Leave No Trace

Nature, my grandfather, and Paul Zindel's "The Pigman"

Jordan Pond, photographed on the trip to Acadia National Park that I wrote about in this essay.

I had an interesting dream the other day—one of those dreams that leaves you unsettled for an hour or two. My grandpa was getting ready to get into a car. The last car that he owned: an early 2000s maroon thing, long in the front and low to the ground. He told me that he was going to drive to church, that it was only fifteen minutes away and he could go by himself. I don’t remember what the circumstances surrounding this were. What church was he going to? His is right down the block from his house. Why was he going there? I vaguely remember that earlier in the dream my grandma, who’s dead, was writing a letter to a rectory, so maybe he was going to the church to drop it off. It’s strange, how in that hazy dream-induced receptiveness, you will accept anything as true. I don’t think it even occurred to me that I hadn’t seen my grandma in a while. I suspect this is because she wasn’t the focal point of this story.

The events that transpired next seemed to happen in slow motion. First, he got in the car—a struggle in and of itself usually, since his ninety-seven year old, arthritic body is usually in a lot of pain, but in the dream this process was just slow, not painful. As he started the engine, it dawned on me that he hadn’t driven a car in years, that there was no way that he could drive for fifteen minutes when his legs were stiff and he could barely see. I started to walk over towards him to tell him to stop, but I was standing about a half a block away and my legs took on that weighted, dreamlike quality where they feel like they’re moving but don’t actually take you anywhere. The whole scene was hazy. Sometime in between my first and second step the car started moving. The windows were down, and I heard him cry out euphorically, “Woohoo! Finally!” His mouth was smiling wide, his eyes looked out proudly at the road. He was the happiest I’d seen him in years.

Then something happened. As soon as the car picked up speed, it exploded. Just burst, not into flames, but into dust. Ash. I couldn’t see my grandpa anymore. He and the whole car were just gone, leaving a shady black silhouette in their wake. The dream ended as I was running over to the faded car, not actually moving, but running anyway, heart lurched out several yards in front of me with an achy feeling in the back of my throat. “He died doing what he loved,” I remember thinking, as I was being hurled back into reality.

My grandpa never wanted to give up driving. He stubbornly held onto it for what seemed like forever—by the time he resigned, he had blown a dozen red lights, knocked down several traffic cones, made a turn or two into oncoming traffic. It wasn’t his fault; he just couldn’t see anymore. His time was up. Despite the necessity of the decision, his spirits sank when he finally quit. He loved to drive. He used to be good at it, too. When he and my grandma were young, he drove them across the whole country. In two separate road trips, they passed through all forty-eight contiguous states. They started collecting magnets (I think they managed to collect all fifty of them), and they still have them hanging on their refrigerator. Well, he has them.

When I was a kid, he bought his dream car: a shiny red Saab convertible. Two doors, soft top. My eyes widened the first time I saw it. I couldn’t wait for him to drive me to school in it, top down, wind whipping. It seemed like the most luxurious thing in the world—to me, and probably to him too. Soon, all of my friends recognized the car, and they loved it. Grandpa felt like a hotshot for owning it. He was always smiling, every time he picked me up, and we would take detours through the neighborhood for the chance to drive a little more.

Things were good until I got a little older, a little shier. After school, I wanted to be looked at as little as possible, definitely didn’t want all the attention of a shiny red top-down convertible with an eighty-something-year-old man sitting in the front. Every day, I’d run into the car making myself as small as possible. It was always a moment of dread, rushing with my face hidden into that car that I once loved. For the most part it was all in my head, but one time, as I was getting in, a mean girl from my class gave me this weird look, and that was it. I told my mom that I didn’t want to get picked up in that car anymore, she understood, and we told my grandpa. He didn’t argue. I don’t think he wanted to seem upset, but he was. He started driving the car less in general. Eventually it just sat in the garage, not being used at all. I must have made him feel ridiculous. A few years later, the car was sold. By that point I hardly remembered it was there.

One of the harder parts of maturing is owning up to the harm that you caused as a child. It wasn’t until I had reached my twenties that I considered that it had hurt my grandpa when I didn’t want to be seen with him in the car that he loved so much. I was young; my world revolved around me. I didn’t stop to think that it might have been a lifelong dream of his to ride in a convertible with the top down. I didn’t realize that the car made him feel young, added a little vitality to his daily routine. That he was proud of it, that it became a part of his identity, and that my being embarrassed of it was a punch right to his core. I’m sorry. But what is that going to do now, besides make me sad? It seems sometimes that guilt is one of the principal coming-of-age emotions.

I’ve been thinking a lot about growing up recently, and I’ve gotten the urge to look back on a number of childhood favorites, the most recent being The Pigman: a book that I read and reread back in middle school, around the same time that I was mortally concerned with the color of my grandfather’s car. It really put things in perspective, reading the same little novel again more than ten years later. For one, I have a difficult time remembering my childhood, but for some reason reading this book kept bringing back this one mental image of me holding my long-lost copy of the book—a yellow cover, with a pink pig’s face right in the center—sitting in my aunt’s bathroom, where I must have read at least a quarter of it in one sitting. I used to take respite in bathrooms as a kid, maybe because it was one place I could go where I knew I wouldn’t be bothered. What a strange piece of nostalgia, though; a snapshot of the past that I had no idea was still in me, brought up entirely by coincidence, all because John and I happened to come across a copy of a book that we both loved at a used bookstore, and because I happened to pick it up off of my bookshelf one day while mourning the end of my innocence.

The mark of a good children’s book is its accessibility to adults. As humans, our problems get more complex, but they don’t really change that much. We all have the same feelings, no matter our age. Anything that is relatable to a child can be relatable to an adult, in some way. Anything of depth, at least, anything involving real, visceral emotion. It is interesting, though, to look back on books you read as a kid and realize how much your perspective has changed. I took care to use this word: “perspective.” At first I was going to say that I didn’t understand a lot about the book, but this is untrue. I understood everything. I may not have been able to articulate my thoughts about some of the more “mature” topics, may not have had experiences which related to the book, but I understood. I felt the way the book was supposed to make me feel. In fact, while I was stimulated differently intellectually, reading the book now, and may have picked up on some subtleties that went straight over my twelve-year-old head, the emotions that the book stirred within me were pretty much the same.

As humans, our problems get more complex, but they don’t really change that much. We all have the same feelings, no matter our age.

Let’s take, for example, the character of “The Pigman”: a tragic character if I’ve ever encountered one, hopelessly lonely, in denial about his wife’s death. His best friend is a monkey and his two new best friends are young kids who started their relationship by deceiving him and ended it by betraying him. At the end of the story, his most prized artifacts from his wife are destroyed, and then he dies. His character has always made me sad; he’s one of those unique types of characters that seem completely real to you, whose death you mourn like the death of a friend. It was instinctual, back then, to feel for him, to love him. The loneliness of old age was so far away to me back then. It’s still distant to me now, although it is a little closer now that I’ve witnessed it firsthand. But loneliness is universal—that’s one of the primary themes of the book. John and Lorraine, the two early-teenaged narrators, are nearly as lonely as the Pigman, in their own way. Lorraine has terribly low self-esteem and very few friends (a state of being that I related to immensely as a young girl). John has no idea how to process his emotions, misbehaves in order to stimulate himself mentally, and his “friends” aren’t true friends. Neither have much support from their parents. Although their circumstances are different, they share one commonality: all they have is each other.

This is why they gravitate towards Angelo Pignati, “the Pigman”: a surrogate parental figure for two children alone in the world. Misunderstood at home, John and Lorraine are children in desperate need of a strong adult to look up to. The Pigman fills their needs, and they fill his. The caveat here is that what they need are parents, and he does not treat them like his children. He gives them gifts and makes them feel wanted and allows them space to be themselves, but he does not provide the structure and guidance that a parent does.

Parents provide structure. They don’t drink wine with their kids on school nights and roller-skate with them across the house. They’ve grown past all that; they let the children play on their own. They join in sometimes, but there is a difference there. They know their role, know that it is to protect their kids from themselves, not to give in to their every whim.

The Pigman is different. He has regressed into a kind of child himself. His favorite place is the zoo. He wears an eager, innocent smile, a smile which is hiding a great deal of pain, but is genuine nevertheless. He loves that John and Lorraine give him the chance to feel like a kid again. Perhaps, when he was young, life didn’t hurt so badly. This is complicated, of course. He beams whenever he is referred to as John and Lorraine’s father. But this is a fantasy—he doesn’t know how to be one.

It is for this reason that the story ends the way that it does, with the kids throwing a party in his house and wrecking everything. They had been given too much freedom. What were two troubled teenagers expected to do? There is a reason why boundaries are put in place, why parents don’t allow their kids free rein of their houses. The kids don’t understand the responsibility that comes with it yet, don’t think about what could go wrong. This is the reason why, when Lorraine expresses her guilt at the end of the book for “murdering” the Pigman, John feels angry, and responds:

“I wanted to yell at her, tell her that he had no business fooling around with kids. I wanted to tell her he had no right going backward. When you grow up, you’re not supposed to go back. Trespassing—that’s what he had done.”

This was a concept that I didn’t understand as a kid: the idea of “trespassing.” I don’t think any child really does—it’s what makes them so vulnerable to getting caught up with these “trespassers.” They don’t realize how little they know, think that they can handle anything. But reading this story now, it’s clear that all of these characters were out of their depth. John and Lorraine clearly were, but the Pigman was, too. He was desperate, alone. He wanted a friend so bad. It is actually quite nice that he ended his life with two. The ending to their friendship is tragic, but this does not mean that it shouldn’t have happened. All stories are tragic, when you trace them far enough.

Everything, whether good or bad, must end. All people must die. Somewhere in the future of any beautiful landscape is a menacing storm cloud. There is both beauty and horror in this world, depending on where we look, and no relationship is perfect. The relationship between the Pigman and his “children” is messy and complicated, but it brought them all a lot of joy before it ended. Yes, John and Lorraine’s childhood may have ended abruptly, once they felt themselves responsible for this old man’s death. But they were approaching this end anyway—this is evidenced by the little romantic moment they had together while alone in the Pigman’s house, pretending that they were adults and momentarily believing it. The loss of one’s innocence is never pleasant. But it’s inevitable. Just like it’s inevitable to feel guilt, to hurt others, to get hurt yourself. Just as it’s inevitable for spouses to be torn apart, and to die.

All stories are tragic, when you trace them far enough.

Going about our everyday lives, we forget the dual nature of reality. We like to kid ourselves, ignore the danger lurking around every corner. But the ambivalence, the indifference of all things is most obvious to us in nature. After all, this is where we can experience the world in its purest form. I recently went on a trip to Acadia National Park, and I can recall a powerful moment, sitting on a rocky cliff beside the ocean. I felt so far from reality—rocky shoreline on both sides of me, ahead of me a tiny island, and then ocean as far as the eye can see. My eye, anyway. The seagull flying above me might have had a different perspective. A scene like that felt so alien, so surreal, and yet it was more real than nearly anything I had experienced. The small sandy beach to my left, a habitable haven among unforgiving rock, seemed to have been made for humans, and yet it is a product of millions of years of erosion, of waves hitting against rock, just as the waves were doing then, right in front of my eyes. The ocean glimmered, reflecting the sun, a billion diamonds which explode into being every second and then decay, children of a star which is always there, which is generous but unforgiving, or rather, indifferent. The sun will warm the earth, allowing you to survive, and it will burn your skin, all in the same moment. Meanwhile, who knows what it is thinking about? Probably nothing, but maybe something, somewhere. It definitely isn’t us, whatever it is. Those rocks underneath me—they’d crack your skull as cluelessly as they’d offer you safe passage to the edge of the shoreline. Everything has a light and a dark. They coexist, just as we coexist with everything around us.

There was another moment, in which I was also sitting, facing the water. This time I was on the edge of Jordan Pond, John sat beside me. Across from us were the “Bubbles”: twin mountains that really look like two little bubbles bursting from the ground. To their right was a taller and much longer mountain, so from certain angles it gave the impression that the earth was practicing, gaining its momentum before leaping to its maximum height. The mountains were green, the water a translucent blue. The sun was just starting to set. There were other people around us at first. They had spotted a beaver in the water chewing on some plants. We watched it for a while. I had never seen a beaver before and found it fascinating that they really did chomp quickly and eagerly with their giant front teeth, just like they do in cartoons. There were two families with us, and a daring little girl was trying to get as close to the animal as possible, to the annoyance of her parents. Eventually, though, we were alone, and that’s when we realized that we weren’t.

When you’re silent in a place like this the world opens itself up to you. Suddenly you start to hear music all around you—the songs of birds, the croaks of frogs. We had had a similar experience earlier in the day, when we stood perfectly still in the woods and heard all of the sounds of the forest, the wind moving through the trees and the owls and crickets, but that was a brief moment—at Jordan Pond we really became part of the scene. Two little frogs revealed themselves once we became still, and they inched closer and closer to us for our entire stay at the pond. Ducks started to swim past and hunt for food. We were at peace. It was remarkable. It dawned on me that this was the way life should be. Undisturbed beauty: a soft orange sunset, mountains reflected in clear water, birds flying overhead. Gulls which fly in the same swooping manner as the ones high above the sea, or above the Hudson River, our final stop before returning home.

I sometimes wonder if the earth has sentience, the way that every little piece of it knows exactly how to act. Hundreds of miles separated the Maine gulls from the ones in New York, and yet they all moved with the same effortless grace, as though they were taught by the same master. Tracing the New England coast back home, we were following the same sea, framed by the same rocky shoreline. Everything seems so small on a map, and yet when you see it in person just a tiny fraction seems to go on for millions of miles. And yet, while it can seem huge, many times it feels like you barely traversed a distance at all. The waves behave the same way everywhere you go, lurching against the shores with all their might and then dying, allowing themselves to disperse across the whole ocean. Little bodies made up of energy—they don’t want to live forever. Or do they? Perhaps, as they’re rushing towards their doom, they cry out for help, wishing for another way. Perhaps this is the sound we hear as they crash against the rocks.

We live our lives in the same way as the waves, leaping towards our doom quickly and beautifully, simply because there’s nothing else we can do. This is okay—it is the way of life. If the wave doesn’t commit its elegant suicide, it does not exist. Its whole being is potential; it exists to come up and then down again. If it did not follow this path, it would just be water, indistinguishable from the larger ocean. This is true of all life. If we didn’t assume our human forms doomed to destruction, we wouldn’t be ourselves—we’d be indistinguishable parts of a greater existence out there that we can’t currently comprehend. That we aren’t supposed to comprehend, while still made of energy. If this is the case, then why do we try so hard to hold onto those moments which are by their very nature dynamic? Why, as I was sitting on that cliff enjoying the waves and the breeze, all things that are made up of motion, did I want to take a snapshot of the moment, hold it forever? Why did I want this, when all of my favorite parts of the moment—the breeze and the waves and the little dots of sunlight, the tranquil, contemplative expression on John’s face—would cease to exist in a still image?

We live our lives in the same way as the waves, leaping towards our doom quickly and beautifully, simply because there’s nothing else we can do.

We want things to last forever. This is why we consider The Pigman a sad story, why it hurts us to read, when, in reality, all of the characters were way better off at the end than at the beginning. Lorraine and her mother began to understand one another. John began to understand himself a little better. The Pigman died, yes, but he was going to do that anyway—and perhaps he reunited with his wife, after all those painful years. And, before he died, he made some friends. He shared his memory of his wife, allowing her tenure on Earth to exist just a bit longer. He laughed, rode rollerskates, and had some wonderful experiences. John and Lorraine hurt him, yes. They made a mistake. He died as the result of a feeling of overwhelming sadness, but he felt great happiness before, all because of those two kids who blamed themselves for his death. Life is complicated. It is often unfair, and things are rarely black and white. If we choose to see the tragedy, that is what we will see. But there is also a great deal of beauty. Paul Zindel knew that. This is why he had his two narrators try to capture the beauty of the Pigman’s life, after mourning his death.

There is a popular motto among outdoorsmen: “leave no trace.” It is a beautiful phrase, but it is also an impossibility. We all leave traces. Waves slowly erode the shoreline. Human footsteps cause animals to scurry away. The beaver chewing its dinner in Jordan Pond caused people to flock, and frogs to stay hidden. He caused a ripple effect—the whole evening could have looked different if that one animal had found his meal somewhere else. Some traces are harder to see. A kind word to a stranger can make their mood a little brighter. A friendship can alter the construction of one’s soul, long after the friends part. In The Pigman, Lorraine’s mom is paranoid, distrustful of men, all because of a relationship that went south years ago. John’s parents grappled with traces of resentment. The Pigman was never able to escape the traces of his deceased wife.

There’s a quote from the book that stuck with me, narrated by John:

“I’ve always wondered about those cases where a man and wife die within a short time of each other. Sometimes it’s only days. It makes me think that the love between a man and a woman must be the strongest thing in the world.

But then look at my father and mother, although maybe they didn’t ever really love each other. Maybe that’s why she got the way she is.”

I can relate to this. I hope above all else that love is the strongest thing in the world. Perhaps anyone who’s in love feels the same way. In a world where disaster looms around every corner, where there is always a rain cloud somewhere in our future, or a tombstone, the only thing we can do is pretend that we are somehow immune to life’s perils. So, we hope. Perhaps we hope that we’ll be that couple that dies within a week of one another, so that we never have to learn to live without the person we love more than anything, never have to live the lonely, mournful existence that plagues the Angelo Pignatis of the world. The people like my grandpa. Perhaps, like John in the above quote, we tell ourselves that couples turned sour never loved each other, to shield ourselves to the possibility that this could one day happen to us. And maybe this works. Maybe the only thing that separates a love that lasts with one that doesn’t is how badly you both want it, cling to it above all else. Or maybe we don’t get to choose. I’m constantly reminded of my favorite Simon and Garfunkel lyric:

“So I’ll continue to continue to pretend

My life will never end

And flowers never bend with the rainfall.”

It’s necessary to go on pretending, if we are to enjoy life’s beauty. Perhaps all that separates children from adults is that children are ignorant to the uglier facts of life (or willfully blind to them), while adults recognize them, and find a way to live with them anyway. There will always be a storm cloud, but there will also be a rainbow, or a quiet evening beside a person you love, where the sun blazes in the sky as it says its final farewells to you, and the frogs creep closer and the water gently stirs in response to a delicate breeze, and everything feels wonderful because you don’t have to pretend—you genuinely forget that there is life outside of that one moment. And you become that being of pure energy that you are supposed to be, like the wave or the breeze or the twinkle of the sun against water, and you realize that, in order to really enjoy your life, all you have to do is forget all the reasons not to.

This article was originally posted on July 29th, 2022, and available only to paid subscribers. I really like it, so I’m opening it up to everybody now.

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