You squint up into the sun’s custard-colored incandescence and make out the silhouette of Jack Pederson, your neighbor from down the road.
His ATV hunkering in your driveway fifty feet behind him like a large dumb pet.
Jack dressed in the same cowboy hat and sharp-toed boots he wore the day he took your photo.
Your and Andi’s photo.
Jack is seventy-two yet refuses to give up ranching.
His father homesteaded the land on which he runs cattle and he is over a foot taller than you but he is still — you search for the right word—lanky.
He is telling you about how he can remember when he was a boy the Indians used to cross this area on horseback, migrating north in the summer and south in the winter.
When you ask him a question, he frames his reply in a maximum of two short sentences as if every word costs him ten dollars.
His skin is foliage brown and reminiscent of dried eel.
He aims his comments over your shoulder, at the lodgepoles behind you, or sometimes at his pet ATV.
He is telling you about how difficult calving can be in February and how, if you are not careful, the cows birth directly onto bare patches of ice, the wet newborns freeze down, and the coyotes sidle in during the night.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
I went to St. Louis once to visit my son, he says over your shoulder.
Your son lives in St. Louis?
My daughter moved to Spokane. My son moved to St. Louis. He works for the phone company.
What did you think?
I was pretty scared at first. But it’s okay. There’s over a million people there, only you don’t see them all at once.
It takes you a second to pick up something enlivening in his eyes and then going out again.
He touches his cowboy hat with his first two fingers like John Wayne, though you fail to make out the complexion of this gesture.
It seems to exist anywhere on a continuum between honestly polite to richly ironic.
Then he turns and walks toward his ATV.
You go back into your house and transfer the laundry from the washer to the dryer and then you walk down the driveway to the mailbox, enjoying the warm breeze.
Your friends back east cannot place where you have moved.
Many apparently believe Idaho exists somewhere in the midwest near other states that begin with the letter I by some alphabetical decree.
Sometimes on the phone they ask, joking, how things are in Montana, implying that on the other side of the Hudson all states must be pretty much the same state.
Sometimes they ask what sort of neighbor Theodore Kaczynski really is.
Like Andi’s grandmother, they worry about you. They doubt the logic of your decision. They cannot imagine how you spend your time, how you can possibly fill your days, because they cannot imagine how they could spend their time, possibly fill their days, if they were in the same situation.
Andi and you are learning to take this in stride.
You even find a certain amount of good sense in the reading they give your life: ten years ago, ten months ago, you would have given it the same reading.
Yet you also understand they will not visit and that over time they will forget you, filing you away with other friends about whom they have nothing but good feelings who have broken suburban faith and wandered off into the wilderness that begins just beyond the western palisades of the George Washington Bridge.
Even now, as you walk up your driveway, sorting through magazines, shoppers, and bills, you notice their letters have begun shrinking, tapering into two- and three-line postcards that tell you less and less.
Less and less and less.
You extract the laundry from the dryer, fold it, and tuck or hang it away in its proper drawer or closet.
Outside, at nearly three-thousand feet, the late afternoon sun is brutal.
At nearly three-thousand feet and well above the forty-fifth parallel, you can actually sense the UV rays frizzling inside your cells.
You can actually sense your skin aging faster than the skin of people who live at sea level.
Like the skin of celebrities in Aspen and Telluride.
Only less famous.
You light the grill on your deck overlooking the gully through which Bear Creek runs.
By this point in the year the water makes weak trickling noises as it passes over cannonball-sized rocks.
In the early spring, after the melt, Jack says, it will sound like a perpetually heavy rain.
On the other side of the gully, almost lost in the woods, is an old cemetery plot belonging to the family that lived on this parcel in the twenties and thirties before their cabin burned down and they moved back to Michigan.
Michigan or Minnesota.
It could have been either.
The plot has the rough dimensions of your garden, perhaps fifteen by fifteen. It is surrounded by a droopy barbed-wire fence and overgrown with huckleberry and thistles. The tombstones are jumbled, weathered, tilting at disconcerting angles.
Most are almost impossible to read, though you and Andi have found birth dates as early as 1856 and death dates as late as 1938.
You scrape charred meat and ancient fish scales off the bars of the grill with a spatula and back in the kitchen free a can of beer from the six-pack in your shiny white refrigerator with a brisk twisting motion, pop the top, wander through the house, drinking.
The shitting fields, obviously, and the leeches.
How, after a rain, leeches would appear everywhere in Nepal. In puddles. On leaves. Sprinkled across boulders. One-inch-long black shell-less snails that could stand up on their back ends like little boneless prairie dogs and suck so much of your blood you could weaken before you noticed.
The way you hiked among the foothills of the Annapurna Range.
The way Machhapuchhare jagged up twenty-one-thousand feet on your right like a huge snowy fin and the terraced farmland staircased down to the river on your left and something would itch your ankle and you would roll up your pants to scratch it and discover your socks speckled with dark pink patches.
Or the way, say, you heard stories about boa constrictors attacking VW Beetles and eating small sleeping children in thatched huts in Venezuela.
Your teachers thinking you were lying.
You about to cry, you being so humiliated.
In the kitchen, you turn on two electric burners on top of the stove. In the loft, you crank the volume on the television. You hear the satellite dish whir into position out back.
I have never taken a picture I’ve intended, Diane Arbus once said. I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.
Listening to the news channel, you open the cabinet above the counter and take out a bag of spaghetti and jar of garlic-and-basil sauce. Someone is either having an affair with a congressman or not having an affair with a congressman, depending on whom you decide to believe. You pour some of the sauce into one pot and fill another with water and place them both on the burners, the right set on low, the left on high. The Royal Family either tried to have Diana killed or did not try to have her killed, depending on whom you decide to believe. You take down two earthenware plates, two bowls, two mugs, and you make yourself a salad of lettuce, spinach, and diced cabbage, none of which is from your garden but will be within two weeks, then you stand in the middle of the kitchen, occasionally taking swigs from your beer, staring straight ahead and thinking about a synonym for pale lemon, the color of the feverish light saturating the room.