Tag Archives: Huck Finn

On the Lam

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So that’s how my daughter and I became fugitives.

We bolted left then right then left out of the suburban neighborhood. We got caught behind a truck trying to make a left hand turn, all the while eyeing the rear view mirror while Poe sat swaddled in Mazie’s lap.

Within minutes we were on the Interstate heading west toward California. Ten miles down the road we pulled onto a side road and released Poe into the dog carrier which we positioned again on Mazie’s lap. We got back on the highway and once we were safely past Bearizona in Williams (where I was afraid the rehabilitator might be), we pulled off once again and positioned Poe behind us, giving him a full frontal view of the road ahead.

We all felt elated – Mazie couldn’t believe we stole a raven, I was pumped that Poe had a fighting chance, and as for Poe, I think he was just glad to be free of jackhammers.

Mazie and I talked contingencies. Keep your eye out for highway patrol, I told her.  Once we crossed the border into California we’d be a measure more safe.  If we were pulled over for any reason, she would drape the sweatshirt over the carrier. If anybody asked, it was a pet animal that was easily agitated. If anyone caught sight of him and had questions, we were rehabilitators taking him to a sanctuary in California. We decided we would keep him covered when we passed through the border inspection station.

Early evening, we pulled into an In n Out and ordered Poe a cheeseburger with fries. He didn’t take to the deep fried potatoes or the bun, but he relished the cheese and beef. He paced inside the carrier, he gurgled, he peered out at the advancing road.

It was time, I decided, for Mazie to hear the talk on Huck and the Higher Law. It’s not good to steal, I told her. And it’s not good to lie. But consider Huck. He was an orphan and outcast. He habitually stole. He was profane. And given a choice between truth and the lie, he always told the lie. And what’s a lie, but a fantastical story? But as he and Jim float down river deeper and deeper into the dark soul of the country, they are increasingly surrounded by the larger lies told by all the adults around them, and the largest lie of all, that Nigger Jim was chattel, a slave unworthy of even being considered human. And as Huck’s lies and the lies of the world compound around him, the deeper truth emerges, that he and Jim, outcasts though they may be, are friends and brothers.

It’s something to think about as we fumble through our own untruths, ever into the ascending darkness.

And with that, the interstate ribbon unfolds before us. Lots of ravens drift in and out of sight, sentinels each and every one. They roost on telephone wires, pick at carrion in the road, mouths agape, cool themselves on the side of the highway. Under their watchful eyes, the three of us – my daughter and I and a fugitive raven – descend off the Plateau, past the Colorado and into the Mojave.

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Poe eating road food

It Takes a Thief

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“Blame it, this whole thing is just as easy and awkward as it can be. And so it makes it so rotten difficult to get up a difficult plan. There ain’t no watchman to be drugged — now there oughtto be a watchman. There ain’t even a dog to give a sleeping-mixture to. And there’s Jim chained by one leg, with a ten-foot chain, to the leg of his bed: why, all you got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain. And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key to the punkin-headed nigger, and don’t send nobody to watch the nigger…..Why, drat it, Huck, it’s the stupidest arrangement I ever see. You got to invent all the difficulties. Well, we can’t help it; we got to do the best we can with the materials we’ve got.

Anyhow, there’s one thing — there’s more honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties and dangers, where there warn’t one of them furnished to you by the people who it was their duty to furnish them, and you had to contrive them all out of your own head.”

And so spaketh Tom Sawyer in the 35th chapter of Huck Finn.

There’s the right way to do something and the wrong way.

In our case, Mazie imagines black face paint and ninja costumes.  Kerry dreams up fake transportation permits and forged documents from the Hopi Tribe.  I consider several furtive and superfluous transfers between waiting vehicles a la Mission Impossible.

In the end though, we just take him.

In our last moment before leaving Hopi, we disinter an old dog carrier from the garage and load it in the car.  That’s the extent of our plan.

A few hours later we find ourselves at the home of the wildlife rehabilitator.  We knock.

After a long wait, the husband shows himself.  His wife is gone.  He doesn’t know where she is, or when she’s getting back.

We came to visit Poe, we explain and he says that we are free to go to the back.

Which we do.  Mazie carries with her a Middlebury sweatshirt.  The air once again is filled with the cacophonous roar of jackhammers.  I step into the cage with Poe and he looks up with wearied eyes.  I whisper for Mazie to walk quickly to the car, retrieve a shred of burrito and bring it back.  I meanwhile sit with the stricken bird.  Mazie returns and we feed Poe with some scraps of meat that he takes eagerly.

And just like that I drop the sweatshirt over Poe and swaddle him in my arms.  I race across the yard.  Behind me I hear Mazie closing the gate so it is slightly ajar.  Goodbye Poe, she says.

We dive in the car and quick as can, we peel away.