The Carry Home (23 page)

The idea of grizzlies proved to be the one thing powerful enough to make Tom pause from questioning me about the canoe wreck on the Kopka. He was clearly nervous about them, shouting, “Hey bear!” at regular intervals to announce his presence, even on open tundra where it was possible to see for miles. We broke early afternoon in a meadow of forget-me-nots; I slipped off my pack, pointed toward Yellowstone, told him one of my favorite bear stories.

One night Jane and I were bedded down on the east side of Rampart Pass—the third of six nights out, walking from Togwotee Pass to Cody—in the thick of the grizzly-rich southern reaches of the Absaroka Range. Dawn was just breaking when suddenly I bolted awake to the one sound you never want to
hear outside your tent. Something close to a grunting pig. Which I wished with every fiber of my being was in fact a grunting pig. Carefully peaking out the screen door, I spotted a big male grizzly not six feet away, ripping apart dead logs and snapping up ants and grubs, groaning and mumbling to himself in what seemed a coarse imitation of a good purr.

Jane was still asleep, so I gently woke her; with my face close to hers I put my index finger against my lips, signaling the need for quiet. She rolled over in her bag toward the screen door, spotted the bear, then after watching him for a couple of minutes turned back to face the ceiling of the tent. By now I was totally shot through with adrenaline, eyes wide, my right hand tightly clutched around a can of bear spray. Time was going very, very slowly. After another ten minutes, my whole body buzzing, I looked over to check on Jane to see how she was handling the stress. Fast asleep. After what seemed an excruciatingly long time, the bear finally moseyed off. Slowly but surely I settled down, started breathing normally again. Jane woke up a little while after that, said she was hungry for oatmeal.

O
N THE SECOND DAY OF THE SCATTERING JOURNEY WE COVERED
just over eleven miles, the last of them rough—up and over a steep, narrow pass high on the tundra, then a scramble on weary legs across a long run of talus, finally descending in the twilight to a mosquito-infested bottom just downstream from Christmas
Lake. The next morning I pulled out the map and compass to triangulate a bearing toward a major trail we'd need to intersect to the west. We crossed Littlerock Creek, and once again started climbing toward the sky.

Barely an hour went by that Tom wasn't peppering me with questions. “What were you thinking in those minutes following the wreck?” “Where were you when they found Jane's body?” Yet the farther we went, the less the questions cut me. Even when I did break down, when I tried to tell Tom what this place meant to us over eighteen years and ended up choking on it, it only took a few minutes for the grief to tumble onto the tundra and blow away. I wiped my eyes with my blue bandana, shook my shoulders to even the pack, and carried on. Happy to be walking. Happy, at long last, to feel at home.

In those times when no one was talking—and thankfully, there were a lot of them—I found myself thinking about some of the last conversations Jane and I ever had. By amazing good fortune, our final road trip together—that last springtime journey across the north country, to Ontario—led to incredible discussions. The sort of exchanges that might happen with couples when one partner is passing away slowly, from an illness, when there's no doubt that each conversation should go solely to things worth talking about. We recounted favorite trips—in Seville and Paris and Oaxaca, in the Weminuche and Acadia, the redwoods and Yellowstone. We talked of what had changed about the dreams that launched us some twenty-five years earlier, and what was still the same. Rolling across the prairie—somewhere
in western Minnesota, I think it was Highway 10—we talked about the wild. In particular, we talked about getting lost.

Jane had spent years on a search-and-rescue team, helping people missing or injured in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. On that drive across Minnesota she mentioned how being lost tended to unleash in some people—a lot of people—a crippling sense of dread. A dread that had to do with realizing they weren't in control. And that state of mind, in turn, often led to baffling, even insane behavior. It was the anxiety about what
might
happen, she said, rather than what was
actually
happening, that sent people ambling off in circles. That made them walk off in freezing temperatures with their coats sitting on the ground. That caused them to lose their food, their flashlights, their shelters, their sleeping bags, their packs.

We talked about why that feeling of being out of control, even for thirty minutes, an hour, was so terrifying. On that day, along that stretch of Midwestern prairie highway, it didn't seem that hard to understand. The fantasy of control, after all, had been one of the biggest illusions of our generation. This idea that with enough cash or brains or privilege or looks or piety or technology or stuff sold to us by companies that traded on that very fantasy, we could opt out of hardship and loss.

“But you really can't spend much time in nature,” she said, “without seeing the craziness of that.” Avalanches run down the mountain. The river floods, gets too high to cross. Lightning hits the ridgeline you're on. The grizzly doesn't give up the trail. And there's never any option but to deal.

U
P THERE IN THE
B
EARTOOTHS ON THAT SCATTERING JOURNEY
, without her, I was thinking about all the ways people lose their bearings on inward journeys, too. When we're lost inside ourselves—we're still prone to panic, and at such times, drugs, booze, or some other kind of isolation can be incredibly appealing. With that in mind, it's interesting to consider that for thousands of years, in every culture on the planet, there's been a sort of loose blueprint for getting through such scary journeys—something that grew out of storytellers watching humans experience times of momentous change. The passage always begins with a loss of identity. That loss of identity is followed by an often-long, sometimes-excruciating wandering phase—a sense of having no idea where you are, no idea where you're going. A sense of being lost.

When something goes wrong out in wild nature—like getting lost—it feels like the world is no longer yours. You've come unmoored in a strange place, in the land of the bear and the wind and the rocks. Jane used to say that as you start searching for clues, as you begin to wander, the trick was to summon the resolve to breathe through that terrifying state of not knowing. Over the years, being in the wild had taught both of us to look such feelings in the eye, to watch them long enough to see clues that might otherwise be buried in panic. Finding a way out never took fierce rationalism. It took the calm courage of attention.

I knew that this was also what I needed when wandering
though the dark, thorny fields of grief. Being able to muster attention, forgoing the enormous seduction of escape, offers travelers an essential reassurance. In a way it was just a new twist on that old Greek definition of beauty—beauty as “being of one's hour”—even when the path is baffling. Even when you're utterly, completely lost.

A
T
C
HRISTMAS
L
AKE
I
HAD A DREAM ABOUT
J
ANE
. O
NE THAT
I kept to myself, puzzling over it the next day as we worked our way north into the heart of the Beartooths. In the dream I was walking with her along the shore of a partially frozen river. All of a sudden, without warning, she jumped off a small bank onto what looked like a solid platform of snow-covered ice. But the shelf gave way, and she fell into the river. I could hear her screaming under the water. Then I was running downstream, frantic, heading for a point just beyond where the ice covered the channel. I was also aware of the real wreck on the Kopka, not believing how such a thing could be happening again. Then I jumped into the river and start searching. Nothing. Soon rescuers showed up, and somehow they turned down the flow on that particular braid of the river, lowering the water level to reveal a long, barrel-shaped tunnel or cave just downstream from where she disappeared. Feeling hopeless, suddenly I heard a shout. And there she was, walking out of the cave.

She went on to tell me how she'd found escape in a small
alcove just above the waterline. Also, that while she was waiting, she'd gotten into some kind of deep meditation state as a survival technique. In the next scene we were in a car, driving away from the river, me in the front passenger seat and her in the back. I turned to ask her about the other river accident, the one on the Kopka. She looked at me with the most serene smile. Told me that we didn't need to get into that right now.

Jane was never specific about where in the Beartooths she wanted her ashes scattered, and there were dozens of options. Lakeshores where we'd sat in the sun with cups of coffee, squinting at distant ridges, trying to figure out how best to cross them; hidden streams where we'd stripped naked after hours of backpacking and laid up to our necks in the cold pools; summits where we'd sat on lichen-covered rocks and eaten salami and apples, a thousand square miles of the world tumbling out to every horizon.

The southern reaches of the range, though, roughly from Line Creek Plateau west to Cooke City, held special meaning for her—partly because of the journeys we'd made there together, and partly from her work with Outward Bound. But also because of time she'd spent here doing search-and-rescue work as a wilderness EMT. Her loaded rescue pack always stood at the ready out in the garage, and when calls came, sometimes at eight or nine at night, saying someone was lost or hurt or unconscious in some faraway rock pile, she changed her clothes, grabbed her radio, and was out the door in minutes.

When she came back from those trips, often well after sunup, she was full of stories: tales of wandering across pockets
of tundra in pitch black with a headlamp, of backboarding people with spinal injuries and transporting them to a decent helicopter-landing spot, waiting there for first light, when helicopters could fly; of how family members cried when the search team appeared. She never went on a rescue call without a special box of chocolates made to look like Band-Aids, which she handed out mostly to any kids on the scene, but sometimes to adults, too, trying to ease their worries.