CMarie Fuhrman

Lake 8

The map that I was given is worn. The crease through the center where it has been unfolded and refolded is delicate. The lakes and tributaries are hand-drawn, the labels in neat, elegant cursive. The paper has become soft, like the inside of a doe’s ear; velvety. The images and words have been photocopied so many times that they are starting to fade; the shorelines of the unnamed lakes are missing, the water flowing from their outlets never reaching the main channel. If the map were not labeled Stillwater Lakes, I would think it a crude drawing of a woman’s generative anatomy. I refold the paper and look at the landscape before me and see it this way; the lakes like ovaries and the streams shimmering fallopian tubes, flowing toward the crease of the valley. I sense that by stepping into this wilderness I am stepping into my own body.

I am trying to get oriented. To line up the map, which lacks a compass rose, with the horseshoe-shaped lake below us. My partner, Caleb, and our two dogs, Carhartt and Cisco, are with me. We have just hiked to the top of Cache Mountain, it is the first of three days we will spend exploring an unnamed chain of lakes in the Frank Church Wilderness. I turn the map ninety degrees until the crescent-shaped lake on paper lines up with the one in the trees below us. According to the map, this is Lake 5. Caleb glasses the area around the lake. Says there is a good tent site, a dry mud flat near the water. We will put our tent there and sleep on the flattest ground that we’ve slept on all summer.

Though a faint trail made mostly by a decommissioned road to a mine, then reestablished by an old fire line, could be found to the top of Cache Mountain there is no trail to lead us to the lake. We will have to make our own way for the mile or so down the steep slope to the sapphire green that lay below us. Caleb goes first, the dogs behind him, and I fall in last, always slower than the others as I stop to take photos, taste pine needles, or rub sage between my palms and hold them over my nose and mouth; inhaling the sweet and sometimes spicy clean smell of it. More often than not, I am stooped over looking at rocks or tracks or the slow progress of a snail and totally lose sight of or run directly into Caleb.

Such is the case this morning as I am nearly on his heels while he is stopped in front of me. Black binoculars to his blue eyes, he is looking down at the valley beneath us and at the soft gentle slope that slowly drains the water from Lake 5. He turns to me. Whispers goats. I smile. I know what it means to him to see mountain goats in this part of the Wilderness. What it means to the Frank Church Wilderness ecosystem to have them here. For years, overhunting and the accumulating presence of people have driven down their populations and what goats remained left for more remote parts of the Wilderness. That they are here now is a sign that the land is coming back to what researchers like Caleb believe is a natural state. Eight, he says, maybe ten. He hands me the binoculars and I look. As perfect as clouds they stand white against green. Slow and lazy, too. But they are wary of predators, as soon as they hear or smell us, they will dissolve like the clouds they resemble, drifting up, dissipating into the rocks and crags that are their natural terrain.

It is August in West Central Idaho. Most of the wildflowers are gone from the ridgelines and the hillsides. The beargrass has blossomed, the long stalks fallen. The arrowleaf is a memory held for spring, only a few Red Paintbrush remain alongside a yellow daisy, ubiquitous, but whose name always eludes me. This isn’t typical. It is dryer than normal. We have not had a storm since early June and the lack of rain can be felt and heard and is carried in the air around us. The grass crunches as we step, the brush of leaves against our bare legs, once tender and welcome, is sharp in death. The sound of airplanes carrying people or water or supplies to a nearby fire, a fire whose smoke has somewhat blurred a view that might have otherwise been so vast that we would lose our sense of size in it, burns our eyes. Brings tears.

We are moving downhill quickly. Gravity and terrain allow us big steps and soon we have dropped almost a thousand feet. As we near the lake it is as if we are stepping back in seasons. Brown grass has turned back to green. We breathe easily again. The smoke now above us. Mountain Gentian lays a carpet of the most unbelievable morning blue before us and we find ourselves stepping carefully among the low plants, not wanting to crush a single blossom, not wanting to carry the scent of that crime on our soles. We shed our packs on the dry mudflat and walk together to the water’s edge.

The map is the result of an alpine lake survey taken in 1996. Though the drawing was made years before, the writing belonged to Peggy, a colleague of Caleb’s at the US Forest Service office in McCall, Idaho. Caleb had found and copied this version, handed it to me when we reached Cache Peak. When I ask, Caleb tells me that among many other tasks that she completed as a seasonal employee since the 70s, such as riparian surveys and road inventories, Peggy often performed lake surveys. Packing an inflatable raft, gill nets, fishing poles, her tent, and camping supplies, she hiked from lake to lake to determine whether fish had survived from decades earlier stocking efforts by Idaho Fish and Game. I admire and envy her work. I envy her strength. That she came back here by herself. Alone. I think about the long days of silence and hiking as I trace her handwriting on the map. I am glad that this is a woman’s work. That it holds within its careful drawings and elegant cursive a certain feminine strength that other women, like myself, would notice. I scan the map and find that Lake 5 has cutthroat trout in it, or did twenty-two years ago in 1996, and according to Peggy’s notes, also had fish forty years ago in 1978. Another survey has not been made since. We suspect there will still be trout living in Lake 5, but as we near the shore the water comes alive with the bodies of hundreds of thumb-sized and shiny black tadpoles. Caleb smiles. There aren’t going to be any fish in this lake. Trout would be forever only a memory held in the silt and on the survey map. The frogs have returned. I write the date below Peggy’s last entry, but pause as I wonder what to write next to it.

Trout, or fish of any kind, are not native to these lakes, are in fact, rarely found in any alpine lakes. When this landscape formed, after the pullback of the glaciers, the way up to the lakes was, and remains, as steep as our way down. Fish passage was not possible. Not even the wiliest trout could make the jumps and climbs necessary to reach these waters. So the ecosystem of lakes, like Lake 5, support a different kind of life. Amphibians mostly. Along with the other aquatic insects that standing water attracts. I ask Caleb how he knew, with such certainty, that there would be no fish. He explains that the cutthroat would have eaten the tadpoles when they were young, smaller than they are now. Eventually would have depopulated the lake of frogs almost entirely. We begin a slow walk around the lake and I hear a splash, and then another, all around us Columbia Spotted Frogs jump from where they were sitting on rocks or logs or in the tall grass that hems the shore and splash one-by-one into the clear water.

We set up our tent among the tracks of cougar, deer, elk, bear, and what looks to be the narrow track of a small wolf. It will feel good to sleep on this earth where so many animals have stood. The mud that was the floor of a vernal pond only weeks ago holds each print as if cast in clay. Tracing the outline of the bear’s toes the soil does not crumble beneath my finger. I can make out the lines of the pad of the bear’s foot like the lines on the palm of my own hand and for a moment I am a palmist smiling at what I hope is a good, strong life line. I crawl to the next track. A cougar paw with just this dip of a claw print. The doe had a fawn beside her, heart after heart of hoof tracks pressed into the tan earth. The elk was moving quickly, it is the only track that shows any sign of a slide. It makes me happy to know that even as we walk atop them, our footprints will not cover theirs, will not destroy them, and will not even be traceable among them. Three days later, when we pack up our tent to leave, the only sign of our being here will be a slight disruption of the earth where we went in and out of the tent. Even this we will smooth out with a pine bough.

As Caleb filters water from the lake, I walk its circumference. I am walking off a headache. That, combined with an unwarranted underlying anxiety and breasts that mark each hard step with a pang of pain, are harbingers of my menses. I will bleed while we are here. I used to avoid hiking and backpacking altogether when I was menstruating. And for good reason. I get devilish cramps. Cramps that force me to lie down, to curl into myself. And, because of a tipped uterus, my blood rarely comes in manageable doses, but often all at once, spilling from me in such a way that I must find a bathroom, a place to allow myself to drain.

But as I have become more accustomed to this landscape, more comfortable in it than not, and now that I know more about the people who inhabited this land, inhabit it still, I have found it very natural to come to the woods during my menses. Movement has always quelled the pain and the ability to find a rock or stump on which to sit upon while my uterus sheds its layers, while my body completes another cycle that female bodies—human and not—share, is somehow comforting, communing; easier than experiencing the same time indoors, placated with hot pad and ibuprofen. As I walk the lake, frogs splashing with my every step, I wonder how many babies were born upon these shores. I wonder about other Native women, those from only a century before, whether any of them labored here, if their birthing cries echoed along the granite where now resounds the wop-wop-wop of helicopters and the drone of small aircraft. That I know so little about these first women and their lives bothers me. Then again, that they were able to live as they did for thousands of years leaving barely any sign is commendable. To know that my blood will disappear into the earth with theirs is a feeling somewhere in the proximity of joy. It is the most natural offering I can give these mountains, the Grandmothers.

Frog after frog alerts my coming. Each with a leap wonderfully awkward and ridiculously formless. The frogs are the size of my hand or smaller. Some are by themselves, others in pairs or groups, as if couples or families even though such behavior is not part of frog lifestyle. These frogs do not know monogamy, only survival. Their brown is the brown of tree bark and lake bottom. They move through the water with a grace I long to follow. And eventually do.

After walking the acre or so around the lake I take rest among the stems and leaves of the dogtooth violet that have already bloomed out. Caleb is on his own walkabout. Silence takes lead on this Wilderness stage. The dogs are concerning themselves with smelling for squirrels or the piss of other animals. The sun is almost directly above us. Butterflies, mostly yellow, but some white and indecorous, drift like falling petals of sunlight through the air. I close my eyes and hold the scene in situ. Then softly the silence breaks. I hear song. Weak at first, growing slowly. The music of frogs, a chorus of croaking amphibians fills the basin around us. When Caleb returns, he is smiling. He wants to know if I heard them. I nod. He says he has never heard Columbia Spotted Frogs croak. He tells me he counted sixty frogs as he walked around the lake. I smile back. I had not counted anything at all.

We hang our food and leave any extra gear in the tent. We want to walk out to where the goats were, we want to see the other lakes. Caleb packs his fishing pole and a plastic case of lures. I have the map, water, and snacks. From here the terrain will be rolling, an easy up and down, almost all the way to the base of the Needles some eight miles away. I feel the same kind of excitement the dogs exhibit. I am eager to know this place, eager to touch the water in the other lakes, to see what, if anything, the lures bring. And likely I am full of hormones as well, that sudden burst I get a day or two before my bleeding starts. I welcome it. Glad for the extra energy.

The goats are gone from the meadow. Not even a track remains which causes us to second guess what we both know we saw. We follow the stream, the water draining from Lake 5, as it makes its way down the crease of a valley. We stand in a bit of what I can describe only as a series of small hanging valleys and cirque basins. On one side, steep hillsides lead to ridgelines, on the other side, miles and miles of wilderness, sometimes abruptly and other times gently draining down. Down toward Elk Creek, down toward the Salmon River. Down toward the Columbia and eventually into the Pacific. So much begins right here.

The next lake, Lake 6, is barely a half mile away. It sits confidently among granite boulders and outcroppings and, unlike Lake 5, which only hosted five or six trees on a prominence in the center of its u-shape, Lake 6 is lined with spruce, lodge pole, and tall, tall whitebark pine. The lake calls to me in a different way now that I know about the frogs. I am eager for the splashes, want to see the tadpoles moving like impossible giant sperm in the clear shallow water. The azure blue of the lake is also tempting. The sun has reached its apex. We are hot, eager to cool off. But as we approach, we can see the water is shallow, the bottom muddy. The shoreline is silent, still. We step carefully around the edges, dodging mud, not wanting to step on the delicate grass, to cast a human print where it does not belong. We walk halfway around the lake and stop. I unshoulder my pack and reach for the map. I put my finger on Lake 6. Written beside its shape, the word: Barren. The B is capitalized, the rest in small letters.

Barren. The word seems like a sentence. As if the lake had done something wrong. Been condemned. Lost value. Failed us. That frogs have not returned to this lake as they had in Lake 5 is a mystery we are not able to solve, but Barren it is not. Sun glints off the wings of mayflies as they move in their rehearsed patterns above the water. Birds call from the pine and shrub around us. The tracks from goats, deer, elk that have come to drink from this water are innumerable. And it is beautiful, which is in itself rich. A dreamy blue that reflects more blue sky, water clear as the earth’s conscience. The lake is, by my simple standards, functioning perfectly. Why was it condemned by two syllables? I sit down on the trunk of a fallen tree and say the word aloud. I don’t like that word, Caleb says in return.

What expectations do we have for wild places? How do these words, these maps, or our own personal enhancements and perceptions change the way that we value nature? Can we allow nature to be in its natural forms, to go through its processes, to lack that which we consider commodity or resource and still see the worth in it? I think back to a conversation, months prior, when fires burned near the town of Durango and a friend wrote, “I can barely stand to watch. All of my beautiful wilderness is being destroyed.”

My. Beautiful. Wilderness. Destroyed.

The line was loaded with judgment. With the assumption that anything natural is only beautiful in what humans have decided is its most productive state. And a sense of entitlement. Ownership. That these wild places belong to any of us in any way bothered me, bothers me still. That notion of ownership somehow touching the roots of my heritage that insist that we belong to the land. Or is it just the knowledge of what land ownership has done to both public and private places. When we own something, be it a horse or five acres, do we then determine its fate and by doing so have we taken away the wildness that we coveted before it was ours? And, when it no longer serves the purpose for which we insisted ownership, do we sell or abandon it? Who hangs on to an unproductive farm? Keeps feeding the old mare when she can no longer be ridden? Stops walking their favorite trail when the trees that shaded it have burned?

That same month, when fires are burning in Southern Colorado, friends from Maryland came to visit. We decided to go on one of my favorite hikes, a rolling, comfortable climb, to Grassy Twin and Coffee Cup lakes. We came to a turn in the trail that holds one of the most spectacular views. Before us, we could see all the way down the Hard Creek drainage. All around us, the blackened trunks of trees, bare earth where vegetation has not returned since a fire passed through here a couple of years prior.

I turned to my friends and ask if they are disappointed. My friend Mattia asks why. I say, because it is burned. Are you disappointed that this area is not lush? Green? She shook her head. And I explained to her and her husband Joe, what had been bothering me about statements made concerning wildfire, about our expectations of beauty. Caleb added that the view we now have would not have been possible without the burn. This was just another stage of life, not the picture of death. We hiked on, all of us now acutely aware of what the fire had brought, even the abundance of tender aspen that had sprouted from the ashy soil.

Caleb and I turn east to leave Lake 6 and pass an old campsite. We pass a small ring of rocks that has not held a fire in years. Caleb remarks about the lack of recent use in this part of the Frank Church compared to other places in the forest, outside of the Wilderness. I guess no one comes back here anymore, he says, kicking at a tin can rusted. In that statement I sense an ease, but also a bit of regret in Caleb’s voice. What is a place to most Idahoans, most of us that live and recreate here, if it doesn’t provide game to hunt or fish to catch?

That night I cannot sleep. The rush of hormones that come before the blood has its downside. I lie awake reading for an hour or so, then slide out of my sleeping bag, unzip the tent door, and step out onto the dry earth. The sky is a chaos of stars, the Milky Way a white brushstroke across a blueblack midnight sky. The moon is waning crescent with just enough light to guide me without headlamp to a log where I can sit to pee. I look out toward the lake, toward our circus orange tent that sits on its shore, and I think of how much the three lives therein mean to me. My family. One man, two dogs. The latter of which I know will not remain as long as the former, the unfair too short length of dog lives out of my control. Nevertheless, they mean the world to Caleb and me. Plans are made around their ability to join us. We rarely go anywhere without them.

Caleb and I talked about kids when we first met but we were almost forty then, almost fifty now. It is likely it will remain just the two of us, and whatever canine companions we adopt, until one or the other of us passes. I think it is fair to say that we both felt a little sadness about this, certain that our kids would love to share these experiences with us, would be as feral as our young selves, as we are now. But I am at a critical age for childbearing. My periods have become more irregular, at night I wake soaked in my cotton nightgown. The shape of my body is changing ever so slightly. My older sister, never gentle about these things, says to me in a later phone call, Welcome to hell. My mom, with a much different, distant perspective, says I am entering the best years of my life. There is no definitive guide my doctor will tell me, it is different for every woman. But whether or not Caleb and I want children, the choice to do so naturally will soon no longer be mine. I finish and wipe myself. There is pink on the cotton. The first hint of a cramp deep in my belly. I push on my uterus with the heel of my palm. I feel the warm blood leave me.

The next morning, we are up early and walking toward Lake 7: FISH. It is easy to make our way around without a path. A turn right would take us up the ridgeline, left and we would go down a steep slope with unnamed waters toward Elk Creek, or we can walk straight ahead along this shelf of land that holds lakes like gemstones. We go forward.

Lake 7 proves as easy to reach as the others. From the top of a ridgeline the day before, we watched as two downy mountain goats and one kid walked its circumference, none of these lakes large by Idaho standards, only an easy ten or fifteen-minute walk around each. When we reach its shoreline, we immediately see its depth. Even though these lakes are not far apart, each one seems to have its own personality, to offer something different to the visitor. Balls of goat hair stick to the limbs of Labrador tea that surround the lake. I pull one off and hold it to my nose and smell only early morning.

Last night a breeze cleared the smoke and today the sky reflects uninhibited from the surface of Lake 7. We sit in shade on the east shore and I eat a snack of nuts and fruit while Caleb attaches a small, dime-sized lure to his fishing line. How gently his big fingers work with the small, silver lure. How deftly they make the knots in the almost invisible filament and how easily he zips that line into the water. Soon he has a bite and is reeling but loses the fish. Again, and again he casts, the barb crimped against hook makes the catching harder, but also the odds less likely of killing a fish. He finally reels one in and I am waiting beside him, camera in hand. We have decided to update the lake survey. Add our findings to Peggy’s list. Caleb will send the photos to his colleagues at Idaho Fish and Game and I’ll keep our original copy, later pinning it above my desk as one might a ticket stub or an autograph.

The trout is small, maybe eight inches. Its head is misshapen, too big for its body. I say this to Caleb. Overpopulated, he replies. And though their presence here in Lake 7 is not natural, we feel somehow happy for them, somehow excited to have caught the fish, to pull a survivor from the depth of the lake. Lake 7 was last stocked nearly twenty years ago. If the fish is about seven years old, which Caleb assumes it is, then it is the great- or great great- grandchild of the 1989 stocking of one thousand cutthroat trout. I watch the careful way that Caleb holds the fish. I have seen this now maybe a hundred times. His gentleness with wild things, his tenderness. He slides his hand in the water and the fish glides away. We repeat the process all around the acre distance of the lake then return to where we started. We put on our packs and move toward Lake 8.

As we walk, I think of the fish we left behind. I think of how quickly it, and other fish, have grabbed the lure. There’s not enough food for them. Many will starve to death. Months later Caleb will tell me about a species of finch that have all but disappeared from their native alpine lake habitat. The larvae, he said, of the caddisfly was eaten by the stocked trout before the finch could get to it. Larvae was a main food source, and once it was gone, so was the Rosy finch. And though my knowledge of these ecosystems is limited, I can only imagine what else has been changed by our human desire to create within these pools some sort of life which humans deem vital, worthwhile. I feel the cramps like a fist clenching in my stomach. I find a log, sit, and press my hand into my uterus. Watch as carmine falls to pine needles, onto earth. Deep red clots among bright red blood. The last time I saw my doctor she said that I had about three percent of my eggs left. Those numbers dropping steeply the closer I got to my final menses. I look at the blood on the ground. Tadpoles. Frogs. Overpopulation. Rosy finch. Natural state. Unproductive. All these words run through my mind as my blood drains onto the soil of the Salmon River Mountains.

Eager to make our way to the upper lakes, we passed by Lake 8 quickly. But we did not pass by without commentary. We were both taken by the color (turquoise), the depth (unknowable), the beauty (incomparable.) On the shore of Lake 8 fireweed was blooming and numbering in the hundreds. Granite black, white, and sparkling with mica tumbled toward the north and west shores of the lake. A meadow verdant and supple lay like an offering at the east shore and to the south, boulders played their way into the water, more fireweed coming up like purple prayers from what little soil the granite offered. Here I could spend all my summer days. Here is where we should have pitched our tent. Here is the most beautiful place in the Wilderness, in Idaho, in the West. My world in the moment we passed it, was only us and the lake. Memory and knowledge of other places I loved fell from me as blooms fall from the fireweed. I lost all agency and felt if I sat long enough roots may grow from the backs of my legs and I might find myself as natural to the landscape as the whitebark pine, the milk colored goat. Caleb tied lure to filament and cast again and again, each time bringing back nothing but the unzipping of water as he pulled the lure through it. Not barren, I said. We can’t label it that. He nodded and added, non-fish bearing. I smiled. Satisfied, but not completely so. The prefix non still bringing with it a sense of the negative, of not being enough. I searched for a better label and could not find one. The word made sense for science, but I am not a scientist.

We made our way to Lake 3 (FISH), by midafternoon. In the lake that sat at the bottom of a steep scree slope there were neither fish nor frogs, but Caleb stripped off his clothes and moved through the water with as much grace. As naturally. I was bleeding steadily by now. The cramps not horrible, but uncomfortable, my energy waning, so I lay in the shade with the dogs, their panting a metronome to my dreaming.

Caleb had told me that when they first started stocking the lakes the trout were brought by mule in large tin milk jugs. What was it like, I wondered, when the first trout entered the water? Tens of thousands of years these lakes had been without fish and then, as the jugs were tipped, suddenly, silver flashes in the water. This must have seemed a miracle to early biologists and sportsmen. To be able to put a life where that life had not before been. I think of my friend Jennifer, five months pregnant now, and holding her hand as we watched a fertilized egg being planted in her uterus by her doctor. As of right now, the nurse said when the doctor stood to leave, you are pregnant. Jennifer grasped her belly. We smiled at each other and all the way home talked about due dates and baby showers. She didn’t want to get her hopes up, afraid she might lose this one as she had others before, but Griffin has stuck with her. She sends me pictures of ultrasounds, lets me hear his heartbeat.

This landscape is so much like a woman, I think again. Each lake an ovary sending its water, life, down each of these outlets. The drainage itself with ridges and deep cuts like an exquisite vagina. The hills like full hips, like perfect breasts, nippled peaks as if mother nature lay herself down over and over, upon the nothing that was the earth before her coming, saying here, here use me. And we have.

I turn to look at the lake just as Caleb emerges from the water. His skin glistens in the sun. He is a deep brown from days hiking, running trails. The water runs off his shoulders and down the length of him and I trace each glistening drop with my eyes as they travel down his chest, pelvis, long legs and disappear into the water. He smiles at me and I wonder if we should make love. Here on the shores of Lake 3. And what if I were to get pregnant, would we tell our child that they were conceived on the banks of a lake with no name; the dogs, trees, birds and goats as our witnesses? Would they grow to know this state as natural, to expect frogs before fish? And then, as if to remind me, a cramp like a finger poking into my belly. And even if I wasn’t bleeding, the chances of a pregnancy are slim. I think about all the years of fertility behind me and the years of infertility in front. In many ways it will be a relief to be through with this monthly ritual. The stains and pain, my earlier years of worrying about missing a period. And yet. In those years I had a choice. I could stop the pill, have the IUD removed, have unprotected sex and watch my belly grow.

I stand and look out into the depths of the Wilderness, out into the acres and acres of land I have not experienced, out onto ridgelines, treetops, into a vastness that blends into a word I know only as landscape, with a qualifier as simple as beautiful. Hundreds of unnamed lakes lie before me. Streams without fish. Cliffs with neither mountain goats nor big horn sheep. And in the same view all these things do exist. This landscape, like my own body, is a narrative of possibility. How it is perceived is found in the words we choose to describe it. As I stand by Lake 3 one of the most sacred choices a woman has slowly drains from me. And when it is gone, how might I be perceived? Labeled? I shoulder my pack and we hike the steep hill up and over the saddle and back to Lake 8.

The picture Caleb took looks like this: The top half is sky. A double-peaked granite mountainside, and a scattering of tall, steeple-like sub-alpine fir trees that all seem to be tumbling graciously toward water that makes up the second half of the picture. Water a shade of green best described as spring green, as that delicate green in a mother of pearl ring, as new green. As a green that is trying to reflect sky and tree and granite. As if somehow the water is in love with the rocks and sky and roots that saunter toward it. In the foreground, the backside of woman’s body, standing hip deep in the water. Hair long and black. Just the hint of the round of her breasts can be seen on either side of her smooth brown back. Arms extended as if welcoming home a lover she has not seen in years. Extended as if she is caught in a moment of rapture. Extended as if she has been released. Is free. Her shoulders strong. Waist narrow. Hips full. In moments the hands will come together in a prayer that she will issue with her body, my body, as I dive into the water.

Even now, months later I look at the picture and I am there again. In Lake 8. My almost post-menstrual body. Moments after he takes the picture, Caleb joins me. Swims out beside me, dives beneath the surface and rises and says, open your eyes while you’re under. I do. And what I see is endless. Is what fish, stocked forty years before must have seen. And it is not potential. Or lack. It is a feeling of creation or have being so forgotten so fully that the need to exist for others is completely gone. I watch sun reflect off the minerals suspended in the water, and I move among them like I am swimming through memories, spawning. I stay under as long as my lungs allow, until they ache with the need for air. When finally I bring my head back above water, I find Carhartt, our oldest dog, swimming beside me. Cisco follows on the shore. Caleb is within arm’s reach. My blood and the last of my reproductive days slowly draining from me, and yet I know I will walk out of this lake more complete than when I had entered it. I swallow the water on my lips, blink it into my eyes.

When we leave the next day, it is not without a feeling that I have left something behind. Not the two feathers, one Clarks nutcracker for Caleb, one magpie for me, that I had found as we hiked, stuck into the ground at the edge of the dry flat where we ate our supper, shared our morning coffee. Not some gear, or random thing dropped. The map, now folded together with a larger map of the whole forest, is in my pack tucked among the debris, the food uneaten, the damp clothes, its words innocuous among all that I carry. I feel no regret for not pulling fish from the lake to eat or bring home or pocketing this rock or that to place in the bowl of forest souvenirs that serves as a talking piece on our coffee table. It was something different. Something left without regret, not an offering yet not trash. Something like a wish that I didn’t need granted any longer.

As we made our way up the steep slope, I looked back to the mud flat. The frogs, the tadpoles, the feathers left to twist in the wind—none of that could be seen. From this height, this distance, the tracks of the deer and her fawn, the blue of Mountain Gentian, the blood, it was all part of a landscape. And the place where we had put our tent was better for our absence, though I hoped that some of our spirit remained and might be felt by whatever lay there next. I closed my eyes and felt the low cramp in my belly that for 35 years has reminded me of the capabilities of my body. I look back to the landscape, all the way across the lakes. See again the sparkling underwater of Lake 8 and remember what it was like to break through the surface, for my eyes to focus on the face of Caleb, hear Carhartt beside me, Cisco panting on the shore, my own breath as I renewed it. The feeling of aliveness and contentment. I turned and looked up the hill and saw Caleb and the dogs waiting for me, the top of the climb was only a few steps away. In an hour, the lakes would be behind me, the frogs could return to their shoreline perches, and in Lake 8, the blood I left behind had already diluted.

Elizabeth HuntSeptember 8, 20202020, Fall 2020, CMarie Fuhrman, CMarie, fuhrman

CMarie Fuhrman

Lake 8

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