Shenandoah Valley

I

The time for moving to Virginia happened upon the couple quickly. It seemed that way even to Dan, who induced relocation by accepting a full-time supervisor position at Dogwood Vineyards in the Shenandoah Valley. He loved almost all of his work in Michigan: pruning vines in the summer, harvesting in the fall, and then pruning again through late winter. His childhood had been spent picking strawberries on his grandparents’ and uncle’s farms, and he always wondered if he wore that tradition on his face, if Marie could read it. However, he also knew that a laborer’s pay created challenges for the family budget and constantly worrying about finances exhausted Marie. He felt it too. So, when the owner of Dogwood Vineyards approached him about the position, circumstances compelled him to accept. Moreover, since she offered him the job after only a single weekend of watching him showcase wines at a convention, she must have been impressed.

He hadn’t been sure how Marie would respond. She would probably be upset that he didn’t ask her first, and she was. “You could have called from the hotel room before accepting, Dan. I’m sure she would have waited a day,” she told him. Whether or not Marie wanted to move, however, remained a mystery long after Dan informed her of the decision. She spent significant time in bed the week following his return from the convention, yet the prospect of moving seemed to have excited her. She couldn’t restrain that look of hers: the one where you could take her green eyes and insert them onto the body of a matador and everything would seem perfectly in place. Dan became especially optimistic one week before the family’s move, as they sat together watching news coverage of the miner’s strike in Britain. Their daughter Iris placed her head against Marie’s brown dress. With an atlas in hand and Marie’s long fingers gliding across colored roads, they traveled through Virginia together, inventing stories about the place they would soon encounter.  

———

Early one morning in March of 1985, the fields of the northern United States, still accented by snow, gave way to the industrial landscapes of the lower Midwest. Rolling hills, creeks, and wave-like mountains framed Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, which reminded Dan of the kind of place an exiled prophet might happen upon, scan widely, and designate as his people’s new home. By evening, the family entered downtown Woodstock, Virginia, passing small retail shops and colonial-style homes. Dan took a brief detour down a narrow state road that crossed the north fork of the Shenandoah River and led to Dogwood Vineyards. “This is where Daddy is going to work,” Dan told Iris, and Marie followed: “We’re proud of him aren’t we?” She looked at Iris and smiled at Dan. Eventually, the family arrived at an old, red brick schoolhouse that had been transformed into an assortment of two-bedroom apartments. The building sat on a large parcel of grass. A ranch-style fence bordered the property. Marie caressed Iris’s hair and said, “Well, it is beautiful here.” 

II

It was either fate or cruel coincidence, Wilson thought as he moved his laptop to the small table just outside of the bedroom where Emily still remained during the late hours of the morning. Virginia Mountain University resided less than forty miles from his birthplace of Woodstock, Virginia. Wilson long wondered why his parents initially moved so far away from home and then moved again a little less than two years later, first to North Carolina and then back to Michigan. They never really talked much about living in Virginia, and for most of his life, the Shenandoah Valley lingered with him like a blurry photograph tucked inside a wallet; its contents remained as much a mystery as its capacity to provoke nostalgia. For a scholar whose research considered human interactions with place, this alignment of improbabilities promised to potentially disclose worldly insight or finally produce his madness.

Many things had to align for Wilson to receive an e-mail with an offer for a tenure-track position at Virginia Mountain University. The fact that he obtained both his Ph.D. and a secure academic position remained the unlikely outcome of a largely chaotic life. White privilege certainly stacked the odds in his favor, but he kept one foot in troubled legal waters during much of his youth. He also attempted suicide twice: once in community college and once during a flirtation with doctoral studies in South Carolina. After returning to Iowa to complete his graduate education, Wilson struggled with the cultural distance between his academic peers and his life back home. On the worst nights, he laid drunk in parks or backyards, watched the stars, and imagined ways of offing himself. The desire to prove them all wrong became the only thing keeping him going; his academic peers needed to know he was capable of making it alongside them and the people back home needed to know he was capable of making it elsewhere.  

Emily likely remained upset about the previous night. It was, after all, the third time it had happened. The first time, she found him on the floor next to the toilet. The second, between the coffee table and the television. This time, she hadn’t even left the bedroom. She was waiting, disappointed, and he couldn’t blame her; she hadn’t known his problems were like this before co-inhabiting. Still, he never knew what to say. He couldn’t apologize because she thought that was a way to avoid direct confrontation with his problems, but he also couldn’t stay silent because then her frustration would boil under the surface until it had a chance to escape randomly during a lunch, while watching a movie, or the next time he had a drink. Telling Emily about the offer and the opportunity to move to Virginia, which was also made possible by her recent acquisition of a sizeable dissertation fellowship, would hopefully distract her from focusing too much on his behavior the previous night. 

III

Marie squeezed Dan’s hand and he thought it felt like a loving touch. 

She surprised him by still wanting to attend Sunday service. The congregation would have understood if she chose to remain home, but Marie insisted on her presence: “I’m pregnant, Dan, not diseased, and still perfectly capable of attending church.” She also told him: “Look, we just need God to bless this baby.” 

Dan realized life in Virginia brought mixed blessings. They had good times, like at that picnic area on the Blue Ridge Parkway where Iris ran up and down the hill before laying at the top and Dan and Marie said, at the same time, “She’s making good memories.” The sense of excitement and adventure, however, collided with the realities of life in a new place—friends came and went, and the drinking common to their parties in Michigan started to produce anxieties that lingered and accumulated well after the hangover. Living so far away from parents and established friendships removed a safety net that otherwise guarded the spirited behaviors of the still newly-minted adults. Most nights produced a hallowed silence, a wide emptiness into which their souls dissipated during a search for home. Sometimes, when he couldn’t fall asleep, Dan imagined people across the valley happily going about their lives, unaware that he, Marie, and Iris even lived there, oblivious to how desperately he wanted to influence their experiences in any kind of way. The supervisor money at Dogwood Vineyards also hadn’t gone nearly as far as he’d hoped, a reality accentuated by the late bill payment notices piling up on their counter. 

Marie grabbed his hand just a little bit harder. “We have to go,” she said. “Now.” 

The labor proceeded far from smoothly. Instead, their son, Wilson, burrowed himself deeper into the womb. At one point, the doctor with grey hair and a skinny face informed Marie, “You have two choices: a c-section or the baby dies.” He then asked Dan to persuade her into choosing correctly: “without the procedure, this baby will die.” 

“Well, he’s an ass,” Marie said as Dan looked at her with both empathy and frustration. 

“They say the procedure’s safer these days,” Dan replied, even though he knew that safety wasn’t her primary concern. She was worried about Dan’s pay, his penchant to spend money, and the second eviction notice they’d received three weeks earlier.

“I really wish you would have accepted your dad’s offer,” she responded. “We would be in a far better position right now. Moving back home would not have been that bad.” 

After his son’s birth, Dan escaped into the parking lot where the mountains rose across the street. He pulled a small bottle of bourbon from his jacket. Yes, the pregnancy had caused unanticipated financial problems, and yes, his dad offered him a job delivering oil back home, but the thought of accepting the offer caused an aching sensation to grow from his chest into his throat. By moving down there, he’d proven something to himself. Most of the people he knew from Michigan had never even been to Virginia, but he was living there. He wished Marie could see how much work he put into making sure they could survive somewhere else, on their own. He stared at a creeping thyme plant, with thin brown stems and only a few of its leaves, surrounding the herb garden to his left. He thought about how they should have covered the plant with sand or gravel over the winter. Nonetheless, like everything during late spring in the valley, the plant would be green again soon. He took a long drink, and then another. There were always ways to work harder, more ways to succeed in the agricultural business; he just had to devise an appropriate strategy. 

IV

Since he and Emily moved to Virginia, Wilson had been experiencing the future through his dreams. It happened twice: in the first dream, he grabbed his cat by the neck. The cat escaped his grasp and ran toward Emily. Through eyes saturated with pain, it asked her, “why did he do that?” 

After waking, unable to shake the guilty feeling, Wilson reminded himself: I would never, ever do such a thing! That evening, however, he discovered his cat staring out of a hole in the basement drywall. He panicked and reached into the hole, only able to catch the cat’s neck. Upon escaping his grasp, the cat ran upstairs to hide under Emily’s reclining chair. 

The second dream happened about a month later. While pulling his car out of a driveway and onto a busy road, he crashed into the side of another automobile. The driver exited the car and, expecting him to yell loudly, Wilson cowered behind the hood. The driver, however, reassured him that “everything is going to be okay.” He knew, upon waking, it had predictive qualities, so he remained alert while driving to work and back the next day, monitored his mirrors and double checked every intersection. Finally, as he backed into the driveway, certain that he had made it through the day safely, he hit Emily’s car. 

 “I just want to run through my thoughts about all of this,” he told Emily, who sat across from him at their dinner table. A pile of books and three emptied beer bottles littered the space between them. “The future and past must exist in the present in complex, layered ways. I mean I got the job here, of all places, where my parents lived when I was born. And when I got here, these dreams started. I just can’t help but think that they’re telling me something: the present must connect to other events that exist in the supposedly distant future or past, events that occur before we even live them.” He searched for interest in her unlined face—a sense of happiness even—but such emotions, if they inhabited her at all, remained buried behind eyes that opened to a mind that drifted elsewhere, somewhere distant, disconnected from Wilson and their dinner table.

Now, before she disconnected, she could have been counting his beers or imagining the liver beneath his abdomen, working to process each one, maybe growing cancerous. She thought like that sometimes. Wilson also concluded that she might have considered the rumors from campus. It was true that he’d been growing impatient and angry in class, likely the result of his relatively permanent hangovers. However, as he tried to explain to Emily, he would not be the first professor to have a problem with drinking. Still, she worried because she had followed him to Virginia on a fellowship, and she wanted the two of them to move together and start over. If this behavior persisted, or continued to worsen, his reputation and employability would be affected beyond the confines of Virginia Mountain University.

Wilson wished he could repay that commitment. He wished his desire to abstain from drinking in front of her could overwhelm his overwhelming desire to drink. The truth was he worried about many things too, including being fired, and drinking helped him survive it. 

V

Marie hadn’t seemed like herself since the delivery. Dan noticed she cried randomly and her interactions with him became increasingly polar: either almost completely devoid of emotion or featuring loud outbursts. She stopped going to church, and the congregation saw through Dan’s ever-shifting excuses. Sometimes, he even caught her looking at him with eyes that seemed almost violent. Upon his noticing, she quickly adjusted, looked down, and smiled. 

He had done his part, though. That morning, he received a two-dollars per hour raise as a reward for his idea to grow and sell fresh herbs at the vineyard gift shop. He’d also been controlling his drinking. Sure, he wasn’t going to meetings as Marie had asked, but he was only drinking beer and only on weekends. He hoped, though he held doubts, that this would be enough to make Marie happy. 

That evening, he convinced her to take a walk with him, Iris, and a four-month old Wilson down the trail that led from the small parking lot across the street into the national forest, eventually ending at Settler’s Overlook. The family sat near where the creek gathered in a pool along the face of a rock outcropping and broke as it encountered recently fallen trees. Iris poked a stick into the water and Dan wondered about fishing. Marie gestured toward Wilson and Dan agreed he looked happy. In the woods, birds traveled between the thin trees, and every now and then a car traversed the small, old bridge that carried state road 42 over the creek. 

Dan daydreamed, and for a brief period, he felt connected to a future, almost as if he existed in two times: the present and a moment well into his time in Virginia. He experienced himself as an older man, near this same creek, but he was tending his own garden. Wilson was visiting. He held a basic, good job around Woodstock, and Dan thought there was something slightly weird about him, like maybe he’d gotten that trait from his mother where he could talk to you while his mind existed somewhere else entirely. Nonetheless, Dan felt happy he continued to visit on the weekends. Wilson asked about Iris and Dan said she seemed happy, the last time they talked. Marie sat at a small window in the house. And then he became connected to a third time: that first night in the hotel room after he’d accepted the position at the vineyards. All three moments seemed woven together in a singular knot. 

———

The family returned to their apartment and Dan dressed a small wound on Iris’s knee while Marie answered the phone in the dining room. Her smile widened slowly, hesitantly, and then her eyes lit with excitement. While collecting her long hair behind the ear opposite the phone, she responded: “I mean that’s just quite the news, Dad. North Carolina. When will you be moving down?”

Dan should have been excited. To have Marie’s father nearby in North Carolina would mean help—with the kids, with finances—and it would have been nice to have somebody, anybody, else around. But Dan also knew his presence came at a cost. He remembered when Marie’s father visited Woodstock, just a few months after they moved there, and Marie learned she was pregnant with Wilson. They were going to dinner when her father pointed to his red truck and told Iris, “You can ride with me. You don’t know if your dad’s been drinking yet today.” 

VI

The future does not appear out of nowhere. Instead, the world features a realm of the actual and realms of the possible. All moments, all possibilities, have already happened. Everything exists right now in a network of possible events. Some of those compose what we humans call “real life;” they are the events that we live. Others hang in the air like energies waiting to be actualized by a consciousness. When we make decisions, we navigate this network of all events and, based on our decisions, we actualize some and let others remain as latent potentialities. Still, they exist; we just don’t live them.

Wilson edited the first few pages of his manuscript, which explored the question of human agency within a terrain of non-linear time. He maintained a basic premise grounded in the distinction between the wave and particle properties of matter: specifically, all possibilities play themselves out before collapsing, and actualizing a moment involves collapsing that realm of possibility into a lived reality, thereby turning the wave into a particle. He identified numerous sources for his theoretical account: Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five; Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway; Kohn’s How Forests Think; Dunne’s own account of his own precognitive dreaming in An Experiment with Time, and Chiang’s Story of Your Life. Wilson had not, however, fully come to terms with how this theory of non-linearity related to his return to Virginia. 

Emily entered the living room wearing the jean jacket he’d bought her back in Iowa. As far as he could remember, she’d never worn it before. The jacket looked good on her, he thought, especially the way the faded blue color interacted with her autumn hair. She had sown a patch on the back near the collar. Emily looked at Wilson and her lips widened slowly into a smile. Her eyes lit with excitement as she said, “I just got off the phone with the University of Oregon. They’re going to formally offer you the partner hire position later today.” Wilson’s eyebrows angled inwards toward his nose, while Emily loosened her posture, let her small frame breathe, and sat next to him on the couch to cradle his hands in hers. 

A few weeks before, he performed the partner hire interview as a kind of postponing of the inevitable. He knew it would result in both of them getting offers, and that being at Oregon would enable them to remain together with secure jobs in the same location. This was not an easy achievement for the two academics. But at the same time, Wilson thought about it like this: if the universe brought someone back to the place where they were born, a place they moved from at such a young age, a place shrouded in lifelong mystery, and the universe did so at the same time that it also jolted that person out of their comfortable belief in linear time, wouldn’t it be smart to dwell in that place for a while and learn what it has to offer?

“Look, this is a good thing,” Emily reassured him. “It’s going to help. Don’t you think part of what’s been going on here is that this place is just a bad fit for you? All the teaching, not enough time for research, colleagues who don’t understand you and, frankly, might not like you very much. Leaving all of this is going to help with your drinking.” Wilson knew if he voiced an objection to the version of the future Emily had become obsessed with actualizing, she would shut down. He would feel her anger not in words, though she would probably say one or two hurtful things, but as it manifested through a distant, unaffectionate silence. 

Still, if he were able to be completely honest with her, he would have told her that being in Virginia made him feel like he was connected to an intelligent universe and that everything he’d learned about addiction suggested that giving your life over to a higher power was one of the first steps toward recovery. He would also say that leaving Virginia could actually make his drinking worse, and that every time he thought about moving with her, an aching sensation grew from his gut and into his chest. But Wilson didn’t and couldn’t say any of this. Instead, the words ran slowly through his head while he remained silent and nodded in agreement that the move would help him out.

VII

Dan didn’t bother to check out shoes or a ball. He went straight to the bar behind a set of doors and to the left of the dimly lit pool room. One short man, shooting by himself, gave a nod in his direction. The bartender poured a shot and opened a can of Schlitz. 

“Haven’t seen you in a while, huh?” he asked.

 After putting the shot glass back on the bar top, Dan replied, “Yeah, well, I quit about a month ago. She gave me a raise and then she took it back, so I quit. I straight up told her: you either let me keep the raise—which was our agreement and I’m sorry where I come from that matters—or I quit, and she said, ‘bye.’ Yeah, that’s what she said. And, so, I left. I said a few things on my way out, too, that she didn’t like, but she deserved to hear everything. All of it.” 

Dan finished the first beer quickly, and then a second one. On the third, the bartender slowly shifted his demeanor. By the fifth, Dan saw that look he knew all too well; the one that said, “Are you really going to put me in a position to stop serving you?” On the seventh, Dan encountered that singular moment which represented the reason he drank. It wasn’t exactly that he became a different person, though it was something like that. He drank in order to feel like he was no longer in control of his actions, to stop analyzing every movement he made. When the switch flipped, it felt like the world flipped too, like he had entered into another universe entirely. The music became louder and more easily made direct contact with his bones. A liquid energy filled the air that kept him moving and speaking in ways that, under sober conditions, he would have been prone to resist. 

He looked around the room and then to the bartender: “Get this. My father-in-law moved to North Carolina. Thinks ‘cause he’s a few hours away that he has the right to tell me how to live my life, how to lead my fucking family. You believe that? I’ll tell you what. I’m over here, supposed to be expecting another child on the way and I’ve got him coming around like that, talking this and that. Let me tell you. He’s lucky he’s my wife’s dad, and the kids love him, or I’d fuck him up. I’d fuck him up.” Dan threw his beer can across the room, which cued the bartender to escort him out. He ended up walking the two miles to his family’s apartment. 

Dan never made it inside that night. Instead, he fell asleep in the woods near the creek across from their home. When he rose the next morning, an empty bottle of bourbon laid next to his body. He sat up next to an oak tree and worked to collect a sense of how he’d ended up there. He remembered thinking that if he went home, Marie would yell at him, appropriately, for once again arriving at the apartment drunk, causing Iris to hide in a corner and Wilson to cry loudly. He shuffled his feet, dug them into the ground, and brought himself back to the future he imagined that evening by that very same creek as Iris poked her stick into the water and Wilson smiled while watching the sky. He thought about everything he’d hoped for when moving down there, about working in the vineyards against the green mountains. His dream was vanishing, becoming more of a ghost than a vapor; still a figure with a form, but one that would now remain forever unlived. 

He looked at his pocket knife, which he had used to carve into the tree, and then toward the empty bottle in the dirt. Somewhere along the way the pursuit of his goals had taken a toll on his family. He looked at his carving. “Stay,” it read. It seemed like an especially ironic thing to write since he knew intuitively that a change was on the way and it would probably entail moving away from Virginia. Perhaps he was just exorcizing the word from his mind. He finished the final few touches on the carving, gathered the empty bourbon bottle, which he would throw away in the trashcan by the trailhead, and readied himself to enter the apartment, apologize, and become the type of husband and father Marie and the kids needed him to be.

VIII

Wilson found a spot across from his parents’ former residence near where the creek gathered in a pool along the face of a rock outcropping and broke as it encountered long-fallen trees. The birds traveled between thin branches, and now and then, a car traversed the small, old bridge that carried state road 42 over the creek. The sound of water and light wind buzzed quietly but persistently in the background.

Sitting on a large rock next to an oak tree, Wilson imagined what life would be like if he were to stay in Virginia. He would have a good job around Woodstock and perhaps his obsession with studying non-linearity would make his colleagues think he was a bit weird, but he would be happy. Maybe he could buy a retirement house for his parents with a garden for his dad and a studio for his mom. Perhaps his dad could even get a part-time job again back at the vineyards where he used to work. He considered those few times that his dad talked to him about living in Woodstock. Mostly, he would just mention how much he loved working in the winery business, growing and trimming vines, and seeing the product move from soil to shelf. Once, Wilson asked him why they had left given that his dad clearly loved the winery business so much. At first, he just said, “It didn’t pay well enough,” but after waiting a moment he continued with a lesson that, at the time, seemed far too distant from Wilson’s experience to be relevant. Dan said, “And sometimes you just need to find the courage to do right by the universe, whatever that might be.”

Wilson looked at the tree next to him and laughed loudly. The word was hard to make out, but the closer he got the more it confirmed his initial perception. “Stay.” Either the world really had been communicating with him or his external reality now took shape around his own solipsistic absurdities. Wilson thought back to times as a teenager when he drove from Michigan to North Carolina, taking the long route just to make sure he traveled through Woodstock and the Shenandoah Valley. At some point, he had to accept that everything in his life up until that moment had coalesced around him being in Virginia, and it was time for him to stay. 

Wilson knew there would be relational consequences to his decision to not accept the offer from Oregon. There would be a brief moment of rage after he told Emily, followed by sadness, distance, and then a quietness. Eventually, they would break up, and it would hurt deeply, especially because Emily cared so much about getting him sober. All those times when she found him passed out on the floor or became silent when he drank at their dinner table, his voice growing louder and more out-of-tune after every beer: she deserved to see the other side. And yet, as the cold air hit his face and the woods grew dim in the final minutes of sunlight, he knew that wouldn’t be the case. Wilson gathered himself and began walking toward the trailhead. He took solace in the fact that, although neither of them would actualize it in this lifetime, the future where they stayed together was still real in the realm of possibility.