Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  But when we got to the base, I looked up at the face, as sheer as a skyscraper, with a lumpy ridge running down the middle like a serpent’s back, and I knew there would be no walking involved. Steph pulled out an extra pair of rubber-soled climbing shoes and thrust them at me. “These should fit!” she said happily. Then she handed me a harness.

  On rock climbing’s difficulty scale, the route we were taking to the summit, named Snake Dike, is rated a 5.7, which is a beginning-to-intermediate technical route. It’s the easiest climb on Half Dome. But it’s also two thousand feet of exposed vertical rock. Following Steph’s lead above me, I inched out on the route, panic-sweating through my T-shirt almost before I found my first foothold. We picked our way up the slab, Steph clipping the rope that connected us into bolts every twenty feet. Far below, the forest looked like the synthetic miniature pine trees Meg and I used to glue onto the model towns we built at Huntly, perfectly conical and painfully spiky. I couldn’t look, but I couldn’t not look, either. Never had I experienced such gorgeous, brain-addling vertigo. I was going to either puke or wet my pants.

  “Don’t look down!” Steph called from above.

  “I have to go to the bathroom!” I shouted nervously.

  “Just pull your shorts down and pee on the rock!” she yelled back. I’ve peed in plenty of places while running before—squatting in riverbanks, behind trees, between open car doors at trailhead parking lots, and once, accidentally, on top of a poison oak bush—but this was a new one. I jammed my feet into the dike and fumbled with my drawstring shorts. It was awkward to work around my harness, and my hands were shaking. Please don’t fall, please don’t fall.

  An indeterminate number of hours later, we heaved ourselves over the smooth lip of Half Dome. We’d been alone all day, but on the summit we were surrounded by hikers as we unclipped from the rope and stepped out of our harnesses. Somehow it was more harrowing to stand on the top, peering over the edge at the whirl of ravens and wind, with nothing but air and rock below. I backed away on rubbery legs while the hikers eyed us suspiciously, trying to figure out how we’d materialized in their world.

  I was just as dumbfounded. My body was trembling from the exertion and adrenaline, but my mind had disassociated from the effort hours earlier. This was the only way I’d been able to keep going. I’d had to mentally detach from the physical world and its untenable risks—those prickly treetops and the gaping sky beneath my flailing feet—and to operate purely as animal, moving from my arms, legs, fingers, palms, and eyes. To become automatic.

  Now that I’d returned to my senses, my brain was trying to catch up to what had happened. What had happened? I’d just climbed Half Dome! This was the biggest, craziest physical achievement of my life so far, maybe never to be surpassed. You could do things you never thought possible, sometimes by not thinking. If I died tomorrow, I would be happy.

  Steph and I hiked the seven miles back to the trailhead. Half Dome reared up above the east end of the valley, silvery and colossal, its summit curving gracefully like the snub nose of a dolphin. I felt my throat catch, my eyes sting. It had endured millions of years of weather and thousands of climbers just like me grappling up its indifferent face. I would never matter to it the way it would matter to me, I felt certain, for the rest of my life.

  It was Father’s Day, and I dialed Dad’s number from a pay phone in the parking lot while we waited for the hikers’ shuttle bus. I hadn’t spoken to him for a while, and I was excited to hear his voice. The phone rang and rang. It was early evening in Virginia, and I could picture him on his tractor, mowing meticulous lines into his fields.

  The answering machine picked up.

  “Hi, Dad, it’s Katie!” I said breathlessly after the beep. “I’m in Yosemite. I just climbed Half Dome!”

  Dad was always the one I called first when I got home from an assignment or adventure. Mom fretted that I might slip and die or forget to eat, and she couldn’t comprehend why anyone would want to camp out like a dirtbag for a story. But Dad had lived it. He got it. I knew that when we spoke next, I would tell him about the light reflecting off Half Dome’s granite face, the breeze riffling my skin, the orange I peeled on the summit and shoved into my mouth whole. He would want to know these things. Not because I’d taken risks or overcome terrific doubt—plenty of others had done the same with more grace and skill than I had—but because he cared about all the parts that made up a story: the details and characters, the texture and arc.

  What impressed Dad wasn’t pure stunt or bravery, I knew this now. Nor did victory matter all that much—he wasn’t an athlete and didn’t think like one. Adversity alone didn’t wow him; it had to be in pursuit of something bigger, less frivolous, weightier, something beyond pride and personal gain. It was about strength of character. I’d tried my best, kept my eyes open, and come home with a story to tell. This was exactly the kind of adventure that would make him proud.

  8

  Letters from Home

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Dad at Huntly Stage, summer 1978

  Between visits to Virginia, I have a birthday. It’s October 30. I’m thirty-nine. I wander shiftlessly around the house, trying to pretend that I’m not waiting for Dad’s call. He always comes through with a silly greeting or gift, something to mark the day. The year I turned ten, he baked me a birthday cake in the shape of a train: two long rectangular cakes for the engine, smaller round cakes for the wheels, a square cake for the smokestack. It was an old-fashioned locomotive, more The Little Engine That Could than Amtrak Metroliner. He frosted it with sticky chocolate icing and outlined the doors and windows in gumdrops. The caboose he adorned with lollipops. In the picture he took, I’m wearing a green “Super Girl” T-shirt and rainbow Mork & Mindy suspenders, surrounded by a handful of children I don’t recognize, from neighboring farms. It was the only birthday I celebrated at Huntly Stage, and maybe only the second ever that I celebrated with my father. He was determined to make it a party.

  How could that one cake outweigh all the other birthdays we were apart? I don’t know, but it does.

  This time, though, Dad doesn’t call. He doesn’t leave his usual message on my voicemail: “Happy Easter—I mean Fourth of July…wait, no, don’t tell me…birthday?!” He doesn’t send me a new book with a long inscription or a funny card with a smiley face beside his name. He’s in the hospital. Two days ago, he was rushed to the ER in the middle of the night to have a catheter installed to irrigate his kidney for blood clots.

  So much of my relationship with Dad has been conducted over the phone or by letter: weekly calls to New Jersey on his staticky party line at the farm, long conversations about school and sports; prearranged calls to a phone booth on an island near ours on Stony Lake, Dad closing with his usual goofy admonition: “Whatever you do, don’t go near the water!” Phone calls about writing and photography. Phone calls asking for advice: Hey, Dad. What digital camera should I buy? How do I hook up my stereo speakers? What’s your favorite Stan Getz album? Phone calls with good news: Dad, I’m getting married! I’m having a baby!

  He mailed postcards from his various wanderings and letters from work on National Geographic stationery. By the late nineties, he was sending long, chatty emails on his America Online account, signing off with his trademark breezy farewell, “Later…Love, Dad.” Now, though, he’s stopped writing. In the last email I got from him, in mid-October, he concluded, “And now I’m off to La-La-Land.”

  When I call his hospital room, he picks up on the second ring. His voice is low and scratchy and rushed, as if he’s been waiting all day for me to call so he could get right to the point—no birthday wishes, no preambles.

  “This is a game-ender, Katie,” he says.

  “The catheter?” I ask hopefully.

  There is a long pause.

  “The cancer,” he answers.

  After we h
ang up, I drive to the Atalaya trailhead. Running is the last thing I feel like doing, but I make myself go. I need to feel the sun on my skin, to see the mountains in their same old place to the north and east of town, all their bumps and pleats, to run the trails I know by heart. I start off fast, so I don’t have to think, but the tears catch me after half a mile and I lean over, crying so hard I can’t breathe.

  Now I know how this is going to end. There won’t be any more letters or notes, no more chatty missives about the books he’s reading or movies he’s seen, no more envelopes scrawled in his handwriting. I see that I’m going to have to try very hard to hold on to the sound of his voice, the deep, throaty way he called Gooood night, girls through the guest room door, his pitch rising on the last syllables as Meg and I lay in our twin beds in the dark, and the way I could always hear his voice, even in his letters, ringing through the pages.

  * * *

  —

  Of all the letters he sent, there’s one I will never forget.

  It was 2004. I’d been with Steve for four years, and he was impatient to get married. He lived rent-free in a caretaker’s guesthouse in exchange for gardening work but spent almost every night at my place. He kept a toothbrush by the sink, frayed canvas work pants in the closet, and strong ground coffee in the fridge. We liked to joke that we lived together and his stuff lived in the guesthouse, but the joke had gotten old. Though I loved him immensely and liked him even more, I wanted a guarantee that what had happened between my mother and father wouldn’t happen to us. I worried that I harbored some secret, genetic flaw that would doom my own marriage to failure.

  I worked myself into a state of frenzied indecision, running up and down my mountain in the evenings after work, as though the answer might emerge from the trees and dirt, from the long views and the sweat sliding down my temples. Steve and I had arrived at a fork in the trail, a crisis of the heart: One sharp turn would take me away from him. It was not so difficult to imagine. After all, my impulse had always been to run. In some ways, it was easier than staying.

  Soon, I told Steve whenever he hinted at marriage, trying to buy myself more time. Soon.

  There was something I had to do first.

  One evening, I got out my stationery and pulled a card from the box. I’d never been as good at letter writing as Dad, but I knew I had to try. I took a deep breath.

  Dear Dad,

  As you know, things with Steve are getting serious. I think he wants to get married. But before we do, I’m curious to know what happened between you and Mom.

  There were certain basic facts I’d always assumed about my parents’ divorce: that Mom had taken us away from Dad; that I was somehow responsible; and that our leaving had hurt him. I’d seen the way he said goodbye to us after each visit, the longing in his eyes. They were the saddest eyes in the history of the world.

  Maybe if I knew why their relationship had failed, my own might have a better chance of succeeding. But now that the question was down on the page, I realized I knew nothing about what had happened. It was, and had always been, pure conjecture.

  I paused, then signed, “I love you, Dad.” I couldn’t remember ever saying it so plainly to him, for him. I licked the envelope and slid it into the mailbox before I could chicken out.

  The letter that arrived in the mail two weeks later was nineteen pages long. It was too fat to fold, so Dad packed it in a flat envelope, like a legal document. I tore it open. It was typed except for the first line—“Dear Katie,” in black felt-tip pen—and the sight of his handwriting soothed me. This was my father, not a stranger. What could he possibly tell me that I didn’t want to know?

  “Okay!” he began. “Ready?”

  The exclamation point was a good sign. Upbeat, nothing to be afraid of.

  Before we wade in too far, it’s important that you realize that the reasons Mom and I went our separate ways are not inheritable. They are not contagious. There is no “curse”!

  He’d read my mind.

  Hope fueled me, and I began to read. I could tell it was a fantastic letter, divulging and conversational, one adult to another. He had clearly taken great care to explain as much as possible, as thoroughly as possible. I’d asked for an explanation about his divorce. What he’d given me was an epic. His.

  For much of his life, Dad explained, he identified himself as a loner. “I began to nickname myself the goodbye boy, because I seemed to be becoming increasingly skilled in finding ways to smile through endings.” Later, when he was married, with a mortgage and two young daughters, he grew impatient with the routine demands of family life, and dreamed of a life of adventure.

  The house on Legation was feeling too normal, too “what all people do.” How could I singlehand around the world from there? The tug at the feet again.

  I wanted to stop reading, but I couldn’t stop reading. Everything had already happened—there was no stopping it now.

  Dad began to look for diversions, and he found plenty of them in the halls of National Geographic: the far-flung expeditions and long evenings poring over negatives on the light table. “There was always more film to look at, photographers to call, research to do, text to write, assignments to be outfitted for.” He and his “working-circle”—bosses and secretaries—“were so intensely together that we became our only friends.” On the weekends, they rode their bicycles along the Potomac River. It reminded me of Outside when I first moved to Santa Fe, only it was Washington in the early seventies.

  It’s important to say something about D.C. and the Geographic in those days, because it was all part of a powerful (and then not terribly positive), yet exciting culture of the times. All across the nation the Vietnam war frenzy was boiling. Demonstrations were on the streets. Divorces were becoming a dime a dozen. And the new gospel was “If it feels good, do it.” It was an extremely hedonistic, me-first time. But everything seemed out of control; there wasn’t solid footing anywhere.

  I sat at my desk, feeling the years collapse on themselves. I was ten again, running the Fodderstack, trying to outpace my shame. I was seven, watching the train platform slide away with Dad on it, one palm raised in farewell. I was six, and the moving van was easing down the street. I was five, on my bike, leaving him behind. I was two, and he was—gone.

  He’d been working up to something; I could feel it. Ten pages in, there it was:

  One day at an office party, a colleague with whom I shared a secretary pointed out that she was interested in me. That was all it took, I am ashamed to say. It was traitorous, the only word for it. And it finished Mom and me. And it finished our time as a family. It’s why I was never with you or Meg for all the day-to-day growing-up things. More than I miss having Mom as my wife—as I can, when I remember back to that “Y” in the road—I miss that. I will never know it, never can know it.

  He was having an affair. Why had this never occurred to me? I’d believed my own suppositions for so long, so completely, that I hadn’t ever considered it. I almost couldn’t bear to go on. Neither could Dad.

  I stopped writing for a couple days. Depressed. This is difficult, Katie. But it’s also long, long overdue. My treatment of you was cruel and unbelievably thoughtless. I suppose I thought you were too young to notice. Isn’t that absurd! Remembering that I once did that cuts the legs out from under me. And I’m not just remembering now, this instant; I remember that always. What do I stand on, except to say I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that.

  I felt the room tilt, and the floor slant at a sickening angle. My head had detached from my body and was hovering high above, looking down at the page in my hand. Nothing seemed real. We had abandoned him, hadn’t we? But no, it was Dad who left us, trading us for his secretary and an apartment on Newark Street. The story on which I’d built my childhood, maybe my very self, had been inverted.

  He described the day we moved away.

&
nbsp; There you were, playing on the street. You didn’t know what your lives would be like, what your new home would be like, where I’d be. Were you bewildered, frightened? We said our goodbyes—for you, maybe, as if for just another routine night—and I drove slowly away, pounding the steering wheel because I didn’t know what to say. I turned the corner onto 31st and you were gone, Mom was gone, the house was gone, a life was gone. It was the worst moment of my life. There was nobody left.

  So. I hadn’t imagined it after all. The baffling, unforgettable sadness. It was all real. He’d felt it, too. Worse, he’d caused it.

  “But, see,” Dad continued, “you’ve done well, Mom has done well, Meg has done well, I’ve done okay.” This somber appraisal of his life was somehow the most heart-wrenching line in the whole letter. Because I knew that no matter how badly he’d screwed up, I wanted him to be not just okay. More than okay. I wanted him to be happy.

  When I finally got to the end, I was glazed in sweat and my pulse was racing. I felt prickly and wired, as if I’d just finished a hard run or had a bad scare. How could I possibly go forward from here?

  Dad knew. It’s what he always taught me to do, no matter what.

  “Onward, onward, dear girl!”

  * * *

  —

  I shoved the letter into the back of my desk drawer and tried to forget it existed. When Dad called a few days later to talk about it, I played it down with some crappy toss-off reply. I wasn’t as much mad as I was embarrassed and disoriented by his honesty, and it seemed an additional, unnecessary humiliation—for both of us—to talk about it.

  I felt duped. How had I missed the clues? The whole thing was straight out of The Bridges of Madison County: the roving National Geographic photographer who feels trapped by family life and succumbs to wanderlust. Dad loved to take solo road trips, and his favorite place was the Midwest, especially North Dakota, where there was nothing to break the horizon but silos listing out of wheat fields. With his angular cheekbones, he even looked like Clint Eastwood—a walking cliché! In hindsight, it was all so obvious.