Mountains And Tides

Eight months after I’d arrived in Western Montana, I was given the unusual gift of a pocket knife. Steely grey and black, its weight in my palm sparked an inward debate. To the residents of the mountain town I had come to call home, it was undoubtedly an essential tool. I had witnessed cowboys open tins of tobacco, cracking the lid with a worked blade that tucked perfectly into faded Levis. I had circled round a crackling fire with college kids, using a knife to open bottles of local beer. A satisfied ‘pop’ celebrated their release, caps flying into the glowing embers. What purpose did the knife have for me? In my home-town, none, but this was Montana. I closed a tight fist around the cool metal and made the decision to find out.
For almost a month I took the knife everywhere, hoping it would illuminate with purpose. At first it was a dim glimmer, as it slid quickly through the packing tape on a stack of cardboard moving boxes. Still, I had found a use for my tool and I was elated. Then, in a bar with a beards and baseball caps dress code, I learnt how to flick it. The blade released swiftly from its casing in one fluid movement; I was both horrified and excited by its power.
For the third outing, the knife travelled with me through the Jurassic landscape of Paradise Valley and into the Absaroka foothills. Nestled amongst the damp, mossy pines and hugging the meandering curve of a brook, the knife came into its own. I started simply, sharpening a suitable stick so that I could toast marshmallows from the comfort of a truck tailgate. I carved patterns into a stump, following the spyrographic circles of a wood beetle. Finally, I selected a splinter of bark and, with unwavering focus, whittled away until it resembled a shaky but fully functional table knife. As I sat back in a hammock slung casually between two trees, my metal tool in one hand and the wooden in the other, it finally dawned on me. My knife was not a weapon; it would never be used to cause harm. Instead, it stood as a memory of every night I had lain under an indigo sky filled with more stars than I knew existed. It was the first bears I’d ever seen, a mother and three cubs that had galloped across my path. It was a paddleboard journey across an impossibly still Lake Macdonald, as the sun set peachy-gold and reflected its glow onto a distant glacier. In that second, the knife became the only souvenir I would ever need. It was my tool, my evidence, that I too had belonged to the wilderness.