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.