Raising Wild

by Michael P. Branch

  In the wake of the fire I remembered little of what had happened during it, and so I’ve had to resort to physical evidence and to other people’s accounts to reconstruct what actually happened that night. I have indelibly sharp memories of certain things: my first glimpse of the flames leaping out of a hole in the floor, the cozy look of our hearth as I passed it in full sprint, the bizarre sluggishness with which water fell from the tub faucet into the bucket. I remember with odd lucidity the sensation of the smooth plastic grip of the bucket handle in my fist, but I do not remember how it came to be there. Because I must have retrieved the bucket from the garage, that is what I have told you I did. The truth is that I do not know how it came to be in my hand. Perhaps it was given to me by an angel or by a ghost. I know what happened that night only in the way we know black holes—by the meticulous extrapolation of data that remain unverifiable by direct observation. I do not know about the fire in the same sense that I know about things I remember.

  During the three years that have passed since the fire, pieces of that night have come back to me, a flash here and a flash there, vanishingly thin, crescent-moon slivers of memory often accompanied by powerful emotion. These memories do not arrive in either priority or temporal order. Rather, they are loose pieces of a jumble, fragments that emerge randomly from the bottomless black box of my brain. And many things remain shrouded in the mystery of blackout. To this day I have no memory of pulling my truck out of the garage or telling Eryn to get the girls into it and off the hill. I learned this part of the story from her later, when she also confessed her fear in that moment. “What if that had been the last time I ever saw you, Bubba?” she asks. It is a question I cannot answer and do not try to. When I later discovered five spent fire extinguisher canisters on the floor of my burned-over scribble den—several of which lay beneath the writing table that held my laptop, which was utterly destroyed by heat, smoke, and ash—I wondered how they came to rest there. I had a memory of using two extinguishers, not five, yet there they were. I recall hurling buckets of water many times but only remember filling the bucket once, and I couldn’t say whether I ran my alarm shuttle ten times or a hundred. Nor do I recollect the number or type of emergency vehicles that had arrived at my burning house by the time I walked out of it. That is information I recovered from the girls’ close observations. The story I have told you is in fact a composite narrative and a reconstruction. If it remains conjectural and elliptical, it is nevertheless as accurate as I am able to make it.

  This partial memory loss has been disquieting, but also disorienting has been the fact that my memories of this important event are not only fragmentary but also disjointed, wrenched from the usual calibration of temporal flow. Some things that occurred within seconds in real time still feel to me as if they took much longer, while other events that took hours feel as if they were almost instantaneous. For example, I had guessed the emergency vehicle response time at well over an hour until I was informed that in real time it was only twenty-six minutes. In my memory my father was with me from the time I walked out of the house, while in real time he did not arrive until much later. This experience, and my difficult attempt to recover it, has introduced me to a concept of time that is disturbingly elastic, subjective, and unreliable. For me, “real time” is considerably less real than it once was.

  Even more disturbing is the way the fire has challenged my sense of myself as a father. I love my children more than life, and I hope always to be their protector. I want to remove risk of harm from my daughters’ home environment. And I want to believe that when a bad thing does happen, I can arrive at an explanation that doesn’t resort to terms like “bad luck” or “one in a million.” The fire statistics I later read suggest that, on average, one child in the United States dies in a house fire every single day. Behind that cold statistic is someone’s son or daughter, somebody’s Hannah or Caroline. Well, sure, we might think, but how likely is it that something like that would happen to me? I now understand that this question of probability is the wrong one to ask. I can recall a time when one-in-a-million odds of danger sounded reassuring. That’s no longer the case.

  If, through no fault of my own, my children’s lives can be put at risk by some unidentifiable, inexplicable pinhole, how then am I to keep them safe in this troubled and dangerous world? I understand rattlers and scorpions, blizzards and flash floods, and even wildfires, but I have no battle plan for pinholes—no certainty that I can protect my girls from harm in a universe whose fabric is shot through with invisible, long-odds hazards against which no amount of preparation will ever be sufficient. I feel the prick of those pinholes all around me. But what threat should I throw my little bucket of water on next?

  I’ve called parenting an art of improvisation. Much of the ad-libbing we do involves telling our children that everything is going to be fine when we haven’t the slightest idea whether it will be fine or not. This “fake it ’til you make it” aspect of being a parent is imperative, because nothing is more important to a child than reassurance. But the poignancy of our sanguine assertions of security weighs more heavily on me than it once did, because my sense of our perpetual vulnerability is now so visceral. How are we to assure our children that we can keep them safe in a world of perils when there is so much evidence to the contrary? Eryn told the girls that “Dad always knows what to do,” and it was exactly the right thing for her to have told them in that moment of crisis. But Dad did not have everything under control. Far from it. I was being humbled by the unbridled wildness of fire.

  It may be because our memories of traumatic events are so unreliable that writing is widely acknowledged to be an effective technique in the treatment of stress-induced trauma. Beginning with groundbreaking work in the late 1980s, hundreds of studies have investigated the positive health effects of writing about emotionally difficult experiences. Widely replicated and validated, the results of these studies show clearly that the health benefits of this kind of writing are not only psychological but also physical. Blood tests employed in this research show that those who write about their traumatic experiences develop stronger immune systems, and other tracking data show that these writers feel less pain, use fewer medications, require fewer trips to the doctor, and function better in the daily tasks associated with their roles as workers, spouses, and parents. People who write about traumatic events are a great deal more resilient than are trauma victims who do not create a narrative of their experience.

  Although the health benefits of writing about trauma are well established, the underlying mechanisms that make this writing so effective remain uncertain. Some researchers posit that writing allows people a safe distance from which to consider and process their most stressful experiences. Others believe that making an event into a story transforms experience into something that can then be let go of. It is also likely that writing triggers a creative form of imaginative reexperiencing, one that, unlike the traumatic event itself, remains under the writer’s control. Whatever the reason, we do know that therapeutic writing is effective in relieving trauma-induced stress and that stress correlates strongly with a wide range of health problems.

  The novelist John Berger’s incisive observation that the work of a writer is “to struggle to give meaning to experience” has special importance when the experience is a traumatic one. And yet the struggle to make sense—perhaps even to make art—of a difficult experience is foundational to the work of any storyteller. Aren’t our lives always elliptical, our memories partial, the ultimate significance of our days uncertain? That is the adventure of experience, its beauty and its mystery. I can testify that fire, which has shaped our home landscape, has now also shaped me. And while I still buck, split, and haul the fuelwood that warms our home, my complicated relationship with fire reminds me that we abide with a wildness that can never be fully comprehended. The story of this fire, like the story of a life, must ultimately remain a narrative reconstruction, however fastidiously it may be told.

 
; As a writer myself, I believe the nearly magical positive health effects of narrating trauma must be related to the way telling a story naturally encourages us to wrest cohesion from the disparate, recalcitrant fragments of our life experience. To write is necessarily to fill in gaps where memory fails or information is missing, to reconcile inconsistent facts and impressions, to fabricate a discernible narrative arc, to weave a tale that expresses significance, or at least to craft a narrative artifact from which meaning might later be made. Writing must also be performed in a specific voice, from a particular point of view, and thus represents an important choice on the part of the writer—a choice that the writer lacked while living through the event he or she now struggles to understand and represent. For even the teller of a true tale is a narrator, and every narrator must also be a character. Essential to the writer’s work, then, are meaningful decisions about who we are and who we will become. I write not to report what has occurred but to transform what has occurred into a story that makes more sense to me than does reality, which I often find ambiguous and uninstructive. What scientists call “trauma writing” I simply call “writing.”

  So who, finally, is the protagonist of this fire story? He could be a man who was prepared for any eventuality, who evacuated his family safely, who owned five fire extinguishers and knew where to find them and how to use them. That is the resourceful narrator. Or he could be a courageous man, one who refused to flee in the face of danger, whose bravery saved his family’s home. That is the heroic narrator. Then again he may be a man who views the outcome of the fire as a miracle, a blessing, an act of salvation perhaps associated with divine intervention. That is the faithful narrator. Alternatively, he could be a man overwhelmed by circumstances beyond his control, who was overcome by an unforeseen hazard, and who is now immobilized by fear. That is the powerless narrator. Or perhaps he is a hostile man who can neither forgive nor forget, who lashes out blindly at the injustice visited by fire upon his family. That is the angry narrator. Conversely, he may be a philosophical man, one who understands the universe to be comprised of a series of events that remain beyond human ken. That is the accepting narrator.

  My narrator is only moderately resourceful, and if he is not quite weak, he is far from heroic. He is neither angry nor fully accepting. He places his faith in his family and in this hard desert and in other wild blessings unrecognizable to orthodoxy. But as the teller of my own tale I am empowered to choose who my narrator will be, and after a good deal of consideration of this important question I’ve finally made my decision. My narrator is . . . a narrator. The man in my story is one who somehow finds a way to tell it. He is a man who must turn an experience over slowly in his hands until he at last discovers the angle from which it shines. My narrator can braid a rope from sentences and cast it down to himself in a dark well of fire; he can climb to safety by grasping at the knots of his own words. I am crafting these sentences in the same scribble den where I encountered the wildness of fire within the sanctuary of home. I am remembering and transforming, braiding and knotting, climbing hand over hand, word by word, from the fire toward the light.

  Hannah and Caroline, you are too young to read this unfinished fire story, but someday you will. And when you do, I want you to remember this: my narrator is above all and forever your father. The truth is that he is not a man who always knows what to do. But he will walk with you, beneath these gorgeous, flaming pinholes of light burning in the unknowable darkness of our high desert night.

  Coda

  The V.E.C.T.O.R.L.O.S.S. Project

  During the winter of the big blizzard, Hannah was not yet six years old, while Caroline was just two. It was mid-January when the first storm hit, dumping nearly three feet of snow. Another foot fell a day later and almost as much again a few days after that. By the time the weather finally cleared, we were buried. Because we live so remotely, we enjoy no public maintenance of the terrible dirt road whose dead end leads to our home. Worse still is our own half-mile-long driveway, which is slick with perilous caliche mud whenever it isn’t packed with snow and ice. Back in those days we had no tractor, and so a big winter storm meant staying put and waiting it out until a few sunny desert winter afternoons could render the driveway passable.

  Anticipating the arrival of the first storm, we had parked our old pickup at the foot of the driveway down at the dirt road. If a sympathetic neighbor with heavy equipment cleared the road, allowing us to chain up and make it to town, we would simply hike the half mile up to our house for a day or two until our hilly, curvy driveway melted out enough to offer safe passage. To our surprise, however, a rare cold front settled in, and that day or two turned into a solid three weeks, during which every trip up and down the half-mile driveway had to be made on foot.

  We became quite resourceful during those three unusual weeks. I snowshoed groceries up the hill in a backpack that I learned to load as quickly and safely as a store clerk packs a sack. I switched from beer to whiskey to reduce the haul weight of our supplies. When I had to come or go from the house before daybreak or after nightfall, I snowshoed by the beam of my headlamp, following the route of my own deepening tracks. If the snow became too icy, I resorted to strapping crampons onto my boots. When shuttling the kids, Eryn would often carry little Caroline in a backpack, while I pulled Hannah along in the girls’ blue two-kid toboggan. Because I sometimes had to haul both girls up and down the hill myself, I devised a harness system by which their toboggan was connected by ropes to straps that I wore crossed over my chest and shoulders. Using this arrangement, I learned to walk in an entirely new way, leaning into the hill, driving hard with the toes of my boots and the tips of my ski poles as I pulled the girls the half mile up to the house each afternoon. In the mornings I reversed my route, using my harness and ropes to ease their sled down in front of me so as to keep it from schussing away. I soon became as adept as a plow horse, maintaining my rhythm and balance as I slid Hannah and Caroline down to the truck each morning and towed them up to the house every afternoon. For their part, the girls devised a system of their own: Caroline sat between Hannah’s knees, with big sister’s arms wrapped around her for a “seat belt.”

  We felt quite isolated during that time, when our home existed as a desert island floating high in a shoreless sea of snow. Huddled by the wood stove, with the electricity sometimes on and sometimes lost, Eryn and I wondered aloud when the sun would return. It was hard work hauling stove wood through the deep, wind-driven drifts, and each night my aching lower back reminded me that every loaf of bread and pint of rye, each library book and school project that came or went from the house, required an arduous trek. But what I remember most vividly from that time is how much fun we had with Hannah and Caroline, who were convinced that coming and going from home by toboggan was as good as life could get. The girls soon referred to me not as Dad but rather as Snow Donkey, and as the days turned into weeks they began to despair that warmer weather would deprive them of an experience that had become the highlight of their winter.

  One afternoon, while I was grunting my way uphill with my giggling progeny in tow, Hannah offered a comment that captured the novelty of the entire three-week adventure. “I asked around at school today,” she told me. “Do you know how many other kids get to start every day by sledding down a mountain? None!”

  “You’re right, Bug. This is pretty cool, isn’t it?” I admitted. “Maybe we should do something special to make sure we never forget how fun this was. It’s hard to imagine right now, but someday all this snow is going to be gone.”

  “How about if I show CC how to make a snow angel?” Hannah suggested.

  “Bug, show me the angel!” Caroline replied, enthusiastically. With that Hannah took her little sister’s hands, helped her up from the toboggan, and then plopped her down in a spot that, if not for several feet of snow, would have been in the middle of our driveway. There she splayed Caroline’s snow-booted feet and mittened hands until the kid looked like a four-armed, bright purp
le starfish. Then she helped Caroline to flap her arms and legs up and down in the snow, after which Caroline took over and did plenty of energetic flapping of her own. There was laughter all around, and when Hannah and I each grabbed a mitten and lifted Caroline back to her feet, we discovered that she had created a striking little work of snow art. Where her arms had flown, the snow did in fact resemble wings in motion, while the pattern left by her flailing legs impressed the snow with twin marks that looked like a pair of ringing Christmas bells.

  Within a week the snow was gone and with it any visible sign of Caroline’s angel. But if her snow art was short-lived, my recollection of it has not been. In the many years since that blizzard I have walked over the angel spot many hundreds of times, and I never pass it without reflecting on that beautiful winter’s day and the small ritual of appreciation we devised to celebrate it. Caroline’s snow art was ephemeral, but my memory of it is indelible. Every trace of her angel is gone, but the angel is not.

  A storied landscape is one in which memorable associations have been forged between specific places and the meaningful experiences we’ve had in those places. Looking out across our home desert, I see layers upon layers of these associations—strata of rich experiences now so textured, so interwoven with the land, as to have created the fabric of a shared life. Here is where Hannah saw her first pronghorn. There is where fire crested the ridge. Here is where I discovered the paw prints of that wayward Sierra bear. There is where the redtail dropped a live rattlesnake from the cloudless sky. Here is the juniper where the great horned owls nested last year. There is the spot where Caroline became, for one cherished, unforgettable moment, an angel.