A DEEPER WAY ACROSS

A DEEPER WAY ACROSS

the true story of how my decision to end my life saved me

 

I drive the road home. Around me, the mountains rise and fall

in an unbroken expanse of gray and grayer. This is heaven. This is hell.

Part One: I Came Here to Die

When I speak of Clear Creek, you may recall the photos I shared of a kaleidoscope sky floating above the fallow fields. Maybe you remember the walls of snow that packed the Raft River Range that record-breaking winter—or the white dog with the glacial blue eyes that never left my side. When I think of Clear Creek, I think about the road. 

Straddling the border of Utah and Idaho, Clear Creek is little more than a reservoir for the rings of dust trailing the cattle trucks. The perfect backdrop for a forgotten breed of men who move like rusty automatons from one ranch to another. A mountain hamlet consisting of a handful of double-wide trailers and half a dozen shotgun clapboards clinging to antique shade and pilfered water rights.

The road signs on Old Highway 81 between Snowville, Utah, and Malta, Idaho, omit any mention of the place—yet they list Strevell, a town that hasn’t existed for half a century. There is only one way in and out of Clear Creek. That matters when summer lightning eyes the dry sage. It also matters in the winter when the wind habitually bullies the snowdrifts over the road, leaving them impassible. In the spring, it’s the rain and mud. In the summer, it’s dust and cattle.

The route is thirteen miles of gravel and dirt funneled between barbed wire fences with the occasional side road marked by a mailbox or a closed cattle gate. When the road reaches the base of the mountains, it turns toward the canyon that cradles the creek. There, the road narrows and weaves as it climbs up the back of the Sawtooth National Forest, ending at the jaws of a locked gate—beyond that are the cabins of the men who come to hunt the bears and mountain lions. 

Life above 5280 feet is not gentle. Collapsed cabins, abandoned mines, and fallen barns litter the hillsides. Weary lilac bushes and cracked headstones mark the women who spent their lives fighting the flies and hanging clothes in the wind. 

I’ve always said houses aren’t haunted—people are—but there’s something peculiar about an east-west mountain range. If I’m not careful and think about it too long, I find myself back on the road, standing in the never-ending wind, staring at the mountains and the pall of morning fog traversing the foothills. I don’t know if it’s the history of failure or the ground itself, but there are ghosts on that mountain. I was nearly one of them. 

Even now, safe in North Carolina, eating dinner on his patio, watching the gentle flow of traffic on Rosemary Street, he tries to reassure me by saying, “You wouldn’t have done it.” I let him believe that because he already doesn’t sleep at night. The truth is, had I not realized the dog had followed me out of the cabin that day, I’d be dead or have died trying to be.

“Mountains are not fair or unfair, they are just dangerous.”—Reinhold Messner