The Tree

Dear Reader!

Another nice story for you. Fiction. Now without the angry rant.

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—————————The Tree————————————————————

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Madeline finds the tree on a Wednesday. She is walking. The tree, its trunk massive, its bark like elephant skin, is on Gantenbien and Shaver. The tree is behind a small board fence, and its limbs extend out over the street. It is the largest tree, says Madeline, between MLK and the river.

It is the very end of wintertime, the wet season, and rain falls every day. Madeline walks everywhere. She has hurt her wrist, and so she cannot ride her bicycle. She also cannot play her violin. The violin, expensive and beautiful, sits in its case, and exudes the lonely smell of rosin.

Without her violin or her bicycle, Madeline feels that she lacks a sense of purpose. Sadness gathers around her like spiderwebs. But sadness is beautiful, and so is walking, and walking is what brought her to the tree.

One afternoon, Madeline is passing beneath the tree when buckets of water begin to fall from the dark, clouded sky. Madeline stands, clutching her wool coat, and watches the water fall. The circle of sidewalk and grass beneath the tree is dry, and after five minutes the clouds are exhausted, and they roll rapidly away, and the sun comes out, and Madeline is able to continue on her way.

Sometimes, on her walks, Madeline stops in front of the tree, and talks to it. She puts her small hands on the board fence and leans over into the patch of dirt in which the tree sits and she tells the tree that she is sure that one day, she and the tree will be together. Behind the tree is a house. In the house live people who Madeline does not know. On the porch is a chair, and a big window, behind which Madeline can see a dog. The mail comes to the house at four in the afternoon. Once, through the big window, Madeline saw a woman bent over the kitchen sink, rinsing spaghetti in a colander. Another day, while Madeline stood on the sidewalk, beneath the shadow of the tree, she saw an old woman step from a Volvo and walk slowly up the to the board fence, holding her sweater closed against her chest. That was Sunday, the day that the people of the neighborhood keep irregular hours, have cookouts, and congregate. Madeline feels loneliest on Sunday, and her life, on that day, seems to have the least purpose. After seeing the old woman, Madeline walked on, and after a few moments she passed the big open doors of the catholic church. Through the church doors she could smell incense and dim, dusty air. An ornate, windowless cathedral obscures the baldness of everyday life, thought Madeline, as continued to walk.

Today is Tuesday, a cloudy day, and Madeline stands beneath the tree. It is a workday, and the house is silent, save for the dog, who whines at the window. Madeline leans against the fence and waits until the mail carrier drops the letters into the metal receptacle beside the front door. He does not see her, standing there, and she watches him go, his calves muscular beneath his blue canvas shorts. Mail carriers, she thinks, have more of a sense of purpose than almost anyone. Gently, Madeline lifts the latch on the small board fence, and crosses the dirt yard, and steals up the front steps of the house. She reaches her small hand into the mailbox and extracts a blue envelope. She puts it into the pocket of her wool coat. Back in the dirt yard, she presses her hand against the tree. Then she walks home.

The blue envelope contains a dentist’s bill for three composite fillings. There is a two hundred dollar deductible, thirty dollars is the remainder.

Madeline is standing in her small room, and she turns the bill over in her hands. Her heavy velvet curtains are drawn over the windows. Her violin case sits, neglected, next to her stack of library books. Each day, when she would be playing her violin, she reads a library book instead. She also reads the books at night, when she cannot sleep.

Madeline looks at the bill for clues. It is a single piece of paper, folded three times, addressed to a man. It was printed on a computer, although someone has circled the outstanding balance with a red pen. Who? Did the dentist do this? Or his secretary? Madeline folds the bill, and returns it to its envelope.

At five o’clock the next afternoon, Madeline again mounts the steps of the house on whose property her tree lives. This time, Madeline rings the doorbell, pressing her finger firmly against the round brass button. The dog, inside, hears her movements, and begins to bark. The floorboards rattle and then the door opens, and a woman stands in the doorway. The woman is wearing loose athletic pants and her brown hair is pulled back from her face. She carries a pomegranate, broken open, and the fingers of her hand are stained red.

“Hello.” Says Madeline, before the woman can speak. “I got a piece of your mail by accident. I live a little west of here.” Madeline holds the blue envelope out in front of her.

The woman shakes her head.

“We’re in between routes, so there’s no regular mail carrier on this route. I’m sorry.”

“I opened it by accident,” says Madeline, “before I looked at the address.”

The woman takes the envelope in the hand that is not holding the pomegranate, and glances at its front.

“That’s alright.” she says. “It’s just a bill.”

The dog, who has been pushing against the woman’s leg, gets loose and stands on the porch beneath Madeline, trembling. Madeline puts her small hand on the dog’s wide, flat back.

“What’s your dog’s name?” She asks.

“Rupert.” Says the woman, frowning.

“Oh!” Says Madeline, her fingers stroking the dog’s fur. “I used to have a dog just like this! When I was a kid. Or my grandpa did, rather.” She runs her hand under the dog’s collar, and scratches him there. The dog closes his eyes, although his body continues to wriggle.

“Really?” Says the woman. “He’s a mastiff shepherd pit-bull mix. My mother got him at the pound. Rupert!” She admonishes the dog. “Rupert go inside!” The dog ceases to wriggle and looks up at Madeline with wet, dark-brown eyes.

“He’s a handful.” Says the woman. “I’ve been taking care of him since my mother’s been sick, and he won’t do anything that I say. Rupert!” She barks at the dog. “Rupert!”

Madeline sighs.

“I just can’t believe how much he looks like the dog my grandfather had when I was a kid.” She looks up at the woman. “Say, you wouldn’t need a dog walker, would you? I’ve got a lot of time on my hands right now. And I live right down the street.”

The woman scrunches up her face, and looks out at the street.

“You wouldn’t have to pay me.” Madeline puts both her hands on the dog. “I could come by tomorrow, even, in the afternoon.”

The woman looks at Madeline.

“He pulls.” She says. “He’s not used to being walked.”

“That’s alright.” Says Madeline. “My grandpa’s dog used to pull too. I’m used to dogs that pull.”

The woman sighs.

“That sure would help me out. Tell you what. I’ll put him in the yard, and I’ll leave the leash draped over the gate. It would be amazing if you could walk him.” She sighs again, and the lines around her mouth relax. “I work at the hospital, and I’m not always around to give him exercise. He gets pent up in the house, and eats my magazines. And he pees on the kitchen floor.”

“That’s awful.” Says Madeline. The corners of the woman’s mouth get tight again, and she looks as if she might cry.

The dog moves closer to Madeline.

“My name’s Madeline.” She says.

“Bethany.” Says the woman. The woman drops the envelope on a table by the door and they shake hands, the woman’s limp, cool hand in Madeline’s small warm one.

“That sure would be a help.” Says Bethany again. She looks at the hand that holds the pomegranate, at the fingers where the juice has dried.

“I better get going.” Says Madeline. “I’ve got to get home.”

“Alright.” Says the woman, and nods. “We’ll see you tomorrow.” She steps inside, and the dog follows her. She closes the door.

On Wednesday Madeline eats a lunch of goat cheese, corn tortillas, and cold coffee, and then she walks to Gantenbein and Shaver. The day is clear and cool, and the tree shakes its small serrated leaves at her, making a rattling like castanets. It is springtime. Madeline unlatches the gate and steps into the small dirt yard. The dog is there, lying in the sun, and it lifts its head to look at her, unalarmed. Madeline walks up to the tree and stretches her arms wide, leaning her full weight against its bark. The bark is smooth and convoluted, and smells faintly of vanilla. Madeline leans her cheek against the tree, and breathes its smell. In front of her face is a dark, dusty crevice, and Madeline runs her fingers along its edges, thinking of the tiny creatures that make their homes there.

They make their homes there, in the furrows of the bark, and it is world enough for them.

There is dappled light beneath the tree, and Madeline lays down in it. She watches the spring sky through the way high-up boughs of the tree. The dog gets up, crosses the dirt yard, and collapses next to Madeline. She can feel the very tips of his hairs where they brush the arm of her sweater. She reaches over, and puts one hand on the dog. She can feel his ribs rising, and beneath that, the gentle pounding of his heart. The yard is quiet, and down the street, a wind chime tinkles. A single cloud sets out across the sky, and Madeline watches it wend its way among the tree leaves.

They make their homes there, in the furrows of the bark, and it is world enough for them.

Madeline wakes on her side, her shoulder wedged painfully in the dirt. Her arm is around the dog, who is facing away, asleep. Warmth comes from his fur and Madeline thinks, momentarily, of a bear.

She stands, and brushes off her clothing. She does not know what time it is, but the afternoon has clouded over, and the air feels like rain. Madeline lifts the leash from the fence, and moves it to the porch. Then she latches the gate behind her, and walks home.

For the next week, Madeline is abruptly busy, and she does not have time for her usual walks. Her mother is in town, unexpectedly, with the man she is dating, and Madeline accompanies them to the Japanese gardens, the bookstore, and the rose festival. She has dinner with them on the rooftop of a restaurant on Burnside, and she drinks enough wine to insure that she does not have to fake enthusiasm over the cool steamed mussels and dry, salty bread. Madeline’s mother talks enough for ten people, and requires nothing from Madeline but the audience. Madeline’s mother works for an insurance company, and has a cat named Ginger who she does not, as far as Madeline can tell, love. Madeline’s mother has a bad foot which requires constant salt baths and the vibrations of small electrical appliances ordered from Parade magazine. Madeline’s mother’s boyfriend repairs tractors, builds birdhouses from small scraps of wood, and speaks only in the literal. They live, together, in a manufactured home in eastern Washington.

By the time Madeline rounds the corner of Shaver onto Gantenbein and sees the tree’s great bulk before her, like a ship in the air, nearly eight days have passed. It is mid-morning, and the house is silent. Madeline stands, looking at the tree’s grey trunk, and then she sees the leash, draped neatly over the gate. The dog, too, is there, resting in the yard. It stands when it sees Madeline, and small sticks and bits of debris hang from its shaggy coat.

Madeline circles the tree, tracing her fingers along its girth. The lowest limb is a good few feet above her head, and she fetches the wooden chair from the porch, and sets it against the base of the tree. Standing on the chair, she can just wrap her hands around the tree’s lowest limb. Tensing her muscles, she swings her legs up against the tree and then walks them up over the limb. For a moment she hangs, feeling the wrinkles in the tree’s cool bark where they bite into her skin. Then she swings up, and into the tree.

Once she is in the tree, the leaves close around her, and she is invisible. Madeline looks below her, at the wooden chair, and at the dog’s upturned face. She looks above her, at the tree’s great, kaleidoscoping mass, and around her, at all the other limbs within reach. She finds a groove in the bark in which she is able to fit the tip of her canvas slipper, and a knot which fits, almost perfectly, in the palm of her hand, and she lifts herself up.

I WANT

I want to bust you out of the city. I want to steal a car and drive up I-5 as fast as I can go. A nice car, a solid box, a bubble-pod, a car that smells like vinyl, nothing of the forest, a euphoric comfort machine. Stolen. What better thing to steal, than a car?

A stolen car and a suitcase full of money, to pay for all the gas. I’ll find the suitcase under some tumbled rocks on the mountain-top, underneath a giant Alaskan yellow-cedar of record diameter. A suitcase full of money and a car. The seas are filling with oil, the world is ending, who cares. This is no time to be pretending to know how to bake bread. This is no time for routine. This is no time for patience, for tolerance. This is no time to love the land of here below.

I’ll pick you up in my new car and then we can go anywhere. First, we’ll chase the sun. For moral. We’ll bust out of the rain cloud that clings to the cascade mountains and drive east into the summertime. It’s so bright out there that we’ll get suntans on our feet in the shape of flip-flops, even while driving. No more getting cheated out of summertime. No more pretending to know how to bake bread.

I never want to learn how to really bake bread. How to give an egg wash, sprinkle the loaves with seeds, mist the ovens with water to make a nice crust. I want to burn all bread loaves. Next, I want to burn all gluten-free bread loaves. I want to burn all pizzas. I want to burn the word PIZZA. As soon as I’m out of the rain cloud this feeling will pass. I’ll have my feet up on the dash, in flip-flops. Bread loaves can live. Bread loaves make a pleasing smell, sandwiches are sometimes interesting to assemble. Anything can go in them. Absolutely anything.

I’ve got you in the car with me and we’re busting out. Routine does not need us. School in the fall can Eat a Dick. Being far apart from each other is unnecessary. Missing your freckles come out, one by one, in the springtime, and seeing them only in bunches now and then, for a night or two, tears my heart apart. Now I’ve got you till the money runs out or we get sick of each other, whichever comes first. You’re wary of my plan, my stolen car, my mercurial wanderlust, but then I tell you that I’ll pay for your art school so you don’t have to spend your savings, and you feel better.

We go to North Dakota, because it is far from everything and not overdone. There’s an abandoned ranch, the grass waist-high. The wind blows ferociously, and sucks the moisture from our lips. The old house tips into the earth, but there is no mold anywhere. All the rooms are filled with light. The paint is peeling, and paint chips get in everything. I have a small gas generator for electricity. You’ve brought a good table and enough coffee to fuel a mild obsession.

All we do is fuck and work. We wake at dawn and run, without time pieces, down the pitted dirt road that goes through the grass. We can see the horizon in front of us, and I think of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her bareback ponies.

We run until we are exhausted, farther every day. There’s a stream to jump into, clear, with wildflowers. We bathe in the stream and then make breakfast out of things from our garden. We’ve cleared an overgrown patch of yard for our garden. It has volunteer watermelons and chicken bones in the dry soil. An old compost pile. We’ve got chickens. We eat and then I push you over into the grass and take off your clothes. We lay in the sun and bake. Then we crawl into the shade to fuck, because I am intolerant of the heat.

After fucking, we do not know what time it is. It doesn’t matter. We stumble, barefoot, into the house, leaving our breakfast dishes in the grass, and begin to work, you at your table and me at my computer. When we get hungry we eat from the big pot of food on the stove. Simple things, mung beans and brassicas and bone broth. Wild potherbs. Bacon.

When the sun sets we stop working, for we have no electric lights, and if we tried to work by oil-lamp we would go blind. The oil lamps hiss and we lay on the warm boards of the deck and watch the stars come out. I’ve got a banjo, and you’ve learned to play the thumb piano. Our hair is wild. We have no mirrors. It doesn’t matter, because we know how beautiful we are. We fuck again. All day, when we are taking breaks, moments of staring out the window at the tall grass, and the wind, we are thinking of new ways to fuck. Ways to fuck that no-one has ever done before. Fucking as improv, as spirituality, as ritual. Fucking that pushes our limits, our pain tolerance, our love for one another. Fucking that doesn’t try to be anything at all. Sometimes I read outloud to you from Little House on the Prairie while you masturbate. Sometimes I try and make myself come just by breathing and watching the clouds.

Frequently your coffee consumption keeps you from sleeping. These nights you sit up in bed and blind-contour draw my chin as seen in the moonlight. During the day you nap, and I write you love letters because I miss you, and feel my infinite smallness, all alone on the plain. I am like Ma in the dugout, when Pa has gone away to find work back east, and the blizzards will not stop coming. Only Ma was infinitely more patient than I am, because she never had the internet. Eventually you wake up, and find that I’ve taken off your clothes and tied you to the bed with some rope I’ve found in a broken-down stable. I’ve rubbed you all over with oil and placed warm stones along your spine. I’ve made constellations of your freckles with one of your shoplifted drawing pens. I’ve made you come seventeen times, in your sleep. You’ve had the strangest dreams, and you’re flushed.

Summer gets old and dried-up, and we run out of salve for our lips. We’ve eaten the twenty-pound sack of mung beans and are down to the bottom of our barrel of salt-pork. The wild pot-herbs have gone to seed and we’ve eaten all the watermelons. One day I wake up and want to read the news. You’ve been reading it on the sly for many months, and tell it to me in one long narrative there in bed, propped on your pillows, talking with your hands. I work in some magical realism to put the world back together, like an emulsifier. The seas are still filling with oil, there is still nothing I can do. The sun from the window is resting on your perfect tits, which have exploded in freckles. I pull the suitcase of money from under the bed. It’s empty. We haven’t grown sick of each other.

What to do next? Get married? There is nowhere else to run. North Dakota was the last place. You furrow your brow. You are both worried and excited by my mercurial wanderlust. Your hands are neat and square, the blue of your eyes has faded from the sun. I do not know what to do with you. Maybe I was exposed to too much lead as a child. All those peeling low-income apartment complexes. The lead weights in window dressings. Lead affects the part of the brain that determines impulsiveness, and one’s ability to learn from one’s mistakes. I flop back down on the sheets, and whine like a puppy. The sheets are thin and soft, like my grandmother’s sheets. They have small simple flowers on them. The sheets make me want to have sex, and sleep. They fill me with infinite peace, like my grandmother’s house, with its hardwood floors and chiming grandfather clock.

We don’t have money for gas, so we leave the car at the house, at the end of the long pitted dirt road. We use some of your savings to mail your art and art supplies and my computer back home, to the raincloud. Then we walk. It’s fall, and the wind blows drier than ever. I have a mason jar of water and a cucumber, and my banjo. We’re barefoot. Our jean-shorts are torn. My tye-dye shirt is faded and thin. Around my neck are rainbow freedom rings, and they glint painfully in the sun.

When we get to the small paved highway we’re so hot we almost pass out. A woman with air conditioning picks us up. She’s unhappy, so I give her my banjo. She rambles when she talks, and offers us diet sodas. You’re allergic to diet soda so to protect you I dump yours out the window when she isn’t looking. In this way you know that I love you, and that I Pay Attention. The woman is so excited by our energy that she calls her husband and breaks up with him, and then drives us to Oregon. She throws her shoes out the window, and after dropping us off in the raincloud she moves to a small beach town, and opens up a shop selling bath oils and gluten-free cinnamon rolls. She’s reached the end of her personal evolution and lives there, happily, until her death.

My problem is that I fear that I will never reach the end of my personal evolution. Back home, we both get jobs somehow, even though the world is ending and capitalism is becoming irrelevant. It feels good, to have routine. It’s much easier to pretend to know how to bake bread than to think. The wild part of me goes to sleep and I lose my suntan. The rains come back and we both have allergies. We don’t worry about what the next part will be because we both know that one day, the day will come when we won’t have to figure out the next part, that the next part will come for us, over the mountains in a tidal wave, and we’ll never have to think again.

the incense and crystal desert

a little bit of “fiction” for you

The desert is filled with rocks. There aren’t any green plants, just the brown earth and the rocks. So at first you think the ground has no color, just the sky, which is blue. And the sun, which is yellow. The yellow sun and the pale blue sky and the brown earth. But in the earth, there are the rocks. The rocks have color. So the yellow sun and the pale blue sky and the brown earth and the rocks, which are every color. They are sea-green and pumpkin-orange and lavender with sparkles. They sparkle in the sunshine, because they are gems. They are gems and crystals, sticking out of the dirt everywhere. If you had a rock polisher you would be rich. It is a magical place.

The only thing that grows in the crystal desert is the incense plant. The leaves of the incense plant are small, and soft, and they are a washed-out green-blue color. They cling to dead twigs. Nothing about the incense plant seems living. If you brush against it, the leaves fall off and settle, fragrant, on the bright dirt among the crystals. You can pick the incense and tie it in a bunch with string, if you have any string. Then you can burn it in a little brass bowl, if you have a little brass bowl. If you don’t have these things, I don’t know where you would get them. The only things in the incense and crystal desert are the yellow sun, the pale blue sky, the brown earth, the stones which are every color, and the fragrant incense. Now and then you will find some very old bones, turned bright white and pale pink and pale green in the sun. You will see teeth marks on the bones, and a place where the end was gnawed away, to get at the marrow inside. There are great beasts in the desert, but they are shy, and so you will never see them, not even their tracks.

There are no trees in the incense and crystal desert, unless you climb to the very top of a high hill that is almost a mountain. On the very top of the high hill that is almost a mountain, you will find a few trees. The trees are hunch-backed and thirsty, and they make bright blue berries that you mustn’t eat. The trees are the only thing in the desert besides the yellow sun, the pale blue sky, the brown earth, the rocks of every color, and the incense.

In the fold of every two hills is a wet place, where a stream runs. The water in the stream is clear and cold, and never stops running. It comes from heaven, and runs for infinity. It is the only thing moving in this great incense desert. If you had a little boat and you were small, you could ride the stream all the way to the ocean, if a big rock didn’t stop you. A big crystal rock, shooting rays of colored light in the bright yellow sunshine, stuck in the stream, that didn’t want you to leave. The rock would stop you because it wants you to stay and become a crystal yourself. It wants you to transcend your mortality and just shoot out rays of light and energy, and become one with the sun and the earth and the desert.

The desert is a magical place.

If you are lost in the incense desert, look at the night sky. The night sky is full of holes. That’s because long ago, men with deer-hunting rifles lived in the incense desert. There weren’t any deer to shoot, just dirt and rocks and hunch-backed trees, so they shot at the night sky, and filled it with holes. If you are lost in the desert, look at these holes, and remember others who have been lost in the desert. It will make you feel better.

If you meet a dog in the incense desert, you should try and pet it. There is a dog that lives in the desert. It is a pit-bull. The pit-bull is tortoiseshell brown with a soft white chest. The pit-bull was beaten as a young dog, to try and make it mean. But it never got mean, it just got low self-esteem. You can try and pet it, and tell it that you like it, but it won’t believe you. It will bow its head meekly and lay back its little ears and look up at you with wet brown eyes. It might have a yellow tennis ball, which it will modestly drop at your feet. You should throw this ball, but not too far, because the pit-bull has a bad hip. The pit-bull lives nearby, in a house with a fence around it. The pit-bull scoots under the fence and goes into the desert. Soon the pit-bull will get hungry and go home. You can’t follow it though, because that is private property.

If you are still lost in the incense desert, maybe you should try becoming a crystal. You will think about what to do, and reach consensus with yourself that becoming a crystal is what you should try and do. So you lay on your back in the dirt, and wait for dark to come. The sun sets, and the pinholes in the night sky come out. You know that lots of things become crystals, like gobs of pine pitch and bits of five-hundred year-old sequoia. You remember seeing these things once, in a museum in a little town. In the museum there were also shoes and beaded headdresses from the people who used to live in this desert, back when the streams had fish in them and the Great Beasts weren’t so shy. The beaded headdresses were so old that the eagle feathers in them seemed faded and bent. You remember wondering where the people got the beads to make their beaded headdresses. There are no beads in the incense desert, just crystals and sunshine. You remember the two women working behind the counter at the museum. They apologized for the mess, the unpacked boxes, it not yet being tourist season. You said that was alright. Admission was two dollars, but you didn’t pay.

The pinholes in the night sky rotate, but you know that it is just the earth rotating. You put your hands on your face, and feel your soft skin. You dig your nails into your cheeks. They are not very sharp. You flex the muscle in your thigh. It is not very big. Something could come eat you, out here in the wild incense desert, and you would have no way to protect yourself. The great beasts that hide in secret caves, high up in the rocky hills, could come eat you. They could smell your tender, oniony breath and stalk slowly through the night to where you lay, and tear you limb from limb, and puncture your organs with their fangs. You shiver, although it is not cold, and wait. But nothing comes to eat you. You wonder if the caves are empty, filled with sand. You wonder if you will ever become a crystal. You wonder if you will live forever. Suddenly, you begin to cry.

happily forever

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———- H A P P I L Y     F O R E V E R  —————————

The lake is ringed in gravel, and sits on the outskirts of town. It smells of soaked leaves and phosphorus, and above it, the sky is empty and blue.

I park my van next to the lake, and roll down all the windows. I fling open the side doors, letting in a big rectangle of sun. The sun goes over the beige carpet, and comes to rest on the wooden cabinet that holds my dry goods. On top of the cabinet is a cast-iron skillet. I found the skillet at the dump.

I climb into the rectangle of sun and sink into the captain’s chair next to the cabinet. The captain’s chair is like a recliner. I put my bare feet up on the back of the passenger seat. I am wearing sweatpants. The sun is in my lap. I feel as though I could sit this way forever, my muscles popping like steel cables. I work as a gardener, and my work is hard. At the end of the day I am tired. It’s summer in Alaska, and the sun doesn’t ever set. I can’t sleep very much.

I look at my arms. My arms are getting tan. So are the backs of my feet. At work, I wear cheap flipflops from the drugstore. The flipflops get wet in the water that dribbles from my watering can and slide around on the soles of my feet, chafing the spot between my first and second toes. Today, my feet are tan in the shape of the flipflops. My calves are tan too. I wear rugged shorts at work, men’s work shorts that come to the knee and have a hammer loop and a cellphone pocket. They’re hot and thick. I steal them from sears.

If I sit any longer I am going to fall asleep. I get up and walk through the trees at the edge of the lake. I take off all my clothes and wade in. The water is the color of broth. Through it, I can see every rock and bit of grass. As I wade in deeper, long leafy plants brush my legs. The lake is cold today. There was rain a few days this week. The rain cools the lake down. I drop all the way in, and rise up, and wave my arms and legs around. I lay back in the water. I am weightless. The lakesmell is on my face. I am not tired anymore. I splash my hands in the water. The water is all around me, holding me up with its million tiny hands. I kick my legs along the shore, pretending I am a small boat. There is a mallard in the grasses along the shore. She retreats as I come close, and keeps her ducklings out of reach. There are barn swallows, they fly over me, just above the water. I can see their soft white undersides. And on the lake’s elastic surface, right where my nose rests, there is another layer- the parasols of dandelions, small beetles, spiders.

I swim the whole circumference of the lake. I finish in an hour. I take two breaks- one on a little shore strewn with rusted engine parts, where the lake floor is mucky and green, and the other on a rocky beach full in the sun. On this beach I squat, my arms around my calves, and catch my breath. I pile warm rocks onto the tops of my feet. The last ten minutes of my swim, the sun has clouded over. The wind makes little wavelets, they slap my face. They try to drown me.

Climbing out of the lake, I put the bricks back on my feet. I put the bricks back on my arms, back on my chest, back on my legs. I am still made of bricks but now I am cooler, and cleansed by the lake. The tannins of decomposing forest, fallen into the lake. Duck shit. Fish. Small clear worms that work like snakes through the impossibly thick water. With my bricks back on, the small shore rocks hurt the soles of my feet. Now I have to be a land mammal again. I tired land mammal. I feel like I’m dying. I feel like I’m old.

I take the towel from the backseat of my van and wrap myself in it, and sit in the rectangle of sun, head back, in the captain’s chair. I take a deep breath. I close my eyes. I feel contentment. And hunger! There is the hunger that comes with exercise. There is that. So I’ll eat eggs for dinner, poached in an inch of curried soup. I’ll cook them in my cast-iron skillet. There is a cooler under the seat, it fits perfectly there. I pull it out to make a table, and set up my propane stove. I pull the eggs from the cabinet. I store my eggs in the cabinet instead of the cooler, because eggs do not need refrigeration. I learned this a long time ago, when I scored most of my food from dumspters. I lived in a house where there were always too many dumpstered eggs, and no room in the fridge, what with all the dumpstered vegetables we found. So we stored the eggs in a big ceramic bowl on top of the fridge. They never went bad. But we always ate them fast. I think that is the secret.

The curried soup sputters, and I crack the eggs into it. They cook, but slowly. I spoon hot soup over the yolks to make them cook faster. I flip them in the soup. Cooking eggs is not like anything else, I think. The food smells good. I switch off the stove and put the skillet on the cutting board, which is on my lap, where I sit in the sun of the open door, in the captain’s chair, where I could stay forever. I cut my food on one side of the board, the other is a trivet, and has the dark rings of skillet-burns. I eat the soup with a spoon. I dip cold, stiff slices of rice bread into it. The soup is salty and hot and sweet. The egg yolks run everywhere. When the soup is gone I pour water in the pan from my gallon jugs and put the pan back on the stove. I click the stove on. With a fork I scrape at the bottom until all the food is loose. I pull the skillet off the flame and fling the water outside, into the gravel. Once more on the stove to dry, and the skillet is ready to go back on top of the cabinet.

The sun is lower now and the shadows are long, the way they’ll stay for the rest of the night. I’m tired. I climb into the front passenger seat and put my feet up on the dash. I check my cellphone. No-one has called. My phone is expensive, prepaid. Ten cents a minute. My friends are all far away. I think of going to the library and checking my email. I could read celebrity gossip. Bits of plant matter float in my open window, carried by the air. I pull a book off the dash. It’s covered in dust from the road. The Devil Wears Prada. It is the exact opposite of Alaska.

*

On Thursday there is a show at the Sea Otter saloon- Girl Haggard, an all-girl Merle Haggard cover band. There’s a wedding on the grounds at work that night- I have to set up the big canvas tents, lug a hundred plastic chairs across the grass, hand out Costco mushrooms stuffed with breadcrumbs and tiny glass flutes of champagne. The bride is beautiful. At the end of the night I carry the demolished cake back to the kitchen and set it on the stainless steel counter. The rich chocolate edges are left, the buttercream fluting. The heel of a slice. It is chocolate cake, and each crumb glistens. I eat the leftover slice. It tastes incredible. The buttercream fluting, not so much. I throw away all the cake-stained paper doilies. I wash the crystal champagne glasses. I feel ill. There is a muslin bag of jelly beans, knotted with a ribbon that says happily forever. I put these in my pocket for later.

At ten the sunlight is long, and filled with dust from the road. Wedding guests, driving up and back. I edge between them in my van, the happily forever jelly beans on my dash. It feels good to drive the long road back into town. There are three country stations and a top forty station, and I switch between them. I like Taylor Swift, and she is on all four. I roll the window down. A good wind comes in, and stirs the dust that coats everything. As I round the last bend I can see town spread out before me. And beyond it the Tanana river valley, stretching all the way to infinity or the Alaska range, whichever comes first. There is the curving flat Tanana river, there are the lakes that shine like coins. There is the short, needly forest. No roads. And Denali. Denali is so big it appears on the horizon in different spots depending on the angle of the light. A trick of space. Denali is so big it’s an illusion. It makes its own gravity, like a planet.

That’s not true. I pass the Sea Otter Saloon. I need food in my stomach besides cake. I go to the store and buy a package of sushi with my foodstamps, then park in the lot next to the Sea Otter to eat. The show has started and there are folks milling about outside, smoking cigarettes. They are gathered around a man selling hotdogs. They are young and have beards. They watch me, in my van. I’ve never been to this bar before. I don’t like to drink, but I am trying to make some friends tonight. The men are pointing at me and saying something. I furrow my brow and eat sushi. I squeeze some wasabi on my sushi. Tamari is everywhere. CLANG! there is a noise like a chain against the metal of my van. I put down my sushi, confused. Suddenly, my van lurches backwards.

I open the door and jump out. My van is moving backwards. There is a tow truck behind it, the kind with the big flat bed that lowers to make a ramp. My van is being pulled onto the ramp. Hey! I shout, above the noisy rumbling of the truck. HEY! The man standing next to the truck looks over at me. The winching motion stops. There is a winching motion in my guts.

“I was in there!” I shout. “I had just parked.” I laugh, ridiculously.

“You’re on private property,” shouts the man. He’s my age, wearing a crass t-shirt with the sleeves cut off. His upper arms are soft, he has tattoos. The side of the truck says Fairbanks I tow. “You want your van back, it’s a hundred dollars.”

“I just parked!” I say. “There aren’t any signs! I hadn’t even gone inside!” I think of my cell pone, inside my van. I think of my paycheck, of all my worldly belongings.

The man shrugs, blank-faced, and points to a concrete barrier, two-feet high, that sits at the end of the row. Beaver Sports, it says, in stencil spray-paint. Lot closed 10 pm to 6 am. Unauthorized vehicles will be towed at owner’s expense.

It’s ten thirty. I look over at the bar. The men outside are laughing loudly, slapping their pantlegs. Raising their glasses of beer in the air. Shouting. They’re laughing at the tow-truck driver. They’re laughing at me.

“I don’t have a hundred dollars!” I shout. “Why can’t you put my van back down?”

“Hundred dollars.” says the man. His partner steps down from the cab and joins him. The truck rumbles. “More if we have to wait.”

There is no strength inside of me. I do not understand why everyone is laughing at me.

“You’re not taking my van! What is this, some sort of scam?” against my will, water comes out of my eyeballs and fucks up my vision, ruins my voice. Now I can hardly speak.

“A hundred dollars or we take the van.” The tow-truck drivers look at each other. “You want us to call the trooper?”

“Yes! Call the fucking trooper!” I am shameless now, screaming through my snot, pacing along the concrete. One of the men gets on his cellphone. He is bearded and wears dirty carharts. They could be brothers. I imagine them in their house in the woods. It is cluttered and has no siding, only tyvek.

A few minutes later, the trooper appears. He greets the tow truck drivers by name, and nods at each of them in turn. My cheeks are flushed, and I can’t stop crying.

“I had just parked and was eating sushi in my van and had only been here four minutes-”

“ID.” he says.

I had him my ID. He looks it over and hands it back.

“This is private property,” he says. “you got an issue, you take it up with the beaver sports.”

He tips his hat at the drivers, gets in his car and leaves. The men stand sideways, watching him go. They do not look at me.

“It’s a hundred fifty now, for the wait.” they say.

The thing winches tighter in my guts. It is a taut rope, pulling my insides too close together. I walk away, and then I turn and screech at them, through my snot- “Is this fun for you? Is this what you do? Wait for the lot to close at ten, then circle around, looking for people still parked here, who have no idea they can’t park here? I have never even been to this bar before!”

They say nothing. They are being strong. It is good money for them, predatory towing. And beaver sports allows it. Not every business will allow it.

“You can pick up your van from the impound lot tomorrow,” says the one with the Crass t-shirt. He looks down at the black pavement. “It’s three-fifty. You want a receipt?”

“No!” I shriek. My voice warbles. I am frantic, inconsolable. I want to kill them. I want to take out a knife and gouge their eyes out. I want to steal their tow truck. The chain clinks, the truck rumbles, and my van begins to move onto the bed again. I do not have my cellphone. I do not have my money, hidden under the cutting board. I do not have a blanket. I do not have a place to stay or a way to get to work tomorrow.

“Ok! I’ll pay you the hundred and fifty dollars!” The van stops moving. I jump onto the truck bed and climb inside, find the money, a small stack of twenties. It is my first paycheck. So insurance will be late again this month.

The man hands me a receipt on yellow paper. He still cannot look at me. Hostility wafts off of him like cologne. Things are spelled wrong. Bever sports, says the receipt. My van comes back down slowly on the chain.

“You’re a fucking douchebag,” I say, as he lowers my van. I am cursing him. I am Durga, the goddess of vengeance. A plague upon his household. Unhappiness forever.

He looks straight ahead. “I don’t care what you think of me.” he says. “I don’t care what you think of me.” I want to shoot him with a paintball gun. I want to chase him through the woods. It doesn’t do any good. He is already unhappy, I can tell. The whole world is unhappy. Nothing does any good.

I am shaking. I get in my van, circle the lot, and, laughing hysterically, park on the opposite side. The drivers look at me and jump into their truck, rumbling to life and peeling out across the lot, trying to tow me again. I scream and pull into traffic. I am insane. I am insane.

I drive east out of town. The sun is low, the sky glows golden, like fire. The dust glows golden. Everything. This week I am house-sitting for my boss’s next-door neighbor. They are leaving on a fishing trip in the morning. “Park in our driveway tonight,” they had said. “We’ll be gone when you get up. You can let the dogs out then.” I am headed to their house, driving fast. It is a nice two-story place in the woods. They have a big garden, a greenhouse. Three dogs.

The sun is in my rearview mirror, the clear blue of the sky. I grip my steering wheel and scream as loud as I possibly can. My body shudders. I have no tears left. I open my mouth and scream again, as loud as I possibly can. It is a perfect summer night. I scream again, and the noise terrorizes the empty space around me, bounces off the wind from my open window. I keep screaming, all the way to the house. I pull in the gravel driveway, and park next to the trees. It is around midnight. I step out and pee in the grass. Outside, the air has gone grey. A gentle dusk has settled.

Pulling the van’s mini-blinds down against the light, I crawl carefully under the mosquito netting and curl up on the bed in back. I lay on my side, my knees pulled up to my chest. I make myself as small as possible. I hardly breathe. I shake. I have brought my cellphone with me into bed and I push the buttons, look at its gently glowing face. I scroll through the contacts. I count forward. In Oregon it is three a.m. There is no-one I can call. I shudder. I try to breathe. I am hyperventilating now. I have an ache inside of me. It eats my bone marrow. It is a sort of scurvy made from missing. All of Alaska hates me. And the hate is attacking me. There is no-one who wants me to live, and so I am dying. I am hyperventilating. I am dying. My bones are hollow gourds, my stomach is bottomless, my lungs are echo chambers. There is no-one in the world to talk to, so I am dying. My only friends are the petunias and the bumble bees, so I am dying. My boss is a grumpy lush and I have spoken aloud to no-one but her and the bank teller in the last three weeks, so I am dying. I have no-one. It makes perfect sense. I have ceased to exist. I am dying.

I die until five a.m. The horror of dying makes me shake and sob and hyperventilate. At five a.m. I turn on my phone and dial 1 800 suicide. I do not know if it will work, but suicide has seven letters.

“I need to talk to someone and I don’t have anyone to talk to,” I say to the man who answers the phone. His voice is quiet and flat, like the voice of someone watching television. Uh-huh, he says.

“I live in my van and I don’t have any money.” I say. “I am small.” I say. “I am helpless. I am barely alive.”

Uh-huh.

I tell him everything that happened and everything I am afraid of, my voice squeaking higher and higher like a cartoon mouse. When I am finished talking I don’t know what to say so I hang up the phone. The man doesn’t offer any solutions. There aren’t any solutions. There was only the pressure of my own existence, cracking the heart in two. Now this man has it. He has grown special pockets so that it does not crush him. He carries pieces of many people, in special compartments. The pieces are heavy, but he carries them just-so, so that they cannot hurt him.

—————————————–

In the morning when I wake, the world is empty. They world has gone and left me with its house, and three dogs. A small terrier and two springer-spaniels. A big house, with big, empty rooms. Antique couches, sad lamps. Still walls. Little light. There is a wrap-around deck with wooden chairs. I sit there after work and watch the light move across the grass. In the kitchen I open all the cupboards and rifle through the snacks. Fat-free potato chips, boxes of jell-o. Fat-free mayonnaise. There are lots of prescription medicines. I take them out and line them up on the counter, one by one. For the heart, for the blood pressure, for the joints, for things I do not know and cannot imagine. I open the fridge and eat slices of fat-free american cheese.

I am reading a book on the deck. The book cannot hold me. The potted flowers need watering. There is a wilting sun, and a bucket of miracle grow. The afternoon is silent. The terrier is tied on his lead and he bites at the grass where I peed next to the steps, he bites and tears and rips at it, swallowing the grass.

I unleash the dogs and herd them into the woods. I chase after them. We go running down the leafy path, sticks and plants swiping at our ankles. The sun comes through in bars and patches, the air rushes past us. The little terrier carries a stick larger than his own body, joyously, like an ant. The springer-spaniels bound stupidly, afraid of nothing. We run down a hill, through the woods. I trip and stumble over fallen logs. The mud of decomposition smears my calves. We run fast, to keep ahead of the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes hide on the backsides of leaves, in pockets of shade. We have to run fast to keep the damp away, the coming evening.

At the bottom of the hill is a meadow. A mud path, a clutter of raspberry canes. The ground is sponge and blueberry bushes. Moose tracks are everywhere. We keep running, through the meadow, through the grass, into the woods again. I cannot see it, but below us is the valley. There is the river, the horizon to infinity, the silence of the huge blue sky. I urge the dogs on. The sun or rain falls down on us. It doesn’t matter.

the woods and what I thought about

I got a craigslist ride down I-5 and from there I hitched on a road that ran wide, narrow, wet, and then dry past a couple little towns and through some bottle-brush doug-firs to get to Paula, who’s living in the woods. The people who picked me up hitch-hiking were number one, a retired plumber with kidney failure and number two, a fourth-generation mill city logger and his handsome sons. The retired plumber with kidney failure drove an old, old oldsmobile and held a blond chihuahua on his lap that was as fat as a two-liter bottle and had a snout like a hedgehog. The old, old Oldsmobile smelled the way old, old, oldsmobiles ought to, like stale cigarettes and freezer burn, and the back seat was full of groceries, melting ice-cream and pizzas and such. The man had diabetes and all the medications he took for diabetes had made his kidneys fail, he said, and then shrugged like, oh well, one thing for another, I suppose. He’d moved to the area from California, because California had so much crime and was really like the end of the world, and in this area the air was fresh and green and you could pretend that the end of the world wasn’t happening yet. The road we drove in the oldsmobile traversed the fat cleft between two mountains, where the river had been dammed and the trees had been cut over and over again since before anyone could remember.

That man dropped me off and I waited awhile and watched the sun sink before the logger man and his handsome sons picked me up. I had to wait for them to get off work. But then they came, right at the strike of almosttoodarktohitchhike, Dude In A Pickup Truck and his sons who did not, yet, have their own pickup trucks, but worked extra hours at the window finishing factory to save up money. Dude eyed me warily through the car window and his little wife, Roxy, rolled it down. I got in the extended cab with his handsome sons who smelled of youth and wore their dirt-biking baseball caps low over their eyes, and pulled their cellphones from some crevice of their clothing now and then to text their girlfriends. The man told me that he and his wife had thirteen kids, eleven adopted, only two girls, and I listened hard to his dialect, noticed how he and his sons said “seen” instead of “saw”, “was” instead of “were”. Just like the people in rural Alaska. He even said “warsh”, like my grandpa. “My great-grandfather homesteaded just up that hill,” said Dude, pointing a big red finger across the road, “and that makes my son fifth-generation Mill City.” We turned off the road and he took me on a little tour through the three-street town, pointed out the boy scouts taking down the flag at city hall, waved at everyone. He cut logs, he said, his father cut logs, they had always cut logs…

He was going to drop me off at the gas station to await my fate in the gathering dark, but like they always do he said no, I’ll take you all the way. “I was an EMT here for seventeen years,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe the times I’ve had to scrape people up off this highway. We got drugs, we got… we got all kinds of things. It used to be safe here. I lived here forty-two years, all my life. There didn’t used to be so much crime. Salem told people that they couldn’t get assistance unless they lived so far from the city so they moved out here. It didn’t used to be like this.”

“I bet there aren’t jobs out here,” I said.

“Oh no,” said Dude, laughing and shaking his big red face. His sons laughed, as if I’d told a really good joke. I laughed too. “But you shouldn’t be out here hitchhiking. I don’t want to get a call in the middle of the night to come scrape you off the road.”

“I appreciate you concern,” I said, staring vaguely out the side window at the rain. “But most violence is contextual, it happens between people who know each other, and in families. I don’t believe in monsters, out cruzing the streets, looking to victimize somebody random. And anyway, the good news is that it’s almost always people like you that pick up hitch-hikers.” I think the man liked to hear that, but I couldn’t really tell. His wife was silent, sitting low in the seat in front of me. She swung her hand over, and offered us in back a plastic bag of cinnamon rolls. I said no thanks. They also offered me a diet pepsi, “had a whole cooler of them in the back,” and I said no, although afterwards I though I maybe should’ve said yes. One trick I’ve learned over the years is that although I don’t drink that shit, strangers are often greatly put at ease when you accept a gift of beverage from them, and you can always tuck a soda or a can of beer into your backpack “for later” and then ditch it somewhere after you get dropped off. As the road shrank into a ribbon of wet asphalt between walls of thick conifers I sent a few text messages and eavesdropped on the conversation between son and dad.

“I want to fish that stretch of river on so-and-so’s of property. Will you put in a good word for me?”

“Hmph. Put in a good word for you. You can fish it, isn’t nobody gonna care. He’s got twenty acres.”

“Well put in a good word for me.” (to me) “Great thing about tubing this river, you can find all the little spots where the fish hide.”

(dad)“It’s too late to tube the river.”

(me) “Water’s cold, huh?”

(son)“Water’s always cold. We get the bottom water from the dam. It’s the cold water from the bottom. You could do it in a full-body wetsuit! Or a dry suit!”

“Sounds fun.”

We got to the hippie hot springs resort where Paula works and Dude’s face was blank as he pulled down the darkened gravel road to the gate. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I wondered. This place had been here, had been a hippie hot springs resort since before he was born, it went back and back and back and he said he didn’t know the story of it, but I wondered. I wanted to ask him outright, ask him how he felt about the hippies and their hot springs, how he felt as a hunter, as a logger, as a rider of snow-machines (They won’t let us ride snow machines up this road, it’s too noisy, at least that’s what they say), as a Dude in a Pickup Truck, as a forth-generation mill-city resident. But instead I heaved my backpack out of the truck bed and said thank you and waved goodbye, wishing that I’d at least accepted the pepsi.

The mountains were cold. And black, like the very inside of the night. Amazing there are any pockets left, anywhere, without the pollution of electric light. A wrinkle in the earth, a gutter for the water to run through, a great river. Salmon. I carried my things across the footbridge into the hippie village, mist gathering around my ears, beading off the tip of my nose. In the dark all around was a lace of even darker, the lattice fingers of the doug-firs and cedars, hanging overhead and shaking, dripping, giving form and substance to the night. Paula’s cabin was a little A-frame way back in the woods, backed up against the ink-black dark, held close inside the moonless morning of the night. I found it arms out in front of me, stumbling over the wet matted alder leaves and through vague fallen fences whose borders I discerned by watching the way lighter black shadows made prison bars along the ground. The moon, I thought, was surely rising.

Paula’s A-frame was a dear wooden triangle with a small narrow porch, like a short hobbit’s house in the deep, dripping woods. I fumbled in the dark, found the lamp on the wall, cast a ring of yellow light, and fired up the propane heater the way she’d told me- turn on the valve on bottom, pump a few times, flick the pilot light. A blue flame leapt up and the pale window-curtain fluttered in the warm draft. I sat down on the futon and spread out my things, pulling out my book of stories that was new. Paula was working in the kitchen till eight, making gluten-free muffins and lentil soup, and massive steel carafes of cinnamon tea. Outside the trees dripped, and inside the air was still and quiet. Heat poured from the heater. Like the underside of the world, a forgotten fold… I felt the rubberband around my skull snap, and fall to the floor. I made a mound of pillows and leaned back, turning a page in my book. There was no longer anything but this.

When Paula got off work she fed me leftovers (cauliflower in almond sauce, gluten-free pot pie) and we sat on her futon and talked, and pulled books from her shelf, and put them back, and Paula had an old copy of the new york times spread on the floor that she was reading cover-to-cover, and I read a national geographic article in the yellow lamplight- it was about army ants. (ants are blind, did you know? as they walk their tidy routes, they rely entirely on scents and pheromones for communication. [I thought of you, of all the ways there were of talking that didn’t use words. Of when language fails me…])

Paula had a yoga class at seven a.m. and work after so she rose early and disappeared. I had no plans but to be a vessel for the quiet peace of the forest and so I burrowed deeper into the woolen blankets and slept for eleven hours, letting it fill and fill and fill me. When I rose the cabin was dim, and outside bars of yellow light cut through the clearing and burned up the shaking edges of the trees. The sun! The glorious sun! And the lichen! Swinging like mint-green Christmas tinsel. And the moss! A damp carpet, fresh on the bare soles of my feet. And the chanterelles! Gone slimy now and pumpkin-orange along the edges of the path. And the steam! Rising from rotted logs, hollow, mossed-over, sprouting frail alders- the steam! Rising up to meet the sun. Shot through with glory and morningtime, I put on my shoes and set off into the forest, eating the last of the cold leftovers first.

I walked all day in the forest, and it swept the city from my brain. The forest, forest, forest, said my feet. I picked up strands of false-usnea and pulled them apart. I hopped on top of steaming logs, I marveled at the light that bounced off stones in the bottom of the stream. Every other step I thought of you, a strand of golden thread, but the ones in between were mine. Boundaries! I thought, Imagine it! Focus! I thought. The cold clear waters of the morning! Oh if this was my life!

I got back as Paula was getting done in the kitchen, running teacups through the dishwasher, pressure-washing pots. We stripped and climbed into the hot springs, water like a smooth hot stone that you swallow, that warms your insides, the hidden crevasses of your bones. I dunked down to my chin, paddled my arms around, and thought of you. Paula is crazy so after we soaked we jumped into the freezing river, even though she has an ear infection. Then I got back in the tub while Paula stood watching the sunset, dripping naked in the cold evening air, as the light draped cherry-red and sweet orange in the cleft between the mountains. Who needs clothes, I thought, when you have this pie-shaped slice of sunset? A secret hollow all to yourself? Who needs anything but this…

For dinner we cooked beefalo and chard and spread it on corn tortillas, and had a salad of massaged kale, and a pomegranate split open, dripping red like blood on little plates. Various older hetero hippie men cycled in and out of the kitchen during our meal, talking with us about such subjects as crab fishing and electromagnetic radiation. One of them offered us wine and we offered him beefalo, and he settled down at the table, the three of us and an old copy of Joy of Cooking, from which I read post-dinner digestion stories titled How To Fill Thirty-Four Glasses Of Champagne At Once By Stacking Them In A Pyramid Shape and The Effects Of Hard Vs. Soft Water On Yeasted Breads, respectively.

After dinner we retired to the A-frame to explore, once again, the world of printed matter that was Paula’s bookshelf, which, this dark and windless night, and in the light of my new-found focus, seemed an impossible treasure-trove of wealth and which held books that, suddenly, rang like bells to us, stories from far away and narratives that clipped along like galloping horses and poetry- Poetry! As if I had never imagined it before! A shelf of books, a shelf of books in which to fall…

We read, and Paula told me about her life. Up at dawn, yoga, maybe a run to the mountain-top if she has time, then to work in the kitchen, chopping carrots, kneading bread, stirring pots of steaming things with great wooden spoons. And after work, her little home, the yellow lamp-light, her art materials spread out across the floor, a rumpled yoga mat, books to read- so many books to read! And soaking! And then to bed, to sleep like a dark rock’s underside, a sleep to heal the weary soul, a sleep that builds, that calcifies, that grows solid as a stone.

Paula was reading Julie of the Wolves, my favorite book from childhood. We talked about befriending packs of wolves, whether or not we thought that was something that could really happen. Paula missed Pearl, suddenly. A few minutes later the book dropped from her hand and she was asleep. I switched out the light. The forest was still silent, the air still vastly dark. The world was not ending. I lay in the dark for a few moments and thought about my friends, our focus or lack thereof, our thoughts that fly like skittish birds, that refuse to touch down, feet that don’t believe in solid ground. I thought of how much was possible and where, and how to make it all fit together like Lincoln logs. I knew I was just sifting things, waiting for them to fall into some sort of pattern that made sense. I thought of the golden ratio, which is tattooed on my forearm and which guides me, like a magical sort of compass. One of the men in the kitchen during dinner had told us that our emotions, apparently, do, or maybe should, follow that ratio- which is approximately three-fifths. As in, three-fifths of our time should, in the end, be used up exalting over the magic and the beauty of the world, confounded at its brilliance, laughing uncontrollably in wonder at a single, inexplicable ray of light on the mossy forest floor- and the other two-fifths of our time should be used thinking about and attempting to process the really heavy shit- war, genocide, unrequited love, housemate drama. This made sense to me, and I clung to it in the dark, imagining the spiral turning round and round, time spinning off like a ball of string flung into the air. So much was unformed, and so much was already over- and here I was. Was I the spiral’s eye? Were we, each of us, the spiral’s eye? And was that history, falling below us into nothing- our tailings- and when we come around again, everything, every single thing, is different.

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how the woodz make me feel

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steaming log

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Paula

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colloidial silver

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bookshelf

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headstand at the portal to infinity

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INVISIBLE JUMPROPE

Everything that’s wrong

This morning I straddle my bike and ride to Sellwood, eleven miles with the wind at my face. My naturopath meets me at the door with a hot cup of nettle tea, invites me into her stucco kitchen, toys strewn across the floor. You see, my child has been playing. Then we sit at her desk as she gathers her papers, small hands fluttering, white sweater pushed up on her forearms. We’d sent various bodily fluids of mine into the lab for testing a few weeks ago and the results have just come in. After four months, five years, three hundred full moons, a century of waiting, now she has the papers, now she knows everything there is to know about everything that is wrong, and has ever been wrong, with me.

MY PANCREAS. My pancreas is broken. I’d always suspected that it was held together with baling wire, plugging along on one rusty cylinder, and now I have the science to back it up.

“Chymotrypsin is a marker enzyme for pancreatic endocrine output. A low Chymotrypsin value is suggestive of poor pancreatic output of all enzymes.”

The “low” rating is 4 to 9. “Abnormally low” is <4. My rating is <3.

Basically, my body no longer makes digestive enzymes, so now I have to take them. A lot.

Parasites- Blastocystis and Endolimax, single-celled organisms that took up residence in my colon back in June, when I accidentally swallowed some water while swimming in my favorite Alaskan lake, the lake which I had nicknamed “lake lonesome”, because it had no name of its own. The lake where I swam every hot afternoon, where I parked my van after work, in the dust, and stripped down to nothing and swam the entire circumference of the lake, every day for six weeks, the lake where bank swallows fly low over the water, flashing their white undersides, and mallards raise their young, and the red-tailed hawk (sometimes two) will watch the ducklings from the top of a bunched and knotted spruce, and sometimes it would be windy and there would be little waves, and the waves would hit me in the face as I swam, and I would swallow water.

Funguses- also in my colon. A rhodotorula species and two saprophytic species. We look up “saprophytic fungi” on wikipedia, me leaning over the desk at Adriana’s computer as she clicks, and it says that saprophytic fungi are fungi that grow on felled trees, cow patties and fallen leaves. I imagine fruiting bodies in my colon, bulbous red with white spots, smurfs-styles. A forest! A forest in my colon. Felled trees and fallen leaves. Dappled shade.

Adrenals- My cortisal and DHEA are depressed, no, exhausted, and as a result, my body is overcompensating with norepinephrine, also as a way to regulate my blood sugar, which my pancreas is struggling with- and too much norepinephrine can cause, among other things, anxiety and insomnia, both of which I have struggled with chronically for the last four years. Also, according to wikipedia, norepinephrine can cause a decreased heart rate, which the chiropractor noticed, listening to her cold metal stethoscope, when I went in a few weeks ago to at last, AT LAST get my spine checked out, my spine which is doing some weird things that can also, according to said chiropractor, be attributed to adrenal exhaustion.

As my naturopath finishes telling me these things she pulls out a paper scrawled with notes and I say,

“Can a lot of trauma in a person’s childhood exhaust their adrenals early on? Like, exhaust them for the rest of their life?”

“Yes,” she says, looking at me. “yes, yes, yes.” She turns away to open a file cabinet. “yes, yes, yes.” she keeps saying it. She looks back up at me. “yes, yes.”

I want to cry.

“I had a really traumatic childhood,” I say. “I don’t even remember nine years of it. I ate trauma for breakfast, and pixie sticks for dinner. I always figured that was why my pancreas was busted, too.”

“Yes,” she says again. “Yes, yes. I know. I know! I had a traumatic childhood too. I know.” She puts the papers down on the desk. “I know.” Adriana is from Mexico City. Her mother was here last time I was over, making tamales in the kitchen. I’d asked her, then, how it was growing up in that city. “You get used to it,” she’d said. “you get used to it.”

Now I look over the paper she’s set in front of me. She zips up her black down vest, refills her teacup from a small ceramic pot. “The side door was banging open,” she says. “It took all the heat from the house.” She reaches out and runs a manicured fingernail over the words on the paper and explains each line to me, what the supplement is, how much I am supposed to take, and why. She stops halfway down, asks if its alright to go on. “I don’t want you to get overwhelmed,” she says. “this is a lot of stuff. If it’s too much we can just do some now and work on other things later.”

“No, no!” I say. “I’m not overwhelmed. I’m excited!” I want to dive headfirst into the paper like it is some warm secret bay and my seat is a barnacled, salt-crusted pier, half rotted into the sea. I want to savor this moment, draw it out, milk it for hours like an unexpected Christmas in mid October. I have been lost! I am stumbling, I have been lost in the wind-blown mountains, sheer rock all around me, and this is my topo map, the only topo map than anyone has ever offered.

Adriana resumes reading, and this is what she tells me-

THINGS I MUST DO

Take L-glutamine, five grams a day, six white capsules, for four weeks. it is the precursor to such-and-such and just might fix my stress hormones. (did you know, says Adriana, that most of our serotonin is stored in our gut? Did you know, that our gut is our “second brain”?) (If I feel wired after taking it I must stop immediately, a magnesium deficiency is possible)

Digestive Enzymes- always and forever, because I do not make my own. 1 with each meal and 2 on waking and 2 before bed without food and also 30 minutes before each meal and 1 ½ hour after also

Oil of Oregano- The most burniest stuff that every came from plants. See below.

Broad Spectrum Complex- small white bottle. Contains barberry bark, goldenseal, wormwood, garlic. Used in conjunction with Oil of Oregano. A barrel of gasoline to toss upon the quaint thatched homes of the protozoa, a book of matches with which to light them afire.

Fish Oil- is the Magic Snake Oil of 2009. I already take it, and will continue to do so.

Apple Cider Vinegar- 1 teaspoon ten minutes before each meal. To acidify the stomach, and to coax a few frail thrusts from the last rusted piston of my pancreas.

Probiotics- All the way baby, as intensive as it gets. Small foil packets sold in the refrigerator section, 25 bucks for seven. Each packet contains ten billion microscopic foot soldiers, strong young country boys from good homes, raised on yogurt and sauerkraut, armed to the teeth with munitions, ready to do battle in the only place it matters, anymore- your colon. Take no prisoners, raze those protozoa villages to the ground.

Tea- made from slippery elm bark, chamomile, fennel seeds, thyme leaves, the curled sticks of cinnamon. The consistency of egg whites, tastes surprisingly hot and good going down, reminds me of the time I made lube from flax seeds. 4 to 5 glasses a day.

Licorice tincture- for my dear adrenals. Two droppers in the morning for two months. Also, any and all adaptogens I can get my hands on- ashwaganda, astragalus, devil’s club (this one I can harvest myself), ginseng, gotu kola, Rheidol, rhemania, alma, Indian gooseberry.

And last but not least,

The Most Incredible Multivitamin I Have Ever Seen.

Adriana pulls it out from beneath her desk, a great hulking bottle, and pours me some in the bottom of a teacup. I drink it- it tastes, amazingly, like cloudberries- these small, dimpled, salmon-colored berries which grow here and there in the bogs of interior Alaska and actually, I noticed this summer, taste quite a bit like rhubarb pie- and instantly I get a bit of a body high.

“You need a good quality liquid multi-vitamin. This is what I take.” Adriana rotates the bottle on the table in front of me. “I don’t sell it to my patients because it’s too expensive and I don’t want to feel like I’m ripping them off. But this is very, very good.” I take the bottle from her and turn it over, squinting my eyes to read the ingredients. My brain has suddenly, somehow, cleared, and I feel GREAT. According to the label, the multivitamin contains, among other things, mustard greens, oxygen, and gold.

“I’ll take it,” I say, clapping my hands together. “How much?”

“Fifty-five dollars,” says Adriana.

I grin and nod, somehow happy, no, elated, to be spending this much money on a multivitamin. I cannot WAIT to drink my two tablespoons, first thing in the morning, just like Adriana. I cannot WAIT to see what happens.

I push money towards my naturopath and lift up the sheet with my lab results on it.

“Can I have a copy of this?”

“Yes,” she says, and slides it through her printer. I stuff my new supplements in my backpack and she hands me my copy, walking me to the front door. I hug her puffy down jacket.

“Let me know how you are,” she says. “I want to know how things are working out. I want to know what happens!”

“I’ll let you know,” I say, as I walk through her garden to the street.

“Where’s your bike?” she asks.

“It’s locked at the corner.”

“You know you can always bring it in the backyard.” she says, from the doorway.

“Ok,” I say.

I smile again as I cross the street to my bike. I turn the lab results over in my hand, and see that she’s copied them onto paper from her recycling, and on the back is an article on “Columbus’s role in constructing the fabricated history of the indigenous religions of the Caribbean”.  Adriana’s clicking accent is still ringing in my head, the cadence like a two-step. The sun has come out for a moment, through the blustery clouds, and I am crossing the street in Sellwood with the big sunflower painted in the intersection, and there are ridiculously cute cob benches there, and ornate glass-paned free-boxes, and even a thermos of coffee and chipped old mugs that hang from little cob hooks, and a blackboard with some chalk on which, last time I was here, I wrote my favorite quote, from Keats, and which is now scrawled all over with hearts, and endearing, rain-faded hippie clichés- and I smile, and my chest is like a flock of crows, and I know that there is nothing wrong, I know that there is absolutely nothing wrong at all.

Here’s the mp3, if you missed us telling stories on the internet radio

You can hear it right here- or right-click the link to save it to your computer. Hurrah!

Tara and Carrot on wholewheatradio!

Did I ever tell you about the time I hitch-hiked to Alaska and met my father?

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No? Well here, I wrote you this story. (Oh, and don’t forget to nominate me for best lesbian personal blog- every day until the 9th. Remember to confirm each vote through yr email, or it doesn’t count!)

The Elephant and the Rock

Did you ever just want to go north? There’s a lot up there, you know. Jagged, lonely mountains, and rivers and lakes and fields of blowing grass. Small, strange towns. And people. People who live in log cabins. That they built. Out of logs. Nailed all over with NO TRESPASSING signs. Old abandoned resorts, their empty buildings filled with sunlight and broken glass, at crossroads 100 miles from anything.

I hadn’t seen a northern forest in a long, long time. Boreal Forest. Boreal means north. We were in Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory of Canada, and the sky was a dirty gray quilt of clouds. And poking the bottom of the quilt were hundreds of sharp black needles. Boreal forest. The silhouette of the boreal forest. I made a deep sigh. It was the skyline of my childhood, different than anywhere else. Like a magical land, that you had to travel for days just to reach. The forest silhouette of this magic land looked so sharp and pointed because it was Black spruce and White spruce, which only grew way up here. Spindly, dense, and leaning. White spruce on the south slopes, Black spruce on the north slopes.

I was twenty years old. I had forgotten about this forest. I hadn’t been in Alaska for six years, since I was a freshman in high school, and had left this heartbreakingly beautiful place to live in the desert with my grandparents.
Now I was back in the north. I’d hitchhiked from Portland, with my boyfriend. My boyfriend hadn’t wanted to come. I’d pressured him into it. I was an evil, manipulative girlfriend. It was nice of him to come with me. It was a long trip, a long trip to a far-away land.

It was summer, and it was hot. Hot in the north, record heat. We both had burnt faces, and the sun had made me crabby and determined. North! I had said. Farther north! We kept going, pushing into the land, but the heat just wouldn’t stop. Summers in the interior are hot, but not this hot!

In the beginning, just past Vancouver, BC, my boyfriend had gotten sick. Really sick. Pneumonia maybe, or SARS, one doctor had told us. This was when people were getting SARS. We had camped outside Whistler, next to a river that frothed deafeningly. I had let him have his big fever, grumbling. I stuffed him in the tent with his shirt off, took his temperature. If it got too high I made him sit in the river. The water was so cold he cried.

After eight days he was better. He tried to be cheerful for me, but I could tell he just wanted to go home, away from this far-away place, back to somewhere familiar.
“We’re going to Alaska,” I said.

I had a little slip of paper in my pocket, and it had my dad’s address on it. I’d gotten the address off the internet, for three dollars and fifty cents. My dad, apparently, was living in Anchorage, the town where I had grown up. I hadn’t seen him since I was three years old. For all I’d known, he was dead or in jail. But then I had found his address on the internet, and now I was going north to find him. I was planning on showing up on his doorstep and introducing myself, and on the way up, spending some days and nights in the fantastical land I had so deeply missed. But I hadn’t wanted to hitch-hike alone, so I’d pressured my boyfriend into going.

Hitchhiking alone is dangerous, no matter what your gender. The creepiest hitchhiking stories I’ve heard are all from my male assigned, male identified friends. They think they’re safer, less likely to become victims, so they hitch alone. And creepy things happen. Nothing really terrible, they mostly just get propositioned a lot. By lonely truck drivers and whatnot. Pretty normal people, actually. Folks you might see every day. Yep, there aren’t any monsters out there. Just us.

So we were hitchhiking to Alaska, my boyfriend and I, to find my dad, and one problem was that we were vegan. When you are very far north, in a far-away land, there is not much for a vegan to eat. There are only dusty bags of potato chips that sit, stale, on the shelves of little log stores crammed with taxidermy, stores peopled with hostile men who wear gently sloping mustaches. Because of this, my blood sugar was often very low. We ate a lot of bread, too, in addition to potato chips, and I didn’t yet know that I had a gluten allergy. My head was always foggy and dull, and I had about as much energy as a bag of rocks.

The other problem was that when Joe had been sick, I’d run out of reading material, and I’d found myself in the safeway in Whistler, BC, which was also made of logs, staring blankly at the glossy bookshelves, running my fingers over tales of tragic turn-of-the-century arctic expeditions, flipping through books on heroic young white women homesteaders in the far north, who had to sleep on piles of spruce boughs and learn to bakes cakes in a woodstove, and glancing at thick books of “old time” northern recipes that tell you how to make Eskimo ice cream (traditionally seal fat whipped with berries) out of canned tuna in oil and pink cake frosting. I finally settled on the only thing worth shoplifting- a big hefty volume of bear attack stories. I stole them, took them back to our campspot beside the loudly frothing river, and I read them. Oh boy did I read them- and when I was done with that volume there were more, and I read those too. There were stories of tree-planters stalked and treed by black bears, stories of loggers attacked by surprised grizzlies, stories of menstruating campers with tents full of snickers bars and what happens in the dead of night when they are sleeping- and of course the newlyweds who go back-country backpacking on their honeymoon. She is attacked, he runs for help- he finds another hiker after a few miles or so and by the time they return with the helicopter, she’s long dead and her remains have been half-buried in a hole by the tidy bear. I realized later that these books are mostly published by pro-hunting fanatics who work to perpetuate the bear’s image as an unpredictable sort of beast in order to justify their careless slaughter, but at the time I believed all of the stories, and didn’t give a thought to what sort of things might be happening in my brain, as I read them. And by the time I realized what I had done, it was too late.

Panicked, I flung down the book I had been reading, and craned my ears to the world outside the tent. My boyfriend was on my right, sleeping deeply in his sleeping bag. Outside, the forest was lit with a grey light- the midnight sun. Everything was silent. Or was it? A twig snapped. Was that breathing I heard? My heart beat faster, images of manic black bears and panicked grizzlies stomping through the blueberry bushes of my mind, competing with the sound of the blood rushing in my ears. Harder I strained for sound, my body stiff, the crinkling of my sleeping bag like thunder.
There was, of course, no bear. One night there was a bear. We had camped right on its path, the path it used to get to and fro, dear thing, along the river looking for fish. It ran by our tent as fast as it possibly could, brushing its short black self against our little diamond-shaped plastic window. My boyfriend was reading me Rumi, and we paused, frozen, my eyes bugging out of my skull. I couldn’t sleep that night until he let me listen to John Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, over and over a few times, with his headphones on the mini-disc player he had brought.

I know now, of course, many years later, what a bear sounds like when it is crashing through the bushes. And I know where to pitch my tent so I am not in the middle of Mr. Bear’s nightly rounds. This is for the Bear’s peace of mind as well as mine, because I know, now, that the bear would rather have its skin peeled off and stuffed in a glass display case in the Anchorage airport than meet me on a forest path. I am the most horrible predator that has ever graced the face of this planet, and the bear is very, very afraid of me.

I have a friend in Anchorage, we grew up together. She has a baby now, and a husband who likes to drink beer and play video games. When I got to Anchorage that hot, dry summer, our ride dropped us off and this friend met us in the Sears parking lot. Surprise! I said. Can I stay with you?

“Well, no,” She said. She was staying with her boyfriend’s mom, and there wasn’t room for us. She would, however, lend us bikes, and so we camped in the woods next to goose lake- a lake I’d swum in a lot as a kid, down the road from a low-income apartment complex I’d lived in, a flat lake covered in ducks. We set up our tent in the woods next to the lake and slept, trying to pretend that there weren’t kids tromping about in the trees around us, playing the exact sorts of forest games I’d played when I was growing up in that neighborhood. After a day or two of gathering our strength, eating cans of beans and fingering the slip of paper in my pocket, I felt that it was Time, and we set off on our rusty bikes to find my father.

It had seemed like a good idea to hitchhike up to Alaska and meet my dad. It had seemed like a plucky and courageous thing to do. And I mean, why not? He was just some stranger, and I was curious about him, curious about that whole side of the family. There had to be something there, some little bit of spark or light or understanding, somewhere on his side of my family tree. It was the dark side of my tree, the half draped in shadow, a side I had never seen. Who knew what those people were like? I figured the odds were good. There had to be someone in my family who wasn’t a total zombie like the people on my mom’s side- who had the guts to feel a goddam emotion and be human, and maybe a wingnut or two, thrown in there, that I could relate to. But as of yet, I hadn’t met them. And I just hoped that if they were there, they would make themselves known- that they wouldn’t be invisible like me, floating around with some stupid nickname, fallen from a limb, forgotten.

He was just some dumb straight guy and I could see the fear in his eyes, shining there a little dull, and it made me want to punch him in the face. My dad the total stranger stood frozen in the door of his stupid, unremarkable townhouse, and smiled an unremarkable smile. He laughed a little and invited me in, faking warm and jovial, not betraying a bit of his fear. My boyfriend came it too. I had instructed him not to say anything. Not a word.

In my dad’s house there were fat leather couches and a big, big TV, and on the TV was a football game. There was a thin Pakistani woman leaning on the counter in the kitchen. His wife. She faked friendly as well. I did not shout. I did not ask him, So- where have you been all my life? I wondered, instead, if I was interrupting. I felt as if I was breaking and entering.

Joe and I sat on the couch. We probably smelled. I had weird short hair under a red mesh cap. On the front of the cap was a rat peeing, and it said Piss on it! and the brim was curled up. I had the cap on backwards, the way I liked to wear it. I was wearing cutoff camo cargo pants, and my legs were hairy. I’d put on a long sleeve shirt over the black tank top I wore, to cover my tattoos. I don’t remember what my boyfriend was wearing, but it was probably a tight polo shirt that showed his nipple rings, and women’s boot cut jeans. He had long blonde hair and a big nose ring, and tattoos on his forearms of fists punching through earth and strange people-symbols in a ring, sharing mind-waves.

My dad looked at us sitting on the couch, a big tight grin plastered to his face. Then the three of us had some awkward small talk, as if this was just the most normal thing in the world, to show up on the doorstep of a parent you haven’t seen or heard from in eighteen years, and sit on their big leather couch and have small talk, the football game on mute, players still running around after the ball. His wife offered us some tea, and we said no. She offered us some juice, and we said no. She offered us juice again, and finally my boyfriend took some from her and then she never said another thing, just stood leaning against the kitchen counter, watching.

We talked, but really, we said nothing. Mostly my dad, he said nothing. He said so much nothing it filled the room with nothing, a big elephant nothing, and the elephant got fatter and fatter until it was crushing me, and rushing into my brain, and my mind went blank in the middle of a sentence and I just stared at him, unable to remember what we had been talking about or what the thought was that I had been vocalizing. Right in the middle of a sentence, the elephant had sat on my head and I couldn’t even finish the sentence. My dad stared at me and the elephant opened its big elephant mouth and screamed with all its elephant might, but it was an invisible elephant and invisible elephants scream invisible screams- it was a panic attack, pouring out of that elephant’s mouth. A great, big, nothing panic attack, because the elephant was really a million tiny ants, one ant for every long-ago day that I had wondered who my dad was, had wondered what he was like, where he was at, if he was in jail or dead, and why wasn’t he paying child support or supporting his children or giving us food. I was hungry and there was nothing to eat and in my world, there was no food, and there were no sheets or clean laundry or bottles of shampoo that smelled like strawberries. Suave. There was no one but me and my brother, staring into each others’ eyes, kicking our legs on opposite sides of the kitchen table, opening and re-opening the kitchen cabinets, hunger and malnutrition pinching at our insides and keeping us awake at night with leg cramps, making us steal other kids’ lunches at school and pick soggy oreos off the soccer field, desperate.

He looked at me and way back in his eyes, I could see it there. I could see what he was thinking. Everything had gone wrong and it was all his fault and now I was all fucked up and had come for him. I had come to make him pay. Emotionally, financially. Something. But actually I wasn’t even feeling too fucked up about the whole thing. I was feeling pretty well adjusted, in my own wingnut way. I wasn’t a junkie or a violent criminal. I was vegan at the time and I didn’t even drink. And I didn’t want to make him pay. I wanted him to be my friend. I wanted him to tell me about his life, and maybe tell me about any interesting relatives on his side that I might like to meet. I wanted him to tell me who he was. I wanted him to open up to me like the single men in pickup trucks that gave us rides north on the Alcan, who turned their bright eyes on us and let all their hopes and dreams spill out like a big vomit of crystallized sugar, used strong emotions, swept their arms across the horizon, declared their love for all of life and sweet regret for years that they had let pass by. One hundred miles the best of friends. Intimacy.

He didn’t want that. On his very longest list of things he absolutely did not want, way down at the very bottom, was that. He was like a rock inside of himself. Break it apart, you just find more rock. No way to get inside. I sat and looked at him, the rock. The big football rock. The silent, passive wife rock. The nice house rock. There was nothing. Even my dad himself- round but not tall, thick grey hair, freshly blow-dried. White teeth. A great big nothing.

I elbowed my boyfriend and we said Oh, Boy, Time to go! My dad-rock offered to drive us home. No, we said, a little awkwardly. We were sleeping in the woods, among the stunted spruce and the mosquitoes. I didn’t want him to see that we were camping. I wasn’t going to share any more of myself with this man, this man who wanted us in his living room like he wanted a natural disaster. So we left his house, pushing our way clumsily out of the elephant’s disorienting force-field, shaking our limbs to be free of it in the evening air, and walked to where we had locked our bikes. The light was cool and low, and as we walked along the street a young man pedaled towards us on a mountain bike, and in his left arm he cradled the most enormous king salmon, and his hoodie was splattered all over with blood. His right arm clutched a handlebar, and under that arm was his fishing pole. The kings were running, and he had been fishing at the creek at the end of the block, where a ribbon of forest ran through the neighborhood. We smiled and laughed at the magic of it all, and then I started to cry, big hot tears that made the world blurry, and since I couldn’t ride my bike because I was crying we just pushed them, and my boyfriend put his arm around me. Sob, sob, as I liquidated the elephant scream and pushed it out of my eyeballs. Sob, sob, quietly, my hand over my eyes, my lips pulled back in a horrible grimace, little gasping breaths. We were walking along a busy road, and the cars rushed by, blowing car-wind at us. One of the cars slowed and a man leaned out the window, waving his hand in the air.

“FAAAAAAAAAAGS!” he yelled, and sped away. I stopped crying and laughed, I dropped my bike and laughed. My boyfriend and I laughed and laughed, I leaned back my red splotchy face and laughed, the air hitting us cool and green, fresh even in the city, because it is Alaska.

I like this so much I don’t even know what to say

I had need of some sockmonkey illustrations, for Phillip’s Story, the fantastical tale of a sockmonkey who meets an oracle in a junk shop (after learning celestial navigation from some chickens) and then sets off on an epic quest to destroy the internet. So I asked my friend Lark, who’s an artist, if she would make some drawings for me. She said yes, and went right to work, steadfastly drawing in her basement apartment in Brooklyn. And today she posted the first five illustrations onto her website, and when I saw them I was so happy I could hardly talk.

You can see them here.

When the drawings are finished, which will be whenever Lark gets tired of doing them, the Brooklyn drawings and the Portland story will come together like two halves of a long-distance sandwich, and what will be left, if all goes well, is a book. I’ll either be printing it myself or doing print-on-demand (if I can find a service that does something other than ugly, glossy paperbacks) or fishing around for a publisher, which sounds discouraging and hard, and would maybe bring up issues such as the fact that my story COULD be marketed for children, except the way it’s written, I think, would be nearly impossible for a child to understand, and is very obviously, at least to me, intended for grown-ups (or at least those who have lived long enough to develop a healthy distaste for the internet, and have need of everyday magic and the ephemera of times past).

A book! A small, narrow, nicely bound book! Can you even imagine it!

Central Oregon is Made of Light and Magic

This is the very last installment of our regularly scheduled hitch-hiking program. The past has hereby officially caught up with the present tense, in a mild and happy manner, where everything goes alright and Home Is Reached. All entries from here on out will be made up of either the future (which by then will be the present tense) and the past (which has yet to be documented in its entirety).

Bear was a fat little black dog with a white stripe, like a skunk. He had a dog bed down on the passenger-side floor-mat, but now my feet were there, and he stood awkwardly in the space between me and the driver, staring at my feet. Finally he squeezed between my pants-cuffs and settled down with his nose on my shoe.

“You like Christmas music?” asked the driver, his big fingers on the radio dial.

“Uhh…”

“I love this station,” he said, turning up the volume. “It’s so soothing.” Light jazz remakes of Christmas songs filled the dark truck cab. I watched the road roll under the front of the truck, bouncing a little on my tall truck seat, with its super-deluxe shocks and ultra-adjustable everything. I reached a hand down and fiddled with the button for lumbar support, feeling the seat inflate against my lower back. The man seemed almost content to just zone out and watch the road. My eyelids grew heavy as the I watched the yellow line come out of darkness and slip under the truck. Have yourself a merry little blah blah…

“So you just travel around?”

I was wrong.

“No,” I said, giving him some garbled answer. The cliff notes of my life. We were headed over the passes in Northern California, and dark, dry pine forests flanked the highway, spotlit momentarily in the truck’s headlights. Suddenly, I smiled, remembering. My long, ridiculous journey was almost over. I was hurtling through the dark night in the direction of home. My chickens were as good as hatched. And it all seemed worthwhile, now- that super-zen devil-may-care attitude I’d managed to cultivate. As if nothing could go wrong. As if no matter how stuck I felt, I’d still make it home in the end. And nothing had gone wrong. And I was as good as home. I wanted to laugh out loud. It all works out in the end, it all works out in the end…

The man and I talked for a good chunk of hours, mostly about his relationship with his wife. They’d been married fourteen years, no kids together, and their children from previous marriages were grown and gone. She used to come with him when he worked, he said, and it had been incredible. Someone to share the road with, someone to talk with about whatever came into one’s mind while accumulating all those empty highway miles.

“Or not talk, too,” he said. “sometimes we’d just be in our own thoughts, and ride along for hundreds of miles that way. It was just nice to have the companionship.”

By and by his wife had wanted her own occupation, something that was soley hers, and had gotten into dog breeding. Now she stayed at home while he was away, and they’d go a week at a time without seeing each other.

The man’s ringtone went off. It was the sound of a baby crying. He pulled a headset from the window visor and put it over his ears.

“What’s up, baby cakes?”

They talked for a while, and he hung up. His wife called back in twenty minutes, and again half a dozen times after that, throughout the evening. I am always amazed when I ride with truckers who do this. They try so hard, in spite of everything, to maintain some sort of connection- even though they are never at home, even though it’s just a voice screeching out of a little electronic box, thin as a flaking pie tin. I wonder how real it is.

“It’s like we live separate lives now.” Said the man. He had been thinking the very same thoughts. “We talk every day, but we don’t share any of the same experiences anymore. She’ll have a problem with this dog or that dog, she’ll get a migraine, she’ll pay this or that bill. I’ll hit some bad weather, I’ll have a problem with a load, I’ll get held up in traffic. It’s all separate now. And we she has a migraine, I’m not there. I don’t share that with her. So when I get home, it’s like…”

“It’s like you’ve grown apart.” I said.

“Yes,” said the man.

“I have a theory,” I said, “that if you don’t share the same physical space with someone, you may as well not exist. I’ve decided that’s why long distance relationships don’t work. As soon as you’re not in the same physical space, you start to grow apart from each other, growing instead into whatever physical space it is that you inhabit. And then when you finally see each other, even if you’ve talked on the phone every day, it’s like you’re total strangers. You may as well have not talked or thought of each other the whole time you’ve been apart.”

The man seemed to consider this.

“Telephone conversations aren’t real,” I said.

His phone began to cry again. He picked up the headset, fumbling with the cord in the dark.

“What’s up, baby cakes!”

We stopped somewhere in the dark mountains to get some dinner. It had begun to rain. I walked across the wet truckstop parking lot, my head floating above my body. I felt like I was wearing moon boots. Too much time on the road, too much time on the road… Inside the truckstop I balked at the bright florescent lighting. Glossy racks held cheap ceramic trinkets, wind chimes and fleece blankets. Snow-globes with deer in them. There were stacks of workboots, dvds in plastic anti-theft cases. A whole bin of discounted candy bars. Giant-size baby ruth. Candy orange slices. The men shuffled up the aisles, dark-eyed, fingering tins of peanuts. Looking like their faces had been frozen halfway between startled and asleep. I stood staring at a rack of snack-chips. The store needed to restock. There was only one bag of barbecue potato chips left, and no cheddar popcorn. I thought of getting home, of changing my clothes. Of wearing a different pair of pants. Of taking the wilted cabbage heel from the bottom of my pack and throwing it away. I could feel myself fishing it from the depths of my pack, now empty and deflated. I heard the thunk as it hit the bottom of the trashcan, and a wave of pleasure swept through me. Too much time on the road, too much time on the road…

The man and I had subway. I ordered a salad, because surprisingly, subway is one of the only fast-food places where there is absolutely nothing that I can eat. Not. A single. Thing. Everything has bread in it. Unless I want to eat the insides of a turkey sandwich, or scrape the tuna salad off its half-pound bread-log. I actually did that once, and it was sort of heartbreaking. So I got a salad, but I wasn’t really hungry anyway. And it was late now, almost midnight. The man was stopping soon, for the night. He’d said that he could leave me in a town on I-5, before he split off on his little country road to Bingen, or, if I wanted, I could come along with him, but he wasn’t going all the way until morning, stopping for the night just over the Oregon border. I knew he wasn’t a creep, and nothing sounded better than that top bunk, with its thin mattress and plastic walls. So I said yes, my heart jumping at the word “Oregon”.

We finally pulled off in the wee hours of the morning, after exhausting all of our topics of conversation. His in-laws, her in-laws, their kids, their ex’s kids. Where I sleep at night. I climbed up on the top bunk and curled up gratefully under my tired sleeping bag, putting away a chapter of my vampire book by lamplight before shoving in my earplugs and drifting off. The man was watching a movie on the bunk below, and I thought down to him, Sleep, sleep, you truckers never get enough sleep, as the foam expanded in my ear canal and slowly squeezed out all the wide world, with its noises and people and bright, endless highways, leaving only the sound of my own breathing and the distant rumble of the idling truck.

He got up too early and I pilfered a granola bar from the truckstop for breakfast. It had nuts in it, and fruits, all stuck together with some sort of glaze that made threads when you pulled it apart, like a rice crispy treat. I appreciate anything that resembles a rice crispy treat in any way. I ate the bar slowly, watching the morning world through the truck windshield. The morning world was full of pines, and dry grass, and bright clear sunshine. The brightest, clearest sunshine, it seemed I had ever seen. There had been sun in Arizona, sure, but the air had had a sort of haze to it- because of the fires in California, maybe, or because of Phoenix. The air here, in southern/central Oregon, was something else entirely. Cold, smelling of pine, and clear like it’d been steeped through a piece of flannel. With little trails of white cloud, startling for all their intricate edging and tiny detail. If I’d felt peaceful yesterday I was the Zen Master today, chewing my granola bar and staring out at the road, silent.

The man and his wife began their morning ritual of back-and-forth calls over the course of an hour. He drove, she called. There was someone at the door. She called back. He was still driving. She went to the store, got some coffee, took care of the dogs. She called. He was still there, behind that big wheel, facing the road. She had some breakfast. He sat, Christmas music down low. I opened my vampire novel and retreated into it. I’d decided that I didn’t want to talk today, that I’d used up all my words the night before. I needed to let them refill, like water trickling into a reservoir. One way to do that was to not talk, to stare out the window, and to read Stephanie Meyer’s absurd new plotline, which included vampires and broken-down motorcycles and was even more badly written than the first book. Edward wasn’t even in this one. He’d dumped the seventeen year-old girl and left town. All she had was her friend, who fixed cars. Sometimes she’d jump off cliffs into the ocean, because she’d found that when her life was in danger, she would hallucinate the sound of Edward’s voice, telling her she was a fucking idiot and that she’d better stop doing whatever she was doing or he’d hold her down by her wrists until her heart stopped.

Oh, those Mormon authors and their thinly-veiled BDSM.

Finally the phone stopped crying and the man looked over at me, tossing out a line of conversation like he was casting for trout. I muttered a word in response, and he looked back at the road. He switched stations, tapped the dash, hummed to himself. He threw out another hook, and I ignored it, staring intently into my book. I felt bad, but I just didn’t have any words left. I was used up. Empty. I’d been hitch-hiking for too long, and finally the fuel-light on my dash had come on. My car had stalled. I’d given him a good five hours the night before of solid listening/nodding/suggesting/encouraging, and now his appointment was over.

This happens sometimes, when I ride with someone for more then a day. No, it always happens. We just kind of turn away from each other, like a curtain has dropped between the seats. We’re over it.

We stopped once to eat, at a taco bell filled with light and the elderly. I ate a chicken bowl and a crispy taco, declaring the ground beef pure of gluten, which I’m sure is not the case. He ordered an unfamiliar foodstuff, a sort of burrito wrapped inside a burrito, the second burrito being deep-fried, and I handed it to him as he drove.

Central Oregon is the size of one day. The day was full of Central Oregon, Central Oregon and more Central Oregon. Around each new bend, was Central Oregon. I had no idea. I never went to Central Oregon. I had never been down this lonely stretch of state highway. Around mid-morning the world outside my window had become such a fantastical place- golden grasses waving in the wind, small towns clustered together in space, nothing to fill the air. Vacant pasture for hours and then a single stoplight, a small wooden church. One old Victorian, perched on a dry road. The highest point for miles. A flat-faced diner, a junk-shop. And the pure golden sun beating down on everything, the air as still as glass.

I am going to move here, I thought. I am going to move here one day.

I wondered about the winters, the summers. I wondered about the people who lived there. I wanted to leave my body and find myself on the dirt sidewalk, walk up to one of the houses and knock on the heavy door. I wanted to step inside and see what there was to see. Would the air smell like sage? Or dust? Would they have a pitbull? A piano? A cupboard of canned peaches? An attic full of framed photographs? A grandfather clock? Old people, the last humans on earth with possessions that do not come from walmart. And they sit inside peeling Victorians, miles from anyone, waiting to die…

All too soon we were through those small towns, we were on the other side of them, they were gone. And it was just the grassland and the sky, uncluttered, an arena for light to play. My spirits were flying high above the truck, my nose was dancing along the lines in my vampire novel. My ride was bored, thinking about his wife, imagining what he’d rather be doing. The day passed like this, in minutes and hours, the middle part of Oregon unwinding like a movie reel. When evening finally came I watched the sun set in the side-view mirror, and it was like an aircraft carrying neon colors had crashed into the horizon, in slow motion. The prairie was on fire. The only other thing besides the ground and sky came once a day, and it was this. A fireworks display to the death of light.

It went on and on and on, and then it was dark. Not too long after we pulled off the highway and suddenly I knew the Columbia river was nearby, I could sense it. The border between Oregon and Washington. And straight west from us was Portland. Ninety miles. I almost jumped, startled.

The man and I said our goodbyes.

“Sorry I wasn’t much of a talker today, I’ve just been talking too much.” I said, by way of apology, after I had climbed out of the truck and stood, planted on the good firm ground, looking back into the cab.

“Oh, no, it was me who wasn’t talkative,” he said, over the seat. I turned that over in my brain. That must be his way of saying he accepted my apology, and was over it.

“No really,” I said. “it wasn’t you. I just didn’t feel like talking. And I’m really stuck in this book I’m reading.”

He nodded, a little sad.

I gave him a wave goodbye and walked into the truckstop. The man only had four more hours to go, four more hours of driving until he could stand up and walk down the manicured walkway to the planet where his wife lived. Tired, he’d set his cooler down on a kitchen chair, and awkwardly drop his jacket on the table. His wife would be everywhere, on all the furniture and all fixtures, in the spacing of the framed photographs and the way the plates were stacked. She’d be in the drape of the curtains, in the way the numbers were worn on the phone. She knew what time the mail came, the houseplants lived because of her. And where was he?

At the truckstop I bought another dark-chocolate candy bar with mint in it, and a sausage breakfast sandwich. And a banana. I sat on a gravel median outside assembling dinner, sliding the sausage off the biscuit and onto my weird, crumbly rice bread. I was on the “car” side of the truckstop, and hardly anyone was fueling up. The night had gotten cold, and I wrapped my scarf around me and buttoned up my wool jacket. I’d made a new sign. PORTLAND, it said, in big, triumphant letters.

Hours passed. My faith was unflagging. My heart danced around in my ribcage. Right around the time I began glancing around, sizing up clumps of trees across the road, thinking maybe I should just get a good night’s sleep and try again in the morning, bright and early, a car stopped directly in front of me and a man peered out the rolled-down window.

“You need a ride?” He asked. “I’m going to Vancouver. I can drop you in Portland.” It was the shiniest, newest car this side of the Willamette river. And the rest, my friends, is HISTORY.