“Jesus.”
Sadie nodded.
“You don’t think your mother…”
“I doubt it, but who knows what she was capable of. In any case she couldn’t have orchestrated not only her own life but the lives of three other self-willed adults to resemble the plot of a silent movie she probably didn’t even know about. It’s just strange. It’s that kind of coincidence that probably happens more often than we imagine.”
When the waiter returned with coffee and pie, Sadie had him take a photo of us with her disposable camera from the retirement party. “Make sure you get the buffalo head,” she said as we posed with forkfuls of pie, our mugs aloft and about to touch. I’m looking at the photo now. The bottom two-thirds of the buffalo head is there. Sadie’s looking at me and I’m looking at the camera and both of us appear to have reached that point where prolonged pretend smiles spill into laughter that, while often at least half put-on, comes through the camera as almost authentic.
We finished and paid and went for a walk through the desolate downtown in the late-winter darkness. Nothing was open; dirty snow clumped here and there; fathomless potholes pocked the streets. We circled back to our Holiday Inn Express, where Sadie FaceTimed with her son in our beige room while I sat in the beige lobby holding a book and thinking about the terrible things her loved ones had inflicted on her. No wonder she took a tragic view of life. No wonder she believed it was the duty of parents to model loss for their children. (Maybe, I thought, opening her marriage was, at least in part, a way of doing that.) I felt a bottomless sadness for her that was also a sadness for myself, almost as if the sad events she’d narrated had somehow also happened to me. And it was true—wasn’t it? I asked myself, as a man in a cowboy hat sat down across from me and opened a thick jacketless hardcover book—that her story involved me in some crucial way. It had to. If it didn’t, she wouldn’t have told it to me, or I wouldn’t have been affected by it, or maybe it would just seem incomprehensible, lacking interest and meaning. The man shifted in his chair and I tried to glimpse the title of his book, couldn’t make it out. Sadie had confided in me, I smiled to think, she had opened up: and now her story was mine as well, and I felt proud and powerful and scared.
When I returned, the lights were off and she was asleep, the Late Show on mute. I brushed my teeth, peed, crawled into my bed, watched Letterman silently flirt with Susan Sarandon, turned off the TV, and went to sleep between one house and the next.
* * *
—
We were following a route I’d taken many times. Every two or three summers in my childhood (I told Sadie, as if to counterbalance her dark story with an almost unreal idyll), my family would load up the forest green minivan and—my father driving, my mother sitting shotgun, my brother in the two-person frontmost back seat and my sister and I sharing the three-person “way back”—head west on I-80 troubled by a small but persistent doubt: could the minivan, humble, elephantine, so adept at shuttling us to and from school, so at its bulky ease on the scruffy streets of Des Moines and western suburbs, its natural habitat, really convey us and our two weeks’ provisions across other states, other landscapes? I remember the floaty feeling that came over me gradually as we drove down Cortez and Lower Beaver and Meredith and Merle Hay to the on-ramp, then the interstate, as if the leaving were making me lighter than air, my only anchor my father’s irritation at our having left twenty minutes later than planned—that and my mother’s attempts, ultimately successful, to assure him that everything would work out fine, we’d get there in plenty of time. My father used to make spreadsheets showing the distance between towns and the estimated times we’d pass through them on our trip, assuming an average speed of five miles above the speed limit and factoring in a fifteen-minute stop every two hours and a forty-five minute stop for lunch (fast food, usually McDonald’s or Wendy’s but sometimes the classier, more adult Arby’s—never Hardees or Burger King, which we tacitly agreed failed to meet our standards). He’d print out five copies and distribute them among us, and although we made fun of him as we did it we secretly enjoyed comparing our actual progress against his model. For the first two hours or so of our journey we required no distractions, sustained on pure anticipation and the gum my mother had let us pick out the day before we left; only on entering Nebraska did we turn to books and music and games—the License Plate Game, the Alphabet Game, Car Bingo, Twenty Questions. Nebraska was the butt of jokes in my family; we used it to prop up Iowa, ourselves. Nebraska! Nothing was worse than Nebraska. It was a true no place, there was nothing there, just dirt, and more dirt, vast expanses of dirt stretching out under vast skies made of dirt. Nebraska. My father liked to threaten the family with the prospect of moving to Ogallala. “Your mother and I have been thinking,” he’d start off, or, “I’ve been presented with an opportunity I’m afraid may be too good to pass up.” Cue mock horror: Dad, no! Not Ogallala! Not Nebraska! Why did it feel so good to object to moving to a place we knew we’d never move to? Nebraska. I remember the excitement, only half-ironic, my family experienced the summer of the construction of the Great Platte River Road Archway outside Kearney. The arch, which turned out to be more of a bridge, would span the interstate in the middle of one of its straightest, most barren and never-ending stretches, a new landmark, something to look forward to. And the next summer we went west, there it was, the “arch,” symbol of—surely a symbol of something, and inside, a museum where we learned it was built (by “a Walt Disney team,” I later discovered) at the confluence of three historic trails, the Oregon, Mormon, and California. Trappers, traders, pioneers in covered wagons, the prairie, buffalo, Pawnee Indians, the gold rush, steam trains, the Pony Express—all dissolved in our interstate-addled minds into the swirling fog of History, so that by the time we left, with maybe a magnet or multicolored pen or packet of stickers from the gift shop, the arch had become just one more thing to mock about Nebraska. Nebraska.
I wonder now if the rest of my family’s complaining was, like mine, mostly an act, if my mother and father and brother and sister actually took refuge, as I know I did, in the monotony and endlessness and emptiness of the state. (The emptier the landscape, I see now, the better for projecting vague desires onto it.) I remember wanting so badly to get there, and yet I remember this wanting much more vividly than any instance of actually getting there. Likewise, the forms that passed behind our windows mattered less than the fact of their passing us by, the perpetual recomposition of the view, in which I felt at home. Escape? No, arrival into motion, the pouring-away world of no attachment. The minivan became our home, with its attendant echoes of domestic rituals. We ate in it—Quaker Oats granola bars or, if we were lucky, Kudos bars, with their chocolate coating that in memory tastes of coffee and peanut butter. My mother and brother napped in their seats while I read book after book to my sister: The Wide-Mouthed Frog, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Berenstain Bears books, Are You My Mother?, or, when she was a little older, The Wind in the Willows, A Bear Called Paddington, James and the Giant Peach, books that my brother had read to me when I was my sister’s age, he mine, and that my parents had read to him before I or my sister was born.
Dusk reminded us that time passed after all. A faint sadness that was also a happiness descended. Since we knew we wouldn’t have to actually face it, we could take pleasure in our fear of the dark—of real dark, the absolute darkness of the prairie—maybe imagining we were pioneers on the Oregon or Mormon or California trail, and that pleasure mingled with the pleasure of anticipation for what we knew awaited us, as often as not in Ogallala, site of our collective fantasy: a motel. A motel! The airbrushed familiarity of our room, with its two queen beds and rollaway for my brother and thin carpet and sliding blinds and dark wood end tables, the coolness of the comforters tucked tightly in, the dusty clean smell of air-conditioning, water glasses topped with snug paper caps, everything neat and crisp and cool.
The moment we arrived I’d j
ump on a bed and turn the TV to ESPN, and since it was summer it was usually baseball, which I didn’t care about enough to watch for long unless it was the Twins or Cardinals or Cubs, and if it wasn’t I’d try WGN, if the motel had it, to see if the Cubs were playing there; and if not, or sometimes even if they were, I’d soon change into my swim trunks and go down to the pool (down, because in my memory we always stayed on one of the top floors of the motel) with my sister and mother and sometimes my brother; my father, probably exhausted from driving, almost never joined us; and after splashing around for a while we’d dry off and my mother would give us change (50 cents, then 60, later 75) for a vending machine candy bar or pop, which we’d eat or drink in the coolness of our room, into which we had brought the purifying smell of motel-swimming-pool chlorine. Then more TV until bedtime, restless sleep, mini-muffins and waffles and Froot Loops for breakfast, and, in the warmth of the morning sun, the return to the interstate, welcoming now, friendly, on this the second day of the trip.
“Where were you going?” Sadie asked. She and I had been back on the road for a few hours and had just passed into Colorado on I-76, a transition whose thrill had always been tempered for me by eastern Colorado’s similarity to Nebraska. But I knew what was coming: an ascent so gradual you didn’t notice it at first, sagebrush starting to dot the countryside, and then—signature moment of the journey—mountains appearing on the horizon, insubstantial as the clouds that shrouded them, so that whoever claimed to see them first opened herself to ridicule. No, they’re mountains! I swear!
“I haven’t said?”
“Maybe I missed it,” Sadie said.
We were going to Sheep’s Head Mountain Ranch, a rustic cabin-and-campground resort in the Rockies, two hours west of Denver, where for the next ten days I’d read and play miniature golf and wander through pine forests on the sprawling network of dirt roads and paths that had never not been familiar to me. Every two or three days we’d climb a mountain—starting with the easy Nine Mile Mountain and working our way to Sheep’s Head itself, with its lovely maddening redundancy of peaks—and once or twice we’d go into town for dinner at the burger place or Italian restaurant (or maybe the burger place was the Italian restaurant, I can’t remember). I loved the seclusion of the pine forest, its glowing darkness, its cozy density, so unlike anything I knew in Des Moines; I felt protected there, even as a part of me feared an encounter with a bear or mountain lion. I could never remember whether you were supposed to freeze or run or slowly back away, play dead or raise your arms above your head, shout at the top of your lungs or stay silent; whether when the bear or mountain lion attacked you were supposed to shield your head or fight back; whether the rules for one were the same rules for the other—and what about moose (they seemed so gentle), surely the rules were different for moose? Our first few visits we went horseback riding through the forest and fields of wildflowers, but when I was nine or ten I was thrown from my horse and had to get stitches on my tongue, unless that was my brother: whenever I see a horse I seem to remember falling, but I can also vividly picture the blood running from my brother’s mouth.
“Sounds like a special place,” said Sadie.
“It was, but something sort of terrible happened, which is that I went there to work at the front desk the summer after I graduated from college. I had a girlfriend at the time, Laura, who was living in Minneapolis. Our relationship was ending but we couldn’t admit it to ourselves, so we had a lot of long, hard phone conversations. Then she came to visit for a week, and we just stayed inside the whole time, talking and crying. By the time she left we weren’t together anymore, and the rest of my time there—a couple months, I guess—was clouded by her visit. What made it worse was that a big part of my job was greeting guests and I had to pretend to be cheerful. We had a script. ‘Welcome to Sheep’s Head Mountain Ranch, we want to make your experience great! How can I be of service to you and your family today?’ It was awful. I spent most of my downtime in the library, reading Beckett. Just to depress myself further I guess. No, I shouldn’t say that, it didn’t depress me, it actually cheered me up. Anyway. Now when I think of Sheep’s Head Mountain Ranch all my childhood memories are absorbed into my memory of that summer. I can’t be properly nostalgic about it. I sort of wish I hadn’t gone back.”
Sadie, who was driving, didn’t speak for a while; she seemed intent on the self-replenishing road that was visibly gaining altitude now, bringing the horizon in close to us. I was thinking about Laura’s invitation to her sister’s wedding, which I’d forgotten to respond to; I’d text next time I had a moment.
“We have to go there,” Sadie said finally.
“To Sheep’s Head Mountain? It’s not really—”
“No. We have to go there! Come on.”
We couldn’t go there, I said, it was out of our way, we’d never reach California by tomorrow, we should stick to the schedule we’d drawn up that morning, try to make it as far as we could into Nevada, but I knew as I spoke we’d end up going there. I let Sadie make her case: if I returned to Sheep’s Head Mountain Ranch now, as an adult, I could create a new layer of memories to set on top of the memory of my bad summer there.
“What if our experience is even more awful than my last experience there?” I asked.
“I can’t imagine having an awful experience with you.”
“It won’t make any sense to go there unless we spend the night.”
Sadie appeared to consider this. “Well then.”
The Rockies hazed forth from the horizon, we skirted Denver, then passed through the foothills and entered the mountains, rising through a valley of golden stone (I texted Laura: So sorry but, etc.), then the switchbacks of Berthoud Pass, ponderosa pines giving way to lodgepoles, the present flickering in and out of the past—and then the high, broad valley from my dreams.
But it wasn’t the same as before, something was off. I don’t know when I first noticed the discrepancy. At first I chalked it up to the inevitable distortions of memory and desire. Then I realized: snow. There wasn’t much, but I’d never been here in the winter. That was it. Then I realized: No, that’s not it. Or it was, but there was something else, something bigger: the countryside, though its contours were familiar, was barren; bald mounds stood in place of forested hills. I told Sadie and she said it was probably the pine beetle, she’d read about it in the Times, the past decade’s outbreak was the biggest insect blight in the history of North America. She couldn’t remember its geographical extent, but she wouldn’t be surprised if it had hit this valley. In my mind I saw thunderclouds of beetles descend from the sky, alight on the vast pine forest that used to be there, and moments later swarm off in a deafening hum, leaving behind silence and the nothingness I saw on either side of the road. “It’s a completely different place,” I said.
In my disorientation we almost missed the turnoff into Sheep’s Head Mountain Ranch, and as we drove down the long dirt entry road I couldn’t suppress my astonishment. What in my childhood had been a magical tree tunnel now had the look of an abandoned lot. Mulch and scraps of lumber littered the snow. Stumps showed evidence of the former forest. Understory that was no longer stood exposed, embarrassed tangles of leafless shrubs. The handful of isolated pines still standing, some green but many the rust red of death, had the look of long, solitary strands of body hair, the kind that grow from moles. I’d remembered these trees as thick and full—an illusion born of their numbers, I saw now. Straight ahead, as if rising from the end of the road, Sheep’s Head Mountain loomed in the middle distance; before, you only caught glimpses of it through windows in the pines. We had come here to rearrange my memories, but instead it was as if my memories had been erased.
We arrived at the main lodge and parked and Sadie asked me if I still wanted to stay here. I detected a note of concern in her voice and worried I looked sad or stunned. I told her I did if she still did, as much to show her I was okay as fo
r any other reason. “Let’s go get a cabin,” Sadie said. It felt good to stretch our legs. The air was dry and smelled empty, clean. The lodge, at least, was as I remembered it: high ceilings, pine beams, large central stone fireplace, mounted heads of deer and elk and moose and buffalo and bear. “Welcome to Sheep’s Head Mountain Ranch, we want to make your experience great! How can I be of service to you and your family today?” As Sadie inquired about availability with the front desk attendant who’d accosted us (front desk attendant had stained my résumé for the first few years of my post-college life), I tried to avoid eye contact with the other, who was checking in a mother and father and young daughter, and whom I was pretty sure I recognized. Just to be sure, I stole a glance, and in that moment he looked back for a split second, and though his eyes registered no recognition I had no doubt it was Jarry, the Polish marathoner. I’d only worked a few shifts with him, but we’d had a long conversation about his plans to return to Poland and go to business school and open his own athletic gear store, where he’d apply the lessons he’d learned in America—lessons about valuing individuals over ideology or groups of people, he explained—to selling shoes and spandex pants. He had a big, friendly smile and kind eyes. Sometimes I’d see him running up Nine Mile Mountain as I sidestepped my way down.
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