I can hear Silver Ridge from up here. People on Main Street. The smell of food from the park drifts when the wind shifts. Music, faint, the kind that happens at town events when someone sets up speakers near the bandstand.
I know without looking. I've been on this ridge for Canada Day for nine years.
I develop the week's work in the darkroom.
The great grey owls, a red fox kit I caught at dawn on Tuesday, a sequence from the upper meadow I've been working toward for a month. The chemicals are sharp in my nose, and the red light is familiar and my hands know every step of this process without consulting my brain. I stand here for three hours and it helps less than it usually does.
I clean my equipment. Another hour.
I eat lunch on the porch. The valley below catches the midday light, and the town is alive down there in a way it only is a fewtimes a year. I can see the park from here if I look — movement, colour, the particular shapelessness of a crowd.
She'll be down there.
I walk the property.
I run through the arguments.
She's here for three weeks. The third week started Monday, which means by the end of it she'll pack her box of books into her car and drive south. That's how it works for the women who come through this town.
I stop on the trail.
Second argument: I've built my life specifically to not need this. The solitude isn't a wound — it's a choice. I work better alone. I've always worked better alone.
I stand with that argument for about thirty seconds before it falls apart.
I've been taking the trail an hour later every morning, so I'll run into her on the way down. I took her to the viewpoint I've never taken anyone to. I showed her the door to the darkroom. And the shots from this week are some of the best work I've done in years — like having her in my periphery has sharpened something rather than dulling it.
Third argument: if I ask her to stay and she goes anyway, that's worse than not asking.
I think about the way she looked back at me from the hotel door last night. Easy. Calm. Not performing anything. The way she gave me space without making me feel the weight of it.
She wouldn't make it a loss. She'd make it a door left open. The question is whether I'm brave enough to walk through it first.
I've been confusing “alone” with “complete” for thirty-nine years. I told her that on a rock above the valley, and I didn't know it was true until I said it.
I go back to the cabin. Sit on the porch. Run through every reason to stay on this ridge tonight.
They all sound like cowardice.
So, I get in the truck.
Main Street is closed off and full of people. I park at the edge of town and walk in. People look at me. The loner Shaw Garrison at the Canada Day celebration is not a thing that happens, and I see it in a few faces — mild surprise, the double-take of recognising someone in an unexpected context.
I walk through it.
The park is lit with strings of lights, the bonfire going in the centre, smoke rising straight up in the still evening air. The fireworks haven't started yet. I move through the crowd and find her without much trouble because some part of me just knows where she is.
She's standing at the edge of the firelight with a drink in her hand, watching a test rocket go up over the valley — a brief crack and flash, a brightness that blooms and fades. She turns before I reach her.
She looks at me, and she doesn't look surprised. She looks like she was waiting. Like she new I would come.
I stop in front of her.
"I don't come to things like this," I say. "I want you to know I came to this so I could see you."
That's the whole speech. For me, it's everything, and from the way she looks at me, I think she knows exactly what it costs me to be so open with my thoughts to anyone.
"How long have you been working up to that?" she asks.
