Walk Two Moons

Walk Two Moons Plot Summary

Introduction

Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle pressed her face against the car window as her grandparents' red Chevrolet carved through the American heartland, heading toward a destination that terrified and compelled her in equal measure. Six days to reach Lewiston, Idaho. Six days to arrive before her mother's birthday—the deadline she'd set in her desperate, secret hope that somehow, miraculously, she could bring her mother home. But her mother wasn't waiting in some distant hotel. She was buried beneath the Idaho earth, killed in a bus crash over a year ago, though Sal had refused to believe it until this journey forced the truth upon her. As the miles rolled past, Sal found herself telling her grandparents about Phoebe Winterbottom—a girl whose mother had also disappeared, whose world had also shattered, whose story became a mirror reflecting Sal's own impossible grief. In Phoebe's tale of mysterious messages, suspected lunatics, and a mother who vanished without explanation, Sal discovered something profound about loss, acceptance, and the courage it takes to walk in another person's moccasins.

Chapter 1: Uprooted: A Reluctant Departure from Bybanks

The day Sal's father announced they were leaving their Kentucky farm felt like the end of the world. She stood in their doorway, staring at the red maple tree that had been her climbing companion since childhood, at the swimming hole where her mother had taught her to skip stones, at the barn where chickens pecked and cows lowed in their familiar rhythm. Everything that mattered was here in Bybanks—everything except her mother, who had left for Idaho over a year ago and never returned. Her father's hands shook as he loaded their belongings into the moving truck, leaving behind the chestnut tree, the willow, the hayloft, and all the spaces that held her mother's memory. "We have to leave because your mother is haunting me day and night," he told Sal with raw honesty. "She's in the fields, the air, the barn, the walls, the trees." Margaret Cadaver, a woman with wild red hair and a voice like dead leaves, had helped him find a job in Euclid, Ohio. The name alone—Cadaver—made Sal's skin crawl. In Euclid, their new house sat cramped between identical boxes, each with a tiny square of grass and no room for imagination. Sal pressed her nose to her bedroom window and saw a round, frightened face staring back from the house next door. The girl had enormous sky-blue eyes and yellow ringlets that framed her pale features like a porcelain doll. This was Phoebe Winterbottom, though Sal didn't know it yet—didn't know that this anxious stranger would become the lens through which she'd finally understand her own shattered world. At school, Phoebe sat alone, her perfect posture and nervous energy setting her apart from the other students. When a black spider wandered across Sal's desk during class, she calmly scooped it up and released it out the window while her classmates recoiled in horror. "You're so courageous," Phoebe whispered afterward, her voice filled with awe. But Sal knew better. Courage had nothing to do with spiders. Real courage was something else entirely—something she wasn't sure she possessed when it came to the things that really mattered.

Chapter 2: Messages and Mysteries: The Winterbottom Household

Phoebe's house felt like a museum of respectability. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Winterbottom, spoke in careful, measured tones, sitting straight-backed at dinner while discussing cholesterol levels and proper nutrition. Mrs. Winterbottom baked endless pies and casseroles, cleaned with religious fervor, and seemed to apologize for her very existence with every breath. Her husband called her "honey bun" and "sweetie pie" in a voice devoid of warmth, while Phoebe and her older sister Prudence pulled away from their mother's tentative touches as if she carried some contagious sadness. The first mysterious message appeared on Phoebe's front steps like a small bomb. The white envelope contained a slip of blue paper with neat handwriting: "Don't judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins." Mrs. Winterbottom clutched at her collar, her face draining of color as she studied the cryptic words. More messages followed: "Everyone has his own agenda." "In the course of a lifetime, what does it matter?" Each one sent ripples of anxiety through the household. Then came the visits from the lunatic—at least, that's what Phoebe called him. A young man with nervous energy and bright pink circles on his cheeks appeared at their door, asking specifically for Mrs. Winterbottom. His hands stayed buried in his pockets, his eyes darted left and right, and he refused to leave his name. Phoebe was certain he was dangerous, possibly armed, definitely planning something sinister. Her imagination painted him as an escaped convict or worse, someone who left those unsettling messages as part of some elaborate scheme. Mrs. Winterbottom grew more fragile with each passing day, jumping at small sounds, locking doors obsessively, asking her daughters to check windows that she'd already checked herself. She spoke in increasingly desperate tones about feeling useful, about whether she led "a tiny life," about the suffocating weight of being perfectly respectable. Something was breaking inside her, hairline fractures spreading through her carefully constructed world, though Phoebe remained determinedly blind to her mother's deteriorating state.

Chapter 3: Disappearing Mothers: Parallel Journeys Begin

The morning Mrs. Winterbottom vanished, she left behind three notes and a freshly baked apple pie. Phoebe's note was gentle: "Keep all the doors locked and call your father if you need anything. I love you, Phoebe." Prudence received instructions about heating spaghetti sauce. But Mr. Winterbottom's note cut deeper: "I had to go away. I can't explain. I'll call you in a few days." Phoebe's world tilted sideways. Her mother, who lived for schedules and routines, who never left dirty dishes in the sink, who apologized for inconveniencing anyone—that mother would never abandon her family without explanation. The only logical answer was kidnapping. The lunatic had finally made his move, dragged her mother away to some unknown fate. Phoebe began collecting evidence: suspicious spots on the carpet marked with adhesive tape, unidentified hair strands sealed in envelopes, a growing certainty that sinister forces were at work. For Sal, watching Phoebe's frantic denial felt like staring into a funhouse mirror. Her own mother had left a letter, not notes—a letter explaining that she needed to clear her head and heart, to discover who she was beneath the layers of wife and mother. "I can't think," she'd written. "All I see here is what I am not. I am not brave. I am not good." She'd promised to return before the tulips bloomed, but the tulips had come and gone, and then came the terrible phone call, the news that she'd died in a bus crash in Idaho. But Sal had never fully accepted that finality. Like Phoebe, she'd constructed elaborate fantasies—maybe her mother had amnesia, maybe she was hiding because of some secret illness, maybe there'd been a mistake at the hospital. The parallels between their situations became impossible to ignore: two mothers who'd felt trapped in lives that no longer fit, two daughters left behind to make sense of the inexplicable. The difference was that Phoebe still had hope, while Sal was slowly learning that hope could be its own form of cruelty. As Phoebe raged against the unfairness of her mother's disappearance, Sal found herself remembering her own last conversation with her mother—how she'd refused to go walking in the fields that final afternoon, how she'd snapped "No! I don't want to go. Why do you keep asking me?" Those words haunted her now, the last memory her mother would have carried.

Chapter 4: The Road West: Grandparents, Stories, and Sacred Places

Gram and Gramps Hiddle arrived in their ancient red Chevrolet like a whirlwind of good-natured chaos, full of stories and determination to drive Sal to Idaho before her mother's birthday. Gramps had German shrapnel in his leg—or claimed to—and a talent for finding trouble in the most innocent situations. Gram called Sal "chickabiddy" and had once run away with the egg man for three days, just to make Gramps stop swearing. They were the sort of people who got arrested for borrowing senators' tires and charmed their way out of speeding tickets with tales of war wounds and urgent family business. Their marriage bed was sacred to Gramps—the bed where he and all his brothers had been born, where his own children had entered the world, where he planned to die so "that bed will know everything there is to know about me." Each night in roadside motels, he'd pat the unfamiliar mattress and declare, "Well, this ain't our marriage bed, but it will do," while Gram giggled and Sal marveled at their unshakable devotion after fifty-one years together. As they drove through the flat expanses of Ohio and Indiana, past the stunning blue expanse of Lake Michigan and into the Black Hills of South Dakota, Sal told them Phoebe's story. She spoke of mysterious messages and imagined lunatics, of a girl whose world had shattered when her perfectly respectable mother simply disappeared. But beneath Phoebe's tale, her own story was unfolding—the account of a daughter who'd lost her mother to wanderlust and death, who'd been uprooted from everything familiar, who was now racing across the country in a desperate attempt to make peace with the unacceptable. The Black Hills rose before them like a sacred fortress, dark with pine trees and heavy with the weight of history. These were the Sioux's holy lands, stolen by white settlers and carved with the faces of presidents. Sal imagined her mother seeing these same hills from her bus window, wondered what she'd thought about the injustice of it all, the way beautiful places could be claimed and scarred and renamed by those with power. Mount Rushmore felt like a monument to conquest rather than achievement—those massive stone faces staring down with blind indifference at the people passing below. But Old Faithful was different. When that magnificent geyser erupted, shooting a river of water straight up into the sky with a sound like the earth itself was boiling over, Gram stood transfixed in the mist, shouting "Huzza, huzza!" with pure joy. She was happy she'd lived long enough to see this wonder, and Gramps watched her with such tenderness that Sal understood something profound about love and time and the preciousness of shared moments.

Chapter 5: Uncovering Truth: Lunatics and Family Secrets

The truth about Phoebe's lunatic came in pieces, like a puzzle assembling itself. At the police station, Sergeant Bickle listened to Phoebe's breathless account of mysterious messages and potential kidnapping with barely concealed amusement. His massive frame and freckled face seemed designed to intimidate, but it was the three photographs on his desk that caught Sal's attention—especially the third one, showing the sergeant with his wife and a young man whose face she recognized. The lunatic was Sergeant Bickle's son. Armed with this knowledge, Sal and Phoebe took a bus to the university campus where Mike Bickle was a freshman. They found him on a bench with an older woman, holding hands, kissing her cheek with obvious affection. The woman was Mrs. Winterbottom, but transformed—her hair cut stylish and short, her clothing casual rather than conservative, her entire demeanor somehow liberated from the suffocating respectability that had defined her. When she leaned over and spat on the grass, laughing as the young man did the same, it was like watching a different person entirely. Phoebe stood frozen, unable to process this betrayal of everything she'd believed about her mother. The perfect housewife, the woman who lived to serve others, the mother who would never leave her children without explanation—that woman was gone, replaced by someone unrecognizable. The lunatic wasn't a kidnapper after all. He was something far more complicated and threatening to Phoebe's worldview: he was family. Meanwhile, Sal's own understanding was shifting in equally dramatic ways. Margaret Cadaver, the red-haired woman she'd blamed for stealing her father's attention, revealed the truth about their connection. Margaret had been the nurse on duty when the bus crash victims were brought to the hospital. She'd sat next to Sal's mother during those final six days of travel, listening to stories about Bybanks and the singing tree, about a daughter who could skip stones and a husband who was too good for his own good. When the bus rolled down that Idaho mountainside, Margaret had been the lone survivor, pulled from the wreckage after nine hours while Sal's mother died beside her. The mysterious messages had their own innocent explanation. Mrs. Partridge, Margaret's elderly blind mother, had been leaving them as "grandiful surprises"—fortune cookies without the cookies, copied from daily inspirational quotes and delivered out of simple kindness. The potential axe murderer was actually a teacher's mother trying to brighten a neighbor girl's day.

Chapter 6: The Snake River's Edge: Facing What Cannot Be Changed

By the time they reached the Missouri River in South Dakota, the whispers in Sal's head had changed from "rush, rush, rush" to "slow down, slow down," though she couldn't understand why until it was too late. The three of them sat in the cool water, Gram and Gramps playing like children while Sal tried not to think about the postcards her mother had sent from each of these places, the messages that had stopped coming after the crash. The snake appeared without warning—a water moccasin that bit Gram's leg while she splashed in the shallows. A teenage boy with a knife helped save her life, sucking the poison from the wound while Gramps carried her to the car, all of them dripping wet and terrified. At the hospital, Gram spent the night pale and sleepy, muttering "piddles" instead of coherent words while Gramps lay beside her on the narrow bed, stroking her hair and refusing to leave her side. They pressed on toward Idaho despite Gram's weakened state, racing through Wyoming toward Yellowstone and the final stretch of mountain roads. Gram insisted on seeing Old Faithful, and the magnificent geyser gave her such joy that she cried afterward—not from sadness but from overwhelming happiness at witnessing something so beautiful. But the snake bite had taken its toll, and the strain of travel was wearing her down in ways that would soon become catastrophic. At the hospital in Coeur d'Alene, the doctors confirmed what Gramps already knew in his heart. Gram had suffered a stroke, her breathing turned rattly and labored, her body finally succumbing to the accumulated damage of age and adventure. "I've been by her side for fifty-one years," Gramps told the intern, "except for three days when she left me for the egg man. I'm holding on to her hand, see? If you want me to let go, you'll have to chop my hand off." With Gram unconscious and dying, Sal faced her final choice. She could stay in that sterile waiting room, counting the hours until loss became absolute, or she could take Gramps's car keys and finish the journey alone. The road to Lewiston was treacherous, full of hairpin curves that snaked down the mountainside, but she'd come too far to stop now. At three o'clock in the morning, their gooseberry died while Sal was driving through the darkness toward her own moment of truth.

Chapter 7: Return to the Trees: Finding Home Again

The overlook above Lewiston showed the wreckage clearly—the bus that had carried her mother to her death, twisted and broken among the trees where it had rolled after skidding through the safety railing. Sal climbed down to touch the rusted metal, to see what her mother had seen in those final moments, to make the abstract fact of death concrete and undeniable. When the sheriff found her at dawn, muddy and scratched from her descent, she was finally ready to visit the grave. The cemetery overlooked the Snake River, peaceful and green with tall trees providing shade for the dead. Her mother's headstone bore an engraving of a maple tree, and suddenly the finality hit her like a physical blow. Chanhassen "Sugar" Pickford Hiddle was not coming back. She was not hiding somewhere with amnesia, not waiting to surprise them on her birthday, not planning some miraculous return that would restore their broken family. She was here, beneath the earth, while a willow tree sang overhead in the morning breeze. "She isn't actually gone at all," Sal told the sheriff as they drove back toward Coeur d'Alene. "She's singing in the trees." And in some profound way, that felt true. The mother she'd known—the woman who kissed trees and told Indian stories, who loved everything that grew or lived outdoors—had become part of the natural world she'd cherished. Death had not erased her so much as transformed her into something larger and more permanent than any single human life. Back in Bybanks now, with Gram buried in the aspen grove where she'd been married and Gramps living with them on the farm, Sal has learned to see her story differently. Phoebe's family helped her understand that mothers could leave not out of lack of love but from an abundance of need—the need to discover who they were beneath the roles that defined them. Mrs. Winterbottom's return with her secret son had shown that even the most conventional people carried hidden depths, that respectability could be its own form of prison.

Summary

The red Chevrolet sits silent in the barn now, its epic journey complete, while Huzza Huzza—Gramps's new beagle puppy—runs circles around the chicken coop where Blackberry, the bird Ben gave Sal, rules with regal authority. The singing tree still performs its mysterious concerts when the mood strikes, and Sal has learned to hear her mother's voice in those sweet, wild melodies that drift down from the willow's highest branches. She writes letters to Tom Fleet, the boy who saved Gram from the snake bite, and receives valentines from Ben that make her heart skip like stones across the water. The moccasin game has become her favorite way to understand the world—imagining herself walking in other people's shoes, seeing through their eyes, feeling their fears and hopes and disappointments. If she were walking in Phoebe's moccasins, she'd be learning to love a brother who appeared like a gift from another life. If she were in Ben's moccasins, she'd miss Salamanca Hiddle and count the days until their reunion. And if she were in her mother's moccasins, she'd be singing in the trees forever, watching over the daughter who finally understands that love doesn't end with death—it just changes form, becoming something wilder and more enduring than flesh and bone could ever be.

About Author

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Sharon Creech

Creech investigates the complex tapestry of family life and the natural world, often drawing on personal experiences to fuel her storytelling. Her upbringing in South Euclid, Ohio, surrounded by a lively family and a host of friends and relatives, informs much of her narrative style. This environment, combined with memorable trips to places like Idaho and Quincy, Kentucky, provided her with a wellspring of material that later appeared in her works. Books like "Absolutely Normal Chaos" and "Walk Two Moons" reflect her childhood's vibrancy and complexity, illustrating her interest in capturing the nuances of youthful experiences.\n\nSharon Creech employs a method of storytelling that intertwines real-life inspirations with fictional elements, creating a relatable yet imaginative world for her readers. Her teaching background in England and Switzerland enriched her understanding of literature's power, which she channeled into writing stories predominantly for young people. Through engaging plots and well-developed characters, Creech explores themes of adventure and self-discovery, as seen in "Chasing Redbird" and "Bloomability." Her ability to create a vivid sense of place, often referencing her beloved Quincy as Bybanks, adds depth and authenticity to her narratives.\n\nReaders gain from Creech's bio insights into the transformative power of storytelling and its ability to bridge real and imagined experiences. Her works, particularly "Walk Two Moons," which earned the Newbery Medal, resonate with young audiences by addressing the challenges and joys of growing up. This connection is not just due to her compelling characters but also her talent for infusing stories with heartfelt emotion and humor. Her ongoing dedication to writing ensures that new generations will continue to discover the richness of her literary contributions.

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