Then my generation took over and the place started to change. My brothers and other members of our family are pretty good cooks, so we worked on upgrading the kitchen and began throwing a big full-week party after Thanksgiving, right around the opening of buck season. Where it used to be lots of trucks and heaps of dirt bikes on the land next to the camp, in our era it became lines of ATVs. Friends and their families come from all over the area, over the back roads and through the streams and down the hillsides, until they get to our place for some brisket. And the other thing that changed was that my brothers and I included our daughters.
We kept the family tradition of stocking the creek with trout in the spring so the kids could learn to fish, but we added in some palomino fish because the colors delighted the little girls and the boys, too. When I started taking Emily up in the hunting stand, I never expected her to want to shoot, although it would have been fine with me if she did. I wanted her to have what I had had with my dad, that quiet time looking around at nature.
I started taking Emily out to camp from the moment she could sit up in a car seat, but never during hunting season, so we could spend time together in the woods. By the time she was three or four, able to walk far enough to check out a porcupine, we’d go out every weekend, just the two of us. Emily loved to climb, so I would let her go first up the long ladder to the hunting stand. I would be right behind her to catch her if she missed a rung. Up there with me she learned to distinguish the different birdsongs, and to look for porcupines, raccoons, and turkeys. She even named pairs of does and their fawns. This was my way of opening this part of my world to her in whatever way she wanted to take it. She loved being there with me. This was why I hoped that getting her to the hunting camp might encourage her to walk.
As we drove slowly down the dirt road to camp, she was scanning the trees for birds and the forest floor for animals. I stopped the SUV next to the camp and got out her wheelchair and her walker, hoping she’d choose to walk, but she did not. I picked her up out of the SUV, gently placed her into the wheelchair, and maneuvered it over a rocky path to the bridge so she could look at the fish and scatter some food for them. Then I pushed the chair over to sit at the side of the stream for a while.
I scanned these familiar hillsides as Emily and I sat silently by the creek. I knew every contour of the hill, every stream, and all the hallows. By the time I was ten and Jim was eleven, we’d saved up to buy dirt bikes. Every chance we got, we were kicking up dust, rocks flying in our wake, as we splashed through the streams to the tops of the strip-mined mountains, heading home only when we saw the sun getting low in the sky. Had my love of this land given Emily leukemia? The doctors said they didn’t know what caused her disease. Was it genetics? Did some inherited genetic defect in the body awaken the cancer in someone who was vulnerable to that form of the disease? Could the medicine I had been taking for years for Crohn’s disease have somehow caused Emily’s leukemia? Or was it mostly environmental? Had my brothers and I splashed through toxins in the streams that ran down the sides of the strip-mined hills? The doctors told us not to focus on what might have caused her cancer because we would never have a definitive answer. They suggested we use all of our energy to focus on getting Emily through this. But I still couldn’t stop thinking, Is this horrible thing that happened to her in some way my fault?
I kept recalling something that had happened the summer before. I had a powerful bug spray that I kept in my SUV, the kind that had DEET in it, to help me fend off the bloodthirsty ticks that attacked us at camp. Also, that summer, Emily loved an apple-flavored spray candy they sold at the concession stands at the high school softball games. One Saturday when we pulled into our driveway, I had just unstrapped Emily from her booster seat when a friend stopped by. While he and I chatted, Emily pretended to drive for a while, but it wasn’t too long before she was on the floor rummaging around underneath the seat and found the bug spray that had fallen out of my bag.
By the time I said goodbye to my friend, I caught her in the foot well with a terrified look on her face. Emily was alarmed by the taste of the “candy” and ran into the house to ask Kari what to do about the candy that was making her mouth burn. That’s when we realized she’d sprayed DEET in her
