[Under a Big Sky, take two. As always: comment, comment, comment.]
I am consistently drawn to the books of male mid-life crisis. Oh, there is such a genre, though I myself didn’t realize that that’s what it was at first. But those straight talking, usually spare, writers who show you their turmoil again and again, though they will never say that trouble outloud – they get me every time. Hemingway, Carver, McGuane, Harrison, O’Brien. I am fascinated with forty-year-old men with issues. Perhaps it is simply the style. Without the slightest whining, without asking for it at all, the characters in these books pull empathy out of you, make it seem as if your own troubles could be expressed in the purest of prose. Of course, I began to read these books for the same reason I began to listen to Led Zeppelin. My dad did.
My dad was born in Sarasota, Florida and spent his childhood in West Palm Beach – a town that is, in whole, on the wrong side of the tracks, separated by four straight iron bars from the southern columned mansions of Palm Beach Drive. My dad is the middle child. His brother is two years older than him, and his father twenty. To this day my dad has never eaten a mango because his neighbor in West Palm year after year allowed the trees of his yard to drop their fruit to the lawn, where they became an oozing brown mass, stinking of bad sugar, a haze of bees and stinging flies. My dad went to Catholic school where, he told me as we read Tom Sawyer together, they actually do rap you with rulers. He spent years hiding baseballs from the nuns, who insisted on the less dangerous and boringly puffy softball. As a sophomore in high school my dad won the State Championship swim meet in the five hundred free. His school placed second, though my dad and his brother were the only members to make it to finals. “If we could have has relays,” he will still say, “we would have won.”
My dad went to Princeton on a swimming scholarship. He got the call at swim practice – it was the only time his coach let him stop in the middle of a set. “I’ve got Princeton admissions on the line,” he said. They wanted a decision. There were other schools who wanted him too, but his brother was at Princeton, and hell, they’d called the pool. In the Princeton yearbook from 1972 my dad has long hair, a messy near-bob, and round glasses. He was a straight A student at Jefferson Davis High (except for the one class, senior year, where he decided to test the bounds of academic flightiness and do no homework, no reading, no studying – he was awarded a B) but was put in remedial English his first week in New Jersey. (This only served to vindicate the observations he had already made about the quality of his secondary schooling.) He began studying civil engineering and architecture. He swam distance for the swim team until the day his coach made them swim a 20,000 for time. At a sprint pace that is nearly a four hour task, and you try sprinting for four hours. After two, my dad got out of the pool and joined the rugby team.
On a whim, because it couldn’t hurt, and because he wanted to see if they would let him in, my dad applied to Stanford Business School. They let him in – over some of his Princeton buddies who had guided their whole undergrad careers toward Stanford GSB. Shocked, he gave them the academic version of a shrug, and deferred for three years. It is here that my knowledge of my dad begins to get fuzzy. I know something took him from New Jersey to Stanford, and north to Napa. Somewhere along the line he discovered he loved wine. He opened his own store, filled with boxes and complete with tasting bar, the year before I was born. But I don’t know how he got there, or why. All these stories – wimpled nuns and state championship medals, rugby scars and academic plans – I’ve had to fight for. None (except the mangoes) has been offered freely; there’s no “Hey Car, did I ever tell you about the time…?” All the leads come from my mother, my grandfather, my dad’s college friends. And the thing is, they’re always shocked he hasn’t told me yet.
***
Glacier National Park stretches, a green icicle through northern Montana, all the way to the Canadian border. Over my fifth birthday, when I was still an only child and long family vacations were the normal form of celebration, my parents and I drove through the brown flats of Nevada and the spiking, tall grass of Idaho to hike in Glacier. There, aside from the predicable icy masses, there are ranges of rocky hills, splattered with brush. There are mountain goats that leap across them, like thick clouds. There is a ranger station and a lodge and a store that sells miniature versions of the fat mountain goats and sugar cones of huckleberry ice cream. In Glacier National Park, there are also bears. Brown and black and advertised on warning signs everywhere. Caution: You are entering BEAR HABITAT. Be Alert. Do Not Feed the Bears. I may have been concerned with making sure the store ice cream freezer was stocked with enough huckleberry to last until I was back from the day’s hike, but most patrons cared only about the supply of bear bells.
We had stopped in the ranger station store to get water or a map – or some other necessity that I, most likely drooling over the play goats and purple ice cream, was not concerned with. My parents argued.
“You know,” my dad said, “they only attract them.”
“I don’t want to see any bears.”
“Wear those and you will.”
Mom chose to listen to the ranger. We were each given a leather strap, with small, round, jingle bells. Leaving the store, I saw that everyone around had them too – a whole herd of reindeer must have been robbed to furnish the joint. My dad refused to carry his, so Mom held one in either hand, letting them ring freely as she walked.
“There’s the dinner bell,” my dad said.
“Stop it, Gig.”
He ignored my mother. “He-ee-re beary, beary, beary, he-ee-re. Come and get some people food!”
I looked at my bells. “They call the bears?”
“No!” said my mom. “They keep them away.” Her voice strained a little, but we were climbing uphill. She shook her bells. “They tell them there’s humans around.”
“That’s right. And human food.” I’m sure she shot Dad a glance at this point.
“But don’t worry, honey, we won’t see any bears.” She tinked her bells on mine.
“I want to see bears.” I ran to catch up with Dad. “Would bears like huckleberry ice cream?”
“You bet.”
I shook my bells for all I was worth. “He-ee-re beary, beary, beary! He-ee-re – fresh huckleberry ice cream! He-eeee-re beary, beary, beary – free huckleberry ice cream at our hotel!”
Suddenly figures appeared above on the trail. My dad stopped sharp – Sshh!
“What, what?” Mom jumped to a stop too, though she was behind us. I noticed that she had stopped shaking her bells.
Dad pointed up the trail. “There,” he said, pointing at the now still shapes ahead of us. “Bears.”
I can feel my mom’s clutch on my arm, the maternal panic in her fingers that spread wide across my skin. She stilled the bells. She may have covered my mouth too, just to make sure I didn’t invite these actual-there-in-front-of-us bears back for dessert and a movie at the Glacier Park Lodge. We were frozen. If I could have seen my dad’s face, I’m sure I would have seen him grinning, but he was feet above and I was fixed in the grip of my mother. There was a beat with no sound but the soft echo and creak of the bells, stirred still by the wind. Then my mom’s eyes must have narrowed, her grip loosened and then vanished; she must have swatted my father too, a hard slap against the shoulder, even as she laughed. A bear might attack a hiker, might steal her food, might – in my mother’s mind – even eat her, but what bear keeps the stolen backpack?
We continued up the trail, past the couple coming down, “He-ee-re beary, beary, beary!” as we jangled past.
My mother was not, in neither her nor my youth, an outdoors woman; it’s not surprising that she bought bear bells. That roadtrip that took us to the far reaches of Montana grizzly country, camping in quaking Aspen groves and fields of grass so tall they hid me from sight, could not have been her idea. Since then, however, she’s changed. She learned the name of, it seemed, every wildflower we ever saw on a Sierra trail, and taught them all to my dad and me. Slogging up Mt. Dana, a peak on Yosemite’s eastern border that rises a vertical mile for every lateral mile of trail – you have to go more than a foot up to move a foot forward – she would point and recite them endlessly, spurring me on by pointing to tiny purple patches half a mile up, saying, “Look how bright it is – what do you think it could be?” Curiosity stimulated, I kept climbing. To this day, when I hike with my dad, he will stop me by the brightest patches, “Do you remember which one this is?”
***
People are shocked that my dad never relates the stories of his youth, but there are certainly things that I don’t tell my father either. My parents separated when I was fourteen, a freshman in high school. Two years later, they divorced. Perhaps one day reams of troubled writing will come from the experience, but at the moment, I doubt it. The shift from one house to two, from arguments echoed down the hall to easy split custody weeks, was far from traumatic. The only trouble I can find is that suddenly, with that split, my dad and I were out of each other’s loops. By the time I got to Dad’s house on Sunday night, the week’s stories were old news. I had already told them – to my mother. It felt awkward to repeat them, and maybe sometimes I really was convinced that I’d already told him, that he already knew. We still talked, of course. We talked about swimming, about the skiing at Taos, about Mario Batali’s latest food network scheme. And what I was studying, thinking, reading seemed too banal for me to repeat.
I began reading these books for my dad. To impress him, to understand him, to know what he was talking about. At least that’s why I think I started. But by now, they are so read and reread that I don’t really know anymore. I keep reading them.
Illumination comes at unexpected moments. I called my mom on a Saturday morning. “I just wrote you into my story,” I said, “what are you doing for lunch?” We went to Coupa Café, had Venezuelan arepas, sat in the back. The walls are painted a rich, bloody red – the color a ruby should be, the color of bottlebrush and ocotillo flowers.
“This is the color I want in my dining room,” my mom said.
My mother and I began designing painting schemes my sophomore year in high school, a year after legal separation made her a homeowner, proprietress of three bedrooms, two baths and lots of white walls. We carried framed pictures from room to room, coordinating colors. I brought home reams of paint sample slips. Our walls are, of course, all still white.
“That’s what you should get Danny to do this summer,” I said. How my brother spends his summer time is always a concerned debate – will he be too bored at tennis camp, is the YMCA day program still as awful as it was when I was there? “Don’t worry about camp, make him paint.”
“He couldn’t do it alone.”
“The kid’s thirteen, by the time I get back from Montana he’ll probably be taller than me.” The fact that this is not an impossible exaggeration is a scary one, and I stopped talking, taking a pull of americano. My mom began saying something about how she doesn’t like to leave him alone, her undying reasoning for ignoring statements like the one I’d just made.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, “he’s going to D.C., to visit his cousins.” His cousins are, of course, my cousins – four cherubic and clever boys who never shut up and who, when they are, one by one, released to collegiate freedom will go wild, bucking hard to shed the vestiges of strict parental overprotection. We saw them last summer for the first time in nine years. They are hilarious, and my brother fits in like some dark-haired clone. Their father, my uncle Mark, is two years older than my dad and, as far as I can tell, his diametric opposite.
“How did Dad and Mark get to be so different? It makes no sense.”
“They’ve always been different,” my mom stirred the ice cubes in her glass, “since I met your dad. Mark was a playboy, gregarious, always. Your dad was shy.”
“Dad was shy?”
“Dad is shy.”
“He wants me to work at the wine shop, after my birthday. If they start opening on Sundays.”
“He told me.”
“He did?” Surprised again – he’d only just told me. “I wasn’t sure he was serious.”
“Your dad doesn’t joke about those kind of things.”
A waitress came with our food, pale cornflour arepas, white cheese and black beans sliding out onto dark green salad leaves.
Mom looked up, smiled at the server, “This looks delicious,” she said. She slid my plate across the table to me. “Your dad’s funny,” she said. She scooped up the arepa with both hands, bent to lift it toward her mouth. She paused, looking at the opposite wall. “What if we only painted one wall red?”
I will not be here to help my mom paint her one wall red because I will be living and working in Montana this summer. (I am not bringing bear bells.) It will be the first time that I am somewhere that is not home as neither a student or a tourist. No hotel rooms, no host families. Living, working – a resident with a P.O. Box and a morning commute from Mammoth Hot Springs, the National Park Service town in the northern reaches of Yellowstone, to Gardiner, where the Heritage and Research Center, the three-storey sandstone building that feeds the Yellowstone Museum stands, built awkwardly into the rolling Montana hills. I leave in less than two weeks and have still not chosen a route, though I was in AAA for maps well over than two months ago. There are so many places between here and what will be my summer home that I haven’t seen yet, and so many that I remember but haven’t seen on my own. I’ve traced at least nine routes to Gardiner, light pencil smudges on the green and brown maps.
Montana is home to bears and goats and glaciers – and writers too. My kind of writers. In the third novella of his collection, The Summer He Didn’t Die, a story called “Tracking,” that is in fact, not a novella at all, but a stream of consciousness memoir, Jim Harrison writes of his move to Montana that that land “had passed the test of having enough otherness to keep the mind alive.” Tom McGuane, after years of publicly – and literarily – chronicled cocaine abuse settled himself and his stories in Big Sky country. Big Sky country. How could it not inspire creativity, possibility? A land so open, the sky must stretch, pulled taut at the edges, a unfillable canvas reaching down to you. I can feel, when I read these stories, when I picture this sky, the enormity of the word choice that that place must give. The Big Sky lends itself to honesty, crisp and true. But I don’t know if that’s what my dad finds there. I don’t know if he hears that same cadence.
I don’t ask my dad why he reads these books because I am scared. We live in a balance – a power dynamic that it is not my place to shift. He is my father. And I am worried that he will laugh at my spirally visions of what it means to be under the big sky. Maybe I’m overcomplicating. Maybe I’m scared that I’ll like my interpretation better.
I don’t talk with my dad about anything that isn’t real. We talk about the relative insanity of climbing Everest without training or bottled oxygen or, like one recent summiter, legs. But we don’t talk about why humans feel an urge to be 30,000 feet in the air, to drop thousands of dollars and possibly years off their lives for a photo or two of them wheezing on the top of the world. We don’t extrapolate.
***
Two Septembers ago my dad took me to Europe – three weeks in Italy, Switzerland, France. A belated birthday present. Together with six or so of my dad’s friends, we would be visiting vineyards, getting private tastings while my dad decided whether to buy this vintage or that, whether certain vineyards were on the way out, which producers were pushing the bounds. Free food, free wine, Europe with the adults – I was thrilled.
Six hour lunches and red wine headaches are not all they’re cracked up to be, however, and by the second week of our trip, I was bloated and tired. That was when we left Tuscany and ballooning wine glasses behind. When we crossed the border to Switzerland. The highways widened, and street signs became uniform and painstakingly clear. We followed the white arrows, past Interlocken, taking a left where the two lakes that give the city its name nearly touch their grasping banks together. We drove along the straight Swiss railroad tracks into the Alps, to Grindelwald. It is a town made of slope-roofed chalets, their balconies dripping with glossy red flowers, and a town made for mountaineers. Gray-black peaks, scraped smooth by ancient ice, rise in every direction.
The trail we took climbs from the south end of town, down and around the last houses at the foot of the glacial valley, and then up, hard. Every so often there is a sign, painted dull gold, that points the direction in which you are walking and how long – if you’re a Swiss grandmama, says my dad – it will take you to get there. The trail is steep, the Swiss seem not to believe in switchbacks. But it was warm, sunny, and my dad returned every “Gruss Gott,” the exultation that passes for greeting in the Bernese-Oberland. I merely smiled. We did nothing but continue up. The valley below us turned into a chasm, a deep gulley that led, the most majestic garden path, to the slowly falling glacier that rests, so precariously, on the back of the Schreckhorn. We hiked, steeply up and over and around the rocky meadows. We hiked for many more hours than we had intended, and the appointed hour for dinner down in the valley came and went. We hiked and should have been in pain, but wanted only to know where the trail led next, where it went whenever it curved up the mountain, out of sight. By the end of it, we would be crippled, a pair of silly American gimps, limping faintly bloody trails through the grass, hiking boots in hand as we covered the last mile back to our chalet. But up above the valley we simply hiked, wanting only to be higher on the glacial moraine. We hiked until there were no other hikers, and we were alone in the alpen scrub, the shadow of the Eiger pyramid cutting a line like jet stream across the sky, no one, no one except bell-collared sheep above and below on the steep mountain field. Ahead the trail curved sharply to the left. A dark leg emerged from behind the rocky corner. I stopped.
“What?”
I pointed. “Bears.”
Dad smiled. “Shh,” he said, “they might know English.”
***
I do not tell my dad about the books because we don’t talk about that sort of thing. My dad is not my source of intellectual conversation. Despite his own intelligence, his own quick wit and quick mind, his is not the educated side of my family. It is my maternal grandfather – the man who put himself through college and grad school, supporting parents who refused to learn any language other than Yiddish, who made himself a professor, a recognized man, sought after for boards and advice, dean of the Sloane School of MIT, thanked in Carly Fiorina’s memoirs – who earns the title of intellectual patriarch. And he deserves it. In his deep, slow voice he discusses theory and life, with no little joking, with each of his grandchildren, starting when we are far too young to understand, consciously creating a passion for chewing on words. He reads nearly everything I write, and I am promised all of his books. Here is the person to tell about the wanderings and hypotheticals of my mind, here is the audience. But would he understand the appeal of a curved horizon, broken only by ancient pyramids of granite, jagged and snowcapped and begging to be climbed?
My reasoning is off though: my dad gives me books too. Now that I think about it, outside of the endowment from my grandfather’s retired office, more than anyone else. He began basic, maybe that’s why it never felt significant – Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Treasure Island, Michael Strogoff – these were obviously the books he had read as a boy, even at eight I knew that, and so it was clear why he was giving them to me. But things have become more interesting. Alan Lightman’s Reunion – another in the middle-aged-man-revisits-his-youth theme – and a translation of a German book called The Arbogast Case, which was so haunting and so graphic I never told my mother what it was about or anybody else that my father had given it to me. These books enjoyed no explanation. I did not know, when I opened them, having felt the hard spines through the Christmas wrapping and peeled the tape back with an unbroken nail, whether he had read them or not. And if not, what it was about them that was making him give them to me. But I like these books. And I like the books I buy myself after seeing them, soft covers beginning to curl, on my dad’s shelf. So maybe it’s time I started paying more attention. Maybe there is a reason he’s been giving them to me.
The last book my dad gave me was The Snow Leopard. I had never read Peter Matthiessen. The book was paperbacked, sheathed in murky plastic with two orange price stickers from the Bangkok airport. I thought I knew the reason I got this book. To be fair, it was both an easy and an elegant conclusion. Matthiessen had trekked through Nepal, on paths frequented almost only by Sherpas, Bhotes, and Tamangs, following the scientist George Schaller in his search for the blue sheep found only in the Himalayan passes. My dad had just returned from Kathmandu, had just returned from a trek through Nepal and Tibet, from Mount Kailas – a mountain so holy its summit is forbidden. I read the Matthiessen in a week, mainly at work, a cushy summer job that consisted mainly of driving the dignitaries of the publishing world to and from lectures at Stanford’s professional publishing course. Each morning I would wake early, drive fast, to get to the hotel early, to enjoy ten, fifteen, twenty minutes in the morning sun, leaning against my white van, dreaming it was Himalayan moraine. The publishers loved it. Men in their fifties, controllers of today’s written word, suddenly began to tell me about their youths, their first encounters with Matthiessen, what they were reading at twenty, the adventures they had led. They would look at my book and begin to talk. It was fascinating, and so I listened. Finished, they would look at the book again, look at its dog-eared pages, “You’ll go far in life,” they always said.
I have begun to pay more attention to my Matthiessen. If it meant so much to these men – if it was enough to establish me in their good graces, to guide me up the path to success – maybe it meant something to my dad too. Having now read and reread, almost in a circle, never ending, simply beginning again, I can tell you what I learned. The philosophy of the mind is changing – we do not think one thing, and think it for the rest of our lives, or even our week. There are good days and bad days, and each has its own thoughts. We save our different thoughts by writing them down and we share them by giving words – in the air or on the page – to others. But up above the glacial valleys – in the Sierra, the Alps, the Himalaya — and under the pinned down curve of our big sky, all those thoughts, and each curve and each shift from one to the other, are visible. We can ask questions and tell stories, but up there, we don’t need to. In the absence of other human life, our self stretches to fill the void, letting every feeling be seen. You cannot hide your thoughts when winded, on the top of a mountain.
I am sure I will never know everything about my father. And I don’t really want to. This mystery, this problem solving, the sleuthing through shelves and nightstands – Is that a dog-ear? Has he been reading this one? – I love the challenge of my father. I can’t imagine my life without it. The fact that I can find these bits of him from the grainy pages of a paperback, from the inexhaustible expanse that circles a summit peak means that those bits must be in me too. Matthiessen says that we are all of the same elements, that the lesson of the mountains is that they are made of the same stuff we are. He is right. It’s nice to know, though, that not only are we made of the same oxygen, hydrogen, and calcium, but those atoms can be moved in just the same way. Bits of understanding that go deeper than the elemental.
