“I Can’t Remember the Name of That Place, but I’ll Never Forget the View”

I had to leave my mountaintop last week to come to town to get a crown. Sounds like I won a prize, but it’s not fancy like that, just expensive. So dear reader, our first stop this week is at the dentist. Don’t worry, it’s not going to be painful. 

Sliding into the dentist chair feels almost like getting on an airplane to me, another generally disdained human experience that I find relaxing. In both cases, the important part is showing up on time, and once seated, your work is over. 

Something paradoxically magical happens under the spell of both roaring jet engines and the whining, high-speed grinding of dental instruments. The noise releases my mind from the shackles of daily worries, the ticking off of the to-do list, and lulls me into an anesthetized dream state. Next thing you know I’m either groggily retrieving my luggage from the overhead bin, or a dental assistant is unclipping the paper drool bib to set me free. In both events the next step, still numb and dazed, usually involves getting a cup of coffee which I end up pouring down the front of my shirt. 

It feels like a betrayal to tell you I don’t hate airline travel, or the dentist; but believe me, I have a lot of other problems.

My dentist is very professional, maybe a bit dry. Depending on the day, he may or may not laugh at my jokes. I do remember him getting a kick out of,

“Why did the tooth go to jail? 

He was guilty of incisor trading.“

But the morning of the crown installation he must have been focused, or distracted, because, 

“What are dental x-rays called? 

Tooth pics,“

barely got a chuckle. 

But I have intel on my dentist that humanizes him each time I am captive in his chair with my mouth pried open. Years ago, a friend of mine lived in the same apartment building as he did while they were both in college. I might have some of the details wrong, but the gist is that one morning the building was on fire and my friend was the only resident unaccounted for, so my now-dentist went and kicked her apartment door down. Turns out she wasn’t even in the building at the time, but the story endears him to me while while he robotically tells me to turn left, turn right, open, and close over the sound of metallic mosquitoes buzzing in my mouth.

The problem might have been my delivery of the tooth pics joke. Maybe my dentist knew my heart wasn’t in it, or he could see the wave of melancholy I rode in on. Either way, it fell flat. 

That morning I’d been digging through a box of memorabilia, the letters I told you about last week, in search of an iconic photograph of my old dog Bandit wearing a cowboy hat. Along the way, I found a letter my dad wrote in 2003 after he hiked up to see me at the first fire lookout I ever worked at. I did the math and figured he was 62 years old at the time. The fact that he drove his car out from Minnesota to Montana, then over desolate mountain passes into the wilds of Idaho and hiked up to see me seems like fiction, even mythology, when I consider that just twenty years later, dementia has obscured his memory to the degree that the simple details of his daily functions are managed by people young enough to be his grandchildren, in the memory care facility where he now lives.

From left to right: Bandit the dog, the author, and the author’s father, circa 2002.

In the 2003 letter he talked about the huckleberry pancakes I made for breakfast, distant wildfires glowing into the night, and the cool morning skies, cloaked in smoke. He recounted the comedy of Bandit chasing chipmunks around the woodpile, and how the view from the outhouse, the door of which had been ripped off in a windstorm, was the best he’d ever seen. In the letter, he promised the trip was one he would never forget.

My dad probably wrote the letter when there were other things he felt compelled to do upon arriving home after vacation, like mow the lawn, sweep out the garage, or sort through the mail. Maybe he did do those things first anyhow, but the important part is that he sat down at the table the morning after his return and wrote this thank you from his heart, still brimming with details of the trip. He carefully folded his musings into thirds, and sharpened the creases lightly with his thumbnail.

That letter, and the dozens of others that I’ve saved from him, takes me through the portal to a time when he was fully alive, vibrant, and aware; providing evidence of a life well lived.

As the whirring drills filled my mouth with the acrid taste of my broken molar being reduced to dust, I flashed to a scene of me and my dad one morning last fall, drinking coffee at his house when he suddenly and clearly acknowledged the reality of his mental decline. “I know I’m losing it,” he said, and tapped at the side of his head. For the first time he was naming what we’d been afraid to name, claiming the mental static and the proximity to his own mortality.

He showed me a box of important papers he kept in the refrigerator, naturally. The box contained, among other things, his will, and a card for the Cremation Society of Minnesota. “Everything is prepaid,” he told me, tapping the card. “You just call this number,” and added, “It’s even a 1-800 number,” running his fingertip under the digits 

He led me down a hallway filled with photographs to a framed collage of photos taken on one of the trips he and I took in recent years. He turned to me and said, “Can you believe that was way back when we were still in high school?” And then a long pause at the next photo, a mountainous landscape at sunset taken from the tower at my first fire lookout job, the one where we’d had huckleberry pancakes for breakfast. He was quiet, searching for words to substantiate the knowing look that washed over his face. Finally, “Well, I can’t remember the name of that place, but I will never forget the view from the outhouse.” 

Author and her father, “way back in high school” at Gooseberry Falls, Minnesota, in 2018.

Though that was less than a year ago, I wonder if that once-solid memory, like a tooth being ground down, has turned to dust, or if at the center of the noise and confusion some skeletal remnants exist.

Back in the dentist chair, trickles ran out of the sides of my eyes, down my temples and into my hair. A few moments later the drill stopped. 

“Are you okay?” The dentist asked, his light shining into my eyes, shielded by the dark safety glasses. 

I’m fine, I managed through lips that could not close, then nodded even though I know dentists are fluent in the dialect of the pried-open mouth. 

He wasn’t convinced. “Does it hurt?” He persisted, touching my shoulder lightly.

I shook my head. I imagined if this was a movie that I might tell him about all of the things that did hurt, though. It might have made a poignant scene, a dentist and his patient having a heart to heart. But in real life my whole mouth was numb, stretched to capacity, and I had no idea where my tongue was. Besides, I could tell he was on a tight schedule.

When it was over, the assistant removed the surgical-grade shoe horns from my mouth, and the dark safety glasses from my eyes. 

“Allergies,” I said to her when she looked into my red, watery eyes, trails of dried tears streaking my cheeks. The dentist lowered his mask, grabbed a box of tissues from the counter and offered them to me with an earnest expression that revealed the young man who once kicked down a door to save someone’s life. 

Outside in my car I finished where I started with the tears, then soothed myself with a half-full coffee I’d left in the cup holder—transitioning to laughter when I thought about the 1-800 number for the Cremation Society, and the memory of my father using an outhouse with no door at 8,000 feet—and managed to catch the cold coffee dribbling down my chin before it even hit my shirt. 

I opened my mouth wide, and the crown looked really nice in the rearview mirror—regal, even. I decided that when the feeling came back to my tongue, I would give my dad a call and try the tooth pics joke out on him. No matter what, it would just be nice to hear his voice.

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