“The Gatepost”: Her father a ghost, woman tries to reconstruct his life ...Middle East

Woodgate, VermontMarch 2024

Esme Weatherhead kept catching herself talking to a ghost. She would be snow-shoeing through the forest, or sitting at her writing desk, or splitting wood, or doing some other chore in or around her rural Vermont farmhouse and she would find herself having a conversation with a man who was no longer alive. Talking about something she was reading, perhaps, or asking him for personal advice. Mostly these conversations took place inside her head, but sometimes she would be sitting in an empty room or trudging along through the snowy forest surrounded by nothing but dormant trees and she would hear herself actually voice the words aloud to the empty air, or to the occasional bluejay or chickadee.

It had been happening more and more over the past few months. So often, in fact, that she was increasingly worried that she might be losing her mind. 

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At best, she was becoming a solitary eccentric with a penchant for nature walks and conversing with dead people. Maybe she was a Wiccan. There were apparently a great number of Wiccans scattered around the state of Vermont, and spending most of the fall and winter alone back on the remote three-hundred-acre property that had been her childhood home certainly seemed to have brought out the tendency in her. It wasn’t that she necessarily believed in the occult. But there was something about this familiar property—in particular the forested parts of it—that she’d never quite perceived before. A spine-tingling feeling that there were spirits present. Or at least one particular spirit . . .

Maybe it was the isolation. Maybe it was a sort of natural inclination that came over women who lived on their own in the forest. You either got a pet, or you started talking to ghosts.

City-dwelling friends, when they came up to visit, tended to find the property spooky. Other than owls and turkeys and the occasional barking fox or pack of trilling coyotes, it could be eerily quiet at night. The nearest neighbor was more than two miles away; you couldn’t see any other houses—not even the lights in their windows. Esme understood how someone used to the press and clamor of the city might feel uncomfortable. For her own part—except for the recent uneasy suspicion that she was losing her mind—she’d always felt quite at home at Woodgate. It had always felt to her like a world unto itself; a timeless refuge from the frenetic madness of everywhere else. It was why she’d thrown away what most people considered an enviable life in San Francisco—the high-powered job; the handsome, sensitive husband—to move back here.

“The Gatepost”

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Well, it was one reason. The main reason was that she was determined to write a book about her father, the man whose ghost she’d been conducting all these one-sided conversations with.

So far, the book wasn’t going so well. In fact, after a solid eight months of concentrated work, she still seemed to be stuck in the research phase.

When she sat down at her writing desk, she would often begin by re-reading his New York Times obituary:

Dr. Gregory Weatherhead, 42, of Corinth, Vermont, missing since June of this year, has been declared dead as of December 31, 2004.

Born September 7, 1963, Dr. Weatherhead was a beloved father, husband, and friend. He was known to the public as the author of an internationally bestselling book on Indigenous shamanic practices and hallucinogenic experience, the publication of which dovetailed with other popular books on similar topics by Carlos Castaneda, R. Gordon Wasson, and Richard Evans Schultes.

Dr. Weatherhead grew up in the Boston area, son of an investment banker and a schoolteacher. He received a B.A. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Archaeology at Yale, during which he spent three years in the field researching ancient Mesoamerican sites in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1990, Dr. Weatherhead accepted a tenure-track appointment at Columbia University. In 1998 he resigned that position and moved to rural Vermont, where he spent the remainder of his life pursuing independent research.

Dr. Weatherhead is survived by his loving wife, Silvana Rodríguez Weatherhead (43), and daughter, Esmeralda Weatherhead (12). In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Vermont Center for Unidentified and Missing Persons.

Esme had been six years old in 1998 when her father and mother had purchased Woodgate, using the royalties from the bestselling book referenced in the obituary and some investment funds they’d inherited from Gregory’s parents. She had a good view of the property from the window of her writing nook: the stately old maples at the edge of the forest showing the first hints of budding, the hayfield still covered by snow, everything bathed in the liquid red-gold light of a late winter evening in Vermont.

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She used to visit her father in his sugarhouse around this time of year, when the sap was running. Nowadays she didn’t tap maples or boil syrup herself, or at least she wasn’t doing it this year; maybe she would in the future if she could get her act together. But there were many people in the area who still did it, and whenever she caught a whiff of that wild, sweet, smoky smell, her father’s memory would come rushing back in with renewed clarity. His unruly, prematurely silver hair. The resonance of his deep but gentle voice. The way his eyes crinkled in his weathered-brown face when he laughed. She still had the beat-up old barn jacket he used to wear, and a tasseled blue ski hat Mamá had knitted for him. She still remembered the taste of the hot maple syrup he used to decant into a shot glass for her and Mamá when they showed up during a boil.

Gregory Weatherhead had been the kind of father who took an interest in the moment-by-moment details of his young daughter’s life in a way that Mamá, though well-meaning, hadn’t been temperamentally suited to doing. He would help her with homework, lead her on hikes and cross-country ski excursions, read classic adventure novels to her at bedtime, sit with her at the kitchen table or beside the woodstove talking about everything under the sun.

And then suddenly, one sunny June day when Esme was twelve, the tragedy arrived that would put an end to her idyllic childhood. That morning, following his usual habit, Gregory Weatherhead walked up into the forest above the hayfield.

But he never came back.

The local sheriff at the time considered it a probable case of abandonment. You think you know someone, but it turns out you actually don’t. Maybe he fell in love with another woman; maybe he got bored and decided to get a fresh start somewhere else. He certainly wouldn’t have been the first middle-aged father to do something like that. Others had suggested suicide. But none of these theories rang true for Esme or her mother or anyone else who’d truly known him.

No. Some kind of accident had befallen Gregory Weatherhead up in the forest. A heart attack perhaps, or a massive stroke—though the family doctor had declared him fit as a fiddle with no indications of coronary trouble. Maybe he’d been bitten by a snake? There were rattlesnakes in Vermont, though they were very rare and didn’t tend to live in moist, closed-canopy forests like the one that surrounded Woodgate.

Apart from the sheriff’s pet theory of abandonment, the problem with all these scenarios was that despite an exhaustive, months-long search effort involving dozens of police and hundreds of local volunteers, his body was never found. His disappearance remained a mystery.

In truth, Esme didn’t want to write a book about her father’s disappearance, her grief, the terrible void it had created in her life, or the ways it had changed her relationship with her mother. She wanted to write about the man, Gregory Weatherhead. She wanted to celebrate his life. To preserve or resurrect his essence by getting as much of him down on the page as she could. God knew what a psychiatrist would say about this notion, but it just felt like something she needed to do.

She actually wished it didn’t, because the work itself was torturously slow, and the longer she spent trying to do it the more of her time and psychic energy it seemed to vacuum up. Honestly, the whole thing had begun to border on obsession. She realized that it was probably not the best way for a recently divorced woman in her early thirties living on an isolated property in the middle of the great northern forest to be spending her days.

She supposed that her problem was ultimately related to the lack of resolution surrounding the whole tragedy. If there had been any hard evidence of his death back then, maybe she would have reached some measure of closure, some measure of peace. Because even though her rational mind knew he was not still alive somewhere, some part of her subconscious mind apparently believed that he was. That he, or at least some kind of spirit belonging to him, was still at large on the wooded acres she could see illuminated in the fading later winter light outside the window of her writing nook.

What was keeping her from being able to move on from the research phase and actually write the book, she was beginning to understand, was that she still lacked an answer to the question that had plagued her with varying degrees of urgency since she was twelve years old: What on earth had happened to him?

Tim Weed is the author of “The Afterlife Project” and two previous books of fiction. He is the recipient of the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Montana Prize, the Fish International Short Story Award, and multiple Writer’s Digest Fiction Awards. He serves on the core faculty of the Newport MFA in Creative Writing and is the co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program. A former expert for National Geographic Expeditions, Tim spent the first part of his career directing international educational programs in Spain, Portugal, Australia, and Iceland. Tim grew up in Denver and Littleton, Colorado. 

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