Personal Narratives
That winter, my girlfriend Nora dislocated her shoulder stripping in a pole fitness class. We celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day by driving to a hot spring just across the border in Idaho. On the way, we told elk stories.
Last semester, I told her, I assigned my students a personal narrative essay. One girl wrote about a drive she took with a friend out past Darby. They took a corner when a herd of elk crossed the road. The boy driving swerved and caught one hard in the back of the car. It ripped the rear passenger door right off, she said. Two seconds after they got out, the whole car caught fire.
No, said Nora.
It’s true, I said. And the thing is, the elk wasn’t dead. It just lay in the middle of the road screaming. And all the other elk had left this one sad elk to die alone. So they just stood there, elk screaming, door missing, car on fire, and waiting for someone to get them.
What was the point? she asked.
The what?
The moral of the story. In the essay. What did she learn?
I don’t know, I said. I guess that was part of the problem.
Sure, she said. Out here, everyone’s got an elk story.
I turned down the radio. The station was half static as we passed into the mountains. Since I’d got to Montana I’d started listening to country, but Nora didn’t like it much. She said country was the luxury of someone not from here.
Before I left college, she said, the first time, we were coming back from Lolo. I’d eaten about five tabs of acid and Coco’d probably eaten five more. We’d been out skiing the pass all day and it was five degrees and fucked with snow. You know, I never drive high.
You drove high two days ago.
Sure, she said, but not high high.
She opened the window and lit a joint. It had been raining in town, but as we climbed the mist turned to light, flaky snow which tumbled through the window. We passed the state line and the valley opened up before us. There were only three colors: white and black and green. Trees like headstones thrust out of the snow and the road twisting along the mountain’s edge. She flicked the joint out the window.
Anyway, she said, driving high was Coco’s job. She could barely get her car out of the lot sober. But tripping she was Danica Patrick. And this herd of elk materialized in front of us. The road was empty and then they were everywhere, pitching and diving like an asteroid field. We were going to die. There was no other way. But Coco jerked the wheel one way and then the other and all of a sudden we were on the other side. And sitting there with the elk behind us, I knew for a second that we were already dead. That we didn’t dodge the elk so much as pass through them. Like ghosts.
She coughed and pointed out the window.
Pull over.
We parked on the shoulder and crossed the highway to the trailhead. It was two miles through the woods into the hot springs. We crossed a wooden slat bridge that swayed over the Lochsa. Rafts of ice floated in bands down the river. Two women crossed from the other side. Nora and I had stopped in the middle to take pictures. She posed bent over the rope rail, blowing a kiss from her hand, her arm cradled in a sling.
The women shuffled toward us, tapping their trekking poles across the bridge.
It gets icy about halfway back, said one.
She pointed at Nora.
Careful with that busted flipper.
It took half an hour to reach the hot springs. It was cold and slick but we went slow. At a toy store, Nora had bought a birchwood and steel bird call. Every few minutes she stopped to grind the call, which twittered and whistled into the trees. A chickadee trilled back to us and she laughed with glee. When the call went silent, she opened her pocket and removed a pill capsule of powdered rosin.
The label read: A small pinch of rosin will renew the bird call’s voice.
And we grinned together about all the poetry in the world that goes unseen.
As we walked, I held Nora by the good elbow. We slipped and flailed down the slope, but I held tight.
Careful of my flipper, she said.
We emerged from the forest into a clearing. The air was filled with steam. The river ran into a soft fen filled with pools excavated into the rock. The springs were packed. Each pool was brimming with bodies and beer cans and joints.
Jesus, she said. Where did they all park?
A teenage boy in a speedo walked by carrying an insulated backpack of Coors.
Bros, he said. Beers?
I took one. Nora looked at me.
What?
We climbed down past the crowd into our favorite pool.
It’s not as hot as usual, she said, glaring at the distant bathers as if the temperature were their fault.
I dunno, I said, I think it just, like, comes out of the rocks.
Lying in the pool, we could not see the others, only the white river and white trees and birds shaking off a fine dandruff of snow. We picked rocks from the bed and searched the Appaloosa-spotted stones for glints of fool’s gold. We discussed a piece she was writing on the Thunderbird Motel, whose neon sign glowed red through my apartment window each night. We made plans for a drive that summer to my parents in the east. Yes, driving! we agreed. That was what we were meant for.
But as we got dressed, we got into an argument.
The argument was bad. It didn’t have to be, but it was. One of those tsunami fights, where nothing is wrong until the water is already twenty feet high.
I’d been sitting in the pool looking at the mountains. Over Nora’s shoulder, a woman was changing. She removed her bikini and stood there naked in the cold. Steam rose all around her. And the whole scene—the steam, the mountains, the snow, the river, the girl, the trees—seemed something extraordinary. The hallucinations of a traveler, lost in the snow, granted a last reprieve before he died. Then my girlfriend looked over her shoulder.
Were you? she asked.
No, I said, but it was too late. I explained about the mountains and the steam and the snow, but even to me it sounded ridiculous. Quickly, it was no longer a fight about another woman. It was a fight about how I said things I didn’t mean. How I would rather lie than talk about anything difficult. How I didn’t listen to or trust her the way she listened to and trusted me. And I kept thinking about the woman and the mountain.
Which was I looking at?
I didn’t know.
We only had one towel, so I waited in the pool as we argued. Nora dried herself very slowly. When she was dressed, she packed her things and stood by the trail. The towel was so wet it was barely usable. The damp fabric had already rimed with frost.
You must be very dry, I said, too softly for her to hear.
As she waited an old man approached us wearing only a T-shirt. He was holding a beer and his long, thin cock dangled past his balls like a question mark. He was an architect, he said, who specialized in designing fake waterfalls for hotel lobbies. He had built fountains modeled on these springs in Hawaii, Hong Kong, and Dubai, but we had stopped listening. We were impatient to return to fighting. When we believe we are right, what we fear most is losing the anger necessary to prove it.
Nora walked ahead of me. The trail was icy and I struggled to keep up.
Careful, I wanted to call out. Your flipper.
But I was the one who was in danger. I clung to the rocks and trees and slipped on the ice as I fell more and more behind. We argued from a distance, me shouting nothing convincing and her words lost to the wind, only her anger remaining. My girlfriend was clumsy. She crashed cars and bikes and was the only adult I knew with perpetually scraped knees. But righteousness had made a mountain goat of her. She yelled and scuttled with an adroitness I’d never before seen. I scrambled down a slope knotted with frost and tree roots before I gave up and slid down on my ass. I tore a hole in my pants, exposing the wool long johns beneath. Here was the evidence. She was strong and I was weak. She was right and I was wrong. If I were right, would I not have glided, like Jesus, across the ice?
She waited for me on the bridge. She looked out at the river which stubbornly refused to freeze.
I don’t know what to do, she said.
She pulled a vape from her pocket and blew a cloud of smoke.
Say whatever you want, but I know what I know.
So do I, I said, but I was no longer sure. I held onto the rope railing, desperate to remain standing.
We stopped at Jack’s Saloon on the way home. It was a good place for the silence after a fight. There was no service and we couldn’t check our phones so there was no choice but to make up. Without data, we were too bored not to be in love.
The exposed wooden beams were covered in names and dates. The names were always in pairs. The earliest date was from the fifties, carved into a crossbeam twenty-five feet in the air.
How do you think they got all the way up there? I asked.
Didn’t you see the sign, she said, pointing. This is Bigfoot Country.
We played pool with two large, ugly men. Scars covered their faces. They were in town for an annual snowmobile race up the pass. Nora was terrible at pool, but that night she sank ball after ball, another sign that she’d been right. The large men bought us drinks and we asked, from politeness, about the race.
Dangerous sport, said one, indicating the scar that cut across his right eye. He clapped me on the back. You think we were born this ugly?
When we left, we dropped a big tip as a thank you for saving us. We got in the truck and Nora held my hand and everything was as it always was, except we were so dog-tired we could scream.
On the way out, we saw an elk standing beside the road. It was shoulder high. I rolled down my window and let in the cool air. I knew if it stepped into the road, we would die.
So what was the point? I asked her.
The what?
The moral of the story, I said. With you and Coco and the elk. What did it mean?
She stuck her arm out the window and wiggled her fingers.
It’s getting dark, she said. Watch the road.
Jesse Nee-Vogelman (@jtneev) is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Montana’s MFA program in creative writing. There, he received the university’s highest creative writing award, the Merriam-Frontier Prize. His work has been previously published or is forthcoming in Arkansas International, The Tampa Review, The New Haven Review, Reckoning (Pushcart Prize nominee), and The Harvard Advocate, where his story won the Louis Begley Prize, selected by Jamaica Kincaid. From 2015 to 2017, Jesse served as the Artist-in-Residence at the Signet Society of Arts and Letters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He currently lives and works in Missoula, Montana.