Since He's Been Gone

Life is so much different when my husband is gone. This must be close to what it feels like to have a husband deploy: I live my life without his influence eating, reading, and doing exactly what I want and then we speak every few days over a poor phone connection and I tell him a little bit about it.

Because he’s in the middle of nowhere, with no access to even the smallest store, I send him a care package every week not really knowing what will be useful in the back country. This week my best guesses include jalapeno potato chips, jarred horseradish for the instant potatoes he lives on, honey, chocolate, and a funny newspaper article about filming Pimp My Ride in Amsterdam. And at the store when I’m trying to decide what to send I always blank: Does he have way too much tea, or did he forget to buy it altogether? Does he want rapid rise yeast or regular? I never feel like I get it right. But he doesn’t complain. He never complains. I wonder if any of the other handful of men in the park notice that his wife sends consistent and thoughtful packages. I wonder if he notices that none of the other men who work in the park have a wife.

When I take the time to think about his living situation my mind wanders to the electric fence around his cabin and the shotgun he packs with slugs. I hope they are enough to keep him safe from the ten or so bears he sees every day. I'm sure they are. Right now he’s on the coast where the bears go clamming at low tide and spend the rest of their time munching on grass and sleeping, so they’re well fed and never aggressive. Even the new mammas with cubs couldn’t care less if he comes or goes. I don’t really fear for his safety but I’m still unsettled because there’s something peculiar about my husband living a life unknown to me. It’s a huge something that we’ll never have in common. And this is just the beginning: he’s on the threshold of a decades long project that will keep him away from home much of the time. Sometimes I’m in the mood to be an alarmist and I imagine that he’s wounded or dead and I wonder how long it would take for someone to realize what was wrong. I imagine the bears lunching on his corps and wonder if his parents would have any objection to cremating his recovered body parts. I’m sure he’s never discussed his post-mortem wishes with them. I decide to go along with whatever they want. I tell myself that death is about the living.

I shop for a dog almost every day, I think because I want the company, but I won’t buy one until I come back from Cuba. My husband doesn’t come home until two months after I deploy and the dog can’t hang out alone in an empty apartment. I think I want a Black Russian Terrier.

I’m off to bed and I’m going to sleep in the middle.