Memories Can Sometimes Hide
Life is change, the experts tell us. We know we have to move on, keep going, but even as we rush headlong toward tomorrow we clutch totems of our past: a ticket stub from a Bonnie Raitt concert, the plastic cup we were drinking from when Sammy Sosa hit his 62nd homer, a paper napkin from the Waldorf.
Mother’s Day cards pile up in our underwear drawer. A once-fresh wild daisy falls out of a long-unopened book, its brown petals taking us back to a perfect hike. A father’s handkerchief, still smelling faintly of aftershave, turns up in a cedar chest. We keep talismans to hold onto decisions made, roads taken, people loved. We accumulate snippets of ribbon, dried petals, scraps of paper, then squirrel them away in places we won’t remember because we can’t bear to let go of times they represent.
Places are like that, too. No matter where we come from, when we go back we look for signs that we were once there. Is the redbud tree I planted alive? Bigger, broader, but in the same place. Is my third grade school still standing? Thank goodness the new condo complex is in the next block. What about the old house? Why does it look so small?
We all make pilgrimages to our scent posts. Just as animals mark their territory so do humans in their minds. When we climb a long-ago hill and see the empty prairie of memory, or open hotel curtains to the postcard view from our honeymoon, we take heart: in spite of its flux, our lives retain shreds of constancy. We were here once, then we went away, all sorts of things happened, but we’re back now and Glory Hallelujah! Our mind’s eye matches the real one. For a moment time stands still.
I have returned to the Yellowstone country after too long. I drive down a gravel road, positive that the mother of America’s environmental movement won’t be there. But she is. Nearly as old as this century, Mardy Murie still lives in the hand-built log cabin where she’s served tea and crybaby cookies to wanderers for generations.
My rodeo friend has given up broncs to become a gentleman rancher. The fishing guide who taught me how to cast a dry fly to a rising trout has taken up real estate. But I can still get a plate-sized T-bone steak in the restaurant at the end of the road. Entering the world’s first national park exactly 10 years to the day after I witnessed eight huge fires sweep through half of its 2.2 million acres, I wonder at the fate of my personal Yellowstone scent posts.
Old Faithful still is, but a favorite log on a lakeshore has vanished. Ditto a green picnic spot, replaced by burnt twigs and erosion. Ranger pals have retired, making good their once-idle threat to hang up the hat and go fishing. I drive toward the west gate, holding my breath. Would I find the pair of white swans my husband and I returned to watch again and again? The swans who’ve mated for life, who’ve lived on the same stretch of Madison River through all their (and our) years together?
No. I cross the bridge and look left, then right. They’re gone.
Ten miles down the road I turn the car around. All the way back I tell myself it doesn’t mean a thing. But I keep driving.
They must have been under the bridge, for there they are now, exactly where they’re supposed to be, preening, gliding, side by side.
Some days, you get lucky.