Narrated by Adam Ramer

Where the Mountains Break Against the Sea: Chapter 4

The walk up felt like an eternity. It was just a few steps up to the front door of a normal one story rambler in the suburbs of Denver. Nothing crazy. But the bright September sun was hot on my neck and the duffel bag I lugged over my shoulder felt like it was filled with rocks. Every muscle in my body complained. Worst of all was the quiet. I’d never arrived at my sister’s house without a parade to mark my arrival.  

My sister and brother-in-law, Elaine and Dan, have five little girls, the oldest twelve and the youngest two. Each time I visited them, the house would erupt with squeals and laughter, until the kids spilled out the front door, vied for hugs and begged to carry my bags. There was none of that when I let myself in that Tuesday afternoon. In the living room, toys and children’s books were scattered around the floor like flotsam after a shipwreck; it looked as if they’d left in a hurry. 

I didn’t understand the gravity of the death of Dan’s mother. Even though all of my grandparents had died years before, I didn’t know what a parent’s death could mean. My parents disliked or outright resented the people who raised them and I could count the times I’d seen three of my grandparents on one hand. My father didn’t shed a tear at his parent’s funerals or anytime after, my mother hardly mentioned the death of her father, and neither spoke of the deceased with any fondness. 

Thinking of my parents made me feel heavy. Despite the forgiveness I thought I’d given them for the way they raised me, I still held onto a lot of anger. I hadn’t had much of a relationship with them since I was a teenager. It hurt to think about them. They couldn’t see, or at least never admit, the way their ideological extremism and isolationism had stunted the starting positions of my brothers and I. In many ways, my parents’ dream came at the cost of our lives and, at twenty-eight, my childhood was something from which I was beginning to wonder if I ever would recover. The moment I walked into my sister’s house, that grief washed over me anew. I wasn’t sure if I would miss my parents, if I would drop everything and go, when they died. 

I took a deep breath and went downstairs. 

The guest bedroom was in the back corner of the basement, adjacent to the bathroom, with small, high windows that let in soft light. It was difficult to describe the sense of relief having a real bed after months of sleeping in tents, cars, and couches. I dropped my bag, collapsed into the mattress, and slept. 

For the next few days, I embraced having the house to myself. The shower felt like a luxury. I blared music and took my time while I scrubbed myself clean. The hot water seemed endless and I loved the way the glass fogged over, how it made the world shrink away. 

Upstairs, I lazily made breakfast under the skylight that flooded the kitchen with warm sunlight. French toast, eggs, and bacon or sauteed vegetable scrambles with warm tortillas and guacamole. Sometimes I’d make chocolate chip and banana pancakes. Everything felt so easy in a kitchen after cooking on a camp stove, storing food in a cooler, and washing dishes on the side of the road. A gas range, a fridge, a sink, and a dishwasher were objects of fascination. 

I couldn’t write in the empty house so, after breakfast, I drove to Pablo’s Coffee on 6^th Avenue to work. The cafe’s checkered ceilings, scuffed wooden tables, thriving tropical plants, and colorful wall art made me feel at home. I ordered an americano with oat milk and took a high table by the window. I put on my headphones, and worked into the late afternoon.

Chapter Eleven

  (dream)

Into the darkness, he ran and kept running.

The burning in his legs sent overtures to his brain, screaming, pleading for pause, to allow his heart a chance to catch up, but he didn’t listen.

Darkness, and darkness.

It seemed inadequate to describe his surroundings because it wasn’t just the absence of light. It was the opposite. It was the opposite of structure, as if things had been built inverse, an expanding emptiness, a void. His eyes were open, but they were as useless as his tongue was for speaking, there was no information they could interpret or relay except the lack of shape and language with which to describe.

He kept running.

Over the past three summers, my travels had been a form of healing. Until I was twenty-five, my whole life was focused on material consumption and I worked harder than anyone I knew to change my circumstances. At twenty, I lived in a cheap apartment in Kent, WA, where I ate Hamburger Helper and fell asleep to gunshots most nights. In the mornings, I dressed in discount rack clothes, stressed about making rent, and drove a limping SUV into work. Four years later, just months before I turned twenty-five, my life looked much different. I bought a condo in the quiet tech bubble of Redmond, a brand new car, expensive clothes, foraged for greens and grass raised beef at Whole Foods, and had just about enough money to do anything I wanted so long as I kept working. As a kid, even asking for a tray of muffins from Costco was enough for my mom to pull out her calculator to see if it was in our budget, and most times it wasn’t. As a young adult I thought that if I could acquire all the things that weren’t available to me as a child then I could be happy. Twenty-five was relatively early in my life to secure all the material comforts that had been missing in my working class childhood, but it wasn’t liberating in the way I had hoped. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I began to feel the weight of everything I bought, as if I’d tossed them all in a sack, and lugged it over my shoulder. These things didn’t free me; they anchored me in place. 

So, I sold everything. From age twenty-six onward, as much as I could, I lived for experiential consumption alone. All I’d ever done since I’d left my parents’ homestead was work. I’d hardly done anything else. Living for experiences, travel, and outdoors specifically, made me feel alive in a way that objects couldn’t. I climbed cliffs in Idaho, bummed around Montana, slept in the mountains of Alberta, and navigated the wide open, trailless wilderness of Alaska. I made new friends, I took photos, and wrote some things down, but mostly I tried to let go. 

Yet, no matter where I went, I’d find myself there eventually. When I did, I no longer felt a sense of restoration but an emptiness. My body felt like a house built on a crumbling foundation that wobbled precariously when wandered from room to room. I didn’t know how to fix myself and I was scared to get at what was underneath. I lacked the courage to tear everything down and start over from scratch, so I decorated the walls and put down rugs, hoping it would distract from my own structural deficiencies. 

On Friday, Elaine, Dan, and the girls arrived back home. The kids were their normal, joyous selves, as if nothing had happened. My sister was tired, as only a mother can be after flying across the country for a funeral with so many young children. Dan was solemn, sadder than I’d ever seen.

One afternoon, when the girls and my sister were away, I found Dan sitting on the back porch—silent and staring at nothing. I took a chair next to him.

“It’s like I’ve become an orphan,” Dan said. “I haven’t had much time to think about things because it’s been a non-stop rush from the funeral to getting the estate in order but being here, it’s starting to sink in. I realize that they are gone, my parents, and I knew they would one day, but I don’t think it’s something I was ever really prepared for.”

We talked like this for an hour, as Dan worked through the reality of becoming an orphan in his forties. I asked questions and listened thoughtfully as he told me stories and released fragments of his grief. It was strange to be the one who could now give him back the gift he’d originally given me.

Dan was one of the biggest heroes of my life. Three years before, he’d taken me backpacking on the Colorado trail near Kesugi Ridge in September when the aspens were glowing orange and yellow. Each year since, we knocked out another section of the trail. Two out of three of those trips had been miserable. Either freezing at twelve-thousand feet in September for lack of proper gear or in June when we scaled the north side of a mountain sinking knee deep into snow up to our thighs for miles. Regardless, Dan’s joy for the outdoors was contagious. I started to see the world differently, began to crave what the natural world could offer, and it was because of this change that I was in Colorado sitting next to Dan talking about death. In a big way, Dan helped launch me into this exploration of the outdoors that led me to be twenty-eight, roaming around in my car, while stoking the embers of dreams to be a novelist. 

But it was more than that. 

Dan’s original gift to me was something he offered long before we went out in the mountains. Out of all the people I’d met in my twenties, he was the first person to sit with me and listen. I know that sounds crazy but I’ll never forget the kindness in his eyes when he looked at me, allowed me to talk, and asked questions because he wanted to know more. Until I met Dan, I didn’t think anyone was interested in what I had to say. In most of my conversations, there was always pressure to be something. It gave me anxiety to talk because I didn’t feel like I had anything to say that was smart, funny, or cool. I always got this sense that every word I said was being evaluated. That my next word could cost me that person’s attention, admiration, and even friendship. I had good reason to believe this because of the way I grew up. I didn’t know anything about anything, and my difference from others was always so obvious to me–even if it wasn’t to them. I knew nothing of pop culture, style, or the education system most had experienced. I didn’t get a chance to try on different things and see if I liked them. By the time I turned twenty-five, there wasn’t much about me that I thought anyone wanted to know. Most of my life until then was something I wanted to forget. But with Dan, it was different. He knew my history because my sister had told him. There was nothing to hide but still I shied away from talking about it, until Dan asked me questions–not as if I was the most fascinating person in the world but as if I was just a person worthy of care.

That afternoon, as Dan and I sat in the silence and shade of his back porch, I thought about how the years and knowing him had changed me, how grateful I was, and shuddered at that thought of who I’d be without his influence.

 Then, as if he could hear my thoughts, he said something to me that would echo in my mind for all the years after.

“You know, Adam, some of the things you say and the way you think is startling to me. I have to stop myself because it’s so thoughtful or intuitive and above any level of thought that I had when I was your age. I think you’re going to do some wonderful things with your life and that mind of yours,” Dan said as he rubbed the scruff on his chin.

“But I think you need to know this. The things you do and say matter. They have power because your thoughts, ideas, and energy have power. I don’t think you realize how much influence you have over the people around you. Don’t take that lightly. It’s a big responsibility, a great one. It’s easy to use this power in the wrong way or, worse, to affect others without even knowing what you’re doing because you don’t even acknowledge how much you matter to others. Don’t doubt the influence you have, it’s yours for a reason.” 

A moment of silence passed between us. Dan’s phone rang from the kitchen and he got up to answer it, leaving me alone in the backyard. 

I felt like my jeans were stapled to the chair.

Ever since I was a child, I’d been an outsider. I was a fly on the wall. I watched what others did or said and tried my best to act in an appropriate way so that I wouldn’t be exiled. This behavior, and fear, continued through my twenties when I moved to Seattle and tried to create a new version of myself where my past did not exist. I rarely thought with any seriousness about the things I did or said because I believed I did not matter enough to have an impact on anyone around me.

After that conversation with Dan, I felt the years of my life come rushing at me with incalculable weight and force. I’d never looked at my life in this way before and the first thing I felt was guilt. I wondered how much pain I’d caused because I was blind to my own effect on those around me, because of my own carelessness. But it wasn’t just my past, it was the question of who I would be in the future, too. The ground was shifting under my feet.

Tear it all down. Start again, my mind whispered.  

If I accepted what Dan said was true, then I couldn’t keep running from myself and I knew exactly where to start.