Running Home

by Katie Arnold

  “Once upon a time, there was a ghost in a haunted house…”

  This is the clear, chirrupy voice of a young girl, vaguely familiar, instantly charming. This is a girl telling a ghost story into the black Panasonic cassette recorder, with its wide buttons and big handle, that Dad slung under one arm wherever we went. The voice is too crisp and mature to be mine. The voice is Meg’s, the story is the same one that Pippa told last night, on the river. Goosebumps rise on my arms, and I feel a strange vertigo. I’ve fallen through a crack in the world, back to Maine the summer after Dad left home.

  The burning moon has been replaced by a pale disk drawn with a white crayon, shaded in gray. The constellations seize their moment: Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, and Orion beam out from the blackening sky. My father’s voice comes on, young and high-pitched, as though he just sucked helium. He’s thirty-nine years old. “This is the evening of August 13, 1976, Friday night,” Dad says, “and we are in cabin number four at Bonnie Ridge Cabins.” It is September 27, 2015, a Sunday night, Colorado flashing by through the glass. I am singing the ABCs. I am forgetting the order after T. Dad is saying, “Good night, Katie! Good night, Meg!” His voice is deeper now, the gravelly rumble. I would know it anywhere, always. How I miss it.

  All our lives, we’ve been coming together and separating, like mirror images of the same parabola, two lines approaching and then diverging over and over. Even after Dad died, the pattern didn’t stop; it just changed, our chance encounters radiating outward on a continuum. Now you see me, now you don’t. Here again our stories have converged, in a dark car in the middle of the night, Dad somewhere just on the other side of the thin line.

  I cross into Wyoming. I am driving backwards and forward in time. I am homesick and full of regret. I steer the car down a long hill into a town with a dingy motel where I will spend the night. Dad’s patting his leg: “Sit up on my lap for a minute, Katie.” I am singing my ABCs again, the letters running together so that they sound like an imaginary language. Elem-enoh-pee. I make it all the way through this time. I am in a cabin by the sea, with lobster boiling on the stove. We are singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” in a round. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dreeeammmm.

  Past, present, and future taper to a pinprick on a desolate road veering north beneath a vanishing moon. I have the strangest feeling I’ve been here before. I’m leaving home and coming home.

  * * *

  —

  I drive all the way through Wyoming, listening to the tapes. In the bleached new light of morning, they’re no less haunting, surreal. The darkest, most terrible ones are of my father alone: “Monologues 1974,” catastrophe tapes, impossible to bear. The depth of his pain is more awful than I imagined, worse by far than any he inflicted on me. The click of his loafers on the sidewalk as he walked to work down M Street, holding the recorder’s microphone close to his mouth so no one would hear. His storms, his secrets, the worst of secrets.

  And also anybody’s secrets.

  The happiest recordings are of us together: Dad and Meg and me. We are at a fair in Maine. We have just picked blackberries and seen Andre the Seal. I remember that seal—the splash of the tank, the hard wooden bleachers, the crowd cheering Ohhhhhh! as the seal breaks the surface. At a parade, an old-fashioned car blows its horn at us—Wubba, wubba—while we eat rubbery hot dogs on the curb. Nothing has been lost. Not all this time.

  PHOTO: DAVID L. ARNOLD

  Me on Mount Battie, Maine, 1976

  I listen to the tapes, hungrily, one after another, until I get to the last one. I’ve been saving Dad all this time, uncovering him in pieces, unconsciously but on purpose, to make him last. Now it seems I’ve come to the end of him. I hesitate, slide the cassette in without looking at the label. One last time, I want to be surprised.

  “Okay, let’s see if this works,” Dad is saying quietly, almost to himself. Then his voice becomes louder, more official: “It’s October 29, 1971, in Washington, D.C.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. It’s the tape of my birth. A memory beyond memory.

  Low murmurings, the clink of instruments on a metal table. My mother huffing and chuffing through each contraction, freakishly metronomic, like a railroad train, never losing her composure. “That one was fifty-five seconds,” she chirps gaily, as blasé as someone filing her nails. Her voice is girlish and bright, only half-recognizable, the voice of the first person I ever heard, exactly as I would have first heard it.

  The cassette whines and thumps, Dad pressing Stop, then Record again, to make the tape last. “It’s one minute after midnight,” he says calmly.

  The bed is shaking. My mother, who has refused an epidural, can be heard swearing. Once. Nervous sweat beads the back of my neck. In the excitement, Dad’s forgotten about the Panasonic spinning on a table in the corner. I know how this ends—and how I begin—yet I can’t bear the thought that the tape might run out before I am born, as though that would somehow alter the events that came after.

  “Ohhh, it hurts,” my mother cries. “Keep pushing,” the doctor says in a Cuban accent. My mother lets out a howling screech that trails off abruptly into a whimper. Then a kitten begins to bleat. Somebody has let an animal into the room, and it’s wailing. It grows louder, more certain, more rhythmic, ramping up for the bigness required of it. The animal is me. My first wild squawks, summoning everything to come. One breath, the slimmest of margins, holds it all: chance, love, hope, air. Life.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Dad exclaims huskily, relieved.

  My mother says, “Oh, look, she’s so tiny! Look at her feet!”

  She says, “Babykins.”

  Footsteps: Dad’s, crossing the room.

  He laughs, giddy almost. “I can’t believe the tape didn’t run out. Amazing.”

  Then the car falls silent. Dad’s gone again, into the bottomless sky, brutal and beautiful in its brightness, into the sagebrush spreading out in all directions, through the moon and a billion stars and beyond into infinite worlds we can’t see but can only feel. A ripple of energy that might someday, still, change the ending.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve been following the trail, looking for answers. It’s the trail that Dad left, but it’s also the one I made, dropping clues that form a pattern, words that make an arc. The signs were there all along, cutting a path between truth and illusion, courage and fear, winning and losing. They wobble out of the shadows like images from negatives, comprising light and dark, sun and shadow. It takes time and distance to see the shapes, but even then, they do not reveal everything.

  Maybe it’s better this way.

  “It seemed miraculous, something from nothing, a kind of creation. What had shaped them?” Dad wrote about watching his father develop photographs of his brother, Phil, and him when he was eight. “The first ghosts bloomed and bloomed…and there we were, shining and wet. Motionless. Forever.”

  Years later, Dad would give up his darkroom and then, little by little, his photography. The mystery of his pictures, the purpose they served, was more than he could bear. “What was the use of taking so many pictures when no one would see them?” he wondered in his notebook.

  He stopped too soon, before he realized there was joy in making photographs just to make them. They didn’t have to mean anything.

  But of course they do.

  * * *

  —

  Now the path has led me here, back to Santa Fe and my sunny kitchen on an early fall day. The house is quiet, buzzing with the comfortable hum it has when emptied of little bodies, of their squealing voices, the flinging about of art supplies, dolls; the pleading, the giggling, the whining. I hear the low purr of the refrigerator and, through the open windows, the crickets. In October in the high desert, they go all day—endurance defined. The girls’ absence has a presence that rea
ssures me. The house holds their energy, wraps its walls around our clattering joy.

  In the near silence, my mind loosens, stretches open. It’s the kind of blazingly blue New Mexico morning when anything feels possible. I know this feeling. It’s the feeling I get when I run, half-ecstatic, a little bit terrified, but spinning on anyway into the unknown. Through the darkness of early dawn, alone into the wilderness on trails so familiar I’ve memorized every step, and on others I’ve traveled only in my mind, with an open heart and fear that falls away with every footstep. I follow the trail as it unfurls, trusting that it will take me where I need to go, where it always takes me: into the story and back home again.

  Being alive does not just mean not being dead. For a long time after Dad died, I thought this. But there are so many ways of being alive in this world, of loving the world and seeing the world and feeling it, too. “How many things there were to love; how many things about which to feel sad,” Dad wrote on one of his road trips. “I wanted to remember it all.”

  I thought I was dying, but really I was just beginning. All those hours and days and years on mountains and rivers, across canyons and precipices, alone and with everybody I love most, I’d been writing this book.

  For Steve

  and Pippa and Maisy—

  I’m always running home to you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PHOTO: KATIE ARNOLD

  Ucross, Wyoming, 2015

  Many of my earliest recollections exist only as fragments. I’m indebted to my father, David L. Arnold, for caulking over the holes in my girlhood, and to my stepmother, Lesley Arnold, for so graciously allowing me complete access to my father’s archives. This book would not exist without your generosity, Lesley. Dad never knew I was writing this book, and for a long while after he died, I didn’t, either. For your words, photographs, recordings, and videos, Dad, and for everything else you gave me, I’m forever grateful.

  Deepest gratitude to my mother, Betsy, always my sunniest champion and brightest light, who showed me there were no limits, ever. Who bought me all those books at the Lincoln School book fair and let me ride my bike all over town, and who was the first to encourage this project before it had begun to take shape. Thank you for your inexhaustible optimism. And to my stepfather, Ron, you have given so generously and taught me so much about commitment, loyalty, and self-discipline. I love you both.

  Enormous thanks to my sister, Meg, for being the other half of my memory, for always having my back, on the steepest hills and fastest flats. And to my siblings Amy and Ron, and their families for their kindness, laughter, and support. I’m also grateful to Philip and Merrill Strange for being such loving friends to Dad, and all of us.

  It takes a team to run an ultramarathon, and the same is true of writing a book. So many friends in my Santa Fe family helped me by taking care of my girls while I ran and wrote, keeping me company on the trails, reading early drafts, and supporting me in training and races. Heartfelt thanks to Blair Anderson, Kate Ferlic, Mary Turner, Erika Benson, Erin Doerwald, Carol Norton, and Anna Davis for their encouragement. Much gratitude to Elizabeth Sullivan—some of the earliest parts of this book started with our letters and emails. Natalie Goldberg shared a millennium’s worth of wisdom with me, and, though I might never come close to understanding it, I feel it. Thank you.

  Special thanks to Sharada Hall, Michael Diaz, Bob Schrei, Meghan Haid Sterling, Kate Reynolds, Bruce Gollub, Ira Berkowitz, Anne Loehr, Wuji Wayfarer, Marise Maxiner, Geoff Kloske, Bill Clegg, Maura O’Connor, Bill Stengel, Alix Kates Shulman, Nallely Chavira, Thais Mather, Rob Wilder, and Lee Lyon; and my fifth-grade language arts teacher, Debbie Kaflowitz, who recognized the writer in me. Thanks to Chris Johns at National Geographic and Jenna Pirog for access to and assistance with Dad’s photo archives.

  I’m appreciative of all my friends at Outside, especially the amazing Elizabeth Hightower Allen, champion of writers and words, who read an early draft and saved me with her brilliant, sensitive comments. Thanks also to Larry Burke, Mark Bryant, Chris Keyes, Hal Espen, Stephanie Pearson, Greg Cliburn, Grayson Schaffer, Hampton Sides, Alex Heard, Jonah Ogles, and Hannah McCaughey, who brought her brilliant eye for design to these pages. Much gratitude is owed to Will Palmer, whose thoughtful, exacting attention made this a better book, and whose funny marginalia, as always, made me laugh.

  I’m grateful to the Ucross Foundation, in northern Wyoming, where I started writing this book, for giving me a perfect room in an old red train depot, cow paths on which to run through the sagebrush hills, and a neon vest because it was hunting season. The beauty and kindness of Ucross are stitched deep into these pages. And to the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, thank you for so generously providing me the silence and space to finish the manuscript, the freedom to roam in body and mind, and a clunky three-speed bike that healed me.

  Big love for my huge-hearted, intuitive, and unshakable editor, Andrea Walker. Your generosity and wisdom can be felt on every page, and the freedom you gave me to find my own way has meant everything to me. Thank you also to Emma Caruso, Andy Ward, Ted Allen, Sharon Propson, Barbara Fillon, Katie Tull, Toby Ernst, and the rest of the team at Random House.

  And to my agent, Dorian Karchmar, a steady pulse on the other end of the line, whose immediate and passionate response and invaluable editorial insights helped create the momentum that carried this book forward to the finish. Thank you for pacing me on the long journey. You are truly an animal! Many thanks also to Jamie Carr, Alex Kane, and Laura Bonner at William Morris.

  To my daughters, Pippa and Maisy—thank you for your patience and understanding when I needed to run and write, and for always being such game girls. Your curiosity and energy inspire me every day. And of course, forever, to Steve Barrett. Thank you for your never-ending supply of humor exactly when I needed it, your wisecracks and steadiness. Thank you for feeding me, cleaning my smudgy sunglasses, and tolerating my obsessions and dreaminess and all the hours and miles I was gone. Thank you for your faith in me, and for always being here when I get home.

  And to the innumerable people who helped me along the way, without acknowledgment, I am grateful. Thank you, world.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  KATIE ARNOLD is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, where she served as managing editor for twelve years. She is the creator and author of the column Raising Rippers, on Outside Online, where she reports on the importance of nature and free play for children. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, ESPN: The Magazine, Runner’s World, Travel + Leisure, Elle, and elsewhere. Her long-form narrative nonfiction has been recognized by Best American Sports Writing, and her essays have been anthologized in collections, including Woman’s Best Friend and Another Mother Runner. Katie is the 2018 Leadville Trail 100 Run women’s champion. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband and two daughters.

  katiearnold.net

  Twitter: @raisingrippers

  Instagram: @katiearnold

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