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A DEEPER WAY ACROSS, mlb manning

A DEEPER WAY ACROSS

At forty-nine, my children were grown. My twenty‑year relationship was a failure. All I had was a string of unfinished aspirations and a bookshelf of what ifs. I had no career and no future. Daily life was unbearably painful. I wanted more than just to be out of the crowded city and our crumbling house—I wanted a permanent escape from life—but for my children’s sake, it had to look like an accident. 

When, in a Hail Mary to save our relationship, we moved to a remote cabin in Northern Utah, the landscape offered a solution: an avalanche. But making it up the mountain in deep snow wasn’t going to be easy. I was depressed, living in chronic pain, out of shape, and dangerously overweight. 

To make my death look accidental, I would need to be in the best shape of my life. I had six months to become someone capable of climbing that mountain or miss the winter window.

A DEEPER WAY ACROSS is the true story of how the resolve to end it all, and the support from a random group of strangers I met online, became the unexpected passage to redemption.

 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 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. A mountain hamlet clinging to antique shade and pilfered water rights.The perfect backdrop for a forgotten breed of men who move like rusty automatons from one ranch to another.

There is only one way in and out of Clear Creek. The route is thirteen miles of gravel and dirt, funneled between barbed-wire fences, broken by the occasional mailbox and closed cattle gates. At the base of the mountain, the road turns toward the canyon. There, the road narrows as it climbs 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. In summer lightning eyes the dry sage. In winter the wind habitually bullies the snowdrifts over the road, leaving it impassible. In the spring, it’s the rain and mud. In the summer, it’s dust and cattle. 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 for 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 that traverses the foothills.


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.



I can see an avalanche scar from my kitchen window. It’s the size of a soccer field—steep and rocky. All it needs is enough snow, and it will make the perfect coffin. I’ve made my decision. Now, the mountain can make hers. 



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