Smartweed, Foxglove

It’s hard enough to face ourselves. What do we truly know of others?

 
The Three Rivers’ News office was a tiny building—one room, with an outhouse out back, a false front, and wooden porch beside the road into Big Bay. Benji kept a bed there for when he worked late to meet the printer deadline or was between rentals or house-sitting gigs. There were stacks of old issues on the floor, a computer on a table, a woodstove. The building had once been a timber company headquarters, supposedly a cover for a little poker hall. It was exactly what you’d imagine for a north-woods newspaper office. Benji and I would sit on the porch on warm evenings and wait for my wife, Mattie, who’d be driving home from the hospital in Marquette where she worked as a nurse in Adolescent Psych. She’d pull up in our dusty, old Wagoneer, and the three of us would drink a few beers as the engine ticked cool and the shade of the forest made its way across the road.

“This place needed you guys,” Benji told Mattie and me. “I needed you guys!”

I couldn’t imagine anything I wanted to hear more. It was as though he spoke for the landscape in which I, like him, had dreamed of living.

“We needed you, too,” Mattie said.

I knew she meant partly for my job. She’s very practical. Because of Benji’s little newspaper I had the start of a writing portfolio. But I knew she also meant for his companionship. She’d been happy to adopt my vision of back-woods life. Along with her professional dress and shoes, she had on the floppy, canvas gardening hat that she put on as soon as she left work and started her drive up the Big Bay Road. But what she wanted out of the place even more than a vegetable garden and woodstove and endless, sheltering forest around us was community. Benji and the narrow plank porch of his newspaper office was the beginning of that.

A high-loaded log truck rumbled past and gave a little blast of his airhorn. We all waved.

“Rick MacIntosh’s new-to-him Kenworth,” Dennis said. “He’s very proud.”

“To Rick MacIntosh’s new-to-him Kenworth!” Mattie offered.

We clinked our beer bottles together.

 

Which is where I’d leave us, if I could and still be honest. I would leave you with an uncomplicated affection for Benji. I would leave you as I was then, basking in the love he felt for the place and people.

As a kid in Minneapolis, he’d listened to John Denver and imagined himself at a campfire cupped in a hand of mountains, friends in flannel shirts, boots propped on rocks ringing the flame. But Colorado was far, and his mother was frequently ill and otherwise alone. So he’d studied maps and found the closest mountains, the only real mountains in the Midwest, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He went to the university there and majored in forestry.

When he graduated, he got work surveying timber and moved to Big Bay, an end-of-the-road village, where there was always a hunting camp to rent cheap or a cabin on Lake Superior to caretake. To make friends, he started the newspaper. In school he’d worked on the university paper and found the job a good way to meet people. He named his publication Three Rivers’ News in honor of the Dead, the Little Garlic, and the Yellow Dog, rivers you cross driving the twenty-five miles north from the college town of Marquette. He filled the pages with upbeat, community-interest pieces—the high school kid who drove the village ambulance, the couple who turned the lighthouse into a bed and breakfast. He did a story about the soccer team from the three-room school, an essay on the return of wolves, a little humor piece about breaking his February cabin fever one night at the Lumberjack Tavern. As a chorus, he repeated, Better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

People framed Benji’s stories about themselves, with photos of their trophy buck, their chainsaw-sculpture bears, their centenarian grandfather who’d come from Finland when the sawmill was cutting wood for Model T floorboards.

The back woods hippies considered him one of their own. He was a writer and gentle, a regular at the farmers’ market and folk dances at the township hall.

He got on well enough with the NRA types, too. They’d see him filling his thermos at the general store and driving into the pre-dawn semi-darkness and thought of him as another strange but harmless part of this place, like the full-sized plastic moose on the store roof. Maybe he was a little over-friendly, but he worked hard. Live and let live, right? It was a different time. And the NRA types knew he was headed out in the early morning to paint the orange slashes on trees for some of them to cut for their living. In the fall his hunting rifle, like their own, hung in the rack of his pickup.

When I moved to Big Bay and took a job writing $50 articles for Benji’s paper and got to know him on hikes as he showed me waterfalls and hidden coves, I couldn’t imagine someone fitting better in a place. He even looked like a tall, lanky version of John Denver.

“Smartweed,” he said once, crouched on the bank of the Yellow Dog. He stripped a fistful of purple blossoms from a stalk and popped them in his mouth.

“Not to be confused with foxglove!” he declared professorially as he chewed. “It looks similar when the flowers are small. But don’t eat foxglove unless you absolutely want to die.”

In that way you remember not only the moment a disaster actually struck but also the preceding moment you later understand as the disaster’s beginning…

Mattie and I live in the West now, near the bigger mountains Benji dreamed of as a boy. We don’t live in the mountains out here, though, or even the forest, but in a neighborhood bungalow with lilacs, near the hospital where Mattie works and the school where our two kids go.

The Three Rivers’ News building is a realty office. At least it was last time I was in Big Bay four or five years ago.

But it was still Benji’s little newspaper clubhouse the last time I last saw him innocent. In that way you remember not only the moment a disaster actually struck but also the preceding moment you later understand as the disaster’s beginning, I remember stopping by the office in the morning on my way to do a story about construction on the new bridge over the Little Garlic.

He was getting into his pickup as I pulled up. He gave a big wave and strode over to talk through my open window.

 I pitched him my idea.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s good. Everybody’s got to drive by there. They’ll want to know what’s going on.” He suggested I interview the flaggers at either end of the construction zone. He’d call the piece “Their Interest Is Flagging.”

I swore I’d quit if he did.

“No, no, it’ll be great!” he gave my roof a decisive bang with his hand and straightened up. “I’ll stop and take their pictures to go with it. I have to go over to Pictured Rocks anyway.” He explained he was going to interview Brandon Dewart, who had grown up in Big Bay and had just returned to Upper Michigan as a park interpreter at the National Lakeshore.

 

There. That would be the final chance to stop. Maybe Benji swerves for a deer or moose on his way to town and rolls his truck. Sad, but only sad. An ending that would allow me to keep him and our time in Big Bay set in sentimental amber.

But that’s not what happened.

There were 42 of us who testified at the sentencing phase of the trial. Mattie and I were living back in Marquette by then. After Benji hit and killed the little girl on the road out of the parking lot at Pictured Rocks and his ordeal began, he tried to keep publishing the Three Rivers’ News. He managed a few more issues, but as word got around, advertising started to dry up. The Tenderfoot Music Fest and Huron Mountain Wellness Center kept their quarter pages, along with a few other holdouts. But it wasn’t nearly enough. Benji’s timber cruising had been contracted in advance, so he worked alone in the woods and let the paper die.

Once I was no longer writing for him, there’d been no practical reason for Mattie to keep commuting from Big Bay. And the place of our daydreams had become forlorn, its vastness emptier and more indifferent than sheltering, so we moved back to town.

We had Benji down to dinner once. He and I went for a walk, and it surprised me that he was somehow still his old self. Still a lover of the forest. But then, who else would he be? As we walked through a stand of old-growth hemlock in Presque Isle Park, he shook his head and told me about a similar stand he was surveying up the Pup Creek drainage. Hemlock was nearly worthless wood, he explained. “They’ll barely break even on the sale.”

“For the jobs? Is it state land?” I asked.

“Private. Probably to keep the timberland status active. For taxes.”

“Government,” I said without any real conviction.

I’m a faster walker than average, but I had to work to keep up as Benji’s long legs strode through that sun-dappled hemlock grove effortlessly. He changed the topic to a guidebook he was working on, A Hundred Hikes in Central Upper Michigan. I’d recently had some broader publishing success, was starting to make a little name for myself, and he asked if I’d be willing to write the introduction.

“I’d be honored.” I said.

I was pleased with myself not to have hesitated.

What does it say about me that I let myself be distracted by spending any thoughts whatsoever on such questions?

Mattie and I agreed we shouldn’t attend the trial itself. Our friend didn’t need us knowing the horrific details of what he’d done. We’d already learned more than enough around town. He and Brandon Dewart had split most of a 12-pack on Sable Beach. Benji figured he’d limp his truck the mile and a half back to Grand Marais and sleep it off in a motel room. Or so he claimed.

The girl was stepping out of her family’s fifth-wheel trailer, which was parked on the shoulder of the road just outside the parking lot.

But because Benji pled guilty, there wasn’t much of a real trail anyway, except the sentencing.

Mattie said she couldn’t testify. Not with her job working with so many survivors of childhood trauma. And she didn’t really want to either.

I said I wanted to, but I understood why she didn’t.

Because Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore is administered by the Park Service, Benji’s crime was federal, and the Marquette Federal Courthouse is on a main corner downtown. It was raining hard as we pulled into the lot across the street. I recognized some of our Big Bay friends’ shabby four-wheel-drives.

We were early so we sat in the car and waited for the rain to let up. I said I couldn’t believe he might actually go to prison.

“He killed a child,” Mattie said. “Not on purpose, but she’s still gone. Forever.” Mattie is one of the most level human beings I’ve ever known, which I suppose is how she can work with mentally ill kids and not become broken. “He didn’t mean to, but he took everything from her. And her parents.”

“I know. ”

It was really coming down, a squall off Superior. The sound on the roof filled the car. Morning looked like evening. The street through wet windows was dark gray.

 

The parents of the girl, Kylie Wells, didn’t attend the sentencing. They were from Vermont. They’d been on vacation at the time of the accident and maybe it was too difficult for them to come back. Maybe they didn’t want to look at Benji, didn’t want anything ever to do with him.

What they did instead was send a photo of Kylie to the prosecutors, who displayed it, enlarged, on an easel, beside their table, through the entire proceeding. That was all the parents asked for as a victim impact statement, and Benji’s lawyer had told him that was actually a very good deal.

She was looking at us over the handlebars of a bike, grinning proudly, showing the gap where her top two front teeth were missing. Maybe seven years old. She appeared South Asian, which surprised me, for a number of reasons, I suppose. Her name, for one. Kylie Wells. And for another, excepting Native Americans, Upper Michigan doesn’t see a lot of ethnic minorities. Also, her family was from Vermont, which I’d always imagined much the same in population.

What does it say about me that I let myself be distracted by spending any thoughts whatsoever on such questions? She was a little girl, and she was gone. The life she would have had was gone.

And her parents—. It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine. People say that, “I can’t imagine.” But of course they can. I simply refused to. My only job, my only reason for being there, was to help my friend.

Most us who spoke were also his friends from Big Bay, and it took two days to get through all our testimonies.

The soccer coach said Benji was always so kind to children and couldn’t imagine how this was tearing him up inside. One mom said she’d still trust him around her own kids. One of the farmers’ market women read a poem about forgiveness. An elderly couple from folk dancing said they’d be willing to sponsor his probation, take him into their home, anything to keep him from going to jail.

“It would kill him,” the old woman said. “Being locked up in that little room.”

Benji sat behind the long table at the front as his friends spoke. He sighed and turned up the corner of his mouth in a small, sad smile.

I moved my eyes between the judge, Benji, and his attorney—avoiding Kylie Wells’s smile—as I stumbled through my part about what a good employer and friend he was. How he’d given my writing career its start.

“He made a terrible choice, yes,” I said, though Benji’s lawyer had instructed me not to refer to the crime and specifically to in no way minimize it. “But in every other way he’s been exactly what we all want people in our community to be.”

I knew I’d done poorly, but when I took my seat again, Mattie patted me on the leg and took my hand.

Last to speak was Benji’s mother. She used a walker going up the ramp to the witness stand. Waiting for her to speak was agonizing, but when she did, her words weren’t terribly pained or emotional. She said, “I’m sorry for what Benjamin did. I know he’s sorry, too. He’ll tell you, I’m sure, when it’s his turn to speak. But what I want you to know, and Mr. Becker says he’s given you my statement about this and one from Benjamin too, is that his father died in a car accident when he was eight. You can read the details. Please read them. He knows what this means better than most people. He understands. And he will have to live with that for the rest of his life. But if you allow him to stay free on probation, to get help, he can still have a life, and he can help others someday. People who go through this. Because he knows both sides.”

After she’d spoken and was back in her seat, Benji turned around and silently mouthed, “Thank you, Mom.”

He was almost absurdly composed. Except for the suit and tie, he was how he’d always been. This seemed to him one more community task to get done together, all of us gathered around. I half expected him to give us a thumbs-up as he finally began his own testimony.

But as he spoke his buoyancy seemed to turn to bewilderment.

“I feel like a trout out of the river, gutted and split open for everyone to see my insides,” I remember him saying. “I am horrified by what I did. Any one little thing, if I’d done it differently, if I’d made a different choice. Sleeping in my truck, but better yet, not drinking the beer in the first place. I can’t believe I let myself do it. Then drive. I’m sorry, Kylie.” He looked right at the photo, his voice flat and true. “I’d tell her if I could. And her parents. And her brother.”

I hadn’t known she had a brother. More grief in the world. And yet, though I’d never say it to anyone, some solace.

Benji took a drink of water and gave another heavy sigh.

“For all my friends to see me like this, and my mom. I want to tell them sorry, too. I am sorry. To everyone. For everyone. The word regret isn’t big enough for the infinity of this.”

He went on for a while, circling back, reiterating his regret for the hurt he’d caused. He was 37. He shook his head in what seemed fascination.

“I even regret the fact that I am. That I exist. If I didn’t, she would.”

Later, when it came time for the judge to pass sentence, he began, “There is one mitigating factor in this case on which everyone has agreed. The family’s RV was parked partially on the roadway. Seventeen inches over the shoulder line. And against the flow of traffic, such that the trailer door opened onto the road. And I believe your remorse, Mr. Durant. As the child of a vehicular-accident fatality, you have some insight into what your actions caused. Yet you made a decision, a decision to consume alcohol and drive anyway. It’s a common choice. Just a short distance to the motel. On a backroad through the woods. The kind of decision many, maybe even most in this courtroom have made. But you aren’t most people. You knew the consequences better than most people. You grew up with those consequences. And here you are anyway. And this time it’s a child who is dead. Kylie Wells.”

Benji stood lanky beside his attorney, his back to the rest of us, and nodded. I couldn’t help but imagine John Denver when he was on the Muppet Show. The judge was one of those Muppet judges, the short, fatter one. For an instant there was an unreality to all of this, a distance, like a performance. I wondered if that was how Benji was able to experience it. I hoped it was.

Then all at once the judge was a real judge again and this was really happening when he said, “As for your place in the community, it seems like you have a lot of people who believe in you. I hope they’ll still be around for you when you get out.”

Then, I kept the secret for her sake. Now, after all this time, I keep it at least partly for my own.

Twenty-four months in federal prisons followed by four years’ probation.

We gathered around Benji, and he hugged each of us before we walked out of court. He thanked us. Said he’d make it. He’d get through this.

They moved him five times, five different prisons. Mattie and I talked about driving to visit him, then we’d learn he was somewhere else.

He ended up all the way out in California. He’d finally gotten to live out West, he said in one of his letters to us, within sight of big mountains. His greatest release was walking, three hours a day, around and around. He’d gone out for every exercise period, even when the desert winds lifted dust into the air. It was there, walking the dusty grounds, that he caught something called Valley Fever, a lung infection that lives in dirt and dust and infects a lot of prisoners. He’d recovered, but because the infection was fungal, there was a chance he’d have it all his life, somewhere hiding out in his body. He’d ended the letter, The fungus amongus, Benji.

When he got released, he came home to Big Bay. He lasted five months of his probation. He couldn’t drive and stayed out of the Lumberjack, obviously, but he also kept away from soccer games and folk dances and the farmers’ market. He cut and sold firewood through summer and into fall, but he was weakened. Slower. More gaunt than just lanky. His skin and formerly straw hair were ashen.

Mattie and I invited him to dinner again. We drove to Big Bay to pick him up, and he and I went to see Into the Wild at the Delft.

“Maybe Chris McCandless had it right,” he said as we sat on the harbor breakwall after the film and drank from a six-pack (I’m ashamed to admit) and looked back at the lights of town reflecting long toward us in the silky, black water.

“Except for the part about eating from the wrong plant,” I said.

“Mmm.” Benji took a sip. “What he needed was just the right knowledge.”

 

A few weeks later, I came home one afternoon and Mattie said a deputy sheriff had come by to ask if we’d heard from him. He hadn’t checked in with his parole officer.

“He said if he does contact us, we should call it in. Not doing so could get us in pretty serious trouble.”

She was on the sofa, holding our cat Cleo with welding gloves to keep him from scratching her while she clipped his nails. She kept working and didn’t look up much, which meant she was upset.

“He did say that if he goes in sooner than later, everything would be fine. They’re just concerned.” But she didn’t sound reassured.

 

I have never told Mattie that I saw him, never told anyone, that I aided and abetted a felon. That’s not the sort of thing she would have been better off knowing. It would have hung over her, threatened her sense of security, like the wildfires she worries about out here where we live now. Then, I kept the secret for her sake. Now, after all this time, I keep it at least partly for my own. Not that we’d ever split, but telling her would cost us both in loneliness. A new loneliness for her, and more loneliness for me than in keeping what I did to myself.

Early on in his disappearance, I’d thought he’d left, maybe to Alaska or Montana. Taken an alias. Maybe he was settling into some new community surrounded by wildness. Making new friends.

Or, maybe he’d gone into the woods, somewhere he’d never be found, with his hunting rifle to use on himself.

But more than a year after he’d gone missing, there was a knock on our back door. I looked through the curtains and there he was. With a full beard. I opened the door and he straightened tall, like a kid himself, posing for a picture, and grinned.

“Well,” he said. “How’ve ya been?”

It was snowing. He had on only a light, plaid jacket and a Green Bay Packers stocking cap. Our little rental house was in the brushy, north end of Marquette, at the edge of the woods. His footprints led from the dark into our back yard.

I hugged him and told him to come inside.

“Don’t say that,” he warned. “I’m like a vampire, once you ask me in, you can’t undo it.”

So we stood there with the open doorway between us.

“Mattie’s at work. She’s subbing night shift.”

“I know,” he said. “I waited until I saw her go.”

“Everyone’s looking for you.”

“They’re not looking very hard,” he laughed. He was enjoying this. And so, I realized, was I. He was alive. It turned out he’d been here all along, out in those vast woods that began just past our yard. He said he’d been staying here and there, empty cabins and vacation houses. He’d hunted and foraged and supplemented with food from patrons who chose to remain anonymous.

But he’d run low. He didn’t want to frequent any one back door too often.

I asked him for a list and wrote as he dictated it. I kept waiting for alcohol. A jug of whiskey, maybe. Something strong and easy to carry back up into the wilds.

But none came. I didn’t know, and still don’t, if that meant he’d given it up, but I’d like to think so. Was it ever even a true problem for him? I mean other than the one, infinite, obvious consequence, that is. It’s hard enough to face ourselves. What do we truly know of others?

I walked to the store and bought the cans of chili and tomato sauce and bags of rice. I came home and left it all in the plastic grocery bags on the back step. I worried about Mattie seeing his tracks in the fresh snow, so I tromped around back there. If she’d asked, I’d have told her I was measuring for the garden planters she wanted me to build in the spring.

When I opened the back door to the cold again an hour later, the groceries were gone.

Is this how it works for everyone to some degree, one empathy refused so we can keep another?

Mattie never asked about the tracks in the back yard. I’m glad about that. Glad never to have outright lied to her, even if keeping Benji’s appearance that night from her is still its own kind of lonely betrayal.

I did build the garden planters. Mattie planted vegetable seeds that had not yet sprouted when we left. She’d applied for the job out here on a whim, but the more we thought about it, the more we became convinced that we should try the West.

There was, of course, no way I could get word to Benji that we’d left.

It was sometime the next year that one of Mattie’s old coworker-friends from Marquette called and told her he’d died. When he’d appeared in the ER with pneumonia, it was too late to save him.

“The Valley Fever he contracted in prison,” Mattie said when she was off the phone and stirring the eggs on the stove. It was early. Three time zones behind Marquette. “Sometimes it precipitates pneumonia,” she continued. “He’d been hiding in the woods this whole time. Living in the cold.” Her voice was level but her eyes were tearing up.

“Jesus,” I said as I got down our plates.

That would have been the moment, my second chance, if I were going to tell her. But I let it pass and now it’s gone.

 

There’s no word for what Benji was. For someone who kills a child in an accident resulting from his own choice. Words like killer, murderer, they steer our sympathies away from the one who willfully committed the action. But even if there were a word—manslaughterer? childslaughterer?—I doubt more of my sympathies would have left my friend for Kylie Wells—who I did not know and whose family I never saw. Whose lives and loss remain an abstraction to me.

Is this how it works for everyone to some degree, one empathy refused so we can keep another?

Or maybe that’s my moral failure. Sometimes I suspect it is, but I still don’t know. All I know is that I rarely think of her, that infinite loss, or her parents and brother, that infinite pain. But Benji I think of often.

The house my family and I live in out here isn’t in the mountains. I’ve gone up there a few times, driven the dirt roads up high, parked and hiked to the ridgeline, to look over at a world of mountains beyond, unpeopled to the horizon. Mostly, though, I just look at the mountains from down here, in town. In the West you can see the mountains from a long way off, constant and impersonal. Which is perhaps their appeal. They are a wilderness you can look into from afar and see the cliffs and sloping meadows and thin trees, even if you don’t go up there.

Benji had never again mentioned the Upper Michigan hiking guidebook he’d been working on and for which he’d asked me to write an introduction. But if he had, I’d have written that what you see there is mostly the forest around you, intimate and close. You only glimpse distances occasionally in the wooded rise of a low summit now and then. I’d have written that it can be helpful not to see too far. I’d have written that the close forest can be good company, if you let it.