Drift Creek Wilderness, Oregon

The day is hot and lazy, and my mind wades around the meandering bend of the river I sat on the bank of with my thirteen-year-old son Quinn just a few days ago. I gravitate back to its banks, gazing at the leaf boats of that singular day as they begin to drift towards the horizon of memory. Downstream around a few more bends, more memories swirl around an eddy on the edge of consciousness, and I just catch a glimpse of him with pinchable cheeks, stacking river rocks into “snowmen” to match the snowman pajama pants he wore. The size of him in my backpack on this same riverbank stands back-to-back in contrast with how he has drawn up even in height with his dad.

In March, my son stopped coming home from his dad’s every other week. He could not deal with the anxiety of bringing the virus from one of his parents to the other, and his dad is better at isolation than anyone I’ve ever known. It was just never a good thing before now. It took a lot of convincing to get Quinn to agree to hike this remote wilderness area trail with me today, both of us masked and social distancing. No hugs.

Quinn’s voice the last time we hiked here was a giddy gurgling over the river rocks, while his voice now glugs into a much deeper gully. I can hear this in person in a way I cannot hear it through the screen during the daily video calls of our pandemic parenting paradigm. I’ve been re-reading The Lord of the Rings to him when we run out of things to talk about. Friends don’t think I’m doing the right thing, “letting” him stay away so long, but I remind myself that my first responsibility in parenting a teen male is to model consent. The switchback weeks away have always cut a raw gash in my heart and this cuts even deeper, but I remain stubbornly committed to honoring his bodily autonomy.

We hike all the way down the switchback terrain to the river. Beside a grove of giant Western red cedar trees, we perch on separate rocks, and do not come close enough for me to smell the top of his head, to see if his scalp still carries the scent of a pinch of cinnamon that it has since birth. What does reach me is the zest of the tangerine he is peeling with his large, capable hands, and this scent, too, tethers me to him briefly, remembering how I ate my pregnant body weight in clementines in my third trimester. The memory is only eclipsed by the thought that I should not tell him I can smell his lunch, or he will suggest we sit farther apart.

I am struck by his hands; they have changed so much since he grappled with stacking those stones, when the river had swallowed less rain, on a different lazy summer day over a decade ago.

Wandering in a wilderness area together all day is unlike our video calls in every way, but most acutely in that I am positioned beside the waterfall of his imagination like I have not been in months. The story comes spilling forth of a pod of whimsical dragons hatched out of colorful eggs, each with powerful attributes perfectly complementing those of their teammates. Once we find our first wild rose on the trail, we find many. “You find a glowing turquoise-green egg in that rose bush!” The first dragon egg, of the species Photosynthesim draconis, we name Douglas Fircone. Doug for short. His power is absorbing sunlight and transmitting plant nutrition through his green breath. Once we spot our first crayfish, we find many, and this time a water dragon is hatched. Once we find one dragon egg, we find more, as it is with many wild things for which one isn’t even necessarily looking. All day, the tale flows in between the huge trunks of the trees we pass by, a comfortable third companion on the journey. Unlooked for, it simply appears like a rainbow where the sunlight refracts in the droplets splashing over the rapids, though the sun and the water never touch.

The last time we hiked all the way to this river, Quinn napped on my back most of the way. Before we built rock snowmen, we threw rocks in the water (splash) for a long time (his name for the activity was throw-rocks-in-the-water-splash!). That day he looked up at me and said, “I love the water! I love the water!!!” He was just barely two, but he wove a story through the trees that day, too. “I am going to grow big and tall. And when I get older and big, I'll drive my garbage truck and come and pick up the garbage cans and dump them into the truck!” I told him, “when you are big and drive your garbage truck to come pick up my garbage, I will come out to watch you dump the garbage cans into the truck, and I will clap for you!”

He has grown so big and tall. The wilderness within him is green and lush as ever, also having grown, expanded in all the ways a teen’s mind does.

Our video calls are now routine, comfortably structured around a game and a book. The book helps us remember wild places, but it isn’t the same as walking in one together, with dragons for company. Like the night wakings I didn’t realize I was nostalgic for until a stray one reoccurred after months of unbroken sleep, this reintroduction to the storytelling magic of his mind in unstructured moments after months apart catches me off guard. What is this pang of guilt? I had not been grieving the lack of back stage access to his imagination until I got a fresh taste. I savor its chocolatey sweetness but too soon there is an edge of bitter brevity and longing for it to last.

Back near the trailhead, he finds me a butterfly, and beckons me to pause and take photos. We both know his dad is probably waiting at the trailhead, but we stop anyway, not ready to be done. The black-speckled orange wings flit among buttercups and daisies, our eyes dazzled by its color, adjusting to the bright sunlight out from under the old growth canopy. We smile behind our masks at each other; him at the knowledge that butterflies are one of his mama’s favorites, me at the idea that this could be one of the Oregon Silverspot butterflies I had recently read about, and even just the potential of finding something uncommonly rare and endemic to this place helps me alight on the flower of this moment a bit longer, not fly off just yet to what it will feel like to ache for him again for another unknown length of time.

Mary Oliver said of an old tree, “Who knows when supreme patience took hold, and the wind’s wandering among its leaves was enough of motion, of travel?” A day of lingering among the cedar, fir, and hemlock giants seems a good way to study their supreme patience which I have by no means acquired, even as this wandering quenches the thirst for motion, for travel, for a day set apart from the many days isolating at home with just the wilderness within to wander. I breathe a prayer on the breeze in the branches, the light on the droplets, the eddies on the edges, for a measure of that patience, that this day may be enough for me and for him of what we have been lacking. Enough of a glimpse at something rare, beautiful, endemic to this place.

Mary Beth Rew Hicks is a marine biologist and writer on the Oregon coast. A nonfiction student in the Mountainview MFA, she is working on a memoir about women and whales. Her writing has been published in Selkie.