Learning to Swim

I wrote this a while back during my master's thesis studies & have been slowly revising it ever since. It's the holidays, which by nature engender a compulsion in me to reflect on faith, my family, and blessing. This essay is just such a reflection. Note: My family's names have been changed, since I'm still too much a chickenshit to use their real ones...

Learning to Swim

“Love is not a victory march/It’s a cold and it’s a broken/Hallelujah”

– Rufus Wainwright

Somewhere, buried in an old photo album, is a photograph my father likes to bring up in family conversations. Apparently it was all the rage in 1983 to bring your infant to the local pool and, quite simply, fling them in. My father says it was a program called Aquababies, designed to familiarize children with water before they were old enough to fear it. In the photo, I’m dog paddling just below the surface of the unnaturally blue water, clad in a frilly navy kiddy suit. As was a strange habit that has lasted into my twenties, my eyes are wide open regardless of the chlorine stinging them. I like to see where I’m going. I imagine my mother taking the photo while standing off to the side, camera trained on me, bubbles streaming from my nose as I paddle toward the arms and hands stretching over from the far right side of the frame—my father’s arms. My father compares this photo to one he’s taken of me in full scuba gear, eyes wide open under the goggles. He says I’ve always sort of looked like a bug, under water. I don’t remember Aquababies at all. I do know that I swim quite well.

In recalling old photographs and bringing them up, at dinner, family barbeques or when a relative comes to visit, my father reminds me that, no matter what, I am still his little girl. He doesn’t say it outright; he’s a quiet man, one who is awkward (although not visibly) around crying women—my mother, for example. When we talk on the phone now, although I am an adult of twenty-five and can talk about ‘adult things’, he would rather discuss the state of the laptop he bought me for graduating with my BA. It is not that he doesn’t converse; he does, but he sometimes ends up sounding like an instructional video for bow hunting or Macintosh computers or Republican politics. (These, of course, are three things close to his heart.) We yell at each other from time to time, over who’s right about inconsequential things: how long it really takes to grill a salmon fillet, which happened first in a series of events, what to listen to on the radio in the car (my pick: music; his: Michael Savage on talk radio). Yet my father’s smile widens in his handsome face when he talks about those old photographs, and underneath what could be inconsequential words is that unspoken message: You are my child and I love you. This is what I hear when I hear my father, telling my aunt about the swimming pool picture, “She still looks like that sometimes.”

*

I cannot tell you what I don’t remember, and so I cannot tell you what it feels like to fly, to exist as nothing but a dark object in motion against a black sky. I cannot tell you the color of the truck that slammed into the Ford Bronco I was riding in, and I cannot tell you how long it was before I regained consciousness. What I can tell you is this: it was cold. When the paramedics arrived, they cut off my new sweatshirt, a fifty-dollar waterproof one; my mother had purchased it for me earlier that day. I touched the chilled and dripping gash in my forehead; it felt like a half-frozen steak. What I looked like immediately following that terrible car accident is not something I can tell you either; I had no mirror. Until the ambulance arrived, I lay sprawled on the side of the road, covered in someone’s jacket. The two friends I’d been in the Bronco with appeared overhead, their faces pushed in around me. If I looked like a bug at all, it was of the variety you might find mashed on your windshield. Apart from my two friends, Tim and Sarah, who’d wanted to go bowling that night despite the icy roads, I didn’t know anyone else who was present. I can tell you that my right arm felt detached from my body, and that after reaching up to touch the bloody left side of my face, I didn’t have enough energy to move again. I briefly saw the face of the kid who had t-boned us hovering above me; inexplicably, I seem to recall noting that he was good-looking. For the duration of the ride to the ER, the tight, restrictive C-collar around my neck had me in a state of panic. I worried little about who was going to break the news to my parents. Everyone had cell phones, I figured. I wouldn’t be lost in the ER, on a gurney somewhere all by myself. Someone would come for me.

*

I believe it must be a supreme act of faith—in what, I’m not quite certain—to do what my parents did at the swimming pool. To pick your child up, to bless them or pray over them or think nothing at all, and then to fling them forth into what might harm. Some people might call it the ultimate aberrant act—chucking your baby into a swimming pool on purpose. It is one thing, I think, to let go of your child, to offer him over to an unknown deliberately, all the while standing by, controlling the variable that is yourself—your fear, your parental instinct, the impulse to dive in after. It is one thing to willingly fling your child into the water. It is another when the world does it for you. No one but she herself will ever know what it is my mother was thinking when she received the phone call telling her that very thing: that one of her children had been flung headlong into the water without her consent, without arms outstretched to catch her.

For a woman who chose to marry an avid hunter and fisherman, who has spent much of that married life cleaning, gutting, quartering and grinding moose, or scaling and beheading dozens of fish at a time, my mother occasionally displays a desperate panic when faced with blood. I suppose, given that this is when one of the six of us injures ourselves, her fear of blood is not of the blood itself, but of what’s happened to the bleeder. She has dealt admirably with split lips and eyebrows, with one brother’s chin gashed all the way across (Gabe tripped and fell on the metal lip of the shower; we got at least a few lollipops each out of that one), with the screwdriver lodged in another brother’s palm (Levi claims he was fixing the trucks on his skateboard; none of the rest of us even knew what a skateboard truck was.) She, fairly calmly, has even handled my little sister belting Gabe in the face with a rock. I suppose the deciding factor in her level of calm the night of the accident was what she later told me the doctor had said:

If she had been in any worse shape, or if she’d been any older, she would have been dead.

The only thing I remember hearing the doctor say was that it would be no problem to stitch up my eyebrow, right there in the ER. All he needed, he averred, was some local anaesthetic and a suture kit. He did just what he’d said, my mother standing somewhere else, refusing to watch as the needle slid in and out of my skin. My mother remembers but that single statement, the one that brought that latent motherly terror to life. She masked her fear from her children, usually, accustomed to running through her ‘crying child’ checklist before pulling out the first aid kit or calling my father to come take a look:

Are you bleeding?

Is anything broken?

Are you dying?

Is anything on fire?

Then you’re fine.

I was not fine. And so my mother was not fine, every maternal fear there is solidified into one. Although I was well aware that she disliked the sight of blood, and especially of her children bleeding, her reaction surprised me. Sometimes the strangest reactions are those of the person who hasn’t been hurt, who’s visiting you in the hospital, just someone bringing flowers or a paperback novel. I had assumed my mother, being my mother, would do something, well…motherly. Touch my hand, perhaps, or stroke back my hair. Instead, and this I saw from the usual hospital-bed angle, which is to say hovering over my face slightly to the left; she leaned down a little, frowned hugely at my newly-stitched forehead, and said, I’m going to go call your father.

*

I do remember a ragged series of vignettes that is most of my family arriving in the ER. First, my sister. She wouldn’t come near me. I was not given the opportunity to see her face hovering above mine as I had my mother’s, but, in a disorienting fashion, I could hear her. I guessed she was standing at the foot of the gurney, but I couldn’t tell. Since they hadn’t cleaned the blood from the left side of my face, I was afforded vision only from my right eye, and only straight up above me. My ears, however, were perfectly fine, and they told me my sister’s reaction quite clearly. She was sobbing over there somewhere: Oh my god. She’s all broken…

A number of minutes later, Gabe, the eldest of my younger brothers (there are four). In his usual manner, he stuffed his hands in his pockets (I heard him do this, as he stood close to my head) and nodded down at me. His slightly gruff and awkward manner reminds me very much of my father; neither of them is good at talking about ‘feelings’; when Gabe and I see each other off at the airport after a visit, it’s a quick one-armed hug, a pat on the back. We don’t really say ‘I love you’. Gabe’s reaction didn’t surprise me when at last he said something: Huh. You look like shit.

Too young to drive themselves over, and exactly young enough to potentially get in the way, the youngest three brothers—Steven, Levi, and David—were still at home. It was just as well, I suppose, since after Gabe arrived, I was moved around, wheeled off down a hallway for x-rays and MRIs, the buzzy-bright hospital lighting hurting my eyes. The x-ray room is the last thing I remember; I must have fallen asleep for the first time shortly thereafter, and would spend most of my six-day hospital stay doing nothing but sleeping. Here is something I do not remember: my father’s arrival to the ER.

*

On one of those six days, having woken up for a little while, like a free diver simply coming back up for air before heading back underwater, I was greeted by all three of my youngest brothers and one of my cousins. Grandma Ann—my father’s mother—was up in Alaska visiting, and she accompanied them. My three youngest brothers—Steven, Levi and David—and cousin Alison had pooled their money to buy me a gift: a new sweatshirt to replace the one cut from my body. Grandma Ann had brought one too, later, Gabe brought me a present of his own; yet another hooded sweatshirt, this one black with red lettering. When something is lost, my family is the kind who replaces it: stuffed toys, shirts or hats that remind us of favorites stained or shredded, especially if one of us has been sick, when we’ve been afraid for one another. Once, when I was a toddler, having my fingers pricked for blood tests, Gabe appeared at the doctor’s office with a stuffed Rainbow Brite dog—this is one of my first memories, in fact. But for our ability to give gifts to one another, we are unable to express what we really mean: that we have been sleepless, worried, and in despair; that when someone we care for may be taken from us, or is hurt, we fill the spaces made by our fear with things—my mother bakes bread or cookies for sick neighbors; we buy novels and books of crosswords when someone is in the hospital; my aunts proffer bottles of wine and movies for a break-up. The fears of my brothers, my cousin, my sister, my grandmother—these are spaces filled with fleece and pull-strings, with the sweatshirts they brought me because they feared that I would be lost.

My father was there from time to time, I’m sure. I heard his voice as I came out of long naps several times, radiating out from his position at the foot or by the side of my bed. The quietude, the air of organization and knowledge that have comforted me always, were there without question. While I can’t recall him ever touching me, or adjusting my pillow, or bringing me drinks of water, I liken the atmosphere created by his presence to a specific memory from childhood. I was probably seven, maybe eight years old, very sick with a fever that caused me to have bizarre nightmares. In these nightmares, I was surrounded by nothing but undulating, pulsing black and white shapes, and a high-pitched continuous whine rang in my ears. For whatever reason, these nightmares forced me into a state of panic on that particular night. I was exactly lucid enough to remember where my parents’ room was: out my bedroom door, take a right, take another right before the kids’ bathroom door, down the hall, through the living room, into what we called the ‘new addition’. My parents slept on a bed that folded down from the wall, big and comfortably. My father had built it himself. Even in my terribly ill state, the one thing I can recall is this: I knew my father would be in that room sleeping. I needed to get to my father. As soon as I crawled into the big, foldout bed with my father, I fell asleep. I know this because I remember my mother—who had been out at my aunt and uncles’, I believe—coming home, which woke me up; she asked my father why I was there. He replied with something, picked me up, and carried me back to my own bed. This did not frighten me over again. I knew my father was there. This was not true of the ER. I fill my father in: present, as he is in the pictures from the swimming pool, yet periphery, there because he must have been, because otherwise, whose arms were those, stretching out toward me?

*

My mother is the one who nurses us when we are sick. She is the one who, faced with a child so sick they refused to eat, would park one of us at the dining room counter and ask if we wanted some ice cream for breakfast. She once camped out on our living room floor with a stomach-achey, crying me and called it ‘our picnic’; never mind that the picnic consisted solely of flat 7-Up. My father is the man who taught us to shoot bows and arrows in the backyard, who once forced a trout hook back out of my chin after I’d been hooked by Gabe’s botched casting. As I spent the few weeks following my discharge from the hospital back on the couch in my parents’ house, my parents, together—Mom with her offerings of cold juice, Dad rising early in the morning to check on me—pervaded my senses, dulled as they were by too much sleep and pain medication. More healing than the medication and the bandages, this sense of being back at home, surrounded by my mother—care and concern, ice cream for my sickness—and my father—the arms outstretched from the corner of the photograph. Once again I was learning to swim. I couldn’t bathe myself without someone helping me drag my useless right arm out of its shirtsleeve. Everything I did, I did left-handed, shuffling around the house in a pair of my father’s old sweatpants and one of my new sweatshirts Once, at dinner a few days after being discharged, I was praised for slowly eating almost all of a baked potato. My parents were a team through all of this, doling out pills, giving pillows, checking back with the hospital about bills and aftercare and checkups. Another way to fill the space: You are living. We will put your life back in order. Gradually things returned to their normal movement. Although I can’t remember doing much but sleeping and watching TV for some weeks, these boring sequences—sleep, bathe clumsily, eat, take pills, watch T.V.—are nevertheless memories. It wasn’t until over a month afterwards that I would learn how my father’s memory of the accident, layered over the accident itself, consisted of what sounded at first like nothing but a song.

I was sitting at the kitchen table one evening listening to music. My father was nearby—perhaps making dinner or doing the dishes. My mother was in their bedroom, probably sitting on the fold-down bed, doodling plans for a new dream house or taking a nap. My brothers and sister were all off on their own, watching TV or at friends’ houses, or outside playing basketball in the driveway. The ways in which we’d lived with each other, eaten, played, slept—all these small routines filled the house with the white noise of family, a white noise that I was drawn out of by the melody of a Rufus Wainwright song:

I heard there was a secret chord

that David played and it pleased the Lord.

But you don’t really care for music, do you?

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth.

The minor fall, the major lift,

the baffled king composing

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

It’s a beautiful song, touching in its simplicity, just a guy and his piano and a simple chord progression. It was on a movie once, “Shrek” I think it was. My father, who will only listen to songs like this—just guys and their guitars or pianos, simple, like those he remembers from his own childhood—looked up from his cooking or dishes, and paused for a second. He leaned out of the kitchen and said,

“You know, when you were having your car accident, I was listening to this song.”

It was said in his regular, matter-of-fact voice, and yet what it meant caused a wave to wash over my core. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what it meant, even though simply hearing the words had such an effect. For a long time I attempted, using the exaggerated tries at reason that occur when I am faced with moments like these, moments I ought, I suppose, to simply let be in their import, the way they change what I remember and what I think about what I cannot recall. I tried to logically piece together the timeline. When did the song begin? Was it playing before or after my mother made the call from the hospital? How could my father possibly have known that the two things occurred at the same exact time? Finally I realized that none of that mattered. Finally the revelation of what this memory meant to my father, and therefore to me, came about. What it meant was this:

Because, at the time of the accident—the time of car hitting car, of bitter Alaskan winter night’s cold, of my body hurled into darkness—the word ‘Hallelujah’ was pronounced in a song, my father had never doubted that I would live. Some might call it out of place: ‘hallelujah’ is a word of rejoicing, what some call the highest word. How could it be joyful, against that scene in the darkness, that scene that might have resulted in my death? But because my father is faithful, and because he remembers what I do not, I believe that the song was a comfort to him, that it was joyful because of what he knew then. I believe that the simple chorus replaces my own lost memories, gives me over to my father’s knowledge that I remained among the living, although I myself was unconscious. I am grateful for having survived, yes, although to what or whom precisely I don’t quite know. I am grateful to others’ memories for filling in my spotty one—my father’s, my mother’s, those memories running in tandem while mine could not.

If the accident were a movie, its soundtrack would be Rufus Wainwright, singing his hallelujahs over the ringing of the telephone. Its visual sequences would play out simultaneously: my father at the computer, turning up the song; my body flung through the cold, clear sky, or strapped to a gurney, speeding to the hospital; my mother picking the phone from its cradle, unsuspecting. What my father remembers: that a single, bright word struck him—‘hallelujah’ from computer speakers. What my mother remembers: mostly that she was terrified, that she went to the hospital alone. That her checklist of fears was real. What I remember: only waking up.

*

The accident was, of course, many years ago, and the injuries have all healed. There remains a scar through my left eyebrow, one that surprises people—most only notice it in the right lighting, or when I’m not wearing make up, and immediately they ask me to recount what happened. I’m getting pretty efficient at detailing everything, but only up to the moment of impact. After that, I rely on what I’ve been told: bits and pieces from Tim and Sarah, some from the doctor who stitched me up, some from my mother. The ordering of events doesn’t always sound the same. I don’t always include the same details or names or descriptions of vehicles; the announcement of it all seems superfluous, the scar itself enough a memory. I cannot describe to anyone that the most vibrant recollection is not a true memory, not that sequence of images dredged up by sight or smell or sound.

I remember the accident most vividly when that Rufus Wainwright song comes on. Sometimes, in need of reassurance or a reminder that I’ve lived, I play it repeatedly, turning the volume up. In place of that hour of unconsciousness, my memory fills up with a vision of my father, sitting as he must have been that night—in front of his computer, reading the daily news online, some awareness woken by the first moments of the song. These are his memories, not mine, and yet I can feel them, the immersive realizations he came to covering up the fear he must have felt. There’s a montage running through my head at moments like these, much like the motion picture I imagine my body’s flight to be, a series of half-lit images that in fact I never saw. I play the song so that I don’t forget what never, in so many respects, actually happened to me, and the blank space in my memory fills up like an empty vessel with something strange and overwhelming. I’m recovering once again, having almost drowned each time in renewed astonishment that I’ve survived. These things I don’t remember play over in my thoughts as the song does through its fuzzy speakers, a voice under water telling me what I’ve come to know—faith, my father, ‘hallelujah’.

Why, yes, I am kind of a socialist hippie.

I wrote this eons ago for possibly one of the best classes I've ever taken-with one of the best professors, who shall remain nameless. But, I've been thinking a lot about work, what it really means, and why it's valuable to me to consistently 'work', rather than taking on the attitude that if I didn't have to, I wouldn't...

Throughout Karl Marx’ major works, there is a tone of derisiveness; Marx’ venom is directed towards that class of people which represents capitalism. His sympathies are reserved mainly for the lower—class, and in particular for the working class. Conception of the state of the working class as unacceptable, as objectified, is extremely important to the understanding of Marx and his ideas. To work, as it stands today, has become a detached, even degrading process, by which men are removed from the very natures and desires that inspired them to labor, to create products to begin with.

In order to better understand how it is that men can be completely segregated from his occupation and the fruits of it, we must first understand Marx’ ideas about alienation; how does it come about, and through what avenues might it be avoided? Here, we see that there exists a relationship between workers, and the products that they create and export to the outside world. What makes a relationship such as this possible, when ‘products’, as most would see them, are inanimate, expendable objects? Marx seems to believe that a product is imbued with the essence of its creator; when someone labors to create something, it becomes a part of them. For example, a woodworker who carves a great statue has spent his energies upon it, such that the statue is now dear to his heart; in a way, it now holds a personal attachment for him. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that the very essence of human-ness is removed from us when we begin simply working; labor becomes not a reason to exist, but a means by which we simply survive. Marx is also wholly opposed to the processes by which men become removed from what he calls “the sensuous external world”, meaning that world around us which is completely natural, is nature itself. Another issue of great concern to Marx is that of the appropriation of this external world; he maintains that, when made to labor extensively, we become detached from the true purpose of it. It becomes less an appreciated “means of existence” and more an indirect means of survival. We are no longer connected to that which has sustained our means of work.

What is most repellent to Marx is not this idea of alienation itself, but the final outcome of being thus removed from our once inherent rapport with the world around us. Marx states:

“ In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a slave of the object….”

This is illustrated as a rather monotonous cycle, throughout which man receives work itself (a job) and then produces something by which he is able to subsist. Without work itself, and without the product to sell, or to get paid to make, he cannot exist. Marx offers several juxtapositions that illustrate the eventual result of this cycle, which, he says, rotates in accordance with the laws of political economy. The relationship of worker to product/production is presented as a nearly-parasitic coexistence: for example, the more the laborer expends, the less he receives; the more value he creates (the more product), the less valuable he himself becomes. As alienation of worker from product is discussed, so is the alienation of the worker from the means of production; after all, if one becomes removed from an object, it stands to reason that one would also become rather indifferent to the fabrication of that object in the process.

During this sense of what Marx calls “alienation of labor”, the work begins to externalize itself from the laborer. It is no longer in his nature to do the work he is now required to carry out. (Perhaps this can be likened to a desk clerk continuing, day after day, to file papers, all the while knowing that she was born to be on Broadway.) Unable to fulfill any personal hopes or dreams while laboring, the worker must therefore turn to leisure for a feeling of well-being. In some respects this is a valid argument, since most of us can relate to the fervent daydream that five o’clock might roll around sooner, allowing us to adjourn our workplaces and go fishing.

Throughout his discussion of alienation of labor, and of the process of laboring, Marx emphasizes that the products being created are always expended, never taken in; the energy and effort of working are always for the benefit of others, not for the worker himself. Here we discover the true reason for his dislike of alienation in its various forms. Since the products themselves have become alien, and the activity of fabricating them is not only alien, but also forced upon us, it cannot belong to us. If the worker himself is not the recipient of any such benefits, then some other human being must be. Thus, using the comparisons given earlier, such as that of the worker becoming less valuable while his work is more so, the labor/product that has caused so much degradation to the laborer must be doing the opposite for someone else.

Marx uses this demonstration of opposites to illustrate the point that there are two factions of society being created by alienated labor: that of the worker, the oppressed, and that of the man who does not work; he also suggests that there is a relationship between the capitalist, and work. Recall that one of Marx’s greatest nemeses is the concept of capitalism, and there lies the basis for much of his opposition to alienation, which he sees as supporting the capitalist agenda. A large portion of his ire is also reserved for the fact that, using the theories already discussed, the inevitable result of alienation is the emergence of private property. To Marx, whose Communist Manifesto is a treatise of one purpose only, that being the abolition of such private property, this is utterly repugnant. Therefore, in order to further his theories about Communism, Marx must have had to attack that which undermined such ideas, namely the concept of alienated labor.

Post-First-Snow/Variety Show

Music.

It's there, although it seems it isn't. The un-sound of the world around me in a snowstorm is unmistakable; as has been posited many a time, it's not a muffling, nor an absence of sound, but rather a constriction of wavelengths, the shortening & refining of the frequencies of certain elements: feet on snow, breath, the snow itself falling.

On a blizzard-y day, you can hear forever.

Roadtripping from island to island on the way to Bellingham last weekend, I stumbled on the track 'The Gloaming" by Radiohead. God, it's bass-heavy. I wanted to throw myself up against a speaker bank & let go; while I don't miss the scene at all, nor a lot of the people in it-at least the ones I knew when still going to house parties & raves & CD release parties, their glazed-over demeanors too much finally-there's something about bass-heavy music that's so primal I can't stay away from it. Ecstatic stasis: the rhythm & frequency of something matching a heartbeat, a breathing pattern, a circadian emotional rhythm equal to your own, whether you recognize it or not.

Some band who'd clearly idolized Everclear a little much in their adolescence played in Bellingham last weeked. They tried to cover Mumford & Sons' "Little Lion Man" 2 octaves too high, in a major key, with no banjo. Something in my inner ear shattered. Then we left the bar.

What frequency, what tonal compunction was it, I wonder, that brought me to you? That held me in place, head flung back, waiting? No matter. It's winter again. Everything is tuned down a half-step, its key shifted from minor to major, sleep & snow & flat light slowing everything to a pace we all match-here on the edge of this piece of land, ocean on three sides, parallel highways on the other.

There's a specific pitch to tires rotating over asphalt. A different one to your forehead on mine. Yet another to our voices-whether I should put them together, or split them into clefs, I'm not sure.

The wind is throwing snow from the cedars into the windows, across the roof: cymbal rush. I've settled into a beat here that I think I can sustain. I write letters. Poems. Sometimes I sing. These words are so far-flung, and so close to one another, like a chorus singing rounds: make new friends, but keep the old. One is...

One is ever a currency; a ha'penny for a tune, minstrel, bard.

All of a sudden?

Sometimes I wonder if, because I'm short of stature, my growth occurs in heart and mind, since it cannot in body; sometimes, it feels as if I'm catching up to myself, doing so in leaps and bounds, growth spurts of the spirit that I can't keep up with, and it lays me out, and builds me up.

This last weekend is an example of such growth, that, like the Grinch, my heart has swelled up to 20x its size. After a long and raucous 'family' dinner (for we've cobbled together a family here, of friends & fellow volunteers), and a decent night's sleep, nine of us trooped out to Tarboo Bay for some conservation work, consisting of pulling invasive English ivy from a location around the beach from the bay. The water was low when we arrived, and we picked our way through piles of driftwood stacked feet high, into our site.

The weather was clear but brisk, and the bay itself a wide, glittering stretch of water. Few houses lined it. Old pilings dotted the way out to sea. It smelled of mud and beach grass and pine. We worked. And while we worked we shouted. We hollered and cussed and hacked things with tools, pulling mats of ivy up by hand & stuffing them into burlap sacks. We talked nonsense: meatloaf pizza, the movie 'Deliverance', Bill Clinton, a record number of 'your mom' jokes, and 'that's what she said' one-liners. The wind blew in. Someone hacked up a stump. The stream bank was slick with mud. Someone else tried to run up it and failed. And we laughed. Oh, how we laughed.

Gut-constricting, leg-crossing, contorting laughter. At everything. At the names of plants, invasive or not. The girls at the boys' manly posturing with pruning shears & hoes. The boys at the girls' occasional shrieks of disgust. At the wind, the bay's nearby waves against the shore; at the gulls. At life.

It was backbreaking work, but. After only 2 hours, we all felt exhausted. The clouds had rolled in a bit & the wind was now whipping through the trees. Yet we detoured several times on the way home, tarrying in old-growth apple orchards, long abandoned, to shake down & pick up as many as we could. More laughter. Someone stepped in bear scat, prompting a lengthy discussion of shitting in the woods in its varying forms. Bags & bags & bags of apples. Blackberry brambles. Exhaustion.

I called it being "blissed out on life"-this curious & overwhelming feeling of satisfaction with the day, with the people around me, with the world. I feel smug, & sated, & overdone with the joy of all of this: apples & headwaters & laughing, with the revelation of being both small in a huge world, and big enough to take it all in.

I learn. Every day. My heart is expanding with thankfulness for what I'm taught. Today I learned to be forthright, firm & fair all at once. To wrangle back neediness in favor of love; the fallibility of what we become when we're shrewish & tired & want only to be comforted, when what we ought to do is give comfort instead. To accept my own distances-from myself as well as from others, the perspective gained by maintaining proximity: human beings can orbit each other, too, when they need to, & sometimes they must.

I'm taught that I'm capable of this-that I can take responsibility for what I'm good at, or bad at, or must be cognizant of. That this should not mean an argument, or hurt feelings, or a slight. That it simply means that I'm here, and present, and must therefore be willing to be fallible.

To be humbled.

I am. Because, as easy as it generally is to say the opposite, to dwell on a sliver in the skin, the chill instead of the warmth that comes after, it humbles me to give pause and then say that, irrefutably, my life is amazing. And more than that, that I am surrounded by stunning people who teach me something new every day-about them, about myself. About what it means to give, to teach & be taught. About laughing.

At everything. Every single day.

Poetry break!

This was inspired by an absolutely incredible day of, first, conservation work, and then, a little apple picking expedition with friends.

Apple-picking in Late Afternoon

And, when we’d come back—across cloud-gray piles

of driftwood, beach grass

laid flat by the tide, jeweled with tiny mussels—there

were apples

shook down from trees into hands

puckering mouths

unable to contain the shouting laughter

that had rung out all day

stringing together—the baritone and alto and high

we strange

seabirds, we gulls

and now, we grazers, joy-slaked

juvenile deer, rubber boots stamping out

our stakes: this patch of nettles, this old-growth

orchard—hills swept with wind

and with light—this

red-leafed spreading tree,

to which we can do little

but gasp, and paw, and exclaim—

look at it will you

just look

just look

"And that was no small thing, the pain you felt..."

This poem has been coming back to me time and time again all week long; or, rather, the final two lines of a poem-what I believe might be the most poignant sonnet I've ever read, written by a dear friend of mine.

We all agreed, on one day or the other this week, that it had been the hardest to date. I can't say for certain, beyond work woes, or being short on gas money, or just flat out being overwhelmed, why anyone else had such a rough time, but in a nutshell (a large one), here's mine:

As aforementioned by J-Sqwalles, one of our team members, I found a dog in Port Angeles. He was skinny, dirty, scared, hungry, and alone, and a golden retriever to boot. Who's NOT a huge sucker for golden retrievers? Seriously. After much coaxing and several pilfered chicken breasts, myself and my friends Marie, Elizabeth, Paige managed to get him into Elizabeth's car, and drive him to the Humane Society.

It was a bit of an ordeal, but after a quick exam and a scan, it was determined that he was not tagged nor microchipped, and as the HS was closing for the weekend, they advised that one of us take him home and care for him. We left Marie's phone number.

I christened him Persy, and after a bath, being made much of, and several metric tons of treats, he was doing much better. We played fetch. He came home to Port Townsend with me and slept on the bed. His tail filled out with brushing, and he came when I called him, even by this new name. I have had golden retrievers all my life-as my father's field dogs, who swam and hid and fetched dummies and ducks, as puppies from litters we donated to the Guide Dog organizations to train. My own last, most loved pet was a golden named Winston. Persy was no exception. I loved him immediately.

A week or so later, it came to rise that Persy DOES have an owner, a very nice lady named Lorraine who entrusted the care of her beloved dog to the wrong person, a person who tied him up outside alone and left him, and didn't bother to go looking for him when he got lost. Lorraine wanted to come pick Persy up immediately. It was Monday.

It was also on Monday that I walked into my 4th grade classroom, where I work with several very troubled and problem children. They are my 'boys'-a freckled, tousled, motley little crew who, no matter how many pencils they sharpen during class, or bathroom breaks they take, or loud noises they make, are still doing their best. They're doing the best they can. I was told that B., one of the students I'd been working with, was unexpectedly pulled out of school, and moved. His parents were perpetually late, or not in attendance at his conferences and plays and presentations. They were on welfare. B. has been sleeping on relatives' couches and floors for weeks. And now he was gone. All that progress was gone.

Lorraine called again. Her aunt and uncle would be in Port Townsend that evening to pick Persy up. Persy, my now-beloved dog, who I hadn't slept without since I found him. B. was gone. Just a couple of days ago, we sat in my classroom eating Dum-Dums mystery flavored suckers and doing fractions. He was learning. He WANTED to learn.

My friends were stressed out, too. I'd been getting texts and calls all weekend. My best friend, my rock, is on the verge of a divorce. I had $20 to my name until payday.

Lorraine called again. She really is very sweet. She praised my care of Persy.

"I want to send you some money," she said, "for the vet bills and other things. And a reward, I'm just so grateful you found him!"

But I don't WANT a reward, lady! I want the dog! Can't you see how badly I want the dog?

"Ok, well, my aunt and uncle will be there to pick him up soon, I'll have them call you."

I had to leave the classroom. I went outside in the chilled sunshine, and sat on the back steps, and cried. Yes, I cried. What else was I supposed to do?

Lorraine's aunt and uncle showed up. Persy looked confused for a second as we loaded his box of treats, food and new toys into their truck. He wagged his tail first at me, and then (oh, the relief...), at them. They tied him up in the truck bed and drove away. I cried more when I saw him hang his head over the edge, looking back at me. I cried while I walked to the mail box. I cried when I got into bed at home.

And then this poem came back to me, perhaps in my sleep. Perhaps the next morning, which looked as sad as I felt-full of fog and misty rain:

"I wanted to give you not was but is.
Love, all I could build to give you is this"

It had always seemed to me so melancholy, until I thought of my parting conversation with Lorraine.

"Do you eat fish? Salmon? I just feel like I should send you something. I can't thank you enough."

About B. and his efforts and his serious little face over his math homework, and how instead of getting testy, he'd finally started to smile at me instead.

About all my friends. The new ones. The old ones. The ones I've yet to make. About how this is, indeed, a two-line testament to what we're all doing, in AmeriCorps, and in our daily lives.

We are not here to do what's "right"-should I have sent Persy back, not knowing if he'd be well taken care of? What about B.? How do I know what's right for him?

We're not here to do what's definitively "right", or to tell someone what's wrong. We're not here to do things by the book, nor to do whatever we want.

We come here, and we do our best. We do the best we can. We build our own this: our own little towers of heartache and compassion and pride, and we stand beside them, knowing that they still stand, no matter how crumpled, no matter not white nor picket.

We do what we're asked, and more. We do the best we can, always.

* from "Late Valentines" by Derick W. Burleson (Never Night, pub. Marick Press)

Little Hamlet By the Sea

I can't believe I live here...

It had never occurred to me that I might fall immediately in love with this new place, and yet it's happened. We're right on the water. The fog rolls in off the strait and covers everything at night. The atmosphere and sea-smell are similar to coastal Alaska, and there are gulls and seals and otters in the harbor. All weekend long I drifted around the docks looking at boats: trawlers, sloops, dories, dinghies, and long-liners, inlaid with hardwood or mother-of-pearl. Boats that people live on, handcrafted, that are a way to make a living but more than that, here, a way of life.

I've met so many people, and absorbed so much information in the last week and a half. There are 40 volunteers with the North Olympic Corps this year-more than they have ever had. And every single one of us brings something enlightening and new to the table. It was incredible to be welcomed to the job and this new place by an entire group of people who are cohesive, united in our differences perhaps more than our similarities. Whether it's at work, or sitting around at the local pub over beers at dusk, or wandering around town, I've been impressed upon by our backgrounds and stories, by how much everyone wants to be here, and how certain we all are of what we're doing here, and why.

It was difficult to leave Alaska, knowing that it's home, having thought that I'd never feel comfortable somewhere else. My sense of community was eroding, though, worn down by more frequent instances of violence in the city, by the feeling that something was missing, and not knowing what. I feel here like a child must when learning to walk: surrounded by things that are stunning, fragrant, delicious and now attainable. We are all embarking on the missions we set for ourselves out of altruism, preparing to work on improving the environment, housing, education, and the lives of children. There are festivals and live music and fruit trees laden with pickable things.

I am taking my first steps. I am rushing headlong into the world, to make it the world I want it to be. Volunteers will be awarded exactly $11,800 in stipend/living allowance for an entire year. Most of us have applied for food stamps, heating assistance, and transportation assistance.

I have never been so rich.