Prologue: Charlie's Story

I had never been on a motorcycle before, let alone without a helmet. I used to make my kids wear one even to play on their skateboards, the deal with them being: 'Once you are old enough to pay for your own health insurance, then you can decide about your brain bucket.' When they got older, it became, 'I don't want to spend the rest of my life taking care of you.' That was true. I wanted them to live their lives without head injuries, and I felt like I had only really just begun to live my own, but here I was being told how to swing one leg over the back seat and where to place my feet.

"I have a helmet and you can wear mine if you'd like. I won't wear it anyways."

To my own shock, I declined.

For the first few minutes of the ride, my arms circling his stomach and my hands splayed so I could feel more of him over his shirt, almost all I thought about was what my kids would say. Or worse, how would they feel if I ended up broken and bloodied by the side of the road, a hypocrite, with them now having to interrupt their lives and take care of me?

As he rode through the back streets of his small town, I felt the warm air soft and humid on my face, I smelled the early summer hay that was being baled into big rolls for miles around us, and I loosened my body feeling the bumps and dips in the road like waves moving through me. I felt my body relax into the sensations of letting go and an unfamiliar recklessness as he turned down the dirt road leading out of town. He pointed ahead at the vast range of the Rocky Mountain front taking up the entire horizon in front of us.

"See that saddle on the left? The 'V' between the two peaks on the far side?"

I had to crane to hear him, the wind had picked up as he had started going faster. I followed his finger with my eyes. The place he was pointing to was far in the distance, in the indigo shadow of the mountains in the evening sky. I could see the indentation he was indicating and to me it looked like it was a full day's ride.

"That's where the lake is," he shouted, "it'll take us about an hour to get there and about an hour back. Just let me know if you need me to slow down, or need anything."

My stomach tightened into knots as we began moving faster. I felt every patch of lose gravel we rode over as though it were an indication of my soon-to-be-published obituary. I peered over his shoulder to look at the speedometer and was surprised it only said about 35 mph. I could've sworn we were going faster. As he leaned us into a turn and navigated over the rough bars of a cattle guard, I felt genuine fear.

Unsurprisingly, he sensed it.

"Just say if you need me to slow down."

He didn't have any teasing in his voice and I was relieved. For him this would be like riding in slow motion, I had no doubt. This was the man who had plowed into two deer coming around a blind corner and left a lot of his skin on the ground. The scars were still only about a year old.

"I wasn't even going that fast when I saw them," he had told me. "If I had been..."

He grinned, zero remorse.

Life was for living and being too cautious can get yourself killed, he had told me.

That logic would defy even the greatest of daredevils, I thought, and I think it was after his mule-deer and gravel face-plant that his kids had bought him the helmet he had just offered me.

"Maybe a little?" my words trailed out over the dry fields we were passing by, and rolled over the soft, faded green hummocks that were scattered within them, and down into the gully where the creek was running low and he had told me to keep an eye out for bear and moose.

He slowed a little and then called out that he couldn't go too much slower or it wouldn't be safe. I at least understood the logic of not toppling over sideways, and I was grateful he couldn't see the shame battling the fear on my face. Because he would've.

I tried again to relax into the bouncing and loosen my muscles from my core out into my thighs. I flexed my gripping feet and laid my head against his shoulder, feeling the roughness of his shirt on my cheek. We tipped into another turn and I consciously softened into it, concentrating on his muscles contracting under my fingertips as I tried to coax my breathing to do the opposite.

My inner debate with logic, my integrity, and flirting with just have fun thought of one of my best friend's husbands, a surgeon; he called these coffins on wheels and I had heard him say at a dinner party that it was motorcycles that were paying for his sons' college tuitions.

I cringed. But fun won out as I looked up and saw the mountains again. I had never seen a range quite like them. I had climbed some fourteeners in Colorado, and seen the Alps in Switzerland and the Drakenbergs in South Africa - all stunning by every report - but this line of craggy sentinels did something to my body.

I would look back later and realize that this was the night I fell in love with a place for the very first time. I already knew I loved him, this man who had told me that afternoon that he couldn't see himself losing his independence. Who had thrown out sentences like: I am not so sure we humans are supposed to be monogamous, and, I am afraid of committing because what if the ideal I've always wondered is out there for me, walks by?

To my credit, I had laughed at that and he grinned chagrinned.

"Yeah, I've been told I like the hunt better than the kill." 

I flinched, but didn't back down.

"Didn't you make that gorgeous desk over there?"

I pointed to the work of art behind us he had hand crafted. It looked to my eye like it could be in the Smithsonian. It had masterful details and the staining was gorgeous. I had sat at it only hours before to meet with clients.

"Didn't you tell me you started with a vision of what kind of desk you'd always wanted, and you remembered the wood you'd been saving for something special all these years; you sketched and designed exactly what you wanted, and then you spent hours crafting it into what you envisioned it to be?"

I saw his eyebrows go up above his eyes that were, for once, focused, curious, and intrigued. It was rare for me to be a step ahead of his mind, so I ran with it,

"We create our ideals, Jack. Ideals are not some illusive thing that walk by us. They are the product of hard work and investment, and collaboration. They come about by co-creating with someone who wants the same thing. Beauty is beauty because it is seen with eyes of love, and it's made lasting by our desire and commitment to create what we believe and dream can be."

I could hear the intensity and attempts to influence in my own voice. I slowed my roll.

He was quiet and watching me with those crinkled, turquoise eyes that loved a challenge more than almost anything. They twinkled most days with hidden humor and intelligence that I delighted in surprising. He regaled me with stories of trapping grizzly bears, ranching in -40 degree weather, and how he'd raised his kids to hunt and guide up near the continental divide; and I regaled him with how I listened.

The motorcycle slowed down and I saw him pointing again - this time at the massive brown humps in the distance. He kept the lowered pace as we got close to ones grazing by the fence. As we neared, several lifted their huge, shaggy heads and turned toward us. I could see their eyes fix on him and the white around their pupils widen. It was surreal. It was like they recognized him. I felt his body tighten.

One by one, they turned their maned heads, their bottomless brown eyes on the sides of their heads staring directly at him.

"I bet I could tell you each of their numbers," he called back to me, "I bottle fed some of them."

Grief was palpable in his voice and he stayed silent until we came to a stand still next to a corral. He gestured at the small wooden building and uniform fencing.

"I built this all by hand."

I hadn't ever heard this much sadness in his voice. He had told me many stories of things that had caused him sorrow, most often to do with his love for nature and how humans treated it, but this raw anguish felt unprecedented.

"How long has it been since you've been back here?" I asked him.

He had knocked out the kick stand and climbed off the bike, he shook his head and turned away. After a bit he walked back and pulled out the two leather coats he'd packed for us in the saddlebags and helped me put mine on.

The sky had started taking on the golden glow that this time of day offers under the best of circumstances, and now the softening yellows in the sky were morphing into shades of tangerine and baby-skin pink. As we started back down the road the pastels added streaks of strawberry red over the mountain peaks, the deepening silence of the isolated acres of ranch land all around us took on the glow of reflected hot pink and orange, creating a tableau saturated in color every direction I turned to see.

I had started to truly relax into the beauty that felt like it was holding us and us alone. We had only seen one other pick up truck out on the road at the very beginning of our ride, and beside the evening bugs and occasional bird noises, the quiet felt soothing after a day of hurt. So I was surprised when Jack called out that it looked like the roads had been recently graded and we'd have to turn around.

As he maneuvered a wide and gentle loop on the ranch road, the mountains became so overwhelming in their beauty to me that I forgot to be relieved that my bravery wasn't going to be needed for as long. I actually felt disappointed.

As we rode, the sky-full of colors that only Montana can fill like the whole universe is canvased above you, everything I had lost and was losing rose up inside of me. Maybe it was the unexpected dismay of turning back home, maybe it was because of hearing this man, with all his love and passion for living without caution, look me in the eye and not be able to own that he sure seemed afraid of one very specific thing. Maybe it was seeing his heart ache a few moments earlier.

It had been unavoidable while I was staying with him to not think of my dad. This was the countryside my father had loved so deeply that it had been contagious to me as a young woman. He loved this state. Even the way Jack's house was decorated, the familiar novels and hunting books on the shelves, the smell of leather and drying elk racks and the art my dad, too, had collected. It was the way so many of these very views reminded me of trips my dad and I had taken. Trips that were some of my favorite memories with him where we had connected effortlesly over our mutual love for the outdoors.

I felt my father over the ranch land, his presence palpable in a way I hadn't felt since he had died a few years ago. My throat tightened and tears blurred my eyes and rolled off my face out into the breeze and out into the big wide country he had adored. Jack pointed to a clump of white animals over on one of the hillsides and yelled something back to me. I nodded wordlessly but he didn't look back at me.

It hit me with the unexpected impact, in unsuspecting moments, that only grief can. I was losing my home, I had lost my dad, and the man I loved didn't want me. I was losing everything. I felt my heart break under waves of past and present grief, an actual physical pain in my chest that only this immensity of beauty could help me hold.

Striations of clouds thousands of feet above the blackening mountain range now deepened into magenta. I had never felt embraced by land the way I felt in that moment of such intense anguish. I hadn't cried that hard in years and the sound of the wind whipping in our ears kept even me from hearing my own weeping. As Jack picked up speed again, the physical sensations of letting go on the back of that motorcycle brought an embodied clarity to me and I placed my hands upward on my legs - my open palms my own metaphor of release - as I felt a letting go I had never experienced before in my body.

All around us the fields were turning silver under the sunset's last streaks of light and the deep blues returning for the moonrise. I felt both the emotional immensity of what I had lost and was losing, and the visceral reality that I was truly, physically letting go. Facing that truth suddenly felt wildly freeing.

I shivered in the night's encroaching cold and my arms back around Jack again and I saw that my tears had stained his shoulder with white, salty circles on his suede coat.