by Tracy Ross
We’re here for reasons I don’t want to think about yet, so I train my mind on the sockeye salmon that used to migrate nine hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean to lay their eggs and die at Redfish Lake. That was before the Army Corps of Engineers put in the dams that obstructed their journey. For decades, no fish have made it back to their ancestral spawning grounds at the base of the Sawtooth Mountains. But when I was young, sockeyes clogged the streams pouring out of the lake, creating waves of bright red color. Mesmerized, I knelt on the banks of Fishhook Creek and stretched my fingers toward their tinfoil-bright fins. My dad told me that the fish were rushing home to ensure the continuance of their species. He said they hadn’t eaten in months; were consuming the nutrients in their own bodies. Over the years I have thought of the fish with love and terror. I want to hover, as they did, over the origin of my own sorrow and draw from it a new, immaculate beginning.
Several times as we hike up the trail, I fantasize about finding the perfect, fist-size rock and smashing it against my dad’s skull. I picture him stumbling, falling onto the ground. I see myself crouching beside him, refusing to hold him as he bleeds. But even as I imagine it, I know I won’t do it, because I can’t afford to lose my dad—yet. For twenty-eight years he has held my memories hostage. Without him, I’ll never know what he did to me when I was a kid.
We climb for another hour until, a few hundred feet from the pass, we turn off the trail. In front of us is a circle of granite towers, sharp and fluted like the turrets on the Mormon Tabernacle. Loose rocks slide down vertical shafts and clatter to the ground. Quickly but carefully, my dad and I crabwalk across the jumbled blocks, insinuating ourselves into tight slots and willing our bodies to become lighter, so the boulders won’t shift beneath us and break our legs.
When we get to the wide, flat rock that looks like an altar, we stop. My dad slumps over, sips water, and chokes down a few bites of food. His eyes, the color of chocolate, begin to melt, and the corners of his mouth tremble, as if he’s fighting off a frown.
Hunching next to him on the granite slab, I squint into his red-brown, sixteenth-Cherokee face. I dig in my pack until I locate my handheld tape recorder. Holding it close to my father’s lips so the wind won’t obscure his answers, I begin the interrogation I’ve waited most of my life to conduct.
“Okay, Dad,” I say. “I’m ready. Tell me. How did it begin?”
1
An Untimely Death
How long have I been searching for a father? Nearly as long as I have breathed air.
I was seven months old the day my real dad went backpacking in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and an aneurysm exploded in his brain. He was leading a group of Boy Scouts, teaching them to track a black bear, hook a trout, and build a fire with one match. He collapsed in a scree field, cutting his cheeks on shards of million-year-old rocks. His friends carried him back to the trailhead, because the blood pouring out of his artery impaired his ability to see. They took him home and laid him on the sofa, where my mom found him shivering beneath a wool blanket, though the temperature was eighty degrees.
We lived on the Lemoore, California, Naval Station, where my dad worked as a weapons technician. He rode on the USS Kitty Hawk, making sure the bombs on the planes it carried didn’t accidentally detonate. When Mom opened the door of our military-issue tract house, she knew instantly that something was wrong. My dad’s boots, which he always placed at attention (whether he was standing in them or not) were slumped against the living-room wall. Hearing the story of his fall in the mountains, she dropped my four-year-old brother, Chris, and me off at a neighbor’s house, then raced our dad to sick bay, where she was told to come back the following Tuesday because it was Flag Day and all the good doctors were out playing golf.
My dad spent Sunday and Monday in bed. He complained that his head felt like a pressure cooker that couldn’t release steam. On Tuesday, he tried putting on his uniform, but he was staggering and sweating, and then he threw up. My mom took this to mean his condition was worsening. Throwing a pillow onto the driver’s seat of the family station wagon, she drove back to the tiny naval hospital, sobbing and steering, while holding me on her lap.
The doctors found blood in my dad’s spinal fluid and made plans to operate. But the night before his surgery, my parents both knew he was going to die. “I’m afraid,” he told her, though he couldn’t have wanted her to know such a thing. He was Peter Lewellyn Ross, twenty-nine, youngest chief in the Navy at the time. She was Doris Mary, a twenty-seven-year-old Canadian transplant, who, eight years after coming to America, still said srimp instead of shrimp. They clutched each other on his hospital bed while my mom kissed his bandages and pressed ice cubes on his lips.
We buried my father a few weeks later in a cemetery in Twin Falls, Idaho. But my mom swears he came back to us after the funeral. She and I were sleeping in his childhood bedroom at my Grandmother Ross’s house when he returned. It was cool outside, and the window was open, so my mom said he just climbed in. She remembers exactly what he was wearing: blue-and-black checkered golf pants and a baby blue polo shirt. He had a list in his hand, just like he always had when he’d been living. He gave her the bright, beautiful smile she says I inherited along with his sea-green colored eyes. He stood over my cradle, adjusted my blanket, and laid his hand across the soft spot on my head.
Seeing him, my mom sat up, a little girl in her cotton nightie.
“How did you get here?” she said.
“Can I visit you? I miss you. I need you.”
My dad sat down on the edge of her bed. “Go back to sleep, Doris Wakeham,” he told her. “I still have work to do. I’m not leaving anytime soon.”
Six months later, Mom packed up our belongings, emptied her military pension, and moved us into another split-level ranch house, at 1537 Richmond Drive in Twin Falls.
She says she did it because she wanted Chris and me to be near our grandparents, who, like my dad, loved nothing more than hooking a trout on a caddis nymph they had tied in their own back shop. The Rosses were exotic, comfortably wealthy, and grounded in the outdoors. Both in their early fifties when we moved to Idaho, they made a striking couple. Grandma Liz was five foot six and stately, with a head full of flaming red hair. She’d grown up in Beverly Hills and, as a teenager, swam laps with Johnny Weissmuller—the original Tarzan. My white-haired, crew-cut grandfather was raised in Contact, Nevada, during the Depression. But he was no hobo looking for handouts, like the characters in Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain. He studied his way to an engineering scholarship at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Howard Ross pumped gas to pay his way through college, and it happened that one day my grandma pulled into his station in one of her two convertible Chryslers. When they married, my Grandma Liz gave up a sizable inheritance. But when she and Howard moved to Idaho, she found a new kind of riches. Both learned to fly Cessnas and went on trips to Canada, California, and Mexico. They fished and hunted and camped out in the desert. They also threw the best dinner parties in Twin Falls County. I know, because they’re the first and most vivid of all my childhood early memories: imagine lipsticked ladies clinking whiskey glasses while discussing the best way to field dress a sage hen, and you have it. With zero effort I can conjure up my three-year-old self hiding under the dining-room table during one of Grandma Liz’s parties. Her German shorthair, Josephine, wags her tail beside me. Dressed in a pair of denim overalls, I feel my way along a half dozen pair of tweed-slacked knees and nylons-encased legs. Occasionally someone looks down to see whose fingers are tickling his or her kneecaps, but for the most part, I am left alone and happy to be surrounded by the sound of so many stories; the sound of so much laughter.
My mom has always said that her decision to plant us close to our grandparents, five thousand miles from her fish-head-eating, whiskey-swilling cousins, was her one true act of heroism. But really she had no reason to return to Canada. Aside from her sister, Marjorie, my grandparents were als
o the only relatives we had in the States. The rest of Mom’s family—a motley but musically gifted bunch of Scotch-Irish Catholics—lived in Newfoundland, where she’d grown up. Her own mother had died of tuberculosis when Mom was two, and her deep-sea-fishing father pawned her off on his cancer-stricken mother to raise. At five, my mom was scrounging the shores of Conception Bay, sent out to look for coal chunks to burn in her stove. At seventeen, she and my Great-Grandmother Wakeham still shared the same bed. When Mom left Petit Forte at the age of twenty, on the day John F. Kennedy died, she swore she would never live there again. But nothing could have prepared her for the desolation she found in Twin Falls, which sits on the edge of the Snake River Canyon, a gash in the earth that, in some places, runs one thousand feet deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Twin Falls. The only reason anyone’s ever heard of it is because Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon there in 1974. My mom, grandparents, Chris, and I sat on the roof of our house trying to watch him do it. Wide World of Sports even came out from California to film the event. Knievel almost made the quarter-mile-wide leap, but the wind balled up in his parachute and pulled his rocket-powered motorcycle into the canyon. By the time he touched down, unconscious and strapped to his bike by a harness from his stars-and-stripes jumpsuit, he was mere feet from the black coils of the Snake River. A few knots to the west, and he would have fallen in and drowned.
“Twin” sat high above the river on a plateau of sticker bushes and sagebrush. When I was young, it was nothing more than a lonely clutch of brick schools, empty churches, and drab, low-ceilinged businesses. But at the far edge of town, the Snake River dropped abruptly, creating two enormous waterfalls. At 212 feet, Shoshone Falls is higher than Niagara, though not as wide. The Twin Falls, which drop 125 feet, are shorter but just as beautiful. Together, the misty cascades lent my dull, mostly Mormon hometown its lone drama and distinction. But for as long as I can remember, the streets seemed too empty, the businesses always on the verge of dying. How they didn’t is a mystery, what with the mighty Snake dividing us from the lusher, more beautiful parts of Idaho. Only the Perrine Bridge, which stretched across the river 486 feet above the water, provided us access to the ski town of Sun Valley, where, I believed, lived the rest of civilization.
I guess it’s no wonder our mom never took to Twin Falls; despite the hardships of her childhood, she still longed for Newfoundland. As a little girl in Petit Forte, she had looked out her window at rolling green hills, dramatic headlands, and fathoms-deep water, where she’d once paddled her own dory across an inlet thick with whales. When she looked out the window of her house in Twin Falls, she saw only sagebrush and piles of lava, remnants of the Yellowstone Caldera’s last eruption, 640,000 years earlier. Now, instead of the scent of sea salt and cabbage boiling on her stove, the smell of pesticide-laden cow manure wafted through her house. She never complained, at least not that Chris and I can remember, but she also never forgave whatever forces of destiny that tore her husband away from her and sent her, reeling, onto the cracked-earth Snake River floodplain, surrounded by Mormons and sheepherders, among the largest concentration of dairy farms in the United States.
Not that Chris and I had one problem with living so close to our grandparents, who treated us like their own children. I’d go to their house and shadow my grandpa while he made his patented Ross Bait Baffler fishing boxes in his backyard shop. At lunchtime, we’d eat potato chips smeared with Adams peanut butter and listen to Paul Harvey on the radio. After lunch, Grandpa would go back to the shop and I’d search for piles of Jo’s dog poop, for which he would pay me a penny each. I loved the smell of my grandpa’s starched, short-sleeve plaid shirts and the sound of his L.L. Bean work boots clomping across the speckled linoleum of his kitchen floor. I’m sure a part of me extrapolated my real dad from him. When I sat on his lap and wrapped my arms around him, I had to have been channeling my father.
Living near Liz and Howard also meant that Chris and I would be indoctrinated early into the wonders of the outdoors. On dozens and dozens of summer mornings, we’d pile into their white Ford pickup and head to Magic Reservoir, one of their favorite fishing spots. While they sipped bourbon in their float tubes, my redheaded, freckle-faced brother and I drank lake water out of rose-flowered teacups and nibbled on gritty mud cakes. We camped in our grandparents’ Airstream trailer and caught tadpoles in Dixie cups. Sometimes we left tiny frogs in their paper prisons until all of the water dried up. We—or at least I—paid for it too. By the time I entered kindergarten, permanently sunburned from the glare off so much water, I’d already had mud-and-lake-water-induced illness twice.
Over time, my outdoor antics became family lore and legend. One day, while camping with my grandparents, we hiked along the bank of a slow-moving river. The water burbled, calling me to peer into the riffles. I looked, lost my footing, and slipped in. Oblivious, Liz and Howard walked ahead of me, scouting for deep pools to cast their lines. But as my grandma used to tell it, at some point they noticed my singing had stopped, and shortly thereafter, that I was missing. Racing back to my last-known location, they once again heard my melody. That’s how they found me, hanging onto a root in the bank, my body stretched out and bobbing on the surface of the water.
For us kids, there was nothing better than stargazing with our grandparents or hanging out while my grandma played gin rummy with her girlfriends in the Airstream. But to my mom, the Rosses were a constant reminder of all she was not. They had never liked her, she was sure of it. Not since the day my dad had brought her to Idaho and they insisted on checking the quality of her teeth. Not when they made fun of the way she said whore-de-oerves, and told her, after both of our births, that she’d better start dieting or her husband would start looking for a new wife. Even as my dad lay dying, Grandma Liz couldn’t stay off my mom’s case. When my mom begged to see my father—one last time before they unplugged him from the ventilator—Liz (who was seven inches taller and outweighed her by forty pounds) practically wrestled her into a cradle lock holding her back.
But our roots, however spindly, were planted, so Mom, Chris, and I made the most of our new digs. We played Chutes and Ladders, watched Sesame Street, and read hundreds of books. My mom loves to tell me how, even as a toddler, I could crack her and my brother up. While she cooked cabbage rolls on our electric four-burner, I’d hook my fingers and toes in the webbing of my playpen and circle around it like a monkey in a cage. Later, when the dishes were stacked and drying, Mom would tuck me into my crib. Since Chris was older, he got to stay up later than me at night. But it was only a matter of minutes before he and my mom would hear the thud that meant I’d hoisted my body over the railing and flopped onto my head. Seconds later, there I’d come, crawling and jabbering in my pajamas, determined to be a part of the action.
“You were the miracle child sent from heaven to quell my loneliness,” says my mom. “I know this, because even though God took your daddy, he gave me you.”
I wish I could have been the elixir that prevented my mom from bottoming out, but that act of heroism fell to the neighbor ladies, Marlene and Terry. Refusing to let her be single and sad, they went to great lengths to set my mom up on blind dates. When she’d drive off with this rancher or that lawyer, they’d come over and babysit, bringing along their own passels of kids. In most of the pictures from my pre-school years I’m standing next to Terry’s daughter, Marcie, looking innocent and sheepish, like we’ve just finger-painted the wall of my bedroom and then helped ourselves to a handful of Milk Bones (which we probably had).
Marlene and Terry were there when Mom needed to borrow coffee, or cry, or celebrate Chris’s first day of school. They invited us to every birthday party, holiday celebration, and parade. And they swooped over to take care of my brother and me on the afternoon our mom decided she could no longer take the loneliness that felt like an anchor around her neck. She was standing at the kitchen window watching Chris and me playing in the backyard when she thought How can I do t
his? I have all the responsibility and no help. She doesn’t remember calling 911, but a few minutes later an ambulance screamed up the driveway and two husky paramedics jumped out. After a quick assessment of her mental stability (not so crazy she needed the psychiatric ward but wide-eyed and ranting enough to be monitored), they loaded her onto a gurney and whisked her off to a week of “rest and relaxation” at Magic Valley Hospital.
If there’s a moment when Mom’s sadness took on a life of its own, it was when she stood at that little window letting the blueprint of her suicide form a picture in her head. She didn’t know exactly how she’d do it, but the tools appeared before her in stark relief: a razor blade borrowed from her Schick shaving kit. Scissors sharp enough to cut a perfect line across my bangs. All the leftover Valium from the bottle the doctor prescribed after my dad’s funeral to help her sleep. What mattered, of course, was not the method she’d use to snip the cord that connected her to us kids, but that she no longer felt capable of carrying all of our weight.
2
A Knight In Shining Bell-Bottoms
Mom, Chris, and I waited three years for a miracle to sweep us off our lonely, displaced feet. And then one day in June of 1974, it pulled into our driveway behind the wheel of a flesh-toned 1949 Willys jeep.
In my memory from that evening, I am standing under the awning of our black-and-white ranch house at 1537 Richmond Drive. A sprinkler on the front lawn sends cool mist across my toes. Fresh out of the bath and dressed in a pair of summer-weight pj’s, I smell like Johnson’s baby powder and No More Tears shampoo. My hair, still light enough to be considered strawberry, skims the tops of my shoulder blades.
