The Carry Home (27 page)

What was especially curious to me on that particular day, with Jane in a jar on my back, was that I felt calmer in the face of all the lunacy. I'd come to know a lot more now about how the world can close in, go dark when you feel powerless and afraid. I too had spent time feeling cheated out of the good old days. I got how awful it can feel, at least at first, when you figure out there's no one to blame.

T
HE NEXT MORNING, SORE BUT UNDAUNTED, WE STARTED THE
gentle thirteen-mile walk down the Slough Creek Valley toward a developed campground in Yellowstone, where my friend John
would meet us with food for the final dinner. The last day. The sun was full on, ringing in the sky, bringing shimmer and shine to the grasslands of Frenchy's Meadows—so named for a trapper in the late 1800s who set off on a fiery mission to eradicate the grizzly bears of the area, only to end up devoured by one. Though we saw no bears, mostly just elk and bison, the real stars of the show were sandhill cranes, their wild, primitive chortle echoing up and down the valley off and on throughout the morning. At one point Tom and I were locked in a particularly intense conversation when we looked up to find a pair of sandhills not ten yards off the trail, plucking bugs from the branches of a sagebrush.

Besides loons (and, in later years, wolves), the sound of the sandhill cranes, which every spring rang through the skies above our house, was for me the most appealing of all the songs of the wilderness. On several occasions I've been lucky enough to see their fabled mating dance, when a breeding pair comes face-to-face, each then launching into the air again and again with the most graceful hops and jumps, fluttering softly back to the ground. For the Greeks, and later the Romans, the dance of the cranes was said to be a celebration of the joy of life.

The walk was one of the finest in many years. The terrain offered less a hike than a sweet amble, one that matched perfectly the easy mood of Slough Creek, falling to the south slowly, flush with meander. Once again I found myself revisiting that Aboriginal idea of the dead being able to experience the world through the senses of the living. On that last day in Yellowstone, I was really hoping it was true. Because if it is, Jane would've
wrapped herself around that trek like a long-lost friend. John was waiting for us about three miles out, eating his lunch on the trail; together the four of us made the final push to the campground. He'd gone to incredible lengths to give us a good welcome, and after a long plunge in Slough Creek, he served up beer and venison chili and salad and Dutch oven cornbread, and we ate until it seemed we'd never have to eat again. Late in the night, after we'd gone to bed, Martha arrived. Doug—my canoeing partner in the Thelon River country of Canada—would find us the next morning at six thirty, arriving in time to join us for the final trek to the ceremony site.

On first planning this trip, I'd intended to have the last scattering just west of the main Lamar Valley. But on that last morning, it just didn't feel right. I found myself wanting to be farther upstream, within view of the old Buffalo Ranch, where Jane had worked as a ranger for so many years. The place where, in the 1830s, the wonderfully literate trapper Osborne Russell laid down on his elbow beside the Lamar River, writing in his journal how he wished he could remain there for the rest of his days. Changing the plan, though, meant that instead of walking three miles from the Slough Creek Campground, it would be closer to five. I told the group, feeling a bit sheepish. But no one seemed to mind.

It'd been raining off and on all through the night, but by dawn, most of the storm had moved on, leaving only gray sky. We hit the trail before seven, strolling out of the campground and then up the highway, the air filled with the smells of Yellowstone:
wheatgrass and patches of Douglas fir, sagebrush and bison dung and an occasional whiff of sulfur. On reaching the west end of the valley, we descended to the Lamar River, traded hiking boots for water sandals, then forged across the sixty-foot-wide flow to a small delta on the south side. Once I settled on a spot for the ceremony, Doug pointed out that I'd chosen a place exactly halfway between a bald eagle nest and an osprey nest. Just up the valley was the Buffalo Ranch, so-named for having served as cowboy central in the early 1900s for the effort to bring wild bison back from the edge of extinction. It would later become a cluster of restored cabins, a cookhouse, and a classroom. And for parts of seven years, it had been Jane's home away from home.

She and I had been off and on in Yellowstone for twenty-three years, and for the last eighteen, Yellowstone had been just beyond our back door. The place soaked into us slowly, revealing some new weave in every season: on top of mountains, in the bottom of canyons, in the swells of these savannah hills. Over the years, we'd left the roads with our packs on and waded knee-deep across rivers, eaten dinner in the shade of lodgepole forests, slept with grizzlies. And as time passed, we'd come to revere this park: the curious look of earth pushing out big pours of boiling water; the spring light on the sage fields of Lamar; the fluty ring of bugling elk in the fall. Even the smells were oddly filling—sometimes like black pepper and lemon peels; sometimes like eggs and toast.

O
NCE AGAIN, ONE LAST TIME, THE CLOUDS BEGAN TO GIVE
way, revealing patches of something close to autumn blue. We sat on the ground in a circle, at which point I invited my friends to share thoughts or memories of Jane. Doug, looking more sad than I'd ever seen him, told us that the Lamar Valley had always been a big part of the work he did as a biologist, that he'd never again set eyes on the place without thinking of her. Once everyone had a chance to speak, I told them that this place, more than any other in the American West, was where two of the things Jane loved best came together: wild nature, and the chance to share it with children. From here she had set off with her young charges across the Lamar Valley, making long treks with them toward the Buffalo Plateau. Some days they'd fanned out into the Norris Geyser Basin to test pH in the thermal features, or headed for Mammoth to study the travertine terraces. On several occasions, she'd called me from a pay phone near the trailer she lived in at Tower Junction, telling me how she couldn't get inside because of a big bison blocking her way.

The whole of the Lamar Valley seemed at ease that day, gently animated: Blue bunchgrass and junegrass and milk vetch trembled in a light breeze. Just up the valley, loose gatherings of bison were lowering their heads and pulling up mouthfuls of grass, chewing for a minute or two, then stepping on.

We sat for a few minutes in silence. Then I explained to my friends how, on this trip, it occurred to me that embracing Jane in the present meant letting go of her in the past. I thanked them for being the ones who early on carried me back to the
wilderness—to the river and the tundra; for quaffing beer with me on summer nights under the stars, for hearing on countless occasions some new version of the nature of my sadness.

I explained how, on this trip, it occurred to me that embracing Jane in the present meant letting go of her in the past. I thanked those friends for being the ones who had early on carried me back to the wilderness—to the river and the tundra; for quaffing beer with me on summer nights under the stars; for hearing on countless occasions some new version of the nature of my sadness. As if on cue, the last of the gray clouds drifted apart to drench us with sun, washing the entire Lamar Valley with light. Just to the north, from somewhere high up on the steep, grassy slopes, a pair of coyotes called out with abandon, launching into a lively call-and-response of yips and howls.

At the end of the ceremony, I pulled out a sheet of paper with a few lines on it from Wendell Berry—a passage I found a year after Jane's death, pasted into one of her journals:

And there at the camp we had around us the elemental world of water and light and earth and air. We felt the presences of the wild creatures, the river, the trees, the stars. Though we had our troubles, we had them in a true perspective. The universe, as we could see any night, is unimaginably large, and mostly dark. We knew we needed to be together more than we needed to be apart
.

When the time came to scatter the ashes, each of us was left to simply find our own appealing place in those vast, open
meadows. For Doug, it was a spot near a big bison wallow, the bare ground layered with course brown hair. John, on the other hand, picked a patch of grass in perfect line of sight with the bald eagle's nest. I went toward the river, finding a low point on the delta. The following spring, the floods would come, carrying Jane's remains on to the Yellowstone, then the Missouri, then the Mississippi, then the Gulf of Mexico.

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

A
s 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.