Where the Mountains Break Against the Sea: Chapter 1

May 2018 

I closed my laptop and cried. I took off my headphones. My hands shook as I brushed the tears from my cheek. I couldn’t believe it. I’d finally written a novel.

As every morning for the past two months since I started writing the book, when my ninety minute timer elapsed, I got up from my desk and put on my jacket. I grabbed the half-empty pack of American Spirits from the drawer in the kitchen, slipped out of my studio apartment, out the front door of my building on Remington Court, and took my place at the fence across the street. The fence cordoned off a youth penitentiary, all concrete and fluorescent lamps looming in the background like some massive prehistoric beetle. It was five-thirty and still dark out, windy but not too cold. I struggled with my lighter, twisting around in the wind until it caught flame. I took a drag and felt the nicotine rush to my head. 

Betty came outside and took a spot at the fence ten feet away. 

“Good morning,” she said and lit her own cigarette. 

Betty lived in the apartment directly above me and we’d come to know each other on our smoke breaks at the fence across the street. 

“Good morning!” I said, cheerfully. 

“You seem excited today,” she mumbled with her cigarette in between her lips. Her hands dove into her pockets in search of her phone. 

“It’s a good day, I guess,” I told her. 

Betty looked up at the boiling gray clouds above us, eery with the blue light of dawn and moving too quickly. Her phone rang. 

“Sorry, gotta take this,” she said, and walked away. 

I was annoyed, I wanted to tell someone what had just happened. Oh, well, I thought. It’s not like anyone would understand.

That was my mantra for my most of my life, why change now.

I inhaled smoke and closed my eyes. 

The sky opened up and the rain came all at once. 

July-September 2018

Two months later, I spent four weeks in Alaska. It was my second trip to the state, the second year in a row, and in many ways I felt like Alaska held a part of me I was trying to find. With a rotating cast of friends and acquaintances, I roamed from Wrangell – St. Elias National Park to the harsh, terrifying Talkeetna Mountains for a six day trek during incessant rains that choked rivers and made each step treacherous. 

After Alaska, I returned to Washington and camped in the North Cascades, Mount Baker – Snoqualmie National Forest, slept in my car, a tent, or occasionally my brother’s couch in Bothell until the end of August.

When September began, I drove to Alberta, where my good friend Nathanael had been for two weeks already, teasing me the whole time with photos of sunshine and summer in Banff. As I drove through the night from Washington, thunderheads lit up the mountains and gusts of wind shook my Subaru Forester from Revelstoke onward.

By the time I made it to Alberta, the weather had turned cold and foreboding, as if winter had come overnight.

During the day, Nathanael and I hid indoors to escape the sleet and oppressive clouds and, at night, we camped in our cars at a pull off near a reservoir just outside of Canmore. In the mornings, I chipped frozen snow from my cargo box to access my cooking gear. I always woke up before Nathanael to make coffee and breakfast for the both of us, beating my gloved hands against the biting cold. I knocked on the hatch of the covered bed of his Toyota Tacoma and he threw it open, eyes puffy and complaining about his frozen limbs. I handed him a steaming thermos of coffee and a plate with a warm breakfast burrito. He squealed in delight.

“What did I ever do to deserve you, man,” Nathanael wondered aloud.

That year had been rough on us both in different ways. Spring bloomed while Nathanael and his girlfriend of the past six years broke up and the loss had left him devastated and aimless in the months after. I had spent a lot of time in solitude, locked in my head, while writing a novel and trying to become something I’d wanted to be since I was a child; a writer. More recently, we were both suffering PTSD from the dramatic, nearly fatal trek we’d done together in the Talkeetna Mountains on the Bomber Traverse barely a month before.

We began to think of it as the year of bad weather, both emotional and environmental.

On one of my final days, our friend Wise drove up from Washington to join us. The three of us pulled our cars behind the Lake Louise Hostel and went inside. As we did, three women who worked at the hostel, Lydia, Tori, and Dorian, singled us out and asked if we wanted to go with them to the only bar in town that was open after the tourists left.

We readily complied.

We went to the visitor center, a glorified strip mall and the last stop on the road to Lake Louise Resort, and found the door to a second-floor bar among the dark fronts of cafes and gift shops. We waited for an hour in line with other young people—most of whom worked at the shops and resorts that made Banff run, and got inside a half hour before closing time. We bought drinks quickly and soaked up sticky warmth from dancing bodies as we watched the snow fall in the empty parking lot outside. The lights turned on as the DJ played Whitney Houston’s ‘I Want to Dance with Somebody’ before we bundled into our jackets and headed back into the night.

The ladies walked with us back to our cars and we huddled under blankets in the back of Wise’s SUV, drank whiskey, and watched the snow pile up around us. We spoke of our travels, of home, and how we weren’t ready for winter. We grew sleepy and started to pack up. Nathanael had hit it off with Dorian and they left together, Tori slipped off to her dorm, and Lydia invited Wise and I to stay in her dorm. We gladly accepted, rather than spending the night in the frigid parking lot. Despite the flirtatious nature with which she’d offered the invitation, Wise and I made our beds on the floor, delighted only in the warmth of a sheltered place to rest, and fell asleep to the sound of her snoring.

The next morning, her roommates heckled us as we gathered our things. 

“Ahh, the walk of shame,” they mocked. 

Wise and I laughed and exchanged a knowing glance. We didn’t see any reason to protest, even if they were wrong. 

Nathanael, Wise, and I did very little of what we had set out to do, which was hike and backpack through Alberta’s grand mountains. In fact, we only went on two hikes in those two weeks as we waited for the weather to break. Every day the wind howled, sleet came down in a fury, and I grew tired and annoyed of the cold but also the way that Nathanael and Wise constantly bickered with each other. I felt like this trip was distracting from my work, which was to complete revisions on my novel in order to submit it before the end of the year. But I was also feeling empty and alone. Despite the closeness I felt with my friends, there was a distance that I kept–none of them really knew me and in a lot of ways I believed they did not care to know. 

So, after a clear and crisp morning at Moraine Lake, where the sun sparkled on the snow covered mountains and the blue of the sky was almost as deep as the color of the picturesque lake, I made pancakes and bacon for Nathanael, Wise, Christian, and myself in the parking lot on my Coleman camp stove. 

Then I got in my car and drove south as fast as I could—hoping to feel summer again before it was over.

It was September 18, 2018. Five weeks before I met Melissa.