I could have killed him, I thought, the way his hand slammed to his chest, fingers splayed, knuckles ridged into white peaks. For a moment, neither of us moved, hung in our separate surprises above the warble of the stream. He hadn’t, evidently, heard me coming up the path, feet soft on the packed umber mud. And I hadn’t understood the weight of my silence, how it burst before him like a grouse through underbrush.
My voice caught up. “Perdón,” I managed. “No sabía. . . .”
His mouth opened, closed. Red-rimmed eyes fell to the white dog beside him, who’d also jumped, body curled into a comma tapering to a tail between his legs. The dog considered me with sad sable eyes. A pink tongue poked between canines.
“Perdona, perdóname.” The apologies surfaced faster now, bubbling over the water. “Yo no quería. . . .”
I didn’t mean to scare you, I wanted to say, but I’d lost the verb, snagged only a noun from the mat of branches above us. Miedo. The same fear ebbing from the whites of the man’s eyes needled into me, stinging with guilt. No quería ser visto. I didn’t want to be seen.
A foreign exchange student raised in the high country of Western Montana, I woke at sunrise to skirt the Andalusian heat, ran the backstreets of Granada where shopkeepers soaped the cobblestone and watched me pass. Near the Albaicín, men hung shirts and scarves and jewelry from wooden racks and watched me pass; in Plaza Nueva, they rolled kegs of Heineken from growling trucks and watched me pass. So did the hotel guests breakfasting with pan con tomate, the tour guides pulling tricks on Segways in front of the courthouse, the painter adding blossoming peonies to a sketch of the Iglesia de San Gil y Santa Ana. And I kept running, head down, counting stone slabs until I crossed the Río Darro and could breathe. Here, beneath the burnt sienna walls of the Alhambra, watchful eyes dropped away. The terrain rose steeply from the muddy river, crisscrossed by narrow trails and exposed bluffs. Songbirds chattered through thorn-tipped branches; an old donkey bayed in the valley below.
I climbed almost straight up the hillside every morning through Spanish broom and the prickled snatch of rabbit’s ear. Kept climbing past hollowed-out caves where young vagabonds sometimes slept, past slick slides of mud that gummed into a cream-colored clay. Then the trails leveled out, ran with the slope and parallel to aqueducts feeding the Moorish palace on the ridge’s western tip. Holm oak and pines shaded the intermittent stream, and for a short window during spring, I once watched the water boil with hundreds of spawning frogs. Then watched, distraught, as they worked themselves to death and hung belly-up in stagnant pools.
The packed rise of earth beside the aqueduct could carry me for miles. Sometimes I took it east, deeper into the dehesa, farther from the sounds of the city waking up below me, into scrubby oak groves and roosters blessing farmland below. Or I turned west, back towards the Alhambra, and skidded through dense forest mulch beside the rose garden walls. On the other side, I could hear people marveling in low voices, snapping pictures of trickling fountains. I caught glimpses of them from certain rises on the trail, but I was out of sight before they had the chance to look back.
I’d seen the man and white dog before, one of the few locals I shared the trails with. He wore a loose polo shirt and faded khakis, walked a steady pace with hiking poles jabbing into the mud. When the weather began to warm, I felt bad for the dog, a shepherd mix, who ambled behind him, panting heavily. This wasn’t the first time I’d scared the pair either; descending a dusty set of switchbacks one late morning, I’d spun around a hairpin corner and seen the man shudder, sharply, a dozen yards down the path. Then, it was only a quick “Perdón” as I passed, and the dog stretched his dry nose in my direction.
This morning, though, I forgot how quiet I could get. I forgot the minimalist running technique I’d adopted, forefoot first, so that my arches absorbed all impact and sound. I forgot that it had rained the night before, that the water feeding the aqueduct gulped over stones and tree roots. Where the trail crossed the stream, a gnarled copse of vines shuttered out the hot Spanish sun, so that it was difficult to see as well. I’d spotted the man, slender shoulders, gaze locked to the stepping stones over lapping runoff, from a ways down the trail. I forgot to announce my approach, offer a Buenos días through the oak and holly.
I forgot, when it came down to it, that I existed. And this is what I was apologizing for—perdón and disculpe and discúlpame and perdóname bubbling from my mouth like rainwater. R’s rolled into a stutter off my tongue. I’m sorry, I said, for being, for shaking that shawl of observation off my shoulders when I crossed the river below, when my feet left the hard ache of cobblestone. There were too many ways to say sorry in Spanish.
*
My brother and I used to practice being invisible. In the front yard of our childhood home stood a mountain ash with branches prime for climbing. It wasn’t impressively tall, maybe twenty feet before the trunk split to twigs, but when we were little, it was enough height to make us feel important. I always climbed higher than my brother, nestled myself into a notch and hummed along with the wind. If our parents came out on the house’s front porch, they couldn’t see me in this spot, limbs pinched among the branches, eyes a flash behind foliage.
The lowest branch of the ash stuck out like a monkey bar five feet above a carpet of lily of the valley, spurge, and pineapple mint. One day my brother and I came up with a game—hook our knees over the branch and hang upside down, completely limp, fingertips gracing the ground. And we’d stay like that for minutes, waiting for cars to pass on the street. Particularly during long summer days, there weren’t many, since we lived in a quiet neighborhood with more recent retirees than not. Beat-up Buicks squealed through bad transmissions. Vans swept by to drop off toddlers at the preschool a block away. The mailman, Leon, puttered up to our mailbox and waved.
Still, we persisted. We swung dizzy and thick-tongued from the tree in the hopes of a perplexed double-take. But no one bit. We frowned and crumpled, defeated, onto the lily leaves. We reevaluated, upped the ante.
We had to be more extreme. Kids hanging from branches was nothing new, even if we didn’t move. So one of us, usually me, climbed up and crouched on one of the lower branches, still in plain view to anyone on the street. My brother, in dramatic flare, sprawled himself across a slab of quartz below the ash, mouth agape. I stretched one arm down towards him, etched false horror on my face. To the passerby, it looked like we’d been climbing the tree, and my brother had just fallen and cracked his head on a rock.
It was perfect, we decided. It was hilarious. We could barely keep straight faces. But for the scene, for the reaction, we sobered up, practiced our motionlessness with resolve. This posed more of a challenge; we had to watch both ends of the street for cars, and once we spotted one, scramble to our positions. Remain perfectly still in the hopes that the driver would shoot a lazy glance out the window, resume driving, and then slam on the brakes in shock after putting together what they saw.
The afternoons dragged on. Magpies sparred with crows in the alleyway, a lawn mower droned in the distance, the sun leaned past high noon. A UPS truck rumbled up Sanders Street a block away. The other way, the occasional car hushed down Oaks. Then an SUV appeared at the top of the hill, turned our way.
“Car, car, car,” we hissed. We scrambled to the mountain ash, adrenaline drumming in our throats, and assumed our postures. And waited, motionless. My outstretched fingers. My brother’s broken-back drape.
The SUV rolled past, not a blink from the driver. So did the next car, an hour later, and the next. Two middle-aged women strolled past with golden retrievers, maintained their gossip without a glance our way.
We were, at first, vexed. But then the absurdity caught on, the realization that as long as we didn’t move, we were unseen. We could pose however we wanted. Both of us flopped across the quartz-stone, limp as rag dolls. My brother dangled from a branch, me with villainous eyes above about to pry his fingers from their clasp. We splayed spread-eagle in the overgrown grass holding sticks to our bellies, tragically impaled.
And no one looked, no one beat an eye. This, it turned out, was better than any double-take or rubber-necking—the reaction of no reaction at all. Stillness, we learned, surpassed the context of any scenario. Stop moving in a moving world and you are invisible.
We stilled ourselves beneath the long summer sun. Melded hilarity and violence behind the dam of laughter in our mouths. How easily we could dim our exuberance. How easily we could spring into that tree, or back into the house when our mom called us in for dinner.
*
I read, somewhere on a list of self-improvement tips I took half-seriously, to express gratitude in place of regret. Instead of I’m sorry I’m late, say Thank you for your patience. Spin the focus away from apologizing to acknowledging the other person, the other side of the equation. It’s not so much about blame as it is pushing past the urge to assume fault—constantly, repeatedly, endlessly.
I’m sorry for bumping your grocery cart turns to Thank you for smiling anyway.
I’m sorry I forgot turns to Thank you for reminding me.
I’m sorry for withdrawing turns to Thank you for giving me space.
I’m sorry I snapped turns to Thank you for waiting until I calmed down.
I’m sorry I’m such a mess turns to Thank you for listening.
The impulse runs in the same vein, though. Swallowing fault only gives it grounds to fester inside, hidden and spreading fast. Tossing gratitude into the wind, I’ve learned, is just another way to go unseen.
*
Once, I surprised a fox. By which I mean that once I moved so quietly a wild canine with her pointed nose and ruby-tufted ears didn’t hear me. Sometimes I see it as an accomplishment. Other times I’m haunted by that jolt of red fur, how our eyes found each other and she bolted with silent paws into the grass.
Deer watched me in those ponderosa gulches and ridgetops, thick-necked bucks and wary does and spirited yearlings. On the trails threading up from my house, I ran in the company of those eyes—mule deer, turkey vultures, jackrabbits, goshawks, field mice, woodpeckers. Once, the brush of a mountain lion’s tail through snow, a berry-dense pile of bear scat. A pine martin scampering across fir branches, and red foxes, low lope, always at a distance. Their dens popped up throughout the forest, but they never stayed long, like drifters with earth-blunted nails. My dad hiked the mountains as well, and we kept track of where the foxes were—on the east side of Rodney Ridge, south of Barking Dog Trail, back to the north face of Bompart Hill.
I started running in high school and never stopped. It grew into something of a dependence, the way most people scoop coffee grounds and half slump across the counter as the machine grumbles. Summers when I worked out of a Forest Service office, I was up at five, catching sunrise half an hour later as I spun pine pollen in my wake. In the winter, I ran after school, up cold gulches as the sun slunk behind mountains to the south. I abandoned trails, too, leapt over beetle kill snags and limestone guts of old mines. I ran forefoot first, and I was always listening. Jingle of dog tags a quarter mile down the trail. Whir of chainsaws up in a patch of deadwood. Distant crunch of snowshoes as I bounded, unencumbered, through the bright powder.
And I could slip away from the sources of these sounds, from people. I skirted up another trail, or descended a draw on the hidden side of a ridge. I offered smiles and good mornings to other trail-users, coughed so not as to scare them if I was coming up behind. “Sorry,” I said if they jumped, if the trail was tight, if their dog ran after me, if I sprayed mud or grits of snow from my footfalls. But when I could, I high-tailed it in the opposite direction—watching, not watched back.
Below, where the gulches widened to city streets and lodgepoles lost their say to maples, I found only fluorescence-washed classrooms, the seething rapids of adolescence, my brother and I bickering every afternoon as I drove us back from school. Up here, sundogs fractured bluebird skies. Cedar waxwings flocked in dark clouds, dropping like soot onto juniper bushes. Heartbeats swept words from my throat, so that on some mornings, hours passed before I spoke. Silence rang in my ears like damp fingers across the rim of a wineglass.
I wouldn’t say I was absent. I’d say I was completely present, but present in these immediacies—rain that tasted of orange peels, dark-eyed juncos babbling like the clink of marbles, how to run atop wind-glassed ice without slipping. Whether I was getting out of my head or reorienting it, I was never sure. Call it a daze, call it meditation, call it prayer. Call it escape, call it pursuit. I just ran.
That particular morning, the fox was trotting down the trail some fifteen yards ahead of me. This path threaded an easy grade across the mountainside, tread soft with pine and fir needles, ponderosas stretching limbs over dry bunchgrass. When I first saw the fox, I cut my stride and froze in the middle of the trail. I anticipated her knowing eyes catching my movement, sprinting off before I had the sense to remind myself to breathe again.
But she didn’t change her pace, and I’d spent enough time under foxes’ watch to know she hadn’t spotted me either. I exhaled, tested a foot on the quiet duff of the tread. The fox continued down the trail. So I took another step and ran the quietest I’ve ever run in my life.
Her black-tipped ears perked forward, and I could see the ridges of her shoulder blades rotate beneath fur that rose and fell like a feathered shawl. But the tail didn’t move. No sway or bristle or tuck. It floated behind her without regard for gravity or the late summer wind easing vanilla-sweet through the pines. I was wholly enraptured by this contradiction of her tail, how she held it still, even through the bounce of her stride.
Awe edged me too close. Maybe the breeze snagged a reminder of my humanness, or my foot cracked a twig under the dust. The shoulders stopped their rolling, the ears whipped around, and dark eyes glinted with fear. Her mouth broke into incisors and ruby tongue, a nip through the grass. She was gone before I could even stop running.
I’ll never forget how she moved without the weight of being seen. What leisure looks like in a wild animal, the most familiar expression I’ve ever encountered. How, years later, I was running the same trail and heard a rise of yips through the forest, bickering almost, and wondered if this was her litter, if she’d moved back to an old den. I didn’t dare step closer. My presence would scatter their comfort, send their proud tails whipping down the gulch.
*
“This city is going to kill me,” I tell a friend. “And if I get killed by a car instead of a mountain lion back home, I’ll be one pissed-off ghost.”
Given, this city has tried to kill me. “Pittsburgh is full of great people,” I tell apprehensive family back home. “But once they get behind the wheel, it’s a mystery to me where that goes.” I know the bright swerve of headlights, drivers behind the windshield lost in some future dilemma. Sometimes they make eye contact as I lunge out of their way, and I want to melt the windows with my glare. Other times I’ve skirted trauma with no witness. The drivers stare ahead with vacant frowns, throttling to the next light, everything outside those curbs invisible.
I’m right here, I want to scream at them. I want to plant myself on the crosswalk and curse with the screech of their brakes. Pound my palms onto their hoods. I am a moving body. My bones will break if you don’t start watching where the fuck you’re going.
But I don’t swear. I almost never swear. Swearing, I learned growing up, means your emotions are out of control. That you are out of control. I coped through internalizing frustration, rotting it to a shapeless sadness, and when that depth swallowed me, I coped through silence. I perfected this magic—stir the saccharine heat in your throat down to the gut, let it condense, and forget how open air makes it froth. Call it melancholy, call it fear. Call it selflessness. But not anger—anger only hurts others, an animal reflex, a bite at close range. Disengage. Pack it deep down and run off the quiet fumes.
So I don’t punch car hoods or add my profanity to blaring horns. Instead, I wake up early, quarter to six, so I can run before traffic gets bad. In summer, this is no problem, but it’s late October now, and the sky remains a hazed black. Black when I set out, black through the worst intersections, black down the blocks with sparse street lamps. Gray only creeps into my vision when I reach Schenley Park, a screen of dimness patched by maple leaves sprinkling into the run.
Barely anyone is out at this hour, only the occasional pair with headlamps and reflective vests. I don’t care that my running clothes are all dark; if cars don’t notice me in broad daylight, I’d rather go totally unseen, even alone in these woods. Some mornings I tell myself I’ll bring my headlamp, but I’ve started getting a high out of running blind. Thrilled something primal in the way I see shapes better out of the corner of my eye.
Appalachian soil moves differently than Rocky Mountain dirt. Less silty, more gummed into bands of clay. These are old stones, worn shale the color of browned butter. They smell of the same unhurried decay as the forest mulch—waxen oak, arterial maple, papery locust. Chipmunks scamper between trunks and hollow logs, all scurry and pip and nut-filled cheeks.
I run the wide path above the stream-split hollow, where only the occasional divot on the tread tests my stride. The canopy, half bare, weaves hardwood branches into a sliver curtain over the run, and I feel like I’m tracing the lip of a cloud forest. I know the terrain rises back up from the stream and onto another path and then paved road, but in these quiet hours, there’s no sign of that opposite slope. No sign of earth, even, except the foundation under my careful feet, only woven canopy and that colorless mist, neither dark or light.
When the sky catches a whisper of blue, the crows come out. I hear them gossiping a mile away, throwing insults at the Cathedral of Learning as they flock east. Dozens of them head towards the fine sliver of sunrise. This tradition stays constant, every morning, every tail end of night. Some days the crows babble and croak to each other. Some days they fly as a voiceless brush of wings.
I count the weeks, then days until daylight savings time ends. And when the hours fall back with their heavy traffic, I sprint into visibility, awake with textures I’d forgotten. In Schenley Park, I leave behind the wide, elevated path, dropping into the hollow on the single-track that flanks the stream. Before, it was too dark, terrain hungry for the crack of my ankles. The trail loops through sandbars and clay-crumbled banks, over and under stone bridges. Chestnuts snap under my feet. Water shushes the sweep of cars above, and I find I don’t miss the crows. I could never shake the feeling that the dark pearls of their eyes followed me through this mosaic of autumn, that their rough tongues were talking about me.
Single-tracks remind me of the West, of home. Alpine meadows sparked with phlox and glacier lilies. Ponderosa pine savanna, pasqueflower blooming at the first breath of spring. Bear tracks through muddy loam, the thud of a double-bit ax into lodgepole.
This happens when I run, too. Distraction, absence. Gone is the damp assurance of an easy winter. I forget the shy whitetail does prancing through the brambles, the raccoons wetting their paws with rainwater. I flirt through past and coax anticipation for the future. Scenarios, empty of even a scrap of plausibility, jump high-strung between the trees.
Today, I’m counting the weeks until I go home. I’m thinking of snow, conifers, family, mountain paths that never end but simply braid into game trails, old roadbeds, and granite-bare ridgetops. This park is wild, but it is finite; after a mile, I’ll climb out of its relative calm, shift my stride back to concrete and my perspective back to distrust. I can see the faces already, smudged behind the windshield, staring at me in limbo at a crosswalk but rarely stopping. Or rolling down a window and tossing catcalls at my bare shoulders, my swinging legs, my body moving because I love to move, because I don’t know how else to be, if not to pace existence into my feet every morning, to run with the earth’s turn into visibility, morning after morning after morning until I can’t remember the last time I woke to sunlight. The objectification of those stares snuffs out the unbounded rush I keep borrowing from childhood. In those moments, I don’t want to run and run anymore. I want to bury myself in the dirt, Appalachian or otherwise, and curl my limbs to stillness.
I don’t hear the wrinkle of leaves, nor do I see the striped bolt of the chipmunk, until it’s too late. I’m already mid-stride, all momentum poised into my left leg. A moment before, only air hung between my foot and the soft earth of the tread. But now there is a body, scampering in terror, and there’s nothing I can do.
I roll over him. Trample isn’t the right word, nor crush or step on or hit, even. Because I run forefoot first, I feel every bruise of muscle and organ, ribs split like a chestnut husk, whoosh of collapsed lungs. My foot comes down, toe to heel, all the way back, across his belly, plump and round and warm. He would have made it through the winter.
The second my other foot meets muddy earth, I am apologizing. “Oh no no no no,” I stammer. “Oh no no. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
I am crying, shaking, gasping. Terrified to turn around. But I do, and I watch as the chipmunk convulses in the middle of the path. His pink toes fumble for cover, going nowhere. Whiskers bend into mulch with the thrash of his narrow head.
Of all the West has taught me—how to turn emotion into stoicism, how to smell lightning on the wind—I know the old truth of deer beside the highway, abandoned kittens, mares earthbound with colic. Be it out of compassion or practicality, leave no creature to suffering. Break the doe’s neck, put down the kitten, shoot the horse. Spare this seizing chipmunk his final moments of helplessness, wipe the terror from his eyes as he breaks his own back.
My eyes search the woods for something heavy and blunt. It’s a different forest now, passive, furtive with its violence, all pliant branches and rotting logs and trees coiled tight around bedrock. The chipmunk shudders towards the closest trunk.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I say to him through my choked throat. I sweep the forest floor again, for anything—a rock, a solid chunk of heartwood. “Why did you have to do that?”
These are the last words he hears. Or sounds, at least, utterance of accusation from my predator’s mouth. The body stills. Eyes dim to a scuff of gray.
My hands hang empty at my sides. The stream ripples on, swollen with grainy water.
“Shit,” I say.
Right away, I find a firm stick and start carving through the wet forest dirt beside the trail. A runner on the wider path above glances down at me, and I pray she doesn’t turn onto the single-track. The chipmunk still lies still in the middle of the tread; I don’t have the heart yet to explain what happened or tell her to watch her step.
My limbs feel numb as I dig, methodically, into the earth. Heat pulses into my foot, though, as if the chipmunk’s body is still rolling beneath me, and I feel it all again—limber crack of ribcage, pelvis caving in as easy as a spoon to the crust of crème brûlée. Round belly compressed to the ground, all my weight driving into this soft body, this broken body, this quiet body.
I keep digging deeper. If only the chipmunk had waited one second longer before making his mad dash. If only I’d been paying attention, like I usually do, especially on this trail, where chipmunks have scuttled and squeaked out of my path before. Maybe this one, once. If only I’d seen the warning signs strewn out behind me—flattened squirrels tossed curbside, dead field mice under tumbleweed back home. The bloodshot eyes of the man in Granada, hand clamped to his breastbone, as if trapping his pounding heart, as if desperate to assure himself of its continued drum.
I run because the mountains and forests give me no pause for apology. They’ve bloodied every given glimpse of my skin, mottled knees and elbows in bruises, frozen fingers and toes, rolled ankles until the tendons went slack. I’ve been stalked by mountain lions, challenged by whitetail bucks, huffed at by bears, dive-bombed by razor-taloned goshawks. And I keep running because so much of my life is peppered by apologies—my apologies—around every corner, every interaction, every conversation. These places are quiet to me not for their lack of people, but for their lack of a grounded reason to say I’m sorry.
Until this morning. I push the branch into soil, scoop cold dark earth atop cold dark earth. I eye the dead chipmunk again, gauging his size, and return to the hole. It needs to be wider, deeper.
Until this morning, I’d forgotten that my presence in the landscape is just that—a presence. That my movements are actions with consequences, and that there is more than just observer and observed. I will scare others. I will hurt others. And those others are not just wild things—deer and foxes and chipmunks—but people too, those close to me as well as strangers behind the grime of windshields. These same people I say sorry to are the same I leave behind when I run, as if absence equates apology, as if either is a sustainable response at all.
My foot continues to ache. I remember that morning above the Río Darro, perdón and perdoname and disculpe spilling from my mouth, and the last words I tried in desperation—lo siento. Translated, literally, I feel it. It’s a deeper form of apology in Spain—condolence, compassion, not usually justified to express regret for surprising someone, however abrupt. But I said it anyway. Lo siento, lo siento.
And I feel it now, too, everything in the chipmunk’s body breaking under mine, everything except his quivering death. For that, I can only give him a damp grave, respite from the sharp-eyed red-tailed hawks that frequent the park. The hole is deep enough, and I stand, carefully drape his banded pelt and perfect paws onto the earth. His mouth is open, and bits of hidden seeds gleam between incisors, crowding there like so many words.
*
I can’t get myself to start running in the dark anymore, especially when solstice has passed and the days are, discreetly, getting longer. I catch pre-dawn dusk, final blink of Venus, and, if the timing’s right, sunrise breaking its seam to the east. Starting out in the black night got too wearying. And I’m more careful to watch where I’m going.
Running later in the morning means I meet the growl of school buses in addition to public buses and Mercedes gunning Pittsburgh lefts through intersections. Kids cluster at street corners, usually watched by a pair of parents. I hear their exuberance from blocks away, shouts and shrieks over the constant drone of traffic. Red-faced and giggling, they race up unfenced lawns, swing from the low branches of a crabapple tree.
A crossing guard is posted at Wightman and Forbes, one of the busiest intersections I pass on my way to Schenley Park. The guard is decked out in a full-length fluorescent parka, neon yellow against the gray streets and sky. Each kid gets a warm smile and check-in on how they’re doing before she leads them, eyes trained on traffic, across the street.
Sometimes I cross at the same time, going the other direction, buffered by this small chattering crowd. Other times, when I roll out of bed early, it’s just me and the crossing guard standing on opposite curbs as buses and cars flash between us. We wait, breaths pluming white in the cold, and then the light changes. I waver, toe the curb. Watch one car tilting into a righthand turn, another behind me creeping into a left across the crosswalk.
The crossing guard steps out onto the street to meet me. She has a worn face creased by an old sadness, I think, or maybe a home after this job that doesn’t quite feel like home. There’s no distrust in the way she moves, only a calm audacity in the poise of her head. I’ve watched her stare down a Chevy rattling high on its axles. I’ve watched her coax conversation from the shyest of kids.
The crossing guard lifts her arms from her sides, opening the span of her visibility. My eyes smart at the fluorescent glare of the coat, the sting of exhaust fumes, the bite of salt on the walk. I start running, meet hesitant eyes with hers as we pass.
“Thank you,” I say over the noise of the city, my first words of the morning.
Sarah Capdeville received her MFA in creative writing from Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Raised in Montana, she’s worked and traveled across Europe and the American West, including four summers as a wilderness ranger in her home of homes, the Rattlesnake Wilderness. Her writing has been published in Fourth Genre, Flyway, the Hopper, CutBank, and Bright Bones, an anthology of contemporary Montana writing.
Photo by tamasmatusik on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND