Love on the Rocks How I Became My More Perfect SelfI fell in love with Ben and the mountains at the same time. But only one was built to last. It’s been almost three years since I’ve seen him, three years since our bitter, soap-opera breakup and the total silence that followed, six months since he shocked me with an e-mail saying he wanted to reconnect. Anyone else would have met an ex-boyfriend like that for coffee, maybe dinner—would have gingerly dipped a toe into such a potentially messy situation. Me, I’m going for an emotional cannonball. I’m about to spend three days alone with him amid the twisting rock sculptures of Canyonlands. But Ben and the wilderness are one and the same. What else could we possibly do? The red backpack in my trunk? Ben helped me pick it out. He bought me my tent and my titanium cookset too, but his fingerprints are on more than just my gear. They’re on the hiker’s curve of my quads and the hundreds of miles that have passed under my boots in the time we’ve been strangers. Maybe even on the desire that propels me to keep climbing higher, up another mountain and then another. He walks in the door, a few pounds heavier and with longer hair, but still sporting that same dirty visor. We hug awkwardly. He doesn’t seem nervous, just smiles and says, “You look just like I remember.” The mountains were just a pretty idea to me when we first met. Fresh out of college in Philadelphia, I’d taken a summer job at Rocky Mountain National Park to try something new. Ben was the tall trail crew leader who caught my eye almost immediately—a guy who could pound 30 trail miles into his workday with a chainsaw on his back without thinking twice. We went hiking one June day to Timber Lake, an 11,000-foot tarn set in the shadow of Mount Ida, me with a cotton sweatshirt and a bookbag with no suspension, him loping easily ahead on the steeply pitched trail. I almost passed out that day, trying to keep up, but, heart damn near drumming itself out of my chest, I followed him. Something was changing; maybe it was the altitude or the shocking beauty of the peaks or the way my stomach quivered when he turned to talk to me. By the time we made it to the icy lake, I felt I could follow him anywhere. That summer was a hazy dream. We wrapped ourselves around each other up on the Continental Divide on nights so moonbeam-bright I didn’t need my borrowed headlamp. We spied moose and marmots in the Indian Peaks Wilderness on my first backpacking trip (the pack I shouldered was his). Ben kissed me under skies ablaze with the Perseid meteor shower, and I could feel my life reforming. It wasn’t just dizzy love. With every mile we traveled, every time he showed me how to prime a camp stove or read the line of a river rapid, I glimpsed a more perfect version of myself. Ben’s world was active and elemental and tied to the land in a way I’d never known before, but in it I felt amazingly at home. That summer ended on the calendar, but in my heart it was still July. Back in Chicago I missed Ben and the mountains with equal intensity. My old pursuits seemed dull in comparison with the dazzling life I’d just been living. I moved back to Colorado five months later. It was glorious: full-moon skiing together on the Grand Mesa, climbing thirteeners in the Flat Tops, sleeping under the stars in desert canyons. But, slowly, it became terrible too. Ben had seemed flawless that first summer, but as the months went by, the cracks in our relationship started to show. We argued. I cried. Once, after a piercing fight in the shadow of a sandstone arch, I truly thought he might drive off and leave me in Utah. A year later it was over. Not quickly and not as neatly as those three words imply. I went back to Chicago and tried not to think about the gaping hole where he used to be. Without him that beautiful new world—the one where I was strong, confident, and tied to the wilderness—crumpled. But it didn’t disappear. Something inside me began to inflate again, pushed me to ride my bike for hours and cross-country ski the rolling hills of Wisconsin. I turned down a prestigious internship in Washington, D.C., for a spring in the Smokies, hiking every spare minute. This time I traveled the trails alone. Now that Ben and I are descending a bone-jarring slope to the Green River, it’s almost as if the years have dissolved—but now I’m the one setting the lung-burning pace. The backpack he helped me pick out is stuffed with my own gear now (a three- season sleeping bag, a lightweight down jacket that’s nicer than his), gear that has been with me on countless nights when he wasn’t. Ben still knows his stuff, but now he doesn’t have to teach me. We set up camp on a high rock bench overlooking the water, then drag our sleeping pads to the edge to stare at the stars. Being with him in the immense, wild beauty of the night is strangely familiar, but the girl reflected in his eyes tonight is different than she was before. I still recognize her, though, because I got a glimpse the first time around with Ben. Somewhere in the years without him, I became a more perfect version of myself. |
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