BEAUTIFUL LOSER

SAWTOOTH RANGE, IDAHO

I'd gotten back from the Arctic, spent two weeks hosting some Canadian friends in Bozeman, and taken it upon myself to introduce them to the start of football season. College football, specifically: a peculiar American institution in which a hundred thousand otherwise reasonable people spend their Saturday screaming at twenty-year-olds over the movement of a leather ball. The Canadians seemed to enjoy themselves.

Then they went home, football season carried on without my assistance, and I found myself wondering what the hell came next.

I'd spent the better part of two years going somewhere. Alaska, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, wherever the road happened to lead. There was always another animal to find, another place to see, another perfectly good reason to put a few thousand more miles on the truck. I'd gotten used to having something on the horizon, even if that something was a thousand miles away and involved sleeping on the side of the road.

Now I was back in Bozeman. I had a house, a dog, friends, and a comfortable bed. Everything a reasonable person should be pleased with.

I was miserable.

The nights had gotten bad. Nightmares, mostly. I'd wake up exhausted, drag myself through the day in a fog, and go back to bed knowing exactly what was waiting for me. It was the kind of exhaustion where you haven't done a thing and somehow feel like you've been beaten with a shovel.

I'd been depressed before. I knew the territory, and I wasn't thrilled to find myself back in it. There was nothing romantic about it. I was irritable and sick of my own company.

What I wanted was to be somewhere else. Where, exactly, I couldn't have told you.

The trouble with wanting to be everywhere is that you always end up somewhere, and somewhere has never once lived up to everywhere.

So I loaded Django into the truck and drove to Idaho.

Stanley seemed as good a destination as any. I'd been meaning to get back to the Sawtooths, and nobody in Stanley cared whether I had a plan. I could drive over, sleep outside, look for something to photograph, and come home whenever I felt like it.

The drive was pleasant. Montana gave way to Idaho, the country opened up, and I was happier with a few hundred miles ahead of me than I'd been under a roof.

I realize this is not a sensible way to operate. Nevertheless.

I found a spot to camp above town. Django was delighted. He generally is. He's spent enough nights in the truck to treat the entire western half of North America as an extension of his backyard, and as long as he's fed and allowed to investigate the smells, he has no complaints. October is a good month for the Sawtooths. The summer crowds are gone, the mornings are cold, and the mountains are getting ready for winter. There's a quiet to the place once the seasonal commotion passes. You can hear yourself think, which was precisely what I'd been trying to avoid, but the scenery helped.

I spent some time wandering around with the camera.

Eventually, I found a moose.

A young bull, head down, wearing a modest set of antlers. He wasn't the biggest bull in Idaho, and I doubt he'd have attracted much attention standing beside one of the enormous old boys. But he was a handsome animal, and I liked him immediately.

There was something rather endearing about him. He had all the seriousness of a full-grown bull moose, without quite having the years behind him to justify it.

A beautiful loser, if I ever saw one.

He wasn't doing anything particularly interesting. Just going about his business in the woods outside Stanley, entirely unaware that some twenty-one-year-old with a camera had decided he was going to be the final photograph in a collection.

I made the photograph. No struggle, no heroic expedition, no great confrontation between man and beast.

Just a young moose in Idaho.

I was awfully pleased with him.

Later I ended up at the Rod and Gun, talking with a forest ranger. We got onto the subject of the Sawtooths, and he told me that by just about any standard the place ought to be a national park. The locals, he said, didn't want one. They liked it the way it was.

I thought that was wonderful. Stanley could have been part of something bigger and seemed perfectly happy being Stanley.

We talked for a while. Nothing profound, just the kind of conversation you have with a stranger at a bar when neither of you is in a hurry to be anywhere else.

For once, neither was I.

The next morning I drove to Ketchum, caught up with a friend, and stopped by Ernest Hemingway's grave to leave him a bottle of gin.

I don't admire the man. But if you've made it this far, you know I admire the life.

Then Django and I headed back toward Montana. By the time we reached Bozeman, the first snow of the year had arrived.

The fireplace was roaring at the house. My roommates were watching TV and drinking, carrying on with whatever nonsense had kept them busy while I was gone. Django settled back into his usual spot.

I was delighted. Which was a little ridiculous, considering I'd driven several hundred miles to get away from exactly this.

I sat around with my roommates. Nobody needed anything from me. There was no road to navigate, no animal to find, no reason to get up before sunrise.

For the moment, that suited me fine.

The depression hadn't gone anywhere. I wasn't suddenly sleeping well, and there were still plenty of things waiting for me in the morning. A couple of days in Idaho hadn't fixed anything. But I'd had a good time. I'd found a funny looking moose, met a ranger who liked his mountains the way they were, and left a dead writer some gin.

And now I had a fire, a dog, some people I liked, and a warm bed.

Not a bad life, really.

I know myself well enough to know this probably won't last. Give me a little while and I'll be looking at maps again. I'll remember somewhere I haven't been, something I haven't photographed, someone I ought to visit. I'll start checking the weather and convincing myself my obligations can wait another week.

And once I'm out there, somewhere along the road, I'll start thinking about home.

I want both. The road and the house. I want to be young enough to do something stupid and old enough to know better. I want to disappear into the mountains for a week and know there's somewhere to come back to.

The trouble is, whenever I've got one, I start missing the other.

So I'll keep going back and forth, occasionally getting it right, more often making a mess of it, and having a pretty good time in spite of myself.

I suppose that's life, though. You spend half of it wanting what you haven't got, and the other half trying not to lose what you've already found.

It's ugly, it's rough, it's hangovers and blisters.

But God, ain't it beautiful?