Tom Bodett - Inside Passage

 

I buried my dad last year in Michigan. He was dead. [audience chuckle] And I don't worry much about dad being dead, I died once and it's not that bad, it's pretty great, actually. And I'm pretty sure it's the best thing that's happened, that did happen to my father in a long, long time. It always creeps me out when people say bad things about their parents. We're raised not to do that, but it's our parents who raise us that way. [audience chuckle] So, there you go. So, my father was a bitter rightwing nut before it was popular. [audience laughter] He was John Bircher. He was a Goldwater Republican. He actually said that if we'd nuked Hanoi in ‘65, that we'd have saved a lot of American lives. And even a 10-year-old knows that's stupid and wrong. 

 

My dad was wrong about a lot of things, but he was righteous. And I have to say, he came by his righteousness honestly. He grew up during the Great Depression in Chicago without a father. He went from high school right into the Navy, fought in a big war, went to college on the GI Bill, got an engineering degree, met my mom, had six children, got a job that he kept his entire career. And then it was just like one day he looked around at this paint by the numbers life he had, and he said, “Well, this sucks.” And he fell back into his Lazy Boy chair and kicked up the footrest in the front room. And that's kind of the last we saw of him. 

 

I remember how hard it was to come home through the front door because you'd have to walk through the living room between my dad and the television. And I hated that. I was afraid he would see me and say something, but I was mostly afraid he wouldn't see me. And he never saw me. Don't you see me? But I figured out pretty quickly that the best way to get my dad's attention was to piss him off. Now, my dad had gotten very sick on ketchup when he was in the Navy, and he hated having it around. So, I started putting ketchup on everything as ketchup dad. 

 

And one night he was going on and on about all these. It's the hippies bringing this great country to its knees. So, I started growing my hair out and I went downtown and I stole Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book and I started reading The Rolling Stone. That worked pretty well. [audience chuckle] And then in high school, they give you these aptitude tests and all my tests said that I was good at math and science, I had great spatial relationships, and that I should be an engineer just like my dad. So, I went off to college and declared my major English. But what I didn't know is that to be an English major, you had to read James Joyce and Ezra Pound and William Shakespeare and these other insufferable writers. [audience laughter] And I thought, well, the only thing that would piss my dad off worse than being a hippie English major is if I was like a hippie college dropout. 

 

“The mountains are calling and I must go,” said John Muir in my Western writers’ class, which I immediately dropped out of. [audience laughter] I stuck my thumb in the air, my finger in his face, and headed out west, heading to Alaska. Alaska had been in the news a lot in those days. They're building this big pipeline up there. It's the Wild West. As far away from Michigan as you could get, as far away from my dad and that sad, lazy boy life of his as you could get. Now, I'd also read enough of Ken Kesey and Jack Kerouac and Jack London and Hunter S. Thompson to know that copious amounts of alcohol and other mood-altering substances were required for any righteous adventure. And I found all of that in abundance when I got as far as Oregon. 

 

And I fell in with these people. We were planting trees up in the Cascade Mountains and there was a bunch of us hippies all living together and we're drinking every night, we're pounding trees into the ground every morning, and we're paid on Friday and broke on Monday. And this was going great. [audience chuckle] And there was this cabin that some of us squatted at on the weekends. And this one Friday night I hitchhiked out to this cabin and found that the power had been turned out and we needed it. It was our hot water. It was our record player. And I said, “Well, how did they turn it off?” And they said, “well, they reached up and they threw that switch at the top of the pole.” What they didn't tell me is they'd done it with a 30-foot wooden stick. 

 

So, I shinnied up to the top of this pole and put my arm up there and pow, dead. I fell backwards, into the arms of a thousand happy strangers. It was body surfing on a million souls and it was wonderful. It was so real. It was like you ever had a dream that's so real that when you wake up, you're a little disoriented, like you're not sure what was the dream, what was life. And it was like that I felt like I had woken up from the dream. And it was so wonderful and I could have stayed there forever. And I wished I had when I woke up, because I was in the hospital room, and my right arm was blown almost off. I was burned all over my chest and arm and neck. 

 

And I'd fallen 30 feet off this pole and landed on my back, which the doctors said is what restarted my heart. And I was in more pain than I thought was possible, even though they had me completely pumped full of morphine. And I laid there in my morphine haze, and my mom and dad were there, and it was really good to see them. And I listened to them talking to each other about me and how I'd get better and get stronger and get me back to Michigan, where they could talk to the university, probably get me back in school in the fall. 

 

And another thing they had to do in the hospital once a day is these nurses would come in and they'd give me a fresh shot of morphine, and I would roll up the tops of my sheets and put them in my teeth and let go of my mother's hand so I wouldn't crush it. And my arm was open from the wrist past the elbow so that these nurses could do this thing called debriding, where they would stick their fingers down into my arm, like up to their second knuckle, and just pull this stuff out of there. And as I'm laying there, screaming into my sheets, I look across the room and my dad is sitting in a chair in the corner and he's smoking a pipe. You could smoke in hospitals then, [audience laughter] and it's impossible to smoke a pipe without looking smug. [audience laughter]

 

And I laid there and I thought, “You son of a bitch. You think you're right about this? You think you won this round?” Well, I tell you, I am not going back to Michigan. I almost died here. I am not going back with you. But they did go back. They had five other kids to raise. And as soon as they left, I got on the phone and called the county welfare agency and got put on public assistance, which would have really pissed my dad off. And several weeks later, when I was well enough to be released from the hospital, I was covered with new skin grafts. And they gave me a bag of codeine pills for the pain and the morphine withdrawals and said, whatever you do just don't get infected. So, I head out into my new welfare life. 

 

They'd set me up in this apartment, which was this fleabag apartment with tick infested mattresses, and I basically just threw my junk in there and immediately looked up this young nurse that I had met while I was in the hospital, and she invited me to join her and some friends for a party they were having out of the lake. And I have no idea what went on, but the next thing I know, I'm waking up in my tick infested bed, bleeding, hungover, alone. And I get up and I look in the mirror and I busted my skin graft on my shoulder open, and there were two ticks in it. [audience laughter] So, I take a couple codeine and clean up a little. And I'm looking at myself and I just God, this sucks. What have you done? I said, you got to fix this. I took a couple more codeine. I said, “First you got to numb this. And this codeine ain't going to do it. There's got to be something stronger downtown.” 

 

So, I head out the door and head down the stairs, and there's a mailbox, my mailbox at the bottom of the stairs, there's a letter sticking out of it. And I pull it out and I immediately recognize my father's handwriting printing, actually. He was an engineer. He had this precise block lettering. And I thought, “Oh, God, I know what this is. I know what this is.” It's like, “No son of mine is going to be living on welfare or you get your ass home, your mother's worried sick about you.” I didn't want to open it, but I did, and unfolded this single sheet of graph paper, of course. [audience laughter] 

 

And it said, “Dear Tom, since I watched you in the hospital, as wounded as any soldier in battle. And I watched how you handled it with such strength and such courage. And I just wanted to tell you how proud I am of you and that I love you and I hope you take care of yourself.” One of the earliest and clearest memories of my dad, I was four or five probably, and we were out at a lake swimming, and I was standing near my dad and my feet slipped off his clay bank under the water, and I went under and I was flailing and as I was drowning, and then my dad just reached out and grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back up and he looked me right in the face and he said, “You got to be careful.” And he let me go and I was all right after that.

 

I was never able to tell my dad how much that letter meant to me. We never did learn how to talk to each other. And the last time I saw my dad was back home. He'd lost most of his memory by the end of his life. And I visited him in this assisted living home and he was laying there in his Lazy Boy with the footrest up, and the only things he had left of his memory were his war stories. And he would just go on and on about that and that's how I left him and his Lazy Boy telling these circular stories from his glory days, which had ended in his life about the same time that my life had ended the first time. 

 

But unlike my dad, I got a second chance at life. And I did get stronger and I did get better and I took care of myself and I made it all the way out to Alaska that next year. And I was on that boat going up through the Inside Passage. And about two days into this trip, you go through this place north of Juneau called the Lynn Canal. And there's these mountains on each side of the pass that comes straight down into the water. And it's like the proverbial gates of the north. You look through there and all you see is mountain range after mountain range, after mountain range. And there's this wind that comes down out of there with this deep throated howl. And you can smell ice on it in July. And it smells like danger. 

 

It smells like-- you don't know if this place was going to make, you know if this place was going to kill you. I had no idea that every adventure I'd ever imagined and every reward that I could never have imagined lived through there. My whole wonderful life was through there. I was terrified and I clutched that railing on the bow of that ferry and I went on through that passage. Did you see me, dad? Brave as any soldier. That's what you said. Maybe not. But brave enough, was brave enough. Thank you.