This was in Montana, where I taught a photography course in a summer program for gifted rural high schoolers in Missoula. (Show the kids the big city!) Even before the leg thing, the summer wasn’t going well. I broke up with the woman I’d been seeing back East over some petty nonsense right before we were supposed to drive west together. She kept the puppy. I got through the drive with a twenty-five-disc audiobook of Lonesome Dove, by the end of which I was convinced Larry McMurtry was the American Tolstoy. Then my rented house, in the part of town ominously designated the Upper Rattlesnake, was full of mice and mold, and there was an unadvertised pickup with no tires in the backyard. I drank myself to sleep and showed up to a classroom of seven dead-eyed teenagers. I distributed battered digital cameras, showed them the button to press, and sent them away with a self-portrait assignment. Then I went outside and joined the instructor-student soccer game.

Missoula has mostly treated me well in the four summers I’ve spent here and I don’t want to come across like an asshole. But when I got hurt it was a real project to get anybody to come around and help me, even though the Rattlesnake is ten minutes from downtown. I couldn’t drive, I couldn’t teach, my leg hurt so much that at first I couldn’t even use the crutches unless I desperately had to piss. On my second day home, Jim, a climbing instructor from Boston who’d gone native, left a Tupperware container of homemade granola at my front door with a note reading, “Get good, pal.” For the next couple of weeks I got to know an older church lady one of my colleagues had tipped off to my existence. She brought pasta salad and told me that Ryan Zinke, with whom her cousin had gone to high school in Whitefish, had gotten a bum rap. On days when no one came around I tried to read through the haze of pain medication but it depressed the hell out of me. I ran out of cigarettes and didn’t want to ask anyone to bring me more. I got lazy and pissed in bottles. I took pictures of the bottles.

One day during this rough patch there was an unscheduled knock at the door.

“It’s open,” I said. “If you’re here to kill me I won’t stop you.”

“It’s Chloe,” the voice at the door said. “Jim’s wife? I brought you a pizza and beer and some cigarettes.”

I loved her, whoever she was. “You are an angel sent from God,” I said.