A History of Wild Places(13)
“Do you know where Maggie is?” I asked her directly.
She shook her head, but again her eyes swayed out to the bay, like there was something she came to say, but had forgotten how. She had built a wall inside herself, a fortress of hard cheekbones and stiff gazes to protect herself from the grief she’d felt the last five years. It wasn’t uncommon—hell, I did the same thing after Ruth’s death.
“If you know where she is,” I pressed. “You could save your husband a lot of agony.”
“I’ve never been close with my daughter—” Her voice had taken on a plaintive tone, the same airy quality as the fog, not quite solid, flimsy even, like it might collapse under too much weight. “We were two different people. And I won’t pretend I was a good mother. But now she’s gone and I—”
I tried to pick apart the root of what she was trying to say. If I could have touched her scarf again, held it in my palm, I might have been able to steal a glimpse of the truth, of her real past. “If you’re certain your daughter is safe, if you know she doesn’t want to be found, then I won’t go looking for her.”
She winced, a tiny motion, and she uncrossed her arms. “I’m not sure anymore,” she admitted, and it felt like the first truly honest thing she’d said. Not guised in misdirection.
I stepped closer to her and her eyes flinched back to mine. “If any part of you thinks she might be in trouble after all these years, then tell me how to find her. At the very least, I’ll go make sure she’s safe. And if she is, I’ll leave her alone and I won’t bring her back.”
Mrs. St. James’s eyes vibrated, like a tremor was working its way up her spine, vertebrae by vertebrae, uprooting her from where she stood.
“Pastoral,” she finally said. A single word.
At that, she pushed her hands into her coat pockets, lifted her shoulders as if she could escape the damp wind, and turned away from me, walking back to her silver sedan parked at the curb.
She drove away and never looked back.
* * *
I sat in my car on the ferry and pulled out the silver book-charm from the plastic bag and held it in my palm. I closed my eyes and felt the lolling teeter of the ferry as it surged forward across the bay. Flashes of Maggie stuttered through me, broken images: she was driving her car, tall evergreens whirring by out the windows, while the radio thumped loudly from the speakers. Maggie was singing along, belting out the tunes. But then the images splintered apart—I was too far away from her.
I needed to get closer: to the place where the police found her abandoned car.
I slid the silver charm back into the plastic bag and pulled out my cell phone. I typed Pastoral into the web browser and got pages and pages of disjointed links: Pastoral Pizza in Boston, Pastoral Winery in southern Italy, Pastoral Greeting Cards: now hiring. I scrolled the Wikipedia page for pastoral: a lifestyle of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons. It lends its name to a genre of literature, art, and music that depicts such life in an idealized manner. I narrowed down my search to the Klamath National Forest where Maggie’s car was found. I dug through layers of blogger sites and pages that led me nowhere—a deep, unending hole of research. Until I hit on something in a genealogical website for a man named Henry Watson, and his wife, Lily Mae Watson. They had disappeared sometime during 1972, and among the scant information about the Watsons was a newspaper article written on September 5, 1973 in the Sage River Review: a weekly paper for local folks.
The newspaper article was old, had been scanned-in at some point, and the heading for the article was smeared and a little off-center, as if the paper had been folded in several places. It read: Commune Buys Land in Three Rivers Mountains.
Not far from where Maggie’s abandoned car had been found was a small town and a local paper—that after another quick search, I discovered was no longer in business—but it had printed an article about a community that called themselves Pastoral, who had purchased a plot of unwanted land somewhere in the nearby mountains.
The article explained that previously, in 1902, a group of German immigrants occupied the section of wilderness. The immigrants had been gold miners, following riverbeds and creeks north through California. There was talk of a railroad being laid through this stretch of forest, so the group settled in an area deep in the mountains, hoping the railroad would come straight through their plot of land. But only a few short years later, when the railroad never came, they abandoned their settlement and left behind homes and pastures and several livestock barns. Decades passed, and most locals forgot the settlement even existed. Until, in 1972, a group of beatniks and hippies and undesirables (the reporter lamented) drove an old school bus up into the remote backwoods, and purchased the forgotten land.
They called it Pastoral and claimed they were part of a movement seeking purpose and a reinvented way of life, the reporter quoted. But one interview with a local man named Bert Allington called Pastoral a cult, a place of wild, reckless depravity. But to the reporter’s credit, she went on to say that the group had fled the social norms of society and came deep into the wilderness to live off the land and start a commune that was built from the simple principles of shared living. Their burdens would be spread over many, so as never to be too much for one. The article ended with the reporter leaving a few words to her readers: It’s easy to fear what we do not know. But perhaps these newcomers only wish for the same as the rest of us, a place to call home.