did she come to write The Wild Truth, the courageous book you now hold in your hands.
Jon Krakauer
April 2014
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
—George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense
THE HOUSE ON WILLET DRIVE looks smaller than I remember. Mom kept the yard much nicer than this, but the haunting appearance of overgrown weeds and neglected shrubs seems more appropriate. Color returns to my knuckles as I release the steering wheel. I hate this fucking house. For twenty-three years I managed to steel myself while passing these familiar exits of Virginia’s highways. Several times I wrestled with the temptation to veer off, wanting to generate memories of time spent with the brother I miss so terribly. But pain is a cruel thief of childhood sentiment. People think they understand our story because they know how his ended, but they don’t know how it all began.
Once a carefully tended mask, the house’s facade now appears to have been abandoned. Unruly thickets of sharp holly stab at the foundation, their berries like droplets of blood drawn from its bricks. The wood siding sags, forgotten and pale, lifeless aside from the mildew creeping across its seams. Gone are the manicured flower beds; the front yard is now adorned with random papers and bottles from passersby. It’s as if the dwelling has utterly expired, worn out from too many years as the lead in a grueling play.
The knot in my stomach quickly transforms into nausea, and I scramble out into the crisp October air to hunch over and wait, patiently. But the relief doesn’t come.
The concrete driveway lies vacant, broken and stained. But I realize the house is not deserted. Someone had to roll the trash cans to the street, and a neatly covered Harley is tucked under the carport, a single wheel exposed just enough to be identified.
I stagger back to my Honda Pilot and crawl inside to make my escape. But just before my key strikes the ignition, a large Chevy pickup flashes in my rearview mirror and lumbers up the driveway. A woman steps out of the truck and begins to unload a few items from the cab. As she suspiciously eyes my SUV parked in front of her house, I rebuke myself for not parking on the opposite side of the street. With a few encouraging breaths and a burst of energy, I find myself back at the bottom of the long, sloped driveway. Her expression asks what the hell I am doing there.
“Hello, ma’am? My name is Carine McCandless. I grew up in this house.” I watch her furrowed brow soften into acknowledgment. “Do you know the history?”
“Yes. Well, a little,” she wavers.
I hastily assume her next reply as I walk up the incline. “May I come up to talk to you?”
She puts down her purse and packages on the truck bed and shakes the hand I have offered. “Marian.”
Marian is tall, nice looking, with a strong build and sturdy handshake. Her long strawberry-blond hair reminds me of Wynonna Judd, and her bright pretty blouse and casual black pantsuit are what you might expect to see on an underpaid social worker. Amongst the delicate necklaces around her neck hangs a heavier chain with a distinctive silver and black Harley Davidson emblem. Her expression is warm yet tentative.
I press on. “I was hoping you wouldn’t mind if I looked around a little bit?”
She gestures at her disheveled yard and balks. “Well, I don’t know what you would gain from that. It certainly doesn’t look the same as it did when you lived here.”
There is a long pause, and it remains unspoken, yet obvious, that Marian is not prone to welcome visitors. Eventually she looks back at my hopeful face and relents. “Well, you’re gonna have to give me a minute to let my dog out before he pees all over the house.” She smiles and hoots, “He’s an ole boy, that Charlie!”
As we walk around the backyard, the wiry chocolate Labrador keeps his head low while he examines me through the tops of his eyes. Harmless growls emerge from his graying muzzle like the rumblings of an old man disturbed from his routine. While urinating about the yard, Charlie ensures that either I am securely entangled in his extensive leash or he is standing between the house and me. Marian ignores the gaps in the dilapidated fence, apologizing as she liberates my legs again and again. “Charlie could just jump right over that.”
While I struggle to maintain my balance, I scan the areas where Chris and I would seek our refuge. No evidence remains of the massive vegetable garden we picked beans in every summer. Aster and chrysanthemum no longer grace the fallen leaves. The beautifully landscaped beds that Mom had so carefully lined with large stones now appear as mouths agape with crooked teeth, coughing up snarled knots of condemned shrubs and weeds. The railroad ties that had been systematically placed to create steps between the multilevel beds are barely defining the slope of the yard.
Free for the moment from Marian’s canine guardian, I make my way to the higher level of the backyard. In the left corner is a generous slope where Chris and I imagined ourselves as archaeologists and where he refined his considerable storytelling skills as an adolescent.
Our neighborhood was developed among a complex grouping of small hills and valleys where minor rivers had meandered centuries earlier to service tobacco plantations. The houses on our street were built along a strand of dehydrated streambeds. Looking down the back rows of neighbors’ chain-link fences, I can still trace the forgotten path of running waters. And those waters left behind a great deal of storytelling material.
I tell Marian how Chris and I would haul up our wagon full of plastic shovels and buckets—and the occasional soup spoon swiped from the silverware drawer—to dig section by section, getting filthy, eager to discover relics of the past. We didn’t come across anything that would be of significance to anyone else. But to Chris, everything we unearthed was legendary. Some of our greatest finds became our secret collection. Between the effortless detection of widespread oyster shells, we were thrilled whenever the excavation revealed ceramic shards of glazed white china. Arms raised in victory, we would run down to the spigot and wash off the mud and dirt until we could see a pattern we had come to recognize: depictions of oriental houses in soft blue-violet hues. Then we would sift through the shoe box in which we stashed our trove, looking to match the remnants together like puzzle pieces.
Our proudest days were those when our score completed an entire plate. Then we would sit and relish our accomplishment, gazing back up at the dig site while Chris weaved intricate stories about how the pieces had come to rest there. He told of ancient Chinese armies—the soldiers coming under surprise attack while enjoying meals in their dining tents—defenseless against superior forces while their dinner plates shattered and fell beside them, only to be discovered years later by the fantastic archaeological duo Sir Flash and his little sister, Princess Woo Bear.
Our dig site now lay covered with scattered piles of yard debris. The pleasant scent of late-season honeysuckle drifts over from the yard next door, and I recall hopping the fence like scavengers to suck the nectar from its delicate summer blooms.
On the days when our instincts led us to flee to greater distances, Chris would take me running down Braeburn Drive to Rutherford Park, where active streams could still be found. We ventured along the creek beds, soaking our sneakers with failed attempts to jump across the clear, cold rush at wider and wider points, skipping rocks, singing Beatles songs, and reenacting scenes from our favorite television shows. Chris was brilliant at creating diversions,
