West

We are from the Pacific Northwest. I haven’t lived there in a long time, and my visits in recent years were brief and done by plane. I tell you all of this because the wild forest and coastal landscapes of this area are part of my core and were among some of my sister’s favorite things.

I left the east coast a little over a week ago and drove back home, drove west. It wasn’t until I hit Montana that I began to feel the west. The wild expanses of mountains and forests and rocky edges to bodies of water all started to feel like the rugged scenes of home. And it was somewhere halfway through my time in Glacier National Park that nature absolutely broke me.

My friend and I had looped around park of Lake McDonald and doubled back, and the thought hit me that I might never stand again in the places I stood, and I wanted to bask in the gorgeous landscapes. And then I realized that while I could return, never again would my sister stand anywhere she ever stood. And never again would she have the opportunity to stand in a new place. Her fleeting existence on this earth, among the natural sites she loved, was over.

I completely broke down. I sobbed silently and could not articulate to my friend what had happened. She never asked, and I never explained. She just waited with me as I let the intense wave of grief roll over me. It took me. Hard. I wasn’t ready for it at all. I honestly don’t know how long I cried.

From that moment onward, the trip had the tint of the reminder that going west meant going home, and going home meant returning to an existence steeped in her absence. Home is increasingly more complicated these days, but it is indelibly infused with the west, with nature, with her.