Autumn equinox near Yellowstone

Summer's coming to a thrilling conclusion.

All deferred maintenance on the property has been completed, the well checked, the leak in the propane tank detected and corrected, the wood panels on all sides of the cabin coated with sealant, and steel wool's stuffed in the corners where the baseboards meet the walls to discourage the immigration of mice.

Those of us who didn't appreciate Led Zeppelin the first time around have revised our opinion, and those of us who loved The Doors now feel sorry for Jim Morrison and everyone else who's died in a bathtub.

The novel one of us is reading contains the sentence, "when you know you're dying, everything comes into focus in a way it never has before," causing the one reading to forsake the novel on page 91 for a biography of Mies van der Rohe. The other begins a book titled, "The Painter," spots extreme male chauvinism in the first chapter, and returns to the mystery by Henning Mankell she was reading in the first place.

Neither of us have to be taught to tell the truth as it's been in each of our faces all summer. When we lie, lying comes quite naturally, not maliciously but from a natural predisposition to alter reality. Sometime in late August we decided the world's divided between men who can't handle intimacy and women who've never given birth, and that this fact explains everything.

There's a bend in the road between the cabin in Wapiti and Buffalo Bill's hunting lodge. One of us wants to stop the car beside the Shoshone River, lock the car doors, hop the guard rail to see how far we can walk up Fishhawk Creek without seeing grizzly tracks, and one of us wants to keep driving.