Page 8 of Catalyst

Small. Functional. He framed it. My father finished the interior. The porch and roof are my work, rebuilt after a bad winter, every board from timber milled on the property.

Tight porch boards. Sound roof. The woodstove heats the cabin evenly if you know where to set the damper, and trial and error in an Alaskan winter is a teacher that doesn't repeat the lesson.

Lunch happens on the porch because the kitchen is four walls and four walls stopped being comfortable a long time ago.

The Army gave me years of enclosure. Barracks. Tents. Forward operating bases where the only thing between you and the terrain was a sheet of plywood and the certainty that you'd built it to hold.

Combat engineers build things. We also take them apart. The second skill came easier, which is the kind of proficiency the Army values and civilian life has no use for.

Home happened because my father died and the land needed someone to meet its demands.

Staying happened because the trees don't require explanations and don't ask follow-up questions. They also don't look at me the way people in town sometimes do, trying to figure out which version of me came back from deployment.

All of me came back. The man who plants white spruce saplings and the one who can calculate a blast radius are the same person. One of those skills pays the bills. The other stays quiet. Both are present.

The saplings from earlier this week are visible at the far edge of the south stand. White spruce in rows that won't amount to anything worth looking at for a decade. This property will still be here when they do.

The view from the porch takes in the valley and the ridge line beyond. On a clear day the road to Whitewater Junction is visible from here. Today the clouds sit low on the ridge, and the world ends at the tree line.

Town comes after lunch. Diesel. The road drops through the switchbacks and crosses the iron bridge.

Main Street takes as little of my time as possible. Fill the truck. Nod at Donna through the post office window. A flatbed loaded with hay bales rolls past the Ridgeline, and somebody's dog is asleep on the community hall porch.

Hank is outside his store, loading a pallet of roofing shingles into somebody's flatbed. He straightens up when my truck passes and raises one hand. Not a wave. A summons.

I pull over. Hank walks to the window.

"Your order came in Thursday. Fence staples and the replacement blade for the draw knife."

"I'll grab them next week."

"They're in the back. Take sixty seconds." He turns and walks inside, which is Hank's way of ending a negotiation he's already decided to win.

The fence staples and the blade go behind the seat. Hank takes my cash and makes a note on a pad. The whole exchange takes less time than it took to park.

"How's the north fence?" he asks.

"Holding."

"Moose?"

"Not yet."

Hank nods. A man who understands that "not yet" is the only honest answer when the subject is a bull moose and a fence line. He goes back to the shingles. I go back to the mountain.

The cemetery is on the way to the north boundary. Not a visit. A walk past. The distinction matters only to me.

Four graves on a rise above the water, surrounded by white birch. Ezra. Catherine. Dale. My father.

The crosses are white spruce, each one carved by hand. My father made Ezra's and Catherine's. Dale's cross was my first attempt, and my father stood behind me while I worked, correcting my grip on the chisel a single time.

My father's cross came later, carved alone in a workshop that still had his tools hanging on the wall. The grain fought me on every cut. I let it.

The birch are healthy. The ground is firm. The dead don't need conversation. They're in the ground they chose, and the maintenance is the same as everything else on this property. Duty. The land holds my dead, and I hold the land. That's the arrangement.

The north boundary takes the rest of the afternoon. The fence wire from last week's work is holding. Posts are solid. The moose haven't tested the new wire yet.

They will. The bull that keeps hitting the third post from the crossing has been at war with that boundary for longer than either of us should be willing to admit. The post has been replaced more times than I care to count. The animal treats my property line as a personal insult. Patience is running thin.