A Return to Wild

It’s nights like these when the wind is a cool snake on the snow winding ever forward and the moon, an icy sphere guiding our footfalls that I think most of home. We fought for this home and it welcomed us and rewarded us with beauty and forgiveness and mirrored the wild within us. It was nothing like the house we once claimed in the desert of Arizona. I look to my companion next to me and I can nearly hear the beat of her heart against her chest as we move respectfully, quietly along the snow-heavy trail, our snowshoes making gentle impressions on the crisp white. We ourselves are but animals forging forward in the night.

The silence of the hike has entranced us and neither of us wishes to break the spell. I imagine what we may be doing on a night like this if we still lived in Phoenix. Maybe we’d be sipping margaritas on the casita. Or camping out beneath a bowl of stars, our sleeping bags on the red earth and the croak of a Sonoran toad our lullaby.

But we were not good people in Phoenix. We were of a sloppier breed – couch loungers and bar flies and angry, angry, angry into the night. As if the heat on our skin brought our moods to a boil and we would seethe at each other across the table, across the bed. There was the broken soup bowl her mother had gifted us after the wedding that shattered when she threw it into the sink. There was the gouge in the dining room wall I’d made with my fist when we were late on the water bill again. And of course, greater than anything broken, the silence that lived with us like an uninvited roommate. It would swell at night to fill our small two bedroom and squeeze between us when we slept. We were never truly alone.

We were not communicators back then. Language failed us and we resorted to snarls and howls of displeasure. I was locked in the world of my mind and so was she. There was a fight to be had at every turn and the dust never quiet settled. It was a turbulence we weathered without grace. By day, I was a tax consultant for a company I loathed. She was an assistant to the dean of the university and was wrapped in gossip and politics and incessant chatter. And by night, we were ogres swatting at each other while the TV lit the room around us and droned on for eternity.

And so, we left. Arizonians all our lives and we fled to somewhere cold and wet and dark to chill the deadly fever of our marriage. I had a cousin in Seattle and though we’d only visited for a weekend I could see myself among the pines, among the coffee shops, a new start. It was our first night in Everett that I heard my wife whisper ‘I love you’ in over a year. In the col sheets the silence had left us to be replaced with the patter of rain above us and our space heater whirring gently.

I gave up alcohol for the month. And then the following month. The days piled on until I was eclipsing one hundred days sober. We bought greens at the farmers market and learned to make soups with kale and blend our own hummus and ferment kombucha. We went on walks every day and held hands and whispered to each other like we did when we were young. I felt primal beneath the cloak of darkness, something of the earth made sentient. We left behind jobs that sucked the life from us and bought stock in a meaningful existence.

And one year to the date we left, we hiked beneath the full moon. In the quite stillness, we paused for a moment, hands brushing, and looked into the wintery sky. As we stared at the round face of the moon, an owl crossed before us, wings fluttering and carrying silence on its back. I squeezed my wife’s hand and held my breath as the creature soared through our sky. The silence it left in its wake was not a void, or an apology, or an excuse. It was simply the space of an animal searching for home.