Chapter 4: Dream Come True
All the Names W Carry is a memoir that draws on an archive of letters and genealogy research to explore how patterns of addiction, mental illness, and silence appear across generations and in my own life.
← Chapter 3: Stick Figures | Part One TOC | Chapter 5: Death Was in the Barn →
Diane’s journal from their trip to Europe is an antidote to the cheerful and comforting tone of the letters she and Sue sent home.
She didn’t write to us about getting lost and separated, creepy Frenchmen, broken beds and stinking toilets at their most expensive hostel, or how she started to feel like a third wheel when Sue met a fellow traveler named Chuck.
Reading about a long, hot day of heat exhaustion, a painful bug bite, a sunburned stomach, and a sprained thumb, I am struck by how much twenty-year-old Sue and eighteen-year-old Diane were managing on their own. The trip may have seemed romantic from New Jersey. On the ground, it was often exhausting.
After they returned from Europe, she and Sue moved out to live on their own.
“Mom said today that if I felt like it and really had to save money and get back on my feet, I could always move home and get everything together this summer in Oceanport,” she wrote in her journal months later.
“If only they could see that we are grown, independent adults.”
“They worry so much,” she concluded. “And I know that’s one reason I love them so much. But as the song says you can never go home anymore. They treat you like a memory; someone you used to be.”
“What I really should do,” she considered, “is move far away forever so they can get over having me gone.”
That was Diane. To her, time at home was time wasted.
In April of 1975, she found the distance she was looking for.
“It was a real scene when I finally got out of the car and walked away,” she wrote.
“Susie was crying, and I was alternating crying and laughing. It was so sad, it was actually funny. I looked forward to this for so long, and now that the time has come, I’m bawling.”
The opening entries of the journal she kept on the trip are anxious and raw: she spent her first night lonely, cold, and missing home. While illegally camped in Pootatuck State Forest, she was frustrated and frightened of being discovered: “I am scared. I’m a fool.”
As I read about the next few days, though, I see how her confidence began to build. She got rides from strangers and found warmth in small acts of generosity.
While she often reported being scared, lost, broke, hungry, or unsure of herself, she also experienced moments of deep contentment: making a fire, walking beautiful roads. And she was learning some important lessons: “I took my first shit in the woods. It was fairly successful. Next time I’ll dig the hole a little deeper.”
I was too young to remember Diane leaving, but I must have believed she would be back again soon. When she reached a hostel at Bantam Lake, she called home and reported that Mom was really worried, Dad was crying, Joey sounded good—but I was great.
“Oh how I love Amy,” she effused.
When she was offered a ride to Warren, the woman said she wouldn’t have stopped if Coco, Diane’s border collie mix, had not been with her.
“Coco makes people think I can be trusted. Good.”
In Kent Falls, she met experienced hikers who taught her how to make a good fire and provided some reassurance that what she was doing was okay.
The more I read, the more I am reminded that Diane was never more at home than when she was on the road.
At South Pond, as she washed her hair in the cold water, she reflected on her desire for a “new horse in the middle of life’s stream”—a quote from a favorite song of hers, Dan Fogelberg’s “There’s a Place in the World for a Gambler.”
She paused there to contemplate “a pair of birds chattering about ten feet away,” a ring-tailed hawk “cruising right along the ground,” and a bright orange lizard who “looked like he was made out of plastic.”
“Such a beautiful pond,” she reflected. “Each time I go down to it, I am struck again by its quite simple majesty. This morning I had to just stare at it as if it were a dream.”
← Chapter 3: Stick Figures | Part One TOC | Chapter 5: Death Was in the Barn →