Treading Through the Undergrowth of Grief
[This story originally appeared in Alpinist 87 (Autumn 2024), which is still available on newsstands and in our online store. Only a small fraction of our many long-form stories from the print edition are ever uploaded to Alpinist.com. Be sure to pick up the hard copies of Alpinist for all the goodness!–Ed.]
APRIL 2021: I WAKE to the wind as it whips across the ridge where the rainbow had rested almost one year ago. The cold air blows down the flanks of the mountain known as Red Lady and through the cracks of my drafty little cabin in the Elk Mountains of Colorado. I breathe sharp and deep, my heart thumping so hard against my rib cage that it echoes in my ears. The cabin whistles and howls. The wind conjures form as snow spirals into feathery drifts and apparitions. The two blue spruces in the corner of the yard sway in unison. “I am listening,” I whisper, unsure of who or what I am saying it to. But I know it is old with a name that only the wind and trees can pronounce. There is no point in attempting to clothe it in language. So I lie there in fear and awe under the cold gaze of the moon gleaming through my window.
APRIL 2020: THE NIGHT before Dan died, I awoke to the sound of dripping: snow and ice letting go of the metal roof and rolling into the open air. It was a constant drip, drip, drip. Not the syncopated sound of rain, but a metronomic reminder that spring was here. The sound that births frogs in time to sing praise to their snowmelt ponds. I lay in bed, sweating.
It’s too hot, I thought, and didn’t sleep much after that.
It was the end of April, the first day of spring if you measure it by the day the Elk Mountains had their first big meltdown of 2020.
I woke up early, groggy and not ready for the day I had planned. To drag myself out of bed, I looked at my phone and read some abysmal headlines. Covid had been raging around the world for six weeks by then. Unnerved, I kept plans to venture with friends into the backcountry on skis, something I had mostly refrained from doing while hospital beds were in short supply. Fresh air would be good for me, I told myself. Skiing always lightened whatever emotional weight I was feeling.
We arrived at the trailhead just after 9 a.m., all of us excited to see other humans and socialize in the mountains. Dan’s lungs were still recovering from Covid, after he had been laid out for almost a month. That didn’t seem to matter. He bounced around and sprinted off like a puppy, climbing up through the aspen forest while the rest of us failed to keep up.
When we did finally reach him, his eyes were wide and sparkling. “I just had a stare-down with a fox,” he said.
Dan Escalante was forty-four but looked twenty-five. He was always covered in dust—I’m still not quite sure of the actual color of his hair—and always hungry. Utensils were unnecessary for him and he would wipe his hands, often slicked with remnants of food, on his paint-and-caulk-splattered pants.
It didn’t matter if it was cheap Chinese buffet, self-caught Alaskan halibut, elk harvested from his backyard, or anything he could forage for free, like half-eaten jars of peanut butter and stale tortillas at the end of a climbing trip that most would throw away.
He was voracious in other ways too. For time in the mountains. For women, who fell so easily in love with his boyish smile, his ice-blue eyes, his buoyancy. For connection with friends, of which he had countless. For most, best is an exclusive term. But Dan didn’t operate under those rules; there must be at least a hundred people who called him their best friend.
Born to petite, brunette Mexican parents, he was a family anomaly: tall with that dusty blondish hair. He was proud of his heritage and loved to shock people with his fluency in Spanish. He admired no one more than his mom, dad and two brothers, and he shared them generously with his friends, many of whom lived far from their families. Feasts of pozole, fish tacos and homemade salsas were common in the Escalante household and offered the kind of nourishment that endures long, cold winters.
Dan had multiple jobs, as so many ski-town residents do. He had been a mountain guide for decades, leading both youth and adults into the backcountry. He also had a business called Hammer Time and would help construct people’s homes. He had been on the town council and was an advocate for affordable housing before affordable housing became a crisis. He created his own system of providing affordability, which took the form of sharing space and ownership of an assortment of living spaces with his best friends.
I had known Dan for at least a decade. We were acquaintances by standard social rules but were weaved closely together by many close friends in common and a deep appreciation of the same place. We also shared his last moments, a dark honor that haunts me every day. Since then, I have thought a lot about haunting. About horror.
Horror, spelled the same as its Latin origin, is defined by the Online Etymology Dictionary as “dread, veneration, religious awe.” By this definition, horror is holy and can offer a window into what is truly worth honoring. Honor your ancestors, lest they become ghosts, my thoughts echo. Honor the mountains—they transform us and teach us of magic—lest they destroy us.
AFTER DAN SAW THE FOX, we climbed our way up to a subpeak of a mountain locally known as Red Lady. The sun was shining bright and the spring breeze blew warm across our exposed arms and faces. The group was a string of friends—I had been invited by my dear friend Lani Bruntz, who was close with Dan, who brought along one of his best friends, Jay Pozner. We talked about how lucky we were to be experiencing the Covid nightmare in a place where we were still allowed to go outside. We ate elk jerky that Dan had harvested and Jay had dried. It was the first time I had shared food with anyone besides my partner in more than a month, which at that time felt like an eternity. Lani flashed her big, glowing smile, as she always does.
From where we stood, we could see hundreds of peaks and a dozen valleys, all of which Dan knew—not only by name but also by foot, or ski, or hand, or ground he had slept upon. If only we could have mapped his tracks. His migratory patterns, both prolific and elusive, would have probably most resembled those of a wolverine: roaming large ranges, taking the most difficult path through crumbling cliff bands or steep cirques or jagged ridgelines.
Through his adventures, Dan was most certainly mapping cartographies of the self and the mystic. There are endless stories of his vision quests, like traversing a ridge for ten hours feasting only on glacier lilies. He climbed all over the world, but perhaps what was most astonishing was his curiosity toward not only celebrated features but also the most overlooked or forgotten places (if only we could all be seen in this way). He used his lungs, legs and careful attention to write a love letter to the landscape he called home.
After finishing our bits of jerky, we dropped in and skied the basin in unexpectedly good conditions. As we put our skins on and climbed up to the next ridgeline we planned to ski, Dan talked a lot about his parents, about his upbringing in Texas. He was both light and nostalgia-laden that day—or, as Jay would later say, “on fire.”
From atop the next ridgeline, we looked down into the valley where I’ve lived for the majority of my adult life. I could see my home from where we stood, which made me feel safer than I was. The sun was shining, the sky was an impossible blue. The snow had the mushy consistency of mashed potatoes.
Dan looked back with a massive smile, then turned and headed downslope. He kicked off sluff into the gully to our right as he skied down the protruding ridge to the left. I heard the loud swish of the slope falling away beside me, the tinkling of ice crystals as they gathered speed. We couldn’t see Dan below the big rollover and waited until the sluff quieted. We yipped, expecting a callback in response. But there was no response beyond the echo of our own voices. Lani was the first to suggest that something was wrong. I could smell spruce and soil. Ravens squawked and circled overhead.
There is an old myth, perhaps the oldest of them all: born of mud and vegetation, a being that is said to have had many names, most of which we no longer know. This figure, a foliate god, echoes throughout history and has been etched across time and cultures on temples, pyramids and cathedrals. Of the forest, the field and the mountains, the furred and the flying, the hooved and the horned ones, they are both leader and lover. They are the sound of the elk rut, the smell of fallen leaves and the taste of fermented grapes. They are the cycle of death, decay and rebirth, and the regenerative seed of life. It is said if you find your way into the heart of the woods, you will surely catch a glimpse of them.
Osiris is the first we are able to name. References to this green-skinned god were carved into stone more than 4,000 years ago. Osiris is linked to the cycles of fertility, vegetation, agriculture and the thinning and thickening of the river. As author and mythologist Sophie Strand writes in her book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, Osiris exposes our addiction to progress, yet “teaches us how to think like a river, how to think like an ecosystem of interconnection.” Osiris shows us that “we need to make decisions from the standpoint of relationships.”
Then Dionysus arrives on the scene wrapped in vines, wearing a shit-eating grin and with a cup of wine in hand. In Greco-Roman mythology, Dionysus is the god not only of wine, but of virility, sacred theatrics, wildness, transformation, death and rebirth. He rains down chaos upon patriarchy, linear time and hierarchical structures, and what emerges are inexplicable synchronistic forces that reveal the harmony of existence, like that of the sun shining on trillions of tiny floating water droplets to reveal a rainbow. Or the way moss and mushrooms can reclaim a Superfund site. He teaches us how to adapt to life’s constant changes and create beauty and meaning out of hardship.
Pan, another ancient relative, is the Greek nature god of mountain wilds who is part man, part goat. Horned and horny, he prances around with nymphs whilst playing his reed flute. He is the god of fields, wood glens, fertility and the explosion of spring.
In pre-Christian Europe, you will also find the Green Man. Leaves sprout out of his mouth and from his face. Another virile and cyclic character, he is in the knowing that in the whites and greys and long nights of winter, green will one day emerge again.
While all of these beings are powerful, they are not invincible. In each of these gods’ mythologies, there is inevitably sacrifice. Each is torn to shreds, dismembered and then buried back into the dirt they emerged from.
HOURS AFTER THE ACCIDENT, I rested on the cold, smooth stones at the edge of the Slate River, arms wrapped around my shins, head cradled in my knees. The soft sounds of droplets I’d awoken to in the morning were now gasping, gurgling and gushing as the ice released its grip on the small, snaking river. Patches of dirt encircled the trees, expanding as Earth yawned and slowly began crawling out from under its covers.
That morning, Dan, Lani, Jay and I had frolicked among the aspens. Now, my body was heavy, exhausted and disoriented. The aspens’ eyes looked swollen. The peaks dripped like candle wax, exposing rock and dirt. Their browning snow caught in purgatory, somewhere between regeneration and rot.
The sun was nearing the top of the ridge where spruce spilled over a steep slope, where avalanche paths have created clearings that appear to spell out the word H-A-P-P-Y. It was a sight I had beheld more times than I could count. I had orbited this small piece of the universe for more than a decade by then, but for once, I felt fixed in place, while everything else whirled around me. I thought of my sweet dog, Sophie, who swam in this spot every day she could, who would emerge shaking and shivering full of life, whose ashes we sprinkled just upriver.
I thought of my mother, Janis, whom I lost at age ten, and how much she still teaches me about life through her death. While I would always choose to still have my mother in the flesh, there are strange gifts that can only come from the death of a parent at a young age. If there is one thing that feels important to share, it is this: death can be expansive.
Instead of being confined to a body, one can be everywhere all at once. While my mother may be deep in the ground, or in the heavens, she is also right here. I drop to my hands and knees and look closely in awe at the fairy slipper, or the dotted saxifrage, or any Rocky Mountain wildflower she taught me of. I delight in cooking chili and cornbread for family and friends on Halloween, as she always did. Or I simply let my hair be wavy and wild like hers, and attempt to hold my shoulders back in that graceful and poised manner she seemed to carry so effortlessly.
Beside the river, I lifted my head from my knees and looked up at the ridge where the sun was setting, the ridge where Dan’s body now lay lifeless against a tree, his final resting place. We would not be able to recover his body until the next day. I was unable to grasp how this place that had brought me so much joy and grounding was now overwhelmingly colored with death.
I rubbed my eyes, thinking I was hallucinating. There, around the sun, was a vibrant quadruple rainbow the likes of which I, nor anyone who has lived in the area their entire lives, had ever seen before. A winglike cloud extended itself from the circular rainbow to beyond.
We didn’t lose you; you exploded into the sky, I thought.
DAN’S DEATH, IN CONJUNCTION with the swift and unpredictable impacts of Covid, destabilized his entire community. How were we to move forward? we wondered, realizing that we were not prepared for what had already happened. This is a psychological phenomenon called discontinuity. As described by climate futurist Alex Steffen in “This Isn’t the California I Married,” a 2022 New York Times Magazine article by Elizabeth Weil, discontinuity is the “moment where the experience and expertise you’ve built up over time cease to work,” and it is “extremely stressful, emotionally, to go through the process of understanding the world as we thought it was, is no longer there.”
Still in the early stages of Covid and at the height of social distancing, Dan’s community was forced to get creative in mourning together, separately. Local radio shows were dedicated to him, and people came together over the airwaves. A box was left at town hall where friends could leave gifts and offerings that would eventually be given to Dan’s family. A few folks organized a mural in the center of town, and chalk was left out for anyone to add to it on their own time. What resulted was breathtaking. The mural was circular and ornate with hundreds of brightly colored images of people’s reflections of Dan. At the center was a four-legged, antlered human. It served as a tangible, physical representation of a liminal space. Eventually, it was washed away by spring rains, but the image was turned into a sticker that you may come across on a post office mailbox, on the bar at a local watering hole or on a sign at the top of a mountain pass halfway across the world.
The book Bereavement: Reactions, Consequences, and Care (Institute of Medicine, 1984) says that in times of preindustrialization, the death of an individual not only affected surviving kin but was “a serious loss to the community’s identity and continuity.” Thus, “bereavement and mourning practices were highly ritualized.” Ceremonies lasted for months, or even years. “Mourning rituals in a preindustrial society reinforced and reaffirmed the group sentiments, common bonds, and social solidarity threatened by death.” We no longer have time to mourn and ritualize as we once did—we must get back to work. As heartbreakingly described in the book, “the mourning process in America today is supposed to be brief and private.”
KT Folz wants to reverse this trend. She is an old roommate of Dan’s and is an ordained secular minister, a guidance counselor and a celebration artist. She helped organize the mural along with various other celebrations around Dan’s life. She believes strongly in the power of creative and somatic expression after the death of a community member. Dancing, drawing, playing music, intentional wanders through nature, tending a fire or telling stories are all important ways to grieve. “It’s about creating ways for everyone to express and offer up their grief,” she tells me.
KT believes that to fully experience life and to lessen the blows of discontinuity, we must normalize grief. For her, this looks like putting food in tiny dishes during mealtimes for those who have passed on, or talking with them in her daily meditation or prayer practice. It means throwing “death dinners” where she helps facilitate conversations around the morbid topic. It means visiting particular spots regularly where she communes with a loved one who has passed on. She recognizes that sometimes “grief is overwhelming and there’s snotty sobbing on the floor or … just wanting a hug from your grandma,” and that “there’s no amount of logic or spiritual faith-based rationalization or ceremony that can make that ache go away.” But, she believes, if you don’t look at it, talk about it or ritualize it, it will undoubtedly make you sick.
SEPTEMBER 2020: THERE STANDS a creature with sunflower eyes, a rib cage of spruce and a heart of rose. It was born from gathered natural materials, assembled by the hands of community members as an altar to honor the Green Man for an annual harvest and storytelling festival. It will stand here, between the Slate River and the base of Red Lady, for a few weeks before it is taken apart and returned to the forest. It will gaze upon people as they leave offerings or make willow wreaths to wear upon their heads.
Schrei believes that in our loss of community ritual around vegetation, we have lost our ability to see trauma as part of a larger ecosystem.
As I sit on the ground before it, I think about how forests and trees have much to teach us of trauma, grief and healing. I was once shown a silvery-grey half-moon pattern in a tree’s core, evidence of scar tissue after it was slammed into by an avalanche decades before. I have seen sculpturesque bristlecones as they twist and reach eastward toward a rising sun after being hounded by a western wind for thousands of years. And I have seen a cedar grow from a fallen tree, a nurse log nurturing dozens of new forms of life. We see the beauty in these trees, shaped by trauma and death in unexpected ways. What if we could see this in ourselves?
Perhaps looking at forest science can offer a clue about our own experience of death. Thanks to scientist Suzanne Simard, we have learned that the forest is not simply individual trees in competition for light and nutrients, but rather an interwoven community that more often shares resources. The death of a large tree does indeed destabilize its surrounding forest community. But it can also nourish it. A dying tree will send nutrients to all the plants and trees around it, and in addition generate mycorrhizal fungi growth that connects the trees and plants in new ways.
As Joshua Michael Schrei, a writer, educator and mythologist, points out on his podcast The Emerald, in the episode “On Trauma and Vegetation Gods,” cultures throughout history have primarily processed trauma “through rituals that center on vegetation, the very familiar human journey of growth and loss, and regeneration, of repatterning and response to forces and impact.”
Schrei says we forget just how deeply connected we are to vegetation, a basic fact that ancient knowledge systems knew and celebrated. Schrei gives the example that ancient Greeks (the ones who worshipped figures like Dionysus and Pan) knew our nervous systems resembled plants. Dendrites, the connectors of our nervous systems that grow, branchlike, as we listen, communicate, write and learn new skills, get their name from the Ancient Greek word dendrítēs, “of or pertaining to a tree.”
As Schrei says, “The correlation of the nervous system with a tree isn’t just a metaphor.” He emphasizes that we evolved in relation to plants and that perhaps this is why a growing body of scientific studies shows that the more we surround ourselves with trees and plants, the better the body’s ability to heal and thrive. Healing happens faster, and concentration, creativity and mood increase. Stress, anxiety and crime go down.
Schrei believes that in our loss of community ritual around vegetation, we have lost our ability to see trauma as part of a larger ecosystem. “Many cultures don’t even have the word [trauma] because traditional cultures don’t tend to tackle things as isolated issues. It’s not like, ‘Here’s the trauma, and here’s your hour to talk about the trauma.’ It’s more like, ‘Here’s the regular ritual.’ ” Thus, people were consistently given the space to process whatever they needed to, but rather than having to diligently plan it on their own or do it alone, they would do it within the more connected context of community, seasons and cycles.
When Dan died, so too did the community I once knew.
In the autumn after Dan’s death, roughly once a month, I’d reluctantly join a Zoom call. Two therapists led the meeting, and I would stare at the screen and see Lani, Jay and up to five other Colorado-based snow riders staring back at me. Within a couple of years, all of us had personally witnessed the death or injury of loved ones in avalanches. I would resist signing in, even if I had no other plans, because, simply put, it was sad and hard. It was hard to watch grown men cry and sad to hear others’ devastating stories. Undoubtedly, though, I would come away from those meetings feeling lighter. Over time, we all agreed that sharing similar experiences, even though most of us were strangers to each other, was an integral part of our healing process.
Starr Jamison, a skilled ski mountaineer with a gigantic heart, organized the meetings. In the wake of a year where she witnessed a close friend die in an avalanche, lost two additional friends in avalanches and narrowly survived a hit-and-run while on her bike, she was overcome by trauma. After a long and arduous recovery, she felt compelled to share what she had learned, and thus Survivors of Outdoor Adventures and Recovery (SOAR) was born. Among the few peer support groups for outdoor accident survivors out there, SOAR and Mountain Muskox—along with other programs like the American Alpine Club’s Climbing Grief Fund—are gaining traction for their success in helping their communities. For Starr, the process of sharing her hard-earned wisdom and becoming a mentor has offered her healing beyond what she could have ever imagined.
There is something cathartic about sharing your experience with people who have been through something similar. When you can say, “I felt that for the first year too, but it’s feeling better now,” you can be the bringer of hope to someone who is in the depths. On the flip side, often I wouldn’t realize I had made progress until I was able to offer a reflection about something I had worked through. Not unlike the sharing of resources in a forest ecosystem, these organizations are connecting and reshaping culture while offering cyclical, consistent spaces to work through grief in community.
When Dan died, so too did the community I once knew. It was a time of mass death, so in that way, we were not alone. Just as Covid exposed the realities of deeply entrenched capitalism, racism and classism, many of us were laid bare in the narratives we were telling ourselves. Being close to death can allow you the ability to see the world more accurately.
To me, what had always felt like a fun-loving community now felt frivolous. Costumed parades felt more like funeral processions. Living in an isolated mountain town felt like ignorance of the social and environmental injustices that we all have a responsibility to address. We were put off by the skyrocketing housing prices, the displacement of locals and the culture clashes stoked by the pandemic, but we also realized that it was nothing so violent and haunting as this land’s history (although current events contained echoes of the same forces). Less than 150 years ago, Ute people were swiftly and violently removed by Europeans searching for a better life. Traditional summer hunting grounds were turned into potato farms, ranches and mines that left holes in the sides of mountains. Death is everywhere if we choose to see it. For me, the aftermath of the accident became a time of reckoning, a time of facing realities.
While skiing had always been life-giving, now it was life-taking. To this day, every time I ski anything remotely steep, I feel less of the thrill and more of the potentially grave consequences. Not everything feels as heavy as it did during the year after the accident (parades no longer feel like funeral processions). My new reality does feel deeper and darker, but also undoubtedly richer and full of more truths. I may feel less desire to take risks physically, but I do feel more psychologically intrepid (one example—writing this story).
Jay says that it took him losing his best friend and seeing the fragility of life to realize he was deeply unhappy, and had been for a long time. He realized he had been emotionally shut down and couldn’t even remember the last time he cried until the accident. The following couple of years were painful ones. He suffered from PTSD, got a divorce and had to find a way to pull himself out of deep isolation. Dan had always been the one to check on him and get him out into the world, and now Jay had to rely upon himself. However, he told me he was “awe-stricken by all of the people who came out of the woodwork to reconnect and support.”
Four years later, he is hesitant to say that good came out of it all. He still gets triggered by the feel of spring and the smell of spruce. He still deeply misses his friend. But, he admits he is “one thousand percent happier” and he has Dan to thank for that. His way of honoring Dan has been to reconnect and pick up a guitar that he always wanted Dan to teach him to play. Now he’s the guy who will hug everyone at the coffee shop, and who does not hesitate to share his feelings or, in his own words, to “be honest or to be human.”
His story reminds me of a stanza in Merit Malloy’s poem “Epitaph”:
Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.
THERE IS A WISE WOMAN who lives on the edge of town who befriends foxes and is a tender of the old stories. She recounts a folktale from Ukraine, in which tears of grandmothers spin the shimmering gossamer web that connects us and protects our communities: a “web of life that can only come from the death of what once was.” Her name is Marcie Telander. She is a psychotherapist, scholar, mythologist and community ritualist. She knew Dan well and works with many who grieve his loss.
“We weep and we weave, and we weep and we weave, and we weep and we weave,” she says.
Forty years ago, Marcie created, and still sustains, the harvest and storytelling festival in town that honors the Green Man, along with other pre-Christian archetypes like the Harvest Mother. Every year around the autumnal equinox, the town transforms into a pagan-like celebration of dance, costume, natural sculpture and community theater.
Its deeper roots can be traced back to traditions in Eastern Europe, which is where many of the miners who settled the town in the late 1800s came from. As it evolved in their new setting, for one day a year, the working class would take over the town in a raucous celebration that would often end in the burning of effigies in the yards of the company bosses. At that time, this was a ritual for the community to process the trauma that came from the backbreaking work of mining—and that comes from simply existing in an extractive system of settler-colonialism.
Today, people dress as forest creatures and wear wreaths of foraged willow and flowers upon their heads. They put on a play in the streets and a massive outdoor feast. The week culminates in a procession of an effigy called “the Grump,” which is then burned and creates a large bonfire in the center of town. The Grump takes a different form each year that embodies the community’s biggest grievances. Burned along with it are little pieces of paper on which people write all they want to release from the previous year. Both the collective and individual burning of “grumps,” and the production and ritual around it, have become something that many community members rely upon.
To Marcie, who knows intimately the healing power of personal and communal narrative, this is ritualized trauma work. As Marcie has learned and now teaches, theatrically embodying nature and its various elements and archetypes is where humans can, consciously or subconsciously, repattern and reweave our relationship to the natural world, and thus to ourselves and each other. There is no coincidence that Dionysus was also the god of theater.
Mythologist Sophie Strand writes in The Flowering Wand that Green Men like Dionysus act like a mushroom that “refruits” and “adapts to circumstances.” Every time he fruits up, he looks different and has different tactics to reshape the status quo. In doing so, he teaches us to be more flexible, too. She writes, “When we tell a different story about an old god … they don’t just improve the mythic realm.” They can teach us to adapt and “deal practically with the stressors of daily life.”
While our culture continues to trend toward screens, sterilized spaces and the destruction of the natural world, Marcie recognizes that many of our new myths lack chlorophyll. But, she says, there are infinite ways to enact and articulate the realities of life and death and the cycles of nature. You need to look no further than your compost bin to see that Osiris, Dionysus and the Green Man remain in the earthly realm.
MARCH 2021: MY PARTNER and I ski out along the Slate. I look up …
My chest still tightens when I am below the slope where you died. My heart beats faster, my eyes instinctively search for the exact spot; I can easily pinpoint it in every season now. I still feel unwarranted fear. Is it weird that I talk to you in my head every time I’m out here, which is way more than we ever talked in real life?
I am not the best at feeling feelings, and I admittedly rely on the seasons to inform my emotional states and internal processing. Winter is for hibernating, for turning inward, for allowing the peace of a snow-covered landscape to soften the clamor.
We stop below the spot next to a swimming hole that is shaped like the head of a raven. The water is black against an otherwise snow-and-ice-covered river. My partner digs through his pack and pulls out puffy things, snacks and a hot toddy. I slip off my clothes, walk barefoot to the edge of the river and slowly dip myself up to my neck. I let the discomfort comfort me. I let my senses sharpen. I let the river take some of my grief because I can’t hold it all in my own body. I emerge, my skin tingling, my mind as clear as the river. I dress and feel shockingly warm.
Dan, I talk to you out loud this time. I hope that you know how many people you deeply supported in your time here, and how many people have found each other in your passing. We are still learning so much from you. Thank you. We pour some whiskey into the snow, each take a sip and watch the sky turn deep blue.
DAN STILL VISITS PEOPLE in their dreams. For some, he shows up just to give big hugs. In others he is angry. Angry that people are trying to turn him into a hero, angry at the risks his friends continue to take while skiing and climbing. I woke up one night as he was gently shaking his head at me. When I opened my eyes, the trees I slept under were slowly and softly swaying in the dim moonlight.
His loss has been felt and explained in various ways. For some, he was the Green Man sacrificed in order to save the Red Lady (the mountain he died upon, which has been threatened by the development of a mine for almost fifty years). Others believe his care and charisma were needed elsewhere, to help comfort and usher the many souls who died during Covid to wherever they needed to go.
After seeing the photo of the circular rainbow from the day Dan died, a friend pointed me toward the Tibetan Buddhist concept of the rainbow body, an ancient and well-documented phenomenon that occurs when a person fully realizes transcendence. It is based on the belief that the human body is made up of the same elements of the cosmos—space, air, fire, water and earth—and at death, the material body can release these elements as radiant light, sometimes appearing as rainbows in the sky.
Whatever stories people tell themselves to ease their pain, most just miss Dan in their daily lives; the obscure adventures he would drag them on, his jokes and laughter, and his undeniable trickster energy.
SEPTEMBER 2022: SPARKS SPIRAL up into the night sky. An orange-starred galaxy forms and fades, again and again. The Milky Way paints a silver streak in the sky beyond. The bonfire burns at the crossroads, “the four-way,” as we call it, because once it was the only intersection in town with four stop signs. While it has been paved over and is now a parking lot, a sacred circle remains, visible only to those who know. It is the same circle in which Dan’s mural was drawn.
Folks are laughing and dancing around the fire. Most don’t notice when one of the firekeepers places a metal box full of white pieces of paper into the heart of the flames. Hundreds of people have scrawled their grievances from the past year on them; some write a few words, some write pages. I watch them burst into flame and disintegrate into smoke and ash. The moment transcends time in powerful communion. It becomes a symbolic funeral pyre, a moment to “banish and beckon, bless and release,” as Marcie says. A mysterious and alchemical promise that the Green Man will rise anew in some form or another.
In this moment, I realize that the most consistent cycles of life look less like days, months and years and look more like this: Behold. Mourn. Celebrate.
JUNE 2023: I SCRATCH and crawl and slip my way up a steep slope and through newly budded aspens who, after being repeatedly hit by avalanches, bow down toward the river as if in worship. My hands are covered in sap from using tree assists as I follow animal tracks that fade in and out. In Dan’s style, I forgot to bring water or food, but hunger and thirst don’t feel relevant at the moment. I greedily take in the sights and sounds of spring. Pasqueflowers and purple, yellow and white violets explode from the ground. The buzz of mosquitoes is dampened by the consistent and swift rush of the bulging Slate River. A grouse flutters up and I let out an involuntary squawk. A hawk circles low. My eyes fill with tears when I come across two fairy slippers, a rare and delicate wildflower. I associate my few encounters with them as messages from my mother letting me know I am on the right path.
It takes me a while to find your tree, and I circle it a few times before I notice your broken ski pole at its base. I smile as I imagine part of your spirit still inhabiting this Engelmann spruce. Damn, what a view. Three years ago, Jay carved your name into its bark, an effort to commemorate your physical final resting place. An effort to etch a memory that could be held here in a particular place and time. Yet, the carving has been repeatedly swallowed. Sap wells up and pours out sticky amber that smells like a distillation of an entire forest, the heart of the wood.
