Distinctly Montana Magazine

W W W. D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A . C O M 21 LITERARY LODE LITERARY LODE DEPARTMENT LITERARY LODE This excerpt is from the start of the memoir. I t was hard for us to keep up with all the ways the boomers were hugging the remote corners of the American wild. By ski and backpack, horse and raft and mountain bike, in harness on the faces of mountains, dangling from climbing ropes. And while we tried most all of it, canoeing had a special place in our hearts. It was a good-sense way of traveling in the American West, a region where everything kneels at the river: elk and deer and grizzly and eagle and osprey, raccoon and wolverine and mountain lion, kingfi shers and dippers and giant rafts of chattering ducks and geese. To be quietly afl oat was to brush against secrets, where you saw things other creatures never meant for you to see. When we were backpacking, we were two people sharing a single journey. But in a ca- noe, we danced: the person in the back of the boat setting the general course, the one in the front refi ning it, especially in white- water, cueing the rear paddler to obstacles by her choice of draw stroke or sweep or pry. Early in our marriage we'd been to Audubon Camp of the West outside Dubois, Wyoming; one evening, we saw a couple in their eighties canoeing down the Wind River. Their paddling was magic, as graceful and effi cient as humans are allowed to be, getting down the river with almost no strokes at all. Only occasionally would the old man's wooden paddle fl ash in the stern—a slight, quick movement at just the right moment, matched exactly to the choices made by the old woman sitting in the bow. Jane and I turned to each other and smiled. We wanted to be like them some day. This part takes place near the conclusion in their beloved Yellowstone Park. On fi rst planning this trip, I'd intended to have the last scattering just west of the main Lamar Valley. But on that last morn- ing, it just didn't feel right. I found myself wanting to be farther upstream, within view of the old Buffalo Ranch, where Jane had worked as a ranger for so many years. The place where, in the 1830s, the won- derfully literate trapper Osborne Russell laid down on his elbow beside the Lamar River, writing in his journal how he wished he could remain there for the rest of his days… It'd been raining off and on all through the night, but by dawn, most of the storm had moved on, leaving only gray sky. We hit the trail before seven, strolling out of the campground and then up the highway, the air fi lled with the smells of Yellow- stone: wheatgrass and patches of Douglas fi r, sagebrush and bison dung and an oc- casional whiff of sulfur. On reaching the west end of the valley, we descended to the Lamar River, traded hiking boots for water sandals, then forged across the sixty-foot- wide fl ow to a small delta on the south e Crry He Gary Ferguson's book is a haunting meditation on wilder- ness, conservation, and grief by the critically acclaimed nature writer in his most intimate, riveting book yet. Gary writes from personal experience about the outdoor life he shared with his wife, Jane, who died tragi- cally in a canoeing accident in Ontario in 2005, and the mend- ing, uplifting power of nature. Confronting his loss, Gary set out to fulfi ll Jane's fi nal wish: the scattering of her ashes in fi ve remote, wild locations they loved. Copyright 2014 by Gary Ferguson, published by Counterpoint Press, Berkeley Listen to Gary talk about the wild: www.distinctlymontana.com/gary152 DISTINCTLY MONTANA | DIGITAL BY GARY FERGUSON

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