by Nick Engelfried.
There is a mountain range in the far northwest corner of Montana, just below the Canadian border, where trees of assorted sizes and species grow jumbled together in dense stands and the fungi and strange, pale flowers living on the forest floor exist in perpetual shade. It is a dank, twiggy forest, a bit like the haunted woods from a fairy tale. It’s a place where you could easily get lost, and there are people who have visited it and indeed lost themselves—some accidentally, others by design because it’s hard to imagine a place more conducive than this to leaving your past behind.
A few people know this forest and these mountains intimately, but the group of us grad students who followed our professor there in a caravan of cars one spring did not. None of us had been to that particular mountain range before, and only one or two have been back since. Any prior knowledge of the place we brought with us was secondhand, mostly gleaned directly or indirectly from Ron, whose battered pickup we followed up the twisted mountain road and who lived in these woods fulltime when he was not teaching a grad school environmental writing class for a semester at the university in Missoula.
The idea for the trip, which turned into a bit of a pilgrimage, came about when Ron looked at us in class one day and said in that dry, spontaneous way of his, “I’m heading to the cabin this weekend. Anyone want to come along? You can think of it as a sort of field trip.”
Ron’s voice bore just the slightest hint of a southern accent, a reminder of his youth as the son of an oil fields worker moving constantly between Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. He stood perhaps five foot six, a detail that belied his stature in the world of letters. He had a smooth receding hairline and a stubble of beard that managed to look rugged yet somehow refined. His gentle way of talking called to mind Southern manners.
“We can drive up Friday afternoon,” Ron continued. “Then stay a bit Saturday and come back. There’s fresh meat for dinner.”
It was all the encouragement we needed. Those of us who’d read many of Ron’s books, stories, and essays knew the mountains where he lived to be a magical place that could work transformations on people who visited. Even those who had not read much of his work had heard Ron talk about the place in class. It was at his cabin in these woods that he wrote his now-famous first book, as well as most of the books and shorter pieces that followed and cemented his legacy as a person of consequence in the field of environmental literature.
“Of course we’ll go,” said Eleanor, who was good at reading the room. “I’ll drive.”
There were eleven of us students, and it took three cars to comfortably fit us all plus our sleeping bags and changes of clothes for a night away. That Friday we organized things so those who got car sick could be in the front of their respective vehicles, then we all followed Ron’s truck up Highway 200 and onto one of those winding Montana roads where only a faded dotted line separates you from oncoming traffic hurtling past at ten miles over the speed limit. Eleanor, who drove immediately behind Ron, seemed not a bit troubled and hummed along with the radio, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel as she flew around bends well over the posted speed limit herself.
“There goes the forest,” Tor said when a huge logging truck sped by in the opposite direction. It was the sort of dark humor with which grad students in environmental writing programs entertain ourselves to cope with the fact that we live in a world which is both worth fighting for, and irredeemably screwed.
Of course, the person likely to be most affected by the sight of those logs was Ron himself, who’d been fighting timber companies in these mountains for decades. To us students, the woods we were entering felt very nearly endless, though we understood they weren’t. The illusion of infinite tree-covered mountain peaks was an example of the phenomenon we all knew from our studies, where a public resource seems nearly inexhaustible, its permanent depletion unimaginable, right up until almost the moment it in fact becomes exhausted and depleted. But we digress.
At last, our cars pulled into the gravel driveway in front of Ron’s cabin. Dust settled around us as we piled from our vehicles and stood gaping up at the structure before us, built years ago by Ron and his now-estranged wife with help from perhaps a few friends. They used trees harvested from the surrounding forest—for, as Ron has made clear repeatedly in his writing, he does not oppose all logging, but only the wasteful kind and the destruction of old-growth forests. It was a medium-sized cabin, with big picture windows and a door made from wooden boards with a few steps leading up to it.
“Nice digs.” Tor whistled appreciatively.
Trees pressed in on the cabin from all sides except the front, which looked out over the clearing Ron had made into a driveway. There was no other building in sight and no sounds of human activity, Ron’s closest neighbor living at least a mile away. It was a picturesque spot, but what really made it significant were the things we knew about it. As aspiring writers and storytellers, we knew there is a way places—landmarks, landscape features, buildings—take on a meaning that goes far beyond their physical existence in the here and now, and which is based in what one knows about their history, the events that shaped them, and the people who did things there.
We were acutely aware of this mythic quality of place, and aware that if we came to this cabin not knowing what we did, it would have appeared quaint and rather intriguing, but no more quaint or intriguing than any number of other cabins located deep in fairy tale-like forested mountains. As it was, the place seemed magical because of the stories attached to it.
This was where Ron and his then-wife built new lives for themselves after coming West from their home in the South. What exactly prompted them to leave all they knew, migrating westward and north until they landed in these out-of-the-way mountains, was a bit of a mystery. However, there are short stories of Ron’s where a character embarks on a similar journey as a means of fleeing the law—not for any very horrific crime, but a series of youthful escapades robbing jewels from rich people more or less for fun—and at least a couple of us believed fervently these stories were in fact autobiographical and helped explain Ron’s decision to settle in such a remote spot.
Regardless, we knew Ron arrived in these mountains seeking an out-of-the-way place in which to write, and that he soon became distracted by the fight to protect that same place from logging. In his first book, a work of nonfiction, Ron writes that he initially expected the battle to save the forest to take at most a year or so. It’s now been more than three decades, and he is still fighting. It has been a hard fight, more a slog really, and while some progress has been made toward limiting clearcut logging, no official wilderness areas have been established here to this day.
And so, we understood this cabin to be a sort of hermitage where great battles had occurred—against both the internal demons all writers struggle with, and the forces of greed and waste. We took in the dense trees around the building, the pond in back, and the fallen log where the next morning Madelyn would swear she saw a bushy-tailed marten bounding in pursuit of a squirrel. And with a certain reverence, we followed Ron up the front steps and across the threshold into the front room.
“It’s like a library,” said Eleanor.
Indeed, the room was filled to the brim with exactly what you’d expect a writer’s house to be full of: books. There was a large bookcase, shelves bulging with volumes, but that was just the start. Another shelf running along the wall above the couch was crammed with books. There were books lying haphazardly on the coffee table, books stacked in a corner, and books on the mantlepiece above the wood stove fireplace. Their spines bore titles like Wolf Willow, The Klamath Knot, Refuge, and Arctic Dreams. They were books about places, mostly, written by people like Ron who loved a place so much they did their best to capture it in words, some spending years defending their place from the forces of progress.
“I should really tidy things up in here,” Ron said, looking around. “Anyhow, it’s getting late. Who’s ready for dinner?”
We all let it be known we were eager to help prepare dinner. Ron needed only a couple volunteers, though, and those turned out to be Tor and Emily, who both claimed to be excellent cooks. They disappeared into the kitchen. Madelyn and Seth slipped out the door to investigate the pond, promising to be back soon. The rest of us spread out over the room, running fingers down the spines of books or admiring photos on the walls.
One photo showed Ron and his then-wife standing in front of the cabin they just finished building, eyes happy and shirts damp with sweat. In another, Ron’s now-grown-up daughter smiled for her high school graduation. A big, framed photo of a larch tree in full fall color hung in the center of one wall, its flaming-yellow branches startling in their intensity.
Eleanor turned to the window and gazed out at big hemlocks and cedars. “It’s funny,” she said. “When you visit a place like this that you’ve read about. It looks just how I pictured, but different.”
“I see why Ron wants to protect it,” said Eric. Most of the essays he brought to class were about climate protests he’d been part of, including a couple where he’d been arrested. “Do you think he ever considers giving up?”
Later, over dinner, Eric posed this same question directly to Ron, who shrugged. “I hope to God not to be doing this all my life,” was all he said. “I’d rather just write stories.”
Each of us knew what Ron meant. We all wanted to be writers, which was why we were in his class. Someday, we hoped to see our names on the spines of books like the ones on Ron’s shelves. But we knew the kinds of things that can distract a writer from getting their work done, from divorces, to children, to wondrous places that should be protected but aren’t. We knew even a cabin deep in the woods in one of the most impenetrable forests in Montana could not keep you so cut off from the affairs of the world that you wouldn’t need to intervene sometimes.
“I hope someday you can just write stories,” Eleanor said, digging into her food. “The rest of us, too.”
Dinner was bean stew with turkey meat on the side. The bird was a wild one Ron shot just days earlier, and we all took some except Seth—who was a vegetarian but later admitted he’d been tempted to try it anyway, because it was hard to imagine a more ethical or sustainable source of meat than this. The turkey tasted good, as did the beans, which were seasoned with a mix of spices that suggested Emily and Tor really had known what they were doing. For a while we ate in silence.
“You hear a lot about hearts and minds,” Ron said at last, thoughtfully, and initially we assumed this was one of those interesting non sequiturs he was prone to offering. “I used to think if I just captured enough hearts and minds, the public would be on my side and it would be enough.”
Ron came to these mountains to write stories—novels, primarily—but his first book and many of the others were nonfiction accounts of what makes the forest and its myriad lifeforms worth saving.
“I never set out to be an ‘environmental writer,’ you know,” Ron said. “Just a writer. But you can’t say anything about what’s really going on in the world without people putting you in a box.”
Later that evening, we gathered in the main room, crammed onto chairs or the couch or sitting cross-legged on the floor, and Eleanor took her guitar from its case and began strumming while she sang softly about making an angel that flies from Montgomery. Seth hummed along with the chorus and Emily joined in singing on the second verse, and the light shining through the window from the nearly full moon softly illuminated the smile on Madelyn’s face.
“Seriously, though, Ron.” It was Tor, speaking up when the music paused. “What are we supposed to do? What’s anyone supposed to do? How do you know what to do in a world like this?”
Ron’s brow furrowed before he answered. He took his time thinking. Then he said, “I don’t know, Tor. I wish I did. I’ve been asking that question for a long time myself.”
And that, really, is the story. It would be nice to report that when the night was over, we understood how to live gracefully as writers in a world that’s really screwed, or that we felt confident each of us would find a place to love as deeply as Ron loves that forest high on the continent’s mountainous spine. Then we could tie a bow on things and make this a story that finishes with an important life lesson.
But that’s not how most real-life stories turn out—we should know, all being writers—and it’s not how this one ends. In fact, there’s no end at all. Just a moment when the light fades as a cloud passes over the moon, and the only sound is the strum of the guitar and the voices of a couple of grad students whose eyes convey vague hopes about the future, until somewhere outside an owl hoots and the sound carries through the still woods.