The Pilgrimage

Have you ever pondered how refreshing it is to take a deep breath? That moment when you first wake up from a deep sleep, or after discovering good news, or like those times when you’ve been thinking so hard and so long that you can only come back to reality after a long, deep inhale and exhale.

I first found the picture about a week and a half ago while I was scouring the basement for my birth certificate for my I-9. Prior to this day in the basement, my life couldn’t have been more predictable. I was born Liberty Beatrice Merriman to Baptist parents in Quinton, Oklahoma. I hate my name. My mother convinced my father to name me Liberty -because she was born and raised in Liberty, Wisconsin- on the condition that my middle name would be Beatrice after his mother. So here I am, Liberty Beatrice, but I have everyone call me L.B. I played flute in the Quinton High School pep-band and sang in the First Baptist Church choir over there on J Street. That was all proverbial, until I walked to Pomp and Circumstance and snagged my diploma about a month ago. Everyone in Quinton expects you to go to Oklahoma State after you graduate, or if you’re from First Baptist, get married and have a load of babies. I wasn’t too sure I wanted to do that.

So back to my basement… who knew how long it had been since anyone had last seen my birth certificate, but my mom thought she might have seen in the filing cabinet down there. So down I went. At the bottom of the stairs my eyes scanned the dark, dank basement where we kept all the “stuff” with little hope of actually finding what I was looking for. I’m almost glad I didn’t, because what I did find was much better. I carefully stepped over the plastic manger scene and dodged our old baby crib as I made my way to the filing cabinets. My last barrier between me and that cabinet was a cobweb that I swept out of my face and alas, I was there. The thing was so rusty I could barely yank it open, but once I had I discovered a whole mess of papers that looked like they hadn’t been touched in years. My fingers made their way through paper past paper until I had reached the last one in that drawer. On to drawer number two; still no birth certificate.

My eyes lay hold of the last and final drawer, after much self-coercion I decided to give it a tug. The drawer made an awful screech when I did, but to my surprise once the drawer was open I saw an old photo album instead of more papers. Now you might be wondering at the fact that there was an enigmatic old photo album in my basement that I had never seen, but to tell you the truth it’s my mother who always goes down to the basement to find things. I guess I just never had a reason to venture down there before. The album looked like it was about to fall apart. I could see through the rotting leather exterior strait to the dried glue that was once the binding. Inside were pages and pages of yellowed black and whites. The people in the pictures weren’t familiar to me, until my eyes stumbled upon a picture of what looked like my dad’s uncle Charles when he was a little boy. The most featured face was that of a short-haired and freckled girl with a pensive eye. She was even in the picture with Charles, if that was in fact Charles. Since the glue was dried up it wasn’t hard to lift up one of her pictures. On the back was printed “Maria Weiss – 1952.” And so began my mad obsession.

I tucked that photo in my pocket and continued to look for my birth certificate, but I didn’t forget about it. In fact, as the day went on I found myself thinking about it more and more. I could feel that pensive eye looking at me from my pocket, nagging me to find out more. I asked my dad in passing if he knew about the photo album, but he gave me a helpless look and said he didn’t know what I was talking about “I couldn’t tell you the first thing your mother has down there” , he said. That wasn’t enough to satisfy me. I did a Google search on the name. There were only three Maria Weiss’ that lived within a 500 mile radius of Quinton. I thought that was interesting, but I didn’t do anything about it…at first. What had started out as innocent curiosity had at the end of the day turned into an obsession of Sherlock Holmes magnitude. My parents were leaving to go visit my grandparents in Wisconsin for the long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday. This got me thinking. The first Maria Weiss lived right in Pittsburg County in Crowder, easily accessible with the minivan my parents were leaving at home. Once I had decided to trek to Crowder, I thought to myself “the next Maria Weiss only lives 150 miles further in Fayetteville, Arkansas.” And since there was only one more Maria left and she only lived another two hours away in Springfield, Missouri I had made up my mind that I would find the Maria Weiss in my picture. It sounds ridiculous I know, but I had an insatiable desire to just do something a little crazy. The thought of acting in an uncharacteristic way excited me.

When Friday 7 AM rolled around I was ready. My parents were gone and I was itching to start my pilgrimage. It only took me thirty minutes to get to Crowder, but once I got there I felt like there was a brick in the pit of my stomach. I had begun to come to my senses. I was so busy trying to be different that the dangers I could face didn’t even cross my mind. As nonsensical as I knew this was, I decided to follow through. I never follow through with risks; that’s probably why I followed through this time. Knot in stomach and picture in hand, I made my way up the dusty driveway of my first house. My hand shook as I lifted it to give the door a knock. A very short man with greasy hair answered the door. Maria Weiss was the previous owner of the house, but it isn’t the same Maria. At least, that’s what he said before he shut the door on me. I took out my sharpie and crossed off the Crowder address. I was left standing on a doorstep with two more addresses in my hand.

I was hungry, so I decided to stop at the Sonic down the street before I started on my next leg of the journey up to Fayetteville. It wasn’t even fifteen minutes into my drive that the sky began to darken. The smoky violet sky was then interrupted with a loud clap accompanied by white bolts that hit the earth. Then came the rain. There was something about that musty smell that hit my nose as the rain hit the dirt and pavement that I hated and loved at the same time. The rain drops were small and unassuming at first, which I didn’t mind one bit, but when the rain turned into a storm is when I began to worry. The windshield wipers on my parent’s minivan needed to be replaced 2 years ago - not very conducive to surviving a rainstorm on the highway. The raindrops began to collect on the windshield and the wipers only succeeded in smudging the dust with the water to create a film that distorted my view. I was about a hundred miles outside of Crowder and struggling to see out the window when I suddenly noticed something that had blown into the road. Without thinking I slammed on my brakes and began to hydroplane. The front of the van charged right into a telephone pole. I wasn’t making it to Fayetteville anytime soon.

Flute-playing Baptists aren’t supposed to get into these kinds of shenanigans, but here I was, 200 miles from home with a broken down minivan and a picture in my pocket. I pulled out my cell phone and called a tow truck. Sitting in the van with time to kill gave me some time to think. If I wanted to do something different why didn’t I just dye my hair?..or smoke a cigarette? It didn’t matter, I had done it. The funny thing is I didn’t regret it too bad. I thought about my parents and what I would say to them when we all got back home. I thought about Maria Weiss and what would have happened if I actually did find her. I even thought about things like my future. Finally a truck with “Mike’s Towing Company” printed on the side could be seen approaching. Mike asked me what brought me out here to the middle of nowhere. I said I didn’t really know, that it was an adventure, and that was good enough for him. So I sat there in the passenger seat of Mike’s beat-up tow truck listening as Nat King Cole floated through the speakers and took a long, deep breath.