The Source of All Things (33 page)

Condensation, caused by my breath clouding my small non-breathable tent, kept sheeting off the ceiling and falling onto my face. Tiny daggers of ice pelted me, forcing me to think.

Deriding myself, I said that my quest was in vain; that
I
was vain for leaving Shawn, Scout, and Hatcher and hiking alone into the Sawtooths. Going into the backcountry solo was stupid, of this I had proof: just two months earlier a congressman's kid had gone missing on a solo hike. A search was mounted with helicopters, volunteer ground crews, and rangers all picking and flossing the granite teeth. There'd been no sight of him until a search dog got onto—and then lost—his scent. I was acting as selfishly as he had, and the stark reality was that if something happened—a bad fall, for instance, or an aneurysm—I could never see my family again. Worse yet, I would leave them, as my own father had left me, in a state of shock and anguished bewilderment. I shuddered at footsteps I thought I heard outside my tent. I tried to console myself, but all I wanted was to go home to my husband and sons.

Just before dawn, I couldn't wait any longer. I slid out of my bag and shoved my still-frozen tent into my pack. Jamming my feet into ice-cold boots, I began running, revolting against my own need for answers. The people I passed on the trail looked at me like I was a madwoman, maybe because I was. I knew then that the next time I returned to the Sawtooths, it would be with my dad.

F
or the first time in years, I am truly afraid. It's July 2007, and my dad and I sit at a picnic table on the far side of Redfish Lake. The boat we took to get here has left, along with the worried Texans who looked at my dad and me, shaking their heads. When we reached the edge of the lake, none of them bothered to help us. Even as they motored away, I thought I could hear their voices carrying across the water. “Where are those people headed?”

Today, my dad and I will hike through the yarrow-dotted hillsides, stopping every minute for Dad to catch his breath. We'll walk along a river full of slippery green rocks. When we come to a place where the water rushes over a natural slide made of granite, we'll stop, so I can take off my hiking boots and slide fifty feet into an emerald green pool. Dad will stop, shoot pictures, and take a deep slug of Gatorade. After I swim, climbing from the water dripping wet and freezing, I'll sit on a rock a few feet from my father. An awkward silence will rise up between us when my dad
offers—and then retracts his offer—to let me use his T-shirt as a towel to dry my skin.

Now we are heading into a mountain range that looks imposing and mean. When I talked to my dad months ago, separated by five hundred miles and a satellite signal, this trip seemed noble, necessary, and, in a twisted way, fun. This will be the first and last time we go on a multiday backpacking trip, just the two of us, in the place we love most on Earth.

I'm scared, because when I am with my dad, I am eight years old. We will walk for days up valleys covered in trees. We will camp in places so lovely we'll want to weep. Fish will rise to the surface of a dozen glassy lakes. And he might try to lie on top of me when I fall asleep.

“I've made some rules for myself,” he announces, then rattles them off. “I won't ask questions. I won't speak out of turn. I won't be vulgar or too descriptive. I won't get pissed off at you.”

I stare at him.
You won't get pissed at me?
I think.
What the hell is wrong with you?

Instead of denigrating him, I remind myself that my father is sixty-four going on sixteen. A week ago, at a party in Utah, he tried playing on a rope swing that hung out of a tree. When he caught the edge of his shoe on a root, he held on and scraped himself over some rocks, rubbing the flesh off of his knees. Now the scabs are deep, dark red, and crack open when he walks.

We continue hiking until we reach the sign for Alpine Lake. We've covered five miles and gained 2,500 feet, but our next campsite is still a mile away and another thousand feet higher. Dad looks weary, like he could lie down with his pack on and sleep until morning. The trail is becoming steeper with every step.
At the fifth switchback, he's fallen fifteen minutes behind me and I consider waiting, then clip along at my own pace. I know Dad is getting older and is out of shape and that in his condition he could be back there somewhere having a heart attack. I keep walking until I reach Alpine Lake.

That night, we set up camp, eat dinner, and drink a gallon of water. I slip away, hiding behind a tree to change into a clean pair of clothes. My dad heads down to the lake and casts for rainbow trout. I scoot my sleeping pad as far from his as possible, until I'm lying in the corner of the one tent we brought to share.

Even on this hike, I am still willing to capitulate against my best interests, my own damaged instincts. My instincts were damaged, along with my boundaries and my sense of personal protection and self worth, when I was abused. Scientists now say that children sustain lasting nerve damage when they are physically or sexually mistreated. It's taken unimaginable strength for me to come this far in my relationship with my father. I'm not going to berate myself for conceding to sleep in the same tent.

Nor will I forget, as I put my dad through the interrogation that's coming, that he has always been my father. When my mom was in danger of falling apart completely, he swooped in and brought joy to our lives. I spent too much time as a child worshipping this man who stole my innocence and almost ruined me. But I can't help myself. The weak places in my heart tell me that he, too, has suffered.

I'll never know the urges that existed inside him, driving him to prey on a cherub-faced near-baby. But I have seen him pay for it every day of my adult life. I also know things about him now that make his actions toward me somehow more understandable;
before our trip, he told me that he had been molested as a child. An older cousin sodomized him at a family gathering when my dad was five. It went on for years, said my dad, but he didn't think he was scarred by it. “It taught me that sex wasn't something you should be ashamed of,” he said. “It was how you showed your love.”

Twisted or not, he now sees the damage that he has created in me. The fact that he and my mom stayed together means that he gets to watch his damage play out, daily, on the one person he claimed to love more than anyone else in the world.

I know that I should hate him. But however flawed, weak, unforgivable, revolting, or treacherous it makes me, I can't. For better or worse, I believed him the one time he cried over his crimes against me. It was in the car after a bluegrass concert when I was twenty. And before that—before everything—there were the years at Redfish Lake. I hold those early memories with care, knowing they are like pressed wildflowers: if shaken too violently, they'll turn to dust.

Still, the tent is a terribly uncomfortable place. And so, this too becomes a crime, because one of backpacking's greatest virtues is that it makes instant bedfellows out of strangers and friends. When else do we lie side-by-side under a star-filled sky separated by a thin piece of nylon and a few cubic inches of down? In the tents of my past, I have fallen in love and whispered my greatest longings and dreams. I've huddled with friends while lightning flashed just inches from our heads. We have wept and laughed until we peed our pants, knowing that in the morning, we will have created a shared history at 10,000 feet. This is one of backpacking's true
beauties, beyond the stunning vistas and close encounters with wildlife: it creates an intimacy that transcends normal friendships and eludes even some of the best marriages.

This is the first time my dad and I will lie shoulder-to-shoulder since I was a teenager in Twin Falls. I will wear all my clothes and never really fall asleep.

The next morning, we pack up, eat breakfast, and head back down the switchbacks, which murder our knees. As we walk, my dad fills the silence I create. He reminisces about bird hunting with his friend Gary Mitchell and fishing for the eight-pound trout that used to feed on freshwater shrimp in Richfield Canal.

He sifts through his better memories, until we come to a big log on the side of the trail, where we break out our lunch. Then this: “I was sixteen the first time I killed a deer,” he says. Bob Murphy and Gary were there, when a four-point buck “that would have been an eight-point by eastern standards” walked into the crosshairs of his gun. When Dad pulled the trigger, he got so excited he started shaking uncontrollably. It was buck fever, and he had it bad.

“You can hardly grab your breath,” he says, grinning mischievously. “Just knowing that you can actually kill something—it's the height of excitement. It makes you weak in the knees.

“I got away from shooting does,” he says, “after I killed one with a fawn.” The fawn's cries echoed through the South Hills, and my dad couldn't stand the sound. So he put a bullet in its head.

We chat, nibble on sausage, and dry our sweaty shirts in the breeze. While they sway in the wind, we take off our boots and wade into a bottom-clear lake. The silence comes back, bigger than it has been all week. A giant rock leads into the water, then
drops off like a cliff. The fish are rising now, and my dad is following the ripples out to the weeds that line the lake. Watching him, I rehearse different ways to interrogate him when the time comes.

So, Dad. When was the first time you…

…abused me? (Too clinical. This isn't an after-school special.)

…touched me? (Too tactile. Might make him fantasize about me.)

…completely fucked up my bearings? Yes, that's it. That's how I'll start the conversation when we get to The Temple and he's so tired he can't retaliate. I join him down by the water. “Feels warm enough to swim,” he says.

Two days later, my dad and I finally reach The Temple. We're in the middle of the boulderfield that threatened to break us in half. Dad collapses the second we reach the altar. Sweat drenches his torso and his face looks punched and weak. Before we left the trail, he stopped to peer up at the stone minarets surrounding us. “Beautimus,” he whispered. I heard the bones cracking as he craned his neck.

Crouching behind him on the altar, I dig into my pack. This is the moment I've been waiting for: when the truth will shine down upon us and the heavens will break open beneath the weight of a million white doves. I take out my Dictaphone, test the battery, and push record, beginning the interrogation I've waited twenty-five years to enact. I have only four questions. The entire conversation will take less than twenty minutes.

The Truth in One Act

[The lights come up on a rock in the middle of a boulderfield. Don, a once athletic man in his mid-sixties, sits slightly in front of his stepdaughter, Tracy. She holds a reporter's tape recorder in front of his face.]