by Pam Houston
My oldest and most chronic recurring dream is about a lobster, dating all the way back to grade school. My class is going on a field trip to some kind of factory lodged among the oil refineries off the New Jersey Turnpike. I get separated from the group somehow and think I can hear them above me, so I get into an industrial elevator and push the higher of the two unmarked buttons. As the doors to the elevator begin to close, a man-sized lobster squeezes through, cocks his head at me, and snaps his pincers. I know this is somehow about revenge—lobster was my favorite food even as a kid, and though I wasn’t allowed it very often, though I never had to drop it into the pot myself, I had been in the kitchen more than once to hear the scream.
In the dream, though, I am something other than scared of this lobster. We stare hard at each other as the elevator travels up and up and finally bursts out the top of the warehouse, hurtling upward into the white of the New Jersey sky.
125. Mallorca, Spain
Gina is elegant as the rain in Spain and was raised on a farm in Africa. At breakfast, she cuts her eyes at me when I roll my little round of goat cheese up in the Parma ham, which I assume means she thinks I am a barbarian, until minutes later I see her do the exact same thing.
When I tell her what I thought she thought, she says, “It’s the only way to eat it,” and then she says, “What do you care what other people think, anyway?” It turns out we also both put strawberry jam on our white cheese slices, and that we both have had crocodiles jump into our canoes (though technically mine was a Grand Cayman), mine in Ecuador, hers in Botswana.
The volcano turned this year’s Mallorca class upside down: half the writers couldn’t get in and all the wine tasters couldn’t get out, so the foodies are learning how to write pantoums and the writers are learning about varietals. Claire’s stuck in London, which she says is heaven without any planes in the air. This morning she and Emma rode their bikes to Windsor Castle just to lie on the grass and gaze up at the wide empty sky.
Jen flew direct from the States to Madrid, and Gigi took the bus all the way to Barcelona from Frankfurt, and Freya Coquet, personal assistant to Fat Boy Slim and his wife, had a train reservation to begin with because she hates to fly. Back home in Sussex, Freya is getting a PhD in Writing for Therapeutic Purposes, and looks forward to being able to answer the phone: “Fat Boy Slim, Dr. Coquet speaking.”
Every day at lunch either Rick or I steal an apple to take to the lonely donkey in the hilly pasture at the end of the lane and when we whistle to him softly we can hear him clip-clopping on his sharp little feet over the ridges of slate to meet us.
In our room with the giant square bathtub Rick asks me if I think Pony and Quinn are entitymates and I say, “I think the way it works is that Quinn and Pony are two bodies that the essences of Quinn and Pony are currently inhabiting and those essences are the entitymates.”
Rick messes up the hair on the top of my head. Says, “Well, that’s you and me, pardner.”
126. St. John’s, Newfoundland
The first night in St. John’s we go to Trapper John’s to get screeched in. We eat baloney, get on our knees in front of the bar, kiss a frozen cod, and learn to say, when asked if we are a screecher, “ ’Deed I is, me ole cock. Long may your big jib draw.”
It’s an hour and a half later in St. John’s than it is in Manhattan. The Newfoundlanders are the only people in the world on this time zone and they like it that way. In 1948 they voted narrowly for confederation and they say some people voted from the cemeteries. They are Newfoundlanders first, Irish (or Basque or Portuguese) second, and Canadian third—maybe—depending on how drunk they are when you ask them.
We were supposed to go to Namibia, but Rick, let’s face it, is afraid of Africa, so then we were supposed to go to Greenland, but the volcano erupted and closed the airport in Reykjavík, so we wound up in Newfoundland, not unlike the sixty-five hundred people on thirty-eight planes when 9/11 closed U.S. airspace, except those people landed in Gander, and we landed in St. John’s.
In 1912, it was the Marconi wireless receiver in the Cape Race Lighthouse that picked up the Titanic’s distress signal. All I think of when I think of the Titanic is Celine Dion thumping on her chest, and I didn’t even see the movie, but in real life at Cape Race that night Jack Goodwin said the most famous words in shipwreck history to his stationmate: “My God, Grey, the Titanic has hit a berg.”
Now, hiking out to Cape Race, I think, I didn’t save Rick’s life any more than Sofree ruined it, but without romantic hyperbole, how would we ever move ourselves along?
If I, for instance, go to YouTube and type in Newfoundland and see a series of commercials so staggeringly beautiful it becomes impossible not to go there; even though I know all along I’m being had by a bunch of twenty-eight-year-old hipsters living in a converted low-rise in Toronto; and when I get to the real Newfoundland it is bleak and cold and rugged—in the sense that rugged is one part wild and two parts ugly—and the people are surly and a lot of them subnormal, and I think, In Alaska at least there would have been glaciers and grizzly bears and the midnight sun, mightn’t I also be capable of understanding that the Newfoundland I create in my mind isn’t necessarily bound to either the YouTube version or the all-too-real end of a four-hundred-year-old cod fishery and the invention of all weather siding, and therefore, what would it really cost me to love Newfoundland anyway? Why not, for example, love the puffin, that stripey-beaked bird that flies like a bowling pin, because the whales, the fishermen say, are still twenty miles offshore and being slow about approaching. And when Rick says he loves Newfoundland because it is one of the few places we get to discover together, maybe that right there is reason enough.
What I’m trying to say is that some of the drivers behind my bottomless wanderlust might not be so insistent anymore. What I’m trying to say is that when you are in the good company of a man who loves Don DeLillo and the NHL, of a girl who needs you to teach her to dive and to laugh at herself, of two dogs who sing for their supper and two sweet ancient horses who lie down every morning to soak up the sun, staying home becomes more of an option.
Maybe.
Regardless, I send a whiny email to Quinn and get one back that says: So you travel a long way to spend a few weeks in a place that resembles Buffalo, New York, where Rick is happy but you are confused, where the people are impenetrable precisely because they are not exotic. Perhaps this was always the ending you were looking for. I hope you see a whale, or if not, that is poetic in its way too. Newfoundland as the poetry of absence. Isn’t that what the New Age says it wants?
127. Fallon, Nevada
The house is full to the brim with death art, a cleaver about to pierce the skin of a concrete duck, a dead horse on its side with actual horse leg bones sticking out, a Day of the Deadesque skeleton sitting on every flat surface from side table to end table to bookshelf to fridge, tiny lighted shadow boxes full of artistic inside jokes and a bathroom painted deep purple. It is the kind of house where you think maybe after dinner the hostess will say, “And now that we have eaten, we’d like everybody to draw straws for the human sacrifice.”
The hostess looks mostly sexy and only a little desperate in her red red lipstick and her flowy halter top and it’s clear she can cook like a house on fire. Outside, in the yard filled with lilacs and agonized Christs, a peacock screams without ceasing.
It was always Rori, at the ranch this winter, house-sitting, when the dogs brought home some part of a dead animal. A horse leg with the shoe still on it, an entire hide of elk, three quarters of a freeze-dried coyote—so it was perfect that it was also Rori who had picked us up from the train in Reno and driven us to this house in Fallon.
The Amtrak from Denver was full of 2012 types who thought the volcano portended the end of air travel. There was a couple calling themselves newlyweds (after nine years, wink wink) who kissed between every sip of orange juice. There was Dartanian the musician, who used to play for a jazz band called Chase, and there was the
Reno High School Band at the station, featuring the shy girl with purple hair who ripped a startlingly good version of Hendrix’s national anthem.
I drive through Fallon often, on the way from Creede to Davis or back, but it is usually late and I’ve never stopped for anything besides gas. A few miles east of town on the way to the mines and Utah, but before you get to the giant cottonwood that people seem bent on killing with shoes, there used to be a whorehouse called Salt Wells that had a sign that terrified me about as much as anything I’ve seen in my life. Three little stick-figure go-go dancers that moved somehow, twisted their black and white bodies in some 1960s special effect.
I would pass Salt Wells a few times a year and shudder, say something like a prayer for whoever was inside. And then one year the sign had been shot out with a rifle, and the next year a chain-link fence went up around the place, and the next year someone must have torched it, and now the whole thing has kind of folded in on itself.
Eventually the desert will reclaim Salt Wells, will suck it right back into the earth, which proves that it is not always the bad things that last forever, and the good things that always die.
128. Creede, Colorado
It takes till May 1st but the ice finally melts. Even Deseo comes back to life.
After this winter I would amend the old saying thusly: You can lead a horse to water, you can carry a bucket of water to a horse and stick it right under his nose, you can float carrot bits on the surface of the trough, you can lie down on the ice in front of the trough and pretend to slurp up water yourself, but you cannot . . .
In March, Deseo was so dehydrated you could have pushed him over with two hands, both his back tendons were bowed and his face looked like that guru they put in the hospital in India to try to catch him in a lie. Now he gallops a quarter mile across the pasture to take a carrot from me; his coat is shiny and even his tail is growing back.
When the ranch turns green after a long cold winter the air is so clear and clean it feels like I might be hallucinating. Madison and Rick and I play Frisbee behind the hill when the wind blows and the dogs follow us out there and lie under the pine trees to watch.
In a bold innovation in coparenting, Tom and I have taken over Communication Day from Rick and Sofree, though we’re allowed to contact each other any day of the week. Madison comes to the ranch for the whole month of July this year, the longest stint ever. She and Rick are building a fort down by the creek and sometimes I stand at the window and watch, impersonating a woman standing at a window and watching, thinking, This is my family, really, it’s mine.
Hiking a roadless coastline in Newfoundland, Rick and I came upon a sign that said: Kerley’s Harbour, Resettled, 1963. The harbor was still there, of course, heaps of rotting pine and the ghost of a fish trap curving out to the silver smile of the sea. It was only the people who were resettled, their houses famously floated on oil drums to a government-sanctioned road-accessible insta-town called New Bonaventure, a few miles up the coast. Everyone had to agree to go or nobody got the subsidies, and the jobs they were promised never came through.
Nowadays tourists come to New Bonaventure by the busload to see the former set of the popular Canadian miniseries Random Passage, a Hollywood re-creation of an outport that looks better than the real thing ever did, built on a site where an outport never was. The tourists are greeted by people dressed to resemble nothing so much as extras in the now-canceled show.
When it gets dark in Newfoundland, traveling turns into a video game made by the Far Side. So many moose in so many positions, waiting to hurl themselves at your vehicle. In 1878 somebody imported two moose to Newfoundland to see what would happen and now there are 120,000 of them, poised to inherit the island when the fishermen give it up for good.
When I tell Rick’s dad that it was Rick’s idea to get screeched in in St. John’s he says, with only a touch of derision, “See how you’ve loosened that old boy up?”
Among the cracked plates and copper pipes and fallen chimneys of Kerley’s Harbour, Rick and I found a grave. Anna Cody (Miller) died in 2005 and was returned to the harbor by her family, the words home at last etched in stone.
129. Tucson, Arizona
On the hike up Pima Canyon, Fenton the human pulls out a tiny clothbound book of Shakespearean sonnets, and reads #29 and #30, while three anorexic hikers tromp by chatting about fitness classes.
We are surrounded by the radiant green of the new ocotillo, the Martian green of the palo verde. In the intermittent creek bottom, which at this moment is holding enough water to hide prizewinning trout, a single cottonwood is leafing out a green so vibrant it almost hurts to look at it. Greener still is the watercress that lines the creek bed, and desert jasmine is filling the air with its syrupy perfume.
Tucked into Fenton’s Shakespeare is the printed announcement for Larry Rose’s memorial, and I recognize Fenton’s prose style . . . Larry Rose was cremated in Père Lachaise crematorium and interred in the columbarium, in the city and country of his dreams, in the company of the writers he loved.
“You wrote this,” I say.
“I’m sure I did,” he says.
Also tucked into the pages is an index card, with notes in Fenton’s delicate hand, the ink still sharp after twenty years: Remember to thank L’s parents. Ask five students to say something about L as a teacher. Describe: L marching in SF parade, L in the Dordogne, final days in Paris.
An hour earlier, there was an army of women coming down the trail we were going up, wielding those expensive hiking poles that take away all of one’s natural balance and talking at a volume that made me think academics. Fenton, Rick, and I stepped off the trail to let them pass on a rather steep downhill, and one lady, perhaps the oldest in the group, paused at the bottom, and for no discernible reason toppled backwards into what in Tucson passes for a large soft bush. Five or six of the other women were on her instantly, tugging her up, which she resisted.
I was thinking, Maybe let her get her bearings for a sec, when one of the tuggers, a fit, fifty-year-old no-nonsense woman of Italian descent with bullet-gray hair and black eyes gestured toward the three of us and said to her group, “Can you believe that these people are just standing there gawking and not helping? Can you believe how rude they are?”
Fenton stepped forward, to apologize, I thought, but said to the woman, “Are you serious?”
“No, I was kidding,” said the woman, meaning she was not.
That night we marinated ahi steaks in ginger, soy, sesame oil, garlic, and lemon in Fenton’s tiny kitchen. I said I didn’t think “Why I Live at the P.O.” ought to be Eudora Welty’s most anthologized story just so Fenton would tell me all the reasons I was wrong. Now that twenty years have gone by there will be no way to say for sure whether Fenton and I got to know each other so well in a former life or this one. The grapefruits on the tree in his side yard are the sweetest in the world.
130. Forest Grove, Oregon
In my dorm room, there is a sign over the toilet that says Harvested Rainwater, Please Do Not Drink, and the whole phrase is in quotation marks.
When I get up to the residency, Madison calls to tell me she set my place at the ranch kitchen table and made a silhouette of me to put in my chair while they ate.
The first day I ever met Madison, she took me up to her room and told me we were going to put on a play. I was to puppet half of her stuffed toys including a bunny, a horse, and an extra large, hideously ugly human doll called Sister, and she would puppet two dogs and an elephant dressed as a bumblebee. The plot was based roughly on SpongeBob SquarePants, a show I had heard of but never seen. I would make each of my toys order either a crabby patty or a hamburger, and her toys would serve me. Each character was to have at least three different names and voices so it seemed like lots of people were ordering. After two dress rehearsals we performed it for Rick. I was so far outside of my comfort zone that day it still makes my stomach turn over three years later. But I ordered and reordered crabby patties, bef
ore I had any idea what they were.
“I would lie down in front of a car for her,” I tell Dorianne, over the college cafeteria lunch which generally sucks but always includes cake: red velvet, angel food, German chocolate; and Dorianne says, about her own daughter, “I would live on one saltine and a thimbleful of water for a month if it would take away her pain.”
If I were a young poet, I would have woken up this morning and written a poem called “Barry Lopez, Full Moon, Dairy Queen.” When we popped out from under the campus redwoods on the way to get Peanut Buster Parfaits and saw it, huge and yellow, rising over fields of strawberry and mustard, Deborah said, “Look Barry,” even though I was driving and Rachel was in the backseat too, and it begged the question, could we even see the moon as he did, and the answer is probably not.
At the reading last night, Kwame said, “Whenever people say to me, ‘I can’t imagine what you are going through,’ I say, ‘Well, work on it.’ ”
I didn’t trust it at first, the way Madison and I fell for each other. “You don’t even like kids,” she likes to say now, flirtatious as hell.
131. Quebec City, Quebec
There are two boxcars, one on top of the other. You enter halfway up via a sheet-metal staircase on the outside. The young woman tells us in French that we may close the door but we must not touch the walls and we must not jump up and down. At least I think that is what she said. She may have said we can’t close the door, and we ought to jump up and down, but I don’t think so. C’est une expérience, she says about six times, to make sure we don’t think we have just paid her eighteen dollars expecting to climb the stairs into a rusty boxcar and see some recently discovered Monets.
The walls are covered with broken pieces of mirror, in a kind of mosaic arrangement, and where the floor of one boxcar should meet the ceiling of the other there is only steel cable stretched across what looks, because of the mirrors on the floor of the lower boxcar, like infinity. The cables run vertically and horizontally, leave squares of space just too small for our feet to fall through. The cables give a little when we step onto them and Rick takes my hand. When we look up our faces are multiplied into infinity. On both sides of us there are an infinity of Ricks and an infinity of Pams holding hands, taking careful steps across broken glass.