ABSTRACT NIGHT IN THE NORTHWOODS AN ASPERGERS PARENTING JOURNEY by Pamela K. Fisher This first-person, disability-parenting memoir tells of raising an intellectually gifted child on the autism spectrum. The book explores the theology of place in shaping both the inner and outer landscapes of characters and the spiritual role of nature as space for solace and reflection. The text’s imagist approach sets memory against nature images to create porous stories of people and place. The narrative style draws from lyrical creative nonfiction to capture the aesthetics of autism and the sense of disequilibrium that threatens to engulf the family. To amplify this sense of disorientation, and the rote rigidity of autism in relationships, the permutations of nature are juxtaposed against the rigidly observed provincial traditions of a small Great Lakes town, rooted in communities tightly bound over generations. The book reflects on the decision to continue with a high-risk pregnancy in light of high probability for disability, and the autism markers that go missed and undiagnosed. NIGHT IN THE NORTHWOODS: ASPERGER PARENTING TALES A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English by Pamela K. Fisher Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2013 Advisor: Professor Eric Goodman Reader: Associate Professor Brian Roley Reader: Professor Kay Sloan TABLE OF CONTENTS Part I THE NORTHWOODS Prologue: Thin Places in the North Woods page 1 Chapter 1: Lake Michigamme: Outrunning the Storm page 5 Chapter 2: The South Shore: Northern Lights page 11 Chapter 3: Key West: End of the Road page 14 Chapter 4: The Narrows: Star Showers & Signs page 18 PART II THE DESERT The Drums of El Nino page 22 Chapter 5: Lake Tahoe Tent Reverie page 25 Chapter 6: Starry Night page 30 Chapter 7: Highway to Hell page 35 Chapter 8: Paris: La Bonne Femme page 44 Chapter 9: Diagnosis page 54 Chapter 10: Pajaro Dunes: Freyja and the War of Words page 59 Chapter 11: One Way Ticket: San Francisco to Orlando page 64 Chapter 12: The Time Space Continuum & Santa page 70 Chapter 13: Push Back page 85 Chapter 14: Mackinac Island: Labyrinth Walking page 91 PART III THE NORTHWOODS REVISITED Chippewa Point: Looking Back page 97 Chapter 15: Ottawa Beach: Homecoming page 101 Chapter 16: Lake Kalamazoo: College Bound page 107 i PART I Night in the Northwoods Prologue: Thin Places in the Northwoods Each August we left the muggy Shiawassee River valley where I lived and headed to the lake. There was a stranger in those woods. One who had known me since the day I was born. He held the key to my identity, an identity my mother kept hidden all the years of my childhood -- so well I convinced myself he had ceased to exist. In the rear view mirror of knowing, those childhood summers have taken on a surreal greenish-yellow Polaroid cast. Then, I hungered for the normalcy of our neighbors in the new tract ranch homes with split rail fences and faux wagon wheels and living rooms with pseudo- colonial braid rag rugs and maple colonial furniture. Each summer the suburb emptied out when the factory shut down to retool. Our neighbors strapped coolers and lawn chairs and luggage to the racks atop the General Motors wood paneled station wagons, bought with their factory worker discounts, and headed up north. We too drove north. In that small, close cottage the first years after my mother and stepfather married, we were all on uncertain footing with one another. We rode all afternoon stuck to the seats, my sister elbowing me aside to get the first glimpse of lake. Scrambling over one another, Linda and I tumbled from the car, racing to plunge our city-soft feet into a spring fed brook that ran alongside the cabin, a childhood first rite of summer marking baptism into a new season of life. During the days we belted "Why do stars fall down from the sky every time you walk by," singing to the Carpenter's Close to You on our new transistor radio until the teenagers smoothing baby oil tinted with iodine on their legs moved their towels down the beach. At dusk, when the fish bit best, we practiced casting for bluegill off the dock across the street. One morning, we didn't clear out of the cottage fast enough and found ourselves the targets of the Coach's famous flying fastball. Perfected during the college no-hitter he'd pitched. Skittish around balls I dodged as they whistled by, smarting into my child-sized mitt. "Hustle! Reach for it," our stepdad barked in a voice honed on whipping the teen boys of his championship team into shape. It made us jumpy. I often wished I could simply drift away on that clear cold stream amid the hot stinging words. 1 We stayed far from the perimeter of the cottage. For hours my little sister and I walked the sandy stream chasing the flickering minnows. One very hot afternoon our stepfather called us. The smack of the baseball slapped in leathery echo from the wood's edge as he threw it into his mitt, impatient, then angry. Co-conspirators, we lay down in the stream, flattening our bodies against the creek bed. His hollering diffused underwater, the liquid rush filling our eardrums. Only our noses and mouths were visible as the bone-chilling current washed over us, fanning our hair out in mermaid fashion. We had been reading Little Mermaid that year. My sister and I pretended to be fish, making fish lips at one another under water, waiting for gills to pop out. If I thought like a fish long enough would my legs turn into fins, would my skin turn to silvery-blue scales? "What if we can't hold our breath that long?" asked Linda, slightly more practical. Nervously I eyed the culvert pipe. What if I got sucked into it and out to Hubbard Lake? Linda's lips turned blue, her teeth chattered. Numb, I popped out, my skin tingling like soda pop in the warm air. "Goddamn it all to hell!" the Coach bellowed from the cottage. How we clever mermaids laughed, ducking below the water to drown out our laughter, blowing piscean bubbles into the water. At night we fished off the dock, calling out constellations, where science and mythology converge: Jupiter or Zeus, Venus or Aphrodite? The conquering Romans renamed the Greek gods: Aphrodite was rechristened Venus and Zeus became Jupiter, as the Coach who claimed my mother erased my given name, LePley, from our birth certificates. Mother's carefully guarded secret. Much later, I learned that the father I thought long dead vacationed across Hubbard Lake in those summers. I wrote many stories in the Northwoods. Stories in which I did not have to play summer softball but went to arts camp and belonged to a family that listened to classical music, like me. I wrote the truth of my life decades before I came to know it. Or perhaps I merely excavated truth in this thin place, where it was waiting to be found. These thin places are old, an old idea of an ancient people. In 500 B.C. the Celts discovered monuments to the earth's thin places, dating back to 2,500 years before their arrival in Ireland. Their oral history and folklore describe them as places where the fabric between the other world 2 and this world is so thin, it is permeable. There, one might pass between two worlds and discover hidden truths. That green tendril truth unfurled into my consciousness in my sixteenth winter. I presented my birth certificate to the DMV for a learner's permit. "Why is it dated six years after the birth date on your application?" the clerk asked, suspicious. I'd been pestering my mother for months to produce it. But she was an artist, loaded up on Valium in those days. By afternoon her eyes had a watery, vaguely there look, as if she too were submerged to drown out the Coach. "Well, where is it, my original birth certificate?” I asked on the drive home, dread twisting inside of me. I was not who I thought I was. Like tumblers in a lock, fragments of memories fell into place. An October wedding, the rosebud corsage pinned on blue velvet jumper. My beautiful, exotic olive skinned mother in her brown suit in First Presbyterian Church chapel, a church where I learned I had been baptized Pamela LePley four years earlier. A dark paneled office where a black-robed man behind a desk asked questions. "How did you register me for kindergarten?" I asked. "It was the 1960s, no one was divorced.” She shrugged maddeningly, as if it was a small detail of little consequence. "Your Dad and I thought it would be easier to just use his name until the adoption was finalized. It seemed like the best thing for all." "Which dad thought that?" "The only father you've ever known," she snapped. "And, whose fault is that? Did he want to know me -- what is his name, and mine?" It was the beginning of our estrangement, her betrayal shook the core of my identity. I found the answers in a bundle of old letters, with California postmarks at my grandmother's, house, where I had lived until I was five. My father had disappeared from my life about the time JFK was shot. The day a boy my age saluted the caisson of his dead father rolling by, I reached out to touch my grandparent's black and white TV to pat the boy's cheek.