Mission Impossible*

Watching the “Moby Dick” episode of The Adventures of Mr. Magoo on Sunday morning TV helped me to understand that I was Ishmael to her Ahab. I was the observer who sort of understood the other’s obsession, and sort of didn’t. 

I, too, was subject to the relatively new body chemistry that intensified my interest in boys. But my best friend Libby’s interest was next level. 

My crushes followed a predictable course: I got fixated, I tested the water cautiously, I backed off. My fixations were somewhat calculated, and I’d already decided an 8th grader was much too grown up to be interested in a mere 7th-grader like me. So I crushed on guys my age who I might have some hope of exchanging a few words with.

Libby did not limit herself in this way. She made no distinction between accessible and inaccessible crushes. We regularly encountered 8th-grade boys in band class and she longed after them. Lee who played French horn, Ricky on trumpet, and Matthew, a flute player like us. Her crushes on them were simultaneous and absolute.

“Oh my gosh, I love ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.’ You know that song? Every time it comes on the radio, I think of Ricky and his mouth on that trumpet. Did you know there’s a drink called a lime rickey? Do you suppose Matthew can play the flute part to the Mission: Impossible theme?” 

Anything served as an opportunity for Libby to be reminded of her love interest, and she was not one to passively pine. She wanted to take action: where was his locker? How could we find it? Had he noticed her as we walked by on the way to the cafeteria for lunch after band last Wednesday? Should she write him an anonymous note and slip it into his locker if we ever found it? There were posters in the hall that she had done the lettering for; should she therefore disguise her handwriting in the anonymous note?

To every question I answered, “Yes.” Yes, he might have noticed you; yes, let’s casually wander the halls to see if we can spot him at his locker; absolutely, yes, you should write him an anonymous note. 

The anonymous note was a brilliant idea. If it didn’t appear to be welcome, it had the benefit of deniability: Who me? No, I didn’t send you a note. But it also cued the boy that he had an admirer; maybe he’d look around more purposefully to see who it might be and his eye would fall on Libby. I couldn’t imagine doing these things myself, but I was fascinated, being so near to this active reaching for a desired someone.

Actually, I could imagine doing these things myself. I’d gone for it, once, the month before, and I didn’t enjoy the experience. Danny Schwartz was in my social studies class. He was stocky with a gravelly voice I loved, wavy brown hair, and a dusting of freckles. He was also funny and his desk was one row over from mine. 

One day we talked before class about nicknames and I revealed I’d never had one. He cocked his head to one side and said, “I’m going to call you Ketchup.” I brought this exchange home like a mystery offering and turned it over again and again. He’d been flirting with me, right? That’s what that had been, wasn’t it? Libby and Danny had locked horns in sixth grade and he’d been her sworn enemy since, so I kept my crush to myself. My heart leapt with every, “Hey, Ketchup, how’s it going?” when he saw me in class. 

Passing each other in the hallway was another story. I’d see him from afar and perk up in anticipation. Maybe he’d notice me this time. Maybe he’d call me Ketchup and everyone would hear he had a special nickname for me. But his notice didn’t extend to the spaces outside of class. Pretty soon, I had to admit it wasn’t that reliable in the classroom either. My crush was getting nowhere. I didn’t enjoy my wants being so exposed, particularly when they were unrequited.

Meanwhile, Libby’s crushes reached a fever pitch. She had to get Matthew or Ricky or Lee to notice her. Lunch was directly after band practice, and the band teacher, in order to discourage snacking, asked that those who brought their lunches from home leave their brown paper sacks and lunch boxes on the floor just inside the door. Libby leaned toward me and whispered with reverence, “I saw Matthew set that sack down. That’s his lunch.” I wasn’t sure exactly what this signified but I nodded indulgently. 

After band, Libby rushed over to the lunches. “Hey, Matthew!” she called out as she drew her foot back.

She told me later she only meant to pretend to kick his lunch, to get his attention and surprise him. Instead, her foot connected and sent Mathhew’s lunch slamming into the wall. Libby cringed away from what she’d wrought, hand over her mouth.

Matthew strode past her and picked up his lunch. He opened the bag. “You kicked my banana,” he said, shaking the leaking, mashed piece of fruit in her direction, his face twisted in disgust.

I never wanted to be on the receiving end of so much negative attention. To be so obsessed with landing the whale that you’d risk humiliation and disappointment was more “out there” than I ever wanted to be. I needed to look no further than Moby Dick itself to understand which role was more survivable.

*(Some names have been changed.)

An Ordinary Day

November 1 is something of a personal anniversary to me. It’s the day in 1976 when I walked out of the house we’d recently moved into in Albany, Oregon, to meet the schoolbus. We lived on the outskirts of town. Across the street from us was a farm field that now lay fallow. A low fog hung everywhere and the field was covered in frost. A spider had built a web between the post and crosspiece of our mailbox and it was encrusted with frost. The beauty of it heartened me. I thought, “It’s going to be okay.” Surely it would be okay, if beauty like this could be had for free on an otherwise ordinary morning.

I’m sure you’re picking up on the fact that, at the time, I understood the existence of beauty to be a cause and effect thing: the fact of beauty’s existence meant good things would happen. Forty-seven years later, I have a different understanding. Beauty simply is, and at that long-ago moment, I was helped by the comfort beauty gave me. But it didn’t change the reality of life, the fact that life comes together and falls apart, comes together and falls apart, on and on.

I love that I was a fifteen-year-old whose gaze could be lifted out of her own suffering by beauty.

For reasons I don’t fully understand, something unusual happened next, in this moment, as I wrote this. I had the idea to imagine that fifteen-year-old me in Israel, then in Gaza. Let’s suppose for a moment that she can find beauty, even in the midst of terror and destruction. Perhaps some quality of afternoon sunlight angles through the window and she is struck by it, how it warms the room with its buttery glow. For just that second, she is in a pure moment with beauty.

It’s pretty clear, though, that that moment is not a promise. Her ability to appreciate beauty changes nothing of the circumstances of her world. Things will not be okay just because she can perceive the beauty that’s there. Beauty helps, helps us, helps me, to carry on. But it’s only humans who can change the suffering we’ve created. The only “promise” that exists is in the hands of those in power, should they choose to take it.

I hope they choose their children. For me, forty-seven years ago, things did get better – and then they didn’t, and then they did again, and so on. I’ve had the privilege of a fairly ordinary life. I want that for the children of Gaza and Israel, too – if it’s not already too late. I want them to be able to walk out on a school day and just have the ordinary fears that go along with being a human kid in a school; I want them to see whatever their equivalent of my spiderweb would be to them – an olive tree or a flamingo flower. I want something lovely to have the power to make them feel better and carry them through their ordinary day.

Reason #543 that I love Portland

[I wrote this draft almost exactly 10 years ago. It amuses me so I decided to finally share it.]

In front of my new workplace, there is a food cart. It’s called the Cultured Caveman and caters to people following the latest foodie trend called the paleo diet. The paleo diet is a meat heavy way to eat, but this being Portland, the cart has veggie fare, too, and I visit it for a snack a couple times a week.  Yesterday, the guy at the cart and I were talking about how great the weather has been and how it’s even supposed to last through the weekend.

The Caveman guy said, “Yeah, I’m super-glad.  A bunch of us are tanning hides this weekend and it’s a lot nicer to do it in good weather.”  Being my brother’s sister, I asked some moderately intelligent questions about his plans and learned they’d procured some roadkill deer and a nutria (a nutria looks like an enormous rat but is web-footed and hangs out in the river). His group would tan the hides this weekend with the intention of eventually using them to make outfits.  “I have a small nonprofit in Portland that teaches people wilderness skills and we thought we should look the part more.”

For some reason, it makes me smile to live in a city where some people are engaged in making themselves deerskin clothing.

Surf’s Up!

A younger friend of mine has been learning how to surf. She returned from the surfing camp she attended in Costa Rica elated – and chastened. On one surfing run, she caught the wave perfectly, and remained steady on the board as the wave swept her across the ocean’s surface. “The speed was exhilarating; I was going so fast!” She was suffused with a sense of accomplishment and joy.

Each evening, the surfers viewed footage of themselves, to check out how they might want to adjust their form and timing. My friend was excited that she’d get to see herself, skimming across the water like quicksilver. “But it wasn’t like that at all,” she said. “What I saw was the surfing equivalent of me taking a stroll in the park.”

I was struck – and so I said – wasn’t it interesting how, after seeing the video, what she saw became truer to her than what she felt?

I thought of her the other day as I got on my bike. I’ve been biking to work most days this summer, trying to get back in the habit. My body is loving it. Sometimes, I push it a little, just to feel my 61-year-old muscles responding. And they do respond. At days end, I feel the good kind of tired.

My body’s returning vitality isn’t obvious from the outside. My outward appearance is still that of a round-hipped, thick-legged 61-year-old woman. When I consider this – the likelihood that my appearance doesn’t square with how I feel – some of the vitality from my bike ride leaches away, and the thought comes, “Don’t get to feeling so good; you wouldn’t feel that good if you knew how you looked to other people.”

What happens when we remember our eyes can deceive us? Or maybe more accurately that our eyes are only one of our senses, and the information they bring is not any more valid than that from the other senses. Inside my friend’s sedate-looking surf run was the rush of pure focus and life! Inside this plump body, my muscles sometimes still rise to the occasion, pedaling me past urban garden patches of corn and squash, chicken coops painted barn-red, and the color-burst of gladioli. If I thought I had to look like Beth Heiden in order to get on my bike, I would miss out on these things.

Maybe as we age, our eyesight worsens and our conspicuousness in the world fades because it’s meant to. We’re not supposed to care as much about how we might appear, because that is so much less important than what’s happening inside of us. We’re not supposed to be so concerned with what we see; what we experience is where the juice is.

Adding Up the Moments

During the 1972/1973 school year, my family lived in Scotland. Two-thirds of the way into the year, my mom had a big surgery. She stayed in the hospital for two weeks before coming home. During those two weeks, I visited her once. I was eleven years old, she was thirty-four.

My dad asked me several times if I wanted to go see her, and after the one time, I declined. Hospitals frightened me. More than that, I found the sight of my mom in a hospital bed deeply troubling. Only moments before she’d been the vibrant center of our family’s life that she usually was, teaching dance classes to Scottish women and children, and cycling into the Scottish countryside with my dad or the whole family. Now she lay in a bed that seemed designed to make her look small and vulnerable. I couldn’t bear to see her that way.

Years later, I learned she’d been confused by my behavior, and a bit hurt. She wanted to see me while she was recovering in the hospital. Of course she did.

I couldn’t go back and make my eleven-year-old self stretch herself a little more, but I could try and learn from the experience.

Fifty years later, a friend, who has not felt herself for several months, finally has a diagnosis. Today, I’ll go see her in the hospital. I still don’t like being in hospitals. They are places where our vulnerability and mortality are laid bare. It’s unsettling to come face-to-face with how much things can and do change.

This morning, I had an imaginary conversation with my mom. In it, I said to her, “I hope you feel I’ve made up for my lapse in Scotland.” The idea of this exchange made me laugh. Because of course I have. I’ve been fortunate enough to have had decades of life to make sure she and I wouldn’t be forever fixed at that moment, when my fear overwhelmed my empathy and I didn’t extend comfort to someone I love.

We’re all of us made up of many moments. We wish we could do some of those moments over again; in others, we do show up the way we intend to. A good enough life is one where those latter moments outweigh the former, and we can forgive ourselves.

The Downpour

I was reading in my room, sinking into what promised to be a complete Sunday-afternoon, sleepy, sloth-like sprawl. I’d never been good at switching gears quickly, and I wasn’t the most enthusiastic biker. But the prospect of getting my mom to myself if only I were up to biking in this fragrant autumn day was too good an opportunity to pass up.

We got our bikes out of the garage, checked the tires, and headed out. We lived in a residential neighborhood but quickly came to a stretch of forested land unbroken by houses on both sides of the road. Clouds – most of them white but some gray – scudded through the blue sky; sunshine poured through the spaces between them. 

We’d moved here from Massachusetts where our summer backpacking brought us into woods that shaped my idea of what a forest should look like. Through that lens, these New York neighborhood woods, while they qualified, seemed sparse by comparison. The trees were spread out and spindly-looking. Many of the species were familiar from my Massachusetts treks – the white pine, the sugar maple, the red oak – but most were unfamiliar, and, to my eye, inferior.

My mom and I biked along companionably in the brisk sunshine. The occasional car eased by at a Sunday afternoon pace. We’d hear it coming like a far-off breeze, getting closer and louder, then disappearing again. Now and then a song sparrow trilled. Our bike tires crunched and snapped on the gravelly shoulder. Stretches of forest rolled by.   

We took notice when a cloud passed in front of the sun and then lingered there. The sky darkened with rain clouds. We biked on, our eyes uneasily turned upward. A sudden burst of wind blew in a dense rain. Our clothes were meant for a sunny day. They’d be completely inadequate in the face of a downpour, yet that’s what was bearing down on us. We stopped biking, rested our bikes against a tree, and walked a few feet into the woods, hoping the tree cover would keep the worst of the rain off of us. The downpour swept through.

Despite my assessment of this forest as meager, once the rain passed, we discovered we were only slightly damp. It had kept the worst of the rain off of us. We resumed our bike ride.

Several yards down the road, the smell of grapes arrested us. The scent filled the air and brought us to a halt. Had we relied solely upon our eyes, we would have ridden right past the grapes. Instead, the downpour had drummed their scent into the air. Now, we laid our bicycles down, sniffed the air blindly, and waded into the autumn underbrush, following our noses. 

The rosy afternoon sun broke through the tree canopy like the climax of a cheesy movie where the rays point the way to God. A wild grape had climbed a thick-trunked tree, a type I didn’t recognize. Hundreds of clusters crammed with spherical dusky purple-ness hung from its branches. We plowed through fallen leaves to the base of the tree to see how many grapes we could reach. The answer was “enough”: enough to know we also wanted the ones we couldn’t reach. Sweet grapes burst through their skins in our mouths. We spit the seeds out onto the forest floor and stretched on tiptoes for more.   

When we’d eaten all we could reach, we fixed the area’s landmarks in our minds, hoping to recognize the place when we returned here in a while. We swung our legs over our bikes, and headed back home to get the car, some bags, a ladder, and as many willing grape pickers as we could persuade. 

On the bike ride back home, the forest gleamed and sparkled, transformed by the rain.

The Brakes

I learned how to drive on a 1973 VW Microbus with a manual transmission. My mother’s patience was a thing of legend so she took on the task of teaching me. For years already, whichever kid sat in the passenger seat was allowed to shift when she put in the clutch, so I had some experience there. 

Now, in addition to all the steering and signaling, I had to also get used to putting in the clutch whenever I braked so I wouldn’t kill the engine. For a while I avoided braking as much as possible, rolling through stop signs when no one was around to see. Because once I was stopped and needed to start again, it meant navigating the dance between clutch and gas pedal, letting out the former while pressing on the latter in hopes of having them catch at the right time for a smooth acceleration. A smooth acceleration was also a thing of legend. It didn’t help that while I was fussing with these two pedals I was unable to depress the brake to keep the car from rolling. On flat ground this wasn’t much of an issue. On hills it was another story.

For hills, my mother taught me – tried to teach me – how to use the handbrake to buy myself some time while attempting to move the car forward. The idea was to engage the handbrake while the clutch was in and, as you felt the accelerator more and more likely to take over, you eased off the handbrake. In this way, the brake kept the car secure during that vulnerable transition. I never got the hang of it and instead got good at being lightning fast at letting the clutch out and pushing down on the gas pedal.

***

I dated Mark casually off and on in high school. College and grad school took him out of state, but whenever he returned on a break, I’d plan to see him. Then, when I was 27, overnight he became interesting to me. We began writing letters to each other, and suddenly I saw behind the veil. Before our correspondence, I would have described him as intelligent, and self-contained to the point of aloofness. Now I was coming to know him as someone with not just an intelligent mind but a lively one too. Once, he wrote that while he dozed on the couch, he thought he heard his roommate shuffling cards, only to find out later the guy was loudly munching Captain Crunch cereal. 

I also came to know him as someone with feelings, and some of those feelings were for me. He said they were strong ones. So strong that, were he not bound to graduate school in Austin, he’d immediately return to Oregon to be with me.

I was 27 and had nothing going on more compelling than declarations of love.

“I want you to move here, but I feel I should warn you. If you came,” he wrote, “you’d be on your own a lot. I don’t really have friends. And I work every day.”

It was difficult to imagine myself into the world he described. How much could someone work, really? And surely no one has no friends. I moved to Austin.

It is possible for a person to work most waking hours. This single-mindedness can make friends feel unnecessary. I convinced Mark to return home each evening for dinner, but then he headed back to the University and his work.

I got a retail job, joined a women’s support group, and hunkered down in the Texas heat.

Months passed. I was unhappy. I loved him. I didn’t understand why, if he loved me, he couldn’t make more time for me.

Once, we drove from Austin to Portland to visit family. I had trouble getting enough sleep on the 45-hour drive. I would drive, and then Mark would drive. Along one stretch in Wyoming, I convinced myself while I drove that I could rest my eyes now and then.

During one tearful fight – Why wouldn’t he spend more time with me? Did he understand that my friends half-seriously thought I was making him up because they hadn’t met him yet? Why wouldn’t he come to therapy with me? – he said to me through clenched teeth, “I told you how it was; I was honest with you.”

For the three years we were together, often I’d dream I was in the microbus, stopped on a steep hill, a line of cars behind me. To the left, the land beside the road rose steeply upward. On the right, no guardrail, just a gentle grassy shoulder and a precipitous drop beyond that. I pulled on the handbrake but it was old or damaged somehow and kept slipping. I yanked on it harder, trying to release the clutch at just the right moment, to propel the car forward, but I couldn’t get it right. With each attempt, I moved, not forward, but backward. It was essential that I not hit the cars behind me. I turned the wheel and continued a slow slide toward the drop off.

Writing Prompt: Barstools

I was in a bar once in Santa Rosa, California, where I stayed at the rustic spa of my then-boyfriend’s aunt and uncle. It was the sort of place Annie Leibovitz went to to get away from it all. I know this because she was there, Annie Leibovitz, getting away from it all at the exact same time we were visiting.

The bar was in town, and we needed a bar because my boyfriend’s aunt needed a shot glass. Forthwith I will refer to his aunt as “Alice” because of her uncanny resemblance to my great-aunt Alice, down to her white-haired Julie Andrews haircut and upbeat, chirping voice. Aunt Alice swam laps every day of her adult life without fail, had never drunk alcohol of any kind, and became a Christian Science practitioner once she retired. Anyhow, there were no shot glasses to be found on the premises of the rustic spa so we piled into Alice’s pickup and drove to town. She needed a shot glass because someone had told her about a bar trick involving two shot glasses and an egg. She was determined to try it out.

Alice brought her own egg to the bar because none of us knew if a bar could be expected to have one; we thought not. We did feel certain a bar was the right place in which to find shot glasses. Alice wouldn’t tell us what the bar trick was until we got there, but it was the sort of trick you’d get people to bet on: “If I do this impossible thing, will you buy my next drink?” That sort of thing.

The bar’s interior was clean and light-colored, save for the bartop long, sleek, and dark. It had only just opened for the day and there were no customers. Some of the table chairs had yet to be turned upright onto the floor. 

Two men stood behind the bar. Alice said, “We’re not here to drink. There’s just a bar trick I want to try. Could I have two of the same kind of shot glass?”

The men looked both wry and skeptical. One flipped his bar towel over his shoulder and reached behind him. He set two shot glasses side by side in front of Alice. She climbed onto a barstool, so my then-boyfriend and I did the same. It was not my first time in a bar, but it was my first time sitting up at the bar on a barstool with shot glasses in front of me. 

“Then there’s this.” Alice reached into her purse and brought out the egg. She eyed the two-gallon container of pickled eggs halfway down the bar from us. “We didn’t expect you to have any,” she said. 

She placed the wider end of the egg in one of the shot glasses, then eyed the barkeep. “Will you give me a dollar if I can move this egg from that shot glass to this one?”

“Uh, no,” the guy said.

“Oh, I forgot!” Alice said. She began again. “Will you give me a dollar if I can move this egg from that shot glass to this one without touching it?”

The barkeep looked only moderately more interested. I, on the other hand, was rapt. He narrowed his eyes. “You mean without touching it with your hands. You’ll probably roll it across to the other glass with your nose or something.”

“No. Without touching it with any part of my body.”

He paused. “Without any part?”

She nodded. 

The barkeep punched a key on the till and the drawer shot open with a ding! He pulled out a one-dollar bill, tented it lengthwise, and held it out to Alice. Then he pulled it back. “And if you don’t do it?”

“Then I owe you a dollar, obviously,” Alice said. She reached out and snatched the bill from his hand and flattened it against the bar. “Okay, here goes. We’ll see if this works.”

Alice leaned above the egg, tightened her lips, and sent a sharp jet of air between the egg and the side of the shot glass. Nothing happened. She looked sideways at me. “Maybe I’m doing it wrong. This is what the book said to do.”

“What book?” my then-boyfriend asked.

“A book on bar tricks.” Alice leaned over again, positioned herself slightly more to the left of the egg, and blew once more. 

The egg jittered momentarily like a jumping bean, then leaped up out of the glass and tipped over into the shot glass beside it.

“Ha!” Alice straightened up and beamed at us all. 

“I’ve never seen that one,” the barkeep told his workmate.

Alice held the dollar out to him. “How many pickled eggs will this buy?” she asked. “I’ve worked up an appetite.”

The Stories That Feed Us

The writer, Barry Lopez, died this past Christmas Day. He was 75 years old. I never met him myself, though when he wasn’t traveling he lived outside of Eugene, Oregon up the MacKenzie River a-ways. By all accounts, he could be a challenging guy, his love of our natural world and our systematic destruction of it rendering him judgmental and angry at times.

I first heard of Barry Lopez in May of 1977. At the beginning of that school year my family had moved to Albany, Oregon. It was a rough year for me, and in March, I moved in with some family friends to finish out my sophomore year in Southern California. While I was still in Albany, though, I got to know Kendra.

Kendra was a profoundly awkward and uncool classmate who loved to write, as I did. Shoulders stooped like many tall young women, she walked a gangly stride down the hallways, her school books pressed to her chest with her arms folded over them. Her nasally voice could be piercing. Her clothes were always nice, her hair cut in the latest fashion, but these things didn’t sit easily on her, her clothes somehow seeming as if they were meant for someone else, her trendy haircut never quite styled right. I suspected the hand of her mother, trying to make her as acceptable-looking as possible, a mission that was thwarted by Kendra herself.

Initially I’d hoped Kendra and I could be friends, but apparently a mutual love of books and writing coupled with our outcast status weren’t enough to forge something quite so close as friendship. Kendra could be abrupt sometimes – not unfriendly exactly, but not warm and inviting either. We might not have been friends, but we were friendly to each other after a fashion. We shared two classes: sophomore literature, and pre-journalism, which was required if you hoped to write for the school newspaper. Also in those classes was Curt.

Truth be told, I had a little crush on Curt. He was nice enough looking, tall, brown-haired and freckled with an abundance of confidence. His wise-cracking was frequently truly funny, and he aspired to be a good writer, too. But whatever luster he had was tarnished daily by his treatment of Kendra. He’d clearly decided to make her life hell, and he was good at it.

Having myself been on the receiving end of this kind of torment I understood that the worst suffering didn’t come necessarily from the words and actions themselves but from their relentlessness and incomprehensibility. You knew you’d done nothing to warrant this laserlike dismembering of your personhood, and still it came. Curt scrutinized Kendra’s every movement and utterance.

“Walk much, Wagner?”

“Who taught you to apply foundation, a bricklayer?”

Kendra would answer a question in class, or offer a comment, and Curt would scoff. He’d sneer her last name. He’d say, “No one wants to hear it, Wagner. That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

The literature and journalism teachers shut Curt down whenever they heard him, but of course he was stealthy as well. And he perplexed them. How could someone who gave insightful, emotional comments about To Kill a Mockingbird be such a bully?

For her part, Kendra tried not to take Curt’s comments lying down. As the end of the first semester drew near, she flared up at him more and more often: “Stop interrupting me, Curt. I’m not finished.” Or the less erudite but equally admirable, “SHUT UP!” I admired her courage.

When I left West Albany High School in March, I asked Kendra if she’d like to write letters to each other and she agreed. I’d hoped the distance might create an opportunity for us to open up to each other more, but her letters remained superficial, detailing classes she was taking, activities she’d participated in. I answered dutifully; it had been my idea, after all.

In early May, I received a letter from Kendra that shimmered.

She wrote to tell me about the artist in residence who’d come to the school the two previous weeks. He was a young writer, no more than 30, and if you were a student in one of the advanced writing classes, you were allowed time each day to meet with him in small groups to talk about your writing. As a member of the newspaper staff, she qualified. Cruelly, she was put in the same small group as Curt. Every day, she marshaled her courage to share her work so as not to waste this precious opportunity with the writer. Every day, Curt ridiculed and snorted at her work – until eventually he was silenced by the writer’s withering stares and his wondering aloud if Curt was serious about writing?

On the last day with the writer, at the end of the last seminar, he asked Kendra to stay behind.

I picture Kendra, standing in front of him, her books clutched against her chest, her shoulders rounded. It must have been a thrill to be asked to stay behind; she must have been grateful that this charmed life she’d been living for the past two weeks would last a few moments more.

She’d gotten used to the gentle, thoughtful cadence of his speech. “You’re good,” he said. “Keep writing, tell your stories. And jokers like that – ” he jerked his head toward the door Curt had recently exited through – “I know it doesn’t help to say ignore him, but I want you to know it gets better, so just keep writing.” Barry Lopez held out his hand for her to shake. “Thanks for being here these last two weeks.”

* * *

Since his death, Barry Lopez has been celebrated and remembered for his commitment to the natural world and for his gorgeous, deep writing. I’ll remember him for that, too, but I am most grateful to him for this moment, for helping my friend to change her story about herself. It would have been so easy for him to see her as a floundering pariah. He could have chosen not to truly see her. But he made the tenderhearted, generous choice, and I believe it gave her a powerful talisman, something she could take out and touch whenever she needed reminding that she was worth seeing, worth reading, worth knowing.

Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. – Barry Lopez

The Beginning Place

Years ago, a friend of mine moved to Guangzhou China to teach. In one of my (embarrassingly rare) emails to her, I told her I’d taken my son to the Air Museum that weekend. This was how we referred to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum in McMinnville, which we occasionally visited to marvel over the Spruce Goose and various examples of aviation virtuosity. My friend, struggling under the worst air quality she’d ever experienced, didn’t know the reference and wrote back grimly, “We should have an air museum here in GZ to remind people what the air used to be like.”

This past week, when my small family fled Portland for Astoria, the air quality at its highest had been in the low 500’s. As we drove out of town Tuesday, it was in the mid-300’s – likely higher even than Guangzhou in 2011.

The Astoria Column sits atop Coxcomb Hill, one of the highest spots in Astoria. It tells the story of Astoria’s founding by whites, and from this vantage point, Astoria and surrounding areas – Youngs River Bay, the Astoria Bridge, and Washington State across the Columbia River – are all visible on a clear day. Garth, Luken, and I drove up to the Column on Wednesday.

It was not clear enough to see Washington, but while we tromped around, we discovered a trail that plunged into dense forest, presumably leading to a trailhead at some significantly lower point. We decided to do some research and, if we could learn where the trailhead was, we’d return with Kami the following day to hike the trail.

Years ago, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a book I loved called The Beginning Place. One day, the main character, in frustration and despair, runs aimlessly, trying to somehow escape his dead-end life. He ends up in a forest. He hasn’t realized he lives so close to a forest, and he’s deeply affected when he crosses into it; it feels so different from his uninspiring, urban home that he feels he’s almost crossed a threshold into a completely other land.

Le Guin wrote beautifully about this threshold, about the moment of stepping into a space palpably different, the air fresh and vibrant. This is what I felt Thursday, stepping onto the Cathedral Tree Trail.

It was like crossing into another world. Astoria’s air, while better than Portland’s, was still smoky, still requiring that I increase my intake of asthma medication fourfold. But the air on this trail was transformed. It was rich in oxygen. Even as hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land around the state burned, these “lungs of the Earth” continued to take in smoke and carbon dioxide and transmute it, exhaling oxygen.

For two miles, we hiked. A white and black caterpillar crossed our path and we watched it for a time. A smaller trail off to the side beckoned, and we waded through salal above our heads. Countless banana slugs, a small snake, many scuttling black carapaced beetles, made up the fauna amidst the essential flora.  

Our future is secured by our noticing only this: in the presence of tress, we can breathe.