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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!
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.
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!
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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 Embodiment of Applause
As the weather raged, I journaled about a trip we’d taken to Camp Ocoee the week before. I had stayed in the car while Jim gassed up at Cherokee Corners, studying how the late-day sun had its way with the grassy fields; how it made the Queen Anne’s Lace at the road’s edge glow. I wanted to try to record that particular quality of light as the cloud towers built in the distance, raising their boiling heads toward heaven. While I studied the pebbled whiteness of the spindly plants, something called in the distance—a goose or a dog with an odd bark, maybe, or a man gone crazy with grief. Only the deepest pain would have made a human run out into the afternoon and scream at nature like a howling animal, I thought, realizing as this popped into my head that my imagination was growing overactive in my pursuit of material. As soon as the admonishment sprung to mind, it occurred to me that to make a judgment like that was ridiculous because using the imagination was the purpose of being creative, especially for a writer!
I was thinking about this as I drove along the beach road the next morning—protected from the suffocating humidity by the whirr of the air conditioner. The waves of heat radiating from the hood and the memory of Queen Anne’s Lace brought to mind another time when scorching temperatures and these leggy plants were fused in the experiential. A field of the “weeds,” as the United States Department of Agriculture classified them, had stretched out for about a quarter of a mile behind our house when I was a girl. I sometimes walked up to its edge and marveled that something considered a blight could produce such graceful Victorian-esque blooms.
I watched one day as they bowed their heads, wilting in the mid-day light right before my eyes. I understood—the air felt like a furnace as I turned away to trudge toward the library with my little sister in tow. When we reached the spot where the Hosely’s creek gurgled beneath the road, we looked longingly into the rushing water but knew we’d be in major trouble if we ruined our clothes so we kept moving, slogging on toward the elementary school to see what books were on the shelves. The antiquated air conditioning in the library provided little relief as we searched the rows of fiction for books to take home, and it wasn’t until we’d returned to the dark coolness of our house with all the shades drawn that we’d felt the relief of being chilled to the bone by air conditioning that actually made a difference. I recalled how the covers of the books we’d carried home were soaked with our perspiration as we tossed them onto the kitchen table. I liked this memory because it was one of my first recollections as to how much books had meant in my life. The sacrifice of making my way through stifling heat to find new inspiration had been well worth the effort.
On that hot Florida morning, I sat in the car lost in thoughts of that far-away time for only a few minutes after the air conditioning had quieted, the memories falling away as I realized I was suffocating. I roused myself from my reverie and hurried out of the car in order to begin closing the condo, as we would be relinquishing the oceanic air for that special brand of Chattanooga humidity. We were returning home that afternoon to prepare for our first trip to South Dakota, and I dreaded it, a fact that made me feel guilty and sad.
Once home, Chattanooga was living up to my memories and there was only one outdoor spot that afforded a dependable escape from the heat: the screened porch. I spent most of my mornings there and had decided it was the perfect place to entertain. We had invited our next-door neighbors for dinner, and they remarked that we’d found a great spot on the bluff as we settled into the comfortable furniture. As the breezes flowed up the mountain, the talk turned to our work in Costa Rica and South Dakota as it always did with people in our lives. Jim mentioned a mutual friend, a dentist, who had just returned from Haiti with a strain of incurable malaria. The conversation lulled for a few moments as Walter, a doctor, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, “I don’t think I can imagine doing that. I could not put myself in such a situation as I’d have to choose between myself and myself.”
The astuteness and raw honesty of his comment ricocheted through my brain. I spent a great deal of time thinking about this as the days rolled along, dawning murky most mornings as the sun sparred with fog to gain a foothold in our patch of sky. The dampness of those precious mornings made me hug my cup of coffee close to my chest as I stood at the edge of the screened porch watching the mist play with the leaves on the trees. They flapped like the rotor blades on helicopters, the constant movement reminding me of how applause would look if the sound were made physical. What would the leaves be applauding? I wondered. Certainly not the choices I’d made…
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. If you are a regular reader, I’d like to take a moment to thank you wholeheartedly for supporting this effort that means so much to me. After next week, I will be posting every other week on either Tuesday or Wednesday rather than every week. I hope you will still stop in and continued to follow me along The Road to Promise!
The Bottom of Discontent
I journaled most of the trip south, admitting in writing that I’d fallen completely in love with the mountain house, which was becoming hidden from the road as the woods dressed in shiny green—the lushness making me feel poignant about missing a minute of the ever-changing beauty. It seemed the only place I was ever able to relax was the screened porch with its “eye” on nature—her cooling breezes accompanied by an elemental soundtrack that included the splash of the waterfall and birdsong. But leave we always did and when we arrived at the fairgrounds in New Orleans, the festival was vibrating with so many types of music that the percussions shook the ground, a feeling akin to the earth having an oddly rhythmic form of palsy. The tents spreading out as far as I could see held gospel, blues, reggae, calypso, contemporary jazz, big band, Cajun, Zydeco and other genres of music I’d never known existed. The mass of people flowing through the grounds created a psychedelic ocean of color that not even Jackson Pollack would have thought to splash on the same canvas. I felt as if I were floating through a kaleidoscope of sound, hues and aromas.
The food ranged from barbecued alligator and crawfish étouffée to oyster poboys, and of course, beignets, which were brought to the festival by the famed Café du Monde. The aroma of barbecue was tantalizing as it floated above the row of food booths, battling it out with the smell of hot grease emanating from the proliferation of deep-fat fryers. Drinks were almost as varied as the dishes served—wine, beer and Bloody Mary’s tempting at every turn. I reached a point at which I declared I had to stop putting things in my mouth because the run I’d taken that morning was becoming a token effort given the excess of food and liquor I was consuming. There were so many outlandishly dressed people that my brain couldn’t fully process the scene as I scanned the crowd, trying my best to remember details that would color the backdrop of any story or poem I might write about the experience. My favorite fair-goers were the ones who stood as close as they could to the stage and swayed their bodies with the music—eyes closed as if they were making love to the rhythms.
One such guy was dancing in the grass by a steel police barricade that protected the acts on the stage from the public. He was moving to the music of the Bluebirds—his skinny hips gyrating in shiny tight leotards. His scrunched socks were pillowed neatly above his Reeboks, which shifted on the grass as he flexed his knees to coincide with the whine of the guitar and the pulsing drums. His tan was obviously hard won and he would monitor it as he went along, shifting a sleeve farther up his arm when he sensed the beginning of a tan line or adjusting his shirt at the neckline as he spritzed himself with a spray bottle he kept at the ready in the beaten-down grass next to a bright blue towel he used to keep the sweat from his eyes. His hair was the color of cinnamon sticks and was clipped short except for a skinny braid that flicked around on his thin brown neck. His head was the liveliest part of his body—it shot to and fro as his arms stayed glued to his sides. Watching his thin butt vibrate to the grinding of the blues made me chuckle, and I was irritated that Jim and the gang were determined to move me along because I could have watched him for hours as I absorbed details that might have explained a bit more about how he lived his life away from the gregarious activity he was enjoying so keenly.
As I sat in the hotel room the next day watching the ships coming and going, I pondered how life kept me tossed about, supposing it would for a while no matter how much I hoped for a better balance. I was grateful for experiences like the jazz festival but I wanted so keenly to be able to be still and write. It was almost comical how many people asked me, “What problems could you possibly have?” I couldn’t explain even to myself why I considered it to be an insult except that it brought about waves of guilt to think about how well off we were materially and how unhappy I could be at times. I guessed people believed this because for most of them, their nemesis had always been a lack of money. Even in moments when I doubted I had a “right” to my grumblings, there was one valid point at the bottom of my discontent and for this I wanted to give myself the acceptance to continue my search. I was extremely happy when I was bettering myself intellectually and creatively. In fact, doing so helped me to relax into a part of myself that was calm and loving. Therefore, I believed my desperation for betterment and for creative time was a valid one; not merely a phantom of psychological dis-ease. The bottom line, though, was that time for neither of these treasured things would fit into my life as it was, and my creative flow was drying up under the pressure of relational issues.
Knowing the spiral that took place when these subjects were uppermost in my mind, I decided that sitting and mulling them over would only push me into a darker place so I decided to take a walk. I headed to Jackson Square where I saw one of the most curious specimens of humanity I’d ever come across. It was a man who must have spent hours in front of a mirror putting on makeup and wrapping himself in rags. He had glued small tusks into his mouth, which pointed up into his painted, tortured expression. His eyes had been a lively shade of green before the bleeding of red had overcome them. He was a study in torn cloth, string and burlap—all smudged with dirt except around his shoulders where he’d fashioned the “costume” into a cape of sorts. At first, I couldn’t tell whether his skin was black or just so dirty that it appeared to be black.
His hairline answered the question, proving that he’d used dark body paint or some such substance to color his face because it had seeped into the hair framing his forehead. Were the blond and red goatees real or were they applied with glue as they extended from the bottom of a patch of white he’d painted to frame lips bulging with tusks? I wondered, standing completely absorbed as he slowly crawled toward a cigarette butt that someone had flipped onto the sidewalk. He extended his hand toward it in slow motion, picked it up with fingers slightly hidden by torn rags and raised it to his nose. He sniffed it like an animal would investigate something before eating it and then rolled it around in his fingers. I felt shy snapping photos of the man but the interest didn’t phase him—he must have wanted the attention given the trouble he’d taken to draw a crowd in a busy square.
Afterwards, I sat in a café recording my impressions of him, curious as to what type of person would think that doing what he was doing was fun. There had to be some thrill in it or he certainly wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble! I wondered what his mother would have said if she’d seen him in his get-up. Were there hints of his bizarre personality in his childhood? I questioned. Or was he perhaps merely a frustrated actor getting his kicks on a spring weekend? My musing made me think of a radio program I’d heard the week before during which Alex Haley said American family values were disappearing. While I listened intently to the interview with the famed author, I marveled at how he made me feel as if I were sitting on the back porch with him as he talked about his aunts, great aunts and grandmothers. He charged every person to interview his or her parents and grandparents because the current generation would be the first to not know who they were in terms of family if they did not. “Go and hug your grandparents,” he commanded. “Say thank you to them because it is from them that you received your life.”
I wondered about the swaddled man in Jackson Square. Did he stay in touch with his grandmother; was she still alive? Did his mother “get him”; was his father kind to him or did he see a man who was either insane or practicing his performance art in an embarrassingly bizarre way? Did the savage-looking man crawling along the cement know “who he was”? Did he care? Somehow it seemed to me his unique way of expressing himself was one of the most sane examples of individuality I’d ever witnessed, even while his behavior was about as demented as any I’d ever seen!
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!
Today's post is a #LetsBlogOff post. For a full list of participants telling everyone how they relax, click here.
In Defiance of the Cold
The mists on the mountain bluff were my only solace—spinning, lifting and descending during the morning hours. We were in the clouds so much their filmy breathing fanned my morning world more often than the sun christened it with its dawning light. I could see the wispy pirouettes as they danced above the falls—water regaling water. The city, still dressed in drab winter garb even with early spring at hand, took the cloudy tears and used them to wash its streets. There were only tiny bits of color in the dullness of the muted world with the first burgeoning of red buds beginning to glow. The bulbs were still sheathed in soft green but seemed to be thinking seriously about opening their faces to the chilly air—tiny star-shapes in pale shades of their future colors aching to slice through the tips of their bulbous heads to celebrate their tender splendor. Japonica was pushing its Carmine-colored blooms from its bare stems as if in defiance of the cold while everything else preferred to patiently await warmer weather.
I thought about how most people wouldn’t think to describe a dreary world as lush but abundance was everywhere. This realization was unfolding in my mind as I grabbed a scrap of quiet for writing in the midst of the events surrounding Jim’s oldest son’s wedding. I lamented to my writer’s notebook, “I can’t wait to get back to you. I have missed your comfort.” Once life had become my own again, I tentatively approached my writing but it felt far away—a foreign thing after the busy-ness that had left me worn. “I have been away from my heart, so now I touch myself tenderly as I review that piece of me that shows through in the faint strokes of my own anxious pen,” I wrote. “Certain words touch me in return and I am sure they are mine. It is an acknowledgement when they whisper back, and deep emotion sparks in me; brings desire rushing forth and my emptiness is filled. My fullness greets me like a friend, but tentatively as if it is unsure how to approach me in my sadness. How can I fault either of us? I had to erect the walls in order to survive, and she was always forced to wait until I was ready.”
As the weeks progressed, the air warmed and the bony tree limbs sprouted their buds like a fine covering of mesh. I made it a point to enjoy the morning lights of the city knowing that the leaves would soon hide them from my view. As I stared at the awakening landscape, I let my mind skip across scenes from my life like a blind person’s hand touching brail in a delicate search for knowledge. As I did, a thunderhead plumed and I marveled at the power it so magnificently wielded as it drew the perimeters of its iridescent edge with a giant finger of light. It fashioned itself into a gilded pillow of moisture and when it unleashed its contents, the deluge wrapped me in a gray world through which puny light fought its way, entering the room tentatively like a tiptoeing mime bent on remaining silent. The storm thrashed against the windows as if angered that I was out of reach. I stood calmly, daring it to try and touch me.
The days seemed to careen along and suddenly the dogwoods bloomed. They unfolded their creamy flowers in concert with the azaleas, which plumped with profusions of color seemingly overnight. With our last Costa Rica trip about a month away, our destinations for the mission work were about to change. We were meeting with Craig Anderson, the Bishop of South Dakota, about repairing and building churches in his diocese, which held nine of the poorest counties in the United States on Native American reservations. We would be working with the Dakota and Lakota Sioux, and he showed us a video that broke my heart as to the conditions these people were enduring. I wondered what had transpired that would have brought them to the point of the poverty and despair I saw in the documentary.
The film led me to search bookstores in Chattanooga for anything I could find that would help answer this question and the options were slim. I found the book Black Elk Speaks and had a difficult time with the pain the story evoked. I also felt an immediate kinship with the keen connection the Native Americans in the story had felt with nature. I looked at everything around me with a newfound awe—wondering if the owl visiting the bluff at night, being a nocturnal creature, ever felt it missed the visual lushness the daylight hours brought to life. Did he sense the excitement of nature bursting forth all around him? I wondered. Of course he would, lighting as he did on tree branches, which a scant few weeks before had been bare, to find a spiky growth like the prickly surface of a piñata beneath his feet.
It was finally warm enough that I could write on the screened porch in the mornings and I loved being so much closer to the waterfall that its splashing was an accompaniment to my musings. I looked to the horizon and recognized the haze that had spawned the name Smoky Mountains—though we were not officially in the chain, I believed our ridges, which held a similar mix of mists and haze between their expanses, were close enough to share the same characteristics. These gaps and gullies, peaks and valleys were once home to a band of Native Americans with as painful a past as the one I would soon find myself greeting. Would I be up to “representing the church” with these people who painfully tapped into my wounding without even knowing it?
With that question resonating, I scribbled a poem on the empty page open in my lap. It would remain a rare first effort that turned out to be a final draft—even more unique because it predicted my experience in South Dakota and Alaska with eerie accuracy:
Plume
It is difficult
to face
someone else’s struggle
when it stokes the fire
of your own
painful burning,
especially when
you’ve labored for years
to swallow the smoke.
-Saxon Henry
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Did I Do Alright?
When there was moisture in the air, morning meant fog’s dull mask would overtake us and the waterfall would rage when rain had been present, hissing as it spilled itself over the indention in the bluff that allowed it an outlet to the rocks below. I couldn’t see it when the fog moved in but its smattering filled the house. It sang me to sleep at night and I often set the alarm so I could awaken before the sun rose in order to watch the sky change. The lights of the city seemed frenetic in the cold air as daylight took over—vibrating intensely as if they were attempting to ward off the passing of their torches by amping up their energy. There was, of course, no way to compete with the sun’s eminence and I thought about how so much of life was like that—a lesson in futility.
The silhouettes of the mountains ringing Chattanooga’s verdant valley seemed to meander when seen from an equal height, their profiles rugged as they rose against the soft orange that went white as morning launched herself with abandon. The trees beyond the windows looked as if they’d been stamped there—so dark against the coming day they were like a serigraph embedded in a lively watercolor. There was one bright star glimmering like a beauty mark just before the night lost its grasp on the firmament. The “changing of the glowing guard” made me question whether light in life was similar to the “light” of knowledge. Neither was consistent as it meandered through its conduits, and I felt there was a similarity to avenues of thought and paths of light, though I couldn’t yet explain how. I was merely left with the question, “How far do we have to travel to grow into consciousness and is there any way to predict where the road leads?”
I was scribbling about this as we drove to Davenport Gap to scout Jim’s next hike on the Appalachian Trail. We faced some wild weather as moments of intensive sunlight were followed by obliterating clouds that seemed to devour the car, spitting sleet and snow before they swirled away to reveal another spell of glaring light. The sunset was blood-orange as it bathed the hills and trees in tones that made them seem as if they were born of fire. Everything was tinted in warmth, which was such a paradox given that it was brutally cold beyond the windshield.
We stopped at a restaurant nestled into the front rooms of a log cabin where there was a glorious fire in the fireplace. The ladder-back chairs were hard and knobby but the flames bathed the room in welcoming heat. One woman tended the restaurant—waiting and bussing tables, and keeping the fire ablaze. We were the only customers and after she read us the specials, she removed the large screen covering the yawning opening of the stone fireplace, then teased us about not bringing in any wood—a comment that had Jim sliding back his chair in order to grab some logs from the porch. She put her hand on his shoulder as she passed, telling him that she was teasing. When she reentered—followed by a blast of frigid air as the screened door slapped closed behind her—she had an armful of small logs that she tossed onto the back of the fire. The blaze caught but the flames were still a bit softer than they had been when we’d first arrived.
“Now come the big ones!” she announced as she disappeared through the door again. Jim couldn’t let her carry them by herself so he went to help her, following her back inside and standing like a good Boy Scout as she picked the pieces of wood from his grasp, placing them in a careful pattern atop the flames. “I’ll scotch it now!” she announced as she placed one in the back. “Did I do alright?” she asked as she returned the screen. Jim told her she’d built the best fire he’d ever seen and I could tell he meant it. When she came to take our order, I noticed she wore no makeup and I wondered if every facet of her life was so free of pretense. I thought about her as we drove home in the dark: there was something about this woman that was so genuine it deserved attention. It didn’t matter that her clothes were rumpled and her hair was disheveled. In fact, it could have been these very details that made her so interesting to me because they were the ones I couldn’t shake. These bare facts made her seem more real than anyone I’d ever met, especially the women in my life who were dressed to the nines and wore slathers of makeup beneath their perfectly coiffed hair.
We were going through one of those periods of being deluged with parties, which meant we were spending far too much time with the “perfectly put-together.” I was hanging on for dear life yet again, and I wrote my notebook, “This writer feels empty: no words flow willingly from her pen.” The only thing that soothed me was nature and her inexplicable moods. She brought me a sparkling gift when she left a blanket of snow on the bluff—so softly and gently it fell, muting the world and making me feel like a child tucked into a nursery wearing my footie pajamas. I was noiselessly padding my way through my cloistered world when the sun came up, the woods glistening and the trees turning to pristine lace. Spaced down the bluff as they were, the frosty progression of limbs joined with the liquid that had frozen as it cascaded over the mountain’s edge to create the illusion that a beautiful bridal veil had been unfurled. This was Bridal Veil Falls, as it had been named decades before on just such a day no doubt. The house was so blissfully quiet in the snow-pack that I could hear the steady rhythm of my shallow breathing. What a miracle for a winter morning!
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A World of Reverie
* * *
After a week’s worth of struggle that found Jim and I trying to settle back into our lives in Tennessee, we managed to call a truce. We simply had to; we were heading to Seattle with a group of his business associates and it made no sense to go if we were not even speaking. When we arrived, we were shown to a room on the fourteenth floor perched above the downtown business district. The buildings surrounding us rose into the palest blue sky, interrupting distant slices of water that curved to shore and mimicked the same subtle arc of the hotel window. It was as if the spots of aqua were placed in perfect geometric alignment at the edges of the man-made scene, natural baubles to ornament the uniformity of the city’s architecture.
Sailboats dotted the dissected pieces of blue, looking as though someone had tossed a basket filled with magnolia blossoms, gleaming white in the sunlight, onto the water’s surface to let them bob in the breeze. Being at the whim of the tides, a cluster of them eddied toward the shoreline as the mountains rose behind them—some speaking in amplified voices of deep charcoal while others farther afield whispered in the coolest shades of blue-gray. As I pulled the heavy drapes to one side of the room, it was as if the buildings confronting me were as varied as a pile of river rocks—some slick and new, others worn from perpetually tumbling at the bottom of a swift-flowing stream.
I took my writer’s notebook to Pioneer Park so I could record my impressions of the rather downtrodden part of town. I sat on a bench and surveyed the filthy cobblestones, the dirt in between them littered with cigarette butts, and pigeon feathers and droppings. Large trees mottled the courtyard with leaves along one edge where a group of Native Americans were lolling. They were nearly replicas of each other—long black hair tied in ponytails; dark skin; faces, pocked with past acne scars, built of high cheekbones and flat noses below dark eyes. They talked of prison, hard times and detox units, the word “man” ubiquitous in their laments.
My vigil was interrupted by a dirty man carrying a soiled denim jacket and a plastic bag. When he plopped down on a nearby bench, a rush of breath escaped his lips as his butt met the wood slats. He began throwing dried husks of bagels from the plastic bag onto the stones, drawing scores of pigeons. They pecked the filthy ground, skittering into each other in their attempts to grab as many crumbs as they could. As I sat there, I had the strange feeling that I was intruding on a world of constant pain—almost as if I had not earned the right to sit on that bench which had likely served as someone’s bed the night before. I have not paid my dues, perhaps, I thought, and I could tell by their glances that the ragged beings gathered in that park agreed with me.
They were certainly curious, yet they seemed to palpably hate what I represented. They openly jeered at several women passing by but for some reason they left me alone. Maybe this is an homage to my silent suffering, I thought as I made my way out of the plaza, happy to no longer feel like bacteria under a microscope. Little did I know this wouldn’t be the last time I would come under the scrutiny of these marginalized Americans.
That episode convinced me that it was best to stay away from the inner city so I was happy we were immersing ourselves in nature for the lion’s share of the trip. We boarded the Victoria Clipper to make our way to the British Columbian capital, and as I took a seat, I felt the rolling of the ocean rocking us as if we were perched upon a piece of driftwood it had set sailing for its own amusement. I was in awe of the vibrating hulk of a vessel that made my feet feel as if they had been hooked to jumper cables. When the horn exploded, the blast of noise was all the more startling in tandem with our lurch forward. As we clipped along, the water spraying from under the hull foamed and churned, marking a trail behind us.
We’d not been underway for very long when I saw them: loons! I’d longed to hear them in person my whole life and here I was, frustrated to find myself locked away in a massive boat with the engines throbbing in my ears. They were tiny slips of matter floating atop the choppy straights, beaks turned downward before they dove, disappearing below molten liquid that swallowed them. The empty surface silvered so quickly I thought for an instant I’d made up the fact that they had been there at all. The cliffs that cascaded to the water drew my eyes away from the empty swaths of the sound, firs atop the gray stony plateau fingering into the sky. There was a lonesome lighthouse that seemed so desolate in its setting it made me sad to think it spent night after dank night weathering the cold alone.
As I watched Seattle’s skyline disappear, the rows of statuesque cranes, their tall arms extending skyward like they were saluting some great watery dictator, made it clear this was a shipping town. In the distance, Mt. Ranier was obscured, as it was most days—smoke and haze parting only once since we’d arrived for me to have a glimpse of its mammoth shape, its snow-mottled top rising far above the other mountains with rugged, knobby tops of their own. The ring of peaks reminded me of a bumpy origami sculpture that sprawled for miles. As we passed Whidbey Island, an assortment of waterfowl traversed the choppy waters, diving and resurfacing like continual shivers on the skin of Puget Sound.
We vibrated across the water in the gloomy gray of a northwest morning—the sun we’d enjoyed the day before locked away above a thick layer of billowing clouds. In Victoria, the surroundings were so misty that the seascape read like an endless expanse of palest graphite beneath leaden clouds. The masts of sailboats wobbled as if trying to draw rudimentary letters in the dull sky, and seals swam playfully in the harbor. I could have watched them for days as they nudged each other with their whiskered snouts and heaved themselves onto any surface they could reach. They would drape their big flippers this way or that as they raised their noses high in the air, their barks sounding like hoarse coughs as they extended their necks. I marveled at their muscular chests that puffed proudly as they let the world know they had something important to say and that they were saying it boldly. Large gulls bobbed in the harbor, waiting to be fed by tourists gathering on the waterfront walkways and I realized I’d never seen such an abundance of marine life in one place at one time.
The next day we took a trip to Rainier and I couldn’t believe the proliferation of grasshoppers clicking through the air as we walked through the Grove of Patriarchs where Marmots were wooly and brazen as they posed for photos, their protruding teeth yellowed and their flat black feet shirred like a closely cropped fur coat. The mountain seemed like a felled giant, waiting for the right time to pounce as it felt our light footfalls. It made me want to tiptoe as gingerly as possible so that I wouldn’t awaken his ice-covered fury. The snow gave me the impression that the top of his head had grayed from worry but what could he possibly have to fear?
It was as if the glacier faults drawn across its hulk formed a wearied brow puckered in sleep. Wild meadows running partway up the mountain’s back and arms formed a burly body—like a teddy bear’s, but it was clear that his thrust was far from sweet or serene. We climbed and climbed as we tried to reach his heart but he kept it hidden from us, allowing us only one patch of reachable snow, which was mottled with rock flour, during a day-climb. I felt we’d come upon as much of his forbearance as we would receive just before we crept away. I looked back toward him as we were leaving, seeing his breath form wispy clouds though his chest never once heaved with his breathing.
As we drove back to Seattle, I realized I was nervous about going home because I didn’t feel I was doing anything with my life. Somehow, it was easier to pretend that this was not the case when I was absorbed in the sensory details a new environment brought to bear on the senses. Sure, I made contributions through Jim, but there was no truth in them for me so there was no satisfaction in them either. This was all the trickier since my commitment to him kept me from being myself. I felt that if I didn’t begin to get a grip on this, I would be lost from ever being a truly happy and fulfilled person and partner. I wanted to find something to do that I was passionate about; I wanted to be close to my partner, but to have a piece of me that was fully mine. I somehow knew, twenty years his junior, that I needed to be a fulfilled being in order to be a good wife. I wanted to improve my self-esteem so that I could be happy, to develop my spiritual self and to learn to relax. Was this really too much to ask?
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The Road to Promise #LetsBlogOff Nod
Follow the Leader
One night I tucked myself into bed with a magazine and came across this quote by Milan Kundera from The Art of the Novel: “Novels can flourish only where there is a spirit of inquiry, not inquisition. A novel worth its name asks questions about the world but won’t answer them, even if its author tries to. Most great novels are a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.” I wondered if this applied to someone like me who was completely without intelligence about the fiction I was writing given the fact that I was too new to have a clue. Somehow I thought not as I drifted off to sleep. What I would have given to be able to discuss this with someone as actualized as Mr. Kundera!
I was overjoyed to find that the bookstore at Seaside had a copy of Kundera’s book, which I bought and delved into as the light leaked from the evening sky. Quite a bit of it was over my head but there were moments of inspiration, especially when Kundera spoke about creating characters: “All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped?” I drifted off to sleep that night with these questions ricocheting through my brain. How does one even begin to answer such monumental questions? I wondered.
With Kudera’s questions fresh in my mind the next day, I decided to study three boys who’d taken over our little beachside street on their bicycles. They held sway over the crumbling asphalt that petered off to scrubby sand—little more than an alley, really, cut off as it was from any main route of traffic. The edges of the street were pocked with grasses and cockleburs, an odd setting for the crafty psychological machinations the kids were playing out. Two of them were obnoxious and bossy, picking on a smaller and younger boy, his size and age making him a target for their bullying. I stood outside the door of our condo pretending to read The New York Times magazine while Sam puttered around the driveway so I could eavesdrop. Their first “game” involved a stick, which they had set at a particular distance from a starting line.
Each of the trio was to try and jump past the stick on their bikes. The young kid shocked me by being the first to speak up. “I’ll betcha $60 that I can!” The mean kid moved the stick about six inches farther and said, “I’ll betcha $50 million that you can’t jump that.” They haggled ferociously, their voices growing louder and more raucous as a little girl with a big attitude walked up, putting her finger to her lips. The boys grew silent as she took on the role of mediator and judge. She moved the stick to a point that everyone could agree upon and stepped back as the little boy copped his most earnest expression and stomped on the first pedal to launch his bike into action.
He picked up speed and flung himself and his bike into the air, straining everything he had to “make it.” He touched the tip-end of the stick, which moved only slightly, then landed on the far side of it with an elated expression on his face. The mean kid said, “That was no good!” The little guy countered, “What? It is so; it’s exactly the way you did it across the street!”
“That was over there,” the mean kid responded. “This is over here and over here it doesn’t count if you touch the stick!” The little girl yelled, “You owe him $50 million!” The dejection on the smallest boy’s face was heart-wrenching. Their next game was “Follow the Leader” and you’ve likely already guessed who the leader would be: the oldest kid with the nasty attitude. The first task the leader set for them was to see who could pull off the best fishtail. Of course, fishtails are tricky because there has to be good speed, a spot of dirt on a flat road and perfect timing of slinging the backend of the bike around while simultaneously hitting the breaks hard.
The little guy had one tiny problem: he had no brakes. That didn’t stop him, though; he simply put the bike into motion and drug a foot while he scooted the backend of his bike around. I was amazed that he was coordinated enough to pull it off and I bet his mom was trying to figure out why the bottoms were worn off his Reeboks! After a perfect round of fishtails, the mean kid decided another round was required to see who was the winner. He went first and, as fate would have it, he fell while he was trying to execute his award-winning coup.
What happened next was brilliant on his part. He froze in position on the ground, clutching the handlebars of his bike just above shoulder-height and said that because it was “Follow the Leader,” each of them had to do a fall exactly as he had done. He stayed in what he called “crash position” and advised each of the other kids to closely observe how his body was placed so they could do the same. It was hysterical seeing the other kids try to make exactly the same move happen without hurting themselves, which fortunately they managed. Of course, the mean kid won because everyone else looked forced as they tried to execute a controlled crash! The next day, I learned that the young boy’s name was Jeremy and that Michael was the mean kid’s name. They must have raided both their father’s garages to gather such a wealth of paraphernalia for washing their bikes because they had the makings of a full-service carwash.
I spent the best part of an afternoon recording their shenanigans in my writer’s notebook and thought about how Michael’s psychological manipulations seemed so modern, something I wouldn’t have even thought about had I not read “Dialogue on the Art of Composition,” one of the chapters in Kundera’s book. “Encompassing the complexity of existence in the modern world demands a technique of ellipsis, of condensation,” he said. “Otherwise you fall into the trap of endless length.” This made me wonder how much of the information from the boys was simply background—for me to know—and how much of it a reader required to get the gist of their characters. The question lingered in my mind through dinner, when Jim commented how distracted I seemed. If he only knew how deep my processing as a fledgling writer was taking me…This, I have come to understand, is the epitome of living a deeply creative life.
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The Gates of Hell
In the scattered villages along the ocean’s edge, dugout canoes littered the shore, each a perfect piece of artistry made whole by hours upon hours of work and many thrusts of a blade. One spot near the ocean held the poorest shack I’d ever seen—the façade looking so tired that it seemed to be straining with all its might to hold together. The ragged boards, uneven on top and bottom with gaps in between, were topped with a rusted zinc roof that skewed precariously due to the jaggedness of these supporting planks. Laundry hung from a drooping line in the yard, and on the crumbling cement steps a half dozen small children, bodies covered with thick mud and hair matted with the same dark ooze, played games.
When they heard our engine droning, they stopped and looked our way. A dog ran under the house as we drove by—skin and bones and pleading eyes. I winced, convinced that if he ran into one of the boards that served as a support for the house, it would tumble into a pile not unlike a scattering of thick pickup sticks. It was obvious that a major tropical storm had not blown through in quite some time since this tenuous structure was still standing in this incredibly wild setting at the edge of the sea.
The sun stayed with us when we arrived—unlike the previous trip when the heavens opened and we were forced to have the beach mass surrounded by a handful of stoned Rastafarians. The Caribbean was fierce, pounding the shore and infusing the already damp air with its salty spray. We decided to put in an encore appearance at Sanford’s, the dubious scene of our impromptu communion before. As Tobie and I walked in ahead of the others, the stoners looked us over with a mixture of lust and hate. There was a peculiar difference in these men that set them apart from any other group I’d seen. They didn’t even try to disguise their feelings: you knew, without a doubt, how they felt about you the minute your gaze met theirs. Lust and hate would seem to me to be a dangerous combination, and I’d never thought of it before, but wouldn’t being regarded with these emotions rather than adoration explain the difference between being made love to and being fucked?
The word fuck had come up in conversation with one of the volunteers the day before. He had mentioned how much he’d enjoyed a recent trip to Belize and I was reminded of Ellen Gilchrist’s short story “Belize,” which I’d just finished.
“You might enjoy it, although it’s a bit trashy,” I said.
“What’s trashy about it?” he asked.
“Her abundant use of the word fuck in the story,” I replied.
“You say fuck all the time, so why wouldn’t you write it?”
“Touché!” I said; “maybe I will.”
I admired Gilchrist’s courage, especially since this story, as well as others as brazenly honest, were published in Drunk With Love in 1986, well before most women writers, especially those from the south, had had the courage to use profanity in their writing. In “Belize” her protagonist takes no prisoners:
“‘What do the rest of them do?’” I say. I am sick of Whit. He’s so goddamn jolly all the time. So goddamn gung ho. Davie had fucked me that morning while I thought about the orange peels. I feel like I’ve gained ten pounds. It’s hot as the gates of hell.”
It would be a very long time before I’d have the courage to put the word in a piece of my writing, and it’s a strange coincidence to me now that Gilchrist had mentioned George Gabb, the Belizian woodcarver who had inspired my poem “Adam’s Perspective,” though not by name:
“Whit’s been out exploring. ‘They have two industries,’ he says. ‘A man who carves sharks from mahogany and a man and woman team who make herons from the horns of cows.’”
When we had visited Gabb in Belize City, I had had the same impression Gilchrist’s protagonist had had of the town:
“The capital city is like a little town in the Delta, only dirtier; dirtier than anything in the world. The bays that cut into the land from the Atlantic are filthy. Things float on them. Paper cartons, shoes, orange peels…”
I would have added the broken partial ribcages of cows and scraps of fish skin, especially near the central market in town where sea turtles were turned upside down and slid under a shelf on rough concrete, their flippers slowly pulsing as if they were dreaming of water. When I read that their shells are so sensitive, they can feel a blade of sea grass as it brushes across them in the water, I was horrified at the treatment they received, though the fisherman who snagged them did not handle them with mal intent as they were simply seen as food to be sold and consumed.
That day on the beach in Costa Rica, I looked around our long table at everyone, settling on the face of the volunteer who’d called me on my resistance to writing profanity, and thought how strange life was that it had brought us to the same table. Everyone was laughing because there was no way to be heard over the pulsating music, though it didn’t stop anyone from trying to talk. The waiter brought beers for everyone and we toasted the fact that we’d landed in such an incredibly amazing spot for an afternoon of exploring. I felt grateful that I’d been given the opportunity to see several of my friends in this odd world. They certainly didn’t seem to be depressed about the experiences they were having—in fact, they seemed as if they were having the times of their lives. I was left asking, yet again, Why can’t I?
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