Read In the Wilderness for Free Online Page B

to any of them was the sure strength of their arms and the direction a tree might fall.
    By the time I was ready to start school, Uncle Clyde had established a more permanent camp just off the main road between Pierce and Headquarters. It was across from a pole yard, a large landing where thousands of peeled poles rose in decks stacked fifty feet high. We called our new home Pole Camp, and once again we circled and leveled the trailers, but this time they were more fixed. Uncle Clyde and Aunt Daisy built themselves a frame house and painted it green. The men erected a large, two-story garage in which they could work on machinery in the coldest weather. Some of the smaller shacks were pushed together; ours, two trailers connected to form a
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, had an indoor toilet. We were close enough to town to have electricity. One day, Uncle Clyde ran a wire from trailer to trailer and into each of the long wooden boxes he had hung on our walls. The first time our new telephone rang, I held the black, bell-shaped receiver away from my ear, startled to hear my fathers bodiless voice.
    The shortest trailers, just large enough to accommodate a bunk, stove and wash pan, went to the itinerant sawyers who hired on for the season. Each in his turn was called “Swede,” and when Aunt Daisy sent me to fetch them for dinner, the answer came from the doorway left open to air the smoke of their pipes and tightly rolled cigarettes: “Yah, um comin!” Their rounded consonants and opened vowels were a song to me, but I never worked up the courage to top the steps and pass into their secret lives: always dark, even the single square window curtained with a towel, the smell of woodsmoke and boot grease and that particular odor of old bachelors alone with their woolen underwear—sometimes, the whiskey on their breath, the heavy sharp scent of it as they came to the door, pulling up their suspenders, rubbing their teeth with rough knuckles.
    My uncles each married women with children and soon brought their new families into our circle. Suddenly, my mother was rich in female companionship—women her own age to share her days with, other mothers struggling with the demands of young children. Suddenly I had cousins. My bed was no longer my own but a place where boys jumped with their dirty shoes and girls squabbled over my dolls. Aunts and uncles gathered close in our kitchen for long weekend games of pinochle and Monopoly, smoke from their cigarettes filling the air to a barroom haze.
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    In winter, after the rains when temperatures dropped far below zero and the heavy freeze set in, the loggers could continue their cutting, shoveling snow from around the trees’ base, moving equipment across the icy clearings with the help of studded tires and chains. But for the pole-makers, winter meant no work: when the slim and fragile poles began snapping like toothpicks in the crackling cold, we would pack what we could into the trunk of our car, resting our feet on boxes and paper bags, and be suddenly gone from the woods to Lewiston, where my father and uncles would work swing shift at the mill or pump gas at the Texaco until the weather moderated.
    The road leading from Pierce to Lewiston is narrow and winding, descending from the Weippe Prairie (pronounced “Wee-ipe”) to the Clearwater River in a series of steep and pitching curves. The last fifty miles is river road, the part of Highway 12 now referred to as the Clearwater Canyon Scenic Byway. The entire trip took less than three hours—across flat farmland nestled between stands of timber, past Fraser Park (named after David Fraser, the man supposedly murdered by the Chinese), complete with a rough baseball diamond, a single set of warped pine bleachers and a galvanized-pipe swing set; down the grade with its switchback turns so tight the trucks with their long loads of poles took both lanes at the curves; across the bridge at Greer and past Orofino with its doctors and tiny airport