In Winter, Far Away from Home is Being Without a Hat

            Winter in Montana. I slip confident into its saddle like I know the first thing about riding. Like I’ve been breaking horses since my grade school crush –– the same boy I’d marry at twenty if I was a real cowgirl. Young marriage common in those meth–addled towns bludgeoned by wind strong and cold enough to crack teeth. Postured by the urgency that comes with such a thing. I understand quick that Montana isn’t all Handsomeness riding upright across plains carpeted in yellow light and set against blazing mountains. I understand slow that there isn’t and is a place for me here, like anywhere else.  

            “I’ve been thinking about this whole Montana thing,” I tell my only female friend in February of that first winter. 2,400 miles from home and, six months in, I have no stable job, living situation, or group of friends. But I’m a girl who doesn’t easily vacate what she wants to love. Diligent and desperate even as a child, I’d stolen and then, on the street, sold my daddy’s office supplies marked-up to make him a profit. I thought if he had more money, he’d be happy. That if he was happy, he’d be better to me and we’d love each other. Never once did I consider his loss of supplies. Who but sympathetic citizens needed staplers and paperclips?
  

            No more reasonable at twenty-seven, I do tea and toast with my one girlfriend. Looking out the diner’s window at –18 celsius on the “time and temperature” building across the street, we keep warm and chat: “I might try horseback riding,” I continue. “Then if he ever decides to take me home to his family’s ranch, I’ll fit in.”

            “Riding’s not cheap, you know.” Looking down, without blinking, my friend removes a sugar packet from the holder on the table, shakes it, and places it back. Also a newcomer, she’s trundled her way as far she can with only one friend through a Montana winter –– a heavyset thing that settles on the plains in October, doesn’t raise on its haunches until May.  Tomorrow, she’ll drive back to New England, where it’s cold too but home for us both.  She continues: “I get it, you know.” 

            “Wanting to ride horses?”

            “No,” she says. “I get the whole Montana not being what you thought it would be thing . . . “ At this juncture –– her decision made –– ‘Montana not being what she thought it would be’ is the only reason she offers for why she’s quitting the place. Offers like an unlabeled jar of homemade jam with the lid on too tight for most to unscrew.

            “You’re ashamed.” I blow on my tea to cool it. 

            “Ashamed of what?” Again removing a sugar packet, she tears it open.

            “Of leaving.”

            “I’m not.” Dumping the sugar into her tea, and, never meeting my eyes: “Can’t get a decent cup of tea in this state.”

            “Or anywhere in America,” I add. 

            Now we keep quiet as you can keep while eating toast. This may be our last conversation, but it isn’t our first.  Months we’ve spent discussing the pros and cons ––personal and mutual –– of staying and leaving. But, at this point, would her outlining the complete disfigurement of her Montana fantasy and my resisting her decision be comforting? Only in discomforting the other may we comfort ourselves in our separate choices. Like a November wind slamming through town exposes the limbs of trees, the difference between our choices alone exposes our anxieties. One being the inability to identify and therefore make the brave or smart choice, and another being the loss of our companionship. No longer would we stand together on the common–ground of staying and leaving equally terrifying us both.  

            And never again would we discuss how, for me, it’s more an obsession with a cowboy than it is an affinity for western life and mountains that keeps me.  Never again would we discuss my friend’s dissatisfaction with not finding her environmental non-profit job, outdoorsy man, or group of mountain friends in Montana.

            Nothing left to talk about but horses and such: “I tried riding a horse Christmas years ago back home. Couldn’t make the thing go left or right. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t the best goat wrestler . . .” (I’d worked on a goat farm that fall).

            “So fuck it.”           

            “Yeah, could be it.”

            Done, my friend throws her napkin onto her toast plate, reclines, and folds her arms underneath her small breasts –– untouched in cowboy territory. “My best friend in New Hampshire rides horses. It will be nice to see her.”

            Only lightly touching the subject: “I bet . . . what do you think you’ll do there?”

            She shrugs and moves the sugar holder from the left side of the table to the right and back. Still not looking up: “I’ve got something in mind. What do you think you’ll do here?”

            To answer, I open my mouth as wide as you must to say, for example, the word “Wyoming.” Should I try to convince her that I do love my very part-time office job, where yesterday I invented such tasks as ordering more trash bags for the bathroom? That I was unsuccessful because I didn’t know the size of the bins? (What trash-bin-making company doesn’t somewhere indicate the size of its bins)?

            But she’s pulling a road map from her knapsack. Blocking her face from view as if with a newspaper, she’s studying her cross-country route. So I shut my mouth tight as a regular Montanan would and switch my gaze back out to the window to the –18 celsius on the ‘time and temperature’ building. When was the last time I hadn’t worried about irritating him and slipped my stone-cold hands underneath his shirt as he was about to fall asleep? When had he started growing as indifferent towards me as winter is towards even its servants –– the skiers who worship and pray for snow that does and does not fall? Loss of the man gradual, perhaps –– like losing one minute of sunlight per day as the northern hemisphere crawls towards its solstice. The whittling of daylight so slow you don’t notice until, one day, it’s too dark to do something you’d planned. 

            Swallowing my last bite of toast: “But if I did try horse-riding again, I bet some funny writing material would come of it.” Shredding my napkin into pieces and talking faster now: “I haven’t written anything funny in ages, and nobody likes my writing unless it’s funny . . .”

            Softening, my friend folds the map, tucks it into her knapsack, and reaches across the table to still my chapped hands, which have started pushing together the napkin–bits into a pile on my small, empty plate. She tries: “Is Cormac McCarthy ever funny? Sylvia Plath? Poe? You don’t have to be funny. Life isn’t always funny.”

            “You’re right,” I say. “And no matter what, it’s all worth it because I can write about it. Do you think I can make a living writing about it?”

            “Of course,” she says.  “And teaching yoga.”

            “You never came to one of my classes.”

            “Well I’m scared of yoga,” she says. “Mostly it’s that I don’t know what to wear. Socks?”

            “Now that’s funny.” 

            The warmth of my friend’s hands squeezing mine and also pain –– sores on my own hands from the cold and chewing on my knuckles while waiting to hear from him. Like Plath and Poe, had I gone mad? But I look down and see my friend’s knuckles equally raw. My one female friend in Montana. “They say summer’s better here.” I squeeze her hands in turn. “You can come back, you know. They say summer’s fantastic. We can have adventures in the summer.”

            She smiles. “Did you call your mother yet for gloves?”

            I smile. I’m all the time losing gloves and calling my mother to send more. I could buy them myself, but it comforts me when she sends them in a little box with a handwritten poem. Last was “Stopping in the Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Frost. Since then, each moment I feel an unusual urge to vacate, I read that poem and imagine myself the person stopping alone with her little horse. I read aloud to myself those last lines: And I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep. And now it occurs to me that I not only need gloves, but also a hat. They say you lose most warmth through the head. In winter, far away from home is being without a hat. -18 celsius and I’ve been wearing only a hood. I need a hat. I need a hat because it’s going to be cold up on the horse that, one way or another, I’m going to ride.