For a farewell gift my graduate students got me a bottle of Four Roses and a snakebite kit. I had told them about the trip, of course, and had made a running joke of my total lack of experience with (and likely ineptitude for) camping, which had coalesced into a vocal fear of rattlesnakes, which before long didn’t seem to be a joke anymore, just something I was afraid of.
My last day of teaching was May 2, a Wednesday. Since school was over and I wasn’t giving any finals, I paid my round of farewell visits and left Hattiesburg that Friday. I left by the same road I’d come in on, I-10, headed east to Pensacola, to spend the week with my in-laws. Over the past year I’d seen quite a bit of them, to the point where Amanda and her sister had taken to joking that I was now the favorite daughter. I sat on their back deck overlooking a canal that feeds into the sound that feeds into the Gulf of Mexico, and filed my final grades from my laptop. I unpacked and repacked the camping gear, took the car in for an oil change.
* * *
—
Pensacola to New Orleans. Amanda’s folks come too, in their own car. I pick up Amanda at the airport. We have dinner with her parents downtown.
The next day we get up early, meet Amanda’s folks at Cafe Du Monde for beignets and farewells. We are the first people through the door at Central Grocery when it opens. We buy a muffuletta and a bag of Zapp’s to share for lunch.
New Orleans to Austin. I drive the first leg. A drizzle as we work our way out of the Quarter and toward I-10 West. Once you get outside the city, the highway turns into a pair of bayou bridges. We pass an exploded big rig on the eastbound side, its cab intact but its whole load gone, the remains of the sidewalls scorched and shredded like the spent shell of a firework. We whip past it so fast it feels like a hallucination, but the dead-stopped eastbound traffic jam snakes on for twenty miles, proof that we saw what we saw. What happened to that truck? What was its cargo and were there fatalities? We never find out. But I can still see it, the blasted-out rig sagging into itself, lightly smoking in gray rain.
Austin to Big Bend. Another early morning, another eight-hour drive. We gas up in Marathon, where the huge blue sky goes gray-black, heralding the storm that catches us out on the two-lane road, where it is flat to the horizon, and wood signs warning of flash floods show the high-water mark above five feet. It seems both impossible and obvious that this whole region was once a shallow sea. When the weather breaks we can see hills and oil pumps. Lightning in the distance. We are headed for a campsite in the Chisos Mountains, our first night out in the open air. We arrive around five and make camp. It goes better than I was expecting. By seven we are walking a short trail that leads to a viewpoint we’ve heard is an ideal spot to catch the sunset.
Trouble is I’m a little paranoid about what happens if we’re caught out here after dark alone. Bears, mountain lions—how long have we been walking? Why haven’t we seen anyone else? Am I wearing the wrong shoes? These are sneakers, not my hiking boots. Amanda puts a hand up. “Snake,” she says, “in the path.” I edge closer, close enough to see it: four or five feet long, pale yellow, basking in the last heat of the day. When he flinches I take off running back the way we came. I don’t go far, just far enough to calm down, and Amanda mercifully decides that we won’t continue on. Later we’ll find out that we were one turn and one hundred feet from the promised viewpoint. As we trudge back toward camp we pass several groups of people, half of them in jeans and flip-flops. Despite my meltdown, this was only ever “hiking” in the loosest sense.
I do not sleep well. I lay awake in my very comfortable sleeping bag on my very comfortable sleeping pad, straining to hear the bears and mountain lions over the sound of my heart in my ears.
A ten-mile hike in the Chisos Basin. We fix a hearty camp breakfast on the Coleman stove that my father-in-law gave us, then set out for the trailhead, our packs loaded up with water, sandwiches, snacks, bug stuff, sunscreen. Unlike the trail on which I melted down yesterday, this is a serious hike. Sun exposure, elevation changes—we even have walking poles! I worry that I’m unprepared, both physically and mentally, which is doubtlessly true, but after last night’s poor showing I don’t want to embarrass myself a second time, or to ruin this experience for my wife by ruining it for myself. Today is May 15. If he were still alive, today would be Dad’s sixty-sixth birthday. I don’t want to disappoint him either.
It is a great hike. Happily, I hold my own. I have fun! We appreciate many scenic vistas and are followed for a while by a curious deer. We’re back at camp by midday and grab the car to go exploring elsewhere in the park. We drive to the Rio Grande, gaze over into Mexico, hike some more. I know that I will sleep tonight.
Big Bend to Las Cruces. White Sands first thing the next morning, then onward west to the Gila National Forest, where we’ll stay at a designated Dark Sky Campground, far enough away from light pollution that you can stargaze with the naked eye. At the campsite, there are concrete pads for setting up telescopes, and you’re not allowed to have fires or use flashlights after dark. We set our headlamps to the approved red-light setting, tuck in to a cold supper of charcuterie and crackers. We break the seal on the bottle of Four Roses my students got me. I had been saving it for this. We turn off our headlamps. We spend hours watching the stars come out, tracing the constellations, spotting planets and shooting stars. There are coyotes howling in the distance, a wild and eerie sound, but not (I surprise myself saying this) a frightening one. Amanda wakes me at 3 A.M. and we climb out of the tent. The Milky Way is visible. We stand in the chilly dark and hold each other and stare out into the universe. This could be a dream but it isn’t. Or if it is a dream it is a dream come true.
New Mexico to Arizona: the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert. We arrive at the Grand Canyon in the late afternoon, our first campsite where there isn’t a burn ban in effect. Between climate change and the current president, Amanda wasn’t kidding when she said we should visit these parks now, because they might not be here in a few years’ time. I build the fire and she makes her famous nachos in the cast-iron Dutch oven. In the morning there are elk all around our tent.
South Kaibab Trail, six miles out and back, which is doable, but the elevation gains are what get you. It’s equal to walking down—and then back up—the Empire State Building. I get dehydrated and irrational on the return leg. I storm ahead, wanting only for it to be over. Amanda tells me later that I was in such a bad mood she actually started to think about what she’d do if it turned out I’d taken the car and left. But I’m at the trailhead waiting for her, drinking water and becoming human again. Being mad at your pain doesn’t make it any less painful. Hot, cramped, sore feet, headache—you can make these things worse by dwelling on them or marginally better by not dwelling on them, but the distance to the end of the path is the same either way. Amanda knows this. She’s a runner like Dad was, and it was running that taught her. He knew it too. I am trying to learn it. Will I? Remains to be seen. I did not learn it that day. But perhaps it is enough, for now, to be restored to civility, to a state where I can be a partner, enjoy a vacation, take a walk.
We do take another walk, find another trail, not nearly as steep as South Kaibab, but longer, and we get lost so by the time we find ourselves at a lodge with a restaurant, it is full dark and we’ve walked fifteen and a half miles—38,430 steps, if you believe the app on my phone. Having climbed the equivalent of 135 flights of stairs. When our beers arrive we weep for joy.
Grand Canyon to Nipton, California. Nipton to Sequoia National Park, then onward to a campsite in Kings Canyon, high in the redwoods, where the air is so damp it takes forty-five minutes to get a fire going. We don’t need a fire, but I want one. I want to be able to make one, and to sit by it and sip bourbon and to have this memory of us sitting by a roaring fire sipping bourbon. I don’t care how stupid that sounds. I stack and restack the wood, stuff more starter into the nooks and crannies. Eventually, I get what I want.
Yosemite. Amanda and I both came here on family vacations when we were children. My family came in 1991, when I was nine and my sister was three. We visited my aunt Francine, who lived in San Francisco at the time, and then we came out here for a few days. The money for such a trip had not been come by easily or spent lightly; it was important to Dad that we have an experience that justified the expense. We were never a family that bought souvenirs, but here he sprang for a panoramic poster, the famous Ansel Adams photograph that spans from Half Dome to El Capitan. It hung in our house until we sold it in 2004, a reminder of the best family vacation we ever took. (Less often remarked upon was that this was one of the only family vacations we ever took.) Dad loved this place. He loved taking his morning run out here. He loved the hiking and the mountains and the primeval trees and the wonder in his children’s eyes. If I could have made the arrangements, if my sister could have joined us, I would have scattered his ashes here.
The next day we’ve planned a hike through Yosemite Valley. It’ll be sixteen and a half miles by the time we’re finished, the last and longest hike of the trip. I’m ready for it. As we’re finishing breakfast and getting ready to set out, my phone buzzes. It’s my friend Joshua. He has texted me a picture of the final paragraph of Sabbath’s Theater. I open up the New York Times app and see that Philip Roth has died.
We leave the park early the next day, skirt around San Francisco, and head for Marin, where we’re staying with friends. Tonight is the first night we’ve slept indoors since Nipton, and before that, Las Cruces.
My friend Peter, one of the three rent-payers at the college house we called Abraham, drives over from Oakland to meet us. He’s been a union organizer since the day we graduated, is an expert on state politics and the machinery of city hall. Of all the people I still know (or know of) from my college days, nobody else is living their leftist convictions as fully as he is. The rest of us have made our compromises, or redefined what our convictions are. Some of us went into finance or law or medicine. A few of us are teaching. Some of us sank down from train-hopping and dumpster-diving into working-class alienation and stints in prison. A few of us overdosed or killed ourselves. Peter gets up every day and does what he can for the labor movement. But today he has the day off and we are grateful for the chance to be passengers for a change, so we let him drive us out to Point Reyes Station to visits our friends’ bookstore and the Point Reyes Lighthouse.
On the last day of the trip, we take Highway 1 from Marin all the way to where it doglegs inland and tees off in a connection to the 101, which we stay on as far as Crescent City, where we get our last glimpse of the coast before 199 leads us through the Rogue River–Siskiyou National Forest and on to Grants Pass, back in Oregon now, where we pick up I-5, the road that will take us the rest of the way.
* * *
—
Where does this story end? Should it have ended a few pages ago, with my wife and I holding each other beneath the Milky Way? Or earlier still, at the end of the chapter before this one, with the last time I saw Dad? Should it end tomorrow, when we wake up to find that the one thing we left on the backseat of the car (a small backpack full of books) attracted the notice of a junkie who smashed a window to get it, mere hours after the poor Nissan finished a journey that had taken us clear across the country without suffering so much as a scratch or a flat?
Should the book end on June 29, 2018, my thirty-sixth birthday, the same day we close on our house? Should it end July 11, when we move in? On August 11, nearly a year to the day after I drove to Mississippi alone, on a visit back to Nashville where the family is gathered for my cousin Ava’s bat mitzvah? The same synagogue where, in August 2019, David Berman’s funeral will be held. What if the last thing you saw was me up on the bimah, having been asked by Ava’s parents to read a few words from Isaiah to help introduce her haftorah portion?
And all your children shall be disciples of the Lord,
And great shall be the happiness of your children…
Should the book end on August 28, the first day of the new school year, with me driving down to Salem, Oregon, where I’ve got a one-year gig as a visiting professor at a liberal arts school? It’s not a tenured job—it’s not even renewable for a second year—but it’s enough to keep me living at home, in my house with my wife, for a while. After that, who knows what will happen? But this is now, and for now all it has to be is enough. And it is enough.
None of these are where the book ends. The book ends the night of May 26, technically very early in the morning on May 27, let’s say two hours before the junkie smashes the window. It’s 1 A.M., maybe 1:30. I’m driving Dad’s car. Amanda’s sleeping. The Stones are on the stereo, loud enough to keep me awake, not so loud as to wake her. I am exiting the highway, turning into our neighborhood. The GPS is off because I know where I am. I’m praying for a parking spot right outside our building, and my prayer is answered. I parallel park and cut the engine, and the music cuts with it. In the new silence and stillness, Amanda stirs. Her eyes blink open. And this is where the book ends. It might have ended at other moments, or in other ways, some maybe better or worse, but we’ll never know. Life goes on but this story is finished. It ends the moment that we both know we’ve made it home.
For my sister, Melanie
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my mother, my sister, my wife, and my in-laws for their love and support; for crucial insights, tough questions, and endless patience; and for their willingness to be portrayed in these pages.
Thank you to Dorothy Nemetz and John Todd for trusting me with Eli’s story. And to Anika Jade, whose story is her own to tell.
Thank you to my readers, whose generosity with their time, attention, and expertise improved this manuscript at every stage of its development: Jami Attenberg, Joshua Cohen, Adam Ross, Eva Talmadge, Adam Wilson, Nell Zink.
Thank you to Noah Ballard, and everyone at Curtis Brown.
Thank you to Caitlin McKenna, Emma Caruso, and everyone at Random House.
Thank you to Literary Arts, the Oregon Literary Fellowships, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, for the provision of time, space, and resources in support of this work.
Thank you to Samuel Nicholson for several things, but especially for the phone call while I was driving across the Florida Panhandle.
Thank you to Hilary Bell, Jennifer Brewington, Adam Clay, Stephanie DeGooyer, Wes Enzinna, Sarah Gerard, Leslie Jamison, Marie Myung-Ok Lee, David Lehman, Peter Masiak, Amanda Peters, Ed Skoog, and Sam Stephenson.
Thank you to my colleagues and students at the Pratt Institute, Butler University, the University of Southern Mississippi, and Willamette University—all my homes away from home.
BY JUSTIN TAYLOR
Riding with the Ghost
Flings
The Gospel of Anarchy
Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Justin Taylor is the author of the short-story collections Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and Flings, and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The Sewanee Review, among other publications. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
justindtaylor.net
Twitter: @my19thcentury
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