A Place Between Sky and Earth

Abstract

I September of 1972, when I returned to Lincoln after a long weekend in Colorado Springs, I resigned myself, insofar as possible, to the death of my brother. We had spent three days talking and drinking and taking an occasional walk—and on television watching Coach Devaney’s Huskers pummel Army, 77–7. We had said almost nothing about what would surely happen if his drinking did not at least slow down. Each time the subject tried to insinuate itself into our conversation, we shoved it aside. Through it all John’s wife, Mary Ann, remained discreetly in the background. She did this not out of fear or intimidation; she did it, I believe, because she respected the importance of our privacy. Perhaps she thought that, regardless of what we were doing or saying, our being together would pay dividends. I shared this hope, but back home in Lincoln I saw it as being thin, if not downright anorexic. I had been reading the poetry of James Dickey, and one of his poems in particular, “In the Tree House at Night,” haunted me. The tree house brought to mind the houses my brother and I had tried to build when we wanted a place of our own to escape to; and the tone of the poem, Dickey’s attitude, struck me with a force I find difficult to describe. It seems to exist somewhere between slightly hopeful and deeply somber, a nebulous stretch of emotion that can be felt but not explained. I read “The wind changes round, and I stir / Within another’s life,” and I felt that Dickey knew more than any so-called higher animal, poet or otherwise, was entitled to—that to a significant extent my life was not entirely my own, much of it having been usurped, however compassionately, by a stranger. So Dickey’s tree house was therefore mine, especially the one