Chasing the Moon

It's December here in Minnesota, but the nights haven't managed to get so cold that I have to hole myself up. There were a few years after it happened and before I left that I'd gear myself up in snow pants and wrap a scarf so many times around my face only my eyes showed.

I went out, red headlamp tight on my forehead, a pack of Hot Hands in each glove and one resting on top of the lens barrel to keep it from fogging and frosting over, at ten, twenty below, if the sky was clear.

Every time I slipped my gloves off to make an adjustment my fingers became stiff and useless. My eyes stung and streamed with tears that froze to my skin. I don’t know how I managed to shoot anything at all.

I suppose I was desperate then, with grief.

Ma didn’t know what to do with me, but she didn’t stop me; she’s always been good that way, letting me get on as I need to.

I sold those photos for a pretty penny. The moon reflected in the snow, the hoarfrost pines glittering under the moonlight. Most people can't see the stars, not from the cities with all those lights. But out here, in the north woods, a clear night sky is as bright as day.

With that money I bought my first DSLR, a pile of SD Cards, a used MacBook, all the international adapters, and packed everything in a Go Bag.

Mom, who always had people leaving her, could sense a change coming and slipped $500 in traveler's checks and an international calling card into my money belt, told me the money was for emergencies and to call any time. She hugged me tighter than I ever remembered, letting go for just a moment of the solid exterior she kept about her.

I think she always knew she’d be the last one left.

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Even though it was 1982 and things were different in some places than they had been, she and Dad married dutifully when Ma turned up pregnant. She was 20 and trying to figure out what she wanted from life; he’d just joined the Army.

She refused to follow him around from base to base so she stayed right where she was, in the house she grew up in and, with the help of Grandpappy’s GI money and Great Grandad and Grandma looking after me, she put herself through nursing school at the college in town and then picked up the night shift.

Dad’d come round on leave a couple times a year. We both made the best of it, but the last time I saw him I was nearing nine years old and developing my own voice. It was awkward between us. Hardly knowing one another, not knowing what to say.

Tucked up in bed, I overheard him telling Ma he wanted to be around more. I’d grown into a whole person while he’d been away, and he didn’t like missing that. She didn’t say anything I could hear, but I saw her smiling warily in my head.

He told me later in the week he had to go for longer this time, somewhere called Iraq, on a different continent (Grandpappy showed me on the blowup globe I'd gotten for Christmas), but that he wanted to stay when he came back. He asked if that was okay.

I gave a nod but smiled as warily as I could muster.

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And then all at once the order of things tumbled all around me.

Great Grandad and Grandma went from caring for us to needing care that we couldn’t give them so they moved into a home too far to visit except on weekends.

And a call came.

Ma grew hard and resolute when she told me Dad wasn’t going to be coming home, that he’d died (she never did mince words) in that place called Iraq and I wondered what he was doing all the way over there anyway.

We flew to D.C., the three of us: me, Ma, and Grandpappy for the memorial. There wasn't enough of him left to bury. I heard Grandpap say that to Ma when they thought I wasn’t listening.

I suppose that's when I started watching the stars.

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Grandpappy was with us full-time by then, his drinking got in the way of his driving truck, I suspect, and he came home. Ma said he was “sick”, but I knew better. I may have been small, but I wasn’t blind. I saw the empty bottles. I didn’t have a concept of “sick” beyond fevers and sniveling noses.

He was always kind to me though, an affable drunk, in retrospect, knowing now how it can get for some people.

And when I couldn't sleep, I snuck quietly through the log house Great Grandad built himself and out the back door. I sat on the deck among the pine trees watching the moon and the stars over the top of them. It made me feel small, which you think'd scare a person but it didn't me.

I felt all pent up and ready to burst in the house sometimes, wondering if Dad’s parts were blown apart whole: a leg over here, an arm over there, or if it was more like hamburger someone had to scrape off the road.

The open, empty space cleared out my head from thinking.

One night Grandpappy caught me, and I thought I'd get told off, but he just sat down next to me, a bit glassy-eyed but smiling warily (I saw where Ma got it from), and we looked together. He let us sit out there a long time before finally sayin’, You ready for bed, Lu? I nodded and we went in.

After that first night, we made it a regular date to sit out and watch the stars together. He found an old telescope he’d used as a kid and we watched the moons circle Saturn, Mercury go retrograde. But we mostly liked just looking with our eyes.

He’d point out constellations, drawing maps in the air: Orion and his belt, the Big Dipper (Ursa Major, officially), they were the easy ones. Ursa Minor gave me trouble. I could never remember where she was at. Grandpap patiently showed me again and again.

He made up constellations, too. Connecting stars with his fingers in the shape of a vacuum, he called it the Vacuum Cluster. Then he moved his hand at a diagonal over his head, drew something that looked like a daisy, and called it the Daisy Chain. It made me laugh.

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On my 12th birthday, one hand held behind his back, he stood gleaming. When it was his turn he presented me with a Canon 35mm camera.

I thought we might capture some of these stars, he said.

Ma, who was wary of our late-night stargazing, gave him that wary smile.

But I squealed.

He taught me about ISO, aperture, F-stop, shutter speed. Red lamps to keep our eyes adjusted to the dark. And about using the two-second self-timer so we didn't get camera shake from my finger leaving the release.

He started telling me stories about when he was young and sat out with Great Grandad watching the stars. Great Granddad taught him all the things he taught me now. All the things he'd hoped to teach Ma, but it got muddled with the war.

Sometimes Ma’d let us drive to a nearby lake to get the moon off the water if she didn’t smell any liquor on his breath, which seemed to happen less and less, at least until I was old enough to drive us. We were at Long Lake one night, the moon bright off the water.

And suddenly, too close behind us, I heard the sound of large wings catching air in a big woosh, a muffled squeak, a screech, and then three hard flaps as if the bird was flying away.

I jumped. What the hell was that?!

Language, Grandpap said hardly stopping to look round.

Sorry.

It sounded like a barn owl picking up its dinner.

Stunned whenever he reminded me he knew about wildlife, too, I just stood there, mouth open in the dim red light of our headlamps.

Strange, he said not looking up from the camera, We don't usually get barn owls this far north.

I found a field guide to birds in a desk drawer and had a look. They reminded me of him somehow. The flat nose and round, dark eyes. Wise, as owls are, but solemn. Sad and hopeful at the same time.

I suppose I knew he was sad, Grandpap. I suppose I understood that.

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It was me who found him.

I don’t think he would have wanted that, but I’d taken a sick day. Ma had just collapsed into bed after her shift but I thought Grandpap might like some breakfast, so after knocking and calling his name I went in. I could tell from the door something wasn’t right.

All the energy in the room had been sucked out.

I woke Ma and waited at the table, leaning forward on my elbows, unable to relax or to cry. I sat like that until the coroner came, which seemed like years though it was less than an hour. He was only 57 so they had to do an autopsy.

Alcohol poisoning.

I was both unsurprised and completely outraged: HE HADN’T BEEN DRINKING MUCH. I wanted to yell.

He hadn’t been drinking, I pleaded with Ma.

But she pulled a few empty bottles of Jack out of his room that night. She said something must have triggered him.

I spent all my time trying not to think of what might have done that. Of what we’d been talking about the night before. Of how it might have been my fault. Trying not to wonder if he did it on purpose, drank all those bottles until his heart was overloaded and stopped.

That’s when I packed my Go Bag and started stomping around outside in twenty below weather, a kind of manic haze of grief keeping me moving.

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I bought a 1976 Chevy G30 conversion van for a couple grand. It was fitted out on the interior with tight sleeping quarters for three, if necessary; a sink, hot plate, and mini-fridge; and miraculously a very tiny shower and cassette toilet. On the exterior, it was painted hot pink and had been handily upgraded to 4WD.

We had some money from when Dad died and Ma put it away for me. I’d been saving money, too. Grandpap helped me start selling our photos almost as soon as he pulled the camera from behind his back, and let me keep the earnings. I don’t know how I was meant to spend that money, college, maybe, but Ma never pressed.

I started by driving as far northwest as Alaska would allow on the Dalton Highway, moving slow, stopping when I wanted to, for as long as it felt right, and eventually turned south, down the west coast, through California, and into Mexico meeting up with the Pan-American Highway to Central America. I shipped the van around the Darien Gap from Panama to Columbia and continued on, taking photos everywhere I stopped.

I wanted to catch the night sky from every angle, but I was confronted with the unfamiliar, and sights beyond the stars started catching my eye. I’d never seen a mountain butt up against a placid lake before Montana. The endless, untouched Alaskan highways and forested mountains; the icy, desolate Beaufort Sea.

The more I looked, the more contrasts I saw, too: the oil mines breaking up the landscape of wild and open Prudhoe Bay. In the cities: grand, ornate architecture sat next to poverty-ridden slums and shanties.

As it turned out, I had an eye for telling these stories through photos and I sent them off to the editors I had relationships with, who paid me well.

I came back north after nearly a year in South America and crisscrossed the states a few times before finally shipping the van over to South Korea from Los Angeles, starting in on Asia.

I saved Vietnam and Cambodia until there was nowhere else to go.

I learned as much as I could about the war from tour guides and books, but in the end, I didn’t take many photos while I was there. We Americans had imposed ourselves on these countries too much already.

I headed north to Russia, west through Europe, and then south again. The van quit on me in Morocco and I sold it for parts to a woman mechanic who owned her own shop (unheard of in that part of the world). I started a love affair with trains. I avoided places in direct conflict as best I could.

I wanted to tell those stories, too, but Ma worried, and I couldn't bear thinking about her getting another call.

I wrote and called home often. Ma met a woman named Sara. I saw it before they did, but they soon realized what they had was more than friendship.

They visited a few times in places I managed to slow down for a while: Costa Rica, Italy, Bali, the destination countries I used to recuperate appealed to them, but I avoided Minnesota as much as I could for the better part of a decade. The pine trees, the snow, the lakes. It was too familiar. Too full of him.

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I’m only home now because Ma quietly insisted. A last Christmas in the house. It’s getting to be too much for her and Sara, and they’re thinking of retiring to a small house in Mexico with just enough space for a garden. So we’re sorting through rooms and boxes. We find Grandpap’s old Canon, the one I learned on. I hardly remember packing it away.

And, in one of Grandpap’s boxes, I find some rolls of undeveloped film, years written on the metal canisters with Sharpie: 1967, 1972, 1985, etc. I clean up the darkroom and start processing them.

The first couple of rolls are from the war: White men in trenches. Marching. Skies full of helicopters. The base and barracks. But horrible ones too: hungry, sad-looking Vietnamese children. A child blindfolded, squatting, with a gun to their head. Bodies. Whole towns turned to rubble.

I bring Ma down to show her, the photos still hanging around the room, drying. We walk through them. Her stoic face wavering, while tears stream down mine. I cry as much for the horror of these photos as I do for my own decade’s long grief.

I know both why he never developed them and why he felt compelled to document the atrocities in the first place.

It feels necessary to finish developing the photos, despite what I might find, but the rest of the rolls are from across America. Small, derelict towns, run-down warehouses, shabby docks. The ruins of America, I think as I examine the photos. They're familiar to me. He must have taken these while he was driving truck. The portfolio as a whole seems to say, What the hell is any of it for?

I call around to the galleries I’ve had shows at. Maybe I can help Grandpap tell his stories. A sort of closure, for us both.

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In all that talking about the stars and the moon and Great Grandad, Grandpap never told me about Vietnam or Grandma Eloise becoming a hippie while he was away and leaving Ma, about the same age as me when Dad died, with his parents.

He never said he took up truck driving and drinking about the same time to escape the hurt of her not being there when he came home and the horrors he couldn’t stop replaying in his head.

There’s a photo of her, Eloise, the grandmother I never knew, too. Grandpap must have taken it just before he left.

Ma tells me she turned up once when Mom was in high school. She asked Ma to call her Eloise. Ma says she wasn’t keen to call her anything at all, but somehow when she was pregnant with me her anger evaporated and I was named Lu after her.

Turned out Eloise’d been just a few hours away at an art commune in Grand Marais. She wanted to marry again so needed a divorce. Grandpap took her to lunch and signed her papers, and after, he drank himself into a bottle of Jack Daniels at the bar.

The bartender called the house when Grandpap passed out, head resting on his forearms. Mom and Dad, just starting their relationship then, drove in and hoisted Grandpap up, each of them under one of his arms. They dragged him out.

She said she’d never seen him cry before or since.

Some drunks, they drink to oblivion every time, Grandpap typically only drank to numb out the pain, steady, and consistent, but mostly you could hardly tell he had been drinking except for every now and again.

No one tends to talk about that kind of drunk. That kind of drunk doesn’t wake up in alleyways or pass out in the middle of the day leaving a toddler to drown in a bathtub or stick its hand in a hot stove.

I suppose he thought he had it under control.

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I’ve taken the old Canon out here, to the spot on Long Lake where we heard that owl more than a decade ago. Bearing the cold with just fingerless mittens, red headlamp glowing, I find my composition.

The yellow December moon’s just coming over the trees across the lake as I find my angle and tighten the tripod. I haven't been here since then.

I release the shutter and get my first shot. Adjust my position a bit. It’s strange using a camera without a screen. There's nothing to examine between shots.

The moon’s risen, fully above the trees now and the lake, not yet iced over, is still and glassy. I shoot again. Then zoom in on the fat winter moon, almost too big to be real. Despite the number of moons I’ve filed away on my laptop, each one looks distinct. I increase my shutter speed and touch the release. I stand back to admire her while the two-second timer counts one, tw—

Something flies across the moon's face just above the trees. I’m so startled, I gasp, Oh!, to no one, and ask, Was that a bat? It was too big to be a bat and I watch the sky for a while to see if she flies back into view but she doesn’t. I shoot another photo.

After breakfast, I head to the darkroom again. I pull down and compile Grandpap’s photos and start processing last night’s film. It feels good to be in the low red light of the darkroom rather than in front of a computer screen. The previous week had been so fraught with emotion that I didn't notice the way my body adeptly adjusts to moving around the space. How good it feels to work with film and paper.

As the first photo of the moon begins to materialize, it’s clear it’s a bird and not a bat that managed to fly into the shot.

I clip it to the twine strung above my head and look closer. She’s blurry, but there’s no mistaking that coloring: the white and beige; the round dark eyes; the long, solemn nose. It’s a barn owl.

It can’t possibly be the same one we’d heard all those years ago. Barn owls tend to starve to death in the cold days of late winter as food becomes scarce, only living on average up to four years. There’s a reason they aren’t common in northern Minnesota.

But maybe, this is a granddaughter?

Suddenly I become clear on something that’s been bothering me since Ma asked me to come home: I cannot let this house go.

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Libby Walkup writes from the north woods of Minnesota. Subscribe to her newsletter Northwoods Recorder.