Good morning, my fellow travelers. Your trusty co-pilot has been under the weather and drowning in a sea of mucous misery. Today’s almost-daily dispatch comes to you from the couch—aka my sickbed for the past few days.
As a creative finding her groove, I have a few projects in the works. Some days, it is banging out blog posts with wit and wisdom, hoping you all find a sense of connection, hope, or inspiration here. Other days, it is working on Swimming in the Gray, a memoir-inspired retelling of my personal healing journey through my forties and into my fifties.
As part of that healing journey, I did a lot of ancestry work. In that excavation, I found the inspiration—and a calling—to weave a fictional companion story set in the high plains of North Dakota and Montana. Its working title is Walking the Highline. It is a story that explores generational trauma, the weight of family curses, and a bit of woo-woo magic to weave the threads together. It is gritty, it is raw, and it may be hard for some to read. But my soul refuses to let this story remain silent.
Without further ado, here is an excerpt from the work in progress, Walking the Highline.
The hum of the Ford Galaxie lulled the towheaded one-year-old into a peaceful slumber. Before Steffie, this beauty was his pride and joy. He still couldn’t believe his luck—a quick repo job down in Tijuana, and the heavy black sled was all his.
They had been on the road for hours, the baby girl finally falling into a deep sleep after a strong fit of frustration and boredom. Eight more hours to go. They were already two days into the drive; Eileen had convinced him to take their time, to treat this like a family vacation. Their first as a family of three.
Eileen had gifted him with a baby girl: Stephanie Lynn. She was perfect. All through the pregnancy, Eileen was certain she was having a boy, while Warren prayed to a God he hardly believed in to please give him a daughter. If he had any chance in hell at being a good dad, it was going to have to be with a girl. Warren didn’t know how to love a boy. All he knew was how to hate himself.
Being a boy, being male, automatically set you back. It meant you had thoughts, feelings, and emotions that could not be hidden from others. It made you dirty, evil, and destined for hell.
Warren didn’t have to wait for hell; puberty had been an absolute, living damnation. Most days were hard, but those years were the worst. His body betrayed him at the most inopportune times—aroused by the scent of Mrs. Johnson’s heavy perfume in church, or the sight of a woman’s bosom cinched up in a girdle, cleavage peeking through a tight cardigan, or a handkerchief tucked discreetly between voluptuous breasts. He did his best to avert his eyes and force his thoughts elsewhere, but a thirteen-year-old boy’s body betrayed him every single time. And his mother never missed a beat.
Warren cracked his knuckles, the sharp pop snapping the memory away, and repositioned his hands on the steering wheel. The radio crackled with static as a weak signal fought its way through the mountain passes. Stevie Wonder crooned through the dashboard speakers: “…I’m so glad that I know more than I knew then, gonna keep on tryin’ … til I reach my highest ground…”
The scenery grew more picturesque as the miles pulled them farther from Southern California, his mind endlessly replaying the phone call that had forced him to pack up the only thing he was proud of and put them in the car: “Your grandfather is dying. There is not much time left.”
Pops. He was the only man to believe in him, the only one to show an ounce of love and emotion. Oh, how Warren had loved going to Pops’ farm in North Dakota during the summers. There, he was safe, and he was free. Somehow everything inside him always simmered to a slow burn on the farm, quenching the raging inferno that normally seethed inside his chest.
But inside the car, on this brisk November day, he was a swirling cauldron of emotion, heading back to that unfortunate place he once called home. He glanced over. Eileen had dozed off, her head resting against the passenger door, feet curled up underneath her. She was a foot shorter than he was and could curl herself into the tiniest ball in the most obscure places. He envied that—the ability to be small, to be invisible. Maybe if he had been invisible, things would have been different. He had done his best to leave the demons behind in Montana, but he knew they had followed him anyway.
His mind drifted back to January of 1966, driving this exact same stretch of highway in reverse. His oldest brother, Thomas, had offered him an out, a chance to get it right. To start again. “Come down for the races,” Thomas had offered, “my treat.”
Warren had been barely twenty-one then, and the walls were closing in. He knew it was only a matter of time until it caught up—until she started talking, until they started talking. Thankfully, shame ran deep on both sides, the hunter and the prey, no one willing to bring the truth into the light.
Thomas was five years older than Warren and was the apple of his mom and dad’s eye. Warren was smack dab in the middle of five kids: two older brothers born back to back, and then two younger siblings that seemed like an afterthought. Thomas and Paul were revered; Warren was a blight on the family. Kenny and Susan were just ignored.
If they had anything in common at all, the McGowan brothers loved cars and speed. Outrunning the law on a Friday night across the Montana–North Dakota state line was a rite of passage handed down from one brother to the next. They didn’t just walk the Highline; they raced it. Pops, the original outlaw in the family, made sure his grandsons had cars that could run with the bitter winds of the plains. He taught them to mount their license plates on hinges, letting the air drafts pin the metal flat against the bumper so the police couldn’t read the numbers. It was one of many tricks of the trade the old man passed down.
Warren remembered the fierce, biting sting of the Southern California sun on his shoulders—sunburned from sitting in the grandstands at the Winternationals in Pomona, intoxicated by the smell of burning rubber and high-octane fuel. He had felt invincible then, speeding north to grab his few earthly possessions and say a final goodbye to his family with the windows rolled down, chasing the illusion that he had finally run fast enough to leave it all behind. The offer to move down to Southern California in the late sixties was the miracle he had been praying for—his big brother willing to give him one last chance. His brother had everything going for him. Always had, always will.
Lost deep in that memory of 1966, the hours and the miles faded until the sunny California sky turned a bruised, purple, hazy shade, and he had driven his blistering, sunburned skin straight into a blinding Montana blizzard. He cursed under his breath and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. The day before, he had been sitting in the bleachers under a perfect seventy-degree sunny sky, a cool can of Coors in his hand. If there had been any doubt, that had clinched it for him. He was moving.
Warren hated snow, hated Christmas, and blamed the winters for just about everything.
The long, claustrophobic months from October to April drove him mad. Literally. He was trapped in a home with a woman who liked to remind him of just how broken he was. A disgrace. A sinner. Never wanted, never loved. He wanted to remind her that he was just like her, but backtalk only resulted in a quick slap to the face and a verbal barrage of scripture—and if it didn’t end there, it quickly escalated to a threat to cast out his demons or castrate him with her sewing scissors.
Now, returning to the land of his origin story with his wife and his daughter—back to the people who failed to protect him, and the person who created the monster he had become—man, it seemed like a really, really bad idea. He tried; no one would ever know how hard he tried. But it was always there—tempting him, taunting him, reminding him of the sick, twisted, dirty boy that still lived inside.
Agnes McGowan made sure of that.