by Nick Engelfried.
And when it was all too much, Marvin would go up into the hills that surround the town of Missoula like the walls of a great, sloping bowl. And for a while he felt like he could breathe again, because in the hills were no computer screens or flashing lights or things needing to be planned or phone calls needing to be returned.
Marvin would ride his bike to one of the small trailheads so easily overlooked by the cars whizzing past on the street. He didn’t own a car—didn’t have a driver’s license even, because cars always struck him as awful creatures with their roaring gas-consuming appetites and noxious farts. Marvin was like that: an idealist, a ridiculous specimen of humanity really, too stubborn and unrealistic to just get with times and buy a stupid car already.
So he’d ride up to the dusty trailhead at Blue Mountain or Pattee Canyon or the wild, wonderful cluster of mountains known at the Rattlesnakes, panting and straining to force the peddles of his bike round and round as he made his way sweatily uphill. There at the trailhead he’d lock his bike to whatever was handy—a signpost, tree trunk, whatever—and begin hiking up, up into the pine trees and boulders and streams so clear they seemed to run with liquid mountain air rather than water.
In autumn the hills were soft brown with dry grass, rolling into a distance broken only by islands and peninsulas and isthmuses of dark green where groves of pine trees and Douglas-firs penetrated into the brownness. Marvin would enter those trees and wander through them, sometimes looking up to see a group of Clark’s nutcrackers—dazzling birds with black wings, white tail feathers, and soft grey heads—feeding on pine nuts in the resin-smelling branches above. Once Marvin made eye contact with one of those birds, and the nutcracker looked at him appraisingly through its glinting, obsidian-black eye. In that moment Marvin could feel he was being taken in by an intelligence—not a thing, but a being with purposes and goals and opinions of its own.
Autumn was the best time to see birds—Marvin had only the vaguest idea when football season was and tended to forget major holidays, but he damn well knew when to look for birds in the mountains—because the broad-leaved trees were bare and revealed the small feathered forms perched on their limbs. Once he spotted a tiny saw-whet owl huddled on the branch of a cottonwood, its feathers fluffed against the cold.
Then there were the big mixed flocks of songbirds that formed in fall and swept through the forest, gobbling as many insects as their collective resources could uncover. Dozens of chickadees and nuthatches together with the occasional brown creeper would move through the trees as one, chirping to each other in high-pitched voices and picking over the tree trunks for bugs with their small, sharp beaks. Marvin could hear them coming, a cloud of birds approaching through the trees like a wind-blown thunderstorm, their high voices and the scratching of their feet on the tree bark proclaiming their presence to anyone who would listen.
Slowly the days grew shorter and colder until one morning the hills were cloaked in a layer of fine snow. It was harder to get to the trailheads then, but somehow Marvin managed. He’d wait for the roads to be clear enough of snow that he could ride his bike up them, or as a last resort he would just walk, determined to get up to the hills and into the forest whatever it took.
The landscape was oddly quiet in winter—a cliché maybe, but it was true—every sound muffled by the snow that covered everything. Sometimes Marvin walked for miles and the only loud sounds besides the crunch of his own boots in the snow were the deep, throaty croaks of a distant raven and the thwump of snow dumped to the ground from a drooping pine branch. Or he’d hear a sudden crashing and clomping from the bushes and look up to see the wide, brown eyes of a mule deer peering through the frozen twigs at him.
One winter day Marvin was walking in the Rattlesnakes when he found a pair of ears on the snow. They were long ears, brown and furry, with a few small loose tufts of fur sprinkled on the snow around them. They obviously belonged to a deer, and it was only too clear what had happened: a cougar had killed a deer in this very place, and after feeding a little had dragged its prey away to hide for later, leaving behind only the ears.
Marvin felt a shiver down his spine as he pictured that big mountain cat’s long incisors sinking into the deer’s soft neck. All Marvin’s senses were more alert suddenly, with something of the alertness a prey animal feels when it senses a predator nearby. That cat was still out there, probably not far away, and the knowledge of this triggered part of Marvin’s brain that normally lay sleepily dormant. He walked very carefully for the rest of his time in the wintery woods that day, glancing about from time to time as though he might glimpse the cougar’s golden eyes staring at him from the bushes.
These Western Montana winters were so long and icily cold, sometimes it seemed they would never end. But of course they always did, and the first tiny sagebrush buttercups would peak their yellow flowers out from the banks of melting snow. This was how Marvin knew spring had arrived.
When all the snow was melted the hills around Missoula turned a soft, light green—not the bright green of a jungle nor the wet green of a marsh, but the delicate green of new shoots of prairie grasses thrusting their way up from the soil. The green seemed to draw Marvin up, out of the town and into the hills.
Up close the blur of green resolved itself into individual grass blades, with wildflowers wonderfully interspersed throughout. Pink petals of bitterroot, purple larkspur, soft blue bluebells, yellow desert parsley—all these and so many more burst from the rich, snow-watered soil and blazed gloriously on the hillside. Bees, flies, butterflies, and beetles descended on the flowers from every direction to sip their nectar and spread their pollen. Through all this Marvin wandered, the soft fragrance of springtime in his nostrils.
Sometimes in spring the hills felt so alive it seemed as if they must burst from their own alive-ness. Small snakes shot across Marvin’s path like streaks of brown-green lighting. Colorful moths flew in for a landing, wings flashing reticulated patterns of yellow, black, and red. Grouse pecked for food in the bushes while flickers called overhead, and big black beetles trundled their way over the forest floor beneath the pines. Marvin wasn’t religious, but all he could think was he’d stumbled into a sort of Garden of Eden.
Slowly, though, the hills dried out. As June gave way to July, then August, the grass grew brown and brittle with summer’s heat and most of the flowers shriveled and died. By late summer everything in the upper hills seemed to crackle with a harsh dryness. The flowers, insects, even many of the birds seemed to be in hiding, seeking shelter underground or in shaded spots away from the desiccating heat that gripped the landscape. Only the cicadas seemed to love the heat, their shrill insectine trills piercing the still air.
At times like this when his beloved hills looked dead, Marvin knew just where to go. He followed the contours of the landscape down, down into the narrow valleys between the hills where the last pockets of moisture remained. Best of all was Rattlesnake Creek, a clear stream that continued coursing down from the mountains all the way through summer. He would follow the trail that skirts the creek, coming down to the water every now and then to wet his head. Clouds of orange butterflies rose from his path as he approached, fluttering up from the moist riverbank where they’d been sucking minerals from the mud.
It was not only Marvin—and the butterflies—who sought out the streams in summer. One day he glanced up across the creek and found himself face to face with a female moose, her ears and nose and forehead all ridiculously big, too large even for her vast body. For a second they just looked at each other, Marvin and the moose, then Marvin began backing slowly away and the moose wheeled around and crashed off into the bushes.
Once Marvin wandered up a small side stream and found himself in a secluded spot surrounded by bushes. His limbs felt heavy from the heat and sweat coursed down his forehead as he slipped his tired feet from his shoes and waded into the water. His ankles tingled deliciously from the cold and he suddenly felt more awake. Slowly, without really thinking about it, he began removing his clothes—shirt first, then shorts, then even his boxer shorts. He lowered himself into the water, immersing completely for a second before coming up gulping for air.
Marvin would remember that moment many times later, even after he’d left the sunlight-soaked hills of Missoula behind and wasn’t sure when he would ever return. He remembered that moment when there was nothing separating him from the cold waters, clear air, and rocky creek bottom and he burst up out of the stream gasping for oxygen and thrilling and alive.