When Natalie Kusz’s parents decided, in 1969, to move the family from Los Angeles to Alaska, neighbors thought they were nuts and relatives deemed them irresponsible. “[Uncle] Ed spoke of bears, of wolves chewing down through the roof to feed on whole families. It was not, he said, the sort of place to take children.” This makes Uncle Ed sound silly; in fact, he wasn’t far off. During their first winter, 7-year-old Natalie, locked out of their cabin, had half her face chewed off by a sled dog. (The door was locked because the land where the Kuszes hoped to escape civilization and its discontents was plagued with vandalism.) Her mother found Natalie in the snow with her scalp torn away and an eye missing. “Over a noise like rushing water I called to her and heard her answer back, Don’t worry, just sleep, the ambulance is on its way. I drifted back out and couldn’t know then what she prayed, that I would sleep on without waking, that I would die before morning.”
Strong stuff, well crafted. But compelling as Kusz’s story is, we don’t always see it quite the way she does: in particular, she lets her parents off easy. “Road Song” is a darker, unprettified update of what was once a best-selling genre: the memoir of growing up in a life-affirmingly eccentric family. Her guitar-playing father, whose own childhood in wartime Poland made his “computer job” seem stultifyingly tame, could have stepped out of a comic heartwarmer like “Cheaper by the Dozen.” As the Rambler station wagon pulls out, “Dad rolled down the window and stuck out his bugle, sounding the charge to battle.” On the road, they meet such conventionally colorful characters as a Cherokee “with degrees in mining and geology” who lives in his camper. They have jam sessions at campgrounds and shout out a countdown as they approach the WELCOME TO ALASKA sign.
But when winter sets in, things get grim in a hurry. Car exhaust comes out as particles and hangs so thick it obscures traffic lights; metal burns the skin; propane won’t flow to the gas stove. The Kuszes run out of money and pawn their musical instruments. Natalie, because she goes to school, is the only one of the kids “sure of getting a fully balanced meal each day.” After she’s mauled, even such tribulations seem more bearable than her inner suffering: first the physical pain, then the anguish of being hopelessly set apart by her wound. (Only once does she make the mistake of showing a wheedling friend what’s under the eye patch.) In her teens, she defiantly takes to greeting visitors “barefaced … measuring faces as they entered.” But willful self-exposure proves no more “healing” than discreet concealment; Kusz becomes a druggie and gets pregnant by a high-school boyfriend.
The family, of course, pulls her through. Her parents and siblings help raise her child, and even now she and her father talk daily on the phone. (Her mother died when Kusz was in college.) Still, readers may find themselves coming down on Uncle Ed’s side: how can parents’ discontented craving for adventure justify putting children in needless peril? It’s a question that never seems to occur to Kusz: her book, her own child, her very self, all result from her parents’ rash, romantic gesture. How could she wish it any other way?
