Where the Mountains Break Against the Sea: Chapter 3

September 2018

“Dan’s mother died. So, we’re headed to New York for the week, but I’ll leave a key for you so you can stay until we get back,” my sister, Elaine, told me over the phone. 

“How’s Dan doing?” I asked. 

“I don’t know. It’s a lot. He’s been out there a week already and it’s his last parent. There’s a lot of weight to that,” she replied. 

I nodded into the phone. 

“We’ll see you when we get back?” she asked. 

“Yeah, I’ll hold down the fort. Have a good trip. As good as it can be, I mean,” I replied. 

---

It was the dead of night when I pointed my car toward my sister’s place in Colorado and left Jackson Hole driving southeast on Highway 191. 

It’s weird how an empty highway at night can feel, almost otherworldly, like tiptoeing between dreams. 

After a while, I got stuck behind a slow moving, rusted Jeep that puffed blue exhaust in my face. It was the first car I’d seen in the last twenty miles and, despite the camaraderie I might have felt, a fellow traveler through the lonesome Wyoming night, I was annoyed. I grew impatient. The curve of the highway followed every switchback of the Hoback river through that rugged canyon and made it impossible to pass. 

I flashed my brights and honked my horn but the driver didn’t acknowledge or even seem to notice. 

When we rounded the next curve, I pulled closer until my bumper was practically chewing their license plate. As soon as the road began to straighten, I turned the steering wheel and accelerated into the other lane. 

That was a mistake.  

Coming into the curve from the other side were the bright halogens and the tall chrome facade of a semi-truck. Too close, fifty yards or less between us. I wasn’t far enough yet to pass the Jeep but I was too far ahead to reverse course, slam on my brakes, and get back over. My head felt like it was going to explode. It seemed like there was no way out. 

So, I stomped on the gas. 

When I was a teenager in rural eastern Washington, there had been an accident on a nearby highway that led to a popular vacation lake. A motorcyclist had veered into the mouth of a logging truck. Dead in an instant. Took the truck a hundred yards or more to come to a stop after impact. People theorized that the motorist didn’t feel a thing, that he was turned off like a light switch. I drove that highway the day after it happened. The stain on the asphalt was thirty feet long, like a massive brown water balloon had burst in the middle of the lane. I couldn’t believe that a human body could make such a mess. 

It was rumored that it wasn’t a mistake. That the motorcyclist veered off course intentionally. A recent divorcee from Spokane, an easy way out in a place where no one knew him. 

I swerved back to the right lane, slipping past the grill of a semi with only a few feet to spare, nearly colliding with the guardrail from over-correcting. My driver’s side window was open and I felt the blast of wind as the truck and trailer sped by. 

I lost feeling in my limbs. 

A few minutes later, I pulled off on the side of the highway, got out of the car, ran to the edge of the cliff that overlooked the river, and screamed. 

I screamed myself sick, puked in the sagebrush, and cried. 

An easy way out, in a place where no one knew him. 

I never thought I wanted to die before. Not really, not until the moment I almost didn’t pull back into my lane. 

When the beat up Jeep puttered past me on the side of the road, I let out a shaky laugh. 

I wiped my chin, got back in my car, and drove on. 

Forest fires raged in Southwest Wyoming and I was driving straight through the thick of it. The air in front of my headlights turned gray and my throat burned. Here and there I caught the glimpse of pyres in the forested hills to my right, orange flames a hundred feet high flickered against the soot filled sky, backlighting the limbs of trees like towers of bones, and flooding the midnight landscape with a nightmarish glow. Firefighter camps, lit by massive pale LED lamps and populated with large canvas tents, skirted the road looking like military outposts.

It looked like war. 

Signs placed along the highway told me not to stop, so I didn’t. I kept driving until the outskirts of Rock Springs where in the early hours of the morning I parked in a gravel lot and slept fitfully until sunrise.

The next morning, I woke up and looked around. 

It was my first drive through this part of Wyoming. Before then, I’d never been south of the Tetons. What struck me was the absence of things, the seemingly endless open space broken only by small ripples that passed for hills, sparse platoons of wheat grass, and the occasional runaway tumbleweed. 

It was strange how claustrophobic I felt in a place where nothing obstructed my line of sight to the horizon.

---

I had a friend in Fort Collins, Bailey, a woman I’d met over the summer in Seattle through mutual friends. She went to college at CSU and invited me to meet up with her on my way through. We drove through Rocky Mountain National Park together but couldn’t go on the hike we’d planned because, despite the fact that it was a Monday, the park had filled up with leaf peepers from the city who’d taken the day off to enjoy Colorado’s autumn, and the park rangers turned us away.

While we waited in traffic, Bailey shared a recent bit of drama; one of her guy friends had just come out as bisexual and this caused some of her friends to turn on him, distance themselves. 

“Bisexual guys have it rough, no one likes them. It’s so much easier to be bisexual as a girl,” she said from the passenger seat.

I nodded as if I understood what she meant. As if there was no reason to doubt what she said.

My mom had married a man who came out as bisexual and admitted that he liked wearing women’s clothes sometimes. He admitted it after they had married. She believed he’d tricked her, that he’d been hiding all along, and she divorced him soon after. She told me that he wasn’t well, that there was something wrong with him. 

I nodded as if I understood how terrible that was. As if there was nothing to question. 

Rocky Mountain National Park was gorgeous, the aspens were brilliant oranges and yellows throughout the drive, but no matter how lovely it was, I only saw the gray clouds gathering above. The beauty passed through me as if I wasn’t even there.  

That night, I slept in my car in the parking lot of Bailey’s apartment and without saying goodbye I left the next morning. I headed south for Denver and the silence of my sister’s empty house to wait for them until they returned from the funeral.