Martha and I had met in college. I was studying civil engineering at a small school in northern Utah. I’d gone there for the skiing. I was going to learn how to build roads into the forest. I was eighteen years old; what did I know better?

Martha was eighteen. She explained to me that what I was doing was bad, that road building in the West destroyed the last pieces of wilderness, fragmented the last sanctuaries where the wild things —the bears and the wolverines, caribou and great gray owls—holed up and hid out from man’s hungry, clumsy, stupid ways.

She told me that we had too many roads already; that the mountains and all wilderness were disappearing beneath con- crete, and that what I needed to be learning to do instead was to tear up old roads and plant trees in their place.

It took me about two weeks to change my major. And I have to say it probably wasn’t her passionate defense of centuries- old forests falling to bulldozers, or soil sloughing into pristine brooks. It was her ass that converted me.

But it’s not like I followed her like a puppy; I steered clear of her wildlife science classes, her ecofeminist curriculum. I changed to literature. When she went out on her wolf howlings (thirty fucking below, in January), I usually stayed in town, at the library. I would read a life, while she lived one.

This isn’t to say we weren’t in love. We were; as much as any two young people are capable of, which is to say, a lot. Our differences — the way she was so outgoing, the way her energy poured out of her, like water over a spillway, and the way I held mine all in —these differences formed a lock on us, the way deer and wolves fit together in the woods: one’s movements always affecting the other’s.