Facing East

One more announcement before we return to normal programming. This video, Facing East, won first prize in the International Reel Paddling Film Festival. It was co-directed and filmed in part by Tino Specht, my wildly handsome and unreasonably talented friend and New River Academy co-worker. It's playing TODAY at 12:30 pacific time, and also on the 16th at 8:30.


Facing East [NBC Universal Sports AD] from Vital Films on Vimeo.

Tino- I'm so so so proud of you. NBC Universal is broadcasting your movie! You're on TV, motherfucker! Hell yeah!

What don't you have? (Me on SoulPancake)

This might be helpful if you're having one of those down days. I wrote this prompt for Soul Pancake, asking people to make a list of things they DON'T have. With nearly 100 replies so far, I guess this one struck a chord. If your struggling because you feel like you don't "have it all," don't worry, it's okay. Nobody does.

If you want to, check it out here.

Have we lost our minds out here?

I'm sitting at a table with my sister and Ben.  The table is outside in a courtyard, in some sunny place surrounded by white alpine mountains. "So? What's it like over there?" I ask, impatient.

Ben looks at Anna and laughs.  "Your sister and I were just talking about how we knew you'd ask that right away."

I give a little pretend pout. "Well of course I'd ask that first. How could I not ask that?"

Ben is glowing around the edges a bit just like you'd expect. Back lit from the sun.  Calm and whole and so happy. He's very pale and the first few buttons on his shirt are undone. He's leaning back and beaming at us. He knows the punchline of some great joke and he's really going to draw it out.

"The food is good there," he says, teasing me.

"I can see that. You look really healthy. Your skin-" I reach my hand out and run it against his face. It's warm and hard and smooth. "Your skin is perfect. But it almost looks like it's made out of marble."

I settle back in my chair with this beautiful peaceful feeling. The clear light and the warmth and the mountains run together. Sitting around this table, we're in this blissful circle that feels totally different than anything I've felt in my real life.

Now we're walking down a trail that runs alongside one of the mountains. I'm leading the way. "Please, come on, tell me more about what it's like." I turn around to look at him, walking backwards.

He is smiling in such a way, if it didn't know any better I would swear he was flirting. "Well, let's put it this way. I'm not alone over there."

I wake up suddenly in my dark bedroom. I've sweat through the sheets again.  And I'm crying. I try and force myself back asleep, but all I can do is cry and cry and cry.

Smash Cut to the Update

Well, you can't buy tickets for the Reel Rock Climbing Film tour anymore cause they're done sold out. Which is crazy because the Egyptian Theater on Capitol Hill ain't small.

 

But you can still help me win a writing grant by 'saving' my trips on Trazzler. Just click here to find a list of my trips, click on any one of them and hit 'save'. Then do it for all of them. And consider your good deed done for the day. Thank you! I love you! 

Reel Rock Film Tour

If you live in Washington, come check out the Reel Rock Film Tour on its stop in Seattle. It's playing at 7pm at the Egyptian Theater. Buy your tickets at Vertical World or Second Ascent in Ballard.

This is a bad ass adventure film competition with lots of giveaways and raffles included, but really you ought to come for the audience who are bound to be ruggedly good looking.

BUT REALLY you ought to come for the fiery, funny, wise cracking, illuminating, intelligent, and good looking presenters: myself and Natalie Stone.  We WILL be accepting drinks afterward.

This will probably sell out so go by yourself a ticket. And find all the info you need by clicking here.

My Great Big Airplane Idea

I have this great idea that I am going to sell to the airlines industry.

I think the airlines should separate the single passengers from the married or otherwise unavailable passengers. This could be done with a simple questionnaire on the online ticket booking site.

The coupled people can sit in the back of the airplane, where they can be content keeping to themselves, or complaining to one another about those couple complaints that no single person can stomach listening to. And us single people can sit up front and mingle.

During turbulence, the coupled people will be forced to sit in their seats with their seat belts tightly fastened, while the singles will be encouraged to move freely about the cabin: Bump! Whoops! Sorry, I landed in your- why, hello. Hello hello.

There will be a third section of the airplane available for those unfortunate people who are unable to classify themselves. Not quite single. Not quite anchored in a relationship. An open relationship, not sure if it's going anywhere. Recently broken up with and 'not ready to move on.' Those people can sit in the middle of the airplane. Nobody cares whether or not they fasten their seat belts. Nobody offers them peanuts or complimentary soft drinks. Those people are used to getting ignored, and nobody's going to complain.

I must be honest, that is a terrible place to sit. For the betterment of everybody, I reccomend defining yourself one way or the other. Remember during your next conversation with your maybe-maybe-not-significant other, that the middle of the plane is where the plane is going to split apart (because of the wings) in the event that the plane goes down. Your chances of survival are much much higher if you're sitting nicely in the front or back of the vessel. Something to keep in mind.

Help me win a writing grant!

I'm applying for a Northwest Writing Grant through a travel site called Trazzler . Part of the judging process is how many people show interest in my trip reports.  You can help me out SO much by doing this easy thing:

Check out my really short reviews of cool things to do in Seattle by clicking here.

All you have to do is open the different reviews, hit "save" and follow the directions. Really easy.  I'm not a big fan of applications asking you to bug your friends, but this would be a huge! Thank you! Thank you ! Thank you!

(PS by the way, when you 'like' the posts, I can see you who you are, and I'm really good with saying Thank you in creative ways.)

The Wilder Coast Turns Two!

The Wilder Coast turned TWO a few weeks ago but I was too busy to notice. Last year I commemorated the first year with a little birthday post. At that point, TWC had 109 posts and been viewed by 4,742 people in over 23 countries.

One year later, TWC is now at 365 posts. It has been viewed by over 37,000 people in over 100 countries.  We (the writing team and the photography team, aka me and me) think that's some serious growth! Thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, and thank you for donating. If you were not reading, I would not be writing, and if I wasn't writing this, I really wouldn't be a writer.

So celebrate with me by checking out this year in review, with links to some of the year's most popular posts . And thank you for reading. 

When it began, I was in Patagonia...

I had that dream job over in Chile. I was a bad ass kayaker. Or at least it appeared as such. I went Chilean Creeking, and Kayak Surfing and River running and was always running around sunburnt, exhausted and doing dangerous things. I found myself, somehow, at the epicenter of the kayaking world in Pucon, Chile, wondering whether or not I should fall down the rabbit hole of the paddler identity.  And I was dating my boss, David, he was much older than me and I loved him very, very much. But I never wrote about it. I was rejected by a mormon missioniary, and we stumbled upon one of the most evil places on the planet and found a waterfall there which turned Tino on his head. I was in Chile for a few months,  and I fell down the stairs in front of Lorenzo, and I started missing a normal life and I slept with a bag of coffee.

My blog got a little more interesting because I got a new Ipod with a video camera in it and took and posted all sorts of videos. But the stress of the job got to me, I suppose, and I had a lot of terrible migraines. I left Dave in Chile and I left my friends behind and I left my job.

So I Started Over and Moved to North Carolina

I fell completely in love with a boy I met on the Grand Canyon years earlier. And I moved to boone to be with him. And my very first day there  I met a Legend which was really a good sign.  For once I had a boyfriend on valentines day and I tried my hand at domesticity. And things were luminous,  life was so good. But I still got a lot of migraines. Which made things complicated. And I thought and wrote a lot about being young and broke and happy and constantly worried about everything, but  I had a good time anway. I started being a little more honest with those  ambivalent feelings that everybody relates so. From these posts I got a lot of feedback, emails, comments, even a letter from a stranger.

During this time in Boone, I wrote a lot.  I wrote Steph's story. I was accepted into the BlogHer Publishing network and won the BlogHer Voice of the Week award for my essay about magical thinking and food.  There was a really nice review about it. I messed with the format and pages and tried out new ways of posting photos and new way of telling stories. I asked for some money and people from all over were surprisingly generous.

And funny things happened, and I wrote about them, like my run in with the law and the fountain incident at the Holiday Inn. I discovered that people are a lot more interested in reading about the little funny things that happen to you than they are in just another narcasistic adventure story.  Things started falling into place and I had a lot of friends and had the life I wanted. But then I ran over a badger and was cursed.  Will and I broke up, it hurt like a bitch and I left and then I barfed all over West Virginia, which was okay since I don't like West Virginia anyway.

Then I Moved Back to New England

I spent the summer alone on a hill in Vermont. I was sad but it wasn't horrible, and I stopped getting migraines. I got hired as a writer for Soul Pancake and was finally effected by the shit economy. While on hiatus from life, I wrote the most popular post ever written which, fortunately or unfortunately, included the word panties in the title. This made me real popular with all sorts of people who search for weird things on the internet. An editor read my piece on the Siete Tazas and a few months later it was published in a magazine and I went and bought it a book store in Maine where I was leading a  teen girl squad in the wilderness.

It was a slow summer. I had beautiful visitors. And I had one epic trip to the Ottawa River and when I returned I was only interested in writing in rhyme.  And I decided that my goal in life is to write for television.

But it's hard to write for television when you live alone in Vermont. It's hard to do anything, really. So I drove for 5 days across the country, stopping once to remind myself that I am still entangled, and now I'm here.  And there is a lot to write about.

What in hell will the next year bring, is what I want to know. Living one day at a time is like reading really slow fiction.  (But I hope you keep reading.)

What is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious lunch hour?

And now I'm working. For someone else. Suddenly there are time frames to adhere to and reasons to fall asleep at an hour that other humans might consider decent. Overnight I have become the type of person who uses sentences with the words "juggle" and "schedule" and "let me see about that." Suddenly, the in between hours carry a lot more weight.

 

So tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious lunch hour?

Things I get for free

Part of an absentminded Wednesday, I go with Kendra our favorite store in Ballard, Kick it Boots and Stompwear which is next to the Kiss Cafe (beer on tap) which is next to the and the climbing gym (which I refer to, fondly, as the it the Meat Market.) The woman who owns the store discusses the job market with me while I sift distractedly through a rack of dresses. Her name is Angela, older and blond and well dressed, and she's incredibly friendly. Then, because the world is cruel I find one dress that I fall in love with. Brown and soft with flower sprigs and a pretty neck line. Because I'm a little bit of  a masochist I try it on. Perfect fit. It hangs off all the right places. I draw the curtains of the dressing room and the women in the store tell me don't I look lovely, and isn't that the most perfect dress there ever was for me!

But, believe it or not, I do have a modicum of survival tactics. It's not in my best interest to be buying anything these days that I don't need, which rules out anything that I can't eat or live within. I soothe myself.  I'll buy myself a new dress when I there is money, when there is something to celebrate. Surely there will be. Soon. Put it back old girl, there you go. (In times like these I talk to myself as if I were a horse.) And I take off the dress and hang it up where it belongs on the rack with all its mates.

Kendra tries on boots and dresses and makes a pile of things to buy. This is unprecedented. Kendra never buys anything. She still uses the same backpack she's had since middle school and she's 29. But it doesn't matter because she's so gorgeous that she could, to quote Sylvia Plath, eat men like Air. And she used to.

Angela gives me a pitying look as I leave the dresses behind and start walking the perimeter of her store, running my fingers over the polished toes of leather boots. I suddenly want to marry some rich guy and spend the rest of my life wearing boots. That doesn't sound bad at all. "That looked so good on you," she says from behind the counter, "we could set it aside...?"

"If you did that you might be holding it for a while." I pick up a shoe and look at it from all angels. Then I find myself telling Angela about a few writing projects. She's listening like a good mother, asking questions. I tell her about my upcoming dinner with Rainn Wilson and Craig Robinson, and also the latest application. The one that demanded three days worth of 9am-1am writing, how I after I hit send I was all hopeful but you can practically hear crickets chirping every time I open my email to check for a reply.

In the end, I buy this blue wrap thing. I know, I know, but it's this miracle fabric thing that I can wrap around myself six or seven different ways. It's very inexpensive and, I think with resounding clarity as I stand in front of the mirror, this may completely transform my 'look'. So I buy it and as I turn to leave Angela hands me a bag with something wrapped in tissue paper and tied up in green ribbon. She says, "This is for you to open after you get home. A little encouragement."

Kendra and I go to the Miro Tea house and she orders a sparkling tea with pieces of mango swimming around. I open the present. It's the dress I loved so much.

The Choice

Dear Applicant/Melina/Ms. Coogan/Writer/Submitter
Thank you for your application! We at xxxxxx depend on submissions like yours to keep in business! It sure was difficult choosing between all the many qualified applicants, but we at this time have decided to take a different direction. Thanks again, and best of luck!
Sincerely/From/Best/Keep in touch/Always,

Editor

I push back my chair and stare at the screen. Again? I look around the cafe to see if anyone is looking at me, if they can see the rejection glowing around my head like a big, glaring halo. I don't understand. Why would anyone want to go in a different direction than me? I'm the greatest!

And then that little insufferable voice starts speaking from the back of my head. No you're not. You're not the greatest. You suck. You little silly goof ball of failure! Think of all the jobs you don't have! And your nose is too big! Go sit in the bath tub and feed me a marshmallow, that's all your good at!

Another day another job rejection. It's so tempting. I could retreat forever into my covers with a Mark Helprin novel. A glass of seltzer water. Spend each day pattering between the bath and my bed. It wouldn't be all bad. I've known people who have done similar things, only instead of a bedroom it's a cave. A tiny little tent in the middle of nowhere.  Or I could go to nursing school.

This is The Choice. Listen to the bitch loser alien in my head and give up. Or, slap myself across the face, open up a blank document, and start again.

I'm not trying to bring you any kitten poster watered down inspiration here. Because I'm not sure how long I can go on slapping myself across the face and starting over. But we all face The Choice sometimes, some more than others I suppose. I figure if we start talking about it, it might sting less.

Maybe?

One last night on an island

But really, you're not alone for too long. And you can't be too introspective on the beach because there is too much weird, jelly-ish stuff to play with.

I loved this girl Andrea ever since she told me the story of how she met her husband.  It was three in the morning. There were drum circles. I was screaming at them to shut up. That's how he noticed me. Oh, new friend Andrea, I hate drum circles, too.  

Sea cowboy:

Edible things:

(I'm just a simple man/ I like cheap things/ I like pretty things/ I'm a simple man, really.)

 

Ocean Ghost Walking

Riding with a dog in the back of a truck at through cold evening. One more night, one more fire on the beach, one more ferry ride. One more return to Seattle.

 

 

Your heart's on the loose. You're rolling sevens with nothing to lose. -Ryan Bingham

In the Clouds

We took off running on the bluffs and then down to the beach. We played with every creepy spectacular thing we could find. It felt like running through a watercolor. I wouldn't describe it as having the sparkle or luster of the Atlantic, no, but it had this particular feeling to it. A pervasive damp gloomy gorgeousness that I wanted to eat, somehow. Or dissolve into.

It felt like you could keep going and going....

and going....

and going....

Until you forget about everyone else.

For the full experience, listen to this.

Sunday on Whidbey

Sunday on Whidbey Island. Waking up in a room of people asleep on the floor, a dark haired girl asleep next me in bed, wrapped up in the covers she stole from me in the night. The smell of wood smoke is in my hair and clothes, and I'm thirsty. I go downstairs to get a drink of water from the kitchen. There are beer bottles and coffee cups settled on every table and counter space. Someone is curled up on the couch reading a book.

Steph is already in the kitchen cooking a huge breakfast and I wonder if she even went to sleep last night. Maybe she just hovered in the kitchen with the lights off till the house was finally quiet, then popped up and started cooking all over again. I take a seat at the table and comb out my tangled hair with my fingers. I think about the previous night, standing over a drift wood bonfire, which I think is illegal, constantly changing positions as the wind blew the smoke in poisonous circles.

The strange summer of one year ago, I started having funny dreams and would wake up in a violent snap- knowing there was somewhere that I needed to be. NOW. Trying to get to the bottom of the dreams, which I was having every single night,  I sent Will a letter. I think the ocean is calling, said the letter. As a reply he sent me a picture of someone walking along the beach. The picture was from a book I'd given him for his birthday, On The Loose. On the Loose includes the most important piece of writing on the planet, a forward by Terry and Renny Russel  called Have You Ever?

Have you ever walked 34 miles on a straight-arrow dirt road in the desert with only a Tang jar of some rusty water because you expected someone who didn’t come and then walked past your turnoff in the dark and had to sleep on a cattleguard? Have you ever dropped your sleeping bag in the ocean by mistake? Have you ever followed a jeep track in the rain, which got worse and fainter and fainter and petered out a vertical quarter mile from where you wanted to go? Have you ever slept on a cobblestone riverbank? Or on a sand dune on a windy night and spit sand all the next morning? Have you ever climbed a mountain but missed the right peak by half a mile but the sun was down and you were freezing and had better find some dry wood and a place to sleep in the snow quick?

It goes on.
 
So here I am, by the ocean, now, feet on the cold sand, salt dusting my skin.

When the moon rose everybody went still to watch it. They talked about it being a blue or a harvest or an equinox something. There is was a smattering of lunar discussion. I can't really keep track of this stuff. I cracked open another beer and said something dismissive, something like "Looks good to me!" and go out to the fire.

My friends in Seattle are smart and earnest and responsible. They talk about public transportation and elimination diets.  My friends in West Virginia are of the live wet die young mentality. They talk about white water, raft carnage, kayaking, sex, and booze. (A lot of them, as its turning out, do indeed die young.)

I get a little lost in between.

Which just means, whenever I wake up I take a moment time to remind myself where I am, who I'm with. Who I'm going to be today.

I clear the table and start to set it for breakfast, tallying in my head just how many people are here. I've met a handful of new people, I'm very excited to say. Last night I met a girl at who used to work on fishing boats, and she knows all these sea shanties. It was a miracle. We sang all night on the beach as empty amber beer bottles of beer collected in the sand at our feet. She has stories of wrecked boats and knife fights. I'm starstruck, a little bit, like I've just met a real life cowboy.

 Breakfast:

After breakfast, the foraging:

We dry off afterward for a few hours with an ultra competitive, caffeine and rain induced battle of Sets. Suddenly and without warning, I get my ass seriously handed to me. By a lot of people. As in, uh, whoa, these people are way smarter than I. I go and take a nap. 

And then, we take off running.

If you'd make the drive, I'd take you there

When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time. When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever. I could say: those mountains have a meaning, but further than that I could not say. -Adrienne Rich

To the reader, do you mind if I indulge myself in the next few posts with an overload of photos, and an excess of overused but unarguably accurate adjectives?  My friend Ammen turned 35, and since he's only ever going to turn 35 once, and since I've known him nearly half of my life, I want it all to be recorded.

We spent a long weekend on Whidbey island, in a cabin on the beach, smoke on the water, the lights of Port Townsend glowing from across the harbor. It was my first weekend back in the Northwest, and the outland dressed up for the occasion in greys and pearls, smoldered in fog, churned out ribbons of alien seaweed onto the pebbly coast. The stormy weather, moody ocean and the silvery rain constantly falling was met with whiskey bottles, bonfires, new belgium beer, hot coffee, books, and huge meals cooked up by Stephanie. 

I've known this for a little while, and I've waited to write about it because I had to first put my arms around her and make sure that it was real. She's one of the biggest reasons I moved back to Seattle, and the best news of the year, of the decade, is that she is healthy again.  All this is behind us. So go outside, run around, drink one down, climb to top of the nearest mountain or sky scraper, take someone out to dinner, kiss them really well if you can, light a fire, and raise a toast to Steph and Ammen, because they deserve it.

Saturday afternoon, the ferry glides through flat dark water on a  perfectly polished fall day. Steph, Guinevere and I spend the whole time digging through the truck to find a board game to pass the time. We overestimate the length of our boat ride, because when we find the thing, "Catchphrase" and bring it up to the deck, we can see the island in such detail that we know we are already there.

We have the truck loaded down with backpacks and bags, coolers of beer and pots of food strapped shut and three birthday cakes, already frosted, balanced on our laps in the cab. We show up windblown and covered in icing. We show up leaping out of the truck and running up the steps to throw our arms around Ammen, and all the other people at the cabin who have biked with him the 80 miles out to the island. And may I say, sometimes it's worth not seeing your oldest friends for a whole year just for the joy of reuniting with them.

At a place like this:

For a weekend spent doing this: 

And this:

More to come. Only so much at once. . . .

Pleasures of the Harbor

After you drive for one week straight, no matter how coked up you are on your new life, no matter how jumping hot the city is, you don't exactly hit the ground running. Instead you hit the mattress whimpering. That's just what I did for a few days. I'd wake up in the middle of the day, stretch into a different position on my bed, flip over the pillow to the cooler side, and go back to sleep. Blinds kept out the sharp September sunlight and a fan swirled the noises of the outside world into whiteness. My boxes and backpack remained untouched at the foot of the bed and while my phone collected messages.

I was recovering not only from the drive, but also the physically brutal days I spent in Idaho on the most dangerous, mind twisting, knee blowing trek of my life. My sunburn reached an apex of pain and then peeled against the sheets. And on another level, my brain and body and circadian rhythms were adjusting to the cataclysmic shift my life was undergoing. I always get tired and need to sleep when the things around me are going through a profound change. In high school, when I learned that the creator, director, head coach of Adventure Quest had been molesting the boys around me and was going to prison for a long time, I fell asleep right there on the ground where I got the news and slept for about five hours straight. It's like emotionally-induced narcolepsy, and unfortunately, it can also go hand and hand with insomnia.  Ironic, ain't it.

Fortunately, this time there is no bad news. It's just that waking up in a new bed, in a new house, in a new neighborhood, and having your weather patterns effected by the Pacific instead of the Atlantic, can be disorienting when you take it all in one shot. Better to sip slowly.

I began to venture out of the house. Down 35th avenue. Market Street in Ballard at dusk. Back to the neighborhood bar with the ultimate friends. During these excursions I have to convince my mind that, contrary to all sensory evidence, I have not actually gone back in time. That actually, a lot has happened to me since I left and even if it's not immediately visible, it's right there beneath my skin. You can come back to live in a place you've been before, and be a completely different person. You can.

That's one thing I'm sure of. I'm a completely different person than I was when I left. 

However, most of the old pleasures of the city remain the same. Like Wallingford at sunset:

And my best friend, Lisa:

Writing all evening at Cupcake Royale in Ballard:

Greenlake walks in the afternoon:

And much much more, but why, forgive my terminology, blow the happy-to-be-back load all at once?

This one is for Jason Tabert, who asked me the other day to write a post that was....happy.

We're not much older now

In the morning I made acquaintances with the North Fork of the Payette River in Idaho. It felt like meeting the other woman.

So there you are. I've heard a lot of good things about you. Yeah. Yeah. Nice to meet you too. Do you smoke? No? Do you mind if I do?

By three in the afternoon I was halfway home. Through the arid edges of Oregon. Into the dessert of Eastern Washington, the dark Columbia river, seat belt burning welts into my excruciating sunburn. Road sign by road sign, the city inches closer.

It's dark when I reach Snoqualmie Pass on 1-90. Rain and traffic and the highway spreads out to 5 lanes. Freedom, by Jonathon Franzen, my 24 hour audio book companion, comes to an end. I surprise myself by bursting into tears with the last line. I cry for every miserable character in the book.

I'd like to make it clear to the reader that, regardless of any conclusion they may have drawn during paragraph 2, I do not actually smoke cigarettes. 

And the North Fork was not entirely like meeting the other woman. I take poetic license. Another woman would be a lot worse. She'd be most certainly prettier than me, and more flexible. Still, being left behind for a geological formation brings with it its own serving of confusing ramifications.


But now I'm merging onto 1-5 and swinging around the bend with the city on my left. There is the purple jagged outline of the Olympic Range, the houseboat moored on the private docks of lake union, cars zipping in strips of white and red light reflecting off wet pavement.

There is the University where I went to school, the famous library, almost gothic, visible from the interstate. There's the house where I lived, the ugly half-high-rise dormitory, playing fields, the ave, 45th street crossing, restaurants, smoke shops, Cafe zokas, that will be 4.75 for the cup of coffee please, ridiculous neon bubble tea houses with twelve different kinds of jelly and tapioca balls to choose from, Asian pop music videos on an enormous HD screen.

The Ave above 50th, where a vagrant man threw up on my shoes one afternoon, I think it was deliberate. The 85th/Green Lake exit with its clusterfuck of double strollers,  too thin moms bopping along behind them throwing dirty looks around to anyone who dares cross their path and slow down their timed-to-the-second 2.8 mile run. The 2nd busiest starbucks in the world (2nd to Tokyo)  my cousins' recently purchased house where I've been sending letters to for 5 months, the CHINA KING buffet where my sister and I would eat after every minor disaster (SARS, 16 day bouts of insomnia, a 1/2 burned apartment, minor mishaps with the stove top burners, unreturned phone calls from boys who should have married us although, in Anna's case, he did marry her after all, worrisome mouth sores, sparsely attended music gigs.)

There's the house where I dug through a pile of my then boyfriend's possessions and unearthed a stack of letters, the parking lot where the car hit me on my bike, the Emergency Room  at Swedish where they just about issued me a speed pass, the secret studio where Pearl Jam records, and Dave Matthews. The letters were signed by another girl and dated back for more than a year. The city buses where days in a row I sat next to a different crazy man who bled profusely from the head.

More than six years of small crimes and contentment punctuated with beads of pure joy. Where I lived, age 17-23. 

But I don't need to explain to you how it feels to be back.
Whoever you are, you've left a place and then returned. You know what it's like. All I'm really saying is, it's good to be home.

Life's Big Stories

Click here to check out Soul Pancake's Life's Big Stories feature today, I wrote it!

Saw Tooth

After the first artist, only the copyist

- Renny Russell 

For anyone who has a love that's returned, whose love is not spread out over mountains or poured into rivers, I envy you. I remember sleeping next to my buddy beneath the covers and and breathing in his smell of soap, detergent, sweat and dirt. Thinking that this one would last. That this was the smell I would inhale for the rest of my nights. Getting used to sleeping alone, with no one to throw an arm around in the middle of the night, legs kicking in space, my body curled into a useless crescent around a memory, this had taken some getting used to. But you adjust. There are your pillows to take the place, blankets, books to divert your attention, pills if you need them. But camping alone is the hardest. Alone in your tent, your back flat and rigid against the hard ground, feathers and nylon and foam protecting you from rocks and roots. You breath a white mist into the cold air, curling deeper into your sleeping bag. Trying to block out the dark, the quiet, the memories of a warm buddy next to you. Your ears are hyper sensitive to the sounds of clicking animals and cracking twigs, footprints, strangers, avalanches. And your exhausted heart keeps running over the well worn memories of your buddy lying next to you in a red sleeping bag. Resting your head on his chest as he wraps you in warmth.  Do you remember what it's like to be woken up to the sound of rock falling in the valley? You imagine the rocks gaining momentum, smashing into your tent. The whole hillside rolling away. You turn over and bury your face into his neck. "Just a rock fall," he says, not quite awake but still aware of your fear, kissing you on top of the head. Camping alone has been hard ever since I left my buddy. Keeping the fire going and running out the batteries in the lamp, rearranging the things inside the tent to try and fill the space.  But gradually its gotten easier just as everything gets easier. Think of a fire lulling down to coals. You become familiar with being just by yourself again. Looking after yourself. It does become bearable again.

So why did I go to Idaho, and be reminded? I got down on the ground and stirred at the embers and fed them pure oxygen. A glowing tent on a deep blue lake so far off the trail no one could ever find us. That splendid heart I once pretended to know. My buddy. His long arms that cast a flyfish reel in wide arcs and gutted the fish and folded me against him like origami.  Why pick at the scar that had come so close to healing, why, why, why.  I sat by the lake the morning of our second day in the Sawtooths, drinking coffee, knowing very simply that we would never be together. I know I love him beyond reason, I miss him more than any other person or thing on the planet.  I know that this is the very end, and, I guess, the time when everything starts over for me.

If you wanted to find me, I'd be about here

I was gunning through the last of Nebraska and into Wyoming, determined not to stop until I reached the state famous for both its violently homophobic history and its gay cowboy movie. One of the three states I'd never been to in the lower 48, my personal challenge of "48 before 21" quest having resulted in a frustrating Incomplete 4 years earlier. 

I never stopped to eat but I did pull off at a neurotic amount of gas stations,  never letting the needle fall beneath a half tank. I harbored a somewhat rational fear of having the engine die on the interstate and being forced to sleep in my seat, bolt upright, waiting for someone to knock on my window, hand me a piece of farm machinery and instruct me to put it against my forehead.

The night before I left a friend stopped by to debate interstates and state routes, sleeping hours verses daily mileage, and in general the decision to leave at all. He knelt above the open atlas on the floor as I crammed another pair of shoes into a plastic bin. "It's all about the shoes," I said aloud, "Shoes and lipstick. Brand new me." He wasn't listening. He bent farther over the map and traced his finger in a circle around the upper left quadrant of the country. "Right around  here," he said, "this is where all the nutjobs live."

"You have a very colorful way of describing the country." I said, studying the big square states with a frown, suddenly envisioning all the terrible things the crazy people of Laramie, WY could do to me and my shoes. "Oh, trust me," He'd replied. "Total nutjobs."

I was tired, not loopy yet but still heavy in the eyelids, as I passed the 16 hour mark, 17 hours, 18 hours. I slammed right through my personal record. But as I slipped through invisible time zones I kept gaining hours in the night which made it harder for me to justify pulling off the highway. I really couldn't afford to stop. I had to be in Idaho the very next day, the earlier the better because Will was there, at the western edge of the state. Will, the person I had loved the hardest, who I missed the most in the world. I don't mean to say that the feelings were reciprocated. But I didn't give a shit. The hours we had to spend together in Idaho were ticking away as I drove and drove and drove and so I wouldn't stop.I had to get there.

Finally in Wyoming, way past midnight, I started looking for hotels. And there was nothing. Miles and miles melted away with no exits, no houses in the distance, just a weird reddish light hanging over the flat countryside with no apparent origin or explanation.The night took on the quality of something that might last long past its universally allotted hours. Patterns and thoughts and things I recognized started to loosen inside my head and blur around the edges.

Nineteen hours into the day, Cheyenne, WY. I found a hotel.