FEATURED ESSAY
 
from "The Men I Left Behind"
by Mary Emerick

Because of the National Park Service, I left enough men behind to field half a baseball team.

I left them because they were too fat, too skinny, too young, too old. They weren’t tough enough, or were so tough there was no breaking through their thick skins. One blazed with a toxic cocktail of jealousy and fear. Another drifted along in his own world, no place for anyone else.

I left some because I was afraid I was in love with them, and others because I knew I never could be.
At least those were the reasons I gave myself. Those excuses sounded good in the middle of the night as I drove through a nameless part of Texas, radio a low lullaby, window cracked to let in the smell of the pavement. But the real reason I left was because I had to go and they wanted to stay. Their pull was not as strong as the current of the road.

Every winter I convinced myself that this time I would stay put. After all, they were actually nice guys down at the core. I could make a life with any of them. I would get a real job, put on a skirt, drive to work clutching a coffee mug and drive home again after a day in an office.

I would stay clean. No more bunkhouses at national park enclaves, no more disappearing into the mountains, no more shoving all my belongings into a pickup, heading out into the unknown. I would give this life a chance. I would learn to cook eggplant parmigiana. Instead of talking about what boot oil to use, my conversations would be about Coach purses or what was on TV. Maybe even football; I could take it that far. On weekends, I would go shopping at the mall. I would dye my hair red. Shave my legs more often. Clean up my language. Curling irons, food processors—I would learn the secrets other women seemed to know.

Each season though, the itch would come and not leave. Nothing made it go away. I always wondered what I was missing. What new park waited to be discovered? Should I go west to Great Basin, south to Carlsbad Caverns? The future hummed with delicious possibility.

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About the Author

Mary Emerick has lived and worked in nine national parks. She has been a wildland firefighter, a cave tour guide, a tree planter, a wilderness ranger, and a naturalist. Her writing has appeared in several anthologies and magazines. She currently lives in a log cabin in the Wallowa Mountains of Northeast Oregon, where she works for the U.S. Forest Service as a wilderness, trails, and recreation manager. Her blog can be found at www.mountainsskin.blogspot.com.