The Voyage Home, Going East
Phoenix, Arizona — Spring 2017
Before there was Gunner, there was Bear.
And before there was a homestead in East Texas, there was a house in Phoenix, Arizona — the biggest house the family would ever live in, before or since. It sat on a cul-de-sac in a nice neighborhood, the lot a little larger and a little more private than most. The yard was well-manicured, with big lemon and tangelo trees, real grass, and a pool surrounded by palm trees. It was, by any reasonable measure, a beautiful place to live.
Dad stood in the driveway one fall afternoon in 2016, looking past the cul-de-sac and out toward the edge of the subdivision, and thought a thing he had been thinking, quietly, for almost a year:
I want out of here.
It wasn’t a dramatic thing. There was nothing wrong with the house — the house was great. There was nothing wrong with Phoenix. Phoenix had been good to the family. All three boys had been born there, in a hospital in Glendale — the oldest in 2010, the middle in 2012, the youngest in 2014. Dad had a good job. Mom had her people. The boys had a pool and a yard with actual trees, which was more than most kids in the city could say.
But the city was growing. Every month, another field disappeared. Every month, another stoplight. Every month, another row of identical beige houses where, the year before, there had been desert. The kids’ school was getting more crowded. The roads were getting more crowded. The grocery store on a Saturday morning felt like a parking lot with a building in the middle.
Dad had grown up in the country. Way out in the country. The kind of country where the nearest neighbor was a long walk and the night sky had so many stars it almost looked crowded. Somewhere along the way he had moved to cities for work, for life, for all the reasons you move to cities — but the tug had never gone away. It just sat in the back of his chest, quiet, patient, waiting.
That fall, the family went on an apple-picking trip.
It was supposed to be just a fun day. A drive up to one of those orchards somewhere outside the metro, the kind of place city families take their kids on weekends so they can pretend, for an afternoon, that they live in a different kind of world. The boys were six, four, and two. The youngest could barely reach the lowest apples. The middle one filled his bag with the worst apples on the tree because he liked the spotty ones. The oldest worked his way down a row with the methodical seriousness of a kid who would later become a workhorse — picking each apple, examining it, deciding, moving on.
And Dad stood there in that orchard, with the smell of apples and grass and cool air, watching his three boys run between the trees, and the tug in his chest pulled so hard he had to sit down on a bench.
Then, a few weeks later, the tipping point.
Dad’s commute home from the east side of town was normally about an hour. One night — construction, an accident, the usual Phoenix crawl that was getting less unusual by the month — it took over two. Two hours of brake lights and concrete and the same half-mile of freeway over and over again. By the time he pulled into the driveway, the boys were already in bed and the house was quiet and he sat in the truck for a long minute with the engine off, staring at the steering wheel.
That was it. That was enough.
A few days later, Mom found him sitting on the back patio after the boys had gone to bed. She looked at him. He looked at her. She knew that face.
“You’re thinking something,” she said.
“I’m thinking a lot of things.”
“Tell me.”
He told her.
She listened the way she always listened — completely, no interrupting, no jumping to conclusions, the steady attention of a woman who had been a teacher long enough to know that the most important thing you can do for a person is wait until they’re done talking.
When he was finished, she was quiet for a long moment. The pool filter hummed. Somewhere down the street, a neighbor’s dog barked once and stopped.
“Okay,” Mom said.
“Okay?”
“Okay. Let’s do it.”
And just like that — on the back patio of a house in Phoenix, after the boys were asleep and the city was finally quiet — the family decided to go.
The where took some figuring out.
There were maps spread across the kitchen table for weeks. There were nights with laptops open and coffee cups going cold. There was a brief, strange period where Dad got really excited about Tennessee for about three days. There was a longer period where Mom kept circling back to the idea of land — real land, not a yard — and Dad kept doing the math on what that meant.
Eventually, it came down to East Texas. Affordable land. Trees. Water. A pace of life that fit. They found a fifteen-acre homestead with an old farmhouse, a barn, a pond, and enough fence to know that animals had once lived there and would live there again.
They put the Phoenix house on the market. It sold faster than anyone expected.
By spring 2017, the moving truck was loaded and gone, headed east on its own schedule. Which meant the family had exactly one job left: drive themselves and one middle-aged brown mutt about eighteen hundred miles across the desert, through the hill country, and into the piney woods of East Texas.
Two vehicles. Mom and the three boys in the minivan. Dad and Bear in the pickup.
That was the plan.
The plan held up for about an hour.
Bear, at this point in his life, was not yet Grandpa Bear. He was just Bear. A solid, brown, middle-aged mutt with a graying muzzle that hadn’t fully gone gray yet, and a personality that could best be described as patient with reservations. He had been with the family since the oldest boy was a year old. He had survived the arrival of the middle boy. He had survived the arrival of the youngest boy, which had been harder. He had survived three small humans climbing on him, pulling his ears, dressing him in things, and once — memorably — trying to ride him like a horse.
Bear had earned the right to be a little grumpy. He had not yet fully cashed in that right. He was still in his prime grumpy years, the warm-up rounds. The full Grandpa Bear was still ahead of him, waiting in East Texas like a grumpy crown he hadn’t yet been handed.
Dad opened the passenger door of the pickup. Bear looked at the seat. Bear looked at Dad. Bear looked at the seat again, with the expression of a dog who had not been consulted about any of this and who was reserving the right to file a complaint later.
“Come on, buddy. Long road ahead.”
Bear sighed — a long, slow, eloquent sigh — and climbed up into the passenger seat. He arranged himself with great dignity. He did not look out the window. He did not wag his tail. He simply sat, facing forward, like a co-pilot who had received his briefing and did not approve of the mission but would carry it out professionally.
In the minivan, behind them, Mom was performing the kind of pre-flight check that only mothers of small children can perform. Snacks: secured. Water bottles: filled. Wet wipes: stockpiled. The youngest’s stuffed animal: located, loaded, double-checked. The middle one’s notebook and crayons: present. The oldest’s book: present, with a backup book, because the oldest read fast and Mom had learned the hard way what a six-year-old without a book on hour seven of a road trip looked like.
The boys were strapped in. The youngest in his car seat. The middle in his booster. The oldest in the back, the unofficial general of the third row.
Mom looked in the rearview mirror.
“Y’all ready?”
Three small voices, in unison: “Yes ma’am.”
She started the van.
In the truck ahead of her, Dad started the truck. Bear continued to face forward, unmoved.
And then — slowly, carefully, the way you start any journey that you are going to remember for the rest of your life — they pulled out of the driveway in Phoenix for the last time.
The first hour was beautiful.
Everyone sang. The youngest sang loudest, even though he didn’t know any of the words to anything. The middle boy made up his own song about trucks, with lyrics that did not rhyme and did not make sense and went on for approximately eight minutes. The oldest read his book. Mom drove and smiled into the rearview mirror at the chaos behind her and felt, for the first time in months, like the decision had been the right one.
In the truck, Dad rolled the window down. Hot desert air came in. Bear’s nose twitched once and then went still. Bear was not interested in desert air. Bear was waiting for trees.
Hour two was still pretty good.
Hour three, the youngest needed to potty. They found a gas station. Production of getting one two-year-old, one four-year-old, and one six-year-old out of a minivan, into a gas station bathroom, and back into the minivan: approximately twenty-five minutes. Bear watched all of this from the passenger seat of the truck with the deeply philosophical patience of a dog who knew this would not be the last time.
Hour four, the middle boy dropped his crayons. All of them. Behind his car seat. In a place where a four-year-old could see them but could not, under any circumstances, reach them. There was crying. There was negotiation. There was a roadside stop where Mom retrieved seventeen crayons from the floor of the minivan while semi-trucks roared past on the interstate.
Hour five, somebody got carsick. We will not specify which one. We will only say that Mom had brought three plastic bags for exactly this contingency, and Mom is a hero, and the minivan smelled like fruit snacks and a small tragedy for the next forty miles.
In the truck, Dad called Mom on speakerphone.
“How’s it going back there?”
A long pause. Then, in the careful voice of a woman who was holding the line by sheer force of will: “It’s going.”
“Want to switch?”
“Yes.”
So they switched at the next exit. Dad took the minivan and the boys. Mom took the truck and Bear. Bear, who had now been transferred from his original co-pilot to a new one, sighed the long sigh of a dog whose paperwork had not been updated and who was being passed between agencies. Mom reached over and scratched behind his ears. Bear’s tail thumped the seat once. He tolerated her. He had always tolerated her. Mom was the one who fed him.
Day one ended somewhere in New Mexico, in a roadside motel that allowed dogs.
The boys, who had been in a minivan for ten hours, exploded into the parking lot like marbles dropped on tile. They ran in circles. They jumped on things they should not have jumped on. The youngest tried to climb a low wall and fell off it immediately, which was the first sign of a long ER career to come. The oldest carried the suitcases without being asked. The middle one named the motel “Hotel Triangle” because of the shape of the roof, and would refer to it as Hotel Triangle for the rest of his natural life.
Bear lay on the motel room floor and did not move for fourteen hours.
Dad lay on the motel bed and did not move for almost as long.
Mom checked on every child, every bag, every snack, every detail, and finally — at almost midnight — sat down in the one chair in the room and closed her eyes for the first time all day.
“We’re a third of the way,” Dad said quietly from the bed.
“Don’t.”
“Sorry.”
Day two was the desert. The long, hot, endless desert of West Texas, where the road just goes, where the horizon never moves, where every mile looks like the last mile and the next mile and the mile after that. The boys watched a movie on a tablet for the first hundred miles. They played a counting game for the next fifty. After that, they ran out of ideas, and the minivan slowly descended into the kind of mid-road-trip mood where everybody is just a little too warm, a little too bored, and a little too aware of how long they’ve been in the same vehicle.
The oldest started reading his backup book.
The middle one drew the same dinosaur seventeen times in a row.
The youngest fell asleep with an apple slice in his hand and didn’t wake up for two hours.
In the truck, Bear had finally accepted his fate. He had stopped sitting upright and had stretched himself across the bench seat with his head in Dad’s lap, snoring softly. Dad drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand resting on Bear’s gray muzzle and didn’t say a word for almost an hour. He didn’t need to. There was something about the steady weight of an old dog’s head on your leg that did all the talking.
This was the part nobody would remember as the funny part of the trip.
This was the part Dad would remember years later, on a porch in Virginia, after Bear was gone — the long quiet hour in the West Texas desert with his old dog asleep against him, the sun coming through the windshield, the road stretching ahead toward something they hadn’t seen yet but had decided to trust.
This was Bear’s last big adventure with the family before the homestead. Before the chickens and the cows and the puppy that would change everything. Before the years of being the alpha of fifteen acres and then one acre and then a porch in Virginia.
For now, he was just a brown dog asleep in a pickup truck, riding east with his person, doing what he had been doing his whole life — going where the family went, no questions asked.
Day three was the green.
That was how the boys would remember it later. The green.
Somewhere east of the Texas hill country, the desert started giving up. Brown turned to gold turned to a kind of dusty green and then, slowly, mile by mile, to real green. Trees appeared. Then more trees. Then the kind of trees that had branches that touched each other over the road, making little tunnels of shade. The middle boy, who had been drawing dinosaurs for two days, looked up out the window and went very quiet.
“Mom.”
“Yeah, baby?”
“Look at all the trees.”
The youngest pressed his face against the window. The oldest closed his book. For the first time in eighteen hundred miles, all three boys were looking at the same thing at the same time, and none of them were complaining about anything.
In the truck ahead of them, Bear lifted his head off Dad’s lap.
He had smelled it.
The change in the air. The damp green smell of the East Texas piney woods, the smell of a place that grew things instead of just baking under the sun. His old nose worked the air through the cracked window for a long moment. His tail — which had not wagged once in eighteen hundred miles — gave one slow, considered thump against the seat.
Bear approved.
Bear had been a city dog his whole life. Bear had lived on concrete and rock and the kind of grass that came in little squares. Bear had never been home before, not really. But somewhere in the back of his old brown brain, he knew. The way old dogs know things. He smelled the trees and the water and the deep dark soil and he understood, in whatever way a dog understands, that this was where he was going to live now.
This was it.
Dad reached over and scratched his ears.
“You feel it too, huh, buddy.”
Bear sighed.
It was a different sigh than any of the sighs from the last three days. It wasn’t a put-upon sigh. It wasn’t a carry me through this sigh. It was the sigh of a dog who had just been told the road trip was almost over.
They turned onto the long dirt driveway of the new homestead just before sunset on day three.
The minivan crunched over gravel. The pickup followed. The driveway curved around a stand of pine trees and then opened up, and there it was — the old farmhouse, the barn, the pond, the fence lines stretching off into fifteen acres of evening light. Cicadas were starting up. The sky was turning pink at the edges. The whole place smelled like grass and water and woodsmoke from a neighbor’s chimney somewhere down the road.
Mom stopped the minivan.
For a long moment, nobody got out.
The boys stared out the windows. The youngest had his hand pressed against the glass. The middle one’s mouth was slightly open. The oldest, in the back, was very quiet — the kind of quiet a six-year-old gets when something is too big to put into words.
Mom looked at it all and felt her throat get tight.
In the truck, Dad just sat there with both hands on the wheel and looked. Just looked. At the house, at the barn, at the trees, at the pond reflecting the pink sky. At the place his family was going to live now. At the country he had been pulling toward for almost a year without knowing exactly what he was pulling toward.
Bear did not wait for ceremony.
Bear stood up on the truck seat — slowly, carefully, the way old dogs stand up — and looked out the windshield at the homestead. His ears came forward. His nose worked. His tail gave another slow thump.
Then he looked at Dad. Just one quick look. The kind of look that, in dog language, means well? are we going to do this or what?
Dad laughed out loud. He opened his door. Bear hopped down — not gracefully, but successfully — and put all four paws on East Texas dirt for the first time.
He took two steps. Stopped. Smelled the ground. Smelled the air. Looked around at the trees, the pond, the barn, the farmhouse.
And then Bear — middle-aged, patient-with-reservations, not-yet-Grandpa Bear — did something the family had not seen him do in years.
He ran.
Just a short run. A brown blur cutting across the front yard, ears flopping, old legs remembering how to be young legs for about ten seconds. He ran a small loop around the yard, came back, sat down at Dad’s feet, and looked up with an expression that was unmistakably, undeniably:
Yes. This. Here. Good.
The minivan doors flew open and three boys spilled out into the grass. The youngest immediately fell down. The middle one started running toward the pond. The oldest stood very still and just looked at everything, taking it in the way the oldest takes things in. Mom got out of the van and walked over to where Dad was standing with Bear, and she leaned against his shoulder, and neither of them said anything for a while.
The cicadas got louder. The sky got pinker. The boys’ voices echoed across the property — the first voices the property had heard from this family, the first of thousands and thousands of voices it would hear in the years to come.
Bear lay down in the grass at Dad’s feet, watching the boys, and let out one final long sigh.
This one wasn’t tired.
This one was home.
Next time: The homestead has chickens. The homestead has ducks. The homestead has donkeys. And one afternoon, Dad pulls up the driveway with a surprise tucked inside his jacket — a wiggling, squirming, impossibly small black puppy who has no idea he is about to become the star of every story this family will ever tell.