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.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
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
Monday, March 31, 2008
There's No Town Called Big Sur, continued
Watching the sun set 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. We've been waiting for this for so long I don't know what it is anymore. 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 (though we are hours from Los Angeles, so it's all natural fog) makes the whole sky look like the aftermath of an explosion, which I guess is what the sun really is, after all.
He pulls out his camera, the orange and brown strap betraying its age and generation, decades before us. Every time I dig back into my memory for a classic moment to retell, the camera is there; do I remember because of the idea that I should be snapping a shutter on the night, too? Or simply because a photograph exists, a tangible reminder that illuminates the other sensory details more clearly than the average time-from-the-past? The sun still burned as red as a flame, wherever that recollection was born. We tried to lift our bare feet, protruding from the end of the unzipped sleeping bag, into the frame, to capture our presence at this sunset, our participation in this memory, but he couldn't back far enough away. 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 gale-force windy night we spent in a tiny, blue tent, 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."
Watching the sun set 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. We've been waiting for this for so long I don't know what it is anymore. 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 (though we are hours from Los Angeles, so it's all natural fog) makes the whole sky look like the aftermath of an explosion, which I guess is what the sun really is, after all.
He pulls out his camera, the orange and brown strap betraying its age and generation, decades before us. Every time I dig back into my memory for a classic moment to retell, the camera is there; do I remember because of the idea that I should be snapping a shutter on the night, too? Or simply because a photograph exists, a tangible reminder that illuminates the other sensory details more clearly than the average time-from-the-past? The sun still burned as red as a flame, wherever that recollection was born. We tried to lift our bare feet, protruding from the end of the unzipped sleeping bag, into the frame, to capture our presence at this sunset, our participation in this memory, but he couldn't back far enough away. 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 gale-force windy night we spent in a tiny, blue tent, 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."
Sunday, March 30, 2008
There's No Town Called Big Sur
He pulled the car over near a blue highway sign because this was the kind of drive where we would follow tourist arrows and random urges for a croissant. We we listening to "Missed the Boat" by Modest Mouse and I was thinking we had discovered the perfect setting for that track: late California afternoon, highway, sun sliding toward the ocean, road trip, no plans. I had never seen an elephant seal. They live in places that are called "rookeries", which I found adorable and funny, so we followed the sign to a parking lot and looked down over a chain link fence to see a couple of sea mammals. At first, 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. Elephant seals can get sunburned. A young one, which Kevin said was probably an adolescent, moved 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 bellyflops. Elephant seals only have the elephant trunk-like noses when they are in heat--and only the males get the magnificent phallic facial development--so I didn't see any of those, because this was the time mothers had just given birth. They snored in the lowering golden sun and did their exhausting bellyflop dating and sometimes climbed right over a sleeping comrade but somehow maintained an air of grace. In the only photo of me there (with no elephant seals in the background), I am pointing to the beach below, laughing.
I was riding cross-legged in the passenger seat, barefoot, absorbing the new Feist album, reluctant to admit how much "Sea Lion Woman" was growing on me. He drove, because he had seen this highway a few weeks ago, and I never had. It's 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 Ford Mustang convertible, usually red or yellow--doing 70 in the oncoming lane.
The feeling 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.
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 green flip-flops and pulled myself out of the car, surprised by the new chill in the air up here, above the ocean. He left the song playing and we climbed into the back, a spread sleeping bag beneath us and one to keep our bare knees warm while we watched the sun set right into the water.
to be continued...
He pulled the car over near a blue highway sign because this was the kind of drive where we would follow tourist arrows and random urges for a croissant. We we listening to "Missed the Boat" by Modest Mouse and I was thinking we had discovered the perfect setting for that track: late California afternoon, highway, sun sliding toward the ocean, road trip, no plans. I had never seen an elephant seal. They live in places that are called "rookeries", which I found adorable and funny, so we followed the sign to a parking lot and looked down over a chain link fence to see a couple of sea mammals. At first, 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. Elephant seals can get sunburned. A young one, which Kevin said was probably an adolescent, moved 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 bellyflops. Elephant seals only have the elephant trunk-like noses when they are in heat--and only the males get the magnificent phallic facial development--so I didn't see any of those, because this was the time mothers had just given birth. They snored in the lowering golden sun and did their exhausting bellyflop dating and sometimes climbed right over a sleeping comrade but somehow maintained an air of grace. In the only photo of me there (with no elephant seals in the background), I am pointing to the beach below, laughing.
I was riding cross-legged in the passenger seat, barefoot, absorbing the new Feist album, reluctant to admit how much "Sea Lion Woman" was growing on me. He drove, because he had seen this highway a few weeks ago, and I never had. It's 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 Ford Mustang convertible, usually red or yellow--doing 70 in the oncoming lane.
The feeling 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.
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 green flip-flops and pulled myself out of the car, surprised by the new chill in the air up here, above the ocean. He left the song playing and we climbed into the back, a spread sleeping bag beneath us and one to keep our bare knees warm while we watched the sun set right into the water.
to be continued...
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Wish List, continued
- Homesteader abilities in a vaulted-ceiling house. Stretching homemade mozzarella, white and rubber0band tough, pulling tart strands into loping braids. The pungent scent of fermenting yeast and leafy hops from a glass vat in the basement; stirring powdered alchemy with a giant spoon into ales and hefeweizens.
- A large wooden sewing table, a brass foot pedal and a hidden machine, folding up out of the oak panel and centuries past. The rhythmic connection between tapping foot and needle, both dancing up and down into delicate white scars across a landscape of gingham, jersey, denim, cotton.
- Non-leather bound, complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica.
- Endless cycle of new shoes, especially kitten heels, pull-on boots, wrap-around canvas sandals, peep toes, and the ability to walk flawlessly in all of them.
- Room enough for all those shoes.
- The Elements of Style by Strunk & White, foolishly discarded back to the college bookstore, the semester I switched from a Journalism major to Creative Writing.
- A coffee shop with one exposed brick wall, full of cycling local art--black and white photographs, mixed-media collages--where they know my name and that my favorite drink is a chai latte. A wide, sidewalk-facing window lined with bar stool, where I will watch the foot traffic, local characters in flannel, cowboy boots, chiffon dresses or Amish, strolling down the sunny small-town Main Street whenever I need a distraction from the notebook in front of me.
- Any kind of boat, preferably a fast one. It sounds terribly pretentious, but I cannot resist any creation that may move me closer to the shifting, time-fluid water, that would allow me to float out across the waves, into oblivion.
- Sepia-toned, standing globe, balanced on polished mahogany haunches. Country names in thin gold filigree, tiny papier-mache mountains for my fingers to trace in Siberia, Nepal, Colorado, Chile.
- Endless frequent flyer miles, for the places I must see again (the Grand Canyon, Rome), the places I want to show him (the Eiffel Tower, Venetian canals, Monet's gardens at Giverny) and the multitude of places I fear I will never have the time to see even once (Costa Rican jungles, Amsterdam and Holland tulips, the beach cliffs of the Peruvian Andes, Great Pyramids, Irish pubs, Vancouver winters, Mexican honeymoon sunsets)...
- A clothesline in a wide, rolling green backyard.
- Just a rope, hanging a single tire, from a single tree, in my own front yard.
- A simpler time.
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Wish List (a new essay)
- Dirt that exists for my hands to sink into. Cool & pebbled, birthing sunset tomatoes and prickly cucumbers. I would never wear dusty olive canvas gloves in exchange for the sense of touch. I will go barefoot and carry lines of dirt in the cuticles of my toenails. I will learn what it means to sweat.
- A dark tan, short-waisted trench coat with lots of brass buckles, zippers.
- Fireplace, stone or brick, that holds real logs, burns licking, snapping flames. We will chop our own firewood, heaving the cold axe like a pendulum, the silver blade whistling past my ear. The cold air cracks with a splinter, bits of wood flying into my red flannel shirt. My pulsing heart, my heavy breath visible in November air.
- The lightest, most unobtrusive laptop computer ever made, so that I may carry it on my palms to the top of a hill I can call my property to survey the land the only way I know how.
- Only organic linens--cotton or bamboo sheets and towels, soft and unassuming in sage, mint, sea mist green or ivory. Neutral. Safe for his skin.
- All four seasons to their extreme. Mountains covered with winter snow, penetrating ice; blustery autumn explosion leaves, crisp apples and cracking pumpkins; dewdrop-wet shining grass, pastel tulips, purple croci, birds and blooming spring with a front porch; sweaty, sandy wave-crashing summers of sea, kelp and conch shells. Montana winter, New Hampshire autumn, New York spring and California summer. Four hourses.
- Real pearls, long, looping strands of iridescent pink and white oyster babies.
- A claw-fotted bathtub, big enough for a family, in the middle of a grey marble bathroom, with antique gold faucets, surrounded by water-smoother river stones.
- A jungle zipline tour--to speed like a blur of light through electric green tropical canopies and feel leaves almost whipping against my bare legs, almost.
- To always live near water that moves. To continue the spiritual path of Naticook Lake, Cayuga Lake, Hyalite Resevoir, and the Pacific Ocean.
- A room full of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, full. A ladder on castors and a giant chair.
- An enormous white wooden desk, in a room with hardwood floors and a heathered blue rug, set in front of a wall of French doors. The view of the water, always windy, blue- and white-striped umbrellas, old driftwood paths to walk when I cannot sit at the desk any longer.
- Knowledge of the night sky. To know in my bones and speak out loud words like cassiopeia, ursa major, sagittarius, orion.
- The ability to create a rainstorm, to orchestrate the volume and timbre of thunder, and the hue of grey in the sky. Escaping into enormous thunderstorms that last all day, a stack of books and a warm mug. Wishes for water, bathrub, library, fireplace are all born of this unending thirst for a long-lasting rain.
to be continued...
Monday, March 24, 2008
Observations at Stewart Park, Saturday 3/22
Seagulls swarm the shore, swooping down from the surreal, cloudless sky at the sight of a plastic bag full of broken bread. The wind today is cold but not biting, the sun warming either it or me. I watch the old man in a grey coat scatter the bread. Cayuga Lake looks almost as an ocean today, the wind coaxing small whitecaps out of the waves. My hands jammed deep into my fleece-lined pockets remind me that speing comes slowly, and it's early yet.
Lately, I've been missing California. It's not the weather I miss, exactly, but the atmosphere. Winds blow differently. Water, I think, means something else. but days like today, when the crystals of winter ice are splintering in the background like a thousand falling bells, but I can crack the car window and wear only a hoodie and let in the possibility of bare feet and wet grass, I remember why I came back to the Northeast.
Spring here is a real celebration, a full-blown breaking open of the chest cavity into song. Our beaches here in the middle of New York'd treed hills don't have sand, but those tiny crashes are wave enough for me. It is only because I have lived through the heavy grey of winter's veil, and in fact loved the snow falling and packed into lawn-shaped squares like a new white earth on which to tread, that I am rewarded with the screm-out-loud joy of my chapped fingertips in the first out-the-car-window air. Here, the first thing water means is an icy windsheild and a driveay to shovel, but we still love the lake in spring.
Seagulls swarm the shore, swooping down from the surreal, cloudless sky at the sight of a plastic bag full of broken bread. The wind today is cold but not biting, the sun warming either it or me. I watch the old man in a grey coat scatter the bread. Cayuga Lake looks almost as an ocean today, the wind coaxing small whitecaps out of the waves. My hands jammed deep into my fleece-lined pockets remind me that speing comes slowly, and it's early yet.
Lately, I've been missing California. It's not the weather I miss, exactly, but the atmosphere. Winds blow differently. Water, I think, means something else. but days like today, when the crystals of winter ice are splintering in the background like a thousand falling bells, but I can crack the car window and wear only a hoodie and let in the possibility of bare feet and wet grass, I remember why I came back to the Northeast.
Spring here is a real celebration, a full-blown breaking open of the chest cavity into song. Our beaches here in the middle of New York'd treed hills don't have sand, but those tiny crashes are wave enough for me. It is only because I have lived through the heavy grey of winter's veil, and in fact loved the snow falling and packed into lawn-shaped squares like a new white earth on which to tread, that I am rewarded with the screm-out-loud joy of my chapped fingertips in the first out-the-car-window air. Here, the first thing water means is an icy windsheild and a driveay to shovel, but we still love the lake in spring.
Friday, March 21, 2008
More forays into the experiments of form -- nonfiction needs some new form words, I think. Poetry is allowed to call anything poetry, but nonfiction is all about the essay. I don't think this thing here is a poem, but an essay? Well, maybe. Maybe an essay is whatever I want it to be and that is more freeing.
I wrote this a little while ago. I really like it, but I don't know if this is the right form for these bits and pieces. I created the "Top Five" approach because Kevin & I play this game where we give each other a category and have to choose our top five (female singers, breakfast foods, articles of clothing, etc.) We actually did this once, and these were our answers. Then I elaborated on what actually took place, to make it more interesting for you all...
Top Five Favorite Dates*
*Date is loosely define as any sequence of hours spent alone together, whether formally arranged or happenstance, during which, kissing, holding of hands or a general sense of romance may have occurred.
His
1. As a Christmas present, you took me for one night to a rustic cabin at Elkhorn Hot Springs (which has since been shut down for fire code violations). We soaked in the outdoor pool and used the indoor sauna made of slick wood; we played trivial pursuit in our cabin which was sagging under the weight of so much snow. The wood stove kept filling the room up with smoke. We made mac and cheese and vegetarian hot dogs. You were sick in the middle of the cold night; we still don’t know if it was the smoke or the hot dogs but you haven’t eaten them since.
2. You came to Montana to see me for spring break, when we were still new. I had been in school there for two months; I had been waiting to see you stand by the mountains. We walked to the Co-op in the snowy streets to buy premade take-out. In my dorm room we spread the comforter on the tile floor and watched “Wonder Boys” while we ate broccoli cheddar soup and couscous salad, then made love there on the floor.
3. I had only been to Lava Lake in the winter, when it was an ice sheet I could walk right onto, so I took you back in the summer. We hiked through a meadow and over a wooden bridge where we felt the spray. When we got there, I raced ahead with the camera, to take a picture of your face the first time you saw it. But I was awestruck and forgot. We sat for hours on the rock and wet our feet; when I saw a chipmunk, I turned too quickly and dropped my lens cap into the rocks, so a part of that day remains.
4. See #3, hers.
5. You were taking a nap when I asked if I could join you. You said my eyes looked like sunflowers and it gave me the courage to kiss you, for the first time.
Hers
1. I drove from NH to NY to see you on New Year’s Eve, the first one we would spend together, in the middle of a year during which we barely saw each other at all. I was dressed up for you and you took me to the Autumn Café where we shared carrot ginger soup and enchiladas. Full of cooks with dreadlocks and patched pants, I felt so warm and at home.
2. See #2, his.
3. We had weeks of winter break together and spent it all in upstate NY, finally ending up in Ithaca, in my third floor apartment. We went to Moosewood, and you were embarrassed because I buttoned one you missed in your fly in public. After we saw “A Very Long Engagement” with subtitles, at the independent movie theatre, we walked home. There was snow on the ground and it started snowing again, and the Christmas lights were still up all over town.
4. In the middle of a sticky July, when we lived together in Montana even though it had been less than a year, you came home from chemistry lab and pulled me out the door and drove me around Ted Turner’s ranch to the crumbling wooden building we call the shack. And we just stood beneath it, pretending it could be our house, and saw the buffalo in the distance.
5. We had been lying on my bed for hours and you said “I don’t know what to do. Because I like you but I’m leaving. And I don’t know whether I should kiss you or run out that door.” But then you did kiss me, for the very first time.
I wrote this a little while ago. I really like it, but I don't know if this is the right form for these bits and pieces. I created the "Top Five" approach because Kevin & I play this game where we give each other a category and have to choose our top five (female singers, breakfast foods, articles of clothing, etc.) We actually did this once, and these were our answers. Then I elaborated on what actually took place, to make it more interesting for you all...
Top Five Favorite Dates*
*Date is loosely define as any sequence of hours spent alone together, whether formally arranged or happenstance, during which, kissing, holding of hands or a general sense of romance may have occurred.
His
1. As a Christmas present, you took me for one night to a rustic cabin at Elkhorn Hot Springs (which has since been shut down for fire code violations). We soaked in the outdoor pool and used the indoor sauna made of slick wood; we played trivial pursuit in our cabin which was sagging under the weight of so much snow. The wood stove kept filling the room up with smoke. We made mac and cheese and vegetarian hot dogs. You were sick in the middle of the cold night; we still don’t know if it was the smoke or the hot dogs but you haven’t eaten them since.
2. You came to Montana to see me for spring break, when we were still new. I had been in school there for two months; I had been waiting to see you stand by the mountains. We walked to the Co-op in the snowy streets to buy premade take-out. In my dorm room we spread the comforter on the tile floor and watched “Wonder Boys” while we ate broccoli cheddar soup and couscous salad, then made love there on the floor.
3. I had only been to Lava Lake in the winter, when it was an ice sheet I could walk right onto, so I took you back in the summer. We hiked through a meadow and over a wooden bridge where we felt the spray. When we got there, I raced ahead with the camera, to take a picture of your face the first time you saw it. But I was awestruck and forgot. We sat for hours on the rock and wet our feet; when I saw a chipmunk, I turned too quickly and dropped my lens cap into the rocks, so a part of that day remains.
4. See #3, hers.
5. You were taking a nap when I asked if I could join you. You said my eyes looked like sunflowers and it gave me the courage to kiss you, for the first time.
Hers
1. I drove from NH to NY to see you on New Year’s Eve, the first one we would spend together, in the middle of a year during which we barely saw each other at all. I was dressed up for you and you took me to the Autumn Café where we shared carrot ginger soup and enchiladas. Full of cooks with dreadlocks and patched pants, I felt so warm and at home.
2. See #2, his.
3. We had weeks of winter break together and spent it all in upstate NY, finally ending up in Ithaca, in my third floor apartment. We went to Moosewood, and you were embarrassed because I buttoned one you missed in your fly in public. After we saw “A Very Long Engagement” with subtitles, at the independent movie theatre, we walked home. There was snow on the ground and it started snowing again, and the Christmas lights were still up all over town.
4. In the middle of a sticky July, when we lived together in Montana even though it had been less than a year, you came home from chemistry lab and pulled me out the door and drove me around Ted Turner’s ranch to the crumbling wooden building we call the shack. And we just stood beneath it, pretending it could be our house, and saw the buffalo in the distance.
5. We had been lying on my bed for hours and you said “I don’t know what to do. Because I like you but I’m leaving. And I don’t know whether I should kiss you or run out that door.” But then you did kiss me, for the very first time.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
7:30 AM: I deboard in Los Angeles International Airport, feeling again like a child, my loose brown pants billowing as I walk the endless hallways of airline travel, following the rush of people to the nearest monitor, gate, coffeestand, magazine rack, following without understanding. I find a map and a gate number and a route to take, stop at a television to see the results of last night's NCAA game. Ohio State lost, and my dad had them picked to win it all, so I call to console him. My head is reeling, and I desperately need food and caffeine.
8:00 AM: After eating a croissant, with a "Venti" paper cup of coffee in my hand, my shoulders aching to loose this backpack, I discover a singular miracle of LAX: a tiny, cement outdoor patio. Fresh air in an airport. The greatest of paradox, the reason I so despise air travel. I push through the glass doors and breathe deeply the humid, smoky morning air of a coastal metropolis. I crouch in a corner and peel the lid off my steaming coffee, still too hot to drink. There are smokers and cell phone chatters and the patio is crowded with people in suits who know where they're headed for the day, but all I want is to stand on my concrete bench and peer over the wall, over the barbed wire fence, over the tarmack and into the mountains I know are out there in the smog. After a few minutes, the smoke makes me crave the cigarettes I gave up years ago, so I retreat inside to bunk out at my next gate.
8:30 AM: Kevin calls, Kevin calls! He can't wait either, and I board the plane feeling exhausted and euphoric.
9:00 AM: I've never been on such a short flight, such a little hop, but it was worth the extra money, extra ticket, to get there faster and without a rental car. I've never been to California. I've never moved like this before. The impulses he arouses are unexplainable. The plane bends sharply to the left, like a downhill highway curve and we are over the mountains, directly over the mountains. They are all I can see. I realize, though I grew up among mountains, though I now live at the foot of the famously omnipresent Rockies, I have never seen mountains from above. Although its still March, these tops are green, draped in summer green, like a photograph of the ocean with shadows where the sunlight should be. Deep, penetrating waves of ancient rock stretched for miles, shrouding themselves for me in the distance, waiting for my arrival, welcoming me with the sheer terror of their mass, the realization of metal that could so easily curve around these boulders. I'm waiting to land, and tears come into my eyes and I whisper "thank you" to the pilot, for bringing me here this way.
8:00 AM: After eating a croissant, with a "Venti" paper cup of coffee in my hand, my shoulders aching to loose this backpack, I discover a singular miracle of LAX: a tiny, cement outdoor patio. Fresh air in an airport. The greatest of paradox, the reason I so despise air travel. I push through the glass doors and breathe deeply the humid, smoky morning air of a coastal metropolis. I crouch in a corner and peel the lid off my steaming coffee, still too hot to drink. There are smokers and cell phone chatters and the patio is crowded with people in suits who know where they're headed for the day, but all I want is to stand on my concrete bench and peer over the wall, over the barbed wire fence, over the tarmack and into the mountains I know are out there in the smog. After a few minutes, the smoke makes me crave the cigarettes I gave up years ago, so I retreat inside to bunk out at my next gate.
8:30 AM: Kevin calls, Kevin calls! He can't wait either, and I board the plane feeling exhausted and euphoric.
9:00 AM: I've never been on such a short flight, such a little hop, but it was worth the extra money, extra ticket, to get there faster and without a rental car. I've never been to California. I've never moved like this before. The impulses he arouses are unexplainable. The plane bends sharply to the left, like a downhill highway curve and we are over the mountains, directly over the mountains. They are all I can see. I realize, though I grew up among mountains, though I now live at the foot of the famously omnipresent Rockies, I have never seen mountains from above. Although its still March, these tops are green, draped in summer green, like a photograph of the ocean with shadows where the sunlight should be. Deep, penetrating waves of ancient rock stretched for miles, shrouding themselves for me in the distance, waiting for my arrival, welcoming me with the sheer terror of their mass, the realization of metal that could so easily curve around these boulders. I'm waiting to land, and tears come into my eyes and I whisper "thank you" to the pilot, for bringing me here this way.
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