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enchilar “1. to season with chiles; 2. (Mexico) to annoy; 3. to sting, burn.

A simple meal in the final execution, the preparation of enchiladas in my house was a labor of love. On a busy evening, it could be quick: a jar of sauce, pre-grated cheese, onion, whatever else was left to throw in, roll them up, stick them in the oven, and they were done. Sometimes, though, I made the sauce myself, boiling and scraping out the chiles, shredding the chicken (roasted–perhaps not traditional, but certainly tasty), softening the onions, nearly caramelized (again, maybe not traditional), before adding them to the cheese and chicken mixture, the mild peppers.

It was a meal that I had loved for a long time, and perfected during the Colorado years, in a land of hedonism and endless meal choices. It was there, watching Mexicans, many nearly invisible in the kitchens of a town many could barely afford to live in, that I was inspired to find the secrets. It was there, in the only affordable living space, a cheap deal in the land of plenty: the trailer court, that I first made enchiladas.

The trailer court was not my first choice for a home, snob that I was (well… not snob, to be honest: I was actually afraid of the trailer court). The trailer option did allow us to stay in town, and after a bit of arm-twisting, my then-husband convinced me that it did not have to be the place of tornadoes and dysfunction that I had grown up experiencing it to be. No, this was the West, not the Midwest, and things were different.

And different they seemed in those early days. I frolicked in the kitsch, put a clichéd pink flamingo out front, and started cooking. I became pregnant, blurred my doctoral dreams, nodded gazedly to the sudden move across the country. Boston. I was in hub heaven. I could still finish my work there, and made arrangements. My advisor said a class at Harvard could help me through the classical language requirement. Harvard! Imagine that.

The enchilada ingredients were harder to find, at least then, at least within walking distance of our house.

Fast forward several months. The baby was pushing to come out. Someone was asking me to sign something. A purchase and sale agreement was Fed-Exed to northern Vermont. “Why there?” you ask. Hell if I knew. I cannot even remember when I stopped asking those questions. The town we landed in was one of so many places where we picked up real estate brochures: Charlotte, Cheyenne, Guthrie, Belfast–at least this one was not a ranch. We could have landed anywhere, back in those days that any vacation could become the next home sweet home. Vermont seemed nice enough, though a bit lonely as the summer faded. I loved being in Boston. My then-husband enjoyed those pre-child moments, too, took long walks, played drums with a friend, went to car races with his brother on Saturday nights, tried to forget the doctorate he quit. No teaching work in Boston, he said, said we could not afford to stay, said we had to move. No job in Vermont, either, not for a long time. The house was a dream, a true beauty, the village isolated, dotted with dairy farms and cross country ski trails. Hard not to love, but to stay there? Babies came, many babies. I loved them well, loved them as if they were all I had. And maybe then, they were.

I was making enchiladas, my gloved hands dipping the tortillas into the sauce, then filling them with the chicken, cheese. Gloved hands—I had learned my lesson years earlier not to mess with chiles without some defense.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I was making dinner. I was cooking his favorite dinner, our favorite dinner, kids waiting, watching, wanting me to finish quickly. The oven was preheated, the side dishes were cooking, a salad waited on the table already.

“Those are gloves for cleaning toilets!”

I had two pair. The yellow ones for cooking, the blue for cleaning. Both were beneath the sink, on separate sides. Two pair: these were the yellow gloves.

“You are an unfit mother.”

He grabbed the dish from me and dumped the enchiladas into the trash. My older son yelled “NO!” while the others cried. I watched in horror as my husband, ‘till death do us part, ripped open hot dogs, baked beans, told the kids not to move. No one did. I saw the look in his eyes. I thought how I had bought the hot dogs the day before, at a grocery store seventeen miles away, thought how he was lucky there was something else to eat. My son said he wanted enchiladas, and I feared for the kid. He saw the look, too, bit into a hot dog, tears streaming down his face. I sat in the stairwell and sobbed, curled up as tight as I could, looking for a safe place, and there was none.

“If no one is going to eat, it’s bedtime.”

It was 6:30 pm. The kids did not argue, the four of them in the bath together. I went into their room, trying to put our life back together, convinced like so many other times, that it never really happened.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

My husband pushed me into our bedroom. I wanted to say goodnight to the kids. I heard myself protesting as he shut the door on me. I know I was yelling please. The key turned and locked.

“You are not safe to be around children,” he told me.

I thought maybe he was right about everything he said until then. I had told people I needed more help, found help. Four kids under six, one noticeably disabled. A woman came from the school, said we were a family, and had to work together. I cried. He was busy, I told her, had to leave early in the morning, and was tired at night. I was trying. She said I was a great mom. How could I believe what she said, if what he said was true? I begged for help. He told me I was telling everyone our business. I found help, strong women who helped me, who glanced knowing looks first at one another–then at me. He hated the invasion of privacy. I thanked God for the help. He said I was lazy, an unfit mother. I had tried to be better, but trying was never enough, never would be. I stopped making enchiladas, and the love in my heart seemed gone forever.

We moved once more–my choice this time. He gave me one present that last year we spent together. It was a pig.

The pig was a baking dish, made in Chile. It was shown in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue with enchiladas in it, he said. He asked me why I never made them anymore. Until I started the process I once loved, I had forgotten why myself. I never did find those gloves.

Last week, though, I did find the pig on top of my kitchen shelves, never used. I went to the grocery store yesterday, and bought the tortillas, the cheese, chiles. I have it all, watched the kids devour something similar at a Mexican restaurant not so long ago. They are ready for this kind of meal, and at last, so am I. Tonight I am making enchiladas.

“That night we moved closer to the border, and clear across the prairie, at the very edge of the horizon. We could make out the gas fires of the refinery at Missoula, while to the south we could see the lights of Cheyenne, a city bigger and grander than I’d ever seen.

I felt all kind of things looking at the lights of Cheyenne, but most important, I made up my mind to never again tag around with a hell-bent type, no matter how in love with him I was” (Sissy Spacek as Holly, in the movie Badlands, 1973).

I recently had a moment of fond reminiscence of dangerous days, the thrill and passion of grasping tight while the wind and the world hit me head-on. Then I woke up.

There are all sorts of reasons that taking off in pursuit of adventure may seem like a fine thing to do, but in the end, most of them seem to involve running away from, rather than to something. The vague idea of adventure was a dream I inherited, a place I guarded in the back of my mind as an option whenever I was faced with too much unhappiness in too short a time.

Until I was in my late 20s, I never did much more than ponder that option. A few times, I felt myself drawn to the flame, flittering perilously close to entanglements that would break my heart, and did—but not irretrievably so. I jumped a few times, but felt that elastic pull back, bungeeing me back into a predictable existence to idle on the lookout for my own truth.

I wonder sometimes if it is a part of growing up, or if it is a part of growing up unhappy that leads a person find truth in sublimation. Sometimes I find that truth in words, my own words, a world on a page, or in a heartbeat, a smile, a carefully placed step and a song, a moment of pure grace. This is a sort of joy.

Try as I might, though, I never found joy on the back of a motorcycle, holding on tight while someone else drove through the unknown vistas and back roads. I did venture once, untethered at last, straddled the back seat of an adventure and never went home again. But where I ended up after that, I expected to stay.

I guess I should have known this was not a ride meant for settling, for bonding, or for discovering ourselves. The never-ending voyages tugged, threatening roots that grew ever deeper. “Why leave? Why not stay and see the flowers, the fruits, this life we created?” I wondered. Garden with me.

“Come alongside me,” he said, and I followed, while I still could. The urge to flee returned tirelessly, a malignant tumor, seeking still more—but what?—some indefinable thing that could ravage me in the process. One day, farther from joy that I ever imagined, I stayed behind; he left. But he could come home, to walk among it, to reclaim this life, this beautiful, imperfect life that had grown, with the weeds and thorns to disparage. He could come home, if only to pick the best fruits from among them, to look at love and believe it would always wait.

I wonder, what hidden parts of ourselves only find expression in actions that seem to defy what life passes to us, even what we choose? I wonder what makes us feel more alive when we speed through space, feeling the vibrations through our skin, into our minds, testing the very limits of our physical life, and abandoning in those sublime moments all that has meaning here on Earth.

And then… what makes us feel justified to return, perhaps unscathed, perhaps damaged irreparably, always hoping to be cared for and loved by the ones we left behind…. or at least, not forgotten?

I wonder what the seeker seeks, if he even knows, or is it the search that he lives for, the never-ending journey? What comfort does the road bring? Perhaps it is the moving skylines, the exchangeable faces, the well-polished security of the new and unblemished. Perhaps the road brings an illusion of perfection, and the safety of never truly being known.

I had nearly forgotten until I was looking for the Gal Costa album that has “Estrada do sol” that I own a pair of cowboy boots. They almost went into the past when I moved a couple of years ago, gone to Goodwill along with oh so many memories, but I had apparently stashed them in the attic instead.

These boots may not be the type you have in your mind; they are ladies’ boots, short, lace-up, black with intricate stitching on the side in red, off-white and pale blue, sort of fancy in a western sort of way, and definitely not the type of thing I had worn before or have worn since. But I wore them then.

Hondo Boots are still being made in El Paso, Texas, as they have been since 1965, according to the company website. In 1992, the salesman at the Wrangler Corral West Ranchwear Store in downtown Cheyenne told me that they were well-made boots, specimens of fine craftsmanship and close attention to detail. He demonstrated this all quite convincingly, so of course I bought them.

The collection from my life in the west sometimes surprises me: the Pendleton bucking horse blanket that I got at Lou Taubert’s nine-floor emporium in Casper, western blouses with overlaid yokes of various designs, horses, stars, enhanced by fringe and sequins, the Black Hills silver (one pair of earrings, anyway), the red cowboy hat, various shirts from Wahmaker. I had nearly forgotten so much of this, even the trailer I lived in with the pink flamingos out front and the wood paneled living room decorated with mirrors and shag carpeting and a faux leather sofa and rocker with the western motif… and that Barracuda in the garage.

One thing I always knew about my dad: he had always wanted to live out west. That call to follow the sun’s path seemed to go back to the time that he was a kid growing up in central Missouri, listening to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, and trying to get off the farm. He did leave, drafted, stationed at Fort Carson. Pikes Peak. Garden of the Gods. We traveled that direction, the four of us, heading out in our 1969 Mercury Cougar to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April, 1970. I remember my aunt and uncle’s front yard: no grass. I remember being afraid to climb a ladder in the Taos Pueblo, where my mom bought some beautiful pottery that I still have, along with the roadrunner pin my dad used to pin on his jacket.

We went to Yellowstone the next year, in our new baby blue International Travelall with the woodlike panels. I remember the ever widening sky until we approached the mountains, and then, the mountains themselves, snow, my ears popping, the elk antler arch in Jackson, Mommy and Daddy eating trout, us waiting forever for the geyser to go off while I froze in the poncho I had gotten the year before in New Mexico. The motel in Kansas on the way home was supposed to have a swimming pool—because what is a vacation anyway without a swimming pool?—but it was empty… victim of a broken pump or something like that, I think. My brother and I cried about it after a whole day in the car. My dad said he was going to kick the desk clerk’s ass, which for some reason made us feel vindicated, and maybe even happy. For years after that trip, we subscribed to the Jackson Hole News, and there was a lot of talk about moving to Wyoming. We started wearing ski jackets for winter coats, although we never learned to ski or ever went back. My dad wore a sheepskin jacket that my mom ordered for him from the Shepler’s catalog, along with the cowboy hat; boots came from Gravois Bootery, which must have been the only store in the St. Louis area that carried Tony Lamas. And finally, one day, I noticed we never talked about moving anymore.

My dad still set the radio on his basement workbench to WIL, and we kept hearing plenty of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings and Conway Twitty, and of course the older stuff on the record player. We still watched Hee Haw, and Porter Wagoner, and then started going every Saturday, it seemed, to the country, and chased the chickens and shot beer cans off the fence posts with my dad’s 22, and sat around in the evenings listening to the grown-ups discuss what J.R. had done the night before, or the various family ailments or mini-scandals, or what my aunt might have heard on the party line, all while they drank gin and Squirt, and I wondered, as the timed air freshener spritzed hollyberry scent above the cigarette smoke, why we couldn’t just go home, or go somewhere, anywhere. So, years later—now—I do by golly know all the words to most Hank Williams songs. Only, now, I like them.

Colorado, Wyoming, the Wild West always seemed to be my dad’s territory. I was led there by coincidence, but never really stopped imagining him there—following his path, maybe I was, on the back of the Virago in the wind and the sun and the driving rain, chugging through Chugwater, holding on for my life flying by Hell’s Half Acre. It seemed so unlike me, but almost necessary, chasing some dream that was inside of him, some dream I never got to see him live or even really hear him talk about.

I do not recommend trying to live out another person’s dream, even if that other person happens to be your father, and even if he happens to have died too soon and too sorry. Searching for someone that way just makes you realize how little you really can know beyond yourself. Searching for my dad’s way made me feel that his spirit was even farther away.

But maybe we are guided to these paths for reasons within ourselves. Maybe those unmarked trails, those wrong-way turns, those errant paths that we find ourselves straying onto without understanding are set in front of us to challenge us, to teach us how to find our own way. We may not know another’s path, but we can know our own. Maybe when we wander, when we yearn, these paths are the ones that lead us back to ourselves.
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