Biography and Memoir, Adventure
Date Published: October 26, 2021
Publisher: Pepin Enterprises
At age eighteen, Yvonne set out to build a home from trees on 80 acres she bought on an Oregon mountainside. In 1975, log by log she creates a cabin and heals from an orphaned past, finding a new family in the forest, and with people in a valley named John Day.
Babe in the Woods: Self Portrait is the second in a three-book series. It chronicles a span in Yvonne's four decades long relationship with her log cabin and the people she meets in the valley. The book continues Yvonne's story of learning to live in the wilderness within and outside of herself. It is also a story of rogue bears, building a bear-proof log studio, a young artist's development, and the trials and triumph of finding oneself, alone in the backwoods.
Prologue
Bears had never bothered me before I shot
one that summer on the mountain. As a borderline vegetarian, I reasoned, since
I deliberately killed an animal I had to eat a bit of animal deliberately
killed. Not entirely to restore karmic equilibrium, but so I could chew upon
the carnal rush of slaughter.
On that summer day, when hummingbirds
drilled air hot enough to bake vanilla smells out of ponderosa pine, I waited,
primed to kill, on my log cabin porch. When a black bear parted brush and
stopped midway in crossing the creek I grasped a thirty-thirty resting by my
thigh. Leveled it on a two-by-four nailed across the railing, aimed, fired. The
bear’s eyes blew open in shock before it faltered, staggered upright and bolted
in a tilted gait upwind of a bullet so immediately embraced.
Days after the bear had been found dead,
I felt the need to eat meat to restore the cosmic balance knocked off kilter—a
mere trigger squeeze is all it took. It had to be wild. Killed in the wild and
not from the bear I shot. I bummed a frozen elk steak from a runty hunter.
After it thawed I roasted the meat on a green willow stick over a twiggy fire
beside the flashing creek, within spitting distance of where, only days before,
I’d blown out a black bear’s rib bone with a borrowed rifle at three hundred
feet.
I seared venison until it was as brown as
the branch piercing it. Until flames licked away and nearly blackened what
cardinal red was left of an animal that like the bear had browsed, a season
before, upon pale, green shivery shoots. When it cooled, I bit into that
charred chunk and chewed.
The creek continued to flow. The forest
practiced its natural order; every leaf, twig, pine needle, rock and pine cone
in forested rapport. But the animal in me got all riled up and I choked up
before I could swallow: swallow the fear that had taken us both down.
Miles above Oregon’s John Day Valley, I
felled, bucked, skinned, notched and chinked a log cabin together from trees:
Douglas, red and white fir, and tamarack to classify a predominant few. I was a
skinny 18 year old, fresh out of orthodontic braces when I began to rebuild the
home lost four years before when orphan replaced the name of daughter.
The road leading to my backwoods home is
so rutted and steep, even the most souped-up, air-shocked four-wheel drives
lose traction in stretches named for disasters at these places. The Eliminator and Shit and Slide
are but two.
Given the amount of rain or snow it is
often swifter and safer to hike than it is to drive this road that ends beneath
igneous peaks named after a blushing berry. I live here alone when I am not
involved in occupations to bank income so I can buy time to live off the grid
and ungirded. This log cabin is the only place I have to call home. It sits as
empty as I feel when I am not there. There is no lock on the door.
John Day is a north-east central city
sharing the same name with a valley, river, county and a dead trapper. Most of
my close friends here call me Lavon. This mispronunciation twists off tongues
conditioned to calling out the likes of women with names like Artice, Nadine,
Emmeline, Delia or Octavia. Names solid as the pioneering women who lived up to
them, unadorned with luxuries I take for granted in country where Yvonne just
sounds too pampered, too proper.
Sometimes, depending on the work I’m
bungling—tasks that involve steely razor-sharp pointy tools, trees and dirt—I
will also answer to Dimwit, Addlebrained and Loser. Dumbass or Dumbshit
occasionally interweave into my own self-calling. The summer I shot the bear I
added Murderer to my list of nicknames despite the fact I was a conscientious
objector and abided by Gandhi’s teachings. One of his lessons is: There are many causes that I am prepared to die for but no cause
that I am prepared to kill for.
I’ve convoluted my practice of his
philosophy by dispatching an animal I was not prepared to die for.
A rational impulse. Either a bear was going
to get me. Or, I was going to get a bear. Who did who in first abet one’s good
fortune. A rifle greatly leveraged my winning odds.
On a pine-board shelf next to my loft
bed, among erudite tomes and decades-outdated encyclopedias, is a hardback copy
of The Prophet, the once-shiny cover now scuffed and
dog-eared. I keep that book beside me when I sleep in the belief that dreaming
beside Gibran’s soulful words generates a token of divine light, like a halo
surrounding this solitary life wrestling me to the mat. One passage is
underlined and read again and again.
Your living is determined not so much by what
life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to
life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
I am twenty-two. My family is dead. What
I call home is a stack of logs in the Strawberry Mountains. My best friend is a
cat. Out of principle for life, until I ate that venison I didn’t eat furry
things.
This is what I looked at.
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Yvonne, I enjoyed following the tour and learning about your book, which sounds like a great self portrait for me to read! Congratulations on your release of Babe in the Woods and good luck with your book! Thanks for sharing it with me and I hope the tour was a success! Have a spectacular holiday season!
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