The Carry Home (28 page)

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.

T
HERE'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

T
his 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

O
ver 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.