Alexandra Middleton
Big Sky
The sky cracked open somewhere just across the border from Idaho to Montana. I’d heard it called “Big Sky Country” before but never quite understood how something like the sky—already limitless—could somehow be more infinite in some landscapes than others. Yet here, the horizon’s edges seemed pushed-out, stretched by mountainscapes, as if the globe was bending perceptibly. This sky, ballooned overhead, was undeniably bigger. It felt simultaneously closer and further away, just like the space between my father and I—he in the driver’s seat, me in the passenger’s—barreling on an open highway, heading East.
For weeks prior, we spent dinners charting our route: from my childhood hometown in Bend, Oregon to graduate school in Princeton, New Jersey, following a Northern stretch of cross-country highways. My father’s childhood and early adulthood strung across the country in a way that begged for a road trip. Born in South Dakota, he spent his boyhood primarily in the rural Montana mining town of Butte, and grade school in the railroad town of Deer Lodge. His father, a civil engineer working on the railroad, moved the family to just outside of Chicago when my father started high school. University was in Iowa City, where my father studied European Literature and Thought. Graduate school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he got his Doctorate of Arts in education. (In between these, he had moved to England, for a Master’s Degree, and Jamaica, where he taught high school English literature, and met my mother, who was in the Peace Corps at the time. But these places—England, Jamaica—were unreachable by car, and so we bracket them.) Many years later, Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where I came along. Before all of us followed him across the country to a new job and made a home in California, then later Oregon. The narrative I spun (he is far too non-nostalgic for this version) was that we would trace the backbone of my father’s past, driving West to East.
I harbored a hope that the road trip would be a chance to get to know my father better, the life that he stitched across all these places, of which I knew nothing. For a writer and literary scholar, he was a man of few words when it came to the personal. Our family joked that his answer to questions about how he felt about something was always: “medium.” The fittingness of his last name—Middleton—was not lost on us. I had seen, though, the stacks of typewriter poetry of his youth, the thick folder of love letters (I wasn’t allowed to read) written to my mother during their first year of courting while living on opposite sides of the island. More existed on the periphery, blurred by a focus on the middle. Spending six days together in a car was bound to reveal something I didn’t know about my father.
I suppose, folded up in this desire to get to know him better, was also a curiosity to know this country, the umbrella holding all the places we both called home into one—this untenable thing of “America”—by traversing it, West to East. My father used to joke that I wouldn’t appreciate the Midwest because I had been raised as a “coastal snob.” I would retort that it was his fault for
moving us. It was the autumn of 2015, just about a year before Trump would be elected as President of the United States, before the faultlines that had been deepening for decades, upending the myth of the union, would be more visibly exposed, palpably felt. It felt right that we would be driving, not flying, through what they called “the flyover states.”
I had packed my audio recorder in the glove compartment, like any anthropologist setting off on fieldwork, imagining I would interview my father along the way. It’s a strange thing, looking back: this desire to document one’s own father like a research subject. Perhaps I needed to take on the role of interviewer in order to disrupt our usual modes of being together, to step outside the usual form of story our conversations would take. To step outside the trope of father and daughter, to step inside the trope of person to person.
I thought, maybe, by visiting where he had lived, we would be at least in the presence of stirred-up memories, a sensorial presence that couldn’t be denied, even in the thirty-plus years since he had been to these places. At best, he’d tell me about them. I could point. I could ask follow-up questions. Was the house blue back then, too? What games did you play with the neighborhood kids in the heat of a Montana summer? Where was the parking lot outside Chicago where your father—my grandfather—suddenly took his last breath?
These questions were decoys for the real ones. The places I, he, we couldn’t touch. The walls that separated his life from mine. What was it like, to lose your father at such a young age, just as you were crossing the precipice of boyhood to whatever came next? How did the shockwaves ripple through your family? What did you feel?
I’ve lived most of my life with an acute awareness of my father’s own mortality, the gravitas of having almost lost him when, at age fifty, he survived a heart attack that I, at age five, witnessed from the back seat of our tandem bicycle. When you see the paragon of stability in your life strapped to a stretcher nearly unconscious, you cannot erase that image. It is imprinted on your synapses.
My father’s father, too, had a sudden heart attack when he was forty-nine, in the parking lot outside my father’s last high school basketball game. He did not survive. He left behind a wife, a twenty-year-old daughter, and my father, just sixteen at the time.
My father and his father’s life trajectories diverged, just one year apart. And so, in a way, did my father’s life and my own. The specter of almost losing my father was ramified by knowing that my father himself did not have the same fortune that I did: he did lose his father. This ineffable rift—between loss and almost-loss—fascinated and haunted me.
My father has a slightly different take on the mortality thing. Many of the major life events we have shared in the time since the heart attack—travels, graduations, meeting the man who would become my husband—he frames, in retrospect, as unexpected bonuses won from the lottery of a second chance at life. I had a sense, even though he didn’t say it, that this road trip was one of them.
I wondered, though, if a parallel story was playing out in his inner landscape, one that had little to do with our relationship. A story not told from the perspective of a father who almost died, but from a son whose life had eclipsed his own father’s life by twenty years, and counting.
My father always told me his father would never talk about The War, even though his Purple Heart medallion, awarded to a soldier wounded in battle, hung proudly on the wall in the dining room. My father always wanted to know more, but it was tacit that “you just didn’t speak about it.”
My father, too, had his own war he would never talk about: the one of losing his father. I had tried to ask directly, but asking wasn’t enough. I needed another way in.
Our relationship was built through words—first the words of others, then our own. A C. S. Lewis scholar, my father read me the Chronicles of Narnia as bedtime stories before I could read. The first book we read together was The Hobbit, when I was eight. He told me he was supposed to interview Tolkien just weeks before he died.
My father only ever raised his temper with me when, in grade school, I’d cry in frustration over writing assignments when the words on the page weren’t matching the thoughts in my mind. “We do not cry about writing.”
He sat with me, imploring me to dry my tears and try again. Leaving the desk, giving up, wasn’t an option. We worked together—starting small, reverse outlining. “Get rid of the flowery language. Say what you mean to say.” Looking back, I see the gift he gave me on the frontlines of those miniature battles: the will not to surrender to the inner critic that keeps most writing from ever getting written.
Through my university years, and later in graduate school, we continued to connect over writing, less as mentor and mentee, more as peers. For forty years, longer than my lifetime, my father carried with him the first sentence of a dystopian science fiction novel. I committed that first line to memory to remind him in case he forgot—not the sentence, but the book itself. Years later, reading a first draft, I was struck how the narrator, who had lost his father, was searching for a story his father took to his grave.
The summer before the road trip, I had stolen some of his old books and placed them on my own shelves—James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, John Steinbeck—vowing I would become “more literary.” Somehow another title made it there that I knew I didn’t place: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. My father had been gently nudging me to read it for years. I kept stubbornly insisting I had no interest in motorcycles. “It’s not really about motorcycles,” he would say. “And there are ghosts.” He was right. I read it, begrudgingly at first, that summer, and felt both surprised and defeated that I absolutely adored it.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance interweaves two plot lines. One: an autobiographical novel about a father and son road-tripping across America by motorcycle. Another: a philosophical tome about an intellectual named Phaedrus haunted and obsessed with the philosophy of Quality. At its core it was a story about a father and a son, madness and myth, and the ghost of a past disconnected from the reality of the present, woven in with the task of getting from A to B combing the roads from Minnesota to California, and not breaking down in the process. The ghost story was my favorite part. It made me think of the ghost stories that all of us carry, the ones that hover between us. The ones that don’t have to be spoken to exist.
If my father and I had always connected through words, why did this one story live beyond them?
In his copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I had underlined Pirsig’s words:
The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
* * *
Of the many places he called home, I always sensed my father identified most with Montana. My mother said that was why he loved Bend: high desert, the dusty spice of juniper, horizon carved by mountain peaks. A few years after we moved to Bend, he bought a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. These were the only items of “fashion” I had ever seen him buy himself, save for his work uniform, jacket and tie, for his role as president of the local community college. He
claimed the hat and boots were only for a work function, but I remember thinking he looked more like himself when he wore them.
Shortly after the sky broke open overhead, after discussing the possible physics of a Big Sky, the navigation lady on our Garmin (the one my father insisted on suctioning to the windshield even though our phones both had Google Maps) announced we were nearing Deer Lodge, Montana: our first stop. We were both excited and tired, having driven eleven hours at that point. The gas meter turned red just outside Deer Lodge, so I pulled into a station, the older, classic kind frozen in time from the fifties that you’re surprised somehow still pumps gas. I got out of the driver’s seat and went to the restroom as my father tanked up on the passenger’s side. When I returned, he was already sitting in the driver’s seat, ready to go. I climbed into the passenger’s seat.
My father put his foot on the gas and looked over his left shoulder, pulling slowly out, when we heard the horrible sound of scraping steel, then a bell-like clang, rounded by an emphatic thud. We whipped our heads around to the back windshield, where we saw the gas tank teetering precariously. I opened the passenger door to see the fuel hose protruding out of our car like a tail, the nozzle still inside our fuel tank.
“Shit. Shit shit shit…” My stomach sank. My father let out a defeated, wordless sigh.
We walked with our heads hung to the station store to confess what my father years later called, “our terrible sin.”
An older woman at the counter was helping another customer, so we waited, anticipating a reprimand, or a hefty fine. I remember deliberating how best to put it: “Sorry we ripped out your gas tank?”
When the other customer left, we approached the counter timidly. I opened my mouth, starting to stutter, when the woman leaned forward, her wireframe glasses sliding down her nose, bringing her finger to her lips: “Shhhhhhh!”
We looked at each other, confused. My father tried again. “We are so sorry… ”
She repeated, a little louder this time: “SHhhhhH!”
She lowered her voice, still leaning forward, and so did we. “I know. Okay. You got two choices right now. One: I write up a report on this and you’ll owe us 200 dollars.” I exhaled. “Two. If you walk out of here right now and drive away… ” she leaned back in her chair and threw up her arms in a shrug, “...I won’t know who did it.”
My father was already walking toward the door, as he was instructed. I was struck by the woman’s goodwill, our luck, and wanted her to know it. “Ohh thank you thank you, you know, my father grew up here and we’re back to see it together and it’s been thirty years and… ” the profusions spilled out, as I felt my father’s firm hand on my shoulder.
“Come on Al, let’s go.”
The adrenaline of feeling a bit like the two of us were on the run from a small crime dissipated around the time we passed the sign for Deer Lodge: Population 2,996. We parked downtown on Main Street (it was the main, as in only, street through town). I snapped a picture of my father, right before he noticed, in front of a colorful mural depicting the mountain range. He looked different—youthful, curious. He gestured down Main Street and pointed to what apparently was the old state prison, no longer functional, now a tourist destination. A tourist prison?
“When I lived here, they had their famous prison riot,” he said nonchalantly.
“A riot?”
“The prisoners took over the whole prison, killed a couple people, put a meat cleaver in the cook. The National Guard went in at three o’clock in the morning.”
“Shit. Were you scared?”
“Nah. My piano lesson was just two blocks from the prison. We were in class, and a National Guard guy came in with a machine gun and said ‘Can we borrow a football? We’re bored.’”
This was my father: always revealing the mundane in the spectacular; reeling in a fantastical story to reveal its simultaneously everyday nature, as if that were actually the more interesting part.
We walked from Main Street to the railroad tracks. My father pointed out the old station, which had in the years since been converted into an evangelical church. Tourist prison, evangelical station.
“The Chicago Milwaukee St. Paul and Pacific Railroad,” he announced, as if reciting a stanza, and I tried to map each of these places in my mind. “Went out of business several decades ago. The railroad died in this town.”
My father stopped in front of a yellow train car displayed outside the station, holding his hands behind his back, taking it in. I stood next to him. “I recognize this one. My father worked on these. The Little Joe.”
The Little Joe had an electrified engine with a telescoping hinged rig that would push up above the car, touching wires above the tracks, providing the torque needed to go through the hilly country of the Western mountains.
“I always knew them as ‘Little Joes’ but never knew where the name came from. But see this plaque here? Before World War II, General Electric had manufactured these. They were to be sent to Russia—Little Joes, for Joe Stalin.”
I read the plaque as my father narrated. The United States, in conflict with Russia, ultimately canceled the sale, and the Milwaukee Railroad bought most of the Little Joes, ideal for powering the Mountain division—Avery, Idaho to Mountain City, Montana—the same stretch my grandfather worked.
Before leaving town, my father offered, “Why don’t we drive by my old house.” We pulled by a small gray house sandwiched between two identical ones. I marveled that my father knew which was his. I asked him if anything looked different. “Well, they paved the street.” We stood in silence for a few minutes, my father taking it in, along with whatever memories I didn’t have access to, until a couple slightly younger than him opened the front door of the house and
approached us. My father would later tell me he hoped they would invite us in, but they didn’t. He asked if there was still a bedroom in the basement, and when the couple nodded yes, he said—not as much to them, but to me, and himself: “My father built that.”
Buried in the boxes of family letters, in the pile of his typewriter poetry I was allowed to read, this:
June 27
Training
When I was smaller
Mom and Dad
Used to take me
On the train
To see Grandma and Grandpa
Montana to Chicago
Two days in Wonderland
Alice never had it so good
Beds falling from the ceiling
Forming a dark quiet tunnel
The excitement of the city
But now I live too near Chicago
And don’t ride the train
Anymore
My old friend doesn’t even wave
As it goes by
The train used to go to Seattle
Then only to Montana
Then to South Dakota
Now Minneapolis
Grandma and Grandpa gone
Dad’s died too
And I only hear the train now
They’re tearing up the track
Behind my friend
As he comes to the roundhouse
For one last
Time.
“Butte was sort of the armpit of the universe,” my father narrated as we drove the forty-five minutes from Deer Lodge to Butte, Montana, where my father lived before kindergarten. “A very dirty old mining town, on top of one of the richest copper mines in the world. The whole town was honeycombed by mines.”
Pulling up at a second house, he continued. “The mine shafts were very close to the surface of the roads weaving through town.” As we got out of the car, he pointed to an empty lot next to the house, still vacant.
“I used to play in that lot. One summer the yard had collapsed into a mine shaft.”
I nudged him to go on. Play? “The walls seemed really high as a young kid. But they were only really about three or four feet. You could climb out, but you really had to scramble.”
My father paused.
“We learned later that the little boy who moved into our house, after we moved to Chicago, also played in that shaft. One day, the shaft further collapsed, at the same time he was playing.” He paused again, and I knew already what came next. “He was buried alive, and died.”
I swallowed, the horror of a story I had heard before suddenly taking on new meaning while we stood in front of the scene itself, next to my then sixty-eight-year-old father who had once also been a young boy playing in that very same shaft, the one waiting to collapse.
“What was it like for you, hearing that story?”
“I felt lucky. It could have been me.”
His words struck me, transported me back to the gnawing sense of divergence I felt cleaved my father’s life from his father’s, and mine from my father’s.
I wondered, in the aftermath of his heart attack, if he felt lucky. I wondered if he thought, “It could have been me.”
Or maybe it was a projection of my own haunting, of almost having lost him. I felt lucky. It could have been me.
The only time my father explicitly invoked his father in those six days, save for the visit to Little Joe and the basement bedroom, was just outside Chicago, in a roaring downpour. We were closing in on the place where the rupture happened: life before and life after his father’s death. The rain was too heavy to see much of anything out the window, as if the skies too were shielding us from the living memory, the story itself. My father recounted the church funeral and the drive to the burial in the family plot established by his grandfather. A space was set aside for my father’s father, and later, his mother. “From that moment, I became in many ways more her uncle than her son,” my father said of his mother, and it reminded me of something a friend had said about the death of a parent as not only losing one parent, but two.
From that point, arching even further East, we traced the life my father charted for himself, largely absent of parental figures: the scholarship to University of Iowa, the corn fields in Iowa Mennonite country where my mother and father made their first home in a converted chicken coop after returning from Jamaica, the master’s and later doctorate at University of Michigan. I had heard these stories before, and I pinned them on the map splaying out before my eyes. The audio recorder stayed in the glove compartment.
The night my grandfather died, he was the game scorekeeper for my father’s basketball team. Buried in the box of letters, amid the typewriter poetry and the thick folder of love letters, this:
The scorebook. Lines, charts, names, numbers. A loopy handwriting I didn’t recognize.
The last thing his father ever wrote.
Then, from one page to the next, dated just one week later, the handwriting changed. Smaller, more winnowed and angular. I recognized it as my father’s.
His own handwriting replaced his father’s and carried on. Keeping score.
Six years after the road trip, in July 2021, I interviewed my father about our six days together on the road. This time, we were on a beach in Malmö, my new home, overlooking the bridge that led to Copenhagen, to the airport, to the skyway connecting me to my parents. It was their first visit to Sweden since the pandemic began. So much life had unfolded in the years since our drive. My own sense of home, of place, had expanded, spiraled outward. Princeton led me to Brazil led me to Sweden, which kept me longer than anywhere prior. The distance between my father and I geographically had widened. We now lived in places we couldn’t reach on a road trip. This rekindled my fear and awareness of the mortality that always haunted. The specter of loss. The gnaw of guilt. The ambiguous grief of lost time, even as we were both still here.
Tobias, my partner, was dozing off in the sun. My mother was reading a book, although I still don’t know if the book was a cover for her eavesdropping. I felt the comfort of all of my most cherished people, save for my brother, next to me. A slight sea breeze carried the chatter of children yelling and playing and parents reprimanding and laughing, all in the thick Southern Swedish dialekt of skånska. The scene was peaceful. I sidled my camping chair right up next to my father’s and put my phone in the armrest, recorder on.
I was taking the position of interviewer again. I was still searching for the Story.
How would he describe it, our days on the road?
“It was a chance for you to be a little bit more connected to places and events in my life that you hadn’t even heard much about.”
I noticed that he said “places” and “events,” not “me.”
“Why was this a chance in ways that other times weren’t?”
“Because we were stuck in the car together for six days. It gave us a chance to have a follow-up discussion.”
“What was it like for you, going back after all that time?”
“Hmm… hard to answer.” I almost expected him to say, “medium.”
“Part of it was the task of explaining things, which helped to objectify it, depersonalize it. It felt good to share some of those things with you.”
I was struck by his use of “depersonalize,” when our conversations on that trip were always so peopled, even when those people were ghosts, and—from my perspective—the whole point of telling and listening to them was to personalize them.
“Why was it important to depersonalize it?”
“It was one way of not getting emotional about it. Make it a task to tell a story, rather than having to deal with any of the feelings about it.”
A task to tell a story. Rather than having to deal with any of the feelings. Feelings, for my father, lived outside story. Whereas I thought story would be the way in to the emotional, story was, for my father, not the receptacle for feelings; it was the barricade.
“What would have happened, if it were to get emotional?”
“A lot of it was tied to memory and the loss of my father. We lived together in Montana, a bulk of our time. We did things there together. Rekindling that. Then, in the Chicago area, where we lost him… Meeting my friend in Wisconsin. Reliving that loss.”
I realized this friend had been at the game, the same one where his father had died.
“I don’t know how much we talked about it, on the drive.” I said, “That loss.”
“Not a lot. But a little bit.”
We sat there in silence. On the recording, I can hear the Swedish chattering of children and parents and the wind pick up, as our voices recede.
Earlier that day, he had pulled me aside on the busy streets of Malmö to tell me to set down my grief, my guilt, at least on his behalf. All he cared about was
that I was happy here, he said, that I had a good life. He told me he would rather me be here, with Tobias, far away but living a fuller life, than if I lived in my high school relationship in the same town as my parents, trapped in the amber of a partnership that was too small for me. All he cared about, he said, was that he got to be around to see some of it. That he had gotten to know Tobias. That my academic career, my writing, had a home here, were taking off. We were planning our wedding on that trip, and had discovered a site for it with my parents, by the sea, with gardens. All of this, he reiterated, was a bonus.
As he told me this, I felt the floodgates open. There is something about hearing the words you were waiting for all along leading not to the relief you expected, but to a whole host of other emotions buzzing just beneath the surface. Chief among these a familiar sadness, like you were holding on to the grief and mistaking it for love. And wondering if and how his own grief had become entangled with love.
“Okay,” my father exhaled, signaling the end of the interview. The wind was picking up.
As an anthropologist, you learn how to respect when your interlocutor is tired, fatigued, ready to be done. That is when you stop the interview for the day.
As a daughter, you want to dig deeper, to tear down a wall that maybe wasn’t yours to tear in the first place.
Perhaps the proximity I craved with my father, to know how his life’s greatest loss transpired and felt, was my own curiosity of what it would have been like to lose him. Perhaps I was mistaking the two stories for each other. I had entered the road trip with a sense of entitlement, to get the story. Perhaps he was telling everything he could tell me. Even in the absence of words. Even when not delivered in the form or eloquence of what either of us shared in writing. Even, especially in the gift of asking me to set down my own grief and guilt, that I had mistaken as a way to show him, my aging parents continents away, love.
Realizing that by driving, we were also writing.
The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
“Okay,” I said, echoing his chosen word, acknowledging we had reached a pit stop. “Thanks, Dad.”
I turned the recorder off and sat in silence with him, looking out at the ocean and the bridge, the swath of sky overhead big enough to hold the space between us.