We left words behind, traded our vocabulary for view. The expanse spoke to us, for us. For years, I’d forgotten the geologic poetry of the West.
We existed in analog. Paper maps and my journal rode shotgun.
Of course I brought my phone. It was mostly useless. The iPad came out once, when the Forester was hobbled in a repair shop in Rock Springs, Wyoming. Pup and I sat at a Starbucks - a clutch find because of shade and ice water - and marveled the good fortune of such comfort (the only other choice was waiting in the repair shop parking lot). I thought about writing to you, letting the portable keyboard speak in my stead, but didn’t. For a few weeks my head didn’t know a pillow.
Some nights it was close to freezing. One night it dipped below. Puppy didn’t move, probably conserving body heat. I discovered that my sleeping bag - college graduation present, that’s how ancient - was woefully insufficient. In the Tetons I made a sandwich of us, the layers going: me, sleeping bag, pup, tech blanket. Sunrise peeked over the horizon just before 5:00. On the coldest morning I got up to photograph sunrise on the peaks, and ran into another couple with the same idea. No one had cell phone service, but we exchaged numbers nonetheless. Yesterday I sent them the photos I snuck of them. In return they sent me the photo they snuck of me after I’d fessed up and instigated the number exchange.
Pup and I picked up the children in Bozeman, Montana. Suddenly words were blooming in the car like the alpine flowers.
The words were English and French. Delights, yet I rarely knew what to do with them.
I’d given up writing for the summer. I wondered if I would give it up forever, words doing less and less in my life.
We left the foxes and coyotes and bears. Waved goodbye to the prairie dogs, wild pheasants, horses crossing the lonely highways in front of the Subaru.
Six days ago we made it back to the Ozarks, a two day burn from Saskatchewan because my daughter wanted a down day before her summer camp. In six more days we head back in to the “wilds” of Nola. To the floods and broken pavement and a house untouched since May. To square footage.
The rough roads do not intimidate me. It’s that I am not yet ready for civilization.
My favorite quote of the trip was spoken by my son in Alberta. He’d just repatriated from Japan, and was having a hard time adjusting back to the North American way. The wilderness was probably the easiest reentry point for a place that holds such conflict for him right now.
I’m ready for civilization, but not society.
-A.
As for me, I remain in a kind of beauty shock, eyes focused at 50 meters and beyond. Each day now is an exercise of trying to recollect friends and furniture, work and wardrobe. What did I leave behind?
The stories of our wilding remain dammed up behind my fingers. I’ve started allowing them in poetry - a form that finds me clumsy and emotional - but am still holding off on all other writing. I think I know that essays from these two months could (and will) eat years of creation. My reading diet en route was varied enough to remember the words of other times and people:
Villette, Emily Brontë
Motherhood and Other Fictional Characters, Nicole Graev Lipson
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Norman Maclean
For this late Saturday afternoon, what else to say but that Puppy was the best boy, and they were the best children.
