CHAPTER 1 - The Inconvenient Death

Aug 25, 2026

Uploaded by Callum

A father’s death arrives in February 2006 in Jackson Hole, Idaho, amid brutal snow, isolation, and disrupted plans. The narrator is blocked from scattering the ashes, while the timing compounds pressures on his daughter Bailey, preparing for her MFA and first solo exhibition. The scene includes a rescheduled high-end photoshoot with elaborate chocolate requests, then contrasts newspaper claims of an accident with the underlying truth of illness, loneliness, and despair.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages11

Reading Time17 min

AccessFree to download

Chapter 1

Death and delayed farewell

Bailey’s art milestone

Photoshoot chaos and luxury chocolates

Accident story vs. underlying truth

CHAPTER 1 My dad died at an incredibly inconvenient time, and I have no doubt that he planned it that way on purpose. It was February, 2006. His home on the Idaho side of the Tetons was buried under six feet of snow from a blizzard that had roared down from Canada and locked the whole region in its icy grip. There were no flights in or out of Driggs for a week, and once I finally arrived, I was prevented from carrying out his final wishes because the particular bend in the Teton River where I was to stand and scatter his ashes in reverence and mourning was frozen so solid that the idea of a trout jumping in spring seemed to be the stuff of myth. His timing also seemed designed as a turbo boost for the only other person whom he believed had been touched by God in the same way he had been – though, good pagan that he was, he would never have referenced anything divine. That person was my daughter, Bailey, 23 years old, who in the spring of 2006 was finishing the paintings she would need to complete her MFA degree from the esteemed Art Center in Pasadena – a milestone that everyone who knew her had been expecting since the day she first picked up a crayon. Just at the moment when Bailey was planning her first solo art exhibition, there were laudatory obituaries about my dad’s career, exultant TV segments about his lasting contribution to American art and the whole news-worthy question of how we would preserve and protect his legacy – all of which acted like an amplifier for what Bailey was doing with her own art. And as if all that weren’t enough, his death came smack in the middle of an important photoshoot for which I had thousands of dollars of artisan chocolate in my studio and millions of dollars of jewels on loan from Harry Winston in Beverly Hills. Chocolate waits for no one, not even death. It sweats, discolors, loses its sheen. While I trekked to Driggs to sign the death certificate and shelve my dad’s remains until the ice had melted, Peter, my camera tech and right hand man, called the client to say we were rescheduling the shoot for the following week, sent home the burly security guards with their sparkling loot, and emailed chocolatiers from Ecuador to Madagascar to request a second round of lavender truffles, port-marinated figs dipped in dark chocolate, and triple milled cocoa blended with Aztec chili. I would have killed my dad if he hadn’t already done it himself. The newspapers called his death a freak accident. He had gone up to the Grand Targhee ski resort late in the day when the snow was wet and heavy, and taken the Dreamcatcher lift to the top ofFred’s Mountain. He saluted the lift operator when he got off the chair, checked his bindings and took off toward the Headwall Traverse. Before he got down to the Blackfoot trail, he abruptly cut into the trees in the middle of the steepest pitch on the run, and he did not turn, he did not swerve. He headed directly into a huge lodgepole pine. He shattered both knee caps, broke one arm, cracked open his skill, and then lay there in the snow and the gathering dark, waiting for the cold. But while the newspapers had the facts right, they had the story wrong. The truth of the matter was that my dad was sick and lonely and he couldn’t take it anymore. His hands trembled from Parkinson’s, his eyesight was so bad that anything he looked at had black holes scattered throughout it like buckshot, and his latest lover – a bush pilot who fancied herself a later-day Beryl Markham – had dropped dead of a heart attack the day after roasting him a Thanksgiving turkey. He was a man who could not tolerate imperfection, who had no patience for suffering, and who believed in the existence of the soul of mountains more than he believed in the existence of the soul of men. Death, for him, would have been a welcome escape. My dad’s luxurious log cabin sat on a curve in the river on the Idaho side of Jackson Hole. It was about five miles outside the tiny town of Driggs, whi

FAQs

为什么叙述者无法在当时完成父亲的遗愿？

暴风雪导致堪萨斯?（原文为Idaho侧）交通受阻且河段彻底结冰，河湾无法进行撒灰，因此遗愿被延后。

父亲的去世如何影响女儿Bailey的生活与事业？

父亲的死亡时机恰好落在Bailey完成MFA作品、筹备首次个人展览的关键阶段，讣闻与媒体报道也在放大她的艺术行动。

报纸如何描述父亲的死，真实情况又是什么？

报纸称是滑雪的“离奇意外”，但叙述者指出父亲其实病重、孤独、无法承受不完美与痛苦，并在某种程度上选择了终结。

Aug 25, 2026

Uploaded by Callum