The Trip to Echo Spring (32 page)

You could get back on your feet in a place like this, after a lifetime of messing up, of being torn apart by the overwhelming incompatibility of your needs. All those bad things you'd done, back in another life: they might rinse away out here, given time, given a landscape so
explicitly devoted to the display of time's long reach. Watching water work through rock, you might come to a kind of accommodation with the fact that you'd once smashed your wife's head repeatedly against a sidewalk for looking at another man; that you'd hit her with a wine bottle, severing an artery and causing her to lose almost sixty per cent of her blood. Other things, too. Stupid, slippery things: drink-driving, bouncing cheques, running out on bills, committing fraud, letting people down, making up dumb and pointless lies. Hardly any wonder Carver's nickname was Running Dog, or that he said, a long time later, ‘I made a wasteland out of everything I touched.'

On the way back to the car we passed a woman chewing gum, who stopped us and said, ‘I don't know if you're interested in birds, but there are like five bald eagles up by the bridge.' We thanked her and hurried on. There were only two by the time we got there, in the tree between us and the 101. In flight they looked like a coat thrown into the air, ragged and enormous. The creek churned beneath them, goose green and full of bubbles. They were fishing, the woman had said. The nearest one roused, ruffling his feathers, wings ajar. He dipped forward to strop his beak on his chest, then looked up sharply as two ducks crossed well above the alders. Imagine a day of this. Imagine years: the increase, the effect it would have on your heart.

On the road to Elwha there was an Apostolic church with a sign outside announcing:
Satan subtracts and divides, God adds and multiplies.
Bright sky, a scum of cirrus. We were taking the Olympic Hot Springs Road into the mountains, stopping periodically to look down at the
river, which shot grey-green through a rocky, moss-covered gorge. This is where the poem ‘Lemonade' is set, the one that contains a hearsay story about a man whose son drowned on a fishing trip, and who watched his small body pulled from the water by a helicopter, using what looked like a set of kitchen tongs.

There were firs on the sheer banks and trees swagged in golden moss. We crawled by a herd of black-tailed deer. They looked up as we passed, faces soft and unguarded as sleepwalkers. The air above Elwha Bridge was full of swallows, darting their unfolding patterns into the mist. The river was nearly aquamarine and very deep now, rippling and fissuring like a pot of boiling water.

We drove on up towards the springs. The trees were glowing in the wet light. Spruce, hemlock, more firs than I could name. It began to rain, and then to rain hard. The road tacked up, higher and higher. The rain turned to sleet, then real snow, the fat flakes falling between the trees and making the air thick and soupy. We stopped to look down. The flakes fell past us, vanishing into the green bowl of water hundreds of feet below. At last my mother turned the car and we slithered round black switchbacks to the relative safety of the truckers' road.

We ate lunch that day at a roadside shack called Granny's Café. There was a man at the bar in a denim jacket and a baseball cap, with a lined, humorous face, well into his eighties. He came over to chat with us as we waited on our burgers. ‘March had double the average rainfall,' he said. ‘I got a big farm down from here. You go out into the hay and you sink on into it.' What do you raise, I asked him, and he said: ‘I got a few beef cattle, hay,' then, deadpan, ‘You gotta do something to keep you entertained.'

People always want to talk to my mother, to make her laugh, to
have her attention. There's something about her that draws strangers; a kind of light. She was the best companion I could imagine that day. It's rare we spend time together, just the two of us, and we drove all over, screeching at one another to watch out for rocks and logging trucks. We drove up to Crescent Lake and took a stroll around it, marvelling at the colour of the water, which shifted as the sun passed in and out of clouds through different registers of indigo, ultramarine and then a deep saturated blue, like cornflowers in a field.

It was hard to express the effect the landscape was having on me. It was a place for settling, for setting down, for relinquishing the past. That evening my mother and I began to talk about Diana's recovery, about how miraculous her transformation had been, and how dear she was to us. During the course of this conversation I asked my mother what had happened over the last days at Tall Trees. I'd begun to doubt my own account, to suspect that there was something cobbled or misconstrued about it. I was right. The story my mother told me that night, in an Italian restaurant in Port Angeles, was one I'd never heard before, and that barely intersected with my fragmented version.

She said that my sister and I had spent the weekend at our father's house, as we did every month. At the time, Diana's work was very stressful, and for two days she sat in her study, drinking and brooding, the alcohol seeping like battery acid until it had contaminated all the regions of her life. On Sunday at six we came spilling back through the door, probably laden down with the presents my father almost always gave us. We rushed to my mother, chattering a mile a minute, and Diana felt, I suppose, poisonously excluded. She went up to our rooms and gathered everything she'd ever given us, armfuls of clothes and toys, and threw them over the balustrade.

My mother took us upstairs then,
into the only bedroom in the house that had a lock. She shut the door and jammed the bed against it. Then she turned the radio up very high to drown out what Diana was screaming, down on her knees against the door. We stayed in there for hours, chatting and playing games, a piece of time that's been completely erased from my mind. Eventually my sister needed to go to the loo, and so my mother opened the door, pushed Diana backwards into her study, which had a captain's desk and oak chairs with green leather seats. She held the handle up and by the time she released it Diana had called the police and was shrieking down the phone that she was being held hostage in her own home.

They were there in minutes, and then I suppose my own memory kicks in with the scene on the stairs, the strongest element of which was my conviction that if only I were allowed to speak to her I could calm her down – a moment of absurdly unrealistic co-dependence that's had long-reaching consequences in the relationships of my adult life.

I lay in bed that night in my room at the Red Lion, tumbling the story over in my head. The Juan de Fuca Strait was moving blackly a few feet away. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn't locate the place where I'd squirrelled away that afternoon. The only thing that seemed even remotely familiar was the sound of the radio, and the raging voice beneath it, though God knows there were no shortage of evenings in which someone screamed while I lay in bed, reading pony stories and listening to
The Phantom of the Opera
or
Thriller
on my yellow Walkman.

All of a sudden I felt very angry. I didn't like the thought of myself in that little room, and I hated the powerlessness of having lost whole episodes of my childhood. There was something almost ridiculously ironic about it, too. The thing I'd always found most
frightening about alcoholism was the way it affected memory: the blackouts, the hiccups, the obliterations. It seemed directly erosive of a person's moral sense, since it's hardly possible to make amends for things you don't recall.

It struck me then that much of the work of the Twelve Step Programme is directed towards remembrance. How did it go? Step Four: ‘Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.' Step Five: ‘Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.' Step Eight: ‘Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.' Step Ten: ‘Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.'

This line of thought reminded me of something else I didn't like: a snag I'd spotted in the fabric of Carver's recovery. ‘I have a poor memory,' he admitted in a famous essay called ‘Fires'.

By this I mean that much that has happened in my life I've forgotten – a blessing for sure – but I have these large periods of time I simply can't account for or bring back, towns and cities I've lived in, names of people, the people themselves. Large blanks . . . Perhaps this is why it's sometimes been said that my stories are unadorned, stripped down . . . None of my stories really
happened,
of course – I'm not writing autobiography – but most of them bear a resemblance, however faint, to certain life occurrences or situations. But when I try to recall the physical surroundings or furnishings bearing on a story situation (what kind of flowers, if any, were present? Did they give off any odor? etc.), I'm often at a total loss. So I
have to make it up as I go along – what the people in the story say to each other, as well as what they do then, after thus, and so was said, and what happens to them next.

There's something missing in this account though – something, in fact, weirdly amnesiac about it. Elsewhere, Carver was explicit about the role of alcohol in the obliteration of his facility for recall. For example, in the
Paris Review
interview of 1983 he said: ‘Toward the end of my drinking career I was completely out of control and in a very grave place. Blackouts, the whole business – points where you can't remember anything you say or do during a certain period of time. You might drive a car, give a reading, teach a class, set a broken leg, go to bed with someone, and not have any memory of it later. You're on some kind of automatic pilot.'

None of this is mentioned in ‘Fires'. The essay is an attempt to answer the question of influence; to name the things that have driven and shaped Carver's writing. Apart from a poor memory, the main influence he can think of, the one he calls ‘oppressive and often malevolent' and later ‘heavy and often baleful', is the existence of his two children.

Bitterly, he describes a particular nadir: an afternoon in the mid-sixties, when he was at Iowa for the first time, as a grad student in the Writers Workshop. His wife was at work, his children were at a party, and he was spending Saturday afternoon in a laundromat, waiting with five or six loads of wet clothes for an empty dryer. Eventually one came free, but before he could grab it another customer pounced. In that moment of helpless failure, of drudgery and thwarted effort, he saw that he was never going to achieve the things he wanted. Soon afterwards, he said, the dreams went bust. No doubt at all whose fault this was.

The time came and went when everything my wife and I held sacred, or considered worthy of respect, every spiritual value, crumbled away. Something terrible had happened to us. It was something that we had never seen in any other family . . . It was erosion, and we couldn't stop it. Somehow, when we weren't looking, the children had got into the driver's seat. As crazy as it sounds now, they held the reins, and the whip.

He finishes up by accusing his children of eating him alive, adding that his life came ‘to a dead stop off on a siding . . . If there'd once been a fire, it'd gone out.'

It's hard to express how disturbing I found this account, which was written at Yaddo in 1981, when Carver was five years dry. Despite his sobriety, it seemed to exemplify an alcoholic cast of mind: a tendency to blame external factors rather than fronting up to one's own role in kindling trouble. Psychologists call this having an external locus of control, and it's common among people with addictions. A person with an internal locus of control tends to think their own actions are responsible for their experience, while a person with an external locus of control tends to blame circumstances, to be superstitious, or to feel themselves at the mercy of forces outside themselves. In alcoholics, this sense of powerlessness tends to lead directly to drinking. (Cheever, on yet another psychiatrist: ‘I think my problems enforce my drinking. He claims I invent my problems to justify my drinking.')

In ‘Fires', Carver ducks responsibility for the consequences of his alcoholism entirely. Instead, he sidles the blame for the erosion of his writing and his family on to the two people who were most vulnerable and most damaged by it. It's a kind of moral blackout, a refusal to link cause and
effect in any meaningful way – which isn't to say, of course, that poverty doesn't exact a cost or profoundly influence the destiny of a writer.

Recovery isn't a simple matter, a straightforward substitution of bad for good. Instead, it's a kind of evolution, slow and sometimes stuttering. Elsewhere, Carver fronted up to his behaviour more honestly. In the 1982 poem ‘Alcohol', he wrote with deliberate hesitation:

and then . . . something: alcohol –

what you've really done

and to someone else, the one

you meant to love from the start.