Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home: A Memoir

by Natalie Goldberg

Hugo wrote: I don’t want to admit / It’s cold alone in the ground….I’m sure he wants to be found. I say they put the dead / here where north and east gales can find them. But we can’t find him. We finally give up, and she takes me to the Milltown Union Bar — a place where he spent a lot of time. He wrote a poem there that begins, You were nothing / going in and now you kiss your hand. We sit at the long bar and order beer. It’s late afternoon. Peggy points out the elk head. She tells me that when her mother died, she drove her mother’s ashes in a box in the front seat of the car for four weeks to all the places her mother’d been and loved. She drove through Wyoming, Ghost Ranch, Taos — where her parents were married — Arizona, and finally up through western Colorado. She spread her mother’s ashes in the wilderness meadow on the Flat Tops where her dad’s ashes were spread twenty-five years earlier. She went home by way of Moab and the Canyonlands, her father’s favorite place on Earth. What a wonderful way to grieve, I thought. The day darkens. We didn’t find Hugo’s granite stone, his dates 1923–1982, and the words written there from one of his poems: Believe you and I sing tiny / and wise and could if we had to / eat stone and go on. But he’s still here with us now, all over Missoula, not contained anywhere. I found him in our talk and drink and walking the rows and driving the roads with big sky over us and the Clark Fork River running through. If I stay alive long enough,...