Exploring a new country was filled with moments: some beautiful, some strange, and some terrifying. Brazil was still under a military dictatorship when I arrived. True, it was moving towards democracy, but the battle was not completely won. Many of my Brazilian friends told me horror stories of living through the 1970s. They explained that during protests, when the police arrived, the protesters would grab each other and say, “Remember my name. Remember me.”

This in case they ‘disappeared,’ taken away by military police and never seen again.

By 1983, things were improving. Not as many people ‘disappeared,’ but it still happened. That is why my Brazilian friends all stressed the importance of steering clear of the police. Plus, because they were Military Police, they all carried weapons that looked like small machine guns. 

I was in the country on a standard Visa, but had managed to get a job teaching English in Rio de Janeiro. Which meant I was in this beautiful country, illegally teaching English. So, I was more than happy to stay the hell away from them.

One night, I was walking through Ipanema with Angelo, a Brazilian friend. I had finished teaching my evening conversational English classes and was ready to have a few beers. It was late, maybe eleven or so, but it was Rio. This beautiful, huge city is made of many different boroughs, each a mini city within the city.  Rio is a place so full of life that the energy alone keeps you up late.

Along the streets, open-air bars rumbled full. From each place, a different type of loud music rolled out, hooked arms with the tune from the next nightclub, and created the soundtrack of the night. A bizarre score made of part samba, part rock, with jazz, melodically evading those simple rhythms, and leading the way into complex beats.

The smells in Brazil were as intricate as the music. Walk down one street and the soft salty touch of the sea floated on the breeze. Turn the corner, and the sharp smell of an open sewer launched into the nostrils. Hurry to the next block, where rich, deep flavors from an open-air restaurant assuaged the sewage-savaged sinuses. The pong of humanity wove through the heavy, humid heat, creating an intoxicating sauna of perfume, aftershave, and sweat.

I loved Rio. The towering jagged jungled hillside, the music, the humidity, I loved it all. But alongside this rich life was extreme poverty. This was my first encounter with street people. These were the people too poor to afford to live in favelas, Brazilian shanty towns. The people on the streets lived in actual cardboard boxes, duct taped together to provide some shelter from the night. Not just individuals or couples. I would see whole families living within an unused church doorway, hunkered down, trying to stay alive. 

My Brazilian friends convinced me that I could not give money to all the homeless. I would go broke. Within a few months, I was mostly successful at building a wall around myself, not seeing the people on the street. I still broke down occasionally when a child came begging to me. For the children, I gave food, not money. I gave them something that would be for them. Something that couldn’t be stolen away.

Angelo and I walked along, chatting about life in Brazil versus the U.S.. when we passed by a large man seated on the ground. I kept my eyes forward, walking and chattering away. Angelo stopped, folded his arms, cocked his head to one side, and stared at the man. I stepped back and let myself look. 

The man was probably in his thirties, leaning against the pillar of a building. His head lolled forward, mouth open. His eyes were open too, but they didn’t appear to see. He began to slump over on his side, so slowly it looked like fog rolling down a hillside. Once he was flat on the ground, he gave a twitch and rolled onto his back. He opened his eyes wider, almost as if he was wondering what had brought him to this moment.

“Yah,” Angelo nodded and tilted his head. “He’s going to die.”

I felt my stomach drop as I studied this man. His chest was rising and falling in an uneven pattern. As if he was trying to remember how to breathe. His right hand reached, grasping for something, until it finally fell back to the pavement.

“Oh my God,” I gasped. “We should call the police!”

“Why?” Angelo looked at me, confused.

“Because this man needs help,” I said.

“We can’t call the police,” Angelo snorted a laugh, turned back, and studied the dying man.

“If you don’t, I will.” I turned.

“What you going to say?” Angelo grabbed my arm.

“That this...that this m-m-m-man needs...” I stuttered to a stop due to the harsh look on Angelo’s face.

His mouth was set in a hard line, his eyes had an almost malicious expression. He looked completely different from Angelo, my drinking buddy. “The police will say to you,” Angelo leaned closer, spoke low, holding my arm tighter. “They say ‘Why you care about this man?”

“I…” was all I got out before Angelo leaned in so close that I couldn’t make out his whole face.

“They say, ‘What you think, gringa? You think Brazilian police no good? Think we backwards? I think we take YOU in. We leave him here, but you come with us.’ Then they put you in their car, drive you way far out into the jungle. If you are lucky, they take only your money. Maybe they bring you back…maybe they leave you in the jungle. People disappear here. Even gringas. No, we don’t go to the police. Here you don’t see ANYTHING. You don’t SAY ANYTHING.”

I nodded, my eyes going back to the man. He lay motionless, his chest not moving, his eyes open, but glazed over.

“We better go,” Angelo said.

I walked away, but a piece of me stayed.  It is a piece I never got back.

Angelo’s fierce lesson on surviving life in Brazil stayed with me. In the six months I lived there, I was drilled in the fine art of not looking at the police. Politely giving way if they were coming towards you, but never, NEVER calling attention to yourself. I had thought of it as a game. Now I realized it was much more serious, and the stakes could be deadly.

I lived in the hills of an area of Rio called Lapa. Each morning, I would walk to teach English. My earliest class was at 7:00AM in the heart of Rio. On those mornings, I would leave at 5:00 AM, going early to meet with fellow teachers for our traditional breakfast: cafe con leche and pao con manteige (coffee with milk, bread with butter).

I strolled, enjoying the quiet of the streets. Even Rio had to sleep. There was a shortcut I could take, but it went by the police station. During the day, I avoided that area, but it was so early that I figured it was safe. I turned the corner onto the square by the station. There lay a man in tattered clothes, barefoot, hair a tangled mane, and obviously dead. You’ve heard of fight or flight, but there is another component of that phrase that few remember: freeze. 

I froze.

It wasn’t the body that caused me to stop. It was the four police officers, laughing and kicking the cadaver. Not nudging the body to see if this person was dead. Full out kicking it. Trying to see who could make the head move the farthest, or, perhaps, trying to see if they could kick the head OFF.

The sound was horrible. Have you ever dropped a cantaloupe? That same thick wet splat was heard with each kick the police delivered. I stood there, trying to figure out how to get away before they spotted me. Angelo’s words ricocheted through my brain, “You don’t see anything.” 

Okay, I need to vanish. Ignore what’s happening. Just slip away.

I took a step backwards, praying that the corpse would keep the police busy. It must have been my movement, because one of the cops looked up. His eyes met mine. He looked surprised, then he stood up straight and glared. The other three followed his gaze; they too straightened and stared. The dead man was finally left in peace.

I made an almost military precision about-face and started walking. I tried to keep my pace steady, not too fast, but brisk. I did not look back. Even when I heard a car start up.

The four military police pulled up beside me in a large vehicle. They paced me, driving exactly the speed that I walked. They stared at me in a deafening silence. 

I kept my eyes dead ahead, feeling the weight of the policemen’s scrutiny. I held my head high, letting my eyes range, trying to find an escape. 

If I ran, I knew they would be on me. I walked faster. The car kept pace. I could feel the police getting excited. Just a half block ahead of me, I saw what I needed. A narrow alley. I picked up my pace. I pretended I would walk by the alley, but at the last second, I turned and sprinted down the passage that was too narrow for their car.

I heard the cops shouting and tires squealing. They were going to try to cut me off. I turned and ran back out the way I came. I darted across a street, into another narrow alley. I took two more turns, backtracking until I was sure I had lost the police. I hid in the entrance of a church, hoping that if there was a god, they would take pity on a terrified gringa in Rio.

After several minutes, when I was sure there were no police in sight, I ran from the church. I didn’t stop running until I reached the café, my friends, and safety. I walked in, dripping sweat and shaking. Yes, it was horrible to see another body, but being chased by Brazilian police? That was terror.  

The teachers cheered my story, saluting my win by clinking our mugs of rich coffee, the customers, and the waitress joined in the celebration. In Brazil, you revel in so much of life. A major part was any win over the military police. 

I went about the rest of my day, teaching my classes, talking with co-workers, and correcting businessmen’s grammar as they worked diligently to learn English. I had learned a lesson, too. I finally understood something about my time in Brazil. I would need to pay for all the beauty of the people, the music, the life, by also living with the ugliness: the military police, the poverty, and the helplessness. What I would do is what everyone else did. I would survive. I would be hypervigilant while enjoying this lush landscape of beauty and pain. 

At the end of my day, I walked out of Feedback School of English and stood for a moment in the doorway. I took a deep breath in, gave myself a shake, and walked into my Brazilian life. Beginning with a very long, convoluted walk back to my home in Lapa, giving a wide berth to the police station.

Debz Briske (she/her) is a writer and storyteller whose work explores horror—both psychological and paranormal—as well as creative nonfiction and personal monologue. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she draws inspiration from its deep green forests, the dark blue-gray waters of Puget Sound, and the ever-present rain that seems to shroud the world in mystery. To her, the landscape has always felt alive with spirits—both benevolent and sinister. When she’s not writing, she works in health care, where she encounters her own blend of horror, humor, and the occasional cadaver.

I had just arrived at my new psychiatrist’s office for my intake appointment. I pulled into the parking lot and, after scanning briefly for an open spot, steered toward a large black pickup parked at the edge of the lot where it faced a ribbon of woods. As I pulled up next to the truck, something perched on the driver-side mirror caught my eye. At first I thought it was a raptor-shaped decoy or some other ornament. It was just days away from Halloween, and the truck’s owner could have given themselves over to the spirit of the season. My heart leapt when the thing jerked its head slantwise and peered at me with an eye like a bead of India ink. Its face was like a rotten Osage orange. I was being regarded by a black vulture. 

I parked, got out, and slowly approached the front of the truck. The vulture continued peering at me over the hood. When I reached the other side, a burst of movement in the grass jostled me again. Not just one but an entire committee of vultures had gathered at the brushy edge of the woods, eight or nine in all. They recollected themselves, some slowly backing into the brush, others bobbing their heads and shrugging their woolly shoulders, all staring me down with the same glimmering eyes as their companion. 

A voice from behind broke the deadlock. “Excuse me?”

I turned to see a woman in marine fatigues, boots, and a tight bun approaching. 

“I’m so sorry to ask this of you, but would you mind shooing them off?” she said, fingering her key fob. “They freak me out.”

I agreed and did so gently. The vultures rustled again but otherwise quietly withdrew into the brush. The ringleader fluttered down from its roost and joined the throng. 

The woman stepped closer once the vultures were gone. “Thanks, so sorry to keep you!” she said. 

I told her it was no problem at all and started toward the entrance to the office building. As I passed by the passenger door of the pickup, it cracked open to reveal another woman who peered out toward where the committee had gathered. She had been sitting inside the truck the whole time, eyeing the lead vulture warily just as it had been regarding her. 

It makes sense that someone like the first woman—presumably a service member who had witnessed or precipitated violent death or likely would one day—should be fearful of vultures. As for the rest of us, what is it about them that elicits such revulsion? That the business of scavenging carcasses is grisly and odorous is a given, and we generally do not like reminders of our mortality. There’s also a reminder of our inescapable animal-ness in the way their bodily functions are so unabashedly and prominently on display—they squabble, gorge themselves, projectile vomit when startled, and soil themselves to stay cool. 

Human babies do many of these things, too. How is it, then, that when met with other displays of bodily reality we shy away, shoo them off, or meet them with displays of force? 

Putting aside the fact that he was a scheming, boastful bigot who mostly killed what he loved, there are parts of John J. Audubon’s entry on black vultures in Birds of America that I am quite taken with. I do, however, think he lingers too much on the qualities that relegate vultures to the untouchables of the avian world. Still, his observations are important because they reflect how most Americans continue to regard vultures; namely, as carrion crows, haunting meat markets, keeping company with feral dogs, casting shadows over the slaughterhouse, painting their roosts with ordure, tainting cistern water, stalking carts of offal on their way to landfills at the city’s edge, grunting, hissing, and gobbling up all manner of ripe flesh. He comments on the force with which they disgorge their stomach’s contents with a kind of wonder, and also notes their characteristic obstinateness. Upon approaching a two-acre roost host to thousands in the swamps outside Charleston, he and a companion “kept up a brisk fusillade for several minutes,” killing an unspecified number. Those that survived the volley began reconvening in the same trees soon after the gunmen retired for the night.

I just recently learned of how the people of Bunn, North Carolina—a small town 30 miles northeast of Raleigh—have been “besieged” by a “plague” of vultures since 2020. When all else failed, they resorted to using cannon fire to scare the birds off. The apparatus employed is actually fascinating—a propane-fueled sound cannon installed on the roof of the local high school and electronically programmed to fire every day in the morning, afternoon, and evening for two weeks straight. Each blast reaches upwards of 130 decibels and sounds like a skeet shooter with an itchy trigger finger. They are not harmful, ostensibly, and are admittedly a more humane solution than Audubon’s habit of disgorging the contents of his gun. Even so, there is something to be said for making it illegal to kill or maim vultures while sanctioning contraptions that shave a year or two off their lifespans. The use of less-than-lethal weapons on protesters is questionable enough. Their use on animals strikes me with the same bluster as North Korea’s missile tests or parents screaming at school board meetings. Both are tactics of riot police. And while it worked for a time, the vultures of Bunn just as soon resumed their posts. 

I have wondered if the vultures circling the fields of Antietam made Lincoln reconsider his invocation of “the better angels of our nature.” By other ways of reckoning, however, vultures are those better angels. Ancient Zoroastrians and modern-day Parsis maintain that it is by the vulture’s mystic eye—so adept at spotting carrion when airborne—that souls are ferried into the afterlife. The diameter of the dakhma, or “Towers of Silence,” is set to be no smaller than 300 feet—room enough for vultures to take off and land as they fulfill their role in purifying the dead. A similar premise is enacted through the Tibetan practice of jhator, or “scattering to the birds.” One’s body is given up in a final act of charity. Blessed deconstitution, the surrendering of material form to the economy of being. 

One of my favorite poems is William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” The poem reaches well beyond the currents in 19th-century Romanticism it’s typically confined to and stands out to me now for the way it speaks to how vultures can be both deathly omens and visiting angels. When Bryant urges us to go forth under the open sky to receive Nature’s teachings and elegizes the surrender of our individual beings to the elements, I cannot help but think of sky burials and their edification in structures like the dakhma or spaces like the charnel grounds. There is an irony in this, as the poem also hastened a flattening of death and its subsequent edification in the rural cemetery movement. If you’ve been to any municipal cemetery built during the 19th century in the United States, you’ve seen its effects: rolling hills and dells cloaked in arboreal splendor, lined with monuments both humble and ornate and traversed by serpentine paths. These features make for an idyllic and placid deathscape, both physically and emotionally. 

The Civil War, with its meeting of archaic tactics with modern armaments, thoroughly obliterated whatever Romantic notions of death Americans still clung to. For those directly involved in the conflict, death’s too-realness was readily apparent; for those insulated from the killing fields, however, the shock of witnessing their carnal truth had yet to set in. This particular trauma and its accompanying shift in thought is well exemplified by the public debut of Matthew Brady’s 1862 exhibition, “The Dead of Antietam.” The exhibits, which featured photographs taken by Brady’s then-employee Alexander Gardner and his assistant James Gibson, provided many with their first glimpse of the field’s most bountiful crop on that mid-September day. For those who had already borne witness, it was like taking in the aftermath anew. The photographs themselves frankly revealed the frozen agony of the dead soldiers, uniformly maimed yet individually distinguishable. The multiple layers of censorship that surfaced in the wake of the exhibit’s debut are also telling: woodblock reproductions of the photographs softened the soldiers’ features, so that they could have collapsed just as readily from exhaustion as from a hail of minié balls. In so doing, mutilated and identifying features alike were obscured.

We seem to need that softening, for the shock of death’s reality is often too bright to look at directly. In her book When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön calls on three methods of reaching through the glare of mortal awareness toward joy: “no more struggle,” “using poison as medicine,” and “seeing whatever arises as enlightened wisdom.” Some Tibetans maintain that the vultures congregating at charnel grounds are bodhisattvas in disguise; their effortless enactment of these methods lends credence to this belief. 

Regarding the first method: vultures tend to be inactive until late morning to midday when the sun has been out long enough to thoroughly warm the earth’s surface. When they finally do take flight, they take advantage of the heated air columns emanating from the sun-soaked ground. Rather than wasting energy flapping their broad wings to lift their cumbersome bodies, they allow themselves to be borne aloft on the thermals.

Regarding the second method: a buzzard’s guts are a miraculous thing. There are very few obligate scavengers in nature, a key reason being that the longer a corpse decomposes, the more toxic compounds it produces. The Zoroastrians were remarkably astute in noting that a corpse will pollute the elements around it. By most biologists’ accounts, however, it is not the dreaded Nasu assuming the form of a fly that contaminates the body, but rather the dead organism’s own microbiota initiating the process of decomposition by dissolving it from the inside out. Vultures not only have one of the most acidic stomachs in the animal kingdom, but their intestinal microbiota also consists largely of Clostridia and Fusobacteria—bacteria found in carrion that would be lethally pathogenic in any other animal. It would seem that vultures have recruited these bacteria as accomplices in a remarkable symbiotic feat, contributing to their ability to consume putrid meat without being poisoned by it. 

Regarding the third method: what else is seeing whatever arises as enlightened wisdom, if not a different form of scavenging? In this, all the world is worshipful. I keep coming back to a time when I drove past a cow field in which several vultures were at rest, their wings outstretched and facing the setting sun. Oh, how the low-angle light caught their wing stars! Assume a horaltic pose and you cannot help but evoke a call to prayer.

I have a friend who lives with his partner in an old farmhouse. Soon after they moved in, they discovered that black vultures had nested in the barn. They don’t use the space presently and have allowed the vultures to remain in residence with their nestlings. One evening during a visit, my friend took me out to the barn to introduce me. Lying at the doorstep were shreds of raccoon or possum skin, fragments of leg bone and teeth—a charnel ground not of the Tibetan plateau but the rurnt tobaccolands of the Carolina Piedmont. No sooner than we crossed the doorstep and entered the barn, there came an explosion of wings, the scraping of talons on floorboards, loud thumps in the loft. The smell was pungent, the corners of the barn a drift of feathers, bones, and splattered droppings. He motioned toward the place where their greenish eggs had lain, a patch of leftover hay in one of the mule stalls. 

There was something eerily familiar in that hybrid, transitional space, where the relics of past human life had become a nesting ground. The vultures still live there, sun themselves on the porch with my friends’ cats, and stay perched on the railing when they pull into the driveway. They have found a niche in my friends’ lives. And mine, too, for I’ve found in them a lesson for how to live not only with the non-human but also with the nearness of that which scares us most.

I’ve been dancing around the subject so far, so let me say it straight: we’re two steps away from being carrion. Worm food. Buzzards’ buffet. Our individuality dissolves in death; memory is but an impression. Even monuments weather. 

So? Bryant said it best: live.

Chris Robey holds an MLA from the University of Georgia and currently works as a cultural landscape specialist with the Southeast Regional Office of the National Park Service. His poems and essays have appeared in The Fourth River, The Peel Literature & Arts Review, and Permafrost Magazine (forthcoming). He lives in Alexandria, Virginia with his fiber artist/librarian wife, their apple-headed tuxedo cat, and a budling collection of native perennials.

The summer transitions into an early autumn, the sun dimming earlier in the evening, and the leaves shifting from green to a mottled brown. The Kansas wind isn’t strong, but it provides a cool breeze that is a reprieve from the heat. Not the same flesh-melting heat as the previous weeks, but just warm enough for a breathable blouse and flip-flops.

It is quiet on my street, the distant sounds of children running through the grass and dogs barking the only noises I hear apart from the occasional car driving by. The sky above is a pale blue, and as my eyes graze down the horizon, it gradates to white, to pink, to yellow. The setting sun silhouettes the swaying trees, dancing to a melody only they can hear. The rustle of leaves is like a whispered conversation between them, and I find myself wondering what they are saying. What secrets do they hold?

When I was as child, we’d go camping in the Rocky Mountains. It was cooler in the elevation, but that didn’t stop us from pretending that the large, protruding rocks were castles. We’d each find a structure, declaring our kingdom and establishing our rule. We built houses of moss and twigs for the fairies and left them silver as an offering. We never saw the fairies, but we somehow knew that they were there, relaxing in our mossy houses. They were pleased with us.

Those times of simplicity and innocence are now long gone, but when I sit here and watch the swaying trees and dancing branches, I am reminded of the magical days in the mountains. It’s amazing how fear evaporates while there. At home, the ideas of bugs crawling on my skin makes me retreat into the house. The idea of bears sends shivers down my spine. But there it was natural. We were in their world, after all, just passing through. Somehow, none of that was on my mind as we slept in a dark forest with nothing but waterproof cloth to protect us.

What is it about forces that we cannot control that frightens us? Tornados, predators, floods, hurricanes. They are elements of nature. My beautiful home that guards and protects me is a modern wonder that I will always be grateful for, but it is not natural. I appreciate the safety it provides, but nature was here before I was. Before my house was.

And yet, I continually grow annoyed when I find an insect inside my home. They don’t belong here, I tell myself. But don’t they? Insects do not conform to human decorum and courtesies. They are not vampires – they do not need an invitation.

I do not relish in smashing the insects in my house. Not even the ants that return every spring to terrorize my cabinets and every bag of chips that is unintentionally left open. But yet, I declare war when they cross the boundary into my home. I consider my home by invitation only, but the moths do not understand this. They flit in the open door, drawn to the light for some uncontrollable reason I cannot understand.

It reminds me of the aliens from Toy Story. “The Claw has chosen! I move on to a better place!” It’s all magnetic, and I think perhaps it is their light at the end of the tunnel. With the dawn, they die. Poetic or morbid, I can’t be sure. But I know I will find it another day, wings curled around it’s furry body under a chair or behind a bookcase.

A soft spot in my heart belongs to rollie pollies. I am not sure what they are called in other parts of the world, but they are the bugs that roll into a ball when you touch them. Mini armadillos with a thousand little legs. As a child, they were my friends. I’d collect them like they were Pokémon: I would build little houses and habitats for them and give them families.

I can’t be mad at them for entering my house. Everyone and everything want to be warm and comfortable, especially when winter comes. I wonder how many bugs are crawling under my couch, how many spiders are camping out in my basement.

I’ve graduated from imaginary castles in the mountains to establishing my kingdom and my rule in my own house. Only in the mountains, insects were welcome, expected. Establishing my dominance here is asserted in the guise of safety and sanitation. I convince myself that all bugs are dirty and dangerous. They belong outside in the uncivilized earth. There is a barrier between us: my side and their side.

I convince myself to be so afraid and disgusted that I cannot hear the tune the cricket

s fiddle on their backs. I do not see the twinkling lights of the fireflies mimicking the stars overhead.

As a child, it was all a wonder. A magic that my eyes couldn’t help seeing, and that my mind couldn’t help but romanticize. I would touch insects with my bare hands, let them crawl along my palm. We don’t inherently fear insects. It is a lesson taught, and sometimes a lesson learned.

A couple of years ago, my niece requested a bug habitat for her birthday. I remember the days of craving simplicity, of catching earthworms and keeping them as pets, burying them in the backyard when they died with a little tombstone and memorial service. My siblings and I would catch salamanders by the creek and secretly keep them in our rooms until our mom found them. I wonder now if my niece would request the same thing for her birthday this year, or if she has moved on, grown up, as I have.

I will never regain this wonder, but now I watch my young son collecting rollie pollies and watching the cicadas emerge from their skins. He draws roads for beetles with chalk along the sidewalk, and chases butterflies. It is unlikely that you will ever find me playing with insects, but I hope against hope that my son will continue. His excitement at seeing a beetle merely walking across the grass is a slice of innocence that in enviable.

Someday he will quit watching bugs. Someday his innocence will be lost to video games and girlfriends. Someday he will grow up and not think twice about walking past an ant carrying a chunk of food back to his colony. But for now his innocence is of the insects, and someday he will remember the magic he had lost.

My name is Jen Longbine. I have published several short stories and poems in Fort Hays State University's literary journal, Lines, as well as their journal, Post Parade. I am a novelist at heart, but like to write essays and poems periodically.

Am I the only one who still views seventh grade as the nadir of his existence, all these years later?

My version of seventh-grade hell is the garden variety experienced by small-town boys whose peers don’t think they live up to the local norms of appropriate masculine behavior. In my case, the small town is Kane, Pennsylvania, tucked in the northern woods of the Allegheny National Forest. And the torture of choice is the “growler”—a quick fisted twist on my downy chin, accompanied by the snarled chant “Davey boy! Faggot!”

But seventh grade isn’t all bad. There are times when the pure hellishness of it is interrupted by brief moments of bright pleasure I know I shouldn’t be enjoying.

Take gym class, for example. Some of the most excruciating experiences in my sad-sack junior high career take place amidst the smells of industrial disinfectant and adolescent sweat in the boys’ gymnasium, but the gym is also the place where I start noticing things.

We are scheduled for phys. ed. on the very first day of seventh grade. Since two gym teachers had retired the previous spring, both the boys’ and the girls’ phys. ed. classes have brand new teachers this year. The name of the girls’ teacher is Mrs. California, which I find a bit misleading. Although she is blond, she is not from California, nor does she in any way resemble a beauty queen.

The new boys’ teacher, Coach Fiori, on the other hand, might just win some beauty contests. Twenty-two and fresh out of Slick Stone State College (where it seems every gym teacher in the state has studied), he is a classic seventies dreamboat: sculpted muscles covered in thick body hair, a square jaw below a jaunty mustache, a thick head of curly dark brown hair. He is the Marlboro man, Mark Spitz, the cowboy in the Village People.

And Coach is dead serious about physical education, as we learn on that first day. In elementary school, our weekly sessions with the gym teacher had been rather casual. We would report to the gym in our regular school clothes and then perform some minor calisthenics in time with a song called “Go, You Chicken-Fat, Go!,” which Mrs. Jensen played for us on a beat-up old record player. A young redhead, Mrs. Jensen was nice, but she was decidedly unambitious when it came to both her own career and our physical well-being. So she used the chicken-fat record with every single class, in every single grade, every single day.

Coach Fiori has a much more ambitious agenda for us, and the first item on that agenda is making certain that we’ll be properly equipped for serious athletic exertion. We are each issued a pair of blue cotton shorts imprinted with the Kane Wolves logo and a gummy white box on which our mothers are to write our names in block letters with a permanent marker. We are also issued a thick reversible t-shirt, blue on one side and red on the other. Aside from showing our pride in the school colors, these shirts will allow us to form teams without reverting to the old-school shirts-and-skins trick (which we will later use in high school, to my great shame and delight).

Coach explains these two items to us and then gets even more serious as he pulls out of a small box the item that my dad had always called a jockstrap, but which Coach Fiori now refers to as an “athletic supporter.” An athletic supporter, he tells us, is a crucial element in the practice of physical exercise, and its use will be mandatory in every single class.

After this long exposition on our required uniform, Coach takes us downstairs to the locker room to explain his policies there. First, we will all be issued an identical black Master combination lock. We can only use the locks he provides, since Coach has a Master master key to these locks and needs to be able to inspect our lockers for possible contraband. Second, we will need to bring a towel from home, because showering will be mandatory at the end of every class, whether we’ve sweated or not. The coach will keep a checklist on which he will note our shower compliance for each class.

Coach’s no-nonsense approach to dress and hygiene is further reflected in the rigorous curriculum, which he also explains to us on that first day. Each month, we will study a new sport, timed to coincide with the sports seasons of small-town Pennsylvania high schools. We will have flag football in September, basketball in January, and track-and-field in May. We will wrestle in February and do rope climbing to coincide with the national Presidential Awards in Physical Fitness. (We will not, incidentally, ever have a unit on soccer. In the 1970s, soccer in the U.S. is a sport played only by the wealthy and by immigrants, and we have neither in Kane, Pennsylvania.)

Coach will begin each unit with detailed instruction on the history and rules of each sport, which we will have to memorize, since he will test us on them in a written exam. For example, I will forever remember that the first intercollegiate football game was played between Princeton and Rutgers, even though I had never heard of Rutgers before that first unit in seventh grade.

These written tests are a godsend for me, because I have no problem memorizing all the material and then regurgitating it on the test. And I need the A I get on the written tests, because I always do miserably on what Coach calls the “skills tests.”

As their name suggests, skills tests evaluate the quality of our performance of various sporting activities. We might get a score based on how far we can throw a football, using the proper technique. Or how quickly (if at all) we can climb a rope to the twenty-five-foot-high gym ceiling. How many pull-ups we can do, or how quickly we can run the mile.

I am chubby, weak, and tragically uncoordinated. Worse yet, I throw like a girl, no matter what type of ball I’m throwing. And I have absolutely no interest in sports. So the skills tests are invariably humiliating for me. Not only do I always get a low score; worse, my classmates snicker during my performance and then incorporate its inadequacies into their later rounds of daily harassment.

Even more traumatic than the skills tests—although significantly more enjoyable—are the mandatory showers at the end of Coach’s classes. Part of this is shame about my lumpy body, having to expose to the other guys my pointy boy-titties. And that lumpy body simply refuses to sprout body hair of any type, even as my classmates develop tufts above their bigger-than-mine genitals and in the pits of their more-muscular-than-mine arms.

Of course, the excruciating pleasure of those gang showers is the chance to observe—furtively and full of shame—these developments on my adolescent classmates’ bodies. With each stolen glance I memorize a few inches of Tim Giordano’s chest here, and a few inches of Jack Herman’s ass there. Then I take these images home and add them to those I had collected earlier, until I am able to construct full portraits of my favorite naked classmates in the gallery of my mind.

Gym class continues to torment me all through junior high. But in eighth grade there is one moment of resistance, one time when I rescue myself from the lowest low of that three-year nightmare.

Coach Fiori means well in making Jack Herman my partner during our unit on wrestling. Although I genuinely detest the mud of flag football and the heart-scorching exertion of running an impossible required mile, wrestling is my most hated phys. ed. subject. On the one hand, it’s just gross: both the rubber mat we use and the more developed of my classmates bear the nasty smell of adolescent sweat. On the other hand, there is the unspeakable danger of being in such intimate physical contact with other boys’ bodies. My subconscious fear of enjoying this contact is so great that I become even more incapacitated than usual when it comes to practicing for and executing the dreaded skills tests. You can’t begin to throw another boy around on a mat when you will barely let yourself touch him—and he can throw you all over the place if you put up no resistance.

It is because I am so bad at wrestling that Coach has made Jack my partner, which is thoughtful on his part, if misdirected. Jack Herman is such a good wrestler that he has already made the high school varsity squad by the time he’s in eighth grade. So Coach thinks it will be perfect for the kid with the strongest wrestling skills to mentor the kid in the class with the weakest skills.

Very bad idea.

Phys. ed. is the only class I have with Jack Herman. Throughout junior high, we take all our classes with the same cohort of students, having been tracked into specific sections based on our perceived aptitude. I am in the highest section, A-1, while Jack is in the next-from-the-bottom, C-1. They are preparing me and my cohort for the college prep track in high school, and they are preparing Jack and his section for Vo-Ag—the vocational/agricultural track. But because of sex segregation in the junior high phys. ed. program, the school combines two sections for gym class, so that both the boys and the girls will have a full class of thirty students. This is why Jack and I are in the combined 8A-1 and 8C-1 boys’ gym class.

Looking back, I can place Jack into a category that has always been especially dangerous for me: short guys with ripe bodies and an intellectual inferiority complex. Jack is several inches shorter than I am, but everything important is ripe and full and exactly where it’s supposed to be. I try not to look, but I can’t help it.

When Coach pairs me with Jack for wrestling, Jack pretends to be happy to help, but he immediately finds opportunities to use the situation to torment me in ways that will grow increasingly intimate. When Coach sets us up in the start position, Jack whispers into my ear, “I’m going to fuck you up, you big faggot.” He links his short arms, one over my shoulder and the other through my crotch, and then yanks so hard that my balls send pain shooting through my entire body.

Although he is shorter than me, Jack is way more muscular, and he is mean. He throws me around like nobody’s business. And since I never resist, I go flying and invariably hit the mat with a resounding thud. Jack particularly likes practicing a move called the “pancake” on me. As I know from the written test I had aced a week earlier, the pancake involves taking a standing opponent and slamming him to the mat in such a manner that the opponent lands flat on his back. It’s kind of like an upside-down belly-flop dive, but when Jack does the pancake on me, it hurts worse than a belly-flop dive, since I am hitting a thin mat on a hardwood floor, which yields way less than a pool of water.

As the dreaded wrestling skills test approaches, Jack isn’t teaching me a thing, and he’s throwing me around in more and more aggressive and painful ways, whispering “faggot” into my ear more and more boldly each time. I feel desperate to get out of the situation but can think of no respectable way to do it, until it comes time for the skills tests themselves.

Coach asks Jack to take his skills test first, so he can model correct form for the rest of the class. We take the test with our previously assigned partners, so Jack demonstrates the double-leg takedown on me, and then the half nelson, receiving perfect scores on each. But when I hear Coach say, “now do the pancake,” something inside me says “no”—no no no no no no no.

Jack wraps his arm around my shoulder and nearly kisses the word “faggot” into my ear. He lifts my soft hundred-pound body above his head and into a perfect horizontal position, so I will hit the floor perfectly flat. But the no in my head pulls my arm out of the perfect horizontal and down toward the floor at a ninety-degree angle. My hand flattens out to break my fall, and my shoulder lets out a perfect CRACK before sending me tumbling to the side like a bad foul ball.

My shoulder hurts like hell, but I couldn’t be more relieved. Coach Fiori takes me off to the side and massages my shoulder a bit. He then tells me to sit out the rest of that day’s skills tests and replaces me with a tough guy Jack doesn’t hate for the remainder of Jack’s exam. Later I am taken to the doctor, who assures me I have only sprained my shoulder and that it will heal quickly if I just keep my arm in a sling for a week or so.

When Dr. Aquino strictly forbids me from any wrestling whatsoever during the rest of the wrestling unit, I nearly hug him.

David Blackmore (he/him) left his small town in Pennsylvania to earn a BA from Harvard and a PhD from UCLA and spent years as a professor of English and Latin American studies at New Jersey City University. Two years ago, though, he returned to Pittsburgh to complete his memoir and to take a position as writing coordinator at Chatham University, where he teaches pedagogy and literature courses to MFA He recently used his faculty tuition benefits to take the leap and enroll as a student in the MFA program, since he had not previously studied creative writing formally. David’s book-length manuscript Chemical Works Road is now complete, and he has published excerpts in Wordrunners eChapbooks, The Watershed Journal, Rockvale Review, The Fourth River, Northern Appalachia Review, and Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose. You can learn more about David and his work at www.david-blackmore.com.

I never considered much of my hands, any hands, until I started painting them.

Historically, the hand has been one of the most difficult body parts to reproduce in oil painting. French Impressionist, Edgar Degas, famously avoided painting them, leaving his dancing ballerinas with shadowed wrists and smudged fingers under a wash of burnt umber. The hand is complex, has a language of its own. Painting them only reveals their insistence: to paint a hand, one must use a hand. At once you are studying a hand from life, all the while looking at your own hand move the brush. You are considering your hand and the hand of the figure model, two separate identities merging on canvas.

We don’t speak much of hands. We might reach for a cup that inevitably spills, or accidentally wedge a thumb between door and hinge, frustration or pain as a reminder of their existence. Hands are somewhat of an afterthought, used constantly and with little conscious effort. They touch, reach, tear, cling. They sift, lift, squeeze, peel. Hands are seemingly uncomplicated.

Suppose I were to tell you, convince you, of the divine nature of the thumb, the ambiguity of extremities—suppose I twirled the ends of my hair into knots as we spoke. Can you see the mechanics of my knuckles? Do you notice the way a strand clings to a finger pad, sticky with lotion? Will you, I often wonder, notice the scar on my palm and the slump of my pinky?

I’ve been shy with my hands since childhood, when I realized my thumbs were nubs, short and fat, rather than slender, pointed, graceful. I catch myself still, sitting on the patio with friends, thumbs tucked into fists. I pick at my cuticles and bite my nails, which has forced them to grow in with ridges. Cupped in my lap is where they stay. Sleeves pulled down and around them, like they don’t exist.

It is unfeasible to go any given amount of time without seeing hands, whether or not they belong to you. The artist’s greatest struggle, then, may be the inability to truly look at the hand, its varying shapes, subtle edges, how light dances with shadow and collides into form. The immature artist tends to draw the hand in their mind, what they believe a hand looks like from experience, the idea of a hand. This is great mistake. Being ignorant of the hand’s vast bone structure may also be considered a great mistake. The gravest mistake of all, however, is avoiding negative space. Nothing can tell us more about the form of a hand than what is not shown.

In simple terms, observe what lay in front of you, and the emptiness surrounding it.

Something like light happens, like god, when hands are painted. No longer functional in quite the same way, yet accomplishing an intangible whisper of intimacy. Does a stroke of alizarin crimson belong in the cast shadow? How much space rests between each finger? Maybe you begin to wonder, in the negative space, where those hands have been, what they’ve touched, who they’ve held. Perhaps the painting has nothing to do with the hand at all. Perhaps it is more about what the hand is missing.

I fall in love with every hand I meet—it’s impossible not to. The big-eyed barista with slender fingers, gently sweeping coffee grounds into her palm. The tall boy in psych class with swollen knuckles. A woman sifting through a sleeve of Saltines, sucking the salt from her fingers.

Each time we are introduced to a stranger, we join hands. Every time something of substance, of beauty is witnessed, we slap them together in harmony. We high-five. We bump fists. We caress.

Have you forgotten, in the scramble of screens and restlessness of minds, to hold your hand to your chest and breathe? Have you forgotten, like so many, the sensation of cracking your knuckles, one after the other? Do you remember what it feels like to sift through dirt, to stroke the softness of an earlobe? Are you aware of your hands? Look down, memorize, touch with intention.

I think of specific hands, the ones I love most wrapped around me. I think of nuzzling knuckles when handing off a mug of coffee. The reassuring reach across a table after losing a game of cards. I think of a finger pressed to lips, shh, time to sleep.

Hands, of course, are functional. The paramedic sews and beats and sirens. The baker kneads and pours and folds. Hands are used differently and for separate acquisitions of skill. And yet, they make so much sense intertwined.

You might stroll through a museum just for the sake of admiring hands: clasped, limp, clinging. On a recent visit to a John Singer Sargent exhibit, I noticed each of his hands, painted with crisp cerulean, yellow ochre, cadmium red. I had forgotten how much ultramarine blue master oil painters use when painting hands, so much so that shadows often look purple, violet, or green, sap.

The blue to green to purple reminded me of a woman who moved in next door to my childhood home. She was in her early thirties, probably, but seemed much older in my squinted, sun beamed eyes. She used to water lilac weeds in her front lawn every evening. Her hands were sweet. Working to foster an environment that may have eventually devastated her grass, but, for now, everything was violet.

I watch hands move through rooms, greeting, grasping at lovers, unraveling loose thread. My hands crave to touch. Maybe cake batter, flour and egg yolk. The rugged, calloused palms of a lover. It could be, though, that my hands only truly crave to be understood, watched, considered. Perhaps if we paid more attention to hands, studied them with the mind of a painter, new life, a still and more intentional life, might be born.

The linoleum floor of my kitchen was replaced in the late 80’s, and even it’s ugly, crusted surface urges me to paint. I haven’t purchased new canvas since February, reusing the tattered and maimed masonite from college. Various hands are painted, layer after layer, covering up each sunken shadow and beam of light. My fingers smell of turpentine and mineral spirits though the brushes are never fully clean.

A neighbor down the hall noticed a copper red splat on my knuckle yesterday and asked, have you hurt yourself? I think you’re bleeding. I smiled at the thought. How lovely it would be for hands to bleed paint. Every scar and bruise, a small reminder of creation.

After years of avoiding their appearance and presence, my hands reach out, unclasped, free of long-sleeved disguise. What a wonder, what a delight, what an honor, I often think, it is to rummage through drawers or play rock, paper, scissors. How curious to yearn for a cheek to cup, a chin to lift. Hands are the most tangible source of tenderness, the nearest vessel for holding a paint brush. I’m still trying to understand what the hand is, in all of its persistence and struggle, but I feel I’m getting closer every time I wash the dishes.

Cassie Tatum is completing her MFA in Professional Creative Writing at the University of Denver, where she seeks truth and meaning about the human experience through writing both fictional works and creative nonfiction essays.

So here we are. It is 9 PM, and I am writing to you from Coarsegold, a central California mining town that is located in the foothills of the High Sierras, 20 miles south of Yosemite National Park. I have rented a one-bedroom here in Coarsegold. The apartment is lavish. The décor is what one might refer to as Midwest Gauche. The walls are forest green and the linens, tan and gold. The bathroom flooring is designed to look like pebbles and it feels smooth against my toes. The artwork reminds me of a fast-food restaurant. There is a painting of a cowboy in the living room and there is a painting of a small-town church hanging above the couch. At night I like to sit out on the patio, to watch the headlights as they make their way along Route 41. This is the first time that I have visited Yosemite, and – due to a hectic work schedule throughout the spring and summer – I have come here in mid-March.

The temperatures have been peaking in the low fifties the past few days. There is still snow on the ground at the higher altitudes, which means that a lot of the more strenuous trails throughout Yosemite remain off limits until further notice. Yesterday I hiked to Mariposa Grove, which is home to more than 500 giant sequoias. A quarter-mile into my ascent the ground beneath me turned to slush. By the halfway point a heavy fog had settled in. There were sequoias now, and they were jutting up like massive lances. Everything but the trees had turned to dust. I began to feel disoriented, and amid my delirium, I found myself repeating a phrase that I had overheard back at the visitor center: ledging out. Ledging out is a hiking term. It refers to arriving at a cliff, or perhaps some sudden break in the earth that prohibits any person from continuing forward. In Yosemite, the most common “ledging out” situations occur when and if a hiker has decided to wander off from the established trail. More often than not, that hiker is assuming that he can simply push toward the summit, at which point he will be able to either reconnect with the trail or piggyback onto another one. Only what if that summit opens out onto a ledge? And what if there isn’t any down-and-back trail? And what if the hike up was racked with loose rocks and precipitous terrain? One’s only recourse given those circumstances might be to dial 9-1-1 (assuming that there is ample cellphone service) or to scream for help. The lesson being that one needs to learn the path before he can stray from it. The universe is not obliged to intervene.

I feel relaxed here in Coarsegold. The nights are quiet and the breeze is slight. Last night, I watched Valley Uprising, a 2014 documentary that chronicles the history of rock climbing in the Yosemite Valley. At its heart, Valley Uprising is about creating a scene, but it is also about a sense of belonging. A lot of Yosemite’s early climbers looked like outlaws, and they behaved like gypsies ... dumpster diving for their dinners, camping and drinking beneath the stars. This was a fraternity, but it splintered as a result of infighting, hampered due to conflicts regarding who should dictate policy (and why). Not that any of this was considered newsworthy, at least not at the time. From the 1960s up and through the 1990s, competitive climbing was not embraced by the general public any more than it was acknowledged by the newspapers or TV. Only then came an outdoor boom, and toward the end of that boom, the ascension of an awkward kid named Alex Honnold. Honnold had grown up outside of Sacramento, and he had learned how to climb at an inner-city gym about 20 miles from his home. By the early 2000s, Honnold had dropped out of Berkley, and he was exceling as a free soloist, which is to say that he preferred to climb without the assistance of ropes. Honnold relocated to Yosemite, where he lived out of a van, and where he had taken to free-soloing a number of routes that even the most experienced outdoor climbers could not attempt without pulleys or bolts. In 2008, Honnold became the first person to successfully free solo the northwest face of Yosemite's Half Dome (5,000 ft). In 2017, Honnold became the first person to successfully free solo the southwest face of Yosemite’s El Capitan (3,200 ft). The first feat was documented for a full-length segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes. The second was documented for an Oscar-winning documentary entitled Free Solo.

During the production of Free Solo, Honnold met a girl, Sanni McCandless, and the two of them fell in love. In the short term, everything became moonbeams. Months later, however, Honnold suffered a compound fracture to his vertebrae, and not long after, he suffered a sprained ankle. Both injuries were sustained while Honnold and McCandless were climbing together. The ankle injury, in particular, occurred as a direct result of McCandless neglecting to belay Honnold securely while the two of them were on a pitch. “I haven’t been injured in, like, seven years,” Honnold explained to a Free Solo camera crew during his recovery, “and then it’s like I’m hanging out with this girl [who] doesn’t climb and I suddenly start getting injured all the time.” This is a familiar touchpoint. It is the stuff of ballads and novels, and fairly often, real life. A romantic interest arrives on the scene and she transforms the pitbull into a puppy dog. It was the subplot of Rocky II. It was the through line of an episode of Seinfeld (“The Abstinence,” Season 8: Episode 9). It may have been the downfall of The Beatles depending on whose side one happens to be on. In affairs of the heart, the woman is almost always considered to be an appropriate scapegoat, particularly whenever the man falls short of achieving his objectives. Is it fair? It is not. But the reality is that no one, not a man or a woman, can give him- or herself unconditionally to one thing and then expect that there will not be any repercussions when love or something like it comes along. Honnold was fortunate. He succeeded in free-soloing El Capitan, and in so doing, he became the envy of the entire rock-climbing world. It is worth noting, however, that Honnold has since pulled back on the severity of his climbs, and perhaps even the frequency of them, as well. A lot of free soloists have died as a result of what they do. The stakes are heightened, and there is zero margin for error. For Honnold, reinvention became a means of battling back against the changing latitudes of chance and age and time.

For nine of the past 12 months, I have been in a relationship with a woman named Deborah. Deborah and I first met 30 years ago in Wildwood, New Jersey. Deborah had a huge impact on my life then, much like she has had a huge impact on my life now. In terms of what went south, well, that’s a story for another essay. The short answer has something to do with what Deborah had written to me during one of our final exchanges. “We don’t want the same things,” she insisted. And Deborah was correct, albeit in a much-further-down-the-line kind of way. Relationships should be fueled by equity. One side is supposed to support the other, and both sides should be supporting the whole. For a time, Deborah and I did support each other. She would say, and quite often, that I had brought hope back into her life. And I would say that she had brought hope back into my life, as well. Deborah and I were both attempting to address our own flaws, accumulated baggage, so to speak; an array of issues that we had either been avoiding or putting off for far too many nights. Both during the 1990s and the now, our relationship had followed a similar trajectory ... three stages, if you will. The first stage was characterized by a feeling of euphoria. Everything appeared heightened and idealized, beyond the beyond. Deborah and I would go out for drinks and we would talk about all of the places that we were planning to visit together, about all the things that we were planning to do as a couple. This was future faking, as it turned out, the type of sentiment that mixes well along with a proper lager on an autumn evening. After a few months, all that kibbitzing gave way to a devaluing stage. Our relationship went from being two-sided to being one-. Deborah withdrew from me, first physically, and then emotionally, and then entirely. Now and again, she would reinforce the idea that I had become a turnoff, that she had little interest in what my wants or needs might be, and that she was simply too busy to be dealing with me at all. In the final stage, I got discarded, both in the 1990s and in the now. You live and you learn. Maybe I should take it up with Narcissus. Who knows. What I have discovered is that people run from the truths that they cannot confront. In the three months since our breakup, I have remained single. In retrospect, I try to look at the relationship with something other than hurt. I can accept that I drug my feet on things that I could have, and definitely should have, addressed sooner. In all of my broken relationships, I have been the common denominator, and I know this, although I also know that self-improvement is a process and it requires time, along with faith and a shared commitment, and empathy, if not an overall sense that neither party will have to go it alone. Deborah was entering a divorce when she and I first started seeing each other again. Within a few weeks, her identity had shifted after nearly two decades of functioning as a wife and a mother and the sole breadwinner in her household. I felt great compassion for Deborah given all the turbulence that she had been through. And I accepted her not wanting to be with me. All the same, I know that I did not deserve to be disposed of in that manner, just as I know that I did not deserve to be ignored for the final two months that we were in a relationship. Doing so was cruel. It not only felt like Deborah had turned on me; it felt as if she was trying to get back at me for something, like I had put her through some undue hardship, as if I had mistreated her or done her wrong. The truth is that I loved Deborah, and if I give my love these days, I give it fully. I am reminded of something that Patti Smith once wrote: “I did not waste my time on things I did not love.” In my head, I have always heard that line as two separate-and-yet-related thoughts: “I did not waste my time on things. I did not love.”

Protect your heart.

I have come to Yosemite for want of diversion. I have also come to Yosemite as a means of writing an afterword for a collection of essays. I like the idea of writing an afterword. The pressure disappears. The readers have already made up their minds. If they have suffered through my collection, they’ll be more prone to stop short of the outro. If they have relished the experience, the afterword will become more like a cup of coffee following the movie, a pleasant walk before we say goodnight. You can find a lot of me within my essays. In fact, I have spent the past few winters traveling in pursuit of new work. To that end, I have written entire essays while on the road, in planes and on trains, in hotel rooms and in rented spaces. I wanted my pieces to feel experiential, in motion. I wanted a sense of place, and I wanted a sense of many places. I wanted every narrative to be conveyed by way of a unique filter. Thus, Yosemite seemed like an appropriate place to dim the lights. It is the scope of things in the High Sierras, and the splendor. It is the open sky at night and at dawn. This morning I am eating breakfast at a Denny’s along Route 41. This Denny’s looks like a biker bar. The urinals in the men’s room are all caked with filth. There are faded air fresheners strung along the ledges of the toilet stalls. The in-house speakers are playing “I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night)” by the Electric Prunes. My waitress, the only waitress, has a tattoo of a hunting blade across her arm.

A few days from now, I will collect my things and I will drive 250 miles south to Venice Beach. I have traveled to Venice during each of the past five winters. Some of these trips have been planned, and some of them have been spontaneous. I never pack more than one bag and I never take anyone with me. When I travel to Los Angeles, I prefer not to have an agenda. I keep a short list of the places I might like to visit. On this trip, I think I might like to hike up and through Laurel Canyon allowing for stops at the one-time homes of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. I enjoy seeing where my heroes lived when they were at their most prolific. I find that there is still an energy about those places, particularly when the property has not been memorialized by statues or placards or (god forbid) admission and tourists. In the documentary Woman of Heart & Mind, Mitchell refers to her use of signature tunings as a search for “chords of inquiry.” I adore that, the notion of sharpening something until it has achieved the perfect tension. That, to me, feels like editing. It feels like the ongoing struggle with dissonance. It feels like the search for something, a phantom signal perhaps, or the gleam of a pearl, the coin of the realm.

Anyway, whenever I am in LA, Venice is the homebase – ideal for running and reading and thinking and writing. The fact that everything about Venice remains a bit left-of-center appeals to me. At night, I am more drawn toward Santa Monica, toward the amusement lights and the movie theaters, toward the Third Street Promenade and its open-air beaneries. My walks to Santa Monica are nothing short of serene, although it is the walks back that tend to flood me with emotion. To wake up in Venice is to feel that the world is somehow lighter. This despite the clustered tents that shift in herds from street to sea. A lot of LA’s homeless are instinctively drawn toward the venetian coastline as a result of its soft-sand beaches and its sun-swept aura. Venice provides the homeless with unlimited access to public restrooms and outdoor showers. It provides the street vendors with a constant churn of tourists. I can see myself in those coastline drifters. I can see me as the teenage runaway who wound up sleeping on the beaches in New Jersey. I can see me as the twenty-something alcoholic, and I can see me as the thirty-something who had developed a mental illness. The past is with me whether I want it to be or not. Time and again, I find that I can still see the past, that it is still glaring back at me in the mirror. I do feel more at peace now than I did during the early 2000s, although I do not feel as at peace as I did during the eight years that I spent sober (2012-2020). When I first stopped drinking, I was unemployed and I was living in New York and I was existing on my savings and what little income freelance writing could afford me. It was the best time of my life. What a gift to be in that city, to have the yearning and the flexibility to explore all five boroughs on my own terms, unattached, and unencumbered by the drowning responsibilities of love, family, or any type of professional climb. I know now that I will return to a life in New York City, just as I know that it will not be something that is born out of nostalgia. I want to be a middle-aged man in Manhattan. I want to settle into old age there, to visit Coney Island in the winter, to attend afternoon matinees and midtown galas, to have a friend who I can meet for coffee, but most of all to write. Writing helps me to make sense out of the world. It is the glue that holds all of the other pieces in order.

A month ago, I had no idea that I would be embarking on a trip to Yosemite. In short, I went to where the writing took me. I wanted to explore the outdoors. I wanted to be in the open spaces. Circumstances have a lot to do with the way that a narrative is recorded. My hope, one of many, is that my writing will reflect its chosen surroundings. To that end, I have been shopping in the downtown thrift stores here and I have been taking in some of the local culture. Yesterday I stopped in at the office of a nearby campground and I asked the owner if she would be willing to take a picture of me standing in front of her family’s 1960 Ford Falcon. She obliged, and the two of us spent several minutes talking along the roadside. We shared a connection, and it made the day seem richer. Even more so because I could hop into a rental car and leave as soon as that conversation was over. I like that. I like that I can walk the streets here as an unfamiliar. To be a stranger is to feel almost weightless. When I wake up tomorrow, I will do so on my own terms without any alarm bells or any office to report to. What pressure to roll out of bed day after day knowing that you need to be somebody, knowing that so much of what we do is based on someone else’s expectations. The real discipline is in remaining true to one’s self. And that is a lot, or at least it is for me … to be happy, and to be present, and to embrace the everchanging person.

Bob Hill is an essayist whose work has appeared in more than 40 publications including Pop Matters, Paste Magazine, and X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine. He is also the co-founder of the Cloudburst Reading Series. For more, please visit thisisbobhill.com.

Included in Wayfarer Magazine Issue 42

All photos by Stephen Trimble. All Rights Reserved.

Walk out the door for… a walk or a hike? Or something else entirely? Hikes tend to be longer than walks, with elevation gain that requires effort. But if you aren’t trying to clock miles, maybe the shorter hikes are really rambles.

For me, moving through space in my home territory at any speed always involves locating myself on an imaginary shaded relief map. I want to know where I am. There’s no need to watch that pulsing blue dot crawl across the Google maps screen. My screen is interior.

In this way, driving is just a higher-speed version of hiking—keeping track of biogeographic boundaries, looking for landmark features rising on the rim of the earth.

Here in Utah, it’s the Henrys—last mountain range in the lower forty-eight to be named. Notch Peak, a nick in the horizon out west in the Great Basin. Three scalloped cirques on Mount Nebo visible for more than 100 miles. Crossing the Colorado River at Hite, stopping on the bridge in the dark, listening to the steel beams humming, looking down and imagining the whole river basin stretching upstream to the Colorado Rockies and downstream through the Grand Canyon and on to the desert. Two hundred feet below the bridge, the river roils and purls and glides.

Naming these places, imagining their relationships, keeping track of my pinned spot on the continent gives me pleasure, grounds me. I’m moving across the earth, hiking on a grand scale.

Now zoom in with a whoosh to a single point, a single trail, still fully aware of where we are in space, in context. This version of hiking is more familiar.

My wife and I have a little house perched on a mesa in southern Utah. We’ve lived here for twenty years. From the kitchen window, red cliffs flare at sunrise and sunset, the ramparts of the Waterpocket Fold that provide Capitol Reef National Park its drama.

Midafternoon, we often say, “How about Chimney Rock?” What a gift to have this trail in our neighboring national park ten minutes from our home.

The scale retracts. Instead of that vast map of the whole West, this hike takes us across a single mesa on a looping 3½-mile walk. We know every turn.

First steps lead from the parking area through the Moenkopi Sandstone flats. Joanne says, “Don’t run.” We search for rhythm, then huff up the steep switchbacks into the easy headwaters bowl of Chimney Rock Canyon. The first trail sign—there are only two—directs us around the loop to the right. We prefer to go clockwise, contrary to the arrow’s insistence. Down through what we call Cliffrose Wash, where the rangy shrubs blossom in early June, the high desert air spiked briefly with heady, honeyed perfume. Across the bare clay of Scalia Point, where Joanne once took a cell phone call from her sister with the news that Antonin Scalia had died.

Then a wide curving climb to the top of the mesa. Big views along the Fold. The ledge overlooking the landmark of Chimney Rock itself. A side hill where one crystalline winter afternoon we snagged first tracks in the snow, postholing all the way. Rimrock, ripple rock, slickrock. And down.

We stroll. We climb. We amble. We chat. We suddenly remember a dream from the night before or a new insight we’ve forgotten to share about a complicated family member. We watch the Wingate Sandstone change color with the light. Today the cliffs are burnt orange against flawless blue sky. Another day, the rock takes on the deep intensity of raw meat. Gray days mute the colors, tan to brown to violet.

We move deliberately where blocky sandstone requires caution. We speed up on smooth clay between gray and purple mounds of Chinle Shale. We swing into the downhill strides.

Every step is familiar. Every day is different. And the goal is to be there, to be outside, to use our muscles, to breathe, to return home exhilarated, for that beer I’ve been thinking about for the last third of the hike.

“That felt difficult today.” “Today, it went super fast.” “What fun to run into that wide-eyed young couple from Indiana.” “How could that guy stay warm in that ridiculous outfit?”

That’s a hike.

When I’m working on a book project, I call hiking “fieldwork.”

I keep a tally of locations to photograph. I note places of ecologic or geologic interest. Special designations, special protection, “areas of critical environmental concern.” These must be the spots worth visiting. I go to each one, solo, to write in my journal, to photograph, to experience, to add these places to the skein of descriptions, verbal and visual, that will bring the Desert West alive for readers.

When I go to Nevada, it’s often for fieldwork. Just writing the word here makes me smile with anticipation. On this trip, my destination is The Table. First, I maneuver up a long rough dirt road to 10,000 feet, stopping at the weathered sign marking the boundary of the Mount Moriah Wilderness. Two miles of walking and a thousand feet up lies a tundra-like plateau, The Table, a sculpture garden for scattered Great Basin bristlecone pines. All this, a thousand feet below the rubbly summit of Mount Moriah, Nevada’s fifth-highest peak. There’s no place quite like it.

This is my third time here, and I’m elated to return. Mount Moriah predictably yields useful material—the weathered trees for photographs, the mountain for context, the potential for bighorn sheep. And, for my journal, new language that may reveal the space, silence, and solitude of the Great Basin Desert. Fieldwork.

Especially when I’m working on a book, I remind myself: pay attention. I tick through my senses. I look for color and texture and light. I watch for stories, for telling details. When the light’s too dull to photograph, I pull out my journal and look around, opening myself, doing my best to connect my brain to the place. Pen to paper.

*

Mid-afternoon I head up Big Canyon from camp, for I want to be on The Table at sunset, when the autumn supermoon rises. I’m not just hiking; I’m looking, intently. Closer and closer, smaller and smaller, the natural world transforms into an endless series of patterns. Aspen and fir on the facing hillside, a mosaic of textures. The path leading in suggestive curves between the white boles of the aspen. Leaves arranged in lovely compositions on the forest floor. A single crimson wild rose hip catching the sun. The contrasts of lichen on stone.

When I place the camera to my eye, it’s both a window into the world and a barrier to full experience. I’m looking with more intention, but I’m circumscribing that vision. I’ve separated myself from unlimited connection, but I’m focusing with clarity and intensity on this one prospect seen through the viewfinder. Both ways of experiencing a place have value, both enrich me. But the difference is profound.

I shift each composition in my viewfinder, framing one graphic among a hundred that could be framed. The tenderness, the sensuality, the order of what I see when I simply deign to slow down and look thrills me.

I top out at The Table and turn off-trail to walk from tree to isolated tree. I can’t help but move slowly, with respect, alone with the bristlecones. These are the earth’s oldest living individual beings, living more than 5,000 years. They erode to sculpted twists of weathered wood, dense with resin, impervious to rot.

Like old people, they remain dignified—not lofty like sequoias but godlike nonetheless. Meditative rather than Olympian. Their best background music: occasional single piano notes.

The bristlecone’s world is perfectly still, but my mind is racing. What’s the best place to be when the moon comes up? Which snag will communicate the ancient spirit of the trees and pair gracefully with the moon?

I hear the air riffling the primary feathers of two circling ravens; the only sound. Last light turns my snag deep gold. The sky fades to pastels. “Sky-blue-pink,” I say out loud, a perfect description I’ve borrowed from my mother-in-law. And, then, the moon. Huge, brilliant, rising right where I’d hoped.

I click my shutter, composing, recomposing, bracketing. I move forward, I move back, I crouch low in a dance that would surely look absurd to anyone watching. I crank up my tripod, I splay out its legs. I try to capture every photographic idea that occurs to me.

The golden glow on the bristlecone wanes. The sky is fading to black. I’m done. I put away my camera, turn, and head for my camp, leaving The Table in a hurry to beat the dark.

The downhill run is a hike, not fieldwork. I fantasize about dinner.

I leave behind two ravens, bristlecone pines, soft-edged evening stillness fast turning to night. And unseen, but satisfying, the possibility of bighorn sheep.

Stephen Trimble (he/him) grew up in the West with a geologist father who taught him that landscape has content. His 25 books are rooted in paying attention as he moves through his home territory, especially the deserts and canyons of the Southwest and Great Basin. He’s won the Sierra Club’s Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation and The National Cowboy Museum’s Western Heritage “Wrangler” Award. Trimble lives in Salt Lake City and Torrey, Utah.

In the year 1006, a star exploded. Visible for three years, it was observed worldwide, from China to the Americas, and is widely regarded as the brightest supernova in human history.

But there is something odd in the record of this event. It was far less noted in Europe than elsewhere, especially in the East. For it wasn’t merely an explosion. It marked the first time in memory that the nighttime sky—the firmament—changed. And so, in spite of the fact that this was, in many senses, an event that was unifying—we all, after all, live under the same stars—it was perceived differently. This perception was colored by the worldview of the observer—that is, the extent to which a culture embraced change or permanence, certainty or the unknown.

The resistance to change is not surprising. Our world is filled with uncertainty. And this can be terrifying. For our earliest ancestors, the chaos beyond community, culture, and kinship could mean death. So they created not merely a space for physical safety, but also a culture that proffered the emotional security that comes from creating symbols and stories—a cosmology, which means both “beauty” and “order”—that give us a sense of place in the world, that give our lives meaning.

This is humanity’s socio-cultural expression of what biologists call umwelt, what each species can perceive based on its sensory bubble. Every species is limited by its senses–humans, for instance, cannot see certain colors that birds can—but the umwelt is always experienced as all-encompassing. So too is this true of human culture, the symbolic and mythic worlds we construct. The world that most human cultures constructed was a dance between cosmos and chaos, certainty and the unknown, change and permanence. But that would change in the West.

IMPERMANENCE

Among the foundational philosophical debates of the Hellenistic world had to do with this question of whether to embrace change or permanence. The Greeks were consumed by the question of what is ultimately real. For Heraclitus (c. 535-475 BCE), the real was change. Nature, for example, is in a constant state of flux, creation and re-creation. His counterpart, Parmenides (born c. 515 BCE), however, insisted that the only thing that was real is that which is permanent. Everything else is an illusion.

In short, Parmenides, largely through the work of Plato and his successors, won. This notion of reality being changeless came to dominate the Western philosophical and theological tradition for centuries. They developed a theological worldview that emphasized the permanence of the spiritual realm, the divine and the soul. Their image of the cosmos emphasized the permanence of the stars. The quotidian world, the world of nature, was mere illusion. As a consequence, as time went on a civilization developed in Europe that was hyper-focused on control and predictability. It sought to engineer a better world than what nature had given us.

But there were other traditions that didn’t follow this path. For Buddhists, permanence is an illusion. Indeed, the attachment to the changeless self—what Western theologians would call the soul, from the Greek “psyche”—is the ultimate delusion. It is not that we do not exist; it is that we exist only in relationship and flux, ever changing. Our attachment to this self is what leads to suffering.

UNCERTAINTY

One thousand years later another supernova occurred: The global COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to the obvious public health crisis, there was a corresponding mental health crisis. In part, this was in response to the deepening uncertainty in which we’d found ourselves. Of course, the pandemic didn’t create uncertainty—it simply exposed it.

Our desire to impose greater control on an uncertain world was at least partly the cause of the rise of diseases like COVID-19, diseases that come from human encroachment on wild spaces. Indeed, our fear has led us to attempt to impose on the world a sense of order and control that has led us to devalue wild spaces altogether. We’ve not only damned rivers and sterilized soils, we have also attempted to sterilize and make-predictable human interactions and culture. We are at once consumed and consumer, algorithms rather than messy human beings. The dance between the chaos and cosmos has been replaced by a paved-over and sterile world.

The wisdom of this approach to life has now been called into question. While the pandemic has made us feel more acutely the lack of predictability and certainty in our world, the truth is that we never really were in control.

In my own life, I’d asserted control in ways of which I was largely unaware. I had lived my life “intentionally”—at least that’s what I called it. I envisioned a particular kind of family, work, home, and career. But life tends to insinuate itself. Our children don’t cooperate—whatever plans we’d had of them, they are autonomous beings who make their own choices. Careers ebb and flow in ways we cannot possibly predict. We are entangled in webs of choices we’ve made and cannot take back and forces beyond our control.

Throughout my twenties, I mentored young people. Recently, I’ve been replaying in my head a series of conversations I had with one young man, around the age of fourteen, who had a particularly hard life: foster care, abuse, poverty. He was a sensitive and gentle kid, but so angry. We used to talk about his life, about how hard it was, about the impossibility of changing certain things: it was the life he’d been given.

I’ve been thinking back to those conversations because I’ve been contemplating my own life. I’d been good at seeing the immutability of fate in the lives of others, but not for myself. The truth is that I believed that I could, to some extent, control my own fate.

I was good at talking others through this, but somehow missed it in myself.

POWERLESSNESS

Living through a global pandemic was fertile ground for all kinds of addictions. It was said that drug and alcohol use increased, for example. And it is here that we collectively might turn to the Twelve Steps. I’d never particularly given the Twelve Steps much attention. For me, they came across as a bit too theistic, gave a bit too much power to alcohol. And powerlessness? Are we really so powerless?

I can recall being sick overseas—malaria, altitude sickness, some stomach bug—in remote areas, without any possibility of finding a doctor. There, I did what people do, have always done, in such situations: I prayed. People don’t, for the most part, pray because they necessarily believe in God; they pray because they recognize that they cannot control it, fix it. As they say in the Twelve Steps, “Give it to God.” In other words, prayer is less about projecting power onto any idol—God included—than it is about humbling oneself in the face of an uncertain world.

The Twelve Steps can be implemented superficially, of course. One can exchange one addiction for another. Religion and God can be no less addicting than alcohol, albeit an arguably less harmful one. But at its core, the belief that we are in charge, that we can fix it with drugs or willpower or achievement, is the ultimate addiction.

The Buddhists would recognize this as a symptom of our belief in the immutability of the self. The Twelve Steps aren’t really talking about alcohol as the ultimate problem. The ultimate thing we cannot control is, well, life. The ultimate addiction is to our own capacity to control.

***

These three things—uncertainty, impermanence, and powerlessness—lie at the heart of this collective, global teachable moment. We cannot know (uncertainty) or control (powerlessness) our world, because it is inherently relational and in flux (impermanence). Each moment is pregnant with possibility and potential, fraught with danger and mystery. Paradoxically, it is when we can be at ease with uncertainty, when we can accept our own powerlessness, we become free.

THEODORE RICHARDS (HE/HIM) is a writer, philosopher, and educator. He is the founder of The Chicago Wisdom Project and ReImagine Consulting & Coaching. The author of eight books, he has received numerous literary awards, including three Independent Publisher Awards and two Nautilus Book Awards. He lives on the south side of Chicago with his wife and three daughters. You can find out more about him and his work at www.theodorerichards.com.

Across the avenue from the inn, the Old First Church and its adjacent burying ground sit on the hill that dominates the original village above present-day downtown Bennington to the east. Built in 1806, the church is considered one of the most beautiful in the state. For all those entering Vermont along Route 9 in Bennington, it rises suddenly into view from the very heart of the old village and is clearly its main jewel. Today the pristine white of its three-tiered wedding-cake steeple dazzles amid the fiery maples surrounding it. Along the front of the cemetery, a white wooden swag fence follows the uneven terrain of the hill, rising and dipping like a hung garland. At regularly spaced intervals, its posts are crowned with urn-shaped finials. A sidewalk of large marble slabs parallels the length of the fence, tiny specks of the smooth stone sparkling in the late afternoon light. Again, just as when viewing the village and ba…

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From the Wayfarer Archive, 2015

When the replica of Lascaux was built into a low hillside near the original cave in Montignac, France, a decision was made to reverse the ‘sense of the visit’, so that the visitor would arrive immediately into the grand Salon of Bulls and be brought almost instantly into the majesty of the art. While a small interpretive chamber precedes entrance into the cave and allows the guides a teaching space to dispel myths and create interest for those who have come simply because in both senses of the word, on a summer’s day they have heard that the replica is “cool,” the immediacy of arriving in the Salon often leaves people breathless from the shock of being in the presence of so much art and at such a grand scale. At the Sistine Chapel, to which it is often compared, one has already walked the whole length of the Vatican to get there. In Lascaux II it is immediate.

The chamber itself is large and oblong with the shape and feel of a Viking longhouse. Along the high walls run black shadow horses who meet a delicate tribe of deer, their antlers filigreed like tree branches held up on heads raised as if they are sniffing the wind across a snowy plain. Above them thunder spotted white bulls for which the hall is named. White bodies born of limestone brought from the walls by hands holding black manganese with such certainty that the bulls leap from the walls themselves, their legs suspended in flight. In the cacophony of images, some 130 in all, the overall sensation for me has always been an auditory one. Absent the true red bellied Chinese horses and the black shadow sprayed true auroch’s bodies, I hear their hooves and feel their bodies as if I were in the midst again of the wildebeest migration in the Serengeti I once experienced as a fugue of hooves, horns, and dust, when I was a child.

The guides, conscious of time and the next tour which must begin promptly at quatre heure talk through the whole visit. They use their red laser pointers to show the ways in which the artists outlined the shapes of some of the larger animals before they sprayed ochre, probably ground up in their mouths and then either spat in a pattern like our modern day spray paint cans, or through a bone or reed straw for far more accuracy. The skill in the artistry alone is dazzling.

For those for whom this might be their only visit to a cave or a painted cave, the guide’s curation of the exhibit, not unlike taking the tour at the Met, might feel just right. For me, though, after years of working in neighboring caves where we have the time to be able to move more slowly through and to take in not only the images, but the images set inside the soundlessness of the space itself, and to be able to feel the vibrations of our voices set off from the cave walls, it is a very different experience. At Lascaux II on a Sunday at the height of summer tourist season, I couldn’t hope for such resonance.

And yet, we had been lucky. I had brought a group of friends who had been together at a conference in western France for a few days of seeing the caves in the Dordogne. We had arrived late and our tour was the last tour of the day. The group was small, and because our group included two interested adolescents whose response to the cave was so palpable, the guide took her time, letting us linger in the Salon before leading us down into the Axial gallery below.

On previous tours with larger groups of people, visiting the Axial gallery had been as pleasant as the London Underground during July rush hour. While the walls of the Salon of Bulls are wide and expansive, in the Axial gallery, the feeling of the narrow stream that would have carved the cave becomes apparent. High walls rise in tight and the floor slopes gradually downward towards the image of a falling horse. Above, the ceiling floats with the bodies of ochred aurochs, horses, including my favorite – a tiny blown black horse tucked innocently into the wall, like a toy left behind after a family who had lived there for 5 generations had sadly moved away. A deer with antlers that in life would have weighed hundreds of pounds graces the right side wall with its graceful head up, facing the wind. Its long back is a single uplifted calligraphic stroke.

Because the walls come in so close and at a height that gives the feeling of being corralled by palace guards, the only place to look is up. In that, the sense of the passage and the art flowing through it is as unmistakable as the feeling one has standing beneath the Milky Way as it curves westward across the night sky.

On this June trip, as the guide was in no rush, she let us stay in the Axial gallery in a spot I would call the Narrows for long enough for the group to grow quiet and simply feel the space. With the vibrations from our voices finally quieting, the closeness of the walls produced a feeling in my chest I knew from the past the feeling of grief. A sort of heartache that has in it both all of the sadness I feel tangled in the colors of joy. 

“You feel it?” she said quietly to me in French.

I nodded. “What is it?”

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From the Wayfarer Archive, 2015

My first job on a sheep dairy was in Maine when I was twenty. I pursued it out of a desire to connect with my matrilineal culture—Greek—near my home in rural New England during a time when it was not feasible for me to spend a lot of time overseas. Sheep have arguably been the single most important animal to the surviving and thriving of Eastern Mediterranean people for thousands of years. The hillsides of Greece have been shaped by their hooves, and the pungent aroma of their fat wafts from stew pots atop old wood ranges and from sizzling plates of fried cheese in tavernas. Despite modernization, people still have to eat, and so the pastoral roots of Greece’s shepherding past remain, a spirit animating the iconic foods of that place. The meat and milk of sheep have come to virtually symbolize Greek cuisine and culture in the form of gyros, souvlaki, feta cheese, and the legendary yogurt, thick from the richness of ewe’s milk as well as traditional manufacturing processes.

For me, it was the cheese that had made a lasting sensory impression on me as a child. One type was hard, salty, and so subtly yellow that it glowed. The straw-like color and slight translucence is characteristic of aged cheeses made from sheep’s milk. The flavor was almost musky—if you weren’t hungry, you might pass up a piece because of the intimacy that its taste obliged. But if you had an empty stomach (with the open senses that hunger brings) a whole story would unfold on your tongue through that taste. This flavor was the kind of experience that, for a little kid, was slightly repulsive and at the same time conjured a strange attraction. That same feeling was there when I was about seven and watched my uncle Lambis skin a huge hare he’d just shot. At first, I was shocked, curious, and a little grossed out. But the image stayed in my memory. Something other than my conscious mind held it, kept in a special container, recognizing some unforeseen value. This is the wisdom of the body. Particularly for me, the wisdom of a body without any living tradition that encouraged me to really get to know my non-human environment—who inhabited it and how to get food from it. Those things are considered hobbies in my culture, or, in the case of food production, commercial industries. I didn’t know anything in between, and neither did most people around me. In Greece on the other hand, especially in the rural villages like the one in the central Peloponnese where my mom is from, the bodies of sheep and goats always seemed close by. You would hear the clang of bells as a flock foraged its way across a nearby hillside. The whooping calls of the shepherd would mingle sweetly with the antiphonal baa-ing of his animals. You would see their carcasses hanging, skinless and glistening, outside the butcher shops, their blood in little rivulets between the cobblestones below. You would smell them simmering in stews in private homes and caramelizing on rotisseries in the public square. Through one sense or another, the proximity of these creatures to human life was constantly revealed.

As an adult, those childhood memories drew me toward that animal so important to my ancestors. And it was through a simple interest in the transformation of milk into cheese that shepherding opened a door to a whole other class of crafts. This is what could be called the “wood-lore” of the shepherd; how to identify plants with the acuity of the cloven-hoofed, to read the forecast in the clouds or in the dropping barometric pressure (like they do), to notice what they notice; to be their student. I saw my subsequent studies of wilderness survival, bushcraft, and wildlife tracking to all have their origins in that part of my heart that was the Shepherd, which is also to say the part that empathized with the animals and took my cues from them. The result of such studies is naturalist knowledge by which one is not just a wayfarer in forest and field, but is empowered to belong there. To be a good Shepherd you must be a dedicated student of the art of belonging in the outdoors. It would be difficult to protect the flock otherwise.

To say that summer in Maine changed my life would not do it justice. Those months were potent medicine. The sheep dairy I worked at was a grass-based operation on nearly forty acres of rocky hills. I would get up at 5 AM to gather the sheep for milking from pasture with the help of a bright-eyed young Border Collie named Geordie. I worked six days plus a seventh morning each week and didn’t tire. Being at the nexus of a dynamic relationship between the grass, the sheep, their milk, and the people they fed healed a wound I didn’t know I had. When I think about the puzzlement brought on by being queer and gender-variant, or about the related struggle of teenage anorexia, I remember how the sheep helped me see myself through the universal identity of creature and earthling, or how their milk helped me see into the sacred dimensions of food. They seemed to answer so many questions that hadn’t been asked with answers that weren’t in words. But it wasn’t just them who had such intelligence. It was them and me; us together. I learned that belonging works like that. I took care of them, and they took care of me, and in doing so I stepped through a portal into nature, where I was a creature too. A very specialized type of creature called a shepherd.

Consider the connection to the reindeer by several different groups of people indigenous to the circumpolar regions of the world. The comparison is germane since some of these groups are perennial objects of Western fascination. Reindeer (a term for the domesticated caribou) are known for their extensive seasonal migrations, and moving with the herds proved a brilliant strategy for the survival of Paleolithic peoples living at the harsh top end of the world. The mythology of their contemporary descendants portrays humans locked in a fated embrace with these arctic ungulates—their destinies intertwined. It was the caribou, according to one account, who first brought clothes and food—indeed culture itself—to the native people of what is now northern Canada. This sacred relationship is expressed through an animistic and shamanistic worldview and so is easily exotified by those of us from monotheistic cultures. But the Abrahamic tradition itself contains at its core a distinctive celebration of ovis aries—the domestic sheep—for very similar reasons. It is the ritual sacrifice of the lamb that upholds the world, whether literal or—in Christian tradition—metaphorical. When we delve into the lore of the sheep, we are feeling the scar where an umbilical cord once was, connecting us as a people to the flesh of the earth. Under various names including ‘spiritual ecology’ and ‘eco-theology,’ modern epistemology has been struggling for a way to discuss the nearly invisible seams where the human world is stitched into the non-human. The outcome—it is hoped—is a more nuanced, compassionate, and environmentally aware picture of the relationship between humans and the rest of nature.

To further explore this theme, we must turn in part to a realm beyond language, the realm of sacred images, uniquely preserved in the art of ancient Christianity. There we find confirmation that the figure of the Shepherd is central to the ancestral memory of the Near East, and thus Western culture in general. The shepherd as a symbol is not complete without the animals she tends, and together they represent a mystical ecology of the human soul’s journey. In one view, the Shepherd functions in mythic consciousness as what depth psychologist Bill Plotkin calls “underworld guide” (a guide of souls), which in more common parlance could be called ‘messiah,’ ‘bodhisattva,’ or even ‘trickster.’ But the Shepherd is also an icon of ecological ‘deep’ history, speaking of a symbiotic relationship between two species that literally made our culture possible. We seem to romanticize such symbiosis in other cultures (especially pre-industrial ones) but fail to see a comparable pattern in our own. But somewhere down the line of history and ancestry, spirituality always connects to something practical, to livelihood. The lore of the shepherd reveals one such point of connection.

I was not raised Orthodox but was inevitably immersed in Orthodox culture during many childhood visits to Greece. Growing up in Vermont, I attended a Unitarian-Universalist church with my parents. Unitarians don’t pledge allegiance to a creed and embrace an interfaith approach to spirituality, and though the liberal ethics of the U.U. Church made an indelible mark on me, I sought a spirituality that was physically strenuous, multi-modal, sensorial, even wild. Most importantly too, one to which I had a palpable ancestral connection. This set the stage for my appreciation of Orthodoxy, which has evolved today into a fascination with the archetypal and mythopoetic possibilities of this tradition which I naturally approach from a queer, ecological, and non-theistic (but not anti-theist) perspective. One might call this eclecticism, and to that I’d say that the religions of the ancient Mediterranean are unequivocally my cultural heritage, regardless of my theological beliefs. Why let the political and social complexities of theology—which are so bound up in imperialism and colonialism—get in the way of the important work of tracking one’s own ancestral life-ways? For me, connecting with the material culture of my ancestors is a powerful ceremony its own right. For too long the Western mind has focused on the abstract and conceptual and has lost sight of the incredible expressive capacity of ceremony and ritual, which are gestural languages, centered on relationship. In the Protestant tradition’s political rejection of high liturgy, I fear that something vital to the image-based language of the soul has been thoughtlessly cast aside.

The draw of Orthodoxy is not for the minutiae of its theology per se, but for its ritual, its rich ascetic and contemplative traditions, and not least, its aesthetic presence. One of my earliest memories of Greece starts with a smell native to any Greek Orthodox church. The honeyed scent of burning beeswax candles, then the feeling of being in the womb-like nave of an ancient basilica. The heavy stone floor and domed ceiling create a kind of silence that feels at once artificial and preternatural. Shadow dominates, with shafts of light and flashes of gold punctuating the space as if inside a mountain cave at dawn. What was impressed upon my young senses was an ancient language: the transpersonal language of ceremony. Whether or not this language speaks to specific Gods, I do know that it speaks to the human soul.

The sheep is a prominent early Christian symbol. So prominent, perhaps, that it is often overlooked for its ecological significance. The earliest known Christian art preserved in the underground catacombs of Rome includes stucco paintings of the “Good Shepherd”—a youthful fellow with a ram lamb slung over his shoulder, surrounded by sheep and birds. In the Christian tradition, the Good Shepherd was one of the earliest known ways of depicting Jesus, but is related to at least two well-known archetypes in the ancient Greco-Roman world. A figure scholars call the “kriophoros” (meaning “ram-bearer” in Greek) was present seven centuries before Christ in statuary and many kinds of everyday objects. A bronze statue in the Museum of Fine Art from the 5th century BCE depicts the Greek god Hermes as the kriophoros, demonstrating the conflation of the archetype with this particular god. Ram lambs were considered the quintessential sacrificial animals throughout the ancient Mediterranean world in both Semitic and Greek religion, in an era when blood-sacrifice was one of the most important rituals in temple culture. A common role of Hermes, whose provenance was generally the realm of communication, was as psychpomp—a guide for souls to the underworld or afterlife. With Hermes as ram-bearer, the ram is a metaphor for the human soul.

Another motif in ancient Greco-Roman art that is similar to primitive Christianity’s “Good Shepherd” features Orpheus, the prophet and poet of Classical Greek legend. Orpheus was both a quasi-historical figure and object of cult veneration—a category not unfamiliar in Greek cultural narratives—and one of his most well-known attributes was his ability to tame wild animals, indeed the whole of nature, through his enchanting music. Greco-Roman renderings of Orpheus depict him seated among trees playing his lyre as a menagerie of wild animals attend. It is important to note that Orpheus was also associated with the underworld, or Hades, in Greek mythology, because he was said to have journeyed there to attempt to bring his lover Eurydice back from the dead. Other figures in Greek mythology also made underworld journeys, but usually they were gods, whereas Orpheus was commonly considered mortal. This was indeed part of his allure, and could also explain why one would be inclined to depict Jesus in a mode familiar to Orpheus.

One well-known image of the Good Shepherd is found in the Roman Catacomb of Priscilla—a subterranean Christian necropolis—and dates to the 3rd century of the Common Era. I had the pleasure of seeing it in person on a class trip to Rome during graduate school. The shepherd carries a ram lamb in the ceremonial role of the ancient kriophoros, but the sheep gathering at his feet and the birds turned toward him, perched on flowering trees is reminiscent of scenes of bucolic harmony and communion typical in images of Orpheus. Both Hermes and Orpheus could, for various reasons, travel between the worlds of the living and the dead and so would be appropriate figures to reference in funerary art. Many Christian theologians as well as secular scholars take this Good Shepherd to be referring to Jesus. The catacombs were underground burial chambers for early Christian communities before Christianity was legalized, and much of the art in the catacombs depicts biblical scenes. The Good Shepherd is not a biblical scene per se, but rather gains its symbolic potency through multiple cultural associations. In the Hebrew Bible King David—an icon of Israelite identity—was portrayed as a sensitive shepherd who devoted himself to the protection of the family flocks (and also played the lyre) as a youth. Psalm 23, which tradition attributes to King David, professes God as the shepherd of humankind. Indeed, it would be advantageous to associate a new prophet, Jesus, with the important attributes implied by the Good Shepherd, such as the stewardship of life (and consequently of souls), communication with animals, and communion with the dead. These are all qualities common to the figure that anthropologists might call a shaman in other contexts. Depicting Jesus as a ‘shamanic’ figure is not as far-fetched as it may sound, and occurs elsewhere in the world of early Christian art. Several scholars have documented the prevalence of images of Jesus performing miracles with a wand or staff. These scenes are common in the catacombs as well as on ancient Christian sarcophagi, and connect Jesus to the archetype of magician that had also at that time become a popular way of thinking of Moses in early Jewish and Christian mysticism.

The figure of the shepherd is, throughout the Hebrew Bible (and also in the New Testament) associated with a unique prophetic ability. Perched at the peripheries of human settlements, far away from the hustle and bustle of urban life, it is the shepherds who are often the first humans privy to divine portents. Angels, omens, and even God himself might appear to the wandering herdsman. By the necessity of their vocation as protectors of flocks, their attention is not toward the human world, but is more often than not trained on the more-than-human world; the place of mystery whence unknown threats might come. They then become tasked with relaying the messages received from their wilderness encounters to their more civilized kin who are perennially distracted with human affairs. Moses is the best-known example in the Hebrew Bible, and in the gospel of Luke a group of shepherds are some of the first people told, by an angel, about the birth of Jesus. This office of translator—mediator between the worlds of human community, wilderness, and dreams—struck me as very similar to the role of the village medicine man or “witch-doctor” that magician and naturalist David Abram encountered during his field studies with traditional societies in Indonesia, which he describes in The Spell of the Sensuous. Considering that these types of relationships can be found in the roots of Western society seems to hold promise as a healing balm for the pain brought on by colonization. Our fascination with the workings of so-called ‘aboriginal’ societies, which can bring up intense grief, projections, and longing for a felt lack of meaningful nature-connection, can be transformed into a curiosity about the aboriginal people that inevitably are part of our own history.

In later Christian art sheep became heavily laden theological symbols in their own right, even without a shepherd. Christ was not only “the Good Shepherd,” but also the ram lamb to be sacrificed. Christian mosaics from the late antique period often depict Christ as a ram lamb, and it was a common feature in Byzantine church art to depict the twelve apostles as sheep. Sheep contrast, visually and symbolically, with deer or gazelles, which are often depicted in church art in paradisal scenes, drinking from the waters of the rivers that flow from the Garden of Eden. In the ancient Near East, deer and gazelles were associated with wildness, a contrast to the domesticated nature of sheep. The deer was also an early Christian symbol of the catechumen (a Christian initiate preparing for baptism), while the sheep was a symbol of the one who had been fully initiated. A simultaneous celebration and lamentation of the tension between the wild and the domesticated seems to lurk tacitly in this art.

Though the mythos of the Shepherd functioned as an early metaphor for Jesus, the archetype of the herdsman with shamanic powers can be traced in the narrative and artistic traditions of figures such as Orpheus, Hermes, Moses, and King David, even to Pan, the rustic and irreverent Arcadian god of shepherds pre-dating the worship of the Olympian gods. In the 3rd millennium BCE, Tammuz (or Dumuzi), one of the most prominent gods of the Mesopotamian pantheon, was a Shepherd-god whose mother, Duttur, was represented as an ewe. The power of this imagery makes sense when one considers that it was in Mesopotamia where sheep, the oldest milk animal, were domesticated. Milk and cheese products quickly became the most ideal offering for the goddess Inanna (Dumuzi’s consort) and dairy products persisted throughout the ancient world as choice ‘bloodless’ sacrifices for numerous deities, appearing often as primitive versions of the modern cheesecake. To think such a rich web of meaning discredits the story of Jesus is to miss the point entirely. On the contrary—the web upholds the power of the story of Jesus, just as vast ecosystems uphold keystone features that humans value so greatly. In the mode of myth, meaning is woven most expertly by using stories that already exist—whether they exist invisibly as patterns within the human heart or as folk tales passed down to children. Interdependence is the underground secret to what can appear independent and unique on the surface.

By virtue of his vocation, the Shepherd often finds himself on an unintentional vision quest. A space opens where altered states of consciousness and cross-species encounters can become typical parts of perception and cognition. The shepherd’s job requires alternating periods of ‘exile’ and ‘return’ to the community—thus he shares in the mystique of the sailor, but his is a sylvan sea. Sometimes, on his return, something new is brought back to the clan: a story, a song, or a vision. In the interface between self and other, human and non-human, village and forest, there is tension, friction; sparks of energy are released. Visions come from such fissures. Ever since humans moved from a nomadic existence to a settled one, shepherds have remained somewhere in between; the sentinels posted at the edge of civilization, eyes peering toward what is dark and what is wild. Even for humans without cities, who still wandered as nomads, the herdsmen were the scouts—the eyes and ears of their collective. The animals they tend turned grass into flesh and wool, then into tools and clothing, economically ensuring the persistence of someone balanced precariously—dangerously—on the edge of worlds. For civilization, no matter how complex, will always require these edges, gradients where human order gives way to other kinds of order that can be easily mistaken for chaos to the untrained mind. It is the herdsmen, the scouts, the trackers, who are trained to read the chaos. While their civilization sprouts religion deep inside its cities, the priests will guard the inner sanctum of the temple. But the shepherd, hundreds of miles away, guards another divine language, a green language. Somehow, the two are related, but the trails between have become overgrown, maybe even impenetrable.

Indeed, there seems to be reflected in the lore of the shepherd our own sort of creation story. Sheep were domesticated 8,000 years ago, and in an ironic exchange, the bodies of these wild ones became the very source of our own domestication. It is little surprise then that the sheep has become both a symbol of the Other and of the Self, of both God and the human. Whether domesticated or wild, they will always remain non-human, with the sharp senses of prey animals. As ‘apex predators’ we are their ecological opposites, yet we can project onto them our own fears and longings, our many disenfranchised and oppressed identities. We can empathize with them because despite our supposed ecological prowess, we, too, are prey in a psycho-spiritual trophic web; we too suffer silently; we too are lost or hunted at the whim of forces much larger than ourselves. In protecting them we empathize with them and in some sense we become them, and this is one view of the essence of shamanism—that is, our human capacity for shape shifting. This is where the pattern can be recognized far beyond just a single culture, reflected too in the reindeer lore of the north or in the veneration of the sacred cows of India, even in the Abenaki story of humans being created from an ash tree, which pertains to the land on which I now write. All these represent a culture’s understanding and mythologizing of its relationship to nature, and to creation. Among the countless material gifts these revered non-human beings provide, they impart one transcendent, immaterial gift that could be said to be the seed of spirituality: empathy across species, across entire landscapes and ecosystems, even beyond life itself.

Sophia (“So”) Sinopoulos-Lloyd is a queer Greek-American who grew up in Vermont. So has an MA in Religious Studies from Claremont Graduate University and has done immersive studies in wilderness survival, nature-based mentorship, and animal husbandry. So currently works as an outdoor guide and nature educator and plans to pursue a Ph.D in Religious Studies.

Now as the train bears west,

Its rhythm rocks the earth,

And from my Pullman berth

I stare into the night

While others take their rest.

                  – Theodore Roethke

The Fourth of July rolls in just east of Lincoln. The train is on time and aims to race the sun for eight hundred eighty-eight miles from the Missouri River west through Nebraska in the dark hours of early morning. If all goes well, the light will catch us at the Colorado line. By the time we reach Denver, we’ll have gained more than four thousand feet of elevation, a slow warm-up for the climb across the Continental Divide. The clack of iron wheels on track is muted here in my upper-level roomette. The dirty window above my narrow bed opens to a surreal vista of distant lights scattered against what I cannot see but know was, less than two centuries ago, the tall grass prairie, where a man on horseback could disappear in a sea of big and little bluestem, switchgrass, indiangrass, sunflowers.

The tall grasses of the relatively well-watered eastern plains once gave way west of here to a mixed-grass buffer zone and then the short grass prairie, where buffalo grass, blue and side-oats grama, purple threeawn, and more sprawled in the rain-shadow of the Rocky Mountains. More than a hundred non-grass flowering species splashed color through the native grasses in the centuries before they were turned out by the plow. The domesticated cultivars of many of these prairie wildflowers have become mainstays of our gardens – coneflowers, coreopsis, black-eyed susan, blazing star, verbena, cranes bill, sunflowers of all sorts.

This is a simplistic view of the prairies, of course, and when settlers moved in they discovered what the Native peoples knew well. The area is a mosaic of environments that vary in their plant and animal life, their geology, their store of water. I can barely wrap my mind around our forebears’ view of this lavish land as a hellish void to be endured en route to the promise of the far West. Steven Long, explorer and government surveyor, dubbed this place the Great American Desert  in 1823 because it was, in the words of his fellow explorer, geographer Edwin James, “wholly unfit for cultivation.” Theirs was an archaic usage that mistakenly defined a desert as a wild, uncultivated, and uninhabited region. Wild and uncultivated, perhaps, but this place was not uninhabited.

As I gaze out my window into the dark I find it easy to imagine the prairie as it once was in high summer. Despite the nineteenth-century perception, this place bustled with life. Bison by the millions. Warblers and larks. Eagles, owls, hawks. Coyote and fox. Wolves. Small furry creatures by the gezillions. Snakes and lizards, bugs and butterflies. Flowers for every season–wild strawberries and pussytoes in spring, and in summer a color-wheel explosion, yellow coreopsis and cup plants, purple gayfeather and ironweed, blue sage, white boneset. And people–Omaha, Ponca, Pawnee.

***

The blue skies and birdsong that fill a summer morning can turn to muscular fury by afternoon here in the heart of tornado alley. Twisters regularly rip out anything that tries to stand in their way, and what they miss, hailstones big as a strongman’s fists can flatten in a single round. Nor are storms the only cosmic violence known here. Fire has been part of the grasslands ecology for thousands of years. Without the wildfires set by lightning and “controlled burns” set by the Plains tribes, the prairies would not have existed.

Native Americans across the continent used fire to control vegetation and enhance what biologists call an “ecological edge effect,” an area where dissimilar ecosystems bump up against one another and create a synergy of biological diversity. Here, the primary edge was where grassland met woodland. Diversity offers practical benefits. It ups the odds that people and animals won’t starve in hard times because if one edible species dies off or departs, another is still around. On the prairies these anthropogenic fires cleaned out dead plant matter and stopped trees from invading the grasslands. Grasslands, in turn, invited grazers, and bison in particular followed the people and the grasses east until they filled the landscape. The native grasses thrive in fire ecology; most non-native invaders do not. Modern prairie restoration programs still use periodic spring burns to “clean up” the population of grasses and flowers, cull saplings and other invaders, and make way for sun and rain to work their magic in the soil. What these programs are restoring is arguably not the natural flora at all, but one shaped over millennia by people and animals.

***

The interior of the train is quiet. Seth, just out of chef school and on his way to study sustainable farming in Oregon, is wired up to ear buds and laptop in his roomette next door. In the one across the aisle, Bill, a computer engineer from Monterey, is downloading images from his camera. It rides on three legs and peers out the window, recording an image every sixty seconds as long as we have daylight. He plans to turn the pictures into a movie of sorts, once he cuts out the shots of tunnels and sandstone walls and blurs of track-side trees. I find a pen and calculate that he’ll have more than two thousand pictures to screen. I’ve given him my email address in hopes of seeing the finished product.

Ours are the only compartments in this car with lights on. Most passengers on these long-run trains withdraw to sleep as soon as the last turquoise light leaves the horizon, and most are up early. The coming day – the middle day of the California Zephyr’s two-day transit from Chicago to the Golden Gate – is the one most passengers come for. The viewing car will begin to fill when the sun is still low in the eastern sky. People will stake out territories for what Amtrak calls “one of the most beautiful train trips in all of North America.” Daylight will escort us for five hundred miles across the backbone of the Colorado Rockies, through remote canyons and high passes, through twenty-six tunnels, through the mountains and into the red rocks of Utah. For the umpteenth time I read the pages I’ve printed from the railroad’s website and study the fine print in my pocket atlas, determined to understand where I am, to speculate on where I’m bound.

This car is the train’s tail, so the engine’s whistle announcing our arrival in Lincoln is almost a dream. I wonder if I’ve imagined it, then hear it again. Folk songs from my long-haired days echo in the night, songs about loneliness and freedom. Can you really hear this whistle blow five hundred miles? If you can, what does it say to you? We rattle slowly into the station. I haven’t pulled my curtains – I rarely do on trains – and I flip off my reading lamp and let the lights from the station platform filter through dust and glass into my nest. This is a quick stop, six minutes by the timetable, an odd precision for a mode of transportation notorious for being off-schedule. Why six? Why not five, or ten? Does it matter when railroad time is elastic, trains arriving early here, late there? But six is the magic number, and the handful of passengers who board and disembark here move with some urgency.

Lincoln, Nebraska, has been home to Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Hilary Swank, and the Salt Creek tiger beetle. Cicindela nevadica lincolniana is a half-inch-long green-brown predator and one of the rarest insects on earth. A University of Nebraska survey in 2009 estimated that fewer than two hundred adults – down from an already small population of almost eight hundred nine years earlier – were still stalking other insects in the saline wetlands of Lancaster County just north of Lincoln. Aside from its rarity, the Salt Creek tiger beetle is important as an indicator species whose presence attests to the health of the saline marsh it inhabits, and by extension the wider environment. In an effort to protect the remaining population, Nebraska declared it an endangered species in the 1990s and halted development of its critical habitat; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t follow suit until 2005, and by then the number of sites known to harbor Salt Creek tiger beetles had fallen to only three.

Voices murmur in the luggage area on the lower level and someone bumps a bag up the narrow stairs and walks the other direction. The door to the outside world slides shut and the train’s joints groan with the effort to move on. I punch my pillow into shape and take a last peek out the window, recalling the final lines of “Night Journey” in which Roethke writes, “I stay up half the night/To see the land I love.” Before I close my eyes, I click on my iPod and read the poem again. Vibration and sway from the car around me infiltrate my own joints and sinews. Like Roethke before me, “Full on my neck I feel/The straining at a curve;/My muscles move with steel,/I wake in every nerve.” I have read about the route we will traverse tomorrow, have traveled parts of it by car, and anticipate now, through the poet’s words, a new way of being here: “We thunder through ravines/And gullies washed with light.”

After sunrise and beyond Denver we will twist and climb our way over the Rockies and descend into eastern Utah. I’ve already stayed up half the night, but now, as we leave the outskirts of Lincoln behind, I crawl under the blue blanket to dream the dreams of travelers as we roll west across the prairie.

***

We push across Nebraska while I sleep in fits and starts. I wake every hour or two and peer out the window at distant lights and sleepy towns, then drop back to sleep.  Dreams take me away from the prairie, but somewhere in the dark it strikes me that there is no better day to be crossing this stretch of American ground than today. It’s the Fourth of July, and in the wee hours we stop in Hastings, Nebraska. If you got off the train here and drove south for a bit more than an hour, you’d find the geographic center of the forty-eight contiguous states. At least that’s what the marker at Latitude 39°50' north,  Longitude 98°35' near Lebanon, Kansas, claims, and although geographers quibble about the accuracy of the measurement, it’s close enough. If you traveled north again to resume your journey, US-281 would run you through Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Pulitzer-winning novelist Willa Cather lived as a child. Her prairie trilogy is set here, and I make a mental note to reread my favorite of the trio, Song of the Lark, when I get home.

We pass in the pre-dawn darkness through the region once known as mixed-grass prairie, the transitional strip where tall and short grasses met and mingled. Early in the nineteenth century the U.S. government declared this “empty” area to be Indian country, generously granting to Native Americans a homeland they already had. But by mid-century the economic potential of the land became clear. Promises were broken. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave settlers free access to the Nebraska Territory, a tract that reached from the Kansas-Nebraska border north to Canada, and from the Missouri and White Earth rivers west to the Continental Divide.

I awaken, sit up, gaze out the window at feedlots filled with cattle. Thousands of them. I am at once thrilled and appalled at this bovine sea, lit here and there by bug lights that tinge the night with a jaundiced air. I can taste the acrid dust rising from beneath thousands of hooves. I can smell the thick muskiness of the cattle, I swear I can, but wonder later whether I made that up. This mass of market-bound animals conjures the great herds that once ruled here and formed the heart of the plains tribes’ economies. By the mid-1880s the American bison had been hunted nearly to extinction, cattlemen had replaced them with longhorns, and the newly planted railroads were carrying beef to the growing Eastern markets.

This is cowboy country, and I’m as much a sucker for the romanticized icon as anyone, but I confess to my own ambivalence. I love traveling by train, and being able to move in comfort around this country of ours. But the truth is that trains and the influx of settlers and livestock devastated the land and the people and plants and animals who lived as part of it for millennia. How do we open our eyes and become responsible without losing hope? I turn away from the cattle, try to sleep, but random thoughts bang and rattle until I can’t tell them from the night sounds of the train. 

***

When Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law in 1862, settlers followed the lure of free land, and by 1870 Nebraska’s non-Native population had swelled from a few thousand living mostly along the Missouri River to a hundred and twenty thousand spread across the state. Lumber was a luxury on the prairies, so settlers relied on houses built of sod wrestled from the prairie floor to shield them from rain and sun and the never-ending wind. Sod houses were notorious for harboring bugs, vermin, and snakes in the walls. In dry weather they were dusty; in wet, they leaked and turned mucky.

In my sleeplessness I surf the Internet to learn about Nebraska and come across a photograph in the Library of Congress collection. It’s the Sylvester Rawding family posing in front of their sod house in Custer County, Nebraska, just north of the Zephyr’s route. Sylvester and his wife are relaxed as they sit at the ends of a table set with a tablecloth and a halved watermelon. A young woman sits to Sylvester’s left. Three young men stand to her left and a collie-type dog flanks one of these sons. Two horses in harness attached to a plow fill the far right of the image, and a milk cow stands on the roof of the house where it merges into a hillock. This is probably not their first sod house, for this one is fancy. It has glass in the windows, and curtains. I love this photo. I would like to know more about these people.

The notion that some people are driven to pick up and move of their own volition has always been part of my world view. Both my parents were born to such people. In 1912 my mother arrived in Alberta, Canada, at the age of seven. Her father had left Scotland a year earlier with surveying skills and two sets of clothes. Economic opportunity was the acceptable explanation, but my mother’s stories of her dad make me think that a daring escape from boredom was the real siren song. For my mother, childhood among immigrants from across Europe was a wild adventure. So too for my father’s father, who responded to Canada’s offer of free land by moving his wife and three young sons from a settled urban life in New Hampshire to a homestead in eastern Alberta in 1905. Their stories were not so different from the stories swirling in the dust outside this train.

For the women, the bright lure of a new life was often dulled by loneliness, backbreaking labor, and lack of medical care. Men, too, exhausted themselves with physical work and were always at risk of injury or disease, but for women the risks were compounded by biology. Caring for a family, especially young children, involved a never-ending round of hard labor by hand or with basic tools. Pregnancy and childbirth were frequent and dangerous. Babies and children died easily. Grief was a constant specter. My dad was too young to remember, but my Uncle Art spoke of how their mother melted snow in winter to scrub their clothing and bedding in a galvanized tub with a washboard. My mother lived mostly in mining camps where her dad worked as a surveyor, and in small towns east of Calgary, but she had stories of hitching up the horse, milking the cow, caring for the hens and running from the rooster, working in the household garden. These scenes played out all across the prairies of North America.

The homesteaders of Nebraska were a motley bunch. They were tenant farmers from the eastern states tired of working someone else’s land. They were newly arrived immigrants from central and eastern Europe – Czechs, Germans, Russians, Swedes, Danes – tired of war and out-dated economies of oppression. They were single women, families, children. They were Irish fleeing the Great Hunger and east-European Jews fleeing the great pogroms. They were former slaves and former soldiers. They were people with hearts on fire for free land and a free way of life.

They learned quickly that the land and the life were not free at all. They were purchased at the cost of isolation, disease, privation, loss, and bone-breaking work and, although they didn’t see it this way, the destruction of ecosystems, species, and peoples. The prairie grasses did not give up their holdings without a fight. John Deere’s cast steel “grasshopper plows” were a technological boost for sod-busting settlers, hardened for blade-to-blade combat with the grass, but they could not drive themselves. Draft animals – horses and, more often, oxen – were essential equipment. In some places it took as many as twenty beasts in harness to rip the prairie open and expose her fertile soil. These were tough, determined people. Still, it’s difficult from where we stand now, with history’s view of the Dust Bowl to come, not to see the rape of the Great Plains as an environmental disaster.

***

Some people itch when settled too long in one place, or in the wrong place. This was certainly true of the people who scattered across North America during the past four hundred years. Even before they saw the agricultural potential of the Great Plains, people came through here on their way west. Pioneers on the Oregon Trail passed just south of Hastings, an estimated half million of them between 1843 and 1868. Those who traveled the whole route packed all their worldly goods into four- by ten-foot Prairie Schooners and slogged two thousand miles from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon. My roomette is nearly that big and I feel crowded with my suitcase and laptop. I am carrying more clothes for a week away than whole families owned on the trail. I do not have to carry food to last for weeks, nor the tools to begin a new life, and my journey will be faster and infinitely more secure. In a good day a team of oxen could haul the covered wagons fifteen miles, and the length of Nebraska, which we cross tonight in five comfortable hours, took them a month if all went well. Often it did not.

 The Oregon Trail has been called “this nation's longest graveyard.” One in eight pioneers died along the way, mostly from accidents and disease. A world-wide pandemic of cholera followed settlers along the trail, spreading from one group to the next through garbage left in camps. Infant and child mortality was high, and many women died in childbirth. Accidental shootings, often self-inflicted, were not uncommon, nor were injuries from working with large animals. With no antibiotics or clear notion of what causes infection, cuts and scrapes that we think minor could be fatal. Many medicines were themselves questionable. A typical kit might hold patent medicines that were often just alcohol or sugar, along with castor oil and peppermint oil for intestinal and skin problems, rum or whiskey to clean wounds and treat illness, and quinine for malaria. Hartshorn, made from the antlers of deer, was used to treat snakebite, but was useless if the snake was venomous. Laudanum and morphine were used as painkillers and sedatives. They didn’t cure anything, but might at least ease pain. The road west took many victims over a quarter of a century. Some lost their minds; some sixty-five thousand lost their lives.

My family did not travel the Oregon Trail, but I grew up on stories of immigration into a wild, unsettled place. Alberta at the start of the twentieth century offered some advantages over Nebraska a half century earlier, but the two were similar in many ways. Opportunity was tempered by risk. Crops and livestock could be wiped out by weather or fire, pestilence or drought. Whole families died within days of diseases we never hear of in the U.S. or Canada today, although some are making a terrifying comeback. My mother’s parents survived typhoid fever, my mother scarlet fever and whooping cough. She spoke of a woman she knew who lost seven children to a diphtheria outbreak, and, eight years later, three more. When he was two years old, my father lost his mother and a baby brother in childbirth. So it was with settlers throughout the continent.

I continue to read and feel a mental shift, an attitude adjustment, a new perspective. Threads of regret and blame and deep respect tangle themselves in my mind. This is not the first time I’ve read about how things were, of course, not the first time I’ve wrestled with my own gentle complicity in changes for good and for bad. Nor is it the first time I have traversed this wide stretch of land. But in the past I have done so by car, by the glare of the modern world. To the day-lit eye, this place is vast, tough, uncrowded. Night draws the past in closer, and as I gaze into the dark outside my window, the shadows of people and animals and plants that passed through here before me. These plains are a place of spirits, no more empty now than they were when the tall grasses waved.

A wayfarer in her writing as in her life, Sheila Webster Boneham prefers to follow where the words take her. She writes across genres, and most of her work concerns nature, place, and animals, ourselves included. She has written extensively about companion animals, and is often accompanied in her wanderings by her dogs. Sheila has ridden long-distance trains in North America, Europe, and Egypt, and is currently working on a series of essays about trips by rail. Sheila holds an MFA from the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program and a Ph.D. in folklore from Indiana University.

1^st Oct

Every morning I humbly and quietly re-introduce myself to the earth. Walking the sloping lane towards the sun kindling at the ragged heart of the wood, beneath an onward rolling blue sky, I breathe deeply enough to feel at peace with what I am and where I am in this very moment.

2^nd Oct

The contribution I make to Being is perfectly minimal, and what I gain is also perfectly minimal. I am simply here. Nothing added, nothing taken away. Or so I would like to think. Bearing no gifts other than this vaguely definable presence that I am, the earth, through grass-blade, falling autumn leaf, cloud and sky and flicking air, remembers me. Or so I would like to think.

4^th Oct

This local beam of earth transfigured into an autumn wood is a numinous realization of itself through me, and every other thing in that wood.

The holy, the ineffable, the nameless hush of light that is the supporting spine of all things earthly, grubby and rough-edged, - not God, no appellations, - is registered, first of all, on the bristling skin, upon the rounded globe of a single goose bump swelling in the coaxing breeze, upon the tongue-tip, the lip and watery eye and voluptuous lung, - those bone-encased, twin homes of blood and oxygen. Continuity between THAT what cannot be named and THIS what lends itself to be named is safeguarded by this body that I am.

6^th Oct

I love the trees, the shades and depths of light the trees create and conjure, the careless litter of crab apples, the steaming warmth of bogged-down bracken piles in the cool mists of, what seems like, a premature morning. I love the shades of water, the whole music of hapless gushing and lapping, the touch of coarse sand beneath the arched foot that curves like an ear pressed down upon secret, enormous melodies. I love it all.

I am happiest when I love the earth and not afraid to use such an overblown verb. A butterfly upon a dying flower is as awesome as the mountain that no butterfly may every alight upon.

Amidst all this passion, the golden maxim surfaces: love of life depends upon the premise of accepting things as they are. One cannot love life if one cannot accept things as they are. Passion must be worked out, without it shrinking into calculation.

9^th Oct

Autumn. There’s a lilting breeze to that word, a sinking and drifting cadence. Deer walk as quietly as leaves fall, their feet tapping away into the distance. Soft brilliance of the sun upon strong green leaves, the last bundle of them, as everywhere and elsewhere the red and orange showers, the blushed carmines and yellow crimsons.

From the darkness, with its golden glow of a spread hand, my heart, - or an organ near to my heart - is roused into equanimity. Trying to hold onto this buoyancy of calm only nudges it further away. Let it come, let it go, my will obedient to that ebb and flow.

Walked on passed elm and holly and squat oaks tangled amidst oaks, branches washed by Autumn rain, the dead leaves of my being go to the ground to be restored whilst I am more exposed to myself, to something other. I see the deer more clearly because of my breakdown into bareness, straight passed the congestion of my own self into deer and the world sharing itself between us.

10^th Oct

As Wallace Stevens puts it: ‘to exist in the world and yet outside any conceptions of it.’ Evasion, then, on my part, of concepts is supported by the conspiracy of things. Is it not imperative in keeping with the above strategy to be eccentric to explanations, yet central, integral to participation?

11^th Oct

Sky surrounding me, my feet embracing the mud, my lungs replete with cold autumn air, the sweetness of it making my mind laugh, - how can I not be content? Pain, yes, comes my way in no short measure but dissolves into this blessed solution of body-world rapport.

There is liberation to be found in knowing that here is the only place I can ever be.

Fresh russet sunrise, ragged cloud-rims gilt mercury and boldly embossed with watery lines. Two tacking and jolting herons flew high above and over the road at home in the wayward, boisterous infinity that tussles everywhere. And a rainbow in the slight film of passing rain! Sense of grounded and elated calm; the whole day remaining to muse upon this hour.

One more heron - dark spectre in darker dusk, - floated above the wood. Veering away she spied me then glided toward the exploded oak that was jostling in the wind.

12^th Oct

Morning breezes, between-branch cast, leaf-wide and long as the alleyway that stretched between trunks replenished by the winds blustering down from dispersed canopies above, caressed my bare arms as I held them out in front and traipsed down the warm lane through four, no, five horses tearing stubbed grass.

 Exhilarating to see the sky, monumental blue, at the same time that acorns and raindrops and crab-apples thudded in off-time with each step. Ethereal sounds. Walking on solid air. Clear clean notes of a wren in a hideaway.

A mere hour’s walk, the same round I repeat so often and find, not dullness, in the short distance and time a length and breadth of experience I have rarely encountered in other domains of the holy, the visceral hush, the barking silence. Such expansion is such autumnal minutiae.

What is this delight or joy I feel is mere existence, and the sadness or frustrated confusion that comes when I am not, by some interruption, permitted to be simply as I am, as I be. In what ways am I broken? Towards what vision shall I re-make myself, and in re-making myself what will happen to the world I have come to know? A discrete effervescence trembles within each thing eager to be sipped by lips eager to purse the shape of silence.

13^th Oct

Without this one leaf, I am not.

At what point shall the restoration of myself, and thus the renewal of the sacred undergo? It begins closer than the eye, than one’s breath. Move a tittle of thought and I miss it by aeons.

 There seems to be no end to how closely I can come into contact with things. This point of re-birth is non-other than the space in which all things from star to grass-blade tip tipsy in the frozen pulse of dew, are one and intensely different. I feel that I am nearing, through simply paying attention beyond myself into the collapsing labyrinth of this autumn wood, the source, the boundless circle of light.

14^th Oct

The thinning of autumn. The incipient fullness of spirit.

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In my family, the men died first; the women carried on.

Women in three consecutive generations faced the death of their husbands from early, unexpected illness.  Necessity shaped their response as they became family matriarchs, resourceful, resilient, and alone.

I.    Bina Rykena Voogd  (1847-1924)

      Abe O. Voogd              (1847-1882)

Bina Rykena Voogd sat beside the bed where her husband of eleven years lay, his weak form covered with blankets and the multi-colored quilt they received at their wedding.  Holding his hand tightly, she bowed her head, his faint, uneven breathing in her ear as she held back tears.  It all happened so suddenly; this illness, the quick decline, and now, sitting in the bedroom, a cold wind blowing outside, her dear Abe, so close to death.  This was not their plan, their vision for their life together.  She kept up constant prayer, repeating fearfully, “Please don’t die; we’ve struggled so much, and have such happiness now with our young and growing family.” 

Abe and Bina each experienced the long journey to the United States by ship. Abe traveled from the Ostfriesland region of northern Germany, and at nineteen, the oldest of five children, he helped his family make the overland trip by train to Illinois. There they lived for six years within the growing Ostfriesen community there, and journeyed by train to Cedar Falls and by wagon twenty miles further west, finding rich, rolling farm land near other German settlers in north central Iowa.          

Bina remembered the ship that brought her and her parents from Hannover, Germany, and the train to Iowa as well. She often said she never wanted to take such a long, exhausting trip again.  The Voogd and Rykena families each farmed land near Highway 20, between Parkersburg and Aplington, two tiny towns serving the growing number of Iowa farms.

Bina often thought about how much life improved once they settled in Iowa.  The farm was hard work every day, but she loved the green fields, the wild prairies, and the beautiful flowers.  They had many friends, and families helped each other with harvesting corn, building barns, and preparing and storing food.  Through these events and gatherings she came to know Abe, a handsome man and hard worker.  After a short courtship he asked her to marry him, and she eagerly agreed. 

They began married life on a small farm near their families. They spent long hours working their farm, and Bina gave birth to four sons: Oltman, now ten, Richard eight, five year-old Dick, and Abe, carrying her husband’s name, recently turned one.  The boys were a handful, especially the younger ones; still they would learn to do their farm chores, and promised to be a big help once they grew older.          

Sitting at his bedside as she carefully watched her husband, Bina tried not to imagine what she would have to do to take care of her family without Abe.  It was more than she could bear.  Their four little boys, without a father.  The family without Abe to farm the land, protect them, and help these boys grow up.  Abe’s favorite brother John lived on the next farm, with a growing family of his own, and constantly talked about moving on to Minnesota.  Abe’s other two living siblings were on the farm with their aging parents. There wasn’t room, and the boys weren’t old enough to help.  She would have to stay and make their farm succeed; if not, what else could she do?

Despite Bina’s tears and prayers, Abe Voogd died March 10, 1882, at the age of 34.  Bina, also 34, now faced all the realities she had not wanted to consider.  Family members reached out to help, and neighbors were sympathetic to Bina’s plight.  Within a few months, however, Bina accepted that her dream with Abe of a family farm where they would support themselves and raise their children was not possible.  She made a decision that changed her life and the trajectory of her children’s own dreams. 

Having expected to be a farm wife in a role she knew well, she sold their farm, left her familiar world, and settled in the nearby town of Aplington.  She purchased a modest house, and rented rooms to boarders to make ends meet.               

Bina, the sole support of her growing family, focused her time and energy on the lives of her four sons.  She stayed connected to her Ostfriesen roots, continuing to speak German, and even listing the boys in the Iowa State census of 1885 with their Ostfriesen names: Oltman, Rike (Richard), Dirk (Dick), and Ebe (Abe).  She also made sure the boys attended the small public school in Aplington.  Each of the brothers took advantage of the opportunities for education and leadership in their small town, and developed a profession or a business, while maintaining a close relationship with their mother. As the brothers became productive town members, Bina left the demanding boarding house role, supported by her sons.   

Oltman, the oldest of the four Voogd brothers, managed The Aplington News, the weekly newspaper, while his brother Dick attended the University of Iowa Law School.  When Dick graduated and began his law practice, Oltman stayed at the newspaper, eventually purchasing it.  He married, and with his wife and four children lived next door to Bina. 

Dick served as one of the two lawyers in Aplington, and also served as mayor for ten years.  Both Dick and Abe, the youngest brother, continued to live with their mother at various times during these years.   Abe managed the local grain elevator, and worked in other sales positions in the town.

At the age of 15, seven years after his father died, Richard started a merchandise business, a small store on Aplington’s block-long main street. Richard’s store expanded to a larger storefront, advertising general merchandise and millenary.  He also bought and sold property, establishing with a colleague the Tiedens and Voogd Real Estate office.  He married Bena Weiss when he was twenty, and they had three children.  The family lived in a substantial home in town, near his mother.

In her later years, Bina lived with her son Abe and his wife.  Called “Grandma Voogd” by all, she remained the head of the family, overseeing the activities and enterprises of her sons.  She never married again and lived more than forty years without her husband Abe, before she died in 1924.

II.   Bena Weiss Voogd  (1874-1942)

       Richard A. Voogd     (1874-1921)

Bena Weiss Voogd, Bina’s daughter-in-law, sat with her desk full of papers, and tried to take in their message.  The family real estate business lost money again.  The lands that seemed so lucrative a few years ago produced less now, and the situation worsened each year.  Somehow the death of her husband Richard had opened up a hornet’s nest of bad financial news.  “We were doing so well!  What are we going to do now?” she kept repeating to herself in disbelief.

Bena married Richard Voogd at a time of great promise for both of their families.

Like the Voogd’s, Bena’s parents came from Germany in the 1860’s, settled for a while in Illinois, where Bena was born, and then moved on to Iowa.  After developing a successful farm, the family moved to town in 1889, where her father Fred Weiss ran a grain, coal and implement business.  He also served on the city council and the township board of trustees and had a small real estate business. It was a happy time for Bena, including a wonderful trip with her father to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.  She treasured the two beautiful glass goblets they bought there, with dark red borders and their names painted on the glass. Bena and Richard’s marriage the year after that trip celebrated the coming together of two of the town’s leading families.

Not all was happy, however; difficult times arrived more than once.  Their beautiful baby girl Beulah passed away when she was only two.  With their son Fred only six, Bena’s parents living next door offered the young family support.  Bena especially valued her father’s energetic and positive attitude.  Then, seven years later, her father died of a heart attack, while on a real estate business trip in Minnesota.  He seemed so vibrant, even at 62, and traveled regularly.   Now a grieving Bena waited, while Richard and her uncle made the railroad trip north to retrieve the body.  Those were the hardest years.    

Bena’s attention wandered from the piles of financial documents on the desk to other memories of her married life.  Their two-story, beautiful home provided space for their family and they often welcomed visitors. Sometimes Richard drank a little too much, like the time he was driving their new car and ran it right into their garage door.  One Christmas, he caused a bit of a scene, and wrote a letter of apology to son Fred, away at business school, for ruining the holiday. But that didn’t happen very often, and he carefully monitored his financial affairs, so they continued to live comfortably.  

Richard sold his general store in 1913, and concentrated on real estate, which continued to support them well; in fact, he was able to buy a farm in the name of each of their children, for future security.  She laughed when he wrote to Fred at business school urging him to be careful with his spending, so typical of Richard’s attitude: “I hope you will…get the habit of taking care of your money as I told you before, every successful man absolutely has to learn this lesson. The sooner the better. Money is a man’s best friend.”  (Richard to Fred, February 17, 1917)

Their three children, Fred, Beulah (named after little Beulah who died) and Edward, grew up strong, bright, and healthy.  Fred succeeded at business school, and Richard’s connections with the owner of the bank in Austinville led to Fred’s job there as a bank clerk.  That same summer Fred married Neva Stockdale, and they began life together, living with Neva’s brother on a farm at the southern edge of town.  Beulah excelled in school, and eagerly planned on attending college, while Ed cared less for school, spending time with friends as a gregarious, busy young man.

Then, without warning, Richard became seriously ill and lay bedridden for a month. The doctor called his condition, “Embulis,” (likely pulmonary embolism, or a blood clot that lodged in his lung), and despite continuous medical care, Richard died on July 24, 1921, a steamy, hot, terrifying day. He was 47 years old. 

Bena knew their son Fred, married and working, could be a great help.  But Beulah was 16 and Edward only 13—so many financial needs, college expectations, and pressures to keep up the house and business.  Like her mother-in-law before her, Bena looked for the way to support her children while facing new and unsettling challenges. Fortunately, Richard’s brother Dick became the legal counsel for the business, and her son Fred, as she had expected, took over many daily responsibilities. She hoped they could count on Richard’s business to continue to support her family.  If so, they would manage.

The year after Richard died, however, the family’s fortunes began to change.  Bena’s tax returns from 1922 and 1923 showed yearly losses of $2000. 1924 returns improved, yet still showed a loss, and again in 1925, the losses amounted to $2000. In addition, Richard’s estate remained unsettled, leaving questions about what taxes to pay.  The lands managed by the business offered little security.

After many long discussions, Bena, Dick and Fred decided that a trip was necessary to see these lands in person and determine what recourse to follow-to sell, rent, or continue to own the farms.  This would be a major undertaking, as the lands included farms in Minnesota, South and North Dakota, and even a farm in Saskatchewan.  Fred arranged for his brother Edward to go along, and Uncle Dick went, bringing his legal experience.  Fred’s best friend and brother-in-law, Bob Stockdale, who had his own farm, joined the travelers.  They set out in August 1925, Fred driving his 1922 Buick, going all the way to Canada, in an effort to resolve several of the unsettled land transactions. 

Bena faced this loss of income and status amidst the increasingly depressed national farm economy.  The real estate business gradually closed.  The only farmland still in the family were the local holdings Richard had purchased earlier for the children, which offered some financial security. Bena continued to live in the family home, in a modest fashion, staying active in church and maintaining a strong hold on her children as they became adults.  Cared for by daughter Beulah, “Mother Voogd” remained in her home until she died in 1942, twenty-one years after Richard’s death.

III.  Neva Stockdale Voogd  (1893-1984)

       Fred R. Voogd                  (1896- 1936)             

Neva Stockdale and Fred Voogd became high school sweethearts. Neva, three years older, grew up on a large farm four miles west of Aplington, while Fred lived in town.  They attended the same Presbyterian Church and new two-story high school.  They socialized with a shared group of friends, attending occasional movies in near-by Parkersburg and band concerts in Aplington every Saturday night, when the farmers came to town.  After she graduated in 1912, a member of the first high school graduating class in Aplington, Neva helped on her family’s farm, and remained a part of this social scene. During those years the two began to court.

Neva hoped that once some of her five younger siblings got old enough to work the farm, she could go to college. Fred enrolled at Iowa State Teachers College immediately following his graduation and quickly decided this school was not for him.  In 1916, he enrolled at the Business School in Cedar Rapids; the same year Neva was finally able to start college.  Fred advocated for her to attend Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, only twelve miles from his school, and Neva agreed. Their informal dating in Aplington became a more established courtship while they were at school, with Fred traveling by streetcar most Fridays to visit Neva.

Fred completed his schooling the next year and began his job at the Austinville Bank, two miles from the Stockdale farm. He saw no reason for Neva to continue with college, although Neva held back.  Even though she admitted her grades needed improvement, she was having a great time at Cornell, making many friends, and she preferred to continue.

Late that same spring, however, Neva’s parents called her home. Gladys, her oldest brother’s wife, was bedridden with illness following the birth of their first child.  Following weeks of suffering and uncertainty, Gladys died, and the family needed Neva to stay with brother Ray and the new baby.  Once she was home, it was clear to Neva that she would not be returning to school, and on a brilliantly sunny, hot July 24, 1917 Fred and Neva married. 

The couple spent their first two years of married life with Ray.  Neva wrote in response to her sister-in-law’s death, “It certainly is a blessed thing that one doesn’t know what’s before them…It seems hard to think its for the best but we know it must be…I always think of Someday We’ll Understand.” (Neva to Fred, 3/31/17)  This was a reference to the Bible verse from John 13:7: “Jesus answered and said unto him, what I do Thou knowest not now; But Thou shalt know hereafter.”  This deep religious belief gave her reassurance in the midst of such losses.

After living at Ray’s for two years, Fred and Neva moved to their own home, a block from Fred’s mother, Bena.  Neva focused on raising their sons Kenneth, born in 1921, and Richard, born three years later.  Fred stopped each afternoon at his mother’s house on the way home from the bank. The family continued to attend Saturday night band concerts, family activities, and the Presbyterian Church. On alternate Sundays they would visit Neva’s mother on the farm and Fred’s mother a block away.

After 1921, when his father Richard died, Fred took on responsibility for the real estate business and its declining income.  Probate issues continued, as well as discouraging financial losses each year.  He took the road trip to Canada in 1925, assessing the land potential of various farms, time away from his young sons and Neva, who he addressed in his letters as “Dearie.” In 1934, while these probate and income issues continued, his Uncle Dick, legal counsel for his mother’s estate, died.  Fred faced further financial and legal burdens.  

Neva knew that Fred sometimes suffered from stomach pains or bowel problems.  She remembered his reassurances, after the travelers left for Canada, that he bought “some magnesia and take a dose, my bowels are in better shape than before, so don’t worry.” (Fred to Neva, August 9, 1925)  However, early in the summer of 1936, at the age of 40, Fred became suddenly and seriously ill, with painful abdominal cramps.  Alarmed and fearful, Neva drove him to the hospital in Waverly, thirty miles away. The doctor insisted Fred stay for observation, and told Neva to go home, get some rest, and return the next day.  She assumed that meant Fred would improve, and reluctantly left the hospital.  Instead, she learned the next morning that Fred had died during the night: June 21, 1936.  The death certificate read “perforated gastric ulcer, peritonitis and neutropenia”—a massive infection in his abdominal cavity. 

Neva, with 15 and 12 year old sons, faced a broken heart and an unsure future.    She built her life around Fred and the family they created together. Financial support for Neva came in part from her mother’s farm income, and from her mother-in-law’s help in erasing the mortgage she and Fred owed on their home.  She and her sons could stay where they were and maintain much of their daily life among family and friends.

At the same time, the loss continued to take an emotional toll.  Neva tried to hold on to her faith that there is a reason for each death, even if we don’t know what it is. As a poem she wrote at Christmas time that very hard year suggested, “Xmas 1936” reinforced her belief that there are reasons for the deaths that come and that Fred would want them to be happy:

But God Knows what is Best for All

And it’s not for us to say

Just who should be the ones to go

Or who the ones to stay!

So now ‘een tho we’re lonely

We Know that Daddy dear

Would want us to be Happy

And wish others Christmas Cheer!!

Two years later, near the anniversary of Fred’s death, Neva reflected with more subdued sadness.  She questioned the belief that God determines who dies and always for some good reason.  “Spring 1936,” described a yucca plant growing near the house, which the family watched throughout the spring for it’s first blooms.  But as the flowers opened:

… how could we know

What their message was to be?

When the first white bell unfolded -

Daddy wasn’t there - to see!

But how could we have known

What their message was to be?

That tall stem pointing, up to Heaven

Was all that we could see!

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

April 29, 1938

Neva never fully said goodbye to Fred. She kept his coats and straw hats in the closet upstairs, and saved his bureau contents as they were when he died.  She began to save other kinds of items, stacking church programs, magazines, and newspapers in piles in the living room and bedroom.  Her sons married, served in the Army, and moved to new communities, while her saving practices expanded.

By the time Neva died, almost 50 years after Fred, each room overflowed with saved objects and papers.  She no longer allowed anyone to come into her house; visitors could only join her on the screened-in front porch.  She still took flowers from her garden to church every Sunday.  She visited family living nearby, and volunteered with her sister Hazel at the town library. But no one went in the house, where Neva shuffled about through the pathways in each room, holding on to her Dearie, Fred.

IV.

Growing up, the only story I knew about these three generations was that my grandfather Fred died when my father was twelve.  No details, no back story, and only a few hints about how strong “Grandma Voogd” was, raising four boys, and a photo of “Mother Voogd” at a holiday dinner in her home, surrounded by family members.

 Whenever we visited Grandma Neva, we stayed with her younger sister, Hazel, who lived in a two-story frame house on Main Street. Hazel never married and was active in the library, and her home was the gathering place for the various family members.  We always stopped in Des Moines on our family visits,  where Fred’s sister Beulah lived.  She was a teacher for many years, and  having waited until her mother passed on to marry, became a widow a few short years later. 

These women shaped my ideas about gender.  They lived independently in their own houses. They traveled to visit us and took trips to several western states.  Their lives included friends, work or volunteer activities, and few interactions with men, other than their brothers.   I loved these women, admired them, and wanted to be like them.  To find out that my great grandmother Bena and Great-great Grandmother Bina also had this experience, also lived independently and well, never remarrying and living close to their children, made my lived experience part of a constant thread.  That strong character and commitment to carrying on came through generations, not only the generation I knew and loved.

I didn’t see the possible shadow sides of their life.  Neva continued to function in the world after Fred died, volunteering at the small local library her sister Hazel and other members of the Women’s Club began, making floral arrangements from her garden for Sunday church services, and traveling to visit her sons’ families.   After she died we finally went into Neva’s house.  We found the pathways through the house, the piles of newspapers on every surface, Fred’s clothes in the closet, 50 years later.  Her outward expression was independent, managing well. However her home became a lonely place, overflowing with saved “stuff” and she allowed no one to visit her.  Her independence and individual life had its compromises.                   

At the same time, I slowly learned of troubling attitudes toward the earlier women’s life choices; a reminder of the way in which our choices may produce both strength and sorrow. Bina, “Grandmother Voogd,” raised four boys who became successful members of the community.  The whispers criticized how demanding she was, perhaps how her strength to carry on meant pressure and expectations on her children that led them to do what they did, whether they wanted to or not.  Her son Richard opened a store when he was 15—how did that come about?  Perhaps he found satisfaction in that step; or did he want to go to school like his brother Dick, or farm nearby, rather than buy and sell farms?  Was his occasional drinking connected to the pressure he experienced, his own unfulfilled dreams, or his loss of a father when he was only eight?  Did his drinking contribute to a thread of alcohol abuse in future generations?

Bena, “Mother Voogd,” also required much from her children.  Her son Fred stopped at her home every day after work, before returning home to his wife and children.  Neva hinted more than once that she was unhappy about that. Beulah lived with and took care of her mother, delaying her own marriage until after she was forty. She never had children, and her husband  (like her brother and father) died young, within a short time after their delayed marriage.   Perhaps Beulah chose that delay, accepting the expectation that she should not marry while her mother needed her. 

The place where these women lived, the land and farms of north central Iowa, played a role in their ability to survive.  Bina had the resources to change her life because she and husband Abe had a farm that provided her with funds to move to town and establish a boarding house.  Bena and her husband Richard started with a small store in town that served primarily farmers, and then a real estate business that provided well for them for many years, mostly by buying and selling farmland.  Neva’s mother and the resources of her family’s farm supported her after Fred died.  Each was in some way dependent on the land to provide their financial stability. 

The network of families, especially women, that existed in each generation offered critical additional support.  The Voogd’s came from Ostfreisland as an extended family, and interacted and traveled with others from their home country.  They farmed in an area where many of their fellow immigrants settled.  While they lived far from everything they had known, they were also part of a stream of immigrants from that area, and experienced a shared culture.  While Bina moved to town and left the farm life she knew, she moved to Aplington, four miles away, and stayed in contact with those around her.  She lived alone, yet had siblings and other women she knew and could depend on for support, advice, and understanding.

Bena also had friends and links to immigrant families of her mother and father, and was part of the Voogd extended family.  Though her financial status declined in the years following Richard’s death, her links within the community and the church continued.  Her children were older, too, so her needs for support differed from her mother-in-law with her young boys.  Bena’s children, especially her daughter Beulah, became part of her support network.

Neva, the most fragile of these women, depended heavily on the women around her. Her sister Hazel was an important support, living two blocks away, and serving as the center of family gatherings and interactions.  With five brothers, all married and with children of their own, the family connections and interconnections within the town and nearby farms provided childcare, travel companions, and help with typical auto and house problems.  While her quirky ways tended toward isolation, the family as a whole served to keep her connected.

I tended to romanticize my grandmother Neva and grand-aunts Hazel, and Beulah, imagining them as happy, independent, and capable.  While they were all of that, at some level, each of them, and I have no doubt Bena and Bina as well, had their share of loneliness, heartbreak, fear of the future, and challenges around children, finances, and managing in difficult circumstances. 

Women became matriarchs in the Voogd family in three consecutive generations.  While the details of their lives varied, critical factors led to this identity; most importantly, each faced the death of her husband from early, unexpected illness.  Unlike many widowed women of their times, they each chose not to marry again.  Their situations offered limited options, often disrupting the lives the family had known.  They exhibited independence, resourcefulness, and, especially with Grandma Voogd and Mother Voogd, an unbending will.  They also counted upon their children as they aged, and created expectations that shaped the children’s experiences as well.  And sometimes grief and loneliness continued, as each woman carried on for her children, while holding on to what she could of an earlier time.

Sharlene Voogd Cochrane is a Professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Master’s Degree at Lesley University. She holds a Ph.D. in American History from Boston College and an M.A. in American Studies from New York University. Her current research and writing focus is social/cultural history, especially the intersections of gender, race, class and religion in women's lives. Her article, "Compelled to Speak: Women Confronting Institutional Racism, 1910-1950," addresses these dynamics as they apply to the YWCA. She is also writing a series of articles based on a collection of her grandmother's letters.  She teaches interdisciplinary courses, including those that support students to develop their degree plans and thesis studies.  She is faculty advisor for our master’s degree students in Guyana.

Dr. Cochrane has supported cultural competency initiatives at Lesley for many years, serving on the University Diversity Council and as a co-facilitator of a university-wide, four-year faculty project, the Cultural Literacy Curriculum Initiative.  She taught for over ten years, the travel/study course, “The Traditions and Cultures of the Southwest,” bringing Lesley students to Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has recently completed a three-year term as Dean of Faculty, responsible for faculty development support and programs across the University.  Dr. Cochrane is also a long-term facilitator for Courage and Renewal retreats for educators. Her research, based on a series of Courage Study Circles for Lesley faculty, has resulted in her article, “Courage in the Academy: Sustaining the Heart of College and University Faculty,” which was recently published in the Journal of Faculty Development.

On Memorial Day 1965, my mother loaded me into the family car, a two-tone yellow and green Chevrolet Bel Air sedan. I was used to impromptu excursions with her, setting off with no sense of where we were going or how long it might take to get there. Eventually, we arrived at the southwest gravel entrance to the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Olympia. My mother parked the car, opened the driver’s door, went around to the back, picked up a Mason jar filled with cut flowers from our home garden, and grabbed a pair of heavy-duty scissors. I slid out the passenger side. Together we walked across the lawn and between headstones to Babyland.

At some point, my mother stopped, set down the flowers, sat on the grass, tucked her legs under her skirt, gripped the scissors, and began to trim grass from around a grave marker. Nearing the end of second grade, I could read for myself:

A silhouette of a lamb was carved into the lower-right corner of the headstone. I asked my mother who that was. My twin brother, she said, who died when he was just a baby. Finished with trimming the grass away, my mother twisted a metal handle located above the gravestone, pulled up a metal cylinder, flipped it over to make a rudimentary vase, arranged the flowers and poured water in. She gathered the scissors and jar, stood up, smoothed her skirt, and we walked back to the car. On the drive home, whether we spoke or not, the emotional effect was silence. Over the years, occasionally my mother would recount stories about my twin and me.

Esther Walz birthed me at St. Peter’s Hospital, assisted by Dr. Maxwell Hunter, on Wednesday, April 24, 1957, at ten past eight in the evening. I weighed 5 pounds, 6½ ounces, and measured 17½ inches. Immediately following my birth, Dr. Hunter said something to Esther along the lines of, “Keep going, mother, you have another one in there!” Once during a pregnancy visit, the doctor listened to her abdomen through his stethoscope and wondered aloud, “Is that a second heartbeat I hear?” It turned out Esther was carrying fraternal twins, but she did not realize it until giving birth. I was the smaller of the two, but positioned to come out first. After my delivery, the larger baby did not immediately follow. Her labor continued for the better part of another hour, until a second baby was finally born at 8:59 p.m. Whenever telling this part of the story, my mother was emphatic, “I never blamed Dr. Hunter. He did everything he could to get that baby out of there.”

We were Baby Boy A and Baby Boy B. My parents had already agreed upon Robin for a boy’s name. Now they needed two. My father took a J.C. Penney’s sales slip from his wallet and tore it in two. My mother wrote Robin Roy (my mother’s father and one of her brothers were named Leroy) on the back of one half, and Russell Ray (my mother’s eldest brother was Russell, and her cousin Jeanette’s husband was Ray) on the other. My father randomly chose: Baby A became Robin and Baby B, Russell. In the “Newcomers” column of births at St. Peter’s Hospital, The Daily Olympian announced, “Mr. and Mrs. William Walz, Route Three, Box 260, twin boys, Robin Roy and Russell Ray, April 24.”

Russell endured tremendous physical trauma during his delivery. He was placed in an incubator, but the distress was severe. He was not going to survive. “His brain was too badly damaged,” my mother would say. The on-call pastor at the hospital, Reverend J. Edgar Pearson, Jr. of United Churches of Olympia, baptized Russell on April 28. Five days later, The Daily Olympian reported, “One of the twin sons born to Mr. and Mrs. William Walz died Thursday afternoon in an Olympia hospital at the age of eight days. A private graveside funeral service will be held in the Odd Fellows Cemetery Monday morning.” At 10:30 a.m. on May 6, Reverend Malcolm Alexander of Westminster Presbyterian Church conducted Russell’s graveside service in the Babyland section of the cemetery. My Uncle Leroy and Aunt Mary attended. Floral bouquets arrived from Bruce and Doris Briggs at Briggs Nursery (where my father worked), the congregation of Westminster United Presbyterian Church (where my mother was a member), and neighbors Bill and Marilyn Seibold.

After the birth announcement, my parents received several “Twins! How Wonderful!” cards and letters. These were soon outpaced by sympathy cards, overlapping no doubt with well wishes from faraway family in North Dakota. One sympathy card was signed by sixteen mothers and grandmothers who lived within a mile of our home on Lemon Road. A new round of “Congratulations to Mother, Dad and Baby” cards arrived, with happy messages about the singular new addition to the family, and continued intermittently from Mother’s Day through baby’s first Christmas.

Of course, I knew nothing of this during the car ride home after trimming the grass around Russell’s gravestone. My eight-year-old brain struggled to absorb what I had witnessed. Who was Russell? Would I ever know him? How do I know that I’m Robin, and he’s Russell? What if I’m really Russell, and Robin is the one who died? I harbored and pondered those questions, obsessively. The earliest answers came from our neighbors across the cow pasture.

Elsie and Roy Sellards were outliers in our local community of small-acreage family farms in South Bay, northeast of Olympia. Like other families, the Sellards had a milk cow, chickens, an extensive vegetable garden, fruit trees and berry patches. As Seventh-day Adventists, they were vegetarians (I remember eating mayonnaise and jelly sandwiches at their house), whole foods proselytizers (owning and operating an on-site bakery), and teetotalers (spurning stimulants and intoxicants), atypical in the fifties and sixties, even in our semi-rural neighborhood. They largely kept to themselves. Still, our families were on friendly terms. Roy and my father milked each other’s cows when needed, and my brothers and I played with the Sellards kids. They were religious separatists, sending four sons and a daughter to the local Seventh-day Adventist elementary school, and later bussing them to Puyallup to attend parochial high school. It was the Sellards who first provided me with answers to questions about my dead twin brother.

I’m not sure when the Sellards gave us Around the World Stories by Dorothy White-Christian and Ruth Wheeler, issued in the “True Education Reader Series” by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists. The opening chapters were like other beginner books I had been reading in school; stories about grandfather and grandmother taking the grandchildren on a trip to the zoo, mother teaching the children about star constellations and extolling the magnifying powers of the telescope, schoolteacher Mrs. Downs identifying types of trees, and children’s problem stories with moral lessons. Chapters on religious instruction were sandwiched between; how God created the world, the Battle of Jericho, and other simplified Bible stories. Later chapters emphasized the importance of missions to provide practical assistance to heathens and to gain converts; the benefits of the missionary potato, and doctors who worked in the jungles and missionary villages of Southeast Asia, South Africa, China, and on the Navaho reservation.

I was fascinated by the penultimate chapter, “When Jesus Comes Again.” One day, it began, a small cloud will appear in the sky, growing ever larger and brighter until it outshines the sun. God’s people will be happy, but bad people will hide under rocks. A full-page illustration accompanied the story. A multitude of angels bore Jesus, with groomed beard and long hair, upon a throne of clouds. Regally robed, he held a scepter and rays of light emanated from his magnificent crown.

I fixated on the pages that followed, which told how, on the day Jesus returns, the dead will wake up, rise from their graves, reunite with their families, and angels will carry them to heaven. I felt exuberant, confident that on that day my mother, father, and I would go to Babyland at the Odd Fellows Cemetery, kneel down beside Russell’s grave, and greet him as he emerged from the earth, the same age as me (because he’s my twin, right?). Then we would all go to heaven’s new earth to live forever and forever.

My eight-year-old mind did not consider the consequences of telling this to my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Burleson. A no-nonsense schoolmarm, she wrote a note, slid it into an envelope, and told me to take it home. When my mother read it, even as a child I could see she was distressed. She called the school secretary and made an appointment with my teacher. In that conference, Mrs. Burleson told her my superstitious beliefs and morbid fantasies indicated deep-seated psychological problems. She recommended I see a child psychiatrist.

By this point, my mother was beside herself with worry. When my father came home from work that evening, she recounted the conversation with Mrs. Burleson. He listened patiently, and then said, “Forget it. He’s just a kid. Kids think all kinds of things. He’ll grow out of it.”

I did grow out of it. Over the course of the next year I resolved the “Robin or Russell?” dilemma. In third grade, Russell Pylkki became my best friend, and remained so through high school. It seemed weird to me that best friends would have the same name.

It was simpler to accept that he’s Russell, and I’m Robin.

I also came to realize that if people had been calling me Russell all along, and that’s how I thought of myself, I would have turned out differently. No one would ever ask Russ why his parents gave him a girl’s name. I was, and always had been, Robin. I grew increasingly comfortable in my skin. The puny kid who started first grade wearing 4T pants. Whose father caught a King salmon that weighed more than he did. The Boy Wonder to Russell’s Batman on the playground. The boy who, in the third-grade talent show, stood alone on the stage and, accompanied by his mother on the piano, belted out “Margie” in full voice before a full audience in the elementary school gymnasium.

Footnote

“Margie,” music by Con Conrad and J. Russell Robinson, lyrics by Benny Davis, 1920.

Bio/Note from the Author: I was born and raised on a small family farm in Olympia, Washington, my father a nurseryman and mother an elementary school cook. For most of my adult life, I have taught history, first at a private secondary school and later at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau. As a cultural historian, I explored the intersection of surrealism and popular culture, most notably in Pulp Surrealism (University of California Press, 2000) and the English translation “Death of Nick Carter” by Philippe Soupault (McSweeny’s 24, 2007). In retirement, my writing has turned to personal essays.

In northwestern Wisconsin, where I’ve lived my whole life, there are more bars per capita than grocery stores and nearly everyone can complete the line “You might be a redneck if”.  Hunting rituals, including the family hunting cabin, are not just a tradition, they are sacrosanct.  As a kid, I tagged along with my dad and brothers when they went small game hunting.  I didn’t have to get stuck carrying a bread bag full of dead squirrels too many times before I realized hunting wasn’t for me.  My dad went to the same hunting cabin each year with friends.  Once he forgot his gun and didn’t notice till two days into the trip.  This became a running joke in our family—“don’t forget your gun”—though it confirmed what my mom guessed all along: Dad went to the cabin more for the food and drink and camaraderie than to shoot anything. 

I grew up in a hunting family in a small town where it was commonplace to see deer carcasses hanging from garage rafters or clotheslines during and after the nine-day gun season.  Still, when my thirteen-year-old son went on his first hunt, I tried not to obsess about my only child out in the woods with heavily-armed hunters.  I told myself, His dad is in another tree stand, just a yell away.  I purposely didn’t think “scream.”  The tree-stand isn’t that far off the ground—like a tree house, I rationalized.  He’s wearing a safety harness and covered in orange from head to toe.  He’s never been a child to take chances.  He’s a rule follower, a Boy Scout.  He’ll be fine.   Even though the other guys in the hunting cabin had names like Moose and Boone, they’re upright citizens or at least careful hunters.  Only their hunting party was on this stretch of private land.  I said this to myself about fifty times in the two days Alex was gone.

The “opening weekend” of 2004 was cold and rainy, and after the first day, Alex didn’t have much to tell. This was the first time my soon to be ex-husband ever hunted, an overdue rite of passage for any thirty-six-year-old Wisconsin man.  After we separated, Alex’s father was even more focused on creating for our son the “All-American” boyhood that he never experienced himself.  This meant going camping, fishing, and now, hunting. 

Neither Alex nor his dad saw a deer.  “I had to sit in the cold for ten hours,” Alex told me.  “There was nothing to do.”

“Should have brought a book,” I said, trying to be helpful.

“And miss the deer!” he answered quickly.  “I slept for awhile,” he said.  “I dreamt there were camels everywhere, hiding behind trees, and I was going to shoot them.”   

Locals call dreaming about the hunt a symptom of “deer fever.”  I don’t know what to call Alex’s malady.  I laughed when he described how he was creeping up on camels. 

“So, did you like hunting?” I asked.

“It was alright,” he said.  Later I found out that Alex got lost in the woods, his dad’s gun misfired, and the two of them drove into a culvert.  Add the rain and wind, and I wouldn’t call the first day of their hunt “fun.”

When I heard about someone shooting deer hunters in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, like anyone with her own hunters in the north woods that day, I felt a fist in my stomach.  I knew Alex and his dad were at least an hour’s drive from the town I’d seen on TV, but still.  When I heard the name, Chai Soua Vang, my gut tightened.  No longer just a hunter, but a “Hmong hunter.”   In the Chippewa Valley where I live, Hmong clan names like Vang and Xiong outnumber Jones and Smith.    They are my friends and neighbors, but in a place that is 92% Caucasian, unfortunately, they are still seen as the “other.”  One online forum headline summed up disparaging perceptions of both sides: “Chai Soua Vang Opens Up On Redneck White Boy Hunters Laughing At Him And Calling Him A Chink.” 

Vang shot eight other hunters; six of them died.   As Americans, we have experienced mass shootings in shopping malls, a movie theater, high school and college campuses, a political rally, a Sikh temple, and most recently an elementary school.  That such a thing could occur in a forest full of men with guns does not seem so far-fetched.  This would never have happened to fishermen.

At the university where I teach, two students and one of my colleagues lost family members; a freshman lost his father and brother.  I’m sure many of the forty-some Vang’s on campus were related to the shooter, though no news story covered them.  The immediate backlash included “Killer” spray-painted on the homes of three Hmong families and a bumper sticker, “Save a Hunter.  Shoot a Hmong,” available for sale—a take-off on the 1989 hate bumper sticker “Save a Walleye.  Spear an Indian.”  This is what made the news in November and December of 2004.  I suspect that across Wisconsin and Minnesota there were countless other incidents in school hallways and hockey rinks or basketball courts, in college residence halls, and in bars. 

On that same Sunday, Alex called me to announce that his first buck—first anything—was a ten-pointer.  He talked for fifteen minutes, fourteen more than we had ever talked on the phone maybe in his life.  He told me how he had the buck in his sites and fired.  Just a click came out because he forgot the safety.  How he fired again and the buck went down and got up.  Then he fired till he had nothing left.

“Was it hard?” I asked.  I meant emotionally, as in What did it feel like to kill your first living being, one bigger than a housefly? 

He paused, “Well, the trigger stuck a little.  That was a kind of hard.”

Experienced hunters talked him through field-dressing his deer, insistent that he do it himself.  He told me he was up to his biceps in deer guts.  On his first cut toward the windpipe, he sliced off his rubber glove.  On the second cut, he sliced into his own pinky. 

I gasped into the phone.

“Mom,” he said.  “It was just a little cut.” 

“So you and your first buck are blood brothers,” I said, trying to sound cool, something a hunter’s mother would say.

He laughed.  “Yeah, I guess.”  He told me the stench of his buck’s entrails was the worst he’d ever smelled in his life. 

I did not mention to him the news reports of hunters being shot.

The next day when I saw Alex, home safe and cleaned up, his first deer story told many times over, he showed me his antlers, fleshy parts wrapped in napkins and plastic. 

“You can see the blood and brains a little bit,” he said proudly.  I knew he was trying to get a rise out of me, his vegetarian mother.  I cringed.   As a parent, this was not the first time I was torn between accepting what passes for traditional male bonding in our neck of the woods and outright disdain for what it takes to be a man in small-town Wisconsin.  I knew that whether or not Alex continued to be a hunter, he would always remember his first buck and this rack of antlers would be mounted and displayed, perhaps a trophy my son kept for the rest of his life.

Alex asked, “Did you hear about the sniper who killed hunters?” This was an added drama he could not have imagined, more video game than hunter’s safety.  Alex’s word choice—“sniper”—made it sound even more menacing.  He, too, might have to sometime dodge bullets. 

“Scary stuff,” I said.

Vang was hunting that Sunday afternoon with relatives.  They’d driven about three hours to northern Wisconsin from St. Paul, since Minnesota’s deer hunting season was just ending.  Vang shot a deer and got lost while tracking it.  He stumbled upon a beat-up hunting stand high in a tree, and he climbed up to get the “lay of the land.”  Like any hunter, he wanted to find and field dress his deer and get out of the woods before dark.  He had a six-week-old baby and a new wife.  After a long, cold day in the woods, he must have wanted nothing more than to be home.  He hunted not for sport but for the fulfillment that comes from a man putting meat on his table.

This private land, in the tiny town of Meteor, was adjacent to public hunting land.

When the landowner discovered Vang in his tree stand, he asked this stranger to leave. 

In that area there were previous reports of some Hmong hunters failing to follow fish and game regulations and not understanding the difference between hunting in public woods or on “posted” private land, perhaps a little bit like figuring out where not to swim on a public beach wedged between cabins.

Witnesses claim this shooting was never about race, though at least one of the landowner’s hunting party of fifteen called Vang “gook” and “chink” as he walked away from the tree stand.  These are words Vang had surely heard many times before, but perhaps never from men with guns.

Thirty-six year old Vang was born in Laos, in the midst of the Vietnam War.  His father was recruited to fight for the U.S., most likely in the jungles of his homeland or in Cambodia.  Almost 50,000 Hmong men were enlisted by the CIA to fight the North Vietnamese and promised resettlement in the United States after the war.    When the war ended, the Vang family escaped Laos and spent time in a Thai refugee camp before immigrating and settling in California when Vang was twelve years old.  After high school, he served six years in the California National Guard, where he earned a sharpshooter weapons qualification badge and a Good Conduct medal for consecutive years of “honorable and faithful service.”

Like many of that first wave of Hmong immigrants, Vang eventually ended up in the Midwest. About 100,000 Hmong now live in Wisconsin and Minnesota.  As immigrants, many Hmong-Americans’ citizenship status was “resident alien,” a designation that may conjure the image of a space alien: not the cuddly ET kind but the terrorizing beast Sigourney Weaver fought.  In either case, an outsider who should go home or be destroyed.

At his trial, Vang testified he felt cornered when his path was blocked by men on all-terrain vehicles, and he feared for his life.  Anyone who has seen a Rambo film or even Deliverance knows this scenario never ends well.  Vang claimed one of the other hunters fired a shot first, and the bullet zipped past him.  He was an American soldier, after all, and his training kicked in.  Witnesses and Vang all agreed that he dropped to one knee, aimed, and opened fire at the group of the hunters.  Six of them—five men and a woman—died; four were shot in the back.  Whose weapon discharged first was never determined.  After the shooting, Vang was still lost in the woods.  He walked some distance and stumbled upon another hunter who gave him a ride to a Ranger Station.  He was arrested there without incident.

Almost one year later, Alex and I sat in the living room watching Vang’s sentencing on live TV after all of the local stations preempted programming.  He was found guilty of manslaughter by ten women and two men.   I pointed out to my son that the “jury of his peers” was all white, and I said out loud what I considered each time more of the story unfolded: “Would any of it even happen if Vang were white?”  This may have been my son’s first major lesson in how race impacts all of us. Alex and I are blonde, blue-eyed, educated, middle class—privileges which offer an immeasurable head start and an invisible cloak of protection.

As we watched Vang’s sentencing I realized that my fourteen-year-old son was discovering tragedies do not just happen in the world, they can occur in your world and part of being an adult means asking yourself, What would I do?  A boy with a gun can open fire in your high school library.  A plane can fly into your building while you’re eating breakfast.  The Columbine shootings and the terrorist attacks on 9/11 are part of my son’s childhood, just as this mass shooting in the northwoods will always be.  As a mother, I hope they taught him empathy not fear, compassion not hopelessness.  Every senseless tragedy has victims and outside viewers who learn from someone else’s sorrow: everything can go to shit in an instant. Beware. 

Alex’s dad and I had been divorced for about six weeks then, and I was still figuring out how I could guide my son if I didn’t have those spontaneous and often tender late-night moments when we might pass in the kitchen and talk.  As Alex grew into a man, how could I teach him or at least prompt him to contemplate what it all means?

Vang was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences, plus seventy years.   After the trial, his elderly mother released a translated statement in which she offered condolences to the victims' families.  “I share your grief,” said this hunter’s mother, “and will mourn your losses for the rest of my life.”  I ached for her and the families—of the shooter and his victims—all who suffered tremendous loss.

A few weeks later, Alex was getting ready for his second hunting season.  I asked if he was looking forward to it.  “I guess,” he said. 

“Aren’t you interested in going?”

“I like walking in the woods,” he said.  “And I like being in the cabin.  I even like carrying a gun.  I just think the rest of it is sort of stupid.”  He may not have been able to articulate more, but I knew this was what a benevolent man would say, one who might always help a stranger find his way.  I experienced the sort of relief that only a hunter’s mother can understand.   

Patti See’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Salon Magazine, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Developmental Education, The Wisconsin Academy Review, The Southwest Review, HipMama, as well as other magazines and anthologies.  She is the co-author of Higher Learning: Reading and Writing About College, 3^rd  edition (Prentice Hall, 2012), with Bruce Taylor, and a poetry collection Love’s Bluff (Plainview Press, 2006).  She also wrote the award-winning blog “Our Long Goodbye: One Family’s Experiences with Alzheimer’s Disease” She is a Distinguished Student Services Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.

From the author: I have been writing “Hunter’s Mother,” for over nine years, since my son’s first hunting trip occurred the same weekend as a hunting tragedy that took six lives. A Hmong hunter got lost in the woods and was trespassing on private property. After being confronted by the white landowner and his hunting party, shots were fired. Eight hunters were shot; six were killed. As a person of privilege—white, middle-class, educated—I can understand how Vang’s experience in the north woods that November afternoon many years ago may have gone down differently had he been a white stranger lost on a white man’s land. I was silenced by that voice in my head which questioned, “As a white woman, what right do you have to write about Chai Soua Vang?” Is it enough that our stories intersect a little bit more than that of a motorist straining her neck to get a glimpse of the person trapped inside a fiery crash? This essay is about Vang, but also about me as a “hunter’s mother,” who must accept that her son makes his own choices about how to be a man.

INTRODUCTION

Shinrin-yoku is a Japanese term first coined in 1982 by Tomohide Akiyama, the then Director General of the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries. The Japanese characters, or kanji, that form the word shinrin-yoku literally mean “forest bath”. The term does not mean to take a literal bath in a forest. Instead, shinrin-yoku is a modern, poetic way of referring to a practice developed in contemporary times of immersing oneself, fully, in the atmosphere of the forest for purposes of mental and physical well-being. This sense of “bathing in the forest atmosphere” is a signature phrase of the shinrin-yoku and forest medicine movement. With a few notable exceptions,“forest bathing” (as a contemporary evolution) involves a brief experience in the forest, with an emphasis on the five senses and the various health benefits to the participant (e.g. stress-reduction).

In this essay, I want to briefly discuss shinrin-yoku and some of the scientific findings of forest medicine research. Then, I want to pivot to another consideration, namely, approaching the forest through an even wider aperture than the physical dimension alone.

Spending extended time in forests and mountains was a facet of my own studies and experiences with my late teacher, Darion Kuma Gracen (1949-2007), a wilderness guide, counselor-mentor, educator, amateur naturalist, and a Wayfarer of a unique, syncretic spiritual path. Her path wove together meditation practices from the Far East, methods of “dreaming-while-awake”, a psychodynamic understanding of the soul (influenced by Jungian thought and Dreambody work developed by Arnold Mindell), and an animistic, experiential approach to Nature-connection (resonant with aspects of Japanese Shinto spirituality) that fosters a sense of the numinous (derived from the Latin: numen, arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring stirrings; classically speaking, numen: spirit presiding over a thing or space, i.e. that which is perceived and experienced through means beyond the five senses). By including this numinous dimension to the experience of “immersing oneself, fully, in the atmosphere of the forest”, we step into what Kuma-sensei called The Forest-Spirit Way. In the second part of this essay, I would like to explore some of these aspects.     

“FOREST BATHING” AND FOREST MEDICINE: THE SCIENCE

Though the concept “forest bathing” may brush across the ear of some as merely a quaint notion, or may even strike some techno-addicted, Nature-avoidant city-dwellers as a downright odd-sounding pastime, the contemporary creation of shinrin-yoku – and the establishment of forest medicine research in general – initially arose as a direct response to two points of concern that Akiyama perceived as being dynamically interrelated; namely, a need to protect Japan’s declining forests, and a way to address the increasing negative health effects he observed in urban Japanese people resulting from both work-stress and an obvious chronic disconnection from natural settings. 

Though it will probably sound quite commonsensical to most readers of Wayfarer Magazine in the year 2023, back in the early 80s Akiyama’s logic was visionary and culturally transformative: 

This led to a robust campaign, with full backing of the Japanese government, funding a number of medical studies into the mental and physical health benefits of “taking in the forest atmosphere”. Two of the primary individuals of note in the “shinrin-yoku lineage”, who have been deeply involved in heading up this body of medical and psychological research, are Dr. Qing Li, author of Forest Bathing: The Japanese Art and Science of Shinrin-Yoku (subtitle: “How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness”) and Dr. Yoshifumi Miyazaki, author of Shinrin Yoku: The Japanese Art of Forest Bathing. 

The medical and psychological studies that have been done on the various features of shinrin-yoku, naturally, are expressed in the parlance of science. Here are but a few examples from the dozens of studies that have been completed in the arena of forest medicine research:

• “Physiological Benefits of Viewing Nature: A Systematic Review of Indoor Experiments”, H Jo, C Song, Y Miyazaki, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2019

• “Physiological and Psychological Effects of Forest and Urban Sounds Using High-Resolution Sound Sources”, H Jo, C Song, H Ikei, S Enomoto, H Kobayashi, Y Miyazaki

• International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2019

• “Sustained Effects of a Forest Therapy Program on the Blood Pressure of Office Workers”,

• C Song, H Ikei, Y Miyazaki, Journal of Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 2017

• “Physiological Effects of Nature Therapy: A Review of the Research in Japan”, C Song, H Ikei, Y Miyazaki, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2016

• “Effect of Forest Walking on Autonomic Nervous System Activity in Middle-Aged Hypertensive Individuals: A Pilot Study”, C Song, H Ikei, M Kobayashi, T Miura, M Taue, T Kagawa, Q Li,

• International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2015

• “Physiological Effect of Olfactory Stimulation by Hinoki Cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa) Leaf Oil”, H Ikei, C Song, Y Miyazaki, Journal of Physiological Anthropology, 2015

• “The Physiological Effects of Shinrin-yoku (taking in the forest atmosphere or forest bathing): Evidence From Field Experiments in 24 Forests Across Japan”, BJ Park, Y Tsunetsugu, T Kasetani, T Kagawa, Y Miyazaki, Journal of Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, 2010

• “An Experimental Study on Physiological and Psychological Effects of Pine Scent”, HJ Jo, E Fujii, TD Cho, Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture, 2010

• “Phytoncides (wood essential oils) Induce Human Natural Killer Cell Activity”, Q Li, A Nakadai, H Matsushima, Y Miyazaki, AM Krensky, T Kawada, Journal of Immunopharmacology and Immunotoxicology, 2006

Suddenly I am hearing my father’s voice say: “Break it down for me, son. What did they find?”

Drs. Li, Miyazaki, Ikei, Jo, and others on their teams, have validated, resoundingly, what many of us already know intuitively: 

Taking into account the primary foci of their research (including the multi-leveled effect of Nature imagery and Nature sounds on stress regulation — even when indoors, and the effect of what are called “terpenes” in the form of phytoncides, or essential oils of cedar, hinoki cypress, and pine) a few of the highlights from their collective findings is that a two-hour session of forest bathing once-per-month:

• significantly boosts the immune system (including cancer-fighting NK cells)

• improves concentration and memory (including with dementia)

• lowers cortisol (the stress hormone that leads to weight gain and heart disease)

• boosts serotonin and decreases both anxiety and depression

• reduces blood pressure

• drastically improves sleep

• lowers inflammation (resulting from breathing in terpenes and negative ions)

The strong evidence of the mental and physical health benefits of shinrin-yoku ultimately led the Japanese government to designate natural areas (and whole forests) for the purpose of the study and practice of forest medicine. As of the writing of this article, there are over 10 dedicated “certified forest medicine bases” or “forest therapy centers” throughout Japan; and, the wide variance of forest bathing research being conducted isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. So, the modern shinrin-yoku movement is alive, well, and spreading (like the roots of its original inspiration) to parts of Canada, Chile, Europe, Finland, and the U.S., where one major urban hospital in Atlanta launched a pilot program in forest bathing for cancer patients in collaboration with a local nature center.

Forest medicine has also influenced South Korea and Sweden (where forest bathing is called samlim-yog and skogsbad, respectively) to prioritize similar standards in research and investments in their citizenry and local ecology as has been done in Japan. According to Dr. Qing Li, Chairman of the Japanese Society for Forest Medicine, and Secretary-General of the International Society for Nature and Forest Medicine: “The South Korean government has spent more than $14 million on a National Forest Therapy Centre, has developed thirty-seven state-run recreational forests, and is training five hundred forest-healing instructors.” 

From influencing university studies, and how some psychotherapists work, to the creation of a whole new category of eco-tourism (where a guided forest bathing session can be booked from the comfort of your hotel room or bungalow), the shinrin-yoku movement has branched outward from its initial seed-concept in Japan into a diversity of applications, approaches, books, international training programs, and applied forms of what is now called “forest therapy”. (see Resources below)

Certainly, I am a celebrant of most of this. I’ve personally benefited from the forest medicine research that has taken place and support the research that continues. I am thoroughly convinced that—in the years to come – medical science (through the efforts of forest medicine research) will so clearly prove and convey the vital necessity for humans to be consciously bonded to healthy, thriving landscapes that it will have even deeper impacts, globally, on government priorities, including boosting the discipline of Nature-centric city planning.

That said, as I reflect on my own experiences of connecting deeply with forests, I have to acknowledge that something equally vital is being left out in the overtly scientific approach; something equally as important, equally as present as the invisible forest phytoncides that are of such benefit to our immune systems. I would like to attempt to talk about these features by returning to the signature phrase of the forest medicine movement itself: immersing oneself, fully, in the atmosphere of the forest.

DREAMING WITH THE FOREST: THE FOREST-SPIRIT WAY

“The Universe is our greatest teacher, our greatest friend. It is always teaching us the Art of Peace. Study how the water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Everything­—mountains, rivers, plants, and trees – should be your teacher.”

– O Sensei, Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969), Founder of Aikidō

When I think of my own relationship to forests, it often presents itself in the form of memories­—memories stored in cells. Memories connected to bare footfalls through sandy creek beds and boot-laced feet moving over rocks and through underbrush. Memories of trails and switchbacks. Memories of bucks stomping ground, coyotes howling, hawks and crows calling from above. Memories of napping in hollows filled with such a cushion of pine needles,…to this day I have yet to sleep as deeply (or been able to find a mattress that approaches the same level of comfort). The earliest memories involve childhood. Time for a poem.

“Little Cowboy, Stumbling”

jumping into mounds of leaves 

napping like a deer in pine hollows

breathing deep of the incense

of butterscotch pines

discovering abandoned shells 

of cicadas left clinging to a Loblolly

hours observing tadpoles in a woodland pool

sheer delight from “forest-stumbling” —

stumbling upon a hawk feather 

stumbling upon a deer skull

stumbling upon a coiled kingsnake

sunrise

pine-wind

sunset

moonrise

tree frogs

cricket-song

how could I have known, back then,

that this would become my religion?

Later on in time, I would encounter one of the deep teachers of my path: Kuma-sensei (to me), “doña Río” (to some) — a rascally ol’ “tumbleweed” with ancestors like mine – back to Scandinavia, rural England, and Scotland. When I think of her now, a strange, dreamy, archetypal image arises in my awareness: a cross between a cloaked völva (Norse wisewoman), or perhaps a Druid priestess, and a female yamabushi (Japanese mountain-priest ascetic). With a penchant for laughter, word-play, tawny port wine, and New Mexican green chiles, my predominant memory of her is of long stretches of piñon-wind zazen (meditation) under the moon. 

Though I spent many an hour wandering through forests as a young man (even skipping high school graduation to consciously mark that “rite of passage” by sitting on “my rock” deep in a North Carolina wood), it wasn’t until I crossed paths with Kuma-sensei that I realized much more fully that Nature is my religion. 

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”

— Frank Lloyd Wright, Nature-inspired architect

This declaration isn’t an overlay, an add-on, or something lifted from some other place. It’s home-grown, cultivated from the heart-mind and soul, but it is cross-cultural. If we go back far enough in any of our ancestral lines, it is universal: Nature-as-sacred presence. All of us hail from people who originally experienced Nature as a numinous reality. Wayfarers in every culture have spoken of mountains as teachers, the forest as a healer. Nature was the original spirituality. Yet, this quality of consciousness and reverence isn’t a level of perception, engagement, or experience that is usually passed on consciously from generation to generation in our modern context. It is an attribute that must be cultivated from within and it is an attribute greatly needed in the here and now. 

In the words of Motohisa Yamakage, a 79^th generation Shinto priest, author of The Essence of Shinto: “Shinto teaches to revere Great Nature. Nature is the transformation  and creation of Kami, therefore the sacredness of Kami dwells within it…The Japanese people have loved and revered Nature as a gift from Kami since ancient times. We have felt that plants and animals, as well as mountains and rivers, have lived with us and have been deeply connected to us. This love and reverence toward Nature is a quality that should be reinstalled in our hearts, if we want humankind and earth to survive the ecological crisis that has resulted from excessive materialism.”

Great Nature (大自然, Daishizen in Japanese)) wasn’t initially a focus of the dialogue with my teacher. It was an ever-present backdrop, but it wasn’t something articulated until later. Over time, however, it became clear that everything I was studying with her — different forms of meditation, methods of dreaming-while-awake, sacred inquiry, contemplative poetics, time spent in forests (and even caves for brief “dark retreats”) — all existed to facilitate a dual process; a gradual purification, on the one hand, and greater alignment on the other. The purification was a purification of perception; from the inherited Western-enculturated, conditioned-masculine, and the burdened, encumbered “lower-self”. The alignment was one of coming into deeper and deeper levels of connection to Great Nature. 

Kuma-sensei’s thoughts on Great Nature can best be summed up with a few key phrases:

• Great Nature is a power we can never fully comprehend

• We can live in or out of essential alignment with Great Nature; meditation, time in Nature, methods of dreaming or purification methods (like a sauna or misogi, a mental-physical-spiritual purification practice undertaken beneath an ice-cold waterfall) can restore our connection through the somatic doorway of the body

• Great Nature is sentient, intelligent, and wise in terms of dynamic energy, sustaining power, and prevalent patterns (symbolized in the dynamic movement in both the ancient symbol known as the mitsudomoe used in Shinto and the Tai Ji /yin-yang in Taoism)

• There is a numinous, spiritual dimension to Great Nature that can be transformative for humans

• The numinous dimension of Great Nature is restorative to the soul (just as forest medicine can be healing to body and mind through phytoncides, Nature imagery, Nature sounds, and slower rhythms)

• We can connect with this numinous dimension of Great Nature because we, too, are part of Great Nature (Shinto tradition says we are children of Kami, thus children of Great Nature; in the Nature writings of C.G. Jung, he speaks of our own psyche being comprised of the same numinous essence as Nature)

• We can connect with Great Nature via the five senses but we can also commune, connect, and communicate with Great Nature in ways that are beyond the five senses (and the intellect) through experiences that involve different forms of attention, intuitive perception, and dreaming (an interesting side note: one word in Japanese for dream-visioning is musō (夢想), part of which is constructed of a kanji that combines the radicals for ‘heart-mind and spirit’ (心), ‘eye’ (目), and ‘tree’ (木); it offers something of a practice-hint: to connect with the deeper dream (夢), we can go into the trees (木) to look(目) with our heart-mind-spirit (心)

Additional concepts from Shinto tradition can assist us in comprehending the Japanese understanding of a numinous approach to Nature. These concepts are tama ( “soul” or “spirit” 霊) and kokoro (裶). Tama isn’t just a word but is something that is experienced, viscerally and intuitively. Tama is felt, known, and perceived. It is an early Shinto term for spiritual power; a specific type of vital power that is awe-inspiring and leads to a profound sense of connectedness. 

Running like an underground river beneath and through all of Japanese spirituality is kokoro (“heart-mind”; or, in the words of Thomas Kasulis, author of SHINTO: The Way Home, another teacher of mine in all things Shinto, kokoro means a “mindful-heart”). This term derives from the term makoto no kokoro – a pure heart of sincerity. Rather than heart-as-object or heart-as-noun (as in the physical heart beating in our chest), kokoro is heart-as-verb, heart-as-energy field that connects with the world in an engaged and responsive way.

Shinto spiritual praxis, in part, consists of connecting with Great Nature at sites known to be kami-filled and tama-charged. A person brings their kokoro (their mindful-heart) into alignment with the spirit of place and this produces a shift in consciousness. The Japanese landscape is filled with markers (such as torii gates, special walkways, and forest shrines) that remind people of the presence of kami and act as holographic entry points for people to experience a reconnection to the numinous. In the words of T.P. Kasulis, “Kokoro is cognition with affect, affect with cognition…To experience the extraordinary, one has to be open to being affectively touched by the phenomenon and its tama.”   

Part and parcel of my experiences with Kuma was approaching the realm of Great Nature (usually forests and mountains but also, at times, deserts and arroyos) by employing such expanded senses, what Zurich-trained Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell calls “the dreambody”, and what I have grown to think of as the faculty of soft-attention (a loose, flowing, receptive quality of multi-sensory awareness rather than the hyper-focused concentration emphasized by modernity). 

In Mindell’s own words:

“The dreambody is a

multi-channeled information sender asking you to receive its message in many ways and noticing how its information appears over and over again…The dreambody is your wise signaller, giving you messages in many different dimensions. When it signals to you in the body, we call it a symptom or sensation. When it signals to you through a dream, we call it a symbol.”

With these multidimensional senses “along for the ride”, so to speak, sometimes Kuma and I explored the visual contours of mountains and rolling forested landscapes as flute-songs (offerings of spontaneous tunes to Nature on different kinds of flutes, matching the notes to the rise and fall of the horizon line). We frequently explored day-long sessions of hillwalking and forest-walking as an unfurling process of poem-making, sometimes “stalking poems” like a hunter or birdwatcher, or — once we had connected energetically with the spirit of place — expressing what emerged for us (or what was made known to us) by communing with a certain locale.

Eventually, like sunlight filtering down through pine tassels and juniper bows, Kuma began more consciously connecting some dots for me, making me aware that all we had been doing — which she called Wayfaring at times, and The Forest-Spirit Way at other times — hadn’t been sourced wholly with her but rather was an approach resonant with and influenced by more ancient ways-within-the-Way (such as Shinto, Daoism, Shugendō, the Way of Tea, and the mountains-and-forests Zen of so many Wayfarers and hermit-poets).

We didn’t speak of phytoncides or “forest bathing”. The results of the medical research studies cited previously weren’t known at the time. Yet, the deep psychospiritual, soul-transforming benefits of time in the forest was intimately known. In the presence of the Forest-Spirit, wounds were healed. In the embrace of Great Nature, old traumas were transmuted. We spoke of kami, the spirit of certain mountains and forests, and of poets who had a deep love affair with forests like Rengetsu (1791-1875) and Saigyō (1118-1190), Bashō (1644-1694) and Santōka (1882-1940), Oliver (1935-2019), Snyder (1930-    ), and Berry (1957-   ); and, like other hermit-poets­—who would sometimes wander into the mountains and forests, or who would sit for days in silence, gazing at mountains from their solitary hut—this became our practice-focus as well. 

At the end of her life, she said I would have to find my own way of Wayfaring, my own way of walking the Forest-Spirit Way. “It won’t be my way exactly. It won’t be someone else’s way. If it’s someone else’s way, it won’t be your way. Great Nature is the teacher.” Time for another poem.

“Amerikua Shinrinbushi”

slow rhythm

silence

the soul unfurls 

the poet’s dreamingbody 

stretches out

to the horizon

realizes itself inseparable

from the dreambody

of Great Nature’s light

the instructions come

from the Forest-Spirit Way:

sit like a mountain

breathe like a forest

flow like a river

BEING HELD BY EARTH: FOREST HEALING AFTER CANCER

When I think of healing and connecting with sacred forests, I can’t help but think of my own mother, Dale. Diagnosed with breast cancer nearly a decade ago, she retired from her role as a trainer of chaplains due to the gradual impact of her treatments. For the first year, after her single mastectomy and radiation, she could hardly move due to fatigue. From the outside looking in, it seemed as if she had entered a deep sleep that hovered in the borderlands of choice. Would her spirit stay, or would her spirit go? 

Then, one day, she arose from the couch and for the next year spent hours upon hours among the many trees and foliage that make up the wooded half-acre behind her home. It is a serene place filled with Japanese lanterns, quiet sitting places, and a multitude of trees, both old growth poplars and grandmother pines as well as new arrivals — dogwoods, sakura, Japanese maples, azaleas and fern, Gold Dust (Aucuba japonica) and Heavenly Bamboo (Nandina domestica).

Of that time, she speaks of taking up the task of “working with the trees”, apprenticing to them, getting her hands into the soil, asking the trees what they wanted. Their collaboration was a co-tending. 

She states:

I began noticing all of the life — the birds, the chipmunks, the squirrels; all the little creatures going on about their business, doing their little chores. Then I started noticing all of the plants and the trees. I realized I needed to get closer. I wanted to know all of these presences more intimately. So, I began to work in the yard, a little bit at a time. There’s a big hill that drops down like a terrace and it was all covered over with debris, so I started clearing some of that away, over time, and revealing what was underneath. Huge rocks, plants, trees that couldn’t reach the sunlight. 

It felt as if I was stroking the face of the Earth, and there were things underneath all of that debris that needed to have things taken out of their face. They were under a foot of leaves. Some leaves are fine but this was choking the life out of everything, so I started inching my way across this hill, and I felt like I was in a dance with the forest. It was very moving. 

In time, I felt like I could just let go. I could curl up and be held by the land and be healed. I stayed out there for a year doing that. Nobody told me to go out and lay down on the hill. I just knew I needed to do it. It was a very natural, intuitive process that — as a creature, along with all the other creatures — I instinctively knew what I needed to do. It wasn’t a mental thing. It was a heart thing. It was a gut thing. It was a visceral feeling. I needed to be close to the Earth. I needed to embrace the plants. If I could have held every creature, I would have had them all over me, and allowed them to teach me their lessons. 

I’ve learned some of those lessons, from afar, as I’ve watched them dig for food and bury their acorns for the Fall. They’re just like us. We’re just like they are. There is no true separation. If you can understand that, you will never treat the Earth poorly, and you will help heal Her.”

I’m reminded of the words of Tim Ryosen Bunting, a New Zealander now living in Japan, who was initiated into the Dewa Sanzan tradition of Shugendō - the Way of Yamabushidō. In a recent dialogue he said:

Forests are part of Nature. For yamabushi, Nature is the womb. 

Nature is all-knowing and it is where we absorb the lessons of life. 

Undoubtedly, Great Nature has been a womb of rebirth for my mother. I have seen it with my own eyes. The same can be true for any of us, whether we approach Nature as a forest bathing exercise, or as a multidimensional spiritual practice. Immersing oneself, fully, in the forest atmosphere isn’t something new. It forms the bedrock of the most ancient form of spirituality for the Japanese people (and continues to influence consciousness despite modernization). Likewise, the Wayfarers of old (along with all our ancestors) knew that Nature heals, imparts teachings, and has the capacity to initiate us into greater levels of awareness. 

As much as I appreciate the modern shinrin-yoku movement, and the general scientific inquiry of forest medicine as an arena of research, it feels equally important to me to consider the numinous dimensions and implications of connecting with Great Nature. It seems a good thing to ask from time to time when immersing oneself, fully, in the forest atmosphere: What exactly do we mean by “immersing…fully”? Are we aware of all that inhabits the “forest atmosphere”? What exactly do we mean by “oneself”?

May the Forest Be With You

________

Last summer I sat on top of Hurricane Point overlooking Silver Lake in central New Hampshire. Wind sounded through scant trees on the steep little hill mingled with the hum of a distant motorboat, then two of them. Their wake slapped against the shore at the foot of the hill. I heard its splash again and again until it went silent. Someplace deep in memory I heard the sound of wind on the prairie, how different it was from the wind here among trees and over water.

For every one of us there is a story to our listening. It started in some particular place, then traveled and evolved from that place and time to now. If we listen for it, we can hear the story of our own listening, and each of our stories differs from all others. Consider right now as you read this where your story began.

A storm seemed to be gathering over Silver Lake. I noticed the darkening air and the smell of rain. For a while the wind stopped, no boats passed by, yet my ears and my entire body kept listening. I thought to myself, does it ever stop? I’ve heard that hearing is the last sense to go when someone is dying. Maybe our listening keeps on going as near to the end as it can get, right out to the edge of breath. Maybe it dares to approach anything, any edge, any precipice. When places inside me get frightened, or happy, or sad at what I hear, listening goes on through it all, a vehicle for travel all around me and inside me.

As I look back over my life, all the way to its beginning, I recognize that my listening was taking its earliest shape by what surrounded me in that place of prairie, its many voices of wind from quiet breeze to fierce gust, the voices of all the creatures that lived there and became my first guides. As a boy walking the pastures this is what I heard:

Night Hawk’s Path

It happened the first time on the dirt cow path when I walked

behind the milk cow, evening chore-time light gliding across Shadwell creek

now shadowed for the night. When I stood still, that hum

no one ever talked about, coming from the earth, moved up my legs

into my hips, turning this body into sound. Light flared yellow,

gathered around haystacks, fenceposts, the cow and me.

Writing that poem opened my listening to the prairie again. Remembering earth’s hum coming into my body as these lines came to me became its own kind of listening, bringing this hum back to me a second time as a gift.

The particular place on this planet that, for each of us, first shaped our listening stands amidst this larger place we inhabit together called cosmos by the ancients. Not only our planet earth, but all the rest of the solar system, our galaxy, and everything beyond, whatever that is, both what we know and what we don’t know of it surrounds us, touches us on every side, shapes us and our listening in uncountable ways. Everything out there is coming at us, and everything out there offers its signal whether or not we have a name for it. I am compelled to imagine that a larger “hum” than even that of planet earth alone comes toward us always and in each moment.

Reflecting on my experiences on the prairie, where things and people came to me in tactile and visceral ways, I like to think that listening is close to touch in its essential nature. It invites into us whatever presses itself toward us on whatever organ of reception we offer. It can be our ears we offer to the words someone speaks, so we hear their story. It can be the heart we offer to the outpouring of another’s grief as we hear of their loss. It can be the hand we offer to someone’s reach for help, our mind that receives the imprint of another’s idea, or the entire body that receives the invitation of a lover.

Though we think of listening most often as the experience of sound landing in our auditory capacity to hear, at its essence listening is receptivity, and we receive in many ways. That the hearing-impaired find other vehicles for listening than the auditory system testifies to this.

***

Listening happens in the call and response between those who participate in it and co-create it. A third “something” emerges when listening blossoms, and it carries the one calling and the one responding along a path they travel, trading call and response back and forth. When it ignites and is most alive, it is a kind of fire, its flames reaching for anything that offers something to be heard, and everything offers something.

There is nothing to do. Listening is the most natural response we offer to whatever being or creature in the cosmos calls to us in its way. The rattlesnake calls with its rattles ripping through the silence around its long body coiled in the bush when we walk past. We respond with our startle, our fear, our moving out of harm’s way. The river calls to us with its murmur. We respond with our ears taking it in, and with our being moved by its gentle yet fervent whisper along its banks. Another person calls to us with her request for the salt shaker, for a helping hand, for an ear to hear her story. We respond with our ears, our hands, bellies and hearts, our touch and our willingness to be touched.

***

When our listening truly opens, it will almost surely carry us to something we don’t yet know. Believing we know what’s coming, we are less open. If we embrace not knowing, we might become aware of a silence inside, an absence of preconceptions. Not “listening for” what we already think we know, we might come into a stillness where we experience what Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, urges us toward when he says, “If you don’t expect the unexpected, you won’t find it.”

***

But what about the times when our listening fails? When we fail to hear another, or we turn away from what the other is saying, what is happening then? What is missing? And what about all this time when we hear the news of our planet being destroyed by our consuming habits? How can we truly be listening yet still cascading toward environmental devastation? If it is so natural and easily opened to what is around us, how come it seems to close or be distorted at times?

I venture this. Our listening gets shaped in ways that constrain it, that warp it around a particular belief, an expectation, an agenda, or an old wounded place inside. When this happens listening becomes protective. It closes at the places where some part of us is trying to steer away from an unwanted feeling or thought. This happens both on an individual and a collective level. Our culture, our patriotism, our religious or scientific orientation, political persuasion, personal agendas, historical traumas, all of these shape and constrain our listening. We see this in the strife of the world today, in the war torn Middle East or Ukraine, in the fight for environmental sanity, anyplace where intense and polarized activity erupts in the absence of open and responsive listening.

***

It can be more subtle than these examples. Even our agenda to help someone can constrain our listening, turn it into an instrument we are trying to wield rather than an open vessel ready to receive another’s call. I practice psychotherapy and at times my desire to help my clients does affect how I listen. When I take myself to be an instrument of healing, I’m less a healer. I’ve learned that if there is anything to do to enhance my listening, it is to listen with compassion and curiosity to those very places where I am vulnerable and protective and where some door might be ready to open.

In this Body

There are rooms that close their doors. Years pass

and a breeze moves through. Maybe it was the look of that man with red hair and heavy hands,

or the woman crossing the street with the soft fingers and far away stare.

A door blows open slightly, the hinges barely agree. Behind that door

there’s a small child who wants you to call him by name.

In my work as a psychotherapist my first task as I enter into relationships with clients is to listen ongoingly to my own listening. My next task is to guide clients toward listening to theirs, to help them discover where it might be blocked yet ready to open, ready to receive the call from a scared or lonely part of them who wants to know that someone is there, finally, and listening.

I try to remember as I sit down to each session that I could approach it as I would a poem I’ve not heard before, and that I want to hear the poem in its own terms, to be open to its voice and what it might reveal to me. When my listening as therapist opens in this way, I feel myself leaning in more, noticing subtle changes in the tone, the gaze, the posture; tracking this person’s story as it unfolds through voice and body. A deepening curiosity guides me toward what is ready to show itself.

When a client responds to the invitation, there is and there is not a therapist and a client. While I might be the guide at times, what really happens is two people listen to each other, bear witness each to the other. It is a profound event when it happens, and the two of us do not leave the same as we entered. Something has called us toward that boundary where our knowing borders our not knowing, opens us to the unexpected in the face of which we are likely to feel vulnerable, excited or both. If we keep listening there, places in us begin to appear that haven’t been heard maybe ever, and what they reveal guides us further along the way. This is also where, if ever we do, we’re likely to receive some kind of guidance from sources for which we don’t have names, at least not yet.

This applies beyond the psychotherapy dialogue, to countries at peace or at war, to parents and children, to relationships of all kinds, and to all of us together in our struggle to save our natural environment. Let us listen to each other as well as to what the river says, what the tree says, the sky and the field, all of it.

In any dialogue witnessing grows out of this listening to our listening. This might be the most profound agent of change we have as humans who speak, who grieve, who weep and laugh, who offer to travel with another to yet unknown places. A few lines of a poem from Rumi speak to this:

“Talking can be sweet. A field can bloom in your Eyes when sharing words with the right person. …

Find some ears that love the touch of your Sounds, and you theirs.”

This is what we have to offer one another, nothing more and nothing less. Our authentic and open listening reveals more of who we essentially are, each of us to ourselves and to one another. It is a profound offering, it is fierce and it asks everything of us.

Gary Whited grew up on a ranch in eastern Montana, where his maternal and paternal grandparents had homesteaded in the early 1900’s. Leaving the ranch to attend college, Gary eventually found his way into the study of philosophy with a special interest in the ancient Greek thinkers. He was intrigued by a kinship between the ancient ways and the life he’d known on the prairie. He studied classical Greek and eventually translated fragments of the Pre-Socratic thinkers, including the poem of Parmenides. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Penn State University in 1973.

For several years Gary taught philosophy at various universities, including University of Montana, University of Texas and eventually at Emerson College in Boston. While teaching philosophy, Gary became interested in the practice of psychotherapy with its keen attention given to the art of listening. He realized that the activity of listening was a thread that ran through his entire life, starting with listening to the subtleties of the prairie landscape and to its people, to the ancient Greek classical voices, to his philosophy students and eventually to clients in his private practice as a psychotherapist.

All along the way he wrote poems, trying to capture the many voices of the prairie, which is how his book Having Listened came into being. A strong sense of place pervades his poems, whether that place is the prairie, the city or the inner spaces we inhabit. His poems have appeared in several journals, including Salamander, Plainsongs, The Aurorean, Atlanta Review, and Comstock Review. Having Listened, was selected by the Independent Book Publishers Association for a Benjamin Franklin Book Award in May of 2014. Gary is currently working on a new translation of the complete fragments of Parmenides, forthcoming from Homebound Publications (Autumn 2023).

by Iris Graville, author of Hiking Naked

Quotidian.  I read that word in an essay I critiqued during my first semester in my MFA program. I had to look it up.  Ironically, it’s a fancy word for something that’s not, well, very fancy.  Here’s how the New Oxford American Dictionary defines it:

quotidian |kwōˈtidēən|

adjective [ attrib. ]

• of or occurring every day; daily: the car sped noisily off through the quotidian traffic.

• ordinary or everyday, esp. when mundane : his story is an achingly human one, mired in quotidian details.

While this word hasn’t become a regular part of my vocabulary, its meaning resonates for me.  Apparently, it does for some other writers as well.

Patrick Madden wrote in praise of “Quotidian Nonfiction” in Creative Nonfiction - Issue #44, Spring 2012:

“I prefer, in both my writing and in my reading, meditative material that considers the quotidian, that pauses and ponders, moving slowly, calmly—the kind of work that would never incite a controversy, work that balances intellect and emotion, with perhaps a bit of spirit.”

Madden, an essayist and writing teacher, claims to lean toward quotidian nonfiction “because my own life so rarely excites even me; I could never win over readers through shock or exoticism.”

I know the feeling.  It crops up for me often as I write personal essays and as I drafted my memoir, Hiking Naked. My life has been shaped by ordinary experiences of birth, loss, work, parenting, friendship, and spiritual seeking. Experiences best described by many of the synonyms the New Oxford lists for quotidian:  typical, middle-of-the-road, unremarkable, unexceptional, workaday, commonplace, a dime a dozen.  In short, “nothing to write home about.”

And yet I do write about these everyday occurrences: essays about community, listening, patience, simplicity; and profiles of “ordinary, everyday” people whose voices often aren’t heard.  Patrick Madden attests to the value of such writing:

“This, for me, is the placid beauty of the best creative nonfiction writing: the opportunity to settle one’s buzzing mind for a few brief moments, to meditate on a focused subject, to escape the plangent assaults of the beeping, blinking world and find respite in the thoughts of another human being… I think we have a right to (and a hunger for) art that is quieter, more enlightening and uplifting.”

Fortunately, an abundance of nonfiction writers create the kind of quiet and uplifting art that many of us yearn for.  One of them, Ana Maria Spagna, taught me how to tell my story through well-crafted scenes, settings, and characters, and her own “quiet” writing enlightens me.

Another is Scott Russell Sanders. I met him at my first residency in graduate school and became a devoted reader of his work. The source of his writing, he explains in Writing from the Center, springs from accepting “the material that my life had given me, and… learning to say as directly as I could what I had to say.”

Also on my list of quotidian writers is Kathleen Dean Moore, Brian Doyle, and Brenda Miller. All of them practice what Madden urges:

“ …each of us, I dare say, can do with a little more wonder in our lives, can benefit by shunning the artificial and superficial to spend more time contemplating the quotidian miracles that surround us.”

Like most people, I need to escape sometimes. Novels, poems, and short stories can take me to unknown places, may introduce me to people unlike any I’ve ever known, or might cause me to consider actions I’ve never imagined taking. But that’s not what pulls me to my pen or keyboard. Instead, this quote attributed to poet Philip Levine succinctly explains why I write creative nonfiction: “I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary."

What extraordinary, quotidian miracles surround you?

Iris Graville is a writer and retired nurse from Lopez Island, WA. Her profiles and personal essays have been published in national and regional journals and magazines. She holds a Master of Nursing degree from the University of Washington and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts where she served as nonfiction editor for Soundings Review. Iris is also the publisher of SHARK REEF online literary magazine. She blogs regularly about writing, the environment, and spiritual matters. In August 2018, Iris was named the first writer-in-residence with the Washington State Ferries.