by Amy Minato
After a few days I return most items to the land for the inhabitants to use in their fashion, or for the next inquisitive visitor. Some treasures I hold onto for a day, a week, years—their whispered tales still spinning. A spider casing stays with me. I look and look at this delicate shell, wondering how the spider pulled her thin legs out of that translucent skin. Spiders have no internal skeleton, so they have to molt in order to grow. During molting, until their new skin hardens, they can’t move their soft bodies and are extremely vulnerable to predators. Why does this intrigue me?
Day after day I resist returning the casing to the land. The light prisms off it, the lack of spider inside giving it a spectral integrity. “Look,” it says to me, “I was once useful but knew when to slough off. Commend me.” I do. And notice the itch of tired personas urging me to move on. It’s unsettling to let go, to not become fixated with familiarity. A practice for the larger yieldings of change and loss.
Through the simple ritual of my revolving altar I learn to trust life’s tilting kaleidoscope, the heart’s dynamic journey.
Sustenance
To survive I work several jobs. As a published poet I teach writing in public schools for two-week stints as a visiting artist. Mostly I help edit Skipping Stones, a nonprofit journal by kids for kids, focusing on cultures and nature, which I co-founded with a man from India. Kids from around the world create it, really. We just arrange the words and pictures. It started as a gesture toward world peace through communication and an appreciation of diversity. We wanted to empower children, offer them hope and a sense of justice, and publish their inimitable writing. This, like most of my life work, though greatly rewarding, involves tedious hours and offers abysmal pay.
Sometimes I answer phones in the office (i.e., garage) of a friend who hopes to fool clients into thinking he’s big time. Having a secretary, he says, shows you’ve made it.
I substitute at a bakery—a place where the bakers sing while they knead bread together at a long wooden table. We listen to music, smell yeast, taste bread, feel dough, and watch hands. Sometime I speculate that living in town, I could work there every day. But it’s not what I want right now.
I get by, mostly, on these sporadic funds, praying that my teeth and body hold out. None of us have much money so we live cheaply. Firewood and utility bills split nine ways are meager. Shared and garden food goes a long way.
Luke, Raul, Sara, and Rita go to grad school; Paul and Jack work construction; Mick’s the only professional, but serving The Nature Conservancy comes close to a labor of love. Basically, we’ve achieved economic parity. No coveting or condescension in this neighborhood. Besides, there’s no room in our cabins for riches, and stuff rots in the barn.
But are we the little pigs building our houses of straw? The crickets who fiddle away all summer while the mice store food? College friends write me about their savings plans and retirement funds. I tell them how red the fox’s fur looks in the afternoon light. They think that I will end up a bag lady unless they can fix me up with a rich guy. Local ones try.
I go on one date with a law student and feel my soul slump under the chair. He orders steak and martinis and talks about estate law. I tell him how close I came to entering law school—back in one of my more practical phases—passing tests and getting accepted and almost signing up. I almost signed on but then it occurred to me that I hated arguing, and was so easily persuaded to empathize with an opposing view. I pictured myself in the courtroom, walking over to the other lawyers, acknowledging their points, and withdrawing from my client’s case. Law school, as would this law student, receded from my future like day before the chase of night.
To ever have a family I’ll need to buck up. Not everyone has this luxury of a hiatus in midlife. I’m told to “figure out what I want to be when I grow up,” but puzzle over how to gracefully fit my new person into the same old world.
Making a Living
One morning I wake to the clatter of a squirrel acrobating above my head. The five toes on a sqiurrel’s back feet and unique ability to swivel its ankles make it a star circus act. This furry sentinel stops to peruse me through the skylight while oak branches knock on my roof. My bed is covered in papers that I fell asleep reading for Skipping Stones, and there’s no way I can make the board meeting that starts in town in five minutes. The squirrel seems to realize my dilemma, and is waiting to see what I will do, thinking, no doubt, that I’m about to put on a good show. A weeping or cussing fit maybe. A comic attempt to dress in two seconds. Instead I stare back into his black eye and hold a silent conference between my yin and yang.
Juggling several jobs and projects is not conducive to a contemplative life. But I like everything I do. The magazine pays nothing but the kids’ writing jazzes me, and it’s my offspring. Answering phones for a computer security business is inane and meaningless. But it’s easy and pays shockingly well. The bakery hours are too darn early. But the smell of baking bread, the smooth, cool feel of dough ...
I realize that at this point I should call my rational friends, my parents or those college peers with the security funds, for some common-sense advice. I should flip through investment magazines or go to law school. But what do I do? O child lacking reason? I look outside at trees.
The banter goes on in my head until the call of the oaks wins out. If I never have time to be with them, to be embraced by their branches, lost in reverie of flickering light and leaf, what’s my life worth? I’ve missed the meeting, but I’m here.
Knowing that I am crazy and doomed but saved somehow, I take a leave of absence from the magazine, quit the bakery and fake secretary job, and decide to live off freelance writing and my occasional artist stints in the schools. I resolve to apply for fellowships and plant a lot of vegetables.
Immediately, I accrue unexpected payments. My car breaks down and my cat, Quixote, gets worms. The magazine is short on funds and can’t pay me for my final month of work. My dreams of simplifying turn to night-mares, literally, of indigence and shame—running down the street naked. Breathing deep and maintaining my resolve, I ask Sara if we can car-share for awhile, cut out all extra expenses, and sell an antique chair that I find at a yard sale to get by. I can’t do this forever, and if I had children I couldn’t do this at all. But for now I don’t know how not to.
Devotions
My daily walk often leads to a small, forested park on a hill, a green hump above gold fields, a place I’ve come to think of as my temple. Unfortunately a neighbor has taken to putting up signs that say, “Keep out! Private property.” I’m miffed and hurt and ask Mick about it later.
“They just think it’s theirs ’cuz they’ve been using it for so long. It’s not. It’s a public park that just doesn’t have a sign on it. You can go there whenever you want.”
So I do. And, of course, one day a fellow in a very large pickup happens by and stops. “Private property, lady,” he says.
“Well, actually,” I clear my constricting throat, “it’s not. It belongs to the county.”
“You tryin’ to tell me,” his ice blue eyes check out my boots and backpack, “where my property is?”
I fumble into my bag and pull out a map. “Here, see.” I point to a green triangle on the otherwise white grid. “It’s public.”
Without looking at the map, he mutters and drives away. A large dog beside him growls and bares yellow teeth as they pass.
I breathe deep and keep walking. Dew-speckled trillium, ginger, and bleeding hearts twinkle along the path. Mick has asked that we look out for unknown plants here. He thinks there may be rare ones in this undisturbed place.
Inside the butterscotch cup of a salsify, a crab spider shingles itself to a petal, waiting for prey. Crab spiders, flat with crablike legs, can move sideways or backwards and change color to match each host flower. An insect cruising into a calyx for some nectar is in for a nasty surprise.
A circular maidenhair fern crowns a fawn lily beside a patch of fringe cup next to a reddis
h, triangular-leaved plant that I haven’t seen before. As I bend closer, a twig snaps near me. A deer, maybe! I look up from fingering the coiled fiddleheads of ferns and lock eyes with ... a cow, munching determinedly on the tender young plants of the forest floor. Dismayed, I shoo it downhill to the denuded pasture where it belongs.
That’s why the pickup guy wanted me gone, I realize—so I wouldn’t discover that his cow is sullying the creek with waste and crushing fragile native plants with its hooves on this rare patch of public land.
I know that I will have to call attention to this, somehow, to alert authorities, to be the “meanie.” Because when we side with ecological health over someone’s personal interest, we are seen as inhumane—as if all of our children’s future is not dependent on the state of the earth they inherit. As one crusty activist put it, “Environmentalists may not make easy neighbors, but we make excellent ancestors.”
At the top of the hill there’s a clearing where you can see most of Rainbow Valley, a rolling patchwork of trees, scalloped sky, and horse farms. I bow to each direction, thankful for health of mind, body, spirit, emotion. Afterward chickadees flit behind the tinsel of lichen on the oaks as I sit for a long time, listening.
At dusk I wander down, feeling raw and protective. Because I know these trees and their squirrels, these ferns and wildflowers, I care about them. The burden of responsibility balances the pleasures of love.
And what in nature is not threatened today? It’s crazy to become fond of a natural world gasping from our assaults. How much easier to watch it on film and in museums, or to casually visit wild places leaving no heartstrings attached. Then when you hear about their destruction by pollution or resource extraction it causes just a small sadness, instead of fierce loss.
So it’s understandable that many of us close the shades and turn on the TV, sheltering ourselves from the devastation of this planet and our complicity in it. But how does it affect us, especially kids, to stay inside? A parade of recent books bemoans the condition of our techno-savvy, nature-impoverished children, correlating the rise of ADD, obesity, and childhood depression with today’s indoor culture.
The more detached we are, I believe, the more miserable we become. A terrible loneliness grows in us, a loneliness for the earth. No consumer goods or even friendship can assuage this grief. There is no substitute for direct experience, for sun on our face and soil in our boots. We need to risk a genuine, daily relationship with place. The only remedy is to take that precarious step outside.
September Wicker chair with a broken straw seat, a lantern with smudged hand marks, small cracked table covered with low shells and stones and feathers, a candle burned down low. A tiger cat curls graciously around the lantern, batting at moths, volleying them between its soft, lethal paws. I’m amazed at how quiet and sure a cat walks without looking, tripping, or knocking anything over. Oh, to be so careful in my own ways.
Accessibility
The cabins don’t have hook-ups, so the nine of us share one phone, which is always in use. We line up patiently outside the narrow, closed door, trying not to overhear someone else’s conversation. The phone room is not unlike a confessional, cramped and dark, where you talk to someone you can’t see. With eight adults here, when the phone rings, the odds are that the call you answer won’t be for you, and whomever the call is for will be in their cabin. So to appease the caller and because it’s a link to the world, you end up in conversation. I catch myself telling near strangers the menial sins of the week.
The phone is our main link to the outside world, which might as well be another planet. That and the mail, which arrives to 28577 Siesta Lane as if there were twenty thousand instead of six houses on our road.
Most of the time when someone calls me the line is busy, no one’s around, or I’m in my cabin or otherwise hard to find. It’s rare to actually receive a phone call. Mostly I get hard-to-decipher messages.
“A. Carol 7 684-917. R.”
“Raul, what does this mean?”
“Your friend, Carol, wanted to come over last night at seven. You were supposed to call her.”
“Last night?”
“Yeah, you were in your cabin. And Luke needed the phone.”
“I don’t know a Carol. Pearl maybe?”
“Yeah, that’s it!”
“This phone number only has six digits.”
“The last one’s a zero. I filled it in.”
Using the phone after someone else gives clues about their conversation. Cuss words etched into the phone pad are a bad sign, as are nail marks on the cord. We turn up the music and pretend not to hear the occasional quarrel slipping in strained tones through cracks in the booth. When you live with others, you can’t always hide your struggles and conflicts, and yet, you are not close enough friends to choose to share such things. So secrets are both shared and kept, breeding an unspoken security among us.
The lack of privacy is compensated by inaccessibility. Although I sometimes miss a coveted call, there’s freedom in being hard to contact. I rarely have to talk to disgruntled or demanding people and have fewer social obligations. Phone and door-to-door solicitors haven’t discovered us yet. During quiet evenings alone in my cabin, I can follow an idea through its forested path until it arrives at a clearing. I can read an entire book or write a poem.
Our isolation nourishes community among us. We tell our woes, successes, and puzzlements to each other. And often, just human presence is company enough.
It’s not that we are removed from the world. We all go to town sometimes, some daily, and a few even travel. Luke gets the local paper delivered and Raul listens to news on the radio. We have political discussions and bemoan the world situation. But Siesta Lane buffers us. We invite the world in; it doesn’t bang down our door. And when it begins to crush our souls, we can ask it to leave.
Mick, Raul, and I particularly like to sit quietly around the fire. We’ve come to appreciate each other’s laconicism. Sometimes I knit, Raul cures leather, and Mick keys out plants. Other times, we just stare, in hypnotic spells, flames reflected in our pupils. A few of us may play cards together on an evening, or read short stories aloud. Meanwhile, the world’s discouraging news curls and disappears in the woodstove.
Perspective
Natalie and I write up a treasure hunt of the land. At first we make clues only for familiar places on the land—“a high-up house” would be the treehouse, “water’s world,” the pump. Communication is often tailored to what others will recognize. This way there is less to explain. And yet, by narrowing our talk, we reinforce only the small known threads of the web. We see only what we talk about.
We decide to write clues like these:
the coolest spot on the land
a good sunrise-watching place
palace of the spider webs
home of the rare plant
tree with the most birds at dusk
the greenest softest patch of grass
tree with the water-filled hole squiggly with mosquito larvae (an attendant spider web poised above)
Such details of the natural landscape used to be invisible to me. But now the hidden world beckons, requiring patience and a retraining of my eye, a refocusing. To see in the shadows, pull the periphery center stage.
We give out the treasure hunt at dinner with mixed response. Mick knows where the rare plant is, and Sara the tree with the most birds. Luke wants to put a fish in the mosquito breeding ground. Paul suggests a good sunrise-watching place, though it’s not the one we had in mind. Raul, in his understated tone, suggests that the coolest spot on the land would be the freezer.
Fire
Lantern light softens a room, scents it, offers a flame to stare into and a place to warm your hands. Shadows smudge the walls.
Last night a forest fire pinched its way north over the ridge—a caterpillar of smoke with glowing belly. I sat helpless, two miles away, watching the helicopter’s blinking lights hover pathetic in the smoke. What are we to f
ire?
Smokey the Bear with his accusing scowl, and wide-eyed, slender-legged Bambi, running in terror from the flames, have convinced us that fire is bad. Yet, historic fire often helped plants and animals that benefited from the resultant patchwork of clearings in the woods.
Just as we have failed at stopping floods, we haven’t eliminated fire. Most ecosystems have evolved with fire and floods, and in a natural system such dynamic forces strengthen and animate the land. But those fires tended to be less extensive—burning snags, clearing brush, licking the base of fire-resistant old growth. Without the buildup of fuel from fire suppression, most of them had a lighter touch than today’s infernos. They pruned and revitalized the forests.
Fires have sculpted the Pacific Northwest forests for millennia—some sparked by lightning, others by native people to increase deer forage and food plants, maybe even to allow a clearing for a sunny camp. Many species benefit after a fire. Fireweed and other pioneer plants thrive in new meadows, leaf litter is cleared away allowing for seed germination, and in some plants, like the ponderosa pine, fire stimulates their growth.
Oregonians hold a constant debate about wildfires. Let them burn? How much? Remove woody debris before fire season? Set controlled fires during the wet spring?
Today, the results of logging and fire suppression (i.e., lots of diseased and same-aged trees) cause fires that burn most everything in their acres-wide swath. Even these fires bring gifts to the forest of strong light and vibrant new growth. They are a drastic response to dire conditions. Yet we fight them as if they’re demons from hell—blasting roads through to get fire fighting equipment in and dumping chemicals on the flames and soil, often to no avail.
