The Truth Will Come Through

I feel like I could start every column these days with, “I was digging through boxes of memorabilia the other day,” and it would be accurate. I am at the place in my life where I am finally dealing with the concert t-shirts, souvenirs, photographs, and Barbies that lived quietly for decades in my mother’s basement filed under “S” for “Someday.” Our childhood home was sold a few years ago, and my mom now lives in an apartment, so Someday has arrived, and the keepsakes have come home to roost.

I’ve had no problem parting with most of it, even the Cabbage Patch Dolls I saved in a Rubbermaid tote along with their birth certificates, which we’d been told would make them worth something someday. You can’t give these things away, even with the birth certificates, even though their signature scent of baby powder is still mysteriously clinging to their looped yarn hair almost 40 years later. I stuffed the dolls into a black trash bag, along with a pile of other things that have depreciated to the point that even Goodwill won’t take them. 

It was easier than I thought to pitch programs from choir concerts, report cards, photos from eighth-grade slumber parties, ticket stubs, and term papers. I won’t part with my collection of curious newspaper clippings, though, including this one which will forever be a source of humor and inspiration.

And I won’t throw away the letters. Hundreds have been culled over the years, perished in bonfires, paper shredders, and even a backyard Weber barbecue grill during a fit of pandemic decluttering, so the ones that survived this far with me are keepers. The whole letter collection fits into just the bottom half of the Rubbermaid tote formerly belonging to the Cabbage Patch Kids. Ironically, I kept their birth certificates even though the dolls didn’t make the cut. 

I believe in letters. Their value only increases as years pass, distance grows, and people depart the way mortals do. I still maintain writing a letter is one of the nicest things you can do for someone for under a buck. A vocal champion of letter writing, people sometimes act like I’m lobbying for the reinstatement of the telegraph, or promoting the covered wagon as an efficient means of travel. Indeed there are far more effective ways to communicate than a letter, but few are more personal. A letter allows you to come to life in the hands of the recipient, and it is not unlike a personalized piece of art. Think of letters like candles: I’m not suggesting you light your whole house with candles, but one or two sure adds ambiance.

Speaking of lighting a room with candles, I want to jog your memory back to August 14, 2003, when a cascade of power outages created widespread catastrophe on the electric grid in the Northeast U.S. and parts of Canada. Raise your hand if you remember this, and raise both hands if you lived through it. 

That summer, I was way off any grid up on a lonely mountaintop, much like the mountaintop I am writing this from, working as a fire lookout. Listening to the events play out on my Sony transistor radio, and the descriptions of people in their sweltering apartments in Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey left me gasping for air. The catastrophic effects of the blackout were palpable, even at a great distance.

I imagined people sitting motionless in the stifling heat, surrounded by conspicuous silence punctuated with unfamiliar sounds. The small thuds of daily living—the closing of doors, footsteps in hallways, even the staccato chatter of neighbors—replaced the constant electric hum of air conditioners, fans, and refrigerators.

From the other side of the country, I felt connected to these strangers in the Northeast. Suddenly bereft of something as vital to urban existence as opposable thumbs, I wanted to know their stories, insights, and experiences without electricity and see how they contrasted with mine on a mountain, where there was nothing to miss. 

Besides my dog, Bandit, I had no outlet for these contemplations, and trying to communicate musings by mirror flashes to my lookout neighbor, some fifteen miles away, was impossible. So I  decided to reach out to the voice that brought these stories of the blackout to me in the middle of nowhere, and wrote a letter to NPR. 

As I penned my thoughts in blue ink on lined paper, starting with “Dear NPR,” I felt like a child writing a letter to the president. But even the president, as I remember, always read at least one kid’s letter. I remember seeing it on TV, or in the Mini Page, a newspaper insert for kids that I used to love. 

The letter to NPR went by mule, then pickup, then mail truck, then by plane, I’d imagine, and somehow landed on a desk just like the rest of the other mail. Maybe the difference was that the hands of the editor it made it to either could not get over the quaintness of a handwritten letter in the 21st century, the fact that it had been sent by mule from a fire lookout tower, or both. Whatever the case was, the letter sparked something to life.

Months later, NPR sent me a mockup of an edited version of the letter I had sent, resembling the original in only a skeletal way. Their version highlighting only the parts about fire lookout life since the blackout had come and gone, and they wanted to use it on Morning Edition. A date was set for me to go record in the studios at Montana Public Radio.   

The following spring, at the station in Missoula, they wired me in with some NPR producer in LA that I talked to over a headset that made me feel like Britney Spears. I didn’t look like Britney Spears though, or even myself, because for some reason I’d felt compelled to wear an almost comical amount of makeup for the recording session, leaving me with a queasy feeling, like I was overdressed for a date, when I caught my reflection in the glass of the recording booth.

The voice on the headset had me record multiple takes, this time with more enthusiasm, now a little more, until I felt like I was auditioning for a junior high play. Combined with the amateurish theatrical look I’d mistakenly created with the makeup, I felt like a miserable fraud. 

When I expressed my skepticism, the voice in LA assured me over the headset that most of the exaggerated inflection would get buried in the airwaves, and not to worry, because the real “me” would come through.  

But that’s actually not the important part of the story. The best, most salient detail came the following summer in the middle of fire season when Dave, the same mule packer who carried the original letter to NPR down the mountain, made a trip up to replenish my supplies. After unloading the groceries from the backs of four sweaty mules, he grabbed his saddle bag and pulled out a fistful of mail; the part I’d been waiting for. 

Photo of a photograph (pre-digital) of Dave the packer and his mule string.

Before he left, he shook the saddle bag out for good measure, and perhaps a touch of comic ceremony. We were both surprised to see a tissue-thin blue envelope float down and silently land in the dirt.

Dave knelt down and picked it up, his brow knit. “It’s from China,” he said in the same tone he’d have used to tell me what time it was. He handed it to me, mounted his horse, and rode away, trailing four empty mules practically bouncing with lightness.

I carefully peeled open the delicate, blue aerogram. The letter, written in extra fine point black pen, was from an American teacher writing from a school in Qingdao, China, where he had heard my essay on NPR over the internet while grading papers. He wrote to tell me in small, carefully formed, rounded letters that my descriptions of the Bitterroot Mountains had made him homesick for Montana.  

He had addressed it to me with the information he was able to parse out from the spot on Morning Edition:

Karla Theilen

U.S. Forest Service

Darby, Montana

And somehow, in these times of barcodes, QR codes, and nine-digit zip codes, that rudimentary address got his letter halfway across the world to me.

It was easy to see the heart and soul in his handwriting, and I guess that somehow, somewhere under the dramatic vocal inflection, the garish makeup no one could see, and all of my other misgivings I had about the radio piece, something of the truth—and my own heart and soul—must have come through, as well.

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