Every parent can tell a score of tales about the
difficulties of raising children, and then of the difficulties in letting
go of them. Here the Texas poet, Walt McDonald, shares just such a story.
Some Boys are Born to Wander
From Michigan our son writes, How many elk? How many big horn sheep? It’s spring, and soon they’ll be gone above timberline,
climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes with spruce and Douglas fir are home.
He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army wouldn’t take him, not with a foot like that. Maybe it’s in the genes. I think of wild-eyed
years
till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles, too dumb to say no to our son — too many
switchbacks in mountains, too many icy spots in spring.
Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in
traction like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a
junkyard, but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed
his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband, leaning into a downhill curve and gone.
First published in New
Letters, Vol. 69, 2002, and reprinted from A Thousand Miles of Stars,
2004, by permission of the author and Texas Tech University Press.
Copyright © 2002 by Walt McDonald. This weekly column is supported by
The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of
English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept
unsolicited poetry.
This article appears in Mar 9-15, 2006.
