Idaho Ghosts
There are volcanoes here, dead they say but dreaming. Remembering the belching fire of the past, like the ruptured blood of the earth, flowing, cooling, scaring and baking star garnets into the heated press. They sleep now, all of them, but their mother Yellowstone murmurs far beyond the jagged boundary of the horizon, her sleep is deep but not silent. She knows in time she will wake and roar for all the earth and her children to hear, and those who are not dead shall rise and join in the apocalypse of their souls.
Snow shrouds them, white over green fading into black. The trees like the mountains sleep in the cold, waiting to awake. The Indians came here in the summers of long ago, the long dim dream of the past carried forward until it crashed into the modern world and shattered into fading memories like ice in the ocean. They would fish and hunt and gather the huckleberries in the high mountain meadows leaving for lower and warmer places before the winds of winter came entombing all in the white sleep. Few tribes, if any, stayed here then. Few animals either. Just the trees and the mountains and the bands of fog hanging in the canyons like their thin, pale breath.
There’s a lake near here, a Crater in the earth’s hide, deep and blown out to the side, the topography in that direction flowing like frozen molasses. The remnants of a volcano, one that burned bright, shouted and died and now is merely a place to be admired by the pilgrims of America’s beauties and the hunters who pass by. Even dormant as it is, it claims a slow tally of lives. Dead does not mean un-dangerous after all, people have fallen down the Crater rim, attempting to hike down to the water only to find much deeper waters awaiting them.
I was told a story once, by a wildland fire-boss, that the Indians had a gold mine here. One, as all good stories must have, that has never been found. They would travel here and leave their squaws at spring that now bears their title and hike north and return with gold peices about the size and shape of rice. It’s not impossible, gold and gemstones are byproducts of volcanoes, it’s not for nothing Idaho is called the gem state and we had our gold rush back in the day. It’s said every stream in Idaho has gold in it, a fact I proved throughout childhood with no exceptions, the trick is getting enough to amount to anything.
There’s another place out here, a steep pointed peak like a crumpled wizard’s hat. On foggy winter days it looms out of the mist, dark and watchful, like an eldrich terror, an assertive point impossible to ignore when seen isolated against the sky. It’s sides jagged with dark pines and glaring rock, it threatens over the surrounding forest. Even old and asleep and short the fire mountains know their imposition. This is not by any means the tallest peak around, it lies at the south western end of a long falling ridge, all mountains here are long ridges really, and juts up sudden and loud. A shout from the living earth, a tooth of time, witness to the spinning stars.
An old man had a cabin down by the river that skirted this point once, a cabin built when he was a younger man who came here after the markets crashed and before social security cards. There was a rocking chair on his porch and he wore groves with it into the wood with long use. He died tangled in his fishing line down by the river. They found him hanging there, unable to right himself, a man, old and alone and dead in this grand canvas he’d called home.
It’s winter here. The silence hangs over this land like the fog, broken only by the purring of my snowmobile. The golden sunlight paints across the snowy pines and mountains, tinting them a pale burning gold. Light contrasts hard on the snow, glaring, spitting in my eyes nearly blinding me with its glory. A photo might speak a thousand words but no thousand words I write could ever capture this picture. Beauty is fleeting and fickle, it defies our best words and technologies and we, like the time bound fools we are, can only capture a crude memory of it. Pixels beneath glowing glass, words typed by a fool on a flickering screen.
Night is fallen, I can see the stars out the window now. A wisp of smoke rising in the silent wilderness, beneath the grinning moon. A tiny flame in this vast expanse of memory and death, a candle before the winds of history. Here tonight, gone tomorrow and the world spins on. Perhaps I will become a story in these lands. Perhaps one day people will see these places and remember my name and tell stories of how I did such and such a thing in such and such a place while the mountains watched indifferently. But I think not, I will pass through these places like a ghost, telling the stories of others, tending the flames of their memories. Looking at the jagged pines dark against the infinite stars, grinning at the big dipper.
