not so different from the banner photo, eh?

Dear Future Tenants of  _____  N Hodgeman, Apartment # 1,

You’ll have to excuse me. I’ve been packing all evening, dispersing my twenty-pound literature and art history texts among boxes containing lighter objects, such as artificial flowers and a gold-fleck motorcycle helmet and various wooden candle-holders made by my beloved, who has already found us a swell little condo in the town he’s living in now. While I pack, I watch episodes of Trailer Park Boys and drink a kind of wine that I forgot gives me headaches. My mind’s a little foggy. My ferret, Squizzy, dives in and out of boxes in the grip of a pure mustelid joy.

First of all, welcome to your new shack. It looks a lot worse from the outside. It’s the drooping power-lines converging at a point above your driveway, like “X Marks the Hovel,” right? They’re kind of festive, once you get used to them. You get used to all of it. The shackiness of it. But maybe that’s part of its appeal—the uneven logs bulging, the cracked paint, the wide dirt lot rolled out like a welcome mat to poverty. That, and it’s under a bridge. Whenever you need a vantage point, just walk a few yards and climb the steps, and survey your kingdom. From the railing, all of Laramie stretches out before you, intersected by the railyard beneath you, spanning out north and south. To the east—the church, the Connor hotel, beyond these, the unseen university (yours is a land of campers and graffiti, and you’re all the better for it, believe me). You live in West Laramie, just across the tracks, although some will dispute this, saying West Laramie begins past the Historic Territorial Prison. Which makes your community Central Laramie. There are those who would dispute this, as well.

There’s a little platform halfway up the bridge if you don’t feel like standing on the crumbling concrete walking path with cars and semis whizzing right by you. From the platform you may enjoy an unprecedented view of the Union Pacific smokestack. In your kingdom, that’s like the tower in which a dark wizard plans the magical corruption of your world, or holds prisoner a princess who will restore peace to the world.

If you’re moving to Laramie from elsewhere, even from another town in Wyoming, you should know that there are a few things you’ll need here that you won’t necessarily need in other places. Funny—as I write, my phone says it’s -17. Anyway. If it’s not already becoming obvious, you’ll need the following:

A space heater.

A humidifier.

High-calorie foods to get you through the winter–you burn more calories when it’s cold, and it gets real cold, like, thirty-below cold.

Maybe you’re thinking it’s not as bad as it sounds. Thirty Below. It’s just a number. It’s kind of romantic. I bet you’re not thinking about the wind, though. That wind is 2 Legit 2 Quit. Don’t worry. You’ll have from February to June to get used to it. The other months, it just blows hard every other week or so.

The wind plays a slightly more prominent role in your life than in some, since you’ll be walking/biking over the bridge from time to time (pretty much everything you need is on the other side of the tracks—school, grocery stores … that’s about it, I guess, but that’s everything). If you think it’s bad at ground-level, see what it’s like suspended several feet in the air. Let me try to illustrate it real quick:

PEDESTRIAN: Wow, isn’t it great! I’m on this bridge, I can see everything from up here – why, just look at the cement factory in the distance, and the –

WIND: HEY, HOW’S IT GOING? IT’S SO NICE UP HERE! THERE’S NOTHING TO STOP ME! NOTHING AT ALL!

PEDESTRIAN: Hey, could you maybe relax for a second? Just while I’m crossing this? ‘Cause there’s, like, a narrow thing I’m walking on here, and there’s the train tracks –

WIND: OH, I’M SORRY! OF COURSE!

PEDESTRIAN: And the semis on the other side –

WIND: YES, YES, HOW RUDE OF ME! AHEM … Is this better?

PEDESTRIAN: Yeah. That’s great.

WIND: Oh, good, ’cause I can see you’re looking a little precarious on that – HEY, GET AWAY FROM HERE, PIGEONS! HOW DARE YOU FLY JAUNTILY ABOUT WITH YOUR SHINY LITTLE FEATHERS! Oh, I’m so sorry. Thank goodness there’s a rail for you to hang on to, right? It’s just the birds. They’re filthy. Flying around. I’m glad you’re okay. That could have been – HEY PLANE! HEY! WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING, WITH YOUR FLIMSY WINGS ALL A-QUIVER! HEY! PLASTIC SACK, GET OUT OF THAT TREE! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY!

Also, there is a pond that develops in your driveway in the spring, or after heavy moisture. A better way to put it might be, your driveway becomes a pond. Ducks land in it. You have to arrange large stones to create a walkway to your car, which swims in the middle of it. I forgot to add the following to the listing of necessary items for your survival in your new home:

Serious waterproof/duckproof boots

Tasha

Dear Future Tenants of the Historic Hodgeman Shack,

I apologize again. I moved out before I could finish your first letter. As I start this one, I’m sipping one of my dad’s ice-cold Coors at my parents’ house in Crowheart, getting ready for Phase 2 of the move tomorrow, which will finally bring all my stuff, and all of Ryan’s grandma’s stuff (which was being stored here in Crowheart) to the place I’ll soon be living in. My belongings fill an entire horse trailer. This is not so much a source of pride as one of horror and disgust. My personal sprawl. I have a lot of crap, and that crap all needed to be wrapped in newspaper, packed in boxes, carried, and stacked in a careful, logical kind of way, which only reminded me how unnecessary most of it is. Oh, well. At least I don’t have a TV. I’ve been clinging to that fact more and more.

I have to say. I’m thrilled to be moving. But maybe you moved to the HHS (Historic Hodgeman Shack shares an acronym with Health and Human Services – and the latter is just the place you’ll need once you complete your blood-lead test while living in the former), for different reasons and certainly under different circumstances. I moved there because I really wanted to go to school (I still am going to school—just mainly online), but I soon discovered that Laramie wasn’t the place for me, for a number of reasons, the main one being that my boyfriend wasn’t there. But also for some of the conditions mentioned in the first portion of this letter, or the combination thereof. Things compound. I wonder why anyone ever wanted to live in Laramie. But they did. And now, so do you. And maybe you’ll love it. I hope you will.

I’m sure, after spending some time rent-shopping around Laramie, you’re quite appreciative of this places’ price. In the warmer (but not super-warm) months, with almost no utility payments, you got it made, man. You’ll see. More importantly, you’ve got great stars. I used to drag a camping chair out and watch them from the driveway, during the non-puddle months.

I’m on the road early tomorrow, so I’ve got to be wrapping this up.

Besides, I don’t want to haunt.

Tasha

by my parents' house. also in wyoming, but some 20 degrees warmer than laramie at all times. but 100% more mountain lion-y.

Greetings from Up North,

I made it.

The air is fragrant with processed sugar beets from the factory down by the tracks. Remember Furbies? Processed sugar beets smell like a million burning Furbies.

My dresser’s from the 60s, and as I was sliding the drawers back in, I found a little piece of folded paper in the bottom, at the very back. It was a page torn from a very old magazine, depicting something called a “Bare-beque.”

It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Bare-chested women hold barbecue grills against their nipples; they bend to heft bags of charcoal. They have short-cropped hair and large breasts, and smile like mothers. Their pubic hair is dark and expansive. On the other side of the page, a family is sprawled out on a picnic blanket – a man, boy, and woman – shooting the breeze sans garments. Nothing sexy about it. Perhaps this is the nudist colony issue of National Geographic?

I folded up the page and respectfully returned it to the inky depths of the dresser. Then slid the drawer in over it.

It helps to remember, while I hunt that for a job that will allow me plenty of writing time/brain-space, when I stop by the convenience store for coffee (to enhance writing-time), when the guy comes by to hook up my internet smelling like a gin-soaked olive (internet has nothing to do with writing-time, except that watching good Netflix movies is as important to me as reading good books), that in my new town, as much as in Laramie, everyone wants to be happy, and everyone’s doing whatever they can think of and taking all kinds of measures to get there – feeding the sparrows, getting the good beer, buying time, as much as it takes, ’til death do we part, we go broke, or we get what we want, finally and forever and always.

Staging Bare-beques.

Listening to Bob Dylan – I am – at this very moment.

I’ve been 10 thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard.

It’s as important as ever, in a new place, with new people, that I remember that no one thinks they’re just never going to be happy (yet, when I bought my coffee today, the clerk’s sleeve, as she passed me my change, lifted to reveal a set of pale track marks), and that, as young as I still am, as fundamentally money-less as I’ll probably always be, when it comes to happiness, I don’t have to try as hard as some (because things have been easier for me, because I’m getting better at my own life, because so far there’s always a horse running outside the howling train car), and as difficult as the next year may be, and how, at any time, I’m months away from being homeless, last night I bought a bottle of Andre and a $5 eight-piece fried chicken basket to christen my new place. And it was perfect.

This morning I signed the lease. Pages were held out to me and explained. Mold disclaimer. Lead paint brochure.

I don’t have a job.

I don’t have health insurance.

I don’t have the time to worry. Scared people don’t write. Which is not to say that I won’t soon be (ideally) pouring beers at the brewpub – part-time.

It makes it easier to know what it takes. Right now, it’s a few days alone in a place I share with somebody I love. Half a day unpacking. Half a day writing. It’s another dry winter, and after all this cardboard, my hands are raw. The writing’s not going especially well, but I’m grateful to be able to do it, so much so, that instead of going out to buy lotion and bread, I’m here, eating eggs on beans with the skin of my knuckles cracking. Writing a story. Trying to find the world it began in, and failing, for now.

I’m glad to be perpetually almost there – that “there” is always shifting.

And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a HAAARD

It’s a hard rain that’s gonna fall

I’m glad for Bob Dylan right about now.

I hope N. Hodgeman give you peace. I wish I would have thought to leave some interesting porn tucked away somewhere. I’m missing a few pairs of my favorite underwear, so maybe you’ll find those …

And what’ll you do now, my darling young one?

… If you do find anything of mine, you’re free to sell it on the internet, or simply put it back where you found it.

I’m goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin.

- t

See my letter to the future tenants of the last place I lived in for a reference to the owl pictured above.

At the same time university students in California were getting pepper-sprayed for sitting in an inconvenient place, the students whose papers I’m grading as part of my job were arguing, sometimes in all-caps and with triple exclamation points (the equivalent of applying a fine layer of pepper-spray to my feelers?), that if one doesn’t like America, one should pack up his or her communist propaganda and GET OUT.

The instructor had asked students to describe how their cultures inform their perspectives. Most of them identified as American, and quite a few wrote as though being an American meant one thing only – the type of thing outlined in the above paragraph.

Few of the essays were so aggressive.

Perhaps most distressing to me is that fact that I haven’t written fiction in days.

My brain is occupied.

I find various events around the world upsetting on a regular basis, but since I’ve been in a Creative Writing MFA program, I’ve made an effort to stay away from the news because I find it troubling to the point that it rules my thoughts and makes me feel helpless and angry – point being, I can’t work. Like now. I have yet to discover how to compartmentalize these feelings, and so I avoid them as much as I can. It’s cowardly, and it’s absolutely key to my productivity. I think everybody has to do this to some extent. Except maybe sociopaths, who revel in violence and tragedy on a grand scale. Probably even sociopaths have to watch war footage in moderation so they don’t start feeling insecure about their relatively low-impact killing sprees.

Speaking of war, many people have pointed out that a dozen or so innocent students getting pepper-sprayed (no matter how outrageous and unwarranted it was) comes nowhere close to the magnitude of tragedy in Iraq. That’s true. You could relate it to a million, arguably more devastating and atrocious things—the heroin epidemic on the east coast, or, Jesus, HIV rates in Uganda. But the footage from the UC Davis incident struck a chord for a number of reasons. That ten seconds or so—from the moment the officer holds that can aloft to the moment he finishes applying a second coat of mace to the seated protester’s faces from a range of a few inches—provides a powerful snapshot of a single incident (among many in the ongoing OCCUPY vs. Trusted People in Authority conflicts) that captures the general brutality of the police responses to the OCCUPY protests, and points to a larger problem—for this to happen, some of us haven’t been doing our jobs. Most of us haven’t been paying attention. And (echoing, on a smaller scale, the outcomes of certain Vietnam protests we perhaps thought were ancient history) it happened at an American university – a place that’s supposed to promote free thought and free speech and ideals and even civil disobedience.

I know what to expect when I see Iraq on the news. There are people with guns. There are other people with different guns. I understand the plot—not because it makes sense, but because I’ve seen it so often. And it does affect me. But not in a different way.

When it comes to UC Davis, I can’t process the image of some kids SITTING there and getting attacked by someone who should be protecting them. It’s like a nightmare. It doesn’t fit. But once my brain stops melting, I have to deal with what it is I’m seeing — what it means, what it says about my country. How things got to this point. Whether we’ll keep following a trajectory that frankly scares the shit out of me.

And then I have to grade some essays.

ANECDOTE:

A census worker called me weeks ago. “Do you know your neighbors?”

My neighbors and I wave at one another sometimes. Not always. I said, “No.”

“Do you trust them?”

“Yes.”

I did.

I do.

Even though I prefer not being on a small-talk basis with my neighbors, I trust them. If that ever changes, I’ll go — gladly. But it would take a massive cosmic shift (or them training their dogs to attack a doll with a photograph of my face glued to its head). It’s my hope that the shift our country’s experiencing will move us toward something that affirms my faith in all the people I don’t know — my fellow Americans.

A month ago, I found a little comfort in an “OCCUPY Laramie” hand-out on campus, though it’s language was questionable (something about “the cries of indigenous peoples going unheard and unanswered”) – it was a step in the right direction, a sign that students here (probably, hopefully, most of them) felt a deeper resonance with the OCCUPY message than the philosophy that working 60 hours a week at a shitty, shitty job with no health insurance is a noble route; why help anyone who can’t help himself; the best people win and the losers rightfully die; a country that encapsulates these ideas represents the highest quality of life one could possibly ever want; and that, if you don’t like it, you should shut up or leave.

Luckily, these are not our only options, despite the heavily exclamation-pointed papers expressing the contrary, which are sitting right next to me as I write this. And which I will, eventually, have to grade. And which, I should say, I’ll grade for things like grammar and clarity only, since it’s not my job to judge these students. It’s not my right either. Who the hell am I? And, again, I don’t know anything about them.

Strangers, strangers, everywhere.

I habitually leave my stuff unattended in public places. Someday, someone might actually steal my cell phone (or break into my house and explode my ferrets!). But I’ll live with the odds that probably, they won’t. Or maybe one or two people might take secretive photos of my face that they glue onto dolls that they then make out with, but whatever. I don’t want to spend my life worrying about the various ways strangers might try to take from me or hurt me or abuse photos of my face. That’s my right. I don’t want to live afraid of strangers, or my own neighbors, or my own stranger-neighbors. That would mean I could never be vulnerable, never stop worrying who might be watching and what they might do, and I probably couldn’t write. Also, most of the people around me deserve to be trusted. I don’t know that for a fact. It’s something I take for granted … you know … like the right to protest peacefully … And stuff.

The fact is, right now, participants in the OCCUPY movement see their home – America, Wyoming, their university, wherever – as a place worth occupying. They’re setting up tents. They’re standing up for one another. It’s not perfect. A girl named Ashlie ODed in her tent alone during the Vancouver protest. Police continue to handle the OCCUPY presence in the worst possible ways. But people — strangers – are coming together and trying to change something. They’re writing different kinds of papers. Goddamn. It makes me truly proud to be here for the first time in a long time.

I don’t have to know someone to like her.

I don’t have to like a lot about my country right now to stay here.

For now, I’m staying.

I hope there’s a way we can all somehow stay here together. I think it’s worth it. We’ll find out. But I really think so.

For now –

Onward, muskrats, Americans, cowboys, cowards, whatever you are, culturally or otherwise.

You’re the best people I’ve possibly never met.

Now.

Something inspiring.

THIS:

the journey to health and wellbeing ... my story

Beaver and Muskrat Prepare for Winter

“The pituitary gland is located deep inside the brain,” explains Beaver.

“It’s true,” says Muskrat. “He’s a doctor.”

I’d like to say I sought out Beaver and Muskrat for advice, but I found them swimming together in a beam of light on the water and when they got to the shore they just started giving advice about my recent doctor’s visit. I was busy thinking about my kidneys taking a grand vacation. They lean against each other before the Great Pyramids. Right now, they could be sending golden eagles after wolves in Mongolia, or snuggled up in Germany, sipping mugs of warm beer.

“Does anyone in your family have diabetes?” asked the doctor — the real one, not the beaver.

“My great-grandma did. And my great-grandpa.”

“Anyone else?”

I thought and thought, because I sensed it was pretty important.

Afterward, I was walking along the Green Belt, by the canal, when I noticed the beam of light on the water — the stripe of light from the sun, and wondered if it could be a symptom of my rare and inoperable brain tumor, and not actually the sun, which I had taken for granted as the source of other brilliant flashes of light on water. I actually didn’t know it — the tumor — was inoperable. I only got so far in my Googling, which the doctor told me not to do. “I’m going to,” I had told her. So she told me what sites to go to. “I would stay off the computer, though,” she said. “It’s going to scare the shit out of you.” Or, “It’s going to scare you.” But it scared me more than that.

So, I was happy to see two small mammals swimming along in a stripe of light as if they were friends — particularly that one mammal was much smaller than the other. And at first, I was happy when Beaver and Muskrat waddled and scurried, respectively, up the bank and introduced themselves. Talking animals! What luck! Of course, in the back of my mind, I thought this of all things screamed “tumor,” but why spoil it for myself. But all they wanted to talk about was my mysterious illness.

I tried to get Beaver to stop talking about my pituitary gland. “Shouldn’t you be getting ready for winter?”

But Beaver moved on to the subject of my kidneys and their impending failure. Or maybe that was Muskrat’s area. And then it was on to the tumor talk. I don’t know—semi-aquatic mammals bore me just now. Maybe I’ll get back to them later.

I was told I quite possibly have this thing, this thing I shouldn’t look up, Monday afternoon. That night I looked it up.

Tuesday was busy. It was a blur. But no crying. I did tell my friend in a weird way that my kidneys weren’t working right (I didn’t mention possible causes, such as anything about a brain tumor; in truth, I find it difficult to believe in things like brain tumors), and asked if he could take me to the hospital if I called him out of the blue. He said he would. And then I said it really wasn’t that serious, and not to worry. The kidneys just weren’t filtering things right. That was all. But of course that could be very, very serious.

Wednesday it took a long time to get moving. I started watching a show about polygamist families. One family lived in a big triplex built by a Fundamentalist Mormon architect, each wife with her own section, and the husband would come home from work and move through each part of the house and kiss each wife and say hi to each group of kids and help with the dishes or talk with a daughter about her plans to join the naval academy. One wife said something like, “We’re separate but work as a unit.” If only my organs were like the wives. But who would the husband be — the thing that unites them all, assuming he is that thing? My brain. But that doesn’t seem right. What if the wives just don’t want to live together anymore?

Finally, I had to stop watching TV. I did work for several hours at a coffee shop, although on many occasions I had to stop thinking about my kidneys and if one if them maybe hurt, and if I was going to die only a month before I was supposed to move back in with my boyfriend in Montana. But then I’d move my eyes over a line of words enough times to focus again and I’d work for awhile.

Wednesday night, I said, fuck it. I drank a beer, just the one, and watched the polygamist show. It was a whole series. On the phone, my boyfriend was worried. So I made jokes about calling my kidneys my kitties. “I’ll go to the doctor and say, ‘My kitties ain’t purring like they should.’”

I think about parties I can throw for my kidneys to boost morale. Kidney beans set out in bright glass bowls. That’s all I can think of. No kidney piñatas. Maybe for strength I’ll eat the kidney of some animal, if that’s possible, if kidneys can be prepared for human consumption, if all the protein won’t damage my own kidneys.

It’s still Wednesday night now. I just have to sit here and ignore my kidneys. It snowed last night, and I’m grateful all the dead grass and leafless trees are hidden. When I’m scared, I think, at least one person in town knows about my kidneys, and will take me to the hospital if I need him to. I wish I could tell him how much it helps to know he’s right across the bridge from me. But what if all this is nothing.

***

Tonight, my kidneys will leave my body. They will go on journeys of their own. Here’s how it happens. They wobble through the snow, leaving depressions that fill with the blood running off of them. They are going away for the winter. They are going to live with Beaver and Muskrat. Don’t they know I can’t live without them? But it’s their 27^th year anniversary in February. And they no longer need that body with its toxins leaking out over the bed, its plans for bowls of beans.

***

“Let me tell you about specific gravity in urine,” the doctor had said, and I wanted to laugh at the outer-space-sounding term applied to the quarter-cup of pee I produced. “Kidneys can concentrate urine to 1.030. Okay?” She waited while I wrote it down in my notepad under the heading, “Specific Gravity.” “And they can dilute it to 1.005. Okay? Your urine is diluted below that. It’s less than 1.005.”

Did I even have human kidneys? Was she saying my kidneys were super-kidneys? How can something be doing something outside the realm of what it could actually ever possibly do?

“So is this hurting my kidneys? Are my kidneys damaged?”

I remember her face. I remember the book she got out — “they just make the letters so darn big, don’t they?” I remember her smile. There will be testing. Before the testing, just do what you normally do. Did she mean I could drink coffee and beer and eat meat? I didn’t ask. These things didn’t occur to me at the time. But what did she say about the kidneys? All there is in my notebook are specific gravity numbers, diabetes insipidus, and the name of the one website she said I could go to because all the others would scare the shit out of me.

Well, if they, my own two kidneys, which I have loved and protected all this time, as best I could, decide to take off through the snow tonight, there’s nothing I can do to stop them.

I didn’t dare get off him. So I hung it out and dribbled down his shoulder and he felt that and he started abuckin’. That GD zipper just about sawed my penis off. I had a hell of a time … [I]t finally quit hurting enough so I could handle it and put it away. I was sorer than hell for a long time (36-37).

An excerpt from a book about my great-uncle called The Last of the Breed: The Story of Trapper Jake Korrel as Told to Kit Collings.  It’s pulled from the story, “King Arthur” — about a horse that would trample any rider who tried to get off him, which is why Jake chose to “dribble down his shoulder” when he had to pee.

Jake’s parents left Russia for the United States in the early 1900s. However, “[d]ue to the confusion and/or the language barrier, they got on the wrong ship and wound up in Buenos Aires, Argentina, for four years before raising enough money to continue on to Ellis Island … (5).

I first met my great-uncle when he visited my elementary school to teach hatchet-throwing.

Now three recent family stories …

1.

My mom was outside with her irrigating boots on both arms, knocking them together to loosen mud from the soles, when she froze and cocked her head. Then she crept around the side of the house, motioning with her booted arm for me to follow. She faced the house with her knees slightly bent and her arms held straight out from her sides. Her boots were nearly up to her shoulders.

“Listen!” she said.

Her eyes were fixed on the side of the house while she did the following things:

She hopped one way.

She hopped the other way.

Some mud fell off the boots on her arms.

She cried, “Karoo!”

She thought there were starlings building a nest in the eave.

And there were.

2.

My parents were missing a bull after my mom had a dream that a man wearing sweatpants stole him.

I said I’d try to find the bull.

“You?” said Mom. “You wouldn’t know where to look.” Then she said to Dad, “But I am worried about him.”

My dad said, “It’s not like we don’t have other bulls.”

“True.”

“Screw him. He’s a little bastard.”

Dad owns a pair of camo pajama pants.

3.

Not long after my boyfriend and I started dating, he drove to Crowheart to visit me and my family for a few days.

We decided to play cards the night Ryan arrived. As we played, my brother listened to his Mp3 player. He began yelling hip hop lyrics.

I remember the conversation like this:

“So Ryan, how’s school?”

“I — ”

“I spit on these ******* before I eat ‘em!”

“ — I like it.”

My brother won the game.

do you see her?

Our Lady of the Rockies has an underbite, and the heavy jaw of a boxer — Our Lady of Pain. This, offset by two tiny hands that emerge from her robe, palms offered meekly to all who might be moved to worship her bulky whiteness, which shines in the night, among neon signs for Econo Lodge and McDonald’s. Up on a ridge east of town, this ninety-foot sculpture of Mary, Mother of Jesus, is so much smaller than her competition of interstate establishments. But from a distance, she is beautiful. It is only up close that her ill-proportioned figure becomes obvious, the suggestion of a knee where her ankle should be — or perhaps she is kneeling, beaten down by the wind that stirred up a tornado four hours east, outside of Billings.

Leaving Butte this morning, where Our Lady shrouded herself in clouds and rain, I was at the end of a week-long, 1,500-mile tour of Montana. I arrived in Butte last night, under Mother Mary’s hallucinatory glow, and had given up on the idea of doing any site-seeing, discouraged by miles of construction and poor weather. Instead, I studied a pamphlet for Our Lady of the Rockies, which featured a photo of a helicopter hoisting her massive head to its designated spot 3,500 feet above the city. I wondered, of what spiritual significance to Butte is this tiny, glowing light on a hill overlooking the Berkeley Pit, a former copper mine nine hundred feet deep and laden with dangerous chemicals? Lost among the other lights, Mary is one more speck polluting the night sky, where, if we had a chance, we could probably see the stars.

I’d just come from Kalispell in northwestern Montana, where I’d spent a day walking the neighborhoods around my hotel in a post-travel haze, just happy to be using my legs. My trip had traced a circle within the perimeter of Montana, taking me along the hi-line — a stretch of nearly mountainless plains that looked a lot like Illinois — where the Fort Peck Indian Reservation nestled the Missouri River, and where I spent the best three days of my trip. This landscape contrasted greatly with that of Glacier National Park, where high, snowy peaks rose as violent as shark’s teeth out of the prairie west of Havre. I drove through the park, consumed by green (I saw none of the beetle kill that reddened trees south of here), a green nourished by unusually high precipitation. Yet, surrounded by all this natural beauty, I felt uneasy, and it took some time to pinpoint the cause.

The Glacier Park area differs from the hi-line in a second way.  Though the Flathead Reservation is nearby, the people I saw were exclusively white, except for three black people walking up the street in East Glacier Park Village.  Many of them were tourists like me, gawking from speeding cars when waterfalls of blue-green glacial water were exposed by gaps in the trees — flashes of super-beauty, each one like a sucker punch. Crosses littered the sides of the road  – some, single clusters of five or six crosses stacked on top of one another.

Despite its beauty, I was happy to leave Glacier Park, where, even in early summer, the sense of being on a cruise ship plagued me, where I went too long without seeing a non-white person, and where every museum I went to seemed disproportionately filled with the history of European settlers. The mountains, seen from the distance, seemed almost artificial, something fashioned with human hands and lit up to make us believe they were the real thing.

When I got here, I had a cold. I was sluggish. My mind felt thick and confused. On the drive, I thought, bleak, bleak, bleak. It was overcast. The sagebrush and marsh humps looked like thousands of small animals massacred in the fields. The next day, I woke up feeling worse. I did not get to be okay until late afternoon. Then, this morning, I felt a little better. I moved my arms. They moved okay. I sat up. I was not too dizzy. My ferrets slept in their cage with their heads on top of one another. I leaned back and looked out the window. It was sunny. The sagebrush looked like sagebrush. The starlings were carrying dog kibble away while the dogs slept in the sun. I heard my parents driving home from chores.

For breakfast, I made a can of soup. I made two pieces of toast. I made coffee. I made a fizzy vitamin drink. I got a glass of water. I got a bowl of grapes, which my mom had set out on the counter. I started eating the soup. It wasn’t too good. I poured out the broth and ate the rice and chicken and little vegetables. I ate half a piece of toast. I ate a lot of grapes. There were strawberries in the fridge,  but I wanted to save them for later. I drank the coffee. I drank the vitamin drink. It took me a long time to drink the water, because it tasted bad. I thought: “I need to brush my teeth.” I thought about why I felt bad for the last few days. Is it because I’m sick? Is it the weather? Is it because I miss my boyfriend? Is it because my mind feels thick? Is it because I’m 26? Is it because I’m not always good with people? Is it because I’m afraid I might never leave this region of the world? Is it because yesterday, I tried twice to write something funny, and neither thing was funny? Because my mind was thick, I couldn’t tell. It’s because I’m sick. I will wait, then.

Earlier, I saw a large bird in a tree down by the corral. When I was little, I would have run to the tree to see what it was. Now, I think: “It’s an eagle. I’ve seen eagles before.” Or: “It’s an owl. I like owls, but I’ll see some later, when I’m ready to walk in the woods. They don’t make a sound when they fly, because of the shape of their feathers.” My mom saw a bobcat on the road to our house. I have never seen one. My dad has seen one. Maybe tomorrow, my feet will feel bigger. Maybe life will move through me more quickly, and I won’t want to watch TV.

The white spots on starlings glow in ultraviolet light, which other birds can see, but we can’t.

When I think of all the people in the world, and what they must feel, and then I think of me, I think, everything feels how it’s supposed to feel. Now everything is moving. Now March is almost over. Now I need more vitamins. Soon I will want less. Now I am who I want. Soon I will go outside. I will brush my teeth first. Now the kitchen is quiet. Earlier, there was an aphid in the cactus on the windowsill. “How did you get here?” I asked. Then my mom squished it. A year ago, my hair was red. Then I changed it.

I don’t do drugs because I don’t think I have the personality that can support them, but I’m going to pretend I’m the kind of person who can sustain hours of intense creative energy. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do. It’s interesting stuff, stuff I love, so I’m not complaining, but I’m not able to put the kind of time that I’d like into each thing, which drives me crazy, and makes me Google boxing clubs in Laramie in search of an outlet. I think they just have mixed martial arts here though, which is not really my thing. I’ve got some gloves, so maybe I’ll just buy a bag and suspend it from the Clark Street Bridge, which is a few yards away, but I don’t want to think about what the pigeons would do to it.

Yesterday was the first day I felt re-settled in Laramie. I took a look at a story I turned into my fiction class last week and kind of freaked out. It’s not very good. I think the idea was good, but I wrote parts of it in different places over the break and so it never ended up feeling real to me. I actually need to sit with it awhile. Plus, it has a lot of obvious mistakes. I spent last night fixing those. I had other things to work on, but I couldn’t move forward with that story hanging over my head. And it really didn’t take long, since I’m finally in the right state of mind to write.

I changed my mind on summer plans and spent most of today re-writing a grant proposal that I hope will be compelling enough to fund my trip, which will basically be pretty rad thesis research. Then I worked out and stood outside afterward in a snow flurry until it stopped. I was wearing the smallest shorts I own and a tank top. My neighbors think I’m insane.

Oh! And also, I’m mapping ghosts and cottonwood trees for the Laramie Atlas Project. Here’s some information on it: http://uwartmuseum.blogspot.com/2011/01/uw-art-museum-partners-with-mfa-in.html. I have to have a map done by the end of the week, which seems kind of crazy, but I’m sure the research floodgates will open, like they do after a little time figuring out where to go, and I can get some basic points to the cartographers, and hopefully the artists will like it. This whole collaboration thing is rad (I like this word right now) after feeling a little too holed up with my own writing. I also have to have an essay done about ghosts/cottonwoods in the Laramie area very shortly.

And now I’m making more coffee, since I’ve been up until the wee hours every night, with or without it. It will actually calm me down right now.

I’m having a really good time.  Just want to highlight that.

But I also can’t wait until the first week of February’s over so I can get to work on some stories again, and my life can achieve some kind of balance. Maybe four new stories this semester, as well as revisions of various old ones? That’d be awesome. Wish me luck.

I’ve just acquired an air purifier AND a humidifier to make my whole situation here more comfortable. I’ve never needed so much to survive the winter. Man, this place is rugged.

Kisses,

T

Kind of wish I was still having coffee here every morning with my lovely Baerfriend (his last name is Baer, with that spelling). After the program ... Kona? South America? Just a thought.

Semester Two of Year One of the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing Concentrating in Fiction with a Special Focus on Violence in Isolated Places and Stuff started yesterday. But I was on a plane. I drove from the Denver airport to Laramie on a clear, below-zero afternoon, and watched the sun set behind the Snowies from my car, in which the last bikini I wore in Hawaii was still tied to my backpack, even though it was dry, and sort of crunchy in a sad, frozen sea-salt kind of way. I called Ryan from my driveway. He just got to his apartment in Montana. I told him I just got back to mine. We never get home anymore.

What we do get is Skype and scattered weeks together in nice places (recently, Hawaii, thanks to Ryan’s parents, who generously invited us along), which we make fun and entertaining and meaningful and relaxing, and do all the things we used to do, and pretend we’re still living together, and believe that maybe we’re connected over distances in a tangible way (like through tattoos or David Bowie’s magic eyes or something), and that we’ll have another home in exactly 1.5 years, even if it’s a railroad car or a generous palm frond, so long as it’s not just a state of mind or a picture of us smiling in front of an ocean we know nothing about and not looking like ourselves.

And actually, that picture does look like us. It’s just that we look different now. Not in a bad way. Faces change.

And I don’t have to be on an island to enjoy rum whenever I want, or to know that missing someone is better than not. So here’s to that:

Keep toastin’, friends. These years are always new.

Scientists: work on portal technology. David Bowie: get those eyes magicking. It’s 2011, people.  With any luck, in the future, love will be weirder still.

Love y’all.

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