Then we reached the peak of Paintbrush Divide, this massive ridge of rock, and I could see so far to the west it was like peering around the corner of the earth. The Tetons rose to the left and right, and looking out across the border to the vast, jagged carapace of Idaho, the evening sun lighting the mountains behind us, joy flooded into me. I’ll always wonder if everything I ever came to feel for her was bound to the endorphins that soaked into me then, the miracle of oxygen finally steeping the red cells. I saw this sacred piece of the world through that prism and had a premonition of feeling deeply and mournfully for another person. Before she broke the silence by tapping the sign that read PAINTBRUSH DIVIDE EL. 10,700 and said, “You can’t wear your church panties for this one,” before we sat together eating a dinner of trail mix and hummus and cucumber sandwiches, watching the sun set over the Idaho mountains, peeling back the night and revealing so many stars it was like we sat on a plank stranded in the middle of space, while we stood on the divide with our hands on our hips sucking wind to slow our pounding hearts, I felt the gravity of what would come. That I loved this girl totally and ferociously and elementally.
When night fell and the temperature dropped, the wind had fangs. We’d set up the tent a few hundred feet on the other side of the divide where the gusts weren’t as nasty. We’d hung our food in a tree, a standard precaution for bears. Now I had on every piece of clothing I’d brought. We huddled side by side in the dirt taking pulls of whiskey from my flask.
“I can’t believe you were ten years old when you first did this,” I said.
“Yeah, well, my dad kinda believes in throwing children into the deep end. It’ll be a miracle if my brothers don’t turn out as crazy as me.”
“Brothers? Older or younger?”
“Ha. Younger. As in one of them is in the terrible twos and the other just popped out of my dad’s wife last Christmas. Good luck to my fifty-one-year-old father with that.”
The wind turned up and a frigid gust pierced all my layers. Kate held the flask with her sleeve tucked over her hand in lieu of a glove.
“I’m sorry. That sounds messy.”
She threw me a skeptical look over the flask. “I’ve never drank anything but potable water. I’ve never gone a day without a meal. And I choose when I sleep outside. I think I’ll step over that hurdle and continue on my way.” She passed the flask to me.
“Hey, I just mean maybe that’s why you don’t want a boyfriend. You’re afraid of emulating your parents’ marriage.”
“Oh my God.” She put her face in her hands. “You’re going with Psychoanalysis 101, Tar Heel? If you’re going to be a writer, you’ll have to tell more original stories than that.” She took the flask back from me, maybe not realizing I hadn’t yet drank. I was quiet after that, uncertain if what she’d said had hurt me.
“When we first moved to Portland, we were supposed to stay with my mom’s friend, but the friend had moved, so she didn’t know anybody. And she was so hurt by everything that had happened with my dad that she refused to call him and ask for money. The whole first month we slept in the car.” She laughed. “I just remember thinking, Lady, I should be taking care of you, not the other way around. At some point you have to learn to take your parents for who they are and not let it rule your life one way or the other.”
All along the rim of the Idaho mountains, flashes of golden light began to ripple. They flickered like incandescent bulbs eating away the last of the tungsten. She explained it was heat lightning. “Better than the sunset.”
The gold bursts illuminated the clouds and made dark castles of shadows in the atmosphere. We watched the lightning for a long time, until she said, “Let’s go to bed.” Crawling inside the tent and zipping the flap closed behind us, I began to unroll my sleeping bag but never finished. She took my crotch in one hand and the back of my neck with the other. Kate moved unlike any woman I’d ever been with. With Candace, it had been implied that I was directing, that it was more or less my show to pull off. But Kate yanked her tank top over her head and directed my hands to her tough nipples. She got my pants down and her mouth was like a storm, slick and powerful and cleansing. Finally, she urged me into her sleeping bag and handed me a condom. Tugging it on, I felt squeamish and young. Then we broke sweats despite the cold. Afterward, we unzipped the inner flap and lay there while I ran my hands over the mosquito bites on her thighs. We watched the heat lightning through the mesh screen. The thunder was distant, but when my heart finally slowed down, I could hear it.
The next day we packed our gear and started down Cascade Canyon to Lake Solitude, a glittering blue pool of glacial runoff at the bottom of the valley. The mountains towered in all directions, and it felt a bit like photographing the sides of an enormous bowl. We stripped down to our underwear, dove from a rock into the frigid water, and I cried out when the surface first slapped my skin. We swam for as long as we could stand, then pulled ourselves out to dry on a rock in the sun. She sat up, leaning forward to hug her knees and look into the distance. Then I said something silly, and she smiled. I forget what it was I said—something errant and forgettable, but at the moment it worked. That was when I chose to pick up my camera and take a picture. Head turned, hair still wet and pulled back into her signature messy bun with strands pulling free in the wind, the peaks of Idaho behind her. It turned out to be a damn good picture. She seemed at once larger than life and the most remote grain of sand in the gutter of the cosmos. Later, I’d make a print of it in black and white. Much later, it would appear in a magazine profile. After that, it would show up on dorm room posters and T-shirts. Then billboards. It didn’t feel iconic when I took it, but it would come to serve as shorthand for ideas and endeavors epic in scale. I’d dwell on the story it told about Kate: the way her eyes seemed to look off to places the viewer could only hope to comprehend, her playful smile hinting at an understanding of a secret beyond even that.
Captain Ray gave me shit about being over the moon, and I could hardly deny it. One time, when Kate picked me up after work, she sat with Ray on the tailgate of the marina truck. Ray said something in his Ray way (arms hugging his chest, looking off in the distance like he could care less), and she doubled over with laughter. Then to my astonishment Ray was laughing too, his nicotine teeth on display. The next day he told me, “That girl of yours has got some serious goddamn charm, Tar Heel.”
But it wasn’t just charm. I was fascinated by her. She’d read everything, she was opinionated, she cared about more topics than I even knew about. When I mentioned that my favorite novel was Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut and had it with me, she borrowed my copy and finished it in two days (“The head of a human being pillowed in the spilled guts of a water buffalo is about the perfect image to describe the Vietnam War,” she said, and I worried that I should have named a book that would take her longer than two days to read). And, of course, we had the sex of people who’ve just discovered a new toy.
So much of that summer was learning how to be with her and her blunt, unapologetic approach. She’d lost her virginity at thirteen to a college freshman she picked up in Powell’s Books; when she was nineteen she booked a flight to Honduras, spent a week in a place called the Mosquito Coast by herself hiking and meeting people, and found out only after she got back that the US government had issued a travel warning for drug cartel and kidnapping activity; she had an abortion in college and the nurse invited her to her birthday party. I’d file away all of this in my ever-expanding Kate Chaos file.