Should I Still Wish

by Evans, John W. ;

  The Badlands rose from the west in near miniature, no bigger than my thumb. Black Hills staggered them into columns and fists, a horizon of discarded pipes stuck in the Earth, welded at the tips and set out to gather heat and dry the land. Few told this origin story, except to say the formation of the outcrops had been beautiful and strange—in spite of such seeming barrenness, quite full of life. Here was the place I had meant for months to spend my last days alone before setting out for California; a beginning that would make no circle to any other part of my life. Roosevelt had come west, off and on, for years, but in my mind, it was a single sequence. The place was so spectacular he needed only to go there once.

  My room just off the ranger station was small, with no electricity. I laid out my clothes, locked the car, and set off on a seventeen-mile bike ride that a ranger had recommended, into the nearby reservation, along the highway, and back through the entrance. I was alone most of the way. There were signs for rattlesnakes, bobcats, rams, and bison, but all I ever heard in that Martian landscape, shrinking at night into miniature relief, was the soggy clump of weeds and gravel under my tires. Back in my room, the disappearing light turned the walls gray, then red. The next morning, I unstrapped the bike, clipped the front wheel into position, filled the plastic bladder with water, and set out on the same loop. Even halfway across the country, in this uncertain place, I liked my circles. The last morning, I rode a mile before I noticed the air was low. I couldn’t find the leak. I walked back into the park, hooked the bike onto the car again, and drove to the nearby town. All that jostling on the highway, the taking down and tying up, and the riding across trails, meant the bike was bending, slightly, along the frame. It needed half its parts repaired, a few others replaced. The bike shop owner explained that he could keep it running for another month or so but I should probably buy a new bike when I got to California. In the meantime, there was blasting happening most afternoons at the Crazy Horse Memorial. I might take a lunch into the foothills, head over to see the four presidents, then come back around closing time.

  Returning to the park, I again paid the ranger ten dollars. I powered down my cell phone, unloaded my pack and bike, and walked the winding mile between miniature canyons, a perfect facsimile of mountains, maybe sixty feet tall, with a road through the shallowest parts, and bluffs that dropped into vast, colorless valleys. Down the path, the peaks looked taller. The sky itself was brilliant and blue. A wooden placard at the entrance to the trail gave helpful hints for how to avoid opportunistic predators. Clap one’s hands and grunt to startle coyotes. Walk in pairs and never leave the trail. However I turned with the trail, I found still another delicate and unmarked offshoot, a path only a few hundred yards from a scenic overview or nature station where strangers stood together with maps and field guides and cameras. Following such trails, I did not feel triumphant. I tried to imagine that the walking itself was a ritual, but I didn’t really believe it. I arrived at my small cabin and found again the empty room with a cot, a sink, and a low table with a simple lamp. I packed my bag and walked out to the car.

  That last night, I moved into the motel just past the park entrance. The motel sign made the only brightness for miles. There were outcrops in the darkness, but my eye drifted to the horizon and up. I hadn’t seen so many stars in the sky since the night Katie had died. The mountain sky, at elevation, had seemed so close to the ground. At the edge of the parking lot, I looked for the constellations I recognized. When that didn’t work, I named all of the ones I didn’t, if only that, from indistinct patterns and swaths of light, some suggestion of order might fall across and over me. I had taken on good faith that the Badlands were bear-less, so I stood a while longer looking up, enjoying the quiet of the desert until it got too cold, and then I doubled back, trying not to look directly at the sign. When I did, I nearly went blind. When I didn’t, I couldn’t see my way. Near the vending machines, an Indian doctor traveling from Siberia to Las Vegas was smoking cigarettes and waiting for a pizza. He would head back in a few weeks to start his residency in a remote part of Russia. How many more places would he go that summer, in no particular direction, until it was simply time to leave? I understood that kind of traveling: always lost, but never really lost. Occupied by an absence of purpose, however temporary. But I couldn’t say that, and since I knew nothing about Russia, and very little about India, our conversation petered out. I said goodnight and unlocked the door to my room. I flipped through the cable movies, set a wake-up call, and fell asleep thinking about Cait. The rocks in the morning were epic and tiny. It took less than an hour to drive the rest of the way through the park.

  *

  The Billings, Montana, airport was little more than a stopover, a short building fenced a few miles in every direction, with a tower and radio, double-glass doors, and private airplanes crammed to one side of the field. I pulled my car right up to the gate. No wonder, I thought, Cait had to take three planes to get here. Heads of dead animals decorated the baggage claim. The usual candy and soda were for sale in the gift shop, beside sunglasses and paperbacks and a few local wares that looked homey and worn on the shelf. The flowers, at least, were reasonably fresh.

  I am supposed to be here, I told myself. I got myself to Billings so that this moment would happen. Sally Todd’s fainting sofa and William Howard Taft’s enormous claw-footed bathtub waited together, in replica, at the entrance to the presidential-themed bed-and-breakfast I had booked online. Past the runways, I could see mountains in every direction and the small bowl of a valley scrubbed into the land centuries earlier, where two cities seemed now to float across a high lake.

  It was so beautiful, this West, so unfairly beautiful. Even the throwaway places brimmed with promise and hope and life. I thought of Grandma’s question. What do they take us for, anyway? Every impulse to discovery seemed rewarded here. A whole history of failures, person to person, magnified by so much ambition to peak, cross, circle, sound, mine, and plot, hardly registered in these bright rivers with high cliffs and miles upon miles of open space. I watched the monitor for Cait’s arrival. I ran the numbers in my mind, taking the difference of the bike repair, gas money, food, motel, and lodge charges, against what I had left in the bank.

  What was I going to buy that we wouldn’t find together?

  Who was ever ready for a next life to begin?

  I caught in the reflection of the sunglasses on the rotating shelf my enormous and circumspect face, beaming, seemingly so happily trusting and naïve, so optimistic, with my stocky build and my habit of leaning down to talk to people so I didn’t seem too tall or intimidating. What didn’t he know that I was about to discover? He didn’t know anything about me or what I wanted. He knew everything about me, especially what I wanted. Katie had known it, too, even before she had married me. How little I was sometimes capable of. How easily I was overwhelmed. What I feared and resented in the people I loved, and especially, what I was willing to take for granted. She knew all those evenings I had wasted, pacing back and forth in our apartment in Uptown, insisting we marry, and wondering if I had any talent to do the things I really loved. Once, to end a fight, I had blurted out the secret of the book we were reading for book club. Piggy DIES! I had loved my victory in the moment. I had felt terrible about it for weeks. Look at you, Katie’s look seemed to say. What a victory. How many of those moments would ever really go forgotten in a second life? What worse things would Cait know that Katie never did?

  Already, people were walking out from the gate. My hands were cold. Beneath the deer carcass, beside a shelf of freshly tapped Montana maple syrup, I would see Cait and hold her, and know, once and for all, what was real. I had only to say it. Yes, it’s been long enough. I have put myself through the middle space in as many ways as I can imagine. I have lingered there, double- and triple-checking myself for wellness, sanity, trauma, and precedent, and now it is time to continue. The other side waits to take away everything in an instant. So what. I still want this. I want this more than anythi
ng else, and I will do this better. I will be a better man. More than the reassuring comforts of misery and diminishment, I want to see Cait and love her. I want to love the West and to find there some variation on what everyone agrees is happiness, a variation on me. I will never again be that man who watched Katie die and was unable to stop it. I will always be that man, and I might even learn to like him. And if I see him watching me, waiting for me to fail, with such knowing smugness from every mirrored square on a sunglass rack, then we will wait together. One of us is right. And it was in such careful worrying about what was going to happen next that I missed her anyway, I who had come all this way for the simple purpose of finding her had nearly lost both of us in a sunglass rack. Cait walked out from security, from the end of a vast wall of trophied animals, walked and smiled, so happy to see me, impressed by the droopy flowers in my arms, and certain, as nothing else in a life, that I was there for her. I had come all this way just for her. She was here, now, and she had found me. More than anything, she wanted this too.

  Crossing to Safety

  1.

  The past is past: aggressive, ursine. I try not to poke at it. Katie is dead nine years. Our life, in memory, is loved too little. I should end our story there. I never do.

  If Katie was alive, I know, I wouldn’t think to envy this life. Walt’s silky mop, once peach fuzz, would look as coarse and unfamiliar as any boy’s hair. I might pause a moment to admire his inelegant tromp, the compulsive fireman getup shading dinosaurs and finally Star Wars, his wandering across some grocery aisle or parking lot, into a car, a city, a different life that belongs to someone else, some other harried and aging man who can hardly keep up with the lisping boy who no longer toddles. It would mean nothing to cross each other’s lives like that. This is what I know about my life after Katie’s life: it makes a sequence I confuse constantly for order. Katie died and then I remarried. I was married to Katie and now I am married to Cait. “Time is linear,” someone says, to be helpful, the way someone used to say, “Katie cannot die again.” At first, it was enough to love this second life after the first, perhaps even in spite of it; to see, in the absence of scale, an inevitable sequence, as though sequences do not make their own music, in phrases and patterns that repeat as a life continues. But if such distinctions begin a love story, our fable, my tale of what comes next and how to like it, then I know that the present is ursine too: persistent, enormous, accustomed to ritual, and easily indifferent.

  Standing mid-river, I see no bears.

  Which is not to say they are not there.

  *

  There are certain coincidences, synchronicities I notice but can’t explain. A year to the day of Katie’s death, the New Yorker runs a grizzly themed cover for the first time in thirty years. Brown bears leave the woods wearing the backpacks and cellphones of hikers. No Picnicking in Buffalo Wilds. Two months later, the highway out of Montana takes Cait and me across Beartooth Pass, up and down Beartooth Highway. There are bear totems in the shops of the cities on either side of the pass and a museum with mounted brown bears, arms splayed and teeth bared. An uncle at Cait’s family cabin pins photos of a black bear sitting on the porch earlier that week. We arrive the next day. On our wedding day, as Cait walks down the aisle, it starts to rain. It hasn’t rained in her city on that day for decades. The rain stops as soon as the ceremony begins. The editor of my book about Katie is named Katy. The agent I work with is named Katherine. For two years, I share an office with a colleague whose sister-in-law, Kathryn, was a Peace Corps volunteer who worked in public health and died a year before Katie died. On a family trip to Colorado, I come back from dinner to find bear scat on the porch of our rented house. My brother takes photographs. Hiking a trail the next day, he follows a bear with its cubs to a river. Among seventeen hundred new students at the university where I teach, the valedictorian from Katie’s high school is randomly assigned to my six-student group of advisees. He is the first student from her high school to ever attend the university. He remembers Katie’s wake and the all-day traffic. Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train” is the song I hear on rooftops and in bars across Chicago all summer when I visit on the first anniversary of Katie’s death. Katie loved Cat Stevens. “Peace Train” is the song that plays on the radio as we drive to the hospital where Cait gives birth to our first son, Walt. The due date for our second son, Sam, is the fifth anniversary of Katie’s death. We induce four days early to avoid the coincidence. Our healthy baby boy is born with blue eyes and a mop of dark hair that lightens to red, like mine, in the summer sun. At a party the next month, a man who knows my father-in-law corners me to show the little moons of scar tissue on his throat. He brags his showdown with a bear near Lake Tahoe, his triumph at fending it off. My bear, I think to myself, would kill your bear. My bear was ten times as big as yours, I want to say, and it killed my fucking wife. But he doesn’t know about Katie, and I don’t want to embarrass my father-in-law, much less begin in anger a critique I can hardly make heads or tails of myself. It is the stranger’s story to tell. He enjoys telling it. The bear is the mechanism of his persuasion: what he once survived that someone else should now believe. Surely, I can sympathize. I smile politely and ask questions. I excuse myself, and a little later, across the room, I watch him tell the story, word for word, to someone else. Three years later, near Lake Tahoe, Cait and I cross the path of a black bear and its cubs. I hold two rocks in my hands and wait for them to pass. They are garbage bears: not predators. They pass down the river, toward other, more remote cabins. Or so I tell myself. The next week, Cait’s sister posts a photo of a black bear on the beach of the large lake near the cabin. Walt is standing beside her as she takes the photograph. Sam is in the water. The baby is asleep inside the cabin. The bear is running down the beach, slightly out of focus, through a family picnic. Everyone at the picnic is photographing it.

  *

  Nearly every zoo in America I visit has a bear. A few have several. Only the largest have brown bears. Whenever we push our boys in the stroller past the penguins and otters, toward the spiders and chinchillas, Cait and I invariably end up a few right turns away. Some habitat—a pen, really, a crude enclosure—makes the daily life of a bear transparent to our curiosity. The bears come and go. At a distance, without intrusion, they sleep on long slabs of cement, wrestle each other, and disappear into habitats. Between meals, they make circles around the inner glass. They neither hunt nor roam. Their boredom is epic and unforgiving. Absurd, nihilistic, and terrifyingly literal, such bears are, finally, everything except a bear.

  “Of the strength and ferocity of this animal the Indians had given us dreadful accounts,” wrote Meriwether Lewis in his journal on April 29, 1805. “He rather attacks than avoids a man, and such is the terror which he has inspired, that the Indians who go in quest of him paint themselves and perform all the superstitious rites customary when they make war on a neighboring nation.” A half century later their outsized legend was finished. Men prospected, then died to tell it. The stories moved east as fast as silver. The land was picked clean of grizzlies and turned inside out. Wrapped as pelts, their heads mounted on clapboard walls, the brown bear became, in ornament, extinct and ubiquitous. The tributes were nearly kitsch: statues, rugs, coatracks, coins, mats, university mascots, even the state seal. Where the last grizzlies disappeared from the Sierras, the scrubbier black bear survived in their place—survive—to scamper unseen down trails and across the porches of cabins in spring, no bigger than a large dog. Even from a distance, the resemblance is minor. Claws are short where they should lengthen. Shoulders round rather than hump. Soaked in chemicals and set out to withstand the seasons, the totem preens, while the pest disappears all winter into colorful anecdotes—cub in blueberries, mama on the slopes—by which the witness brags his savvy. In miniature, a history is brought full circle. We are tolerant. “The sow was fierce and mighty,” Lewis wrote, “but I knew to stand still until she passed.”

  *

  Every summer, we make
our crossing. We take our boys to a cabin on the far side of a lake that John Muir called “the most delightful place in all the famous Tahoe region. From no other valley, as far as I know, may excursions be made in a single day to so many peaks, wild gardens, glacier lakes, glacier meadows, and alpine groves, cascades and the like.” There, at the edge of Desolation Wilderness, we unlock doors and cupboards, open windows, roll out mattresses, carry in groceries and supplies. Cait and her mom row back and forth from the parking lot to the dock while I hike the long way around on the path. There are boulders near the lake where the path turns from the trees. There is running water from a higher stream to the cabin, but no plumbing. The cabin is wired for electricity, with a wood stove to warm the loft at night. Other cabins stagger along the hill, up and down the mountain, nine in all spaced a few hundred yards apart, on a path between them that does not reach the other side of the lake. From the porch I can see the peak of one roof and, father below, the boathouse. We are not quite remote and not entirely close to anywhere. The year that marmots eat through the wiring of our car, it takes all day to run a tow truck up the hill.