Faithful Travelers

by James Dodson

  We said good night and a little while later my daughter came back from her shower and asked me to comb out her hair, which I was delighted to do. She hadn’t asked me to comb out her hair in what seemed like ages. First I tossed on another log, sending up a burst of sparks, and then put on the radio softly, though no news this time. Central Michigan University was playing Copland’s Appalachian Spring, a bittersweet anthem based on Shaker melodies which had its world debut on the same day fifty years ago that the war ended in Europe. My father had been in that war, had seen things as awful as Hemingway had, and it had changed him, too. Strangely, it made him more determined to be kind and optimistic.

  The Copland piece was one of my favorites. It reminded me of my home in North Carolina and I suppose I loved it for that, though not as much as I loved combing out my daughter’s sweet-smelling wet hair and not as much as I loved being lost with her in the Michigan woods with a storm rumbling like a timpani drum or maybe the gods bowling far out on Lake Michigan, heading, like us, for the Upper Peninsula.

  “Dad?”

  “Yeah, babe?”

  “Do you think that fish remembers that we caught him today?”

  I smiled to myself and complimented her for asking such an interesting question. Soon she would have her own chair in philosophy at Yale—or at least a great country band. Did fish have memories? Only she would ask such a thing. That trout we’d caught and let go was two pounds of muscle, fin, membrane, and sinew, a few thousand strands of taut nerve endings and survival instincts as old as stone, one of the most efficient eating machines on earth—amazing, I said, when you thought about it, for a creature whose brain was just slightly larger than a fresh green pea. She reminded me that we’d had fresh green peas for supper and hamburgers shaped to look like trout and said there must be room in there somewhere for a bit of memory. I smiled again, kept combing, and explained to her that the Psalms say memory is immortality and I would remember that fish a long time even if I’d failed to touch him and he forgot me the moment I let him go. God gives the solitary a home, the Psalms also say. A little girl gives you hope, I would add.

  “I think that trout will be a little bit smarter next time. That’s how small fish get to be big fish.”

  “Did he feel pain when you caught him?”

  “Yes. It hurt him to get caught. Every living thing feels pain. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “It made him feel better to be set free. I bet he won’t remember the pain.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  No Small Miracle

  “DAD, MAY I ask you a question? It’s really important.”

  “Of course.”

  What burning question of the ages would it be this time, I wondered, glancing at my precocious fishergirl. My head was starting to ache from trying to answer so many Big Picture questions about fishing and life, stuff I hadn’t even begun to figure out yet. Her bare feet were propped on Old Blue’s dash and a large grasshopper was balanced on her knee. Did the grasshopper know he was traveling with fly anglers and thus was potential fish bait?

  “You really don’t like Barbie, do you?”

  “Who?” The prairie wind was roaring past one ear and Paul McCartney was wailing about a long and winding road in the other. For a minute I thought she’d asked me which Beatle was my favorite. We’d been playing our made-up game called Beatle Challenge in which someone announced a Beatle song’s title and the other person had to sing at least twenty words of it or risk being made the laughingstock of an entire generation. Maggie, naturally, was well ahead on points.

  “Bar-bee.”

  “Ah.” I nodded and smiled, stalling for time. Aside from the fact that Barbie was older than the oldest Beatle and never visibly aged, had plastic bullet breasts, a brainless smile, and represented an impossible ideal of womanhood I dearly hoped my daughter wouldn’t aspire to, I thought Barbie was fine, probably fairly innocent stuff. After all, through much of the sixties I’d wandered around with a pair of cheap six-guns strapped to my person pretending I was Hoss Cartwright, and even grew up to vaguely resemble him, but I had never had the slightest inclination to gun down anybody. Barbie was the perfect little capitalist icon, a doll originally modeled after a German fräulein who looked a little bit like a hooker, but I figured her allure would probably pass and we wouldn’t have to build an extra wing on the house to accommodate Barbie and all her accessories.

  “What makes you think I don’t like Barbie?”

  A faint shrug. “I don’t know. You looked kind of annoyed at that mall.”

  “It was more the mall than Barbie, Mugs.”

  The mall in question was the Mall of America, just south of Minneapolis. Being a couple hayseeds from the slow lanes of Maine, we’d gone there with friends to see what all the hoopla was about and found packs of teenagers in floppy clothes and face metal wandering through the Food Court and fake palm trees of America’s biggest mall. Seeing it made me glad the state of Maine has only one mall to speak of, a large edifice we seldom feel the need to visit, and I confessed to her that malls in general made me worry a bit about what was happening to the America I grew up in because they all smelled and looked alike and you could never tell where you were in them or whether it was night or day, dry or raining cats and dogs outside, to say nothing of remembering where you parked your dad-gummed car—which, I supposed, was the point of having a bunch of chain stores under one roof and why most people really liked them. Malls had surgically killed off much of Main Street America, and I started to give her my full dreary dinner speech about the related declines of gas stations and neighborhoods—how gas stations were now convenience marts where the clerks, inconveniently, couldn’t give you decent directions to the next street corner and how neighborhoods weren’t what they used to be because of the explosive growth of “gated” communities. But I realized in the nick of time that I was veering dangerously close to achieving Whining Old Fart status and decided to keep the banter light.

  “Next question,” I said. I was sure there was a next question because with my fishergirl there always was.

  “Okay.” She took a helpful slug of Gatorade and thought for a moment. I sensed a good Beatle Challenge question coming. Perhaps she’d foolishly toss “In My Life” at me and I’d volley it triumphantly back across the net, showing her I might be an Old Fart but wasn’t an entire disgrace to the Fab Four generation.

  “Do you, like, believe in miracles?”

  “Depends on the miracle,” I said, marveling at how nimbly a girl with a freeloading locust on her knee could shift the general floor discussion from the ridiculous to the sublime. On the other hand, my children and I talked often and freely about the subject of God and faith and they knew or sensed I had strong feelings about the spiritual side of life and that I encouraged their own wanderings in this realm. My son went through a period where he believed with the simple faith of a mustard seed that God was the sun. He had no doubt about it whatsoever, was as sure as any ancient Egyptian and child of Ra. For her part, my daughter was of the unwavering opinion that everybody had a guardian angel appointed by God and that God would agree to let you come back as the animal of your choice if you were nice to all His creatures while here on earth—hence her worries about causing fish pain. I haven’t a clue where such otherwise pleasant Christian children got such embarrassing heretical notions, though I’d half made up my mind to ask the Almighty to come back as a Boothbay Harbor seal and perhaps the Episcopal church we attended was a bit more ecumenical than we even knew.

  The simple truth was, I didn’t quite know what to make of miracles—not in this modern Age of Reason where people or their legal representatives demanded to see the physical evidence before rendering a legally binding opinion. Myths were full of wondrous healings and gospel accounts of Jesus’ miracles were deeply moving and, to me at least, believable—spit that opened a blind man’s eyes, seas calmed by the solemn lift of a hand—but perhaps because I’d been a street reporter for far to
o many years, relating modern tales of man’s inhumanity to his neighbor, modern miracles seemed a bit irrelevant or simply too flashy to be believed, like vulgar parlor tricks designed to make the prayer lines ring off the hook and keep the tithes flowing. Much of my own Christian religion seemed, at times, from the vantage point of a dirt road in Maine, far more obsessed with raising steeples than advancing human hopes, erecting ambitious satellite ministries than feeding hungry people, curing budget deficits instead of suffering, promoting political agendas in place of faith. But there I was about to make another speech to the Old Fart Convention. I will put a muzzle on my mouth, says one of the Psalms. Good advice.

  “Well, like what for instance?” she demanded.

  I explained that miracles were different things to different people and that the miracles I’d witnessed, if you could call them that, tended to be on the small side—things you might just as easily overlook. The fact that my lavender plants came back every year on the heels of a fierce Maine winter seemed almost miraculous, as did looking out our window back home one summer morning recently and seeing a gorgeous ten-point buck standing in the yard. When the Braves won their first World Series, I was convinced it was a minor miracle, and I’d had a few putts to win golf matches over my old nemesis Pat McDaid that fell neatly into that category. I explained that Christian mystics, Buddhists, and Native American holy men maintained that miracles were constantly happening around us but we just refused or were unable to see them. Catching a trout seemed a little bit like a miracle. So was riding in an airplane. Ditto duct tape and the Phillips screwdriver. If I could somehow get telemarketers not to call the exact moment we sat down each evening to supper—that would surely be a miracle to match the fish and the loaves.

  I laughed at my own irreverence, but Maggie didn’t. Come to think of it, the locust didn’t look all that amused, either. Perhaps the locust was the reincarnation of my Southern Baptist grandmother who always insisted on hauling her suitcase-sized pocketbook to the communion rail with her because, let’s face it, theologically and otherwise, Lutherans really couldn’t be all that trusted.

  “Well,” she countered, “that guy Paul said it was a miracle we weren’t killed and I wondered if it really was.”

  A prairie flicker darted across the highway in front of us and it came to me that she didn’t mean Paul on the road to Damascus. She meant Paul on the road out of the Adirondacks, the Paul who had some big-time explaining to do at the Ryder rental counter in Ithaca. Indeed he had said it was a miracle we weren’t killed and for all I knew perhaps he was right.

  “What about that boy?”

  “Boy?”

  “The boy on Meadow Road. The one on the sled.”

  “Oh. Right.” Three years before, a few days before Christmas, I’d run over a boy on a sled who came out of nowhere. He’d lived to tell the tale, and perhaps it was a miracle that he survived. His family certainly believed so. An angel had descended from the blizzard to save the day. Jesus had waved an unseen hand, preventing disaster. Or perhaps it was merely dumb luck—a near-miss of colliding molecules—that we’d both walked away unhurt, though certainly not unchanged, from this powerful and strange encounter. The event had been so shattering, to tell the God’s truth, I was still trying to make spiritual heads or tails of it.

  “I suppose that might qualify as a miracle,” I admitted uneasily to her. “Tell you what. Let me think about it a bit and I’ll get back to you.” The first rule of being the parent of an inquisitive child is this: When in doubt, stall for time.

  —

  We were on the edge of the Great Plains and would not fish again for at least two days, not until we reached Wyoming. It was late morning and we’d just passed through Blue Earth, Minnesota, stopping to buy some Prairie Girl ears of corn on the edge of the prairie from a woman at a roadside stand. The corn was beautiful, the color of new pearls, six ears for $1.46. The woman, adjusting her hair bandanna slightly, said it was grown in her father’s field in Worthington. He’d just had a stroke but wouldn’t give up his corn patch. Nearby, a man was gassing up his Harley. He was wearing faded jeans and fringed buckskins and had an American flag tattooed on his neck, a single silver earring, military shades, a Rockies baseball cap, and a beaded Lakota vest.

  I saw Maggie watching him. A modern rider of the High Plains, he told us he was headed to the big Harley rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. Two hundred thousand bikers were already there, as he put it to me, “hanging out and getting high on fumes.” He measured us with a low slow smile. Dakota Territory lay dead ahead, the vastness of the Great Plains, the ever-widening sky.

  Pulling out from the farm stand, we learned on the radio that sprinter Michael Johnson had just set a new world record for the hundred-meter dash at the Atlanta Olympics—a kind of miracle, if you thought of it that way—but that there’d been another suicide bombing in the Gaza Strip and a thirty-eighth black church had been torched by unknown persons in northern Mississippi. So, in a sense, the daily tote board was a spiritual loss. A few moments later, however, Paul Harvey revealed that Madalyn Murray O’Hair, America’s most famous professional atheist, the woman who chased God from the Republic’s classrooms, was herself missing and suspected of socking millions of her foundation’s funds away in Swiss accounts before hitting the bricks to parts unknown. You could hear in his voice that Paul Harvey was tempted to declare a national day of celebration.

  I turned the dial to South Dakota Gardener’s Hotline with Norm Evers out of Pierre—properly pronounced “peer”—and learned, more interestingly, about the early warning signs of corn smut and how to protect a garden from an infestation of “Creeping Charlie.” I’d never had a case of Creeping Charlie, so far as I knew, but a vacationing rose gardener can’t be too complacent about these matters.

  A large highway sign announced that the “world’s best coffee” lay just ahead in Mitchell, “home of the world’s only Corn Palace,” and another one a short time later advised us: “We Dakotans reject animal activists. Fur, fish, game, and livestock are our livelihoods!”

  It had been three days since we threw fly lines and I missed it, but heavens, what possible minimiracles of American ingenuity and culture we’d beheld in a thousand miles of the Republic! In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, we’d fished a second Indian Lake on the shores of the Hiawatha National Forest, then gone into Manistique to eat lake perch at a nice diner and attend the Schoolcraft County Fair and run slap into the outgoing Miss Schoolcraft County, who was hoofing across the dusty ball field in her starched white ball gown, dabbing her eyes every few steps, a pretty made-up farmgirl named Arlene—a real-life Barbie!—who stopped and chatted enthusiastically with my daughter about how you had to say only positive things about life and America’s youth and how you should remember to always smile if you wanted to win beauty pageant titles and then explained to me, when I asked, that what she would miss most about her reign as Miss Schoolcraft County, she guessed, was singing to the old people in rest homes and inspiring the kids who might never have the opportunity to leave Manistique. She was about to do that herself come fall—she was headed to dental school in Akron—and when I pressed her about whether she might someday come back, she glanced around, spotted some approaching neighbors, produced a spectacular smile, squeezed their hands as they passed, then turned back to me and said with a tearful sniff, “Probably not.”

  Across the border into Wisconsin—America’s leading cheese state!—we stopped for cheese in a town that had the largest iron skillet in the world, right there in the main drag for all comers to admire, and I wondered to a waitress named Ruthie how the town could possibly resist the temptation of going for broke after the world’s biggest cheese omelette record, and Ruthie, sloshing more coffee in my cup, told me it was my kind of big thinking that made the Packers the best team in pro football. She told me I could be a Cheesehead, talking like that. Then we moved on to a place near La Crosse that, if you can fathom it, boasted the world’s largest six-pack of beer.
A short time later, we removed what might have been the world’s largest snapping turtle from a busy country road, perhaps sparing him a visit to some hungry Cheesehead’s soup pot au gratin, then pushed on to St. Paul and stayed for two nights with my old friends Tony and Patti, who lived in a racially mixed innercity neighborhood called Frogtown. There we got to have breakfast on the Mississippi River, tour a swell state history museum, watch the Frogtown community parade, and then walk around a multicultural food and music fair where everything I ate made me proud to be an American, if not a Packer Cheesehead.

  Later, while our daughters rode bikes around the block, Tony and I sat on his porch on Van Buren Street drinking beers and talking about our fathers. Mine, Opti, with a little luck, was playing a golf course somewhere in Valhalla. His, Emil, was a retired garage owner and widower who lived in the small lake town west of Minneapolis where Tony grew up.

  I had pleasant memories of Emil at Tony and Patti’s wedding, the reception of which was conducted in Emil’s garage due to the uninvited arrival of a sudden ferocious thunderstorm. As we stood there watching the sky empty itself, Emil explained to me the proper way to disassemble and rebuild a Plymouth Fury engine, highly useful information I’d unfortunately never been able to put to much good use. I asked Tony how his father was doing with his mother being gone.

  “Oh, fine, I guess. I think he’s lonely and misses her a lot, but he never really lets on about it. It’s a different world for him, though.”

  “Does he fish?” I had memories of Emil talking about the killer walleye in the land of ten thousand lakes.

  “A little bit. I think he enjoys gambling more these days. Once a week he gets in his car and drives out to a casino on the edge of the prairie run by the Indians. He loses a bit of money and comes home a well-contented man.”

  Tony, who ran Frogtown’s little community newspaper now, was my closest reporter chum from my Atlanta years and we both had swapped big-city stories for small-town lives and now shared fatherhood and gardening and news of blood drives and bean suppers and drank our beers in contented silence for a moment, waiting for our daughters to pedal back as a blue dusk settled over Van Buren Street. Maggie had never ridden a bike on a city street before and I was visibly nervous about her maiden sortie—“Relax,” Tony deadpanned, “we haven’t had a drive-by shooting in, oh, at least two weeks”—and I took his word on faith and was eventually rewarded by the sound of two girls coming around the corner, their voices floating ahead of them on the night. I smelled something sweet from Tony’s garden and said I would take that second beer after all.