What I Carry: Chapters 1–4

My packing credentials were passed to me from my namesake and honed since my birth, straight into foster care and never adopted.

I’ve got no objective context because I was left newborn, nameless, cord still attached...A “foundling.”

The Wilderness World of John Muir. A weighty, hardback anthology of Muir’s best writing about nature, curated by another naturalist, Edwin Way Teale, who arranged the essays in a way that makes them also a biography of Muir’s life.

The transcendental nature and half the vocabulary of the book were beyond me, of course, because third grade, but Joellen has, all my life, been more about what I need than what I think I want.

Standing alone on the mountain-top it is easy to realize that whatever special nests we make—leaves and moss like the marmots and birds, or tents or piled stone—we all dwell in a house of one room—the world with the firmament for its roof—and are sailing the celestial spaces without leaving any track.

He walked thousands of miles over mountain ranges and forded rivers; slept in trees and deserts and forests; and carried with him only a washcloth, a bar of soap, a loaf of bread, a compass, and, oddly, a stack of heavy books he felt were as vital as the bread—which I think is ridiculous—so I see his books and raise him one library card.

Dying in sweltering summer heat in a bedroom crammed with bunk beds the day after my seventeenth birthday, I kept Joellen waiting while I debated for the hundredth and maybe last time the merits of abandoning a secret I carry that renders my “John Muir Packing” TED Talk a bunch of hypocritical garbage.

This foster mom liked to think she was well intended, a white lady who, instead of providing kindness and understanding, had a penchant for calling the police for minor offenses.

Zola hugged me around my middle, and I let her and felt my throat swelling tight, so I turned to the newest kid, a boy whose arrival this morning made my being here untenable—no more room at the inn; he’s younger and needs it more; our ages and genders can’t share a bedroom—who did not hug me because he is ten years old and scared and also doesn’t know me, so I waved to him, alone on the porch swing.

Thirty minutes from Seattle, where I’ve lived nearly my entire life, but I’ve never been to any of the islands because what foster parent has the time or gumption to haul a bunch of kids on a ferry across the Sound for fun?

This island, Wiki also tells me, holds the grim distinction of being the place where America’s disgusting Japanese internment began but is described now as “twenty-seven square miles of land, much of it untouched forest, marked by thirty-two miles of trails, and farms and fields, and rocky shoreline.”

She led me up two flights of steps in a metal stairwell to the top deck, and we leaned together over the rail in the cold sea air and sunshine, Joellen wrapped in a blue down jacket, her short curls moving like mown lawn, me taller beside her in forgettable jeans and T-shirt, straight brown hair whipping around dark eyes in my nondescript white face.

I breathed in the brackish sea air and tried to absorb the beauty of the water reflecting the summer sky, and the skyline, and I tried to exist in the moment, but electric nervous heat squeezed my heart.

The file is the only lever I control, and I have crafted it with painstaking care; clean behavior means more people are willing to let me live with them, which makes it easier for Joellen to place me somewhere new when, to preserve my freedom, I leave a house on short notice.

Most kids in care are understandably sick of always moving, and conventional wisdom among us says that when you find a place and people that feel okay, you stay as long as you can.

This is a good time to say that I understand, and so should you: I am definitely not representative of all kids in foster care. I am an anomaly. Mine is not a typical life in care; which is not to say there even is a standard, because every kid’s situation is our own; every birth family and foster family and CPS and social worker situation is its own universe, and laws change all the time.

And I have unfair advantages that other kids do not; as a foundling, I am not in perpetual mourning for a family I remember losing or being taken from, and I am not escaping abuse or neglect at the hands of a relative.

I have advantages in place for when I’m on my own: thanks to my flossing obsession, my teeth are healthy (so is the rest of me—oral hygiene is the key to good health); I’m not dependent on any expensive medications or booze or drugs; despite the meth-birth debacle, I can keep my head above water with acceptable grades (not exceptionally good or dismal, nothing worth drawing attention); and most fortunate of all, I have had one social worker, only Joellen, almost my whole life.

No job, no experience or education to get one, no home, no health insurance, and a file full of justifiably angry behavior with repercussions that follow them and make it impossible to live.

Afterward, they thought I was napping at last, but I lay in the bed and listened to them talking in the kitchen, the mom’s mom’s voice not at all modulated.

In a glass case crowded with gaudy bracelets and diamond earrings was a necklace, a simple gold chain that looked like something a mom could wear all the time, even to the park or the pool or riding bikes.

“Beautiful, right?”
It was. Worthy of public television voice-over reverie extolling the virtues of small-town life.

“Beautiful, right?”
It was. Worthy of public television voice-over reverie extolling the virtues of small-town life.

“Bats,” she said.
Joellen’s face went ashen.

I am impeccably reliable and so have earned the right to not be under constant surveillance.

No foster parent had ever let me just take off for a walk like that, and definitely not twenty minutes after arriving, especially not in a brand-new town. Francine was a puzzle. Maybe, since I was her last, there was no reason to be meticulous.

I keep ten dollars with me at all times, strictly for emergencies and necessities like Fruit Stripe gum. Not frivolities such as eating in coffee shops.

Thick, buttered slices of sweet wheat bread, crisp outside, warm and mealy inside, and a dish of homemade raspberry jam.

A lifetime of people saying one thing but doing the opposite has inoculated me, and now I understand how to survive with my freedom and sanity intact until I’m eighteen: I can have friends but can’t let myself “life or death” depend on them or let them “life or death” depend on me.

Joellen started worrying when I began refusing offers of adoption, that I’d become “emotionally detached.” In truth, I prefer to think of myself as “emotionally prescient”—there are better ways to express love than through obedience and submission.

“God says, his own words right here in the Bible, man has dominion over every living thing. Men are the stewards and all living things were created for him, to use or eat or whatever. Don’t be arrogant in God’s eyes—eat that chicken. It’s breaded with panko.”

Nothing infuriated Muir more than the hypocrisy of white men claiming God-given blessing and authority to kill his supposed own creations.

I kept my head down, hid the chicken in my paper napkin to toss over the fence later to the neighbor’s dog, didn’t say any of the snarky rejoinders I had on deck.

I started purposely hanging around on shopping days to help her unload the bags and then waited for her to leave the kitchen so I could rescue the tea and the wayward animals from the trash.

I put them in clean Ziploc bags and surreptitiously dropped them into the donation bins at the church each Sunday.