Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  “Not then. It was just Amos and me. She came a bit later.”

  Dorothy’s white farmhouse was still where I left it in a crook of the river across a grassy meadow. We pulled in and I knocked softly on the door, wondering if she could still possibly live there. A younger woman, looking somewhat flustered, opened the door, pulling back a strand of hair. I told her I’d once rented a house on the property and wondered if my daughter and I might camp for the night in her meadow by the river.

  She studied me for a moment, biting her lip, glancing over my shoulder at the girl and dog in the truck.

  “I guess that would be all right,” she said. “Please don’t have an open fire, though. It’s been rather dry lately.”

  I thanked her and assured her we wouldn’t have a fire. We drove down and found a good flat spot by some alder bushes, a gap through which led to the water. It was growing dark rapidly now but I still hoped we might fish a bit. Maggie carried her fly rod and walked Amos down to the river while I put up the small Bean tent and started making ham and cheese sandwiches from the cooler, on Old Blue’s tailgate, thinking how strange it was to be back here with my daughter and the pup who’d now grown old, in the place I once ran away to, my own private little Walden. Thoreau said life is simply one great circle sailing so perhaps it made sense that I’d come here again, to find the right question if not the answer.

  The summer I came here had been full of dark questions and the irony of Saint Cecil’s gentle injunction to avoid outliving my beloved had seemed to strike painfully close to the source of my trouble.

  At age twenty, my childhood sweetheart, Kristen, was murdered by a nervous sixteen-year-old in a botched robbery attempt of a fine restaurant, one of those sudden, incalculably tragic events that never should have happened, a random act so violent and pointless it sends sane people spinning and makes pundits wonder what the hell’s going on in America.

  I’d loved Kristen and felt certain we would spend our lives together and simply could not imagine her dying and was not prepared to face a world without her. Thinking to stall that moment of truth, I tried graduate school and then quit. I considered going to seminary but decided I was furious with God. I took a job at the newspaper where I’d been the wireboy the night Richard Nixon resigned, and six months into the job abruptly quit and took off for Europe with my golf bag and favorite books of poetry in tow, searching for God knows what. I applied for a job at the Herald Tribune, hoping I might get sent to cover a war the way Ernest Hemingway had. War had been good for Hemingway. He’d been wounded and fell in love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes and found enough good stories to write about for a lifetime. I loved Hemingway’s writing then—had since I was a boy when my father introduced me to Nick Adams. But nobody was hiring greenhorn reporters that year in Paris and the war in Southeast Asia was over so I went home to work at my hometown paper again.

  Not long afterward, a job offer came from Atlanta and I moved there and began writing stories for the nation’s oldest Sunday magazine about political reformers and unsolved murders. An epidemic of homicides was raging in the city that proclaimed it was “too busy to hate,” and I spent almost six years following politicians and homicide suspects around, hanging out with beat cops and bartenders, interviewing grief-stunned families and watching autopsies being performed. An autopsy on my own psyche might have proved useful, for this work was like nothing I’d ever done before and it drew me with an almost illicit pleasure. I’d finally found my private war, created a moveable feast of death and violence. I wrote scores of these stories and even won a couple awards for them. I lost myself in their unanswerable questions, their inexplicable tragedies, and never took a day’s vacation in nearly six years of work.

  One afternoon I was interviewing yet another grieving family member, the mother of a nice girl named Sheila who’d apparently been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her body would never be found. After the interview we were having coffee when Sheila’s mother looked at me and remarked, not unkindly, “You’re so young. How can you do this? Doesn’t it bother you to ask people such terrible questions?” I remember how her mascara had smudged darkly below her eyes.

  The scary thing was, it didn’t. Her question did, though. It frightened me to the core to think this was who I’d become and this was all my life had to offer. One night I sat straight up in my bed, rigid with fear, convinced I was as far from God as you could get and only moments from my death. I didn’t want to die like that and knew I needed help. Or out. Or something.

  And so, with my father’s blessing, I ran away to Vermont, leaving behind confused friends and splendid career prospects, unaware that I was still simply attempting to outrun these accumulated griefs. I told myself I planned to cool out, take a break, shed a skin, try and find a door I could walk through to a new kind of life. I remember wanting to go someplace I’d never been, thought of Montana and chose Vermont instead, wanting to find a place that finally felt like home. The South was my birthplace but it didn’t feel like home. There was too much sadness there.

  My brother helped me move my furniture to the edge of the Green River. I remember how he looked at the river and said it reminded him of the Blue Ridge rivers we’d fished in and camped along as boys.

  After Saint Cecil and my introduction to fly-angling, I spent that first winter in my tiny wood-heated cabin trying to housebreak a yellow pup and reading everything I should have read or had meant to read for years—most of the Bible and all of Steinbeck including his interpretation of the Arthurian legend based on Malory’s Winchester manuscript, enough of Faulkner to know I truly hated him, Hemingway for the umpteenth time, Emerson’s essays, Plato’s Dialogues, volumes of poetry and history, books on Eastern religion and Western philosophy, farmers’ almanacs, manuals on growing roses and astronomy, Rilke’s love poems, Darwin on golf, Campbell on myth.

  I read clean through the Book of Mark in one sitting. I learned how to fly-fish and keep a woodstove running all night. I discovered the pleasure of splitting wood to keep warm and rediscovered the joys of golf. I took my dog to nuclear freeze meetings for fun, and ate more zucchini bread and bean sprouts than I care to try and remember. Things change. Worlds come and go. I realized I wasn’t dying after all and maybe God would somehow find me. What a fine thing to discover.

  —

  I walked down to the river to see if my daughter was having any luck with the local trout population. I came through the alders just as she was making a fine back cast, her line and tippet making a lazy beautiful S-shaped movement through the air. She was standing barefoot in the water, mid-calf. The fly landed in some riffles and the current swept it gently along. I had no idea if fly-fishing was just a momentary fascination for her or something she would do with great passion till she became Saint Muggins. It didn’t really matter. For the next six weeks, she was mine.

  “Nice cast. Van would be pleased. Any trout in this river?”

  Van was the Bean instructor who looked like a poster boy for the rugged outdoors. He’d helped her learn to tie flies and told her she had a creative talent for it. Her woolybugger came out looking like the Liberace of dry flies, spangled with all sorts of bright pieces of yarn. It was clear Maggie had a crush on Van as hefty as the Bean Christmas catalog.

  “I think one almost…” She was watching the fly drift in the current, then she looked at me and said, “I think they must be sleeping or something.”

  “It is kind of late. C’mon. I’ve got dinner ready. Ham and cheese. Straight from the Official Approved Foods List.”

  “Dad.”

  Maggie hated it when I made jokes about her having only seven foods on her official list, though it was pretty much true. We walked back to camp and I lit a Coleman lantern and opened a can of Senior Alpo for Amos and fed him two aspirin wrapped in a piece of cheese. He was a finicky eater, too, and had only five or six items on his Official Approved Foods List. One of my unstated goals in life was to eat my way around the world, never eating the sam
e dish twice, and the thought of all those local hometown diners preparing to feed us across the heartland gladdened my heart.

  Later, a bobbing light appeared in the meadow. The woman from the farmhouse came down to tell us we were free to use her well. She brought us pieces of rhubarb pie, too. The pie was tart and still warm.

  By then Maggie was already wearing her sleep shirt and had been reading Stuart Little by flashlight in the tent, her first “chapter book,” as she called it. The woman, whose plain face looked long and somewhat haggard in the lantern light, asked Maggie how old she was.

  “Seven and a half,” Maggie answered, then asked, “Did you know my father when he lived around here?”

  The woman looked at me and smiled. “No, I just moved up here two years ago after my divorce.”

  I explained it had been more like fifteen years since I’d lived in the neighborhood and glanced at my daughter to see how the woman’s remark had set. I half expected Maggie to blurt out that her father was getting divorced, too, but she didn’t; perhaps it was still too new to have any reality. If so, I shared that feeling with her, part of me still refusing to accept it would happen. Instead, she simply made a polite but hollow pantomime of eating her pie in silence—rhubarb clearly wasn’t on the OAFL. I asked the woman if she’d known Dorothy, my former landlady, and she said she hadn’t because a real estate agent in Brattleboro had had the house when she bought it. The house had been empty a while. She apologized needlessly, and then asked if we were headed to a vacation spot somewhere in Vermont.

  “No,” I heard myself say. “We’re fishing our way out to Old Faithful.” It was the first time I’d stated our destination this way and seemed like a manifesto of some sort. “We’re going out West to roam around a bit, see some of the country. Try and catch some fish.”

  “How wonderful,” she said, and explained that her parents had taken her by car out to see Yellowstone Park when she was five. Thinking about it almost brought tears to her eyes these many years later, she admitted. I asked her why she thought that might be.

  She shifted onto her other foot. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it was because that was the only big trip we ever took as a family. That made it somehow all the more special. You grow up so fast.”

  You can only ask a kind stranger so much. We shook hands and I thanked her for the pie and for letting us camp in her meadow—then remembered to ask her name. Her name was Becky. I watched Becky walk slowly back to her farmhouse on a narrow path through the tall meadow grasses, following the swaying beam of her small flashlight. Maggie crawled into the tent and I kissed her good night. She was a quick sleeper. Her light went out.

  The night was warm and still, with low clouds hiding the stars. On the Indian calendar it was the month of the Blood Moon, a time of cleansing and renewal. I didn’t feel like turning in so I tuned Old Blue’s radio to a local classical station that was offering Respighi’s ancient airs and dances and snooped around in the truck, pretending I needed to try and organize stuff that was already organized. It suddenly struck me as foolish how much equipment I’d dragged along, the classic overpacking job, probably far more stuff than we could ever hope to need or even want.

  Besides our sleeping bags and two large duffel bags filled with our clothes, I’d brought along a pair of L. L. Bean tents (one large, one small), a large Coleman cookstove, a medium-sized rain tarp, one large plastic ground cloth, two lanterns, four flashlights, one deluxe emergency road kit, two Katahdin folding cots, a large Red Cross regulation first aid kit, two camp stools, five road atlases and several folding Michelin maps, one full-sized air mattress, three large Tupperware boxes filled with various canned goods and dry foodstuffs, another smaller Tupperware box containing cooking utensils, matches, candles, etc., a deluxe Bean cooking set, one small Coleman cooler, two complete sets of rain gear, four fishing rods (two spinning, two fly), three tackle boxes, two vests, one set of hip waders, four pairs of boots (two pairs each of men’s 11 and children’s 2), one folding Buck knife, one new Hudson Bay ax, one bottle of Famous Grouse Scotch whiskey, and one large canvas tote bag filled with far too many books. My version of Opti’s famous Medicine Bag.

  Maggie had brought her own Medicine Bag, a slightly smaller canvas tote bag filled with her essential stuff. I decided to snoop and found a Pocahontas journal, a box of colored pencils, various colored hair scrunchies, a child’s travel guide to America with activity pad, three Barbies, three sets of extra Barbie clothes, a plastic Magic Eightball, several chapter books and various cassettes and CDs, and one small pink stuffed bear named Susie who’d been everywhere a bear can go in seven and one half years of life.

  It was a little embarrassing, all this stuff we’d brought. But it seemed to say there’s no going back now.

  The ancient airs ended and the late news came on and I sat in Old Blue listening to a report from the Long Island coast, where a TWA jumbo jet had mysteriously exploded just after taking off from Kennedy Airport a few days before our departure, killing all 230 people aboard. Recovery crews were combing the ocean waters, searching for bodies and what one official euphemistically called a “eureka piece,” some shred of telling physical evidence that would either confirm a terrorist bomb or describe a catastrophic event. I could just picture the reporters doing their jobs. Meanwhile, grieving family members had gathered on the beach and were holding an ongoing prayer vigil.

  I opened the Scotch and poured myself some in a paper cup, trying to imagine the unimaginable desolation the surviving parents and children and loved ones must feel, would forever feel, lives jerked inside out by the gods. I’d been there myself. A young designer bound for Paris to search for antiques had died, as had a mother flying home to France to reunite with her children, a couple celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary, a Country Music Hall of Fame guitarist, a Connecticut man taking his girl to Paris to propose, twelve kids from the same high school French club…

  The page turned, the news rambled on. Charles and Diana had announced that their divorce agreement was finalized and the “Marriage of the Century” was officially toast. The Atlanta Olympics had opened with a gala that was more modern Broadway than ancient Greece. The pope was kicking back at a chalet in the Dolomites. America was suffering from a precipitous decline in honeybees. A man in St. Paul had been arrested for keeping his two children attached to electronic dog collars and giving them powerful jolts whenever they misbehaved. I turned off the news, the news junkie in me sufficiently sated for the moment, and sat in the silence and heard, after a few seconds, the sound of the river running through the darkness.

  Trout Music.

  Sorrow is holy ground, Oscar Wilde wrote in De Profundis, a memoir I read the summer I fled to Vermont, a story Wilde could write only after he’d lost everything he thought he valued—money, grand possessions, literary fame—and found, waiting for him at rock bottom, an unexpectedly close relationship with his Maker, perhaps even salvation. I wondered if those people clustering on the beach in Long Island would ever really come to believe that such a thing was possible, that faith could be deepened by unthinkable tragedy. Did I? It seemed we inhabited an age of unthinkables—planes falling from the sky, vanishing children, warming oceans and killer microbes and a record number of marriages failing for seemingly the thinnest of excuses. Biblical fundamentalists saw this as hard evidence that the center wasn’t holding and that a tribulation of some sort was now at hand. Polls showed that more Americans were beset by anxiety about the future than at any other time in the nation’s history, but a theory of newspapering held that people couldn’t get enough of somebody else’s bad news simply because it made their own humdrum lives feel better.

  Who could say what was really going on—the usual millennial jitters or one last big giddy waltz on the orchestra deck before the ship rolled and slipped under? Lacking any talent for prophecy, I told myself that luckily, for the moment at least, I had other fish to fry and opened a road atlas and looked at New York State to see if I could find a
place we could go next. Someplace a bit wilder, remoter, a bit farther from the news and ourselves. You don’t take a trip, Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley. A trip takes you. So take us, Father, I think I prayed, to whatever spirit was floating out there in the cosmos and perhaps eavesdropping tonight. It was good to be gone. But Yellowstone still felt as distant as the Dog Star.

  “Dad?” a small sleepy voice came out in the darkness.

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “I need Susie.”

  “Right. I’ll bring her.”

  I picked up Susie Bear and carried her into the tent, where I found Maggie more awake than I’d expected.

  “Are you coming to bed soon?”

  “Soon. I’m just arranging a few things in the truck.”

  “I’m glad you told me that story about Saint Cecil,” she said, “because now I know where Amos came from.”

  “I’m glad. I’ll tell you something else, Mugs. That’s not all I found here. In a sense you and your brother came from here, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. I met your mother right after I got Amos. We fell in love and a year later got married. Three years after that you came along. Then your brother. Talk about a miracle. That’s how it happens sometimes. The best things come when you least expect them.”

  “Neat,” she said in a voice growing fainter, already halfway to Nod. “Tell me…some more…”

  “Okay,” I said, but added nothing more; then her even breathing told me she was asleep. That was enough of that particular tale for now, and someday, when it was time, she would learn the rest. When you really want love, Wilde wrote, you will find it waiting. Coming here, I sat with her thinking, was an intelligent move. Then and now.

  Back then it had saved my life and ended my grudge with God, possibly begun my slow rekindling of faith. Perhaps, in a sense Saint Cecil would have fully understood, I was born again. This time it gave us a place to begin and even if I still had no answers for why good or bad things happened in my life or anybody else’s, perhaps tomorrow I’d finally catch a decent trout.