This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  Also, he thought that without him there, I might never figure out how to comport myself among the dangers.

  For example, every dorm-residing student was either required to get the meningitis vaccine or get their primary doctor to sign an exemption form. Arthur told me the vaccine would eat my flesh, starting with my brain, and I could never go back to the person I was before. I didn’t believe this—I believed meningitis was everywhere, and would surely work its way into my brainstem and make my spine swell until it burst through my vertebrae, sending their splinters like shrapnel into my organs, but two years into this relationship, I had run out of the energy needed to challenge him. When I presented the doctor with my form, my mom, a nurse, looked on in horror. Usually, she and Dad let me make mistakes and learn from the pain, but this one required intervention. “Do you remember what I told you about infections? What they are?” Dad asked. Of course I remembered. “There’s a war going on,” I said. “Exactly,” he said. Sometimes, the body has everything it needs to fight the war; other times, the body will wage the war but die when facing an unknown enemy for which it never could have prepared. Inside the campus clinic whose mental health floor would, years later, become more familiar to me than the dining hall, I received my meningitis vaccine. I tore off the little round Band-Aid and never told Arthur what I’d done.

  Additionally, he thought that without him there, I might forget about him.

  He knew I logged off instant messenger for hours most nights, and he didn’t believe that I was doing what I said I was doing: walking around campus. And anyway, I shouldn’t be doing that, he said, because I might be raped. And anyway, where was I walking and why? To clear my head, I said, but actually, I was walking around looking for the history TA I believed I loved, though we’d never spoken. Somehow, Arthur knew. He got an apartment not far from campus and took two buses and a train so he could accompany me to my history lectures. The next year, when I first tried to break up with Arthur, I told him that—still—I loved a man to whom I had never spoken. “I think you should go for it,” Arthur said. “I think you should walk into his office wearing no shirt and a bra.” I told him I wasn’t going to do that and I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Just go in wearing a sports bra, like you’ve just been running,” he said. “I think you wouldn’t like that,” I said, “I think you’d be jealous.” And he said, “Not at all. I want to know that someone is doing the things to you that you never let me do.” He meant sex.

  I believe he put a hex on me.

  FOURTH BODY PARAGRAPH

  Sometimes, during the writing process, we realize that we have omitted key information that will provide background to the reader. Fear not—the work of reorganization is a key component of the revision process! While drafting, get down as much relevant information as you can, knowing that you can move it, cut it, or expand upon it later. Sometimes, we only come to know our position fully through engaging in a written support of an argument.

  I realize now that I’m supposed to talk about my background, which is a code word for my status as an enrolled member in the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, and the struggles I have faced as a Native American. But my background, as I understood it at age eighteen—which was a limited understanding because it didn’t extend back into the generations that came before me—did not include struggle. I grew up in Mountain Lake, New Jersey—not a town, not even a township, but a community within a mostly forest township. At the center of this community was a lake. At the periphery were streets, including mine, set above the road circling the lake. I grew up in the woods, in a sense—there were neighbors, but there were also acres of forest. I found paths where none had been cut. Every time I stepped into the woods, I met new wonders: the dozen foot-long night crawlers that raced across dead leaves when I lifted a broad stone; the heap of stones where I believed snakes were living. The cicadas sent unified shivers through the air between the trees. I set my pulse by their rhythm. Growing up in the woods, I became so accustomed to magic that I watched Disney’s Alice in Wonderland on loop, wishing our backyard moss would turn, in the dark, into Alice’s mome raths, a cluster of small, helpful, multicolored creatures with bug-eyes. At night, I locked the doors and gathered the cats when no one else thought we needed to; I was afraid of the sinister unknown. I couldn’t explain why I thought the woods would rush in through the unlocked door to consume me. Really, the only unsafe time was hunting season, when we were reminded what, to other people, the forest was meant for. None of this, though, is relevant to a college admissions essay; I must demonstrate that I have overcome obstacles.

  You can always develop this key information in your second draft.

  FIFTH BODY PARAGRAPH

  While in high school, you may have only had experience with the five-paragraph essay, in college, you may find that you are expected to write considerably longer essays. You might treat the entire essay as an “accordion essay,” expanding as needed to explore your topic and support your argument.

  When mom would ask to have a bite of my ice cream cone, I would protest: at health camp, I had learned that communicable disease could be spread through saliva. “We have the same germs,” she would say, and I didn’t think that was right. However, it was. According to Lax et al. in an study of families and the microbial communities in their homes, “Humans sharing a home were more microbially similar than those not sharing a home,” and when an individual leaves the home even for three days, that individual’s contribution to the microbiome is measurably diminished, suggesting that the human microbiome signature on surfaces quickly disappears.2 In “Sources of Airborne Microorganisms in the Built Environment,” Prussin and Marr write that microbial communities in different indoor environments—schools, houses—are markedly different, in part because of different sources of airborne microorganisms in the built environment: “humans; pets; plants; plumbing systems; heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems; mold; dust resuspension; and the outdoor environment.” However, the greatest impact upon the microbiome in a space did not result from human occupancy; “Rather, microbial communities observed in indoor air were closely related with those in outdoor air, and changes in microbial communities in outdoor air were mirrored by changes in indoor air.”3 Therefore, when I left my home, I changed it completely; when I was away, I was altered; when I returned, it was to a place I’d never been to.

  SIXTH BODY PARAGRAPH

  Have you adequately provided support for your thesis statement? Read it over again and use your final body paragraph to present any additional findings.

  Throughout this essay, in exploring the question of whether or not one can go home again and whether or not they have to take you in if you do, I have avoided directly addressing my most persuasive and consequential fact: that, halfway through my sophomore year, the night I broke up with my longtime boyfriend, I was raped by a boy I knew only a little; that I didn’t tell my parents for a year because I believed it was my fault and wasn’t even sure it was rape; and that I would never fully inhabit my home again, in some ways, because it was a sanctuary and some part of me believed my presence might defile it. But I was the only one who ever wondered whether home should take me in when I came back altered. The moss was there, and the blue jays were there, and the night crawlers were there, and the ferns were there, and the cedars were there, and the cats were there, and the people were there, all thriving in a place where the only constant was change.

  CONCLUSION

  This final section brings the essay to a satisfying end, summarizing the connections made in the body paragraphs to the thesis statement. The reader should experience a feeling of finality and a thorough understanding of your point. The conclusion should contain the strongest and clearest statement of your message because it is what the reader is left with. Do not bring up new information or the other side of the argument; less is more.

  In conclusion, in college, I learned about the change that happens when someone gets deep inside a body and puts his bacteria
there. I learned that my wound was infested with microbes I’d never known. I learned that my home is a body: it lives by regeneration, turning over its every cell until it is both completely new and completely recognizable. A creature in flux, I belonged there.

  AND NOW, REWRITE YOUR INTRODUCTION

  After completing your first draft, you may want to revisit your introductory paragraph, rewriting it now that you know the ground you will cover in the essay. The introduction should serve as a “map” for the journey you will take the reader on over the course of the essay.

  Cicadas’ dead bodies littered every campus sidewalk during the spring of my freshman year of college. Growing up in the woods as a child, I heard cicadas, and I saw their translucent brown skins sloughed off and clinging to peeling cedar trunks. But I had never seen anything like the mass appearance and death of cicadas on campus. This phenomenon was known as Brood X, a huge group of cicadas that, every seventeen years, tunnels to the surface of the ground to lay eggs and then die. When I returned home and saw their husks clinging to trees, I could imagine the corpses, knowing now that these skins were shed by animals with wings, animals that had hidden dormant underground for most of my lifetime, safe from predators. They emerged in a massive group so they would be too plentiful for predators to consume them all, increasing the cicadas’ likelihood of surviving long enough to reproduce. They live in trees. They feed on sap. They are cryptic, avoiding predator detection by concealment. And so, when I returned home after my first year of college and saw the delicate exoskeletons I used to collect in jars, I realized I had never paid attention to what I was meant to learn: that I could never truly go home again, because the woods had been telling me all along that some places provide protection, and others provide none, but we need to tunnel out from under the ground. Because we are humans, and humans believe we are not part of nature, maybe we’ll find parts of ourselves consumed by others’ violent actions that defy the universe’s instructions for living in it. Maybe we will do the work we will exist to do. Certainly, we will die. The forest is made of death and change, and as I will demonstrate in this essay, I am made of the forest, made of change, made of the sound of hundreds of millions of the body’s cells dying every minute.

  Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and the author of two books, Starvation Mode and My Body Is a Book of Rules, named a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She is an assistant professor of English at the Ohio State University.

  1 This is not the exact wording of the prompt; it’s my best recollection of it.

  2 S. Lax, D. P. Smith, J. Hampton-Marcell, S. M. Owens, K. M. Handley, N. M. Scott, S. M. Gibbons, P. Larsen, B. D. Shogan, S. Weiss, J. L. Metcalf, L. K. Ursell, Y. Vazquez-Baeza, W. Van Treuren, N. A. Hasan, M. K. Gibson, R. Colwell, G. Dantas, R. Knight, and J. A. Gilbert. “Longitudinal Analysis of Microbial Interaction Between Humans and the Indoor Environment.” Science 345, no. 6200 (2014): 1048–1052. doi:10.1126/science.1254529.

  3 Aaron J. Prussin and Linsey C. Marr. “Sources of Airborne Microorganisms in the Built Environment.” Microbiome 3, no. 1 (2015): 3, 7. doi:10.1186/s40168–015–0144-z.

  Inheritance

  Elisabeth Eaves

  At twenty-five, I was looking for a way out—of town, of my relationship, of the life I had created—when my mother invited me on a trip to Baja, Mexico. A trip with my mother, however temporary a solution, was at least an opportunity for respite. That winter I was working part-time jobs while applying to graduate school, a bright goal that kept me going when I felt mired in quicksand, which was most of the time. From the point of view of my parents, or indeed anyone over the age of forty, it might have looked like I had my whole life ahead of me, but I wanted to start over. I felt old, and disconcerted that I had come dangerously close to messing everything up before even really getting started.

  My parents, meanwhile, had recently gone in on property in Baja with a windsurfing-obsessed Oregonian, and intended to build a house. I was floored by this out-of-character behavior. They had always travelled, frugally and independently, sometimes returning with books, pottery, or yards of fabric. As a family of four we had lived abroad, and taken vacations during which we piled into Turkish minivans and Mexican buses. My mother is a psychologist who taught me to shop for clothes in thrift stores, and my father was a math professor who, among his off-hour activities, enjoyed poring over stock market reports and family balance sheets. We never wanted for anything, but we were not the kind of people who bought luxuries or owned a second home. Vacation houses were for families with more money and a different definition of leisure, one that involved cocktails and golf. Or so I thought. As I boarded the plane, I tried to reconcile what my parents had taught me about travel in Mexico—you take the chicken bus—with the new reality that we would have a place of our own.

  It would become much more than just a vacation house. As my parents were reborn there, so it grounded me through many transitions. And perhaps because I moved so often in my outside life, saying unceremonious goodbyes to one urban apartment after another, over the seventeen years that we owned the place in Baja, it came to feel like my true home.

  On that first trip, we flew into the languid seaside city of La Paz and rented a convertible Volkswagen Bug, a model still ubiquitous around the region in the late nineties. A two-lane, mostly shoulder-less highway circled the cape, and we drove it, top down, taking turns at the wheel over several days, eating lunch on beaches where pelicans flocked to incoming fishermen. We spent a night in the mission town of Todos Santos, another amid sun-burnt sailors and margarita slingers in Cabo San Lucas. We drove north along the east side of the cape and stayed in a whitewashed, hillside inn in Los Barriles with a view of the Sea of Cortez, the sparkling, 700-mile-long expanse separating mainland Mexico from the Baja Peninsula, imbuing the latter with its sense of isolation. Cut off from the rest of the continent by water on three sides and an endless two-lane highway running north, southern Baja was a world apart, vast and sleepy, where natural forces never seemed far away. Bright colors delighted me at every turn: a turquoise pottery duck for sale in a market, a garishly striped woven rug on a hotel wall, a colonial-era building painted two tones of vivid pink. I resuscitated my lapsed habit of journal writing, and took pictures of the homemade roadside shrines erected to commemorate the victims of car accidents. The sky was sharp blue by day, teeming with stars by night. Cardón cactuses, among the world’s largest, assembled in abundant forests like many-limbed Wild West outlaws.

  One morning we drove a couple of hours north from Los Barriles. The road, rutted by hurricanes, was, in places, washed over with sand. Cows crossed unhurriedly. We had to put up the Bug’s top and roll up our windows to avoid choking on dust along stretches of unpaved road. Finally, a spur led us to a wide bay called La Ventana, or “the window,” named for the way the wind rolls straight in through a frame created by the southern tip of Cerralvo Island and the northern tip of Punta Arena de La Ventana.

  On this bay sat the village of El Sargento, a handful of one-story homes, some made of raw cinderblock and others candy-bright. There the road turned to dirt again. Ten minutes further on, we parked at a spot marked by a few iron stakes. A plateau of desert plants sloped down gently to a low bluff, which dropped to a sandy beach and the aquamarine sea. This was where the house would stand one day. A few small, vivid sails cut across the bay as an invisible hand whipped up the morning’s first white caps. I felt a sense of desire that was simultaneously fulfilled, the scene stoking a wish and granting it all at once. I began to believe I could untangle the knot I had created. Look, my parents seemed to be saying, you can start a new life. If they could change course in their sixties, surely I could do it in my twenties. I knew then that I would return from this vacation with a greater sense of detachment from what I wanted to leave behind—the boyfriend, the house, the city—and more hope for the future.

  It was almost two years before I went back to La Ventana, on a winter break from gra
duate school in New York, and by then my parents had built their new house. It was a one-story home, the color of warm sand, with terra cotta tiles and interior walls that were white, yellow, and red. The master bedroom, office, living room, dining room, and kitchen all faced the sea; standing at the kitchen sink was like standing on the bridge of a great ship, looking out over the water. I watched the steely, disciplined pelicans flying in tight formation while I washed dishes, waiting for a bird to break off and dive-bomb the surface. Sometimes, from the patio or roof deck, we would see a whale breach far out towards Cerralvo Island, mighty blues or humpbacks on the annual migration to their breeding grounds.

  I was still unused to the idea that my parents had built a second home, and not in some brooding landscape of dark evergreens and opaque waters like Vancouver, where my younger brother and I were raised, but under Baja’s expansive sky, where the sun lit up even the underwater world. My newly retired father sank his teeth into the project of operating a home in a barely-on-the-grid corner of Mexico, somehow completely in his element. No public utilities ran to the house when it was first built. He relished the opportunity to put his Spanish to practical use as he dealt with builders and banks; now he could stay on top of accounts in two languages, which was his idea of a good time. Over the course of his retirement, he would also take up Italian and Chinese.

  Together my parents bought ornately painted ceramic sinks and rustic wooden furniture. They had balky solar panels installed. My mother planted cactuses, aloe vera, and bougainvillea. They hired a gardener and caretaker, Manuel, for the months when they weren’t there. He was exactly my father’s age—born in 1933—and a former fisherman with a large clan and a fenced compound near the church. The two of them had long, winding conversations about water supplies, insects, and plants, my dad struggling with Manuel’s dropped consonants. My mother found an old cowbell on one of her walks and affixed it to the wrought-iron gate to our courtyard. It became our de facto doorbell, alerting us with its hollow music whenever someone arrived.