Claiming Ground

by Laura Bell

  South of Thermopolis, the road cuts through blazing red cliffs in the Chugwater Formation. We begin what feels like the descent into the Wind River Canyon, but the rising walls are deceiving. The river we’re following is actually flowing north, against us, headed for the Yellowstone and eventually the Missouri. We are, in fact, ascending through the canyon to the Wind River Basin and south toward Laramie.

  Rising up, we drive through Sand Draw, Sweetwater Station, Jeffrey City and Muddy Gap, then pull off the highway by some gravel piles and picnic from the open trunk. The wind’s whipping, so we forego paper plates and eat straight from the coolers—cheese and ham with mustard and crackers, coffee from the thermos, dark chocolate broken into pieces—and my parents rise to the occasion with light heart and a sense of adventure. We laugh that in all this open and stunning country, we’ve tucked ourselves up in some construction site. I watch them lean into the trunk to pour half-and-half into their coffee and think about all the places they have followed me to, from my sheep camp at the top of Burnt Mountain to the Diamond Tail Ranch on Shell Creek, from my cow camp at Granite Pass to our home on Beaver Creek, then to Greybull, Salt Lake City, and Cody. They’ve slept in sheep wagons, tents, hotel rooms, camper trailers, on lumpy futons, on mattresses on the floor. For weddings and funerals and birthdays they’ve crossed the country to be here. I’ve spent many years leaving them far behind, but they have always found me, and now I find myself wanting to be with them, to soak them up. This day, more than ever, I appreciate having them at my side.

  As I pull the car back onto the blacktop, puffs of clouds sail by in the spring light and cast streams of shadow across the road.

  My mother leans forward over the back of the seat. “So remind us of who’ll be here tonight?”

  “Pretty much the whole cast of characters. Amy’s mother’s family will be in from Duluth, her Norwegian grandparents and her two aunts, and I believe a cousin. And from Texas, there’ll be Joe’s mother from the panhandle, and his brother, Ken, from San Antonio. You would’ve met him at the funeral.”

  As we visit about each one—where I’d last seen them, what they’ve been up to through the years—I feel my stomach tightening.

  “I’m a little nervous about seeing everybody,” I say, feeling myself descending the cobwebby basement steps into my past. I’ve lived my life by closing doors and moving on, but now I’m heading back into the deep pitch of it all. We haven’t all been together in five years, since Jenny’s funeral, and those memories are only of loss, numb grief and incomplete sentences.

  My father reaches over and gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Well, we’re right here with you.”

  “We’re family,” my mother adds, “and we’ll back you up,” this last part with some humor and sounding more like we’re bank robbers than visitors.

  Still, the words sit inside me and shore me up.

  We arrive at Amy’s apartment in the early afternoon, and she’s glowing. Her blonde hair’s cut chin-length, swingy, and she’s bustling around in cropped pants and flip-flops stringing up white party lights on the patio fence. She greets us with a big hugs. “Can you believe I finally made it?”

  Then her father walks through the gate, favoring one leg and wearing a white shirt and worn suede vest, his cowboy hat pulled low. Amy lights up at the sight of him and throws her arms around his neck. He gives greetings all around, leaning into each handshake with a soft, respectful voice and a shy smile.

  “Fit to kill,” his two brothers would say about Joe’s grin. I remember him in his striped shirt and suspenders, his hat tipped back, tending to steaks on the grill with a beer in one hand, telling a story. And that grin would come after the punch line, as if to say, Can you believe it? His grin was a beam, an invitation to the devil, and it showed up whenever there was a song to be sung or a Texas two-step to be danced. It had been a part of the bright light shining on the early years of our marriage, but as sometimes happens, it had turned into something that represented all I couldn’t bear.

  “Hi, Joe,” I say.

  “Hello,” he says back, tipping his head down in a gracious nod.

  By the next morning, Joe’s mother and older brother have arrived, and now all three families are gathered around Amy. In her little apartment, we scramble eggs, fry sausages and pour coffee around the room. We fill our plates and sit in folding chairs or on the floor in the living room with graduation gifts piled up like another guest. We nudge them toward her, presents from all of us, and also from friends and family who couldn’t be here.

  In this gathering, histories sit uneasily side by side. I watch the faces around the circle and think of the love and loss that each one holds, the memories as present as this celebration, the dead as present as the living.

  Joe has been quiet, sitting on the edge of the circle with his eyes resting on Amy. It is for her that he endures the rest of us, for her that he endures me. It has been a long time since I’ve let myself remember him as someone I loved. As the young man who followed me to my remote camps and brought stories and laughter, the man who could build anything with a chainsaw and was the first to dance at a party and the last to leave. I loved the man who braided his daughters’ hair as meticulously as he did reins and rawhide, who packed them up the mountain and out in the hills by horse or pickup to work with him day after summer day. It has been twelve years since we divorced, and since then, with only a handful of words spoken between us, the drifts of blame have piled high.

  Amy opens her gifts, one by one, then stands up from where she’s been sitting cross-legged on the floor and comes to each of us and gives us a hug. To each of us she says, “Thank you.” To each of us she says, “I love you.” She has her arms open wide, letting us, in all our imperfections, love her back.

  After the graduation ceremony, we celebrate at a hip little restaurant downtown. When a tall, fair young man passes by, Amy calls him over and introduces him. They’ve only barely met and have yet to go on a date, which today she doesn’t even know they’ll do. He leans over the table and shakes the hands of friends, parents and grandparents, and I can tell that he’s kind and that his mother has raised him well. “A counselor at a group home for teens,” Amy says, shrugging her shoulders, but I catch a glimpse of a smile. They will have that first date and fall in love just weeks before she packs to leave Wyoming for an internship in Tucson. In two years’ time they will marry in the Shell Church and dance in the community hall, but today they have no idea of this. He walks out the front door and wheels away on his bicycle.

  Around the table are Joe’s family, Amy’s mother’s family, my parents, Press with his wife and daughter, and the smart and beautiful women who have become Amy’s closest friends. Toasts are made, and Joe’s brother stands and raises his glass “in honor of Amy, the daughter of Joe Ed Little and Linda Ramfjord Little.” I realize I shouldn’t be sitting next to Amy while her father’s down at the end of the table, so we switch places, awkwardly, as eyes tear up around the table at this solemn moment.

  With a seven-hour drive back to Cody, Mom and Dad and I agree to slip out once the meal’s over and get on the road. As we make the rounds saying good-bye, Amy’s aunt comes up and gives me a big hug. “I’m sorry your sister isn’t here,” I tell her, the one who should be, I think, but don’t say. At the door, Joe stands large and immobile as though ready to bolt from the concentration of people, emotion and memory. But when I extend a hand to say good-bye, he wraps me in a bear hug and says, “I don’t know how to thank you for all you’ve done,” and holds me and holds me. When he releases me, my eyes are wet with tears, and I’m the one who shoots out the door.

  It’s nearly midnight when my parents and I pull into Cody, the place that has become my home. I want to stand in the moonlit shadow of Heart Mountain and claim something solid and enduring. I want to be this mountain, but my life feels more like a hall of trick mirrors with a different view in each one.

  It’s my last weekend with my lover, but I don’t know it ye
t. We have each walked through fire this spring and retreated into our own lives to make sense of it—me into writing, he into dreams of building a boat and traveling—but here we are, together again, having shed our skins. “Hello,” I say brightly. “Hello!” What I notice is that we laugh more, naked and cross-legged in bed eating or making love. “What shall we do with ourselves now? Build a house? Grow a garden? Learn Spanish?” We read out loud to each other in a patch of sunlight. He is thoughtful, open, his heart coming out every pore. He massages my feet, lingering over me. He has moist eyes and the cherishing look of a man about to jump off a cliff. Then, on Sunday morning, he tells me he wants to be free to travel, to meet someone else. He kisses me good-bye and walks out the door, and I never see him again.

  I find out later that he’d begun another relationship, had begun it months before. My sister gives me a copy of Pema Chödrön’s When Things Fall Apart. A Buddhist nun, Chödrön writes that we should embrace the change, embrace the fear. When your world falls apart, there is an opportunity for gold to emerge.

  But what to do about the burning coal in my chest?

  I wait days before calling my parents, then call them about something else and mean to slip this news in as an aside. But then they’re both on the phone with me, and when the words come out, I hear my mother gasp in surprise and outrage. And the tears come to my eyes and will not stop. My eyes closed, the phone pressed to my ear, my world becomes the sound of their voices across eighteen hundred miles saying they love me, saying I’m too good for him, saying I’m their treasure, their words overlapping each other’s and choking me into tears I hadn’t wanted to show, that I’d never in my life shown them. The tears that come are old tears, and I weep for the loss of Jenny, for the loss of my marriage, and for every small hurt I have hidden away in my silence and solitude. Through it all they keep talking to me. My treasure, my love.

  For months I try in every way possible to make the betrayal not hurt. I try forgiving him, feeling sorry for him, feeling sorry for myself. I rage and contemplate breaking his windows. I declare my freedom and buy a little black dress, throw up my hands and dance. But nothing lasts for long, and as the months go by, I reluctantly bring the mirror to my face. Have I lied and hurt others with my lies? Yes. Have I pretended that I could step from one life to another with no consequence? Yes. Have I righteously chosen my own stories, discarding the ones that make me look bad? Yes.

  Oh, I think, this is how that feels. My blame burns to ash.

  I call my mother on the phone. They’ve booked passage on the Trans-Siberian Railway as part of their sixtieth-anniversary celebration, but my father is having last-minute hesitations because of health issues. And my mother, uncharacteristically, shares her frustration and anger. “He’s old, and if he’s old then I must be, too! I want to feel adored,” she says, raging against the dying of the light. I call her back two days later, just before they’re about to leave. “Mom,” I say, “I adore you,” but she doesn’t need to hear it. They’ve unburdened their anger, worked it out, touched and found each other again. On the phone they both sound giddy as teens.

  So this is where I’ve come from, I think, the good news and the bad. In their eighties, instead of shrinking they’ve grown larger and more fierce. The bad news? There seems to be no coasting.

  This is what I’m made of. From my father I have received thoughtfulness, a love of books and dancing, the inclination to play with ideas. From my mother I have inherited the courage to leap, the ability to compete, lightheartedness, an elemental surprise at being loved.

  Chödrön says that things falling apart is both a testing and a healing. We think the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth, she says, is that things don’t really get solved once and for all. Time after time, things come together and they fall apart again, like breathing.

  I remember riding through the Gravel Creek drainage eight years after the Yellowstone fires of 1988 on a ten-day pack trip that led from a trailhead west of Cody, into the Park and out the south side, toward Jackson Hole. The fires had raged in this drainage, drilling a fierce heat down into the soil that sterilized it of all life. Riding through stinging rains, we found ourselves in a world fallen apart. With no vegetation to hold the soil, cliffs had slumped into creek bottoms and water had cut raw channels through the hillsides, leaving only cobble. Even then I knew that wind-blown wisps of soil would someday catch among the gravel, that live seed would be dropped from passing birds, that in my lifetime this chaos would grow back into wild-knit life. But who among us can bear to see it go without a tear?

  I’m sitting in front of the fire in a cabin that I’m house-sitting miles up Breteche Creek, west of Cody toward Yellowstone Park. It’s twelve below zero this morning and snowing lightly. The lower valley is narrow and private, flanked by volcanic escarpments whose rims have been weathered into knobby pinnacles the locals call hoodoos and that lean spiritlike over the valley, keeping watch. I look the word up in the dictionary and find a negative meaning, a person or thing that brings bad luck, but in this country I’ve never heard it used that way. They’re gnomish, ghostlike, watchful, and when the wind blows hard through the valley, there’s a sound like the deep and steady vibration of the pipe organ.

  Visiting my parents the past Christmas, I’d asked my father about the word redemption. “It’s been on my mind,” I say, “but I don’t know what it means.”

  I understand this is a risk. He’s a theologian and has the intellect to go on for hours, but he pauses, surveying his options, and chooses simplicity. “If you feel worthless,” he says, “and someone restores your sense of value, you’ve been ‘redeemed.’”

  We’re driving Kentucky’s winding roads to visit with my great-aunt, Ella, who recently turned a hundred, and to see my grandparents’ graves in the Cyntiana cemetery and the tobacco farm where my mother was raised. She’s in the backseat, and I’m up front, taking notes on a yellow pad.

  “If you were sold into slavery,” he says, “and someone has paid the price to free you, you’ve been redeemed. It can mean revalued,” he adds, then pauses again.

  I imagine him running through a list of theological references in his head. Instead, he chooses to meet me on my own ground. “The idea of redemption has meaning in terms of the work you do, in terms of conservation. You pay the price and redeem the land for future generations; the land is freed, saved.”

  I nod, unsure of where I was going with this question in the first place.

  Nearly thirty years ago, I’d headed west to find refuge in the empty spaces of this land where I still live. Among the sage and rocks and transient lives of the herders, I hid as others might hide in heroin or alcohol. I didn’t think I knew how to live in the world, and sheer miles had been my cloak from it. I look back now and realize I was lucky in my choosing, blessed beyond measure. The isolation had tossed sharp splinters of life straight back up in my face, waking me to the crack of thunder, the smell of rain that hadn’t yet hit the ground. This land where I’d hidden offered up gold coins of sunlight and held me constant under a bewildering sky of stars.

  In this pause of conversation, I look back and see my mother dozing with her head tilted into the window. Beside her on the seat are gardening shears and gloves, for the cleaning of her parents’ graves, and also a small cooler with chicken salad for her aunt Ella. In her lap are papers for a presentation she’s preparing, the pen fallen from her hand. On her sweater there’s a brightly colored metal pin of three female stick figures, arm in arm, their heads haloed by ropes of wild hair.

  It seems our love is never enough, by nature can never be enough, until you realize that it is or maybe once you decide it is. Then there it is, tender love strewn like petals at your feet, everywhere as far as you can see, thick and soft, under your feet. A place to lie down, a soft place that has always been there, but you’ve not seen it.

  Above the cabin, Breteche valley widens into a high sagebrush bowl with clumps of aspen and conife
r draws. The Breteche Creek Ranch rises up into the divide that separates the drainages of the north and south forks of the Shoshone River, its windswept spine reaching out from the heart of the Yellowstone country in a high migratory corridor that allows wolves, grizzlies, elk and bighorn sheep passage through its dark timber and bare cliffs, out through the forest and onto Sheep Mountain and the outer edges of their territory.

  Several years ago, this ranch was on the market and was being bid on by a developer looking to split it up into fifty-two parcels. I’d worked to find a buyer who instead would protect it and keep it whole. In a job that often feels like I take three steps back for every step forward, this one clear shifting of fate seems an undeniable success, a celebration of my efforts to give something back.

  On my last day here I walk the dirt road back up to the high basin, with chinook winds blowing up the valley and softening the snow. At the drift fence, a black cloud of crows squawking in alarm rises up from the hillside and leaves behind an intricate stitching of tracks as sharp as frost splinters, and I find a deer kill, a fresh one, the body no more than pieces exploded through the sage—tufts of hair, a hoof, a scapular bone, patches of snow stained red. It’s already been picked nearly clean, and beyond the carnage in the clean white snow, there are coyote tracks, many of them.

  The only thing that remains intact is the intestine—or rather its contents, lying on the snow in the perfect shape of that organ. I know the deer’s winter browse must be sage leaves, willow tips, wildrye, fescue and bluebunch wheatgrass, but I can’t tell much by looking. I see only brown shredded plant matter closely compacted into the graceful shape of a bota bag full of wine. What’s amazing is that the intestine walls are simply picked clean, leaving only the contents. I imagine a magician pulling a tablecloth from a fully set table without disturbing the candelabra and place settings.