Advancing Our Relationship

Over the next few years, I gradually taught her more and more things. Ellie continued to amaze me with how bright she really was, and how much she could learn. I did not ask her to take a job, but she reached the level of maturity that I think she could have, though her lack of a high school diploma might have kept her out of many. She seemed as capable as any woman of her apparent age.

Sex was one of the first things I had taught her about because she was already doing it, and after giving her the basics that any girl would have been taught at age 12 or earlier, though we did it frequently, I hadn’t taught her any more. After more than three years together, though, I brought up the concepts of sex and relationships and marriage again.

“Back when you were a dog, you already understood that people form couples committed to each other.”

“Yes. And I know we’ve become committed to each other,” Ellie replied.

“There are different levels of commitment. We are committed to only have sex with each other and not other people. Usually a couple starts dating and has several dates before they reach that level of commitment.”

“Didn’t you ask me for such a commitment when we first started living here?”

“Yes, I did. But we traveled together for weeks before that. Dates are usually only for part of one day. Usually, those couples who become committed have dated over a longer period of time than we were together, but they aren’t living together full time and the amount of time they have actually been with each other is less than we had. Living together usually comes later, another level of commitment.”

“How many levels are there?”

“A couple could be dating but not yet have a commitment not to date other people. Not dating or having sex with other people is the first level of commitment. Living together is a second level. A third level is becoming engaged. Engagement is a promise to get married but it’s not actual marriage, and it could come before or after a couple starts living together.”

Ellie looked confused.

“It will make sense after I explain marriage.”

“OK.”

“Marriage is a formal and legal agreement making you officially a couple. All of the other commitments are things that either partner can break, just by saying so, though there are consequences. Breaking one commitment may mean breaking all of them.”

“Oh, I see. All the commitments stick together. If a couple wants to break their engagement, it may mean they don’t live together or have sex at all anymore.”

“Yes, that’s it. But marriage is different. Marriage means you are committed for life, and legally. There is a formal process for breaking a marriage, called divorce, and it’s complicated. It is not just saying ‘I divorce you’ and walk out the door. But it is like those in that if you break a marriage, you break the other commitments, too.”

“So marriage is the last commitment.”

“Yes, that’s fair to say. But I’m telling you this today because we already have the first two kinds of commitments and I want to ask you for the third, the engagement.”

“Oh, wow, Michael! I... I want to, but I am worried about the stuff you said about breaking it.”

“You don’t have to accept right away. You can even say no without breaking our other commitments.”

“OK. Let me think about it.”

“There are also certain customs in asking for an engagement. It’s called a proposal, and I want to do it properly so you get to experience what other women experience before getting married. Usually a man makes this proposal to a woman, like I am doing for you, and... it’s probably easier if I just do it. This is the traditional style and the traditional question.”

I knelt on one knee, pulled the ring box out of my pocket, opened it, and held it up to her as I asked her, “Ellie, will you marry me?”

“Oh, wow, it’s so pretty!” After a pause, Ellie added, “Oh, Michael, it makes sense now.”

“What makes sense?”

“I’ve seen proposals on TV, and I knew it was something important but I didn’t understand it all, but you have explained it, and now what I saw makes sense.”

“I would have explained it sooner, but there were so many other things you needed to know, things that you didn’t learn growing up as a dog.”

“No, you did right. If you had explained it sooner, I would not have understood.”

I grinned a huge grin but didn’t say anything.

“And yes! Michael, yes! I will marry you! I want what we have to continue forever!”

Over the coming days I explained the ways people get married, and how it sometimes involves a huge party with hundreds of people, but it can also be just the couple signing a document.

Ellie asked, “Who would be at our party?”

“Usually the wedding guests are family members and close friends. But you have nobody except people you’ve met here, and I was in the park to find you because I had nobody left after the explosion that killed my family and most of the other people I lived near. I took that journey to make a new start. So I think we’re going to have the kind where we just sign a document.”

“Hey, I have some friends around here!”

But when she listed them off, they were the neighbors, the checkers at the supermarket, the park rangers, and other people like that. In the next couple weeks, Ellie let these friends know she was engaged, and they were happy for her, but out of all of them, only one neighbor couple was interested in attending the wedding.

Ellie reported back, “I guess you’re right. Most of the people I know don’t feel like they know me well enough to attend our wedding, and the supermarket people figure they probably can’t get time off. Only the Hendersons were interested. So do it your way.”

The concept of a “justice of the peace” was a bit dated; nobody here had that title, but there was a county clerk who still performed civil marriages. Witnesses were optional, but we got our social worker Rhonda and Mrs. Henderson (as Mr. Henderson was working) to be witnesses to the event. Rhonda was more than happy to attend, and impressed with how far Ellie had come from the girl who couldn’t speak and didn’t understand a lot of basic ways of life.

I got Ellie a proper wedding dress for the event. That was one of the things she’d picked up from TV, and I didn’t want her to feel left out, even though it wasn’t typical for getting married this way. And there was another lesson about rings and why the wedding band was a simpler, plainer ring than the engagement ring even though it represented a greater commitment. But the clerk didn’t want to see that, so after we got done signing, we went to one of several little alcoves that were there for events like this, and exchanged rings in front of our witnesses. Rhonda took pictures for us.

The Return

Getting married didn’t really change things for me and Ellie, though she seemed happier and even more willing to do things to please me. We didn’t go on an immediate honeymoon, either, because we’d gotten married pretty quickly and didn’t do a lot of planning. But over the next couple months, I figured out how I wanted to celebrate.

“Ellie, if we go back to Yellowstone, do you think you can find the sex-change veil?”

“Yes, I still remember where it is. I hope we aren’t walking back again, though.”

“Oh, no. I’ll drive us to the park and we’ll just walk to find it once we are there.”

So the second week of August I drove us out. I hoped we could get there and find the sex-change veil and celebrate what was legally Ellie’s 24th birthday while gender-swapped, but even if we never found it at all, I would be with her in the land she knows, in the place we met.

It was too long a drive to make in one day, so we stopped at a motel, and arrived in the park during the second day of the trip. I parked at Madison Campsite and we headed on foot toward the middle of the park, at first on marked trails and later on unmarked ones. About 2 miles from the road, we found a part of the veil, and Ellie led me along the edge of it, where there was a crude trail.

“Animals afraid to enter the veil walk along here to get around it,” Ellie explained. “If we see anything dangerous, all we have to do is enter the veil; the animals won’t follow.”

We walked about another 2 miles along the edge of the veil, and then we came upon it. There was no more than 15 feet between the red and white veils, with the trail we were following running between them, and it was easy to see one from the other. Unlike the white veil, which went on for miles, the red one was small. It was only the size of a modest house, and had four trees growing in it.

“Wow, so small! How did you ever find this?”

“When I lived in the veil, I explored all of it to find the best food sources. There are places inside the veil where it is too overgrown with trees, so I sometimes had to use this trail to get around to parts of it. When I saw there was a red veil animals also don’t enter, I was curious about it.”

We set up our tent in the middle of the four trees, where Ellie had slept during her time here, as it was the only open spot clearly within the boundaries of the veil. Confident that nothing was going to disturb our campsite, we kept our food with us but left most of our stuff there. I found a way out from there to the main road, noting landmarks to find our way back. The trail along the road made a much easier hike to and from this location, and we picked up more supplies from my car and returned to our campsite.

After dinner, we settled down to sleep there. In the morning, success! We had both changed sex, and we had the whole of Ellie’s birthday to celebrate in our alternate bodies. Since Ellie was a diminutive of Ellen, we decided her male name was Alan, and my female name was Michelle. We tried to call each other those names for the day, though we both slipped and used our normal names sometimes.

We didn’t actually do much exploring, because we had to estimate and hadn’t managed to bring clothes that fit our other bodies very well, and in particular the shoes didn’t work. So we mostly explored each other, and Alan told me more stories of his/her time here four years ago, while I recounted details of my journey before arriving in Yellowstone. And of course, we had sex. What would be the point of doing this if we didn’t try it? It definitely felt weird, but it felt good.

On the morning of the 16th, back in our usual bodies, we gathered our gear and hiked back the easier route to my car. We ate lunch in West Yellowstone, dinner and stayed the night near where we stopped on the way there, and spent all of the daytime of the 17th finishing the trip back to Portland.

Sharing the Magic

I knew this was an amazing thing, and it wasn’t something we should simply do once and then forget about.

The next morning at breakfast, I said, “We have to tell transsexuals about this, Ellie!”

She had a confused look, so I explained, “People who change their sex.”

“You have other places where this happens besides the red veil?”

“No, they don’t change that way. They use a combination of drugs and surgery to give their bodies the appearance of the other sex. They aren’t really changed inside-and-out the way we were in the red veil.”

“Does that really work?”

“Yes and no. They live their lives as the new sex, but they aren’t fully functioning. They can’t have children. It causes some of them ongoing health issues. It’s expensive. Some of them never really go through with it, even though they want to.”

“Then why do they do it at all?”

“They really feel deep down that they want to be the other sex. You changed, but I’m not sure it was for the same reason.”

“I changed because I thought it would help me get out of the park and to some better life. And it did!”

“Most transsexuals have a completely different motivation, but the result is the same as for you. Someone born male chooses to live life as female, or the other way around.”

“The same, except not also changing from dog to human.”

“Of course.”

“Do you know some of these transsexuals?”

“There was a boy here who graduated high school last year who was transsexual. He was starting to take hormones that were making his breasts grow, on the way to becoming female, and he told me about it because he was worried about changing with the boys. I shared his concern, but I also thought it would be a problem letting him change with the girls since he still had a functioning penis.”

“What did you do?”

“After consulting with the principal, I told him, ‘As long as you still have boy parts down below, there’s no way I can let you change with the girls. But what I can do is let you do is change in the faculty restroom.’ That was a restroom normally only teachers were allowed to use, but it was a single stall restroom with a shower stall and a locking door. I gave Eddie a pass that let him use it before and after his gym class all that year. I had to tell a few other teachers, but they were all pleased I’d arranged this thing for Eddie. But he’s still got years of this to go.”

“And it won’t be real, even then,” Ellie commented, showing that she understood.

“Yes. I want to take him to the veil, maybe on an extended weekend, and let him come back changed. Assuming he actually wants that, but I expect he’ll jump at the opportunity.”

It took time to find him... actually her, as she was now going in public as female and had changed gender legally. When I explained to people at the school that I wanted to help Eddie, someone who knew her current situation put me in touch with her, now known as Betty. At first Betty didn’t believe me, but I showed her the pictures of the veil and selfies Ellie and I had taken of our changed selves, and also had Ellie talk with her about it to eventually convince her. Betty was not a hiker, and wanted time to practice longer walks before trying this. It was complicated for other reasons in Betty’s life as well, so while she accepted my offer, she needed time. She wasn’t going to be able to do it before the park closed for the winter, so we planned it for June, after the park was open again. It gave Betty the time she needed to prepare.

We met a number of times, and I gave her advice based on my experience.

“Ellie told me that her feet changed size, but she didn’t have a ruler or anything with her when she discovered the place. We went there with spare hiking shoes a size smaller for me and a size larger for Ellie and it turned out our feet only changed a half size, but it was just enough that neither pair of shoes was comfortable enough for walking multiple miles, so we stayed close to the site while we were changed. So bring shoes a half size smaller, and maybe ones a full size smaller just in case.”

“Are other parts of me going to change size, too?”

“All the places men and women are different. Your hips will get wider, your waist narrower, your breasts bigger... I can’t tell you how much, though, because I don’t know how the therapy you’ve started will interact with the change. Bring flexible clothing.”

Eventually, the day came. It was 12 hours of driving, so we started Friday at noon, drove 6 hours and stayed in a motel for the night, then 6 hours of driving Saturday to arrive at Madison campsite early enough to hike, at Betty’s slower pace, to the veil before dark. We helped Betty pitch her tent, and then Ellie and I set up our own just outside the veil, as we were not planning to change on this trip.

The change worked. Betty was overjoyed. And the clothes and shoes she brought worked, too. We hiked back to Madison, and I drove us to West Yellowstone for a late breakfast. Then we spent much of Sunday on the road, and after a motel stop, got back into Portland Monday in time for lunch.

Betty paid all our expenses for the trip: food, gas, and lodging. I didn’t ask her to pay anything more. But over the rest of the summer she kept in touch.

During a phone call, Betty suggested, “We should share this with more people, but we also have to limit it. There’s not much room there; you might fit two 2-person tents in there between the trees.”

I agreed, “Yes, and the site is only open for about 6 months each year.”

After the call, Ellie exclaimed, “Wait, what? The park is only open 6 months each year?”

I explained, “It snows, way more than it does here. It snows and the snow piles up and there’s no practical way to remove it like they do here with snowplows. They could clear the main road, at the expense of destroying the natural beauty along it, but they couldn’t possibly clear all the little trails. So they just close the park in the middle of the fall and open it in the middle of the spring.”

Ellie replied, “Thanks for saving my life. I couldn’t have survived that.”

“You’re welcome, but I only behaved like a civilized human being and helped once I realized your plight. The way I see it, you’re at least as much responsible for that as me. You helped draw attention to your situation. If you were just a dog, I probably wouldn’t have done anything but run, as I did at first. There are a lot of wild animals in the park, and they live through the winter somehow, in dens they build in caves and other such places. It was only after I realized you were a human being, at least some of the time, that I knew I needed to help.”

Days later we spoke with a lawyer, who helped us with a lot of details. No, we can’t clear the trees or build any permanent structures there, as it’s protected National Park land. And no, we can’t buy that land, either. But yes, we could charge people to take them there; there are other paid tours within the park. We can also make them promise not to compete with us by telling other people the location of the veil or bringing them there, but it would work like a trade secret. If someone not under such an agreement finds out, other than from someone under an agreement, there would legally be nothing we could do to stop them from bringing other people there.

He also gave us advice about the legal gender changes. Cases like Betty’s, where she had already changed legally, were best. If they hadn’t started that process, we needed to make sure they were prepared to do so. And the laws about getting your gender legally changed varied all over the place; it was easy some places, and forbidden in others. But getting a doctor to attest that someone now had organs corresponding to the other sex was sufficient to get both drivers’ licenses and birth certificates changed in most places.

Over the next year, we worked out plans. Betty would be our contact within the transgender community. She would seek out candidates to come here and change, and help them prepare. We would set up a base of operations in West Yellowstone, which, despite its tiny size, has an airport with commercial flights during the part of the year the park is open, almost exclusively for tourists going into the park. This would mean we could get patients from anywhere, and not just the people who could drive here.

We arranged with a doctor in West Yellowstone to examine candidates before and after the change and provide statements affirming the change. Her cost, apart from regular fees, was that we include two of her transgender patients in on the deal. Our lawyer helped us establish a business legally located in West Yellowstone to handle operations and set up the secrecy agreement that we would have our patients and others involved in the operation sign.

My plan was to continue working at the school in Portland, and just rent space in West Yellowstone during the summers to help patients, but Betty convinced me to quit my job at the school and move to West Yellowstone permanently. She said there would be a steady stream of paying patients. Even though we could only operate 6 months out of the year, we would have one or more patients most of those nights, and it was good to have a permanent base of operations.

This also solved another problem: the lack of longer-term rental property in West Yellowstone. The town was set up to cater to tourists spending one or two nights there, and there were few summer-long rental deals available. Businesses with part-time residents as employees usually had living quarters for those employees on site because of this. So, for us, it was much more economical to buy property. We found a suitable property and arranged with a contractor to get it set up as an inn. Another good thing about West Yellowstone: It was a small town. There weren’t any zoning issues.

We had six guest rooms, potentially supporting two singles or couples who changed the previous night, two changing the current night (who weren’t sleeping there, but would still have belongings in the room), and two changing the following night. In addition, there was a room Ellie and I would live in permanently, and a spare room for emergencies. Ellie would stay at the inn managing things while I led patients to and from the site of the veil. And we bought some sturdier tents and warmer sleeping bags for the colder nights. I realized those would wear out, and we’d buy new ones each year as a cost of doing business.

While all the construction was going on, during one of my visits to West Yellowstone, I took the doctor’s two patients on a trip into the park as a test run. They were permanent residents, so they did not need the inn, and it was just me who needed a room. That worked perfectly. They had their own jobs in town, but I arranged with them to serve as backups. Ellie would be my backup to take people out to the veil if I couldn’t for any reason, and they could come in to take care of the inn.

The inn construction continued into the winter, stopping due to heavy snow several times, but it just needed to be done for the next tourist season. The local construction crews had experience operating like this, and sent me regular updates.

The first week of May, the second year after I first visited the sex-change veil and six years after I first hiked through the park, I drove in with Ellie to establish residence at the inn, and set things up for our incoming customers. We went out to the red veil a few times in the first week after the park opened, in part to ensure it remained accessible, but we also brought proper clothes and shoes so we could change and really experience life the other way. We spent three whole days as Alan and Michelle. While we enjoyed it, I was still more comfortable as Michael and my spouse also preferred being Ellie, and I really didn’t plan on taking others in to the veil as Michelle, so we changed back.

The nights in the park and the morning hikes back to the car were cold. I think it was even worse for my female body, though I don’t know why. But I took note of it as something to mention to patients. This switching back and forth was something we weren’t planning to offer to patients, though, because Betty thought we would not have time to allow it. I considered doing it ourselves partly as our prerogative as the founders of this venture, and partly as more testing.

Betty was right. From the last week of May until the first week of November, we had someone out there every night, and two tents most nights, though it was often two single people. We were surprised how many couples there were. At least twice a week we had male-female couples changing to female-male couples. There were also pairs of same-sex friends both changing to the other sex who sometimes stayed together in a room and tent, but at least two-thirds of our customers were single. Each of them paid a hefty fee, parts of which we doled out to everyone helping with the effort or spent on costs like the inn, but it was far less expensive for them, far more effective, and far faster than the alternative, and literally every customer loved the result.

After one year of doing this, we were doing quite well with the fees from our patients, and had fully paid for the inn with a good bundle to spare. As we saw a number of residents leave town in November to return the following spring, Ellie and I decided to do the same thing. But we didn’t have any particular destination in mind. I bought an RV and we spent the winter touring the warmer parts of the country. That didn’t guarantee we wouldn’t see snow, but it let us not deal with being snowed in, in a tiny town with barely any services, sometimes for weeks at a time.

It was a weird life, but life often throws you a curveball, and we hit this one out of the park.