Passage West

Dearest and Closest,

Oklahoma stretched like a wide, bendy rubber band, undulating in the prairie winds. I could see bright, vibrant greens, parched yellows, red dirt, scrubby trees, farmhouses shielded by copses of trees and little crops of trailers, built so closely together they are almost one unit, hovering in protection from the wind. When I stood outside in that wind I felt the relentlessness of having your ears boxed by nature and the anxiety wind howling ceaselessly must have created for the pioneers.

Dan let me drive for the first time of the trip and let himself sleep for an hour, finally. With M. asleep behind me and Dan konked out next to me, Hopper looking out the window and Van Morrison on the ipod, I was finally able to literally feel the journey we are making. This is no simple trip. It’s a journey back home, sure. But it’s more than that. It’s a voyage imbued with so many different emotions that coalesce into an almost ritualistic passing into a phase of adulthood until now not yet reached. This is the first deliberate step I’ve ever made that does not factor my career and ambitions into it. The major factor is our son, the fact that the bottom fell out for us in LA and that as a family we have to do what’s best for us together. That’s a new thing. Very different than the choices I fuzzily leaned into as a single woman. Or the choices Dan and I energetically made together. This is about something bigger than our wants and likes or dislikes—it’s survival on a basic level, it seems, and not just ours. In fact, our survival feels almost incidental to our son’s.

I drove Dan crazy for the last six weeks we were in LA. I knew we were making the right decision in so many ways, but like all decisions, I hated the finality it. I like to wiggle on decisions. I like to look endlessly at all angles. Dan likes to make a decision and then plan accordingly. I wanted to fiddle with this one even when I knew in my bones what we needed to do. I guess there’s a part of me that rejects that any of this could be happening to us—and that’s the part I’ve had to get over. Maybe that’s the humility lesson.

Passing through the southwest I saw the savagery of our economy in every town we stopped in. In Flagstaff shops closed, boarded up, stores selling everything 75% off. In Albuquerque, the same thing. When I talked to people they said it was bad. Every time I passed a car or truck loaded to the gills with stuff and pulling a U-Haul I wondered if those people, too, finally had to pack it in and head somewhere they could touch ground. I’ve needed the camaraderie of that thought, at least.

In Oklahoma City Dan got BBQ. We went to a place called Earl’s that reminded me of Norm’s in Portland because it’s one guy who’s hit on something that does really well and has opened five of his BBQ places all in the same city within miles of each other. I always thought Norm Jabbar’s hubris was a certain form of insanity specific to him alone. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is just insanely brilliant business.

While Dan slept I crossed the Oklahoma Arkansas border and for the for the first time since last summer when I was back east, I saw everywhere around me lush, beautiful green. The Ozark Mountains looked almost blue to my left and all around me the grass was green and the trees covered with soft buds and little leaves. Small farms with black earth and horses and cows dotted both sides of the highway. Arkansas felt so gentle after the hard red dirt and scrub of the desert and the southwest, the winds of the prairie.

Maybe it was just because I was in Where the Red Fern Grows territory, but something felt like I had been in this part of Arkansas before. I looked over to see a horse flit its tail and it reminded me of they way Ellison would flick hers as punctuation to something I’d say. For instance I’d say “I love you,” and she’d look at me, heavy lidded, purring and flick her tail “I know. I love you, too.” Ferns, I’ve decided, are what I need to plant on her grave because of their soft flickery movements.

We stopped in a small town to get gas and look for somewhere to eat and put M. to bed. We went into a place called “Western Sizzler,” which is a chain in these parts, to see what they had—it was the only place in town and we wanted out of the car. Around us regular people doing their regular lives sat at booths and small wooden tables eating from the buffet and saying “hi” to their neighbors. As we stood looking at the food and trying to decide if we could deal with the picked over salad bar and “cobbler bar,” an older man, a working man, in big blue overalls turned around with a bowl of peach cobbler and saw M. A huge smile came over his face and he said “Hi lil’ bit!” in a voice that had genuine kindness, but more importantly, joy in it.

Putting M. in his pjs and strapping him into the car set—although he resists it and finds it lonely back there—makes me think about how things flip when you become an adult. I’d do anything right now to be able to get into some snuggly pjs and get strapped into a car seat and not have to worry about anything. But that’s the thing—we always realize way too late how much we wanted something.

Tonight we’re staying in Memphis. Tomorrow it’s Graceland and then Nashville. Then up the East Coast. As we drove tonight, M. slept in his car seat facing the back of the car, surrounded by his little toys and his little white bear with a black nose and black eyes. Hopper slept next to him, stretched out, his head on the side of Marsy’s seat, reminding me of Juliet’s nurse in the great play.

Hopper Dan and M. are all ready to get out of the car and get this part over with. I want to journey to continue because the uncertainty of the other end looms large. But I’ve never been great with change and have always done best in motion. As Tennessee Williams writes in The Glass Menagerie I’m always “…attempting to find in motion what was lost in space.” And that may be my greatest strength and also my greatest weakness.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, Hopper and M.

Dearest and Closest,

We’re in Oklahoma. And I don’t see Hugh Jackman anywhere. This is very disappointing.

Yesterday we drove across Arizona, through a corner of the Navajo Nation and on to Albuquerque where we spent the night in a room that smelled of some horrible air “freshening” cleanser. Going across the Indian Reservation made so many things clear to eyes that had not yet witnessed the truth: First that the government couldn’t have given a more arid, desolate, impossible seeming patch of land to the Indians. Secondly, how one survives emotionally in sun that intense and wind that forceful is unclear--the sun and the wind just pound you all day long, it’s relentless.

All along the road here are billboards with large drawings of Indian chiefs that announce "Pottery made by REAL Indians" or "Straight from the Indian Factory" or "Two Navajo Blankets for 12$." After all that work only 12 bucks? Sometimes these places selling Indian wares share a parking lot with a casino all lit up like a Christmas tree and of course the tarmac in front of the casino is packed with eighteen wheelers.

Perhaps the most indicative image of some of this country is a strip of barren land with a beat up road running through it and along its sides are blank billboards that give no message, encourage nothing to sell and have every so often hand written messages that say things like "For Lease call 888-9900" or "McCain/Palin The Best Vote For America."

Today we drove from Albuquerque to a town in Texas called Amarillo where Dan hoped we’d get some BBQ, a desire which diminished after we drove by a large beef farm that teemed with steers awaiting their demise in damp manure covered paddocks, not a blade of grass in sight. So, we ended up, after passing franchise after franchise, at the Olive Garden eating salad and bread sticks. It's ridiculous, I know. I even remembered reading somewhere about amazing BBQ in Amarillo. But after about 25 minutes of driving around with M. screaming in the car and finding only some boarded up shops and restaurants, and a strip with everything from Wendy's to Chili's, we ended up eating something made in a huge plant in Kansas. After that we crossed the rest of Texas and started coming across Oklahoma.

M. continues to be very patient with his parents. We’re having to do bed time in the car seat so we can put some tracks down across this enormous country of ours. Yesterday Deputy Dan started mumbling again about airplanes and how if this took us two weeks to get across the country we’d all lose it. So it worked out that we are now changing M. into his pj’s in the car, reading a few stories, singing a few songs and back he goes to his little island in the darkness behind us and before we know it he’s asleep. This morning we worked around his schedule, playing and nursing and walking around Albuquerque until he was so tired his eyes were hanging off his face and we put him in the seat and took off, getting a good number of miles under our belt before stopping to eat and nurse and cuddle and do bedtime all over again in the car. This is sort of like camping, in that everything we need, except food, is all right here in the car. And when I say everything, I unfortunately mean everything. The amount of stuff we have which Dan has to unpack and pack again each stop makes him very tense. According to him we have enough diapers to go on a safari—it’s as if we thought no one anywhere sells diapers. We have outfits for every eventuality, a bouncy seat, a jungle gym thing with brightly colored animals made in China that hang around M. and he bats at them (I have no idea what it’s called), two comforters and two pillows because we learned on our last trip never to cross the country expecting to use any blankets in hotels, Hopper’s bed, Dan’s cameras, my recording equipment, my jewelry and various other odds and ends which are packed ever so tightly into our little Prius making us feel padded to the gills with the fuselage of our lives. We also have snacks.

But despite all this stuff, the car feels empty. Ellison should be here and when you remember she isn’t, it’s like being punched in the stomach. She loved to travel in the car and just knowing that makes her absence sting. Hopper is depressed and is not totally sure where he fits in our pecking order now that Ellison is no longer his alpha; we’re not the merriest bunch.

Tonight, the wind is coming across the desolation of Oklahoma with a force I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced, even in Maine. It whips right through you and rather than being exciting is lonely making—or maybe it’s just me. We’re in a dreary Holiday Inn not far from Oklahoma City. Tomorrow Dan wants to make it to Little Rock. Memphis and Nashville loom like beacons of exciting light in our trip future.

And then on up the East Coast and home again.

Love, Caitlin, Dan, M. and Hoppy.

Dearest and Closest,

Ellison died yesterday. We left California today.

You don’t know how a death will affect you, really, until it happens. That’s the surprising thing. Even if, as in my case with Ellison, you’ve played it out a million times in your nightmares. But there is a moment in the suffering of someone you love when you wish for it to be over. Then, when it’s over, you’d give anything for five minutes back with that being—even five minutes of suffering—so you could say and do all of the things you forgot or were too shocked by what was happening to do.

To say I feel like shrapnel went through my organs does not begin to explain the pain. We had planned to leave yesterday and were still hoping we could make it safely home with all five of us. But Monday night Ellison slipped into such inconsolable suffering that after a long bone wearying night where Dan and I tried everything we could think of to ease her pain, we made the most difficult decision of our lives to date. To tell it would be too hard. There are no words really. And, also, to tell it would betray something so private between Ellison, myself and Dan that it would hurt so much more in the telling that I would find no relief in the release. All I can say is what I feel: This is the kind of grief that makes you cry with your mouth gaping open, that makes you gasp for air as if you’re trapped in a plastic bag.

Later, yesterday, as Dan cleaned her bowls and wept, I took Hopper and M. for a walk around the canals and a small gray hummingbird, silken and shiny like my dear Ellison, flew so close to me I could have reached out my pinky and touched it. It hovered at one bird of paradise flower, then flew to another right next to me, hovered some more, totally unafraid of Hopper or myself. Then it did a little circle in the air and disappeared. Do I believe in these kinds of things? Right now my insides are so hollow I’d give anything to.

Ellison, named for Ralph Ellison, but by no means as invisible as his most famous character, a gray, silken, big eared, green eyed, witty, obnoxious, fierce, beautiful, gentle, brilliant, true and perfect being in a world full of flaws, will always be with me. We hung her two most recent collars from the rearview mirror; I put a tag of hers on my necklace. We are driving with her bed and a basket of her toys, her leash and halter, her favorite raven’s feather. This is all we have of her. Her body will come as ashes in about a week. But that’s not enough, of course. Leaving without her alive is terrible enough. Leaving her body behind almost killed us.

Last night, wearied to the bone and swollen with grief, we stayed in a hotel in Santa Monica. We didn’t actually hit the road this morning until after twelve. Exactly a year ago we drove into Los Angeles listening to Solomon Burke’s song Millionaire and singing to it, full of hope and big dreams. Today we drove out on the I-10 playing the same song and singing a tonally different tune:

“Some say love is more precious than gold, it can’t be bought and it can’t be sold. I got love, love to spare and that makes me a millionaire.”

All either of us could think about was the love Ellison gave us. And also that Los Angeles ate us up. And took a casualty which we will never forgive it for taking.

We drove for exactly one hour and nine minutes before M. started screaming from the back seat and then we stopped for an hour and forty-five minutes while Deputy Dan got very grumpy about our rate of travel and mumbled some threats about M. and me needing to get on a plane. But we got back on the road and made the best of the next naptime. Hopper snuggled in and put his chin on the lip of M.’s car seat, and a toy our friend Laura gave us with some bumble bees twirling to a Chopin nocturne played endlessly into the gloaming.

In the middle of the Mojave Desert we got off to get gas and passed a young couple that had run out of gas and were walking in the relentless heat to the gas station. When Dan came out of the convenience store, the young man, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, walked towards him and I saw this look of such shame, such total self hatred come over his face, my heart went out to him as I saw him ask Dan if he had any money for gas. Broke and stranded in the middle of the desert is not a place anyone wants to be. Dan gave him thirteen dollars to fill his gas container and patted him on the back.

Tonight we’re in Arizona and will push on tomorrow to New Mexico. Our son sleeps so peacefully, so without the heaviness that we carry right now, we are so grateful to have his light, trusting, gentle little body in our midst. He alone can save us.

Love, Dan, Hopper, M., and Caitlin. And to the memory of our dearest Ellison.

Dearest and Closest,

In the middle of the Laura Ingalls Wilder series, at the beginning of By the Shores of Silver Lake, Pa starts packing up his family—now Laura, Mary, baby Carrie, Ma and their dog, Jack, whom they’ve had for all of Laura’s years and who walked underneath their covered wagon from Wisconsin to the Prairies to Plum Creek, who defended them with Pa against any number of dangers, who followed Laura and Mary all over the countryside. Jack takes a look at the wagon packed with all their things and goes back inside their dug out house and lies down in his bed. The next morning he’s dead. He just didn’t have another journey in him.

We leave in four days.

And Ellison, I’m afraid, might not have another journey in her. Dan has been packing up our things for a little over two weeks now, a box or two a night, so carefully like he always does, making a log which lists everything in each box and labeling each one with a number and then “glass” or “Updike” or “R. Ford.” And maybe it is the strain of seeing those boxes mount to the ceiling once more that’s just enough to make her heart twist and thicken. I don’t know. Maybe I just want it to be someone’s fault, mine. What we do know is that early this week she came into the bathroom like she always does to sit on the toilet during M.’s bath and we noticed her breathing was labored. The next day I took her to the Vet and he pumped her chest for the second time in two months. M. and I went to pick her up and when they brought her out and I leaned down to say hi to her, M. hanging off my chest, he grinned at her and sucked in his breath at the recognition of someone that was not just any cat, but his cat. She came home drugged, unable to walk properly, nervous and thirsty but unsure of where the water was so she would immerse her whole chest and feet in the water bowls just to feel it was there and then lick her paws. Once she walked over to Hoppy’s water bowl and got almost completely inside it and he looked it me like “Mom?” and I said “It’s ok Hoppy” and a look of such sadness and love for Ellison came over his face while he watched her—it was almost human. No, better than human.

I’ve told her: I need you to get home. I need you to go outside on my mother’s lawn one more time. I need you to sit in front of the woodstove. I need you to see a bird outside. I need you to do this for me: Just make it across the country. I don’t know if she can. She looks at me with such regret. But the regret is all mine. L.A. is a horrible place to be sick, to die. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It is a place for the strong of heart and those who are too stupid to be weak. I want her home before she lets go.

Ellison has been game for so much—from that first day she ran to me from underneath a truck in Providence and threw her body into mine, putting her arms around my neck, I knew she was mine unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced except maybe with M.—but even then that was more like “I can’t believe he’s mine.” She’s been right there in the mix with every move—ready to make a new place to sleep and a new place to play with her toys. For thirteen years I’ve had her—in apartments all over this country with roommates and boyfriends. Once, even, in an apartment in NYC infested with mice where she kept me up night after night killing every mouse that dared breath in our space. In Dan she found true love and was besotted with him in a way that made me horribly jealous because she chose to sleep on him more often than me and would look at him with such adoration I’d want to punch him.

After she had her heart pumped in February she made an amazing recovery and wanted to be on the bed next to M. all the time. One night she slept on top of him—until I pulled her off. She wanted to sniff him and purr at him and even earlier this week she pulled out her toys in the morning and played next to him when he played with his. Tonight she lies listless in the bottom bunk of his little crib, the two of them breathing in sync.

Of course, I’m not in charge of this. And the truth of that makes me sick like someone has punched me in the stomach.

M. is going through a phase where he wants to be held constantly. I put him down and he fusses. I want to hold Ellison, lie next to her, sleep next to her, and yet, it’s like there isn’t enough room in the day full of M. and packing and Hopper and a career. How does a life get like this? Where there is no room to say goodbye? How did my life get like this?

Tonight she became disinterested in eating even though I have an assortment of bowls laid out for her of anything from tuna to cat food to raw turkey to roast beef to shrimp (her favorite). And I fear, in the words of Maxine Kumin, her ground time here will be brief.

Dan and I have had to discuss things I can’t imagine—what happens if she dies on the road? Would it be better or worse to fly with her? Is it a good idea to fly an 11 week old on an airplane? Are we insane driving these two? What should we do? What can her heart literally handle? What can we handle?

M. has started sucking his thumb with his little fingers crooked around his nose. He makes outrageous sucking noises. Every day his eyes get deeper and bluer like the widest most profound sea I’ve ever seen. As of yesterday he was almost 15 pounds and over 25 inches long. He’s growing out of everything, overnight it seems. One day a pair of overalls fits and then the next I can’t button them. Keeping up is hard.

Anyway. I’ll write again when we hit the road. From here to there I don’t know what will happen—it’s all too fast and too strange, more like a dirty balloon deflating on the side of the macadam with a slow, soft, eking of air. To steal from Updike, I awake every morning with a distinct feeling that the bed is being tipped and I’m slipping. Into what I do not know.

You all at home, you’re the prize our eyes are trained on. Love, Ellison, M., Hopper Caitlin and Dan.

Dearest and Closest,

There must come a point in a person’s bad luck story when the reader, you, thinks, What’s wrong with these people?

Ah, dear reader, you may have hit that point months ago—perhaps when insane Claire threatened to kill our unborn child? Or was it when you’d had enough of my many colored descriptions of puking and wanting to puke? Or of Hopper’s journey back East on the plane which almost killed him? Or maybe around the same time I described my birth in great (although not entire—I could have said more) detail?

Well, there’s more. And, yes, what’s wrong with these people indeed? What was wrong with Job, I guess, one might ask too. I’m not ninny enough to suggest that we’re having it as bad as Job—I hope it doesn’t get to that point—but I would describe our story as Jobian (to throw around an Ivy League term), for sure.

First, I will tell you this: We’re coming home. That shall save the suspense and also satisfy readers like my mother who has always skipped ahead and read the end of a book long before she deserves to.

But let me back up. In the last month since I’ve written, M. has grown great guns. As of today he was 13.4 pounds! He’s 24 inches long and already growing out of his footed PJ’s which, oddly, makes me sort of sad, not soccer mom proud like some new moms who flaunt milestone detail after milestone detail with such high pitched and competitive pride, you get sweaty palms just listening.

It’s all going too quickly. Soon he’ll be taking some girl in a JC Penney’s dress that barely covers her important parts to a Prom I’d rather he not go to at all and maybe even trying some wacky weed behind the gym with one of his stoner friends whom he knows I would rather he not fraternize with. It all feels too close for comfort. But revel in his growth we must, because this is the biggest, fastest, change that will ever happen in my life—M. growing, growing, growing and myself getting older and even old. Life, death, change—all inextricably entwined in a way I never once before felt.

On March first we sent our landlord a letter telling her we needed to go by April first. With still no work on the horizon and literally hundreds of job applications later, Dan has had it. With good reason. We have no income. And it’s not like working for NPR is going to save us—I’m not yet Nina Totenberg. Although I plan to be some day so that my dear M. can feel something other than ‘what’s wrong with these people’ about me.

On March 2nd we discovered our apartment was riddled with mold. On our mattress, our bed frame, our clothes, our curtains. Mold. Black, furry, terrifying, spore making mold.

On March 3rd we had to rush Hopper to the Vet because he suddenly couldn’t walk. He miraculously made a full recovery as soon as we passed through the Vet’s doors and had imbibed a few treats and had many many kisses.

On March third Dan told me: “We’re done. We’re going now. We’re not waiting till the first. “

On March fourth—today—we started disinfecting and packing. I don’t know how long this will take us because we have a baby and a million things and are totally exhausted, but I know that Deputy Dan will make sure this happens presently. He wants to be home no later than the day we left, exactly one year ago, and, ideally, before. Like tomorrow. He’d like to fly and leave me and M. to sort this out. No, really: You know those stories about moms lifting entire cars off their babies? Well Dan will lift us out of here, no matter what it takes, even if it kills him.

We will ride caravan style. Me with the baby and Ellison (both screaming, I’m sure) and Dan with Hopper in a truck with our stuff. The Joads go home. For better or for worse.

We are headed to my mother’s as a landing place. From there all I want to do is go back to Portland and hit “Play” as if all this last year was stuck in some weird pause mode that was mostly anxiety dream and some kind of wonderful which created M. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think it was a wash at all. It was an experience. One that has aged me considerably and left me with a loose post baby middle, breasts which squirt every time a baby—any baby anywhere--cries, thick ankles, and a head ache that won’t quit, but an experience nonetheless.

I plan to get home and being again as if nothing happened. Please allow me this dignity.

Tonight we are sleeping in the living room—M. and I on a blow up mattress. Dan on the couch. Our mattress is sitting in the bedroom steeped in a mixture of tea tree oil and oxy clean with a friend’s dehumidifier drying it all out. Tomorrow Dan is packing our books.

I will let you know when we begin our trek. It will be a journey full of the anticipation of home, laden with some dashed dreams and broken hearts, buoyed up by the beautiful, perfect joy that is our son who might never have come to us without this passage west.

And so we beat on…boats against the current. Borne back ceaselessly into the past. (Ah—I finally found the perfect place to use that!)

With love,
M., Caitlin, Dan, Hopper and Ellison.