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Little Ben, waiting to exhale...

little Ben, waiting to exhale….

TThe Chevy’s latest quirk is to decelerate on inclines to a disturbing 30mph; as we wound slowly up the road Kate murmured under her breath “This is not Seattle”. I’d been telling her for weeks that we would stay in Seattle, the City of Flowers, because in a silly way I thought my friend Jamie lives there. She doesn’t. She lives in the Cascade Mountains, on the outskirts of Redmond, WA. We passed a building with a jubilant sign declaring “Teriyaki Milk Barn!” and took a left.

I called Jamie five times, crossing little bridges, passing farms pastoral and weird, twisting our way up the mountainside. I looked forward to seeing the home she’s made with her husband, Bryan, a video game developer from Everett. What’s little Jamie been up to all these years?

I can’t really say how we met; she was a grade beneath me in high school, but her smarty-pants program and mine often threw us together. Was it a party? Doubtful–I rarely got invited. Soccer? Model U.N.? Shucks, I forget. She helped me with math homework, I made ouija boards for her friends. In the summer of my junior year, I left home and stayed with her family till graduation. I was given a room of my own and loved it. Jamie seemed to me then a kind of “golden child”: pretty, blonde, smart, friends with the freaks and the geeks (this was before they got their own show), possessing of gentle parents who allowed her a cool boyfriend, and –to top it all off– her mother raised rabbits in the backyard.

The last time I saw her, Jamie was living on Monroe Avenue in Rochester, tending her store that sold chain mail jewelry and black-black dresses, and…I seem to recall a certain little pair of…shiny Boots of Leather? Downy sins of streetlight fancies? You can only wear those things in TOWN, Mavis, not in the country.

We turned up a driveway, rounded the bend and rolled to a stop. A screen door slammed shut and out came Jamie, wearing a black hoodie and slim-fit jeans. From her purple house scrambled a pack of dogs, many dogs! and I knew that Jamie was the same sweet kid of my heart’s memory.
These are the sort of people you want your children around: they’re vegetarians, succumb to ice cream once in a while, compost their own food scraps, and rehabilitate abused animals. He paints, she welds, he cooks, she sews. Sore from our own domestic attempts, Kate and I took heart in the love these two so clearly shared.

Maybe there is hope for us yet. Who knows? Maybe there is lots of hope.

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On the Columbia deck, Gulf of Alaska

On the Columbia deck, Gulf of Alaska

WWhat distinguishes a “good person” from anyone else?

I’m on the Columbia ferry, a 335,000sf rig that has taken us from Bellingham, WA to Petersburg, Alaska, and is now taking us back. The public announcements overhead are preceded by a lute-ish tone sounding like my phone when it receives a text message; Though there hasn’t been a cell signal for days, I scurry after my phone at each “car deck” call. Below us, 134 cars, RVs, vans, and SUVs are held hostage in the belly of the whale, below sea level, along with 50 dogs locked in the cars. Jonah’s song rises up from their throats toward a heaven so far above them now that it must, at times, seem futile.

A week has flown by. I haven’t written anything. If there is a reason, it’s a stupid one. Have I been busy? Have I been tired, or cranky? I was raised in a rather disciplined environment. You could even say that I’ve come to love discipline for its own sake. This isn’t an efficient way to be, but what can you do? I was telling Kate about my appreciation for the steely, “Greatest Generation” characters who fought our wars and built our bridges. The most beautiful part about discipline, to me, is what you might call its “mechanism”. It goes something like this:

1. Person determines to do something that is not effortless (and sufficiently beneficial to warrant the effort, i.e. lose weight, keep in contact with friends, etc.)
2. Person starts out strong, “disciplined”
3. After a week or month, Person starts to falter in her desire to remain disciplined. She wakes up too late to exercise, or she starts thinking that she’ll never be a real artist so WHY draw EVERY DAY?? This is called sabotage.
4. The beautiful mechanism of discipline: Person can relax and simply buckle down to the task. This is because she:
A. Said she would, and
B. Submits herself to a Greater Good–both the good of her endeavors, and the good that comes from keeping your word

Now — isn’t that exquisite? Simply Splenda. Maybe discipline is one of the marks of a “good person”. We certainly recognise it when we see it, and usually with respect. Of course, my discipline falters all the time–as when I’m on a boat trawling up the Gulf of Alaska, on deck in a sleeping bag, trying to get up the get-go to write. I am not nearly so good as I’d like to be.

Last time we were on this ferry, there were entire hordes of elderly couples, a few foreigners, and a harried father with four (five? six?) terrible sons. These boys slept by day and ran about all night, squealing like puppies. I felt sincere pangs of sympathy for Dad–alternating with a wish that he would kill them. But I don’t mean to sound ungenerous.

Generosity is another trait that “good people” possess. They laugh heartily, give freely when they can, and harbor no agenda for recognition or pay. Good people have a generosity of spirit that attends their language and their deeds. I swear, you can see it in their eyes. They brim with a loving sobriety. A generous person doesn’t suffer for the sake of others–that’s something different. That is what we call “masochism”. (I have no problem with masochists, some of my best friends et-cetera et-cetera, but I prefer to call something what it is. In the way that a man without fear cannot be courageous, a man without love for himself cannot be generous.)

In Petersburg, Kate and I saw a movie called “The Straight Story”, about an old man who drives his lawn mower from Laurens, IA to Mount Zion, WI to visit his elder brother. This man is depicted as independent, proud, disciplined and kind–not a hardened soul, not a pushover either–just reliable, human, and good.

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Street view at 11 a.m.

Street view at 11 am.

WWallace, Idaho is one of those towns you drive into and behold through your window, thinking, “my but what a pretty town!” It is buffeted on all sides by the Bitterroot mountains and on the north by I-90, a swooping concrete structure overhead that thins to a ribbon in the distance.

We wanted to stay at The Stargazer Motel, with its starburst neon sign and rooms advertised at $34.50. That’s a price you don’t see often in Brooklyn, not even for a decent acai-goji berry-whey protein smoothie. Kate went inside to procure our lodging, but alas! there was no room at the inn for that price. The lady at the front desk snapped at her, “Just you? (sneering)…or you got someone with you?” Well, everyone likes to bemoan the absence of good customer service nowadays. I tell you, go to The Stargazer–for there is the enemy, and she is Mavis.

In 1883 Colonel W.R. Wallace bought 80 acres of swampy land and started the Hecla Mine. By 1885, his wife Lucy had arrived and named the town Wallace. It quickly became known for its rich silver deposits and semi-legal brothels. Today, Wallace remains a productive mining town, but the working girls are gone. Everyone, in fact, is gone. The antique stores, library, gift shops, pizza parlors, and dollar stores are closed. We stayed at the Brooks Hotel, efficiency rooms with their tiny television sets suspended from the ceiling, angled toward the bed like sentinels from the 1950’s. Absent is the thin-wall din from adjacent rooms, absent is any sound of life at all. Whatever happened to Wallace, Idaho?

The internet provides a few clues. Like any single-industry town, Wallace is wholly dependent on its mining. When veins “dry up” and are not replaced by new ones, miners leave town, taking with them the stores, brothels and other services that support them. The story of Wallace has been one of ebb and flow, people either carried along on streams of molten silver, or washed ashore. It is the only town which, in its entirety, is on the National Historic Register. There exists a determined pride, betrayed by signs like “Center of the Universe” on the corner of 6th and Bank Street, which serves to underscore–not offset–the eerie sense of defeat that seems to rise from the streets like steam. I have felt this defeat before, in towns like Gary, Indiana. I have seen a whole town sad before.

The local supermarket’s motto is “We Honestly Care!” and in a tourist pamphlet I picked up in the hotel we are exhorted to stay for lunch, because Wallace is “Better than Expected!” It made us laugh, but we wondered: What did people expect? More sleuthing online yielded the following nugget:

When the final occupants of the Oasis Rooms left in January 1988 (the last recorded date in the “hotel” registry), they seemed to have left in a hurry. Clothing, makeup, toiletries, food and personal items were all left behind. An accurate and tastefully-presented twenty-minute tour of the upper rooms explains the mystery of the ladies’ hasty departure and gives a glimpse into the town’s bawdy past with details that range from poignant to hilarious….”

Kate and I did not take the Oasis tour, though we do regret missing out on all the touching hilarity that a hundred years of surviving among miners has contributed, no doubt, to the national lexicon. I thought of all those soot-covered miners, the women in their dresses, the saloon floor stained with sweat and alcohol, and the greedy excitement that like a fever infected everyone. I imagined what it must have been like to live in a place with a male to female ratio of 200:1. Reportedly, in 1975 there were five active brothels on Main Street alone.

As we headed out of town I said a prayer for Wallace, Idaho–for its aging miners and hotel lodgers bleary-eyed in the sun.

But I did not look back.

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tour of Lewis and Clark Caverns

Tour of Lewis and Clark Caverns

II’ve been thinking all day about phobias: intense, irrational and persistent fears which can interfere with daily life to the extent that life is arranged around them. Name a “fear”, and there’s a “phobia” lurking in the shadows, waiting with its mouth half-open to seize you. When I was a child, someone told me I was “hydrophobic”. All these years I’ve avoided beaches, pools, and various water sports because of it. Recently, though, I am not so sure. I have no fear of water…I wash my face with it, drink it, take baths in the stuff. What I do have, however, is an acute fear of drowning in water. Does that qualify as a “phobia”? It manifests itself in deep, over-my-head water: I start to hyperventilate, my stomach knots up, and I want to get to dry land immediately. This is the normal behaviour of a mammal that 1. doesn’t swim well, and 2. cannot breathe underwater. It seems perfectly rational to me.

Fear of zombies, on the other hand, is an authentic phobia. There are no zombies! The undead do not walk among us, unless you count i-bankers in midtown. I was alarmed to learn that zombie phobia doesn’t have an official name. The mummy-fearers have a name. Even the people who are Afraid to Look Up have a name. Someone online suggested “ambulothanatophobia,” meaning “fear of the walking dead”. If I Look Up one day and see a horde of zombies coming over the horizon, I will know what to call my feelings. For now, I will accept that there are no zombies, and that I am extremely afraid of them anyway.

This morning, Kate and I went on a tour of Lewis and Clark’s Caverns, discovered by two Montana hunters in the dead of winter, 1892. Despite the name, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark did not explore the caverns (and probably never knew of their existence). The tour started out with a twenty-minute hike at a 7% incline–not too shabby! I found that if I didn’t chat with the other hikers, I could keep my breathing under control. Yes, I know, I should exercise more. There were bats near the entrance of the cave, but I didn’t see them. I was too busy preparing to face the dark, narrow passageways and the terrifying heights to come. I’d gone “caving” before, as a child, but children are not afraid of death. Howe Caverns in the 80’s were a breeze. Kate navigated the high cliffs and slippery stairs before me, so that my gaze always had a safe place to rest. I kept telling myself, “I am a BRAVE spelunker! I am a brave speLUNKer. I AM a brave spelunker!” and this seemed to help. Apparently, I also have a fear of heights, narrow spaces, wide open places very high up, and darkness. But…are they phobias?

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Grapefruit Soup

Grapefruit Soup

LLast night I made grapefruit soup. Grapefruit was all we had so Chunsoon bartered them for veggies to go in our broth. This was not too different from begging when presenting wrinkly grapefruit to plump old couples who are watching satellite tv in their Aerolites. The old people in their RVs took pity on ol’ three percent (there is a reason she went instead of me) and gave her cabbage, carrots, and tomatoes. Voila, grapefruit soup, you know, like stone soup.

Tonight we are in a hotel room in Wallace, Idaho. The whole town is on the national register of historic places. I believe it too. I think there are some old families here in Wallace and they all look like they want to eat us. I mean, they look like a bunch of cannibals. We are outlanders and they are all giving each other silent signals while eyeing our calves. I know I’ll be the first to go. When we don’t come back from this trip, don’t look for our frozen bodies in Alaska, look in the Wallace Hometown Foods meatlocker. I once read a book about a town that saved a lot of money on groceries by eating people from other towns. They liked to get women so they could rape them first. One woman had the foresight to swallow her gag- the cannibals ended up raping a corpse. I suppose that’s one way, sister. Speaking of gagging…

I took a bath tonight, safe in the knowledge that Chunsoon was making me veggie rice stirfry with our campstove on the little motel table. I sat down at the table, warm and clean and not too sad –I had a bit of an appetite. I could smell the garlic from the bathroom. As Chunsoon put the oatmeal carrot soup down in front of me, I started to tear up. She got confused.
“Don’t worry honey, we won’t eat the burned parts,” she told me.
“How could you burn it with all this water?”
“I don’t know how to cook quinoa.”

We both ate a few bites before Chunsoon started saying something about “the thought that counts” and asking if I thought there were any homeless people in Wallace. “No,” I told her, “Cannibalism is a good way to clean up your streets.” Chunsoon always wants to know if there are any homeless people or dogs or little anarchist boys in tight black t-shirts wading through dumpsters to whom we can give our food. Our meals have become a time of examining, questioning, and a bit of snobby commentary instead of about eating, and this weighs heavily on her conscience. I no longer have a conscience and everyone who has ever wronged me will pay. Tonight, she stared at the gummy soup for a while before she walked it over to the trash can. She held it above the can and then started screeching and bouncing and jabbing the pot towards me. “AAAh! You do it! I can’t! OH NO!” She had the same reaction earlier when she cleaned a dead bug off of my windshield with her eyes closed. I should have thrown the soup away for her.

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