Email this article

The Way Out

by Craig Childs

review by Katharine Niles

Found in: | Inside | Books |

The Way Out, Craig Childs' new book, goes so far beyond the usual macho male survival story that I want to sing its praises from many mountain tops. Like Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge, Childs weaves the story of a landscape with the story of his, and his companion Dirk's, own lives. Though Refuge is radical both for its implication of the U.S. government in one family's health crises and for its glimpse into traditional Mormon family structure, it seems unsurprising that this kind of personal testimony would be written by a woman. Since feminism's resurgence in the 1970s, women have made great strides in telling their stories truthfully and with great insight.

Men, alas, have lagged behind. It probably goes without saying that this has everything to do with a patriarchal power structure that places men at the top and insures that they stay there by cutting them off from the right to their own emotions. Yet it needs to be said. If the violence by which this patriarchy sustains itself is epidemic, it is also something that a "real" man, raised on Louis L'Amour and John Wayne, is supposed to remain unaffected by. Childs' book lays bare the raw lie of this, and does so with heartbreaking grace.

It wouldn't be a Craig Childs book without an extensive stint into the wilderness, and we find ourselves plunked down this time into a remote part of the Navajo reservation that Childs first spies from an airplane taking him to his father's funeral. This detail is important, because Childs' father was, in his own words, "a sonofabitch," a violent drunk who grew corpulent and died before his time from a heart attack. Childs' companion in his subsequent journey through the Navajo territory first spied from the plane is an equally terrorized man named Dirk Vaughan, who spent 15 years as a cop and who, like Childs', copes with the aftermath through the sacrament of wilderness. These are traumatized men, and yet these are men we all know, and are.

Childs' relationship to his wild meanderings, so well documented in his previous books, has always struck me as one long dance with the Fool Card from the Tarot deck, and in The Way Out we get at the root of that two-step. Deep in the second of three all-but-impassable chasms, Childs challenges himself to go where his father could not; "This is where you failed, my father.[...] You found yourself in the tortuous bed of the maze. Was it for fear or laziness that you never moved again?" This is the journey of Greek tragedy, and if we are to grow up and past our parents, we have to undertake it.

Yet this could have been, so easily, another macho story of "conquest" and "survival." That it's not speaks a great deal of Childs. The harder work of survival, here, is not the habitat he and Dirk crawl around in - both are experienced backcountry men and even though this landscape is particularly confounding, and rendered with utter beauty by Childs - this is not new emotional turf.

What is new is the artifact of Childs having survived a childhood in which his father could very well have killed him, and then having the wisdom to seek out Dirk, a man also exposed to violence and capable of it, to heal through. Dirk is orderly where Childs is not; Dirk's response to his past is to try to put impossible things, such as noodle servings for dinner, in exact boxes. This drives Childs nuts ("What's up with that spoon ritual of yours?") but he also understands what a complement it is to his own innate need to let things fall where they will, order be damned. Theirs is a pas de deux of reckoning with chaos, and each man performs it differently but with enough maturity to let the other be with it.

The effect is heartbreaking, and while Childs is forthright in his love for Vaughan, Vaughan himself unwittingly expresses it for Childs in his contempt for Childs's father.

I left this book wanting to spend a long time with both men, and feeling utterly safe in the hands of two souls who have bothered to go into deep country where the way out is not a given. Let it therefore be said, to every peak-bagger wannabe, every John Wayne hopeful: The false bravado of the patriarchy pales in comparison, and if you want to know what genuine masculinity looks like, you could do far worse than to track through that wretched, gorgeous territory with Childs as your guide.