Where I’m From
By: Rachael Renk
Tags: Travel, Nature, Idaho, Home, Wilderness

My home is the lonely wilderness.

Here trees are the alpha and the omega, everywhere and all the time. They harbor unforgiving ravines and rivers that carve deep and slender paths through rock mountains, bubbling hot springs, creeks and great, granite boulders.

Road to McCall, Idaho. Photo by Drew Lindsley on Unsplash.

There are those that know something about the danger and solitude of the wildness in this country.

Maybe there is something in our DNA, formed without our implicit consent and dictated by ancient biology. It is a strange tribe and breed of person that feels the pull to go alone into the mountains. To face and be in the vastness and the closeness, to invite the loneliness. Heavy and nothing all at once. Perhaps that string of DNA bounds us close together, so that when we pass each other on the mountain we also pass back and forth a kind of knowing.

There are those that will go when the lonely wilderness calls.

In 2016, Idaho had the 8th highest suicide rate in the country, 57% above the national average.

There are those that will go when the wilderness calls and they will not return, and the truth of their stories will never be known. I won’t draw conclusions for you but it’s an illustration of my home that begs consideration.

In Idaho, there are 4.8 million acres of wilderness, ranking third in the country. Folks get lost in it. They walk into forests and mountains and find every one of those 4.8 million acres, but nobody finds them.

Sawtooth mountains. Photo by Tim Peterson on Unsplash

How do you assign a statistic to those people who are never found? (In the writing of this essay, I conducted research to identify a number or estimate of people missing in the Idaho wilderness; I could not find any statistics. Perhaps it is too vague, or perhaps it is because we don’t really know the depth of those who are lost.)

In 2014, Lucius Robbi left Horseshoe Bend to return to the University of Montana and was not seen alive again. August that year we anxiously followed the story in the news from the safety of our city, keeping respectable distance from any tree or ravine. After some days, with the assistance of a helicopter, a search party found Robbi’s vehicle at the bottom of a 60-foot embankment five miles from Stanley, deep in the Sawtooth national forest.

And another: DeOrr Kunz, the toddler that went missing on a family camping trip in 2015. It’s a morbid favorite, discussed at length and argued over, placed at the center of podcasts and news stories. It remains one of many cold cases and one of many instances where a human went missing in the wilderness.

Patrick Lusk and Jason Gritten intended to canoe across the Salmon near Riggins in 2015. It was May, and the river took them. It’s one thing to be lost in a city, or even in the desert — while vast, it has an openness. Tragedy catches easily on every obstacle in mountain terrain. Gritten was found near fifteen miles down the Salmon river. Two weeks after the men were reported missing, they found Patrick. He was my sister’s cousin by marriage.

Four names that could, truly, be any four names. I do not know how many in total are gone, or when to start counting, or who they are. I know that more join them every year.

Idaho. Photo by Clark Wilson on Unsplash

The question is whether you are the person who craves the emptiness, knows deeply the promises of danger and peace but also fulfillment of some unspoken need. The person who hears her when she calls and goes to her, finds a satisfaction and becomes, willingly, part of those 4.8 million acres. Or are you the person who is crushed beneath the weight of the emptiness, who can go into the wilderness but cannot find your way or the strength to go back out again.