by Kaya McLaren
Just two hours later, she neared her first stop. Dinosaur National Monument was on the way to Yellowstone. She passed by the visitor center in the Colorado portion of the park and continued driving to Utah, since that’s where the quarry was. On the road, she’d noticed a strange mountain, twisted and swirled, the strata that should have been horizontal lifting straight up to the sky. Sure enough, the road ended there.
At that visitor center, she went through her routine, buying postcards and stamping her passport book, before catching the shuttle bus to the quarry. She imagined her dad sitting next to her—not the dad who didn’t recognize her, but her old dad, the dad with unconditional love and plenty of questions about the natural world. She imagined what she would say—Hey, Dad, look at that! How do you suppose that formed? And she imagined just looking into his eyes, seeing him cognizant and happy, and feeling connected with him.
After a short drive, all the passengers disembarked and walked into the quarry building, where an entire excavated hillside was both exposed and protected in the structure. Large bones poked out of the sediment everywhere. Strolling along, she read interpretive signs, still imagining her dad was next to her enjoying the experience as well.
When a young mother looked at her, ruled her out, and then asked someone else to take a picture of her family, the spell was broken. A year ago, that woman would have asked her. Now, she scared people, it seemed.
It would have been nice to have Paul there right then to put everyone at ease. She became keenly aware of her aloneness. It felt exposed. But that wasn’t a good enough reason to be with Paul.
She walked out of the building and onto the next shuttle bus, hoping the woman who hadn’t chosen her wouldn’t be on the bus. Although she knew there was no hour or minute of her life to waste hiding, she couldn’t help it. She wanted to hide until her hair grew and she felt better. Instead, back at the car, she did the next best thing. She pulled out the wig that she’d had made out of her own hair before it had fallen out. It wasn’t comfortable even now that her scalp was no longer unspeakably tender from chemo rash. Although it was her hair, it didn’t look like her hair the way it came out of her scalp naturally. She put a hat on over it to hide that and just enjoyed seeing it frame her view of the ground below her as she walked a short nature trail. It reminded her of digging out her blankie after a bad day in second grade … knowing she was too old to need this thing but finding so much comfort in it that she didn’t care. Inside, she scolded herself for this moment of weakness. There was no shame in surviving. None. The fact she had just survived cancer and cancer treatment was nothing that she should have felt any need to hide. She supposed she was simply tired of being so exposed all the time. Her history, her struggles, they were nobody’s business—and yet there they were, written on her body out there for the whole world to see. What a cruel joke—to be so sick, so close to dying, and then, following being bald, have ugly hairstyles for the next two years.
A breeze picked up some strands of her hair from her wig. No, she shouldn’t need this disguise to hide behind, but sometimes it was just such a relief to see the world the way it used to look—framed by strands of red hair blowing in the wind.
* * *
For the last four and a half hours, Amy had driven on roads where she rarely saw another person. The visitor center at Fossil Butte National Monument in Wyoming was open for only ten more minutes, so she stamped her book and looked around at the many fossil displays before it closed. She had planned to camp here for the night but was surprised to find that in order to prevent fossil theft, no camping was allowed.
One of the two rangers in the visitor center warned her that there was a moose nearby that had charged her just the day before. Fortunately, she had been near one of the only trees in the area and had been able to take cover behind it until the coast was clear. All signs were pointing to moving on, which was fine. There was national forest land between there and Grand Teton National Park where she could find a campground that still had available spaces.
Before she left, she walked around the porch of the visitor center where the rail had been turned into a time line of life on earth. She walked past all the labeled points, past ferns and butterflies, past fir trees and dogs, all the way up to humans. Resting her finger on the rail, she felt that it all came down to this spot. Whether her life was long or not so long, it was just part of this, part of this tiny dot on the time line of earth, fairly inconsequential, she supposed, in the grand scheme of things. It didn’t bother her and it didn’t comfort her.
Instead, she redirected her attention to listening to the song of an unfamiliar bird. She was here now. Here with this bird. Here discovering something new—a new birdsong. That was all. And it was enough.
Carly
Carly’s sore muscles woke her again, but this time a faint light illuminated the eastern sky and the birds were singing. Great-Aunt Rae was still in her cot, her fingers in her ears. The birdsongs were loud, but lovely. Carly rolled onto her side to study Great-Aunt Rae more closely, to try to determine whether she had actually fallen back asleep plugging her ears or whether she was just resting like that.
Sensing something was staring at her, Great-Aunt Rae opened one eye and smiled as she lowered her hands.
“Birdsongs?” Carly asked quietly so as not to wake the guests.
“Yep.”
“It’s not like they’re crows squawking or anything. They’re pretty songs.”
“Too pretty. They break my heart.” Great-Aunt Rae shut her eyes tightly and shook her head. Opening her eyes again, she said, “American robins. Most mornings I can handle it, but this morning is the anniversary of the day I met my one and only true love. The birdsongs take me back to that summer. You’d think they’d have lost their power by now, but all these decades later, they still haunt me.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I was your age. Sometimes it’s strange to watch you do some of the things I did that summer. That takes me back, too. But boy, things were different for me. I didn’t have all the choices you have. After high school, the plan my parents had formulated for me involved going to secretarial school, which was one of the three options available to women at the time, nursing and teaching being the other two.”
“That’s it? Three choices?”
“Yes, ma’am. However, I wanted adventure and so I spent the little bit of money I had received as graduation gifts not on books for secretarial school, but on an Amtrak ticket to Whitefish, Montana.”
“Your parents must have flipped.”
“That is an understatement, but to their credit, they did not drive up there and get me. They let me figure it out for myself. For the first month, I waitressed in a café, and that was where I met Cal, my future boss, who liked my service, and offered me a different job—one with housing.” She laughed. “And by housing, he did mean a tent—cooking on horse-packing trips. Well, that sounded just fine to me! Far more adventurous than working in a café.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, pretty daring for a woman in my day.”
“Pretty daring even now.”
Great-Aunt Rae smiled. “Smartest decision I ever made. Sometimes I rode with the tourists, followed by a pack string that carried all the things we needed for meals. Oh, that was great, riding for miles and then cooking in Dutch ovens and frying pans over the campfire. That was relatively easy because I was riding with the group, you know? But other times, I hitched the chuck wagon to a team of Clydesdales and drove up a dirt road to meet the tourists—usually hunters—at a designated spot, and that was far more involved than I had initially imagined. I had to learn to do all that by myself.
“Sam—he was the boss’s son—showed me how to catch, brush, pick their feet, on this very day back in 1968.… I was so scared of those giant horses.”
Carly imagined what it would be like to stand next to a Clydesdale for the first time if she’d never been around them before. It would be intim
idating, to say the least.
“And then, there was the seemingly impossible task of making sense of all of the straps involved in their harnesses so that I could put them on right.”
Carly nodded emphatically. “Yeah, I have no idea how anyone does that.”
Great-Aunt Rae laughed. “And when that was done, I had to hook the horses to the wagon. All of that was in addition to packing the wagon, checking four times to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. Sam was patient and encouraging with me as I gained confidence in handling the horses. But just when I thought I had a handle on it all, it was time to head up the road with a topographic map and try to identify the meeting spot. Well, I’d had no experience with topographic maps and could not figure out the scale. The first three times, Sam rode with me, his saddle horse tied to the back of the wagon, coaching me on how to drive and making sure I found the correct place, and marking little landmarks on the map to help me when I would have to do it alone. I tell you, I was straining to concentrate on what he was trying to teach me because I was so distracted by his smell. Is that too much information?”
Carly laughed and shook her head. “Some guys smell really good.”
“Mm!” Great-Aunt Rae smiled and shook her head. “We talked about the different places we were from, you know, comparing and contrasting the culture and geography of Oklahoma and Montana, telling stories about family, school … embarrassing moments, and stuff like that. God, I loved his smell. He’d had a very distinctive smell, an earthy smell like dirt and musk but sweeter. Whenever I was around him, I found myself breathing in his scent with long, deep breaths, trying to name it, getting drunker and drunker on his intoxicating scent.”
Carly laughed. It was so hard for her to imagine her great-aunt under the spell of some boy’s smell, and it was amusing to see a different side of her.
“He was not particularly handsome, nor was he particularly homely,” Great-Aunt Rae continued, and this frank statement made Carly laugh. “He wore these thick glasses with black frames that made his eyes appear larger … kind of slightly bulged at times. They seemed to domesticate him in an otherwise wild setting. His skin was not his best feature either. If a woman stopped looking right there, she would have missed the magic. He was strong and well built, and utterly magnetic. Yeah, that was the start of something wonderful. You know, there are moments in life that are golden, and if you’re smart, you know when you’re in one of those times and just drink it all up like you might never drink again.”
Carly didn’t know what to say. Great-Aunt Rae shut her eyes and a few moments later rolled over with her back to Carly, an invitation to go back to sleep for the remaining hour.
It was strange to imagine that Great-Aunt Rae had ever been in love. Carly could only picture her alone. She had once overheard her mom and Aunt Alicia arguing over what they thought Great-Aunt Rae’s gender preference was, and even then, Carly thought it was irrelevant because Great-Aunt Rae was simply alone.
* * *
The next thing Carly knew, it was morning again, but this time brighter and without the loud songs of American robins.
The previous morning, Carly had been amused at the guests from Florida when they hobbled out of their tents, sore from being on horses for the first time in a long time. Today, however, it was Carly who could hardly move.
Great-Aunt Rae was sitting in a camp chair outside, drinking coffee and laughing at her when Carly hobbled by on her way to the outhouse. “You’re staying in camp today!”
“Twist my arm!” Carly replied without turning around. It was true: there were muscles a person used only when she rode horses.
Amy
Amy had been too excited about returning to a place that held family memories to stop for more than a bathroom break in Grand Teton National Park. It was beautiful, for sure, but her heart ached for something else.
After she crossed into Yellowstone, she did stop to watch Old Faithful blow, amazed at how reliable it had been over her entire lifetime and probably many others. She stamped her passport book at the visitor center there before driving on a bit further to look at the Grand Prismatic Hot Spring, a pool of water that was nearly all the colors of the rainbow, with red tendrils of water radiating from the outside of the circle. One day, this very spot was rumored to be the center of a massive volcanic explosion that would wipe the western half of North America off the map and cover the sun with ash for years. No one knew when. It was like cancer recurrence, but on a much grander scale, a grave, hidden danger that lurked deep within. Despite that, hundreds of visitors a day still came to stand at the very edge of it and appreciate its beauty. And in the same way, she supposed, there were many, many people every day who stood on the edge of their lives, or who stood right on ground zero in some way, and instead of thinking about the end of their life chose simply to admire the beauty of it. She wished she could be like them. Maybe one day she would be.
After driving a little farther north, she wandered through the Morrison Formation on boardwalks, looking at strangely colored hot springs and the bursts of steam rising from fumaroles. One misstep, one slip or trip, could leave a person dying in boiling mud, yet the boardwalk was filled with people, people who brought their children out here in this dangerous place, and they all seemed to explore joyfully and unscathed. She supposed it was ignorance, really, that allowed everyone to live so happily—ignorance and denial. She wanted hers back desperately. Of all the things she had been robbed of, this perhaps was the very worst of all.
Then she moved on to Mammoth Hot Springs, taking a detour past the employee housing where she had lived with her family for one summer. She paused for a moment, waiting, she supposed, to see whether her mother would open the door and call her in for dinner. Then she looked around to see whether her dad might be walking home from work. Neither of those things happened, so she drove on.
She had only the vaguest recollection of the place she was looking for and little hope she would find it. It had been thirty-five years since she had been there. As she drove the road leading toward the magical place, her mind traveled back in time.
At the end of the summer before, on their way back to Oklahoma from Mt. Rainier, her parents had driven a little out of their way to stop here in Yellowstone so her dad could say hi to a ranger who had worked at Mt. Rainier with him the year before. After exploring Mammoth Hot Springs and the Albright Visitor Center, where her dad saw his old friend, they piled back into the car and drove east—how far, she could not say. She remembered only that it was a while, whatever that meant. There was a place on a curve where her dad pulled off the road, and then the three of them walked down a little hill into an aspen grove. There, nestled in the trees, were the remains of wickiups left behind by the Sheepeaters, a subgroup of the Shoshone tribe, long ago. The poles were similar to tipi poles, set in a circle, but instead of being covered by hides, they had been covered in reed mats, bark, or brush. The poles, although they were rotting into the ground, still stood nearly ten feet high.
In the middle of the wickiup remains, her family sat together, eating sandwiches and thinking about those who had made the structure and had lived there. Had the trees been all around it then? Her dad thought the trees were too young. They speculated about the foods the Sheepeaters might have eaten in addition to the bighorn sheep they had been named after. The wickiup seemed almost like a portal to another time to Amy, like the books she had read a few years before where the kids entered an enchanted land through a magical closet. Sitting in the wickiup made anything seem possible like that.
When they were done eating, they lay back and gazed at the early evening summer sky through the leaves. That was when the aspen grove looked like a kaleidoscope, partitioned off into sections by the radial lines of the poles above. What she remembered was peace. Peace and a sense of possibility.
More than anything, that was what she needed now.
As the day began to reach its end, she knew she needed to find a place to camp that night. All
campsites inside the park had surely been booked for months, so she would have to drive west, possibly quite a long way. But first, she turned right instead of left, in hopes of finding the wickiups where perhaps peace awaited her.
Truthfully, she had no idea whether the wickiups were even still there. It seemed likely that sometime in the last thirty-five years, they might have finally buckled and fallen to the earth and become part of it.
When a curve in the road seemed to feel familiar, she pulled over and stopped. It was getting late in the day, so she needed to be extra careful not to get lost. Stepping out of her car, she thought about the megafauna—the bison, the cougar, the grizzlies—and something about taking the risk of walking alone among them felt like a relief to her. Maybe it was because it offered her the opportunity to die in another way, a way that was somehow more natural. A way that was certainly faster. But she didn’t think that was it. She thought it had something to do with being freed from the percentages that haunted her. No one would tell her what her chances were of surviving her trip to Yellowstone the way her doctor told her what her chances were of still being cancer-free and alive in five years. She was allowed to visit Yellowstone in ignorant bliss, and it felt like truly living.
