My son still tells people this story, though he and I remember it differently. Which is not to say that the facts are in dispute. The difference is more a matter of the way we feel about what happened—what it means, what it says about me, about us.
New England was in the middle of a sweltering July heat wave, and we were driving from a funeral in Massachusetts back to the boys’ summer camp in Oakland, Maine, where I ran a music program and fifteen-year-old Darius was a camper. Twelve years had passed since we’d been in a car accident that had taken the lives of my wife, Susan, and my older son, Cyrus, and Darius and I were finally in a good place. I was remarried to Rachael and thriving. Darius and Rachael had thoroughly bonded, and though he and I both still had a lot to figure out, we had turned a corner toward normalcy and something approaching happiness. But funerals could still be triggering for both of us, and even though my grandfather had made it past a hundred, we’d somehow still been unprepared for his death. I had assembled a funeral outfit quickly from a consignment shop. You don’t pack a funeral suit for summer camp, and the one I’d bought was polyester, navy, and shiny as an oil slick, the jacket a little too tight in the chest. I don’t really remember what we threw together for Darius—probably a shirt he had brought for the socials we had with our sister camp across the lake, maybe a jacket borrowed from a counselor.
For the most part the funeral was more stressful than sad. My mother had asked me to play a song at the service, so I had grabbed the big blue Washburn guitar from the music room and hurriedly prepared George Harrison’s “All Things Must Pass,” a song I already knew and that seemed appropriate. But I got performance anxiety, so my hands were sweaty and I fumbled the chords a bit. Though I did a passable job, I couldn’t help but feel ambivalent about playing a song I’m sure my grandpa wouldn’t have known or liked. I remember my throat being a little tight, my voice sounding nasal and pinched, the last chord chiming, and then the awkward silence. (Had I been expecting applause?) I almost dropped the guitar as I unslung it from my shoulder. Unsure where to go, I mumbled, “Excuse me, pardon me, I’m sorry,” as I made my way back to the pew beside my sisters, where I ended up hugging the guitar on my lap through the eulogy and prayers.
Darius and I were trying to get back to camp by early evening to see a play the theater program was performing that night. So as soon as the last words had been said over the grave, we hustled to our Corolla, edged it past the rows of other vehicles—one tire on the pavement, the other on the grass—and hopped on I-95 to head back up the Eastern Seaboard.
I didn’t remember we were low on gas until the car seemed to throb, then lurch beneath me. I’d noticed that the fuel gauge was near empty before we’d reached the Methodist church where the service was held, but there’d been no time for a stop. Then, after the service, we had to join the funeral procession to the grave site. By the time we were headed back to camp, our need for fuel had completely slipped my mind. Somehow I had not seen, or possibly had ignored, the orange warning light. The Corolla had logged well over four hundred thousand miles, and the lights on the dashboard flashed constantly, unconnected to any engine emergency. I remember my stomach dropping and Darius looking over at me with the wide-eyed, oh-no-what-do-we-do-now look he’d perfected over years of being the son of a single dad with PTSD and ADHD—a dad who was always figuring everything out on the fly, teetering on the edge of disaster and panic, forgetting to pay a water bill, failing to move the laundry into the dryer until ten minutes before his son had to head off to school, leaving something on the stove while taking a phone call and setting off all the fire alarms in the house, realizing there was no money in the checking account with a week to go before payday.
“Don’t worry,” I said with a forced smile. “I just need to make it to the next exit.”
And we did make it to the exit—but only to the exit, the car giving a last heave and gasp before rolling to a stop halfway up the off-ramp, about twenty feet from the crest of a small hill.
“Damn it.”
Had I been thinking clearly, I would have simply called a tow truck. Every Christmas my father gifted my sisters and me AAA memberships, and this was the age of smartphones. Though my phone’s battery was low, Darius had his, which is how we learned we were only a little over a mile from a gas station.
“OK,” I told him, loosening my tie and undoing the top two buttons of my shirt. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Five minutes later my son was sitting in the driver’s seat with a holy-crap-what-are-we-doing expression he’d perfected in the past five minutes.
“When I yell, ‘Now,’ ” I told him, “put the car in neutral, and I’ll start pushing. Stay in the breakdown lane. Do not drift into the road.” I explained that I just had to push the car to the top of this hill, and then gravity would take over. I’d leave the passenger door open so I could hop into the passenger seat, and we’d let the car roll as far as we could.
Darius set his jaw and nodded, pulling the seat up so his legs could reach the pedals.
“Don’t touch the brakes unless I tell you to.”
I want to pause here and point out the obvious: According to the laws of physics, as soon as Darius put the car in neutral, it would begin to roll back. With me behind it. A 2002 Corolla sedan weighs 2,503 pounds. At my heaviest I’m a little under 190. I played college football and am pretty strong from the waist up, but the car accident had fractured my right hip and crushed my sciatic nerve, and the muscles in my legs had atrophied and never fully regained their strength. (This is why I hardly ever wear shorts.) The point is, there was no reason—other than a genetic predisposition toward stubbornness—for me to believe I could push that car up a hill. The best-case scenario should have been that I jumped out of the way as soon as the car began rolling backward, and Darius, who had never driven anything bigger than a go-kart, quickly realized what was happening and hit the brakes, even though I’d just told him not to.
The worst-case scenario is not one I like to think about.
There are places called “gravity hills,” seemingly magical locations where a car placed in neutral will appear to defy physics, rolling upward as if pulled by an invisible string. You can find YouTube videos of people documenting the phenomenon. There’s even such a place on an access road in Greenfield, Massachusetts. But Greenfield is off 91, not 95. We were nowhere near it.
Yet somehow, some way, everything went exactly according to plan. I shouted, “Now!” and Darius put the car into neutral. I pushed, and the car slowly, inexorably began to roll up the hill. It wasn’t even that difficult. After five feet or so, the Corolla was practically moving on its own, gaining momentum until the front end topped the crest, and I hustled to hop into the passenger seat, swinging the door shut with a bang. (What if I had tripped and fallen?) I had to yank at the seat belt several times before I could click it into place, and when I looked to my left, Darius was sneaking glances at me out of the corner of his eye, his sweat-darkened bangs plastered to his forehead, a smile of wonder and delight on his face.
We rolled down the hill a good two hundred feet. We even had a little additional luck: No cars were on the rural access road, so Darius didn’t have to brake at the stop sign. We just coasted through.
On Earth, though, momentum always runs out, and we came to a stop on the narrow shoulder, still just a little under a mile from the service station. But we were off the ramp.
Author and humorist Harrison Scott Key writes, “There comes a time in a child’s life when he stops believing that his father is Superman and sees that he is just a man with his own nameless spiritual diseases.”
This was not that time.
Even in the moment, I think I knew that this story would become legend for Darius. Something to tell his friends when the subject of fathers came up: My dad pushed a car up a hill! A knockout punch in the “whose dad is the biggest badass” competition. I was more than a little shocked by what had just happened, struck dumb by my own luck and stupidity. As we got out and began our long, sweaty walk to a gas station in a tiny New England village whose name I can’t remember, the pointlessness of the entire enterprise finally hit me. I could have, maybe should have, gotten myself run over by my own car, with my son at the wheel, and yet I’d escaped unscathed. I had taken a meaningless risk that had endangered us both, and yet here we were, the beneficiaries of a small miracle. I tried to apologize to Darius for running out of gas, for putting him in this situation, but he wasn’t having any of it.
I’ll admit that, at the time, we both needed for me to be the hero of this story—his impossibly strong, unkillable father who could survive anything, handle everything. It felt good to be seen that way, to be that man, if only for a little while.
Darius is now twenty-three and beginning to define for himself what it means to be an adult. I have watched in amazement as he’s gone from success to success: graduating from an Ivy League school, attending one of the best MFA programs in the country, publishing in the best magazines, winning writing awards and book contests, his trajectory angled ever skyward.
I am happy for him, but I’m also scared, because I have seen him struggle with anxiety and imposter syndrome, never convinced of his own merit, at times seeming to feel unworthy even of love. And I fear that I have exacerbated this by allowing him to see me as indestructible. That’s how I saw my father, and it left me feeling as if who I was and what I did could never be good enough. It wasn’t until a year after my dad’s death that I found out he had sucked his thumb well into his teenage years, that he’d been bullied as a child. Maybe it would have helped me to know these things. Maybe it would have helped us both.
I’ve spent too much of my life chasing one achievement after another. I don’t want my son to grow into a man who experiences peace only as a momentary break in a churning battle for affirmation; a man who needs to be the hero or the fool and can’t simply accept the grace of a small miracle and then live in its light.
When I remember that day now, I think mostly of the long walk down that dusty road, marking time by the distance between the cool shadows thrown by overarching trees—the two of us passing a full red gas can between us on the return trip, sharing the burden. I can see him smiling and relaxed, tie loosened at his throat, sweat spreading across his back. It amazes me even now to remember how calm he was. How consoling. How silly. What teenage boy wouldn’t have complained or whined, resenting the mistake his parent had made to put him in that situation, the danger and discomfort caused? But that’s what makes Darius who he is. It’s his superpower: empathy, kindness, the willingness to risk hope.
I don’t know what got that car rolling up that hill, but I know who kept me moving toward the future, the miracle who brought me home.
