I need your help!
Next semester I will be a teaching assistant for an undergraduate intro-level creative writing class. Our job is to lead a once-weekly mini-group workshop, using basic writing exercises and longer works as our basis. As a result, each TA gets to choose their own novel and their own memoir to teach. Memoirs? I'm good. I read like, seventeen a year. I have some favorites and many ideas.
Novels? I need help, and here's why. Most of the fiction I read is either a)short, b)classic (see:old and not cool for freshmen), or c) too advanced (garcia marquez, kundera, all out). So far the only idea I have is the Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, because I'd love to do something modern and international, but that's really not Lahiri's best work, so...
I need recommendations for novels that do the following:
1. Will appeal to young undergrads (so are interesting, modern, and not too complex).
2. Not super long.
3. Still in print so my students can buy it used on amazon for cheap.
Basically, think of those books you LOVED in high school, especially those books that made you love books, love writing, and maybe even want to do some of your own.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Here's another short piece from Percy's workshop. I actually finalized this piece awhile ago and have sent it out for submission, but it's footnoted and I didn't want to go through the trouble of figuring out how to do that on this blog. Now I apparently have lots of free time on my hands and can do that.
Scarred
I have seven scars on my body: three accidental, and four intentional. One soft, white dent; two red-purple skin blemishes; two former holes, pulled shut by time; two tattoos.
I got the first, accidental scar, when I was two years old. I don’t remember it happening, but I’ve memorized the story: a nightmare drove me into my parents’ room, fumbling through the dark, bumping into their bed, toddler hands grasping in front of me for the familiar warmth of their bodies. After my father soothed me back to sleep, he, in his bare feet and pajamas, was carrying my limp body back to my bedroom, when he slipped and fell, sliding down the staircase with his oldest daughter in his arms. My small freckled forehead, laced with towhead-blonde wisps of baby hair, knocked against each wooden step on the way down. Minutes later, my mother cradled me on the floor of the bathroom, held a washcloth full of ice to my forehead, screamed at my father, tried to prevent a scar. Human skeletons remain malleable throughout childhood, to allow for growth, so the bone remains slightly sagging even now, more than twenty years later, my skull with a small swoop in the upper right corner, smooth and barely visible. (footnote #1 here: When I first told that story to Kevin, it reminded him of one of his first scar stories: as a child, he was hit on the head with a baseball bat during a Little League game. He ran my fingers over the small, white ridge of a scar on his forehead.) There was no cut, never any blood.
Age 20, years deep into a rebellious streak, I got a secret, spontaneous tattoo because my best friend was having a bad day. We walked to the convenience store and withdrew fifty dollars in cash each from the ATM that didn’t charge a fee, and walked into Medusa Tattoo Shop. Cesar didn’t have any appointments that afternoon. Twenty minutes later, I walked out with a gauze bandage between my breasts, hiding a small, black ampersand permanently injected under the skin. The first people I showed it to laughed. Explanations (which depend on who I’m talking to and how much I feel like revealing): a—I love the English language, particularly grammar and punctuation, and I think ampersands are lovely (true); b—it’s to symbolize that I am an unfinished work and can always be added on to; to express my eager, interruptive personality; to keep my heart open to change (footnote #2: A few years ago, AT&T began running a television commercial whose slogan was “The conversation never stops with ‘and’.”). But I usually leave out the part about deciding on the symbol twenty minutes earlier, in Caity’s dorm room, because she told me to come get a tattoo with her.
A year later, I got my second tattoo, much more meditated, but equally a secret from my conservative parents, to memorialize the massive geologic scars of the places on the earth I have called home. Four hours bent over a black leather pillow, clutching it, crying into it, biting my knuckles, fighting the involuntary spasms of the lower back muscles. Black outline, grey ink, a permanent sketch based on the print of a t-shirt. Craggy mountains with snow on top, pine trees along the bottom: the White Mountains of my childhood, my coming-of-age Rockies, Adirondack future homes (footnote #3: A friend who saw my tattoo exclaimed, “I’ve been there!” Once, when I wore a bikini at a public hot spring in Montana, a complete stranger ran up to me, yelling, “That’s my mountain!” She literally had tears in her eyes.). I wanted a lasting reminder, a physical manifestation of the buried internal effects of those ranges, far beneath my skin.
I’ve never broken a bone, never had an operation, never spent any time as a patient in a hospital since the day I was born. But each land has laid its own marks across my body, just as time and weather and geology have wounded those lands.
Scarred
I have seven scars on my body: three accidental, and four intentional. One soft, white dent; two red-purple skin blemishes; two former holes, pulled shut by time; two tattoos.
I got the first, accidental scar, when I was two years old. I don’t remember it happening, but I’ve memorized the story: a nightmare drove me into my parents’ room, fumbling through the dark, bumping into their bed, toddler hands grasping in front of me for the familiar warmth of their bodies. After my father soothed me back to sleep, he, in his bare feet and pajamas, was carrying my limp body back to my bedroom, when he slipped and fell, sliding down the staircase with his oldest daughter in his arms. My small freckled forehead, laced with towhead-blonde wisps of baby hair, knocked against each wooden step on the way down. Minutes later, my mother cradled me on the floor of the bathroom, held a washcloth full of ice to my forehead, screamed at my father, tried to prevent a scar. Human skeletons remain malleable throughout childhood, to allow for growth, so the bone remains slightly sagging even now, more than twenty years later, my skull with a small swoop in the upper right corner, smooth and barely visible. (footnote #1 here: When I first told that story to Kevin, it reminded him of one of his first scar stories: as a child, he was hit on the head with a baseball bat during a Little League game. He ran my fingers over the small, white ridge of a scar on his forehead.) There was no cut, never any blood.
Age 20, years deep into a rebellious streak, I got a secret, spontaneous tattoo because my best friend was having a bad day. We walked to the convenience store and withdrew fifty dollars in cash each from the ATM that didn’t charge a fee, and walked into Medusa Tattoo Shop. Cesar didn’t have any appointments that afternoon. Twenty minutes later, I walked out with a gauze bandage between my breasts, hiding a small, black ampersand permanently injected under the skin. The first people I showed it to laughed. Explanations (which depend on who I’m talking to and how much I feel like revealing): a—I love the English language, particularly grammar and punctuation, and I think ampersands are lovely (true); b—it’s to symbolize that I am an unfinished work and can always be added on to; to express my eager, interruptive personality; to keep my heart open to change (footnote #2: A few years ago, AT&T began running a television commercial whose slogan was “The conversation never stops with ‘and’.”). But I usually leave out the part about deciding on the symbol twenty minutes earlier, in Caity’s dorm room, because she told me to come get a tattoo with her.
A year later, I got my second tattoo, much more meditated, but equally a secret from my conservative parents, to memorialize the massive geologic scars of the places on the earth I have called home. Four hours bent over a black leather pillow, clutching it, crying into it, biting my knuckles, fighting the involuntary spasms of the lower back muscles. Black outline, grey ink, a permanent sketch based on the print of a t-shirt. Craggy mountains with snow on top, pine trees along the bottom: the White Mountains of my childhood, my coming-of-age Rockies, Adirondack future homes (footnote #3: A friend who saw my tattoo exclaimed, “I’ve been there!” Once, when I wore a bikini at a public hot spring in Montana, a complete stranger ran up to me, yelling, “That’s my mountain!” She literally had tears in her eyes.). I wanted a lasting reminder, a physical manifestation of the buried internal effects of those ranges, far beneath my skin.
I’ve never broken a bone, never had an operation, never spent any time as a patient in a hospital since the day I was born. But each land has laid its own marks across my body, just as time and weather and geology have wounded those lands.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Big time revisions this week. Here's a piece I revised for my Craft class, otherwise known as "The Heart & Soul Essence of El Duende". By which I mean, we hate this class. Anyway, here's what I got for my revised nonfiction--a series of short pieces, how shocking!
How I Ended Up Midwestern
I chart my life by the changing landscapes out the driver’s side window. When I was born, I could smell the great pine forests of New Hampshire. Walking in the shadows of mountains for eighteen years, I played with dead orange pine needles in my hair. I fell in love with Kevin, in college, inside a crack in the earth, a deep, glacier-cut gorge, with the roar of New York’s Cascadilla Falls buffeting my ears. He taught me the truths I already knew and I left the East Coast I’d called home so he could help me discover the secrets of each time zone, the movement of change. I went west with him to worship the Rocky Mountains, to be buried under mounds of Montana snow and huddle like avalanche survivors. He passed down biology terms like family histories, whispering the names of rocks jagged like my bones, which jutted into the sky. Still, we had more to learn, had to travel further, melting like a river that must flow to the ocean, all the way out to the edge of the world, to stand on California’s Pacific beach and watch the sunset. This land has cut a path relentlessly into my skin, leaving behind a rutted scar, leaving behind tiny seeds that grew into twisting vines of nostalgia. Then, suddenly deposited into a new world of tall grass and flat flat fields and corn and nothing to see but sky, I stand, bewildered and lost, waiting to be pointed in my next direction. I need roots. I am trying to translate Iowa, trying to figure it out: how I ended up Midwestern, how I ended up in between.
* * *
If I had been alone, the first time I went to the prairie, I probably would have waded right into it, into the expansive green and brown sea, the wind teasing its feather-tips into motion. I wanted to be submerged in prairie, in the words of prairie, to know the names of wild rye, blue stern, Indiangrass by the way they brushed my bare legs, by their rhythm and texture. I wanted to dip my head and join my tendrils to theirs, to create a field of hair stretched out around me that would fold over me like a blanket in a strong breeze. Each color, each surprising shade could have painted me until I was purple, yellow, brown, blue with native Iowa, until my skin became Midwestern. But I wasn’t alone, so I murmured, “So this is what they mean by tall grass prairie.” And he took my hand and we walked into the ocean together. After, I made him check me for ticks.
A trail unlike any other I’ve ever seen extended in front of us. There were no fallen trees to climb over, no slippery needles or even dirt, just pure bright emerald grass, mowed short, as if bowing, asking for our steps. I walked across the carpeted path gingerly, afraid I might crush it, or worse, imprint myself upon it, so that some new visitor, some farmer or transplant would know another human had been here recently. The grasses stood, some over my head, along either side of us, able to balance furry tops on thin, willowy stems, without so much as a sag. This wasn’t a hike like the traipsing of a Yellowstone backpacking trip, or the dirt-pounding-into-your-socks scrambles up the White Mountains. This was something delicate and floating, something altogether ethereal. I felt I could break it open if I tread too hard.
* * *
I woke up on a Friday in March in Montana. My first morning visiting him there: the first morning of our life, it seemed. The floor of his new dorm room was a smudged white, tiled, lit by the sun. I thought my heart would burst through the skin that struggled to conceal its beat. He shifted behind me, beginning to wake up; I remembered last night, in the dark, as he pulled me against his stomach, more than halfway across the narrow bed, his back to the cement wall. I asked if I wasn’t crushing him, and he moaned “no” into my back. “I have to hold you close,” he whispered, “you’re really here.”
I had never been there before, this landscape of strange mountains. I’d grown up in New Hampshire, and I thought I knew what mountains were: the White Mountains, like our resting bodies beneath a blanket, were gentle, curving, covered in green or autumn firework foliage, but these, the Rockies, were different. These mountains were bare, grey, jagged, coated only with dusty white snow. The sunlight on them was more saturated, a harsher yellow, the shapes of the rocks so much bigger, uneven and unpredictable.
I slid out of bed and opened the curtains. The sun belonged to winter, crisp and frosty, as if it had ice crystals edging its rays, and reflected off the snow with a glare bright as headlights flashing at a deer on a dark highway. I put my hand to the glass, trying to touch these curious shapes, these crags and cliffs and snow-filled swoops of rock jutting at strange angles into my heart. I turned to look at him, overwhelmed with beauty and slightly puzzled by the view. He was watching me from the bed, lying on his side and propped up on one elbow and I could see his bare shoulder. “I’ve waited to see you there,” he murmured, as tears filled both our eyes, at the sight of the mountains through the window, “just like that.” I knew then that I would stay in Montana, struggling to learn the mountains.
* * *
Fifty miles off the coast of southern California, a one-square-mile island provides a floating sanctuary to a little-known, highly threatened species of seabird. After Kevin graduated, he got a job there, on Santa Barbara Island, monitoring reproductive success of the Xantus’s Murrelet, a small black-and-white auk, a miniature flying penguin with a long, thin bill. We packed up two cars and drove down through Utah, Nevada, Arizona to get to our newest time zone. Late that September, we set out to explore the western coast of the country beyond the little seaside town where we lived, climbed into his car with nothing more than an overnight bag, a sleeping bag and a pile of CDs to drive north on the Pacific Coast Highway.
As the sun began to dip down, he found a little pullout shoulder of sand, surrounded by tall, waving silhouettes of sea grass, backed in and popped the hatchback. I slipped on my sandals and pulled myself out of the car, surprised by the new chill in the air up here, above the ocean. We climbed into the trunk, and spread a sleeping bag across our bare knees, to keep us warm while we watched the sun set right into the water.
Watching the sun sink into the ocean can only happen on a cliff like this, high above the end of everything, in a place like this, alone together and at peace with our traveling. A bright red Japanese-flag sun dips lower, towards the elusive horizon, wrapping itself in the tall grasses, blackening them with its shadow. The haze of California makes the whole sky look like the aftermath of an explosion, which I guess is what the sun really is, after all.
He brought his camera into the trunk, the orange and brown strap betraying the Minolta’s age and generation, decades before now. His old camera is present in so many of the memories I’ve created over the last five years and four time zones, capturing the way I recall snow in the Spanish Peaks and the color of buffalo hide in Yellowstone and the sun on the ocean at Big Sur. Do I remember the combustion-red sun of that night so clearly because a photograph exists, a tangible reminder that illuminates the other sensory details? I remember we tried to lift our bare feet, protruding from the end of the unzipped sleeping bag, into the photograph’s frame, to capture our presence at this sunset, our participation in this memory, but he couldn't angle the lens properly to fit both our feet and the sun. The photograph only reveals part of the secret, but unlocks the door of California somewhere within my brain, my heart, my skin, so that I can remember the truth about the sun setting into the Pacific.
Other things the photograph forgot: my feet were cold, and I was surprised. The purple-bruised feeling of cold toes had already begun to fade after seven stretched-long months of summer in California. My sleeping bag pulled over us like a blanket, smelled like dust from the night three weeks ago that we spent in a tiny, blue tent buffeted by gale-force winds on his one-square-mile island. The right side of my neck was beginning to ache, from leaning against his flat, hard chest and twisting towards the disappearing sun. I loved him, and still do, but that never shows in photographs, even when our feet make it into the print.
We timed it, counting in Mississippi’s until the entire sphere had sunk below the ocean's line against the sky, but here's another thing no one told me about California: you can still see the sun through the ocean. I sat up then, startled, actively bewildered at the bizarrely obvious realization. Of course. I can see through water, and the sunset is actually the Earth rotating away from that big ball of gas. The sun isn't giving up on us, on California, on the ocean or land, on me: she waits beneath the surface. A glimmering reflection, an explosion in a watery mirror, remained, promised she'd be back in eight hours. My mouth hung wide with wonder. Everything made sense. We had driven all the way out here and all the way across the country and all the way to the Big Sur to learn that the sun never really disappears and to tell everyone else about it, to begin to reveal the secrets of the ocean.
* * *
Not so far below the surface of Southwestern Montana, a slow heat burns. Rivers of hot magma bubble through tunnels, flowing to or from the Yellowstone super volcano. Just in a small corner of the state, a particularly thin sheet of the Earth’s crust sits atop a water table that occasionally mingles with this volcanic presence. Water hot with a recent molten encounter reaches holes in the surface of the earth, and pours forth a tiny, hidden spring in the middle of the Tobacco Root Mountains, for no other reason than the water is there, the magma is there, and the mantle isn’t that far below. There are possibly hundreds in the Gallatin Range, in the Crazies, in the Bridgers, some we’ve never discovered, some others have found but kept to themselves.
We had tried, unsuccessfully, to find the hot spring twice before, but this time we had guides: lanky, corn-fed Cody, bearded Doug, and his German Shepherd Bagel. Kevin and I held mittened hands and plodded behind them through the snowy woods, following an unmarked trail, covered with a thin sheet of new snow. The navy sky was speckled with stars, but cloudy with cold. I could see my breath, and the moisture stung my exposed nose, so I questioned the wisdom of stripping down to bare feet and a bathing suit, but the allure of a thoroughly hidden underground spring was too much to pass up.
So I packed two worn-to-threads towels, two Peruvian-knit hats, layers of long-sleeved shirts with thumb holes poked through the wrist and cable-knit sweaters, plus a bottle of cheap cabernet I’d bought at the Four Corners gas station, and found myself, teeth chattering, bright red toes tense on icy rocks, breathing February mountain air, lowering my glowing full-moon white body into a six-by-six foot steaming hole in the ground. The water, full of silt and smelling slightly of sulfur, slowly warmed my blood. We lounged there for hours, waited for the stars to come out or for anyone else to join us, but we were the only creatures to enjoy the water that night. In the distance, we knew, was one of a growing Montana industry of $200-per-night resorts, where guests could rent their own private tipi built up around groomed, stone-lined “natural” hot springs. The guests at Potosi Resort would be retired to their individual log cabins by now, tucked under red plaid blankets, warm in the knowledge they had enjoyed a clandestine piece of nature that night. We drank our wine and sang songs to the mountains, warmed by the burning inside secret of our own nature: nature free for the taking if you could find it, laid out for anyone to love. When we climbed out, shivering, naked behind towels, shaking hands tugging on wool socks and hats over our still-wet bodies, we laughed into the evening, laughed at the sleeping rich tourists and the little ways nature reveals herself to us, for the secret we shared.
* * *
Over the nine months we spent in California, we developed a routine. Every other week, he took off on a boat with a week’s worth of food and water, with a beat-up laptop and a field notebook, to explore murrelet nests, count brown pelican chicks and play his guitar to no one. I took only one trip to the island with him, swaying along the slick, grey horizon, huddled on the open, wet deck and vomiting into a bucket so he could show me what he’d learned out in the Pacific. After surviving the four hour boat ride, and climbing three hundred stairs with a day pack and our food, we went out in search of hidden nests and elusive eggs.
Murrelets need obscured nest areas; they build in thick shrub brush, laying their babies among silver lace and ice plant, or fissures in island cliffs, where they can dive right in from flight to protect their eggs. All along the edges of this little land mass, these brave, vulnerable birds construct their nests and try to start their families. But Santa Barbara Island is so remote, and murrelets are so unknown, that even the slightest shift in their ecosystem—a downturn of annual temperatures, a change in plant life, an increase in predation—could completely wipe them out. So the National Parks Service sent him and others out, to monitor their breeding success, to plant the bushes they can live in, and try to breathe new life into the population.
He gave me a tour of the whole island, pointing out native plants—purple needle grass, cheery yellow coreopsis—and invasives—wild oat, ice plant—proud of the portable, PVC-walled greenhouse he’d built and the vegetation that was beginning to sprout there, under his delicate care. We scrambled tentatively down steep slopes, freckled with Cholla cacti, and I learned another valuable lesson. The pinkish thumb-shaped lumps of Cholla are protected by spikes full of neurotoxins that surge into the bloodstream, hurting only when you extract them from your toes and shins. The Pacific Ocean lay at the bottom of the cliff, and I could only make it halfway down, afraid I’d tumble into the sea lion-owned waters. We finally made it to the rocks, and he peered into the little crevices and hidden crannies I never would have noticed, because he knew—that is where the murrelets laid their eggs.
Late that first day, we went back down to the dock where our boat had landed, to check the last few of the boxes he had constructed to encourage more murrelet nesting. I skirted a sleeping sea lion, starting when he let forth a snort, and ducked beneath the wooden beams holding up the landing dock. We crawled across a slippery, flat rock, towards a potential nest box, and he handed me a flashlight. I pointed the thin beam at the hole on the face of the box, thinking it was far too tiny for any creature to have fit through, and saw, amazingly, a perfectly oval, creamy almond egg. I gasped and waved him over, speaking in a whisper as if I might wake the chick inside. He flipped open the secure lid on the nest box and reached in, then handed the egg to me.
“Here, hold this,” he commanded, “I have to take some notes on it.” Horrified, I sat slowly on the rock and cradled the egg in both palms, breathing as shallowly as possible, trying hard not to shake. He wrote in code, a sequence of numbers and letters that he later explained had to do with the egg’s condition and apparent age, the lay date and size, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the shell of that flawless egg. Before he replaced it, where its mother would later find it, undisturbed, I smelled its sea salt vitality, and stroked it softly with my fingertips, trying to feel a heartbeat, trying to learn whether or not this egg would survive.
It was the only new egg we found that week, and one of the only eggs that he later found hatched, though he never saw the fledging. Murrelet chicks leave the nest only days after they hatch; he will never know the fate of that life, but in the world of Santa Barbara Island, that egg was a success. Out in the middle of the ocean, under a dock, inside a box built into the side of a smooth rock, was born a single hope.
* * *
Our first weekend in Iowa, Kevin and I ventured to Ledges State Park, eager to learn our new nature, to explore what secrets the Midwest might be willing to reveal. We had seen the cliff swallow nests along the fragile sandstone cliffs, little spun mud huts crafted into stone. When we emerged from the depths of the river valley and started to drive away, I pointed out to him a swirl of dancing birds over the tall grasses of the roadside prairie.
“Cliff swallows!” he gasped, swerving the car off to the road’s shoulder. “Get the binoculars, quick!” I scramble over the backseat and opened his pack, digging for his binoculars, a recent Christmas present, and handed them up front. He rolled down the window to confirm his original identification, and turned to me, thrill lighting his face, his glasses askew from being shoved aside. “Cliff swallows!” he repeated in a whisper.
We walked to a nearby gazebo and perched on a picnic table, his head swerving as he followed individual birds in their swoops and dives toward the insect-rich flowers. I watched from a distance the swallows’ ballet, back and forth across a surprisingly concentrated area. We sat for at least fifteen minutes, and not once did a single bird leave the ellipse they had established. I stared, mesmerized by the delicacy of the motion, despite knowing that the birds were feeding. But mostly I watched him, listening to his little murmurs and surprises, smiling as I watched the discovery take place. He had never seen a cliff swallow before. I had forgotten, sometime between eastern and central standard times, during this latest move to a new unknown, the shock of learning there are still surprises for us in the world. There are still mysteries, if we are willing to get down on our knees and dig in the dirt—if we aren’t afraid to spend some time waiting, watching the rocks change shape against the sky.
How I Ended Up Midwestern
I chart my life by the changing landscapes out the driver’s side window. When I was born, I could smell the great pine forests of New Hampshire. Walking in the shadows of mountains for eighteen years, I played with dead orange pine needles in my hair. I fell in love with Kevin, in college, inside a crack in the earth, a deep, glacier-cut gorge, with the roar of New York’s Cascadilla Falls buffeting my ears. He taught me the truths I already knew and I left the East Coast I’d called home so he could help me discover the secrets of each time zone, the movement of change. I went west with him to worship the Rocky Mountains, to be buried under mounds of Montana snow and huddle like avalanche survivors. He passed down biology terms like family histories, whispering the names of rocks jagged like my bones, which jutted into the sky. Still, we had more to learn, had to travel further, melting like a river that must flow to the ocean, all the way out to the edge of the world, to stand on California’s Pacific beach and watch the sunset. This land has cut a path relentlessly into my skin, leaving behind a rutted scar, leaving behind tiny seeds that grew into twisting vines of nostalgia. Then, suddenly deposited into a new world of tall grass and flat flat fields and corn and nothing to see but sky, I stand, bewildered and lost, waiting to be pointed in my next direction. I need roots. I am trying to translate Iowa, trying to figure it out: how I ended up Midwestern, how I ended up in between.
* * *
If I had been alone, the first time I went to the prairie, I probably would have waded right into it, into the expansive green and brown sea, the wind teasing its feather-tips into motion. I wanted to be submerged in prairie, in the words of prairie, to know the names of wild rye, blue stern, Indiangrass by the way they brushed my bare legs, by their rhythm and texture. I wanted to dip my head and join my tendrils to theirs, to create a field of hair stretched out around me that would fold over me like a blanket in a strong breeze. Each color, each surprising shade could have painted me until I was purple, yellow, brown, blue with native Iowa, until my skin became Midwestern. But I wasn’t alone, so I murmured, “So this is what they mean by tall grass prairie.” And he took my hand and we walked into the ocean together. After, I made him check me for ticks.
A trail unlike any other I’ve ever seen extended in front of us. There were no fallen trees to climb over, no slippery needles or even dirt, just pure bright emerald grass, mowed short, as if bowing, asking for our steps. I walked across the carpeted path gingerly, afraid I might crush it, or worse, imprint myself upon it, so that some new visitor, some farmer or transplant would know another human had been here recently. The grasses stood, some over my head, along either side of us, able to balance furry tops on thin, willowy stems, without so much as a sag. This wasn’t a hike like the traipsing of a Yellowstone backpacking trip, or the dirt-pounding-into-your-socks scrambles up the White Mountains. This was something delicate and floating, something altogether ethereal. I felt I could break it open if I tread too hard.
* * *
I woke up on a Friday in March in Montana. My first morning visiting him there: the first morning of our life, it seemed. The floor of his new dorm room was a smudged white, tiled, lit by the sun. I thought my heart would burst through the skin that struggled to conceal its beat. He shifted behind me, beginning to wake up; I remembered last night, in the dark, as he pulled me against his stomach, more than halfway across the narrow bed, his back to the cement wall. I asked if I wasn’t crushing him, and he moaned “no” into my back. “I have to hold you close,” he whispered, “you’re really here.”
I had never been there before, this landscape of strange mountains. I’d grown up in New Hampshire, and I thought I knew what mountains were: the White Mountains, like our resting bodies beneath a blanket, were gentle, curving, covered in green or autumn firework foliage, but these, the Rockies, were different. These mountains were bare, grey, jagged, coated only with dusty white snow. The sunlight on them was more saturated, a harsher yellow, the shapes of the rocks so much bigger, uneven and unpredictable.
I slid out of bed and opened the curtains. The sun belonged to winter, crisp and frosty, as if it had ice crystals edging its rays, and reflected off the snow with a glare bright as headlights flashing at a deer on a dark highway. I put my hand to the glass, trying to touch these curious shapes, these crags and cliffs and snow-filled swoops of rock jutting at strange angles into my heart. I turned to look at him, overwhelmed with beauty and slightly puzzled by the view. He was watching me from the bed, lying on his side and propped up on one elbow and I could see his bare shoulder. “I’ve waited to see you there,” he murmured, as tears filled both our eyes, at the sight of the mountains through the window, “just like that.” I knew then that I would stay in Montana, struggling to learn the mountains.
* * *
Fifty miles off the coast of southern California, a one-square-mile island provides a floating sanctuary to a little-known, highly threatened species of seabird. After Kevin graduated, he got a job there, on Santa Barbara Island, monitoring reproductive success of the Xantus’s Murrelet, a small black-and-white auk, a miniature flying penguin with a long, thin bill. We packed up two cars and drove down through Utah, Nevada, Arizona to get to our newest time zone. Late that September, we set out to explore the western coast of the country beyond the little seaside town where we lived, climbed into his car with nothing more than an overnight bag, a sleeping bag and a pile of CDs to drive north on the Pacific Coast Highway.
As the sun began to dip down, he found a little pullout shoulder of sand, surrounded by tall, waving silhouettes of sea grass, backed in and popped the hatchback. I slipped on my sandals and pulled myself out of the car, surprised by the new chill in the air up here, above the ocean. We climbed into the trunk, and spread a sleeping bag across our bare knees, to keep us warm while we watched the sun set right into the water.
Watching the sun sink into the ocean can only happen on a cliff like this, high above the end of everything, in a place like this, alone together and at peace with our traveling. A bright red Japanese-flag sun dips lower, towards the elusive horizon, wrapping itself in the tall grasses, blackening them with its shadow. The haze of California makes the whole sky look like the aftermath of an explosion, which I guess is what the sun really is, after all.
He brought his camera into the trunk, the orange and brown strap betraying the Minolta’s age and generation, decades before now. His old camera is present in so many of the memories I’ve created over the last five years and four time zones, capturing the way I recall snow in the Spanish Peaks and the color of buffalo hide in Yellowstone and the sun on the ocean at Big Sur. Do I remember the combustion-red sun of that night so clearly because a photograph exists, a tangible reminder that illuminates the other sensory details? I remember we tried to lift our bare feet, protruding from the end of the unzipped sleeping bag, into the photograph’s frame, to capture our presence at this sunset, our participation in this memory, but he couldn't angle the lens properly to fit both our feet and the sun. The photograph only reveals part of the secret, but unlocks the door of California somewhere within my brain, my heart, my skin, so that I can remember the truth about the sun setting into the Pacific.
Other things the photograph forgot: my feet were cold, and I was surprised. The purple-bruised feeling of cold toes had already begun to fade after seven stretched-long months of summer in California. My sleeping bag pulled over us like a blanket, smelled like dust from the night three weeks ago that we spent in a tiny, blue tent buffeted by gale-force winds on his one-square-mile island. The right side of my neck was beginning to ache, from leaning against his flat, hard chest and twisting towards the disappearing sun. I loved him, and still do, but that never shows in photographs, even when our feet make it into the print.
We timed it, counting in Mississippi’s until the entire sphere had sunk below the ocean's line against the sky, but here's another thing no one told me about California: you can still see the sun through the ocean. I sat up then, startled, actively bewildered at the bizarrely obvious realization. Of course. I can see through water, and the sunset is actually the Earth rotating away from that big ball of gas. The sun isn't giving up on us, on California, on the ocean or land, on me: she waits beneath the surface. A glimmering reflection, an explosion in a watery mirror, remained, promised she'd be back in eight hours. My mouth hung wide with wonder. Everything made sense. We had driven all the way out here and all the way across the country and all the way to the Big Sur to learn that the sun never really disappears and to tell everyone else about it, to begin to reveal the secrets of the ocean.
* * *
Not so far below the surface of Southwestern Montana, a slow heat burns. Rivers of hot magma bubble through tunnels, flowing to or from the Yellowstone super volcano. Just in a small corner of the state, a particularly thin sheet of the Earth’s crust sits atop a water table that occasionally mingles with this volcanic presence. Water hot with a recent molten encounter reaches holes in the surface of the earth, and pours forth a tiny, hidden spring in the middle of the Tobacco Root Mountains, for no other reason than the water is there, the magma is there, and the mantle isn’t that far below. There are possibly hundreds in the Gallatin Range, in the Crazies, in the Bridgers, some we’ve never discovered, some others have found but kept to themselves.
We had tried, unsuccessfully, to find the hot spring twice before, but this time we had guides: lanky, corn-fed Cody, bearded Doug, and his German Shepherd Bagel. Kevin and I held mittened hands and plodded behind them through the snowy woods, following an unmarked trail, covered with a thin sheet of new snow. The navy sky was speckled with stars, but cloudy with cold. I could see my breath, and the moisture stung my exposed nose, so I questioned the wisdom of stripping down to bare feet and a bathing suit, but the allure of a thoroughly hidden underground spring was too much to pass up.
So I packed two worn-to-threads towels, two Peruvian-knit hats, layers of long-sleeved shirts with thumb holes poked through the wrist and cable-knit sweaters, plus a bottle of cheap cabernet I’d bought at the Four Corners gas station, and found myself, teeth chattering, bright red toes tense on icy rocks, breathing February mountain air, lowering my glowing full-moon white body into a six-by-six foot steaming hole in the ground. The water, full of silt and smelling slightly of sulfur, slowly warmed my blood. We lounged there for hours, waited for the stars to come out or for anyone else to join us, but we were the only creatures to enjoy the water that night. In the distance, we knew, was one of a growing Montana industry of $200-per-night resorts, where guests could rent their own private tipi built up around groomed, stone-lined “natural” hot springs. The guests at Potosi Resort would be retired to their individual log cabins by now, tucked under red plaid blankets, warm in the knowledge they had enjoyed a clandestine piece of nature that night. We drank our wine and sang songs to the mountains, warmed by the burning inside secret of our own nature: nature free for the taking if you could find it, laid out for anyone to love. When we climbed out, shivering, naked behind towels, shaking hands tugging on wool socks and hats over our still-wet bodies, we laughed into the evening, laughed at the sleeping rich tourists and the little ways nature reveals herself to us, for the secret we shared.
* * *
Over the nine months we spent in California, we developed a routine. Every other week, he took off on a boat with a week’s worth of food and water, with a beat-up laptop and a field notebook, to explore murrelet nests, count brown pelican chicks and play his guitar to no one. I took only one trip to the island with him, swaying along the slick, grey horizon, huddled on the open, wet deck and vomiting into a bucket so he could show me what he’d learned out in the Pacific. After surviving the four hour boat ride, and climbing three hundred stairs with a day pack and our food, we went out in search of hidden nests and elusive eggs.
Murrelets need obscured nest areas; they build in thick shrub brush, laying their babies among silver lace and ice plant, or fissures in island cliffs, where they can dive right in from flight to protect their eggs. All along the edges of this little land mass, these brave, vulnerable birds construct their nests and try to start their families. But Santa Barbara Island is so remote, and murrelets are so unknown, that even the slightest shift in their ecosystem—a downturn of annual temperatures, a change in plant life, an increase in predation—could completely wipe them out. So the National Parks Service sent him and others out, to monitor their breeding success, to plant the bushes they can live in, and try to breathe new life into the population.
He gave me a tour of the whole island, pointing out native plants—purple needle grass, cheery yellow coreopsis—and invasives—wild oat, ice plant—proud of the portable, PVC-walled greenhouse he’d built and the vegetation that was beginning to sprout there, under his delicate care. We scrambled tentatively down steep slopes, freckled with Cholla cacti, and I learned another valuable lesson. The pinkish thumb-shaped lumps of Cholla are protected by spikes full of neurotoxins that surge into the bloodstream, hurting only when you extract them from your toes and shins. The Pacific Ocean lay at the bottom of the cliff, and I could only make it halfway down, afraid I’d tumble into the sea lion-owned waters. We finally made it to the rocks, and he peered into the little crevices and hidden crannies I never would have noticed, because he knew—that is where the murrelets laid their eggs.
Late that first day, we went back down to the dock where our boat had landed, to check the last few of the boxes he had constructed to encourage more murrelet nesting. I skirted a sleeping sea lion, starting when he let forth a snort, and ducked beneath the wooden beams holding up the landing dock. We crawled across a slippery, flat rock, towards a potential nest box, and he handed me a flashlight. I pointed the thin beam at the hole on the face of the box, thinking it was far too tiny for any creature to have fit through, and saw, amazingly, a perfectly oval, creamy almond egg. I gasped and waved him over, speaking in a whisper as if I might wake the chick inside. He flipped open the secure lid on the nest box and reached in, then handed the egg to me.
“Here, hold this,” he commanded, “I have to take some notes on it.” Horrified, I sat slowly on the rock and cradled the egg in both palms, breathing as shallowly as possible, trying hard not to shake. He wrote in code, a sequence of numbers and letters that he later explained had to do with the egg’s condition and apparent age, the lay date and size, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the shell of that flawless egg. Before he replaced it, where its mother would later find it, undisturbed, I smelled its sea salt vitality, and stroked it softly with my fingertips, trying to feel a heartbeat, trying to learn whether or not this egg would survive.
It was the only new egg we found that week, and one of the only eggs that he later found hatched, though he never saw the fledging. Murrelet chicks leave the nest only days after they hatch; he will never know the fate of that life, but in the world of Santa Barbara Island, that egg was a success. Out in the middle of the ocean, under a dock, inside a box built into the side of a smooth rock, was born a single hope.
* * *
Our first weekend in Iowa, Kevin and I ventured to Ledges State Park, eager to learn our new nature, to explore what secrets the Midwest might be willing to reveal. We had seen the cliff swallow nests along the fragile sandstone cliffs, little spun mud huts crafted into stone. When we emerged from the depths of the river valley and started to drive away, I pointed out to him a swirl of dancing birds over the tall grasses of the roadside prairie.
“Cliff swallows!” he gasped, swerving the car off to the road’s shoulder. “Get the binoculars, quick!” I scramble over the backseat and opened his pack, digging for his binoculars, a recent Christmas present, and handed them up front. He rolled down the window to confirm his original identification, and turned to me, thrill lighting his face, his glasses askew from being shoved aside. “Cliff swallows!” he repeated in a whisper.
We walked to a nearby gazebo and perched on a picnic table, his head swerving as he followed individual birds in their swoops and dives toward the insect-rich flowers. I watched from a distance the swallows’ ballet, back and forth across a surprisingly concentrated area. We sat for at least fifteen minutes, and not once did a single bird leave the ellipse they had established. I stared, mesmerized by the delicacy of the motion, despite knowing that the birds were feeding. But mostly I watched him, listening to his little murmurs and surprises, smiling as I watched the discovery take place. He had never seen a cliff swallow before. I had forgotten, sometime between eastern and central standard times, during this latest move to a new unknown, the shock of learning there are still surprises for us in the world. There are still mysteries, if we are willing to get down on our knees and dig in the dirt—if we aren’t afraid to spend some time waiting, watching the rocks change shape against the sky.
Monday, December 15, 2008
First semester's ending, and I feel as if it's been incredibly productive. I will hopefully get much revision and writing done over the break, but here's something I hope to work more on soon... my attempt to write a more traditional "odd-object" essay about, well, theoretical physics.
Grand Unification Theories
On September 10, 2008, I brushed my teeth with a new toothbrush I’d been saving. I showered, same as every day, and watched the Today Show while I drank coffee. I learned a twenty-five year old mother of three survived a car crash and was stuck in a ravine for five days. She told rescuers that remembering how her children needed her kept her alive. Britney Spears’ mother was shopping her new memoir/guide to parenting and all the hosts were asking her whether she was really an authority figure on that subject. Lehman Brothers announced a third-quarter loss of nearly five billion dollar and planned to sell assets. A video from the New York subway system showed a passenger being beaten, curled in a fetal ball on the dirty floor, while another rider read the newspaper two seats down. The fashion experts told me that white pants and accessories are still acceptable, despite the passing of Labor Day. Shrek was going to be made into a musical; Ed Harris talked about the limited opening of Appaloosa. Salvia: legal herb or a drug to be banned: discuss. Kim Jong-Il may have had a stroke. And scientists near Geneva, Switzerland flipped a switch, starting the Large Hadron Collider, which might completely change the way we understand the universe.
The Collider, a multi-billion dollar physics project, runs for miles beneath the Alps and Jura Mountains like the stone laid down roots, breaching the Franco-Swiss border. Two intersecting orange metal tunnels, lined with thousands of opposing magnets in the red and green and blue of tropical rainforest plants. Each tunnel contains a proton beam, infused with energy and blasted into the tunnel at milliseconds less than the speed of light. The goal is impact. Protons whirl in spirals around the edges of the tunnel, attracted by invisible force endlessly on toward each other. Scientists in a separate lab watch the white dots flash on the computer screen, guide the particles around the tunnel, wait for the crash.
No one knows what happens next. I imagine the protons, like two fast yellow-white bullets, colliding like movie slow-motion, splintering into thousands of metallic pieces. Or maybe like craggy rocks of ice, fused and slick with water, shattering into tiny crystals with sharp edges and mysterious curves, goggled men watching in awe from a separate room, as new, cold stars get born.
Science transformed from self-assured to hesitant, as they wait for a miniaturized version of the Big Bang in reverse, wondering, hoping that in that moment of impact, the origins of matter will be revealed. If/when two protons collide, they will split into smaller particles: this they know, this they are prepared for. What they hope is for something new, that some theorized but undiscovered particle will be born in that breaking apart of light and energy. And that particle could change everything.
The world of particle physics is built of theory, a world of imagining a solution and then squinting into the darkness to spot the elusive proof. The Collider, if successful, could provide the evidence—the missing particle called the Higgs boson—that confirms the accuracy of years of study. The Standard Model of physics explains the way in which all particles in the universe were created, but it’s just a thought. If the protons collide just right, and they split apart the way they expect, all that wondering becomes truth: this is what we could learn from destruction. The goal is to go back hundreds of billions of years, before DVDs and highways and boundaries and time, before we knew we came from monkeys, before we believed in and gods, before dinosaurs became fossils, and to peer through the shroud of matter into the moments before anything existed.
But we do exist. We can’t go back. We can only get there by taking protons, the smallest pieces of our puzzle, and breaking them apart. We can only get to our creation through destruction.
The scientists have code words—hadrons, electro-super-collision, dipolar magnetic—have dedicated their lives to developing the words and ideas and mathematical equations on which the Collider is based. They conjured the tunnels and the protons out of thin air—matter never realized until we named it. Some of the best minds in the world, spending days underground, scribbling and counting and hunched over stopwatches, predicting the way the universe will behave. Physics is the place where the impossible to define and the necessity to identify fuse, and the Higgs boson is the missing piece. The Large Hadron Collider, a dream they created in their own little universe, where the cosmos of supersymmetry exists, where new matter can finally be seen.
The thrill of their lives, those who spend their days imagining the universe as it once could have been, happens in those moments when two protons collide, because there are infinite possibilities for what could be discovered, each with its own tantalizing name: dark matter, neutrino mass, electroweak symmetry breaking. Stephen Hawking said that he hoped the Large Hadron Collider wouldn’t discover the Higgs boson: that would mean the physicists get to start over, think again, challenge their aching minds and fast beating hearts to dream up a new universe, then try to create that one by smashing things up in a deep, underground tunnel.
There are six different detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, each with its own mystery to observe. ATLAS will investigate the origins of mass, and the possibility of extra dimensions. CMS will look for clues into the nature of dark matter. ALICE will study the quark-gluon plasma, a liquid form of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang. And, since physicists are sure that equals amounts of matter and anti-matter were created during the Big Bang, LCHb will seek the anti-matter that no longer exists in the universe. We don’t need to understand what all those words mean to understand the buzz, the sheer joy of potential discovery, and the magic of the language with which we talk about breakthrough.
Despite this, despite all the process and the potential, the world does not wait with bated breath. The LHC was another line-item on the Today Show, a blip between fashion advice and heart-wrenching human interest stories. But who’s to say whether the confirmation of a certain particle and the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking matters more than a mother returning home suffering only dehydration, returning to cook chicken nuggets and slice apples and play ship’s captain. The Large Hadron Collider may prove that we don’t know how the universe was created, but Lehman Brothers’ third-quarter losses led to a bankruptcy, the elimination of more than 1300 jobs, thousands of unpaid credit card bills and cancelled vacations and missed field trips and sore throats unexamined. Theoretical physics couldn’t have protected a man on the subway. Kim Jong-il has broken trade agreements, built nuclear weapons and performed secret experiments, could gain the potential to annihilate humanity, if his nuclear developments go unchecked.
Given war and robbery and climate change and poverty and manic world leaders, does the Large Hadron Collider matter outside the world of particle physics? The Collider suffered a massive helium leak on September 18th, 2008, putting it out of commission until November. It would have been shut down for the winter anyway, so proton beams will not be circulated again until spring of next year. And even once the Collider is up and running, even if the Standard Model is correct, even if the Higgs boson exists, only a single one will be produced every few hours. In science, discovery is repetition, slow, lingering, waiting repetition. Years may pass before enough white dots appear on computer screens, before enough notes are taken and enough equations are recalculated to unambiguously, officially, verify the way the universe works. The Today Show may cover it, on some April morning in 2012, but will the world notice if the Collider tells us that scientists were right and the Big Bang is no longer just a theory?
And what if the Standard Model is wrong? I would still switch toothbrushes every six months and not eat meat and see the same constellations. Subprime mortgages would still have led to a massive worldwide recession, and random acts of violence would continue to occur and presidents and prime ministers and premieres will still abuse power in horrific ways. What will be different if Stephen Hawking wins his bet and there is no such thing as a Higgs boson? Probably nothing.
But there is a secret out there in the cosmos, whether in our troubled minds or the swirling galaxies of the universe and so we reach out to grasp it. Not because we have to, or because it will transform the way we cook our food or comb our hair, but because we can’t help it. The act of wondering is inescapable; imagining possibilities contained within the invisible particles of existence and inventing explanations is the endless journey of the human mind superimposed on the universe. We will always seek what we cannot see, tempted to reach out into the terrifying darkness. The repetition, the testing and the precise work of discovery is the lesson whatever universe we believe in will try to return to us. We ask the question and work towards the answer. And maybe that’s what the Large Hadron Collider teaches us—not just the origins of matter. But that we should never stop hurling tiny sparks together at impossible speeds, hoping they explode.
Grand Unification Theories
On September 10, 2008, I brushed my teeth with a new toothbrush I’d been saving. I showered, same as every day, and watched the Today Show while I drank coffee. I learned a twenty-five year old mother of three survived a car crash and was stuck in a ravine for five days. She told rescuers that remembering how her children needed her kept her alive. Britney Spears’ mother was shopping her new memoir/guide to parenting and all the hosts were asking her whether she was really an authority figure on that subject. Lehman Brothers announced a third-quarter loss of nearly five billion dollar and planned to sell assets. A video from the New York subway system showed a passenger being beaten, curled in a fetal ball on the dirty floor, while another rider read the newspaper two seats down. The fashion experts told me that white pants and accessories are still acceptable, despite the passing of Labor Day. Shrek was going to be made into a musical; Ed Harris talked about the limited opening of Appaloosa. Salvia: legal herb or a drug to be banned: discuss. Kim Jong-Il may have had a stroke. And scientists near Geneva, Switzerland flipped a switch, starting the Large Hadron Collider, which might completely change the way we understand the universe.
The Collider, a multi-billion dollar physics project, runs for miles beneath the Alps and Jura Mountains like the stone laid down roots, breaching the Franco-Swiss border. Two intersecting orange metal tunnels, lined with thousands of opposing magnets in the red and green and blue of tropical rainforest plants. Each tunnel contains a proton beam, infused with energy and blasted into the tunnel at milliseconds less than the speed of light. The goal is impact. Protons whirl in spirals around the edges of the tunnel, attracted by invisible force endlessly on toward each other. Scientists in a separate lab watch the white dots flash on the computer screen, guide the particles around the tunnel, wait for the crash.
No one knows what happens next. I imagine the protons, like two fast yellow-white bullets, colliding like movie slow-motion, splintering into thousands of metallic pieces. Or maybe like craggy rocks of ice, fused and slick with water, shattering into tiny crystals with sharp edges and mysterious curves, goggled men watching in awe from a separate room, as new, cold stars get born.
Science transformed from self-assured to hesitant, as they wait for a miniaturized version of the Big Bang in reverse, wondering, hoping that in that moment of impact, the origins of matter will be revealed. If/when two protons collide, they will split into smaller particles: this they know, this they are prepared for. What they hope is for something new, that some theorized but undiscovered particle will be born in that breaking apart of light and energy. And that particle could change everything.
The world of particle physics is built of theory, a world of imagining a solution and then squinting into the darkness to spot the elusive proof. The Collider, if successful, could provide the evidence—the missing particle called the Higgs boson—that confirms the accuracy of years of study. The Standard Model of physics explains the way in which all particles in the universe were created, but it’s just a thought. If the protons collide just right, and they split apart the way they expect, all that wondering becomes truth: this is what we could learn from destruction. The goal is to go back hundreds of billions of years, before DVDs and highways and boundaries and time, before we knew we came from monkeys, before we believed in and gods, before dinosaurs became fossils, and to peer through the shroud of matter into the moments before anything existed.
But we do exist. We can’t go back. We can only get there by taking protons, the smallest pieces of our puzzle, and breaking them apart. We can only get to our creation through destruction.
The scientists have code words—hadrons, electro-super-collision, dipolar magnetic—have dedicated their lives to developing the words and ideas and mathematical equations on which the Collider is based. They conjured the tunnels and the protons out of thin air—matter never realized until we named it. Some of the best minds in the world, spending days underground, scribbling and counting and hunched over stopwatches, predicting the way the universe will behave. Physics is the place where the impossible to define and the necessity to identify fuse, and the Higgs boson is the missing piece. The Large Hadron Collider, a dream they created in their own little universe, where the cosmos of supersymmetry exists, where new matter can finally be seen.
The thrill of their lives, those who spend their days imagining the universe as it once could have been, happens in those moments when two protons collide, because there are infinite possibilities for what could be discovered, each with its own tantalizing name: dark matter, neutrino mass, electroweak symmetry breaking. Stephen Hawking said that he hoped the Large Hadron Collider wouldn’t discover the Higgs boson: that would mean the physicists get to start over, think again, challenge their aching minds and fast beating hearts to dream up a new universe, then try to create that one by smashing things up in a deep, underground tunnel.
There are six different detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, each with its own mystery to observe. ATLAS will investigate the origins of mass, and the possibility of extra dimensions. CMS will look for clues into the nature of dark matter. ALICE will study the quark-gluon plasma, a liquid form of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang. And, since physicists are sure that equals amounts of matter and anti-matter were created during the Big Bang, LCHb will seek the anti-matter that no longer exists in the universe. We don’t need to understand what all those words mean to understand the buzz, the sheer joy of potential discovery, and the magic of the language with which we talk about breakthrough.
Despite this, despite all the process and the potential, the world does not wait with bated breath. The LHC was another line-item on the Today Show, a blip between fashion advice and heart-wrenching human interest stories. But who’s to say whether the confirmation of a certain particle and the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking matters more than a mother returning home suffering only dehydration, returning to cook chicken nuggets and slice apples and play ship’s captain. The Large Hadron Collider may prove that we don’t know how the universe was created, but Lehman Brothers’ third-quarter losses led to a bankruptcy, the elimination of more than 1300 jobs, thousands of unpaid credit card bills and cancelled vacations and missed field trips and sore throats unexamined. Theoretical physics couldn’t have protected a man on the subway. Kim Jong-il has broken trade agreements, built nuclear weapons and performed secret experiments, could gain the potential to annihilate humanity, if his nuclear developments go unchecked.
Given war and robbery and climate change and poverty and manic world leaders, does the Large Hadron Collider matter outside the world of particle physics? The Collider suffered a massive helium leak on September 18th, 2008, putting it out of commission until November. It would have been shut down for the winter anyway, so proton beams will not be circulated again until spring of next year. And even once the Collider is up and running, even if the Standard Model is correct, even if the Higgs boson exists, only a single one will be produced every few hours. In science, discovery is repetition, slow, lingering, waiting repetition. Years may pass before enough white dots appear on computer screens, before enough notes are taken and enough equations are recalculated to unambiguously, officially, verify the way the universe works. The Today Show may cover it, on some April morning in 2012, but will the world notice if the Collider tells us that scientists were right and the Big Bang is no longer just a theory?
And what if the Standard Model is wrong? I would still switch toothbrushes every six months and not eat meat and see the same constellations. Subprime mortgages would still have led to a massive worldwide recession, and random acts of violence would continue to occur and presidents and prime ministers and premieres will still abuse power in horrific ways. What will be different if Stephen Hawking wins his bet and there is no such thing as a Higgs boson? Probably nothing.
But there is a secret out there in the cosmos, whether in our troubled minds or the swirling galaxies of the universe and so we reach out to grasp it. Not because we have to, or because it will transform the way we cook our food or comb our hair, but because we can’t help it. The act of wondering is inescapable; imagining possibilities contained within the invisible particles of existence and inventing explanations is the endless journey of the human mind superimposed on the universe. We will always seek what we cannot see, tempted to reach out into the terrifying darkness. The repetition, the testing and the precise work of discovery is the lesson whatever universe we believe in will try to return to us. We ask the question and work towards the answer. And maybe that’s what the Large Hadron Collider teaches us—not just the origins of matter. But that we should never stop hurling tiny sparks together at impossible speeds, hoping they explode.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Revised this piece I've posted before. Feel free to let me know what you think...
Central Standard Time
This morning in Wisconsin I braid my hair, pulling the wet strands into French pigtails while he sits on the cigarette-burned sheets and watches Animal Planet. We aren’t staying put. We’re driving across the country, Kerouac pilgrims in our early twenties. His red Subaru wagon, with less than one thousand miles on its odometer, is packed so full—and the sticky mid-June heat is so penetrating—I can’t fathom climbing back in, sitting still for so long, as the exhaust pipe pumps blue smoke from the full-force air conditioner. He waits while I lounge on the cheap motel bed, letting my pale skin, dotted with faint freckles, dry off; he rolls his eyes and tries to tease me into moving faster. I laugh, knowing I am frustrating him, and tease him back, “You hate me today.” I haven’t even known him a full year yet.
An hour ago, when we took a shower together, the whole bathroom flooded—only about a half-inch of water—but we don’t want to spare any of the too-small hotel towels, so we’re leaving it that way. This is a shit motel anyway, with brown-edged holes burned straight through the sheets by someone else’s cigarette, and we’re not too pleased with Madison or Wisconsin in general. Last night, after eleven hours of driving, we tried to get a bottle of wine to go with the motel cable, only to discover that you can’t buy alcohol in this state after 9pm. It will take some time for us to get over this, because we have a habit of latching on to things and embracing our mutual hatred as an inside joke. For the rest of the summer, we curse Wisconsin, shake our fists at how awful it is, blow raspberries at Wisconsin license plates.
I’ve never been to Wisconsin before, not anywhere like it; this trip is my first venture west of the Mississippi, and I know only from pictures the enormity that lays ahead—the wide, flat expanses of prairie, the massive grey of the Rocky Mountains, the fields of amber wheat and yellow corn. I am so curious about the Midwest, so conscious of this transitory landscape; I know the hints of Eastern hills still lingering are the last I will see for awhile, and the promise of a longer, larger horizon is just beginning to show. Wisconsin is both the first and the last: a new, rocky landscape sprouts from the ground while the old, humid weather of my Atlantic childhood sticks to my still-wet, bare arms, echoing home. I stare at my inner forearm, seeing how far I can trace the blue veins until the red blotches of sunburn and freckles obscure them. We’re in Central Time Zone, headed for Mountain.
Eventually, we have to leave, and I let him take the first shift at the wheel. His brown feet in sandals press against the pedals. I watch the way his mouth wraps around a cigarette and think that his big fingers are what I always imagined a man’s hands would look like. He’s wearing the shirt we got from his house yesterday, his thrifted Alvin Lee Live 1973 t-shirt, so thin with wear that tiny holes fleck the collar, and I can see part of his protruding collarbone. We were supposed to leave my house and get right on I-90, but he was in a rush when he left New York and his family, so he had to say goodbye to his little brother who was still in the shower and he forgot this, his favorite shirt, and he wouldn’t see them again until Thanksgiving, so I got off the highway while he was sleeping and drove into the obscure upper woods of New York so he could get everything he needed. His mother had folded the t-shirt on his childhood bed, with a little note she’d already written, to mail to him. She thanked me for going to Montana with him, so he wouldn’t have to spend the summer alone.
Though the air conditioning blasts out of the plastic vents, it cannot reach all the crevices of my body—the backs of my knees folded over, the curves of my neck against the cloth passenger seat. We leave the windows up, except when we smoke cigarettes. I’m bored, put my feet on the dash and let them breathe their sweat into water vapor on the windshield, begging for a scolding.
“Don’t,” he warns, not turning his eyes from the road to me, just darting to the side to see my feet near the windshield. “It’ll leave a mark that never comes off.”
“Oh, so protective of your new baby,” I say. I curl my toes and tap just one against the glass. It’s hot.
“I’m serious.” I smile, knowing he’s not. We don’t know each other as well as we think, but I know he loves to tease me. I spread my toes slowly, feeling air conditioning rush into the tiny curved spaces between, and flex, flattening them against the glass, smearing skin oils on the inside where bugs are smeared outside.
“Oops.” I’m barely containing my laughter.
“What the FUCK! I just told you not to fucking do that! Jesus Christ, that’s never going to come off.”
I jerk my feet off the dashboard and under my body, stung and surprised. I turn towards the window to hide the tears welling up in my eyes and bend to find napkins in the pile of trash accumulating on the floor.
“I’m sorry, I…I really thought you were just kidding.”
“Why would I kid about that? This car is fucking brand new!” I scramble to wipe the spots off but he stops me. “You’ll just make it worse.”
I have no idea what I’m doing, or whether everything is a huge mistake.
We’re going to try and make it to Wyoming tonight, but neither of us knows what to expect of South Dakota, which turns out to be the biggest state I’ve ever seen, hundreds of miles full of flat red clay, little more than a motel and a gas station every fifty miles, our only traffic company semis from big box stores. The waiting drives me crazy, and I sink into my head, tired of reading or singing along to the radio, tired of being trapped in this car. I’m sick of the limbo that is our relationship, sick of driving. I just want to start.
Along I-90 past Madison, there are massive red rock outcroppings. They tower dangerously high and appear ready to collapse, like those games where you stack logs on top of each other, carelessly. It’s a delicate balancing act, an exercise in distance; take love, divide it by three thousand miles for six months, then add in three months together in the foothills of the Rockies. I’ve never seen red rock before, and the largest pieces of stone I’ve ever seen were the White Mountains, where you can barely see the granite for the trees. The precipice of summer looms ahead of us as we drive. Neither of us knows what to expect of this summer, the first time for both of us playing grown-up, sharing a house and a bed and bills. Neither of us knows whether we will survive the mountains, but both of us know this is our chance to try.
No matter what we find in Montana, I won’t be staying there. I wear sunglasses and stare at myself in the passenger side mirror, watching rocks and states slide by me, trying to catch a glimpse of a self ready for all this adulthood, responsibility, ready to love someone with everything and then leave the West and him behind, ready to return to everything familiar after a field season of experimentation. This is summer: we’re silent with heat; weighed down with the exhaustion that comes from boredom, repetition, driving; teetering dangerously on the edge of either love or loss.
The last thing he said before he kissed me for the first time, nine months ago, was “but I’m leaving.” But we didn’t believe in time then and went ahead and fell in love anyway, stupidly, without thinking. We had a blissful, new autumn—full of afternoons in feeding each other cookies in coffee shops and studying in the same oversized library chair and crunching through leaves to kiss in the woods—that lasted a supremely long two months before winter descended on New York and us. Suddenly it was December and it was snowing and it was true, he was moving to Montana and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. When we kissed on New Year’s Eve I couldn’t stop crying and he said, let’s just try it, let’s just see what happens if we stay together. Just three and a half months into our relationship, we were three thousand miles apart with summer the only end in sight. So when May came and all my friends were working for National Geographic or Glamour, I took an internship at Outside Bozeman magazine, packed a couple of suitcases and went with him.
The back of the Subaru is packed and not budging with as few things as I could muster, and all the extras he couldn’t fit the first time out. An old bike (mine), a tub full of chemicals and a photo enlarger (his), two enormous suitcases of clothes (mine), boxes of books I won’t read in the next three months, but can’t bear to leave behind, bandanas, a tent, a huge sleeping bag (his). I’m wearing only a striped cotton sundress, my flip-flops wait on the floor of the passenger side. There are piles of maps, a small, flip-top AAA TripTik with an orange highlighted path for us to follow, atlases grouped by state—Wisconsin/Minnesota; South Dakota; Montana/Wyoming; Ohio/Illinois/Indiana—my CD binder, my empty Nalgene water bottle, before it had any stickers on it. Our summer to-read books: Ulysses for me, On the Road for him. The 90-degree weather seeps in through the glass. I think I might be getting sunburn. I shaved my legs in traffic in Ohio yesterday, and I read out loud to him in between eating cheese sandwiches and pasta salad—road food for vegetarians.
Whenever I get tired, I toss aside the countless empty Styrofoam cups between the seats and curl into him, my head on his thigh, my body wedged in between the gear shift and the arm rest. He keeps his hand on me while he drives, usually on my leg, his fingertips tucked around and underneath my left thigh, but sometimes in my hair or on my neck, sometimes just the back of my seat, his two longest fingers dancing and teasing on the top of my head. When I drive, he tries to sleep on my shoulder, but he is too timid to relax his head all the way, worried I’m not strong enough to support his weight.
He doesn’t know that I already feel it, this enormous pressure against my chest every time I look at him. This love I don’t know what to do with, I don’t know where to put it. When he sleeps, I have silent, internal panic attacks; I have become that crazy girl who follows her man to the ends of the earth. We’ve made no promises. I imagine two possibilities: we live in idyllic peace for two months and then I have to rip the bandage off again to go home and finish school anyway and see him twice a year for at least another year. Or, we hate it, we fight all the time, we’re not a fit and I leave without a boyfriend. I don’t know which one to hope for. Worse: I don’t know which one he hopes for, because we’re less than a year in and girls aren’t supposed to say things like where is this going anyway that soon. But I watch him sleep and think about how I’ve never seen a buffalo and can’t imagine not doing this. Maybe he does know.
All the hours bleed together, the state lines our only milestones and the further West we go, the fewer there are. Today we leave Wisconsin, enter and leave Minnesota without seeing a single of its 10,000 lakes, leave behind the green world of my youth, and enter South Dakota, a pink-grey state, a Western state. Today we cross two state boundaries; yesterday we crossed four, four familiar eastern states, states I had seen before. The day drags on; I am eager to become Western, ready for arrival. I wonder if I will be able to pull off cowboy boots or if I will discover I have an East Coast accent. He’s going to take me rock climbing outdoors for the first time, and teach me how to roll a kayak upright and take me hiking at the Flying D Ranch. I’m going to get to cook him dinner and cover the local horse show for my magazine and go to my first national park. Whatever happens, it won’t happen in this car—it won’t happen until we get there. I like tallies and want to check South Dakota off my to-do list. I drive for six hours and we’re still only halfway through South Dakota; the giant pink image of the state in an I-90 rest area too static, too overwhelming. As we climb back into the car, I sigh deeply, seeing the future out the dirty, bug-streaked windshield; no protective hills to shield me from reality—only clay earth, only the horizon.
The day ends in South Dakota, and we pull off the road onto one of those wide, paved shoulders to watch the sunset. We lay a towel on the warm engine hood and wait, the immense Badlands stretched out in front of us, welcoming the sun. The cliffs seem to be stained from previous sunsets, with clear striations of orange, green, grey, beige and red. The markings of cliffs confuses, startles me; I am so recently removed from the Eastern land of green and blue mountain forest lagoon, thrown now into heat without moisture. The sandy, dusty sweat of the desert replacing the sticky, maple syrup sweat of blackfly summers. Flat, wide, endless expanses of land, leading straight up to the mountains, all I could see for miles, sky and rock and earth. Western panorama surrounds me on all sides; the same sun sets over barren cliffs, with a different barometric pressure reading, with new colors and at new angles. I am content to move out West and live a cowboy life off a page: a life of casual front porches, of late nights in bars, working or drinking. Where I write only on a typewriter and paint my walls like a rainforest and don’t wash my hands, where I learn to dance without shoes on and stop pushing the hair out of my eyes. I have him beside me, and finally, if only temporarily, we are leaving together. He pulls my arm off my belly and wraps it around his neck.
“Hey,” he says, “I’m sorry about the windshield. It’s no big deal.”
We collapse into sleep in Gillette, Wyoming and the next morning, we stop for gas at a wooden outpost, where I make friends with a shepherd dog wearing a red bandana, and the owner tells us where to find the best fishing. We climb back into the Subaru for one last day, and I adjust the dashboard clock to one hour earlier. I start to drive away, dust kicking up under our tires, and I notice the freckles on my arms growing stronger, readying themselves for the mountain sun.
Central Standard Time
This morning in Wisconsin I braid my hair, pulling the wet strands into French pigtails while he sits on the cigarette-burned sheets and watches Animal Planet. We aren’t staying put. We’re driving across the country, Kerouac pilgrims in our early twenties. His red Subaru wagon, with less than one thousand miles on its odometer, is packed so full—and the sticky mid-June heat is so penetrating—I can’t fathom climbing back in, sitting still for so long, as the exhaust pipe pumps blue smoke from the full-force air conditioner. He waits while I lounge on the cheap motel bed, letting my pale skin, dotted with faint freckles, dry off; he rolls his eyes and tries to tease me into moving faster. I laugh, knowing I am frustrating him, and tease him back, “You hate me today.” I haven’t even known him a full year yet.
An hour ago, when we took a shower together, the whole bathroom flooded—only about a half-inch of water—but we don’t want to spare any of the too-small hotel towels, so we’re leaving it that way. This is a shit motel anyway, with brown-edged holes burned straight through the sheets by someone else’s cigarette, and we’re not too pleased with Madison or Wisconsin in general. Last night, after eleven hours of driving, we tried to get a bottle of wine to go with the motel cable, only to discover that you can’t buy alcohol in this state after 9pm. It will take some time for us to get over this, because we have a habit of latching on to things and embracing our mutual hatred as an inside joke. For the rest of the summer, we curse Wisconsin, shake our fists at how awful it is, blow raspberries at Wisconsin license plates.
I’ve never been to Wisconsin before, not anywhere like it; this trip is my first venture west of the Mississippi, and I know only from pictures the enormity that lays ahead—the wide, flat expanses of prairie, the massive grey of the Rocky Mountains, the fields of amber wheat and yellow corn. I am so curious about the Midwest, so conscious of this transitory landscape; I know the hints of Eastern hills still lingering are the last I will see for awhile, and the promise of a longer, larger horizon is just beginning to show. Wisconsin is both the first and the last: a new, rocky landscape sprouts from the ground while the old, humid weather of my Atlantic childhood sticks to my still-wet, bare arms, echoing home. I stare at my inner forearm, seeing how far I can trace the blue veins until the red blotches of sunburn and freckles obscure them. We’re in Central Time Zone, headed for Mountain.
Eventually, we have to leave, and I let him take the first shift at the wheel. His brown feet in sandals press against the pedals. I watch the way his mouth wraps around a cigarette and think that his big fingers are what I always imagined a man’s hands would look like. He’s wearing the shirt we got from his house yesterday, his thrifted Alvin Lee Live 1973 t-shirt, so thin with wear that tiny holes fleck the collar, and I can see part of his protruding collarbone. We were supposed to leave my house and get right on I-90, but he was in a rush when he left New York and his family, so he had to say goodbye to his little brother who was still in the shower and he forgot this, his favorite shirt, and he wouldn’t see them again until Thanksgiving, so I got off the highway while he was sleeping and drove into the obscure upper woods of New York so he could get everything he needed. His mother had folded the t-shirt on his childhood bed, with a little note she’d already written, to mail to him. She thanked me for going to Montana with him, so he wouldn’t have to spend the summer alone.
Though the air conditioning blasts out of the plastic vents, it cannot reach all the crevices of my body—the backs of my knees folded over, the curves of my neck against the cloth passenger seat. We leave the windows up, except when we smoke cigarettes. I’m bored, put my feet on the dash and let them breathe their sweat into water vapor on the windshield, begging for a scolding.
“Don’t,” he warns, not turning his eyes from the road to me, just darting to the side to see my feet near the windshield. “It’ll leave a mark that never comes off.”
“Oh, so protective of your new baby,” I say. I curl my toes and tap just one against the glass. It’s hot.
“I’m serious.” I smile, knowing he’s not. We don’t know each other as well as we think, but I know he loves to tease me. I spread my toes slowly, feeling air conditioning rush into the tiny curved spaces between, and flex, flattening them against the glass, smearing skin oils on the inside where bugs are smeared outside.
“Oops.” I’m barely containing my laughter.
“What the FUCK! I just told you not to fucking do that! Jesus Christ, that’s never going to come off.”
I jerk my feet off the dashboard and under my body, stung and surprised. I turn towards the window to hide the tears welling up in my eyes and bend to find napkins in the pile of trash accumulating on the floor.
“I’m sorry, I…I really thought you were just kidding.”
“Why would I kid about that? This car is fucking brand new!” I scramble to wipe the spots off but he stops me. “You’ll just make it worse.”
I have no idea what I’m doing, or whether everything is a huge mistake.
We’re going to try and make it to Wyoming tonight, but neither of us knows what to expect of South Dakota, which turns out to be the biggest state I’ve ever seen, hundreds of miles full of flat red clay, little more than a motel and a gas station every fifty miles, our only traffic company semis from big box stores. The waiting drives me crazy, and I sink into my head, tired of reading or singing along to the radio, tired of being trapped in this car. I’m sick of the limbo that is our relationship, sick of driving. I just want to start.
Along I-90 past Madison, there are massive red rock outcroppings. They tower dangerously high and appear ready to collapse, like those games where you stack logs on top of each other, carelessly. It’s a delicate balancing act, an exercise in distance; take love, divide it by three thousand miles for six months, then add in three months together in the foothills of the Rockies. I’ve never seen red rock before, and the largest pieces of stone I’ve ever seen were the White Mountains, where you can barely see the granite for the trees. The precipice of summer looms ahead of us as we drive. Neither of us knows what to expect of this summer, the first time for both of us playing grown-up, sharing a house and a bed and bills. Neither of us knows whether we will survive the mountains, but both of us know this is our chance to try.
No matter what we find in Montana, I won’t be staying there. I wear sunglasses and stare at myself in the passenger side mirror, watching rocks and states slide by me, trying to catch a glimpse of a self ready for all this adulthood, responsibility, ready to love someone with everything and then leave the West and him behind, ready to return to everything familiar after a field season of experimentation. This is summer: we’re silent with heat; weighed down with the exhaustion that comes from boredom, repetition, driving; teetering dangerously on the edge of either love or loss.
The last thing he said before he kissed me for the first time, nine months ago, was “but I’m leaving.” But we didn’t believe in time then and went ahead and fell in love anyway, stupidly, without thinking. We had a blissful, new autumn—full of afternoons in feeding each other cookies in coffee shops and studying in the same oversized library chair and crunching through leaves to kiss in the woods—that lasted a supremely long two months before winter descended on New York and us. Suddenly it was December and it was snowing and it was true, he was moving to Montana and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. When we kissed on New Year’s Eve I couldn’t stop crying and he said, let’s just try it, let’s just see what happens if we stay together. Just three and a half months into our relationship, we were three thousand miles apart with summer the only end in sight. So when May came and all my friends were working for National Geographic or Glamour, I took an internship at Outside Bozeman magazine, packed a couple of suitcases and went with him.
The back of the Subaru is packed and not budging with as few things as I could muster, and all the extras he couldn’t fit the first time out. An old bike (mine), a tub full of chemicals and a photo enlarger (his), two enormous suitcases of clothes (mine), boxes of books I won’t read in the next three months, but can’t bear to leave behind, bandanas, a tent, a huge sleeping bag (his). I’m wearing only a striped cotton sundress, my flip-flops wait on the floor of the passenger side. There are piles of maps, a small, flip-top AAA TripTik with an orange highlighted path for us to follow, atlases grouped by state—Wisconsin/Minnesota; South Dakota; Montana/Wyoming; Ohio/Illinois/Indiana—my CD binder, my empty Nalgene water bottle, before it had any stickers on it. Our summer to-read books: Ulysses for me, On the Road for him. The 90-degree weather seeps in through the glass. I think I might be getting sunburn. I shaved my legs in traffic in Ohio yesterday, and I read out loud to him in between eating cheese sandwiches and pasta salad—road food for vegetarians.
Whenever I get tired, I toss aside the countless empty Styrofoam cups between the seats and curl into him, my head on his thigh, my body wedged in between the gear shift and the arm rest. He keeps his hand on me while he drives, usually on my leg, his fingertips tucked around and underneath my left thigh, but sometimes in my hair or on my neck, sometimes just the back of my seat, his two longest fingers dancing and teasing on the top of my head. When I drive, he tries to sleep on my shoulder, but he is too timid to relax his head all the way, worried I’m not strong enough to support his weight.
He doesn’t know that I already feel it, this enormous pressure against my chest every time I look at him. This love I don’t know what to do with, I don’t know where to put it. When he sleeps, I have silent, internal panic attacks; I have become that crazy girl who follows her man to the ends of the earth. We’ve made no promises. I imagine two possibilities: we live in idyllic peace for two months and then I have to rip the bandage off again to go home and finish school anyway and see him twice a year for at least another year. Or, we hate it, we fight all the time, we’re not a fit and I leave without a boyfriend. I don’t know which one to hope for. Worse: I don’t know which one he hopes for, because we’re less than a year in and girls aren’t supposed to say things like where is this going anyway that soon. But I watch him sleep and think about how I’ve never seen a buffalo and can’t imagine not doing this. Maybe he does know.
All the hours bleed together, the state lines our only milestones and the further West we go, the fewer there are. Today we leave Wisconsin, enter and leave Minnesota without seeing a single of its 10,000 lakes, leave behind the green world of my youth, and enter South Dakota, a pink-grey state, a Western state. Today we cross two state boundaries; yesterday we crossed four, four familiar eastern states, states I had seen before. The day drags on; I am eager to become Western, ready for arrival. I wonder if I will be able to pull off cowboy boots or if I will discover I have an East Coast accent. He’s going to take me rock climbing outdoors for the first time, and teach me how to roll a kayak upright and take me hiking at the Flying D Ranch. I’m going to get to cook him dinner and cover the local horse show for my magazine and go to my first national park. Whatever happens, it won’t happen in this car—it won’t happen until we get there. I like tallies and want to check South Dakota off my to-do list. I drive for six hours and we’re still only halfway through South Dakota; the giant pink image of the state in an I-90 rest area too static, too overwhelming. As we climb back into the car, I sigh deeply, seeing the future out the dirty, bug-streaked windshield; no protective hills to shield me from reality—only clay earth, only the horizon.
The day ends in South Dakota, and we pull off the road onto one of those wide, paved shoulders to watch the sunset. We lay a towel on the warm engine hood and wait, the immense Badlands stretched out in front of us, welcoming the sun. The cliffs seem to be stained from previous sunsets, with clear striations of orange, green, grey, beige and red. The markings of cliffs confuses, startles me; I am so recently removed from the Eastern land of green and blue mountain forest lagoon, thrown now into heat without moisture. The sandy, dusty sweat of the desert replacing the sticky, maple syrup sweat of blackfly summers. Flat, wide, endless expanses of land, leading straight up to the mountains, all I could see for miles, sky and rock and earth. Western panorama surrounds me on all sides; the same sun sets over barren cliffs, with a different barometric pressure reading, with new colors and at new angles. I am content to move out West and live a cowboy life off a page: a life of casual front porches, of late nights in bars, working or drinking. Where I write only on a typewriter and paint my walls like a rainforest and don’t wash my hands, where I learn to dance without shoes on and stop pushing the hair out of my eyes. I have him beside me, and finally, if only temporarily, we are leaving together. He pulls my arm off my belly and wraps it around his neck.
“Hey,” he says, “I’m sorry about the windshield. It’s no big deal.”
We collapse into sleep in Gillette, Wyoming and the next morning, we stop for gas at a wooden outpost, where I make friends with a shepherd dog wearing a red bandana, and the owner tells us where to find the best fishing. We climb back into the Subaru for one last day, and I adjust the dashboard clock to one hour earlier. I start to drive away, dust kicking up under our tires, and I notice the freckles on my arms growing stronger, readying themselves for the mountain sun.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Another piece from Percy's workshop. Currently untitled, which I hate, so feel free to make a suggestions... Inspired by a story from Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven.
Imagine that Greenwich Mean Time, the International Dateline moves each year, that the red line sweeps across the turning globe by small increments. Wands spinning around clock faces. A new calendar, where the sun rotates differently and the nights are never the same. Imagine the new order of continents. Imagine new time.
Imagine you could watch the sun set into the Pacific Ocean and be on Central Standard Time. Imagine watching the first sun rise over the rocky islands off the Maine harbor, the great flaming ball rising over puffin colonies. Imagine you could see it while waiting among the cornfields. Would Iowa have the best lobster? The sea lions would still swim in warm teal water but the state would be called something different. Would we need a new name for the place, or just the people? Would they still be called the Northern Lights, if that big clumsy star could bloom first in the Midwest?
Imagine November with long, sunny evenings, evenings that stretch into the next day like day-old shadows on a suburban sidewalk. The bare trees, their bark grey and cracking, would point their unburdened limbs into a summer sky, blue and bright. Could you feel a chill in the wind, would they still feel like change? The branches might look stagnant, instead of hopeful—sweaty instead of winter-knuckle chapped. The light of autumn might be less golden or summer shimmer-white. Imagine the days in July ended before five o’clock. Imagine a summer of dark purple night skies speckled with stars that you could see before dinner. Would children still play into the night, stay up late watching reruns of the Dick Van Dyke show, because they could, because there’s no school the next day? Families could sit outside in the warmth and watch the stars spinning fast and try to pinpoint the hour when the dateline passed overhead.
Imagine Montana had weather like California. Would they still love cattle and shotguns and open land? Would they be a blue state, their blood like melting mountain snow rivers? They could lay down their guns. We could all see the doctors we need. Electricity would run on the beating wings of birds, or the running of antelope hooves or the spinning of the new, fast globe. Would we still need Prozac? If Florida could endure the same climate as Vermont, would we even notice the blues and reds of the map? If the days got shorter, longer five six seven times a year, if time moved more rapidly, if the seasons cycled more frequently, would we all be the same?
Imagine the seasons didn’t last as long. Imagine you only had to bear the oppressive heat of August or the glacial frozen time of January for a month at a time. Would you move faster or slower? Would you try harder or stand still, the world revolving around your locked-in feet? Imagine the new days that could teach you to understand the other. Imagine the pace that would catch your heels and send you aloft, into orbit. Imagine an alarm sounding. Imagine waking up.
Imagine that Greenwich Mean Time, the International Dateline moves each year, that the red line sweeps across the turning globe by small increments. Wands spinning around clock faces. A new calendar, where the sun rotates differently and the nights are never the same. Imagine the new order of continents. Imagine new time.
Imagine you could watch the sun set into the Pacific Ocean and be on Central Standard Time. Imagine watching the first sun rise over the rocky islands off the Maine harbor, the great flaming ball rising over puffin colonies. Imagine you could see it while waiting among the cornfields. Would Iowa have the best lobster? The sea lions would still swim in warm teal water but the state would be called something different. Would we need a new name for the place, or just the people? Would they still be called the Northern Lights, if that big clumsy star could bloom first in the Midwest?
Imagine November with long, sunny evenings, evenings that stretch into the next day like day-old shadows on a suburban sidewalk. The bare trees, their bark grey and cracking, would point their unburdened limbs into a summer sky, blue and bright. Could you feel a chill in the wind, would they still feel like change? The branches might look stagnant, instead of hopeful—sweaty instead of winter-knuckle chapped. The light of autumn might be less golden or summer shimmer-white. Imagine the days in July ended before five o’clock. Imagine a summer of dark purple night skies speckled with stars that you could see before dinner. Would children still play into the night, stay up late watching reruns of the Dick Van Dyke show, because they could, because there’s no school the next day? Families could sit outside in the warmth and watch the stars spinning fast and try to pinpoint the hour when the dateline passed overhead.
Imagine Montana had weather like California. Would they still love cattle and shotguns and open land? Would they be a blue state, their blood like melting mountain snow rivers? They could lay down their guns. We could all see the doctors we need. Electricity would run on the beating wings of birds, or the running of antelope hooves or the spinning of the new, fast globe. Would we still need Prozac? If Florida could endure the same climate as Vermont, would we even notice the blues and reds of the map? If the days got shorter, longer five six seven times a year, if time moved more rapidly, if the seasons cycled more frequently, would we all be the same?
Imagine the seasons didn’t last as long. Imagine you only had to bear the oppressive heat of August or the glacial frozen time of January for a month at a time. Would you move faster or slower? Would you try harder or stand still, the world revolving around your locked-in feet? Imagine the new days that could teach you to understand the other. Imagine the pace that would catch your heels and send you aloft, into orbit. Imagine an alarm sounding. Imagine waking up.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Something I wrote for my workshop with Ben Percy a few weeks ago, which he really liked. I worked with him to revise it slightly, and then got it put together for submission this week. Thought I'd share...
The Names of Things
I love the way he knows the names of things: he romanced me with words like gneiss, Helianthus, mollisol, and Vermivora chrysoptera. We explore the sun-streaked crevices of northern forest paths. He crouches to the dirt. Hands me smooth acorns with little caps. Holds up crisp yellow leaves. Shows me palms full of soil. Count the number of blades along the leaf, he says, are the edges serrated? A twitter and a rustle from above. He starts. Gropes for the binoculars hanging around his neck. Write this down: bright yellow belly. Necklace of black streaks. Uniform grey above. I think it’s a… We sit on the cool ground and I drink water slowly. He turns the pages of his field guide. Fingers scanning the index. Classifying by characteristics. Confirming the identity. It was a Canadian warbler.
For several years now, I have relied on him to be my scientific index, a walking list of categories carefully recorded, I wish I knew what that red tree was, what kind of bird makes this sound like “sur-ee-sur-ee-sur-eee? He was the map. He knew the lands. He had brought me there. In Montana, he taught me the type of rock that towers as cliffs along the Gallatin River. The colors of the soils. What a bear’s paw print looks like. How to interpret shit. In California, there were lessons in cacti. How to age a brown pelican chick from a mile away. What the dead body of a baby sea lion washed on the beach smells like. He had the facts. He beat me to them. When he didn’t know what kind of flower that was, blooming along the edge of a canyon waterfall, he would pick it. He would bring it to the encyclopedia. He would use the shade of blue, the number of petals, the root structure. He would unlock the codes of science to bring me the answer.
Neurobiologists say that as we age, our brain’s ability to store new information is altered; instead of forging new pathways, we understand by linking new wires to old telephone poles, to the information we already have built. Everything new must be related to something old. I remember the first week I was in California, getting lost intentionally, exploring my new home, driving to the Buenaventura Mission on the hills above Laurel Avenue. I performed a treacherous three-point turn and stopped the car, stunned by the sight of a wide expanse, green as eucalyptus, far below. Utterly mystified, I tried to determine what plant that would be, to cover such an enormous part of Southern California’s pasture. I had seen, in the days I had been there, wet lemon groves, fields of shimmering lettuce, rows of bright strawberries, trees that bore lumpy avocados, but nothing that looked like this. I stood, slowly, up out of the car. The narrow, winding road sloped sharply beneath my feet, and I leaned back against the car, the driver’s side door in front of me, staring, hoping no cars drove by to laugh my tourist gawking. Out on the street, with the haze of the windshield removed, I laughed at myself, at my newcomer’s mistake, at my unfamiliarity, at the way we learn our geography, realizing I was looking straight out over the Pacific Ocean.
When we came to Central Time zone, we were both meandering blindly in a new wilderness; I had brought him here. Neither of us knew how to be Midwestern. We needed to learn what to call this place, to embed words like prairie, like knob-and-kettle, like soybean yields into our heart’s vocabulary. One day, driving back from a state park, from collecting more data, he pointed to the purple-grey clouds of the Sunday twilight, how would you describe that in your writer-ly way, I don’t know what to call that color? Embarrassed, I hedged, it doesn’t work like that, I can’t just pull it out of thin air. But I remembered the black walnut tree he’d recognized in our backyard and how he’d smashed open one of the impossible green shells to show me the staining ink of the nut’s meat and so I gave in. There was a storm coming, I don’t know, I guess…bruised with rain.
He smiled, nodded, a gentle laugh under his breath, I like that, he said, I never would have thought of calling it that.
The Names of Things
I love the way he knows the names of things: he romanced me with words like gneiss, Helianthus, mollisol, and Vermivora chrysoptera. We explore the sun-streaked crevices of northern forest paths. He crouches to the dirt. Hands me smooth acorns with little caps. Holds up crisp yellow leaves. Shows me palms full of soil. Count the number of blades along the leaf, he says, are the edges serrated? A twitter and a rustle from above. He starts. Gropes for the binoculars hanging around his neck. Write this down: bright yellow belly. Necklace of black streaks. Uniform grey above. I think it’s a… We sit on the cool ground and I drink water slowly. He turns the pages of his field guide. Fingers scanning the index. Classifying by characteristics. Confirming the identity. It was a Canadian warbler.
For several years now, I have relied on him to be my scientific index, a walking list of categories carefully recorded, I wish I knew what that red tree was, what kind of bird makes this sound like “sur-ee-sur-ee-sur-eee? He was the map. He knew the lands. He had brought me there. In Montana, he taught me the type of rock that towers as cliffs along the Gallatin River. The colors of the soils. What a bear’s paw print looks like. How to interpret shit. In California, there were lessons in cacti. How to age a brown pelican chick from a mile away. What the dead body of a baby sea lion washed on the beach smells like. He had the facts. He beat me to them. When he didn’t know what kind of flower that was, blooming along the edge of a canyon waterfall, he would pick it. He would bring it to the encyclopedia. He would use the shade of blue, the number of petals, the root structure. He would unlock the codes of science to bring me the answer.
Neurobiologists say that as we age, our brain’s ability to store new information is altered; instead of forging new pathways, we understand by linking new wires to old telephone poles, to the information we already have built. Everything new must be related to something old. I remember the first week I was in California, getting lost intentionally, exploring my new home, driving to the Buenaventura Mission on the hills above Laurel Avenue. I performed a treacherous three-point turn and stopped the car, stunned by the sight of a wide expanse, green as eucalyptus, far below. Utterly mystified, I tried to determine what plant that would be, to cover such an enormous part of Southern California’s pasture. I had seen, in the days I had been there, wet lemon groves, fields of shimmering lettuce, rows of bright strawberries, trees that bore lumpy avocados, but nothing that looked like this. I stood, slowly, up out of the car. The narrow, winding road sloped sharply beneath my feet, and I leaned back against the car, the driver’s side door in front of me, staring, hoping no cars drove by to laugh my tourist gawking. Out on the street, with the haze of the windshield removed, I laughed at myself, at my newcomer’s mistake, at my unfamiliarity, at the way we learn our geography, realizing I was looking straight out over the Pacific Ocean.
When we came to Central Time zone, we were both meandering blindly in a new wilderness; I had brought him here. Neither of us knew how to be Midwestern. We needed to learn what to call this place, to embed words like prairie, like knob-and-kettle, like soybean yields into our heart’s vocabulary. One day, driving back from a state park, from collecting more data, he pointed to the purple-grey clouds of the Sunday twilight, how would you describe that in your writer-ly way, I don’t know what to call that color? Embarrassed, I hedged, it doesn’t work like that, I can’t just pull it out of thin air. But I remembered the black walnut tree he’d recognized in our backyard and how he’d smashed open one of the impossible green shells to show me the staining ink of the nut’s meat and so I gave in. There was a storm coming, I don’t know, I guess…bruised with rain.
He smiled, nodded, a gentle laugh under his breath, I like that, he said, I never would have thought of calling it that.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Once upon a time, I was forced, against my will, to write peotry. Then I decided it was good for me. I draw inspiration from John D'Agata. Here are a few samples...
Eastern Standard Time
67 Constance Street, Merrimack, New Hampshire: A grey cape with: forest teal shutters; a pool; a playset that included a trapeze; a wide, sloping hill perfect for sledding, except for the fact that it ended at a chain-link fence, a granite boulder, and the aforementioned playset. Location of first memory.
4 Paige Drive, Merrimack, New Hampshire: Same house. Addressed changed due to fire hazard implicit in having two streets in the same town with the same name.
306 Hood Hall, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York: Cramped, double-occupancy dorm room, shared with the daughter of a Baptist minister in the Substance-Free housing unit, where I lost my virginity after an Ani DiFranco concert. Location of first joint.
211 Emerson Hall, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York: Cramped double-occupancy dorm room, with a private bathroom! Bunked beds so we could fit a futon, where I heard my roommate and her boyfriend have sex the day they got matching Sanskrit tattoos. Location of first broken heart.
414 East Tower, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York: Single occupancy dorm room, on same floor as best friends, with a drafty wall so that one night in January, I had to sleep in hat, coat, mittens, socks, laid out on top of the radiator to avoid the -30 degree cold. Where I first realized I loved the man who would leave me for the mountains.
224 West Spencer St., Apt. #4, Ithaca, New York: Top floor, three-bedroom apartment of sagging, grey, Victorian upstate New York house. Slanting balcony porch where I sat, watching the construction workers pave the road below, smoking cigarettes and typing essays. Our secret rabbit, Pedro, chewed through the wires connecting the speakers to my computer, before the landlord discovered his presence and Pedro had to go live with roommate’s parents. Location of first lease with my name on it. Last college apartment.
1763 Columbia Ave, NW, Apt. #411, Washington, District of Columbia: Fourth-story hardwood floor apartment with floor-to-ceiling window views of the Washington Monument, found in just a week ,after receiving my internship. Four girls in two bedrooms, an unfenced rooftop, an old brick building surrounded by Ethiopian restaurants, fire engine sirens and themed nightclubs, walking distance to my big city, office park job. After three months of summer-humid mid-Atlantic city life, I am ready to leave the East Coast, for the first time.
Drift Plain
(some bits of this poem harvested from Landforms of Iowa by Jean Prior)
As this dissected landscape was evolving,
as the muscles beneath my skin began to shift
like tectonic plates, splitting
causing earthquakes
The oldest landscape surface was left at the highest elevation; newer, younger surfaces each cut into lower landscape positions and into stratigraphically older material.
Glass shards and pumice fragments:
All those distinctive visual clues—
a lobster-red sunburn on the left arm only;
a texture of finely etched rills;
a tangle of wind-blown hair;
a distinct ribbed or furrowed appearance to the terrain;
piles of empty plastic bottles and crumpled cellophane wrappers;
the tiny, blood-specked scar on my left knee, and the purple one on my right ankle;
a road atlas from 1994; a coded list of interstate highways;
the space between hills,
The terrain of this region provides a feeling of enclosure when we travel among its hills. Views extend only as far as the next ride or the next bend in the road.
There are no long-distance vistas.
the space between hills—
reveal past irregularities.
Reveal the domed skies of New Hampshire held
In my arms, and the cityscape of 18th and Columbia,
as my legs dangled out the fourth story window.
Reveal the big Montana sky, the stretches of land
between here and the mountains:
the Bridgers,
the Spanish Peaks,
the Tobacco Roots and
the Crazies.
Reveal the vastness of ocean,
and the wide, raging Western rivers,
glaciers standing in their headwaters.
This ancient soil profile
caught in the creases of my palm.
This dendritic network
spinning around my wrist twisting in the wind
as I cross the Mississippi.
Rainfall and snowmelt percolating through the loess tend to move laterally once they reach the less permeable clay of this paleosol.
Eastern Standard Time
67 Constance Street, Merrimack, New Hampshire: A grey cape with: forest teal shutters; a pool; a playset that included a trapeze; a wide, sloping hill perfect for sledding, except for the fact that it ended at a chain-link fence, a granite boulder, and the aforementioned playset. Location of first memory.
4 Paige Drive, Merrimack, New Hampshire: Same house. Addressed changed due to fire hazard implicit in having two streets in the same town with the same name.
306 Hood Hall, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York: Cramped, double-occupancy dorm room, shared with the daughter of a Baptist minister in the Substance-Free housing unit, where I lost my virginity after an Ani DiFranco concert. Location of first joint.
211 Emerson Hall, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York: Cramped double-occupancy dorm room, with a private bathroom! Bunked beds so we could fit a futon, where I heard my roommate and her boyfriend have sex the day they got matching Sanskrit tattoos. Location of first broken heart.
414 East Tower, Ithaca College, Ithaca, New York: Single occupancy dorm room, on same floor as best friends, with a drafty wall so that one night in January, I had to sleep in hat, coat, mittens, socks, laid out on top of the radiator to avoid the -30 degree cold. Where I first realized I loved the man who would leave me for the mountains.
224 West Spencer St., Apt. #4, Ithaca, New York: Top floor, three-bedroom apartment of sagging, grey, Victorian upstate New York house. Slanting balcony porch where I sat, watching the construction workers pave the road below, smoking cigarettes and typing essays. Our secret rabbit, Pedro, chewed through the wires connecting the speakers to my computer, before the landlord discovered his presence and Pedro had to go live with roommate’s parents. Location of first lease with my name on it. Last college apartment.
1763 Columbia Ave, NW, Apt. #411, Washington, District of Columbia: Fourth-story hardwood floor apartment with floor-to-ceiling window views of the Washington Monument, found in just a week ,after receiving my internship. Four girls in two bedrooms, an unfenced rooftop, an old brick building surrounded by Ethiopian restaurants, fire engine sirens and themed nightclubs, walking distance to my big city, office park job. After three months of summer-humid mid-Atlantic city life, I am ready to leave the East Coast, for the first time.
Drift Plain
(some bits of this poem harvested from Landforms of Iowa by Jean Prior)
As this dissected landscape was evolving,
as the muscles beneath my skin began to shift
like tectonic plates, splitting
causing earthquakes
The oldest landscape surface was left at the highest elevation; newer, younger surfaces each cut into lower landscape positions and into stratigraphically older material.
Glass shards and pumice fragments:
All those distinctive visual clues—
a lobster-red sunburn on the left arm only;
a texture of finely etched rills;
a tangle of wind-blown hair;
a distinct ribbed or furrowed appearance to the terrain;
piles of empty plastic bottles and crumpled cellophane wrappers;
the tiny, blood-specked scar on my left knee, and the purple one on my right ankle;
a road atlas from 1994; a coded list of interstate highways;
the space between hills,
The terrain of this region provides a feeling of enclosure when we travel among its hills. Views extend only as far as the next ride or the next bend in the road.
There are no long-distance vistas.
the space between hills—
reveal past irregularities.
Reveal the domed skies of New Hampshire held
In my arms, and the cityscape of 18th and Columbia,
as my legs dangled out the fourth story window.
Reveal the big Montana sky, the stretches of land
between here and the mountains:
the Bridgers,
the Spanish Peaks,
the Tobacco Roots and
the Crazies.
Reveal the vastness of ocean,
and the wide, raging Western rivers,
glaciers standing in their headwaters.
This ancient soil profile
caught in the creases of my palm.
This dendritic network
spinning around my wrist twisting in the wind
as I cross the Mississippi.
Rainfall and snowmelt percolating through the loess tend to move laterally once they reach the less permeable clay of this paleosol.
Saturday, September 13, 2008
I realized I could easily get this blog going again, what with all the writing I'll be doing over the next three years (in Iowa State's MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment. Here are a few pieces I've written so far for my favorite class of the semester: Rewriting the West with Ben Percy, and unBELEVIably talented writer who I love (Language of Elks and Refresh, Refresh, his short story collections are very worth checking out).
Each week, we have to read a book, and respond in two ways: one critical, and one creative. These are my first two (completely unrevised) creative responses. The first is a response to Charles Portis' novel, True Grit, and the second is a response to The Virginian by Owen Wister. Let me know what you think!
“The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.”
~ Psalm 118, Douay-Rheims Bible
In Bozeman, Montana, there was a wetland I passed every day. It was a small marsh, blooming with cattails through the winter, their thin straw stalks poking through the snow, home to squawking fowl in the spring, ducklings tottering behind their brown mallard mothers. One day I saw a great blue heron there, perched, still, on a sideways branch; it looked as if his eyes were closed. Wetland is such a simple word, just a little corner of nature stuck behind the buildings growing downtown, taken for granted. This marsh sat quietly adjacent to cattle ranching land, drinking in pollutants, breathing the particles of nitrogen and phosphorous through a complex life-cycle, protecting the water in our table glasses, our bathtubs, our washing machines, absorbing into the sediment on our behalf.
A developer named Mike Delaney diverted the water that flowed and fed the marsh, because the city couldn’t get the money together to buy it s a park. The wetland has become “The Village Downtown”, a brick strip of shops, home to a grocery store where the people of Bozeman can purchase filtered, bottled water.
***
The first white explorers of North America faced a wide ocean of tall grasses in shaded and muted colors like overcast sunny days, yellows and blues. Indiangrass brushed their legs as they walked, forbs and coneflowers bursts of color explosion over the miles of whispering grasses. A prairie is a living thing, buzzing with insect life, swarms of grasshoppers and crickets feeding, great bands of birds whirling overhead, diving and dancing, singing. The accumulation of loess and organic matter made the soil of the tallgrass prairie some of the deepest ever recorded. John Deere invented the steel plow, enabling farmers to dig for gold, turning and turning this lush resource, tearing out tall grasses and planting vegetables instead. Over 99 percent of North America’s tallgrass prairie is now farmland.
The blossoming prairie digs deep into its soil, hundreds of plant species providing a primary food source for the birds that eat agricultural pests. The higher the concentration of plant life, the greater the possibility for carbon sequestration; prairies would inhale our gases.
***
The Pacific Yew is a Western conifer, with craggy, gnarled bark, in tones of red like the clay soil of Wyoming, spotted with bone white lichen. But there is magic in that innocuous bark, the power of healing; when peeled gently off the trunk, exposing a yellow-white heart of wood, and transformed through lab-coat alchemy, Pacific Yew bark becomes Paclitaxel, one of the world’s most successful chemotherapy drug treatments. The Pacific Yew’s thin and delicate bark contains a treatment for cancer. Already scarce by the time this discovery was made, this promising Yew was never commercially harvested. Scientists scrambled to mimic the bark’s properties in a lab, to write its secrets down before they disappeared.
Current estimates suggest that between 35 and 100 species go extinct every day.
***
A settlement was recently reached between the corporation in charge of highway transportation in California to reduce the amount of toxic storm water runoff in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Previously, more than six million gallons of oil ran into California’s waters, in addition to trash, rubber, brake dust and microscopic bits of metal that killed or poisoned marine species, including fish in waters where commercial fishing is legal. The water reaches us all.
One of the newly implemented storm water runoff control mechanisms will be freshly-planted strips of absorbent vegetation.
Each week, we have to read a book, and respond in two ways: one critical, and one creative. These are my first two (completely unrevised) creative responses. The first is a response to Charles Portis' novel, True Grit, and the second is a response to The Virginian by Owen Wister. Let me know what you think!
“The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.”
~ Psalm 118, Douay-Rheims Bible
In Bozeman, Montana, there was a wetland I passed every day. It was a small marsh, blooming with cattails through the winter, their thin straw stalks poking through the snow, home to squawking fowl in the spring, ducklings tottering behind their brown mallard mothers. One day I saw a great blue heron there, perched, still, on a sideways branch; it looked as if his eyes were closed. Wetland is such a simple word, just a little corner of nature stuck behind the buildings growing downtown, taken for granted. This marsh sat quietly adjacent to cattle ranching land, drinking in pollutants, breathing the particles of nitrogen and phosphorous through a complex life-cycle, protecting the water in our table glasses, our bathtubs, our washing machines, absorbing into the sediment on our behalf.
A developer named Mike Delaney diverted the water that flowed and fed the marsh, because the city couldn’t get the money together to buy it s a park. The wetland has become “The Village Downtown”, a brick strip of shops, home to a grocery store where the people of Bozeman can purchase filtered, bottled water.
***
The first white explorers of North America faced a wide ocean of tall grasses in shaded and muted colors like overcast sunny days, yellows and blues. Indiangrass brushed their legs as they walked, forbs and coneflowers bursts of color explosion over the miles of whispering grasses. A prairie is a living thing, buzzing with insect life, swarms of grasshoppers and crickets feeding, great bands of birds whirling overhead, diving and dancing, singing. The accumulation of loess and organic matter made the soil of the tallgrass prairie some of the deepest ever recorded. John Deere invented the steel plow, enabling farmers to dig for gold, turning and turning this lush resource, tearing out tall grasses and planting vegetables instead. Over 99 percent of North America’s tallgrass prairie is now farmland.
The blossoming prairie digs deep into its soil, hundreds of plant species providing a primary food source for the birds that eat agricultural pests. The higher the concentration of plant life, the greater the possibility for carbon sequestration; prairies would inhale our gases.
***
The Pacific Yew is a Western conifer, with craggy, gnarled bark, in tones of red like the clay soil of Wyoming, spotted with bone white lichen. But there is magic in that innocuous bark, the power of healing; when peeled gently off the trunk, exposing a yellow-white heart of wood, and transformed through lab-coat alchemy, Pacific Yew bark becomes Paclitaxel, one of the world’s most successful chemotherapy drug treatments. The Pacific Yew’s thin and delicate bark contains a treatment for cancer. Already scarce by the time this discovery was made, this promising Yew was never commercially harvested. Scientists scrambled to mimic the bark’s properties in a lab, to write its secrets down before they disappeared.
Current estimates suggest that between 35 and 100 species go extinct every day.
***
A settlement was recently reached between the corporation in charge of highway transportation in California to reduce the amount of toxic storm water runoff in Los Angeles and Ventura Counties. Previously, more than six million gallons of oil ran into California’s waters, in addition to trash, rubber, brake dust and microscopic bits of metal that killed or poisoned marine species, including fish in waters where commercial fishing is legal. The water reaches us all.
One of the newly implemented storm water runoff control mechanisms will be freshly-planted strips of absorbent vegetation.
I braided my hair this morning in Wisconsin, pulling the wet strands into French pigtails while he sat on the cigarette-burned sheets and watched Animal Planet. It was sticky mid-June in the Midwest, but we weren’t staying put. We were driving across the country, Kerouac pilgrims in our early twenties. The car was packed so full, and I was so hot I couldn’t fathom climbing back in. He waited as I lounged around on the cheap motel bed, letting my skin dry off, rolling his eyes and trying to tease me into moving faster. I laughed, knowing I was frustrating him, and teased him back, “You hate me today.”
When we took a shower together, the whole bathroom flooded—only about a half-inch of water—but we didn’t want to spare any of the too-small hotel towels, so we’re leaving it that way. This is a shit motel anyway, with small, brown-edged holes burned straight through the sheets by someone else’s cigarette, and we’re not too pleased with Madison or Wisconsin in general. Last night, after eleven hours of driving, we tried to get a bottle of wine to go with the motel cable, only to discover that you can’t buy alcohol in this state after 9pm. It took some time for us to get over this, because we have a habit of latching on to things and embracing our mutual hatred as an inside joke. For the rest of the summer, we laughed about how awful Wisconsin was.
The thing about Wisconsin was I’d never been there before. Not just there, but anywhere like it; this was my first venture west of the Mississippi, and I knew only from pictures the enormity that lay ahead. I was so curious about the Midwest, so conscious of this transitory landscape. Wisconsin was both the first and the last: a reminder of the past and an indication of what was to come. The new, rocky landscape was just beginning to sprout from the ground while the old, humid weather was sticking to my still-wet, bare arms, echoing home.
Eventually, we had to leave, and I let him take the first shift at the wheel. His brown feet pressed against the pedals, air conditioning coming in spurts against the particular crevices of our bodies. We leave the windows up, except when we’re smoking, and I press my feet against the windshield, begging for a scolding. We’re going to try and make it to Wyoming tonight, but neither of us knows what to expect of South Dakota, which it turns out is just about the biggest state I’ve ever seen. We’re in Central Time Zone, headed for Mountain.
Along I-90 through Madison, there are massive red rock outcroppings. They tower dangerously high, out over the road as if they are about to collapse, like those games where you stack logs on top of each other, carelessly. I’d never even seen red rock before, and the large pieces of stone I’d seen up until then were the White Mountains, where you can barely even see the granite for the trees. I wore sunglasses and stared at myself in the passenger side mirror, watching rocks and states slide by behind me and trying to see myself change.
The back of the Subaru was packed and not budging with as few things as I could muster, and all the extras he couldn’t fit the first time out. An old bike for me, a tub full of chemicals and a photo enlarger, two enormous suitcases, boxes of books and bandanas, a tent and a huge sleeping bag. I was wearing only a striped cotton sundress, and my flip-flops sat on the floor of the passenger side. There were piles of maps, my huge CD binder, Ulysses, my empty Nalgene, before it had any stickers on it. The 90-degree weather seeps in through the glass. I shaved my legs in traffic in Ohio yesterday, and I read out loud to him in between eating cheese sandwiches and pasta salad—road food for vegetarians.
Whenever I got tired, I moved the countless empty Styrofoam cups to the floor and curled into him, my head on his thigh, my body wedged in between the gear shift and the arm rest. He kept his hand on me while he drove, usually on my leg, his fingertips tucked around and underneath my left thigh, but sometimes in my hair or on my neck, sometimes just the back of my seat, his two longest fingers dancing and teasing on the top of my head. When I drove, he tried to sleep on my shoulder, but he was too timid to relax his head all the way, worried I’m not strong enough to support his weight.
All the hours are bleeding together, all the state lines our only milestones, and the further West we got, the fewer there were.
In South Dakota, we pulled off the road onto one of those wide, paved shoulders to watch the sunset. We sat on the warm engine hood and waited, the immense Badlands stretched out in front of us, welcoming the sun. The cliffs seemed to be stained from previous sunsets, with clear striations in the rock of blue, green, grey, beige and red. I was so recently removed from the Eastern land of green and blue mountain forest lagoon, thrown now into heat without moisture. The sandy, dusty sweat of the desert replacing the sticky, maple syrup sweat of black fly summers. Flat, wide, endless expanses of land, leading straight up to the mountains, all I could see for miles, sky and rock and earth.
An entire country of possibilities stretched in front of me. I was content to move out West and live a cowboy life off a page: a life of casual front porches, of late nights in bars, working or drinking, doesn’t matter. Where I write only on a typewriter and paint my walls like a rainforest and don’t wash my hands, where I learned to dance without shoes on and stop pushing the hair out of my eyes.
The next morning, we stopped for gas at a wooden outpost in Wyoming, where I made friends with a shepherd dog wearing a red bandana, and the owner told us where to find the best fishing. We climbed back into the Subaru for one last day, and as I started to drive away, dust kicking up under our New York tires, I noticed the freckles on my arms growing stronger, readying themselves for the mountain sun.
When we took a shower together, the whole bathroom flooded—only about a half-inch of water—but we didn’t want to spare any of the too-small hotel towels, so we’re leaving it that way. This is a shit motel anyway, with small, brown-edged holes burned straight through the sheets by someone else’s cigarette, and we’re not too pleased with Madison or Wisconsin in general. Last night, after eleven hours of driving, we tried to get a bottle of wine to go with the motel cable, only to discover that you can’t buy alcohol in this state after 9pm. It took some time for us to get over this, because we have a habit of latching on to things and embracing our mutual hatred as an inside joke. For the rest of the summer, we laughed about how awful Wisconsin was.
The thing about Wisconsin was I’d never been there before. Not just there, but anywhere like it; this was my first venture west of the Mississippi, and I knew only from pictures the enormity that lay ahead. I was so curious about the Midwest, so conscious of this transitory landscape. Wisconsin was both the first and the last: a reminder of the past and an indication of what was to come. The new, rocky landscape was just beginning to sprout from the ground while the old, humid weather was sticking to my still-wet, bare arms, echoing home.
Eventually, we had to leave, and I let him take the first shift at the wheel. His brown feet pressed against the pedals, air conditioning coming in spurts against the particular crevices of our bodies. We leave the windows up, except when we’re smoking, and I press my feet against the windshield, begging for a scolding. We’re going to try and make it to Wyoming tonight, but neither of us knows what to expect of South Dakota, which it turns out is just about the biggest state I’ve ever seen. We’re in Central Time Zone, headed for Mountain.
Along I-90 through Madison, there are massive red rock outcroppings. They tower dangerously high, out over the road as if they are about to collapse, like those games where you stack logs on top of each other, carelessly. I’d never even seen red rock before, and the large pieces of stone I’d seen up until then were the White Mountains, where you can barely even see the granite for the trees. I wore sunglasses and stared at myself in the passenger side mirror, watching rocks and states slide by behind me and trying to see myself change.
The back of the Subaru was packed and not budging with as few things as I could muster, and all the extras he couldn’t fit the first time out. An old bike for me, a tub full of chemicals and a photo enlarger, two enormous suitcases, boxes of books and bandanas, a tent and a huge sleeping bag. I was wearing only a striped cotton sundress, and my flip-flops sat on the floor of the passenger side. There were piles of maps, my huge CD binder, Ulysses, my empty Nalgene, before it had any stickers on it. The 90-degree weather seeps in through the glass. I shaved my legs in traffic in Ohio yesterday, and I read out loud to him in between eating cheese sandwiches and pasta salad—road food for vegetarians.
Whenever I got tired, I moved the countless empty Styrofoam cups to the floor and curled into him, my head on his thigh, my body wedged in between the gear shift and the arm rest. He kept his hand on me while he drove, usually on my leg, his fingertips tucked around and underneath my left thigh, but sometimes in my hair or on my neck, sometimes just the back of my seat, his two longest fingers dancing and teasing on the top of my head. When I drove, he tried to sleep on my shoulder, but he was too timid to relax his head all the way, worried I’m not strong enough to support his weight.
All the hours are bleeding together, all the state lines our only milestones, and the further West we got, the fewer there were.
In South Dakota, we pulled off the road onto one of those wide, paved shoulders to watch the sunset. We sat on the warm engine hood and waited, the immense Badlands stretched out in front of us, welcoming the sun. The cliffs seemed to be stained from previous sunsets, with clear striations in the rock of blue, green, grey, beige and red. I was so recently removed from the Eastern land of green and blue mountain forest lagoon, thrown now into heat without moisture. The sandy, dusty sweat of the desert replacing the sticky, maple syrup sweat of black fly summers. Flat, wide, endless expanses of land, leading straight up to the mountains, all I could see for miles, sky and rock and earth.
An entire country of possibilities stretched in front of me. I was content to move out West and live a cowboy life off a page: a life of casual front porches, of late nights in bars, working or drinking, doesn’t matter. Where I write only on a typewriter and paint my walls like a rainforest and don’t wash my hands, where I learned to dance without shoes on and stop pushing the hair out of my eyes.
The next morning, we stopped for gas at a wooden outpost in Wyoming, where I made friends with a shepherd dog wearing a red bandana, and the owner told us where to find the best fishing. We climbed back into the Subaru for one last day, and as I started to drive away, dust kicking up under our New York tires, I noticed the freckles on my arms growing stronger, readying themselves for the mountain sun.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
A revision/restructuring of a piece I'd written before, which I now think is ready for submission. Flashquake... Brevity's reading period is closed. Anyone know of any other publications who might be interested in a piece only 1,001 words long?
There's No Town Called Big Sur
I felt that we had reached the end of the world, at this moment, on this evening, and together. We had been traveling for almost four years and we'd finally gotten to Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, along the edge of California. It was September and we were driving on a cliff at the edge of the world and we didn't know where we'd sleep that night. The road wound like a snapped rubber band, perched on a steep red rock outcropping, a hill of rubble leading to the heat-glimmering sand and to the painfully bright ocean, yards below.
I was riding cross-legged in the passenger seat, barefoot. Kevin drove, because he had seen this highway a few weeks ago, taken a weekend road trip with his visiting brother when I had to work, and so I never had seen this road, which is a thing to see, something you come to visit. The Pacific Coast Highway is not the kind of road where you can enjoy the view while you drive: the sharp curves lined on both sides by life-threatening, rocky plummets, and the inevitable California rental car--the red or yellow Ford Mustang convertible--doing 70 in the oncoming lane. We were listening to "Missed the Boat" by Modest Mouse and I was thinking we had discovered the perfect setting for that track: four o’clock California coastal highway, sun sliding toward the ocean, road trip, no plans.
Late in the afternoon, he pulled the car over near a blue highway sign for an elephant seal rookery, because this was the kind of drive where we would follow tourist arrows and random urges for a croissant. And, I had never seen an elephant seal before. At first, my small hands gripping the top of the chain link fence, on a cliff high above their birthing beach, I could barely pick them out against the sand: their already sun-brown bodies matted with the dirt they slap on their back to keep cool. A small movement appeared on the sand, a rippling quiver of muscle and then I could see them all, like road bumps on the beach for miles. I watched my first seal dance himself across the sand, a frustrated, messy movement that resembled a series of belly-flops. The whole clan snored in the lowering golden sun and heaved their massive bodies around and sometimes climbed right over a sleeping comrade, but somehow maintained an air of grace. In the only photograph of me there, I am pointing to the beach below, laughing.
About an hour later, he found a little pullout shoulder of sand, surrounded by tall, waving silhouettes of sea grass, backed in and popped the hatchback. I slipped on my sandals and pulled myself out of the car, surprised by the new chill in the air up here, above the ocean. We climbed into the trunk, and spread a sleeping bag across our bare knees, to keep us warm while we watched the sun set right into the water.
Watching the sun sink into the ocean can only happen on a cliff like this, high above the end of everything, in a place like this, along together and at peace with our traveling. A bright red Japanese-flag sun dips lower, towards the elusive horizon, wrapping itself in the tall grasses, blackening them with its shadow. The haze of California makes the whole sky look like the aftermath of an explosion, which I guess is what the sun really is, after all.
He brought his camera into the trunk, the orange and brown strap betraying the Minolta’s age and generation, decades before now. Do I remember the combustion-red sun so clearly because a photograph exists, a tangible reminder that illuminates the other sensory details of that night more clearly? I remember we tried to lift our bare feet, protruding from the end of the unzipped sleeping bag, into the photograph’s frame, to capture our presence at this sunset, our participation in this memory, but he couldn't angle the lens properly to fit both our feet and the sun. So the photograph couldn't be manipulated to reveal the whole truth.
Other things the photograph forgot: my feet were cold, and I was surprised. The purple-bruised feeling of cold toes had already begun to fade in my seven-months in California-summer mind. My sleeping bag, the one pulled over us like a blanket, smelled like dust, from the night we spent in a tiny, blue tent, buffeted by gale-force winds, on his one-square-mile island, three weeks ago. The right side of my neck was beginning to ache, from leaning against his flat, hard chest and twisting towards the disappearing sun. I loved him, and still do, but that never shows in photographs, even when our feet make it into the print.
We timed it, counting in Mississippis until the entire sphere had sunk below the ocean's arbitrary line against the sky, but here's another thing no one told me about California: you can still see the sun through the ocean. I sat up then, startled, actively bewildered at the bizarrely obvious realization. I can see through water, and the sun setting is actually the Earth rotating away from it. The sun isn't giving up on us, on California, on the ocean or land, on me, and she waits beneath the surface. A glimmering reflection, the explosion in a watery mirror, remained, promising me she'd be back in eight hours, and my mouth hung upon at the sense of it all. Everything made sense. We had driven all the way out here and all the way across the country and all the way to the Big Sur, a place that doesn't really exists to learn that the sun never really disappears and to tell everyone else about it.
He laughed, at my expression, and because he was taken aback as well. "Wherever we make it to this weekend, that's what we tell people." He made me promise. "Tell them we drove to Big Sur to see the sunset."
There's No Town Called Big Sur
I felt that we had reached the end of the world, at this moment, on this evening, and together. We had been traveling for almost four years and we'd finally gotten to Route 1, the Pacific Coast Highway, along the edge of California. It was September and we were driving on a cliff at the edge of the world and we didn't know where we'd sleep that night. The road wound like a snapped rubber band, perched on a steep red rock outcropping, a hill of rubble leading to the heat-glimmering sand and to the painfully bright ocean, yards below.
I was riding cross-legged in the passenger seat, barefoot. Kevin drove, because he had seen this highway a few weeks ago, taken a weekend road trip with his visiting brother when I had to work, and so I never had seen this road, which is a thing to see, something you come to visit. The Pacific Coast Highway is not the kind of road where you can enjoy the view while you drive: the sharp curves lined on both sides by life-threatening, rocky plummets, and the inevitable California rental car--the red or yellow Ford Mustang convertible--doing 70 in the oncoming lane. We were listening to "Missed the Boat" by Modest Mouse and I was thinking we had discovered the perfect setting for that track: four o’clock California coastal highway, sun sliding toward the ocean, road trip, no plans.
Late in the afternoon, he pulled the car over near a blue highway sign for an elephant seal rookery, because this was the kind of drive where we would follow tourist arrows and random urges for a croissant. And, I had never seen an elephant seal before. At first, my small hands gripping the top of the chain link fence, on a cliff high above their birthing beach, I could barely pick them out against the sand: their already sun-brown bodies matted with the dirt they slap on their back to keep cool. A small movement appeared on the sand, a rippling quiver of muscle and then I could see them all, like road bumps on the beach for miles. I watched my first seal dance himself across the sand, a frustrated, messy movement that resembled a series of belly-flops. The whole clan snored in the lowering golden sun and heaved their massive bodies around and sometimes climbed right over a sleeping comrade, but somehow maintained an air of grace. In the only photograph of me there, I am pointing to the beach below, laughing.
About an hour later, he found a little pullout shoulder of sand, surrounded by tall, waving silhouettes of sea grass, backed in and popped the hatchback. I slipped on my sandals and pulled myself out of the car, surprised by the new chill in the air up here, above the ocean. We climbed into the trunk, and spread a sleeping bag across our bare knees, to keep us warm while we watched the sun set right into the water.
Watching the sun sink into the ocean can only happen on a cliff like this, high above the end of everything, in a place like this, along together and at peace with our traveling. A bright red Japanese-flag sun dips lower, towards the elusive horizon, wrapping itself in the tall grasses, blackening them with its shadow. The haze of California makes the whole sky look like the aftermath of an explosion, which I guess is what the sun really is, after all.
He brought his camera into the trunk, the orange and brown strap betraying the Minolta’s age and generation, decades before now. Do I remember the combustion-red sun so clearly because a photograph exists, a tangible reminder that illuminates the other sensory details of that night more clearly? I remember we tried to lift our bare feet, protruding from the end of the unzipped sleeping bag, into the photograph’s frame, to capture our presence at this sunset, our participation in this memory, but he couldn't angle the lens properly to fit both our feet and the sun. So the photograph couldn't be manipulated to reveal the whole truth.
Other things the photograph forgot: my feet were cold, and I was surprised. The purple-bruised feeling of cold toes had already begun to fade in my seven-months in California-summer mind. My sleeping bag, the one pulled over us like a blanket, smelled like dust, from the night we spent in a tiny, blue tent, buffeted by gale-force winds, on his one-square-mile island, three weeks ago. The right side of my neck was beginning to ache, from leaning against his flat, hard chest and twisting towards the disappearing sun. I loved him, and still do, but that never shows in photographs, even when our feet make it into the print.
We timed it, counting in Mississippis until the entire sphere had sunk below the ocean's arbitrary line against the sky, but here's another thing no one told me about California: you can still see the sun through the ocean. I sat up then, startled, actively bewildered at the bizarrely obvious realization. I can see through water, and the sun setting is actually the Earth rotating away from it. The sun isn't giving up on us, on California, on the ocean or land, on me, and she waits beneath the surface. A glimmering reflection, the explosion in a watery mirror, remained, promising me she'd be back in eight hours, and my mouth hung upon at the sense of it all. Everything made sense. We had driven all the way out here and all the way across the country and all the way to the Big Sur, a place that doesn't really exists to learn that the sun never really disappears and to tell everyone else about it.
He laughed, at my expression, and because he was taken aback as well. "Wherever we make it to this weekend, that's what we tell people." He made me promise. "Tell them we drove to Big Sur to see the sunset."
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Birds, part two
The first one I remember hearing was a cardinal. Or, the first one I noticed and trice to commit to memory the trill. The rhythm and the pitch, he said, the two parts. So I tapped my hand against my thigh in a pat-pat-pat-pat-pat and sung her song inside my skull, like a silent echo. A quick happy whistle followed by the low-pitched twitter. He was still asleep inside, and I was standing still in our backyard, waiting to get in my car and drive to work, repeating a song to myself. I didn't want to wake him up to ask him. When I remembered, later that week, I was surprised to still have retained the noise, bouncing around inside the hollows of my brain. "Cardinal," he said, without pause. "Northern Cardinal. They're everywhere."
I was so proud, as if I had discovered some ancient secret, a hidden language that he was born knowing, to which I had finally found my way. What I mean is, every time I hear a bird sing, I think of him.
Birds, part three
We were visiting his family, all the men and me hiking to the top of a mountain, but they're in better shape than I am, so we lagged behind, and he taught me the new pieces of music he had learned in our two weeks apart, as we heard them in the rustling, sun-streaked pine forest of his New York home. Mostly it was the red-eyed vireo, which really does have red eyes and looks quite devilish, as I later learned. Teaching it the wrong word, because he wasn't showing off; he was on a hike, he is constantly aware, in this heightened state of awareness of the bird calls transmitting around him and I could begin to pick up that frequency, too.
This time, he told me that a lot of birds--but not all-- have words or phrases associated with their calls, to help ornithologists more easily remember and identify them. I was elated,bu the reality and the symbolism; now that we were dealing with words, we were in my territory, a new land for which I had my own maps. besides that, it meant that science and the art of language could find in each other a partner. He needed my knowledge of syllabication, verse, assonance and timbre, just as I needed his ability to hear music and see feathers in even the most dense tree cover.
"Teach-er, Teach-er, Teach-er, Teach-er," he repeated, stopping in his tracks, grabbing at my elbow, as all good teachers do, knowing that absolute stillness is the best location for learning. We heard it's call and he repeated his English interpretation, identifying it as the Ovenbird. Ovenbirds build massive nests up against the sides of things, like trees or houses, and enter them by the side, making them look as if they are roasting little birds inside their own ovens. I tried to remember the call, but up over the next steep rocky hill along the trail, another bird called, only to him. "That was it," he said, "the ovenbird." But it had slipped through my fingers. I hadn't recognized it. But after the next and then the next time, I realized why. "The syllabication is off," I said, excited, Shakespeare excited. "The ovenbird sings in a trochaic foot, not an iambic!" I explained the difference as I caught my breath, my palm beating against his chest in a yellow meadow, before we pushed over the last hill to reach the top. We made it up the mountain, and sat, mostly silent, in the rusted, dormant chair-lift from this mountain's days as a ski resort, waiting for the next ovenbird, decided we would revise its call, for our own purposes, to "I teach, I teach, I teach, I teach, I teach."
The first one I remember hearing was a cardinal. Or, the first one I noticed and trice to commit to memory the trill. The rhythm and the pitch, he said, the two parts. So I tapped my hand against my thigh in a pat-pat-pat-pat-pat and sung her song inside my skull, like a silent echo. A quick happy whistle followed by the low-pitched twitter. He was still asleep inside, and I was standing still in our backyard, waiting to get in my car and drive to work, repeating a song to myself. I didn't want to wake him up to ask him. When I remembered, later that week, I was surprised to still have retained the noise, bouncing around inside the hollows of my brain. "Cardinal," he said, without pause. "Northern Cardinal. They're everywhere."
I was so proud, as if I had discovered some ancient secret, a hidden language that he was born knowing, to which I had finally found my way. What I mean is, every time I hear a bird sing, I think of him.
Birds, part three
We were visiting his family, all the men and me hiking to the top of a mountain, but they're in better shape than I am, so we lagged behind, and he taught me the new pieces of music he had learned in our two weeks apart, as we heard them in the rustling, sun-streaked pine forest of his New York home. Mostly it was the red-eyed vireo, which really does have red eyes and looks quite devilish, as I later learned. Teaching it the wrong word, because he wasn't showing off; he was on a hike, he is constantly aware, in this heightened state of awareness of the bird calls transmitting around him and I could begin to pick up that frequency, too.
This time, he told me that a lot of birds--but not all-- have words or phrases associated with their calls, to help ornithologists more easily remember and identify them. I was elated,bu the reality and the symbolism; now that we were dealing with words, we were in my territory, a new land for which I had my own maps. besides that, it meant that science and the art of language could find in each other a partner. He needed my knowledge of syllabication, verse, assonance and timbre, just as I needed his ability to hear music and see feathers in even the most dense tree cover.
"Teach-er, Teach-er, Teach-er, Teach-er," he repeated, stopping in his tracks, grabbing at my elbow, as all good teachers do, knowing that absolute stillness is the best location for learning. We heard it's call and he repeated his English interpretation, identifying it as the Ovenbird. Ovenbirds build massive nests up against the sides of things, like trees or houses, and enter them by the side, making them look as if they are roasting little birds inside their own ovens. I tried to remember the call, but up over the next steep rocky hill along the trail, another bird called, only to him. "That was it," he said, "the ovenbird." But it had slipped through my fingers. I hadn't recognized it. But after the next and then the next time, I realized why. "The syllabication is off," I said, excited, Shakespeare excited. "The ovenbird sings in a trochaic foot, not an iambic!" I explained the difference as I caught my breath, my palm beating against his chest in a yellow meadow, before we pushed over the last hill to reach the top. We made it up the mountain, and sat, mostly silent, in the rusted, dormant chair-lift from this mountain's days as a ski resort, waiting for the next ovenbird, decided we would revise its call, for our own purposes, to "I teach, I teach, I teach, I teach, I teach."
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Oh, I'm such a slacker. Things have been getting crazy, with Kevin moving and getting ready for the big grad school move, so I've allowed myself to be lazy with the writing. I've got a lot of ideas bouncing around but haven't put any of them to paper. I'm trying to get better though, so, here we go.
As I was driving home to NH the other day I got to thinking that I haven't written about Kevin in awhile. He's been in a lot of my writing, but nothing about him since ... well, really since right after I moved to Montana. So I wanted to change that, because the biggest pieces of the backdrop are the most important and they shouldn't be ignored just because they're everywhere.
Anyway, of course I can't just write about a subject, it must be masked by other subjects. So this one is about Birds. I was thinking about calling it The Thing With Feathers but that would just be too... something.
Birds, part one
The first thing I do when I wake up now is to topen the window directly behind our bed. I yank up the flimsy white metal blinds, and hold my breath with the strain of hauling the frame up, leaving flecks of purple paint on the sill. Flopping back down on to his empty pillows, I take in the days first breaths of Ithaca air, humid and sun-streaked and check the level of the bird feeder.
Just a few weeks before he left, we finally found a shephard's crook on which to hang his new bird feeder. We brought it home and found the perfect spot, wedged between our neighbors' fence and our bedroom window, two feet wide and not our soil. When you rent an apartment but you live inside the safe walls of a four-year relationship, you find ways to make any land belong. We wouldlay in bed on Saturdays and stare, waiting for the holy grail, the impossibly tiny flying visitors who would flutter in to crack seeds with their yellow beaks. He would identify them for me, by their colored marking, red and yellow and grey streaks in their wing feathers, even knowing how old they were, but I would mostly just watch him, his wide eyes focusing on their details, waiting.
...
As I was driving home to NH the other day I got to thinking that I haven't written about Kevin in awhile. He's been in a lot of my writing, but nothing about him since ... well, really since right after I moved to Montana. So I wanted to change that, because the biggest pieces of the backdrop are the most important and they shouldn't be ignored just because they're everywhere.
Anyway, of course I can't just write about a subject, it must be masked by other subjects. So this one is about Birds. I was thinking about calling it The Thing With Feathers but that would just be too... something.
Birds, part one
The first thing I do when I wake up now is to topen the window directly behind our bed. I yank up the flimsy white metal blinds, and hold my breath with the strain of hauling the frame up, leaving flecks of purple paint on the sill. Flopping back down on to his empty pillows, I take in the days first breaths of Ithaca air, humid and sun-streaked and check the level of the bird feeder.
Just a few weeks before he left, we finally found a shephard's crook on which to hang his new bird feeder. We brought it home and found the perfect spot, wedged between our neighbors' fence and our bedroom window, two feet wide and not our soil. When you rent an apartment but you live inside the safe walls of a four-year relationship, you find ways to make any land belong. We wouldlay in bed on Saturdays and stare, waiting for the holy grail, the impossibly tiny flying visitors who would flutter in to crack seeds with their yellow beaks. He would identify them for me, by their colored marking, red and yellow and grey streaks in their wing feathers, even knowing how old they were, but I would mostly just watch him, his wide eyes focusing on their details, waiting.
...
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
This weekend, we went to Binghamton to help Kevin's brother build a patio. And we brought a bunch of friends. And for reasons unknown, I had this very regressive day; all day, little sensations of childhood kept coming to me, like it was the summer of 1992, and I was back by my parent's pool and doing little kid things. I don't know, it was strange, so I kept talking about it, and Stephen suggested it would make for an interesting mini-memoir essay, and I agreed. So here goes--a little free-write on Saturdays of summer and youth, with no pre-thinking.
I Spilled My Juice
I didn't want to track the dirt in from the backyard, and I was tired of taking my shoes off every time I had to go inside, so I took them off permanently and let my feet enjoy the cool of the shaded dirt. I stretched my toes wide open and pressed them into the lawn, where patches of grass were struggling to grow. Mostly it was still just bare, dark brown, feeling like it had rained two days ago dirt, with the perfect balance of hard and soft, giving beneath my feet but not mushy. So I was sitting, bent over at the waist, on the bottom stair, checking out the way the dirt never seemed to absorb my toeprints, when Lindsey yelled that she'd heard the ice cream truck and the girls went running.
We paused on the sidewalk in front of the house, our ears pricked for the tinny, circus sounds of summer's vehicle, trying to figure out which way around the block the driver would come. I followed Lindsey and Ashley, past Lindsey's grandma's house, and around the corner, still close enough that we could find our way back. My feet were still bare, as they always are in summer, and even though it was the first really hot weekend of the year, the bottoms must have still been callused from last summer, because the cement sidewalks and the little road pebbles and the hot asphalt didn't bother me at all, or I was just thinking about what kind of ice cream I should get.
I hung back behind the other two girls while ordering our ice cream. I rolled tiny chipped bits of asphalt under my big toe, sending them flying into the gutter with little flicks, as the bare, exposed yellow sun penetrated the skin on the back of my neck. Frustrated, I brushed flyaway pieces of hair back off my sweaty forehead, feeling a light smear of dirt left behind. My old, pilly t-shirt clung to the center of my back, and I wished for a pool, for the deep, cold water to wash all of this sticky season off my too hot, too pale skin. A moment later, walking back towards our house, a giant styrofoam cup full of mint chocolate milkshake in one hand, I giggled with Lindsey and Ashley and felt more cheerful with every sugary slug.
to be continued...
I Spilled My Juice
I didn't want to track the dirt in from the backyard, and I was tired of taking my shoes off every time I had to go inside, so I took them off permanently and let my feet enjoy the cool of the shaded dirt. I stretched my toes wide open and pressed them into the lawn, where patches of grass were struggling to grow. Mostly it was still just bare, dark brown, feeling like it had rained two days ago dirt, with the perfect balance of hard and soft, giving beneath my feet but not mushy. So I was sitting, bent over at the waist, on the bottom stair, checking out the way the dirt never seemed to absorb my toeprints, when Lindsey yelled that she'd heard the ice cream truck and the girls went running.
We paused on the sidewalk in front of the house, our ears pricked for the tinny, circus sounds of summer's vehicle, trying to figure out which way around the block the driver would come. I followed Lindsey and Ashley, past Lindsey's grandma's house, and around the corner, still close enough that we could find our way back. My feet were still bare, as they always are in summer, and even though it was the first really hot weekend of the year, the bottoms must have still been callused from last summer, because the cement sidewalks and the little road pebbles and the hot asphalt didn't bother me at all, or I was just thinking about what kind of ice cream I should get.
I hung back behind the other two girls while ordering our ice cream. I rolled tiny chipped bits of asphalt under my big toe, sending them flying into the gutter with little flicks, as the bare, exposed yellow sun penetrated the skin on the back of my neck. Frustrated, I brushed flyaway pieces of hair back off my sweaty forehead, feeling a light smear of dirt left behind. My old, pilly t-shirt clung to the center of my back, and I wished for a pool, for the deep, cold water to wash all of this sticky season off my too hot, too pale skin. A moment later, walking back towards our house, a giant styrofoam cup full of mint chocolate milkshake in one hand, I giggled with Lindsey and Ashley and felt more cheerful with every sugary slug.
to be continued...
Friday, April 18, 2008
I recently remembered something I'd been interested in writing many years ago, which I had all but abandoned. I love to watch this show on the Travel Channel called "Mysterious Journeys" which explores various mysteries of the Earth or human history. A recent one, on Easter Island, was fascinating. Yesterday, it was on the Nazca lines, a series of astounding geoglyphs in Peru, which I studied back in my college anthropology days, and became a little mesmerized by. So, I took some notes while watching and jotted down a few random thoughts to explore, which may or may not become an essay.
Notes on the Nazca, Dreaming
I have dreams of flying over Peru—dreams of a landscape like watercolor, with muted grays and smears of the palest, sandiest pink. Tiny stone brushed like paint across the Pampa, the desert, the back of my forehead. Time does not mask all; time does not reveal all truth. There is such a thing as a thing we do not know.
Ages ago, a people called the Nazca worshipped the desert and the rivers of secrecy that flowed in an unending pattern beneath, and they danced these paths into reality on the surface of the malleable Pampa. By their own feet, hands, brooms, they strode across their most sacred and enormous of canvasses and swept away the tiny grey pebbles that hid the pink sand below, in order to map out water, fertility, worship and balance.
On the great and wide vista of the Pampa Colorada, in the silent heart of the Peruvian coast, for centuries, the Nazca carved themselves and their community onto the desert like a strong wind. Their marks, though they seem so ephemeral, so delicate, have lasted for so long: between 1,300 and 2000 years have passed, slowly and definitely since they were danced across the wilderness. The windless and arid ground tucked into the hidden spaces of our globe. In a place seemingly so sturdy, so permanent, so unchanging, a wild history embossed like a breeze, like a ballet, like time or water.
Massive lines. Simple lines—straight or curved, arching and aching, twisting and forming shapes that were so familiar to the people who walked them. There are enormous trapezoids and quadrangles, swept clean of stone and appearing flat and depressed into the landscape they identify. The long beak of a hummingbird artfully graced into the sand stretched for hundreds of feet, alongside a monkey’s spiraling tail and the bowed body of a snake. They are so vast; they consume the desert in my mind. I picture a crowded Pampa, stuffed full of vivacious imagery, from centuries ago, from another world.
The endless lines pointing the way to an unreachable horizon, the animals and shapes: they all embody the concept of flight. They seem to have been created from the air, or by the air.
It cannot be that they were created by people who would never see them: and yet, it is.
People like us, people we were in another lifetime, people who could be our ancestors. People with a sort of broom, with devotion and a long walk. They had only the most basic surveying tools and they swept the stones as they walked and walked the desert. The people of Nazca swept the sand for years at a time and, for nearly a century, diligently preserved their mineral artwork. This desert that they worshipped, the desert that was their mother and goddess, the desert that sustained them, somehow, the desert of animal mystery and ancient instances.
And the most compelling truth of the creation of these magnificent and enduring lines is their mystery. Anthropologists, scientists, researchers and villagers have speculated for centuries; they furrow their brows over the hundreds of intersecting and unswerving straight lines. The ambiguity of geometry is that all the maps in the world cannot reveal to us the furtive truths of our own human past.
We forget this, in our age of information, technology, fingertips to research to answers. We forget the parts of ourselves we will never understand because we cannot understand not understanding. From long ago there are stories of ourselves: mysteries. For they are the stories of ancient people, the stories of civilization from thousands of years before ours, stories from a social structure so foreign, they seem like myths. We know of their pottery, their dances, their garbage pits and domesticated plants and animals; we know nothing of their hearts.
These lines have, since they were first seen from the air in the 1930s, represented all that puzzling, frustrating, terrifying anonymity; they reflect the void on and on into endless, frightening darkness. But if we are willing to listen, they could also teach us a great deal; they teach us of depth and understanding, of acceptance and movement, of penetrating embrace.
Notes on the Nazca, Dreaming
I have dreams of flying over Peru—dreams of a landscape like watercolor, with muted grays and smears of the palest, sandiest pink. Tiny stone brushed like paint across the Pampa, the desert, the back of my forehead. Time does not mask all; time does not reveal all truth. There is such a thing as a thing we do not know.
Ages ago, a people called the Nazca worshipped the desert and the rivers of secrecy that flowed in an unending pattern beneath, and they danced these paths into reality on the surface of the malleable Pampa. By their own feet, hands, brooms, they strode across their most sacred and enormous of canvasses and swept away the tiny grey pebbles that hid the pink sand below, in order to map out water, fertility, worship and balance.
On the great and wide vista of the Pampa Colorada, in the silent heart of the Peruvian coast, for centuries, the Nazca carved themselves and their community onto the desert like a strong wind. Their marks, though they seem so ephemeral, so delicate, have lasted for so long: between 1,300 and 2000 years have passed, slowly and definitely since they were danced across the wilderness. The windless and arid ground tucked into the hidden spaces of our globe. In a place seemingly so sturdy, so permanent, so unchanging, a wild history embossed like a breeze, like a ballet, like time or water.
Massive lines. Simple lines—straight or curved, arching and aching, twisting and forming shapes that were so familiar to the people who walked them. There are enormous trapezoids and quadrangles, swept clean of stone and appearing flat and depressed into the landscape they identify. The long beak of a hummingbird artfully graced into the sand stretched for hundreds of feet, alongside a monkey’s spiraling tail and the bowed body of a snake. They are so vast; they consume the desert in my mind. I picture a crowded Pampa, stuffed full of vivacious imagery, from centuries ago, from another world.
The endless lines pointing the way to an unreachable horizon, the animals and shapes: they all embody the concept of flight. They seem to have been created from the air, or by the air.
It cannot be that they were created by people who would never see them: and yet, it is.
People like us, people we were in another lifetime, people who could be our ancestors. People with a sort of broom, with devotion and a long walk. They had only the most basic surveying tools and they swept the stones as they walked and walked the desert. The people of Nazca swept the sand for years at a time and, for nearly a century, diligently preserved their mineral artwork. This desert that they worshipped, the desert that was their mother and goddess, the desert that sustained them, somehow, the desert of animal mystery and ancient instances.
And the most compelling truth of the creation of these magnificent and enduring lines is their mystery. Anthropologists, scientists, researchers and villagers have speculated for centuries; they furrow their brows over the hundreds of intersecting and unswerving straight lines. The ambiguity of geometry is that all the maps in the world cannot reveal to us the furtive truths of our own human past.
We forget this, in our age of information, technology, fingertips to research to answers. We forget the parts of ourselves we will never understand because we cannot understand not understanding. From long ago there are stories of ourselves: mysteries. For they are the stories of ancient people, the stories of civilization from thousands of years before ours, stories from a social structure so foreign, they seem like myths. We know of their pottery, their dances, their garbage pits and domesticated plants and animals; we know nothing of their hearts.
These lines have, since they were first seen from the air in the 1930s, represented all that puzzling, frustrating, terrifying anonymity; they reflect the void on and on into endless, frightening darkness. But if we are willing to listen, they could also teach us a great deal; they teach us of depth and understanding, of acceptance and movement, of penetrating embrace.
Monday, April 07, 2008
OH MY GOD.
I just received what is quite possibly the greatest email of my entire life. My essay "Wish List" (you can find it in two parts further down on this page) has been accepted for publication in a future issue by The Diagram, my NUMBER ONE FAVORITE online lit magazine.
I cannot believe it--this is the long-shot version of my publication hopes come true. It is the one mag I've DREAMED of getting published in! There is almost no way my life could get any better right now.
(I know I said nothing personal in this blog, but this is writing-related, and amazing.)
I just received what is quite possibly the greatest email of my entire life. My essay "Wish List" (you can find it in two parts further down on this page) has been accepted for publication in a future issue by The Diagram, my NUMBER ONE FAVORITE online lit magazine.
I cannot believe it--this is the long-shot version of my publication hopes come true. It is the one mag I've DREAMED of getting published in! There is almost no way my life could get any better right now.
(I know I said nothing personal in this blog, but this is writing-related, and amazing.)
Sunday, April 06, 2008
I found my old memory stick today, hidden in my pencil holder! So I poked around, and found this essay bit I wrote a few years ago, on an assignment about women writers who inspired me. I tinkered with it a little, and actually really like it, so I thought I'd post it here...
American Letters
“The world needs a new ecological wisdom…It needs to be faced with its injustices, to hear voices that speak for the voiceless and powerless. It needs conscious women."
~ Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter
The fields here lie in a different time. Snow dusted over the brown remains of an autumn harvest, crisp beneath my boots. I feel the crunch of snow pack through the soles and into my ankles. To my right, against a row of short pine trees, a tractor sits like an extinct species of great beast—the powerful limbs so frozen and dormant, an history iced over. The blueness of this winter sky, the speckled yellow-brown poking through the snow, always the snow, like a museum against the mountains. I never see people in this field—sometimes cattle, black and lazy, sometimes a brown, thick horse, but never farmers, workers, never overalls or red flannel. No movement, just waiting.
Are there still men who rub brow dirt between thick fingers, who smell the wind and whose brows are wrinkled with thoughts of drought? I turn, searching the fields again for a glimpse of Antonia Shimerda, brown face bent towards a plow. I see tracks cut into the earth, and I wonder where these women have gone.
Miles to downtown, where I park parallel in front of the wine bar, as jazz music lining the sidewalks. Dim lights, record players and fancy cocktails in glasses with thin stems shift among the customers inside, slowly, like the steady, underground pulse of fields growing into mountains. I’ve changed out of boots, into kitten heels and a tea-length skirt. I am standing on the edge of an era, here on the sidewalks of Montana, waiting to learn of which memories this country will be made.
This open land, some of the youngest, truly, on this continent. The stories of cowboy and Indians here come from grandfather’s mouth. Prime rib dinners six dollars, rodeos and prospectors. Parents who have lived “boom and bust” cycles of a mining town and strange metal ladders that bend in half and plunge through the ground searching for black gold, light and heat. We are so young, yet it seems ancient—trapped in traditions we haven’t the generations to understand. Frozen in history while future decisions lie around our ankles. Our exploring hearts lift our eyes to the horizon. We still think of the future as something distant, something to be rounded up and tamed. We are still learning this country; we are tripping over ourselves.
Which pieces of the big sky are small enough to be built upon, drilled into, mined or clear cut? What are we willing to demand of this Earth, who has given us so much> Has the West forgotten its past, the godmother and guardian who fed our ever-expanding families and manifest destiny dreams? Here we stand, like eager teenagers in the face of history, prepared to eat her up beneath our shopping malls and casinos.
The field near my apartment is peppered with stakes and orange tapes. A bulldozer waits for the spring to thaw the ground for development. Development—a conservative word for pounding of earth, pouring of concrete foundations, and the transformation of the land into moderns houses. This is the very dirt of our history, a living museums, an open space book with the lessons of women and men to guide us into a conscious future. Our youth and innocence is just behind us, and this legend still flows in our blood.
Pioneer women from all of Europe, from factories in Virginia and cabins in Northern New Hampshire have made this journey before me. I wore a short sundress but felt the rustling of petticoats around my ankles, the depth and strength of blistered female hands on my shoulders, as I hear the whispers of Willa Cather in my ear… “we belong to a world split in two”.
Willa and Antonia were both women of fiction, women of a transitional time. They were transistions, characters in an American drama which I am just learning is far from over. We put our feet in the dirt, all three of us, and tried to understand what she was telling us. The ground beneath us offers her protection to the infants of hope and exploration. She promise us so much.
My pioneer women knew the sacrifice of their Mother. Antonia knew how to coax life from the expansive fields, worshipping with her own blood, her family and smooth skin. Willa could see the meaning in the rhythm of red wheat swaying. Like drinking strong wine, she took life in two hands and moved poetry from the struggle of every existence side by side, man and Earth.
These were powerful days, strong as wagon ruts in the dust, and just as ephemeral. But these women still live in the winds of the West, holding freedom and creation on either hips, birthing a new country with a weathered smile.
I want to protect this, my adopted country, from the demons of itself. We are all pioneers, founders, first families to the land on which we build our homes. The shoulder of Antonia Shimerda, the horse-drawn travels of Willa Cather, have much to teach us, their daughters, of the possibilities in this new country. They embraced the simplicity of life on Earth, of life with the earth. I stand and face winter in Montana, and feel the wisped grey hairs of females past brush my face with America’s potential.
American Letters
“The world needs a new ecological wisdom…It needs to be faced with its injustices, to hear voices that speak for the voiceless and powerless. It needs conscious women."
~ Sue Monk Kidd, Dance of the Dissident Daughter
The fields here lie in a different time. Snow dusted over the brown remains of an autumn harvest, crisp beneath my boots. I feel the crunch of snow pack through the soles and into my ankles. To my right, against a row of short pine trees, a tractor sits like an extinct species of great beast—the powerful limbs so frozen and dormant, an history iced over. The blueness of this winter sky, the speckled yellow-brown poking through the snow, always the snow, like a museum against the mountains. I never see people in this field—sometimes cattle, black and lazy, sometimes a brown, thick horse, but never farmers, workers, never overalls or red flannel. No movement, just waiting.
Are there still men who rub brow dirt between thick fingers, who smell the wind and whose brows are wrinkled with thoughts of drought? I turn, searching the fields again for a glimpse of Antonia Shimerda, brown face bent towards a plow. I see tracks cut into the earth, and I wonder where these women have gone.
Miles to downtown, where I park parallel in front of the wine bar, as jazz music lining the sidewalks. Dim lights, record players and fancy cocktails in glasses with thin stems shift among the customers inside, slowly, like the steady, underground pulse of fields growing into mountains. I’ve changed out of boots, into kitten heels and a tea-length skirt. I am standing on the edge of an era, here on the sidewalks of Montana, waiting to learn of which memories this country will be made.
This open land, some of the youngest, truly, on this continent. The stories of cowboy and Indians here come from grandfather’s mouth. Prime rib dinners six dollars, rodeos and prospectors. Parents who have lived “boom and bust” cycles of a mining town and strange metal ladders that bend in half and plunge through the ground searching for black gold, light and heat. We are so young, yet it seems ancient—trapped in traditions we haven’t the generations to understand. Frozen in history while future decisions lie around our ankles. Our exploring hearts lift our eyes to the horizon. We still think of the future as something distant, something to be rounded up and tamed. We are still learning this country; we are tripping over ourselves.
Which pieces of the big sky are small enough to be built upon, drilled into, mined or clear cut? What are we willing to demand of this Earth, who has given us so much> Has the West forgotten its past, the godmother and guardian who fed our ever-expanding families and manifest destiny dreams? Here we stand, like eager teenagers in the face of history, prepared to eat her up beneath our shopping malls and casinos.
The field near my apartment is peppered with stakes and orange tapes. A bulldozer waits for the spring to thaw the ground for development. Development—a conservative word for pounding of earth, pouring of concrete foundations, and the transformation of the land into moderns houses. This is the very dirt of our history, a living museums, an open space book with the lessons of women and men to guide us into a conscious future. Our youth and innocence is just behind us, and this legend still flows in our blood.
Pioneer women from all of Europe, from factories in Virginia and cabins in Northern New Hampshire have made this journey before me. I wore a short sundress but felt the rustling of petticoats around my ankles, the depth and strength of blistered female hands on my shoulders, as I hear the whispers of Willa Cather in my ear… “we belong to a world split in two”.
Willa and Antonia were both women of fiction, women of a transitional time. They were transistions, characters in an American drama which I am just learning is far from over. We put our feet in the dirt, all three of us, and tried to understand what she was telling us. The ground beneath us offers her protection to the infants of hope and exploration. She promise us so much.
My pioneer women knew the sacrifice of their Mother. Antonia knew how to coax life from the expansive fields, worshipping with her own blood, her family and smooth skin. Willa could see the meaning in the rhythm of red wheat swaying. Like drinking strong wine, she took life in two hands and moved poetry from the struggle of every existence side by side, man and Earth.
These were powerful days, strong as wagon ruts in the dust, and just as ephemeral. But these women still live in the winds of the West, holding freedom and creation on either hips, birthing a new country with a weathered smile.
I want to protect this, my adopted country, from the demons of itself. We are all pioneers, founders, first families to the land on which we build our homes. The shoulder of Antonia Shimerda, the horse-drawn travels of Willa Cather, have much to teach us, their daughters, of the possibilities in this new country. They embraced the simplicity of life on Earth, of life with the earth. I stand and face winter in Montana, and feel the wisped grey hairs of females past brush my face with America’s potential.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
When I wake up on Red and Judy's farm, in the white, slanted-ceiling bedroom tucked in the upper corner of the house, I wake up into a book. I am a character, a blonde barnyard girl with pigtail braids and muddy-kneed overalls. I stretch, imagining chores I am not actually responsible for with romantic mis-idealism: milking the cow on a little three-legged stool, or pulling smooth white eggs from beneath obliging hens, my freckled hands rooting around in the straw, until I discover the treasure. I can feel the egg cradled in the palm of my hand, as the clear autumn sunlight reveals the floating dust above my homemade quilt.
We eat pancakes for breakfast at a table under a vaulted, exposed-beam ceiling, and I marvel at the strange farm decor: carved wooden roosters perched atop a cabinet, peacock feathers displayed proudly in a vase, as if they were fresh-cut daisies. The butter is almost pure white, and, rather than stick-shaped, sits in heavy spoonfuls in a glass bowl, a wooden knife for spreading. I pour more of the strong maple syrup from an old rust-colored glass bottle; it cuts straight through the pancake, spreading its espresso, wooden flavors through the fluffy batter, making each bite spongy, sticky and ready to dissovle without chewing into my mouth. Today, I am going to uncover the secret of this strange recipe, so unlike the lighter, sweeter grocery-store plastic-bottle lookalike. Red is taking us sugaring.
Red's name came to him honestly, an Amish-style ring of beard circling his chin the color of his hen's breast-feathers. Several years before this day, when I was only seven and met
We eat pancakes for breakfast at a table under a vaulted, exposed-beam ceiling, and I marvel at the strange farm decor: carved wooden roosters perched atop a cabinet, peacock feathers displayed proudly in a vase, as if they were fresh-cut daisies. The butter is almost pure white, and, rather than stick-shaped, sits in heavy spoonfuls in a glass bowl, a wooden knife for spreading. I pour more of the strong maple syrup from an old rust-colored glass bottle; it cuts straight through the pancake, spreading its espresso, wooden flavors through the fluffy batter, making each bite spongy, sticky and ready to dissovle without chewing into my mouth. Today, I am going to uncover the secret of this strange recipe, so unlike the lighter, sweeter grocery-store plastic-bottle lookalike. Red is taking us sugaring.
Red's name came to him honestly, an Amish-style ring of beard circling his chin the color of his hen's breast-feathers. Several years before this day, when I was only seven and met
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