The cop pulls me over at 1 a.m., just after I leave Norfolk. In a car designed to roar along at 130 miles per hour, I'm doing 50 - in a 65 zone. My right turn signal's been gedinking away for no obvious reason. I must seem like a drunk trying to look inconspicuous.
The dog is barking six inches from my ear. She's a big dog with a big mouth in a small car. The cop flashes his light in my face. He has to shout so I can hear him. "Everything all right here?"
Everything all right? Well, let's see. The World Trade Center's a week-old pile of smoking rubble, the Pentagon has a big black hole in its side, I just put my husband on a ship full of Marines bound for the other side of the world, and my freaked-out alternator's been acting up for the
Kristin Henderson is a 39-year-old freelance writer who divides her time between Washington, D.C., and Swansboro, N.C., near the Marine Corps' Camp Lejeune. Her husband, who asked that his name be withheld, is a Navy chaplain serving with the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit. They've been married 16 years.
last four hours. But driving slow got me to Norfolk, by God, where I've just managed to see my husband one last time before he deployed.
"Yes, sir," I say, "other than my alternator, everything's all right."
One week earlier, we all watched that jet explode into the south tower, explode into the south tower, explode into the south tower. Instinctive response: Close your arms around the ones you love and don't let go. I had to ignore that instinct. Me and thousands of others, we had to open our arms and let the ones we love go. I'm not complaining. He chose this life freely, and I freely chose him. But before I let him go, in a dark parking lot out of sight of the looming gray amphibious assault ship that would carry him away, I sat next to him on the curb and listened to his voice. I don't remember what we talked about. Nothing important. Then we stood up and he hugged me goodbye. I'm a little taller than he is, but inside the circle of his arms I felt small and safe, and in that moment, everything was all right.
I'm a member of the Religious Society of Friends. I'm married to a man who's a member of the United States armed forces. I'm Quaker. He's not.
I'm an environmentalist who drives a car that gets 15 miles to the gallon. Going downhill. With a tail wind.
I've always wanted a Corvette. Three years ago when my husband and I finally faced the fact that we couldn't have children, I bought one. A Corvette, that is. A 1978 midnight-blue coupe, white leather disco interior, big bad rumbling double-barreled mufflers. Life is short; seize the day.
I've always wanted to drive across the country and back. The day my husband ships out, the dog and I hit the road in the 'Vette. Life is short, I'm thinking, my mind replaying the jet exploding into the south tower; seize . . . something, anything, on the other side of the world, and smash the hell out of it. Thinking this - recalling, especially, tiny fragile human figures standing at broken windows a hundred floors up, someone's mother, someone's son, all peering down and surely hoping against hope, not knowing there was no hope - recalling this, I know I will not be satisfied until I see something over there destroyed.
I horrify myself. I hit the gas and don't look back.
Some nights we camp. Some nights we stay with friends or family. Some nights we stay in pet-friendly motels with names like the Pioneer (TV in every room!) and the Tam O'Shanter (Queen-size luxury!). That's where the woman at the front desk looks at my driver's license and interrupts her spiel about the ice machine to sigh, "Every time I see one of these I think of all those poor people . . ." I have no trouble following her. Sept. 11 is the subtext of every conversation, no matter how ordinary, and my license is from Washington, D.C.
Anytime I get within arm's reach of a phone jack, I check my e-mail. He can e-mail me from the ship.
Hey babe,
Don't forget to send me the jock straps I forgot whenever you return home. Also, I mentioned that you were traveling about in the early part of deployment. Chain of command is asking that you provide the battalion's volunteer coordinator with your locations. My suggestion is that you call her and give her your cell phone number. In the event something happens she can then contact you to ask where you are and tell you to stay put.
This is because if something tragic happens to him, the military has a policy of delivering that kind of news only in person. I picture myself answering the phone on some long empty highway that crosses the prairie, pulling over and waiting there, the wind blowing, till a distant speck grows into a nondescript government vehicle that slowly slowly grows larger, and closer, and finally stops.
Of course, what do I have to worry about? He's a chaplain, a noncombatant. Chaplains carry no weapons. There are others with a lot more reason to worry - the wives of the men who lead companies into battle, the mothers of the boys who carry the guns. Besides, what good does it do to imagine the worst? Much more productive to stick with the facts, and the fact is, they could well spend the next six months just sitting on the ship. This becomes my silent mantra.
We are in an ocean now. Nothing in sight except other ships every so often. First few days were calm. Now we have been rolling enough that it wakes me up sometimes at night.
The dog and I move steadily in the opposite direction from him. We rumble through the candy-colored forests of a northern autumn, then start across the prairie states.
Driving leaves the dog plenty of time to zone out. Driving leaves me plenty of time to think. I think about that ship he's on, engines thrumming through the waves. I think about the leaders I'm not sure I trust to do the right thing and the boys who might die for nothing if those leaders do the wrong thing; if, for example, all they do is fight a war, then walk away without fixing the problems that caused it in the first place, so that we just have to go back someday and do it all over again.
This is what I'm thinking about - brooding about - in Iowa, after the sun sets, while a gravel road rolls out of the dark under the headlights, flat and straight and white. In the rearview mirror, dust billows red in the taillights. In the black fields on either side, tractors harvest soybeans with their floodlights on, industrious little islands of light inching through the night. Watching them is like watching a candle. Watching them, I live in this moment of the road's white noise and no other. I'm not where I was and I'm not where I'm going. I'm not brooding on the past, I'm not worrying about the future. I'm just here, as Zen as the dog. When I hit a bump, it's like waking from a flying dream.
Everyone speculates as to what we will do and where we will go, but no one knows for sure. It wears me out trying to control rumors. There are always those needy personalities who want to be at the center of attention, and they do that through their dramatic overreaction to any little snippet of news. The next thing you know, the rumors say we are about to go off to do something that is actually nearly impossible for us to accomplish right now. I would like to stuff a dirty sock in some people's mouths and tie them up in a dark closet. God forgive me.
At midnight in a campground in the Badlands, it's about 32 degrees - a two-dog night, but all I have is the one I'm with. I can't sleep for thinking. The dog and I lie on a blanket on the ground outside the tent and look up at a fairy-tale highway of stars. The dog's ears prick up, then over the next rise I hear them. Coyotes. They yelp and stutter and laugh. Slowly they fade away. The dog sighs and drops off to sleep. I'm still awake with my thoughts.
Women tell me they'd be afraid to do what I'm doing. But I have a big dog looking out for me, and although she's really just a chicken with fur, she barks like she wants your blood. Driving alone, that's not what gives me the willies.
The dog and I roll on west. We pass the Marlboro man herding cattle along the shoulder of the interstate. At dusk in the Bighorn Mountains, climbing up through uninhabited forest, we hit snow. We aren't supposed to hit snow. But driving in snow, that doesn't give me the willies, either.
The road disappears beneath the drifts. I'm about to hunker down in the car with my dog furnace and my sleeping bag when I see something through the swirling white: two small neon signs. "OPEN" and "Miller Lite."
It's a rip-snortin' miracle - it's a hunting lodge.
The next morning, a ponytailed young guy serves me breakfast. The TV over the bar chatters with news of troops' ships churning toward the Arabian Sea. The guy points at the TV. "I think bin Laden's the wrong guy. You watch. We're going to wind up in Iraq and Libya and Somalia and all those kind of places, going after who really did it. And then who the hell knows where it will end."
When he says that, I find myself repeating my silent mantra: He could spend the next six months just sitting on the ship, just sitting on the ship, just sitting on the ship‚. . .
A few days later, as we roar into California's Altamonte Pass, my foot comes off the accelerator. My mouth drops open. On both sides of the freeway, as far as I can see, bone-white wind turbines stud the hills like hundreds of mystics in a trance. I pull over, roll down the windows, kill the engine. Beneath the wind, I hear the humming. I sit and listen while the dog sniffs the air.
Since that breakfast conversation in the hunting lodge, a cousin has forwarded an e-mail to me, pacifists rhapsodizing about what an amazing message it would send to the world if America were to respond to Sept. 11 with gifts of food and clothing instead of bombs. I had rolled my eyes - in an ideal world maybe. I realize now: I'm a Quaker, but not a very good one. I think of those doomed people at the windows and I don't have a problem with the judicious use of force. But it's that business of putting your life, or the life of someone you love, at the disposal of leaders who may throw that life away while not solving anything, and there's nothing you can do about it. That's what scares me. Really scares me.
I guess that's why I'm on this trip. My hand on the wheel, my feet on the pedals, deciding where I want to go as I go - it gives me the illusion that I control my life.
An hour later we reach the Pacific.
Really have nothing to say. Just want to enjoy the illusion of some kind of contact with you.
The separations must have been a lot harder back in the days before e-mail. I get a taste of that when he leaves the ship for 10 days of military exercises in a Middle Eastern desert. So now I listen incessantly to the news channels for any word of his battalion. I hear exactly nothing. This is good news, I guess. Through the e-mail silence, the 'Vette floats south along the cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway. Fog rushes up the cliffs and curves over the highway like a breaking wave, so that we shoot through a pipeline of clear air.
More and more often now, time recedes into the road's white noise. I leave brooding behind. I live in the moment.
At my uncle's place in Santa Cruz, I watch CNN with his housemates. One of those fast-talking, high-pressure, 60-second spots bursts onto the screen, the kind of ad that used to hawk the incredible Ginsu knife set that never needed sharpening. Only now they're selling flags. Plastic flags. Flags that let you show your colors. Just hook the base over the car window, roll it up (It's that easy!) and drive down the street with your very own Old Glory snapping smartly above your car. Act now and you'll receive a God Bless America flag absolutely free. But wait! There's more! You get peel-off flag stickers, too! Plus a flag lapel pin! Call toll-free and order today!
My libertarian Republican uncle's not flying a flag. He has always marched to his own drummer.
As American jets start dropping bombs on Afghanistan, his younger housemates, all in their twenties and thirties, discuss the pros and cons of fighting terrorists in caves. I watch the fuzzy images of things blowing up on the other side of the world. I feel no satisfaction. Somewhere along the way, that burning need to see something destroyed over there must have flickered and gone out.
I ask my uncle, "So what do you think of all this?" I ask him from out of the blue, like the desk clerk at the Tam O'Shanter. And just like me, he has no trouble following. "I think bombing's a bad idea," he says, "but I don't have any better ones."
I get an e-mail from my D.C. neighbors back home. At an upcoming party, they plan to take their anger out on an Osama bin Laden pinata. I feel a flash of unease. It reminds me of images of overseas mobs burning our presidents in effigy. Shouldn't we strive to be better than that?
Back on the road, when I see a shiny new flag on a $50,000 SUV, I think: hypocritical beneficiary of our country's riches who couldn't be bothered to fly one before. When I pass a shiny new flag over a beat-up trailer park in Colorado: unsophisticated people caught up in unthinking mass emotionalism.
Then it hits me: Isn't it always dangerous to presume to know why someone else does something? Before he went ashore, my husband sent me an e-mail about a "letter" received on the ship: a crayon drawing from a little girl with 70 cents enclosed, addressed to any Marine or sailor. Maybe people are flying the flag for the same reason - maybe they're just trying to help in the only way they know how.
I'm not sure why I can't bring myself to fly the flag. Maybe it's because I distrust that simplistic emotion, patriotism. It's too easily misused. I grew up hearing from my German grandparents how patriotic the Nazis were, and they didn't mean it as a compliment. From my Dad I heard how German American kids beat up pacifist Quaker kids like him to prove what good, patriotic Americans they were. Maybe that's why I can't bring myself to fly the flag. But I have to admit it: I want to.
I buy a red-white-and-blue bandanna for the dog and tie it around her neck.
Since leaving home, my taste in reading material has shifted from heavy historical treatises on war to light historical romances. By the time I reach Los Angeles, after a little more than a month on the road, I'm coasting along the surface of this escapist brain candy at a rate of about four a week.
Meanwhile, in my motel room a block off the Walk of Fame or in the car, the news chatters on. CNN and NPR are the Muzak of my life. They offer zero news about my husband.
Then all of a sudden he's back on the ship and back online.
By the time we arrived at our site, way out in the desert, we had eaten about a pound of dust and gotten pretty well knocked around in the truck. Combat Engineer Battalion had a backhoe and dug us a slit trench. Over it they placed a box with toilet seats built into the top. A hill-top machine gun nest overlooked it for security. None of us objected to it being there. The last thing you want to do is catch an enemy bullet while . . . that is not how you want to be remembered.
It's the same thing guys have been writing home about since armies started arming people who could write. I laugh as I read. Somehow I find the continuity reassuring.
I got up about an hour before sunrise and shuffled towards the slit trench. After passing the machine gun nest, getting challenged (it was still hard to see exactly who was coming towards you) and giving the password, I made my way down the backside of the hill to the hole. I dropped my drawers and sat down facing east and saw the most glorious sight. The horizon was starting to airbrush itself into strata of rusty and pastel velvet. Just over the horizon was a waning crescent moon, and just a few degrees to the right of it was Venus. It almost looked like a sign from God for a Muslim.
He closes with:
I have the only two good pix of you and the dog where I can see them as I sit at my little desk. You still wearing that locket? My ring line is almost gone, but everyone knows I am married. I talk about you.
His ring he left behind for safety reasons. The locket is the first present he ever gave me, 18 years ago. It's a cheap gold locket that he chose as his free gift when he ordered a turntable from a catalogue. He could have had a calculator the size of a credit card, but he chose the locket because he thought I might like it. I didn't. But I appreciated the thought. After he deployed I put it on and wrote him that I'm not taking it off till he comes back.
People are starting to die of anthrax.
A stranger at a gas station, making neighborly conversation, looks at the 'Vette's tags and says, "Bet you're glad to be out of Washington, D.C."
The 'Vette's nose is pointing east these days. We've left L.A.; we've turned for home. We drive away from sunsets instead of toward them. Melancholy settles over me.
In Las Vegas, the dog and I walk the Strip till late at night. Overhead, Wayne Newton grins down on his neighborhood from a billboard. He looks crisp and casual and tan. WAYNE NEWTON, it says across the top. Beneath that: STARDUST. An American flag is pasted across part of his name and GOD BLESS AMERICA! I realize it's time to leave Las Vegas.
Approaching Hoover Dam, I pass an electronic sign:
PASSENGER CARS ONLY
HOOVER DAM
Then I pass another one:
ALL TRUCKS,
CARS WITH TRAILERS,
EXIT NOW
I watch the car ahead of me pull its trailer right on past the exit, headed for the dam. Red alert sounds in my head. I think: No way I'm crossing Hoover Dam the same time as that thing. I drop back. I wonder if I am witnessing something. I wonder if I should grab my cell phone and dial 911.
The car turns off on a side road.
Suspicion. Hysteria. According to the radio, I'm not alone in this. It's a not-so-brave new world.
In Cortez, Colo., the NPR station switches to the local news. The announcer, nasal, Midwestern, says: "I guess we've had some worries about anthrax here. But looks like the government's got all that under control. They've got drugs that even if you do get anthrax, will put it into remission. So you don't have to worry about that."
He goes on: "Looks like we had an accident just outside of town. Looks like a car went through a stop sign and hit another vehicle, killed two of our local teens. 'Course our condolences go out to the families.
"So, uh, I just want to tell you people out there, everyone take care of each other and love your brother."
I listen with a big grin. Alone in my car, listening to the radio, I feel like I'm part of a community, a real community of real people. They're all right there in his unpolished, truly conversational voice. Connecting with other people on a personal, human level like this, that's what Quakers call recognizing "that of God" in others. Conclusion: When I'm feeling close to other people, that's when I'm closest to God. And thus do I grin.
We are getting care packages from people we do not know. Part of the patriotic fervor back in the States. We have no idea what is going on. One of the motors on the antenna that feeds us Direct to Sailor programming has burned out, so we get no news. There is no word on when it will be repaired.
The most popular items you can put in a care package: prepaid phone cards, wet wipes, Pop-Tarts, batteries.
From Roswell, N.M., I send him a care package of my own: one inflatable green alien, one pink-and-green alien party banner, two green alien Gumbys, and a flying saucer of candy.
The 'Vette rumbles into Houston at 1 a.m. My engaged poet friends and their dogs are waiting for us. They've just cleaned themselves up from a Halloween party. Fake blood is smeared all over the bathroom. Poets.
We sit around the table and finish off the Tex-Mex dinner I started somewhere in West Texas.
"So what does your husband do in the military?" one of the poets asks.
"He's the combat chaplain for a battalion of Marines."
"Oh, a chaplain," she nods, munching chips and salsa. "I think that's the coolest thing you can be in the military."
"Yeah, but as an anti-military pastor I know once pointed out, it's just helping the military to do what it does, which is kill people."
"True," she concedes.
Because, I mean, what's wrong with this picture: A Christian pastor, follower of a religion that calls its God the Prince of Peace . . .
Who signed up for a job that requires him to stand ready to go unarmed and defenseless into harm's way . . .
To support people whose mission it is to kill and destroy . . .
So those of us at home can live in peace.
And yet . . . and yet . . .
She points a salsa-laden chip at me. "But soldiers are people, too."
Exactly. I think about the faces of the Marines I saw while waiting with my husband before he left to board the ship. They stood around in their camouflage utilities. They were surrounded by piles of green backpacks and duffle bags. They played with our dog.
They were so young.
One of the guys asked me if he was becoming nuts or morbid: He wanted to leave a letter to his loved ones with someone who would mail it home for him in the event he is killed by hostile action. I assured him that there was nothing wrong with his concerns and told him that similar ideas led to the invention of the dog tag. He asked me if I would hold the letter, and I said that I would, but I also asked him what would happen if I were killed. We decided that I should hold any letters in my safe with a note from me saying that if I am killed, only the letters of others who had also been killed should be sent home.
There was a combat chaplain in Vietnam who would crawl out on his belly under fire to get to the wounded and dying. If the soldier was lying on his back, the chaplain would raise himself up on his elbows to speak or pray with him. Someone asked him why the hell did he always raise himself up like that and make himself a target? Because, he said, he had to look those boys in the eyes and make sure they saw the love of God.
He received the Medal of Honor. Posthumously.
But that was Vietnam. Supposedly this is a different kind of war. Driving northeast past the eerie flames of petrochemical plants, I'm not sure what that means. That's as far as that thought goes. These days, I can enclose myself in the peaceful white-noise bubble of the present almost at will. I'm not where I was and I'm not where I'm going. I'm just here, in this groove of a moment where the miles roll away and the passing scenery soothes or astounds. I absorb what flows out of the radio, the television, the newspapers, draw conclusions when I can, maybe write a check for Afghan relief and try to stay unpopped by things I can't control.
The person I love is being swept farther and farther away by forces bigger than both of us. The leaders of my country might really screw things up. These thoughts go by like boats on a river. Sometimes they pull in to the dock for a while, but if they stay there too long, after all these miles, I'm able to push them off downstream again.
It's Oct. 31 and I'm almost home. Within a couple of days, the dog and I will roll back into Washington, where the Pentagon has become a tourist attraction. On a balmy Sunday afternoon, I'll stand in a murmuring crowd on the grassy median across from the ruined fifth side. After six weeks and 12,000 miles, the sight still has the power to hit me in my stomach. I find myself squinting at the world. I find myself wishing to be alone.
Next to me, a Japanese couple will take turns smiling for their photo op. I'm not making this up. I couldn't make this up. During the course of the couple's American vacation, the photo op will have become such a rote activity that they may not even be aware they are smiling.
This next part I make up. I imagine them returning home, developing the pictures, showing them to friends. If one of their friends should ask why they are smiling in front of a place where people died, they would frown and say, "But we do not remember smiling."