We hiked, we climbed, we rafted, we went to the rodeo and watched the bulls toss the cowboys free. “Told ya, I’m not that PETA,” she said. I brought Damien down from Colter Bay each Saturday, and we drank for free at the Cowboy Bar until she closed.
“You don’t care that he won?” she demanded.
“No.”
“You don’t care this racist monstrosity is president at all?”
We sat in the Cowboy with all the lights on and the booths and stools cleared, Kate Windexing and wiping down the bar while she looked at Damien like he was insane. This was literally days after the riots in Charlottesville and the death of Heather Heyer, when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd.
“It’s not that I want him to be president,” said Damien. “I just think it’s another thing that happened in a system that’s designed for things like this to happen. Bet you anything in fifteen years, this whole era will be pure bar trivia and people will be on to complaining about what a dictator the next guy is.”
Kate set her spray bottle down and rubbed her temples. “This is hard to listen to for someone who spent last year getting hosed down with freezing water by corporate security firms.”
“Oh, at Dakota Access?” asked Damien.
“It was called Sacred Stone,” she snapped back.
I’d been silent, listening to them, hoping my best friend in Wyoming wouldn’t piss Kate off and leave me trying to mend fences over topics I didn’t dare comment on. I asked, “What’s Dakota Access?”
Still looking at Damien with irritation, Kate said, “It’s an oil pipeline. We were blockading into last fall, and they fucking cleared us with dogs and hoses.”
“But even that,” said Damien, sipping his glass of free whiskey through a straw, ice cubes tinkling, “it’s like you’re really upset that our species is destroying the atmosphere with smokestacks and cow farts, but back in the Proterozoic, when it was just mats of dumb algae calling the shots, the algae was like, ‘Fuck yeah, this planet is rad, and it’s all ours!’ And then they went and farted out a bunch of oxygen and exterminated themselves.” He folded his arms and nodded his head once.
Kate said, “You’re sitting there very satisfied like you’ve made any kind of point.”
“Just that everyone’s running ’round trying to fix humanity but the only fixed thing is change. You gotta let go, dude. Embrace the chaos.”
“How ’bout I fucking punch you instead?”
And until she threw the bar towel down and walked away, she really looked like she was going to.
Kate showed me her office, if you could call it that, and suddenly her pipeline story made all the sense. The Bison Project worked out of a small apartment above a Laundromat. When she’d described the operation to me, I’d envisioned a bustling war room. After all, it was an advocacy group attempting to influence state governments and battle a powerful business interest that spanned Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. But it turned out to be four people working at card tables. I came to understand that Kate more or less had become the Bison Project. She’d organized protests on six college campuses and successfully lobbied members in all three state legislatures to put forward bills that would halt the indiscriminate slaughter of bison. Though none of them seemed likely to pass, Kate’s coworkers told me she’d orchestrated all this mostly by sheer force of personality. She explained how she’d landed on this particular fight.
“After the election, I just wasn’t in the right headspace for much of anything—I was too shocked. It seemed like I could come here and do something righteous without also investing in the frenzy. You just can’t keep up the fury of the Women’s March twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five, but now… Obviously it’s beginning to frustrate me how little this one issue might matter in the scheme of what’s going on.”
Her apartment was awash in file folders and binders. A bulletin board dominated one wall, loaded to the point of collapse with pictures, papers, note cards, receipts, bills, reminders, and anything else that could be hung by thumbtack.
“It’s a system,” she assured me. We rarely stayed there, as she had three roommates and her bed was always covered in books and papers anyway. Frankly that was fine with me because she also had dozens of photos of dead bison on the walls, their throats cut, disemboweled, maimed, or tortured in ways that didn’t seem like a systematic culling so much as a war zone. Hundreds of dead-eyed heads trailing blood and knots of spine still held together by cartilage piled in the grass. I never understood how she could sleep in that room. And I’d never realized how intoxicating passion could be in a person because I’d never really encountered it before.
As the dewiest part of me took over, and I began scouting out winter ski jobs in Jackson, as I began describing her to my folks and my sister in phone calls, I could hear my own gushing. Eager to impress her, I pushed her to read some of the short stories I’d been working on that summer. Again and again, she demurred.
One night while we were making pasta for dinner at my place, I found myself pressing her on it.
“It’s a no-win situation.” She tested the sauce, blowing at the steam before slurping off the wooden spoon. “Either I’ll lie to you and feel like shit or tell you the truth and feel like shit.”
I made a sound resembling a laugh. “So you’re assuming I’ll suck?” I’d been nervous enough about asking her to read something in the first place. To have her blow it off like this felt like a stamp of what she thought of me intellectually.
“No, not suck. I just have such a low threshold for fiction written by men. I can’t even open a novel written by a man anymore—”
“What about the Vonnegut?”
She dipped the spoon back in the sauce for another round. “First novel I’ve read by a man in two years.”
“Is that a joke? That’s reductive.”
“Maybe it is. I’m just trying to explain why I might not be the best reader for you.”
“So explain.”
She steeled her mouth in that way she had when she was preparing to lay down some Kate Truth. “Contemporary fiction is all status quo white male entitlement regurgitated over and over with almost no perception of what’s unspooling outside of its closed circuit. All this literature of late capitalist exhaustion and alienation ad nauseam—no thanks.”
“And you just assume that’s me too?” I kept my voice light, but for the first time since we’d met, she’d pissed me off. I felt the frustration of all her small condescensions trapped in a vein near my skull.
Licking the spoon, she assessed me. “Don’t use that bitchy tone, dude. This is not personal. I thought all this long before I met you.”
“I’m just asking why you assume that about me?”
She cocked her head. “It’s not hard to look at you out here, Matt, trying to have your little adventure in Jackson, Wyoming—the ultimate Jeffersonian yeoman’s fantasyland serving as stage dressing for investment properties for the global elite and the celebrities living on ranches that they pay Mexican immigrants to maintain—and see what your quote-unquote fiction will look like. For Christ’s sake, the Fed has its annual conference out here. You’ve never given a thought to what fuels these fantasies. Open-pit mining and mountain-top removal and systems of white supremacy and sexual violence—”
“Okay, Kate, I’ve been on a fucking college campus lately, I know the spiel.” She gave me a cold, fixed stare. I didn’t understand what I felt then. I’d passed for depth around my fraternity because I read books for my major, and it was suddenly frightening to realize how unmoored I was—without even a set of tools to calculate an opinion. “Because none of that is original,” I went on. “You don’t need to remind me I’m a privileged white man. I get it. That has nothing to do with why I want to write.”