As the sun rose higher, the silence was broken by what sounded like drunken partiers, laughing and yipping. Some wranglers must still be out, I thought, annoyed that they were ruining my morning quiet. When I went down to breakfast I asked Ivy about it.
She frowned. “Really?”
I explained the laughing and the yipping I’d heard.
“Are you sure it wasn’t coyotes?” She pronounced it kay-yotes.
I stared. “Seriously?”
She laughed. “Probably. They’re everywhere.”
“Ivy, I’m from New York. The only thing we have everywhere are rats.”
The next morning, I listened more closely. But this time along with the yips I could now hear howls. It was coyotes! Eventually I began to think of them as my morning companions, singing up the sun and giving voice to these new wild mornings.
In the evenings, before bed I walked down to say good night to the horses that had not been turned out for the night. In New York, I was only ever aware of the moon as an accessory to the skyline, something that added to my enjoyment of the Brooklyn Bridge. Here I quickly became attuned to it as if it were a traffic light. The road out of the camp, the same one I walked in the morning, would first take me by the saloon, which most nights was booming with either music or guests and staff. The light spilled out the windows onto the roadway in golden squares. By the time I crossed over the stream that ran through camp and reached the gate, the noise of the saloon had almost entirely died off; all I could hear was the noise of the water running by. A little beyond the gate, the road dipped down, and I would pass through a pocket of cool air. On the nights when there was a moon, I was able to make out the roadway clearly in the dark—it glowed in the moonshine as if it were lit from underneath. Even when there was no moon, the light from the stars on clear nights provided enough glow for me to see where I was going. But if there was no moon and it was cloudy, I’d have to do the walk in the dark. Not dark, pitch-black.
The first time I did it I felt like I was in a closet with the door shut. I literally couldn’t see my hand before my face. I had to force myself to keep walking, one foot in front of the other, and push thoughts of bears and coyotes out of my head. I was too loud, the camp was too near, the horses would alert me if there was something to be concerned about. I navigated my way by the sound of the gravel under my feet, by the cool pocket of air I blindly walked through, keeping my ears alert for the comforting sound of the horses, and then the warm smell of ammonia and hay. The dark was thrilling. It pushed everything else out of my head until my whole life was contained in this one stretch of gravel roadway.
After a while, I began to know the horses and was able to differentiate them by their appearance and personalities. Horses galloping through the wilderness were cosmic poetry. Horses grouped together in a paddock were a high school soap opera. There were cliques and bullies, weaklings, losers, and of course the popular crowd. Each night, I watched which ones grouped together and who pushed whom out of the way or nipped or sometimes even kicked (there were a few mustangs in the bunch), and who always came first when I held handfuls of hay out for them to eat.
“They are so bitchy!” I marveled to Ivy one evening over cold beers. “It’s like a lunchtime cafeteria filled with preteen girls.”
At the end of my first week J.D. showed up. J.D. was Dustin’s friend whom he’d been talking about so much that week, and in such adoring terms, I was annoyed by the idea of him before he even arrived.
J.D. arrived one afternoon on a slim little motorbike he’d ridden all the way from Georgia. “Straight through,” he drawled in an accent even thicker than Dustin’s. “I stopped once for a four-hour shut-eye under a bridge.” He told me he’d kept awake by taking swigs from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s he kept wedged in the pocket of his leather jacket. He was twenty-eight, and so handsome that when I first bumped into him and Dustin coming around the corner of the kitchen, I’d nearly remarked on it out loud. Thick blond hair that appeared to have arrived directly from a seventies cop show, muscled body, and that accent.
I’d continued to go out on Tinder dates here and there since my sixty-year-old stunt guy fiasco. There was no end of messages in my account. But nothing held my attention for too long. “You have to make an effort,” said my friend Marianne. “Dating is work.” But why? I thought. An effort for what? I still wanted romance, sure. Of course I did. And sex. But “you have to work at it,” suggested dating was the equivalent of paying my dues, a necessary evil on the way to a larger goal. I had no larger goal. And it made the whole thing much easier. Maybe this could be something, he looks good on paper, I’ll keep trying became This was not very interesting, see you later. Men had become something to enjoy, not a means to an end.
I didn’t see J.D. again until the next day I tagged along on another fishing trip, this time to a place called Crazy Woman Canyon, so named because according to legend the woman (depending on whom you spoke to, she was either white or Native American) who once lived here had been driven mad after her husband and children were killed by either (again, depending) Native Americans or white men. I was the only woman in a group of middle-aged, married male guests. As everyone fanned out, J.D. stuck close by asking me questions about what I was doing here, what sort of writer I was. What I wrote. I kept shifting the conversation just so I could hear his voice. After dinner, he came up to me at the saloon and bought me a shot of tequila. I knew it was the beverage of choice with the camp staff, but I’d stayed clear so far. The last time I’d drunk tequila I’d been twenty-four years old, and the hangover had been three days long.
It was square dancing night, and all the girl wranglers had put on their short dresses, were out on the floor doing swings and flips that made me dizzy. Out of their cowboy hats and jeans, they looked as though they could be competing in a Miss America contest.
By our second shot, J.D. was telling me about his childhood with a difficult single mother, describing how she would force him to exchange punches with her so he could learn to toughen up. He responded to my look of horror with a shrug: “The world is not a nice place. She wanted me to be able to deal.” He told me about his time in the marines and the ex-girlfriend he had back home. “Does she know she’s your ex?” I asked. He grinned and shrugged. Then he switched to politics and writers. He loved Vonnegut.
“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time,” I said.
He nodded, his eyes sparkling with recognition. And then he stopped and looked at me.
“How come you don’t have a boyfriend?”
In the last few days a lot of the wranglers had been slowly working their way toward me, tossing out funny questions: “Is that dress you’re wearing called a muumuu?” “In New York, it’s called a caftan.” “Who’s that person on your t-shirt?” “Debbie Harry.” But no one had yet been so direct.
I shrugged, a shred of the old feeling that I should somehow feel bad about myself flickered by and then promptly disappeared. “I just don’t.” I smiled. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not at all. It’s just, you’re so gorgeous, and the best conversationalist I’ve ever met.”
If he’d simply said, “You’re gorgeous,” I would have chalked it up, like any other bar come-ons I’d received over the years, to alcohol and lack of imagination. But “the best conversationalist I’ve ever met”? It was a funny compliment coming from a gorgeous twenty-eight-year-old marine, currently drawing sideways eyes from nearly every woman in the room. I thought of all the dates I’d been on, phone calls made, and text messages I’d sent, where every word had been weighed as though I were making a court appearance. “Don’t say the wrong thing!” is something women are taught from birth. I thought back—I had no idea what I’d been saying all day. I’d been too mesmerized by the scenery and keeping my eyes peeled for rattlesnakes. J.D. was still staring at me. This was a particular power I was not prepared for, I thought. No wonder intelligent older unmarried women were
always cast as dangerous creatures. Furies and witches and sorceresses and harpies. Experienced, confident minds, bodies far from failing. I had all the power right now. To come and go, to unhook from one life and plunge into another, to drink with a sixty-year-old one day and a twenty-eight-year-old the next. Mine for the choosing. I had become unstuck in time, I thought. Absolutely untethered from any expectation, or lack of one, that I’d ever had regarding my life past forty.
An hour and two (or possibly three) more shots of tequila later, J.D. walked me to my cabin, sticking his arm out for me to loop mine through. For a while we stood on the driveway staring at the blanket of stars above, it appeared as though someone were shining a bright light through an empty pincushion, and listening to the coyotes cackling away in the hills. At my door, he did a little bow. “Good night, madam.”
I opened the door and walked in, but he stayed on the porch.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“You have to invite me. Like a vampire.”
“Honestly.” I rolled my eyes. “Just come in.”
We sat on the couch talking for so long I thought perhaps this was what it was going to be: a long night of talking. And then finally he leaned over and kissed me. Off came my dress, then the bra. For a brief moment, I considered what my body looked like compared to a twenty-eight-year-old’s, and then just as quickly I forgot to think about it. I knew better. If there was one lesson I had learned by now, it was that how confident I felt was directly proportional to how much I was enjoying myself. And I was very much enjoying myself. We landed on my bed, the springs squeaking underneath us, the weight of his body pressed down on mine so heavily I could barely move. I pushed him back. “Slow down,” I said, “here’s what I want you to do.”
I saw him only briefly at breakfast the next morning. An entirely friendly lighthearted exchange free from any strangeness. He was leaving later that day and wanted my email address so we could keep in touch. An hour later, as I was sitting upstairs in the saloon, I heard a rumble and looked up in time to see him roar by on his motorcycle and disappear past the paddock and over the hill. I stopped for a moment and stared at the dust settling on the empty road and then burst out laughing. And then he rode off into the sunset! I thought. For the next week every time I thought of it I’d start laughing again. At some point I realized I had no idea what J.D. stood for or even what his last name was.
•
By my second week, I felt confident enough to go out for a hike by myself. I’d done a few already with Laura, who knew all the trails. She and Eve, a tall, willowy blond twenty-three-year-old who was in charge of the children’s program, and I had hiked up behind the cabins to a pond filled with lily pads and small green frogs. While I huffed behind, carefully avoiding the tree roots, which seemed to be forever leaping out and grabbing my feet like hands, they discussed their friends’ wedding back home: the dress, the invites, and what they planned on doing differently when their turn came. For the first time that year I felt old. The years between us yawned out like an enormous gulch, and for a moment I saw forty the way I’d seen it when I was twenty-three . . . a distant point on the horizon so far away as to be meaningless.
When I’d been in my twenties, the mother of a close friend would sometimes call me up and take me out. To the theater, to dinner, to a book reading. She seemed to have an uncanny sense for times when I most needed some caring for. She was a successful professional and had a large family, and she always seemed to burst with life. After one night out at the opening of a new play, I turned to her and said, “You make me not afraid to get older.” I was fast approaching my thirtieth birthday at the time, and she must have been in her early fifties. But she didn’t mock me, or take offense. Instead she laughed and took the compliment as I had meant it.
Another time over dinner she’d been recounting the troubled love life of one of her clients. “Some people are made to be in relationships, and some just aren’t.” She said it the way one might remark that some people were born with a good singing voice, and some were not. It was an offhand observation, but it was the first time it had been suggested to me that being alone might be a natural-born aptitude, and not a flaw. I’d never forgotten it.
I did not feel old. Me at twenty-three did not seem that long ago. Maybe that would have been different had I had children. Time is measured in experience as much as anything, and children, I thought, must both slow it down and speed it up. But I also didn’t want to spend time trying to stay young. I wanted to live unafraid and fully in my life.
The talk turned to New York. The girls wanted to know how I had managed it. Could they move there? Do what I had done? I told them everything I could about my life, thinking that if they reached age forty and found themselves hiking through the hills of Wyoming, they’d be lucky.
Before I went out alone, I stopped by the office so Laura could explain my route to me. I’d done it the day before on horseback and thought I remembered it well enough, but she insisted on drawing me a map.
“Maybe you should take a radio.”
I assured her I’d be fine. Phone service felt like an insult here. Plus, it was hard to think of anything being all that worrisome when the camp was so close by. I said so to Laura.
“Just don’t ever leave camp without telling people where you’re going,” she said with a serious face. “Or where you think you’re going.” She handed me the hand-drawn map. “This should take you two to three hours. If you’re not back by the time the talent show starts at eight, we’ll send out a search party.”
I laughed, but she wasn’t joking. On the way out I ran into Ivy. “Are you taking a radio?” she immediately asked. I shook my head. “Okay,” she said, walking away, “but just pay attention, things can go bad quickly out there.”
I walked out into the hills. Up the long valley that the horses were let out into at night, and then into the trees. It was silent. I was alone. Not lonely, the way I’d been so many times in the last few years, but in solitude. I tried to follow Laura’s map, but eventually I gave up, and instead kept my eyes peeled for hoofprints and piles of horseshit. When I came into open spaces I made sure the sun was to my left, in the west—I knew it set directly behind the camp. My whole body vibrated with alertness. I’d spent so much time since my birthday agonizing over how my life no longer hewed to a map, how I was unsure of where to go, and now here I was in the literal version of that fear. Off the trail, in the wilderness, without a map, feeling as focused as I’d ever been. I felt dazzled that I’d made this happen. That I’d gotten myself from where I was to here, where I wanted to be without even knowing I was doing it.
I struck a line of horse prints again and stuck to it this time. The trail took me through the wooded pines, and down through pastures surrounded by rock faces. I knew the coyotes (in my head now, I called them kay-yotes) lived up here, and I kept my eyes open for them, half terrified I’d see them and half hopeful. I walked on. Sometimes I’d catch groups of antelope frozen mid-graze, staring at me as though I were an alien emerging from a spaceship. The silence wasn’t really silence. Not like the morning silence on the mesa. Here there were woodpeckers, and other birds I sadly couldn’t name, and the constant hum of the leaves moving in the breeze. And the sound of my feet. The path led me back into the trees, and then across a stream, and then up a steep, rocky hillside. No one knew where I was. I thrilled to the thought as I walked, glancing behind me every now and then out of habit, as though I were walking home along New York City streets. I paid attention to my steps and crossed the streams carefully, knowing if I fell and twisted or broke something I’d be out here for hours on my own. Eventually, I came through the woods to the top of a hill, below stretched a valley; from the crest I could see the Bighorns, and to my right, the aspens rolled away like a golden river. At the bottom, I connected back with the two track, which eventually led me back into camp. I arrived just as the dinner bell was ringing.
“You’re glowing!” said Ivy.
The hike became part of my daily routine. By the time I left a month later, I knew the route the way I knew the streets of New York. Eventually I was such a familiar sight on the slope leading out of camp they named the trail after me. I didn’t get comfortable, though. Things can go bad quickly out here, I thought, every time my foot slipped. They never did, though. For that month, at least, I was merely a woman wandering alone in the wilderness, who always found her way back to camp.
•
By the beginning of week three, I’d become friends with most of the wranglers and was able to hang out with them at the saloon at night and hear about their day. Fairly quickly the mystique began to wear off. They worked with their bodies, lived their days in the wild, and had very old-fashioned ideas about women. Down from their horses, with their cowboy hats off, they were like superheroes without their masks and capes. Cowboy Clark Kents.
Beau, the wrangler with the handlebar mustache who’d mesmerized me on my very first day here with Jo, had finally confided in me.
“I’m lonely,” he said, staring sadly down into his drink.
“Well, surely there is no shortage of women who come here who are interested in you.” I knew plenty of the female guests arrived here, as I had, and immediately asked about Beau.
He shrugged.
“Well, what sort of woman do you want?”
He finished off his rum and Coke. “I want a woman who makes me French toast.” He looked up at me. “Not pancakes, French toast. And wears a slightly see-through dress while she’s doing it, or maybe even a dressing gown. And we’d live in a cabin.”
“You sound like you’re describing the cover of a romance novel.”
He looked at me like I’d hurt him.
“That’s what I want.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Well, I have to tell you, Beau, I think if you came to New York with me for a week or so you’d probably find a woman who’d be more than happy to do that for you.”
He shook his head. “Too many people in New York.”
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