When I Came West Part 1
About this time, in January, thirty-five years ago I came West from the Chicago suburbs with a back pack and twenty-five dollars in cash left over after I paid for my one-way train ticket to western Montana. I always knew, from the moment I received my first letter from a modern day mountain man who called himself "Makwi Witco," (Crazy Wolf, aka, Wild Bill or William F. Atkinson) that I would one day write a book about my experiences. The book due to be released from the University of Oklahoma Press the end of this month (January 2010) is not the book I thought I would write. The book I wanted to write, that I hoped to write, will never be written. Why? Because the journey of those years (from 1975 to 1983) was fraught with impossible situations and uncanny mysteries, too much, in the end, for a young woman to process or carry into her mature years.
Whenever I tried to write about my wilderness experiences on the Northfork of the Flathead River the emotional fallout consumed me. For decades the letters that Bill wrote to me stayed hidden in a locked trunk with buckskin and furs, moccasins and beadwork, knives and tomahawks. I could not bear to reread the words we had written to each other because with every hope expressed and every dream envisioned I found fault with myself for the fact that we had been unable to manifest our desire for the original paradise: a man, a woman, and a life on the land.
It seems foolish to talk about all this now, but I want the readers of my book to know that the stories they read are the ones that survived the years. Like rich cream they floated to the top of my consciousness, were duly skimmed and saved.
The rest, like milk that has soured, has been thrown away.
