It was a brilliant finish. In part, I believe, because there’s no place on earth like Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley. It was here that the American bison was nursed back from the brink of extinction. And here too that, a century later, wolves would take their first steps back into the wild, after being absent for some seven decades. Both run free today, loping or howling or snoozing amidst eagles and ravens and grizzlies and otter and fox. It’s in the Lamar, too, that every May, pronghorn fawns, as well as bison and elk calves, are born, the latter by the hundreds—babies rising on wobbly legs, soon to walk, then to run.
When she was working for the Park Service nature school, this was where Jane could be found most every morning, especially during the month of May—an eager woman surrounded by eager children. There she and her students would stand huddled against the chill, staring across these meadows, whispering and gasping and giggling. And every now and then, just looking at one another wide-eyed, feeling lucky. Knowing what a good thing it was to be smack in the middle such a wild place. Chosen ones, they were, witnessing for the whole world that unforgettable spill of new beginnings.
EPILOGUE
As I write this, in early February, the creek that rolls past my back door is frozen fast, little sign of it save the wide path it carved though the belly of the valley long ago, in the time of ice. My experience of this time of year has completely changed since Jane’s death. Not that I haven’t always liked winter—schussing down untracked slopes on telemark skis, hooking tow ropes to cars with friends and pulling each other down old forest roads at dubious speeds. But now I spend a fair amount of time simply taking in the woods. Sometimes, during storms, I watch whitetail deer coalescing into lines, breaking trail through the deep snow. Small familiarities, akin to the little pieces of miracle that so comforted my mother, and at the same time a part of the grand stories Kenneth Rexroth talked about—pieces of the myths that make us human. The tragedy has left me feeling more aligned with that Inuit notion Jane and I ran across in the Arctic—the one that claims the whole world can be comprehended by paying attention to the relationships at your feet.
I also find myself trying to figure things out—childlike things of little consequence, like just how long a bald eagle is willing to sit on the cottonwood branch outside the house and scan the creek for fish before he gives up the effort and tries someplace else. It’s in the woods just beyond my door where I’m likely to recall that life as we know it wouldn’t even arise in the first place, unless it also passed away.
Each morning now, all through the winter, there arrives to the edge of the creek a plain little bird—the dipper, jumping off blocks of ice in even the worst weather to pluck larvae from the bottom of the stream, then back up onto the ice again, where she bobs up and down for a time, looking like a little kid about to wet her pants because she’s got something important to say. Jane and I used to pretend the dipper we saw across our fourteen years together in this house was the same bird. We called her Darlene.
For reasons I don’t fully understand, winter, if not my favorite season, is in these days the one I’m most drawn to. On every night of cloudless sky, Orion and Gemini and Libra come rolling overhead, through heavens so clear I can see starlight shimmering in the forest. A time well after the end of things, and long before they begin again. When every morning I stand in the living room, arms down, and my face inches away from the east-facing window, breathing in and breathing out, considering one more time the right kind of devotion needed to conjure from that snow and ice the buds of spring.
As so often happens when someone dies, especially someone relatively young and strong and full of fire, in the years following the accident, there came to those of us who loved Jane a somewhat tilted vision. It was a kind of delightful penchant for elevating her courage, her astonishing enthusiasm, to dimensions more rightly suited to the gods. We spent countless seasons being both hugely thrilled and deeply saddened by our bedazzling memories of her laughter, her kindness. But Jane didn’t live in some kind of paradise of ease and contentment. Like any of us, she was never completely free of doubt, or fear, or uncertainty.
It’s been good for me to see this. To reach a point where I can know her again as fully human. Among the greatest gifts she gave, after all, had nothing to do with perfection. Rather, it was the sweet reassurance, the simple boost of spirit that comes from having known someone who managed to see the mythical shining through the mundane.
THERE’S GOOD NEWS THESE DAYS, MIXED IN WITH ALL THE craziness, as we push together into this new millennium. But then I suppose that’s the way it’s always been. America’s twenty-somethings—the goat herders, the young woman shuttling local organic produce, even a group of young African Americans in the Yerba Buena section of San Francisco, “grinding for the green”—keep reminding me that we still have choices. Close to home, hundreds of people are making heroic efforts to establish critical wildlife migration corridors, including a passageway from Yellowstone through the Canadian Rockies all the way to the Yukon. Meanwhile the old McLaren Mine near Cooke City, which has been leaking deadly poison into a major watershed at the edge of Yellowstone for more than 120 years, is now nearly reclaimed. Windmills are going up on the highline. Little kids are running around Yellowstone, deliriously happy. And in my hometown of Red Lodge, a nature camp has been started in Jane’s honor. Now every summer kids get the chance to traipse through meadows of phlox and forget-me-nots, kneel on the banks of mountain streams, shoulder their packs and set off on the same trails she roamed all those years.
And there’s something else, too. Something truly amazing. Terry Tempest Williams once said about grief that it “dares us to love once more.” In the spring of 2013, I took that dare. I met a remarkable woman from Portland named Mary Clare—a social psychology professor, a listener, a champion of diversity and justice. And beyond that, a survivor of her own runs of heartbreak and calamity. We would fall in love in these uplands of the northern Rockies, and also wandering that great Northwestern city of hers, amidst the azaleas and roses, under the London plane trees of Laurelhurst Park.
From the very beginning, we walked, walked everywhere. And six months after we met, on a brilliant day in August, we walked to Becker Lake—that place in the Beartooths where Jane’s ashes had been scattered four years earlier. Standing on a ridge high above the eastern shore of the lake, Mary’s hand in mine, I opened my mouth and called out into a warm southern breeze.
“Jane,” I said. “This is Mary!”
And far below, for a minute or so afterward, there was this dazzling little miracle of wind and water and light running up the south end of the lake. We married the following winter, on Rock Creek, on a morning in January when the dipper was flitting from ice floe to ice floe, and the sun seemed like a village bonfire hanging in the air, lighting fourteen inches of fresh snow.
Our lives too, like every life, are unfolding as wilderness. On any given day, there’s both beauty and chaos standing together, just as the Paiute said they would. In some ways, the miles we’re traveling together now have been sweetened by our wounds—by each of us having learned beyond the shadow of a doubt that nothing lasts forever. It isn’t really fear that rises from such notions, such feelings of impermanence—at least not on our good days—but rather a simple appeal for presence. An invitation to life. And when we accept, there often comes a feeling of being on the finest, brightest of paths—free of future, unshackled by past. All of life encompassed in a single step. And then another. Strung together like pearls, in our long, precious journey from beautiful to goodbye.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have been written without the support of an extraordinary group of friends, family, and colleagues. Thanks especially to Mark and Gin, for a friendship that not only lifted me when I was broken, but in the end convinced me that I could once again begin to run. Also to Jane’s niece, Abby, my brother, Jim, as well as to all the kindhearted people of Red Lodge, Montana. Enormous gratitude too to those
who helped craft the narrative: My agent, Nancy Stauffer, for her brilliant insights into the nature of the tale, as well as for her many years of steadfast encouragement. To Dan Smetanka at Counterpoint, for his abundant enthusiasm and masterful editing. And to the spectacularly gifted faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop.
Lastly, my enduring love and respect to my precious wife, Mary: For her luminous spirit and her dazzling mind. For the way she loosed a gentle breath across my heart, blowing frail embers into lasting flame. And finally, for the way she offered up so gracefully a great measure of the courage needed for two people, each having borne a feast of calamity, to join hands, and begin again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Over the past twenty-five years Gary Ferguson has established himself as an expert chronicler of nature, having written for a wide variety of publications from Vanity Fair to The Los Angeles Times. He is the author of nineteen books on science and nature, including the award-winning Hawk’s Rest. He is also a highly regarded keynote speaker at conservation and outdoor education gatherings around the country and is currently on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop Masters of Fine Arts program at Pacific Lutheran University.
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