We are at the Mexican place when the artist calls us back and says it’s fine for us to drive up. Altamont, Tennessee is on top of a mountain, an hour plus a little away. It’s too rural for GPS, so my husband grabs a napkin and takes down directions. I poke him and he looks over at me. I want to take the dogs, I mouth, and he nods.
The artist carves faces into stones. I saw his work at a gallery near us a few months ago. Some of the faces were peaceful looking, beatific, while others looked sad or stricken. I couldn’t decide which I wanted, beatific or stricken, so I left, but I couldn’t stop thinking about them. This morning we went back to the gallery so I could choose one for my birthday, but the artist had taken them all out.
“They weren’t great sellers,” said the gallery owner, and jotted down the artist’s phone number.
My husband finishes taking down directions and shoves his phone in his pocket. We pay for lunch and walk to our car. It’s November, but still warm out. We live in a tourist town where people swarm the streets almost year-round, packing the donut shop and the tattoo parlors, the dive bars and the boutiques and the vape stores. At the four-way stop light where the two main roads meet, a Walgreens stands like a sentinel, a bastion of remedies to combat the sting of exaggerated pleasure seeking.
In four days, I will be fifty-eight. I suspect there are many people this age and older who feel, as I do, unnerved by the hard-hearted march of time. I have had good years, to be sure. But I’ve lost many to the torpor of a specific, circular kind of gloom. I need to focus, I need to get ready, my journals say, year after year, but without any indication of what on or what for, pages and pages of earnest delegations from a mind unable to read itself. These days gloom is less an ever-present haze and more random patches of black ice, melancholies I don’t see coming until I’m spinning out. But fifty-eight is sobering. It’s one year older than my father was when he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. It’s one year older than my mother was when he died of it four years later. It’s hard not to feel like I’m standing at the edge of a precipice, and the only way forward is down.
In the car, my husband whistles a tuneless tune under his breath and drums his fingers on the steering wheel. He’s happy to have this small mission to Altamont on an otherwise unscheduled Saturday. I am too, initially, but then I begin to think it’s just a pointless pursuit, a squandering of time (of which I have less and less) that should be spent on endeavors that are outwardly meaningful or that make me a better person, like walking dogs at the animal shelter, for example, or reading something obscure and hard to digest. Things that, when asked, at the edge of a precipice What did you do with your life? I could point to. A net over an abyss. Things that would keep me from falling.
At home I grab the dogs’ harnesses from the coat closet and slip them over their heads. The demented one loads into the car with no trouble but the vivacious one has to be coaxed; once in, she sits sideways in the back seat, eyes cast down like she’s been naughty and this car ride is her punishment. My husband thinks she remembers the trip to the shelter that marked the last time she saw her previous owner, and that this is where her brain goes whenever she is strapped in the back with the other dog mindlessly lounging against her.
“But there was also the car ride that brought her from the shelter to our happy home,” I point out. But we both know that pain leaves a gash, while joy rarely leaves a mark.
It’s ten minutes from the time we pull out of our neighborhood until we get to the highway, and by then my husband has resumed his whistling, a tune with no discernable beginning or end, not even a beat, just one roving nomadic stanza after another. There is still time to renege on this trip, to un-call the artist and go back home and set about doing something of value. I remember standing at my parents’ dining room window when I was a teenager and watching as an endless stream of cars glided noiselessly up and down our road, a steady exhale of frigid air streaming from a vent in front of my legs creating a patch of condensation that slowly crawled up the glass. Where were all those people going, I wondered, what were they doing? These were the years when my own life was spent in staunch avoidance of after school clubs and outings and friends, and so not only could I not imagine what people did at any given time of day or night, I didn’t know why they did any of it, how they convinced themselves it mattered. Looking back, I’m fairly certain I could have watched a team of neurosurgeons perform a brain transplant and been every bit as undone by the banality, the pointlessness of it. I shift around to look at the dogs. The vivacious one is slumped over with her nose almost touching the seat. A cloudbank of despair mushrooms behind my eyes.
When I was a college freshman, I had what I took to be an epiphany. I was in my dorm room with my boyfriend who was pulling me toward the tiny unmade bed when it suddenly occurred to me that, as a psychology major with dreams of being a psychotherapist, I would need to earn a PhD. Newly in awe of myself, I announced that I couldn’t have sex because I was going to be a doctor—a doctor! —and as such, needed to get to the library. It was an aspiration that would guide me for the next decade of my life, and I would feel, that day and every day thereafter until I did not become a doctor, possessed of purpose. The destination known, the road well lit, it was this sense of certainty (and importance) that imbued everything I did for the next many years with the sunny glow of imagined future accomplishment.
In the valley, the trees have only just begun to turn. The yellows are still sallow and pale, the reds not the hotheads they will be in a week’s time. But on this two-lane mountain road up to Altamont, stands of trees in hues of realized gold and scarlet shimmer on the sidelines, so bright and vivid they appear to have been excessively photoshopped. Out of my mouth, like a toneless tune, come insipid platitudes, as if extreme beauty needs an extreme counterpoint so as not to be taken for granted. There is commentary on the weather (“It’s so warm for fall!”); on the swirling leaves (“Like a whirlpool!”), on how curvy the road is (“So curvy!”). I am reminded of my husband’s grandmother who, when she saw a video of their family Christmas, asked, who’s that old lady who won’t shut up? not realizing it was her own incessant chatter filling up the soundtrack.
“How close are we?” I ask my husband, but without GPS he can only venture a guess.
“Not too far,” he says.
The rural roads are narrow and poorly marked. We follow the artist’s directions exactly and still, more than once, wonder if we’ve taken a wrong turn. Streets are like driveways; driveways are like footpaths. The artist’s house sits at the end of a dead-end road, obscured by privet and trees. When we finally find it, we pull in slowly, leaning forward in our seats to look around. The house is beautiful, all dark, weathered wood and tall glass windows. We unfold ourselves from the car and unbuckle the dogs from their seats. Let out first the unhappy one and then the demented one. The artist walks out to greet us, hand extended for a shake. He’s got light hair, a kind, round face, and an easy-going saunter that makes him look like he just happened to wander out of his house and find us there. After introductions he leads us around to the back. There is a semi-circular brick patio with a fire pit, around which a few metal chairs orbit. At the lip of the patio there is a low rock wall. Beyond that, the world falls off into a vast, yawning canyon. I can hear the breeze rattle the leaves and a sound like falling water, but I can’t see anything except this wide gash and its dense population of trees, and across from us, the sheer cliffs of the opposite side.
The story in my family goes like this: In 1949, my father was in his first year of medical school when he had a panic attack he mistook for a heart attack. Believing it was a sign, he never returned to medical school, becoming instead a respected journalist, radio personality, and the author of several historical books. But writing the truth, no matter how well or thoroughly you are able to do it, is rarely lifesaving, and about that my father was never unaware. Having rejected the chance to treat disease, he decided instead embody it, seeking sympathy and cures for increasingly indistinct ailments. At fifty-eight, after a lifetime of good health he could not abide, he was diagnosed with bladder cancer. It was the black ice he’d always anticipated, yet never saw coming. After he died, my mother found notes he’d written to himself, apologias for all he did not become, tucked into folders alongside letters to his brother and multiple certificates of accolade.
From the canyon arises a hush. The quiet is somehow both floating and weighty, like how I feel in water, or in bed just before sleep. A breeze weaves through pine boughs and picks up my hair. In the distance there is a waterfall, or the sound of wind like a waterfall. My husband taps me on the shoulder, as if to remind me why we are here, and I turn to face an audience of carved, genderless stone faces. A few are the size of a large male torso. Most are the size of a human head. There are the beatific looking ones and the stricken looking ones I’d seen at the gallery. There are some that appear cross, and others mirthful. A few look startled, as if they were caught off guard in the carving, and shocked to find themselves emerging from the dumb unknowingness of stone. I am most sympathetic to these.
One night, after I have left my post at my parents’ dining room window, a driver overshoots the curve just past our house and his car nose-dives into our ravine, trapping him in the wreckage. Another night, my father’s new Volkswagen Beetle, whose parking brakes he has failed to engage, excuses itself from the carport and plummets backward, plowing down our persistently rotting split rail fence, and then the thick underbrush, before the woods swallow it whole. If those wayward cars were harbingers of the way my own life would careen off course, I couldn’t have known it at the time. But what life doesn’t, without warning, hurtle awry?
By the time I started applying to doctoral programs I had wrestled my way through anorexia nervosa, worked as a substance abuse counselor for a year, and gotten a master’s degree in psychology. I was close to my goal, but admittedly tired of the tropes—counselor as wounded healer, the concept of identified patient, the alcoholic codependent—and I had, I felt, lost my capacity for empathy. I was weary of the gushers of dysfunction that had an easily identifiable source but no apparent cut-off
valve. But I ignored these feelings and applied anyway. Because without the sunny glow of imagined future accomplishment, I would be adrift, or worse, immobile: a bystander at a chilly window watching fathomed lives glide by. My trifling activities, gilded by the promise of future purpose, would lose their shine, and my most banal conversations, elevated by the assurance of a brilliance biding its time, would deflate, leaving only the thin ice of observation: annotations about swirling leaves, and the unremarkable geometry of streets.
But I turned down my acceptance to a doctoral program in Kentucky. I told myself I wanted to hold out for a better program, that it was only a matter of sending another round of applications. I promised myself I would start immediately. But I never did. Instead I took a job at a community mental health center and moved with my three large dogs from South Carolina to the rural outposts of north Georgia, and that was that. Unlike my father, for whom a panic attack masquerading as a heart attack made him change course, there was no big event that made me change mine, just the gradual erosion of passion for that which I always believed would define me. For the next fifteen years, until I quit to become, like my father, a writer, I ministered to the ills of the depressed and the weary and the frightened, many of them less unhappy than myself. I didn’t do a bad job—I like to think some of them are at this moment making their way from the donut shop to the tattoo parlor, soaking up all the fun that can be had in my small tourist town, because I in some way helped them feel better about themselves.
From the line-up of carved faces, I choose one with kind-looking eyes, a wide nose, and a soft mouth that reminds me of my father holding back a laugh. There is a deep gash in the stone that runs the length of one cheek. I wonder if the gash was already present in the stone when the artist found it or whether he chiseled it in, but I don’t ask, because I decide it doesn’t matter whether it was born in the stone or exacted upon it. It is a harshness, a ruggedness, a mark, somehow, of survival.
My husband pays the artist and puts the stone in the back seat floorboard. I strap the dogs in and we wave goodbye. Miraculously, the one who hates car rides relaxes and sleeps all the way home. That evening, my husband hoists the head up onto the mantel, where it is visible from the living room and kitchen.
“Happy birthday,” he says.
“I love it,” I say.
In the coming weeks and months, I will think about how I got to this place of being fifty-eight, and not what I thought I would be. I will think about how my life as a writer instead of a psychologist was the culmination of all the big and small decisions I made to follow one path and not another, and how each decision was a snapshot of my heart at the moment I made it. I want to say that this was enough, this knowing that I’d followed my heart all along, and in truth it was a part of my coming around, but it was not all of it. It would be four more years before I would be able to put the narrative of my derailment behind me, to see that where my life went awry—and maybe my father’s as well—was not at the moment we closed the door on one path to follow another, but rather the moment we first believed that accomplishment would raise us up out of the ferment of ordinary humanity, and usher us to a realm where we would be perennially at peace.
The carved stone face lives in my garden now, watching over the chipmunks and squirrels who come for our blueberries. I look into the benevolent eyes and trace my finger the length of the gash. I know better than to think I am at the end of my struggle, but for now, at least, it is as if some ineffable regret has been lifted.
Dana Shavin’s essays and articles have appeared in The Sun, Oxford American, Fourth Genre, Garden and Gun, and Psychology Today. She is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years.