Brutiful: stories of a brutally beautiful life is a serial memoir written through letters and poems during a month-long stay at Hawks Rest, the most remote camp in the Lower 48. Set against the wild backdrop of the Teton Wilderness, the memoir reflects on pivotal moments of love, loss, fortitude, and healing. Each letter captures the raw interplay of life’s hardships and beauty, offering readers an intimate glimpse into a life shaped by caregiving, survival, love, laughter, and transformation. But it’s not all dark and stormy—mischief, laughter, and silly tales wind through these musings, bringing a lighthearted balance to the journey.
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A note before you read: This letter holds some of the harder stories of my life ~ childhood sexual abuse, family dysfunction, a mother’s cruelty, and the sudden loss of a brother. None of it is rendered graphically, but it lives in the body of the piece, and I want you to know what you’re walking into. If today is not the day, that’s okay. Put it down. Come back when you’re ready. Or don’t. Either is fine.
If you’re carrying something similar and need support, the RAINN hotline is 1-800-656-4673, available 24/7.
9/23/24
Matty,
Up at two again. The cold out here has teeth this time of year. It bites through the canvas before I’m even fully awake, and there’s that half-second where my body remembers it’s an animal before my mind catches up. I peeled myself out of the sleeping bag, found my headlamp, fumbled the matches twice before I got the woodstove going. Sat there on my heels watching the kindling catch, breath fogging in the orange light, fingers slowly waking up.
Bacon on first. The smell of it goes everywhere out here. Through the canvas, across the meadow, probably halfway to Lake Bridger. I cracked two dozen eggs into the big bowl and whisked them while the cast iron heated. Sourdough toast. Hash browns from the potatoes I cut last night by lantern. A pot of oatmeal for the one or two who pretend they want something virtuous before riding out into the cold. Coffee strong enough to dissolve a horseshoe, the smell of it mixing with the bacon, the woodsmoke, the wet wool of the coat I stole from you.
I worked in the small radius of my headlamp, the rest of the cook tent dark beyond it, the propane lantern hissing low above the prep table.
Around four-thirty I heard them start to stir. The soft thump of boots in the wall tent next door. Someone coughing. The rustle of canvas. A few minutes later the headlamps started floating across camp like slow fireflies, bobbing toward the cook tent, beams cutting through the breath that hangs in front of every face.
They came in quiet. Plates loaded, coffee poured, eyes still half-closed under their hat brims. Nobody talks much before five AM in camp.
By the time they finished, the wranglers had the horses saddled. I stood in the doorway of the cook tent with my own cup of coffee and watched them mount up. Headlamps bobbing again, this time at horse-height. The breath of horses and men. The soft clink of bit and stirrup. And then the sound that gets me every single time. Hooves meeting dirt. That deliberate, weighted sound. The whole string moving out as one body, slow at first, then steady, headlamps disappearing one by one as they hit the trail and the trees took them.
Then it was just me and the dark and the smell of bacon grease, cooling in the pan.
I wiped down the table. Started boiling water for the dishes,stepped outside once to dump the grease, and stood there a minute looking up. Stars still scattered hard. Orion right where he’s supposed to be. The Milky Way is doing that thing where it looks painted on with a wet brush. The cold worked on me until my eyes watered.
It’s the in-between hours that get me. After dishes, before lunch. That pocket of quiet where I sit on the stump outside the cook tent with my notebook and let whatever wants to come up, come up.
A redtail came through earlier, low over the meadow, pulled up at the last second and arced east over the river. I tracked her until she disappeared. Sat there a long time after she was gone.
And then the story rose up the way they do out here. The land has a way of pulling things out of you that you’d been holding tight in town for thirty, forty years. There’s no traffic to drown it out. No errands. Nothing to do but feed people and tend fire and let your own life come back to meet you.
Today it was the knife.
~
People ask me sometimes where my strength came from. Or how I made it out of what I made it out of. I never have a clean answer.
The truth is it has always been there. Like the river out here. Older than anyone who’s ever stood beside it. Dropping when it has to, swelling when it has to, going quiet under ice in the hard months and roaring out from under it again come spring. Always moving. Always carving the country into whatever shape it needs to be.
The first time I knew it was mine, I was twelve.
After Dad’s stroke, the house came apart. Slowly. The way wallpaper lifts at the corners before anyone notices the room is changing. My mother went somewhere I couldn’t follow. Her love turned into something you had to earn, and there was no map for how. She had a way of finding the soft place in you and pressing on it. Scorpion precision. I’ll write that letter when I’m ready. Not today.
Dad sat in the rocker under Aunt Millie’s afghan and went quiet in his eyes. The man who used to come in from the garden with dirt on his knees and a tomato in each hand, who knew the names of every bird at the feeder, who could fix anything that ran on a motor or breathed through gills. Just gone. The body still there. The afghan over the body. The eyes looking at something none of us could see.
Eric started rocking against his mattress at night. Rhythmic thumping that filled the whole house. His small body throwing itself against the bed frame over and over, the springs creaking with him, the headboard knocking the wall. Every night. Sometimes for hours. Bryan would eventually yell at him to stop, and the house would go still again, the way our house went still around everything that mattered.
Nobody asked Eric what was wrong. Nobody held him. Nobody sat on the edge of his bed and said I see you, buddy, I know. He just rocked. We just listened.
And Bryan started coming into my room.
The body learns to listen for footfalls before the brain even names what it’s listening for. Ribs crushing my lungs. Every floorboard creak landing in my body like a hand. I’d start dissociating before he even reached the door, going somewhere behind my own eyes the way Dad had gone somewhere behind the wool.
The doorknob turning. The soft click of it. Years of that sound. Years, Matty. Not weeks. Not months. Years of pretending to be asleep. Years of holding so still my legs would cramp. Years of the same prayer, every night, the one I never told anyone about. Please let him go to someone else’s room tonight, please please please. Which is its own kind of sin, asking God to give your sister or your friend the thing you can’t carry anymore.
He never did. There was only me in that house. Only my room.
Sundays we went to church. Pastor Steve up there with his eyes closed and his hands raised, speaking in tongues. My mother in the front row with her head thrown back like she was being filled with something holy. Me in the pew, watching all of it, wondering where the fuck God was at bedtime.
Nobody came.
That was the lesson. Not the one Pastor Steve was preaching. The one I was learning anyway. If I wanted to be saved, I was going to have to do it myself.
~
Around then is when the throat clearing started. Ehem. Just a little tic at first. Then another, because one wasn’t right. Then a third, but three felt wrong too, jagged, unfinished. So, a fourth to even it out. Always even numbers. Two. Four. Six. Eight. Whatever it took to land somewhere balanced.
If anyone interrupted me before I got there, I would have to start over.
I’d be sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, ehem ehem, halfway through a count of six, and my mother would walk in and snap stop that, and I’d freeze, and then I’d have to wait for her to leave the room so I could begin again. Because if you stop a count of six at three, the world tilts. Everything inside you tilts. You cannot live inside a tilted world for one more second than you have to.
I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that not one adult in that house ever sat down beside me and said Heather, what’s going on. What are you carrying?. What do you need? Not one. Not a single one.
What I got instead was my mother grabbing me by the shoulders one day in the kitchen, nails going into my skin, shaking me hard enough that my head snapped back. Are you retarded? What is wrong with you?
I went still. The way a rabbit goes still in the grass. I didn’t cry. I didn’t answer. I just locked eyes with her and watched her face from somewhere very far back inside myself.
She let go. Went back to whatever she’d been doing at the counter. Like she’d just swatted a fly.
The tics went underground after that. Everything went underground after that. I learned how to be two people at once. The one at the breakfast table, eating cereal across from him, smiling at the right moments. And the one nobody saw. The one already starting to figure out that no rescue was coming.
~
I don’t remember what made that particular day different. I just remember walking into the kitchen alone and looking at the knife block and choosing one. The big one. The handle cool in my palm. I carried it upstairs like it was nothing. Like I was carrying a book, a glass of water. I slid it under my pillow and smoothed the case down over it.
Then I got into bed and waited.
Hours. The house doing its night sounds. The radiator clicking. A dog two yards over barking at something only it could see. My heart loud enough I thought it would give me away. The knife under my pillow felt impossibly large. My right hand kept finding the handle, then leaving it, then finding it again, like my own fingers couldn’t quite believe what they were touching.
The doorknob turned.
He came in the way he always came in. He pulled the sheets back the way he always pulled the sheets back. And when he leaned down close, when his breath was on my face, I brought the knife up and put it against his throat.
I told him if he ever touched me again, if he ever stepped foot in my room again, I would fucking kill him.
I meant it down to the bone. He saw that I meant it. I watched it land in his face. This look I’d never seen on him before. Not anger. Something smaller. Something almost like recognition.
He backed out of the room and he never came back.
That was it. No witnesses. No rescue. No grown-up walking in to take the weight off my chest. Just a twelve-year-old girl and a kitchen knife and a sentence she said out loud in the dark.
~
Years later, the phone rang. We were in the kitchen. I picked up without looking, distracted, half a sentence into something else.
And then I heard his voice on the other end.
I stopped. I looked at you. I tossed you the phone.
The body decided. The body always knows before the mind. I remember your face catching it, that flash in your eyes ~ what just happened ~ and then you put it together. You took it from me, and that mattered more than I could say in the moment, because for the first time in my whole life there was somebody else in the room who would handle it. You listened to what he said. Told him you would talk to me. Took his number.
I stood there with my hands empty and my breath gone all the way out of me. Legs not quite under me. A kind of shaking I didn’t know my body had been holding.
It took some work after that. The slow patient labor of finding my way back to a body that had just shown me, in one second, that it was still keeping the score on a thirty-year-old account.
Eventually I dialed his number myself.
He apologized. Properly. Named what he had done. Didn’t soften it. Didn’t ask me to forgive him. Didn’t ask anything. He had done the work to face himself, on his own time, without ever knowing whether I’d pick up.
I closed that part of my life on that call. The door on the room with the doorknob that used to turn ~ I shut it myself, locked it from the outside, walked away.
~
A year later, Bryan died in a car wreck.
One of those wild, random, ridiculous deaths that have no shape and no warning. He was here, and then he wasn’t.
And I was at peace with it. Not because the harm was undone ~ it isn’t, it never will be ~ but because we had spoken our truths to each other before he went. No unfinished business. No words I’d been saving. No call I’d been putting off. We had each, on our own and on our own time, done the work of being able to sit across from each other as adults, and we had done it just barely in time.
Of every adult in that house, Bryan was the only one who ever sat down with his own life and looked at it. My mother never did. The whole congregation that watched my family come apart Sunday after Sunday and never asked a single question never did. They went on performing their innocence right up until they died inside it, or they’re still alive inside it, which is maybe worse.
The one who hurt me the most was the only one to reckon with himself.
I am, weirdly, proud of him. Proud of who he became after he stopped being the person who came into my room. Proud of the work he did. Glad I knew that man before he died. Glad I was the one who picked up.
The universe handed me something strange in him. Not an apology that fixed anything. Not a redemption arc tied with a bow. A small, unlikely opening. A glimmer. A door somehow still cracked after everything. Take the glimmers when they come. They are not the same as healing, and they are not nothing.
People still ask me if I’m religious. No fucking way, is what I want to say. Not after that pew. Not after that house. But I’ll tell you what I do believe in. I believe in the body that knew to toss the phone before the brain did. I believe in the door that stayed cracked. I believe in the river out there, older than anyone, still moving. Mostly I just smile when they ask, and let them keep their answers.
~
I think about her sometimes. That girl. Her hands shaking under the pillow. How long she lay there before she found the nerve. How she went back downstairs the next morning and ate cereal at the same table as him and nobody knew anything had changed except her.
She’s the reason I’m out here, Matty. The reason I can sleep alone in a wall tent in grizzly country. The reason I can wake at two AM with the cold biting through the canvas and crack two dozen eggs into a bowl by headlamp. The reason I can feed sixteen people three meals a day with a creek for a sink and a woodstove that hates me on principle. The reason I could open the bathroom door at the courthouse that day and walk out and marry you. The reason I could toss you the phone, and later, on my own time, dial it myself.
She did that. Not God. Not my mother. Not Pastor Steve and his slippery devil. Her.
She just grew up. That’s all.
~
The light’s full now. Long shadows stretching east, the lodgepoles holding the early gold. I should get the cobbler in the dutch oven. They’ll ride back in tonight smelling like horse and woodsmoke, and they’ll want everything hot and plentiful and they won’t say much, and that’s how I like them.
Out past the meadow this morning I saw fresh grizzly track in the soft mud by the river. Big. Claws beyond the pad. A reminder of the obvious thing about this country, which is that it does not promise anyone safety. It only offers you the chance to walk through it with your eyes open and your senses awake.
I walk through it that way now. I sleep that way. I cook that way. The girl with the knife taught me. Some doors close and stay closed. Some never quite do. You learn which is which, and you keep moving.
I love you, Matty. Thank you for never once being a doorknob turning in the dark. Thank you for catching the phone the day my body finally let go of it.
Lots of Love,
HZ
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Catch up on Brutiful:
Brutiful: stories of a brutally beautiful life is a serial memoir written through letters and poems during a month-long stay at Hawks Rest, the most remote camp in the Lower 48. Set against the wild backdrop of the Teton Wilderness, the memoir reflects on pivotal moments of love, loss, fortitude, and healing. Each letter captures the raw interplay of life’s hardships and beauty, offering readers an intimate glimpse into a life shaped by caregiving, survival, love, laughter, and transformation. But it’s not all dark and stormy—mischief, laughter, and silly tales wind through these musings, bringing a lighthearted balance to the journey.
Chapter Three
Chapter Two
Chapter One
Prolugue
Buy Me A Coffee ☕
Brutally Beautiful is a reader-supported newsletter.
If you enjoy this article or feel you gained some value but are not ready to commit to a monthly paid subscription, you can buy me a coffee!