Karen was the happiest person I've ever known and I am privileged to have been her husband, travel companion, lover, best friend and father of her daughter. Karen developed pre-eclampsia shortly before the Feb. 5 birth of our baby Aryana. After a successful delivery, the complications cascaded and Karen died 45 hours later with several family members at her side. Dozens of our friends came to Bozeman Deaconess Hospital to say goodbye. Her Ultimate teammates painted her toenails red and sang us songs. One song, borrowed from a notorious Abba tune, commemorated Karen’s identity as the Doodle Queen. Pictures of Karen and some of her favorite things were stuck to walls of the hospital’s ICU.

Karen packed a lot of life into her 37 years. She was a connoisseur of experiences and personal relationships. She was born in 1966 in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. slightly upstate from the Bronx, where her grandparents, immigrants from southern Italy and Sicily, settled in the 1920s. She grew up in the town of South Salem, the youngest of four girls. Her sisters were several years older and they would fight over holding the tiny baby who looked so much like a Native American papoose that their mom called her Pocahontas. Her jet-black hair grew long and straight, prompting her curly-haired sisters to allege that she was adopted. In the neighborhood games of cowboys and Indians, Karen played on the losing side and sometimes wound up tied to a tree.

Of her 32 first cousins, Karen was the only one who moved West. After visiting Montana when she was 5 years old, she vowed someday to live in the Big Sky. She always stood out in this big extended family. Probably because of her eye and an ear for the silly, she was known as "my crazy cousin Karen" in three northeastern states and Florida. Karen was a woman of exquisite contradictions, an avowed vegan except, of course, when chocolate and certain species of fish were involved.

She missed her sister's wedding while she was on one of those month-long NOLS death marches through the Wind River Mountains in September1986. Half the kids almost died of hypothermia (or at least were seriously uncomfortable), but the experience steeled her resolve to live amongst the untrammeled landscapes in the interior West. Karen graduated from the University of Vermont, with a degree in English and environmental studies, in 1988. On a whim the following February, she headed to Wyoming with her college buddy Sammy Jo Whitney in Sammy's old pickup truck that doubled as their accommodations. It was butt-cold in Jackson Hole when they arrived and the two women fought over who got to snuggle the dog as they hunkered in the back of the truck at night. Karen told me she lived in eight different places during the year she spent in Jackson, couch surfing from one abode to another, strenuously trying to avoid having to work. She saved enough money to embark on an adventure, then return to start the process over. Karen moved to Bozeman with her boyfriend Aaron in 1991. She went through more part-time jobs than anyone can count: the Community Food Co-op's deli; the Wild Flour bakery; Second Wind Sports; the Bagel Works; cleaning offices. She even worked a couple weeks at the legendary Stockyard Cafe, where she flat out refused to handle the ground beef. Once when she was hard up for cash, she bathed her hands in an E. coli wash to test some anti-bacterial soap. Karen wouldn't touch raw meat, but would deliberately expose herself to a meat-borne pathogen for $75. Go figure. She finally settled on a semi-real job as a tour leader for Backcountry Adventures in 1997.

Karen and I crossed paths many times over the years at Ultimate tournaments before we officially met six years ago. In fact, she was well acquainted with my endearing dog Felony long before she ever knew me. We met on Aug. 15, 1998 at the tournament in Jackson, Wyo. It went down like this. Our respective teams were lined up against one another in a preliminary game that I should have missed. Rick Whitty and I had been driving all morning from Utah, taking the less-than-scenic, long cut through Idaho Falls. My team was whopping on the Bozeman team in a very politely contested game. I didn't care about the score, however, because I was fixated on the ripped, dark vixen running the Bozeman team's back field and wearing zebra-striped tights and a lovely skirt. I asked my friend and teammate Dave Greene, who is better known around Northwest Ultimate circles as Monkey Boy, to introduce me to this striking lady. Dave obliged and I began scheming on how to win Karen's heart from that very second. I'll never forget one of the first things she ever said to me: "Oh, you're Felony's dad." Little did I know, she was scheming right back at me and winning her heart proved easier than "rolling off a log." Within a day or two upon returning to Salt Lake, I was receiving her emails from the Bozeman Public Library, where Karen transacted much of her business, making it very clear that she and I belonged together.

She moved to Salt Lake City to live with me a few months later, but she only agreed to the move if I promised to move to Bozeman once my sports-writing position ended following the Winter Olympics. She enjoyed Utah despite its reactionary politics and and made numerous friends behind the Zion Curtain. Within a few weeks of becoming a resident of the Beehive State, she got herself invited on a three-week Grand Canyon river trip. Once-in-a-lifetime opportunities like this opened up for Karen the whole time I knew her. Taking advantage of these opportunities was her calling.

Karen was a genius at living simply, finding cheap travel arrangements and "borrowing" money from her dad to make these journeys financially possible. Seeing Karen ceaselessly travel without ever holding a real job, some mistakenly concluded she was a trust funder. If you are a free spirit with an engaging personality, you will find a way to enjoy life to the fullest.

I proposed to Karen in July 2001 as she said goodbye to me for the summer in the Anchorage airport. Rather than face the gauntlet of a huge wedding, we decided to elope to Italy after she got home from guiding in Alaska. Getting married there turned out to be too much of a bureaucratic hassle so we turned to the Montana elopement option. Karen purchased a marriage license in Gallatin County while we were in Bozeman for our friends' Deana and Dan's wedding at Big Sky near the end of September. We tried to get Deana's minister friend to marry us the night of that wedding but she was too impaired and had to catch an early flight.

The next day, Sept. 23, we enlisted aid from some of the helpful citizens of West Yellowstone to find someone to marry us before we left Montana. Karen was damned if she was going to marry in Utah. Through a series of phone calls placed from Free Heel and Wheel, we located Mike Bryer, who became empowered to perform weddings by the Universal Life Church while serving time for refusing to fight in Vietnam.

Mike married us near his home on the banks of Duck Creek, which proved quite serendipitous because Duck was our pet name for each other. Migratory creatures that are loyal to their mates for life, ducks have always been a metaphor for our relationship. I always think of her with great longing every time I see ducks, which happens often because waterfowl inhabit many of the wetlands in my southside neighborhood.

A few days after Karen died, some 400 people packed the Holy Rosary Catholic Church and the Baxter Ballroom to remember Karen. Her passing left us all with a lot to think about. We love her. She will always be missed.

Brian Maffly
Bozeman, Montana
December 2004