sit with eyes closed on the wooden deck that runs along the entry doors of the Elkhorn Lodge in Cooke City, Montana. Clear skies brought a brisk morning and a cool day, and I welcome the slender slice of sunlight hitting my body. The hill before me is naked and yet covered with trees: these are trees that burned during the town’s terrifying fire of 1988, trees that stand tall, lean precariously, and lie on the ground, dead, none able to leave this death knoll. The sun is ready to drop below the mountains though the sky remains bright on this June evening. Tomorrow morning we leave Yellowstone. Part of me will stay here, just like these trees. Will eventually decompose, will become part of the soil. Will give life to what comes next.
And how much of this landscape will come with me when I leave? I look within, searching for wild, for what’s been reignited. And suddenly I’m thinking of Daniel, our relationship flat, lifeless. I see us in our house, in shorts and t-shirts, a project.
I am on a stepladder. I jam the putty knife under a corner of paper, shove it up, between wall and ancient grasscloth paste. The wallpaper is dated, has been on the foyer walls for decades. I’d lived with it for six years, and am excited that Daniel and I are stripping it, replacing the bumpy, stringy stuff with smooth, taupe paint. It hadn’t been easy to settle on a color. Daniel wanted the sage green gone—he thought my house entirely too green—and we’d tried eighteen shades of gray-tan-beige before finally choosing this taupe. He and his fifteen-year-old son had moved into my house when we married a few months before. I’d lost more of my space than just that inside closets and cupboards.
He preps an un-papered wall, I soften old glue and scrape dusty paper from another era.
“I was stripping old wallpaper the week that Jake was born,” I say.
“Oh?”
“This puts me back there—I haven’t scraped old wallpaper in a long time. I’d taken a week off work, and was just home, nesting I suppose.”
I pause between sentences, sometimes between words.
“I’d had an ultrasound a few days before, and on that Monday morning my doctor called, told me he wanted me to have a non-stress test to check on the babies. They were concerned about the growing size discrepancy. I said sure, any day, I’m off all week. He suggested Thursday. I said okay.”
I scrape distractedly. I tear a strip of stringy paper free, and toss it in the trash pile before continuing.
“I hung up the phone, climbed back onto the stepladder, and kept scraping. And then by Thursday, Little Joe had died, and then on Saturday Jake was born. Wall paper will probably always put me right back there.”
“Mm.” He tapes his wall. I sit.
Silence.
I don’t need much, but I need more than an “mm.” His back is to me and I watch him stretch, measure, press blue tape against the ceiling. He finishes that corner and moves to the next wall. I sit on my stepladder. Then I scrape some more. I squeeze my eyes against the tears.
Three months later, I bring it up when we begin therapy, how I’d hoped for some supportive words, some display of empathy. Oh, he says. I didn’t know you wanted me to say anything.
The therapist suggests I’d given Daniel a “love test,” expecting him to know what I wanted. Instead of simply asking.
We leave Cooke City after buying another bag of cinnamon rolls and sticky buns at the Bearclaw Bakery. We head west, a final drive through Lamar Valley, then on to Missoula. Our eyes are peeled for wolves. Mark brakes for bison, for black bears, for tourists who are too focused on taking pictures to think about driving. We get stopped by bear jams: tourists pausing half-way and no-way off the road to watch a bear amble, munch berries, or otherwise occupy itself within sight of a road. An eagle soars over Soda Butte River. A deer hides in an aspen copse, his antlers sliced by the tall, narrow trunks.
Once outside the park, we pick up speed, dry brown land changing to lush hillsides of greening shrub and tree as we enter Paradise Valley. Voluptuous growth. Delicate lady’s slippers and thunderous sequoias. Creatures both meek and predatory. Hares. Wolves. Pounding waterfalls, deer and bears and muskrats. Wilderness, untrammeled, roadless. And border lands, where roads snake through wildness, where we’re allowed glimpses of creatures in their own spaces. Places where I pedal my bicycle as dawn breaks, letting the world seep into my consciousness.
It’s slightly before five and predawn hovers, resting on the surface of the road and rising upward as far as I can see until it touches the remnants of a night sky, Venus hanging low, a flare of light just a finger, maybe two, above the hills at the mouth of the canyon. The birds are wide awake, exchanging messages, declaring their intentions for the day, and I am an interloper, eavesdropping. This portion of the world is dark and asleep yet wildly vibrant. Dew-moistened grass is slick and the breeze rustling over it releases a wet whisper that I hear beneath the slapping of tree leaves and the creak of weakened branches soon to be torn from limbs by the next violent windstorm. The early mornings here are always blustery, the cool air rushing down-canyon into the warmer city. By mid-morning the pattern reverses as the heat of the city searches for escape and pushes its way up between the sloping canyon walls. But I ride during the dawning of the day, wind against my body, clapping the flag’s thick white cord against the flagpole at the top of the street just before the canyon’s entrance, warning me that I will have to work hard these next six miles before the sweeping switchback in the canyon places the wind at my back.
I hear the water crash over the rocks of the creek bed—I cannot see it—just as I hear a critter, a squirrel or a magpie, move through the coarse undergrowth beside the road. I’ve barely entered the canyon, am no more than half a mile in, and everything inside me has shifted. The two miles I’ve ridden to reach the canyon mouth are urban, the roads mildly steep and most houses midnight dark. With entry into the canyon my world becomes wild and untamed, the grasses high and irregular, the hillside artistically barren then lush. I breathe better here.
I round a curve and approach the spot I once heard coyotes howl. I was new to riding, new to the canyon’s predawn milieu. I’d heard the howl—a brief one—then immediately convinced myself I hadn’t, when another howl tumbled down the hillside. I sucked in a breath. I was spooked. No streetlamps dot this two-lane road, no fence runs resolutely along the shoulder. Not a single house sat within a mile of me in either direction. Coyotes won’t attack me, of course not. I’m much too big. But shivers flew up my spine, the way they do when a wild animal’s howl leaps from the dark and you are solitary, exposed, ignorant of what wild creatures truly are.
I pedal past the spot of those long-ago howls—it’s been five years since that morning—and follow the curve of the road. It rained last night and every fragrance is intensified, released and flung by brush and shrub. I inhale deeply, relish the mix of all I do not know. I am the happy wanderer. I don’t need to know the name of every plant and bird and tree. I learn a few more each year, research new sightings, try to single out a unique bird call and determine its owner. I temporarily name what I do not know but intend to learn: full-petaled yellow flower in bunches, gnarled trunk twisted brown tree. Ah, arrowleaf balsamroot, a bristlecone pine. I’m often torn between making up my own name for a thing, and researching its official name. Naming is an act of creation, of possession, an act that forges a bond. But even in learning a name bestowed by someone else, I tighten the connection. The purple-red reed-like shrub in thick bunches I love—they line creek banks, they are munched by moose—the separation between us evaporates when I learn its name: ah, red twig dogwood.
As I ride I search the hillside to my left, a meadow on my right, combing the tall grass for an indication of life, a brown back, movement not attributable to wind. I anticipate a call, a throaty bark, a deep whistle or a delicate scampering through dry twigs. Wildlife is here.
