Well, my friend Lauren just sent news.  The janitor at her school agreed that this feeling of suffocation is–as I had feared, and according to Mexican legend–the devil sitting on top of the one possessed. This scares the poop out of me because the man who confirmed my fears is a man of wisdom, according to Lauren, who knows history, religion, and myth, and who looks for the shimmer where others see the sludge. He collects any shard of gold glinting from anywhere in Denver–on the bus, on the curb, under a restaurant booth–brings his booty home, and melts it into jewelry for his wife. His cure for waking up under the weight of who-knows-what: two Hail Mary’s, which would imply that he believes one is, in fact, awake, during the sleep paralysis state, if they can muster two memorized prayers.

Lauren also prompted me to look into the definition for sleep paralysis, which seems to fit the symptoms I’ve had. From wikipedia: sleep paralysis occurs when the brain wakes from REM activity, but the body paralysis enacted during the dreaming state persists. While the brain dreams, the body supresses the physical actions which might accompany the thought progression of being asleep (your legs and arms don’t pump if you’re running in a dream, you don’t generally throw up in your bed if you’re throwing up in a dream).

Put simply: when REM is ON, your muscles are turned OFF. With sleep paralysis, it remains unknown why REM switches off–meaning consciousness prevails–and the body still sleeps. Or why somethings sometimes appear.

When this happens to me, all goes stiff but my eyes. I yank them from wall to wall, looking for a way out, and sometimes I see twisted images, contorted faces, or just the hovering essence of something horrible. I found that yes, eye movement, according to tests, is possible during such episodes and that “the paralysis state may be accompanied by terrifying hallucinations and an acute sense of danger. The hallucinatory element to sleep paralysis makes it even more likely that someone will interpret the experience as a dream, since completely fanciful, or dream-like, objects (often described as looking distinctly demonic by those who experience the paralysis) may appear in the room alongside one’s normal vision.”

This explains some things. The folklore surrounding sleep paralysis points to the darker side of the mystery. The stories range in narrative creativity, but not in root beliefs. In Nigerian lore: it’s known as “the devil on your back.” In Hmong culture: “dab tsog” or “crushing demon.” The Mexican belief: “subirse el muerto”–dead person on you. In Vietnamese: to be held down by a spirit, smushed by a shadow.

WebMD says not to be scared of night demons, to try antidepressants, or different positions while sleeping. Obviously, whoever wrote the sleep paralysis entry has never experienced it. First, you cannot convince yourself out of the fear that you can’t move and desperately need to get out of that room. Second, antidepressants aren’t good for people who aren’t depressed. Third, how do you try a different position if the condition’s number one symptom is that you can’t move?

I’m not sure what I think. Is “the dark presser” (the Turkish term) something worse than the body and the brain’s waking disagreement or is it just a physical fluke? I remembered recently, while telling Lauren about the bad mornings, that the man who used to sleep on the same bed as me also engraved all the headstones for the Sitka cemetery. We used to find cracked headstones in the yard when we looked for good grill grate props to use as hot beds for our peppered salmon.

Look up any ailment and it has its lore. Look up any folk story and it has more logical explanations. I remember a friend once saying that people who don’t believe are just as uncertain of their stance as those who do. Straying from science and math at an early age for literature and history, I realize certainty isn’t something I’ve ever pursued. Who knows what sometimes stops me from moving. My husband’s early mornings or the hangings-around of people who have only half-left the world. As the events in my life increase so does my stock in at least two beliefs:

1. From the smallest beauties (the perfect spores on the underside of the infinitesimal fragile fern) to the largest horrors (the dusted corpses of mothers holding their dead babies in Haiti), the natural and the supernatural coexist in all things.

2. Every quiet morning, my mom slides her small fingers over the 100-plus beads of the rosary, and I know–regardless of if I believe in the words or if sometimes I just believe in the comfort of my mom believing–that there’s no way it’s for nothing.

I spent last Saturday shoving myself up a gradual incline on cross country skiis and then falling on my ass, wrists, and chest on the way back down. Now my knee and my ego hurt, and the impingement problem I’ve been having in my shoulder (which sounds whiny, since a person is only allowed one physical thing to complain about lest they be labeled a faker) has worsened.

A correction following a misconception: I did not quit my gig with The Denver Post. I resigned from the food magazine where I wrote boring articles in a basement. I spent today writing other articles, rubbing my deltoid, and talking to principals in front of a huge coffeeshop window until I got home and realized I didn’t have a key to my own house.

I wonder, as I enter a freelance “career”, peppered by part-time possibilities, what happened to the rags-to-riches myth we read about in high school English? If I were getting paid in rejections, I’d be making a good living. I have a hard time accepting that the Horatio Alger stories may have become one burnt-out version of American dream.

I consoled myself when I was working on my first essay for grad school that effort was everything, but I recently read this quote from Antonio Porchia, the Italian shortist and sweetist, and felt that it better qualifies the work of anyone trying today: “No one understands that you have given everything.  You must give more.”

It seems harder now to strike upon good luck (and by luck, I mean good fortune invited by concentrated effort) than it was for my parents’ generation. I’m working at a steady pace, but I feel like the guy on the treadmill tonight at the Wash Park gym whose ipod ripped off his arm, and whose legs got ripped right off the conveyor, too, when he turned around to look for his tunes.

Despite the fact that we’re trying to save money, Luke took me out to dinner for a pep talk. A woman with long gray hair pulled halfway back served us dinner in an underground pub where bottles of wine line the walls and caved candles flicker from every table. She called the hazelnut beer “lovely” and every one of her descriptions thereafter convinced me. I squeezed a lemon wedge over our raw oysters and then poured scotch over a basket of homemade chips.

I’m pitching articles left and right, and ideas come to me faster than I can query, but I’m only getting tiny bites, I lament to Luke over my creamy orange soup. Luke says that I have to have confidence in my product and that in this case, my product is everything I’ve ever experienced.

This is the other lesson I’ve learned so far in the last three days: do not underestimate what you’ll feel like after bad decisions. My shoulder hurts because I should have sat at a low chair, not the nice big table where I had a wobbly, white, and frothy chai tea this afternoon. The entrées (butternut squash bisque, toasted bread, and a burger covered in Stilton blue cheese) following the chai following the appetizers following the huge beers made me feel sick. I regret that I missed an important meeting last week because my keys were in Luke’s coat pocket. I regret the other things I think about when the Quincy and Luke’s heavy breaths fill the room.

When we got home tonight, I nurtured myself with a hot bath while Luke talked to our friend Jordan about the fishing moratorium they’ve scheduled for summer 2011 in Sitka. People who were boat owners in 2004 or 2005 in addition to 2008 will have their current permits transferred to next year based on how many days of fishing they’ve logged. But a lot of people will be cut out of the fishery, like Jordan, like Luke, who bought boats in ’08 and hadn’t logged any days in 2005. Unless we can pay for a permit someone else wants to sell.

In the tub, I put down Madeleine L’Engle’s journal on marriage that I’m reading (yes, THE Madeleine L’Engle of A Wrinkle in Time and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, who changed my childhood life and, as it turns out, is having some influence in my adulthood) to ponder this weird concept:

all the fish in the ocean are owned.

I can hear Jordan’s anxiety rising up and down in intonation through the phone in the other room and then I hear Luke joking to cheer him up. I’m a little worried about it, but I don’t understand fish talk so much, so I defer the anxiety and keep reading with my chin just barely dipping into the liquid. When I get out, I have a hot pink farmer’s tan around my upper arms and down near my ankles from the heat, but warm water always keeps its promises to me. My ski knee and tight shoulder are easy going for the time being.

“How much will it cost?” I ask Luke later about the permit I know he’s thinking about but not mentioning.

“Pfoof” is the sound he makes. “15 to 40.”

Thousand.

Luke is lying next to me in bed and pretending he’s dead. I wonder where we’ll be next year with these new developments in the fish world and the lack of work world. “Look,” Luke says, freezing his face with his eyes wide open and his mouth in a deranged grin. Then, without blinking or moving his mouth the slightest bit, he moves his eyes over to mine.

“I like being married to you,” he says.

We have a lot on our minds right now, but it’s true. I like it, too.

Of note in my Nixionary inbox after my last few articles:

A single-sentence man writes: “You should learn how to fish.”

John tells me about the book he’s writing and the books his semi-famous southern son has already written.

A woman living in the Sangro de Cristo range without electricity was crumpling up newspapers to start a fire in her wood-burning stove and came across a few of my wrinkled ideas.

An email with no body. Subject read: “If you need extra income I have here some information that you might need.”

Another one: “If you look to the bottom of the real barrel, Ms. Nix, what you’ll see is yourself.” (Extra care taken to italicize).

An email from an old swim team friend I knew when we had hair on our legs and painted “Homestead” down our thighs in zinc oxide, who writes that she believes we can hold a lot of pain, but we have the capacity for just as much happiness.

An online comment from someone I know who says that “occasionally” my writing crosses the boundary from “stylistic to sappy.”

Yeah. Well …

I’ve tried to respond to all of the emails that were reasonably written. My mom and I took a walk tonight towards the jagged black silhouette of the mountains and talked about how people never seem to know what they (themselves) sound like. I took a long bath and let the conditioner sit in my hair for half an hour and that felt like I was doing something with definite results.

Now I’m sitting here in my thick white bath robe with the tips of my hair dripping Pantene Pro-V Intense Conditioner down my neck. Somewhere between July and now, the ugly-mean emails have begun to matter less and the good ones have begun to matter more. I wonder if I only want to be conditioned with goodness once it comes time for public judgment, and if so, does that make me a self-absorbed writer, or just a realistic one?

I’m reading Volume One of The Paris Review Interviews, and up pops this part from an interview with Truman Capote who calls the interviewer “girl,” and says things like “Heavens,” God love him.

Of note here–

Interviewer: Do you think criticism helps any?

Capote: After something is published, all I want to read or hear is praise. Anything less is a bore, and I’ll give you fifty dollars if you produced a writer who can honestly say he was ever helped by pissy carpings and condescensions of reviewers. I don’t mean to say that none of the professional critics are worth paying attention to–but few good ones review on a regular basis. Most of all, I believe in hardening yourself against opinion.

I believe in it, too, but believing and being love to play opposites. For me, hardening is harder than softening. The sappy comment really stung and I’ve been trying to wash it out of everything I’ve ever written. I know, that despite (and maybe even because of) my efforts, it’s staying put. Sap’s in me. And it’s sticky.

Being Married. It’s a subtle change. Like getting a haircut and forgetting you look a little different until you glimpse a glance of your new look swishing past in a mirror, and you feel a little ping of excitement at the new you. Since I’ve felt my whole life that I was made to share it with someone, living a half-shared life feels pretty natural to me. Luke scoots around on his hands and knees sliding dog hair out from alongside the baseboards while I pour hot water into the French press and my tall teacup. I look at him and I feel lucky, so I say to him, “When I look at you, I feel lucky.” He calls me his wife, and that’s still a little wierd.

Boxes are stacked in every doorway and on every flat surface—serving bowls and silverware, salad bowls and wine glasses, towels and trinkets—the things you receive when you have a wedding. My parents brought us a basket of booty they’ve been collecting for months—books on cooking fish, seafood platters, placemats, a little treasure of a letter stuck between sets of chopsticks. Luke’s parents and brothers handed pizza around the room and tore shiny ribbons away from three-by-three foot packages while we read little notes from our friends like Dr. Savory (a dentist) who wrote that “every good relationship has its foundation in proper oral hygiene,” and whose daughter reminded us that “the key to a good life is a leisurely breakfast.”

This morning, our little house has the feel of leftover Christmas with its shredded paper and sharp edges as I shuffle my way to the back door to let out Quincy and Wyatt, the new dog we can’t decide if we’re going to keep. He’s somewhere around 10 months old, a border collie/Australian Shepherd mix, with white fur, big brown spots, and eyes a cornflower, crystal blue. He’s not a bad dog, just a new thing, and I think I’m hesitant about him because I just want the peace of mind to enjoy things like my new husband and our nice knife set and the books and books that have been waiting for me for the last eleven months.

This morning the snow is eight inches deep when both dogs highstep into the stuff, and I don’t realize as I hold out my palm to catch a few flakes spinning down that the gate is open out to the street. Wyatt, a low-scurrying cattle dog who doesn’t have the speed of walking built into his genes, bounces out past the chain link fence, and stops to look at me like he’s waiting for some direction. Come here, I say, and he stays. You better live up to your name, I tell him, then he pushes up some snow with his nose, and comes trotting back.

I can sense he’ll be loyal if we just let him, and he’ll stop peeing in the corner behind the yellow chair if we have the patience to teach him. Most of the time I feel like I do until he gets muddy and puts his paws on my clean jeans and then I feel like he’s ruining my life. When I lay on the couch with a book, he points his bright blue eyes up at me with a look that says please keep me, and he sleeps under the bed with his nose sticking out, which makes my heart hurt a little, so I guess we probably will.

We took both dogs to the park yesterday and sprinted around in the falling snow. Wyatt is so excited to not be at the pound, he can’t help himself but pull so hard he starts hacking up. Poor Quincy has a little extra padding around his orange hips and huffs and puffs the whole way, lagging like an old emphysemic man even though he’s only six. There are so many perfect people in this neighborhood with their perfect dogs, sleek black labs and shiny golden retrievers, who leave slack on the leash and heel when that weird command is called. Wyatt fits in our hodgepodge house stocked with wild game and Byzantine icons and salvaged goods, and he reminds me, when we let him off leash and he’s so excited that his legs slip out from under him as we’re crossing the street, that life is inclined towards the unwieldy, not the ordered.

Mostly I’m leaning towards keeping Wyatt because when we saw him at the pound, Luke, who longs for space in the same way as this silly little dog, said, “I’ve been waiting to have someone like him my whole life,” and I know how that feels.

Most marathon runners don’t train beyond the mileage of my lucky number. If you run further than the 22nd mile during training, veteran marathoners say you’ll dread the actual race. You won’t believe you can actually make it 26 miles if you train for 26 miles. The training run will hurt way worse than the real race which brings the greetings of adrenaline and momentum and, maybe most importantly, witnesses.

I was one this weekend for Pizzo’s first marathon. I rode a turquoise bike with a hard seat while she chugged up 7th, down Downing, around Wash Park, across Logan, and straight on to Civic Center Park Sunday morning. Sometimes, mostly on the uphill parts, she stayed pretty quiet, which is when I talked about candy, shoes, and how great she was doing.

“I hurt all over,” she said at one point, while we bumped across the uneven pavement on Speer. We were in front of my old apartment and I missed the way the sun came in over the golf course and through the wrought iron window frames. I like marathons because you cover a whole town in a single morning, slowly enough to remember the parts of your life that have happened on those same corners. Marathons, when I watch them, make me think of my best friends who have done them in different cities, and as sentimental as it sounds, long distance races make me proud of human beings.

I think part of what makes people run is you think in a different way when you’re willing yourself through your body’s physical resistance. The snow looked wet on the sloped side of Mt. Evans and the trees blinked red and silver in the sun, but Wash Park didn’t really feel like Wash Park, Denver wasn’t really the same workday Denver. Races can make you hate or love a place, but for me, they always make me see that space like it’s being poured out, layer by layer, and you’re stepping into each memory or sidewalk or streetcorner with an awareness of those past miles and how your mentality will effect the present ones.

I asked Peez where her favorite place in the world is, and she said a cavern off the side of the Grand Canyon that looks a like  rainforest in the middle of a red desert. I thought about my favorite places. A gelato place in Trastevere. The blue and yellow, chipped mosaic table Kate and Ashley and I used to sit at on the corner of my porch in New Orleans. My parents’ kitchen when it’s early and the Sunday paper is still one unruffled chunk on the counter. Groups of men turned around with their mouths open and congratulated Sarah when we passed them, me on my bike, cheating and thinking, and she in her day-glo gear.

At Mile 22, Peez looked a little white and unsure when she looked over at me and said, “I’ve never felt like this before.”

Teenie, who had joined us, said that at the worst point during one marathon, her sister asked another runner, “How many miles are in a marathon?” and the other runner replied, “Shoot. I don’t know. 22? 23? I really have no idea.”

How do you explain that?

Mile 22 also presents to the hopeless runner a catch-22. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you stop running, it will all be for nothing; if you keep going, each step means more pain. Joseph Heller’s book, Catch 22, where the term came from, was a book I didn’t totally get when I read it in high school. I remember Major Major Major Major and little else. I felt like I was in a catch-22 when I was reading that book. Keep reading and I will be more bored and lost; stop reading and I might never understand. In Catch 22, the catch-22 is when a paradox in rules makes a character a victim, but they can’t do anything about it. What if you put yourself in that helpless position, regardless of definitive rules? Is it still a catch 22? And is there really such a thing as a catch-22 if everyone either quits or keeps going? I’ve had a lot of 22nd miles, but no true catch-22s; I grew up with a mother who taught me that hope will always push you out from between the rock and the hard place.

My favorite number is 22 because a girl I used to dance with named Emily opened my eyes to all the 22’s in the world. “Once you start to look for it, you’ll find 22’s everywhere,” she said. Emily’s dad died when we were young, and she kept a t-shirt and a tiny black comb that smelled like him under her pillow. Her mom had a mini grocery cart that held their apples and bananas near the kitchen sink, and we used to swing from a knotted rope into the Highline Canal behind her house after Saturday dance practice when the summers brought enough rain to fill the channel to its grassy banks.

Because of Emily, I learned about cherishing objects and numbers and people. I did start to see 22’s everywhere. I was assigned number 22 for soccer. Cars in front of me had a 22 on them more often than not. I could convince myself I’d see a 22 in the next 22 minutes and I would—on the front of a house, on a sheet of wayward paper, on a digital clock. I even turned 22 once. That year, the year Katrina hit, felt like a much worse 22nd mile than the one I’m at right now. “I’ve never felt like this before” is the only way I might have put it.

I don’t remember moving  a single thing into our house in the Garden District with the dusty camping chairs and the pigeons that roosted on top of the pillars. I don’t even remember the drive back to the city after the hurricane. I wonder what it is about stress that makes us lose our memories. Sometimes I feel like I’m running after the blurry snippets of my past all day and all night in a race I’ll never finish.

People who run marathons don’t finish single trains of thought, prayers slip into daydreams, and songs become single line mantras. I’d like to do a test on marathoners and talk to them at 22 and see what they remembered. What does the brain do during all those grueling, stretched out minutes? Does it go quickly or slowly? If I can remember all the songs on my Mariah Carey tape from 8th grade, shouldn’t I remember my more current, maybe more important footfalls?

The memory is like a choosy little person with tight fists. Sometimes you can get her to open her hands, but only when you catch her unawares. I know my own memory doesn’t remember myself as well as others, but I’m glad. I love the snapshot insights that stick with me from all my favorite people. And if you gave me a choice, I’d rather be the witness than the runner.

Just after the 22nd marker, Sarah said, “Well. I have about a 5k left. I can do that.”

Since I’ve been home I’ve been thinking more in contrasts than comparisons. When I got back to work, it felt like the room was more full of stuff than when I’d left. When I put my clothes on, I realized I’ve been smelling more like mold for the last four months than I thought I had. When I thought about my grandpa, I had to shift everything a little bit to remember he’s not in his apartment anymore on a green sunken couch above the lake listening to the radio station on his TV. I wonder why it’s sometimes hard to remember that people have died, and I think it might be because so little else changes until we make an effort to take our notes–to notice, really. When I came off the plane, Colorado felt light on its feet and dewy, but I woke up the next day and, to my surprise, missed the curved spoon of a sky in Sitka and the way my boots sound when the mud sucks them down then lets them go.

Then my best friends came. We hiked up a shallow stream, set the camera timer, and tried to jump right when the shutter went off and I realized how good it is to be around a group of girls for a few days before you share your life with a man. We fixed each others’ hair and ordered flavored vodkas. We traded clothes and read magazines. It was perfectly cliché and sometimes a girl needs to live out a few magazine scenes to feel like her life is familiar again. I remember last summer, during the months with no sun, I saw a magazine photo of a woman in a white dress and I cried. This time, in Alaska, I read books about ice and realized as long as Luke lives where I do, I can do cold. Teenie sent me a long sweater and I bought expensive teas. Some days, I almost didn’t notice the rain. When I got home, the sun was nice, but I waited for Luke like light. When he got here, it was like putting on that white dress.

Last night, my mom and I pulled the flowers in towards the side of the house and draped flannel sheets over them like you would with a corpse. I bought a six pack of socks and some exfoliating soap. I read another magazine and drank wine instead of writing even though I’ve been telling myself for weeks I need to. I learned you can use a rubber band to open a screwed-tight jar. I clipped out an article on managing anxiety. I thought, for the first time in my life, I might be an anxious person, and thinking about anxiety makes me more anxious than the things that are supposed to start it. Then I laid in bed and thought of everything I’ll never do, like eat dinner on a crane, suspended 180 feet above Las Vegas, which is what I’m writing about at work, and the anxiety inched up a little higher under my heart. I thought of the flowers under my bedroom, like lumpy monsters sleeping on the porch, and I wanted to rest like that, and then I dreamt of a red boat, the color of our gardenias, that crested the mountains like it would a wave.

Sometimes I’m afraid of spending the rest of my life between two places. It’s not that here is good and there is bad or there is good and here is bad, it’s just that everything moves differently away from the sea, and here, the ceiling is always moving east. I realize the problem isn’t where I should live, it’s that I want the whole world to inhabit my immediately present world. I guess the only way I know how to do that is to read, and maybe sometimes, when I get it right, to write.

At work, the angled light coming off the tin in the window-well reminds me of Alaska’s not-quite-enoughness. Not quite enough sun, not quite enough of whatever we might need to fully process beauty or largeness.  My coworker’s black dog Bowie noses carrots across the carpet and catches my wrist in his pointy teeth. At the coffeeshop this afternoon, nubs of soft feet stick out from a stroller and try out different directions. A Van Morrison song, Indian Summer, reminds me of the way a best friend in high school moved. There is then and there is now and for me they meet in the afternoon.

I’m also up because there are more things that keep me awake than those that put me to sleep. If there were an antonym for lullaby, I would use it here. The morning is a series of stimulants and shufflings that begin with the slow, weighted creaking of the upstairs floorboards while the tenants pour their coffee, feed their old dog, Crow, and get ready to be in their boat for four days. Sometimes I can smell the slightest hints of chocolate and toast while I’m still in bed, and instead of rolling over, I lie there thinking, “is that coffee or chocolate and if I want toast, do I have to walk to the store to get some bread today?” Then I think, am I honestly thinking about this at 4 in the morning and what’s wrong with me?

Then I think about if I’ll go into town for a mocha this afternoon and if I’m in town, if I should bring my interviews to transcribe them, and if I’m doing that, I might as well go to the library and get Trespass, a book on my to-read list about the desert and a Mormon and how religion and environmentalism might save the orange canyons near Green River where I almost, one hot summer, ran out of gas, and can religion or environmentalism really save what’s still naturally orange and, come to think of it, what if I’d run out of gas?

What gets me out of bed is a “give a mouse a cookie” set of incentives, not necessarily good or bad, but so connected to memories and necessities and tasks that rely on other tasks, that my time with my brain translates into time to get away from it, so lying in bed longer is an against-the-grain, ugly option. I sling my legs out of the sheets and reach for my knee-length sweater and woolsmart socks. I start the tea. If I could be different, I would move more and think less. I would transform rhetorical questions into rhetoric. It’s getting colder, says the morning. Not yet, my summer-loving insides insist.

There’s another thing. Some mornings after the fishermen leave, I could go back to sleep if I tried hard enough to not think. But when I do force myself back to sleep, I keep having this recurring dream/state of semiconsciousness where I’m in the room, lying in bed, and I can’t move. The first time this happened to me, I thought I was paralyzed. My eyes were wide open, and one corner of the dark blue curtain was folded under itself like a bird’s wing at rest. I remember I looked at this small detail so I could test if I was awake, like I was pinching myself. I tried to lift my head, but I felt this immense weight pressing down all over me, like an invisible and immovable person had spread themselves, heavy and dead, on top of the blanket.

I tried harder to move. All I could do was shift my eyeballs from the closet to where my feet lay lumpy and lame. I seemed to go back to sleep. I opened my eyes and it happened again even though this time, I tried to wriggle from side to side to wrench myself from whatever it was that had trapped me either in a dream that looked like my room or my room that had become a frozen state of awakeness. It was nauseatingly warm and the compulsion to move was terrifyingly urgent, like I’d slept through my alarm, only it was an alarm to save the world. That bad.

The next time I opened my eyes, I hinged my upper body upwards so fast I saw little lights flitting like perforation lines on the walls and in front of the open window. These little dashes moved where my eyes moved, and my heart was banging behind my sternum, and I was thinking, I am going to keel over, and I’ve never even known what the word “keel” actually means.

After three or four of these incidences, I started looking and I found someone else who had the same experiences. She’d done an interview with Ira Glass on This American Life. I listened and it was the exact same sensations I’d had: she woke up, like a life had been pushed down on her, felt that she had lost the use of her limbs, and wrestled to get free until she either did or she woke up. It was unclear whether time or effort had resurrected her.

She, like me, has had this happen multiple times, and as you would in a lucid or recurring dream, you make yourself aware of your own awareness: you look at the folds in the curtain, you chronicle your foiled attempts at moving–the neck didn’t work, the fingertips didn’t work, nope, not the toes either–then you say to yourself, I am stronger than this feeling and I’m getting up now, no, for real, right … NOW. But that doesn’t work, either. The word mire sounds as seriously stuck as you feel.

I wanted to find some commiseration or some tricks for untangling myself online, but the interview made no conclusion as to whether the girl had been asleep or awake. She’s from a Mexican family and a relative, who seemed to be religious or a carrier of myths or both, told her, “Oh. That heaviness? That’s the devil sitting on your bed.” Oh. That. So much for consolation!

I haven’t had one of those dreams(?) for a while now because I don’t stay in bed long enough to tempt them. There’s too much day, good or bad, to be had. None of these feelings are really recent. I think we are born to the morning or the night. I used to watch Rocky and Bullwinkle before the sun or my parents rose. I found out my friend did, too, and she became my best one. I’ve always felt a sisterhood with women out walking or drinking coffee or bending over for the paper in the low-lying blue, undeterred by the silence and aloneness of early morning.

I am, on the other hand, jealous of Luke, who falls asleep in public and snores like an old truck. My life would be easier if I had a relationship with sleep like I do with the dawn.

This morning, I was lying there thinking about my dying grandpa and the trash I need to bring down to the harbor because of the bear ordinance (no trash out until Tuesday). I guess it’s a good thing that the mind makes no priorities of its musings–the brain brings issues of all weights to the surface, one after another. It’s the decisions we make that organize them. Love and death and garbage are what brought me into today. I’ve gotten some small things done and thought about bigger ones. I’ve been awake for six hours and it’s only 10 o’clock.

Every time we came up to a pile of scat, I’d ask, “What do you think?” or “How new are you?” or nudged it with the tip of my shoe to see if it would steam or break into days-old pieces. Natalie would say, “It’s ok, I saw that scat last week,” or “Can’t really tell.” She’s braver than me. I don’t want to be afraid of bears, but I am.

We saw one last week, small and dark as a wet rock, slipping his tongue around the reeds at the estuary. That bear didn’t scare me because we watched him from a bridge and he wanted to eat plants, but the hidden ones, the ones who eat me head-first in my imagination, do. Like the sow with her four cubs, plucking salmonberries in a friends’ backyard who I know would shred me just to protect her young, or the one who knocked a woman off her bike, pinned her down, then ran away, or the one my neighbor warned me about when she flung the door open and said, “Get inside, don’t you know there’s been a bear on this street all afternoon?!”

Thing is, I wasn’t even thinking about bears until she said that and bravery must be innate, like ignorance, until questioned by something bigger. I was on my way home from swimming laps, swinging my bag of shampoo, devil-may-care, but now I scurry home from the gym and check my hands for honey strings before I leave the house.

I know that groups of three or more (that can be three humans or two humans and one dog) have never been attacked by grizzlies. Bears would rather not bother with humans, it’s just that when you come out of nowhere and startle their status quo, they’re apt to start something right back. I understand that. I am afraid of stepping on bear toes. The trails we take through the trees are on the cusp of crossing some sacred line. I can feel it, like fog. We might even cross it. The scary thing is how much we don’t know we don’t know.

There are more bears in town this summer than this town’s ever seen. Healthy sows have adopted neglected cubs because the rivers are dry and the bears’ lifesource, salmon running upstream to spawn, are late. The bears come hungry and begrudged. They leave hunted. The police have shot at least one already.

The times this summer that I’ve actually seen bears (in the flesh, not tearing my flesh in the narrative my imagination illogically returns to), when they’re standing on their hind legs and sniffing the tips of tall grass, I love them. Their hulk and silvery coats, their toes which can be larger than my entire foot. Their hangdog lips and gleaming teeth, eyes the color and sharpness of copper fish hooks. I keep hoping I’ll see one while we’re hiking even though I know I might crap my pants and fiddle so much with the bear spray, I’ll shoot it straight at myself.

I wish the police would leave well enough alone. I wish I knew what well enough alone meant. Seems to me that well is always enough. Seems to me that bears only make big trouble for people who haven’t been careful. I secretly (and I know, stupidly) wish I were Natalie’s friend who had her arm gummed by a grizzly before her boyfriend yelled, “Hey bear! Get outta here!”

I’m sure there were bears who saw us while we walked the other day, but we didn’t see them. The Chariot crunched the gravel, and the twins made happy little gargles under their polka dot blanket. Natalie said she’d like to think that the sows understand she has babies, too, and they won’t mess with us.

When we hike, I mistake everything lumpy and dark for the hunched back of a brown bear about to rear up for a false charge. Natalie mistakes confidence for safety. No matter. Moving and pretending are two things we do more effectively at steeper levels of resistance, and maybe I like hiking so much because it affords us the pleasure of holding tight to our illusions.

I have gotten used to reaching for Liam’s little hands above wet pants and milky puddles and listening to Sara’s sharp and soft insights on being a fisherman’s wife. Leaving friends is never easy and it’s especially hard when it’s raining and they live on an island without a phone.

When I got to the loading dock, the same oompa-loompa-ish man who patrolled the gangway in Homer asked me for my ID and boarding ticket, and I asked him if it would be as rolly as our ride three days prior. “Never can tell,” he sang with a voice that seemed to come out his nose, so I went up the slick plank to my narrow room, 22C, the same one Sara and I had last week on 20-foot seas that sent a chorus of barf noises from the bathrooms and a captain with a pad of bandages rushing past who said, “We’ve got another bleeder on level two!”

Sara was in our cabin and I was upstairs watching cold drinks crash when the intercom told the passengers to remain seated for at least 15 minutes and to steer clear of detached objects. When I went to check on her, she admitted she’d already planned an escape route for every person on board, while I had only planned on the stroke I’d swim in the event that the whole ship went down (freestyle). Sara reminds me of my own mom; they both exhibit that rare, instinctual compassion that comes with being thoughtful mothers.

The weather is better on this long leg back to Sitka. From my porthole, I watch the waves for hours at a time, alternating between the gray and its foggy lid, and the two books I have going: My Antonia (“Half the sky was chequered with black thunderheads, but all the west was luminous and clear: in the lightning flashes it looked like deep blue water, with the sheen of moonlight on it and the mottled part of the sky was like marble pavement, like the quay of some splendid seacoast city, doomed to destruction, and all about us we could hear the felty beat of the raindrops on the soft dust of the farmyard”) and Speak, Memory (“How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness to a single individual recollection and its expression in words!”). One takes place in the plains and one somewhere far away, and this is where I live.

Outside, the waves are dark gray, rolling like a snapped sheet in slow motion, and right up under the lacy fringe where the water breaks is a ribbon of vivid turquoise, the color of the warm water on the Maya Riviera. Today, we were supposed to see Mt. Elias, the 18,800-foot peak above Yakutat, but instead, there is only the charcoal unrolling itself from under the boat and blending with the edge of the gauze-like fog. For dinner, I eat a gingerbread man and a green apple that tastes like Anchorage.

In Yakutat, I follow a road past lily pads in a still pond to Fat Grandma’s—a dusty store of t-shirts and candles and leaning shelves where the woman behind the counter calls, “Swap out a book and take one for free!” Before I leave, she says she’s getting on the boat, too, and corrects herself, yelling: “Anyone in the store can take any books for free!” The only books I see are Nora Roberts and John Grisham and the shiny kinds with lots of moonlight and the authors’ names bigger than the book titles, so I decline.

A little further down the road at a jam-packed general store, I buy two bars of soap and a mango, but they don’t have knives, so I spend a half a mile trying to pry it open with a plastic fork before two tines crack off inside. Back on the boat, a very old man comes up to where I’m sitting (I’ve found a knife and am pulling long strips of juicy mango off the blade with my teeth), and he says–slower than I’ve ever heard the word–“Pap-eye-ah.” I say, “Mango.” He says, faster, “Papaya.” And we leave it at that.

I am trying to not think about the work this coming year will bring, but I can’t. While we weave through blue canyons and watch fog rise steadily, smoky, over rivers of pastel-green glacial ice, I am thinking about the book I’m supposed to write. It’s not about here. It’s about New Orleans, but I can’t be there, and I don’t know where to go so I can write it. I look at lit cabins and talk to people who say they would move to Alaska in a second if they could, but I don’t know where I’m supposed to live or if I’ll ever decide on one place as home. This worries me a little bit, not in a way that preoccupies me, but in a way that makes me feel like I’m trying to remember a word and it’s almost in my mouth, and then it’s gone.

On the narrow highway outside of Anchorage while the dogs were baying in the back, I saw this black blocky shape galloping across the mud flats the tide had left behind. “What is that?” I asked Joan, who veers into oncoming traffic anytime her eyes leave the road. She crossed left over the double yellow, then skidded into the gravel on the right-side shoulder. “I think it’s a bear! It IS a bear!” Joan’s anxious hands moved up the wheel, back down, back up. We watched the bear some more, and I could tell Joan was getting worried, which is what she does, which is why she’s rescued four dogs and a husband and a house with raw floors.

Through the long shoots of fireweed and alder on the highway’s edge, we watched him sprint back and forth on a slippery strip between the ocean and the smaller ocean closer to the shore. He was on a stranded sandbar, pounding across an almost silver, ice-white island. For a second, looking at the water and the bear under the heavy fog, I thought it was winter. I think I kind of forgot where I was.

The bear threw his front paws down, brought his head in great swooping motions from the ground up towards the sky. We sat and watched. We couldn’t really do much. He looked panicked and like he was trying to get somewhere and couldn’t. I wondered how he’d gotten himself out there. I reminded myself: you are in Alaska, you got yourself here. This felt satisfying and deliberate, unlike writing or thinking about writing. I haven’t written for weeks because being around other writers sometimes does that to me.

Tomorrow, Sara and I take the ferry from Homer to Kodiak where her family lives. I miss the sun and my mom. I love the sound the bananas make, a weighty thunk, when Joan tosses them at her chickens. I miss the green parrots in the trees on Jefferson Street that I never noticed until my fourth year living in Louisiana. I love to watch the eagles here ride the current above timber line like they have nowhere to go. I will miss Alaska when I leave, like everywhere I have spent time, and I wonder if going more and more places means leaving more pieces of ourselves behind. I heard that people given only one option are on the whole happier than those who have too many.

Joan and her husband have folded some blankets and packed their F-250 with bread and red wine and their pile of hyper dogs. I keep looking through their books and stealing small handfuls of cashews from a jar. I decide on Oprah Magazine so I don’t have to commit to anything too serious, but inside an article by Michael Cunningham says, “A writer should always feel like he’s in over his head.”

The kitchen still smells like the halibut omelets we had this morning. Bursts of wind make this house shift and click and a calico cat slips between the rooms like my being here means she needs to keep secrets. I think of the bear whose movements might have been pure excitement, like the ones of Joan’s dogs, and instead of hoping he’d make it back to where he’s supposed to be, I realize (with a little jealousy) he’s probably been there all along.

On Sunday, I went to hear Gary Snyder speak. He was smaller and older than I thought he would be, and talked about life in Japan and a commune in northern California where people passed a talking stick in large circles to clear up arguments. Snyder was wearing this light blue shirt whose arm-lengths were crisp-creased, pressed by a dry-cleaner, maybe, and I couldn’t quite picture him pounding redwood poles into the frames of homes. He didn’t talk like a poet, like he was downtrodden with meanings, which I liked. He had on a fishing vest, and read a simple haiku about dew that had the ending “and yet…and yet.”

Someone in the audience asked him if his ideas were enough for newer generations and he said, “You can’t tell kids what to do, but given enough years, a lot of them will come home and engage again,” which is what I did, I think, when I moved back to Denver last year. He also said that in case kids don’t come back, which is a fear I have of having my own, that “People will use the work you’ve done, one way or another.”

Then, these two Tlingit women, one whom I know from school, stood up and handed around a basket into which thank you notes and abalone shells went for the Symposium starters. The one in a magenta turtleneck had native earrings and a long, old ponytail and they danced when she looked both ways, then said, “There is no language for true gratitude.”

This is a harbor with women who grow their hair long and gray, scour beaches for smooth glass, understand that sometimes there are no words for what we need to say.

At the tops of the hikes here, there’s so much to see between the thumbs of fog and lumps of islands, it’s hard to make progress with your thoughts. The way down is worse because it hurts. On days when there’s too much rain, I go to the gym, where there’s a group of women who do aerobics in purple spandex, kicking out their heels and making chicken wings of their hangy white flesh. They do this right under the weights where the rest of us giggle and try to do more serious repetitions. Occasionally, one of the jazzercizers will scream a “Woo!” or a “Oh yeah!” with her fists in the air before the whole cluster grapevines with new gusto in the other direction. So the hikes are hard and the gym is hard, too. Otherwise, I’d just be sitting here alternating between work and my own work and where to put it and creamy chai tea.

We are staying with Nancy and Brent, who own a boat called the Dipper, and fish for days at a time. Nancy lives in shorts and fleece sweatshirts and hangs her brown and maroon laundry on long lines that make a checkered ceiling over the backyard. We cook salmon and albacore, rosemary bread and asparagus over a pile of wood on the dirt ground, resting the grill grate on white marble gravestones.  The man who used to live here made all the headstones for the cemetery at the end of the street, and left the misprinted ones back here, buried under the soil under the bed where I sleep.

The more I’m in this town, the more realistic life here seems. You lug your dinner home from the hull of an aluminum boat, you cook it on the names of people who’ve done it before, and in the morning, the rain has washed the soot off all the stones and they’re renewed to their purpose. Maybe it’s a Disney motif, but the “circle of life” theme plays out here with such purpose, the days feel like they are a different version of “functioning” than they are in bigger places.

Last year, in Anchorage, we had this guest speaker named Oscar Kawagley, a man born between the old Alaskan world of folklore and the new American world of institutionalized education (his grandmother didn’t want him to go to school because she thought it would make him dumb), who talked about the construction of Yupiaq homes. These dwelling places, still lived in up here, are made without nails or spikes. Each piece fits into the next perfectly–a series of sliding tongues and grooves.

What I remember most about his talk was that each part of the heated, sustainable house has a name. Each piece of cedar, each element to the fire pit is given a specific title so that it renders a specific function complete. The Yupiaqs believed that teaching happened outside of schools, that you teach the very thing itself, not just about it. There is a fish camp up here where kids can go to learn how to tan hides and can their food. The natives believe in the role of elders and environment, echoes I’ve been hearing in this town as I research its roots and talk to its white-haired characters for my work with the Conservation Society. Still, the division between the people who were here first and the people like me, who weren’t, is palpable and impossible to attend to appropriately.

Even though a new hydro plant will bring renewable energy to a town that will perish if it keeps using petroleum, to make the factory means destroying thousands of acres of trees that will take several human lifetimes to regrow. As a nod to the Tlingits, who might never have needed electricity had the whites never introduced it, the uprooted trees will be made into boats and totems for their incensed communities. The late-night drunks in the town are stumbling natives, the man who plays the ukelele at a clean, white cafe owned by a baker from Colorado sings with the sadness of a thousand years.

On the water, the division between cultures is less clear. Last night, I took a trip out to the West Chichagof Wilderness where the curve of a humpback whale surfaced and lower repeatedly right alongside the boat. His split tail fanned out like a flippant farewell each time he dove for food. A sow and three bear cubs stood on their hind legs and sniffed the air when they heard our motors approach, and later, we saw more bears, this time an injured mother and her two older babies, who lumbered through the tall grass and bumped their shoulders against each other to get the next bite. A friend told me you can make tea out of the lychen that gives the cliffs here a green and black bathtub ring. We ate local Theobroma chocolate bars with pecans and raisins and squinted into eagles’ nests in the tops of protected trees.

It is amazing to me to see that the world, like this, still exists. And, despite our human missteps, we can still be a part of it.

It strikes me that I might never have any idea who she is. Inside her truck are her things: a huge brown teddy bear, another lifeless stuffed toy with only one ear hanging out of the cup holder, pink and purple ribbons and bags, and sentimental country music CD cases.  We have lunch with her friend Mike who’s also in the Coast Guard and either gay or in love with Krystyna. I can’t tell. I’m not sure it matters, but what does is I am not used to being around strangers at such lengths anymore, and I feel like I’m stuck in the middle of being young and not old.

We run into Ed at a breakfast diner at the edge of town as I’m squeegying yoke off my plate with a piece of wheat toast, and he doesn’t make eye contact with me once. He says, “You’re 26 going on what? 20?” There’s an edge there that had been, apparently, smoothed out by the boat before. He has his laptop, he needs to find wireless, and he might see us later in the day after he hikes and writes. Urgency: there’s that too, in the men who come on short trips to take in all of Alaska.

Over the water, an eagle and a raven and float planes swoop down and fight for space. A 12-story cruise ship puffs its way out of town with a man on top who’s running laps against the muscles of the wind. When we make it back to the house, full on breakfast and a lunch of blackened halibut tacos and beer, we sleep hard and sweaty on two big green couches while the sun makes it slow way west over mountainous islands with ribbons left by boats in-between. The smallness of being me returns throughout the day while I watch the sky play with the waning light.

When I wake up, I walk for a half-an-hour down to a small marina with a hamburger and shakes shack and a few plump, pink little girls who are looking for a towel. From the boardwalk, thousands of needlefish catch the light on their silver scales, darting over each other and back in a choreographed blob of pivots and decisions. I’ve heard they stick together like that so they appear to be one big fish. I drop a penny into their circular system and they spread like tumbling pick-up sticks.

Getting back to the ferry for the next boarding call means waiting on the netted ramp for three hours until the sun has almost come back up. I call my mom and tell her I’ve met a friend and didn’t have to hang out with the homeless people in Ketchikan. Krystyna’s back is against the driver’s side window and her knees are pulled up to her chest. It is almost 3 in the morning, but filling time this early is the same as filling it late. I realize that some people’s stories mean little to nothing to me, but this girl whom I barely know and all these men and all these people in all these remote places and myself, we all want at least one thing, which is to be listened to as someone who’s distinct, and that’s worth not falling asleep.

When we push heavy into the sea, the air comes pulling through the top deck, cold and clean, and I remember now what Alaska feels like. It feels like you’re so alone, you really need to be near people you love.

Bellingham’s quaintness becomes a cluster of khaki behind us and soon there is nothing but silver and islands and sun. It doesn’t set until after 10, and in the late light, I’m talking to a man about writing and volcanoes, which I’ve been thinking about for weeks.

Before I left Denver, a friend was telling me that Old Faithful in Yellowstone is 60,000 years overdue for erupting. This has terrified me since I heard it. “If it does erupt, you better be halfway across the world,” he said, “because the ash cloud is going to block out the sun and kill most of the existing population.”

It’s easy to forget this omnipotence when the radio works and the car crosses bridges and you can close your bathroom window when the breeze is a little too cool. But when you’re on a boat or when you get talking about the tiny string attaching you to a furiously rotating and changing earth, things are not so controlled or calm, they’re horrible and scary-pretty and bigger than anything you’ve ever thought about, muchless done.

Hanging over the fourth floor deck of the M/V Columbia, this man asks why I’m going to Sitka because he’s going there, too. I’m going there to live and fish and try harder at being there than I did last year; he’s going there to hunt a volcano.

“I drove from North Carolina to summit Mount Edgecumbe,” he says. I’m surprised because Edgecumbe is no Everest. It sits northwest of Baranof Island like an overturned cereal bowl with a top of snow running over its rim and down its slopes in long, wide drips. This guy’s friend is a vulcanologist who flies into bigger monsters like Redoubt and Vesuvius, testing rocks and snapping shots of their powdery slides. Edgecumb takes only a day to climb without equipment, and I’m impressed someone would make a trip for its humble height.

Later, in the cocktail lounge straight out of a 1970’s Joan Didion novel, with gold and black wallpaper, hundreds of globular lightbulbs hanging bare from the black ceiling over booths with backs so low, your shoulderblades touch the person’s at the table behind you, I find the same volcano man again.

We have Alaskan ambers in two frosted mugs while the sun flashes through the window seams and rows of seats in the forward lounge. I want to know everything about volcanoes, and Ed seems to know everything about them and wishes to know nothing about me. He talks, I listen. It is often this way with men who are attracted to Alaska; they are attracted not only to the grandeur of the place, but also to their own grandeur as they attempt to conquer the state’s features. I have felt like an amateur in many ways for my whole life, but I feel an exterior insistence on my own inexperience even more when I’m in Alaska because I’m young and I’m a woman. I wonder if anyone ever feels like a professional or if they just talk themselves into feeling like one.

When I ask Ed about Old Faithful, he says it’s on a ridge that has been always moving west. “It’s nowhere near erupting,” he says. “Geology is slow.” His accent is southern with a metal north-of-the-deep-south edge. “People don’t realize that it’s much slower than we can even comprehend. Measuring it and predicting it doesn’t really show us anything.”

When we dock at a town where I can use my computer, I find that The National Park Service would beg to differ: their measurements do not detect any pre-eruption matter. Nonetheless, one of the most frequently (absurdly) asked questions is: What is being done by the NPS to prevent a possible Old Faithful eruption?

We decide to have dinner with a few other travelers in the nice restaurant on the back of the boat for the full experience of being onboard. While we wait for our “Tour of the Sea” dinners, an otter slides by, slick and chocolate, his hands folded on his chest contentedly, and looks straight up at our eyes above the white tablecloths. There is just the heaving of the boat’s breath as we look out at the pink and blue and bald eagles cutting through it. Ed shows me a picture of his two daughters, around my age. I ask him if it’s hard having daughters and he says yes. Women are, I think, can be more difficult than men.

Then there’s Ellis, a fisherman who lives on San Juan Island during the year and fishes for 20 days at a time in Wrangell, who never stops talking. He’s next to me from the minute I start drinking my tea at 7am til the time it’s empty, and I drink slowly. He must be in his late 60’s, but he has this boyish glee about boats and the fish he’s caught as a gillnetter and the trips he’s taken on this very same route in a 38-foot skiff. He shows me his calloused fingertips from picking knots and talks faster when he talks about storms. I am almost entirely quiet for two hours, while he talks about the Fish and Game folks who came and ripped his floorboards up to see if he was properly disposing of waste. With his nephew, we walk to the other side of the ship to see a preserved 102-pound salmon mounted on the wall, and under its belly, they tell each other, but they’re really telling me, the stories they’ve known for a long time: the biggest one they caught, the one that got away, all the others that didn’t.

There is a lot of pride onboard, but the more people I talk to, I realize there is little to no bitterness on these boats and I can take hours of cheerful braggery over the slightest bit of cynicism. I meet a young woman around my age with dark brown hair in two long braids who offers to put my stuff in her truck and let me hang out with her and her friend in Ketchikan where I have 20 hours and my four months of stuff and nothing to do. Getting off the boat feels final and a little bit unfair when the new people with their luggage bump down the gangway with all their own things rolling against mine.

It makes you sit with things you haven’t sat with in a while:

Age. Yourself. Yourself at your age and all the ages you’ve seen in others but haven’t felt even though you know you will one day and some numbers might not necessarily feel as good as now. Hunger. If hunger continues to increase. For different things—others, aloneness, faith, hope, love, and snacks.

My parents are driving me to the boat that will take me to Alaska. We stop at Manzanita, Oregon, a little town with a little hotel where two drunk women open my bottle of wine on the balcony and scream at me about Sitka. What are my favorite things to do there? the one with tight orange curls asks.

“Fish for salmon,” I say. “Hike Harbor Mountain.” These things are true. I realize how simple some answers can be when the right questions are asked.

“Real salmon?” the one from New York says. Her teeth are turning the color of prunes like mine do.  The sun has just dissolved into the navy blue sea and behind us a salmon-colored line stretches between sharp rocks and the silhouettes of beach-combing birds. The ocean’s roar is quiet and continuous. I want to do something with it. Drink it, maybe.

I go downstairs to get my bag, and in the shrubbery between the beach and the road, a tall coyote fixes me with dark eyes. I thought they’d be yellow and he would run. He just stands there. I want to stare at him forever and see what he’ll do, but then my dad starts clicking at him like he’s a dog, and he bounces out towards the waves.

In the morning, the tracks are everywhere: pencil-thin circles of them, then straight lines, squiggles, and separated sunken ones like the animals had a little dance party in the sand.

On the way here, I read Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. I can’t decide if I want oceans or mountains or just horses in a low field of long grass that turns to flowers in the spring. Some have shrunk and some have grown, but some of my dreams haven’t changed since I was a little girl. Petterson says: “The movement first and then the comprehension.” This is a good lesson, and I think it’s about approaching the things of dreams.

My dad likes to read every sign we pass. Salt water taffy. Shiatsu. The Human Bean. A Gypsy’s Whimsy. My mom likes to make comparisons: Portland’s tight streets are like New Orleans, Astoria’s hills dump you into intersections like Galena’s, the long log of driftwood we pass on the beach looks like the one her father brought home one day, out of nowhere, and covered with a squiggly piece of glass. It became a coffee table. It became trash when the kids kept breaking it and my grandma said, “no more.”

I can tell when my mom is thinking about her parents. I wonder if memories are the movement or the comprehension part of the Petterson equation or a little of both. Maybe we all have different ways of processing beauty and breaking it down so it makes more sense.

On 101, we pass crematories and creameries, a tree farm with thousands of trunks planted on a perfect and dizzying diagonal, halls of shade, and rows of auburn light.

I can tell that my dad wants to take pictures of everything. This is how he comprehends movement. Later, he will move the movements again, shifting the f-stop and aperture on the computer. He likes long shadows, the contrasts between sky and land. He yanks the car to the other side of the road and leaves the door open as he approaches the lip of the Pacific, crunching down on his knees and aiming the camera almost clear of the shore, up to where the clouds have been stretching thin all morning. On one spindly bridge, while he’s driving, he holds the camera up near the rearview mirror and videotapes our car just barely staying on the right side of the dividing line. My mom shakes her head and looks out the window at the white birds rising and falling in the wake.

I drive and read and see, backseat drive and write. Bright yellow bushes explode from the green. Two horses burst into movement and their tails follow. The ocean stays steady, moving, then moving back into itself.

I love how much we trust this type of travel. Engineers must have known the best road, though long, is the one the sea already chose.