Chapter 13
The Appalachians:
Noncustodial Parent
Minot, 1979-2001

A long time ago, there was a coastline about where the Eastern coastline is now, except that the ocean it bordered is now called the proto-Atlantic. Then, not too long before the first animals with shells hard enough to leave fossils came along—about 400 million years ago-- a series of landmasses started colliding with the North American continent, pushing up a mountain range, as such events do. Eventually it became as high as the Himalayas are now.  This went on until all the land in the world had coalesced into the super-continent Pangaea, with the Appalachians in its approximate center, already eroding. Then, about the time when the dinosaurs were flourishing (160 million years ago), the continent began to break up. First Europe and North America peeled away to the north, then Africa and South America went their separate ways. Geologists make a big deal of this,  but we have to understand that Pangaea was not the first super-continent. There had been others, though less is known about them. Continents form and break up all the time.


*****


Joanne and I had been married in the fall of 1980, and by the summer of 1981, we  were as broke as people with jobs could be. Yet Joanne was determined that we would vacation together, so we bought the only car we could afford that could hold all six of us—a 1966 Mercury, probably a Comet, with a 390 cc Ford engine. It was a behemoth of a thing with many luxury features that did not become standard until years later--such as variable rate windshield wipers. The back quarter panels were rusted through so that when we stored cheap canned soda in the deep wells inside the trunk, you could see them peeking through from the outside.  We eventually drove that pile of iron to four national parks (Glacier, North Cascades, Rainier, Olympic).

We were deep in one mountain range (The Cascades) when he heard that our children were being called to another—The Appalachians. More precisely we were in a suburb of Seattle, visiting Charlie Watters, a favorite students from my Columbia Basin teaching days. In 1967, Charlie had been a talented writer and actor and a good student,  one of those whose intensity, yearning, and good humor lit up my sky over Columbia Basin and made it the finest teaching experience I ever had. By 1981, however, he had fallen into the alcoholism he inherited from his father and was living on unemployment in a trailer park in  with his son. We may have been the first houseguests he had ever had; he let slip that they had worked for hours with a carpet shampooer to prepare the place for us.

It must have been on a Sunday when I called the boys, because that’s the day I always did that. Their mother came on the line to tell me she had finally finished the MFA at Montana State and accepted a job at Frostburg State College in Western Maryland and would be moving there that fall. Stricken, I relayed the news to Joanne and we looked at each other, awash in sadness. Later, we agreed we heard the same words in something close to an audible voice: “It will be all right.”

It wasn’t all right, not by a long shot, but it was not all bad either.  I can remember good times, most of them from my annual trips east. When I began making those, Amtrack was trying to popularize train travel, and it was ridiculously cheap.  I could travel round trip, coach, from Minot to Cumberland for $125. The lay-over in Chicago was about five hours, time enough to walk through the graceful cavernous Union Station, built in 1925, out on to Jackson Street and then east, past the Sears Tower, under the elevated train tracks, and into the Lincoln Park, with its treasure of museums—all of it drenched in nostalgia from my childhood visits to my grandparent in Wilmette. Five hours is enough time to do some justice to some small part of the Art Institute, wander along the low cement wall beside Lake Michigan, and get back in time to catch my connecting train.

The early morning hours—always the best part of train travel, sitting in the observation car with hot coffee in a paper cup—were through the hard-scrabble valleys of southern Pennsylvania where the skeletons of mining shacks still clung to the hillsides and where the rivers with tongue-twisting names—the Conemaugh, the Yougiogheny-- still ran yellow with tailings.

Cumberland, where the train arrived late in the morning, is a picturesque town set deep in a notch in the Appalachians. It has the same name as the more famous Cumberland Gap in Kentucky and for awhile I had them confused. But this Cumberland was the eastern terminus for  the National Highway that ran west to Ohio in the early 1800’s and the western terminus for the Chesapeake and Ohio canal that parallels the Potomac river all the way the Washington D.C. As late as 1924, boats were still hauling freight 185 miles up and down that elaborate set of culverts, aqueducts and tunnels. You can ride a bicycle on a paved path that parallels the old canal bed all the way from Cumberland to Washington, D.C. , and someday I would like to do that and think about how  Cumberland was the end and beginning of the line in more ways than one.
 

When I arrived in Cumberland, I would trudge with my suitcase over the herringbone brick sidewalks a couple of blocks to the bus station and ride the 10 miles into Frostburg. When the bus stopped at the Gunter Hotel, once elegant but now seedy, I would walk to what was then the only clean place to stay in Frostburg:  Al’s Motel. It is called something else now and is probably nicer, but I loved it for its name, its sheer utility, and because it was only a few blocks from where my boys lived with their mother in what they called a townhouse.

I would get a room with two beds and nap or read until the boys came over after school got out. We’d go to dinner at the Italian restaurant that was attached to the motel and then watch a little television, sitting on the bed, and sometimes Brian would do homework. If it was a week night, they would go home, and I’d get up the next day and walk up the Princess Restaurant which had good breakfasts and old fashioned booths with miniature juke boxes in each one, with leaves that turned over like a book. A sweet little city library opened late in the morning and I’d work there until school let out.

My visits always included at least one weekend. On Saturday,  we’d get on the bus and ride over to Cumberland were we could walk across Mills Creek to the place where George Washington had camped twice—once when he was leading troops in the French and Indian Wars and again when in 1794, when as president, he reviewed some of the  militia assembled  to put down the Whiskey Rebellion.  From there, we might walk across the Potomac so we could say we had been in West Virginia or wander up and down Cumberland’s renovated main street. My heart would be full but breaking at the same time, each minute precious as blood but each one ticking its way to when I would have to leave.

During the earliest visits, we would actually go to church together, all willingly. During the last years of the marriage, after my recommitment, when their mother was gone part of every year to Bozeman working on her MFA, I took the boys to church occasionally and involved them in church activities that were relatively doctrine free: spring cleaning day for example. In one scene I remember, Brian is putting furniture oil on the woodwork below one of the stained glass windows on the north side of the church, probably the one depicting Mary holding the infant Jesus in her lap. Looking up at the colored light streaming in on his face, he looks like Galahad holding the grail aloft in a famous painting by Rossetti.

I didn’t push this very hard, though, since religious instruction was one of the many sore points between the boys’ mother and me after my conversion. I do remember though, seeking counsel from the priest, Fr. Ollerman, about my disintegrating marriage. He said something that astonished me at the time—that a wife determined to end a marriage will do it by tormenting her husband until he must choose between insanity and separation. I suppose if my wife had gone to him for counsel, she might have heard the same thing, with the words “wife” and “husband” interchanged. I suppose he projected from his own experience, though there were times in the next year when I felt he had been right and I wondered how he knew such things. He turned out to be an alcoholic and resigned in some disgrace, but before he left, he let me go through his excellent library and choose whatever books I wanted. I picked out  handsome sets of Augustine and Aquinas in sturdy slipcovers, and they sit on my shelves yet.  

Out of all this something took, if only briefly. There was—probably still is—a small Episcopal church in Frostburg. Incredibly, Brian took it on himself in the first months after they moved there in the summer of 1981, to get Marc up on Sundays and attend. For a short time, the boys also joined AWANA—a religious youth group that did a lot of memorizing of scripture. That phase didn’t It didn’t last long—perhaps only a few months or less—and I had mixed feelings about it. Between fundamentalism and secularism, a good Anglican will waver. Both have a lot of disadvantages.

There was also a Roman Catholic priest in their lives  in the first year or two. He must have been the college chaplain because he had a kind of office and library in one of the townhouses where the boys lived. I think his name was Fr. Tom. I used to work in his library and I remember writing a talk there that I was to give to our own Youth Group during an harrowing canoe trip we made in the summer of 1982, after my Frostburg trip. At one point Brian had a little book Fr. Tom had given him, a distillation of the works of Thomas Aquinas, with comprehensive answers to most of the essential problems of life, couched in language appropriate for teenagers. Hope flared that Brian might read it and even use it to guide his life, but mostly books like this seemed fruitless then, seem fruitless now. Probably there never was a time when youth could be driven or led to comprehend and store away answers to questions that had not yet occurred to them. I talked to Fr. Tom and to the Episcopal priest about the boys, as I did to the assistant principal at the school. They all told me the boys were doing fine.

Though he stopped attending the Episcopal church in Frostburg after a few months, Brian’s commitment to the church went on for a few years. Even as a freshman at NDSU in Fargo, he was a member of Navigators. But during a summer in Washington D.C. he became absorbed in the punk scene and showed up at our house in Minot with a face and jacket full of metal, and with a spiked Mohawk dyed pink.  In the transition from high school to college, Marc began heavy drinking and then drugs, and he didn’t stop until he was 28. I asked Marc once much later about Fr. Tom. Too predictably, the story was that he had been dismissed after allegations of inappropriate behavior with college boys. Marc said he had placed a hand on Marc’s knee at one point. It was all too sad.

Once, on a foggy, misty Sunday afternoon,  they took me into the hills above Frostburg to visit some of the coal mines  (by then mostly shut-down). Partly, we needed something to do on a Sunday afternoon, but also, Marc wanted to show me the  abandoned carcass of a school bus had struck his fancy. Marc would sometimes hold my hand, unbidden, as we wandered for an enchanted hour through the fog, past rusted coal cars and spidery scaffolding built out from the little shacks that enclosed the windy maws  of the mines themselves.

But we became disoriented in the fog and could not find the bus, and I saw Marc ‘s eyes filling with tears. When we found an abandoned truck, he scooped up a fistful Appalachian mud and wrote the word “bus” on its shattered window. He could not give the gift he wanted to give, but with a word, he transformed what he had into what he wanted and ended by making something even better than the thing he  had been seeking.  That word “bus,” written in mud, remains among the most touching gestures I have seen. And, as it happened, we found the bus, quite by accident as we were heading back.  

From the main street, we could also walk down a block to an train station that had once served a little narrow-gauge railway that ran between Frostburg and Cumberland. The line has since been reopened as a tourist attraction. From there, we could walk along the rail bed that had been hewn through the thick Appalachian woods. Cuts through the low hills themselves had been lined with attractive stone. Logging roads—not more than tracks--wound through the woods as well. During one of our rambles—this one with only Marc—we came across two sets of planks that had been laid down over a ravine, so that an very brave person might have driven a vehicle across it. Marc was  open-mouthed when I  scrambled across it on hands and knees because he had seen it before and never considered crossing. But he said something like, “I can’t let my aging father do stuff I can’t do,” and he scrambled across himself.

Sometimes when the boys were asleep, I would walk by myself to the outskirts of town and beyond to where the brick streets ended and the once-genteel houses were replaced by shacks clinging precariously to soggy hillsides. The poverty seemed more stubborn than the rural poverty in the west. It seemed to have a European quality, timeless, irreducible. I tried to describe that poverty once, in a short story set in Frostburg. I based on the fact—or perhaps the legend—that the public swimming pool in Frostburg had a mysterious leak that no one could diagnose.

The story has some decent passages but an improbable plot involving local witchcraft and a loner pool repair man. It needs a lot of work, work I don’t know if I will ever get done, so I will put a bit of it here from the end, where the narrator and his son (an amalgam of Brian and Marc) go swimming in an abandoned quarry. The son is determined to attempt a dangerous running jump off the high cliff, one that may carry him past rocks into the deep water. Or not. The father knows he can do nothing to forbid the attempt. Whatever authority he had he had signed away in the divorce or had taken from him by time:

He braced himself about 30 feet from the edge, sprinted to a mark he had scratched in the dirt, hurled himself into space and pulled his knees hard into his chest. From my angle, I couldn't tell until the end whether or not he was going to clear the wall, but he did and with room to spare. He swam underwater for a long time and came up grinning.
    
Afterwards, we spread our towels on the limestone and baked  in the Appalachian sun talking about things we'd never talked about before, including the divorce.
    "Whose fault was the divorce?" he said.
    I was ready for that one. I'd thought about it a long time.
    "It takes two to make a marriage, I said, “and two to make a divorce. Part of it was my fault. I can't say how much or which part.
    "It's been rough on both you."
    "I can't say about your mother, but whatever ways it's been rough on me are OK. It's better to suffer for your mistakes and know you live in a just world. It would be worse to get away with things and have to admit you live in an unjust one."
    "Most people think they could handle it."
    "They may be stronger than I am." That night, on our way to get fast-food, we drive by the pool, which shimmers its electric blue, as lovely as ever.
    "Hear anymore about the pool?" I ask.
    "I haven't heard anything for a long time," he says. "I don't know anyone who goes there anymore."  

But always, the stays would move toward that moment when I would get on the bus back to Cumberland, and when the westbound train would pull away and I would strain to look backward at the town as it diminished behind me.

Between trips, there were phone calls every Sunday afternoon, first one boy and then the other called to the phone. I don’t think males in my generation ever got comfortable chatting on the phone, so the calls  were mostly awkward and sometimes heartbreaking. Somehow I always seemed to know more about what Marc was doing than Brian, so I would try to help more. When he got involved in karate and was trying to qualify for one of the beginning belts, he had to do a fixed number  push-ups  on his knuckles. So  I practiced them myself and  then tried to suggest ways to build up his strength: do as many as you can and then three more; do one more each day. all my advice seemed to vaporize in the distance between us. When I tried to find out how the test had gone, he became evasive I later found out he had failed the test, been so devastated he had walked the hills around Frostburg for hours, and never tried again.

By phone, I heard him describe the wooded hills in the fall as looking like a box of crayons with the colors stacked, row on row. By phone, I earned that he was running for student body president, and  I was proud of him, even though it was  on a kind of rebel ticket. His irrepressible creativity touched everything he did.  He had a photo of himself beside a wall of empty cherry coke cans with the slogan: Vote for Marc Slanger—He knows what he likes.” By phone, I learned he had applied to be  it to be editor of the school paper. When I gathered he was turning it into an alternative sheet. I was still proud of him, but I  been the faculty adviser to a rebel student newspaper and I knew where those things generally went.

Clearly things were falling apart even before I began getting the troubling phone calls from his mother: He was failing courses, he was not coming home at curfew; he was sneaking out the window of his bedroom; she had threatened him with not being able to go to college.

I don’t know of any human experience more agonizing than seeing your children struggle and not being able to help. It seemed natural to blame the divorce: “If only I could have been there, if only we both could have been there, if only we had  not lost the marriage,  if only we had tried harder.” Over the years, I went to counseling again and again to deal with it, generally in the spring when it was the worst.  Persistently the counselors would make the obvious points: a) that even children from stable marriages sometimes struggle, drink, take drugs, dye their hair and b) that all that was now past, I could nothing about it, I had to move on, and c) that ultimately children become responsible for their own lives, their own choices. I have hardly internalized these truths, even yet. Great waves of sorrow still sweep over me when I read accurate accounts of them, as  in Marylynne Robinson’s book, Giliad.

When windows of time were short, I would sometimes fly east and rent a car. That way I could see Brian in New York and, later, Baltimore, then drive across the state to see Marc. At least once twice I was able to combine such a trip with junketing for the North Dakota Humanities Council. I was appointed to the Council in 1991 and served as president in 95-96. This is noted in an wooden plaque I was given at the end of my time, in 1997. It has a small clock built in, which I suppose it was running at the time, but has now stopped and there does not seem to be any way to access the battery.

A long trip alone in a rented car across strange terrain is a unique pleasure.  Rented cars are new and reliable and you never have to change the oil before the trip is done. The radio is always clearer and more powerful than it is in your own car. You keep your road atlas open on the seat beside you.  If you want to eat potato chips and drink a diet coke, you do,  but you jettison your trash at every stop so the car never gets cluttered. Everything you really need for the foreseeable future is in a small suitcase in your trunk. You stop for gas where no one knows you, where the accents of retail clerks the architecture of the strip malls is enough different to be exhilarating.

For at least two of those trips, I followed the new Interstate 68 as it passes  through the Sideling Hill, cutting 810 feet into sandstone and shale laid down in the early Mississippian, 350 million years ago. Had I come this way a few years earlier, I would have followed the old National Road, Highway 40, two miles to the south. But a new route was needed to meet interstate standards, so ten million tons of rock were blasted away in the mid 80’s and fill used to create the grades up to the top. In the cut, the curved lines of a folded landscape are clearly visible, like a stack of blue and tan cereal bowls. There is a nice exhibit center there that explains how the layers were flat at first, until Africa took a notion to collide with North America, crumpling  this whole part of the continent up like a car hitting a wall in slow motion. The fact that the curves are concave tells us that this was once the bottom of a  mountain valley before the what had been adjacent hills were eroded away. Thus what was flat is now folded; what was high is now low. I would walk out to the observation point and look out over the mountains where the air, laden with humidity, lay in the valleys like smoke.

My solo trips east were interspersed with trips Joanne and I made  together to see the boys. The  first trip may have been in 1989 in what we called the “Buckskin van,” a 1972 Dodge cargo van that had been converted to passenger use by crude a bed across the back and bench seats running down the side. No thought of seat belts, of course. We had a rebuilt engine put in and drove it to Ontario, where a friend had loaned us a cabin, then to New York City, returning via Frostburg.  By this time, the boys were in college at Frostburg State, living in apartments. The apartment were  Marc lived was owned by his roommate’s mother. Marc had his clothes neatly stacked in his space, but  there was trouble afoot that would get a lot worse before it got better.

Brian moved to New York City shortly after he graduated from Frostburg State. I visited  him there, alone, when he lived in a tiny apartment in the East Village, in a tough neighborhood across the street from the national headquarters of he Hells Angels. He worked in New York for a well-established photographer named Jay Miasel, who had transformed a deteriorating bank building in the Bowery into handsome living quarters and studio space. He was kind of Brian, and I am grateful for that. Through him, Brian had a glimpse into the restless, driven energy that famous people often have—enough of a glimpse that after a few years, Brian moved to the quieter atmosphere of Baltimore, where he married, divorced, and established his own successful free-lance photography business.

After lingering longer in Frostburg than Brian head,  Marc moved to  Gaithersbug, Maryland,  where he lived in an apartment and commuted into the Washington D.C. to help construct the Holocaust Museum and later the Post Office Museum. By then, he was deeply involved in making his own shot-on-video films. In high school, Marc has become deeply attracted to underground films with a Gothic edge,  first as a fan, then as an artist.  Over 15 or 20 years, he did dozens of them, first  with a simple video camera his mother gave him and then with a more elaborate one Joanne and I gave him.  The  results sit on our shelves, some of them handsomely jacketed, with names like “The Short Films of Marc Slanger”. He entered some in competitions and got some recognition, but the ones that got chosen for prizes were hard-edged, bitter things that seemed uncharacteristic. In one of them, Marc’s friend, Jason, throws bottles full of water against a brick wall. They smash, and the liquid runs down the wall.  End of film. I will say that that you do not forget it.

Some of his early films  were in a genre called “splatstick,” where he and his friends would build elaborate dummies out paper mache and then blow them up with shotguns or explosives, drenching the scenes in gallons of fake blood he cooked on the top of the his mother’s stove. The violence is so over-the-top that it is not really troubling. He also did fake documentaries that I thought were brilliant, one called “Mondo, Illinois,” about his trip to see his friend Marc Saffman who was in school there. Later he and some friends did a feature-length film based (closely based)  on a kitsch horror film called “Dracula and Frankenstein,” using his friends as actors.  Marc has a part in it, and he also painstakingly edited it, frame by frame, with primitive software of the time. Its showing, in a Frostburg movie theater, was a community event. I had been East recently and could not afford to go again for the showing, and I still feel bad about missing it.

But my favorite is still a short film called “Life Styles of the Relatives of the Rich and Famous,” about people who looked like and had the same characteristics of famous rock stars but lived ordinary lives and so were filmed doing ordinary things, like vacuuming. The scene that burns in my mind is one of Marc playing Jack Morrison, Jim Morrison’s brother. He does hilarious  parodies  some of the most famous scenes from real documentaries about Morrison, like the long speech about his mystic vision of  Native Americans in the California desert. In the last heart-breaking scene, he really is vacuuming, in a leather jacket with long fringes that we gave him. Morrison’s music is playing in the background and Marc is increasingly drawn into it as he vacuums. The  vacuum cleaner becomes a partner and then is abandoned altogether as Marc moves around the room in a free-form dance that seems to me to express everything beautiful about him.

When his museum work ended, he moved back to Frostburg where he helped design children’s clothes for a time an then worked in a frame shop until eventually,  he moved to New York City.

On a later trip in a 1982 Chevy diesel van with a fancy conversion package, we made a trip to Swallow Falls about 30 miles away. We drove there with Brian and  Marc, Brian’s girlfriend, Kim, and Marc’s friend, Matt. It is a lovely spot where the Youghiogheny river flows through an ancient stand of white pine and eastern hemlock. Walking down to the river from the parking lot is like walking through a cathedral. On one of the three falls  the water has worn the rock smooth as it flows from pool to pool. In the spring it would too dangerous to swim in, but when we came in late summer, it was just right, and we frolicked for hours, easing ourselves out of one pool to be carried in a rush down to the next one.  Then we meandered downstream to Muddy Falls where the river drops 53 feet—the highest falls in Maryland. You can work your way under the falls and stand in the hollowed out space behind them looking out at the world from behind  a curtain of water. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, who were great friends, often camped here, along with Harvey Firestone and the naturalist John Burroughs. In those days, naturalists and industrialists could still be friends.
 
On that trip, or another, he were returning late at night from some outing, on the night before I had to head west. Everyone else in the car was quiet, perhaps asleep, perhaps only musing on the sadness. Then incredibly, Paul Simon’s song, “Slip Slidin’ Away” came on the radio. I could not  tell whether anyone in the car heard it but me. The second to last verse goes like this:

And I know a father who had a son
He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he'd done
He came a long way just to explain
He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping
Then he turned around and he headed home again

Slip sliding away, slip sliding away
You know the nearer your destination, the more you slip sliding away

.