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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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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…
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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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Impolite Houseguests
While the unruly visitors were in residence, my entries in my writer’s notebook took on a despondent tone: “I am one with the waterfall. I feel myself spilling over the bluff that is my life. The output continues when nothing comes to replenish the flow. I gasp for breath and, dehydrated, fall into jumbled dreams. I languish on bleak sheets, too tired to care. I feed those around me as I starve to death.”
I wondered if suicide was really senseless and dallied with the idea that maybe when the pain was so great, it wasn’t such a stretch. With these dark thoughts flitting through my mind, I studied a shimmering ice pellet hanging on the railing of the deck—caught by some invisible thread as it quivered at the mercy of wind-whipped patterns of chaos. It was odd to be thinking of something so momentous with about the same intensity as wondering when the ice crystal would let go. These subjects reverberated in me—death was simply on my mind—as I felt the rain wanting to come to end the dance of the pinprick of ice. I could feel it as the sky puckered its brow in petulant warning but the crystal danced unafraid, its frozen strength refusing to budge until it was ready to leave. I knew that ice was fragile when temperatures rose but for the moment, it was a symbol of strength—a trait I felt I lacked so desperately. The fact that it could perish so organically without a shred of remorse made me wonder why we humans were so terrified of letting life go.
As I journaled about how the idea of death and the act of dying were not one in the same, it occurred to me that if I’d had a stable emotional life to underpin me, it would have been impossible for me to be unhappy in a home that surrounded me with windows on the world, lenses from which the pink fresh light of a brand new day replaced starlit nights filled with trembling pinpoints of illumination as far as the eye could see. I was fascinated by how the atmosphere changed throughout the hours of any given day, the sun marking the sky as her own. She took, greedily, the tangerine tranquility of morning and bathed herself in it until she knew the world was fully awake, that each of her subjects would be awaiting her. Only then would she burst above the mountain’s silhouette, leaving no doubt that she had arrived. She was vanity personified.
I was feeling her need for attention, her intensity blinding me as it reflected from the white page, as I journaled about a friend I had dined with the night before. She was a resident alien and her “take” on our inaugurations in America fascinated me. She hailed from Holland and said that a historian from her country deemed our celebrations of an incoming president as somewhere between a coup d’etat and a coronation! She had blocked off the entire day to watch President Bush being sworn in because she said it was important to honor the process (though she did admit she wouldn’t have tuned in if Dukakis had won!).
I was ashamed of myself for feeling so frustrated with politics that I had no stomach for a day of ceremonies and I realized she proved that Americans, myself included, often take liberties for granted. It was the posturing in the political realm that made me feel as if the arguments being waged amounted to a discourse as inane as whether the world is round or flat. When would the rhetoric advance beyond whether we would fall off if we wandered too close to the edge? I wondered, feeling as if the ineptness of it all was a gigantic waste of time.
Equally frustrating was my attendance at my first Vestry retreat for the church. The politics were just as insidious and I felt the insecurity of being a novice weighing on me the entire time I was there. I returned home to a rainy Monday, spent from the activities that found me giving my all without receiving anything in return. Worse than my outpouring of myself was the fact that our priest and Jim berated me for admitting that I had been nervous. “It was supposed to have been a relaxed time,” Padre said. Jim chimed in, “She doesn’t work that way; always tense…”
I suppose I was perpetually anxious but I’d never seen it as a negative thing. I simply saw it as my desire to give every moment the quality it deserved. Knowing that this was a flaw in Jim’s eyes sent me into a dejected place. I was so ready to chase the light—revel in vanity like the sun—but it seemed my life was determined to keep me wallowing in shadows, as the snippets of poetry I managed to record illustrated:
The pain goes deep
The storm grows wild
and darkest night swallows
my evolution
Stars collide in a skyless void
our world lacks
true solution.
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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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Night Tiptoed In
She certainly used her surroundings for creative fodder, as is illustrated in this passage describing the Wild Turkey from Our Southern Birds: “Any one who has followed the trail of the turkey through its native woods, or who had made the acquaintance of some lustrous purple-legged baron hatched from a wild egg and raised in a poultry yard, will not grudge this species the phrase that has often been applied to it—‘noblest of American birds.’ An appreciative southern wrier, Mr. Lanier, once suggested that the Wild Turkey would be a better choice for adoption as our national emblem, instead of the rapacious and quarrelsome Eagle; but, however suitable to American ideals and character this change might be, it is not likely to take place, for the reason this splendid game bird is being killed off at a rate that insures its disappearance from all but the wildest parts of its ranges. In short, the Wild Turkey will probably be nearly extinct before the general public becomes acquainted with him…”
Fall was coming full on and the bluff was being leached of its greenness, the leaves coloring as they clung to the barely hidden branches of trees that heaved them into the dull sky. A thunderstorm raced through, bellowing as the limbs danced its bidding. I went to the screened porch to feel the drifts of mist racing up the gully, enjoying the cool moisture caressing my face. As the storm moved away, the sun radiated red-orange, spilling its hues like a paint pot someone had overturned, its contents seeping earthward until it infused the entire atmosphere with its pigments.
I was just beginning to learn how the weather affected the spot on which we were perched. The wind would race over the cusp of the rocks that formed our foundation, blasting around the house and rattling the windows with its fury. As one gust would die, another would rush forward, its fist closed tightly to pound the door and to pummel the trees, which were forced to cling all the more mightily to the puny soil beneath their roots. The beating seemed more sinister at night as everything went black beyond the windows. I was drawn to the cold panes, curious to feel the fury of the gusts—the rattling of the pulsing glass keeping me company as I watched for shooting stars. They would arc through the sky every so often and I had finally made enough peace with my life to have wishes ready to salute their passing.
As night tiptoed in on a dusty pink horizon wedged between layers of soft blue one evening, I wrote, “I can say I will not be a writer as many times as I like but it will never keep me from writing.” The next morning as the sun rose above the far horizon, I listened to the “stars” of a writer’s conference read poems and fiction on public radio. The broadcast pulled at my insides, making me want to write as they had written but I was stuck in some strange rut of fearing the very thing I desired the most (and the thing what would set my spirit free if I’d only allow it).
Even as my internal angst with my identity roiled, I must have been embodying my desire to become a writer without even knowing it because a man I knew continued to approach me with his own need to accept himself as a writer. He was not nearly as far along as I was in the discipline of journaling and I felt his desire to connect with a kindred spirit ooze from him when he would seek contact with me, a needy look in his eyes giving away his internal angst. I guessed that having an exchange with someone who was struggling as much as he was shored him up, something I thought about frequently as I fumbled through my own chaos.
As I bought myself a new writer’s notebook one afternoon a thought flashed into my mind. I stood looking at the shelf of journals, lips pursed as I tried to decide if my idea would cross any inappropriate boundaries, when the doubt fell away and I decided to buy one for him. The next time I saw him, I gave it to him along with one of the special pens I favored. I wished him well when I handed it to him and I could tell it meant so much to him. The next time I bumped into him, he thanked me profusely and I could feel his anxiety mixed with joy over the book of blue-lined pages he clasped in his hands, the blank surfaces gnawing at his desire to fill them, hungry as they were for his words.
I wanted to tell him that the moment before he began his path toward a desire to write would likely be more peaceful than any moments following; wanted to tell him about how the impulse to write complicates a normal life in ways that are difficult to explain. But I decided it would be best for him to find this out in his own way in his own time. After all, that’s an important part of a writer’s journey, and who was I to say where his process would take him and how it would unfold? If nothing else, writing is an incredibly personal discipline, one that demands of its collaborator his or her own blood, sweat and tears…
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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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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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A Gritty Song
I had stocked up on Dramamine because I’d just had my first bout of seasickness during a fishing trip with Jim, the nine-foot swells in the Gulf of Mexico making me want to toss my toenails. I wasn’t much for fishing, hating the fact that it must have hurt like hell when a hook entered the gullet or the outer rim of a fish’s bony lip, but I did love to eat fresh seafood so I went along, making do with taking notes about the cruelty of it all in my writer’s notebook. I did have to admit there was something graceful about the act of fishing, the caster’s shoulders flexing when the line unfurled, the reels singing a gritty song, and the lures striking the black surface of the choppy ocean with a plop.
I wondered if the view the fish had as they contemplated the lure was akin to peering through gray/green water glass. Was it the murkiness of their world that fooled them into thinking the contrivance they were about to devour was sustenance? The foam that floated past as I lounged on the front of the boat was like spittle on the face of an elderly man whose expression had gone slack, though this unfathomable water presented a countenance closer to the face of a poker player—so much activity beneath the surface kept secret by the mind willing it not to show. The oyster beds drew black lines on the horizon—dark as India ink—and buoys and fishing boats pocked the water as far as the eye could see. One mound of shells was like a dark pillow continually gathering sand to soften its entry into the water. Nearby a lone leafless tree seemed so forlorn as it spread its arms to the sky, begging for a mirroring stripped-down lover to echo its hapless shape. Did it curse the fact that it landed in such an isolated place?
Jim was the first to pull a fish from the water, its vacant eyes disguising the turmoil its gasping mouth and trembling fins betrayed. Was it wondering what explosion had hit its soggy world to cause such an upheaval into what must have been a painful deluge of light? Its luckier water mates hid out in the leaden liquid filled with marsh grasses that segued to a dusty green shelf of mangrove. As we made our way from the ocean into a wide creek, foamy blankets of Milfoil swayed with the movement of the water near the jagged banks, unfathomable as it ate the light that might have penetrated to the creekbed. We crept into the channel just as dusk’s light was purpling the surface of the water. Stumpy palmetto palms craned their bushy heads skyward, native-like and curious, they seemed to furtively peek from the grassy beds, some leaning precariously to one side while the others listened for noises in the opposite direction.
Snowy egrets were stark against the deep-coated world as if announcing their greatness by flashing their wings—the pristine hues of their feathers catching bits of illumination. I watched a giant pink sun sink below the line of the world’s edge as a frog began its honking, inspiring the entire amphibian nation to follow suit. They were so boisterous they could have been a flock of geese camping in the midst of the tall grasses, and I wondered how large a frog would have to be to make such an impressive sound.
The next day I sat as morning awakened and marveled at the calmness of the water surrounding the house—there wasn’t even the tiniest ripple in sight. Birds twittered, and just as I thought about how the world was softly silent, a pine tree beside the porch creaked as if to prove me wrong, then someone cranked the engine of an airboat across the marsh. It sounded like a giant mosquito buzzing around in the humid air. A second boat geared down on the river as the water mirrored the sky’s baby blueness, the reflection of marsh grasses turned upside down as stem met stem, connecting twin opposites on the surface of the river. These thick-haired grasses held froths of white flowers, each delicate like a pin on a jaunty beret that would have been right at home perched askew on a young girl’s head.
We were back on the water by mid-morning and as we approached Deer Island, the throaty grinding of the boat motor was the only sound reverberating in the hot, damp air. I tried to imagine how it would feel to be driftwood and realized that being blown into the ocean would likely be the perfect version of a nightmare—the water incessantly lapping at the skin, raw and exposed to the morning sun, which only added insult to injury. The waves would eat at the flesh, polishing the dermis to a stony smoothness. My view from my prone position would be water lapping up and over my eyes as the tide filled my world with nothing but liquid, a flood of color as murky as the feeling emanating from my abandoned heart. Grasses would drift onto my torso and rest like dark scars as the high tide receded, taking with it all the choking I had been forced to endure while the water entered every fissure it was slowly creating.
That evening, I sat on the deck of the couple’s waterfront home, enjoying the quiet as the sky deepened, attempting to record everything about the trip that I’d found interesting. Darkness was grabbing at my pen and paper, so I had to write as quickly as possible as night ushered in the cool air. A cricket called from the flowerbed as the breeze stirred the ferns above the water that rippled past. A dark cloud was skulking toward me from the west and I had to squint to see the words I was recording as its front edge reached me, further muting the light. Wind chimes made far-too-happy sounds as I raced to get my reactions to the watery world in which I’d been immersed on paper. I’d never noticed how the tinkling of the hollow metal mimicked china teeth chattering on a winter morning. I looked up as something skirted past my peripheral vision to see a small black bat flutter against the charcoaled sky. In relief it was quite outstanding and I watched as it pirouetted in the last bit of light that oozed from the far horizon. Suddenly the dark consumed it and me; I put down my pen and rested in the chair in secrecy, the words I’d so desperately wanted to put on the page invisible in the inked evening.
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!
