In the Wilderness Page 24

  I carry it all with me, in the quiet pools and strong currents of my being. I fill my hands with the black dirt left by the river’s birth. I believe that what I hold in my hands is memory: like the river, it takes what it touches, carrying it along until all that remains is the bed over which the water flows.

  So it is that I have chosen to remain here, above the Idaho river whose feeding brooks once ran beneath my window, whose waters I drank from my hands. All that I am and have ever been the river has known. It is the map I follow back to understand what has shaped me: my family, the camps, the church; the preacher’s son whose initials I carved into the spongy bark; his family I believed loved me—back past the dam and into what remains of the forest, to where my father’s voice once rose in laughter, back to that place where I sang with the soul of a child.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Kim Barnes’s stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Georgia Review and Shenandoah. She coedited, along with Mary Clearman Blew, Circle of Women: An Anthology of Western Women Writers. She lives with her husband and children above the Clearwater River in Idaho.

  ALSO BY KIM BARNES

  HUNGRY FOR THE WORLD

  On the day of Kim Barnes’s 1976 high school graduation in Lewiston, Idaho, after a disagreement with her father—a logger by lifelong trade, and a fervent adherent of the Pentecostal Christian faith—she gathered her few belongings and struck out on her own. Alone for the first time, she sought to make a life for herself—without skills, without funds, with barely a shred of knowledge of the world outside the insulated confines of her family.

  Hungry for the World is the story of how an intelligent and passionate young woman, thirsting for experience of what lay out there, rejected the patriarchal domination of family and church and tried to find her way, only to be all but undone at the hands of a man whose dominance was of an altogether different sort. It is a classic story of the search for knowledge and the consequences, both dire and beautiful, of that search. Barnes’s story breaks the code of silence imposed by shame and maps a trail of hope through the swamp of human failure and survival.

  Memoir/0-385-72044-0

  ANCHOR BOOKS

  Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:

  1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).

  First Anchor Books Trade Paperback Edition, March 1997

  Copyright © 1996 by Kim Barnes

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday in 1996.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of

  Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday

  hardcover edition as follows:

  Barnes, Kim.

  In the wilderness : coming of age in unknown country / Kim

  Barnes.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Barnes, Kim—Childhood and youth. 2. Women poets,

  American—20th century—Family relationships. 3. Women poets,

  American—Idaho—Family relationships. 4. Barnes, Kim—Homes and haunts—Idaho. 5. Idaho—Religious life and customs.

  6. Idaho—Social life and customs. 7. Wilderness areas—Idaho.

  8. Pentecostalism—Idaho. 9 Family—Idaho. I. Title.

  PS3552.A6815Z467 1996

  811′.54—dc20

  [B] 95-24889

  eISBN: 978-0-307-75884-2

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.0