The Romance of Discovery in the Life of Today

Oh that? Full of poison ivy.

Photographs: of my sister, Kylie

Something's Gonna Crush You

Six hours on the Pennsylvania Turnpike will make you grateful to arrive just about anywhere, I think. Six hours isn't a long trip, but it's a narrow one, between hills I call mountains and mountains Coloradans call hills, and it stops and it starts and it reminds you that there's no room to pull over, because: DANGER FALLING ROCK. Personally, I've never seen one, but the government-issued signs say they'll come careening down those slopes onto the highway that's been carved out-- just wait and they'll come. That official yellow diamond looks pretty menacing to me.

If it isn't falling rock that crushes you on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, it's bound to be your too-tight seatbelt, or the luggage that's piled in the seat next to you and topples over onto your lap when a sharp curve gets taken too quickly, or if nothing else, your generalized anxiety disorder. Something's gonna crush you on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. I can't say right now what it'll be. I just know that when you get to wherever you are going, it won't really matter where it is. You'll be glad, and remember you've got lungs for about two seconds, and then tell yourself that your t'ai chi class was bullshit, like just about everything else. Still, I know you won't totally believe it, because those first gulps of air when you tumble out of the car into Ohio, or wherever else you ended up, will be some sort of breathing exercise. I'm not really an authority, you understand, but I hear these kinds of practices are the only way to decompress from whatever crushed you on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, so it's an awfully good thing that you know about them, and that they come naturally to you.

Photo Credit: Historical Photographs of Ray's Hill, circa 1940

Unsolicited Advice

While a natural setting is generally recommended for the ease of tensions physical and mental (by myself and a great many others), there are certain states that seem desperate for pavement and glass, and do not ask much of the architecture. There are states, I think, of anxiety and restlessness that maybe you can sweat out, if you walk in circles long enough around a half-dozen city blocks. Even if it isn't late July in Baltimore, if you walk long enough, you will at some point open a door and go inside somewhere, or get on a train, and then you will peel off every sweaty layer that you piled on that February morning-- taking the frenzy with it.

If you do that, in a city where you don't live, and then you rinse it all off and go to bed and wake up the next morning and cut your hair and eat a doughnut (but probably only if you do all of that), you might have a chance of getting rid of whatever mania swelled inside of you, and possessed you to skip town in the first place. If you do those things, you can expect another year and a half to two years before you start feeling that way again, and then you might be lucky, because it might be summertime, and you won't have to walk as long or as far before you've sweat everything out.

Xena

"...He should live without mantras. He should bathe at the start of the three periods of the day and, deeply immersed in meditation, he should realize his union with the Self."

-from Aruni Upanishad 1-2

I have decided, because writing a short personal essay about the importance of my dearly departed cat will likely be of little interest to you and inevitably fail to convey the desired effect, to simply present a series of titles that will give you the general idea, and nothing more. My great faith in your imagination allows me to do this, along with my laziness (of which the cat might herself approve). With that, I very humbly present:

XENA: A Cat You Might Have Liked to Meet (Unless You Were Very Allergic)

One: In Which the Cat Is Found in Great-Grandfather's Raspberry Patch

Two: In Which the Cat Is Brought Home

Three: In Which the Cat Promptly Plumps

Four: In Which the Cat Receives Approval of the Pets

Five: In Which the Cat Is Right at Home

Six: In Which the Cat Is Beloved and Clumsy

Seven: In Which the Cat (and Everyone Else) Moves House

Eight:In Which the Cat Creaks and Purrs

Nine: In Which the Cat Succeeds in Renouncing the Material World

Ten: In Which the Cat Curls up in the Basement

THE END

West Virginia's State Girl

"There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man; but it is easier to deal with the real possessor of a thing than with the temporary guardian of it."

-from Civil Disobedience By Henry David Thoreau

It's no secret that I just adore old postcards. The combination of image-collecting and correspondence is just irresistible. Why, look here! West Virginia as she ought to be: rhododendrons in bloom, and bursting forth from state beauty is State Beauty-- the West Virginia State Girl. However, if the state song of West Virginia is any indication, it is hardly fruitful to dwell on such nostalgic imagery. I reference the third verse of West Virginia Hills:

"Oh, the West Virginia hills! How unchang'd they seem to stand,
With their summits pointed skyward To the Great Almighty's Land!
Many changes I can see, Which my heart with sadness fills;
But no changes can be noticed In those West Virginia hills."

Of course, those lyrics are outdated at best and tragic at worst, because the hills of West Virginia are anything but "unchang'd". West Virginia's State Girl, proudly perched on a penny postcard with fair skin gleaming in the rosy glow of her state flower, might better represent her state's beloved hills if her face was smudged with coal. The tourism bureau of today will likely point out the splendor of the hills and the flowering rhododendron bushes, but it would be foolish to mistake that for a celebration of what is. It seems that if things are to be idyllic on postcard or brochure, they merely celebrate what still is.

For that, we can thank the destruction of mountaintop removal mining. I think there might be a gentler term for it, one I heard in fifth-grade geology, and one my father uses-- "strip mining" is that it? I think it's meant to emphasize the "stripping" of resource from the earth, which really doesn't sound too much better, but certainly less mythical. At any rate, I'm sure I do not have to explain this practice to you, because you already know just what it is; even if you don't, the name sort of speaks for itself. Say "mountaintop removal" and immediately you can picture all sorts of wild scenarios and consequences, and I doubt you'd be too far off. The whole thing just looks ghastly. The man in charge is positively merciless. And, to provoke the sympathies of the unsympathetic: The charming Lorax of your childhood would doubtless be rendered apoplectic. (If you still don't get the idea, or if you'd just like to know more, I suggest taking a look at this article in Vanity Fair .)

Now, I am hardly an activist for anything much, but beautiful things are dear to me, and so I will derive my authority on the matter from this angle, rather than attempting to explain the vast ecological impact that mountaintop removal ends up having. This might be a defect in my personality, that despite taking an interest I am not moved to leap to the region's defense, and throw myself in front of the first flowering shrubbery I can find. I am lucky, though, because I happen to know Sophie, who got herself arrested on Wednesday for doing just that.

Well, not exactly. There were no rhododendrons involved, so far as I know (they bloom earlier in the season, anyhow), and Sophie's defense of the wilds of West Virginia was far more relevant than my imagined "Save the Shrubbery" campaign. Instead, Sophie and three other activists locked-down a highwall miner (a large piece of equipment used in mountaintop removal mining) in a nonviolent act of protest (you can read more about it here). After an arrest, Sophie sits in jail, where she doubtless knew she might end up for breaking the law in the name of, well, this. I think you'll find that Sophie's motivations are far more easily defended than my own. For all of its admirers, natural beauty generally fails to hold its own in battles against corporations or people trying to make a living. This is another reason I am grateful to Sophie, because she is one of the people who might rescue the cause from well-intentioned folks like me (we generally spoil things and have pathetic arguments, if we bother to argue at all).

I know Sophie would love it if you read her activist statement (which I linked you to above), but if you don't have the patience, you can listen to her and the other protestors describe their motivations and personal justifications here:

It all is terribly complicated, like everything else, and I worry for my dear friend now in a West Virginia jail. Still, I am terribly proud of her, and I have written her a letter telling her that, and I will write again tomorrow. Although this time, I think I will address it to West Virginia's State Girl.

Maryland, My Maryland

"I am sorry to hear that you are to pass your summer in Madrid. What a pity that the diplomatic circle should be doomed to the sterile monotony of that city in the desert; what a residence in Seville might have made for.."

-Correspondence: To Madamoiselle Bouvillier from Washington Irving

Seville, May 28, 1828

It has been decreed that I should spend six months in Maryland, rather than returning to the bricks and the prairies of Galesburg for school come September. It is next to impossible to determine the justice of the situation, because from where I stand things look impossibly bleak and quite unfair, and from the position of the powers that be*, sending me to Illinois once more appears absurd and foolish and irrefutably doomed to fail. It is so terribly difficult to be objective, and "There is everywhere enough liberty of arguing both for and against, on both sides" (from The Iliad By Homer). With that being the case, and with the decision having been quite firmly made, I will have to just take the advice that I love to give, and be a sport.

As it happens, I'm an awfully good sport. I've referenced the miserable Maryland summer several times, but I do not dwell upon it. And, trimester after trimester, I hang back in Baltimore while my friends head back to school to be reunited and transition into a fresh term's joys and dilemmas all at once. No matter how many times this happens, it seems just as calamitous as the last, and I find myself stranded in some little room at Johns Hopkins (outpatient if I'm lucky) waiting on some sinister mystery lurking behind blood vessels to be solved. This is very frustrating, but even with wires protruding from my scalp, connected to the wall, systematically sleep-deprived and video monitored 'round the clock, I have occupied myself. I have looked forward. I have watched movies. Written letters. And so when I've pined, it was in a small room full of diversions that I had created for myself; I was equipped to very quickly open a book and carry on.

The six-month sentence, however, presents new challenges in recreation and  in sportsmanship. I will have to leave the Little Room. I think I will be lonelier than I am now come September.

*The decision to "take a term off" was made by my parents, rather than say, my school's administration.

Photographs taken from the window of the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit at Johns Hopikins Hospital in Baltimore, MD

Man of My Dreams

Image: Study for Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, Rembrandt (Albertina)

K.I.T.

"People there are like birds that come down in flocks, hop about chattering, gobble up their seed, then fly away, forgetting what they have swallowed. I love not to scatter grain for such as these. With you, friend, it is different."

-from Story of a Piebald Horse, By W. H. Hudson

In May, which seems just so very long ago, my dear friend L. took a train to Galesburg, missed her stop, and took one back from Princeton, having realized her mistake. Some hours later, she stood before a small, delighted assembly of old friends. The reunion took place over sweet potato fries, and we discussed plans for her weekend visit as The Oak Room slowly emptied of other students. After sopping up sherbet spilled by one of L.'s overzealous devotees, and publicly displaying our affections, this little band of the newly reunited went about their debauchery and adventuring and gossiping.

I am not really here to recount the story of L.'s visit to you in any great detail.  If you are curious, it was a lovely time. We started our weekends early. We stayed up late smoking cigarettes on porches, poking fun and catching up. We did all of the sorts of things that make for a splendid time in person but rather dull reading. I bring up the reunion, not because I think fondly of it (although of course I do), but because it was so surreal and bittersweet.

L. left Galesburg just about a year ago, because of a sort of change in educational plans. I think this sort of thing happens all the time. At any rate, L. is in Galesburg no longer, and there are few circumstances in the foreseeable future that might bring me to her whereabouts. "Give up." said Geography, "Proximity rules". "I'm coming to visit in May!" L. replied.

The reunion temporarily defeated separation. It was a swell time. The gang was all there. The strangeness and the sadness that just barely crept in, though, came from knowing that L. would leave, and that she was not scheduled to board any more trains and miss any more stops for Galesburg. There was the great hope that she would come back, but no assurance. What now? 
 

Drifting apart seems most obvious, and in some ways, inevitable. Proximity has its benefits. However, L. has reminded me that we can choose our friends no matter how unfortunate our geography, and what a timely reminder! Stuck here in Maryland for the summer once again, friendless and generally miserable, Geography would have me believe that she has crushed every human relationship I treasure. Instead, I write letters, have started a blog, and lo! Those friends that are dear remain so, simply because we correspond occasionally, and most importantly, because we like one another.

Keywords

"Wayne Laney. Whadda name."

"Mhmm. It's a good one--rhymes. That's why I took a picture of it, just because I thought Wayne Laney was such a good name."

"I wonder what happened to Barbara."

"Yeah."

"I'm going to look up 'Barbara Laney' on the internet when I get home. You know, to see if she really did love Wayne, if they ended up together."

"Ha!"

"I'm serious. And what about how she only put her first name, but put Wayne's full name? I'm going to see if she married him, and took his name."

...............

There is a Wayne Laney in South Carolina. He is a Republican. There are two Barbara Laneys in North Carolina; one goes by "Barbie". Both are Democrats.

Photo Credit: Kylie, my sister, who is in all likelihood a better sleuth than I