On the ropes next to Old Faithful we kissed for the last time, a kiss like a basket of snapped rhubarb, a kiss as sweet as kindergarten punch.

We used to move the big irrigator pipes together in the Bitterroot Valley, to earn cabin rights, for us and our respective daughters, both 4 years old. After the morning moves and some hay work -- the owners were in Spokane or LA or just gone, most of every summer -- we had no chores til dusk.

So we hauled it over to the narrow defiles of the western side, the thickly-pined walls of green, the coruscated wetness and ancient volcanic compression below Frog Peak and east of  Skookum Butte, to pick berries.



Huckleberries in straggling 8 foot hedges. Real Blueberries hugging the lichenous rocks. Red Raspberries everywhere, multi-miles of them crabbing the clearings. Black Raspberries, black caps, by the road and on the ridge edges. True Fat Blackberries, heavy in the hand. Luminous orange Salmonberries, higher up, filling the sunny breaks.

And best of all, crowding every riverside, every wet cascading rivulet and slipalong creek: Thimbleberries like prurient thumbs, giant upside down cones that fall when you jostle the vine, under lime green leaves as big as hats.



We picked for polyglot pie, 6 inches high, and we filled buckets. The leftovers? for pancakes and there's more? crushed for juice, or plopped in jelly jars of late night Grappa.

The evening work was hardest. It took both of us to drag the long wheeled pipes, and not the few from breakfast but a half-dozen or more. Our work ended at 7 or so, and we rushed back to the cabin. While Margaret got the giddy girls fed, I made pie.

By lantern light on the porch, in their PJs, blowing on every bite, the girls ate pie; they mlarmed it down, and the crickets chorussed approval. We loved them so. Reddened Emmet Kelly mouths, but licked-smooth spoons.

We rocked together, radiant in the last of the day, the green-rimmed purple glow. We read them Goodnight Moon in the warm puddle of the lamp, then carried them up to the loft, to foam pads and Barbie sleeping bags and favorite blankies, giggles and flashlights.

Margaret and I made our dinner then, using extra pastry dough for goat cheese, tarragon, and pine-nut pot-pies. With a bottle of dusty cote-du-Rhone, on blankets under the northern lights, we ate it up, plus slabs of sweet pie, with greedy fingers, supine under the spruce-drenched black perfection of that western sky. We stayed out there til sunup.

It didn't last. Our final trip, to Manhattan and the disarmament rally, was our end: I stayed in Queens, en route to Lyon, and she went back to Missoula. She's a doctor now in rural Alaska, the place of our dreams, and I am stranded here back east. We poke each other sometimes on Facebook, on the sacred and forlorn internet.

See, every Good and True single parent has a cool, dry place inside, and ours, each, said: not quite. I don't know why. Oh rats. I do: I needed a career. I couldn't get it in underfed Montana. It was me. I want to explain myself but I cannot. I can't make sense of that young man, who did so well with his daughter but staggered and reeled his way forward, whose fathering hands were too preoccupied to cradle any other heart.

So it was, weeks later, en route to the Big Apple -- at that last stop in the Rockies, an ironic traipse thru disneyfied Yellowstone, and both of us knowing I wasn't coming home -- we stood and waited for the steam to rise, for a roiling Lazarus to come forth.

We kissed one last time, a kiss started that night outside the cabin, a kiss as sweet as berries in the Bitterroots, as warm as homemade pie, and slow and tender as a star-cloaked Montana moon, drifting to rest behind the Sapphires.