Pete Fromm - Indian Creek Chronicles: A Winter in the Bitterroot Wilderness

Also by Pete Fromm

The Tall Uncut

Copyright 1993 by Pete Fromm

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews and articles. All inquiries should be addressed to: Lyons & Burford, 31 West 21 Street, New York, NY 10010.

Design by Catherine Lau Hunt

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publications Data

Fromm, Pete, 1958

Indian Creek chronicles: a winter in the Bitterroot Wilderness /

Pete Fromm.

p.; cm.

ISBN 1-55821-205-1

Fromm, Pete, 1958- . 2. Authors, American20th century

Biography. 3. Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness (Idaho and Mont.)

Biography. 4. Outdoor lifeSelway-Bitterroot Wilderness (Idaho

And Mont.) I. Title.

PS3556.R5942Z469 1993

818.5403dc20

[B] 93-16430

CIP

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A condensed version of the final several chapters, Spring Runoff, was a winner of the 1991 Sierra Nature-Writing Contest, appearing in that magazines November, 1991 issue.

Chapter Nine was originally published in slightly different form under the title, To Be a Mountain Man, in the November, 1992 issue of Grays Sporting Journal .

The author would like to thank John and Susan Daniel and Ruth McLaughlin for their help with the manuscript.

To Ellen for the books, and Big Dan and Paul for trying,
and finally to Rader, my connection to the world.

O nce the game wardens left, the little tent wed set up seemed even smaller. I stood in front of it, shivering at a gust I thought I felt running across my neck. Could this really be my home now? My home for the next seven months? For the entire winter? Alone? I glanced up at the river canyons steep, dark walls, already cutting off the mid-afternoon sun. Nothing lay beyond those walls of stone and tree but more of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. I was alone, in its very heart.

The shadow of the canyons wall fell over me and I hurried away from it, into the sunlight remaining in the meadow. My steps rustled through the knee high grass and the breeze soughed through the towering firs and cedars hemming the small opening. The rivers whispering rush ran through it all, creating an insistent quiet that folded around me like a shroud.

I stopped at the phone pole the warden had said would link me to the outside. Yesterday wed discovered the phone didnt work. I picked it up anyway, listening to its blank silence, the voice of the rest of the world. With the receiver still against my ear I turned and looked back at the shadowed tent, far enough away now for perspective.

The canvas walls closed off an area fourteen by sixteen feet. The wardens had told me that, bragging it up, making it sound spacious. On the phone, sitting at a college swimming pool, when Id been accepting this job, it had sounded palatial.

Now I hung up the empty phone and walked back to the tent. Pulling the door flap aside I stepped in, out of the wilderness. A pile of boxes and bagsall my possessions and supplies for seven monthsstood in the center of the floor, greatly reducing the space in the tent. I remembered the way, only yesterday, those boxes and bags had filled my dorm room, and the way my roommate and I had carved trails through them to get around.

I sat down on the pole and Boone, the little rat-like dog my roommate had given me, sat on my foot. She had been weaned too early for this and didnt want anything to do with anything unless she was within a foot or two of my leg. I took a big, shaky breath and scratched her drooping ears, whispering, Its beautiful here, isnt it, Boone? But instead of being able to conjure up any excitement for seven months of solitude, I sat and petted her warm head, wondering how in the world Id wound up here.

I thought of that first call to the warden, from the swimming pool where Id first heard of this job, and I realized that swimming had started me toward this dark, lonely tent long before I ever could have guessed.

The very first step on the long trail here could well have been the one my brother missed on a stairway in Milwaukee, four years earlier. Paul, my twin, the high school swimming star, had broken his leg by the time he reached the bottom of those stairs ending his swimming that season, but starting mine.

The coach was on me first thing the next morning. You Fromms twin? he wanted to know.

Though we didnt look a bit alike, I couldnt see any point in lying.

Good. Practice starts at 3:30. See you there.

I dont swim, I said.

Youre Pauls twin, right?

When I didnt bother answering again he said, 3:30, and walked out the door.

When the last bell rang that afternoon I started home, only swerving into the pool building at the last possible moment. Until I was inside, the reek of chlorine engulfing me, Id never thought of going. Unwittingly, Id made the first in a series of completely unconsidered decisions leading to the tent.

I struggled through twenty laps and when everyone stopped I thought it was over. Nobody could possibly swim another stroke. But the coach assigned the next set and I flailed away with the rest of them. Anything else would have been giving up. Though this wasnt my world, I wasnt about to face that kind of shame.

This was junior year. The year of the college selections. But the world of swimming swept me up and I couldnt have thought less about college. By senior year even my lunches were spent at the pool, making up for lost time, churning the water back and forth alone, with just the coach walking alongside me on the deck, shouting encouragement. With that in my ears and the searing oxygen debt in my lungs I forged new worlds for myself in my headworld records, the Olympics, Mark Spitzs seven golds around my necklaying the foundation for a life of daydreaming. Well suited to solitude.

Toward the end of my senior year I spent more and more time deflecting my parents questions about college until the day a sheet of paper slipped from a friends pile of college catalogs. A bighorn sheep stood boldly atop the page, a stirring symbol of wildness and freedom. Beneath it were the obscure words Wildlife Biology and University of Montana .

For years my family had taken summer camping trips, starting with a trailer, progressing through family-sized canvas tents, and finally to canoe trips and even a backpacking trip or two. The less civilized the better, I thought, and Id often have the family drop me off as they drove to guided nature walks. I preferred exploring alone, seeing what there was to see without some guide telling me what to look at, without becoming part of what I saw as a crowd of ignorant city dwellers. Mooching, my father called it. Mooching around.

Id never heard of wildlife biology, but it sounded pretty much like professional mooching. In the second of a series of decisions without thought, I sent out just one college application.

My knowledge of western geography was sketchy and I didnt know how to pronounce the word Missoula , but three months later I landed there, a wildlife biology major. And though I didnt know it yet, the tent site on the Selway River was only eighty miles away, as the crow flies.

By the end of my first day in Missoula Id joined the swim team. Id felt adventurous coming to this empty state alone, but now I felt lost, and I fell gratefully into the discipline of the workouts. By winter quarter I had a scholarship, an official reason to be in Montana.