by Amy Minato
We begin at 10 a.m.
By 10:30 a.m. we have gotten Luke’s vehicle determinedly stuck in a gravel ditch. By noon, and after sufficient awkward maneuvers, the truck is free. Undaunted, Luke and I clamber into the back and bounce along over the potholes to stake out a few slim, straight trees near the road.
The trees stand sentinel amid the brush, pointing charred beaks to the clouds. We find where the creek has been, and look for the beaver that is hidden away, her home dried up from the long summer. We pick a few splotchy apples from a wild tree, ones it seemed unlikely other creatures would harvest. They are pinched and tart, keeping their juices to themselves, their sweetness in reserve. As people do, who are unloved for too long.
We rev up the chainsaw and scatter the guardian jays that chatter furiously back from their new perches higher up. Luke, with blind courage and considerable aplomb, puts on goggles and earphones and hunkers down against a tree base in a cloud of engine roars and wood chips. Samaras, ash seeds shaped like boomerangs, waft onto his shoulders. Drops of thick red oil spill onto his jeans. After an alarmingly short time, the first ash tilts and thuds to the ground, where the grass beneath it seems to arch up and cradle its fall. Luke turns off the motor. The birds quiet.
We stand in the meadow’s peculiar silence, looking at what two minutes had dropped, which had been growing, until the fire, all its years toward the sky. I sense we have somehow startled the landscape, that it shivers and shifts slightly, allowing room in its consciousness for this new intrusion, this necessary surgery.
Luke restarts the saw and sweeps it like a swashbuckler from base to tip of the horizontal tree, rowing through the largest limbs. Mick and I snip the smaller branches off the trunk. No one speaks, but a humility is born among us, by this act bound to our surroundings.
Couched in our tender flesh, we are three beings helpless to the elements without clothes, shelter, fuel. We are grateful for the chance to acquire firewood in a sustainable way but we are using the remains of what had once been alive on earth for the energy to do this. Our faces alternately flush from sweat and cold, we remember the winter coming on. I take my turn with the saw.
Compensation
I’m donning the requisite layers of clothing beneath my extensive raingear. My mitts are even waterproof, and one could store cider in my industrial boots. It’s the Pacific Northwest, after all, and rain’s the lover who won’t stop tickling you.
On my walk I pass ducks showering blissfully on the pond. Every once in awhile, one freshens up its feathers with water repellent from the oil glands on its back. Why don’t we have such a neat trick? Fur to keep us warm or large teeth to frighten predators? Nobody else in the animal kingdom wears clothes.
I think of the exquisite swirl of pinecone bracts, their shape adapted to coax windblown pollen to the ovaries. Or the graceful guise of the owl, whose soft feathers make no swish to alarm its prey. There’s the rough, water-repellent fur of the wolf, the whale’s inspiring blubber, the curved claws of the coyote. But what about humans? Standing upright was a good trick, as were our opposable thumbs. But in some ways, haven’t we become less adapted to the natural environment? Our vision dims, hearing is less acute. With a comfort range of less than 10 degrees (sans clothes), we must be more sensitive to temperature than our hardier ancestors.
That’s the niche we fill, I guess. The oddball cousins with overextended brains to make up for vulnerable bodies. Instead of relying so heavily on physical adaptations, we change our environment to adapt to us. We create things to protect us. Clothes, fuel, weapons. Our bodies lose resilience.
Other life-forms evolve, adapt, and equip themselves from internal clues, without major tinkering with their environment. Seen this way, the evolution of other life on the planet can seem more profound and accurate, their adaptations simply work, without the residue of new problems. Plants and animals don’t depend so heavily on analysis. They produce a genetic variation that works, or they go extinct.
For us it appears to primarily be the mind that evolves, and we then cater our surroundings to our weakening bodies. Wild nature feels alien because we can’t survive in it without accoutrements from our society. For many people, camping now means watching TV in an RV in a state park lot. We manicure our yards and design golf courses, making nature palatable for us.
But many non-human life forms can’t adapt so readily to our manipulations of the earth. They retreat to the rare undisturbed places or disappear from the gene pool. We stare sorrowfully at other species across the fence, the same barrier that gives us Mozart, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, but also pesticides, clear-cuts, and oil spills. We like our inventions, and we never meant to unravel the garden, but we are using its threads to build our cities and fuel our machines.
But can this go on much longer? There’s only so much sand in the sandbox. Nowadays I gaze on wildlife with apology and a bit of envy. They suffer more now, but when society bottoms out, who will be better equipped to survive?
The rain has become a silver screen so I hurry home. The radio reports severe flooding and landslides in the Willamette Valley, exacerbated by erosion from logging and developed floodplains.
I place my wet raingear and damp clothes by the fire in the main house and note that rain has soaked through to my skin in many places, anyway. No one’s around so I run nearly naked across the grass toward my cabin, stopping just once to lift my face and surrender to the storm, before a sword flash of lightning has me scurrying off again.
Dread
Everyone knows there’s a ghost at Siesta Lane. Shutters left open, spilled milk, laundry gone from the line, a distant, bitter laugh.
You may be alone in your cabin, listening to the rain, arranging books on a shelf, and she shows up—cold and pale, dripping on your welcome mat. Your insides liquefy like a spider’s victim. She is silent, still, sullen, tenacious.
All night you are a stone dropped into a deep well. You moan and writhe and do not sleep. She is greeting every anxiety of your life at the door and beckoning them in. It is her party, at your house.
There’s no easy out at Siesta Lane. It’s dark and quiet as a grave for miles around. Fears sidle up and jump on you like lap cats. Wrapped in goose bumps, percolating with nerves, you pet them. Loss, alienation, mortality. They purr and snuggle down.
During an excruciating self-imposed exile teaching in Greece right out of college, I resorted to staring in the mirror reminding myself that I was going to die, eventually. I thought that summoning fear would keep it from trailing me, like staring down a bully or a barking dog. But instead it was the Medusa. The more I looked at death, the more I turned to stone.
So on a rare night on our homestead when the fire has died and everyone else is asleep, dread might pass through one of us like a river, clattering our bones. We don’t speak of our ghost, but at breakfast it’s clear who’s been visited. The one munching toast slowly in the corner, there since dawn, cutting out ads for high-rise apartments in town.
Then chatter fills the kitchen and the sun lays warm palms on our cold hands. Only the fiercest angst can linger past noon and withstand the sparrow’s song or the smell of fresh bread from a warming kitchen.
Beauty
Oregon’s Willamette Valley can be bleak in winter—blurred and monotone—like a sketch that fell into a puddle. Edges are smudged, shadows erased, colors muted. The rain can be so oppressively constant that the idea of it being used for torture makes teeth-grinding sense.
I catch myself wearing grey sweats and grey sweat-shirts every day for an entire week. This is easy to justify, as I’ve been nowhere near town. However, it’s not a good sign. I’ve grown accustomed to the exquisite landscape bolstering my daily reverie. With the scenery washed out, I feel myself sink. Since moving to the rainswept northwest, I’ve developed a mild case of seasonal affective disorder, a winter lethargy brought on by the lack of sun.
To avert a downward spiral, I need to muster my creative forces and push back against the
gloom. This morning I rise determined to seed grace and color throughout my day. A creative rebellion in this weather’s prison.
First, I don my Guatemalan dress with purple tights and an indigo scarf, although I have no plans to go anywhere today.
I wash and braid my straight hair, and secure it with a brightly beaded barrette. (Today, I will say things like “brightly beaded barrette.”)
“¡Hola! Como estas, muchachos? Día hermosa, no?”
Luke and Raul are hunched over their cereal, fingers melded to their coffee mugs. Raul does not look amused. Luke grins to hear even my sorry Spanish in the house.
“Está un día caca y tu sabes,” he says. (It’s a shitty day and you know it.)
I pin on each of them a button from my stash. Luke gets “Subvert the Dominant Paradigm” and Raul “Creatively Disturbed.” The opera tape that I play loud enough to jingle their orange juice glasses drives them away.
“See you, Amy!”
“Ciao, Loca!”
Maybe this needs to be done with more subtlety.
On my morning walk I gather wheat stalks, dried grasses, and cattail that I arrange carefully in a tall vase and place in a corner. I wash the living room windows, do yoga, and sew bright napkins for each of us from my fabric scrap box.
I knead both a loaf of bread and a poem for the rest of the morning, make a fragrant soup for lunch, and replenish the birdfeeder.
Stacks of freelance work mutter and pimple with impatience on my desk. Too bad! I am taking an aesthetic day.
Jazzed by poetry, with bread and curry soup scenting the kitchen, and Mahler’s Third Symphony secretly unlatching the clean windows, I slowly recover from the iron grip of ceaseless drizzle. The rain is a prince in a silver suit. I put on a bright yellow slicker to dance with him, and my heart lays petals of whimsical joy on Beauty’s altar.
December The pheasants come out of the grass like puffs of smoke: one, two, three. They waddle across the road and disappear into the hedge. I look more carefully into the ditch backed by barbed wire than I have ever looked into bushes before. The grey and brown and green take shape into rock, branch, leaf. No pheasants. Like my thoughts today the pheasants enter the brush: solid, quick, lost once they cross my consciousness.
Motion
A maple leaf, yellow as a duckbill, twirls a quiet ten yards down and lands at my feet like an offering. There, there is my life, I think. May I sway as I go.
The cliff bears rivulet marks where trickles have etched the sandstone. Water gnaws and eats. What is large is not necessarily safe. What is ancient, erodes. But what is motion and fluid also changes. Heat slurps the waves. Wind cools the heat. Taking and taken from—all a wild dodge, a continuous theft. Sweat rockets off my skin, exhausted blood cells race to my lungs for oxygen, which I in turn pull from the leaves.
Eastern philosophy and Western physics concur that the essence of life is motion and relation, that nothing is isolate or stagnant. Just as our skin sloughs cells at the rate of 100,000 a minute, everything is in the process of maintenance, renewal, and transcendence—keeping balance, making new cells, and creating new forms. Life is a creative process—a dance between active agents, a co-evolution, a music.
At a planning meeting for a new nature education group, in the middle of a friend’s crowded couch sloped to the center, I meet a dark-eyed ponytailed man with glasses held together by safety pins who tries not to crush me. A physics grad from MIT, Joseph, teaches me about motion—the pull of gravity and magnetism, the Coriolis effect, centrifugal force, inertia, friction. Unknown to me, this begins our own dance that will ebb and flow through the next two seasons. For now, I’m courting my new life.
On a trip to the Columbia Gorge, I follow a single drop of water from the lip of a waterfall to the base of its crystal tongue, centering my eyes on its clear swoop beside the cascade, a prismed tear holding together in a dizzying free fall. We travel, as Frost’s poem says, To Earthward, from birth to death heading for that long stay underground. But not willingly.
We build skyscrapers and airplanes, climb trees, lose weight, grow tall to beat gravity. We bend our necks in impossible ways to catch sight of our bright feathered cousins gliding overhead. What views they have! But would we really see better from up high? Or would we just see more, but with less accuracy?
I’m wondering if the constant itch to be successful (i.e., climb the ladder) stems from a rebellion of our weight, trying to escape the body’s heft.
But here at Siesta Lane gravity wins. We sink and settle like apples into the earth, dirt in our skin creases, stains on our pants, leaning in as the planet whirls and hurtles through space.
And there’s magnetism here, a force of attraction or repulsion between objects. Paul moves toward me who makes him laugh. He moves away from my desire to have children. I move toward Paul who plants peas and builds fences and knows how to raise a daughter. I move away from his smoking and muttering about women. His wife left him with a child he hadn’t planned on but who commands his deepest commitment. Attraction, repulsion. The switch of these forces within him has set his jaw, lined his face, grayed his beard.
His daughter, Natalie, likes me but doesn’t want her father to. She hurls the concentrated power of her bright twelve-year-old personality between us. Although drawn to their closeness and charm, their centrifugal spin pushes the rest of us to the edge.
When an object is moving in one direction, Joseph says, its tendency is to keep moving in that direction. Hence we lean to the opposite side when a car makes a fast turn. Inertia.
So that’s why we stay in sorry relationships, I muse, thinking of my recent past, my bruises from smashing up against men who were decidedly taking a sharp turn. As there’s nothing rational about staying with a bad habit, it’s comforting to know there are physical forces at work.
In relationships we are like so many molecules, with electrons to give or take, weak areas to bind with stronger ones. Bumping up our energy level with our personal gains or losses. We move toward and away from each other, clustering into something either life-giving, neutral, or cancerous.
But what currently affects my motion most these days, what slows me, is the brush of grass and wind here, the catch of color and scent, the sensory details of this heady place that arrest my mind and stay my wandering soul. The varied and complex friction of the land. I’m hoping to stay still long enough to feel myself move.
Ballet of a Life Cycle
Beyond the park where two kids spar
with yellow bats, among the reeds
and willows, heralded by the hinged call
of the red-wing blackbird, the female
red skimmer dragonfly rides
the underside of the male as they drop and pause,
in each touch thirty eggs born to water, a slim,
crimson finger tapping the surface of the creek.
In two weeks, the bristled
lower lips of the hatched nymphs
will snatch for mayflies, minnows,
tree-frog tadpoles in languorous paddle
among the rushes. They’ll ricochet
the creek bottom propelled by water
shot from the ends of their abdomens,
crawl to shore, and split
from their casings like trumpets. The pale
new dragonflies will buckle onto leaf
blades, fanning wings dry and
brittle as mica. Unwitting insects
will fly into the basket of their hooped legs.
In time, each male will curl
the end of his abdomen under and drop
a jewel of sperm just below his heart,
and like a red compass seek out
and saddle a female, eight wings beating,
and after twining in delicate hover
above the lilypads and fat eyes of bullfrogs,
arcing the fine tip of her ovipositor up,
she will accept the gift.
Homemade
“Y
ou’re gonna make your own mustard?” My friend Pearl asks, placing a bouquet of irises on the kitchen table. Pearl is someone who quietly makes every place she visits more beautiful and the people she encounters feel better about themselves. Rather than a fountain, Pearl is a pool of clear water. Instead of drawing attention to her own warmth, creativity, intelligence, and beauty, she reflects these qualities back onto others, whether they can claim these charms or not.
But that is another story. Back to the mustard.
“I’d like to try.”
“But why? I’ll give you some.”
Pearl and I have been housemates before and she is flabbergasted by my desire to make things that normal folk just buy. This is not unrelated to her knowing that I, unlike her, am lousy at crafts. The drapes I make are crooked, the vests I knit unravel, and the broom of dried grasses leaves more of itself on the floor than it sweeps up.
I once brought horseradish back from Illinois where I’d dug up the roots and blended them with vinegar, sniffling and crying through the fiery process. Afterward, I was afraid to open it. Mold refused to grow on it. Two years later, we finally chucked it and the raccoons stayed away from our compost for weeks.
However, the crackers I make are a hit, along with the salad dressing. Lots of the baskets I weave turn out functional, albeit rustic looking, and everyone pretends at least to enjoy my homemade bread. My friend’s partner appreciates the sage and witch hazel aftershave that a former sweetie of mine returned after one use.
