The Source of All Things by Tracy Ross Read Free Book Online Page B

back to camp and share tin plates piled with elk pot roast and campfire-baked potatoes.
    â€œYou watch, sis,” Dad would say, while we kicked the frost off dead grasses on our chilly late-autumn hikes. “When you’re big enough, we’ll spend every day of hunting season staked out in Big Piney. Far as I’m concerned, from now on, you’re my number one bird dogger in the family.”
    When Dad talked like this, I knew he was sniffing out the best me in me, helping to unearth my hidden talents. At home, I was good at all kinds of things—from ballet and tap lessons to Browniesand gymnastics—but I was also overweight. By third grade, I would tip the scale at eighty pounds, a good twenty more than most of my friends. The girls in my Donna Mauldin’s Dance Academy classes were all bones and eyelashes, with beautiful skin and tiny appetites. I had chipmunk cheeks and bumpy arms and could eat an entire six-inch Blimpie by myself. The ladies in my family didn’t approve; when I stayed with my grandma, she sent mixed messages, telling me to clean my plate one second and watch what I ate the next, and my mom had already started taking me to her high-end hairdresser, who trimmed, layered, and permed me until I was so ashamed of my appearance sometimes I refused to leave the house.
    At home I was just a “big-boned” kid trying to mask my extra pounds with a winning personality. But in the mountains my size was matched only by my desire to fish, hunt, hike, and swim. It helped that there were no mirrors for me to judge myself in. Only my dad’s expression, which, when he looked at me, said, You are strong, and beautiful, and perfect just as you are.
    Dad’s pride and joy—after his new family—was the Roadrunner camper-trailer he’d bought in 1976. On Thursdays, and sometimes as early as Wednesday, he’d start loading it with supplies: big bags of chips, Tang mixed with tea, and twelve-packs of minicereals for Chris and me. By the time the other dads on Parkway Drive were cracking their first weekend beers, we’d be chugging across the Perrine Bridge, past the lava flats with their searing heat, and approaching the cool, clean air of the Stanley Basin, where our favorite mountain range, the Sawtooths, top out at twelve thousand feet.
    In the long shadows of the Sawtooths, we built castles in the freshwater sand and took turns swimming out to a giant rock a few hundred feet from shore. Sometimes, other families came with us, and all the kids would hike together, searching for bird nests along wooden walkways that stretched over primordial wetlands, or climbing on top of beaver lodges before taking off shoes and pants and jumping into the murky ponds. At the time, the streams pouring out of Redfish Lake teemed with sockeye salmon on their way home from the Pacific Ocean. As a little girl, I stared down at their rotting bodies covered with slime, the bulging eyes, and the long, hooked jawlines dotted with razor-sharp teeth. I was afraid but also fascinated, and though I couldn’t have articulated it then, I wondered what demon drove them to travel so far inland—without food or rest, for weeks—to decompose and die while furiously wiggling up the feeder streams that fanned off of my favorite lake.
    In my last, best memory of 1979, we’re on our way to Redfish Lake. I am eight years old, on the verge of entering third grade. Dad has eased the camper off the side of the road below our favorite hot spring, Russian John. Soaring, soft-edged mountains flank both sides of the road, and the sound of water burbles through brown-tipped grasses. Our clothes—Mom’s silk bra next to my size 8 flowered panties, big jeans and little jeans in a heap, a kid’s navy blue down vest, and a grown man’s camouflage hunting cap—are piled next to a juniper bush near the steaming pool. One by one we slip into water that smells like minerals and sage.