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God is Wakantanka
I had learned a painful lesson (once again), one that I need not have repeated—a writer’s conference has never been a good environment for me and that remained “my truth.” I was simply not at all comfortable talking about myself or my work to strangers who had the same terrified look in their eyes invading my own when my work was the subject of scrutiny. It was rather pathetic, really—I could say this only because I felt I was pitiful when I used the side trips from life as a search for acceptance from others who had the same insecurities as mine. The simple truth was that I needed to be the one accepting myself because until I did, anyone else attempting to validate me was a lost cause.
Hoping to quiet the storm the conference had awakened within my head, I retreated to our friend’s house tucked into the lush spruce-speckled hills with a book I had been given during our first trip to South Dakota—Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s That They May Have Life: The Episcopal Church in South Dakota 1859-1976. The boys—Jim and his friend—took fly fishing trips to area lakes and went into town to play while I devoured the recount of the church’s history with South Dakota tribes. It had become an important piece of literature documenting the actions of the Episcopalians working among the Native Americans, and Sneve wasted no time in getting to the crux of the matter, beginning her first chapter “God is Wakantanka” with this paragraph:
“When the missionaries brought Christianity to the Dakota or Sioux Indians, there was a great change in the native value system. Some Indians were able to retain old values and integrated them into Christian beliefs, so that the old was combined with the new and conversion to a new religion was an easy extension of the old. For others the conflicts were insurmountable and there was hostility and resistance to the missionaries and to Christianity.”
As I lumbered deeper into the past through her words, I felt a great ache for people who had been duped time and again by church and state, and I realized I had gleaned something that made my one day at the writer’s conference worthwhile. The evening speaker the night before had said, “Effort is the key: know your subject and work at it.” I used that as my battle cry, the only thing that made plowing through the material showing how the past had spiraled around the Native Americans like a snare tolerable. I was intellectualizing it all, of course; I knew better than to think such trauma could be emotionally understood by someone like myself who hadn’t experienced it. I was okay with that, as I felt I could at least be a witness to a subject no longer brought to the fore in our culture’s consciousness; and I just might instigate change at the very most.
“…in times of crisis and disorder,” Sneve wrote, “many Dakota slipped back to the old traditions and religions. Christianity among the Indians became very much like Christianity among the whites. Those who remained faithful Christians and accepted the new order realized that the old Dakota way of life was doomed: it could not stand against the stronger white civilization. They knew if they were to survive, they must adopt Christian standards and behavior.”
Sneve regresses in time, telling the stories of the missionaries’ interactions with the Sioux, noting the first convocation which took place in Santee on October 5th and 6th 1870, well over a century before I had attended one. With her description of the reservations reverberating in my head, we drove out of Steamboat heading toward South Dakota in an ornery Ford Bronco Jim had left at his friend’s since selling his half of another Steamboat retreat several years before. We would be using the brute of a vehicle for our transportation in South Dakota and it felt like the perfect workhorse as it thrust through the thin high-mountain air in the crispness of a late summer morning.
With the first touch of light coming into the sky, we drove the winding road as the brightness turned magnificently blue against the stark relief of the peaks looming black and bold. Along the road, the tips of wheatgrass sparked like paintbrushes dipped in a radiant sheen, and the racks of the antelope grazing in the fields glowed as the sun illuminated the summer’s velvet covering their horns. I juxtaposed this predawn beauty that enveloped us as we drove out of the Rocky Mountains with the words of Issac Heard, who wrote the History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863. Sneve quotes him in her book, his descriptions of the Great Plains as the earliest reservation dwellers found them terrifying:
“It was a horrible region, filled with the petrified remains of the huge lizards and creeping things of the first days of time. The soil is miserable; rain rarely ever visits it. The game is scarce, and the alkaline waters of the streams and springs are almost certain death.”
With these images floating in my mind, we descended into the high plains and the land known as Wyoming, its resolute flatness stretching as far as the eye could see. It would have been ominous to traverse the dry and dusty high-valley floor on foot as many of the Native Americans did in the early days. We drove through the color of gold-kissed beige for so long that my eyes began playing tricks on me, making me believe everything around me was radiating like the scene was being filtered through heat. It was as if there was no other color existing anywhere in the entire world, as parched grass was interrupted only by the occasional tumbleweed clinging to the grid upon grid of barbed-wire fences.
The Bishop had certainly been right about the proliferation of land being cordoned off, an ironic fact given that one of America’s greatest mottos had always been “Don’t fence me in.” I had already convinced myself that if we had only had the good graces to have remembered this caveat when first interacting with the natives of our country, history could have been vastly different. What were we thinking? I wondered as we moved through the flatlands that comprised the middle of a country I had assumed I’d understood, only to come to realize I didn’t recognize it or its politics at all.
As the light harshened into late afternoon, I found myself missing home terribly, knowing the soothing surroundings of the world I had created for myself were farther away than ever before. Was I meant to be continually jerked away from anything closely resembling a haven so that I could serve as a testament to what was transpiring in the world around me? It seemed this continued to be my fate while all I wanted was my own bed, my own pillow and a room of my own in which to unravel all of the angst that the world brought tumbling into my life. Home, I thought; what a breathy word when spoken, what an emotional one when contemplated. I had had the opportunity to choose where to make my home. According to the books I was reading, the Sioux had been denied that privilege, and I was having a difficult time reconciling the fact in my heart and in my head.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
It just happens to be Let's Blog Off (on Twitter as #LetsBlogOff) and #TravelTuesday again. See how my pals are answering the question, "What is home?" here.
The Rich Coast
The airport coffee shop—a long, thin room with a garishly bright red tile floor and beige, nondescript wallpaper rising above the wood paneling—was separated from the bar by a rounded wooden partition of staggered boards. I was studying the random patterns of the roughhewn slats when Jim brought me a cup of strong coffee and toast grilled in butter. As we waited to board what would be my last flight from Costa Rica to the U.S., a constant flow of camaraderie enveloped us—the travelers awaiting their chance to wander out of the country with a nonchalance bordering on disdain in spite of the fact that they were obviously determined to go elsewhere.
Rick and Christy were still kidding Jim about an episode that had taken place at the San Jose McDonald’s drive-through the evening before, causing his face to go as red as the floor and a nervous chuckle to slide from his throat. We had wanted French Fries after weeks of rice and beans, and since Jim was in the driver’s seat, he was the one who had to place the order. He stared at the menu board with its sunken speaker and no matter how many times we coached him, he couldn’t wrap his tongue around a large order of French Fries in Spanish. After a very pregnant silence, we resorted to shouting papas fritas grande in unison in the hopes that the person receiving the order would hear us. When it became obvious that it wasn’t working, Jim held his hand up for us to be quiet and shouted with great bravado papas fritas Gandhi. This sent us into throes of laughter as we thought of skinny little fries with bald heads. It’s one of the stories that would be repeated often as our volunteers came together to talk about their times in Costa Rica.
It seemed an excruciatingly long wait before we were ready to board the plane and take off. Once TACA Airlines finally whisked us away, we climbed above misty mountains, the clouds resting peacefully as they clung to the volcano Irazu’s textured slopes. I thought about how we’d made so many memories in the lush country, one of the funniest of which was our first day of the trip that our flight home was bringing to a close. Jim and I had been walking around San Jose when we noticed a man following us for an alarmingly long time. Jim had finally worked up the nerve to ask him why and he answered, in broken English, that he wanted his autograph. “Why?” Jim asked. “You Sean Connery!” the man had replied, grinning from ear to ear. “No,” Jim said, “I’m not.” The fellow simply wouldn’t believe him no matter how many times he said it wasn’t true and he continued to doggedly follow us until I convinced Jim to acquiesce because the guy was giving me the creeps. The piece of paper the man had been waving in our direction every time we had looked his way was finally signed with Jim’s own signature but that hadn’t mattered to the sincerely excited man, who held the scrap of paper in the air as if he had just received a priceless treasure as he walked away from us!
The silliest things had always come about because the people were so genuine, I thought as I took a long last look at the fading peaks below. I said goodbye to the rich coast that had held such a paradoxical mix of experiences for me, thinking to myself, “Emma, how could I forget you or anyone else here?” I realized I’d mouthed her name aloud when my warm breath fogged the portal-shaped window, which had grown frigid as we climbed higher, and we sliced into a cloud that further obscured the land below. I leaned back in my seat, wrestling with a mixture of relief and grief, as I wondered, Was this all there would be of my relationship with Costa Rica and its gentle people?
The question faded only slightly once I was back at home, a two-week respite before traveling west to South Dakota. During the rare down-time we visited a development called Dunaway, a getaway for the area’s elite with wooded lots large enough that cabins could be tucked into the middle of lush foliage for privacy. It was in its early stages of being carved from the Tennessee hills and Jim was purchasing a sequestered parcel of land on which we would build a cabin. The seclusion was a must for the wealthy determined to have safe havens when they attempted to escape from their “lives”—a fact that I found ironic because “they” always took their lives with them (I suppose this is where I should own it and say “we” because I was among them at this point in my life)! There was a beautiful lake on the property and I sat in a canoe one afternoon, filling myself with the comforting silence broken only by the intermittent buzzing of cicadas and the occasional click of dragonfly wings.
I was so steeped in the deep dampness of the abundant setting that I was able to quiet my mind for the first time in months. As my eyes followed the shoreline hemmed in cattails, a thought took hold of me so forcefully that it was as if some unseen force had grabbed me and shook me hard. My own voice, buried deep inside me, whispered, “You don’t have to wrestle with your spirituality; you don’t have to worry that you are at odds with religion—there is room for your way of being. Yes, there is much to know for certain, but you have begun your search for your meaning and that is all you need to know for now.”
This is a participating #LetsBlogOff post; to see my fellow bloggers taking up the subject of privacy today, click here. For a writing exercise that I have used to push myself to my highest quality of description for this post, visit adroyt, and if you are so inclined take up the cause of quality in writing yourself, I’d love to know what you create from it. If you are new to this blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Lying to Tell the Truth: A #LetsBlogOff Reverie
Jim was racing around with only a week to prepare for his final trip to Costa Rica because he was determined to cram three week’s worth of activities into the seven days he had in town. His meetings with his cronies segued to long lunches at the Mountain City Club; and his determination to taste the best of summer filled our evening and weekend calendar with barbecues, al fresco cocktail parties and boating on Lake Chickamauga.
He would spend a week in Central America before I joined him with six volunteers, and I was up early the morning I took him to the airport, watching as his sunburned head—all that was left of the leisure time he had known—bobbed in and out of view as he heaved the heavy LL Bean duffle bags out the door. I stood at the window admiring the bluff trees, which I knew would envelope me in coolness once I was back from dropping him off because I was determined to park myself on the screened porch for as much of my week of freedom as was possible. I settled myself there the minute I returned, sitting quietly for a few seconds in order to attune myself to the waterfall smattering against the gully of rocks into which it spilled. It seemed that the staccato notes mimicked my lack of output at the typewriter—the tap, tap, tap echoing the stilted rhythm of my creativity gone bone dry, the keys sticking in mid-strike so that the words came out of me in a halting trickle.
I was waiting for an imaginative storm to blow through and leave the ideas cascading from my brain in a torrent but that had not happened in far too long. This made me fear the long summer months ahead, knowing the heat would diminish the waterfall’s voice to a dribble. Would mine be sentenced to the same fate? I wondered. What would it take to get my writing back on track? It was then I realized the sound of that splattering was identical to the noise that falling water made as it splashed into a deep, boxy concrete sink. I closed my eyes and let the sensory memories wash over me as they brought Costa Rica, where I would soon return for the last time, flooding over my senses.
I was still trying to process what I had experienced in South Dakota—a time of controversy, conflicts and extremes. During the convocation, I had felt the need to hang back and remain aloof. I had never met such shy, closed people and I felt there was prejudice against me, though I hardly blamed them because I was just another wasichu. I could only imagine how much deep-seated mistrust had built up in them and I felt sad that there was no unity among tribes because it kept them from moving forward in a way that might have enabled them to assuage some of the despair I had witnessed.
I moved through the days of Jim’s absence with this fretfulness jangling around in me even during the delicious mornings I spent soaking in the beautiful mountain backdrop. The surroundings calmed me as always, but I found that I was so weary it was all I could do to put two sentences together. I kept at it, making false starts as my annoyance at the sound of the heavy equipment cutting the road far below, which sounded downright evil juxtaposed against the soft spraying of the waterfall, edged out the faint momentum that offered itself to me. This must have been the same sound the people who lived near the strip mining operations heard when the ruination of certain parts of the Appalachian Mountains came to pass, I thought. Oh, why do I care? I am a peace here, and I wish I could sit like this for the rest of my days!
I had seen the play “Steel Magnolias” with friends and found myself wishing I could capture the eccentricities of the southern character as brilliantly as Robert Harling had. The only other time I had been as enamored with the authentic rendering of the eccentric southern personality was when I had seen Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart.” Would I ever get my act together so that I could leave something as forceful to the world?
The Fourth of July dawned and the weather was a deluge. I realized that most people must have been angered by the weather but I was reveling in the fact that I had peace, quiet and every excuse to hole up. The tropical-like downpours had created a snarling waterfall that ravaged slick rocks lit by a queer fog-filtered light—to the point that they glowed, alien-like. Within that odd radiance, hammered silver contrasted shiny green leaves so brilliant they appeared to be made of patent leather.
I’d been reading an article in Harper’s titled “In Deepest Gringolandia.” In it Bob Shacochis declared Mexico was being used as a third-world tourist theme park by North Americans. He wrote, “North Americans, boarding their planes, take North America with them—in varying degrees, yes, ugly or beautiful, but North America nevertheless.” I thought about how uncomfortable some of the places we’d stayed in Costa Rica had been and how I had succumbed to this myself. Being overwhelmed by roaches had certainly thrown me, and living at the mercy of the elements had challenged me to no end. If I was a snob by admitting that being in a clean environment soothed me enormously, then I was guilty as charged.
Since my writing voice was firmly on strike, I found myself reading voraciously while Jim was away—making my way through a stack of books and magazines I had been intending to read for months. I’d thought that focusing on fiction would help me to escape the lack of momentum in my own writing so novels held high priority, but the tactic was having little effect. I awoke on the fourth morning of my solitude, my knee bumping the books tossed haphazardly onto the opposite side of the bed, and looked out into the dull sky. Where the clouds hung thicker, there were puffy lines of deepest gray—a scowl to interrupt the endless monotony of graphite. I felt restless and edgy so I laced up my running shoes to take advantage of the misty umbrella nature had sent before the sun burned it off and brought on the sizzling heat.
It felt good to let the warm moisture move through my hair as the sweat poured from my body. I felt my breath enter and leave my lungs, marveling that flesh and bone had the fortitude to endure when my emotional self felt so beaten down. As I made my way past the familiar vantage points I always saw on my runs, I wondered how my life would look in twenty years; thought about Picasso’s premise that the artist lies in order to reach another kind of truth. What lies could I tell in order to create a life with a truth I could tolerate? I wondered as I turned the corner toward home, accelerating my speed to match they pace of my disconcerting thoughts.
This is a participating post in a bi-monthly exercise known as Let's Blog Off. I don't know what it is about the choices LBO leaders make for topics, but somehow my ramble through the past 20 years seems to always be on point. The material for this post and the photo of me on Lake Chickamauga were created, oddly enough, 20 years ago almost to the day. I can't wait to see how much headway I make as a writer in the next 20 years! To see posts by the other #LetsBlogOff participants du jour, click here.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Tortured Water
Once we crossed to the western rim of the river, the land grew a bit wilder, feeling more isolated and lonelier, especially on the Cheyenne River Reservation where the Convocation was underway. I was trying to nail descriptions of what I had seen in my writers notebook when the hymns that had filled the breaks in the programming ended, leaving only the sound of distant chainsaws to rend the sudden silence. They were being run by heavyset Native American men cutting and stripping the pine poles used for building the bowers, the new ones necessary to accommodate a swelling crowed. The rough-hewn constructs were fastened together with wire and topped with mesh over which dying limbs and branches were tossed to create dappled shade. The spots of light beneath them glinted on folding metal chairs and peppered crude benches made from planks of raw timber that had been nailed onto short sections of tree trunks.
A long line of presenters moved across the dais under the largest bower straddling the podium as the day’s agenda progressed. First up were the varied chapters of the Episcopal Church Women. Beulah Turgeon shared her details of the activity that had taken place on the Rosebud Reservation, noting that they felt a sense of accomplishment given the monies they’d raised from their series of lunches. Mrs. Runs With Enemy asked that grave markers be maintained more vigilantly in her parish because it was a sign of respect for the dead. The pleas of the women to follow were similar, each noting needs beyond their parish’s means. As the women wrapped their agenda, a group of men filtered in, separating into small clusters.
Mr. Little Soldier was the first to step up to the microphone. He asked, “Who is our God?” paused and stared keenly at the audience before adding, “Is he in favor of a separation of church and state?” Every so often he would break into the Sioux dialect, which made his sentences sing as his voice rose and fell, going soft on syllables like "ha" and "cha." English phrases emerged in the midst of the melodic language—“all this time” sandwiched between Woniya Wakan, or holy spirit, and niyelo, “it’s up to you.” He was a member of the camp advocating a vote to approve that both Lakota spiritual activities and Episcopal services be embraced by the Diocese. Some men offered murmurs of acceptance and others dissent, depending upon which side of the issue they supported. A critical argument had to do with whether traditional customs of the Episcopal services could be altered, namely the sips of wine during the Eucharist.
Not everyone wanted the custom to be changed, but the ones who did were adamant that using grape juice or non-alcoholic wine was of grave importance because it took only a tiny bit of alcohol to ignite a setback for the addicted. The sun illuminated the handmade quilts hung behind the podium as the debate wore on—the colorful stars and the war eagle so exquisitely crafted. Set in relief against the artful backdrop created by these beloved symbols, Reginald Bird Horse spoke of how the native religion was a comfort to those who still believed in the old ways. The parade of names of the ardent speakers as they presented their heartfelt positions on a string of issues quickly became a jumble.
Father Makes Good delivered his impassioned plea to preserve the Episcopal services as they had always known them. A lay reader from St. Elizabeth’s named Reginald Bird Horse remarked, “I’ve been to the hill. How long since we’ve been involved with alcoholism? And now it’s bingo. I have found myself by communicating with God; going to the hill to fast and pray.” He was advocating the use of the peace pipe and the drum in church services, and was one of the speakers to address the plight of those who had beat alcoholism only to be faced with the wine at the communion rail.
Nelson Young Hawk came forward and spoke of his tiyospaye, or extended family—his grandmothers and great grandfathers who had adopted the white man’s way by accepting their religion. He was certain that they should not change the services in any way; that these weekly rituals should remain exactly the same as they had been since the church first entered their lives. Simon Speaks approached the microphone and said in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, “We don’t come together to think about the almighty dollar from the U.S. treasury—the Indian got along without it for a long time until they took our gold mines and now we can’t get our own money—we should take our religion back, too.”
As clipped, grey clouds drifted through a Wedgwood blue sky, Father Bears Heart took the dais and the men nodded as his voice cascaded through the Sioux language, a dialect that such a small minority within our country’s borders would recognize. His friendly face disappeared as another—thinner and more haggard—took its place, and the back-and-forth continued into the afternoon. I thought of Black Elk’s statement: “They talked and talked for days, but it was just like wind blowing in the end.” As the last man exited the low stage, the sound of crickets and the clink of metal from a small group of men playing horseshoes were suddenly drowned out as the recorded hymns flared from the giant speakers, which had been heaved onto a tall wooden platform.
I learned that day how important the word tiospaye is to Native Americans, and I also came to see that I was intruding on a discussion that wasn’t mine to hear. With a heavy heart, I moved to a bower away from the activities of the church after hearing Bishop Anderson tell those who were asking him to make a decision as to how their church services would be shaped that it was their decision to make, not his. He said decisions had been made for them for far too long and it was in their best interest to talk amongst themselves and come to their own conclusions.
As I noted how sadness seemed to be leaking from each person speaking, I wondered about the jovial demeanor of the people milling around a large pot of buffalo stew—such a contrast to those speaking that day. It took several men to stir it as it bubbled furiously, the intense flames beneath the black vessel holding the soup dancing vibrantly against the pot’s rounded bottom. I stared at the ground a great deal as the hours passed, walking around as I tried to get my bearings. As I did, I saw how the fine, silt-like dirt beneath the grass, which was so dry it crunched with each footstep, eagerly took the imprint of the logos and patterns carved into the bottom of each pair of sneakers that had passed over its surface. I had read that the dirt in this part of the U.S. was the drift left by glaciers of long ago and I wondered whether our version of hieroglyphics would be the motifs on the bottoms of our shoes when the next Ice Age hit.
A priest from Colombia struck up a conversation with me as I sat off to myself scribbling my impressions of things. He told me that he was Lutheran and that he’d had a falling out with his church. He had married an American and found himself on the Pine Ridge Reservation ministering to the Ogalala Sioux. “The American Indian is rich compared to the poor in Latin America,” he remarked. “Their poverty is not in their world, it is in their minds.” His words reverberated as we drove the serpentine road to Mobridge, stopping there for coffee before heading back to Sioux Falls. We laughed as Randy thought to officially welcome us to the land of “tortured water”—the name they’d given their particular brand of joe in South Dakota.
As we flew back to Tennessee, my mind was exploding as I attempted to process everything that I had seen and heard. My confusion as to whether western religions had any relevance for Native Americans had been amplified, and I thought it fitting that one of the first Lakota words I learned was skinciya, or struggle. Stevie Smith once wrote that a mind stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions. At that very moment, I was living, breathing proof that this was powerfully true.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Utopian Attitudes
As we left the outskirts of Sioux Falls, our drive to the Yankton Reservation took us through an expanse of checkerboard farmland. It was deemed an open reservation due to the mix of Native Americans and white landowners within its boundaries, and this became clear as we pulled into Wagner, which looked as all-American as any other farming community in the Midwest. We met Father Field and his wife Mary, Rocky, Elmo, Edna, Peter and Annette that day—names of people we would come to know very well as we built a church they had been asking the Diocese to provide for them for many years.
Our second stop was Greenwood, which rests in the nipple extending below the rectangular state at its southeast corner, its meandering outline there defined by the Missouri River. The church we would be replacing with the one we would build was eerily quiet—its interiors musty from being closed up for quite some time because the community that once utilized it had moved to Wagner to be closer to the services a town provides. I’d never been as moved by “The Lord’s Prayer” as when I saw a large framed needlepoint of it, written in the Sioux language, hanging in the vestibule. It was as rag-tag as the little strip of land along the Missouri River we found ourselves walking along that day—the waterway nothing more than a stream indolently moving through a deep ravine the river had made before being dammed upstream. The quiet spot held a collection of abandoned churches and a few run-down houses, and I could feel the sweep of history, though not the bustling one that had long been silenced along the jagged banks.
After the lush vegetation of Greenwood, our next stop—Lower Brule, a closed reservation—felt barren and dry. We met Marilyn, Boots, Gloria and Mr. Small Jumper, all eager to greet us because they welcomed our help. Father James, who was younger than most of the priests we’d met in the mission field, had been assigned to the isolated reservation that held nothing but buttes and flats spanning for miles. When we left the Lower Brule, we traversed the Crow Creek Reservation, moving through undulant gold grasses as we listened to Randy explaining that the Dakota, Lakota and Nakota were all arms of the Sioux tribe, and that the first-letter change of their names designates their linguistic differences—certain words used by all the Sioux would begin with “D,” “L,” or “N,” depending upon which segment of the tribe the speaker had been born into.
As we headed farther north and west, we drove a rain-soaked road that rose and fell away, mimicking the undulant profile of the hills. The Missouri River tracked us, slithering out of sight through distant gorges and reappearing when the cliffs gave way to expansive meadows. We glided along the silvered ribbon winding through velvety green for several hours until we came to a field of flattened grass that was littered with beater cars, giant speakers, several pine bowers and an odd assortment of people, both Native American and white.
The four-day, out-of-doors Convocation was in full swing. Christian hymns blared from the speakers as we walked through the trampled prairie grass rousing grasshoppers with every step. I attempted to make eye contact with the Native Americans I passed, but my searching looks were met with stoic distance. I sat alone for most of the afternoon, watching puffy clouds glide effortlessly through an enormous sky as I wondered why my attempts to connect were being met with such resistance.
I realized there was so much to learn. I had always taken my ability to connect with other human beings for granted, and I had already been told once since we’d arrived that I was being very idealistic. What else is new? I thought, admitting that I could see this in most of my dealings, though I wouldn’t have been so quick to put a name on my emotional makeup. It was a bit like being categorized, then stamped with a number to be shelved in the “Idealist” section of the library. How did I come about these “utopian” attitudes? I wondered as I scribbled in the notebook in my lap, the smell of pine infusing the air.
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This is a participating post in #LetsBlogOff. The question du jour: “What do you take for granted?” I hope you enjoyed my realization about taking human connections for granted; to see the other posts answering this question, click here for the full roster.
Some Hint of Myself
We were a few days away from taking our first trip to South Dakota and I had no idea what to expect. We would be attending the Niobrara Convocation, a church convention for Sioux Episcopalians, in Promise, South Dakota. The Bishop had mentioned we’d see a bit of the wild wild west as we traversed the Great Plains—prairie dogs, buffalo, antelope and miles upon miles of barbed-wire fences. Though not as “exotic” to me as the animals he listed, I was battling some pretty sneaky Tennessee wildlife as I tried to protect my herb garden on the mountain, and it had me wondering whether the native animal kingdom on the Plains could be any more troublesome.
For three mornings in a row woodchucks had decided it was their duty to dig around in my newly planted pride and joy—a series of mounds of dirt skirted by carefully placed stones from between which plumes of perennials and knots of herbs sprouted. I had planned this perfect garden for months and it had taken me an entire week to physically create it so I was understandably feeling a bit territorial. I had pegged the perpetrators as our regular visitors, the raccoons, until I caught the groundhogs red-handed one night. Just before heading to bed I had heard a noise that sounded suspiciously like terra cotta scraping on wood. I flipped on the deck lights to see the critters pulling my bay tree out of the dirt, placing it carefully on the deck beside the pot they were plundering. I left them alone, knowing the plant would survive the night in the open, and just before drifting off to sleep, I wondered if I should put some dried ears of corn at the bottom of the steps for them the next evening—a peace offering of sorts. Then I quickly realized how silly the idea was, as they didn’t consider their behavior destructive; they were simply foraging for food.
Jim had built me a remarkable potting bench for planting herbs and flowers, and I’d found the perfect place for it in a nook facing the woods. I was making my way to it to repot my bay tree the next morning when I nearly stepped on a large snake sunning on the deck. I thought I was going to drop dead from fear before I could reach the door to the garage, high-stepping more successfully than any drum major I had admired when high school bands were still known for turning out such prancing leaders!
I shuddered all afternoon thinking about how close I had come to stepping on the slithering creature. When I described it to my neighbor’s gardener, he declared it to be a harmless chicken snake but I felt certain it had been of the deadliest sort. I raced down to the bookstore to buy a guidebook so I’d be able to identify snakes from then on. Needless to say, I never nonchalantly walked around any corner on the deck from that day on, and when I would see an elongated reptile sunning on one of the large, flat rocks on the bluff below, I’d pull out my handy book and see if I could tell its type. It was a ridiculous effort, of course, because you had to get pretty close to a snake to make out its details and I certainly wasn’t signing on for that task.
The next day, we took off for South Dakota before the light had come up on the city and I felt inexplicably nervous on the flight to Sioux Falls as I fingered a newspaper clipping with my grainy visage stamped into it—an advertisement I’d used to mark my spot in Black Elk Speaks. I’d agreed to model for this ad at the request of several friends who owned First Impression, a clothing store they’d just opened. I scanned the image for some hint of myself—some sign that it was really me—and I found nothing that told me I was present when the photograph was taken! In fact, it had been an embarrassing endeavor as I tried to figure out how to pose because I’d never done so. Afterwards, I realized I should have practiced before I went to the shoot but that wouldn’t have occurred to me either. The photographer was completely green so he didn’t have a clue as to how to help me, and I had left feeling self-conscious. That’s what I thought about when I saw my wide smile, the discomfort causing me to jam the flimsy piece of paper into the back of the book as I vowed never to do something as out-of-character again.
I had made it about three-quarters of the way through the story of Black Elk’s story and was gaining a Native American’s view of how their lives were changed by the whites they encountered in the days preceding, during and following the “Indian Wars.” Black Elk, who lived in a log house on the Pine Ridge Reservation between Wounded Knee and Grass Creek when he was relating the story to John Neihardt, said,“…the Wasichus have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not with us any more. You can look at our boys and see how it is with us. When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen years of age. But now it takes them very much longer to mature…Well, it is as it is. We are prisoners of war while we are waiting here…”
Until reading the book, I’d never heard the word wasichu, which means “white person” in Lakota. It was bizarre to be perceived as different because I’d never been put in a situation of minority before. I suppose something told me I was heading into tricky territory given the anxiety I felt as I finished the book, which I closed as we were beginning the final approach into Sioux Falls. I found myself swallowing tears as the medicine man’s words lamenting the moment when Native Americans were relegated to reservations echoed in my mind.
“And so it was all over…I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…”
Black Elk’s story had been lived one hundred years before my arrival in South Dakota, and it made me sad that there had been even further decline for the freedom-loving people. “O make my people live!” Black Elk had wailed. It occurred to me that I would likely look back on Costa Rica as a piece of cake compared to the emotional territory I found myself entering in South Dakota. The thought was sobering as I stepped out of the plane and walked down the steps into the heat of the Great Plains.
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The Puzzle of My Life
It’s remarkable how quickly #LetsBlogOff comes around and the topic today is “Where do you get your ideas for creating what you do…Do you have a favorite writing table or a quiet corner in your house or apartment?” My ideas have varied birthing points but rest in only one repository—my writer’s notebook—which carries them forward, keeping them safe and alive until I’m ready to use them in projects such as this memoir. I’ve been in the hospital for a week—heading home today I hope—and I’ve filled page after page with sensory perceptions about my time here that I know I will use somehow somewhere. My Lucille Ball-esque run-in with the ice/filtered water machine is likely the only thing you won’t be seeing recorded anywhere amongst my copious notes (a girl’s gotta reserve some dignity!). To see how other #LetsBlogOff participants glean their creative ideas, click here for a full list.
The Puzzle of My Life
We were back in Siquirres. The morning had dawned rainy, the tip-tap of large drops drumming the tin roof making me so drowsy I slept longer than I should have. When the other noises of life finally penetrated my consciousness, it was the birdsong that capped all the other sounds. It was, in fact, always difficult to ignore in surround sound but I had to admit on that particular morning there was a difference—suddenly, the twittering of the birds seemed positive, quite a turnabout for me given how negative I had been of late.
I was far from proud of that and I wished I could learn to be different but I was having a tough time making an altered attitude stick. “Maybe it is time for me to grow up,” I wrote in my writer’s notebook, which was normally sturdy but was so damp it had become pliable—flexible to the point of disintegration. Was it possible that the environment here would help me to become strong if I could learn how to be more flexible or would I fall apart as quickly as this pressed cardboard book I’d grown so dependent upon?
Kimberly and Gertrude were taking the bus to Siquirres so they could have lunch with me, a break from the grind that I celebrated. I would give Kimberly the Barbie Coloring Book and Crayons I brought her. Little did I know as I placed them on the table in the kitchen they were bringing me gifts that would mean much more to me than the silly nothings I had brought from the states. Mrs. Green had sent me a wooden calendar. I was moved and humbled by its exquisite craftsmanship and the beauty of its presentation. She had made it, which meant all the more, and this level of generosity was so in keeping with the deep respect the people continued to show me.
Having news of her made me remember how close Gus and Mr. Green seemed. They would sit for hours on the porch talking about the most inane things, and every chance I had, I would light like a fly on the wall to listen in on their musings as I crouched in the corner of the porch. I learned that Mr. Green gleaned most of his medical inclinations, for which he was touted, from his wife. She was always recommending this treatment or that one, such as a “prescription” for Marcie, who had a sore throat. Mrs. Green insisted that she mix banana vinegar with black pepper, heat the mixture, and gargle it.
One day one of our volunteers had asked Mr. Green if he could think of anything he didn’t have that he might want. He thought for a long time, his ample lips pulsing as he rubbed the knob of his chin, then finally answered, “It would be money. I have everything else.” I was sitting with him one afternoon when a harmless crazy man, well known around town for his antics, passed by. He had a yellow ball cap socked on his head sideways, the bill pointing to the right making him look far younger than he was. Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up” was blaring from the house across the street and he began dancing to it—quite well actually. When the song trailed off, he opened his mouth wide, looking side to side to see if anyone was admiring him, then held his hands up in the air, fingers splayed, as if to say, “Hold your applause!” Mr. Green and I laughed until we were doubled over in pain.
The rain had finally stopped and the sun was shining brightly. This was the tropics I remembered: sultry to the point of suffocating. The mosquitoes had multiplied greatly from the abundant moisture and I was battling a swarm of them when I bumped into Philip Wheaton on the way back from breakfast. A jack-of-all-trades who prided himself in the breadth of his skills, he had visited the job site several times, and was now helping with some of the new church’s paperwork. He typed with one hand flying and the other resting on the edge of the typewriter—his shoulders moving back and forth with the rhythm of his characters as they indented the paper in fuzzy black blobs.
He was tall and loosely jointed. Not too well groomed, yet not dirty. It was as if he’d been haphazardly put together and I marveled at his thin sideburns extending almost to his mouth. They angled off to a point as they reached for his lips, little more than skinny triangles of graying hair. His eyebrows were barely there, but the hair that did remain was wiry and unruly. He had a great deal of personality in his eyes, especially when he smiled. His great receding hairline was combed back, lending his sideburns more prominence and giving him the appearance of a scrooge or some other Dickensian character. I pegged him as rangy as he ambled along on spidery legs. He was almost hyper about his work, or extremely intent at the very least. As he talked about this project or that project, his brown eyes danced in his wide, creased face.
I was terribly homesick, was missing Sam so much I ached with it. I had brought a jigsaw puzzle to work and it had helped me to pass the time, but as I worked it, I thought of how simple it seemed to put together piece-by-piece compared to the puzzle of my life. I looked around the large front room with its alternating dark and light wood floorboards, walls made from the same, strong dark wood plentiful in Costa Rica—some of which had been painted yellow. In that moment of observation, I felt more isolated than I could bear but I couldn’t let the longing hold: the feeling was far too melancholy. I stood so quickly the chair crashed to the floor behind me, then headed to the kitchen for a glass of water. I felt ever more alien in the sparsely equipped room with its tiny refrigerator and petite stove, which were dwarfed by a huge porcelain sink spouting only cold running water.
I gulped down the water as I sunk into a chair covered in faded Naugahyde—the once bright pink, caramel and pert green flowers on the upholstery long faded to pastels. There was a tan mat woven from rushes under a tiny coffee table draped with a bright, though very dirty, linen shawl, which had been stitched with a decorative motive in silk threads. The furniture was straight and hard, and I sat on the clammy unforgiving upholstery thinking how relieved I was that I’d be heading home to greater comfort the day before my 31st birthday. I’d been trying to think of a way to sum things up as far as life in Siquirres was concerned and I’d hit upon the theme that life vibrated: music, birdsong, weather, the vivacity with which everyone spoke—everything vibrated. I might have given the idea “life vibrates” more power if my thoughts hadn’t been as dry and cracked as the dustbowl. There was no spark for the jungle, only the excitement of going home.
As I approached 31, I made the commitment to myself to try and rebuild whatever it was that was broken in me—not remake it as it had been but to refashion it into something stronger and real. God help me do it right this time, I thought as I packed and let the thrill of the fact that the next day I would be “home, sweet home,” fill me with hope.
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Yes, Man!
I had stayed in Siquirres for the day, and my head was pulsing from the dampness, the moisture-laden air making every noise more intense. There was a great deal of sound in the outpost town. A bell clanged at the Catholic church as the priest chanted into a microphone, the words reverberating inside the big, domed concrete block building then echoing out into the streets. Roosters crowed and the train engine thrummed as the cars clanked into each other, jerking as the slack was eaten by motion. The furniture maker next door running his lathe paused, letting it sputter noisily until he was ready to make it sing again when it happily devoured the wood he fed it. Dogs barked and squealed as large diesel trucks coughed on the highway, then throbbed as the drivers employed their Jake brakes to slow down. A motorcycle fired and a baby cried simultaneously, the twin sounds creating a high-pitched drone.
When the woman next door sneezed, it sounded as though she was in the room with me—that’s how little noise the wire mesh covering the windows held back. As I listened, I felt so absorbed that I transcended the noisemakers to become the noise: I wasn’t the furniture-maker but the whine of the lathe. I wasn’t the priest or the microphone, but the chant. I became the woman’s sneeze, then, as her hands moved from her face to the dishes she was washing, I was the sloshing of the water rendering her hands raw. I wondered if her skin was as rough as the palms of the elderly black man’s who had shaken my hand the day before. His fingers had felt as though he had laminated them and then roughened the plastic coating with sandpaper. He’d said to me, “Good to see you, yes, man!” The minute he turned away, I was met with the surprise of my life. Barney trundled up with a bouquet of flowers and a basket filled to the brim with chili peppers and limes.
He handed me the gifts so self-consciously that my heart melted, an intimate moment that held only for a fraction of a second because the weather upped the ante on its terrible mood and gushed water, sending us both running for shelter. We stood beneath a tarp that Jim had strung between two trees and I struggled to think how I could recapture the mood so I could express my gratitude for his gift but he sensed my earnestness and pulled his poncho over his head, tossing back a goodbye and slipping away. As he sloshed through the thick mud toward home, I watched as he passed a pregnant dog drinking from the gutter—the filthy water rushing under her lapping tongue. He didn’t so much as glance in her direction and I stood there regretting that I hadn’t been able to tell him how much his gesture had meant to me.
I couldn’t begin to guess how many inches of rain had fallen in two days’ time. I simply knew it was significant because my clothes were so soggy they were beginning to sour. Lying on the bed in the mornings was unfriendly because the sheets were so damp they might as well have been pulled right from the washing machine. This was difficult for me and I hated myself for it. I kept thinking that surely there was some way for me to find the strength to gracefully deal with all of the challenges I faced, but good-humored acceptance continued to allude me.
After a brief respite of sunshine at midday, the sky scowled and the thunder rumbled yet again—threatening from a distance and growing louder with each chant. The ocean must have been aiming to free itself from its contents because water came in great torrents that obliterated everything from sight. I unpacked the goodies that Barney had given me and realized I was growing a bit more accustomed to life in a country where sweet limes were bitter and they called avocadoes pears. I would always remember mornings that dawned with jungle noises and the smoky smell of a fire lit by the furniture maker next door as he burned the sawdust from the previous day’s work—neither of which I’d ever experienced in my life until I had landed on a coastal plain where moss dripped like an old man’s beard from misshapen trees.
We were preparing to head home and I felt happy that I’d spent some time working on the material for “Mornings at Lakeshore” because we would be moving into a house perched on a beautiful bluff overlooking the northern edge of Chattanooga. I’d be floating far above a bend in the Tennessee River rather than steeped in the lake setting that had inspired the writing. My new world would be a levitating one that I imagined would bring its own fascinations, the newness of which I hoped would make up for my loss of the lushness of living on the water.
I watched Jim fuss with the building as he prepared to leave the job site unattended—his expression as earnest as a mom preparing to send her child off to the first day of school. I understood his passion for what he was doing but I felt the eggshells I’d been dancing around on were becoming slicker and more dangerous as the viscous of the slimy whites thickened every time I made a pass over the crumbled mess. At what point did the tiptoeing stop making sense? I wondered. At what point did I say screw it and set my heels firmly on the ground?
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Slack from Hunger
With the man’s help, we finally found our way to Guapiles, which had a well-appointed clinic—by Costa Rican standards—that served the workers of the town’s banana processing plant (to use the word loosely). I sat with Barney as the clinicians examined Jenks, who winced as they tried to pull histee shirt up over his uninjured arm. When they attempted to lift it over his head, disturbing his busted arm, he yelled, “Cut the damn thing off!” Even after his outburst, they were so frugal they were reluctant to damage the cement-stained shirt. Jenks grabbed the scissors from a nurse and clipped the bottom edge, holding the gashed fabric up to her. She grabbed it from him and finally ripped it from his body. The next insult awaiting him was at the end of a trek to the facility’s interior courtyard, where they splashed the construction muck from his upper body with rainwater from the roof that had collected in a barrel.
I could tell by the grimace on his ashen face that he was feeling beset, understandable given that the level of medical care he was accustomed to receiving was so superior to this, and it must have made him feel all the more uncomfortable in his weakened state of mind that conditions were so unsanitary by our standards. Needless to say, he was over it by the time he’d been given a sedative and had a cast covering most of his arm. The episode really shook me up and I couldn’t sleep that night for reliving the nightmare of seeing his twisted body on the rock-strewn dirt, not knowing until he stirred if he was dead or alive.
The next day, Barney had a grand time telling Jim his rendition of our road trip. The inevitable disclaimer—“I don’t know the word in Spanish” was followed by, “I’ve been here so long, I’ve forgotten my English!”— peppering his repertoire to the point that it was comical. He was a small man—all of about 5’5”—with a protruding stomach that pillowed above the sagging waistband of the same pair of baggy jeans he always wore. The frayed pants were perpetually sliding down what was left of his naturally narrow hips and butt, which had become gaunt from years of inactivity. The only way he managed to keep them up was a continual cinching of a ratty leather belt threaded through the two existing loops on the waistband. The action was repeated so often it was as if he had a tick of sorts or was participating in a bizarre modern dance sequence during which his hand reached for the belt and flung the end of it in the air at waist level. He’d snap his arm straight and then lower it to his side exactly the same way each time, as if the dance’s end required the formality of an Olympic dismount.
He claimed that his body was ravaged not by alcohol but by the “action” he saw in Vietnam, which was unlikely. I knew this because once when he was particularly intoxicated he had admitted to me that his supply ship had never been anywhere near warfare and that he’d been a cook, not a soldier. His face was rugged and pocked with sores, and I’d never seen him when he was clean. His head was covered in a furry pate of hair, which wasn’t long but was never perfectly shaven. His mouth was drawn in from missing teeth—frozen in a sort of perpetual circle—which meant his words came out in mumbles even before they were slurred from drinking.
His eyes were large and hooded, and he would stand with his hands on his thin hips, staring off with his lids closing slowly as if he were dropping into a trance. After a few seconds of swaying, he would jerk back to reality and immediately begin to prattle on about nothing even if someone else had the floor. At first I thought he just talked to hear himself speak but I later realized it must have been the only thing keeping him awake.
He had a filthy mouth and was indignant about almost everything, including race relations. He’d been born in Birmingham and had been in Alabama his entire life until he had “sailed off to war.” The small jungle village he had decided to claim as his new home allowed him to stay backwards by the sheer fact that he could barely communicate with anyone. It was clear that he stayed because he knew he would be left to his own devises as he drank, ranting and raving his way through his waning years.
The environment supported his hostility by fostering the old prejudices because no one there cared what he thought about the ancient state of affairs in a faraway country. Though he was so insultingly verbose, I tried to look beneath his diatribes and I found that he wasn’t a cut-and-dried hater. One of the clues was his relationship with his dog Girl because he cared for as well as anyone I’d ever seen nurture a pet. He was always talking to her as she limped along beside him, wagging her chewed-up tail at the sound of her name.
Another way I recognized heart in him was through his adoration of Jim. He called him Mr. Jim and would go to the ends of the earth and back for him. He was continually asking him questions about things and I watched one day as he queried why we were using the catheads we’d brought from the states on the ends of the protruding rebar. As Jim explained, his gaze followed his pointing finger to the top row of blocks and it was as if he was receiving the equivalent of the ten commandments, so great was the look of hero worship in his eyes. He followed along as closely as his Guaro-addled brain would allow, scratching his head as his puckered lips to mouth some of Jim’s words a few beats behind. “Well, I’ll be,” he said when Jim paused to see if he understood what he’d said. “Did you hear that, Girl? We got fancy stuff here in our little town thanks to Mr. Jim, don’t we?”
I’d seen Jim bring this out in people before but it was exaggerated in Barney, who seemed to have a desperate need to believe in something, and Jim seemed to be that “something” in spades. I think he loved his dog so much because she gave him unconditional love, and I suspected he’d never had anything close to that, which had left him starved for it. The only thing that made sense regarding his oversized Jim adoration was that he saw in him the kind of man he’d longed to be but had given up on when he had sunk into an alcoholic fog. He wasn’t so unlike that beaten-down dog that roamed the Pocoran streets—skin and bones and hungry eyes, all gone slack from hunger—though Barney’s starvation was emotional rather than physical.
I heard M Scott Peck’s words echoing in my head: “We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.” I’d not understood this when I’d treated the sick dog’s condition as a problem to be solved rather than letting the mystery of life play itself out at the animal’s expense. Why did this have to be so hard? I wondered. At what point had the mystery gone out of Barney’s life, and how in the world could I get mine back?
I certainly didn’t want to end up carrying around as much pain as Barney did but it sure felt as if that’s where I was heading if I couldn’t get a handle on myself. “Problems do not go away,” Peck wrote. “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
Could it really be that I was experiencing some of the most splendid moments of my life? What a strange concept that seemed given the confusion that reigned inside my head and my heart! I was riddled with unhappiness and was lugging a heavy load of grief from feeling so unfulfilled. The idea that, in hindsight, this discomfort would shine a light on my finest hours seemed far-fetched and foreign to me.
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This is a participating post in #LetsBlogOff. To see other bright minds exploring the question "What are you carrying? [Everybody goes through life and picks up stuff as he or she goes. It’s pretty much part of what makes us, us. But what is this stuff? Or in the terms of this week’s Blog Off, what are you carrying? Is it cherished mementos from your life and times or is it the scars and hurts of disappointment and missed goals? All of us carry with ourselves the trappings and scraps of the lives we’ve led.]" click here for the full list of #LetsBlogOff superstars!
See Her Way Into Daylight
We’d been mostly catching rides from people as we traveled between towns, and more times than not we suffered through vehicles like Donald’s. I wasn’t a car snob by any stretch of the imagination—the ugly brown-gold Vega I had in high school proof that I’d drive anything—but I did feel that penny-wise/pound-foolish treatment of a piece of transportation was just plain silly (Okay, I know that love affairs between guys and their cars are legendary but this is an altogether different subject!). If a vehicle was meant for getting one from point A to point B, shouldn’t it do so in a modicum of comfort and dependability regardless of its appearance? Apparently not in life according to Donald, who had recently had his truck repainted—a bright red color with a giant yellow and black zigzagging stripe taking over its body so grandly that the paintjob screamed, “My next life will be lived in Las Vegas!” In order to afford the makeover, he’d ignored the lack of padding in the seats, which meant the body took a beating careening along the bumpy roads. He had also ignored the engine that coughed and the clutch that stuck so unmercifully that the stick shift beneath the floorboard must have been worn down to the thickness of a swizzle stick. We were basically riding along in a very pretty tin can with a passenger-side door that would only open from the inside, and a driver’s side window that would not roll down. I suppose it won’t surprise you that he was gushingly proud of his ride!
As I contemplated what to do with my writing, the only other person around was a local laborer Jim had hired who spoke only Spanish. He had a bitter expression stamped on his face that made me slightly afraid of him so I ignored him as I massaged the material, hoping he would give me the same courtesy. Staring at the page with my scrawling handwriting on it, something occurred to me that I should have realized before but had not: I had a tendency toward personification in my writing. The notes I’d made in Panama City Beach were proof: “The sky presents a checkerboard this morning. Sections of dark and light march from the ocean as if a known pattern had been predetermined. Maybe there was a director just offshore, giving each parcel of sky its dancing orders so that the segments would prance and twirl in pretty order. This is the type of day I long to have tucked into my routine—a day when everything feels moist and beautiful; a day when I can sit on the sofa and read, and no one will think ill of me. The ocean knows how to escape the jouncing mental activity of life: she whispers it every day—her breathy foam cascading, the chorus one of dark and light, of wetness, of persistence, of murmuring hypnotic laziness. She sings to me that it’s okay. I want to sing back but I have no idea what to say.”
As I scratched out words and jotted ideas into the margins of the overly messy sheets of paper, I heard the crunch of tires on gravel. I didn’t think much of it until I heard Jim yell, “No!” as forcefully as he could. He jumped out of the truck so quickly I wondered if he’d remembered to put it into park. I followed his angry gaze and saw why he was so upset. The man he’d left laying block was sawing off the rebar that was protruding from the top block at the edge of a window opening. I guess it was the first time the laborer had seen rebar and he didn’t realize that if the stabilizing steel wasn’t running through the heart of the blocks, a strong earthquake could tumble them like they were children’s toys. Jim stood there with his arms akimbo, shaking his head while the man kept on sawing. Since no one within shouting distance spoke Spanish but the laborer, there was no way for Jim to get it across to him that he shouldn’t be removing the rebar. Yelling “no,” which he understood perfectly, mattered not for whatever reason as the spiteful man defiantly moved his blade rhythmically across the metal, each grating pass causing Jim to wince.
With the laborer’s ineptitude, Jim’s mood turned dark so I tried to stay out of his way. I did so that evening by losing myself in revisiting “Mornings at Lakeshore”—the series I’d started and then abandoned. I figured the writing would help me to feel closer to home and maybe—just maybe—at some point would gel into a collection of poems. But even if all I gained were a couple of hours for pleasing explorations, it would have been time well spent.
I sat at the kitchen table of our jungle house, positioning my notebook to catch as much light as I could from the bare bulb hanging from its socket in the ceiling, and remembered home where there was beauty at the edge of a vibrant lake:
• Her eyes sparkled yesterday like a satin dress of brilliant blue. She peeked at me from between the rooftops as I climbed the hill, her sunny sheen illuminating everything around her like a dazzling smile. She is dark now, as it is too early for her to show herself. The streetlights twinkle on her surface as if hinting at the glittering eyes she will use to see her way into daylight…
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