We Are Not Our Bones

To this day, I still don’t know what kind of skull it is. There are people I could ask, but I’m not really interested in knowing. It has a long nose like a horse, but it’s not big enough. It has the flat head of a deer or elk but no antlers or holes where antlers should have been. The bottom jaw is missing, so it’s frozen in a constant sun-bleached snarl. The brain case on the back is a bulb that swoops to where the brain stem must’ve been, though I’m no biologist. Nor am I an archeologist. I found it by accident. I took it home on purpose.

I’ve had it for years now. Almost a decade. I’ve displayed it on almost every piece of furniture I’ve ever owned: From the craigslist bookcases and found desks in college to the mantel in the house I lived in when I first moved to Seattle. Now, I have it balancing on a bookshelf that I made myself for the corner of the Seattle studio.

I found the skull at the height of a heavy Rocky Mountain summer. Even the cicadas took naps. Wildfires wound around faraway valleys so that the dissipated smoke looked like a sheet of wax paper against the sky. The skull was lying in a patch of berry bushes when I found it. I was in deep Idaho, miles into the Salmon-Challis National Forest in the red dust mountains between the Salmon and Snake Rivers. Ben was living there, building trails, hiking and recovering from his most recent relapse. He’d moved to the wilderness because he had been a heroin addict. I was visiting him because I liked to hike. I lived only a few hours north, then, and Ben was my brother.

He was twenty when he left home. I was a teenager. I never did know much about him. But when I found out he had gotten addicted to heroin, I couldn’t help but think: that explains it. We lived in the same house for seventeen years but all I ever really learned of him was that he was brilliant and violent. I was obvious and eager and I bored him.

I drove down to Idaho years later in an old Mercury Cougar and it slipped precariously on the loose gravel road. Rocks and branches scraped the undercarriage so violently that I could feel their shapes through my feet. The dirt track went on for hours into the high country and I knew—I knew—I’d be stranded here when the Cougar finally gave up.

In the late afternoon, I and the Cougar descended into a brown grass valley. The different cabins of Ben’s outpost were wedged up against the bottom of a burnt-out ridgeline. He was there with a few other twenty-somethings, horny hippies all, and half-hearted hermits with Kerouac dreams, working for the Forest Service.

I was younger than all of them, at twenty, by at least a few years, but I had come from a real bedroom, in a real house, on a real street in a real city. I had come with a debit card and food. They were eerily fascinated with me, perhaps expecting someone different, considering who I was related to. But on the first night there, I made them vegetarian chili with the canned goods they kept in the pantry. I cooked for an hour in the gaslight communal kitchen while they drank old, warm beer and played lawn volleyball. At night, they were thankful and hammered and, by the next morning, were all too hung over to go on a hike with me.

That’s when I found the skull.

There were no actual trails around the outpost, so I just picked a gully to start fighting up. It was hot and bits of tree bark and dried pine needles stuck to the sweat on my arms and the back of my neck. I enjoyed this sort of thing—I still do. I was disappointed...