Old Country

NO MATTER HOW many times I drive the stretch of I-80 through southern Wyoming, I never get bored. Pronghorn, sagebrush, refinery in the distance, weather-beaten rock formation, billboard with a quote from Revelations, more sagebrush, more pronghorn…It’s monotonous but harsh and beautiful country. Harry and I’d done at least a dozen backpacking trips in Oregon, Idaho, and the Wind River Range over the previous decade, and had visited friends in Jackson during the last few ski seasons, so I’d made this drive what felt like a hundred times. Pretty sure I can even mentally distinguish the interiors of gas stations in Laramie, Sinclair, Rock Springs, and Evanston.

The voice of my audiobook’s narrator was interrupted by a ringtone and Harry’s face filling the screen of my phone.

“Hey, babe, you good if we fill up in Green River? It’ll be like another hour.”

“I’m good, love, keep driving safe!”

I was in our 4Runner, following behind Harry, who was driving the awkwardly large U-Haul we’d packed our entire life into over the last several days.

“How’s Dash doin’?”

I looked into the back seat, where our golden retriever, Dash, was curled up.

“He’s fine. Ready to stretch his legs, but we’re all good back here.”

“All right, love, keep driving safe.”

Ever since we’d crossed from Colorado into Wyoming on 287, it had started to really set in that—holy shit—we were actually, finally doing this. Harry and I had been talking about it since we met in college over a decade ago. On one of our first dates, I’d asked Harry some generic question about his “hopes and dreams” or maybe some even cheesier bullshit like “Where do you see yourself in twenty years?” I don’t remember precisely how he started his answer to my question, but I’ll always remember one part of it, because it enchanted me right away. Might even be the reason I fell in love with him.

He’d said: “I want to find some land in the mountains, somewhere where I can sit on my porch, look out, and the only man-made structures that I can see are my own home, barn, and workshop.”

He’d said it with such sincerity and this hopeful longing in his eyes. Although, at the time, I wasn’t sure if he was just another dude trying on different personalities and making whimsical bullshit proclamations in an effort to get me to fuck him. Maybe that was actually part of what he was doing, but either way, it worked. Also, he’s certainly maintained his passion for doing exactly that ever since that date, and he’s made me fall in love with the prospect as well.

I didn’t need too much prodding, though. In fact, I’m actually more familiar and experienced with the prospect of life in the rural Rocky Mountain West than Harry was. Growing up in a wood-burning-stove-heated home in a small mountain town in southwest Colorado with two lifelong ski bum parents certainly greased my axles for it. That’s also probably why I was immediately attracted to Harry’s “dream,” and why, ever since that first date, I have associated it with a deep, warm feeling of home.

I’d been bringing up that old quote of his to tease him since we began this process about a year ago—the process of seriously looking into buying land somewhere in the mountains. That process was initiated by reaching out to real estate agents in Bozeman, Missoula, Helena, Bend, and Coeur d’Alene, and even just that experience and having ongoing email correspondence with them, by itself, made it all start to feel real and exciting. Then, when I pitched the creation of a unique position that I could do remotely to my COO and CEO, and then actually started working with them to create the position, it got very real.

There have certainly been moments when I’ve felt apprehensive and anxious about doing this. I’m going to miss the hell out of my friends, random happy hours, live music, and being a day trip away from my parents and hometown. That being said, I’ve been paying attention to the ever-increasing anxiety and gut feeling that we needed to really give this lifestyle a try and commit to it now, or we just never would.

I’d also paid close attention to whether I was doing this just to make Harry happy, and was continuously surprised to find it really was something I wanted for myself as well.

Harry’s thirty-five, I’m thirty. Most of our college friends were having kids while getting even busier with work. As for ourselves, we’d begun to feel we were at a junction between either buying a hilariously overpriced little house in Boulder or Denver and working even harder, or giving this lifestyle a try. Arriving at that junction made me realize how badly I wanted to at least attempt the homesteader life, and how fond I’d grown of the idea of making a home with Harry somewhere quiet, beautiful, and wild.

There was a distinct moment when we began taking this dream seriously. We were on I-70 a little over a year ago, heading up to go skiing, and the traffic was so bad it took us six fucking hours to get over Vail Pass. Harry and I had been in bad traffic on I-70 countless times before, but I’ll never forget the look on his face about four hours into that particular drive. I remember so clearly watching him from where I was reclined in the passenger seat. Watching him stare around at the stop-and-go traffic with a look of resignation and anguish on his face. He finally looked over at me and said, “Babe, we need to get the fuck out of this state.”

We’d quickly realized that Bozeman and Bend were dead ends. Land around there was too expensive, and we wanted to find somewhere in the “real West,” and Harry—and I, to a certain extent—didn’t really feel as though Colorado qualified for categorization as the “real West” anymore. We’d been living in Denver for the last seven years, and it had started to feel like LA or Phoenix. Growing and sprawling, eating the plains more and more by the day.

Our Realtor in Coeur d’Alene introduced us to a colleague of hers who works out of Jackson but manages listings all around the Tetons. Jackson was laughably out of our price range, but this Realtor, Nataly, sent us some amazing listings on the Idaho side of the Tetons that—at least to me—appeared to be bigger, nicer, and a fraction of the price. Harry had taken our dog out to Driggs, Idaho, on a fishing and grouse-hunting trip with a college friend a few years earlier and was immediately, adorably enthusiastic about this part of the country.

I remember sitting on the couch as he showed me a satellite map of the area and pictures he’d taken while he was there. “It’s amazing country. I can’t believe I hadn’t considered this area right from the beginning. It’s just trout-filled rivers, aspen forests, public land everywhere. It’s an hour-and-a-half drive from Jackson, around four hours from Boise, and like three and a half from Salt Lake. Babe, trust me, it’s fucking awesome.”

That past September, we’d driven out to Jackson for a friend’s wedding and spent a few days afterward in Idaho meeting with Nataly, looking at places around Teton and Fremont Counties. Harry was right—it was amazing—and the trip certainly got me psyched about the Idaho side of the Tetons, as well. We didn’t see anything we loved in our price range, but I was absolutely floored by how beautiful the area was and knew right away that Harry was right. This was where we needed to move.

A few months later, our Realtor reached out about a little ranch in a quiet valley outside Ashton and Judkins. Nataly was all hot and bothered about this property too, said it was an amazing deal.

It was a little thousand-square-foot house on fifty-five cattle-fenced acres. New roof, new water heater, it had a separate garage/workshop, a couple little sheds, a porch that ran along the entire front of the house and wrapped around the side into a big patio off the kitchen, a chain-link-fenced acre around the house that looked nicely landscaped. On top of that, the neighbor to the north and east was a national forest several times the size of Rhode Island.

Nataly explained how the property had been purchased almost a decade earlier by some big ranch-land real estate investment firm for the purpose of being incorporated into some kind of land and easement exchange deal with the Forest Service. That deal with the federal agency had either fallen through or moved forward without the use of this property, so the real estate firm fixed up the little house and the land a bit so it could be approved for financing and was now just trying to get it off their books. She said it would “definitely sell” within a day.

Harry spent almost that entire night on GIS maps, tearing through the property documents he could find on the county’s website, reading about the hunting unit the land was in and the seasons, doing water rights searches; he pulled the damn soil classification maps—you name it, he read about it. That next morning, he gave me a full-on why we should make an offer right now pitch. I’ve got to hand it to him too; it was a good pitch.

With the VA mortgage plan Harry qualified for, and having already convinced ourselves both that we loved the area and that it was a sound investment, we were pretty much set, even though we’d never actually been on the property. Besides, it was still cheaper than what our friends were spending on houses in Boulder, Denver, Portland, and San Fran. So, we said fuck it, let’s just do this, and we called Nataly and told her to put in an offer. The next morning, we got an email from her saying they’d accepted our lowball offer without any counter. We were officially under contract. A few weeks later we got the inspection and title report, no red flags, so that next Friday we officially closed on our first home.

When it came to actually affording a house on fifty-five acres, well…you could say we looked good on paper, but we were mostly just piss and vinegar. That is to say, we both had good credit scores and Harry qualified for a kickass financing option through the VA, even though our savings account was quite modest.

On top of that, because Harry qualified for the “Combat-Related Special Compensation” program, he didn’t face many work restrictions and we got a nontaxable check every month from the government that could cover a significant portion of our mortgage. As Harry likes to say, way too often these days, “This mortgage and the GI Bill are the only pleasant pieces of baggage that come from six years in the infantry.” I know Harry doesn’t include the monthly check in that list because it makes him feel guilty. Makes him feel weak.

I’ve done what I can to convince him not to feel that way, because he fucking shouldn’t. The number of times we’ve argued about it and I’ve heard him use the same old line—“Sasha, the government paid for my degree, I’ve healed from my injuries, I can work full-time, we don’t need this fucking handout”—is equal to the number of times I’ve told him “The hell we don’t.”

I’d be a liar if I said it wasn’t very nice getting a text every month notifying me that Uncle Sam had just made another deposit into our account, but why shouldn’t that be nice to see? Harry deserves every penny of that, and more.

I started dating Harry not that long after he’d learned to physically function again after getting literally blown up and torn apart. I fell in love with him as he learned how to function socially again. I watched his eyes as he’d struggle and fight to act calm and happy around me in a crowded bar or at a concert. I see his scars every night when we get in bed and watch him wince and limp every morning as he gets out of bed. I rub his back to wake him up from nightmares. I see the pain in his eyes late at night as he looks into a fire. I hear the distance and sorrow in his voice when he has a bad day.

There are still places Harry won’t go with me. Things that happened overseas. Things he did, things he saw. I think he believes he’s protecting me, but it’s so much harder having this silence between us. There’s this unspoken chapter of his life filled with seismic events he’s been a part of and that are a part of him. I could spend all day cataloguing the ways in which the VA is a hopelessly flawed institution, but I was always glad that at least they gave him someone to talk to. If not me, at least there was someone. I feel some anxiety knowing that he won’t have those regular therapy sessions going forward, at least for a while. He needs someone to talk to, and while I’ve never put the pressure on too hard about it, I just wish he would make that someone me. At the same time, I realize I’m probably not the best person for that kind of therapeutic back-and-forth. I don’t have the institutional knowledge, and I don’t really care to develop it.

I’m sorry, but fuck the United States Marine Corps conventional infantry. I might’ve walked down the aisle with a marine in dress blues, but I have absolutely no fondness for that destructive, maniacal, abusive institution. Thirty-two hundred dollars a month does not even fucking begin to adequately compensate my husband for the things they had him do and the sacrifices they demanded, and for what? Our freedom? I’ve yet to hear someone make a substantive, logical argument connecting my freedom to my husband getting blown up on the other side of the planet ten years into a losing war against a fucking idea. Having watched the Taliban take full control of Afghanistan within minutes of the United States’ withdrawal last summer, it seems no such argument could possibly hold water now, if it ever even could.

So, yeah, we’ll be taking that goddamn check.

I saw the U-Haul’s blinker flick on when we got to the second exit for Green River, Wyoming, and followed Harry into the gas station, pulling up to the pump behind him.

Dash woke up in the back seat and sat up, alert, leaning forward to look out the front window as Harry got out of the U-Haul and walked back toward me.

I got out of the car and stretched, immediately feeling the cold bite of the Wyoming prairie’s dry March air. Harry smiled at me as he walked up. “How you feeling, babe?”

“I’m good! What are we lookin’ at, about five more hours or so?”

Harry nodded as he plugged the pump into the 4Runner. “Yeah, seems about right. I’m gonna take Dash to do his business.” I watched Harry as he opened the back door of the 4Runner and clipped Dash’s leash. “Let’s go take a piss, buddy.”

“Watch for goatheads and glass, Har; I think rural Wyoming gas station parking lots are designed to fuck dogs’ feet up.”

He smiled back at me. Dash trotted along at his side, his dark red tail plume waving in the air, looking up at Harry as if he were a god.