turn to the back of this book for a list of the sustaining funders of Etruscan Press.
This book is printed on recycled, acid-free paper.
For my father, brothers and son:Jules St. Germain, Jay St. Germain, André St. Germain, and Gray St. Germain Gideon.And for all those who have wrestled with addiction.
Whatever
Guides you back
To the world.
That dark so deep
The tiniest light
Will do.
—Gregory Orr
FIFFTY MILES
It’s Come Undone: Crocheting and Catastrophe
Thinking about The God of Questions on Winter Solstice
Waiting for the Toxicology Report
Hiking in Wyoming, After a Death
The Ink that Binds: Creative Writing and Addiction
FIFTY MILES
Introduction
Most people who compulsively seek to escape through drugs do so because they find their consciousness unbearable. That’s the real source of addiction.
—Maia Szalavitz
My son was born into a family cursed with substance abuse. I use the words addict and alcoholic often in this collection, but it’s not without awareness that those words often color too deeply how we see someone. If I say my son and I come from a family of alcoholics and addicts I must also say that we come from a family of workers: carpenters and builders, waitresses, warriors and mechanics, gardeners. We come from a family of politicians and jocks, musicians, book-lovers, drug dealers and dreamers. We come from a family of good cooks and risk-takers, a southern family as proud of its southern roots as it is of its dark handsomeness. But the thing that ties most of us together is a propensity for drink and drugs.
I was raised in New Orleans, a city known for its excesses, a city I left at 27, moving to Dallas with my son’s dad before he was born, hoping to escape the fate of others in my family: an alcoholic father dead at 59 of cirrhosis, a brother dead at 23 of a drug overdose, another brother at 41; an aunt dead of overdose at the same age; a nephew dead in his twenties from risk-taking behavior; grandfathers and grandmothers, and great grandfathers and great grandmothers who lived shortened lives, some developing cirrhosis in the throes of alcoholism. A brother-in-law addicted to crack, stabbed to death during a drug deal gone bad. Other relatives are still active substance abusers.
It didn’t help to move. Gray, my only son, born in 1984 in Dallas, died thirty years later, in 2014, of a heroin overdose.
