Page 32 of So Far Gone

Sontag, nineteenth-century economics—it all proceeds from the human mind, deals first with human experience. But naturalism,

environmental philosophy, which put us on a neutral footing with the world around us, these are barely fifty years old. So,

what I’ve been thinking is... what if you went back over thousands of years of philosophical history from this new vantage,

trading human experience for environmental ethics. Which ideas continue to make sense? And from that, can we make a new kind

of metaphysical map of the world. Something we could chart, orient on a globe. What if you could write it like an outdoor

field guild or a topographical map. A sort of... revised Atlas of Wisdom .”

For just a moment, she found herself listening to the father she’d loved at twelve, the father she couldn’t wait to see walk

through the door at night, whose newspaper byline she would run her hand over, desperate to understand what he’d written the

day before... about dam removal, or wolf populations, or nuclear waste... stories that were never quite as interesting

as the versions he told her when he got home, the father who didn’t talk to her like she was a little girl—the way her mom

did, the way her teachers did—but who would talk about forestry policy needing to evolve past Muir, or who might randomly

quote Sartre or try putting abstract theories into an Atlas of Wisdom.

But then, she became a teenager and began to see this other, reclusive father—moody, selfish, aloof, depressed—right around

the time they drifted apart. She blamed him when her parents split, even though they insisted it was a mutual decision, and

even though Celia went off and married Cortland, like, an hour later.

It was also when she was a teenager that Bethany began to sense Rhys Kinnick’s profound disappointment in her —his face betraying it, as if he hated every single choice she’d ever made. He bad-mouthed the guys she brought home, especially

Doug and Shane (both of whom reminded her of her father), and he scoffed and rolled his eyes at the cars she drove and the

classes she took and the apartments she lived in, as if she were constantly letting him down with her bad judgment, as if

she had failed to live up to her twelve-year-old promise. ( And worst of all, what if he was right to be disappointed? ) Even now, she wondered what he saw when he looked at her. Instead of becoming a writer like him, contemplating “metaphysical

world maps,” she was just a part-time teacher, just a frumpy housewife with two kids whose ages Rhys couldn’t bother to remember, just a nearly middle-aged woman with questionable taste in men (as if all of them had lined up and she’d merely had to point out

the ones she’d wanted).

No, this social distancing was nothing new; she and her father had been at least six feet apart for twenty years. And whatever

insight Bethany might have gleaned by coming to see the man now, whatever key he held to her own mysterious heart, she had

the sense, seeing him like this, that her idea of disappearance was an illusion.

Maybe that’s what Peggy had wanted her to see, the ultimate hollowness of the man standing before her, and the empty promise

of her own vision of escape.

Perhaps this character flaw was exactly what she’d seen in her father back when she was a teen. Rhys Kinnick was like the

math concept she’d recently helped Leah with—a negative equation. If the signs are different , as she’d told Leah, the answer is always negative. The signs between Bethany and Rhys would always be different. The answer was always going to be negative.

“Four minutes,” Asher said. He held up the red digital wristwatch he’d proudly bought with his Christmas money last year.

“It’s been ten minutes so far.”

“Okay, Ash,” Bethany said. “Thanks for keeping track.” And that, ultimately, was why she could never do what self-absorbed Rhys Kinnick had done.

She could never turn her back on her children the way he had turned his back on his child. On her. Bethany said to her father:

“Looks like we have only four minutes.”

“So soon?” He seemed a little panicky.

“Afraid so,” she said.

“But you’ll come back?”

“Sure.”

“I’d like that,” he said sheepishly.

Asher came over with a saltshaker-size hunk of basalt. “Can I have this?”

“Of course you can,” Kinnick said. “Leah, do you want a rock?”

She looked at him like he might be insane. “We have them at home.”

Her father smiled at Bethany. “That sounded exactly like you.”

Bethany felt her face flush as she walked the kids toward the car. Leah got in front and pulled her seat belt across her lap.

Asher climbed into his booster seat in the back, and Bethany leaned in and buckled him.

When she straightened back up, Kinnick flinched, as if he were about to come in for a hug, but suddenly remembered the pandemic,

and stayed back.

She smiled, said, “Well,” and got in the driver’s seat.

Before she could close the door, he crouched down, careful to stay six feet away. “Bye, kids.”

“Bye.”

“Thanks for the rock.”

“You bet. Come back for more. I’ve got plenty.”

Bethany reached for the door handle but at the last second, turned to her father. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“When I was fifteen, I skipped school one day.”

“Well, that’s okay,” he said.

“No, I know.” She laughed. “It’s just, as we drove back to school, I saw you standing on the porch, and... I wondered if

you saw me, too.”

He stared at her blankly. “Jeez... I don’t... I don’t remember that. When did you say this was?”

“It’s okay.” She smiled. “Don’t worry about it. Bye, Dad.”

“Goodbye, Bethany,” he said. “I love you.”

“Love you, too.”

Also true, that. Of course. And that is what stung so much. She closed her door, started the car, and drove away, watching

him shrink in the rearview mirror, standing in the middle of his driveway with his hands in the pockets of his brown suede

jacket. At the end of his driveway, she turned, and when she looked once more in the mirror, he was gone.

***

Kinnick stared out the window, pine trees blurring to green and brown bands, like a dull Rothko painting. Brian drove them

deeper into the woods, ever closer, Kinnick hoped, to finding his daughter. They had somehow missed the turnoff the first

time and were doubling back on this empty two-lane highway.

They’d woken up that morning—Kinnick on Brian’s couch, the kids in sleeping bags on the floor. After breakfast, he and Brian

had climbed in his Bronco, stopped at Rhys’s house to get his passport, then started out for the border, leaving the kids

with Joanie. They crossed into Canada above Metaline Falls, drove north and west, passing through pristine forest alongside

a series of rivers and streams, past farms and ranches, quaint little towns. And now, according to the vague directions they’d

gotten from a gas station attendant in Montrose, they were getting close to Paititi.

Apparently for the second time, since they’d driven past it once.

“I don’t see how you missed it the first time,” Brian said.

“How I missed it?” Rhys was tired of being a passenger in his own misadventures—first with the boxing priest, then Lucy, then Crazy

Ass Chuck, and now with his old friend, Brian. When this was all over, when he’d gotten Bethany back to her kids, Kinnick

was going to cash out the rest of his sad, little newspaper pension and make two quick purchases: a cell phone and a reliable

car.

They drove slowly down a narrow, tree-lined corridor, passing no houses at all, only solitary roadside mailboxes every mile

or so, until—

“There it is!” Kinnick said. A hand-painted sign nailed to a tree read: paititi. An arrow pointed down a narrow dirt road.

“That’s it?” Brian asked.

“I guess so.”

Brian looked briefly at his phone again. “No GPS. How does anyone find this place?”

“I suppose that’s the attraction,” Kinnick said.

“Who’s playing anyway?” Brian asked.

“What?”

“At the Pie-Whatever Music Festival? Anybody I’ve heard of?”

“Let’s see. Steely Dan. Elvis. Mozart.”

“Good plan: be a dick to the one person willing to help you.”

“First of all,” Kinnick said, “how would I know who you’ve heard of, especially when the newest band I’ve ever heard you play is Styx? Second, this is an electronica festival.

Do you listen to a lot of electronica, Brian? And third, I have no idea who is playing other than Sluggish Doug and whatever

half-assed band he’s in now.”

“Well. Forgive me for asking a question.”

Kinnick sighed. “Sorry. This whole thing has me feeling stupid. But I’ll stop taking it out on you.”

“I get it,” Brian said. “It’s stressful shit. If my daughter ran off to some greasy hippie festival, I’d be in a mood, too.”

This is what Leah had told Kinnick: her mother had come to her bedside on the morning she left, and whispered a secret: that Leah’s father, Doug, was in a new band, The Boofs, and, according to what Bethany told Leah, The Boofs were playing at an outdoor music festival in Canada this week and—this was the part Bethany was most excited about—The Boofs were performing two songs that she’d written years ago.

Bethany was going to “take a little vacation” to go hear her songs played live.

Kinnick had forgotten that Bethany once wrote songs with Doug.

In fact, it was how they’d met, as he recalled, at an all-night coffee shop in Olympia where Doug was playing guitar and Bethany was writing in a journal.

The classic failed poet meets failed musician failed love story.

Bethany had once shown Kinnick a song she’d written, a protest anthem about the Iraq War. To his shame now, Rhys had landed

somewhere between confused and dismissive as he read his daughter’s lyrics. But his response wasn’t so much about the song

(all he could remember was a single rhyme: armed forces and remorseless ) as it was her writing songs (wasting her talent!) with this perpetually stoned simpleton with blond dreadlocks and sleeved