varietal exile

Saturday the rain wasn’t too bad and I held out under a couple viaducts when it puffed its chest (Back of the Yards, West Englewood, respectively). Otherwise it was a perfectly good ride, and the weather has held, here.

I spent Sunday unable to stick with something. Plumbing project. Cleaning project. Finally getting through the articles I’ve held to in last year’s New Yorkers (and last month’s, frankly.) I kept waiting for the storm to roll in and in the rain I’d finish this. The thin discount store curtain moved in and out with some semblance of romance. It’s possible the tatters are no longer romantic on this side of middle age.

I should check on Kiara who told me at the beginning of the year that she had goals, and there was a quarterly plan. Instead of being annoyed by this, I found it earnest and hopeful. It won’t happen unless I make time. I’ll make time. I’ve somehow made a not terrible practice of some version of morning pages, balancing out harsh rigid expectations with the genuine satisfaction in doing them. Sometimes they are not even a lot of lines of, I’m tired, over and over again. They’re morning pages, that’s the bargain. But I’ve also really not been reading the past month or so and I’m not sure why. There’s books all over the various tables in my house but I won’t give up on this Neruda biography. I don’t think I like Bluesky all that much but writers and stuff hang out there, so I remain, for now. I don’t, in fact, know at all about the internet right now. WBEZ turned me onto Half Gringa and I’ve enjoyed that on Bandcamp. I haven’t used Spotify in probably a month, when my credit card got canceled for fraud. Things are bad. They’re so bad and I try and hold a gratitude practice each day, and it is often fraught. But you write, anyway. I hope you continue to try to keep on, wherever you are.

Another piece on the Where’s of 2020. 2500 words? Jackie Ess (everyone should read Darryl) wrote something today about how things take time, and just know I have spent a lot of time with this one in the hopper.

pt. 2

In September the Lolo held vast swaths of burnt forest. This would remain the case the farther West I traveled. I found it the Colville, the corner of Washington’s green forest before its arid center. It descended into Bellingham just after I arrived, amidst starving mule deer and something else unable to keep trying.

The smoke would be omnipresent once I got all the way to the Pacific. It would descend and sit over Seattle when I turned around, surprised, at the weight of the blow of the return to the Midwest and how it felt like a curse.

There was a sculpture of wild horses careening, almost as if about to take flight, off of 90 towards Wyoming. I took the exit and walked closer to where they emerged from the smoke.

Smoke all summer traveled into Minneapolis, on the heels of when the Precinct went up. When we hosed down our yards with rumors of violence. I didn’t leave Minneapolis because of a burning summer or what I saw. I felt guilty. I still do. Useless guilt. I still left.

But this isn’t about that, or the steel horses, or how it was the first time I pulled into the dispersed woods on my own and curled up in the backseat, a practice I would perfect. The bins of my life carefully shifted into seats and turned into a bedframe. The blessing of a double sleeping bag. The flashlight glowing near the emergency brake. A year later, next to the river, I’d make my own space where I’d been taught this technique. I would not remember we’d been there until the sun came up. and I pissed near the bridge.

*

I took a road atlas with me everywhere I went that summer. This was the way to see the forests and campsites and rest areas and exits, It was a way to open up something when you know you have to go, and the going is the point, and maybe the where will be where you are meant to be.

It came in handy because as I crossed North Dakota, the roof rack on my car I had begrudgingly begun to get used to all summer decided to suicide off the roof. My bikes went with onto 94. I watched them bounce and with some preternatural calm, pulled over. It was Labor Day Sunday, 2020. An emptier interstate. A blessing. But somehow the bikes remained intact. I locked them to a mile maker sign, retraced my steps to buy a flimsy trunk rack in Bismarck, prayed, and knew I would avoid any interstate at all costs. When North Dakota turned into Montana, I split for the backroads and this is how I found the Lolo.

After miles of burnt out and abandoned towns, endless and still jet black tanker rail cars, but no cars passing me, I made it across the Continental Divid and picked out a horse camp on the map. I drove up the gravel road and found no one at the site. Two miles in, at least, I wondered if I’d fucked up, passed private ranches on USFS land, ominous flags flying, and no one to be seen. And then I ended up at the camp.

When I told people about this summer, young women I worked with at Trader Joe’s asked if I wasn’t scared in the remote places, by myself. My little hatchback tucked into space by the creek, slightly hidden. A couple fishermen showed up the third day and we quietly ignored each other. I was not afraid.

*

I found no one in the Lolo, which made sense, as I mostly did not find anyone where I went. In Minneapolis during the riots our neighbors fucked off to their cabin, which we found disheartening. Once July hit and I truly would not get my job back, nor know what to do, I took my unemployment and began small trips during the beginning of the week to different parts of the state or Wisconsin. My friend Jen taught me to make a fire outside St. Cloud in a rainstorm, hatcheting away. I’d forgotten my tent and so slept in my trunk, still figuring out the mechanics of a hatchback. I fucked off to Cable and Duluth and Hayward and Cuyuna and outside Houghton. I fucked off a lot.

Mostly I found no one and pulled out the road atlas to find where to sleep. In dispersed areas of state or national forests I found boondocking sites and settled in over my own fires. I read Bruce Springsteen’s memoir and tried to write my stupid feelings. I dicked around on my bike and suntanned my chest and realized something was coming to an end. I had turned thirty three and a Saturn return was no longer an excuse. I’d spent the beginning of the year taking a month in San Francisco to write, a gift from my friend and mentor on his semi-official 554 Residency. I figured it would be a good way to test something out, possibly get into a writing Masters, and if all else failed I could go back to my underpaid work in the bike industry. I arrived back, did friends and family work for a wedding, got wasted, fucked off to Memphis, got stuck in Chicago, got back to Minneapolis and after a long summer, could not find a prospect.

I wanted one, though. At the very least, I wanted to see the Ocean again, if I was to end up stuck in the Midwest, forever. Even if I hadn’t been still to stuck to someone out there, I had finally figured out I could actually do most things on my own. When the lease was up, I packed up everything I owned into my hatchback (so mostly: notebooks, books, clothes, sex toys, bike shit, and bikes) and told everyone I was headed West. I wanted to go, I said, as far as I could, because who knew? If I got to the Pacific, great. But until then, I was gone. I left.

*

The day I drove from the border of North Dakota across the back parts of Montana, I mostly listened to Bruce Springsteen (see: reading Born to Run, his quite not-bad memoir). Oddly enough, until that point I’d mostly listened to Nebraska which is pretty good listening around Minnesota and across the Dakotas to the Badlands. I left the Badlands and started listening to Badlands. When I was pretty fucking spooked, having watched the two most prized possessions I owned fly into an interstate, the bright keys and driving drums of the first track made me feel like I could make it. I drank gas station coffee and the flat continued West, vaguely geological until the landscape changed again, suddenly. I gunned up, pushing the little car to 80, 85, windows down and speakers as loud as I could. It was burnt out meth shacks and despairing graffiti. It was no one. The highway spiked up and down into old oil and fossil fields, and I pulled off into a spot to piss and learn about ancient beings.

A sedan pulled next to me, a man in a Veterans cap in the back.

“Got your whole life there, do ya?” A hoary smile, the women driving him stretching their legs. My grandad dead ten years, then.

“Yessir,” I said. There was not much to look at, but that was sort of the point.

“You be safe out there, miss.” I kept West, passed so few people. I cried when the piano and drums crested, Tonight I’ll be on that hill because I can’t stop, I'll be on that hill with everything I got. I followed until I met 200 south of Chouteau, where my mom’s uncle had ended up after guarding the border to Canada, warning her my dad was marrying her for a green card. I wondered many things.

As I stopped to take in a Continental Divide, I played Varieties of Exile by Beirut and marveled at my lonesomeness. I’d end up somewhere. That was mostly how it worked out.

*

The campsite was thick in fir and the calm of juniper. I pulled the car to block my way but set my tent far enough to where I couldn’t see it mostly, and where I would keep the food locked up. I set the tent twenty feet or so next to the creek and that night ate my quiet dinner of cheese and stale bread and somehow still fine cherry tomatoes and sausage from the Cities. The moon would be full the next day. In the near mountains, I relented in the September just cool.

The dark came on quickly in the woods and I read Kelly Barnhill’s The Witch’s Boy from a friend under the light of my flashlight strung up in the tent. Wolves and friendship and fierceness. There was no one to answer to, nowhere to be, no one with me. I wish I could say I slept outside peacefully always, but of course this is untrue. Those nights in the Lolo I slept without waking. I slept in no other way I can describe except for happily.

-

In the morning I lazed with nothing to do and truly nowhere to be. Any direction was available. The sun hadn’t rose over the treeline and so I pulled on longsleeves and my cowboy boots and climbed onto my mountain bike to take off down the path behind the horsecamp.

I can see the entrance still. A wide path that narrowed over another creeklet, splashing through the rocks. A curve that followed the base of the hillside, the ferns that abruptly turned to scree, the charred and lean remnants of the grand firs, abrupt flowers. I moved slowly to take it in, the silence and the crunch of the wheel on the path.

At once the path opened into the bottom of a valley in the aftermath of whatever fire had passed through. Grasses had burst forth again and the blue of the sky was everywhere through what was left of the branches. A blue I had never seen before and I stopped to breathe. I got to the edge of the next ascent and stopped. I’d only gone out and back, but I knew where I was, my limits, the absence of anyone but myself. I turned around, the mountains with the sun in their keep, the skittering of sliding rock.

*

So I passed the days in wonder and relief and the type of content that comes from the possibility of not having to go anywhere right away, the choice of staying, going, and having the place be pretty nice. It was early September, and the skies were clear, and maybe it still would have been fairly empty but it was COVID and I had been learning on where to hide out.

I drove down into Ovando to refill my water jugs. There was an ancient filling station, the type of which I had never used in my life, and may never again. In the station the man asked where I was from, in my mask and my dusty skin. He did not ask me where I was going. There was a ghost town down the road, he said, and not many were passing through. I made my way back up the highway and the gravel and hid back out again.

In the afternoon after going out riding up and down again, I sat in the creek next to my campsite. Clear water, the sun in the ideal position to cast down warmth. Cold runoff from down the mountain and some way of settling my exhausted and frayed bones, some pull away. I’ve read my journal from these days and know there was a Full Moon, the ghostly appearance above the trees. I let my chest go bare and caught as much sun as I could, as I’d done all summer, alone, got out only when my fingers went blue.

I lay my skivvies on the warm rock to dry, heated canned ravioli above the firepit. It’s a far away blur of a memory for me, one that I was not sure existed until I mentioned it again this year. Endless rain on some canoe trip, me and my pa and his coworkers, cans of what could be called pasta over fires, ball lightning that comes out of nowhere and lights up a tree. When the can bubbles, I forget about how to get it out and use the damp boxers to pull it away, eat happily.

I notice it now. I try and use the word less: happy, happily, with happiness. But I was.

*

As I wandered through the woods day after day, I hated myself but I thought about Lewis and Clark bumbling their way towards the Pacific. Some assholes who didn’t even know what they were looking for, following the Missouri, oblivious to any divide of the continent, just crossing it. I had followed their path and now I lay in the wood, knowing there was really only one answer which was that I, too, had to make my way to the ocean. I could not help thinking about them and in 2020 it felt incredibly stupid. But I wrote poems in my head anyway.

Later that fall I would read the hefty, popular account of their travels. When he got back, eventually, despite making it across the continent and bank, historians surmise he killed himself. Not syphilis, not a cold, just garden variety suicide. There was nowhere he could go, nowhere he had to go, and so he came to his end.

*

Not quite a year to the day later, I found myself back in Montana, back at the site. All different and so the September spell gone. I was looking for places to sleep as I juggled working a job and saving money and not knowing where to live. Other people camping, and the spot beneath the pines and next to the creek already occupied.

I keep wanting to go back, although it makes no logistical sense with my life right now, even as the small hope of possibility and Westward adventure remains, later this year. There have been other places in the forest where I have read in the dark, trails to slowly follow, other strange senses of solitude and safety. I packed back up and kept heading West, where my days filled up with people and their choices, and the certain weight of the inevitable return, the stop, would follow me through the wood.

they’re not all winners, but you try anyway? something different, maybe, next time.