Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace (11 page)

My spoiled thoughts were nothing compared to what Dad would likely tell Alice about quality time with me. The onslaught of my period was a siege in a lost war. My stomach was a putrid pulp. I was nauseated at one end, gassy at the other. With every movement, I complained, cried or cursed. I couldn’t stand me.

Some adventure.

I picked myself up and brushed dirt and grass from my knees. Lies came easier when filtered through an electronic screen.

I’m all right.

Really.

Before I could change my mind, I hit ‘Send,’ stuffed my phone in my pocket and pressed onward. Technology and tantrums, two t’s that always dwarfed my speed.

When I limped up to milepost 166 and tried to snap a shot of my foot, my stomach heaved. I leaned on the metal post and shrugged out of my backpack. “Where is my Natchez Trace Parkway map?” The sight of food made my stomach clench. Underneath my sandwich, I found the map and flipped through sections. “One-two. Three-four. Five! This is it.” Lines and dots littered its surface.

“What’s around here? Anything?” I wondered right before I doubled over. My bowels threatened to detonate, but the map showed nothing for ten miles. I wadded it up, zipped everything into my pack, pinched my legs together and forced them to walk. “If I just keep moving, I’ll get past this,” I whispered as I wiped cold sweat from my upper lip.

Ten steps, and my gut wrenched again. Holding my butt cheeks together, I ran up an embankment. Into the woods. Without a care for snakes, bugs or poison ivy, I ripped down my pants, clutched a gum tree, and ejected a noxious pile of feces. I stepped away from the stench and tried to pick a splinter from my ass, but I couldn’t turn my head far enough to see it. “This is what I get for lying to Alice. I should’ve just told her everything about this stupid trip sucks,” I muttered as a car blasted its way south. “Dammit!” I jumped back and almost fell, my forgotten pants still around my ankles. Full-frontal, I faced the highway. The car blew its horn, leaving cackles of laughter and a rebel yell in its wake.

“Asshole!” I shouted, as another cramp sent me straddling the tree again. Explosive diarrhea shook my whole body. When I was finally done, I fumbled with my backpack to pull my toilet paper from the front pouch. Plastic broke free, and I stared at a zip-lock bag and sobbed. “Two squares of toilet paper. I can’t clean all this with only two squares.” I dumped everything on the ground, but my pack contained nothing wipe-worthy. Brown liquid ran down my fingers and puddled in my sleeves as I tried to mop up with two squares. I unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Gatorade, leaned over and launched the sticky drink between the folds of my butt crack. I used more to wash the mess from my legs and feet. When I pulled up my compression leggings, skin, sugar and shit squished under a layer of lycra.

“I quit! I quit! I quit!” Waves of pain shot through my legs as I ran down the grassy embankment, pounded my backpack on pavement and screamed. I whipped out my mobile phone to summon my father, to tell him I wasn’t an adventurer, to come get me, to take me home, to embrace the failure I was. NO SERVICE taunted me from the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

“Dammit!” I slung my abused pack into tarmac a final time and sunk to my knees. “I can’t even succeed at failing.”

Three hundred and sixty degrees of trees, with a narrow road in between. I panned my eyes over the landscape until, seasick, I collapsed on a faded yellow dash of paint that marked the highway’s center.

Maybe somebody would come along and run over me. Put this torture session to an end. Maybe then I’d be a martyr to the memory of whoever, instead of a failed, feces-encrusted quitter.

Ten minutes later, when my darkest thoughts didn’t summon a single vehicle, I zipped my phone into my pants and staggered on. Meriwether Lewis wouldn’t quit, I told myself. Not when so many people were watching.

Who was I kidding? ‘So many people’ wasn’t even fifty.

A flock of cardinals fluttered across the road ahead of me. A whirling red cloud. I dried tears with stained fingers and listened to their music ping-pong across pavement.

All my life, I believed cardinals were good luck. Mamaw, my mother’s mother, collected cardinal paraphernalia and scattered splashes of red all over her house.

After Mamaw died, I believed every cardinal was a message from her. That she was somewhere, even if she was only in my heart. Or in a dancing pack of cardinals, leading me north.

Sunlight freckled the forest interior. I squinted through pine needles and barren branches for glimpses of red and gray. Color dove in time with the cardinal concerto. I tried for my camera, to capture the moment’s mythic quality, but a feathered body buzzed my head. Fleeing wings whispered an order through a faint zephyr. “These moments are building blocks of memory…………..live them. All of them.”

Life was easier when I lived it once removed, but my walk was a baptism of moments. I drowned in experiences that pulled me under, slowed me down. I couldn’t fathom how people like Meriwether Lewis ventured into the unknown, discovered new peoples, and propelled themselves onward by the force of determination. I was ready to quit over one upset stomach and shredded feet. How did Lewis and his men battle the elements for more than two years?

Cardinals flew through my sightline as I shifted my gaze northward. “There’s some sunlight up ahead. If it isn’t a mirage. Maybe I can get warm.”

Forest gave way to a muddy field. Still dormant. Percolating with the rebirth of spring. Without realizing it, I ran. Earth licked my shoes as I galloped through a ditch. My lungs burned by the time I pulled up at the far end of the field and surveyed the landscape.

Green shoots, mottled with a thousand yellow heads. Daffodils nodded and swayed. I heard them whisper, “Stay here. With us.”

When I threw off my backpack and collapsed in their midst, they clapped and welcomed me. I lay there, panting, while clouds merged and parted in the sky. I worked my arms through golden trumpets and ran stems between my fingers.

For the first time, I forgot my schedule. The next milepost. Where I needed to be.

Because I was where I needed to be.

In that field. Experiencing those moments. Without thinking about foot pain or a migraine. How much I stank. The reality of walking would be there when I decided to leave. Tears stung my eyes, and I swiped the grimy track one made to my hairline.

Images of Dad shimmered a few feet from me. Too preoccupied to talk to me when he got home from work. Too harried to sit through a family meal. Too tired to stay awake and watch television with me.

Or maybe he just never knew what to say. Awkwardness was often labeled something else by the human need to classify.

“Life gives us these intervals, these incredible gifts,” I whispered into the sparkling air. “Why am I always too busy, too stressed, too overwhelmed to see them? Just like Dad always was when I was growing up?” I turned my head to gaze into a daffodil’s eyeball. “This walk is supposed to be about these experiences. Right here. The magic and the mystery and the beauty that color the lines of our one brief and shining life.”

When I adjusted my backpack and left that field, I stood at a junction. I looked south at a path of hardship and pain, and I raised my hand in a faint wave. “I’m leaving you now. This is the dividing line. You can’t follow me. I’ve been given these joyous moments, and I’m going to focus on them.”

I turned my face northward and took a few steps. Still agonizing, every one of them. But when a cardinal flew over my shoulder, its wings fluttered a message. “Your walk—and your life—will be different. I know it.”

I heard my Mamaw’s voice.

WALKING ON BROKEN GLASS

Annie Lennox

“You okay, Andra?” Dad waddled through the parking lot of Cole Creek Swamp. Milepost 176.

“I wouldn’t get too close to me, Dad.” I sat cross-legged on a wooden platform built between swirling-skirted cypress trees. Swamp water lapped against the dock, and peanut butter stuck my cheeks together. “Had a little accident a few miles back. Ran out of toilet paper.”

“I got some if you—”

“No-no. I’m only four miles from the end. I’ll just get to French Camp and shower.”

“They got some good Mississippi mud pie at that place.” He took a few steps toward me. “Want me to go get you a piece?”

“Sure. That’d be great.” I leaned against rippled bark and wondered what lurked beneath black water. Was it a key ingredient in Mississippi mud? The sound of the car faded, and I was left with fish chasing the sun.

When did Dad and I switch places?

He was the child, weaving stories through carefree days, while I was the parent, reaching for panicked dreams, a middle-aged gasp to force life’s math to tally.

And I was always dyslexic with math.

When I was in elementary school, Dad spent hours on the phone every night, a victim of the whims of weather. Juggling the wood supply for his plant informed almost every evening of my childhood. I combed Barbie’s hair and pretended not to hear him beg and bargain, curse and plead.

“You’re going to turn around, Roy, and your daughter will be grown, and you won’t have even talked to her.” My mom whispered unwelcome advice in their bed when she thought I was asleep. She repeated it in my presence as she stood over his recliner with ice cream. She shouted it for the neighbors while she packed me into the car for another piano recital he failed to attend.

When he finally initiated a conversation of depth, it wasn’t to say he was sorry. “I didn’t tell my parents I loved them enough, Andra, and now I can’t. If I could have just one minute with them today, I’d tell them I loved them one more time.” He paused and rubbed his eyes. My bed rocked with his departing shot. “I don’t think you love me.”

At thirteen, I didn’t comprehend Dad’s meaning. I only heard surface words and phrases, sentiments akin to swamp water. In my hormone-rattled mind, he was just lecturing me.

I dragged one foot along the white line. Milepost 178. My hand slid from metal. I turned my thoughts to daffodils.

Joy. I discovered it one hour ago.

When I looked to my right, Dad was there.

“Dad……”

I slid toward him.

And I saw a car plow through me.

What did it feel like when the soul was knocked from the body? I went numb and threw my arms around my head. Through my elbows, I glimpsed two halves of a Mercedes. While I hovered between life and death, the pieces joined together and formed one unit that fled up the highway. It vaulted around a curve and disappeared.

Was this what Meriwether Lewis experienced when he died? Explosive light and seeping cold and paralysis? Could he really see the landscape around him after he was gone, as I wrote in my book?

Was my death some cosmic repayment for writing about him in the first place?

I braced myself for waves of pain. Broken limbs. Exposed bone and viscera.

But my feet were glued to white paint. I was still upright. Unscathed. Dad’s car idled a few feet from me. When I looked at him, he smiled.

“I got your pie.”

I rattled my head between my hands.

How did that happen?

The car never braked, but I was convinced it hit me. Angry molecules spun inside me, emotions I thought I scraped off and left in a daffodil field.

I leapt across the road and assaulted Dad. “You can’t just stop in the middle of a highway to talk to me, Dad!”

“But I got your pie. Don’t you want it?”

“Did you even see that car? It almost hit me.” I rubbed my face with shaking hands. “I don’t know how it didn’t hit me. I’m sure it hit me. I know it did.” Pebbled tar and yellow paint wobbled beneath me. Dead. I should be dead.

“What do you want me to do with this pie?”

I pounded the car with my fists. “You can take that pie and—”

Dad shrunk in his seat. Confusion lit up the lines on his face. How did he miss the almost-death of his daughter, her mangled body parts strewn over a federal parkway?

Or was I the problem? Maybe hallucinations were a logical part of a migrained-stomach-bugged-dehydrated-muscle-pained-shit-perfumed day.

Meanwhile, Dad’s world was all about pie. Pie made him happy. Bringing me pie was a nurturing act, right? For the first time on the hellacious trip, Dad volunteered to do something for me. So what if it was a thing I didn’t want, calories that wouldn’t make my feet stop bleeding.

Inside my head, a voice screamed, “He’s trying to connect, to take care of you, you stupid idiot.” A cardinal flew over the car’s hood, a daffodil in its beak.

“Dad.” I touched his shoulder. “Don’t stop in the road and talk to me anymore, okay? It isn’t safe. Somebody might rear end you, and I’d feel terrible if you got hurt.”

“Well, back there you looked like you could use some pie.”

“Bethel Mission is just ahead. Pull in there and wait for me, and I’ll come and eat that pie.”

“All right.” He started to roll up his window.

“And don’t eat it before I get there.”

Laughter filtered through glass. “Don’t worry, Andra. I already had mine.”

I was full of Mississippi mud by the time I reached milepost 180. Two miles from the end, I sat within the faded lines of Bethel Mission and savored every gooey bite. Richness landed in my stomach like rocks, but I scraped the container clean.

And I wondered how I could walk fifteen miles a day and not lose a pound.

Dad picked me up and drove into the village of French Camp. One of the oldest settlements on the Trace, it was still an outpost in Mississippi wilderness. People came to gaze at the stars, to meditate with the Bible. We bounced down a dirt road to our cabin. A full kitchen and a bathroom I didn’t have to share. Dad followed me inside.

“Not more stairs.” He regarded a sketchy staircase along one wall. “You sure those things’ll hold me? Maybe I’ll sleep down here.”

I lugged a box of food laden with enough sugar-free snacks to feed the tiny village of French Camp for a week. The table groaned when I slid stuff on top, but I was too tired to care if it buckled. “Just be comfortable, Dad. I’m going upstairs to bed.”