In the computer lab at the University Center on campus in Missoula, I set down my bag of studies, plugged in my headphones and tuned in to the free internet music service, Pandora. Soundtrack is important. The song that came on first, as I looked out the window at the sterling blue sky and sun washing the bare branches of a tree, was Rusted Root’s, “Union 7”. I cracked a smile and chuckled out loud, as the song was most excellently fitting. I had thought I’d tune in to something more ethereal, but this, this was perfect.
Yesterday, as I walked to work in downtown Missoula, I recognized the figure of a man walking just ahead of me. I called out to him, “Are you Josh?” He said yes and turned around. We hadn’t seen one another in ten years. Josh was a close friend of Chad - a lover and friend of mine - through boyhood and into their adult years. They’d grown up in rural Pennsylvania. Chad had attended the University of Pittsburgh to study philosophy and moved out west after graduating. When I met Chad, they were roommates in a house just three blocks down the street from where we stood.
We chatted for a few minutes about Missoula, loved ones in our lives now. I asked then about Chad, had he heard from him lately. He stopped and caught his breath a bit, paused for a minute looking at me.
“Oh, my god, … you didn’t… Chad actually passed… last August. He died from pancreatic cancer… I’m so sorry, you didn’t… know… ” he said.
Somehow, standing there, I was not surprised. Not in that moment. Chad had always remarked in a very matter of fact way that he most likely wouldn’t live past his thirties. His dad had died when he was four years old in a canoeing accident. He seemed to figure he would go out in a similar fashion at some point. I heard it as a twenty-something man being somewhat fatalistic, or just underestimating what more life might have in store for him. As it turned out, it seems he may well have known what he was talking about.
Josh shared a few of the details that he knew. I gave him my card with my email and we said we’d be in touch. I went into work directly from that conversation and performed fine, though, hollow, or as if out on the sidewalk with Josh I’d just looked through a hole, a ripped seam, into another dimension. I looked up Chad’s full name and hometown on Google and found the obituary. It was true. I had looked him up a dozen times over the past year, on Google, Facebook, MySpace, as I hadn’t heard from him in eight years and was curious about how and where he was. My searches had turned up nothing. I also searched for his sister using the same methods. Had I remembered the name of his hometown at that point, I would have found the obituary. As it was, I didn’t, and found out on the street from his dear friend.
On the way home from work, I stopped and bought two large bottles of pale ale. I packed them in my bag and got on my bike. I remembered, as I rode, sitting out in the hundred degree Arizona air with Chad, with bare skin browned from the sun and cactus all around us. I remember drinking cold beer with him at a picnic table in Saguaro National Park after a long day of pulling invasive weeds as volunteers. When I got home, after a few draughts of cold ale and a toast to Chad, I dug out the photo album in the closet, the one with photos of our time together. I found one of him and me with our friends on top of Mount Sentinel and one of Chad sitting in the Raven coffee house, in front of a red wall, looking upward. I found one that I took of Chad sitting on the round rock beach at Lake MacDonald in Glacier Park, in his boxers and meditating after having swum with me in the late afternoon. I found another that I took of him perched atop a red rock hoodoo in southeastern Arizona, on one of our journeys into Chiricahua National Monument. I found also one of him sitting on my couch in Bigfork, Montana, under a bright colored oil painting, looking very sexy and intelligent with the newspaper in one hand. I remember what it felt like as he looked at me in that moment. I remember sensing a touch of annoyance at me at disturbing his paper reading with my ogling of his beauty.
I remembered as I looked at that photo and recalled that feeling, that I had been hard on him then. He was searching for something, and we didn’t groove together well at that point. Our energies were going in different places, different directions. We were trying, but it just got harder to meet in mind and heart. He had returned to Montana from Arizona six months after I had. We had been living together in Tucson for several months, and had decided to part for a time and get some space. I returned to the Flathead Valley. When he returned and joined me again, he worked trail crew in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in northwest Montana. He came out on his weekends to visit me at a cabin I rented outside of Bigfork. Once, instead, I drove into the Meadowcreek trailhead, a two hour dirt road journey with no services. I parked the borrowed ancient yellow Datsun truck and hiked in alone nine miles to meet him. I remember walking in, a long walk through pine, fir, and low scrub along the South Fork of the Flathead River. I passed no one. I stepped around horse and mule shit on the trails. I utilized footbridges over muddy creek crossings, bridges that he and his crew had worked on that summer. I wondered as I walked where I would encounter him along the trail. I loved that walk. We shared a couple of days camped out together, near his crew, hiking, fishing and swimming naked in the cold, jade green river. I found a few pictures of me from that trip, wearing a bright yellow shirt, a bandana on my head. I remember walking through a meadow, near a back country landing strip with him during that visit. The spring grass was fluorescent green. I took a picture of him, in that meadow, in his work pants, Forest Service blue t-shirt, ball cap and heavy work boots. He looked happy, and was strong from hours of digging, shoveling and hauling timbers.
When Chad and I met, we both worked at a newly opened high-end restaurant, Marianne’s at the Wilma. He was a busboy and I was a waitress. It was a jacket and tie sort of place, with swanky jazz trios playing in the little balconies. It didn’t last long; people didn’t dig the jacket requirement and who knows for what other business reasons. But we met there. He invited me to a poetry reading. I don’t remember the poetry reading. I do remember his bedroom, waking up there on some morning following that initial invitation. I remember the warmth and earthy strength of Chad, mixed with a touch of melancholy. I made him a talisman from a piece of tree branch, lichen, moss, rock and string and left it as a gift one day on the railing that bordered the stairway into his room.
Not long after meeting, we began devising an adventure to the southwest. We picked up a publication called The Caretaker Gazette, and put an ad in as willing to do most anything for free room and board in a new and wild place. We brainstormed the kinds of places we could live, what we needed to make to eat and cover the basics. We found an ad one day for a place called The Earthen Spirituality Project, in New Mexico. We applied to be interns with them, in exchange for a place to camp and the opportunity to assist with solar panel construction and riparian restoration. After we received their welcome letter, we gave notice at our jobs and mailed at least ten boxes to Reserve, New Mexico full of our belongings. We packed our car, a decade-old white Subaru that we found for $800, and headed south. We had no knowing of what we would find, who the people were that we would encounter. But we had maps, a car full of food, backpacks and our tent. We had good music to listen to, and conversation. It was late fall of 1999. The impending millennium, Y2K, was being broadcast and forecast everywhere. Neither of us thought much would come of it, other than human panic, but figured it wouldn’t hurt to be in the middle of the Gila Wilderness.
Months earlier, we shared a long day in the Rattlesnake Wilderness, just outside of Missoula. We had eaten psilocybin mushrooms prior to our bike ride from town and were feeling the full effects as we walked toward the upper end of Sawmill Gulch. We had left our bikes near the trailhead in favor of foot travel. At one point along the trail I stopped and was acutely, in part from the psilocybin, aware of how overused the trail and surrounding area was. The earth was packed, the roots off trees cut and bruised by bikes, feet and most likely off-road vehicles. The grass was dead, matted and the entire half mile of trail felt weary. The lower branches of the fir trees were scarred, stripped and many broken off. I felt held there, obligated and listening, for a good twenty minutes, standing and feeling that, noticing every detail of the environment there. I knew that I was being asked to pay attention and because I saw and understood it, I therefore had a particular responsibility. The feelings were not new to me, nor were they dependent upon eating hallucinogenic mushrooms, but that moment was charged. Chad had walked on up the trail and was heading up toward the ridgeline. I called to him to wait. I walked up to meet him in a more vibrant stand of grass. We stood together for a time and I told him about what I felt further back along the trail. Then, I wanted to lie down to rest in the grass where we stood, as the warm sun baked the ground and invited my body there. I could feel the word “meadow” then and it connected for me with “woman”. I could feel his restlessness and strength and need to continue on upward along the ridge, and then he told me that in words. I remember knowing that feeling in him as “man”. I agreed to move on with him and we strode on up the ridgeline and into the trees.
Nearly a year later, after three months of winter camping and volunteering in the Gila Wilderness - chopping wood, hauling water, prayer, coyote and eagle for company and sacred trail-making - we moved to Tucson, Arizona to find work. A cousin of mine lived there, and we both were attracted to the warmth and proximity to Mexico. After work one weekend, Chad and I made a trip to the sky islands of the Chiricahua Mountains, southeast of Tucson. We camped and hiked. We brought more mushrooms. It was the second time we had eaten them together. We ate, swilled a bunch of water and put on our backpacks. We hiked that day through oak, juniper, Pinyon pine, prickly pear cactus and over boulder strewn dry red earth. Lizards sunned on rock faces, skittered in front of us on the trail and cactus wrens followed us through the trees. After a good hour of striding up and out of the dry arroyos to the bluffs, we reached a fork in the trail. Chad headed to the right, I to the left. We stood looking at one another for a moment, and both remarked simultaneously that we didn’t have to take the same path at the same time. We divvied up the snacks and water into our packs and set off. We didn’t make a time to meet up, or place. We each knew that we would find one another later. We both were comfortable with this.
During that time, I perched for a good hour on an iron-red boulder, next to a juniper and overlooking a lower wash filled with pines. The sky was wide open blue and not a single person passed on the trail. I saw myself, as I sat in comfortable silence, walking through the forest, with young people following me. I was a guide and happy with swinging limbs and striding legs, at home amidst the trees and rocks. I remembered being seven and eight years old, and the joy of that age. After hours on our own, and Chad with visions of his own which he would relate to me later, we found one another again, with ease. This is what I remember most distinctly about Chad Palmer - this connection to instinct, earth and between the animal body and the philosophical mind. I adored this courage, power and knowing in him, and his allowance of the same in me. This feels like a tribute today, following this coil of memory, to a man that I knew last as a man of the forest and of the desert, and a man that adventured with me.
I am, now still, in shock that Chad is no longer on the earth in his fine form. I find it difficult to wrap my head and heart around the fact that he died seven months ago, and I didn’t know until now. His friends have written several accounts of their time with him over the past years and through the last months that he battled pancreatic cancer. I have read their descriptions, which I found online while typing his name into Google search, over and over. I hear in their writing some of what I knew in Chad. I also have witnessed something that I never knew – his bravery in the midst of a ravaging illness which changed his body drastically from the form that he so actively employed.
The last thing that Chad said to me was “Look for me in the Times.” But I didn’t need to. His philosophy was not for the newspaper or the university. His was for the wilder places and for people that he loved. The last note he left me, eight years ago, was left for me atop the note paper pile we kept by our door in Bigfork. I had cut discarded documents into scraps to recycle paper. This particular scrap read “page 1 of 1” on the lower right corner.
He underlined it and wrote above it in red pen: “Enjoy!”
I shall.
And you too, fine man, wherever and whatever you are. And in the words of Rusted Root, “steadily bloom my soul wind got to bloom my baby steadily bloom my soul wind steadily bloom my mind.”
Alethea, Missoula, Montana - April 2009
