Sometime in my thirteenth year, but a little before I actually achieved that age, things began to assemble themselves into what I called “the situation.” By this I did not mean anything peculiar to myself—from the conditions of my family to the historical moment—but things more generally shared by humankind: ecstatic springtimes and bitter winters, swirlings and shrinkings, yearning and terror. All followed by death.
At this point I set my goal for life, which was to find out why. What is the point of our brief existence? What are we doing here and to what end? I had no plan of attack because I had no notion of what form the answer might take or where it might be found. Would it be in a book or in a place? Coded or in plain sight? Would it take years of patient study to comprehend or would it come in a rush of revelation? And if it was easily available, say in a library book, why didn’t anyone ever mention it? Because one thing you learn early in this line of work is that you can’t go around telling people, “I’m on a mission to discover the purpose of life.” Not if you’re hoping to prolong the conversation.
I read everything I could lay my hands on, from popularized science to the Romantic poets, and just in case the answer lay all around me in some more hidden form, I looked for patterns everywhere—anagrams, number sequences, clusters, and coincidences. I still do these things and tend to think of them as a normal requirement of the waking state: counting whatever items present themselves, checking for prime numbers, monitoring for tiny trends in the number of birds or the passage of cars as seen from a hotel window, inventing elaborate backstories for everyone I encounter.
The one place I never thought to look for answers was religion. That approach had been foreclosed at some point in the late nineteenth century when, according to my father, his grandmother Mamie McLaughlin renounced the Catholic faith. When her father was dying she had sent for a priest, only to get word back many hours later that the priest would come for no less than twenty-five dollars. Perhaps the priest could be forgiven for dodging the long ride by horse or mule to whatever makeshift, mudbound mining camp she and her family lived in. But Mamie did not forgive him. When she herself lay dying in childbirth a few years later, the priest, who may have been in the neighborhood anyway this time, showed up unbidden and started administering the last rites. At which point, as my father told the story, she used her last ounce of strength to hurl the crucifix off her chest and across the room.
How much of this story is true I don’t know, but the fact that he liked to tell it testifies to the strength of my father’s undying antagonism to religion. When he was a boy he had used some subterfuge to get a peek at the atheist texts kept out of public view in the Butte library, and when he grew up he bought himself a set of the complete works of Robert Ingersoll, the late-nineteenth-century American atheist lecturer, and sometimes bored us by reading aloud from these on Sunday mornings. What he could not have guessed and I only dimly understood at first was that his insistence on utter rationality could cut the other way and eventually lead to doubts about the entire system that my parents held up as “reality.”
So I did not come to atheism the hard way, by risking the blows of nuns and irate parents, and maybe I would have been more steadfast if I had. I was born to atheism and raised in it, by people who had derived their own atheism from a proud tradition of working-class rejection of authority in all its forms, whether vested in bosses or priests, gods or demons. This is what defined my people, my tribe: We did not believe, and what this meant, when I started on the path of metaphysical questioning, was that there were no ready answers at hand. My religious friends—and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox—were convinced that God had a “plan” for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don’t overintellectualize.
My parents never discouraged me from accompanying friends to religious services or events, and even once a sorry weekend of Baptist summer camp. I’d like to think they understood that any encounters with religion as actually practiced would only deepen my disbelief, but it may be that they just weren’t noticing. When I was very young, still in the single-digit ages, I went with my friend Gail to her summer Bible class, where the instructor wound up the lesson by asking everyone to raise their hands if they had “acknowledged Jesus Christ as [their] personal savior.” My hand stayed down, not because I was so honest but because I was afraid of follow-up questions about, for example, the details of my “acknowledgment” and to whom it had been addressed. What was she asking—that we not only accept the world as it is, but that we should be grateful for it? So the instructor kept me after class, although this was, for Christ’s sake, only Bible class—and filled me in on the torments sweet Jesus had in store for an unsaved child. I wasn’t frightened by her vision of hell, only anxious about how long she intended to hold me captive, because there was no way for a child to get past a looming grown-up and out the door.
It wasn’t easy being a child atheist during the great Cold War or, for that matter, probably any time in human history outside of a few short-lived communist states. At school, I tried to blend in by mouthing the Lord’s Prayer along with everyone else, which was mandatory in those days in the public schools, only sometimes permitting myself to slip into inaudible mocking gibberish. But I couldn’t hide my peculiarity on Wednesday afternoons, when all the other kids were bused off to “religious study” at various churches while I remained behind at my desk under the grudging supervision of a teacher who might otherwise have been free to leave. There were times when I was taunted after school for being a “communist,” which I understood only as a derogatory term for “atheist.” Once some boys picked up rocks and chased me home, but I outran them.
How would I have turned out if I had not been set apart by this irreconcilable difference, if when I first started asking why, I had been given that great non-answer, “God”? I like to think that I would not have been satisfied and would have persisted, taking my question why right up to him. But then again, maybe I would have ended up as some denatured version of myself, content with whatever anodyne explanation was being handed out.
Certainly there were things other than atheism that distinguished my family, like our leaps-and-bounds upward mobility from the tenements of uptown Butte, Montana, to, by the time I became a teenager, the leafy exurbs of New England. My parents had eloped at the ages of eighteen and nineteen, bringing me into existence a decorous ten months or so later. At the time of my birth, my father was a copper miner in Butte, his father was a switchman for the Union Pacific, and my mother was cleaning boardinghouses. Thanks to a series of scholarships, my father made an almost unprecedented climb out of the mines, sweeping us along with him to Pittsburgh for graduate school in metallurgy, then through a series of white-collar jobs that took us to New York, Massachusetts, and finally Southern California, where we ran up against the irrefutable barrier of the Pacific Ocean and stopped right there.
Through all these moves—and there were enough so that I went to eleven different schools before entering college—Butte was our mythical touchstone and standard of authenticity. My parents had left when I was only two, but I treasured the summers when we got to return for a month or two, thanks to reductions in train ticket prices conferred by my paternal grandfather, the railroad switchman. I knew it was a hallowed place, and not only for the mountains. When anyone in the family did something heroic, criminal, or just plain self-destructive, my aunt Marcia would credit “the Butte in him [or her].” It wasn’t a place, this Butte that lived on inside all its children, it was a condition of permanent defiance. All the generations of class struggle—miners’ strikes, unexplained explosions, marches, and street brawls—boiled down to this, in my father and Marcia’s exegesis: We don’t take crap from anyone, never have and never will.
As a geographical place, Butte always takes a little explaining. Outsiders want to locate it in “Big Sky Country,” where of course it is, and imagine it populated with cowboys, so I have to start by telling them that Butte was a city, a dense cosmopolitan city that had at its peak drawn sixty thousand people, mostly from Europe, to man its copper mines: Italy, Ireland, Wales, Serbo-Croatia, Bulgaria, Romania. In the Butte cemetery where my son and I went to lay wildflowers on the grave of IWW organizer Frank Little last summer, we found tombstones from the last century in Arabic, Cyrillic, and Chinese. There were Jews, too, probably from Russia—at least enough to form a minyan for the first synagogue ever built in Montana.
Butte people—“Butteans,” you could call them, though I never heard anyone do so—did everything they could to distance themselves from the mythical cowboy-land of Montana, to the point of calling their city “Butte, USA.” They even liked to extract it from the larger nation, quoting with pride the County Cork woman who saw her sons off from famine-ridden Ireland with the instruction, “Don’t stop in America. Go straight on to Butte.” Physically, Butte remains an anomaly: a cluster of multistory brick buildings, mostly empty now, and long-dead mining rigs jutting out from a mountainside like a quartz crystal sprouting out of a sheer rock face.
But today, in the shell that remains of postindustrial uptown Butte, there is no escaping the Big Sky anymore, no air pollution, for example, to shelter you from the all-encircling violence of the light. The other day I heard a Hidatsa man in Havre, Montana, struggling to answer an NPR interviewer who wanted to know what that “Big Sky” is like, and finally coming up with something about how it has “no edges,” meaning, as I heard him, that it is everywhere and could swallow you up. You could be standing firmly on the ground, trusting in gravity to keep you earthbound, and then—poof—some part of you gets sucked up into the sky, leaving just a crisp of a person behind. This is what I always imagined must have happened to a cousin of my mother’s, who lived on a farm in eastern Montana and out of the blue shot himself dead with a rifle when he was only nineteen. It was the blue, I guess, that got to him.
Copper had drawn people to Butte—the mine owners looking to get richer and the miners hoping to feed their children while their wives took in laundry. But when I went there on an achingly bright day last summer I formed a different impression—that Butte is where men went to escape from the sky. First they dug mines that ran a mile deep into the earth, which was about as far from the sky as you could get, and you had to be so desperate to get there that you’d risk being crushed in a collapsing tunnel or atomized in an explosion. Then they built the smelters to blur the sky with toxic smoke so that no miner emerging from the end of a shift would be exposed to the naked firmament, even for the short time it took him to get into the reassuring darkness of the bars, where you could count on the cigarette smoke to soften any stray intrusions of natural light. These are the lengths men will go to avoid being eaten alive by the emptiness, or at least that’s how I began to see it as a child.
But I didn’t know any history then and “class” was not available to me anyway as a category of analysis. No, the categories that shaped my childhood were much more primal than class or anything else, like gender, the sociologists have to offer. My childhood world was defined by desire and oppression, yearning and resistance, the push out and the shove back. You peek out and get poked in the eye; you reach out with your hand and it gets slapped down. So you try new angles for peeking and reaching, only to find new barriers thrown up in your way. You press against the wall, you jump to look over the top, you try crawling under until your knees are scraped and bloody.
If there was a recognizable demographic category in my childhood it was age. I entered the world as a child, of course, and I entered a world engaged in a war against children. We were the intruders; we could do nothing right; we were subject to constant rebuke. At home we were expected to work off our uselessness through chores—I was assigned, for example, to washing the dinner dishes at age six, when I had to stand on a chair to reach the sink, and when my brother was old enough, he dried. But we never did that task or any other well enough; dishes had to be rewashed, pots were not allowed to soak until the crust came off by itself. School was another site of correction. The penmanship was not neat enough, or I had neglected to carry a number while adding. Miss Sabatini, my third-grade teacher in Queens, made us sit with our hands crossed on our desks and our feet flat on the floor, all the time insisting that we “must learn self-control.” Although clearly if we had any real measure of control over ourselves and our lives we would be out in the playground, running and screaming.
In this war against children we all enter on the losing side and carry our wounds along to the next generation. My mother had been abandoned as a small child to her maternal grandparents, ostensibly because her parents couldn’t afford her, which may have been true at the time, because her father was drinking so heavily, in the normal way of miners, that her mother had had to humiliate herself by going to the shift boss at the mine and asking him for help, requesting that he give her the paychecks directly. But my mother’s parents did manage to raise their two younger children on their own, no problem, while my mother, the unwanted one, suffocated in the Victorian prison of her grandmother’s house in Nelson, British Columbia, which was devoted to the display of precious teacups and silver spoons commemorating important events in Canadian history. Maybe, in defense of my maternal grandparents, the reason they didn’t take my mother back even when they had the means to do so was that she was supposed to function as a replacement child for the daughter (who would have grown up to be my mother’s aunt) my great-grandparents had lost at any early age to some routine early-twentieth-century infectious disease. My mother’s job was to drive the sadness out of that house in Nelson, but I suspect the sadness won.
According to my mother, there had been a similar deficit in my father’s past. He worshipped his mother, whom I remember as an obese, perpetually sedentary woman with stringy hair pulled back in a bun. But his mother had eyes—and what eyes, so fascinatingly deep-set and blue!—only for her eldest son, Gordon, who was by reputation in Butte not only a drunkard, brawler, and fornicator, but a murderer too. (He was not the only man on my paternal side who was said to have killed another man. Murder was apparently not such a serious crime in Butte.) Uncle Gordon, a railroad worker like his father, was crushed under his own train at the age of thirty, either pushed or falling-down drunk. But nothing my father achieved—his degrees and eventually, by working-class Butte standards, his wealth—ever threatened Gordon’s primacy in his mother’s heart.
The loathsomeness and dependency of children seemed to drag down the entire adult female sex; at least that was the impression I formed from the vantage point of my own family, My mother’s anger was the central force field in our home, its targets divided between my father, who got to leave every morning and often delayed his return till late at night, and me. She cleaned and scrubbed and seethed and cursed, to what I saw early on was an unusual degree, since my playmates judged her to be “mean.” When in an outbreak of defiance I passed this information on to her, along with a personal declaration of hatred, she washed my mouth out with soap.
Home, in those earliest years, was a standoff between my mother’s dreams of middle-class orderliness and the routine chaos of life. When we lived in Pittsburgh I shared a tiny bedroom with my little brother where I once woke up to find him painting the wall with shit mined from his diaper. One bedroom—there must have been three total—was occupied by a married couple we took in as boarders, whose nightly fights—or, as my mother suggested by saying, “Some people enjoy that kind of thing,” sadomasochistic rituals—shook the house. When I was about twelve, at least old enough to have sprouted the first appalling pubic hairs, I slept on a fold-out coach in the “den” in our house in Waltham, Massachusetts. To get to the bathroom I had to pass through the living room, where at night my mother would be alone, ironing and working herself into rage at my father’s perpetual absence. Once, I was too terrified to get up and walk by her for a second time and resorted to wetting the bed. When I gave up on sleep and confessed, she slapped me hard before allowing me to change the sheet.
My first efforts at systematic observation of a scientific or at least naturalist sort took place at home, in an effort to understand and predict my parents’ behavior. My mother’s alternations between “nice” and “mean,” for example—did these follow a predictable pattern, in which, for example, a “nice” day, in which she might peaceably instruct me in cooking or sewing, would be inevitably followed by a day of curses, slaps, and, on my part, tears? Then there was the mystery of alcohol and its effects. My father had been a heavy drinker since adolescence, or so my maternal grandmother told me much later. She did not like to say anything bad about him or any of her children’s spouses, nor did she like to confide much in anyone, this quiet, stoic woman who had abandoned her first child, but she did blame my father for spreading his alcoholism to my mother, where it had begun to have a visibly deleterious effect by the time I was eight. It was then that they had their first drunk-driving accident serious enough to draw blood, coming home way after midnight (I was the babysitter), lurching, cursing, and bleeding from their faces. In my observation, alcohol changed a person by removing their customary mask, so that some “true self,” or so I thought, characterized by unconstrained anger and contempt, showed forth. The effect of the accident, though, was to leave their faces permanently altered by scars so that their “true selves” bore the label “damaged.”
Compared to home, school was spacious, austere, and well lit. At first I hated it, and routinely vomited in the morning before setting out—not deliberately, but out of fear. Fear of the teachers and, although it’s hard to admit this now, fear also of being separated from my mother, whose dark energy, after all, was the reigning force in my life, like weather, only occurring mostly indoors. I had two recurrent nightmares as a child: In one of them, I would be walking home from school the usual way but unable to find my home. Everything else on our block would be the same, but the building that we lived in would be gone without a trace. In the other one, I was being chased by lions and there never had been any home. There were good dreams too, and in them I had the ability to fly.
It wasn’t until about fourth grade that I discovered a reason to achieve in school: By doing so, I could win my father’s praise. Not that that was an unmixed benefit, because the more I rose in his esteem, the more I earned my mother’s wrath. Those were the sides that shaped up in our family—him and me versus my mother and to a lesser extent my brother and sister. My mother valued education, not having gotten beyond high school herself, and read novels whenever she wasn’t cooking or cleaning, pausing now and then to fill me in on the plot, but the family factions overshadowed our shared allegiance to books. To the extent that I was my father’s favorite, I was his proxy and her enemy. She never discouraged me from studying, but neither did she ever allow me to forget what I was—a child and, worse, a girl. “You think you’re so above it all,” she would say, referring to my shortcomings in the housecleaning department. But the “it” I was attempting to rise above would catch up with me. Just wait and see; I would end up like her. If I was lucky, that is, for it was unlikely that anyone as sullen, as withdrawn and negligent about personal appearance as I was would ever find a man.
But if you are thinking this is the usual story of dysfunction and abuse, then I’m doing a poor job of telling it, and projecting my own standards as a parent onto a time, and a class, when children were still regarded as miscreants rather than the artisanal projects that they have become today. It’s not easy to explain my parents’ complicated role in repressing and inspiring me, clamping down and letting go. Who am I, a former child, to tell the stories of these giants of the earth, whose ambitions propelled us from one city or state to another, bound to each other in our constant motion? They were driven by their own yearnings, in part, for the usual status and money things—a car, eventually the larger homes and second car—all the stuff my mother would eventually renounce as “empty materialism.” Who can blame them, when you bear in mind what they came from? By the time I was twelve, they were beginning to acquire some of the objects that seemed talismanic of a broader perspective than what had been available to them in Butte—framed Audubon prints on the wall, the Ladies’ Home Journal and Life magazines on the coffee table, new furniture as opposed to used. But their yearnings went further, toward some unspecified “more,” some great challenge or adventure. They were rebels too, and I respected that, even as I rebelled against them.
Ah, hell. Even now, insulated by so many intervening years, I could choke on the pity of it. They started out so young and brave, my parents, and ended up such sordid messes. Only one thing saved my father from dying as a slobbering drunk, and that was Alzheimer’s disease, alcohol being unavailable in the nursing home he finally expired in. As for my mother, she didn’t live long enough to find out that I grew up to have all the things she craved, that the entire package, plus some, would be delivered exactly a generation late—the adventure, the causes, the friends and hot romances. She died, too, before we could settle things between us, on her third suicide attempt. The earlier ones had led to successful stomach-pumpings, but in the last one she managed to down enough pills before anyone noticed the cessation of vital signs.
We will get back to my father soon enough, that great man-god and Shiva-like genius of self-destruction. It was he, after all, who instructed me to always ask why, and thereby started, or at least abetted, the entire project. But we are still in prehistory here, before the situation was clearly defined and the question formulated, before I was even much of a reader, when I was driven largely by the desire to explore, to get outdoors and see new places. All I required was a hill to climb, a corner to turn, a shore to run along. In Pittsburgh my wanderings were confined to the grassless enclosure made by our row houses, where all the children played, but things opened up with our move to Queens, where—this was a long time ago—there were still vacant lots grown over with trees and streets that ended in mystery. Better yet were two of the places we lived in in Massachusetts, Waltham and Hamilton, which offered woods and meadows and streams. Before I explored books and libraries, I explored with my body—pushing it up rocks or trees, hurling it through space on my bicycle. This is what I wanted before I wanted answers; I wanted to move and run and climb.
Every kid wants these things, but mine was perhaps an especially acute case of what Edward Wilson calls “biophilia.” Part of it may have been the sheer lack of alternative sites for exploration. We had no malls then, only department stores, and these had little to offer me, since the clothes my mother did not sew were ordered from the Sears catalog. Besides, the man-made environment, at least in its emerging proto-suburban form, was too numbingly repetitive—each brick or shingle designed to be exactly like any other. Nature, in contrast, excels in the art of small differences. No two branches or clouds or waves in the ocean are the same; each commands our close attention.
In fact I came to hate the built environment, both for its dullness and the way it shut me out. When a house came up on what had been a vacant lot, which was happening all the time then in Queens, that lot was barred to me, just as the common fields were barred to my British ancestors by the enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first “political” act of my life would now be categorized as ecoterrorism: I recruited another eight-year-old to help me vandalize a “model home” in a new development a block from where my family lived. We broke into the house on a weekday after five, when the realtors weren’t around, ripped up their papers, smashed windows, and defaced the clean-painted walls with hurled ink. For months I lived in fear of being caught, because I understood that the defense of trees and empty lots was worse than mischief; it was a crime.
There were no limits on my outdoor life, especially after my father taught me to ride a bike—a skill I came to value almost as much as reading. In my physical explorations, as in reading, family dysfunction served me well; just as my mother’s rage pushed me into books, her indifference—one might say neglect—left me without any outdoor limits. She made a point of not confining us, saying that she had been smothered by her overprotective grandparents, and that there would be none of that for her own children—no distances too far to go, no neighborhoods labeled as dangerous, no time of night too late. My father was equally indifferent to physical danger. He was an athletic guy—a competitive ski jumper at Butte High—who trusted his strength even after years of lab and desk work had sabotaged his upper body. Once, when we lived in Queens, he took us out into the East River in a rented rowboat, where the sky turned gray and the wind and currents drove us ever farther out into the bay. We had no life jackets, nor could anyone of us except my father really swim, and although he became unnaturally silent and concentrated, I could detect no worry in his face.
Sometime in the late fifties, a hurricane struck us in Massachusetts, in Hamilton, where we were truly out in the country, surrounded by pines and elms. My father was at work, leaving my mother, brother, and sister and me to run from window to window watching the trees crash down around the house. I, naturally, wanted to go outdoors and run around and test my strength against the storm, and my mother said okay. If you ever needed evidence of her unfitness as a parent, this was it. Why did she let us go out—my brother, who was probably eight or less, and me? Maybe she thought, with the power out and the trees falling, that it was the end of the world anyway and we might as well participate firsthand. Or maybe we were having some rare moment of mother-daughter concordance in which she could see as well as I that there was freedom in the storm for anyone willing to go outside and exult in it.
So my brother and I slanted our bodies against the hundred-mile-per-hour wind and headed down to the bridge, about a quarter mile away. He fell behind, and when a tree snapped down between the two of us I looked back and to my surprise saw his face open into helpless bawling. He couldn’t see me because I had crouched down beside a stone wall, and he must have thought that I had been crushed by the falling tree. Even at that moment, I had no idea of danger. The amazing thing was that my brother, with whom I was so often locked in trivial combat, loved me enough to cry.
I didn’t think much about the future when I was a child—who does? The future self is different, with aims and desires unknowable in one’s current form. Besides, I had no control over it. We might move arbitrarily at any time, plunging me from multiplication into long division or, much later, from solid geometry into trigonometry, leaving me scrambling to keep afloat. But to the extent that I did imagine a future, it held an ever-widening range for my explorations—more hills and valleys, shorelines and dunes. I would be a lawyer, or so I thought for a few weeks after reading a biography of Clarence Darrow, or a scientist, as suggested by a biography of Marie Curie, but mostly I would learn to drive, acquire a car, and penetrate huge new vistas by myself.
The idea that there might be a limit to my explorations, a natural cutoff in the form of death, was slow to dawn on me. Without that, though, there could have been no “situation” demanding explanations. Yes, I lost pets with sickening regularity—my crippled German shepherd Caesar run over on the street, a kitten crushed under my father’s tire—but the humans around me seemed durable enough, despite my nighttime fears that my parents would be claimed by their final DUI and never make it home. Mostly, I encountered death in books, where it largely functioned as a plot turn or finale: Beth died in Little Women, Roland in his Chanson, Achilles in The Iliad, and their deaths were grand and necessary.
I read all my parents’ books, with few restrictions. The censored items included Kinsey’s book on male sexuality, which I skimmed through without enlightenment, and—also banned for sexual content—Mika Waltari’s novel The Egyptian, which I read anyway. The censors should have paid more attention to their copy of Bulfinch’s Age of Fable or Beauties of Mythology, which I read over and over, and not only for the juicy intrigues of the gods. In it I learned—mostly from the Norse and ancient Greeks—that we are mortal and that heroes have chafed against this condition from the dawn of time. Even more instructive was the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which my parents possessed in a beautifully illustrated edition. Who were these Persians? I had no idea, but when Khayyam said, “Ah, Wilderness were Paradise enow!” he spoke for me, even with that crazy Old English word for “enough.” So I struggled to absorb the bad news too, delivered in one elegant quatrain after another, that this life is “like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face, lighting a little hour or two…”
The full sorriness of it didn’t hit me until my maternal grandfather let slip the fact that death was not only empty and inglorious, but approaching at breakneck pace. I didn’t get to know my mother’s father well; like most of the older men in my family, he was a man of few words, and those doled out only grudgingly. His wife, my grandmother, told me that he had been a dazzling wit as a young man, like my brilliant aunt Jean, and that that’s what drew her to him. There were rumors, encouraged maliciously by my own father and given some credence by Granddad’s high cheekbones and aquiline nose, that he was a Native American or partly so, but the official story is that he was white and born to the Simmons family, small farmers in Montana’s eastern plains. After his mother died in childbirth, he and his siblings were dispersed to other families, which is how he acquired the surname Oxley. He ran away from the Oxleys, though, who had been using him like an indentured servant, and spent his teenage years living among the Kootenai people, learning to fish and track and hunt. Inevitably, like any other male of his class, he ended up in the mines in Butte, where, after overcoming the drinking problem mentioned earlier, he rose in middle age to the estimable position of shift boss. He smoked Raleighs, for the coupons, and fished whenever he could, though he never took me with him.
We were standing in his garden one summer morning, where he was showing me his prizewinning hollyhocks and sweet peas, when—apropos of what I do not know—he said, “It all goes by so fast.” Something like that anyway, about how you think you have all this time, and then it all runs out. In his case, at this moment, he was right. He had retired from the mines about a year earlier and would die of a heart attack within another year or two—meaning that in his adult life not much more than a couple of years were spent continuously above ground, in the wind and the possibility of sunlight. He was dying right in front of me, in other words, a once strong and vital man, left old and baffled within the transient carnival of flowers, and only the hills, gray and ruined by Butte’s smelters, would keep on going as they were.
No doubt I asked my parents about death, and no doubt they answered conscientiously. This was one of my mother’s greatest virtues—she said we could ask her anything, and unless the question touched on sex or reproduction, when you would get some gobbledygook about ovaries and fallopian tubes, without the slightest reference to actual humans, the answers usually made some sense. I can’t recall a specific conversation on the subject of death, but I know exactly what the response would have been: There is no afterlife; we are here and then we’re gone. Death is a fact; get used to it. And why are you just standing around with nothing to do?
What no one could explain was how the fact of death applied to me. To accept death was to believe in, or otherwise vividly imagine, a world without me in it. But believing anything was exactly what a “realist” should refuse to do. I had no evidence for the continuation of the world without me. How could I? So if death stalked the world, cutting down kittens and heroes alike, there was still no reason to think it would come for me.
Then, just a few months shy of my thirteenth birthday, came the onset of menstruation and with it the realization that I too was marked for personal destruction. I didn’t want to grow up, which I understood as a defection to the enemy side, and resisted—unsuccessfully—the pressure to start setting my hair every night and applying a smear of pink lipstick before leaving the house. What was the meaning of that lipstick anyway—that I had tasted the cotton candy and was ready to proceed as directed? Some of my mother’s interventions were welcome insofar as they helped mitigate the damage of puberty, like the ointments for acne and the first padded starter bra. But mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother’s explanations of veal: I was being recruited into the great death march of biology—be born, reproduce, die.
I resolved that one thing would distinguish me from the long line of those who had fallen before me, the great-great-grandparents and so on stretching back to Ireland and Scotland and before that the Eurasian plains the Celts had originally come streaming out of: Surely they had also grasped “the situation,” but I was going to find out why, which I understood even at the time to be a protest as well as a question. What my grandfather was trying to warn me about was that there would be an end to exploration—over that last hill or bend in the trail—a bracket or final punctuation mark awaiting me, and that the end wouldn’t necessarily come when I had finished my heroic mission, as in the case of Roland or Achilles. It could come in the middle of things, before I’d gotten any traction. Which meant that for me, still a child of not quite thirteen, time was already running out.