Wilderness

"Wilderness" didn't make it onto my blog while my father was living for obvious reasons. I will say he did make good in the end. I flew up to see him over Christmas this year. I wrote this after visiting my father in Alaska after a long estrangement.

"Wilderness" was originally published in the Open Field. It is the winner of a 2015 Clyde D. Tull Prose Award, a 2015 Reader's Choice Award. It was a finalist for the Nick Adams Short Story Contest in 2016.





I watch leg bones swing in the vet’s aged hands. Tibia sliding away from femur like the opening of a drawer. Arthritic bones grind together in the knee. These are the classic signs of a torn cranial cruciate ligament. I see pain manifest in the tiny shift in my dog’s glance, the change of tide in his large liquid eyes; the subtle language of dogs. Large breeds know how to endure hardship. The silver haired vet speaks animal stoicism fluently but only addresses humans in short blunt bursts. With a face nearly as expressionless as my dog’s, the he says, “At his age he may not survive surgery.”

I press my face into the soft merle fur on the top of my dog’s head breathing in the sins of domestication; the inbreeding of weak knees and fragile hips; the flat faces where breath becomes ragged and desperate; and the creation of delicate, dependent animals: broken wolves. His drive to push through the pain and continue is one of the few remnants of wild left inside him. The vet gives me ten days of Rimadol and tells me to restrict my dog’s movement to one hundred feet outside. It will be a long slow recovery since surgery is not an option.

I’m far from home with an injured wilderness companion. All treks for at least a year will have to be solitary, guilty adventures. I don’t know if I have it in me to go alone. As a working student I often take housing in whatever form it appears. At night walking a large animal makes me feel safe. It’s an illusion; my dog primary defense in a mugging would be to lick the perpetrator to death. I am terrified I will become lost in the wilderness alone.

“Everyone has to be somewhere,” writes Margaret Atwood (97). Wilderness is the exception. Wilderness is the unknown, the dense unsettled areas of the human heart, the untouched forests, mountains, or deserts. In the wilderness one can be truly lost in a vast nowhere. It needn’t be in untamed wilds of Canada, any wilderness can swallow a person whole,
particularly if she’s come alone. My best friend writes in her personal blog “Sometimes I forget how close we are to the wild.” She notices “Strands of trees threatening to become forests. Tall grasses breaking through overpass concrete,” as potential wilderness in the suburbs. She worries though, even a minor mistake can have devastating consequences, “How easy would it be to wander off into a strand of trees and never emerge? Fall down with a broken leg, drown in a nearby mire, vanish into the depths of a lake? It happens all the time” (Lax).

Last year I learned of the eerily similar deaths of former classmates. Within a year of each other the two unacquainted women, whom I attended school with on opposite sides of the state, went into the woods. Then as if following a migratory memory, left a tidy pile of personal belongings on the shore before vanishing beneath the surface of small bodies of water. Both would be found by hikers, but one would not be discovered until spring, waterlogged and decayed in the process of returning to muck. This call to the wild haunts me still. What is that drive? I carried these deaths around all last year, to wonder at the sameness of these events: too similar to be accidental, too remote to be connected. I wonder if this drive towards wilderness for destructive ends is coded within each of us. Dormant.

Last night at the Ore Dock, we drank for the dead,
lying in the water with stars in their eyes,
whose hearts were cut from unstable fabrics.
We carry them around like stones in our pockets
drawn to the water's edge. In their starry eyes reflected
are the friends and lovers we’ll never be.
We carry them around like stones in our pockets,
weighing down our bones.
As friends and lovers, we’ll never be
more alive--bloody wine-stained fingers peeling off the layers
weighing down our bones.
We practice love, the dead perfect it.
Whose hearts were cut from unstable fabrics?
We practice love, the dead perfect it.
Last night at the Ore Dock we drank for the dead.
We carry them around like stones in our pockets.

Last winter in Alaska, a pipeline burst in my father. For six days his stomach filled with a sanguine sea. Tides, almost menstrual, raged within him as he labored a new self in a hospital bed, alone. None of us knew, not his siblings or his children. When the sea calmed he finally contacted me. He wanted to see me. My aunt warned me of his haggard appearance. My father suffered cirrhosis of the liver, malnutrition and muscle atrophy secondary to alcoholism which caused his veins to burst. My aunt sent my brother and me pictures of our father looking out from the large doe eyes of the malnourished and the shriveled face of a man nearly eighty. He was forty-seven. My final semester of community college I was thrust into a physical and emotional wilderness, the darkest unknowns of the human heart.

“Don’t give up on your dad,” my uncle wrote in an email, “he seems serious about recovery this time.”

No sooner had my uncle typed his email then my father updated his Facebook from his favorite bar in Anchorage. I wondered if the same drive flowed through my whiskey soaked veins. I determined to follow the course of my genetic rivers into the wilderness. I had not seen my father in eight years. I don’t want my last memory with him to be of my storming out of our Michigan home.

Theodore Roethke is the patron saint of my poetics. During that difficult year I slept with his Collected Poems and On Poetry and Craft beside my bed. A lifeline. He advised his students to memorize poetry so in moments when they could not have a book they might recall the verse. I tried this and poems began to come to me like prayers for appropriate occasions. I thought then
of “My Papa’s Waltz” which in haunting ersatz waltz-rhythm begins “The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy; / But I hung on like death: / Such waltzing was not easy.” This seems like another waltz, another dance with genetic destiny.

I emailed my teachers to let them know I must be on the ready to leave for Alaska at any moment. Only to one of my favorite professors do I add I felt I couldn’t function with this trip looming over me. I felt like less of a student and more of a sea sponge, I wrote “I take that back. That’s insulting to sea sponges who function perfectly well as sea sponges.” As human beings we give ourselves the exclusive right to try and change our genetic destiny, but I wonder has a sea sponge ever wished to depart from its genes?

A few days later my professor emailed me. He decided to rent a van to take students to hear Margaret Atwood lecture at Notre Dame. In another life he coached girls’ soccer. The last mile of community college I felt as if he ran alongside me shouting helpful cues. As soon as he hears about my dad he emailed me about everything I don’t have time to think about, like confirming I would be in this van to the Margaret Atwood lecture and making sure I planned to visit Cornell College. My teachers refused to let me recede into wilderness in peace.

The trip to Indiana from Kalamazoo is a couple hours. The trip from Kalamazoo Valley Community College to Notre Dame University is a lesson in social mobility. We would never make it into this school as transfers. It is one of the many doors closed to community college students. Still, they welcome us and even reserved us a section of seats to see Margaret Atwood. Perks of being at the bottom of the academic food chain. But, that day the world felt possible. We are not our genetic destinies. We are not the children of the working class, the students who screwed up their academic careers, second class citizens of the academic world. We emerge from
the wilderness in our genes, the chaos of our homes to piece together an education lecture by lecture.

My professor owns four or five Newfoundlands at a time, mostly rescues. He told me once “people only like the idea of Newfoundlands, not the reality of a 180 pound drooling dog.” People only like the idea of breeding, to mash up the pieces, male and female and create something new. A monster with no name. Children to set adrift in the world. Yet we ended up here, at Notre Dame on a warm spring day.

During the Q&A a young woman asked Margaret Atwood what advice she has for aspiring writers in a world where the unknown is becoming smaller and smaller due to technology. She reasoned we have satellites over wilderness areas and have the technology to exploring the depths of the ocean. The mysteries of the woman-eating wilderness of Atwood’s fiction are surely diminishing. Atwood’s eyes lit up and she said with voice filled with wisdom and a hint of darkness, “oh, there is still plenty of unknown.”

We laughed. Maybe we didn’t believe her. Our generation grew up looking up to science to explain the world, a rational world. It took me a while to understand there is not just unknown but the unknowable left in the world.

I left for Alaska in June. My trip took seventeen hours. I rarely slept from nerves and altitude. I took a city bus to the train station in Kalamazoo, a train from Kalamazoo to Chicago and then flew from Chicago to Seattle and from Seattle to Anchorage. Each leg of the trip took me further away from the known world.

From the final plane I saw mountains for the first time. I thought I knew mountains but these defied my paltry definition. The massive forms violently pierced the sky. I stared down at
the gray tips cut through a thin pink cotton layer of clouds from the plane window, awed by the terrifying beauty of the landscape below.

I reflect on the moment I saw those mountains. The initial terror fades and I consider going back. Wilderness may be violent, it may be treacherous but it can also be transformative. Landscape never simply ‘is’; it is always what we imprint on it. The puritans saw the wilderness as a literal Hell on earth at the same time the indigenous peoples saw it as sacred. It is both. It is neither. It is the potential for transformation, here in the place where life is created and destroyed diurnally.
My aunt Dolores greets me at the airport. I know it's her because I see my grandmother’s flat feet walk towards me. They are also my feet that I’d always hated until I see them nearing me on her legs. She is maybe an inch taller with her hair puffed up. She was always my favorite aunt, my father’s only sister. I have not seen her in twenty years since she and her wife moved to Alaska. Our familiar bond transcends the years.

We drive to her home in the mountains in the evening daylight. I thought I knew wilderness. In this midnight sun the plants grow wildly, dandelions are waist height and savage. The sun has a similar effect on me causing a sort of photosynthetic-mania. I’m high on sunlight. My aunt places two hot pink Benadryl in my hand but even still I am awake at five in the morning. I joke I woke up with the never-setting sun.

“Have you prepared emotionally to see your dad?” Dolores asked my second morning over coffee.

“I read Frankenstein.” I said. That seemed credible source for advice on meeting one’s progenitor in a world of ice.

My father and I spent Father’s Day walking around Anchorage stoned on his medical marijuana which made the harsh edges of the world meld together; mountains to city; civilization to wilderness. In front of a shop advertising boat tours stood a piece of a glacier sitting in the sun, melting so slowly it’s almost imperceptible. I touched it, it felt like damp glass. It was the densest ice I’ve felt. My hand came away wet but didn’t make a dent in the chunk of immortal cold. We stand there touching it but don’t talk about anything of consequence, like genetically similar strangers: two birds twittering to each other because they know the same song. I learned to let my father be who he is. We closed The Cross Bar that night. Downed glass after glass of local beer. He seemed happy. Quality of life may not be measured in years but rather in moments like these, which for my father are numbered.

I see Roethke’s poems “Cuttings” and “Cuttings (later)” as the best description of the painful process of growing apart from one’s genetics, “This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, / Cut stems struggling to put down feet, /What saint strained so much, / Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?” Pulled from its parental plant, a cutting will suffer but ultimately grow into a new, separate being. The true self. We may be lost, as many new growths are or we may emerge from the cracks in the sidewalk, or out of the woods reaching upwards towards the open sky. It hurts, naturally to take root in our own wilderness.

Next to my drafty old Iowan apartment sits a mansion; the domestic habitat of a judge, his wife, and their Rhodesian Ridgeback. The dog is a lion hunter on suburban safari. It is ridiculous to picture this massive dog, who simpers at the sight of another animal, being a killer of anything as majestic as a squirrel. Yet, the neighbors’ dog hunts lions in his blood; he’s bred for it. We do not always fulfill our genetic destinies.

I can’t be too preachy, my honorable neighbor points out I’ve got a Catahoula Hog Dog. At least, he tells me, that’s how they used to be advertised in old hunting magazines. My dog’s bred with a collie for better shepherding ability. Herding dogs know how to care for the broken-hearted, the wandering, and the lonely. That’s all me. Lord knows I need shepherding. I tell my dog “Don’t get old. Not now. I need you.”

Dogs are our strongest link to the natural world. They are at once our companions and our guides to the wilderness. I fret about my dog’s quality of life. He can’t run or jump. I position an old towel under his hips to lift him up and down stairs. This awkward maneuver is something neither of us enjoys. I spend $40 on liquid glucosamine supplements, made of ground up seashells to mix with his food. Mostly he stares out the windows of the apartment morosely, not from pain but because he longs to tree a squirrel and roam the hiking trails by the house. Animals do not measure the quality of life the same way humans do. I imagine a quality life for him would be measured in cookies eaten, small rodents chased, and naps taken in afternoon sunlight. I want to fix him. I want to throw money at the problem until it goes away. I want a human solution to an animal problem. I pick up shifts at work to make more money to throw at my dog, when he would probably just like to spend more time with me sitting on our porch.

Medication may help but the wild in my dog will pull him through. He will limp forward into an uncertain future. I will finish my degree, pack up my collected poems and we will leave the plains in search of a new wilderness to grow our budding roots perhaps grow apart from our genetic destinies and into the unknown.

Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. “Death by Landscape.” Wilderness Tips. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
97-118. Print
Lax, Shayna. “A Walk in the Woods.” Shayna Lax. Zombies and Dice. 25 Aug. 2014. Web. 10
Nov. 2014
Roethke, Theodore. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. New York: Anchor House P,
1975. Print.