Pica

 

I had to go down to work to pick up a stack of flyers to distribute for one of my spring classes. It’s a non-credit community ed. course, so instructors play a certain role in self-promotion, I guess.

It was a beautiful day and I didn’t mind the idea of a bike ride after a long week of sitting in front of the computer.

Down by the sawmill, they were slicing through some kind of coniferous wood that had a clear, limey smell. In the rising, late autumn fog there was something compelling about this smell and, since I hadn’t eaten much, I found myself with a pica-like impulse to want to eat it. Perhaps pica, or the impulse to eat strange, inedible substances while pregnant can be transmitted. My wife is pregnant, but seems to crave only bread, but I frequently find myself struggling with some strange impulse to taste pinecones or the ornaments made of cinnamon and applesauce (you’re not supposed to eat ém!””—my wife tells me) on the Christmas tree.

When I make it through this appetizing fog of shredded green wood, I remember the appointment and check my phone. There’s no message and this leaves my stomach feeling cold and tight, so I send a reminder.

“How’d it go?”

Or maybe it was:

“Hope everything went well”

Something innocuous anyway, because I’m hoping that it won’t be some fresh insult to receive the message. I worry about it almost as much as she does. The Doppler, then the ultrasound, the undetectable heartbeat, the unfeeling ultrasound tech callously saying “there’s nothing there”. COVID keeps me from attending any of the appointments so I’m off riding my bike and thinking of eating pine instead of being supportive. Support these days is just a text message and an innocuous one because when you need someone, a text message is total bullshit.

I’m out by the mouth of the Elk River when I get the reply.

“Everything good! Bebe moving a lot.”

She doesn’t write ‘bebe’’ because it’s cute but because that’s how she pronounces it and somehow that detail makes the relief so much more palpable. I grin and pump my fists like a 10-year-old.

I get on the highway and ride the rest of the way to work with the speeding logging trucks and I listen to this podcast about how people who don’t lie to themselves are miserable. It’s true. They did a test. Respondents who lied about stupid questions were more likely to be able to hide the pain of the world from themselves. Respondents who confessed stupid truths were less successful and frequently miserable. But it made me think of Mikey and how everyone loves him—at least I do—because he feels it all so keenly and doesn’t want a filter. Yeah, life is difficult for those who only tell the truth to themselves, but they’re a hell of a lot more admirable. I guess I’m in the middle somewhere. I can distract myself with really stupid things like new cereal or Halloween and I guess there’s a bit of deception in the reliance on these things for happiness.

Campus—as you’d expect—was empty. All the calendars in the associate faculty room were still on March 2019. It reminded me of the time my friends and I went into a haunted house when we were teenagers and found a calendar on the wall from the 60s. The realization the no one had been in there since then was the scariest thing about the place.

I got the fliers and responded to emails before packing up. A student needed clarification. A student needed an extension. I typed answers, probably way too long.

As a teacher—I’m tired of calling myself an instructor, I’m not that important or bland—you develop relationships with your students even online. They tell you things and, if they choose to, they write about these things in reflections and for assignments. One of these things this semester was cancer. One of the brightest students had had it, had been radiated and had had everything cleared up (I’m using the past perfect very intentionally here; a duration of time in the past). And then, gained strength. All semester, I had read the road to recovery, no, fuck that, the road to life, the road to everything the rest of us totally take for granted: running, building confidence, making plans for the future. And now. Now. No more past perfect. Three organs. Immediate chemo. Assignments might not be in. And the kicker, at the beginning “hope you’re having a good day”.

I start the ride home through the subsuming citrus fog with glassy eyes. “I hope you’re having a good day”. The logger trucks are wetly lapping past and I put the podcast back on because if they hit me, they hit me. They have your number or they don’t. The podcast continues to remind me of Mikey and how feeling it all sucks. And how there’s really no benefit to not deceiving yourself. Those of us who don’t, we’re not successful. We’re not happy. If we’re admired, we don’t want it anyway (we see how this admiration, too, is self-deception).

“I hope you’re having a good day.” They won’t even let anyone in the recovery room. How could anyone not think about these things?

 I go by the sawmill and the pica-impulse returns and mixes with these sad thoughts and I’d just like to sit in the cool darkness and eat splinters and bark and leaves until I’m full of self-deception. Instead, I go to the grocery story—a Hopper painting in the wet dark—and buy a frozen pie which just adds more weight to my pack and doesn’t deceive me.

After eight miles, I get off the highway and coast through the marsh on the other side of the bay. It’s not so foggy, but the darkness is sodden with cold and the bike path is unlit and only visible section by section as a repeating patch of flat, wet leaves. At one point there’s a backpack and someone back in the treeline rustling into their burrow. I check my phone: “ride safe!”

In the bottoms, the flat farmland out by the ocean, the house is a smear of light against the darkness. The back door is even propped open and the light is spilling out onto the plum tree in the back. In the window, the living room, my wife and daughter sitting together on the couch, wrapped in the same blanket. Steven Kellogg’s The Mysterious Tadpole propped up between them. When she hears me come in, my daughter comes running up and, without thinking, I drop all the stuff I’m struggling out of to scoop her up into my arms and I can’t hide from myself how great this makes me feel even if, to feel it, I have to struggle out of my preoccupations for a while.

We go back to the couch and read the book together and then, my daughter and I put our ears to my wife’s stomach and listen.  

Two Gates

 

The Manila Dunes are divided into two distinct sections. One, the southern section, passes briefly through a dune forest before emerging onto piles of humpbacked dunelands strewn with succulents, ropy flowering vines and clusters of other plants that grow over the sand like a net rather than through it. Walking in this section, eventually you’ll climb a slight rise and then the surf will be crashing into the densely packed sand no more then 50 feet in front of you, redwood logs lolling in tide, bladderwrack dripping with fog. The dunes are such an excellent sound-barrier, even the roaring of the winter Pacific can barely be heard through one of them.

The other, northern, section, is only open on the weekends. The access road to reach it is seven tenths of a mile long and it’s pitted with holes which, even in dry weather, collect morning fog and are lined with mud. In wet whether (which is the norm) each of these potholes is like a tarnished mirror reflecting the pine and cedar boughs that crowd the path on either side. From the parking area at the end of this road, the Mad River slough can be accessed. Before I moved to northern California, I’d never heard of a slough. Sometimes, I still read the word as ‘slow’ rather than ‘slew’, as it’s pronounced here. At high tide, the slough is a river; in low tide, it’s a trough of mud with a few drainage ditches snaking through it, egrets and herons poking around, godwits running in the mud. The trail here is beautiful following this river of mud along a narrow line that skirts a coniferous forest and a towering dune that’s pouring into the forest like something loosed from an enormous broken hourglass: a clean, solid background for the flaky, needled chaos of the swampgrowth at its base. Further down the trail, the shrubs and swampy undergrowth cluster and rise over the path creating a tunnel through which to walk, even in the bright afternoon, surrounded by a sort of littoral gloom.

This, perhaps because it is such an outrageous landscape, is the only place my two year-old daughter will walk at a persistent clip. Anywhere else, the forest, the beach, the marsh, she will take a tenth of a step and bend over to examine the minutiae at her feet or within arm’s reach, overhead and anywhere else she can find minutiae. I can’t bring myself to interrupt her explorations—it makes me feel like I’m pushing some kind of adult agenda on her—so I just stand there, unable to appreciate the pebble she’s rolling between her fingers for the five minutes she’s spent savoring the thing, and likewise unable to find the value in returning to the same broken tree to declare—in increasingly shrill tones—Broke! Broke! To which I invariably reply “Yes. It’s broken,” like I’m already starting to correct her grammar—God forgive me.

So, on Sunday, we went out to the northern section of the dunes to take an actual walk. I had some work to finish up as my students were writing their final essay which was due that night and the inevitable what-are-we-supposed-to-be-doings were swelling my inbox. After daylight savings, it’s been getting dark well before 6, but, as it was only a little after four when I finished up, I figured we had plenty of time for a little walk.

We arrived at dunes and bounced down the long, pitted drive to the northern parking area to access the path along the slough. There were a few other cars in the parking lot, but it’s not a crowded area. We only saw two other people on the path that only has a few spurs out to the ocean and is mostly a loop along the slough.

I don’t know if it was the gloaming or just that we’d been the week before, but my daughter wasn’t as interested as she’d been in the past. She was still walking, but she’d mixed in a bit of her dawdling and asking to be carried, only to ask to be put down. We were making progress, but it was a steadily halting progress. The gloaming gathered around us and streamed from the swampy thickets, becoming a syrupy darkness, like something squeezed from the humid mushrooms that lined the path in places where trees had fallen and rotted. The lighter color of the sandy soil in contrast to the dark underbrush made the path just luminous enough to see and made the darkness feel like something grasping. There was no moon, but it was becoming a clear night and there was a touch of sunset smoldering under the western horizon.

We were a little more than halfway along our loop when Gina said something about maybe hurrying, maybe being locked in. It wasn’t something that had even occurred to me, but even with the mention and the swelling darkness, it seemed too early to worry about. We hadn’t been gone very long and when we’d left there’d been three other cars in the parking lot. Surely those people were all out here coaxing their two year-olds to a normal walking pace as well, but, when we arrived in the parking lot, we found it not crepuscular, but dark. All the other cars were gone. I’m the type of person that waits until the last minute to hurry and, as this was clearly the last minute, I dove into the car and started it up, hurrying Gina through getting my daughter into her car sear like it’d been my idea all along to hurry.

Let me be clear. As we splashed down that rutted road, the headlights scudding along the dirt and gravel, barely rising through the fog to eye-level, I didn’t really think there would be a problem. I jokingly said something to Gina about the suspense of the moment, but I felt sure we’d be fine. Maybe we’d cut it close, but I knew that no one was going to be that vigilant about locking a gate in the middle of nowhere but as I was thinking this, it hove into view, at first just cuts in the fog, like someone had been slashing a cutlass at it, but then slashes took on a strange geometric design, something like a long isosceles triangle barring the road: the gate was closed.

Even understanding that the gate was closed, and being faced with it, I didn’t feel worried. It could probably be opened, I thought and my mind wasn’t even scrambling, it was just ambling along a neat row of possibilities. I got out and checked the gate; it had three heavy padlocks dangling from a manacle of interlocked iron pieces. It was heavy and formidable to even lift the locking apparatus. Even if one of the locks could be forced, there were two others. I wondered vaguely who would go to the trouble of so severely locking a place that one could easily walk to if one wished. There was about three feet open on either side of the gate. Was it really that big of a deal to keep cars out or, in our case, in? I looked at those locks and then back and my wife and daughter looking up expectantly from the glow of the car’s interior lights. It was completely dark now and we’d have to call for help.

I took out my phone and, noticing I only had 8% battery, called 911. I knew it wasn’t an emergency, but I had no idea who else to call. After I explained my non-emergency to the operator, I was quick to mention the two-year-old with us, hoping to give the non-emergency a little more priority. I was given the Humboldt County Sheriff’s number. The battery was down to 6%. I called the Sheriff and explained to the voice on the other end and to the dark around me: the locked gate, the two-year-old who didn’t have a spare diaper the long walk from here to anywhere, that was dinner time about an hour ago.

“I’m sorry,” the sympathetic voice said. “We don’t have that key and I have absolutely no idea who would.”

By the way she’d stressed absolutely, I decided to cut my losses and call Gina’s folks. I hadn’t even hung up when the screen went dark. The phone had died. Damn things always die when they still read 4% battery.

I think we all have doubts about our parenting ability, but standing there suddenly holding a dead phone, looking at my daughter through the darkness, knowing I’d driven us way out into this remote swamp and when it started to get dark, I’d ignored the warnings from my wife that maybe we should try to hurry, I knew it was my fault. We were absolutely stuck and I’d been the one to ensure it. I stood there, uncertain how to even begin to address the situation. Luckily, my wife is resilient and has a lousy understanding of spatial relationships.

“Wait a minute,” she said getting out of the car after I’d told her my phone had died—naturally she hadn’t brought hers. “This bank is all sand,”she said pointing to the right of the gate. “Maybe we could dig our way out. The car’s small enough.”

“Maybe.” I said. Looking at our shoebox of a car. Luckily, I’ve got an even worse sense of distance and measurement than she does and it seemed herculean but possible to actually dig a road out of the sand to the right of the gate. We got a tire iron and a wrench out of the trunk and began to madly claw at the sand and plants. It was a ridiculous hope, but one that, if pulled off, would be immensely gratifying. I could see it, we’d clear out the sand and leave the gate-locking bastard scratching his head when he came back in the morning and found a lane open at the side of the gate. Maybe I’d even leave a note about the futility of putting gates in sandy places. That would show ‘em.

Our daughter was occupied with a bag of Kix while we hacked and tore at the bank, breaking through roots and pushing heaps of sandy loam between our straddling legs, like dogs at the beach. It seemed to be working, gradually we were breaking the bank down, first by inches than by feet. I was going nuts with that tire iron just hacking at the sand and the roots underneath, trying to make up for my other, myriad inadequacies. There were only two issues. We’d need an excavator to get rid of all the sand; it would be tough to drive over it and the gate had this terrible guideline projecting into the bank which was also iron and thick enough to gash a hole in the roof or break the windshield. Even if we dug a two-lane road out of the sand, this guideline, I was beginning to see, would still be too low to get around. I thought we could maybe dig it out, but the longer we spent digging, I began to realize that it wasn’t looking good. Even if we cleared it all away, that guideline couldn’t be moved and the car would be on a serious angle.

Still, we decided to take a look. Gina got in and drove right up to the opening we’d made. No good. No good at all. But, seeing no alternative, I couldn’t give up. I dug frantically for another 10 minutes, tearing and pushing heaps of dirt, but when Gina moved the car back, the situation was the same.

Luckily we had the stroller in the trunk. I took it out. We got our daughter out—she was surprisingly calm as little kids tend to be in those situations—and I got in and drove the car back to the parking lot so it wouldn’t be blocking the road, then, I ran back carrying more Kix and another toy that had been in the car. Gina had explained to our daughter what was happening and she repeated “gate” and “stuck” like a mantra occasionally asking “key?” like a refrain in a song about our situation. It was great. Two-year-olds are great for adding levity.   

The three of us, made our way down the rest of the road in darkness. We’d gone quite a way before Gina asked me what my plan was. Funny, I hadn’t really even been thinking of one. I’d gone into some kind of autopilot, perhaps planning on walking all the way home—as I would’ve done had I been alone, but it wasn’t an option.

“I guess we’ll try to flag down a car and ask to use their phone. There’s no way I’m going up to one of these houses around here.” The houses around the Manila dunes are notoriously ramshackle, swarming with barking dogs and cars rusting back into the sand that’s grown up over their flattened tires. The kind of yards that belong to people who shoot when they see someone picking their way up to their door in the dark. I wasn’t even so sure we could avoid being shot by these people even if we didn’t go anywhere near their homes.

We were nearly back to the first parking area, the one they don’t lock, when we encountered it, and even in the wisps of fog and strands of murky residual light, it was funny. Even if we’d managed to dig ourselves out of the gate, we wouldn’t have gone more than half a mile, before we would’ve hit this one, a second gate, which was even more formidable than the one before it with trees on either side. I started to imagine how awful it would’ve been to dig ourselves out from around that first gate, only to bang up against this one. It made me feel better that I hadn’t done anything too stupid to get out from behind the first one—that is anything other than spending half an hour frantically digging into an embankment. I imagined someone seeing it in the morning and having a pretty good laugh.

At this point my daughter’s mantra changed to “two gates, stuck, key?” When she said ‘key’ she shook her head.  

When we’d made our way around this second gate, a car pulled down the narrow road going in the other direction. We called after it and raised our arms. It continued around a corner, but I knew the parking lot to the beach was just around the corner, so we walked quickly, hoping to stop who ever was going to the beach in the dark to ask to use their phone.

We didn’t even have to go all the way to the beach. The car had stopped in front of one of moldering houses sinking into the sand, surrounded by rusted cars and collapsing fences obscuring barking dogs. Someone was standing by the car. Just standing there in the dark. I explained the situation to what could’ve been a cardboard cutout or even just a shadow. Gina took up the explanation and I thought it better to let her finish,  in fact to let her and our daughter take as much of the spotlight as possible so as to downplay that reality that one man had stepped from an empty darkness to address another who’d been standing, also alone, in this darkness.

The dark form, without saying much, offered a phone. Gina called her folks. We thanked the guy for the phone and went to wait by the entrance to the area just off the highway. Within a few minutes, the guy who’d let us use his phone came driving back out from the house we’d met him in front of. He slowed, leaned out the window and asked if we’d needed to use the phone again before driving away. When I’d called the Sheriff’s Department and told them I was in the middle of nowhere with a dying phone, no food or water—well, except the Kix—and with a toddler, I’d thought maybe they’d send someone just to make sure we were alright, but in the end, it was the kindness of someone who was either buying or selling drugs that provided the help we needed. The entire time we were out there, we didn’t see another car until Gina’s dad drove up to get us.

Luckily, Gina’s folks aren’t the judgmental type. Her dad was genuinely glad to help. As we got into the car, we realized we’d forgotten the car seat and I set off, all the way down the dark, gated and fog-saturated gravel road to get it. The car’s headlights swum out ahead of me at first, but then faded and dropped back until, turning around, they were distant enough to resemble stars in the sky. By the time I’d reached the car and gotten the car seat out, I couldn’t even see them and I was convinced something was going to eat me while I humped the increasingly ungainly car seat back down the road to the car that, was waiting on the other side of that second gate.

…

In the morning, I woke up early as I usually do when something is unresolved, got on my bike and rode out to the dunes.

It was foggier than it had been at night and I couldn’t make out much in front of me once I got to the dunes, but the gates, still locked, were just as plain as they’d been the night before.

It wasn’t hard to get my bike around the gate and I rode until I came to the mess we’d made trying to get out of the second gate. Sand was strewn all over the gravel and ferns and a few other plants were tossed here and there. There was a wild crisscrossing of tire tracks where we’d made a few attempts to drive through before giving up and doing a ten-point turn to go back to the parking lot. I kicked a few of the ferns aside in an attempt to tidy up, afraid that when whoever arrived to unlock the gate, I’d be charged with some kind of destruction of property.

It was fitting that whoever had been so zealous about locking the gate the night before should be late to unlock it in the morning. We’d checked and all the signs said that the gate was locked “an hour after sun set”. The sun set around five and I’d called the Sheriff’s department at 5:52. We’d cut it a little close, but we would’ve been ok if the hours had been a little more strictly attended to. And now the gate that was supposed to open at sunrise was still locked with the sun floating an entire hand’s breadth above the horizon. I took another walk around the forest and, when I came out, it was like some magic spell had blown through the air. After focusing on these locked gates for over twelve hours, they’d come to seem immobile and, driving through them, even at that early hour, I couldn’t help but to give a little toot on the horn for all those living in various kinds of captivity; would that your gates, your bars, your cages, like mine, should one morning, be found standing inexplicably open no longer impeding the progress of the clear and rising sun.

In my imagination, I could hear my daughter’s reaction “two gates, open?” and I drove home just as the fog, that had settled in so heavily the night before, started to burn away.

Neighbors:հարեւաներ:qonşular

 

i.                     Azerbaijan

In 2010, I was in Baku for a few days. My friend Elliot and I were going to take a boat across the Caspian to the port of Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan. The boat, a freighter, was continually delayed for departure and, as such, we had to put up in Baku longer than we’d expected.

As dull as the experience became after a while—both Elliot and I were anxious to get to Turkmenistan—it was an important one.

For the last two years, I’d been living in Armenia and traveling around the country. I’d seen some of the results of the Karabakh (or Artsakh, in Armenian) conflict. In some places, Armenians who’d fled Azerbaijan in the late 80’s still lived with only basic amenities. Along side these homes, were others that were empty. But when I asked Armenians about their erstwhile neighbors, I couldn’t get them to condemn anyone. Most of the people I talked to still referred to the Azeris as neighbors or ‘harevaner’.

Perhaps because the Armenians were so forgiving and gracious, I could only assume that the people on the other side of the border were the bellicose saber-rattlers. And with a passport full of Armenian stamps, I think I crossed into Azerbaijan almost looking for a fight. I hoped to tell anyone who would listen that the Armenians wished them no harm. The problem was, there was no one to listen.

It hadn’t been possible to travel overland into Azerbaijan, so we’d flown in Baku, a city that felt much more cosmopolitan that Yerevan or Tbilisi. Karabakh, and the resulting devastation, felt very far away from the central shopping district where we wandered between McDonalds, different Irish pubs and oil workers out for the weekend..

The only time Baku felt like anything I’d imagined Azerbaijan to be was during the last call to prayer of the day when the setting sun was rippling from the smooth paving stones, the cats hunted through dumpsters and more bearded men in shalwar kameezs seemed to be out. Even then, it wasn’t threatening, just a little vague. True, there were a lot of flags, many of them very large, but the people didn’t see to be weighed down with nationalist fervor. They walked along with the levity of a people with no grudges, people with McDonald’s to go to. It was hard to believe Sumgait was only 20km away.

…  

One afternoon after we’d brought our bags down to the pier only again to be told that the freighter wouldn’t leave that day, we took the long way back to where we were staying with a houseful of lovely EVS volunteers. On the way we stopped at the memorial for those who’d died in the Karabakh war. I don’t think we knew it was there. We just happened to pass it. There was the same statue I’d seen all over the Caucasus, but instead of commemorating the Great War, it marked a much more recent occasion. The marble was whiter, less weather-beaten, but I couldn’t tell if this made it more or less dignified as a monument.

Later that afternoon, we stopped to get peroshki, as we did many times on that trip, and when we told the proprietor we’d been in Armenia, he seemed curious and even hazarded a ‘barev’. I think he tried to say something else in Armenian as well, but we weren’t able to understand it until he’d repeated it a few times. The word was rusty from disuse. ‘Sosed’—neighbor. and left the experience feeling slightly confused. Rather than get a fight, I was only meeting indifference and here even appreciation. Who were these people who’d ordered the war? Who were these people who’d build the monuments? Had they all died? Despite the flags had they been forgotten or had everyone just stopped paying attention?

A few days later, we got our answer when our freighter finally came in. We’d gotten a call the night before and celebrated with probably too many Efes beers and so when we got to the pier, we forgot to be nervous about all the Armenian stamps in our passports. In fact, we forgot all about them until an official summoned us up from our sweltering room below decks where we’d been trying to figure out the bathroom with only a fifty gallon drum of water, a toilet with no flush and a hose.

When we got above decks and met the loose jowled military figure with our passports, we knew it best to feign ignorance when he pointed to the stamps.

“Armenia?” We asked. “Shto?” But even in broken Russian (on our side) the official ferreted an explanation out of us. It was clear he didn’t like what he heard, but that there wasn’t much he could do. We didn’t have Armenian names and we didn’t have a Karabakh stamp in our passports, and I was glad we didn’t. After seeing the bathroom in the freighter, I could only imagine what the bathroom would look like in jail. He grunted at each answer. “Volunteers.” “America.” “Ochin karasho.” It seemed we’d finally met the adversary I’d been hoping to meet all along, but it was in the last person I wanted to challenge—the one with the visa exit stamp in his hand. Let him be bitter. I knew I couldn’t change his mind, especially not in Russian.

Eventually, he mumbled something and slammed the stamp down. We scooted back below decks to the improbable bathroom and ended up drinking chacha with some Georgians who came barging into our room as always seems to happen on long passages through the former Soviet Union. After the interaction with the official, it was nice to have a predictable experience. I guess if we’d have been employing all our faculties, the official would’ve been a predictable experience, too. But, with all the casual indifference we’d met with, I’d forgotten there was even a conflict that we had to be mindful of.  

ii.                   Karabakh

Six years later, I had my chance to visit Karabakh and I got my visa still thinking of the Azeri official at the port of Baku and his scowl. He seemed to be peering at me through the years from under his visored official hat. Thinking of him, I flaunted my Karabakhi visa that night walking around Stepanakert. It was a strange feeling to possess something that would’ve, at one point, been so problematic, but now, would mean very little. They hadn’t even put the visa in our passports. They just handed the unpeeled stickers to my wife and me. But, because of this, I was continually taking the sticker out and looking at in the fading autumn light. Karabakh.

It was October and we walked the long sidewalk out of town to the Papik u Tatik statues. A row of streetlights stretched out to the monument, but otherwise it was ringed with dark fields and further off, the smoke from burning dung fires on the chilly night.

At the statues, such a famed symbol of both Karabakh and Armenian-ness, there were a group of young people listening to Ruski Pop and sitting around their white Lada Nivas eating sunflower seeds. We nodded to them and climbed up to the monument. I stretched out over pyramidal head of the Tatik. I couldn’t help it. The shape was too inviting.

…

We spent the next few days in Shushi, roaming around the crumbling, but respected Govhar Agha Mosque and walking the janapar, the famed hiking trail that has a Swiss or Alpen quality to its views and sheep and twisted vinegary apple trees. The sole difference, I found between a village in the Dolomites and the trail from Shushi was to be found in a neglected Muslim cemetery. Just a few tombstones with indecipherable calligraphy and names, the same tombstones I’d seen a few years before in Repulika Srbska in Bosnia and even in Albania. There’s something particularly pious and haunting about overgrown Muslim cemeteries. But, like the mosque, the tombstones weren’t broken or defaced. They’d just been left alone a long time.

On our way back to the hotel, we stopped and talked with the streetful of twilit children while gusts of wind blew the smoke from bonfires into our clothes. It felt as if we were on a ledge looking down over the sea of lights that was little Stepanavan. Above us the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral loomed in new white stone, like that I’d seen in the memorial in Baku years before.

And the next day, back in Stepanakert, we stopped at a peroshki stall we’d found at the bus station and had a long talk with the proprietor about the war and its ravages and relics. “Look” she’d told me, “that’s all in the past. We have no problem with our Azeri neighbors”—haravener—there was that word again. The same word I’d heard from her Azeri counterpart in Baku and the same word I’d heard from the displaced in Armenia. Was the border official the only one with any animosity? Had it been required of him?

…

Today, as civilians on both sides of the line are dying, I’m reminded of those sagacious remarks from two shopkeepers in peroshki stalls in Baku and Stepanakert who worked right under the white stone that symbolized the deaths of their countrymen and forgave.

To me, Karabakh, Artsakh is Armenian, because that’s the way I experienced it. The people who welcomed me into their homes were Armenian and the people who’d told me to visit again were Armenian. But I’d be remiss if I forgot the crumbling mosques and the tilting headstones, just as I’d be remiss if I’d overlooked the ruins of Armenian churches surrounding Erzurum.

Today, the Ghazanchetsots Cathedral is rejoining the Govhar Agha Mosque, as the stone repair work is blasted open again, and both beautiful buildings succumb to the rapid decay of mortar fire. I can’t help but to see the kids that ran down the street from one landmark to the next, mindful only of the approaching autumn night and the building, church or mosque, that was closest to their home and marked the way in walls of white stone.         

Smokescreen

 

The air quality index has got pictures of cartoon faces next to the ratings, I guess so you don’t have to try to parse out the numbers or figure out what ‘very dangerous’ means. You can see it.

The last few days, the face has been brick red with an expression somewhere between morose and angry, but today, it was purple and looked like it was suffocating or choking. I looked outside and couldn’t tell if the washed-out look of distant buildings and trees was due to smoke or fog—the weather called for both—but I decided not to risk taking my daughter to the park, but to the mall. Thinking, I suppose, that she’d be able to run around a little in there.

The car was still filmed with the ash that had fallen yesterday which has more of a dandruffy quality than the weightless snowy fluff that issues from a campfire. Must be all the houses, cars and bitumen roads the fire has melted that’s given its ash this ponderous quality. It must take a substantial heat even to be able to keep that greasy stuff floating through the air. I swiped my fingers across the car, the ash smeared like lotion.

From the car windows, the outside world looked flattened, toneless, like it had lost its affect and was now just a movie set or a photo in a newspaper. I drove through the ghost town haze with headlights that barely projected to the next car. The other cars were the same, all the lights had a dull brassy quality, like gold icons in a church. Perversely, it turns out, fire makes light look distant and cold. It gave me a headache to even be out in such a still, drained landscape. Even the tallest and most isolated weeds refused to sway and even that brightest star—the sun—refused to glow.  

I listlessly drove toward the mall, trying to imagine what it was we would do when we got there, trying to remember if I needed anything at home. I couldn’t think of anything. The news on the radio refused to mention the fires and kept intoning the successes in Taliban negotiations.

…

I’d gone to a mall earlier in the summer and seeing the lost-looking masked shoppers and the vacant storefronts, I realized didn’t feel sorry for the malls. After all, they’d killed the downtown shopping districts. It was only right that they should eventually suffer the same capitalistic fate they forced on their competitors.

I’d thought seeing this great institution come down would look depressing. But it didn’t. At least no more than it had watching the main streets of the 1980s shrivel up into seedy alleys of chipped sidewalks and unused parking meters. The demise of the malls was part of a cycle, and I’d already seen from my parents and their parents how little good it would do to lament the passing of the familiar; it certainly wouldn’t bring it back. And really, why should it matter to me that my daughter won’t have a mall to flit her pre-teenage years away in?

Despite the failings of the malls, many of them endure, nearly empty, coughing Muzak and Bath and Body Works odors on anyone who treads their airplane hanger environs. They are still serving as  meeting places in a world that hasn’t quite agreed on what should replace them.

…

The parking lot was ashen and still. Cars trolled through it like boats in a fog and shoppers slogged into the entrance like they knew they weren’t going to find what they were looking for inside but went anyway. I struggled to get my daughter out of the car and kept thinking of that purple-faced warning. What did it mean for such little lungs?

The Halloween Store, or whatever name if goes by these days was open and here, I thought, could have been what we came for, a little cheering up, a hint at the celebration that will probably be cancelled this year but would normally take place. Only at the door, an animatronic skeleton, red-eyed and screeching surprised us and I felt an unexpected indignity well up when my daughter stretched her lower lip out and her eyes started to water. Ah, what was I thinking coming in here? She understands how this is supposed to be threatening now. She is not the doe-eyed baby we carried in last year ambivalent to both horrific shrieks and loving coos.

We were nearly chased out of the store by a caterwauling of the electric undead which I normally would’ve enjoyed, but, now only seemed indicative of my own parental incompetence and rather than warn or scare, each cloaked and phantasmagorical figure seemed only there to chastise me. “Bad dad!” they all seemed to moan. “Bad dad!”

Out in the main corridor, other shoppers slunk past, masked, sullen and oddly diminutive. I encouraged my daughter to run, hoping she’d be able to get some energy out in the wide halls and put the Halloween decorations behind her, but the spectacle of the wide open area was too much for her and she stared and began to move through it with the hyperconsciousness of someone walking though a museum they’re going to have to write about for an upper-division class. She took in each empty storefront, rattled each chained door, scrutinized her dusty reflection in each empty display window and stopped to bemoan the fence wrapped around the little rocking rides for kids: a helicopter with a dog for a co-pilot, an ice cream truck and a Stewart Little car.

We walked all the way to the other end. My daughter’s excited footsteps reverberating from the shuttered storefronts. A shoe store was open. A hat store. One customer each. Everyone else, just trundled past, thinking their own thoughts. I noticed the light in the mall had the same gray and still quality it had outside and all the new rubber and polyester and floor cleaner made it perhaps even more nauseating than it had been outside with ash.

The end of the mall opposite that of the Halloween Store, was completely empty. All the store fronts were dim and vacant, save for a gym that looked to be doing alright. A woman was doing rapid leg-lifts in front of a window and a few stationary bikes whirred and wheeled behind the glass.

We played in the empty end of the mall, but I think my daughter could feel the emotional resonance of the place, or maybe it was just strange for her to be an institution that probably won’t even last into her adolescence. I remember this feeling as a kid running errands with my mom and stopping into small, flyblown TV and VCR repair shops with dusty spools of cable on the wall and, usually, a staticky radio broadcasting a sports game or the local weather. Walking into such places, I moved like one out of place in a world already gone and unfamiliar. If my daughter remembers malls at all, it will be in this way.

We got a cookie and a cup of coffee and found a table by the window in the food court. My daughter toying with her chocolate chips and me watching the haze through the floor-to-ceiling windows and feeling suddenly like I needed to cry, almost physically the way one feels they need to sneeze or cough.

Shoppers cleaved the gloom of the parking lot with the brightly-colored and loosely fitting clothes of sports teams. I sipped my coffee and watched them go by like I was watching birds in a park, feeling completely removed from the rhythms of their lives, whatever they were.

The whole time, this upbeat music had been playing over the loud speakers, as it usually does in such places, but I hadn’t paid it much attention. With the mask over my face and the smoky fog clouding up the windows, everything felt muffled but in the cavernous environment of the food court—you ever notice how echoey those places always are?—I could hear Pink crooning about how she was a tiger and we were going to hear her roar-or-or-or-or.

At first her protest seemed so stupid and meaningless as did the fact that everyone in the food court was being subjected to it, but gradually, as the song went on, this meaningless became absurdity and, in this way, it was like all the pieces suddenly fit: the suffocating air-quality face, the brassy headlights on the frozen world, the fallout shelter mall and its anonymous patrons/shelterers, the cackling animatronic skeletons, it was all held together by an absurdity so great that it was a force like gravity or stench. In that lonely fireside food court, the absurdity was palpable, just what it was we had all come here to do was irrelevant. We were just here, a strange page in history and one that I was glad my daughter would transcend even though her generation would surely only create a more absurd reality to supplant this one, I couldn’t help but to be glad to be accompanied by its representative.

On our way back through the mall, my daughter and I ran laughing the entire way. The skeletons in the Halloween Store and the damp smoke outside had lost their threatening qualities and dissolved back into the general nonsense that the world has always been completely awash in.   

National Distance

My mom had rescheduled her flight several time before the coronavirus took off and, in the end, we decided it would be best if she just canceled her visit to come out and see her granddaughter.

“Don’t worry, ma,” I told her. “We’ll come out and see you, instead.”

But I didn’t really have any plan in place for doing so other than a sudden opening my summer calendar where my trip to Glacier National Park had been canceled. United Airlines had given me a credit for $300 after I’d learned that most of the park wasn’t going to be open. I could’ve used the credit to buy tickets to Michigan. I had the money to make the trip and I had the time but I wasn’t sure I had the moral authority.

Where we live, up in sparsely-populated Humboldt County, we’ve been spared the brunt of the COVID pandemic. For one thing, there’s very little to do here indoors. Our usual recreation involves drifting down foggy morning beaches where the water is ice-cold, but the scenery is majestic or hiking through mountains which have no superlatives and are near no population centers but are, none-the-less inspiring and wild. That is, the whole point of living in a place like this is ‘getting-away’. No one comes here to stand in a crowd. Sure we’re lacking a bunch of amenities that you’d find in places with crowds, but it’s a trade-off and one that showed itself to be advantageous after the pandemic. They even had spots on the local radio stations comparing our county’s numbers with other counties across California ending in the suggestion to stay local for the summer because this place was so comparatively safe.

Unfortunately, I’ve always been lousy at heeding warnings. I’m restless and I guess I still have a little too much of that teenage feeling of invincibility. In May, after the semester ended, I furtively sneaked down to the Bay Area to camp for a night and go see a friend I hadn’t seen since Christmas. I spent a night in the city, but I didn’t feel guilty about it until I came back, wondering if I was carrying anything back up to the pristine redwoods. I felt like patient zero on the drive back. But I kept my distance in the grocery store and washed my hands a lot and the county’s numbers never started going up, so I felt like it’d been ok.

The greater challenge came when my mom started calling, barely managing to hide her urgent need to see her granddaughter. Since she’d canceled her flight, the need to connect seemed to have grown disproportionately. The time that had gone by compounded with the distance between us was beginning to tell on her. And, in truth, I couldn’t help but to feel like the Skype calls were becoming such a thin approximation for interacting with a toddler. I think the biggest blow came when my daughter started trying to offer my mom food and we had to explain to her that it couldn’t be passed through the computer screen. After that, she lost interest in talking with grandma and I think we all saw Skype for the interactive ruse it was.

Almost unwittingly, I started looking at tickets, much the way I look at home prices and available jobs. Such an activity is the internet’s substitute for contemplation. I don’t go for long walks and think about finding a home, I scroll through catalogs and let the possibilities present themselves, only then do I bother to think about whether anything I’ve found would be tenable. It’s as if everything has been reduced to list of items, a menu for life and we only need continually find something to select from this menu.

And select I did. One day I came across a reasonable direct flight. Covid had brought the prices way down and I had my credit to use. But rather than think about whether it was something I should do, I put the onus on my wife—as I usually do when faced with a burden either of thought or deed.

“Hey,” I yelled from the computer. My wife was in the other room trying to change our daughter’s diaper and at the same time attending a dinner cooking in the kitchen. I’d been on Duolingo—which had become some kind of important ‘work’ for me over the summer. “There’s a flight to Detroit for $250. Should I buy it?” I shouted, without even being sure I was being heard. When no one answered, I sighed heavily, as if I’d been put out and got up from my chair.

In the living room, my wife was wrestling with our 18-month-old daughter, trying to get her into a diaper while trying to get a large container of oats away from her that she’d managed to grab from the pantry when no one was looking. Instead of helping, I just repeated my question from the doorway, looking at the chaotic scene as if it were something totally removed from my life, like watching crows on a telephone wire or my neighbor mowing the lawn.

“Hey. There’s a flight to Detroit for only 250 bucks. Should I book it?”

My wife looked back, unbelieving that I’d be asking something so superfluous when whatever is in the kitchen was clearly starting to burn, but rather than chide me, she prepared to think over the logistics of the situation that I’d neglected in my impetuousness when the top suddenly came off the oats and they showered over the living room carpet, the couch, the rug and the children’s books scattered all over the floor.

“Sure.” She said, with a deadpan delivery. “Book it.”

I wasn’t sure if she meant it, but I went to book the flight anyway. $250 was just too good of a deal. I meant to help clean up the oatmeal, but by the time I finished with the booking, it was already done and dinner was on the table.

Gradually, I began to think about the trip. Between bouts of Duolingo, I had time to contemplate what flying would mean. With a toddler, we’d have a member of our traveling party not wearing a mask—there’s no way she would’ve kept one on for a minute let alone 6 hours—which would make my wife’s and my mask useless in avoiding contact since my daughter would be breathing all the sneezes and coughs of the plane’s passengers and when we got off she’d be breathing right into our faces and into the faces of my parents and my grandmother, who we were also planning on seeing. They were all healthy people, but I didn’t want to be the one to test their health. And what about my daughter? While babies were usually spared sever Covid symptoms, I was hearing more reports of the Multi-System Inflammatory Disease which was infecting children who’d been exposed. On top of that, there was the social question of travel. I couldn’t help but to notice that when I saw people obviously on vacation in my small community, I wanted to roll my eyes. Even up here in the rural redwoods where tourism is fairly important and it’s easy to stay away from people, I resented those who’d made the choice to drive here and have a look around when they obviously didn’t have to. I puzzled over how I could feel this way when I was planning on flying across the country to do something that a lot of people would probably consider even more indulgent than camping in the forests of northern California.

But that’s a big part of the way the world is now We’re willing to give ourselves a pass for reckless behavior because we know our reasons. But, for others, we’re inclined to assume the worst. I had to go back to Michigan because my folks were missing my daughter’s toddler-hood. The last time they’d seen her she’d been crawling and babbling and now she was running and sharing her food. If we waited until the end of the pandemic, who knows where she’d be developmentally. But when I saw the people with out-of-state plates, I assumed they were just taking a trip because they’d gotten bored. So with this selfish logic in place, I decided we had to go. My mom was calling almost daily asking what we wanted to eat while we were there and my dad was pulling all the old baby toys he could find out of the basement. They sent me pictures; the yard looked like playground. I told myself I was doing it for them. I told myself other people couldn’t understand—couldn’t judge—my motives and it was easier to live with the decision.

In the week leading up to our departure, I found myself avoiding mention of the trip to anyone I spoke to. I was frequently doing some syntactical juggling to avoid mentioning it. “Gonna take a little time off,” I told everyone at work when getting shifts covered. I even went so far as to tell a few people I was taking a camping trip, which was true in a way since I was doing a little camping before we left, but drawing these two days into nine was a pretty bold lie. Again, it came down to the personal reason I had for traveling, to allow my parents to see their granddaughter. This wasn’t something I felt I could expect anyone else to understand. Of course I realized that everyone would have some justifiable reason for travel like this and I began to wonder how many other people were creating reasons for themselves to get on a plane that they weren’t telling anyone else about?

I got my answer at the airport. Not in Humboldt, because this airport is tiny and under-funded, especially now that United has canceled about half their daily flights here. But at SFO, I guessed the numbers to be about half, or a little over half what they usually were. I could be way off here. Canceled flights could have artificially brought up the number of people in the airport or perhaps it was only in the domestic terminal and international flights were different, but seeing all these people at the airport made me feel better. I wasn’t the only one taking a risk here. Other families chased small, unmasked children through the terminals, young couples shared drinks in the airport bars—many incongruously still open—and harried professional in suits yammered into smart phones slightly louder through their masks while waiting in line for Starbucks. The scene in the airport was pretty much the same as it always was and seeing it, I couldn’t help but to wonder if this was part of the reason that COVID numbers in America were still rising. Perhaps it is not so much that we are selfish, freedom-obsessed dolts, but rather that we’re all able to find legitimate personal reasons for taking the risks when we dig deep enough and that, in the same way, we think we can be careful enough not to spread anything when we return.

Our flight schedule had been changed due to cancellations and we had to catch three, rather than two flights, which made for a slightly longer day, but our connections were smooth and short at each airport. We stopped at O’Hare to find the place looking as busy as ever, unlike SFO, it didn’t look affected at all. It probably would’ve been surreal to contemplate the sea of masked faces surging past us, but by then we’d become accustomed to it.

Despite the enforced social distancing, everyone in the airport seemed to share a kind of solidarity in finding themselves traveling during such a troubled time. My daughter, who’s spent most of her life walking rural roads and lingering near cow pastures, was overjoyed to see so many people and she ran around the airport waving at everyone who passed us. Most of these people eagerly waved back to her. Seeing this one innocent and unmasked face in amid the backdrop of anonymous rushed travel seemed to delight a great number of people and I couldn’t help but to feel proud of having such an enthusiastically happy daughter who found no difficulty in making strangers happy.

Of course, the people she made the happiest were my folks. When we arrived in Detroit, they were both obviously very glad to see her after so much time and remarked on how much she’d changed since they’d seen her last. Although they’d seen her on Skype almost weekly, they had very little idea what to expect in person and, like my ability to search homes and jobs without thinking of actually moving or taking a new job, my parents had been able to see their granddaughter without really being able to learn much about her. This is perhaps the problem with our information age in which ‘content’ has become a byword for ‘filler’. If the objective has been met, say in being able to converse with someone face-to-face, or walk around an old neighborhood using Google Maps’ street view, than we can consider the task fulfilled while, in reality, the heart of these interactions is based on ‘content’ not in the fulfillment of the object. In other words, it’s not enough to see. We must also feel and that’s something which is more more difficult to simulate.

We managed to stay pretty low key while in Michigan. I saw a couple of friends. We stayed outside, but the impulse to embrace after a long absence was too great. Again, I’m sure that most people are making this exception for the people they care about; it’s a very difficult temptation to resist.

Mostly, we hung out in my folks’ backyard. My dad had set a swing up for my daughter and she marveled at the possibility of having something only found in the park only for her personal use. It would’ve been difficult to get her away from it regardless of what was going on, but given the circumstances, we were happy she’d found something to distract her. The swing became the focal point of our visit. At any moment, someone was out there with her and everyone else was watching. There’s something healing in watching absolute contentment. My daughter could’ve stayed out there all day and she nearly did with everyone on shifts pushing her. Watching my mom push my daughter on the swing, such a simple thing, the reason for the risk seemed plain. We had to fulfill this human function. We had to see each other in person.

If the fault was anywhere, it was mine for moving across this vast country and having a daughter was has grandparents who live 3,000 miles from each other. Perhaps this pandemic will allow us to see that we have not yet conquered the spaces that separate us, though we have made a valiant effort with the mail, highways and internet. The space of America, after nearly 100 years, is once again proving to be something insurmountable. Many people of my generation, having lost their jobs in distant cities and worried about their aging parents are moving home again. Perhaps they, too have begun to feel all the space between families weighing upon them at night when they are lying in bed and tracing the steps of their lives.

…

Having already done it, traveling back felt much less risky. After just one trip, it felt routine and we slogged through the series of airports in reverse to arrive back home, no longer with the eager forward momentum of travelers, but with the perfunctory movements of someone making their way home again. I tried to read. My daughter slept on my lap and woke up and squirreled around before we landed back in SFO. At the gate for the last flight, they made an announcement about fog that could possible force the plane back. Even from the skies, the region where we live has an impenetrability about it, behind the coastal range, buried in the shadow of redwood slopes and the surging, tsunami-prone sea. As the last flight dropped down toward our tiny airport and entered a wave of wool-colored fog, I felt the traveler’s peace at returning home and the anxiety about leaving was gone. We had gone to challenge the space that both protects and alienates us: an American tradition and, like all traditions, one not easily subdued.

I’m still waiting for my test results, but already the distance that separates me from everyone else, from the rest of America, has begun to accumulate. At night I feel it weighing upon me and I watch the planes crossing the skies, knowing that everyone up there felt it, too and found a reason for defying it. I can only hope they all wash their hands as much as I did.

Petites Fleurs

In early spring the landlord asked if we were going to do a garden in the raised bed behind the house. He said this while we were standing in the backyard, looking at the patch of naked earth. I didn’t want to disappoint him, so I picked up a dirt clod and let it fall from my hand. I told him we’d think about it.

The next day, after I’d forgotten all about it, he came over with a bundle of bamboo poles. “You can use these for the peas.” He said. “Sure,” I said, not quite sure what he was talking about. I left the bundle of bamboo poles leaning against the wall by the back door.

The poles stayed in their bundle for a few days until I crossed the small backyard one afternoon at midday and almost ran right into the landlord emerging from his garage, paint-spattered and in the rollicking good humor of someone who’s been getting things accomplished. I’d been inside trying to pull a composition class together on the computer all day.

“You want seeds to plant?” He asked after greeting my daughter who was also tottering around the backyard in equally good humor, despite her having accomplished nothing that day. “I’ve got plenty of seeds. I’ve decided I’m not going to mess with a garden this year, so I figured you guys could have my seeds…if you want ‘em.”

This was getting to be a bit much. So I worked myself up into a polite refusal, but my voice took on a discordant, complaining quality and I came off sounding like I was afraid of the work, rather than being too busy and just not interested—which, I guess is sort of the same thing. When the landlord tried to wear down my resistance—probably noting how easy it would be to do—so, I turned treacherous and told him to talk to my wife.

“Um, yeah, maybe,” I responded, edging toward the door. “Gina usually does the gardening. I’ve been pretty busy. I’m not sure when I’ll have time and she’s usually the one…I’ll ask her.”

All this awkward dithering really wasn’t my fault. It was the result of a communication problem that’s grown up between generations. My landlord’s generation seems to prefer the straightforward approach, where my generation seems to have developed a less-than-confrontational approach. It’s something you’d read in a sociology textbook. For example, how in some cultures, it’s considered rude to say ‘no’, how there are all these ways of ‘signaling’ a negative response without actually saying the word. Those familiar with the culture recognize the signs, while those who aren’t familiar with it will plow through until they get the word they’re looking for. I felt like I was being forced into a ‘no’ I didn’t want to say or couldn’t culturally, I mean.

Not that I cared about trying to do a garden. But the previous summer, the thing had been a hell of a flop. After we’d planted the seeds, I’d watered weeds for a few weeks before we pulled ‘em up and planted starters that reluctantly took off and then, overnight, went to seed and grew faster than the weeds had, hefty as they were with bitter herbs and greens and then we ended up eating these strange stews all winter trying to finish the stuff off.

I was also having a hard time working up an interest in a garden because I didn’t even know if we were going to stay. There was a good job in Ukraine that I’d been going back and forth on until I finally decided just to apply and then just to poke the right people for references and then just to do an interview and then just to answer some more essay questions and prepare for a second interview. I had been hoping, for my family’s sake, to sort of haphazardly stumble into this job and into a new life back overseas, but the process was getting so drawn out and all these doubts had begun to creep in and I’d had to keep talking about living in Kyiv, which was driving my wife crazy.

Every afternoon, when I’d finished administering life support to my online classes, I was taking marathon bike rides in attempt to clear my head and figure out if I should continue to pursue the job in Ukraine. I was becoming terrified of getting it and, at the same time terrified of refusing it for fear of turning down something so obviously ideal. I rode along the bay, out to Manila and past this wreck of a beach house that was for sale for an insanely low price. I’d get off my bike and go into the backyard and pretend I’d bought the place. I’d look out over the garden and imagine planting a garden my own way, with no landlord giving me bamboo poles. I saw myself building green houses to grow peppers and tomatoes and not having a plot bristling with nothing but tough and stringy dinosaur kale.

The beach house was dumpy enough, I could’ve afforded it. The roof sagged. The wall sockets all looked fried and it was in a tsunami zone that I think couldn’t be insured. Not that I was really planning on buying it, but thinking of buying it and all the work that would have to be done kept my mind off the Ukraine thing. It was nice to think of my daughter growing up close enough to the ocean to hear it when the tide was up.

After a month of long bike rides and indecision, I asked to withdraw my application for the job in Ukraine. I think the deciding factor was the idea that I was going to have to either sell or store the damn washing machine and dryer. For some reason, that detail, more than anything, made the potential move this awfully insurmountable thing. It wasn’t the corona virus or the idea that we’d move only to be quarantined somewhere else, or, worse yet, that we’d clear our home out and be told we couldn’t move—those things were secondary. Mainly, it was the damn washing machine. Just thinking of touching that thing made me feel tired and apathetic.

Probably the day after I withdrew my application, I came home and found Gina had gone ahead and started the garden. The soil had been drawn into rows, the hose was out and the box of seeds the landlord had brought over was in the grass next to a small gardening shovel and a couple of earthen pots that, at various times had furnished us with basil for a month or two before the plants died. The lawn smelled like cold water warming in the sun and my daughter was running around naked, her mouth lip-sticked with dirt.

I could’ve stayed to help, but I needed to reconcile myself to the Ukraine decision and I went camping for the night instead. I hoped that I’d be able to come back after a night in the woods with a better understanding of my own mind.

Of course, when I came home, the next afternoon, I still had no idea what my mind was nor about what I wanted, but the garden was fully underway and since I felt bad for shirking it for so long, I decided I’d try to put some work into it. I turned the hose on and stood there, watching the wind catch the spray and blow it against the house.

In case you’re keeping score, this is a full six weeks after the landlord had approached me and dropped off the bamboo poles. I couldn’t help but to think he was watching me from his window thinking “that man is either the stubbornest or the laziest son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever met.”

Once I got started and avowed to make it a decent garden, there never seemed to be enough to do. Or maybe I never knew what to do. My friends who plant gardens talk of being in the garden all day. I imagined them on a Sunday, sun hat on, phone turned off, sun tea brewing in a glass decanter on the lawn, doubled over and grinning with the worthwhile exertion, ankle deep in dirt. But when I tried to emulate my friends’ assumed example, I’d roll up my sleeves only to pull up a few weed sprouts, spray the mess with a hose and look around and realize there was nothing left to do and I’d only been outside five minutes. I had to keep asking my wife “what now?” Until she finally just went out there with me, tired of being bothered.

When we were both looking at the pea sprouts and trying to figure out what the bamboo poles were for, my daughter ripped up all the mint we’d grown and ate the plants, stalks and all in great nervous gulps, the way a dog eats grass when it has a stomach ache. The mint was about the only thing that seemed to have been growing and now it was gone. We went back inside without determining what to do with the bamboo poles.

I can’t say I ever figured out what to do, but I began to appreciate the process of trying to figure it out. I’d go out, stare at the dirt, imagine things growing, wave the hose around, pull a few weeds and call it good. It gave me an excuse to stand around outside with my shoes off and lie down in the grass afterward, even if it didn’t look like much was happening.

That is, until this Mickey and the Beanstalk morning when I went out and found that the patch of dirt was turning into something resembling a garden. I half-considered going over to the landlord’s and asking him what he thought of my efforts, but then realized how obvious that would seem and decided to wait until we both happened to be in the backyard and then I’d very casually say something like “Yup, figured I might as well put those peas in the ground.”

Late May, it turns out, is a very fecund time. Only a day or two after the garden began to emerge, my wife decided to take a pregnancy test. Two blue lines, like filament, gradually bloomed over the paper in the plastic wand and, after that, I took my gardening duties more seriously. It was my only means of cultivating the spirit of things and preparing for the future.

Through May and into June, I weeded, unraveled the hose, and raveled it back up again; I even offered to mow the landlord’s lawn to extend the work that seemed to spill out of the garden right up to my door. I weeded areas in the yard that didn’t need weeding. I pulled up all the horsetails up by the driveway and I raked up the rhododendron blooms that had encrimsoned the yard. Some days, I just stood out there like a scarecrow, looking over everything, grasping the earth with my toes and sighing.

The winds over the ocean grew in constancy until the spring was being blown away by gusts in the afternoon and freshets all evening. Sometimes, at night, I could hear the ocean roaring even after the wind quieted down. It was hard not to think of those dark waves rolling out of the Pacific, swollen from the waters of the Yellow River, the Lop Nur, the Syr Darya, Volga and the Dnieper River running out of Ukraine, draining toward me. Something in that hollow booming of the tides resounded with the lives I had evaded to get to where I was.

I hadn’t been offered any work for the fall. The budget was being cut, classes were being reduced. The fall schedule came out without my name listed with a class. Had I given up a good opportunity to stay here with this billowing salt wind? This resting place of the world’s rivers and wind? As often happens in the summer, the landscape seemed to whither, the roads out of the area successfully closed off, blocked by wildfires and landslides. I stayed huddled near the garden in the daytime and went back to taking long bike rides in the evening. The derelict beach house had sold, or, more likely, had been repossessed by the bank. The ‘For Sale’ sign had been replaced with a ‘No Trespassing’ sign. I rode by without stopping, doing the whole circuit around the bay, just pedaling without trying to get anywhere.

One day, after a long bike ride, when my daughter was in bed, I went out to rake up the rhododendron blooms in the last hour of sunlight and found the bush was green and the blooms were gone. There were only a few left on the ground. Enough to pick up with my hand and throw over the fence and even that felt redundant.

I woke up the next morning and stared at the garden. There was nothing to do there, so, I took my daughter to the park. She likes the swing, so we hung out there. Every time I’d try to coax her into playing on something else, she’d shake her head and kick her feet until I thought “Why am I bothering her? She likes the swing. Let her stay on the swing.” I felt like such an adult, trying to coax her into my world of slides and jungle gyms, thinking there was something wrong with just staying on the swing. I didn’t want some communication problem to pile up between our generations.

While she swung, I let my mind wander around, out over the ocean, which was already starting to unravel a band of gauzy fog.

We walked home, stopping to pick and eat blackberries and wave to the cows lowing softly in the fields already covered in afternoon fog. I opened the door and heard my wife was sobbing. We came in the house and found her sitting on the border between the laundry room and the kitchen on the floor. My daughter ran up to hug her with blackberry-stained hands. I stood in the doorway with my head down, listening to the anguish in her tears, knowing and being unable to know what it felt like. I joined my daughter in hugging her, all of us sitting on the floor and holding each other. Above us, on top of the washing machine, there was a little packet of cloth, tied up like a package; a little bow.

It was dinner time, but we all just sat around the rickety table, prodding our food around like they do in TV shows after an emotional moment. I don’t remember the transition to bed time, it was like we all just lay down where we were and slept with the fog buffeting the windows like moths trying to get at the light.

That night, I lay awake listening to the ocean roaring and I imagined it overflowing with the waters of the rivers of the world, streaming over the beach on the other side of the dunes and coming up over the fields, like a second, darker horizon bearing dark alluvial soil from all the world.

In the morning, we took our coffee out to the garden and had a small burial in an empty patch behind the staked pea plants. We pushed a few stones into the soil as markers.

We took the morning off and went to the beach. My daughter pointed to the dogs and the starfish and made excited noises. My wife and I smiled sleepily. The wind was always easy in the morning and the tide was down.

I got an email a few days later. The college was going to offer me a class for the fall and maybe an opportunity to do some other work. I started getting things together and stopped thinking much about the garden. I felt good if I remembered to water it once a day. By now, everything looked like it could take care of itself.

A week or two went by and then, one morning, after watering, my wife came in and told me a cluster of flowers was breaking forth from where we’d pushed the stones into the soil behind the peas. I went to look and found them flowing out of the ground, defying the wind that swept the ground around them. Glowing with life.

While I stood there gazing at these small flower buds rapturously, with tears dangling from my eyelashes, the landlord came by and said “Hey, Jonny! The garden’s looking pretty good!”

Superman's Voicemail

When you wake up at 4am, any morning seems cold and rainy, but on cold and rainy mornings, the world looks doubly harsh and impersonal, especially when you commute by bike. But after a few warming sips of strong dark coffee and the application of a rainsuit, the resulting ride isn’t too bad. The streets are empty and the streetlights reflect in the puddles like pennies at the bottom of a fountain. The only rain I feel brushes off my face in a manner that is cooling and comfortable. Protected as I am from the rain, it no longer seems a harsh and vindictive thing bent on soaking me. It falls heedless of my presence. Almost musical.

...

The warmth from the coffee stayed with me even through the cold spray sent up by bike tires and the colder showers, running through tree branches and tapping the plastic hood and arms on my jacket. Even after my short ride, the water had pooled in every wrinkle. I dismounted to lock my bike up and a small cataract tumbled from my lap.

There was only one person at the bakery over on the production side. The area where the delivery drivers bag the bread was dark and rimed in cold flour, like attic dust. Once I began to move things around, this flour shook out of everything I touched and took to the air.

The other driver arrived after the air was saturated with flour and we began the arduous task of bagging bread for delivery, made especially arduous by the need to double bag each loaf with a protective plastic bag in response to the Corona Virus scare. Generally, for fresh baked bread, as near as I can tell, there’s some kind of rule about using plastic and one that I’m glad to follow. Most bread eaters feel an instinctual abhorrence of a baguette in plastic. Even in Southeast Asia, where bread is seldom eaten (outside Vietnam) and most food items regardless of size or temperature or consistency went into a plastic bag, yes, even in the land of hot soup in plastic bags, I don’t recall seeing baguettes in plastic. There’s just no cause for it.

But now there is, so we put the bread in plastic. It’s not so bad because the night crews baked it and it’s been out of the oven for a while, having long grown cold on the racks. While I was double bagging this bread for delivery, a worker on the production side came over and asked for help. I volunteered with alacrity, happy to take a break from all the bagging and rebagging.

I’d expected some kind of errand with a high shelf or a heavy bucket of dough, but I guess I should’ve known better. I did the production job once and I was utterly exhausted at the end of the shift. The people that work over there are tough. The shift starts at 3am. They scour huge vats of dough, they lift multiple 25 lb. bags of flour at once. They’re not the type of people who would need help lifting or lowering something, in fact this is mostly what their job is comprised of.

Some one else was over on the production side. I smelled him before I could see him, a boozy and bacterial breath was mixing with the sourdough starter and the place was fast taking on the scent of a pile of mildewed rags.

I came around the corner and found the culprit standing there, dripping with rain. His face slack and grayed, perhaps as a result of having been in the rain too long. He was shivering uncontrollably.

This happens often enough. Nothing else is open this early in the morning. And someone who’s been roving around all night alone finds something irresistible in the bakery’s warm beacon of light. Initially, they are drawn to it, probably meaning to do no more than look in the window or see if there’s a discarded loaf or two in the trash, but when they arrive, the quaint scene of dough being rolled on a long wooden table through the rustic, flour diffused light is simply too much for them. I imagine these people look in and see Christmas morning. The warm light and the smell of baking bread stirs some instinct among even the most wayward for homely comfort and stability. During the day, perhaps they would spurn this scene for other company, but at 5 in the morning, even the most unrepentant wanderer feels the need for some kind of warmth and companionship, especially under the dull but soaking rains of the pacific northwest. A glance back over the shoulder is sufficient to realize that the rest of the town is still asleep under the dark sheets of rain that have been falling through the night. There is no place for coffee. There is no one to bum a smoke from. There is only the coldest and darkest part of the night to wade through cold and alone. And here is a bastion of warmth and possibly companionship. Who could resist just peeking in the door and saying ‘hi’?

But as in other small and rural communities, methamphetamine has made inroads here and these heads that peek into the doors of the friendly night kitchen often have little idea how obviously the drug has affected them. They have been alone for many nights, kept awake by the drug and adverse sleeping conditions. As tired as everyone in the bakery is, no one is quite on par with the shaggy, tottering, skittish sleepwalkers who come to the door with all manner of unreasonable pleas. Some are sensibly asking for bread—still a request we can’t indulge— but others want the phone, others have a cart full of magpied items that are dropping all over the parking lot and want a piece of rope to tie it down and others are clearly in search of company, but a tight baking schedule, lack of room and, often, inability to understand the speaker, make this impossible. What others want is incomprehensible, perhaps even to themselves. Most of the requests are made politely, but in the strange over-politeness the seems indicative of use of the drug, as if being polite will somehow make up for the absurdity of the situation.

And the most jarring aspect for the bakers, is that these faces often appear out of nowhere. There you are measuring, kneading, shaping, deeply absorbed in your task when you feel a presence. The windows are dark. There’s no one around for miles. The stillness of the night reigns outside and, yet, something is different. The flour falls in a different way through the air. Follow its source, the eddy of a breeze and there, the door, the door is open and peeking through the seam is a face, one whose intentions in this still and otherwise undisturbed night are unknown. No one likes this kind of introduction. To be scared usually sets one person very quickly against another. Even if the scare occasioned was unintentional. The bakery worker assumes a stern air, both annoyed at being interrupted and bluffing in case there is some nefarious reason this person has come to the door in the middle of the night. While the face in the door may have had the most reasonable request, there are simply too many things going against them for that request to be considered. It doesn’t hurt that the excessive politeness often causes them to ask in a way that assumes a negative reply.

“Uh, I couldn’t use the bathroom, could I?”

“Of course not,” the production worker answers, thinking: ‘You scared me. You look haggard. I have a job to do. It’s 3:45 am and I’m alone in here.’

Of course, all the face in the door hears is another ‘no’. This one issued from the dreamy hearth of a night bakery, what looked like it might be a last refuge of kindness, but it’s not to be.

There is a too-long pause, but eventually the face pulls back into the night and for a while it will swim through the dark outside the bakery, surfacing near the glass like a shark in an aquarium and then, in a clatter it will go back into the night to await the same stages of rejection and disapproval in the morning, when the town wakes up and the face is inclined to go asking for other things, in other places in the same dejected tones which preclude negative answers.

But the man who stood at the door on this morning was different. His eyes weren’t quite so red. His attitude was more sullen than skittish and probably because the production worker wasn’t alone, she had let him in use the phone—usually something we frown upon, but, nonetheless a request that is granted by most employees who, perhaps at one time or another, have also needed to use the phone of a stranger. But the man was unable to use the phone, not because he was inebriated or uncertain how to go about it but because he was shivering so intensely he can’t hold the receiver to his ear. How he managed to press the buttons in this condition is a mystery.

This was where I walked over. The gray-faced man was spasmodically shivering, holding the receiver to his ear with his eyes opened to owl width, because he was surprised by something or because It kept the water dripping from his hat out of his eyes wasn’t clear. He looked like someone trying hard to stay awake on a long drive. Seeing this strange expression, I started into the “you can’t be in here” speech but stopped short when I saw the state of this guy. He was absolutely soaked and all he was wearing was a t-shirt which was wet enough to cling to him like milky shrink wrap. His back was muddy. Either he slipped or he’d been sleeping on the naked ground, which is something that anyone who’s ever spent a night outside knows is the best way to lose what little body heat you might still have with you. His baseball hat was dripping, oozing water from its twill like it’d been recently used to scoop water from a river.

“Damn.” I couldn’t help but to exclaim. “You’re soaked, man!”

The owl eyes regarded me and for a moment, I wondered whether he’d understood me, but it seemed he was only trying to coax out a response from his trembling lips.

“I’m t-t-trying to call my g-girlfriend” he managed to exclaim through teeth chattering so hard I thought they’d break. “We had a f-f-fight—Kimmy?!” He suddenly asked the phone, but it was just her voicemail and, from what I could tell, not the first time he’d reached it as the production worker had given me to think he’d been in there calling for a while already. But the way he’d said the name. It was obvious the guy was getting scared. He’d been literally left out in the rain and a night of drinking had rendered him incapable of forming a clear plan. He had nothing with him and I doubted he had any money. Everything was closed and, with shelter-in-place orders, even in the morning, nothing would open. I’d even read that the police were holding off on investigating a string of burglaries because they wanted to maintain social distancing. There was nowhere for this frozen guy to go. Even our homeless shelter didn’t keep regular hours. If anything, early morning was when it turned people out, rather than accepted them.

“Dude,” I began in the way of anyone trying to help, but not willing to commit to anything. “You’ve got to get warmed up. You’re hypothermic. You should let me call you an ambulance.”

He shook his head. He wanted none of this help.

“My g-g-g-girlfriend’s just s-sleeping. If I keep calling, m-maybe I can wake her up.”

The problem was he’d been drinking and judging by the smell, I’d say it was a lot. He was no longer drunk after his night in the rain, but if his girlfriend had been drinking anywhere as much as he’d been and was somewhere warm and dry, there was no way a ringing phone—one that was probably muffled by a purse or pair of jeans—was going to wake her up. He’d been in there calling for a while and his shivering was so violent, something else was called for.

I took him outside to the thrift store next door. I’d often seen donations dropped off after business hours and the resulting messes when people decided to rifle through them in the middle of the night. While we tried the area around the dumpster, to see if there was something dry this guy could put on. I continued calling the girlfriend on my cell. What was so exasperating and surreal was that the shivering man’s girlfriend had one of those outgoing ringtones, a snippet of a song that I could only imagine must’ve been maddening to him when normally calling her, to say nothing of how ironic it was now its impotence.

“...I’ll be here to saaave the daaay/ sUperman’s got no-thing on me/ I’ll be here to sav—Hi, this is Kimmy(!), I can’t get to the phon—”

I hung up. The rain had let up a little, but it was still steady and I was getting wet rummaging around in by the dumpsters listening to tinny snippets of bad pop songs.

“Look,” I told my friend, trying to make some kind of executive decision. “You’ve got to get out of the cold. We don’t have the ovens on in there” I said pointing back to the bakery and you need a heater and a change of clothes. I think your best bet is to go to the fire station. It’s right down this street.” I said gesturing down 10^th, not sure if that’s where it was, but knowing it was close.

But he was set on his course of action.

“She d-didn’t answer?” He almost seemed surprised, like he expected call number 8 to be the one she couldn’t refuse.

“No and she’s not going to. It’s late and she’s asleep. You need help now.” I said, using the kind of clipped sentences it seems first responders find so efficacious. “Go to the fire station. Ring the doorbell and ask if they have some way for you to warm up. If they don’t answer, there’s a shelter less than a block away. I don’t think they’re open, but by the time you get over there maybe they’ll be someone there to help you.”

“Can I call and leave a message?”

I started to sigh, but checked it, redialed, handed him my phone and waited, maybe a little too peevishly, while he called again. I could hear the strains of the ‘Superman’ issuing from around the folds of his wet ear. I made a mental note to wash my phone off when I got back inside.

The song abruptly ended, as if introducing Kimmie. Her peerky voice came on after the song like someone who’d made the resolution to never let anything bother her. No wonder it sounded like this, being beseeched as it was by a soaked and shivering man with terrible breath in an empty parking lot so early in the morning. For as far away as she was, and as nonresponsive, she might as well have been Superman. That was the impression I had at the moment, watching this guy patiently listening to the long-winded outgoing message He might as well have been asking for Superman’s intercession.

I gave him space to leave his message, but I couldn’t get far away enough to avoid hearing part of what he said. The ‘p-please’ and the ‘freezing’ and the ‘I love you’. It was every desperate phone ever made after a fight when, after the slamming doors and the callous words, one person finds that they are the loser in the ambiguous contest, that after the insults were exchanged, they are the one standing hungover in the five am parking lot with no idea what to do next. This is when they realize what it is that they need, that which they so easily take for granted.

He handed me back my phone and it was then that I noticed he had “Kimmie” tattooed in fairly fresh Spencerian script on his forearm. The letters were think, probably each about a ¼ inch across of blackish blue ink. I wondered if this was the result of another fight, the peace offering, a way to anchor the relationship against its tendency to slide into dispute, a reminder that, whatever the problem of the moment, the two were linked together, at least as far linked as the tattoo could make them. I’ve noticed it doesn’t take long before one ceases to see tattoos that are seen every day. Maybe Kimmie had already stopped seeing it and the endeavor had been in vain. It usually is when your actions belie your words. A tattoo is a mute appeal for character—imagine how absurd it would be to hold it up and point to it in an argument—and, as far as I know, as never counted for anything in a courtroom other than incrimination. No one, it seems, can write innocence onto their person, but we keep trying.

And having given me back my sodden phone, the hypothermic man in nothing but a soaked t-shirt and jeans receded from view behind mounting curtains of rain. In the vague direction of the fire station, but clearly hoping that Superman would save him the indignity presenting himself there as the wreck he was.

I walked back in, cleaned the phone off with rubbing alcohol and went back to getting the bread ready for delivery. As expected, I never received the panicked callback from Kimmie. Either she woke up and drove out to get him, or she was beyond the point of caring about his freezing. Even the mightiest of characters can only endure so many appeals before growing indifferent—something Superman would know well.