by Jewel
This was about the time I really began to think about the fact that I had to be a good parent to myself. I had loathed how my dad criticized and emotionally abused me, and here I had begun doing it to myself. I’d relabeled it “perfectionism,” instead of abuse, which seemed kind of sexy—I got results, I told myself. I pushed myself hard and expected a lot, and it worked for a while, until the internal critic eclipsed everything else and I floundered rather than flourished. I’ve often thought of this dynamic, especially as a professional years later. High standards are great in many ways. Challenging yourself and expecting a lot is great. But perfectionism gets you results only to a certain altitude. It propels you up a mountain, but if you want to move around in the rarified air of the summit, it takes creativity and freethinking—and you can only be genuinely brave in your ideas and vision if there is enough safety to take risks in your thinking and push your art. Negative self-criticism is an iron chain that will never let you ascend to real greatness. I had been hard on myself since I moved out. It had gotten me pretty darn far. But now it was crushing me. Nothing was enough. I lacked the ability to be proud of anything I’d accomplished. I knew I had to start practicing something I had never been given or shown in my family. Kindness. Patience. Tolerance. Being allowed to mess up without feeling that my self-worth would go down the tubes with one poor performance. Or that love would be taken away if I did not behave just so, or to the standards of my caregiver.
I didn’t know it at the time, but between my panic attacks, the need for control over my life, and my self-defeating behavior, I was experiencing what it is like to be a trauma survivor. Something would trigger a memory of a past trauma, my fight-or-flight response would kick in, and I would freeze, gripped in terror much the way a soldier experiences PTSD. The reaction never matches the stimulus. Sometimes I felt my body being transported back to a time, adrenaline flooding my system with terror. Sometimes it was a wave of fear as I froze, feeling helpless. I had to learn to trust it like the tide—the episodes would come but they would pass. Sometimes the tide was just out, but nature dictated that it would always come back in.
In many ways I was a grown-up, navigating grown-up things, but in other ways I was so young and I desperately wanted to belong. I had parents who I called home to, but they were not like normal parents. I wanted them to love me, I had some connection to them, but they didn’t function like normal parents. Not like other kids’ parents. I just started to handle things on my own. When I got letters from my mom, I read and reread them so many times the writing began to fade. I remember one in particular where she said she admired me, and that we were twin flames. She said we were not just alike, but the same soul in two different bodies. For a lonely girl, it was music to my ears, and made me feel that I belonged, and that she wanted me. I was able to explain away all the reasons she was not in my life with those few words. We were the same soul in two bodies. How I wanted to believe it. Her words set a trap, though—when your soul is tied to another’s, you feel responsible for them. You feel their will by an extension must also be your will. Her values and desires in many ways became mine.
fourteen
the wisdom of silence
When I graduated from Interlochen, my parents came to the ceremony, as well as Atz Lee. My dad made a memorable entrance, dressed as a sourdough, wearing steel-jaw bear traps slung over his shoulder, a hat with a bullet hole through it, a flannel shirt, and Carhartt pants with the legs rolled up to reveal rubber boots—the Alaskan cowboy boot. He came rolling into the lobby with a hunched-over posture and began to sniff the fine ladies in their pastels and pearls, saying, “Where’s that girl?” He made a rapid pass through the lobby, sniffing the air and different folks, repeating, “Where’s that girl?” When he saw me, he said loudly, “I wanna see what an educated girl smells like!” Everyone already thought I was some wild animal, and now they could see I came by it honestly. It probably would have embarrassed most teenagers, but I thought it was hysterical. The horrified looks on the faces of the well-to-do families was fairly priceless, and I appreciated my dad’s flair for drama. I have fond memories as a child of my dad involving me in elaborate skits he planned for girlfriends. He would dress as the Birdman from The Magic Flute, his wings made of odds and ends we’d bought at the secondhand store and sewed to his shirt, a beak made of construction paper, and he would serenade his beloved with an aria. Another time he dressed as Caesar and stood in the airport with a wreath of leaves we had sewn for a crown, while reciting some improvised oratory. My dad was creative and spontaneous, and I learned a lot about taking risks from him. He never wrote a set list, opting instead to read the crowd—still a habit of mine today.
I worked feverishly to finish my final marble carving right up to the graduation ceremony. I could hear that the ceremony had started and I waited until they got to calling for the kids whose last name started with H before I threw my gown on over my clothes, which were covered in marble dust and sawdust, and pulled my cap on over my messy hair and ran for Kresge Hall. I remember being a bit embarrassed by the attention of walking onstage and accepting my diploma. It was very hard for me to feel proud of myself, and I think I threw the diploma away as soon as I got offstage. It was just a piece of paper, and the school was much more than that for me. Plus it didn’t fit in my backpack, and I had a strict policy: if it didn’t all fit in there, I didn’t keep it. I was brutal about that, and didn’t save any of my student art. Instead I took pictures of it and threw the actual art away. I had no home lined up and didn’t want to ask my dad to keep it in a shed somewhere. I decided philosophically that it was better to just keep things light and avoid clutter. Part of me still believes this, and I subscribe to the less-is-more theory to this day. On a subconscious level, though, it was a way to protect myself because I knew I was not in a position to be able to have much, and this made that harder reality seem like it was my choice. I didn’t have money to buy a yearbook, and while I secretly longed to have one, I reasoned away the mixed emotions about graduating and the uncertainty of my future with a laissez-faire attitude.
All the other kids had plans to go to amazing fine arts colleges like Juilliard, and I was planning on nothing, really. For some reason it just didn’t dawn on me that college was in the realm of possibility. No one had ever mentioned it to me. Counselors at school didn’t bring it up. I didn’t think about music being an option beyond how I always had—bar gigs and getting by. I would have loved to pursue something in the visual arts, but I never really felt I was talented enough to go further, much less obtain another scholarship to a college. Not to mention I felt the reason I got a scholarship to Interlochen was because of Joe’s suggestion and help. I didn’t have an “in” anywhere else. Applications and the like were still a mysterious world that I knew very little about. I’m sure if I had asked, someone would have helped. Perhaps my parents thought the school handled that stuff, and the school thought my parents handled that stuff. I did have one promising proposition. My vocal teacher mentioned she would like to mentor me if I wanted to pursue classical singing, and while I was flattered and really enjoyed singing classical music, I loved the freedom of writing my own songs and singing my own melodies without the structure and rules. Knowing there was nothing left there for me, I was ready to leave the rigidity of school and the difficult social navigation and just get back on my own and be free again. Into the great wide open. My dad could not bear to see me throw away my marble carving and bought it from me for two hundred dollars to give me some cash.
My first postgraduation adventure was a road trip the day afterward, with two girls, a sculptor and a painter, both friends from art classes. Atz Lee piled in as well, and we headed off in the Bronco that belonged to one of them. We were headed west, where they would drop me off in San Diego to see my mom, who was working at an alternative health center called Optimum Health Institute and attending its program for her seemingly persistent health problems. We all made it as far as Seattle, w
here we had a falling out because I could not afford my share of the gas money. My little brother made his own way down to San Diego (he was only sixteen, but somehow in our world this seemed normal, and I didn’t worry or look out for him), and I stayed in Seattle, busking and writing. I found busy street corners and yodeled and sang “Who Will Save Your Soul” and newer songs like “Money” until I earned bus fare to go on.
Eventually I made it back to Alaska for the rest of the summer, and I got a small cabin at my aunt Mossy’s. I wrote feverishly, spending two weeks in silence. I cannot overstate the importance of silence to young artists, or to anyone seeking a creative voice. It takes great influences to find your way to unique self-expression. You must stand on the shoulders of artists who have gone before you. Read great works. See great arts. Listen to great voices. This sets a bar for your spirit and psyche to work toward. Then you must dive inward into silence. Stand on the rippling edges of the expansive universe within your own being and create from there. Don’t compare yourself with what’s popular. Doing so is like one child comparing himself with another. Greatness is never achieved by trying to imitate the greatness of another. Greatness is chipping away at all that does not belong to you and then expressing yourself so truly that others can’t help but recognize it. It is in silence that we discover ourselves. The silence and the unknown can be frightening, but with time it stops feeling like there is nothing there. The darkness and silence will begin to feel like a void in a positive sense—the womb of creation. It is the magical nothing that something is birthed from. Feed yourself a diet of great work, and then go away by yourself and listen alone to your soul speak to you. Silence will be your greatest teacher.
That summer I fell in love with a young man named Phillip, and by fall we had decided to take a road trip across the States, eventually winding up in Boulder, Colorado, where I planned to move in with a girlfriend from Interlochen. Like the kids we were, we slept in the back of his pickup truck and showered at rest stops. I thrilled at seeing the country change as we headed east. Phillip, or Musse as I called him, was fairly fluent in Swedish, as his family hailed from that part of the world. I tried to learn how to speak some as we drove, writing down notes and pronunciations of each word.
“How do you say ‘dolphin’?” I’d ask, looking out at the sea.
“Delfin. But you say it like del-feen.”
“How about ‘wolf’? Would it be ‘voolf’?” I asked, sort of kidding.
“No, that’s varg, pronounced va-ree.” Oh, not too similar this time. The music of each language is so particular; which words rise and which ones fall determines and describes as much as the words themselves. It was like learning a difficult song, as exciting an adventure as the drive itself.
“Hoor mor doo? Tack, yag moor brah.” Does that sound right?” I would ask.
“Yes, that’s right, but do you even know what you are saying?” Musse asked patiently.
“How are you? I am fine, thanks,” I answered, all teeth, beaming with pride. “Where are we? Arizona? How do you say ‘Arizona’ in Swedish?”
“Arizona,” he answered in a flat tone, staring at me with a smile to make his point.
“Riiiiiiiiight . . .” I said sheepishly, and looked out the window. I tried to see the subtle beauty of the desert that had inspired O’Keeffe and so many others. I didn’t get it. I missed the explosive drama of the land that raised me. “Shit!” Musse said. I stayed quiet as he pulled off the road. Our engine seized, made one loud clank, and then quit right then and there. He got out and opened the hood.
“I ran it out of goddamned oil. Son of a . . .”
I got out to investigate. Musse kicked the dirt and flagged down a passing car. He explained what had happened and asked if they would be so kind as to stop in the town up the road at the service station and have them send us a tow truck. They said they would, so we watched them drive off. We began to wait. There was plenty of daylight and it wasn’t too hot. “How do you say ‘broken engine’ in Swedish?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood, but Musse wasn’t interested. He just stared out the window.
It took a few hours, but a tow truck came and we drove into a small dusty town, where the mechanic surveyed the damage. He turned to us slowly, wiping his hands on the oil-stained legs of his coveralls. “Well, you are gonna need some parts that we ain’t got.” He watched the thoughts cross our faces: Where will we stay and how long will that take?
“But, I can get the parts,” he continued, clearly enjoying himself. We stared at him.
“It’ll take a week.” He raised his hand as if to stop us from flooding him with questions, then answered them before we could ask. “There’s a cheap motel called the Cactus Inn up the road. You can stay without settin’ ya back too much. If you didn’t know, this is kind of a resort town. You can go sightseein’ down there at Havasupai, maybe take you a mineral bath,” His mouth shut again, this time for good. The tow-truck driver turned to us and offered us a ride to the motel.
We grabbed some clothes out of the back of the camper shell and shoved them into a bag. The motel was cheap, but not cheerful. I have always hated depressing places. I guess I’ve always been depressed enough on my own that any extra provided by a dismal environment was just more than I cared to bear.
I asked the lady at the front desk if there was anywhere else we might stay, perhaps the mineral spa I had heard about. She was tired and couldn’t have cared less if we rented a room from her or not. She told us if we were the adventurous but broke types, we could hike into the Grand Canyon, and after several miles along the bottom, we’d find an Indian village. No hotel, but there were places to camp and hot mineral springs. A local man named Gary would drive us out to the trailhead. A week camping somewhere would beat a week of sitting around bored. We walked into the lot and saw a worn and dusty burgundy Cadillac, with a man just getting into it.
As Gary drove us out, I tried to pay attention as he told us what to expect. We had a six-hour hike ahead of us.
Musse and I had spent the night before in the back of the truck, backed up to a lovely vista overlooking one of the branches of the Grand Canyon. We had risen early to the sound of wild horses as they snorted sharply, approaching our vehicle with equal measures of curiosity and caution. I lay there and watched them scrounge for food among dry grass and sagebrush. I had no idea when I’d awoken that morning that later in the afternoon we would be afoot, hiking into that massive canyon I’d stared into as I stretched, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
After about thirty minutes of driving, Gary pulled over at a rest area, pointed us to the unmarked trailhead, and wished us luck. It was only noon and we had plenty of time to make our way down to the bottom. I marveled at the red dirt trail that cut like a ribbon through the hard rock canyon walls. Deep purple clay wove in and out of the steep cliffs, and the downward pull was hypnotic, impossible to disobey. It had warmed up considerably with the sun high overhead. I tied a bandanna around my head and took in the vast landscape. It really was beautiful in its own way; nothing like Alaska, which was full of bold colors, water, mountains, and varied landscapes. This terrain was muted, just variations of one color. The canyon was massive—my eyes boggled to comprehend the twists and turns of sandstone cut by the invisible sword of millions of years of wind and weather. As we descended deeper, the walls grew taller, like massive wings that unfurled around and above us as we walked. Sounds changed as we descended. At the top our voices were tiny and lost in such a big sky, but at the bottom the slightest whisper carried and echoed as it rattled around the canyon walls.
We walked for some ways like this, seemingly at the bottom of the world, along a narrow path of pebbles with womblike canals unfolding before us. Even though the sun was at full strength, the carved canyon walls remained cool. I listened as our footsteps clattered brightly and echoed against stone. Soon I heard something familiar: the crisp and precise sound of hoof on stone, many hoov
es. We rounded a corner and there was a short straightaway, where we could see a mule train coming toward us. An Indian man rode a sinewy horse, and in his hand was a lead rope with a train of maybe six mules tied nose to tail. They were packed with garbage, mailbags, and random items that were being brought out. I introduced myself and said we were looking for a place to stay at the falls. I asked him about his mules and told him I had run a few pack trains on hunting trips in Alaska. His eyes brightened.
“I have two cots in my yard in the village underneath a cottonwood tree. You can sleep on them if you want for free. You can stay as many days as you need if you run the mule train up to the top of the canyon once a day for me.”
I turned to Musse, and then back to the Indian. “Sure! It’s a deal!” We shook hands and I asked his name.