The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise

“I walked back up to my freak dad and our hilarious, horrifying home and I didn’t have downcast eyes or any sort of heavy heart. Nope. It was all right. It was all right. There was nothing to cry about. There was nothing to cry about.

Sure, I woulda liked to have had another day there. Sure, I woulda liked to hang out with Fiona and talk about books and share secrets and build forts. Sure. But that didn’t matter. We always kept moving, Rodeo and me. That’s the way it was. That’s the way it’d been for years. That’s the way it was gonna be always, I thought. That’s the way it had to be, I thought.”

Coyote’s attempt to claim that nothing is wrong is starkly contrasted by her language in this passage. The self-hatred evident in her “freak dad” and her “horrifying home” reflect her true feelings about constantly being on the move with Rodeo. Her reflections about the interaction with Fiona and how she wishes she could bond with her peers foreshadows the conflict between Coyote and Rodeo that is to come, and demonstrates that it has been building for some time.

“‘Yeah. Remember that little park at the end of the block?’

‘Of course.’ It’d been five years since I’d seen it, but I didn’t even have to close my eyes to picture it, with its picnic tables and rusty old swing set and, most of all, the corner of it that was all wooded and overgrown and wild-looking.

‘Well, I’m afraid it’s going away, dear,’ Grandma said with a sad click of her tongue.

Everything stopped. Everything inside me, everything outside me. My eyes locked on the cigarette butt I’d been eyeing, still smoking on the hot asphalt by my bare feet. My lungs caught in mid-breath. My fingers froze on the phone, clutching it in a death grip. I forgot about the old lady watching and pretending not to listen in, blurred out the sights around me.”

Coyote’s first response to a change in her old neighborhood is to freeze. She has not processed her grief over losing her family members completely, and this change to her home alters her motivation for the rest of the book. This passage serves as the turning point and leads to the confrontation between Coyote and her father about returning to Poplin Springs.

“Dead Dreams were a thing for us. It was an acronym. When one of us—and let’s be honest, it was usually Rodeo—got a strong, undeniable hankering for something and it just couldn’t wait, we called it a D.E.A.D. Dream, a ‘Drop Everything and Drive’ Dream. Didn’t matter where we were. Didn’t matter what we wanted, or how far away it was. Rodeo loved ‘em. He’d had a D.E.A.D. Dream once for a fish taco from a specific taco truck he loved in San Diego. We were in North Dakota at the time. Didn’t matter.”

Coyote and her father Rodeo have developed many conventions over the years, such as the “no-go,” which is a hard denial by her father of something she wants. The D.E.A.D. Dream refers to any impulse that moves them to hop on the bus and start driving. She uses this technique since she knows her father has refused to return to their former home or even speak about it or their deceased loved ones.

“Now, here are some things I don’t generally believe in: fate, astrology, angels, magic, or the mystical power of wishes. Sorry, I just don’t.

So there ain’t no easy explanation for what happened next. But that’s all right, ‘cause not everything in this world needs to be explained. We can just chalk it up to luck and call it good.

Here’s what happened: I was sitting there, wondering how on god’s green earth I was gonna get us to Sampson Park before the bulldozers fired up, when I heard the following words from the booth behind me.

‘Tammy, you know I wanna get there. Of course I do. But I’m broke. I got no money for a bus ticket. How am I gonna get all the way across the country with no money?’ I stopped mid-chew.”

Coyote demonstrates the realism she operates from as she states her disbelief in mystical powers. This reflects her loss of family and a loss of faith in higher powers. In addition, her quick wit and intelligence are illustrated as she immediately finds a solution to her problems and is able to persuade the adults in her life to follow her plans.

“‘I love Rodeo because if tomorrow I spit in his face and threw all his favorite books out the window and called him all the worst words I could think of, he wouldn’t love me one little bit less.’ The bus rocked and swayed underneath us. I kept my eyes on Rodeo, on the back of his shaggy head bobbing to the music. ‘I love Rodeo because on the worst day of my life he held me and held me and held me and held me and didn’t let me go.’ I tried to clear my throat but kinda failed, so I went on in a scratchy sort of whisper. ‘I love Rodeo because if I didn’t love him, he’d fall apart.’”

Sitting in the middle of the bus and watching her father drive, Coyote explains her affection for her father. The ambivalent nature of her feelings is apparent here as she describes how she was able to lean on him after her mother and sisters died, yet she realizes he relies upon her, and she will not let him down. Her maturity is also on display as she unwaveringly explains her deep feelings of affection and how she knows these feelings display true love.

“‘I’m sorry, but is everything okay?’ She was looking with wet, hungry eyes into my face, searching for clues.

There were a couple of ways to play this. I went with bravado. ‘No,’ I answered. Her eyebrows shot up and I saw her eyes glisten with excitement. She opened her mouth but I barreled on, not giving her a chance to talk. ‘Climate change is wreaking havoc on our planet,’ I said. ‘The coral reefs are dying. Species are going extinct at a terrifying rate. Honeybee colonies are collapsing. And have you heard about the deforestation of the Amazon?’ All those National Geographic magazines that Rodeo made me read were paying off. I shook my head and took a suck of my Slushee, which tasted even worse than I’d feared. ‘The world is a mess, ma’am. Everything is definitely not okay.’”

This exchange takes place between Coyote and a concerned older woman who sees her standing on a service station parking lot and crying when Rodeo and Lester drive off in the bus assuming she is back in her bedroom. Coyote does not want to explain her situation to the woman who is obviously concerned that she is a runaway. Coyote’s response to the woman’s inquiry is characteristic of her quick wit and resilience in the face of real adversity. While she is not averse to asking for help from total strangers when it is needed, she has an unfailing instinct about whom to trust.

“‘It was no big deal. But I’m glad you morons caught on so quick.”

‘We didn’t,” Lester said, then pointed at the bus’s windshield. ‘It was that cat of yours, started going nuts the minute we pulled out, pacing and scratching at the windows and howling. Made a big ole fuss. Rodeo kept hollering at you to get your cat under control and when you kept ignoring him, he went back to check on you. So, don’t thank us. Thank that noisy feline right there.’”

Just about every person and animal who joins this cross-country trek at some point becomes a rescuer. This is the pivotal moment in which her adopted cat proves he is worth more than simply being lovable. The irony of course is that Ivan is typical very quiet and only becomes noisy when he wants to alert humans that something is wrong.

“I’d made that decision for me, and I’d also made the secret choice to head home, no matter Rodeo’s no-goes and hang-ups I’d spent a long time mostly worried about Rodeo and what he wanted. Maybe it was time to start worrying about someone else.”

Coyote describes a new quality beginning to emerge within herself. She just invited Salvador and his mother to ride with them on the bus, something she decided to persuade her father to do. She decides that this new quality began to emerge when she decided to sneak Ivan onto the bus. Coyote says she is beginning to make decisions that are good for her instead focusing on the feelings and welfare of others.

“I was sitting in the middle of the music with all those singing souls and it felt like forever, it felt like always, it felt like a little piece of the biggest thing in the world. It felt like family. My whole heart was tingling.

And then, of course, the song ended. Come on, Coyote, of course it did. The clapping stopped. The tambourine disappeared. And I fell back to earth, back down into my bones, and I felt that it was only a cat on my lap, felt the empty space on the couch beside me, and maybe I don’t know why, but I felt something like tears sting their way into my eyes and I looked away from everyone else, looked off out into what was just kind of an empty highway world.

There’s so much sadness in the world.”

This passage is revealing of the part music plays in the novel as well as demonstrating the high and low emotions Coyote experiences. Playing his guitar, Rodeo inspires everyone on the bus to join in a particularly uplifting piece. This could not have happened previously, since it was typically on Coyote and her dad on the bus. When the music stops, Coyote is acutely aware of the emptiness that rushes in when the song is over. This is the first of four occasions when Coyote observes there is a lot of sadness in the world.

“For a while we did that hug-yourself-and-breathe-through clenched-teeth thing you do when you’re getting used to the water, even though it wasn’t all that cold. We grinned at each other, shivering. And then, at some point, we both got awkward.

I mean, I was wearing just my swimsuit, which was a two-piece. And he was standing there with no shirt on. I don’t care who you are, it changes the tone of a conversation if you can see each other’s belly button.”

Stopping for a lunch break, Coyote and Salvador go for a swim in a river. The two tweens end up standing in the water. This is Coyote’s first focus on Salvador as a person of the opposite sex. The growing bond between them is strengthened as they candidly share those aspects of their lives that are kept secret from all others.

“I didn’t say nothing, I looked at them coyotes, too. And I was trying my best to breathe and swallow. I don’t know how long we all stayed like that, us and the coyotes. Looking at each other, sitting quiet. Whether it was a few minutes or a few seconds, though, that time felt full, stuffed thick with life and feeling, splitting at the threads with breathing and thinking.

The sun finally poked its head over that mesa, and its sharp white light pierced the dawn’s softness.

The mama coyote raised her nose, sniffing at the sky. Then she lowered her head and looked at us and whined, just once. It wasn’t a sad whine, or a hurt whine, or a scared whine. I don’t know what it was. But I know it was for us.”

This a symbolic treatment of Coyote and Rodeo perceiving that Coyote’s mother and her two sisters have come to visit them in the middle of the night when everyone is sleeping on the bus. Rodeo’s longing is expressed as he holds out his hand and traces the image of the mother coyote through the windshield. Later, he takes a photo of Anne, Coyote’s mom, from the memory box and runs his hand over her image as he did with the coyote. Rodeo can only symbolically deal with his lost wife and daughters.

“Sometimes trusting someone is about the scariest thing you can do. But you know what? It’s a lot less scary than being all alone.”

Coyote pronounces this moral as the end of the chapter having taken Lester and Salvador into her confidence as to why she is pressing to make a rapid journey to the Northwest. Having realized she could not pull off this plan on her own, she takes these two fellow travelers into her confidence out of necessity. Having two very competent co-conspirators fills her with new hope.

“Almost funny that they both secretly cried at night when they knew the other one was sleeping. But not really funny at all, really. I thought about how brave they both were, and how tough.”

Coyote here refers to the Vegas––Salvador and his mother Esperanza. Each of them feels frightened and overwhelmed yet conceals his or her feelings to protect the emotions of the other. This mirrors the relationship between Rodeo and Coyote, with father and daughter working diligently to avoid dealing with the grief that is always just out of mind.

“Out of nowhere, tears came stinging into my eyes, I just wanted everyone to be happy. Lester and Tammy and Salvador and his mom and his aunt and Val and me and Rodeo. It is hard, though, when everyone carries around a heart inside them that is so loud and so strong and so easily broken.”

This wish comes at the end of a chapter in which Lester makes and acts upon the decision that he will not continue the trip to see his girlfriend, Tammy. He compels Coyote to use his phone to call Tammy and tell her he is not coming to her. Coyote expresses recognition of the complexity of loving relationships. The one thing she wanted for each of her traveling companions was happiness, something she realized to be exceedingly difficult to achieve.

“‘How you feeling?’ Lester’s voice was soft, his eyes deep into mine.

‘Good. Well kinda scared, I guess. And sad. Rodeo is right it is sad to think about it. To think about them.’ I took in a breath, let it out. ‘But it’s worth it. I think remembering them and being sad about it is way better than forgetting about them.’”

After struggling for much of the story to arrive at a place where she can freely grieve over her lost mother and sisters, Coyote at least begins to experience the grief she and her father have avoided. The insight she experiences is that, while the grief is painful, it is better to regain their memory than to have intentionally forgotten them. In this passage, Lester is asking Coyote how she is coping.

“‘Don’t leave me, Coyote.’

‘I don’t want to. But you gotta say my name. ‘Cause if you can’t say my name, that means I don’t matter to you. And if I don’t matter to you, then...Well, I don’t know.’ My voice cracked, froze, caught its balance, and stumbled on. ‘I...I know you don’t need me, Dad. But I need you. I need a dad. Even if you don’t need a daughter.’

His jaw dropped open. He took three big breaths right in a row.

‘Oh,’ he said, and then ‘Oh,’ and then he dropped the bottle he was holding. And he fell forward onto his knees.

‘Honey,’ he said, ‘how could you...how could you think that I don’t need you? You are all I’ve got. You are all I care about in this whole world.’

I couldn’t see anything now. I blinked, but it didn’t do any good.

‘Then prove it. Say my name. My real name. Please.’”

Even after Coyote has openly begun to deal with the sorrow of her mother and sisters’ death, Rodeo has not brought himself to the point of accepting their loss or dealing with their grief. Her demand that he call her by her birth name rather than Coyote is the pivotal turning point for Rodeo. In this conversation the reader first learns that Coyote’s original name is Ella.

“‘You know you gotta do this. You gotta. And you know together is better than alone. So let’s do it. Together.’ He looked at me, those eyes of his all intense and probing and sparkly. Then he said it. He didn’t say it begging, or pleading. He just said it human. ‘Come on, Coyote.’

Now, here’s a thing. When someone you trust—maybe even someone you love, but not in that way—looks you in your eyes and talks to you and it sounds just like you talking to yourself, here’s what you should do: You should listen. So I did.”

This exhortation comes from Salvador as he encourages Coyote to follow the coded instructions given to her by Rodeo. Rodeo was just arrested on suspicion of kidnapping Val. As he was led away, he said something that made Coyote realize she should find the hidden bus key and drive the last eight miles to the park. While she is reluctant, she decides that, since she trusts and loves—though “not in that way”—Salvador, she should drive the bus to Poplin Springs. This is another incident of Coyote becoming aware of a person’s inner being by looking into their eyes.

“I stopped because I knew exactly what I was doing, and exactly why I was doing it, and the absolute true-blue rightness of the moment darn near took my breath away. I wasn’t doing this for Rodeo. I wasn’t doing this to take care of anyone else. I was doing this to take care of me. And it was a good thing.”

As Coyote starts the bus to drive away, a wave of revelation washes over her. She realizes what she is doing is following her own self-interest and it is the proper way to proceed. Though initially reluctant, she is now determined, resulting in her racing and outsmarting a police officer who tries to stop her.

“His fingers locked onto my arm. Hard. And he stopped me hard and spun me around hard. He was all hardness, that cop.

I didn’t have it in me to deal with all his hardness, because there was nothing hard left in me. I was soft and broken and falling apart, right down to my middle. But I was ready to fight that cop to the end to do what I needed to do, what I was aching to do, what I was almost dying to do. I was ready to fight his hardness, because gosh darn it, the world is hard enough as it IS without hard people making it even harder. I was ready to fight.”

Having made her way to the park and, with the help of Salvador and several workmen, located the memory box, Coyote is carrying it toward a shade tree to sit down and open it. The officer who grabs her arm is the same one who pursued her on the Interstate highway, and he is understandably irritated with Coyote. This quote is notable for her judgment about the hardness of the world and how she had experienced all of it she could endure and was ready to fight back.

“Then she turned her head and looked at me, looking at her. There was nothing but green and bloom and light between us. And she smiled at me. A sharing smile. A smile that was just for me. A smile that said all the most beautiful things that moms say to daughters. And I smiled back. A smile that said all the most important things that daughters say to moms.”

Chapter 44 is a brief insert into the storyline in which Coyote, holding the memory box and about to open it, remembers an occasion as a child when she and her family climbed to a scenic vista. The most poignant part of the memory is the moment when she stood at the summit and turned to see her mother smile at her, the two sharing an unspoken, timeless message of the love that existed between mother and daughter.

“So I don’t know how long it lasted, but I can tell you how long it felt like. It felt more or less exactly like five years. It felt like, breath by breath, we fell back and back and back. Back through all those years and all those miles, back away from Coyote and Rodeo and back to just me and my dad. And then I was kneeling there and I was daughter again. I was a sister again. And Rodeo—or Dad, really Rodeo had a wife again. A wife that he missed like oxygen. And he had three daughters again.”

Rodeo appears, courtesy of the officer who arrested him, beside Coyote under the shade tree. The two of them are left alone to look through the memory box. What they see transports them back to before the accident that took the lives of their loved ones and helped them to remember what it was like before they took to the road to deny their grief.

“I woulda smiled, but it wasn’t really a smiling kind of a moment. I don’t know what kind of moment it was, really, but I know it was a big kind. And a good kind, in the way that big moments can be good without being happy, exactly.”

Coyote describes the experience of being with her father as they finish looking through the box and close it. She does not have the proper words to describe what she is feeling, though she clearly conveys the solemnity, poignancy, sadness, joy that are combined in that instant.

“‘She ain’t all that excited to go home, but it sure sounds like her folks might be looking at things a little different now. I think she gave ‘em quite a scare.’

I nodded. Losing something can sure make you realize how much you loved it, even if you knew you loved it all along.”

Here Rodeo is relating to Coyote what is happening with Val, who has turned out to be a minor—only 17 years old rather than 19 as she claimed. Coyote is explaining that she is facing a difficult encounter with her parents, who are driving from Minnesota to pick her up. They recognized what it meant to lose her, even though they demanded that she take back her proclamation of being gay or leave.