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| Prologue | 1 | (12) | |||
| I. Winter | |||||
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13 | (16) | |||
| II. Spring | |||||
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29 | (8) | |||
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37 | (4) | |||
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41 | (10) | |||
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51 | (5) | |||
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56 | (4) | |||
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60 | (3) | |||
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63 | (3) | |||
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66 | (4) | |||
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70 | (8) | |||
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78 | (8) | |||
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86 | (7) | |||
| III. Summer | |||||
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93 | (5) | |||
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98 | (6) | |||
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104 | (4) | |||
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108 | (7) | |||
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115 | (2) | |||
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117 | (8) | |||
| IV. Fall | |||||
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125 | (9) | |||
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134 | (11) | |||
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145 | (7) | |||
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152 | (4) | |||
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156 | (4) | |||
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160 | (11) | |||
| V. Winter | |||||
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171 | (7) | |||
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178 | (12) | |||
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190 | (15) | |||
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205 | (3) | |||
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208 | (9) | |||
| VI. Spring | |||||
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217 | (4) | |||
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221 | (3) | |||
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224 | (7) | |||
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231 | (3) | |||
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234 | (10) | |||
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244 | (5) | |||
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249 | (5) | |||
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254 | (6) | |||
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260 | (7) | |||
| VII. Summer | |||||
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267 | (12) | |||
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279 | (5) | |||
|
284 |
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Chapter One
A Suburban Sargasso
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck
inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.
--Bob Dylan, "Stuck inside of Mobile"
I had no notion of what happened behind the closed doors of our neighbors' houses, but I knew all too well what took place behind ours.
Tempers rubbed raw by ten-hour-plus workdays, disagreements over how best to parent, and squabbles that erupted from nothing and seemed to lead nowhere had come to define my relationship with my wife, Susan, in our suburban Knoxville home. The veneer of civility and respect we displayed toward one another had grown thin over the previous few years, and the slightest scratch revealed a core of anger that ran deep.
Susan and I married young--she was twenty-one; I was twenty-six--and as she eased into her mid-thirties, she began to gain a strong sense of self and a perspective from which to evaluate past choices. To her, my suitability as a partner had become suspect, and I acknowledge truth in much of her criticism of me.
As a writer, I spent far too much time living in my head, formulating story lines and musing over detail and structure. I created a trail of clutter wherever I went and often seemed not to notice the chaos I left in my wake. I was inclined toward unbridled candor, which frequently assumed a hurtful form. I admit to an impetuous bent, and I was far too inclined to make unilateral decisions, though I generally had the family's welfare at heart.
As Susan and I grew more distant from one another, I developed an adaptive knack for taking care of myself, and Susan came to interpret my care of self as selfishness. But the roots of our troubles likely traced further back, as most problems do. Susan's family was scarred by the divorce of her parents--the result of incompatible temperaments and interests.
Perhaps the cycling of divorce grows more from flawed choices in selecting life mates than from failure to invest emotion and energy in making viable relationships work. Meanwhile, though my family had never known divorce, we had experienced our share of marriages that perhaps lasted longer than they should have.
Whatever the reason, after eighteen years together, our lives had become increasingly divergent. We kept separate checking and savings accounts, we had few friends in common, and we pursued separate careers. Susan ran a home-based graphic-design business, and I worked as a freelance writer and communications director for a research center at the University of Tennessee. As the stressors in our daily lives increased, we became less intimate, less nurturing, less engaged in each other's pursuits, and as a result, we faced a widening interpersonal gulf that taught us all too well to tend to our own needs while neglecting care of the other. It saddens me to think that two people who lived in the same house, shared the same bed, and doted on the same children could evolve as strangers.
There was a time early in our relationship when we relied on each other for nearly everything, and the attraction we felt for one other was so powerful that I never imagined it would ebb.
We had met at a Halloween party in 1980 in a large house I shared with two other bachelors. The Marz Hotel, a bohemian outpost named in tribute to the Grateful Dead album, From the Mars Hotel , sidled next to modest homes of working-class people in a blue-collar neighborhood near a GM plant a few minutes north of Cincinnati. The twenty or so former high school buddies who lived there over the years were known collectively as Martians.
The Marz had become a party mecca of sorts, and for our All Hallow's Eve bash, revelers arrived by the dozens, some from out of state, including Susan, who had traveled with a group of fellow art directors from Chicago. The common link was my roommate's brother, who lived in Chicago and who had attended art school with Susan in Colorado.
I was, at the time, a happy bachelor and determined to stay that way, until that Halloween night, when I laid eyes on the Hershey's Kiss who entered through the front door with a gang of superheroes in elaborate costumes who'd assumed grandiose names. Among them was Chotar the Magnificent, whose papier-mâché warrior's helmet boasted a hinged nose piece, which allowed him to drink beer without stepping out of character.
I recall standing in the entryway and peering down the hall and glimpsing the most profoundly beautiful creature I had ever seen, blond and lean and athletic, clad in a tapering aluminum foil wrapper. Brown hose-covered legs emerged from the bottom of the Kiss and seemed to extend endlessly to the floor. Meanwhile, I had assumed the guise of a green-faced Martian with wire antennas sprouting from a blue ball cap.
I remember thinking to myself, "Brill, you don't have a prayer," but I determined to see if charm and a little Martian juju could offset whatever I lacked in rugged good looks. We locked eyes, I approached, and we kindled a conversation that began sometime after nine o'clock and continued unbroken until four in the morning. For the seven hours we were together, my gaze never left Susan's beautiful face, and though we were awash in a sea of boisterous partyers, we might as well have been alone on a deserted island. A friend, who served as the official party photographer, snapped a couple of rolls of film of the two lovebirds, though neither of us noticed his presence or heard the clack of his shutter.
"I've never seen anything like it," he said, later. "It was like someone had shot you two with a tranquilizer gun or something. Neither of you moved all night."
Then it was time for Susan to leave, and as she piled into the car with Chotar and his band of superheroes, I felt a stab in my stomach, fearing that I'd never see her again. The next day, I was cranky and had no appetite, but not because I was hungover. The only thing I had overindulged in the night before was fantasy. Later in the day, I tried to play tennis with my friend Grant, but my serves kept dropping into the net, and I stood staring blankly as his forehands blazed past me.
"Brill, focus!" he yelled, at one point. "You're losing it."
And I suppose I was. That evening, I visited my folks' house, and I told my mother that I had met the woman I was going to marry. This from a guy who valued his freedom over all else and had pledged to be a lifelong bachelor.
"She must really be special," Mom said. "Where does she live?"
"Chicago."
"How is that going to work?"
"Don't know, but I'll figure it out."
A couple of weeks passed, my appetite slowly returned, my tennis serves started dropping in, and I figured the vision in tinfoil was wowing Chicagoans infinitely more deserving of her than I. Then one afternoon, the phone rang at the Marz. It was my roommate's brother calling from Chicago. After a brief conversation, he said, "Hey, there's somebody here who wants to talk to you."
I tensed, my mouth got dry, and Susan's voice came on the phone.
"I had a great time with you at the party," she said, after a few pleasantries. "Any chance you'd want to come visit me?"
"Yes! When?" I struggled to control the quaver in my voice.
"How about next weekend?"
"Yeah, great!"
She gave me directions and her phone number.
"I'll see you Friday night."
At the time, I was the proud owner of an eight-year-old Chevy Vega with a broken heater and rust holes in both fenders large enough for a basketball to pass through. The radio didn't work, and the cassette player was marginal. I had only one tape in the car, which had Richard Nixon's resignation speech on one side and Jackson Browne on the other. The car was barely adequate for around-town trips and hardly roadworthy enough for a six-hour jaunt to Chicago in November. Besides, I was certain I didn't want my fantasy woman to cruise the streets of Chicago, freezing toes and fingers while listening to "Effective noon tomorrow, I will resign as your president...."
As it turned out, my brother and a few of his friends were heading to Purdue University that weekend to hook up with some college buddies. Steve, who had just taken a job as an engineer at General Electric, had purchased a Toyota, and he offered to let me continue north to Chicago in his new Celica after I had dropped him and his friends in West Lafayette.
I arrived in the outskirts of Chicago at 2 A.M., and I remember that the airways were abuzz with people calling in to talk shows to discuss who had shot J. R. Ewing on the hit TV series Dallas . The assailant's identity had been revealed earlier that evening in the show's weekly episode. Though I'm proud to say I've not endured a single episode of Dallas , the show does help anchor that blissful period of my life.
Perhaps it was the heady experience of talking on the phone with the woman of my dreams, or my poor navigational skills, or the combination of the two, but the directions I had jotted down led me, not to Susan's apartment near the lake, but directly to a ghetto neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, a place where, I'd heard, deliverymen burned their headlights even during the day as a sign of respect to the street gangs, who might otherwise have taken potshots at them.
After meandering lost for more than an hour through alleys and side streets lit only by the glow of tavern signs and the occasional light post, I found a pay phone and called Susan. I described my location and read the names on the street sign above me.
"You really don't want to be there," she said, and offered me a hasty course correction. "Get back in your car right away and lock your doors."
A short time later I arrived, and we reconnected immediately and waded right back into the seven-hour conversation we had begun a few weeks earlier. The next day, we rode the el, visited the top of the Sears Tower, and ate French bread and drank red wine on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Afterward, we hit the bars on Rush Street with my roommate's brother and few other expatriate Cincinnatians who had settled in the Windy City after college.
Though the setting was different, our time together was equally as blissful as our first meeting--and I suspect as revolting to our friends, who had to endure hours of dopey gazes and hand-holding. That night, Susan and I didn't sleep, but lay awake together till dawn.
Within a few weeks, Susan was flying into the Dayton airport every Friday evening, traveling free by virtue of her father's position as captain for TWA, and returning to Chicago, first on Sunday evenings, then Monday mornings. A couple of months later, she left her job in Chicago and moved into the Marz Hotel.
During the following summer, I set out with three other hikers on a four-month, 1,200-mile wilderness trek across the Pacific Northwest. It pained me to leave Susan, but the expedition had been planned long before the two of us had met. By that time, we had moved from the Marz into our own apartment, and my departure was tearful and frightening, largely because our relationship was still so new. I imagined that in my absence, Susan, beautiful and amiable as she was, would meet someone else, someone who wouldn't leave her behind to go climb mountains a few thousand miles away.
As it turned out, we were both poised to benefit once again from her father's position with TWA. A few weeks into my journey, I arrived in Orient, a tiny logging settlement in eastern Washington near the U.S.-Canadian border, just before noon on a Friday. I found a pay phone and called Susan at the ad agency where she worked as a graphic designer. After a month in the woods, sleeping in a tent with a hiking partner who smelled like a goat anointed with insect repellent, I was badly in need of a conjugal visit.
"I miss you," I said. "And Koegel's snoring is wearing thin. I know this is impossible, but is there any chance you can come out here?"
A pause.
"We'll it's two o'clock here, my boss is out, and I've got this project I should get done by the end of the day. But ..."
Within an hour, she was packed and on the way to the airport to negotiate free passage on planes headed west, and I was standing out on the main road through Orient, with my thumb thrust in the air, hoping that some kindly stranger would shuttle my large orange expedition pack and me a hundred-plus miles into Spokane.
As it turned out, a guardian angel named Ed Calhoun, a forester who lived near Spokane and who had been cruising timber around Orient, stopped, offered me a ride, and drove me all the way to the airport Hilton. Before he left, he jotted down his phone number and told me to call him Sunday. He'd pick me up at the airport, let me crash at his house Sunday night, and then give me a ride back up to the trail in Orient the next morning.
Along the drive, Ed and I talked easily about a range of subjects, as hitchhikers and their chauffeurs often do, including love and marriage. He had just gone through a divorce and was still bruised and depressed. But rather than emerge from the experience cynical and resentful, Ed urged me to work hard, to make my relationship with Susan last. Over one hundred miles of pavement, we became good friends, and we corresponded with each other for several years after.
After Ed had dropped me off, I lugged my backpack into the lobby of the hotel, dug deep into my pocket to come up with thirty-five dollars for a room, and spent forty-five minutes in the shower, scrubbing off a month's worth of grit. Within two hours, I was at the airport, nearly trembling with excitement, waiting to spot Susan in the line of disembarking passengers.
We hadn't talked since that morning, and I was well aware that passengers traveling gratis are the first to get bounced. Until the moment I glimpsed her, wearing a yellow and turquoise polka-dotted white shirt and jeans, I feared that somewhere between Cincinnati and Spokane she had been grounded.
For two nights and two days, we stayed locked in the hotel room, making love and then dozing in each other's arms, aware that the clock hands were spinning and our time together was growing short. At one point, we decided we were hungry, and not wanting to waste precious time in a restaurant, I set out down the hallway, foraging for food and eventually found a picked-over hors d'oeuvre tray outside a banquet room. It sustained us through the weekend, along with the bottle of wine Susan had brought with her.
Sunday, Susan climbed on the plane home, and Ed picked me up in front of the airport and took me back to his apartment. I slept on his couch, and the next morning, he made me pancakes with fresh blueberries he had picked while up in the mountains. By Monday afternoon, I was reunited with my hiking buddies in Orient. They smelled just as rank as I had remembered, but the envious glares on their faces were new.
Susan's and my relationship survived my four-month expedition, and afterward we endured a period of lean earnings, during which, at one point, we were forced to eat leftover freeze-dried food from my trip. Despite our cash-flow problem, we seemed content just to have each other. I recall one Friday evening scraping together our pocket change and walking to a nearby store to buy a Scrabble game and a couple of steaks.
It was one of the best nights of my life, and I remember feasting on the steaks and then stripping down to play a game of au naturel Scrabble.
We were married the next fall, after I had entered graduate school, and we moved to Knoxville in 1985 and took jobs with a publishing company based here. We lived on a thirty-acre farm in a hundred-year-old farmhouse, and we spent much time, as most newlyweds do, planning our future, which, we agreed, would include children and dogs. As it turned out, the dog, a black Lab named Morpheus, came first and became our child through several frustrating years when a baby never came, which ended with the birth of our first daughter, Challen, in 1989.
Susan and I witnessed the births of our daughters, Challen, now ten, and Logan, who arrived two years later, with shared joy. But over the years, our connectedness gave way to separateness and aloof autonomy. I believed that we were still in love, but somewhere along the way, we had forgotten how to be loving.
I'm not sure the frantic tenor of our lives could have sustained the level of intimacy Susan and I seemed to have lost, even if we had been determined to regain it. There were many, many times I wished we could have stripped down, dusted off the Scrabble game, and resurrected the spontaneity and playful joy that attended our early years together.
My conversations with other suburban moms and dads revealed that they, too, felt scattered by obligations and had been left unfulfilled by careers that demanded so much but in the end offered little meaning or purpose. They, too, had lost the ability to play.
I couldn't recall the last conversation I had had with a friend who felt truly gratified by his work and whose enthusiasm in describing his job bore that out. In the end, most of us seemed to be working because it represented a means to an end, a way to meet the mortgage payment, the car payment, and to squirrel away a few dollars for our children's college educations.
Were we to ask our children which they would value more, increased access to their parents now or a free ride to college a decade or so hence, I think their choice would be clear.
But beyond the work world, even the pursuits that we term recreation seemed to be tinged with tension, and as I stood on the sidelines at Challen's soccer practices, I saw little of the joy I experienced as a Little Leaguer when I took to the baseball field with my buddies, surrounded as we were by dads who were completely present with us.
I recalled Mr. Emerick, Mr. Bashman, and my own dad, clad in shorts and T-shirts and wearing our team's official cap, showing us how to grip a baseball or swing a bat. They had left the office behind when they joined us on the field, and their focus on us communicated the importance they placed on spending time with us.
I confronted a different scene on the soccer field. In fact, pagers and cellular phones appeared to be part of the soccer parent's uniform, and I recall watching the father of one of Challen's teammates crimp his cellular phone between shoulder and ear for a twenty-minute business conversation while he worked the girls through various ball-handling drills. Though I'd never had occasion to phone out from the soccer field, I was as guilty as the next dad in terms of being emotionally sidelined by thoughts of the office during my time with Challen's team.
I could only imagine what effect that constant running and round-the-clock connection to work had on the other families, but there was no disputing the influence it was having on mine. Frequently, I unlocked my office at the university at 7:30 A.M. feeling wrung out even before my workday began. And Susan's graphic-design business routinely kept her tethered to her computer long past midnight.
We and our daughters collapsed on Friday evenings with tired eyes, feeling perversely gratified that we had survived another week spent addressing other people's needs--or at least needs external to our family--while ignoring our own.
I spent far too many weekends working, and over the course of a year or so I noted a widening emotional gulf between my daughters and me. Evenings, they tailed me down the hallway, relating valuable experiences from their days at school. But I had become a passive listener.
"That's nice," I would say reflexively, barely registering the information they'd shared. I was preoccupied with tomorrow's obligations while I should have been focused on the all-important "now" with my family.
My halfhearted listening suggested to my girls that I valued my work over them, and I realized that someday they would turn away from me for good. I realized, too, that I was becoming the very person I loathed so much in my early days of parenting--the stereotypical workaholic father--and that I was damaging the most precious relationships I would ever know.
Then there was our morning routine, which I'd describe as falling somewhere between a masochistic scavenger hunt and a bruising game of human bumper cars.
I had bestowed watches on our children, hoping to teach them respect for time and encourage efficiency. Instead, I persuaded them to become slaves of timekeeping, and in my more cynical moments, I regarded our watches as shackles reflecting our indenture to the chronograph.
As it's turned out, the watches served more often to remind us that we were falling behind our time rather than to help us stay in front of it. And frantic mornings spent scrambling to find socks, shoes, and book bags "before the little hand was on the seven and the big hand was on the six" earned my daughters far too many tardy slips.
One fall morning, during a chaotic sprint to school, Logan reached her breaking point. "I'm so tired of rushing!" she boomed, standing on the kitchen floor, tears streaming down her face. She had one sock on, its mate lost in a pile of laundry on the floor of her bedroom.
If I hadn't been so disturbed by the outburst and the level of distress it reflected, I might have found some humor in the cartoon-strip image of a howling seven-year-old clutching a white tennis shoe in her left hand, a half-eaten bagel dripping grape jelly in her right.
"We're always rushing!" she screamed.
Amen, I thought. At that moment, I was melting an ice cube in my coffee cup so I could chug down its contents without scalding my mouth as I mentally planned the agenda for an 8:30 A.M. meeting. Susan, edgy from a long night spent in front of her computer, dashed past me in search of her missing car keys.
"We've got to leave now!" she urged.
I noticed Challen, whom I'd hardly characterize as a morning person, standing zombielike in her bedroom, fully dressed but still in the grips of sleep, and I felt sad for all of us. In my younger, more idealistic days I never imagined that I would live that way.
Perhaps I would have been more resigned to the inevitability of an existence spent rushing if I hadn't experienced an entirely different way of living and being some years earlier while hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. While on my journey, I spent nearly half a year living in the forests of the Eastern United States, and the experience exposed me to the beauty and power of the wilderness and imparted the value of surrendering to the gentle rhythm of nature. In my first book, As Far as the Eye Can See , a collection of essays based on my Appalachian Trail adventure, I wrote:
Over my five months on the trail, the very rhythm of my life settled down.... I rose at dawn and covered my daily mileage with ample time to tarry at mountaintop vistas or soak my feet in streams and still make camp with enough daylight to roll out my bag, boil my noodles, write in my journal, and brew my evening cup of tea.
More recently, I wrote scripts for a national television series called The Good Life , which airs on Home and Garden TV. The show profiles men and women who fit one key criterion: They've dropped out of the career rat race to pursue their dreams. While researching and writing the scripts, I interviewed a former stockbroker who became an organic gardener, a once-harried ad-agency art director who had become a furniture maker, an executive who ducked out of the boardroom to create a museum for vintage wooden boats, a newspaper reporter who chucked the daily deadlines to operate a cooking school.
Though they followed different paths in achieving their goals, all had taken that critical first step in defining the lives they wanted for themselves and their families, and then they mustered their resources and planned their escapes. Ultimately, all realized their dreams, and I count them among the most self-contented people I've ever met.
Often, as I buckled into my car and sprinted off to the office, I switched off the radio and recalled the feeling of being clearheaded, focused on the moment, and embraced by the beauty of nature. Those feelings were central to my Appalachian Trail experience. And as the highway miles slid by, I would surrender to the fantasy of retreat that had stayed with me since I reached the pinnacle of Maine's Mount Katahdin at the end of my Appalachian Trail journey.
While the fantasy played out in my head, contractor Joe Sexton and a crew of carpenters were poised to begin work an hour away in Morgan County, Tennessee, constructing my fantasy board by board. Six months earlier, I had purchased a ten-acre parcel of undeveloped land situated on a wooded ridge overlooking Clear Creek at the edge of the Cumberland Mountains. There, Joe and his crew would soon begin fashioning a 630-square-foot cabin, and in the process, they'd play a pivotal role abetting the Brill family's escape.
But even before the cabin began to take shape, the property became a prime destination for frequent weekend trips. On our visits to the property through the winter, my family and I spent hours evaluating candidate trees for rope swings and hammocks. We watched deer and turkeys moving quietly through the forest. We sat on the creek's shoreline, with snow swirling around us, imagining ourselves floating in cool water on hot summer afternoons. We stacked firewood, whittled walking sticks, collected bird feathers, and sat and listened to the wind move through the pines. We even began to experience the pang of regret that came when it was time to depart the woods and return to the suburbs.
In spring, the season my Appalachian Trail journey began twenty years earlier, the season I will forever associate with spiritual awakening, I realized that within a few months, my family and I would arrive at the property and see our dream cabin fully expressed and ready for habitation. And we would begin a new journey together. There, over weekends and vacations spent together at our cabin, I hoped we could strip away the distractions and stressors that had nudged us apart and, in Thoreau's words, "front only the essential facts of life," reach to the core of our commitment to one other, and mend damaged relationships.
Though I've never been one for grand gestures, the retreat cabin, at its heart, was just that. It represented my attempt to hold my family intact. The notion of divorce was completely at odds with my definition of family, and I never imagined I would arrive at that threshold. Somehow, I'd always considered marriage as a perpetual process of second chances and opportunities to atone for past mistakes. It was a naive vision and one that failed to recognize that any relationship can sustain only so much hurt and neglect before the damage is irreversible. But back then, I believed the cabin would play a central role in helping us get "unstuck" and move beyond the fear and inaction that had paralyzed us for the previous three years.
The coming months, I realized, would put my hopes for reconciliation to the test and launch a process that would shape--and perhaps redefine--the context of family for the four of us.
Copyright © 2000 David Brill. All rights reserved.
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