Written By Sarah Capdeville
Across the roadbed, three prints press into a scuff of snow. I recognize them right away—snowshoe hare tracks, two hard-nailed hind feet in front, tailed behind by a single print where smaller front paws overlap nearly one on top of the other. The rest of the roadbed is marbled in packed ice, scribbled in boot prints, dog tracks, squirrel bounds. The snowshoe hare prints hop off the path into a copse of dense firs, the needled ground bare and brown.
I keep walking, metal tips of my hiking poles jabbing into the hard ice of the path. It’s only a couple days after winter solstice, and the low sunlight wraps around a steep ridge to the south. I pause again, notice the way the light turns the distant firs and pines into amber feathers.
I’ve always felt like my first language was landscape. And specifically these landscapes of the Intermountain West, places with ridges and gulches and saddles, creek beds thick with willow and cottonwood, mountainsides evergreen with ponderosas and firs and lodgepole. The pace that I’ve moved through these landscapes has varied over my life—a curious meander as a kid, long trail runs, the slow and deliberate slog of backpacking with a fifty-pound pack. And, in the past years, a slower pace, milder changes in elevation, more old roadbeds than switchbacks.
For a long time, I wasn’t okay with that. I grieved the absent weight of my backpack, the ease of bagging peaks, the runner’s high that sloughed away for good one July day. I used to frame my experience of chronic illness around that day, a hard-edged before and after. But as time passed, the landscape unfurled again. Illness and disability settled into the ecosystem of my new reality, into the ways I moved through the land.
Last year, we had five straight months of winter. It snowed the first week of November, and then didn’t seem to stop until the end of March. But this winter has swung in the opposite direction, a temperate autumn that has continued through the end of the year. Inversions pooled damp fog in the valley, while above the sky stretched uncharacteristically pale and cloudless, long and warm stretches between snowfall.
In the creekbed where I’m hiking today, the steeper mountainsides mean more of this snow has stayed, though in crusted patches at the base of firs and well-shaded slopes. Up ahead, my dog trots with her nose to the ground of a game path, probably on the trail of another snowshoe hare. I wonder if she can smell how it’s faring this mild winter. I wonder if the low snowpack is a benefit to the hare, meaning more access to forage, or a disadvantage, their white winter coat glaring against the brown earth.
The question rests on my tongue, pluming out into the cold air: Is a snowshoe hare disabled in a snowless winter? White-coated animals like snowshoe hares or polar bears against a bare backdrop are a clearcut visual of how climate change kicks ecosystems out of balance. But as I look up at the slopes above me, rocky outcrops and assorted age classes of conifers, I realize there’s another reason why I gravitate towards these landscapes, especially when my own bodymind is in turmoil. Disability is written all across the ecosystem.
I used to work in capital W wilderness. Words like pristine, untouched, and untrammeled made up a large part of my lexicon. The framework of the Wilderness Act erects hard binaries between humans and nature, props up wilderness as the ultimate apex of this spectrum. And as my chronic illness caught up with my long and wild miles, as fatigue demoted me to light duty, I started to see the construct of wilderness clearer, started to see how this supposed epitome of the outdoors served as a metric of able-bodiedness and another tool of ableism.
This was probably the hardest thing for me to communicate with other people, let alone process myself. Pushing your body to its limits is a hard rule in outdoor recreation and work, and I had over two decades of that to unlearn. It was one thing to pull it apart within the industry; it was a different animal altogether to untangle those worldviews from my own connection to place.
But it turned out the land had my back. I wasn’t running a dozen miles in one morning anymore, wasn’t backpacking and setting up camp three days away from any road. Instead, I was rediscovering what Forest Service lingo deemed as front country—recreation areas and trails near town, easier to access. And I was rediscovering them, I realized, because this was how I spent my childhood, wandering across landscapes that were equally spellbinding as they were scarred and changed by decades of settler colonialism and environmental exploitation. As a kid, these places didn’t feel any wilder because I knew where the foxes denned, didn’t feel any less wild as I scampered down clefts gouged into the earth by hydraulic mining. The land was just the land, in all its elegant pines and dynamite-torn outcrops and sentinels of mullein stalks.
I picked this particular trail because of its slow rise along the creek. My near-constant fatigue is even heavier today, muscles wobbly and achy. I hike at the pace my body needs, my dog ever-ahead and on another trail of smells. Just across the stream is a dirt road, and up ahead I can see the bright yellow marker of an underground petroleum pipeline. Spotted knapweed, an invasive plant, thatches the ground. Whitetail deer tracks spear through the snow.
I never would have called this place anything but wild. It’s just that I might have denoted other places as more wild, like the mountain range to the north outlined by a capital W. I would have seen the knapweed and mellow path and mossy old stumps from when the mountainside was clearcut as checkmarks away from a true wildness. And I would have framed my body’s own capacity around that wildness, my strength distilled from extremes and not balance.
Today, though, the land is as wild as that wilderness to the north. Kinnikinnick splashes green across the forest floor, reminding me it’s alright to take the seasons at a different pace. I don’t like the petroleum pipeline that bisects the creek just as much I don’t like that my immune system could decide to destroy my kidneys, but neither have the power to negate wildness, negate my wholeness as a person.
In the same way that I’ve shaped my identity as disabled in a political sense just as much as an individual one, I see these landscapes as disabled. Firs hunched by mistletoe, hillsides carved by backhoes, rivers silted by heavy metals, traditional ecological knowledge stripped away from Indigenous people, western larch dropping their needles every autumn, the whitetail buck with nubs of ears from frostbite, and the pipeline snaking downslope, shushing with oil that will be burned, churned as CO2 into the atmosphere, and someday drip that much snow away from where the snowshoe hare in their white coat tries to make it through the winter.
What I struggled so hard to articulate to myself about a diagnosis of lifelong chronic illness was that this somehow made me less connected to nature. Because I couldn’t access the same places, those demarcated as the most pristine, I felt I’d lost that wildness in myself. But the double-tracks told me otherwise. There is no right kind of wildness, just as there is no right kind of body.
I pause again, take a deep breath of the winter air. The early-setting sun hinges on the steep ridge ahead of me, so that a couple steps forward brings my view of the land into light, a couple steps back into shadow. It’s a sunrise and sunset that doesn’t have to be chased, an elegance I’ve found again and again by embracing the messiness of disability, not fighting to overcome it, as I move through this equally messy and beautiful world.
The tips of my hiking poles twist into the ice below me, two more points of contact with the ground in the same way the snowshoe hare, bedded down nearby in a hidden copse, can bound across snow with their wide and furry toes. I give the hare a nod, wherever they are, and step forward into the golden seam of winter’s sunset.
Land Acknowledgement
This essay takes place in an area now called Deer Creek, east of Missoula, Montana. To the Séliš and Qlipsé people who have lived in these landscapes since time immemorial, it is the area between Slo?té, Valley Where Two Ravines Meet, and Naaycčstm Sewlkws, Bull Trout’s Waters. This creekbed sits in the midst of networks of trails that connected the homelands of the Séliš, Qlipsé, and other tribes, from rich fisheries to camas and bitterroot digging grounds. In 1855, tribal nations met with United States government officials to negotiate the Hellgate Treaty, which established the Flathead Reservation north of what is now Missoula, ceding much of the land to the south but maintaining hunting and gathering rights. Today, Séliš, Qlipsé, and other Indigenous people continue to live in and maintain relationship with these landscapes. To learn more about the history of the Séliš and Qlipsé people, you can visit https://plateauportal.libraries.wsu.edu/digital-heritage/bitterroot-valley-and-place-names-lesson-séliš-u-ql̓ispé-curriculum
Bio
Sarah Capdeville is a queer, disabled writer and hiker who lives in Missoula, Montana. She worked as a wilderness ranger in western and central Montana for five seasons before shifting to communications in the domestic violence field. Sarah is a lover of books, crosswords, crochet, community care in an ongoing pandemic, and, of course, spending as much time outdoors as possible. She is the author of Aligning the Glacier’s Ghost, an essay collection on solitude and landscape, available from University of New Mexico Press.