Monday morning, the return of Ordinary. Ryan’s first day back at school. I may not get my own winter break, but I did get him, for two weeks worth of moments we don’t usually share. We woke up together on weekdays, and he waited up for me after my closing shifts. I know he is ready to get back to his kids, and I need to get back to my writing, my puzzling over how to make it my Work, as daunting as that is. But this morning, I am right there with all the schoolkids, bitter over the end of the break. I want another morning of blankets on the couch, movies and conversation and shared food.
I put on some mellow gal-with-guitar folk music from Andrea, and load the dishwasher. It clunks and hums its way through the cycles. Water beads on the bare branches in the yard, and the dog stands outside in the rain and whines for reasons I cannot discern. Put water in a saucepan and measure out a cup of grits, set them to boiling. Crawl under the blanket we last occupied together and read Sherman Alexie while the grits thicken in the pot. Projects are waiting for me after breakfast and before my dinner shift, but in the meantime all I want to do is lose myself in story.
I eat grits with soybutter and succanat and soymilk and think about reading out loud, but the baby’s inner ears are still forming and I don’t think it can make out words. It makes sense that it can feel my emotions though, maybe even taste and smell them. This morning, Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven seems like the perfect thing to read to a person who is four inches long and floating in a sea of amniotic fluid, with only the light that manages to filter through my skin and organ walls. I suspect emotion has all sorts of dimensions for this person that I’ve forgotten how to experience. Is sadness a vibration in there? Does storytelling feel like passage over solid ground, or does it come in waves? I think survival and joy might taste like salt. Or does everything taste the same when you’re getting your oxygen and nutrients through the cord? Can you even discern the difference between tasting and being when your entire existence has played out in the same context? What did we think about in those months afloat in the half-quiet half-dark? I try to remember, but if I can, I don’t know how.
I’ve been half-watching for the rain to let up so I can walk to the bank with the dog but Its steady coming down every time I think to look and so I don’t, yet. I look at folklore journals online and try to screw up my courage to submit a piece. Stare at my “freelance editing” website and try to screw up my courage to do something with it. I’m too good at thinking of reasons not too. I wonder what this feels like to the four-inch-long-person. Adrenaline, then quiet, then the bitter taste of doubt? I’d rather these qualities of mine didn’t invade that world, but they most certainly could once it is born. Its good to remember that they might even now.
For days there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky. We’ve been going about our lives bundled up under an expanse of cold, crystalline blue. The thermometers are stuck in the teens at night, the twenties during the day. Its unusual for Seattle, even in the midst of December. Starting out on my walk to work yesterday afternoon, bundled in wool and fleece, I deterred myself from wimping out and taking the bus by cranking up the Prince song “Chelsea Rodgers” and setting it to repeat on the ipod. Nothing like a little funk to get the blood flowing. They call it a cold snap, but a snap seems like something that ought to end as soon as its begun, like a snap of the fingers. There are so many moments in these cold days. Most of them are Ordinary, and for that, I love them.
The dog is sleeping next to me on the couch, using three pillows and hiccuping softly. I’m sipping tea, watching the leafless branches in the front yard, still and elegant in the cold. Having a quiet morning. Read a few articles in the Shambhala Sun with my oatmeal and toast at the kitchen table, and then some short stories, curled up beneath the window by the furnace vent. Decadent.
On Mondays and Tuesdays, my closing shift days, Ryan and I never see each other awake. I leave for work thirty minutes before he gets home, and slip into the house after work three to four hours after he’s gone to bed. We leave a notepad on the kitchen counter, and collect the bits of our days we want to pass on to each other in scribbled lines. Sometimes the cultural historian in me flips thru the pages and geeks out a little over our tiny archive of 21st century love and domesticity. We look forward to Wednesday evenings. He’ll have had a full day, and I’ll have been running errands with my Saturday, likely as not, but we make the most of those few hours, and the rare chance to share a meal and fall asleep together.
Outside, the winter garden is curled over on itself. Leaves of brussel sprout plants and kale and chard and spinach and cabbage and broccoli are bowing to the earth under the weight of the frozen water in their vessels. They’ll spring back up once as the freeze lifts—last year they spent three weeks under 2 feet of snow and emerged healthier than ever. But still, I worry over them. They seem vulnerable, trapped in suspended animation like hibernating animals or fish in frozen water.
Walked to the bus today to go to an appointment in Columbia City, and the winterlight was spilling over every corner of the neighborhood, setting every frozen contour aglow. Found a friend on the bus, and caught up for 3 minutes before her stop. Noticed how her almond vanilla smell mingled with all the other scents on the bus after her stop, and realized that a good many of the strands of odor on a city bus represent someone who’s no longer there. Found this fascinating… metro bus as temporary olfactory museum of humanity.
Downtown, I walked a few blocks to catch the number 7. A man was playing a cello to the empty space of pioneer square, and the notes carried perfectly in the cold air, the vibrations floating like clear water through alleys and grates, invading all the same corners the cold did. I couldn’t tell if he had a case out for donations, but given how few people were out walking, his playing seemed more altruistic than anything else. I listened as I strode past, and decided the city ought to find a few hundred bucks to subsidize talented street musicians, for the good of humanity. Sure, everyone’s tastes are different, but I bet crime would drop.
Picked up my second bus at 3rd and main, and waded through the crowd to a seat midway back. Dozens of conversations were taking place in a bevy of languages, and a whole city of smells mingled together in the heated aisleways. Elderly riders boarded in Chinatown, clutching plastic bags of groceries. A woman asked me for five dollars for gas money, offering me her costume jewelry in exchange. She spoke too quickly and though she clearly needed the money, I didn’t feel comfortable giving it. She moved to a different seat. A middle-aged man carrying two bags of fast food takeout asked me if I’d ever ridden public transit in Portland. I said yes. “I like it down there,” he said, looking out over the crowded seats. “They don’t let homeless folks with real strong bad smells get on. Not that its those people’s fault they smell that way, but it gets on you, and you can’t get it off sometimes.” I say I know what he means, and agree Portland is a nice city. “You have a nice day,” he says, and I wonder who he is carrying the second bag of food to. I imagine it is his son, home sick from school, or his elderly mother. Maybe its just for him.
Back at home later in the afternoon, I let the dog out to romp in the cold air, and sit down to edit a paper for a friend. The house creaks loudly and often in the cold, as if there is someone living in the attic. Slice an acorn squash in half, scoop the seeds out with a spoon, and slide it into the oven on a cookie sheet to roast. It pops and crackles in the heat, and I find myself craving time in a sauna.
Ryan leaves a message that he is racing the sunset home to me, and I sit here watching it fade on the near horizon, brilliant orange and salmon-colored pink hues trailing across the saltwater to the peninsula.
Six weeks or so ago, I was working a Thursday lunch shift, which had gotten off to a slow start, as they often do. One of the restaurant televisions was set to CNN, as it often is, with the volume off. As we waited for the lunch rush, the other waitresses and I leaned around in the server station, watching the looping news of the hour. The lead story centered on a horse that had stumbled into a large mudpit in Dawson, Texas.
Within a few minutes, CNN had seized on breaking news that trumped even the excitement of a live horse-rescue in a Texas mudpit. Beneath a giant “breaking news banner,” the picture changed.
A mushroom-shaped, silver balloon was skimming across the blue skies of Larimer County, Colorado. According to CNN, a 6-year old boy was trapped inside. We gawked at the television, then at each other. Those of us with tables circled out onto the restaurant floor to wait on them, then returned to the server station to crane our necks at the silent television overhead.
The picture wouldn’t change for a long time. CNN spent the rest of the lunch shift broadcasting live coverage of the flight of the supposedly-child-bearing silver mushroom, breaking away from the rippling silver orb only long enough to interview key experts on the matter as they were dredged up. Experts included: the Larimer County Sheriff, a neighbor who had seen the balloon under construction in the family’s backyard, and an expert on balloon aeronautics. They even showed us pictures of the kid, who turned out to be named Falcon, ironically enough.
He was a cute kid. We figured that if he was in the balloon, he was either crying, unconscious, very cold, or all of the above. We also speculated he was probably just hiding somewhere in his house. Even if he were crying, unconscious, or very cold several thousand feet off the ground, he was still just one, albeit, one very scared, kid. As I stared and made cynical comments (such as: “We’re probably invading another country right now”) I wondered how many kids were dying in war zones or starving to death right here at home while America (me included) stared at the television, captivated by the flight of the silver mushroom. My customers started asking me for updates, the same way they often ask me for the current or final score of sporting events I generally know nothing about. “Is it true he fell out?” “How fast is it going?” “Do they have any idea what the altitude is?” I answered them to the best of my abilities, offering what little “information” we’d gleaned from the closed captioning.
We like a good spectacle. It distracts us from the mundane (a lunch shift), the depressing (the recession), the ordinary (politics as usual, insufficient paychecks, credit card debt, ketchup bottles and bleach rags). It wasn’t just Americans who tuned in… Al Jazeera was even giving the balloon some coverage.
I leaned in closer with everyone else as the balloon began to lose altitude, finally skimming across the soft brown of plowed Colorado fields.
And then we knew. There was no six-year old boy in the silver mushroom. His absence gave new credence to the theory that he’d fallen out, and the network offered enhanced still photos from the flight with a tiny dot beneath the balloon, potentially his body or some piece of the apparatus.
We started to wonder if the Larimer County Sheriff had bothered to search the kid’s house.
Sure enough, Falcon turned up in the attic later that day, safe and unharmed. His father and mother shed tears of joy on national television, and we began to learn the sordid details of their family album. They’d previously starred on the reality show “Wife Swap.” The three prepubescent sons had made their own youtube rap video with a little help from dad. It featured a variety of references to bodily functions, and sterling lines like “faggot in a tree peeing on me.”
The following morning, little Falcon-who-hadn’t-been-in-the-balloon threw up on the Today Show. Somewhere during the family’s national media junket, he was asked why he’d hidden in the attic, to which he responded “they said it was for the show.” The entire mess unraveled quickly, and within a few hours, the publicity-hungry family had lost its ability to captivate viewers. We heard updates over the following weeks—mom and dad charged with false reporting and misleading public servants—but America had already gotten bored and moved on. By Thanksgiving, all you could find on the news was stories of a couple of reality tv show contestants who’d wrangled their way into a state dinner at the White House. This incident was also discussed, ad infinitum, by every “expert” the networks could dig up. Experts included: other people who had attended the dinner. Reporters and makeup artists who thought the couple looked out of place. Society column writers. Washington D.C. bloggers.
?????
The Uninvited State Dinner Guests are, like the Flight of the Childless Silver Mushroom, essentially meaningless.
Its the context in which we learn about them where the real and terrifying meaning lies. Millions of us stare slack-jawed at the 24-hour news networks, which bend over backwards to ignore the rest of the world for our entertainment. During the hours while Falcon was not in the balloon,
Two American soldiers were instantly killed and two others died of their wounds after their patrol vehicle hit an improvised explosive device in southern Afghanistan, military officials said on Friday.
The explosion took place sometime on Thursday, but no other information was released, pending notification of family members, said Lt. j.g. Tommy Groves, a Navy spokesman for American forces in Afghanistan.
In a separate episode, an Afghan woman and school-aged child were killed in cross-fire in southeastern Afghanistan during an operation to find militants suspected of carrying out a series of attacks, the international forces in Afghanistan said. (NY Times, 17 October 2009)
The federal budget deficit… surged to an all-time high of $1.42 trillion as the recession caused tax revenues to plunge while the government was spending massive amounts to stabilize the financial system and jump-start the economy. The imbalance for the budget year ended Sept. 30, more than tripled last year’s record. The Obama administration projects deficits will total $9.1 trillion over the next decade unless corrective action is taken.
As a portion of the economy, the budget deficit stood at 10 percent, the highest since World War II, according to government data released Friday. (NY Times 16 October 2009)
We’d rather watch a silver mushroom floating through the sky than hear about people dying in Afghanistan, or learn that the budget deficit is higher than its been since the last World War, sixty years ago. Just like we’d rather listen to talking heads speculate on a publicity-seeking couple who snuck into a state dinner, rather than consider the fact that thirty-thousand troops are about to ship out for Afghanistan. Or the fact that our elected representatives can’t stop squabbling or pandering to insurance companies long enough to pass the healthcare reforms Americans have been clamoring (and dying) for.
Here’s a novel idea: a news program thats dedicated to news. Were Edward Murrow on the air now, would he have bothered to give airtime to the Flight of the Silver Mushroom? Would Bill Moyers? We should thank our lucky stars for Amy Goodman. Her program Democracy Now ignored the Flight of the Silver Mushroom that day, reporting instead on headlines like:
US Considers Rewriting Intel Report on Iranian Nuke Program
12 Die in Suicide Blast in Pakistan
Runoff Election May Be Held in Afghanistan
House Votes to Allow Gitmo Prisoners to be Tried in US
Obama Makes First Visit to New Orleans as President
Dozens Arrested at Sit-In Protests at Health Insurance Companies
CNN Commentator Revealed to be Working for America’s Health Insurance Plans (HUH)
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Backs Goldstone Report (a groundbreaking expose on war crimes committed by Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza)
Syrian Dissident Attorney Arrested
Mothers Seek Release of US Hikers Detained in Iran
Puerto Rican Workers Stage General Strike
Social Security Recipients Will Receive No Cost of Living Increase in 2010
House Panel Votes to Regulate Part of Derivatives Market
Louisiana Justice of Peace Refuses to Marry Interracial Couple
Beef Industry Threatens California School over Michael Pollan Speech
Report: Little Progress in Reducing World Hunger Since 1990
Sure. It sounds like a depressing gang of headlines. And sure, some of those stories are hard to listen to. [So are the hours of coverage CNN devotes to child rapists, and the mysterious case of the little girl who may or may not have been murdered by her mother 2 years ago, a case which somehow merits coverage on CNN every other night I'm at work.] Here’s some surprising news: listening to Amy Goodman’s news program isn’t actually depressing. She consistently airs stories about the struggles and triumphs and needs of ordinary people. She gives these people the chance to speak for themselves, and for context, she relies on the expertise of activists and scholars and statesmen who have real-world experience relating to these life and death issues—not talking heads who spend every night of the week making the rounds of the networks. She tackles global politics every day, and she makes it clear how those abstractions perpetuated by people in power actually affect working people on the ground.
Of course, Amy Goodman doesn’t tend to air on the restaurant and airport televisions of America. Her headlines do not occupy the sidebars of our internet searches. They hardly ever merit the snarky re-coverage of the other news networks. All those networks care about is giving us the kind of “news” they think we want to hear.
SO WHAT if we’d rather watch the spectacle of a mushroom shaped balloon and speculate on the fate of a single American six-year old? Some things matter more, like the fact that our efforts to combat world hunger have gone no where in the last 19 years. Or the fact that somewhere in New Orleans, social justice activists are still fighting to get people livable housing, over four years after Katrina. And while its sad that they have to keep fighting, its inspiring that they are. And I want to know about it.
Maybe its time for a SENSATIONEWS channel. They can talk about The Flight of the Childless Silver Mushroom till the cows come home, and the rest of the networks can learn a thing or two from real journalists, and start reporting on the things that Matter.
My nan passed away 9 years ago, on 29 October 2000. I was nineteen then, and I’d missed seeing her on her last visit to the northwest, because I’d spent the summer working and living in southern Oregon.
I don’t think I knew then what it meant to lose her. I naievely assumed I’d miss her less as time went on. I’ve been surprised to discover that I feel her absence more acutely with every passing year.
She was born in Philadelphia on 23 January, 1918, to Edward and Minnie Saller. Her parents immigrated to the United States as children, from Russia and Lithuania, respectively. They married in 1911, and raised their family over their tobacco, ice cream and candy shop on the corner of 12th and Mifflin Street. They kept the store open from 6 am to 2 am every day but Sunday, when they had shorter hours. Frances played in the neighborhood, and savored her rare trips out of the city to visit Atlantic City, or her aunt’s Lena’s farm northeast of Philadelphia. She graduated from South Philadelphia High School in 1935, and worked in a department store, then as a secretary at the Naval Yard.
(I know this because my mother thought to ask. There is a reason I am hungry for stories. I grew up that way.)
She met Morris Fox in 1948, through Ruth Kaplan, a mutual friend. Frances and Morris enjoyed each other’s company a great deal, and one day, as they stood waiting for a late streetcar, my grandfather proposed. He’s told me many times that if the streetcar had been on time, they might have dated forever. They married on 16 January, 1949, and moved into a tiny apartment over Edward and Minnie’s store. My Aunt Ellen came along the following year, and my dad Howard was born in 1953.
They moved into a newly constructed rowhome neighborhood on Baldwin Street, where Frances developed close friendships with other young mothers and her children roved the sidewalks with a gang of neighborhood children.
Once her kids were a little more independent, she returned to work at the Naval Yard. She survived breast cancer while my Dad was in high school, something I never knew while she was alive. My sweet Nan, a fighter.
Once I was born, followed by my brother and sister, Nana and Grandpop traveled regularly to visit. She always packed her recipes, and kept the kitchen warm with baking. She knitted on the couch, while Grandpop read the newspaper. We took day trips around the northwest. She called me kid, even when I got older, in a way that was filled with warmth and love and utterly devoid of condescension. She and Grandpop taught me bits of Yiddish, and I fantasized about what their childhoods must have looked like in 1920s Philadelphia.
A few years ago, after she’d passed away, I had a dream that she came to visit me in Logan, Utah, where I was working on my master’s degree in history. It was one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had. She met me at my office, and I showed her my desk, and introduced her to my colleagues in the department. We walked down the hall, and went to a cafe for lunch, where we ate steaming tomato soup in robins’ egg-blue bowls, and shared a piece of pie for dessert. After lunch, we walked to a park and found a place to sit. We both worked on our knitting, and I noticed that we held our loose yarn in the same fashion, keeping the tension with a bent knuckle. We talked about being in our twenties, and she told me about her womanhood in Philadelphia in the Great Depression, about meeting my grandfather and having my dad. Finally, as if we both knew the dream was ending, she gave me a hard candy from the tiny wallet in her purse, as she always used to do, and then she walked away, leaning into her cane, in the graceful uneven way she developed after her hip surgeries.
I had that dream four or five years ago, and I remember it like I dreamt it last night. It still makes me cry.
I thought missing her would be a matter of calling up memories from a finite set, like paging through an album of photographs that fade with the passage of years. I thought missing her would be a matter of fixating on the way I missed her in those photos, and on static little memory clips of the way her voice sounded when I was five, or the way she bent over the warm cave of the open oven, checking on almond cookies when I came home from school at twelve. Or the way she’d hold up pieces of the sweaters she knit for me, to see how the fit was coming along.
As I age, I am coming to realize that missing her is less about clinging to that finite set of dear memories, and more about wanting to share my life as it is now with her. To have her sweet laugh in this house, this living room. To drink tea with her in this kitchen. To bake her the recipes I’ve learned lately, and to show her my garden, to introduce her to my husband. To show her my book, when it finally gets published. To hear her say “I’m proud of you kid” the way she always used to, except about the things that I have done lately. She always told me that, and I can hear it clearly. But its been so many years. I’ve done so many things since she last said it.
I want her to be my friend as I cross the threshold into my thirties.
I want her to tell me stories I never even thought to ask for.
And this kind of missing is so much harder than the other.
But its sweeter too.
It makes loving her fresh. I don’t have to leave her in those memories, in those static photograph images and frozen nostalgic sound files.
I get to keep her close for the rest of my life. I get to keep dreaming about her, and imagining the visits we would have. The things I would show her. The stories I would tell her, and the ones she’d tell me. About my dad’s childhood, and life with my grandpop, and her solitary dreams. The way she would smile and the way she would walk. The way we would knit together.
We would cook together too. She used to worry about the desserts she baked, as my grandfather has had a series of heart problems over the years. Many of her staples—kugle, knish—were loaded with eggs and butter (and lordy, were they delicious). I’ve been on a mission for several years to create a vegan version of her knish bread, my favorite among all of her exquisite desserts. Its hard to replace four eggs, and every attempt has ended up in the compost up till now. Last night, I finally succeeded. In honor of my Nana, I am sharing the recipe. Its by no means identical to her knish, but its a pretty delicious, much healthier alternative. And Grandpop gave me the thumbs up. So that’s all I figure I really need. You’ll need a couple of old-fashioned ice cube trays… easy to find at thrift stores… just discard the metal innards that separate the ice cubes, and use the tray! If you can’t dig up any, use small bread pans.
Vegan Knish Bread
1 c. sugar
1 c. oil
4 “eggs”:
[Whisk together 4 Tbsp. ground flaxseed with 12 tbsp. water. Be patient... eventually it will acquire the
precise consistency of eggs!]
dash vanilla
2 c. flour
1 tsp. baking powder
dash salt
several squares of dark chocolate chopped fine
handful of nuts, chopped fine (almonds, pecans, or walnuts are good)
pour batter into foil-lined ice cube trays or bread pans. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.
Lift baked knish loaves out using the foil. Slice into 1/4 or 1/2 thick slices (the thinnest slice you can get without them breaking apart). Lay out on a baking sheet. Bake ten minutes at 350, then flip and bake for another 10 minutes.
Vegan Knish
I love you so, Nan. We all miss you. And we are all so, so, so grateful for the time you spent with us, for your warmth and sweetness and and your humor and your generous heart. I see you in my Dad, and I see you in myself.
You are still with us.
On a grey October Wednesday, I catch the number 22 bus downtown, then walk through a light rain to the train station. Buy a ticket, and board the Coast Starlight southbound to Portland.
I find my seat and settle in as the train nudges out of Seattle’s King Street Station, swaying gently from side to side. Work on an editing project for a while, glancing up every now and again to watch the landscape unrolling alongside the tracks. Eat an apple, and a burrito I’d made that morning from leftover quinoa and black beans. We pass through marshland dotted with the golds and browns and reds of autumn.
After a few hours, I wander to the observation car. Get a cup of dining car coffee and find a seat facing out the window. The train track angles, then runs parallel to the interstate 5 for a few minutes and I realize we must be going sixty or sixty-five, since we’re going just a little bit faster than the big semi-trucks.
Think about how how unusual it is to face east when traveling south across the landscape. I watch the traffic flying along beside us on the road and think (in a macabre sort of way) how strange it would be to watch a wreck from this perspective. How the wheels of some car, never attached to the pavement to begin with, could leave the road, taking someone’s life could flying thru the air to crash into someone else’s… Realize, as if it is a novel concept, that the train would keep moving steadily south thru these autumn trees and the tragedy would recede from view, because of course an amtrak wouldn’t stop to help at the scene of a crash. The scene would disappear but that sick unease would remain in the pit of your stomach, the knowing that the accustomed can break so easily and that the rest of the world will mostly just pass by when it does.
The tracks angle away from the interstate. Pass thru towns that should have thrived, located as they are along the tracks, but which are now shrinking into rural obscurity, since the freeway has become the main blood vessel of the body of the nation. Old farmhouses filled with unspoken stories and fading wallpaper. A dock rotting in the woods by a lake that doesn’t exist anymore. Broken car parts and rusted out washing machines, filled with reeds.
I sip my coffee and listen to bits and pieces of people’s lives. A man going to visit his son and watch him play football in Bakersfield. A young woman who is worried about money. Another young woman who flirts with the man going to Bakersfield, and talks about how she raised her siblings because her mother couldn’t. A middle-aged man who sits nearby and assembles a guitar from pieces, then plugs in headphones, props sheet music up by the window, and proceeds to play a song that no one but him can hear. Its poetic, somehow.
Look at my reflection in the window of the train and realize that I am nearly 30. An adult, by some people’s reckoning. Decades of grade school spelling tests and family roadtrips and seminars at Evergreen and solo hikes on Rainier and flying kites in the potato fields behind our house when I was ten. Years of muddling through relationships and trying to figure out how i fit into the order of things, and coming to understand, on some level, how gender and society and body were constructed and also literal. All those days! All those hours and weeks and months trying to plan my life and doing yoga and trying to find healthcare and being a waitress and falling in love with mountains and recording people’s stories and sitting alone transcribing them and wondering what it all meant… watching the layers of reality pile up and peel away and getting a sense of how America is layers of sediment and story and violence and redemption and how my life is just one story, one bit of a river running thru all that landscape, tangled up in everything it passes thru.
Get distracted from my stream of consciousness reverie by the backyards of Kelso. Kids’ toys abandoned on warmer days, now papered with wet leaves. 6 swallows flying together over the neighborhood. Fog clinging to the evergreen-autumn-gold-green foothills. Sunlight breaking through the grey here and there and I feel content, thinking about my home. My book. The man I love. My dog. My family. My friends. I have everything I need and so much beyond that.
Last fall, I was dancing at a friends wedding on Vashon Island. As darkness settled in, a string of paper lanterns was turned on, and I discovered that looking at the soft glow of the lanterns produced an intense pain in my right eye. The light sensitivity was nearly unbearable the following morning, and shooting pains had begun to radiate back into my skull. I tried to grin and bear it for a day or two, assuming I’d rubbed my eye too hard and bruised something.
When the pain continued to intensify, I called Group Health’s consulting nurse. The nurse took down my symptoms, then ordered me to be seen immediately. I got on the bus, and was sitting in an optometrist’s chair within two hours. They diagnosed me with Iritis, an autoimmune disease that results in an inflammation of the iris.
I’d never heard of it before. Turns out, its the 3rd leading cause of preventable blindness in the developed world. Left untreated, the inflamed iris can swell until it permanently fuses with the cornea.
Fun stuff.
They dialated my right eye until it looked like a shark’s eye (not kidding) and kept it that way for over a week.
Shark Eye.
Any time with my eyes open made me nauseous. (Contact lens wearers: try spending seven days in a row with only one contact lens in.) I was ordered to put steroid drops in every thirty minutes, then gradually phase off the drops when they deemed safe.
At the end of it all, I’d came out unscathed, with no permanent damage to my eye.
Nine months later, I ended up in the hospital again, with the same symptoms. This time, three different doctors misdiagnosed me, even though I told them my symptoms matched my last bout with iritis. After an emergency room visit on the fourth of July, I was finally referred to a specialist in degenerative eye disorders, who immediately diagnosed me and quadrupled the prescription other eye doctors had given me. I spent the entire month of my honeymoon in India putting in twelve steroid drops a day, and I will continue putting in one a day until November.
Two weeks prior to my first bout with iritis, I lost my health insurance from Basic Health of Washington. I was making too much money waitressing to qualify. Within a few more weeks, the economy would begin to crash into recession, and thousands more people would be dropped from the state healthcare system rolls.
Washington State’s Domestic Partnership law enabled my partner Ryan to add me to his insurance. It wasn’t cheap… over three-hundred dollars a month would be deducted from his teacher’s salary to cover my healthcare. I protested, worried we couldn’t afford it.
He insisted we go ahead, and after he threatened to make me call my parents to tell them I was willingly going without insurance, I acceded.
In all likelihood, that decision—and the domestic partnership law that gave Ryan the right to add me to his healthcare plan—-saved my vision in my right eye.
Ryan and I are just starting out.
Neither of us has much extra money laying around. Certainly not five hundred dollars or so to walk into the Emergency Room—not unless the situation is desperate. Had I been uninsured, I would have waited until I could no longer tolerate the pain in my eye before I sought medical attention. Chances are good I would have been misdiagnosed in the emergency room, or been prescribed the wrong quantity of eyedrops. Unable to afford follow-up care, I would have suffered further damage to my vision.
The domestic partnership law helped save my eyesight, at the age of 28.
Wait, you say, that’s you in your “wedding picture.” You don’t need the domestic partnership law anymore, right? You’re married, so you’re automatically entitled to coverage under your husband’s plan.
Yes, we got married in June, in the eyes of our family and friends, and the holiest people we know. Not, however, in the eyes of the state.
Too many of our friends and thousands of people we haven’t met yet are unable to marry the person they love. They are denied the right, legally, to take care of the person they’ve committed their lives to, by providing them access to health care, or comforting them in intensive care. Other people have deemed it their moral right to dictate who is entitled to love whom, and take care of whom.
We do not accept this reality and we refuse to tolerate it. Which is why we had a really beautiful wedding, committed to each other in the presence of everyone we care about, and never signed a single paper. We call ourselves married. Ryan is my husband, and I am his wife. We wear rings. And we are provided the legal rights of a “traditionally” married couple by the domestic partnership law.
A lot of people think that law threatens “the sanctity of marriage,” or the “integrity of the family.” These people gathered signatures to initiate a challenge to the domestic partnership law. 4000 of the signatures they gathered were judged to be of questionable validity, but the challenge to the domestic partnership law was allowed on the ballot.
Washington State law mandates that when a measure already signed into law is put up for a referendum, voters vote either “approved” to confirm the law or “rejected” to oppose it. Thus, although the petition to put this law to a vote was circulated by its opponents, the ballot wording is such that voters vote in the affirmative to approve the law or in the negative to reject it.
A little confusing, eh? Which is what the opponents of domestic partnership benefits are banking on.
If you vote to approve Referendum 71, you will be voting to PRESERVE domestic parnership rights in Washington state. (The rights that helped save my vision.) IF you vote to reject Referendum 71, you will OVERTURN domestic partnership benefits in Washington state, causing me to loose my health insurance.
Ryan and I are privileged. If that happens, we have the right to go to the courthouse, get legally married and rescue my health care. A lot of people we love and respect are denied access to that privilege.
Please take a moment to shelve your dogmas, your slogans, your culture wars, your ideologies, and your biases (on both sides of the aisle.)
This is the bottom line, as I see it (out of two seeing eyes):
If People Love Each Other, Let Them Take Care of Each Other.
VOTE YES on Referendum 71.
Here’s the dates you need to know:
October 5, 2009 (TOMMORROW): Mail-in and online voter registrations and transfers deadline
Seattlites: go to http://www.kingcounty.gov/elections/elections/200911.aspx
October 14, 2009
Ballots mailed to voters. As soon as you get it, mark it and mail it back.
YOUR BALLOT MUST BE POSTMARKED BY 3 NOVEMBER 2009 OR IT IS INVALID!
I’ve been particularly attuned to the weather for the last few weeks, because I planted my autumn/winter garden seeds at the beginning of September. Walking to work on nice days, I’ve been guessing at the heat of the light and the number of hours its been landing on the garden, warming the seeds. We had lots of days like that, interspersed with gentle September rainbursts, which I gloried in, imagining the droplets seeping down through warm soil to nourish emerging seeds. It was the perfect weather for starting a cool-season garden.
autumn in the garden 1: ripening tomato
Witnessing vegetables sprout from seeds is one of my favorite things, so I watch my garden like a hawk in the days after I plant it. When they’ve had enough time to germinate, I start checking every few hours, increasingly giddy and paranoid. Giddy because I know tiny green shoots will appear at any moment. Paranoid because I know as soon as the shoots appear, the snails will come. They decimated my spring starts, migrating into my garden under cover of darkness by the hundreds and chomping the plants down to the dirt. So, as I took satisfaction in the garden-friendly September weather, I also because increasingly neurotic, imagining hordes of gastropods converging on my garden to destroy everything I’d planted and yearned for.
Autumn in the garden 2: pumpkins
As the day neared when the seeds would sprout into the daylight, I became increasingly obsessed with tactics to protect them. I could use poison to keep the snails out. Or something less toxic; say a beer trap for them to slime into and drown. I could even follow the example of New Zealand grandmother Oriole Parker-Rhodes, who decided to one-up the helix aspersa by harvesting them right along with her garden veggies and serving them up in butter and garlic.
Oriole Parker-Rhodes
But weirdly enough, even though the snails destroy something I love SO much… I can’t bring myself to kill them. For a couple reasons.
First: its hard for me to kill anything, honestly, which is part of the reason why I am mostly vegan. [I eat fish maybe once a month, cheese once a week or so, and meat once or twice a year. Every meal I cook at home is vegan.]
Second: I’ve come to realize that each of my actions—particularly those that involve consumption—have far reaching consequences. I recently discovered that, in addition to creating a carbon footprint, I am also creating a water footprint. Josh Harkinson recently published a fantastic article on the subject in Mother Jones. Chew on this:
[Farmer] Shawn Coburn, turned toward me and demanded if I knew how much water it took to grow one almond, a cantaloupe, or a pound of tomato paste. (I didn’t. Turns out it’s 1 gallon, 25 gallons, and 55 gallons, respectively.) “The people in the city, they don’t know what their footprint on nature is,” he scoffed. “They sit there in an ivory tower and don’t realize what it takes to keep them alive.”
autumn in the garden 3: peppers
Farmer Shawn is right. We have no idea what it takes to keep us alive. After reading Harkinson’s article, I did some research and discovered that being mostly-vegan also enables me to reduce my water footprint by nearly TWO TONS every year. Once I learned that, I became obsessed with my two tons of not-wasted water. Where was it? I started imagining a tiny, two-ton alpine lake, ringed with talus slopes and huckleberry plants. Every day in the year I abstain from consuming animal products, the lake gets a little deeper. If I’m dawdling in the shower, I picture my lake-level dropping, and I turn the water off. I try to only water my garden at night or in the early morning, and if a dry spell goes on for too long, I will stop watering altogether and let my garden die until the rains come again.
I suspect that, akin to the imaginary lake filled with water I have Not wasted, there is an unseen ecological consequence of all the snails I have Not killed.
I’m not against using scare tactics. The other day, while helping me rake leaves and fill holes our dogs had dug in the yard, my friend Gretchen picked up a snail to study it more closely. Her chocolate lab puppy Butters darted up and licked the snail, top to bottom.
Butters, prior to snail-attack, in bottom left.
Gretchen turned the snail to face her and informed it seriously: “Tell all your friends. This is what we do to snails around here.” Then she tucked it safely in an empty potting container, from whence I deposited it in the (covered) compost cone later that day, to live out its snail-life in a paradise of rotting vegetable matter.
I’m too lazy and squeamish to pick them off my garden at night with a flashlight, like Thich Naht Hahn does at Plum Village. Some online gardeners suggest lining your garden with hair clippings, but I don’t have any at the moment. I have lots of dog hair, but I’m sure it would blow away. Eggshells are also supposed to dissuade snails from crossing into your garden, but being a predominantly vegan household, we don’t generate any eggshells. Copper is also rumored to dissuade snails and slugs via a tiny shock to their tender bellies (vaguely Guantanamo, but still non-lethal), so I tried lining my garden with pennies. It seemed to be working, but then they started getting knocked off the edge of the bed by unshocked and/or braver snails, clearing a path for their legions of followers.
By the time I’d pulled together a little extra cash to buy copper wire to wrap around my 36 foot garden perimeter, it was too late. The snails had made short work of my babies. Six rows of winter greens, chomped all the way down to the root. And despite all those hours of obsessing over my seeds, weather patterns, and non-lethal slug aversion techniques, I wasn’t angry at first. Just sad and frustrated.
I comforted myself with the concept of coexistence. I thought of a conversation I had last week with Dharma teacher and organic gardener Dan Peterson, who reflected thoughtfully that the snails probably enjoyed eating his garden just as much as he did. Staring ruefully at my decimated garden, I thought about Aldo Leopold, who noted in the Sand County Almanac, that humans are simply “plain members of the biotic community.” Who’s to say those snails’ pleasure is any less important than mine? I’ve identified philosophically with deep ecology since my early twenties romance with the writings of Gary Snyder. I agree with deep ecology’s founder Arne Næss, who wrote in 1973: “The right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species.”
Still, this was MY garden! Those winter greens belonged to Ryan and I. We were going to use the kale in soups, as and bake it in olive oil and salt. The spinach was going to get drowned in peanut sauce and served up with tofu, and the rainbow chard was destined for hundreds of breakfast scrambles. I clambered into the garden and knelt down, searching in vain for any surviving green. There was none. Now I was mad. I shouted at the alley, and retreated into the house.
Later, I listened to a recording of a talk Dan Peterson had given at the Seattle Shambhala Center on mind terma, the treasures of Buddhist teaching passed from teacher to student through the generations. I’m not a practicing Buddhist, and I have trouble sitting still, so a lot of Buddhist teachings sail straight over my head. But Dan tells great stories, and his talk pulled me in. He talked about “how we wake up, moment by moment.” I thought of all those days I’d taken note of the weather and the light, and all the times I’d knelt by the edge of the garden to watch for the tiny miracle of green sprouts pushing their way up through the dirt. Moment after moment of awakening to my surroundings, to the intimate process of growing food. The moment of discovering decimation by snails contained an equal amount of awe— awe at destruction, not creation. But in that destruction, the snails thrived, and something else was created. Dan told a story from his own garden:
In the morning I go out into the garden in my barefeet to water, and I had the experience of stepping barefoot on a slug. It felt like electricity. It was a sentient being! So I would gather the slugs in a plastic container and carry them to my compost heap. I kept it moist, and they were fine there. Later, I found literally fifty to eighty slugs coming out of the compost heap, and they were all lined up in the same direction, going back to the garden! Our regard for what we call slugs can be east. We can be facing east when we look at a slug. There’s no enemy.
By facing east, Dan was referring to a Shambhala chant. “Radiating confidence, peaceful, illuminating the way of discipline, Eternal Ruler of the Three Worlds, may the Great Eastern Sun be victorious.” He explained:
The East represents richness, brilliance, and is the quality of unconditional experience… Peaceful means that there’s no aggression, which means there’s no territory. There’s complete openness. With no territory, there is primordial confidence. There’s nothing to defend, no enemy. This is a lot of conceptual load to put onto the simplicity of direct experience, but I think its helpful to point out that’s what happening. There’s no enemy… Radiating confidence, peaceful, is east.
I tried facing east. Watching snails destroy my planting, after all those weeks of tending and watching and waiting, was an opportunity. A pile of direct experience to wade into and consider.
There is no territory. The garden Ryan and I built belongs no more to me than it does to the snails. The land the garden sits on belongs no more to my landlord than it does to me. We are all of us only dwelling here for a little while. Here, in my decimated garden, was my deep ecology philosophy made real. How could I be angry? There was no enemy. I took deep breaths. Felt peaceful.
A couple brussel sprout plants were large enough to survived the snails, so today I planted some company for them. Stopped by the West Seattle Nursery and picked up small starts of red cabbage, kale, broccoli, winter greens mix, and some onion and garlic bulbs, all big enough to (hopefully) survive the oncoming snails and frosts.
I still remember the first time I heard him say that, eight years ago this month, September 20, 2001. I heard the audio clip again today, sampled at the end of a hiphop track, and it gave me chills.
There was the America I lived in before he said that, and there was the America I lived in after. I am still trying to figure out what changed.
journal, 10 September, 2001. day off today, decent weather. decided to have a try at making the hike-climb to Camp Muir. Left Guidehouse around 10:45 or so and began trudging up the cement trails to Pebble Creek. Around Panorama point, I reflect on an orderpad (brought along cuz its lighter than the journal) “the breezes coming off the mountain are cold from the glaciers, and sweep away everything that lingers.” felt an incredible sense of peace and singleness of purpose as I passed through subapline meadows and hiked up into the fellfields. Notice for the first time that the waterfall coming off the Wilson Glacier disappears entirely into the loose rock above the Nisqually Glacier, as if it is funneling into a chute. No snow on St. Helens, but a fair amount on Adams. The Cascades stretch out in front of me to the ocean, ridgeline after bluegreenpurple ridgeline, like the shapes left in the sand after a giant wave has receded back into the sea. On that note, notice that the waterfalls coming off the mountain sound exactly like the ocean roar, and the occasional icefall or rockslide sounds much like the breaking of larger waves.
September 11 came at the end of my twentieth summer, which I spent living and waitressing in Paradise, the small employee village/tourist destination on the southwestern flank of Mt. Rainier.
Paradise is the small cluster of buildings in the sunlight beneath the clouds
The mountainsides were turning fall colors, and I was reading a lot of Beat poetry, and picking a lot of huckleberries, having figured out where the tastiest ones grew from a Gary Snyder poem: “Delicate blue-black, sweeter from the meadows, small and tart in the valleys with light blue dust.”
I was cynical about the new Bush administration, angry that the country had just laid down and let him take office when it was clear that something was rotten in Florida. I was unnerved by the prospect of a political dynasty, and the administration’s potential for doing harm. But I wasn’t afraid of them yet. Resenting corrupt national leaders seemed in keeping with being twenty and enamored of the Beat poets and living in the mountains. I figured they’d do some damage, and get voted out in four years, and we’d go to some rallies and make some good art about it. I didn’t understand yet all the ways people could get hurt. Would get hurt.
On September 10th, I set out to hike to Camp Muir, the primary base camp for mountaineers attempting the summit of Rainier. I’d been eying the hike all summer. None of my friends had the day off to go with me, so I went alone. Its no easy day hike— you ascend nearly five thousand feet in less than five miles, and the last portion of the hike crosses the Muir snowfield, which is prone to frequent whiteouts. That summer, enough snow had melted to expose crevasses on the snowfield, something none of the mountaineering guides could remember in recent decades. I was prepared, but also young, and bent on proving to myself and everyone else that I could. My male friends were constantly going off on solo hikes, but women were cautioned not to hike alone, and it rankled me. So I set off, with my ten essentials and my extra water bottles, on a sunny, clear-skied September day.
“in early afternoon, i finally hop over the last narrow crevasse and hike into the camp, tucked in the bowl between Cowlitz Cleaver and Anvil Rock. Sit leaning against the shelter looking out over the Tatoosh range, which seems so small now. The sun is warm, and the hiss of campstoves comes from all corners, as climbers melt snow for their water bottles. Most will leave sometime tonight to attempt the summit. We’ve watched their lights from Paradise before, nudging up those last four thousand feet in the dark, and its strange to be here now, looking out across the world from ten thousand feet. It was work getting up here, but I’m not really tired or sore. Steep slopes of snow angling down before the rest of the lowlands, crevasses cutting through the snowfield and the glaciers all around. Take a small nap on the little plateau, and talk with a few climbers, then slip slide back down the snowfield and trudge back down to Paradise.”
That night, I was sitting in the employee dining room, eating some food-service-of-america-brand dinner, writing about the hike in my journal. Two of my coworkers came in to make pb and j’s for a hike, and told me they were setting out to camp on Pinnacle Peak. Within twenty minutes, I’d traded my September 11th breakfast shift for someone’s lunch shift and re-packed my backpack. We drove down to the Pinnacle Peak trailhead at the foot of the Tatoosh Range, just below Paradise, parked the car, and turned on our headlamps.
ten percent of the time, we are hiking on the trail, and 90 percent of the time we are winging it, navigating scree slopes by Petzlglow beneath dark peaks silhouetted against a sky absolutely overflowing with stars, clambering down rockslides and cutting mountaingoat style across rockfaces. we find a spectacular little plateau on the backside of Castle Peak and unroll our sleeping pads. the plateau is on a saddle between two of the Tatoosh mountains, which means we can see the small cluster of lights on Rainier that is Paradise behind us, and the small cluster of lights downvalley which is the town of Packwood before us. We pass around a bottle of Sammy Smith oatmeal stout, and watch the moon rise. For a time, it is an eerie shade of red, as it passes through the more chemical-laden slice of our atmosphere, then it fades to yellow and then bright white as it ascends. The night grows cold, and I don’t sleep much. Crazy sunrise in the morning, like laying under a heatlamp by eight. We eat pb and j and pick huckleberries for breakfast, then clamber straight down the side of Castle and bushwhack our way to the car, talking about vagabondage and Merle Haggard.
I think: I could live like this all the time, and be really happy. love having fingers that smell like pine and are covered in dirt and huckleberry stains.
back at Paradise, I run up the stairs to my dorm room. Throw on a black skirt and the cleanest white shirt I can find, splash water on my face and hair. I am digging for a clean apron in the mess on the floor when another waitress pokes her head through the door. She says “someone flew a plane into the world trade center!” I picture the small airplane that had crashed on the lawn of the White House sometime in recent memory, and i say, “oh, how bizzare.” Realize I’m truly late for work, and finish getting dressed as I run to the dining room, picking the dirt out from under my fingernails and adjusting the knot on my tie.
8 years later, I remember how quiet it was in the dining room when I came running through the double doors. All the servers, bussers, and hosts were standing on the little platform by the bar window, peering through at the only television set in the lodge. The footage was a few hours old by then, and we weren’t entirely convinced it was real. Smoke billowing out of downtown New York. The planes, flying into the side of the towers. The tiny specks that were people’s bodies, leaping from the inferno. The dumbstruck newscasters. It was all too much like a movie. As it turned out, so was what followed.
Because no one wanted to fly anymore, out-state-guests canceled their reservations at the lodge. The shell-shocked, somber national mood dovetailed with the end of the summer season, and every morning we waited on a smaller group of tourists, refilling coffee cups and moving quietly among tables where everyone was reading the same newspaper. The air grew cooler, and the rain and fog settled in around us. We kept living the way we had been, taking hikes in between shifts and sitting next to bonfires and playing out summer romances.
On September 23rd, I copied Ed Abbey’s definition of somnolence out of Desert Solitaire: “a heaviness in the air, a chill in the sunlight, an oppressive stillness in the atmosphere that hints of much, but says nothing.”
As Bush ramped up the nation to invade Afghanistan, my best friend and roommate Erin and I ripped up a sheet and painted banners to hang out our third floor dormitory window: “War IS terrorism,” we proclaimed to the emptying parking lots.
erin sitting beneath our banner outside of Guidehouse, our dormitory building, writing in her journal.
We realized the president was asking us to take sides. His speeches, which we clipped out of the Tacoma News Tribune, reduced reality to two dimensions. There was good, and there was evil, and you were one, or you were the other. Young as we were, we were unnerved, and not fooled.
8 years later, I am married, and 28. I live with my husband and my dog in a sweet little house with a garden near the water in West Seattle. I’ve gotten a master’s degree and written a book manuscript. I am still a waitress. My life is good. Erin is 29, married with a stepdaughter in a sweet little house in Portland. She’s been the editor of a newspaper, has gotten a master’s degree, and has learned to surf. We still read beat poetry, write in our journals. The war George Bush began has lasted nearly the entire decade of our twenties.
21 September 2001, Friday. weather comes and goes today. Rained a bit. Bush says you’re either with America or for terrorism. I refuse to believe its that black and white. especially when I seem to remember laerning that America trained a lot of these “terrorists” in Afghanistan back in the 80s to fight communist Russia? So much for good versus evil. how do you mobilize against “terrorism,” anyway? Bombing the Middle East will accomplish the following, in my uneducated opinion:
1. the deaths of untold numbers of Muslims from violence, starvation, and “smart bombing” (which will be continually three steps behind the “real terrorists”)
2. More terrorism.
3. racism, rampant prejudice, alienation and violence against Muslims and brown people in the United States.
4. on the “plus” side, war is often good for the economy, and solidarity among many Americans will increase, at least temporarily, which tends to happen when you think evil people are trying to kill you. Consequence: the country will rally behind our “leader” and let him get away with pretty much whatever he wants.
8 years later, change in presidential administrations notwithstanding, Operation Enduring Freedom is still churning merrily along. America has gone bankrupt, but plenty of golden parachutes have opened, sparing corporate execs a bumpy landing in the ravaged economy. Some corporations—primarily prescription drug companies and defense contractors— have actually managed to get richer. (Bad times are good for buzzards). We’ve had other Hallmark moments; in August of 2006, American citizens drowned in New Orleans because the National Guard was stationed in Iraq and the national leadership was too busy plotting war and buying shoes. We’ve merrily ignored genocide in Darfur, installed new puppet governments in the Middle East, and made torture part of our “national security” program.
Last month—August 2009—was the deadliest month to date in the war in Afghanistan. 77 coalition soldiers died… that’s 2 people a day, and 3 on Sundays. 199 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan this year alone—the highest casualty rate sustained since we invaded in 2001 to root out Osama bin Laden. Who, eight years later, is reputedly alive, well, and releasing more videotapes. The Taliban now controls an estimated eighty percent of Afghanistan. 2009 set another record as well, while we’re on the subject: in the first six months of 2009, over 1000 Afghani civilians died, a 24 % increase from 2008. .
Eight years later, I realize there’s very little connection left between the people of Afghanistan and those New Yorkers who held hands and jumped into the sky. I realize there was never really much of a connection to begin with, and what connection there was got lost in the mud of a war waged in Iraq under entirely false premises.
America claims to have turned over a new leaf. I’m not sure what’s actually changed.
Imagine waking up with your nose poking out of a sleeping bag misted in morning dew. You’re briefly annoyed about the dew, but you remember that’s the price of sleeping out under the stars, and you’re glad it didn’t rain, at least. You pull the mummysack drawstring more snugly around your face and stare at the greyblue northwest sky, jagged between the evergreens. It may have been hot yesterday, but its September in Cascadia, and the mountain nights are chilly—mornings before sunrise even chillier, somehow. There is the possibility of coffee, or hot tea, once you crawl out of your sleeping bag, but for now you are comfortably ensconced, so you lay there. You can smell the campfire smoke in your hair and maybe someone you love is closeby, or maybe you are alone. You glory in either circumstance.
There is nothing like waking up in the mountains.
A sunspot appears on the pinedirtground next to you, and you watch it snake across the clearing, setting individual shoots of grass to glowing as it goes. Tendrils of steam-mist begin to curl off the damp earth. The patch of sunlight continues to grow, crawling into all the corners it abandoned for shadow last night. The pine smell gets headier in the sunlight, somehow. You are caught up in these individual moments and then you realize suddenly; Sunrise is happening. You get swept up in everything turning gold and the sky being born as an entirely new hue, and last night being over and tomorrow beginning which is happening now, incidentally, and suddenly the sunlight is racing up the evergreens at the foot of the clearing, branch by branch, climbing the trees like a cat, and then its leaping off the treetops and spilling down the mountainsides, and a whole new day is begun.
You’re left a little breathless by the whole thing.
As far as I’m concerned, mountain sunrises are as good as it gets. Urban sunrise has never really moved me that way.
Confession. I don’t tend to get up for sunrise in the city. I’m a lunch/dinner waitress (read: never have to be at work before ten and usually get off long after sunset). Its a worklife that’s enabled me to continue my college hours (read: I get most of my writing done in the middle of the night). I don’t see much beauty in sun hitting skyscrapers, and glowing pavement isn’t that interesting, unless it has shadows.
Its not like I live in some horrible concrete jungle. Confession: I actually live in the most beautiful city in the world. At least the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen. Seattle is surrounded by water, islands, and mountain peaks, and I live on the westernmost face of the city, on the westernmost edge of the last hill before the water, which means that our neighborhood looks over a wide stretch of the Puget Sound, backed by Blake Island, Vashon Island, Bainbridge Island, and the Kitsap Peninsula. These landmasses are covered in Evergreen trees, and behind those trees are the jagged and often-snow-capped teeth of the Olympic Mountains, and there’s usually a couple green and white Washington State ferries chugging across the water.
SO, if I bothered to get up and walk to the end of my street, I could take in a pretty damn picturesque sunrise, from the city. I could also walk up over the crest of the hill and watch the sunrise hitting the 14,000 foot peak of Mt. Rainier and the neighboring Cascade range (the setting of many versions of the aforementioned mountain sunrise).
Granted, there aren’t too many buildings in my views, so maybe those sunrise varieties wouldn’t qualify as urban. I’ll mull over that. The point of this blog is, I saw the sun rise in the city this morning, and my view didn’t have any mountains, or islands, or ferries. And it was still magic. (and you thought this blog didn’t have a point).
I laid awake last night listening to Ryan and the dog sleep-breathing, mentally poking thru garden and cupboards, plotting a dinner with friends. This morning, after Ryan left for the first day of school on his new scooter, I putzed around cleaning the kitchen, and then went outside to dump the compost jar. The sky was still darkish, and the grass was wet, because it is September in the northwest. A zillion fruit flies plumed up out of the compost cone when I pried the lid off, and I waved my hand around my face and thought, “goddamn it, I hate fruit flies. I hate it when I wait to take the compost out until its gotten nasty in the jar. I like compost when it is freshly chopped vegetable remnants, and gorgeous rich humus for my garden, and I am not big on it during the in-between stages.”
But then it occurred to me that compost reminds me of autumn, which is the time when the year rots into itself and creates the mulch for next year. Compost is a creative process, and autumn is a creative time, for me. I tapped the last of the sludge out of the jar, closed the lid of the compost cone, and turned around, feeling satisfied about autumn. Noticed the maple outside our backdoor was starting to turn colors, one of my favorite things about our little urban backyard. Noticed the sunlight creeping across the grass.
It hadn’t occurred to me yet that sunrise was happening, just that it was light enough to spot ripe vegetables in the garden. Went to poke around under the leaves. Picked a good size zucchini, 3 pattypan squash, a handful of tomatoes, and a fistful of basil. Noticed the sunlight creeping across the uneven bricks of our backyard patio, and glowing on the weeds growing out of the cracks between the uneven bricks. Started to walk up the steps, balancing all the garden vegetables, and noticed the gold light inching up the steps alongside me.
Suddenly, I realized I was watching the sun rise. There was no dramatic vista, no glowing peaks or shimmering saltwater. There was only our dear little backyard in the city, getting drenched in the gold light of Wednesday, on the first day of school.
I stood there, holding an armload of vegetables on our little cement back stoop, grinning like a fool, and watching the sunrise crest the sage plant and pick up speed as it climbed up the dark blue pot on the top step and into the forest of basil. It was at that moment that the sun itself crested the hill behind me, and the warmth joined with the light and set the sweetpea vine glowing alongside the backdoor.
I had an inane thought:
“I just watched the sunrise in the city, and it was beautiful.”
Inane because: I live in a beautiful city, in which I have a backyard, and a garden, a privilege many city-dwellers don’t have. It made me wonder: would it occur to me to watch sunrise if it illuminated ugly things? Would those things look less ugly in the warm light, or more?
And I went inside and arranged the garden bounty on the windowsill.
windowsill
basil driftwood ikebana
A few snapshots from the weekend, just because….
spinach and bok choy starts for the winter garden, rescued from a friday night rainstorm
“Maybe everyone felt this way at some point, when one realized there was a depth to one’s life and emotions beyond one’s own significance.”
-Kiran Desai, the Inheritance of Loss
A week ago, I was lying in bed next to Ryan in a tin-roofed cottage in an orchid nursery on a steep hillside in Kalimpong, India, scribbling in my journal, thinking forward to our return to the states. I began a sentence:
“I am trying to fathom”
and a power failure swallowed us in darkness. They’re part of ordinary life in India—usually happening several times a day and frequently lasting hours. I crawled off the bed and bumped around in the dark looking for the matches, which stubbornly refused to light when I struck them, as the dampness of August monsoon in the Himalayan foothills had softened their matchheads.
Digression: the dictionary of English etymology defines “fathom” as the length made by the outstretched arms, 6 feet. It is a verb for measuring depth, getting to the bottom of. In the world of sailing ships, a fathom is the same measurement, and in the days before electronic nautical instruments, a rope was stretched along one’s arms, and knotted at intervals matching the human reach. Once this rope was lowered into a water of unknown depth, the number of submerged knots would give an indicator of how far down the bottom lay. Fathoming. The word has always reminded me of Melville’s sailors, staring fearfully into the dark of the ocean. I learned in college that Moby Dick was a metaphor as much as it was a whale, and so I suppose it follows that in testing the depths of that deep water, sailors were searching for meaning as much as literal ground. In the act of fathoming, we make ourselves vulnerable. When we stand with arms outstretched, reaching our fingertips as far out as they will go, we expose our vital organs to the dangers of the world. And it is in this way, and this way only, that we are able to gain some idea of what it is that lies at hand.
After I’d struck a half-dozen Indian matches, one sputtered into flame, and I lit the 4 candles we’d been burning across India.
I crawled back into bed in the candlelight, and we lay without speaking. The forest was suddenly audible in the absence of the oscillating hum of the electric fan; now we heard the low buzz of thousands of crickets rubbing their legs together, the brushing of insects against the leaves and the echoing telegraph of the village dogs, passing messages in the streets. Ryan returned to his book, and I picked up my journal again. “It seems to me,” I wrote, “in the darkened silence, that we’re made aware of where we really are, this place it is we inhabit. Suddenly it feels like we’re surrounded by jungle-forest, even though we’re only dwelling in its edges. After all, it is vast enough, this thick green of the foothills of the Himalaya, that even roads and villages are little more than an interruption, and a small one at that, as all of this “civilization” could be washed into the river by the forest in the mudslides of a good monsoon. Listening, it seems the forest breathes between the paced exhalations of cricketsong, and having just read about the tigers of the Sunderbans [the mangrove-forested islands in the mouth of the Ganges River], I feel respectful and small in the dark.”
The lights and the fan clicked back on after only a short while, and I returned to the unfinished thought I’d begun before the power outage.
I am trying to fathom
Like many sentences in my journals, this one had been abandoned half-finished, interrupted by a distraction. I stared at it for a moment, bemused that it might actually constitute a complete sentence. Subject, me. Verb, fathom. I had left myself standing there on the page, arms outstretched, reaching into the darkness. It was, technically, complete, I supposed. But what had I been reaching for?
I am trying to fathom what I’ll say to my dear ones next week, when they ask
so how was your trip
which moments will I select for recapitulation? which observations will surface in my jetlagged disorientation? I realize I am trying to fathom what This All Means. These 32 days in India, living out of a backpack.
One the one hand, These 32 Days in India Living Out of A Backpack were nothing more than a collection of moments. They can be reduced to a list, of places, and journeys between places: cities, airports, trainstations, rowboats, hostels, lodges, rivers, mountains, monasteries and restaurants, faces, pots of tea, meals and evenings and books and rickshaws and tickets and rupees and bad maps and alleys and signs in Sanskrit.
I could recount all those details, and it would be an exercise akin to measuring the depth of the ocean by making note of the quantity of seaweed floating on its surface, or the size of the waves.
The real measure of the experience has nothing—and everything—to do with the details. There is no fathom-rope deep enough to get to the bottom of 32 Days in India Living Out of A Backpack. It is an ocean of murky emotional-intellectual-spiritual experience (which is also made of observable things, like waves and seaweed). Walkabout— wandering the world just for the sake of seeing what it has to show you— is an act that is, by its very undertaking, a fundamental unmooring from the Acccustomed, the Habitual, the Known, the Routine, the Familiar. Like a sailor setting out under the wind, you realize you are not entirely in control of where you end up. Like a sailor, you bring what you think you’ll need, the tools and clothes and bits of knowledge you think may best serve you. India, like the ocean, can change on you in a moment. Suddenly you’re in over your head, bobbing up and down and rubbing the sting out of your eyes, as wave after wave of new smells, tastes, sounds, and visions splash into you. You are washed over by culture, history, and curious, probing stares. You are confounded by new and ancient ways of doing things. And as the hours pass and you remember you never did have any control over all of this, you start to relax, and recognize the universal currents flowing around you, human suffering, joy, art, commerce. You start to take stock of all you have carried with you from home: preconceptions, useless luggage (why this pair of pants? why that assumption?). You feel deep gratitude for the things that prove useful: patience, that orange pashmina scarf from Emma, this nail clippers you got past airport security, that gluestick, open eyes, open heart…
You begin to realize things about yourself, attitudes and prejudices and capacities, revealed over the passing days, things you never really understood before. The country, the people, offer you a mirror in which to see yourself; your mannerisms, your skin color, your clothing, your privilege, your guilt, your joys, and the wellspring of patience that is infinitely deeper each time you dip into it. It is the kind of mirror most Americans conspire to keep covered, because the reflection is not always flattering to our ego. Yes, I see in the mirror of India, I am capable of racist thoughts. Yes, I am capable of walking past a starving child, reduced to bones and skin and eyes, sitting next to his unconscious mother on a traffic island surrounded by a chaos of cars and rickshaws and buses belching diesel fumes, walking past and doing nothing.
There’s plenty of beauty too, too much to take in, enough to bathe in the memories of it well into my old age. But I think the discomfort, the awkwardness, the truly unnerving took more fathoming, had more to teach me about myself.
Now I am home again, in the states, and my jeans and my music and my shower and my kitchen table and my house feel like a foreign country for the first few hours. I am trying, again, to fathom
what I’ve brought home. What it means to be here, to be of here, in my sweet kitchen, my backyard garden, the land of milk and honey, Michael Jackson and roads with lanes.
