stopped once to look back at us over its shoulder, then loped away into the trees and disappeared up the far side of the gully.

Bill dropped his branch and without a word stepped forward and hugged both of us.

“Well, that was something.”

Stan made a face of exaggerated horror. “I thought you were a goner, Bill.”

“If it hadn’t been for you guys, I would have been for sure.”

The three of us headed back along the trail, sharing a kind of survivor camaraderie, rehashing the event and commenting how lucky we all were to have escaped unhurt.

At one point Bill clapped us both on the back. “Well, I guess you know what answer I’m going to give you on the warehouse.”

Stan yelped. “Really, Bill, do you mean it? Really?”

“How could I say no to a fellow bear fighter?”

Stan looked suddenly serious. “I won’t be able to work at the garden center anymore once our business gets going.”

“You just stay on as long as it’s convenient.”

Stan was anxious to tell my father about his adventure and ran on ahead. After he’d gone Bill said he’d have some lease papers for the warehouse drawn up and that he’d give us a discount on the market rate.

“And the, er, thing with Nicola, that girl, we can be discreet?”

“It’s none of my business what you do. I’ll tell Stan not to say anything.”

“Good, good… We understand each other. It’s crazy, I know. I love my wife very much, but sex… I’m not like other men and for me, when it rears its head it’s like going mad, something I just can’t control.”

Bill looked like he was set to continue sharing, but just then three of the men from the picnic met us on the trail. They were carrying an assortment of makeshift weapons and when they saw us they looked visibly relieved. Nicola had raised the alarm and the Elephant Society members who hadn’t yet gone home had sent their finest. Bill was in his element answering questions and describing how close to death we had all come.

When we got back to the picnic ground he got to do it all over again. Among the people who gathered around to ooh and ah at the drama I noticed a tall man and a blond woman with their arms around Nicola’s shoulders. They watched Bill with a little more scrutiny than the others and I couldn’t help imagining that a small part of them was puzzling over the exact nature of their daughter’s excursion into the woods.

My father was not among Bill’s audience. He had fallen asleep beneath the pages of his paperback and since he was on the far side of the picnic ground Nicola’s panicked cries had not disturbed him. Stan woke him and told him about the bear, all energized and proud of himself, wanting to impress him with this feat that surpassed what might have been expected of even a normal person. He was surprised, I think, when my father drew him close and held him tightly for a long time without saying a word.

Later, as we were heading back to the car, my father told me I was never to take Stan into the woods again.