Between the Facts

It’s a gorgeous sunny day on our Thursday Evening off, and we’re not about to let it go to waste. And so it is that the ten of us, freshly showered and toting bags full of recently laundered clothing, find ourselves piling once again into Sally and Shelly, and heading down to explore what I now call Jabba Land.

We trudge up the first hill as a group, then spread out, dispersing unintentionally as we explore. Some take the sandy two-track and soon discover a rusty dilapidated car half-swallowed by the sand. Others veer off across the sage and up onto an overlooking ridge. Some scramble up then down again as the mood hits, playing around and snapping a few shots then hiking onward again. Yet by the by, we’re all drawn to the slanted slab of bulbous rock that’s carved across the landscape.

The rock is dotted in the strangest blobs of stone, ridged and marked like giant natural cairns. They remind me of hardened turds, of the lumpy towers my dad would make on the beach with dark wet sand. It looks like a field of petrified Jabba the Huts.

It is like a playground for me. I clamber up one mound and down the next, hoping around like a little kid, taking photos like I were my dad. I wish Stephen were there with me. It is just like all those myriad hikes of ours, those weekend we’d spend hoping along the slippery stones that jut out like stepping stones along the creaks. We were always drawn to the creeks, abandoning the hiking trails again and again to clamber along the creeks instead. Annadel. Helen Putnam. Fairfield Osborn. Crane Creek.

He would love this, my brother. He would love this Jabba Land.

One night as I lay sleeping in the top bunk of the Trail Bag, curled up and warm in my mummy-bag, I was awoken by the call of a great horned owl. I knew the call instantly, having heard it numerous times while working in the Sierra Nevadas on the spotted owl project, and even from Brian’s back yard. Hoo-hoo hooooo hoo-hoo he called. Hoo-hoo hooooo hoo-hoo. I lay for a while in a half sleep, the call reverberating in the hazy back of my mind. At least at first.

Hoo-hoo hooooo hoo-hoo. He was calling to me. He had awoken me fully. Enough that I sat up, pulled aside the curtain, and peered out the window in search of him. As he called again I spotted him, a dark silhouette perched upon the top of the power-line that supplies our camp. I don’t know how long I watched him, soaking in the eerie hooting, smiling contentedly. That part is important: that I was content with him there, that I fell back to sleep smiling.

That was weeks ago, early on in my stay here. Back when it was still just Jessica and I. It couldn’t have been long after Todd left. And yet, in all the time since, that great horned has never again paid me a visit. Nor any other. I don’t even know that it would make sense, to see a great horned owl out here in the the the treeless sage-brush fields of central Wyoming. Do they hunt in the sage? I do not know.

I do know one thing, however, and it sends a shiver through me every time I think about it. I’m not a superstitious person, but I can’t disconnect such coincidence. It was on that night, I learned the next morning, that my grandmother had died.

I still don’t think I’ve accepted it. How can I? When I left for Wyoming, she was fine. I had spent an entire day with her. While I was driving across Nevada and Utah, my mother and Bill were moving her into her new apartment. A week and a half, maybe two weeks later, I got a call from my mother. My grandma was sick with pneumonia and in the hospital. The next morning she called to tell me she had died. Just like that. Like that.

And in between, a great horned owl paid me a visit.

I missed her funeral. I tore myself to pieces debating over it. Do I go? Do I leave Jessica on her own here to fly back to California just after arriving, with all the problems we’re having here already, all the hitches? Do I accept Brian’s offer to pay for the flight, Bill’s to drive up to get me and bring me home? How would I come back to work after that?

I decided in the end to stay, after my mother told me again and again I don’t have to come, it’s okay, everyone will understand, Erin didn’t make it to Grandpa’s after all. I riled and I cried and I silently killed myself with guilt, but I stayed. I stayed and even without intending to I’ve distracted myself enough to have only just recently begun to react to it. Only just.

And my comfort, in this moment? Not Brian. Not Stephen. Not Andi. Not even my mother. No. As much as I appreciate your parts, my main comfort is not in you. It is in this superstition I so unexpectedly find myself clinging to. That the night she died, my grandma came to say goodbye, disguised as a great horned owl.