by Carrot Quinn
Jordan knew.
When I arrived in Colorado after our year apart, Jordan was agitated, strange, hostile. I didn’t recognize him.
“You’re weird,” he said to me once, when we were eating lunch at Applebee’s after my shift. His voice was controlled but I could hear the disgust, and the fear. “Being weird is not okay. You should be medicated.” It was the same disgust and fear I saw on my grandparents’ faces, when they looked out at the larger world. The face they made at anything they didn’t understand. The face they made at me. It was a look that made me want to curl up inside myself until I was so small I ceased to exist. I left the restaurant without finishing my mozzarella sticks.
A few months after my brother leaves for boot camp, two planes fly into the World Trade Center in New York City and the war machine rumbles to life.
War is incredibly dangerous.
There is a plane of existence on which Jordan and I are the only living beings. We are the two bearers of an experience so heavy it cripples me.
Don’t leave me alone, I whisper as I watch the news coverage in the weeks after the attack on the twin towers. Please don’t leave me alone.
They say that if you want to move away from Grand Junction, you have to fill a jar with dirt and take it with you, or else you’ll be sucked back and you’ll never fully escape. I drive past the faded strip malls and the “Faces of Meth” billboards on the way to my job at Applebee’s, where my coworkers talk about church and their young children’s birthday parties. There’s a big world beyond these sun-crumbled mesas, I know. What is in this world? Are there places with less sadness and heartbreak? Or is it the same amount of sadness and heartbreak everywhere that you go? After work I park my car on the side of the highway and walk into the desert. I fill a pickle jar with sandy, loose soil and stash it in my trunk. I’ve been saving my tip money for a year, and I think about that money when I wake in the quiet hours of the night and the blackness unfurls around me, threatens to pull me under. My head fills with images of my mother, alone in Alaska, of my brother in his barracks, curled under a wool blanket. I count the bills in my head like rosary beads.
“Maybe we should move away together,” I say to Chris over pancakes at the Village Inn on my day off. His mouth scrunches up and he pulls his baseball cap low over his face. I start to laugh, and then stop myself when I realize that he’s crying. Chris doesn’t travel at all—he was born in the high desert and wants to live here until he dies. Later on in life, I’ll think of Ennis’s line in the movie Brokeback Mountain, when Jack asks him to run away with him to Wyoming, where they can start a ranch together. Ennis declines, saying, “You know me. ’Bout all the travelin’ I ever done is goin’ around the coffeepot, lookin’ for the handle.”
I have two cousins who are brothers, the children of my mom’s sister Patty. Nathan and Jason are three and five years older than me, real adults in their early twenties, and I’ve met them only in passing, when they were in town for holidays. Nathan has dreadlocks, loves beautiful women, snowboarding, and psychedelics. Jason is tall, spectacled, thoughtful, and teaching himself to write code. Nathan recently moved to Portland, Oregon, and Jason is planning on joining him there in the fall. I’ve never been to Oregon, but it sounds nice; forests and green things and rain. Like Alaska, but not so lonely and not way up in the middle of nowhere. I ask Jason if I can make the drive with him. He agrees, and Nathan offers me space on his couch when we arrive. I pack everything I own into my small car and one morning Jason and I set out, the red mesas receding in the car mirrors, Fashion Nugget on the CD player.
It is November of 2001, and I am nineteen years old.
2001
It’s so green. I’m standing in a city park in the fog, wearing several pounds of thrift store wool, as the dew on the grass soaks through the thin fabric of my shoes. The wide trunks of Douglas fir trees hulk around me in the mist, their boughs suspended in the cold white. These trees are hundreds of years old, I’ve learned. They are the tallest trees I’ve ever seen. I take a deep breath and draw the wet air into my lungs. I breathe again, trying to tug the air all the way into my heart. Moving to this dim sodden corner of Oregon called Portland, with its coniferous forests, damp wooden buildings, and air so close to the sea that it never quite dries out, has felt like coming home.
The drive from Grand Junction, Colorado, across Utah, into Idaho, and finally Oregon—first high plains dusted with snow and then the wet Columbia Gorge and, finally, rainy Portland—took us eighteen hours. My cousin Jason, a worldly twenty-four-year-old, perched his wire-rim glasses on his sharp nose and leaned forward to squint at the road, which was often icy, his pale hands wrapped tightly around the wheel. I was too high to drive; we’d both taken Adderall, which I’d never tried before, and once the drug overcame me I resigned myself to the passenger seat, clenching and unclenching my jaw as we drove through the night, my thoughts racing as Jason recounted to me the entire premise, chapter by chapter, of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
“Our government can’t be, like, bad, though,” I said, as dark, unknown open spaces wheeled themselves past the warm crowded capsule of our little car. Silhouettes of landforms approached us and receded, and out beyond everything there were stars, impossibly bright. Although I knew that things were bad in the world, I’d never thought to question the systems and institutions that made up the scaffolding of our society. I’d never heard that idea spoken out loud, that our government could have anything but our best interests in mind, had never known anyone who believed it. Or if the idea had been floating around, I hadn’t been paying attention; I’d never given it any thought.
Jason replied by recounting the careful, systematic process of genocide and colonization on which the “United States” was originally founded.
“The generational wealth and power of white Americans is a direct result of the exploitation of indigenous peoples and African slaves, over a few hundred years of American history,” he said. “The richest white people didn’t get to where they are by hard work. They got there by stealing from others. Meritocracy is a myth. The system is built on oppression. It’s a pyramid of oppression. A Ponzi scheme. In order for rich people to exist, there must be many, many poor people, working for such low wages that they are essentially performing slave labor. There is no other way.”
The wheels in my Adderall-racked brain were spinning.
“It’s called capitalism,” continued Jason.
Jason was different from the other men in my family. The men in my family were stocky and muscled, loved driving lifted trucks in the mud and worked the sorts of manual-labor jobs that eventually broke you. Jason was delicate and spoke softly, preferred books to TV, and had been teased by my grandparents and uncles his entire life.
“He’ll never have a good job,” my grandparents would whisper with my aunts and uncles in the kitchen after church. My grandpa’s mouth would turn down in disgust. “He acts like a faggot. He’ll never find a wife. All he loves is computers!” They didn’t know, though, about the way the world was changing. They didn’t know that Jason had more of a chance of making it in this new world than almost anyone.
“But why were Europeans the ones who were able to colonize the U.S.?” I asked. “Why was it so easy for them?”
Jason then explained to me the premise of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond. Europeans had access to metal. Because of this, their weapons were more efficient and wreaked more havoc than those of the peoples they were colonizing. The Europeans also had immunity to certain infectious diseases; their presence alone visited a plague on every new shore on which they landed. Also, there was the Anglo-Saxon Protestant idea of Manifest Destiny: an entitlement to and sense of ownership over the land, an insatiable need to extract resources at a rate so reckless it would eventually destroy the land itself, and then the entire earth—but no matter; that’s what the Rapture w
as for. At the very last instant, when the earth had been run into the ground, God would appear; a god who loved only these exploitive white folks and no one else. This god would spirit them away to eternal life in heaven. The earth was just a stopping-over place. It was here to be destroyed. That was its only purpose.
“Wow,” I said, as the black night began to purple and the stars dimmed. The sun would be up soon. “I…I never thought about that.”
We arrived in Portland midday and my cousin Nathan put a Pabst Blue Ribbon in my hand as we stood in the drizzling rain outside his apartment. Nathan told us that his apartment was so damp the landline had stopped working because it had molded, and the clothes and shoes in his closet had also molded. I tried to enjoy my beer, but I had that deeply tired, gritty sensation in my brain. I fell asleep on the couch that night feeling as though I had left one world behind and entered an entirely new one; as though I had traveled through space and time. As though I had experienced a rapture of my own.
The park in which I walk now is so large that, in the very middle of it, I can pretend that I am lost in a forest. Then I am out of it, crossing Powell Boulevard with its swell of traffic, and then into the quiet of the neighborhoods north of Powell, with their peeling Victorian-style houses sitting wet in the rain and small coffee shops with mismatched chairs and the People’s Co-op, where Jason, Nathan, and I buy black beans, brown rice, and peanut butter in bulk. Twenty minutes later I arrive at the Bread and Ink Cafe on Hawthorne, where I work as a busser. I hang up my wool layers, now steaming, and tie on a black apron, soon to be marked with flour handprints. Nathan works here too, and he helped me get the job. The Bread and Ink Cafe makes its own challah, bagels, and garlic bialys, and the tables are spread with clean butcher paper. My shifts pass quickly; I compete with myself to see how many glasses and plates I can carry in one trip, and before I know it, the day is done. On slow afternoons I stand behind the server station eating buttered toast, dreaming, and watching the rain fall. I’ve been reading the book Evasion, which is published by an anarchist press called CrimethInc. Jason found the book at a punk house when he was traveling across the country on his bicycle. Originally, Evasion was a zine, or more accurately, a stack of xeroxed pages that were re-photocopied and passed from hand to hand. Then it became a book, and now I have a copy. Anarchists, I’ve learned, think that the system is fucked, the whole lot of it, and that for any real change to happen, the entire system must be dismantled. Evasion is the story of a young man who quit his job to squat in a utility closet on a university campus. He eats dumpstered bagels for every meal (forty percent of the food produced in the U.S., he writes, ends up in the trash), and rides freight trains across the country just for the poetry of it, and because it’s free and doesn’t use any fossil fuel. I’ve never met someone like this young man, and I hadn’t realized that people rode freight trains in this day and age. And I’ve never thought about eschewing systems entirely, but it makes a lot of sense. If everything is busted, why participate? I know that things are broken. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen more than most of the people around me in this fancy restaurant have seen, combined.
Someone got into my car the first week I was in Portland, and everything I still had in there was stolen: my clothes, a box of checks, my fiber-optic lamp. I sold the car for a few hundred dollars and began walking everywhere. On these walks I felt my spirit expand, as though it could fill up the sky. I bought a vintage cruiser bicycle for thirty-five dollars and rode the heavy bike with great effort up hills, my lungs and muscles burning. On the bike I could go much farther than on foot; I could pedal west to the gunmetal river or across the Hawthorne Bridge, with its cars singing on the metal grating. I could ride all the way to downtown! At Nathan’s apartment I learned how to cook for the first time in my life, feeding myself burritos from the huge pots of black beans we kept bubbling on the stove. I drank dark coffee that tasted like the earth. My eating disorder began to feel less useful. There are so many things, now, to look at and think about and talk about and do. It’s much harder to starve myself when I feel so hungry from all the exercise. And it’s hard to remember what I’ve eaten when there’s so much else going on in the world!
One day in January a letter arrives from Jordan. The letter is pencil on lined sheets of notebook paper. The envelope looks as though it’s traveled a long way. Basic training is awful, he writes. They are woken in the middle of the night and berated. He is often hungry. He worries about going to war. He’s also heard from Barbara—she called our grandparents, and they used caller ID to get her number. He called her on that number, and she answered. Jordan said she spoke clearly for a moment. She told him she loved him and missed him. And then her speech disintegrated and she turned strange and cruel, monologuing about Satan and the demons that possessed Jordan and me. He asked her where she was staying and she hung up the phone.
I read the letter three times, smell the envelope and then fold it, trancelike, and tuck it into my journal. So Barbara is alive. Barbara still exists. Barbara. I go into the bathroom of Nathan’s apartment and close the door. No one else is home and the apartment is still, the patter of rain on the window glass the only sound. I sit on the bathroom floor next to the tub and draw my knees to my chest. I rock back and forth as the blackness whooshes out of that very small hole in my heart, the hole that connects me with the Great Dark Nothing, the hole that often overwhelms me. My guts are cold seawater; my head is television static. I am outside of myself, floating alone in space again. I’ve worried about Barbara since I left Alaska, but hearing nothing from her, as well as my recent move to Portland, has allowed me to distance myself from the darkness; the darkness has receded and occasionally I’ve been able to pretend that it is gone. It isn’t gone, though. It waits. The darkness is a part of me.
Later that afternoon I pull myself up off the bathroom floor and walk to the kitchen, where I numbly put the kettle on to make tea. I have to put Barbara out of my mind. For the first time in my life I have a hold, however tenuous, on another way of being. I am finding good things in the world. Ideas that enchant me. There are moments of possibility. I want to grasp this rope in my two hands and follow it to sturdier ground, until it no longer feels as though I am standing on thin ice that might fracture at any moment. I don’t want to be afraid. I don’t want to be that little girl, standing on the side of the road in the dark of a winter morning, waiting for the city bus, hoping that the driver will let me on even though I don’t have money to pay. The little girl who hasn’t eaten for three days. The little girl whose only parent speaks in tongues, when she speaks at all. That little girl who belongs nowhere, and to no one. The one who can’t imagine a future, much less how to survive another day.
“I can’t go back there,” I say to myself, as I pour steaming water into a mason jar of dried nettles. “I can’t go back there.” I wrap the jar in a dish towel and sit on the couch, clutching it like a hot water bottle. The darkness is in my bloodstream now, has disseminated all through my body. I close my eyes and shake my head, but the feeling remains. I feel like I’ve been drugged. How long will it take for this terrible intoxication to pass? Days? Jordan wrote Barbara’s number in his letter, but I know I won’t call her. If this is how it feels to hear that she is alive, what would happen if we spoke? “I can’t go back there,” I say again.
2002
“I’m leaving to hitchhike across the country,” I tell my coworker in the spring. We are watching the rain fall. He laughs.
“You are? I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“I am,” I say. I spread butter on a hunk of warm baguette. I’ve gained twenty pounds since moving to Portland six months ago, but I don’t care. I have muscles for the first time in my life. I can ride my heavy cruiser up hills without having to get off and push.
“When I was your age,” says the eighty-year-old mother of the restaurant’s owner, when she stops by with our freshly laundered tablecloths, “I wanted to
be free too.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “I think that’s just great.”
I buy a discounted external frame backpack at an outdoor gear store, and put things inside until it is full. I make a cardboard sign like the guy in Evasion, whose sign said, simply, East. One morning I ride the city bus to the freeway on-ramp and walk partway up it while cars hurtle past. My heart shakes in my chest. I have no idea what I am doing. I don’t really feel scared, though. I feel oddly safe. No one can hurt me. I am harder than any motherfucker. I lift my thumb in the air and wait.
With incredible luck, I am picked up by a couple in a VW bus headed all the way to the East Coast. I let out a sigh of relief as I climb into the vehicle and shrug off my heavy pack. Hitchhiking alone as a woman is genuinely dangerous, and lonely besides. I’m glad I won’t have to actually use my toughness now. My kind saviors are a younger woman and a much older man, and they say they can take me all the way to DC, which is my vague destination. I know only that there is a large protest planned for DC, and I have never been to a protest. It’s a march against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. To prepare, I’ve cut my hair into a long Mohawk. I’m an anarchist now. Capitalism blows. Let’s all get free! Now I just need…some friends.
Three days later I say goodbye to my hitchhiking ride. They’re headed to a Rainbow Gathering, which is another sort of way to be free. While together, we camped under the stars on dirt roads off the highway, the two of them in the van and me on the ground in the army surplus sleeping bag I bought for cheap in Portland. Before drifting off, I gazed up at the Milky Way, my heart stammering, and thought about what a big world it was, and just how little of anything I knew.