19 February

When no one knows where I am

1991, 2011

That first time, I was seven and I didn’t tell a soul. I made a pilgrimage across the biggest city in Vermont to Cassler’s Toy Store for a troll with purple hair.

In Springfield, Massachusetts I walked down the block to the drugstore lunch counter to buy a bowl of chicken noodle soup I could have had for free at home. It’s the sort of thing the grown-ups do.

When I was ten I ran away to the woods behind our house on the Monkton road. I hid for hours under boughs draped to the ground, waiting for the search party that never came. I returned along the trail of footprints I’d left in the snow to find my father lacing up his hiking boots.

I used to wander down the railroad tracks along the river late at night, lucky to be alive, my folks would say if they’d found out, but no one in the bushes by the rails waiting to murder me knew I was there.

I searched the dark midsummer streets of the second biggest city in Vermont when I was seventeen, in tears. I never found the rose-gold Spanish brooch my mother sometimes let me wear.

On my way back down East Mountain it was getting dark and the sky-blue blazes led me into a swamp each time I followed them. I remember wishing just this once I’d told someone where I was going, but I hadn’t, so I walked back up the trail until I found the place where two trails of blazes forked, and ran down the other one singing the Doxology all the way to my dorm room.

One winter afternoon in Cincinnati I ate a pint of Jamoca Almond Fudge at a Bergman matinee, then walked toward home through the early dark past a jeering gang of men in denim and metal. I imagined my body in the morgue with Jane Doe on the toe tag, since no one knew where I was.

In the hills above what, at the time, was the world’s busiest lumber port, I hiked from my new job to the college where I sang alto in the community choir. I watched the faces in the cars blur by and thought maybe they know where I am, but they don’t know me, so they don’t count.

I remember a meeting that was interrupted over and over by phone calls, the best thing about it. One by one, each subcommittee member got a call, except for me. “You’re next,” they joked and I laughed and didn’t tell them no one even knows I’m here.

There’s a patch of ground on a slope overlooking Lake Baikal, a narrow twisting path through the tropical forest of Little Corn Island, Nicaragua, an empty compartment on a train hurtling through a snowy night toward Tarnow, Poland, a steep stretch of road spilling down out of McLeod Ganj, India to the terraced valley below where tiny fires sparkle like gemstones, a balcony in Siem Reap, Cambodia overlooking a garden that’s a wetland in the rainy season. All over the world, no one knows where I am.