In celestial mechanics, escape velocity refers to the minimum speed a body must achieve to escape the gravitational pull of a planet or other object.
GRAVITY
I first felt the tug of gravity when I was five years old. Until then, I floated in the protective bubble of a two-parent home, unaware of the strong forces at play in the world. I was well loved. There are pictures to prove it. Unfortunately, my parent’s relationship did not endure. Sometimes it goes that way. Their split pierced my bubble, atmosphere rushed in, and I began to experience the weight of things.
My mother took up in an old hunting cabin she had acquired for a pittance and made livable. The woman possessed incredible vision when it came to real estate. Sure, we were living year round in a glorified shack with the R-value of a potato chip bag, but Christ what a view. I’m not sure “the camp” as we called it could legally sit so close to the water; it perched atop a rocky outcropping two dozen steps from a salt-water lake that drained into the Atlantic. It was crooked, cozy, and cold as fuck in the winter, but, as they say, location-location-location. The moment I stepped out the front door I had my choice: water or woods. Nature made as fine a companion as I could ask for, and I found great joy outside in my own company.
My dad lived three miles away in town with my grandparents whose long, one-story home functioned as a side-by-side duplex. My grandfather was in poor health and my grandmother lacked full mobility, so my dad helped care for them, and they helped keep an eye on me and keep us both full. Undoubtedly, the arrangement was also financial, one that allowed my dad to keep up with child support payments, though I was unaware of this dynamic until much later.
I can’t quite pinpoint when things began to deteriorate, but they did. My mother did not have a support system. We stopped seeing her parents abruptly and didn’t talk about them anymore. I found this odd because I had been close with both of them since birth. Next, she quit her job, and, after that, could not hold down another for more than a few months at a time. I didn’t understand what was happening but soon realized it was going to be my problem. My mother needed someone to vent to about our prevailing financial woes, her anger towards my father, and a variety of other topics best suited for a therapist or someone who measured their age with more than one digit. Instead, she had me.
As time passed, she became fully unbalanced. Nothing could be certain. Not her mood, not the availability of heat or electricity or a working vehicle, not the right thing to do or say in any situation. Only her deep-seated hatred of my father remained rock steady; it surpassed reason, proportion, and, often, her concern for me. Bouncing between the chaos of her custody and the stability of my dad and grandparents was jarring. I found myself stuck on the ducking stool like a medieval wrongdoer, bound tight to a chair and lowered again and again and again into a rushing river, held aloft just long enough to catch my breath before being plunged back into the dark current.
I remember the hard ritual of getting dropped off at my mother’s house. (I know my dad does as well because we still find occasion to talk war stories from time to time like ‘Nam vets reminiscing at a VFW). Designated nights with him often felt like long countdowns. The mood would shift at six o’clock with the chiming of the wall clock on my grandparent’s side of the house. That meant we had thirty maybe forty more minutes to play cards. After that, my dad and I returned to his side of the house and waited for her to call. Sometimes the call never came. Other times, she would just say, “You can keep him” or something nice like that. Either was a tremendous stroke of luck; like staring down a firing squad with wet gunpowder. More often than not, though, I would be summoned back.
I tried to gather bits of data from the timing of her call and its duration, but the tone of my dad’s voice on the phone and the look on his face told the tale. It’s good to know what you’re in for. Then, there was nothing left to do but get in the truck and go. I don’t remember talking much on those rides, but I do recall the mood. Somber. Reluctant. Like taking an animal to the vet one last time. I knew all the turns. The distance between landmarks. I even knew the points in the road when my dad would shift gears just before the small engine of his Nissan pickup began to strain. I savored that drive like a last meal making minutes into hours in my mind.
After ten or sometimes eleven minutes had ticked by on the blue digital clock on the dash, we would reach the top of the long, dirt driveway leading down through the woods, finally terminating in a pitch black clearing. I used to drag out that last goodbye. In time, I lingered less. I had to leave, so I learned how to go and let something else take over: “Put the body in motion. Don’t think. Disengage. Unfasten seatbelt. Short hug. Long breath. Exit. Orient to footpath. Three steps, big root, step, step, small root, step, step, six stone steps. Reach threshold. Look back. Watch red taillights disappear. No back up. All me. Control face. Regulate breathing. Steady now. Get stony! You’re a stone, damn it! Shields up. Good. Now, turn the knob and face it.”
GATHERING SPEED
In Kindergarten, I was an odd duck. I wouldn’t talk in class; I just sat and listened. This went on for weeks. I knew the answers to the questions, but I needed to see what happened. I waited and watched, noting who got questions right, who got them wrong, and what my answers would have been. Most of all, I watched how my teacher reacted. It seemed nothing bad ever happened to anyone, right, wrong, or otherwise. She never yelled. In fact, she seemed very kind. Most days she would ask if I wanted to talk. I would shake my head no, and she would say that it was okay, that I didn’t have to talk if I didn’t want to. It took a long time, but, one day, I was ready. I raised my hand, spoke, and everything was still okay.
I grew to trust and love school. I valued the seven hours of guaranteed structure and safety. I was free to speak, free to question, free to be silent; free to be right or wrong, whichever the case might be, all without risk of explosive reprisal. My teachers praised me when I was clever or kind and corrected me gently if I did something wrong. “This place actually makes sense,” I thought. I figured out what I had to do for love, and I did it. The more I did it, the better I got at doing it, and the more I came to depend on it.
By middle school, my self-worth flowed mainly from academic achievement. The further along the prescribed path I went, the more praise I received: people told me I was smart; recognized that I was capable; acknowledged, even, that I was good. I liked these feelings and I liked that I had some control over them. When I did “X,” I almost always got “Y.” I could brew myself this wonderous ego-boosting tonic and drink it down over and over and over again with every “A,” every award, every perfect score. But ego was not my sole motivation; there was a larger design.
For me, accruing knowledge and accolades was like a whore secreting jewels. It was my getaway money, and, unlike precious stones, this forms of capital could not be confiscated by an unscrupulous pimp. No one could stop me from learning, and no one could take my learning from me. Sure, I could still be punished for possessing it. Contradictory displays of reasoning, even if solicited and sound, still triggered unhinged soliloquies and worse from the woman whose twisted custody I fell under. It had become clear, now on a conscious, actionable level, that I needed to get away.
My neck bent under a necklace of millstones: the quiet desperation of my small hometown, the profound frustration of self-inflicted poverty, and the punishing flails of a woman stubbornly drowning in untreated mental illness. But how best to break free? Running away was a poor long term strategy. High risk, low reward, likely unsustainable. I still had my dad. I could do better. I just needed to endure. My biggest strength was my mind. I was an exceptional student. Escape was simply a matter of having enough jewels to flash when the right moment came.
Thankfully, by high school, life had greatly improved. Slowly, surely, I had built an iron sense of agency fierce enough to incinerate any strings of dependency. When I turned sixteen, got my license, and got a car, that was it. I could exert my own autonomy. I was mentally stronger, physically larger, delusionally capable, and dead focused. I had a few bosom friends, was a varsity athlete, had a nice girlfriend with a nice family and a long list of adults I respected that knew me as a good kid and a winner. I had momentum and direction; I just needed one good chance.
BREAKING AWAY
Senior year, I got my shot. College acceptance letters arrived, several scholarship applications panned out, and a financial aid package from one well-regarded liberal arts school in the mid-west looked generous enough for the math to work. I figured I’d only be knee deep in student loan debt after graduating rather than up to my eyeballs, but I gave only a scant fuck for matters of accounting at that juncture. I had an out, and I accepted it gratefully. The long war was won, but there was one last engagement that required surprising courage.
Highschool graduation loomed, and I had to speak. I still think it’s odd to have a seventeen year old address a town-full of adults in a packed gymnasium. “If nothing else, keep it fucking short. I don’t want to watch you die a slow death up there” my favorite teachers offered. Solid advice. I was so nervous the day of that I considered skipping the whole thing. I nixed the thought immediately. To have come so far only to end the campaign in cowardice? Fuck no. Turn the knob. I threw up, suited up, and showed up, feigning confidence until the moment came. I had to follow the commencement speaker, a friend whose father died during our junior year. He fucking killed. Not a dry eye in the house. Applause thundered well after I reached the podium.
I knew, with grim certainty, that I was about to eat dirt. My speech was literally a long series of jokes. I don’t know how, but I made the transition from death to laughter seamlessly. It makes sense in retrospect. I wasn’t some young demagogue; the crowd just needed a release of emotion. I spoke about the mundanity of our everyday lives as students: the quirks of our old school building; peculiarities of the faculty; assorted inside jokes. It was an invitation to see the humor in life.
After the crucial first laugh, my nerves faded, my voice carried, and I got through it. Traditionally, the class valedictorian delivers the final address (known as the valediction, from the Latin, vale dicere, meaning “to say farewell”). The speech is intended to serve as a farewell address that reflects on the shared experiences of the graduating class. I was not the valedictorian, but I’ll be damned if mine was not the valediction that afternoon. My speech was a personal farewell address, and I stood tall and delivered it to everyone I knew.
Two months later, I made the 700-plus mile drive to the campus I would call home for the next four years. I hopped in my ’97 Saab at the crack of dawn (the ass-crack if I recall correctly), fired her up, and took off. Navigation consisted of directions scrawled in pencil on a 3×5 index card. For provisioning, I had a bag of beef jerky, a full case of polar seltzer (lime). Finally, for entertainment, there was “The Brick” (an MP3 player my dad gave me whose capacity was exceeded only by its astonishing density). Despite devil-may-care preparation, the trip was a major undertaking. It marked not only my first time leaving home, but, to my knowledge, it was the first time anyone in my family had left the state at all for any significant length of time.
Bombing along I-90 West through the picturesque yet repetitive countryside of New York State at a smooth seventy-five mph, I saw signs for Ithaca and considered the journey of the Grecian king who ruled the city’s ancient namesake. I remember laughing at myself. It takes a cheeky prick to draw comparison to Odysseus a few hours into a one-day trip. Whatever. This was my grand adventure. I shook my head and patted the dashboard reassuringly: “C’mon, old girl. We can make it.” I told the Saab softly, audibly, not for the first time or the last. And we did. After twelve hours and two tanks of fuel, we touched down. Groaning, I hoisted myself out of the car, legs tingling, blood rushing to my extremities, heart hammering away, and took my first hobbling steps on what might as well have been the surface of the moon.
Onward. Always.
Half Good Hiker