It takes maybe twenty minutes to walk the long way around from the cabin to the parking lot. The water is cold and high for the season. Trees converge in all directions to a single point of shade surrounded by light. I know this hike to where the little bridge is washed out. No big deal. It is the custom on the hill to make a new bridge each spring. Cabin owners damn the water with sticks and rocks to slow the erosion, as the beavers do each spring, raising the lake. In a few hours, I know, Cait will walk around and fix it, or her brother-in-law, the economist, will come later in the week to jerry-rig a separate path. I try one way across, careful, then double back. I hike a little ways up the river to see if there is a better path. How have I gotten lost in such a narrow space? There is another path that winds up the mountain. The ground is softer higher on the hill. I can’t quite make out the place where the trail starts back. I don’t trust my footing in the water.
What am I doing, I think, in the woods by myself? I am breathing at high altitude, a little faster than I mean to, in the exaggerated manner of a person trying too hard to relax. But the trail is nearby. I know it. I can see it in my mind, past the bridge, and maybe a few hundred yards away, on the lake in the blue and red rowboat, Cait. I listen for the oars on the water. That scent on the air—no, the taste in my mouth: bitter, metallic. I cannot stop reassuring myself. This is normal too, I think, though what follows is less helpful: It begins like this too.
I let the white earbuds fall to my side and close my eyes. I listen for any noise I might recognize: a far cry for help, an approaching grunt. No one is going to die is too silly and vivid—too much. I am standing by a lake in the woods in California. Someone is crying for help. I can hear the pitch of a voice over the noise of the water. No, that’s my phone. A tinny radio podcast ticks and hisses at my hip. I have forgotten to stop it. Anyone nearby would hear it. Anything. Something is watching me. Nonsense. These aren’t even the right bears, I remind myself. As certain and impractical as reason itself: There are bears in these woods, and you are far from the trail.
There are rumors that the Forest Service has for years relocated brown and black bears from Yellowstone into Desolation Wilderness, though people mostly see the black bears. Black bears knock down half the cabin doors every winter, tear open the fridges and pantries, and shit on the living room rugs. Every season, someone comes to repair the bridges, and someone else rehinges the doors, and someone drives all the way to Raleigh’s in South Lake Tahoe to buy gin and tonic water so that everyone can get drunk quickly at altitude. No one worries about black bears. They are not predators. Hungry and foraging, moving farther from the cities into narrower tracts of high desert plain, black bears keep wide and far of the snowshoeing locals who make a sport of opening cabins for the holidays. Come summer, especially during a drought, the bears leave the high streams and rivers to amble through the parking lots, into the outhouses and beyond the lake where, at dusk, someone is often photographing a cub as it bathes itself, insisting the sighting is good luck and posting the picture on social media.
I watch the trees, which are not moving. I can hear the water moving. What is the point of all that therapy, the weekly call I keep even when we visit the cabin, those Friday mornings I drive into town, park at the supermarket, and sit with my engine running for exactly one hour, charging my cell phone and scribbling notes about trauma and integrity on the backs of envelopes, car service statements, and candy wrappers—any paper I can find in the car—if I do not, in such a moment, start walking? And if I walk in circles, doubling back an hour later along the trail, following on foot the long way across the hill and around the lake and finally find Cait near the parking lot, where she ferries me across and says, “It’s a lovely day. We can see all the way to the far peaks”; if she names the peaks should I agree, “Yes, they are beautiful”? If I survive another year at the cabin, will the next year feel less strange and terrifying? Will my boys, here, become sensible and rugged in nature, scraping knees and bruising themselves day after day, so happy in the mountains, where the blood makes terrific goose eggs on their foreheads, as I make myself lonely with each failed prognostication at every dark shape that never fumbles out of trees? Because no one else really shares my fear of this place. Surely what they find most compelling, if less and less interesting, is that most obvious fact of my life, the one I have lived all of this time with the hope of simply living after. Poor John, I imagine they will say, he didn’t come up this year. You know he lost his first wife in woods just like these.
2.
I was happy. I didn’t keep a journal. I rested my head on your shoulder, and you kept driving west. How far since Billings? How much farther to Utah? We passed mountains, canyons, and sulfur pools. We passed buffalo, mountain goats, and squirrels. In the Gardner River swimming hole a Korean couple happily scalded their white skin. Clouds clung to the outcrops. You named widgeons, stills, and rails. You named sisters, cousins, and aunts. I said that when your boyfriend left the city that winter to attend a Rambo premiere in Las Vegas, it gave me hope. How from Dolores Park a few months later this generous city lit everything: streetcars and pylons, porch lamps and ships, the Bay Bridge but not the Golden Gate. We ate ribs, chicken, and brisket. We drove US-212, State Road 3, I-90. Crossing the Beartooth Pass, the glacial air was thin and cold mist rose on the water. A petrified spruce felled by lightning peaked the tree line at dusk. We left Wyoming to enter Yellowstone. We left the lodge to walk to our cabin. I don’t know how the heart makes decisions. Maybe love is something born again in different bodies so it can keep moving forward. On the wall of a diner, just past Heart Lake, the rangers nailed simple, hand-painted warnings. We saw nothing until suddenly, everywhere, the sound of antlers, like ice chipped from a roof. It made no sense to count them.
*
We drove Highway 212 out of Billings and across the Little Bighorn River. The turnoff was a small road from the highway that went straight up the hill to a parking lot. Three or four souvenir shops sold all manner of headdresses, plastic revolvers, playing cards, and feathers. Buffalo and vista postcards were three for a dollar. Next to a photo of Dustin Hoffman, a shoebox took donations for the local arts center. There were snakes in the grass that time of year, and handmade markers on sticks numbering various stages of the famous battle, showing the movements of Union, Sioux, and Cheyenne soldiers on the hill. We were encouraged to check their movements against our souvenir map. In one patch of brown grass, a few men on horses had turned the whole war. The next summer, they camped across the Dakotas one last time as free people. The exhibits in the museum seemed mostly to argue about the legacy of Custer. He was a coward, a hero, the little general, the stone face of no surrender, a patsy of bureaucratic big government, yet another bearded face of white oppression. No one, it seemed, really knew Custer all that well or understood why he was so keen to capture women and children. Nor did they know whether Crazy Horse had surrounded Custer and pressed to the center or made instead one great charge up and over the top, slaughtering the horses and scattering the terrified soldiers. On the other side of Last Stand Hill, white and black crosses marked the death sites of soldiers. We walked a narrow and circling path to reach the very top. Other tourists parked at the lookout and crossed the main road. Down the trail, a ranger said to rustle the grass as we approached the ravine. We wouldn’t see the rattlesnakes, he said, but we might hear them coming.
“What noise,” I asked, “does a rattlesnake make?”
“Well, he usually rustles the grasses at your feet.”
What a strange place, we agreed, for a first date. Cait had flown all the way to Montana to meet me for my drive west, and I had taken her here. I said that it was too bad the summer hills were covered in dead grass.
Cait laughed.
“The grass isn’t dead,” she said. “It just turns that color in summer.”
I shuffled my feet against the gravel to make as much noise as possible. She laughed at that too. At the far edge of the map, the ranger pointe
d out a hospital to which tourists raced every few weeks, a belt wrapped just above the wound site, the heartiest among them sucking valiantly to slow the circulation of venom. The hospital was stocked with antivenom. A nurse measured a syringe and made a note on the computer. The hospital was in Billings, our city for the night. Our beautiful and temporary bed and breakfast had five rooms named for five different presidents and an owner who, seeing my bumper sticker, wouldn’t stop making Obama jokes. Why can’t Barack Obama dance? Because he has two left-ist feet! As the crow flies, it would be, what, three or four miles to the hospital? But we had time. Our strange date was memorable. We would always remember it: the sandwiches at the airport, the invisible and ubiquitous snakes, the markers and crosses stuck in the hill. Where else could the courtship go but up? Even the dead-looking spots teemed with possibility: great rolling plains buckling across the valley, with no shelter from the sun and no place to hide except in the lowest parts, those small patches of shade where lavender bushes and wild sage went soft at night and the snakes hid from the day’s heat on the cool pavement under cars.
*
At the bed and breakfast, we unpacked our bags into a lacquered dresser with clawed feet. We took showers, changed our clothes, and sat on the bed, reading old magazines someone had left on the side table.
People do this all the time, I told myself, meaning sometimes old friends sit together on a bed reading magazines in the early afternoon, and other times, new lovers rip off each other’s clothes and wear the bed right through the ceiling of the kitchen. In the reflection of the old-fashioned vanity, I could see the whole room. Cait was reading Newsweek and People. I should take as my cue, I thought, the faces of the small children struggling with the stigma of so much bad nutrition and wheezing. Childhood Obesity: The Silent Epidemic. Did their ardent and curious faces kill the mood? Should I sweep Cait into my arms and smell the shampoo on her skin?
And if we kissed like that, would it feel good—if there was chemistry—to enjoy this last first part of falling in love? The possibility ran like a bolt down the back of my neck. It made my fingers warm. On the opposite page: fat kids, fireworks. A space rocket launched across a pill ad. A woman perched in a grandfather clock cheered wildly the arrival of her bottle of perfume. And is it really worth it? I thought. Is now the right time? As though I might forget how suddenly the body notices itself when it refuses to make a decision; the heavy heartbeat pinned under the ears, the limbs sunk in cement and refusing to lift. Yes, this was one moment. And if nothing happened, there would be other moments, right? We had the week ahead of us. We talked about it all summer. If not this week, then in California; if not this year, then next year. And yet, the Taft bedroom was ours for the night. It was mostly bed, a conversation piece for sure, billed as goods, the high palace of Taftian obesity and somnambulism, so spacious, I thought, that we’d at the very least get a good night’s sleep. So I said to Cait—
“I think you should put that magazine down and kiss me now”
—and she did, and yes, that was the first moment, who knew? And I liked it, it was full of chemistry; so we kissed a while on the bed, rolling back and forth across ol’ Taft. We got dressed and walked into Billings, Montana, The Magic City, where a giant theater marquee flashed the names of touring bands. We drank champagne and ate french fries, ordered drinks, and split some chocolate thing stuffed with chocolate and in a cake shape. And when Cait pulled me under the street lamp, kissed me, and looked me dead in the eyes—
“I think we should wait a little while before we take this thing all the way”
—I thought exactly what I said. “I’m fine with that. That sounds great.”
*
All week, I drove. Cait told family stories. A high-end cruise line that opened on Black Monday had sunk the family fortune. Her father jumped out of helicopters and chased snakes and tree frogs across the African continent. A cousin who probably wasn’t a spy worked for the organization that everyone agreed didn’t secretly run the world. Right away, I set a soundtrack of upbeat, sunny songs: early Dolly Parton, late My Morning Jacket, James Taylor’s Greatest Hits. The music was simple and happy. Corny. One night, crossing Salt Lake City, I played all my country-and-western tunes, as fast as I could queue them. Katie’s favorites were the back half of the catalogue. It felt irreverent and weirdly sincere to hear them now, as though some part of two affections could interconnect over the radio so long as I didn’t think too hard about the overlap. Cait loved the patriotic ones. “My god,” she asked, as I told her about karaoke in Indiana on the Fourth of July, when all the sad men kept singing “Beer for My Horses,” “do such people really exist?” They don’t, I thought, live in California. I played the song a few times in a row. It became our anthem. We arrived each day a little farther west: Montana, Idaho, Utah, Nevada. We drove like that for hours at a time, telling stories, listening to songs and podcasts, tuning in to whatever news we could find in the mountains.
How far could I lean across the car toward Cait? How long could I hold that pose and keep the road more or less in front of us, with the sun in our eyes and the gas gauge ticking ever closer to empty? I never wanted to leave the car, not for any reason. I didn’t want anything to disrupt our easy happiness. In the woods, on a day hike, Cait asked again, was I worried about bears? Were the mountains okay? I was doing fine, I told her; it would all be fine. The Rockies were so much larger than the Carpathians. I had read online that brown bears lived farther north, in Canada and Alaska. It was mostly true. No one had killed a brown bear in the wild for nearly a century, though the populations were tracked year to year. A brown bear hadn’t killed a tourist away from a zoo all summer, as far as anyone could tell.
Driving into Yellowstone, we got stuck in a herd of buffalo. Cars were stopped eight and nine deep, with all the drivers leaning out to take pictures. I felt so safe, I said, inside our car. I think I meant it. Buffalo weren’t bears. They seemed indifferent to us, passing beside our windows and between our bumpers, easy and slow and deliberate, as though they did this all the time. Probably, they did. Their hair smelled like wet wool. They grunted and butted each other as they moved. Certainly, it would take only a few nudges to roll our car across the highway and into the ditch. It would be a free-for-all there. But I didn’t know how buffalos spooked. I wasn’t sure, even, what they ate. I assumed they were friendly and meant well. I tried to enjoy the buffalo. Everyone was taking pictures.
The road opened up again. It was getting dark. We had planned to drive across the park and stay in one of the cities just past the exit, but we had hardly gone a quarter of the way. Now, the roads were empty. It was the last week of the season. We stopped at the Roosevelt Lodge and asked if they had any rooms to rent. No one had arrived to claim the last cabin, the clerk said. It was ours if we wanted it. We ate dinner on the wraparound porch and then sat out on oversized rocking chairs, watching the stars. Someone had made a fire. As it chattered and snapped at the cold night, we huddled close. There were signs on the stairs, and again between the cabins, warning what to do if we saw a grizzly, how the bear was likely to react, the few and simple things we might have brought with us on our hike or purchased from the lobby store that could buy us precious seconds to flee, distract, disinterest, survive. From the porch, it was a lovely view of the sky. In the middle of the woods, miles from any light pollution, there seemed no end in any direction. Cait named minor constellations. I made up the names of a few—Rastraya the Dancer, Septum Minor—but she caught on. Then, we talked about ourselves. It was beautiful to feel so in love, as though the great negotiation we had begun months earlier was now stuck up in the stars, and we could simply admire it, falling all around us in its certainty. Leaning into the light, Cait was there. I knew what we were thinking. I liked that certainty. It made me feel powerful and bright. Back at the cabin, I locked the door, pulled Cait close, and slept straight through the night.
*
Up the Beartooth Pass, Cait said, “Let’s stop for
candy.” Our last city before the climb was tourist friendly and flush. Official-looking squares of painted aluminum warned passersby, Grin & Bear It! and over the lumbering silhouette of a grizzly, Peak Show Ahead! From plastic bins we filled plastic bags with taffy and gummy worms. We spent the next hour digging pastel wax from wax paper, stretching the neon gelatin to twice its length, winding our way up the mountain, past the tree line. Cait leaned across the seat and closed her eyes. James Taylor was singing on the radio about Carolina on his mind. On the display over the dash, the temperature outside ticked down a few more degrees. The sky clouded over. The engine raced furiously to keep minimum speed on a stretch of interstate nearly empty of other cars. At each switchback, we could see all the way across the mountain. There were clearings in the trees there, and boulders rimmed with sand. Further up, the grass was gone. The paved roads were darker than the surrounding hills, but I could see them still, the wide roaming paths where no humans came and went at a distance. Were the high alpine lakes stocked with fish? Did deer stop there to drink? All I really wanted to feel was Cait’s head on my shoulder, how beautifully the mountains, up close, trimmed the gray sky, and what had it been, at least twenty years since a grizzly had attacked and killed someone in Montana?
I wanted to prove something.
I had no idea what I was doing.
“Let’s stop here,” I said, “and walk around that lake.”
At the turnout, the wind whipped open our doors. It was loud there, and colder still than either of us had expected. Cait dug sweatshirts out of our bags and two wool caps. She had grown up spending summers in country like this, surrounded by aunts and uncles, older siblings and cousins, who set out each morning into the wilderness with one happy rule: home before dusk. Past the turnout, there was a small trail between the trees. We were on the ridge now. In every direction, we could see level, open space and a horizon flat and gray as the sky overhead. Cait held my hand and pulled me up onto a rock. The water was right below us. The lake was no bigger than a swimming pool. In a few minutes, I thought, we could get back to the car. If I had my keys out, we could both push into the passenger seat and get the door closed in less than a minute. Why had I left my phone in the car? Surely, another car was coming this way. It would pass in a few minutes. I thought, The noise of cars at this altitude, the flat land, the few places for cover in any direction, the few trees and Bears do not cross during the day and This place is filled to the fucking brim with bears, in every direction, around every corner and behind even these pitiful rocks that give us, what, six inches of high ground?, which is when I knew I’d outplayed myself. I would have to ask for help. My bravado, my upping of the ante, a full-on machismo pissing into the wind, proved nothing. I was terrified. Cait was talking to me. She had been talking the whole time, and smiling, holding up sprigs for me to smell, snapping off tree leaves I could rub in my palm to bring out the scent, telling a story about her childhood that began with off-trail hiking and ended at waterfalls near glacial lakes with jumping rocks sixty or seventy feet off the ground. Someone died there every couple of years. All summer, tourists and locals made the delirious plunge, swam back to shore, and told the tale.
Should I Still Wish Page 6
