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.

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.

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.

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.

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.