I don’t need much, but I need more than an “mm.” His back is to me and I watch him stretch, measure, press blue tape against the ceiling. He finishes that corner and moves to the next wall. I sit on my stepladder. Then I scrape some more. I squeeze my eyes against the tears.
Three months later, I bring it up when we begin therapy, how I’d hoped for some supportive words, some display of empathy. Oh, he says. I didn’t know you wanted me to say anything.
The therapist suggests I’d given Daniel a “love test,” expecting him to know what I wanted. Instead of simply asking.
We leave Cooke City after buying another bag of cinnamon rolls and sticky buns at the Bearclaw Bakery. We head west, a final drive through Lamar Valley, then on to Missoula. Our eyes are peeled for wolves. Mark brakes for bison, for black bears, for tourists who are too focused on taking pictures to think about driving. We get stopped by bear jams: tourists pausing half-way and no-way off the road to watch a bear amble, munch berries, or otherwise occupy itself within sight of a road. An eagle soars over Soda Butte River. A deer hides in an aspen copse, his antlers sliced by the tall, narrow trunks.
Once outside the park, we pick up speed, dry brown land changing to lush hillsides of greening shrub and tree as we enter Paradise Valley. Voluptuous growth. Delicate lady’s slippers and thunderous sequoias. Creatures both meek and predatory. Hares. Wolves. Pounding waterfalls, deer and bears and muskrats. Wilderness, untrammeled, roadless. And border lands, where roads snake through wildness, where we’re allowed glimpses of creatures in their own spaces. Places where I pedal my bicycle as dawn breaks, letting the world seep into my consciousness.
It’s slightly before five and predawn hovers, resting on the surface of the road and rising upward as far as I can see until it touches the remnants of a night sky, Venus hanging low, a flare of light just a finger, maybe two, above the hills at the mouth of the canyon. The birds are wide awake, exchanging messages, declaring their intentions for the day, and I am an interloper, eavesdropping. This portion of the world is dark and asleep yet wildly vibrant. Dew-moistened grass is slick and the breeze rustling over it releases a wet whisper that I hear beneath the slapping of tree leaves and the creak of weakened branches soon to be torn from limbs by the next violent windstorm. The early mornings here are always blustery, the cool air rushing down-canyon into the warmer city. By mid-morning the pattern reverses as the heat of the city searches for escape and pushes its way up between the sloping canyon walls. But I ride during the dawning of the day, wind against my body, clapping the flag’s thick white cord against the flagpole at the top of the street just before the canyon’s entrance, warning me that I will have to work hard these next six miles before the sweeping switchback in the canyon places the wind at my back.
I hear the water crash over the rocks of the creek bed—I cannot see it—just as I hear a critter, a squirrel or a magpie, move through the coarse undergrowth beside the road. I’ve barely entered the canyon, am no more than half a mile in, and everything inside me has shifted. The two miles I’ve ridden to reach the canyon mouth are urban, the roads mildly steep and most houses midnight dark. With entry into the canyon my world becomes wild and untamed, the grasses high and irregular, the hillside artistically barren then lush. I breathe better here.
I round a curve and approach the spot I once heard coyotes howl. I was new to riding, new to the canyon’s predawn milieu. I’d heard the howl—a brief one—then immediately convinced myself I hadn’t, when another howl tumbled down the hillside. I sucked in a breath. I was spooked. No streetlamps dot this two-lane road, no fence runs resolutely along the shoulder. Not a single house sat within a mile of me in either direction. Coyotes won’t attack me, of course not. I’m much too big. But shivers flew up my spine, the way they do when a wild animal’s howl leaps from the dark and you are solitary, exposed, ignorant of what wild creatures truly are.
I pedal past the spot of those long-ago howls—it’s been five years since that morning—and follow the curve of the road. It rained last night and every fragrance is intensified, released and flung by brush and shrub. I inhale deeply, relish the mix of all I do not know. I am the happy wanderer. I don’t need to know the name of every plant and bird and tree. I learn a few more each year, research new sightings, try to single out a unique bird call and determine its owner. I temporarily name what I do not know but intend to learn: full-petaled yellow flower in bunches, gnarled trunk twisted brown tree. Ah, arrowleaf balsamroot, a bristlecone pine. I’m often torn between making up my own name for a thing, and researching its official name. Naming is an act of creation, of possession, an act that forges a bond. But even in learning a name bestowed by someone else, I tighten the connection. The purple-red reed-like shrub in thick bunches I love—they line creek banks, they are munched by moose—the separation between us evaporates when I learn its name: ah, red twig dogwood.
As I ride I search the hillside to my left, a meadow on my right, combing the tall grass for an indication of life, a brown back, movement not attributable to wind. I anticipate a call, a throaty bark, a deep whistle or a delicate scampering through dry twigs. Wildlife is here. But the rare appearances of the deer—four foraged by the roadside yesterday, a doe hurrying along three smaller companions, their coats mangy and uneven in this late spring—the porcupine, the raccoon, tell me either that I must begin earlier, before rays of sunlight begin lighting the world, or that wildlife is better at watching me, than I it. How many sets of eyes might that be, hidden by thick trunks and fields of vibrant yellow balsamroot? The thoughtful hunter knows his quarry stalks him, just as he does it. I am a hunter of wildlife, but my weapons are none. A gently whispered good morning and my slowly moving body on a bicycle are the worst with which the deer and porcupine must contend. My hunting results only in my own deep gratitude for each brief sighting of bird or beast. And what do I miss when I blink, turn my head at the moment something flits by in the opposite direction? The more aware I become, the more I will see.
This canyon I claim is not my own but is Emigration Canyon, the Donner-Reed party’s path of entry into the Great Salt Lake Valley, now speckled with homes. The road winds gently upward for eight miles before reaching the crest, long ago named Little Mountain. The final mile-and-a-half climb is uninhabited by humans, though parcels with water rights are for sale. Were I wealthy, I would buy them all so that the deer and owls, the rabbits and raccoons and hawks could retain their stomping grounds. From the summit on, the land is governed by multiple agencies—and one corporation—with plans and leases: two different counties, the federal government, Chevron, and a watershed. To my delight and benefit, the result of this confused management arrangement is a peaceful land devoid of homes.
Following the road down, now on the eastern side of the crest, I coast toward Little Dell Reservoir, a body of water barely large enough to kayak or canoe in—perhaps a mile from dam to distant shore and a quarter mile across. I sometimes see a fisherman quietly contemplating life or nothing at all as his line dangles into the gray or blue or green water, depending upon the clouds, the sun, the fickle wind. Some days the reservoir is Caribbean blue at its edges, other days it is glass-like, mirroring the pine-covered hillside to the south. Wind can chop its surface into millions of white caps. Predawn mornings render it glossy and iridescent as a gray pearl.
In the hollow of a curve halfway down, between summit and reservoir, deer graze then hearken, heads lifting, eyes alert. A moose munches willows in the pocket where snowmelt collects in the spring, and I grin in delight as rabbits and chipmunks dash across the road before me. A few summers ago I saw fox kits, leaping and jumping upon each other, full of energy and mischievousness in this same hollow. Hawks swoop and soar, and the rare peregrine falcon sits, regally, in a stark gray tree not yet lush with spring’s buds. My soul is damn happy, awash in a delight that springs loose and bubbles to my surface.
After riding past the reservoir, I skirt over dirt around the edge of a still-locked snow gate and begin the climb up Big Mountain. I’m still following the path of the Donner-Reed party, yet in reverse. I continue east, an anti-pioneer emigration route.
While Little Mountain is beautiful and a beloved place to visit, Big Mountain is wild. Pine and aspen coat north-facing hillsides, while those that face south are sagebrush-speckled red rock and dirt. Hawks circle, porcupine amble, deer dart and