Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Natural Forces

2014; Colorado State University; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/col.2014.0046

2325-730X

Liza Cochran,

Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies

Natural Forces Liza Cochran (bio) Heading west out of Kalispell, us-2 passes a Smith’s grocery store, some mom and pop casinos, and billboards in the yards of half-built homes before the land opens into wide fields. They are spring flooded: fence posts planted in water, horses and cattle relegated to the far swath of pasture that rides the flank of the hills. In May, the odd northern marriage of late evening light and unthawed air evokes a tenor of the wild. We are far from New England, with its seaboard cities and settled pockets of fertile land. This remote cattle country spans the northern rim of the homeland. Montana was one of the last regions to be populated by settlers, and today the state hangs on to this spirit of the frontier, remaining one of the least populated among the lower forty-eight. Just north of these pastures, the Whitefish Mountains climb from the valley floor and build steadily into the eastern slope of the Canadian Rockies. You can feel this range of snowcapped shoulders and granite fins hulking somewhere above you, glaciers cascading and calving, grizzlies roaming the vast tundra and boreal forests, curtains of clouds parting atop peaks to let down the light. We are driving to a four-thousand-acre cattle ranch that houses wayward young men. My younger brother, Sam, is one of them. He has spent the last month working the Twelve Steps, working the land, and after our visit—a three-day program for family members—he’ll venture into the Bob Marshall Wilderness on snowshoes and spend another month learning how to survive. The idea is to soften the men—boys, almost; Sam is twenty-one—through hard work. The idea is that physical labor opens the mind to digging inward. They strip logs and build buck and pole fences. They admit powerlessness. They make searching and fearless moral inventories of themselves. They surrender to the scale and harshness of western land. Mom and Dad sit in the front of our rental car, my older brother, Silas, and I in the back, our twenty-nine and thirty-one years flying out the window in deference to this old formation [End Page 73] of childhood. I could be ten years old, slung low in the backseat of the little Hyundai, and the uncertainty of the coming visit opens wider the conduit for childhood grievances: vying over control of the radio, Silas chewing his bagel too loudly. Still, here we are: family loyalty contained in a metal frame moving west, exigency calling us back together. I feel, as I have before, the closeness spawned by shared grief, shared hope. This isn’t our first family program. For most of a decade Silas, now four years clean, was in and out of treatment. A vast majority of recovering addicts relapse within the first few years, and while Silas never again picked up the bottle, his addictions instead shifted faces: alcohol to narcotics to gambling to pornography. Each reconfiguration of dopamine and endorphins brought us to a new treatment center in a new city—Tucson and Minneapolis and Hattiesburg and Prescott. The theory behind family programs is that by participating in treatment, parents and siblings, spouses and children, can aid an addict’s recovery, cut the chances by a sliver that an addict will relapse after he returns to the outer world. When we visited Silas for the first time ten years earlier—when addiction in the family still felt like a fresh wound—I had learned about enabling and condoning, the ways that families organize around an addict’s behavior, unintentionally clearing a path for the dysfunction to persist. The classes and lectures focused more on ourselves than on the addictions of our loved ones, and I saw, immediately, my own complicity: the ways I’d justified Silas’s drinking, the excuses I’d made for him, and the ways I’d blamed myself—the contorted logic I’d drummed up: that somehow the ease with which I found success in the world was grounds for his demise. It took just that first visit to see that a broken family gathering around a...