2016.
Wolf mother, where you been?
You look so worn, so thin.
Ivy Maude is singing, her small voice, clear as a bell and in perfect pitch, comes ringing from the back of the car. Her older sisters, Tatum, picking the ukulele, and Cleo join in.
The faded blue seats of the white and rust-pocked suburban are torn here and there but still soft. We have settled in for a road trip. The rhythmic bouncing in the captain’s seats and the melodic melancholy of my daughters’ song are somehow soothing my senses against the thunderous rumble of the engine.
When I run through the deep dark forest long, after this begun—
Tatum, 14, switches from picking to strumming in the chorus and then back again for each subsequent verse. Her strawberry blonde hair is pulled into a haphazard pony-tail, her clear blue eyes peeking through her fashionable clear-rimmed glasses are juxtaposed against the maroon Alaska tourist sweatshirt we’ve picked up on the road with a fluorescent starfish printed in the middle.
She wants to grow up.
She isn’t sure how.
I can hear in her voice that she teeters on the edge of coming into her own. It was always a deep voice, but it’s beginning to manifest early signs of knowing. Pink splotches look painted across her cheeks, giving away both her tendency for rosascia and the early signs of acne. I am constantly aware that she is straddling the final stages of childhood. And something about the way she sings the words of this song tells me, she knows it as well as I do.
Tatum taught herself to play the ukulele a year ago and has since taught herself the guitar. She creates parts for her siblings and tries in vain to teach them to harmonize. She needs creative outlets like most people need water.
Her twelve-year-old sister, Cleo, does not have her older sister’s natural musicality.
It is a frustration they share.
There is no working radio or music player in the old SUV that we bought for a song the first time we came to Alaska 4 years ago. The children have a short list of tunes they know. But this song, written by Swedish folk duo First Aid Kit, will become the anthem of this Alaskan summer. Sung daily by my daughters, it is as much a part of the wild northern terrain in my memory as the regular copses of tall and lanky black spruce pines that have the haunting effect of the uncanny.
Tatum is the oldest of my brood. At every moment I am aware that this will likely be the last of these trips for our family-- detached from the growing importance of her social life and social media and the chaos of 21st century living--it is likely the last year they will play “Chopped” on the shore of the bay together, the last year they will fall asleep in a pile telling each other stories, and the last year we will be able to convince them to abandon their lives to follow their parents into the wilds of the country.
I listen to her. To all the children. I record their voices on my phone and in my memory as best I can. I don’t really trust either mechanism.
Tatum elbows Cleo for coming in too soon on the song.
Cleo audibly “hmphs” at her, but doesn’t stop singing.
We affectionately call this behemoth vehicle Yukon Cornelius, and it is packed with the smattering of items we need to make our way through as much of this northern territory as two weeks will grant us. Two small tents, 6 used sleeping bags, a couple tattered throw blankets, a single duffle bag packed full of underwear and socks, a handful of headlamps, two changes of clothes each, a pot for boiling water, a small stove, some mismatched thrifted dishes, a small stack of books, a ukulele, and a deck of UNO cards. We pride ourselves in packing light and requiring little despite our numbers.
I perch in the front seat, the landscape liquefying beyond the water-stained windows as we move along the Old Sterling Highway. I am hypnotized by the way the great white spruce pines blur into a green belt that stretches across the swathe of blue sky. The vibrant fireweed lines each side of the narrow two lane highway creating a bleeding ribbon of fuschia along the lower border of my passenger-side view. The dissolution of the tangible before my eyes makes me aware of my own solubility.
As we make our way across the Alaskan land, I am overcome with the sense of detachment, freedom. I frequently muse both aloud and in my head that I could give up everything to live on the road like this. I’ve left behind social media and social obligations, which sometimes have a tendency to be one and the same. I am glutted with the relief from a life that often feels like I’m serving myself up on darling china to everyone around me. And I loathe to think about ever going back.
Even my children seem to need less of me in this place.
Eagles swoop overhead and the immensity of the sky becomes the only stable fixture against our inertia. The sun makes an appearance between the clouds and the dirt-speckled glass, growing warmer all the time. The vista is sporadically dotted with a cabin here or a small building there, but they are few and far between in this part of the state.
Brig begins telling Eli a story about his childhood from the driver’s seat. It is the story of how his brother accidentally shot him in the foot when he was five. He has to project just loud enough to be heard over the sounds of the road and that song that fills the space.
I envy his memory.
It’s made up of a series of tidy and distinct vignettes, and in no particular order. They each have beginnings, middles, and endings, almost always a punchline or a surprise twist to punctuate. His stories are never grounded in chronology or contain any temporal relation to the others, seeming completely devoid of time. They hang in his past like a laundry line-- a sock here, a shirt there, and a handful of unmentionables—to be tossed and re-sorted and hung again in any given retelling.
The moment he begins with, “There was this one time,” the children are spellbound. But it isn’t only the children. Anyone that has met Brigham is captivated by his stories. Between his feral childhood in Texas, his parents’ foibles through divorce and remarriages, the eccentric and hilarious mishaps as his mother leads a half-hearted cult, and ultimately his Lost Boys adventures after said parents abandon he and his brother in a borrowed home in the middle of one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of Salt Lake City where they never know what utilities have been paid up and which ones they would be living without at any given time– every story is unbelievable and tragic in its own way. And somehow, Brig manages still to keep his audience in stitches.
He is beloved.
There is good reason.
I have no such stories of my middle-class Southern California childhood.
I remember the way it looked, the way it sounded. I remember the way it all felt.
My memory is all sweeping, affective landscapes--stretching across timelines and bleeding from one recollection into another.
I can tell you about the fruit that grew in our backyard, the taste and feel of warm plums dripping from my chin in the summertime; of swimming in the neighbor’s pool nearly every warm day of the year while pretending to be a mermaid that was both magical and heroic, and going home sunburned and smog-suffocated most of those days; of growing up an introvert, the 6th of 8 children, and how I often felt lost and alone in that brood. I remember bits and pieces of moments: the shoes I wore or the sound of a particular voice; I can tell you what each room looked like, about how tall I was, but not stories. There are not tidy beginnings, middles, or endings. Only a vague notion of what and where something happened. Nothing else.
With me, it’s always setting. Landscape.
We slow, then point and crane our necks when we spot the occasional grazing bull moose, his stately, velvet, bowl-shaped antlers bobbing up and down as he works the ground for pinecones and shrubs.
And we stop for a moment to catch a glimpse of a cow moose watching over her calf drinking from and bathing in a pond. I watch that mother nudge her young one that looks to be well into its first year. If it’s a bull calf, she’ll chase him away in a season or two. If it’s a cow calf, she’ll likely stay with her offspring for a few more years. From where I am watching, I can’t tell how much longer she’ll mother.
Either way, I think, they’re on a timeline.
I was told this would get old—that I would reach a point of complete saturation with the land’s sublimity.
I am immersed, it’s true.
But not quite saturated.
We make another stop somewhere near Chikaloon because a rushing river is so arresting in the afternoon fog, we have to get out of the car to document it. We watch it, we listen to its howl, we feel its cold mist spray against our faces. We try to capture it on camera, and we store what we can in our minds, fodder for our future imaginative memories.
My son pees on the roadside. And so we all take a moment to relieve ourselves. This wilderness somehow gives us permission to stow away our inhibitions and we become quite adept at managing this just about anywhere.
With no certain destination in mind, we navigate the roads with little more than a map and a handful of locals’ recommendations. Driving, we all agree, is half the point.
8 year-old Ivy Maude sits and entertains herself as we drive. Through with singing, she plays with a doll she brought along, and I can hear her telling herself stories as she plays, though I can make no distinct words out above the noise of our vehicle. She is as easy a kid as a parent could ask for. When I was expecting her, I walked into my doctor’s office the moment I realized I was pregnant—by the fourth you almost don’t need a stick to tell you what your body is now adept at navigating. Because we had insurance—a luxury for our young but growing family-- I got to choose a doctor to see, one that was actually close to where I lived and had been well recommended. He took one look at my chart, at the dates of my previous births, and chuckled saying, “Well, your fourth pregnancy in 7 years. Do you feel like you’ve been pregnant or nursing for almost 8 straight years now?”
Indeed. I did.
But having children was never really a choice. It was what women in my family did. My mother had her eighth baby well into her forties. My maternal grandmother had her ninth in as similar a timeline. My two older sisters were at child number four and seven by then, and even my younger sister had a year and half head-start on me in the baby producing. There was never a moment when I asked myself, Do I want to be a mother?
I didn’t realize anyone did.
Stopping at four, believe it or not, was a progressive decision.
Motherhood was always part of the plan, if there ever was a plan.
Brig determines that we should make our way to remote McCarthy to visit a friend of his. So we head in the direction of Glen Allen toward Chitina. Chitina is home to about 125 residents, a gas station, post office, small grocery store, a couple of local eateries, and the end of the paved road. It was established as a railroad and supply stop for the Kennicott Copper mines situated at the foot of the Wrangell mountains. This will be our last chance to stock up on some food and to fill the car’s hungry tank with fuel before we take the slow, gravel road toward McCarthy.
I take note of one of the great phenomena of the drive. Peppered in the breathtaking Alaskan landscape is the occasional rusted, steely carcass of a vehicle that seems to be growing right out of the ground. Abandoned and sinking into the earth, cars and trucks are buried in the snow during the long winter months only to be enveloped by a brilliant palette of fireweed, forget-me-nots, and devil’s club during the brief summers.
Their corroded bodies become land-laced relics.
Startling silhouettes of loss and waste and reclamation.
Elias, 10, takes out the UNO cards and tries to talk one of the girls into playing a round with him. We take UNO everywhere we go and have several sets at home. Eli has multiple developmental and intellectual disabilities including challenges with short term memory, speech, language, and visual, auditory, and sensory processing. His cognitive disabilities mean that he will never be capable of being fully independent. The official diagnosis is Autism Spectrum disorder because it’s the only one we can name, but we also know that is only one small piece of the enigma that is Eli.
I suppose it’s one-part genuine martyrdom and three parts that 24 karat gold heart mothers of kids like my son are expected to have. We are the bloody saints raising the children no one else wants to admit they’re glad they don’t have. It allows them an opportunity to say things like You are the perfect mom for him or God picked you for this because he knew you could handle it.
Sentiments that are all just nice ways of saying Better you than me.
Eli’s thick, shiny, straight brown hair is nearly to his shoulders and he has developed a signature head toss for throwing his hair out of his face.
His smile could stop a runaway freight train.
When he’s happy, he mauls whomever is closest with hugs and kisses. Unlike some kids with autism that don’t want to be touched, Eli is sensory seeking. He wants to hug and cuddle and wrestle and play hard because it soothes him. His trademark move is to bowl you over with a hug and a wet kiss, knocking you completely off your feet. I have been pummeled by his affection almost daily for nearly eleven years, and the older and bigger he gets, the harder it is to stay upright.
This is to say nothing of his tantrums.
I don’t know what he’d be like without his particular set of challenges.
What would any of us be like without the great walls we come up against–either the ones we’re born with or the ones of our own making?
When Eli was two and a half he hadn’t said a word or even attempted “mama” or “papa.” One day, in a fit of excitement, he opened his mouth to find a single dragged-out syllable from the back of his throat: “Cccckkkk!” It came like a revelation to both of us and his arms flailed and his eyes widened and he repeated “Cccckkkk!” And he looked at me wanting something, wanting me to recognize something. And he looked from me to the street beyond our front room window: “Cccckkkk!” he repeated, his chubby arms pulling his uncoordinated body up and poking at the window: “Cccckkkk!” And that’s when I noticed the truck coming down the road, Eli’s eyes now glued to the window, his knees bouncing with his new-found language: “Ccccckkkkk!”
“Truck!” I squealed and cried and jumped with joy.
“Ccckkkkkk!” he continued, bouncing and flailing.
That was the first time we understood each other. It was the only word he would have for several more months and he wielded it with pride and accomplishment each and every time we approached anything with wheels.
Of course, he also made lots of sounds that were lost on me. As he got older, he learned that as the third of four children he needed my undivided attention if he was going to communicate. So he’d take my face between his hands when I was sitting with his baby sister and he’d let out a string of disjointed sounds “Lim cckkkk mmmta.” And I’d try my best to decipher. And he’d repeat himself, at first patiently, as though he were teaching me something important. But each time I asked him to repeat it, he grew impatient. If I didn’t get it by the third repetition, his eyes would fill with tears. And he’d shake his head no and walk away from me.
I have always wondered what he dreams at night, what language he speaks in his dreams. Is he fluent and clear in that other consciousness? Or does he struggle to be understood there, too?
Here it is: Do I love my son with all his challenges?
With a love that is uncontainable.
Do I wish this life was easier on him?
Without a doubt.
UNO doesn’t require reading or counting or creative language skills. And it’s portable. So it’s the game we pack wherever we go together.
When the rest of us have had as much UNO as we can take, Cleo will abandon the song or whatever else she might be doing to take him up on it. That’s just how her heart works. Unlike her brother, language came quickly and easily to Cleo. I almost cannot remember a time when she wasn’t speaking clearly, competently, and in complete and vibrant sentences. And even as a very young child, Cleo never took anything from anyone without first making sure others were receiving, too.
When she was just a toddler, we managed an apartment complex in Monrovia, California. Tatum had just started preschool and Cleo, just under two years old, was my morning side-kick in our daily chores around the apartments. One day, an older couple that liked to spoil my girls with candy came out to say hello. The old fellow reached out with a lollipop in his withered hand and offered it to Cleo.
She held out two hands and said, “one for Tatum?” And its been that way ever since. No one goes without on Cleo’s watch.
Despite the fact that she shares many of my most frustrating qualities, Cleo is the kind of child I’m just grateful to know. And if I’m being honest, I hope to be more like someday.
Ivy Maude croons in the back, just happy to be included in the revelry. We are a noisy, and it has been said, feral group, but the youngest is quiet. Mighty. She once determined, after a discussion about the many possibilities of God--ours is a heretical practice of the Mormon heresy-- that she should pray to a Mother-God. She later confided in me that a voice told her that the Mother’s name is Luna.
It is not lost on me that my eight-year-old daughter prays to a God of her own invention.
The deep growl of the suburban is strangely pacifying as the noise of the family grows. Several hours into the drive and the children, tired of singing and tired of reading and tired of looking out windows, begin to be impatient with one another. Eli is throwing a fit and throwing cards, Tatum is yelling that he never gets punished, Ivy Maude is trying to avoid getting hit when Eli swings his arms and Cleo tries to get Brig to respond to the knock-knock jokes she just made up. They continue to bicker, and they whine and Brig occasionally threatens to “pull this car over,” because parents have been doing it since the advent of automobile travel and, though ineffective, it’s a right of parental passage.
I hear the din of family life around me.
I am lost somewhere in this insistent forward motion.
It will be just an hour or so before we find a place to set up camp and set everyone free. I keep watching out the window, the landscape melting with the day as we move through it, and that song rolling through my head.
…where the sun would set, the trees were dead, and the river was none.
And I hope this path will lead me back home from this place…
***
We have to take very small steps so we don’t fall. It takes us a moment to adjust our balance, the cadence of our motion to the icy terrain from the dirt earth we left behind. And stepping onto the surface of Root Glacier in the heart of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is something like leaving earth.
The temperature drops almost instantly. We find ourselves suspended somewhere between earth and sky, adrift between the summer blueness of the expanse above and the arresting blueness of the glacial surface beneath our feet.
This isn’t the first glacier my family has hiked to, but it’s the first time that we step off the trail and onto the face of the formidable, polar giant. Exit Glacier, of the Kenai-Fjord’s National Park, was the first hike we took to see this natural phenomenon up close. It was back in 2012 when our youngest was only 3 and our oldest was just 9. We skipped and sang along the trail, giggling and wondering at its sight and magnitude. About half way up the short but steep terrain, the glacial ice met the trail. When we returned to that hike earlier this summer, we were stunned to find that the entire hike could be completed without ever reaching the ice, so far had the glacier retreated.
There is a deep and mournful moan that a tidewater glacier makes just the moment before a piece breaks away to form an iceberg. It’s called calving.
Funny, I think.
Perhaps birth is a mother’s first lesson in letting go.
Crossing over into the gelid atmosphere, a reverential hush comes over us. The boisterous babble of our hike involved, as it always does, singing and joking and teasing, occasionally whining or crying. Our children have been hiking since they were old enough to walk. When they were quite young we told them stories and sang songs on the long hikes to keep them going, keep them happy.
Now that they are a bit bigger, they do most of the entertaining for us.
But as we venture into the winter of this space, we do so with an instinctive quiet and care. Each of the six of us begin to drift in different directions, lost in our own private reveries. And I wonder about this mammoth of nature; about how ancient this solid rock of waters might be.
I wonder what stories it has to tell.
And I think that maybe the voices of human ancestors are recorded on the water the way the memory of rocks is written on their bodies, or the way that grief, that is not my own, is coded in my DNA.
As I stand on the face of this great glassine chapel, I watch my husband and my children commune with it, each in their own way. They touch its surface, take pictures, hum to themselves and look up at the sky as though they’ve never seen it before.
Indeed, before today, none of us had.
I glance across the frozen floor to see a silky ribbon of water cutting the cerulean-marbled surface. I follow it to where my eight-year old daughter, quiet and wild, is crouching on her hands and knees, her face in the water, drinking it as though she has just crossed a desert.
I watch my family take notice and one by one begin gathering around her, around the water. We drink it from our cupped hands and fill our water bottles before we cross back into the din of our earthen trail.
In my memory there will always be something sacramental about this water, this moment—redemptive and sanctifying.
As I watch my family, I realize that someday we’ll do our looking back when the children have grown and gone. Brig will always have tidy, entertaining stories to tell about this trip during holiday gatherings or awkward family reunions.
The children will always have their pictures and their songs and the pieces of us that they have taken with them.
And I’ll be left with my memories: these broad, sweeping landscapes that I love.
***
2026.
In a small, quiet living room, with the lights turned low, I search the baby’s face for signs of my daughter’s DNA. But like her mother, she was born with her father’s face. She looks up at me in between soft cries and wincing from sleepiness. Despite her strong paternal genes, she is familiar.
Brig sits next to me and 4 day-old Matilda. The dancing light of the Muppet Movie flashes in the dark, and though the volume is turned low, Maude occasionally sings along to her favorite songs while Eli shushes her louder than either the movie or her songs. Cleo sits beside them; she’s in town from where she lives in Seattle. We feel lucky to have her around for a couple of days. She doesn’t get a lot of time off from the youth detention center where she works, but she didn’t want to miss out on kissing the new baby and introducing herself as auntie right from the start.
Tatum didn’t exactly choose this timing. But somewhere between finishing a biology degree, taking the MCAT, and applying for med-school, a rogue IUD was dislodged, and a new life determined it’s way into our family. She managed to arrive at the exact moment we all needed her most.
Brig’s long bout of unemployment in television required him to take a job in the marketing department of a corporation this year–”working for the man”-- as we joke. And it is truly taking something of his soul to motivate him to show up every day. I have spent the last five years growing a nonprofit dedicated to helping teens and adults with autism navigate mental health challenges by giving them a life-raft of social connection. It is fulfilling work. But draining: mentally, emotionally, and financially. Eli graduated from high school last year, works as a bagger at the local grocery store and plays a lot of basketball with the Special Olympics. Maude is nearly graduated and has visions of fashion school on the horizon.
Brig and I offered to come take the first part of the night shift tonight so that Tatum and her partner of three years, Owen, could get a little sleep. The rest of the crew didn’t want to miss out.
Brig takes the baby from me with the pretense that he has the “magic touch” for getting babies to sleep, but really, he just wants his turn snuggling and cooing. Cleo sits close and impatiently and waits for her own turn to hold Matilda.
The muscles in my arms loosen and relax after handing off the little one, and I sit in that tiny space in wonder– my children under one roof again, laughing and singing and cajoling one another, and my oldest, taking her first breaths in her new life:
Wolf mother.
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