All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

by Philip Connors

  When I went back to the farm—rarely, always alone—I was looking for some piece of myself I had lost in a place whose loss, paradoxically, had liberated me to become my true self. Maybe my hunch about him was wrong, and he went back not because he’d lost something of himself but because he wanted close contact with something he would always have or always be. We each eventually drifted away to distant cities, but I was the restless striver, the chameleon, trying on a series of potential identities, while he became a slightly different version of what he’d always been, a shit-kickin’ country boy who adopted a northern finger of the Chihuahuan Desert as his new home country, though not for long.

  Because our leaving the farm marked a kind of rupture in our lives, I return in memory to the time before, years I’m tempted to think of as prelapsarian. The memories are vague, though, and faded like the color in the Polaroids my mother saves in photo albums, but in spite of their haziness they’re a major part of what I turn to when I try to reconstitute the brothers we once were.

  Much of what I recall arises from pure sense memory. The heavy feel of bottle glass in our hands, empty pints and quarts of booze the previous farmer, Old Man Leysen, hid everywhere in the grove of woods behind the house where Dan and I played in summertime. The scaly texture of the wild asparagus we picked outside the barbed-wire fence on the northwest corner of the pasture for our mother to cook with dinner. The milky surface of the ponds in the low spots of the pasture, where we played broom ball in winter, bruising our knees on the ice. The neat cords of firewood we stacked next to the house after our father split the rounds he’d bucked up with his chain saw by the river. The seed-dust smell of the granary where we laid traps for mice. The crunch of shells as we walked through ancient lake beds drained for farmland, picking rocks. The dirt beneath our fingernails from our practice farming in the side yard. That beautiful soil that crumbled in our hands and smelled of ten thousand years of prairie fecundity. All of this I suspected Dan remembered too, the shared geography of a vanished way of life, though we never spoke of it.

  Sometimes after a hard summer rain we’d step into the yard with a flashlight and a pail and collect the elongated earthworms stretched in the wet grass, dozens and dozens of them writhing in the dark. They contracted as soon as they were touched, and they left a film on our hands when we handled them. No bait was more effective in catching bullheads. They were so fat you could pinch them in half and bait two hooks with one worm. Fishing was our major pastime away from farm work; if we left the farm it was usually to buy groceries in town, attend church on Sunday, or ride our bikes to the bridge across the river with our poles and tackle boxes. Those hours were the sweetest of my childhood, brothers at play on the land, at play on the water, a simple enjoyment of each other’s presence amid the thrill of catching fish.

  There was an old schoolhouse just down the road—an abandoned one-room country school with a potbellied stove and a blackboard still hung on one wall. Our grandmother received her first years of education there, in the depths of the Depression. When we played inside of it, often with Lisa alongside us, dust motes stirred in the light slanting through the cracked windowpanes. One day the three of us startled a skunk who’d been taking shelter under the floorboards. We ran when we saw it, and it ran when it saw us, and thankfully a moving target isn’t easy to hit when the thing taking aim is moving too. We’d heard that the only way to rid yourself of the stench of a skunk was to take a bath in tomato juice, a thought that repulsed us and, mercifully, a remedy we never had to endure. One close call was enough. We never played in the old schoolhouse again. A short while later it was struck by lightning and charred. Someone decided the risk of it burning was too great—it was only a short distance from a telephone pole whose wires passed close overhead—so it was demolished, the wood hauled away for kindling in someone’s stove, a harbinger of what was to come for our own home.

  When I picture us a little later, around the ages of nine and ten, I see myself with a basketball shooting endlessly at the hoop on the side of the granary, and I see Dan hunched over some project in a corner of the garage, which was actually a kind of workshop. It was a world of metallic smells and funky fumes that made you feel funny if you sniffed them deeply at close range, but all the various tools nestled in boxes or hung on nails seemed to speak to him of a world that made sense, a world you could take apart and reassemble with your hands, a world in which every thing fit with some other thing and if it stopped fitting you either fixed it or threw it out and replaced it with another. It was a world he felt drawn to by skill and temperament. It was a world he in fact mastered, working with his hands all his short life. A car engine was a world to be taken apart and rebuilt. A china cabinet was a world to be carved from nature and assembled as functional art. His pieces, if you knew when he’d made them, showed evidence of his ever-increasing skill. They were scattered in homes from the Midwest to the Southwest and places between. I have seen and touched them. Everything fits. Everything is smooth and plumb and buffed to a sheen. It seems only natural to wonder if his undoing was that thing he could not make fit in the story of himself, the one thing that did not make sense and could never be fixed or discarded.

  Whenever I’m in Minnesota I visit his grave, but its chilly rectitude, the cold headstone, do not summon him. There he’s simply underground inside a box. I visit too our old home on the farm, but the architecture of the place, the house and barns in which we lived and worked together, are nothing but a ghostly memory. Maybe our erasure from the land erased my memory, more so than his death; either way, what I’ve written here is most of what I have in the way of story from my childhood. I wish there were more. Maybe it will come in old age, as some say it does. For now, when I want to be close to him, I visit that cairn I built on a lonely ridge of the Black Range. Over the years I’ve added more chamfered bones, antlers and potsherds and turquoise beads, snake skins and mushrooms, turkey feathers, stones, the serendipitous accumulations of my evening walks. He’d like it there, I feel certain. The view from the ridge is wild as all get-out, the deep headwaters canyons of a trout stream to the west, the distant valley of the Rio Grande across the desert to the east. It’s as wild a place as you can still find in the Lower 48.

  In the summer of my twelfth year on the mountain it burned, as we’d all known it would one day. I watched as the plume took off in a running crown fire of two-hundred-foot flames, the smoke billowing black into the sky, as if roaring from a fissure in the basement of the world. A helicopter plucked me from the mountain ahead of the flames. I watched the spectacle for a month from a different tower thirty miles north. The fire covered two hundred square miles in the end. On the hottest day of its run it torched ten thousand acres in an afternoon. The smoke plume rose into the lower troposphere, a pulsing column of heat topped by its own pyrocumulus cloud, from which could be heard the rumble of thunder. Charred oak leaves fluttered to the ground as far away as twenty-five miles.

  I returned after the late-summer rains. It was a peculiar hike in, the first time back. The burn area was still closed to the public, so I let myself through a locked gate on the highway near the forest boundary, aware that the country was entirely mine, for a little while anyway. As I walked and gawked I added everything I saw to my memory’s palimpsest of the landscape, the original layer as I’d found it in the beginning with M.J., another layer as I’d seen it before a fir-beetle outbreak killed thousands of trees, and another layer after, one from the whirlybird on my way out, and now the newest and most radical revision as it greeted me in the aftermath of the burn, black as black gets in places. About two-thirds of the way to the top, big islands of untouched forest appeared where the fire’d had no impact on the canopy. From the open meadow on top you couldn’t tell there’d been a fire at all. The peak still wore a cap of green, the grass luxuriant from the rains, the trees along the peak’s edges untouched. I wandered around looking for the places where the fire’s fingers made their highest runs. I didn’t have to go far
. A couple hundred yards in any direction there were big patches of scorched earth. Back on top, an hour after my arrival, something bright green quivered in the grass between the cabin and the outhouse: a tree frog. In all my seasons there I’d never seen one. It felt like an omen, a sign that despite the tremendous changes, the life of the mountain carried on as before.

  The next day I visited the cairn with the half-charred pelvis of a mule deer. I wasn’t sure what I’d find. All around stood the spooky pikes of burnt trees, a forest poised between what it had been and what it would be. Ash had turned to mud on the ground. No birds sang, but the grass was already greening, the oaks resprouting; soon the birds would return, the aspens would burst from the char, the cycle of death and rebirth gone around once more. Strangely, the landscape felt more like home than ever. Perhaps when your childhood home is lost to the bankers and then lost forever when its new owner torches everything on the property for two more acres of tillable land, you can’t help but be mesmerized by the erasures achieved by fire. Perhaps when your brother ends his life with a bullet to the brain, you can’t help but feel an intuitive understanding of the forces of earthly destruction. Standing inside the black can feel like a form of belonging.

  By some miracle the cairn remained untouched by the flames, solid as the day I’d built it, a tiny oasis amid the burn scar. I removed the cap rock. I placed the bone inside. I felt the enormity of his loss once more. The pain of it never does fade entirely, never will—no doubt it disfigured me in ways that will endure for what remains of my life—but at last I found a place to put it where it wouldn’t eat me alive. My devotion to his memory led me there, the place I venerate above all others on earth, my little voodoo shrine to the lost and the damned, as wild and remote as the country of grief itself.

  Also by Philip Connors

  Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout

  Author’s Note

  Some names and identifying details have been changed in an effort to protect the innocent and the guilty.

  Portions of this book first appeared, in different form, in n+1, Ninth Letter, the Dublin Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly, the editors of which are gratefully acknowledged; special thanks are due Keith Gessen, Brendan Barrington, and Elias Altman.

  Copyright © 2015 by Philip Connors

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  Excerpts from “After the Party,” “A Beautiful Day Outside,” “The Complete Works of Anton Werbern,” “February,” “Hart Crane Near the End,” “To Start at End,” “Easter,” and “December” from Poems: 1959–2009 by Frederick Seidel. Copyright © 2009 by Frederick Seidel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

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