The Carry Home (7 page)

L
ong ago, cartographers from the land of mental health erected signposts for journeys through the blackness of loss.
At least he's moved out of denial
, friends and family might have been saying to one another. Around the next bend would be anger. Then bargaining. Then the crumbling backstreets of depression. Finally would come a return home—an “acceptance”—at which point flowers would bloom again and light would shine in the windows. Whatever. In that first autumn, it made no more sense to hope for a normal life than it would for a man who's lost his leg to expect to wake up one morning and find a new one growing in its place.

It was barely past Labor Day when I decided to make the first scattering of Jane's ashes. That time of year when the coats of the whitetail deer are thickening, turning from the reddish brown of midsummer to the color of wet sand. The time of sandhill cranes gathering into small groups, chortling to one another about the old urge for going. That time when the color of the sky deepens from powder to cobalt blue. Free of the cast on my leg, I was desperate for movement, and the movement I wanted most was something having to do with honoring Jane's wishes.

Effort with purpose.

Years later, when I was talking about all this with a good friend, he'd confess to thinking how terrible the first scattering journeys must have been. I'd said that other than breaking apart and collapsing, my muddling forward, this moving deeper into grief, was the only thing to do.

Of the five places she wanted her ashes scattered, she never said anything about which one should come first. It probably didn't matter. But it mattered to me. There was the canyon country of southern Utah, which she'd come to know long before we met, confronting in that longwinded landscape an emotional struggle that had nearly killed her. There were the magnificent Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, where we'd fallen in love and later married. Also a little cabin in the woods of northern Wyoming. And finally, two places in greater Yellowstone: the Lamar Valley, in the northeast corner of Yellowstone National Park, long a touchstone to the work Jane loved; and a certain high alpine lake in the northern Beartooth Mountains of Montana—symbol of the place that,
after much wandering, we'd come to call home. I decided to first go to the Sawtooths, to begin the hard goodbye at what was our starting place. The place where we'd become a couple.

I
LEFT ON A FALL MORNING WHEN THE
B
EARTOOTHS WERE
shining, capped by a fresh smear of snow. Driving through our town of Red Lodge seemed normal, which even four months after Jane's death was confusing: Merv the photographer walking down Broadway on his way to the bakery to sip coffee and swap jokes. Brad, looking serious in his orange patrol belt, waiting to guide the next batch of school kids over the crosswalk. Norm, wearing his one pair of brown Carhartts, stooping over in front of the coffee shop, combing the sidewalk for cigarette butts. Suzy out washing the front windows of her store. Mr. Bill strolling up Broadway with his hands in his pockets, trolling for conversation. Long before we had ever set foot here, a friend in Idaho had told me over a beer that this small town in Montana was a friendly place—not overly impressed with itself in the way towns in beautiful places can be. That's part of why we had stayed.

And yet we had come here from southwest Colorado in 1987 mostly for the surrounding lands: the far northeastern edge of a nine-million-acre tract of more or less undeveloped territory. The largest generally intact ecosystem in the temperate world. A place of snowfields and grizzly bears and whitebark pine forests, of elk and wolverines and mountain lions and moose.

Beside me on the passenger seat that September morning was the box holding Jane's ashes. Made by a friend up the canyon, a former Forest Service ranger named Rand Herzberg, it measured six by eight inches—a combination of aspen wood, blond and delicate, rimmed with strips of clear cherry. It was simple but elegant, graceful, so much so that it eased a little the uncomfortable feelings I had about what it held inside.

Speeding up at the edge of town, I cranked up Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young on the tape deck; with the palm of my hand resting on the box, I could feel the rhythm of Dallas Taylor's drum pulsing through the wood. Then the song “Helpless” came up, with Neil Young crooning about a town in north Ontario, and how “all my changes were there,” and I ended up having to pull off the highway for a few minutes to get myself together. I stayed on the shoulder through “Our House,” with its lines about two cats in the yard, about how life used to be so hard but now “everything is easy 'cause of you.” Thankfully, “Almost Cut My Hair” came on after that, and with David Crosby letting his freak flag fly, I was finally able to drive away.

Like most couples, our relationship had a soundtrack. The year before we were married, by the end of our first summer together in the Sawtooths, we couldn't make the hour-long drive to Ketchum without Willie Nelson's
Red Headed Stranger
or Bonnie Koloc or Jean-Luc Ponty in the cassette deck. Jerry Jeff Walker and Emmylou Harris were well matched to the slow, full-hipped curves of the downriver road, and if not them, then Tim Weisberg or Stan Getz. Meanwhile the long, 128-mile
trek west to Boise allowed everything from Ella Fitzgerald to
Hotel California
.

The fall after our first season together in the Sawtooths, Jane headed off to do her master's internship at a nature school in Michigan. Working by pay phone from Stanley, I managed to secretly arrange for a musician in Grand Rapids to meet us in a city park on a certain Saturday. Then I stuck out my thumb, making for the Midwest. East of Denver I got a ride from a truck driver named Big Daddy, and after a half hour or so of small talk he asked if I'd be interested in learning to drive a semi. Sure, I said. So he pulled off on the shoulder of Interstate 80 and switched places with me, then set about teaching me just enough about shifting gears so I could keep us rolling across the prairie while he nodded off in the shotgun seat.

The song I hired the musician to play for Jane on that Saturday in September was Judy Collins's “Since You've Asked.” The singer was blond, in her late twenties. She took her place on a park bench on that sunny afternoon and smiled at the two of us, strummed her guitar, and began to sing. Afterward I thanked her and shook her hand, pulled from the pocket of my sport coat a white envelope with forty bucks in it. She tucked the money into her guitar case, said a quick goodbye, and walked away. Then I pulled out a folded handkerchief, spread it with a flourish on the green grass, got down on one knee, and asked Jane to marry me. I gave her seven roses that day, handing them to her one by one, each with a promise. The second rose, the second promise, was that I'd always protect her.

Now, some twenty-five years later, I was scattering her ashes.

After the town of Columbus came three hours of freeway, then blue highways again just east of Butte. All strangely quiet. Not a single car came on or off the interstate in Reed Point, or in Big Timber, or at the three or four off-ramps marked as ranch exits, each pegged with a blue sign with the words “no services.” The movement, that lonely whine of tires on open roads, was a gift. For the first time the memories were just a little less suffocating. The grief ran down the highways with me—a mix of tenderness and sorrow that shifted with every passing town, with the far side of every mountain pass, at every place where pavement turned to dirt.

F
OR A TIME WHEN WE WERE YOUNG, IT SEEMED OUR WHOLE
generation was moving. Leaving home. Leaving town. And while Jane was fond of wandering, for me it was an obsession. And if at the heart of that peculiar nomadic age I was too young to stick out my thumb, I did what I could.

Starting when I was thirteen, with my brother fifteen, every Monday of summer vacation our parents would let us hop on our bikes for daylong meanderings. And it didn't matter how far we went. Fueled by Corn Flakes and toast slathered with Smucker's strawberry jelly, the two of us—sometimes with another friend or two—gathered the five or ten bucks we'd each made mowing lawns the previous week and started to ride,
my brother on a Schwinn Super Sport and me on a twenty-four-inch purple five-speed Sears Stingray. First we exhausted destinations with the coolest names—Shipshewana, Diamond Lake, Wawasee—followed by trips to more practical-sounding places like Michigan City, Syracuse, Goshen. Sixty, eighty, a hundred miles in a single day.

We left from Twenty-seventh Street in River Park, pushing off from our tiny house past the tiny houses of our neighbors—as often as not, heading west. In ten blocks came Potawatomie Park, with its greenhouse and little zoo of crowing peacocks and snorting donkeys—the place where our mother said when I was around three, I got so entranced with a geriatric lion that she and my grandmother couldn't get me to move. Finally they started walking away, thinking it would prod me to come along. I wished them well, so the story goes, then got back to enjoying the big cat.

A block later came the grand brick edifice from 1940 that was our high school, visually prominent thanks to a curious, medieval-looking tower that once housed a radio studio where Kate Smith stood and belted out “God Bless America.” From there it was twenty minutes to downtown, cruising past the department stores—Robertson's and Gilbert's (“where one man tells another”), as well as the Masonic Temple on North Main where at twelve I earned $25 as a trumpet player playing the “Charge!” refrain for three guests being honored for some civic accomplishment, long since forgotten. Then past the old Palace Theater, in 1940 host to the World Premiere of
Knute Rockne: All American
.
And in later years, to a terminally groovy teen dance club called the Top Deck, with black walls and fluorescent cartoon paintings, hosting pop bands from Tommy James and the Shondells to Archie Bell and The Drells and The American Breed. It closed the year I started riding my Stingray past, after two sixteen-year-old boys were stabbed to death out front on the sidewalk.

Soon we were pedaling through the west side of town, and there the neighborhoods were poorer. Along with the usual scatter of Hot Wheels and doll buggies on the frost-heaved sidewalks, the lilac bushes and the Laundromats with revolving signs—things you'd see on the other side of the Grand Trunk Railroad tracks, as well—here there were cracks in the pavement, more broken glass and debris on the shoulders to steer our bikes around. Now and then there were little scrap yards tucked between the houses with the carcasses of a half-dozen cars scattered about, maybe a washing machine and a couple refrigerators, a beat-up bicycle on its side in front of a General Electric range, rolls of wire and piles of boards and strange gasoline-powered machines the size of suitcases. Tiny bars squatted on every other corner, their faded white Hamm's signs hanging in the smoky windows. There were fluorescent hair salons, and markets with cardboard boxes out front filled with tomatoes and potatoes and onions and apples. There were liquor stores and gun shops with iron grates in the windows. And out on Western Avenue, women in short skirts with lots of makeup, trying to be flirty, looking like they hadn't slept in a long while.

Finally, in the northwest corner of the city, past Mayflower Road, South Bend just fizzled out in that blessed way of smaller cities, replaced after ten minutes of no-hands riding by empty roads and fields of corn. Now came the smell of cut alfalfa and ditches full of chickweed. The mew of catbirds in the raspberry bushes. The gossip of blackbirds on the telephone wires. We'd crossed the wall of the city, as psychologist James Hillman once called the boundary between town and country. People in trucks waved as they passed, as did old retired couples out sitting on their porches. Riding at a steady ten miles an hour, which was no big feat for about any bike with air in the tires, by lunch we'd routinely find ourselves some forty, even fifty miles from home. Under our own power. Calling our own shots.