That Which We Carry: The House on Utica Street

I found the bones on a run. The geometry of their artful layout led me to stop and cross the street and stand before them, the scaffolding of what would one day become a home. The early dawn light lent a whisper of intrigue to the bulldozed plot. Mud and rock erupted angrily from the ground, a former cover of grass and weed chewed and spat out in tufts here and there.  

I always ran early in the morning, just as I do now, the sunlight sneaking through the outlines of trees, illuminating cracks in the sidewalk as light brought birdsong and promise. I ran, the strike of my forefoot a metronome set to match the weather and my own wellbeing. 

In the sixty seconds I stood still, the house—of which I could see the innermost regions—became a home. I heard my daughter’s laugh as we tossed pillows at each other on the couch while James, my husband, rustled up a pungent stew, the steam of which I thought I could see. That wall. There. My books. In that room, a bed where I’d give birth to my son two years later. 

Maybe a house would keep me still.

~

I fancied myself a nomad. My take on the Bedouin goat-hair tent were my books, a collection of spices in quarter-pint glass jelly jars, and my husband, who was willing to uproot and transplant every few years. 

Now, I wanted to belong somewhere. 

I hadn’t belonged to the land of gnarled, ancient olive trees where I grew up, or to the religion of my parents, or to the future expected for me. I worked tirelessly to build a fortress around my heart.

~

I ran by the house most mornings, watching as a staircase connected the two floors before walls covered the load-bearing beams and joists from my view. I began to dream of a place of our own. After all, I had waited out my insistence on not having children for the twelve years of my marriage. Maybe my daughter needed what I’d never had—a home to which she belonged.

We met with the organization rebuilding the house for low-income, first-time buyers and signed an agreement to purchase the soon-to-be pale green house on Utica Street. For the two of us, a teacher on family leave and an underpaid social worker, $104,000 was a great deal of money. We had been frugal, eaten well but inexpensively—my spices were put to use often and well—and put cash in envelopes kept in a kitchen drawer—ten dollars for entertainment and ten for spending. We felt like grownups, a change from our days of high school romance.

~

We moved into the Utica Street house during the height of summer, the backyard straw-covered and barren. We added a couple of trees—a river birch we brought home strapped to the top of our four-door Mazda sedan and a tulip tree that we centered in the yard near the kitchen. Its heady fragrance would come through the windows on warm summer nights. We dug in the corners of the plot, pulling out stone after stone to use for beds. The garden grew in swirls and flourishes, not a straight line to be seen.

We painted a room or two in shades of sunshine, and arranged the few belongings we had—a cherry coffee table James had made at his first job out of college, a walnut table we had rescued from a dump and restored, a futon covered with a thinning, Indian print bedspread I had bought on a trip to India when I was fifteen. My mother recommended items for a “hope chest” even then. 

We were happy. We were. I wasn’t.

~

My restlessness grew noisier until some days my chest felt as though it housed shards of broken glass. I was deeply in love with my daughter, and chose to stay home with her—our days filled with long walks, picnics, Mamma Mia dance parties in the cold of winter, and an easel set up in the backyard, the paint that streaked her blond hair washed off with the garden hose before dinner. 

I had no reason to be dissatisfied, I would tell myself, the mothering magazines piled high on the coffee table reminding me of the nobility of full time “natural” parenting, shaming me when I thought I was losing my mind with boredom. Three years after Emma, I gave birth to Owen on the “big bed,” as Emma described our bed where she slept for two of her three years. 

I loved my Utica Street house. Giving birth there just sealed the deal—we were a family and we belonged to it, and it to us.

~

Sent away—three days on a train away—for boarding school, my mother’s childhood dream was to be a queen. As a child, I judged her lack of imagination, thinking she suffered from visions of grandiosity. Not until I lost my house did I see that queens, typically speaking, aren’t sent away from family homes. In the most perfect fairy tales, queens control what happens to them. They have palaces. They belong. Building castles in the sky.

~

Days were endlessly long and brilliantly short in the company of my young children. The garden grew, grass baked under summertime pools, and a hammock was hung. Still, I’d stand at the kitchen window, steam from my coffee making the lilac tree shimmer, wave, as though beckoning me. 

~

One day, I had a home—a husband and two children, a house meant for us, a future of knowing, a certitude born of belonging. 

And, then, on another seemingly random day, a fire truck passed by and a woman waved, a wave that began in her shoulder, her body swaying with the rhythm. 

What followed were days that turned into months of ending, leaving, starting over.

~

Leaving a marriage, coming out after two decades of knowing, meant moving. Around the corner from my Utica Street house, I found a tiny apartment above a garage. This meant that the kids spent part of their week with me, taking over the bedroom while I slept on the sofa. The other half, I spent listening to their voices as they played in the yard we’d spent so many hours creating and living in. 

It was unbearable. Almost. The bearing of it was unbearable.

On the nights the kids were with their dad at our—still mine, legally—house, I crawled into Owen’s bed at the apartment, pulling up covers scented with five-year-old boy sleep, sobbing with regret and loneliness. My breath no longer mingled with the sleeping exhalations of my children. Grief and self-pity turned once sweet-smelling air into a well of dank.

~

My mother’s mother, Vesta Miller, left her small town of Goshen, Indiana, in 1938 to travel to India. She studied Hindi in the Himalayas and a year later took over leadership of a school in Balodgahan. She married my grandfather, a stern, emotionally barricaded missionary three years after she arrived in India, alone, with one suitcase.

My mother tells me how her mother changed when she married and moved with my grandfather to a house with an ayah, an Indian woman who cooked and cared for families of the British Empire. They were colonialists, sanctioned by God. 

She lost herself, she tells me. She lost every bit of independence. Everything about my grandparents’ history rubs me the wrong way—I’ve lied more times than I can remember about my missionary lineage— and I wonder who I would be if my grandmother had stayed single, a woman abroad. Of course, the irony of my irritation doesn’t escape me—I also lost myself in a marriage, even one in which I knew happiness.

~           

I would walk by the Utica Street house almost every day, looking through the front windows, seeing the forms of my children jumping on the sofa, running across the living room, the light to the room where I gave birth flicking on and off. 

Those moments, the heart of a home, a series of tiny photographs I carried with me, were exquisite reminders that I was no longer there. No longer there showed me how little of me had been there to begin with.

~

My mother wants a new house. Hers is too small, she thinks. She is angry at hearing from my father that they’ve lived in their home for seven years. It hasn’t been that long, she says. She has no past to hold on to and her future is dimming. 

It’s all crumbling around her and there’s not a thing to be done.

~

Before is three-dimensional—mostly, but not all, constructed of lines and walls and doors that shut tightly. A skeleton of belonging. Beckoned with a wave, I leave. After is a fractal of possibility, forays into an unknown—expansive and open. Mostly.  

~~~

I will read the word, MISSING, before I glance at the photograph, imagining for a split second that I’ll see a young girl—so often they are—smiling at the camera from her front steps, arm resting on her backpack. An everyday scene. Someone’s precious photograph is now a grainy copy.

This photograph—his wry grin unmistakable.

~

Late summer. Paper birch are starting to yellow, the sugar maples reddening like the hint of an unmissable sunset. We, my wife and I, are entering the northern end of Maine’s Baxter State Park for two nights at a campground, South Branch Pond, not ready to head home after finishing a thru-hike of the 100 Mile Wilderness, a repeat adventure for us. 

The park is large, approximately 209,644 acres of protected wild lands, and it’s taken us a few hours to travel the 85 miles from Abol Bridge, the terminus for our trek of the 100 Mile Wilderness, to this northern entrance, Matagamon Gate. We are in moose country and I peer out the window like my nine-year-old self, hoping, as the road narrows and we slow onto rougher surfaces, to see one. The remoteness of this northern edge of the Baxter wilderness breaks me out into a smile at the promise of sleeping to the call of loons and the hike we have planned for tomorrow.

I toggle my phone to airplane mode just before the park boundary, breathing a sigh of relief—no scrolling through a newsfeed or tones alerting me to a text. I set the phone on the console between us and turn toward the park office, my eyes catching the poster plastered to the window behind the ranger.

“No,” I say. “No. This can’t be. I can’t believe this,” I repeat, over and over to myself, to the ranger at the gate and to my wife, who has pulled up our car right next to the ranger station. 

“What?” asks my wife. “Kris, what’s going on?” 

“How is this possible?” I ask of no one, even as I note the pitch and volume of my voice rising. “He was my neighbour. A friend,” short staccato statements one after the other. “I know him.”

I see the guarded look in the ranger’s eyes as I press her for information. “We haven’t found him, yet.” she says. “Yes, he’s still missing.” She doesn’t offer anything more than that and, “I’m sorry,” and I notice a strange feeling in my chest—an interweave of bewilderment, shock, and confusion. 

Missing: a cascading stream of questions and blame and worry and grief. A space defined by wanting, waiting.

This section of Baxter State Park feels like a return to a time when kids skipped rocks and built fairy houses out of moss and twigs. South Branch Pond is crystal clear, a camera obscura for the surrounding mountains on its surface. Rocks just beneath the rippling waters are covered in a verdant, sleek carpet of green biofilm, a collection of the living and the dead. Pit toilets, well-tended by the rangers, are scattered throughout the campground, but that’s the extent of the facilities provided. Funny how I imagined I might take a shower—sorely needed—after our eighth-day backpacking. The air is brisk but the water is still warm enough for a quick swim—our version of a bath. We make camp, setting up the tent and throwing in sleeping pads and bags and a set of dry clothes. We boil water for soup and to drink. We walk with cups of hot chocolate to the lakeside, choosing ample, rounded stones for seats, sitting in the quiet as gentle laps of the water near our feet. Sunset comes early as a brilliant mist of pink over the mountains, and dark descends hot on its heels.

I can’t shake it off. Somewhere, only a few miles from where I am now, a friend who once lived next to me, a gifted artist whose handiwork is evident in my home, was last seen just a few days before we arrived at the park gate. I didn’t know him well, his gentle quiet like a shield, but then again, I hadn’t tried to reach deeper than the pleasantries of sharing a neighborhood and shared musings about our basement staircase, which he was transforming into a coat closet of sorts, one with an orange cement floor and cubbies for this and that. He started his work days late morning, eyes tired, his steady hands taking arguments with the sharp whiff of sour fruit as he spoke. He carried sadness like his well-worn Carhartt jacket.

“How is this possible?” I ask my wife, again, for the umpteenth time since we’d arrived. 

She just shakes her head as though there are no words. 

There aren’t. So, we sit on the rocks, our knees touching. Silent sentinels waiting for the call of the loon, its mournful, haunting cry piercing the darkness. 

The grief of missing is kept alive through the possibility of finding.

We wake early the next morning, the day brisk and open before us. We have planned to complete the Traveler Loop out of the South Branch Campground, a 9.5 mile trail with considerable elevation gain—approximately 3,700 feet—no water sources, and exposed ridges much of the way. My kind of trail—open to the sky, views of Katahdin, winds rustling above treeline scrub–a challenge.

The first mile and a half meanders over trail and aptly placed bog bridges along the shore of Lower South Branch pond on the Pogy Notch Trail. This trail, if taken further, leads to the remote backcountry campground where my friend was last seen some 8 miles on from where we are. 

In a wilderness, 8 miles feels like right around the bend and incredibly far away at the same time.

~

We take the steep Center Ridge Trail, which follows the knobby spine of the ridge to the first of the peaks, Peak of the Ridge. We hike around boulders and scramble up talus, me holding my two trekking poles in my left hand so I can grab rock with my right. I only glance ahead when I’m making three points of contact, two of which are my feet, planted. I’ve taken one too many falls on trails when looking up only to trip on a root or small stone rather dramatically, one time a painful concussion and another a broken leg. These rocks are rhyolite, a light gray or pink volcanic rock, speckled with quartz and crystal that shimmers as the sun shines. Our ascent is slow, the path marked only with paint on rock or trees, sometimes with a small cairn. 

My wife, too far ahead for my liking, resembles a mountain goat as she picks her way with certainty. To me, the ridge feels dangerous and the skies begin to look ominous, dark gray clouds massing in the distance. Between us and peaks to the south, rain is falling in curtains, obscuring the panorama of valley and mountain before us.

The ridge opens to exposed slabs of rock and we wind our way through fields of browning blueberry patches and deep red sumac. Wizened white pines provide an illusion of cover from the threat of lightning. I’m unsettled and anxious, worried about blowing off the mountainside, a fear fed by my missing friend, his whereabouts unknown.

I’m carrying my cell phone so I can take photographs but I’m also obsessively wondering if I should, if I can, text my missing friend’s ex-wife from the top of one of the peaks on the Traveler Loop. She is a closer friend, one I’ve stayed connected to throughout the years. 

“I think you should,” Gill, my wife, tells me. 

I can’t explain why I’m hesitant. 

“I feel like I’m intruding,” I say. “What if she doesn’t know?”

“No way she wouldn’t know and it’s the right thing to do,” she responds.

~

On top of Traveler Mountain, I pull out my phone and find I have two bars of service. I send the text I’ve been composing the entire hike, reaching out to say, “We just saw the poster. We are here, in Baxter. So sorry. Can we help?”

She answers almost immediately. “We can’t figure out how to get his car home. Could you drive it back?”

Some of us walk into the wilderness to heal, to mend, to find ourselves, to grieve. For some, there’s no beyond, no “and then.” Nature, her waters and mountain ridges, her scrubby hemlock and belted kingfishers, a witness.

Mountaintop communication leads to the outline of a plan. I have questions that will remain unanswered, a heaviness that matches the dark skies, and a skittishness about my footing all the way from North Traveler back to camp. The rocks are slick with moisture and the wind bites. 

South Branch Pond sparkles and the mountains beyond are dusted with the reds and yellows of autumn, the beauty bearing a hint of malice—the darkening skies, biting winds, and my missing friend—but all is well. We make our way through meadow and over a rocky outcrop and then down the ridge to meet the Pogy Notch Trail we began on.

We hold hands and meander back to our campsite, our home for the night. 

Our lives feel rich—the rhythmic question of the northern barred owl, hands cupped around a hot chocolate, water lapping on the rocky shore, nestling into downy bags—enough. 

A day. Long ago. I line up the vials on the edge of the bathroom sink. I call my sister and a crack in the darkness lets in just enough light.

We rise with the sun, savoring our last hours in Baxter, puttering around our site before leaving—eating oatmeal in a mug, hanging our bags in the sunshine before stuffing them into their sacks, walking the perimeter of the grounds looking for what we might leave behind, stretching our tired legs from the day before. The sun warms us and my fears of the previous day evaporate. Still, I think of him. One person in such a vast space. Alone. Such profound loneliness.

We find the campground ranger who calls into headquarters to find the car we are to drive back home. It’s in Millinockett, a couple of hours away, so we drive there and wait for the Chief Ranger, Dan Rinard, to meet us at the Baxter State Park headquarters. He’s been planning the next search party, gathering a team from all over the state.

It’s the 23rd of September and my friend was last seen on the 8th but I don’t think about those two missing weeks. I sign the evidence log, passing the chain of custody from Dan to me.

~

We glance inside the back, seeing bags and gear, but don’t open any doors other than the driver’s. On the front passenger seat, a folded pair of jeans and a change jar on the floor. A water bottle. A belt.

“I can’t drive it,” I say.

“I will,” my wife says, knowing all the reasons I can’t.

~

I understand how someone might want to disappear—the world too heavy, dark. The reasons are as numerous as there are people suffering. A commonality, an absence of hope. We cannot see the palette of nature’s handiwork as breathtaking—the stream weaving around rocks, swirling at roots, the mountaintop glistening pink in the sunset, the eagle soaring in and out of low-slung clouds nestling a valley’s slope—when shadows grow long and darkness descends. 

For him, for his family, we drive home two cars, my heart full of all of it, tears washing my face clean.

~

A few months later I receive an invitation to an art show. His former partner has taken up creating art, again, a new perspective and a way to heal. I attend and stand before the work that she calls doodles, a series of portraits the colors of sky and sun and earth. I choose one to take home, all proceeds going to Suicide Prevention and Crisis Services.

I will hang it where I pass by multiple times each day.

“This work is what hope looks like to me now,” she tells me.