She made her way out of the door. She’s got a real, big-time, and completely legit career. I wiped wake-up gunk out of the crevices of the sockets that contained all the regret my liver consumed, over the years, in the retinas of my bleakly disillusioned eyes.

 

Silence blares like a metal show between the walls of our home. I rip-a-curse of rage at the universe – “damn, my reprobate style!” My peculiar brand of wayward chutzpah. The beats of
my heart felt like the leaves outside, decaying on the ground. Fall always makes us realize how far we still have to go, to get back up.

 

The numbers on the clock read: running behind. Change never comes from the maniacal rush, faster never saved any souls. I staggered out the door, frowzy and draggin’ my spirit. Crisp air hit my nostrils, and the trees breathe purity.

 

That dilapidated truck always takes a few attempts, but ain’t missed a horizon-line, yet – five turns, and benedictions, and the engine rumbled. Stopped at red-light despair, the cadence of an electric-cowboy tune, combined with the putrid scent of pristine death – a squished cat, all nine lives spent – shoots me to an old scene, like a shotgun to the memory glands.

 

I’m gettin’ out of an effaced rig – neon turned booger green. The road hits a stop, a dead-end; civilization has run out, there’s no rules, it's all self-reliance for the daring, who keep going. I yank on my pack-of-a-house, and it’s too heavy for my neophyte alignment of my spine. I’m gone, there’s trail to tromp. The inclines take you by the streams running clean as holy water. Deep into the infinite nowhere...the Mont-ucky wilderness, and the exigencies of lower status on the food chain.

 

I wanna puke, it’s high elevation and thin oxygen. The view makes the title-worthy grade: Big-Sky country! Every morning, raw with big adventure – hell, you were just happy to zip your skull in the comfort of a sleeping-bag at night, and the body always ached, but it beat the gnaw of predatory jaws.

 

I almost met my fate in those hallowed woods – damn near shook the maker’s hand, whoopin’ it up, over spectacular wildlands. We had left two axes behind, misery-whipping logs that blocked the path of the trail.

 

I was alone, retrieved the tools, and U-turned my steps, going back to camp – two hours till sunset. In the desolation of rangy miles of the Bitterroot backcountry, I descended steep dirt, and the trail swooped left, skirting a pond, where jagged peaks took bites like teeth out of the sky. Up to its chest in the pond was a massive moose, and it cooled itself off; dunking is humongous head and broad paddles in the glacial water. I stopped to marvel at trifle thing, that city-slickers don’t even consider.

 

The quiet hung eerily, the moose splashed carelessly, and I recollected the hunter’s advice, “I ain’t scared of anything, out in dese darn woods – except, of course, for a moose, that is.” The escape route hooked into a thicket of trees. It was time to make a furtive exit. I took a last-minute glance to scald my brain fibers with a memory. The moose, twenty feet away, glowered intentions of territorial menace into my soul – it was a big sky showdown at the little pond.