Rapid City, South Dakota, to Buffalo, Wyoming

I can only see a sliver of my face in the rearview mirror of my parents’ car. My nose is red. My cheeks are pale and dry. I run straight from the backseat, dressed too warm for activity in a teal puffy jacket and flannel. The temperature is only a hair below freezing, but I can’t shake the chill. Not until I force heat out through cramped legs to toes with each strike on the packed-dirt trail. The sky is not clouded over, yet flakes fall. None stick. They hint at winter’s approach—a warning without consequence. The path is eerie in its stillness. Ravens’ throaty calls are the only sound outside of my own body. If I were to run this trail in summer, I’d have to dance around hordes of fellow visitors. Instead, I am alone. My parents are behind me, closer to the car. Without evidence of their existence, it’s as if I’m as abandoned as I feel. It’s only me, and the dark granite spikes.

I shouldn’t be here. If the world had ticked on its alternate path—what I thought was its right path—I’d be sitting in a graduate nonfiction writing class, listening to my classmates pick apart and reassemble book proposals. I’d be waiting for A. to call. I’d be buying bus tickets to visit him. Months later, I still can’t bear to call him “my ex,” or refer to him by name.

To find myself in the Black Hills, of all places in the world, was not a history I could have predicted writing. I knew my parents were driving cross-country, moving from their temporary home in Minneapolis to be near the Wyoming hospice center where my maternal grandfather was, we believed, dying. They would see national parks they never had before, skimming through the front-most percent of land without feeling our family’s usual compulsion to venture deep into the backcountry. It would be a way for a pair of empty nesters to make the most of preemptive grief.

My presence, squeezed between their bath towels and ice skates in the backseat, was never the intent. Their duvet fills in the cracks between boxes and spills down to warm my lap. My knees jam into the driver seat, a physical reminder of the space and role I thought I’d outgrown.

Barely a week before they left, and a day after the breakup, my mom asked if my dad could join our phone call. I don’t know how many times I called her in those first days, crying every time. I laughed, still teary, when Dad insisted a change of scene was what I needed, and a reasonable ticket to Rapid City was at my command. I refused. Mostly out of guilt. I told them it was generous to fly me on such short notice, but were the tickets really that reasonable? The carbon price of such a jaunt felt irresponsible, regardless of personal cost. And, I could never get away with abandoning school and work for a week. It was the ultimate “dad plan”—all heart, no practicality.

But then, I accepted. It might be the last time I could see my grandfather. I didn’t want to even open that thought. In my mind I listed the stories he’d told and retold even when we insisted we knew them already. Canoeing around Manhattan. Building his own, octagon-shaped house. Training ranch horses—even hand-feeding one through the hole another had kicked in its esophagus.

I didn’t know my grandfather’s stories well enough to tell them myself. I only held their outlines. There must be a hundred others I’d never asked from him. They suddenly felt far more important than what I could write for my graduate program.

My head had no room for schoolwork, anyway. Every moment alone was a moment of reliving a conversation no one had anticipated. Before he’d started medical school, A. hadn’t expected its rigors and the years of uncertainty and transience that follow would overwhelm him. He hadn’t expected to be scared into believing he could focus on nothing else. At least, he’d let me believe we could feel our way through the next years, apart but together. When we could, we’d split our weekends between hiking New Hampshire’s northern mountains, and wandering Manhattan’s grid. That had been our plan. It hadn’t included both of us sobbing, A. repeating he was so, so sorry, and that it was killing him to do this to me.

His plan, he’d said before his final visit, was just to see me. He didn’t stay long enough for us to make it to a trailhead.

It’s after hours of driving west from Rapid City that I first tell my parents I have to run. My hamstrings feel irreparably knotted, folded into my stowaway nook. More than that, my mind is too close a space to live in. My parents agree. Fresh air, however sharp, will help us all.

And so I run between phallic spires that had poured up through the Black Hills. It seems right to see the surreality of my outer circumstances and inner state reflected in an unsettling landscape. Piercing up from Earth’s skin, the rock forest I weave between is as disconnected from normalcy as I am. I should be surrounded by beech trees and maples, their bright leaves drifting to rest on glacier-smoothed boulders. Here, everything is angular, muted. Snow flecks the air. I should be describing it all to A.

The trail my parents choose is not a long one, and takes far less time for me to run than it takes them to walk. I won’t return to the car and sit while they still move, though. Instead, I run back and forth, shuttling in a kind of Zeno’s paradox between parents and car, parents and car, the distance shrinking but the trail unchanged. With each pass, granite spires take on their own personas—hooded figures towering on either side, impassive. Each curve of packed dirt, each leap over a stream or dodge around a boulder becomes familiar. It is the same pattern my mind traces.

From back-porch evenings together—clutching bowls of some chickpea concoction we’d cooked, listening to sirens and the neighbor’s harmonica with my shoulder tucked into his ribs, when A. and I had lived a walk away from each other in Somerville—to the unbearable visit when he said he wanted to save me the pain of following an indentured servant of medicine. And back. Between the years of companionship, and the weeks without.

Mind and body move without stopping, over the worn ground, retreading each step I’d made before.

Buffalo, Wyoming, to Dubois, Wyoming

In façade-fronted Buffalo, where we stopped for the night, I run again. This time, away from one emptiness and into another. Night is the hardest. Darkness makes the shape of A.’s absence clearer.

It’s six in the morning, but the sky is midnight-dark, no hint of sunrise. A hazy moon lights the trail out from town. Sky stretches forever. I’m alone by the creek with Orion and the Dipper. I look for Cygnus the swan in her Milky Way river. A. was the one who taught me to find that bright cross. In college, crunching over snow or through leaf litter back from the library to one of our rooms, we’d trace her flight above us. He can’t, now, in Manhattan. The city hides her from him. 

Later that morning, we cross the Bighorns. Sun breaks the snow clouds massed at the crest. Golden cliffs, wet with meltwater, gleam like the limestone walls surrounding Oxford—where A. and I had visited his English family months before. Together, we’d walked endless paths over sheep stiles and through greenwood, the quilt-patterned terrain gently rolling, if at all. A.’s sister and I had traded stories of the land’s past inhabitants—Britons, Saxons, Danes, Normans—and exclaimed over the chalk horse, grassy barrows, and circles of standing stones. A. added his own made-up histories. I laughed at each wild invention. His sister rolled her eyes, and said he was lucky to finally find someone who’d put up with his shit.

Here in the Bighorns, the last remnants of morning fog veil and reveal each precipice the road snakes around and through. I try not to think about those summer walks, of how A.’s mother had told me I was one of the family. I focus instead on the fluted cliffs and lodgepole pines.

Below the mountains, tawny hide of land ripples as if the earth itself is in motion. Ochre and umber grasses contrast with sky and the blue-shadowed peaks. An oil derrick spikes from the plains. Powerlines mar the horizon. Beyond infrastructure, there’s no evidence of people who might make their home here now—let alone of the Shoshone and Crow who lived here before. My mom and I convince my dad to pull over for a bathroom break. The map shows hours until the next town. We could relieve ourselves in the middle of the road, if we want. Only black cows are near enough to see. 

We drive onward. Stone towers poke from plains like broken teeth. I’d believe the sandstone blocks, distinctive red capping pale foundations, were soldered together by mistake.

Beyond Thermopolis, population 3,009 and the largest town we pass, grazing ground opens into fissures. The highway drops with the Wind River. Unmoving drills loom like huge, sleeping birds above cliffs striped with russet and lavender sediment. Earth-time is painted visible. Here, humanity is a scratch in the stratigraphy—the land long-occupied, but only recently and irreversibly altered by our hands. It’s the opposite of Britain, where human history is tangibly layered, where our time in all its destruction and beauty shrouds the landscape.

I try not to think about—but cannot help think about—the layers of time I had with A., and the years ahead I relied on. Who, now, will run, and hike, and cross-country ski with me for hours? Who will cook increasingly experimental stews with me, making sure I eat enough? Whose fingers can trace my arms, naming every bone and muscle, tendon and vein? Who can make me laugh to the point of tears, and hold me through my flashbacks of finding a friend’s dead body?

I hadn’t realized how deeply I was tangled, how many ideas of self and future I had layered with the idea of him.

Dubois, Wyoming, to Jackson, Wyoming

We reach the Absarokas, Jackson Hole’s eastern edge, in less time than I’d expected. Togwotee Pass is slush-soaked. My mom leans forward to peer through shuddering windshield wipers. We can’t see the Tetons when we crest the divide. Everything is soaked with gray; burnt sienna branches along Blackrock Creek are the brightest color.

My parents argue. I can feel my dad’s impatience. The valley closes around him after the expanse of plains—and the thrill of the Minneapolis job he was leaving. The city had glittered with more social and cultural possibilities for him than Jackson does. That’s what his voice says, accusing my mom of tying them to this place. She snaps back, wounded, the fragility of her own father’s health suddenly real once we slip into a landscape she first saw from the back of a car he drove.

I want to swat away their pain, and the pathetic fallacy of weather. I itch to get out from under their pile of bedclothes and my own backpack.

Sleet hardens to snow on the valley floor. Sagebrush, ranch horses, cottonwoods, mountains, all are inked in monochrome.          

As soon as we reach my grandparents’ house, I run. White ground, bare trees, clouded sky. Snow stings my cheeks—a different sting from tears. Clouds smother the Tetons. I could be anywhere flat and cold. The wall of mountains, that instant compass pointing west, is gone.

My feet kick up puffs of powder. Lungs expel stale air. As I always do out here, I fall into the country’s mythology: that West is the way to freedom. Exploring these mountains used to be my escape. Scrambling amid the Tetons’ spires, peaks, and cirques—or simply moving through their shadows on the valley floor—was a way of slipping the confines of the east. This time, I want the discomfort of rough edges for an additional reason. Inhabiting western topography, even for such a short time, is a confrontation of inner, layered reality.

The space dwarfs me. Half-buried sagebrush stretch to the cloud walls in all directions. Ravens scrawl unreadable messages on either side of my wake through the snow. I’m gripped with awareness that personal pain and anticipation of loss are miniature foretastes of what’s to come for all on Earth—of what’s already unfolding. Species loss. Habitat loss. Entire ecosystems scarred or destroyed. Ways of life and cycles of life thrown into chaos.

Vastness offers new grief—and yet, with it the tiniest possibility of relief, of scale beyond the individual.

It will be difficult to return to the safe cradling of New Hampshire’s granite hills. Maybe there will be a time when I’ll appreciate again the sureness with which I can navigate any White Mountain peak or trail system; the friendly curve of mountains rubbed by time and water; how the names of lakes, summits, flowers, and trees spring to me without effort. But now I need wild unreality, these temporary roots shot into unfamiliar soil. It’s a gift to be delivered to these places where geology breaks through the surface with the hidden ferocity of earth and hardened fire.

Here, my grandfather still grasps at life. Though not moving with his old vigor, in the months after we leave, most days he’ll shuffle down the hospital living center hall to the picture window view of the Tetons. I know I won’t hike up their canyons with him anymore. But I want to believe he’s anchored himself in the mountains’ granite. At least, for now.

Jackson, Wyoming, to Durham, New Hampshire

When I return east, a professor mentions the geographic cure in class. He explains that sometimes, when your heart breaks, you pack everything up and escape to some far-off place, a place that holds no reminders of your beloved. You hope the novelty can make you new.

What he doesn’t explain is the geologic cure. Everyone—my mother, my childhood and college and local friends, the university counsellor—says to me: it takes time. I know how time works. Time heals on a geologic scale. I know from past loss that healing cycles as earth cycles, as rocks and water transform in circular stages from liquid to solid to liquid again. I know how inner cycles move.

A new geography cannot undo heartbreak, but perhaps there can be solace in topography that reflects the soul. Pillars of rock cresting from plains. The bleakness of flurries against yellow-edged clouds. The jarring return to kid-status, wedged into the back of a car, my parents’ past years of life without me piled on top and behind and beside. To be set adrift, unmoored on seas of tawny grassland. I was not comforted, but affirmed. The open sky’s indifference felt right.