The Source of All Things (26 page)

If Colin had been a cartoon character, smoke would have started billowing out of his ears. He went to the closet and started packing a small, yellow duffel with rock-climbing gear and a sleeping bag. I thought for a second that maybe he was going to trust me enough to give me a little space and freedom. But I must have wanted it too badly, because he turned around and said, “Ahhh, now I see what you're up to. I know your
friend
. It's that kid from British Columbia. I know exactly what you're trying to do. You want me to leave so you can have him over and fuck his brains out. You'll wiggle your ass just like you did to me. I'm not stupid. Pack your gear. You're coming with me.”

This time, I let my parents buy me a plane ticket back to them: was there another choice?

I'd sold my car, was living at “home,” and had lost most, if not all, of the self-confidence I'd built up before meeting Colin. So when he called, saying he'd spent several weeks rethinking our relationship and that he had come to realize how truly special I was to him, I let him back in. I was nothing but a recidivist, and the pattern was now entrenched. I asked my parents if he could come live with us, and they said yes, for a little while.

Two weeks later, Colin was back in America. And two months after that, he was hounding me to get married. He said if we didn't, he'd never be able to make money. If he tried to work without a visa, he'd be deported. Believing his claims that I'd “seduced” him back to the States, I agreed to marriage. I also believed I had no other options. We went to the courthouse in downtown Las Vegas on February 23, 1996, and signed our names on the dotted line of the King County marriage certificate. A date was set for two weeks later.

It just so happened, though, that Mayz, the angel from Twin Falls, was coming through Las Vegas. For years, she had sent me cards, bought me presents, and prayed for my well-being. We'd kept in touch through letters while I went to Interlochen and Cornish; Mayz kept all of mine in an extra-wide Manila envelope, which she eventually sent me. Now she was coming to visit, and I had to tell her about my wedding.

Never was a marriage undertaken with less hope but more fatalism. Mayz knew something was wrong the second I answered my parents' phone. Her husband, Steve, was attending a conference, and she said she wanted to see me. We agreed to rendezvous at a Catholic church near the strip, with sculptures on the outside that looked like Power Rangers. Neither of us thought I should bring Colin.

Just seeing Mayz always made me want to crawl into her lap and start bawling like a little baby. She was the one person I believed wanted only good things for me. I knew when I told her about Colin she'd be shocked. She'd met him—and disliked him—before we went to Scotland. The second I sat down next to her, a water main burst behind my eyelids.

“I'm sorry,” I said.

Mayz stared at me, surprised.

“Sorry for what, honey? You have nothing to apologize to me about.”

“Yes, I do. Because I didn't tell you about the wedding.”

“What wedding?”

“
My
wedding,” I continued. “Colin and I are getting married.”

Mayz stared at me for a good long while, slowly shaking her head. She looked at the cross of Jesus at the front of the church, suspended over a bright gold tabernacle. When she finally spoke, her voice sounded grave and serious. “I know you, Tracy,” she said. “You don't seem happy. Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

“I have to,” I said. “Colin's counting on me.”

But Mayz didn't agree that I couldn't get out of my marriage. Holding my hand, she looked into my face with her beautiful nut-brown eyes. “Please tell me that you won't go through with this if you don't want to,” she said. “Because you don't have to, Tracy. You don't.”

“Why not?” I cried.

“Because no one can make you do something if you don't want it. Not if you don't give them power over you.”

“But Colin
does
have power over me,” I said. “He's counting on me. He'll kill me if I back out of the wedding now.”

Mayz put one arm around my shoulder. She grabbed my hand in her free hand. I sobbed quietly, tried to keep my hiccuping to a minimum in case other people were praying. As she held me, she whispered, “Colin can't kill you, honey. No one can. If you do this it has to be because
you
want to.
You
count for something, Trace. I want you to believe that.”

Because I didn't believe her, I had nothing to say.

Mayz continued. “I want you to tell me one thing, Tracy. Let it be the first thing that comes to your mind. What do
you
want? Try hard and tell me if you can see it.”

I closed my eyes and waited for a picture to form in the oxbows of my grey matter. It wasn't hard, because I'd often dreamed this dream. What I wanted was so simple anyone could have had it.

“All I want … is to live in the mountains. With a dog, and a job that lets me do things. I could work at a health food store. And ride my bike, all the time. I'll ride through meadows full of wildflowers. And I'll write poetry. I doubt it'll ever happen, but it'd also be nice to find someone who actually loved me.”

I wish Mayz would have called my mom right that minute and told her to come get me. The two of them could have packed me up and Mayz could have taken me back to Twin Falls. But I believed that I'd gotten myself into another mess that I couldn't possibly get out of. There were too many people counting on me. My mom had already bought me a $50 dress from the Gap.

Two months after the wedding, Colin and I moved back to Alaska. This time we went to the town of Talkeetna, which had four hundred year-round residents but swelled to five times that in the summer, when climbers from around the world congregated there to climb 20,320-foot Mount McKinley. I got a job in a small liquor shop-slash-grocery store, Nagley's, and Colin found work as a raft guide. We spent our first several weeks camping in a tiny, two-person mountaineering tent at the end of the town airstrip. While
Colin kept busy showing our new neighbors—climbing guides, commercial fishermen, and Denali National Park rangers—how to do things they'd been doing for decades, I got to know the local color.

One of them in particular stood out. He was a soft-spoken raft guide with scraggly brown hair and eyes the color of blue glass. He looked to be twenty-two or twenty-three to my twenty-six years on the planet. When he walked into Nagley's, he instantly gave me a spark. He introduced himself—Shawn Edmondson—and said he worked with Colin at Talkeetna River Guides. He and his giant black malamute, Tank, had driven up the Alcan from the University of Montana, but he had no intention of returning to school at the end of the summer. Once the snow flew, he and Tank would head to the ski slopes of Colorado.

The boy with the cobalt eyes lodged in my mind and wouldn't leave me. He continued dropping by Nagley's, where he'd reward himself after a long day of guiding with a freezer-cold bottle of beer. If we were alone in the store, we'd stand in front of the cooler with the doors swung wide and let the icy air cool our bodies. Shawn told me he'd grown up ski-racing in Connecticut and that he'd been raised solely by women, including his mom, grandmother, and two sisters, Courtney and Shannon. The way he spoke of them—half smiling, half complaining, but with obvious respect—made me instantly trust him. When he talked about the one thing in his life that was missing—a girl who loved the mountains and skiing as much as he did—I wanted to reach across the counter where the cash register sat and grab him. “I'm that girl,” I wanted to shout. “Say the word and I'll run away with you!” But we never made it that far in our conversations. We'd talk until the
glass on his beer bottle started to sweat and then, brushing fingertips against palms in the exchange of money for a buzz, smile and say, “
Good-bye, take care, I'll see you again sometime.
”

During my days
off, I rode my bike, picked blueberries, and stood on the banks of the Susitna River, staring at Mount McKinley and dreaming of the day I might climb it. But every night I had to go home to Colin. Even though we were newlyweds, he treated me like I was going to run off on him any second. I might have sent the subliminal signals; in a vague, uncertain way, I was already planning my escape.

In October, with money from my parents, we bought two acres of birch- and spruce-studded property outside of Talkeetna and built a tiny cabin on it. I helped with the construction and cared for our growing team of huskies. Though we could barely afford to feed ourselves, Colin was collecting dogs like another person might collect expensive shoes or foreign money. On my days off from Nagley's I pounded nails and swept the job site until one day, when I was having trouble hammering together a two-by-four, Colin screamed—driving all interest in helping out of me.

“Need a hand?” he said. He was standing behind me, watching my progress.

“I think I'm okay,” I answered.

“Fucking hell, woman. I didn't ask if you were okay. I asked if you need a hand.”

My ears burned. I slowly put down the hammer and took off on my bike.

But from that point on, Colin's temper started flaring up so often and unexpectedly that I began constantly guarding myself against it. A friend who knew me then says she thought of me as two different people inhabiting one body. She says when I was alone, I was gregarious, creative, and joyful, but when Colin came near me, I became visibly smaller and constricted. She was right on both counts: my new neighbors brought out the best in me, but when Colin's shadow came over me, I withdrew into myself. Once the cabin was built, I did everything I could to stay away from the tiny confinement, overpowered by Colin's emotionally demanding presence. I worked back-to-back shifts at Nagley's, built a small network of women friends, and started teaching yoga at the Talkeetna Community Center.

I only knew what I'd learned in my book
Yoga for Runners
, but in those days in Talkeetna, it didn't matter if you were an expert. My students came to me needing an antidote to the poundings their bodies took while chopping wood, wrenching on Cessnas, and hauling tons of live crab out of Cook Inlet's marathon commercial netting sessions. I led the hardened men and women through carefully planned asanas, teaching them simple poses like Mountain, Triangle, and Warrior. Afterward, I relaxed their minds and bodies with soft-spoken guided meditations. I was never paid for my time, but my students more than reimbursed me with gifts from their various trades. They brought me grocery bags stuffed with two-foot-long king crab legs, mittens knitted with homespun husky fur, and, from the famous bush pilot and musician Doug Geeting, huge jars of cantaloupe juice that tasted better than any milkshake I'd ever sipped.

My yoga practice was also helping me. Moving in the heat of my wood stove, I'd bend and flow while the sweat of a million bad memories dripped from my pores and onto the floor. The slow, meditative movement calmed me; it allowed me to drop in to my feelings for the first time ever. Always before, I'd run, climbed, hiked, and skied away my fears. With yoga, I found a way to experience my emotions.

And what I felt was that old, profound sadness that lived in each of my cells. It was dense and heavy, like mercury or chocolate pudding. But what surprised me was how much I liked my sorrow, which seemed like the single most important thing about me. Few people I knew had been to places as dark as I had. I figured my journey to hell had made me better able to empathize with others' suffering.

It extended beyond me, to a neighbor named Krista Maciolek, who, in January of 1997, asked me to help her train her sled dogs for the 1,161-mile Iditarod race. Krista was brave and afraid; her boyfriend, Pecos, was dying of cancer. To deal with it, she was preparing herself for the second-toughest race on earth; I recognized that, like me, she was pushing herself to the physical extreme in order to process her anguish. I helped by feeding her dogs, stringing them on the gangline in front of her sled, and handling for her at races. Occasionally, during training runs, I mushed my own team of dogs behind her.