by Tracy Ross
Mom’s eyes bugged out behind her glasses. “What are we doing?” she asked. I was so frantic I couldn’t answer. Just jammed the gas pedal into the floor mat and screamed back down the highway.
“Tracy,” my mom said again. “Where are we going?”
“Back to the cabin,” I practically shouted.
“Why? Did you forget something? What’s the matter?”
Fighting hot tears that were surging against my eyelids, I snapped, “Stop asking so many questions! I just have to go back. I’m worried about the boys.”
“The boys?” she said. “Why would you be worried about them? I’m sure they’re fine. They’re with …”
She stopped speaking as soon as the realization hit her. I looked over and saw anger flash across her face. Her mouth dropped open, and I knew she was going to defend my dad. But for once she didn’t try to talk me out of the sickening way I was feeling. She gripped her purse, nodded her head, and said, “I understand. Let’s go back.”
The image stayed with me all the way to the cabin, of my sons, lying on one of the beds with their diapers pulled down around their legs. They were crying and squirming, trying desperately to crawl away. Standing before them, I saw a man, also with his pants dangling off his hips. It was my dad, leaning over Scout and Hatcher.
Swerving into the gravel lot, I jammed the truck into park, not even bothering to lock it. I ran to the door and started pounding. “Open up!” I yelled. “It’s Tracy. Let me in!” Dad opened the door, looking surprised to see us.
“Hey Trace,” he said nonchalantly. “What are you doing back here so soon? What’d ya do? Forget your wallet or something?”
Instead of answering, I tore past him, looking for Scout and Hatcher. The room was tiny, so I found them instantly. Scout was sitting in his portable high chair, sucking on a handful of Cheerios. When he saw me, he smiled and raised a grubby fist. Scanning the room, I found Hatcher lying on the bed in his diaper, drinking a bottle of milk. He smiled when he saw me, too, which caused the milk to dribble out of the side of his mouth.
Without looking at my dad, I unbuckled Scout and lifted him out of his high chair. With my other arm, I bent over and scooped up Hatcher. Pushing past both of my parents, I carried my boys out of the darkened cabin and into the bright Idaho sunlight. Kneeling because I could no longer stand, I smothered my sons in kisses. When I finally assured myself that they were happy and unharmed, I turned around and faced my father.
He stood in the doorway, slowly shaking his head. He started to speak, but I held out my hand to silence him. I knew that he was going to tell me nothing happened, but I didn’t care about what he had to say. The last thing I wanted to hear was his voice, trying to overrule my instincts.
Dad didn’t touch the boys, I’m certain of it. And the look of dread when he realized why I rushed back to the cabin still fills me with wrenching guilt. But on that day, the Earth shifted. I saw for the first time the risks I was willing to take to be my parents’ perfect daughter. I saw the compromises I’d made to keep Mom and Dad happy, by being the well-adjusted, forgiving girl they needed to maintain the illusion that they had been redeemed.
If I am to be completely honest, I must admit that I was also still ruled by my own weakness. It takes time to sand away a wish that’s carved into the stones of our psyche. All my life, I had longed for a happy, normal family. I’d convinced myself that my own memories were overblown; the truth couldn’t possibly have been as terrible as I remembered it. At some point I assigned a number to the times my dad molested me: twelve. And I told myself that twelve times wasn’t such a big deal. Millions of kids had suffered far worse. It was probably better if I stopped thinking about it. It took work, but I had managed to bury the past deep inside of me, especially when I was around my family. What else could excuse that feigned “forgiveness” I had shown my dad at the wedding? How else could I have spent more than ten minutes with my mom without trying to kill her? What emotional amnesia could allow me to let my parents babysit my precious little boys?
As I stood in the parking lot outside the cabin, I felt like a girl who had just been trampled by a herd of cattle.
The vision told me I was fast approaching my break point. I knew if my dad was going to stay in my life, everything had to change. I needed vindication. He had to explain what he had done to me as an eight-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, the child who trusted him and loved him beyond belief. He had to confess—not only to me but to my whole family.
It took some time, but after my outburst, I regained my composure. But for the rest of the trip, I kept Scout and Hatcher close beside me. Mom never asked me to go to Sun Valley again, and I never offered. When my sons were around my father, I didn’t want to take my eyes off of them for a second.
23
Crash and Burn
A few years after Hatcher was born, I nearly died. It wasn’t an almost-death of the body but an almost-death of the soul. Shawn and I were riding our mountain bikes on a trail near my cabin above Boulder when I missed a turn and skidded into the dirt. The sun was shining on tight blue buds that would soon flower across the hillsides. The boys were at home with a babysitter. And I was falling apart.
“I can’t do this,” I told Shawn. “I can’t hold up the weight.”
Shawn began untwisting my legs from my bike. “What do you mean?” he asked. “You were flying back there. You looked good.”
Most things in my life were looking good. After Scout and Hatcher were born, I kept writing, first for the Winter Park newspaper and then later for Skiing magazine. When Scout was still breast-feeding, I traveled back to Jackson Hole, where I got to do a steep-skiing camp with a pro skier named A. J. Cargill. The following winter, with Hatcher nursing, I scored an assignment for Outside Traveler, in which Shawn and I got to climb and ski a big couloir on Mount Heyburn, in the Sawtooths. All the while I was penning a weekly adventure column for the Winter Park Manifest. I barely made any money, but slowly and steadily, I was gaining respect as a journalist. In 2003, an editor at Skiing called to ask if I’d consider working on staff. I went to Boulder, applied for the job of associate editor, and got it. Shawn and I packed up the boys, bought a house, and moved to the mountains above town. For the next three years, I skied, hiked, and backpacked all over the country (as well as Canada and Iran) while honing my skills as a feature writer. Through it all I made enough money for Shawn to stay home with the boys.
We made our life on two wooded acres at eight thousand feet surrounded by the Roosevelt National Forest. Nearby, the Continental Divide snaked toward Wyoming and Montana. Black bears, mountain lions, and bobcats wandered through the aspens and ponderosa pine trees that provide shade—and hawk and songbird habitat—on our land. Scout and Hatcher spent their youngest years playing in a seasonal creek that swelled past its banks when the snow in the high country melted. During the summer, we sat on our deck watching stars shooting across the sky. In the winter, with snow blanketing the ground, we listened to a quiet so vast it created its own sound. And yet, despite all the joys of my home, work, and family, I still wasn’t happy.
Despair and loneliness had chased me ever since my awakening in Idaho, and it got worse as I fell into normal familial patterns with my parents. I’d invite them—or they’d invite themselves—to Colorado, and I’d clear my schedule for their weeklong stay. The boys would barely sleep on the night before their arrival, knowing that they were bringing toys, goodies, and new pajamas for them to sleep in. For the first few minutes after they showed up, I’d feel an overwhelming relief that they’d made the drive from Las Vegas safely. But as soon as Scout or Hatcher climbed into my dad’s lap, I’d feel like I wanted to vomit. Never once did I pull my sons off of him or ask my parents to leave early, but every time they visited, I would start counting the seconds until they left. I knew lots of grown kids had the same reaction to their parents or in-laws coming to visit, but I doubted many of them felt that way because of the abuse they’d suffered. The second my s
tomach started contracting, I would know that I shouldn’t have invited my father anywhere near Scout and Hatcher. But I kept doing it—even asking him and my mom to babysit while Shawn and I went on short vacations—because I was afraid and selfish.
More and more, I also began to feel the deep, abiding betrayal of my entire family. Dad had created the lie, but Mom and Chris had let me carry it all. Never once did either of them ask me what had happened during all the years I’d been molested. In some ways, their refusal to ask was more painful to me than the actual abuse.
It came out at home, when I was playing with the boys or having sex with Shawn. With depression sapping my energy, I never felt that I could give any of them my full attention. Shawn’s normal hunger for sex made me feel dirty and disgusting. Even though I was five foot five with a lean 125-pound body, I thought I was too ugly for even my husband to desire. As the years had passed, we’d been intimate less and less often. I tried to explain why I couldn’t close my eyes and relax enough to enjoy the feel of his body, but as soon as I opened my mouth, I knew I couldn’t say what I was thinking. I could barely admit to myself that twenty years after my abuse had ended, when I closed my eyes at the wrong moment, I still had flashbacks of my father.
In March of 2006, I stayed in bed for a week. Shawn put heavy wool blankets over the windows and kept the boys quiet, so I could sleep. For days, I lay under a mountain of covers, listening to my children playing in the woods. The music in their voices soothed me, but they also made me think of my dad. I let my mind stay on him, and the abuse, and the million chances I’d given him to fess up. And then, one afternoon, another vision changed my life.
In my mind I saw the shores of Redfish Lake, and on them, a trunk battered and half-buried in the loam. Autumn light slanted through the lodgepoles, and small birds flickered through the leaves. Though the trunk was locked, I could see inside it, the walls invisible to me. What I saw were several pairs of little girl’s underwear, a pair of men’s pants, and two pale yellow, soiled bed sheets.
As I stared at the trunk, I knew that there was only one way I could unlock the secrets that still haunted me. If my dad wouldn’t tell me the truth, I’d go seek it out myself. That day, I started plotting my return to the place my abuse began on a cool autumn evening in 1979. Going alone, I would return to Redfish Lake.
October 2006: I stood at the counter of River One Outfitters in Stanley, Idaho, waiting to pay for a map. Outside, the thermometer read 41 degrees. A man in a red flannel shirt stepped behind the cash register, sizing me up. “What’s a pretty girl like you doing hiking alone?” he said.
“I’m prepared and conservative,” I told him. But it was only a brave front. Though I’d done it—come back to the Sawtooths—I hadn’t wanted to be on that trip. It was coming on three decades since my dad put his hands down my pants at Redfish Lake. During those years, I’d been to therapists, astrology workers, and priests. I’d even visited a psychic, who told me that going into the mountains with my abuser would be the most dangerous thing I would ever do. That’s part of the reason I went back the first time on my own. I wanted to see if I could find the answers that I needed without the trouble of involving my dad.
My plan was to backpack—because I loved it—while opening myself to the memories I hoped would flood me if I returned to the scene of the crime. People had done that recently, after the World Trade Center bombings: put flowers at the location their loved ones were believed to have landed after leaping from the burning towers. In a sense, I was trying to mimic them. I wanted to find the child who had been traumatized near the streams filled with decaying salmon, and offer her a proper burial.
It was late afternoon when I finally started hiking, leaving the trailhead for Sawtooth Lake. I climbed through yellow aspen leaves and up switchbacks littered with scree. At a dead ponderosa, I took a picture of myself and my pack, a memento to prove to myself that I had actually done this. But as the sun began to fade, thoughts of wolves crowded my brain. I knew they’d been reintroduced to Idaho during the mid-1990s but that wolves in general don’t attack hikers. But something about the trip, and my own heavy heart, made me see myself as the perfect prey for any predator. I found a campsite next to a small lake ringed by razor-edged mountains. I ducked into my tent, and burrowed into my sleeping bag without eating supper.
Through the night, I lay as still as possible, waiting for an epiphany to shock me. The memories came—of me in the camper bunkbed, of me running toward a bridge in my Tweety Bird nightgown. But no resolution. I tried hard to make myself remember the events that led up to the abuse, and to see if I had been a willing accomplice to them. My body had the same reflex it always had when I thought back to the tickle sessions or the mid-afternoon fondling. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, my eyes clamped shut, and my mouth contorted around the words No. No. Not me. Not you. But answers to why it had happened? Only one person could provide them.
Condensation, caused by my breath clouding my small non-breathable tent, kept sheeting off the ceiling and falling onto my face. Tiny daggers of ice pelted me, forcing me to think.
Deriding myself, I said that my quest was in vain; that I was vain for leaving Shawn, Scout, and Hatcher and hiking alone into the Sawtooths. Going into the backcountry solo was stupid, of this I had proof: just two months earlier a congressman’s kid had gone missing on a solo hike. A search was mounted with helicopters, volunteer ground crews, and rangers all picking and flossing the granite teeth. There’d been no sight of him until a search dog got onto—and then lost—his scent. I was acting as selfishly as he had, and the stark reality was that if something happened—a bad fall, for instance, or an aneurysm—I could never see my family again. Worse yet, I would leave them, as my own father had left me, in a state of shock and anguished bewilderment. I shuddered at footsteps I thought I heard outside my tent. I tried to console myself, but all I wanted was to go home to my husband and sons.
Just before dawn, I couldn’t wait any longer. I slid out of my bag and shoved my still-frozen tent into my pack. Jamming my feet into ice-cold boots, I began running, revolting against my own need for answers. The people I passed on the trail looked at me like I was a madwoman, maybe because I was. I knew then that the next time I returned to the Sawtooths, it would be with my dad.
24
Return to Redfish Lake
For the first time in years, I am truly afraid. It’s July 2007, and my dad and I sit at a picnic table on the far side of Redfish Lake. The boat we took to get here has left, along with the worried Texans who looked at my dad and me, shaking their heads. When we reached the edge of the lake, none of them bothered to help us. Even as they motored away, I thought I could hear their voices carrying across the water. “Where are those people headed?”
Today, my dad and I will hike through the yarrow-dotted hillsides, stopping every minute for Dad to catch his breath. We’ll walk along a river full of slippery green rocks. When we come to a place where the water rushes over a natural slide made of granite, we’ll stop, so I can take off my hiking boots and slide fifty feet into an emerald green pool. Dad will stop, shoot pictures, and take a deep slug of Gatorade. After I swim, climbing from the water dripping wet and freezing, I’ll sit on a rock a few feet from my father. An awkward silence will rise up between us when my dad offers—and then retracts his offer—to let me use his T-shirt as a towel to dry my skin.
Now we are heading into a mountain range that looks imposing and mean. When I talked to my dad months ago, separated by five hundred miles and a satellite signal, this trip seemed noble, necessary, and, in a twisted way, fun. This will be the first and last time we go on a multiday backpacking trip, just the two of us, in the place we love most on Earth.
I’m scared, because when I am with my dad, I am eight years old. We will walk for days up valleys covered in trees. We will camp in places so lovely we’ll want to weep. Fish will rise to the surface of a dozen glassy lakes. And he might try to lie on top of me when I fall asle
ep.
“I’ve made some rules for myself,” he announces, then rattles them off. “I won’t ask questions. I won’t speak out of turn. I won’t be vulgar or too descriptive. I won’t get pissed off at you.”
I stare at him. You won’t get pissed at me? I think. What the hell is wrong with you?
Instead of denigrating him, I remind myself that my father is sixty-four going on sixteen. A week ago, at a party in Utah, he tried playing on a rope swing that hung out of a tree. When he caught the edge of his shoe on a root, he held on and scraped himself over some rocks, rubbing the flesh off of his knees. Now the scabs are deep, dark red, and crack open when he walks.
We continue hiking until we reach the sign for Alpine Lake. We’ve covered five miles and gained 2,500 feet, but our next campsite is still a mile away and another thousand feet higher. Dad looks weary, like he could lie down with his pack on and sleep until morning. The trail is becoming steeper with every step. At the fifth switchback, he’s fallen fifteen minutes behind me and I consider waiting, then clip along at my own pace. I know Dad is getting older and is out of shape and that in his condition he could be back there somewhere having a heart attack. I keep walking until I reach Alpine Lake.
That night, we set up camp, eat dinner, and drink a gallon of water. I slip away, hiding behind a tree to change into a clean pair of clothes. My dad heads down to the lake and casts for rainbow trout. I scoot my sleeping pad as far from his as possible, until I’m lying in the corner of the one tent we brought to share.
Even on this hike, I am still willing to capitulate against my best interests, my own damaged instincts. My instincts were damaged, along with my boundaries and my sense of personal protection and self worth, when I was abused. Scientists now say that children sustain lasting nerve damage when they are physically or sexually mistreated. It’s taken unimaginable strength for me to come this far in my relationship with my father. I’m not going to berate myself for conceding to sleep in the same tent.
