My Abandonment(62)

The trees grow thick since it's the Deschutes National Forest all around us. I can run straight from my door, lose hours out there by myself in alone time. In winter I wear white clothes, in summer brown and tan. In hunting season you're supposed to wear orange so the hunters won't mistake you but I never wear orange. I blend in. I can still walk without leaving a trace. I can hold perfectly motionless and I can sway slightly, keeping pace with the trees and bushes in the wind.

The dirt is black, volcanic, sharp underfoot. Still I go barefoot when I can, when the weather allows. I wander now more than I truly run since in the week after Boise my left foot, my toes got worse. Frostbite. I read about it, how it works, ice crystals between the cells as my skin went white and waxy and then red and itchy. Frostbite can turn to gangrene, where your tissue dies away and you can lose your body piece by piece. My little toe was black and loosened already, snagged in my sock. I iced that toe down but still it hardly hurt when I took Father's sharp knife and cut it straight through. The bone made the smallest sound. This changed my balance and it's tricky to run so sometimes I wonder if I cut off the little toe on my right foot I'd get my balance back and be able to run straight again.

Just over a mile from my yurt I've dug down into the edge of a ridge and I've built a roof that hangs over further, just like in the forest park with dirt on top and a mattress inside, a cooking stove, a pine branch that leans against the front door so no one would know it's here. I hardly ever sleep here but I can with my sleeping bag and in the night I wake up and pretend that Father is next to me, that in the morning we'll walk down through the trees and across the St. Johns Bridge to the Safeway.

Lying on the mattress in the afternoon I watch eagles circle in, and red tail hawks and peregrine falcons, the egrets with their legs bent back. I've seen helicopters glide across the treetops with their noses pointing down, spilling great bags of water to put out forest fires.

Wandering and ranging I cross in and out of the burnt sections where the fires have been. Even where the fires have not been the trees here are not as good for climbing. I am heavier now but still I'll spend an afternoon thirty feet off the ground stretched out on a branch watching everything that passes below. I see deer and rabbits and elk. I hear marmots whistle to each other, see them disappear into rock piles. I've never seen another person out here. I sit in the branches without moving and animals pass right beneath me without sensing a thing so I could drop down on them like a wolverine, which is the largest weasel, a mammal that will fall from above to break a deer's spine. There are no wolverines here since now they hardly live anyplace except Canada.

A bird shouldn't be able to fly backward but I see this. Clouds come apart and pull themselves back together if I am patient enough. A red fox leaps forward three times then bounds back to where she started, her feet hitting the ground in just the same places and then coming forward again and bounding past where I can see. I sit still. A deer rattles past with its white tail coming first and its antlers dragging the air behind before it suddenly leaps forward on the same tracks. A leaf falls off the tree then raises up and reattaches itself. The sun jerks up a few inches before easing down again toward the evening.

I feel like myself with the sage and pine in my nose and all the little scratches on my bare arms. I wander across the slopes of the Black and Belknap craters, those old volcanoes, or north, crossing the highway near the Cold Springs campground where sometimes there are bright domed tents and the smell of bacon frying.

I know where the Cold Springs come up, and the Four Mile Springs, I cross Bluegrass Butte and Graham Butte, Five Mile and Six Mile. I know the names but I know buttes and springs that have no names. I follow the paths of animals, I recognize broken trees and burnt out stretches, rock formations that I give my own names. I pause above Black Butte Ranch, the bright green of the golf course and the carts scuttling across it. Out on their little lake the canoes and paddleboats drift and slide.

I come down this slope, not far from the fancy condos, the hot tubs and tennis courts and everything else. I can double back the way I came or come out on the Santiam Highway and walk back to Sisters this way, where the work crews in their orange suits are always stacking the firewood cut from the fallen trees and the burnt ones that have been cut so they won't fall on passing cars. I wave, I wonder if it's possible that some of these criminals could be the same men from the forest park, even if they got out in Portland and committed another crime and were caught again and put to work in another orange outfit.

It's miles to walk to Sisters from here. That's no problem. I cut across north of town to get over to the McKenzie Highway, near the junior high school where if there's a carnival or a softball game I slow down.