Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  FAITHFUL TRAVELERS

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published May 1998

  Bantam trade paperback edition / September 1999

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 98-12967.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

  ISBN 9780553378887

  Ebook ISBN 9781101969502

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada.

  Bantam Books, 1745 Broadway, New York, New York.

  v4.1

  a

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue: The Medicine Bag

  Chapter One: Babes in the Woods

  Chapter Two: Trout Music

  Chapter Three: Norumbega Girl

  Chapter Four: Maid of the Mist

  Chapter Five: Touching a Trout

  Chapter Six: No Small Miracle

  Chapter Seven: Silent Sam

  Chapter Eight: Cody

  Chapter Nine: Oh, Yellowstone

  Chapter Ten: Song of the Snake

  Chapter Eleven: The Oldest Thing on Earth

  Chapter Twelve: Letter from a Hill

  Chapter Thirteen: Stones in the Passway

  Chapter Fourteen: South of Sorrow

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Also by James Dodson

  About the Author

  Come away, O human child!

  To the watery and the wild

  With a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  —from “The Stolen Child,” by W. B. Yeats

  Rivers, I suppose, are not at all like human beings, but it is still possible to make apt comparisons; and this is one: Understanding, whether instinctive and immediate or developing naturally through time or grown by conscious effort, is a necessary preliminary to love. Understanding of another human being can never be complete, but as it grows toward completeness, it becomes love almost inevitably. One cannot know intimately all the ways and movements of a river without growing into love of it. And there is no exhaustion to the growth of love through knowledge, whether the love be for a person or a river, because the knowledge can never be complete. One can come to feel in time that the whole is within one’s compass, not yet wholly and intimately known, but there will always be something ahead, something more to know.

  —from A River Never Sleeps, by Roderick Haig-Brown

  PROLOGUE

  The Medicine Bag

  “I HAD A nice dream,” my father said.

  “Really? What?”

  “We were camping somewhere. You, me, your brother. Perhaps up in the Blue Ridge. Nice river. Good swift water. We had a big fire going. I was reading something to you boys. Like old times.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “The Medicine Bag.”

  A dim smile appeared. He’d been sleeping most of the afternoon in my childhood bedroom. Now it was early evening in late February, the last of the day’s sun streaking low across the yard out the windows. You wouldn’t have known there was sleet in the forecast. My mother had gone out somewhere. His dog Molly lay sleeping on the floor. His skin was pale, nearly translucent, his hair neatly combed. My father had just turned eighty. He looked serene, almost beautiful, just an old man waking from a nap. At times he made dying look easy.

  “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Not bad at all,” I admitted. “We didn’t want you to know that, though. If it got out that our old man read us Tennyson and Longfellow by the campfire we could have been socially ruined. Tough crowd, the ninth grade.”

  “It didn’t appear to do you much harm.”

  “Perhaps. Dick did all right. Thanks to the Medicine Bag he was safely cured of any interest in poetry forever. I nearly took up a career writing sonnets in the woods, though.”

  I was pleased to see I could still make my father smile. We both needed a lift. I’d been with him for more than a month, away from my two children and out of the stream of my own life. I’d spent my days attending to his needs as he slowly faded, avoiding my work, neglecting my rosebushes, waiting on his death. My brother would come join me later for the overnight vigil, and I wished he could have been here for this bit of give-and-take. Dad’s lucid moments were becoming rarer.

  The Medicine Bag was what Dad called the canvas book bag he hauled along on our camping trips. He liked to say the contents were good for whatever ailed us—the poetry of Whitman, Yeats, or Longfellow, The Just So Stories of Kipling, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology of Greek gods and heroes, White’s Once and Future King, various fables, psalms, Indian legends, bits of Plato and Aristotle, stories of the Old West and the New Testament.

  His roving chautauquas were pretty corny stuff, but then I found so much of what my father did and said in those days deeply embarrassing—how he’d cheerfully go out of his way to help people he hardly knew, attempt to find the silver lining in any situation, view even the smallest weekend excursion as a grand adventure, and quote Churchill on service or Emerson on joy to my impressionable teenage dates when they least expected it. For these and other high crimes of the heart I bestowed on him the nickname Opti the Mystic, a gently mocking moniker.

  I admitted to him now, perhaps not too late, how much I’d loved those camping trips, the Medicine Bag, all of it, just being with him, wading in rivers, catching our supper, listening to him read to us by the fire. The world felt so large but we felt so safe. I told him I planned to take my children soon on their first camping trip. Perhaps somewhere up the Allagash or possibly to Acadia in Maine, to where the mountains meet the sea. My daughter Maggie had recently asked me to teach her to fly-fish and my son Jack wanted to climb a mountain. The sky deeply interested him. If you climbed Cadillac Mountain, I said, you could be the first to see the sun rise on the continent, the way original peoples had. I would take my own Medicine Bag, perhaps.

  “I wish I could go with you,” Opti said, drifting away again.

  “Me too,” I admitted, then added, “You will.” But I’m not sure he really heard me.

  —

  Two nights later, we sat together watching a documentary on TV.

  The documentary was on Yellowstone Park, which was about to celebrate its 125th birthday. The world’s first national park was in deep trouble—slowly coming back from devastating wildfires, beset by problems of overcrowding and pollution, a damaged Eden due to federal budgetary cutbacks and a soaring park crime rate. Even Old Faithful, the world-famous geyser, a living symbol of America’s dynamism, wasn’t all that faithful anymore, rising less than half of its original height and erupting so erratically some geologists predicted it would actually cease functioning in the near future.

  “That’s too bad,” I said, really more to myself than to Opti, because he was asleep in his wheelchair. “We talked about camping and fishing our way out there.”

  “I remember,” Opti replied softly, opening his eyes.

  I looked at him and smiled, then turned my attention back to the documentary and grumbled something about the world coming apart at the seams.

  “Things change. Worlds come and go. Yours will too.” />
  I looked at him again, wondering what he meant by such an unsettling remark. It seemed so unlike Opti. Before I could ask, though, he spoke again.

  “Keep the faith,” he said. “You can figure it out.”

  I went outside to see if perhaps there was an explanation in the stars. My father knew his constellations and I was working on mine. But no stars were visible. Clouds had rolled in from the west.

  —

  The next afternoon, as I washed his arms, we talked of Aunt Emma.

  Emma was his paternal grandmother, a full-blooded Cherokee Indian woman, perhaps a foundling from the infamous Trail of Tears. No one knew her history clearly; she had been dead more than half a century. But her farm in Orange County had been my father’s favorite place as a boy, and he’d taken my brother and me there as boys at Christmas to shoot mistletoe out of the oak trees that surrounded the abandoned homeplace, a house settling in the morning glory vines.

  For years my father and his brothers Jim and Bob had talked of buying the property, but it had fallen out of family hands and been sold to a man who wouldn’t sell. They were proud of the family’s Indian blood and I reminded my father of how he was always dragging my brother and me to Indian burial mounds, all those hours we spent looking for traces of a lost race of warriors on hot summer afternoons.

  I’d finished with his arms and asked if he wanted something to drink. He was really drinking only water now.

  “You could still go there,” he said quietly.

  “Where?” For a moment I thought he meant Aunt Emma’s place in the oaks. But of course that was long gone. A cluster of condos stood on the site now, guarded by a man at a gate.

  “Out west. To Yellowstone.”

  The sockets around Opti’s eyes were deep, like small fierce craters. “Take Maggie and Jack and just go. Show ’em their history, tell ’em some stories. Teach ’em to fish and camp. Just go.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said.

  —

  Later that night, I went to the attic in search of books from his Medicine Bag.

  My father’s words had touched a nerve, but I also needed something to read to get my mind off the fact that I couldn’t imagine the world, however it had changed, without Opti the Mystic in it.

  I found a pile of books in an old chest containing, among other things, the scouting merit badge sashes and toy armies that had belonged to my brother and me. I sat on the floor and lined up soldiers—Roman gladiators, Johnny Rebs, Greek warriors, Viking chieftains, GI Joes, Indian warriors, Deadwood gunslingers, Arthurian knights. What epic wars we’d had with them. Now their swords were broken and their bayonets bent. But I still loved them, every one. I decided I would take them home to my son Jack.

  I looked through several books and brought Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and something called The Soul of an Indian, by Charles Eastman, back downstairs. I read the Whitman for a while but soon found myself engrossed in The Soul of an Indian. Eastman, I learned, was a mixed-blood Sioux named Ohiyesa who came East to become a physician in the white man’s world. He later returned to serve his people as a reservation doctor, witnessed the massacre at Wounded Knee, and wrote ten or eleven books eloquently attempting to explain the vanishing Native American ways to the conquering white race. His stated goal was to be a sympathetic bridge between two colliding worlds, a vision at which he pretty much failed. Among other things, though, Ohiyesa had a strong and lasting influence on the values of the American Boy Scouts, which he helped found.

  I read most of this little book with its badly frayed cover while seated beside my father’s bed. “The attitude of the Indian toward death,” Ohiyesa wrote, “the test and background of life, is entirely consistent with his background and philosophy. Death holds no terrors for him; he meets it with simplicity and perfect calm, seeking only an honorable end as a last gift to his family and descendents….If one be dying at home, it is customary to carry his bed out of doors as the end approaches, that his spirit may pass under the open sky.”

  —

  “Is that rain?” my father asked.

  “Sleet.” The storm had finally arrived.

  “That’s okay,” he assured me calmly. “It’ll be fine in the morning. Go kiss your wife.”

  I tried to smile at him, thinking how even now he was dispensing useful advice. A few weeks before we’d had a conversation about the complications of modern family life and I’d admitted to him that something was chewing at me about my marriage—the way things had quietly gone out of focus, how distant my hardworking wife of ten years and I sometimes seemed to each other. It was curious. Our marriage was so calm and civilized and productive that no one could really see this, I said, except us. The children didn’t have a clue, and neither did our closest friends. Perhaps I was just making too much of it, worrying about something that time and a decent vacation would take care of. As usual, he didn’t say much except that it sounded like I was describing a corporation rather than a marriage. He added that you could love your kids more than life itself but your lover had to come before everything else. It was curious that he always called my mother his lover. Curious, too, I realized later, that he always put her first but my brother and I never felt second. How had he managed this feat?

  Now I wanted to say something but I couldn’t speak. Perhaps it was thank you; perhaps it was just good-bye. I really don’t know. Suddenly my mother was by his side and taking his hand and I stepped back. They’d been married for fifty-five years. I left them alone and he passed away a few moments later.

  In the morning, just before dawn, I accompanied Opti’s body to the funeral home where his remains would be cremated. The attendant, a young man with an impatient air, looked mildly stricken when I asked him to open the wooden box so I could see my father’s body.

  Opti was still dressed in his pajamas, his silver hair swept back. His body looked oddly beautiful, as noble as any Viking chieftain about to be put to sea on his burning longship. I leaned over and kissed his forehead, which felt pleasantly cool, like a marble statue. I took a small plastic figure out of my pocket, an Indian warrior, one of my favorites, hand-painted for war long ago by me, and placed it on his chest, just above his clasped hands.

  As I did this, Ohiyesa’s words were still fresh in my mind and a powerful thought occurred to me—a crazy wish, really—that I could take Opti’s earthly remains up to some high Blue Ridge summit, build a great bonfire, and commit his soul to the Great Mystery or whichever thoughtful deity had fashioned this rarest of men from the elements of earth and wind. With this vision of my father’s death, something seemed to be stirring and awakening in me. I wish I could say it was peaceful and reassuring, this awakening, a vision of comfort, but it wasn’t. It was nothing short of frightening.

  I was forty-one years old and this was my first day on earth as a fatherless child, the beginning of a journey I never imagined I would have to take, a painful unraveling and unexpected rebirth.

  But I couldn’t possibly have known any of that then. All I knew, as I watched his remains roll to the fire, was that once again Opti had been right. The ice storm was gone, and the morning, as he’d promised it would be, was really fine.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Babes in the Woods

  EARLY ONE FRIDAY afternoon a year after my father died, my children and I drove up to Acadia National Park and found a beautiful campsite by the sea.

  The campground was virtually empty—strange, I thought, for the start of what a native-born pal of mine calls Luggage Rack Season in Maine, that alternately blessed and accursed time when seven million tourists lash half of everything they own to the roofs of their cars and haul it into the state. I put up our new L. L. Bean tent and suggested to my children that they take Amos, our elderly golden retriever, for a nice walk on the beach before supper.

  Amos was almost fourteen, an amiable brute who was either deaf or perhaps no longer particularly interested in what anybody had to say to him, particularly me. He’d always more or less fo
llowed his own path through life and generally behaved as if I was damned lucky he didn’t object to my hanging round him.

  I reminded Maggie to be sure and keep our senior citizen safely on the lead, per federal regulations, and also advised her to keep an eye on Jack, her younger brother, who was almost six and didn’t realize that he hadn’t quite learned to swim. Maggie was seven going on fifteen and already an excellent swimmer and advisor on matters of life and sport. But I still didn’t want anybody near the water.

  “Dad,” Jack said, “what’s over there?” He was pointing east, past Cadillac Mountain and over the ocean.

  “Ireland, I think. Or maybe Portugal. Don’t even think about trying to swim that far.”

  “Dad,” Maggie said with that world-weary sigh all seven-year-old girls seem to possess. “You worry too much.”

  “I know,” I said, smiling at her. “That’s my job.”

  —

  She was right. I do worry a lot. Worrying about things is my nature. Sometimes I worry about the vanishing rain forests or hidden land mines in Bosnia. Other times I worry about declining songbird populations, wormholes in the universe, and the escalating wages of Major League Baseball players—things, in other words, I’m pretty helpless to do anything about, a feeling of global powerlessness that also makes me worry. Mostly, though, I worry about my children.

  As I started preparing our first camp supper, I realized I was even more worried than usual because something I once couldn’t have even imagined was about to happen to our world. A few days before this trip, their mother and I sat together in the attractive office of a woman named Jennifer. Jennifer was a certified family therapist. She was a pleasant woman in her late fifties who drove, I noticed, a snazzy red sports car with vanity plates that cutely read MDLFCRS.

  “I think,” Jennifer said pleasantly, “it’s time we stopped talking about marriage counseling and began talking about divorce counseling.”