by Katie Arnold
My heart skips the way it used to when I was a girl and we’d come back after a long absence. What was waiting for us? What had changed while we were away? We were gone far more than we were here. Always I had so many questions.
Now, at last, I see it: the wooden sign, HUNTLY STAGE, hand-carved in large black letters, hanging from its post. We ease in and creep between two long rock walls overhung by persimmon trees, giving way to grass on both sides. The field to our right slopes up a long hill that hides the house, until it doesn’t, and there it is, rising right out of the grass, all the lights on, calling us back.
* * *
—
I’ve been coming to Huntly Stage since 1978, after my parents divorced and my father bought the property with his girlfriend, Lesley. I was six that year. Through much of our childhood living in New Jersey with our mother and stepfather, Meg and I visited the farm four times a year; this dwindled to once or twice a year after we went to college, and considerably less when we got jobs and, later still, had children of our own. A quick computation yields a disappointing sum—fifty-two weeks, a year of my life at most.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Dad, Meg, and me, summer 1978
Because of the infrequency of our visits, Huntly Stage has never felt entirely like home, yet it’s as familiar to me as any place I’ve ever known. I can close my eyes and summon it in my mind: a two-story wooden house overlooking twenty-seven acres of fields and streams and forest. After a summer rain, no greener place exists than this corner of Rappahannock County, in northern Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dad likes to joke that he can watch the grass grow, but I’ve seen the way he studies his fields and tends to them like children, and I know he’s not kidding.
As with so many things we come to know well over a long period of time, at some point I began to take Huntly’s constancy for granted, or perhaps I always had. I thought it would never really change, just as I thought my father would never change.
I was wrong.
Three weeks ago, Dad was diagnosed with stage IV kidney cancer. Shortly after getting the news, I flew east with Maisy from Santa Fe, where I’ve lived for fifteen years. My husband, Steve, stayed home with our two-year-old daughter, Pippa. Meg caught a flight from her home in California, and together we rented a car and drove an hour and a half from Dulles airport to the farm for a long weekend to help however we can. On the plane, I worried that Dad would have cancer written all over his body, but when we pull up the driveway, he’s ambling down the walk to greet us.
“Hello!” he bellows. He looks okay, a little wan but still sturdy, himself.
“Dad,” I say, hugging him hard and handing him the baby. He puts his arms around her, and I put my arm around him and together we walk slowly inside. Through his sweatshirt I can feel his shoulder blades moving up and down with his breath.
The house is comfortably cluttered and largely unchanged from my childhood. Books line the shelves in the living room, paintings and photographs hang on the walls. In the kitchen, the refrigerator is plastered with cartoons; a plastic Queen Elizabeth figurine sits on the windowsill, gracing the room with her regal, solar-powered wave when the sun shines. Lesley, who married my father in 1981, is from England and still goes back every other year.
What’s different is the way the house feels. The air inside is heavier and quieter, sleepier, but there’s too much to do to just droop around the house. Meg and I run errands in our rental car, hauling in supplies from Kmart, ten miles away in Front Royal: a case of chocolate Ensure, because Dad’s losing his appetite, and a new pair of plaid pajamas, because his old ones are threadbare. Both seem like terrible portents of what’s to come.
In the late afternoons, when our chores are finished and Maisy and Dad are resting, I slip out the back door, sit on the stoop, and put on my running shoes. It’s early October and the sun is hot on my skin. I’m tired and I don’t feel like going, but I need fresh air. I need to move.
I jog down the long arc of the driveway, between two pastures bounded by a curving split-rail fence, past Lesley’s barn, where she runs a small horse-breeding business, one foal a year, for show. The grass is so immaculately trimmed, it looks painted on. At the bottom of the hill, I swing left along the creek and past the Huntly Stage sign. Dad and Lesley gave the farm this name, after the faint, grassy track that cuts across one corner of the property, which they liked to imagine was once a stagecoach road traveled by George Washington.
My legs are heavy and slow, but I don’t care. I’m not running for speed or fitness. I’m running to get out of the house and escape the dread of what’s to come. I’m running to feel the humid air swoosh through my lungs, to feel normal again, and just a little bit alive. I’m running to forget, and to remember.
* * *
—
I became a runner by accident. It was April 1979, and I was seven. Meg and I were visiting Dad, as we always did over Easter break. Spring was the best time of year in Virginia: the cherry blossoms were in bloom, and the grass and leaves were greener than they were in New Jersey. Easter was Dad’s holiday with us, just like Thanksgiving and New Year’s and the last few weeks of August. Often when we were with him, I had the uneasy feeling that this was not enough time and also too much. Dad was always trying to think up clever things to do with us.
Now he had an idea.
“What do you think about running a race?” he announced at breakfast. “Six miles, from Flint Hill to Little Washington?”
“How far?” I asked, between bites of peanut butter toast.
“Six miles,” he repeated. “On the Fodderstack Road.”
I knew the road he was talking about. It was famous in our family for its short, steep hills—tummy-funnies, we called them whenever Dad intentionally revved his rust-colored diesel Rabbit over the small rises, sending our stomachs into our throats, as if we were hurtling down a roller coaster.
Six miles. The distance was so audacious that it meant absolutely nothing to me. I had never run a race, never a single mile, let alone six, all in a row. Dad might as well have been suggesting we run home to New Jersey.
Meg, sitting next to me, bent over her bowl of Corn Flakes and shrugged noncommittally. At ten-going-on-eleven, she was the cool, discerning big sister, capable of withholding judgment until she deemed an endeavor worthy of her time and interest. A slight sneer of her upper lip indicated it was not. I, meanwhile, was the overeager puppy, ready to leap at anything. We played to our birth order perfectly.
Dad smiled, his mouth curling into a sly, crinkled grin. It was, like so many of his ideas, a lark. He was half daring us to say yes but not really believing we would.
“Running?” I said again. Never in my life had I seen my father run or heard him talk about running. He liked hiking and camping and riding his bicycle along country roads, exploring. This was often what we did when we were together, rambling around with no apparent destination, up and down trails in the woods, in our red Keds, bashing at brambles with our bare arms, dying of boredom and fatigue but not wanting to quit, because this was the only time we got with Dad and we didn’t want to waste it.
Dad nodded. He’d thought it all out. “You two can run the race, and I’ll be waiting in Little Washington, taking pictures.”
I nodded. This made complete sense to me. Dad was a National Geographic photographer. Just the thought of this gave me a little shiver of pride. The kids I knew in New Jersey had banker dads or lawyer dads or dads who ran Chinese restaurants, but my dad walked around with cameras dangling from his neck and wore a mesh khaki vest and got his pictures on the cover of the most famous magazine in the world. In my eyes, this was a grand and noble pursuit that bestowed upon him, and, by extension, me, the faint glow of celebrity. Picture-making was important work, and it trumped everything, even the craziest of things, like running six miles without an
y training or parental supervision.
Dad assured us that other kids would be running the race, too, and lots of grown-ups, some of whom were his friends, so even though he wouldn’t be with us, we wouldn’t be alone. If we got tired, we could always walk, and, he chuckled, he’d be there to capture our triumphant finish on film. Those were his actual words: triumphant finish.
I was a stringy second grader with a Dorothy Hamill haircut and perpetually skinned knees. For the past three months, the bathroom scale hadn’t budged from forty-nine pounds. Mom joked that maybe I would always be forty-nine pounds, and part of me worried that she was right. Meg had Princess Di cheekbones and skinny supermodel legs and was on her way to becoming six feet tall. She might actually have a legitimate chance of finishing the race, but I was the long shot, the underdog, the scrappy kid sister desperate for Dad’s attention.
“Sure,” I said, tugging my mouth into a grin to match my father’s. “Okay.”
* * *
—
Meg and I made an unlikely, woebegone pair on the starting line of the second annual Fodderstack 10K Classic. We wore holey Tretorn tennis shoes that, much to our mother’s chagrin, were fashion-forward in 1979; ankle socks with purple pom-poms; and terry-towel gym shorts destined to become soggy with sweat, like clammy kitchen sponges, at the slightest exertion. The collar on my raspberry-pink Izod shirt was turned up, and I’d stuck a ribbon barrette in my hair to kept my bangs out of my eyes.
The instant the gun went off, we lit out hopefully for Little Washington, sneakers slapping, limbs flailing. Two-tenths of a mile in, where the course turned right onto the Fodderstack Road, we were decisively dropped off the back of the pack. We inched forward in a bumbling, ill-advised combination of running, jogging, walking, limping, and staggering. The effort engulfed us—Meg and I locked in our own private circle of hell, yet too dwarfed by the distance to stray far from each other. It seemed desperately unlikely that we would ever make it, and yet how could we quit? We had no choice but to push on. Few words passed our lips, just the occasional pained grunting.
The course was pretty, passing hundred-year-old brick farmhouses with high hedges and stone walls. Dogwoods bloomed pink in the meadows. The road rolled up and over short climbs and down the other side. Every couple of miles, farmers in denim overalls stood at the roadside holding out Styrofoam cups of water from wobbly card tables. Meg and I stopped at all of them, drinking as though we’d been lost in the desert for all of eternity. At about the three-mile mark, the course ascended a long hill. Dad had actually referred to it in jest as a “mountain,” and from the bottom, staring up at the long squiggle of blacktop disappearing beneath a canopy of oak and maple trees, it looked as menacing as any I’d ever seen. I leaned into the slope, trying to will my legs to move, trying not to cry. Beside me on the road, Meg attacked the climb. Her gangly legs were so long that for every step she took, I had to take two just to keep up. I had to keep up. Somewhere in the distance, Dad was waiting to capture the moment on film for posterity.
Dad wore his camera everywhere he went, like an extra appendage, as familiar to me as his thick horn-rimmed glasses and his wavy black hair that crept back slightly from his high forehead. Slung around his neck, the Nikon was part of his dress code, just like the thick gray ragg wool socks we teased him mercilessly for wearing, day in and day out, winter and summer. Just as we made fun of him for taking too many pictures. He never took just one—never. “One more shot,” he’d murmur as the shutter went click, click and Meg and I held our positions, eyeballs rolling back in our heads with exasperation, faint smirks twitching at the corners of our mouths. “Okay, just one more, one more.” Our expressions changed as we got older, tinged with the aloof superiority of teenagers who’d learned to tolerate his relentless, occasionally mortifying documentation, but only barely. He was so intent on making the picture that he lost track of his words, and of time. “Good, one more, good. Good! Last one. Good!” Behind the lens, Dad seemed to disappear and become the camera itself.
In film, there are two sides to every picture. Negatives render dark subjects light and light subjects dark: reality inverted. But the positive image is not infallible, either. To tell the truth of something, you need both light and dark, sun and shadow, transparency and secrecy, things exposed and others withheld. If you are patient and pay attention, these details might begin to arrange themselves into a recognizable shape, a pattern that starts to make sense. Dad believed that the most important element of a photograph is what you leave out, so as to frame only what is most significant. But for himself, he seemed to want the opposite—to amass the world, gather it all up in his sights, to capture everything possible of this life. It wasn’t always comfortable, this deep, persistent hunger. But I recognized it in myself. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt this way, too.
* * *
—
When the redbrick houses of Little Washington appeared over the final hill of the Fodderstack 10K Classic, I was so stunned and ecstatic, I began to sprint. My legs were on autopilot, the world funneling to a single point. All I wanted—all I had ever wanted in my whole life—was to cross the finish line and collapse in a jubilant heap at my father’s feet. I’d grown miraculous new legs, and they were powerful and fast, wheeling me along to him.
I could pick Dad out from half a block away: five feet eleven inches, navy-blue crewneck sweatshirt, khaki work pants, L.L. Bean leather work shoes. Meg was gone, ahead of or behind me; it no longer mattered. With two hundred feet to go down the homestretch, it was every girl for herself. I barreled across the finish line and straight into Dad, nearly knocking him over. My lungs were scorched, and my legs were spasming so hard from fatigue that I couldn’t have slowed down if I wanted to. I’d been running for nearly two hours, and now I couldn’t stop.
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
The Fodderstack finish, 1981
“I’ll be damned!” Dad bellowed, fumbling for his camera. But it was too late. Maybe it was my spastic, unexpected dash or the miraculous fact that I wasn’t lying crumpled in the fetal position on the side of the road, but he was too distracted and befuddled to get the shot.
“Whoa! There you go, old girl!” he cried, grasping my shoulders to steady me. “Well done!”
Somehow I managed to lower myself onto the curb, where I slouched, panting and red-faced, until my heaving breath begin to settle. Dad handed me a Mountain Dew and patted me a few times on my back. This was his signature gesture, a firm, reassuring thumping that conveyed both comfort and approval, if not exactly gentle affection.
I might have sat there all afternoon, stuffing my face with brownies from the finish-line picnic, but I could tell by the mischievous glint in Dad’s eye that we weren’t done yet.
“Okay, girls,” he told Meg and me. “Now go back and pretend to crawl across the finish line!”
Dad was serious about his photographs, but he had a silly side, too. Often he’d arrange us into joke poses and fake scenarios, the exact opposite of his documentary pictures for National Geographic. “Stand up on that rock and look tough,” he’d say, positioning us on a rocky precipice atop Mount Washington or Old Rag, chortling from behind the camera as we flexed and grimaced like the Incredible Hulk. “Okay, back up. Just one more step, and one more. Ha ha ha.” That we always obliged him with mock exasperation but never fell for the gag was a time-honored part of the game.
Meg and I rose stiffly to our feet, groaning a little for effect. We limped a few feet onto the course and got down on our hands and knees, looking furtively around at the other runners; we were just barely old enough to feel embarrassed. Dad pointed his camera. “Look like you’re really in pain!” he commanded, laughing, as we dragged ourselves over the fraying strip of duct tape laid across the road. Did he not realize we really were in pain? Obligingly we rearranged our faces into masks of pretend agony that only moments before had
been real. Click, click, click went the shutter. “Okay, one more, just one more!” Click, click.
Meg and I must have come in dead last that day, but it didn’t occur to me to care. In the picture Dad took of me, I’m grinning madly, all my freckles popping, my expression one of delirium and relief. I know that look. It’s runner’s high. It’s the look that says I ran 6.2 miles and survived the improbable, and nothing will ever feel hard or annoying again! Not even posing like a fool on my hands and knees in front of complete strangers.
We drove back to the farm the same way we’d run, covering the same demented distance in not much more than fifteen minutes. Meg and I rode in the bed of Dad’s pickup, the wind slapping my hair, my legs stiff as logs, elated. Flooded with endorphins and a crazed surge of optimism, I had a flash of understanding: Suffering and perseverance were their own rewards. They could make me stronger. They could make all the tricky bits of life seem easier.
2
Dares
PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD
Huntly Stage, summer 1980
Dad’s MRI shows a tumor the size of a fist. “It’s a rather massive ugly thing,” he writes in an email a couple of weeks after his diagnosis, a sinister image that lodges in my mind. There are spots on his lungs. “Suspicious,” he calls them. “The assumption is that the cancer has spread.”
When I was little and felt sad or out of sorts, Mom always gave me the same advice: “Just get busy and do something.” Had I botched a multiplication quiz? Just get busy and do something. Was I mad at Meg for locking me out of her room? Just get busy and do something. When my sixth-grade friend’s father killed himself in the guest bedroom where only the week before she and I had made electrical circuits for our science project? Just get busy and do something. Anything. Being busy kept us out of trouble, but it also saved us from having to feel, think, or talk about what might lie beneath our restless moping.