It felt like freedom. It felt like independence. The kind of feeling that settles warm in your chest and refuses to be talked down. I was headed to a place so empty and so desolate that if trouble arose, search and rescue would have needed all day to find me if they ever did at all. And maybe that danger was part of the sweetness.

I met Gail when she was in her nineties. It started with a video: a little clip shared by Mossy Oak’s Cuz Strickland that went viral.