Living With a Wild God

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  We got to Mammoth Mountain just as the chairlift opened. I don’t know about Dick, but neither my brother nor I had ever skied on a serious mountain before, compared to which New England has nothing to offer except what amount to foothills, suitable for the display of fall foliage but offering no life-threatening thrills. Mammoth, in contrast, seemed to erupt right out of the earth, and had in fact been created by a volcanic blowout a mere fifty-seven thousand years ago, which might as well have still been going on, so fiercely were the snow-covered peaks, some of them actually called “minarets,” puncturing the deep blue sky all around us. I mostly stuck with my brother, a sturdy enough, self-reliant kid, but who was after all only thirteen, and it seemed wiser to keep him in sight than to spend the last few hours of the day searching for him on unfamiliar trails. Other than this vague sense of sororal responsibility, though, I felt not the slightest connection to my species. The point was to go up and down, up and down, at maximum speed, celebrating and reenacting the violence that had created the mountain in the first place.

  It was an unnaturally warm day to be skiing, maybe all the way up to seventy degrees by midafternoon, so we took off our jackets and tied the sleeves around our waists. We couldn’t stop, nor was it easy to remember what our lives had been like before we strapped our skis on that morning. Of course the chairlift made stopping unnecessary, returning us again and again to the brink of disaster, the ecstatic liftoff, and then—for minutes on end—the obliteration of everything complicated and demeaning in the perfection of speed and snow. Only when the sun began to sink behind the ridge and the wind got cold did we regroup and think about leaving. The idea, at least as I understood it, was to drive straight back to L.A., arriving in the early hours of the morning.

  But we got no farther than the town of Lone Pine, where we parked at the side of the road and spent the night in the car. My brother stretched out in the backseat while Dick and I sat straight upright in the front side by side like two crash test dummies, since the seats in this old car did not recline. No dreams intruded, and no cops knocked on the windows to check on whether we were runaways.

  Why did we spend that night in the car? The question is important, because if we had driven straight on to L.A. I would have ended the night in my bed and none of the rest might have happened. I would have gone back to being a normal geeky, alienated adolescent and this book could end right here or dribble off into a standard coming-of-age story, culminating, within a couple of decades, in the coffin of “maturity.” For years I filled the gap in the narrative with car troubles: The car must have broken down; we couldn’t get it fixed till the morning; we had no money for a motel. The fact that I couldn’t remember any details of this supposed car trouble—any sputtering, any towing, any long wait at a service station—I attributed to my lack of interest in all things car-related. But when fifty years later I asked my brother about it, he couldn’t remember any mechanical problems either. In fact, one of the few things he could remember was that Dick had impressed our uncle Dave with his knowledge of cars.

  It wasn’t too easy to track down Dick—the old man Dick, that is—because I hadn’t remembered his name right, but I did recall that his mother had been a published writer, and that led me eventually, through the Internet and a book about her, to a voice on the other end of the phone who claimed to remember me, some of our mutual friends in high school, and our trip in 1959. Like my brother, he denied any car trouble and insisted that there was nothing odd, at least not for him as a teenager, about sleeping in a car on the side of the road. He had done so many times during his adventures with other boys, or even slept outdoors on the ground. The problem was, he told me, that I had been overly “sheltered,” even for a girl. Before I could muster any sort of protest, he was already off on an old man’s tirade on the subject of “young people today,” who, though strikingly overindulged, are mostly to be found in violent, drug-dealing gangs.

  His remark about my having been “sheltered” may offer a clue about what made Dick so angry almost from the moment we started driving out of L.A. I think something must have happened offstage, just as we were about to set out on the trip, perhaps when I ran back into the house to get something, leaving my father alone for a few minutes with him, and my guess is that what happened is that my father took the opportunity to warn Dick against any attempts at tomfoolery. Why this sudden concern for my virtue from a parent who had up to that moment shown no hesitation about sending two of his children off on an overnight trip with a stranger for the purpose of engaging in a risky sport? My guess is that my father was alarmed by the mere sight of Dick, who was not the scrawny teenager he may have been expecting, but a darkly good-looking young man at least an inch taller than my father. Dick’s looks were not lost on me, but I didn’t aspire to be his or anyone’s girlfriend. If anything, my secret, inadmissible craving was to be a boy like him or at least some sort of gender-free comrade at arms.

  In our recent phone call, Dick didn’t mention any contact with my father, and, for reasons that will be apparent shortly, our call did not end in a way that was conducive to follow-up questions. But such a scenario is at least consistent with the erratic territorialism my father was later to display when I brought home actual boyfriends from college: Short or ungainly ones were tolerated; big, handsome ones were subjected to tasteless hazing, and almost all of my boyfriends fell in the latter category. I suspect that whatever my father said to Dick had been put in fairly crude terms, with the effect that Dick determined to have nothing to do with me, even in the realm of small talk, despite the fact that I was sharing the front seat with him for hours on end. If this is in fact what happened, then the awful anger and shame that filled that little car, and which were to set the stage for what followed, originated with my father, along with the idea of skiing.

  The upshot of this second night of troubled sleep, following on a day of unusual exertion that had, incidentally, included very little to eat, was that I entered the third day of our trip in the kind of condition that the Plains Indians sought in their vision quests—low on blood sugar but high on the stress hormones engendered by sleep deprivation. At the time I had no inner nurse practitioner to tell me it was time for some food and a rest; all I had was an impulse, as soon as the sky began to lighten, to get out of the car and walk. Who it was that quietly closed the car door behind her, so as not to waken the others, is not so easy to pin down: a thin film of cortical alertness, perhaps focused on finding a bathroom, but under that, pretty much nothing. No history, no future, no tiresome Barbara-ness. The desert, the snow, the struggle to subdue my sense of hurt and rejection had emptied me out. And here, no doubt, my many experiences of dissociation finally made themselves useful; a world drained of referents and connotations—the world as it is—held no terrors for me.

  The town of Lone Pine offered no complexities to explore, and at the time very little even in the way of side streets, so I just headed east to where the sky was lightest. The street I was walking on held a few grudging concessions to commercialism—an auto parts store, for example—but nothing was open and there were no humans or moving cars to be seen. I moved through a haphazard assemblage of surfaces, still gray in the opalescent predawn light. The amazing thing about the world, it struck me then in my radically dissociated state, was that I could walk into it. And thanks to my history of dissociation, which had accustomed me to strange and scary places, I was not afraid to go right on into it, one foot in front of the other. In ordinary life, we don’t make enough of this three-dimensionality. We don’t pause to appreciate the softness of air and the way it parts before us without our having to resort to a machete or shovel. The fact that the world as we find it is permeable and that even slight muscular exertion can lead to sudden changes in scene, as from rounding a corner or climbing a hill—well, we just take it for granted. But on this particular morning I was sufficiently drained of all conventional expectations that it seemed astounding just to be moving forward on my own strength, unimpede
d, pulled toward the light.

  In the next few minutes, on that empty street, I found whatever I had been looking for since the articulation of my quest, or perhaps, given my mental passivity at the moment, whatever had been looking for me. Here we leave the jurisdiction of language, where nothing is left but the vague gurgles of surrender expressed in words like “ineffable” and “transcendent.” For most of the intervening years, my general thought has been: If there are no words for it, then don’t say anything about it. Otherwise you risk slopping into “spirituality,” which is, in addition to being a crime against reason, of no more interest to other people than your dreams.

  But there is one image, handed down over the centuries, that seems to apply, and that is the image of fire, as in the “burning bush.” At some point in my predawn walk—not at the top of a hill or the exact moment of sunrise, but in its own good time—the world flamed into life. How else to describe it? There were no visions, no prophetic voices or visits by totemic animals, just this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured out into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by the Eastern mystics. It was a furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once, and one reason for the terrible wordlessness of the experience is that you cannot observe fire really closely without becoming part of it. Whether you start as a twig or a gorgeous tapestry, you will be recruited into the flame and made indistinguishable from the rest of the blaze.

  I stopped at some point in front of a secondhand store, transfixed by the blinding glow of the most mundane objects, teacups and toasters. I could not contain it, this onrush: The dream in my uncle’s house had been right about that. Nothing could contain it. Everywhere, “inside” and out, the only condition was overflow. “Ecstasy” would be the word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence. At no time did I lose physical control of myself. I may have leaned against a building at some point, but I never fell down. Whatever else was going on—whatever cyclones raged in my brain—the neuromuscular system remained functional throughout.

  There is a gap here, a brief period of overload in which no long-term memories were laid down. Somehow I got back to the car, too stunned to feel anything but hunger. In the next scene I can recall we are sitting in a diner eating breakfast. Actually we could afford to buy only one breakfast, which my brother ate while Dick and I each made do with a piece of his toast. I was astonished by the multicolored busyness of the restaurant, the impeccable logic of the menu, the waitress moving purposefully from one table to the other. The mundane was back to its old business of turning out copies of itself—one moment pretty much like the one before it—but anyone could see that the effort was hopeless, that the clunky old reality machine would never work the same way again. I knew that the heavens had opened and poured into me, and I into them, but there was no way to describe it, even to myself. As for trying to tell anyone else, should anyone ask where I had disappeared to at dawn—what would I have said? That I had been savaged by a flock of invisible angels—lifted up in a glorious flutter of iridescent feathers, then mauled, emptied of all intent and purpose, and pretty much left for dead?

  Over breakfast, Dick suddenly became animated. Spreading a map out on the counter, he started making the case for a scenic detour into Death Valley on our way south. He had been there before and it was on the way home or near enough, so we might as well go. If he had proposed a tour of the circles of hell, I would have agreed to that too—let the good times roll. We could do anything, as far as I was concerned: Drive over a cliff or just sit in the diner until they asked us to leave. In my post-Damascene moment, these were indistinguishable options.

  My memories of the rest of that day, of the things that actually happened, are pretty badly decayed, if they were ever formed in the first place. We drove south, stopping somewhere on the way to use our last couple of dollars on milk shakes, and then turned east into Death Valley, which made the Mojave Desert seem lush by comparison. After a while we turned north onto a rugged dirt road, as if we had a destination. There was a stop now and then when we’d get out of the car and peek down into an abandoned mine shaft or just stumble around in the creosote and dust, flinching against the afternoon sun. Death Valley wasn’t only incomprehensibly large, it was actively hostile. Maybe this was just part of the natural evolution of exhaustion, but the insane beauty of the morning had drained completely away, and what remained was not easy to look at. Everything, every rock and shrub, came framed in its own outline of black, like a formal rebuke of heartbreaking severity. I strained to make the dead world burst back into life, but no effort of mine could revive it. Every now and then the mountains to the east would form themselves synesthetically into a line of music, and ever so briefly try to pull me back into their dance, but then they would just as suddenly harden back into indifference. The function of the desert was to cauterize an open wound.

  I should have died that day, or—to give it a nice Buddy Holly ring—that should have been the day that I died. I don’t mean by this that the rest of my life has been a weary slog; far from it. But the story seemed to end here, or at least that was my strong sense for years to come, into my early twenties anyway, when I carried on with the mechanics of living in the jaded spirit of someone who knows she has overstayed her visit: seen all the sights and can find no further way to make herself useful. A girl searches for “the truth.” She tries every avenue she can think of—poetry, philosophy, science—all the while remaining open to odd perceptual alterations for whatever clues they may hold. She even wrestles with the question of whether she would want to know it even if the truth turned out to be ugly or in some way ignoble, even if the knowledge ruins her life forever, and decides that, yes, she would want to know. Then one day, apparently selected on the basis of incidental physiological factors like exhaustion and hypoglycemia, the truth arrives in all its blinding glory, but with two conditions attached to it: one, that you can never speak of it, even to yourself, and two, that you can never fully recapture it ever again.

  At least those were the terms as I understood them at the time, and if it took years before I questioned them, that was because I saw them as disabilities peculiar to myself rather than as rules that could be challenged like any others. I could not speak of it because I lacked the words, and I could not recapture the experience any more than a burned-out filament could be used to light a fresh bulb. Something had happened, but it seemed to have happened to me rather than for me or for my edification. Maybe, from some unimaginable vantage point, I had served my purpose, which was to let this nameless force flow through me so that a circuit could be completed and the universe, for a moment anyway, made whole again. Having accomplished that, there was no good reason to go on.

  In fact I should have died that day, and rather spectacularly, if my old traveling companion Dick is to be believed. Toward the end of my call to him in 2011, when I had begun to make sounds preliminary to sign-off, like “hmm” and “well, then…,” he said, in a suddenly energized voice, “I have a secret.” He said he meant a secret about our long-ago skiing trip, and asked if I could remember our detour into Death Valley.

  Of course I could, I said, trying not to display an unseemly level of interest. Well, there was a reason for that part of our trip, he told me now. He’d been to Death Valley with some friends, about a year before our trip. They’d poked around ghost towns and abandoned mine shafts and come across a box of unexploded dynamite, which they’d left where they found it. Then, at some point during the trip with my brother and me, Dick had fastened on the idea of retrieving the dynamite and taking it home with him. Hence our apparently rambling tour of Death Valley, where he had finally located the treasure, probably while my brother was sleeping in the car and I was lost in a personal existential zone. It was really old dynamite
, Dick told me with evident pride, so old that some of it was oozing liquid nitroglycerine, which, he didn’t have to tell me, is one of the most improbable chemical compounds there is: just the ordinary ingredients of living things—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen—but bonded together in such an unnaturally painful arrangement that it flies apart at the slightest vibration.

  What did he want the dynamite for? I asked, imagining for a moment that I was dealing with some kind of a terrorist. Oh, nothing much, he said. He was just “a dumb kid” who liked to take sticks of dynamite up to the fire road that bounded the city and shoot at them with a shotgun. It was better than fireworks. So that’s why we had driven home from the mountains and the desert, on bumpy dirt roads and eventually crowded highways, with a box of unexploded ordnance in the trunk.