by Laura Bell
When we climb out of the trees, the summit is bare and open with gravel and limestone in a shock of bright sunlight. I stand with my arms stretched wide, drying the sweat from my body, and spin a slow circle like a radar disk scanning the terrain from this dizzying height. The Absarokas and the Beartooths and, toward the east, the Pryors and the Big Horns. To the south, the rose-hued McCullough Peaks in the foreground and the distant haze of the Owl Creek range. From here, it seems the tracks of my entire adult life are visible, scratched out across this landscape that has been my constant, more sure than any man’s touch, less frail than the walls of any home.
We drop to the limestone slabs and pull food and water from our packs, peel oranges and divide ham sandwiches among us. We stretch our aging, achy bodies. An eagle rises from beneath the cliff. After a summer spent with strangers, the familiar presence of my family is a balm.
From an empty space amid the conversation around me, I am uncovered to tears. “I’m stalled out and don’t know what step to take next,” I hear myself say. “I’m tired of moving, of carrying everything with me. I want a home, but I don’t know where it is.” For a moment it’s silent, and then I say, “I don’t know what to do.”
The wind picks up and billows the jackets strewn around us. I pull my hands away from my face and see that my brother and sister and niece are still there with me, quiet, listening. My sister lays a hand on my shoulder and rubs my back. “It’s all right,” she says. “You’ll know.”
That night I dream that something large and awful is after me. I run into a big glass gazebo with round glass walls and leafy trees both inside and out. I pull the door shut behind me and run through another circle of glass walls, out of breath, and close that door behind me, too, pressing my face to the glass. Through the leaves I see a dark shadow on the outside of the farthest glass. I hear its breath and know it can see me, know that the walls are thin and I am small. I realize that if I open up my lungs like a bellows, I’ll become loud, and that the louder I am, the larger I’ll grow. With my voice, I can become big and save myself.
My sister, sleeping next to me, shakes me awake, frightened by the sounds I’m making in the night. “Like the wind,” she says. “Like a wild thing howling.”
I don’t know for sure, but I think I would have beaten it.
There among the rocks that day, so close to the sky, my words must have stirred the wind. It wasn’t long before there was news of a position opening up with a conservation organization that had just bought Heart Mountain Ranch and planned to open an office in Cody. Against my crazy-quilt résumé, the job description looked daunting, but they offered me the position, telling me they needed someone who knew the country and understood the ranches.
So within months I have a home in the shadow of Heart Mountain and my days are filled with migration corridors, winter ranges, rivers, landowners and a life back in the land that has carved me.
One day, I make arrangements to ride with the manager of the Two Dot Ranch, a sprawling, fifty-thousand-acre cattle ranch on the northern Absaroka slopes and a critical haven for wildlife. “I want to show you our sagebrush projects back up country,” Mark says, “but we’ve had something come up, and I need to help these guys get our bulls moved before I can go. Do you mind coming with us? Or would you rather wait for another day?”
“Not at all. I’m here to visit and see the country, and as long as we’re horseback I’m happy.” I unload my saddle from the pickup and lift it onto the tall bay mare he points out for me. “That’s my wife’s horse. She’ll do dressage or cut cattle or anything. And she’ll take good care of you.”
We trailer the horses north to where seventeen bulls are scattered along Neumeyer Creek. We split up to go to work, and trotting out, I can feel a smile spreading across my face, and the sense of being at home and in place.
Once we’ve gathered the bulls to the road and are trailing along behind, Mark says, “These guys have something they want to ask you.” The two ranch hands are smiling like Cheshire cats.
“So, you like wolves?” the younger one asks, cocky and certain that he doesn’t.
Mark glances at me in apology but is swallowing a grin himself.
“Sure I like wolves.” That snaps their heads around, ready for an argument.
“Well!”
“But I like cows, too. Without cows, you don’t have ranches. And without ranches, you don’t have winter ranges. I’m more of a middle-of-the-road kind of person.”
“So, you aren’t a tree hugger?”
“I actually like trees quite a lot.”
When a bull feints back on us going through the gate, my horse dives and gets around him. The hands look at me as if I might not be completely worthless after all, and I feel a flush of happiness for this day—for the horse under my saddle, for cowboys who love to argue about wolves, for the country spread out around me once again as far as I can see.
Amy calls to say that she’s coming over to Cody and has something she wants to talk about. In the year since Jenny’s death, she and her boyfriend have moved into her father’s house, and she’s been working at a Western-wear store in Greybull, sometimes waitressing, treading water in her grief. Having never particularly liked this young man, I’ve worried about her and made myself available, but this is the first time she has asked.
She sits across from me at the restaurant wearing a paisley scarf I’d given her and dangling silver earrings. Her hair’s long and unkempt, but I see a bit of brightness in her face and can tell a question’s waiting to be asked even as she studies the menu. When our wine arrives and we’ve ordered, I say, “So what’s up?”
“Well.” She hesitates. “Ryan’s taking a construction job in Indiana and asked me to go with him.” Her cheeks flush with color and her eyes open up with the first sign of hope I’ve seen. “What do you think?”
“What would you do?”
“Waitress, probably, something easy for a while. What do you think about Dad?”
“Oh, Amy, your dad loves you. The last thing in the world he wants is for you to stay and take care of him. Ask him. I’m sure he’d say the same thing.” I watch her eyes glisten as she fiddles with her ring.
“So, what about me? Do you think this is a good thing or a mistake?”
“Well, it’s a dead-end job in Indiana. And he’ll never be good enough for you, but then nobody will.” Her mouth crumples into a smile at these familiar words. “So I can’t think this is a good thing, but maybe you just need to move off home base. Have a little adventure.” Her face brightens, and I know this is what she was hoping to hear. “You can always come home. You can always change course. But if you want this you should go ahead and do it.”
We toast our glasses, and I wonder what the hell I’ve just done.
In the months to come I watch her ebb and flow with the excitement of being in a new place and the eventual boredom of her job there. They move from Indiana to Colorado, and she talks about their charming community and the quaint house they’ve rented, until time passes and again the boredom returns.
One morning I pick up the phone and hear her sobbing. She finally spits the words out that she and her boyfriend are splitting up and she feels stuck without a car and doesn’t know what to do. I keep her on the phone for over an hour talking this through, what’s possible, what her next steps might be. It’s a Wednesday in late August and registration at the University of Wyoming starts on Friday. With a few calls, I have her transcripts from the local community college sent to Laramie. After another call, my brother’s daughter, Sarah, heads down to Colorado Springs and loads Amy up into her Subaru and drives her to Laramie to get registered and find a place of her own. With this fork in her path, a time of unfolding begins.
I turn east out of Cowley and follow my memory past sugar-beet fields and hayfields to find the cemetery. Across the entrance is a welded metal overhang, and I turn under it and park, gathering my flowers, my jacket and a small canvas bag to go in search of John Ho
pkin’s grave. I pass the larger, older headstone of his grandfather Claude and come to a small granite slab lying flat on the fresh grave. A sheepwagon nestled in tall grass is carved to one side of the stone and across the top a horizon of mountains. A stream winds down past the camp and two evergreens, above the words
JOHN LEWIS HOPKIN
JUNE 21, 1940
OCTOBER 4, 2003
“Goddamn it, John. Where the hell have you been?” I unwrap the flowers and push them into a cup in the cement base. Given all the years he took care of the herders, tending their camps and whims, it seems unbearable to me that he was ill and passed without me knowing or helping.
I try to think of who to be mad at for not calling to tell me, but I haven’t kept up with people here and can only blame myself. I only happened upon the news when I called Elaine, who ranches just north of Heart Mountain. She has family in Lovell and Cowley and takes that paper. “Damn, I missed John Hopkin’s funeral last week,” she’d said. “Did you go?”
“John? Are you sure?”
“Well, yes, it’s here in the paper.”
“I didn’t know, never heard anything and never even saw him in these last few years after he and Charlie moved and their number was unlisted.”
“I guess his friend moved away, and he was real sick the last two years. Nobody seems to know for sure what, but they say he didn’t want anybody to know. Didn’t seem to want anybody to find him. I think Lila kept up with him, though.”
“Damn it, damn it. I had no idea.”
It’s now mid-October but the sun’s clear and warm. I settle down next to the gravestone and pour myself a cup of coffee from the thermos, unwrap a meatloaf sandwich, and share some with Grace. She smacks her lips in protest of the ketchup but holds me in a deep stare, ready for more.
“You’re one spoiled dog, you are.” She whimpers hopefully in reply. “You should’ve known John’s dog Rusty. Now he was a sheepdog. Compared to him, you’re just one spoiled Australian shepherd lapdog.” Her bobbed tail wiggles in the grass as she follows the meatloaf to my mouth. “Rusty only had three legs and he could put any sheep anywhere anytime.” I run my hand across the gray granite, feeling the rough texture of the grass and stream and mountains carved into it. “There’ll never be anyone else like him. Or like John. Never anybody in the whole world, damn him anyway.”
Heart Mountain rises up all alone out of the high sagebrush desert of the Big Horn Basin to an elevation of over eight thousand feet. The Crow tribe called it Buffalo Heart Mountain, the Shoshone, Home of the Birds. To each it was a sacred place. To the eleven thousand Japanese Americans interned at its base during World War II, it was their horizon. And from anywhere I’ve traveled across the basin, it’s been part of my horizon, too. Across Cody, it nearly casts a shadow.
On the first of May 2004, I’m hiking the Heart Mountain ridge road as I have just about every year on this day since Jenny’s death five years ago. This track follows the sharp crease that curves the northern boundary of Buck Creek Basin and climbs to the double green gates at the saddle. This afternoon I only want to hike that far and look over into the north slopes of Heart Mountain, the Absaroka and Beartooth ranges beyond.
Much of the winter, winds keep this route scoured of snow, and in the spring it’s the first to clear. In early May, small spring flowers are low to the ground, tucked out of the wind in among the sage; alpine phlox, shooting stars, yellow violets, wild iris. I climb the ridge, one foot in front of the other, and think about what I have come to know about this place. I’ve learned where the sage grouse gather each spring to drum and mate in the early frosty hours of morning. I’ve learned how the elk move across Skull Creek Pass to winter on the mountain and that more of them are summering, too, some say because of the wolves. I’ve learned to watch for a young boar grizzly who happens over to the mountain but never stays. I’ve learned that botanists get dewy eyed over the rare plants found here: Absaroka goldenweed, aromatic pussytoes, Howard’s forget-me-nots, Shoshonea. I think about what Amy has told me, that she knows in losing her sister she’s done the hardest thing she’ll ever have to do and that this makes her brave. I vow to remember her words whenever I get scared or lost, because remembering them sometimes makes me fierce again.
When Grace and I reach the saddle, the wind blasts through the metal gates, straining them against the chains and playing the crossbars in wavering chords. I bury my nose in my collar and hang at the gate, determined to linger at least for a moment. From this place, I can look up the steep pitches to the top of the mountain, across the Two Dot Ranch to the west and down to Elaine’s ranch in the north, where elk feed on tender new grass after last fall’s burns.
From across the miles, wind howls through strands of barbed wire and draws its bow across them. I look for the sound as though in this cacophony an orchestra might be warming up, getting ready for what it’s meant to do. A tumble-weed shakes loose from the fence and sails bouncing across the slopes, a note gone wild.
CLAIMING GROUND
The sign on the airport wall says WELCOME TO GRIZZLY COUNTRY. I’ve passed it a hundred times coming in and out of the Cody airport, never giving it a glance or thinking it odd, but my parents’ flight is late and I have time on my hands. I study the large sepia photo next to it of three cowboys on horseback pulling a small plane up a grassy hill with ropes dallied around their saddle horns, this entitled Backcountry Rescue, 1938. And farther down the wall, in a photo dated 1936, the pilot’s kneeling in front of the plane with twenty-three baby antelope curled in the grass around him, destined for zoos across the country and Europe. Above the baggage claim, among advertisements for hotels, a large poster of Heart Mountain says welcome to the big horn basin. I wander over to the bank of windows facing the airfield and watch the night sky for signs of their plane, aware that I’ve been forgetting to breathe.
My mother comes through the security doors first, followed by my father, their faces scanning the small group of welcomers. I raise a hand to get their attention and watch them break into smiles. “We made it!” He’s in a jaunty tweed cap and leather bomber jacket; she’s in her soft traveling clothes and wearing bright lipstick and the earrings I’d given her for Mother’s Day. I lean in to hug them, to welcome them, and feel them to be bright sparks, alive and awake beneath my hands. It’s been over six months since we’ve been together, and they’ve come for my fiftieth birthday and, more important, for Amy’s graduation from the University of Wyoming.
Getting them settled in my home, I pour small glasses of wine, and we visit before going to bed. They’ve brought books along, notes, and are writing articles and outlining presentations. They’re deep into the conversations of an election year and worried for our country. It’s late at night, later for them by two hours, and they’re well into their eighties. But they are engaged by life, full of it, in a way that some people never are. The lamp’s amber glow illuminates their faces, and I find myself drawing close as I would to a fire.
We’re passing the Hoodoo Ranch south of town, just beginning our long drive down across the state. The morning light’s strong, casting long shadows through the sagebrush. On Carter Mountain there are pockets of snow. It’s the three of us in the car, leaving Cody early in the day, a Friday, with the trunk full of coolers, tablecloths and platters of food for Amy’s celebration dinner that night.
“We’ve brought Kentucky bourbon chocolates,” my father says, “some for Amy and some for you and a box to share at the party.” These dark chocolates are a family favorite, richly filled with bourbon and with a southern pecan on top, and nothing that can be found in Wyoming. “Will Amy’s dad make the trip, do you suppose?”
“He says so. I saw him just last week, the first time I’ve seen or talked to him since the funeral. I was headed over the mountain to Sheridan and stopped at the café in Shell to gas up. He was there, in a booth, having breakfast.”
My parents, astute and respectful, won’t stumble into the hard places without invita
tion. It’s silent, and I realize I’m meant to go on.
“It’s been so long. He seemed glad to see me, so I sat down and had a visit. He was smiling, sunny like he always could be, still shoeing horses, though I’ve heard his hip’s really bad. He loves her like the world and says he’ll be there.”
“Do they see each other much?” my mother asks.
“They’re very close. They talk often, and she stays with him any time she comes north. She knows the best part of him, that sweet way he can have, his humor, his love of good books. She loves him, defends him.”
After Jenny’s funeral I’d called for help in unloading a stone bench at her grave but never heard back. He’d quit answering the phone, maybe only for me, though I don’t think so. There are things about this man I’ll never understand. But I’ve come to know that there can be a time when the story’s just too hard, and you have to close the book, put it back on the shelf, and walk into another room.
“Well,” my dad says, “I’ll be glad to see him. I’ll make a point of it to visit with him and make him feel comfortable.”
Driving down the road, I stumble over the question: “What is it that lets you grow old so well? Is it luck, attitude, exercise, some special vitamins?”
This sounds silly and makes all three of us laugh. But apparently they’ve talked about it before, and they have answers.
“Well, we try not to talk about our ailments.”
“We cultivate an interest in young people and their lives. And we make an attempt to contribute where we’re needed.”
“And we exercise.”
They finish with a flourish, as though they’ve made a pact and signed on the dotted line.
By comparison, my life feels haphazard, tilting, scattered and foolish. Turning fifty, I want to have a story to tell, a milestone to celebrate, but it feels like things are falling apart. My lover of several years has grown distant, distracted, tied up in knots about leaving his job. I had imagined building a house with this man, creating a life from scratch, a marriage, a story that has a plot, makes sense, and has a happy ending. Instead of loose ends getting knit together, though, I feel them unraveling day by day.