The watercourse, a speeding bullet

I. August 2011

Today I sit in an air-conditioned, boxlike structure, near the edge of a continent, waiting. On the opposite edge of the same continent, a wall of water unleashes its fury on the city on whose contour I was raised. Well-fed, a bit tipsy, lonely, I wait out the gale, wait wondering how the storm will vent its spleen and where and when. This is the second time this summer those I know and love have been evacuated due to natural disaster. The Earth twitches as the dead rattle before succumbing, while two female politicos talk drill, baby, drill and dismantling the EPA, and pretend they’re not women who sustain life.

photo: Heidi Utz

Last night I walked in Lithia Park and watched the Ashland Creek shoot across the rocks in its twisty, curvy trajectory through the woods. Stood on a bridge and looked out with a question on my lips…What will it be like if I stay here? And what will it be if I go back to the desert? Divination came in two eddies, side by side. The first, for staying, was black and flat, with nearly no movement the eye could see. The second, for going, was a gentle circular swim—not a whirlpool or anything close to dramatic, just a foamy, leaf-flecked swirl in the same direction, over and over again. Both seemed like little circles of bathwater, set aside from the main current which seemed to fly. This, something told me, is the current of much of the world. In living here, in this isolated valley, you are set aside, a protected observer.

I walked further through the woods still unsettled, as I could feel a pressure in my body, the foreboding of a wall of water about to upend mile after mile of concrete barriers mortals had placed against her. Waves of a planet that had withstood so much for so long, finally exploding in fury… And soon I heard water splashing loudly, as if dammed and released, dammed and released. Charging through a pipe into the creek.

Thirty-one summers ago, my mom and I sat on the shore of a barrier island, where the waves landed gently inches from our beach chairs, and we read long novels and allowed the water to hypnotize us day after day. The small stores that sold plastic rafts and pails and colorful long towels and suntan lotion felt like innocence. And sometimes I did not know if this was her last summer walking barefoot in the wet sand. But I knew that whatever happened, the land beneath us would not waver. That the shore in Jersey would always remain, year after year, a place of unique identity, escape, a reliable spot to see fishing boats and dirty seagulls and blue sea glass with soft rounded edges.

II.

The storm ducks and weaves through territory I know, the place of my birth, the province of my ancestors, my father’s home now, the dwelling place of friends and former lovers, the streets I’ve walked, the skyscrapers my great-cousin the architect once built. It’s a hot clear day in Oregon, nearly 100, hardly a cloud in the blue sky, a light breeze. I stand in a graveyard ready to harvest blackberries in a spot my love once showed me. I feel more than 3,000 miles from the East as I walk past a pristine duck pond and the residents honk and squawk. The berries are still not quite ripe, sitting red and green and grey in tiny clumps on the vine. Last year this time they were plumper, blacker, and more ready. But spring came late and the whole cycle of nature is thrown off. I walk back up the steep hill to where the graves are. See a stone marked “NOBODY,” with a birthdate in March 1981. Another, more sculpted white stone has no name, but a curved sliver removed: “Passing through.”  

When I left my mother in her human form, she was in a small, medicine-green room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Waiting for a wall of water to carry her war-torn body to higher ground. I stood vigil and could feel her readiness and fear of leaving, the stillness of a life ratcheted down to just its essential operations: breathing, moving blood through small channels, the barely perceptible throbs within organ tissues. A storm that had come to her nine years prior, with black-shrouded visions of apocalypse she gave no quarter. Came as a notice to evacuate, leave her earth-body as a shell, give in to the inevitable. She waved it on as one refusing when all the sheriffs and mayors and official mandates told her she could not stay. And for nine years she sat in her attic ducking waters that kept rising and holding her ground, even when the house was marked “occupants dead.”

photo: caphotosnewyork, Carlos Ayala

III. Bloomberg has ordered the evacuation of hundreds of thousands, and the city that never sleeps has no mass transit, no flights coming or going, no exit routes for thousands sitting waiting in its five boroughs. The streets are empty, subways stopped. Nine are dead. Two million have no power. The rest have no agency. Irene brings tide like no New Yorker has ever seen to its jaded doorstep, commanding respect from even the most cynical. The island is surrounded on every side with water, a fact so easily ignored when you are walking beside a thousand others on their ways to work and play at 8 or 10 or midnight. In a place so given over to the human-made, nature is the animals in the Bronx zoo on a class trip or a skinny sapling tied to a stake with a length of rubber hose every six blocks. Taxi tires may swoosh in a rainstorm, lightning may crackle in a summer sky. Other than that, it’s entirely the man-created world, reminding you of your sinew, your strength, your engineering prowess…at least for a couple hundred years of history. You drive a mile through a tunnel barely remembering that on the other side of that concrete wall is the entire force of the Atlantic Ocean. You travel through it, dry and unscathed, forgetting you are surrounded by sea. Without reminders of your guest status in nature, leaving your primacy in the land human made feels silly and even annoying. How could anything so ridiculous as “nature” threaten these massive 100-story monoliths? How could the splashes of water even touch what all-powerful beings have so carefully constructed? A hurricane? Just another show. We’ll stay home and watch it on our flatscreen TVs, drink beer, light candles. Have a little party. Hey, Irene, show us whatcha got. And get the fuck outta here by tomorrow because this nature shit is a real pain in the ass.

IV.

My favorite photo of my grandmother shows her standing on the beach, Avon-by-the-Sea, wearing ballet shoes, one pointed toward the water. She is in her sixties, sporting cat-eye glasses, smiling wistfully toward the ocean. Even when she was a girl, growing up in Paterson in the early part of the last century, nature and NJ did not often intersect. They sat in different corners of the boxing ring, and usually man came out swinging, while nature cowered and ducked blows. The century was being industrialized and we were winning, triumphing OVER and ABOVE. It was a match, and we were so frequently (albeit ostensibly) victors. Harnessing power of rushing waters. My grandmother and her father and sisters and brothers worked in a mill on the Great Falls using the seas of the Atlantic to make fine silk for the world. My grandmother, a soft, sensible, sweet, and very smart woman, did not see the harm in the illusion of control over—if it crossed her mind at all.

As churchgoing and God-loving as she was, nothing told her that the natural world was not ours to use. Her way was the way of all early-20^th-century city dwellers. When you don’t live in a forest, it’s hard to feel the heartbeat of a tree pulsing through its rings. When there are modernity and Machine Age notions of progress to cater to, those that live and breathe become merely resources.

V. January 2013

I sit behind a wall in a sad, loutish city. It’s winter; the five strands of green in the yard are dead. Drought makes the desert even drier than I’d remembered it, the spirit much more gristly and insular. If you want water here, you need to walk where the earth opens up. In Santa Fe it’s deemed acequia; here it’s just “the ditch.” Under the ugly brown mountain, there are few poets, and the remnants of indigenous identity are discarded somewhere near the confluence of routes 25 and 40. I leave my house seldom because there’s little I’m connected to outside and no one wants to talk, really. They text my avatar and I hit Ignore. People live in condos and shop at Walmart and work for the military-industrial complex or Taco Bell. They get lost in their adobe and concrete microcosms, in their screens and phones, and forget to glance up at the edges of sky and points of stars. When you walk the streets, no one will risk eye contact because you are nondigital and therefore suspect. They mostly look at themselves, and more importantly, themselves.

Last fall, the hurricane of the year before was superseded by an even greater behemoth, one whose wreckage still litters the Jersey shoreline. The patch of coast from which my mom and I surveyed the horizon has washed away. The beach houses we rented each summer, the restaurants we frequented, the pier we played on, all of it, gone. Thousands have been homeless all winter, freezing in tents while Congress equivocates. Twelve-foot waves subsumed everything, pressing southern coastal NJ into memory and memory alone. We are told that this is the way it’s going to be from now on, that the storms will get bigger, the waves mightier and more arrogant, the damage more incalculable—as if incalculability had degrees.

Here in the middle, we die a different death, death of desiccation, of poverty, of people who lack nature and nature that lacks respect. And into this standoff America brings anger and guns, decides that kids are acceptable victims, and vents the collective spleen through bullets and displays of madness and hubris we’ve been told is “our right.” Our children sit in lockdown as our oceans take our homes. And the politicians tell us nothing’s wrong. It’s all as it should be. And in a sense, they’re right. As every reaction demands an equal and opposite reaction, we stand in the path of a balance coming due. As it should be. And despite making baboon-like shows of macho bluster, the AK-47s and overamped testosterone, there is nothing left for us to do but wait in absolute vulnerability for that which will inevitably carry us back into the stream.

Photo of the Day

Wave
Ashland, Oregon, Fall 2009

Cheryl Strayed & A Record Thru-Hiking Season in Oregon

This makes me so nostalgic for Ashland and life among my tribe...so happy that they're having a great season. I have to wonder how much of this has been influenced by Cheryl Strayed's bestseller Wild. For my review of the book, please see 5/9 entry.


PASSING THRU
A record number of thru-hikers are heading toward Southern Oregon on the Pacific Crest Trail

Section hiker Dan Ahlvin, 24, of Corvallis, walks an overgrown section of the Pacific Crest Trail on Mount Ashland. A record number of thru-hikers left the California-Mexico border in April and are beginning to pass through Southern Oregon.

Bob Pennell

July 13, 2012

By Janet Eastman
for the Mail Tribune
Cam Honan arrived at Callahan's Lodge late after a long, wet day. Hungry and in need of a shower and sleep, he learned that all the rooms were booked for a wedding.
No problem, said the 42-year-old Australian. He'll just crash on the lawn.
The Pacific Crest Trail Association, which protects, preserves and promotes the trail, needs more trail maintenance volunteers in this region. Training is provided, so no previous experience is required. Email volunteer@pcta.org for more information.
And he did, as thousands of other endurance hikers traversing the 2,663-mile Pacific Crest Trail have done over the years.
"I will sleep where the wedding reception will be held tomorrow," says Honan, after finishing a beer and a few plates of spaghetti on the lodge's veranda on June 29. "If they need an extra best man and there's a free meal, I'll do it."
Honan, whose trail name is "Swami," pointed to his backpack, an efficient, 7-pound toolbox that holds everything he needs to rip through 40 miles of trail a day for his months-long trip from Mexico to Canada. Right now, his pack is empty of dried beans and other lightweight food.
But also in front of him is a box of provisions he had shipped to Callahan's. Consuming 21/2 pounds of food a day, the lanky hiker will make it to Crater Lake in less than three days, about twice the speed of the average PCT hiker.
In the next several weeks, Ashland will see more "thru hikers," as they are called, arriving in town with scruffy hair, a spare backpack and trekking poles. They will be in need of a computer, washing machine and place to flop. And often a cold beer.
The number of PCT hikers has increased each year since the trail was completed in 1993, says Jack Haskel of the Pacific Crest Trail Association. But because of low snow levels this year, a record number of hikers left the Mexico-U.S. border in April and are heading this way.
"It's the busiest year ever on the trail," he says.

So far this year, his organization has issued 835 thru-hiker permits, an increase of 181 over last year. In addition, 578 permits have been granted to long-distance section hikers. Some of the permits cover couples or small groups of people.
Haskel keeps tabs on the progress of the hiking herd by talking to the trekkers, business owners along the route and trail angels, who give walkers lifts to town, shelter and a hot meal.
He says the hikers are fairly well spread out this year. Leaders like Honan are arriving now, and Haskel estimates that most of the group will pour into Ashland from July 20 through Aug. 10 or so.
Some hikers are taking their first trek on the Pacific Crest Trail, considered one of the Triple Crown of American routes along with the Continental Divide Trail and the Appalachian Trail. They are college students on a gap year or retirees who finally have the time to cross the grueling trip off their bucket list.
A few women were inspired by Portland author Cheryl Strayed, whose best-selling memoir, "Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail," related how an unprepared 26-year-old escaped the pain of losing her mother by walking through California, Oregon and Washington.
Haskel, whose trail name is "Found," says that by the time hikers cross over the Greensprings Highway or near Callahan's Lodge off Highway 66, they are seasoned veterans who have endured the scorching Mojave desert and a 13,153-foot high snowy pass in the Sierra Nevada.
Greeting them on their entrance into Oregon is Ron Bergquist, who owns Callahan's. To help hikers navigate their way through the forest of conifers, he posted a directional sign that reads "First Beer Free."
"They can't be day hikers to get the free beer," he says. "They don't get it unless they smell bad."
Section hiker Dan Ahlvin, 24, didn't qualify for the free beer, either. The former finance worker from Corvallis hopped on the trail at the California-Oregon border on July 6 and is spending the next two months inching his way to Canada.

At the lodge, hikers can shower, do their laundry and sleep on the property for $25. For double that, they also get bottomless bowls of spaghetti at night and an endless stack of pancakes the next morning. Few pay for a room.
Most are watching their budget or the calendar. Staying off the trail, called a "zero day" in hiker lingo, is sometimes necessary but not liked.
Marilyn Northcross looks forward to the PCT hikers every year, and it's not because some stay at the Ashland Hostel, which she owns. "They tell the most fascinating stories," says Northcross, a self-described neat freak who has not hiked the PCT — "I'm not drawn to it as they are," she says — but was given an honorary trail name, "Den Mom."
For $28 a night, lodgers at the hostel get a bunk bed, linens and a place to stash food. But even at that price, they stick around for just a day or so, unless they're sick or injured, she says. Before they go, they organize their resupply boxes in the basement's communal living room, a sight she thinks captures the culture.
Few, however, who will reach Ashland have the hiking credentials of Cam Honan. The PCT is just one part of his 15,000-mile continuous walk across North America. He started July 2, 2011, and hopes to finish by December, "assuming I have any cartilage left in my knees," he jokes.
"Hiking is when I'm happiest," he says. "There are places you can only get to by walking. You experience an awesome fusion of geography, culture, cuisine, music, religion, society. You see places from the inside out."
He started seriously trekking 20 years ago and has gone around the globe, tramping across deserts, jungles and mountains. He says North America is his favorite continent to explore because it's so geographically diverse.
The two luxuries he carries are an iPod packed with audio renditions of 20 plays and 25 classic books and an iPhone he uses to post on his website www.thehikinglife.com.
He planned to stop only once a month to renew himself, but a weird reaction to a poisonous poodle-dog bush sent him to the hospital in Ridgecrest and he lost six hiking days.

Even though he only left the trail when his legs swelled so much that he couldn't put his shoes on, he laments the delay.
"I don't like those off-trail miles," he says. "I won't take another day off until I finish."
This is his second time hiking the entire PCT. He stopped here in 2007, when Callahan's was not rebuilt after the fire. Although he has walked thousands of miles since then, he still remembers the pancakes, omelet and cereal he consumed at the Morning Glory restaurant and seeing "The Tempest" at the Elizabethan stage.
On this second swing through, he left Callahan's early the next morning, after eating countless pancakes for breakfast. But he took the time to date and sign the lodge's thick PCT Hiker Journal: "6/30: Thanks for the wonderful hospitality. Cam 'Swami' Honan."

Cheryl Strayed's Walk on the Wild Side

  Disclaimer: It’s tough to dispassionately review a book when someone else seems to be writing your life. When you share so much geographical and emotional common ground that it becomes both compelling and a bit scary to read the evidence. You’ve been their shadow—or have they been yours? But shared experience is a tricky thing. What if they tell the tale all wrong? Arrive at distinctly different conclusions? Botch the job? Conversely… what if this stranger seems to shoulder the very thing you thought was yours alone to bear? What if they uncover something you’ve never realized? Shine a light on the most painful part of your past such that you recognize your own strength in having endured it? This may be the ultimate goal in reading: to find a kindred spirit who helps you better understand your own journey. And while not everyone has shared this particular junket, I’m sure that its major themes will resonate for many.

Wild. The very word connotes the primordial ooze, a place where ideas are born in the midst of the natural world, where there’s freedom to go places we wouldn’t in everyday life. Where we are released into something that frees us to explore parts of ourself we hadn’t known before, and in the process stand eye-to-eye with many things that scare us. Indeed, wilderness is the land of the real, not the land of the metaphorical challenge. And for most of us framed into the workaday world, it’s a place in which we spend little time, as life seems to demand riding the conveyor belt of familiarity.

From this world, author Cheryl really did stray, changing her name for a reason: a determination to depart from the life she was given and to shape hers in radically different ways than what seemed her fate. This passage began when she lost the mother she adored to cancer at the age of 22. My own mom died of breast cancer when I was about the same age, and it remains the single most painful event of my life. After 9 years of caring for her, I can well-relate to the psychic chaos that descends when Strayed realizes how very different life will look without her mother’s anchoring presence. As I did, the author spends several years feeling completely adrift, wandering. She attempts to assuage her grief through a marriage to which she can’t commit, affairs, heroin, and frequent “geographical cures.” Nothing seems to ease the anguish. But as she spirals downward, a book about thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) appears, and she reads it cover-to-cover.

While this might not sound odd to an REI geek, Strayed is no veteran hiker. At the age of 26, she’s young, passably fit, acquainted but not intimate with the outdoors—and motivated to believe that several months on the trail could give her perspective on her life and a literal path forward.

Strayed embraces her solo-hike the way any young adult might: heavy on enthusiasm, light on practicality. For starters, there’s her pack, “Monster,” which must have tipped the scales at 75-80 pounds when Strayed began straying. In fact, she spends many pages describing how exceedingly difficult it was just to carry the Monster on her back. While this scenario bleeds metaphor, and readers her parents’ age will find it annoyingly short-sighted, it becomes a significant part of her proving her mettle. What she lacks in executive function, she seems to make up for in raw tenacity. And her ability to endure misery reacquaints her with her own inner resources.

“Uncertain as I was as I pushed forward, I felt right in my pushing, as if the effort itself meant something. That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been skeptical about, I didn’t feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.”

In the summer of 2008, when I was working through my seemingly doomed relationship with a person I deeply loved, I bounded into the Pacific Northwest with the tempest of my confusion. And as echoes of our endless fights rang in my ears, I distinctly remember walking the PCT craving healing, wanting to give all the words I’d misspoken and things I’d done wrong to the redwoods that bathed me in their consoling, ancient presence. Like Strayed, I welcomed the uncomplicated clarity that walking in nature conferred on me, the simplicity of trees that had weathered so many storms and yet still stood upright, keening toward the summer sky.

As a writer, Strayed does many things well, and her technique is so subtle that readers might not realize just how skilled she is. She seamlessly weaves flashbacks to the specifics of her mom’s death with present-day narrative, which is hard to do well. It feels like the reverie a hiker enters when a tree, rock, or cloud evokes memory recalled to the rhythm of foot touching dirt.

Of the many evocative scenes in the book, one stands out as one of the saddest and most poignant I’ve ever read. In it, Strayed realizes her mother’s favorite horse must be put down, and her family must be the ones to do the deed. But when the aged horse refuses to succumb, Strayed’s fantasy of her mother’s riding Lady to the other side devolves into the harsh light of killing a beloved family pet. After I read it, I literally threw the book across the room. One of death's many aftershocks is realizing that you’re still earthbound, and need to deal with the things that were so precious to the person you loved.

But Wild is not emotionally overwrought or desperate, in the ways that Eat, Pray, Love can be every now and then. And while the female body count on the PCT may increase in the next few years, the book is not as overtly feminist, or urging, in its tone. God willing, there will be no commercial tours following in the author’s footsteps, as there have been with EPL. And though I adore EPL, I find Strayed’s comparative restraint a good thing. Though not as gooey and effusive as Gilbert’s can be, her insights are spot-on.

I like this passage:

“I didn’t know my own father’s life. He was there, but invisible, a shadow beast in the woods; a fire so far away it’s nothing but smoke. That was my father: the man who hadn’t fathered me. It amazed me every time. Again and again and again. Of all the wild things, his failure to love me the way he should have and always been the wildest thing of all. But on that night as I gazed out over the darkening land fifty-some nights out on the PCT, it occurred to me that I didn’t have to be amazed by him anymore. There were so many other amazing things in this world.”

Like Gilbert, Strayed ultimately derives a profound sense of self-acceptance from her long journey. In one revelatory paragraph, she begins to get that she can forgive herself for betraying her husband. “What if I was a liar and a cheat and there was no excuse for what I’d done other than because it was what I wanted and needed to do? What if I was sorry, but if I could go back in time I wouldn’t do anything differently than I had done? What if I’d actually wanted to fuck every one of those men? What if heroin taught me something? What if yes was the right answer instead of no? What if what made me do all of those things everyone thought I shouldn’t have done was also what had got me here?”

This was the graf that took the 500-pound backpack of guilt I’d also been shouldering and left it by the side of the road. Because, of course, it’s true. We only get to where we are by living through what we do, and making choices we believe at the time are right. And their rightness extends to an existential level, as they are the chips of the chisel that shape us into the people we are meant to become.

My own walkabout took me to a town Strayed also knows: Ashland, Oregon. In addition to being overtly quirky and magical, Ashland plays temporary host to many PCT thru-hikers, whom you’ll often see at the post office, retrieving their resupply boxes (the value of which can’t be underestimated).  I stayed in the same room Strayed did at the Ashland Hostel, and encountered plenty of thru-hikers, who dazzled me with their filthy roguishness and earthy charm. One morning I overheard a phone conversation between a skirt-clad hiker and her parent, and as she begged for another month’s subsidy to finish the trek. And when she hung up, after fighting for this like a mother bear defending her cubs, I apprehended her completely differently: I knew what a significant, all-encompassing journey she was enveloped in. How we both were undertaking a quest away from civilization that would shift our paradigms for the rest of our lives.

Though my own trip was not as strenuous as that of a PCT hiker, after it my life did indeed change, and I found some of the strength and context and meaning I’d been craving. Like Strayed, I understood how to ride out the many obstacles that come when traveling and camping. And how enduring them and finding solutions and making it to the other side gets you very familiar with how strong and tenacious a mofo you can be. When you’re left early without a mother, these are facts that it takes time to learn--and taking care of yourself goes from being a great mystery to a necessity to a point of pride.

Strayed is at her best when she shows us not only this painful part of her life, but the path that brought her insight into and transcendence over it.

**********

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed (Alfred A. Knopf; 315 pages; $25.95)

For a followup on this piece, about the 2012 thru-hiking season in OR and the influence of this book, please see my 7/13 entry.