My Year of Dirt and Water

by Tracy Franz

  “Yoko-san and Satsuki-chan have been a welcome distraction in many ways. Still, it’s overwhelming—an assault on the senses. I feel tired all the time.”

  “Was it like that when I went to Alaska with you?”

  “Somewhat, yeah. But we’d only been dating a year. I’m pretty sure that all I could really see was you.”

  “That was mutual. . . . Maybe people who don’t leave have time to grow into a place, or they grow with it. But those who do leave—”

  “Yes, yes! There’s this sense of a split personality, or of lost time. There is no real connection to that person who was and the person who is. It’s terrifying. Like being unable to locate my self, my ego. I’m lost.”

  “Maybe it’s time to shave your head, baby.”

  ~

  In the evening, I call Cheryl, my best friend from high school. We have, over the years, kept a slender thread of contact. Her voice, not heard in a very long time, exactly the same as I remembered it.

  Monday, August 16

  Yoko-san and Satsuki-chan are leaving at 3 a.m. tomorrow, and Yoko-san suggests that we say goodbye now, as the hotel shuttle will deliver them both to the airport at that early hour. So we see them off at the hotel entrance with an armload of souvenirs: a book of Alaskan photography, some coffee and loose-leaf tea, an assortment of chocolates from the gift shop where my mom works part-time. This is followed by lots of bowing, which my mother and I return awkwardly. Then as we get into the car and pull away, we observe as Satsuki-chan and Yoko-san dutifully stand and wave until we are out of sight.

  “Wow, that was an elaborate send-off,” says my mother.

  “If we turn the car around now and catch them before they go back inside, I’m pretty sure that Japanese etiquette will require that they start up again,” I offer. Some cruel part of me wants to do just this, as experiment.

  “What now?”

  “I have no idea. I feel like my purpose has been taken away.”

  “Is there anything that you know you’d like to do while you’re here?”

  “Nothing special—just be here,” I say. “Take walks, read, write a bit. Oh, and maybe try local Zen—I guess there’s a little group that meets in the mornings.”

  “Okay. How about a drive to Portage Glacier today?”

  “Sure!”

  And so we shuttle off down the Seward Highway, that great route of stunning vistas—towering mountains and vast sea. When we arrive, it is as shocking as the first time I noticed: a concrete building adjacent to nothing more than a cold lake. Years ago, in my childhood, the lake was mostly glacier. Somewhere, there is a photo of me standing in front of this same building and the massive white-blue river of ice next to it, a small inquisitive hand reaching out to touch the frozen chunks that have settled along the dark riverside sands. Now, we stand before a giant vanished. That great receding, as if a memory erased.

  “It’s changed a lot, hasn’t it,” says my mother.

  “It shocks me every time. When we last saw the ice—that must have been with Fred.” I ask her if she ever thinks of her last ex-husband, the man who served as my stand-in father for most of my childhood.

  “Sometimes, but not that often nowadays.”

  “I worked very hard to put him out of my mind when I first moved to Japan—it was an active forgetting, I think. But sometimes something comes up, and I almost can’t believe it’s real, that someone could actually treat other people that way.”

  “Yes, it was like being caught in one long nightmare.”

  “That’s a good word for it, ‘nightmare.’ Our own personal hell. Nobody could see it but us. Or they chose not to see.”

  My mother looks at the edge of water, then up toward the mountains. “When you went off to college, I remember having vivid dreams that he was fattening me up to eat me—to devour me—just like in the Hansel and Gretel story. That’s when I knew I had to get away.”

  “I’ve had dreams like that. Little echoes after I left. Always something about being trapped—terrible.” And at the same time I allowed men to build traps around me. I walked into those iron cages knowingly. I shut the door and locked it behind me again and again.

  “But you know, there were good times, too. We shouldn’t forget that.” This odd habit of my mother’s, always applying the positive spin.

  “He was a bully, Mom. A horrible person. Nothing can change any of that.”

  I think of a childhood friend, Matt, the son of a minister. His father hunted bear and moose with my stepfather while discussing the mysteries of God. Matt’s family moved out of state just after I entered high school—we already lived in different parts of the Valley by then, and we had been attending different schools. Still, over the years, we stayed in touch off and on. I had written him a letter that first year in Japan, and I told him what I had failed to tell so many others. But he hadn’t believed me. In his reply, he wrote how Fred, as his fifth-grade teacher, had been a kind of inspiration to both him and his younger brother, and that he would always be indebted to Fred, for showing him how to be strong, how to be a man. I never wrote back, even though he wrote to me again and again. That broken thread of friendship. A boy who had once held my hand as we crossed a treacherous tributary of a river swollen with spring ice-melt and glacial silt. I had thought we would always know each other. Maybe I shouldn’t have told, maybe he should have believed. I still don’t know which is true. I still don’t know.

  Tuesday, August 17

  My first day of “Alaskan Zen.” I rise at 6 a.m., pull on loose, dark clothing, and with my mother’s car keys in my hand rush out the door chanting, “Stay on the right, stay on the right, stay on the right.” Though directionally challenged, I do succeed in both driving on the correct side of the road and locating the little yoga studio where, according to the Internet, the Anchorage Zen Community meets for zazen every morning.

  Still, I feel that I am trespassing as I enter the building. Standing before an empty reception desk that sits next to a large dark and empty room, I weigh my options: call out or leave or just snoop around. Then I register that the hallway extending beyond the desk is lit, and I follow it (thus opting for “snoop around,” I suppose). At the end of the corridor is another big room with a single glowing lamp, a few tall bookcases off to the side obscuring one corner, a simple table altar with incense curling around a small Buddha, and a number of square cushions and round zafu set out in a long rectangle. No one is in here, as far as I can tell, but at least I now understand what I am looking at. I gassho and bow, enter, and seat myself on the nearest zafu and let my gaze rest on the wall in front of me.

  A few minutes later, from behind the bookshelf comes the sound of cloth—a monk’s ample robes, perhaps. I sense an emerging from behind the bookshelf, a settling-in, and then the strike of a bell to begin the session. If I close my eyes, I could be at Tatsuda Center, or at Shogoji with Koun.

  After a while, I hear movement again, a kind of pacing around the room, and then the person whom I have now decided is definitely the priest puts his hand gently on my shoulder and presses my lower back to correct my failing posture. I misunderstand and gassho, bowing low to accept the firm smack from the kyosaku stick, but he whispers, “No, no, no, no, no,” laughing a little under his breath. I smile when I recognize the accent—Japanese.

  After zazen and then kinhin and then zazen again, there is a flurry of prostrations and chanting in English and Japanese from the lone figure at the front of the room. Without other laypeople to guide me, I’m not sure what to do, so I fake it, fumbling through every movement and chant. Finally, we rise and bow to our cushions and to the potential of other practitioners, and then I turn my gaze to the front of the room and really see the priest for the first time: a small, older Japanese man with a wide face, and an easy, broken smile. I like him immediately.

  “Good morning,” he says. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m very sorry. I messed up your beautiful ceremony.”

  “Don’t worry
. How about zazen? You are okay? It was not too difficult?”

  “I think it’s always difficult for me.”

  “Oh I see.”

  “Do you need help with this stuff?”

  “You can put the cushions away here. And the sutra books go here. There is a special way for the altar things—I will show you.”

  “Is it always so quiet?” I ask as I gather and stack.

  “Alaskan people are always busy enjoying their lives in summer,” he explains as he disappears behind the bookshelf. He emerges minutes later, now dressed in plain black samu-e. “Please call me Tozen,” he says. “Will you come again?”

  “Yes. For a couple weeks, anyway. I’m visiting my mother, but I live in Japan. This year my husband is training in a monastery.”

  “Oh I see. You are lonely like me.”

  Wednesday, August 18

  After a late breakfast, I borrow my mother’s car again and drive north through birch and evergreen and across endless mud flats, toward a stunning view of Pioneer Peak in bright sun. In just under an hour, I arrive in Palmer, the small town where I attended junior high and high school. Cheryl, now a high school teacher in the Valley, greets me with a hug at the door of her house—this tall, tan, stunning woman with long brown hair. We stand back briefly and just take each other in. “You look the same!” we both exclaim, and we do, but for that slight angular maturing of the features, that falling away of softness and rounded youth. Her son and daughter, she says, are with her ex-husband this week, so she has the day to herself.

  “Let’s sit out back—in the sun,” she says, and we pass through the living room, out onto a bright deck. “So your husband—how long has it been now?”

  “This is the sixth month. Six more to go.”

  “You know, I was thinking about something you wrote me a while back, something about Buddhism.”

  “Oh yikes—I hope I didn’t say something stupid.”

  “No, it’s just that I was going to counseling for a while, after I got divorced. The more I think about it, it seems spiritual. Not what I expected at all.”

  “Maybe Zen is like that. A little like that and a little not like that. I’m not sure.”

  “Hey, do you want to—do something?” Cheryl has often been my guide to perilous outdoor adventure. I know whatever she has in mind will not be boring.

  A short while later, we are biking at breakneck speeds along a forest trail that offers views of the glacially silted waters of the Matanuska-Susitna River. Descending a hill, my tire connects with a big rock and I’m neatly thrown into the bushes.

  “You okay?” Cheryl asks as she maneuvers her bike to me.

  I brush dirt and foliage from my body and pick up the bike. “Nothing broken. But I might need to walk it off for a few minutes.”

  As we walk, my racing heart and breath begin to slow.

  “I love coming here,” says Cheryl. “Makes me feel like a kid again.”

  “Thank God we’re not. I don’t think I could bear all that teenage angst.”

  “Yes, angst. . . . I worried about you, you know. Back in high school. I always did. But I had my own problems, too.”

  I laugh. “I always thought you were the together one. I envied you.”

  Cheryl stops walking and I stop too. I grow aware of the metal carcasses of vehicles between the trees around us. Ghosts from a distant time, a haunting. Cheryl says, “There was Ms. P, do you remember her? She once told me that we all have our time—‘yours just hasn’t come yet.’ That meant a lot to me, you know. That meant a lot. And she was right.”

  We climb back on our bicycles, and I look on as Cheryl rides ahead of me. It is jarring how the memories of others, once revealed, can rewrite our own histories in an instant. Cheryl was tall and awkward and smart and fearless and beautiful in a way that few could see. I was slight and shy and pretty and damaged, and for some reason certain things came easily to me. Self-absorbed in my own misery, I could not fully comprehend the misery of others. I had not been a good friend.

  ~

  As I am driving back to Anchorage, a memory comes to me, bright as the evening light. One winter day into our second year of high school, Cheryl and I walked into the woods near her house. We carried with us the long and painful letters we’d written each other in junior high and that first bit of high school. There were many, and we had meticulously saved every one of them, compiling them in a three-ring binder over the course of those years. We also brought photos—one of Cheryl’s first boyfriend, one of a boy I had liked until, in the darkness of a near-empty movie theater, he tried to force me to do something I did not want to do, one of a girl who had called one or both of us “bitch” to all of her friends. We brought matches and a bottle of lighter fluid. We gathered dry branches and bits of yellowed grass revealed by the thaw. After we lit the fire, we dropped the photos in one by one, watching them curl up and burn. The letters, our devastating masterpiece, we could not bring ourselves to burn, so we buried the folder in the snow. Sometime after that day, we drifted apart, each to our own paths.

  Thursday, August 19

  I feel broken this morning. When I attend zazen, I am vaguely aware of many comings and goings of the participants—but it is all through a sleepy fog. Afterward, Tozen suggests he and I have breakfast at a little mom-and-pop diner nearby. As we walk across the parking lot, he tests my Japanese—a long riff of questions that move from easy to more and more difficult.

  When I completely fail to answer, he tells me in English, “I am not only a monk. I am also a Japanese-language teacher.”

  “Then you know exactly how bad my Japanese is.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ha—in Japan I always know I’m doing badly when someone compliments me. ‘Nihongo ga jozu desu ne!’ It’s a real giveaway.”

  “Do you get a lot of compliments?”

  “So many.”

  “I see.”

  Over breakfast, I learn that in Japan he lived in Gunma, “famous for nothing.” And that, for a while, someone in his family was desperately trying to develop a fugu blowfish with no poison. But this, according to Tozen, was a very bad idea because the mother said he had always been careless. I also learn that Tozen’s deshi’s deshi was at Shogoji recently.

  “Tim?” I ask, faintly recalling Koun mentioning something about an American man, someone who stayed there only briefly. It seems everyone knows everyone in the small world of Zen.

  As we are about to part ways after breakfast, he asks, “Do you know Tora-san?” Tozen has collected and watched the entirety of this long-running Japanese series about an ever-lovesick traveler. He says, “I am like Tora-san—completely hopeless.”

  Maybe I am like that, too.

  Friday, August 20

  Sitting this morning is pure pleasure, a rarity: my posture balanced, my respiration measured, a gentle humming in the mechanisms of the body. Tozen is not here today and the atmosphere in the room feels slightly different, though I’m not sure if his absence is the reason. Maybe it’s the rain outside and the sound of cars moving through water. Or it’s that flash of brightness in my peripheral vision: a pretty blond girl in her twenties wearing all-white, in contrast to the others’ dark, demure clothing. A reluctant goddess, she slips away after the first end-of-zazen bow.

  That pleasant energy evaporates midway through the morning, and the deep tiredness of yesterday hits me again. Mom and I make plans to go to a movie—a low-key event—but Koun calls just before we step out the door. I tell him about meeting Tozen, and when I mention his deshi’s deshi, Koun reminds me that Tim was the American monk who decided to leave Shogoji a few weeks ago. Jisen-san was constantly berating him for not being able to “sit like a real monk.”

  “He has water-on-the-knees. A very painful condition. But she wouldn’t hear of it. She called him weak, lazy. I felt bad for him.”

  He also tells me that he and some of the Shogoji monks had been invited to visit the Kurume temple, a complex nestled next to an unfo
rgettable landmark: a huge statue of Kannon, or Avalokiteshvara, overlooking the city. Some years ago we entered the building and climbed the spiral of stairs inside to peer out from the very eyes of compassion. I remember a scratchy recording of the Heart Sutra echoing up and around us and also the jigoku, the hell realms at the base of the structure—horrifying yet somehow Disney-like dioramas of demons and figures trapped in eternal torture. Thus we climbed out of hell, and then entered back into it.

  “The priest there carves beautiful religious statues,” Koun tells me. “He’s made a living of it. If we ever have a temple here I’ll go to him first for statuary.” He also tells me that he served as the babysitter for the priest’s newborn son. “Such a happy little guy, his head constantly bonking on my chest. It’s the best monk’s job I’ve been assigned so far.” I smile at the image of my husband as Kannon with a baby in his arms. I wonder if we will ever be brave enough to have children.

  He asks, “How are things there?”

  “I don’t know. I think maybe I was an asshole in high school.”

  “I doubt that very much.”

  “Well, I know for sure I’m tired,” I say. “Everything feels heavy.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  “Maybe it has something to do with the midway point. Or maybe it’s the weather or Alaska—I don’t know. Part of me can’t believe that we’ve come this far already. Part of me can’t believe we have six more months to go.”

  Sunday, August 22

  Mom and I drive out to Hatcher’s Pass today, stopping here and there as we ascend the mountain, snapping photos of each other dipping our fingers into the cold, clear water of the Little Susitna River, or pointing at damp stones laced with fool’s gold.

  Near the top of the mountain, we’ve climbed high enough to reveal the blanket of clouds floating above the valley. Here dense foliage has given way to moss, lowbush cranberries, and blueberry bushes. We’ve brought buckets to gather blueberries, but it’s unusually warm this year, and the fruit is sparse and wrinkled. Still, we continue to search, taking pleasure in our rare findings.