“The violin, actually,” I admitted. “In a big high school orchestra, where I could blend in with the crowd. If I screwed up, no one but my stand partner could tell.”
He smiled. “We’re just here to mess around, and we’re a pretty forgiving group,” he said. “I’m new to music myself.”
I was surprised to hear that. “You seemed really good—for the two minutes I heard you play, anyway.”
He sat down on the stool next to me. “I practice four hours a day.”
“Wow, I was lucky if I hit twenty minutes,” I said.
The bartender placed a beer in front of him and he took a sip before saying, “Doctor’s orders.”
“The beer?”
He laughed. “No, the practicing.”
I could tell there was a story in this, and I leaned forward. “Please tell me how it came to be that a doctor wrote you a prescription for music.”
“If you really want to hear it,” he said.
“I do.”
He told me he’d been a soldier in Afghanistan, riding in a truck with a soldier from another company, when they hit an IED buried in the road.
“I didn’t have my Wileys on,” he said, “just a pair of Ray-Bans. So glass and shrapnel went right into my eyes. I couldn’t see a thing. I was bleeding all over the other guy, but he managed to clean me up. And then we were stuck there, in the shell of the truck. We were shooting at anything that moved—well, he was; I was shooting blind.”
When they weren’t shooting, he said, they were telling each other about their lives, because they knew they were more likely to see an RPG heading their way than any kind of rescue vehicle. It seemed like the last conversation they’d ever have with anyone. Eventually, they’d used up their ammunition, and the only thing left to do was take cover and wait.
“I still couldn’t really see anything, but he knew the enemy was moving in. And so he covered me with his body—this man I’d never met before in my life. And because of that, he took a bullet to his back.”
He stopped for a moment and drank half his beer in what seemed like one long gulp.
“Hard luck poppa standing in the rain,” sang the bluegrass folks. “If the world was corn he couldn’t buy grain…”
“We made it out alive,” he said. “Which was a miracle. But he can’t walk, and I can barely see. When I got home, I was so full of anger I didn’t know what to do. And then my doctor, who I’d always thought was some VA quack, told me to learn an instrument. I said, ‘I can’t see to read music.’ And he said, ‘That’s what your ears are for.’ I didn’t have the money for a guitar, which is what I really wanted, but my friend had this old violin. So I taught myself how to play it.” He patted it where it lay on the bar. “That soldier, Pete, saved my life. But so did this.”
“That’s an incredible story,” I said.
He ducked his head, like no big deal. Said, “I’ve got more where that came from. But let’s go play something. You can borrow my violin.”
He held it out, insistent, and so I took it from his hands. I tucked the instrument against my neck, feeling the cool smooth bowl of the chin rest. I took the bow in my right hand and curled my fingers around it.
It had been such a long time.
“We’ll start with something easy,” he said.
And so I played “Barbara Allen,” and then “Man of Constant Sorrow,” with a group of Colorado strangers, and I wasn’t even terrible.
Which is not to say that I was any good, either.
But if that didn’t qualify as coming out from behind my camera lens, I didn’t know what would.
Chapter 20
THE SUN had barely risen over the Mt. Galbraith foothills when I parked my dirty van in a rutted parking lot and set out along a trail above the city of Golden, Colorado.
I wanted to pause before the next leg of the journey, which was going to be a long one. I wasn’t ready to sit behind the wheel for ten straight hours again, for one thing. But there was another reason for the break: it seemed to me that when I arrived at my final destination, my whole life could take a turn.
I hiked the rocky path alone for the first hour. My only company was a half dozen hummingbirds that darted through the air on invisible wings. The trail rose through scrubland, with pockets of sage and Ponderosa pine, and I felt wild and alone.
I also felt like I needed to exercise more regularly: after only an hour, I was out of breath and my legs had become Jell-O.
Eventually I crossed paths with a family—two determined-looking parents and two sullen teenagers, one of whom was staring at his phone while hiking.
I waved and said cheerfully, “Great day for a walk!”
“Whatever,” one of the teenagers muttered; the other ignored me completely.
I smiled sympathetically at the mother, thinking, Good luck with those grouchy children of yours. But she didn’t smile, either, and in fact looked at me quite angrily.
I took a picture of their backs as they walked away. Even their posture seemed affronted. I wanted to call after them, Hey, if you don’t like it, don’t do it!
But it wasn’t any of my business, so I kept on walking.
Toward the summit of the mountain I stopped and took in the grand rugged isolation; somewhere out there, in those brown, craggy peaks, was the Continental Divide. I took pictures of the vista, but only because it seemed like I should. It was the pictures of people I cared about.
In a way, I felt like I was carrying everyone with me as I traveled. But they weren’t baggage; they were more like buoys, lifting me up and nudging me along.
I thought again about what my dad had said—Wherever you go, there you are—and I realized that I had to disagree with that. A journey could change a person, and not just by atrophying all her leg muscles.
As I stood above the wild desolation of central Colorado, I could finally admit that I was going to California. And that I was going to call up the first boy I’d ever loved.
And then? I’d just have to see what happened next.
Chapter 21
UTAH PASSED by in an eighty-mile-per-hour blur, and, after a night in a musty Budget Inn, I crossed into Nevada.
The land stretched out flat and dusty on either side of the highway, and on the horizon I could see only barren hills. I’d heard people call Route 50 in Nevada the Loneliest Road in America, but to me, it felt more like the loneliest road on Mars.
After singing every Beatles song I knew, followed by every Bruce Springsteen and then every Rihanna, my throat hurt, my ears rang, and the sound of my own voice was aural torture to me.
This might have been the time I started wishing for something—anything—to break up the monotony. And pretty soon something did.
I heard a boom, and right after that the car began to shake and careen to the right. I slammed on the brakes and skidded off onto the gravel shoulder, adrenaline coursing through my veins.
I waited for a few minutes until my panicked heart slowed. I was fairly certain I knew what had happened, and a look at the right front tire confirmed it: something had punctured the rubber, and it was totally flat.
As I looked in the back for the spare I knew I’d never be able to put on the van, I tried to cheer myself up by thinking about how this would be a good story to tell someday: about how I was stranded for hours on a deserted highway until I got rescued by a long-haul trucker who wasn’t at all perverted. Everyone would laugh when I got to the moral: Be careful what you wish for.
Then a horn sounded, and a white van pulled up right behind me. An older man with mirrored sunglasses climbed out of the driver’s seat and called, “Gas?”
I couldn’t believe my luck. I hadn’t seen a car for what seemed like two hundred miles, but here was help, just when it was desperately required. “Flat, actually,” I said.
He walked over, and as he did, more people got out of the van—eight in total, men and women of varying ages, wearing matching T-shirts that said I WANT TO BELIEVE.