Dear God, what a helluva week.
Monday and Tuesday I spent the days driving the forest roads through the mountain range just north of my cabin. I was just exploring The wilderness area I had picked out was a no-go but I found a place called Lillywaup Creek that was the next best thing. Primitive camp sites, bring or filter your own water and a couple of vault toilets. (That’s the fancy term for an outhouse, as I have learned.) The entire campground was deserted and I got the pick of the litter. 25 feet or so off the prettiest little creek you ever saw. I drove up Wednesday morning and got my camp set up. I set up a folding camp chair and spent most of the day with a cup of coffee close to hand and started re-reading The Lord Of The Rings. It was certainly appropriate as I swear the place I was staying in was lifted from the trilogy and transplanted to Washington. Giant moss covered first growth cedar trunks, swaying pines, a happily babbling little creek and songbirds and humming birds flitting about. It was absolutely Sylvan. I read until dusk and then started a fire more for the cheer of it than for the warmth.
Then I learned something pretty elemental, but something that we tend to forget living in the modern world that we occupy. 20 miles up in the mountains and all by yourself can be a bit spooky. Your world shrinks to the soft circle of orange and yellow light reflecting off the surrounding trees. You become real damn aware of the sounds of the night. You settle in pretty quick, but I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t a comfort having a pistol strapped to my hip as I sat and watched the fire. When I was a kid I had an almost morbid fear of the dark. In certain circumstances it is sometimes easy to stand in the shoes of the child you were once more. In some ways I was a little relieved that the backpacking into the wilderness thing got short circuited. I was able to haul along most of my Snivel Gear. (The roomy tent and the heavy folding chair to name two items.) I was also able to haul along a 6 gallon jerry can of water rather than taking along a collapsible container and my filter pump.
What I was doing felt more like a cushy expedition than some arduous feat. It still felt pretty cool. Miles up in the wild, hell and gone from any living soul, sipping coffee by the campfire and listening to the wind sigh through the trees and rustle the boughs while the water gurgled over the rocks in the stream. With a Colt .45 on my belt and wearing my khaki hiking fedora. Pretty damn good feeling. Slept pretty well and was up at 5:30 with the sun. Well with the daylight anyway. They had promised gorgeous weather for the next three days, but the morning was a little chilly with actual frigging clouds hanging overhead in the tree tops. Then mid morning the sun was there and the clouds disappeared.
I did a little hiking up into the hills around the creek, as much as I was able to. A mile or so out from the campground and the trails started getting pretty iffy and rather than lose track of where I was and having to remember how to do orienteering on the fly, I doubled back and just wandered about close to the stream. When I got banged up and tired enough I wandered back to the camp and spent the rest of the day with Mr. Tolkien and often just staring at the creek rushing by and thinking. About my life. What I liked. What was lacking. Which parts were mine to blame for the failings and which parts were just shit happening, if you will. I found more good than bad in what I was looking at. Which is no small thing.
We all have baggage we carry with us that we fill with the mementos and knickknacks that we buy with our blood, sweat and tears as we go through life. The painful crap that we buy or get stuck with always seems to be the heaviest. I did not have a good childhood. I’m not whining about it mind you, just stating a fact. It took me longer than it should have to learn how to be an adult, and there were portions of it that I did, and still do, just plain suck at. I still have no idea what the hell I want to do with the remainder of my life. I can do or be anything I really want to be. Literally. Within a few confines, the sky is the limit. So why is it so damn hard to figure out? I mean seriously…
You pick something you enjoy and that you are good at and you develop the skills to do it for a living.
Piece of cake. Right?
Set that aside for now. Baggage. My father and I did not speak for the better part of about eleven years. Estranged, with a capitol ‘E’. The man didn’t come to my wedding. A couple of years after we were married we were living in Las Vegas. My wife was carrying our first child and running the Veterinary Clinic at Nellis Air Force base. I got a phone call from one of my brothers telling me that my father had slipped on the ice while working and hit the back of his head on the concrete. Hard. Subdural hematoma. Brain surgery to relieve the pressure. But he pulled through and was home. That hit me like a ton of bricks. The old man almost died and I didn’t find out till after the fact. I put some thought into it and finally called him. Told him that for my part I was truly sorry that it had come to where we were. That I had a daughter on the way and that I wanted her to know her grandfather. That if he had died without me being able to tell him “I love you.†It would have torn me to pieces. That I missed having a father.
We reconciled and for the next ten years we had a cordial if long distance relationship. He came back into the fold with the whole family as a matter of fact and he and my step mom became part of the regular extended family holiday gatherings. He made handcrafted wood work gifts for the grandkids and the daughters in law and my sister. It took time but we became friends in our way as well as father and son. When my son was delivered into this world in 2001 we named him Robert James after him.
We finally moved back home in 2002 after a little more than ten years in the service. I got to spend a good amount of time with the man. I saw him more in the following year than I had in the previous twenty. We arranged a day to go to the firing range together after he returned from a vacation in late Autumn.
I was a little shocked when I saw him. He was grey and he looked drawn out and tired. We had a really good day together. My dad the former cop was a lousy shot, but we had fun. But he was done in when we were finished. On the ride home I told him that his Mini-14 was pretty neat but that I liked my AR-15 better. He got a faraway look on his face and told me that he was going to tell my step mom to be sure to pass on his guns and the gun case he had built in his woodshop to me when he died. I just sat there for a second or two kind of shocked. I laughed it off and told him that I better inherit them when I was 60 because I wanted him around a lot longer. He told me he was having some issues and was going to see the Doctor on Tuesday for some tests. When we got back to his house I handed him a cleaning kit I had picked up and he asked me what he owed me. I told him it was on me, and he handed me a box and said, “Well take this for it then, okay?†It was a .22 pistol. I was floored. I drove home and sat at the kitchen table looking at the gun and cried because I knew something was coming.
He went to the Doctor on Tuesday and never really came home. Cancer. Systemic. He was in the hospital while they were running tests trying to quantify what was going on. He was too sick for chemo and the cancer was going to kill him if he didn’t get chemo. After a couple of days I went with my step mom for the meeting with the Oncologist who just said “I’m so very sorryâ€. I held her for a bit and she went off to make calls. I went back up to my father’s room to get my brother who was there to brace him and try to figure out what we were going to do. When I walked in he was gone. I went over to the window to try to see if he was in his car and before I could slip out, my dad woke up. He reached out and took my hand and asked me what the doctor had said. I honestly contemplated doing anything short of lying to get out of that room right then. He looked at my face and sighed. “This is it isn’t it?†he asked me in a quiet voice. And I had to look into the eyes of the man I had named my son after on that sunny autumn afternoon and tell him he was going to die. I had so rarely seen him cry in my life. He didn’t cry when I told him what the doctor had said as best I could. His voice broke and the tears started when he told me that he was scared that he wasn’t going to die in his right mind. He held my hand and told me that he hadn’t worried about me in ages. That he was proud of me and the man I had grown up to be. I struggle with that some days, because I am not sure I know who the hell that man is that he was speaking of. But it is a shiny gem in my lot of baggage that I treasure.
He died six short weeks later. After some time at home he relapsed. He chided me gently for spending so much time away from home to visit the last time that I saw him. He had a good day and was complaining about the hospital dinner he was trying to eat as I left. I looked over my shoulder at him and I knew somehow deep inside that I wasn’t going to see him again. Within the week pneumonia set in and my step mom called me to tell me that things did not look good. My wife was in Canada on business and I called her and she moved heaven and earth to get home that day while I let my sister and brothers know what was going on. She made it halfway home when they called from the hospital to tell me he had died. He did not die alone. The man was surrounded by family all day. But I wish I had been there for him at the end all the same. There’s an old quote, “He’s in better hands now, but God, we wish he were still in ours for a while.â€
So I struggle sometimes with this. He was proud of me. A lot of men go through hell in life on the basis of unfulfilled parental approval from their fathers. There are whole chapters in psych texts on the subject. It’s funny to me sometimes that I’m not sure that I’m proud of the man I have grown into but that he was. God knows I should probably take more pride in myself. I am a good man, for the most part. I have a good life and a good and loving family. I am starting to sort through the baggage during my time alone on this trip with an eye toward ditching the crap that I don’t need to be carrying and sorting out the spaces I need to fill yet. Balancing the load. God, it’s hard sometimes. You carry so much crap that you don’t need that you sometimes lack space for the essentials.
Maybe that was why the last few days were so golden. For a while there was just this bit of peaceful forest wrapped around me and the rest of the crap just stopped mattering for a bit. I have choices that need to be made soon. Important ones. I am standing at a crossroads in my life and I need to get off my ass and pick a road and start walking. I am tired and sore right now, but pretty content. I have not spent this much time with myself in many years and I am finding that I am still pretty happy with the guy in the mirror. As I said, I have found more good than bad when weighing my load in life. It’s a decent start on figuring out the path from here. It’s after midnight and the tree frogs are singing, the moon is up over the woods here and I have about run the laptop battery down to nothing. It’s been a long week and bed is calling.
