Or did I choose the distance myself? It’s not as if my father hasn’t made a habit of gestures of affection: my whole life, ungrudging, he’s driven me to the movies, paid for my ticket and my candy and my phone call for a ride home. I have a vague memory of banana splits at a drugstore soda fountain back in Tennessee, every Sunday after church. I remember him taking me to a drive-in, back in Tucson, the year of Mikey’s death, when some deeply stupid movie I wanted to see was playing only there, and in my second-grade rapture with the work of Edgar A. Poe I simply had to see it; he’d endured the whole thing, bought popcorn, and we’d watched Vincent Price melt right on screen, after his rotting body had been abandoned by whatever awful immaterial force had animated him. And over the years he’d always slip me cash, the bills increasing—ones to fives, tens to twenties—as our family fell apart.

I do not think he wanted to be far away from me, but somehow he’s resolutely unavailable, the life of feeling sealed away in him, nearly impossible to reach. He doesn’t say what he feels or thinks for a long time, so that such statements emerge finally under pressure, awkward, hot, unkind. Slow to speak, because it was dangerous for him to feel? At twelve, of course, I don’t see any of that. The hike is something for me to get through, though I like dark woods, the plummet and spume of the falls, which do feather out in the air, and I know I’m supposed to keep this walk in my memory: an Experience with my Father.