Was it Sacajawea buried here? All the people carrying
burdens to hold over the Pacific ocean. All the ways a horse can lay down its
head. Roads unfurling into what? The forests of Seussian trees; the carpets of
wildflowers: resourceful, jaunty. Outside of Ennis, Montana, the foothills roll
into blue real hills. The real blue hills fold into real blue sky. Big Sky.
Plains and glaciers. Glaciated plains with their screes of debris. Cows roam.
When did you decide on blue and gold? When did you decide on green? The road
unfurls into dilapidated farms. The image of a Ford driving away down the road.
The image of the first timid deer over the doorstep. And they – deer and
antelope and foxes – flushing out onto roads or wandering the stalks of corn.
The real cowboys with their round chew silhouettes; rubbed raw, back pocket.
And you can still be born and still go to high school and still die in these
places. The ladies used to come and look in consternation at the lakes,
fanning. You can see where the photographers brought their plate glass and
curtains thousands of feet up. A bear is above you; the sunset’s unfurling
below. The sunset is a cloud threading its hand over the crags. The sunset is
the ring of blood on the trees. The bones of original ancestors lie here. The
Blackfeet called this the backbone of the world. Even Sacajawea was buried
here. Even she.
This collection intrigued me and I stuck with it, though in the end, it didn't stick to my ribs or blaze through with an unforgettable line. I think the more colloquial, story-telling prose poems were the most accessible of the collection, though they, too, seemed to deliberately elude a complete grasp.
I admit that by the end of this large collection of stories, I was praying to myself, "please don't go crazy, please don't go crazy." Madness, obsessive thoughts, anxiety, drug use, familial death, and physical disfigurements all feature heavily in these dark pieces, all originally published by 1970. These are stories of their time, too: racial integration, counterculture in conflict with suburbia, trapped housewives, the decline of Detroit.
"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is by far the most famous story here, and it's really not overrated, in my opinion. I would group it among the most perfect, unsettling short stories written in the past 100 years. It's a distinctly American classic. Another classic would be "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Corrections and Began My Life Over Again." Love and sexuality loom as disruptive forces for the men and women of these stories, especially the women. Characters are paralyzed in adulterous hell or transfixed in moments of despair over a life that stretches predictably ahead. On the other side, those who choose the bohemian way fare no better. They are flying dangerously free, unmoored and despised.
Oates' stories depict a culture at a crossroads and railing within it. The smoothness of artistic production can be ripped apart by the intrusion of the other. The burden of performing personality is a sentence of permanent psychic anxiety.
From a stylistic standpoint, these are also worthwhile fictional experiments. Rather than conventional plots, many of the stories in this collection rely on snapshots in time of the same character. Sometimes, they are told backward. Sometimes, groupings of experience and advancing psychological states are captured beneath obtuse or leading subject headings. I enjoyed this organizational ingenuity and the way Oates' distinctive prose lingers on mental states and character impressions. Nothing is described dispassionately; in contrast, everything is experienced as intense, jarring, and grating on the senses. This technique does a good job in creating unease for the reader and illuminating the interiors of Oates almost uniformly troubled characters.
This was my first time reading Oates at length, but I definitely would like to read more of her fiction. I feel after completing The Wheel of Love that I've experienced that time period more viscerally than I have before.
Like many amateur smartphone photographers (and before smartphones, iPhoto & point-and-shoot aficionados), I take great pleasure in going to beautiful places and snapping eminently editable photos. Not that many areas in the Jackson Hole region need much of a boost in color saturation or sharpness, but still, the small tweaks here and there or the revelation of HDR make me feel that I've somehow done more than aimed and clicked. I've photographed.
Recently, I've been exploring the Gros Ventre region, which is full of pleasurable place names such as the Red and Lavender Hills, and is also the home of the most charming backcountry cabin I've ever encountered. Set betwixt a ridge and a burbling creek at the end of a scenic little dale, its outside was so perfect that I thought it might still be in use by the occasional Forest Service ranger. However, on closer examination, I found the cabin actually split in two and long-abandoned, even though its front windows still wavered with their original glass. In one side sat a 1940's era stove, and on the other, a built-in shelf and table. As to its owner, an hour of feverish internet research produced nothing, though I did uncover a snooty entry from an evaluator criticizing another Gros Ventre cabin's entry in the National Register of Historic Places. Historian snobbery, alive and well.
Klimt Stone
The Gros Ventre is defined by a massive 1925 landslide that brought an entire side of Sheep Mountain down in a crush of tons of rock and trees. The slide, in turn, dammed the Gros Ventre River to form Lower Slide Lake (the "Gros Ventre Slide" is also a locally-beloved breakfast dish at The Bunnery). Two years later, part of the dam gave way, flooding the nearby town of Kelly almost out of existence. Because of its devastation in the flood, Jackson stepped forward to become of the county seat of Teton County.
Evidence of the slide has not dissipated in the ninety odd years since it happened. Huge boulder fields and drowned trees rising eerily from the lake still attest to this past natural violence. Primarily composed of sedimentary Tensleep Sandstone, the rocks and boulders ejected from the mountainside have sometimes an orangish hue and are speckled with bright splotches of many-colored lichen. In my head, I've begun calling it Klimt Stone because this reminds me of Klimt's metallic, speckled, and variegated paint textures.
Burnt trees also lend themselves well to being re-interpreted and morphed into looming, portentous signifiers. The following was on an unnamed ridge (at least, unknown to me) bordering Granite Creek, which is south of Jackson. Against bluer-than-blue skies, the carbonized skin glitters--a stalk of coal.
And this brings us to cloudscapes--perhaps the easiest to manipulate into technicolor visions, mimicking the layering of paint pigment in the depth of the alabaster, the lemon, the champagne. Dialing up a cloudscape brings baroque and rococo heavenly vistas to mind--those windows into ethereality usually guarded by chubby putti with trumpets and garlands. The cherubim don't work for free in Wyoming, however. I've seen plenty of rare animals, including a wolverine (!), but so far, no swirling celestial babies. I'll keep you posted.
As I continue to walk the woods, thinking of my book, and continue to indulge my side interest in documenting new hikes and spectacles, the vividness of real nature and the artificiality of art and nature-translated-to-image continue to inform one another. Sometimes reading is the most vivid thing of all; sometimes writing feels like the shoddiest paintbrush to communicate what is real. Regardless, the richness of a life lived in art and in landscape imparts a reverence for all that hallows, communicates, and beautifies experience. The one is essential to the other.
I am thinking over a phrase of Annie Dillard's this morning, encountered in her collection of meditations on writing, appropriately titled The Writing Life. "There is no shortage of good days," she writes. "It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life."
It's an uncomfortably wise insight. Although I have never confused sensation-seeking with writerly preparation, it has nevertheless been an underlying motivator in many things I have done. I always feel an anxiety about missing things, or allowing experiences to remain undiscovered. In Jackson, it is some mythical canyon that haunts me: somehow obscure and crystalline; a field of wildflowers where no one is walking; a view from so high, that as I wrote once, "I can feel the cold on my eyes." Other places, it is about the potential of art, the potential of hitting just the right point of intoxication on food or wine, the potential that some person hides behind one of many turned shoulders, and that person has keys to unlock any number of things. It's what leaves me hungrily scanning the walls of cathedrals, looking for the original, homely paintwork, obsessed with even the humblest joints of the ceilings. I'd hate to think I missed it.
I think my assumption has always been that these moments of beauty will accrete, one layer of sand to the next, to make my soul altogether something fine and glittering, honed carefully and curated as I go. And yet, I often write so little of it. Why, I wonder.
Summer is upon us now, with its exquisite songbirds and trails, cleared at last of snow. In mid-May, it seemed that all the aspens and cottonwoods turned green at once. I thought of it as a susurration of some kind, completely undetectable to human ears, but nevertheless communicating spring through the groves, vibrating the landscape into a new incarnation of being. The green was so new; the operation itself so delicate. A miracle was gifted in a day, but a quotidian miracle, too, happening each May in a sudden sweep. And then summer. And then the sun and the obstinate eggshell blue.
It is a time of golden water in the evenings, and green trees etched in gold around it. The yellow of balsamroot flowers and the sentinels of violet lupine and monk's hood. Baby elk, tremulous on newly-jointed legs; a rather fat and pleased-with-himself marmot, like a caricature of an English friar; a miniscule duck who fed at the edge of a quiet stream, buoyantly bobbing up after each quarry.
A hard thing it is, to revise, when all of this is happening outside. The outdoors are a constant imprecation to leave the room and abandon the work. That mythical canyon taunts like a mirage. But ho hum, another chance to gather strength and plug along anyway. To remember the life of the spirit. So many moments of muster, and then finally, I write about this color of green at last, and let go of that last nagging sensation, returning concentration to where it ought to be.
Spring is a brown time in Wyoming. I noticed this anew as my plane flew low over the hills two days ago. Each time, I can pick out the road that curves against the bluffs south of town, and then we fly over one of the low hills that marks my own neighborhood, over the entirety of the town grid, and touch down--spectacularly--at the base of the snowcapped Tetons. That's what I noticed, however, as we flew over: a neverending swath of brown, and all the mountains still encased in snow. Bison welcomed me back, as did an intrepid weasel that somehow snuck into our suburban home, crept into my room, and, in illustration of every possible rodent horror story, hopped right onto the bed. This is the west, after all.
I was flying back from Seattle, my home of seven years, and where I had spent two luxurious weeks visiting with friends, celebrating a wedding, and remembering the riot of spring. Cherry blossoms, dogwoods, tulips, magnolias. Spring in Seattle is a time of carpet petals and palm-sized camellia flowers that fall, often unblemished, directly to the grass. It is a time of chill winds and spitting rain and oddly timed sunbreaks, too, but I couldn't help but feel that I'd picked an almost tropical locale as snow continued to drift in my hometown and the thermometer dropped back down to winter temperatures.
What does it feel like to be back in Seattle? It's an odd disjunction--more familiar to me in many senses than my life in Jackson, and yet the tugs of loyalty to Wyoming were there, too, as if, in choosing to spend these months in the mountains, I must swear fealty again to my vision, even as the warmth of my friends and the verdant scenery were things I could slip back into so naturally. I caught up with my friend Jessica, who now makes her home in the Bay Area after years spent in Seattle as well, and she remarked that visiting the city now feels like it once did to visit her hometown. This seems about right: the instant, comforting embrace of the known, not tinged by nostalgia, but rather by a deep sense of recognition. A marvel over what has changed, and yet an ease with what has not been forgotten: the buses I take, where we should choose a restaurant, where I should buy a book of poetry.
It's been months since I've ridden buses, and while I sat on one reading, I realized that the city had created a mode of thought for me in the rhythm of how I got from place to place; in the cadence of my walking, in my notation of businesses I passed, in my constant state of being around others in public spaces, and yet often burrowed into my own solitude. It was the same as I rode the bus from Portland to Seattle on a Sunday evening, a continuing drama of glowering clouds, rainbows, and sun outside the windows. I tried to take a picture of the clouds out of the glass, but I ended up taking one with the strip of setting sun from the opposite aisle smeared along the bottom of the frame. Like a double exposure or two counterpanes, tissue-thin, existing side by side. This was the feeling of being in Seattle. My old life close enough to taste and easy enough to resume, my new one waiting anxiously, afraid of being abandoned.
And yet. Part of living in Jackson feels like coming back to the beginning in the best way. Here, I have found new ways to think, too. In cars, playing my music and singing along like a banshee. On long, aimless walks while our dog Iris bounds unbidden into fields to chase the birds. In the feeling of electricity whenever a coyote howl pierces the dead of night or yes, even when a weasel sneaks into the house and brings everything that is outside, inside. I know the big question hangs there, swollen with the accumulation of months: Where will you go? And the truth is, I still don't know. I suppose I am still living the questions. I suppose my journey is meant to go a little further. At least the scenery will not disappoint. And at least I am reminded of the dear friends who support me and mean so much to me and whose much-needed company will no doubt buoy me through the rest of this month and beyond.
I am also turning 30 a week from today. It's a milestone that I want to meet with a marker. This week, I will complete my book. So, when I say I am marking time with words, I mean it very explicitly. This is the week. I will be holing myself up for as long as it takes so that I can emerge on the dawning day of my next decade and know that one thing I did in my twenties was finish my book. I will put the dot at the bottom of that question mark. I will move to the next sentence. And then, it will be time to move onto living another question, to finding another path in the trees.
As I pondered what my theme would be for 2013, a friend told me about her own goal-making for the upcoming year, which is based around aiming for desired feelings rather than achievement-oriented goals. I did some poking around, and liked what I saw. Happiness is never the sum of things we check off our list, but rather the product of how situations make us feel. It's not that accomplishing our goals does not bring happiness, but goals are not just a phrase. For instance, goals of my past like "finish my thesis" were not happy-making in and of themselves -- the attendant emotions of pride and accomplishment were. Not to mention, there are plenty of accomplishments or things we have finished that haven't made us happy at all. (Hmmm...actually, completing my thesis may be among those).
I know I have a lot to decide this year, especially when the book is finished. Where will I live? How will I construct that life? What are things going to look like, wherever that may be? If I stated it to myself flatly as "Figure out where to live and how to do that," I know I would instantly feel panicked and destined to fail. Instead, I want to take a page from Rilke's book and live the questions themselves. I want to pay attention to how things make me feel, and no rationalizing, no neurotic mental backbends -- I want to go from there. The past, as ever, provides a fruitful place to mine. As I drove home on what has become my Rumination Road two days ago, I listened to this song, and thought back over the past year and the moments where I felt truly happy and at peace...or one, or both. I got choked up and turned down a side road, and kept thinking. I listened to the song again. And then, lighter, I drove home. In order to start thinking about what I want to embrace this year, here are the memories that embraced me first. In no particular order, my Greatest Hits of 2012:
1. Standing in bare feet in a 1960's cocktail dress on my 29th birthday, eating cake with a spoon straight out of the pan with so many Seattle friends around me.
2. Skiing in the first 10k ski race I had done in 10 years (thanks, Becky!).
3. Singing mournful country ballads in a two-person karaoke room with Elizabeth on Valentine's Day. Also, the surreal moment of singing "Ring of Fire" a couple of octaves higher in the room by myself, all full of ghostly reverberation.
4. Running in bare feet around the Cal Anderson Park baseball diamond on the night of Michelle's bachelorette party. That was springy, yo!
5. Camping with my Dad in Idaho on the shores of Lake Coeur d'Alene the night I left Seattle.
6. My mom and sister and I getting serious about Easter Brunch in Yosemite. I had seven mini-desserts. Dinner and conversation with one of my oldest friends in Oakland a couple of nights before.
7. Running on the beach in La Push during one of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen.
8. Maggie and I taking the ferry to Bainbridge Island, walking ourselves to a sunny pub, and then treating ourselves to a wine tasting before ferrying back.
9. Sitting on a crinkly tarp in the middle of the woods, quieted down like middle schoolers, as we listened to a midnight troubadour at Doe Bay. (Trixie!)
10. Going on an 8-mile hike by myself and standing absolutely alone at a trail crossroads as the late afternoon light flared from behind Mount Moran. True gratitude.
11. Being whipped by the wind at the top of Jackson Peak with the whole valley spread out below, and good company.
12. Sitting on a sunny patio, post-Pride parade.
13. Fresh tomatoes and green beans and a glass of wine with my parents on our back deck.
14. Knowing that my family loved me during a hard time. Probably the most important one of all.
15. Holding my Grandaddy's hand and seeing my family in Ohio.
16. Dancing wildly with my college friends at my friends' Erin & Mike's wedding, with my best friend and her husband there, too. All staying in a hotel room together.
17. Every time I turn a corner and see the Tetons.
18. Rambling, long phone conversations while out for walks. You know who you are, ladies!
19. Bluebird skiing with my brother.
20. The aspens turning colors in the fall. Driving the curve of Oxbow Bend.
21. Treat Yoself days.
22. Leisurely Cinco de Mayo tastiness and conversation at the Owlery.
23. Shivasana, and in a similar vein of peacefulness, W.G. Sebald and compline at St. Mark's.
24. Cracking ice on the Snake River at the first hint of winter. Watching the fish dart past even in the cold.
25. Picnicking at Gasworks with dear friends on one of my last evenings in the Northwest.
Honestly, I could go on and on...which begins to feel self-indulgent. I mean we're already up to 25 here! And I've probably forgotten some, too. Lucky to have gathered so many special times together, like picking up smooth stones and sea glass. Common themes to all of this slip-slide through memories of the last year? Friends. Family. Connectedness. Meditation. Nature. Silence. Love. Those are the feelings I need to seek out again, no matter where I go. Here's to finding the way.
One more day left in the Year of Being Brave. Yesterday, I got out of bed and looked out the window and was shocked into full consciousness by the sight of a little red-breasted bird sitting on one of the crystalline branches right in front of me. That little streak of red on an otherwise white, glittering world reminded me that so much of winter in Wyoming lies in brushstrokes: the planar snow, the dusky shadows of the trees, the days that lack dimension as layer of layer of snow fold down vs. the days that are etched in true bluebird blue. Those days dawn with an almost shocking clarity. When I lived in Seattle, those skies -- so full of pigment -- were one of the main things I missed about home. The dense, mysterious snowstorms have their own beauty, however, not least being the anticipation of skiing fresh powder...
It's time to set a goal for next year, but I'm not sure what it will be yet. Last year, it came to me on a wan, sunny morning as I sat on a bench on Orcas Island, facing the water. That's when The Year of Being Brave declared itself as the goal and the mission for 2012. Like anything, the grandiose title was truly a product of incremental changes and decisions, as well as setbacks, because, well, that's life, isn't it? This year has tested me in ways that I couldn't have imagined: some of it has led me to immense happiness and pride, and some to sadness and discouragement. One of the oddest things that occurred was that life began to imitate art, the very art I'd set out to create. It's a bit eerie. Someday I'd love to share that story, but first things first: the book.
I tabulated today, and the first draft is very close to done. Of course, after that there will be days and weeks and months (??!?) of polishing and reconfiguring and quilting together the two narratives. But the actual writing part is definitely on the wane. At this point, I am happy to report that I am as comfortable in the skin of my second character as I was with my first. If anything, she has become my virtual stand-in -- the more neutral, dispassionate voice. I wrote a love scene for her today and felt almost suspicious of myself. Was I subconsciously writing it for myself? Hard to say. I have learned through this process that spending so much time with one work is often glorious rather than limiting. So much expansion is possible, so many tangents (even if I need to edit them out later). Overall, the process is more freeing than expected. So, yay! Onwards...
Friends, so many of you have accomplished amazing feats this year. What are your goals and purposes for the coming year? I'd love to hear. In the meantime, I'll wait for that stroke of clarity that will hopefully arrive on the morning of January 1.
It seems only yesterday that I was rhapsodizing about autumn. Then this happened:
You may be able to make out the Wyoming flag flapping in the breeze. A metallic edge is in the air and crystals are forming on our windshields at night. In high school, I drove my sister to school in the mornings and we were always running so late (totally my fault) that I would scrape the tiniest little square using my driver's license and then force her to roll down the window and watch the edge of the road as we careened into the school parking lot and tried to make it to class before the 7:55 bell. We were successful about 50% of the time. Scraping a windshield in 10 degree weather on a dark, moonless morning with snow clogging the bottom of your flats? Probably not the most romantic part of Wyoming. But, of course, even with the trees bared and the grasses grayed, a beauty of desolation remains.
In the past two weeks, a lot of things have happened, some of which I am choosing not to write about here. I visited my grandfather and family in Dayton, Ohio; I started reading a book about the tracing of a family heritage through objects. I started writing a children's book. I wrote a description of Seymour, Indiana for a hotels website. I want to write at length about stories and families and the beautiful sculptures of glass, light, and stainless steel that I saw at the Dayton Art Museum. Several friends have been blessed with new joys, and some have met new griefs. And, the other things that have happened...well, they have renewed my gratitude for life and for the people I love in ways I could not have imagined. It truly is a gift, this life, and being able to see it as a gift...well, at the risk of sounding trite, that's a gift, too.
Also, I got a library card.
One thing I love about my life here is the repetition of my walks. Readers of this blog may even notice that many photographs are taken from the same areas. Each time I tackle Game Creek or Cache Creek or what is fondly known in town as "the high school butte," I feel rewarded with the incremental changes to the landscape I see. Geese were migrating, and now four swans are flapping by like white linen on a windy day. No more two-stepping herons in the field; but on a still night, the coyotes whine. The yellow leaves I love are also gone, but in their place are bundles of ice, binding the grass together in little clumps, little secrets. The stars, even, seem colder and more inscrutable. The characters in my book feel ignored; they, too, are cold and fractious and on edge. That's what this in-between season is all about. It's about the portent of changes, and oddly, amidst the tumult, about settling in. It will be a long winter. Better keep writing. Better keep walking. Better keep pausing to say thank you, under my breath, and yet loud enough for the world to hear.
A couple of days ago, I found myself longing for a specific poem about autumn. I knew I had read it before, and that it was a well-known, oft-anthologized work. I riffled through my memory, recalling that the poem was infused with a sense of drowsiness, the sharp smell of a cider press, the subtle-sweet scent of autumn's glorious decay. Was it Yeats? Something about gold, or another poem about the beloved "quiet one"? Was it Dylan's young boy, singing in his chains by the sea?
But no, the poem I sought was Keats' "To Autumn." "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" it begins, full of praise and exhortation. There is a cider press, and a winnowing wind, and the long locks of autumn, golden in the sun. The poem is infused with a honeyed sense of time, with languour, with, really, all those lovely -our words that signify leisure and slow time. It sounds a bit like the autumn I am inhabiting right now--one I have not experienced in this specific setting for eleven years. And oh, how worthy of an ode it is.
I smelled the first intimations weeks ago as I hiked into the Teton Range with my family on a very hot and sunny day. The soft, sweet smell of the yellowing heart-shaped aspen leaves immediately conjured the first signs of an autumn I had completely forgotten. I thought of all of the poets who have dedicated their work to each of the four seasons, and I listened to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons"--the alternating frenzy and light strings of a year's passage. In all the years of living elsewhere, autumn was always the season I had missed. And how could I really say I had come home again until I experienced its return--right here? I realize now that we can never truly love--or know--a place until we have experienced it in its roundness. Every day is a gradation in color, every day adds a new, delicate tine to the comb of the chilling breeze. Every day is a revelation.
This morning, I drove the curve of the highway, returning home towards town, and saw the crest of the Grand Teton peeking out over mellow, pastoral hills and fields, its crags just rinsed in snow. My soundtrack for the drive--Prokofiev's "Romeo & Juliette"--swelled with grandeur during my favorite portion of the score, which I will unashamedly admit is the ultra-romantic balcony love theme. (So beautiful!) Ah, yes, there loomed my beloved. Sighted with full orchestra accompaniment. There have been so many moments like this for me in the past month that startle me into feeling vibrantly alive and full of an intense, heart-pressing gratitude for being here at this moment in time. For seeing this place that has been relegated into memory for eleven years through a newly-discovered season, and a newly-discovered me breathing within it.
***
(I realize all of these blogs from Jackson have ended on somewhat of a heart-swelling note of effusion so far, but what can I say? Effusive seems to be the name of the game for me right now... As Modest Mouse would say, Blame It On the Tetons.)
As anyone familiar with Strayed's advice column at The Rumpus, Dear Sugar, can tell you, Strayed has an immensely appealing voice--the kind that is emotional, but not cloying; generous, but not over-the-top. I always love her columns, and several of them have brought tears to my eyes with their ability to truly address those in pain with understanding, wisdom, and what can only be described as love: the kind of love miraculous in its non-specificity. The kind of love that only rare people feel for every other human who walks the earth. A kind of Gandhi Redux, if you will.
I am happy to report that this same appealing voice is present in Wild, Strayed's memoir about a transformative period of her life spent hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Appealing, yes, and a book I finished in just a few sittings. However, Wild pales considerably in comparison to memoirs and travelogues I've read recently that marshaled a more superlative power of description, a more expansive ability to draw conclusions, and an even rawer revelation of the self. I don't think Strayed intends to enter the company of writers such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, W.G. Sebald, or Maggie Nelson (whose book, Bluets, is far more fractured in its method of excavating a festering emotional wound). Nevertheless, I think a truly great tale of the road should illuminate all that is visible and something else--something less tangible, but important nevertheless. They should illuminate something eternal, even within a landscape that is always in flux, or within memory, which is fluid by its very nature.
I'm not even sure what I am asking for... Wild is a friend you would enjoy hiking with for the day. The greatest writing on nature and voyages of self and world discovery are like Strayed's cherished copy of The Dream of a Common Language: those are the books that you cannot burn and leave behind, even when the hiking is done.
I took the above video in order to illustrate the peacefulness of the swaying aspens outside of our living room window, but what ended up coming through more ominously was the seemingly amplified ticking of the living room clock. This winsomeness doth tend towards time-wasting, the clock seemed to declare, and I have to admit, it had a point. I am under the gun, so to speak. The Year of Being Brave has a timeline that can run out: it is a finite goal, and when I am tempted to treat my time here as just one long lollygagging vacation, the truth is that time looms large. And so, I have responded with internal deadlines of my own: setting dates that characters' arcs will be completed and a date when I want to be done drafting and headed into revising (around December).
Two nights ago, I made the ill-advised decision to climb the small butte behind our house in the waning twilight. I was treated to some spectacular sunset views at the top:
However, on the way down, I quickly realized my error in attempting to dismount in the encroaching darkness on a switchbacking trail wearing flimsy Tom's (total non-local move). Using my phone as a flashlight, I stumbled down, taking twice as long as it would normally take, and set off on the bike path that curves through most of the valley and provides a beloved trail for bikers, dog walkers, and foolish pedestrians walking home in neighborhoods with no streetlights. Relying on my familiarity with the path, I entered a section with a church parking lot and bushes to one side and homes on the other. My phone died and all went dark. At that exact moment, I heard the crashing of brush and twigs and one gigantic shape loomed ahead of me in the darkness, followed by another, slightly less tall dark shape. I did the smart thing, and completely froze. I knew a huge moose was standing just yards from me, and that the smaller shape was most definitely a moose calf.
Now, one thing about moose--they do not crash out spastically from the brush like deer and run every which way, alerting you to their presence while also revealing their fear of you. Moose just stand there and stare at you, either aggressively or nonchalantly, and it's up to you to give them a wide berth, especially if they have young whom they'll want to protect...with their hooves. So, locked into a staredown, I backed up, and up, and crashed through some underbrush of my own in order to cut across lawns and parking lots and come back to the trail far from where I'd encountered them. And, just for good measure, I started to run.
The next morning, our dog Bodhi bayed and alerted us to the presence of not two, but three moose grazing on our neighbors' yard shrubbery. Mama in actuality has two calves! In another classic non-local move, I retrieved my camera and crept closer. I stared at the two calves (probably up to my shoulders in height) and they stared back, unblinking, arranged identically side by side. And then, once more, the cow--that huge, looming shape from the night before--lurched out and raised herself to full height. Daylight staredown: engaged. I knew my cue and hightailed it away, scampering on the driveway in bare feet. As I fell asleep last night, I'm almost certain I heard the same moose crossing over our back deck during the witching hour. Neither patron saints or goblins, the moose family are placidly going about their existence, and their neighborhood just happens to be mine. I feel pretty lucky.
Second calf is hidden in the brush to the right.
I leave you with a few images from my last week about and around:
This summer, I left my job and life in Seattle to move back to Jackson, Wyoming and finish my novel.
I woke up the morning after leaving Seattle in a tent 30 miles from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho to the sound of thunder and droplets of rain hitting my nose. The previous evening had been so mild that my Dad and I had opted not to cover my brother's tent with a rainfly, and after sitting around the fire and drinking a glass or two of wine, I fell asleep looking up through the transparent netting towards the tops of Ponderosa pines. The campsite was one of only two indicated on our indispensable road atlas, and after driving two country routes past "towns" with atmospheric names like Rose Lake, we found ourselves up high, flushing deer from their hidden hedgerow posts and passing old barns and cabins crumbling in on themselves. (A note: decaying barns in fields are like my favorite thing, ever). The next day, I listened to an interview with the author Deborah Magpie Earling, whose grandfather drowned in that very lake. His son always remembered the sweat-stained hat that lay--abandoned--after he vanished beneath the glassy surface. Oh, yes, I thought, it's totemic details like this that make us write in the first place.
Sleeping in a Forest Service campground after a long drive, partially on dirt road, seemed like exactly the right thing. Even though I was still hundreds of miles from Jackson, my hometown, those kinds of woods are home, and so are the little outposts within them. The campsite attendant camping there for the summer with his thick Northeastern accent; the little wooden port-o-potty and well structures; the process of walking out the flattest section of the ground and strategically pitching the tent to face the morning sun. Those steps have been with me since I was very, very young.
Of course, the thunderstorm and whipping winds dashed all attempts to rise with the sun or eat oatmeal cooked on the campstove, so off we drove as the sun rose (something I rarely see, being so much a night owl). All of I-90, the route we'd taken straight from Seattle and eventually into Montana, proved to be a rich vein of memory. As childhood memories tend to do, various family camping caravans and passings had collapsed in on themselves, but as the names of towns rose on green highway signs, the distinct places came back. Wallace, ID where we had once visited a defunct brothel and seen a list of "acts" and prices taped unceremoniously over the light switch; "Anaconda Opportunity," surely one of the most delightful road signs in America; Deer Lodge, MT, home of the old territorial prison and an old car museum and a preserved rancher baron's property. As a child, I'd keened towards every hint of History with a capital "H" and had probably driven the whole family crazy by insisting that we stop at all ghost towns and gravesites. Sometimes, I was disappointed to find that my excavations of cross-beam cabins produced nothing more than beer cans and the remnants of campfires. But nevertheless, a sense of struggle and effort underlies even lonely highways like I-90 and the empty fields and thick forests that mainly surround it.
My first glimpse of Jackson itself was through a haze of forest fire smoke, but the joyous greetings of our dogs remained the same. And so now I'm here. My trappings of Seattle life lie in a clutter of boxes and bags in my brother's borrowed room (the little kid's room, it still seems, even though Ben is 25 years old now). In the morning, I wake to the sound of my parents going to work and the dogs' nails clicking back and forth along the tiled highway. At night, I go to bed to the sound of coyotes wailing somewhere in the fields, and Canadian geese land and take off from the same fields all day long, honking and stitching together their ragged V-shape. The aspens pattern our drawn shades like static, ticking and shivering.
Wyoming. A place where you can go home again and ride around with one of your oldest friends in an old Ford Lariat pick-up truck and go to look at your old house on Angus Drive. It looks the same from the street, but the well-worn trail you used to trudge into the willow thicket has been swallowed by a new house on the corner lot. The trees are much taller. Oddly, everything seems bigger rather than smaller. And so you can go home again, but someone will have built a house over some part of your memory; a new generation of kids are leaving their inner tubes to dry in your old yard; the late-night diner is long-closed. The landscape, however, neither remembers nor forgets you. And this has always been the comfort of home.
(P.S. My friend Jessica Day is one of the people who inspired me with her own brave, astounding writing journey this year. She gave me the excellent advice that blogging is like the warm-up run for the writing ahead, and keeps you accountable to your goals. Her own blogging on the subject is so rich and lovely that I really must urge you to go here immediately and read it. My first entree is just a pale copy in comparison!)
I am a writer of fiction and essays with an abiding interest in literature by and about women. My work has been nominated for inclusion in the Best New American Voices anthology, a Pushcart Prize, a four-time finalist in the FENCE/Summer Literary Seminars annual contest, and has been featured in Quick Fiction, City Arts Magazine, Hoarse Quarterly, Pacifica Literary Review, District, & Wigleaf. In August, I left Seattle for Wyoming with the goal of finishing my novel. Please feel free to contact me at kirstenruewrites@gmail.com.
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