by Pam Houston
109. Knoydart Peninsula, Scotland
From Euston Station, you take the Caledonian Sleeper to Glasgow, and then the local all the way to Mallaig. If you are lucky you talk a boatman into taking you from Mallaig across to Inverie, and today we are lucky, sharing the boat’s tiny wheelhouse with a Catholic family, three beautiful and frivolous teenage girls, and a Stephen Dedalus of an older brother who hates them all so entirely we can taste the venom dripping out of his ears.
Our first sight of Inverie is the tiny line of whitewashed buildings strung out along the shore of the bay; almost insignificant under the towering bulk of Sgurr Coire Choinnichean. Claire and Emma are waiting for us on the dock, two heads of brilliant red blowing in the substantial wind. It is six miles from Inverie to Airor, over the hills that are so green you think they have got to be kidding, on a tiny farm lane barely wide enough for the tires of the jeep that came with the vacation home, around the west end of the peninsula and past the Plastic Mary.
There is only one bar on the peninsula, the Old Forge, recognized by the Guinness Book as the remotest pub in Britain. There are guitars and banjos on the wall and Arran Sunset and Red Squirrel on tap, Talisker behind the bar, haggis, tatties, and neeps on the menu.
Jonathan, the caretaker of the Airor house got kicked out of the bar five years ago for starting a fight—“out in the lane,” he is quick to emphasize, “not even inside the bloody bar.” The owner told Jonathan he had to stay away for five years, and only a month ago the five years was up so he went back in and the owner said he’d changed his mind, that Jonathan couldn’t come back in the bar forever. “So as I’ve got nothing to wait for, I guess I’ll be going back Glasgow way,” he says. “Now my father’s dead I have naught to be afraid of.”
It rains most of most days here, great clouds rolling in over the Isle of Skye, but then the sun comes out and it is granite and green jewels everywhere. If I sit in the big chair by the window for even a minute, I can see sea lions, dolphins—once even a whale—pop its head above the surface of the silvery bay.
Everything was quiet around here the first few days until Claire’s boyfriend Kent showed up, trying so hard to prove himself it hurts. Charging up and back and around us like a border collie when we climbed Roinna Bheinn, nearly drowning himself trying to swim to a tidal island, taking so long for his turn at Scrabble the games don’t end till 2 a.m.
Claire believes in using something called sow pods, two-letter words like ee that nobody has ever heard of, and they change the game entirely. “That’s fine,” Rick says, meaning it isn’t, “but if we are going all professional-grade, shouldn’t we at least use an egg timer?” Rick is ultra competitive at board games, so much so I have learned that when I win I lose and when I lose I lose; the best case being to call the game somewhere in the middle.
Each morning, with a good strong cup of Monmouth Street coffee, I read to Rick and Emma from a book of old Scottish tales which were told way back when to actual people on this very peninsula. They are full of blood and mayhem, and someone usually gets tricked into killing their mother for a gag, and selling sexual favors with her dead body for a hell of a profit, and it is always the trickiest and the meanest people who get all the money and cows in the end.
Rick gets melancholy about the ways Americans are disconnected from their heritage and keeps insisting to Claire that hers surrounds her. “Look around! Look around!” he says, so we do, but all there is to see are the green green hills, and occasionally a lazy sea otter, and way down the beach the flash of the lighthouse that marks the place where Ring of Bright Water was written, and a group of what Claire calls wild campers across the channel on Skye.
What she means by wild is in a tent, just like when she says Red Indian she means Sioux, or Navajo or Hopi or Ute. What she means when she says Darling! to Kent is Disappointment! and everything she says to Emma means, If I were ever not your mother, I would surely die.
110. Seaside, Oregon
When the wind blows through the aging Best Western in the middle of the night it sounds exactly like a crying baby. It is unaccountable, how much rain the sky above the Oregon coast can hold. In ten days here, we have seen the sun for exactly seventeen minutes one late afternoon, just before it set, when it turned the gray beach golden, and made the hundred plovers that stood together, braced against the shoreline, illuminate magically, like a string of bird shaped Christmas lights, advancing, and receding with the waves.
At the Crab Shack the owner called both Tayari and me sis, repeatedly, as in, “How’s that chowder working for you, sis?” or, “Need a hand, sis, cracking those claws?” He wanted Tayari to know that he was glad she’d come in, that he had no problem with a black president, that he’d lived some places in his life and knew a few things about the destructive power of hate.
In the stranger-than-truth department, one of the 150 students at this residency is a guy named Steve who I lived on a commune with back in Fraser, Colorado, when we were barely out of college. In the bar tonight, we get to talking, and I remember that not long after I left the commune I was living in Utah, and Steve, who had, in the interim, fallen from a helicopter while doing Search and Rescue work and broken so many bones they would still be finding fractures years later, the same Steve who would soon become addicted and then unaddicted to Advil, who would eventually move to Houston and come out of the closet and entirely remake his life . . . Anyway, after the helicopter, but before the Advil and Houston, Steve came to visit me in Park City.
It was early fall, and we climbed to the top of a hill and ate mushrooms which made the late summer grasses beautiful beyond measure, and then we came back down to the tilted little Victorian I lived in and got the munchies, and all I had in the fridge were green and red bell peppers, and we ate them raw, like apples. Steve said, “Whenever I’m tripping, fruits and vegetables really come alive for me,” and I said, “That must be really scary,” and then we realized what we thought the other meant—you know, like Mr. Potato Head?— and we laughed till we peed. Remembering it all, of course, I had to tell it, so now everybody around here is calling him Mushroom Steve.
When another student named Jenny, one of the best writers in the bunch, hopped onstage mid-poem during Pete’s banquet reading because she was moved to convey her gratitude to each of us, students and faculty alike, I heard the phrase manic episode fly around the room, but after it was over I noticed everybody wanted a chance to talk to her; touched in that moment, however she was, by whatever hand it might have been, as if she were the crack in the universe we’d been hell-bent these ten days to step through.
Jenny’s eyes were so bright that day. She had come to my room before the banquet and asked me two questions . . . “How do you slow down?” and “What about gratitude?” which seemed like excellent questions for any aspiring writer to ask. I said I thought that when art took trauma and turned it into form, maybe it was the marriage of innocence to intention that mitigated our terror, that helped us love the world when the world was least lovable. And maybe what she did at the banquet wasn’t crazy at all, but simply a way to answer back to the answer I had given her.
In Tomales, Dorothy said, “We want the sex, the sexy, the catastrophic.” It is times like these when I understand precisely why the Acoma built those ladders to tear holes in the sky.
111. Trenton, New Jersey
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that my back hurts so much because when I was four and in my three-quarter body cast, my mother found it easiest to carry me around upside down like a monkey, using the plaster bar the doctors had fashioned between my knees to keep them, for three and a half months, the correct distance apart. And let’s say she did just that, until my second to last appointment when the orthopedic surgeon said, “You haven’t been carrying her around by this bar have you?” and my mother shot one quick glance at my father and said, “Of course not, no,” and it became a funny story the two of them liked to tell together to friends over a couple of drinks. And let’
s say that when their friends asked, as of course they would, how in the name of heaven a four-year-old breaks her femur, they said that I had somehow managed to pull the giant wardrobe over onto myself, except instead of wardrobe they would have said credenza, because it would have made us sound richer than we were.
I still don’t see how it would make me feel any better to think of the pain in my hip and spine as anything other than my most loyal and valuable companion, the continuous nonvoice in my ear that says, You got out alive and you still get to go.
No two people who have ever lived, loved to travel more than my mother and father. They gave that love, in their fashion, to me.
112. Taylor Fork, Colorado
Becky’s old lead dog died this morning. Becky knew it was coming; the dog stopped eating a week ago. “I was all prepared and everything,” she says, “but still.”
We are in the sleds on our way to Crystal Lake, and even though it’s Matt’s birthday he is letting me drive. If I soften my eyes I can see all forty paws at once rising and falling in front of me, like the world’s happiest meditation.
A long slow climb from Tin Cup, lots of running behind the sled, over a fin and then two hundred yards down, fast and furious to the surface of the lake where we do doughnuts and let the dogs eat snow and try to get Roja to eat some turkey.
Roja is one of the smaller dogs, and hypoglycemic, but nobody pulls harder. She is the only dog who will not stop to rest with the others, who will not even grab a mouthful of snow on the run. When we are stopped, standing full on the brake, anchor set, the dogs cooling their bellies or rolling on their backs, Roja will tug, and tug, as if it is the only thing in the world she knows how to do, as if it is the only thing she will ever do again, as if she can move the weight of the anchored sled, two humans, and all nine of her teammates single-handedly.
Roja has died in the traces twice, Matt tells me. Becky had to bring her back with mouth-to-mouth. Now, on the flat surface of Crystal Lake, Matt offers her ham and chicken, morsels the other dogs would take his arm off at the elbow for, and she looks up at him like he is crazy, gives another smart tug on the rig.
Matt tells me about the last dog death in his family, a dog who truly belonged to his wife, a dog he would have said he didn’t like that much, because he was headstrong and misbehaved.
“One day Max came walking into the living room and just looked at us,” Matt said, “and we knew what he was saying, so we loaded him up and took him to the vet, and I thought, No big deal, no big deal, but when it was all over I started crying and couldn’t stop and it got so bad I started hemorrhaging from my nose, and finally the vet told my wife to take me to the hospital.”
For many years Matt ran a successful construction company in Aspen, building homes for the rich and famous, negotiating what he calls the antics of excess with architects and interior designers and some new thing called a space expert, until he decided to quit and move to Vulcan and work as Becky Barkman’s hired man.
We are on our way down from Crystal Lake in four inches of new snow, a gentle descent that lasts forever, and I only have to touch the brake now and then to keep the sled off the wheel dogs—mostly it is perfect velocity on the brink of out-of-control—even Roja is smiling, and I say, “Counting a prizewinning thoroughbred, counting Back Bowls at Vail in eight inches of powder, counting coming home across the Gulf Stream in front of a following sea in a 57-foot catamaran, surfing down the rollers, this is the very best way to move through space on the planet.”
“Correct!” Matt says, and spreads his arms out of the sled bag and up to the sky.
113. Sacramento, California
Rick comes to California for a whole month and I take him to dinner at the Waterboy, my favorite California restaurant east of the Carquinez Bridge, where you can get white anchovies as a little pre-appetizer appetizer, and the bottled water they serve is Badoit.
We don’t have a reservation, so we have to wait on the patio for a table, and because putting actual miles between ourselves and Sofree has started to make us feel all in love and grand about ourselves, Rick tells the waiter to ask the bartender to make us something interesting, one with rum and one with tequila, and he comes back with elderflower this and Vat #54 that and even though we know they are going to cost twenty dollars apiece it is nice to see Rick be spontaneous.
Before we have time to finish our drinks we are tucked into a corner, and at the four-top next to us there are two couples who seem to have made their money in something like Ski-Doos. They spend a good fifteen minutes reading the wine list out loud, saying succulent, ripe, and juicy. There are jokes on the subject of boob jobs, hand jobs, hose jobs, and blow jobs.
When they look guiltily over at us we smile, magnanimous in love.
When Rick orders the sweetbreads I am pretty sure he is thinking, like, accompanied by some kind of danish, but I don’t say anything, because, let’s face it, I can be a know-it-all bitch. He is a good sport when they come, not afraid to ask the waiter what he is about to put into his mouth, and the waiter is pleased to tell him. By the time the waiter comes back to ask about dessert we are stuffed, and the foursome next door has jollied their way out of the restaurant.
We agree to look at the menu, perhaps split one dessert just to prolong the evening, when the waiter says, “Just so you know, the gentleman at the table next to you has picked up your entire dinner. He felt that you were trying to have a romantic evening and that it might have been compromised in some way by their rowdiness.”
“In fact, it wasn’t,” I say, and then I say, “That’s unbelievable.”
“They’ve left more than enough for dessert and gratuity,” he says, grinning. “How wonderful,” he says, “that there are a few people who remain conscious in the world.”
114. Ashland, Oregon
In the soup and sandwich shop called Pangaea, over a bowl of smoking curried yam soup, I point out to Quinn a painting called Undaunted, They Face the Future Together.
We’ve been singing along to Jim Croce all morning in the Prius, eating red licorice Scotties and drinking IBC root beer. Another thing Quinn and I have in common is that we’ve always liked the dude-ish songs better: “Don’t Fall Apart on Me Tonight” and “The Long Way Home” and even “No Regrets, Coyote.” Quinn always calls friendship the better kind of romance.
I tell Quinn that Rick says his biggest problem with our relationship these days is that I have taken away the cone of tenderness in which I used to envelop him, so we are brainstorming about ways I might find to redeploy it.
Last night we stayed in Quinn’s little sister’s apartment which could have been my apartment, if I had ever had an apartment, when I was her age, which is twenty-eight. There were giant eucalyptus leaves hanging all over the bathroom, a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap the size of a car, lots of pictures tacked to the walls of outdoorsy girls kissing their dogs, a painting that incorporated the words of Khalil Gibran, a lithograph of three monks looking over their shoulders and several B. Andreas posters—those little colorful stick figures who sit on bridges and the man-stick waits for the woman-stick to say something magical and then she does—every item in the apartment chosen and carefully arranged to say one thing: You’re okay . . . really.
Two nights ago on the phone, Trish said she had used up all her frozen fertilized eggs: four attempts, none of them viable. So even though she is broke from the implantations, even though she doesn’t have one spot on her body that is not black and blue from shooting herself up with hormones that made her suicidal, she wrote to a lesbian couple who used the same sperm donor she used the last time, and is negotiating the purchase of one of their fertilized eggs.
Way back when I lived in the commune, in the sheepherder’s trailer called the African Queen, we sat around the campfire every night and sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and “Fido Is a Hot Dog Now,” and one night we called Dr. Bronner because after all the number was right there on the bottle and why not? And he answered, as th
e bottle promised he would, and talked to us for a little while about God.
In those days my mother would send me letters that I remember mostly for her odd habit of putting a few words per sentence into quotation marks. Sometimes it seemed like there was a secrect code I was supposed to break, as in: Your “father” has gone to play “tennis.” More often I couldn’t make sense of her choices, as in: This “morning” I cooked an “egg” for the “cat.”
The first title for this book was Suicide Note, or 144 Good Reasons Not to Kill Yourself, but I changed it, because the contradiction felt dishonest, and also because I realized if I ever did kill myself it would simply be a preemptive strike to keep my father from getting to do it first, which, turns out, is something I’ve been worrying about forever, or at least since I was four.
Patrick told me it would only get worse after my father died, and boy, he wasn’t kidding. Dead, my father can live in the airplane engine, in the black ice on the highway, in the water bottle that is not BPA-free. If you are wondering why 144 reasons, and not 100 or 150, I can only tell you that I have always thought in 12’s, which I hope has something to do with moons or months, and nothing to do with the apostles.
Last time I went to Santa Rita Springs to see Amanda for Watsu she said, “I don’t think it is so much about the story anymore. I think it’s about what kinds of possibilities are out there when you can finally stop telling the story.”
The single most incontrovertible fact revealed in that terrible day of mediation is that Tom truly loves Sofree. He wants her to let him help her be better than she is.
Back in Pangaea, a real couple sits beneath the couple in the painting. They are fiftyish, in brand-new love. The man says to the woman: “I already miss the dogs we haven’t gotten yet.”