A PASSAGE OF GHOSTS

NOW A MOTION PICTUREstarring Robert Cicchini & Chase Maser

STEVEN FAULKNERSTEVEN FAULKNERlexographic press

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IN THEATERS MAY 2012

Steven Faulkner and his sixteen-year-old son Justin paddle their way on a 1,000 mile journey following the 17th century Mississippi River discovery route of the French exlorers Marquette and Joliet. Tired, hungry, lost, lonely, fogbound, canoe-wrecked, unable to make their way in the darkness, they embark on an unforgetable adventure of their own and discover more about their own relationship and themselves.

Faulkner, a poet with a sense of humor, o�ers an antidote to that winged demon called speed, a dangerous addiction that strikes Justin down on a later, swi�er trip that weighs heavily on the reader’s mind as the canoe journey unfolds.

“Terri�c, Faulkner is a marvelous writer”Alan Couture, ForeWord Magazine.

www.waterwalkthemovie.com

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$19.99

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Praise for Waterwalk

“Writer and poet Steven Faulkner had a brilliant idea to grow closer to his distant teen-age son. Take a nine-week, 1,000-mile canoe trip. And not just any canoe trip, but one that followed the route Father Jacques Marquette and explorer Louis Joliet took between St. Ignace, Michigan and St. Louis, Missouri in 1673.”

Ellen Creager, Detroit Free Press

“Gripping. WaterWalk is energized and made relevant in part by Faulkner’s descriptive literary prose.”

Geeta Sharma Jensen, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“His is the quintessential journey—a trip far outward, deep inward—to see what you’re made of. It turns out Steven Faulkner and his son are made of very strong stuff, and the vivid account Faulkner here provides makes for exciting reading.”

Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong and Eventide

“WaterWalk is a triple journey: a journey into the heart of this continent 300 years ago—as depicted in Marquette’s own journal, a modern exploration of the quiet waterways that weave their way through busy, rush-around America, and a voyage through the heart of a father-son relationship.”

The Topeka Capital Journal

“An adventure of heart and soul.”Larry Freeze, Kansas Country Living

“A poet, Faulkner keeps the book flowing like water, slipping easily between history, cul-tural critique, and riveting pictures of what the two adventurers saw on their odyssey.”

Annie Calovich, The Wichita Eagle

“Steven Faulkner skillfully enlists sun, moon, wind, water, sand and fire in bringing the reader alongside him and his son on their nine-week voyage. WaterWalk is in turns hu-morous, haunting, exhilarating, even devastating. There are encounters with ‘ghosts’ here to be savored long afterwards. It’s a lyrical odyssey I did not want to end.”

James Kushiner, executive editor, Touchstone Magazine

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WATERWALK A PASSAGE OF GHOSTS

STEVEN FAULKNER

Lexographic Press 1555 N Astor St, 15NE Chicago, Illinois 60610, US

© 2008, 2010, 2012 by Steven Faulkner. All Rights Reserved

Portions of this book have appeared in DoubleTake, Wisconsin Trails magazine, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, and The Dos Passos Review.

ISBN: 978-0-9847142-2-3

WaterWalk: The Movie © Michigan Blue Lake Production Group, 2012

Cover photographs: Roger Rapoport Cover design and production: James Sparling, Lexographic Text design and production: Lexographic, London Maps: David Faulkner

Printed in the United States of America Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro, 11pt/14pt

WaterWalkA PASSAGE OF GHOSTS

STEVEN FAULKNER

lexographic press

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For Joy—and all the years

… walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.

—Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins

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PART I:

Chaos

… ruin upon ruin, rout on rout, Confusion worse confounded . . .

—Paradise Lost

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After

Justin is alone. The black night is loud with wind and rain. He is rushing down Interstate 70 at 80 miles-an-hour in his little red convertible, wind tearing at his canvas top, heavy rains flooding his windshield. He eases off to 70. The highway before him is hardly visible, a dark running pool of rain-needled headlights. Sudden lightnings hammer the heavy clouds into shapes metallic, colors steel, bright brass, and arsenic grey. The approaching tail-lights of an eighteen-wheeler blur red as its tires slash spray onto his wind-shield. He maneuvers and pushes the little car past the trailer and truck, hurrying home. Another semi-truck appears directly ahead of the last one; all three vehicles are rushing up a hill in a chaos of driving rain, flung spray, and incessant lightning. Justin slips past the surging trucks, skims over the crest of the hill, and plunges down the other side on a thin slick of black run-ning water. The glare of the semis gradually diminishes behind him as he picks up speed. His tires rip through standing water—he’s sliding—hydro-planing—slipping—sideways—going—the boy pulls the wheel left to correct the slide—his turned tires hit pavement, and the little car whips around and slams head-on into the concrete partition that divides the highway. He is not wearing a seatbelt.

Night Life

I had lost touch with my son Justin. His sixteen years of growing from baby to young man in this supposedly quiet Midwestern city had been sixteen years of runaround mayhem in my life. He was a vague figure, an occasional apparition flitting in and out. And what was I to him? Busy beyond belief. Running newspapers after midnight, rushing off to college

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classes by day, racing on to evening meetings for another job, studying, teaching, writing research papers: a father phantom disappearing by day, slipping away by night, always evading him.

It’s two in the morning. My aging truck, weighed down to the axles with 1421 copies of the Topeka Capital Journal, sways around a corner, its sus-pension emitting almost human groans. I swerve from one newspaper rack to the next, hurrying from red box to red box like some huge me-chanical insect pollinating large metallic flowers.

Counting out sixteen papers, I shove open the truck door, walk to the paper rack, yank open the steel door, pull out yesterday’s worthless news and drop in today’s. Hurrying back to the truck, I glance about, wary of anyone approaching along the shadowed sidewalks.

A storm is moving in. I keep an eye on the frenetic lightning jump-ing and glaring from between the highrise office buildings of downtown Topeka, Kansas. Hot air, humid, motionlesss, smothers the streets and al-leys. I am sweating in a T-shirt. Thousands of tiny green bugs swirl around the street lamps, some darting toward my eyes and ears and mouth. They crawl in chaotic carpets up the sides of lighted storefronts, attracted al-ways to the lights that kill them. But few stores downtown are lighted anymore; businesses have fled to the garish suburban malls where traffic slows to a crawl and thousands of shoppers move along the brightly lit shops while these old buildings, some a century old, stand gaunt and va-cant along the deserted streets.

The prostitutes still find customers. Some in miniskirts, some in sweats, some in long overcoats in the summer heat; one on this street, a couple more two streets down, they pace the brick walks watching the coming cars. But they know my old truck. There’s no money here. I nod as I go by, and they look the other way.

Thunderheads are building in the northwest. A faint percussion of thunder reaches me as I pull into the Amoco station. The air waits, full of that oppressive heat that has made the asphalt, the brick, the concrete its own through the long summer day.

I think of my friend who left M.I.T. where he was working on a Ph.D and moved to a Kentucky farm with no electricity. He tells me he learns about who was elected president or if we’ve gone to war again about a

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week or two after the event. Word of mouth, he says, is a kind of filter that eliminates most of the trivia. He and his family live a quiet life, chop-ping their wood, baking their bread, collecting rainwater in a barrel for showers, plowing a couple acres with a horse and plow. He knocked on my door one day and said some land was available; we could move there. But I wanted to finish my long-delayed university degree. I let it go and kept on running papers seven nights a week, 365 days a year, no time off for good behavior.

Jumping out of my truck, a gust of wind snatches a paper from my hands and chases it like a wounded goose down the sidewalk. Thunder-squalls can be vicious. A few weeks ago I saw oak trees a foot-and-a-half in diameter snapped in two, crabapple trees ripped up like radishes, pow-er lines mangled by flying debris.

There’s Burt with his long, twisted walking staff. He waves from an alley as I drive by. He pushes a garbage-can-grocerycart-contraption he uses to collect aluminum cans. One night he found a teenager in a dump-ster shot through the head.

At the Kwik Shop old Kelly Joe is getting coffee. He lives in a nearby halfway house for the mentally impaired. He’s a congenial old man who has trouble with his consonants. When he’s drunk they disappear alto-gether. He looks around as I drop off 35 papers. “Orna ain,” he says.

“Better get back home before it breaks loose,” I say. “Na. O ine a ain.” “Take it easy, Kelly.” “Ee ya ayer, Eve.” In a highrise for the elderly and handicapped, I hurry down the con-

crete-block hallways, slapping down papers for paying customers. Old Helen, who is addicted to games of chance, meets me at three-thirty in the morning with her strange concoction of herbal tea. She used to grow the stuff, whatever it is, in her farm garden. Little pieces of green swim in a dark brown liquid. It tastes bad, but I sip at it to thank her for her kind-ness. She shows me the latest letter from the contest she’s sure she’s won.

“Read the fine print, Helen. They’re just trying to get you to buy stuff. You didn’t buy it did you?”

“It was just pencils,” she says. “You want some pencils?” “Don’t buy their stuff, Helen. They’re leading you on.”

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She shrugs. Her farm is gone. Her people are absent. She can’t sleep. I hand her the teacup and the newspaper, then hurry on.

Alone. The elevator hums up to the top floor of another government-subsidized highrise. In a ninth-floor apartment, old Jack Music is going mad. He’s convinced that “Old Greasy” is out to get him; she’s the wom-an down the hall who eats fried hamburger smeared with strawberry jam for breakfast every morning. Her leathery face is patchy and creased by years of smoking, the varicose veins on her lower legs bleed through gauze wrappings. Jack tries to point out the powdered chemicals Old Greasy is using to poison him. I run my finger along the floor and smell it; it’s nothing but dust. His apartment is empty: no bed, no chairs, just a few cushions scattered across the vinyl tiles. Some nights I hear him, alone in there, pouring out a stream of hideous invective against the bare walls.

Four am. I swerve into another gas station. One night I smelled gaso-line fumes here. Someone had just stepped from behind the building and emptied his pistol into an occupied car. He missed everyone, but a bullet punctured a gasoline hose.

Across the street, the high dome of the state capitol building stands serenely before the nervous flashes of the approaching storm. I swerve across the street, counting out fifteen papers, pull to the curb, and jump out. Thunder crashes simultaneously with the agitated lightning. The storm has lost all patience with this city. Great sheets of cold wind plunge down the highrise office buildings and rush up the streets and alleys scat-tering leaves and papers. The trees that grace the capitol grounds thrash this way and that as the mad winds riot. I run for the newsstand as the rains rush me from across the street.

Justin is ten years old. He lies on the bed beside me watching my face. It’s 10pm. Three hours before paper route time. I’m reading him a bedtime story about a boy and a raccoon named Rascal. The boy’s father is often away from home for days, even weeks. The boy finds a wild raccoon to keep him company… but I can’t keep my eyes open. I keep dozing off. Justin gives up on the story and falls asleep. My eyes jerk open and I look at his quiet face.

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On a dark summer night, for no apparent reason, a twelve-year-old boy fires a pistol at another newspaper carrier. The carrier jerks out his own pistol and empties eight shots at the twelve-year-old. They both miss.

One night a gang of young men throw a carrier against a picket fence and beat him with bats. He survives with crushing bruises on his back and puncture wounds in his chest from the pointed fence. He never finds out why.

Classes are over for the summer. Justin is twelve. He begs to go on the pa-per route with me. In spite of the risks, I take him along. All night long he bumps and bounces through the city streets with me, helping me count out papers for the next stop. We buy Tic Tacs and Cokes at the Kwik Shop to keep us both going.

At dawn his small hands follow me up a dark ladder in an enclosed stair well. I unlatch and push open the heavy, overhead door that opens onto the roof of a highrise. The paper route is finally over and I want to show him something. We climb onto the flat, gravel roof. The air is clear. A few wisps of cloud have caught gold from the coming sun. The city and its dark streets lie far beneath us, a maze of gabled roofs, a tangle of grey foliage, a glare of street lights. I point out the dome of the capitol build-ing silhouetted against the brightening east, the gothic spires of Topeka High School to the north. We turn and try to locate our own neighbor-hood to the west and spot the white dome of the Washburn University telescope. We walk across cinder blocks to another ladder and climb up to the topmost platform. We breathe in the cool, bright air; the sun just now flashes above the eastern horizon. A moment of lucid stillness.

Another nameless night. A man lies spraddled over a curb, his head in the street. I step out of the truck, glancing this way and that, stoop down, and feel for a pulse. His stubbly neck is still warm, but he is quite dead.

A heavy man falls across the threshold of his third-story apartment. His wife is hysterical; she has already dialed 911. She begs me to do some-thing. I press the flesh of his thick throat for a pulse. I can’t find it. I lay my

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newspapers down and try his wrist. I don’t know what to do. The medics are thumping up the stairway calling, “Code Blue!” Heart attack.

A prostitute ducks behind my truck and snarls, “That man’s horrible! Horrible! Get me out of here. Just get me out of here! A few blocks. Don’t let him find me.” I spot a man lunging along the sidewalk across the street. I open the truck door and quick as a cat she slips in. I drop her off a few blocks away.

Justin is fifteen years old. He walks in with a black eye and a bruised head. A hallway fracas in the high school. A boy started kicking his locker for no apparent reason. Justin told him to stop. He kicked it again. Justin shoved him and turned away. The guy blindsided him up the side of his head. Justin turned and caught the boy with his fist. Teachers pulled them apart. A teacher had Justin’s arms pinned to his sides when the boy jerked free and landed one in Justin’s eye.

A British reporter is on the radio in the predawn darkness. He character-izes the American Midwest as “the placid, dowdy, un excited heart” of the country. He is giving news of the Oklahoma City bombing.

It goes on like this, month after month, year by year. Justin brushes into the house after track practice. I say, “Hi. How’s it going?”

“Okay, Dad.” “See you Friday at the track meet.” “Okay, Dad.”

Not long ago I remembered a book I had read to his older brothers. Rum-maging around in closets, I found it: The Explorations of Pére Marquette. It’s a child’s version of history. I turned to the Foreword:

The boys and girls who read this story will be transported in imagination to the time when the Mississippi River flowed in mysterious grandeur through unexplored prairies and forests that stretched for countless miles on either side. They will camp where only unknown fish and game and Indians lived.

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But Justin was too old for a children’s book. I reached for Homer’s Odyssey. Maybe this. But when would we find time to read together? We hadn’t read together now for years. I picked up the Marquette book again and paged through the account of his epic exploration to discover the Mississippi. My mind was far away, full of pioneer adventures and warm, sunlit afternoons, of leisurely rivers winding slowly, of time to spare, time aplenty, free time, time unhurried …

Maybe we could read a book together again. Maybe we could find the track of those old discoverers Joliet and Marquette, find the vanishing wake of their birchbark canoes.

Before

So Justin and I bought a canoe. Canoes are quiet. John Graves, who knows about these things says, “Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited. Those for being unquiet seem to abound.” “Canoes,” he says, “are unobtrusive; they don’t storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence.”

Canoes are slow. But speed is a species of winged demon, promising quick excitement, less time in transit, more time with our families; but having paid great sums for the fiend’s wings, we find ourselves living far-ther from our places of work, farther from friends, farther from family—speeding every which way to make up the distances.

Justin and I spent two weeks of my off hours shingling a house to buy that canoe. We needed one made not of fiberglass, canvas, or alumi-num, but a canoe made of the new tough stuff that can take the abuse of slamming into rocks, scraping over tree trunks, and grinding onto gravel beaches. Shingling was hot work. The day we cut and hammered down the last line of ridge caps on that infernal roof, temperatures rose into the high nineties. We were hot-footing it over sun-roasted shingles in our socks to avoid scarring the asphalt shingles. We sweated. We panted. Sit-ting sideways on a hip, shingle heat seared through my jeans making me shift from side to side in order to pound in that last sweaty handful of nails. We earned that canoe.

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In the basement of the University of Kansas library, I found a nineteenth-century translation of Marquette’s journal of his journey with Joliet. Scrounging minutes here and there in my busy schedule, I read it and plotted our course. I ordered rain jackets and pants. Lightweight cooking pans. Backpacks. I gathered the goods: hatchet, fold-up saw, tarp, books, resolve. I ordered a spray skirt that would snap down over the canoe to protect us from swamping in rough water and called in Justin to help me drill and rivet thirty-six snaps along both lengths of the canoe. I installed an oak thwart to keep our backpacks in place, and rigged up loops along the gunwales to tie stuff down. Preparations took time and a lot of work, and Justin was content to let me take care of them. I kept suggesting he read Cliff Jacobson’s book on camping and canoeing, but he couldn’t be bothered; it sounded too much like homework.

We christened our new canoe the Natty Bumpo, after James Fenimore Cooper’s hero in The Last of the Mohicans (I had read the book; Justin had watched the movie). Cooper added a “p” to his hero’s name, making it Natty Bumppo. I suppose that made it appear on the page, if not to the ear, more Indian and less like a clumsy Yankee. I thought clumsy was about right for us. Make it Bumpo. And nattily dressed he was when we were through, with a yellow spray skirt I splotched a mottled green and black for camouflage. Most boats are female, so goes the tradition. And it’s true Natty sported a skirt. But in these days of the gender wars when half the hurricanes have undergone a sex change, I decided boats can be male. Besides, it wouldn’t be right to spend that much time away from my wife in the arms of another woman. Call the skirt a kilt.

Occasionally, I would stop and ask Justin if he really wanted to do this. He would shrug and say, “I guess so.” Not a lot of enthusiasm.

I knew this was a fool’s odyssey: a middle-aged, sedentary, city-living, flabby-muscled man launching a nine-week canoe trip with his now six-teen-year-old son. I found it impossible to imagine weeks and weeks of canoeing, of staking out a tent wherever we could find a patch of sand or a few feet of grass, harder still to comprehend that passing of linger-ing, leisurely time that would add slow mile to slow mile until decades of miles passed into centuries and centuries into a millennium. How would we stand up to a two-month journey: three hundred miles along Lake Michigan’s stormy northern shore, some three hundred miles upcurrent

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and down, crossing the entire state of Wisconsin on two rivers, and fi-nally, over four hundred miles down the wide Mississippi? This was the route Joliet and Marquette took 300 years before, the maiden voyage of Europeans into the heart of what is now America’s Midwest.

Justin and I had virtually no experience canoeing. How would we sur-vive the Great Lakes? I didn’t know, but I was determined to take a long walk, call it a waterwalk. We would walk away from the sound of the shutting of doors with the comfortable click of the lock that tells us we have food in the refrigerator, beds to ease our bones, television to unravel our minds, isolation from our neighbors, and insulation from storms. For a good stretch of time, I hoped to lose the dependable dependencies.

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PART II:

A Newer World

Come, my friends. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset …

—“Ulysses,” Alfred Lord Tennyson

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