Today’s post is revived from the archives—a rewrite of that older piece at any rate. A version of it was first published as “Suddenly Not Alone” in November 2023, back when only 223 of you were rolling with us. I wanted to share this again to celebrate there being nearly 800 of us here now that the Rolling Desk is a year old. If you’re new here, you might not know that Ruby the van and I drove from Arizona to Alaska a few years back. This vignette tells the story from an encounter along that road.
The slim path is about to turn in toward jack pine forest. I stop. My cheeks feel hot. The shrubs lining this subalpine ridge are thick and tight. Silvery wolf willow pods, bearberry the shade you see when you press your eyes closed, and indigo berries like teardrops hover inches from the ground. Over the edge, the lake is an aqua shimmer. A crow flies on silent wings into the sun.
I picture the canister of bear spray on my belt but don’t reach for it yet. I’ve learned, almost surprising myself again and again, it’s in my nature to sense and meet impending peril with calmness. Like the time when, seconds before tires hit ice, I sat up straight in the backseat of the jeep I’d been lounging in and clipped in my seatbelt. As we tumbled off the side of the canyon, I relaxed and watched the sleet coming at the window like stars in a space movie go slant and then disappear, replaced by muffled images. Now, I’m not sure why my limbs are tingling and blood is crashing over my eardrums.
Foxes and snowshoe hare and hoary marmot make their homes here. But I dismiss each. Some part of me knows whoever’s near is far larger. Both wolverine and lynx seem farfetched. I think of how black bears, with a sweep of a maw, strip entire vines that grow lush and languid in lower, warmer altitudes and realize I’ve been thinking of the berries of my feet as harder to attain. And what a weird thought is that? Then I remember that grizzlies dig roots from the earth or take down caribou and moose. Hold still, I command my legs.
The wind picks up, playing the bodies of lovers immemorial. Pine needles quake. The water below edges over rocky shores, slides back in release, edges up, slides back, edges, slides. A long branch lets out a whistling moan as it whips and then settles. I hear in the stillness the absence of caw, caw or chit-chit-chit or twee, twee, twee, twee, twirrrrr. Breathe.
Wait. There beneath the tang of pine is something else. A hot muskiness. Like the final reward from one of those hidden image 3D paintings, there emerges from brush, a massive silky carob flank. Above it, a long neck of darker brown, a head tilted toward me, a coal pupil in chestnut iris, soft, considering. The elk cow’s ears are raised. From her position, it’s clear she was coming in my direction. The path won’t accommodate us both.
I want to give way to her, whose home I’m visiting. My only move away is toward the ridge’s edge. I take a hesitant step but then move quickly back onto the path. I’m probably imagining that pebbles loosened by my foot tinkled in slow motion down the sheer cliff. But I can’t envision her passing without me tumbling.
When the jeep stopped rolling, I was hanging from the belt. I knew right away we were in a tree, still far above the raging river at the bottom of the canyon. “We’re OK,” I’d said into the stillness. “Let’s move slowly.” I knew not to unclip the belt until I could hold my weight with my arms and pull myself up and through the passenger door, now facing the sky, knew to drop gently to the snow and not look back.
Now, I look toward the elk cow. Before I can form a plan, we become two creatures melded. A welling up of something like longing surges from my belly to my throat. Show me, it would say if it had voice, everything. As if she could transfer to me the feel of summer’s white rays caressing rump high above alpine treeline, the way spongy tundra floor becomes a memory when wind speaks of snow once more and presses the rocky journey to forest below, the satisfaction of yanking a woody morsel lodged in frozen crystal. How long before the salt melts on the tongue does a mineral lick float up the nostrils like a tantalizing allure from faraway sea? Is it comfort, the chattering mew and bugle that whines and murmurs through a grazing herd?
She takes the lead to solve our impasse. To change direction, she must turn her back to me, a move that brings her slightly closer. Before I can stop myself, I reach out. But thought catches up and stops my hand from grazing her back.
Even so, hovering in the air between us, my fingers feel her heaving side, soft but thick, flesh and muscle, steam transferring her heat to my hand—like an imprint from the eons that pulse through our veins. In an instant, she becomes a memory.
Who I Met on a Path in the Woods Alone