Then
My first day out on the trail started at sunrise. With a walking stick in one hand and an honest-to-goodness machete in the other, old Dave Dewitt led the way through what he called “his leg” of the North Country Trail, a crooked line of earth that stretched 4,600 miles from New York to North Dakota. Dave’s portion consisted of the forty-two miles displayed on the large map in the visitor station break room. It rambled past dunes, through forests, and along the quivering lips of cliffs, crossing rivers and marshes, skirting waterfalls and towers of ancient stone.
For one week each spring, he walked every inch of the challenging terrain, marking large trees for removal and cutting through the smaller obstructions himself using the chain saw that hung from the back of his pack. Normally he slept outdoors in his hammock and lived off unfiltered water and something he called GORP—“good old raisins and peanuts”—to which he’d started adding M&Ms twelve years ago.
“But we can’t leave your parrot at the house alone for a week,” he’d said that morning over oatmeal, “so I guess this year we’ll have to drive in to a few sites and do day hikes until we’ve covered what we need to cover.”
We packed up his truck with supplies and I went to put The Professor back into the travel cage, but Dave stopped me.
“He don’t want to be in there all day. Better to let him have his run of the place. Anyway, I ain’t got nothing he’s going to ruin any more than it already is.”
I wasn’t in complete agreement, but it was his house and I couldn’t argue without talking. Leaving The Professor to his own devious devices, I hopped up into the passenger seat and settled in for a long day of listening to Dave Dewitt’s unceasing monologue.
He did talk constantly on the drive to the trailhead in Munising, yet once we were prowling through the trees he was strangely taciturn. It was as though the great, brooding silence of the landscape had packed all of his many words back down his throat and into his belly. And because I wasn’t hearing him, I could hear other things.
All the other things, in fact. The swish of denim and vinyl. The jingle of zipper pulls. My increasingly labored breaths alongside his steady ones. The sound of every footfall, which was one sound on dirt and another on pine needles and another on damp leaves and another on rock. The hiss of spray paint—blue to mark the trail, orange to mark the dangerous lurching trees that would be removed later by a team of young volunteers.
When we were in deep forest, I heard the rush of snow-bloated rivers and the whisper of Lake Superior somewhere beyond, somewhere I could not see. But when we came up to a bluff and there was nothing but gray-blue water stretching to the clouded horizon, I realized that the lake had not been whispering at all. The matrix of tree trunks and air pockets in the forest had deadened the roar, but it had always been a roar.
There was peace here. But not quiet. A pleasant reversal of the cemetery back in Sussex, where it was always quiet but never quite peaceful. Creeping like mist through the maze of bare brown tree trunks was so much like weaving through the dark gray headstones. Except here I did not wonder at what was missing in death, despite the fact that there were few signs of life around—no grass, no flowers, no leaves.
This forest was not dead. It was merely sleeping. More than that, it was about to wake up. That thing that was missing from the bodies in the cemetery? Nearly all of these trees had it, even some that Dave Dewitt had marked for destruction. It was stirring in their roots, coursing upward through channels deep within their stiff trunks, squeezing out into every branch and twig and waiting bud.
And I felt it stirring in me.
Two days ago, I had thought my life was over. Just as I had thought it was when my father was arrested, and again when my mother was arrested, and again when I had to move to Michigan. My grandmother was dead, my home had been ransacked, and my best friend had betrayed me. Every one of those moments felt like the last autumn leaf had plummeted to the earth, like all my life from that point forward was destined to be an eternal winter.
Yet here I was. Alive. In springtime. Blood running through my veins, oxygen filling my straining lungs, sweat seeping from my skin, though it was cold to the touch.
Maybe my life was really just starting.
Dave Dewitt and I worked all week in the woods and along the shoreline of the best of the Great Lakes. He showed me how to build a fire, how to identify animals by their scat, what to do if I saw a bear. Though I would not have thought it possible from such a chatty person, he taught me how to disappear—to walk unheard, to stay upwind, to blend with the background. Useful skills for someone on the run.
As the weather warmed and the calendar pages turned and the trail filled up with hikers, I moved as Dave’s shadow, a silent partner in everything he did. He quashed the questions of other park employees and acted like it was perfectly natural for an old man to spend his every waking moment with a strange mute girl who had appeared out of nowhere.
Soon no one noticed me at all. The summer flowed over us like Bridal Veil Falls flowed over stone into the sink of Lake Superior—fresh and reckless and beautiful.
And then four hijacked planes changed everything.
Summer was over. No one was hiking. To a person, the nation was glued to its TVs, yearning for answers, looking for someone to blame.
In October, I helped Dave close up the facilities for winter and saw the first newspaper headline linking Norman Windsor with al-Qaeda. Then one about a new trial. Then one about a verdict. In my room late at night I choked on gallons of swallowed tears as I thought of my father, of all those people in the towers, of people in mountain villages on the other side of the earth being blown up, people who’d had nothing to do with the attacks. I gripped my sorrow tighter and tighter until I had controlled it, like a rat snake squeezing the life out of its prey.
I was glad Dave had insisted that The Professor get the run of the house. It had meant a lot of unpleasant discoveries followed by Windex and paper towels, but at least I would not have to see terrible news stories staring out from the bottom of a cage every day. Instead, I watched the news of my family’s shame burn up every night when Dave started the fire.
The other blessing of that time was that Dave didn’t own a TV. While everyone else was watching the invasion of Afghanistan and coverage of the second Norman Windsor trial, we spent the long cold nights in front of those crackling fires, Dave reading westerns, me slowly working my way through his library of wilderness guides and botany texts and geological surveys.
I tried to put terrorists out of my mind. I tried to put my parents out of my mind. I tried to put Peter and Emily Flynt and the stacks of beautiful books I had left behind in Sussex out of my mind. I memorized facts and figures, the unchanging properties of nature, the things that could not be affected by ideologies and arms deals and resentment.
Alone in my room at night I considered writing my mother to tell her where I was, to tell her I was safe and I was making a new life for myself. I wanted to tell someone about Dave Dewitt, about all the things I was learning, about how I’d kayaked beneath stone arches and into watery caves, about how I’d seen the northern lights dance over Lake Superior.
But what if the people who ran the prison read the mail? What if they alerted the authorities? Or what if my mother did? I loved it here, and I would not risk being found again. Anyway, who would care to read my thoughts about a grizzled old chatterbox or the exact hue of the water at the moment the sun is submerged in it? In the face of national tragedy, what else mattered?
Eventually the world moved on. The Professor’s feathers grew back. The months became years. Grandma’s car was slowly swallowed up by the forest. I never did cut and dye my hair, never wore glasses or sweatshirts with patchwork pumpkins on them. I helped pay for groceries and gas, and Dave never asked me where my money came from. He had offered me a paid position at the park, which I didn’t take. He may have guessed why, or he may not have. But he was a gracious enough person not to ask.
On my eighteenth birthday I considered speaking, telling the truth. I was the daughter of Norman Windsor, who was now on death row for aiding and abetting enemies of the state. But by that time, I hadn’t talked to another human being in three years. I’d had a number of whispered and rather one-sided conversations with The Professor on the rare occasions I was alone in the house, but talking to a bird didn’t count. Birds, even parrots, didn’t ask uncomfortable questions, and they didn’t feel the temptation to share juicy gossip with their friends.
Anyway, something in me said the truth was worse than the lie, that there wasn’t really a lie at all until I told the truth. I had never told this kind old man I couldn’t talk. I had never told him my name was Alex. I had never told him anything at all. But if I told him who I really was, how would he feel about having taken me in? Dave Dewitt was not a fool. And I didn’t want to be the person to make him one.
So I left things as they were. Because things were good.
Nine years into my stay with my surrogate grandfather, he suffered a stroke that robbed him of the use of his right arm. The park staff, smaller in recent years because of the recession, gave him a lovely retirement party. But Dave was not the type of man who retired. Though I worked hard to make him comfortable, I could not make him happy. He deteriorated at a steady rate over the next two years until I could not care for him any longer.
Before I could quite decide what to do for him, whether to get him into an assisted-living facility or hire a live-in nurse, Dave died uncharacteristically quietly in his sleep. When I found him the next morning, emptied of that mysterious essence that had made him alive, that had made him who he was, I finally let out all of the tears I had swallowed for nearly a decade.
A legendary figure in the UP, Dave would have been pleased to see how well attended his funeral was. As he had no family, I paid for everything—the plot, the casket, the headstone—with money I now believed to be tainted with the blood of thousands of innocent people. I watched them lower the box into the hole, the last autumn leaf falling to the ground.
What now? Did I stay where I was? Did I remain Alex, the eccentric, mute, amateur naturalist? Did I reclaim the identity of Robin Windsor, daughter of the most hated man in America?
Or was there a door number three?