I don’t remember the last time I saw my father, much less the last words we spoke. I don’t remember what his note said, either. A muzzy picture of it surfaced in my college email one day, a loose .jpeg hanging freely. My grandmother had waited a couple of weeks after he died to send it to me. I think she hoped time would dilute its ruthlessness, but it made no difference to my poor broken-hearted brain.
I had heard he had been unwell. A month prior, he walked himself into a San Diego hospital and said he was thinking about killing himself, a declaration that earned him a 72 hour stay. As he paced the corridors of the hospital in his thin hospital gown, gripping the linoleum in his sticky hospital socks, he must have confirmed his fate. Three days later he left newly anointed with a nimbus of sorrow a shade darker than the one with which he’d arrived. He only lived another few weeks. I often wondered if that brief hospitalization was not a conscious attempt to save himself, but instead the rehearsal for a decision the talons of his darkening thoughts had already alighted upon.
His note left no clues. He didn’t write much, as was his wont. My memory has saved the shape of his crooked handwriting, but the letters flit and ebb as languageless runes to me now, inscrutable as a pile of sticks. Perhaps their illegibility was true to the note itself. Perhaps his quivering letters, sensing what they foretold, were blurrily captured in their escape. Either way, when I graduated from school the following spring, my email account was deactivated and his last words disappeared.
—
When I was still a boy, all mopheaded and toothy and small, my father and I would drive north from San Francisco to the Marin Headlands, a peninsula that cut us off from the city whose beauty we could no longer feel now that we lived in it. Fire trails took us through sagebrush valleys and up honeyed ridges, while a marine layer the color of teeth leaked into the bay below. Quickening before the July sun, its downy cowlicks unspooled over San Francisco’s busy striations and the skyline paled because of it. I often thought of a large gray sponge shrewdly blotting up all of the city’s pigments to wring them out in a place scant of color.
Beneath hillsides balding next to the sea, my father would string me along by his liver-spotted hand, mine smooth like apple skins. I’d grip the long bones of his fingers and draft behind in his wake, following the footsteps his big boots left in the waterlogged soil. I’d hop from one footprint to the next, my two tiny feet landing in each basin. If I lagged, his block shoulders would recede into the distance, occluded by a bruise-colored fog that muffled my yips as I called after him. I tried hard not to trespass on his silence. We spoke very little.
All through my childhood it seemed to me that my father went through his adult life with a head full of noise that gradually ate him alive. At home, he stayed away. I’d occasionally catch his eyes, wet and settled, but protective of a woefulness that would begin to dribble out if I looked too long. Stress honed him into a fine point. The drab business suits he wore to work acted as a kind of sheath to his sharpness, but left uncovered the knifepoint of his face, taut and lean and fearsome. I never really knew how to approach him without getting pricked. Instead, I watched from afar as he built up a fortress to hide his anguish, only later to become imprisoned in its ruins.
On mornings hemmed in by wind, we would stray off trail to explore the abandoned gun installations that crenelate the coast. Commissioned in the early 1900s, the War Department plowed artillery batteries into these hillsides to lob parcels of destruction at distant warships. Today, these battle stations still swell with a sense of their own importance, as if the cracks scaling their walls were not marks of erosion but scars suffered fighting their way back to life. Leaving my father’s side, I’d run into the batteries’ sooty bunkers and disappear into their catacombs. Once out of his care, a lack would begin to settle above my hips, as if my whole stomach clotted with worry. Just as soon as I darted off, I’d return white with fear to seek refuge behind the denim bulwarks of my father’s thighs.
The dark circles of his depression continued to close me off from him as I grew into a teenager. From a matured perspective, I began to glimpse their source. I think my father found himself marooned in a marriage he found inimical, but he refused to do anything about it. By the time he finally did, divorcing my mother when I left home for college, unhappiness had put deep roots in him. At 55, he must have felt as if his misspent past had foreclosed on his future. These are just guesses. Sometimes it seemed like I knew my father inasmuch as one could know a concept or a theory — someone you’d have to go through the steps of building up every time you thought of them.
if I had any premonitions of loss, I kept them to myself, fearful that speaking their words would somehow hasten their arrival; instead, I passed mutely over his decline for years until he died, a silence that has lodged an intractable sadness in me, like a tree that has grown around a stone.
—
When the sun slung low each October, clearing the sky save for a scudding cloud, my father and I would climb the prominence to Hawk Hill. Together we formed a small audience for the hundreds of raptors that descend on this vista from August to December. Red-tailed hawks and other predatory birds avoid flight over open water where thermal lifts are scarce. During this time of year, throngs filter into the Headlands to take advantage of strong onshore winds and the abundance of small game native to the peninsula.
Turkey vultures circled us as we sat lazing. Their fleshy heads bayed impatiently as the rings they made tightened above. Meanwhile dozens of hawks hovered motionlessly by our side, suspended in breezy updrafts as if they were pinned to the sky. I often wondered where these birds would roost at night, or if they did at all. Maybe their weightlessness lulled them to sleep, and the wind blew them miles down the coast in their slumber. I pictured the birds stirring, confused and defeated, to spend the next few hours working their way back to the Headlands, only to repeat the process the following day.
If visibility suffered and fog piped into the valleys below, my father and I would descend to stalk blacktail deer together as the coastal Miwok people did so long ago. Freeing ourselves from our boots to better mute our movements, we’d crawl side by side through damp chaparral. My father would signal, and we’d gently rise from the undergrowth; the two of us watching like sentinels in a sea of gray. With luck, deer would pause and return our stares for a beat before bounding off. Their eyes looked like pieces of polished obsidian, reflecting nothing in the absence of sunlight.
It occurred to me that my father might have sought my company only to assure his own survival. As he waded deeper into the pale headwaters of his misery, I unknowingly kept him tethered to the world. It’s an idea that has stalked me since he died: that he may have used my company in the Headlands to set a temporary bounty on his head, one that would only lift by safeguarding my passage home.
Once I tired, my father would swaddle me in his wooly arms and carry me back to the car. Coated in a thin mud that had hardened to our bodies like pottery, we’d both strip to our underwear before making the short drive back to the city. A noiseless fog courted the din of rain. My father blindly peeled an orange between his legs, steering by the skin of his knees. Sitting next to him in the front seat, my head barely cresting the glove box, I’d study his reflection framed in my window.
When I turned to look up at him, I’d see a wooden face flecked with ocher dirt, reach up with both my hands, and feel that same dirt scattered like a constellation across my own.
—
Many of the footpaths that work their way through the Headlands are abutted by walls of sediment, ribboned and vermillion, variegated amongst the sand and shrub. Geologists call this material radiolarian chert: A red clay from the seafloor formed from the mineral skeletons of ancient protozoa. The Headlands sit on a convergent plate boundary and came into being when one plate subducted under the other, raising all that had been interred in the depths of the Pacific and littering their remains across the fledgling peninsula.
Seeing these rouge outcrops now, with rows of stone long whorled into knots, I’m reminded that this place abides a deeper sense of geologic time. The same pebbles I raked my hands against as a child trap warmth from the same yellow sun. Inertia has preserved the landscape, and with it, saved my memories here. But they pursue me every time I return, my hopeless longing their hidden engine. In the Headlands, my father is more alive to me, more real, more scary, than he ever was.
Despite myself, I cannot stay away.
Every week I run up Tennessee Valley’s steepest grade, letting my lungs punch at my chest as I toil. Threads of saliva split from my lips; I clench down to the taste of copper. With a curtain of fog before me, it is an endless slope. I breathe through the slats in my teeth.
Beyond a certain point, physical pain removes the necessary conditions to its being experienced. Hurt ebbs away and I disappear into my thoughts. I think about my father, whose mental suffering knew no such limits. There was always more pain, brought forth like groundwater from an artesian well. Perhaps he thought his suicide would be a proven end, but in his cravenness he ignored the blight it would visit upon the ones he loved. That pain was not his to give.
After my father died, I became convinced that if I flayed myself in the Headlands for long enough, my torment would somehow match his own. Naively I believed that the register of pain was written in a common language, and that by subjecting myself to enough of it, I would come to understand his fate.
I add up the years, nearly 10 now, and I no longer think that way. There is no sense-making. Any compassion I once held for my father has been blackened by the heat of my anger. In acting on his cowardice he opened a wound in me I will never mend — so I widen it myself to spite him. That harm is mine to own, both poison and purification.
Once atop the rise, I’m doubled up breathless. I taste tears in my throat. I sound like a hurt dog. A kettle of vultures swarm in spirals above, lilting up and down with the breeze like burning sheets of paper. I count them one by one, trying to find some hidden meaning in their orbit. Luckless, I carry on, savoring the fraying of my legs.
