I receive eight of them in the mail, stamped, signed and sealed by the University of Oregon – the invitations to my very first public reading. They’re cut lengthwise ten inches on slate blue cardstock and then folded in half. A bold black and white photo of rock cliffs on the Oregon coast is centered across the four-inch front of each card and the University logo is offset on the bottom right. The header reads: “You are invited to the EIGHTH ANNUAL NORTHWEST PERSPECTIVES ESSAY CONTEST READING.”
I flip it open:
Thursday, June 7, 7:30 p.m.
Alumni Lounge, Gerlinger Hall
1468 University Street
University of Oregon
Opening remarks by this year’s judge, Molly Gloss, the author of four novels, including The Jump Off Creek, which was a finalist for the PEN-Faulkner Award for American Fiction and winner of an Oregon Book Award for fiction. She has also written numerous short stories and essays. Gloss often teaches writing through workshops and college programs. A native Oregonian, she lives in Portland.
This is followed by a list of six names (3 winners in the open category and 3 in the student category) and the title of each essay. “Free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.”
I must have read it three times, flipped it over in my hands, opened and closed the lovely top flap and admired the photo. I decide to hang on to two invitations and mail the rest to friends, even though most people obviously can’t come. How often in life do we really get to bask in our accomplishments and totally dweeb out about a little slip of paper? No harm done in that! All I did was check the mail and I feel miles better than I did this morning (this morning – a.k.a. day 11 of no phone call from Cass).
I’ve printed out the essay I’m reading in 14 point font and put it in page protectors. I know to do this much – the page protectors prevent the sound of pages rustling into the microphone. Beyond that, I’m not sure how else to prepare besides practice reading out loud. Of course, there is the question of what to wear but that was decided weeks ago and without hesitation. Oh, my heart is still breaking but maybe grand distractions and a supportive community of writers awaits me on my west coast adventure.
Forget the empty airport gate arrival. I have to charge forth, not look back or even look ahead for her. The movie keeps playing in my mind – this one now of hope, where she surprises me at the airport and is all apologies and hearts and everything is back and safe again. Instead, I have to walk off that plane and refuse to stop moving until I’ve read the last word on the last page of that essay. I cannot flinch because she will not be there, even if sometimes I think I want her to be. I don’t know how else to direct my energy and so I must turn it towards perseverance. It’s a small reading. Small recognition. A pebble in a two-ton truck. But still, it’s something.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Attempt at a Villanelle
Victims' Villanelle (First draft - I've never done this before, it's hard! - I used a newspaper article.)
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes the drive to work is the least of his worries.
The blue-cream Carolina sky just a backdrop to his teaching ho-hums and rural drive.
He kisses his wife, her azalea cheeks still flushed with sleep as she hurries.
Northbound across the Blue Ridge, while he ties his laces, takes his vitamins, snatches his keys,
Sixtos, Magana, Masias, y Ruiz sing with the Mexican radio, “canto no llores,” but back home they always heard it live.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes the drive to work is the least of his worries.
He cruises in his Range Rover, traveling south, freckled left arm out the window to catch the breeze
while the workers count wages, Sixtos daydreaming of his sweet Maria and the necklace he’d like buy.
He kisses his wife, her azalea cheeks still flushed with sleep as she hurries.
Later, she will say to the reporters: “My husband was a man of integrity,”
Explaining why he swerved left to outwit Sixtos and his compadres as they oversteered, danced, and jived.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes the drive to work is the least of his worries
The papers he graded drift across the median and settle amidst the daisies.
The carnage of torsos and decapitations, a freckled left arm, strewn across fifty yards like candy from a piñata scattered for the passers-by.
He kisses his wife, her azalea cheeks still flushed with sleep as she hurries.
Counseling and condolences are offered to the authorities.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes.
He kisses his wife.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes the drive to work is the least of his worries.
The blue-cream Carolina sky just a backdrop to his teaching ho-hums and rural drive.
He kisses his wife, her azalea cheeks still flushed with sleep as she hurries.
Northbound across the Blue Ridge, while he ties his laces, takes his vitamins, snatches his keys,
Sixtos, Magana, Masias, y Ruiz sing with the Mexican radio, “canto no llores,” but back home they always heard it live.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes the drive to work is the least of his worries.
He cruises in his Range Rover, traveling south, freckled left arm out the window to catch the breeze
while the workers count wages, Sixtos daydreaming of his sweet Maria and the necklace he’d like buy.
He kisses his wife, her azalea cheeks still flushed with sleep as she hurries.
Later, she will say to the reporters: “My husband was a man of integrity,”
Explaining why he swerved left to outwit Sixtos and his compadres as they oversteered, danced, and jived.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes the drive to work is the least of his worries
The papers he graded drift across the median and settle amidst the daisies.
The carnage of torsos and decapitations, a freckled left arm, strewn across fifty yards like candy from a piñata scattered for the passers-by.
He kisses his wife, her azalea cheeks still flushed with sleep as she hurries.
Counseling and condolences are offered to the authorities.
He wakes up after 36 years of marriage and assumes.
He kisses his wife.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Windind Down
It’s becoming a tradition to stop at the Red Thicket Gallery on my way home from work. With a beep of the horn and a hand wave through the sun roof, I get a warm welcome and holler from the gallery owners, my friends, DT and Raz. I keep a beer cold in the fridge during my shift at the coffeehouse, then store it under the seat for the fifteen minute drive to the gallery, where we pop tops and sit down on the new deck for an end of the day drink.
It’s small, but it feels like the beginning of something. Certainly, it’s a commitment to living here, in this new place, one county over from the South Toe Valley. It’s also a commitment to friendship and good, neighborly ways. All three of us are here for a while, if life goes easy on us, by which I mean none of us plan on leaving any time soon. Since so many of the friends I make at the craft school come and go, good friends that stick around can be hard to find.
I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself to read constantly and produce new words daily – even though right now I am on my little break between semesters. I’ve got to remember to take a breather. Or at least that I can read and write without pressure and without critique. Just for fun – imagine that! Time to pop the top on my brain, too, I guess…get in there and mix things up a bit, relax, and breathe deeply.
It’s small, but it feels like the beginning of something. Certainly, it’s a commitment to living here, in this new place, one county over from the South Toe Valley. It’s also a commitment to friendship and good, neighborly ways. All three of us are here for a while, if life goes easy on us, by which I mean none of us plan on leaving any time soon. Since so many of the friends I make at the craft school come and go, good friends that stick around can be hard to find.
I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself to read constantly and produce new words daily – even though right now I am on my little break between semesters. I’ve got to remember to take a breather. Or at least that I can read and write without pressure and without critique. Just for fun – imagine that! Time to pop the top on my brain, too, I guess…get in there and mix things up a bit, relax, and breathe deeply.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Book Madness
Website updates! I fixed the about/bio page, added a new obsession on the homepage sidebar, and updated the achievements page. Soon, there will be photos posted daily to chronicle my 4-week journey to Oregon and Washington. Suggestions to the homepage are welcome – it’s my first.
Books I’ve read for school or hobby this year that knocked my socks off:
The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr (nonfiction)
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (fiction)
Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller (nonfiction)
Labors of the Heart by Claire Davis (fiction)
Wanting Only to Be Heard by Jack Driscoll (fiction)
Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt (nonfiction)
Night Swimming by Pete Fromm (fiction)
The Hermit’s Story by Rick Bass (fiction)
Burning Fence by Craig Lesley (part one, anyway) (nonfiction)
This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff (nonfiction)
A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel (nonfiction)
Name All the Animals by Alison Smith (nonfiction)
Rampant by Marvin Bell (poetry)
The Brink by Peter Sears (poetry)
Overtime by Joseph Millar (poetry – FAVORITE)
In the Surgical Theater by Dana Levin (poetry)
Collected Works of William Stafford (poetry)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album by Joan Didion (old favorites)
I Sailed With Magellan by Stuart Dybek (particularly “We Didn’t”) (fiction)
Splitting and Binding by Patiann Rogers (like Mary Oliver only more cosmic and intelligent) (poetry)
Becoming the Villainess by Jeannine Hall Gailey (poetry)
Facts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux (poetry)
Books I’ve read for school or hobby this year that knocked my socks off:
The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr (nonfiction)
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (fiction)
Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller (nonfiction)
Labors of the Heart by Claire Davis (fiction)
Wanting Only to Be Heard by Jack Driscoll (fiction)
Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt (nonfiction)
Night Swimming by Pete Fromm (fiction)
The Hermit’s Story by Rick Bass (fiction)
Burning Fence by Craig Lesley (part one, anyway) (nonfiction)
This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff (nonfiction)
A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel (nonfiction)
Name All the Animals by Alison Smith (nonfiction)
Rampant by Marvin Bell (poetry)
The Brink by Peter Sears (poetry)
Overtime by Joseph Millar (poetry – FAVORITE)
In the Surgical Theater by Dana Levin (poetry)
Collected Works of William Stafford (poetry)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album by Joan Didion (old favorites)
I Sailed With Magellan by Stuart Dybek (particularly “We Didn’t”) (fiction)
Splitting and Binding by Patiann Rogers (like Mary Oliver only more cosmic and intelligent) (poetry)
Becoming the Villainess by Jeannine Hall Gailey (poetry)
Facts About the Moon by Dorianne Laux (poetry)
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Baby Steps
Baby steps. That’s what it takes to come back from a low blow. It’s starts with abundant self care. I eat soy ice cream for dinner and watch a writerly movie (Almost Famous). I submit to another writing contest and pat myself on the back. I clear off my desk, sort my mail, fold my clothes. Baby steps.
The next step involves picking up the pieces and sewing the narrative back together. Work here. Play there. Sing here. Eat there. Sleep well.
I have a week and a half before I leave for Oregon. A week and a half to regain the strength and make the movie of Cass picking me up at the airport stop reeling across my mind’s eye. There will not be anyone there because I refuse to call anyone else. Call them to what? Say hello to me? No. The first thing I have to do is get in the car and drive to Corvallis, where I will stay with a friend so that I may wake up the next morning and drive to Eugene for the reading and workshop. It is this moment, or rather, the first 24 hours, that I am the most nervous about.
Baby steps. I cannot stumble. I have to prepare my spirit to believe, as I walk across the stage, that I have something profound to say and that I AM somebody. I must believe, with each shuffle of my heels up to the podium, that I WILL become the published writer I want to be. Every cell, every breath, ever flutter of my heart has to believe this so that I may read my essay with all the assurance I can muster.
A week and a half to regain strength. A week and a half to mature miles with my heart. A week and a half to complete a last minute freelance assignment that’s going to pay for the unexpected costs of the rental car (now necessary in the absence of Cass’ ride). A week and a half.
The next step involves picking up the pieces and sewing the narrative back together. Work here. Play there. Sing here. Eat there. Sleep well.
I have a week and a half before I leave for Oregon. A week and a half to regain the strength and make the movie of Cass picking me up at the airport stop reeling across my mind’s eye. There will not be anyone there because I refuse to call anyone else. Call them to what? Say hello to me? No. The first thing I have to do is get in the car and drive to Corvallis, where I will stay with a friend so that I may wake up the next morning and drive to Eugene for the reading and workshop. It is this moment, or rather, the first 24 hours, that I am the most nervous about.
Baby steps. I cannot stumble. I have to prepare my spirit to believe, as I walk across the stage, that I have something profound to say and that I AM somebody. I must believe, with each shuffle of my heels up to the podium, that I WILL become the published writer I want to be. Every cell, every breath, ever flutter of my heart has to believe this so that I may read my essay with all the assurance I can muster.
A week and a half to regain strength. A week and a half to mature miles with my heart. A week and a half to complete a last minute freelance assignment that’s going to pay for the unexpected costs of the rental car (now necessary in the absence of Cass’ ride). A week and a half.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Week's End
Mono test is negative. Nothing more to do. Wait until Tuesday to talk to the Doctor, when she has time. Meanwhile, I can't seem to get enough rest. My tonsils are perpetually enlarged.
I try to distract myself. I play music all the time. I read any spare moment I can get. I rent a movie. I go to the city for a night. I attend events. But always, at the end of the day, there is the sting-sigh of reality when my head hits the pillow and all is silent in my world of self-made distraction. Five days and no phone call. Not that I made it easy for her to call back, but still. That's five days of open, hanging, anger that's slowly clawing at me. I can't make the movie of her with someone else stop playing in my mind.
The fatigue/tonsil/weird sickness exacerbates my sadness; makes me feel more defeated. I have to be nice to myself during this time. I'm sorry I just can't seem to pull together a decent blog post. But I'm working on it, trying to add ingredients to the stew of life that will come out clean and well-rounded, thick and nourishing, like soup - and life - ought to be.
I try to distract myself. I play music all the time. I read any spare moment I can get. I rent a movie. I go to the city for a night. I attend events. But always, at the end of the day, there is the sting-sigh of reality when my head hits the pillow and all is silent in my world of self-made distraction. Five days and no phone call. Not that I made it easy for her to call back, but still. That's five days of open, hanging, anger that's slowly clawing at me. I can't make the movie of her with someone else stop playing in my mind.
The fatigue/tonsil/weird sickness exacerbates my sadness; makes me feel more defeated. I have to be nice to myself during this time. I'm sorry I just can't seem to pull together a decent blog post. But I'm working on it, trying to add ingredients to the stew of life that will come out clean and well-rounded, thick and nourishing, like soup - and life - ought to be.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Message Board
Ok. This is what I want. I’m putting it out there. Carving it into the cosmos. And then letting it go. Hello world! I deserve the best:
1. Someone who understands this quote and can live up to it:
“Don’t come at me with the sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life—the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose shell most be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.” (Dorothy Allison)
2. Someone who can sing to me like Josh Ritter in the song “Kathleen,” saying:
“All the other girls here are stars, you are the northern lights!”
3. Someone who “has their own thing” and therefore understands the quiet, solitude, and faith necessary for the writing life.
4. Someone who is balanced.
Meanwhile: I’m here. I’m trying to publish a book and save the world by being a nice person (a slow and steady form of peace activism). Sometimes I sing with children. Their innocence and strength of heart fills me up so fully that my gratitude for life comes out in tears.
1. Someone who understands this quote and can live up to it:
“Don’t come at me with the sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life—the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose shell most be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.” (Dorothy Allison)
2. Someone who can sing to me like Josh Ritter in the song “Kathleen,” saying:
“All the other girls here are stars, you are the northern lights!”
3. Someone who “has their own thing” and therefore understands the quiet, solitude, and faith necessary for the writing life.
4. Someone who is balanced.
Meanwhile: I’m here. I’m trying to publish a book and save the world by being a nice person (a slow and steady form of peace activism). Sometimes I sing with children. Their innocence and strength of heart fills me up so fully that my gratitude for life comes out in tears.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Done
Sorry friends; the broken-hearted find it difficult to write. Truer yet, the broken-hearted know there is truth in words, and so sometimes turn away from them for fear the power they hold.
Cass was unfaithful and that’s all I’ll say. Single again and that’s fine with me. It’s where we were headed anyway…But I won’t say the circumstances don’t tear at my flesh like maggots gone rabid. Disturbed? Imagine more. Imagine a sleepless night, the film reels ticking nervously in your mind’s eye from dusk until dawn. Imagine scenes so marred that even the soft call of birds in the morning light does not cheer you up. You rise. Put on music because you don’t want to write, don’t want to read. You stare and stare and stare. Eventually you eat an apple, drenched in all the salt tears you have wept.
What matters is what I have right now, in this moment. And all I have is who I am in the world any given second. The seconds seem to add up into solid moments and ways of being, but really each breath is just a random dot on a placeless map. We like to attach emotion and meaning to those “moments.” It’s what we build the stories of our lives on. Hope hurts in the end for all its projections.
I am weary of the hurt. Would rather write my book, hide out in the mountains, give my heart only to friends who know how to cherish it. I am rock. I am steady. I am nothing but here. Now. Free of past or future. That’s the only way to endure.
Cass was unfaithful and that’s all I’ll say. Single again and that’s fine with me. It’s where we were headed anyway…But I won’t say the circumstances don’t tear at my flesh like maggots gone rabid. Disturbed? Imagine more. Imagine a sleepless night, the film reels ticking nervously in your mind’s eye from dusk until dawn. Imagine scenes so marred that even the soft call of birds in the morning light does not cheer you up. You rise. Put on music because you don’t want to write, don’t want to read. You stare and stare and stare. Eventually you eat an apple, drenched in all the salt tears you have wept.
What matters is what I have right now, in this moment. And all I have is who I am in the world any given second. The seconds seem to add up into solid moments and ways of being, but really each breath is just a random dot on a placeless map. We like to attach emotion and meaning to those “moments.” It’s what we build the stories of our lives on. Hope hurts in the end for all its projections.
I am weary of the hurt. Would rather write my book, hide out in the mountains, give my heart only to friends who know how to cherish it. I am rock. I am steady. I am nothing but here. Now. Free of past or future. That’s the only way to endure.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
The Continuing Saga of Bacteria and Words
How is this possible? My sore throat is back but I feel perfectly strong and rested. Putting in MD and Acupuncturist calls tomorrow. Ugh! What more can I do – I’ve been on house arrest for six days, not having left the mountain ONCE!
I don’t know where my other writing voice went, but this other one is still siphoning cells from my brain. This is how it goes – the writing life is a process of surrender…So tonight, another excerpt from the same draft story, picking up where I left off two nights ago:
The consequences of those early morning rides finally caught up to us on an advanced trail ride one afternoon during fifth session. A 13-year-old camper named Heather had fallen instantly for Casino, hurrying down after lunch chores each day to give him an extra brushing before saddling up. Seeing her confidence with him, Tina and I obliged when she requested to ride Casino for the remainder of the session. Tina would ride Blaze, a complacent Quarter horse cross, sent to us mid-summer that stood 16 hands tall. Heather could ride second in line on Casino, who had by now grown accustomed to leading but might fare well with the transition. I held position in back, the exhaust from Lady’s ass profuse enough to keep Vegas at a safe distance without my command.
Our line must have been ten or twelve horses long and as I imagined Tina and Blaze rounding the bend from the fire road that opened up to Main Beach, I heard a commotion at the head of the line. Tina called on Channel 2, “Casino’s bolted. I need you up front now. Hold the line!” Fear hijacked her voice and while I steered Vegas through brush alongside the line of horses, I heard Heather’s rabbit-kill shrieks fading in the distance. By now, Blaze had worked himself into a fit; sidestepping and circling in the middle of the trail while the rest of the line whinnied and backed up. I had left a camper on Lady to hold the rear of the line and could only hope she’d play the part. At the sight of Vegas, Blaze took off across Main Beach, Tina cussing in Czech all the way, though by the time they crossed the beach and re-entered the woods, she had him under control again. Surely she knew enough not to chase Casino, an act that would only hasten his revolt. Vegas seemed nonchalant and stepped into position at the head of the line without a fuss, which allowed me to assure the harried campers.
If my own fear felt as poignant as I remember it, it did not show when I turned to face the campers. Casino had bolted, camper and all, an act I never experienced as a rider, the mysterious threat of it echoing in me as persistently as Heather’s screams. Somehow her wails had embarrassed me. My imagination could relate to every trill of uncertainty in her screams, a confession that made me feel all the more childish. Though this would be my best summer at Y-Camp, holding the line with Vegas that afternoon I’d had to face up to the severity of my own lack of experience – as both a rider and a would-be lover.
Seconds felt like minutes and the row of riders, myself included, stared through the woods making a slow arc from left to right with our collective gaze, following the loop we knew the trail made, though we could not see the other side of it through the dense forest. The only sign that Casino stayed roughly on trail was the continual call of Heather’s shrill voice, which despite its pitch, I knew proved she hadn’t been knocked senseless by a low-hanging branch. But as our eyes scanned the woods, by now at the far edge of the periphery where the trail should have looped horse and rider back around, Heather’s cries grew distant instead of near. In that moment I realized Casino had run off trail, for the fire road ended, leaving only two options: barreling through the woods toward the property line or to looping back around towards our diligent line.
Tina radioed again: “Bring the line across the beach now, and loop around. Casino’s found a patch of blackberry at West Beach. We’ll meet you near the far end of the loop.” Again, the curved tones of her Czech accent exuded confidence. West Beach. I hadn’t thought of that but it made sense now. West Beach fanned out at the end of an un-groomed trail Tina and I frequently ran the horses on during Chapel, a trail far enough from the worshipping campers so as not to disturb their silent prayers with the sound of pounding hooves and our uncensored whoops and hollers.
By the day’s end, Tina and I both needed a beer. Being underage and on-duty this was out of the question, so we rallied the rest of the AHE team members for a swim in the cold Sandy River to ease our sweated thigh muscles and lick the corral dirt from our pores. Carl, our team director, had been on Channel 2 during Casino’s bolt and commended us for a job well done. While he hadn’t seen the fears I’d hidden from the campers, he had heard me call to Tina over the radio and suggest they join back up with the group on foot, a move Carl approved of for the psychological relief it provided our young camper. He’d also gotten wind that Tina and I worked with Heather in the corral later, helping her back on Casino and chaperoning five laps of trotting and a few stretches of cantering so she could regain her integrity and Casino wouldn’t get the last word. Carl’s praise, although short-winded, rang in my ears the rest of the week enough to relieve the pangs I’d felt on the trail in the heat of the moment. Maybe I did have a bit more know-how than I thought and besides, what did my foolish act with Emmett matter? I had found a new attraction and this time, I led the way.
His family called him Drew, though everyone else called him Doughboy – unflattering only if you hadn’t seen his Pillsbury impression. Soon, Doughboy shortened to D-boy, the name that finally stuck. Spoken quickly enough, it reminded me of Dubois, an author whose work I admired and a fact that served D-boy well, though he hadn’t heard of the man. D-boy stood a whopping 6’6” and the one time I saw him on a horse, it simply didn’t look right. His distaste for large mammals made my work as an AHE team member that much more admirable to him and he frequently complimented the knack I had enticing small children onto horses for the first time. “You know how to make them smile,” he’d said, then slipped his smooth, giant palm into mine.
Where Emmett and I had been unromantically bold and bordering on obscene, D-boy and I stayed G-rated. I believe we kissed only once, something I had pulled off late one night in the staff lounge in order to get his attention and finally persuade him that yes, I was interested in him, despite his size and ungainliness. Honestly, this had been just the pairing I wanted – something that came with enough genuine affection to merit acceptance and get noticed by the other staff members, while also remaining utterly simple and manageable. I never considered him a boyfriend, never wanted more than his approval, and rarely offered more than that in return. It wasn’t until later that fall, both of us on opposite sides of Washington State attending college, when his emails persisted and I discovered he had more room in his heart for me than I’d originally thought. But by then I’d moved on, wooed too easily at a Violent Femmes concert by the sad-eyed Rex Wallace, an Army recruit and the man I’d eventually lose my virginity to.
[NO, the rest of the story does NOT divulge the details of Rex Wallace…I don’t believe in sex scenes.]
I don’t know where my other writing voice went, but this other one is still siphoning cells from my brain. This is how it goes – the writing life is a process of surrender…So tonight, another excerpt from the same draft story, picking up where I left off two nights ago:
The consequences of those early morning rides finally caught up to us on an advanced trail ride one afternoon during fifth session. A 13-year-old camper named Heather had fallen instantly for Casino, hurrying down after lunch chores each day to give him an extra brushing before saddling up. Seeing her confidence with him, Tina and I obliged when she requested to ride Casino for the remainder of the session. Tina would ride Blaze, a complacent Quarter horse cross, sent to us mid-summer that stood 16 hands tall. Heather could ride second in line on Casino, who had by now grown accustomed to leading but might fare well with the transition. I held position in back, the exhaust from Lady’s ass profuse enough to keep Vegas at a safe distance without my command.
Our line must have been ten or twelve horses long and as I imagined Tina and Blaze rounding the bend from the fire road that opened up to Main Beach, I heard a commotion at the head of the line. Tina called on Channel 2, “Casino’s bolted. I need you up front now. Hold the line!” Fear hijacked her voice and while I steered Vegas through brush alongside the line of horses, I heard Heather’s rabbit-kill shrieks fading in the distance. By now, Blaze had worked himself into a fit; sidestepping and circling in the middle of the trail while the rest of the line whinnied and backed up. I had left a camper on Lady to hold the rear of the line and could only hope she’d play the part. At the sight of Vegas, Blaze took off across Main Beach, Tina cussing in Czech all the way, though by the time they crossed the beach and re-entered the woods, she had him under control again. Surely she knew enough not to chase Casino, an act that would only hasten his revolt. Vegas seemed nonchalant and stepped into position at the head of the line without a fuss, which allowed me to assure the harried campers.
If my own fear felt as poignant as I remember it, it did not show when I turned to face the campers. Casino had bolted, camper and all, an act I never experienced as a rider, the mysterious threat of it echoing in me as persistently as Heather’s screams. Somehow her wails had embarrassed me. My imagination could relate to every trill of uncertainty in her screams, a confession that made me feel all the more childish. Though this would be my best summer at Y-Camp, holding the line with Vegas that afternoon I’d had to face up to the severity of my own lack of experience – as both a rider and a would-be lover.
Seconds felt like minutes and the row of riders, myself included, stared through the woods making a slow arc from left to right with our collective gaze, following the loop we knew the trail made, though we could not see the other side of it through the dense forest. The only sign that Casino stayed roughly on trail was the continual call of Heather’s shrill voice, which despite its pitch, I knew proved she hadn’t been knocked senseless by a low-hanging branch. But as our eyes scanned the woods, by now at the far edge of the periphery where the trail should have looped horse and rider back around, Heather’s cries grew distant instead of near. In that moment I realized Casino had run off trail, for the fire road ended, leaving only two options: barreling through the woods toward the property line or to looping back around towards our diligent line.
Tina radioed again: “Bring the line across the beach now, and loop around. Casino’s found a patch of blackberry at West Beach. We’ll meet you near the far end of the loop.” Again, the curved tones of her Czech accent exuded confidence. West Beach. I hadn’t thought of that but it made sense now. West Beach fanned out at the end of an un-groomed trail Tina and I frequently ran the horses on during Chapel, a trail far enough from the worshipping campers so as not to disturb their silent prayers with the sound of pounding hooves and our uncensored whoops and hollers.
By the day’s end, Tina and I both needed a beer. Being underage and on-duty this was out of the question, so we rallied the rest of the AHE team members for a swim in the cold Sandy River to ease our sweated thigh muscles and lick the corral dirt from our pores. Carl, our team director, had been on Channel 2 during Casino’s bolt and commended us for a job well done. While he hadn’t seen the fears I’d hidden from the campers, he had heard me call to Tina over the radio and suggest they join back up with the group on foot, a move Carl approved of for the psychological relief it provided our young camper. He’d also gotten wind that Tina and I worked with Heather in the corral later, helping her back on Casino and chaperoning five laps of trotting and a few stretches of cantering so she could regain her integrity and Casino wouldn’t get the last word. Carl’s praise, although short-winded, rang in my ears the rest of the week enough to relieve the pangs I’d felt on the trail in the heat of the moment. Maybe I did have a bit more know-how than I thought and besides, what did my foolish act with Emmett matter? I had found a new attraction and this time, I led the way.
His family called him Drew, though everyone else called him Doughboy – unflattering only if you hadn’t seen his Pillsbury impression. Soon, Doughboy shortened to D-boy, the name that finally stuck. Spoken quickly enough, it reminded me of Dubois, an author whose work I admired and a fact that served D-boy well, though he hadn’t heard of the man. D-boy stood a whopping 6’6” and the one time I saw him on a horse, it simply didn’t look right. His distaste for large mammals made my work as an AHE team member that much more admirable to him and he frequently complimented the knack I had enticing small children onto horses for the first time. “You know how to make them smile,” he’d said, then slipped his smooth, giant palm into mine.
Where Emmett and I had been unromantically bold and bordering on obscene, D-boy and I stayed G-rated. I believe we kissed only once, something I had pulled off late one night in the staff lounge in order to get his attention and finally persuade him that yes, I was interested in him, despite his size and ungainliness. Honestly, this had been just the pairing I wanted – something that came with enough genuine affection to merit acceptance and get noticed by the other staff members, while also remaining utterly simple and manageable. I never considered him a boyfriend, never wanted more than his approval, and rarely offered more than that in return. It wasn’t until later that fall, both of us on opposite sides of Washington State attending college, when his emails persisted and I discovered he had more room in his heart for me than I’d originally thought. But by then I’d moved on, wooed too easily at a Violent Femmes concert by the sad-eyed Rex Wallace, an Army recruit and the man I’d eventually lose my virginity to.
[NO, the rest of the story does NOT divulge the details of Rex Wallace…I don’t believe in sex scenes.]
Friday, May 18, 2007
Gaaahhh on the Mountain!
My strength is coming back. I’ve slept and napped more hours in the past five days than perhaps in two ordinary weeks combined. I cannot remember a time in my adult life when I’ve rested so much for so many consecutive days.
Yet work still gets done. I’ve finished a memoir this week and written three essays. In the past two days I’ve written 14 pages of new material and am shooting for 20 to send out in my fifth packet to my advisor this Monday. The semester is nearing a close. I’ve now officially read 40 books and written 24 essays in the past 11 months. There have been many more books during breaks and so forth, as well, plus informal studies of poetry and collaborative challenges with Cam, too.
It feels good, but it’s still a bit too soon to celebrate. I still have evals to do and a study plan for next semester, including a proposal for my critical essay. Kyle and I are set to drink a celebratory beer over the phone Monday or Tuesday, so I’m keeping that as the carrot at the end of the stick so to speak.
Meantime, I’m still allowing myself only one activity per day and requiring afternoon naps of myself. I’m starting to go a bit stir crazy though – talking to myself a lot and laughing out loud from daydreams I’ve been lost in for who knows how long. I had a few long sessions of leaping around and shaking and dancing interspersed throughout the day, as well. That might sound strange, but really, I’m not talking to people or seeing anybody and I’m all alone and staring and the trees and naming birds (indigo bunting, scarlet tanager) and cussing at mice and picking my nose and more and more and more. The shaking and laughing keeps me alert to the physical world at hand, lest I get lost in the one I’m creating on the page.
Phew. Three more days of this then let loose the reins!
Yet work still gets done. I’ve finished a memoir this week and written three essays. In the past two days I’ve written 14 pages of new material and am shooting for 20 to send out in my fifth packet to my advisor this Monday. The semester is nearing a close. I’ve now officially read 40 books and written 24 essays in the past 11 months. There have been many more books during breaks and so forth, as well, plus informal studies of poetry and collaborative challenges with Cam, too.
It feels good, but it’s still a bit too soon to celebrate. I still have evals to do and a study plan for next semester, including a proposal for my critical essay. Kyle and I are set to drink a celebratory beer over the phone Monday or Tuesday, so I’m keeping that as the carrot at the end of the stick so to speak.
Meantime, I’m still allowing myself only one activity per day and requiring afternoon naps of myself. I’m starting to go a bit stir crazy though – talking to myself a lot and laughing out loud from daydreams I’ve been lost in for who knows how long. I had a few long sessions of leaping around and shaking and dancing interspersed throughout the day, as well. That might sound strange, but really, I’m not talking to people or seeing anybody and I’m all alone and staring and the trees and naming birds (indigo bunting, scarlet tanager) and cussing at mice and picking my nose and more and more and more. The shaking and laughing keeps me alert to the physical world at hand, lest I get lost in the one I’m creating on the page.
Phew. Three more days of this then let loose the reins!
Thursday, May 17, 2007
A Brave Excerpt...
Fascinating, the way influence and study go hand in hand…Look here, an example from this afternoon’s free write. Clearly, Mary McCarthy, whose memoir (How I Grew) I just finished, has hijacked my voice. I guess I had more of a meandering intellectual in me than I thought. The names are changed but yes, this is of course an excerpt from a true story, embarrassing as it is, of my second summer as a camp counselor for the YMCA (I seem incapable of fiction). What a different tone!…
After three weeks of staff training, Sam (the camp director) organized a dance party the night before summer session officially began. Fortunately for those less inclined to dance, it was the summer of the Macarena and, therefore, no one had any excuse to skip out. Broken down step-by-step, it was about the simplest a synchronized dance could get, and so it was that I found myself out on the dance floor with the rest of them, Ulrika and Jules howling above the bass beat, their laughter like drums beating a rallying cry across the dance floor. Ansgar, a camp counselor from Germany, danced in front of me, his thickly framed glasses slipping down his nose with each thud and turn to the music. Behind me was the more interesting BJ, our assistant director, a round, Filipino man in his early twenties with an eye for just about any woman. He’d made the YMCA his career, at least so far, and that included the series of women he dated as well – always employed by the Y, most often beneath him in the ranks, and quite frequently coveted by his fellow employers who drooled over the younger counselors just as much as he did, but had the moral wherewithal to withhold their attractions at least until summer let out.
I think it was on my shoulders that I first felt his hands, during the opening moves of the Macarena. But as the dance progressed, so did his advances and before I knew it I was shaking my ass in his palms, invariably trying to stay synchronized with the group lest I break free from the dance and be forced to move and jive freeform, which I felt incapable of doing. I wore light, jersey material shorts that night and I could feel his hands slip across my buns as my skin shifted beneath the fabric. The sensation was overwhelming if for no other reason than the fact that the lights were dimmed and his actions were certainly out of line. And this at only the start of summer!
I made a point several weeks later, at our next staff dance, to line up with BJ again and presented my rump to him in the line up, eager for at least a little attention. He obliged and so began our silent touching, which occurred on only two more occasions that summer, always during the Macarena. Where everyone seemed to have found a mate within a few weeks of summer, I was satisfied at least to get a little naughty action on the dance floor, albeit PG at best. Later, I learned BJ had screwed a senior counselor, Sandra Hoagland, in the staff showers, a rumor that enticed me promptly to buy flip flops for the bathhouse.
Later, I fell into the hands of Emmett, a renegade counselor who came back summer of ’98 as a maintenance crew member, preferring the periphery and physical labor to the patience required to work with kids all day. I somehow found myself drunk and sitting on his lap at yet another staff party, this one to mark our summer’s halfway point, whereupon he stuffed his right hand up the back of my shirt and unhooked my bra with one hand, all while I held sloppy conversation with our director, Sam, under the dim porch light of the main building. We’d been given bulky fleece vests with the YMCA logo as promotional gifts and it was this adornment, worn hastily over my cotton staff t-shirt, which concealed Emmett’s meandering hands. I recall that Sam said something about plans for restructuring the archery course next summer, and also a new bathhouse as a part of the five-year plan. As Sam expounded further on said plan, Emmett continued his groping, by now his hand fully cupped beneath my breast, callused fingers twittering at my right nipple, all still unbeknownst to the director. Again, it was a taste of the forbidden and this time I didn’t even have to make eye contact with the perpetrator. I crossed my legs and must have continued to sip my beer. We were pulling one over on the director, and that was as exciting to me (if not more so) than the busy hand underneath my shirt.
Sam took his leave, light on his feet and utterly oblivious. The crowd of partiers had thinned and, having thought our game concluded, I swiveled on Emmett’s lap to get up and face him fully, perhaps to share a laugh. His hands were swifter still and I was instead guided into a straddling position, his legs now each wrapped around my calves and my crotch positioned directly over his. I remember the roughness of his workpants on my summer skin. His tongue found my mouth in a flat second. There must have been the rough formation of a sentence or two in my mind, some sort of rebuttal I’m sure, just as his tongue was reaching the back of my throat, and then I pulled away, somehow shocked. Had I not seen his coming? He laughed.
I went to my closest camp friend Tina the next morning. We’d taken to skipping Chapel, a required event for all YMCA campers following morning chores, and riding the horses instead. The camp horses were cared for well enough, but mostly they wanted to let loose those reins and small children who could barely withstand a trot, and gallop down the camp trails breakneck. Tina and I sensed this, needed an excuse to skip Chapel as it were, and met regularly to run the horses under the guise of “taming them” before the kids got to them for morning rides. True enough, the horses were more fatigued by the day’s end and therefore slower at the bit, but I think instead the end result was that a few of them began to associate the trails with free range galloping. The price for that would come later. For now, I needed Tina’s advice.
“You won’t believe what happened,” I’d exclaimed. But she did believe it, in fact, she’d seen it coming that night, thought I knew of Emmett’s longing, and so trusted me with him under the porch light that evening. But where had she gone off to, then? She smiled. “To the director’s bed.”
I suppose that was the kind of confidence a world champion motor-cross racer must have. To bed the director that hired her, knowing at any time he could turn around, revoke her Visa, and send her home to the film crew and familial craziness back in Czech. Tina had the same brazen manner in the corral, as well, showing no tolerance for Lady, our Palamino mare who threatened with her hind legs so profusely that only advanced riders could lead her down trails. I hesitated to raise a hand to a horse, but by mid-summer Tina had taught me better. “You let them bully you once and they’ll never forget it,” she’d recited daily in her Czech accent that had a way of curving words so that her tone was always flowing and rapid; impatient sounding if you didn’t know any better.
On the trails, Tina and I were paired most often of the ranch staff team members and so our friendship grew through the trust necessitated in such circumstances. Tina usually rode up front, and I trusted her with that; needed her for it, in fact. I was still somewhat inexperienced, despite the amount of responsibility I had, and Tina was too. But she exuded confidence, therefore the horses swiftly responded in her presence. She preferred Casino, a beautiful gelding whose walk resembled more of a trot as he always required being slowed down to keep a safe pace for the young campers. I rode in back, a horse’s length from Lady’s stained rear end, on Vegas, the retired BLM Mustang and my favorite horse of the summer. We communicated by radio and sometimes switched channels to avoid being overhead by Sam, who by then had apparently fallen completely in love with Tina.
True love, it turned out, was apparently just the thing Tina couldn’t handle. Where she aided me on the trails and in the stables, I provided a listening ear and steady stream of advice to calm her confused mind. “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know,” I finally told her, shrugging my shoulders for lack of anything further to say. It was a quote from Blaise Pascal, though I forgot to tell her that at the time. She shoved a pitchfork into steaming manure and tossed her hat from her head. “You mean to tell me there is nothing I can do?”
She treated love like an unwanted bacterial colony – something she needed to rid herself of. Later, she’d try to explain to me in so many words that she was a sex addict, though I always suspected it was sex as a safe substitute for true love that she was addicted to; that, in fact, she confused sex with acceptance and forgot entirely to fit love into the equation. Her addition, then, was to acceptance, if nothing else – though I never had the courage to put it that way to her. When she finally found both sex and love in Sam’s bed, she’d been too afraid to allow such overlap and insisted he was off his rocker. Clearly, there was more to her YMCA employment than Camp USA’s recruiting materials had promised her over in Europe. I learned, slowly, that her time in the States served the dual purpose of giving her a hiatus from the hordes of naughty motor-cross men who hungered for her. This explained the way she fingered those magazines we’d seen earlier in the store, those hands no doubt remembering the flesh behind the snapshots…
Wow! Long, wordy sentences? Semicolons? A bit of snobbishness in my tone? The past “to be” verbs left and right? I’ve truly surprised myself.
Thoughts? Reactions? Criticisms?
After three weeks of staff training, Sam (the camp director) organized a dance party the night before summer session officially began. Fortunately for those less inclined to dance, it was the summer of the Macarena and, therefore, no one had any excuse to skip out. Broken down step-by-step, it was about the simplest a synchronized dance could get, and so it was that I found myself out on the dance floor with the rest of them, Ulrika and Jules howling above the bass beat, their laughter like drums beating a rallying cry across the dance floor. Ansgar, a camp counselor from Germany, danced in front of me, his thickly framed glasses slipping down his nose with each thud and turn to the music. Behind me was the more interesting BJ, our assistant director, a round, Filipino man in his early twenties with an eye for just about any woman. He’d made the YMCA his career, at least so far, and that included the series of women he dated as well – always employed by the Y, most often beneath him in the ranks, and quite frequently coveted by his fellow employers who drooled over the younger counselors just as much as he did, but had the moral wherewithal to withhold their attractions at least until summer let out.
I think it was on my shoulders that I first felt his hands, during the opening moves of the Macarena. But as the dance progressed, so did his advances and before I knew it I was shaking my ass in his palms, invariably trying to stay synchronized with the group lest I break free from the dance and be forced to move and jive freeform, which I felt incapable of doing. I wore light, jersey material shorts that night and I could feel his hands slip across my buns as my skin shifted beneath the fabric. The sensation was overwhelming if for no other reason than the fact that the lights were dimmed and his actions were certainly out of line. And this at only the start of summer!
I made a point several weeks later, at our next staff dance, to line up with BJ again and presented my rump to him in the line up, eager for at least a little attention. He obliged and so began our silent touching, which occurred on only two more occasions that summer, always during the Macarena. Where everyone seemed to have found a mate within a few weeks of summer, I was satisfied at least to get a little naughty action on the dance floor, albeit PG at best. Later, I learned BJ had screwed a senior counselor, Sandra Hoagland, in the staff showers, a rumor that enticed me promptly to buy flip flops for the bathhouse.
Later, I fell into the hands of Emmett, a renegade counselor who came back summer of ’98 as a maintenance crew member, preferring the periphery and physical labor to the patience required to work with kids all day. I somehow found myself drunk and sitting on his lap at yet another staff party, this one to mark our summer’s halfway point, whereupon he stuffed his right hand up the back of my shirt and unhooked my bra with one hand, all while I held sloppy conversation with our director, Sam, under the dim porch light of the main building. We’d been given bulky fleece vests with the YMCA logo as promotional gifts and it was this adornment, worn hastily over my cotton staff t-shirt, which concealed Emmett’s meandering hands. I recall that Sam said something about plans for restructuring the archery course next summer, and also a new bathhouse as a part of the five-year plan. As Sam expounded further on said plan, Emmett continued his groping, by now his hand fully cupped beneath my breast, callused fingers twittering at my right nipple, all still unbeknownst to the director. Again, it was a taste of the forbidden and this time I didn’t even have to make eye contact with the perpetrator. I crossed my legs and must have continued to sip my beer. We were pulling one over on the director, and that was as exciting to me (if not more so) than the busy hand underneath my shirt.
Sam took his leave, light on his feet and utterly oblivious. The crowd of partiers had thinned and, having thought our game concluded, I swiveled on Emmett’s lap to get up and face him fully, perhaps to share a laugh. His hands were swifter still and I was instead guided into a straddling position, his legs now each wrapped around my calves and my crotch positioned directly over his. I remember the roughness of his workpants on my summer skin. His tongue found my mouth in a flat second. There must have been the rough formation of a sentence or two in my mind, some sort of rebuttal I’m sure, just as his tongue was reaching the back of my throat, and then I pulled away, somehow shocked. Had I not seen his coming? He laughed.
I went to my closest camp friend Tina the next morning. We’d taken to skipping Chapel, a required event for all YMCA campers following morning chores, and riding the horses instead. The camp horses were cared for well enough, but mostly they wanted to let loose those reins and small children who could barely withstand a trot, and gallop down the camp trails breakneck. Tina and I sensed this, needed an excuse to skip Chapel as it were, and met regularly to run the horses under the guise of “taming them” before the kids got to them for morning rides. True enough, the horses were more fatigued by the day’s end and therefore slower at the bit, but I think instead the end result was that a few of them began to associate the trails with free range galloping. The price for that would come later. For now, I needed Tina’s advice.
“You won’t believe what happened,” I’d exclaimed. But she did believe it, in fact, she’d seen it coming that night, thought I knew of Emmett’s longing, and so trusted me with him under the porch light that evening. But where had she gone off to, then? She smiled. “To the director’s bed.”
I suppose that was the kind of confidence a world champion motor-cross racer must have. To bed the director that hired her, knowing at any time he could turn around, revoke her Visa, and send her home to the film crew and familial craziness back in Czech. Tina had the same brazen manner in the corral, as well, showing no tolerance for Lady, our Palamino mare who threatened with her hind legs so profusely that only advanced riders could lead her down trails. I hesitated to raise a hand to a horse, but by mid-summer Tina had taught me better. “You let them bully you once and they’ll never forget it,” she’d recited daily in her Czech accent that had a way of curving words so that her tone was always flowing and rapid; impatient sounding if you didn’t know any better.
On the trails, Tina and I were paired most often of the ranch staff team members and so our friendship grew through the trust necessitated in such circumstances. Tina usually rode up front, and I trusted her with that; needed her for it, in fact. I was still somewhat inexperienced, despite the amount of responsibility I had, and Tina was too. But she exuded confidence, therefore the horses swiftly responded in her presence. She preferred Casino, a beautiful gelding whose walk resembled more of a trot as he always required being slowed down to keep a safe pace for the young campers. I rode in back, a horse’s length from Lady’s stained rear end, on Vegas, the retired BLM Mustang and my favorite horse of the summer. We communicated by radio and sometimes switched channels to avoid being overhead by Sam, who by then had apparently fallen completely in love with Tina.
True love, it turned out, was apparently just the thing Tina couldn’t handle. Where she aided me on the trails and in the stables, I provided a listening ear and steady stream of advice to calm her confused mind. “The heart has reasons that reason cannot know,” I finally told her, shrugging my shoulders for lack of anything further to say. It was a quote from Blaise Pascal, though I forgot to tell her that at the time. She shoved a pitchfork into steaming manure and tossed her hat from her head. “You mean to tell me there is nothing I can do?”
She treated love like an unwanted bacterial colony – something she needed to rid herself of. Later, she’d try to explain to me in so many words that she was a sex addict, though I always suspected it was sex as a safe substitute for true love that she was addicted to; that, in fact, she confused sex with acceptance and forgot entirely to fit love into the equation. Her addition, then, was to acceptance, if nothing else – though I never had the courage to put it that way to her. When she finally found both sex and love in Sam’s bed, she’d been too afraid to allow such overlap and insisted he was off his rocker. Clearly, there was more to her YMCA employment than Camp USA’s recruiting materials had promised her over in Europe. I learned, slowly, that her time in the States served the dual purpose of giving her a hiatus from the hordes of naughty motor-cross men who hungered for her. This explained the way she fingered those magazines we’d seen earlier in the store, those hands no doubt remembering the flesh behind the snapshots…
Wow! Long, wordy sentences? Semicolons? A bit of snobbishness in my tone? The past “to be” verbs left and right? I’ve truly surprised myself.
Thoughts? Reactions? Criticisms?
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Trying to Stay on Track
When I hit a wall, I hit a wall. Tonight, it comes at 7:36pm. I promised myself one activity only each day. I slept nine hours last night. Woke up and alternated between reading and writing all day, moving slowly throughout the house, drinking lots of tea, and breathing and staring off into space as needed. I wrote 1 3/4 essays and read fifty pages. That’s mellow, right?
The single activity was “hiring” the young Zac and Sammy to help deal with the gravel I had delivered on Monday. It needed to happen today, as the rain already started coming down and more is on the way. I know enough to know that a gravel truck dumping 28 tons of gravel on the drive surely filled all the water bars, and that if it rains much more with the water bars clogged, I can watch all the money literally wash down the side of the mountain.
And so the boys arrived, and we did our work, in the rain. It took shovels and fire rakes and a pix axe and loppers but two hours and about two miles later, we were finished. Thing is, I was too tired to hike back down the mountain (for what would have been a third time that day) to get the car and do a test-drive up the road. I suppose that can be tomorrow’s activity. I fed the boys cookies, made sushi, and PD arrived in time for all of us to have dinner on the floor. (I don’t quite have a “kitchen” table so to speak, let alone four chairs that one could eat in.)
As soon as they left I called the Montessori school to cancel my weekly music offering, thinking that I just cannot do it this week (they have a campout, in the rain most likely, in a very obscure place many miles away…and I would bring my guitar and voice to them).
One day at a time, right? It’s the third day of antibiotics. Tomorrow I will hike down the mountain, check my mail, and hopefully drive the Volvo back up it for the very first time. Then I will continue the slowness, the homework, the healing. I keep waiting to feel stronger…that’ll come, right? I hope.
The single activity was “hiring” the young Zac and Sammy to help deal with the gravel I had delivered on Monday. It needed to happen today, as the rain already started coming down and more is on the way. I know enough to know that a gravel truck dumping 28 tons of gravel on the drive surely filled all the water bars, and that if it rains much more with the water bars clogged, I can watch all the money literally wash down the side of the mountain.
And so the boys arrived, and we did our work, in the rain. It took shovels and fire rakes and a pix axe and loppers but two hours and about two miles later, we were finished. Thing is, I was too tired to hike back down the mountain (for what would have been a third time that day) to get the car and do a test-drive up the road. I suppose that can be tomorrow’s activity. I fed the boys cookies, made sushi, and PD arrived in time for all of us to have dinner on the floor. (I don’t quite have a “kitchen” table so to speak, let alone four chairs that one could eat in.)
As soon as they left I called the Montessori school to cancel my weekly music offering, thinking that I just cannot do it this week (they have a campout, in the rain most likely, in a very obscure place many miles away…and I would bring my guitar and voice to them).
One day at a time, right? It’s the third day of antibiotics. Tomorrow I will hike down the mountain, check my mail, and hopefully drive the Volvo back up it for the very first time. Then I will continue the slowness, the homework, the healing. I keep waiting to feel stronger…that’ll come, right? I hope.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Ready, Set...REST!
Everything changes. I have three weeks until I travel – possibly for two readings in Oregon now, in addition to the residency – and I must be well before I leave.
I make a new rule: Only one activity per day in addition to homework. I cancel roadwork for the afternoon with the boys. I cancel women’s singing night. I cancel a day trip to Canton. I decline a freelance gig that would take me to Buncombe County for a day of research. I call the director of my MFA program. I email my advisor. I call my boss. I hunker down and sleep nine hours. I take a nap in the afternoon. Then…
Dad to the rescue. He arrives, from forty minutes away after a day of hard work on a carpentry project, and brings me groceries. He has a truck and therefore saves me not only the trip in town, but the tedious task of hiking the groceries half a mile up the mountain. The bags are small but just what I need – organic produce, soymilk, some essentials. And to top it all off…the ingredients for baking chocolate chip cookies. Wow. Superhero Dad!
And then, instead of just leaving me to be all alone and sick on the side of the mountain, he stays and reads with me on the porch and we talk about books while I sip tea. What a guy!
Tonight, to bed early if I can. Tomorrow – stay home all day. Write two essays and ready fifty pages. Do road work with the boys, but take it slowly. Sleep, sleep, sleep.
It feels good to at least know why I was such a freaking mess for over three months, why my right tonsil kept puffing up and nearly exploding, why I couldn’t seem to stay out past 8pm without feeling like I’d pass out, why I couldn’t seem to get up early like I ordinarily do, why I seemed to need more coffee than usual, etc., etc.
Healing, here I come.
I make a new rule: Only one activity per day in addition to homework. I cancel roadwork for the afternoon with the boys. I cancel women’s singing night. I cancel a day trip to Canton. I decline a freelance gig that would take me to Buncombe County for a day of research. I call the director of my MFA program. I email my advisor. I call my boss. I hunker down and sleep nine hours. I take a nap in the afternoon. Then…
Dad to the rescue. He arrives, from forty minutes away after a day of hard work on a carpentry project, and brings me groceries. He has a truck and therefore saves me not only the trip in town, but the tedious task of hiking the groceries half a mile up the mountain. The bags are small but just what I need – organic produce, soymilk, some essentials. And to top it all off…the ingredients for baking chocolate chip cookies. Wow. Superhero Dad!
And then, instead of just leaving me to be all alone and sick on the side of the mountain, he stays and reads with me on the porch and we talk about books while I sip tea. What a guy!
Tonight, to bed early if I can. Tomorrow – stay home all day. Write two essays and ready fifty pages. Do road work with the boys, but take it slowly. Sleep, sleep, sleep.
It feels good to at least know why I was such a freaking mess for over three months, why my right tonsil kept puffing up and nearly exploding, why I couldn’t seem to stay out past 8pm without feeling like I’d pass out, why I couldn’t seem to get up early like I ordinarily do, why I seemed to need more coffee than usual, etc., etc.
Healing, here I come.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Ugh!
The verdict is in: walking pneumonia.
Which explains, among other things, the utter fatigue I've felt at the keyboard when I sat down to write for the past three months.
Today I ushered Dean up and down the mountain as he dropped 28 tons of white gravel on the road. I have to much to tell, and I know the voice I want to tell it in, but I feel beat.
Started antibiotics tonight. More soon....Sorry! Patience....
Which explains, among other things, the utter fatigue I've felt at the keyboard when I sat down to write for the past three months.
Today I ushered Dean up and down the mountain as he dropped 28 tons of white gravel on the road. I have to much to tell, and I know the voice I want to tell it in, but I feel beat.
Started antibiotics tonight. More soon....Sorry! Patience....
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Update...And Good News!
Sorry no post last night – got home late after helping a friend and hit a wall of exhaustion. The strep throat is not strep throat and not responding to treatments. I go see the MD tomorrow for mono tests and so forth. It would explain the struggles with sleepiness and keeping up with my schedule that I’ve had this semester, that’s for sure. Uck.
The upside: I won another writing contest! This time, 2nd place in creative nonfiction for M Review, the literary journal of Marylhurst University just outside of Portland, Oregon. Their website isn’t updated yet with this year’s winners, but here is a little bit about the 2006 issue of the publication: LINK. The story that one is my supposed first chapter for my memoir. Very exciting!
The upside: I won another writing contest! This time, 2nd place in creative nonfiction for M Review, the literary journal of Marylhurst University just outside of Portland, Oregon. Their website isn’t updated yet with this year’s winners, but here is a little bit about the 2006 issue of the publication: LINK. The story that one is my supposed first chapter for my memoir. Very exciting!
Friday, May 11, 2007
A Warm Welcome
The phone rings at 8 am.
“Hello, Katey?” says a stranger’s voice.
“This is Penny, your postmistress.” She speaks clear as a bell but in my morning fog and with her true-thick accent, what I actually hear is: This is Peony, your mistress.
“Good morning,” I say, hesitantly.
“I see now you’re up Fork Mountain way, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’ve got a package for you today but there’s no way this one’s gonna fit in your box there. Now how far are you from the mailbox, ‘bout half a mile?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’m not aloud to drive any further than that off my route, but, you gonna be home today?”
“Yes ma’am, I’ll be here. Weather’s supposed to be fine. Why don’t you just leave it on the road there and I’ll come down and pick it up,” I say.
“No, no, that’s quite allright. I’ll come on up there. Been ages since I been all the way on up now, no problem at all. I’ll be there around noon, say, 12:30.”
“Alright, thank you very much. I’ll be here.”
As promised, Penny arrives around lunch time. I hear her car first, barreling up the mountain. She pulls into the turnaround at the top of the drive and lays out too long blasts on the horn. I holler from the loft window, “I’ll be out there in a minute!”
When I get outside I see she has a Jeep with four-wheel drive. She’s smiling and waving before I can even get a full glimpse of her but I make it up the log steps to her car and receive the package. It is an unbound version of a book I’ve been asked to copyedit and turnaround in 48 hours. The package has been sent overnight delivery and thanks to Penny, it’s in my hands now.
We make small talk in the driveway for about twenty minutes. I invite her in from some homemade chocolate cake I’ve just finished, but she shakes her head no. “Ordinarily I’d say yes, but I already received fresh muffins this morning.” She holds up a bag left to her by a loving customer.
I learn that she’s driven this route for upwards of twenty years now. She has two boys in the local schools and knows PD and her boys. She knew Stuart and Sandra, my friends and the owners of this house, and she even knows Grover over the other side of Fork Mountain all the way there in Buladean.
“I can sell you anything and everything the post office can,” she says. She hands me an ordering sheet and envelope. “Now, postage goes up on Monday so here’s the new information. And you can just leave me money in your box and I’ll sell you a new roll of stamps, new envelopes, whatever you need. I’m the same as the store only all fit up into this Jeep here.”
I pause in my questions to her and Penny jumps in. She wants to know my story. “Now Schultz, I got a brother married a Schultz once over there in Yancey county, you know them? Probably not. Where you from?” Clearly, she noticed my tone.
“Oregon, originally,” I say. “Don’t know about any Schultz’s out here. But my parents are over there in Celo.”
Penny nods. She knows that route and is friends with the driver, though she hasn’t driven it herself. She wants to know what I do for work and how I know Stuart and Sandra. I confess to her that I’ll be gone in June so the mail will pile up a bit. “But I’ve got a few folks coming by to check it now and then, so hopefully it won’t fill up and make you mad.” I smile at her. It feels good to tell her I’ll be gone, so that someone else knows what should and shouldn’t be going on up at the end of the road.
We finally say goodbye and she reminds me of her name again. “That’s right, Pee-oh-knee,” she says, making a quick three syllables out of the two syllable word. She pronounces it with such a thick accent that I almost feel to say it my way is truly improper.
“Peh-knee” I say, flat as cardboard.
She smiles. “Yup, you got it. Pee-oh-knee.”
I send her off with a wave and a laugh.
“Hello, Katey?” says a stranger’s voice.
“This is Penny, your postmistress.” She speaks clear as a bell but in my morning fog and with her true-thick accent, what I actually hear is: This is Peony, your mistress.
“Good morning,” I say, hesitantly.
“I see now you’re up Fork Mountain way, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’ve got a package for you today but there’s no way this one’s gonna fit in your box there. Now how far are you from the mailbox, ‘bout half a mile?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I’m not aloud to drive any further than that off my route, but, you gonna be home today?”
“Yes ma’am, I’ll be here. Weather’s supposed to be fine. Why don’t you just leave it on the road there and I’ll come down and pick it up,” I say.
“No, no, that’s quite allright. I’ll come on up there. Been ages since I been all the way on up now, no problem at all. I’ll be there around noon, say, 12:30.”
“Alright, thank you very much. I’ll be here.”
As promised, Penny arrives around lunch time. I hear her car first, barreling up the mountain. She pulls into the turnaround at the top of the drive and lays out too long blasts on the horn. I holler from the loft window, “I’ll be out there in a minute!”
When I get outside I see she has a Jeep with four-wheel drive. She’s smiling and waving before I can even get a full glimpse of her but I make it up the log steps to her car and receive the package. It is an unbound version of a book I’ve been asked to copyedit and turnaround in 48 hours. The package has been sent overnight delivery and thanks to Penny, it’s in my hands now.
We make small talk in the driveway for about twenty minutes. I invite her in from some homemade chocolate cake I’ve just finished, but she shakes her head no. “Ordinarily I’d say yes, but I already received fresh muffins this morning.” She holds up a bag left to her by a loving customer.
I learn that she’s driven this route for upwards of twenty years now. She has two boys in the local schools and knows PD and her boys. She knew Stuart and Sandra, my friends and the owners of this house, and she even knows Grover over the other side of Fork Mountain all the way there in Buladean.
“I can sell you anything and everything the post office can,” she says. She hands me an ordering sheet and envelope. “Now, postage goes up on Monday so here’s the new information. And you can just leave me money in your box and I’ll sell you a new roll of stamps, new envelopes, whatever you need. I’m the same as the store only all fit up into this Jeep here.”
I pause in my questions to her and Penny jumps in. She wants to know my story. “Now Schultz, I got a brother married a Schultz once over there in Yancey county, you know them? Probably not. Where you from?” Clearly, she noticed my tone.
“Oregon, originally,” I say. “Don’t know about any Schultz’s out here. But my parents are over there in Celo.”
Penny nods. She knows that route and is friends with the driver, though she hasn’t driven it herself. She wants to know what I do for work and how I know Stuart and Sandra. I confess to her that I’ll be gone in June so the mail will pile up a bit. “But I’ve got a few folks coming by to check it now and then, so hopefully it won’t fill up and make you mad.” I smile at her. It feels good to tell her I’ll be gone, so that someone else knows what should and shouldn’t be going on up at the end of the road.
We finally say goodbye and she reminds me of her name again. “That’s right, Pee-oh-knee,” she says, making a quick three syllables out of the two syllable word. She pronounces it with such a thick accent that I almost feel to say it my way is truly improper.
“Peh-knee” I say, flat as cardboard.
She smiles. “Yup, you got it. Pee-oh-knee.”
I send her off with a wave and a laugh.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
In the Land of Boys (Part 2 - One Year Later)
Almost one year ago to the day, I visited PD just a hop, skip, and a jump along the slopes of Roan from the house I live in now. I traveled there with another teacher to visit she and her loveable, playful, joyful boys. Their story is recounted here.
This , perhaps, is a continuation of that story. Or perhaps it is the beginning of another, one where we are neighbors with a deepening friendship. One where I become more and more connected with the land here, PD and her boys leading the way…
I hear them before I can actually see them, their high-pitched boy yelps and the romping of Doce (the twelve-toed dog) pouring through the woods. I am sitting on the porch, forty pages into a fifty page assignment, the morning’s work of studying transcripts and outlining a biography finally accomplished.
“Hey guys! I’m up here!” I holler down and finally spot them.
“Hey Katey!” Sammy shouts, waving a his walking stick high above his head as he marches up the trail from the lower portion of the property on up to the deck. Today, Sammy has fashioned bands out of matching plaid fabric and tied them in tight swaths around his wrist and ankle. He’s wearing his soccer uniform even though today there is no practice and no game.
Zac beats his brother to the porch and proudly holds a jewelweed plant out in front of me. “You know what this one does, right?” He is proud and smiling, waiting for my answer.
“Yup, that’s for stinging nettle. Helps calm the pain,” I say.
“Yeah, and do you know how big they can get?” he asks, then, before I can answer: “Almost four feet! Almost as tall as me! With bright orange flowers!” He crushes the plant into a pulp and holds his palms out to show me.
“See, we’re making jars and jars of the juice,” Sammy says as the boys follow me into the house. “You can mix it with water then freeze it into ice cubes and rub it on your skin when you get stung. We’re going to sell them. Jewel cubes, we’ll call them, yeah.” He elbows his brother, who is rubbing the potion on his knee which got whacked with some nettle on the way up the hill.
I pour the boys glasses of fresh spring water and Sammy spreads a hand drawn map across the kitchen counter. “So we’re here,” he says, pointing to his illustration. “And this is your gate, and here is the turnaround spot, and this is the house down below with the barking dogs.”
I nod my head. His map is not only accurate, but practically to scale. “We’re going to hike you down this much of the driveway, then bushwhack across Cook Creek here,” he points to the map again, “then down to the old gravel road and over to our house.”
I show the boys my maps on the wall from the Forest Service and after I orient them, they can find their house and the creek quite easily. They are mesmerized by the maps, though, and want to know more. What are those brown lines for? Why are the roads numbered and not named? What are the black dots? I tell them about topo lines in 40 foot increments. I show them the scale at the bottom of the map and invite them to measure how far apart our houses are. I teach them that the black dots are residences, the grey area is the park boundary, and the numbered roads are the state names for our streets and gravel roads. They set about determining the elevation of their house and my house, and the precise distance between the two while I run downstairs to change into bushwhacking clothes.
On the way down the driveway the boys are eager to tell me more about their plans for the Jewel Cubes business. They are proud protectors of the mountain and make a point to tell me everything they know about each spot along the road. The point out where the last tree feel across the drive, where the old trail was through the woods and across Cook Creek, where the new trail is and why, and how to avoid the barking dogs by crawling upstream, then dropping down and onto a makeshift trail.
We hike, and push across stones and barrel through patches of poison ivy (the boys wearing tall socks, I in long pants), puddle hop, amble across fallen logs, and finally find our way to the other side of the creek bed. It’s not far, really, but it takes time without a trail. Once we hit the makeshift trail the boys have lots to say. They’ve left their bikes in the woods and run ahead to catch them.
“We’ll ride slow, Katey!” Zac shouts over his shoulders. They brake and screech and ride up and down the trail in sections while I catch up with them.
“See up there? That’s a great climbing rock, and that’s about halfway between your house and my house,” Zac says.
“So we could call each other and meet there, right? What do you call that rock?”
“Let’s call it Eagle Rock, because it’s almost as high as the birds,” Zac says.
“No, something from The Lion King, see, because it looks like that one spot where he stands at the edge and all the animals stampeded down below him.” Sammy hops off his bike and pauses in the trail to gaze at the boulders.
“How about Roaring Rock,” I say, “like the lion’s roar.”
“Yeah! So we could say, ‘I’ll meet you at Roaring Rock at 3pm’ and then you would be right there!” Zac is pleased with the name and pleased with our imaginary plan.
Naming things is fun and so we keep doing it: Bubba Tree (for the big oak with the bulbous bulge at the base of the trunk) and Poison Field (for the field of poison ivy) and The Three Stooges (for the three goofy dogs that bark from their yard above us on the road) and the Jewel Cube Company for their future business in potions and cures. “And we also have another business,” Zac says. “We do lawn work.” The brothers detail their skills and talents to me, explaining the ins and outs of the lawn mower an weed whacker they are allowed to use and offer services with.
“I’ve got a gravel truck coming on Monday. How about I hire you guys on Tuesday afternoon, say afterschool, to help me spread gravel and use loppers up and down the drive to clear it for cars?” I offer.
“Lopers. Yeah, we could do that, right Sammy?” Zac asks.
“Sure we can!”
When we arrive at their house, about 3/4 of a mile later, they are both eager to show me their artwork and instruments and remind me again of their pets and the trampoline and their uncle’s CD and their aunt’s talents and more and more and more. My attention is spread between the beauty of the house, the beauty of their energy, and the sheer strength of heart and will and spirit that their mother, PD, exudes.
Years ago, PD camped on the lower portion of the property I’m on now and built the original structure of the house I live in now. She and her partner felled the locust trees and hauled them across the side of the mountain with horses, erected the structure, set up running water, and got things going. She is a woman, so it seems, who can do anything she puts her mind to. Her body has cooperated with her mind’s vision for years, as she’s built that home and now the home she is in, set up her own forge, and made a life for herself as a blacksmith, jeweler, and sculptor. PD’s arms are rigid and carved as the steel she shapes, though nothing about her figure is overbearing. Her voice is gentle but knowing, not at all timid, yet even opinions are delivered with an even tone that suggests forethought and honesty. Her smile is wide and abundant, little wrinkle-echoes lining her lips. I’ve admired her since I first met her, really, though now that we’re neighbors and I’m not teaching her kids in the classroom, we really get to relate even more as friends.
Dinner is simple and filling, a colorful salad with tofu, rice, some chicken. I hiked a watermelon in my pack to their house and offer it for dessert. There is wine and water and we sit on the back deck and watch the boys bounce and laugh on the trampoline. It amazes me to see their fearlessness and joy, and I think to myself how many years it has been since I played that way, since I laughed so much everyday, since I had a best friend I loved and saw and played with everyday…since I played, just to play, just to be, just to live.
I’m not sad, really, just grateful for their presence and the reminder it offers. When all is said and done, PD and the boys walk me home in the fading light. Halfway back it gets harder to see and Zac asks his mom, “Can we turn back so Sammy and I can get home and do homework?”
I smile and say a silent prayer, Oh, if I ever have boys, let them be like Zac and Sammy. The boys hug me goodbye and promise to come back Tuesday for ‘the job.” PD walks me across the creek through the rough bushwhacking spots and to the bend in the driveway. We pause for a moment before the road splits and I’ll turn to my new home and she’ll head back to hers. We listen to the creek, notice the light fading even faster, and breathe a little.
“I can remember hiking up here with one baby on my back,” PD says, “And another one almost full and ready in my belly, and bags of groceries on each arm.”
I shake my head. I cannot imagine really, carrying another’s life on my back and in my arms, then building a life together with such grace as she has done. “You just have to stay steady,” she’d said to me earlier in the night as we discussed old relationships, the parenting, and her life primarily as a single parent. It’s good for me to listen, to understand these things as much as I can before living them or knowing them myself as the case may or may not be one day. I have nothing that even comes close to the experiences she’s had, so when she talks I can really take it all in, wondering, learning, and imagining rather than comparing it to anything I might have known.
We’ve talked before about how her kids need mentors; about how she loves to include plenty of adults in her boys’ lives to diversify their perspectives and give them role models. It’s not difficult to see how that parallels what PD provides for me, but she is humble and so I don’t say as much as we hug goodnight on the road. She takes one path home and I take another, but they’re connected by more than soil and rock, by more than even the history of this place and all the friends who have walked to and from these two houses before. They’re connected with possibility, with elegant unknowns, with some kind of forest magic that, if Zac and Sammy were still with us in the woods, they would surely know the name for.
This , perhaps, is a continuation of that story. Or perhaps it is the beginning of another, one where we are neighbors with a deepening friendship. One where I become more and more connected with the land here, PD and her boys leading the way…
I hear them before I can actually see them, their high-pitched boy yelps and the romping of Doce (the twelve-toed dog) pouring through the woods. I am sitting on the porch, forty pages into a fifty page assignment, the morning’s work of studying transcripts and outlining a biography finally accomplished.
“Hey guys! I’m up here!” I holler down and finally spot them.
“Hey Katey!” Sammy shouts, waving a his walking stick high above his head as he marches up the trail from the lower portion of the property on up to the deck. Today, Sammy has fashioned bands out of matching plaid fabric and tied them in tight swaths around his wrist and ankle. He’s wearing his soccer uniform even though today there is no practice and no game.
Zac beats his brother to the porch and proudly holds a jewelweed plant out in front of me. “You know what this one does, right?” He is proud and smiling, waiting for my answer.
“Yup, that’s for stinging nettle. Helps calm the pain,” I say.
“Yeah, and do you know how big they can get?” he asks, then, before I can answer: “Almost four feet! Almost as tall as me! With bright orange flowers!” He crushes the plant into a pulp and holds his palms out to show me.
“See, we’re making jars and jars of the juice,” Sammy says as the boys follow me into the house. “You can mix it with water then freeze it into ice cubes and rub it on your skin when you get stung. We’re going to sell them. Jewel cubes, we’ll call them, yeah.” He elbows his brother, who is rubbing the potion on his knee which got whacked with some nettle on the way up the hill.
I pour the boys glasses of fresh spring water and Sammy spreads a hand drawn map across the kitchen counter. “So we’re here,” he says, pointing to his illustration. “And this is your gate, and here is the turnaround spot, and this is the house down below with the barking dogs.”
I nod my head. His map is not only accurate, but practically to scale. “We’re going to hike you down this much of the driveway, then bushwhack across Cook Creek here,” he points to the map again, “then down to the old gravel road and over to our house.”
I show the boys my maps on the wall from the Forest Service and after I orient them, they can find their house and the creek quite easily. They are mesmerized by the maps, though, and want to know more. What are those brown lines for? Why are the roads numbered and not named? What are the black dots? I tell them about topo lines in 40 foot increments. I show them the scale at the bottom of the map and invite them to measure how far apart our houses are. I teach them that the black dots are residences, the grey area is the park boundary, and the numbered roads are the state names for our streets and gravel roads. They set about determining the elevation of their house and my house, and the precise distance between the two while I run downstairs to change into bushwhacking clothes.
On the way down the driveway the boys are eager to tell me more about their plans for the Jewel Cubes business. They are proud protectors of the mountain and make a point to tell me everything they know about each spot along the road. The point out where the last tree feel across the drive, where the old trail was through the woods and across Cook Creek, where the new trail is and why, and how to avoid the barking dogs by crawling upstream, then dropping down and onto a makeshift trail.
We hike, and push across stones and barrel through patches of poison ivy (the boys wearing tall socks, I in long pants), puddle hop, amble across fallen logs, and finally find our way to the other side of the creek bed. It’s not far, really, but it takes time without a trail. Once we hit the makeshift trail the boys have lots to say. They’ve left their bikes in the woods and run ahead to catch them.
“We’ll ride slow, Katey!” Zac shouts over his shoulders. They brake and screech and ride up and down the trail in sections while I catch up with them.
“See up there? That’s a great climbing rock, and that’s about halfway between your house and my house,” Zac says.
“So we could call each other and meet there, right? What do you call that rock?”
“Let’s call it Eagle Rock, because it’s almost as high as the birds,” Zac says.
“No, something from The Lion King, see, because it looks like that one spot where he stands at the edge and all the animals stampeded down below him.” Sammy hops off his bike and pauses in the trail to gaze at the boulders.
“How about Roaring Rock,” I say, “like the lion’s roar.”
“Yeah! So we could say, ‘I’ll meet you at Roaring Rock at 3pm’ and then you would be right there!” Zac is pleased with the name and pleased with our imaginary plan.
Naming things is fun and so we keep doing it: Bubba Tree (for the big oak with the bulbous bulge at the base of the trunk) and Poison Field (for the field of poison ivy) and The Three Stooges (for the three goofy dogs that bark from their yard above us on the road) and the Jewel Cube Company for their future business in potions and cures. “And we also have another business,” Zac says. “We do lawn work.” The brothers detail their skills and talents to me, explaining the ins and outs of the lawn mower an weed whacker they are allowed to use and offer services with.
“I’ve got a gravel truck coming on Monday. How about I hire you guys on Tuesday afternoon, say afterschool, to help me spread gravel and use loppers up and down the drive to clear it for cars?” I offer.
“Lopers. Yeah, we could do that, right Sammy?” Zac asks.
“Sure we can!”
When we arrive at their house, about 3/4 of a mile later, they are both eager to show me their artwork and instruments and remind me again of their pets and the trampoline and their uncle’s CD and their aunt’s talents and more and more and more. My attention is spread between the beauty of the house, the beauty of their energy, and the sheer strength of heart and will and spirit that their mother, PD, exudes.
Years ago, PD camped on the lower portion of the property I’m on now and built the original structure of the house I live in now. She and her partner felled the locust trees and hauled them across the side of the mountain with horses, erected the structure, set up running water, and got things going. She is a woman, so it seems, who can do anything she puts her mind to. Her body has cooperated with her mind’s vision for years, as she’s built that home and now the home she is in, set up her own forge, and made a life for herself as a blacksmith, jeweler, and sculptor. PD’s arms are rigid and carved as the steel she shapes, though nothing about her figure is overbearing. Her voice is gentle but knowing, not at all timid, yet even opinions are delivered with an even tone that suggests forethought and honesty. Her smile is wide and abundant, little wrinkle-echoes lining her lips. I’ve admired her since I first met her, really, though now that we’re neighbors and I’m not teaching her kids in the classroom, we really get to relate even more as friends.
Dinner is simple and filling, a colorful salad with tofu, rice, some chicken. I hiked a watermelon in my pack to their house and offer it for dessert. There is wine and water and we sit on the back deck and watch the boys bounce and laugh on the trampoline. It amazes me to see their fearlessness and joy, and I think to myself how many years it has been since I played that way, since I laughed so much everyday, since I had a best friend I loved and saw and played with everyday…since I played, just to play, just to be, just to live.
I’m not sad, really, just grateful for their presence and the reminder it offers. When all is said and done, PD and the boys walk me home in the fading light. Halfway back it gets harder to see and Zac asks his mom, “Can we turn back so Sammy and I can get home and do homework?”
I smile and say a silent prayer, Oh, if I ever have boys, let them be like Zac and Sammy. The boys hug me goodbye and promise to come back Tuesday for ‘the job.” PD walks me across the creek through the rough bushwhacking spots and to the bend in the driveway. We pause for a moment before the road splits and I’ll turn to my new home and she’ll head back to hers. We listen to the creek, notice the light fading even faster, and breathe a little.
“I can remember hiking up here with one baby on my back,” PD says, “And another one almost full and ready in my belly, and bags of groceries on each arm.”
I shake my head. I cannot imagine really, carrying another’s life on my back and in my arms, then building a life together with such grace as she has done. “You just have to stay steady,” she’d said to me earlier in the night as we discussed old relationships, the parenting, and her life primarily as a single parent. It’s good for me to listen, to understand these things as much as I can before living them or knowing them myself as the case may or may not be one day. I have nothing that even comes close to the experiences she’s had, so when she talks I can really take it all in, wondering, learning, and imagining rather than comparing it to anything I might have known.
We’ve talked before about how her kids need mentors; about how she loves to include plenty of adults in her boys’ lives to diversify their perspectives and give them role models. It’s not difficult to see how that parallels what PD provides for me, but she is humble and so I don’t say as much as we hug goodnight on the road. She takes one path home and I take another, but they’re connected by more than soil and rock, by more than even the history of this place and all the friends who have walked to and from these two houses before. They’re connected with possibility, with elegant unknowns, with some kind of forest magic that, if Zac and Sammy were still with us in the woods, they would surely know the name for.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Still Uck...
The mechanic is really quite breathtaking, which makes the $50/hour labor rate a little easier to swallow. Her hair is cut boy-style and dark brown, matching dark eyebrows and lashes. This makes her key lime eyes glow in immediate contrast and I have to look a few times to confirm that yes, there are genuine specks of lemon yellow in the iris of each eye as well.
I am in the city to buy goods for tomorrow night’s party and already I can feel it sucking the life out of me. I would have shopped locally but I needed to buy alcohol and I live in a dry county (surrounded by two other dry counties).
By the time I get home I am weeping-sad-tired and still feeling sick. Must tend to the body again, then the words. Goodnights.
I am in the city to buy goods for tomorrow night’s party and already I can feel it sucking the life out of me. I would have shopped locally but I needed to buy alcohol and I live in a dry county (surrounded by two other dry counties).
By the time I get home I am weeping-sad-tired and still feeling sick. Must tend to the body again, then the words. Goodnights.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Saturday, May 05, 2007
On Retreat
I'm on a meditation retreat this weekend but couldn't find a computer last night to say as much. No posts until I return.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Ho-Hum But Still Happy
Sometimes I feel painfully different than my peers. I go to the auction at the craft school and everyone is in their truest form. Picture a dance hall with hardwood floors and metal folding chairs positioned around a level stage where thousands of dollars in artwork will be auctioned off in the course of about three hours. The auctioneer travels all the way from our capital city and works the crowd with finesse and genuine support for the school – all funds from the auction go to the scholarship fund.
But it’s not just the art that makes the evening, as this represents the culmination of two months worth of work by the 96 enrolled students we’ve had this concentration, plus work from instructors and local artists. We’ve all been pushing hard this season, me from one side of the counter – serving them as they need and humoring them as well. The students, from the other side of the counter, confessing their troubles, questioning their techniques, celebrating good kiln firings or enticing glass demos or a successful handmade dye. On Saturday, they will all leave and only our staff and core artists will remain.
And so it is that from the audience I watch the faces I will miss the most. They are caught up in the magic of the evening, the lull and rock of the auctioneer’s sing-song wooing, the heavy weight of keg beer in their blood, the exhaustion of the final week of classes behind their eyes. Johnny leans against the north wall of the hall, his classic features outlined by the auction lights, a dense five ‘o’ clock shadow accentuating his jaw line, his hair slicked back in style for the evening. His laugh is garish and gruff and his smile just the same. He’s a blacksmith who just left Seattle (his home for 15 years) and will move to NYC next week.
Nearby, Tess stands in the doorway, her blonde pigtails brilliant underneath the lights, a white flower decorating her hair. She gave up Hawaii, her home and paradise, to move to these mountains and train in the trade of blacksmithing. I watch her now, leaning against FamousArtist who has lately been her mentor, their laugher contagious to the audience as the auctioneer tries to coax them into pooling funds to outbid someone on an ornate five foot tall hand-forged candle stand that is up for bid.
Bright faces all the way around the room, and each one of them with a story. By 9pm I have been away for 14 hours and am beat. I have to call it quits and duck out a side door to walk back to my car in the rain, dive 15 miles, then hike up the mountain in the rain (hauling a croquet set on my back…more on that, later). Some friends are surprised when I say goodbye to them on the porch. They protest, But arent’ you coming to the party later? It’s the end of concentration? We’ve just gotten the party started! But my close friends hug me and wish me well. They know my ways and I wave goodbye.
For I moment I feel very alone. I am a single-ish twenty-something woman with a stated career and path, a spiritual practice, a smile on my face, and a lot of love to give. What on earth could possess me to leave such a party? Isn’t someone else feeling the need to go, too…to tend to things at home, to get back to business, to make more out of the day? It’s this twinge of loneliness that sometimes makes me feel sad because it highlights how different my day-to-day choices are from some of my peers. I was always warned that the writer’s life is a solo life. That the solitude is par for the course. That seriousness a symptom of such persistent introspection. And yet I am still surprised by this twinge when it haunts me, and slightly resentful of it.
I make it home in the dark and Cass has left me a message full of sweet things. The rain pounds on the tin roof and clouds block the wild light of the moon. I heave myself up the stairs and curse the desk, curse the keyboard, curse my tired mind and body…then sit in the chair and pray for the poltergeist of words with each peck of the keys.
But it’s not just the art that makes the evening, as this represents the culmination of two months worth of work by the 96 enrolled students we’ve had this concentration, plus work from instructors and local artists. We’ve all been pushing hard this season, me from one side of the counter – serving them as they need and humoring them as well. The students, from the other side of the counter, confessing their troubles, questioning their techniques, celebrating good kiln firings or enticing glass demos or a successful handmade dye. On Saturday, they will all leave and only our staff and core artists will remain.
And so it is that from the audience I watch the faces I will miss the most. They are caught up in the magic of the evening, the lull and rock of the auctioneer’s sing-song wooing, the heavy weight of keg beer in their blood, the exhaustion of the final week of classes behind their eyes. Johnny leans against the north wall of the hall, his classic features outlined by the auction lights, a dense five ‘o’ clock shadow accentuating his jaw line, his hair slicked back in style for the evening. His laugh is garish and gruff and his smile just the same. He’s a blacksmith who just left Seattle (his home for 15 years) and will move to NYC next week.
Nearby, Tess stands in the doorway, her blonde pigtails brilliant underneath the lights, a white flower decorating her hair. She gave up Hawaii, her home and paradise, to move to these mountains and train in the trade of blacksmithing. I watch her now, leaning against FamousArtist who has lately been her mentor, their laugher contagious to the audience as the auctioneer tries to coax them into pooling funds to outbid someone on an ornate five foot tall hand-forged candle stand that is up for bid.
Bright faces all the way around the room, and each one of them with a story. By 9pm I have been away for 14 hours and am beat. I have to call it quits and duck out a side door to walk back to my car in the rain, dive 15 miles, then hike up the mountain in the rain (hauling a croquet set on my back…more on that, later). Some friends are surprised when I say goodbye to them on the porch. They protest, But arent’ you coming to the party later? It’s the end of concentration? We’ve just gotten the party started! But my close friends hug me and wish me well. They know my ways and I wave goodbye.
For I moment I feel very alone. I am a single-ish twenty-something woman with a stated career and path, a spiritual practice, a smile on my face, and a lot of love to give. What on earth could possess me to leave such a party? Isn’t someone else feeling the need to go, too…to tend to things at home, to get back to business, to make more out of the day? It’s this twinge of loneliness that sometimes makes me feel sad because it highlights how different my day-to-day choices are from some of my peers. I was always warned that the writer’s life is a solo life. That the solitude is par for the course. That seriousness a symptom of such persistent introspection. And yet I am still surprised by this twinge when it haunts me, and slightly resentful of it.
I make it home in the dark and Cass has left me a message full of sweet things. The rain pounds on the tin roof and clouds block the wild light of the moon. I heave myself up the stairs and curse the desk, curse the keyboard, curse my tired mind and body…then sit in the chair and pray for the poltergeist of words with each peck of the keys.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
The Beginning of the End of the Beginning...?
Cass calls and it is confirmed, she cannot make it out to NC for her visit next week. Last week she was asked to headline a series of readings at a regional literary event and it’s scheduled during the middle of our vacation together. Financially, to spend the money for a changed flight and lose the money from work would be brutal this close to the original flight date. And so it is that I have time off from work and a big potluck planned up on the mountain, and no date for my own party.
So be it. Long distance makes you a ghost in your own life. I can no longer do it and said as much on the phone tonight. May will be rationed affection but true affection all the same. June will be intense and loving, certainly, and time together well spent. And after that, no more long distance relationship, no more stretching the heart across the country, no more, no more, no more. It’s what needs to happen, unless there is some grand twist of fate that yet awaits me in June. I’m and sad and relieved at the same time.
Everything keeps telling me that this life I’ve been offered up here on Fork Mountain is one of the purest, no strings attached gifts I’ll ever receive again. I’ve got to use every minute of this ever moment, every breathe of fresh air come down off the mountain, to feed my spirit and my words and write, write, write my way into whatever awaits me next. This will require focus. Above all, it means no part of my heart or spirit can be ghost or supplanted symbolically elsewhere. I am here. The mountain reminds me everyday. I am here and this is where I belong.
So be it. Long distance makes you a ghost in your own life. I can no longer do it and said as much on the phone tonight. May will be rationed affection but true affection all the same. June will be intense and loving, certainly, and time together well spent. And after that, no more long distance relationship, no more stretching the heart across the country, no more, no more, no more. It’s what needs to happen, unless there is some grand twist of fate that yet awaits me in June. I’m and sad and relieved at the same time.
Everything keeps telling me that this life I’ve been offered up here on Fork Mountain is one of the purest, no strings attached gifts I’ll ever receive again. I’ve got to use every minute of this ever moment, every breathe of fresh air come down off the mountain, to feed my spirit and my words and write, write, write my way into whatever awaits me next. This will require focus. Above all, it means no part of my heart or spirit can be ghost or supplanted symbolically elsewhere. I am here. The mountain reminds me everyday. I am here and this is where I belong.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Map Mania
I drive the back way from Fork Mountain to SmallTown, NC where the Forest Service Headquarters are located for our mountain counties. It’s a thirty minute drive up and over the hills, paralleling the river for long stretches, then dropping down into town a few thousand feet lower in elevation.
“You’ll see here ma’am that this topographical map of Tinyville and the surrounding mountains hasn’t been updated since 1960. But you’re fine with that. Some of the districts haven’t even been surveyed since the 1930’s.” The park service officer is tall and friendly, well-trimmed silver hair peaking out from his cap.
“Thank you, sir.” I say, taking the map for Carver’s Gap/Roan Mountain and the neighboring map of Tinyville and Fork Mountain into a conference room where I can spread them out on the table for a closer look.
It doesn’t take long for me to see that Grover was right. There is no Fork Mountain peak proper. Fork Mountain refers to the arm that extends off the peak of Roan and reaches down into the community of Fork Mountain. And indeed it does form a fork through two bodies of water, hence the name. I can see also that, as the crow flies, my new home is less than one mile to the summit of Roan and the Tennessee state line at 6,262 feet.
“Do you have any questions in there?” the ranger asks.
“Actually, yeah. See, this road here that I’m on ends at this spot according to the map,” I say, pointing to the end of the dashed line that indicates a gravel road. “But I’ve hiked up here and there’s an old logging road that’s not on the map, see, right here.” I point to the cut off for my driveway (which isn’t on the map either), then draw my finger in a line straight up the mountain. “This is the road my dad got my car stuck on. There’s an old shack up there, and further on past that is a gate marked for deer preserve. What’s that all about?”
The ranger gets another man from the front office and we study the map together, shoulders hunched over the table in the conference room, fluorescent lights buzzing high above us. The second man explains that if I go across the parking lot and speak to So-And-So, I’ll get a straight answer about the deer preserve. To his knowledge, it’s a state sanctioned designation that qualifying neighbors often request if their adjacent properties add up to 500 acres of more.
“What’s the benefit to the landowners?” I ask.
He shrugs his shoulders. “That’s what you’ve got to go to the water and soil conservation office about. The man there is a partner in this with his property up over BigTown way, so I imagine the same requirements apply since it’s a statewide designation.”
I thank both men and return to my studies. I can count seven cemeteries within one mile of where I live, and one of them is tucked away up the slopes of the mountain without any road access or structures nearby. I resolve to try and find that, once I get a buddy to go bushwhacking with this spring. I see, also, that Cook Creek is the water that comes roaring down the side of the driveway and it originates from a spring at about 5,000 feet. Another spring feeds into it along the way before reaching the property I live on, then it tumbles on down and eventually joins the main artery of water below.
Delighted in my quest, I pay $15 for the maps and get more information from the receptionist about hiking trails. “Now that map,” she says, “is for sale over in the Erwin offices, over there in Tennessee.” She laughs a little because, I assume, she knows I’ve been given the run about. This is the fourth office I’ve been to in two weeks trying to find maps. But you can get it just as fast online and shipping isn’t much. Just ask for map number ### and you’ll see, your house is on it and all the trails up the Roan and then some.”
I thought getting the maps would help me understand where I am. Foolishly, I forgot what happens to me whenever I see a map. Now, the explorations must begin. It’s not enough to trace it with my fingers, to name things and orient myself by the compass. Clearly, some hiking is in order.
“You’ll see here ma’am that this topographical map of Tinyville and the surrounding mountains hasn’t been updated since 1960. But you’re fine with that. Some of the districts haven’t even been surveyed since the 1930’s.” The park service officer is tall and friendly, well-trimmed silver hair peaking out from his cap.
“Thank you, sir.” I say, taking the map for Carver’s Gap/Roan Mountain and the neighboring map of Tinyville and Fork Mountain into a conference room where I can spread them out on the table for a closer look.
It doesn’t take long for me to see that Grover was right. There is no Fork Mountain peak proper. Fork Mountain refers to the arm that extends off the peak of Roan and reaches down into the community of Fork Mountain. And indeed it does form a fork through two bodies of water, hence the name. I can see also that, as the crow flies, my new home is less than one mile to the summit of Roan and the Tennessee state line at 6,262 feet.
“Do you have any questions in there?” the ranger asks.
“Actually, yeah. See, this road here that I’m on ends at this spot according to the map,” I say, pointing to the end of the dashed line that indicates a gravel road. “But I’ve hiked up here and there’s an old logging road that’s not on the map, see, right here.” I point to the cut off for my driveway (which isn’t on the map either), then draw my finger in a line straight up the mountain. “This is the road my dad got my car stuck on. There’s an old shack up there, and further on past that is a gate marked for deer preserve. What’s that all about?”
The ranger gets another man from the front office and we study the map together, shoulders hunched over the table in the conference room, fluorescent lights buzzing high above us. The second man explains that if I go across the parking lot and speak to So-And-So, I’ll get a straight answer about the deer preserve. To his knowledge, it’s a state sanctioned designation that qualifying neighbors often request if their adjacent properties add up to 500 acres of more.
“What’s the benefit to the landowners?” I ask.
He shrugs his shoulders. “That’s what you’ve got to go to the water and soil conservation office about. The man there is a partner in this with his property up over BigTown way, so I imagine the same requirements apply since it’s a statewide designation.”
I thank both men and return to my studies. I can count seven cemeteries within one mile of where I live, and one of them is tucked away up the slopes of the mountain without any road access or structures nearby. I resolve to try and find that, once I get a buddy to go bushwhacking with this spring. I see, also, that Cook Creek is the water that comes roaring down the side of the driveway and it originates from a spring at about 5,000 feet. Another spring feeds into it along the way before reaching the property I live on, then it tumbles on down and eventually joins the main artery of water below.
Delighted in my quest, I pay $15 for the maps and get more information from the receptionist about hiking trails. “Now that map,” she says, “is for sale over in the Erwin offices, over there in Tennessee.” She laughs a little because, I assume, she knows I’ve been given the run about. This is the fourth office I’ve been to in two weeks trying to find maps. But you can get it just as fast online and shipping isn’t much. Just ask for map number ### and you’ll see, your house is on it and all the trails up the Roan and then some.”
I thought getting the maps would help me understand where I am. Foolishly, I forgot what happens to me whenever I see a map. Now, the explorations must begin. It’s not enough to trace it with my fingers, to name things and orient myself by the compass. Clearly, some hiking is in order.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
