Driving through a broad valley in western Idaho eight years ago, my daughter turned toward me and said, her voice deepened with emotion, “I love this valley. It’s so beautiful.”
We had spent the weekend skiing in Payette National Forest and were returning to Boise, where she was living at the time. Before packing up that morning, we’d sat on the shore of frozen Payette Lake, holding mugs of hot tea, wearing every layer we’d brought, and talking – about her upcoming wedding, career plans, and hopes for the future. For the mother of an adult daughter who lives 2,000 miles away, such is the definition of heaven, and a lingering sense of that intimacy was still with me in the car.
Then she told me she loved this valley.
I could understand why: the expansive views, the craggy peaks, the raw, dramatic grandeur of it all. But I was gutted. As much as I enjoy my visits west, it’s not a landscape in which I feel comfortable. I’m overwhelmed by such expansiveness, intimidated by mountains of such scale. It’s a landscape that doesn’t so much invite as dare me to enter.
And here was my daughter, telling me she loved it.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. When you raise your children to love the outdoors – to love, in particular, mountains and snow – and you raise them in the Northeast, you can’t expect them to do anything but go nuts when they eventually, inevitably, discover the West.
But what I heard in her voice was more than going nuts. The West was winning her heart, working its way into the deep places, maybe even vying for position with the landscape of her youth – a landscape whose ethos I thought she and I would share, no matter where she lived.
When she first left home, I had adjusted to our having a long-distance relationship. It’s what you do as a parent. But this felt like a distance of a different kind, one I hadn’t anticipated, one no number of cross-country visits would span.
We raised our two daughters in Vermont, hiking and skiing in the Green Mountains and, as they got older, the neighboring Adirondacks and Whites. Seminal to all that was The Loop: a 2-mile footpath behind our house that runs along a stream, through patches of forest, across a sometimes-wetland, through an overgrown apple orchard. Here, the girls gained their outdoor confidence, honing the skills necessary for adventure.
They skied The Loop in all manner of conditions, from smooth sailing to classic Northeast snow-ice-rocks-and-roots. They searched the forest floor for elusive spring ephemerals, and panned the woods for the rare flash of deer and evidence of beaver. They found drama in the slow, erosional power of the stream. And they stopped each time at the place beside the river with a long downstream view – of the lowering sun sparkling on the river’s surface, of ice brackets newly formed along the river’s edge, of allées of marsh marigolds lining small rivulets – before heading home.
Six years ago, my daughter and her husband moved from Idaho to Wyoming. Their equivalent of The Loop is Coyote Rock: a half-hour hike to a ridgetop behind their house, from which you can see the entire Teton Range (“My mountains,” my 4-year-old grandson calls them). Moose walk their driveway on a regular basis. In the fall, they hear elk bugling nearby. In the summer, the meadows leading to Coyote Rock are brilliant with wildflowers. Massively snowy winters are a given; skiing is always smooth sailing.
I know my grandchildren are beyond fortunate to be growing up in such a place, to have such grandeur and wildness immediately at hand, to feel comfortable within such enormity, and to take such abundance for granted. I also know that they are becoming, in some ways, strangers to me.
Recently, though, wildfires and politics and the housing market have my daughter and son-in-law looking with considerable interest at the Northeast, particularly Vermont, as a place to live. Part of me has to keep my heart from soaring, for fear it won’t happen. Another part of me fears that if they do move here, my daughter will be disappointed, finding she no longer has patience for the limitations and subtleties of the Northeast, that it has become second-best to her; supplanted.
“The differing landscapes of the earth are hard to know individually,” writes Barry Lopez in his book, Arctic Dreams. “The complex feelings of affinity and self-assurance one feels with one’s native place rarely develop again in another landscape.”
Most of me believes Lopez is right, that if – when – my daughter looks again on the Green Mountains as home, she will not be disappointed, but will recognize, in their graceful silhouettes, the very contours of her soul.
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