by Tim Sandlin
Christmas, they flew back to Santa Barbara and stayed a week with Lana Sue and Loren. Roger tells me he still has nightmares, but not nearly so often, and when he awakes after one, Shannon is there to hold him. He no longer fears uncontrollable suicide.
***
I wrote this book in his old cabin.
***
There never was an Oly Pedersen Day in GroVont. The week before he turned one hundred, Oly and Irene Dukakis ran off to live in Greece. I didn’t even know Oly had a passport. We had no clue as to where they were for a month or so, until Roger got a postcard with a picture of Delphi on the front. The back—in a scrawl like a bird scratching blood—read:
Irene and I are hitched. We would prefer cash to wedding gifts. Send money orders to…
and then came an address in Amfissa, Greece. I mailed him two hundred dollars, in Lydia’s name.
***
Last Mother’s Day—two years after Lydia got out of prison—Gilia and I took Esther to Yellowstone to look for Evangeline’s grave. We found it too, right where Oly said it would be. There’s a picnic area, now, on Nez Perce Creek. Her marker sits thirty yards or so beyond the bathrooms. The park service has placed a low pipe fence around the site, so kids won’t climb on the stone, I guess. I can’t think of any other reason.
If you stand with your back to the picnic tables and face the Firehole, the view must be close to what Oly saw seventy years ago—the blooming balsamroot and larkspur, ravens soaring the updraft, juncos in the sage. It helps that our visit came within a week of the funeral date. The similarities were easy to see.
The stone is a yellow-white slab, not marble, maybe quartz. Rock identification always has been a flaw in my nature lore skills. It’s that rock from over by Canyon that gave Yellowstone its name. The words read
Evangeline Pedersen
July 10, 1902–May 15, 1924
Our Angel Has Flown
Gilia said, “That sounds just like Oly.”
“The man is a born poet,” I said. “Or was. He’d be pushing one hundred and two now, if he’s still alive.”
“He’s still alive,” Gilia said. “That old blowhard is unkillable.”
Gilia took photographs of the grave and the surrounding land, so when I wrote this scene I wouldn’t screw it up while I worked out the relationship of beauty to death and how one meant nothing without the other. Esther did cartwheels around the fence. Cartwheels are her new method of getting from place to place. She doesn’t walk, run, or skip much these days. She cartwheels. It’s a skill she picked up in Mighty Mite Gymnastics. As she cartwheeled around the circle, Esther sang a song in which a woman swallows a fly and tries to figure why. It wasn’t one Lydia taught me. I don’t remember Lydia teaching me any songs when I was young.
My daughter was so heartbreakingly alive I gave up on the deep thoughts to watch her circle the grave. As Lydia pointed out more times than I wanted to hear—for a person who thinks deep thoughts for a living, I’m not very good at it. I don’t have the discipline. I’d rather watch my daughter, or a cloud, or listen to running water. I start out with a thought chain and end up with white noise.
With each loop, Esther’s dark hair brushed the dirt, and sooner or later one of her palms was going to come down on a sharp rock. I knew I should say something, but I kept putting it off. Gilia was more interested in photography than parenting. The day was too nice to criticize. My women were happy; therefore, I was happy.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “You ought to stop that before you get hurt.”
Esther glanced over to see how serious I was, and decided I wasn’t.
“Her hair is getting dirty,” I said.
Gilia’s next line would normally have been So what? but this time it was so obvious she didn’t bother to say it out loud. Instead she shifted closer to me, so our shoulders were touching as we watched our daughter cavort. The things that are simple to other people—sunlight on skin, spring air, family close by—floor me when I suddenly recognize their value. I have trouble breathing.
Esther yelped and twisted her arm back to avoid touching elk scat, and she went over backward in a crash. She sat on the ground, legs akimbo, eyes flashing, glaring at me.
“That was your fault,” she said.
I laughed. Big mistake.
“Daddy. Don’t laugh at me!”
“I wasn’t laughing at you. I was thinking how much you’re growing up like your Grandmother Lydia.”
Gilia socked me hard on the upper arm. “Good Lord, don’t say that.”
“Why not? Lydia was my mother.”
“I wouldn’t brag, if I were you.”
Esther stood up and brushed sage and elk scat off her shorts. “I want nachos.”
I said, “Okay.”
With no more thoughts of death and dying, the three of us loaded into the Madonnaville van and drove off in search of nachos. Lydia would have approved.
Author’s Note
You Yellowstone sticklers will notice I switched the Midway Geyser Basin for Fountain Flats. There is a good reason for this. Fountain sounds better in a sentence than Midway. Try it. Other than that, the history and geography are more or less correct, at least as Sam and Oly would have remembered them.
Acknowledgments
Much of this book was written in Pearl Street Bagels and the Center for the Arts. I wish to thank the fine folks at both for their patience while I lived in one world and existed in another.
Valley Books, as always, kept me going.
My family gave me time, space, and optimism.
Todd Stocke and Flip Brophy had the faith.
Thanks to the Sandlinistas, especially Curt Pasisz and Army and Aero Feth. You too can join at timsandlin.com.
I thank the board of the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, particularly Nicole Burdick and Linda Hazen.
I have now been with Maurey and Sam through four novels, two movies, and twenty-seven years. My loved ones say that’s enough. Even though, when pushed in a corner, I will admit they aren’t real, I still want to thank those two for giving me their travails and deepest needs. It’s been more fun than folks who only live one life can imagine.
About the Author
Reviewers have variously compared Tim Sandlin to Jack Kerouac, Tom Robbins, Larry McMurtry, Joseph Heller, John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Hiaasen, and a few other writers you’ve probably heard of. He has published nine novels and a book of columns. He wrote eleven screenplays for hire, two of which have been made into movies. He used to write reviews for the New York Times Book Review but was fired for excessive praise. He lives with his family in Jackson, Wyoming, where he is director of the Jackson Hole Writers Conference. His Sandlinistas follow him at www.timsandlin.com.
