by Tracy Ross
We kept telling each other love was for losers. I said it was stupid, and Shawn said that if you had to tell someone you love her, you really didn’t. We kept it up all the way through Colorado and into Utah and then Nevada. The land transitioned from skyscraping peaks to red-mud hoodoos to bleached ocean-bottom-like desert.
It was there, in the desert, on the eve of Shawn’s departure to Colorado and mine to Denali, that we finally said the three words we pretended to scorn. We said them almost at the same exact moment. Salty tears streamed down our faces as we tried to come to terms with separating from one another. Mine stopped when Shawn told me that in a couple of weeks he was following me to Alaska.
Shawn and I were always in a live-or-die situation. At least that’s how it seemed, our first summer in Alaska.
At my cabin alone, we counted ten grizzly bears wandering through the devil’s club past the front porch. Thanks to Colin, the cabin door was a piece of reinforced plywood, and the windows were Plexiglas insulated with Styrofoam cutouts. The door’s lock was a piece of bungee that attached to a driftwood handle. One day, Shawn and I heard whimpering under the house—my sled dog Merlin’s litter of puppies. When we looked outside, we saw a giant grizzly sow with twin two-hundred-pound adolescents. We opened the door and stood on the porch, because, without a gun or even supposedly bear-repelling pepper spray, if the bears wanted, they could have pushed down a wall and eaten us. Each time the puppies whined, the bears came closer. Each time they came closer, Shawn and I shouted them off. Eventually Merlin returned from eating a neighbor’s garbage, at which point the bears lost interest in the puppies.
If we’d had an animal totem that summer it would have been the grizzly. They found us everywhere we went. On a river trip down the remote East Fork of the Chulitna River, in our tiny, inflatable raft, we drifted past three, all walking on the silty banks. This time we carried a loaner rifle, but neither of us ever thought to grab it. Vulnerable as babies, grizzly finger sandwiches, we floated silently, back paddling away from the shores they walked on, each hoping the bears wouldn’t notice us.
When we’d finally had enough close-call encounters with grizzlies, we went on one final adventure: this time to the no-bear zone of the snow- and ice-covered Alaska Range, which one of my bosses at the park agreed to let me use as a “patrol.” With three other climbers, we took a bush flight into the Ruth Amphitheater, near a tiny stone hut constructed on a pile of rocks in the middle of the glacier called the Mountain House. Shawn and I had little climbing experience, so we put our trust in two dudes from Telluride, Colorado, who knew how to travel as a rope team across the Ruth Glacier’s gaping crevasses.
The trip was plagued with problems from the beginning. It turned out our “guides” didn’t have all that much experience. We made it through the crevasse fields safely, but when we tried to climb Pittock Peak across from the famous Moose’s Tooth, we encountered hip-deep sugar snow melting on top of featureless black granite. If the snow had slid, we would have fallen to our deaths.
We retreated just as our pilot was flying overhead trying to make contact. But our radio was shoved in the bottom of someone’s pack. Later, we’d learn that he was trying to signal us, to tell us that bad weather was coming, which would shut down flights into the amphitheater. Instead, we retreated to a place called 747 Pass, where, within hours of setting up camp, the temperature rose, the clouds socked in, and the mountains started “shedding their skin” in avalanches like you can’t believe. Through the haze of clouds we could hear them ripping in every direction around us. We thought ourselves safe because we knew we were on an island. But we didn’t know when or if they’d stop, when or if we’d be able to retreat to safety.
For three days we sat in our tents, worrying. I felt bad for our tentmate Julia, who suffered the sound of Shawn and my smooching to pass the time. As the days before our eventual pickup passed and the tension in our group rose because we truly didn’t know if we’d make it out or get buried by an avalanche, Shawn and I never argued once. Since then, we’ve been in more than our share of killer fights that have taken us to the brink of divorce and scared our kids so badly we’ve made them cry. But we always manage to get back to the foundation we built in Alaska.
Shawn and I married in Winter Park on July 10, 1999, in a meadow overlooking the Continental Divide. Patches of snow still clung to the mountains, which shimmered in the thin, high-altitude air. For as far as the eye could see in every direction, giant, bald peaks fanned into the distance. A red-tailed hawk skimmed the meadow, searching for dinner. Lily pads floated on the surface of a pond that someone had dug to attract small birds and animals.
Though the forecast had called for afternoon thunderstorms, the weather held, bright pink and sunny, until after the ceremony, when we turned up the music and started to dance. I wore a long, cream-colored gown with a modest bustle in the back. Shawn wore a smart green suit. We both had grass stains on our bare feet.
Mayz officiated, standing between Shawn and me, the three of us contained in a circle of family and friends. In one of the photos, her hand has just fluttered up to her heart in response to the vows we wrote each other, which were tender and aching and true. But what doesn’t show up in pictures is the impact she had on me just hours before the ceremony, the message she shared that dampened the happiness I forced myself to exude outwardly. It was so awkward and disturbing, it almost made me call the wedding off.
In the years since Dad and I had driven down the Alcan, his apologies had become more flagrant and heartfelt. But he still talked euphemistically about “hurting me” and “making my life difficult.” On the surface, I’d played like we’d made amends, but underneath my gracious exterior I still burned. The flames of my anger often licked at both of my parents; the previous March, however, they had flared up at my mother.
“You’re going to let your dad give you away, aren’t you?” Mom had asked. She’d come to Winter Park to help me pick out napkins and a real wedding dress. Unlike my wedding with Colin, this one would be a big, serious ceremony. But even though my dad and I were on decent terms, I refused to let him hand me off.
“Let him give me away?” I exploded. “If he were going to give me away, don’t you think he would need to have had me in the first place? I hardly think either of you have done anything to deserve the honor of giving me away.”
Mayz had watched me level my parents, who’d driven six hundred miles and spent hundreds of dollars to make my wedding a special event, for two days. I could tell my behavior was making her sick, but I couldn’t help myself. In the midst of all this holiness, I wanted my parents eighty-sixed.
Now, two hours before the wedding, Mayz wanted to have a heart-to-heart. We sat in the parking lot of the salon, where several girlfriends waited to watch me get my hair and makeup done.
“Tracy, there’s something I need to say.”
A pang of guilt stabbed my gut. My behavior. Mayz had seen the worst of it and I was fully expecting her to call me out.
“I know. I’ve been a monster. And I feel bad about it, okay? Don’t worry, after the wedding I’m going to apologize for everything. I promise. But can we just not talk about it now?”
Mayz reached over and grabbed my hand.
“Tracy, honey, I need you to listen. This is not about your mother. It’s about you. And Shawn. And Don.”
I turned to face her, expecting another blessing, a final invocation of grace. But Mayz was finished with blessings.
“Tracy …” she said. “You are going to be given a moment. I don’t know when, but a door is going to open. You’re going to be given a chance to give your heart completely to Shawn. The door is going to open, and you’re going to walk through it. You’re going to be given a chance to forgive Don.”
Up the road, a dozen friends were setting tables and arranging bright flowers in a circle on the lawn. Two sets of relatives had driven hundreds of miles before winding up and over Berthoud Pass, bearing gifts. Mom, Dad, and Chris stoo
d in the crowd, smiling awkwardly, anxious to see the daughter-sister-bride. I was feeling guiltier by the second because I hadn’t relented and agreed to let my dad hand me off to my new husband. And now Mayz had stuck me with the heavy burden of God.
When she was finished, Mayz got out of the car and went into the salon. I sat there for twenty minutes, maybe more. At first I thought, Screw you, Mayz—and your “mystery.” And then I thought of a way to get around the hard part. I would be brave, and walk into the circle where Shawn and I were to be married even though I felt like the lowest life form on the planet. I would smile and pretend that I was having the time of my life. I’d never let on that Mayz had almost ruined it for me, with her ill-timed prophecy or whatever it was. If and when I encountered Dad, I would say I forgive. That way, I could forgive the situation, which may, or may not, include him.
That’s how I decided, at the last possible moment, to walk into the center of the circle, where Shawn was waiting to promise me love, support, and protection for the rest of my life.
21
Shooting Stars (or Birth Stories)
Shawn and I spent the first year of our marriage skiing, thinking about skiing, or dreaming up ways to ski more often. Five days a week from December through April we arrived at the lifts in time to hear the first avalanche bombs detonate, then ripped through stands of timber until the sun set. We fed our habits by working low-wage jobs at Winter Park Resort. Come summer, we returned to Alaska, where Shawn continued to raft guide and I worked at Denali. But when autumn came, we circled home to Winter Park. It was there that our first son, Scout, was conceived, in a big lonely basin just below the Continental Divide.
It was late August, a year and month after our wedding. We’d thrown our sleeping bags in a meadow full of columbine husks. Though we knew it could snow at any moment, we carried no tent; just our bags, zipped together and reeking of woodsmoke, wilderness, and sleep. Because we were in a basin, the sky created a giant dome around us, framed in by the bald mountains of the divide, the dark, craggy cliffs jutting here and there, and the trees fifty feet high and crowded together like people at a silent wake. Sometimes we thought we could hear a train whistling down in the valley, but it could just as easily have been the wind, kicking up somewhere near Tabernash and wrapping over the Divide.
I remember the feel of Shawn’s body, tight and lean, with broad freckled shoulders and a skier’s ripped torso. This was when we hardly ate and kept ourselves mildly dehydrated at all times because we believed it could curb our hunger for food. This was when we wanted to be hungry only for each other and despised the thought of excess flesh coming between us. In the dark we pressed our bodies together, chest to chest, hipbones knocking, attempting to dissolve into one person.
We had been talking about babies, even as we’d wound down the Alcan Highway on our way home from Alaska. Shawn wanted to be a father because his own dad had failed so miserably. A violent alcoholic and product of Vietnam, he had run out on Shawn’s mother when she was still pregnant with his little sister. Shawn was looking for karmic comeuppance: he wanted to spirit a family across the West, read Ed Abbey to his children while they camped in the Escalante Desert, stargaze and fly-fish, build snow caves they’d actually sleep in. More than anything, he hoped to spend a few more summers in Alaska, where he could teach his kids the value of hard labor, independence, and good friends.
There was a huge barrier to his plans for fatherhood, however. I knew that if I had kids, I would just screw them up. Not only did I have plenty of parent disqualifiers—I drank beer while driving, dabbled in hallucinogens, and could live for weeks out of a truck—I was also the product of abuse. According to the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, this made me five times more likely than the average person to inflict the same horrors on my own kids. Thanks to Dad, I was statistically doomed not only to hug my babies when they were crying, but to console them by putting my hands down their underpants.
Having babies and caring for them was for someone loving and stable, with a stomach for carnal intimacy that included breast feeding, diaper changing, and, in some cases, placenta eating. That someone was not me.
Apparently, though, none of this mattered to Scout.
That night, high above the Continental Divide, he was already winging through the autumn sky, crossing the Pleiades and the other constellations, his star form dead or currently dying. When he saw me lying in a field of columbine husks, he thought I looked like the perfect place to stop his trajectory and settle in. Burning hot and full of energy, he dropped into my belly, ready to become a boy.
Nine and a half months later, the day after Mother’s Day 2001, Shawn and I drove to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. At thirty-eight weeks pregnant, I felt bigger than a helium balloon. Brimming with water, blood, and adrenaline, I knew that I was carrying a baby boy.
We cruised past the cattle ranches in Kremmling and the bald eagles perched on tree branches along the Colorado River. Tank and my sled dog Merlin rode in the back of the truck. Today’s plan was to hike, for hours maybe, after we met with our baby doctor, whom we already knew would be flippant and terse. A small-town obstetrician with time to kill, Dr. Schaller didn’t seem to care that I’d gained thirty-five pounds despite obsessive overexercising and undereating.
At the clinic, a nurse came into the exam room, all smiles and questioning.
“How are you feeling?”
“Good, good.”
“How are the contractions?”
“Good, I think. I’m not sure I’m having them yet.”
“Are you nervous?”
This one I had to think about. Nervous wasn’t the right word. Mortified, yes. Uncomfortable, certainly. A tankard moving through a sea of molasses, farting and burping and suffering fat ankles, esophagus burns, and hemorrhoids, hell yeah. Oh, and did I happen to mention that pregnancy had brought with it the added benefit of making me profoundly emotional? “I guess we’re nervous.” I said. “Who wouldn’t be, right?”
Shawn slipped his fingers through mine and smiled weakly. We were both scared out of our minds, because of the unknown, because we were small and young and unsure of ourselves, and because we’d decided—weeks earlier, after the first Lamaze class—that we’d rather wing the birthing process than hang out with a bunch of fat, boring pregnant people who would give up everything they love to become parents.
We are not like them, we told ourselves. We are strong, free, and independent! We are so connected to the rhythms of the earth that we don’t need Lamaze! Let’s go skiing instead! (What we really meant—what I meant, and Shawn went along with it—was that I was so sickened by the thought of focusing on my “area” in front of other people that I would rather have blundered my way through childbirth than sit in the living room of the local sheriff and listen to his wife say things like, “cervix,” “perineum,” and “vagina.”)
It states in my personal rule book that I never, ever discuss anything having to do with my period, ovulation, or contraception, and I remember wishing that everyone associated with my pregnancy had been given a copy so that they could do the same.
I had made a decision years ago to put a clamp over my sexual organs and seal the edges with a blowtorch. While my dad ground his hipbones into me, I built plutonium-enriched shields over my breasts, vagina, and uterus. Psychologically, this had the effect of making me feel as fortified as an army bunker and toxic to the touch. Physically, it made me alternately numb and torturously sensitive.
But on that day in May, none of that mattered. What mattered was that I was thirty-eight weeks into one of the least-prepared-for pregnancies in history. And sooner than I could imagine, I was going to have to coax a baby through an area so foreign to me it might as well have been the moon. Back in the doctor’s office, the nurse wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around my fat upper arm, pumped the rubber ball, and counted my pulse with two fingers while my forearm turned purple. I practiced slowing my heart rate by holding my breath, smiling, and
thinking of cherry Popsicles. When the red needle on the monitor stopped, the nurse frowned and made a note. She removed the cuff, rewrapped it, and pumped the ball again.
This time her fingers rested on the exam table, tapping the crinkly white paper, tat-tat-tat. Her eyebrows strained toward each other as she waited for the result. When the needle paused, once on the systolic number and once on the diastolic, she wrote on her clipboard again. The third time she frowned, unwrapped, rewrapped, and pumped, I asked, “Am I dead?”
“Nooo, but did you bring your overnight bag?”
Oh, no. “What?”
“I’m just wondering if you came prepared to stay. It’s a long drive back to Granby, and you might be here awhile.”
Shawn and I looked at each other with hard, dilated eyes. We had no idea what this cryptic nurse meant, but we felt instantly like we needed to laugh, throw up, and cry, as it dawned on us that in a matter of hours, we would no longer be just Shawn and Tracy. We would be Shawn and Tracy and the baby we jokingly called Number Three until we saw him on the sonogram pictures and felt our hearts momentarily short-circuit, at which point we named him Scout. The nurse put the cuff next to me on the exam table and said, “Have a seat, both of you. You’re not going anywhere.”
Two hours later we checked into Yampa Valley Medical Center. Tank and Merlin were still sitting in the back of the truck. At some point, Merlin would manage to jump out the window and run wild through the streets of Steamboat. An excellent tracker taking advantage of our distraction, she would find a fresh pile of steaming horse manure and roll in it before being picked up by the Steamboat dog catcher and landing in doggie jail. Meanwhile, Dr. Schaller would have come to the hospital to recheck my blood pressure, which now read 140 over 88. This is a great blood pressure if you are a 250-pound sixty-year-old who dines regularly on cheese, butter, and beef. On an extremely active thirty-year-old it meant hypertension, which, left unchecked, could have been bad for Scout. We were staying in Steamboat until I pushed him out.
