The Journey North

Wild Onions, 2000

During the 58 years of their generally happy marriage James always prepared for any possible contingency he could imagine. This trip was no exception. It was mid January and they would be driving north. A sudden winter storm with blinding snow could hit. The car could break down, and more than one man was found frozen to death in his car a day after he was expected at his final destination. He had taken the car to the dealer from whom he'd bought his cars ever since they'd moved to the Michigan city so many years ago. They'd come there straight out of graduate school. James had been hired to teach in the business college. There were only 35,000 miles on the car, and the mechanics had pronounced it mechanically sound. However, they did not know about the trip and would certainly have urged him not to make it. James and Ellen had taken winter trips before. He would put blankets and candles in the back seat, take two extra coats and make Ellen do the same, stow enough food and water for five days, and take both his CB and hand-held amateur radio along.

But now they were much older, and their health was not nearly so good. Ellen's memory, once capable of recalling with no hesitation the names of high school classmates at her fifty-year reunion, could no longer handle stove burners, pill schedules, and sometimes even James' name. The monthly outlay for diapers and Ensure was much more than they once spent on a year of movie tickets. And James had just learned that his recent back pain was not caused by shoveling snow but by the prostrate cancer that had, after several years of quiet, moved aggressively despite the medicines that had achieved a chemical castration. He would have told her, but knew that the news would register only as a worrisome background buzz in the cluttered entry hallway of her once able mind.

She would travel with him on this trip, without hesitation. It had been her habit to trust him in the past. She'd help to prepare for earlier journeys and had been just as adventuresome as he.

He was an odd mix: obsessive-compulsive, yet willing to take risks that others thought should not be taken. Their two children would never forget the month-long cross-country trip one summer when they were eight and ten years old. They told their teachers in school in September about the twelve different national parks they had visited. The part of the trip that became family legend was the burst radiator in the middle of the Death Valley (James had read that several birders had spotted a wood stork there and he wanted to see it himself), and the radio contact with a cowboy in an rusted-out Ford pickup truck who came within half an hour, before even a drip of the water, so carefully stored in the trunk, was drunk. That mix had led to wealth business professors in small college towns never attained. He had played the markets well. He attentiveness to detail combined with his willingness to take risks led him to buy early into what turned out to be the right technology stocks. Ellen and James had more than they and their children and their grandchildren could ever need. And James had the plans laid out for what to do with the money left over.

Even for Michigan it was bitterly cold the morning they left. Their daughter Anne and her husband Doug lived two hours north. James had called them two days earlier and told them they were coming. Anne knew better than to try to convince him not to come. Had Doug not been away, she'd have sent him down in their four-wheel drive. The car was warm when James, with considerable difficulty, half-carried his bundled­ up wife across the threshold of the door to the garage and gently set her in her seat. He had started the car 20 minutes earlier, opening the garage door eight inches to vent the exhaust. He backed out the driveway, past the snow-covered lilacs Ellen had planted thirty years ago, bushes that had done so well with her careful tending for twenty years, but were now dying. The car slid on a bit of ice and nearly hit the rusting pole holding up the now rarely-used basketball hoop James had erected when Ben was nine. The grandchildren seemed more interested in video games when they came to visit.

They had driven forty miles north when Ellen suddenly called out, "Jimmy, do... remember....the time....we went to....on the....the little...?" James was taken aback. Ellen rarely talked at all any more, and then never started a conversation. But in a second he realized she was talking about the little lake ten miles off the road, to the west. The sign pointing to the lake, blown clean by the wind, must have fired some rusty synapse in her brain.

How well James remembered. It was in the fall of their first year at Emmetson, over the long Thanksgiving weekend, that they'd gone to the little lake and rented out one of the small white-boarded cottages. Hardly anyone else was there. It was a mild November, warmed by an unseasonably south wind. They talked long into each night, thinking about the events that had brought them to this time, realizing that the college life was to their liking, that they now knew the direction their life together would take. An old couple who lived at the lake year round invited them over for a meal. They were embarrassed at the frank talk of the couple of their uncaring children, their explicitly- described medical problems, the woes of insufficient money, and their unrewarding careers. And James also fondly recalled that it was during that long weekend at the lake that Ben, their oldest, was conceived. They'd gone back year after year until the cottages became too dilapidated to be rented out.

"Let's....go....there", said Ellen. And so James carefully turned round on the snow packed road. Three small cottages still stood. James was certain the middle one was the very cottage they'd occupied that Thanksgiving so many years before. He drew up in front of it and turned the car so both could see. He reached and took her hands in his. She turned and smiled and said, "Oh...yes! That's...."

They found them there, late that afternoon. Her head was on his lap. He was bent over, sideways, atop her. The new snow that had blown in from the north, through the open windows, covered their bodies.