I Miss the West

I woke up this morning yearning for wide, windswept roads, red rock, and mountain views through hot windowpane. Instead, I woke up in Providence, Rhode Island, missing a hometown 2,000 miles away. I miss the West. I miss my home. I miss the natural playground I grew up in, I miss falling in love on rockslides and meeting up with friends at trailheads and roadside diners and family-owned small-town breakfast places. I miss rippling fields of Indian Paintbrush, snowmelt waterfalls striking my scalp, burnt orange sunsets through smoky skies. When I was a kid, I hated Montana. Newcomers would come and gawk at the expansive mountain views, swoon over the shops in downtown Bozeman, and complain about growing up elsewhere. I never understood their obsessions. I’d been gazing at those mountains and shops since before my eyes were fully developed, I was touching pine trees and collecting bits of moss before I could walk, and starting ski lessons just after. Montana was all I knew. The mountain ranges marked not just the edge of the horizon, but the edge of my world. I never got the experience of seeing those mountains for the first time. For me, it was a mundane, everyday backdrop, meaningless gray, blues and greens. My parents were different. Neither one had been ‘out west’ until college. My dad applied to a job in Yellowstone impulsively and moved with 2 weeks' notice. My mom took a summer job here and never left. But I loathed Montana—my prison, a barren hellscape, devoid of people and just about everything else. Western cowboy-bolo culture always felt foreign. I craved marble fountains, whooping sirens bouncing off cement, pigeons. I craved crowds and buildings I had to crane my neck to see the top of, brownstones and urban gardens. I told my Mom once, in Chicago, “Nothing happens at home. Everything happens here.” But for some reason, this morning, I miss Montana. I miss the rest of the West, too. I miss Utah’s otherworldly cliff faces and sandy bellows, I miss Idaho’s pine forests, Oregon’s waterfalls pouring from mossy, black rock, California’s wide, wet tree trunks in inconceivable proportion, Nevada’s dried sagebrush leading nowhere, Wyoming’s two-laned highways and weathered church steeples. For two years, I tried hard to avoid going home for the summer. It felt like a regression. It didn’t feel right to go to college, to live alone and fiercely on the East Coast, to galavant around Boston with my newfound friends, and get drunk at bars with my fake ID. My attempts to secure a job were unsuccessful though, and the summer of my freshman year I stayed home. I traveled often, but when I was home, I stayed busy to keep my mind quiet and started a blissfully all-consuming business. Truly, that was the summer of escape. Escape from the backyard I grew up in because I was too old and it’s too well explored. Escape from thousands of trails I used to use for wildflower and mushroom hunting. Escape from a place that formed me, my body, soul, heart, and mind, a place I had no idea how to love. My second college summer, I went home again. Mania has a way of disrupting a person’s life. I completed two classes that semester, one book, and zero internship applications. In the mental hospital, I ‘knew’ I’d spend the summer road tripping with my ‘soulmate,’ showing the world what true love was. We’d soar above the Grand Canyon. When you’re manic anything is possible. As my delusions faded and I returned to my safer (though less interesting) existence in the real world, I told my nurses I’d spend the summer road tripping, writing, and selling copies of my published book to small-town bookstores. But the plan never came to fruition, so once again, I was stuck in Montana, the place I had just managed to escape from. But everything changed when I stumbled into love last summer. He loves Montana. He’ll be there for the rest of his life, ranching, moving water, birthing cattle. The edge of his world is the edge of his horizon, and the yearn to leave will never be strong enough. That gave our love an expiration date, because my home is not Paradise Valley, it is not Sheep Mountain, it is not Ennis or Bozeman or Yellowstone or the Gallatin or the seas of wildflowers. But somehow, this morning, I miss the West. I miss how I’d clamber onto the back of his four-wheeler and we’d roar upward toward a breathtaking view of the sunset. It splattered reds and oranges on the backsides of rocky peaks like a blind painter. I miss him in the driver's seat, searching dirt roads and creek beds for solace. I miss those afternoons and evenings because though I didn’t notice then, I wasn’t just falling in love with him. I was falling in love with Montana, reworking my relationship with the place. Don’t get me wrong. This is not some ultimate declaration of love to my hometown. This essay is not a shot in the dark, it’s not some pronouncement that I’ll be spending the rest of my life in a white two-story farmhouse with a porch swing and an aversion to urbanization. But it is to say that I miss the West, despite everything. He transformed my resentment into gratitude, untanlged my mind, and did some much-needed untangling. I left him, he left me, and then we left each other, and now I’m left nostalgic. I spend a good amount of time, now, in the warm embrace of nostalgia. That’s always been true, but never in my life has it been directed so westward. I’ve been remembering a road trip with two friends, a northbound drive up the coast of Oregon. On the left side of the Subaru Outback was the ocean, its sky-blue surface pierced by rock spires, irritating the water, turning it white and frothy. To the right were tree trunks drowning in thick, soft moss, stretching upward through a bed of dead stuffs rotting from the moisture in the air. The views were panoramic. Pristine beaches, oceans, and forests burdened with life as far as the eye can see. I’ve been remembering a hole my sister and I dug in our backyard. May brought snowmelt and our first ‘digging days’ of the season. We dragged shovels, a pick ax, gardening tools, rakes, and mallets from the shed to the backyard. The hole was sheltered between two huge pine trees and a medium-sized cottonwood. We kept a wooden stool back there too, so one of us could sit while the other hacked. The ground was always dry and unforgiving, though. Years of toiling amounted to a hole that was just a foot deep and two feet wide. I’ve been remembering time in the woods and on the edges of cliffs in the heart of the wilderness. I’ve been remembering spontaneous camping trips, screaming my heart out across mountain lakes, caves I discovered, piles of pinecones, and bike rides along rivers. I’ve been remembering all of this and more, because now that I’ve truly escaped my home, now that I have an apartment on the East Coast and no plans to cross over to the other side of the Mississippi any time soon, now that I’m living this life, I’m realizing I’m living the dream of the trapped, timid, resentful boy I used to be. And whatever I do, wherever I end up, whoever I become, and whichever path I choose, I’ll need wide open spaces, night skies overburdened with stars, and campsites miles away from any sign of life. I guess it’s just who I am.