The Source of All Things (29 page)

At some point that winter, my parents had bought me a round-trip ticket from Las Vegas to Alaska, I think to ensure that I'd come visit them before I left the Lower 48 again for who knows how long. So Shawn offered to drive me down from Winter Park. We left in early April and stopped when we got to Crested Butte, Colorado.

The resort offered free skiing at the end of each season, so we hit the slopes, skiing terrain I never would have imagined possible before that year. We rode the Poma lift and picked our way through no-fall cliff bands and 40-degree faces. Shawn said I was the coolest girl he'd ever met and took a picture of me doing a spread eagle off a jump. I watched him launch off rocks and straightline his skis down cliff-peppered slopes, wondering how I had gotten so lucky.

We spent our nights sleeping in the back of his pickup. It was freezing, so we zipped our bags together. We'd roll around, creating sparks big enough to start a wildfire, then lie side by side, staring up at the constellations. I should have frozen in my 15-degree bag when the temperature dropped to near zero, but with Shawn beside me, the heat trapped in our sleeping bags never left us.

We kept telling each other love was for losers. I said it was stupid, and Shawn said that if you had to tell someone you love her, you really didn't. We kept it up all the way through Colorado
and into Utah and then Nevada. The land transitioned from skyscraping peaks to red-mud hoodoos to bleached ocean-bottom-like desert.

It was there, in the desert, on the eve of Shawn's departure to Colorado and mine to Denali, that we finally said the three words we pretended to scorn. We said them almost at the same exact moment. Salty tears streamed down our faces as we tried to come to terms with separating from one another. Mine stopped when Shawn told me that in a couple of weeks he was following me to Alaska.

Shawn and I
were always in a live-or-die situation. At least that's how it seemed, our first summer in Alaska.

At my cabin alone, we counted ten grizzly bears wandering through the devil's club past the front porch. Thanks to Colin, the cabin door was a piece of reinforced plywood, and the windows were Plexiglas insulated with Styrofoam cutouts. The door's lock was a piece of bungee that attached to a driftwood handle. One day, Shawn and I heard whimpering under the house—my sled dog Merlin's litter of puppies. When we looked outside, we saw a giant grizzly sow with twin two-hundred-pound adolescents. We opened the door and stood on the porch, because, without a gun or even supposedly bear-repelling pepper spray, if the bears wanted, they could have pushed down a wall and eaten us. Each time the puppies whined, the bears came closer. Each time they came closer, Shawn and I shouted them off. Eventually Merlin returned from eating a neighbor's garbage, at which point the bears lost interest in the puppies.

If we'd had an animal totem that summer it would have been the grizzly. They found us everywhere we went. On a river trip down the remote East Fork of the Chulitna River, in our tiny, inflatable raft, we drifted past three, all walking on the silty banks. This time we carried a loaner rifle, but neither of us ever thought to grab it. Vulnerable as babies, grizzly finger sandwiches, we floated silently, back paddling away from the shores they walked on, each hoping the bears wouldn't notice us.

When we'd finally had enough close-call encounters with grizzlies, we went on one final adventure: this time to the no-bear zone of the snow- and ice-covered Alaska Range, which one of my bosses at the park agreed to let me use as a “patrol.” With three other climbers, we took a bush flight into the Ruth Amphitheater, near a tiny stone hut constructed on a pile of rocks in the middle of the glacier called the Mountain House. Shawn and I had little climbing experience, so we put our trust in two dudes from Telluride, Colorado, who knew how to travel as a rope team across the Ruth Glacier's gaping crevasses.

The trip was plagued with problems from the beginning. It turned out our “guides” didn't have all that much experience. We made it through the crevasse fields safely, but when we tried to climb Pittock Peak across from the famous Moose's Tooth, we encountered hip-deep sugar snow melting on top of featureless black granite. If the snow had slid, we would have fallen to our deaths.

We retreated just as our pilot was flying overhead trying to make contact. But our radio was shoved in the bottom of someone's pack. Later, we'd learn that he was trying to signal us, to tell us that bad weather was coming, which would shut down flights
into the amphitheater. Instead, we retreated to a place called 747 Pass, where, within hours of setting up camp, the temperature rose, the clouds socked in, and the mountains started “shedding their skin” in avalanches like you can't believe. Through the haze of clouds we could hear them ripping in every direction around us. We thought ourselves safe because we knew we were on an island. But we didn't know when or if they'd stop, when or if we'd be able to retreat to safety.

For three days we sat in our tents, worrying. I felt bad for our tentmate Julia, who suffered the sound of Shawn and my smooching to pass the time. As the days before our eventual pickup passed and the tension in our group rose because we truly didn't know if we'd make it out or get buried by an avalanche, Shawn and I never argued once. Since then, we've been in more than our share of killer fights that have taken us to the brink of divorce and scared our kids so badly we've made them cry. But we always manage to get back to the foundation we built in Alaska.

Shawn and I married in Winter Park on July 10, 1999, in a meadow overlooking the Continental Divide. Patches of snow still clung to the mountains, which shimmered in the thin, high-altitude air. For as far as the eye could see in every direction, giant, bald peaks fanned into the distance. A red-tailed hawk skimmed the meadow, searching for dinner. Lily pads floated on the surface of a pond that someone had dug to attract small birds and animals.

Though the forecast had called for afternoon thunderstorms, the weather held, bright pink and sunny, until after the ceremony,
when we turned up the music and started to dance. I wore a long, cream-colored gown with a modest bustle in the back. Shawn wore a smart green suit. We both had grass stains on our bare feet.

Mayz officiated, standing between Shawn and me, the three of us contained in a circle of family and friends. In one of the photos, her hand has just fluttered up to her heart in response to the vows we wrote each other, which were tender and aching and true. But what doesn't show up in pictures is the impact she had on me just hours before the ceremony, the message she shared that dampened the happiness I forced myself to exude outwardly. It was so awkward and disturbing, it almost made me call the wedding off.

In the years since Dad and I had driven down the Alcan, his apologies had become more flagrant and heartfelt. But he still talked euphemistically about “hurting me” and “making my life difficult.” On the surface, I'd played like we'd made amends, but underneath my gracious exterior I still burned. The flames of my anger often licked at both of my parents; the previous March, however, they had flared up at my mother.

“You're going to let your dad give you away, aren't you?” Mom had asked. She'd come to Winter Park to help me pick out napkins and a real wedding dress. Unlike my wedding with Colin, this one would be a big, serious ceremony. But even though my dad and I were on decent terms, I refused to let him hand me off.

“Let him give me away?” I exploded. “If he were going to
give me away,
don't you think he would need to
have had
me in the first place? I hardly think either of you have done
anything
to deserve the
honor
of giving me away.”

Mayz had watched me level my parents, who'd driven six hundred miles and spent hundreds of dollars to make my wedding a special event, for two days. I could tell my behavior was making her sick, but I couldn't help myself. In the midst of all this holiness, I wanted my parents eighty-sixed.

Now, two hours before the wedding, Mayz wanted to have a heart-to-heart. We sat in the parking lot of the salon, where several girlfriends waited to watch me get my hair and makeup done.

“Tracy, there's something I need to say.”

A pang of guilt stabbed my gut.
My behavior.
Mayz had seen the worst of it and I was fully expecting her to call me out.

“I know. I've been a monster. And I feel bad about it, okay? Don't worry, after the wedding I'm going to apologize for everything. I promise. But can we just not talk about it now?”

Mayz reached over and grabbed my hand.

“Tracy, honey, I need you to listen. This is not about your mother. It's about you. And Shawn. And Don.”

I turned to face her, expecting another blessing, a final invocation of grace. But Mayz was finished with blessings.

“Tracy …” she said. “You are going to be given a moment. I don't know when, but a door is going to open. You're going to be given a chance to give your heart completely to Shawn. The door is going to open, and you're going to walk through it. You're going to be given a chance to forgive Don.”

Up the road, a dozen friends were setting tables and arranging bright flowers in a circle on the lawn. Two sets of relatives had driven hundreds of miles before winding up and over Berthoud Pass, bearing gifts. Mom, Dad, and Chris stood in the crowd,
smiling awkwardly, anxious to see the daughter-sister-bride. I was feeling guiltier by the second because I hadn't relented and agreed to let my dad hand me off to my new husband. And now Mayz had stuck me with the heavy burden of God.

When she was finished, Mayz got out of the car and went into the salon. I sat there for twenty minutes, maybe more. At first I thought,
Screw you, Mayz—and your “mystery.”
And then I thought of a way to get around the hard part. I would be brave, and walk into the circle where Shawn and I were to be married even though I felt like the lowest life form on the planet. I would smile and pretend that I was having the time of my life. I'd never let on that Mayz had almost ruined it for me, with her ill-timed prophecy or whatever it was. If and when I encountered Dad, I would say
I forgive.
That way, I could forgive the
situation,
which may, or may not, include him.

That's how I decided, at the last possible moment, to walk into the center of the circle, where Shawn was waiting to promise me love, support, and protection for the rest of my life.

S
hawn and I spent the first year of our marriage skiing, thinking about skiing, or dreaming up ways to ski more often. Five days a week from December through April we arrived at the lifts in time to hear the first avalanche bombs detonate, then ripped through stands of timber until the sun set. We fed our habits by working low-wage jobs at Winter Park Resort. Come summer, we returned to Alaska, where Shawn continued to raft guide and I worked at Denali. But when autumn came, we circled home to Winter Park. It was there that our first son, Scout, was conceived, in a big lonely basin just below the Continental Divide.

It was late August, a year and month after our wedding. We'd thrown our sleeping bags in a meadow full of columbine husks. Though we knew it could snow at any moment, we carried no tent; just our bags, zipped together and reeking of woodsmoke,
wilderness, and sleep. Because we were in a basin, the sky created a giant dome around us, framed in by the bald mountains of the divide, the dark, craggy cliffs jutting here and there, and the trees fifty feet high and crowded together like people at a silent wake. Sometimes we thought we could hear a train whistling down in the valley, but it could just as easily have been the wind, kicking up somewhere near Tabernash and wrapping over the Divide.

I remember the feel of Shawn's body, tight and lean, with broad freckled shoulders and a skier's ripped torso. This was when we hardly ate and kept ourselves mildly dehydrated at all times because we believed it could curb our hunger for food. This was when we wanted to be hungry only for each other and despised the thought of excess flesh coming between us. In the dark we pressed our bodies together, chest to chest, hipbones knocking, attempting to dissolve into one person.

We had been talking about babies, even as we'd wound down the Alcan Highway on our way home from Alaska. Shawn wanted to be a father because his own dad had failed so miserably. A violent alcoholic and product of Vietnam, he had run out on Shawn's mother when she was still pregnant with his little sister. Shawn was looking for karmic comeuppance: he wanted to spirit a family across the West, read Ed Abbey to his children while they camped in the Escalante Desert, stargaze and fly-fish, build snow caves they'd actually sleep in. More than anything, he hoped to spend a few more summers in Alaska, where he could teach his kids the value of hard labor, independence, and good friends.