When I think about the time they found my father, I think of the sound of water. It was early spring, and I was twenty-two years old, and the temperatures had risen suddenly, too suddenly for the rivers to handle the snowmelt. All through town, the creeks jumped their banks, groundwater seeped up through basements, and cow fields were turned to marshland. Main street was lined with sandbags, and everywhere was the sound of running water, an almost musical sound that shaded into white noise.
I was at work, sitting at the top of the basement stairs, looking down into the cement box where just the day before we had kept cartons of backstock and two massive pressing machines that had been recently upgraded. We’d cleared it all out when the drains started backing up, and the next day, when my phone buzzed in my hand, I was sitting at the top of the steps watching the water rise dark and opaque up to the third step. A swimming pool’s worth, right there under the shop.
The call was from my mother, and that’s what I was doing when I heard the news: looking down into that flooded basement, where the sound echoed crazily, and the light from the doorway behind me lay in an elongated reflection at the foot of the stairs. She said they’d found his body up the mountain.
My father had been missing for five months at that point, and no one really held out much hope for a happy resolution to the missing persons case. He hadn’t taken his phone, or the car. He hadn’t accessed his bank account or credit cards. If there was one thing I knew it was that he wasn’t the type to simply skip town. My father had been like an anchor all my life. The solid, steel weight to which all our boats were tethered. Something had happened, and we knew it wasn’t good.
Hikers found him. He was lying at the base of a tree, wearing the fatigue jacket he’d found at the Salvation Army. It was September when he went missing, and the nights were already very cold up the mountain by that time. That’s what I thought of first. How cold he must have been. It would take a while to determine the cause of death, but exposure was the most likely answer. But even that wouldn’t answer much.
How had he gotten up the mountain? Not in his own car. Why had he gone up there without his phone? What had he hoped to accomplish up there? Even in the word “exposure” there seemed to be another word whispered just beneath it, like water whispering in an unseen stream: suicide. There might be a million ways to die in the west, but in this part of the country, one was certainly preferred.
And we were just settling into this new uncertainty, this knowledge that we might never understand, when the next mystery opened up right under our feet.
I was at my parents’ house. We all were. We were eating from a buffet of casseroles dropped off by concerned friends, watching the news. My younger brother was sitting on the couch, his feet up on the coffee table. Mom was in her chair. She’d been running on self-delusion for five months, sure that he’d show up, that he’d wake up in an ICU somewhere, asking for her. Now she was eerily quiet. I was perched on the arm of the couch, keeping near to her. I could already see it all coming. Even then I could sense her drifting away.
We weren’t expecting anything about dad. It was CNN. National news. Our little town didn’t even have a broadcast news station for a hundred miles, so the story had been pretty quiet. Just a couple of columns in the local paper and then nothing. But there it was: dad’s picture over the newscaster’s shoulder. And then another picture, dad again, but younger, his beard wilder, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses, his hand raised in a closed fist. The whole segment went by without my taking any of it in. Maybe forty-five seconds of airtime, and my whole life cracked open.
Dad had had his wallet in his pocket, so the initial I.D. had been pretty easy. I hadn’t been there, but mom said it was him. But of course they’d run prints, and the prints had tripped some alarms, matching something in some FBI database. And somehow, before we ever even knew it was a question, CNN was broadcasting the story.
His real name was Anthony Madsen. He’d first entered the FBI’s most wanted list in 1991, when he and his group of what CNN called ecoterrorists took credit for the bombing of a government building in Northern California. Two other members of the group had been apprehended after a brief standoff with police and were still serving sentences in Pelican Bay. Anthony Madsen had vanished without a trace. But now his remains had been discovered deep in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. A decades long mystery finally solved.
We sat there in that darkened room as the television went to commercial. Loud music. A sales event at the local Ford dealership. Never a better time to buy. I couldn’t be sure if it was the sound of rushing water or the sound of my own blood in my ears, but either way it was the sound of all boats breaking their moorings, lost to the current, and I realized that he had never been the anchor. He had been the river itself, appearing constrained but always shifting, dark beneath the surface, always ready to break its banks.
Josh Hanson lives in northern Wyoming where he teaches, writes, and makes up little songs. He is a graduate of the University of Montana MFA program, and his work has appeared in journals such as Stoneboat, Dance Cry Dance Break, Diagram, H_ngm_n, and No Tell Motel.