Walk Two Moons

The plaster wall in the Hiddles’ Bybanks farm is a symbol of the role and function of storytelling in human experience. For one, the wall—which conceals a fireplace behind it—reflects the multilayered nature of stories, where something can be both itself and a metaphor for something else. This is the point Mr. Birkway makes when one of his students complains about symbolism in literature:

Mr. Birkway said that the drawing was a bit like symbols. Maybe the artist only intended to draw a vase, and maybe some people look at this picture and see only that vase. That is fine, but if some people look at it and see faces, what is wrong with that? It is faces to that person who is looking at it. And, what is even more magnificent, you might see both (207-8).

Similarly, the plaster “wall” is both the wall itself and the fireplace it hides. The above passage also helps clarify the point of this layering. Mr. Birkway suggests that symbols aren’t so much a way to hide a story’s “real” meaning, but rather a way to expand its relevance to more people. In fact, this is what Sal sees as the significance of the plaster wall and the fireplace, which she likens to the relationship between Phoebe’s story and her own: “The reason that Phoebe’s story reminds me of that plaster wall and the hidden fireplace is that beneath Phoebe’s story was another one. Mine” (3). Similarly, by the end of the novel, she realizes that both her story and Phoebe’s are lenses for understanding the story of Gram and Gramps.

Blackberries first appear in the novel in connection with Sal’s mother. In fact, the association is so strong that Sal declines a piece of blackberry pie because of the memories it evokes: picking blackberries with her mother; the “blackberry kiss” Sugar gave one of the trees on their property; etc. Initially, then, it seems that blackberries reflect Sal’s unwillingness to engage with the painful reality of her mother’s death; she tells Mrs. Winterbottom she has allergies because she “could not admit that blackberries reminded [her] of [her] mother” (21).

As time goes on, however, the meaning of blackberries shifts. Sal writes about the blackberry kiss in her journal for Mr. Birkway, noting that every tree she has kissed since that day seems to taste like blackberries. Then, when Ben and Sal kiss for the first time, Ben asks her whether it “taste[d] a little like blackberries to [her]” as well (232). In this way, a symbol that initially seems bound up in Sal’s grief over her mother’s death becomes intertwined with her budding romance with Ben. It thus mirrors the journey that Sal undergoes over the course of the novel, as she comes to terms with death and loss; although blackberries don’t lose their painful associations, Sal learns to acknowledge this pain and then refocus on everything that is good and beautiful about life. 

Although the journals the students write for Mr. Birkway, the proverbs Mrs. Partridge leaves at the Winterbottoms’ door, and the postcards Sugar sends her daughter aren’t stories in the conventional sense of the word, they do help the novel develop its ideas about storytelling. More specifically, each serves as a text that the novel’s characters respond to and interpret, often in ways that illuminate their own preoccupations and experiences. For example, when Sal learns the truth about Mrs. Cadaver’s husband, she draws on the messages left for the Winterbottoms as she thinks through her newfound knowledge: “I started wondering if the birds of sadness had built their nest in Mrs. Cadaver’s hair afterward, and if so, how she got rid of them. Her husband dying and her mother being blinded were events that would matter in the course of a lifetime” (214).

Of course, characters don’t always interpret these texts in ways that ultimately prove accurate. Phoebe, for instance, becomes so convinced of her theories about her mother’s disappearance that she reads those theories into Mrs. Partridge’s messages: “We never know the worth of water until the well is dry. ‘It’s a clue,’ Phoebe said. ‘Maybe my mother is hidden in a well.’” (192). Ironically, this proverb does hold potential significance for Phoebe, who only realizes how much she relies on her mother when Mrs. Winterbottom disappears. However, in her obsession with thoughts of murder and kidnapping, Phoebe entirely overlooks this figurative meaning in favor of a literal one. Similarly, when Mr. Birkway reads a journal passage describing the writer’s crush, the girls in the class allow their own hopes to color their understanding of the excerpt: “Every girl in the room was smiling. Each girl thought that this had been written about her” (204).

Texts and stories of all kinds are central to the novel, but myths and legends hold particular significance for reasons best summarized in the novel’s final pages: “One afternoon, after we had been talking about Prometheus stealing fire from the sun to give to man, and about Pandora opening up the forbidden box with all the evils of the world in it, Gramps said that those myths evolved because people needed a way to explain where fire came from and why there was evil in the world” (272). This explanatory function is common to all stories in the novel, but it’s often explicit in myths, like the Native American legend Sal tells her grandparents while in the Badlands: “Long ago, the sky was so low that you might bump your head on it if you were not careful, and so low that people sometimes disappeared right up into it. People got a little fed up with this, so they made long poles, and one day they all raised their poles and pushed. They pushed the sky as high as they could” (139).

Creech includes stories like this throughout the novel, but one legend that plays a particularly important symbolic role is the story of Pandora’s box. The novel centers on Sal’s efforts to come to terms with painful realities like mortality, and the inclusion of hope in the box offers her a way to think about the extent to which people allow suffering to define their lives: “Maybe when everything seemed sad and miserable, Phoebe and I could both hope that something might start to go right” (169). The idea that happiness is as much a matter of perspective as it is of objective reality is one Creech develops further in Sal’s addition to the Pandora myth: a box full of good things rendered unenjoyable by the inclusion of “worry” (168). The myth therefore underscores Creech’s depiction of life as a choice between hope and sadness, while Sal’s contributions to it illustrate the ways in which people interpret and rewrite stories in order to make sense of their own experiences.

The frame story of the novel centers on a journey: Sal’s road trip to Idaho, which itself follows the path of the bus trip her mother went on more than a year earlier. A similar journey is at the heart of Phoebe’s story, which centers on her mother temporarily running away from home, and culminates in Phoebe and Sal following her to the university campus where Mrs. Winterbottom’s secret son now lives. Other journeys in the novel include John Hiddle’s decision to relocate to Euclid after his wife’s death, and the time when Gram ran off with the “egg man” for three days.

Significantly, most of these journeys result in the characters arriving at some new understanding of the world, others, or themselves. In some cases, this understanding involves a concrete shift in the facts a person has access to: Phoebe, for instance, discovers that her mother has a relationship to the “lunatic” by visiting the university. By and large, however, the changes journeys bring are harder to quantify. In going to Lewiston, Sal not only comes to terms with the reality of her mother’s death, but also learns to see her relationship to her mother in a new and more mature light (realizing, for example, that her mother’s trip was something she did for herself, which had no bearing on her feelings for her daughter).

In this way, the journey motif underscores Creech’s depiction of the role that losing a parent (literally or figuratively) plays in growing up. However, it also supports the related but distinct idea of self-discovery, which may take place in adolescence, but can continue well into adulthood. Sugar, for instance, decides to visit Idaho in order to learn who she is outside her role as a wife and mother: She hopes her cousin can “tell [her] what [she’s] really like” when she’s away from her family (138). Journeys therefore serve as a very literal means for characters to distance themselves from the thoughts and feelings that may cloud their understanding of themselves and one another. As Gram says of running away with the egg man, “I don’t even remember why I did that. Sometimes you know in your heart you love someone, but you have to go away before your head can figure it out” (146).