The Home Not Lived In

The first night that I slept in the Yaak valley in northwestern Montana, I closed my eyes and saw the pattern of ferns on the floor of a mixed pine forest. The images were those of an old, smoky, foxed mezzotint, full of grays and browns and coppers. Typically, behind my closed eyelids before the drift into unconsciousness, I see formless granular shifting sands or that odd checkerboard of turquoise and grass green. Only a day into the Yaak and the place was strangely approachable, as if it could be home-like, though I hadn’t been there before. I have seen numerous types of forests in the USA, but not one like this.

Far from the Yaak I am back home in prairie country preparing for storage the fabulous coral mushrooms that we picked with a couple named Ginny and Paul. "Come with us!" they said, and we did. They didn't know us from Adam but wanted to share with us what they thought would be the unique Yaak experience of gathering the forest mushrooms, a regional delicacy. Ginny and Paul live in the Yaak but work on industrial equipment all over the world and in the states. They had just returned from a job in Romania. During the summers and autumns they harvest the bounty of the area: mushrooms, huckleberries, deer, and grouse.

Paul doesn't believe in bear spray, so he strapped to his side a big .460 with a scope on it and dove into the Yaak's dense forest with us in tow. The coral mushroom looks like coral, hence its name. It is also called a brain mushroom. It pushes up through the dark forest floor, and the forest duff of pine needles, lichen hairs, and loam clings to the convolutions of the fungi.

We picked the younger firm ones, the ones with the whiter flesh. The older, browner ones are a bit past their prime. The deer and snowshoe rabbits had gotten to a few of them first, but there seemed plenty to share between animals and humans. The forest smelled good, and here at home the mushrooms smell good, fresh, and clean, too. After sautéing and freezing some mushrooms, and slicing and oven-drying others, I have not washed my hands because I want to relish the smell of the Yaak forest for a little while longer.

The Yaak has the ability to make the well-appointed home in the city seem strange and alien. I am not entirely sure why this is. For many people the Yaak valley would be a disconcerting place. Airplanes seldom fly over that Pacific Northwest forest. People do not walk around with their eyes glued to their cell phones (no service in the Yaak). There is no entertainment industry, there are no billboards, there are no river cruises or water parks, no coffee shops, no McDonald's, no movie theaters. A neighbor often lives ten or fifteen miles away. One would be hard-pressed to find employment, and one rarely sees a policeman or state trooper unless there is a manhunt in the woods. And the woods are dark, dense, damp, and steep. Some people would find them spooky and scary.

But there are other qualities that prevail. The woods are not so much spooky (although it would be unwise to underestimate them) as rich and hypnotic. We spent hours driving on dirt roads at 5 mph, never seeing another soul. The trees themselves are quiet, saturated in green, and mesmerizing, a closely packed variety of pines, firs, cedars, and larches, as well as birches and aspens. Birdsong is loud, fluting, and caroling.

We stopped at snow-fed springs, parked the car smack dab in the middle of blacktops and two tracks that saw no other cars, and walked on the soft ground, listening to the run-off, trailing our fingers in the icy water. In a square foot were a dozen or more types of flowers, mosses, ferns, grasses, and lichens.

After a few days in such a place, the return home is an odd experience. I found myself driving to my local grocery store and feeling disoriented at an intersection I have seen thousands of times. Flashing signs and large billboards seem intrusive, people are preoccupied with their phones, garbage litters the streets, and homes seem to have altogether too many things both inside and out.

I don't mean to romanticize the Yaak or, worse, disparage my town and a Midwestern landscape that I have sunk into wholeheartedly and called home. The prairie is not less diverse or complex or beautiful than the Pacific Northwest forest. Indeed, it may be richer and more diverse in some ways. I mean only to identify differences, contrasts, and affinities, and perhaps to pinpoint a landscape far away that I would like to imagine as a home but that is not and cannot be. Surely, many of us have encountered such places.

Days later, the feeling persists. In the old film "Local Hero," the lead character, a business executive played by Peter Riegert, returns home to Houston, Texas, markedly changed from a business trip to Scotland and the rhythms of village life and ocean tides. From his apartment he makes a call, and the last frames of the film are of an outdoor phone booth, ringing, in the tiny Scottish seaside town.

Minus the story's oil refinery plot, I feel like that.