Empathy
The core theme of the novel, as evident from the origin of its title, Walk Two Moons, is the idea of empathy. Creech has stated that while writing a sequel to Absolutely Normal Chaos, the story of Sal emerged, and as Sal's story materialized, she received a fortune cookie that read, "Don't judge a man until you walk two moons in his moccasins." This origin story works its way into the novel in a very literal way in the form of Mrs. Partridge leaving cryptic, moral messages on the Winterbottoms' porch—one of which is the same message to which Creech attributes the title and a portion of the inspiration for the novel. Mrs. Partridge later explicitly explains her actions using the metaphor of fortune cookies. When Phoebe confronts Mrs. Partridge about the messages, she says, "I thought they would be grandiful surprises for you—like fortune cookies, only I didn't have any cookies to put them in" (253).
The proverbial phrase about withholding judgment until you've "walked two moons in someone's moccasins" or "walked a mile in their shoes" is about trying to imagine circumstances from someone else's perspective, feel how they feel about a situation, and understand how those feelings may lead them to act a certain way or make certain decisions. The definition of empathy is "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another," and the proverb of walking in someone else's moccasins is simply an imagistic way of conveying that exact concept.
Creech situates the concept of empathy at the heart of the novel—empathy is a major component of the novel's thematic engine. The question Sal works through throughout the novel—why her mother left—is, of course, inextricable from other major themes like domesticity and grief, but the general process of trying to understand the feelings behind Chanhassen's decision to leave, and later, Norma's decision to leave the other Winterbottoms, is an empathetic process. The entire frame of the novel—the Hiddles' road trip from Euclid to Idaho—is an exercise in empathy. In the final chapter, Sal says, "One day I realized that our whole trip out to Lewiston had been a gift from Gram and Gramps to me. They were giving me a chance to walk in my mother's moccasins—to see what she had seen and feel what she might've felt on her last trip" (276).
Beyond following the literal path her mother took to Lewiston in order to better understand and share in her feelings, Sal has to consider why her mother left in the first place. Sal has to abandon her own perspective—the perspective of Chanhassen's daughter who felt abandoned and betrayed by her mother's sudden absence—in order to eventually come to the conclusion that just because Chanhassen needed some time alone and space to figure out who she was outside of the domestic sphere of marriage and motherhood, doesn't mean that she didn't love Sal more than anything. Over the course of the novel, Sal has to try to embody perspectives outside of her own, and her personal work leads her to be particularly astute about Phoebe's mother, Norma. Sal notices Phoebe's mother's dissatisfaction before any of Norma's actual family members do, and it is because Sal is positioned in a particularly empathetic place, having already had to consider the many reasons why a stay-at-home mother may feel unfulfilled and underappreciated.
Grief
Walk Two Moons deals with the many conflicting aspects of grief, including guilt, sorrow, denial, and even anger. Although grief is not always associated with death, it often is. Much of the novel's emotional content comes in confessional passages in which Sal tries to determine her role in her mother's leaving; though Chanhassen's death is kept a "secret" until the end of the novel, in the sense that it goes unsaid and unacknowledged by Sal, the only vessel through which the information of the novel is dispensed to readers, the way she talks about her mother's absence is clearly interpretable as grief. Once Chanhassen's death is confirmed in the final chapters, Sal's behavior can then be, in retrospect, that much more obviously mapped onto a process of grieving.
Early on in the novel, Sal discusses the first time she felt joy after her mother left:
I was standing against the fence watching a newborn calf wobble on its thin legs. It tripped and wobbled and swung its big head in my direction and gave me a sweet, loving look. "Oh!" I thought. "I am happy in this moment in time." I was surprised that I knew this all about myself, without my mother there. And that night in bed, I did not cry. I said to myself, "Salamanca Tree Hiddle, you can be happy without her." It seemed a mean thought and I was sorry for it, but it felt true. (38–39)
This sense of guilt, the feeling that she's being mean by acknowledging a moment of happiness in the absence of her mother, gestures to a more permanent absence than living several states away. This moment shows Sal in the midst of the process of trying to extract her personal identity and the way she feels on a day-to-day basis from her mother's identity and emotions. Sal explains that she often took cues on how to feel about something from her mother, and after her mother's death, she felt numb for a long time, because she wasn't sure how to feel. Learning how to feel things for herself is a huge moment in Sal's grieving process.
Creech shows the reader how John grieves Chanhassen, and even shows, in broader strokes, the fresher grief of Gramps at the end of the novel, after Gram dies in Coeur d'Alene. Creech shows how people grieve in different ways; for instance, John had to leave Bybanks because he felt the memory of Chanhassen in the trees and the walls and pretty much everywhere he looked on the farm. She's buried in Lewiston, Idaho, where she died, because John felt that her presence was so strong in Bybanks, they didn't need a gravesite there. "She is in the trees, the barns, the fields. Gramps is different," Sal says, about burying Gram in Bybanks. "He needs Gram right here. He needs to walk out to that aspen grove to see his gooseberry" (276).
In Walk Two Moons, Creech demonstrates the nuanced process of grieving in both young adults and the adults around them, and she does so from the perspective of a young person negotiating the transition from childhood to adolescence.
Domesticity
At the center of both the primary and secondary stories, the framed and frame narratives, is a woman unsatisfied by her domestic role and yearning to transcend expectations of those around them and the limitations placed on them by their dependents. Sal likens her story to the fireplace that John uncovers from underneath the drywall in their farmhouse, and Phoebe's story to the drywall he chips away. Through Phoebe's story, Sal is able to better comprehend her own.
Sal's story is the story of her mother leaving Bybanks; over the course of the novel, she reflects on why her mother left and what reasons she may have had for leaving. When Sal hears Norma Winterbottom ask her daughter, Prudence, if Prudence thought she, Norma, lives "a tiny life" (88), Sal understands this question as a clear indication that Norma is unsatisfied with "Mrs. Supreme Housewife," as Sal describes her at the beginning of the novel. Sal's first impression of the Winterbottoms is that Mr. Winterbottom is an office worker, and "Mrs. Winterbottom baked and cleaned and did laundry and grocery shopping." She says, "I had a funny feeling that Mrs. Winterbottom did not actually like all this baking and cleaning and laundry and shopping" (30), which, of course, turns out to be true.
Mrs. Winterbottom's great secret is that she has a son, Mike, whom she's never told her husband George about because she was afraid he would find it unrespectable that she had a child outside of marriage. Chanhassen, on the other hand, has never felt able to measure up to John Hiddle's "goodness." Chanhassen's family is quite like the Winterbottoms in that they're obsessed with appearing proper and respectable, whereas the Hiddles are primarily concerned with considering others and doing little things to brighten each other's days. Sal says of her father, "He was always thinking of little things to cheer up someone else. This nearly drove my mother crazy because I think she wanted to keep up with him, but it was not her natural gift like it was with my father" (108). When Sal describes why her mother left, she says, "She needed to learn about what she was" (110).
She remembers her mother describing her reasons for leaving to John—"I need to do it on my own. ... I can't think. All I see here is what I am not. I am not brave. I am not good. And I wish someone would call me by my real name. My name isn't Sugar. It's Chanhassen" (110). This conversation happens, we learn later, after Chanhassen has had a miscarriage and an emergency hysterectomy, rendering her unable to "fill the house with children" like she and John once talked about doing. This sudden deprivation of a traditionally domestic process, procreation, emphasizes Chanhassen's sense of dislocation and alienation in the domestic sphere.
Chanhassen dies before she has a chance to resolve things at home and negotiate a role for herself that satisfies her individual aspirations as well as her aspirations as a member of a nuclear family. The Winterbottoms, on other hand, are given this chance to reevaluate how they treat the woman who plays the role of mother and wife. After Sal finishes telling the story of the Winterbottoms to her grandparents, she says, "I could have told about Phoebe getting adjusted to having a brother, and to her 'new' mother, and all of that, but that part was still going on..." (255). The novel ends on an optimistic, hopeful note about the possibility of change and empowerment in the domestic sphere.
Cultural/Regional Identity
Creech has stated that Native American influence in Walk Two Moons was inspired by a proverb she read on a fortune-cookie fortune: "Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins." Moccasins are a type of leather shoe associated with Native American culture; the word moccasin is an Algonquian word meaning shoe. Though much of the novel and inspiration for the novel's location stem from Creech's personal experiences as a child, Creech does not claim Seneca ancestry, or any Native ancestry for that matter. On her website, she writes, "The fortune cookie message inspired a journey (walking 'two moons') and a character who is a very small part Native American (the moccasins)." "A very small part" is a key phrase here when trying to parse the relevance of cultural identity as a theme in Walk Two Moons. Though Sal's reflection on her Seneca heritage plays a not-insignificant role in the way she interacts with the world and the way she remembers her mother, the novel does not dig very deeply into the political questions it raises around the language people use to refer to indigenous cultures, and wholly omits any discussion of the genocide of Native American people initiated by colonialism.
Salamanca's name is a misremembrance on the part of Chanhassen and John of the Seneca people; in other words, they meant to name her in a way that would pay homage to the people and culture with which Chanhassen yearns to identify, but they don't actually know the name of the Nation. Throughout the novel, Sal refers to animistic practices such as praying to trees, practices broadly associated with Native American culture.
In the Wisconsin Dells, the Hiddles encounter a group of Native Americans dancing and beating drums in the park. Here, Sal reflects on the terminology she's been told to use in school, versus the terminology her mother preferred when referring to her Native heritage. She says, "My mother had not liked the term Native Americans. She thought it sounded primitive and stiff. She said, 'My great-grandmother was a Seneca Indian, and I'm proud of it. She wasn't a Seneca Native American. Indian sounds much more brave and elegant'" (56-57). Later on, in Pipestone, Minnesota, Sal approaches a man and asks him if he's a Native American. He responds, "No, I'm a person." She tries again, "But are you a Native American person?" and this time he answers, "No, I'm an American Indian person." "So am I. In my blood," replies Sal (73). This encounter affirms Sal's stance on the terminology from an earlier chapter, but it still shies away from analysis.
The Hiddles smoke a "peace pipe" with some people at Pipestone and stay at a motel called "Injun Joe's Peace Palace Motel" (74). Sal observes how the name of the motel and some of the merchandise have been problematized and changed by guests or locals—it's left ambiguous as to who, exactly, is taking issue with the language and changing Injun to Indian and Indian to Native American. At one point in their stay at the motel, Sal says, "I wished everybody would just make up their minds" (75). This statement suggests a sort of exhaustion or weariness with the question of language and identity. Ultimately, the novel's thesis seems to be that acceptance and openmindedness takes precedent over politically correct language; however, this sense of weariness can feel at times unearned and reductive where there is little other than superficial discussion of Native American culture and history, to the point where the adoption of certain aesthetics broadly attributed to Native American culture feel appropriative.
Love and Family Dynamics
Love comes in many forms in Walk Two Moons—there is romantic love between spouses, and young, budding love, like Sal and Ben's. There is also love for one's parents, love for one's friends, and love, even, felt for strangers that against all odds maintain a connection between the living and lost loved ones, like that between Margaret Cadaver and John Hiddle. Creech offers different paradigms for love in the domestic sphere. Gram and Gramps's marriage, for instance, vastly differs from Norma and George Winterbottom's. Gram and Gramps's love story begins in Bybanks, Kentucky; Gram used Gramps's old beagle as a litmus test for whether he would make a good husband, reasoning that since he treats his dog so well, he'll treat her even better (77). Their courtship represents an old-fashioned approach to love and marriage, where Gramps asked Gram's father for her hand in marriage, and there was a sense that she was being "given away" to him by her father. But Creech also emphasizes Gram's "wildness," and includes an instance where Gram spends three days and nights with "the egg man."
For Creech in Walk Two Moons, the idea of romantic love very much overlaps with the theme of domesticity and the idea that "if you love something, you'll set it free." When Chanhassen leaves, Sal tells John that they never should've let her go, but John says, "A person isn't a bird. You can't cage a person" (141).
Creech casts a special attention upon the way married couples interact in Walk Two Moons, and there is a correlation with how free versus how "uptight" they are with how well-adjusted and generally happy they and their children tend to be. The Finneys are an example of a free and open couple who are not afraid to publicly display their affection for one another. Sal remarks on how they roll around in the leaves and kiss on the roof of their house. The Winterbottoms, on the other hand, barely touch one another. This binary of up-tight versus chilled-out seems to extend to every facet of the book's thesis on family life. The Finneys eat fried foods off of mismatched plates with random, mismatched cutlery. The Winterbottoms eat muesli and couscous off of matching plates with matching cutlery. The Hiddles don't care what is "respectable," while for the Pickfords, respectability is everything. This binary is reinforced when Norma introduces her family to Mike and uses the word "unrespectable" to describe how she feared she would be perceived if she told George about her son (247). It's only after the Winterbottoms do away with notions of respectability that they can finally begin a process of healing and understanding each other's needs.
Adults vs. Children
Walk Two Moons is a young-adult novel written from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old girl dealing with very "adult" themes and life events, like the loss of a parent, separation, identity crises, and mental illness. Like a lot of young people, Sal is quite astute when it comes to the general differences in how adults and children express themselves, particularly in speech and language. When Sal meets Phoebe, she observes, "Phoebe had a way of sounding like a grown-up sometimes. When she said, 'That's what I'm telling you,' she sounded like a grown-up talking to a child" (20). This so-called "adult" phrase, "that's what I'm telling you," is especially pertinent to Sal's theory that adults often speak in subtext. She notices how often the way adults feel has little to do with the actual words they say, and more to do with how and when they say them; this particularly applies to the Winterbottoms.
Gram and Gramps are an example of adults who act like children, according to Sal's father. John asks Sal to take the trip with Gram and Gramps as a sort of chaperone for them. This is an exaggeration on his part, and Sal knows it, but the joke points to a suggestion of the novel, that when adults manage to tap into their inner children—say what they really mean, stop being so concerned with respectability, and live life youthfully and joyfully, like the Finneys—they will be generally happier and less anxious.
Storytelling
Walk Two Moons emphasizes the importance and power of narratives. The impetus of the entire frame narrative comes from a desire to hear and tell stories. Gram, noticing how anxious Sal is being in a car on the interstate, asks Sal to tell them a story, and Sal says she could tell them "an extensively strange story" (9). This extensively strange story is the story of her friendship with Phoebe Winterbottom at a strange juncture in both Phoebe and Sal's lives.
Beyond its importance to the structure of the novel, storytelling shapes the way characters make sense of their trauma. For Sal, telling the story of Phoebe helps her to understand her own story, as she states in the fireplace metaphor: "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). At the end of the novel, Sal points out that Phoebe's tendency to believe outlandish things was likely a method of coping with her circumstances. She says, "If I were walking in Phoebe's moccasins, I would have to believe in a lunatic and an axe-wielding Mrs. Cadaver to explain my mother's disappearance" (277). In the end, the different possibilities Sal and Phoebe concoct to explain Norma's disappearance and John's relationship with Margaret are all just narratives to help them cope with harder truths.
Sal relates this narrativization-as-coping-mechanism to the Greek myths she learns about in Mr. Birkway's class: "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" (277). The inclusion of a literature class as the only class we see Sal and Phoebe attend is also pertinent to the importance of narratives and language to the thematic framework of the novel.
