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.
ON 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.
UP THERE IN THE BEARTOOTHS 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.
AT CHRISTMAS LAKE I HAD A DREAM ABOUT JANE. ONE 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.
TOM, BRIAN, AND I REACHED BECKER LAKE THE MORNING of the fourth day, having lost time when I tried an alternate route I’d heard about but couldn’t find. After a night of cold and nearly constant rain—the only such weather of the trip—the wind rounded to the west and the sun broke free. As we topped a small rise at the south end of Becker, the scene took our breath away. The lake shimmered with the deep blue of glacier water, while the shore was dappled with a loose toss of conifers. Beyond the far end, at last within easy reach, was Lone Mountain—the peak we’d been staring at hour after hour on our first two days of walking, high above the Rock Creek Valley. At the best campsite was a yellow tent, which I recognized as belonging to my old friends Kent and his wife Diane. I tossed a loud whistle down the rocks, and with binoculars saw them turn and finally spot us, waving their arms overhead. Their dog Buckley was quicker on the draw. Sensing an important mission, he was already heading toward us at a fast gallop, anxious to herd us home.
THE SCATTERING HAPPENED MID-AFTERNOON, JUST AS A TATTERED sheet of overcast sky pulled apart into clusters of gray-bellied clouds floating through the summer blue. The air smelled of pine and sedge and lake water. We were an eclectic lot: an attorney and his wife, a restaurateur, a retired ranger and his wife, a fellow writer and a judge—all glad to have come for the friend they’d lost, as well as for the one who still remained.
This ceremony was the first done with other people present, as would be the last one, in Yellowstone. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the power of community: I’d seen it time and again, both in the months following Jane’s death, but also years before—how friends, even new friends, really can in times of tragedy take a share of the burden and, in doing so, stem the bleeding of loneliness.
I’d done the first scatterings by myself because those journeys were about me claiming an intimate gift: the chance to go to wilderness on Jane’s behalf. By remembering what the Sawtooths and the Wood River and the slickrock country had done for each of us, I was able to begin moving from the feeling that I’d been cheated to a recognition that nothing could take away the life we’d shared. With that gratitude, I began to discern the stepping-stones through grief. The first three scatterings had been about recovery. These last two were about celebration.
We sat in a circle under the arms of an old Engelmann spruce, and I asked if anyone had any Jane stories to share. Janet told of sipping champagne with her in the outback under the stars on New Year’s Eve—a memory plucked from one of the many ski treks we’d made with her and Rand, pulling sleds filled with cheeses and game hens and wild rice and cream sauces. She said she still talked to Jane, had long conversations, especially in summer, on her almost-daily walks into the backcountry. Diane said she missed the sight of Jane skiing the two miles from our house into town at ungodly hours of the morning, on her way to work at the café.
As the stories unfolded, some of us cried. But we cried with smiles on our faces. Even all those years after the wreck on the Kopka, Jane’s life was binding us to one another. Seven different versions of a good love.
As for me, I decided to tell a story. My favorite story, passed to me years ago by an Ojibwa elder in Minnesota. Since Jane’s death, hardly a week passes that I don’t think of it.
It was a long time ago in the land of trees. Spirit Woman had given birth to human twins. Now as it happened, it fell to the animal people to care for these babies, and they were committed to the task—doting on them, eager to meet their every need. Bear warmed them through the wee hours by hugging them to her hairy chest. Then each morning at dawn, Beaver came along, taking the babies from Bear and carrying them to the shore of a nearby lake, where she dipped them in the water and then set them out in the meadow in the sun to dry.
Then it was Dog’s turn. Dog took his job more seriously than anyone. When flies came along and pestered the babies, Dog snapped at them to chase them away. When the twins were cranky, out of sorts with colic, he nuzzled their bellies with his cold, wet nose and made them laugh. If that didn’t work, he jumped into the air and did all manner of clever tricks. Deer gave them milk throughout the day. At night the birds sang them to sleep.
But something wasn’t right. And one morning Bear got up the courage to say something about it. “We feed them and care for them like our own,” she said. “But still they don’t stand. They don’t run and play.” Everyone knew exactly what she was talking about. “Okay,” said Dog, already making a plan. “Nanabush, the son of the West Wind, is coming tomorrow. He’s smart. He’ll know what to do.”
Sure enough, the next day, Nanabush did come. Because Nanabush always comes when the animal people need him. He studied the babies out in the meadow, all the while listening, nodding his head as the animal people explained the problem. First of all, he finally told them, you’ve done a good job taking care of these human babies.
“I think maybe you did too good of a job. The young of any creature don’t grow by having everything done for them. They grow by reaching, by struggling for what they want.”
But as smart as Nanabush was, he was clueless about how to fix it. So as he’d done countless times in the past, he readied himself for a long journey west, to a certain high peak he knew about—maybe it was right here in the Beartooths—to ask the Great Spirit what to do.
Nanabush left the land of the trees and began the long trek across the prairie, reaching that certain mountain after weeks of hard travel. With no small effort he climbed to the summit, and there summoned Great Spirit. And Great Spirit came. Because Great Spirit always comes when Nanabush calls. After explaining the predicament, Nanabush was told to start scouring the summit of that great mountain for a certain kind of colorful, sparkling stone. “Gather every one of them into a big pile, right here,” Great Spirit said. It was a huge job. But Nanabush had been around long enough to know there was no use trying to bargain for something easier. He started collecting, day after day after day, until finally there was an enormous pile made up of every last one of the colored stones.
But what was he supposed to do next? Hour after hour he sat there hoping for some further instruction from Great Spirit. But no word came. Finally, out of boredom, Nanabush began tossing the stones into the air, first one at a time, then big handfuls. He invented games. He learned to juggle. Then one morning, as the sun was poking above the east horizon, he grabbed a big handful of the stones and tossed them high into the air. Only this time, they didn’t come down again. This time they changed, turning from stones into the most beautiful winged creatures Nanabush had ever seen. They were the world’s first butterflies.
Now he knew what he needed to do. He worked h
is way down the mountain and began the long trip back across the prairie, the whole time surrounded by a flashing, fluttering blanket of butterflies. When he finally got back to the land of the trees, back to the babies, the twins looked up from the grass and were overjoyed. Their arms went up toward the sky, and they were trying their best to catch the butterflies in their chubby hands. Of course that’s no way to catch a butterfly. Pretty soon they started crawling after them. A few more weeks passed, and they were on their feet, still reaching, still trying. In time they were walking. And then not so long after that, they were running through the woods and across the meadows, trying to catch even one of those beautiful winged creatures.
And that, say the Ojibwa, is how butterflies taught children to walk.
I told my friends how before I left the storyteller’s cottage, she’d put her hand on my shoulder and said that if I told the tale, I should understand something: that her people don’t keep it alive because they need to be reminded not to give their children everything they want.
“We pretty much get that,” she told me. “We tell the story when we get stuck. When we fall into sadness or anger or lose hope. The story tells us to first heal our relationship with beauty—that beauty will help us start moving again.”
When the circle came to an end, when no one had anything more to say, I offered up the silver spoon and the pottery jar, inviting everyone to take part in the scattering of ashes. Each person took the spoon and walked away, disappearing for a time, searching with great care—for the right view, the perfect cast of granite, a certain strength of breeze. Plucking metaphors in the quest for a perfect final resting place for their friend. The only one I actually saw was Diane, standing fifty feet above the shore on a narrow perch of granite; I caught sight of her just in time to see her let loose her measure of ashes, watched them float east and then north, toward the heart of the Beartooths, before finally disappearing.
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