In a moving reflection, Susan Marsh writes about losing her husband, dealing with sorrow, government service and trying to rally for the wild things that matter
A lone hiker stands on top of mountain in the middle of Yellowstone, heart of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Photo courtesy Jacob W. Frank/NPS
by Susan Marsh
Springtime in the Rockies: seventy degrees one afternoon, in the teens the next morning with an inch of overnight snow. Wind. In spite of the weather, spring arrives later here and advances in small tentative steps. The bare branches of aspen, alder and willow sprout pollen-bearing catkins and the first tiny wildflowers appear. Dawn creeps through my window earlier each day and the evening sky holds light until after 9.
It’s time to attend each fleeting milestone of the season—cranes calling, meadowlarks singing, and mountain bluebirds perched on the highest twigs of sagebrush like little chips of the sky. Ground squirrels emerge from their winter quarters just as the red-tailed hawks arrive. By these and other springtime events I mark my days.
But this year it feels as if spring has come too soon. While I take note of each emergent and ascendant sign of life, I do so without the usual unfiltered delight. We’ve been through a year of pandemic and my husband died in February.
The yearly explosion of light and growth and vigor seems somehow incongruous with these circumstances. Not that I think the world should stop for me; it’s just that I can’t keep up. My soul is mired in the dark and cold of February. Emptiness clutches my chest as though my heart has shrunk and left a cavity around it. The rest of me feels flat, limp, and lost.
I can’t sleep, can’t read more than a few pages at a time, and can’t remember what I just read. I wander aimlessly from room to room, each time forgetting what I went there for. After a few frustrating laps around the house, the answer dawns on me. Get outside.
The healing power of nature lifts my gloom, even if I do nothing more than sit in a sunny corner of the yard and watch tree branches sway. The chill wind pushes clean, living air into my lungs like no ventilator can. And because of my great good luck at having landed in the Yellowstone region, I don’t have to go far to feel the familiar sensation of skis gliding on crust or boots on bare earth, rhythmic motions so ingrained they need little of my attention. I can turn my eyes and ears to the shifting clouds, courting ravens, and the clacking sound the wind makes in thickets of bare willows. And, thankfully, I seem to lose myself to the greater world.
Out and away from the house where sorrows dwell, my busy mind takes a break and allows the senses to take over. I am awake, aware and present in the moment, while forgetting about the sad small self in my head. A daily outing, even a walk around the block to see whose daffodils are in bloom, gives me the only part of my day when I can feel the unalloyed joy of simply being alive. For a change, I don’t feel guilty for being here when beloved others are not.
Out and away from the house where sorrows dwell, my busy mind takes a break and allows the senses to take over. I am awake, aware and present in the moment, while forgetting about the sad small self in my head. For a change, I don’t feel guilty for being here when beloved others are not.
Most of us who have found solace in fields and forests during the lonely months of pandemic isolation understand what I’m trying to say. The wild world has kept us grounded, sane.
Returning to the empty house, I find my mood improved. I worry less about the bags of recycling that I meant to take days ago and which now block the doorway. Perhaps later today I will find the energy to sort them into their proper bins, load the bins into the back of the truck, and drive to the muddy lot where tall blue recycling trailers are parked. Or not. I used to think I was organized. I used to think it mattered.
It is not, during what psychologists refer to as “early grief,” that performing the errands of daily living cease to matter. It’s more that I feel too overwhelmed and exhausted to act on them. I start a project and forget what I’m doing. Keys, eye glasses and freshly poured coffee disappear, causing me to spend more time looking for things than completing the small task I’ve assigned myself for the day. I wake in the middle of the night, not brooding or thinking about anything—just lying there, aware of being awake. I might as well be a house plant.
Don invented his own taxonomy for the birds that became our favorites, and he made me laugh with his names for them, mostly based on their shapes as they floated among the wavelets.
All of this is normal, whether grieving a loved one or suffering from pandemic fatigue. So I am told.
If this is normal, I’m not sure I want to be. But as Don said when he knew he was dying, “Sometimes you don’t have a choice.” So I go with it—if the recycling seems like too much work or I can’t find the pair of glasses I just laid down, I sit, look out the window, and watch a pair of nuthatches working on their nesting cavity. If what I meant to do was important, I’ll eventually remember. Or not.
A delight of spring: mountain bluebirds (female). Photo courtesy Wikipedia/Linda Tanner CC X2
I turn on the computer to deal with some hang-up involving a bank account and decide the louvered closet doors need to be dusted and rubbed with lemon oil instead. Anyone who has done this job knows how long it takes with all those tilted slats and corners from which the caked dust refuses to budge. I can use up an afternoon completing a job that has been neglected for years with little ill effect while the bank account remains in limbo. Satisfied, I return to the chair beside the window.
The nuthatches have left. My mind skitters like a stone skipped along the surface of time, to when I met my husband. I don’t mean to reminisce as a form of self-indulgence, but to honor a person I loved for 45 years and whose family history was the reason I found myself in Wyoming—an unforeseen blessing.
Male mountain bluebird, often seen along rural roads passing through meadows. Photo courtesy Wikipedia/Linda Tanner
I never wanted to live beyond the shores of the Salish Sea where I grew up, but like other refugees from once-wild but now urbanized regions, I have settled in the farthest upstream reaches of what might be considered my home range. When I follow my husband in death, my ashes will join the Snake River. A molecule or two may end up at the mouth of the Columbia where the prevailing winds will blow it home.
° ° ° °
I took up bird watching in 1975, when Don and I were still calling ourselves “friends.” We liked the outdoors and we liked to hike, so with binoculars in hand we spent winter afternoons beside Bellingham Bay under dishrag-gray skies. Seabirds and ducks bobbed in the water, easy to spot and, with practice, to identify. If I had first tried to find warblers among the densely branched evergreens I would not have gotten far as a birder.
Uncertainty walked with us. After a summer of climbing in Alaska, Don had supposedly stopped in Bellingham to drop his brother off at grad school before heading home to Colorado. A few months later he continued to mention this plan, although with less enthusiasm as he and I grew closer. I was committed to staying long enough to finish my degree, and after I’d spent the previous summer near Denver working for USGS, Colorado didn’t hold much interest for me.
The subject of parting ways dropped from conversation, and we kept walking along the shore. Don invented his own taxonomy for the birds that became our favorites, and he made me laugh with his names for them, mostly based on their shapes as they floated among the wavelets. The common loon, whose low profile resembled a swamped boat, was a barge. The elliptical silhouette of a marbled murrelet: a cigar.
Spring arrived and we glided along offshore in the Grumman canoe we had bought together, each of us paying half—one of the early warning signs of commitment. We could look over the gunwales into cold clear water at purple and ocher starfish, sea anemones, and waving fronds of algae, always scanning the water’s surface for barges and cigars.
From the start, the practice of counting the birds we saw appealed to me, and I carried a notebook to record them. By the time most of the wintering seabirds left for nesting grounds in the Arctic or inland Canada, I had pages of lists. One day I showed them to a veteran birder, who glanced through them with a skeptical eye.
“Well, I guess this might be useful for something,” she said. “But I can’t imagine what.”
I conceded that my notebook had little value beyond my own interest, and when I moved away for graduate school, I tossed it out. Years later I regretted doing so, for my months of observations included many of Don’s cigars.
Years later, the grassy parking spot from which we launched our canoe was transformed into a terminal for the Alaska ferry and the adjacent hillsides were given over to high-end human housing.
Years later, cigars were listed as a threatened species.
My sightings from the mid-seventies might have provided an early snapshot of the number of marbled murrelets wintering on the margins of a growing town. Perhaps they also nested in the tall Douglas firs along the bluffs. If it were possible to go back and walk the trail of my memory, would I see any cigars?
Don and I moved around as I pursued my education and began working for the Forest Service. After six years with the Gallatin National Forest in Bozeman, where the management climate had become hostile to those whose values clashed with the agency’s utilitarian principles, I started looking for other work. I loved the national forests, the Gallatin in particular, and the friends I made in Bozeman. But I was demoralized, and my thoughts returned to my beloved Pacific Northwest.
Don and I moved around as I pursued my education and began working for the Forest Service. After six years with the Gallatin National Forest in Bozeman, where the management climate had become hostile to those whose values clashed with the agency’s utilitarian principles, I started looking for other work. I loved the national forests, the Gallatin in particular, and the friends I made in Bozeman. But I was demoralized, and my thoughts returned to my beloved Pacific Northwest.
I applied for an open position at the same ranger district where I had taken my first seasonal job, Sedro-Woolley, Washington. As I waited to hear, I daydreamed about the places Don and I had explored. Paddling the Skagit River and its delta as the tide changed, backpacking in the North Cascades, and wandering tidal mudflats on rainy winter mornings as trumpeter swans flew beyond rusty bare stands of red alder. I looked forward to doing it all again.
When I learned the position I’d applied for had been filled, I called the office in Washington to ask how I could compete better next time. “Oh,” the man said. “You were our top candidate.” I held the phone away from my ear as I heard the rest of the story. The forest supervisor at the Gallatin told them I was not a team player—the kiss of death in the Forest Service.
Crushed, I sought other local opportunities—Montana State University, the Post Office, whatever I could find that would allow me to stay in Bozeman, which after only six years felt like home.
Then Don started talking about Jackson Hole.
He had a connection from his climbing experience in the Tetons, and also from his father’s early exploits. In the spring of 1934 Harold Plumley and his brother Bill, twenty and sixteen, drove from the University of Chicago to climb and tour in the west. They visited national parks from Mesa Verde to Yellowstone, and decided their favorite was Grand Teton. As charter members of the Chicago Mountaineering Club, they devoted each summer through 1941 to climbing in these mountains. Then came war, and duty.
Harold dreamt of retiring to the Tetons. In the mid-nineteen sixties he bought a half-acre lot in the newly developed Teton Village. He envisioned a small Tyrolean-style cabin tucked into the forest, similar to others that were being built in the sixties. When he last visited the property, in 1981, the forest had been displaced by large boxy houses and manicured lawns. When I asked if he still wanted to live there he shook his head in disgust. I hate to think what he would have to say about it now, forty years later.
As I struggled to find work in Bozeman, Don thought we should consider moving to a place he had been fond of, and where he already had somewhere to build a house. Okay, I said—uncertain about the prospect. What would I do for work, sell beer or tee-shirts?
As it happened, I was successful at last in finding another Forest Service position—in Jackson. Instead of going with what he heard from my superiors in Bozeman, the Bridger-Teton Forest supervisor talked to my former boss, since retired, who told him the team-player business was a bunch of baloney.
When I was introduced to the Bridger-Teton Forest’s leadership team, the group I was about to join as its only female member, I was braced for the same cold stares that had greeted me at the Gallatin. To my surprise, people smiled in welcome. Two of the district rangers left their seats to shake my hand. Was this the same Forest Service, or was something in the water here?
The author and her late husband, Don, on one of many treks into the outdoors.
We didn’t build a house in Teton Village after all, but chose a spot in town from which I could walk to work on cold winter mornings instead of scraping ice off the windshield and driving a dozen miles. Jackson has been home to me for thirty-three years now, longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. And though it is changing in ways that I find difficult, it remains surrounded by public wildland—my medicine. Favorite aspen stands, creek-side trails, and wildflower parks are among my best friends.
Perhaps it is my friendship with places as well as people that provides the support I need to find moments of joy while grieving. For over a year we humans have been apart from one another, unable to hold the hand of a dying parent, unable to accept a hug from a sympathetic friend. Our souls are raw with hurt.
But near my home I can walk to an aspen stand without wearing a mask, press my hand against a cool smooth surface, and lean against it if I need to sigh or cry. I can fluff the leaf mulch in my garden and see the green spears of crocus breaking the soil. The cold spring air that fills me is a reminder to be grateful for simply being alive.
*
Not long after Don died an old friend asked, “So, what are you going to do?”
I guessed she was asking whether I planned to stay in Jackson, and I found the question a bit premature. Anyway, why would I leave? Why would the transition from married to widowed prompt anyone to depart from a beloved place that gave solace and held fond memories—especially after only a couple of weeks?
The larger question is this: no longer partner or caregiver and bound to another person’s needs and desires, what shall I do with the rest of my life? It will take some time to consider, and in the meanwhile I wish people would refrain from asking what I will to do, whether I am planning any out-of-region adventures, or if would I like to sell that Silver Pigeon shotgun. None of the above, for the moment. First I must allow this time of liminality to show me what comes next, and what matters most.
Now when I consider what matters most my thinking has shifted. Rather than wanting to spend as much time as possible outdoors, I have reframed the desire. I want to be outdoors to deepen my connection with all forms of life as well as the non-living world.
I have believed in many things during my life, some of which have turned out to be unworthy of my efforts. I return to an exercise I’ve repeated over the years, delving into what might be called my core values.
Once I listed aspirations and achievements—to be of service, to develop expertise. Now when I consider what matters most my thinking has shifted. Rather than wanting to spend as much time as possible outdoors, I have reframed the desire. I want to be outdoors to deepen my connection with all forms of life as well as the non-living world. Compassion and kindness have always been important, but now they’re even more so. And I practice gratitude for all that is given, earned, or stumbled upon.
Personal grief and shared grief resulting from pandemic have made me more aware than ever of the urgency with which we must change our way of life. “We’re in this together,” goes the COVID-era slogan, but we don’t seem to act as if we believe it. We can’t wait to get back to “normal.”
Normal, as we know it, cannot take us where we need to go; a major course correction is in order. It’s my belief that compassion, kindness, and living as though we are in love with this world will shine a light in the right direction. I realize I am not the first to arrive at this conclusion.
While in a state of grief, it’s easy to feel helpless and exhausted, but each of us can dip a paddle into the troubled water of our time, contributing our little bit to change our collective course. We cannot bring back the dead for whom we mourn, but we can help the coming generations inherit a healing world. Like those who grieve, the earth is resilient.
I may not feel able to do much about race relations, threatened ecosystems, or the widening gap between haves and have-nots, but I still know how to paddle. In some strange way, the loss of a loved one makes me want to bend into more powerful strokes. Grief breaks your heart, but I find that it also breaks it open.
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About Susan Marsh
Susan Marsh spent three decades with the U.S. Forest Service and is today an award-winning writer living in Jackson Hole.
