We stopped on a slice of rocky beach at the bottom just long enough to change into water boots and gather up the fishing rods.
“Let’s go,” said Dustin, nodding his head in the direction of the river, which wound away from us. “You and I are fishing up this way.”
“How far up that way?”
“A mile or so.”
I looked for a path along the water but there was none. Dustin plunged into the river, against the current, I quickly discovered. He seemed deeply uninterested in whether or not I could keep up. For the next half hour I struggled against the water, over the slippery rocks as the water rushed by, sometimes as high as my waist. Around me small bluebirds bounced on the rocks as though connected to springs and then leapt off, zooming along the water like fighter jets. Finally I caught up to Dustin, who’d stopped at a curve in the river where a ten-foot waterfall emptied into a deep pocket of water.
“What would happen if someone got hurt down here?” I asked, staring up at the rock face towering above us. I’d lost my footing a number of times already, once on a sharp rock that I’d just missed landing on with my face. While pulling myself up, images of my own head cracked open and bleeding into the water went through my mind.
“Don’t,” said Dustin sternly.
“But why?” So far, this trip had been so untethered from reality, I’d not given much thought to, well, reality. But as I looked around, it seemed clear that should something bad happen here, we’d be pretty fucked.
“Well,” said Dustin, his drawl now dripping contempt, “for one, we’d have to hike back to where our bags are. Then we’d have to use the satellite phone to call the forest service, then they’d have to get a helicopter, and then a few hours after that they’d airlift you out of here and send you a bill for a hundred thousand dollars.”
In my purse back in our cabin at the ranch were eye drops that had cost me one hundred fifty dollars, because I did not have prescription coverage. The woman behind the counter who sold them to me had insisted on calling the insurance company herself to make sure I was correct, and she couldn’t get them for me for cheaper. Still, there was something thrilling about the seriousness of this decision to be here. There were real-life ramifications to my every step.
It turned out I had very little interest in, or talent for, fishing. After a half hour of trying to teach me to cast a line and yelling one-word instructions with increasing frustration, Dustin took the rod back and I lay down on a smooth rock and watched him make graceful arcs as though his arm and the line were one, yanking huge fish out of the water and then releasing them. Eventually he lay down beside me. Overhead the clouds sailed gently by; below, the river streamed past in a continual series of whooshes and gurgles.
“I feel like I’m in one of those meditation, noise-canceling apps,” I said.
“I was told I should try meditation.”
“How come?”
That was all it took. Within minutes he unloosed his story, with a speed and defensiveness that suggested he’d spent a lot of time hoping for someone to show an interest and unhook whatever door was holding it back for him. He had a troubling relationship with his father. He lived with his mother, who was on disability. He was the first in his family to go to college and was there on a full engineering scholarship.
He told me all this without looking once in my direction.
“That’s a lot,” I said.
“I guess. I don’t sleep much. I mean I have problems sleeping.”
I’d had a yoga teacher once who’d advised us to envision ourselves lying in an open field and picture our thoughts as the clouds passing by overhead, separate from us and freely floating away. I told Dustin to do the same, except there was no need to visualize anything. It was all around us. We lay there for ten minutes in silence. If our roles and ages were reversed, I’d probably be falling in love with him right now, I thought. Ten years ago, I would have done acrobatics around him. Tied myself into a million knots over that silent non-smile, and stayed tangled for far too long. Looking at him now and thinking how much sway he might have held over me if the timing had been different felt like looking at an old picture of myself in an outfit I’d believed was the height of fashion when I’d put it on, but which now mostly just amusingly revealed my insecurities.
•
I tried hard to stay awake on the ride back to the ranch, not wanting to miss any part of the drive. The boys had cranked up Taylor Swift again. She was their dream girl, two of them told me. I dozed off anyway, despite the van plunging this way and that into deep pockets in the road. It was my vibrating phone that woke me. Like an air bubble in water, we’d caught a pocket of signal. It was my friend Rebecca, who ran a website about death and grief, asking me if I wanted to contribute something about my mother. We’d talked about the possibility before I left.
I don’t, I wrote, even though thanks to all my years as a freelancer, I almost never turned down a writing assignment. I’m feeling so happy right now, I want to stay in this space for as long as I can.
I looked out the window. It was true. I was happy. Not excited, not exhilarated—but deeply satisfied. It was as though the immensity of the empty space around me had absorbed everything else, my sadness, and anxiety, and emotional exhaustion, and left me in only this present moment, driving back to the ranch. I whispered it out loud to myself. A declaration. I am happy.
My phone buzzed again. I looked down expecting it to be Rebecca. It was 646.
Of course. Of course. I hadn’t heard from him in months, hadn’t thought about him in nearly as long, but who else in this moment of contentment could it be?
Hello! Sending you greetings and I hope everything is going great.
I looked at the screen for a while. And felt . . . nothing actually. He didn’t belong here. I felt as though I had crossed over into someplace else and he was back on the edge of the cliff on the other side shouting. That was how I knew it was completely over. Whatever empty place I’d once leaned on him to fill up for me was full now. There was no space for him. All there was to do was wave politely and turn.
I’m actually the best I’ve been in a long while.
I hit send just as I lost the signal again. He was gone. It would be another two days before it occurred to me to check my messages again. By that time, Jo and I were racing through Nevada. We left the ranch Friday afternoon, as late as we possibly could. In our few days there, it had become a camp-wide game to map out the shortest route we could take to San Francisco, and then estimate how far we could push our departure.
It meant driving nineteen hours with only a few hours’ break at a motel on the Wyoming state line. At a sprawling Flying J gas station outside of Reno, the kind that has showers for the truck drivers and a dark, cavernous casino, I picked a Corona out of the fridge to take with us with the intention of drinking it while I drove. We’d been in the car so long, I’d stopped thinking of it as a vehicle; it was simply where we lived. It took me a full minute to agree with Jo that I should put it back.
We pulled into San Francisco at dinnertime on Sunday, and the next morning I boarded a plane back to New York. I spent much of the flight gazing out the window, marking parts of the land below that we’d just spent two weeks driving across. I’d left Jo in her new life, and now I was returning to mine. It was August 1; the first draft of the puberty book I was cowriting was due in mid-September. All I had ahead of me was a month of writing.
The plane landed in the August heat. The city had that wonderful pressed-in, intense stillness that it gets only in August. Like a slow-motion explosion. Maddy had stacked up my mail and turned on the AC so the apartment wasn’t a furnace when I walked in. A note on the fridge said there was a chocolate Popsicle waiting for me in the freezer. I lay down on my bed and looked up through the skylight. It was perfect.
I didn’t want to be here.
I could still feel Wyoming as though it were both a mirage and a net I couldn’t untangle myself from. I texted Jo.
<
br /> I want to go back to Wyoming.
You should.
I texted Dustin.
I want to come back.
You should!
I could feel all the machinery in my head start to move the way it sometimes did when a fleeting idea, seemingly ridiculous, took hold. I lay still as my mind mapped out a way back. The owners of the ranch had mentioned they were eager for social media, some sort of internet presence, but they didn’t know how to do it. It was the sort of job that in New York media circles was now being assigned to interns; I didn’t really consider it a job. Perhaps I could do it for them in exchange for room and board. I could sleep in a bunk bed in the staff quarters, write the book in the morning, and spend the rest of the day creating this for them.
It sounded ridiculous even to me. I’d just landed. I couldn’t just up and go back to Wyoming for the month in an entirely self-created position. It was bananas. Laughable. I thought about the open mesa top, the horses running in from the hills in the morning, the intense brightness of the Milky Way at night, the cowboys and their unironic hats. There was nothing keeping me in New York except my own idea that somehow I was expected to stay put. No one needed me. Why not find out how ridiculous? I thought. All they can do is say no.
I sent the owner an email the next morning laying out my plan. Took a breath, and hit send. Twelve hours later he wrote back asking me to let him know what time my plane landed so he could arrange for someone to pick me up.
22. “Balls,” Said the Queen
The book I associate most closely with my mother is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Despite her own inability to read without knowing the end of the story, she was adamant about sending me to bed at the end of each chapter. I think of this often when I read to my niece and nephew, and naturally find it completely understandable; she was tired. She wanted a few hours kids free. But as a child, it felt like a cruel rule written in stone. Lucy gets into Narnia, reaches the lamppost, and spots a very strange person carrying an umbrella, wearing a red scarf. He sees Lucy, gives a start, and the chapter ends. When I think of my mother and me on the white couch, Pauline Baynes’s illustration of Tumnus the Faun on the last page of that chapter often comes to mind; it seemed to signify all the adventures life held in store, but that for the moment were just out of reach.
We read that book so many times that many years later I could nearly recite the opening chapter by heart. When I arrived back at the ranch a line from those pages, which Peter utters the first night they are in the Professor’s house, having been sent away from London during the war because of the air raids, repeated itself in my mind: We’ve fallen on our feet and no mistake.
I had been given my own cabin. I’d proposed, and been expecting, to be shuffled into a bunk bed in the corner of the staff quarters, which I’d heard about but never seen. Instead, I had my own little house, huge by New York standards: a large living room, a stone fireplace, my own washer and dryer. As I sat on the couch, staring out the window at the same view that had taken my breath away just two weeks earlier, I remained stunned, not just that I’d pulled this off, but that I’d thought to do so in the first place. I’d followed my gut, because I could, and had wrenched myself out of my life into a place with no internet, no cacophony of voices, no lives that I recognized.
At first, no one knew what to do with me. I was neither guest nor employee. I was the woman alone. I could feel the side-eyes as people tried to sort out exactly where I belonged.
The staff fascinated me. Almost immediately I began attending their breakfast, served at 7:00 a.m., a half hour earlier than the guests, so that I could eat with them. Nearly everyone was under thirty, many of them still in college. There was a hierarchy that revealed itself most clearly at breakfast. The wranglers, ten of them, five women and five men, ate together at the center table. When they rolled in in their worn jeans and leather chaps, required plaid shirts, and cowboy boots, all I could think of was the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story. Each morning they’d remove their cowboy hats and place them on the stone mantel before taking their seats or going to the buffet and dishing out large bowls of fruit for themselves.
At the tables on either side sat the housekeeping staff, girls from Kansas and Ohio, and on the other side, the office and childcare staff. I sat here with Laura, the pretty young woman with the thick hair who’d met Jo and me in the rain when we first arrived, and some of the kids’ staff. Girls in their early twenties, just on the brink. I remembered myself at that age, so determined to hurl myself into the deep end of life. These girls seemed calmer, more assured and in control of where they were going. They had come up with the internet; the world was not a great unknown, but something that could be mastered and directed. No doubt some of their mothers were the same age as me, or close; many of them had grown up in small towns, with conservative religious upbringings. They’d been homeschooled up until college, and many of their friends were already married. Some expecting children. But they took me on as an older sister, and after the initial settling-in period, I could see their eyes light up when I spoke about my life.
By day two, I’d forgotten that cowboy boots could even be considered amusing. My leggings and the trucker hat I still donned when I went out walking in the hills now struck me as ridiculous, a sartorial punch line. But the camp seemed to take my appearance in stride, part and parcel with my arrival during a thunderstorm and reappearance ten days later.
By day three a routine began to take shape. I rose at 5:45 a.m., slipping out from under the many blankets I had piled on my bed, into the brisk August mountain air. I pulled on my thick winter leggings, my hiking boots, my wool sweater, and a down-filled vest, and stepped out into the predawn dark to watch the “morning jingle” come in. There were 190 horses in camp; each evening half of them, the ones being used by the guests, would be released into the hills for the night, thundering along the path from the barn to the pasture, driven by a gang of whooping wranglers and then fanning out over the hills like a flock of birds before reassembling into their various groups to graze. In the morning three wranglers would ride into the hills and round them up. This was called the “jingle,” in reference to the bells that were attached to lead mares on the open range to alert riders to where they were; horses are pack animals and never stray far from one another.
As I walked down through the still-dark cabins and up the road, past the barn, to the fence that lined the driveway, I could hear the whoops of the wranglers in the hills. I reached the gate that separated the camp from the road to the barn so the horses couldn’t wander in. One of the rules of the mountains was to “always, always leave a gate the way you found it.” I was nervous I’d somehow not close it properly so I scrambled over, leaving handprints in the frost that had gathered on the wood. I scurried faster up the road. I needed to be on the other side of the fence before the horses came down, or else I risked getting hurt, or hurting them, or worse: throwing a wrench into the wranglers’ long day. At the bottom of the driveway, just up the road past the barn, was the chapel. I climbed up the steep hillside toward it, and then perched atop the fence that surrounded it. I was just in time. A minute later I could hear a rush, like the wings of many birds taking flight, then it deepened and became a rumble, and then like water bursting through a canyon the horses came galloping down the road, all one hundred of them, in a sea of browns and grays and whites. A few attempted to dart away, running up the road to come alongside where I was alighted on the fence, before catching a glimpse of me and shooting straight back down with rolling eyes.
This was not like my job at the racetrack as a teenager, where the horses had been carefully monitored from stall to track and back again. This was primal. It spoke to some long-forgotten instinct I didn’t know I possessed.
After they had passed and been put back in the corral for breakfast, I hiked up the steep slope behind the paddock—named the ski slope thanks to its nearly vertical angle—slipped once again through the gate at the top, and set
off through the band of aspens that ringed the top of the valley. A black bear had been spotted in camp with her cub. There were no grizzly bears on this side of the state, nor, sadly, any wolves. But as I marched through the towering aspens I kept my eye out for any movements. There was no need; I was too loud and clumsy to come upon anyone, much less a wild animal, without them knowing. Still, when a young buck, his rack still new, burst out ahead of me on the path and then bounced away like an enormous rabbit, my heart nearly exploded.
By the time I reached the top, I was huffing and puffing with exertion, all my extra layers tied around my waist. I was on the mesa. The very top of the flaxen hills that surrounded the camp and undulated as far as the eye could see toward the Bighorn Mountain Range. I strode across it as the sun peeked over the lip to the east, turning the mesa gold and the mountains purple and casting my shadow in front of me until it was four times longer than my actual height. I felt like Peter Pan, that any minute it would detach and strike out on its own. And the silence! I was mesmerized by it, as if it were a color outside of the spectrum. I walked over to the edge. From a distance, the mesa looked like it reached all the way to the sky like a golden ocean, but when I got to the edge I could see it dropped down in a sweeping slope until far away, it reached the trees below. I was overwhelmed by a sense of wholeness. Nothing existed here but me. My fears, anxieties, regrets had left me.
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