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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.
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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.
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!
To read the clever posts of the rest of the #LetsBlogOff gang, click here and enjoy the ride!
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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Otra Ves
Our move to the “mountain house,” as we had dubbed it, was in full swing. I was surrounded by boxes and awaiting the arrival of the moving van. I would be so happy to get the chaos behind me and snuggle into the new surroundings as I put life back together piece by little piece. And yet there was a bitter-sweetness to it all: it was my last morning at lakeshore and Mother Nature had sent a fogbank to wrap me in cotton wool as I sipped my hot mug of coffee standing on the deck that now had none of the homey touches it once held. The sun, dulled by the moisture’s mantle, was rising ecru, its reflection dimmed on water bathed in wispy steam as the lake’s warm body fended off the chill of the air.
I was pouring as much creative energy into my writer’s notebook as I could snatch from my busy days—knowing my nesting into a new home would make it difficult for me to settle into any intensity of writing beyond what felt like water in the desert—a meager smattering of liquid on a vast expanse of parched sand. The mornings were becoming quite chilly, the blooms on the flowers shivering as the cool breath of changing seasons touched their softness. A cloud, flat and gray—looking cold as marble—obscured the sunrise as it floated a delicate orange through powdery blue with the day’s progression. The phenomenon of a mood only a morning could hold was fleeing right before my eyes as I watched in wonder.
As the light changed, I wondered how I had managed to build a relationship with someone whose thinking was so opposite my own. Jim and I had watched the movie Barfly the night before and as I was admiring the acting, he said he saw no point to the film; that it was ridiculous. I disagreed but knew better than to challenge his stance. As far as I was concerned, in one line, the plot made its point when Mickey Rourke’s character, Henry Chinaski, remarked, “No writer can actually write in peace.” The comment seemed off-handed, of course, but that was just good screenwriting and directing. The line exploded in my head, haunted me as I slept, and stayed with me to jangle my nerves as I watched the orange sky spark into a burst of light. Could this possibly be true? I wondered. I craved peace, craved a settled life in which I could breathe and write. Would it be more of the same procrastination if I did somehow have the calm I believed would support a writing life? This thought unnerved me because it was the idea upon which I was pinning all of my hopes and dreams.
“My writer self finds only tiny cracks in which to sink her fingers as she climbs the shear rocky wall of this bustling life,” I wrote later that day. “She squeezes me down to try and seep through, just as a footfall on the crack blocks her light. She muses her next move only to crash into a ravine—bruised, battered and silenced.” This frustrated piece of me held sway—pouting through the throngs of life’s activities that included a mix of formal gatherings and private parties, vestry meetings, and a brutal exercise class I was taking to try to punish myself back into shape. She grew even more silent during a ski trip to Steamboat even when I spent a gloriously quiet day propped in front of the fire while the others were off skiing. I couldn’t eek a single word from her, and she and I seemed to be officially polarized in a nasty standoff. I just kept making notes, even inane ones, hoping I could tease her out but she was a stubborn conscientious resister.
As I settled into the mountain house, there was plenty to record. I was in awe of the natural mood of the landscape surrounding the home stepping down the cliff. The fog was different at the higher altitude—like sheets of milky white tissue paper that hung behind the trees, coming and going as it desired. The lake in the distance below blazed like a diamond when the sun burned the cottony moisture away. It was colder “on high” as well, and the wood slats on the deck sparkled with dainty flecks of ice. Frozen veins of it had carved lifelines into the glass-topped table, the pattern sophisticated and intricately elemental.
Though I was reveling in the newness of these surroundings, it took the desert surrounding Santa Fe, New Mexico, where we went to shop for fine art for the house, to bring my writerly voice back. As we rose above the clouds on our way there, we broke into sunshine illuminating a tightly knit cloud-front that could have been a lumpy sweater made of knotty virgin wool. It was unrefined and rough, but plush. I wanted to run my fingers over it and fondle the softness, even if it would have disintegrated at my touch and wisped through my outspread fingers like the vaporous matter it was rather than the wooly coat of a sheep that I imagined it to be.
“Snow should look like this as it falls thick and heavy, clumping here and there,” I wrote, “but Mother Nature retains the control when the wet flakes fall, orchestrating the blanket to be flat and uniform, each flake joining hands with another to bond in a perfect union. Yes, control is everywhere.” Why couldn’t my own humanly bonds hold this level of perfection? I wondered. I suppose the answer should have been obvious—I was not even remotely in control of my situation, but then who ever is?
We drove to Taos while we were in Santa Fe, through a vastness that illustrated how ethereal rain could devour the much weightier earth, chewing great rivulets wherever it willed. The sun glowed crimson on the rocks, the sheen of the dirt seemingly aglow from within. Snow rested in rocky furrows worn by time and weather, and I thought about how this was certainly another world—stranger than any I’d ever known. I wrote a poem entitled “Otra Ves” on the plane on the way home, a few good moments entering into the mix but not much of it remaining worthy of a mention. The point of the poem is missed opportunity, particularly where dealing with Native Americans was concerned. In hindsight, I see now that life was preparing me to deal with this issue head-on. “Otra Ves” ends: “We wouldn’t force custom to sleep/ We’d teach the wilderness to be wild/ We’d cling to our land like a child to its mother.”
I came away from the desert of New Mexico feeling awed by the light and the landscape, questioning, Where else in the world would cacti bloom from heaps of pure white snow? And with that paradox looming, I turned away from a time of materialistic gluttony to prepare to head back to Costa Rica. What might the tens of thousands of dollars we had spent on art have done for the people we were “serving” there?
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!
I had great fun in being featured on the Building Moxie site yesterday. To see a few poems that I continued to work over the years (I didn’t abandon many, only the ones like “Otra Ves” that could never find their centers) click here.
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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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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A Steady View of Heaven
His name was Barney and my take on him was a ne’er-do-well, ex-pat American who had landed in the Costa Rican jungle, tasted the Guaro and decided he had no reason to ever leave. He had signs of a heart but so little patience for connection that he seemed incapable of opening himself to nurturing of any kind, especially with the parishioners in Pocora who were so excited about having their own church they were effusive in their thanksgivings. The Jamaican and West Indian women were especially unrestrained, leaving Barney no choice but to shake his head, grumble and retreat to his hut to protect himself from any goodness that might have accidentally spilled over on him!
He must have been terrified of emoting because he’d freeze when the women approached the clearing where the foundation of the church had been poured. Hesitating like a confused child, he would watch with horror as they made their way around the jobsite hugging everyone. Their voluptuous bodies and strong, meaty arms seemed made for enveloping others and it was a bit shocking to suddenly be wrapped in a mountain of an embrace but Barney seemed to take it especially hard. As they would draw closer to him, he would take a few steps back and pause before breaking into a stumbling run that led him into the jungle and out of empathy’s way before they could embrace him.
The only time he seemed comfortable in his own skin was when he stood around telling Jim bawdy stories about his military days. I watched as he laughed at his own tale one day, wondering why being hugged and touched by these women, which was nourishing to me, would bother him so much. They were so sincere, and the kindness of their attentions knew no racial, cultural, national, or class boundaries. In fact, if I had believed in the pearly gates, I would have wanted the greeting I received when I arrived to feel similar to these great, fleshy arms opening to welcome me. Since I’d never had a steady view of heaven and its master—an outlook that had become even more clouded during my time in the mission field—I celebrated the fact that having these magnificent women enfolding me was reward enough for my desire to live life with integrity.
I wondered if the matriarchs of the little village were aware that I had a battle raging inside me as they wrapped their arms around me. I was craving home so acutely it physically hurt. More often that not I had to talk myself up from moroseness when I awakened each morning by vowing to do one small thing to make things better just to get myself out of bed. On the successful days, I felt relief. During the less than stellar ones, a sinking feeling ruled while the battle consuming my energy wore on. I was actually succeeding when a painful turning point occurred one day and the veneer of bravado I’d managed to wrap myself in was ripped away.
It happened while we were eating lunch in the cantina in Pocora. I saw a sight that sent me into the deepest grief—a dog so starved it trembled, the sagging skin on its body quivering as it hung slack over its bony frame. It was skittering around sniffing for crumbs on the ground as I looked at it in horror. I glanced at Jim and declared I was going to feed it. He frowned at me, though he didn’t argue knowing that I had a stubborn streak about things that touched me so deeply. I rushed to the meat market nearby and bought some raw hamburger, which I place on the ground near the skittish dog. Tears were running down my face as I watched it inhale the meat. I felt better even with everyone sitting in the café laughing at me, but only for a moment because that’s how quickly I realized that unless I was going to feed it regularly I’d only prolonged the agony of its life rather than really helping it. This was a lesson I’d have torture me many times as I ached to make things better in the challenged places I found myself inhabiting.
The poor dog’s comparison to my Lhasa Apso, Samurai, was extreme. Sam was my surrogate child and I pampered him to no end when I was with him. As a dog lover and owner, I knew how helpless they could become once they were made dependent upon human beings. I couldn’t understand a culture that cared nothing for other creatures needing their support. A dark splinter invaded my heart that day and it stayed there festering as I tried make sense of what I was seeing.
Church held no solace for me as the words cascading from the lips of the ordained seemed empty, almost as rote as the Nicene Creed we mouthed every Sunday. There were divine moments but they were always of the mundane variety. The Sunday after I’d tried to help the ailing dog, a half a dozen ladies sat in front of us in church—some petite and shrunken, others ample and buxom. Each one had on a perfectly combed black wig—their heads a rising and falling row of curls framing the napes of chocolaty necks. As I sat there studying their heads, I noticed how they suddenly leaned in the same direction, their heads tilted at exactly the same angle simultaneously. I looked to the front of the church where the lay reader, a tiny black man with glasses turned askew on his small face, was tilting his head sideways in an attempt to read the Epistle. I looked back at the ladies in front of me and had to press my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. It was then I realized I was leaning, too. The lay reader had the entire congregation tilting their heads as they watched him crane his neck into the slant of his lenses.
A visiting priest, Charlie, was preaching that day—his sermon about offering weaknesses up to God so that his power could be made perfect within each one of us leaving me feeling less than inspired. “When you are in a time of weakness, that is when his power is best used,” he proclaimed. If only it were this easy, I thought to myself as I looked down at my hands gripping the prayer book in my lap. Was offering my weaknesses up to some ephemeral deity really the best tack to take as I suffered through my struggles, or was M. Scott Peck right when he wrote, “Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organization…This means we give away our power to that entity…In attempting to avoid the pain of responsibility, millions and even billions daily attempt to escape from freedom.”
Had I been able to grasp the depth of his meaning, I would have seen that taking my own power would have been the best piece of advice I’d ever received but I wasn’t ready. Maybe if I could go backwards from the end, everything would start to make sense! I thought. If only that were possible!
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A Road Less Traveled
Once I arrived, the setting inspired me—a good first sign I decided as I drank in the spiky mantle of cattails edging the marsh that spread out around the hotel. The murky water filling the shallow expanses sparkled like it had been sprinkled with bugle beads. I unpacked and wandered around the room like a testy lioness, finally giving myself a break as the early evening sun transformed the water into a festive crackle of light. I drew a chair to the window to record what I was seeing in my writer’s notebook, regretting my decision to leave my camera at home so that I would be forced to capture everything I saw in words. Though I was happy for the exercise, I missed looking through the lens to capture the details of such a resplendent setting.
When the tide went out to sea, it left a slick plane of polished mud stretching out from the hem of the mounded land on which the hotel was built. Hummocks of grass sprouted in the water, which took on the color of a knife blade as the sun glided westward. A brown rabbit fed on the green tufts, its ears moving like the sonar of a ship as its nose twitched with its chewing. A woman called out to a friend as she passed it, causing it to raise its soft head and sniff the air before hopping into a thicket of stunted bushes, the bottom halves looking as if they’d been stained by tobacco from an incessant submersion in sludgy water.
Just before sunset, the light infused the water until it appeared backlit like an ice-skating rink. A meandering walkway cut a linear silhouette through the center of the scene, and a rail of pickets framed the water and two figures standing separately on the edge of a copula that punctuated its end. They were perched on opposite sides of the octagonal surface that rested just above the face of the water—the man leaning forward with his arms spread, hands grasping the railing and hips cocked in a stance that “read” frustration. He changed positions often as if his thinking was too tumultuous to allow him to stand still.
The other figure was a woman whose gaze seemed to burn itself into the horizon. What questions did she ask? I wondered. Had these two bodies, black against the glow of the water, ever been intimate with each other? It wasn’t likely given how they inhabited separate worlds at such close range, and yet something about them made their stories seem intertwined. Why would I think this as each of them walked silently from the pier, keeping whatever struggles they were experiencing secret? And why did I assume they were grappling with something? If there was conflict, it would not have been with each other; was it with the sea, or only in me?
I was beyond nervous to face the other writers at the conference—something I had never done and something I had little confidence in doing—so I walked to the edge of the bay the next morning before it was time to meet to try and calm myself. The bank was pocked with holes into which crabs rushed on tiptoes, scampering around like ballerinas on point. Several challenged each other, face-to-face as they sidled across the mud, their shiny, claw-tipped arms raised like swords. Their warring world was far from clean, but the muck in which they lived was elemental, unlike the toxic waste spilling from the factory across the Intracoastal Waterway. It belched smoke and steam at a serious rate, and I’d noticed that cloud towers had formed at sunset the night before near the spewing of the pollution. I’d wondered then if nature was hoping to rain the toxins down before they had a chance to erupt into the atmosphere.
The summer solstice had arrived at 11:57 p.m. as I tossed and turned, feeling overwrought and chiding myself that my nerves were getting the best of me. It turned out that my anxiety wasn’t unfounded because as early as my first session, it was clear I wasn’t going to do well at the conference. I managed to keep myself steady through the first day, retreating to my room as soon as an excruciatingly slow dinner had passed. I was polite enough as I made small talk with the older women at my table, all hoping to publish cookbooks or craft books about knitting and crocheting. I knew I was being arrogant but the quality of the writing that had been shared that day was disappointing. Once back in my room, I stood watching the edge of a front approach and wondered if I shouldn’t just go home.
The explosion of gray felted clouds comforted me until the rain came, tough as nails as it pelted the windows. Far above, a half-moon, muted by mist, emitted a fuzzy light as the storms began to overtake it. When the torrents were unleashed in full, the pounding heavens echoed my internal chaos. I decided to leave the next morning, feeling conceited that I’d dismissed the majority of the attendees because I did not feel as if they were serious writers while also feeling clear that this was not the way I wanted my writing education to unfold.
On the way home, I was barreling north on the highway near Savannah—speeding along at 90 miles per hour—when an old man in a pickup truck crested a hill in front of me, driving the wrong way in the fast-lane of the highway. Had I been passing someone at that moment, it’s not likely I would have survived the collision that would have been unavoidable, though he might have made it given he was perched in an ancient Ford pickup as solid as a hunk of steel. I shuddered as I watched him blunder on his way and prayed that he would not meet anyone else head-on. The experience made me cringe; made me grateful that I had lived to cringe, and I vowed to try to be more appreciative of the opportunities I had in my life, even when they turned out to be disappointing.
Back home, I found myself so emotionally charged that it seemed I was spilling myself on the sidewalk, emotions leaking out of me like perforations had sprung up in my psyche. I couldn’t seem to get back to my writing, the conference having taken the wind out of my sails, so I did the best I could by scribbling missives into my writer’s notebook: “You are almost a stranger to me, oh book that glues my guts together and holds the secret dream I nurture in silence. Why is it called free verse if it is never free? After all, someone had to pay the price to write it, no?” Do words have a shelf life? I wondered. If so, would mine be out of date before I’d ever figure out how to make them palatable enough to consume?
In a week’s time, we would be heading back to Costa Rica and I caught myself humming, “Do you know the way to San Jose?”—the answer, of course, being yes. Before we departed, I made a trip to Atlanta to have my car serviced and felt so weary that I began to seriously wonder what was wrong with me. It frightened me that I was such a sad case of the walking wounded. My therapist had me reading M. Scott Peck’s A Road Less Traveled because I found myself so solidly groping for direction and a measure of peace. I tried to let the book help but it simply made me wonder why I’d come into adulthood with such issues like character disorder and whether I really needed to know what my dis-ease was called.
I felt spent, even as I craved the motivation to carve beautiful words into the spongy surface of a page, any page. For whatever reason, they simply would not come. Peck implied that God is love but I couldn’t seem to feel how the concept of a divine being fit for me because my soul was scabbed over with so much pain that the concept of unconditional love seemed like such a foreign thing. I did hunger to learn so I continued to try to make sense of his advice as I dealt with the stress that I was possibly on my way to losing Jim and my own life. If I continued to digress into the hard-bitten places I seemed destined to live, I didn’t feel my life would be worth much anyway so it was difficult to see the point in trying.
“I want so badly to ‘get it all together’ so I can have an effective life,” I wrote, “but I seem to become all the more ineffective the harder I try.” Jim and I attempted to talk about how lost we had become to each other but he remained adamant that I had not been working at our relationship so I limped away, yet again, feeling as if everything that had happened was my fault. How could I work at anything when I didn’t have a clue as to who I had become? I wondered. Our life had gone through so many changes, as had I, and it was remarkable to me that he was able to stay unscathed. I felt that I had lost myself under the weight of everything I was handling. “It’s ironic that I’m so materially fortunate,” I wrote, “and that I feel uncomfortable with my life I can’t enjoy it. It’s time to grow into it so I can be an effective person in the world and in my relationship. But how?”
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