Petty is Dead, by Timothy Gort

“Stardust turned into conscious living matter aware of its existence, and with that comes consciousness of mortality.” 

– Erik Olan Wright, Stardust to Stardust.

We were driving down Oregon’s Highway 101 when my wife, Regina, received a friend’s text about Tom Petty. She gasped and read it aloud, but I was too distracted for her words to register fully. We were driving past thousands of towering Douglas firs, all the hundred-foot monoliths jutting out of the Pacific, and panoramic views of reeling right-hand point waves.

“I’m surprised you aren’t stopping to surf,” as she questioned my speed past green corduroy lines rifling into the shore.

I was surprised, too.

We were heading toward Manzanita, a coastal town known for its steelhead, sturgeon, and Chinook salmon fishing. I also knew a great spot to surf was coming up. Just down the road was Oswald West State Park, a cove I had surfed a few days before, which still had me smelling, tasting, and buzzing with the waves I rode at a break known as Short Sands. 

The waves were so clean that an offshore breeze feathered the textures into perfect curls. I dreamed about surfing all the spots down the coast into Cali for years after I taught myself how to surf on Lake Superior before I turned 40.

At first, surfing helped me deal with the anger and stresses of caregiving for my medically fragile children. Over time, the waves grounded me but became my version of a heroin needle, an addiction to intense charges of dopamine. Surfing helped me process emotions; before that, it was always music. Poetry and feeling magic through coordinated rhythms and sounds usually made me cry. 

I nodded to Regina.

She needs to understand I need time to surf, to find myself, to isolate, to attempt to feel, to identify, to find damn context.

We drove through oblong tunnels without bike paths and around mountain edges that seemed a million feet in the air. I tried to identify the birds arming their wings in fixed, clock-like circles above the ocean thermals. 

“There’s no time to surf,” I reciprocated.

“O.K., let’s listen to Petty,” she answered before pressing the radio’s tiny black triangle button to play his discography.

For the first time on our road trip, we had a deadline to reach one of the planet’s most elite respite spots: The Esalen Institute. Regina’s dream destination was on a cliffside in Big Sur, abutted by hot springs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.  A holistic learning and retreat center, EI is a product of the counterculture of the 1960s and a founding place for the Human Potential Movement. 

I found my own HPM when I managed to find an opening after I called and explained my fifteen-year life partner was in a terrible spot.

“My wife just lost two of her children, her father, and desperately needs a break,” I explained to a stranger through a rusty connection.

In this conversation, ‘just’ meant within the last year:  January, July, and August 2017. As I unloaded our story to her, I felt my father-in-law’s love of boxing, a ten-round match we all withstood. 

Each loss was analogous to a punch: jab, jab, jab, uppercut to the jowl, body blow, body blow, kidney punch. Meanwhile, the knockout clock ticked—ten, nine, eight as I waited for her to answer.

“You have impeccable timing,” she said.

“We’ve just had a cancellation for a time to reflect, which never happens because people spend their entire life planning these things; some have waited for over ten years,” her voice echoing in what seemed like a cooking popcorn tin.

How do I secure her spot?” I asked apprehensively.

The hope I felt in her initial response buzzed me with heroism 101, a vibration I hadn’t felt in months.

“Hello? Hello? How do I secure her room,” I shouted into my iPhone.

Nothing. No answer was returned.

“Hello!” I screamed.

Fuck. Not now.

I dialed the 800 number, which spiraled into busy signals for fifty more dials (or was it a thousand?).  I remembered her mentioning that the area had experienced higher-than-normal storms and that a bridge on the PCH had washed out. But she didn’t say anything about telephone lines.

There’s no way.

Regina had been trying to attend writing retreats and poetry workshops at Esalen for years. She’d always missed out because registration closed too quickly or the timing coincided with our children becoming horribly sick. I didn’t tell the Esalen receptionist about the day before. While I bombed mountain bikes down Mt. Hood with a friend, Regina went to her sister’s therapist in Portland, where another incomprehensible event occurred.

She was hypnotized without her knowledge or consent. Instead of helping her, the session unleashed numerous childhood memories lying dormant in her subconscious. Forty years of her private archives were unlocked in two hours. The unethical, inexperienced so-called therapist forgot to put them back—sucker punch to the face – five, four, three.

When I reconnected with the Esalen receptionist, it was a simple decision to drain the rest of our travel budget and secure her respite spot. We had sold one of our wheelchair-accessible vans to make the trip possible and were driving the other, a Sprinter we aptly named Mastodon.

“You can’t miss the window, as we have a strict schedule policy; the gates are otherwise closed,” she said.

With the bridge gone on the PCH from Monterey, she told me we’d have to drive to Big Sur the back way, through Fort Hunter.

“No problem, see you in three days,” I said before ending the call.

We were still early in the Petty set when a marine layer rolled in, and the ocean turned dark. I sucked in the pungent, sulphury air before turning the wheel inland onto a two-lane highway, which quickly and precipitously became obscured in a syrupy fog. We belted out Petty lyrics as men on drift boats spiderwebbed their fly lines into the eddying turns of the Umpqua River, dioramas disappearing as quickly as they revealed themselves.

Starry-eyed in the rhythm of Mary Jane’s Last Dance, Mastodon turned lazily and effortlessly under my command. At the same time, the Umpqua River breathed a heavy vapor into the crisp October morning. Our tuskless, wooly mammoth moved as if we were chasing Chinook salmon up the winding split, past muck islands peppered with Great White Egrets, and along the rapids where dinosaur-sized Great Blue Herons waded for quarter-sized minnows.

Brief moments of gaining light along the river led to hazy flares of ponderosa pines, lodgepoles, and western junipers. The aspens, which were ablaze in neon orange, also made the fog sufferable, but nothing could penetrate its roof. Neither a glimpse of sunlight nor the aspen trees stopped me from feeling like my lungs were fused to my spine. My upper ribs pressed and squeezed with each breath I took as I tightened my knuckles around the black steering wheel. The river’s magnetism was there but feeling it or anything else was challenging.

“He’d kept up, adapted his music, and stayed relevant, and even Gwendolyn liked him,” Regina said.

“So true,” I responded.

Gwendolyn was our oldest. At 14, she was selective about the kinds of music she would listen to. Her range included Bob Marley, Jack Johnson and ninety percent of the Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. Among her eclectic list of tolerable musicians on repeat for most of her life, she didn’t love Petty but listened to (and judged) his earlier works, like Refugee. She couldn’t walk or talk but was very good at laughing and crying, communication methods I imagine actual refugees might know too well.

But when the first track on the Great Wide Open album drowned out the highway hum, we destroyed the lyrics in unison, our version of car karaoke.  I envisioned Gwendolyn and her sister, Eliza, in the stars, learning the flying part, how to float, shine, twinkle, reach the heavens, and whatever else stars do when we cannot see them. When I looked over to Regina, she was crying.

I want to cry with you.

I do.

In front of her on the dashboard was a miniature brass urn with Eliza and Gwendolyn’s remains, along with a few old photographs of my father-in-law, scattered with random crystals, a potted cactus, a few dull trinkets, and a sage bundle from the Devil’s Tower National Monument. On our way to Seattle, we held a ceremony at Devil’s Tower volcanic rock, the birthplace of the Kiowa legend about the seven sisters who escaped from bears and became the Pleiades stars (Seven Sisters Constellation). 

Regina and our son, Victor, made a mandala out of rock, sticks, moss, and sage, adding our girls’ ashes to the center before Regina read Mary Oliver’s poem, Invitation. Feeling the power of the Kiowa story so deeply and wholly, they cried at the thought of Eliza and Gwendolyn as part of a cluster of stars watching over us.

I tried to cry. 

I did try.

But I couldn’t.

When Gwendolyn was losing the battle with her illness at home, under our care (and hospice), a backyard astronomer friend sent her his nerdy voice recordings. The topics ranged from newly discovered galaxies, supernovas, and all-sized particles. She loved his voice and could listen to him for hours if she wasn’t watching Neil deGrasse Tyson videos.

One of my favorite talks he sent her was about the most potent event in the known universe: a supernova. A supernova is how a star dies. Stars burn for billions of years, constantly making new kinds of atoms, which we can see when we look out the window on a clear day. Eventually, the star’s atoms become too big and heavy for this process to continue. The inward pressure of gravity overwhelms the outward pressure caused by fusion and the star implodes. 

A star’s implosion results in a dramatic explosion – a moment of tremendous destruction. The light of a single star outshines the entire galaxy. Stars that go supernova are responsible for creating many of the elements of the periodic table, including those that make up the human body. According to the Natural Science Museum, this is 100% true: nearly all the elements in the human body were made in a star, and many have come through several supernovas. 

Who am I to argue with 13 or 14 billion years of star formation and demise?  The life cycle of stars is the first truth I told myself during the immense vacuum created after Gwendolyn died. It became the only version I knew after Regina’s father, a deeply religious man and one of Muhammad Ali’s biggest fans, passed away. Like him, Eliza also went out fighting until the miserable end. Believing she was twinkling among the galaxies with her sister and grandpa gave me relief and a shred of reality in what otherwise felt unreal.

Religion, no, but stars; I can get behind this.

With my grip loosened on the wheel, all twenty-four feet of Mastodon felt mouselike. We heaved and distorted past western larches, Doug fir tunnels, the mayhem of the muddy river and mountain mahogany – while the wheels churned, the asphalt held, and we lurched through the fog.

Petty blared as I thought about Eliza, our little ball of happiness, especially if she was doing anything with her entire family. She had survived so much in her seven years that every Petty song we listened to portrayed her completely. If she had any nickname—she had so many—she was our little Petty, with her little curly mullet, so adaptable to even the most stressful of times. His love ballads just seemed to fit her personality.

After listening to Petty for hours, we found ourselves blazing south on I-5 through olive fields, bright with tractors and farming equipment, pushing sand-colored clouds into the overcast horizon. Funneling dust tornados carried in front of Mastodon, causing me to hold my breath when they ghosted through us and crossed the freeway. Droning in three-lane traffic was when I heard and felt a sharp boom.

Mastodon blew a leg!

It was as if something exploded underneath, in the engine compartment, or outside.

“Was that us!!” Regina yelled over the music,

“I don’t know,” I yelled.

I killed the radio. Regina looked at me like I should, but I didn’t know. I looked out among the zipping surroundings, regripped the wheel, which felt stable between my stiffened arms and surveyed the cars closing in. Victor was wearing his headphones, watching a movie, and didn’t hear a thing. I will never know how the lanes opened around us. I gently drifted Mastodon, molasses-like one, two, three lanes until we stopped in the right median. Though I thought her tire or something else burst into shreds at eighty miles an hour, I couldn’t see any damage, smoke or tire morsels.

What in the hell was that?

The entire world is blowing up.

When will the universe, eventually and specifically, target its muckiness toward me?

If my children, my father-in-law, and Petty can die, it can’t be too far behind us.

When will it be my turn?

Regina’s?

Victor’s?

Who else?

All the vibrating down the road shook me.  The trip, which had given me windows for curing myself through nature, surfing, and mountain biking, began to create a void. The black holes were here, like the ones I learned about from Gwendolyn’s astronomy recordings. I scratched my head, found nothing wrong with our rig, got in, turned the key, and pressed south toward Fruitdale. When Regina looked at me, I shook my head.

–

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Timothy Gort is a peninsula nomad. Michigan. Florida. California. In college, he fell in love with his partner, culture, and writing. He writes stories about traveling, fatherhood, caregiving and his Cherokee-Scottish DNA. He is a surfer, biker, and hiker and enjoys rock climbing with his son when he’s not writing. 

© 2024, Timothy Gort