The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind Read Online Free PDF

U-Haul trailer that now flew along behind uslike a ponderous shadow, carrying everything our family possessed in its gloomy, malodorous insides. My mother, her bare feet propped just over the glove compartment, read Woman’s Day magazine from behind her sunglasses, a straw hat pulled down over her head, her thick hair braided down her spine. My father listened to a Pacific Coast League ball game—Portland vs. Spokane? Portland vs. Tacoma?—on the Bel Air’s fading radio, one index finger wrapped around the bottom of the steering wheel, the back of his shaved neck—from where I sat—sunburned and latticed with pale crevices. He wore his hair cropped short and gelled rigorously with Brylcreem, a Hawaiian print shirt, zoris, and his bathing suit, below which his slack thighs lay pale against the car upholstery. He was much given to rooting in his nose as he drove and, at crucial moments in the baseball game, turning up the radio volume to deafening levels. At these times Harold fell silent.
    “Twenty questions,” our father said, just before Astoria, because he felt we were bored and that he owed us something. “Let’s see which one of you can get it, all right?”
    “Male?” said Harold.
    “Yes.”
    “Before nineteen hundred?”
    “Yep.”
    “American?”
    “Right.”
    “A president?”
    “Right.”
    “Abraham Lincoln?”
    “No.”
    “George Washington?”
    “You got it.”
    Harold clapped his hands emphatically. “I did it in six,” he pointed out. “Did you hear that, mom? I did it in six.”
    “Very good,” said our mother.
    In such a manner we flew north together, in our box on wheels, dragging our possessions behind us. We all knew how momentous this journey was: when my grandfather died in heart surgery that spring my mother came into a modest inheritance, and with this my parents made the down payment on the Seattle house, for they desired, the two of them, a new life in the city, the life they had talked about for many years. In Seaside they’d grown weary of vacuuming sand from ravaged motel rooms while the wind from the Pacific blew seams into their faces and made them both old before their time. They’d wanted to be free of this wind and sand and of empty wine bottles on bedside tables and of living like visitors in the motel’s office-apartment while strangers came and went ceaselessly, leaving behind an eternal mess to be cleaned up so that others could come along and, finding it clean, wreak havoc on everything because they deigned to. They were tired and wanted to be where cleaner jobs were and where my mother’s family was; they took it for granted that moving to this new place meant all things unwanted could be left behind, and they persisted, for years to come, in believing that they could always move again should their lives begin to turn sour on them. We have all thought this, people have always thought it; but this fact did not prevent the idea from taking root in my parents’ hearts and nurturing them through all the harsh times.
    We crossed, in our Bel Air, the gray-green breadth of the Columbia. We passed through Megler, Naselle, Raymond, Artic, Melbourne, Montesano, Elma. And as the journey thickened and the towns became more foreign to us we allbecame less talkative—each with our private universe of sentiment to contemplate en route to a new home to live in. We watched the world rush past outside our windows and felt that it was increasingly alien, increasingly strange but beckoning.
    Now, if a move to a new place is an opportunity for change in whom we have thus far played at being, then all of us, traveling north together, must have noticed the expectant quiet that seemed to me to settle over the land as the Bel Air rolled up Highway 12, drawing us with it toward a new life in which—because we were only human, a human family—the passions that had thus far held us together might be forever rearranged under the sky of a distant city.
    It was the day before Neil