Mountains Beyond Mountains

by Tracy Kidder

  When Farmer told me this story, I asked him where he’d stayed in the meantime.

  “In a tent. Of course. What kind of a question is that?”

  There were times inside the bus when the Warden would dance around and sing, times when he’d read them Shakespeare plays and books such as Aesop’s Fables. But at least for Farmer’s older sister, Katy, even his reading aloud could be nerve-racking. There was The Swiss Family Robinson. When he’d read a little way into that tale of a shipwrecked family which finds happiness by living rustically on an island, Katy thought to herself, “Uh-oh.” Later, when he got a few pages into Robinson Crusoe, she thought, “No! Please!” There had been other ominous signs. The Warden had never gone to sea, but even back in Alabama he’d been buying boating magazines. He had a great stack of them by now.

  Around the time P.J. entered high school, the Warden bought at public auction an old Liberty launch, a fifty-foot-long empty hull with a hole in it, which he repaired. Then he took a year off from his paying jobs: he was teaching school and working with retarded adults in Brooksville. He built a cabin for the boat, cussing and fuming, learning his ship’s carpentry, such as it was, as he went along. In the middle of his labors—the whole family had to pitch in—he started running short of cash, and he announced to P.J. and the two younger boys, “We’re going to pick citrus.”

  P.J. said, “But, Dad, white people don’t pick citrus.”

  “Yeah? I’ll give you white people.”

  Most of the workers up on ladders in the orange trees were black, in fact. P.J. heard them talking from tree to tree in a strange language and asked his father what it was. “Creole. They’re Haitians,” the Warden explained. To young Paul, he described, briefly, the epic poverty of their country. But P.J. didn’t get to know any Haitians then. The Farmers didn’t work in the groves long enough. The pay was meager. After a few days, the Warden called it quits. He went back to work on the boat, which he named the Lady Gin, after his wife. When he declared it finished, he bought a generator for it and a fair amount of fishing gear that they really couldn’t afford but that, he insisted, would pay for itself in no time. According to his plan, the boat would make them truly independent. It would serve as both their home and a source of revenue, through commercial fishing.

  Their first voyage began on a calm and sunny day, the Warden at the helm. They steamed out into the Gulf of Mexico, far out of sight of land. They anchored in the shallow waters of the gulf, had lunch, and swam, P.J. and his siblings cavorting all around the boat. But they hauled up only a few edible fish, and then, that night, a storm blew in. The wind was howling, the boat was pitching at its anchor, and Ginny became terrified. Fear must have made her as implacable as her husband, because at some point that night, at her insistence, he tied a rope to the generator and threw it overboard as a second anchor. Meanwhile, down in their berths in the rocking, rolling cabin, the children were enjoying themselves immensely. “Cool, a storm.” Years later Farmer’s brother Jeff would tell me that he’d known all along his father was incompetent in boats. Even as they’d motored out that morning, he’d realized that the man knew nothing about navigation. “But the thing was—it was a strange feeling—you knew he didn’t know what he was doing, but you also felt the security. That he would get us out of the situation. That nothing was really going to beat him.” Ginny, for all the frights he put her through, would say of the Warden, “He was a great risk taker, and everything always turned out all right.” She paused. “I mean, no one ever got seriously hurt.”

  The next day, heading landward, the Warden got lost and grazed a rock, but they made it safely into port. The Lady Gin went on a few other short, eventful voyages. On one of those, the Warden disregarded the channel markers—he seemed to think they represented arbitrary rules that he was not obliged to follow—and Jeff said, “Dad, you’re not in the channel.” The Warden said, “Shut up. What do you know about it?” and a moment later ran them hard aground. But for the most part, after its first and only fishing trip, the Lady Gin stayed moored in an otherwise uninhabited bayou on the Gulf Coast named Jenkins Creek.

  On a bookcase shelf in his little house in the parched hills of inland Haiti, Farmer kept a photograph of that other home. The Lady Gin, painted white but not very recently, floats moored to a metal pipe in the inlet. It’s surrounded by marsh grasses, tall palm trees in the background. A gangplank leads to terra firma. A TV antenna sits on top of the cabin, and the cabin, a square superstructure planted on a rounded hull, doesn’t quite fit. The Blue Bird Inn doesn’t appear in the photograph, but it was parked nearby, ready for family excursions, on a dirt road beside the creek.

  The Warden was happy there. He had his family where he seems to have wanted them—on an island, so to speak, safe from malign influences. As for young Paul, he loved the bayou, the starlit solitude, the osprey that lived in a nest off the Lady Gin’s starboard bow, the otters that would swim by, the alligators they’d hear barking at night. He’d save the money from his part-time jobs in Brooksville, at Hogan’s Drugstore and at Biffburger, to buy materials for landscaping and for a fish pond across from their gangplank, and he does not seem to have been very discouraged by the high tides that periodically wiped out his handiwork.

  The bayou life was hardest on Ginny. She worked all day at the Winn-Dixie and had to take care of six children and a husband on a boat. P.J.’s two brothers were growing up to be as large as their father. Their appetites were huge, and the refrigerator in the cabin was so small she had to restock it daily. When it rained, they put pots and pans beneath the leaks in the cabin’s roof. At night cockroaches skittered in the bilge like a roomful of impatient women tapping their fingernails on tables. They washed their clothes in a Laundromat in town, and themselves and their dishes in the brackish water of the bayou. They got their drinking water some miles away, usually from a spigot outside a convenience store, surreptitiously filling the jugs that rattled around in the back of one or another of the vehicles that the Warden bought at auction—the Truck of Many Colors, or the olive drab army surplus sedan that they called the Staff Car, purchased by sealed bid for $288.

  Once, on the lonesome road from Brooksville, the Staff Car overheated. They had no water with them, so the Warden ordered the boys to urinate into the radiator. The cars embarrassed P.J. and his siblings, especially the Staff Car. On the way to school one morning, they asked the Warden to drop them off a block away. Instead, he drove right into the bus lane in front of the whole school, honking the horn as he pulled up. “That’ll show ya,” he said.

  Farmer would say of his childhood, “The way I tell myself the story is a little too neat. I’d like to be able to say that when I was young I lived in a trailer park, picked fruit with Haitians, got interested in migrant farmworkers, and went to Latin America. All true, but not the truth. We’re asked to have tidy biographies that are coherent. Everyone does that. But the fact is, a perfectly discrepant version has the same ending.”

  Indeed, growing up without running water on a bus and a boat, with the Warden at the helm, hardly implies a single personality or fate. All Farmer’s siblings grew up to live in houses. One of his sisters became a commercial artist, another the manager of community relations for a hospital’s mental health programs, the third a motivational speaker. One brother was an electrician, and Jeff became a professional wrestler (known to his fans as Super J and to his family as the Gentle Giant).

  No question, though, that Farmer’s childhood was good preparation for a traveling life. Like all his siblings, he emerged from the bayou’s waters with what he called a “very compliant GI system,” and from dinners of hot dog-bean soup without much fussiness about food, and from years of cramped quarters with the ability to concentrate anywhere. He could sleep in a dentist’s chair, as he did at night for most of one summer in a clinic in Haiti, and consider it an improvement over other places he had slept, and one might suppose that his fondness for a fine hotel and a good bottle of wine had the same origins.
After the Staff Car, Farmer would say, it was hard to feel embarrassed or shy in front of anyone. He allowed that growing up as he did also probably relieved him of a homing instinct. “I never had a sense of a hometown. It was, ‘This is my campground.’ Then I got to the bottom of the barrel, and it was ‘Oh, this is my hometown.’ ” He meant Cange.

  It was partly to avoid the onerous houseboat chores assigned them by their father that Farmer and his siblings threw themselves into virtually every extracurricular activity that Hernando High in Brooksville offered. “No couch potatoes in the family,” I said once to Farmer’s mother. “No couch,” she replied. Farmer was very popular in school, especially among the girls. The reason was simple, his mother said. “He listened to them.” He was president of his senior class and went to Duke on a full scholarship.

  To Farmer’s great surprise, as Ginny remembered, he didn’t get straight A’s his first semester at college. Everything was new. He was soaking up high culture. He became drama critic and art critic for a student newspaper. The first play he’d ever seen was one he was sent to review. He was also discovering wealth. He met a fellow freshman in his dorm, named Todd McCormack, the son of a very successful sports agent. “How come you put your shirts in plastic?” Farmer asked, watching McCormack unpack. He was a brainy kid from a small south Florida town to whom hot showers were something of a novelty, who didn’t have the right clothes or much spending money, and at Duke he had a couple of classmates whose father bought them a condominium so they wouldn’t have to live in a dorm. For a time he dated a girl who kept her own horse near campus. Like about 60 percent of the student body, he joined a fraternity—and he became its social director. “I was pretty taken by it, by wealth,” he remembered. “Nearly taken in.”

  There was a period, during his first two years at Duke, when to some of the family it seemed that P.J. might be making that customary American rite of passage and turning his back on them. He came home from college wearing a Lacoste shirt, and he said something to the effect that he couldn’t wear clothes that weren’t “preppy.”

  “Yeah, well,” said the Warden, “Pel the preppy can still clean the bilge.”

  One time one of his younger sisters visited him at Duke, and over breakfast with P.J. and his current well-heeled girlfriend, his sister told in great graphic detail the story of how, in the bayou, she’d killed and disemboweled a pregnant water moccasin and made what she called a medusa hat for Paul out of the remains. The story had the effect she’d hoped for, the girlfriend pushing away her uneaten omelet while P.J. turned bright red trying to keep from laughing. Farmer remembered coming home from college once and the Warden opening the tailgate of his derelict pickup truck to reveal a chaos of worthless old lumber, a couple of wasps flying out, and the Warden saying, with his sardonic smile, “Someday, son, this will all be yours.”

  By then Farmer had quit his fraternity. He wrote them that he couldn’t belong to an all-white organization. (“I received quite a frosty reply,” he would say, in a tone of voice that implied this still surprised him.) He’d come to admire his father’s distaste for putting on airs, and the man’s fondness for underdogs—for the retarded adults he worked with and the neighbors at the trailer park who one year gave all the Farmer children piggy banks made out of old Clorox bottles—and his tendency to give money away to people who were truly poor. Farmer returned home less and less during his last years at Duke, but it wasn’t as though he still intended, if he ever had, to trade in his old life for something fancier. “He had to get out from under his father,” Ginny explained. “Back home everything would revert to the old order.”

  All the Farmer children, according to their mother, had craved their father’s approval. He made it hard to get. Come home from high school with an A on a paper and he’d say, “Did anyone get an A plus?” The Warden loved sports. Farmer’s brothers excelled at all. P.J. wasn’t good at any. But he tried. It was an item of family lore that during the year he played baseball, the only thing he hit with a bat was the head of the coach’s son, by accident. In high school, he went out for tennis and track, and would push himself so hard in races that he’d throw up at the finish lines. “When I think of it, I could just cry,” Ginny would say. “He wanted to show his father he was an athlete, too, and his father would be so proud of him now.” Actually, according to his brother Jeff, the Warden bragged about P.J. constantly—his test scores, his full scholarship to Duke—but only when P.J. wasn’t around. “He was unbelievably proud of P.J., but he wouldn’t tell him because he was the kind of guy who thought, I don’t want your head to get too big.”

  In the Warden’s evolving dream, his children grew up and had families and all settled down around him and Ginny in one large compound. Instead, one by one, they began leaving home. Then the man who owned the land beside Jenkins Creek died, the county purchased the property, and the Farmers had to leave. They moved ashore to a trailer home on two acres in a pine barren, off Star Road in Brooksville. Only the two youngest daughters, Jennifer and Peggy, were still around by then. They called their new home Star Road State Prison.

  The Lady Gin had to be removed from its long anchorage. The Warden decided he would take it to a harbor farther south. He brought along only Jennifer, a teenager then. His navigation hadn’t improved. His disdain for buoys and channel markers still endured. “He got the boat beached on a sandbar all night and couldn’t get it off,” Jennifer remembered. In the morning he told her, “We’re just gonna burn it right here.” He said he wanted to give their boat a “Viking funeral” out at sea. “No one else is going to live on it,” he said. So he and Jennifer went through the boat and collected all the things they thought worth keeping, books and pictures mostly, and they loaded them into the dinghy—the Mini Ginny—which they rowed to a marina. They were in the process of buying gasoline for the Viking funeral when a man on the docks got wind of the Warden’s mad intentions. “Don’t do that. You’ll kill yourselves. Besides, I want the engine.” The man towed the Lady Gin off the sandbar and brought it into port. The Warden did burn the family boat, though, in a bonfire on land.

  Looking back, Jennifer would say that her brother Paul and her father shared certain qualities. Above all, she thought, once they’d focused on a goal, neither one would quit. Her father had thought he could conquer the very elements. Nothing and no one ever seemed to intimidate him. “The only time I saw him vulnerable, ever, was that morning when he decided to burn the boat. Nothing was working right. The boat was aground, his kids were leaving, and he had no good helpers anymore.”

  He died a few years later, in July 1984, while playing a pickup game of basketball. He was forty-nine, and, to all outward appearances, had been a healthy man. He’d probably had a heart attack.

  The telephone had not brought out the man’s best qualities. When P.J. had learned he’d been accepted at Harvard Medical School, he’d called home from Haiti to tell his parents, and the Warden had said, “Oh yeah, we knew you’d get in.” It had been, at moments anyway, a difficult relationship.

  Farmer had a steady girlfriend by the time the Warden died. Not long after the funeral, she went to Florida with P.J. They stayed at Star Road State Prison. The Blue Bird Inn was parked there, semiderelict, and he went inside the bus and found some old books and letters. His girlfriend left on a brief errand. She remembered, “I came back and P.J. was sitting in the driver’s seat, holding a letter his father wrote to him when he got into medical school. It said something like, ‘I just want you to know how proud I am.’ And P.J. was sobbing.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Old college friends describe a boy who made friends easily, legions of them, at least as many female as male, and who had a “photographic memory” for facts about each one. “He’d ask about relatives that I didn’t remember I’d even mentioned to him.” If you went to lunch with him at a campus hangout, it could take half an hour to get to a table, he had to stop so often to chat with other people. He liked company when studying, and if you stayed
up late with him to do it, you’d feel as though the work came more easily to him than to you, but then he’d start a food fight or make weird close-up images of his face on the copying machine, and later you’d all walk back across the silent campus loudly singing songs from The Sound of Music—“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.”

  After his first semester, Farmer started getting A’s. He spent one summer and fall in Paris. He went there with only a little money and no job, and found a Franco-American family that wanted an au pair. His mother would send a five-dollar bill in her weekly letter, and he’d use it to go to plays. On his days off, he went to political demonstrations. “It’s Saturday,” the man of the house would say to him. “What demonstration did you go to today?” He took four courses in Paris, among them the last ever taught by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, so infirm by then he had to be carried up onto the stage. By the time Farmer returned to Duke, he read, wrote, and spoke French fluently. He studied mostly science in his first two years of college, then focused on medical anthropology. He also read widely in subjects not assigned. Many professors were fond of him, and he of them. He wrote his senior honors thesis on “gender inequality and depression,” no doubt in part because the medical anthropologists he knew were all psychiatrists. But he didn’t claim any as a mentor. That distinction went to a German polymath named Rudolf Virchow, dead for the better part of a century.

  Compared with other historical figures in medicine, such as Pasteur or Schweitzer or Florence Nightingale, Virchow isn’t very well-known. Only one full-length biography of him exists. Yet he was, as one commentator writes, “the principal architect of the foundations of scientific medicine,” the first to propose that the basic units of biological life were self-reproducing cells, and that the study of disease should focus on changes in the cell. Virchow made important contributions in oncology and parasitology, coined at least fifty medical terms still in use today, defined the pathophysiology of a host of diseases, including trichinosis, and led a successful campaign for compulsory meat inspection in Germany. He designed a sewage system for Berlin that transformed it from a fetid sty into one of Europe’s healthiest cities. He founded a nursing school and hospitals. He was a practicing archaeologist and played an instrumental role in Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations of Troy. He helped to define the field of medical anthropology. He was a physician and a teacher and a practicing politician, so nettlesome in opposition to Germany’s imperial ambitions that Bismarck once challenged him to a duel.