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Authors: Tracy Ross
The Source of All Things (2 page)
Note to readers:
Names and identifying details of some of the people portrayed in this book have been changed.
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Copyright © 2011 by Tracy Ross
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Free Press Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Free Press trade paperback edition February 2012
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Ross, Tracy.
The source of all things / by Tracy Ross.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
(alk. paper)
1. Ross, TracyâChildhood and youth. 2. Abused childrenâUnited StatesâBiography. 3. Adult child abuse victimsâUnited StatesâBiography. I. Title.
HV6626.52.R674 2011
362.76092âdc22
[B]Â Â Â Â Â Â 2010031245
ISBN 978-1-4391-7297-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-7298-8 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4391-7299-5 (ebook)
2
A Knight in Shining Bell-Bottoms
11
Where There's Love, There's a BMW with Heated Seats
21
Shooting Stars (or Birth Stories)
Â
To Scout, Hatcher, Hollis, and all children, who must be seen, heard, and believed, no matter what.
Â
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I will meet you there.
âMowlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Â
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Dear Reader,
Â
They say the truth hurts. It does. It hurts so much, in fact, that I'd like to tell whoever “they” are that such an understatement should be banned from the English language. The truth, when it's the kind I discovered, crashes over you like a giant tsunami. Before I was a year old, my biological father died of an aneurysm that burst in his brain during a backpacking trip in California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. And around the time I turned eight, my stepfather began sexually abusing me. It took me years to tell anybody about the abuse, and even longer to understand its impact on me. Throughout that time, my stepdad stayed in my lifeâstill married to my mom, still someone I spoke to and saw. It wasn't until after I became a mother that I confronted him about what had happened.
My stepfather taught me to love the outdoors, instilling in me the very passion for the wilderness that has helped me overcome the abuse. He was a devoted parent; he also betrayed my trust. He made my family whole again after my biological father died; he also tormented me in my home. To this day, our relationship remains fractured, because he is part of my best and worst memories. It would have been easier to sever him from my life completely, but he's the only father I've ever known.
“They” also say the truth can set you free. I don't know about that, either. When I finally confronted my dad, the details he provided were far worse than the story I'd been telling myself for a quarter century. It didn't seem possible that my dadâwho time and again during my adulthood had done everything in his power to protect meâcould have mistreated me so badly when I was a child. Nor could I believe that Iâa reporter who clung to images and scenes like religious doctrineâcould have blocked so much of my abuse from my memory. I spent weeks lying in bed trying to comprehend what my dad had done to me. Then I began the long, arduous task of writing down my story.
Ask any sexual-abuse survivor and he or she will tell you that his or her life has been an exaggerated series of one tentative step forward and two enormous leaps back. In book-writing terms you can multiply that by a hundred thousand. Between 2009 and 2010 I sat in my studio writing
The Source of All Things
. Because I'd committed to telling the whole story, I had to go homeâto my parentsâand mine them for the gritty details. Bit by bit, they surrendered, yet I felt little victory. With each new revelation I would become physically ill remembering myself as a child, and then a teenager, struggling to remain happy while my dad exploited my innocence. Ask my husband, and he'll tell you that at any given moment during that period I was hell to live with: a depressed insomniac who cried over everything from beer commercials to drowning polar bears. But I believe he'd also tell you that, based on how I've come out of it, my inquiry, and resulting depression, was worth it.
When you turn to face the thing that haunts you most, you immediately become the hero of your own story. I know this because I spent fourteen months staring down a past I didn't want to acknowledge. The journey taxed me in ways I never imagined. But now that I've gotten through it, what I've won is joy. I've learned that I'm strong enough to face the thing I was most afraid of, and that I will not be destroyed by it. I've learned that talking about the source of my deepest fear and struggle makes me stronger and more accountable. Childhood sexual abuse is one of the worst things that can happen to a person. But it's not the only thing.
Joy is what happens when you shine light into your own darkness. It's what's waiting when you lift the veil off your past. For a sexual-abuse survivor, the truth is the only thing separating us from believing we were culpable and knowing we were not. In truth there is power, creativity, and love. Having to face the difficult truth about my past makes me braver as I encounter the future; it allows me to take risks that I wouldn't have taken otherwise, to have compassion that I might not have felt otherwise, to be empathetic when I might not have been able to be otherwise.
I'm telling you this because
The Source of All Things
was my process of lifting the veil of darkness and discovering the truth. And because I don't want you to worry about me as you're reading this story. Writing it was like shining a high-beam, heavy-duty flashlight into the remotest corners of my potential. I may never be completely free of my own history, but with so much room for creativity, I can't wait to see what's in store for me next. I wrote this book for myself, but also to show others that the past only defines us as long as we let it.
Tracy Ross
October 23, 2011
Prologue
Redfish Lake, Idaho, July 2007
A
ll my dad has to do is answer the questions.
That's it. Just four simple questions. Only they aren't that easy, because questions like these never are. We are almost to The Temple, three days deep in the craggy maw of Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains, and he has no idea the questions are coming. But I have them loaded, hot and explosive, like shells in a .30-30.
It's July and hotter than hell on the sage-covered slopes, where wildfires will char more than 130,000 acres by summer's end. But we're up high, climbing to nine thousand feet, and my dad, who is really my stepdad, says that this heat feels cooler than the heat in Las Vegas, where he lives. Four days ago, he and my mother met me in Twin Falls, a town 140 miles south of here where I grew up. They'd driven north, across Nevada, past other fires, including one on the Idaho border. When I saw my mom, at a friend's house where she'd wait while Dad and I backpacked, she'd seemed even tinier than her four-foot eleven-inch frame. Her sweatpantsâplucked
from the sale bin at a Las Vegas Abercrombie and Fitch storeâdrooped like month-old lettuce over her bum. In the creases of her mouth, a white paste had congealed, proof that she was taking antidepressants again. Officially, she's said that she's glad Dad and I are going back to the place our troubles began twenty-eight years ago, almost to the day. But as I kissed her goodbye, leaving her standing in our friend's driveway, I wondered,
which way is the wind now blowing?
It was late when we left Twin Falls that nightâtoo late to reach the trailhead to The Temple. So Dad and I slept in a field of sagebrush above the town of Stanley. A gnawing in my stomach kept me from eating our black beans and tortillas, but the smell of the sage helped quiet the fear I felt welling beneath my ribcage. In the morning, Dad parked his red Ford pickup at the Redfish Lake Lodge and we took a boat across the water. On the far shore, we found the trailhead to our destination, which we started hiking toward and have been for the past three days.
At sunrise this morning we slid out of our bags, made breakfast, and caught a few fish. When we finally started hiking, we climbed out of one basin and into another, inching up switchbacks sticky with lichen and loose with scree. At the edge of one overlook, we saw smoke rising on the horizon from a fire that was crowning in the trees. And when we arrived at the lake with the dozen black frogs chirping across the water, we called it Holy Water Lake because it was Sunday and we did feel a bit closer to God.
Now the wilderness seems haunting and dark. The air is thin, the terrain rugged, and my dad's bodyâsixty-four years old, bowlegged, and fifteen pounds overweightâseems tired and heavy to me. He's been struggling the last half-mile, stopping every few feet
to catch his breath, adjust his pack, and tug on the big, wet circles that have formed under the armpits of his T-shirt, which reads
Toot My Horn
. Ignoring his choice of wardrobe, I try to remember the father who first led me into these mountains. That man was lean, with a light brown mustache and hair that fanned out from his cheekbones in beautiful blond wings. In a Woolrich shirt and hunting boots he charged up trails, coaxing me on to ridgelines with views of vast, green valleys. If I whined from heat or wilted with hunger, he'd lift me onto his shoulders so effortlessly it was as if my body were composed entirely of feathers.
I know my dad is hurting because I am hurting tooâand not just my legs and lungs or the bottoms of my feet. We have barely spoken since we left the dock at Redfish Lake, left the boat and the worried Texans who said, “You're going where?” I'm sure we seemed an odd pair: an old man and hisâwhat was I? Daughter? Lover? Friend? When we stepped off the boat, I'd wanted to turn back, forget this whole sordid mess. But The Templeâa spot on the map I'd latched onto and couldn't let go ofâwas out here somewhere. And, besides, I still hadn't decided if I was going to kill him outright or just walk him to death.
We're here for reasons I don't want to think about yet, so I train my mind on the sockeye salmon that used to migrate nine hundred miles from the Pacific Ocean to lay their eggs and die at Redfish Lake. That was before the Army Corps of Engineers put in the dams that obstructed their journey. For decades, no fish have made it back to their ancestral spawning grounds at the base of the Sawtooth Mountains. But when I was young, sockeyes clogged the streams pouring out of the lake, creating waves of bright red color. Mesmerized, I knelt on the banks of Fishhook Creek and
stretched my fingers toward their tinfoil-bright fins. My dad told me that the fish were rushing home to ensure the continuance of their species. He said they hadn't eaten in months; were consuming the nutrients in their own bodies. Over the years I have thought of the fish with love and terror. I want to hover, as they did, over the origin of my own sorrow and draw from it a new, immaculate beginning.
Several times as we hike up the trail, I fantasize about finding the perfect, fist-size rock and smashing it against my dad's skull. I picture him stumbling, falling onto the ground. I see myself crouching beside him, refusing to hold him as he bleeds. But even as I imagine it, I know I won't do it, because I can't afford to lose my dadâyet. For twenty-eight years he has held my memories hostage. Without him, I'll never know what he did to me when I was a kid.