Angles of Repose

The maximum slope, measured in degrees from the horizontal, at which loose solid material will remain in place without sliding.

By my eleventh summer, I knew where the earth would give way just enough. Where it would allow a brief arc beneath my waffled soles before they went airborne again, moments of weightlessness punctuated by dryland facsimiles of ski turns to come. The corrugated trunks of a dozen giant ponderosas marked the run, begun with a sprint towards an ever-steepening angle until each leap would send me yards at a time towards my Montana home below. Launch and lean left, launch and lean right, flinging myself into space with a certainty the world would do as I wished.

The last turn came beneath a clear demarcation, beyond which trees could no longer hold. Here the graveled hillslope was slowly, surely, eating itself from below. Proof of its appetite could be found in regular pebbled staccato against my bedroom window, moments that sometimes jolted me awake. On some of those nights the spreading pines were rendered in ghostly detail, each needle piercing the moonlight while my heart raced beneath widened eyes.

By day, I would race beneath those branches and make that final leap, my feet inevitably giving way to a prolonged slide on one hip, before I’d lean breathless against the weathered brown siding and check my watch. Did I set a record?! Then I’d admire the final few turns above. Each one a crescent pockmark in a carpeting of needles and cones.

At the time, both Stegner’s novel and equations that governed the hillside’s response were years from my consciousness. So too was the realization that my mother’s own angle of repose seemingly approached ninety degrees.

I remained unaware of her law school interview in 1973, when the dean asked what do your husband and young son think about you wanting to do this? During parties at the house with her classmates, I thought little of the fact that her friends Jean and Mae Nan seemed to be the only other women amidst a throng of men. When she joined the county prosecutor’s office upon graduation, I’d occasionally wind my way past the women who sat out front and along a series of offices, each one occupied with potbellied men who seemed to blend into one another, before eventually finding hers.

At one point, I went to see her in court and found it unsettling. There was a man in black behind a high bench, another man in uniform to his right. Just beyond, five more men across two tables. All of them looked at my mother as she faced yet another man to the judge’s left. A hard look in his eyes as he spat out monosyllabic answers to the questions she asked. I remember the straightness of her back and her measured pace as she turned from the witness and strode towards her chair.

As the years passed, now and then I’d overhear the words murder or rape or assault and perhaps witness a moment where her ever tranquil face appeared just a little drawn. But these intrusions of her other world into mine were rare. She’d come home and swap a blue or burgundy suit for something more comfortable, by late fall usually a sweater with 3D bears or jingle bells or reindeer. To me the sweaters were funny, an opening for a gentle ribbing. I never thought how perhaps they soothed something inside.

Her cancer struck during the sweater season of my 27th year. I pointed my car north through limitless undulations of cheatgrass and sage, my view of the road periodically obscured by blasts of snow or the welling in my eyes. But her own eyes filled only for a day, then she quietly said I’m beating this and she did. Striding across courtrooms through most of it, right up and through the moment when a picture arrived of her standing beside an engaged Sandra Day O’Connor. The two of them seeming to share something only they could know.

She appeared to rest so easily amidst the rough and tumble landscape of her own profession that I scarcely considered how, well, rough and tumble it truly was. How her days were filled with stark evidence of humanity’s evil and heartbreak, all the while surrounded by men who secretly — or not so secretly — felt she didn’t belong. Only years later, after real dents came to the boundaries of my own world, did I begin to see the ones she had to absorb or ward off. Only then did I see the stories written in invisible ink all across the blue judicial robe she eventually donned.

Yes, blue. For when she became the first woman judge in the history of Montana’s second largest district, she decided to find out if a black robe was required. If she had to conform to a history that did not include her. The answer discovered, she announced her intention with typical lightness. I look better in blue. But I sensed something more.

Because sense it you must. Only rarely do the sediments of her life shift to allow the molten forces beneath to reveal themselves, ever so briefly, until the fissure anneals almost as quickly as it appears. In those precious few moments you see the imprints of a requirement to be better, calmer, wiser, smarter than the men around her. You see the ever-present threat of a subtle shift in landscape form that could push the angles beyond what even she could grasp. You see, if you are paying attention, yet another example of how those angles are steeper throughout the geology of nearly every woman’s existence. And yet the world travels through, scarcely noticing the adhesion required.

She retired a few weeks ago, trying to do so in typically understated fashion but finding herself celebrated nonetheless. For her grace and wisdom, for her strength and judgement, for her kindness and humanity. Tales were told of the paths she blazed and the hills she climbed. Then she headed off to interview a famous author who once complicated her life, delighting him and the audience alike. An audience of renowned attorneys from around the country, some of whom elected her to join their ranks years before. Ah it’s just my snooty lawyer’s group she would say.

Last night, as I angled my youngest daughter into her own repose, I thought of the blue robe. Of moments that led to it, and the celebrations of the woman it draped. And of how that woman’s blood ran in the little girl before me, a throughline of grace and strength and force of will that kept her too from slipping free even as the world raged around her tiny form. I thought, with renewed certainty: she too can walk her grandmother’s path.

And then I thought: if only she didn’t need to.

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Angles of Repose was originally published in State Factors on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.