Walking Nature Home

The Road Ahead

Wednesday was a long day. We left home at seven-forty in the morning, as the sun was coming over the Arkansas Hills, and returned after sunset, which meant we saw some spectacular alpenglow like that in the photo below, but we didn't get home until after dark. In between we drove to Denver for an appointment with Richard's radiation oncologist and his "fitting" with the radiation techs who will give him his five-day-a-week doses of radiation.

I've been thinking about what we learned, turning it over in my mind, letting it compost until I could make use of it. The most immediate news is that we know have a date for when Richard will be starting the six-week course of radiation therapy: the Monday after Thanksgiving.

By the way, if you want to know how radiation therapy works, the radiation oncologist on Richard's case, Dr. Chen of the University of Colorado Hospital, explained it very simply: Gamma rays kill cells. But all cells aren't equally susceptible. Those with mutated DNA like cancer cells (the mutated DNA is what distinguishes them from the ordinary cells of your body) go first. So the idea is to blast the affected area with high enough levels of radiation to kill the cancer cells and not kill the healthy cells around them. Of course, some healthy cells die too, but the plan is to keep the damage to a minimum.

In Richard's case, they'll be radiating much of the right temporal lobe of his brain. That means they have to be really careful to not injure his optic nerve (vision) or his brain stem (basic bodily functions like breathing and heartbeat). Yikes.

We also learned that in the case of brain cancers like Richard's, the radiation has to be done in one continuous chunk of time. Why? Because the nature of mutation in cancer cells--and thus their resistance to the radiation--varies. The weakest cells die off first, and as the cumulative dose of radiation builds up over the course of treatment, the most resistant cancer cells eventually die too. But if treatment is interrupted for any reason, those more resistant cancer cells that have survived keep growing and dividing unchecked.

Here's the problem: Thirty business days of radiation beginning November 30th run to the middle of January (allowing for a few days off for Christmas and New Years). Including the time between December 26th and January 3rd, when Richard was planning to travel with me to Isla Espirtu Santo off La Paz, Baja California, to help with the writing workshop I'm leading there. 

When Dr. Chen explained that the radiation would be much less effective if Richard took time off to go to Baja with me, and that make it much more likely the cancer would return, Richard asked if he could start the radiation and chemo after the trip.

"Maybe," said Dr. Chen. But it's risky to wait, he explained, because the tumor could return in that time. We looked at each other, and asked a few more questions. Pretty soon it was clear: Richard should start treatment on the 30th. We would figure out what to do about the Baja trip later. 

We held hands and talked about the implications all the way from the radiation clinic on the south edge of the Metro Area to the Anschutz Cancer Center, where we found a sunny bench to eat our picnic lunch before Richard's fitting with the radiation techs, and then we continued our discussion--and the hand-holding--on the drive across the city on I-70, south on C-470 to the exit for US Highway 285, through the Dakota Hogback, and winding up and up with the highway through the foothills, over Kenosha Pass, and across South Park in a drawn-out pastel sunset.

Before I spotted the new moon, the thinnest crescent of ghostly silver just above the dark western horizon, we had decided: Richard will stay in Denver and I will go to Baja without him. It's a painful choice for both of us. I want to be there to snuggle next to him, to hold his hand, to make special meals, and generally coddle him throughout this grueling treatment. He wants me to take the time to do what I love. We are rarely apart, especially not at times like this. But I see his point: Sometimes taking care of each other means our paths diverge for a while. I don't like it, but I agree.

This is a hard road. But we're fortunate: no matter where it takes each of us, we still share the moon. Years ago, when work regularly separated us from time to time, we began the practice of reminding each other to look up at the moon each night, no matter where we were, and think of the other, seeing the same ghostly orb sailing across the heavens. We still do it. And sometimes we can hold hands and witness the moon together, as we did on Wednesday night, driving the last miles toward home. We watched that thin crescent disappear over the black edge of the horizon, like a silver scimitar vanishing into the night.

An Honest Homage to Home

I'm taking another break from the "Kingdom of the Sick" to think about memoir and story, and the choices writers make as we tell the stories of our own lives and the places we love. As I wrote in Walking Nature Home, "Stories nurture our connection to place and to each other. They show us where we have been and where we can go. They remind us of how to be human, how to live alongside the other lives that animate this planet."

Here's a conversation wtih Julie Whitesel Weston, author of the new memoir, The Good Times Are All Gone Now, an unflinching but affectionate portrait of, Kellogg, Idaho, the former mining town where she grew up. The book open with these powerful lines:

I bought a lottery ticket. The prize? Pushing the plunger to dynamite the smokestacks rising above Kellogg, Idaho, on Memorial Day weekend in 1996.

That's a compelling opening, and Weston's book is a fascinating story of the town that shaped her. It also illuminates the people who lived there, Weston's complex family included. I was curious about the choices Weston made in writing this memoir of place, so I asked her to talk about how the story came to be.

SJT: I've called The Good Times Are All Gone Now a "memoir of place" because it draws on many people's stories--not just your own or your family's--to paint a compelling portrait of Kellogg, Idaho, your hometown. What prompted you to tell the story of the town?

Weston: When I began working on the book, I was afraid the town was going to disappear--go the way of other western mining towns. I wanted to preserve the stories of the town and the miners. Then, too, at high school reunions, my friends and I always commented on how important the town had been to us. I wanted to explore why we had such strong feelings for this place, which on the surface, looks as if it’s filled with toxic smoke, black stumps and ramshackle houses.

SJT: In writing The Good Times Are All Gone Now, you clearly did an enormous amount of research, including delving into geology and history, as well as interviewing many current and former town residents. How many years did you spend researching the book? And how many hours of interviews did you conduct?

Weston: I did the interviews first because I was working on a novel about the long and bitter labor dispute described in the book.  I wanted more than my perspective as a teenager. When I couldn’t seem to get anywhere with the novel, I realized I had over a hundred hours of interviews that told the story of the town, so I began writing that story. I knew some of the mining history and my mother had a large collection of books on Idaho that I re-read. I also spent time at the University of Washington Northwest Special Collections library, sorted through old newspapers in Kellogg, found fascinating really old newspapers at the Eastern Washington Historical Society in Spokane, so I worked off and on with research maybe fifteen years. I began writing directly on Good Times when I attended the Imnaha Writers Retreat, courtesy of Fishtrap in Oregon in 1998.
 

SJT: You've said that the book isn't really a memoir, in the sense that it's not the story of your life. But your life and the story of your family threads through the pages, taking it from a more traditional history narrative into the territory of memoir. Did your concept of the book change as you worked on it? 

Weston: My manuscript went through a number of permutations. In the beginning it was much more memoir-ish and less history and interviews. A writing friend advised me to do a history OR a memoir, but not both. I still ended up with both, but perhaps heavier on the “place” as opposed to the “personal.” I have stacks of old drafts in my office and I’m now using those pages for drafts of another book.

SJT: Some of the family material involves memories that are clearly difficult ones--for example, your father's rages, his drinking and gambling, and your relationship with him. What impelled you to include those difficult memories? Did you find yourself censoring them at all?

Weston: My story of the town was not complete without the story of my mother and father, so I needed to write about them. My father was a major character in the town in my growing up years. It was at the reunion when several friends and I sat around a table and told things we’d never known about each other. The ‘50s and early ‘60s were times when secrets were kept, but in the ‘80s, some of them came out. I decided if my family was going to be in the book at all, it should be a whole portrait. And yes, I did censor things. Not all secrets needed to be divulged, particularly because my mother is still alive.
 
One of the rewarding aspects of having my book in print is the number of letters I’ve received–some from people I didn’t even know. Many of those letters tell more stories and occasionally stories that were secrets too. I think my readers have felt released and relieved because I was honest in my book.

SJT: The structure of The Good Times Are All Gone Now is complex, beginning with what seems like the end: the scene of the smelter chimneys, the symbols of the town's mining life, being blown up. From that ending, you work backwards in time to trace the story of the town, the mines, and the community as a whole. How did you decide where to begin, and in what order to tell the story?

Weston: Where to begin and in what order to tell the story took me a long time to figure out. Once I saw the dramatic photos of the smokestacks falling, I decided that was my way into the story. That, too, is how most people have even heard of Kellogg–that headline: Toxic Town Blows Its Stack.

SJT: At the end of the book, it seems like you want to believe that Kellogg is reinventing itself, but you are not quite convinced. Would you write a different ending today?

Weston: Today, Kellogg still teeters. When I wrote the ending, it looked as if Kellogg would become known as a four seasons resort, with all the implications that has for lower wages, lack of affordable housing, transients and so on. The recession has hit hard: loss of jobs, no wages, no sales or purchases of homes at all. It feels a little as it did after the mines closed. So no, I wouldn’t write a different ending today.

SJT: It's hard to look home and family square in the face and admit that we care and no, all is not well. But that's the essence of a good story: it's not easy, and it doesn't necessarily end happily, just like life. A good story is honest, and true to itself. And it's written with love, even with the subject is difficult. Good job, Julie Weston!

Full disclosure: I reviewed The Good Times Are All Gone Now on Story Circle Book Reviews.

And on a personal note: Richard's feeling so good that he's thinking about sculpture again. In fact, we're talking about a collaborative project or two--after he's through with his initial course of radiation and chemo. We're still walking hand in hand, happy in the moment. Bless you all for your support!

A Tale of Two Hospitals

Yesterday, Richard and I drove to Denver on a perfectly lovely November afternoon with no wind or blowing snow, or any of the other weather tricks that life in the Colorado mountains can conjure. We left home at a few minutes after two--right on time--and sped up and over Trout Creek Pass, across the winter-brown prairie of South Park (that's a bit of South Park below), and up and over Red Hill and Kenosha passes, and then up and down through the Foothills and into the Metro area by a few minutes before five, skating in before the rush hour traffic got too bad. 

I should have known things were going too smoothly.
 
We had planned to bring dinner to my parents, who live not far from our route into the Metro Area. I called them as we left home: no answer. I left a message. I called again from Fairplay in South Park, where the cell service is good. No answer. I called again from Conifer in the foothills, another patch of good cell service. No answer. I called again from the Whole Foods about two miles from their apartment in a senior complex. No answer. By then, I was worried.

When we got to the Westland Meridian, where my folks live, we learned that my mom had been "transported" (you've got to love jargon that brings up images of flying carpets and time machines!) to the hospital for severe dehydration. My dad had gone along. Which hospital? Jeremy Klassen, the executive director at the Westland, found out where she was and gave us directions. (Thank you, Jeremy.)

We drove to the hospital, and there was my mom in a room off the ER, looking tiny and and attached to more tubes and wires and monitors than I could easily count. She was sitting up though, and devouring her hospital dinner--sorry, Mom, but there is no other word for it! That was cheering. Turns out that the sore throat she reported when I called on Sunday had been the beginnings of pneumonia. Yesterday afternoon my dad got worried and they ended up in the hospital, where she was getting antibiotics from one IV bag and saline drip from another, plus oxygen whuffing into her nose, and electrodes attached to her chest to monitor her heartbeat.

She was stable though, and scheduled to be transferred to a real room for more care. After a while, we drove my dad home, and got out dinner for him from the deli stuff we brought (roasted root vegetables, rice pilaf, cherry crisp with lemon mousse--not a bad spread!).

By that time, Richard and I had almost forgotten why we ventured over the mountains to Denver. Almost. We hugged my dad and drove the rest of the way across the city to our room in the comfortable house where long-distance patients stay when they come to the other hospital in the story, the Veterans Administration's Denver Medical Center.

This morning we woke before dawn and snuggled for a while, and then got up, did yoga, ate breakfast, and headed to the VA Medical Center in time to get a spot in the free parking garage and make his eight-thirty appointment with Oncology. The one where we expected to learn what happens next in this journey with brain cancer. Not that we were anxious or anything.

Richard checked in, and just a few minutes later, his Oncologist, Dr. Catherine Klein, came out to get us. She introduced herself, greeted us warmly, and led us back to the exam room. Over the next half-hour we learned that his tumor, a Grade 3 Astrocytoma for those that track these things, is serious enough that they want to treat it aggressively, which means six weeks of daily radiation focused on his right temporal lobe, accompanied by oral chemotherapy designed to enhance the effect of the radiation. 

According to Dr. Klein, who not only clearly knows what she is doing, she also cares about the people she's treating, the theory is that although his tumor was clearly differentiated from the rest of his brain, the removal was clean, and he's healing well (although he's not back to sculpting granite yet, as in the photo above), the likelihood is very high that there are other cancer cells in the brain tissue around where the tumor was. Because cancer cells have mutated DNA, they are more susceptible to being killed by the radiation than the healthy cells around them. So the radiation with chemo to boost it targets the cancer cells, and the healthy cells are either be able to survive it, or will be able to grow back once the treatment is over. (Good thing he has plenty of brain cells to spare!) He'll be treated in two stages: the initial six weeks of radiation plus chemo, and then a longer-term course of oral chemo for another three to four months.

The radiation treatment is daily (well, five days a week), so we'll be living in Denver for that period and coming home on weekends if he feels like it and the schedule allows. The chemo alone we can do at home, with frequent trips to Denver to check his white blood cell count (chemotherapy nukes white blood cells, making you more vulnerable to infection).

We also learned that his brain cancer may be related to the colon cancer that runs in Richard's family. (Four of his Dad's six siblings had colon cancer; Richard's sister survived colon cancer when she was in her early '40s.) That's a nugget to chew on, and something we need to learn more about--later. 

For now, we're home again, and waiting to hear from the VA about when we're due in Denver to begin the radiation and chemo--we hope as early as next week. We're looking at the time in Denver as an opportunity to get to know the city in a way we haven't before, living as we do in rural Colorado, and also as time to just be together on this stage of the journey. Seen that way, it's like a residency--a residency for brain cancer though, not artistic promise. Still, it's a period that gives us a chance to focus on what's most important in our lives. That's a short list: each other, our family and far-flung community of friends, our art and writing, and being able to live in a generous and sustainable way. That kind of time is precious, and we'll do our best to use it well.

Oh, the news from the other hospital: When we left there earlier today, my mom had ordered a cheese and mushroom pizza, plus cookies to share with my dad for lunch. And she was agitating to go home. She's going to be okay.

So are we. It may be a long road for Richard and I, but I'm sure of that.

In case you wondered, yes, I do come by my stubbornness--and my faith in love's power to heal--honestly. The path of my inheritance is clear in the trio below.

Coming Home to the Garden

Richard and I left Marfa, Texas, last Thursday morning, bound for Las Cruces, New Mexico where I was scheduled to talk to a journalism class and teach an intensive writing workshop. As we drove across the grassy plains, we watched for aplomado falcons, boldly patterned, fast-flying hawks that once hunted birds and insects throughout the desert grasslands. Overgrazing and pesticide use nearly killed off these agile falcons in the American Southwest, but they've been reintroduced to the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas where we were.

We saw loads of fall-tan grama grass, spine-ridged desert mountains, creosote bush with its sparse olive-green canopy, tall yuccas, some red-tailed hawks, one kestrel chasing a small bird very energetically but not very effectively, and a couple of roadrunners sunning. But no aplomado falcons.

We did see this Border Patrol dirigible. Normally it floats high in the sky at the end of its tether eying the U.S.-Mexico border. Only that day however, it was hauled close to the ground, looking rather like some kind of enormous beached bathtub toy. (The building in front of the dirigible in the photo is the size of a mobile construction-site office to give you a sense of scale.) The dirigible is proof, if anyone needed it, that an armed border is a strange place.

We spent two days in Las Cruces, a city where we lived for seven years (or five books, as I measure time, since that's how many I wrote there). Our brief visit included time enough for me to speak and teach, and for Richard to roam the campus of New Mexico State University and catch up with some of his former colleagues on the faculty. Also for us to eat some good green chile and see some of our friends. (Special thanks to Pam Porter, Ann Palormo and Las Cruces Press Women, and Barbara and Harold Harrison and their Scotty, Hallie.) Not time enough to see everyone we wanted, but we were on the homeward leg of our trip, and eager to be on our way.

Saturday morning we headed north on I-25, aiming to make it at least halfway home. As Richard drove, we called each other's attention to familiar landmarks, including the narrow desert mountain ranges edging the wide Rio Grande Valley, beginning with the Organs, east of Las Cruces. (That's the Organs above, from the Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park.) The Organs give way to the the San Andres, the Sierra Caballo, the Fra Cristobal range, and in the distance the Sierra Oscura and towering beyond that, Sierra Blanca, the highest peak in Southern New Mexico. There's a poetic rhythm to these names, in part because they're in Spanish, a language to which singing comes more easily.

 

(That's creosote bush above, the shrub whose olive-green leaves tint this part of the Chihuahuan Desert. It's not especially memorable until you look close and see those yellow flowers and the funny cotton-fuzz seeds, or you smell its spiced-tar and honey fragrance, which suffuses the desert after rains.)

South of Socorro, New Mexico, we dived off the interstate at the exit labeled San Marcial, which despite the name, is out in the open desert with no sign of town unless you look very hard. (The town, which once boasted a railroad roundhouse and a Fred Harvey hotel, was wiped out when the Rio Grande flooded in 1929 and never rebuilt.) It's now the back road to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, winter home to about 10,000 of the sandhill cranes that pass over our valley during their spring and fall migration, plus tens of thousands of snow geese and dozens of other species of birds and other wildlife.

The Bosque itself was in full autumn color, painting the wide and winding band of gold and orange in the photo above. (By the way, the word is pronounced "BOHS-kay," not "BAHS-key," and it means woods, as in the tangle of native cottonwood and willow, plus invasive salt cedar and Russian olive that lines desert rivers and streams like the Rio Grande.) And there were sandhill cranes around, loafing near the refuge's many ponds, feeding in nearby fields, flying past on wide wings, long necks outstretched and legs trailing, and calling in their resonant voices. (Those gray birds in the photo below, under the gorgeously golden cottonwood tree, are sandhill cranes.)

After the stop at the Bosque, we sped north on I-25, stopping in Albuquerque to meet poet, writer, and botany junkie Sandra Lynn for a short and wonderful visit. We were too tired to drive all the way home, so we spent the night in Santa Fe. The next morning we stopped in Española to see Dale Doremus, a geologist who specializes in groundwater issues for the state of New Mexico. Dale and her partner, Bob, also cultivate an orchard of heritage fruit tree varieties, and she brought us a bag of their late apples, Arkansas Blacks. That's Dale's apples in the photo below, which does not do justice to black blush on their ruby-red coloring. These may be the most gorgeous apples I've ever seen, and they're delicious too: spice and honey, like a winesap but crisper. (Thanks, Dale! We'll be back for more....)

By the time we wound our way up the Rio Grande Gorge, through Taos, and north along the base of the Sangre de Cristos into the San Luis Valley, we were so tired, we were running on fumes. We had thought about stopping at Great Sand Dunes National Park, since our route took us right by the wave-like expanse of dunes. But we kept going, aimed for home. (We didn't even stop to take a photo, as you can tell by the picture below, shot from on the road.)

Today we woke in our own bed, with its view of the pinon-pine-and-juniper-studded ridges across the river. We snuggled and did yoga; we ate our usual breakfast and basked in the morning sun coming in the living room windows. We plowed through stacks of mail and email, washed three loads of laundry, and Richard even started cleaning up the guest apartment after the latest batch of vacation renters. And when we pulled back the row covers from the kitchen garden we discovered that the fall planting of lettuce mix not only survived being buried under two feet of snow with nighttime temperatures dropping to 12 degrees while we were away, it was ready for thinning! Eating those crisp and tangy leaves for lunch was the best gift of coming home. (Thank you, Renee Shepherd of Renee's Seeds, for the Monet's Garden and Paris Market lettuce mixes!)

It's not going to be a long stay: Wednesday afternoon we'll drive over the mountains again for Richard's appointment with Oncology. But we're here now, and that feels good. We may not know what's ahead--who really does?--but we know this: We're lucky to live in a place we love, to have each other, and to feel the love and good wishes coming from our community of family and friends. Bless you all!

Traveling from Wildflowers to Shooting Stars

Richard and I are sitting in a tiny coffeehouse attached to what is surely the hippest laundromat in the world in Marfa, Texas, a small town that rises out of the West Texas plains like a mirage and disappears just as quickly if you drive through without stopping. Like most places though, there's a lot to it if you stop and look. Marfa is a curious combination of dusty west Texas former ranching town built on a tidy rectangular street grid and bisected by a railroad that still carries trains, plus a former munitions depot from World War II since renovated to house minimalist sculpture by some famous names who were the darlings of the New York art world, plus the famous Marfa Lights, eerie lights that appear and disappear in the desert plains south of town on their own mysterious schedule.

This place is a world away from Austin, which we left in the rear-view mirror yesterday as the sun rose. No traffic, no spreading live oaks undergrown by a riot of greenery, no high-tech industry, no blue-green rivers coursing out of limestone hills. It does have sky, stars, open space, charming old houses, a cool old hotel, an elaborate courthouse visible from miles away, and some fabulous art. And great coffee, scones, and ice cream in Frama, the coffeehouse alcove attached to the Tumbleweed Laundromat.

Our last few days in Austin included a drive out to the northern edge of the Hill Country to have brunch with mystery authors extraordinaire Susan and Bill Albert at Meadow Knoll, their lovingly restored patch of limestone ledge and oak savanna; a breakfast with Susan A and Theresa May, Editor-in-Chief at University of Texas Press, surely the smartest, funniest, and most creative editor I've ever worked with (that's our trio below: Susan Albert, Theresa May, and me); and appearances at the Texas Book Festival with Susan A on Sunday followed by a wonderfully attentive audience for the final "Two Susans" conversation on writing about place, sponsored by Story Circle Network on Monday night.

Richard and I left Austin Tuesday morning as the sun was rising in order to get across the city before the rush hour traffic got crazy. As we drove south toward San Antonio and then west across the southern part of the Hill Country, I pondered travel and what I learn from seeing new landscapes and meeting new people. What came to mind was the quote Richard and I saw at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin:

My special cause, the one that alerts my interest and quickens the pace of my life is to preserve the wildflowers and native plants that define the regions of our land--to encourage and promote their use in appropriate areas, and thus help pass on to generations in waiting the quiet joys and satisfactions I have known since childhood.

That's Lady Bird Johnson, talking about why she founded the Wildflower Center. The part that sticks in my mind is her fidelity to plants "that define the regions of our land"--she recognized that uniqueness of place is due in part to the uniqueness of the native inhabitants, human and more so. And she also recognized and wanted to pass on "the quiet joys and satisfactions" of knowing and celebrating one's place through the native plants and wildflowers. Lady Bird's rural Texas childhood gave her the joy of being rooted, and her years in the peripatetic world of politics taught her the value of being placed, of knowing the other species that shape the landscapes where we live, and the pain of being displaced. 

As we drove west on a two-lane highway through woodlands of spreading live oaks and bushy junipers, crossing the rivers colored blue-green by their limestone beds, I thought about how our tumbleweed culture can re-learn the joy and skill of being rooted, wherever we find ourselves. How many of us know even ten of the native species where we live, or can name the river that drains the spot we stand on, or the people who lived here before us; how many of us can pick out the constellations in the night sky over where we live? 

One person who can is the poet David Lee, and after years of gaining accolades and readers by writing poignantly wry and insightful narrative poetry in the voices of rural folk, poetry that had him compared to Mark Twain and brought him a nomination for the post of Poet Laureate of the US, he's now writing closer his heart, penning elegies to the landscapes he loves, including his latest, So Quietly the Earth, on the slickrock landscapes of Utah.

We stopped to visit Dave and his partner Jan at their place sheltered by oak trees above Bandera Creek. We talked about poetry and our kids and how to protect live oaks from oak wilt and how much rain they've received and Texas history and publishing and wildflowers before they took us to lunch at the OST Cafe, named for the Old Spanish Trail that once ran through the area, and yes, still full of Texas-style cowboys, spurs clinking and all. (That's Dave and Jan above, and indeed, his t-shirt says "Living in Zin," as in Zinfandel wine.) Dave and Jan may divide their time between Texas and the Oregon Coast, but they are rooted in the particulars of each place.

Heading on west across rolling limestone hills, I watched the live oaks gradually shrink until they were barely tall enough to be called trees, and the understory of grasses and wildflowers and shrubs change from those species that need moisture to those that know how to survive drought. The huge bald-cypress trees along the rivers changed to pecans at about Junction, where the flaming scarlet clumps of sumac we had been watching since west of San Antonio were replaced by feathery mesquites.

In the Hill Country near Dave and Jan's house, the butterflies were so numerous that we couldn't avoid hitting them as we drove through their swarms, resulting in a windshield smeared with opalescent streaks of iridescent scales over yellowish bodilyy fluids, surely some of the most gorgeous evidence of roadkill ever. As we drove further west toward the massive buttes that tower over the Pecos River, the line between savanna and desert, those fluttering insects all but disappeared except for the occasional monarch taking its genes south for the winter. The live oaks vanished too, except along the washes, and the vegetation turned from savanna woodland to semi-desert shrubland, where trees retreat to the rare places boasting water.

The sun dived toward the horizon as we passed Fort Stockton. We exited the interstate headed for the blue-hazy peaks and buttes in the far distance. About half an hour later, the sun finally set, throwing rose and yellow rays across the whole western sky. The blaze of color persisted, becoming more intense and then contracting toward the horizon in a wide band of gold and then orange and finally bronze.

Just past Alpine, as Jupiter and the first stars were appearing in the blue-black sky overhead and the western horizon was still colored by the last glow of sunset, a meteor streaked across right in front of us. It shone brilliant blue-white and passed right through that after-sunset glow, low to the horizon and trailing a sparkling orange and blue tail. Both meteor and tail seemed large and intimately close, probably due to the magnifying effect of atmospheric dust so close to the horizon.  

"Wow!" said Richard, his face stunned.

We held hands as we drove on and night descended, watching the black silhouettes of desert plants pass by out the car windows: the wand-like flower stalks of sotol, a tall lily with spiky leaves, the finely branched acacias, growing in the most contorted shapes, and the feathery bunches of Muhly grass. 

As we reached Marfa and our motel, the two-days-past full moon rose behind us, nearly round and butter yellow. The silhouette of the lunar hare was clearly visible, dancing with ears blown back by the cosmic winds.

I take that blazing conjunction of sunset, meteor, and then the rising full moon as a good omen, a reminder that no matter what happens in our personal lives and the world, we can always find beauty enough to feed our souls--if we take the time to look.

Seeing Spring in Autumn

There's snow at home, an unexpected blanket nearly two feet thick dumped by an unusual fall storm. And here in the crazy autumn of central Texas, it feels to me like spring. The air is soft, moist, and warm, flowers bloom, and butterflies dance over prairies greened by rains that finally came last month after 20-some months of drought. In the face of these wild weather swings, "climate-boinga," the term coined by writer, editor, blog-book-tour queen, and gardener Dani Greer to replace the somewhat-misleading term of "global warming" seems awfully apt.

(That's a migrating monarch butterfly tanking up on nectar at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Research Center in Austin.)

Since arriving in Austin on Tuesday, I've plunged into the world of book promotion, doing several appearances with my friend and fellow writer, Susan Albert, whose memoir, Together, Alone, came out from University of Texas Press this year, as did my own Walking Nature Home. Best known for her China Bayles mystery series, Susan is well-read, thoughtful, and just a pleasure to work with. Our programs take the form of public conversations: each of us reads a bit from our respective memoirs, and then we talk over that passage, teasing out what it says about our writing, our journeys, and our lives. We're learning as much as our audience.

If you're in the Austin area and want to catch our evolving dialog, Susan A and I will present one more conversation, Story Circle Network at the First United Methodist Church, 1201 Lavaca Street in Austin, on Monday, November 2nd at 7:00 p.m. (We're also both signing books at the University of Texas Press tent at the Texas Book Festival on Sunday, Nov. 1 from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.) Join us if you can!

Richard and I made time one afternoon to go to one of my favorite Austin-area places, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Research Center. Walking the trails through the native blackland prairie, we were amazed by the abundance of wildflowers: Maximillian sunflowers in tall clumps, tickseed in drifts of gold around islands of spreading oak and juniper, flecks of pink and blue marking tiny blossoms I couldn't identify, a prostrate milkweed blooming in extravagant balls, the pointed buds of wild onion ready to burst into starry bloom. (That's tickseed above, and milkweed, with one wild onion, below.)

Today, we strolled Austin's West Sixth Arts District, poking into galleries to look at sculptural art, and sharing our delight in the details of the area's lovingly tended historic houses, like this house named for its beautiful veranda (that's a porch for we ignorant northerners!) and the tall windows with real shutters for use in real storms.

Tomorrow is Samhain, the day in the Celtic calendar that marks the changing of the year between the light months when all the world (at least here in the Northern Hemisphere) goes mad with growth and reproduction, and the dark months when life takes a break and slows down for winter. (Most of us know tomorrow as Halloween, a time to dress in costume and beg for treats, or the day before Dia del Muerto, when we tend to the spirits of our dead.) It seems odd to be celebrating this transitional time, the holidays that mark the end of summer, here where a spring of sorts has just blossomed.

 
Or perhaps it's not so odd. Life feels topsy-turvy in many ways, whether in the global sense as climate change causes wild swings in the planet's weather, or the personal sense with perennially healthy Richard's brain cancer diagnosis. So as we celebrate the turning of the year in the Celtic calendar, the change from the light time of year to the dark time, it occurs to me that the year is not so simple. It's not just light and dark, summer and winter; nor is our existence as simple as life and death.

Life's a cycle, and the part of the year when snow blankets the landscape and the days grow short is just as vital as the fertile time of longer days and wild growth. When the year goes quiet, life rests, recharges, and prepares for the next turning of the season. Once our lives were guided by that natural cycle of the year, and the rhythms of our days gave us a more generous kind of slowing down in winter. Now we press ourselves to go faster and do more, regardless of the season. It may be time to reclaim that hush, the unhurried pace, the breathing space that once came with the dark time of year. It may be that slowing down could yield the wisdom we need to walk forward into whatever lies ahead.

Snow to Desert: Beauty and Joy Along the Way

Yesterday we drove from winter to fall. It was snowing over the peaks when Richard and I left home, so our first stop was to soak in one of our favorite hot springs, Joyful Journey, over Poncha Pass in the northern end of the San Luis Valley. (One of the good things about living along one of North America's two rift zones--fault lines that split the continent's crust--is that those same faults provide a way for groundwater to penetrate deep in the crust, where it is heated naturally and rises to the surface as hot springs. Rift zones also bring the potential for major earthquakes--think the San Andres in California--but the faults that dropped our valley floor some 7,000 feet elevation below the neighboring peaks haven't been active in eons.)

As we left the hot springs, I shot the photo above of the mountains visible from the outdoor pools where we soaked in 107 degree F water: the peaks of the northern Sangre de Cristo Range. The one farthest left is Hunts Peak, a Fourteener, and part of the view from our house on the other side of those mountains.

The snow showers continued on and off as we drove south down the valley. We spotted lots of hawks hunched on utility poles waiting for the weather to clear, not a single sandhill crane (no doubt they all migrated south before the latest storm), and one beautiful golden eagle that made all of the hawks look very small. As we passed Sierra San Antonio (St. Anthony's Mountain), the volcanic dome that marks the southern edge of the San Luis Valley and our part of the Rockies, we could see sun off in the distance over the high desert in New Mexico. 

And indeed, by the time we wound down the Rio Grande Gorge between Taos and Santa Fe, stopping to visit Richard's friend, sculptor Mark Saxe, at his Rift Gallery in Rinconada, the snow was gone and we were back in fall. The cottonwoods that have already lost their leaves in our part of the world were just turning gold there. We missed much of the color season this year while Richard was in the hospital in Denver, so it was a treat to go south and see the season unfold again.

We stopped in Santa Fe to eat at the Plaza Cafe for dinner, as a nod to a trip Richard made on this same route 41 years ago as an 18-year-old heading back to Texas to go to college. On that long drive from Salida, he stopped for dinner late one night in Santa Fe and ate at the Plaza before driving on Clines Corners, New Mexico, where he pulled off the road to sleep in his 1950 Ford truck. 

Last night as we drove south out of Santa Fe on the same route Richard took all those decades ago, we watched the sun set over Mt. Taylor, a hundred miles west on the distant horizon. It went down in a ball of golden fire, and the orange glow lingered in the west. Long enough to still be visible by the time we and the highway climbed up onto the high plains east of Albuquerque and into a hellacious east wind blowing sleet and wisps of fog across the pavement in the dark. Not pleasant weather for driving.

This morning we woke to sun peeking through a curd-like layer of rain clouds. We followed a meandering two-lane road down the Pecos River (that's the Pecos above, winding its way along below red bluffs) thinking to take a scenic route part of the way to Roswell. The route was indeed scenic, but this is New Mexico, so it exactly didn't go where the map indicated.

It did take us to past this sweet old Catholic church in the tiny town of Puerto de Luna (Door of the Moon), but we had to retrace our route to Santa Rosa and get back on Highway 285, which took us south and east over the high plains under a dappled layer of mackeral clouds that played hide and seek with the light in the most entrancing ways.

By afternoon we had dropped off the grassy plains and into the Chihuahuan Desert, a land of shrubs, grasses, cacti, and wildflowers that display incredible creativity in the genre of "how to stay alive for months and months while waiting for rain." It's a subtle and outrageously expansive landscape, one best appreciated on a day like today after a good rain when the desert soil is dotted with rare puddles, the moss that is invisible for 350 days a year appears green and lush in an ephemeral seemingly miraculous revival before the soil dries out again. On a day like today after a rare rain, desert wildflowers bloom, even in late October.

We stopped to enjoy it at Living Desert Zoo and Gardens State Park outside Carlsbad. (Don't be put off by the name. It's not a roadside zoo.) This lovely spot atop a steep butte showcases the different ecosystems of the Chihuahuan Desert on a trail through sandhills, gypsum buttes with gorgeous layers of glassy crystals, oak woodlands, and other desert habitats. And it provides a safe refuge for Chihuahuan desert fauna who cannot be returned to the wild, like the one-legged burrowing owl, the golden eagle with the broken wing, and the Mexican gray wolves. 

From Carlsbad, we hit the road in earnest and drove steadily southeast across the desert on Highway 285, through Loving, Pecos, and Fort Stockton, where we turned east again, passing by row after row of mesa-top wind turbines that comprise the world's largest wind farm. (Those turbines don't look big, but they're each the height of a 15-story building, standing atop the lonely mesas of west Texas where no buildings rise at all.)

We watched the sun set in a Dreamsicle orange glow in our rear view mirror over the limestone buttes of the Pecos River in west Texas several hundred miles south of where we crossed it at Puerto de Luna this morning, and made it to Sonora in the west edge of the Hill Country just before dark.

If you're wondering what deep meaning I'm going to pull out of these highlights of nearly 900 miles and two days of road trip, from the southern Rocky Mountains in Colorado to the east edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in west Texas, it's just this: Life is full of beauty and joy, even now when Richard and I live in the shadow of brain cancer. But you only see the beauty and joy if you look.

And there's Richard, looking.

The Blessing of Snow and News

When Richard and I left home on Monday before dawn, the temperature was 48 degrees F, unusually warm for late October in southern Colorado's high country. In Denver, the dress was shorts and sandals and the day's high was 80 degrees. Two days later, we woke to snow and pulled on jackets and scarves before droving home in a storm that muffled the peaks in cloud and dusted the mountainsides with white.

The landscape was still and muted, reduced almost to shades of gray. Even South Park (not the TV show, the real thing, a 50-mile-wide bowl of windy grasslands averaging nearly two miles above sea level and surrounded by higher peaks), was calm--hence the mirror-like reflection in this pond just outside Fairplay.

Unlike most storms this year, this one came out of the southwest, so our part of the state, which has been gripped by drought while the northern part of the state has nearly drowned, finally received some moisture. Snow was falling steadily when we got home, with several soggy inches of white stuff on the ground. Richard built a fire in the woodstove while I unpacked the car. The snow fell like white rain as we relaxed over tortilla chips and beer, as we ate leftover Indian food for dinner, and as we headed to bed. We fell asleep to the "whump!" of snow sliding in wet avalanches off the metal roof.

We woke this morning to fog and a wet, white blanket covering our garden and yard. (That's a chard leaf above peaking out of the snow in the kitchen garden.) As the sun gradually broke the fog open, the mountainsides above town began to show through, the forest iced white. Soon, the gutters sang and chuckled with melt water.

Moisture isn't a permanent resident here in the high desert. It's a rare and ephemeral event, a gift from wetter climates that sweeps in and doesn't stay long. This storm brought us that blessing in the form of snow.

And this morning brought Richard's pathology report, which doesn't seem like a blessing at all: The tumor removed from his brain almost two weeks ago was a Grade 3 Astrocytoma, which in plain English means he has brain cancer. Brain tumors are given grades from 1 to 4. One is benign, 4 is seriously bad news. Grade 3 in this particular type of tumor, an abnormal growth of the star-shaped support cells that surround the neurons, means he's likely to be treated with an intensive program of radiation and chemotherapy. We'll know more about that after his November 12 appointment with Oncology.

On the plus side, he feels good. His quarterly cystoscopy on Wednesday was all clear, and this brain tumor isn't related to that bladder cancer. His wonderful neurology doc (Thank you, Brooke Allen!) encouraged us to take a break and go on with our plans to head out for Texas this weekend. She also said the treatment shouldn't prevent us from going to Baja California at the holidays, a trip we've dreamed of for a long time. (Which reminds me: I've still got a few spaces for Writing Adventure: Baja including five days on magical Isla Espirtu Santo off La Paz. Let me know if you want to go.)

As we digest this news, one thing is clear: We're still blessed with each other, with the life we've built and we're living right now, and with the love and support of family and friends. Thank you.

Taking a Break from the Kingdom of the Sick

There's still no news on Richard's pathology report. His slides are on the desk of a top neuropathologist, and she's out of the country at a professional meeting until next week. Richard and I are pretty tired of living in what Susan Sontag called "the kingdom of the sick," so after we get home from Denver, where we are now for three days of follow-up tests and consults, we're taking off on a road trip to Texas and New Mexico.


While we're there, I'll be doing several appearances with an author I admire: Susan Wittig Albert, creator of the China Bayles herbal mystery series, as well as the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter mystery series, plus others co-authored with her husband, Bill Albert. Susan is also the founder of Story Circle Network, an organization devoted to nurturing the voices of women writing about their lives. She's former English professor and university administrator, and a voracious researcher. She's also the author of a new memoir, Together, Alone, published by University of Texas Press, hence our "two Susans tour," where we'll read from and talk about our memoirs, both of which look at place and our relationship to it, as well as at making space for ourselves in our lives. So here to break us out of the kingdom of the sick is Susan Albert, talking about her memoir and the decisions she made in telling the story.

Q: You open Together, Alone by describing the late April day when you and Bill parked Amazing Grace, the tiny RV you had spent the past seven months living in, on a hilltop at the edge-of-Texas-Hill-Country land you now call Meadow Knoll. After an afternoon of walking the creek and sitting by the lake, you write that the two of you return to Amazing Grace, where you heat a pot of soup on the propane stove and make sandwiches, and then take your food outdoors to eat while watching the sunset. Much later, still awake as Bill sleeps and watching the black sky through the camper window, you watch "a star fall like a blazing gift. We didn't know it yet, but we had come home." Why begin there, and not at some other point in the story?

Susan A: As you know, life stories often don’t have a “natural” beginning--it’s up to the memoirist to choose the opening that fits the story best. But stories can take so many different shapes, go in so many different directions, and it’s hard to decide just where to start.

In this case, the beginning (as did the ending) emerged after I had been writing for a bit and more of the focus of the story began to emerge. Then it became clear that Amazing Grace (nomad that she was) was an important aspect of myself (nomad that I had been, to that point in my life). So I went back to my journal, found my entries for the weekend that we decided to commit ourselves for the foreseeable future to Meadow Knoll, and used those as a starting point. Coming to a stop, as it were. Parking that RV and leaving our nomad, wandering ways to settle down, to root ourselves, to find a home, to come home.

Q: When you say, "We didn't know it yet," you (the narrator) switch from being immersed in the present of that day more than two decades ago, to the you now, a different person in many ways. Was it hard to call up what Zen Buddhists sometimes call "beginner's mind," and remember what you didn't know then but you do now? It seems to me that being able to remember you as you once were is critical to writing memoir, and being able to switch back and forth fluidly  helps create the dramatic tension that memoir requires. Is that a switch you made consciously, or does it come without thought, polished by your practice of writing novels and switching from narrator to character and back again without tripping the reader in the process?

Susan A: Memoir is a wonderfully open form that allows us to move from points in the past into the present and back again--as well as from one voice (the naive narrator/storyteller, embedded in the story time) to another voice (the knowing commentator, the one who reflects on the story). This play with time and voice can lend memoir a richly ironic tension.

But it also imposes an especially difficult discipline on the writer: the responsibility to return as fully as possible to the remembered moment that she wants to write about, and report it faithfully, even though that moment is gone, buried by layers of subsequent experience, feeling, reinterpretation. How can the memoirist become that naïve narrator when she has already gone through the experience, forgotten so much--now, perhaps, knows too much?

I was incredibly fortunate, because those years of my life were so deeply documented. I was journaling like a madwoman, situating myself in a new life, in new commitments to marriage and place, unmoored from my nomadic, uncommitted past. And in those journal entries, my “beginner’s mind” was right there on the page, in front of me: myself, in all my clumsy naïveté, with so many lessons ahead of me. I don’t know whether it was my experience of novel form/practice that helped, or whether it was the availability of such rich primary material. But there it was. I loved working with it.


Q: You've said before--on your blog as well as in other contexts--that you love research and immersing yourself in the details of a story. That comes across in Together, Alone especially in the early chapters telling the history of Meadow Knoll: you picture the geology of the area, where it fits in its bioregion, the inhabitants you know only as fossils, and you conjure up the people who have lived their before you and Bill. That ability to dig up beneath the surface and tell the story of a place also comes across in the chapters from Lebh Shomea, the retreat center where you go for time away. It seemed to me as if you are painting a portrait of yourself using what visual artists call the "negative space," the area around you, or in this case the places you chose to live in and love. Were you thinking of it in those terms as you wrote? Is this a device you've used in your novels?

Susan A: “Negative space.” I like that! It’s a rich idea, and I’m pleased that it came to you as you read.

But what was in my mind was more basic than that. I am a creature of place, and the place that shapes me exists in a temporal continuum, within an evolving history. That’s why the idea of nomads--a motif that ties together the two places in the book--is so important to me. The residents of my place (plants, animals, people, from pre-history to the present) are all a part of my own story, whether I meet them as fossils or find their relics (an iron wagon wheel--that nomadic symbol of westward expansion) or meet them face to face. We are all (plants, animals, people) searching for a place to anchor ourselves within the flux of time and change. We can’t know who we are until we know the place where we are, whether we’ve chosen that place deliberately or simply find ourselves in it by accident.

And of course, setting (that’s what place is about, isn’t it?) is an important element in every novel. But I do try to foreground setting, and the books of mine that I like best include a great deal of setting material: the history novels I’ve written with Bill (as Robin Paige), and in some of the China Bayles novels: Bloodroot and Wormwood. These are books about people who are shaped by the places they live and the times they’ve lived through.

Q: Together, Alone is a book of two places, Meadow Knoll, where you live with Bill, and Lebh Shomea, where you retreat to be alone. That structure and that dichotomy are very much a reflection of your marriage, which you describe by saying that although you and Bill live and work in close quarters, you are still "alone, individual, not a both but an each." It seems to me that dichotomy also describes you as an individual, and perhaps all of us, as we try to find a balance between the seemingly opposing desires to be part of a pair and at the same time to find space alone to maintain our individuality. In writing the book, was it hard to weave those two parts--the two places, the concept of marriage as a union of "eaches," and the two Susans--into a coherent and compelling whole?

Susan A: Yes, it was blasted hard! At one point, I thought: this is really two books--why am I trying to pull all this together into one? But I finally recognized that this duality/dichotomy was the crux of the issue: that I want to be in a place with Bill and I also want to be in another place where he is not. This is the trick of our marriage, and the trick of the book. It’s not easy to live within this dichotomy, and it wasn’t easy to create a narrative structure that embraces both of the parts. Finally, I had to rely on the continuity of the voice as a bridge between the two places. I’m present in both places. I hope that’s a strong enough force to hold the two halves together.

Q: I'm struck by where you end the book: Back at home in Meadow Knoll, at the end of an extended retreat to Lebh Shomea. After a walk around the place, you describe a literal and metaphorical coming back to where you began the story, down to the details of the meal and your view of the night sky from the window over your bed (even though it's a different window now): "And later, after soup and sandwiches and a quiet evening, lying in bed with the window open and the room flooded with the moon's silver brightness, I hear a coyote singing, her coyote self filled with the infinity of night and stars, at home in the wholeness, loving the loveliness of the world, in place and free." Did you plan the arc of the story this way, or did it just come around in a circle on its own?

Susan A: The ending came on its own, through the force of the story. (And I have to say this, as a writer: when this happens, I’m delighted. I love to sit there and let the story find itself.) There’s an earlier chapter that describes the ancient European tradition of “beating the bounds”--walking around the place where you live, marking its boundaries, re-placing the self in a changing and often conflicted world. The ending grew out of that chapter and is true to the many times that I have come home and felt compelled to walk around the place before I did anything else. But as I wrote it (or watched and listened as the last paragraphs wrote themselves) I remembered the place where I had opened the story: the walk to the lake, the simple meal, lying awake in Amazing Grace. As an arc of understanding, it felt right to me. It felt complete, a kind of peace.

*******


If you're in the Austin and San Marcos area, join Susan and me in our Women & Place: Two Voices, Two Perspectives tour next week. Here are dates:

• 10/28  Texas State University-San Marcos, Allkek Library, 3:30 - 5:00 p.m. Reading and book signing
• 11/01  Texas Book Festival, University of Texas Press booth, Austin, 11:30 - 12:30 p.m. Book signing
• 11/02  Be Our Guest Event, Garrison Chapel, First United Methodist Church, 1201 Lavaca Street, Austin, 7:00 - 9:00 p.m., Reading and book signing sponsored by Story Circle Network

Waiting As Practice

We're home, which is a good thing when you're trying to absorb more life lessons than anyone can really assimilate over what seems like eternity but has really only been a bit over six weeks. Last Friday, Richard was in the operating room and then the ICU, today he's in our living room. (That's my beloved Frankenstein below--Doesn't he look like a thoughtful and elegant version of Mary Shelley's monster?) The journey home over three mountain passes, all over 10,000 feet in elevation was hard on his head and his energy. But being home is definitely good for his spirit, and today, he's feeling stronger.

And we're waiting for news on his tumor. We still haven't heard the pathology results, which of course, we hope will be summed up in one simple and powerful word: benign. Waiting is hard, especially for something like this. There's also a grace to it. Waiting forces a sort of suspension of time and of the oh-so-determined purposefulness we often think life requires. It's a pause in our drive and busyness, a hush in our chatter, a time in which we can listen within to the softer, quieter voice that often speaks for our true self, the self unencumbered by shoulds and woulds and what-ifs. When we engage in the waiting mindfully and don't push it aside, waiting allows us the opportunity to just be. To breathe, literally and metaphorically. To practice life pared to the basics. To perceive what we hear and feel and are, without filters.

I'm also practicing another kind of waiting, along with all of the other lives inhabiting this unique sentient planet: We're collectively waiting, whether we realize it or not, for the changes global climate change is bringing. I like to think of this as active waiting, a time when after stilling ourselves and honoring our fears and our feelings of being overwhelmed by a global trend of such magnitude and gravity, we take responsibility for our contribution to the problem. And then we do what we can to change the way we live. 

So in honor of Blog Action Day, where thousands of bloggers around the world are writing about global climate change, I offer this list in no particular order of the things Richard and I are doing to reduce our carbon footprint and to more generously share this beautiful blue planet with all of our fellow travelers in all sizes, shapes, colors, and species:

• Walking more, driving less.
• Washing our laundry in cold water and hanging it outside on a clothesline to dry (the bonus is that beautiful fresh smell).
• Installing a solar power plant (photovoltaic modules) on our roof to generate electricity. (Does anyone have a "solar-powered blog" tag? I'm writing this post with solar power.)
• Eating locally and organically as much as possible, including growing much of our food in our own kitchen garden. (That's some of our garden produce above, harvested last week.) 
• Darning the holes in our socks instead of throwing the socks "away," as part of our aim to reuse as much as possible and recycle the rest.
• Composting our garden waste (which then renews the soil that grows our food).
• Heating our house primarily with the sun, supplementing with local wood burned in our woodstove.
• Saving water: In some parts of the perennially water-starved American West, moving water from rivers and reservoirs to faucets (and treating and cleaning it after use) consumes as much as 40 percent of the electricity used in a particular area.
• Restoring habitat for wild life in our own yard, in an effort to re-weave the frayed bonds forming the natural communities where we live. (Richard reminds me that we've seen unusual numbers of crows and grackles over the past few days--the grackles have been eating grasshoppers from the garden. I like that!)

Patience has never been one of my virtues. But as I practice waiting and listening and living a sustainable life, I'm amused to see that for some things, the things that matter, I can actually be patient. For a while, at least. Right now though, I'm going to do some active waiting and make lunch from the garden.