the Nixionary

When I left Denver for Lawrence, Kansas last weekend, I underestimated the time it would take and the storms that are always possible this time of year driving across the plains. The drive started well. I had four books on tape—Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Nick Arvin’s Articles of War, Joyce Carol Oates’s The Tattooed Girl, and Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls. I figured I’d save those for later. I stuffed sunflower seeds in the right side of my mouth and moved the shells, once shucked, over to the left. I had a fountain soda and a sunny afternoon ahead of me. My mom called to check on me. “No storms. All sun,” I said, all sunny. The sunflowers prayed at the sky. The wheat glowed gold. Then it started to storm.

Funny that “storm” is a noun and a verb and that storms themselves are nouns and verbs. A thunderstorm appears as a bulky puff and then it puffs its bulk over the fields. Rain rains, tornadoes tornado, but humans don’t human. Maybe we are weaker. Just proper nouns who do things.

I probably should have pulled over. Whatever in us makes us think “Surely, I won’t die. Everyone else might, but not me,” is the same thing that made me drive through the storm. I watched the black mass circle around the highway counter-clockwise as NPR announced its very clear severity. The swirls started south of me, whispy and half-serious, becoming black, but soon they were sitting on the highway, straight east, straight ahead of my hood. A fat rainbow twinkled out the edge of a furry gray cloud. The sunflowers bowed down, yellow bonnets curling over brown faces.

“If you’re on I-70,” the crackly voice on the radio said, “You should pull off and wait this cell out.” Cell. This storm sounded like something in The Matrix. I had a wierd feeling I’d either hit a really bad storm or no storm at all. Red pill or blue pill? What did I do? I kept driving. Well, no, that’s not entirely true; I pulled into the McDonald’s drive-thru for an ice cream cone, then I got right back on the highway, with my vanilla soft serve in one hand and my camera, flash turned off, in the other.

I don’t know what I was thinking. Wind does not blow over the plains; it rips across them. It tears paneling off cars and knocks semis over sideways. I tried to catch a line of cows running on camera. I tried about 15 times to capture the lightning hitting the ground and the dust galloping over the highway. But I could barely drive with two hands, much less none. I threw my cone into the cup holder and I wouldn’t find it til later, til it had melted into an opaque, milky pool.

One thing I love about storms in the West is that they approach. In Alaska, they just sit on the town, stubborn and sullen. In Colorado and Kansas, they make an entrance, swooshing their robes of many colors across the ground like an angry king. “Who stole my land without asking?” This king would say. Farmers would scatter. Sunflowers would lie prostrate. Cars would pull over and passengers would enter McDonald’s and stay for hours. The clouds would move and the world would run for cover, then stop.

This was one of the most magnificent storms I’ve ever seen. I counted: for every five seconds, I saw at least five bolts of lightning, sometimes more like ten. The bolts turned all my windows white (I took the pictures above during the same second). Some cracked sideways across the sky, then like a shattered windshield, branches erupted from the initial line, and squiggled down to the ground.

When my brothers and I were little, we used to go into this spoof gift store in Southwest Plaza called Spencer’s for ten minutes at a time while our mom was in the department store. Amongst the dirty playing cards and pins with the F word on them, they had one of those electric spheres on a stand—a crystal ball that looked like a giant lit-up snowglobe, with electric bolts wiggling out from the epicenter towards the glass like wavy tentacles. If I put my hand against the glass, the tentacles all came to meet it. They were hot pink and hot to the touch. The ball felt like magic. Was it magnetic? Did it sense me? Each of my fingertips controlled a magenta zigzag. I could rake the electric fingers with the tips of my own from one side of the curve to the other, from the top to the bottom. We always had to leave Spencer’s before we’d had enough.

So it was with this storm in Kansas. I couldn’t just sit there under the McDonald’s awning and watch the sky turn from inkblack to milk-white without going into it. So I drove. Pretty soon, I had my shoulders pulled up towards my ears. I leaned over the wheel like my mom does (even in sun), and sent the wipers into a fury. They did nothing. The rain came from both directions. The man on the radio reiterated the speed of the wind: up to 75 miles an hour. “Trees are lying across the road in Hays,” he said. “It’s too dark to see how deep the water is. Get off the roads!” I went 80. I would beat this thing.

There were other headlights, but not many. I had started going so fast that I realized, as suddenly as a bad headache, that I couldn’t stop. A black shimmery curtain covered the exit ramps. All I could see was the white line along the shoulder. If I stopped, someone would slam into me. If I tried to pull over and pulled over too far, I’d roll down the steep hill or end up going off the side of some bridge I didn’t realize I was on.

There was one brief moment, it lasted maybe two seconds, where I could see absolutely nothing. I wedged my car in between the shoulder and a semi spraying even more water across my windshield, and thought, prayed, I hope I make this, I hope I make this. I couldn’t see the shoulder, the sky, the truck, just water thrashing its way across glass like a thousand transparent snakes. My speedometer still read 80 (I know because I had never turned cruise control off—I just wanted to burst through the storm like I was digging to China and I’d end up in some wonder world if I could just get far enough to pop out into the other side).

Which is pretty much what I did. Right after I pictured my bloody body on the side of the road and my car flipped over and some bystander calling my mom, the rain let up just enough for me to see that I wasn’t on the road anymore, but driving down the gloriously wide shoulder. I righted the wheel and the semi disappeared into the mist behind me. The rain splashed against the windshield, but it left spaces for me to see. I breathed and brought my shoulders back against the seat.

I have probably driven across Kansas and Nebraska 30 or more times. We used to take I-80 to Chicago, I-70 to Kentucky, and later, I used to drive those same flat roads to pick up Ashley on the long drive to Louisiana. Most people think the plains states are boring, but the continuity of the land has a strange beauty and dependability to it—gray rocks, slow livestock, lines of gold-green that will pull a car across the country.

When you drive alone across a place that is mostly bare, you begin to feel that way yourself. Your best and worst memories wave from the roadside. You’re like those rusted old trucks half-decayed under the grass, half-growing into the green. I know all the signs along the side of the road like lines in a song about my summers growing up—“World’s largest Czech egg, next exit!” “A Kansas farmer feeds 128 people and you”, “Come see the largest live prairie dog in the world”, “Pet the 36-inch live donkey!”

When I drive across Kansas, I think of pulling over for storms and eating gorp in the back seat of the minivan. When I drive past the camouflage tanks parked in long, blocky strips at Fort Riley, I think of my uncle Mark who went AWOL from the Army and ended up in Alaska. When I pass the wooden “Welcome to Colorful Colorado” sign, I think about all the heartache I carried across these plains when I was in college. I like driving here because of the time and the storms and the parts of history–my history–that I would have forgotten if it weren’t for this highway.

I-70 was the first stretch of interstate that opened in the U.S. I always think of one of my favorite books, My Antonia, when I drive east out of Colorado. “There seemed to be nothing to see,” Willa Cather writes. “No fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

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Yesterday, I was walking through the woods in Anchorage, half trying to get lost, half thinking about how bad it would hurt to be stomped to death by a moose, when I came around a quiet corner and landed smack in the middle of a huge beach party. Men turned burgers on charcoal grills and bluish white women lolled on lumpy pink towels. Screaming kids tromped out into Goose Lake, some in red life vests, others dragging black innertubes out to where the buoys separated slow kayaks from cold water dawdlers. I stopped and stood like some creep watching suntanners from the trees. It has been three years since I’ve seen people doing summer things.

When I checked the weather yesterday before heading out to walk, it was 59 degrees. One thing I love about Alaskan kids is that as soon as the sun’s out, it’s an opportunity to get in the water. I had on my sweater pants (no, not a sweater and pants–we’re talking the softest, most sweater-y pants you’ve ever touched) and a light jacket, and here these people are, stripping down to practically nothing to soak up what I feel is one of the biggest sacrifices of being here: living so close to water and not being able to snap on my goggles and get in. Well, I could, but on most days, the double cold would make me miss the Gulf even more.

That scene, though–stumbling into what looked like some south side of Chicago lake shore picnic–is how it feels to live here for part of the year. I’m always coming around some corner in Alaska, tripping my way into an unexpected view or an unexpected realization of my place in this place.

A friend in the program writes about finding bones in the fields where he grew up caring for and killing cattle in Minnesota. Another writer showed slides of the bones he’s found in deserts where the sand sticks up like small castles and few animals can tolerate the change in the weather’s extremes. On my walk yesterday, running into him, I mentioned when I’d been Colorado three years ago, when I was waiting for those old knee bones they put in there to become my own, and sometimes, here, I feel like I’m taking all this cold, wet marrow into me to see if it will set.

I hate the houses here–poop brown, single-story shacks with overgrown grass and green trim–the sprawl, the strip malls, the way the trails I took yesterday kept ending up on some road. Sure, there is natural architecture–those Chugach mountains rise navy blue and angry just above Tudor Road, the one we take to the bar and the coffeeshop and the well-organized, over-priced Anchorage thrift stores. But this is no city for me. I will come here next year to finish my degree and buy used books, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be back after that besides as a stopover to smaller towns. In Sara’s voice, I notice this longing to leave Alaska mixed with a stable–or at least stabling–loyal love that might keep her here for longer than she planned. I wonder if that happens to most of us. Is it by convincing ourselves that we make the hardest decisions?

Michael, the friend who writes about bones, described himself as a city mouse-country mouse kind of guy. I thought I might describe myself the same way, but as I think about going home to Colorado, I think of all the places we’ll fly over that I’ve never seen. I want to find watering holes and wolves, vineyards, vultures, haunted hotels. Maybe I’m more like the “Give a Mouse a Cookie” mouse. Give me water, and I’ll want to swim. Give me mountains and I’ll want wild music. Give me bones, and I’ll want to pick apart whatever’s left in the ribs.

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I’m in Seattle, waiting to get to Sitka. I have six hours to people-watch or drink in the airport bar. I’m holding off til at least 5 to get a glass of wine. I’ve already had the PB&J my mom made, a bag of Vic’s popcorn, and a Freshens frozen yogurt–the kind they used to serve at Tulane when we’d order six-piece sushi sets, smoothies, and sit out on the UC quad after art studio.

It’s a very Seattle day today. Everything’s white. The sky, the runways, the planes. It’s not gray, like rainy days in Colorado, when the clouds come in angry and stratified, layers of midnight blue and charcoal and ash. Flying into Seattle, like Sitka, the clouds seem like the thin cotton sheath a doctor wraps around a broken bone before covering it with a cast. With all this pale drizzle, it would be a hard day to draw.

Most times when I’ve been here it’s been hot and humid. I think of the weekend Luke and I spent two hours looking for an Asian market. We drove up Seattle’s east side hills, from Chinatown up to some brick hospital, parking and shuffling into stores that smelled like fish and old ice. We must have gone in and out of 10 of them, but I can’t remember what we were looking for. Some kind of sauce, I think, or maybe a rare vegetable. I can remember the place, not the purpose, which is something I’ve been thinking about as I talk to people about where we’ll spend the rest of our lives–should we choose our places because we like them, physically, or should we choose them as a step towards a more focused purpose? Our decisions feel like the chicken and the egg. Move, then figure out what you’ll do. Find out what you’ll do then move. Decide to stay or stay to decide.

At work the other day, we had to look up two words: purposely and purposefully. “Purposely” is when you do something “on purpose” or intentionally. “Purposefully” means to do something with a specific purpose in mind. We purposely drove around for hours because we enjoyed seeing the not-so-touristy parts of Seattle. We purposefully chose Asian markets to find whatever it was we never found.

I tried to get on an earlier flight today, but I would have gotten stuck in Ketchikan, and that’s happened to me once before, so no thanks. I got caged in Ketchikan for 20 hours one day with a girl I’d met on a boat and her friend from the Coast Guard who drove a red car with a flip flop figurine he’d strung from the rear view mirror. That little metal sandal swung 180-degrees, from east to west, west to east, then in defiant circles shedding sun as we flew down his 16-mile road and into town. I think I wrote about this day before, but it would be interesting to go back and see what escapes me now. Ketchikan, in my mind, looks like this: a prefab building that says “Fish House,” four horrible 12-story cruise ships, mountains upon mountains, and a harbor where kids had ice cream in the sun and skipped between skiffs. Dropped coins and waving kelp and needlefish held audience below the surface, and I walked and watched them run and writhe away, and then return.

I chose this seat in the airport because it was near a drinking fountain, but now I wish I hadn’t. Every time someone leans over for a drink, a speaker under the spout starts this ridiculous, loud imitation of what an elephant would sound like tromping around a shallow pool. The water fountain glugs and glops, hooves pound through water, and innocent old women straighten back up from the trough, look around, and wonder if it’s them–innocently trying to hydrate–and making all that sloppy racket. This is actually pretty funny. Every person who uses the water fountain hasn’t used it (I guess you usually only use them once), and it either startles or amuses or angers or all three. A mom leans over and her sons start roaring and when her red face resurfaces, she says, “Isn’t that the loudest drinking faucet you’ve EVER heard?”

The Philipino men who work at SEATAC in the baggage claim department have to take their breaks in the airport. One of them is watching me write and he has a closed-lip smile that looks like it might become a laugh, and two freckles next to his left eye. A friend sits next to him and they say nothing, just smile and look on. I wonder if this is where they come for their break because of the stereophonic watering hole a few feet away. I feel bad for people who have to take breaks from work at their place of work.

I know they’re from baggage claim because their hospital blue shirts have a canary yellow circle over their hearts that says “bags.” All lower-case. I wonder who decided not to capitalize “bags” on their shirts, and if this was on purpose or just easier to stitch. Easier can be a purpose, I guess, but usually I hope it isn’t. Maybe that’s why we live in two places–staying in one would seem too easy. It would be easy, in many ways. I wouldn’t be sitting here thinking of all the people I should have spent more time with. I wouldn’t have to have two sets of hiking boots and two rents. But my places and purposes would also be halved if we bought a house and lost our harbor.

On the other side of me, two twins from India are kicking each other on the airport chairs. The little girl stands in front of the little boy who is swinging his legs so hard, his little body is lifting off the chair. She gets closer and closer until he bangs her in the knees and she falls over, stiff as a board, stunned, then rolls over on the carpet giggling and readjusting her red hat before getting up to get kicked down again. The parents don’t notice, it’s just me here, watching the kids and listening to the African bathing ritual and waiting to get on my plane.

I still have a few more hours. I am hoping for a late, melty sunset as I crest the mountains that separate Juneau from Sitka. If you know me, you know I don’t like to fly, but here’s a secret: I love airports. There’s a young man playing an electric guitar (unplugged, but resounding) (and the music is actually quite beautiful, water-like and unending) in the middle of the concourse. Here, there are purposes aplenty: to listen to these melancholy fingers finding the strings, to snag words from foreign languages and roll them around in my mouth, to anticipate a new place even though I already know it.

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Being away from blogging for a few months, then hopping back on the bandwagon, is not like riding a bike. There are considerations. What do I tell Tom, first of all? How do I recap? What if I’m bad at this now? Are a bandwagon and a bike in the same sentence mixed metaphors? Too many people to mention, too many incidents to cover important days adequately.

I’ll start. I got a few haircuts. I got a new job. 9,000 writers came to town, including Sara and her new son, who flew through the 12-hour clouds from Kodiak to Seattle to here. We walked to the middle of the park to eat blackberries and comte cheese and figs and honeyed almonds on a white sheet we stole from her hotel. In the foothills, we feasted on eggs and toast, strawberries and yogurt, and huevos rancheros running over the edges of wide white plates, and wondered at the rocks bursting into stillness along the front range.

We listened to dozens of writers talk about their doubts and their duties at the AWP conference, and I showed Sara the places here that I love. She showed me that you can ache for simple things: fresh fruit sliced by someone else. Thirsty land that stretches, red, under a rainless sky. People from Alaska have this rare sense of gratitude and awe (tinged with a certain sadness) for “life down south.” They reintroduce me to what I should appreciate: art, sky, fresh produce, restaurant design.

I love having visitors because it reacquaints me with hunger. No matter where I live, I always feel that the place is lacking. Maybe it’s the ocean or the heat or the colors I loved in some city on its homes. For me, getting to share my home with someone makes me realize what I have and what I wish for the most.

Sometimes I wish to be in certain places, but lately I wish for time. Time to write, time to read, time to be. My friend Annie says she and her dad have a favorite thing they do together and it’s “just being.” Just to be. To sit and be one person in one chair with two hands and two feet.

In the writing classes I’ve been teaching, I’ve been trying try to create an arc–the students should sense the scaffolding from one class to the next, not just learn how to accomplish disjointed series of exercises. Sometimes I have no idea what my own arc is; I remember moments like snapshots, but they never assemble into a neat little story with a lesson.

We moved, too, and all the shake-up came with. When I first came to sign the lease, the crumbling house out back scared me. Handshakes held drugs, trash reached through the chain-link fence when I walked by with the dog. Luke and I went back to our old house, still full of our things, and I had this deep sense of foreboding that I had made the wrong choice to move our books and blankets into a less-safe neighborhood, albeit into a loft that felt, with its high ceilings and clawfoot tub and concrete counters, that it had more life.

The Victorian homes and the shades of purple and the amount of people lingering on the sidewalks of our new neighborhood reminded me of New Orleans, but then I wondered, is it fair to keep moving our lives closer to a life I used to have, or should I be wherever I find myself, and just try, like Annie and her dad, to be? Maybe it is by just being that our lives attain their arcs, and when we think too hard about how they play out, we strangle the intuition that creates our direction.

Another thing that happened recently is I got a bad cough and Luke’s dad gave him an orange bottle to give to me.

“Don’t drive on this stuff,” Luke said, handing it to me. The grains glinted on the top layer of the liquid. I took a little swig.

“Is it a daytime or a night-time drug?” I asked him.

“Daytime. Nighttime. Just don’t drive.”

Ten minutes later I felt like a cloud with no arms. I bumped into the dresser and missed my mouth when I went to drink water. I forgot the conversations I had at work the next morning. Tussionex: a narcotic cough syrup made of hydrocodone and chlorpheniramine. Not recommended for human beings who plan on functioning. My cough is better.

I’m getting used to where we live now, too. The Tai Chi instructor with the studio downstairs keeps encouraging us to come, and I will, if he gives me enough time. There’s a house I want to buy, down the street, with trees that smell like jasmine, a red door, and a yard covered in petals. When we walk here, the kids follow the dog and speak two languages.

Last night, I listened from our deck as a mariachi band burst through applause three yards down, and the Burlington Northern train let out an extended moan over its tracks, like a synthesizer chord being held down by heavy fingers. I thought of the kids in the drughouse out back and hoped they could sleep or hoped they know what hope is and don’t grow up thinking they have to stay in one neighborhood and watch images repeat themselves without evolution.

Today, on my way home from work, I saw two figures standing in that yard. Two nuns were slipping through the chain link gate, smiling under their long white veils with navy blue edging. They’re the Missionaries of Charity, and like everyone you can see around here, they live right down the street. The kids jumped off the tiny, broken trampoline, beaming, and let the fabric of the nuns’ habits run through their hands while they circled around the swaddled women.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the insights from the panelists at AWP. “You can learn to look at things,” Robert Wilder said. “Examine where you live.” Pam Houston mentioned how being from a place makes it hard to see it for what it really is. And someone else, I can’t remember who, urged her audience to “fall in love with something every day.” That’s what I fell in love with today. Those two nuns and that group of happy kids, singing in the trash-strewn yard.

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