The Shadow Catcher

Physically beautiful.

As much as my father yearned toward landscape, looked at it with yearning in his eyes, he never put himself into it, engaged with it physically, until the very end — which made the circumstances of his death all that more shocking. You wouldn’t have thought he had the strength, the sheer ability to do what he finally did. But when I think of Curtis on the land, Curtis in the landscape, I can believe that he could tackle anything, that he had, from the very early years, a natural physical agility, a natural balance in the world.

Like the stereotypical male Indian.

Like Huck Finn.

I can imagine him saying to himself, as Huck does, “Well I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and civilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

Curtis lit out in a big way — so did my father — though it’s impossible to know for sure if they were running from or running to.

That’s the potency of lighting out, of journeying: the from and to are both in play.

Until you stop. Until you stop, the journey is the only rationale.

Huck never says where or what he’s bound for, he just needs to go. Make tracks. Get outta Dodge. Hit the highway. Avoid, elude, escape Aunt Sally. We all have our own Aunt Sally — call her loveless marriage. Call her thankless job. Call her parenthood. Domestic mess. Daily reminder of debt and obligation.

Tedium.

Routine.

The great promise here is that if we load the TV in the truck and move just three states over we can start anew.

Tie the cash cow to the Conestoga and set out across the Plains and Rockies.

Sell mama’s stuff and drive all night to Vegas.

Try to count the miles some Americans rack up on a single family tree, I dare you. Not every family lights out as spectacularly as Curtis’s — or my own Greek grandparents all the way from the Aegean to Virginia — but most families have at least one member who takes off. Throws in the towel and swears take that, Aunt Sal. Laissez-faire and laissez-passer constitute the air we breathe. It’s in the Constitution, the pursuit of. Hell, it’s written. It’s our right. Hell yes, drive all night to Vegas. Hell yes, join the circus. And in the nineteenth century they were giving land away, out here. The railroads were. Homesteading Acts arose in every western state connected by a railroad to the East, so in 1887 Johnson Curtis bit the apple, got the travel bug again and convinced himself that all he needed to restore his health was the purer climate of a Pacific kind. He boarded a Northern Pacific train in Minneapolis with Edward and headed out for Portland, Oregon, then north to Puget Sound, where he purchased land for $3.00 an acre on which he had been told palm trees swayed all the way from Mt. Rainier to the Pacific Ocean. Edward was then nineteen years old and had been serving as his father’s shadow body, his ailing father’s body double, since he was old enough to wield an axe, chop wood, say grace and talk to people. He had never had a childhood in the modern sense — rural children in the nineteenth century worked as soon as they could walk — so by the time he came west by train in the summer of that year, Edward had his own array of resident Aunt Sallys. Filial obligation. Family duty. His own self-imposed yardstick measure of his manhood. He was a man, already, at nineteen; but if any place can redefine a person’s sense of self it’s our American West. If Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had had our land equivalent, she would have put far fewer boys to sea.