Within Sight

Abstract

FEATURED AUTHOR—MEMOIR Within Sight Darnell Arnoult "What possessed him to ask you to do that?" my daughter Beth said when I called her to tell her the plan. "Is he out of his mind?" Beth immediately hung up the phone and called her brother at work in Delaware. "What possessed you to do that? Are you out of your mind?" "I know! I know!" Chad replied. "It just popped out and I couldn't take it back." It was late June, 1994. My son Chad, older than Beth by twenty-one months, had called me earlier at work. He was one month into his summer internship with MBNA in Delaware. He hadn't had time to stop in North Carolina for a visit on his way north from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, where he was a rising junior. He would have only a few days at the end of the internship before he needed to report back to Rollins. Both my children were athletes, abilities they inherited from their father. Chad had captained in football and baseball in high school and had just finished his second year on the Rollins baseball team. I was an overweight, out of shape, early middle-aged mother who had spent more than ten years sitting in the stands at nearly every athletic event my children participated in, cheering them on and developing bleacher hips. For fifteen years I'd been a single mother; my children were at the center of my life and they knew it. So Chad knew I would be crushed if he didn't stop to visit me on his way back to school. Chad also had a new found passion—backpacking. He really wanted to get in a good backpacking trip before school started, and he knew better than to go by himself. Chad had a dilemma. I'm still not sure what possessed Chad to ask me to come along on a four day hike in George Washington National Forest in Virginia. But mothers don't turn down such offers from adult sons. At least, this one didn't. The theme from Rocky started playing in my head. Chad instructed me to get my fanny on the stair-climbing machine every day until the hike, and to invest in a good pair ofhiking boots and startbreaking them in immediately. Veteran hikers in my office at Duke, once they asked me to repeat my good news so they could be sure they had heard me right, warned me about the importance of breaking in 34 those boots. I went right out and spent $150 on hiking boots and wore them every day, everywhere, with everything: dresses, skirts, culottes, pajamas, everything. I still wear those boots. I wasn't as diligent about using the Stair Master. Needless to say, I don't own it anymore. Like in an old movie, the calendar turned rapidly and the end of summer arrived in no time. I understood we were going into the woods at Harrisonburg. Chad stopped at a Waffle House pay phone near our trail head to call his grandmother and tell her for certain where we would enter the woods, in case there was a problem and someone had to come looking for us. She would then meet us at the same Waffle House when we came out four days later to take me back to my car, which I had left at her house in Bassett. Chad would go on to his father's house in Alexandria, for a brief visit, then head south to Rollins. While Chad talked on the pay phone, I looked around and realized we were in Staunton, Virginia. I hadn't been paying attention to the signs when we exited the interstate. Stunned, I recognized the boxy red brick rectangle buildings cast across the hillside across the road. It was the state mental hospital where my mother was hospitalized in 1963, when I was eight and she was forty—the same age I was that day, sitting in the Jeep outside the Waffle House in my hiking boots waiting for my son to lead me into the wilderness. The smell inside those...