No one thinks of the children arriving here now as refugees of a hemispheric war that extends, at least, from these very mountains, down across the country into the southern US and northern Mexican deserts, sweeping across the Mexican sierras, forests, and southern rain forests into Guatemala, into El Salvador, and all the way to the Celaque Mountains in Honduras. No one thinks of those children as consequences of a historical war that goes back decades. Everyone keeps asking: Which war, where? Why are they here? Why did they come to the United States? What will we do with them? No one is asking: Why did they flee their homes?
NO U-TURN
Why can’t we just go back home? asks the boy.
He is fidgeting with his Polaroid in the backseat, learning how to handle it, reading the instructions, grunting.
There’s nothing to take pictures of anyway, he complains. Everything we pass is old and ugly and looks haunted.
Is that true? Is everything haunted? asks the girl.
No baby, I say, nothing is haunted.
Though perhaps, in a way, it is. The deeper we drive into this land, the more I feel like I’m looking at remains and ruins. As we pass an abandoned dairy farm, the boy says:
Imagine the first person who ever milked a cow. What a strange person.
Zoophilia, I think, but I don’t say it. I don’t know what my husband thinks, but he doesn’t say anything either. The girl suggests that maybe that first cow milker thought that if he pulled hard enough—down there—the bell around the cow’s neck would ding-dong.
Chime, the boy corrects her.
And then suddenly milk came out, she concludes, ignoring her brother.
Adjusting the mirror, I see her: an ample smile, at once serene and mischievous. A slightly more reasonable explanation comes to me:
Maybe it was a human mother who had no milk to give her baby, so she decided to take it from the cow.
But the children are not convinced:
A mother with no milk?
That’s crazy, Mama.
That’s preposterous, Ma, please.
PEAKS & POINTS
As a teenager, I had a friend who would always look for a high spot whenever she had to make a decision or understand a difficult problem. A rooftop, a bridge, a mountain if available, a bunk bed, any kind of height. Her theory was that it was impossible to make a good decision or come to any relevant conclusion if you weren’t experiencing the vertiginous clarity that heights impose on you. Perhaps.
As we climb the mountain roads of the Appalachians, I can think more clearly, for the first time, about what has been happening to us as a family—to us as a couple, really—over the last months. I suppose that, over time, my husband started feeling that all our obligations as a couple and as a family—rent, bills, medical insurance—had forced him to take a more conventional path, farther and farther away from the kind of work he wanted to devote his life to. And that, some years later, it finally became clear to him that the life we’d made together was at odds with what he wanted. For months, trying to understand what was happening to us, I felt angry, blamed him, thought he was acting on whimsy—for novelty, for change, for other women, for whatever. But now, traveling together, physically closer than ever before but far from the scaffolding that had sustained the daily work in progress of our familial world and distanced from the project that had once brought us together, I realize I had been accumulating similar feelings. I needed to admit my share: although I hadn’t lit the match that started this fire, for months I had been leaving a trail of dry debris that was now fueling it.
The speed limit on the roads across the Appalachians is 25 miles per hour, which irritates my husband but which I find ideal. Even at this speed, though, it took me a few hours to notice that the trees along the mountain path are covered in kudzu. We had passed acres of woodland blanketed in it on our way up toward this high valley, but only now do we see it clearly. My husband explains to the children that kudzu was brought over from Japan in the nineteenth century, and that farmers were paid by the hour to plant it on harvested soil, in order to control erosion. They went overboard, though, and eventually the kudzu spread across the fields, crept up the mountains, and climbed up all the trees. It blocks the sunlight and sucks out all the water from them. The trees have no defense mechanism. From the higher parts of the mountain road, the sight is terrifying: like cancerous marks, patches of yellowing treetops freckle the forests of Virginia.
All those trees will die, asphyxiated, sucked dry by this bloody rootless creeper, my husband tells us, slowing down as we hit a curve.
But so will you, Pa, and all of us, and everyone else, the boy says.
Well, yes, his father admits, and grins. But that’s not the point.
Instructively, the girl then informs us:
The point is, the point is, the point is always pointy.
VALLEYS
We wind up and down the narrow, sinuous road, across the Blue Ridge Mountains, and head west into a narrow valley cradled between two arms of the range, once more looking for a gas station. When we start to lose signal again, I turn off the radio, and the boy asks his father for stories, stories of the past in general. The girl interrupts now and then, asks him very concrete questions.
What about Apache girls? Did they exist?
What do you mean? he says.
You only talk about Apache men, and sometimes Apache boys, so were there any girls?
He thinks for a moment, and finally says:
Of course. There’s Lozen.
He tells her that Lozen was the best Apache girl, the bravest. Her name meant “dexterous horse thief.” She grew up during a tough time for the Apaches, after the Mexican government had placed a bounty on Apache scalps, and paid large sums for their long black hair. They never got Lozen’s, though; she was too quick and too smart.
Did she have long or short hair?
She wore her hair in two long braids. She was known to be a clairvoyant, who knew when danger was upon her people and always steered them out of trouble. She was also a warrior, and a healer. And when she got older, she became a midwife.
What’s a midwife? the girl asks.
Someone who delivers babies, says my husband.
Like the postwoman?
Yes, he says, like the postwoman.
FOOTPRINTS
In the first town we pass through, deep into Virginia, we see more churches than people, and more signs for places than places themselves. Everything looks like it’s been hollowed out and gutted from the inside out, and what remains are only the words: names of things pointing toward a vacuum. We’re driving through a country made up only of signs. One such sign announces a family-owned restaurant and promises hospitality; behind it, nothing but a dilapidated iron structure beams beautiful in the sunlight.
After miles of passing abandoned gas stations, bushes sprouting through every crack in the cement, we come to one that seems only partly abandoned. We park next to the single operational fuel dispenser and step out of the car to stretch our legs. The girl stays inside, seeing her chance to sit behind the wheel while my husband fills the tank. The boy and I fiddle with his new camera outside.
What am I supposed to do? he asks.
I tell him—trying to translate between a language I know well and a language I know little about—that he just needs to think of photographing as if he were recording the sound of an echo. But in truth, it’s difficult to draw parallels between sonography and photography. A camera can capture an entire portion of a landscape in a single impression; but a microphone, even a parabolic one, can sample only fragments and details.