Fire Walker

Usually, when someone says, “I’ve walked on fire for this company,” they don’t mean it – at least literally. But I do. I have walked through fire.


A Cold Day in Michigan

After the third false end of Winter in April of my twenty-second year, I decided I needed a change. I lived in rural Northern Michigan where eight months of the year were cold and gray. Snow would accumulate in feet and sometimes people would be stuck in their houses a few days anxiously waiting for the snowplows. There were a number of times I sat in my house wanting to go bowling or to see the latest blockbuster movie, but couldn’t see the road to drive. It made exercise near impossible and work hard to find. Sometimes I would go outside and shovel, my muscles aching as I lifted mound after mound just for something physical to do.
I had to be innovative with my forms of entertainment. The nearest city was 45 minutes away and the biggest attractions there were the movie theater, Walmart, and the large Sault Locks bypass that regulated shipping between the Great Lakes and St. Mary’s River. Living among an average of 3,000 people in my little rural town, finding a good paying job was hard. Making over minimum wage was even more difficult. Yet, our little town had a large presence of banks, gas stations, and bars. That’s why many residents resorted to drinking, including my father.
My father had a problem with drinking for most of his life. He started early. In high school, he was the Keg King. He even put that on his graduation announcements. I’m not sure if his parents didn’t care what he did or if they weren’t aware of the extremity of his problem. I do know they didn’t take much action to stop him. Living in such a town did not help his situation at all. At one point, he stopped drinking, but he never lost the alcoholic personality.
The day I decided I needed to move, I stared out the window watching the boughs of the pine trees dip closer and closer to the forest floor with the weight of the falling snow. The day before there was green grass and the moss in the forest was beginning to show signs of returning to life as a hint of green was returning to its brown patches. When I woke that morning, my heart sank as I saw that was all gone…again. My father was back to drinking and my mother and I suspected he was having an affair. I needed the green. I needed the sunshine of Spring. I needed the clear roads of Summer, which I always associated with freedom.
I knew I had to make a change. I just didn’t know where I wanted to go. I entertained the idea of applying for an internship at Disney World in Florida or joining a student program overseas. Then, that summer my brother-in-law, Ryan, and I had a conversation about places we would like to live in someday. He liked to travel and occasionally took side-work in the south to earn extra money. He suggested the Wilmington, North Carolina, area. He had been there before and loved it. A person could live within 10 minutes of the ocean and not have to own a million dollar house. He had tried talking my sister, Kristen, into moving. Thought she wanted to leave Northern Michigan, she would never leave her family. That was also a factor for me. I was close to my mother and sister, and I had animals. I couldn’t leave Whiskey, my Golden Retriever, who was emotionally attached to my mother, behind. But if they were willing to move, then I would. The only problem was my father. Before I talked to him, I had to do some research.
Unlike the Midwest, North Carolina had continued to grow. While doing research on the web, local residents on message boards warned me there weren’t any jobs in Wilmington, but online ads proved otherwise. While my hometown paper was lucky to have fifteen help wanted ads at one time, Wilmington had pages of them and many of them were two steps up from what I was able to find in Michigan. Wilmington was also surrounded by water. My father, a long time boater, would love it. He could take up fishing again.
My father was in our four-car garage when I went to talk to him. Work benches, tool boxes, half-built wood boats, and shelving crowded with steel cans, boxes, power tools, and beekeeping supplies lined the walls. My father’s unfinished ’34 Ford and tractor took up one large bay of the garage. He was cleaning, which usually meant shifting one pile of stuff from one corner of the garage to the other. He never threw anything out.
“Dad, can I talk to you?”
“Yes,” he replied dropping a garbage bag full of rags. I hesitated seeing the grumpy look on his face, but pushed forward anyways.
“You know things around this area haven’t been very good. We’ve lost fifteen businesses last year. There aren’t many jobs and for me there aren’t a lot of opportunities for writers. Not as many tourists are coming here and boating isn’t what it used to be with the bay disappearing.”
“You’re right. Things aren’t very good here and they’re only going to get worse unless this fucking township stops voting in arrogant, dirty hags and do something with downtown.”
“Well, I was talking to Ryan and Kristen, and we thought it would be a good idea to move – probably to North Carolina. But, you know Kristen. She doesn’t want to leave family behind…neither do I. That’s why I thought I would ask you if you would consider moving.”
My father stood straight up, his lips tensed, and he squinted at me. “You want to move?”
“Yes, I don’t feel like there is anything here anymore.”
“You can move, but I’m not.” He emphasized “you”.
Little did I know that conversation was going to be the end of the life I lived.


The Turning Point

After the conversation with my father, I asked him one more time. He told me he would rather live in a shack in Northern Michigan than move anywhere with me. That struck me hard and left a sharp pang in my chest. I tried to maintain my relationship with him, but his drinking elevated to new levels. One day he found out I had asked a friend to show me how to put my jetski in the lake. I had asked my father numerous times, but he would constantly put it off. He was always weird about females handling watercraft. When he found out, he started throwing garbage bags at me. He could be verbally abusive, but it was a surprise to me when he became physically violent.
One night a week later, I sat at the top of the second story stairs listening to him drinking in the living room. My mother was doing the laundry. She was walking back and forth past the living room with baskets of clothes. My father was sitting in his chair chanting, “Fatty. Fatty. Fatty. Piggy.” My mother was ignoring it like she had learned to do. He started to stand up and I heard my mom say, “Hold on!” I slid down the stairs to look. He was standing in the middle of the living room leaning forward, close to falling. She was rushing to help him get to the master bedroom. That’s when I saw him take the first swing. She stepped out of the way and then moved to hold him up as he fell head first into the entertainment center. Upright again, he tried to punch her. She stepped away and he missed. This pattern continued on has she tried to get him down the long hall to the bedroom. I followed her as she struggled with him.
“Don’t you ever try to hit me again!” She left him sitting in a chair outside the master bath.
I was panicking. It reminded me of being a kid and having to take care of him alone. “What do we do?”
“We just leave him there. He has the bathroom and the bed. Hopefully he’ll sleep it off.”
This was the second night of two weeks binge drinking and violent behavior. After the second night, mom decided to file for a divorce. His escalating behavior scared her and at the instruction of her lawyer, we file personal protection orders. However, it took until the end of those two weeks for the cops to arrive to remove him from the house. The county cops had a “good boy” attitude. They didn’t like dealing with these situations. It took three phone calls to the police after episodes of him punching walls, pounding desks, and throwing things to get them to finally come out to the house.
After he lived for three months at my brother’s house, my father threatened suicide. It was late at night and I was sitting on the couch watching Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman (I still can’t watch that movie today) when he called to say good bye. He was very drunk and sitting in the empty cottage of the woman he was having an affair with. Confused and scared, I asked my mother to go check on him. She did. I paced the house looking out every window, holding the portable phone in my hand, and babbling to my dog, who was sitting at the front window waiting for my mother to come up the driveway.
“Whiskey? Where’s mom? Is she coming yet? I don’t like when it’s this dark. Do you? Why does he do this? He’s such an asshole. Why did he have to do this at HER house? If you were human, you wouldn’t do crap like this. You’re a good girl…”
When mom found him, he couldn’t stand, but he was awake. According to the PPO, she wasn’t supposed to be there, so she left and called the police to check on him. When they finally got there, he was gone. He had somehow made it back to my brother’s house. My brother took him to the hospital where the doctors said he almost died. After that, he started to get help for his problem. He began going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and taking pills to help his depression. My mom, afraid of robbing me of a father, agreed to let him move back if he continued his treatments and never talked to the other woman again.
It was a big, BIG mistake.
This was the start of a long drawn-out divorce and two more years of abuse.


Mom, Whiskey, the Bird, and I

During the divorce, I spent full days held up in my bedroom watching television, reading, doing homework, and playing online. I had no friends in my town. The mix of embarrassment caused by my father’s behavior kept me in the house; the fear that he or my brother, who moved in with us when he was put on a police tether for drunk driving, would do something to hurt me or my mother kept me in my room. The only time I left was to go to work, run errands with my mother, and check on Whiskey, who was unable to climb the steps to my room.
I felt like I was living in a cave. The dark cedar walls of my room arched into a low ceiling. During the winter months, cold air seeped through the poorly insulated walls. I wrapped myself in layers of blankets and sat on heating pads to keep away the cold. To maintain sanity, I looked for houses in Wilmington online. If it was possible, I wanted to buy a house rather than rent. I didn’t like the idea of giving money to someone else when I could benefit from ownership and few were one-level houses that allowed dogs the size of Whiskey. Either way, the money spent each month would be about the same. I knew I wouldn’t have a chance to visit Wilmington before moving (Mom gave the house to my father and we couldn’t afford to move twice), so with the help of Google maps and message boards, I was able to pinpoint areas I would like to live. One area was Kings Grant. The posters on one of Wilmington’s message boards described Kings Grant as an older neighborhood with affordable brick ranches that were built in the ‘70s and looked like prisons. One person said I wouldn’t want to live there, because – Gasp! – not everyone mowed their lawns each week. I thought that was silly.
There were only a handful of houses for sale in the neighborhood and they all seemed good for a first-time home buyer. But there was one I was keeping an eye on. The inside was newly renovated, including the central air and new laminate floors. The front lawn was very shady, the shutters were an ugly black, and the lawn was mostly sand with a few poorly maintained Azalea bushes. I could see why it wasn’t selling. Still, I had been working at a greenhouse and landscaping center for two years and I had built a garden outside our current home. This house was the perfect project for me.
As the divorce dragged on for an extra six months, I feared the house would be sold. I checked its status everyday online. Luckily, my mother’s divorce papers were signed and she got her money in time to give me a down payment on the house. So, July of my twenty-fourth year, I bought my first house and together, along with my mother, her bird, my fourteen-year-old Golden Retriever, and a stack of internet maps, we moved to Wilmington, North Carolina.
Since my mother and I had the dog and bird, it took us three days to get to Wilmington. It felt weird leaving the roads I had traveled so many times in Michigan knowing that I would not see them, if not ever again, a long time from then. It was hard saying good bye to Kristen, Ryan, and my niece and nephew. They were putting their house up for sale, but would not be able to move for a few years. Kristen was bawling. Three years before she was saying she could never leave her family and here we were leaving her. She needed time to adjust and we called her many times on the way down to tell her about the trip she would one day make.
The drive down went relatively smooth. We spent the first night at the Michigan-Ohio border. The second day we drove through the beautiful mountains of West Virginia. I had never driven through mountains before. I was very nervous when we started to see the emergency stop ramps for semis. I was even more nervous when we drove past a trailer that had been split in two when a truck had to use one of those ramps. That night, we slept in a motel in Andy Griffith’s hometown, Mount Airy, North Carolina, which was four hours away from Wilmington.
I was nervous to see the house. Maybe it wasn’t anything like I thought. I got it for a good price, but didn’t have time for my own inspection (the owner already had one) so anything could have been wrong. I’ll admit, I was slightly disappointed when I first saw it. After days of travel and seeing the half-dead lawn and none of the small comforts of home, I was about ready for a nervous breakdown. That would change after hours of working outside planting and pruning, and the arrival of our furniture a few days later.