BOOBS
I was flat-chested as a boy until my junior year of high school.
On school holidays, my friend Kam and I would walk up and down my mother’s street in our torn-at-the-knee jeans and our bras. Three passes – black, printed, the extra-thrilling nude – and no one, those late Friday mornings, to see us.

CATALYST
Generally speaking, those I sleep with experience epiphany. Waking early – I let no one close the blinds – they realize that the inevitable has arrived, they are falling in love, they have fallen in love, crazy, technicolor, shouting love that bursts from their pores, glistening. Love sweat, unstoppable, undeordorized. It’s not me they’re in love with. And that’s not to say that they’re in love with the experience of me, or the mysterious spector of me. They are not in love with me; they are in love with someone else.
Generally speaking, this doesn’t bother me. I never deeply care for, and often don’t even deeply know these stricken souls. I like to think of myself as the catalyst, the bright burst of sex and shallow, easy affection that brings two foreign elements together. My body, the Bunsen burner.

DUN, DUN, DA, DAH, I’M GETTING WET!
September 2003, Cosmo’s top one-hundred sexy things to say in bed, number 37: I am getting wet!
“Who wants to announce it?” Katie said.
“Shouldn’t you not have to announce it? Theoretically?” I said.
“It’s a proclamation. Of joy,” Kam said.
“Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, da, daaaah! I don’t know what any of the boys I’ve been with would have done if I had proclaimed in the middle of sex,” Keerthi said.
“You’ve had sex?” I said. “Plural?”

ECDYSIAST
def. A striptease artist; stripper. Coined by H.L. Mencken in 1940 from the Greek root ekdysis. Also the title of the newsletter of the Charleston, SC, based Crustacean Society.

FORGIVE AND FORGET
I go back and forth on whether this is healthy.

GERSHON, GINA
I first saw Showgirls over winter break. I know because it was on during the three promotional days of Showtime, to which my family did not subscribe, which run close to Christmas. My dad was on the large chair in the back of the room. I lay, half hidden, in the beanbags below. I suppose I was all hidden. Realizing I was there, my father kindly suggested it was past my bedtime. It was too late. I had seen Elizabeth Berkley kick her topless way to the top, had seen Kyle MacLachlan lure her, naked, to the pool with vibrant cocaine, had seen Gina Gershon whisper “Darlin’” like a snake hissing hello. But mostly I had seen the dancing bodies, bare but for fishnet and lace, glide with tantalizing grace across that Vegas stage.

HBO
When one is fourteen, HBO’s Real Sex makes one wonder just how prevalent sex circuses, flaming pasties, and stripping Scandinavian weather women really are.

“I WROTE THAT STORY MYSELF, IT’S ABOUT A GIRL WHO LOST HER REPUTATION AND NEVER MISSED IT”
-Mae West

JEWISH MOTHER
One day last spring, my mom and I planned the Passover menu.
“He’s a vegetarian,” I said.
“What’s the deal with this boy?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s less than defined.”
“Are you friends,” my mom said.
“Yes,” I said. “But recently we do things that friends typically don’t do.”
“Like kissing,” she said.
“Like kissing, yes,” I said. “Sort of.”
“Have you slept with him?” She didn’t even look up.
“Well, yes.”
“Carly!”
“You asked?”

KOMODO DRAGON
During mating, female dragons become fiercely antagonistic and must be completely restrained by the male in order for successful impregnation. Despite this violent behavior, Komodo dragons often form pair bonds, a rare show of monogamy in the reptile world.

LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN
Ideals are dangerous things.

MINSKY’S
Rose Louise Hovick made her stage debut as Gypsy Rose Lee at Minsky’s House of Burlesque. Gypsy’s life, adapted from her memoirs was chronicled on Broadway and in Hollywood in Gypsy. The film starred Natalie Wood, Rosalind Russell, and Karl Malden.
NATALIE ANGIER
A science writer for The New York Times, Angier reported on the sexual behavior of dolphins in 1992. A year later, Condé Nast Traveler ran the caption “The mating habits of male dolphins amount to gang rape” next to a photograph of a pretty blond tourist snapping a picture of a bottle-nosed dolphin off the Australian coast. As Gregg Mitman reports in Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film, this was no revelation to the film industry, which had been censoring footage of male dolphins on homosexual escapades and female dolphins masturbating with beach balls since the 1940s.

OPPOSITES
Karl Malden plays Mitch to Vivien Leigh’s troubled Blanche in the Elia Kazan version of A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams gives Blanche the truest line in print today. “Death,” she says, “the opposite is desire.”

PROBLEMS TALKING
Rape victims are often portrayed as having problems talking about what has happened to them.
I didn’t talk for three years.
This is apparently no longer a problem.

QUINCE
“I wasn’t sober.”
“Were you drunk?”
“I don’t remember getting there.”
“But you–“
“I remember. I woke up. Or starting remembering again.”
“Carla, you should talk to someone.“
“And say what? A bruise can happen from anything.”
“What bruise?”
I pulled the zipper of my sweater down from my neck. Across my chest, slanting down from my sternum under the curve of my clean, white bra is the uneven mark, mottled and darkly purple, like quince cooked too long in wine and honey.
“Carla.”
“I know, I know.”

ROHYPNOL
Rohypol is the pharmaceutical name for flunitrazepam and is illegal in the United States. According to womenshealth.gov, a women’s health information center maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services, Rohypnol can cause the following problems after ingestion:
sleepiness
muscle relaxation or loss of muscle control
drunk feeling
problems talking
difficulty with motor movements
confusion
loss of consciousness
problems seeing
dizziness
inability to remember what happened while drugged
confusion

SHOCKED DISBELIEF
RAINN – the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network – catalogs three phases in Rape Trauma Syndrome. The first, the “acute phase,” can be either Expressed or Controlled. Emotions run like sparkling water, shaken and released in a torrent that touches the ceiling of sanity, or capped in time and left persistently pounding bubbles at the bottle’s inner edge. Survivors, as RAINN calls them, can also react with Shocked Disbelief, characterized by an inability to orient oneself to everyday tasks and decisions. This can manifest itself in the failure to study for econ tests, sit through more than five minutes of math section, write English papers without a hangover, or follow through on the cushy tutoring job your TF set you up with.

THAT’S ALL THERE IS, THERE ISN’T ANY MORE (stage door canteen)
In the film Stage Door Canteen, Rose Louise Hovick, by this time firmly established as Gypsy Rose Lee, performs a striptease. Her audience, men and women, hoot. She pulls her garter from under her skirt, teases one leg at a time out from her petticoats, coaxes down her stockings to the beat of the music. Slowly she recites:
“When I lower my gown a fraction and expose a patch of shoulder, I’m not interested in your reaction, or in the bareness of my shoulder, I’m thinking of some painting my Van Gogh or by Cezanne or the charm I found in reading Lady Windermere’s Fan….And when I raise my skirts, with slyness and dexterity, I’m mentally computing how much I’ll give to charity.”
Leaving the stage with her gown intact, though her petticoats are around the neck of a lucky gentleman in the first row, Gypsy smiles. “That’s all there is; there isn’t any more.” She laughs at her own line and, with a bare-legged kick, backs through the heavy velvet curtains and off stage.

USED
There is a pervasive feeling, once you’ve had sex with someone for the first time, that the jig is up.

VAN MORRISON
Van Morrison was the only artist Justin and I could agree on.
I made a promise. No sex until the third date. Isn’t that the rule? Justin laughed into my mouth. “It’s great,” he said, “that you’re the one who’s dying to have sex. I can be patient.”
“So I’m the boy?” I said.

WIND POWER
North of Palm Springs, Highway 111 passes through the wind farms of the San Gorgonio Pass. The double bladed windmills spin across the desert scrub, their arms turning at eerily different speeds, the trick of angles and breezes to fine to catch from the speeding car. Staring out the window of a rented sedan, the scene lulls you into daydream.

XENA, WARRIOR PRINCESS
Kicking ass in a leather corset and hiding a sword beneath a shimmering veil are tricks that every woman should know.

YOU GOTTA GET A GIMMICK
Watching the miles of wind turbines through the Coachella Valley, I daydreamed my strip routine. I had learned from Gypsy. My gimmick was fire. I wore flames, my hair shone mahogany. Slowly easing around the stage, out of grasp of the vying men, I called a volunteer from the crowd. He jumped the stage. I slid my palm down his chest, spun myself around him like a web. I pulled him in and I kissed him. He fell like dead wood. He was a plant, my boyfriend, and we would pull the bills from the raised stage and drive home together through the desert night.

ZOOMY
A German body-artist, Zoomy paints abstract designs and costumes on naked bodies.
My mother told me I was fascinated by the cover image of Madonna, painted into a tux, on the cover of some glossy magazine in 1994.
She told me this to explain why she was not surprised that I was the only girl in the infamous Larkin Calendar with only a layer of paint between her breasts and the camera (not to mention KTVU and CNN viewers everywhere).

“Sunday night? Mirrielees?”
“I’m good any time after 7.”
“Sure.”
“Seven it is. Ready to get rocked?”

Innocuous sounding, sure. But veiled beneath those words is a snarl of alliances, secrets, sex, and, of course, bullshit. These kids are playing BS.

It began in the fall, when the quarter was young enough to still be confused with the misspent days of summer, when the responsibilities of school had not yet clamped its jaws around the ankles of our heroes. It began in Montara.

Seniors, these four were the last remaining at the end of a long day of team bonding, the tried and true Stanford method of the group retreat. Meetings had been run, goals set, dinner cooked and messily eaten. A rousing group game of Boggle was followed by a covert slip down to the beach, where underclassmen were given beers and the talk turned to ten fingers and who had done what in what semi-sordid academic building. But the hours passed and as the new day rolled over, the group drifted to their snug hostel beds. The charges were down for the night. Our four seniors were left in the softly lit kitchen.

The ringleader pulled out a pack of cards. He shuffled once, twice. “Ever play BS?”

The others laughed. Who hasn’t been to summer camp?

This was not that kind of BS. In this game, order was tossed out the window, players could count cards, stall, pass, and lie lie lie until even then didn’t know which of the eight sets of two sixes they’d put down was the real thing. Maybe they’d never had sixes all along.

The four, each centered along a side of the smooth wooden table, settled in. Music hummed softly in the background. Lying, and winning, one player began to dance in her seat, her eyes half closed, her lips pursed, watching the competition through her eyelashes. The dark horse pressed his leg against hers under the table. Neither of them moved. On her other side, a queen was rising. She must win. She called every quickly whispered bluff, laughed at the awe and anger on the faces of the losers. The dancer, between them, gently swayed. Let them destroy each other. She ran her foot up the strong leg beside her. She can eliminate the dark horse in another way.

The ringleader watched them. They would get no sleep that night. They would play until the sun crept over the mountains in slashes that streaked the windows like water. The daze of the game would linger. They would spend the day laying on the beach, driving home through the mottled shadows of Highway 84, developing strategy. In the months to come they would pass the game to others, but they would always play each other, the assembled guests just accessories to the subterfuge. “Three kings,” he said, watching the dancer. The players passed. “Three kings,” he said again.

“Pass,” said the queen.

“Pass,” said the dancer, now straight and still.

“One king,” said the dark horse, hoping. No one was watching his hand. The ringleader held the room.

“Three kings.”

“Bull fucking shit.”

The ringleader smiled and slowly turned the cards, three smirking kings. He leaned back, his chair tilting toward the wall. With a smash his fist hit the table. “Rocked!”

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.

I am consistently drawn to the books of male mid-life crisis. Oh, there is such a genre. Those straight talking, usually spare, writers who show you their turmoil again and again, though they will never say that trouble outloud. Hemingway, Carver, McGuane, Harrison, O’Brien. When I read women writers – Annie Proulx or, my far and away favorite, A.M. Homes – they are usually writing about the same thing. I am fascinated with forty-year-old men with issues. Of course, I began to read these books for the same reason I began to listen to Led Zeppelin. My dad did it.

He gave me The Old Man and the Sea on the way to Florida, and he talked about Panama while we were in the keys. But he doesn’t know I’ve read Jim Harrison’s The Raw and the Cooked six times, excerpted it like it was my Bible. I bought it after he gave me just one of Harrison’s articles from the Kermit Lynch wine newsletter. In fact – I bought it twice. I scoured the outdoor shelves of Green Apple books to find a hardcover copy, only to have my mother toss it out of my suitcase as I packed to go abroad. “A hardcover book? Sweetie, they have books in France.” It was out – and the first book I bought while traveling, in Poland of all places. In the land of my mother’s family, I found not Jewish heritage, or even Slavic remnants, but my father, encapsulated in terse masculine essays on food and wine, nature and sex. I read it twice within a week of purchase. My dad doesn’t know that. I don’t tell him these things.

My parents made sure, in my infancy, that I would be the right kind of child – who would become the right kind of person. That is to say, they didn’t let my appearance on the scene put a damper on their lives. I got to live right along with them. Much of this was a collaborative effort – together my parents took me, snug in my stroller, up and down Clement Street, all through the Richmond district of San Francisco, and over the rise to Ocean Beach. Together, I am sure, they agreed that my first restaurant experience could come at the ripe age of three weeks. They wanted to eat out, and so why shouldn’t I? This kind of scheming worked. By three years old I was ordering my own single lamb chop and spinach timbale, with chocolate mousse, strawberries, and yes-I-will-have-it-with-crème-anglaise-please for dessert. Some schemes, however, I know were my fathers doing. No mother who wanted to keep her baby healthy, and herself sane, would decide it was a good idea to fly her seven week old down to the desert, to hike. Especially mine.

Dad saw it differently, and Dad won. One week shy of my two months, on what was surely a busy day for Southwest, the Friday leading into Labor Day weekend, I boarded my first jet. The next day, I was in Joshua Tree, pudgy, pink, and high as a kite from the altitude and heat of the high Mojave desert. At least, that is, to judge from the puffer fish faces I am making in the pictures pasted into my dad’s dark red album.

My mother was not, in neither her nor my youth, an outdoors woman. Over my fifth birthday – when I was an only child and annual vacations found themselves stretched serendipitously in early July – we went on a roadtrip, through the Rocky Mountain northwest, camping our way through Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana. We drove through the Blackfoot reservation. “Your grandmother was part Indian,” my dad told me. I looked at the dolls, selected one as my belated birthday present. “They were Blackfeet,” I said. It was an assertion I believed for years, until it became clear in the course of a seventh grade autobiography project that my grandmother’s people had lived in eastern Iowa and no further. For years I advertised it – already the only kid at school with a Christian father, I was even more special, I was part Blackfoot. Reality may have squashed that brag in the form of my grandmother’s looping handwriting, but the project of chronicling my father’s family quickly supplied a new one – postmarked West Palm Beach. Grandpa Pug – Pugliese, that is, my dad’s dad, my name, my family – sent me the story of his parents, which I had never heard. My dad knows, or says, very little about his grandparents. But suddenly I was the proud owner of a great-grandfather from southern Italy and, even better, a great-grandmother who was a pied noir. What that meant I, at twelve, was entirely unsure, but it meant Algeria and that was a brag I could play with. Again, through my father, I could claim a part of the world that was, at least as far as my friends were concerned, mine.

Glacier National Park stretches, a green icicle through northern Montana, all the way to the Canadian border. 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. 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.

I am worried. I am worried that you, not knowing my dad – not having heard his voice – won’t understand. That you won’t be able to see, and want to unfold, the crisp concentric layers that make him up – that I would die, am dying, am always dying to flick apart, as easily as he pulls apart sweet Maui onions for spaghetti sauce–

You can’t want to know them until, well, until you know my dad.

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 facebook 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. 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; 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.

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, he hadn’t gotten me anything back in July. But it wasn’t my trip. In fact, regardless of whether I went or not, Dad was going. With his girlfriend. But who passes up three weeks free in Europe?

I believe that he had no concept of how awkward it could be. But for a week and a half we drove through Tuscany in a not quite big enough Opel wagon – well, he drove, we jockeyed for the front seat. Then we hit Switzerland, and Dad, turning to her in the middle of the street that runs through the center of Grindelwald, beneath the dark mass of the Eiger, said, “You can’t come.” I wanted to stay in Switzerland forever.

The trail 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 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.

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 began to pay more attention to my Matthiessen.

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.

We are in the car – roadtrip. Me, my dad – and my brother. Dan’s new arrival on the scene – not his birth, but his growth, into a person, who thinks and speaks, who knows irony and who has moved beyond temper tantrums to the more subtle jabs of sibling rivalry – has pushed me into a new role. I am the second adult here, and I am the woman here with these two boys. Sometimes, I think, they are speaking in code, their abbreviated, bursting words taking me time to decipher. We are going to Utah, and they have been this way before. The car cuts down the road, a bottle green streak, and the ground by the side of the highway rushes by, a dizzy blur. Five, ten, thirty meters from the car though the land slows, like some invisible hand pressing back on the spinning disk, distorting its motion. The pale-hazed rim of peaks refuses to move closer. I ask how long of a drive we’re in for today. The sky shines blue, pale and polluted at the edges, but above us, above the brown, dented plain west of the White Mountains, it is clear and bright.

I am cross-legged in the front seat, no room for my feet in the rubble of guidebooks, water bottles and jackets erupted from my backpack. “Dad,” I say, “is it your turn for music?” I hope he will say yes – I hate to pick.
“Danno?” he says, looking in the rearview mirror to my brother in back.
Dan shrugs. “Where are we going?”
“All the way to Vegas today, man.”
“We’re staying in Las Vegas?” I say. I turn around the tall seat-back, raise an eyebrow at D. Las Vegas?
“Staying in Paris again?”
“New York, New York,” Dad says.
“Las Vegas?” I repeat outloud.

Apparently, Las Vegas is the only reasonable stopover on the way to Utah. Apparently, it was placed just so, by whoever placed it there, halfway between the East Gate of Yosemite and Moab’s Gonzo Inn, close enough to reach before dinner, just beyond where the square yellow signs – State Penitentiary Area: Please Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers – end.
“Gosh, Car,” says Dan.
I nod. “And so why are we driving north?”
“White Mountains.”
“Uh huh.”
“That’s where the bristlecones are.”
“Good,” I am not sure whether or not I should care.
“Gosh, Car.” Dan sticks his feet on the shoulder of my seat. A fraying gray sock heel brushes my ear. “Don’t you know about bristlecones?”
“Do you?” I know he hasn’t seen them either.
“Dan? Water. Thanks,” Dad sips, his head tilting back, his left thumb and forefinger an L on the wheel. “Oldest trees in the world, Car.”
“How old is old?”
“Pharaohs, Dan?”

D agrees. Clearly there is a reason to care. Clearly seeing something that was here five thousand years ago tugs at my dad – an opportunity not to be missed. Five thousand years. Before Christians and Jews were different people – or people at all. Before oceans were crossed in exploration and gluttony. Five thousand years ago is a time so far different from ours it may well have happened on another planet. It did. When I look at my Dad, I can feel it too. The tug, in the pit of somewhere behind my stomach – nothing about this world is the same as it was then, except these trees. These are George Schaller’s sheep, for him, this is Matthiessen’s leopard. I know it is, I see it in his face, in the glare of the sun coming in through the windshield from the mountain plain. And when I let it be, it is mine too. I learned the spiritual openness of the mountains from only my father. I put Who’s Next? into the CD player, move my feet to the dash. I flex my toes against the windshield. Look out at the rushing ground, and then up and out farther to the still, still peaks.
“Which pharaohs?” I say, waiting for the story to unfold.

I want to explore this strange secrecy. I want to look back at the most vivid memories I have of my father and me, most of which are in places of sublime – and humor ridden – nature. Because I also learned a love, a reverence, of the mountains from my dad, and that he knows. This summer I am heading off to Montana, to national parks and rock faces and white frothing rivers, and the locus for my first hiking memory. Montana is home, too, to several of the writers to whose books both my father and I find ourselves drawn. What are these books about? What do I see in them? And if I read them for him, why can I never tell him about them?

They are talking around the table. It is, I suppose, only right for a dinner party – but certainly a table was made for better uses. I set this one groaning, candlelight dripped onto my roast and carrots, the sweet glazed onions, moved closer – the candles bent lower to the table – over trifle and biscuits, each lovingly formed and glazed and coaxed golden. I made them. I made them and sent them out, along with their cognac, ridiculously served in the Admiral’s favorite wine goblets.

They are not eating them.

Captain Wentworth is speaking, this is why. They discuss it – is it bad luck to take a woman on board or simply not comfy enough for her? Apparently any vessel is comfortable enough for a wife. Ann flinches at the talk of marriage, the talk of love and that un-met woman he would risk all to take on board. The young ones twitch and flitter, touching their hands to their plates like moths. They laugh horribly, their eyes too wide and their mouths open much too wide. It is better – even I will admit it – that they have not been eating the crisping cookies.

“We ate sandwiches.” Again, it is the Captain. They can talk of food but not eat it, apparently. No, now they have moved on. “The year six,” he says. “Yes, well I had no wife, in the year six.” Ann shifts again, leans to the Admiral, looks at her plate. Eat them, dear. They will help.

I am crossed-legged in the front seat, no room for my feet in the rubble of guidebooks, water bottles, and jackets erupted from my backpack. “Dad,” I say, “is it your turn for music?” I hope he will say yes – I hate to pick.

“Danno?” he says, looking in the rearview mirror to my brother in back.

Dan shrugs. He is indifferent – and the only singer he knows is Weird Al. “Where are we going?” he says.

“All the way to Vegas today, man.”

“We’re staying in Las Vegas?” I say. I turn around the tall seat-back, raise an eyebrow at D. Las Vegas?

“Can we stay in Paris again?”

“New York, New York,” Dad says.

Now I turn to my father. Ask him to explain. Apparently, Las Vegas is the only reasonable stopover on the way to Utah. Apparently, it was placed just so, by whoever placed it there, halfway between the East Gate of Yosemite and Moab’s Gonzo Inn, close enough to reach before dinner, just beyond where the square yellow signs – State Penitentiary Area: Please Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers – end.

“Gosh, Car.”

I nod, ignoring my brother, who, though his voice has not yet broken, still manages to achieve mature disdain in those few words. “And so why are we driving north?”I say.

“White Mountains.” Dad lifts a finger from the wheel and indicates the hazy peaks.

“Uh huh.”

“That’s where the bristlecones are,” he says.

“Good?” I am not sure whether or not I should care.

“Gosh, Car.” Dan sticks his feet on the shoulder of my seat. A fraying gray sock heel brushes my ear. “Don’t you know about bristlecones?”

“Do you?”

“Dan, pass me the water?” Dad says. “Thanks.” He sips, his head tilting back, his left thumb and forefinger an L on the wheel. “Oldest trees in the world, Car.”

“How old is old?”

“Pharaohs, right Dan?”

D agrees. I put Who’s Next? into the CD player, move my feet to the dash. I flex my toes against the windshield. Look out at the rushing ground, and then up and out farther, to the still, still peaks.

“Which pharaohs?” I say.

From Schoenefeld, you must take the train into Berlin proper. Down a long curving sidewalk, shielded from the jet wind by metal siding, decorated with Ryanair ads. If you turn and look back you will see a relic tank, though the soldiers who flank it are real enough. Rising behind it, on the other side of the terminal building, is an El Al jet. They fly here from Israel? A stupid question, but you, together, will ask it outloud. Between the jet and the tank – a universal mediator that makes you feel somewhat better about the situation – stands a brown-papered breakfast shack, a portable like the kind that littered your high school, housed countless classrooms while campus was under construction year after year. Using the scraps of German you remembered from odd conversations with your dad about his own school years, you had managed “Svei kaffee, bitte,” and then beat a hasty, though gratified, retreat with your potent European caffeine.

The train. To get to the train you must go down, down steps that are perfectly square. Flat and even and clean. Store-fronts sell subway fare. The floor is stain-free and a warm sepia red that radiates comfort. Everywhere people with bags are walking up stairwells – wide, wide stairwells – grand entrances to the tracks above. To your right, a small line forms behind two black machines. You shrug to your companion; you join the line. No one rests their bags on the floor, the pace is too quick for it, and you are at the front of the line. You think. Two men, one by either machine, still stand there. In uniform. Is it- you step- They are leftovers from the World Cup and they smile, greet you in German and in English, show you where to enter your money, ask you how long you will stay for, and tell you how much to enter. They hold your coffee, your bags, while you search for the right change. They compliment your hat, wish you a beautiful visit and usher you up, up the grand staircase to your awaiting train.

Remember, mein kinder, this is also the land that coined the word mensch.