The Carry Home (8 page)

Early in the afternoon we'd pull into a Dairy Queen or Tastee-Freez, dismount the bikes with our chests puffed out, and swagger to the window to order a Mr. Misty, our skinny legs poking out of our shorts, hoping somebody would take notice and ask where we were from. But they almost never did. The one guy I recall striking up a conversation with us on the outskirts of Michigan City did raise his eyebrows when he heard we'd started forty-five miles to the east, but not in a look like wow, that's great—more like geesh, you guys must be stupid. We took a pull from the straws in our drinks, made an authoritative check of tire pressure with our thumb and forefinger, remounted, and pushed on, ready for the next amazing thing, knowing full well that we were having the most fun of anybody in the world.

The older I got, the farther I went. And not just for adventure.
I needed reassurance that the world didn't demand or deserve the brittle distrust my mother gave it, that I could fling myself to the winds and end up being blown to good places. By my senior year in high school, I was hopping into boxcars, rolling west out of South Bend on Friday nights toward Laporte and Chicago, or else north and east, through a string of small towns that would eventually lead me all the way to Detroit.

Riding rails was the ultimate “backyard” travel, offering glimpses of things never meant to be seen; over the years I saw couples rolling around naked on blankets spread across the lawn; a man in the garden kneeling between rows of lettuce, crying; an old woman passed out in the ditch, clutching an empty bottle; two teen boys standing next to a clothes line, kissing. In college I rode further still, drifting out of Bloomington, Indiana. Late one night in July, riding through a thick forest in southern Illinois in an L&N boxcar, the train reached a long, high trestle. About a hundred feet below was a narrow valley, about as long as a football field, filled with hundreds of thousands of lightning bugs. As the boxcar creaked out across that trestle, every single one of those flashing bugs paused for a couple seconds, pulling the valley into black. When they started blinking again, it was in perfect unison. Blink, dark. Blink, dark. Blink, dark. They were still doing it when I finally lost sight of them, when the train plunged back into the trees, making for Effingham.

When I wasn't in boxcars, I was hitchhiking—sometimes five or six hundred miles on a weekend for no other reason than
I didn't have any other plans. I traveled with next to nothing. On one trip I left Bloomington, Indiana, in 1976 for the bicentennial celebrations in Washington, D.C., with $1.36 in my pocket, hitching all the way in one ride, courtesy of a guy in his twenties in a candy-red Triumph TR6. In my junior year of college, a friend and I attempted to sail to the Bahamas in an English catamaran. We'd wrangled it for $250, rebuilding it through the spring on the back lawn of our apartment complex. We returned home from that outing early, turned back by storms on the ocean. One evening, my mother took me into the backyard, asked if I remembered how when I was little she used to point to a wink of light on the north horizon, telling me it was my star.

“Remember me saying how that star would watch over you, keep you safe?”

I nodded.

“Don't wear it out.”

But by then I was out of her hands. Nothing for her to do but pray for me—that, and try to stifle the dark rumble of disquiet she still carried about the unreliability of the world. She'd been a dreamer once, smitten as a girl with the idea of becoming a professional singer. But at nine she lost her father, and then, just two years later, after tending her bedridden mother during a long bout of congestive heart disease, that parent was gone, too. Suddenly orphaned, she and her older brother, Junior, huddled together and made a solemn pact to stay with each other always, no matter what. Soon afterward, a big, dour German uncle came by the house where they were staying, stood in the living room
with his arms crossed. After several minutes sizing up the siblings, he pointed to her brother.

“We can use Junior,” he said. “Can't use her, though.”

Of course she knew I was a dreamer, too. Years later, I had the surprising thought that maybe she took that belt to me because she'd come to know, at a young age, how awful life could be for those who expected too much from the world. As if those big expectations led to the cruelest pains of all.

Yet there was no knocking it out of me. On an ill-advised first date in my senior year of college, I remember talking to the young woman across the restaurant table about how someday I wanted to walk the length of the Rockies. She poked at her salad, bored. Then she asked me when I was going to grow up.

That only made me want to go more.

S
TILL THREE HUNDRED MILES SHY OF THE SCATTERING
grounds, I pulled in for the night south of Anaconda, Montana, along Doolittle Creek, a fifteen-minute drive on a dirt road branching off the highway toward the tiny town of Wisdom. Just me in deep woods at the foothills of the Pioneer Mountains, the floor of the forest rife with the silky leaves of sedge and Solomon's seal. Beyond the trees was a long roll of grassland dappled with Black Angus, and then the foothills, rising for several miles toward the highlands, tossed with thick clumps of Engelmann spruce and lodgepole pine. Exactly the sort of place Jane and I
and Abby the traveling cat camped hundreds of times. I tried to read but couldn't focus. Tried to write. But mostly I stared into Doolittle Creek, gurgling through a clear, sand-bottomed pool stirred by fingerling trout.

My routine on the scattering journeys would end up much the same as when the two of us were together. First a cold beer from the tiny fridge in the back of the van. A little cheese, some chips and salsa. Beans, or maybe a stir-fry dinner, cooked on a Coleman stove given to us as a wedding present in 1980, the meals always served up on the brown porcelain cowboy plates Jane bought in that same year to mark our new life on the road.

After cleaning up, doing the dishes, came fires. As great as it was across our twenty-five years to be on the move, no less pleasing was no movement at all; as often as not, fire was the bridge from one state to the other—sitting up late at night at the edge of some black woods, or in the mouth of a chiseled canyon in the Southwest, or even nestled in front of a small blaze under spruce branches, in a hollow of snow. Fires had even been a part of the work we did—burning slabs of pine for happy tourists in the Sawtooths, and later in Yellowstone, spinning tales for them about bears and volcanoes and trappers and legendary snowfalls. Sometimes on New Year's Eve we plucked pieces of driftwood from the riverbank, decorated them into Yule logs, and tossed them into the flames. In the mid-1990s I learned how to fashion a bow-and-drill fire set from pieces of sagebrush. Even now I go out behind the house and twirl the spindle against the fire board with the bow until a tiny ember
forms, lay it into a kind of bird nest made from juniper bark, blow it into a blaze. “Mother giving fire,” as a Paiute elder once described it to me.

Late that night on Doolittle Creek, sipping on a short bourbon and poking at the fire, I recalled a conversation Jane and I had shortly after we were married around a small blaze at the base of a run of slickrock in southern Utah. It was cold and the sky was the color of ink, pricked with stars—sometime around midnight, in the hour when old memories come down to hover at the edges of the flames.

“I was sixteen,” she said. “Struggling. One day my boyfriend just ended it. Right when I'd been trying so hard to be perfect.” She looked up from the fire to catch my gaze, brushing the bangs off her forehead, tucking them under the edge of a blue bandana.

“I thought if I was perfect, the world would be perfect, too. That'd be my reward. Proof from God that I was doing a good job.”

That night was the first time she talked of her mother being the daughter of an alcoholic—child of a man who abandoned his family when she was just a girl. And how, for a long time before he left, Virginia had this strategy of not making waves, of pleasing. Thinking she might keep that last straw off of the camel's back. Jane said she picked it up, too—this sometimes-desperate feeling of not being in control.

Meanwhile her father, though he'd later mellow, was a hardboiled perfectionist. Fierce in his expectations. And very serious about that notion common to the rural Midwest, which says appearances are exceedingly important. His lawn was clipped.
His house and wife and kids and tractors were clean. His furrows were straight as good lumber.

She leaned forward and stirred the fire, gathering embers from around the edges of the ring. “I made mistakes. I was sure I'd failed the family. Failed my boyfriend. Failed the whole town.”

She was in high school when the anorexia started, though back then no one called it that. For two years she sat at the dinner table picking at the pot roast and potatoes and corn and cottage cheese, then excused herself to tie on tennis shoes and slip out the back door to run six miles along the county roads that framed the farm. At night she went to the bathroom, locked the door, and gobbled down ex-lax. I later saw photos of her from that time, alarmingly thin, showing the dim, weary eyes of the underfed; always with a thin smile, though, maybe for the benefit of whoever was taking the pictures. When she finally started eating again, at seventeen, she fell off the other side of the fence, gaining more than eighty pounds in under a year.

“People didn't know what to say. I went to see the pastor. He patted me on the shoulder, said I looked good with a few pounds on.”

Then one night, in some dark bottom where even now I can't imagine her, out of energy and ideas, she choked down a handful of sleeping pills.

She woke up in the hospital, her parents standing beside the bed, the two of them worried and fumbling, trying to be encouraging. Her father looking slightly embarrassed. But more than that, like he was about to cry.

“There was a lot of love. They couldn't get it, though. But then neither could I.”

There was no more purging, but she kept running, still using the six-mile loops along the cornfields and woodlots near her family's farm to hold on to some feeling of sanity. And there was therapy, too—lots of hours spent trying to figure out what she wanted and, in particular, what she wanted for herself. She also started perusing what was for nature lovers a kind of underground reading list of poets and scientists and storytellers: Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Loren Eiseley, John Hay, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Edward Abbey. Works that invited her to go outside and reconsider things she'd long been told weren't open to reconsideration. Over time, things got a little better.

Around that late-night fire in Utah, she also talked about going back to Kentucky as a counselor for the Girl Scouts. And how, from then on, the work seemed different—how there was this feeling of seeing smiles on the faces of girls who didn't have much to smile about. Poor girls. Abused girls.

“They didn't see going outside as a vacation, or as some kind of time out from school. It was more about making peace with the world.” The fact that the woods didn't judge, didn't condemn, didn't expect anything, was never lost on them. All they wanted—and by then, all Jane really wanted, too—was to find a place that would let them in. And nature was always willing.

But there was something else, too. The natural world, even at a summer camp, was uncontrollable, unpredictable. And yet unlike in the daily lives of those girls, here the unpredictability
was pure, utterly lacking in agendas. Nature had no intentions. It might sound odd, but more than a few of the struggling girls would, on first arriving, interpreted a cold, rainy day as some kind of punishment for their shortcomings. In a few days, though, they put such ideas away. They began to see that not every discomfort was their fault. They didn't want the bugs to be biting, but there they were. They would've preferred the headwinds to stop pushing against them while out paddling in the lake. But unlike when they had such thoughts at home, out in nature those kinds of wishes seemed a waste of time. Things just were as they were. And that difference made it easier to start thinking about their own lives differently—things they could do something about, versus things that for the time being they had to learn to accept. There was enormous relief in that lesson. Powerful not just for those campers, but for Jane herself, who used it as a motivation to start looking for her next big outdoor experience.

Nine months after Jane's hospitalization, an older cousin with some strong back-to-the-land urges of her own happened to mention a program she'd heard about called Outward Bound. Jane liked the sound of it, sent off for a brochure. Among the saturated Kodachrome photos from the various courses the school offered were shots of southern Utah. She said it looked distant and outlandish beyond imagining. Bereft of any trace of the world where people measured each other by the straightness of their corn rows; absent, for that matter, every single ingredient she'd ever been told went into the making of a worthwhile landscape.