At some point during this phase, I was crying pointlessly on the kitchen floor. As was common practice during bouts of floor-crying, I was staring straight ahead at nothing in particular and feeling sort of weird about myself. Then, through the film of tears and nothingness, I spotted a tiny, shriveled piece of corn under the refrigerator.
I don’t claim to know why this happened, but when I saw the piece of corn, something snapped inside me, and then that thing twisted through a few permutations of logic that I don’t understand, and produced the most confusing bout of uncontrollable, debilitating laughter that I have ever experienced.
I had absolutely no idea what was going on.
My brain had apparently been storing every unfelt scrap of happiness from the last nineteen months, and it had impulsively decided to unleash all of it at once in what would appear to be an act of vengeance.
That piece of corn is the funniest thing I have ever seen, and I cannot explain to anyone why it’s funny. I don’t even know why. If someone ever asks me “What was the exact moment where things started to feel slightly less shitty?” instead of telling a nice, heartwarming story about the support of the people who loved and believed in me, I’m going to have to tell them about the piece of corn. And then I’m going to have to try to explain that no, really, it was funny. Because, see, the way the corn was sitting on the floor . . . it was so alone . . . and it was just sitting there! And no matter how I explain it, I’ll get the same confused look. So maybe I’ll try to show them the piece of corn—to see if they get it. They won’t. Things will get even weirder.
Anyway, I wanted to end this on a hopeful, positive note, but seeing as how my sense of hope and positivity is still shrouded in a thick layer of feeling like hope and positivity are bullshit, I’ll just say this: Nobody can guarantee that it’s going to be okay, but—and I don’t know if this will be comforting to anyone else—the possibility exists that there’s a piece of corn on a floor somewhere that will make you just as confused about why you are laughing as you have ever been about why you are depressed. And even if everything still seems like hopeless bullshit, maybe it’s just pointless bullshit or weird bullshit or possibly not even bullshit.
I don’t know.
But when you’re concerned that the miserable, boring wasteland in front of you might stretch all the way into forever, not knowing feels strangely hope-like.
One morning, shortly after my family relocated to the mountains of northern Idaho, my sister and I woke up to find our mother lurking impatiently in our bedroom doorway. She was dressed like a woodsman.
Apparently, sometime during the night, she had awakened to the urgent realization that she lived near an area of wilderness, and, coincidentally, she had learned a few wilderness-related things from a short stint in the Girl Scouts, therefore she needed to take her children into the wilderness so that she could teach them the ways of the forest.
It was a noble goal.
We set out shortly after sunrise on a path that twisted down a hill and eventually led to a fence, beyond which lay thousands of acres of wilderness. Our dog—a fat, disobedient Labrador mix named Murphy—trotted along next to us.
Once we crossed the fence, we had to cut our own trail through the underbrush, ducking under branches and stepping over fallen logs. Our mom tried to teach us things while we ran around like maniacs, kicking trees, throwing sticks at birds, and uprooting random plants simply because we were children and they were plants.
By late afternoon, we had worn ourselves out.
And Murphy, who had spent all day dragging huge logs around for no reason, was looking a little weary as well.
Our mother attempted to lead us back the way we came, but unfortunately, her natural sense of direction was no match for the sheer amount of directions there are, and she became disoriented.
She tried to be confident and follow her instincts, but after an hour of trudging through unfamiliar, waist-high plants, she accepted that she had no idea where she was going. She was lost in the forest with two young children and she was completely terrified.
She didn’t want to alarm us, so she tried to play it off like it was her choice to still be in the woods—like she was having so much fun that she couldn’t stand the idea of going home yet. But, you know, if she wanted to go home, she totally could.
When my sister asked where we were, our mother whirled around with a grin plastered across her face. “We’re in this little swampy area! Isn’t it fun?!” she said.
We weren’t able to muster the same amount of enthusiasm about the little swampy area.
She had to think fast if she wanted to maintain the illusion that we were still hanging out in the forest on purpose.
We didn’t want to find pine cones. We wanted to go home. But we didn’t really have a choice. Our leader wanted us to collect pine cones, so we obeyed, hoping that we could placate her as quickly as possible and move on.
We had severely underestimated how difficult the task was going to be.
We’d gather a bunch of pine cones, then trot over to our mother and ask her if we had found enough to be able to go home. “No. But maybe there are more on the other side of that hill,” she’d say. So we’d march over the hill to look for more. When we were on the other side of the hill, she’d say, “See where Murphy is on the far side of that meadow? I bet there are bigger pine cones over there. Let’s go find out!” Then she wanted browner pine cones. Then heavier pine cones.
Several hours later, we had come no closer to meeting our mother’s ludicrous standards. We were beginning to lose hope.
She was going to have to change her strategy.
We had spent hours combing the forest for the biggest, brownest, heaviest, cleanest pine cones it could offer, hoping that maybe, just maybe, if we found exactly the right ones, our mother would let us go home. We had bled for them. And now she was telling us that we had to abandon them.
We were confused and more than a little demoralized, but we dutifully piled our pine cones near some bushes while our mom started playing “who can yell ‘help’ the loudest and the most” by herself.
It was a pretty anticlimactic game and we lost interest quickly.
We didn’t understand why she had suddenly become so intensely interested in playing these stupid games. Did she not realize it was getting dark?
“Please, Mom. Please, please, please let us go home. Please,” we pleaded. She just looked at us and said, “We haven’t even played ‘walk over that hill and see what’s on the other side’ yet.”
We tried to reason with her. “Mom, aren’t you hungry? And what about Dad? Don’t you miss Dad?”
Still, she refused to go home.
Our mother was clearly insane, so, as the eldest child, it fell upon me to step up and take charge of the situation. But without knowing how to find my way home, my options were pretty limited.
I silently assessed our predicament before deciding to implement the only real plan I could come up with. It was a risky plan—a plan that could easily backfire. But it was my only option.
I was going to have to scare my mother out of the forest.
Normally, I wouldn’t have been able to think of anything frightening enough to breach her grown-up resistance to scary kid stories. But a few nights earlier, she had watched The Texas Chainsaw Massacre while she thought I was asleep.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t asleep. I was hiding behind the couch.
And I had imprinted everything I’d seen that night.
I imagine it would be pretty terrifying to be wandering through the forest at night when, out of nowhere, your eight-year-old child begins describing the plot from the horror film you watched the other night, which, as far as you know, she hadn’t seen. But my mother maintained her composure very well—until a twig snapped, at which point she whirled around shrieking, “WE HAVE A DOG!” As if Murphy’s presence were enough to deter a homicidal psychopath with a chainsaw.
It was too much. All the helplessness a
nd frustration that she had been trying so hard to hide from us came rushing to the surface.
She couldn’t keep up the illusion forever. At some point we were going to figure out that the last seven hours of our adventure had not been on purpose. And then we were going to panic as we realized that—contrary to our prior assumptions—we did not have the option of going home.
She pulled herself together and broke the news as gently as possible.
It must have been difficult for her to watch our innocent, hopeful little faces go blank in confusion, and then slowly contort in horror as our sense of security shattered.
And it must have been especially horrible when my sister panicked and started scream-crying uncontrollably.
Sensing that there was something amiss, Murphy picked up the largest stick she could find and ran loops around the meadow.
Our mother stared at Murphy in silence for a long time. Finally, she spoke.
“Maybe Murphy knows the way.” She reasoned that, because Murphy was a dog, she would have an innate homing instinct.
She spoke to Murphy in a slow, deliberate voice. “Murphy . . . home? Murphy go home? Home? Home, Murphy. Hoooome.”
We waited for Murphy to seize the heroic opportunity that was upon her.
But Murphy wasn’t like the dogs you see in movies like Homeward Bound. Her chief concern seemed to be treating sticks as violently as possible.
However, she was our only hope.
Murphy’s actions over the next few hours didn’t seem particularly purposeful. But at some point during one of her stick-thrashing sprees, she took off into the woods—presumably to see what it would feel like to run into a lot of objects while holding a small tree trunk in her mouth—and her path of travel happened to intersect with an old logging road. We followed the logging road to a clearing, and on a hill in the distance we could see a house with its lights on.
The house belonged to an elderly couple who were quite alarmed when our mother banged on their front door so late at night, but kindly offered to let her use their phone to call our dad.
And finally, we got to go home.
We never did go back for the pine cones.
Packing all of your belongings into a U-Haul and then transporting them across several states is nearly as stressful and futile as trying to run away from lava in swim fins.
I know this because Duncan and I moved from Montana to Oregon several years ago. But as harrowing as the move was for us, it was nothing compared to the confusion and insecurity our two dogs had to endure.
When we started packing, the helper dog knew immediately that something was going on. I could tell that she knew because she becomes extremely melodramatic when faced with even a trivial amount of uncertainty. She started following me everywhere, pausing every so often to flop to the ground in an exaggeratedly morose fashion—because maybe that would make me realize how selfish I was being by continuing to pack despite her obvious emotional discomfort.
When the soul-penetrating pathos she was beaming at me failed to prevent me from continuing to put things in boxes, the helper dog became increasingly alarmed. Over the ensuing few days, she slowly descended into psychological chaos. The simple dog remained unfazed.
Unfortunately for the helper dog, it took us nearly a week to get everything packed up. By the time we were ready to begin the first part of our two-day journey to Oregon, she seemed almost entirely convinced that she was going to die at any moment. She spent the entire car ride drooling and shaking uncontrollably.
But the simple dog seemed to enjoy the trip.
Even though she threw up seven times.
She actually seemed to like throwing up. To the simple dog, throwing up was like some magical power that she never knew she possessed—the ability to create infinite food. I was less excited about the discovery because it turned my dog into a horrible, vomit-making perpetual-motion machine. Whenever I heard her retch in the backseat, I had to pull over as quickly as possible to prevent her from reloading her stomach and starting the whole cycle over again.
But as far as the simple dog was concerned, it was the best, most exciting day of her life.
It wasn’t until we stopped for the night that the simple dog became aware that there was any reason for her to feel anxious. But at around two o’clock in the morning, the simple dog finally realized that something was different and maybe she should be alarmed.
This particular dog is not anywhere near the gifted spectrum when it comes to solving problems. In fact, she has only one discernible method of problem solving and it isn’t even really a method.
But making high-pitched noises won’t solve your problem if your problem is a complete inability to cope with change. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the simple dog did not understand this concept and she went right ahead and made an interminable amount of noise that was just invasive enough to make sleeping impossible.
After an hour of failed attempts at comforting the simple dog, her constant, high-pitched emergency-distress-signal became a huge problem.
I tried to communicate my displeasure to the simple dog, but communicating with the simple dog usually goes like this:
She was going to make that sound forever if she felt it was necessary. We tried everything from spooning her to locking her in the bathroom, but none of it was even the slightest bit effective.
The simple dog made the noise all through the night and was still going strong the next morning. When we were loading the dogs into the car, the constant, high-pitched sound emanating from the simple dog finally broke the helper dog. The helper dog wailed in anguish, which alarmed the simple dog. In her surprise, the simple dog let out a yelp, which further upset the helper dog. And so it continued in a wretched positive-feedback loop of completely unnecessary noise.
When we finally arrived at our new house, the dogs had calmed down considerably. However, it had snowed the night before and there was still snow on our front lawn, and that was enough to catapult both dogs back into hysteria.
The simple dog had either never experienced snow or she’d forgotten that she knew what it was, because when we let her out of the car, she walked around normally for about seven seconds, then she noticed the snow and her feeble little mind short-circuited.
At first, the simple dog was excited about the snow. She started prancing around the yard like she was the star of a one-dog parade—her recent personal crisis overshadowed by a haze of enthusiasm.
The prancing turned to leaping and the leaping turned to running chaotically in stupid little circles. Then she just stopped and stared at the ground. There was a visible shift in her demeanor as she realized that she didn’t understand snow and it was everywhere and she should probably be scared of it.
She started making the noise again.
Not surprisingly, the helper dog interpreted the snow as a sign of her imminent demise. But she was so exhausted from worrying about all of the other signs of her demise that she just gave up and accepted her death. She peered up at us, half-buried in the snow. Her eyes were filled with pain and helplessness, as if she thought we had summoned the snow for the sole purpose of making her sad.
We decided that it would probably be best to bring the dogs inside.
As a condition for allowing us to have dogs in our rental house, our landlady made us promise that we wouldn’t let the dogs scratch the wood floors. We didn’t anticipate it being a problem because it hadn’t been in the past, but as soon as our dogs set foot in the house, they morphed into perfectly engineered floor-destroying machines. They started sprinting as fast as they could for absolutely no reason, skittering around in circles to avoid running into the walls.
We finally corralled them in the bedroom and shut the door to give ourselves a little time to regroup and come up with a plan. Until we could get some rugs or convince the dogs that it was unnecessary to sprint around chaotically, we would need to find some way to prevent them from scratching the floors. What we ended up doing was going to th
e pet store and buying two sets of sled-dog booties. It was the only way.
It is easy to imagine that a dog who has recently experienced a dramatic upheaval of its formerly safe and predictable life might not react well to suddenly having strange objects attached to all four of its feet. This was most definitely the case with the booties.
The helper dog panicked and started trying to rip the booties off with her teeth.
I scolded her and she reacted as if I’d ruined her entire life.
But at least her immobilizing self-pity kept her from chewing the booties off.
The simple dog just stood there and looked at me in a way that would suggest she didn’t realize her legs still worked.
They had to wear the booties for two days. Those two days were filled with the most concentrated display of overemotional suffering I have ever witnessed. The simple dog spent most of her time standing in the middle of the room looking bewildered and hurt, and the helper dog refused to walk, instead opting to flop her way around the house like a dying fish.