Wild Awakening

by Greg J. Matthews

  I sat on the edge of the bed and glanced around. Stuffed animals patrolled the top of my niece’s dresser, while pictures of Rhiannon and her friends performing gymnastics and cheer routines adorned the walls. The temperature was warm and the room was cozy. I knew that the next day’s environment would be far different.

  Was there anything else I needed to do? Had I forgotten anything? I realized that at this point, if I’d forgotten something, I would have to go without it. During two years of planning, I’d done everything possible to ensure the success of our hunt and our safety. Now everything seemed to be falling into place. I had all my gear, our preparations were complete, and all was well with my family and with Matt’s. I’d even seen a moose already with my own eyes—if that wasn’t a good omen, I didn’t know what was.

  Only two things could have made this moment more perfect. One was if Shane had been able to join us. I understood completely why Shane had decided to opt out. It just would have been extra special to have all three Matthews brothers together for this one.

  The other missing piece, of course, was Dad.

  5

  * * *

  SPIRAL

  The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

  Not long after my parents divorced, my mom met a man named Gene while tending bar. They married in 1979, when I was twelve, but it was a relationship of convenience more than love. They split up soon after. A few months later, my mom met a painting contractor named Jeff and both of them fell hard for each other. My dad, meanwhile, was also moving on. I was fourteen when he married his live-in girlfriend, Brenda. Two years later, Mom married Jeff. If I’d had any hope of my parents getting back together and our family reuniting, that hope was now gone.

  My parents seemed to be handling life a lot better than I was. I still lived with Dad and Brenda during my last year at Pepper Drive Elementary and my first year at El Cajon Valley High School. I continued to get into fights at both schools. I began hanging out with the older baseball and football players at El Cajon. To fit in, I started drinking beer, which only made things worse. Then came the time a few of my buddies and I decided to go to dollar movie night at the mall. While running around in the parking lot after the movie, we somehow decided that tearing down a stop sign was a good idea. Each of us took turns kicking and pulling until the sign finally lay dead in the street. We didn’t notice until too late the headlights approaching at a swift pace. They belonged to a police squad car. It was my first arrest, but not my last.

  You could say that my judgment was a bit questionable in those days. I was mad at the world and busy taking care of Greg. I didn’t much care what anybody else thought.

  By early spring of my sophomore year, I’d grown tired of the tension I felt around my dad and moved in with Mom and Jeff. As hard as I tried, I never felt I measured up to Dad’s standards. It wasn’t that his expectations were over-the-top. I just grew weary of attempting to be perfect for him.

  One night a guy on the baseball team, Tony, drove me and another friend, James, over to a 7-Eleven, where we “fished” for beer—that is, we asked people going into the store if they’d buy us some. We eventually “caught” a case of beer and headed to Parkway Bowl, a combination of bowling alley, pool hall, and arcade. It was one of the local hangouts for the high school crowd.

  The three of us alternated between the arcade and drinking beers in the car. James and I drank a few. By the end of two trips back and forth, Tony must have downed a twelve-pack.

  After spending a couple hours inside Parkway, we decided it was time to head home. I noticed that Tony stumbled a bit on our walk to the car. Then he fumbled with his keys when he tried to unlock the door. Finally he staggered over to the passenger’s-side front door, managed to open it, and dropped into the seat. A few seconds later he was puking on the floorboard.

  James sat in the back seat and announced, “I’m not going to drive.”

  I had a curfew. I needed to get home.

  I didn’t have a driver’s license, but my mom had let me practice a few times. It was mostly a straight shot to my house—a couple of intersections with traffic lights and one right turn onto my street. I can do this, I thought. I can definitely do this.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll drive.”

  Tony’s car was a Buick, big as a tuna boat. I did just fine backing up the Buick and maneuvering through the parking lot. What I didn’t realize, however, was that I hadn’t turned on the headlights. The lot was so well lit that I didn’t notice.

  I pulled onto the street and made it through the two traffic lights without a problem. Everything was going great. Then I missed the right turn to my street. I was in the process of turning around when a squad car’s lights started flashing in my direction. A cop had noticed I was driving without headlights.

  I knew I was in big trouble.

  “Have you been drinking, son?” the officer asked.

  “I’ve had a couple beers,” I said.

  “Are you legally old enough to drink?”

  I realized there was no way out of this one. “No,” I said.

  The officer had me get out of the car and try to walk in a straight line. I couldn’t do it. Then he had me blow into a Breathalyzer. Before I knew what was happening, he was putting cuffs on me and directing me into the back of his patrol car. I was being arrested for driving under the influence and driving without a license.

  Dad hated drunk drivers. He’d seen them destroy the lives of too many innocent people. “It’s the drunk drivers that always live,” I’d heard him say, “and kill everybody else.”

  Dad is going to kill me, I thought. I’ve become what he hates the most.

  We drove to the precinct, where I was escorted into a jail cell for minors. I was literally behind bars. I would never forget the sound of that metal door sealing me in.

  It took about an hour for Dad to show up, but it felt like a year. I couldn’t imagine life getting any worse. Once again I’d given him a reason to be upset with and disappointed in me.

  Finally, I heard my dad’s voice drift down the hall. He was explaining to the officers that he was a highway patrolman. He and two officers soon walked to my cell. The stare Dad gave me was unmistakable—he was embarrassed for himself and ashamed of me.

  I am never going to be able to recover from this. I have completely failed.

  Yet again I rode in the back seat of my dad’s car as he drove me to Mom and Jeff’s house. There was no conversation. When we arrived, Dad said, “Right now, I’m too angry to even talk to you.” I got out without a word.

  A couple of days later, Dad showed up at the end of one of our baseball practices at the high school. This time he was in uniform. We still hadn’t talked about what happened. When practice finished, he called me over and we walked around the corner of a brick wall that lined a walkway between the baseball field and an apartment complex.

  The moment we were out of sight of the other students, Dad put his hand on my chest and slammed me against the wall.

  “I can’t believe you embarrassed me like that,” he said in a low tone. “I don’t understand the way you’re acting and the things you’re getting involved in. You need to make some serious changes in your life.”

  I said nothing and showed no reaction, but my thoughts were racing. I have no idea why I’m acting like this I don’t know why these things are happening. All I understood was that I was incredibly angry.

  Dad’s hand pressed harder against my chest. “I’m ashamed of you and what you’ve done.” Then he turned and walked away.

  As I watched my father’s retreating back, I was overwhelmed by the memory of that day in front of our house when he drove away, leaving me and my brothers in shock. It had been the most devastating moment of my young life, but another, even worse, would soon follow.

  In the months after Dad’s departure from our home, he
kept promising to pick me up so I could spend the weekend with him at his new place. From my eight-year-old perspective, I decided that the only reason my father would leave me and the rest of his family was if he’d discovered something incredible. I believed he must live in a mansion or perhaps even better, something that compared to Disneyland. I’d been shaken to the core, but I held on to the hope that my dad had found an amazing new life. I couldn’t wait to see him and learn what it was all about. I expected that everything would finally make sense.

  The first two weekends that I was supposed to visit didn’t work out, but at last, on a fall Friday, there he was after school in the familiar Chevy Malibu. He called through the open window, “Hey, how’s it going?”

  In the car, I practically bounced in my seat and asked rapid-fire questions: “What is your place like? Where is it? How is the furniture? I’m so excited to see it.” Dad said little. We drove to an area not far from Jack Murphy Stadium, home of baseball’s San Diego Padres, and approached a U-shaped two-story apartment complex that was partially hidden by a fence. When we pulled up to the gate, I saw that the apartments consisted of rows of beige stucco structures. I noticed cracks in some of the walls. I was surprised that the exterior was so unimpressive. I decided that the rooms must be phenomenal on the inside. We walked to number 8, Dad’s ground-floor apartment. He walked in, with me following eagerly right behind, and flicked on a light.

  I stared at the room in disbelief. The furniture consisted of an old vinyl couch, a used Formica table with two flimsy chairs, and a worn entertainment center with a few books on it. His TV stand was a piece of wood atop a pair of bricks. A lone window at the back of the apartment allowed a dim shaft of light in. In a dish drainer in the kitchen sink were a single glass, fork, knife, spoon, and plate. The white plate was trimmed with gold flowers; it was the only item I could see that didn’t appear drab and shabby.

  I had another reason for hoping that Dad’s home would be something special. According to my grade school logic, I thought that I might be the cause of my parents’ problems and divorce. I was the oldest child, after all. I knew there were times when I disappointed Dad. It made sense to me. Yet, if Dad had left us for a fantastic new situation, I might be able to let myself off the hook.

  At the moment I saw Dad’s apartment, however, I knew. He hadn’t traded up at all. If this was what made him happy, I must have done something pretty terrible to drive him away. It was entirely my fault. I hadn’t lived up to what my father expected of me. I had to accept the fact that I meant nothing to my dad. Because of what I’d done, I no longer had value in his eyes—or mine.

  If anything, my fights and arrests since the divorce had only brought more shame and embarrassment to my dad. My life was spiraling out of control, but I couldn’t talk about it. My hero had abandoned me and deemed me worthless. I kept my feelings to myself. I would never let anyone hurt me like that again.

  I wished I could be happy. I wished I had something to hope for. I thought back to the summer before I started high school. The anger, tension, and feelings of worthlessness were such a contrast to what I’d experienced then. When I finished eighth grade, I still lived with Dad and Brenda, but Shane and Matt had left to stay with my mom and Gene, who had just moved to a rental home in Grants Pass, Oregon. The house was in a rural area on the Rogue River, which was known for its salmon runs, white-water rafting, and rugged scenery. My brothers told me about the opportunities for amazing adventures: fishing, hiking, building forts, catching snakes and night crawlers. I missed them and my mom, and I wasn’t connecting with my dad. It was an easy decision to join them for the summer.

  I had a blast exploring the Oregon outdoors with my brothers, but it wasn’t my only great memory of that time. On one of my first days there, Mom dug in a side yard with a shovel while my brothers and I played in the backyard. A couple that looked in their seventies—the man wore overalls and a ball cap and the woman had on a flowered dress—walked up and introduced themselves to Mom. They were Al and Tina, our next-door neighbors.

  “Are you thinking about putting in a garden?” Al asked.

  “I am,” Mom said. “The soil is so rich here. But I’m just going to start small with some tomatoes.”

  Al explained that he’d farmed some of his property and had gardens himself. “If you could do all that you wanted, how big would your garden be?” he asked.

  Mom indicated an area that was probably twenty-five by seventy-five feet and mentioned planting cucumbers and beans along with the tomatoes. “Hopefully I can do that someday,” she said. “But right now I’ll just do what I can with this little patch here.”

  Al and Tina seemed like nice people. In fact, Tina brought us a bag of apricots and plums. But that didn’t prepare me for what happened next.

  The following morning, about six-thirty, a loose pane of glass in my bedroom window began rattling. It was accompanied by the sound of a motor. I rubbed sleep from my eyes and pulled back the curtain. To my surprise, there was Al, still wearing his overalls and ball cap, astride a John Deere tractor. He was skimming grass off the top of the ground in the area where Mom had wanted her garden. Once he pushed that grass into a pile, he lowered the rake in the back of his tractor and began tilling the soil.

  I ran out of my bedroom and into the living room. Mom was watching Al through the front window. “I can’t believe it,” she said.

  “He’s tearing up the yard!” I said. I didn’t understand what was happening.

  Mom laughed. “No, he’s tilling it for my garden,” she said. “I’m going to have a garden!” Al saw us watching and tipped his hat.

  “I can’t believe he would do that for us,” Mom said. “We don’t have any money to give him.” Based on our experience in California, people just didn’t do things like that.

  A couple of weeks later, Shane and I were practicing fly casting in the backyard, when we heard the doorbell ring. I dropped my fishing rod and ran into the house to answer the door. On our front step stood a man wearing a plaid shirt and round, wire-rim glasses. He was starting to go bald on top and had rosy cheeks and a big smile.

  “Hi, what’s your name?” he said.

  My mom arrived, and after a minute of chatting, she invited the man in. Ernie Sackett was a friend of Al and Tina’s. Mom served Ernie berry cobbler that they ate in the living room as they talked. Shane, Matt, and I ate cobbler in the kitchen and eavesdropped.

  Ernie got around to mentioning that he was the Sunday school teacher at the local church. “I live in that trailer park not far from here,” he said. “I wonder if it would be all right with you if I picked up your boys on Sunday mornings and took them to Sunday school. We learn about Jesus Christ and all the Bible stories in my class.”

  Mom said she thought that was a great idea. I was actually kind of excited about the idea myself. Other than one Easter service with my grandmother years earlier, I’d never been to church. I’d heard a little about God but really had no concept of what or who he was. I thought I might like to find out.

  I’d thought briefly about God back when Dad left us. I wasn’t even sure if God was real, but if he was and Dad was mad at and disappointed in me, I figured God must be too. Now, though, I wondered if enough time had gone by. Maybe there was a chance he wasn’t mad at me anymore.

  The following Sunday morning, we heard the honk of a car horn. A brown four-door Buick was in our driveway. Ernie drove us to the church, which looked like something out of the Little House on the Prairie TV show—a white building with a steeple, mostly one big room with wooden pews. Our Sunday school class was in an attached room. That first morning, Ernie placed felt characters on a flannel board to tell the story of Joseph, the man who was left for dead by his brothers yet rose to become second-in-command in Egypt.

  After class, we sat with Ernie in the pews for the church service. Al and Tina were there too. It was all a new experience for me. I didn’t understand everything that Ernie and the pastor talked about, but I foun
d it interesting. It helped that the people were so nice. I liked the after-church snacks too.

  Ernie continued showing up at our house on Sunday mornings. On our fourth Sunday, after class, Ernie beckoned to me, Shane, and Matt. “Hey, you guys, come here,” he said. “I have something for you.” He handed each of us a cardboard box. When I opened mine, I saw a brown Bible with “Gregory Matthews” embossed in gold letters on the front. I opened it up and discovered colorful maps in the back and saw that Jesus’s words were indicated in red throughout. This was a gift I would treasure for a long time.

  Compared to my otherwise tumultuous adolescent years, that summer in Grants Pass was an oasis. The kindness and compassion demonstrated by Al, Tina, and Ernie to our family was unlike anything I’d seen before. They made me feel special. They acted as if I had value and a reason for existing. It was the opposite of what I usually felt when I was around Dad.

  I also saw that Al, Tina, and Ernie believed in God. I had only just begun to think about whether or not he was real, but I sensed that something was out there. Ernie had talked about all of us being able to have a relationship with God. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but if it led to the compassion and love that I’d experienced that summer, I was interested in finding out.

  Unfortunately, after I moved back in with Dad and Brenda in San Diego, my memories of that magical summer faded while the anger and feelings of worthlessness came roaring back. I had to go to court after the DUI. My dad paid the fifteen-hundred-dollar fine, which I had to pay back with money earned from a part-time job. The court also prohibited me from getting a driver’s license until I turned eighteen, a terrible blow to an almost-sixteen-year-old teenager.