Brother, Brother

from the vault

The root-strewn footpath snakes up through a canopy of young trees, meandering along a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The cyclists below downshift through their gears. My lab runs ahead, tail turning like a flywheel. This ridge trail is my new favorite escape route: a five-minute drive from the front door, a good trek up steep switchbacks to ridge top. I could hike all the way to Mt. Mitchell but will turn around after an hour or so. There’s been little to no humidity this week, so sweat doesn’t break until halfway out, when the day’s concerns buzz the loudest, like the mosquitoes that swarmed all summer but that now have disappeared with the colder weather.

My brother called the other night, his voice rife with hurt and worry. After years of strife, he and his wife are getting divorced. It’s been coming for a while, so no big surprise to hear Bill announce it. Still, I know he’s scared of what this will mean for his kids, worried what he’s going to put them through by splitting up. Our parents divorced when we were young, and we spent much of our childhood shuttling back and forth between them. Indeed, my brother sounded like a young boy on the phone, as if afflicted by an old childhood hurt. His usual confident, rich voice cracked a little, wavering thin at the edges. This call a way for him to climb back out of the ditch of fear he’d fallen into.

There’s a bend in the trail up near the ridgeline articulated by an S-curve of old stones. Passing out of a rhododendron thicket’s damp shade, I step into a bath of sunlight. I can make out the car hum below and a patch of deep-blue autumn sky through the trees, but that’s all. The stones appear under my feet naturally, building up in a snake’s tail of small cobble before fanning out into a step-down of broad stones that fit the turning slope of the knob. A few more steps then the trail cuts back up before giving way again to dirt footpath and shade. I could have easily passed over these neatly assembled stones without recognizing them for what they are: perfectly laid rip rap, the nearly invisible artwork of trail expediency. Someone worked all weekend on this turn, moving up and over the ridge to find just the right stones, cutting them out of the mossy ground with a blade.

After Bill finally talked himself to a resting place, I told him what I thought he needed to hear. That just because he was getting divorced didn’t mean he was repeating a pattern initiated by our young parents. That calling off a marriage wasn’t necessarily a failure. Bill listened to me, agreeing with my soothing words, but couldn’t help return, as if in shock, to the essential questions: Why did this have to happen? How could I have avoided this? What’s wrong with me? I tried to show him that he was focusing more on the pain inflicted than on the decisions that lay before him like, well, a trail. Close to the ridge top now, I approach my favorite corridor of oak-lined path that floats and sways over the cove like an enormous rope bridge.

There’s always a light breeze shimmering up here, light falling in dapple across these old mountains’ shoulders. My footfalls slow, breath sinking down into a deeper rhythm. It’s why I come up here. I am a short-take-off-and-landing plane dropping onto a tiny little strip, landing free and coasting along this shaded purchase with my senses alive. My hope is to burn conscious steps into the ground for bears to read days later. A breeze riffles the leaves. Perfect fall weather, no one out on the trail. But although I have walked myself to this incredible vantage, I am unable to see past my own worries. I can only think of Brother Bill’s voice as he got off the phone. How sad and tired he seemed. There was nothing left to say. I feel sad, hurt by my brother’s hurt.

As I sit and look over the valley, letting the sweat cool on my skin, I imagine my brother’s life returning to life, trying to picture the ways Bill will come out of his tailspin. I hope he will be happy in his new bachelorhood. I keep a look out for the hawks I know migrate through here about this time, passing over mountain gaps in motorcycle rally formation. And just over the ridge, I know, Asheville’s downtown bar graph of brick buildings. But all I can see is an edge of the mall and flashings off Highway 40. I think about the last few difficult months of teaching. How just last week I sat in my office listening to a student confess that he had been poisoning my class, falling into a posture of “resentment,” refusing to budge. He called me passive-aggressive and accused me of being an ineffectual teacher. Though I didn’t say it, I had to agree with him. I hated him for pointing it out.

In the last year it seemed all the senior creative writing majors were avoiding my classes, flocking to the new teacher with her “rigorous” style. They no longer came to office hours because they “despised” talk about creative process. A few showed up hurt and sad, or in need of signatures, one of two with questions about grad school. I tried to answer their questions but didn’t have the energy. I tried not to feel scorned.

The wind has picked up at the top of the ridge, tossing the branches around in little swirls. I am utterly sick of it, nauseated by the whole depressing drama. I can see I have become my brother, lost in a spiral of shock-tinged worry, besieged by the familiar, internalized rant of self-doubt. Need to keep moving. As if on cue, the sun comes out from behind a bank of clouds, throwing a net of speckled light across the ridge. I stand up and brush dirt from my pants, taking one last look down into the valley: the trees are just beginning their autumnal turn, a few weeks late due to this season’s drought. The whole county is hoping for rain. When the sun falls back against the breeze pulses low.

I make it to the spot where the trail swerves and dips off the ridge. The dog at my side, tongue lolling, I walk forward, aflame in feeling—for my life, for my brother, for the glorious day. Then I trip over a root, heel slipping on its slick coat, falling both backward and forward at the same time down the slope, throwing my hands out in hopes of regaining my balance, and failing.