All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

by Philip Connors

  Before I left her mountain, M.J. did me a favor I could never repay. She made noises about being bored in the lookout, wanting to get out on a fire, then maybe a camp crew for a hunting outfit—if only she could find a replacement on fire watch—but I suspect she secretly made it her mission to get me out of the city. She set it up as me doing her a favor, when in fact we both knew otherwise.

  No one resists M.J.’s charms for long, and certainly not her boss back in district headquarters, to whom she took our plan devised by firelight and whiskey. Toby Cash Richards was born to that country, an aspiring logger turned schoolteacher and summer firefighter who’d worked his way up to become the Black Range district FMO (fire management officer) through the sheer ballsiness of letting things burn on landscape scale, in a landscape where fire was essential for a healthy forest. He was as country as country got. He knew his way around guns and was a master with a chain saw; he hunted elk with a bow and arrow, and people I came to trust eventually told me they never saw a man on a prescribed fire run drip torches with greater efficiency and zeal. If your truck was stuck in the mud or your horse had thrown you from the saddle, you wanted him alongside you. I once saw him drink a case of beer in the course of an afternoon and evening and wake the next morning at five o’clock to cook breakfast before another day in the woods, while the rest of us slumbered or moaned, at least until the smell of bacon roused us from our mummy bags. He did nothing half-assed, drinking included, and it never seemed to impinge on his capacity for work the next day, or his ability to two-step at closing time in the Pine Knot Bar.

  After rehearsing her argument with me, M.J. got on the two-way radio and told Toby she needed out. She was going stir-crazy in her tower. She needed time on a crew in the woods, wanted to see the action from another angle, up close and personal on the hot, smoky edges of a fire. She told him I needed a career change and some time to think, that I was competent with maps and binoculars, and that she’d personally train me in all the idiosyncrasies of the lookout’s tools—a ten-minute job, she said, and he laughed. She talked like a raving pyromaniac, sick of looking at fire from a distance. She knew her audience. Toby, I would learn, was nothing if not keen on fire. He respected her gumption. Eventually he buckled, said fine, he’d take a chance on a greenhorn, and when could I be back and ready for duty?

  Fifteen days, it was decided. I’d offer two weeks’ notice at the paper and take the earliest Saturday flight back. I’d relieve M.J. for whatever remained of the season, no guarantees on the length of my employment, rainfall and fire danger the deciding factors.

  After she’d signed off the radio, M.J. stared at me with as serious a look as she could muster.

  Don’t screw this up, she said.

  I told her I was so grateful I would do whatever it took to earn her trust in me.

  Her face contorted in laughter.

  Kidding! she howled. It’s not possible to screw up as a lookout, as long as you stay awake on the job.

  I gave her a bear hug and shouldered my pack, took one last long look around the mountain I would soon call home. On my way down the trail I built a cairn on a wind-whipped ridge, in a place I felt sure no one but me would ever visit—a place as wild as the feeling in my heart—and set the deer bone inside of it.

  I met Paul Gigot as I got off the elevator on my second-to-last day of work at the Journal.

  Well, it’s been a pleasure, I said.

  Yes, good luck, he said.

  Now you’ll be able to hire someone who’s more enthusiastic about working on the editorial page, I said.

  We’ve had a change of plans, he said. Your replacement is only going to work on Leisure & Arts.

  He stepped onto the elevator and threw me a little half wave, half salute.

  I’d always expected I would one day be shown the door. It was some kind of miracle that I’d lasted as long as I had. Having earned my original position at the paper by means of sanitizing the truth to my advantage, I had to admire the fact that I’d been purged by my own hand. But what was I going to do about it? Rescind my resignation? Beg him to let me stay?

  So long, I said, waving.

  Watching over the wilderness of the Gila country, alone with the wind and the stars and the bears and the birds, day after day, night after night—eventually season after season, for more than a decade—was far from easy at first. The enforced solitude made me not just mentally but physically uncomfortable, like a snake molting its skin. All the stimulations and diversions on which I’d come to rely in the city were gone, except the whiskey I made sure to pack in on mules, with all my other supplies. Beyond that I had only myself and the landscape, nothing but time and nothing to do but watch. At long last I had a way of being in the world that didn’t feel fraudulent.

  Outside was a world that dwarfed the self, and I fell hard for the country, especially those parts of it that remained wildest. The headwaters of the Gila River encompassed the first place on earth where an industrial society made a conscious decision to avoid disturbing the landscape with motorized or mechanized machines, an administrative order of the Forest Service in 1924, and it remained a harsh and forbidding landscape, unpunctured by roads, where all travel occurred by foot or by horse. Day by day the place worked its magic on me. Its harshness spoke to something harsh inside of me. Its cruelty attracted. And it was beautiful as only those pieces of the old, wild world can be, places where the ancient music of birdsong and elk bugle still plays undrowned by man and his tools. I lost myself in the manic profusion of starlight, the blinding glare of noon; I hovered in numinous mysteries, laughed like a madman at my unexpected good fortune. By staying put through all the various moods and weathers I couldn’t help but feel awe of a sort I’d previously thought unattainable, an ecstatic dissolution of the self. The place tore me down and remade me; its indifference to my cares and sorrows was magisterial and, in unexpected ways, comforting. I had believed that the streets of New York were the pinnacle of indifference to the individual human life and I had been mistaken. In the streets of New York you could always perform and at least pretend someone watched, or recede yourself into the act of watching, a necessary member of the audience for the performance all around you. Alone on a mountain there were no such luxuries.

  Having seen two towers reduced to a crumble of rubble on fire, I couldn’t help but appreciate the poetic reversal of watching for fires from a tower in the wilderness. It felt like a useful act of witness, like journalism minus the obsession with ephemera. But it’s also the case that in my renewed grief for Dan and all that he had suffered, I wanted to honor the gift he’d given me the last time I saw him, the gift of an incomparable view of mountains and desert from above the great rift valley of the Rio Grande. From the moment I stepped foot inside the seven-by-seven-foot cab of M.J.’s tower I was reminded of the basket of Dan’s balloon, and the unimpeded view from her peak—a view that included the great rift valley of the Rio Grande—called back that long-ago feeling of flight, the dignity and grandeur of floating eye-level with distant mountains. I wanted to perpetuate that feeling. I wanted to live inside of it again, remaining close to what was best in him. If it took an act of intentional downward mobility to do so, trading a job in journalism for a vocation less than a quarter as remunerative, so be it. That great sweep of sky more than made up the difference. The adventure he had dreamed of but never attempted, soaring over the Sandias in a big wind—I could live a version of it every day, afternoons amid the lightning, mornings above the clouds.

  I never really left southern New Mexico after that first taste, not in my heart of hearts anyway, although it would take me another two years before I left the city for good. While there during those last dismal winters between fire seasons, I mimicked a human being with cosmopolitan cares but I no longer had any such thing, if indeed I ever had. The first winter I burned through my Dow Jones 401(k) and looked in vain for freelance work; I participated in the big antiwar protest, when half a million people took to the streets to i
ssue a warning on the rush to invade Iraq on ginned-up pretenses. I’d always thought of the city as the natural home of free speech and collective action but I watched while protesters were penned in like hamsters by metal barricades and threatened with arrest on the flimsiest of pretexts. Innocent people were brutally cuffed and stuffed, and cops on horseback charged crowds for no good reason, threatening the safety of parents and the kids they carried on their shoulders. Those of us who lived in the city that suffered the brunt of the terrorist attack made clear our distaste for visiting a misguided version of the devastation on Baghdad, and we were treated like dogs, some of us manhandled and jailed, all of us told to shut up and keep shopping and the wise men in Washington would handle the rest. Marching felt like pissing into a headwind. The storm was coming, and we knew it. Chicken hawks were in charge, itching for glory. But someone had to say no, even if—especially if—those in power viewed us with contempt.

  In the bitter last days I worked a series of demoralizing jobs, dreaming of the next fire season, the low point arriving when I signed on at twelve bucks an hour to transcribe tapes of CEOs and senior executives shilling for their companies to something called the Wall Street Transcript, which published the interviews verbatim and at preposterous length in a weekly printed booklet. And by tapes I do mean tapes. I played the cassettes with a foot pedal that allowed me to stop the recording or rewind when necessary. I’d have preferred not to suffer such humiliation, but I had to make a living somehow, and the WST was the only thing I could find.

  At the end of my first fire season I flew to Minneapolis and rented a car for the drive to the little town in southern Minnesota where my parents lived. On the day I was to leave to catch a flight to New York, when they were both home from work for their lunch hour, I asked them to sit with me at the kitchen table. I said I was very sorry for what I was about to tell them but I thought they deserved to know.

  My father’s reaction was about what I expected: unemotional, rational in the extreme. That explains some things, he said, when I finished telling him what Emily had told me. I asked him what it explained, not because I didn’t feel similarly—victims of childhood sexual abuse are many times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population, for starters—but because I was curious about his take. He said that he’d always suspected Dan of being afraid of sexual intimacy. He’d had so few girlfriends in his life, and when he lost them he was disconsolate in a way that was hard to fathom. Nonetheless, the loss of Wendy, the proximate cause of his suicide, had never seemed a sufficient reason for putting a gun to his head. The fact that he’d carried with him such a secret for most of his life placed his difficulties with women in a new light.

  Do you know who it was? he asked.

  When I offered a name, his jaw set in resignation tinged with anger.

  I can’t say that surprises me, he said.

  My mother reacted about as I’d expected too. Her face suddenly drained of color; she wept a few silent tears while my father and I speculated about what it all meant, and then she went to their bedroom and closed the door.

  Just before I left to catch a flight home from Minneapolis, my mother reemerged and said to me, There’s a blue notebook in the office, on top of a box in the closet. You can read it if you want.

  After she and my father left again for work, I found the notebook and sat at the kitchen table.

  June 3rd—I was at work & Bill told me that Bob had called & said to go home for a minute. I thought he’d hurt his back. When I walked in the door, Bob was leaning against the kitchen sink with Father Evers beside him. Bob grabbed me and pulled me against him. I thought he said Dad died, then I realized he said Dan. I was stunned. After a short length of time, sitting on the couch, I asked Father Evers if Dan would go to hell for this—I didn’t know if Dan believed in God. After that I don’t remember much for the next week. My heavy heart was in my throat & I couldn’t swallow or breathe. I couldn’t eat, drink, think, or sleep. The neighbor kid asked his dad why we were having so much fun if Dan had died. He had heard all of these people out on the deck all night long, laughing and telling stories, trying to deal with his death in the best way they knew how.

  Sam & Jan went to Granite Falls to tell Lisa & bring her home. Who told Phil about Dan? When did he find out? Was he alone when he heard? How terrible that he had to take that long plane ride by himself.

  Dan called Sunday at noon. Thinking back on that conversation, I think he knew what he was going to do. He said he and Wendy were having trouble. I said, “Give her some time.” He said, “Oh I’ll give her a lot of time.” If I had only known, I would have got on a plane right then & gone down to see him. I forgot to tell him “I love you” before I handed the phone to Bob so they could talk about fishing.

  Sam & Jan helped us through the funeral decisions. We were told to bring friends in case we couldn’t understand any of the decisions we needed to make. I’m sure that Mr. Almlie thought we would be VERY distressed over this suicide. Lisa was with us & helped make some of the decisions, which I hardly remember. I only knew I didn’t want to bury him, I wanted him alive.

  Bob made the decision not to see his body, after Almlie said it wouldn’t be a good idea. I regret that decision to this day, but don’t hold it against Bob. He wanted to remember him like he was, not with a hole blown through his head—maybe he didn’t have his face left? We were glad when Lisa went to the funeral home late the next night when his body finally came in. She came back reporting that he looked fine. She only saw, under the cloth on his face, a bruised looking spot on the one side, & they had his eyes sewn shut. She cut off a small lock of his hair & she brought it back to me. That’s all I have left of him. I keep it in a small coin purse in a drawer. I can’t bring it out to look at because it brings all the heartache back again.

  It takes all my strength to not think about him & talk about him. That’s the only way I’ve been able to get through these past 5 yrs.

  Even writing this, the tears are flowing so hard I can hardly see the page.

  Every year on this day, and on his birthday, I just want to stay in bed. I don’t want to do anything or see anybody. Thank God today fell on Sunday so I didn’t have to go to work.

  Were we bad parents that we didn’t raise our son to feel strong enough not to take his own life?

  Now when I see a beautiful morning, a beautiful sunset, a bird, lovers in a park, people fishing, I think: Why did he want to give that up? Why did he want to deprive us of his birthdays, his wedding, his children, visits to his home?

  I need someone to say the right words to me so that I can deal with this heartbreaking sadness in a positive way because right now—all I do is cry.

  I worry about my kids being lonely and being alone.

  There are days when I feel guilty for not crying or for being able to sleep.

  Double rainbow on his funeral day.

  Liberated by writing this down.

  When asked how many kids I have, it’s hard to answer three. I’m afraid they’ll ask me about Dan. And if I talk about him, I’ll cry.

  It’s my birthday today, Phil called and we talked for 2 hours, some about Dan. I cry while I’m talking but it still feels good to talk.

  When I hear a song on the radio that I knew he liked I want to turn it off—but I can’t force myself. If it stays on maybe he is close by listening.

  I copied this down, word for word, transcribing through my own tears, and then I returned the notebook to the place where I’d found it, unaware I’d begun writing this book. Until then my thoughts on my brother’s death remained very rarely spoken aloud, mostly locked up in private notebooks—tens of thousands of words’ worth of the most bleak and lugubrious maunderings—but my mother’s brave act of connection set me free. If she could share her innermost thoughts, maybe I could a tell a story worth sharing too, in my own rude way.

  Shortly afterward she sent me a package containing VHS tapes of Dan’s varsity wrestling matches. She didn’t th
ink she would ever be able to watch them, so she wanted me to have them, just in case. I’d become the documentarian in the family, the keeper of my brother’s records—photographs, report cards, test score results, 4-H ribbons, bank statements, wrestling tourney programs, balloon pilot logs—which I saved with the usual journalist’s pack-rat mentality, except in this case it had all added up to squat in answer to the major question. I tried twice to watch him but I couldn’t get more than a few minutes in. He was as I remembered, fun to watch, tough in the clinch, a technical master and an escape artist more than a brute force. The incongruity of seeing him alive, grappling his opponents into submission—he won twenty-five matches his senior year—was too much for me.

  I was surprised that my father wouldn’t wish to keep the tapes, but then I remembered that more than once over the previous years he’d told me that he refused to dwell in the past, that he would not let his son’s death define his life. I have no reason to doubt that he succeeded through a herculean effort of will, or maybe just a cold shrug of contempt for unpleasantness of any sort. I know for a fact that he thought my interest in the story to be an unhealthy wallowing in darkness—his alien, oversensitive son, gripped by morbid curiosities. His of all the theories I’d heard rang truest, that whatever sickness festered inside his youngest son, the suicidal impulse had been just that, an impulse he mistakenly heeded with the aid of booze and a gun, that all too lethal combination for sad young men. I had the presence of mind to avoid telling my father that I felt certain, almost from the moment I heard the news, that my brother’s death would be the most interesting thing to happen in what remained of my life, that surpassing it in sheer riveting power would take something so horrible as to be unimaginable, or so wonderful as to be unreal, and that to deny these facts would have taken more determination than I possessed. My father went his way, I went mine, and never the twain shall meet, though I’m closer to him now in other ways than I’ve ever been.