Sanctuary

PROLOGUE
October 1998

When Rachel Anderson planned her mover to northern Wisconsin, she knew she was cutting it close. The weather at the end of October was iffy. Snow and wind could come without warning, but she didn’t anticipate the fog. It wasn’t that wispy fog that blew away with a light breeze that happened often along the river. This time the river was producing fog that billowed up from its bands and spread out, encompassing the entire state.
This wasn’t a trip that she could put off. This was the trip that Rachel knew would change her life. There was urgency in this flight away from everything that had become familiar to her. The fog was hampering her progress, making it impossible to see anything other than the impenetrable white wall in front of her. She was hopeful, thinking the fog would dissipate the further she drove from the river.
Even though she couldn’t see, Rachel wasn’t going to stop—the fog couldn’t get any worse, and she wanted to believe that it would lift. As she peered through the windshield, looking for any little break, she had a sinking feeling that this wasn’t going to get any better. Her driving was hampered not only by the lack of visibility but by the mesmerizing quality of the fog. It was difficult to concentrate, and she couldn’t see anything beyond the headlights.
She wasn’t sure where the road was and she didn’t think she would be able to see any oncoming traffic if there was someone else desperate or foolish enough to be out in this mess.
Rachel glanced at the odometer often to see what progress she was making, afraid that any time spent not staring through the windshield would cause her to veer off the road. The car seemed to know its was as she had made the trip frequently. She knew the route well because Up North was where she came from. She left as a young adult, looking for something better.
Now Rachel was leaving a life she had made for herself because she didn’t like what she had found. For most of her life, she hadn’t thought that things would ever be any worse than just something to complain about. In fact, complaining gave her something to do. She often criticized the values that were espouse by politicians and the media. She didn’t believe that the values they talked about were those that were routinely practiced. Instead they were values that were pulled out of the dust trunk in the attic of history to be used during election campaigns. The promises made during campaigns sound to her like the promises made by recalcitrant drunks, who, in flashes of insight, realized that they had disappointed most of those upon whom they depended.
The old values seemed to have turned corners and became invisible, leaving people to make up new rules that would fill in the gaps. Rachel thought the country was becoming one big shopping mall, encouraging self-indulgence and a complacency that ran rampant, evidenced by the ads for newer, better, and more, creating a competition to have the newest, the best, and the most.
She noticed that people fought over points of view that different from their own. Compromise was a lost art. She saw conformity rather than diversity, and she agonized over the term “politically correct,” believing that the concept suggested that there was one way to think. Rachel saw something sinister in all of this even though she couldn’t quite define it. She knew she needed to leave and was filled with foreboding, as if perhaps she couldn’t move fast enough or far enough away to escape. The fog added the noir of a 1940s mystery and did nothing to allay her uneasiness.
Droplets of water clustered on the windshield and Rachel turned on the wipers while she wiped the inside of the windshield with her sleeve, trying to clear away the white blanket in front of her. She struggled to remain present as the light reflections, the fog, and the windshield wipers added to the surreal scene that conspired to hypnotize her. All of this, along with the mood set by the fog and her foreboding, unleashed her imagination and she expected to see something large, dark, and menacing with hug teeth dripping blood loom in front of her. This vision added to her anxiety and increased her anticipation of something evil ahead.
While Rachel concentrated on her driving, she turned her thoughts to the women with who she had shared her last few hours before her departure. She saw them as the last vestiges of the Feminist Movement, representing a middle generation of feminism that had reaped the benefits gained by the previous generation of women who fought for equality, dignity, and safety for women. After that second generation had entered the work force and made its impact on the culture, the Movement had died a slow and quiet death, leaving scattered pockets of believers. Some said this was post feminism.
The women she left behind were women with varied interests and varied beliefs. They worked in a domestic violence shelter for little pay or appreciation, characterized as man haters by many. They were willing to face the ridicule because they believed their work was worthwhile. Rachel admired them because of their commitment to create change in spiote of the lack of support, and she admired the variety that was a byproduct of the Movement.
At the same time Rachel saw other women who had gained much by professing to be feminist, and the more they gained, the more they had to lose. The more they had to lose, the more conservative they became, and the less they concerned themselves with the pli9ght of those women less fortunate than they were.
The Women on Welfare were nameless and faceless. They were women who had made poor choices and deserved to be singled out and punished.
Rachel believed that poor women were vulnerable and absorbed the blame that the culture placed on victims. She viewed the inequality in simple terms: poor men went to prison and poor women lost their kids to foster care, while men with money were safe and women with money lived with an illusion of safety, believing that others made choices to live impoverished lives. Rachel saw the latter and fields of flowers, red, white, and blue daisies, bowing according to the direction of the wind, doing whatever they had to do to maintain the illusions that kept them feeling safe.
As she remembered those last hours she spent with those women who believed in the values hidden away in dusty trunks, Rachel remembered back to when the Feminist Movement started, at least when it started in her lifetime. It was a time when women couldn’t say nor do anything that went outside of the acceptable norms established by men in power and reinforced by the rest of the culture. She hadn’t been raised to believe that she was to keep herself in line, and was uncomfortable when she found out that this was expected of her.
She graduated from high school, left home, and found that there were often consequences when she spoke her mind. There were other women voicing their discontent with the status quo, and another chapter in the history of the Women’s Movement was written.
Rachel was a student of history and learned about the spurts of activism by women and for women and families that seemed, for the most part, to be brief interludes in a history dominated by the daring adventures of white men. The difference with the Feminist Movement of the 20th Century had been the media coverage, often negative, of female activits who wanted the freedom to choose. Choices had increased with birth control. That first was of feminism was made up of women who were willing to risk whatever comfort they had to gain quality.