Some of my friends have tattoos to remind them of significant chapters in their life stories. I have scars.
I am not talking about the kind of scars we all pick up through accident, injury or misfortune. I am talking about the four I laid down myself in neat, straight, parallel lines, first three then one. The set that look like a wildcat raked my forearm with razor sharp claws.
In previous essays, I’ve alluded to these scars and what they stand for. The closing essay of this very strange year seems like a good time to tell the rest of the story.
As people who read “Switching Sides” may remember, twenty-nine years ago I was deeply questioning my life choices. I had just finished a two-year tour of hell where I worked (Mr. Wizard, I don’t want to be an engineer anymore). Even after that environment had finally calmed down, things weren’t working out quite as I’d hoped. Most of my friends had picked up and moved to Seattle without warning. None were much interested in helping me find a job out there so I might join them. I needed to figure out what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go.
So, I decided to embark on a vision quest.
The week of Thanksgiving that year, I scheduled vacation so I could head into the mountains of North Carolina. When I was a teenager, I had begun a personal tradition of going camping the first weekend it got cold. Cold in Florida meant lows in the 40s. But that year, I really wanted to go somewhere more remote. I’d been to the North Carolina mountains several times by then, first on a family vacation when I was under ten, then for two weeks at a Boy Scout camp when I was a young teen, and again on a hiking and camping weekend with friends five or six years later.
I love the mountains, whether the Carolinas, Virginia, Vermont, or the Olympic National Forest. Something about the esthetic of wood, water and stone resonates with my soul. Perhaps my Abenaki heritage shining through. For me, they are a perfect place to retreat and reflect.
From my North Carolina travel atlas, I picked out a camping area in a national forest with an intriguing name: Hanging Dog. It was right outside a town named Murphy in the far southwest corner of the state. Karen and I had done a driving tour through that area and adjoining Tennessee the year before. So, I packed up my camping gear in the Jeep and headed north. I planned to stay up there for several days, hoping to get back before Thanksgiving Day. Having never before undertaken a vision quest and having no training, I had no idea how long it might take.
My plan was simple. The first part of most vision quests involves a fast. The drive to Hanging Dog would take twelve or so hours. I figured if I ate a decent breakfast on my way out of town that my time on the road would be a good jumpstart on that portion of the ritual. I brought rations up with me, knowing that driving back while still fasting after possibly several days would be an insanely bad idea.
When I got there that night, the campground was almost abandoned. I think there was one other person there. I chose a campsite as far away from him as I could get. Something I didn’t know until I was unloading the Jeep was that the park had designated, bordered areas filled with chipped gravel where you were required to setup your tent. Because it was dark when I arrived, I didn’t have time to gather pine needles to insulate and cushion my sleeping area. Which made for a very cold and somewhat uncomfortable night. As I remember, the temperatures dropped into the lower teens. The daytime highs were just above freezing. Normally not a problem. I own decent equipment and have more than a little experience.
But funny thing: when you don’t eat, your body doesn’t have fuel to generate heat. Which meant when I woke up the first morning, I couldn’t feel my feet. Very literally, everything below my ankles was numb, as if encased in ice. It took several minutes stomping and walking around in boots before they warmed enough to recover sensation. Even keeping a fire and wearing wool socks inside my sleeping bag the next night didn’t make much difference.
None of that mattered. Cold went with hungry as part of the ordeal.
I spent most of my days hiking around the area, exploring the shore of a lake that had been flooded as a part of a TVA dam project. Mostly, I just poked within a mile or so of my campsite, understanding it might not be the best time to get lost out in the wilderness. At some point I stumbled across graveyard with headstones that predated the Civil War, which I was pretty sure had been moved up from the valley floor when the lake was flooded. This place felt old with human habitation although the mountains in this area were still sparsely populated.
I found I had a lot more time on my hands than normal. It might surprise some of you how much time camping is spent in food preparation, between tending a fire, cooking and cleaning up. Usually two hot meals a day, at least in winter, breakfast and dinner. Without that chore, I suddenly had a fair bit of unoccupied time to think and meditate alone. Which was pretty much the point of the exercise.
With nothing else to distract you, you really begin to understand what hunger feels like. That dull ache becomes a sharp sensation when you know food is stashed a few feet away in your vehicle. By the second day, that taunting becomes torture. Except by then, you have a hard time focusing on it. Or really much of anything else.
But at its heart, the quest is about sacrifice, hoping it will be rewarded with a vision. Even with the cold and hunger, I knew hadn’t offered enough. I knew I needed something to hone my focus away from that privation. While I wasn’t familiar with Abenaki traditions specifically, with many native people’s that meant an offering of blood.
I hadn’t really thought about that part too much but I remembered the Sun Dance of many Plains peoples, which both the Canadian and US governments had outlawed in the nineteenth century. Some stories told of warriors who hung buffalo skulls from rawhide strips laced beneath the skin of their chest before they danced, sometimes for several days. I wasn’t quite ready for that level of commitment. Besides, I didn’t have a ready supply of rawhide or skulls on hand. Possibly poor planning on my part.
And yet, the more I meditated, the more it came clear to me that I needed to lay down a similar, if minor, sacrifice to demonstrate my resolve. So, on the third day I took out my razor-sharp belt knife and carved three parallel cuts high on my left forearm. I ensured the cuts were deep enough to transcend all the layers skin but not so deep as to expose muscle or tendon. Even with a sharp knife, that required effort and determination. When I was finished, I let them bleed a bit to help clean the wounds. Then I wrapped them in a cotton handkerchief as a bandage and tied it tightly.
And I waited.
I thought a lot about my current dissatisfaction and whether it was just ennui. I thought about the incidents in my background and how those jigsaw lines had helped craft the puzzle of who I was. I thought about the choices I’d made that had led me there, and whether I had truly made them for myself or for someone else. I thought about where I wanted to be and where my talents might take me. I thought about what I valued in this life and the things that brought me joy. I thought about the sacrifices that might be necessary to attain the life I’d envisioned.
Eventually the cold and hunger and throbbing ache in my arm did what I’d asked of them. I won’t go into details, but that night I got what I had asked for, though perhaps not as dramatically as I’d expected. It was more of a strong feeling of a path forward than an outright vision. But I knew it was all that would be forthcoming. When I finally broke my fast the next morning in preparation to drive home, I had a plan and a vague timeline. The plan that eventually led me to where I am today.
Why three cuts? At the time I didn’t know. It felt like the right number. As I thought about them on the drive back, I thought they might symbolize something different. It wasn’t until I was home and fully fed that I recognized what they truly represented.
When I was maybe seventeen, my father shared a story with me that I had never heard before. He was annoyed with me for something about my mother, likely for repeating something she’d said or for defending her in some way. Neither of my parents was above using my sister or me as pawns or weapons to settle scores over their longstanding grievances.
At any rate, sitting at the table in the breakfast nook of my father’s condo, he proceeded to tell me how on the eve of my kindergarten graduation, my mother had beaten me so badly that my head swelled up. He didn’t say what spawned this, only that when he had got home from work afterwards my mother insisted that we couldn’t go to the graduation ceremony because everyone would see what she had done. As he told the tale, he said to her, “You’re goddamned right they’ll see, Sally. Because we’re going.” And apparently, we did.
I don’t remember the beating. I’ve been told I likely blocked it out, which may have been a blessing, although it does leave a disconcerting hole in my developmental history. I do have a memory of something that may have prompted it, me accidentally breaking my father’s favorite liquor bottle in our front hall closet. My mother forced me to call him at work to tell him, which at the time simply wasn’t done. I was incomprehensible from terror on the phone. I didn’t fear his reaction; I feared my mother’s rage. I can’t say with any certainty that this was the incident that prompted his story. But I do have a vague recollection of that kindergarten graduation ceremony, of tottering down the aisle as ecstatic at being there as only a little kid can be.
That gave his story at least some credibility with me. But as I said in "Choices” earlier this year, I am an applied scientist at heart. From hard won experience, I look for evidence to confirm or refute what I’ve been told. That comes from growing up in an unstable, sometimes Machiavellian environment. Trust nothing you can’t verify. Everyone has an agenda.
The thing is, I never caught my father in an outright lie. My mother plenty of times. Her memory seemed completely malleable to her desire. But my father, no.
A year or two before this story, he had told me about my mother’s suicide attempt when I was still a toddler, where she slit her wrists during an argument sitting in the driveway of our house. He said this was just a cry for attention (exactly how he would have seen it). He said that because she was a nurse, she knew exactly how to open her veins if she had been serious. I was pretty dubious when he told me that story. But when I surreptitiously looked at my mother’s wrists at some point later, I spied very thin white scars transecting each. Not deep. When I asked her about them, she refused to answer.
By then, I had also heard and confirmed that when my parents were getting divorced, my father’s two sisters were ready to stand up in court to ensure he got custody. Or if not him, one of them. In 1974, that meant proving my mother was unfit as a parent. My aunts were fully willing to go to bat to get my sister and I removed from her care one way or another. My father was not. And without his support, nothing could happen. So nothing did.
From other things my father said to me much later, he and my mother never should have been married. His heart was never in the marriage or the family it spawned. He thought it was all a societal expectation. He fully believed he had been forced into it (he wasn’t). He certainly made clear to me before he died that I was not the son he wanted, the one he could drink and carouse with. “If you’d been a better kid, maybe I would have done more to help you.”
But that quote came more than a decade after this story, which is a story of its own.
At the point he shared the story of the beating with me, all I had was his account, supported by all the other incidents I remembered (and I have written about in poetry and a host of essays, including some from this year and last). While I can’t fully attest to exactly what happened in his story, the things I do remember resonate with it as likely truth.
Like my sleeping on an unset collarbone that I’d broken while hill-siliding one afternoon when I was eight or nine until my father ordered her to take me to a doctor the next morning. Or her throwing everything my sister and I owned into the middle of the floors of our rooms at least twice around the same time.
My mother was volatile and sometimes violent.
Taken as a whole, I knew there was something desperately wrong in my family. Things I was still sorting out. Certainly not as wrong as in some other people’s but wrong enough.
When I’d headed to the mountains that year, the aftermath of all those events was slowly filtering into place in my now fully-developed adult brain. Sometime after I’d returned with my soon to be scars, I realized I’d laid down three to represent the members of my immediate family: the one who abused me, the one who tried to kill me, and the one who left me to survive the other two. A few years later I added a fourth for Karen’s brother, the one who raped the one I love.
It was only after that mark of Bast was complete that I fully understood exactly why I’d crafted it. I needed a physical scar, something I could see and point to, to show that I’d been through something meaningful and survived. Something all four individuals denied or deflected each in different ways. All four of whom remain unrepentant, two until their deaths. I have no real hope for an epiphany from the other two. Nor am I holding my breath.
Yeah, kind of messed up but there it is. Psych 101 in all its glory.
And yet, seeing those scars every day has helped me, if only to remember, if only not to be gaslighted by what others deny that I recall. Generally, I am the only one who sees them other than my wife. Fortunately, I always wore long sleeves at work so they rarely drew much attention while they were still bold and angry red. I think only one friend ever asked me about them. Maybe a handful of medical professionals when I’ve had to roll up a sleeve. When asked, I usually say I that got them while camping when I was younger, which is absolutely true. I don’t often feel the need to explain. They weren’t meant for anyone but me.
From the aftermath of my childhood experiences, I’ve learned that sometimes you have to lay wounds bare to allow them to fully heal. Sometimes that’s the only real way to acknowledge something and leave it behind, which at the time I created them was something I had just started to do. To get where I was going, I had to find a way to acknowledge what had happened, how it impacted me, and leave the worst of it behind. To live for the future, not the past. At least as much as any of us ever can.
I am sure no therapist would recommend my particular method but the principle is sound.
I’ve thought about those scars a lot during the past four years. I see millions of people in the same position I was in, having survived something extraordinary and sometimes existential that was beyond their control, something often times denied. Millions will bear scars from this failed experiment of an Administration, some full tangible, others invisible. Hundreds if not thousands of children punitively caged away from their parents (who ICE and DHS now claim they cannot find). The relatives of tens of thousands who needless died in a mismanaged pandemic. Tens of thousands more federal employees whose service and oaths to this country and its Constitution have been denigrated. Tens of thousands whose marriages are now threatened with being invalidated. And countless others who continue to suffer from the rabid racism, sexism and homophobia that is not only back in the open but is increasingly back in vogue.
A new Administration cannot cure these ills. An election is only palliative. The hard work comes after, should it not be obstructed and stillborn as before. To recover, I believe we require hard reflection, truth and reconciliation. I fear that is unlikely to happen in the current climate.
Should we choose not to expose the wounds fully and allow them to heal, in my experience we will continue down a very dangerous path. One we have seen and continue to see of undermining the foundations and institutions critical to the survival of our democracy, a free press, free and fair elections, the rule of law, a peaceful transition of power, regard for science expertise. Instead, we’ve heard hypocrisy, orchestrated lies, propaganda, calls to violence, calls to suspend the Constitution, and a cabinet meeting where declaring martial law to rerun the election was discussed. With silence that echoes complicity.
This is not how a healthy democracy survives.
The night of the election, I woke up in the early hours of the morning with my heart pounding so savagely that I was afraid I would hear it stop. I had a disorienting feeling like I had done something wrong, just like I had when I was a kid, even though I knew I hadn’t, now as then. Just like four years earlier. Only this time, over the next four days, things turned around as all the legal votes were finally counted and all the claims of massive fraud debunked.
Around that time, once again in the middle of the night, I accessed that vision quest from so long ago and felt something I haven’t felt in a very long time. As our resident coyotes raised their voices just across the ditch from our sliding glass door, those scars flared back to life and I once again tapped into their power. The power that saw me write this essay faster than any other this year. The power of knowing I had survived. Again.
That calmed me in a way I cannot fully put in words. Once again, I found myself looking forward not back.
When I started this year’s essays, it was with the expressed purpose of reflecting on the past four years. Not to dwell on them, rather to influence people, if only by providing some insight that might make them think. Because I saw a stark choice that stood before us.
Five years ago, I swore to myself I would never again use my memories as the basis for essays. At the time, I thought they had become too bound up in other people’s entertainment which somehow felt wrong and unhelpful. So, I stopped writing them.
I changed my mind this year because the situation I saw unfolding was too important for me to let my own discomfort stand in the way of doing what I thought was right, even if it meant lacing my flesh with new, unseen scars. I was too disconcerted by what I’d seen unfold for four full years. I valued what I knew needed change too much.
Despite my desire, I doubt I accomplished much other than revealing a few more difficult experiences in my life. Most of the essays were painful to write because they were painful to relive. Although I have gotten a handful of emphatic thank yous, there have been more awkward silences, some defensive commentary, a few stunningly insensitive statements, and a little mocking of what I see and believe. I knew all that was likely walking in, but am still somewhat disappointed. I can only hope my words have helped someone reading them along the way, whether to consider a new perspective or just to understand on some deeper level that they were not alone.
Either way, it’s time to lay aside these burdens as we prepare to set fire to the candles to mark the Winter Solstice. With their light we defy this longest night along with all the tragedy and suffering the year has wrought. Knowing in our hearts that our days will only get brighter from here as we resolutely march toward spring.
© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III
