As a toddler, my daughter loved the Good Dog, Carl books. In these stories, two parents leave their beloved rottweiler Carl to watch over the crib of their sleeping child while they go out. Unbeknownst to the parents, Carl and the child slip out into the world. The dog dresses, feeds, carries, and protects the child as they undertake a new adventure in each book—a zoo, a masquerade, a birthday party—and then return undetected to the child’s bedroom.
My daughter is no longer a child, but she still loves children’s books and still has a fascination with dogs, wolves, and other animals. She has a developmental disability, autism spectrum disorder, that makes her particularly attuned and sensitive to the natural world and makes it difficult for her to function in the human, social world. She excels at facts but struggles with interpretation. In the summer of 2019, for her twenty-first birthday, I took her to Alaska, a place she had wanted to go for years.
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Our first stop north of Anchorage was the town of Talkeetna, on the way to Denali National Park. Located at the convergence of three rivers, Talkeetna was on the map before Anchorage—an Athabascan village, a trading post, a mining and prospecting town, and then a steamboat and railway stop. Now, it is a tourist trap. After visiting a musher’s kennel and getting a sled-dog ride, we walked among throngs of visitors in the town center, past Alaska-themed curio shops, galleries, restaurants, and microbreweries. It was the kind of crowded, loud, overstimulating environment that brings out what others would likely describe as “odd” behaviors in my daughter. In these situations, she will sometimes pace or prance back and forth, flapping her hands, words forming soundlessly on her lips. At Nagley’s Store, which preserves a rustic, frontier look at big-city prices, she stood stroking an animal pelt for minutes, a rapt expression on her face, until I quietly told her to move on because she was calling attention to herself. Shortly after, she bounded onto the porch of the High Expedition marijuana dispensary because she saw a wolf T-shirt for sale. I heard male voices laughing deliriously inside and steered her away from the door. From there we walked to the rushing Susitna River, past hipster wanderers sleeping in hammocks strung between trees, empty bottles on the grass beside them. I cast a wary eye on passersby, then cautioned her to stay back from the eroding riverbank. I suppose I am a little too protective of her, but I feel responsible for monitoring possible dangers and assessing the intentions of people around her, because at age twenty-one, she is not able to do so herself.
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My daughter was born in Shiprock, New Mexico, on the Navajo Nation. My wife worked for the public health service there while I taught part-time at a junior college. Our daughter spoke early and spoke a lot, learning both Navajo and English words. She was an ardent, elfin child with thick, puffy, dark hair, a button nose, long eyelashes, and gigantic brown eyes. She was and is beautiful. At age two she spoke in full sentences, and her memory astonished us. She would repeat verbatim long segments of movies like Balto or The Lion King, not only exact words but cadences and intonations. Her mind was like a digital recorder. But in her spontaneous speech, she struggled. She recited more than she interacted, and she had trouble with pronouns. The word you requires a shift in perspective-taking based on who says it. She did not understand the valence of you. When she was thirsty, she might say, “You want a drink of water?”
As a toddler she was tyrannically rigid about routines, preferences, and textures. We spent an entire year feeding her Yves vegetarian hot dogs and trying to sneak fruits into smoothies. She was affectionate with us but barely noticed other children. Yet her oddity was charming. The otherworldly burble of her self-talk seemed like a keyhole glimpse into a strange and magical landscape we could just barely discern. Her mind would hover, loop, and flit sideways like a bee between blossoms. We felt sure she was bound for brilliance in something. We loved her, and because she was our first child, we accommodated her behaviors and demands, stretching more and more, holding tight to the generous assessments of nonplussed friends and relatives—She definitely marches to her own drummer!—and warding away a fear that our daughter’s life might be much different, and harder, than the one we had imagined.
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Leaving Talkeetna, we spotted a Thai restaurant in a roadside cabin that looked better suited to selling fireworks than food.
“Thai food! I want Thai food!” she demanded. Her tastes had broadened considerably over the years, but her rigidity remained.
“We’re in Alaska,” I said. “You can get Thai food just about anywhere. Why don’t we go for some salmon or halibut?”
“Please Dad. Thai food, just tonight!” she insisted.
In fact, we’d eaten mediocre strip-mall Indian food the night we landed in Anchorage. While it is a generally accepted tourist convention to eat, photograph, and rave about the local cuisine on a vacation, convention means little to her. She loves Thai and Indian food and eats it every chance she gets. She can be frustratingly insistent and inflexible when she wants something. It is like negotiating with a battering ram. I often use the words “badgering” and “hectoring,” which convey something of the visceral persistence and the heroic strength of her willpower.
“I don’t know,” I grumbled, pulling over. “It looks kind of…sketchy.”
She had pad thai, and I had green curry. The owners were recent transplants from Thailand, and the food was excellent.
“This is the bomb,” my daughter said, using a phrase about ten years out of date. “Thai food in Alaska. It doesn’t get any better than this!”
I realized that by yielding to her we had both won. This was her trip, and if it hadn’t been for her, we’d have been eating overpriced halibut. I needed to resist the urge to control things; I needed to let her choose. Our twelve days had already narrowed to ten, and I knew they would fly by. After that, we’d be returning, me to my job in the public schools and her to a future that was and is a big question mark, or—perhaps a better way to put it—a precipice.
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In the autism community, there is something known as the services cliff. School districts are required by the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) to provide free and appropriate educational services for people with disabilities. Special education is expensive for school districts, but it is a legal right for students. After graduation, students can still receive “transition services,” including vocational training, job placement, or day-habilitation opportunities. And then, at age twenty-two, these services end. There is often nothing to replace them. Affordable residential and day services for adults with autism are, depending on the state, either scarce or nonexistent. Adults on the autism spectrum have the lowest rate of employment among people with disabilities even though many possess strong cognitive abilities in discrete areas and have qualities like honesty, attentiveness to detail, and excellent rote memory. One of the most comprehensive studies of adults with autism, published in 2017 by Drexel University, found that only 14 percent of adults with autism who were receiving state Developmental Disability services held a job for pay. As it happened, my daughter had just lost her part-time job at a cafe because of challenging behaviors associated with autism. When she returned from the trip, there was nothing on her schedule.
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From Talkeetna, we drove north to Denali National Park, where we saw another sled-dog show and then took a packed tour bus through the park, scanning the flowering tundra and taiga slopes and riverbeds for wildlife. Subalpine valleys of flowering dwarf shrubs were sparsely adorned with spruce and willow trees along the streambeds. The bus driver slowed to point out moose ambling on a distant slope, then a caribou in a stream. Beyond the hillsides and valleys, the peak of Denali was obscured by cloud cover and remained so for our time there. I was told two out of three visitors never see Denali’s summit because of clouds.
Like me, my daughter loves the outdoors. She is a strong and uncomplaining hiker who consistently reminds us, as vacations approach, of all the national parks we haven’t seen. When she was a baby, I often hiked with her in a marsupial carrier in the Four Corners area—at the Hovenweep National Monument, along the Shiprock, through Arches, and even into the Grand Canyon. I remember holding her thick little feet as we walked, sometimes tickling them, while she cooed and babbled contentedly, filling her senses, and eventually yawned and slumped forward in sleep. Our perspectives were completely aligned then; she was at the center of me, seeing what I saw, feeling my lungs expand and my heart beat. Parenting is like that in the early years. You bear all of a child’s weight, and you are never closer. But even then, a slow and necessary divergence is beginning, a splitting of perspective, of experience, of intimacy, as the child takes control of her own life, or tries.
In part, it was the open space, the wildness and nonconformity of Alaska that appealed to both of us. But even in Denali National Park, there are social situations to navigate. On the tour bus, she began to question me aggressively about our itinerary, and when I brushed her elbow, she pushed back hard on my arm. Her manner was taut and agitated. I sensed she was headed for an emotional meltdown, something that had happened before on planes and busses. What she really needed to do was move—walk, prance, flap her hands—and bleed off some of the anxious energy, but she couldn’t. Despite the fact that a pathless wilderness extended for miles in every direction around us, we were stuck in a confined space with a group of people, and having experienced her tantrums before, I experienced my own, more neurotypical panic—a heightened awareness of others and their potentially judgmental thoughts, a fear of causing a scene in front of a group—as I negotiated with her in a tense whisper.
We made it to the next stop, where we got out, and a young Native American man gave a quick talk about the history, hunting, and customs of the Alaskan Athabascans. With his long hair, goatee, and warm, winsome voice, he looked to me like an environmental-sciences major who maybe fronted a band for kicks. This was his summer job, I imagined, and what he needed to do in about ten minutes was present the National Park Service’s official acknowledgement that Native Americans knew, named, and belonged to this land first. What he did not need was a series of repetitive questions about the sociolinguistic relationship between Alaskan Athabascan tribes and the Southwestern Athabascan tribes. But this is what my daughter gave him.
“Is your tribe kind of the same as the Southwestern American Indian tribes, the Navajo and Apache, who speak an Athabascan language? So, are you kind of the same?”
“Kind of the same, only we’re better,” he answered, gamely, and then tried to move on. But this answer did not compute with my daughter’s factual understanding. So, with a crowd of about fifty waiting, she asked the question again, slightly rephrased, in an anxious, needling voice that I have heard many times. He then politely told her that the term “American Indian” was not used (although, it sometimes is by Native Americans where she was born) and tried to move on with his talk, but she interrupted him with her original question, replacing “American Indian” with “Native American.”
People around us glanced and muttered, and I saw a head shake. I tapped her shoulder and whispered, “It’s someone else’s turn to ask a question. Let him go on now.” At which point she turned to me and almost yelled, “No, Dad, leave me alone!” and then asked her question for the fourth time.
There was a short, excruciating silence. I walked away from the group because I felt a familiar frustration growing in me, a pulsing, radiating anger that focuses first on my daughter—her intransigent behaviors embarrassing me—but is immediately deflected by my love for her outward, toward the people who stare, who don’t understand, who make it an issue, whom I will glare at, mad dog, only to realize as they avoid my gaze, turn away, or occasionally even nod understandingly, that it is not their fault either, because there is something—this thing called autism—that my daughter was born with, and I cannot get my hands on it; I cannot beat it into submission; I cannot protect her from it because it’s part of who she is. And so, the anger swirls in me and erupts outward, focusing on things it shouldn’t. It has brought me to the edge of a fistfight more than once. It has screwed up my marriage. It has encouraged me to drink that third beer. Some days, the anger wins.
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Among my daughter’s impractical aptitudes is cartography. Sometimes I will find five or six of the exact same map, drawn scrupulously by hand, with states or territories filled in with different colors. The accuracy and care of these maps impress me, but I get irked by the amount of time and paper she uses drawing the same thing. After reading the book Undaunted Courage with her grandmother, she became obsessed by Lewis and Clark’s journey and the story of Sacagawea and Pomp, and she would draw multiple identical maps of their expedition route.
A person of Mexican, Peruvian, English, Spanish, Welsh, and Norwegian heritage who was born on the Navajo Nation, she thinks obsessively and cyclically about genetic and cultural identity, and when the proceedings of the outer, experiential world snap into alignment with the orbiting facts in her brain, she feels an immediate need to confirm (rather than discuss and expand upon) what she knows. It is more of a matching exercise than a conversation, a need for resonance and repetition, which is comforting to her. It is her way of understanding the world. This is what happened on the tour in Denali. In her own way, she is trying to figure out who she is.
Humans have an innate need for repetition and likeness, in my opinion; hers is only unusual in degree. I swim laps for exercise and stress relief. Some people call that boring, but I love the rhythmic certainty of it, the even, repetitive breathing sewn into the motion. It’s almost musical: breaths and strokes in 2/4 time; the flip turn at the wall like a double-bar repeat. I love the oxygen greed and the shivering, aqueous light. I swim the same amount—a mile—about four times a week unless my shoulder is bothering me. At age fifty-one, I have learned not to push through pain. Not somatic pain, anyway.
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Before coming to Alaska, my daughter had a job at a large cafe. It was arranged through our school district’s transition services program. For pleasure she often makes waffles and lemon-meringue pies from scratch, following old, grease-stained index-card recipes with zealous precision, but at the cafe she rolled silverware in five-hour shifts on the weekend.
Challenges arose quickly. She has always been hypersensitive: loud noises, as well as unexpected textures or touch, can cause her to freeze, shut her eyes, and clamp her hands over her ears, the way I might if a smoke detector started shrilling a foot away from my head. At the cafe, she stood in a highly trafficked passage between the counter and the kitchen, amid a low tumult of conversation punctuated by the clatter of dishes. Wait staff brushed against her as they passed. All this overwhelmed her senses, and she took fifteen-minute bathroom breaks to decompress, which did not thrill her supervisor.
Like many others on the autism spectrum, my daughter has difficulty recognizing what other people are thinking about her behaviors. While she can follow explicit rules, she has difficulty with hidden rules—the way people change their actions, their register, their body language, even their facial expressions from, say, a bank to a bus to a bar. There was no explicit rule that she could not lick her fingers after touching syrup bottles, and you can get away with that at home, but at the cafe other employees noticed and felt uncomfortable with this behavior.
Her job instructions were to roll knife, fork, and spoon sets into a napkin, following a very precise pattern, then to place them in perforated plastic buckets. When she finished a bucket, she would carry it to the hostess, who then placed the rolled-up napkin-silverware combinations onto a clean table when she sat a new party. My daughter was told to fill five buckets a shift.
During a rush, the hostess came back several times and took buckets of silverware that were only half full. My daughter had been told to fill the buckets with silverware and bring them, full, to the hostess. Although the point of her job was to provide the hostess with clean silverware, her instructions were to fill the buckets, and in taking the buckets away half-full, the hostess was causing her to fail at her job, which made her feel desperate. She went over to the hostess and, unable to contain her frustration, stepped on the woman’s toe, hard.
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After Denali, we drove south to Whittier, a former military base on the Kenai Peninsula that is reached via a rough-hewn, one-car-width tunnel blasted through a mountain. One emerges into a picturesque fishing village among startling peaks. Cascading streams of glacial melt feed lush, forested slopes above the town. Whereas Talkeetna’s main square felt like tourist flypaper—not much left to the town but its bright, sticky surfaces—Whittier is a working town, where fishermen in rubber overalls and boots unload their catches late into the night. Up the hill from the docks sits a hulking, fourteen-story building that once housed military personnel and now contains almost the entire town’s population, as well as its school and services. Many have commented on its ugliness, but to me the drab, monolithic building serves only to highlight the overwhelming natural beauty of mountains, glaciers, and water that surround it.
On our first morning in Whittier, we hiked up onto a ridge above the town. She was quiet, intent on the path and the landscape, and we felt happy in each other’s company. From the ridge the boats looked tiny, inching along the passage. We stood as the wind blew the cool glacial air and the smell of lush vegetation, and we talked about things we were grateful for. Later, we took a high-speed catamaran tour of the immense Prince William Sound, where the peaks and glaciers of the Chugach Mountains rise above pristine spruce and hemlock rain forests. Eventually, the tour boat sidled up to a tidewater glacier, and tourists thronged the decks, GoPros, cameras and cell phones in hand.
Up close, this glacier was a massive and beautiful thing, a frozen anarchy of cracked shapes and shadows in glowing cyan and turquoise, rising a good hundred feet out of the water, leading back to a distant apron of ice slung between black peaks. It radiated pure cold. Every so often a distant crack, like a cannon shot, caused a stir of excitement on the deck. People waited in hushed anticipation, hoping to record a building-sized chunk breaking off to create a splash and a wave, while the captain noted over the loudspeaker that this glacier had been “extremely active” due to climate change.
In fact, glaciers throughout Alaska and all over the world are receding and disappearing. There are potentially catastrophic effects of vanishing glaciers—on sea level, water temperature, available fresh water; on plants, animals, and humans—but nonetheless we all cheered at the spectacle as we stood on deck with two huge diesel engines pumping out fumes behind us. When a small piece of ice broke off and fell, people oohed and ahhed. Despite myself, I found myself waiting along with them, hoping to catch a great explosion of melting ice. My daughter did not. She does not mirror other people or become interested in something simply because others are. And she did not care to see the glacier breaking apart. She was below deck, reading a book about wolves.
At Exit Glacier, our next stop on the Kenai Peninsula, the National Park Service has highlighted the issue of climate change by placing wooden signs marked with different years along the glacial valley. Standing at the 2005 sign, one can look up the rocky valley to the glacier’s terminus hundreds of yards away and see how far it has retreated in the intervening years. We hiked to the end of the trail, near the snout of the glacier, where we made a video diary about our day and our observations. I wondered if the glacier would be gone when my daughter reached my age in 2050.
Back at the visitor center, she cornered a U.S. park ranger and began asking him anxiously about glaciers and warming temperatures. I hovered behind her, ready to help her move on, worried he might get impatient, but the ranger was delighted. He gave her detailed answers and extra handouts about climate change in national parks. Although the park was crowded, few people had apparently asked these questions. He seemed relieved that someone actually cared.
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In fact, my daughter cares a lot about climate change. It seems like a sign of her autism spectrum disorder—her factual and cyclical and anxious way of thinking—that she returns constantly to the subject of environmental degradation, global warming, and habitat loss. Sometimes, she will bring it up twenty-five times in an hour. We call it thought-looping.
Is anybody doing something about the fires and deforestation in Brazil? Will polar bears go extinct? How can we simply shrug and accept that we are destroying coral reefs and with them myriad forms of life?
Although I, too, am upset by climate change, I get tired of her anxiety. The truth is, she does not have the requisite mental flexibility, the skills of self-justification and moral relativism, to buffer this issue with excuses, to blame-shift toward other people or countries, to remediate it with denial and cynical doubts, or to simply ignore it. She can’t get over the fact that we are eliminating species, disrupting the natural world, and creating problems for future generations that will likely cause disproportionate suffering to poor people. Many individuals on the autism spectrum have difficulty lying to others. They are bad at faking, bluffing, and so-called theory of mind. It may be that they have difficulty lying to themselves as well. In this way perhaps they live on a higher ethical plane than the rest of us, but our world is cut to our dimensions, the bar is set to the height of our minds, and we focus instead on what people with autism are not able to do.
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As a toddler, my daughter had a set of six barrel-shaped magic markers. Each marker was a different dog breed—a rottweiler, a poodle, a basset, a German shepherd, a husky, a retriever. The round caps were the dogs’ faces. She treasured and obsessed over these markers. She would arrange them carefully on a table, feel them, talk to them, and even smell the tips as if they were flowers. The only thing she didn’t do was draw or write with them. They were too precious for that. For a year or so she carried them everywhere. The set had to be complete. At a family vacation in Maine over her third birthday, she misplaced the husky marker and began to have an emotional meltdown at bedtime—not tears, but a frantic, anxious wail interrupted by distressed shrieks about her husky.
“We’ll get another set,” we assured her. “I’m sure it will turn up tomorrow.” But the wailing continued, loud enough to be heard across the lake. Imagine a young mother whose child goes missing on a beach with rough water and big waves. Minutes pass, and the child is still gone. My daughter had this level of alarm. She was inconsolable as her extended family, young and old, searched frantically with flashlights, looking under couches, in cars, all around the cabin, until the missing marker was found, and everyone could sleep.
It was on that trip that a caring and knowledgeable aunt mentioned the word “autism” to us. It felt like a dreaded summons from a mysterious, all-powerful court.
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We spent an overnight in the lovely city of Seward, which sits in the shadow of Mount Marathon at the edge of Kenai Fjords National Park. The start of the historic Iditarod trail and the end of the Alaska Railroad, Seward has a busy commercial harbor, a historic downtown, and one of the most stunning small libraries—inside and out—that I have ever seen, with gray stone, stainless-steel tiles of an iridescent peacock purple, and a second floor with wraparound windows overlooking Resurrection Bay. While my daughter slept late, I strolled around town, enjoying seventy-degree weather, shopping for tchotchkes, then walking along the waterfront. Airstreams, Winnebagos, and Casitas lined the camping areas near the waterline. People were out reading, eating, walking, and sunning themselves on a swath of land that was once, in 1964, consumed by a thirty-foot tsunami that tossed train cars and boats into houses, exploded multiple oil-storage tanks, and created a hellscape of fire, water, and industrial debris.
That next afternoon we left Seward and began the final leg of our journey to Homer, on the southwestern side of the Kenai Peninsula, then back to Anchorage. At one point we detoured off a portion of the main road still closed from a forest fire several days earlier. The air smelled of charred wood. In fact, a number of fires were ongoing while we were in Alaska. Spurred by a longer, hotter summer, over two and a half million acres of Alaskan forest burned in 2019. Shortly before we visited, trains to Denali and roads in the area had been shut down. Not long after we left, wildfires threatened the evacuation of Homer. We were lucky. We hit a sweet spot and were not affected by fires; many other people were that summer.
And it’s not just fires and glaciers. There have been other ominous signs of change in Alaska: salmon dying off in rivers that have become too warm. Nearly eight thousand dead common murres washed up on a single mile of beach in Whittier, part of a greater die-off of murres that scientists believe is caused by warming ocean temperatures, and this die-off is just part of a spate of die-offs of other species: tufted puffins, sea lions, baleen whales. How long will the political quorum in this country go on pretending they don’t see this? How long before I radically change my own life? By virtue of being an American and living a middle-class lifestyle, I have generated more waste than most other individuals in the world. I have a motorcycle; I ride it for fun. I eat meat. I take trips on airplanes. I buy products I don’t, strictly speaking, need. As much as anyone else, I am the problem. My daughter has helped me understand this.
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At the southern end of the Kenai Peninsula, the town of Homer is the self-proclaimed end of the road, the terminus of Highway 1. We stayed in a weathered A-frame loft set on a hillside among blooming, head-high purple fireweed. There was a fat, aggressively affectionate tabby cat who lived in and around the house. Great windows looked out on Kachemak Bay and the four-and-a-half-mile Homer Spit, a strip of galleries and shops that protruded into the bay like a long fishhook. I watched the float planes approaching low over the water and the distant fishing boats coming in and out of the harbor, framed by the mountains and glaciers across the bay.
One afternoon we took a kayak trip out into Kachemak Bay, where we paddled around small islands, laughing at the otters floating on their backs, snoozing, untroubled, with sheets of bull kelp as blankets. It was a gorgeously gray day—the kind I have come to appreciate after years of living in Texas and the Southwest—with fomenting cloud battles adding a second dramatic and changing landscape over a more static, mountainous one. I have a picture of my daughter on the water taxi, her smile unguarded and yet almost sly, as if there were some memory of a joke replaying in her mind, or perhaps just a private happiness dancing inside her.
We stayed there two days. It felt like paradise found. If it were not for the slight haze of forest-fire smoke we sometimes saw over Kachemak Bay—far enough away, thin enough, it almost could have been a mist—we would not have known anything could possibly be amiss in the world. I dug into a Russian novel—Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman—and my daughter in the loft above me put on her headphones and practiced with her Duolingo app. We sat in a contented silence, tinged at times by the distant drone of a single-engine plane, the soft patter of cat feet, or interrupted by her sudden non sequitur in another language. For two days, we had found a tiny, peaceable kingdom, our home at the end of the world. My mental journey with the Russian physicist Viktor Shtrum and the heroic defenders of Stalingrad would suddenly be interrupted by my daughter’s voice, loud enough for her to hear herself through her thick headphones: a scrap of Portuguese, resounding through our luminous loft:
“Eu sou uma garota.”
Or: “Não me lembro.”
I didn’t understand it, but it made sense.
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At a certain point in my life, around my mid-forties—an optimistic halfway point—I began to feel the end of things in the beginning of them. This perception feels burdensome. I have been through many cycles of life and experience—homes, trips, cars, pets, houses, relationships. I have seen them begin and end so often that beginning and ending are intertwined. I remember feeling this in the airplane on the way to Alaska. As the jets suddenly boosted in power and the takeoff pushed me back into my seat, I could already taste that peculiar, retrograde sensation of returning home, landing, touching down, all the visions and experiences of the trip folding down like an accordion fan into the thin stick of a runway, the abrupt bump of return, an ending.
Already, the trip was mostly memory. At fifty-one, perhaps the same thing can be said of my life, and when I look back, so many memories of my daughter appear. I can still feel her on my shoulders as a toddler, her little feet in my hands, the slight, almost trifling weight of her, as we watched airplanes land at a tiny airport in Flagstaff, Arizona. I can see her on September 11, 2001, holding onto a string web that all the preschool children held as they exited school early because nobody knew what was going to happen next, even in Arizona. I can see her anxious, off-topic, blurting embarrassingly during a school play in fourth grade—a memory that stings with humiliation and sadness—while accompanied by a kind and gifted special-education teacher who died shortly afterward in a car accident. I can see her poised, excited but controlled, giving her short and eloquent speech at the stage of her high-school graduation before her proud family.
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We left Homer reluctantly and as late as possible, driving north in the late evening light along a bluff that overlooked the Cook Inlet, past the town of Ninilchik, with its Russian Orthodox church among gravestones and flowers, on past Clam Gulch, Kasilof, and Kalifornsky. Our last stop on the trip would be a cabin in the tiny town of Hope, Alaska, but that still lay ahead of us.
By now we’d logged hundreds of miles in our rental car, yet we were not tired of driving in Alaska. We both love music. We listened to some of my favorites—Dylan, Mississippi John Hurt, Peter Case—and some of hers too. She loves Cuban, African, and Brazilian music with complex, polyrhythmic, syncopated drumming and joyous singing. As we drove north toward Hope, in a bubble of thunderous drumming and multipart harmonies, passing along wooded valleys and over braided rivers, I was reminded of her eighteenth birthday, when we went as a family to see a Cuban music group—members of the Buena Vista Social Club—at a theater in Austin. It was a small audience, a few hundred people, and we were close to the stage. As the music picked up, a few people began to twist and sway experimentally around us, signaling that it was time to dance if you were so inclined. And then I saw my daughter pogo-stick bouncing straight up and down in time with the music, like a Maasai warrior, with a delirious smile on her face, flapping her hands. The elderly Cuban singer on stage looked directly at her, and I felt a familiar mixture of embarrassment, defensiveness, amusement, and— in this case—a certain pride. She was being herself. This was a concert; dancing was expected. And this was Austin, Texas, which once considered weirdness a virtue. Yet it was hard not to feel self-conscious too, so I hovered far enough away that people would not immediately associate us but close enough to intercede if the situation somehow escalated, if she got made fun of or bumped into somebody. She was on her own, but I was waiting, watching, at the ready.
Nobody minded, and nothing bad happened. The song ended to great applause, and the venerable bandleader smiled and looked directly at her and nodded.
“Tanta alegria,” he said.
So much joy.