I have dyslexia and left home at 14. I wanted to stay gone. But I came back. Then I left again, came back, and left again. Home was awful and loud with arguments, and I wanted school to be good, so I tried to make it work. But C.W. Woodward High, on Old Georgetown Road near Rockville, Maryland, was a nightmare. At Woodward back then, students who were different got stomped. Instead of becoming a vandal or a criminal — which was what happened to kids who didn’t fit in at Woodward — I ran away again. This time, trying to go as far as possible.
I had no money and almost no plan other than wanting to make it to Alaska to work on the pipeline. I made it up to where the road near Dawson City in the northern Yukon ran into snow banks deeper than I was tall. That turned me back. Then I spent nearly another half year hitchhiking back and forth across Canada and the U.S.
Most of my time was spent sitting by highways or walking in the many wild places I made as my destinations: Death Valley, the Cascades, the Florida swamps, the Canadian Rockies. I stayed far away from cities and tried to avoid most people. No one knew where I was, and six months alone at 17 is a long time. Still, it was a much better time than being in Woodward.
What was most difficult was not the hunger or the open weather, nor was it the ever-present danger of the road with its assortment of twisted people. It was the absolute quiet of the darkening evenings when I felt it deeply, when I knew how alone I was. The quiet next to the roar of highways. The quiet in the forests and deserts far from any road. The quiet that gently asked for music. I decided then that I must learn to play an instrument I could carry in a backpack at all times. When I came back one last time, thinking I would try to finish school, what I wanted was to learn music. I asked a friend who played the French horn for help finding and learning to play the flute.
My friend told me I was “too old” to start, and that I would have had to start much younger. But he did introduce me to Annelise, since she was a flute player, and explained to her that I was interested in trying a “late start.”
Today, I smile when I think of 17 as being considered old. Annelise, though, had no such prejudice. She also had a car and drove with me down to a music store in D.C., where she played about 30 used flutes until she found one for less than $100 that sounded and played as well as the thousand-dollar ones.
I still have that flute. I still play it, and in the quiet times — different now than the quiet times of the wild, dangerous places — I am glad that I met someone who told me, “Anyone can learn. You just have to start and keep going, no matter what. You can learn whatever you want.”
These simple words from one person were more valuable than the high school degree I never received. Music came first. After that, I kept learning, especially the things people said I probably could not do. And somewhere along the way, I learned how not to be alone.
