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07 November~2003
She was an artist when I met her. I was awed at the talent she possessed when sketching an outline, then creating a watercolor of yellow and black Rudbeckia's in the course of an hour. We married only six months after we met, and moved to a tiny house shaded by cottonwoods in a small Western Slope town. Some Kestrel falcons nested in the tallest tree in the corner of our yard one year, and I would see the three babies up in the trees and the parents flying in and out to feed them. We created a garden in the back, and around the side had a flower garden of magenta and pink and blue Beidermeier columbines.
I can see her riding home from work on her bicycle, slim and beautiful, with long brown hair, smiling as she came up the step to our house. Our first child was born there, and we often rolled our daughter around town in her stroller, and took her for hikes in the foothills with our dogs. I learned then that the dogs I always had as close companions as I was growing up were good preparation for being a Dad. Both kids and dogs do well around those with a simple and joyful outlook, like to be taken places, and respond to love.
I don't think I have experienced such happiness as I had with my family then, when we would take our little daughter to play in the park, swinging, running up and sliding down slides, turning her on the merry-go-round. How many times have this been said, that the best times of our family lives were when we were young, with small children, with few possessions and lots of love.
Much has changed in the twenty eight years that are gone since then. I live alone most of the time, except when our youngest daughter visits, which I like so much. I often backpack in solitude to high wilderness mountains in my time off. Evening will find my dogs and I sitting on a ridge camp over a timberline lake, watching as the light fades in the alpine and the shadows overtake the forest below us. I take pleasure in the cold mountain winds coming down the basin, that blow into my face and lift the fur on my border collies. I pull my collar tight against the cold, and think about my life.
And It is not a bad life doing what I do, wandering around the mountain West. I am at a loss to describe the beauty I have experienced in the Colorado and Wyoming and Idaho and Montana Rockies. Last August I hiked up to the mountains just west of Yellowstone, and in midweek had a timberline lake all to myself and the dogs, with the exception of the Grizzly that left tracks at the edge of a pond a quarter mile down. The peace and healing of those mountain journeys do more to give me strength to endure tough times than anything else I can imagine.
I may take more risks that I would have before. Two or three years ago I took a roundabout way back to camp after crossing a valley to get to a lake that I knew had huge cutthroat trout. Almost within sight of camp I found myself cut off by a rock slide. Rather than circle back around and be hiking in darkness, I risked that I could make across the slide. A slip probably would have caused me to fall 500 yards or so to the valley bottom. I swore never to do anything that stupid again.
A year ago last spring something large came into my camp at 3:30 in the morning, while camped alone in the backcountry on the east side of the Teton valley. I had been expecting that might happen, being in a Grizzly recovery area, and was awoken by an early warning system I set up, consisting of 25 pound fishing line tied to 9 volt alarms strung in a perimeter around camp. I made a big commotion to scare it off, and when I turned off the alarm found that something was still watching from the woods and just then decided to leave. What I heard in the darkness was huge rambling footsteps, knocking rocks over at each step, flushing a grouse by the ridge, disappearing downslope into the darkness. I figured at the time it was a Grizzly.
When I am done camping and feel the need to be around people I go to the Saturday night dance hall where her and I became so skilled at twostepping and had so much fun for all those years. We hardly even look at each other and I have no illusion that there is a future for us. Our story together is done. She has moved on, like she said she wanted to a couple of years ago, and is there with her boyfriend. We don't talk, or even make eye contact, and I figure I should try to move on also. I dance with all the ladies til I am tired, and the pleasure and celebration of those Saturday night's renews my spirit, and is healing, in a different way as going to the wilderness alone.
But I will proceed at my own pace of moving on. To me it seems naive to think that once you sign a piece of paper that twenty six years of your life are just done, to be forgotten. I will take my time getting over a relationship that lasted all my adult life, with the only woman I have been close to, to losing the friendship that was always there, even up to the day we stood before a judge to end it.
And when I am in the mountains, sitting up to watch the stars come out on a cold night, I will not apologize for remembering the good times and how pretty and loving she was, and how happy we were, because that was a huge part of my life, and as Hellen Keller said, what we love deeply becomes part of us, and stays with us.
I still have that painting of hers of the yellow and black Rudbeckia's. It remains taped to the hardboard she painted it on, sitting on my desk, in the room where I sleep. I often look at it when I return home.
That is how I would like to remember her, from back when we were so in love, and she was an artist.
