weightless
In the heavy suffering
of the nothing
now surrounds me
of the nothing
now surrounds me
I've cowered from
its absent form
slow approaching
Until it towered
looming large
its vacuum tapestry
Swallows the sky
devours the dirt
eats up everything
Thrown from the earth
sever the tether
inevitably terrible
Over the edge
lift off and orbit
in cyclical drift
Amidst the dark
stars all gone out
Floating ghostly
Reaching for solidity
in spinning shadows
of dusty memory
These words a new world
carve out a small ledge
on which I can rest
Wait out the days
until it feels right
amidst what is left
Places IV: The Road (on and off 2004-2010)
Having obtained a near useless degree, I spent the summer saving up money, working as a carpenter’s assistant while living with my parents. I wanted to go to the west coast, it was warmer, which seemed nice, but mostly it seemed more relaxed, more open minded, friendlier. It was known to be a multigenerational mecca of countercultures, and like the beatniks, hippies, and punks before me I was going to go places, meet people, have adventures, make art, and find myself. That fall I caught a ride to Portland Oregon with an old classmate from high school and after a few recovery days, one of her roommates dropped me off at an on-ramp so I could hitchhike out to the coast.
I spent most of the next seven years living out of a backpack, occasionally with a room of my own but most often crashing wherever I could. Cheap campsites, beaches, shelters, city parks, closets, couches (perhaps yours at some point), yards, and floors. I stayed with old friends and friends of friends, but also with random strangers that I connected with in person or through the internet and who were willing to let me stay in their homes for free, something that seems inconceivable in today’s world.
To not overstay my welcome I was frequently on the move. Hitchhiking was my primary means of transport and it was surprisingly effective. Most people I met were kind and besides rides I was offered food, places to stay, and work. A few had agendas I wasn’t interested in but I was never threatened or attacked. Occasionally I was harassed by police, but I was careful to follow laws and so their shakedowns, although frustrating, always came to naught. Because hitchhiking out of cities was difficult, I would sometimes take local buses, find a rideshare, or just walk. In fact, walking became my dominant hobby and on days I wasn’t traveling or socializing with others, I spent much of my time either walking around or in parks or libraries. I also filled sketchbooks with drawings of cafes, people, and scenery, letters, poems, and journal entries, all of which I would ritualistically burn once the book was full.
I explored the west coast. My memories and experiences are too extensive to list here but I would be remiss not to include a few snapshots: My first time seeing the giant redwoods. Watching the sun set and the full moon rise over a Big Sur beach. Driving an RV with no breaks along the cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway. Sneaking into a luxury oceanside resort to soak in their lithium spring water hot tubs. Rolling into Olympia late at night and immediately being greeted by someone with a bike trailer full of free pizzas. Sitting around a fire listening to a camp maintenance man wax poetic about his experiences working on Alaskan fishing boats (bonus points for his Spalding Gray references.) Getting a ride through wine country with a cork salesman who brought me to a number of fancy wineries. Working at various EDM festivals and then staying up all night to dance. Cooking pastries in cobb ovens at 2 AM in the middle of the Wyoming forest at the national rainbow gathering.
It was a quest of spiritual discovery and was accompanied by the highs and lows one expects to face on that path. The beautiful tranquility of a golden-warm afternoon contrasted with a rainy night, cold and alone in a tent; The kindness of those who fed, housed, and helped me contrasted with those who threw garbage or yelled at me from car windows. In my head I was propelled by and carrying with me the momentum of every alternative movement that dared imagine a better world. But in retrospect, I can see how, like many of my idols, I was also hurt and running from truths I wasn’t ready for. While this lifestyle was a personal choice for me, there were factors that pushed me towards it. Disillusionment combined with confusion about my identity lead to depression and feeling alienated from society. The road was on the outskirts of societal norms, a liminal space, always changing and evolving just as I was, full of infinite possibilities. Enlightening but exhausting. I met a lot of great people and got to make and see friends often, but it was also lonely and unstable. After a nice run of it, I needed a home of my own.
Unimpressive Atlas
The kindness
is sometimes
the harder part
Pain at least
makes sense
in a world of abject suffering
But if both are possible
why are we here
instead of there?
the harder part
Pain at least
makes sense
in a world of abject suffering
But if both are possible
why are we here
instead of there?
It's the distance between the two
that s t r e t c h e s my heart
I'm left
that s t r e t c h e s my heart
I'm left
holding two worlds
losing my grip on both
A very
A very
unimpressive Atlas
Places III: Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico (2002, 2003)
In college, I had a summer job digging holes in the middle of the desert. Technically, some of the holes were in the Colorado Shrub Steppe and the Great Plains Short-Grass Prairie, but it all felt like desert to me. Ostensibly the job was for scientific purposes, studying the effects of changing rainfall patterns on the flora of different terrains, although my involvement was largely menial. In addition to digging I sometimes measured things, carried things, counted plants, and helped construct large metal structures. We started at sunup so we could leave by early afternoon when the heat became intolerable. Before crawling down into the holes we did our best to clean out the black widow spider webs that had accumulated the night before.
I stayed at a nearby research station consisting of 10 adobe houses laid out in a circle with a small pond in the middle. At dusk the pond would be visited by throngs of bats, drawn by the insect swarms that thrived in the artificial oasis. The houses had a back door that led to a small patio and infinite desert. Nearby was a longer building that had a wing of research labs and a meeting space/social area. The buildings were connected by a small sidewalk, on which in the early evening hours you could often find rattlesnakes warming their cold blood, as it held the sun's heat longer than the desert sand.
Sometimes I would share housing, sometimes it would just be me and the caretaker, who was nice enough but kept to himself unless necessary. The station was owned by a university and there were often groups of students staying there while they worked on various projects. They were largely agreeable people and I got to know some of them quite well. We got into some classic college shenanigans such as going out into the desert under a full moon on mushrooms, or using a large jug of embalming alcohol from the laboratory to make big bowls of jungle juice (being very careful to use ethyl, not isopropyl, so we didn’t go blind or die). Sometimes I would go back with them to Albuquerque on the weekends to get into city shenanigans but I also enjoyed my time alone in the desert. There was all sorts of new nature for me to explore. Badgers, tortoises, strange new varieties of deer, snakes, black widows and wolf spiders galore, kangaroo mice, horny toads and other scampering lizards. No cacti, but plenty of spiky and pokey things. At night, a porch light would slowly attract bigger and bigger beetles and moths until around 2 AM when they would start surpassing the size of my hand. I watched the monsoons roll in and drop torrents of rain and lightning, melting the crusty sand into beachy mud.
The fact that I returned for a second summer of labor is a testament to my appreciation of the desert’s majestic beauty and quirky characters. Although the temperate forest will always feel like home to me, I returned to the desert several more times in the years to come, having had a very kind introduction to it.
a metaphor for impending loss
There's a cliff in the distance
and you're going over it whether you want to or not
and you're going over it whether you want to or not
Typically in this sort of metaphor you're on a train
or bus
a symbol of a society speeding too fast
to avoid what's ahead
But in this case you are alone on foot
and you move much slower
The cliff is below you, you must climb down to it
The scenery is majestic at times
but traversing the terrain is arduous
taking your eyes off what you are doing can be
hazardous
You move down towards it,
walking, scrambling, slipping,
falling, crawling, climbing
Night comes, you sleep but do not dream
Day comes and you continue down towards the ledge
Rocks and plants
alternately obstacles and aides
Lending a hand then scratching and biting
small wounds easily ignored
in the exhaustion
It's hard to tell how far away the cliff is
sometimes you can see it in the distance
and sometimes it is obscured by landscape
You think it's there
but then it's not
This goes on for a long time
but not forever
Dreams are few
but sometimes
before you can surrender to sleep
you wonder what it will feel like to be
weightless
Because whether you want to or not
There's a cliff in the distance
and you're going over it
Places II: Montreal (2000-2004)
By the end of high school my patience for Vermont's small town culture had been all but exhausted. I felt misunderstood, isolated, and I was naive enough to believe city life would solve these problems. I had initially wanted to go to New York as I thought it would help me connect with my heritage, something I was interested in at the time. But Montreal made more sense financially and still met my requirement of being a big city, so I went with it. Despite its proximity, Montreal was technically in a foreign country, falling over the Canadian border. Adding to its international aesthetic was the strong Quebecois regional identity that enforced use of the French language. In spite of culture and laws, Montreal was largely bilingual and any of my garbage French was met by replies in English.
Montreal was cold, its winters were long. Its climate partially insulated and protected the city, a shield of frozen snow and ice temporarily staved off the inevitable gentrification of expansion. Most of the city was made of concrete, bricks, or stone, connected by wrought iron stairs and fences, materials that could withstand many seasons. Buildings were connected in long blocks with few alleys to preserve heat. As a result there was nowhere to plow snow to, following storms the snow was scooped from the streets and trucked to the edge of the city to be dropped in the St. Lawrence river (It's easy to forget that Montreal is an island, gifting it a lazy, psychedelic undertone present in Leonard Cohen’s early work.)
The best way to cope with the winter was by staying inside. Because it is an old city, most spaces were small, and although often dirty as well, they retained their comfort by virtue of not being a part of the frigid outside world. Besides the underground city, a conglomeration of malls, hotels, and office buildings, united by tunnels and a subway system of rubber wheeled trolleys, there were a million hole in the wall venues, smokey bars, bodegas, tea bar hash fronts, basement bakeries, cafes, record shops, galleries, bagels pulled from giant steaming cauldrons at 2 in the morning, cheap pizza, falafel, samosas, and of course poutine. I found my favorite art house movie theater, comic and game store, punk bar, dive bar, and restaurants. The legality of alcohol allowed my still untapped alcoholism to flourish, allowing me access to social skills while also robbing me of the memories necessary to retain social relationships.
As a result of the cold, many residents carried themselves with an air of coolness and indifference, as if ignoring the cold negated it. An apathetic hipness descended from ancient strains of ennui brought over from Europe. The youth were all the main character of their own drama, woefully underdressed for the freezing temperatures in stylish black, pushing through crowds on the way to the next thing. Cool, but unable to enjoy it because of their coolness. Oh cruel irony. Adults had no time to talk or look you in the eye, they were also in a hurry. Especially in their cars, which they drove as fast as they could for as long as they could, hitting the brakes hard only when a collision was imminent.
And then, suddenly in the summer the city would thaw into a kaleidoscope of activity, open markets, jazz and comedy festivals, the bright colors of buildings and people bursting forth from the previously obscuring winter gloom. Now adults had time to talk, and the youth were no longer underdressed. The tamtams would start, a weekly gathering of resident freaks and weirdos to the city’s central park on the mountain from which the city takes its name. There, they would picnic and party, juggle, wrestle, roleplay, jump, flip and tumble, wheel and deal, footbag, slackline, and dance to the pulsing beat of hundreds of hippie hand drums. Truly a bohemian shambala paradise.
My time and life in Montreal were very centered around university, and although I spent most of four years there and certainly got out and explored the city, I still feel like I only caught glimpses of what is a much bigger picture. My lack of conversational French made true integration into the community at large impossible but additionally I was overwhelmed by everything. Going from the tranquil forest to an international city was a big change, and my personality and social skills didn’t automatically adapt just because I was there. As far as cities go, I liked Montreal and I could have possibly finagled a way to stay, I know kids who did even without speaking French. But by the end of my time in Montreal I had made my peace with it, learned to navigate, appreciate, and love it, but also, I was ready to leave.
the hospital at night
Enter a dark parking garage
through emergency security
A maze of empty halls
filled with dim light
but no people
In their rooms they rest
an uneasy peace
sleep disrupted by beeps
or the drawing of blood
before it vanishes into the night
Sometimes the TV is on
to quiet the silence
and remind about life outside these walls
Sometimes you even laugh
at the antics of the characters on screen
Then it is late and you must go
back to the world beyond
On the way down
large windows become
dark mirrors, reflecting a
tired translucent you
waiting for an eleventh floor elevator
When you get in
there are stains on the floor
try to ignore them
Exit a dark parking garage
a maze of empty streets
filled with dim light
but no people
Places I: Vermont (1982-2000)
I grew up in the woods. There were people there too, but it was mostly woods. My parents were New Yorkers who moved to Vermont. They met in Madison Wisconsin, attending college, where my father got a degree in teaching English as a second language and my mother started a jewelry business. My father got jobs overseas and they spent some time traveling in the Mediterranean and northern Africa, as well as India and Indonesia. Having recently returned, they had intended to move to Oregon, and were only visiting to pick up an anvil for my mother’s aforementioned jewelry business. But their Volkswagen bus broke down and they decided to stay. After scouting options around the state, they bought some land on a mountain, cleared the trees, and used them to build a house. Things were simpler then.
I grew up looking out over the green mountains, alternately a beautiful red-orange-yellow show of foliage in the fall, or a soft, white wasteland in the winter. I drank spring water pumped from a mountain well, and breathed the air purified by thousands of trees. Nature abounded. Deer, moose and bears were in my yard, eagles and owls were in the trees, newts and snakes in the grass. Rivers and streams housed trout and other fish, as well as insects that floated on surface tension, and monstrous larvae amongst the stones. Ponds filled with tadpoles that turned to singing frogs, along with salamanders and dreaded leaches.
I ate fresh corn, tomatoes, local cheeses, apples and berries, washed it down with cider or maple sap snuck from buckets hung on neighbors’ tree taps. I hiked up mountains, watched the stars, swam in lakes, rivers, and ponds. I climbed trees, although never quite as high as my friends who were less intimidated by a trip to the hospital, and sledded down snow covered hills, although not quite as fast as my friends who were less intimidated by a trip to the hospital. We built forts out of sticks, hopped along river rocks, collected eggs from chicken coops, and rode our bikes to the general store that was also the post office, where we would buy popsicles or pennycandy.
In the winter I learned how to shovel snow and tend a fire, important skills if you didn’t want to get stranded or freeze. Our driveway was a quarter mile dirt road up a mountain. Even with my father's dedicated care, there were times of year it was inaccessible by car and the only option was to hike out. I lived at the edge of town so I was the first one on the school bus and the last one off. My town had no stoplights and all but two of the roads were dirt. My rides to and from school lasted an hour each way, and contained such perils as high school students and bumps in the road big enough to throw you out of your seat. Occasionally they would get so big kids would hit the top of the bus. For a while my friend and I would intentionally sit above the back wheels, where the bumps were the biggest, until we got tired of having the wind knocked out of us, an uncomfortable and terrifying feeling.
My first school had only two classrooms, but this was appropriate as there were only five people in my grade and so each class had several grades. One time bees got loose in the school. Another time a student brought a snake they found on the way in and it bit the principal. Eventually the school got to be too small or too unsafe or both. Certainly, the playground’s many wooden structures were starting to rot, leaving jagged, splintery holes and missing monkeybars. The second school was superior in that it was much bigger, and because in the corner of the property was a washed out culvert where at recess we could excavate cow bones buried back when the land had been a farm.
Socially, Vermont was a strange concoction of eclectic energies blended into something palpable. The three primary tribes of hippies, yuppies, and rednecks, overlapped and blended in a loose Venn diagram that muffled and padded their differences, smoothing communities out into something cohesive and functional. People helped their neighbors, even if they didn’t always agree. The culture was also divided into three parts, although they strangely did not correspond to the social groups. One part was cute, quirky small town Americana, full of coffee houses, summer concerts in the bandstand, neighbors helping each other out, and all of the most generic holiday celebrations. One part was backwoods depravity brought about by wealth or lack thereof, a hidden underbelly of affairs, addiction, abuse, arson, occasional murder or suicide, crimes of the madness brought on by the wild spirits of nature and the extended solitude of the dark winter months. One part was comical hijinks and shenanigans, likely involving some combination of drugs, alcohol, fire, guns, sleeping with someone you shouldn’t, getting in a fight, and going to or from a place while unsafely operating a car in bad driving conditions. This all followed by reconciliations or an attempted cover ups and repeated with comforting regularity.
I never fit in socially, although in high school I eventually found a small group of freaks and weirdos who trauma bonded together until they could go places where their talents and idiosyncrasies could be appreciated. I am grateful that I got to grow up in Vermont at the time that I did. It is a beautiful place and it has made a lasting impression on my perspective and ethos. But it wasn’t the right place for me, I had to leave and did so as soon as it was convenient. My visits back reaffirmed that Vermont is not a place where I thrive, but also that I am very lucky to have gotten to spend that time there.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)