“There’s always some surprise, something cool, something that makes you go wow, that was amazing. I’m curious, I like to learn, and they’re always teaching us something new.”
I release Pete to the rest of the wolf watchers, and turn away from the coyote hillside and toward the Lamar River. I inhale air from miles away, air that has traveled here over small valleys, skimming lake surfaces, rolling up mountain peaks and swooping down their craggy sides, leap-frogging over the bison by the river to brush past me before skimming the next rise of hillside. Sun-warmed, river-fresh. I’ve left my bicycle behind for three days now, and am operating at a lower frequency than usual, breathing in peace and breathing out tranquility. My day is structured only by the movements of the wolves that live in the canyon, the wolves that seem to be hiding from us this afternoon. There’s a crinkled brown paper bag with two cinnamon rolls from the Bearclaw Bakery in the car and my water bottle is full. I look out at cranes high-stepping through marshy river edges. I am possibly the hundred millionth person to stand here and whisper, thank God this place exists.
Emerson’s words echo: the landscape belongs to the person who looks at it. I possess this beauty, me alone, as I breathe it in and store it in my cells. I color it with my past, seeing mountains I skied as a girl, rivers I splashed through, meadows where I ran and swung on tree limbs. I place myself inside it all. I move into vrksasana, tree pose. I am balanced. A breath, two, five, then I become human again and walk back to the car.
I haven’t always been balanced. I toddled like most children, and earned each bruise and scrape. As I grew I became more steady, learned to skateboard, ride a bike, ski. I earned a degree, worked a corporate job, got married. Stable, settled, tethered by a house and a bank account and a husband. And then the pregnancy, the loss, the death. I lost every bit of balance I’d ever possessed.
My feet are spread so far apart, I’m immobilized. One is planted in the cemetery—with Little Joe, and the other at the hospital—with Jake. I lose equilibrium with the slightest shift toward one or the other, and crash noiselessly into a netherworld. Grieving is impossible when I navigate by clinging desperately to a thread of hope.
On Jake’s second day of life we’re told he had a seizure during the previous night.
“A seizure?” Bob asks.
“Yes, so he’s on phenobarbital to suppress them. But we have an ultrasound scheduled, they should be here soon with the machine.” The nurse is small, short dark hair, olive skin. Her eyes are walls. She doesn’t smile.
“An ultrasound?”
“They want to look at his brain. Seizures usually indicate some kind of injury to a section of the brain, so they want to look, see if they can determine why he had the seizure.”
I look at Bob. I’m in my wheelchair again this morning. I cannot walk all the way from my room to the Newborn ICU. I have another heated blanket on my lap, a plastic band on my left wrist stating that I am the mother of Jake Imhoff. I do not have a band for Little Joe.
Each day in the newborn ICU is a week in normal life. I assume the babies in the incubators to be worse off than those under lights on warming tables, until I’m told the opposite is true: on a warming table the baby is available for immediate intervention should he or she suddenly retrogress. Crises erupt and resolve, blood is drawn, tests are performed, diagnoses pronounced and options presented. What is life-threatening in the morning can disappear by evening. What appears normal can indicate severe distress. And just when I think Jake is stable, I’m told of some new complication. He hasn’t urinated, he might have necrotizing enterocolitis, he isn’t alert enough. Hourly I’m presented with something new to absorb and incorporate. You must keep hope.
There is a room off the hallway with a single reclining chair and a machine that pumps milk from my breasts. I hide here. Alone in this room I am protected from beeps and severe expressions, from bad news, from terror of the unknown, from others.
Sympathy pours toward me, and I can’t bear it. Believe. Hope. Each expression demands a reaction I can’t give because I am hollow.
Why are you keeping him alive, my mother asks. The fury of my netherworld leaps from me, pulsing, and shoves itself between the two of us. I don’t know who this woman is. Jake is keeping himself alive. His heart beats, his lungs compress and expand, his stomach digests, his kidneys filter. I say nothing.
I see pain darken the green of her eyes. My mother doesn’t believe in medical heroics. But she’s never given birth to a preemie, and she doesn’t understand that there’s nothing heroic about feeding and keeping warm a newborn baby boy—even a baby boy who’s suffered cerebral hemorrhages in both hemispheres of his brain. Bleeds, they’re called. A grade IV in his left, a grade III in his right. There’s nothing heroic about this. Nothing heroic about placing one foot in front of the other. Feeding and changing diapers, cradling and kissing my baby, hoping and praying—all while operating almost by rote, my entire belief system in pieces, my sense of self in shards.
I sit with eyes closed on the wooden deck that runs along the entry doors of the Elkhorn Lodge in Cooke City, Montana. Clear skies brought a brisk morning and a cool day, and I welcome the slender slice of sunlight hitting my body. The hill before me is naked and yet covered with trees: these are trees that burned during the town’s terrifying fire of 1988, trees that stand tall, lean precariously, and lie on the ground, dead, none able to leave this death knoll. The sun is ready to drop below the mountains though the sky remains bright on this June evening. Tomorrow morning we leave Yellowstone. Part of me will stay here, just like these trees. Will eventually decompose, will become part of the soil. Will give life to what comes next.
And how much of this landscape will come with me when I leave? I look within, searching for wild, for what’s been reignited. And suddenly I’m thinking of Daniel, our relationship flat, lifeless. I see us in our house, in shorts and t-shirts, a project.
I am on a stepladder. I jam the putty knife under a corner of paper, shove it up, between wall and ancient grasscloth paste. The wallpaper is dated, has been on the foyer walls for decades. I’d lived with it for six years, and am excited that Daniel and I are stripping it, replacing the bumpy, stringy stuff with smooth, taupe paint. It hadn’t been easy to settle on a color. Daniel wanted the sage green gone—he thought my house entirely too green—and we’d tried eighteen shades of gray-tan-beige before finally choosing this taupe. He and his fifteen-year-old son had moved into my house when we married a few months before. I’d lost more of my space than just that inside closets and cupboards.
He preps an un-papered wall, I soften old glue and scrape dusty paper from another era.
“I was stripping old wallpaper the week that Jake was born,” I say.
“Oh?”
“This puts me back there—I haven’t scraped old wallpaper in a long time. I’d taken a week off work, and was just home, nesting I suppose.”
I pause between sentences, sometimes between words.
“I’d had an ultrasound a few days before, and on that Monday morning my doctor called, told me he wanted me to have a non-stress test to check on the babies. They were concerned about the growing size discrepancy. I said sure, any day, I’m off all week. He suggested Thursday. I said okay.”
I scrape distractedly. I tear a strip of stringy paper free, and toss it in the trash pile before continuing.
“I hung up the phone, climbed back onto the stepladder, and kept scraping. And then by Thursday, Little Joe had died, and then on Saturday Jake was born. Wall paper will probably always put me right back there.”
“Mm.”