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in northeast Yellowstone.
    Of course I remember, I told her.
    Now, wrapped in this impossible fog of grief, I have only one thought about the future: That after my leg heals, when neighbors are no longer bringing over covered dishes, when friends are no longer stopping by to mow my lawn and vacuum my house, no longer driving me to the mountains so I can sleep under the stars—probably sometime in early fall—I’ll make up the bed in the back of the van, stock the tiny fridge, pick just the right music, and drive away. Beside me will be a jar, a beautiful jar. One last time for the two of us, outward bound, into the West.

THE RELICS OF HOME
    A s best I recall, I started leaving the ordinary around age seven, escaping by ascension—going up twelve feet, sometimes fifteen—sitting in the crook of maples or oaks and hugging the trunks, curtains of big green leaves wound up in the wind, making noises like rivers running through the sky. Kid-style adventure, mostly. But on some days—days when my mother’s rage was running, when she’d been at me with that studded belt she kept hung behind the bedroom door, spinning me around until my bare butt and thighs were covered in a splatter of welts—on those days, the trees were sanctuary. On those days, I’d squirm higher still, to the uppermost branches big enoughto hold my weight. And I’d sit there, sometimes for an hour or more, way above everything, halfway to the sky.
    At about the same time, Jane was doing her own version of leaving the ordinary, mostly in a loose toss of woods at the edge of her family’s farm. A modest patch of mild disorder where foxes did half gainers through the air, landing with front paws pinned to unsuspecting mice and voles. Where raccoons waddled up to the creek and washed their faces—looking, she said, like overfed hoodlums cleaning up after a hard night of stealing. In time those encounters led her to join the Girl Scouts, and later to take a job as a counselor at the Kentuckiana Girl Scout Camp in northern Kentucky. Nicknamed Calamity Jane, she kept the sash from her uniform hung in our closet for years, festooned with twenty embroidered merit badges: among them “Outdoor Cook,” “Drawing and Painting,” “First Aid,” “Reader,” “World Knowledge,” and “Adventurer.” I always thought it strange there was no “Rambler” badge, though for all her urge to wander, her chance wouldn’t come until later, long after the uniforms had been put away.
    It was the best of luck for us to have come under the spell of trees and foxes and hedgerows at a time when millions of other Americans were falling in love with nature, too—in city parks and urban wetlands, along the Appalachian Trail, the California redwoods, at Yellowstone and Yosemite, Rocky Mountain and Great Smoky Mountains and Acadia national parks. Mostly the travelers were young, not ten years older than us, keen to be slipping into that now and then silly, now and then profoundattraction that rolls across this country every forty or fifty years. A drive not unrelated to one that exploded in America in the 1780s. And again in the 1830s. And again in the 1870s. Then still again in the first two decades of the twentieth century—a time so full of fire that journalists described it as a movement like no other in the world. A time when the best-selling books were nature books. When naturalists like John Burroughs and Ernest Thompson Seton were rock stars.
    In 1913, a pot-bellied, beer-swigging part-time illustrator from New England named Joe Knowles sidled up to his friends in a Boston bar and ordered up pints. As usual, they joked, ribbed one another. Argued politics. But eventually the talk drifted to nature, to wilderness. And that was hardly unusual for the times. Any American over thirty had memories of the official closing of the frontier—the frontier being defined as a line