running away

The summer before my senior year of high school, my father’s restlessness reached a magnitude that we had never before witnessed. This was the summer that he spent walking up and down the city streets while everyone else slept, and I spent the month of June watching him from our balcony. In the light of the day, he still wore his tweed jackets and collared shirts, a wise man with crow’s feet stamped beside his eyes from years of laughter and tears. But at night, some devil worked its way into his heart, pricking at his mind until he became frenzied and wild-eyed. One night at three or four in the morning, as he marched toward the door in his boxer shorts, I tried to stop him and ask where he was going, but he only drew his eyebrows down over his eyes and snarled, “Don’t question me,” snatching the key out of the door and leaving.

Our mission board had a policy that parents had to send their children to boarding school if there were no suitable international schools in the area, since home schooling took time away from ministry. My parents always took positions in developing countries and impoverished areas that hardly had schools at all, let alone international schools of any high caliber. In all the years that I had lived at boarding school, from just after my sixth birthday until my senior year of high school, he never once called or wrote to me. To me, this was proof of the fact that he had abdicated his position as my father. I began to see myself almost as an orphan, and boarding school as my foster home. The tricky part was that Dad still expected me to submit to his authority without question whenever I was home in the Balkans.

Our relationship throughout high school was turbulent at best, as I chafed against his tyrannous moods and struggled to measure up to his impossible and exacting standards. Failure was never an option with Dad, but it was also an inevitability given his expectations. Though the fact that I lived in Germany and he lived in Macedonia separated us physically, the winter and summer holidays I spent at home distanced us from each other even more. That last summer I spent at home, his restless summer of pacing, crackled with tension between us, as his temper boiled closer to the surface and my tearful defiance grew in intensity. Our fighting peaked during a trip to America’s West Coast to visit colleges.

The two most painful arguments both began in the car. The first time, he was angry that I needed help carrying my heavy suitcase into the Nevada casino where we were spending the night. The town was called Elko, a cowboy town that looked like it had materialized out of an old Western film, complete with sagebrush, tumbleweed, and spurs. His fury grew, railed, and rambled, moving from the luggage to my dreadlocked hair to the laziness of teenaged girls to all the ways I was a disappointment to him. Reduced to tears, I could do nothing but turn and leave as he shouted, walking until I reached an old, overgrown cemetery. I paced among the graves, worn smooth and crumbling at the edges, the faint traces of engraved dates telling the story of the cemetery’s inhabitants. Most of the deceased were soldiers in the Spanish-American war, which I had never heard of, and I laughed myself sick through my tears over the abbreviated inscriptions: “Henry Lewis, Veteran of the SPAM war.” I lay for a long time in the tall grass under one of the graveyard’s trees, calming myself before walking back to the hotel to hear Dad’s mumbled apology.

The second argument was one of the last we ever had. Driving through Portland, Oregon, I tried to navigate our path to Reed College on our road atlas, its pages unfolding to obscure most of the dashboard and windshield with blue and pink lines and numbers. Frustrated by the number of times I had turned the map upside down, exclaiming, “Wait, I found it! Oh, never mind, wrong road,” Dad snatched the atlas away from me, crumpling it into the back seat. The longer we drove, the more lost we became. I sat quietly twirling my dreadlocks as Dad grew silent and terse. Finally the dam broke, and he began softly, with sentences ragged and half-swallowed, bitten short between his teeth. He moved from the fact that I had gotten us lost to expound on my uselessness and stupidity, warming up like a Baptist preacher taking off his suit jacket. By the end of his tirade, he had told me that I was slowly destroying our entire family with my selfishness and that I had ruined his life, plunging him into depression when I forced him to move to Macedonia. I knew that the move to Macedonia hadn’t been my decision, that I had even begged him to stay in Kosovo, but I could hardly breathe, let alone find the words to deny his accusations. I slumped in my seat, crushed by the force of his resentment and the weight of my crimes, shaking. The second the car slowed near Reed’s campus, I jumped out of the passenger door and ran for the nearest tree.

The day was grey and crisp, typical of a July morning in Portland, as I climbed up as high as I could. I stopped on a sturdy branch far above the ground, too high for Dad to reach me, as far as I could get from his bitter anger, and glared out at the river, trembling and steadying my breath. The college’s beautiful buildings, brick with white trim and columns, stood behind me, and the city stretched out before me, across the river. I heard Dad walk up behind me, staring out at Portland as the sun climbed higher in the sky. Looking out at the college, the river, the city, pale with the morning’s frail light, I saw my escape open up before me, worlds away from the Balkans, boarding school, and my family. As I recognized the avenue of my escape, so did my father. And for the first time, I think he understood that the second I turned eighteen, I wouldn’t be walking to a Nevada cemetery or hiding from him up in a tree. The next time I ran away from him, I would put thousands of miles and an ocean between us.