The Innate
Theory

There is a place I carry inside me that I have never owned and will never own, and it is the truest home I have ever known. A thousand acres of Virginia soil — or what felt like a thousand acres to a boy of five — where the air smelled of cut hay and beehives and the particular quiet that only exists in places that belong to God or to no one, which I have come to understand are often the same thing.

Linton Hall. That was its name. A school run by nuns on a campus so large it had its own post office, its own chapel, its own cemetery, its own water tower standing pale against the sky like a sentinel that had given up watching for anything in particular. There was a pond full of panfish and sunfish and the kind of frogs that let you catch them if you moved slowly enough. There was an old wooden dock that stretched out fifteen or twenty feet into that still water and I spent more hours on that dock than I could ever account for, fishing and thinking and being the kind of alone that does not feel like loneliness at all. There was a real Indian totem pole that nobody ever seemed to find strange. There were hay bales laid on their sides in a long row and we rode our bikes across the tops of them because the thought that we could fall never quite reached us the way it should have.

We did not belong there. They made sure we knew it.

"A boy who grew up on a farm and then spent the rest of his life willing to die trying just to get back there."

My father had worked that land before me. Not owned it — worked it, the way his father had worked land before him, the way the men in my family have always worked things that belonged to someone else. My grandfather was a sharecropper in all but name, raising dairy cattle in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains along the Shenandoah River, milking cows he would never own, growing corn he could not keep. I never met him. He died of a heart attack before I was born and I spent a good portion of my childhood listening to my grandmother tell me stories about him, watching something warm move across her face when she looked at me and said, without fail, that I reminded her of him. A man I never shook hands with lives somewhere in my bones. I have accepted this the way you accept the color of your own eyes.

My father gave me music. Not the ability to play it — neither of us ever learned that — but the understanding of what it is for. Music was his escape and it became mine. He was the kind of man who would give you the shirt off his back even though he spent most of his life shivering in the cold without one, everyone else warm because of what he had sacrificed. I do not say this to make him a saint. I say it because it is simply what he was.

We were poor. Not romanticized poverty. Just poor. Moving sometimes twice in the same year because that was what the economy of the 1980s demanded of families like ours. I learned early that the trick was not to unpack everything.

I learned that nothing belongs to you. Not really. Not permanently. I have fallen for that myth myself — there were years I grieved a house I lost as though grief could somehow reverse the transaction. But I always came back to the same understanding I first arrived at on that Virginia farm: you are allowed to make a thing yours for a while. That is all. That is enough.

I live in a house right now that I do not own. I have renovated nearly every room in it. I do this because it is what I am supposed to do with the time and the space I have been given. You make it yours. You make it beautiful. And then you let it go.

"I thought I sprouted from that soil, and so it was in me — it was mine because it shaped me."

I always know where North is. I have known this about myself for as long as I can remember. Once I have been somewhere I can find my way back from anywhere in the world. I crushed land navigation in the Army. In the woods as a boy I would disappear for hours, building a map of the world inside my head that has never failed me.

My bus stop was a half mile from our house. I was five years old. I walked past the post office and the loading docks and the beehives and the chapel and the all-boys school and the totem pole, and I did this alone. One day someone stole my bike and the nuns offered me a ride home on their golf cart and I refused to get in because I did not get into vehicles with strangers. I was five years old and I already knew that much. I walked home.

I left that farm and I have been trying to get back to it ever since. Not to the place itself — but to the feeling of it. The particular quality of being exactly where you are supposed to be.

I am still looking. I think I will always be looking. But I have stopped being ashamed of that. The looking is not weakness. The looking is the proof that something real happened there.

My name is Nathan. I sprouted from soil I never owned and I have been trying to find my way back to it my whole life. I always know where North is. I think that has to count for something.

I was 5'4" and a hundred and twelve pounds with wet boots on. I had not finished going through puberty. I had been smoking Marlboros for four years and drinking beers on the weekends and I carried myself with the particular confidence of a boy who has had to figure out too much too soon and has decided that this qualifies him to figure out everything else. I was seventeen years old and I was about to board a bus outside the terminal at Hartsfield airport in Atlanta, Georgia, and it would take me to a place I had not chosen and a life I had not designed and I would spend the next several years of my existence resenting almost all of it.

Almost.

There are things about myself I have always known. I have a low tolerance for bullshit. I have a high enough IQ to recognize it when I see it. Some people have called me a weasel for this — for the particular skill I developed early in life of extracting myself from situations that were not in my interest. I prefer to think of it as a finely calibrated instrument for detecting the distance between what people say and what they mean. Growing up the way I grew up, moving the way I moved, raising yourself in the margins of other people's worlds — you either develop that instrument or you don't survive. I developed it.

None of it prepared me for the United States Army.

My brother was already in. That is the beginning of this particular story, the hinge everything else swings on. He was older, tougher, more capable than me in almost every way that mattered at the time, and he had gone in first the way he had always gone first — ahead of me, clearing the path, absorbing the worst of whatever was coming so that when I arrived the damage was already done and I only had to walk through the aftermath. This was the story of our entire childhood. He was the test subject. The first one through the door.

He is one of the toughest men I have ever known. But his toughness was never cruelty. It was armor, and he wore it so that I did not have to. Because he was so tough I did not need to be. He took the brunt of it all. I did not deserve this. I am not sure I ever adequately thanked him for it. I am saying it now.

"Because he was so tough, I didn't have to be. He took the brunt of it all."

I called him from the MEPS station at Fort Meade. I was crying. This is important to say plainly because I think it establishes something true about who I was at seventeen — not the weasel, not the bullshit detector. Just a kid. Scared. On the phone with the one person in the world whose opinion actually mattered to him.

The news was this: I was color blind. Color blind recruits had three career options. Infantry. Truck driver. Personnel clerk.

My brother listened. There was a pause of the particular kind that contains a decision being made. And then he said: well you ain't working in no office, and you ain't driving no truck, so if you're going to be shooting and humping a ruck you might as well be the best at it.

Come to Ranger Bat, he said.

I have spent considerable time over the years evaluating the quality of this advice. I have reached no firm conclusion. What I know is that it was completely characteristic of him — practical, unsentimental, load-bearing. Not here is what will make you happy. Here is what makes sense given what you are and what you have got to work with. This is the language our family spoke. This is the language I still think in when things get hard.

We were in Bravo Company of the 3rd Ranger Battalion together for a year and a half, he and I. There is something that happens when two people who grew up together find themselves in an extreme environment — something strips away all the accumulated friction of shared history, the old jealousies and resentments and the long shadow I had always felt myself living under, and what is left underneath is just the original thing. Two brothers. Blood. The fact of each other.

"We were allowed to do what so few actual real brothers get to do together — jump out of airplanes and shoot shit. Now that I think about it, I miss those days."

It was my third jump in Airborne school. We were down at Lawson Field getting rigged up when a jumpmaster appeared and pulled me out of line without explanation. He walked me outside the hangar and pointed toward a figure standing alone at the edge of the tarmac, already rigged, already waiting.

As I got closer I realized it was my brother.

We boarded the C-130 first, him and then me, the way we had always moved through the world. He led. I followed. This was not weakness on my part and it was not domination on his — it was simply the natural order of things between us, worn smooth by years of practice. He was always slightly ahead. Always turning back to make sure I was still there.

We left the aircraft the same way. Him first, out into the August air over Georgia, and then me behind him, stepping into the nothing that becomes everything the moment the chute opens and the world goes suddenly, improbably quiet.

August 1997. I was eighteen years old — had been for three weeks exactly. The sky over Lawson Field was pale and enormous and I was falling through it and my brother was somewhere above me in that same sky.

Lawson Field, Fort Benning, Georgia — August 1997. The only photographs Nathan has from his time in the Army. Taken by his brother on a disposable camera tucked inside his BDU pocket, at altitude, three weeks after Nathan's eighteenth birthday.

A few weeks later, after the film had been developed, my brother handed me an envelope. Inside were photographs taken from a disposable camera he had been carrying in his BDU pocket — a camera I had not known about. One photograph shows me in the distance, parachute open, falling fast through a pale sky. Small against all that blue. His little brother, caught in a moment he did not know was being preserved.

In the other photograph he has turned the camera on himself. All you see is his face and his helmet and the risers of his own parachute rising over his shoulders, and behind him the sky, and somewhere in that sky though you cannot see it his brother falling.

I have those photographs still. They are the only photographic evidence I possess that I was ever in the United States Army at all. I have looked at them across thirty years and through several versions of myself and they have not lost anything. Every year they mean something slightly different and slightly more.

I hated the Army. I hated the institution, the hierarchy, the particular brand of manufactured consent that the military runs on. I was not built for that. I am built for the opposite of that — for the margins, the woods, the half mile walk down a dirt road alone, the making of my own map.

But it did not suck the way it would have sucked without him. He was my real family in that place, in those years. And what we had between us in that year and a half in Bravo Company — that was real. That was ours. Nobody gave it to us and nobody can take it away.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have looked like if I had gotten back on the bus. The one that brought me to the MEPS station, not the one that took me to BWI. What was waiting for me back there? What was I getting out of town from?

The bus question keeps coming up. I notice this. I think it is trying to tell me something.

Then again, if I had gotten back on that first bus I would never have stood in a field in Georgia at eighteen years old, parachute settling around my shoulders, looking up at a pale August sky and knowing my brother was up there in it somewhere. I would never have had this particular story to tell.

This one got on the bus. This one followed his brother out of an airplane and fell through the sky and landed in a field and has been finding his way back from places ever since, one way or another, always knowing where North is, always making the map as he goes.

This is the one I know how to be.