Random "Best Of" Pics from Europe

Why I Still Believe in CouchSurfing, Part the Second

So...to pick up where we left off, my first host in Warszawa was extremely helpful from the outset, coming to pick me up at the train station, giving me maps & directions & invitations to various events. I assumed, given his age (20 years my senior; I am 27), that he was a fatherly sort of person, & was grateful for the help.

The uncomfortable situations began almost immediately: hugs as I left for the morning during which he slid his hands down my back quickly enough to graze my butt before I could pull away; random comments about Indian women; one evening, a conversation about CouchSurfing that ended with his mentioning, "If I said I have never slept with my CouchSurfing guests, I would be lying; if I said I had never slept with any hosts, that would be a lie, too." Most people reading this will same a similar reaction: That's fucked up, for one, and for two, why didn't you get out immediately?

This is, of course, the reaction of someone outside the situation, although I must concede to this point. Why DON'T we remove ourselves immediately & forcibly from these types of scenarios? Why DON'T we open our mouths & tell the offending party where to step off, that what they're doing is inappropriate & wrong? It's good question, I allow; it's very easy to become incensed by the way someone has been treated & to let that indignation tell you what to tell them they should have done. I can only reference myself in this case, to say that I had no idea how to react. It was shocking. I had entrusted myself to this person's care, as one does whilst surfing, & rather than having a pleasant, friendly, respectful host, I now had a pleasant, overly-friendly & audacious one. As difficult as this may be for others to understand, I believe it is also a valid point. Many women (or men, for that matter) are at a loss as to how to effectively remove themselves from a situation like this. In the case of CS, it becomes all the more difficult for one's predisposition to timidity: We are guests, and the host has been gracious enough to provide a bed, or guidance around the city, or a meal, or all of the above; we feel as though the only reaction available to us ought to be gratitude. Or, more simply, we are taken aback by this abuse of the project, especially by those who (again, ON PAPER) come to us so highly recommended.

To shorten this lengthy account, the situation got out of hand a few days later, after I had-probably unnecessarily-put up with these comments & gestures for four or so nights. Having walked around Warszawa all day in the cold, I arrived back at the apartment to find my host was not in. This was a huge relief, but it lasted only briefly, as he called to say he would be home shortly. I sat stiffly on one end of the couch as he flipped through the T.V. channels & then suggested we watch a movie. At one point during "The Break-up" (which I do not suggest watching), he laughed at something Vince Vaughn said & clapped his hand down over my thigh, then started rubbing my leg. I moved. As soon as the movie was over, I stood up and said I was going to sleep. He had been sleeping in the living room on the pull-out bed, giving me the bedroom with its door of frosted glass & reassuring bolt lock. Instead of leaving me alone, however, he came into the bedroom (as I was not yet asleep, the door was open; I was straightening up my things) and stood in the doorway.

"So", he said, "Do I get to sleep with you tonight, or do I have to sleep in my own bed?"


I believe I felt three things:
1) Confusion: How could someone who came so highly recommended by others on the CouchSurfing project be doing this? How could he deem it "OK" to approach a female guest like this? While I doubted I was the only woman to experience this kind of sexual harassment, the references left on his profile were undeniably stellar; no one else had made any comments regarding him approaching them sexually. Was I just overreacting?
2) Panic: I had no idea what to do. Again, as you do, I was relying on this person for shelter in Warszawa. I knew there were plenty of hostels in the area, but I had no idea how to remove myself from the house without being forced into a lengthy & probably unpleasant altercation. I had keys to the house, & the security codes for the gates. I was on foot with a heavy backpack. How far would this guy go?
3) Total Paralysis: Based mostly on the combination of the two above feelings. It was now close to 3 AM. How in the world was I supposed to find somewhere to stay that night?

The end result of this was that I stayed that night, slept not at all, and immediately left the house the next morning. I spent the rest of that day touring Warszawa with a friend, then returned to the house only to pack up my things & leave; another Couchsurfing host picked me up.

So, why do I still believe wholeheartedly in CS, its mission, its participants, & the system in general?

Because occurrences like the above are a rarity. : In my experience, the vast, vast majority of CSers are, if not innocent, completely devoted to making the system work in their favor, which entails making it work for EVERYONE. They are open, fun, friendly, and just the right amount crazy, but never disrespectful, intrusive or sleazy.

Because for every oddball, creep or personality mismatch, there are hundreds of absolute gems: This was never more true than in Warszawa. Immediately upon leaving the nightmare, I walked straight into one of the best CS experiences of the trip. Staying with my 2nd host (hosts, actually: they're brothers) was so much fun, & I plan to return to Warszawa to surf with them again on my way back home. You may encounter creeps, like I did. You may have hosts or surfers that you quite simply go not get along with, for various reason. You may host someone whose habits strike you as odd, or perhaps somewhat alarming; you may surf with someone who just seems 'off' somehow. This may leave a bad taste in your mouth until you next host/surf, and I can guarantee you that, next time or the time after that or consistently for a year, you will make the best friends you never knew you could have, & have experiences with them you'd never have had without CS.

Because I refuse to let go of my faith in human goodness, hospitality, & altruistic trust.: Shit happens. We all know that. There are bad people & weird people & sneaky people all over the world. But that doesn't mean that you should walk through the world with a can of Mace in your pocket, or stay only in hotels, or refuse to travel to a place because you heard "the crime rate is really high". I refuse to live by looking over my shoulder constantly, traveling only from point A to point B, speaking only to those who "look safe" or are familiar. CS is based on the fundamental & integral belief that human nature also includes the inclination towards altruism: by helping & supporting our peers we ensure our own survival, or, helping others to help ourselves. CS is devoted to this principle.

I will continue to surf, to host & to explain both to everyone I know, in the hopes that CS attracts more & more of its essential & upstanding members.

Terrible Belgian Weather: 1. Me: Negative 10

Or: How I Learned to be Soaking Wet and Like It
Mons, Belgium

Please do not insert innuendo into the above (which in and of itself is an innuendo, and now I am screwed.)

The first 3 days here in Belgium were spectacular. The weather held marvelously, producing hot-pink sunsets & warm breezes, & for the first time since leaving Krakow, the sun soaked through my black fleece so that I was forced to remove it, & walk around in a t-shirt. It was not to last. For the better part of the first day, I rode a borrowed bicycle down side roads to emerge at SHAPE-the headquarters for all allied personnel in Europe, a daunting concept, even more so when one considers the events leading to its creation. (Here, of course, is what's amazed me regularly since arriving in Europe: that all of this could be built back up from rubble & ash, that it had to be in the first place...)

It started to rain after the 3rd day (sounds like the Bible, eh?). This wasn't any rain. This was driving, pelting, cold fucking rain. The driving & pelting were helped along by a brisk wind. I attempted time & time again to venture out into the countryside, camera protectively slung under one arm.

Pastoralism has its own appeal, an appeal that comes from piles of corncobs & sugar beets & white potatoes heaped carefully by the roadside, waiting for transport. From a flock of big, orange-billed, honking geese, curly tails wagging under a stand of lemon trees, green grass under webbed yellow feet. From houses & barns & streets made solely of brick, crumbling away slowly under your feet: this contribution to both the life of the town & to you, since the brick is polished smoother by your walking, & the residue of it comes home with you, to be preserved in the soles of your shoes. This is where I'm staying in Belgium: outside town, and I walk down the back roads from cluster of houses to sprawling field to duck yard, nowhere in particular in mind. Then again, to be particular is not a habit one forms while backpacking alone around a foreign country.

Two days into the trip, I'm already restless, having completely unpacked my ugly blue packframe, laying clothes out in folded, nice piles, doing laundry, showering in my own bathroom with fluffy rose-pink towels. My host mom & dad have dinner on the table every night, a fireplace that roars (though for the life of me I can't get it to light after fewer than 6 tries). Every night we sit around the table & chat about our days, what we'll do tomorrow, gossip from home (the States). My feet are stretching under the covers at night, accustomed now to 5 or 6 hours per day of walking nowhere in particular. I elect to take the bus into Mons to do errands for my host mom, who needs some things from a specific store. She describes it, and gives me directions, and says she knows for sure there's a big yellow plastic button on the door handle. It seems fairly self-explanatory. Instead, I march resolutely up and down the streets of Mons for hours, searching. In the Singer Sewing Machine Parts Store, I finally give up and ask the shopkeeper if he thinks it still exists.
La Vitresse, c'est fermer, n'est pas?"
Non, c'est impossible. La Vitresse est ici, a cote de la fontagne.

Fuck. I've already passed the damn fountain 5 times, and I know it's not there. In frustration, I march in the opposite direction, in complete ignorance of what might this way lie. Suddenly, I'm outside the square, and everything is quiet, but I spy a pub with the ubiquitous Leffe beer sign above its entrance. A glass of wine sounds amazing. It is 2 PM.

As soon as I open the door, I know this is my kind of place. Small, out of the way. The proprietor wears a long white beard & John Lennon glasses. There's a little old lady with a newspaper & a cup of tea sitting at the bar, a couple of disheveled men smoking cigarettes in the corner. My bad French isn't so bad that I can't order un vin rouge, s'il vous plait, which costs me 1.90 Euro, a fucking bargain, if you ask me. All along the windows are cards. I peer curiously at one as I sit down; they're info cards for Free Trade & Organics, explaining that 25% of the profits from specific products purchased here will go to OxFam. I wonder if my wine is one of them. Something French is blasting on the radio, and I understand approximately .0025 of the lyrics, but I love it, with its light-sounding guitar & rock n' roll rhythm. I pull up a chair in the back, next to the huge chalkboard displaying the menu, & yank T.S. Eliot out of my backpack. I take a sip of the wine: for 1.90 Euro, it's impressively rich & full of the taste of pepper & plums.

Outside, it's starting to darken, the clouds coming in yet again. I know it will rain as soon as I leave this place. That's just the way my luck is with weather around here. The kindly bar owner brings over a coaster & nods. He, like everyone else here, seems to know a tourist when they see one, but they don't let on. Finishing good old T.S.'s "Ariel Poems", less certain than ever whether I like that venerable old poet at all, I throw on all my gear, pack everything up & step out. Prophesy fulfilled (too much Tiresias in the last hour??): it immediately starts to fucking pour. Awesome.

I've got another 10 minute walk to the bus station. In this 10 minutes, I meander, hatless, through crowds of Belgians returning from, or going to, work. Sensibly, they have umbrellas, plastic ponchos, shopping bags wrapped around their purses. Rain is absolutely streaming down my face, my hair is soaked, & my pant-legs are becoming heavy with water. Yet, as I walk, I'm passing cathedrals & the famous Belfry of Mons. There are pubs & shops with their windows lit up, some blaring American hip-hop, others filtering just voices & the clank of glasses out the door. The Christmas decorations are up, every street strung overhead with tiny white lights. Webs of them illuminate what's below just as much as what's above: the bustle of all of us on the cobbles underneath, & up over our heads, the arches & statues & carved stones of the churches. From the numerous patisseries & brasseries comes the mingled scent of pain au chocolat, gaufres, poulet au roti & everything is somehow commonplace & rich all at the same time.

I finally reach the bus stop to find that the #15 to SHAPE won't arrive for another 20 minutes. It's a bit cold, & I can feel the chill in my legs & hands. I huddle up on a bench, & an elderly Belgian woman arrives to sit next to me. She's petite & demure-looking, dressed stylishly in a long skirt & flat black shoes, even in this rain. As she puts her packages down, she drops her umbrella. I stoop to pick it up, & hand it to her. C'est ta parapluie, madame. She hooks the offending contraption over her arm & smiles at me, pats my arm a couple of times.

Ahh, merci beaucoup, mademoiselle. Tu est tres gentile, tres gentile.

You're so kind, so kind. A thanks is ever & always a warm draught, no matter the weather. We can barely communicate, since I struggle still to reply quickly to rapidly-spoken French, but we sit amiably together on the bench, & she turns to me again, smiles, & mimes a shiver: C'est tres froid au'jourd-hui! Pas mal. I do the same. In front of us, part of the Christmas carnival looms: rides blaring more hip-hop music as they sweep children above & past us, the cotton-candy vendor, game stands hung with purple & gold & blue stuffed animals & balloons, & the woman's arm against my shoulder (for we are squeezed onto the small bench with her packages between us) is warm. I'm still soaking wet, but the free-trade wine I drank warms my belly still, as does the casual salute the old bartender threw my way as I left, & this is how I got soaking wet & learned to love it, while the buses carry us all back home & the evening wears on in its own way.

Why I still believe in CouchSurfing, possibly now more than ever.

Part the First: A Little History


There are a few to whom I've told the partially-horrific story of my Couchsurfing experience in Warszawa. Please don't tell my mother. In fact, don't tell anyone who's skeptical, nervous or downright disparaging of the project; it will just confirm their fears. I suppose I ought to let this account speak for itself, but first, a preface, and an explanation of the Couchsurfing project for those who've never been exposed:

The Couchsurfing project was founded by a young gentleman who, upon deciding to world-travel, became aware first of its inevitable costs, the most consumptive of which is always lodging, and second, of the fact that he had had enough of paying them. So, before going to Iceland, he kicked out roughly 1,500 emails to local students and residents, asking if anyone had a spare bed/couch/piece of floor he might occupy. The return was plentiful: over 50 potential hosts. Casey Fenton was hooked and determined to launch a hospitality site devoted to making travel for young people (for any people, ultimately!) free, friendly and safe.

The 'safe' part is where most people have questions. To doubters, we appear as nothing but a travelers' MySpace, a giant collective of faceless, nameless and bodiless posters just running around waiting to be mugged, stabbed or raped. CS has been of late at the forefront of travel news, the center of a murder investigation. (Just Google Couchsurfing and murder and you'll see the result...)

Having hosted several surfers in my own home before I came to Europe, I remain without doubt as to the safety of CS. I've hosted only guys, young ones at that, one from Turkey, another from New York and so on and so forth. All were kind, polite, helpful, and harmless. I've met up for coffee and drinks with other CSers that I was unable to host, another pleasant experience. None of this, however, is a substitute for being the 'surfer' rather than the 'surfee' or host.

My first host was a woman, and she is fabulous (I say is, because at the time of this post, we're planning on meeting back up in Lisboa for another epic night of dancing). Clearly there are assets to surfing with only women, if you are a woman, first and foremost being the relative lack of risk to your person and personal boundaries. Having come from such a positive first surfing experience, and based on my experiences as a host for young guys, I didn't think twice about soliciting a couch in my next port of call, Warszawa, PL. I requested to surf with many people in that particular city, and received a reply from a man who was listed in the CS directory as the City Ambassador for all of Warszawa. He had over 200 guests boasted on his profile and the references were undeniably positive. ON PAPER, this guy looked like the man to meet if you were an avid surfer, and more so if you were just starting out. He said he was able to host me, and I accepted, little knowing that my own Couchsurfing nightmare was lying in wait.

At long last, more pictures...

Lille, FR.


In transit, SNCB from Lille, FR to Mons, BE


Lille, FR


Lille, FR



Sunset, Erbisoeul, BE
Mons, Belgium & Lille, France; random photos from an SNCB train

Distance: Successive Portraits

Mons, Belgium

I.

All my plans to leave are slow,
but I'm a patient man.
Patient with whom, it's hard
to say.
Snow makes my shadow
indistinguishable
from my Self.

I paint.

I paint until I can see you again,
iridescent in the fumes,
plastic car parts as limbs,
your body
a cloud, off-white like thunderheads,

the kind I used to dream
I could walk
or run
or lie upon
without
fallling through.

II.
All my plans to leave

are slow, but I'm
a patient man,
since there are still
leaves on the trees, still fires
burning in the Interior,
& the sick haze
they make is a fever
dream,
of the sort I once had
ill in bed for days,
heat like a hot wax
creeping up my face-
this it it
then,
death mask,
features solidified-
& you
brought me what you call
your 'special drink':
lemon peel
& clover honey
& a shot of whiskey
in black tea:
Drink this
& I tried, blaze
in my throat like the taste
of you under
my tongue
the day you said I was the only
one to make you do that,
ever.

III.

All my plans
to leave
are slow
but I'm a patient
man & today
I smoked
the last
cigarette:
Marlboro Lite
because
you always told me
smoking kills
& here I am
chewing peppermint
gum
poking today's paper
into
the fire
with the cigarette
packet, waiting
for the craving,
for the descent
toward madness
to start.

IV.

All my plans to leave
are slow but I'm a patient man.
I can walk to the sea from here,
& from there I can, & have,
cast out bottles,
with notes inside, sometimes,
& other times with scraps
of sheet metal, or paint scrapings,
or bits of wire wrapped in copper,
or full of the shavings
from a fiberglass boat hull.

I thought you might like
them, & I'm not good
with words.

Only with my hands.
Only with them wrapped around
a welding torch, or a paintbrush,
or the stubs of black pens,
the ones I used to shade your hair
in that sketch.

Most of the time, I toss
the bottles out
full of my hopes, which I rest
on you,
& these bottles are full
of nothing, of nothing at all.

Let me tell you why I cannot go to Auschwitz.

There were women scattered over the floor on scraps of straw, some, some of them quite obviously with the mark of death on their faces. Uh, their, they, they, all of them looked just horrible, and of course we could see they were emaciated and, and ill. And something that I have never been able to forget, was an extraordinary thing that happened. The girl who was my guide made sort of a sweeping gesture over this scene of devastation, and said the following words: "Noble be man, merciful and good." And I could hardly believe that she was able to summon a poem by the German poet Goethe, which was called--is called--"The Divine," at such a moment. And there was nothing that she could have said that would have underscored the grim irony of the situation better than, than what she did. And it was a totally shattering experience for me.
-Liberator Kurt Klein, from the Holocaust Museum's archives.

Cracow, Poland, November 2009


For god's sake.

I invoke something I don't even believe in, thinking of this. We are sitting around the kitchen table at the hostel, a group of us, and discussing what we're planning to do in Cracow. Everyone else, all six of them, have a bit of a go-around. Two of them are Jewish.

-Are you guys going to do Auschwitz?

Yeah, I reckon we'll go in the morning.

-What about all you guys? You going, too?

I am the only one at the table who says no. They stare. I stare back. There's a division between us now, and suddenly I am swamped by protests:

-You can't come here and NOT go to Auschwitz. I mean, it's so important. You really have to go.

I bridle, as I always do when someone tells me I HAVE to do something. No, I don't. I don't have to do anything. But this time it is not a mere refusal out of petulance; it's not just that I feel backed into the inevitable corner formed by the intersection of one person's choice to action, and another's to inaction.

I cannot do this thing. I cannot go to Auschwitz.

-No, seriously! I can't believe you're not going. Why not?

Let me tell you. Let me tell you, as I told them, why I cannot go to Auschwitz.

It is not my story to tell.

All these comments around the table underscore immediately what makes me shudder with revulsion when I am dragged into a conversation like this one, all about how, to truly be confronted by the horror and the grief and the scale of it all, one must go there, must attend the sites, and hear the true accounts, and listen to the 30-minute documentary film. The same revulsion surfaces again whilst reading others' blogs or essays about how they've gone there and done that. How 'here is a photo of the gate that says ARBEIT MACHT FREI'. About how it's changed them.

And yet, what is it that changes within them, save for the amplification of non-generational guilt, of that universal apology that wells up in all of us when we think of it? We are so sorry. We are so sorry that someone did this to you. We are sorry, of course, but for what? The cliches are flying all around the table: overwhelming, terrible tragedy, absolutely unbelievable, living people like skeletons. I can feel my irritation growing. Why is everyone so intent upon this, the one denial they've heard of the desire they all feel to set foot on that grass and to walk through that gate and to view the collected, preserved piles of eyeglasses, of children's shoes, of human hair?

It is because they do not understand that there are some things so profound one does not need to see them to experience them. We've all heard the speeches following 9/11, from politicians and celebrities and public figures. We've all seen the news clips, read the articles. As much as those events were unbelievable, they were also a source of deep sorrow for the world at large, in countries to whom nothing had as of yet happened, in places one might not have expected. And some of these sympathizers, who cried when they heard, whose furrowed brows appeared on T.V. or in the paper had never set foot on U.S. soil. The mere thought of it, the application of the imagination--placing themselves in the shoes of the victims, of the families, of the country as an entity--was enough. It was too much. It was more than they could handle.

And maybe that's it then, the primary reason that I simply cannot bring myself to view Auschwitz: selfishness. I have sat through enough films, in class or at home, with the lights dimmed, with tears streaming down my face. I have read Anne Frank's diary, and Eli Wiesel's novels, and transcripts from interviews with survivors, with civilians, the Nuremberg Trials. I know what's there, in Auschwitz, now arranged and displayed and ready for viewing. And I know what I would do, if I went:

I would lose my mind. I would lose my mind from sorrow.

To confront this place is to confront what I already know: that evil in its human forms exists like this, that 6 million people were shot and gassed and starved. I already know these things, the numbers. I already know what I do not want to know: that we are capable this. Yes, we. For why should we be allowed to distinguish when humanity is itself an entity? I know what would happen there, in front of the display of children's shoes (children! My god.). I would be broken by it. I would cry. Perhaps I would vomit. And I would become angry. I would become angry at us. I would become angry...at myself.

All of this, dear reader, to you, seems perhaps hyperbolic and perhaps false. I cannot convince you that it isn't. I cannot convince you, either, of how one should react. They're asking me again, why I cannot do this thing. Why I don't decide to go with them:

-You should just come. You might be surprised.
Yeah, isn't that the point? It's supposed to be hard on you.
-It's not like it's fun or something.

Someone asks about flash photography. Someone else pulls out a brochure.

-No, no. You can take pictures there. It says.
Oh, ok cool.

Pictures. As if this were another tourist attraction. "This is me in front of Auschwitz."

For god's sake.

This, again, I have no desire to do, to experience. Hordes of tourists with cameras, people with backpacks and purses and maps. To be surrounded by those who have come "to do Auschwitz", to feel a powerful remorse, then to get back on the bus and inquire where one might find some lunch around here. I do not want to be near anyone, if nor when I fall apart. I couldn't bear it. I cannot bear a mass of humanity standing about trying to fathom what it all means, in the same spot where humanity was being dismantled, defiled, torn apart.

And so I tell them with as much vehemence as I can:

This is not my story to tell. It is and always will be my story to hear.

For when I cease to listen and begin to speak, I am adding a layer of sentimentality, a layer of falsehood, a veil. It is not my story to tell how I stood in front of a tour guide and was moved to tears by his speech. Not my story to tell anyone that I have seen the gate marked ARBEIT MACHT FREI, nor how it might have chilled me. It is not my story to add photos to, of the barracks emptied and cleaned, or the ovens.

It is my story to hear and hear alone, about how someone else was saved here, and someone else died, and some people more lost their mothers and children, and fathers, and lives. To never put an image to save for those made by voices, by memoirs and films.

As to the need to see it, to understand, I will tell you now that I never, never want will. That going there will not help the desperately angry and lost feeling I have when I am reminded that this thing has happened. I do not want anger to dissolve completely into sorrow; anger is active. Anger has inertia. I must grieve and rage at the same time, sometimes, to continue on in a world where we battle the seeds of this thing always.

I cannot be the person who sits at a table, and puts on a list of things to see today, Concentration camps.

Perhaps no one accepts this. Perhaps I sound bitter, or disdainful to those who did choose to go. I assure you I am not. They tried to convince me once more to come with them, and in my head, once again, I heard my own voice crying out,

For god's sake, don't ask me. For god's sake, I can't.

the pleas we make to divinity when we cannot comprehend what is asked of us, what's happened, what we thought could not be.

Two days later, we take a tour of Wieliczka Salt Mines. On the bus, I meet two women from Holland, one who's been to Cracow many times in the last few years. I've been to the camps, she says, I've been more than once.

She tells me she doesn't know, anymore, what to make of it. She says she's always brought to her knees by it. Then she tells me she won't be going this time. Her friend will just have to go alone.

-Why is that?, I ask her. Why not this time?

She tells me that (and this she cannot take any longer), between the gate exiting Auschwitz, and the gate leading into Birkenau, there are always people taking photos. She says she can't go anymore, that it's all too much, each and every time.

Then she tells me, her eyes raised to the sky, that just inside the gate to Birkenau, they have built a pizza stand.

-A pizza stand. Pizza and hot dogs. Right there. Right there where they starved them to death.


On the bus ride, I can think of nothing but that I want my mother. I sleep a little, I think. I think I dream of vultures.

Highway to Katowice, Nov. 2009

Double-decker bus:
we're stacked above what moves through this world
as small, as significant
in the ways of ants,
the ways of industriousness,

and here that industry is: landscape
of provincial Poland, strips of green farm, billows
of smoke topping red brick
and gray shingle rooves,

below us (for we've chosen to ride on top,
to climb as high as we're allowed),
a thousand cars, a thousand
drivers aimed towards the setting sun, ablaze
to the left and slightly ahead.

Theirs are impatient faces, heads tilted to one side,
hands on the wheel straying from ten-and-two,
listing counterclockwise
while they speed past, and we in our perch,
all of us longing,

this collective of gravid, vehicular beings,
stranded, and then we see them: three jet contrails,
pure white against Katowice's hazy sky, meeting just above
the topmost curve of that orange, orange

sun and we all strain and silently plead with them
to do what we cannot,
to keep climbing and climbing,
and we beg them against a backdrop of bright light,
of old pine,

to bring us the knowledge
that someone, some man has burst from this earth,
and refused to come back, has done his level best

to bring us all as high as we're wishing for,
as high as we can ever get.

Catching up on imagery

I have not posted a single picture to this point, of Portugal or anywhere in between. Here are a few from Krakow. I suppose I should note at this juncture that not a single one of these blogs will appear in chronological order, neither the photographic nor the written, since I have a tendency to enter things into my notebooks as they come into my brain; this last to say that I can't think in a straight line...

KRAKOW, POLAND or: In which we get our hair cut in the bathroom of Hostel Yellow, Stare Miasto (my favorite place) and other shenanigans.






In which Ezza cuts everyone's hair in the bathroom and Stevie mixes up some vodka punch...in a saucepan...and pours it into empty pasta jars...



Sky view, Barbican Gate, Krakow



View over the river from Wawel Castle



All the apostles carved in stone


Kitchen jam session (right before we got yelled at for being too happy and loud) at Hostel Yellow





Main Square, Stare Miasto, Krakow, my favorite place

St. Mary's Basilica, Krakow, Poland

Everyone here sees something I don't.

It's a Thursday afternoon in Krakow and it's pissing rain, as it has been since the day I arrived here from Warsaw. I've made it to Stare Miasto (the old city) and paid 6 zloty (roughly the equivalent of $2 US) to duck into this massive old church, preferring this reverent kind of sightseeing to being wet and cold, although it's no less cold inside than out.

A well-dressed young Polish guy, seeing my camera slung over my back, informs me that it will cost another 5 zloty to be allowed to take pictures. So I don't. Somehow, to interrupt all the prayer and worships around me with a camera flash or its insistent clicking seems intrusive and full of the kind of mouth-open-finger-pointing-posing for snapshots tourism I hate.

Because you are, in fact, still allowed to worship here. Certain areas, lined with smooth, old-wood pews and flanked by plaques and dedications in chiseled stone or bronze are cordoned off, and behind those cordons, in the pews, sit elderly women, heads bowed. Or sometimes a couple, the man in a black peacoat, the woman in her long gloves, leaning against each other quietly. Still fewer are the people seated alone, listening for something. Their pleas are so strong I can feel them, can feel the kinetics of forcible thought. I know what they're asking for, having once spent every waking minute of my life doing so myself.

They are asking the ornate golden figures of Jesus and Mary. They are asking the priest who's just snuck into the sacristy, through its heavy carved door. They are asking God to hear their prayers, but not only that: they are asking someone to answer. Not the prayers themselves, but to answer back. To prove that that amorphous divine entity exists. They're all asking for answers, but more than that, they expect to hear only themselves.

The basilica has a high, high ceiling, covered in intricately painted and carved gold stars, a few comets across a brilliant blue background. There's a towering monument directly behind the altar, depicting the Ascension. Each figure portrayed is at least a foot tall, and along the walls, there are bas-reliefs of former popes and Polish bishops looking on. The candle holders are gold, the chandeliers are brass and crystal, there are alabaster statues and votives between the pews. Velvet seats beside the tabernacle. The entire place seems to suggest that through this decadence of tribute, one might hope to find salvation, or at least some favor from this God, having gone to the trouble of offering up all this stuff. It is unapologetic in its opulence, much as the worshippers it contains are unapologetic in their fervency of belief. And it is this I envy:

Observing these worshippers, I feelt what I have always felt. As a former professed Catholic, I spent hours doing exactly as they are, to no avail. Sitting or kneeling, or lying in bed, reaching out for what I had been to was so certainly there. Sometimes I was convinced the Archangel Michael was responding somehow, leaning down over me from whereever he lived. In time it was clear: I was talking to myself. Or to thin air, or to no one. But, today, since I am here already, and it seems as good time as any to try all over again, I sit in the very last pew, staring first at the giant statues, at the candelabras, at the tourists taking pictures of it all. I can see why people are drawn here, nevertheless, because it is beautiful. Candle light glints off of everything. It all shines, giving the impression of what its architects must have though that their heaven, that salvation and redemption and ressurection were all about-having a place in all this, amongst the riches, up in the sky.

A sky unclouded and full of stars which are eternally bright. A sky forever blue.

Yes, I envy them this, these devout people, waiting to hear that which I've decided will never be uttered, will never come, because they appear never to waver, that they can sit or kneel here without looking up for hours, convinced in their eventual right to be heard, convinced they'll be saved. And so I sit with them, the believers, and I ask for strength to continue my travels. I ask for courage, and I ask what it is that they know, what it is that I don't. What inexplicable drive is it that keeps them coming here, to talk to no one, to talk to themselves? I ask for that same ability.

I ask these things of myself, and of something larger. But I don't genuflect for it, or avert my eyes from it. I don't know how to invoke it, but I'll try, sitting on these pews worn smooth from years of the same kind of trying. I continue to despair that I'll never truly know what it means 'to believe'.

And I stay there, under the blue painted sky, staring into the faces of the statues and likenesses, and I cannot say what or whom it is that comes to me. I don't know how to say it, what I'm asking for. I don't give it a name.

Four Part Harmony: Poland, 2009

I. Stare Miasto in the evening, Warsaw, Poland

Karol says it's all been rebuilt
and it looks it, the colors blown out,
reds & blues too bright,
souvenirs for the eyes, for the cameras.

Off-season, the square seems quiet.
A flock of pigeons,
an old man with his cart full of whistles & postcards,
an artist selling paintings

whose tints are faded
in comparison with the buildings they represent.

And now Karol is saying
this is where the pictures were taken;
you know the ones,

Warsaw in a rubble,
triptychs in black & white & gray
of nothing but dust on stone on bare,
hard ground,

and sometimes a face in one corner
or the next. Yet here we are now,
discussing the finer points of Polish beer,
and a group of girls

goes before us, laughing.
It was raining before, but it's not now, and they're shedding
hats, scarves, gloves, hands full.
and one of them drops

her green scarf, oblivious, leaving a bright
banner, sodden, on the still-wet ground.

II. Day of the Dead, Lodz, Poland

Reconstruction is, here, incessant.
Today's a day for the dead-as last night was for the living,
all of us costumed, dressed to the nines-and there

are a million candles lining the walkways,
ornate gold & red, sunset-variegated roses on headstones,
huge wreaths around the necks of the statues:

Mother Mary, St. Christopher, and Arthur Henkel, whomever
he is (father, beloved son?).
Behind Arthur's gravestone they're rebuilding a church,

old bricks & ironwork obscured on one side
by construction, platforms & rebar crawling up the walls.
It's not done yet, but it will be.

They'll install plaques to tell us how it was built,
& by whom, & when, yet for now it's off-limits,
so instead I watch a Polish woman showing her small grandson

how to dust the yellow leaves
from his grandfather's grave, how to replace an old bouquet
with fresh white chrysanthemums,

& the old church blocks their uncovered faces
from the wind, & all of it is here tonight, in this cemetary:

the past, the present,
and the dead are here too,
with us, with the scaffolds we build
to hold it all together,
to hold ourselves up.

III. Central Park, Stare Miasto, Krakow, Poland

They're always feeding pigeons here
and this park is no exception.

There's an elderly man with a whole bag of bread,
throwing the crumbs out into the path,

dozens of pigeons crowded around.
On the corner there are groups of students,

waiting for a tram; across the street, old women
vending pretzels and pierogi and flowers.


Someone is playing the accordion; unseen,
his voice echoes out into the center of this park.

The sun has just come out
from behind its cover of cloud for the first time

in two days. Behind me, the open-air market,
bins of russet apples, the smell of ripe tomatoes, brewing coffee.

One man sells mulled beer, & I'm surprised
when it's good, permeating everything with orange & barley & clove.

It's the noon hour.
It's not too early here for this beer

or these people, for their lives,
for living.

IV.

Imagine all of this.
Now blow it all up.

Campismo Grande de Lisboa, Outrela Portugal

We've been here three days. Everything is soaked, in the fragrant, repressive way of temperate forests. Eucalyptus trees surround us but they're a poor cover against the torrential rain and driving wind. It stops and starts; none of us are brave enough to race downhill and check out what's been affectionately been dubbed "Expat Pirate Camp." Instead, we're huddled around a small fire, started with Kleenex and twigs, under the campsite's picnic shelter. It is black and liquid and not yet 8 p.m.

I should explain 'us'. After days of delays and mix-ups, and with the unexpected and unprecedented help of several Couch Surfers, I've finally met up with Brandon. Here at the campismo, we've accumulated others: Tommy, Glastonbury's finest, big and blonde and somewhat clueless, who's been working for room and board and fresh veg on a farm in Porto; Paul & Jacky, young Australians who've been at this for weeks and are headed to Greece next. By virtue of the English language, we've found each other. Tommy, beer in hand at 3 in the afternoon, comes out of his slow meander as soon as he hears Brandon and I speak. Paul and Jacky are tented up behind us, heads perked up when Tommy laughs out loud, exclaiming "Fuckin' Hell, man." Soon, we're all crowded around a picnic table, sharing two liter bottles of Super Bock (Portugal's favorite beer), a large bottle of tart, cheap white wine, chips, plastic containers of bacalhau com batatas.

The rain is blowing into the fire. We can't get the lights to work, so we've rigged a flashlight to hang over the table, and cut apart water bottles so their bottoms can serve as candleholders. Before the rain started, Paul, Jacky, Brandon and I set out across the highway to a local market. There are pork cutlets, chicken breasts, cloves of garlic. A bag of huge black grapes. More Super Bock. A slab of beef. Butter, a huge, round loaf of pao mistura (bread, its crust still dusted with flour). For days we've been scrounging the campsite's tiny store and over-priced cafeteria for things that aren't too pricey, unsatisfied, and no less wet nor cold for it. Tonight, we are going to make a feast. Brandon and I pick over the groomed ground and find enough small logs and fallen branches to get the fire roaring. Over it, we gingerly place the grill grate left behind by some other campers. Paul and Jacky cut vegetables and open bags of chips. Somewhere in the night we lost Tommy; he resurfaces the next day, having sensibly taken the bus into town to stay the night, high, dry and warm in a hostel.

The total blackness requires Paul & I to alternate roles, one of us holding the flashlight, the other using dirty hands, a plastic fork or our single knife to turn chunks of meat that have been slathered in butter, salted from a twist of paper, and sprinkled with chopped fresh garlic. The smell is killing us. Hunger is a constant but not unbearable thing, has been for a week or so, since none of us can eat more than we can carry or afford, and the two are not mutually exclusive any longer. From somewhere, there's music: Coltrane, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan. (Brandon has his laptop, an incongruously lush accessory in this place that smells of eucalyptus and wet clay, that's slowly filling up with woodsmoke. At least here, between the four of us, there exists a companionable silence about what this entails. Although there are hot showers, none of us has worn a completely-clean or dry outfit for days. Our shoes are caked in clay and mud. Everything we own, collectively, exudes a bit of dampness at all times, and most of this time, we are indescribably but triumphantly weary. On the tram or bus or on foot, we're set apart by our heavy packs, by the half-purposeful, half-wayward way we walk. In the campsite, we have anonymity-no one here is concerned with much but protecting their belongings from the rain, or finding a hot drink or meal, as are we. In the campsite, we have each other.

It takes 20 minutes for the pork to finish, and we rip it apart with our fingers, sharing out pieces blackened by the fire, seasoned with the rusted grill grate. In another 25, the chicken too is done, though by that time we've made our way through half the bag of grapes, two rounds of a sharp sheep's cheese, a bottle of Super Bock, yellow peppers, an onion, some tomatoes. Jacky and I stand quietly around the fire, watching the beef cook, listening to Paul and Brandon delve into politics-they're discussing Obama and his healthcare reform and the recently-awarded Nobel Peace Prize. The fire's smoldered down further, the light from the candles blocked by our bodies, and instead of joining in, Jacky and I stay silent, the warmth and presence of other people a deterrent rather than an encouragement to conversation. To point out the differences between our cultures, our countries and ourselves might spoil it, might force us to remember that, rather than a patchwork and somewhat soggy solidarity, what we have is a strange combination of disparate politics, of nations who do not get along, whose expats, even, may never see eye to eye.

By the time the beef is done, we're all too full and exhausted to handle it. Brandon produces a single round Tupperware container. Everything-chunks of chicken, pieces of bread, large strips of steak, garlic-is swept into the container, since we are loathe to waste anything. It will become breakfast. The rain has let up just slightly, so we don't bother throwing garbage bags over our heads or shrugging into raincoats. Jacky is the first to say goodnight, then myself, and we leave Paul and Brandon to finish the last of the Super Bock. Back in my trusty REI tent, I find everything as dry as I had left it, although the two lea sides of the tent are wet through, the rainfly plastered to the tent walls, rivulets draining down between them. I don't brush my teeth. I climb into my sleeping bag with my winter jacket on, using a folded sweater as a pillow. I have no sleeping pad, so my body must adjust to the hard, flat ground, and yet, within minutes, I am asleep.

I sleep without dreaming, and must sleep well. When I wake up, everyone else is gone. Brandon tells me later I have slept until noon. As I crawl out of the tent, the sun is out, and the leaves of the fum tree above me are starting to dry.

Joao's Party & Crazy CSers

Or: In Which A Brasilian Stripper Crashes Our Party

I'm not making this up.

There's a Brasilian stripper making her way on all fours across the tatty, waxy linoleum floor of the loft in the old district that we've rented for Joao's party. We're upstairs, all us CSers, foreign and Portugueuse alike, hands in pockets or folded across chests, sipping cautiously on Super Bock, water, mixed drinks. Some of us are still wearing the wigs we were instructed to bring: Ana's is a Cher-like straight, shiny black; Dea is Cruella De Ville, black with a white stripe. Cassandra and Andre sport long, curly, gaudy yellow and pink.

And we've all just gotten done giving poor, blindfolded Joao lap dances, the odd textures of wigs and hands making it impossible to tell how many of the bodies gyrating up against his chair are actually female.

Cameras are everywhere. Someone takes a picture of myself and Jaako, the seven-foot-tall Fin, his beer resting on my head. I don't even come up to his chest. This is what we do, pleasantly lost in a country where we don't speak the language. Find other expats. Speak English, because it's common between us. Drink beer. Laugh at what's funny anywhere you go, a giant of a Finnish guy using the short Indian girl as an end table.

One of the 'Portuguese' guys turns out to be a transplanted Dubliner. He meanders up. Amiably, I say, "Boa noite, meu amigo. Como estas?". He unleashes a stream of Portuguese against which I'm helpless, forced to admit that I don't speak the language all that well.

"I'm sorry," he says, "I just thought you were Brasilian."

Is this, too, the story of my lif? To always be mistaken for something I'm not? The stripper has a great body, but a mean, hars face; Joao is sitting with his hands thrust forcefully over his head. He will not touch her. Nao meu quero. He is not, he is saying, this kind of guy anymore. Everyone else hoots and whistles, rented strobe light and green tinsel streamers mixing the light crazily across their faces. The stripper kicks a leg out, hovering over Joao's face with her breasts. She cracks a long whip, pulled from nowhere, it seems.

I sit on the corner of a table, sharing another Super Bock with Jaako and talking to Sarah, a German girl who comes to me out of sheer relief at hearing me speak English. We are one in our need to rest just for a moment, to lapse back into the blessed partial-trance of the familiar. The conversation dies out and soon we are all just sitting, watching the dancers out on the floor. Joao leaps up and changes the song-he puts on 'Jeremy' by Pearl Jam and suddenly everyone is on their feet again, bellowing in the unselfconscious, unintelligible way that indicates no one knows the words.

Joao pulls us all out onto the floor with him and we form a rock concert huddle, jumping in place, all of us singing as loudly as we can, and although the music's loud and some sing in Portuguese, some in English, some nothing but the one or two words of the chorus they remember, in this instant, I am aware that we have understood each other perfectly. Pearl Jam ends and next is Nirvana, and we're all familiar with Kurt Cobain, too, so we keep right on jumping and huddling and singing, and in the middle of the floor, under a blue and green disco ball, Pavel and Agnes, wrapped up in each other, are dancing alone to a song no one else knows.

10.18 CS Party and Joaos birthday, first days in Portugal

Ive arrived. Airport in Lisboa is packed with people, mainly Portgueuse, but I am relieved to hear, all around me, words and phrases in English. Nine and a half hours from Paris. A million miles from Alaska and yet there are no butterflies. In the back of my mind, at all times, I hear myself as I must have sounded to Dominica, my seatmate on Air France flight 1624, I cant believe Im doing this.

But, priorities. I need to get to my first Couch Surfing hostess. The damn payphone! I had no idea, or had forgotten that, foreigh phones dont ring. They beep. I waste almost 5 Euro on this fucking Portuguese contraption before getting it right. Finally, friendly voices. I call Luis. Tell him, Ana is busy but could he pick me up here? He waits nearly 2 hours while Air France mucks up our baggage.

The first of a million thanks. He is standing outside with a sign handwritten, my name on it in black marker.

Ana radiates. Meeting me at the door of her cool, cozy apartment, she bestows kisses upon me (this greeting I will have to learn, for its standard in Portugal) and is immediately so gracious that right away I feel at home. I can see myself standing on her balcony, leaning out. Shes on her lap top chatting away, and lifts it so the face on the screen is pointed towards me. Say hello! she tells both of us. This is not jut a gesture, but an invitation. Gestures, the offering of coffee, of tea, handshakes, tours of bathrooms and backyards, say to the guest You are a guest, and welcome, but this is not home.

Ana doesnt sign off. Insted, I do go out to the balcony, taking in Lisbon, the Vasco da Gama bridge, and she finishes her chat. She has made me at home in the way an ignorance does, invited me into her life. Yes, I am her guest, but my presence doesnt interrupt her activities, wont derail her day. Already weve laughed together, shared a piece of her life that others may not know about.

She takes me for my first really Portuguese meal, what she calls a gourmet hamburger, a burger more like a steak really, with no bun, garnished in cream sauce and piled with thick potato chips. Its delicious. Around us, the breeze picks up, blowing in the smells of the gourmet burger shop, charcoal, a womans perfume, a mans cigarette. All the way home, we talk about our men. Giggling, I emote to Ana about John, finding this common thread between us, gushing about how smart he is, how good looking, how I dont know what to do when I return to him.

Ginginha. Fat ginger berries floating in these tiny plastic cups of it. Jaako, the tall Finnish Couch Surfer and I trade drinks. Were all standing in Al Fama, in the square, backs turned on hustlers and beggers alike. I float a little. Around us are more expats, Pavel and Agnes, the quiet Polish couple, he dreadlocked and cheerful, she blonde and demure. Pedro, scarf at the ready around his neck, jumping about from group to group. Susanna and Emmi, the stylish Finnish students. Its warm. Were all picking the berries from the bottoms of our cups, waiting to head to the old part of town, to a birthday party for Joao, another CSer. The ginginha stand is close by. The night is only begun.

August & Everything After

...which is, in fact, the title of a Counting Crows album, and so I've marked myself as unoriginal.

I am officially unemployed as of Friday. For my entire adult life, I've been employed/employable/an employee; the revelation of unemployment hangs over my head like a skewed tiara on a doll: It shines, appears important, and is expensive. Liberating is not the word for it, although I suppose it to be the most accurate descriptor. At the moment, it's difficult not to feel like a bum, a burden, not a contributor but a walking rucksack, an empty stomach wandering about from meal to meal.

My budget for each month of this two-month excursion is around $400 US. What that might amount to in Euros, I've no idea. I lack direction upon arrival in Lisboa. Brandon can't make a ferry off the island (Madeira) until Saturday, so I am muito sozinha em Lisboa for two to three days. This will give me a chance, I hope, to experience the other side of CouchSurfing: This time I will be a surfer rather than the host. The only problems remaining may be navigation, the language barrier, and finding a string of pay phones by which to contact Brandon.

I worry. Rather, the residual parts of me accustomed to structure, to planning and itinerary, are worried. I grew up traveling as the head of a ragtag convoy, my family racing hand-in-hand across airports and bus terminals around the world, a chain of paper dolls, oldest to youngest, our suitcases numbered off digits 1-8: 1. My father, 2. My mother, everything following attached to a kid. Now, I have a giant, ugly blue packframe, crammed to its tattering gills with clothing, notebooks and Handi-Wipes. Two flashlights, a Ziploc full of dryer sheets (helpful as fire starters should I need them), several soft sweaters, a package of Orbitz Bubblemint gum. A picture of my family. Several memories of John. Extra socks. I count the hours until the plane lifts off. I count the hours until I return home.

A myriad of other adventurers, predecessors and colleagues alike, tell and have told me that this can be done. That one can wander the world alone surviving on nothing but the occasional hearty meal at the invitation of strangers, on air and water and the hard ground under a sleeping bag. In August, two months from departure, I still didn't believe I'd purchased a plane ticket, decided to quit my job, or that I would relish the idea of traipsing a foreign city, attempting to make my way on a rudimentary knowledge of its layout and language. The years I've spent clawing through things: bad relationships, too much snow atop my aging car, my own fear, books and books and books on the way to a degree, are all falling away now, and the openness of it all reminds me of when we were kids playing outside after a blizzard, one of those dumps of snow that piles up in feet, not inches, grazes the rooftops, buries the yard:

One tree, hidden in the woods past our front yard, bent over with the weight of snow and its own age, makes a perfect arch, eight, maybe ten feet over a pristine patch. We struggle into snowsuits, pull on mittens (the kind with strings through our sleeves, the ones Mom can't believe we lose anyway), force feet into boots. We are going to scale that tree. We are climbing to the top if it's the last thing we do.

We each shimmy up, padded knees clinging, until we can sit with our legs hanging over the trunk, feet dangling. My brothers are the reckless first: They stand up slowly, balancing on the curved-most part of the arch, then flail out into the cold air, arms tucked by their sides, eyes slammed shut. I wait in the space between their disappearance and my own hesitation, then do the same. The air rushes by. It's strangely warm- perhaps the friction between my body and its chilly surfaces becomes a kind of warmth, and then the air itself is gone, replaced by the soft crump of my body hitting snow, and though I've held my breath the whole way down, I suddenly realize that I can breathe, and the air I've passed through becomes crystalline, saturated with the taste of bark, dry and fresh at the same time. I can hear my brothers, and my sister laughing, but most of all I hear everything living in the woods all at once: a woodpecker landed several trees away, ice melting into a bucket beside the house, and breathable air is indistinguishable from cold, solid snow, and I am not afraid to drown here.

Time moves forward. I remember now how, two weeks ago, I kissed a man with a mouth like the sea and left him to catch his own plane. In three days I'll catch mine. I may be sleepless, jobless, homeless, but it all rises up around me now and I am not afraid.

Bear Mountain: Exploration

Bear Mountain stands just outside tiny Peters Creek. As my hiking partner Rich has put it, because it is there, we've all ignored it, this ridge of a height lesser than those so fabled up here, and so even to locals, passable and mundane. It's hot-a lingering 80 degrees, one of the driest days of the summer, and we are all wondering why climbing this peak was the first activity to come to mind. Chad, in a welcome executive decision, opts to take his new Toyota FJ, a shiny yellow vehicle with 4-wheel drive and we pile in, feeling slightly conspicuous and overdone. There's only one pack, full of water and fruit, the dog dish, and some $7 beef jerky from REI, pricey and smacking of pretension.

Jumping out of the FJ, I feel ready. The trailhead is not steep, nor particularly different from any other I've seen. The dog, Chip, my sister's miniature schnauzer, is off like a shot. While there are many cars parked along the pullout, we encounter only two men with aluminum telescoping walking sticks. There's an elated sense of pioneering: we may be the only ones on the mountain today. In the puffed-up, overconfident way of the conquistador, we all believe it more noble to be the 'first', to set foot to a terrain unfettered by other eyes and feet-no one but we could then say what transpired, what was said or undone or given.

We had very little time to come into a stride. The steadiness of our entrance to the trail soon gave way. Chad veered to the left-"I'm pretty sure this is it",- he seemed preoccupied. We were not, then, to take the main trail, one I would later learn curved steadily around and up the back of the ridge. Instead, Chad was intent on finding that a less-traveled path, one that sloped up quickly, leading directly to the summit. Our calves ache immediately. Chip scampers ahead, sending up a dust cloud; the first hint of that heavy, ripe-cranberry smell, and often it is impossible to tell what must be done as it hits your nostrils. Is this decay? revulsion? Do you recoil from it? Or is it merely the scent of harvest, of a season not dying but being born? Perhaps, though, the cranberries told us what we were refusing to acknowledge otherwise, stranded by the energy of our own wakefulness in the heat of summer, not yet able to begin hibernation. Chip ate a few blades of grass and turned. Chad was convinced he was taunting us. The trees covered the sky, yet the patchy sun we were exposed to crept up our bodies, a gradual overheating, and Chad stampeded up the first rocky, muddy incline, while Rich and I hung back, our hearts knocking in our throats, lungs heaving. We yelled a few breathless obscenities at Chad's ascending back: "Chad, we fucking hate you right now!"

He was running on his toes, not lightly, but with the labor and strain of a mountain climber. Shortly thereafter, each of the three of us would juggle the adoption of this same strategy. One soon learns, after an embarkation of this type, that each small offering of energy-from a calf muscle tensed against rock, from a few deep breaths-must be accepted and immediately distributed to the denizens of the body, and more importantly, to the unfocused and hesitant mind. One at a time, with the other two lagging behind, we each charge up ever-shorter sections of trail, bursts of energy lasting first 200 feet, then 100, then 50, Chip's gray and white back bobbing in and out of the brush ahead. Using another strategy, we never looked up.

Those with a fear of heights, of falling, refuse to look down. When summitting, it is preferable to practice the opposite. One focuses on feet, on seeking a foothold first with the eyes, taking in every stray crushed plant, and rock, distillation of a usually-smooth, thoughtless action into its component parts. Having not looked up for minutes at a time, we were surprised to find that when we did, we had come up through the shade into full sun: treeline.

Reaching the treeline is not an achievement understandable to those outside the jargon engendered by the outdoors. True, such a term is, on paper, dry, poor substitute for the event that it describes. Passing from brush out onto a slope above the treeline is like surfacing abruptly from under water, a gasp associated with struggle, the shock of it simple to overcome, but never avoidable. In late summer, with each plant's colors beginning to change, the terrain rising up above us is subtly briliant with reds, browns, yellows. Here and there the fuschia hue of fireweed lingers. Suddenly, as with a rush of oxygen after long deprivation, everything is perfectly and calmly clear, devoid of stressors, as effortless as the movement of a few wispy, feeble clouds across the sky. There was nothing tall above us, nothing creating a canopy, and very little greenery . Once past the treeline, the tallest, most invincible bodies around were ours, unfettered as we were now with trunk or tendril or leaf.

It was of course, here that the climb became most difficult. The surface of the trail was powdered with dried, pounded dust, a fine dirt that, not matter how careful you might be, you cannot help but kick up. Rich's feet raised a thick swirl of the stuff straight into my face as he took the lead again, toes digging in for hold, hands cranking at his sides. "Sorry, sorry..., this stuff is so gross..."

We ate it, our faces like those of little kids at a campfire, blackening around the mouth and across the cheeks. Chip, even, eas looking strained. He stopped twice for us to catch up and laid down, tongue hanging out.

About half the way to our eventual summit, Chip disappeared, hearing voices. The three of us were perturbed. Other people on our mountain? This insurmountable peak and obstacle that we claimed for ours, sweated over, and were fiercely determined to not share. Around a corner, we came upon an entire family, mother and father and two kids, spread out under a sparse bush, having a picnic. The mundanity of it was incomprehensible. We'd toiled for some two hours now only to find that an elderly gentleman holding a diamond willow walking stick, his wife, and two little boys had beat us to it.

There was, of course, only one solution to our feelings of inadequacy: pure, unadulterated raucousness. Leaving the family behind to finish the picnic, we are heedlessly louw as we barrel up the trail again. We hoot. We holler. One of us (me? Chad?) yelles and obscenity upon realizing that we had hit the base of the steepest incline yet: the final, hard 25-foot ascent. Once we come up over it, reach its apex, we will be there. We aren't exactly sure where 'there' is. Chad and Rich had admitted earlier that they'd never actually hike Bear Mountain, although they grew up directly beneath it. I certainly never had. What lay on the other side seemed as enchanting and full of frightening mystique as the sea creature always etched in the corners of old world maps. Having climbed and strained for all these steep feet, we know that this particular world is not flat. It is all too possible, still, to step off the edge.

Much to the detriment of our spirits, we are soon joined by another hiker on the descent: a boy of about twelve years, grubby, long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans, pink in the cheeks but calm, not panting and desperate like we are. He is another part of the family below us, and has clearly reached the same goal we have yet to achieve.

With the arrival of this other person comes disappointment. Here was a messenger returning; what will his message be? That it's nothing special, the sea creature nothing but some low-bush cranberries, a blade of two of grass? Thankfully, though, we nod amiably, and he does nothing but smiled a little and continue down. Our resolve strengthens again: if this gangly boy can do it, so can we. We take the twenty-five feet in on hard plunge, arms pumping, legs burning. Chip hits the apex long before we do, looking down on us. We all feel, then, that we will burst, fly to pieces before we make it, the heat too much, sweat pouring into our eyes and down around our ears.

THat's the thing about tests of will, of mind over matter, endurance: when they are over, we always feel we could have done more. Pushed a little harder, one last show of strength that might have given us greatness. And yet the three of us, so utterly exhausted before that last climb, thought of nothing but the relief of it. We thought of the last half-bottle of water, of how dust felt rolled between lips. We thought of how good it would feel to take our eyes from our feet, to finally look up.

Beyond us the blessedly-flat ridgeline were were now spread out along was russet-red, lacking tall things, no trees. Barely even a shrub. The sun blinded, then showed us what it was hiding: a river-valley vista, the small town of Peters Creek bordered by highway directly in the shadow of the mountain, yet laid out beyond and beyond that, the vast silver twist of the river and its tributaries, the flat and browning floodplains, a flock of geese arrowing their way south, flapping silently below us. Below us. We keep up our exploration, so in awe that every few feet, one of us breaks off, gingerly peering over the edge again to take in what we've discovered. Tundra blueberries smash under our boots. Eventually we kneel to pick and eat, tart oblong-shaped and truly delicious. Thick everywhere are black crowberries, somewhat flavorless-in fact, they taste like water. A handful of two quenches our thirst: epetrum nigrum, carpet under our feet. For a while Rich hangs over a precipice, looking out on the valley. Chad goes further ahead to find a similar vantage point. I wander behind, Chip busily sniffing, and despite the fatigue settling in our limbs, the warm ground and the smell of moss and berries comes up around us, and the only word for what we feel might be 'cleansed', might be subliminal.

Might be free.

CHAMMOMILE

for Zoey Zeller


All that summer, your mother and I
walked as far as we could, the city smelling of something
ready to fall from its vine, she
with her hair pulled back, our faces and
shoes glistening with thin sap squeezed from clover,
gritted with dust and molten asphalt and gravel.

And some days I wanted to cease,
in the way that a season does, or perhaps like a fire
confronted by a break, by a river, by men
with shovels, to turn back on myself until there was nothing
left to consume,

but the scent of chamomile tea drew me back,
your mother’s face wet behind the steam.
Months later, I could picture her uncontrollable smile

when she told me she was pregnant
with you, and what did I recall but the hour of my greatest
grief, when years ago, knees buckled,
I knelt in the street, in the rain, in another summer,
body sagging toward soil,

in front of me, as far as my arms could stretch,
sturdy, fragrant blossoms of wild chamomile,
surrounded by pavement,
thriving in the gray, inhospitable twilight,

accepting the tepid water of my tears,
and all around me--as they are today,
now that I know you are born--

things green and new and scented,
the water collecting itself in the ditch beside me
amber, like your mother’s eyes,
and all the world—though laden as it was—was full of new life,

and yesterday I dreamt I heard you cry.

FOUND OBJECTS: Hiking Powerline Trail

1.
8 o'clock in the morning.
Vapor.
Series of strange and broken child's things:
(These are a tricycle with one flat tire. A plastic Go-Kart, muddy. Swing set.)

2.
If possible, wild snapdragons, pale yellow and whose stems are either spike-leaved and equally-pale green, or, if not against the rusty dividing fence, autumn-red.

3.
How do these tiny versions of hothouse flowers get across the trail?
Growing outside their flowerbeds, now.

Civility can become wilderness.

4.
Tiny: I think they are orchids?
Maybe ladyslippers.
Exotic, shaped perfectly, deeply pink miniatures, so small and fragile,
perhaps by their very hiddenness avoiding being picked.

5.
As if someone has tired of Monet's gardens, flung them aside with the onset of cold, a pile of trampled nasturtium, uprooted: red and purple and punk.

Flung out onto the path with their potting soil rounds still attached.

6.
Rotting burlap sack.

Hollow ahead an ideal place for moose to bed down. It is still so very, quietly early.

Sure enough-moose turd in the trail. Long gone.

7.
Dog is in someone's yard.

We've left the "nice" part of this neighborhood. These are all trailer homes, and old.

One, painted bright green with pine-green trim, has its own shed.

A picnic table.

A statue of a kneeling angel on the railing of its tiny deck.

The next has a collection of prisms hanging across the rear window.

8.
A rainbow.

9.
Cluster of Shasta daisies whose petals have all fallen, leaving nothing but their round, golden centers.

I am thinking of the way yellowness will creep, then rush, up over the mountains.

It will be met by snow.

10.
Walk back.

Boots wet and spackled with grass.

The dog chews a single sprig of cat-grass. All the fireweed in this area are blown out, fuzzy white seeds help down by the damp.

11.
Blue Toyota full of elderly couples pulls out. They point at the dog, then wave.

He does look like a stuffed toy. Chinese delivery man from last night called him a "baby caribou."

12.
On the pavement, in candy-colored chalk, a drawing of a dinosaur, and next to it, lettering:

G A B e.

good morning!!!

I LOVE LUKE

Another rainbow.

Christ, I love Tony Hoagland.

Lawrence

by Tony Hoagland


On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,



a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder



to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name



the way pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
“O Elephant,” they say,
“you are not so big and brave today!”



It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven’t earned,
and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people



don’t defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,



I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,”
or, “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life



as to deserve to lift
just one of D. H. Lawrence’s urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips.”



Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven’t come that far



in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more



than fight, and fuck, and crow,
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.




Copyright © Tony Hoagland

I don't know how to feel.

Grief and mourning, I think, seem by nature concrete and dichotomous: either you are grieving and your entire countenance is given over to it, or you are not. The intensity of these feelings may vary, or their duration, but never how they are manifested. It seems to us a fallacy, an unfathomable excuse: I don't know how to feel. We cannot grasp that death engenders uncertainty. We may not weep nor wail nor pull our hair, but we are somber. We have 'respect'.

My grandfather passed away on Thursday. Far from being unexpected, his death has come with plenty of warning, with a sense of finality and relief. (He had been progressively ill, and living in a nursing home for many months.)

In honesty, given my grandfather's disposition, it is difficult to find grief within me, grief that is at least representational of itself: sober, head bowed, involved with the business of being see, grief that assumes the same posture as those around you in order to uphold its two sides, to remain within the bounds of its own etiquette. One does not smile during this time, unless it is through tears: what a sweet and poignant story, about the time he slipped and fell into the cow's trough. How sad it makes us to recall. Memory, tempered by time, feels like an anodyne, a thin layer of salve over what we're in denial of, may have, to save ourselves the thought of it, attempted to leave behind.

Now, I am the uncertain one. What an excuse this must seem, an evasion of what's expected of me-to mourn my grandfather properly, to stay quiet, morose, and perhaps to cry, to weep a little for this man who raised my mother, who is mourning also. To feel paid as my grandmother does. And, instead, I utter the phrase once, when a friend asks how I am, then again when a coworker does the same: I don't really know how to feel. In this fashion, grief is kinder, more immediate for those who knew the dead, who could fix them a cup of coffee with two sugars, tripped over their shoes in the entryway, shook their hand or kissed their cheek or waved to them across the supermarket. The tangibility of it, the knowledge of another person's present and soon past, and then future-ness-a place in our minds that cannot be otherwise occupied. Disappearance.

Having been apart from my mom's family for some years, I can no longer envision them. I have two cousins I have never met, whose existences are, painfully, only that. I am aware of them as one is aware of a photograph, a vague and sometimes negligible affection for faces on a flat surface, there and not there, glossy and unreal. For weeks now, as Grandpa fluctuated from lucid to incoherent, remember my mother and fed himself, then refused to be bathed and could no longer recognize Grandma, I have wrestled with what images I have of him, someone whose place is occupied by transparency, his face in my mind always a part of some other memory, another, more lasting recollection. My brothers and sister have all been to Iowa more recently, a feat I have not managed. They say the loss is made less difficult by seeing the loved one as they were in life, so that one is able to preserve their motions, the little details. I try to conjure up something, anything about him that causes me to smile a little, to find inside myself that bittersweetness we are supposed to feel. I fail.

I try again, and fail.

My earliest and only memories of my mother's father are unpleasant. He was a gruff man, full of criticism for my timid, gentle grandmother, and for my mother, who is like her. One summer they visited us, and my mother worked her fingers to the bone to provide a clean house, a fishing trip, hot meals. Grandpa mocked her, mocked my grandmother as well, for what, I don't remember. I only remember him making my mother cry.

Someone else asks how my mother and grandmother are doing. I can only say that they're OK, that it hasn't been so bad. That I just spoke to both of them and they seemed fine. I cannot assume an air of sorrow. I can only be sorrowful for them, for their loss is not mine, not when all I remember is that my grandfather, that I know of, did not bring anyone lasting job. And suddenly I am standing at the counter of my favorite coffee shop sobbing.

This then is the way we become mourners: inexplicably, in the middle of routine, shaking nutmeg into a dark espresso, believing ourselves exempt from the slow onset of it, and what I really mourn are the gaps in time, the happiness I cannot assign to my grandfather's life, to his relationships with my mother and grandmother, and through them, to me.

My mother calls. The funeral is over. They gave Grandpa full military honors, a folded flag in my grandmother's hands, my brother reading from the Bible. It was lovely to see all the cousins and old friends, she says, a way to catch up, albeit not the way she'd have liked. Such guilt: this man served in WWII. He was a soldier and then a veteran. How can one imagine or begin to judge the life of someone who has, in essence, already given theirs-to the dark and inescapable battlefield, to some cataclysmic event long past and yet still with us? My grandmother comes on and tells me about the dress uniforms, the twenty-one gun salute of sorts. This too is grief: salutations to those who are honorable, though we may not even know their names. Predecession as worthy of silence, of prayer, while among us still stand the products of it, its lingering and real countenance. She sounds only sleepy, not tired nor under duress. She says she knows he's in a better place.

I speak to my mother again, briefly, to tell her that I'm sorry I couldn't make it. And I am. I regret that she had no one to help carry her suitcases, her head slack, cushioned by the cold window of an airplane. I do not tell her I am relieved. To attend the funeral, I feel, would have been hypocritical, a show of grief that is not mine to have, so I tell her I love her and to put Grandma back on, so I can say that I love her, too.

We bear it together, parts of a spectrum, across all these miles, the legacy of this man with his gruffness, the years he spent in the military. I say that I love them both, hang up the phone. Outside the rain is coming down on the pavement, and there's a raspberry bush sending its scent up into the air.

A memory from Yellowstone, summer 2007

Prescript: This trip to the park the summer before we all graduated was one of the most liberating and awesome experiences of my life. In particular, I bonded with my good friend Tana, a strong and humble woman who startles and delights with her laugh and the sharpness of her mind. It was also, in many ways, a study in the sort of solitude Thoreau wrote about, yet with a tinge of palpable loneliness, a loneliness one only explores fully through exposure, to an elemental sort of journey, whatever that may be.

One day, Tana and I had had enough. In the park, we tended to spend most of the day in uncharacteristic idleness: After scoping for the Granite Creek pack all morning (beginning at 4 a.m.), our group rode in silence (a quietude born of sleepiness at times, yet at other times, possessed of an audible reflective quality) back to our cabins, where nearly everyone went straight back to bed.

This particular day was shaping up to be hot, dry, cloudless; the sun, at this altitude, was all the more intense for the five to six hours of early morning chill we had endured on trailsides, in pullouts, hunkered down over our long-range scopes, straining with naked and tired eyes through binoculars, trying to spot our wolves in the dewy, hazy mountains. The leader of our expedition, our graduate poetry professor Jonathan Johnson, having made this excursion into Yellowstone innumerable times, assured Tana and me that there was a quick, flat little trail following a streambed that would take us from a drop-off point right outside Silver Gate back into camp. The whole thing, he said, was no more than three miles long; for us, an easy, brisk walk rather than a true hike. Already we had hiked the 1 1/2 miles in to Trout Lake, just off the park road, stretching our legs, and we were ready for more.

And that, in retrospect, was the crux of it : In many ways, our subsequent adventure was the subconscious result of what we felt with chagrin we had lacked-isolation; we had not yet traversed Thoreau's 'howling wilderness'. Granted, this is difficult to achieve-being quiet in one's head-while sharing small cabins with other students, but it wasn't just the other people.

Tana and I agreed: this hike was needed in mind and in body, so while the rest of the group stayed in the van, heading toward hot showers and sleep, we let Jonathan drop us off near the supposed trailhead, located immediately to the left of the road. It was still early, and the last of the morning cold lingered in the shaded spots, tricking us into a feeling of the freshness of early fall when instead, it was high summer in the mountains. The trail was supposed to be marked, as nearly all trails in Yellowstone are, with the ubiquitous brown triangle, a white man marching across it. We walked up and down the left side of the road for a while, in the area Jonathan had indicated, but saw no such sign. The need to move off the road, away from this traveled area, started to take us both over, the as-yes minor strains of heavy packs and heavy sun and hot clothing amplified by the same restlessness that had catalyzed our decision to hike at all. The closest feeling to it, I think, was that of waiting for a day to give way into another, as if by turning the calendar's pages over we might reach one that was blank, a place of rest.

Instead of giving up and taking the park road back into Silver Gate, we crossed the road. Our first mistake was in reading the topographical trail map wrong. Perhaps, though, we once again succumbed to an unconscious desire, one being communicated between us: the desire to invoke a challenge, the sort of risk one takes without expressing it, staying out just an hour too long in the cold, a touch to a hot surface, when long ago we should have learned that lesson, about how feeling a quick, sharp pain often uncovers so much more. So, through naivete or through the influence of will, we scanned the dirty, plastic-encased map briefly and decided to chance it. I recall distinctly thinking that we were certainly headed in the wrong direction, but ignoring it. We took the path anyway.

Adversity is a strange companion. We immediately began to climb, although Jonathan had insisted our trail started out flat. The starting altitude listed at the trailhead-roughly 6,000 feet-gave way to a rocky and narrow path, so that for the first portion of the hike we were forcibly making our way up on an angle. Tana led, her longer legs taking the strain of stepping up and forward from toehold to toehold better than mine could. And we talked. At first our conversation was lax, brief-we dissected the long van rides, our classmates, the upcoming school schedule, next fall...all quickly, jovially clinical: we were on an adventure, far from it all, and at first we were elated. It took nearly 30 minutes for the sounds of the park road below to disappear and I felt the quietude as a gradual easing, as if into cold water, one sense at a time growing accustomed to it until it is barely noticeable, not even there. After an hour or so, however, a shift in both our paces occurred. Having crossed a long stretch of tree-line, we came into full sun. We had started out around 10 a.m., and it was now high noon, the heat of it evoking what happens in Westerns, a sense that with the sun hot upon us, and no shelter in sight, this was the hour at which one begins to be honest, and must surely perish of it.

We were, too-honest, that is, but not about the lingering idea that we should turn back. As the heat built and we climbed further still, we talked more. I knew Tana had had a hard life, but, in the way one has when faced with only fragments of another's hardship, I had put that sense of her away, choosing to label her amorphously: 'strong', 'hardworking', 'a great lady'. Too wrapped up in the details of my own life to ask about hers. It was as if the ever-growing discomfort of our sweating faces and tired feet and laden backs became its own purgatory, brining out of us the same progressive discomfort.

She talked about her divorce, her daughter. Her fear that she'd not done right, by either of them.

I talked about the baby, the boyfriend. I talked about how I'd cried.

Our conversation turned, at the same time the trail did, downward into shadows, and there was no sound around mechanical enough to drown it out.

Yellowstone Park, in the summer, teems. It is not quiet, nor a haven for those seeking solace in 'true' wilderness, or merely to be away from men. From the very first day, although surrounded by huge pines, lakes fringed with tall grass, or sharp peaks, all necessarily spots one might assume peace is found, we had not yet had occasion to truly take in the experience of those things, to feel the great and welcome loneliness that one hopes to feel when confronted by the overwhelming smallness of being sentient in this place. Every morning we piled into the van, and for hours on into the day, we clustered around our equipment, flanked by dozens of other wolf watchers and tourists. To be alone, of course, is always a state of mind, and with so many other people at odds with each other's space, it was, until now impossible to achieve. I thought of this as Tana and I came out of the trees and into a clearing bordered on one side by thicket-the remnants of the trees we had come from, and on the other, by an endless, open bowl full of yellowing, rustling grasses. We had climbed far enough to reach the peak of our side of the mountain, and now stood in its cradle, the distance between one summit and another spannable by our strides if we chose, and the loneliness in both of us was palpable then.

Tana moved away, presumably to look for a good place to cross the creek in front of us, which at this time was low, dry, a simple waterway rather than a raging river. I stayed. Here, too, was the center, the height and distance of it separating us from the park, with its roads and hordes of people. Here too was ebullience: what perhaps we had both acknowledged wordlessly was a need for the lightness of being singular in a world of sensory pluralities, our personal griefs at last our own, without cacophony, to dwell for a moment on how we could be so simultaneously in awe of this place and sorrowful for it. Tana crossed the stream ahead of me, and then we were up and into the grassy elevation before us, and there were no birdsongs, no animals about, and the only breath for those miles was ours, and I felt the quick and undeniable advent of the sadness I was carrying with me, but what did that matter to the grass or the cloudless sky, and where else did I have to put it but back inside of me?

We finally decided, halfway between the peaks, dry grass shattering under our feet, to turn back. We knew camp lay the opposite way; we had not, until the sudden weariness, cared much. From that point forward, retracing our steps, we spoke of redemption. Of what it means to learn that to forgive is not necessarily the way. Of how we had seen, two mornings before, an old, old coyote crossing a buffalo wallow full of rain, right in front of us. He loped to within feet of the van, big paws raising the dust, tongue out, and looked us all over just once, as if to tell us that he knew for whence he was headed, that when he got there, he would lie down to die. I am ready, he seemed to be saying, and was just as quickly gone. Of what it meant to run away while still looking back, pillars of salt, the penalty for attempting to remember. It stayed brutally bright and warm the whole way back across the field, the heat beating in around us without making a wave in the still, thin air.

A little over halfway to the place where the trail finally started to level off, we paused for a moment on a bed of scree, a cascade of rocks and jagged edges left by a rockslide. As Tana clanked around in her pack, she scared up a huge figure: wide, squarish head, wings the length of our bodies and spanning the breadth of the trail. Silent. He crossed the path ahead of Tana, still bent over her pack, and never before had I felt so swallowed up by the presence of another moving thing, the wingspan of him, the complete lack of disturbance in his passing. There had been not a single sound, nor a change in the stillness of the trees, and if I too had been distracted, he might have escaped unseen. He lighted on a pine, this great horned owl, surveying; we worked in negation to him: heed nor fear nor even curiosity were in him. For all our grueling trek, our mental anguish, to this owl we were still merely obstacles on the path, as loud and bumbling and needy as any other animal, and just as easy to dismiss. He watched us for a short while from one pine before moving to the next, and we were stunned in his absence.

Once off the scree, we doggedly began the walk back to Silver Gate. The pavement was unwelcome to our feet, accustomed as we had become to the terrain in the mountains, the distance between us and camp nothing now, given what we had already come through. Our pace quickened a little at the entrance to camp, determination all that was left now that we had stood in the face of a lingering, separate grief in between the peaks.

"What took you guys so long?"

Incredulity: Jonathan pulled out his old trails map, and confidently announced that, all told, Tana and I had hike nearly 15 miles that day, and had ranged in altitude from 6,000 feet at the trailhead up to almost 10,000 feet at the summit. There was a fire in camp, bottles of wine, hot food; somewhere miles away our owl was still winging from tree to tree, and we had stood in our singular loneliness, been taken over by it, had returned. We called ourselves the warrior women. We still are today.