The Source of All Things (6 page)

At recess Jenny Harr and I played our favorite game, Little House on the Prairie. Like every six- and seven-year-old girl in 1977, we were fanatic about the nineteenth-century capers of our tomboy heroine, Laura Ingalls, and her soon-to-be blind sister, Mary. I always let Jenny play Laura, but only because, deep down, I knew I was the more convincing actress. At home, I was constantly begging my dad to play Pa, and had actually cajoled Grandma Liz (an expert seamstress, among everything else) into sewing me not one but
two
sets of matching gunnysack nightgowns, because I needed one for me and the other for my “sister” Mary (a king-size pillow that I'd stolen from my parents room and slept next to at night).

One day, I was sneaking bites of Milk Bones in the garage when I heard a voice call out, “Hey, half pint. You ready to go to market?” Amazed and confused, I replied, “Pa? Is that you?”

“Sure is, half pint,” answered my brother. “I have the wagon ready. Now get your lunch pail and come on board.”

Inside the wagon, Chris had placed a pillow, snacks, and my favorite sleeping bag, a gesture of rare, inexplicable kindness that, had I been older, would have raised a million red flags. But I was young and prone to bouts of loneliness, which made me only too eager to pretend. For weeks, I'd been strolling my Baby Alive
around the neighborhood, looking for someone to play with. But all my friends were either on vacation or more interested in playing indoors. And besides, in one corner of the wagon, tucked below the lip, sat a plastic cup full of milk and a stack of graham crackers—my favorite.

It was Indian summer, a Saturday, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Never before had my brother gone to such lengths to assist me in any game. His role had always been to ignore, tease, and berate me, then tickle me until I peed my pants. But now, the snack-filled wagon was ready, sitting at the top of our driveway. Chris helped me in and encouraged me to zip my sleeping bag up to my neck. I tucked my arms alongside my body while he worked the zipper up. Soon, the only thing sticking out of the bag was my face, shaded beneath the rim of my bonnet.

“You snug as a bug, half pint?” my brother asked. But there was no time to answer. Knocking on the box with a wooden stick, he yelled, “Git up now, horsies!” and pushed the wagon down the steep pitch of our driveway.

For the next twelve seconds, then, I was Laura Ingalls Wilder, rolling down a rutted wagon-train road on my way to Kansas City. I had my lunch pail (a plastic beach bucket) and my baby sister, Carrie (a Madame Alexander doll), next to me, and grand visions for the future. Sitting in front of us and guiding the horses was my one and only favorite and forever father, Pa, on the lookout for Mormons and marauding Indians.

It was the best twelve seconds of my life. And then, on the thirteenth second, I was crashing into the pavement at the end of the driveway, where grey cement met gravelly black tarmac. Rolling out of the wagon but still wrapped in my sleeping bag, I was
suddenly awash in a tornado of milk and graham crackers. Toys and dolls flew through the air, whacking me in the face and body. When I landed, I was head down in the gutter and already wailing. Footsteps pounded toward me, interrupted by the sound of my brother's cackling. And then, from the top of the driveway, another voice called out.

“Dammit, Chris, what the hell are you doing?” yelled Dad. “Can't you leave your sister alone for one single goddamn second? Get in the house—or I'll give you a beating.”

Dad's footsteps hustled down the driveway and stopped outside the wall of cardboard. He was still cussing, which scared me to death. I'd been at the receiving end of his belt-whippings before and fully expected him to lift up the box, rip off his belt, and whip me, like the time he'd found Chris and me shoving and hitting each other in the downstairs shower and spanked us until we were bawling. He didn't hit us often, but from time to time Chris and I could drive our dad to corporal punishment. I hoped today there would be no spanking.

There wasn't. My dad lifted me out of the gutter and wrapped me in his arms. The harder I cried, the tighter he held me, until it was time to go inside.

Even though we lacked the same genes, it seemed my dad came preprogrammed to protect me. The previous summer, when I could barely swim, the family had gone to Nat-Soo-Pah hot springs. After a few rounds of Jaws and seeing who could hold their breath underwater the longest, Dad got out of the pool to
change his clothes, leaving Chris and me under the watchful eye of our mom. Mom had never learned to swim, so I didn't take chances when she watched us. But for some reason, I decided I needed to prove how brave I was to my dad.

While Dad blow-dried his hair in the dressing room, Chris and I clung to the side of the pool, playing Motor Boat and pinching our noses. We probably farted in each other's direction. At some point, I got out of the water and migrated toward the deep end, careful not to slip on the slimy cement. I was perched above the ten-foot-deep mark when Dad stepped out of the change room and back into the pool area.

“Hey Daddy! Watch this!” I shouted and did a half cannonball into the water. Seconds later, when I came up for air and realized that my feet didn't touch the bottom, I started sinking. Fully clothed, in a pair of snug Levi's suspended by a King of Beers belt buckle, Dad dove in after me, outpacing the lifeguard on duty. I couldn't have been more thrilled by my dad's act of heroism, but when we surfaced, Dad was infuriated. “Why would you do that, Trace?” he shouted. “Why leap to your death when no one's looking?”

I'm sure my cheeks burned as I tried to come up with an answer. I hadn't meant to scare my dad, just wanted him to marvel at my bravery. But my leap had unleashed a shock of repressed terror through his veins. I didn't know then that his baby sister, Debbie, had died in the Wood River when she was three. A bank had collapsed beneath her and she slipped in. My then teenage father sprang into action, dropping his fly rod and jumping into the snowmelt-bloated rapids. But it was too late. The last time he saw Debbie alive she was disappearing under a tangle of logs in
the river. The last time anyone saw her, she was hanging from a grappling hook that my grandfather had used to comb her waterlogged body out of a deep, slow-moving eddy.

At the time, I didn't know the story of Debbie and the grappling hook. All I knew was that my dad always materialized when I was in danger. It felt nice to have someone big, strong, and handsome watching over me. I knew that what I had was as good as—or better than—what any of my friends had, even with their shared-blood daddies.

O
n September mornings during my seventh year, Dad, Chris, and I met Gary Mitchell and his daughter, Jeannie, at their farmhouse on the outskirts of Jerome. We drank hot chocolate and ate cinnamon rolls, then slinked along the irrigation canals where the pheasants hid in the sunflowers. Jeannie and I didn't carry guns; we were only little girls. But when our dads dropped a bird out of the bruised autumn sky, we hugged each other with pioneer pride. We strung our bounty on a wire and hoisted it over our shoulders, pulling out the tail feathers and pretending to sword fight.

Dad loved hunting with both of his kids. But given my unending enthusiasm, he especially liked hunting with me. Chris was generally stuck in his own boyhood agenda—playing the piano, building models with his Erector set, and hanging out in the underground fort Dad built in the empty lot next to our new house. Quality family time for Chris included all-day rounds of
Battleship and practicing the various songs he was learning—by Rush, Van Halen, and Led Zeppelin—on the drums and electric guitar. Since his eleventh birthday, it also included chasing me around the living room with a cassette recorder, taping my beleaguered responses to his constant taunting about my being fat.

Dad decided early on that I would be his longtime hunting partner, knowing that if I learned to love hunting, he would get to go more. He wanted us to drink cowboy coffee and eat gritty eggs as the sky turned shades you read about in westerns but never actually see unless you're out there. Sometimes he talked about the day when we would pack our bags with cold meat sandwiches and watch our breath form clouds of exhaust on the windows of the jeep. When I got older, he said, we'd creep through the pine groves looking for deer warming themselves in bright strokes of sunlight. I'd follow my dad, watching his hand signals. At just the right moment, I'd drop onto the crisp, curled leaves that fell from the trees and made the ground look like a giant mosaic, then watch for my dad's signal for me to take a shot. I'd pull the trigger, killing a winter's worth of venison. After cleaning and field-dressing the steaming animal, we'd hike back to camp and share tin plates piled with elk pot roast and campfire-baked potatoes.

“You watch, sis,” Dad would say, while we kicked the frost off dead grasses on our chilly late-autumn hikes. “When you're big enough, we'll spend every day of hunting season staked out in Big Piney. Far as I'm concerned, from now on, you're my number one bird dogger in the family.”

When Dad talked like this, I knew he was sniffing out the best
me
in me, helping to unearth my hidden talents. At home, I was good at all kinds of things—from ballet and tap lessons to Brownies
and gymnastics—but I was also overweight. By third grade, I would tip the scale at eighty pounds, a good twenty more than most of my friends. The girls in my Donna Mauldin's Dance Academy classes were all bones and eyelashes, with beautiful skin and tiny appetites. I had chipmunk cheeks and bumpy arms and could eat an entire six-inch Blimpie by myself. The ladies in my family didn't approve; when I stayed with my grandma, she sent mixed messages, telling me to clean my plate one second and watch what I ate the next, and my mom had already started taking me to her high-end hairdresser, who trimmed, layered, and permed me until I was so ashamed of my appearance sometimes I refused to leave the house.

At home I was just a “big-boned” kid trying to mask my extra pounds with a winning personality. But in the mountains my size was matched only by my desire to fish, hunt, hike, and swim. It helped that there were no mirrors for me to judge myself in. Only my dad's expression, which, when he looked at me, said,
You are strong, and beautiful, and perfect just as you are.

Dad's pride and
joy—after his new family—was the Roadrunner camper-trailer he'd bought in 1976. On Thursdays, and sometimes as early as Wednesday, he'd start loading it with supplies: big bags of chips, Tang mixed with tea, and twelve-packs of minicereals for Chris and me. By the time the other dads on Parkway Drive were cracking their first weekend beers, we'd be chugging across the Perrine Bridge, past the lava flats with their searing heat, and approaching the cool, clean air of the Stanley Basin, where our favorite mountain range, the Sawtooths, top out at twelve thousand feet.

In the long shadows of the Sawtooths, we built castles in the freshwater sand and took turns swimming out to a giant rock a few hundred feet from shore. Sometimes, other families came with us, and all the kids would hike together, searching for bird nests along wooden walkways that stretched over primordial wetlands, or climbing on top of beaver lodges before taking off shoes and pants and jumping into the murky ponds. At the time, the streams pouring out of Redfish Lake teemed with sockeye salmon on their way home from the Pacific Ocean. As a little girl, I stared down at their rotting bodies covered with slime, the bulging eyes, and the long, hooked jawlines dotted with razor-sharp teeth. I was afraid but also fascinated, and though I couldn't have articulated it then, I wondered what demon drove them to travel so far inland—without food or rest, for weeks—to decompose and die while furiously wiggling up the feeder streams that fanned off of my favorite lake.

In my last,
best memory of 1979, we're on our way to Redfish Lake. I am eight years old, on the verge of entering third grade. Dad has eased the camper off the side of the road below our favorite hot spring, Russian John. Soaring, soft-edged mountains flank both sides of the road, and the sound of water burbles through brown-tipped grasses. Our clothes—Mom's silk bra next to my size 8 flowered panties, big jeans and little jeans in a heap, a kid's navy blue down vest, and a grown man's camouflage hunting cap—are piled next to a juniper bush near the steaming pool. One by one we slip into water that smells like minerals and sage. My parents slide down the algae-covered rock and laugh—at the urgency, the cold air, and the slight, acceptable indiscretion we're
committing, uphill and just out of range of the car beams passing through the night.

We soak until the last rays of sun paint the mountains pink. We all scan the hillsides for deer. Spot one and you earn a dollar: my new dad's rule. A star—my dad points it out—burns itself into view. “Wish on it,” he says, and we all do. When our skin begins to prune, we jump out of the water, rushing to pull clothes over sticky goose-pimpled flesh. We run to our yellow Jeep Cherokee, where we blast the heater, screaming the lyrics to “Free Bird,” my all-time favorite song. It's dark when I lift Mom's head off my shoulder and move into the front seat. Dad and I call truckers on the CB radio, using our handles, Coyote and Pinky Tuscadero. Outside the window, the Sawtooths rise into the night.