by Pam Houston
115. Tucson, Arizona
At the Rockies–Angels spring training game, war planes of every vintage do loop-de-loops in the sky and in the end the scoreboard, which must be the last one in America that only shows balls, strikes, hits, runs, and errors, reads Rockies 11, Angels 10. When I ask Clint Barmes for his autograph, he looks at my hat, the one I’ve brought to every spring training, and just like the boy he seems on TV, says, “Man, you got Matt Holliday! That’s a really cool one to have.”
The King of Hearts is playing for free at the Loft Cinema, and I tell Rick it is terrific and then get consumed with worry that it might seem sillier now than it did in 1979, but by halfway through I can’t stop smiling, and every time Poppy says Coquelicot, I feel it down in my bones.
The next day Rick and I plan to hike up Ventana Canyon four miles to the Maiden Pools, but we can’t agree about lunch. He wants to buy some sandwiches and bananas to eat at the pools, I want to hike hard up and back for four hours and then go to the In-N-Out Burger. There are points to be made on both sides, beyond the customary: his plan is more sensible, mine is more fun, but then he says, “Can’t you see that this is an example of how you need to control everything?” So I swerve into the Safeway parking lot and pull up to the door without speaking.
We manage not to speak on the rest of the drive and a quarter mile up the trail and he finally says, “We ought not to spend the entire hike at this absurd emotional distance.”
I say, “My feelings are hurt.”
He says, “I have some hurt feelings of my own.”
I roll my eyes, say, “You go first.”
He says, “I don’t have to go first, but we have to start somewhere.”
“Do we, really?” I say, watching a water skimmer on the surface of a slickrock pool, “Because I was just thinking, I might be able to suck up all of my hurt feelings, if it meant I didn’t have to listen to yours.”
116. Corrales, New Mexico
Walking in the Bosque with Hailey and Ripley, sandhill cranes in every farmer’s field. Last night we took the train with the roadrunner on its nose up to Ristra, and had one of those dinners where it all was so good and kept getting better—tuna tartar and butternut squash soup—and we talked and laughed like people on the Löwenbräu commercials I used to see when I was a kid in my angry little family and wonder who were these people who got to have a life like that?
Hailey left her scarf, which has major sentimental value, at the restaurant, so she made a run for it, only nine minutes before the last train. When Practical Karen told the conductor Hailey would be back in a flash, he said, “I sure don’t like to be late,” but then a transvestite who was just getting off work at World Imports picked Hailey up at the far end of the parking lot and drove her back to the train platform with two minutes to spare. Which is just one of many reasons it comes as a shock to us this morning when Hailey tells us she voted for John McCain.
“Sarah Palin?” Rick says, caught, as he often is, between the urge toward politeness and disbelief.
“Does she hate transvestites,” Hailey says, “I mean, specifically?”
When the girls all came to the ranch last summer, Mackenzie and Cinder both wore tight black turtlenecks and tight single ponytails and big gold hoop earrings. Mackenzie wore her miniskirt and cowboy boots even though there were no boys there to see her, and she always sat on the piano bench butt to butt with Cinder, and finally Willow took me aside and said, “Are those two sleeping together or what?”
Rick says now that I finally really have him I don’t so much really want him, and if that is true I am the simplest kind of person on earth and the worst. In my twenties I pretended I wanted a long-term relationship but just kept picking wolfmen by mistake. In my thirties I thought my marriage phobia was something chronic I needed to get cured of, like back pain or herpes, but now that I’m almost fifty I suspect freedom is the secret pleasure girls born in the sixties won’t fess up to. What if Janis was wrong, and it’s actually a whole lot better to be free?
Driving over Slumgullion pass at dawn, listening to Ashes of American Flags at volume 50, watching two hundred elk gallop chest deep through the new snow. All my lies are only wishes.
When Madison shouts Pam-Pam! and leaps off the stage into my arms in her lion cub costume, her face all painted with a button nose and whiskers, I think, I cannot save her from her suffering. Nor is it true that nothing I do will make any difference in the end.
117. Barcelona, Spain
Here is the city and across the street here is the beach full of sand sculpture. Giant sand dogs and giant sand cats, peace signs, entire adobe villages with water fountains and tiny fires inside of hogans, even a to-scale Sagrada Familia.
Only the men here seem to want to be naked, strutting back and forth on the sand, dangling, and stretched out on their backs spread-eagle.
“Whoops!” Rick says, because a guy is getting a hand job from his girlfriend out here among the masses, her hand so white it’s almost ghostly against his radically more colorful cock.
Seeing the real Sagrada Familia for the first time, from the Olympic port, backlit and through several windless days worth of carbon monoxide, makes it waver like some holy mirage. When we get up close we see that all of the stone is carved to look like living things: sheaves of wheat, bowls of grapes, and a giant canopy of trees to lie beneath when you talk to God.
Before Sagrada Familia, Gaudí built a house called Casa Batlló that can breathe and cool off and shed water all on its own like an animal. We say gaudy, but we might also say functional, we might say constructed in serious conversation with the world.
Across town, at the Barcelona Cathedral, there is a big hole, with stone steps that descend to the crypt, which contains the alabaster sarcophagus of Saint Eulalia, who was martyred for her beliefs by the Romans. The cathedral is dark, the steps down to the crypt even darker, the sarcophagus illuminated by a creepy red light.
We are standing at the bottom of the steps with a handful of others, looking through ancient iron bars, when a woman starts descending, much too quickly, toward us. She tries to catch herself, but her weight is already too far forward. First it looks like she is falling and then it looks like she is tap-dancing, and then it looks like she is trying to fly, and she does fly, for a moment, with only eight or ten steps still to go. But gravity prevails, and she bounces, headfirst, and then skids to a stop against the gate, her arms twisted awkwardly around her. After a terrible moment where it seems we might all be paralyzed, she gathers her limbs and rolls up to a sitting position, and several of us help her back up the stairs and out of the church.
It’s easy to see what Miró loved: women, birds, stars, and almost anything strongly backlit. At his Fundación on the flank of Montjuïc, it is hard not to fall in love with the names of the paintings even more than the paintings themselves. Women Encircled by the Flight of a Bird in the Night. The Half-Open Sky Gives Us Hope. The Smile of a Tear. The Gold of the Azure. The Lark’s Wing, Encircled with Golden Blue, Rejoins the Heart of the Poppy Sleeping on a Diamond-Studded Meadow.
Out of crushed Venetian glass on the roof of the apartment building he named La Pedrera (the quarry) because of its cave-like walls, its curves and concavities, Gaudí has formed fragments of the angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary.
If Karl Rove’s book can be called Courage and Consequence, what on earth does it matter what my book is called.
118. Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Snake River at sunset, gray glacier water, shiny steel. A pair of trumpeter swans flying north. It is reaching 50 degrees in the heat of the day and the snow beneath our skis keeps getting soupier. Hailey says she doesn’t mind bringing up the rear, but I keep thinking if I were a grizzly bear, I might be about to wake up hungry.
If Rick were here he’d say, “Do you think we are going to get a peek at Mr. Nipper?”
Willow and Practical Karen are waving their poles at Hailey, Nora, and me, and we can’t figure out what they mean
until we are right on top of the she-moose, three of them, agitated and not ten feet off the trail, but we just ski on by like idiot tourists while the locals hide in the trees gripping the collars of their dogs.
On Saturday morning, the whole of eastern Wyoming was closed, so Nora and I drove up the Poudre and stopped for lunch in Saratoga Springs at a place that opened exclusively on the first Saturday of every month. It was only chicken salad but we felt pretty special anyway.
Nora had never been to Wyoming so I insisted we go the Moran Junction way, where you come over the pass and get the first view of the Tetons, side-on, and I don’t know who you would have to be not to gasp. The sun was setting in an orange smudge behind them, making them all backlit with Cecil B. DeMille rays and Nora said, “I knew they were big but I didn’t think they would be like this.”
The marble sinks in my room are decidedly seventies and look like something right out of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Hailey bakes bread and I make beef bourguignon and while it cooks we all get in the hot tub together. Nora and Willow are discussing whether helicopter parenting is a neutral or a derogatory term and Practical Karen says, “What I want to know is whatever happened to benign neglect?”
At dinner everyone is talking about Santiago, and Haiti before that, and Willow says that thing you always hear: If Yellowstone goes, it will take the whole U.S. with it, and Hailey says, “Do you think we should worry about being this close?” and Nora says, “I think if Yellowstone goes, close will turn out to be the good news.”
I get an email from Quinn that says: If freedom is a quantity, or is exchangeable like money, then what if love is, too, such that the love you feel for Rick is measured by the freedom you give him not to get over Sofree and the freedom he gives you to live your come one, come all frequent-flyer life. This might be one way of keeping track of what’s “real,” what’s exchangeable and what’s unspendable, where it turns out that the real reason you won’t spend your father’s money is that you don’t want it to be true that he’ll never give you anything again.”
Nora hasn’t seen Shut Up and Sing, and even if it means driving all the way to Idaho Falls we are determined to rent it. My favorite part is where Natalie says, “Well, now that we have completely fucked ourselves, I feel like we have a responsibility to continue to fuck ourselves.” There, as Quinn would say, is a woman after my own heart.
119. Goosenecks of the San Juan, Utah
Dawn breaks over camp, rose-colored and cool on the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, twenty miles downstream from the town of Mexican Hat. Yesterday Rick and I parked my boat outside the San Juan Friendship Inn and went inside for Navajo tacos and vanilla milkshakes, bought another bag of ice for the cooler, reclaimed our raft and headed down into the deepest, most labyrinthine part of the canyon. We camped below the notch of the Mendenhall Loop, an oxbow in the making where the river turns so hard back on itself that I let Rick off to hike up and over the crumbling canyon wall and he got to the other side faster than my boat could float around the five-mile bend.
Today we’ll load up the raft and glide through the Goosenecks, traveling five river miles for every air mile we accomplish, passing through the Tabernacle and the Second Narrows, the river 3,000 feet below the Grand Gulch Plateau. We’ll have plenty of time to stop and hike the trail built for Henry Honaker’s horse, who fell from it to his death in 1892, and if we are really lucky, somewhere between mile thirty-six and John’s Canyon, the river will give us some sand waves.
The result of a perfect combination of streambed gradient (steep), suspended silt load (heavy), and water velocity (fast), sand waves develop along stretches of the San Juan where the gradient flattens somewhat, allowing the coarser particles to settle out of suspension. The sand grains accumulate and build ripples on the streambed which migrate upstream, and as those dunes build, waves form on the surface of the water that can grow to ten feet before they wash themselves out, the entire cycle taking less than ten minutes.
Now it’s midmorning, and the canyon air is heating up in earnest, the water as flat as a short-order grill as far as the eye can see. It’s a good day for dozing on the raft’s big rubber tubes, limbs dangling in the water, and Rick has fallen asleep with an unfinished sandwich clutched in his hand.
All of a sudden they rise around us, like something out of the Twilight Zone and in about ten seconds the perfectly flat river on all sides of us has grown seven-foot waves. I point the nose of my boat straight into them, and gear is flying everywhere, some onto the floor of the boat, some along with Rick, into the river with a splash.
I want to tell Rick to tighten his life jacket, to point his feet downstream, to pull himself back into the boat with the lifeline, but I can’t because I’m laughing so hard; the canyon so deep and grand, the sand waves so decidedly silly. They make me want to do cartwheels, to give indiscriminate kisses, to hit somebody in the face with a pie. The waves are so big now I can’t see beyond them until the nose of my boat rolls over each crest. The motion is blissful, like skiing bottomless powder, like sailing over a woodpile on the back of a horse you trust.
But the look on Rick’s face is the opposite of blissful and my brain registers alarm. “There’s nothing in these waves that can hurt you,” I shout between giggles, and there isn’t, no rocks, no stumps, no sharp-edged falls. Just perfectly round, perfectly symmetrical, ridiculously large, entirely temporary waves. “Sit back and enjoy,” I choke out, “it will be over in a minute.”
The words are scarcely out of my mouth when, just as miraculously as they appeared, the sand waves shrink and fade, and there we are again, in the Goosenecks, the river as flat as Grampa’s new haircut, and I throw the lifeline to Rick, stow my oars, and haul him in.
120. Point Reyes, California
Redwing blackbird sitting on a wire. White horse, green field, gray barn after a wet winter in California. No place on earth more beautiful.
At Ad Hoc you always have what they are serving: English pea salad, lamb sirloin with sunchokes, peanut butter ice cream over banana bread. Cinder rents the Jasmine Cottage for the weekend and brings some seeds to put in our yogurt that were the miracle food of the Aztecs. On the Internet she shows me a company called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets who will ensure that when the rapture comes, your left-behind animal companions will have good homes with caring atheists: $110 for a ten-year contract, $15 for each additional pet.
When I invite Janine, for the third time, to go to Moloka’i she says, “You don’t know . . .” and pauses, and says, “I’m not really . . .” and pauses, and then points at the room where she does acupuncture and says, “I am my best self in there.”
I say, “I know who you are,” and am pretty sure I mean it.
She says, “I’m just trying to figure out how to be here.”
“Davis?” I say, and she says, “Davis . . . California . . . the world . . . this vibration.”
It hardly needs saying, but if I didn’t have any back pain, I never would have met Janine.
The last time I visited the commune where we sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” Gloria, fifty-one, was pouring hot homemade soap into egg cartons and Bella, fifty-two, said, “Come here, Pam, I want to show you something,” and she took me over to her nightstand and put a medium Pace picante jar into my hand with something that was not Pace picante inside it.
“What is it?” I asked her, and she said, “My uterus. When I had my hysterectomy, I said to the doctor, You can’t have that, it’s mine.”
On the way to the airport, Rick says, “Little yoder running down the road. He’d put a nippins on you, but it wouldn’t hurt that much.” This kind of talk, I know, means Rick is happy.
Sign on the back of a park bench in Tucson: A career with a future! Are you being called to be a Catholic priest?
Being born in New Jersey probably rules out Buddhism, and anyhow, for me, this life, it is something.
When I told Ruby what Sofree said about climbing out of Rick’s hole
she said, “Oh, Pam, Sofree lives in a hole. You . . . me . . . everybody lives in a hole. But what’s great is if you go over and tap on the wall of your hole, you find out we’re all connected.”
“We can only do what we can do,” Rick says, about Madison, and I expect he’s right about it.
When I tell Quinn he calls Amarillo the Riller Diller, it makes her like him even more.
UA #368
AFTER FOUR DAYS AT the Four Seasons Sydney, the Novotel where United puts us up feels not so great. Still we are all in it together, all four hundred and eleven of us, and the pilots and the copilots; a little cheer goes up every time they walk through the lobby.
The next day, Terminal A is back to business as usual and we reassemble at Gate 44. I have bought my greyhoundesque flight attendant friend candy and flowers. Looking at the faces around me, I’d say more than one of us was freaked out enough to have considered an alternative means of transportation back to San Francisco. Looking into steamships on the Novotel Internet was the first time I truly understood exactly how far from home I am.
They board the premiers and premier executives first. Sister’s Wedding Guy and I settle in for another conversation. There are about a hundred of us on the plane scattered through first class and business class and economy plus. Then there is a lull and after a while it starts to seem odd that no one else is getting on the plane.
My friendly flight attendant crooks his finger at me and I meet him behind the partition in the galley. “You’re not going to believe this,” he says, “but a Qantas luggage handler just backed a cart into our number two engine. Nobody’s gonna take this baby out of here today.”
It is only a few minutes later when the announcement comes over the loudspeaker. “One of our colleagues at Qantas . . .” is how they began. By the time we have all shuffled back out to the gate there is another announcement. Since our group has been inconvenienced already, United is going to give us SFO passengers the plane bound for LAX, and make the LAX people stay overnight tonight while the engine on the SFO jet is repaired.