There’s almost no reason we should be best friends, other than that we’ve had the same mentor, Doug Peacock, and that we share a love for the West, including the strange state of Utah, where we both went to college. Terry was trained as a natural historian, and I a wildlife biologist. As I’ve mentioned, the world first pulled us together at Edward Abbey’s memorial, near Moab. The second time I met her was at a dinner party in the Tetons for various Western writers. I closed a car door on her writing hand and broke her thumb.
She works in the exact opposite fashion of me. I’m a grinder, showing up for work every day, seating myself at the desk, and wearing down the paths into the subconscious—not getting up to leave until something has happened, good or bad. Some days the wellsprings are dry, but I go down to them anyway, hoping, because sometimes you find it.
Terry, on the other hand, disappears from her writing for weeks, even months, at a time, fully engaged with whatever cause or opportunity life brings her way. The world demands her time, savages her reservoir of it, and she rarely says no. Visiting President Obama or meeting with Bishop Tutu, traveling to Northern Ireland and Rwanda to talk about reconciliation and spirituality. Despite her middle name, she works from a place of greatest calm, of candle-flame centeredness. When she writes, there is nothing else in the world. I’ve never known anyone with such focus, or ferocity.
She’s best known for her memoir, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, but as with few other writers, each new work travels to surprising places: art history, national parks policy, Africa, the Galápagos, prairie dogs. In this wide-ranging curiosity, she reminds me of John Berger. She is a frequent participant in civil disobedience and direct action. She is the person who most typifies the phrase force of nature. She’s won just about every award in the world, and has changed countless lives for the better with her wisdom, passion, and generosity of spirit.
To the outer world, she is like a saint. It’s fun to tease her about this. “Nobody can even have lunch with Terry without crying,” Doug Peacock says, bemused and admiring—but it’s also true.
She and her husband, Brooke, have a successful marriage of forty-two years. They met in a bookstore—how romantic and geeky is that? Terry was working the counter, and Brooke, with his then girlfriend, buying a stack of field guides to Western birds. Brooke’s girlfriend was complaining about his choice in reading material, and Terry, ringing the books up, looked across the counter with her ice-blue eyes, said, “I love these reading choices,” and that was that.
Tempest. Occasionally, chaos does attend her, as if drawn toward her calm. When she and her family were camping in Glacier National Park several years ago, a wildfire swept in, forcing them to flee the stone chalet where they were staying and run for their lives, down the backside of the mountain and into a creek, with embers settling over them like scorched stars. She was in New York on 9/11, and at the Boston Marathon, watching her nephew run, on the day of the bombing.
The red-rock desert of southern Utah is her beloved home. Terry has dedicated her life to fighting for its wilderness, but she does so much more. She is also a citizen of the world. She will spend weeks preparing each talk or lecture, then scrap her notes as she approaches the podium and speak extemporaneously, reducing audiences to tears, then raising them to standing ovations. She is at once elegant and earthy.
One icy, foggy December she was the keynote speaker for the Montana Wilderness Association’s annual banquet, and I picked her up at the airport, out in the agricultural lands north of Kalispell. On our way, in the center of the six-lane highway to Glacier National Park, lay a car-struck bird, feathers still fluttering from the windblast of each passing car and truck.
“A Hungarian partridge!” I cried. “A gift from above!”
Terry was wearing a long black dress and jewelry, but I made a U-turn, drove down that double-wide center turning lane, and instructed her to open her door as we passed and snatch it up. In the cold weather, and when their individual feathers are still ruffling like they do when the bird has not been dead long, they’re all right to salvage. (I was already dreaming of how delicious it would be, one of the best-eating game birds.) And as if she’d been doing it all her life, Terry opened her door, leaned out, and scooped up that plump little bird on the fly, with me slowing only enough to facilitate the pickup.
Just like that, the bird was in my old Subaru, still warm, almost as if it was unharmed there in Terry’s hand, with each feather a miracle, mahogany and russet and mustard, taupe and amber, earth-colored for camouflage yet also somehow as singular and flamboyant as a parrot.
We rode into town and checked into the Garden Wall, a little Victorian bed-and-breakfast, where, the next morning, in cold sunlight, wearing fleece, we sat on the front steps and plucked that beautiful bird. Its feathers swirled around us and clung to our jackets. When we had the bird plump and ready, our hosts took it and said they would fix it for us for dinner, which they did, complete with finely diced garlic and onions, a jalapeño, and an olive oil, huckleberry, and balsamic vinaigrette reduction. They grilled it perfectly, and with the snow falling outside we ate it on fine china, with a bottle of ruby-colored Beaujolais. By the time we checked out a couple of days later, one of our hosts had tied each of us a beautiful tiny fly with the hackle feathers of the Hun’s downy legs.
So much has changed, of course. Terry knew Elizabeth well, and was witness to our dissolution. But enough time has passed that the scars, while still scars, are starting to be accommodated. I know how to deal with the pain when it returns; I know, too, that it will pass on, like a cloud, and that ever so slowly other things will become visible at its edges.
Mary Katherine, my older daughter, has been coming home as much as she can. She has enlisted me to be a board member on a campaign she’s running, at the ripe old age of twenty-four, to create medical-research centers in California and Montana. She travels to Australia and Switzerland to give presentations and interview Nobel Prize–winning scientists. She sits down to lunches and dinners with ex-presidents, mayors, senators, governors, ambassadors. She works eighty hours a week some weeks, as I once did.
Lowry is home again in the Yaak this summer, following a life of the mind, a life of literature, supporting her studies as a student of environmental writing and general nonfiction at Middlebury, where she decided to transfer after her freshman year. (Not to be, I’m afraid, her adventure house-sitting for Lorrie Moore.) She’s the best reader I’ve ever come across, reading more patiently and deeply than I do: curling up in the overstuffed chair by the window, with the marsh beyond, and spending hours in paradise, while we trade off cooking and I shovel more books at her. Hoagland, Welty, McKibben. After so much loss and grief—such failure—I feel like I’m getting my feet back under me, helped by those I helped for so long, my own children.
Terry, who has known both of the girls since birth, wants to see Lowry before she heads back east to Vermont, and so, having spent weeks planning this meal, Low and I head south, to the cottage that Terry and Brooke keep near the Grand Tetons.
Lowry and I share driving duties en route to Jackson Hole, with me typing while she takes her turn. The car is stuffed with backpacks and gear—after cooking for Terry, Low and I will go into Wyoming’s Wind Rivers on an ambitious backpacking trip we’ve been planning for years—as well as ice chests, skillets and pots, pie dishes, and groceries for the meal with Terry. (Brooke, alas, is down in Utah.) After the long trip, Lowry will return home for a few days, then rocket back out to Vermont. The big house will be empty again. There are stirrings in my mind, men and women made of clay becoming slowly animated in the landscape of the novel I want to write, the one I’ve been making notes on for fifteen years. I can feel them churning around, way down there in the mud, the late-summer sun awakening them. It feels good.
In Dillon, several hours out from Terry’s, we stop at the famed taco bus for huevos rancheros and green chile enchiladas. We reach Jackson Hole, and the Tetons, ten minutes ahead of schedule. The peaks above are magnetic. I don’t mean metaphorically. You can feel their mass tugging you as the moon must feel the pull of the earth. The flecks of pyrite, hornblende, mica, and zinc glitter. The ice caps soothe the air around them.
When we pull up in Terry’s driveway, she’s on the porch, wearing a long black dress and turquoise necklace, the picture of elegance in the cool green bower of her and Brooke’s cottage, which their family has owned since long before Jackson Hole became Jackson Hole. Aspen leaves flutter and quake. Mule deer emerge from the cooling shadows and into the darkening green of the meadows.
Terry envelops us in a hug, seeming as strong as ever. This is a woman who for the last several years has lived with the everyday presence of a bleeding brain, a meningioma, which induces a stroke-like response in her body every time the lesions burst. Numbness, then partial paralysis of limbs, speech difficulty, migraine, cognitive fuzziness—in short, everything that could conspire against a writer. Surgery is one possibility, but such a high-risk procedure that she’s opted against it, and instead just keeps living one day at a time. The surgery could render her a happy vegetable, the doctors say; she would still be able to take delight in the world, but would have no capacity for memory. This could still come to pass, even without the surgery, as a result of the disease itself. Living in the moment was a skill she possessed before her diagnosis, and one that she practiced better than anyone I’ve met, but now she does this more than ever.
Her writing has gotten even better. I don’t think it’s necessarily due to any neurological alteration, though there has been one curious side effect: as if less able to traffic in clichés, her brain’s wiring for idioms and colloquialisms appears to have gone completely FIGMO, so that when she means to say something like “It’s no skin off my nose,” she’ll say instead “It’s no shit on my knees.” It’s delightful—and, knowing her so well, I understand exactly what she means.
Two chairs sit on the porch and a single newspaper, the New York Times, on a wicker table, unread but plump and waiting. We pass inside, into a home that is neither spartan nor overappointed. A small kitchen, a small dining area—with the house and its corners ceding to the central living area, adorned by a long leather couch, bookshelves, and a stone fireplace.
Before unpacking—before we even open the Cowgirl Creamery blue cheese, the oily green and black olives, the Raincoast crackers, and the rosemary butter and sourdough baguettes—we go out to the back porch in the late-day sun with a bottle of cold sparkling wine. We sit in the thin sun and catch up for over an hour, while cooking time slips away, guaranteeing us a late dinner. It is a delicious squandering. A moose, dark as chocolate, wanders past, browsing the willows.
Lowry and I string a hammock for Terry and insist she lie in it and read while we begin making the meal. And she tries; she reads for about ten minutes, but then comes back inside for more talk.
With our ingredients spread across every available space, we begin stacking things in tiers of two and three. Lowry’s unflappable, simultaneously preparing the salad—figs, goat cheese, basil, arugula, pumpkin seeds, and a vinaigrette—along with her homemade black pepper and lime gingersnaps (perfected even further since our trip to see Sedaris), which she’ll use to make ice-cream sandwiches. As if that weren’t enough, she’s also assembling the galettes: baking the sweet potatoes, rolling out and cutting the rough puff pastry dough into squares, brushing it with oil, mincing the jalapeños, and toasting the pumpkin seeds. All while I stand in the kitchen staring at the pile of dough with which I’ll make a double crust.
I’ve made hundreds of pies, but tonight I feel I’m moving in slow motion. My brain won’t let go of my instinct and desire, which is to relax and visit with Terry, who is perched on the other side of the bar. All I have to do is bake a crust, pour Yaak huckleberries in it, cover it with a latticed crust, and be done. At the last minute I’ll salt and pepper the elk tenderloin, throw it into the iron skillet with some Yaak morels, and sear it.
The galettes don’t bake long. Soon their parchment-thin laminae are browning and it’s time to fire up the meat, which is seasoned only with kosher salt and cracked black pepper, all it needs. I stir-fry the morels quickly in butter, caramelizing them. The weight of the meat, and the sound of it in the heated skillet, tells you how long it will take for it to be done just right. There’s also a smell the peppercorns make when the elk is ready. At this point, you want to slice and eat it immediately. (The veteran of a thousand such dinners, Lowry knows this, and is bringing the dishes to the table as Terry lights the candles.)
This is the meal of my dreams. The house is a universe of scent: not just morels and butter and seared elk but also the holiday aroma of baked sweet potatoes. The pie, meanwhile, is in the oven, and the hint of vanilla that Low put in the gingersnaps wafts through the air. We hold hands, Terry says thank you, and the three of us sit down to a great feast of the earth: potatoes, wild meat, wild mushrooms and greens, with wild berries awaiting. Terry all but roars at the first bite of elk.
It’s been a year to the day since she and I last saw each other, and we make an agreement not ever to let more than a year pass. Terry asks us each what was the best thing that happened in the last year. Low’s and my best was a horse-packing trip to British Columbia’s Muskwa-Kechika Management Area, just a month earlier.
Terry’s lowlight, her meningioma, is obvious. Not far behind that, being persecuted by her former employer, the University of Utah, for her environmental activism. Her highlight was having her father and Brooke accompany her on the tour for her latest book, The Hour of Land, her personal, idiosyncratic, and political journey through a dozen of America’s national parks. It was the first time either of them has done that.
Her biggest surprise was becoming the owner of two oil-and-gas leases, as a counterintuitive means of continuing her work to stop drilling on public lands. She and Brooke and her father started their own energy company, with leases they had secured but which the government is trying to take back from them, given that their definition of energy production differs from the state of Utah’s. They intend not to drill for hydrocarbons, but rather to use the lands for natural-history field trips and exploration. A different kind of energy. Litigation against them appears inevitable.
“The job of the poet is to remain indignant,” Terry says.
It’s remarkable, how much food we’ve eaten. It’s so good that we can’t stop. We’re stuffed, but the pie and the gingersnaps remain. Terry and I lean back in our chairs, beyond sated, while Low scoops vanilla-bean ice cream onto her snaps, sprinkles it with lavender sea salt, then pours the thinnest drizzle of black-pepper simple syrup over the ice cream before pressing the cookies and ice cream into sandwiches. I get up and cut wedges of hot huckleberry pie, each round and sweet berry having been picked by hand in the backcountry just a few days ago specifically for this pie.
After dessert, we sit in the candlelight, delirious with happiness. Terry wants to play dress-up. “Let’s blow out the windows and have a fashion show,” she says. Her request seems to make perfect sense. We snuff out the dinner candles and go into the living room. She’s come across a beautiful long maroon velvet dress she wants Lowry to try on. It’s ankle-length, with a flamboyant belt and padded shoulders, totally Parisian, and Lowry wears it elegantly.
For me, Terry finds a soft buckskin blazer—a Halloween prop?—and it’s great fun to model it as if I were Natty Bumpo. Coupled with the fantastic meal, it feels like the best therapy ever. It’s like we’re all seven years old again. Low is so radiant in the maroon dress that Terry gives it to her. The two of them are taking silly photos, which they’ll post to social media. The evening stretches to the other side of midnight. Terry insists on getting Low’s guest room just right, plumping the pillows, then arranging and rearranging my spot on the couch, fooling with different variations of sheets and blankets. “Are you comfortable? Are you sure?”
All the while, time slips away; as if we are made of time, and as if our lives are defined not by the balance of equinox and solstice, but instead by the ebbing away of time.
Breakfast: huckleberry pie, purple in the high-altitude morning sunlight, gingersnaps, vanilla-bean ice cream, black coffee. Terry and I sit quietly, with the awareness of more than half a lifetime’s friendship between us unspoken. I am reluctant to leave but the day is stirring, and we must go out into the world. Terry has work to do on an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times about national parks, and Lowry and I have miles to go to reach the Wind Rivers.
We embrace, after which Lowry and I load our car with all the cooking gear amid the camping gear, and pull away. I worry sometimes that Terry is traveling too much, waking up in too many different hotel rooms. The thing we most wish for her we cannot give. The more famous and revered she becomes, the more she gives, and the harder it gets for her. The physical as well as emotional and spiritual toil accrues. I feel both fortunate and guilty to be going off into the woods for a week. Maybe in the fall things will slow down for her. Or if not the fall, then the winter. She’ll write again. It’s forming in her, even as she waits for it, gracefully.
What I know most of all is that I’m lucky. Other than Terry and I both loving the woods with the ferocity of a wolverine, we couldn’t be more different. And yet I couldn’t wish for a better friend.