» Nonfiction

Take Me Home

Lee Anderson

John Denver died the day I was meant to be born. On the other side of a hooked thumb of land, less than one hundred miles from my hospital, he crashed his airplane into Monterey Bay. All things considered, it’s not a bad place to die: twinkling water, craggy rocks, branched hands of lichens and low-blooming wildflowers. Sea otters, paws tethered. If you hold your breath, the sound of your blood rushing in your ears becomes the rhythmically pummeling ocean. You just have to close your eyes to forget where you end and the world begins.

Twenty-two days earlier, my exhausted mother handed a fragile body to my father. He introduced himself to the face only recently no longer blue. “Hi, little one. My name is Don, and I’m going to be your dad for this life.”

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If John Denver were still alive, he would be having a renaissance. Not only does he rock the circle glasses that have resurfaced in popularity lately, but his music provides a genuinely compassionate heart that runs contrary to ironic burnout. As a musician, he is deftly earnest and completely serious about his exuberance for the world. But even when he was in style, he wasn’t, really. This was not his fault.

The music business contorted Denver’s young, malleable image into what social norms and corporations believed a “family-friendly hippie” could be: marketable, profitable, consumable. His recorded albums were overproduced by a man who made many big folk hits in the ’50s, and it’s easy to hear that line of succession in Denver’s playing. The twang, the saccharine strings, the way he always sounded like he was leading televised prayer.

John Denver is one of Dad’s dad’s favorite singers. When I am twelve and get a silver plastic brick of a karaoke machine for Christmas, Dad’s sisters pretend to croon “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and roll their eyes like children in the back seat of his car. Denver is just old references and the butt of dad jokes to me for years.

Denver repeatedly thanks his grandmother for gifting him his first guitar at age twelve, allowing him the space to step into music, but he does not address his father. Back when Denver was still Henry John Dusseldorf Jr., his father, Senior, was the worst in ways only dads can be. In his 1994 autobiography, Denver describes his father as a cold, stern man who could not show his love for his children. Whether or not he wanted to doesn’t matter.

In spite of his upbringing, Denver insisted that one not only should but had an obligation to be kind. Rather than an elementary school tolerance of otherness, Denver—and, through him, his music—relied upon the idea that if enough people are optimistic and greet the world with an open heart, the changes necessary for us to thrive would naturally come into motion. In an interview with Playboy in 1977, five years after “Rocky Mountain High” became an international hit, Denver said:

I’m aware that I have this underlying purpose of wanting people to know, in the midst of this incredibly insane world, with all of the terrors and problems, that life is worth living. I love life! I love everything about it. And there comes a point, when I’m incredibly angry or sad, that I experience that emotion so strongly it gets to be a celebration.

It’s life, you see? … I get to a certain low point and what I really experience is, God, I’m alive! How wonderful to feel this way! How wonderful it is to care so much that your heart is breaking! I’m aware that throughout all of this pain, what permeates me is this sense of love and of life. And that’s what I want to give and share with people. Anybody I see or talk to, I’d really like him to feel better afterward.

I mean to ask Grandpa about what he loves about John Denver, but this question sits on the shelf for months while I research and write other essays and start a novel and quit a job and start a new one and watch the sun come up and set over Lake Michigan hundreds of times. Then, Grandpa almost dies, but like most times this has happened in my family, it doesn’t take. (We always survive when there is no room to.) I resolve to finally ask Dad after his birthday the following month, late October. I mark it on to-do lists and take notes in a Word document, then type out the question in our neglected text thread that only shares happy birthdays and delete it dozens of times because something about reaching for him feels stupid.

Then, on December 1st, Dad dies.

Grandpa, rich with stories, goes silent.

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Alongside his parenting flaws and deeply internalized masculinity, Dusseldorf Sr. was an excellent pilot whose life felt most complete in the skies. Dad was a Crew Chief on Chinook helicopters post-Cold War, straddling nuclear weapons between southern Germany and Russia, living in barracks that have long since been shut down, and performing a job that has long since been replaced by computers. He was never a pilot, but he cared for the metal beasts with kind hands. Dad waxed nostalgic about Big Windy, two windows of his two helicopters framed and matted on black velvet, hung far out of reach. Denver’s father raced B-58s, broke speed records, held rules high like trophies. Denver Sr. drove his son in and out of the Southwest in the same way Dad drove me to Arizona for graduate school, though Denver’s trip was a retrieval from a place he’d run away to in order to make music, while mine was a deliverance to art. Even John Denver’s first serious hit single was about reluctantly flying away from those you love. I am fine enough on the ground, but the first words that escaped me—my first assertion of self—identified a small helicopter over our backyard. I cooed the onomatopoeic term Dad always chugged out, and he laughed. I was his. Maybe I could understand him, even as his daughter.

When I want to really listen to John Denver, I put on a pressing of his 1975 Los Angeles Universal Amphitheater show. His live performances stand starkly against his overproduced studio albums. He performs playfully, gleefully, in stadiums. There is magic that comes from hearing just one man and his guitar sound like a living room for thousands. Denver creates an intimacy straddling the decades between the concertgoers and I—a feeling only a lucky few can inspire between people they have known their whole lives.

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To offset our world’s bad, John Denver served high roles in at least thirteen commissions and institutes and boards for everything from the National Space Institute to the Hunger Project to the Human/Dolphin Foundation and won humanitarian awards as fast as they could be minted. Dad ran a soup kitchen out of his passion project brewery in the financially precarious early pandemic because he and Mom saw a problem in the community they could do something about—no questions asked. John Denver loved existing, thought we could make the world a better place so that everyone could experience the joy of being alive. Dad turned to stoicism after his mom died to balance the crushing weight of still having to be alive. I gave him a book of 365 stoic meditation prompts, and he read that book aloud to Mom, hummed silently to himself, traveled from room to room, creased pages and dog-eared them, every day until the last. John Denver’s friends really thought his life was turning a corner when he died. Mom and Dad stopped fighting two months before his death, after eight years of wondering why they kept trying. And, at his peak, John Denver was so skilled as a pilot that he passed all of the physical and mental requirements to be an astronaut. He desperately wanted to be the first civilian in space. Denver said he’d write a song from space about the experience, a second Pale Blue Dot. Dad’s excitement to show me Carl Sagan’s Cosmos sits with the full box set of DVDs on my shelf. But, ultimately, something beyond us intervened, and John Denver could not take his spot on the Challenger.

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I hear my lineage when Denver mentions being (re)born in his twenty-seventh year in “Rocky Mountain High.” Mom, her mom, and her mom all birthed their first living daughters when they were twenty-seven. Mom, haunted by my quiet body tangled in umbilical cord; our small, young family curled against the soft, bowed underbelly of the land. As a firstborn born-daughter, the idea that I’d follow suit always floated overhead. But if I’d been born male, I would have been a John too, named after Dad’s grandfather who also died in his 50s. John Denver’s father had three more years on this earth and thirteen more with his son than my father had with me, but their hearts both collapsed at ages that make people cluck and say, “He was too young.”

When I am twenty-three and new to myself, I spend a lucky month in a writing residency on the other side of the Elk Mountains from Aspen. I arrive only a few days after the funeral of my maternal grandmother, who raised me when the repetitive stress injury in Dad’s hands from years of fixing helicopters and airplanes meant that he could not hold me. I walk in circles around the small grid of town. I don’t eat for the first two weeks and cocoon in my bedroom instead. A new friend tells me that it’s possible to hike from Crested Butte to Aspen, if you really want, but it’s twenty-two miles round-trip. There’s a small mountain pass between here and there that’s just opened. I grieve my past self and my grandmother and where my newly morphed relationship with my parents will go and my uncertain, unstable future, and I walk not to Aspen and John Denver’s true comfort, but toward myself. I loosen myself from the sadness, bit by bit, rebuilding myself with cragged rocks and my first beard hairs and wildflowers trying to bloom.

I came out to Dad less than a year before I went to Crested Butte. The father of three “daughters” with three younger sisters himself, I don’t think Dad ever said out loud that he wished he had a son, nor do I really believe he ever did, but I saw a glint of something when I FaceTimed him on his birthday after two years on T. He wasn’t expecting to see his early-twenties ragged, horned beard on me, and I wasn’t expecting the excitement he quickly tucked away. He’d only met me twice prior as his somewhat-son, a self not fixed because I was never broken, only recalibrated, and Dad would only have one more chance to see it.

Eventually, Denver reconciled the tense relationship with his father by becoming his student, learning to fly planes in his father’s skies during the mid-’70s. This relationship with flight would become one of the most important in his life and also his downfall. I wonder if I would have had the chance to bond with Dad, what he could’ve taught me about becoming.

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John Denver tried to fix everything himself, and it took him a little bit, but he got somewhere, kind of, then maybe realized he couldn’t, that there are things you can’t anticipate as much as you may want them all to be beautiful. Then he died. Or maybe he held fast watching the world crest, dying before his longing for justice would finally crumble.

These cycles happen over, and over, and over. John Denver’s father ignored him to fly as fast as possible. Denver fought against the absence, then spent his children’s formative years on tour. Grandpa went to the disco every night, and Dad looked at the hole he left and swore that he would never be like him. Yet I still expect that he’s just not texting me, that he’s still living his life without me, that every time I hear a garage door open he’ll be coming in, hems of his Kirkland jeans wet from a long day of brewing alone. I’ve looked at that same hole, the shape of a well-meaning body that did not have the knowledge or insight necessary to make a true change, and made that same promise. I like to think that my deliberate step into masculinity would make me different enough to break the cycle, but there’s no way to know until it happens.

And I don’t know what to do with the fact that Dad will never get to see me step into the role of father. I think about introducing myself to a baby as their dad for this life, and I want to call him and ask him how to do it, but if he were here, I don’t know that he’d have answers. Flowers have been dying and blooming but mostly dying in a changing climate for more than 150 years, running generational cycles around us. John Denver had a DUI that revoked his pilot’s license a few years before his fatal crash, not yet reinstated at his time of death, but his autopsy revealed no drugs or alcohol in his system. We can see death coming but can’t understand it. The cicadas sing quietly now. As much as we know there’s a problem, death is unseeable in a culture that will not make room for it.

There has always been a shadow within John Denver’s music. In his first album’s titular song, Denver reflects on how joyful his life has been, holding himself at a distance as though he’s already at the end, age twenty-eight. Sing, he tells crowds, if you are moved to. Beneath the mass-produced, BPA-laden joy cast upon him, there is a man who believes so strongly in a world that refuses to see him, who misses his father so much he can’t help but become him. Denver wrote songs for his children about how much he loved them before they had names, and Denver’s father settled in Aurora, Colorado, only 200 miles away from his son, before he died.

Dad, I learn, is most proud of me for my month in Crested Butte. Every time I nursed a drink in the back of his brewery with him and his friends, he elbowed me, requesting that I tell the same story about how, yes, they paid me to write and then read at a festival; yes, I worked hard for it; yes, I did a lot of hiking and exploring and, look, I even saw a moose. In the unfathomable dark of his wake, where we poured five packets of his Christmas-gifted color-changing-flame powder into one outdoor fire pit, a loved-like-family bartender tells me that Dad thought I was a badass. He set rules, and I looked the other way. And he loved me for the ways I loved.

Grief is, on a physical level, a complete undoing and redoing. It is learning how to exist again in a world without. Some things take longer to relearn, and some things never can be relearned; we hold tightly to shredded ideas that oppose the truth in front of us. Colorado public schools teach “Rocky Mountain High” to children like the Pledge of Allegiance while distracted adults strip their chances to experience future’s cold wind. Fathers learn fundamental truths a little too late. I sweep piles of ash into each other, trying to build something that cannot stay. The core melancholy behind Denver’s music is that he could not fix the system or himself but loved us all through it anyway. The joy in Denver’s music does not run contrary to or despite this ultimate sadness, but exists because of it. A pure expression of love.

Wouldn’t it be nice to listen to an acoustic guitar and feel your body move in synchronicity with hundreds of others who are all experiencing the same bliss? To sit alone on a beach, lit only by stars dying millions of light-years away, and let the drone of waves tether you to this earth so your feelings can escape through your open mouth? To want to reach out and talk to your father, to hear his love for you sweep across thousands of miles? To let yourself have the thought among catastrophe that, yes, one day I would like to be a father too? To sit back and see the world as something worthy of love? To notice the Perseids flying overhead from a mountaintop for the first time and think, how wonderful it is to care so much your heart is breaking?