By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

Petrified wood is a lesson in belief, not so much a belief in what you see but in what you feel. Touching it, rubbing your fingers over its impossibly stony skin, you have to remind yourself that what it once was has changed entirely. A sequoia transformed into a rock wall. The language of trees turned to silence. Given the right conditions, the elements moving perfectly into place, it’s only a matter of time.

The Wild

I met Pete the summers I spent working in West Yellowstone, Montana, the tiny town situated just outside the west entrance to Yellowstone National Park. I was a freshman in college and had never lived away from home. A senior in high school, he hadn’t either. I’d also never had a boyfriend. Pete tied and sold flies over at Jacklin’s Fly Shop and dreamed of being a fly fishing guide one day. More experienced outdoors than I was, he naturally held a youthful energy for the place while developing a kind of wisdom I always envied. Each time we drove through Yellowstone Park, he recited to me the scientific names of the wolves, elk, and buffalo, those gorgeous Latin words decorating our conversations: Canis lupus, Cervus canadensis, and the comically redundant Bison bison, which always made me laugh. He even knew the scientific name of the lichen growing on the rocks (Pleopsidium), and older fishermen remarked to me how adept he was on the river, especially for an eighteen-year-old. I was proud, of course, of finding someone so unique. Instead of flowers, he brought me the best flies he’d tied for the week, and I stuck them in my ball cap and wore them all summer, woolly buggers and caddisflies flapping against my head in the breeze.

We’d joined the throng of summer help that floods the town in May, taking positions as maids and hotel clerks, ice cream scoopers and soda fountain jerks, gas pump jockeys and fly fishing guides. I worked in Eagle’s Store, built between 1927 and 1930, and made malts at the antique soda fountain, sold moccasins and Stetson hats to tourists. On our days off, he fished the Madison or the Gallatin, angling over the river for hours while I nestled in a meadow and read or watched the osprey circle overhead. In the evening we’d go back into town and eat a po’boy at The Gusher or walk down Canyon Street and watch the lights slowly come on.

Founded in 1908 when the Oregon Short Line Railroad was completed, West Yellowstone, or “West” as we lovingly called it, guarded its homesteader feel and shrugged off any pretensions of manicured lawns and trendy coffee shops. It embraced the rugged, the remote. That’s partly because it was so isolated. Still is. Bozeman, the closest city, is 89 miles north up Gallatin Canyon, and Jackson Hole to the south is a two-and-a-half-hour drive through the languid, winding roads of the park. But the biggest reason, I think, had more to do with that old code of toughness that hung around. You could thumb a ride into town, get a quick meal, and hitch a ride back out, no questions asked. Renegades were welcome there.

One day, on his way back from fishing Quake Lake just outside of town, Pete picked up a hitchhiker, brought him into West, bought him dinner, and got him a job washing dishes at Trapper’s Inn.

“He’s really going to take it?” I asked when he came to my cabin later that day to tell me all about it.

“Yeah,” he responded excitedly. “He said ‘Thanks’ and everything.”

Then he explained that he’d paid for a room for a few nights until the guy’s first paycheck.

“Told him I’d come by tomorrow, check out how he’s doing.”

I was floored by that level of generosity. Pete functioned by a code of ethics the town also lived by: help a man who’s down and don’t ask too many questions. But when Pete drove over to Trapper’s Inn the next morning, he discovered that the hitchhiker never showed up for work, just skipped town after a good dinner and one night in a comfortable bed. And though Pete related this to me casually, I could tell he was disappointed. He continued to pick up hitchhikers in his travels back and forth on the highway, but he never stuck his neck out for one again.

Wildness in West Yellowstone was a way of life. For me, it was a revelation, a departure from the conservative, pristine college town I’m from. But for Pete, a native Montanan and quasi-mountain-man, it was as natural as his own skin. In fact, the ruggedness and generosity of the town were perfectly mirrored in Pete, in the way he took people for who they were, gave them space, and expected the same from others, the way he worked hard and played harder. But he also reflected the danger. Over time I saw that, like anything wild, he was both tough and vulnerable.

Water

Pete, like many fly fishermen, unwound at the end of the day with a beer, and also like many of them, particularly the younger ones, one beer never seemed to be enough. He told me one day that, when he was drunk, he was the most entertaining, funny, relaxed version of himself, and he needed that.

I remember looking at him in total bewilderment. I’d never had a drop of alcohol in my life. Raised in a deeply religious home, I had abided by my parents’ (and my church’s) “no alcohol” counsel. Sure, I snuck into bars with our gang of friends, but most of us just listened to the live music: Fat Eddie who looked and crooned like John Cougar Mellencamp and covered all his songs. And I people-watched: a few tourists cozying up with the fly fishing guides; my boss, Linda, who was intersex, letting loose at the bar, finally at ease in the world. It was the aftermath of the ones who kept going I couldn’t watch. My aunt had spent most of my life at that point in jail or prison and could link most if not all of her problems to alcoholism. The claim that drinking brought out your best self was not something I’d ever heard.

“I like that part of me,” he protested.

Even though Pete was only in his late teens, he could grow a thick beard and pass for much older than eighteen. He used his buddy Jonathan’s ID since they looked alike, and so long as that worked, the town was happy to provide all the alcohol he wanted.

My younger brother had also come to West Yellowstone to work, and he often joined the throng in the bars. He’d abandoned the “no alcohol” counsel years before, something my parents lamented and I slowly accepted. One night I helped walk him home from the Iron Horse Saloon with Pete, and since my drunk brother couldn’t remember where he put his keys, he ripped open one of the screens of his cabin and wriggled in through a small window.

“I’m worried about Dylan,” Pete said after we watched my brother’s feet
disappear into the dark cabin, the last part of him to struggle through the
opening. “I think he has a drinking problem.”

The next week when Dylan left a party above Jacklin’s Fly Shop at 1am, he
also left Pete there, laughing out of control, a pile of bottles strewn at his feet.
He came to my cabin to talk. “I’m worried about Pete,” he said seriously, looking
at me hard. “I think he has a drinking problem.”

Everyone had a drinking problem. They drank like the fish they caught and released, all those brookies drinking that cold river water, drunk on all that sunlight and shadow that ripple across the surface of everything.

Wildflower

An admirer of smalltown newspapers, I’ve kept copies of the West Yellowstone News over the years. The police report in particular is a source of entertainment and poetic truth: haiku-like in its construction, it offers images of wild animals wandering the town or midnight fisticuffs between neighbors. The other, equally poetic section is the fly fishing report, which, in one installment hints at less trafficked streams “where you can find a little solitude and some feeding trout if the crowds are getting to you.” I’m certain that’s why Pete went regularly. While many of our friends fly fished, no one was as obsessed as Pete. He drove his dirty red Plymouth into the heart of that country and stayed for hours, lost to the swish and click of his fly rod dancing over the Madison River.

In West, Pete felt like a king. He was a terrific storyteller, one that wasn’t afraid to poke fun at himself. A disarming goofiness—flailing arms, eyes widening in mock terror—punctuated nearly every story. In one of our favorite tales, he told us how he accidentally shot a hole in the floor of his father’s Jeep as they drove into the mountains to go hunting. As he mimicked his father’s rage and his own dismay, even the burliest of men listening laughed themselves to tears, slapped him on the back afterward, offered him a drink. He was everyone’s favorite.

Pete could find his way through any landscape as long as it was natural, or in a town that’s small, intimate, that mirrored a ruggedness of the outside. But in a big city he was awkward, overly rough, uncomfortable. When he visited me back home in the fall and we spent the day in Salt Lake, he didn’t know how to enter revolving doors. He’d never seen parking meters. Large department stores were completely overwhelming. Outside of the wilderness, he seemed to crumble and become almost useless, utterly lost.

While he’d always been free-spirited, Pete was also becoming more and more fragmented. The next summer, he seemed changed. Nearly every time we went out, he’d lost his wallet or was out of money, even though he was working two jobs, had cheap rent, and borrowed almost everything he had, including his toothbrush, which his poor, unsuspecting roommate never discovered.

For my birthday he showed up a week late with a fistful of wild asters he’d found by the roadside, stuck them in a red plastic cup and placed them on my kitchen table. It was sweet, but something felt strange watching those asters slowly morph from bright faces to dull and ragged stalks. By the time I threw them out they looked depressing. And the fact that he’d been a week late, busy working on a ranch out of town and stressed, or so he said, made me wonder about his state of mind.

To make up for missing my birthday, he offered to treat me to lunch at the Happy Hour Bar, a local dive overlooking Hebgen Lake and 15 miles outside of West on a winding, scenic road. But when the check came, he patted his pockets and realized he had no idea where his wallet was. He thought about it a moment, then simply shrugged and suggested we offer to clean dishes in exchange for our meal. Luckily I’d brought my purse, but I was running out of money paying for everything.

I kept telling myself it was simply a juvenile, scatter-brained state he’d grow out of, that because he was two years younger than me he was still growing up. But rather than getting better over time, he seemed to get worse. One day when my car was in the shop, I borrowed his car to drive into Yellowstone Park and found under the gas pedal a whole, unwrapped chicken from the grocery store. When I asked him about it, he said casually, “Oh man, that’s where it went.”

I wonder now how it was so easy to deceive myself for so long. When I try to explain how Pete changed, to give evidence that his logic began to break apart, I realize it was probably there all along, I’d just willed myself not to see it. When you care about someone, you see things in them no one else sees, and you can’t see things everyone else does. Still, when I was alone, there was always a voice in me that said a life with Pete was impossible. I rode it out at times like a renegade, but sooner or later that voice always found me.

Though his boss, Bob Jacklin, had raved to me the summer before about what a skilled fisherman Pete was, how well he tied flies, how knowledgeable he was about each river, his co-workers began to admit that he could barely stay on task. One evening in the middle of the summer he came to my cabin, distressed and humiliated. He’d lost both jobs.

Stone

One afternoon late that second summer, a perennial Eagle’s employee offered to take my brother Dylan and me on a hike in Yellowstone Park to a place he said few tourists knew about or would ever visit. The mystery of it felt sacred, and he gently dropped the words petrified and forest. Though I had encountered once, as a child, a piece of petrified wood, nothing could have prepared me for the otherworldly experience of finding an entire forest of it.

Yellowstone’s petrified forest sits cradled on Specimen Ridge, a spine that runs along the southern part of the Lamar Valley and separates it from Mirror Plateau. The entire trail is about 8.5 miles, but that day we decided to do the shortcut and hike straight up the mountain to the forest, a three-mile trip that is, for the most part, unmarked and unmaintained. The trailhead is an abandoned service road we’d have missed but for our co-worker, who knew Yellowstone the way most people know their hometowns. We left
the winding road, packed with minivans and campers, and cut our way up the mountain, straight into the heart of the park. After climbing up a steep pass, with lookouts over meadows dotted in wildflowers and even the spot of a bear moving in the distance, we finally came to it: a cluster of trees that look like trees on the outside and are nothing like trees within.

There’s currently a debate over the petrification process at Specimen Ridge. It’s creationists vs. evolutionists, and the main argument is how much time it takes. Fast or slow, I’m not sure it really matters. It’s the process that does. The trees are buried under layers of ash (in this case, most likely from Mt. St. Helens), cutting off oxygen, and the water that flows through the ash carries minerals that seep into the wood, which replace the organic material of the trees’ cells. In other words, the trees suffocate, and something foreign and overpowering enters them. They’re natural without being in their own natural
state. Over time—earthquakes, shifting plates—the layers of ash slough off and the trees come to the surface again. But they’ve changed.

From a distance, their stoic trunks might look the same as other trees, but there’s an eerie silence around them. No breeze shudders their branches, no wood creaks, no leaves shake like tiny hands waving, the light glinting off their palms. They’ve experienced their own death but stay as monuments, not letting us forget what they once were.

I took a piece of petrified wood, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to. It’s against park regulations. I put it in my pocket and felt it jangle, the hard edges of it knocking against my leg all the way down to the car. And I wondered, with each tree I passed, Why not that one? Will it turn to stone one day too?

Shadow

After a few summers, my studies took over and I didn’t return to West Yellowstone to work. Neither did Pete. I graduated from college, moved away from home, spent my summers in other towns. Pete attended a semester or two of college but dropped out. He worked the warm months at various fly shops. In the winters he drove snowplows. I know this because of the letters we wrote to each other. His letters came sporadically and grew less and less legible. We hadn’t dated in years but stayed close friends, and it felt important for me to know how he was doing. At one point, I moved to New Jersey for a year and a half, about the same time Dylan and our younger brother moved in with Pete in Bozeman, Montana. When I called home at Christmas, Dylan told me that a few weeks earlier, Pete was in a bar when he got angry about losing a pool game, so he carried the cue ball into the bathroom and shattered the mirror with it. He got arrested. Violence and anger were slowly replacing the happy-go-lucky disposition he’d once had, and most of his friends faded out, confused or disturbed by his behavior. Pete’s letters to me rambled on about fights with co-workers, complaints about the city, then became incoherent. One included drawings of his baseball-pitching techniques from high school: a ball twisting
through the air, then curving sharply at the end of the page and falling out of sight.

The last letter I got from him came a few years later. I was living in Alaska for the summer and hadn’t actually seen or spoken to Pete in several years. In the letter, he accused me of lies, deceits, said I belonged to him, threatened to come get me. The writing was shaky, almost impossible to decipher in spots.

Something in him was broken.

I called Dylan, read him the letter, and sobbed for an hour, asking what I should do. He promised to call Pete’s mom soon, see what was going on. I realized for the first time I was genuinely afraid of Pete.

A month later, I was teaching English composition at a university in Utah and arrived at my office one day to find a note from the secretary taped to my office door. It said, Pete called. 10:30. I panicked. In the car driving back to the house I shared with three other girls, I felt a sense of dread, as if he were driving right behind me, following me at every turn, waiting to see where I stopped. I worried for weeks that he’d call again, but he never did.

Over the years I would read through his old letters. I’d put on sad music and write sentimental poems, remembering moments from those summers but twisting them, editing out the mania. Then one day I got curious and looked him up on Facebook: a dozen posts a day and not one of them coherent. Old Testament references mixed with photos of Jennifer Lawrence or Jesus on the cross, obscenity-laced political rantings, racial slurs, paragraph after paragraph after paragraph of jibberish repeated five or six times. Only one person “liked” any of them. When I clicked to see who it was, Pete’s name popped up.

For days after that, I felt shaken. But more than anything—and I say this with mixed shame and gratitude—I felt spared.

Buried within an old edition of the West Yellowstone News I’ve kept over the years is a police report that reads: “A caller complained of an ‘older Suburban with one headlight out swerving all over.’” I picture the other drivers scared and bewildered, unequipped to help, and that one car, a single shaky light, darting about haphazardly in the dark.

Compass

Now, about twenty years after those summers in West Yellowstone, Dylan is working as a chef at a European restaurant in Deer Valley, Utah, a town tucked into the Wasatch Mountains next to Park City, home of the Sundance Film Festival and famous ski slopes. The hours are long, but he sounds happy when we talk on the phone, and when the ski season ends, he breaks away with his dog Zach to float the Colorado River for a week or camp in the desert under an endless sky. I know he’s okay, that he doesn’t drink the way he used to, that he pours his emotions into cooking now and the photographs he takes on his travels. He’s become an artist.

I still teach at that same university in northern Utah but spend most of my time at home, cooking, gardening, driving my three boys to soccer practice or birthday parties, our small, suburban 1950s red brick house flanked by scrub oak and pine trees. The poetry book I worked on sporadically for ten years was finally published, one poem about West in its pages with a brief reference to Pete, but the others I’ve left in the past. I’ve dedicated the book to my husband and sons. For them, West Yellowstone is a brief stop before the famous geysers and mud pots, the place where we bought the wooden toy pistols my sons brandish when they dress up as cowboys and chase each other around the yard.

Sometimes Dylan and I reminisce about West and Pete, our last interactions with him and the day we found out what was wrong. After the disturbing letter Pete sent me in Alaska, Dylan finally called his mom and let her know something alarming was showing up in his letters. She told him Pete was in a home. Not his parents’ home, but a home. She said, Schizophrenia, and left the word hanging in the air for a moment. It made sense. Young men diagnosed with it often experience their first symptoms in their early twenties, and we’d seen the unraveling for several years. She didn’t say much, just listened to Dylan repeat what was in the letter and ask what we could do. “This one’s a toughie,” was all she said. “A real toughie.”

I’d met his mom once, my second summer in West, when she’d accompanied her husband and younger son on a fishing trip. I sat in the middle of the boat with his mom and tried to read while menacing hooks and garish flies whipped past my face. I remember her perfect composure, at ease outside and in the company of men, the way we talked about Switzerland where her sister lived in a fairyland of green Alps, how she’d visited her once, how I wanted to go there one day too. She liked me. She was glad Pete had found a nice girlfriend, one who went to church and liked to read and laughed easily. Before he left home she’d given Pete a picture of himself at five: toilet paper stuffed in wads into his white T-shirt to look like muscles, little-boy bravado and flex, the big grin. He showed it to me, proud of the boy he’d been. I think now about what she’s lost. Pete was a stone that rippled the waters of my life. He was the oxygen in hers.

At the end of the conversation, she asked Dylan to mail that last letter to the home so they could better assess his thought processes, maybe understand where he’s going, what he’ll do.

But people are unpredictable. That’s part of being wild. And Pete is the wildest person I’ve ever known. Somewhere deep inside him there was always a weight, a pull toward what I couldn’t understand. I thought it was just the natural world, the way he connected to Yellowstone and the rivers there, but I think that is where he found his relief from it, that dark, magnetic pull that drew him away from us over time.

Years before, our first summer together, he’d done something that surprised me. One night a group of us decided to drive just outside of West Yellowstone to Rainbow Point and build a fire. Pete had to work late and said he wouldn’t be able to make it. When we got to Rainbow Point, the campsites were already taken, and we had to weave through various back roads for a while, everywhere dotted with other fires and cars, until we found a place that would work, somewhere we’d never been before. It was dark, and we were so far out we couldn’t see any fires besides our own. In the middle of our chatter, we saw headlights moving toward us, then heard a car door slam shut, and Pete walked right over to the fire.

“Hey guys, I got off early,” he said casually.

“How did you know where we were?” I asked, incredulous that he’d found us.

“I don’t know. I just did.”

“Did you check Rainbow Point first and see it wasn’t us?” someone else asked.

“No,” he said. “I just came straight here.”

If he had checked each campsite, it would have taken hours. This was before cell phones, so no one could have called him. He said something about his inner compass, that was his only explanation, and we left it at that.

And over twenty years later, I’m still wondering: What’s pulling us one way or another? And how in control are we really? We’re complex and wild, each of us made up of elements that are, at the root, incomprehensible.

I keep my piece of petrified wood in a small dish by my favorite earrings, and I see it nearly every day. It’s long and thin, like a bone, though the contours of the bark show layers. All those years turned to stone. No way to turn them back.

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Sunni Brown Wilkinson is the author of the poetry collections The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press) and The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has been awarded New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, and the Sherwin Howard Award. She teaches at Weber State University and lives in Pleasant View, Utah, with her husband and three sons.