noted that this time of year, many of Deadwood’s historic locations were either closed or only functioning on a limited basis.
“And then there’s hiking,” he continued. “Just up the hill is Mount Moriah Cemetery, where famous Deadwood locals are buried—Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, and Seth Bullock.”
Fifteen minutes later, Grace and I were dressed and out the door. The cemetery gates were only about three blocks up the hill, but we were huffing and puffing almost as soon as we set out. The incline was steep, the temperature was below freezing, and the air up here—nearly a mile above sea level—was far thinner than we were accustomed to. We trekked along a paved path through the cemetery for a time, but layers of snow and ice made it difficult to follow. I looked over my shoulder at the falling sun.
“We’re not gonna make it if we keep trying to follow the road,” I warned Grace. There were no more gravestones here, so she shrugged and began sidestepping directly up the mountain. Navigating straight up through the trees and around the iciest patches as best we could, we arrived at the top in less than twenty minutes. To the west was a view of pine forests in Deadwood Gulch, and to the east, a vast expanse of the Black Hills with their rounded summits, some covered in snow and others dotted with the standing remains of dead trees. The wind was ferocious. We only had a few minutes before we had to head back—I was convinced we needed a cushion of daylight in case one of us broke several bones tumbling over the rocky edge or down the steep slope—but I sat down on a frozen concrete beam to take in the view anyway. Grace sat across from me and slipped her phone out of her coat pocket.
“The Snail and the Rosebush,” she began, “by Hans Christian Andersen.”
It was a short tale, maybe half a dozen minutes long, but the wind was whipping away my tears by the end. “But shouldn’t all of us on earth give the best we have to others and offer whatever is in our power?” the Rosebush asked the Snail.
“What do I have to do with the world?” the Snail derided. “I spit at the world. It’s no good! The world means nothing to me.” My mind called forth images of our most contentious protests, surrounded by scores of counter-protesters who were screaming, chanting, only held back by lines of officers and police barricades. I remembered our intent in those moments, the insistent need to show ourselves unbowed by “these God-haters,” our willingness to wound, our desire to cut them down in their arrogance—even when they were preparing to bury their closest loved ones.
Which of those people wouldn’t love to hurt me now? An admission of guilt would be blood in the water. They would eat me alive.
It was clear that the Snail’s path was the only option now: “I retire within myself, and there I shall stay.”
My sister came to sit next to me, and we linked arms and wept.
“I don’t want to be a snail!” I cried into her shoulder. We could never be more than an object of scorn to the world. What did we have to offer anyone? Our lives were forever tainted and would never amount to anything so good and pure as the Rosebush.
“The sun was warm and the air so refreshing. I drank of the clear dew and the strong rain. I breathed. I lived. A power rose in me from out of the earth; a strength came down from up above; I felt an increasing happiness, always new, always great, so I had to blossom over and over again. That was my life; I couldn’t do anything else.”
It was just too late for us.
We stood and started back, arriving at the inn at sunset again.
Twenty-four hours.
Dec. 19, 2012—Day 2
THE SUN ALSO RISES
You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.
It was only our second full day up here, but we’d already slipped into the pattern that would define our trip: Sleep late. Eat breakfast. Read. Eat lunch. Read. Use the late afternoon to explore the Black Hills. Eat dinner. And then read until it was time to sleep again.
Tonight we would do our evening reading at the Four Aces, to keep Cora company on her next shift. I already felt like a regular, and the employees greeted me like one. Cora put mugs of