by Joe Donnelly
Similarly, the cry from hunters that wolves decimate deer and elk populations isn’t borne out by fact. Ungulate numbers are up in most game management areas across the West where wolves live and slightly down in just a few. Deer and elk are just harder to find. Wolves have made them more alert and elusive—made them better at being deer and elk, and us at being hunters.
As for the argument that there are enough wolves now to withstand the hunts, there were a hundred times more back when we almost exterminated them. These hunts wreak havoc on the highly developed social structure of wolves, tearing families and communities apart, and orphaning ill-prepared adolescents, who are then more likely to get in trouble. Hunting and trapping wolves serves no purpose for sustenance or profit. It’s done for the basest of reasons, for a trophy that is nothing more than a token of shameful ignorance and folly. After all we’ve done to them, wolves deserve better. We deserve better, too.
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While wolf-hunting season was just getting underway in neighboring states, California’s wildlife commissioners met in Sacramento to vote on whether or not to consider protecting California’s lone wolf under the California Endangered Species Act. The room was packed, and the battle for hearts and minds went on for hours. Conservationists, wolf lovers, ranchers, cattlemen associations all had their say, although neither side seemed much moved by the other. Not surprisingly, no one there had actually seen the wolf in question.
In the end, the commissioners agreed by a narrow margin that the petition to list the gray wolf, this gray wolf, as an endangered species did indeed warrant consideration. The vote triggered numerous studies, reviews, and meetings that should result in a decision any day now about whether to protect wolves in California. If approved, it’ll be largely symbolic until more wolves wander across the border, prompting perhaps a new moniker to consider: CA1. But for anyone looking to make amends with the truth, it would be a welcome symbol, a small bit of progress in the tortured dance between humans and what’s left of the wild.
Meanwhile, OR7 just keeps moving. In late February, he left Plumas County, where I crouched in darkness beside the river with naïve hopes of seeing him, and started retracing his long-ago steps north. By mid-March, he had crossed back into Oregon. Maybe he wants to know if you can, indeed, go home again. Or maybe he’s hopeful yet that he’ll find what he’s looking for.
The only thing we know for sure is that time outruns even a wolf. And as every new day dawns unfulfilled, the epic story of OR7’s journey to find a place for himself, to start a family and be the first of his kind so that others may follow, takes a turn toward a more familiar fate: that of a lonely middle age spent on the outside looking in while death does double time to chase you down.
The Farewell Tour
Originally published as “Driving Vince Donnelly,”
Los Angeles Times Magazine, June 16, 2002
Author’s note: I first tried to write this when I was helping to care for my terminally ill dad during his final weeks. Upon seeing the mess of a first draft, Martin J. Smith, the fine editor for the long-gone, but still-missed, Los Angeles Times Magazine, told me to take care of business and come back to the piece later. As a result, this slice of life and death ended up being published on the first Father’s Day after my dad died.
The valet at the Pittsburgh Airport rental-car office brings around our white Lincoln Continental, and Vince Donnelly raises his eyebrow slyly and says, “If I’m going to go, I’m going to go in style.”
I appreciate the subversive humor. It helps alleviate the shock of how he looks. Prior to this trip, I hadn’t seen my dad since I spent Christmas in Vail, Colorado, where he and my mother had moved several years ago. What a difference five months can make.
During the holidays, Vince didn’t look so bad for a guy who recently had had a third of his pancreas cut out. I even dared to hope he was on the mend. Then, a couple of days after Christmas, he asked if I wanted to drive his new Cadillac STS down to the Eagle Diner where we’d find the best milkshakes in the county. The weather was warm for the Colorado high country, the sky a saturated blue. It was not a day for bad news, and my dad tried to deliver it as gently as possible.
“The horses are out of the barn, Joe,” Vince said as we gained speed and lost altitude cruising down the valley. “I don’t think they’re going back in. I can feel it. It’s running wild.”
My dad went on to explain that the cancer he’d been diagnosed with the previous summer had metastasized despite the drastic operation. His CA19-9 markers (cancer activity in the blood) were climbing the charts. He rattled off the meager survival statistics, the chemo protocols, and the grim prognosis. I stared out the diner’s windows and told him he was going to be fine. There had to be some exception to these rules, and I was sure my dad would be that. After all, he’d lived his life being the exception. Growing up in a household weighed down by poverty, alcoholism, and old-world Catholicism, he still managed to get out, get educated, and become a successful business owner. He had survived colon cancer twice in his early fifties, and several years ago he’d brushed off prostate cancer as if it were the flu. I’d been conditioned to expect him to walk out of life’s burning buildings.
As he spoke, my mind wandered back to Los Angeles, where my own trajectory away from the past had run out of turf. Vince had visited me there recently and appreciated all of the things that we residents take for granted–the light, the architecture, the action, the intelligence. We talked about spending more time together in LA. I thought better times had arrived for my dad and me. We had both survived near-death encounters with booze and the things that drive men crazy. He was lucky to walk away from a drunken head-on collision with a truck. I was lucky to have called a friend instead of pulling the trigger of the gun in my mouth. We’d both gotten sober since and had even become optimistic.
Now this: the two of us in the rain at Pittsburgh International Airport, loading three bags into the white Lincoln–one for my clothes, one for my dad’s, and one for the syringes, saline solutions, antiseptics, enzymes, anxiety reducers, and chemo pills that have become my dad’s constant traveling companions. Pittsburgh, the town where I more or less grew up and where my dad’s working life finally paid off, is the first stop on our trip–a journey that will retrace our steps to Syracuse, NY where my family started.
As I navigate the rain and slippery roads toward the city, I wonder what the hell we’re doing. The figure in the passenger seat is a hollowed-out version of my dad that is alien to me. His jokes help remind me that it’s still him and that he is still alive. The white Lincoln radiates against the black skies and brown buildings of the city. I’m glad my dad chose white. It’s heavenly.
Just a year before, my dad could bench press two hundred pounds, leg press five hundred, and swim, hike, and ski laps around athletes half his age. At sixty-eight, Vince Donnelly was in the middle of an astonishing physical renaissance when the cancer in his pancreas erupted.
His strength had helped him survive an operation at Johns Hopkins to remove a large chunk of his pancreas. Soon after, though, tests showed cancer in nearby lymph nodes. Opinions varied on whether my dad was treatable. The operating surgeon suggested that he just go home and live his life as best as possible, not concern himself with things such as CA19-9 markers, CAT scans, chemotherapy, and all of the other ways people try to corner and kill the beast. It was the doctor’s way of saying that fighting probably was a waste of energy. But fighting is in my dad’s blood. I didn’t expect him to stop now just because cancer was in there, too.
The following spring, my dad’s hopes for survival took a severe blow. PET scans ordered by my father’s oncologist in Vail showed cancer spreading throughout his upper spine and sternum. The images also indicated increased metastasis in his liver and near his kidney. The Vail oncologist told him he could reasonably expect to live four more months.
That’s when my dad called and sugg
ested this road trip through his past. The impulse surprised me. Although the Irish are given to singing weepy pub songs about heroic near-misses and might-have-beens, my dad was never the sentimental type. Vince justified the trip by saying he had business in Pittsburgh and wanted to “check out a few things relating to family history” in Syracuse. His voice told me there was something more to it, but I wasn’t sure what. Maybe he needed to go back to own what he did, to see how far he’d come before he died. Maybe he needed to know he’d done enough, because even in these sober, looser, happier years of late, my dad still at times felt as if he should have earned more, done more, been more. That notion seemed preposterous to me, and my secret fear always had been that I could never live up to his legacy, that the deep ruts of his giant footsteps would swallow me.
I agreed to drive him. Truthfully, though, I was nervous. I was thirty-seven, sober, and alive but still dogged by self-doubt and not sure what I was doing with my life. Was I ready for this type of reckoning? God forgive me for thinking it, but my dad, facing death, could at least go back to where we came from as a conquering hero. What was I?
I told my dad we should call the trip “The Farewell Tour.” He laughed and suggested we print T-shirts with a hot rod hearse on the front and the names and dates of the tour stops on the back.
A valet hails my dad like a close relative when we pull up to his beloved Duquesne Club, where he stays when he’s in Pittsburgh for business. These places are the pinnacle of the social and business hierarchy of last-century towns such as Pittsburgh. In the past I’d looked down my nose at Duquesne Club anachronisms such as having to wear a coat and tie to dinner and the old, gold-framed artwork depicting fox hunts, steel mills, coal barges, and other bygone local customs. To me, the club was the kind of place where the Addams Family would be happy to room and board.
This time, however, I can’t help but draw parallels between the club and my father. The club is irrelevant and fading. My father is fading and becoming irrelevant. Nature knows when you’re dying, and the world politely moves on long before you’re gone from it. Watching this happen to my dad hurts. The club no longer amuses me. It makes me uncomfortable.
Soon after arriving, Vince slips a previously undisclosed mission into the agenda of meetings with lawyers, accountants, and insurance people (death actually requires more precise planning than life). My dad is fond of an upbeat oncologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. If the four horsemen of the apocalypse appeared on the horizon, Michael Wong would say they were dressed nicely. Vince is attracted to Dr. Wong’s positive outlook and wants him to provide a second opinion of the Vail oncologist’s disheartening interpretation of the PET scans. I know a second opinion is ultimately meaningless, but I go along with the plan until I, too, get caught up in my father’s hope that the lesions are actually arthritic football injuries that had been pestering him for years.
Dr. Wong meets us and tells Vince things that fall gently on his ears, including that blood markers are often unreliable, and PET scans are far from the industry-standard imaging technique. Wong says he will compare the CAT and PET scans and give us his assessment when we return from Syracuse.
The meeting buoys my dad. We’re back on the initiative! That evening, we go down to the club’s dim and mostly vacant dining room and eat pork loin and scalloped potatoes. Just to make sure things don’t get too healthy, my dad orders chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream for dessert. Twice.
“I’ve got to keep my weight up,” he says.
“Hey, this cancer [stuff’s] not all bad,” I offer.
“Not all of it.”
Despite the joke, Vince is really desperate to keep his weight up. I can see he is terrified and scrapping to hold on to whatever life remains. I can’t stomach the fight anymore. He’s getting mauled. I don’t want to see the champ getting pummeled while everyone’s heart breaks—like when Ali fought Larry Holmes. I just want him to die gracefully. With every forkful of cake and ice cream I want to scream, “It’s over! You’re dying right here in front of me! Stop chasing false hope! Stop nuking yourself with chemo! Give up!”
I don’t say a thing, because my dad wants to live and what can you say to that?
After the operation on his pancreas, I started hugging my dad—big, uncomfortable, loving hugs. This hugging thing was new for him. All of his life he could joke, pat a back, shake a hand, but he couldn’t put his affection into a messy embrace. I also began to stroke his hair, to hold his face, to kiss him five times in a row. To his surprise, he liked it. He started asking for it. This cancer had opened up a new world of physical affection between us that didn’t previously exist. I wondered what might have been different if we’d lived our lives like this.
Saying good night after dinner, Vince turns in his doorway and says, “Joe, come in here and wrap me up in your big, strong arms. I’ll never forget how you held me in the hospital like I was a little baby.” He cries and cries as I hold on and hold back my own tears. He’s just skin and bones.
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It’s hard to think of anything to look forward to in Syracuse. I was born there, but all I know of it are my dad’s memories—of pulling my grandfather out of bars when he’d gone missing for days, of fighting with his father when he tried to “get at” my grandmother during a bad drunk. One story still haunts: the time my grandfather lined up my dad and his younger siblings with a shotgun and drunkenly threatened to blow their heads off. Vince talked the gun out of his father’s hands.
Vince told these stories without bitterness. Things were just the way they were. At least through Vince’s stories my grandfather was a real figure to me, not always horrifying, sometimes even funny and warm. I knew my grandfather loved to fish and dance, was faster with a quip than you were, that he worked hard and had a terrible chip on his shoulder. I knew that my dad’s ultimately sobering head-on collision was an eerie and fortunate echo of an accident in which my intoxicated grandfather killed someone in a road accident.
I also knew that before he died, my grandfather had sought and received forgiveness from my dad, because, despite everything, Vince always hung the moon for him. But I knew almost nothing about my grandmother.
What little information I had painted a vague picture of a bent-knee Catholic, praying for deliverance from poverty and regret—a woman who lived on the edge of severe depression. The nature of that depression was shrouded in mystery. She kept my father at a chilly distance even though he was often thrown into the role of protecting her from her drunken husband. My dad could never quite explain this except to say, “She lived with a lot of disappointment.”
We drive north from Pittsburgh in a barrage of cold rain relieved by frequent stops for coffee, doughnuts, and ice cream sandwiches. When we finally skate into downtown Syracuse, the afternoon sun appears briefly and barely. I ask my dad if he thinks it’s somehow symbolic.
“It’s probably happy to see me return to the scene of my many crimes,” Vince jokes.
We park across the street from the little house on Teal Avenue where Vince grew up. He stares at it and tells a story about the woman who lived upstairs and sewed him a winter coat from the remnants of his father’s overcoat. Vince laughs about how bad it looked. I suggest that he stand in front of the house for a photo. He does so without enthusiasm.
During the next couple of days we drive by my father’s old haunts, rarely braving the miserable weather to get out of the Lincoln. Vince provides a constant soundtrack about friends, family, and history. We stop at the grim tenement where I was born. My dad seems embarrassed. I ask what the complex is called.
“The slums,” he says.
Syracuse unfolds as a black-and-gray ghost town. I’d be surprised if there’s a less attractive place in America. We cover the same ground again and again. It’s clear that Vince is searching for something, some place or meaning that is eluding us. I want to go home to Los Angeles, return t
o the sun. This place spooks me, and I know it’s because I can still feel it in me, like the memory of a close call.
Eventually we turn onto a shoddy thoroughfare that lights a flame in Vince’s eyes. We park and walk. He’s found the route along which he used to escort his mother to work at Woolworth. The store is gone, but Vince sees what he’s been looking for. It’s a small shop in a tidy Victorian set back from the street. It sells tombstones and once had one for sale with a lamb etched on it.
“We’d walk by the monument place every day because she worked up here, and we’d see that little lamb. How many times she must have looked at that stone,” Vince says, his eyes going past the shop. “It probably cost fifty bucks. Fifty bucks to buy the stone with the lamb on it for the baby she thought she had killed.”
Standing in front of the strange shop, Vince explains the terrible nature of the baby’s death, which he had only recently learned from his sister. The baby was his older brother, “Baby Paul,” who died just months before Vince was born. Apparently his mother had given Paul a can of talcum powder to play with that she thought was empty. Somehow the baby got the top open and, his mother believed, some powder got in Paul’s lungs and killed him. She carried that secret guilt her whole life until she told Vince’s sister while on her deathbed.
“My mother, you know, she had that tragedy with her first child. I can’t imagine what it was like. She loses a child in March and she has a second one in August,” Vince says. “How she could transfer any immediate love and care to that second child was beyond me—that child being me.”
Only then do I realize what Vince has been looking for. It wasn’t the memories of his childhood, the ghost of his father, or the sled he rode in the winter. He was really looking for the tiny footprints of the older brother he never knew–forever just “Baby Paul” to him, a long-lost explanation for his mother’s absent embrace.