It is with me as I used to think it would be with the poor uneasy white bear I saw at the show. I thought he must have got so stupid with the habit of turning backwards and forwards in that narrow space that he would keep doing it if they set him free. One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.
—George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 1860
Though her life had taken a dark turn, Jessica Soule still loved Grafton. When she hired someone to drive her to the doctor’s office, she never tired of the woods and streams that rolled past her truck window, of the passing ghosts of her life with the Unification Church.
“I should be glad I made it this far,” she said. “But the reality is that nobody wants to die. Everybody wants to live more.”
One day Soule rolled her wheelchair out onto the front porch, did a quick bear check, then went down the ramp, past the mailbox, and on out to the truck in her driveway. Ordinarily, when she came out here, a helper would give her an assist into the truck’s high cab, but this time, she hadn’t told anyone what she was doing.
“Unless you’re in the mood to jump in front of buses, you want to keep living,” she said. “And I’m way beyond jumping in front of buses.”
Soule got the driver’s side door open and then reached up to grip the steering wheel for support. She hauled herself out of the chair, up into the cab, and maneuvered herself safely into position. Her heart pounded, though she couldn’t blame it on the exertion.
“I was scared to death,” she said.
Soule was on the precipice of a decision. She had looked into her future in Grafton and foreseen a rapid decline into death. But if she moved away, she would be leaving behind her meager network of remaining friends and family members, the people who helped her run errands and visit the doctor. If she was going to make it somewhere else, she wanted to be capable of driving.
She twisted the key in the ignition, and the pickup rumbled into life, the motor vibrating like a nervous thoroughbred, ready to run.
Soule’s right leg was too weak to hold the brake down, so she couldn’t even shift into gear safely. She grabbed the steering wheel again and scooched toward the center of the cab. With her left leg, which was stronger, she pinned the brake down with all her force before shifting into drive. Holding her breath, she eased off the brake and the truck lurched forward, down the driveway and up Wild Meadow Road, the same path she’d driven all those years ago to get to the church summer camp.
For the first time in years, Soule felt the flush of independence.
I can still drive, she thought as she pulled back into her driveway. I can go places.
When she got home, she began making calls, asking people whether they could provide a good home for her cats.
When Soule left Wild Meadow Road for the last time, she wasn’t driving herself. She’d hired a woman to go with her, and they headed out, Route 4 up to I-89, south on I-91, and then west, out of New Hampshire.
As Grafton receded farther and farther into the distance behind her, she felt surges of anxiety, but she kept going. West, out of New England, west, across the endless Great Plains, and beyond.
A determined driver could cover nine hundred miles a day, but Soule found that traveling took a toll on her; she and her driver made less than half that time. They stopped for meals and at inexpensive hotels. In all, it took them six days to cover 2,700 miles; when she arrived at her new home, a house in Arizona previously owned by her brother, she was exhausted.
Soule’s helper got her items into the house and then caught a plane back to New Hampshire the next day. As soon as Soule was alone, a hush settled over the strange new home. The silence was brought into sharp relief by the unnaturally bright sunlight that seemed to probe at her from every window.
For the next day or two, Soule busied herself with the details of unpacking from boxes into her new kitchen, her new bedroom. She hadn’t brought much, so it didn’t take long, but she fussed over the details, trying to take pleasure from the arrangement of dishes in the cabinets or knickknacks on the shelf. Sometimes she used the walker to hoist herself out of her wheelchair, so she could reach higher. But always, it was inside.
Soule had put thousands of miles between herself and the wilds of Grafton, but it turned out that wilderness was as much a state of mind as a geography. As long as she stayed isolated, an unbidden wilderness could spring up around her. As the days passed, a thin, barely visible layer of dust began to accumulate on the top surface of her plated front doorknob, atomized pieces of Arizona soil and long-burned meteorites, soft bits of wool and synthetic fibers from her clothing and blankets.
Soule ignored it. Whatever lay on the other side of the door was bright and intimidating. In here, she had her items, all laid out just as she liked.
Look! she exulted to herself. The wheelchair rolls right into the bathroom!
Time passed. The days were restful, but the nights occasionally brought seizures, paralyzing her body. She had fluid in her ear from an ear infection; sometimes she would wake up to find the world spinning in a vertiginous whirlwind.
Those were the moments when she thought of the thousands of miles between herself and her Grafton friends. Even when the walls of her bedroom slowly resumed their stationary places, she would be unable to go back to sleep, dark tendrils of worry crawling endlessly from one end of her brain to the other.
Had she made a terrible mistake?
In Grafton, neighbors were distant presences through thick buffers of woodland; here, where her house was hemmed in by others, she felt naked. When she peered through the window, she saw people in the streets, so many people, walking back and forth for unknown purposes. They were all strangers. Soule told herself that she would go outside when she felt a little better. She hadn’t yet fully recuperated from her trip.
The layer of dust on her doorknob thickened infinitesimally as it added minuscule pieces of pollen from strange plants whose names Soule did not know, tiny bits of her own dead skin and hair intermingling with pieces of the home’s former occupants, pinpoint-sized arachnids that fed on the skin, and feces from those arachnids. A whole chaotic ecosystem in miniature rose up on her doorknob.
One afternoon about a week after Soule came to Arizona, that little wilderness was thrown into turmoil. Even as fresh motes of lint and spiderweb descended from the sky, a vibration swept through, knocking hundreds of particles off the doorknob to ride the whisper-gentle air currents of Soule’s living room.
More vibrations followed, pulse after pulse setting pieces of dust adrift. Soule heard the vibrations—they were the sound of civilization, the bass line of a song that was coming right through the walls and windows of her new home.
She wheeled herself to the window and peeked out through the shades. Outside, she saw people standing along the street in little groups, chatting and drinking from small plastic cups. It was a block party.
Soule steeled herself, gripped the doorknob, and, without realizing it, obliterated in that instant the tiny wilderness that had been growing in her home. When she opened her door, sunlight flooded in. She wheeled herself tentatively to the sidewalk, trying to hide her wariness with a smile.
Though she knew her primary concern should be the people in front of her, she couldn’t help but notice the sky above. In Grafton, she’d enjoyed watching white cotton sliding across the crystalline background, but it was always just a little slice of air, bounded by the contours of New England’s wrinkled, tree-whiskered face.
“Here, they get all depressed if there’s any kind of clouds in the sky,” she said. “The sunset was all red. The big blue sky, from one end to the other.”
Before she knew it, somebody had pressed a plastic cup into her hand, and she was talking to a family from across the street. Next, she was talking to everyone.
“They know me,” she told me afterward. “They’ll look out for me because of my age. I feel like I’m adding positivity.”
Someone told her where the nearest Walmart supercenter was, so she could do her grocery shopping. In the coming days, she hired someone to go with her, and they went in together. Soule rode a motorized cart, directing the shopping.
When the ear infection passed, Soule found that, with her balance restored, her legs felt stronger than they had in Grafton. The next time she used the walker to stand up, she took a few shaky experimental steps. She hadn’t been able to do that for six or seven years.
She parked the wheelchair next to her bed and began using the walker to get around in her house. She spent long hours sitting on her back porch, marveling at the lack of New England bugs.
After the long, cold chill of Grafton, where one miserable winter had bled into the next, her body drank in the heat and dryness of the blazing hot afternoons. The angry screaming of her joints settled down to sullen mutters.
The porch allowed her a glimpse of the Superstitions, a mountain range that, like the bear, has been imprinted with the culture of the primates who live in its shadow. To the Apaches, who once used the Superstitions as a stronghold against European interlopers, the mountain range was a gateway to the underworld. To incoming white settlers, it was the site of the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, featured in a get-rich-quick legend that has led to the death of many seekers.
To Soule, who spent hours looking up at the rocky outcrops, the mountain range was the source of the cool breezes that ran down its slopes and tickled her neck, bearing tidings of a brighter future, where before there had seemed none.
“I believe in spiritual healing,” she said. “And that you can turn things around with your mind-set. As long as you’re breathing, there’s a chance you can change yourself and the world around you.”
The next time Soule and her helper went to Walmart, she left her wheelchair behind. A few times after that, she left the helper behind too.
In Phoenix, Soule has risen again. She walks into her backyard under her own power and looks upon the red rock and boundless blue sky, taking one miraculous step after another, knowing she is free.