Category Archives: Last things

103

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Today, August 2, is the 103rd anniversary of my father’s birth.

A lot of things have happened since he died back in 2000. I finished the first house Leah and I lived in. He told me the night he died that he was afraid wouldn’t be able to help me work on it. He never got to see it finished.

For years after he died, when I completed some little bit of work on the house, I had the urge to show it to him.

He met Leah before he died, but he had been dead five years before we got married.

My mother died 13 years after he died. I don’t think my father could have handled having her die before him.

We built another house. He never got to walk out onto our front porch and see the view. I wasn’t able to show him the trim I put around the arch on our front living room window.

He never got to see the various RV’s we have had over the years. He and my mother loved traveling with their trailers and in their motorhomes

I couldn’t show him my bright, red truck.

He never got to meet Zeke the dog. Or Sam the dog. Or Zoe the dog. I come from a long line of dog lovers. He would have loved them all.

He never got a chance to walk down Fouche Gap Road with the dogs. He could have named all the birds and all the plants.

He never got to see the foxes that lived around our old house. Or the owl that flew into our garage in our new house.

He didn’t get to see his grandson get married.

Every once in a while I hear a song that I think he would have liked.

My brother died, 18 years after him. That and my mother’s death are two of the few things I’m glad he missed.

I understand why people want to believe in an afterlife, where you can meet your loved ones again. There are a lot of things I would like to talk to my father about.

Death visits the mountain

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Before I start, I want to say that nothing bad happened to Leah and me.

Friday afternoon we went down to the grocery store and stopped to get some takeout. As we drove back towards our house on Huffaker Road, an ambulance came up behind us and passed. A minute later a second emergency vehicle, this time a fire department rescue truck, also passed us. They disappeared before we reached the turnoff to go up the mountain, and we assumed they had kept going towards the next road that leads into Texas Valley.

A neighbor called as we drove up the mountain and asked if we knew what was going on. She heard the sirens coming up, but nothing came by her house. We drove up to her house, which is around the curve beyond us, and were talking when another neighbor came by going down. A few minutes later he came back and told us that Ron, the man who works with John, the grading guy, had turned over his four-wheeler down at John’s house and had been killed.

It was quite a shock to Leah and me. Leah had not seen much of Ron, but I had. He and John worked on our property while we were building, and I’ve seen and talked to him quite a few times over the years. He was as nice a guy as you could want to meet.

The real connection with Ron was that he was the one who actually brought Sam, our dog, to John’s house when John acquired him for his step son around six years ago. At that time Sam was afraid of everyone except John’s step son, John’s wife, and Ron. Sam always came to Ron when Ron was around. He would never get anywhere near me unless Ron was there. Even after Sam came to live with us, he always seemed to recognize Ron’s car, even after Ron bought a new one.

Later in the evening, the same thought occurred to Leah and me: Ron had gotten up Friday morning just like every other Friday, and had gone to work expecting it to be like every other work day. He probably planned where he and his wife would go for dinner. It was a completely normal day. The only difference was that this was the day he died.

We, too, get up every morning, expecting the day to be the same as ever, and never, ever the day we die. But it might be.

Two years

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My brother Henry died two years ago today, April 6. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just before Thanksgiving. He died seven months and four days after his 70th birthday.

His death still doesn’t seem quite real.

Two years should be long enough to internalize something like the death of a brother, but I don’t seem to be any closer to that than immediately after he died. It’s as if there are two realities, one where he is dead, and another where he is still alive.

The strangest thing for me to contemplate is that in a little over a month I’ll be the same age he was. If I survive until Christmas of this year, I will overtake him and he will no longer be older than me.

An unfortunate hunch

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Our new dog Zoe has still not shown up, and something happened today that makes me think she never will.

I was driving around looking for her when I saw a woman outside her house near her car. As soon as I stopped, she started towards her front door. I spoke up and told her I live up on the mountain and was looking for a lost dog. She said they had not seen any dogs around there, and wanted to leave it at that. I tried to show her a photo on my phone, but she said no, just tell me what the dog looks like. So I did. She said she would keep an eye out and let us know. I wondered, how? She doesn’t have our phone number.

At the time I thought her behavior was odd, but maybe just fear of a stranger. The woman’s behavior and demeanor made me uncomfortable. To me, it was clear that something was going on with her. A few hours later a thought suddenly hit me and left me with a rare feeling of certainty: someone at that house shot Zoe.

I know that’s a big jump; there was nothing in our exchange that could pass for even the weakest of evidence. But that leap to certainty has happened to me probably five times in my entire life, and I have learned to trust it.

It explains a lot. There is no reason Zoe would not come home unless something prevented it. Sam came home, but only a day after they disappeared. He knows his way around, so there was a reason he didn’t come home that night. Seeing someone shoot Zoe would explain it in a number of ways. If someone fired a gun near him, I know he would run away as quickly as he could, which would explain why he wasn’t shot. But he wouldn’t forget or desert Zoe, at least not right away.

Someone on out local Facebook group recently posted about someone shooting a little dog in the head with a .22. I don’t necessarily think the woman (or more likely her husband) shot that dog, too, but it just shows that we have people like that. It’s not rare in the rural South for people to shoot strays. Not common, but certainly not unheard of.

Also, the woman has to have recognized me. I recognized her car because I have seen it many times while walking the dogs, and I always wave at the people who pass me. That means she has seen me and Zoe over the two months we have had her. So she knew the dog I was looking for.

The house is less than a half a mile from our turn-around point, so it was not too far for the dogs to have wandered.

I had planned to write a post about my search for Zoe, and to compare it to trying to solve a 500-piece crossword puzzle when you only have only five pieces. Now, in my mind, the entire puzzle has fallen into place.

I told Leah what I thought. She thought we should do something. However, I don’t have any real evidence to back up what I believe happened. Writing it out makes it clear to me how skimpy and meaningless it all seems on the surface.

A lot the works of the mind are hidden. Thoughts and memories swirl around beneath our consciousness. Sometimes we don’t know why we think what we think. In this case, the things I have mentioned plus everything else in this sad affair simmered in my subconscious. My subconscious has been working on this. It finally reached a conclusion and pushed it up to my conscious mind.

I don’t expect anyone to believe that the woman or her husband shot Zoe. The police would laugh at me if I told them my “evidence”. It probably seems a little crazy for me to have reached my conclusion, because I can’t articulate everything that went into it. Some of it is buried in my subconscious, and it would take a while to dig it out. But I don’t feel the need. Whatever it is that has convinced me, I trust it.

Once I reached that conclusion, I felt entirely differently about Zoe’s disappearance. The desperate urge to look for her simply evaporated. The worry about what happened to her, what’s happening to her right now, what will she do on Saturday night when the strong storms hit, all of that worry turned to sadness.

I had some color lost-dog posters printed today, but the only reason I’m going to put them up around the mountain is for Leah’s sake. I think Zoe is dead, and there is nothing I can do about it.

I hope I am wrong. I hope I open the door into the garage Saturday morning and find her looking up at me.

Old river

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The New River rises in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Boone, NC, flows within the crests of the Appalachians through Virginia and then into West Virginia, where it passes through the New River Gorge. It is thought to be a very old river, maybe only as old as three millions years, maybe as old as 320 million years. Some people think it is the second oldest river in the world, but some think perhaps it is not even the oldest in North America. My brother Henry subscribed to the  very-old school of thought.

Henry wanted his ashes scattered in the New River because he wanted to be as close to the creation as possible. That has not been done yet. I’m not certain that his wife will ever do it. It’s a long drive from Chattanooga. We have not had any communication with her since the summer after Henry died, so we don’t know what her plans might be.

But for me, it was time to do something. So I scooped up some ashes from our stove and put them into a small cardboard box. Then, on Wednesday, I started out for the New River Gorge Bridge.

I got there too late in the evening to do anything, so I spent the night in a hotel not far from the bridge. Thursday morning I drove to the visitors’ center on the north side of the gorge to get a look at the bridge and the river, far below. Pedestrians are not permitted on the bridge except for one special day every year, and this was not the day.

A panorama, looking both up and down the river

I viewed the bridge from the overlook, and then drove the narrow, winding road down deep into the gorge. At the bottom of the gorge there is an old bridge that was once the only way people wanting to go from one side of the gorge to the other could go.

I crossed the wood-floored bridge and parked on the other side of the river. Then I walked out onto the bridge to take a look. The new bridge is so high above the river that it’s hard to see the scale. But Henry was not interested in the bridge, only the river.

The old bridge at the bottom of the gorge

I helped a couple of women get some photos of themselves with the bridge in the background, and then waited for them and one other tourist to leave. Then I opened the box of ashes and scattered them.

There was a steady breeze from the east. It took the ashes away. They billowed out in a thin cloud that almost sparkled. I had wondered whether I would have any sense of Henry, despite the purely symbolic nature of the act. But I did not. I thought to take a photo of the sparkling ashes, but by the time I got my camera out the cloud of ash had dissipated and disappeared.

Then I thought, that was like Henry. The ashes were there in a cloud, and then they were not. And Henry was here, with us, and then he was not. That was the closest I felt to him.

One day Henry’s wife may decide to take Henry’s ashes and scatter them into the river, and maybe she won’t. Maybe she already has. If she hasn’t, maybe she will ask us to come with her. And maybe not. However that happens, I think I have done my duty to Henry and his memory.