Salamanca Tree Hiddle (Sal)
Sal is a thirteen-year-old girl who is the narrator and the protagonist of the novel. Her full name is Salamanca Tree Hiddle; her parents believed her great-great-grandmother had been a member of the Salamanca Indian tribe, and although they later discovered the tribe in question was actually the Seneca, they had already named their daughter. Sal's middle name comes from her mother's love of trees. She had wanted to be more specific about the type of tree but this would have blessed Sal with the rather unwieldy name of Salamanca Sugar Maple Tree Hiddle - so "Tree" sufficed. When boys want to annoy Sal they call her "Salamander."
Sal is a country girl who loves every aspect of growing up on the family farm in Kentucky. She especially loves the fact that her parents built the house they live in, and the fact that every day she can be with trees, wild flowers, chickens, and cows. She adores the wide-open spaces. Sal hates their new suburban home in Euclid and feels claustrophobic there.
Sal misses her mother enormously and all she wants is for her family to be back together again. Her heart has been aching since her mother went away, and now she is almost used to this pain. She loves her father very much and wishes he would stop trying to insert Margaret Cadaver into their lives.
Sal is well-liked although considered a little weird—initially for her long, black hair that hangs past her waist, and subsequently because she admits to kissing trees in the journal that is read aloud to the English class. She is a good friend and supportive of Phoebe even when Phoebe is being overly dramatic or extremely demanding. Sal is basically a nice girl who will put up with a lot from her friends. Just entering her teen years, she is both confused and excited by her feelings for Ben, which seem to her to come from nowhere and make no sense. Sal is at the crossroads of childhood and adulthood and for the most part, she seems to be negotiating the transition well.
She enjoys her grandparents' company and is astute enough to realize that she is the most sensible one of the three of them. Initially frustrated by the length of their road trip, she later comes to realize that they gave her the most amazing gift by taking her on it and providing her with an additional layer of closeness with her mother as they follow the same route and see the same sights that she saw when she left.
Phoebe Winterbottom
Phoebe is Sal's new best friend in Euclid. Although they seem very different in character, they are similar in that they both experience their mothers leaving them and are both trying hard to find a way of dealing with that. Phoebe is highly over-dramatic and always sees the worst-case scenario; if a family member is late coming home from work, she assumes that they have been killed in a car accident rather than caught up in traffic. She is frightened of strangers and so believes that her mother has been kidnapped by the potential lunatic she has seen around her house lately. She also cannot bear to believe that her mother would leave her deliberately and so creates a scenario in which her mother was forced to leave as a mechanism to protect herself.
Phoebe's family is proper and uptight and these traits have rubbed off on Phoebe. She also believes in telling people the best way to do things, like how she criticizes the Finneys for eating high-cholesterol foods. She finds so many things wrong with the nutritional content of the meals served at Mary Lou's house that she ends up eating a bowl of dry muesli for dinner instead of the food served to everyone else.
Gram and Gramps Hiddle
Gramps and Gram are Sal's grandparents on her father's side. They are spontaneous, carefree, and fun. They are pretending to stop at the spots that they want to see on their road trip while actually stopping at all of the places Sal's mother visited on her way to Idaho, giving Sal the unique gift of "walking in her mother's moccasins," so to speak. Gram and Gramps are madly in love although they like to tease ease other about times they've strayed—Gramps with his wife's friend Gloria and Gram with the egg man. They depend on each other and don't care who knows it. Both Gram and Gramps are impractical and given to wild flights of fancy which makes the road trip eventful and memorable.
John Hiddle
Sal's father is naturally kind and thoughtful, to the point where Chanhassen often felt threatened by his thoughtfulness because she worried she could never measure up. He always knows the right thing to do or say and is instinctively able to give little gifts or do nice little things that show he is thinking about someone. Sometimes his niceness can be overwhelming. He loves his family and they are his priority. He loves his wife so much that when she is gone from their home, her absence causes him too much pain because he feels her presence everywhere he looks and cannot stand living without her while steeping in her memory. He is a man who likes life's simple pleasures and who loves working with his hands, so his new office job feels constricting to him with its buttoned-up suit and cubicle office spaces.
He is not a man who expresses his feelings well, and instead he works things out with manual labor and physical exertion.
Chanhassen Pickford Hiddle
Chanhassen is a loving and kind person who feels as though she can never be good enough because her niceness is always outdone by her husband's. She seems to be searching for her identity and feels trapped in not knowing who she really is yet. She deeply loves her husband and daughter but seems to feel that in being wife and mother to them she has lost her sense of what she is to herself. She goes by the name Sugar but longs for people to use her full name, Chanhassen. She loves nature and feels a connection to Mother Earth which she has passed down to her daughter.
Norma Winterbottom
Despite feeling unimportant in her family's life, Phoebe's mother is actually central to the plot of the novel, as it is her disappearance that brings Phoebe and Sal closer together. She is a stay-at-home mom who feels that everything that made her a person in her own right has dwindled and that she is taken for granted by her family. She is focused on being proper and respectable, which is why she kept the existence of her son a secret for so long. She seems poised to rediscover the person she was before cooking, cleaning, and ironing took over her life and finds a courage she was not aware she had.
Margaret Cadaver
Margaret has formed a strong bond with Sal's dad, which makes Sal hate her immediately. She tries hard to convince Sal to like her. Sal and Phoebe think she comes across as slightly spooky and unhinged due to her wild red hair and her voice. She was a nurse on call when her mother and husband were brought into the emergency room after a drunk driver crashed into their car and ultimately killed her husband and left her mother blind. She was also, as it turns out, the sole survivor of a bus crash in Idaho that killed Sal's mother, which is how she connected with John. After the accident, John flew to Idaho and visited the sole survivor of the accident, who happened to be Margaret, who happened to be Chanhassen's seatmate.
Mr. Birkway
Mr. Birkway is actually Margaret Cadaver's twin brother. He causes a great deal of friction at school when, in his English class, he decides to read aloud the private journals written by his students as a summer project. Despite changing the names of the people being written about, students are able to deduce through context who wrote about whom, and social chaos ensues. He later apologizes for reading the journals aloud.
Ben Finney
Ben is a classmate of Sal and Phoebe's and also Mary Lou's cousin. He lives with Mary Lou and the rest of the Finneys because his own mother is in an in-patient psychiatric hospital. He develops a crush on Sal, who eventually reciprocates, and they grow closer over the course of the novel, eventually becoming romantically involved. Ben gets Sal a chicken and names it Blackberry because he knows how badly she misses the farm in Bybanks. Ben loves to doodle and often depicts things people say in abstract interpretive drawings.
Prudence Winterbottom
Prudence is Phoebe's older sister. She is obsessed with appearances and status and ignores her mother Norma's cries for help when she asks her whether her life means anything. Prudence aspires to be a cheerleader and eventually makes the team after a disastrous initial tryout.
Tom Fleet
Tom Fleet is a young man who the Hiddles encounter while wading in a lake on their road trip. Fleet approaches them threateningly with a buoy knife, but when Gram is bitten by a water moccasin, he gives the knife to Gramps to cut an incision at the site of the bite. Fleet sucks out the venom all the way to the hospital. Sal and Tom keep in touch via letters.
Mary Lou Finney
Mary Lou is Ben's cousin. She is a free spirit and a product of her warm, buzzing household. She is the protagonist of the Walk Two Moons predecessor, Absolutely Normal Chaos, a novel based on her summer journal assignment for Mr. Birkway's class.
