The Carry Home by Gary Ferguson Read Free Book Online Page B

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-miletrek 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