The guy punched me in the forehead, and I reeled backward a little, just in time for the second punch directly on my cheekbone, same side.
This is not good, I (slowly) thought, and I turned to run. I stumbled maybe thirty or forty feet before he kicked my legs out from underneath me and I fell to the pavement, face-first.
I awoke alone, no pickup truck forty feet away, no people nearby. I could hear the creek running downhill from me, and when I realized I had shit my pants, I thought about diving in to rinse myself off. My ribs and face hurt. I got up and started walking.
I accosted the first couple I saw and told them Ottumwa was the biggest shithole I’d ever been in. I had blood all over my face and bare chest, which may have been what caught their attention. I told them what had happened, and they gave me a ride to their house in the back of their truck. There was room in the cab, but I think they could smell me. They gave me a can of beer and a clean towel, and through the bathroom wall, I could hear the woman calling someone and telling them what I’d said about my one-sided fight. She was outraged that something like that could happen in her town. I was too.
When they gave me a ride back to camp, I found my teammates drinking with an older couple named Bear and Mary. Bear told me that he used to get in all sorts of trouble when he stayed out late. Once he quit staying out late, he quit getting in trouble. He was giving me advice, but I was too stupid to understand. I thought he meant I should just drink at home from now on.
When I got back from the trip, feeling mistreated and wanting to blame someone, I wrote a letter to the Des Moines Register about my experience. The Register printed my angry, naive letter, blaming the town of Ottumwa, and a reporter called me to follow up with a story. She pointed out that I had never reported the incident to the police, had never registered for the bike ride (we hadn’t in three years of riding), and had been drinking (which I’d admitted over the phone). So I got beat up, but I was the one who ended up looking like an asshole.
A few nights before Ottumwa, three girls I’d never seen before picked me up in Ankeny and took me to Ames, where one of the girls and I messed around in someone’s bedroom, and then I never talked to her again. Amy and I were not officially “dating” that summer. I think we had talked and decided that we should “take a break,” or I used some other wording that made me feel okay about wanting to hit on other girls.
So I deserved what I got. When you treat people like dirt, sometimes other people will treat you like a punching bag. Sometimes this happens just days apart. A couple of years later, I stopped believing in bad luck.
On my 365th day of sobriety, at Altered Skin on Brooks Street in Missoula, I watched a buzzing tattoo needle rip into my skin, just above my left bicep. Watching the needle seemed to make the pain less sharp—I could see it coming.
I had decided I needed a tattoo instead of an AA chip for my one-year, so on the exact day, I walked down to the shop and showed the artist a piece of paper with some ideas. I spent a hundred dollars of the little money I had and got two tattoos: a claddagh wrapping around my left arm just under my shoulder, and a crown and a copyright symbol on my right shoulder, a sort of signature of the ’80s pop artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. He was a hero of mine who had died of a heroin overdose long before I’d ever heard of him.
I walked the mile home in the cold spring air, over the Higgins Avenue Bridge, with fresh blood and fresh ink on both arms, prouder than hell of myself for making it through the hardest year of my life.
A month later, everyone else in Missoula was partying and I was out front smoking another cigarette on my second-floor porch. I had warmed up a cup of coffee in the microwave and was sipping it with my cigarette. Three guys I recognized as my neighbors walked across the parking lot to their Honda Accord. As the two guys standing by the passenger side waited for the driver to unlock the doors, they both looked up at me.
“Just havin’ a cup of coffee and a cigarette,” one said, just loud enough for me to hear. Then they got in the car and drove away.
Anger welled in my chest and bubbled toward the top of my head. They had lived there long enough to know my Saturday night routine. To them, I was a lonely old lady in a housecoat and curlers, a sad fixture on my porch watching all the neighbors live their young, exciting lives. I hated them for having the freedom to go out on the town and talk to girls and drink a little too much. I hated myself for not having anything else to do, or knowing what to do. You could have wrung the desperation out of me and filled up a bathtub with it. I had no social life and no friends. Well, one friend.
Tim and I had started the journalism program together. He was built like a runner, slight but strong, some of that probably due to his thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail two summers before he came to Montana. He was from Silver Spring, Maryland, and had majored in zoology during his undergrad because it had “sounded interesting.” He smiled big and laughed loud, and was always happy to take a smoke break with me. Unlike me, Tim had a bit more of a social life, but he found time to hang out with me once in a while on the weekends.
At the end of the first semester, Tim left the journalism program, because he wasn’t getting what he wanted out of it. I hadn’t considered what I wanted out of it; I had arrived in town to get a master’s degree in journalism. I had never thought further than that. After he quit journalism school, Tim stayed in Missoula, working remotely for a software company and thinking about going to law school, but we didn’t see each other in class on campus anymore, just at the Raven for coffee or a weekend hike. Tim could talk movies and books and music and life almost nonstop, and seemed like he’d already explored every trail within an hour of Missoula in our short time there.
One late spring Saturday afternoon, Tim and I started hiking up the back side of Mount Sentinel. It was my first time going up that route, but I trusted Tim to know what to do if it got dark on us before we finished.
After a mile or so, we met up with the Hellgate Canyon Trail, which climbed sixteen hundred feet through the evergreens and some unmelted snow to a jeep trail named Crazy Canyon Road. It was nearly pitch-dark when we hit Crazy Canyon Road, which took us a steep quarter mile up to the top, almost all by moonlight.
At the top was a view of Missoula’s lights, stretching out onto the plain. Tim said the view was actually better from farther down the front side, closer to the giant white concrete M that hung about six hundred feet up from campus. The lights of the city bounced around as we started down the trail, closer to jogging than walking.
A few hundred feet down, we sat without talking, watching a plane slowly cover the six miles over the valley from the Bitterroot Range to land at the Missoula Airport at the far northwest end of town. We had to be the only people on that mountain just then.
Near the end of my second semester in grad school, the clouds lifted off Missoula and the sun came back for good, not going down until almost 9 p.m. Everyone under the age of thirty switched to dresses and tank tops and shorts, throwing Frisbees around campus, riding skateboards and bikes, and taking their time outside instead of rushing between heated buildings. It was once again the sunny Missoula you see on all the college brochures.
A few weeks before the end of classes, I planned to skip the Dean Stone awards banquet for the School of Journalism, despite the fact that it was taking place two and a half blocks from my apartment, at the Holiday Inn. Everyone gave me shit about it, until I finally went to Professor Swibold to explain that I was skipping the banquet because, well, I was a recovering alcoholic, and I really didn’t know how to handle myself yet at functions where everyone had a few drinks—no offense. He said he understood.
As I stood on my porch smoking another cigarette, drinking some coffee, and wishing I knew how to act around large groups of people again, they announced my name for the A. B. Guthrie Memorial Scholarship, and Professor Swibold had to go to the microphone to tell everyone that I couldn’t be there that night.
One afternoon, my dad called as I ate lunch in m
y dim kitchen. He said he’d gotten pulled over the other night.
“For what?” I asked him.
“Well, you know, I had to drive down to the Waverly store to get some filets, because we were out and we don’t have a truck coming for another week. So I drove down, and you remember my friend Kent?”
“Yeah, kind of,” I said.
“Well, he sold that Bourbon Street bar in Cedar Falls and opened up another bar in Waverly, so I stopped in to see him, since we used to golf together every once in a while.”
“Okay,” I said, hoping the part with the cops would hurry up and get there.
“Well, I had a couple of beers while we talked. It’s a nice place. You would have liked it.”
Stopping in to see someone was not out of character for my dad, but drinking “a couple of beers” was. I figured maybe he started to loosen up a little after my brother and I got out of his hair.
“Anyway, I start heading home, you know, on the back way that goes through Ionia, the way we used to take when I had to drive you down to the orthodontist.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, as I’m going through Ionia, I really gotta piss. I mean really gotta piss, like now. Nothing’s open in Ionia except that one bar, and I don’t want to go in there and use their bathroom without buying anything, so I just keep going on my way home. But after I get out of town, I realize I’m not going to make it, so I pull off on that first gravel road. You know, where the Uglums’ house is.”
“Yeah, Gilmore,” I said. I had stopped to pee many times on Gilmore Avenue while drinking with the Uglums’ son.
“Well, I’m taking a piss off in the ditch, and a car pulls up behind my truck. It’s a state trooper.”
“Whoa,” I said, wondering what this would mean for my parents’ reputation. In our small town, news travels through the beauty salons faster than it does on the internet.
“Yeah,” Dad says. “Well, he saw me pissing, which it turns out is actually illegal. Anyway, we start talking, and he smells beer on me and asks me if I’d like to do some roadside maneuvers. You know, touching your nose—”
“Yeah, I know what they are, Dad.”
“Yeah. So, I passed ’em, and he asks me if I’d agree to take a breath test, and I figure I better take the breath test, because if you say no—”
“You lose your license for a year. I know, Dad.”
“Yeah. Well, I gotta have my license to drive to work, so I take the breath test. I only had a couple of beers, you know.”
“Yeah. What’d you blow?” It was killing me.
“Well, I blew a .09.”
“Shit,” I said.
“And you know, they lowered the limit from .10 to .08, so that’s a DUI.”
“Jesus Christ, Dad.” People in New Hampton would be talking about Joe Leonard by the end of the week, for sure.
“Well, he didn’t give me a DUI. He gave me a choice.”
“No shit?”
“He said I could either take the DUI or a ticket for indecent exposure, since I was pissing outside.”
“Well?” Please say you took the DUI.
“Well, I gotta be able to drive to work. What am I gonna do, walk? Have your mother pick me up? I can’t do that.”
“You took indecent exposure?”
I could already hear the ladies at the hair salons in town: Did you hear about Joe Leonard, the meat man at Fareway? Got caught out on a gravel road near Ionia, taking a leak. State trooper busted him for indecent exposure. And that was if they heard his side of the story first. If not, he’d be crucified all over the county. DUIs were pretty much a dime a dozen in my hometown. But indecent exposure? You got one, you were marked as a pervert, for sure. My parents were finished in New Hampton.
“So, what? Are you getting a lawyer?” I asked.
“Nah, it’s just a fine,” he said.
“No shit? How much?”
“Twelve hundred bucks,” he said.
“Jeeeeesus Christ,” I said. “For indecent exposure?”
“Yep,” he said. “A hundred bucks an inch.”
Silence. I shook my head.
“You’re a fucking asshole, Dad.”
Laughter from his end of the phone.
“More like fifty bucks,” I said. “You prick.”
Louder laughter. It was the sound of the end of his statute of limitations on telling jokes about drunk-driving arrests to his son, who very recently had massively fucked up his life by getting arrested twice for drunk driving. I smiled.
ELEVATION
TIM AND I RACED OUT of Idaho Falls in my old Pontiac, which my parents had driven out to Missoula at the end of the second semester. Near the end of my summer internship at the Idaho Falls Post Register, I’d talked Tim into driving down from Missoula for an adventure. We were headed for Ketchum, the town where Ernest Hemingway had been buried after shooting himself in the head with a shotgun in 1961. In the early afternoon, we found his tombstone, covered in coins like a wishing well, and we posed for photos.
After getting groceries, we headed north on Route 75, to the closest town, Stanley, Idaho, population 100, sixty-two miles away. From there, we traced the path of the Salmon River another fifty-five miles to the intersection with Highway 93. Thirty-five miles south of there, we turned onto Birch Springs Road, a rough dirt path that climbs about a thousand feet to the base of Borah Peak.
I’d been working at the Post Register in between my semesters at the University of Montana, and one of my coworkers at the newspaper, Jerry Painter, was a real mountain climber. Jerry had said that since Tim and I were planning to go up Borah on a weekday, we’d most likely have the whole mountain to ourselves. But the chatter of twenty or so kids camping at the base of the peak said this was not so on this particular day.
Tim set up his tent, because I still didn’t know how to set one up on my own. I helped and tried to watch what he did. He had recommended I buy a sleeping pad to go under my sleeping bag, but I didn’t bother, thinking the forty-five dollars I had spent on my Expedition Trails sleeping bag at the army surplus store was enough. Tim had laughed at it when he saw it sitting on the couch in my apartment, because it was so bulky and heavy.
Tim cooked dinner on his backpacking stove, a tiny device that sat on top of a tank of butane the size of a can of cashews. I watched him and then refused when he offered me some food. I was nervous as shit—way too nervous to eat—and I was smoking a cigarette about every twenty minutes. Our destination, Chicken-Out Ridge, was about halfway up the mountain, and a guidebook I’d read had described it as a “knife-edge.” According to Jerry, it was a place that could give someone “a quick exit off the mountain.” He also told me just to stay as high as possible and I’d be fine. I didn’t know what that meant, but that was the least of my long list of anxieties.
Can I handle the altitude? Can I handle climbing fifty-two hundred feet in less than four miles? Is fifty-two hundred feet in less than four miles tough, or is that normal for a climb? I have no frame of reference. Should I really be smoking all these cigarettes right now, the night before I try to haul my skinny carcass up to almost thirteen thousand feet? How high is that, really? Isn’t Mount Everest like twenty thousand feet or something? What am I doing here? I’ve never even read a book about mountain climbing. This is not rational.
Well, quitting smoking a few hours before trying to climb a mountain wouldn’t help that much, I reasoned. So I’d just have to take it slow. I walked over to use the pit toilet in the parking lot, and, standing in line with my toilet paper, I chatted up a couple of the kids from the large group. They were from BYU-Idaho, in Rexburg, thirty miles north of Idaho Falls. Their professor had climbed Borah nine times.
Finally, when it was dark, I smoked my last cigarette and crawled into my cheapo sleeping bag next to Tim in the tent. I rolled over on my side, trying to ball up my sweatshirt into a pillow. I tried sleeping on my stomach. Tim, asleep, farted. I tried sleeping on my back. It was quiet. The wind stroked t
he tent’s rain fly. Was I really going to do this?
I tried to sleep on my side again. Nope. Back onto my back. I should have brought a book and a flashlight. Tim farted again. I didn’t hear it, but I could smell it.
I hate camping. I wonder if there’s a way to do all this outdoor shit and not have to sleep in a tent. What’s the point of making yourself miserable to enjoy the outdoors? We could have just gotten up really early in the morning and driven here. No one can possibly get a good night’s sleep in these conditions. Maybe Tim was right. I should have bought a sleeping pad. Is that another fart?
I don’t know if I’m going to be able to handle this.
At 5 a.m., I gave up the hope of being even halfway well rested and sat up. It was still dark outside the thin nylon wall of the tent. I stuffed my sleeping bag into its stuff sack and went out to put my shoes on. My hiking boots were in a storage shed in Missoula, so I wore my vintage Adidas Marathon Trainers and itchy wool socks. My backpack, crammed full of extra clothes, three liters of water, and some snacks, was heavy—maybe fifteen pounds.
I’d told myself the night before I wasn’t going to smoke any cigarettes in the morning, but Tim took so long brushing his teeth and putting in his contact lenses that I figured, the hell with it, I might as well. The sun was beginning to come up, but it was on the other side of Borah Peak, so it was going to be chilly until it could make its way over the top of the huge mass of rock in front of us.
The kids from BYU-Idaho started up the trail ahead of us. I’d been hoping we’d start ahead of them and still have a chance to have the mountain all to ourselves. We walked through the opening in the log fence at the start of the trail and past the sign that said the mountain was named in honor of William E. Borah, a US senator from Idaho from 1907 to 1940, and that it was the tallest mountain in all of Idaho. It was my first mountain in all of Idaho.
Sixty Meters to Anywhere Page 7