Brian Benson
One decade ago, two years after he’d retired, and two years before either of us had begun therapy, my dad and I went cross-country skiing in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It was late December, a few days after Christmas. Dad, for Christmas, had gotten a big box of weed chocolates from a pal in Colorado, and he’d suggested we eat some during our day in the woods. I wasn’t sure that was the best idea, but he and I hadn’t been connecting, not like we once had, and I missed him.
“Why not?” I said.
I drove. It was important for me, back then, to drive. I told myself it was because I wanted to take care of Dad, this kind, gentle man, the man who’d raised me, who’d for thirty-plus years worked crazy hard building crazy elaborate homes to earn the money that afforded me my lofty ambitions and soft landings. I wanted to take care of this man who’d loved biking back roads and skiing laps around frozen lakes, who’d instilled in me a deep love for the same, who’d for decades built an identity around all of the above, then abruptly lost most of it, when, in the span of a year, he sold his business, and his body and mind began to revolt, and he turned from a home-building, century-riding demigod into a sixty-two-year-old man who tended toward nervous laughter and thousand-foot stares.
I drove, I told myself, because I wanted to take care of him.
What I didn’t tell myself: I drove because I needed to feel in control of something.
We were bound for the Porcupine Mountains, a state park on the shore of Lake Superior. The plan was to ski a twelve-mile loop, one we’d done together years ago, when I was basically still a kid. It was a perfect December day. Cloudless skies, no wind, every tree and hill and home blanketed in sun-glittered snow. As I drove, we talked. Dad told me about the bike trail he was co-designing, the building project he’d soon be doing in Haiti. I told him about the machinations of publishing, my upcoming book tour, the classes I was teaching. Our conversation felt lighter than it had lately. Lately, when we talked, Dad would try to give me fatherly advice, and I’d tell him I didn’t need it and then give him advice, about taking care of himself, about maybe finding a therapist. We both clearly wanted to be the adults in the room. The men in the room. So that day, though we were talking somewhat freely, we were also still holding back. I wasn’t telling him how afraid I was that everyone would hate my book. Wasn’t telling him that, since sending the final draft to my editor, I’d barely written and had begun to wonder if I had anything left to say. Wasn’t telling him how lonely I was, how tired I was of being single for the sixth straight year, how scared I was that there was something wrong with me.
I wondered what he wasn’t telling me.
I still didn’t know how to ask.
When we were halfway to the trail, Dad pulled out the chocolate. It was called a Mile High Bar. I asked him how much we should eat, and he said the wrapper said the serving size was one bar. The wrapper also said that one bar was 175 milligrams of THC. This was 2013, a few years before weed was legalized in Oregon, so my understanding of dosing was basically: fill up the pipe and smoke it. I did think 175 milligrams sounded like kind of a lot, and I suggested we look it up. Neither of us had cell service, though. And it did say the serving size was one bar. We decided to split it, just to be safe.
Later, we’d learn that this serving was the recommended dosage for people who had a terminal illness and needed weapons-grade medication to sleep through their chronic pain.
Later, we’d learn this.
It was about eleven o’clock when we snapped on our skis. The parking lot was mostly empty, temp in the low twenties, trail freshly groomed. We set off, and within a few minutes I was feeling ecstatic. The snow was extra sparkly, the air extra sweet, and the simple motion of skiing—the kick and glide, whoosh and thunk—suddenly felt quasi-religious. “This is glorious!” Dad kept chirping, as he skied in front of me. Every few minutes, he’d turn around, grinning, pointing his poles at various mounds of snow in the woods and saying he wanted to go touch them. A few times, he did.
It made me happy to see Dad this happy, to be this happy with him. A few years earlier, before he’d retired, and before I’d started taking myself so seriously, we’d played like this a lot. We’d biked a dirt road to an Ecuadorian waterfall, then hitched back to our hostel. We’d gone cliff diving together, headbanged to Nirvana together, done a geriatric triathlon (horseshoes, mini golf, shuffleboard) together on a visit to my grandpa’s retirement community. We’d even, a few times, gotten really high together. I’d almost forgotten, by now, that we could be like this. I was glad he’d suggested this trip. I told him so, and he said he was glad, too, then stuffed a handful of snow in his mouth.
After about twenty minutes, we came upon some people skiing the other direction. A happy couple, with their happy kids. “Perfect day for a ski!” one of them said, and I opened my mouth to respond, but it took one hundred percent of my being to manage a simple, “Yeah.”
Once they’d passed from earshot, I told Dad I wasn’t sure we should ski so far today.
“Aw,” Dad said, over his shoulder. “Are you not feeling so good?”
“Are you?” I asked.
“Yeah, buddy!” he yelled. “I feel grrreeeat!”
He really said it like that. Like Tony the Tiger.
Dad said that we should keep going, the cold air would help. And because I was feeling weak, feeling small, feeling humiliated that my sexagenarian dad could still party harder than me, I said okay.
I picked up the pace, darted out in front of Dad to show how fine I was. I was fine, I kept telling myself, as I listened to the whoosh of my skis, felt the frigid air on my face. Before long, though, I realized that there was a problem. And the problem was that I could only focus on one of these things at a time. If I knew the snow was pretty, I didn’t know I was skiing through it. If I knew I was skiing through it, I didn’t know Dad was behind me. If I knew Dad was behind me, I didn’t know we were in Michigan. If I knew we were in Michigan, I didn’t know what it meant to be somewhere.
I suddenly needed to close my eyes. I needed a little nap. Or maybe a big one. I was wearing jeans, though, and there was no bed here, just two-foot-deep snow. I was scared. And embarrassed that I was scared. I stopped skiing, and Dad pulled up beside me with the hugest smile on his face. He was so happy. I wondered if I could maybe keep going, if I was just being a baby.
“Dad,” I said. Words were so hard.
He leaned forward on his poles.
“I think we should turn around,” I said.
Dad started laughing. It was this goofy giggle, like something you might hear out of a seven-year-old watching Saturday morning cartoons.
I was getting dizzy.
“Dad,” I repeated. “I think we’re too high to do this.”
“Speak for yourself!” he yelped, then did his Tony the Tiger thing again.
I wanted so badly for him to need what I needed. Wanted him to be as weak as me, or weaker. He was looking up at the sky, though, looking at it like it’d just proposed to him.
“Fine,” I said. “I can’t do it, Dad. I need to go back.”
All at once, he got very serious, as if he’d just remembered that he was Daddy and I was Baby. “Okay, Bri,” he said, nodding. “Let’s go back.”
I felt a wave of relief, followed by a bigger wave of shame. On the one hand, Dad was taking care of me. On the other hand, Dad was taking care of me.
Dad was beginning to turn himself around. Halfway, though, he stopped, skis perpendicular to the tracks. He looked over one shoulder, then the other. He tilted his head.
“Do you kind of feel,” he asked, nearly whispering, “like someone else is out here with us?”
I stared at him for a second, sure he was fucking with me.
He cupped a hand to his ear.
He wasn’t fucking with me.
Only then did I remember a thing I knew about myself, a thing everyone knew. I had a very fast metabolism. Guinness-Book-of-World-Records fast. Dad wasn’t partying harder than me. He was just partying slower. Wherever the hell I was, he’d be joining me, soon.
“Dad,” I said. “We are going back to the car. Now.”
He shrugged, said okay, if I needed to, we could go.
I took the lead, Dad following close behind. I had no clue how far we’d skied, how many miles separated us from the car. Two? Thirty? With every stride, I could feel more lights flicking off in my brain and body. Goodbye, peripheral vision. Goodbye, hippocampus. Everything was very loud, and my vision was darkening around the edges, and my legs and arms were shaking, and though I was a good skier—had done half-marathons, made decent time—I was now working as hard as I could to just stay upright, to stay awake, to remember that there was snow, and I was skiing, with Dad, in Michigan.
Snow, ski, Michigan, Dad, I thought, over and over again.
Finally, we pulled up to the little ungroomed sidewinder that led to the parking lot. It’d been easy on the way in, because we’d been going slightly uphill and had still known our names. Now, though? Double black diamond, at least. I came into a sweeping downhill turn way too fast, missed it, and plowed into a snowbank. Just as I pulled myself up, I turned to see Dad, arms spread wide, mouth open, fly around the corner and bellyflop into powder. He lay there, starfished in the snow, for just long enough that I wondered if he’d knocked himself out. Then he stirred. I waddled over, helped him up.
We made it to the parking lot, barely. Dad was no longer grinning. He was no longer even skiing. Just duck-walking like a little kid while gaping at the trees, the cars, his hands, his feet. We found our car, shed our skis and poles and got inside. Dad took the driver’s seat. He managed to turn on the engine and the heat, and I exhaled, feeling so relieved and so proud that I’d known our limits and gotten us back here. I reclined my seat, lay back and did what I’d been yearning to do: I shut my eyes.
I’d had the spins before. This, though, was not the spins. This was the plunges. The second I closed my eyes, I felt like I was being stabbed by a million Technicolor needles. I swallowed back vomit, gripped the armrests and opened my eyes. I heard some rustling to my left, and when I turned I found that Dad was frisking himself. Padding his pants, his jacket, his face. He turned to me, his eyes wild. He wasn’t having fun anymore. “Bri,” he said, “I can’t find my glasses. I lost them out there.”
I’d never seen my dad so scared. Not after he shattered his femur. Not after he retired. Never.
I began constructing a sentence in my head, a sentence that’d tell him it was fine, we could buy new glasses, and anyway he didn’t need to drive today. Before I finished, though, I looked down, and there they were, Dad’s glasses, next to the gearshift. I handed them to him, and he nodded and sat back and exhaled. So I sat back, too, and I looked out at the snow and sky and pine, and I told myself this was fine, everything was fine, but then I heard more rustling and grunting and I turned to find Dad twisted around, staring into the back seat, saying, “I swear. I swear there’s somebody else in here.”
I put a hand on his leg. Worked hard to summon words.
“Just us, Dad,” I said. “Just us.”
He seemed to accept this, and he settled back into his seat and I into mine. After a few minutes, I closed my eyes again, and this time it was okay. I didn’t feel like I was going to projectile vomit or get eaten by my own face. I began to do what I often do when I get way too high, I began to do what I often do when I get way too high, which is compose music and kaleidoscopic music videos in my head, and then watch those videos play on a screen in my chest; I was well into a synth-heavy opus when I heard, again, some noise from the captain’s chair. I opened my eyes and looked over and found that Dad was outside the car, staring at his feet.
“Dad,” I said.
He looked up at me, and this time it wasn’t fear on his face. It was something I couldn’t name, something I wouldn’t be able to name until a few years later, when he got his Parkinson’s diagnosis, when he had a few bouts of intense delirium, when it became clear that there was something happening in his brain for which none of us would ever have language.
“Dad,” I said again.
He was looking for something, he said, when I asked what he was doing. When I asked what he was looking for, though, he couldn’t remember. Saying this seemed to make him more scared—or, rather, more of whatever it was he was feeling—and so I did my best, with the few words I had left, to coax him back into the car and tell him it was okay, we were okay, we had everything we needed.
For the next little while, or maybe a long while, we sat there, both of us staring straight ahead into the woods. The longer we sat there, not talking, the more impossible it seemed that we would ever talk again. At some point, I heard some noise outside the car, and I glanced out my window and there were people, right there beside us, taking off their skis and talking very fast. I faced forward. I could feel them looking at me, at both of us, at these two men sitting silently in an idling car. I knew what they were thinking. They were thinking, just look at these men. These men who are out in this glorious place on this glorious day, just sitting in their vehicle, straight-faced, silent. How sad, they were thinking, to be the sort of man who can’t communicate with other men. A man who can’t communicate with his own father. Such bad, sad men, they were thinking. They were going to tell everyone.
By the time I crawled out of my shame hole and looked back out the window, the people and their car were gone. I stared at the empty parking spot for a long time. Then I turned the other way, toward Dad. Dad’s eyes looked like a wild animal’s eyes. He was blinking a lot. Rubbing his hands on his legs. I knew, whether or not he’d admit it, that he’d been depressed, on and off, for years. I knew very well what could happen if one got too high while depressed. I didn’t want that to happen to him.
“Dad,” I said, very slowly. “Are you okay?”
He gripped the steering wheel with both hands. Shook his head.
I felt my tongue going fat in my mouth. He needed help. I didn’t know how to help him.
Then he smiled.
“Okay,” he said. “Just stooooooned to the bone.”
I laughed, for the first time in what felt like forever. Dad laughed, too.
I was settling back into my seat, getting ready to compose some more music, when I felt Dad’s hand on my leg. I turned to him. He was leaning toward me, his eyes huge.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
At first, I felt kind of offended. Felt a little sorry for him. I thought we both knew that he was the increasingly infantile retiree, and I was the adult, the one who took care of him now. I kept looking at him. At the face of the man who’d taught me how to shave, how to ride a bike.
“Yeah, Dad” I said, squeezing his hand. “I’m okay.”
For the next hour or two, this is how it went. We closed our eyes when other people appeared beside us and prayed they wouldn’t speak to us. I made more music videos in my chest. Dad, here and there, spun around in his seat, looking for whatever or whoever he thought was behind him. And every few minutes, one of us would lean forward and ask the other, “Are you okay?”
Over the course of the day, we probably asked and answered this question three dozen times. And at some point, I stopped feeling annoyed about Dad checking on me. It was kind of nice, actually, to be asked how I was doing, asked by my father, by this man who looked a lot like me, who was so often confused and wonderstruck and delighted and terrified in the same ways I was.
“Are you okay?” he asked me.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
Again and again, we asked.
And again and again, we told each other, as best we could, that we were okay. Or, maybe we weren’t, but eventually we would be, could be. The only way to know was to never stop asking.
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Brian Benson is the author of GOING SOMEWHERE and co-author, with Richard Brown, of THIS IS NOT FOR YOU. Originally from the hinterlands of Wisconsin, Brian now lives in Portland, Oregon, where he teaches creative nonfiction at the Attic Institute. His short nonfiction has appeared in Hippocampus, Sweet, Bending Genres, and Hunger Mountain, among several other journals.