Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  After a minute or two, Dad puts his notebook aside and looks at us expectantly. It would be so much easier to talk about the still-blooming Indian summer, his photography archives, the grass that won’t quit growing, but that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to have the Conversation—not What are we going to do? but What do you want? And the uncomfortable question none of us want to ask: How much time?

  Dad tells us he’s scheduled an embolization surgery in a few weeks that will shunt blood away from his tumor to slow its growth. “It’s not a cure,” he says quickly, lest we get our hopes up. “There is no cure.”

  He pauses and takes a long sip of water. Orange juice is out now—sugar feeds the cancer. Wipes his brow, hesitates half a second, working up to the hard stuff. “When it comes time,” Dad says, “I’d like to be scattered.” It takes me a second to understand what he means—cremated. I can’t help but smile at the expression, as though in his next life he will sprout from seed as a maple sapling or, better yet, his beloved grass. A line of verse stirs out of the dimmest crevices of my brain. I wrote my college thesis on Walt Whitman. What was it he’d called it—the beautiful uncut hair of graves?

  Meg bends over one of Dad’s small spiral steno pads, taking notes. “Definitely no funeral,” he continues. “Just have some people in for snacks.” Now I feel like crying. A whole life he’s lived and he wants us to commemorate it with pretzels? His face is expressionless, as though he’s talking about some distant date in the unknown future, about someone other than himself. But I know that, unlike me, he’s not in denial. He can see what’s coming and is ready to meet it.

  “Play some nice music,” he continues. He’s already picked out the song: “The Jig,” composed by Bach and performed by the organist E. Power Biggs. The CD is on the shelf in the closet, with the rest of his collection. “Play it loud, like really loud. So loud it fills the room. So loud you can’t talk over it.”

  In my own notebook, I scribble in a shaky hand: Biggs. Play @ full volume.

  “I’ve met with my lawyer and taken care of almost everything here.” Dad gestures to his notebook pages, stuffed fat with the provisions of being alive. “But all the flopsy-dopsy…” He trails off, sounding dispirited. “All my unfinished stuff—my pictures and research. Someone is going to have to put it away. After I’ve gone, it won’t make a difference to me what happens. You girls should take what you want.” He pauses, thinking it over. “If you want anything.”

  Before I can respond, Maisy starts chirping through the baby monitor, waking from her nap. When I bring her out to the patio, Dad reaches for her without hesitation, wrapping one arm around her neck and the other on her belly, propping her up on his lap so she can look out at the lawn. She nuzzles his cheek and tucks her head beneath his chin.

  PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD

  Dad and Maisy, Huntly Stage, October 2010

  I lean back in my chair, trying to imprint the moment in my mind. If only I hadn’t waited until my mid-thirties to get married and have babies. If only Steve and I lived closer to Huntly, so Pippa and Maisy could spend more time with Dad, so we all could. I want to tell him this, but after all this time I don’t know how. To fill the silence, I blurt, “I think I’m going to start writing about being a mother.” My words come as a surprise to me. I haven’t actually thought about this before, but now that they’re out, I think they must be true.

  Dad stops rocking Maisy and turns to look me in the eye. He’s always had a certain way of talking when he wants you to pay attention—emphatic, as if he’s speaking in capital letters. Occasionally his tone can be condescending, as if he knows what’s Good and Right and he’s just waiting for you to catch up. Other times he’s quietly assuring, certain that if you pay attention and try hard, you’ll eventually figure it out.

  Quite possibly many words come out of Dad’s mouth—supportive and encouraging. But the ones I hear are: “If you’re going to write, be sure it’s about something important.” My cheeks grow hot with embarrassment. I know his serious tone. He means Important. He means: Don’t mess around. Write what matters. Live this way, too.

  6

  The Faraway

  PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD

  Abiquiu, New Mexico

  In the picture Mom snapped of me the day I moved to Santa Fe, I’m standing in front of their house, wearing a faded purple shirt with a freckled fish screen-printed on the front, my shoulder-length hair parted low to one side. One hand is cocked on my hip, my elbow jutting out at a jaunty angle. I’m staring straight at the camera, a wry grin on my face, not quite defiant but almost. I know this day belongs to me. All I have to do is smile and open my arms and pull in the fresh air and drive away, and the future will happen, without even trying. I am twenty-three.

  It was the first of July 1995. I was leaving my job at a publishing house in New York City for an internship at Outside magazine. I was not cut out for city life. For two years, I walked to and from work every day through Central Park to Rockefeller Center, wearing my white Reeboks and carrying my navy-blue pumps in the sensible saddle-brown briefcase that Mom had given me, just like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. In the evenings after I walked home, I put on my Rollerblades and skated back to the park, circling the paved loop all the way to Harlem and home again. From the Sheep Meadow, when the setting sun lit the buildings along Central Park South orange, I could almost pretend they were mountains.

  I’d tried to ask Dad for a referral to National Geographic, but he was reluctant. “Oh, I don’t know, Katie,” he said, sounding uneasy, as if he did know but was afraid to say it. “I’m not sure it’s the best place for women. I think it’s easy to get marginalized in the assistant track.” I was trying and almost succeeding at not feeling hurt when he added, “And, well, nepotism makes me uncomfortable. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’d gotten you the job and that you couldn’t have gotten it yourself.” I felt like I’d been punched. Okay, I thought, I’ll have to do it on my own.

  It was Ron who encouraged me to apply to Outside. I’d subscribed to the magazine in high school, and he’d read in The Wall Street Journal that it was relocating its headquarters from Chicago to Santa Fe and was hiring. Six months after I applied, I got the call. After the pinch-me shock passed and the elation set in, after I danced a crazy jig around my studio apartment and eyeballed the calendar and tried to imagine Santa Fe and conjured not one single thing but blue skies, the doubt set in. What had I done? Quitting a real job with health insurance and a 401(k) for a short-term internship that paid $5 an hour without benefits, in a city and state in which I knew no one and had never set foot.

  Watch me.

  The trip to New Mexico took three days. Arkansas appears flat, but it is actually one very long, gradual hill. My Jetta was so loaded down with my clothing, camping gear, mountain bike, and Rollerblades that I had to turn off the air-conditioning just to keep the speedometer from sagging below fifty. In Oklahoma, I watched an RV drive into a gas station overhang, shearing off its roof like the lid on a can of cat food. I laughed carelessly until the man behind the counter gave me a stern warning. “You’re in Tornado Alley now,” he said. “If you hear the sirens, you’d better get your ass in a ditch.” I’d been so blasé about leaving, but suddenly I felt unsure. I thought about Dad, who, just the day before, had driven half an hour from Huntly to a Howard Johnson’s on the interstate in Winchester to see me off. We sat in a booth and ordered BLTs and iced teas and looked at the map spread out on the table, tracing the highway west to New Mexico, two thousand miles away. My internship was supposed to last three months, but I hoped that if I worked hard I could stretch it to six. Beyond that, I had no idea what would happen.

  In the parking lot, Dad checked my tire pressure and pulled me in for one last, long hug. “I’m proud of you, old girl,” he whispered. I drove away slowly, watching Dad grow smaller, a solitary blue dot ben
eath HoJo’s blue crown, his hand in the air. I was leaving him again.

  * * *

  —

  Santa Fe sits at seven thousand feet at the tail end of the Rocky Mountains, where they peter out into desert. The city was like no place I’d ever seen. Even though it’s the state capital and home to 65,000 people, many of the roads near downtown were dirt, and they twisted narrowly, never in a straight line. The buildings were uniformly brown: one-story adobes made from mud bricks or wood frame and then stuccoed the color of paper lunch sacks, with tall brown stucco walls. They looked as if they were simultaneously sprouting from the earth and crumbling back into it. The roofs were flat, the walls sloped, and the windows small, trimmed in turquoise and bright blue that matched the sky. I had never seen sky so big and bright, so saturated with color, with an almost brutal clarity—I had to blink to make sure it was real. You could do whatever you wanted and be whoever you wanted to be under that sky.

  Georgia O’Keeffe called New Mexico “the Faraway.” As a young artist visiting from New York City for the first time in 1929, she was transfixed by the sprawling desert, its radiant light, the mesas and rooster-comb ridges. “The distance has always been calling me,” she wrote. The latitude she felt as she ranged far and wide through canyons and buttes lit her paintings from the inside. “I decided that the only thing I could do that was nobody else’s business was to paint. I could do as I chose because no one would care.” The faraway was as much a state of mind as a specific place, a way of being wild and sure, a way of seeing and living and making art on her own terms.

  On the surface, Santa Fe had a ragged, hard-edged beauty. There was the crumbly dirt and rocks, no grass to speak of, and the shrubby juniper and piñon trees fanned out on the foothills, stunted by lack of rain. The scratchy adobe walls and the sharp glare of the sun, the arroyos chewing away at the ground, the dry air that cracked your skin, and the prickly cacti underfoot—all had a toughness to which I was unaccustomed. The necessities I’d taken for granted in the East were rarities here: oxygen, moisture, greenery, family. And yet there was a softness about Santa Fe, too. I could feel it right away. The earth-tone adobes, with their rounded edges, and the gently rounded mountaintops, so old that all the jagged points had been worn down. Even the openness—the scale of the landscape, its great emptiness—seemed conciliatory. You could see what it was dealing you; you could see the weather coming from half a day away. You knew where you stood.

  Nothing about Santa Fe should have made any kind of sense to me. Except for my new friends at Outside, there weren’t many people my age; the city’s traditional Native American and Spanish American populations had been inundated by New Age healers and artists and retirees living out their golden years buying art and going to healers. It was easily misunderstood. People from other places assumed, as I once had, that Santa Fe was just like Phoenix: hot lowland desert. Or they’d mistake it for part of Mexico. “No, New Mexico—it’s a state, not the country,” you’d have to say when someone got confused. (Although sometimes it did feel like a foreign country.) Even the license plate was compelled to clarify: “New Mexico USA.” While forecasting tornadoes in Texas and heat waves in Arizona on national TV, the weatherman stood in front of New Mexico, blocking the whole state with his body.

  It was the blank space in between. Somehow, by chance, I’d landed right where I was meant to be.

  * * *

  —

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Me with Lesley and Meg, Pennsylvania, early ’90s

  My job at Outside was both an understatement and an overstatement. There were three of us interns at any given time, and our job was to fact-check every word in every story in the magazine. This was in the very last, dying days of typesetting, and at the dawn of the Internet, so we marked up paper copies with pencils—checkmarks when the fact checked out, long marginalia when it didn’t—and called all our sources on the telephone, using phone books that lined one long shelf.

  The Outside staff was predominantly male, in number and attitude. If you weren’t a guy, you could still make it at the magazine, but it helped if you acted like one, rode your bike or ran fast like one, and thought like one. And, above all, wrote like one.

  When I wasn’t calling Burmese refugee camps or virus hunters at the CDC or being patched through via satellite phone to Everest Base Camp, I climbed my own mountains. The first month I lived in town, I rode my bicycle to the trailhead and climbed Atalaya every evening after work. The trail was dusty and loose and stitched together by roots and small rocks that behaved like ball bearings in the dry summer heat. It switchbacked and wound uphill for more than two miles, cresting a false summit, through tenuous sections where it was easy to lose your footing and slide off the edge. The route was marked erratically by blue blazes on trees, and the first time I climbed it, I wondered more than once if I was on the right path and what I was doing out there alone. It was cooler on top, the heat draining off the mountain in waves, and I sat wheezing on a granite ledge, the altitude burning my lungs and all of the little brown bumps of Santa Fe spread out below me. I thought, the way I have on every subsequent Atalaya summit, I’ve done it. Not just the climb, but the whole thing—my new life, all on my own.

  Sometimes when we were kids and Meg and I took the train to Washington, Dad would pick us up and we’d ride the Metro to National Geographic, at 17th and M Streets, until he finished work. He worked in a narrow shaft of an office on the eighth floor, with a long light table on one wall where we’d mash our eyes against the light boxes, looking at negatives. He organized them precisely in tall stacks, rubber-banded twice around, a dozen or more stacks per story. When we got bored, we’d take the elevator down to Explorers Hall, the museum in the lobby, which consisted, thrillingly, of a talking parrot named Henry and numerous interactive dioramas. The clear glass boxes contained intricate, three-dimensional scenes, miniaturized renderings of dusty, inhospitable places like sub-Saharan Africa, with rumpled brown knolls that looked as if they’d been molded out of clay. You could pull the conical earpiece from the wall by its curlicue cord and listen to Louis Leakey’s ancient voice crackling on about the discovery of the first Homo sapiens, lulling you into another land.

  Looking down on Santa Fe from high on Atalaya was like peering into a diorama. Especially at sunset or sunrise, when the light slanted in, the color of honey, at such a low angle that you could see all the details in sharp relief. It made the immense desert seem almost quaint.

  Climbing a mountain at nine thousand feet when you are used to Rollerblading through Central Park feels like blasting a blowtorch into your open mouth, repeatedly. My breathing was so jagged and labored, I sounded like I was about to go into cardiac arrest. I’d heard that it could take six months to adjust to the oxygen-depleted air. Each week, my panting became a little less pronounced, my leg muscles more springy, the trail more familiar.

  One evening on the way down Atalaya, I skidded on the rocks and tumbled down the trail, coming to a stop against a piñon tree. When I pulled myself up, blood was spurting from a gash in my left kneecap. Except for the key to my bike lock, which I’d shoved in the front of my sports bra, I carried nothing. No water, no phone, no first aid. I had nearly two miles and a thousand vertical feet to descend. I yanked off my T-shirt, looped it around the wound like a saggy tourniquet, and hobbled gingerly down the mountain.

  When I got back to the trailhead, my knee was so stiff I could barely bend it, and I felt lightheaded. Riding my bike was out of the question. A woman was getting into her car, and she stared when she saw me.

  “Uh, do you think you could drive me to the hospital?” I asked nervously, gesturing with raw, blood-streaked palms to my bicycle, locked to the post. “I’m new in town and don’t have anyone to call.”

  “Get in,” she said.

  At the ER, the doctor gave me the choice of stitches or not, and I foolishly
chose not. The scar it left, lumpy and red-fading-to-white—the first of many in Santa Fe—was a reminder of why I’d come: to live on the brink of comfort and risk, between the familiar and the faraway.

  * * *

  —

  New Mexico’s official nickname is the Land of Enchantment, but it’s often jokingly referred to as the Land of Entrapment. People have a way of washing up here and staying far longer than they’d intended. This is not a recent phenomenon. In 1898, the artists Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips were traveling from Denver to Mexico on a painting expedition when one of the wheels on their covered wagon fell off, stranding them in Taos. Seduced by its vivid light and landscape, they settled permanently there, the first of what become known as the Taos Society of Artists, a loose-knit colony that would later draw legions of painters, photographers, and writers to the sagebrush mesa at the foot of the mountains. Of the winter he spent at a ranch north of Taos shortly before his death in 1925, D. H. Lawrence wrote, “I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had….In the magnificent, fierce morning of New Mexico, one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new.”

  Six months after I arrived, Outside offered me a full-time job, and six months after that, Mom boxed up my Manhattan apartment and sent my furniture west on a moving truck. Eventually she stopped asking when I was coming home. I was home.