Homing Instincts Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Sarah Menkedick

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Some of the material in this book originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Paris Review and Vela.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Menkedick, Sarah, author.

  Title: Homing instincts : early motherhood on a Midwestern farm / by Sarah Menkedick.

  Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016034573. ISBN 9781101871416 (hardcover). ISBN 9781101871423 (ebook).

  Subjects: LCSH: Menkedick, Sarah—Family. Motherhood. Families. Country life—Ohio.

  Classification: LCC HQ759.M464 2017. DDC 306.874/3—dc23. LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2016034573

  Ebook ISBN 9781101871423

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover background image by Sjharmon/E+/Getty Images

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Homing Instincts

  Journey into the Ordinary

  Motherland

  A Wilderness of Waiting

  Mildred, Millie, Grandma Menkedick

  Open

  The Milk Cave

  The Lake

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Dad, whose grace, empathy, kindness, and humility I struggle to emulate.

  This book is yours as much as mine.

  En memoria de Doña Rosa, con su gran corazón abierto y amoroso, quien nos enseñó más importa en esta vida

  HOMING INSTINCTS

  THERE ARE five types of navigation, five means to find your way home: topographic, celestial, magnetic, olfactory, and true.

  Topographic is used by the lowest forms of life, your mollusks and your limpets. Celestial is the rarest, wielded by some species of birds, some species of seals, certain humans, and the dung beetle. Many creatures finagle a combination: magnetic for broad route finding to general points, then olfactory for specifics.

  True navigation can only be engaged in familiar areas, where one can rely on landmarks: roads, rivers, mountains, buttes, fields, forests, the abandoned house, the one-room Airport Inn, Stauf’s Coffee, the water tower, the corner grocery, the place where memory has imprinted like the fuchsia or mournful blue on stained glass.

  —

  In my twenties, I flung myself into the world. I leapfrogged across continents, hungering for experience and proof of my own wildness. I taught English to recalcitrant teenagers on Réunion Island, picked grapes in France, witnessed a revolution in Mexico. To be aware was to be outside, under Mongolian skies and in bantam seaside bars, far-flung places where every conversation and scent prickled with exceptionality.

  In my early thirties, I cling to this paradigm: experience lies on the road, in adventuring beyond oneself and beyond the ordinary. Then, in the autumn of 2013, I move into a tiny nineteenth-century cabin on my parents’ Ohio farm, and my life flips outside in.

  It is a chilly October day. In the morning, from the cabin porch, I watch the slow-motion glitter of gold maple leaves adrift in the churchly woods. Being here, I keep attempting to assure myself, is not so different from traveling: my latest adventure is simply a self-styled writer’s residency in rural southeastern Ohio, where I’ll learn to plant flowers and spot eagles and herd the chickens back into the coop.

  I’ve recently graduated from the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, which entailed three long years in the United States. Throughout most of the program, my husband, Jorge, and I longed to leave, perpetually asking ourselves, Where next, where next, where next. But the September after my graduation, when we move to the farm, I am surprised to no longer find a ticker tape of proximate destinations—Singapore or Russia or Qatar or Peru—running through my head. It has been replaced by stillness, a sense of suspension.

  I go running one morning past Seneca Lake—herons lifting their reedy legs in slow motion, pines swaying against the pale sky—and feel not the rocketing thrill of joy but a disarming tranquillity. I have always been a person who operates in extremes, ecstasy or brooding discontent, and who sees calm as complacency or blunted awareness. But for a minute, descending one of the tummy-twister hills that undulate around the shore, I see all the ups and downs of the past several years as just that: mere ups and downs. I am suspicious of their swift barometric shifts, and instead appreciative of steadiness. I have begun to sense that living always in search of a new triumph or adventure, spending each morning run fantasizing about the moment when I’ll accept the award or board the flight to Singapore or say Well, Terry, thanks so much for having me, means living in perpetual, haphazard evasion of the ordinary. The reality is that postpublication or postgraduation or postarrival in the Indonesian backcountry is composed of the same arrangement of sunrise to sunset, coffee to beer, and back again. The quickly familiar quotidian starts to chafe, and I’m once again lusting after the next peak.

  Running that morning I think, Perhaps steadiness is not capitulating but transcending. Cows; crows; a tilting hand-painted sign pointing right and reading CORN: all around me Ohio embodies the tame middle. The heartland. Neither mountain nor ocean nor brimming metropolis: cheeseburger soup at the Wooden Wheel and Queen Anne’s lace and long-winded neighbors who call Jorge “George.”

  That September I write in the mornings and dig up weeds in the afternoons and for the first time in a decade I do not think about the future. I do not want to plan another trip. I do not want to grab at opportunity but simply to be where I am, which, in a twist I never would have imagined, is this modest patch of the Midwest where I grew up.

  Amid this strange new ease, Jorge and I say, “Well, let’s see what happens.” Meaning, We’ll give having a baby a go, and if it works, it works, and if not, we’ll continue with our beers and Boggle in the long summer evenings. It is a decision that feels at the time like driving into Columbus to watch my niece’s softball game: nice, comfortable, maybe a bit more humdrum and domestic than we’d like to envision ourselves, but important in its way and part of an essential and not-quite-nameable process of growing up.

  It is night by the time Jorge returns with the test. My family is having a bonfire in the apple orchard. Meg and Dad are sipping beers, telling stories, their faces aglow. Dad’s beard, once a brilliant ginger, has gone white, and Meg’s hair is silvery in the moonlight, but both look younger than their respective decades (his sixties, her fifties). They are fit and energetic from farmwork, home cooking, poetry in the mornings, horseback rides in the afternoons: a vigorous country existence they’d dreamed of since they first met nearly thirty years ago. They bought these forty acres in 2002 and have spent the past decade making them a home; they built the horse barn down the slope from the orchard, the house on the rise across the ravine, the dog run, the chicken coop, the tractor shed, the loft in the old red barn. They laid gravel; they fenced and dug and seeded and tended a garden. They carved the bonfire pit, planted wildflowers, set rocking chairs on the cabin porch, mowed the pastures, hung a wooden swing deep in a grove of maple, unchoked trees from the clutch of bittersweet, set hand-hewn birdhouses on the posts of the horse fence. This is their new life together after decades of raising children in Columbus; it is their shared work, and it has smoothed and enlivened them like a river br
ightens stones.

  When Jorge and I first moved in, Dad was worried about boundaries, and in his methodical research-scientist way drew up a list of rules and conditions we’d all abide by—quiet time from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., shared chores and duties, and dinner approximately three times a week but not every night. (“We have a little flexibility here,” he explained, with trademark Dad attention to detail, going on to suggest that maybe we’ll eat together Tuesday, but not Wednesday; Friday, but not Saturday; and so on, until Jorge and I nod that yes, we’ve got it). This Dad contract went out the window early the next afternoon when Dad popped up around 2:00 p.m. to see if Jorge wanted to go fishing and was pretty much wholly forgotten from that point on. We end up in a natural rhythm, coinciding in the space between house and cabin, by the garden or chicken coop; calling one another up when we’ve made stew; or—in Dad’s case—sauntering up in his distinct Dad way looking for a buddy to help saw wood or talk turkey hunting. “Whoo boy,” he begins, and he and Jorge sit on the front porch like a pair of old-timers, squinting at the sky, muck boots splayed before them, missing only the overalls.

  I am conspicuously not drinking, conspicuously quiet. The Milky Way is out, a gossamer river poured across the black country sky. There are coyotes howling, and the echoes of owls sounding down the valley, but all of this is static as I hurry single-mindedly through the pastures toward the cabin.

  Jorge and I brush our teeth while we wait. A clock blinks on the test screen. It appears and disappears: Wait, wait, wait. My heart gallops in that small yellow bathroom, though I don’t really think it possible. I spit, rinse, and look back.

  “Oh my God,” I say. “Oh my God. Oh, my God.” I mean it literally. It is not my usual easy expression of incredulity or sarcasm. I am actually, in that moment, marveling at some sort of higher power. I am clutching my stomach. I am bending over. I am thinking, I am actually going to do this we are actually going to do this.

  At first it seems akin to the feeling I got the day I was offered a job in Beijing. I was sitting in front of Oaxaca’s Santo Domingo Church when the university called and said I had the position teaching composition, and I thought, We’re going to China. It is like this and yet, I quickly understand, not like this at all. It is not exterior but interior: a feeling in my gut, slung taut from hip bone to hip bone, of transformation. It is not so much a sense of being in control as of being taken over by a much-greater, daunting, awesome force.

  That night Jorge puts his hand on my stomach, and we whisper about money, about names, about what it might be like, about the potential due date. I barely sleep, and in the morning I watch the blue light of early fall rise over the pastures. My body and mind are filled and fused with this secret, this knowledge, and I can think of nothing else. I am in awe that after all this time of wondering, fantasizing, vacillating, of swirling like a leaf in a whirlpool around the questions of home and children and change, suddenly a decision has been made, a physical decision with a heartbeat that now thunders at the core of my life.

  I spend the first two weeks like this, unable to write, unable to think, unable to do anything but feel that tingly marvel of news. It is like being in a luminous tunnel, bedazzlement and hypnotic hum, free of time and space. And then I fall out the other side of it, and the architecture of my life collapses.

  —

  I was already taking my first vodka shot in the stuffy dorms of Madison, Wisconsin, while my dad was crying at the wheel on the way back to Ohio. Ever since I’d been old enough to grasp the notion of living on my own, I’d dreamed of escaping the dreaded Buckeye State.

  I had a loving family, a lovely childhood. But I wanted out. I imagined my independence like a train barreling somewhere, anywhere, where I could create myself. Where I would be made real, new, free. Where I could do a twenty-seven-second keg stand and stay out until 6:00 a.m., then play delirious racquetball all morning, then run across a frozen lake; or where I could hop in a car and drive to the farthest corner of Texas to chase javelinas in the night and hike the barren, eerie, purple mountains along the border.

  I started small, with Madison. Then France. Then Mexico, then Patagonia, then Réunion Island and China and Japan, the lines of my journeys tentative, then picking up speed, arching across the planet, pulsing on obscure islands. If I had been tagged, I would’ve been far out of range.

  I missed births and deaths and graduations and recitals. I saw the photos, got the calls, sent congrats and consolation from cramped Internet cafés in Ushuaia and makeshift bamboo rooms by the south Indian sea. Talk of “family,” “the importance of family,” seemed absurd to me, as if family were an arbitrary and confining circle drawn in the sand.

  “Family,” and particularly the man-woman-child version, was the most traditional of concepts, the essence of the status quo. It was the core institution at the heart of all the institutions to which we are expected to conform: for family we do our homework and go to college and get a reliable job and make car payments and marry a nice man and have a baby and stick with our job and keep making car payments and send the baby to college and repeat. When I heard it evoked, it rang with near-mythical responsibility, an überstructure we must obey, like the KGB or the IRS. I say this coming from a family that is unusually close and like-minded, one of inside jokes and dynamic conversations and genuine intimacy; it is not that I’ve felt trapped by my specific set of parents and siblings but rather by the concept and its demagogic invocation.

  I loved my family, but I also loved the jostling of a bus across the altiplano, the distinct sense of myself in the world away from the limiting molds of familial roles, and the characters I formed friendships and relationships with over the course of continents and years. The challenges lay elsewhere, humped in an undulating line like dunes extending to a vanishing point. My job was to tackle them one after the other. Home was too easy.

  What I failed to recognize, but increasingly discern like a new delicacy in the air just before summer, are all the complex interior workings of family, the way our homes are written on us and we on them, and the increasing need over time to study these inscriptions, heed them, test them, learn them like a sacred text. Eventually, after so many years of travel, I reached the point where my self—the one who wandered alone through the gray foreign streets of Bogotá, the one who ran in the blue dawn on the frayed white edge of an island, the one who flirted with an Argentine in a frigid Chilean cabin, the one with all of her clever noticing of striking detail—had become boring. She began to seem like the handful of go-to phrases I first mastered in Spanish—tengo que, voy a—phrases that at a certain point could no longer express three-quarters of what I wanted to say. Beyond them I could sense an entire language, with all of its intricate meanings and signifiers, that I couldn’t yet speak. Beyond that self lay an interior, familial morphology of blood and muscle, memory and longing, a terrain mappable less by active thought than by absorption, in the same way that language cannot be directly translated but must be felt.

  —

  Salmon are born in freshwater rivers at high altitudes and spend their first months or years in the relative safety of their natal rivers, camouflaged by brown-black stripes that mimic the moving chaparral cover of the water. Fitting in and staying alive are paramount in these years: only 10 percent of the young fish will ever make it to sea.

  Those that survive are called smolts, gaining brilliant silvery scales that are easily rubbed off. They move into brackish waters to begin acclimatizing themselves to the salty sea, where they’ll finally earn the title of salmon. Then they’ll spend up to five years in the open ocean, gradually reaching sexual maturity. When they’re ready to spawn, the salmon turn around and travel hundreds of miles back to their natal rivers, to the very spots where they were conceived years ago. They form massive salmon runs upriver, leaping as high as twelve feet over rapids and waterfalls, some snapped up by fishermen and grizzlies before their destinations. Once they make it home, they reproduce and promptly die, their gaping,
hook-jawed skeletons disintegrating in native waters, and the cycle repeats itself.

  The salmon find their way back through all that choppy, anonymous ocean to the alpine niche of their creation via a process called magnetoreception, or magnetic navigation. The earth’s equator can be imagined as a bar magnet, which sends magnetic waves southward; these waves then curve back northward and hit the earth at an incline. The waves that hit closest to the equator have almost no incline; those that hit closest to the poles have the steepest inclines. The salmon have imprinted the particular incline waves of home, the so-called magnetic footprint of their birthplaces, in much the same way that a certain species of Ohioan is engraved with the insistent pulsing of crickets or the smell of a musty basement or the feel of rushing downhill on a sled with a soaring heart. Imprinting has three characteristics: it has to occur during a particular critical period, usually early in the life of the animal; its effects last a long time; and these effects cannot be easily modified.

  Singing “America the Beautiful” on our octogenarian neighbor Herman’s doorstep in exchange for strawberry-flavored, diabetic hard candies, or the view out our kitchen window onto bare branches and that eggshell-thin winter sky, or the scraping of the skateboard as it picked up speed on our sloped driveway. The one-hundred-mile stretch between Columbus and Cincinnati: corn and sky, barn and highway. Dad’s backpacking vacations, the film containers of salt and pepper, the rasp of cards being shuffled, caves and creeks and boots with red laces.

  So this magnetic imprint, activated by the procreative urge to return home after so many years adrift in the great beyond, guides the salmon to the mouths of their rivers or the general vicinity, but what takes them all the way back, to the very spot, to the cradle where it all began and will end, is smell.