The last time I really “awoke” was just before dawn on Saturday, on the cliffs above a mountain meadow in the Wyoming wilderness, beside the glowing embers of a fire that I’d been tending most of the night and some friends I’d met only a few days before and have little likelihood of seeing again. It was the end of a week that brought a number of things back into focus that had been allowed to go blurry, not all of which need discussing here.
A few weeks ago, I learned that a place I’d been visiting since I was a kid – and where I worked the summer and hunting season after college — was to go on the auction block in September, leaving only memories and an uncertain future. After scrambling a bit with travel arrangements, I finally found myself in open spaces, windows down, driven onward to the mountains by some of the best music ever made.
Glorious.
Most of the following week was spent on horseback, discovering new approaches to landscapes that have been a small but significant part of my life since I was eight. The elk herd in the high country made the icy rain streaming off my hat brim a mere inconvenience. Meadows of alpine flowers, moose, and deer accompanied the constant search for a new trail, an untouched path into the next valley and the valley after that.
When I went to work in this place I had no plan for what to do with myself, and though that is still mostly the case these several years later, I was thrown off balance a bit by the flood of memories reminding me of who – and how – I once was. Am I now what I thought I might become? How many moments was I too blind, too consumed, to recognize along the way? What if…? What if…?
As the smoke curled up beyond the trees toward the Milky Way and thoughts of everything that might have been slowly gave way to sleep, I couldn’t help but pine for that 22-year-old’s swagger. I should hope there’s still some of it left…somewhere.
