scout
BY THE TIME our son Joshua had his first birthday, we were doing everything we could to become a steadfast, reliable family. None of it worked.
Richard had taken a job as a pharmaceutical sales rep, traveling through Ontario, though he was able to return home most evenings. We lived in a worn-down bungalow north of Toronto, in an Italian Canadian community where little English was spoken.
“Hey darlin’, let’s take him to the pub,” Richard said on nights when the baby wouldn’t sleep. He wrapped Joshua in blankets and we walked down to the neighborhood tavern, where the kid usually settled to loud rock music.
“He calms with the bass,” Richard said, “just like when you were pregnant.”
We had roommates to help pay the rent, and we threw parties so we wouldn’t lose connection with our college friends, but we were struggling to take care of our son. Joshua cried for hours every evening, and I met Richard at the door many times already dressed in my coat, ready to leave the house.
“Rough day?” Richard would ask as he stashed his briefcase, loosened his tie, and took the baby in one arm like he was cradling a football. “Come on, little man. Let’s give your old mum a break.”
Those nights, I read at the library, took ballet classes, walked around the block. An hour of being childless soothed me enough so that I could continue feeding the baby through the night, every two hours. Those first months, I would learn our child was sensitive and active, a combination that would challenge us, since we had few parenting skills to cope with our stress. Richard met whatever his little boy gave. He churned the kid’s legs, sang him James Taylor songs, tucked him in a sling for walks in the snow.
“I’ve never seen a kid like this,” my mother would say when my parents came to stay, so Richard and I could have some time alone.
“He’s going to be a tennis player!” Richard would tell her, as if that were clear from our firstborn’s early crawling. And when Joshua walked at ten months, heaving himself up onto his feet by clinging to shelves and turning the dials on the stereo receiver, my mother said, “How are you doing this?”
I knew she meant allowing him to try things she would have forbidden. “I can’t keep saying ‘no’ to him,” I said. “I’ve got to find some ‘yes’ or else we’ll crush him.”
But I also knew that I had to find a way to give myself that kind of freedom.
One day that spring, after returning home from a stroll with Joshua in the used pram our home nurse helped me find, I saw a postcard from Wendy in the mail. A photograph of panoramic mountains near Banff in the Canadian Rockies, the place where my friend had traveled for a summer job, then ended up staying. I stared at the image for a long time. Turquoise Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks: images we’d grown up seeing on the twenty-dollar bill. Banff was located in Canada’s largest national park, one hundred miles west of Calgary. With 2,500 square miles of mountains, ice fields, glaciers, rivers, waterfalls, canyons, caves, forests, and those famed turquoise lakes, and surrounded by the national parks of Yoho, Jasper, Kootenay, and a network of provincial forests in Alberta and British Columbia, it was a vast ecological sanctuary. People could live there. People with families.
Changes in location always made me feel more alive. Richard longed to settle down, to make the stable home he never had. I wanted to wander, to cast off ideas people had for me, test my mettle. Being raised in Canadian culture had given me an outsider’s sensibility, and I was never nostalgic for a restrictive suburban America. My childhood move north brought me everything—nature, fine storytelling, my man. Now I wanted to see if the archetypal Canadian experience of survival, unlike the American frontier story of conquest, could play out in my choices. Mountains allured. Wilderness beckoned. But could we survive their harsh conditions?
That evening after dinner I showed Richard the postcard and told him that I wanted to leave the city. He pumped Joshua’s little legs, flew his scrawny body toward the ceiling, tossed him a foam ball—our nightly ritual to exhaust our child’s nearly ceaseless energy.
“How are we going to live?” he asked.
“I’ll work. You can stay at home.”
His eyes flashed possibilities like fireworks across his angular face.
“What about the money to move?”
“Let’s sell some of our stuff. We’ll reduce our expenses. We can do this.”
“I want to stay for the Serious Moonlight tour,” Richard said. David Bowie would be in Toronto on Labor Day weekend.
“Let’s stay until Joshua’s first birthday.”
We would not arrive in that land of glaciated limestone and shale until the New Year, after I had secured work as the editor of a local magazine and Richard was ensconced in daddydom. He was thrilled to walk all over town, his boy on his shoulders, comfortable in the winter clime among skiers, mountaineers, adventurers. Richard shared that alpine wanderlust; he knew what to wear; he was a robust furnace of pink-cheeked happiness.
To me, the Canadian Rockies were a romance and a devastation. The postcard image hadn’t translated the sensation of forty below, and eight months of snow, and the isolation of living encircled by ten-thousand-foot rocks, the weather arriving only overhead, the distant horizon always obscured. I hadn’t counted on the hard work necessary to acquire the skills to endure. I hadn’t realized boots would be required for warmth and stability, not fashion; that, many months, skin froze with exposure of under a minute; that the beauty of the vast mountain temples would slay my composure. We arrived in that town with no car, our only entertainment the turntable and hundreds of albums we’d carted across the frozen plains. We left behind rugs and the washer and my wedding dress to bring musical memories encased in protective sleeves of white frost, like snow.
In Banff, we carried groceries home in our backpacks and skated on the Bow River. We walked quiet trails where bull elk shed velvet and cow elk mewed to their copper calves. We stared at glaciers. We soaked in the hot springs. We went to Pop’s Bakery, ate buttery cookies, and made snow angels. When Joshua turned two, we enrolled him in a day care whose leaders taught us how to parent, their encouragement a balm to our shame-filled childhoods.
Richard took work as a tour bus driver, and he tried out his new knowledge on me everywhere we went: names of mountains and mountain ranges and mountain passes, geological history, indigenous tribes, early alpinists, early settlers, railroad stories, river systems, wind patterns, waterfall depths, animal tracks, habitats, forests, tundra, even how to back a bus full of scared foreigners up a steep switchback. He picked up Joshua many afternoons in the massive motor coach, the children pressed to the window of the day care in awe of the kid who got to ride home in the fifty-seater.
Each night, when we returned home to our apartment at Squirrel Corners, we put an album on the turntable, grimacing every time the rumble of the nearby Canadian Pacific Railway crossing caused the needle to skip a line or two of a song. I’d hear the train whistle in the distance and imagine the worn echo resounding from the faraway sandstone hoodoos and the Kicking Horse River, through spiral tunnels, over the Continental Divide, past ice-capped Castle Mountain, and then straight to the Banff station, a block from our home. Then I’d wait for that train’s arrival, all of its romance and earnestness and archetypal longing splintered into discordant notes and my husband shouting “Noooooo!” and the baby laughing to see his father’s large body lunge toward the stereo. I should have been the happiest woman. But something skipped clashingly inside me too.
I left my writing work to take a money job entertaining media for a grand hotel, and started spending many evenings drinking with journalists on the company’s expense account. I escorted fashion photographers and people from film companies and ski magazines around Banff by day, and drank expensive wine while telling amusing stories to Japanese, German, British, Aussie, and American media by night. I liked not feeling like somebody’s wife, not identifying as somebody’s parent, and I found reasons to extend the work into all-night parties.
Alcohol emboldened me. In its grip, I could loosen whatever strictures a dogmatic Catholic upbringing imposed on my young mind. It never occurred to me that I might avoid the substance and simply change my thinking. Who would I be if I didn’t belong to someone? Who would I be if I didn’t have a drinking problem? Who would I be if I didn’t need something to set me right? I didn’t wonder about these questions, except alone, in the disgrace of some drunken binge.
Sometimes I went out with girlfriends to bars and walked home after midnight on snowy streets. “I don’t know,” I’d shout over my shoulder when Richard wanted to know what time I’d be back, even though I knew that his worry would keep him from sleeping.
Once, Richard got tired of my irresponsibility, walked into a party, threw me over his shoulder, and carried me home. My friends laughed at my stubbornness. When we arrived back at our house, I slammed the door.
“You can’t leave me with the kid when I have to go to work in the morning,” he yelled.
“I just wanted to be myself without people to take care of for a while,” I yelled back.
He threw the push-dial landline phone across the room. I jumped out of its path. The phone smashed against the wall, the long beige cord a snake across my feet.
We stood toe to toe, yelling things we knew would hurt the other: all of the you-always, you-never, I-give-up stories we believed about ourselves.
Later that afternoon, I called to apologize. He came home and we had makeup sex and resolved to start anew. This pattern kept me from realizing what I wanted: to be a good mother in an unconventional marriage. Living under the shadow of someone so magnetic kept me hidden. Richard tried so hard to be the best at everything, and I grew bored with his one-man show.
Richard began working at Sunshine Village Ski Resort, marketing to skiers, managing media, carving turns like a he-man in his svelte ski attire. He taught hotel guests and townspeople to play tennis in the summer. In between, he did nifty gigs like a modeling stint for GWG, Canada’s leading jeans brand, in which he was paid to take a trip and stand on a mountain ledge while a helicopter camera captured his ridiculously fine ass. I was envious of his ease, and tired of standing in his light—the same light that drew me to him when I fell in love with his intelligence and wit—and the only way I could get out was to become the wild girl.
Eighteen months after we arrived in the mountains, we bought a house, and I found myself pregnant again. The pregnancy was unplanned, but I was joyfully expectant. This was my chance to change. During the pregnancy, I (mostly) quit smoking and drinking, and took long walks alongside the river. That spring, as I looked out high hospital windows onto resplendent Mount Rundle, our daughter Dylan was born. Our girl was tiny and big-eyed and solemn, and I felt like a part of myself could calm now that she had arrived.
Through the day care I’d met a group of parents who were artists, and we took our children to karate lessons with a man we called Sifu, a Zen master and recent immigrant from Korea, who spoke in poetic sentences and told stories that had mysteries at their center. That summer, the short, pot-bellied man with a beard like Confucius and a booming, theatrical demeanor took me into his office and made me tea. He swirled the leaves in the cup, then poured the whole thing out onto my saucer.
“You do not take who you are into practice,” he said, making a ckee sound in his nose and pointing at the tea debris. “See what happen?” he asked, staring at my overflowing saucer as if I had forced him to spill the leaves. “No Zen without first empty cup!”
“Believe me, I get it,” I said. I’d spent most of my twenties trying to conform to some version of myself that I thought others wanted. I was willing to dump any of my habits, functions, history, if it meant that I’d get a chance at reinvention.
“You come here tomorrow night,” he commanded, and I did, sitting for an hour that first evening with three women friends and several climbers who had their own reasons for stilling their minds. I sat two nights a week, evenings filled with silence and laughter and koans that I thought Sifu must have designed to split our brains.
“You have your own treasure house. Why do you search outside?” Sifu asked. “Always ‘where is my treasure house?’ Ckee.” And he laughed, big-bellied chuckles, while we sat, our spines tall, our faces serious, as we tried to crack his code.
“I don’t see why you have to be out all night at meditation now,” Richard said, angry that something else was taking me away.
“Sifu invited you,” I said.
Richard tried to cross those long legs on the cruel basement floor, but his sharp mind wouldn’t be blunted by a boot-camp method. When Sifu helped me quit smoking through his crazy wisdom blend of acupuncture and mental toughness, Richard decided to support my practice. He was relieved that I wasn’t partying at clubs and pubs and coming home tipsy, but he still wished I was happy doing all of the things that satisfied him: watching television, playing sports, staying home.
“You can go to those full-moon all-night things, but I can’t have the kids three nights a week by myself,” he said.
“That sounds fair to me,” I answered.
Then Sifu, up to his own shenanigans, insisted that I bring the children to practice. Joshua jumped on the bed in the spare room like it was a trampoline. Dylan crawled on my lap, inserting her fingers into my nose.
“Great strength!” the Zen sadist said.
Sifu introduced our family to his own teacher, whom we called the Wolfmaster, a lean calligrapher from Japan who climbed mountains like a goat. We hiked in the backcountry with our strange troupe, and threw parties where we painted and danced. We enacted something called “stupid practice,” time on a stage acting silly, so we could relax our too-solid egos. I returned home feeling I was shaking loose much of my old, insecure self. I could do something difficult, persist in a discipline my capable husband had given up on.
“There’s my spiritual scout,” Richard said, proud of my effort.
He was grateful that I hadn’t killed myself in one of my alcoholic blackouts, that I’d found some peace with a group of people who were weird but obviously not going anywhere dangerous. And Richard was correct: I had become his scout. In these early years of our married life, I discovered that my job was to locate my truth. Not his.
One day, with the toddlers tucked into day care, I climbed from Lake O’Hara to its ledges at eight thousand feet with Wolfmaster and Sifu, the spring-slanted sun buttering snow patches and early poppies at the edges of an icy stream, and my feet a shocking blue cast after I thrust my bare toes into the glacial melt. The Wolfmaster wore a straw hat and walked on the rocks across the river, calling my spirit name, Sunyata—Sanskrit for “emptiness.” I squinted into the light, watching starbursts erupt from alpine snow.
“If you like snow, don’t be afraid to freeze to death!” he said, and I smiled, scared to ask what he meant. “Someday you will know this meaning,” he said. “You will not forget.”
I swear it happened just like that.