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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9/22/24
Matty,
The squash is stuffed and resting on the counter ~ herbs, burger, sausage, parm all tucked in close, rolls rising slow under their cloth, spice cake cooling under its thick hood of frosting. I’ve got maybe an hour before the cook tent needs me back, so I’m walking down to the river. I do this when the camp goes quiet and the morning gives me a little room to breathe inside of it.
The grass out here in September is something I haven’t found words for yet and I’ve been trying since I got here. A myriad of greens, dense and layered, shifting every time the light moves ~ the pale silver-green of the sage lower on the hillside, the deep wet green along the creek banks, the yellowing at the tips where the season is already beginning its long goodbye. The meadow holds the night’s cold in it until almost noon, and when you walk through it your boots come back dark with dew, mud working up into the laces, the ground soft and giving in a way that feels almost apologetic. Like the earth saying ~ I know. I know it’s a lot. Just keep walking.
I keep walking.
Past the ponds first, where the frogs are doing their loud prehistoric business and the dragonflies stitch back and forth through the air like they’re hemming something shut that keeps coming undone. A beaver cut a clean V across the near pond about twenty minutes ago and I stopped dead and watched it like it was the most important thing I’d ever seen. Out here it kind of is. You lose the ability to scroll past things. Everything insists on being witnessed.
The trail runs across from the river, the willows standing guard on the far bank the way they always do ~ patient, rooted, unbothered by anything the water throws at them. The light comes through the lodgepoles in long slow columns this time of morning ~ the kind of light that makes you feel like you’ve wandered into something that was already happening before you got there and will keep going long after you leave. Which is true. That’s the thing about this place. It doesn’t need us. We are guests here and the land is endlessly, magnificently indifferent to our small human urgencies. I find that more comforting than I probably should.
The bells carry down from wherever the herd has moved to this morning. That low rolling irregular music ~ some bells higher, some deep and slow, all of them swinging to the rhythm of horses moving through grass. My nervous system has memorized it now. Knows what it means before my brain catches up. It means the herd is close. It means the world is doing what it’s supposed to do.
A hawk just cut across the open sky above the meadow, riding something invisible, not working at all. Just held up by it.
I’ve been sitting with something all morning that I don’t think I’ve ever said to you straight. Not all of it. Not like this.
~
After dad died, before the house had even settled into its new quiet, the neighbor knocked on the door.
You know the one. The kind of neighbor my parents waved to across the fence for years, exchanged pleasantries with, maintained some version of a relationship with that I never fully understood and, looking back, don’t think was ever really mutual. He was standing in my doorway and I knew immediately ~ the way the body always knows before the brain has a chance to catch up ~ that he wasn’t there because he was sad. He wasn’t there because he’d lost any sleep. He was there because something had happened next door and he wanted to know what it was. His face was forward, almost aggressive with the wanting of it, like proximity to our grief had earned him the details. Like showing up at the door made him entitled to whatever I had left to give.
Matty, I had nothing left.
Not a single thing. Not even the performance of politeness.
I told him I needed him to leave. He was not happy. I closed the door anyway.
And I stood in that house ~ dad so newly gone the air hadn’t changed yet, his absence still raw and shapeless ~ and I thought about their whole lives. Both of them. How they’d burned through people for decades. The friendships that curdled. The goodwill that got spent and never replenished. The neighbors who maybe genuinely cared once, early on, before the dysfunction made it too costly to keep showing up. I thought about how neither of them had built anything that held. How when the end came there was nobody at the door who loved them. Just people who wanted the story. Just people who came to look.
That man’s face has never left me.
That hunger where grief should have been.
That is what a life looks like at the end of it when you’ve emptied everyone out.
~
And then Connor’s accident.
You’d gone down for coffee. I was sitting in that waiting room ~ that particular fluorescent misery, that hospital quiet that isn’t really quiet at all, the rolling of gurneys, the low intercom, the sound of someone else’s crisis leaking through a curtain ~ just sitting there holding myself together with both hands.
And you came back with the coffee and the tea and you told me.
That Kevin ~ your boss at the time ~ had been there. Sitting in that lobby for hours, just waiting, just in case you came down, just in case there was news, just in case we needed something. Didn’t call ahead. Didn’t announce himself. Didn’t make it into something we’d have to manage on top of everything else we were already managing. Just drove to the hospital and sat down and waited for one of us to appear.
Matty, it blew me open.
Both of us, I know. I saw your face when you told me. But I want to tell you what it does to me still, out here on the side of this mountain with nothing but time and quiet ~ when I turn it over and look at it. That he didn’t need to be seen doing it. Wasn’t performing it. Just pointed himself at the place where we were breaking and sat down.
I keep thinking about the difference between that and the man at my parents’ door.
Both of them showed up.
Only one of them came for us.
~
And then we had to move. Had to make the house work for Connor, had to make the world fit a life none of us had planned for. And I remember standing at the living room window that morning, mid-morning, the light coming in flat and bright, and watching you outside directing traffic.
Because there was traffic to direct.
Trucks, Matty. Trailers. A line of them. People loading at the old house and unloading at the new one simultaneously, boxes moving hand to hand down human chains, someone painting a bedroom while someone else was still hauling furniture through the front door, the ramps going up out back with the focused efficiency of people who had decided this was simply what was happening today and they were going to see it through.
I couldn’t move from that window for a long time.
Connor was outside in his shell brace, saying hello to people, still so newly himself in that body, still finding the edges of who he was going to be inside it. Chris Bates had painted the Superman logo on his chest at the hospital ~ the Superman logo and Horsetooth ~ and Connor was wearing that city on his skin, standing in the driveway while our whole community moved around him like water around a rock. Max was your shadow, taking it all in the way Max always takes things in, quietly, completely, filing it somewhere deep.
And I stood at that window and I could not breathe.
Not from grief. From the opposite of grief. From being so overwhelmed by the love being poured over our family that my body didn’t know what to do with it. Houska’s held a fundraiser for us. People showed up to organize when I asked for help organizing. The bathroom remodel, the ramps, the meals, the months of dinners while Connor and I were down at Craig ~ I cannot get to the bottom of the list. I have tried. Every time I think I’ve named it all I remember something else. Another person. Another Tuesday. Another moment where someone just showed up and did the thing without being asked twice.
And I catch myself still, even now, even out here ~ wondering how. How we built that. Why people want to show up for us.
You, I understand. That part was never complicated. You are one of those people the world just opens for. There is something in you that people feel the second they’re near you ~ this steadiness, this real and completely unperformed interest in whoever is standing in front of you ~ and they move toward it the way everything moves toward warmth. It’s not something you do. It’s something you are.
Me ~ I am an acquired taste. Always have been. You either love me or you absolutely do not and there is very little middle ground and there never has been. I am too much and not enough in all the wrong moments. The woman I am now is so far from who I was in those early days ~ the one who accused you of stealing a fleece and meant it, and also just wanted to talk to you, and both of those things were completely true at the same time.
But somewhere in building this life with you ~ the table, the music, the door that has always been open, the way people feel when they walk into our house like they can finally exhale, like they don’t have to perform or manage themselves or brace for anything ~ somewhere in all of that we made something. Not on purpose exactly. We just couldn’t have done it any other way. Neither of us is built for performance. Our house was never a stage. It was just ours. Loud and full and honest and sometimes an absolute shit show and always, always safe in the way my parents’ house never was.
And what thatmeans, it turns out, is that when the ambulance comes, the right people show up.
Not the ones who want to know what happened.
The ones who just sit down and wait.
~
I’m at the river now. Boots off, feet in the cold water, the current pushing around my ankles like it’s been doing this since before anyone alive was born and will keep doing it long after. A crow is making a scene somewhere in the trees behind me, very important crow business, very urgent. The bells are faint from here ~ just underneath the sound of the water, barely, a thread of something familiar running through all this wildness.
I am so humbled by our life, Matty.
Not the hard parts ~ goddess knows those humbled me plenty, brought me all the way to the floor more than once. But this. The fact that we are surrounded by people who actually want to be there. Who show up without being asked. Who have given us more grace than I knew grace could stretch to cover.
I grew up watching people show up for the story.
We built something where they show up for us.
~
I keep thinking about my parents. About that man in the doorway with his hungry face. About Kevin in that lobby. About the line of trucks in our driveway and Connor in his shell brace with Fort Collins painted on his chest and you out there directing all of it like of course, like this is just what people do.
We chose different. We built different. And I don’t say that enough ~ to you, to myself ~ that we did that. That it wasn’t only luck. That it was ten thousand small choices about who to be and how to show up and what kind of table to keep and what kind of door to leave open.
I’m coming home soon and I want to sit with you and not say much and just feel the weight of it.
How lucky we are.
How lucky we made ourselves.
How those are maybe the same thing.
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!