I lost almost everything in that Wilderness. I lost everyone. I lost Jake. Twice I bled heavy and late, and those were losses to me. I even missed Pinecone sometimes. This wild Fern, this girl I call my daughter, was someone else’s daughter in the Wilderness. She lost her mother, a sister, and ended up with me. I’ve watched loss daily, but sometimes it’s my mother I miss the most.
* * *
Now it is just me and my Fern.
She is probably seven years old now, as scraggly as a coyote pup and as curious too. When she was young and in the Wilderness and we were on the run, sometimes she didn’t bother to walk. She just sprinted on all fours as fast as any of us were walking. She loped alongside a coyote we encountered once by a stream, and the coyote, convinced of her feral canine-ness, yipped and bounced around her.
Here, in the City, she takes all of this concrete, bustle, decay in with interest. She’s inquisitive as she wanders around, as though it is just another wilderness to explore. Another part of the map we had yet to unfold. A thing to become part of. She calls it her New Wilderness. “It’s yours too,” she says to me. But I know it isn’t.
She has her bad nights, dreams of her mother, her sister. Dreams of all the messages she grew up hearing from the coyotes, the wolves, the elk, the magpies, the peepers, the crickets, and the snakes. Here, the message is untranslatable. It’s an ever-present hiss, gurgle, hum, and then a scream. It comes from the Refineries. But Fern listens hard to it, as though someday she’ll know what it’s saying.
“It has to be saying something, Agnes,” she says. “It’s making noise.”
Here’s what I’ve discovered. If you follow the fence from our Resettlement complex out to its farthest point, where it meets another fence at ninety degrees, there is a hole cut there. We squeeze through the fence hole and then we are in a marsh. The marsh borders the Refineries. It absorbs the heat from the machinery, and at night it steams against the cold air. At night, just like my mother said, there is life in the marsh. In the day you’d think it was dead. But that’s because the creatures know they are rare, and rare things never last. We go through the fence and wait until the curfew alarms screech and the sun finally sets, and then, quietly, a frog will croak. A mallard will moan.
Someday, someone who doesn’t want the hole to be there will find it. They’ll close it up and there will be no way in. The fence is high, its top barbed and electrified. I’m squirreling money away for wire cutters so that when this happens I can make a new hole, and when that one is covered, I can make another.
The ground is worn under the fence hole. I know others come here. Sometimes in the night, when we are exchanging calls with a bullfrog, I even hear a rustle that I know is human. I put my hand over Fern’s mouth because even through the Roundup she never fully learned to be afraid of what she couldn’t see. But I’ve learned. I know better. It’s not safe to make yourself known in a place you’re not supposed to be. We must always hide. But even though we’re hiding, I have a sense that the people who come here at night come for the same reasons we do. Escape from the world as we know it now. To know the world as it once was.
I bring my Fern here, cutting into her night’s sleep, because I want her to remember what she knew in the beginning of her life. What I knew my whole young life. The other night when I tried to rouse her, she rubbed her eyes sleepily, whined and kicked. She didn’t want to go. She threw the blanket up over her head. Eventually I cajoled her out of bed, but I’m afraid of the day when I can’t. When she becomes obstinate. When she becomes different from me. What will we share if we can’t share this? Will we be nothing but strangers? I want to grab her in these moments, squeeze her too hard, growl into her hair, never let her go. But she always wriggles free, unfazed, or maybe with a small eye roll. She knows she has everything I can give her. I think of my mother in these moments. She was someone who never did what I expected her to. When she looked at me, I didn’t understand what her look meant. She looked at me sharp-eyed, her mouth twisting and pained. As though looking at me hurt her sometimes. I didn’t understand it until I had the chance to care for this little Fern and I looked at her and saw all that came before and all that would come after and all its potential awfulness and certain beauty and it was too much for me to bear. I looked away, scared, disgusted, overcome with love, on the verge of crying and laughing, and finally, finally, finally I began to know my mother.
* * *
I tell Fern stories sometimes. Stories I grew up with. From our home in the Wilderness.
I tell a story I made up, and at the end she asks what I call it.
“What I call it?”
“Yes, you have to name the story. My mom always named her stories. The Tale of the Wolf and the Weasel, for example.”
“Got it.”
“So what is the name of your story?”
“It’s the Ballad of Fern.”
Fern blushes. “Oh, no,” she says bashfully. “That story’s not as good as the others.”
“It will be,” I say.
I’ll tell her this story and the others with all their complications and confusions because those complications and confusions are what make them true. It feels at times like the only instinct left in me. It’s the only way I know to raise a daughter. It’s how my mother raised me.
* * *
A few months after returning to the City, I walked into a hardware store. The clerk eyed me. I could not possibly be rich enough to buy anything, dressed in my Resettlement stripes. I went to the paint swatches and I picked out all the colors I remembered from my old life, my wilder life. I took those swatches, the generous rectangles of color, a code and a name in their corners. I took them all and slipped them into my bag and ran from the store well ahead of the clerk.
Back home I spent a sleepless night taping each square to the wall in a mosaic, placing patches and lines of color how I remembered them. Looking out from the height of land over a patch of verdant grasses toward the smudge of mountains on the horizon. Perhaps on a rainy day when all the colors would seem to have blurred their boundaries. It was a pretty and quiet and private place. A place you wouldn’t want to leave.
When Fern awoke, she rubbed her eyes twice and said, “I know that place,” a serene smile on her face, her voice thick with sleep and with wonder.
Land Acknowledgment and Author’s Note
Further Acknowledgments
Thank you: Josie Sigler Sibara for accountability. Hilary Leichter, Amanda Goldblatt, and Jorge Just for above-and-beyond reads. Aric Knuth, Jessamine Chan, Heather Monley, Xuan Juliana Wang, Dennis Norris, and John McManus for engaging with part or all and having excellent thoughts. Aziza Murray, Ben Parzybok, and Kat Rondina for playa shenanigans. Berkley Carnine for a helpful question. Seth Fishman and Terry Karten for many, many thoughtful reads and boundless support. NELP for so much, but especially for the mail table. A special nod to the Summer Lake Hot Springs, where, in reality, the water is not too hot.
I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, PLAYA Summer Lake, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Grass Mountain and Frank and Jane Boyden, Ucross Foundation, Caldera Arts Center, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony for their supportive funding, time, and space.
Research for this book was general and wide-ranging, but early igniting inspiration came from Oregon Archaeology, by Melvin C. Aikens, Thomas J. Connolly, and Dennis L. Jenkins. Sarah Green and Fred Swanson, USFS, led the walk that sparked the idea for this book
. Alan Weisman’s books helped me imagine a future world. And the online trove of primitive-living experts and enthusiasts made researching brain tanning and other wilderness skills surprisingly easy.
About the Author
Diane Cook is the author of the story collection Man V. Nature, and was formerly a producer for the radio show This American Life. Man V. Nature was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and elsewhere and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is the recipient of a 2016 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Also by Diane Cook
Man V. Nature
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the new wilderness. Copyright © 2020 by Diane Cook. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Lyrics by Alex W. Chilton
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Printed with permission
first edition
Title page illustration by Avychai Chinwan / Shutterstock, Inc.
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © James Warwick/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition August 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-233315-5
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-233313-1
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Part I: The Ballad of Beatrice
Part II: In the Beginning
Part III: The Big Walk
Part IV: The Ballad of Agnes
Part V: Friend or Foe
Part VI: To the Caldera
Part VII: The Roundup
Epilogue
Land Acknowledgment and Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Diane Cook
Copyright
About the Publisher