Chapter 5: Where the Mountains Break Against the Sea

When my sister flipped the calendar that hung on her kitchen wall to October, I knew I had to leave Colorado. Not because she and the family wanted me to leave or that the weather had turned but the urgency of autumn sat heavy on my chest. The change in month seemed like a doorway and I feared that once I stepped over its threshold it would be January and the year would be over. I wasn’t ready for that. Despite my rocky mental health that year, it had been one of the best years of my life. The past three months I’d taken off work and spent in Alaska and the Rocky Mountains of Canada and Colorado had granted me more freedom I’d never known. 

My parents never traveled. As a kid they told me, whether because they were broke or because they meant it, that they didn’t see much point in going somewhere just to see it. My family rarely wandered beyond a fifty mile radius of our home and I could count the times we’d driven more than a couple hours in any direction without running out of fingers. Until I was twenty-three, I’d only been on a plane twice, both to Denver, one for a funeral and the other for a Kenneth Copeland convention. 

Like my parents, I hadn’t seen much of the world either but the truth was I hadn’t really noticed. Living deep in rural Washington at the turn of the millennium, we didn’t have the internet at home or smart phones and we rarely watched TV. There was no information other than what was immediately present to us. The world outside of my childhood spaces was obscured and I was not bombarded with an ever present out there through screens that showed me what life could be. The world might as well have ended beyond those fifty mile radiuses. It’s likely this was also a product of being friendless until I was almost eighteen. Beside the folks I saw briefly on Sundays at church, there was no one in my life to tell me about the beyond. Sure, I’d read about other places in my school books or traced the lines of continents on a cheap globe that sat on my parents desk but I’d never met anyone who had been or gone there.

 I’ll never forget the first time I met someone who lived in Seattle. I was twenty at the time and wasting my nights drinking cheap beer and dropping coals from someone’s hookah on the carpet of a double wide near the Pend Oreille river that I rented with four other poor boys like myself. One of my roommates had a cousin in town from the big city and they invited them over to our place. This cousin told us about the Space Needle and the buildings that were so tall they made your neck hurt to look up at, all of them lined up on a hill in front of something called the Puget Sound that had whales in it. When he told of frat parties at the university where they stacked up cases of beer the size of that living room, we looked around and tried to calculate how many hundreds of cases of beer that would be. In a small town like ours, it was crazy if you got more than thirty people together at a bonfire out in the woods. How many people were at a party if you needed a living room sized stack of beer? Thinking about a place with that many people made my ears itch. 

A few months later, I moved to western Washington for a job that paid fourteen dollars an hour because the City was less scary to me than staying put and working in a lumber mill or joining the army and leaving for Afghanistan. A job with a wage like that in my hometown would have put me at middle income, but I quickly learned that fourteen dollars an hour was barely survivable for one man to live alone in King County. I took all the overtime my boss would give me just so there was beer money left over after food, rent, and utilities for a one bedroom apartment that I split with a coworker. I didn’t have the time or the money to drive up and see the city that sparkled by the Puget Sound until almost two years after I had moved across the Cascade mountains. The part of the city I’d seen, the suburbs, the ten lanes of I-5 near Tacoma, and the sprawling shopping centers that never seemed to end, didn’t seem so great to me. It was noisy, jammed, and made you feel like a thin film was settling on your skin. It wasn’t the kind of dirty I got from the forest, the grit that smelled rich under my fingernails. This dirt was in the air, invisible but tacky and seeped right through your clothes. Sure, anywhere in western Washington was close to a mountain or a trail where I could have escaped but I had just come from mountains and trails. What I needed was money so I could survive. It’s pretty hard to see the beauty around you if your head is always down, shouldering a rock up a hill. That’s what my life had been since I was thirteen years old. 

What had changed for me by twenty-eight, was a combination of economics and geography. Luck and hard work had granted me an apprenticeship in Seattle’s crane union at twenty-one and, four years later when my apprenticeship was over, my economics changed. I’d entered a new tax bracket which, if only financially, granted me the breathing room of the middle-class. I stopped checking my bank account when friends asked me out to eat. I started shopping at stores with quality goods. I didn’t limit myself to the items that were on sale at the grocery store, stopped filling my cart with Hamburger helper and Pastaroni, and allowed myself to get salmon if I wanted. I stopped getting overdraft fees. I stopped wearing socks with holes in them. I started scrubbing the dirt from my nails when I got home from work. I started reading again. I went to yoga. But, most importantly, I had time to think. One of the most pervasive aspects of being working class is the gnawing anxiety that wraps around your gut like a tangle of vines, tightening, obscuring, and squeezing the life out of you. It wasn’t until I had money that I could imagine how to hack my way out. When I did, when I saw how much of the world I’d missed and misunderstood, a new discomfort gripped me just as tight as the last. The luminous window of my twenties was closer to its end than its beginning and I hadn’t done anything except work for most of my life.

I walked out the door of my sister’s place in Colorado with my duffel bag slung over my shoulder, hugged my nieces and said goodbye. As I got in my Subaru and pointed myself in the direction of Grand Junction, a new realization bloomed in my stomach like hunger. The open road no longer beckoned to me and my insides didn’t buzz in anticipation of what lay ahead. Both my time and savings dwindled as the slender branches of aspens shook loose the last of their leaves. Yet, it wasn’t the time or the finances that I thought about most. It was something that I struggled to name. Something that reminded me of rummaging through my father’s closet as a kid, pulling clothes from the hangers and slipping into the oversized coats and pants. Every article fell heavy on my shoulders and was thick with the musk of neglected things but I strutted in front of the mirror and acted out the motions that I believed were fitting of a man. I’d give a speech or act as if I was doing important business with a shifty customer. Many times, I’d bust up laughing with just one look at myself. Sooner or later, I’d put all the clothes back and it would just be me in the mirror. I’d look at my slender limbs, the knobs of my knees and elbows, and my soft, hairless face mottled with freckles from the summer sun. I ached to grow up, to no longer be a boy, for muscles to hide my bones, to be powerful, certain, and most of all, to be something other than what I was. 

At twenty-eight, though I looked the part of a man, I still felt like I was waiting to become and that distance between where I was and where I wanted to be filled me with emptiness. I thought that writing could fix my unhappiness. I believed that if I made this dream a reality, then I could rid myself of the dark clouds that hovered over me since I was a teenager. I tricked myself into believing that writing would change me into someone else, that I could split myself open with paragraphs and slip into a new skin. What exactly was I trying to shake? I understood to a degree that something had stopped inside me as a child when my family had moved away from everything and everyone we’d known to start their homestead in northeast Washington. As a kid I’d loved the forest and the open space but the isolation and the conditions that left the six of us crowded in a travel trailer for six years, a time which fractured our family in ways that have yet to heal, snapped something inside me and forced me to grow up quickly. I’d become useful and strong because my brothers were unable and my father was always at work so we could eat. When I realized that being useful couldn’t fix my family, I fled my small town and threw my entire being into my career. I excelled because I knew exactly how to be what my bosses needed me to be. I’d never learned how to be what I needed and each time I looked in the mirror, I saw the limbs of the child who used to try on his father’s clothes–still scrawny and waiting to become. 

My next stop was Utah. I drove Interstate 70 through Grand Junction before dipping onto Highway 128, and followed the Colorado River Canyon all the way to Moab. The winding two-lane road dove through red canyons that were punctuated by sage brush and stunted pine trees. The sky was robin’s egg blue and sun rays fell through the canyons in slant, beams of light illuminated by a thin haze.

That night, I tried to sleep in a parking lot near the highway just outside of Moab but the noise of cars kept me stirring all night. The next morning, the clouds came and so did the cold and the wet. I got up and drove into Arches National Park under the cloak of dawn and did not see a single vehicle as I weaved my way up the entrance road. When I drove past the park sign, the world changed. The landscape unrolled in front of me like a rug in a psychedelic dream. Red cliffs broke through the sandy earth here and there, bulbous, serrated, and carved with radiuses that confused the eye. Monoliths shot out of the ground like bony fingers, some with egg shaped boulders the size of small cars balanced atop at impossible angles. The sweeping valleys of red earth with nothing to stop the wandering eye except tufts of blackbrush, purple sage, and the occasional pinyon pine standing like sentinels guarding a sleeping garden. To call the land magical was to reduce it to some form of trickery. I could now see why Edward Abbey had been so fond of this place and why he protested the road on which I was now driving. It seemed too easy, too sudden to come upon this collection of oddities. I had to get out of the car and touch it. 

  I parked at the Delicate Arch trailhead, put on my hiking shoes, threw some snacks in my bag, and set out on the trail alone. 

  Despite my elation upon the drive into the park, I felt something slip away inside me as I stepped onto the trail. In the mid-morning light, which had grown bright under the overcast sky, the landscape lost its gauziness. Now, as I walked the wide and dusty trail, the colors seemed flat and dizzying shapes of the cliffs I passed underneath were suddenly unimpressive. 

The words Dan told me on the back porch in Colorado echoed in my ears but I had begun to doubt what he had said. What kind of influence could I possibly have? I wondered. I had always been the outsider, an extra, something interchangeable, and easily discarded. He didn’t know me at all, he had no idea what I’d been through, what I was going through, and how I’d always felt like I was split in two. I couldn’t shake the image of the little boy I had been, how I loathed and longed for him. How I hadn’t the faintest idea how to be a man. 

The trail was short and felt as if it had barely begun before I pulled to a halt directly in front of Delicate Arch. It was an anomaly. Sandstone that rose out of the smooth plateau into a semi-circle whose top loomed some fifty feet above. It could have been a portal in a sci-fi film but when I walked through its opening, nothing changed. I picked a spot on a ledge nearby and sat for a while, staring at the structure. Rain began to fall lightly, beading on my eyelashes.

There was something that I was looking for, a home that I’d never been to, that consumed my mind. I didn’t give a shit about a dumb arch carved out of rock over a millennium. The longer I stared at Delicate Arch, the more I felt as if it mocked me–as if I was the gaping hole that led to nowhere.

I got up and left.

  In the parking lot, as rain pattered on the roof of my car, I sat in the back with the hatch open and read the rest of Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. A friend I’d met over the summer in Alaska had recommended it to me and it was the first time I’d read one of his novels. 

There was a line near the end of the book that slipped under my ribs like a hot knife.

  “Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there- to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.”

  Reading those words made me wonder if it was time to go home. I’d already seen the ends of the earth and there was a sense of failure, despite returning with a few new stories in my pocket, that the miles I’d traveled had not been enough to escape myself. I knew that once I returned I would go to work, my life scheduled once again, restricted, so unlike the wonder I’d felt the past three months, but I was ready for that bored kind of predictability. I wanted to be distracted because being alone on the road gave me way too much time with myself. 

I tossed the book on my pile of gear in the back of the car, got in the driver’s seat, and drove home to Seattle. 

At that moment, it seemed to me that the excitement of that year had passed, that the final months would follow a predictable course through the holidays and the days would run together. Little did I know that I was on my way back home just in time to fall in love for Christmas.