Holiday On the Edge of the Inferno

Summer ends and another year of business begins with the annual dawn of Labor Day. This year, I woke up headfirst in a pile of my own clothes in a tent at an elevation of 7,000 feet above sea level. In spite of the fact that the hills have been burning for weeks, there is no fire here, just the vague smell of smoke and a haziness over the tops of the trees. The weather is glorious, in fact: warm lake-floating, hiking weather. Outside the tent, a dog is already patrolling the perimeter, snuffling at his tin food bowl, curling up in an astonishingly small ball of fur, waiting for the rest of us to get up.

In a few minutes, I hear the sounds of the eight-year-old giggling and rustling into her purple down jacket to walk to the bathroom, then her father and his girlfriend wondering aloud about whether there is enough bacon for everyone. When we emerge from our tent, we all snuffle quietly around the

site like the dog and smile at each other, re-teaching ourselves how to toast bagels in a skillet.

The forest had been burning for weeks, starting on August 17^th and it plowed through over 200,000 acres of land; gnashing up trees, brush, branches and a swath of land that is comprehensively bigger than the city of Chicago. They call it the Yosemite Rim Fire and it swallowed a summer camp and over 100 more human structures. The moment that Jason and I hit the edge of Desolation Wilderness, a gray miasma seemed to be pluming from nowhere in thready clouds and the smell of smoldering brush was immediately in our noses. Completely ignoring the needs of Califonia tourist season and the end-of-summer holiday, the fire threatened to cut San Francisco off from its water supply and even had the temerity to develop its own weather system.

Nevertheless, traffic along route 50 heaped together at town centers, ice cream stands had long lines

In case you can't tell, the sign reads "Welcome to Kyburz,
Now Leaving Kyburz"

and people were content to set their folding lawn chairs directly into the sun-drenched meltwater river that we rode along. Autumn and California tourism are both inexorable, it seems.

It is an interesting thing: going camping with an eight-year-old. You realize how raw and un-evolved you might possibly be, how much you have in common. For example: when the adults fail to stop at In n’ Out Burger, you might very well both entirely lose your shit. When the battery on your phone dwindles slowly to dead, you might wander around in a funk wondering how you are ever going to get through the long ride home without your music. It is almost certainly true that you would rather be reading your book than talking to any of the very pleasant people that you are camping with. And both you and the eight year old are positively sure that “happy baby” is definitely the best yoga pose. And, of course, without sufficient snacks between meal times, you will surely consider throwing someone innocent into the fire.

At least, I can say that this is one of the most charming eight-year-olds I've ever met: interested in hiking, plant names, and yoga poses. Throughout the entire two-and-a-half days that we were in the mountains, she read her book, chatted gamely with the adults, went running up and down trails and climbed rocks more sociably than most of the adults that I know.

But what reveals itself just as plainly, is how much you have changed since last you were eight-years-old.

I wake in the middle of the night that first evening and I can’t breathe. I sit up, massaging my chest, feeling like I could shake something loose. I unzip the tent and walk around in the dark under a sky startlingly blank of stars. The whole world is dead quiet and much as I imagine black bears and coyotes beyond the ken of my night vision,  I realize that it is far more likely that what is making it so hard to breathe in the already thin air is not fear, but the smoke filtering through the trees. The rim fire burns through my mind as I zombie-shuffle through the camp site, imagining that I perhaps can see an orange glow reflected in the tops of the trees and I sit there considering it: its portents, how dry and burnt out the planet is, giving way to my thoughts about the vanishing coral reefs and the great Pacific garbage patch. It is difficult to sleep for the rest of the

night.

At the campfire, after we’ve melted chocolate-covered marshmallows onto gourmet graham crackers, I realize that the purple-jacketed eight year old has maneuvered herself close to me, and by the shushing of her down jacket, I hear first and then feel her wrapping her arms around me while we watch the flames in the fire pit. I snuggle in closer, so pleased to have affection heaped on me: an almost stranger. And wonder how: in complete abandon, with absolutely no reserve or apprehension that I might pull away or reject her at all she can remain completely emotionally available. And I realize that the cheek now tucked under my chin has never known the pain of settling for second happiness.

In a moment of small drama, our eight-year-old takes awhile to come back from her walk around the campground with the dog and just as her father departed on the motorcycle to trace the camp paths looking for her she came triumphantly around the bend, announcing that she had gotten lost and found her way back and was now ready to do yoga. She regarded her absence as a grand adventure, her

return as a testament to her level-headedness and resources and not at all as a failure on her part to do what was expected of her. She didn't waste a moment of reflection or self-beration. She pulled out the thermarest and directed me to the large open field that was obligingly sunlit: “Time for Yoga!”

Autumn has always been a splendid and somewhat mournful season in my heart. I once read that the biggest changes in our life continue to follow the academic calendar no matter how old we are: new ritual beginnings in the autumn, grand adventures that begin in the springtime. I look back over a year of journal entries and realize that I have been in the same place for a year, that the only other country I traveled to this year was Canada, that I am in love and impatient as ever for adulthood to yield up something better than the privilege of being able to eat an ice cream sandwich at midnight if I wish to. I am wondering what this year will be the year of: the year of a career move, or the year of publication, the year of gaining five pounds or the year I learned how to sail? As summer closes down, I realize that there’s very little left of the year to define itself by. I’d better get to work.

The Yosemite rim fire has diminished over the past few weeks, but experts are still predicting that full containment won’t come until October. The fire has burned about 400 square miles, making it the third largest conflagration in California history. It is still unclear how the fire began, though a careless, unnamed hunter is thought to be the source. 

Strange Currents

Two costumes deep and nowhere to wear them. A few bags of check-out counter candy run-off in a last minute panic that trick or treaters were going to come by our apartment door. I may put on my Angela Chase costume all the same and eat Almond Joys with Jordan (heheh – Jordan) while we watch Hocus Pocus on the pull-out couch. This will have to be enough holiday for now, because keeping pace with multiple lives is an exhausting business: work, writing, French class, cooking, fires on the beach, old friends coloring the west coast with an odd sort of implied time travel. Maybe I’ll pull it together for late-night Halloween karaoke. It’s possible… but I doubt it.

The kitty surveys her carnage.

The cat has eaten my Mac cord.  Literally must have swallowed pieces of it while I wasn’t watching, because not only is it in chunks, it is substantially shorter. She is a strange bird these days – racketing from room to room like a furry, white comet making little chirruping noises as she goes. She follows me while I fold clothes, clean the mirrors, look for my keys and she finds various perches from which to observe and evaluate my behavior. She is tolerant, if not affectionate, but oddly more involved and invested in the goings-on of the apartment than she ever was back in Seattle. And now she’s eating electrical accessories when they’re plugged into the wall. I worry about her.

I worry about all of my time on a motorcyle, too. In my experience, the most dangerous thing about being on a motorcycle is also one of the best things about it. Not the speed or the risk, either. It is the quiet of it. Not, certainly, the quiet of the engine or the wind that harasses even the most smartly buttoned leather coat or the roar of other irritable cars on the road – the internal quiet. Without music or conversation, there is really nowhere for you to spend time but in your own head. On a long enough ride, you can take some truly meditative journeys and find yourself at the top of Mount Diablo a bit surprised at having arrived on a peak from which you can see most of the surrounding country. One considers the validity of one’s contribution to her job, the state of climate change, whether our democratic process has really imploded, if living up to one’s potential is actually that satisfying, the regrets of past conversations. It is possible that you speak of this to no one.

Traveling to Pittsburgh in the fall means pumpkin carving and friends and the smell of leaves that reminds me of a brick-buildinged campus that is almost a decade in my rearview. It means that people I love have made a small child that has the most perfectly pink lips. This small human and I looked at each other: me, considering the first very tenuous weeks of her life that brought her here to my lap and what it will be like for her to grow up in a generation that has always known Facebook. I wonder what her prom dress will look like. Her trim little shoulders seem to shrug when I sit her upright on my thighs and frown over these thoughts.

Sandy in Nantucket, MA

Much of my family (real and chosen) is back East – scattered from Maine to Massachusetts, New Hampshire to New York. They stayed away from their windows and hoarded water in their basements with a resigned New England air as Hurricane Sandy pummeled the coast this week. My mother lost power quickly enough, even though they never cancelled her classes that she taught at school that day. My cousin on Nantucket Island sent photographs of water flooding the port and Main Street and surrounding the lighthouse of Brant Point. My pregnant cousin is still without power, ferrying herself and the rest of the family to the community center to periodically recharge their phones and shower. It is possible that they won’t have electricity before the election on Tuesday. A close friend’s basement flooded waist-high in Brooklyn and their car bobbed down the street and away.

With my hair like this...
it hurts to look at me.

These are the things that I’m thinking about on my couch while wearing a plaid shirt and black leggings, wondering whether it’s really a complete costume if I don’t dye my hair red. I’m thinking about the disparate driftwood of experience that is making up the lives of the people I know, feeling (as ever) a bit overcome.

Look, it’s a strange year and we’re caught in strange currents. Nearly everyone I know is living their life at a higher volume than they’re used to; making bigger moves and maybe vibrating at a slightly higher frequency as a result. People are moving, quitting their jobs, writing their novel, buying houses, having children, sitting in hospital waiting rooms, falling in ill-advised love, and going back to school. Maybe it’s 2012 and there’s an enormous prophesied bird-dragon headed right for us, maybe I’m in my thirties and so are many of the people that I know and love, and we’re going through those big life changes that we’ve been hearing about all these years. Or maybe I’m thinking too much. Maybe it’s not all as connected as it seems. But troubling as some of these realities are, I like thinking of my life as more comprehensive and inclusive. The boundaries between me and you don’t feel quite so linked to geography that way.

Last Saturday a small pack of East Bay kids crossed the bridge and headed for Ocean Beach: three scientists, an architect, an ex-theater kid, and a socially ungainly writer who would be the oldest person in the group. We dug a hole in the sand and built a fire that evening.

I’ve never made a fire on the beach (though I’ve certainly spun fire and watched fire spinning by sunset before on the shaded, well-trafficked beach of Golden Gardens in Seattle). But simply watching a flame swallow branches and old cardboard is better than most forms of entertainment that I pay for (internet, film, shows, museums). It is a pleasantly primal experience to hold a stick and marshmallow near a flame and watch it brown. The fire stays in your clothes for days afterwards, causes you to lean into strangers, share blankets, lick your fingers of small dabs of chocolate. It feels more permanent than most things in our commercial break world.

Just another pack of strangers discussing the weather, politics, stories we’ve loved, times that we’ve been left, nicknames we’ve adopted (by the way, I now refer to Jordan as “zombie”), all edging around the borders of vulnerability wondering what’s too much to share or say.

But what if nothing was too much and you could just say what you meant at that moment? What if you could tell strangers that you were lonely and have them put a blanket around your shoulders? What if you could tell the girl with the glasses that you think she laughs better than most of the people that you’ve known in your life? Maybe you could talk about what faith is like, where it gets lost, how difficult trust is, how grateful you are. What if simply saying things out loud felt like a solution? Perhaps that could be California in October.