Big grief, big trees.

Schuman Girls' Roadtrip of Healing 2025, Day 1

I don’t like introductions; they’re the small talk of the written word, and I literally cannot perform small talk anymore. My social skills, never great, have regressed with age and unmasking to the point of near-disappearance.

When I teach introductions in Writing 122 I use the context/problem/tease-a-solution model, so I guess I’ll just do that. If it’s good enough for 225 students a year, it’s good enough for you.

CONTEXT: In April of this year my mother Sharon was out for her customary morning jog. I had just talked to her — all right, texted her — about her plans that afternoon to pick my daughter up from school. I told her I’d leave my daughter’s gymnastics clothes in the mailbox. Her house (formerly my parents’ house; formerly my childhood home, smelling of cedar and safety) is on my bike route to work, and I stopped quickly by without opening the door. “I’ll be on my run,” she’d said. “Sounds good,” I’d said. I dropped my daughter’s leotard and shorts off at 9:15.

By 9:45, my mother was dead.

A driver lost control of his Rav4 on the curves of the parkway that skirted the bark jogging path where she’d run nearly every day for 45 years. He hopped a curb and drove across many (many) feet of prairie grass without braking. My mother died instantly. The car didn’t stop. The man finally drove into the creek near the path. (This is all widely-reported on local media and in publicly available police records, in case anyone’s lawyer is reading. And notice that I have not editorialized a single solitary word.) The driver was eventually arrested and charged with second-degree manslaughter and driving under the influence. I watched on a livestream as he was arraigned in jail scrubs, pled not guilty, bailed out. The state sent me a text when he was released from custody. He is currently awaiting trial from his apartment, which I can see from my house. This is a small town.

PROBLEM: My mother is still dead.

TEASE OF A SOLUTION: In mid-July I spent an inordinate amount of human Earth money to take my daughter, who is 10, on a healing journey through California by automobile, just us two. For the next words, as many or as few as I can manage, I’ll share some of that trip.

For our first day I diverted from the unrelenting heat of the Interstate, west until I hit water at Crescent City, glimpsing the ocean, dodging Redwoods at 25 miles per hour and finally alighting at the legendary Motel Trees, the companion lodging to the Trees of Mystery theme park in Klamath.

The next morning we housed some pancakes at the Blue Ox Café and headed across the street and past the life-sized (I assume) Paul Bunyan, who was now speaking to us (or at any rate someone was, though a speaker).

As you are about to see, we are a rope-dropping kind of family, so we arrived precisely at opening and avoided crowds as we made our way through the winding trails and fact-filled placards that dotted the star attractions, most of which were hundreds of feet tall and wide enough to drive a car through. (A compact car, at least.)

(My human child, for scale.)

We rode a gondola up into the canopy, my daughter waving at the returning passengers as I tried to remember the last time I’d seen the top of a 300-foot Redwood before (never). Before that we braved the park’s star attraction, a trail of interconnected suspension bridges a hundred feet in the air, a Star Wars meets forest bathing experience I am glad I did but which was also so scary I spent most of it quoting Garth from Wayne’s World. (I am nothing if not a master of my environment’s vibe.)

I’m having a good time…

Nottttt.

On about our fifth canopy platform (only slightly less terrifying than the bridges) my daughter, who had thus far yapped in glee with zero interruptions since the moment we awoke, stopped and turned to me with this one smile she has, closed-mouth and angelic and looking every single bit the precise facsimile of my great-grandmother Ida. She grabbed my hand and was silent for a moment (just a very short one), and then in her absolute sweetest voice she said: Thank you for bringing me here, Mama. (This would become a refrain throughout the trip, one of our many new inside jokes and the double-neurodivergent mother-daughter code that nobody else understands.)

From the years of 1981 until about my sophomore year of high school (when the aforementioned great-grandmother Ida died), we took exactly two vacations every summer. One was to the mountains of Eastern Oregon, usually to a middle-fancy (or what once was a middle-fancy) vacation community called Black Butte, where my parents’ friends had a house and would invite us out to stay for a week. (It was full of outdoor activities I loathed and usually no working television. I only liked the years I was allowed to bring a friend.)

The other was a week in the Bay Area, at my great-grandmother’s chic midcentury masterpiece of a house, now located in the middle of Silicon Valley but at the time surrounded by a sleepy rich-person’s town called Woodside and a whole lot of marshland (or whatever that area was; I remember grass, a lot of grass and then finally a Nordstrom and the Stanford campus). The house smelled magnificent, like fancy wood and hydrangea air and pine trees and leather. For the last ten minutes of the drive my father would crank down the windows of the car and let in the air.

It was always very late at night by the time we rolled into Ida’s; my great-grandmother and her home health aide would have stayed up to receive us and then politely adjourned so that we could settle in to our respective guest bunks, my parents on the fold-out couch in the study, my brother on the massive wraparound couch in the cavernous beam-ceilinged living room, me nestled next to Idie herself in the double bed in the main suite, the place of ultimate honor, with a magnificent great-grandmother I got to know until I was in high school, who lived until she was a few months shy of 100, whose Schuman lifespan precedent both my parents were supposed to follow.

My dad loathed multi-day road trips so we always got dragged before dawn out of the Eugene house, which now sits empty, having just been stripped for parts by us, by my parents’ friends, by an estate sale, and finally by junk haulers, my mother’s final treasures unclaimed at the bottom of a landfill somewhere. (She grew up poor and she kept everything, not in a hoarder way but in a “this is now a toy I made and here’s how it works” way. Some of my daughter’s favorite toys were the teeny tiny leftover rolls from the compostable dog waste bags my mother used to pick up after Billy Budd, the Cairn Terrier my father finally let her get in the 2010s. My daughter and my mother were best friends. If I think too much about it I can’t see straight.)

We would hit Ashland for a sit-down breakfast at Ashland Bakery and Cafe (“Life is short. Eat dessert first.”) and then lunch somewhere desolate and hot like Redding or Red Bluff. By the time we cut across to the Bay it would be dark. This was not about scenery; it was about efficiency (and thrift). Every year we would beg my parents to go “the Redwoods way,” and most years they would say no.

But sometimes we’d wear them down. Sometimes it would be my dad weaving through the dappled magical fairy trail that is Highway 101 at that latitude. Sometimes they would even let us stop at a tourist attraction like Trees of Mystery where they would even weaken enough to let us buy a small souvenir. I remember one year, at some gift shop that I don’t remember, I chose one of those little peg games like the ones they have at the Cracker Barrel (to pass the time with my brother in the car that didn’t even have a tape player until 1986, and even then all we listened to was my dad’s two tapes, Paul Simon’s Graceland and the Emmylou Harris, Linda Rondstadt and Dolly Parton Trio album). It was unremarkable except for the Redwoods logo printed on the top, crookedly. The wood was smooth. I remember running my index finger back and forth on it for what felt like hundreds of miles as I watched the trees get impossibly bigger and then smaller again.

At around 11:30 my daughter and I rounded the end of the Trees of Mystery exhibits, which included dramatization of numerous American myths via giant wood carvings and this:

I always tell my students not to explain their entire “solution” in their introductions. Otherwise, I say, they won’t need to write a paper. They need a problem big enough that it will take a paper to solve, if it even can be. Sometimes it can’t. Sometimes it never will be, even if someone ends up in prison for it.

Let me be very clear that although I will always be grateful for the outpouring of love and grief that has cushioned the past three months (technically it is three months and one day), there is one thing keeping me alive right now and that thing is my daughter. I endure dreams so vivid and sad that I wake up in silent tears, for her. I keep myself together while she’s in the car and then lose it once she’s safely dropped off. (Car time = cry time, obviously.) She has already been through so much unfair and inexplicable loss at her little age, two fewer safe people in a world full of people who will never understand her. She needs me to get through this somehow, even if I don’t. (I won’t.)

Thank you for bringing me here, Mama.

Thank you for keeping me here, Daughter.

Next: Santa Cruz. Later: Disneyland.

Heartfelt thanks to Holly, Garrett, Kathy, Jessica L, Amy C and Jill for funding this piece. I am writing this series independently because I cannot fathom subjecting myself to the pitching and editing process about something so painful. If you would like to support my independent writing projects, feel free to buy me a coffee.