The Deluge, page 12
As far as dates go, it didn’t have much to recommend it: one foot in front of the other, eyes set on Kate’s heels and muscular backside (okay, it had that going), trying to keep pace with her and feeling like an epic wuss, my legs, back, and shoulders burning. She took the tent and that helped a little on the next two-hour leg, but the dread settled in and stayed. What if I actually couldn’t finish this? We stopped around one thirty to eat again. Kate propped her bag on a rock and dug past a can of bear spray. She checked the trail map on her phone. I uncapped my camera, an expensive Canon EOS that had been another graduation gift from my mom. I snapped away at the woods, too tired to put much effort into it.
“Okay, we have a choice,” said Kate. “Our campsite, the one we reserved, it’s only about an hour short of the Paintbrush Divide.”
“Which is what again?”
“That’s like the peak of the hike. I’m kind of thinking we push on and camp on the divide. It’ll be windy as hell—not to mention illegal—but the chances a park ranger will come by are virtually zero.”
“And the upside?”
She squinted like, Um, should we start back at the ABCs? “We’ll see the sunset from the most beautiful place in Wyoming, which means it’s close to the most beautiful place in the world.”
Without a doubt, I did not want to do this. I was seriously wondering if I’d get altitude sickness and have to be rescued by chopper. Yet I sensed the test inherent in her suggestion. This wasn’t a test of my masculinity, but a test of how I dealt with being out of my element. Our every interaction felt like an exam, and now I wondered if maybe this woman was just too much for me. If she’d test me to collapse.
I forced a smile. “As long as you can carry me all day tomorrow.”
As we climbed higher, the trees disappeared, and soon the trail was nothing more than a dirt path cut into an enormous slab of sloping mountain, loose stones skittering down an abyss with every footstep. Huge patches of snow still covered the ground, and we could see the beaten, muddy trail of those who’d marched before us. We were ascending again, and my legs almost couldn’t comply. The burn shot from my hips down to my calves. My back and shoulders were on fire; the tent felt like an anchor. Perspiration again soaked my T-shirt and yet at this altitude the air was frigid, the wind icy, so I had my flannel and a windbreaker on, which only made me sweat harder. Even Kate finally looked like she felt it. Her tireless pace slowed. The back of her gray tank top was soaked through, and she stopped to pull her jacket on. If breathing was a chore before, now I felt a bit of terror at the conscious effort of each inhalation. I felt not just tired but ill. Sick to my stomach, sick in my head, dizzy, and diarrheal. I could only stare into the violet of the fading daylight and wait for it to pass.
Then we reached the peak of Paintbrush Divide, this massive ridge of rock, and I could see so far to the west it was like peering around the corner of the earth. The Tetons rose to the left and right, and looking out across the border to the vast, jagged carapace of Idaho, the evening sun lighting the mountains behind us, joy flooded into me. I’ll always wonder if everything I ever came to feel for her was bound to the endorphins that soaked into me then, the miracle of oxygen finally steeping the red cells. I saw this sacred piece of the world through that prism and had a premonition of feeling deeply and mournfully for another person. Before she broke the silence by tapping the sign that read PAINTBRUSH DIVIDE EL. 10,700 and said, “You can’t wear your church panties for this one,” before we sat together eating a dinner of trail mix and hummus and cucumber sandwiches, watching the sun set over the Idaho mountains, peeling back the night and revealing so many stars it was like we sat on a plank stranded in the middle of space, while we stood on the divide with our hands on our hips sucking wind to slow our pounding hearts, I felt the gravity of what would come. That I loved this girl totally and ferociously and elementally.
* * *
When night fell and the temperature dropped, the wind had fangs. We’d set up the tent a few hundred feet on the other side of the divide where the gusts weren’t as nasty. We’d hung our food in a tree, a standard precaution for bears. Now I had on every piece of clothing I’d brought. We huddled side by side in the dirt taking pulls of whiskey from my flask.
“I can’t believe you were ten years old when you first did this,” I said.
“Yeah, well, my dad kinda believes in throwing children into the deep end. It’ll be a miracle if my brothers don’t turn out as crazy as me.”
“Brothers? Older or younger?”
“Ha. Younger. As in one of them is in the terrible twos and the other just popped out of my dad’s wife last Christmas. Good luck to my fifty-one-year-old father with that.”
The wind turned up and a frigid gust pierced all my layers. Kate held the flask with her sleeve tucked over her hand in lieu of a glove.
“I’m sorry. That sounds messy.”
She threw me a skeptical look over the flask. “I’ve never drank anything but potable water. I’ve never gone a day without a meal. And I choose when I sleep outside. I think I’ll step over that hurdle and continue on my way.” She passed the flask to me.
“Hey, I just mean maybe that’s why you don’t want a boyfriend. You’re afraid of emulating your parents’ marriage.”
“Oh my God.” She put her face in her hands. “You’re going with Psychoanalysis 101, Tar Heel? If you’re going to be a writer, you’ll have to tell more original stories than that.” She took the flask back from me, maybe not realizing I hadn’t yet drank. I was quiet after that, uncertain if what she’d said had hurt me.
“When we first moved to Portland, we were supposed to stay with my mom’s friend, but the friend had moved, so she didn’t know anybody. And she was so hurt by everything that had happened with my dad that she refused to call him and ask for money. The whole first month we slept in the car.” She laughed. “I just remember thinking, Lady, I should be taking care of you, not the other way around. At some point you have to learn to take your parents for who they are and not let it rule your life one way or the other.”
All along the rim of the Idaho mountains, flashes of golden light began to ripple. They flickered like incandescent bulbs eating away the last of the tungsten. She explained it was heat lightning. “Better than the sunset.”
The gold bursts illuminated the clouds and made dark castles of shadows in the atmosphere. We watched the lightning for a long time, until she said, “Let’s go to bed.” Crawling inside the tent and zipping the flap closed behind us, I began to unroll my sleeping bag but never finished. She took my crotch in one hand and the back of my neck with the other. Kate moved unlike any woman I’d ever been with. With Candace, it had been implied that I was directing, that it was more or less my show to pull off. But Kate yanked her tank top over her head and directed my hands to her tough nipples. She got my pants down and her mouth was like a storm, slick and powerful and cleansing. Finally, she urged me into her sleeping bag and handed me a condom. Tugging it on, I felt squeamish and young. Then we broke sweats despite the cold. Afterward, we unzipped the inner flap and lay there while I ran my hands over the mosquito bites on her thighs. We watched the heat lightning through the mesh screen. The thunder was distant, but when my heart finally slowed down, I could hear it.
* * *
The next day we packed our gear and started down Cascade Canyon to Lake Solitude, a glittering blue pool of glacial runoff at the bottom of the valley. The mountains towered in all directions, and it felt a bit like photographing the sides of an enormous bowl. We stripped down to our underwear, dove from a rock into the frigid water, and I cried out when the surface first slapped my skin. We swam for as long as we could stand, then pulled ourselves out to dry on a rock in the sun. She sat up, leaning forward to hug her knees and look into the distance. Then I said something silly, and she smiled. I forget what it was I said—something errant and forgettable, but at the moment it worked. That was when I chose to pick up my camera and take a picture. Head turned, hair still wet and pulled back into her signature messy bun with strands pulling free in the wind, the peaks of Idaho behind her. It turned out to be a damn good picture. She seemed at once larger than life and the most remote grain of sand in the gutter of the cosmos. Later, I’d make a print of it in black and white. Much later, it would appear in a magazine profile. After that, it would show up on dorm room posters and T-shirts. Then billboards. It didn’t feel iconic when I took it, but it would come to serve as shorthand for ideas and endeavors epic in scale. I’d dwell on the story it told about Kate: the way her eyes seemed to look off to places the viewer could only hope to comprehend, her playful smile hinting at an understanding of a secret beyond even that.
* * *
Captain Ray gave me shit about being over the moon, and I could hardly deny it. One time, when Kate picked me up after work, she sat with Ray on the tailgate of the marina truck. Ray said something in his Ray way (arms hugging his chest, looking off in the distance like he could care less), and she doubled over with laughter. Then to my astonishment Ray was laughing too, his nicotine teeth on display. The next day he told me, “That girl of yours has got some serious goddamn charm, Tar Heel.”
But it wasn’t just charm. I was fascinated by her. She’d read everything, she was opinionated, she cared about more topics than I even knew about. When I mentioned that my favorite novel was Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut and had it with me, she borrowed my copy and finished it in two days (“The head of a human being pillowed in the spilled guts of a water buffalo is about the perfect image to describe the Vietnam War,” she said, and I worried that I should have named a book that would take her longer than two days to read). And, of course, we had the sex of people who’ve just discovered a new toy.
So much of that summer was learning how to be with her and her blunt, unapologetic approach. She’d lost her virginity at thirteen to a college freshman she picked up in Powell’s Books; when she was nineteen she booked a flight to Honduras, spent a week in a place called the Mosquito Coast by herself hiking and meeting people, and found out only after she got back that the US government had issued a travel warning for drug cartel and kidnapping activity; she had an abortion in college and the nurse invited her to her birthday party. I’d file away all of this in my ever-expanding Kate Chaos file.
We hiked, we climbed, we rafted, we went to the rodeo and watched the bulls toss the cowboys free. “Told ya, I’m not that PETA,” she said. I brought Damien down from Colter Bay each Saturday, and we drank for free at the Cowboy Bar until she closed.
“You don’t care that he won?” she demanded.
“No.”
“You don’t care this racist monstrosity is president at all?”
We sat in the Cowboy with all the lights on and the booths and stools cleared, Kate Windexing and wiping down the bar while she looked at Damien like he was insane. This was literally days after the riots in Charlottesville and the death of Heather Heyer, when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd.
“It’s not that I want him to be president,” said Damien. “I just think it’s another thing that happened in a system that’s designed for things like this to happen. Bet you anything in fifteen years, this whole era will be pure bar trivia and people will be on to complaining about what a dictator the next guy is.”
Kate set her spray bottle down and rubbed her temples. “This is hard to listen to for someone who spent last year getting hosed down with freezing water by corporate security firms.”
“Oh, at Dakota Access?” asked Damien.
“It was called Sacred Stone,” she snapped back.
I’d been silent, listening to them, hoping my best friend in Wyoming wouldn’t piss Kate off and leave me trying to mend fences over topics I didn’t dare comment on. I asked, “What’s Dakota Access?”
Still looking at Damien with irritation, Kate said, “It’s an oil pipeline. We were blockading into last fall, and they fucking cleared us with dogs and hoses.”
“But even that,” said Damien, sipping his glass of free whiskey through a straw, ice cubes tinkling, “it’s like you’re really upset that our species is destroying the atmosphere with smokestacks and cow farts, but back in the Proterozoic, when it was just mats of dumb algae calling the shots, the algae was like, ‘Fuck yeah, this planet is rad, and it’s all ours!’ And then they went and farted out a bunch of oxygen and exterminated themselves.” He folded his arms and nodded his head once.
Kate said, “You’re sitting there very satisfied like you’ve made any kind of point.”
“Just that everyone’s running ’round trying to fix humanity but the only fixed thing is change. You gotta let go, dude. Embrace the chaos.”
“How ’bout I fucking punch you instead?”
And until she threw the bar towel down and walked away, she really looked like she was going to.
Kate showed me her office, if you could call it that, and suddenly her pipeline story made all the sense. The Bison Project worked out of a small apartment above a Laundromat. When she’d described the operation to me, I’d envisioned a bustling war room. After all, it was an advocacy group attempting to influence state governments and battle a powerful business interest that spanned Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. But it turned out to be four people working at card tables. I came to understand that Kate more or less had become the Bison Project. She’d organized protests on six college campuses and successfully lobbied members in all three state legislatures to put forward bills that would halt the indiscriminate slaughter of bison. Though none of them seemed likely to pass, Kate’s coworkers told me she’d orchestrated all this mostly by sheer force of personality. She explained how she’d landed on this particular fight.
“After the election, I just wasn’t in the right headspace for much of anything—I was too shocked. It seemed like I could come here and do something righteous without also investing in the frenzy. You just can’t keep up the fury of the Women’s March twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five, but now… Obviously it’s beginning to frustrate me how little this one issue might matter in the scheme of what’s going on.”
Her apartment was awash in file folders and binders. A bulletin board dominated one wall, loaded to the point of collapse with pictures, papers, note cards, receipts, bills, reminders, and anything else that could be hung by thumbtack.
“It’s a system,” she assured me. We rarely stayed there, as she had three roommates and her bed was always covered in books and papers anyway. Frankly that was fine with me because she also had dozens of photos of dead bison on the walls, their throats cut, disemboweled, maimed, or tortured in ways that didn’t seem like a systematic culling so much as a war zone. Hundreds of dead-eyed heads trailing blood and knots of spine still held together by cartilage piled in the grass. I never understood how she could sleep in that room. And I’d never realized how intoxicating passion could be in a person because I’d never really encountered it before.
* * *
As the dewiest part of me took over, and I began scouting out winter ski jobs in Jackson, as I began describing her to my folks and my sister in phone calls, I could hear my own gushing. Eager to impress her, I pushed her to read some of the short stories I’d been working on that summer. Again and again, she demurred.
One night while we were making pasta for dinner at my place, I found myself pressing her on it.
“It’s a no-win situation.” She tested the sauce, blowing at the steam before slurping off the wooden spoon. “Either I’ll lie to you and feel like shit or tell you the truth and feel like shit.”
I made a sound resembling a laugh. “So you’re assuming I’ll suck?” I’d been nervous enough about asking her to read something in the first place. To have her blow it off like this felt like a stamp of what she thought of me intellectually.
“No, not suck. I just have such a low threshold for fiction written by men. I can’t even open a novel written by a man anymore—”
“What about the Vonnegut?”
She dipped the spoon back in the sauce for another round. “First novel I’ve read by a man in two years.”
“Is that a joke? That’s reductive.”
“Maybe it is. I’m just trying to explain why I might not be the best reader for you.”
“So explain.”
She steeled her mouth in that way she had when she was preparing to lay down some Kate Truth. “Contemporary fiction is all status quo white male entitlement regurgitated over and over with almost no perception of what’s unspooling outside of its closed circuit. All this literature of late capitalist exhaustion and alienation ad nauseam—no thanks.”
“And you just assume that’s me too?” I kept my voice light, but for the first time since we’d met, she’d pissed me off. I felt the frustration of all her small condescensions trapped in a vein near my skull.
Licking the spoon, she assessed me. “Don’t use that bitchy tone, dude. This is not personal. I thought all this long before I met you.”
“I’m just asking why you assume that about me?”
She cocked her head. “It’s not hard to look at you out here, Matt, trying to have your little adventure in Jackson, Wyoming—the ultimate Jeffersonian yeoman’s fantasyland serving as stage dressing for investment properties for the global elite and the celebrities living on ranches that they pay Mexican immigrants to maintain—and see what your quote-unquote fiction will look like. For Christ’s sake, the Fed has its annual conference out here. You’ve never given a thought to what fuels these fantasies. Open-pit mining and mountain-top removal and systems of white supremacy and sexual violence—”
“Okay, Kate, I’ve been on a fucking college campus lately, I know the spiel.” She gave me a cold, fixed stare. I didn’t understand what I felt then. I’d passed for depth around my fraternity because I read books for my major, and it was suddenly frightening to realize how unmoored I was—without even a set of tools to calculate an opinion. “Because none of that is original,” I went on. “You don’t need to remind me I’m a privileged white man. I get it. That has nothing to do with why I want to write.”
