adolescence. But reading them now, I find they are full of insight into
our divorced family and the role that the natural world played in his
mental landscape.
In 1979, I was twelve and Dad was in the midst of a difficult
relationship with a girlfriend. We spent a couple of weeks paddling
the wilderness lakes around the Canada-Minnesota border. A picture
from that trip shows us sitting on a broad boulder by the shore,
sharing a huge loaf of bread. I am wearing my new Swiss Army knife
on a lanyard around my waist. My father, deep in his Grape Nuts
phase, is tan and lithe, bearded, long-haired and shirtless. “This year
more than ever finding extraordinary solace in these odysseys with
my daughter,” he wrote that year. “Early in the trip, my head was still
full of dilemmas to be resolved. I was less accessible, more quick to
anger. Yet as the events of the trip developed, my anxieties became
less severe and I started to feel some measure of balance. I felt a
peace such as I had not known for many months. What is it about me
and water?”
Dad grew up climbing trees in Richmond, Virginia, and tending
the family’s victory garden. Blessed with good health his whole life,
he was never long without walks or other adventures in nature. Now
this had changed. There are few places farther removed from natural
landscapes than a typical hospital room. Because I was researching
this book at the time of his accident, I knew enough to request a bed
near a window for his long stay in rehab.
I had, for example, come across Florence Nightingale’s famous
nursing textbook from 155 years ago: “It is the unqualified result of
all my experience with the sick, that second only to their need of fresh
air is their need of light,” she wrote. “It is a curious thing to observe
how almost all patients lie with their faces turned to the light, exactly
as plants always make their way towards the light.” I’d read Oliver
Sacks’s account of recovering from a serious leg injury after he’d
fallen down a cliff in Norway while being chased by a bull (not all