“Indians scattered
On dawn’s highway, bleeding,
Ghosts crowd the young child’s
Fragile, eggshell mind.”
-Jim Morrison
Chapter 1
In the spring of the year that all the things had happened, Don knew he needed to return to somewhere inside, like all men do when they feel the pain of life.
The world around him pressed down and into him, forcing outward skill back into his mind to leach through his marrow and be swollen and throbbing there. His soul was convulsed by this so that his dreams, contracting, lying dormant inside of him burned his heart and evaporated back out to return to the acrid Western air from whence they came.
The fact that the things were true made him rage at the world. He could no longer see real beauty as he had seen it when he was young, but he didn’t want to stop believing that things could be beautiful. He looked for the sun each morning and, when he saw it, was able to believe again. When all the things were done, he understood that the sun had been the same one the whole time.
All of Don’s degrees amounted to expertise in making things up, which he valued deeply, but felt resentment toward when he could not make his dreams escape life.
He wondered if any wisdom during these times had crept in and inoculated to bring him to this moment, and if this were a moment of clarity. Don thought things out in little compartmentalized fragments of who he was. Despite the sharpness of each piece, they all overlapped and blurred when he tried to use any of them to figure something out.
Sitting in the recliner one morning, writing in his notebook and drinking the black coffee, Don had seen this about himself. He wondered if any of the fragments could work with each other to create one clear picture of how he should live another day. He thought of the short walks he had taken with his dad down the halls of the cancer wing at San Francisco. The short walks were now with his brother, leading their mom’s dog down the country road together, his illness ruthlessly suppressing life’s natural motion.
Don was determined to not make his own death obsolete, or for nothing. He had seen the many dreams of his father fade away in the tide of death. The dreams never died but they had been clouded by Fate. In the storm that came and caused disillusion, these dreams precipitated and had weight. Don considered doing what he saw in these dreams, for the power of the dreams were so strong to Don that he believed that their purity was stronger than what was real. But the only thing Don could understand of his father’s dreams was the need to see everything. It all weighed on Don and made his bones cold. But it woke him up and cleaned him off.
There was no reason for Don to live the way he had been, or the way he had always planned. The weight was a scourge that pulled away the shell from the bones so the blood could breathe. The day before Easter, Don decided to be alive.
Don tugged the last two straps of the pack tightly, just like he had envisioned. But instead of the heroic ascent up the stairs to meet his wife for an ambivalent farewell, with his Spartan supplies, Mara had heard him packing and knocking things off the shelves in the storeroom and came down to see what was up.
He was in the basement sorting through the camping gear as he thought about how he would approach Mara, and how he would explain what he had to do.
He pulled the old green frame backpack off the hook on the wall and thought of all the trips this pack had taken. Don unzipped all the pockets to rummage through them, and see if he could find anything in there from his past that would give him reassurance. All he could think about was how every other trip he had taken this green pack on had been rooted in innocence and a sense of naïve adventure—the kind of true wandering that grows from the ignorance of youth.
Mara stood in the doorway. “What are you doing?” Don looked down and blinked. He pretended to check the pack again, to make sure that everything was just so. Don sighed—he knew how not to hurt her, so he took the moment to give her the cue to know that he had already put a lot of thought into this.
“I need to do something.”
“Okay,” she said, leaning back.
It is said that opposites attract. At times, when they are too far away, the waves between them are too great to let them know each other. In the case of Don and Mara there was initial disdain in college when they became too close. It took time to see the way each other worked.
After being in the same places got them acclimated, Mara saw the deep feeling that Don had in everything and, when he saw her as a child and was there with her and could be in dreams together, both of them smelling the breezes that can only be kept safe in the hearts of people, and breathed again when the time was right, she loved him for it. For that, and the other things—the passion, the dreams, the knowledge, and the stark capacity for suffering.
“I can’t keep this up. I need to take a trip.”
Mara’s eyes were fixed on him. Her mouth opened a bit, but she didn’t say anything. She could tell Don had put some thought into this, so she let him finish.
“I’ve been trying to push through. You know that. My brother—all of it. I don’t want this to be one of those ‘I-just-need-to-be-alone-right-now’ things. I don’t think it is.”
Mara nodded. She had felt her husband’s soul through the years as it growled deeply, and slept at times, bled profusely at others.
It had taken awhile for Don to see what he must do, but he got his wish of seeing one thing clearly, and he did it. Two weeks prior, he had parked his truck in the driveway and walked inside. He stood in his bedroom and pulled the cord to the blinds. He looked outside and down the street. The decision had already been made under the surface of his thoughts and his cognizance of it was merely an assurance of what must be done.
Life before then for Don had been intermittent visions, dreams and memories of mountains and streams of his youth and the smell of alfalfa in the fields of his home, and the force behind it all was a god who gave and took away. His father had taken him to these places and died in the middle of showing him what they mean.
Looking at Mara now, he knew that he wasn’t a monster and that his wife understood him and loved him despite it. Knowing he had to tell her, he dreamed that the shock with which the idea had struck him would carry enough momentum so that she wouldn’t need to say a word. He had imagined coming up the stairs with his pack fully loaded, with her stoically following him to the truck for a tearless and knowing embrace. As he thought these things he saw that he was abusing her kindness already in his mind and knew the biggest deal was to not hurt her.
“I need perspective. I get a little here and there. We’ve been able to get away, and I’ve felt refreshed after. But there’s part of me that needs something specific. You know I work best when I can be alone, and cope that way. I feel like this is that, times a thousand. A capstone of all those times I needed to be by myself. I think this could change me. What do you think?”
Mara took a deep breath, and looked across the room where the green backpack had hung for six years. “Well,” she said as she finally walked in and sat on a stool, “There are some things to figure out first, like what you want to get out of this.” She cupped her hands between her knees and stared at the floor. “Or how you’ll know that it’s what you really need.” Don leaned against the freezer and sighed deeply. Mara pursed her lips. “I can tell this is important. I know this isn’t just a knee-jerk reaction. But, I have to be honest. I don’t know how this would work.”
This trip would be different. Don had a better idea of what he was running away from. Age had taught him by now that he could not outrun whatever was after him. Unlike his youthful days, he had to think of the irresponsibility of running.
There was no single place where the transformation had happened, but, one night a few weeks before, Don had stood at his kitchen sink and stared at the Guinness sign hanging over the faucet. As he stared at the yellow corner of that sign, the crimson paint covering the rest of the kitchen made a frozen piece of time where Don saw his present and future at once.
Don’s dreams had always left a residue of darkness that he couldn’t explain. People he secretly wanted to trust would confide in him. He would dream of dying but at the last minute survive and not know why. He could never understand the reason in his dreams for being kept alive or knowing what he did.
But in that piece of frozen time, he had felt a thing seep into him that would not be erased again.
The morning after that, Don had been resolute. He needed to figure out what change had taken place and how to use it. He always worried that he would never get the exhilaration back from adolescence.
In college he had found himself quickly. He had found the values of his childhood amplified in the religious life on campus. When he wrote his lecture notes on the three-holed, perforated paper, he convinced himself that the religious thinkers of history mostly agreed with how he was raised.
He got more sacramental than he would have guessed. Riding on the wake of his dad’s departure had drawn him to the crest where he thought he could see reasons for awhile. But when he came down the other side and saw that he was still human, he had lost momentum and saw for the first time that he had never seen the depths of life. Looking back, he had done it with passion and so would not flagellate himself for it.
