Hummingbird Salamander(97)
By sign and symbol, by having once existed, the salamander gave me a kind of hope.
[102]
For a handful of years, I lost myself in the King Range, living off the land most of the time, often poorly. An eye out for a huge salamander in a quiet pool. An extinct hummingbird up in the trees. Found neither, but instead waded through unpolluted creeks, encountered black bears, mountain lions, elk, muskrats, and skunks. So many birds of every description.
The birds still migrated north, and south, despite the changes to climate and the disintegrating political situation. Uncertain, dangerous times. I felt for them and their journey. Did not take them for granted. They had not heard the news about the human world that so impacted theirs. They had no choice but to keep on living, keep on flying to sanctuaries that might no longer exist. But, also, the resistance in that. Some might survive. Some might adapt. Keep adapting.
By chance, I had removed myself at a critical time from confusion of the world. Because I could. Because I was burnt out, a walking corpse. Because I did not want to end myself but had to end something.
Even if I kept expecting to die in the wilderness. Even if the wilderness kept surprising me. Or I surprised myself. How was it that I became so attuned to and at peace with the change of seasons, even so corrupted? How did I become so content with silence?
In time, I got better. On some level, I thrived. My leg healed enough that I didn’t need the cane except when the barometer dropped and my joints ached. My shoulder popped and crackled, and cold days around a too-small campfire made it cry out. But mostly I felt well, almost good. Even if I could never really escape the burning warehouse, or the deep water beneath Unitopia.
Live in the moment. Funny how if that had been a saying carved into Lorraine’s front door I would’ve sneered at it. But there was such blessed relief, among all the regrets, to put Shot aside, my mother and father aside. They didn’t live within me as they had before. Ned had faded, too, as if he was a problem I’d solved or decided was unsolvable. He was still there, but I’d kept him in my thoughts for so long that I was exhausted by him. No matter who he’d been.
Memories of the outside world came to me more as glimpses of people I’d never really known. The man who drove me to the storage palace. The woman behind the counter at the storage palace who wanted my ID. The barista who handed me Silvina’s note. But Charlie at the gym most of all. The one I’d seen so often but only ever really exchanged pleasantries with. Perhaps I puzzled over them because they might be alive. Or because they’d existed on the fringes of a mystery so central to my life.
I came across people rarely, I had struck out so far into the roadless interior. Often, I kept to high elevations, coming down to the same streams as the bears and deer. I learned to travel during moonlit nights and sleep during the day. People unsettled me. Gruff or polite, friendly or wary—didn’t matter to me. Had nothing to say to them—sometimes drew my gun as a precaution. Didn’t want to meet their gaze, know their stories. Just waved them on, or stood aside on the trail, amid moss lumps and thick stands of giant ferns, waiting for them to leave.
Still a paranoia about Vilcapampa, some lingering doubts that Langer’s death had closed that account. But mostly Vilcapampa. Because even in the midst of crisis, when I came to places where my phone worked, I could tell that the Vilcapampa companies soldiered on. It might be short-term, but in the moment, they had converted over to making vaccines, to making masks, to providing essentials like bottled water. Even fossil fuel extraction, even this late in the game.
The sting of guilt came less often, unexpected but sharp. Washing my shirt in the stream, wringing it dry, and, in the twisting, the twisting free of anguish at having lost so much in return for so little. All the usual, useless things. Because I couldn’t shake Silvina’s letter. No matter how I tried. Kept the photo, though I felt I was better off without it. Felt that Silvina had broken a contract with me. Even with the relief that there was no “ground zero” event with her fingerprints on it. As if Unitopia had been the actual pinnacle of what she could accomplish.
I told myself that sometimes powerful forces pass through your life that speak to you but, in the end, keep their own counsel. That they wash over you like an extreme weather event, then are gone.
No analysis can fill in the rest.
[103]
In the spring of the fifth year, things changed for me. The winter was harsher, or felt harsher. A near disaster slipping on some rocks and falling twenty feet down a steep slope made me less sure of my existence in the King Range. The way my body felt for weeks after. How I moved in more tentative ways and how that affected my judgment. In short, I felt old.
Even as more people were coming into the area, and federal officers had begun a standoff with a nearby Native American reservation over water rights and sovereignty. Twice I also stum bled across what I believed were right-wing militias on training exercises. Came back to my camp one night to find it ransacked, although I’d hidden anything valuable before I’d left.
I could survive among these new intrusions, but the mental strain became intense. How I blocked the outer world from my thoughts, only for it to intrude. Each time more alien, more different than memory.
By then I had no evidence Vilcapampa cared about me anymore. No evidence that the police sought me. Where I’d buried Langer, no one would ever find him. I began to think about the old house. That was what really began to draw me back at first. A fixation on what it was like now. It might be in foreclosure, but it might not. My husband had kept up the mortgage and property tax as long as he could. I might have a little while before it was no longer mine. Or, at least, it might be derelict.