Memoirs

I've been reading and enjoying a lot of memoirs lately. Usually, I'm more of a fictional-novel kind of girl, so this is a departure for me (look at me, breaking out of one of my many ruts!). As I'm reading, it occurs to me that it seems to help a great deal, if you wish to write a memoir, to have had an absolutely hideous childhood/adolescence/life in general. My life has been largely hideousness-free, so I'm not sure I have enough material for a real memoir, but I do have a couple stories that may be worth telling. Here's a quick one, as quick is all I have the time or attention span for. Ugh, I hate ending sentences with a preposition, but it just sounds so goofy to say "for which I have the time or attention span."

I went to high school in Forks, Washington - it's almost literally the end of the earth. The northwesternmost town in the continental US, Forks survived on timber alone for its first sixty or so years, and was hit hard when new environmental regulations slowed legal logging to a crawl. It's beautiful, but incredibly isolated (the nearest town is 60 miles away) and tiny (there were about 2,500 residents when I lived there).

One of the local pastimes is hunting, and there are a lot of choices - elk, deer, and black bear are prevalent. I was raised by pacifist parents and am myself a strong proponent of gun control. However - a girl's got to do what a girl's got to do, and I was usually restless to the point of insanity, so when my friends and boyfriends went hunting, I often tagged along.

One August evening, my then-boyfriend and I went out with another couple during bear season. On a whim, we took my boyfriend's mother's station wagon way up into the foothills of the Olympic Mountains, still wearing swimsuits under our clothes after an afternoon swimming a local river. We hadn't been out long when we saw a bear loping across a hillside clearing. My boyfriend took aim with his grandfather's gun and brought the bear down with one shot. He and his friend climbed down from the higher road to where the bear fell to clean it, while my friend and I drove the car around to the low road for easier access.

The summer days are long in northern Washington, but the hike up the hill from the car took longer than we anticipated, and we reached the guys under a cerulean sky that seemed chillier than when we arrived. The boys were afire with blood and testosterone, and it felt like a primal celebration. Like I could squint my eyes and see the shadows of ancient man, victorious over nature and assured of survival, however temporary. Our boyfriends began to carry their prize down the hill, but my friend and I were electrified by the night and the kill and the wild boys, and we decided to continue up the hill and have them meet us with the car. We walked, then climbed upward as the slope increased, chattering gaily and carrying the rifles, and were startled near the top by a sudden cascade of pebbles that in turn released a basketball-sized boulder. The boulder crashed through the gun I carried and pinned my leg to the side of the hill, somehow without hurting me. The shock silenced us temporarily, then drove us into teenage girly giggles. Our boyfriends pulled up in the car to find us clutching each other and weeping with laughter.

My boyfriend was unthrilled to find that his grandfather's gun had been shattered in his absence, and I was unthrilled to find that he cared more about a gun than about my leg almost being pulverized by a boulder, but the sun was setting and we were all winding down from high-test giddiness, so we just got in the car with the bear and headed on down the road. About twenty minutes later, just as my boyfriend said "I think I made a wrong turn somewhere," an ominous clunk emanated from the station wagon's front end and we drifted slowly to a stop. The guys got out to look at the engine, but as it was pitch black and they had no fucking idea what they were doing anyway, that didn't get us anywhere, and the bugs drove them back into the car pretty quickly. I don't remember ever being pestered by insects the whole time I lived in Forks except for that one night. We hadn't intended to be out after dark, so we had no supplies at all - no food, water, warm clothes, or entertainment. For a couple hours, we were so desperately bored that we played "guess what time it is" every few minutes, using one boy's digital watch to judge the winner. Our families began searching for us before midnight, but as we had wandered afield of the actual road, they didn't find us until the mountains in the east were rimmed with purple and the bugs had given way to the birds.

That night seemed to last forever, but there was nothing we could do to improve our situation and so no feeling of urgency, except as the smell of the poor dead animal in the back began to permeate our bug-free pocket of air. My boyfriend later had the bear's head mounted and hung on his wall, since he had had to forego the meat after the long night with no refrigeration. And that all seemed normal to me then.

I write this from the perspective of fourteen years of city life - I moved straight from Forks to Los Angeles, and have since lived in Seattle and Baltimore. It's hard to believe now how much time I used to spend off in the woods. Off-season or over-limit, we would spotlight deer or go elk calling, things my husband had never heard of until he met me. My idea of roughing it now is to roll the window down instead of using the air conditioning in the car when the temperature hits 80, in an effort to conserve gas. It's hard to believe I was fourteen and so unconcerned in the wilderness.















Three of the children in front of the big log in downtown Forks last summer.