Dying here, in this place to which I’m grafted, doesn’t seem so hard. Breathing easy, beyond struggle, down the road past fear. I settle in beside Dave’s ashes on the bluff above the North Fork, at the edge where the cut bank drops away and the river’s breath and chatter come up clean at night. 60 backlit miles of Glacier peaks will guard our sleep, as they did for 20 years. We’ll dream, if such ethereal fancies are possible, of the little fox with his Fuller-Brush tail and black sox who joined us for a summer; of radio ballgames; the swift warmth of a china-dry larch fire; lightning-laced clouds. We’ll have forgotten how hard it was to find the money for fences or the energy to pack and tote our town lives to The Land and back each week.
The other half of me, the ashes anchoring the urn stretch out up Findon Lane, blow down the coulees and up the ridges of the Leary’s hard-won ranch. I’m a stone’s throw from the bench of tipi rings, the homesteader’s three-room rough-planked cabin, the pink trailer house, the goats and bum lambs, dude-ranch bison, and Gene and Evy who shared this Eden with me. Eternity curved into that sweep of sun and land, held high between the Little Belts and the Crazies.
What looks much harder, unbearable, in fact, is the likelihood of living here when I can’t—in the shadows between now and dying. What happens when I cannot feast my eyes and fuel my imagination on bow-roofed, tar paper homestead shacks; wide, empty small town main streets; mossy second-home, Bide-A-Wees; tipsy Butte four-plexes built on copper; the simplest rail engineer’s bungalow. What happens when I cannot limp out to a river or hunt for old roadbeds sliced into a valley edge or sight down long-abandoned rail tracks? What ache when my memories of September light angled through Seeley-Swan ponderosa or the twists of curve and hill between Avon and Helmville dissolve—and I cannot drive back over? What silence if I can’t hear Blackfeet honor drums or the wind? ©
