Talking to Strangers
There is an old Peanuts comic strip where Charlie Brown’s younger sister, Sally, is writing a school report on “Forest Strangers.” She starts out, “Our wildlife and our trees are protected by brave and dedicated men. These men live by themselves in towers and are called Forest Strangers.”
(Click to enlarge.)
Of course, an updated version of this would simply say, “brave and dedicated people,” not just men, but the copyright date on the comic is 1972, the year I was born, and let’s face it: a lot has changed since then.
I was one of these Forest Strangers, and spent the summer alone on a mountaintop. While all of that solitude had the potential to make me stranger than I already am, it was actually an exercise in building social skills.
You see, it’s not easy to avoid another person, or even a group of people, when you are the only humans sharing a mountaintop for any amount of time. It’s sort of like sitting in the front row in a class; there’s no escaping detection. You also can’t resort to the normal social tricks, avoiding eye contact by pretending to be searching in earnest for something at the grocery store, digging for something in your purse, or scrolling through your phone with a studied look of consternation.
It took me a while to get used to the fact that, despite my remote location and the great lengths one would have to go to to arrive there, strangers could, and did, show up without warning. I had a view through the trees of the last half mile of road, which, best case scenario when I was lucky enough to detect a vehicle as it drove through, usually gave me just enough time to pull myself together before encountering the vehicle’s occupants.
I told you about the kid from Wisconsin a month or so ago, whom I welcomed into the lookout tower despite my midwestern hesitation to entertain a guest without tidying up ahead of time, but there were memorable others, too, throughout the summer; my neighbors for a minute.
There was Jim, a photographer from northern Idaho, who pulled up one morning as I unloaded the back of my pickup, having returned to the lookout just minutes earlier after taking a few days off. After introducing himself, he fell into step with me, helping me unload a half-dozen five-gallon jugs of water and haul them to the tower. At over eight pounds per gallon, that’s 40 pounds of water per jug, even accounting for what had sloshed out on the drive up.
I noticed he walked with a pronounced limp, and, worried that he was in pain, insisted I had it covered.
“Please” he smiled, “I want to help.”
He explained that some years ago, he’d been sitting on a bench in downtown Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, when a car drove up on a sidewalk and into the side of a brick building, trapping him in between. The details of what happened during—and after—the accident and the years of rehab and recovery, in which he progressed from wheelchair, to walker, to crutches, to cane, all added up to nothing short of a miracle.
He noted how, rather than being mired down in loss, “I just focus on what I want, which is to walk, and to be alive for this,” he said with a sweeping gesture at 360 degrees of wilderness, the water jugs, me, and my dogs, beaming with the gratitude of a person living on borrowed time.
Jim, sitting with my dog, Jack.
In the grandness, the vastness of the mountain, there were also remarkable moments of small world-ness, like the time a family on a road trip showed up with three kids wearing neon-yellow wristbands. For the sake of conversation, I asked if they’d been at the Ravalli County fair in Hamilton, Montana, a town I knew they’d driven through on the way there.
“No,” the dad clarified, slightly abashed, “we went to some drag races a few days ago before we left Minnesota, and we just haven’t taken them off yet.”
Drag races? Minnesota?
“Brainerd,” he answered, which is the town I was born and raised in, and is also the home of the Brainerd International Raceway—which, to this day, I have never been to.
This just days after a group of men on motorcycles had detected traces of my Minnesota accent, and asked where it came from. When I told them, one of the guys lit up, having visited Brainerd every summer as a kid. And there on a mountaintop in the middle of nowhere, we discussed Rafferty’s Pizza, pie at The Barn, and, of course, Paul Bunyan.
As they say, “All roads lead to Brainerd.” “They,” of course, being people from Brainerd.
On my way to the spring one evening toward the end of July, I was singing show tunes at the top of my lungs—ostensibly to ward the bears off. I noticed a pickup and a camper parked where for weeks had been just open space. It was like walking into a wall, or a telephone pole, and I must have turned beet red, caught in the middle of belting out the chorus of “Seasons of Love” from Rent.
The group of four were eager to know the likelihood of seeing a bear. They asked in such a way I wasn’t sure if they did or did not want to see one, so my answer landed somewhere in the middle.
We talked about plants, trees, flowers, and birds, then moved on to books while their son surreptitiously fed my dogs grilled sausage of a caliber they will likely never experience again. Had the dogs appreciated the luxury, they may have chosen to savor, rather than inhale, said sausages.
One of the women, a poet from New York City, mentioned that one of their stops on the trip would be Missoula, Montana, where she’d visit an old friend and fellow poet.
I explained that Missoula was where I lived when I wasn’t on a mountain, or working as a travel nurse in far flung parts of the country.
“That’s crazy,” she said, adding that her poet friend is also a nurse, but shrugged off any possibility that I’d know her.
But I did.
It reminded me of a cartoon I’d seen recently of two aliens popping out of a moonscape to see a couple of astronauts in the distance. The caption read, “They’re from Earth. I wonder if they know Dan?”
Never hurts to ask.
Over the course of the summer, among untold others, I met a couple from Florida on their honeymoon, a solo cyclist from France, a recently retired X-ray tech from Salt Lake City, and a convivial group of ham radio operators from Indiana who asked, “What’s your handle?” before they left, making me wish I had one.
Although, come to think of it, maybe I do have a handle. Not on Twitter or ham radio, but in some parallel universe I'm the Forest Stranger: a friendly, singing one, and maybe just a little less strange after you meet me.
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Karla Theilen is the Neighborhood Storyteller at Strong Towns. Karla is a writer, storyteller, and Registered Nurse based out of Missoula, Montana. Her penchant to explore wild places informed early career choices as a trail builder in the Grand Canyon, and a forest fire lookout in Idaho. Her current writing inspiration comes from a different kind of wilderness, navigating healing journeys with her patients in far-flung places where she works as a travel nurse. Her writing has been featured on NPR, and select stories and essays have been anthologized. She has been Facebook-free since 1972.