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56 True North M y weeks in Austin have left me with a few answers and still more questions. Like an onion, there are innumerable layers of Blaze to peel back; I realize now there will never be an end to them. Yet someday, anyway, I will have to let go. Meanwhile I have one last stop in Texas. This morning I’m on a northbound bus to Athens, where Blaze’s younger sister, Marsha, lives. We haven’t seen each other since 1976 and frankly, I’m nervous about our visit. The botched attempt at mythmaking in the cemetery was a wry reminder. The fates may be free to pronounce me Blaze’s wife, but I’ve no idea what his evangelical Christian family would have to say about that. The bus leaves Austin behind. Above the freeway, vultures wheel on tilted wings. Myself, I’m done with scavenging; I just want to go home, wherever that is. To find the past, I had to shed the present. I’ve given up the house in the Catskills, any means of income, and all certainty about the future. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve been lucky. As I ricocheted between New York, Georgia, and Texas, family and friends have caught me every step of the way. In a world where war clamors, the earth sickens, and hunger abounds, I have had the luxury of dallying with a ghost. Blaze, too, lived by the generosity of others. Though I’ve always managed to keep a roof over my head, I, like him, have had trouble staying still. Now, home can no longer be determined by coordinates on a map or shelter or even habit. Instead it can only be found by an internal compass, magnetically drawn to some kind of authenticity, to an innate wildness that can be neither charted nor contained, not even in words. I’ll always be tumbleweed so long as I look for anchoring anywhere but within. Seeking such elusive harbor, I left New York City in 1990, the year after Blaze was killed in Texas. My dog, Larue, became home then; with her I was 221 222 | Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley safe wherever we landed in our meandering life. In the Hudson Valley of upstate New York, she led me unerringly back to the woods. Together we roved the bony cliffs of Shawangunk Mountain, watching the turkey vultures soar above and below us. They flew so close, I could almost feel the updraft of their sailing glide. It was there I became enamored of the huge birds, and was moved to write about them. I’d never seen such enormous wings, nor imagined such effortless flight. The return to rural life coincided with a wave of good fortune. I brought with me a file of letters from theaters around the country regarding Brink of Devotion, rejection notices tempered with praise, the epitome of bittersweet. In a little house on Rondout Creek, I knuckled down for a six-month stint as a writer on a daytime soap opera, an experience I can only compare to having a low-grade fever all the time. There I began a novel for young readers, Speed of Light, that contained the refrain, sung by the congregation of an AfricanAmerican church: I am going to a city/Where the roses never fade/Here they bloom but for a season/Soon their beauty is decayed/I am going to a city/Where the roses never fade. The book’s publication would take me into classrooms around the country , talking to kids about writing. Mostly they are intrigued by the process of transmuting life into fiction. “How does a story happen?” they want to know. “It’s a mystery,” I tell them. “You have to trust what arises.” From the bus window I see the vultures climbing higher and higher in the blue Texas sky, naked red heads gleaming in the midday light. Below their black-and-silver lapels, the fringes of the highways are once more in bloom with early spring wildflowers. The bus pulls off at a wayside gas station, which is also the local stop, and a lanky, gray-haired man gets on, plunking down in the seat beside me. His bag—an ice cooler wrapped with bungee cords—doesn’t fit in the overhead rack. Finally he shoves it under his feet, apologizing in a mild, cross-eyed manner each time he jostles...

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