That time I almost passed out while banding lambs.
Read MoreThe Handsome Man in the Very Clean Car
When I think about the things that can happen to a woman, I think about the stranger who pulled up to the bus stop on 19th Avenue in San Francisco as I waited in the rain. He was handsome in a nondescript way, with close-cut hair and eyes that seemed warm. I was twenty years old, still a country bumpkin, insecure in the way only twenty-year-old girls can be. I had been waiting for the bus that would take me back to my college dorm for almost an hour.
“Get in, I’ll give you a ride,” he said. I was flattered. I didn’t think, as I should have thought, that no trustworthy stranger meets girls by trying to pick them up at a bus stop on the highway.
I don’t remember, 18 years later, if I was anywhere close to getting in the car, or if I just wanted an insecure girl’s taste of gallantry, to look him in the eyes and see someone wanting to make me happy. I wasn’t dumb. I knew what happened to women who accepted rides from strangers. But I do remember what made me remove my hand from the window and step back onto the curb.
“Your car…is very clean…” I said, suspicion and fear running in chill waves down my back.
“It’s a rental,” he said, his smile growing just a fraction too wide.
When he drove away I played the game with myself that young people do, checking the facts against my feelings and wondering if I’d missed something. What if it was a meet cute? What if that stranger was the love of my life? No, I thought, boarding the MUNI and sitting down amongst coughing strangers, my breath misting the window as the bus lurched back towards downtown, I made the right call.
I can’t explain what it was about the interior of that car that gave me pause, or why the memory of it even now makes the back of my neck tingle. Maybe it was the antiseptic clean of the backseat and the cargo area behind it, every nap of its carpet brushed in the same direction. Maybe it was a subterranean smell wafting from the man himself, rising behind his gleaming teeth, the smell of anticipation.
But, as I say, I think of him often, and about the cluster of strangers at that bus stop with me, watching me lean into an open window, get a whiff of danger and back away. It could have gone a different direction. I could have been a different girl, it could have been a different day, he might have had a patient dog sitting in the back seat, signaling to someone young and naïve like me that this was someone safe.
“No,” one of the strangers might have said when they called the police tip line later that month. “I couldn’t tell you what he looked like. I thought she must have known him. I thought I heard her say, ‘Your car is so clean,’ before he drove away.”
The Best of Us
The work will always be there; there will never be a shortage of good work to be done, or people who need you to do it.
Read MoreDefensible Space
Raindrops falling on late summer dust make a particular sound. I woke up this morning thinking I heard it, but it was only of Dad’s sprinkler as he tried to get a little moisture into the ground around the house. I worked on my own defensible space last night, trimming overgrown branches away from the roof of my cabin, filling tubs and buckets full of water on the porch. Dry lightning is predicted for the next two days.
It’s been a terrible year for our corner of the county, where when I was a child it would rain for weeks on end every winter. This year the rain came late and didn’t last long. The last few weeks have been hot, steal your breath hot, but this morning the sky had a scrim of clouds over it, their bellies dark with promise, disaster or both.
We have friends and cousins on the ranch now for rifle season and they, too, are girding for disaster. They are all mostly older, in their 60s and 70s, but they have gathered tools and one has turned his old hunting truck into a water tender. We stood together a while and watched the old water tank fill from a garden hose.
“Like watching paint dry,” his wife said, and I laughed an agreement, flickering my face to the sky. The morning had turned to afternoon and the clouds had turned to gauze, but the air still sat on top of us, pushing down with its heavy ominous heat.
Last night Dad and I drove out to where he’d parked the grader so we could move it closer to the house, ready to scrape the ground if the hills caught fire. Like most of his tools, it’s a vintage machine, the tread of its massive tires worn to nubs. We pulled the tarp aside and he tinkered with the controls. It took two of us, pushing together on the back tires, to force the machine into a lurch down the small incline, then he got behind the controls again and, with a belch of blue smoke, the grader ambled down the road towards home.
I followed in his wake in the side-by-side, a welcome breeze blowing up the ridge to ruffle my hair. The grader goes just slow enough for me to think and worry, the things I’m best at. I live in Eureka now. A few months ago, I left my fulltime job so I could do things like this — follow my dad around, think, worry and write.
There’s a lot happening on the ranch this week. A two year-long project that brought together CAL Fire, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, The Save the Redwoods League, the Mattole Restoration Council and the Mattole Salmon Group is entering its final phase. If all goes well and nothing catches on fire, Wednesday will see helicopters rise into the sky above the ranch, toting bundles of logs. The logs were cut as part of a fuel break intended to protect wildlife habitat from fire; they’ll be dropped into some local creeks to create more habitat for salmon.
We’re all excited about the helicopters, but I’m thinking about all the people showing up, the biologists and project managers and choker setters, people who love my dad and might get close enough to breathe on him. I consider following him around with a cattle prod and a spray bottle of disinfectant, but I doubt he’ll put up with that.
So, I watch the sky and wait, and ponder the kind of world where the people I respect most – tough-as-nails ranchers and veterans who can skin a buck faster than I can paint my toes – face existential threat from an errant sneeze. I think about the word impossible and what it means. I grew up in the 90s, a logger’s daughter in the time of the Timber Wars, when the watchword was clean streams, clear creeks for salmon. The science has evolved. The people have evolved. Now we’re doing impossible things together. Somewhere else in the world, someone else is doing the impossible thing that needs to get done to get us through COVID-19. They’re inventing a vaccine, drafting a policy, teaching their kids, scrubbing their hands and showing up to work at a hospital.
I’ve always been struck by my dad’s approach to the impossible. You wouldn’t think, for example, that a 75-year-old man and his middle-aged daughter would be able to push start a 20-ton machine. You wouldn’t ask them to or expect them to or —if you were writing the best laid plan for fire prevention —depend on them to. But this is what being on the land is much of the time: A series of tasks that often feel hard or impossible but must be done anyway. And so, you do your best with what you have for as long as you can. And sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes it rains.
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This column originally appeared in the Ferndale Enterprise.
Half Full
He still drives the 4-wheel drive Jeep he drove to highschool in 1960. Thanks to consistent maintenance and taking it slow, they’re both chugging along just fine, thanks for asking.
Read MoreGo Ahead and Be Sad
For the last 10 years or so, I have been calling myself an athlete. It’s a very grand title for a middle-aged woman who has never run a complete mile on pavement, who has been fighting with her body since she tried her first “miracle diet” at 11 years old, who regularly goes mountain-biking with her family and vapor-locks at the top of small hills, afraid to put her feet on the pedals, let go of the brakes and coast with momentum. The word athlete connotes skill, physical fitness and daring. I don’t have those things. What I do have, and am slowly building, is persistence. More days than not I put on an athlete’s clothes and shoes and do the things that athletes do — I work my muscles, cultivate new skills, create pain to create growth.
I am often sad, and I find it hilarious. The world is very sad right now. It’s a tragicomedy. It’s horrifying. And I am alright, which makes me feel guilty, and the guilt makes me feel sad, and I am off caroming into the hilarity of it again, the way you do when you take a large spill and find out you’re intact and there’s nothing to do but laugh with relief. It’s a real small problem, having to qualify your sadness with the words, “But I’m doing okay. I’m employed and my family is healthy and I might be a little lonely but it’s so rural where I live that i can go running every other day without wearing a mask. Other people have it a lot worse. I should just stop complaining about being sad.” Yeah, I do that daily. And the other people I talk to, okay, not to be reductive but —truthfully— the women I talk to, they say more or less the same thing. “I feel awful because the world is screwed up and we have no idea what’s going to happen next but there are people who have it much much worse than me.”
Girl, I’ve got nothing for you.
If you feel cowardly and unproductive saying you’re sad and scared, well, I feel the same way. Being sad and scared isn’t the way we’re supposed to approach the world if we want to change it, or so I’ve been told. A person with more confidence than me would pep you up by saying that resilient people find ways to cultivate joy despite all odds, and that scared is an anagram for sacred and that there’s some holy lesson in feeling this shitty. But I don’t think that’s true.
We’re living a human condition. You’re going to be sad, and you’re going to feel sorry for yourself. And you’re going to do things that are productive but feel pointless, like putting on your shoes and brushing your teeth and sitting down to work. And you’re going to do things that feel like throwing a glass of water on a housefire, like donating money or calling friends or buying lunch to go at the restaurant you love and want to keep open. And it won’t feel like enough on most days, because in the face of the Unknown there is no Enough. And at some point your condition will slide from feeling sad and guilty to something else. Maybe even joy. Because that, too, is the human condition. Nothing — good or bad — lasts forever.
There was a belief I used to have about self-improvement. I don’t think I — or any of the self improvement “experts” I read — really ever said it out loud, but it was baked into our approach. The belief was that discipline and internal order could align a chaotic world. It’s why we count calories, declutter, find people or politicians who reinforce our worldview, embrace guilt as productivity.
Running should feel like that, but it doesn’t. I don’t run because I’m in search of some way to make the world make sense, I run because I’m an athlete. An imperfect athlete with a fat dog who hasn’t quite mastered a bunny hop on their mountain bike, but an athlete none the less. The best advice I ever got about running came from a friend who told me it’s not about physical prowess. It is, in fact, a mental game, one where your body wants to give up but your brain keeps you going, saying things like, “I can run on tired legs” or “My lungs are, in fact, meant to feel this way.” Athletes, as it turns out, are supposed to feel like they’re dying some of the time.
You can survive this without feeling gratitude. You can change the world without cultivating joy. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in both gratitude and joy, but i also believe in feeling sad. Because sadness is a human condition. Go ahead and feel sad until you feel something else. You’re a human, doing what humans do, and this thing we’re all in is a marathon, not a sprint.
In Praise of Slutty Reading
There are books to buy, and books to read. There are books to shelve by genre or by subject, rows of matching author names like tombstones in a family graveyard, biographies and autobiographies kissing in mutual admiration.
There are pet systems and pet hobbies for your taxonomy. Top shelf: The series your mother lent you to read when you have time, perched in plain sight so she will know you know you should start it soon. Below, Malcolm X stares at Barbara Ehrenreich. A children’s series leans haphazard against the annotated copy of the author’s first draft.
There are the shelves of paperback mysteries waiting for time to obscure their murderers again. A hardbound copy of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories migrates from its place next to Charles Dickens to sit stuffily next to Agatha Christie. Below, witty Austen presses cheeks against wild Bronte like boarding school friends tempting each other to mischief.
There is a particular joy in reorganizing a personal library, mixed with a particular guilt. There are more books coming in the mail. There are more books bought and unread than books I will ever read. So many are aspirational books – smart and dense literature, historical nonfiction, neuroscience. Those could be borrowed from the public library instead of purchased in a burst of fickle passion.
There is no better reading than slutty reading — indiscriminate vacation reading, the kind you do when you’re in a tourist town and find a shelf of abandoned airport best sellers in a motel lobby. I never would have read the biography of Michael Alig, the travels of Bill Bryson or anything by Maeve Binchy if it weren’t for the nil desperandum of having strangers choose my pleasure for me. Aspirational books can’t scratch that itch. I read for pleasure in the hour before sleep, and the pleasure is only heightened when I cheat on what I “should” be reading with mass market horror or a romance novel.
A nonfiction book about the 1918 flu pandemic sits on my nightstand, the bookmark waiting five chapters in. It is an excellent book. I bought it three months before the coronavirus pandemic, and picked it up because I felt I “should” two weeks ago. I have really enjoyed it so far. I’m not reading it. I’m reading a battered paperback I found tucked behind the Kierkegaard in my childhood bedroom. I should sell the Kierkegaard but I always think back to my Existentialism professor, and how I told him I would keep my books from the class to reread.
“Everyone says they’re going to reread Kierkegaard,” he said gloomily. “I don’t know one student who has.”
Someday I’ll defy him, but right now there’s Lord of the Far Island, a gothic mystery/romance novel I didn’t know I owned. It’s the tale of Ellen, a dark-haired, headstrong woman who’s invited by a mysterious benefactor to visit his island estate in remote Cornwall. It was written by Eleanor Hibbert under her penname Victoria Holt. Hibbert, born in 1906, wrote more than 200 books across three genres. She lived through the 1918 flu pandemic, World Wars I and II and countless other calamities before dying aboard a cruise ship in 1993 and being buried at sea. She knew how to live, she knew how to write, and she knew what people wanted.
My copy of Lord of the Far Island is an ugly duckling – missing a cover, dogeared with a mysterious pink stains. Someone has scrawled, “hope you enjoy the book” in loopy, childish handwriting on the back cover. Its bookmark is a page from a different desecrated book, a Western I believe. It should feel dirty to read this book, to prop it on the shelf next to last year’s New York Times bestsellers with their pristine dustjackets. Oh, but it feels so good. I can’t feel guilty today. Guilt is the habit of time’s petty dictators, for those who want to control a world that will always resist it. In times like these, each act of joy is an act of survival.
I Find the Best People At the Mall
I drive to the mall to return the slippers I bought for my mom. Wrong size, wrong style, too expensive. She turns 72 tomorrow and should have the pair she wants, even if they arrive a little after her birthday. On the country station a Fox news broadcast has a soundbite of a Republican Senator calling the impeachment testimony “a matter of hearsay.” On the NPR station live coverage of the trial features a Democratic Senator quoting Alexander Hamilton. In the food court of the mall a man in an orange shirt and cheap sunglasses calls a hello to me and I bounce it back. It’s a strange time of day to be alone, running errands, nothing to do but fix my mistakes.
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