The Unknown Unknowns: DJ Lee's Wilderness

In 2018, 15 years after DJ Lee begins exploring the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, her long-time friend and intrepid wilderness ranger, Connie, is reported missing. At first, Lee is inclined to disbelief: how could someone who knows this area of land so well become absorbed by it? But as Remote demonstrates, wilderness—and particularly the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, one of the most remote wilderness areas left in the United States—will always remain somewhat unknowable, even to its most dedicated worshippers.

A map at the beginning of Remote shows the expanse of Selway-Bitterroot, spanning a northern portion of Idaho and the very Western portion of Montana. It is accessible only through a smattering of small towns around its edges. To experience the more secluded internal areas, one must travel by foot or helicopter, which Lee does many times over the last 20 years, in search of both her own sense of belonging and her family roots. Lee brings a sense of awe to her descriptions of the land, recognizing that the wilderness is not something to be mastered or understood but instead appreciated. “None of us really owns the earth,” Lee writes. “This is a lesson I relearn again and again.”

Lee’s personal connection to the Bitterroots emerged in February of 1999 when she was instructed by her grandmother to retrieve a mysterious box from her attic. Inside the box is an old photo with the enigmatic note scribbled across the back in grandma’s hand: “Moose Creek Ranger Station, in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, where I spent many miserable years married to a man I didn’t love and who didn’t love me.” Thus begins Lee’s search for the stories of her grandfather and grandmother, Esther and George.

If anyone is to be handed a box full of mysterious old documents, it should be Lee, a meticulous archivist. Weaving her own family history with those of the original Native American inhabitants and various homesteaders throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Lee crafts a sort of patchwork anthropological history of the Bitterroots, from lost pioneers to modern-day opportunists. Most interestingly, Lee also includes photos in almost every chapter—of her relatives, of strangers, and of the land itself, curating a multimedia sensory experience that seems rarer in prose narratives than it should be.

In her journeys into the Bitterroots, Lee meets a slew of memorable characters, including Dick, an unofficial Bitterroot archivist, and the “The Indiana Jones of Moose Creek,” and Joe, who operates a shuttle service for hikers, described as petite, but gregarious. Of course, the character who made the biggest impression on Lee is Connie, who hovers as a presence in Lee’s memories throughout the text, offering both warm and hard lessons about how the wilderness has a certain disregard for human experience. In one passage, Lee recounts a story Connie told her about witnessing a moose mating ritual:

“And then one morning I woke up and there was blood all over the ground. I investigated and it was clear that another animal hadn’t died there—that was obvious. I knew it was some mark of animal life, some mark of love. Makes you think about the mystery of life that thrives in that place, and there I was, a lowly human, trying to figure out what happened.”

Connie’s is only one of a long line of disappearances in the Bitterroot, some of them positively haunting, like the story of George Colgate, a cook in an expedition of wealthy men from New York who became sick and was abandoned by his party. Later, a message in a bottle with a goodbye to his wife and children was found. Though these stories, Lee also paints the wilderness as its own character: an enticing mistress, one with no allegiances. Despite the love that the author has for the land, she also recognizes it can be a profound place of loneliness and unease, both for herself and her grandmother, who suffered from unnamed mental illness during her life as the wife of a wilderness ranger at Moose Creek. Through these stories and others like it, Lee also seems to be crafting a subtle portrait of women in the wilderness, and how their relationships to the land might be different than men. When Lee and her family are on a camping trip, they encounter a young woman, covered in bruises and near-starving, who arrives at their campsite with her menacing boyfriend. Refusing to leave with Lee and her family, the woman continues on her trek, and Lee worries after her welfare. When she confides in her mother, her mother replies that some people don’t want to be rescued. “And I knew immediately she was right,” Lee writes. “Because this was the wilderness, where people came to be left alone. Where people could disappear, if they wanted to.” 

In the Johari window, a therapeutic schema popularized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a Pentagon briefing in 2002, there are four categories of knowledge that one has about the self and others. There are things known to the self but not known to others, things others perceive but not the self, things both others and the self can perceive, and finally, things neither known about the self nor others. These are the true “unknown unknowns,” the category of which I might put Lee’s story. As much as Lee works to “solve” the mystery of her grandparents’ lives, and Connie’s disappearance, the lesson learned here is that the wilderness, like the true narratives of our lives, rarely wraps up in neat ends.

But there can be a kind of spirituality in the limits of where our knowledge can take us. In one of the most moving and fascinating threads in the book, Lee describes the phenomenon of “constellation workshops,” in which participants are asked to re-enact each other’s family and ancestral dramas in order to bring new energy and light to the hardships they faced. At first, Lee is skeptical of the practice, preferring her data-driven approach, but eventually, she attends one, letting strangers and the workshop leader, Barry, re-enact the story of her grandparents and the wilderness as a live drama. Here’s what Lee writes after the workshop:

It was more than insight that I had gleaned. As we motored through the streets in silence, all I could think about was how, at the end of my constellation, George had said, “I love the land more than I love them,” how Barry lined up the women, Great-Grandmother Mary, Esther, my mother, the representative of me, and me, each with our hands placed on one another’s shoulders, my own hands stretched toward an imaginary Steph and whoever would come after her, and how Barry said, “you can let the land go, but it’s there for you, always.” How the thunderstorm that had been building outside finally burst and rain hammered the metal roof to drive home the point.

And so, in essence, is Lee’s point—the wilderness can be there for us as a refuge, but, like people, we have to learn to accept it in its refusal to be contained or completely understood. In this acceptance of the unknown, we can also find a sense of belonging.