Catch your breath a second. Go on, I'll wait — this grade has been taking the wind out of folks for ninety years, and you're in good company. You feel that burn behind your knees? That long pull up out of the canyon? Somebody laid out this climb on purpose, switchback by switchback, so a body could make it without his heart giving out. Ranger Boone Merrick, and I'm right glad you climbed up here to find me. Look around you a minute before I say another word. You're up on Maple Ridge now, high above where that South Fork of Silver Creek cut its gorge. See these big maples leaning their mossy arms out over the trail? That green shade you climbed up through — that's the rooftop the boys I want to tell you about worked under. Stand here in that maple shade and let me tell you who cut this path into the side of a ridge for you.
It was the nineteen-thirties, and this country was hurting in a way that's hard to hold in your head now. The Depression had folks beat down flat. No work, no money, fields blown to dust back east, young men by the hundreds of thousands riding the rails with no place to be and nobody wanting them. So in the spring of nineteen thirty-three, a new president named Franklin Roosevelt put his name to a thing meant to catch some of those young men before they fell clean through the bottom. He called it the Civilian Conservation Corps. Inside of a few months it had taken a quarter-million boys off the road and put them to honest work in the woods and the parks all across the country. And a couple of years on, when the program had found its legs, a whole company of them came here to Silver Falls — better than two hundred strong, the most of them flatland boys out of Illinois — and pitched their camp back of the canyon and went to work. They held this ground the better part of six years.
They were young. Eighteen, nineteen, some of them not yet shaving good. A lot of them had never stood on a hill in their lives, never seen a tree this tall, never heard a creek run loud in a canyon. They drew a dollar a day for the work, and most of that pay didn't even stay in their pockets — the government sent the bulk of it straight home, back to mothers and kid sisters and a kitchen table somewhere that needed it worse than they did. A boy kept a couple dollars to call his own and gave the rest away to people he was homesick for. Nobody made a fuss about it. That was just how it was done.
And here's the part that I think on every time I climb this ridge. Cutting a trail up the wall of a canyon is brutal work. There's no easy way to do it. They had picks and shovels and their two hands and a strong back, and not much else. They had to read the slope and find where a path could even go, then dig it foot by foot into the hillside, haul the rock, set the stone, build the wall that keeps the tread from sliding off the mountain in the next big rain. And they did it in the wet. This is a rainy country eight, nine months out of the year. Cold rain down the collar, mud to the shin, hands you can't hardly feel. A flatland boy a thousand miles from anyone who loved him, learning out in that drizzle how to lay a trail that would hold.
Now the story goes — and I only tell you what the old hands tell me — that of all the company, it was the ones who worked this ridge who took the longest to forget it. The people say that years on, gray and stooped, some of those men came back. Drove a long way to stand right about where you're standing, under these same maples, and put a hand to the stonework, and couldn't rightly say why their eyes filled up. Like the ridge had kept something of theirs and they'd come to see was it still here. And it was. It is. You climbed up it just now.
I'll leave you with this, and then the trail's yours again. When the wind moves through these bigleaf maples up here, and a few of those broad leaves come spinning down loose across the path in front of your boots — slow, the way they fall — you might let yourself think it's the boys, sending word down. Not ghosts haunting, mind. Just a tip of the cap, ninety years late, from one stranger to another. They cut you a way up the mountain and went on home. And the maples drop their leaves on it every fall, slow and yellow, like they're covering it over gentle for the winter.
