The Nature of a Man
It is Doug’s idea to go to Yosemite. His dad used to take him there every summer until his Freshman year of college, when he suddenly became too cool for father/son camping trips. Now he throws himself into making the arrangements, even pulling out the ratty old tent and smelly cooler from the recesses of his parents’ garage. It’s the first time he’s set foot in their house in the entire year since they’d given up the search for his dad.
We spend our first evening at the campsite burning photographs, old workshirts, notes, letters, anything containing fragments of his dad’s essence. Doug collects the ashes the next morning, and sets off for Half Dome before dawn. When he finally returns to camp at sunset, we all silently agree something inside of him had been freed along with those ashes. After a year of watching him brood in painfully distancing silence, half checked out from this world and our lives, I am washed over with gratitude. So later that night, when I find him at the canyon’s edge, arms around a stodgy looking pine tree whose bark is soaking in more of Doug’s tears than I’d counted the whole time I’d known him, I decide to leave well enough alone. When Doug and I first met, he described himself as ‘outdoorsy’. I discovered for myself, after a few months in his company, how much more comfortably his spirit rested in wide open spaces than between any four walls. We would chase the sunset to the edges of clifftops, camp out on beaches to watch it rise up again over the ocean…and in the midst of it all, we fell in love. One night we lay stargazing at the velvet sky, Doug pretending to count and recount the stars with an unconvincing look of concern on his face. He’d scratched his head, and tugged at his whiskers until finally he pulled out a ring, making an aha! face like he’d discovered the one missing star that had fallen out of the sky and landed right in its center. Somewhere between laughter, tears, and kisses, I’d managed to say yes. Even after we were married, Doug never missed his annual weeklong pilgrimage into the wild. It was him, a tiny daypack, and all the eagerness in the world. I don’t know how he survived out there, but he’d return every time, sun-kissed and smiling that big bearded smile of his. We had a running joke about him growing an inch after each journey, drinking in sunbeams and raindrops like some big ambulatory tree.
Doug starts packing for his trip soon after our return from Yosemite, but this year the summer heat is off the charts. He decides to wait it out, preferring cool crispness to the steady intensity of this weather, but it lingers on endlessly, burning a slow, unyielding path into autumn. By mid-October, with still no trace of raincloud in the sky, everything around us feels dry, shrinking, wrong. It wears us all down, draining our parched spirits of energy, and we skulk around like afternoon shadows. With Doug though, it’s as if something essential has gone missing. His hair, thick and black and mane-like, starts falling out in patches. I’m afraid to touch it, to run my hand through like I love to, tracing circles around the small shock of silver near his right temple that’s been there since his birth. At night I used to twine my fingers in it as he held me against him, feeling the warm huskiness of his breath on my face. I’d joke about how the silver strands stand out like my north star, how I could follow it like a beacon, honing in on him among any crowd we’d find ourselves in. Now it’s as if my star has dimmed and I strain to reach him. He’s wasting away, cheeks sunken in, limbs limp and bowed over like the world’s oldest living man, and my heart aches with helplessness. I sit with him, speak with him, try to understand. He is too far off, lost in his own personal world of stoic silence. I gather that he understands as little as I do about these sudden changes, but he rests in an indifference that terrifies me. One night I wake to the welcome sound of raindrops pelting against the windows. The bed is cold next to me, and I follow the trail of opened doors out into the yard. Doug is standing barefoot in the center of the lawn, rooted to the ground with his arms outstretched and fingers splayed, his face turned up to the stormy skies. I walk up behind him and wrap my arms around his chest, feeling his body shake out quiet sobs from somewhere deep within. I cry too, pressing my face against his back, feeling my Doug come alive again. By the time Thanksgiving rolls around, things have regained a sense of normalcy. Doug begins to feel like his old self, round, robust and full of humor. He resurrects plans for his annual trip, and we both agree it is just the thing to fully revive his spirit. The morning of his departure, we wake in time to catch the sunrise from our front steps, and amid the stirrings of silence still within him, I also feel the pulse of a familiar vitality. Our goodbye is long and lingering, and holds the promise of forever. Three days after his scheduled return, Doug is declared a missing person. The days and weeks that follow are a blur in my mind. I am told many details later, but the only thing I remember is staring at the front entrance, waiting for Doug to appear. They call off the search a few months later. It takes a few years after that for the veils that shroud my consciousness to fall away, and I decide it is time for a pilgrimage of my own. I pack some of Doug’s old things, wrap myself in his jacket, and head up to Half Dome. Before I strike out for the mountain top, I walk down the canyon to visit the old pine tree that Doug laid claim to years before. Rising into the skies beside it is a strapping young fir, covered in dark green branches save for one tiny spot. My breath catches, and I reach up to twine my fingers into its lush needles, into the shiny patch of silvery white growing out of one side…like a north star.