Mud Road

The storm broke just as I reached the outskirts of Iowa City. An unexpected boon, since I had decided to just drive in the country regardless of the weather.

It had been raining for weeks -- heavy, dark, driving rains. March rains, holding potential for record snowfalls with just a slight dip in temperature. I was "playing hooky." Well, not exactly -- I had bailed out on obligations that I never really needed to take on in the first place. I was supposed to lead a graduate student meeting (we were all riled up over our new head of graduate studies), but I couldn't do it. Told my friends I just had to bail out -- the messiah role had become too much, and I needed everything I had to deal with my daughter.

She had come to live with me the summer before, at age 14. For two years before that I'd been on my own, living the grad student life, responsible for no one but myself. Staying up late at the library doing research (most nights it was open until 2 a.m.). Doing whatever I wanted or needed to do without having to think about anybody else. I had forgotten how much a child needs, how young 14 really is. Or perhaps never knew.

When my daughter was 7 her father won sole custody of her, two years after our divorce was final. People gasp when I tell them that. It's so unusual for a mom to lose custody. And it's not like I was a drug addict or crazy or whatever. The story is so complicated, how that all happened. How I tried to have a "good divorce" and make sure my daughter had a father involved with her life. How when we were first working out the divorce we were supposed to have joint custody, but the judge wouldn't allow it, so on my husband's promise never to use the power it gave him, I signed over physical custody. And then, two years later, he "changed his mind." Ultimately she did come to live with me -- after her emerging adolescence became too much for her father and stepmother to handle. He gave her up to me easily -- I took advantage of the image of Iowa as a wholesome place for kids.

I went to Iowa from southern California in January, 1984, drawn by some deep voice inside that said I had to make a dramatic change in my life or I would die. I wanted to be in the Iowa Writers Workshop but I'd been turned down, so I took my second choice, the doctoral program in mass communication at the School of Journalism.

Leaving California was easy. I actually exulted in the winters, did what I call my "polar bear routine," walking everywhere even in subzero temperatures. I could do minus 5 with no problem, so long as the wind wasn't blowing.

Leaving my daughter was hard -- the hardest thing I have ever had to do. She'd been pretty cheerful the day before I left. She seemed to be OK with my leaving, seemed to understand when I told her I needed a profession, that I couldn't just be a part-time mother the way I had been.

New Year's Day 1984. We saw "Yentl" together the night before. I told her how I identified with the Barbra Streisand character, that I was going off to school to try to be somebody, to use my brain. She was only 11 years old. How could I expect her to understand? But she seemed to. The last night I was with her, though, she had trouble sleeping. So I did what I often did when she was younger; I lay down beside her and stroked her tummy and sang songs and told her stories until finally she slept.

I knew she was scared about my leaving. But I had to close my heart to that. If I thought too much about it I would never leave.

And I had to leave.

The first eight months after she arrived were rocky. We fought a lot. She would hardly talk to me. I was scared that she and her friends were doing drugs. She showed all the signs. She was screwing up in school although she'd been a good student before. (OK, I was sure her dad would say -- that was my fault. He should have kept her in California. Obviously I wasn't doing my job. He was taking her back.) Finally, at my wit's end (and knowing it was a terrible thing to do), I read her diary and learned she'd been experimenting with a hallucinogen. I confronted her on it, and of course my violation of her privacy made her resist me all the more.

I could not reach her. And I was petrified. How could I possibly solve this problem, alone?

It was my fault. I wasn't there for her. As she told the mother of one of her friends, she saw her more than she saw me. I'd call her up, tell her I was going to be at the library, there's food in the fridge, don't wait up. I think about it now and wonder how I could have done that.

But I grew up on my own. My mom was physically there but she wasn't there. At least, it seemed, not for me. By the time I was 11 I was baby-sitting my three younger siblings. At 16 I was left in charge for two weeks while my parents took a "second honeymoon" in Mexico. I never let on to my parents how scared I was. I was so responsible. I didn't need anybody. I had learned not to need.

The golden pink light emerging from the swagging clouds lifted my spirits. Iowa has a certain subtle beauty I'd come to appreciate. It isn't spectacular, like the broad vistas and deep canyon gorges of the mountains I would escape to when I lived in California. There's nothing impressively large in it. Except for the sky. That's where you find the drama and the spectacle -- in storms as they pass, in the radiant light playing across the soft, rolling ills; the cathedrals of barn, silo, quarry.

The moment the light broke through I reached for my camera, then remembered I'd left it at home. If I returned for it, the light could be gone with the next group of storm clouds. "Just enjoy," I told myself. So I drove, turning down whatever road seemed to offer the best view.

Then I saw the barn. It stood tall against the skyline -- solid, monastic, like a granite outcropping in the Sierras. Just before the barn was a sign for a wildlife refuge to the right, down a gravel road. Wild. Life. Refuge. That's what I needed to see, I thought. So I turned.

Within a couple of miles I saw a sign saying "Mud Road." Somebody's idea of a joke, I thought, laughing. But very soon the gravel gave way to -- you guessed it -- mud. I drove on, however, as if I wanted to get into trouble.

Soon my car started sliding around, fishtailing here and there. But the road was very narrow, with steep ditches on either side. There was no place to turn around. Finally I came to a side road to the left that led to an abandoned barn. I figured the junction would give me enough flat space to maneuver.

It didn't. I ended up with my car not only stuck deep in the mud -- it was on an incline and tilted backward at about a 30-degree angle toward the ditch.

I had set myself up for this challenge. If I could get out of this mess, I thought, perhaps I could find a way through the anger and mistrust between my daughter and me.

First I tried gathering brush to put under the tires, then rocked the car. It didn't work. Got some more brush, rocked the car. Didn't work. More. Still didn't work. I finally figured out that I was never going to get the car to budge at that angle, so I backed it down the road toward the abandoned barn and tried more brush. No luck, still. Unwilling to give up, I tromped through the mud to check out the barn.

The interior was dark and scary, and I didn't want to linger. Who knew what ax murderer might be lurking in the shadows? I quickly found some broken wooden planks -- unfortunately, with nails in them. Well, I figured I'd lay them nail-side down underneath the tires and pray.

I tromped back through the mud and laid them down. Rocked the car. Didn't work. Got out, took note of the angles, rearranged the planks. The car budged a little. Went back to the barn, got some more planks, and rearranged them. Rocked, rocked, rocked, rocked

Then, at the very instant I was ready to give up, the car shot forward so fast I nearly ended up in the ditch on the other side.

When I felt that car move forward, I shouted gleefully at the top of my lungs. I felt higher than the sky. I sang and shouted all the way home.

That night my daughter let me "baby" her in a way she hadn't for years. She talked about being terribly hurt when I left California (something she wouldn't admit to before), and about how much she missed her stepdad.

I slowed down my progress in the graduate program after that. She was interested in photography, too, so I took her into the darkroom and taught her how to print. We went out into the countryside and shot old barns together. In her senior year she placed second in a high school photography competition.

I can't say we lived "happily ever after." We still had some pretty hard years, fighting years, years we weren't sure we'd done the right thing by coming back together. But something held tight.

Maybe it was all the time I'd spent singing to her each night when she was little, rocking her and rubbing her tense little back. Maybe it was remembering the times so long ago when she'd seen me crying over the terrible state my life was in, and brought me a Kleenex and her "blanky" to comfort me.

Whatever it was, we saw our way through.