MASS

Banff was supposed to be the ceiling. The insurmountable objective. The place I'd looked at on a map at nineteen and thought... there. That's as far as someone like me gets to go.

I'd left it that morning as a pit stop.

Wonowon, BC. Dead of night. Roman Holiday playing on repeat. The sky above the Alaska Highway was the wrong color, still blue, a deep impossible blue, hazy at the edges in a way that felt like nostalgia without an object. Not nostalgia for anything specific. Just the feeling arriving uninvited the way it does when you're alone, moving fast and the world is suddenly too large to argue with.

I'd gotten dumped. Went to Alaska. Wrote that down for future reference.

Two people knew roughly where I was. Maybe. I was the only one who knew why.

Fort Nelson. Two hours of sleep on the floor of a campground because stopping felt like losing and I wasn't ready to lose yet. Back on the road before the cricket on my shoulder could say pump the brakes. Toad River. Gas station. Stood at the pump for five minutes while a full tank sat there waiting for someone to pull a lever. One lever needed to turn on the pump motor in -33F. I'd never encountered this mechanism in my many years and decided it had to have been broken down. The gas stayed.

Muncho Lake was trying to say something. I had my sunglasses on against the snow blindness, beard overgrown, squinting anyway, sixteen hours into the drive on two hours of sleep, white knuckling the edges of the lake in the dark when the road became unavailable.

Black shapes. Erupting around a corner in a white world.

My body froze before my brain voted. Not the freeze of danger. The freeze of the world briefly failing to make sense. I was on two hours of sleep on a frozen lake two days from anyone who knew where I was and the landscape had just produced something that walked on stilts and had no business being there. For one half second I didn't trust what I was seeing.

Then they moved and moving meant real. Phew, no need to check myself in.

Then I looked closer and real meant something else entirely.

Wood bison. Roughly thirty of them crossing the tamped snow of the Alaska Highway like the road had been built for exactly this purpose and the intervening century of human traffic was a minor inconvenience they'd been patient about. The largest land mammal on this continent. They once moved through the boreal north in hundreds of thousands. By 1900 there were fewer than 300 left alive. Hunting. Habitat. The whole human story told in one species. Today there are around 5000. Which sounds like a resurrection until you try to imagine hundreds of thousands and realize you have no frame of reference for that kind of abundance and never will.

I sat in the truck and watched them cross.

I did not choose to stop. The road simply became unavailable.

Confusion replaced with awe. Just awe. The kind that makes you stop being the main character. The road, the truck, Denali somewhere ahead, all of it receded and there were just thirty wood bison crossing a frozen road and I was very small and very still and completely present for the first time since I'd left.

One stayed behind.

The size of him was genuinely offensive. He didn't look at me. Didn't acknowledge me. Just stopped in the middle of the road and closed his eyes. He wasn't following the others because he had nothing to fear and he was tired and those were the only two relevant facts. I wasn't anything to him. Not a threat. Not an obstacle. Not even a curiosity. Just weather. A thing that was briefly there.

I teared up. Not from sadness. From recognition.

I was looking at centuries. At conservation efforts and near extinction and the specific stubbornness of something that wasn't finished yet. At a creature that had been reduced to 300 individuals and came back not dramatically but slowly, through time and effort and the particular refusal of a thing to be gone. He was standing on the shoulder of the Alaska Highway in -40F because he was tired and this was a reasonable place and nothing in the universe was going to suggest otherwise.

I had driven away from a full tank of gas that morning because I couldn't pull a lever.

He walked to the shoulder and lay down and closed his eyes. Because he was tired. Because that was reason enough. Because nothing in his entire existence had ever successfully argued that it shouldn't be.

I watched him for a long time.

Banff was the ceiling once.

He didn't know what ceilings were.

Then I pulled over and took a nap.