Steve Turner: An Inquiry

A couple of months ago, I applied for a scholarship to the Surprise Valley Writer’s Conference, a scholarship given in the name of Steve Turner, a journalist, novel writer, and raconteur whom I knew nothing about. I thought I knew about Steve Turner, because I mistook his name for that of a totally unrelated poet. So I introduced myself with effusive praise for my mistaken poet rather than researching just who this Steve Turner fellow was. Lazy and ignorant in one fell swoop. Somehow I received the scholarship anyway.

In the weeks that followed, I have done my best to make an acquaintance with Steve’s (and I have come to think he was the kind of person who would not mind me being familiar) work. But, as these things go, the impetus for honoring the man was the passing of his life. Which made it necessary to work backwards in time. 

Thus I began by reading mostly memorial remembrances. Mostly from other professional writers whom he had aided in his role as a founder and grievance officer of the National Writer’s Union. They bespoke a bulldog of a man, beloved by his union brethren (And sistren—he was from Santa Cruz after all.) and a reliable champion in their efforts to be paid justly.

I have to admit, though, that as a writer alienated from making my daily living with words, the language of unions, their process, is opaque to me. It is a matter of not possessing the proper ear for the dialect. But what I did understand was the reflected impact of a man who insisted upon the dignity of labor. The butt in chair, notebook in hand, contract fulfilled, mechanics of the writing life.

My own cash-in-pocket work usually involves my hands and my back, as I know Steve’s once did; I cleared brush, hauled garbage, and installed solar panels to make gas money from Big Sur to the conference in Cedarville. I got on food stamps to scrimp a few more dollars away and I left the coast with fingers crossed that the fuel pump in my truck might not fail yet again. But I brought an extra just in case. 

I read through Steve’s study of the eastern Washington dry wheat culture, Amber Waves and Undertow: Peril, Hope, Sweat, and Downright Nonchalance in Dry Wheat Country, as I went about my chores. And here I began to connect in a direct way with his word craft, his skill as a writer. The passage below is one that I came back to again and again:

So the lineup of old trucks so neatly parked out on that Providence Road place testified to a family’s mode of thriftiness—wear it out before you replace it—as well as affection for favored equipment that transmutes into a mechanized form of pethood. But the Providence Road display also measured a crucial development in the changes that have made modernity what it is.

It’s an obvious fact that those trucks, and the vehicles that preceded them, needed roads. And it is roads—dirt, macadam and rail, and their precursors, the trails—that have changed this land so completely: the roads and what they’ve brought, what they’ve enabled, and what they’ve killed—right up to the present.

One could argue that the best way to preserve some sort of purity in human communities is to isolate them. But that doesn’t happen. The flow of people and goods from one place to another—for trade, settlement, or conquest—has been a primary component of recorded history. So also in the Big Bend. For many hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, colored beads, flints with durable cutting edges, and other valued goods were moving in slow exchange from as far as South America to the native tribes in the Columbia Basin.

What I love about this is the sly, sinuous way that the writer expands his lens from a farm equipment boneyard to its context with warmth but not nostalgia. It strikes me that the sensibility here reflects a man who both drove trucks and cared about what he was hauling. Who moved his mind, in some fashion, like the land he was writing about. Plain wrought, but filled with contour; visceral yet saturated with the sweep of time.

I have worked among eastern Washington wheat farmers, and found them a particularly leery and laconic people. This was exacerbated in that my job there—mapping the power grid of entire counties from the cab of a truck—might have been custom designed to elicit suspicion. And the fewer power connections a place might have (a dryland farm has not even the three-phase transformers needed to move irrigation water) the greater the hostility I was met with.

In other words, there are a lot of people whom dryland farmers don’t want to explain themselves to. And merely driving a truck to their door doesn’t unlock much in the way of insight. So it is no small thing to me, the reportorial skill within Amber Waves. But it is the reporter here who impresses me.

I’m told that Steve was a champion of the little guy, the working folk in general. But there’s a tough love in his reporting, a compassion rather than a mere sympathy. An absence of the privileged nostalgia that distorts many do-good portraits of rural inhabitation. These qualities inform a righteous politics rather than flow from it. They are, in themselves, a solidarity.

I am reading Steve’s Night Shift in a Pickle Factory as I finish this essay, mulching the reading and writing together. Let me mention a few things about the little book itself, green as a dill spear and sized to fit in the pockets of ordinary workaday clothing. It reminds me of that era—the late 70s and early 80s—when a crop of earnest small presses arose to slake the thirst of a generation thirsty for pragmatic, hands-on knowledge. Be it how to cut firewood, grow vegetables, repair one’s car, build one’s own home. A time when books could be more revolutionary and when revolution was understood to involve both muscles and words.

Pickle Factory is both hilarious and stomach turning; I don’t think I’ll be heading down to the store for a jar of relish anytime soon. A reluctant ode to the day in and day out of factory labor, the idiocy of The Boss, and the ways in which human beings adapt to being treated as pieces of machinery. A slice of life in a little package sound on the inside and out.

So my inquiry into Steve Turner’s work leads me, for now, to this place: a factory floor slick with pickle pulp and broken glass, rendered by a writer both at odds with and in tune to his surroundings. As it began with an act of sloppiness, I’ll refrain from offering an ill-digested conclusion to my incomplete investigation. I will say, though, that the process itself has been a second reward after first receiving the scholarship.

Reflecting on his time packing pickles at the Brogan’s factory, Steve writes: But not liking the place hasn’t meant not liking the experience. I can tell you I saw that coming. That this was a man who reveled in labor shared with others even as he refused to be anybody’s fool. A writer whose good name has recently filled my stomach and improved my own tool box of word craft. A life and work I would offer my solidarity to. 

Old Woman Riding Home

It is my habit at night to walk the six miles to Pacific Grove and back. Something I have done in sporadic bursts for twenty six years, whenever I am in Monterey. It is a kind of going home, over and over again. 

I have been walking the bike path over to Lover’s Point for most of this winter. The weather has been good for it, at least since the early season rains blew themselves out. It is a steady routine, perhaps my steadiest. When I start out the door of my mother’s house, I know I will not turn around until I am under the cypress trees and the fluorescent lights at the trail’s end, just past where the harbor seals have given birth to their pups.

Not long after I started this winter, I noticed the same older lady would pass me on her bicycle at about the same time. I could see her slightly weaving progress from afar, her yellow wind jacket and blinking reflectors when she neared. Shortly after, she began to say, “Good night!” when she passed, without looking up.

It startled me at first. And then it made perfect sense. We two people often occupied the same place and we ought to greet each other. But I thought too long and gave a muffled you too! to her distant back.

I began to look forward to this little salutation. Sometimes she would not see me, or I would wear unusual clothes, and she would be silent. I would feel neglected but it would not occur to me to say good night first. I got better at preparing for her somewhere between Pacific Grove and Cannery Row, so that I could wish her well before she was out of earshot. You too old woman riding home!

It is spring now. The nights are foggy and warm, a breeze blows in from the ocean. The tourists are here, the flowers are up. And I find myself thinking that soon this habit, like all of my good habits, will come to an end. As soon as possible, I need to be somewhere else, doing something else. The reasons change. I pay less attention to the cypress trees and the sea lions barking on the pier. 

I was walking along in the gravel tonight, counting the reasons I am a shithead, nearly to the mural which turns sepia under the sulfur streetlights. I heard the sound of tires behind me and knew without thinking it was the old woman riding home. I turned to greet her, it was in my reflex to say, “Good night!” first this time. But before I could, she called out softly and smiled as she passed. All I could do was wish her along, her bike bobbing from side to side, the red light flashing on the back of her wind jacket. “You too!” I said with as much feeling as I could muster. Maybe too much feeling, maybe I sounded like I was mocking her. 

I invented a story for her as she pedaled away. That she is a docent at the aquarium on Cannery Row. After closing time, she walks among the tanks of undulating kelp and sardines flashing in the dark, on the way to her bicycle. She checks on all of her familiar creatures before saying good night, gets on her bike, and says it one last time. To me, her jellyfish drifting along beside the way home. 

Whales Big as Submarines

When I got to Strawberry Valley, the only water was a green algae filled puddle in the creek bed. Flies buzzed around. All the water I was carrying in my pack was gone, and it was very hot. I had screwed up.

There were several thousand feet to climb and maybe ten miles to go before a big spring on the coast ridge. I scooped a bottle full of the green muck. Then I soaked my tee shirt in the water and rung it out over my head, started up the trail.

I passed through the pine and sandstone of Indian Valley, but didn’t pay much attention. Every few minutes I stopped, closed my eyes, and stood still until the spinning in my head died down. Switchback after switchback, but not sweating much. I stopped to pee but couldn’t. Somewhere I had heard it was bad not to be able to pee every hour. So I pulled out my stove and set the green muck to boil.

It smelled like tea, even strained. It was so hot it burned my tongue. But it didn’t make the spinning stop. The hot water ran right through me and wafted away as sweat. I began to stop at each switchback, the dizziness making me panic which sped me up then made me dizzy again. No thirst anymore, and the spring ahead was abstract, an idea of water. I picked flecks of algae off my shirt with my fingernail. 

At the top of the ridge, the Pacific Ocean breeze blew into my face. I sat beneath a conifer drinking in the feel of it on my eyebrows. But my head would not stop spinning. The water below beckoned, impossible. I tried and failed to get up and put my pack on several times before succeeding. It was still a ways to the spring.

After a bend or two, I came upon a man sitting on the porch of a cabin. The cabin peaked out above the road, its windows facing south toward the sun and the water. He looked at me for a moment then asked, “You want a beer?”

I didn’t but it felt rude to ask for water first. So I sat upon his deck drinking a beer and looking down on the ocean with him. His name was Pete and he was short and his hair was black. He wore sunglasses, metal rimmed with dark lenses. He said, “Down there, sometimes I see whales as big as submarines. All the way down there.”

I told him where I had been and he asked about Indian Valley. 

“I remember,” he said, “riding through there in the forties on a mule. The pines and the cedars were everywhere on the ridges. But now.” He waved his left hand toward the backcountry.

He had been here when the Marble Cone fire, the biggest in California history to that point, had started nearby. He had seen the lightning striking and knew what it meant. And then watched what he believed was the Forest Service’s neglect as it expanded. 

He believed they had wanted to burn him and others off of the road, to let the fire get into the wilderness where it would expand and their hands would be tied. He feared the Forest Service encroaching upon him in various ways. He told me these things without malice, without persuasion. They did not seem to inhibit his ablution, his sitting on the porch with the ocean at his feet. 

“My kids don’t like this place. So it’s just me.” He opened another beer and stood up. “I remember all those pines, and the Santa Lucia firs too. We were on mules.” He chuckled about it.

Pete stood there with his nose jutting into the wind and his eyes on the ocean. He was not just looking at the scenery, he was looking into it. Like a bird. 

The beer had gone straight to my head but I felt ashamed to have empty bottles on such a day. And I didn’t want to interrupt the sitting there, smell of the porch wood in the sun. But finally I managed, “Say, could I trouble you for some water for the walk to Cold Spring?”

He poured it for me, right into my mucky water bottle. I didn’t care. I sipped it slowly at first, then faster. Finally in big gulps. 

let's get a look at it

I am watching birds. American Avocets, meadowlarks, black-crowned night herons, red-head ducks, shovellers, perhaps a least bittern. 

Northern pintails, immature marsh hawks, barn owls, red-shouldered black birds, California gulls, mallards, egrets of some sort. Plenty of Canada geese. Killdeer. 

But mostly, the curlews. In the marshy grasses north of Borax Lake they scream at the dogs and me, protecting their nests and searching around for who knows what on the white salt flats where nothing but black greasewood grows. In the distance, the wind blows down off Steens Mountain and whips up dust devils on the Alvord playa. The dust devils spin, shimmy, and die before reaching the Wildhorse Ranch country to the east.

The dogs vie for a thin patch of shade by the wheels of the truck, and I huddle in a cheap lawn chair with them. The sun burn squares into the tops of my sandalled feet as I peer through binoculars. I contemplate getting up and putting more sunscreen on. Instead, I drink water from a plastic jug. 

A white Isuzu Trooper turns off of the main road and, a half hour later, pulls up to the rusted borax refining vats by the lake and stops. The dogs start up a rolling bark which I do not discourage. The driver and I talk while he waits for a trailing van full of high school students from the Willamette Valley to arrive.

“Aren’t there some hot pools around here for the kids to see?” he asks. 

I point to where a faint road heads out past a series of boiling water potholes and marshy pools. I volunteer, “There’s also the chub in the lake here.”

“Fish? In this lake? Tell the kids when they come along, they’ll want to see that.”

I tell the sweaty kids about the famous Borax Lake Chub. A two-inch long fish whose habitat once stretched out across a vast inland waterway. Then that water dried up and the fish’s range shrunk and shrunk until it learned to make do with a ten acre pond. A pond filled by a hot springs and what a BLM sign warns is twenty-five times the safe level of arsenic for human consumption.

One of the chaperones says, “It only lives here and you might never have a chance to see it again. Let’s get a look at it. Let’s go.” The kids shuffle to the bank and stare out at the water. One or two think they see something.

The kids and the other chaperones wander about while the driver of the Isuzu makes an assessment of the southern sky. “I think,” he concludes, “that I might be able to get the Blazers' game from here.” He gestures to a satellite dish tucked in the trailer behind his Trooper. I agree that he might. 

But now I wish he would leave, so I walk back to the edge of the lake and stretch out on the ground. I ease my chin onto a patch of sedge and focus my eyes beneath the water. It takes awhile, but a minnow-sized chub darts by. And then another. And then another. 

mostly built by slaves

The man who met me at the Lexington airport was driving a new diesel truck with two chainsaws and some firewood in the bed. He was talking on his cell phone and when he finished he apologized and said he was a tree contractor just finishing his work day. He didn’t look like an arborist; his clothes were clean and his hands were soft. “I just run crews now,” he said with a shrug. “It’s a comfortable job. And I don’t miss being in the tree.” I believed him. He had a placid way of talking, like someone who had come to a still point after a lot of turbulence. His phone kept ringing, but he ignored it now.

We drove along and didn’t actually talk about the reason I had come, to retrieve the Volkswagen van I had bought from him on the internet. The plane ticket had been a pot sweetener, an incentive to get more money for his vehicle. “I must confess,” he said, “I thought I’d get more for it. But my son said ebay was the way to go.”

I got the feeling that selling the van was about more than money. It can be that way when one has lived out of a Volkswagen for awhile. So I told him I planned to drive the van down to Tennessee, to an old commune where midwives would deliver my child, that it would be our first home of sorts. 

He nodded a bit but said nothing, and I watched the edges of Lexington slip past the window. As we got further from the city, the country became filled with horse farms, and the horse farms were often bordered along the road by old stone fences. We came to a turn and he pointed to the stacked limestone and said, “Those were built by Scottish immigrants. They didn’t use any mortar. A couple of years ago, some people came all the way from Scotland and were able to tell us where the builders had immigrated from, which area they came from, because each had a different style.” He stared at the stacked wall in silence, and I did too. It is the kind of moment that happens in the South, the kind where the past asserts itself. 

After the turn, there were huge pastures, a few horses in the dappled winter light, and it made me think of bourbon labels. There seemed to be an impossible number of horse farms, and I was relieved when the man’s house turned out not to be one. It was old though, a narrow two story colonial with peeling paint, surrounded by a yard of very big trees and a barn that looked like it could have been a livery. The house was small but fronted with an enormous columned facade, the way it was done on plantations. 

The man explained that he was part of a barter co-op, a group of people who traded their labor for scrip with which to trade for other people’s labor. He had cashed in some of his scrip to have the van detailed for me. A crew of young guys with buzz cuts was still blasting away with a pressure washer. So we went inside to sign papers. 

When we were done we looked the van over but I was reluctant to get inside or open the hood. It seemed the man did not want to be drawn into the details, the mechanics of the thing. But when we opened the sliding door, he nodded at the stove and said, “I cooked a lot of good meals in there, the year I lived in the van.” He shook his head, “I saw a lot of things that year. A lot of things.” 

We opened beers and he told me that he had bought the van when had gotten divorced. He had sold everything he owned, and bought it from a nurse. His kids, everyone really, had thought he had come unhinged. He had installed an expensive stereo, packed up some food, and headed west to see the national parks. “Sitting at night, eating the same old spaghetti at that stove. It was just always that much better with the top up and the wind coming in. I saw some things, I really did.”

I asked him where his favorite place had been, and he said, “I went to Big Sur and ended up living there for awhile.” 

I told him I was from that area, that I knew Big Sur well and he had probably met people I knew. He became animated, nodding his head with recollection. He leaned close to me and asked, “Do you know Partington Ridge?”

I told him I did. How one could be there and see the coast stretching out like a curtain along the sea. And how Jaime DeAngulo had danced around there naked and my friend Roland had tried to live up there without money and mostly succeeded. The man couldn’t get over the fact that I knew this place where he had lived in the van. There were tears in his eyes.

His cell phone rang and he took it in the kitchen. It was his girlfriend and he told her, “I can’t believe it. The guy who came for the van knows Big Sur. I know, I know, it’s amazing.”

We drank more beer and waited for his girlfriend to arrive. After awhile, she called back and he made baby talk to her in the kitchen. I felt like an intruder and told him I was anxious to get on the road back to Oregon anyway. I took a long look at his old house, with its heart pine floors and warped window panes, got in the van, and drove away.

Before I was out of horse country, I pulled over to have a look at what I had driven off with. It was a cold evening and already the water from the detailers had frozen into one of the door locks and shorted the yellow check engine light on. But I felt it would be a good vehicle anyway.

I could see a section of rock wall in the sweep of the headlights. The top row of stones was stacked diagonally and pointed up like dragon’s teeth. I made a note to find out whether my own family had come from somewhere in Scotland that was known for its masonry. 

So I looked it up when I got home to Oregon. Evidently the Scottish and Irish first brought the style of masonry to Lexington. But most accounts I read quietly noted the fences had mostly been built by slaves. 

Normally Descended

I was perhaps fifty feet up the crumbling metamorphic cliff and looking down. The glacier below, which had been a scary sheet of ice when I had been atop it, now beckoned like a down pillow. I looked up at the moves ahead. I had tried them twice and concluded the moment of no return would be the third hand hold, where my butt would be hanging in the air and I would be committed to grabbing at something I could not see. It was not a difficult sequence, but the rock was not very friendly. 

I was by myself, and that made it easier to accept that it had been a mistake to leave the glacier. Though I felt enough fear to hesitate, sequence the moves, and understand that I was over my head, I did not feel any dis-ownership of the predicament. When I am in the mountains with others, a part of my brain grasps such situations in terms of how I got there. Did someone else make the suggestion and I just went along with it? Did I not want to do this for reasons that had fulminated earlier, earlier grievances now coming out in whether to buy into the route or not? Was this my lame idea and now I needed to pretend otherwise? 

But in all likelihood, a partner would have increased the chance I would have been part of a more rational route choice and never found myself hesitating in this particular place. I had scrambled along all morning, taking the harder rock problems just to take them and declining to get my butt wet glissading onto the easier snow. Then turned up the staircase of a cliff until it had become a wall. The image of a horn player improvising notes until the song underneath is lost came to mind. 

I pulled out a loose piece of the dark Minaret rock and watched it fall to the snow below. Unlike the cohesive, dependable granite in much of the Sierra, the Minarets don’t let you know where you stand until you stand there, telling yourself if I clean just a little gravel away or toss a handful of loose stuff, something more agreeable is just beneath. Shattered, tricky rock. 

I kicked at the cliff. This is kinda dumb was the only useful abstraction I could muster about the situation. I tightened my shoes, drank some water, and pulled through the moves. As I passed the last hold, I immediately told myself the problem had been elementary, even felt embarrassed to have been intimidated by it. 

I hopped up the easier slope above on lighter feet, regaining the fluid, smug lift of the earlier morning. Near the top of the cliff, I was brought to a stop by a surprising site, a pair of nylon slings and a rappel ring. Other people had come this way, this unlikely line from a to b. But they had been heading down; the route was normally descended. 

The anchor suggested something about the cliff I had come up. I flexed my arm and tried on a conquering guide pose. But that wasn’t it and so I headed off to climb the rest of the mountain. 

These People Find Me (three portraits)

1. the dunes of Monterey

“Are you,” asks the old lady from half way across the Greyhound station, “familiar with the works of Glenn Beck?”

I don’t have to look up to know that she is wearing too much mismatched clothing for the hot day and dark sunglasses inside the station. I had noticed her as soon as she had walked in and said to myself: here we go, these are the people who always find me in places like this. I said that yes, I was quite familiar with the work of Glenn Beck.

The lady came and sat next to me, gave me a detailed list of the websites, books, and radio shows I would need to absorb in order to understand the full peril of the New World Order, to see the invisible hands pulling the strings on the whole thing. She gave me names, she gave me dates, she made predictions. I nodded with care whenever she asked if I had heard of each item on her list. I paid attention.

After a bit, she gathered her shopping bags and went out to wait on a cross town bus. Seeing an open space, a second person came and sat next to me. There was a twisted and frail anger to him, barking at the attendant behind the counter and muttering to himself. He was a short man with a battered, reddened face. He wore his hair slicked back in a grey pompadour. His clothes marked him as an old timer of the streets; his dark blue jeans and flannel shirt were spotless and pressed, turned out in the way of an old con or someone trying to maintain dignity in messy circumstances. He sat down and swirled a big styrofoam cup of ice water in his hand. “Fucking L.A.,” he said. “I gotta go to L.A., I gotta go. But I fucking hate it there. Where are you going?”

I told him I was coming from a month in the mountains, two days stuck hitchhiking by the roadside in Merced, and I was looking forward to getting home to Monterey County. Probably, in my weary state, I spoke warmly of getting there, the pleasures to be found in reaching the coast.

“Monterey...Monterey,” he said, looking up at the ceiling in a kind of grimace. “I had an old lady who moved there. Married a millionaire and lives somewhere by the sand dunes.” He let it slip that maybe there was still business between him and the millionaire, that maybe the woman had technically been his old lady when she took up with the millionaire, who himself might have been the man’s best friend on the streets of Hollywood at that time. But he thought maybe they could all overlook that, have a drink in the sand dunes, talk about old times. The son he and the old lady shared. “I think I’ll do it,” he concluded, “I think I’ll change my ticket to Monterey. Hey, Goddammit!” he yelled to the counter help, “I wanna change my ticket!”

“Can’t do it,” said the man. “Your bus to L.A. comes in four hours.”

“Goddammit, I want to change my ticket!” he shouted as he got up to walk over to the counter. 

They continued their discussion, and a middle aged black man with a paper bag took his place beside me. “Hey man, I heard about you,” he said. “You’re the guy been stuck trying to get a ride out of town.”

In my limited experience, the street people of Merced had proved to be a tight and generous crew. The first I had met, as the sun was setting last night, had called to me from a milk crate next to a liquor store, “That’s a fine hat you’ve got. A Stetson.”

I asked how he could tell, given that it was crumpled up and lashed to my backpack. “I could tell.” he said, “You look like a Stetson man.” We chatted for awhile and I asked him for a safe place where a traveler might sleep in the bushes in that neighborhood. He looked me up and down, as if asking himself you mean for me, or for you?  He instead told me the name of an honest motel down the way. In gratitude, I went in the store and bought him a forty ouncer of Natural Ice but he insisted on paying for it himself and gave me the change for a can of tea.

I met a second beer hound the next morning, as I stood along the roadside at 6:30 am. He suggested that I move on down further toward the edge of town and wandered off to buy his breakfast. When he returned, three hours later, I had not moved and the temperature was moving toward triple digits. He said, “You’re still here? You having a bad day.” Peeling back the brown paper around his forty, he said, “Here, you gonna need this.” He unscrewed the top and said, “Hit that real good now.” I did.

And so I had generated a reputation that had reached the third man in the station. Opening his own big paper bag, he said, “I’ve got a deal for you, since you having such a bad day. That’s Absolut,” he said with a shake of the bag, “ten for the whole bottle. Vodka is what you want for the hound. You can sit there and hit it, and no one will even smell you.” He looked over both shoulders. “And say a fine young lady comes and sits next to you, you don’t smell like sauce. Ten dollars.” I thanked him, but although my day had indeed been hard, it had not been that hard. Yet.

The other man returned from the counter, now with a freshly punched second ticket in his hand. “Fuckers made me buy a whole new ticket, but I can use the one to L.A. some other time. Tell me some more about Monterey.”

I did, but when the bus arrived and we all stood up to board, he had become hesitant, fingering both tickets in his hands. He sat a long while before collecting the styrofoam cup as his only luggage and joining the line. 

When I was safely aboard in my air conditioned seat, I heard a loud splat outside the bus and a muffled fuck. I looked out the window and the man had dropped his styrofoam cup of water all over his shoes. He was muttering to himself and vacillating between bending down to dry them and pushing the ice cubes off the sidewalk with his toe. He looked confused and sad and the counter attendant came out with a broom and told him not to worry about it. He pulled out a cigarette and walked back inside.

I expected him to return and sit next to me, perhaps after drying himself in the bathroom or having a smoke. But the doors to the bus shut and I never saw him again. 

2. there’ll be elk hunters

I was fleeing a snow storm and looking for a hot springs. I was driving a little black diesel car down south toward Austin, Nevada. But I decided to make a rather bold navigational decision. I turned off of the pavement on a gravel road I knew only from the Rand McNally. It was a decision I made because of something that had happened several years before.

I had been sitting in the springs when a UPS truck had driven up the long dirt road, at 8:30 at night, and disappeared over the mountains. I had imagined that whatever his destination was, whoever received packages so far from town, would be an interesting scene. And that place would likely be down the gravel road I had turned onto. It didn’t look like the best place to take a low-slung German station wagon, but I figured if the UPS truck had made it, with some care I could as well.

Thing was, the Toquima mountain range and a good forty or fifty dirt miles of dirt and gravel road were between me and the springs. And it turned out, due to my shyness at turning in at the ranch house many miles from pavement, that I extended the trip by missing the proper turn off back to the springs. After several aborted attempts to cross the range on rapidly dwindling dirt paths, I returned to the ranch and turned on what I was sure was the correct route.

Pretty soon I was flying along, unable to slow down on a deeply rutted road for fear of high centering the little car. Head high sagebrush scraped the paint off of the passenger side door as I drove. I was taking the rocks too fast and they were banging up on the undercarriage. Finally, the ruts subsided and I emerged at the top of the mountains, grateful to be able to slow down, looking forward to seeing the springs ahead in the dying light. But the road had other ideas. It turned up still higher toward a distant grove of aspen trees. Which was exactly the wrong direction.

I got back in the car and told myself: careful now, this is where things go wrong. It’s after your luck has run out and you’re frustrated and you know you can make it over the terrain ahead but you get impatient.

I crept back down the road, trying not to panic and came to a stream. Not long after I crossed it, the red oil light on the dashboard came on and a beep beep beep filled the silence. I had smashed the oil pan and when I got out a black pool was spreading under the car.

More than once, when faced with a dead vehicle on a cold October evening, miles from help in some interior western mountain range, I have been saved by believing in a simple premonition: There’ll be elk hunters. There’ll be elk hunters. I packed a backpack with warm clothes and food, tried to imagine sleeping in the hay shed down at the ranch eight miles distant, and told myself don’t get cocky.

Before I got a mile down the road, there they were. The elk hunters. A man and wife with a palatial trailer and a new GMC diesel truck. When they asked about camping spots ahead, fortunately for me the honest answer was that there were none. I piled in the cab and they deposited me at a lighted doorbell on a newish double wide within the compound of the ranch at the foot of the canyon. Alongside the doublewide, the original dwelling, a magnificent little gothic house made from stone, was returning to dust in the shade of homestead poplars. 

I wondered if the installer of the doorbell would have ever imagined it being rung nearly fifty miles from any town. I pushed the button and the sound boomed throughout the house. But no one was home.

The driver of the truck was actually happy at the prospect of putting some miles on his new toy and drove me all the way to Austin, refusing my offer to put fuel in his tank. After I got a motel room, and arranged for what would become a three hundred mile tow out of Fallon, I went looking for a drink.

Austin is an old mining town, with staircases made to be hoisted out of the way of the flash floods, and faded brick and pine-post buildings that money will hopefully never come to turn into corniness. I found a saloon with a sidewalk of rough logs in front and pushed through the heavy doors.

There were four people inside. One was a bartender with a grey ponytail and a Hawaiian shirt. There were two Australian tourists and, at the other end of the bar, a young man in a cowboy hat and oilskin coat standing in front of the bottles, drink in hand. I sat in front of him and he did not flinch, didn’t even seem to notice me but kept staring right over my head. He looked, like the town itself, so resplendent in his own image that it was impossible to tell if he was playing a role for outsiders, or whether the role was in my imagination.

The bartender was telling anecdotes about life on the loneliest highway in America to the tourists. Only, somehow his every story ended with a reminiscence of the days he had spent, “on the beach in Coronado with the San Diego hippies back in sixty eight.” He didn’t seem to be in a hurry to serve a new customer and eventually, without looking at me, the cowboy asked, “What do you want?”

He poured me a full glass of Jim Beam and thereafter took more notice of his surroundings.  When the bartender would get a story back to Coronado, the cowboy would look at me out of the corner of his eye, a sort of you’re not buying that, right? look. He wobbled a little now and then, betraying what had probably been long hours of steady drinking.

The Australians finally got to the question they had really been wanting to ask: “Do you ever get any of those....burning people...around here?” I imagined it would not take long for the bartender to get from Burning Man back to Coronado, but before he could hit the beach, the cowboy said, without looking at anyone, “I went there once.”

All eyes turned to him now. After a long silence, the bartender asked, “You did?”

“I went with my dad. He wanted to see it.”

We all waited. And waited. The moment stretched on forever, the cowboy had our attention now and knew where he wanted to go with it.

“My dad said, ‘I hear they got a hundred woman nekkid bike ride.’ So we figured, with two hundred titties, there had to be one or two worth lookin’ at.”

He wobbled harder after the exertion of his performance, and poured himself another drink. The tourists and the bartender went back to their banter. A short while later, having said nothing else, the cowboy left. 

3. the mess I am in 

I was sitting in the courtyard at Tassajara, on a late spring day, drinking tea and waiting on friends. A woman came into the courtyard, made herself something to drink, looked around the mostly empty patio, and asked if she could sit next to me. 

It seemed a rather flirtatious maneuver. But it emerged that she just wanted to talk to a stranger. I told her that I was from down the road in Cachagua, that geographically speaking I felt at home at Tassajara but not necessarily in the company of the people I met there. She nodded in recognition and said, “I’m just from Berkeley. Not very interesting,” and shrugged.

But there was some unfinished business to this being just from Berkeley. She wore a dusty engineer’s hat, worn boots, and said that she had been in the Sudan, working with refugees there for years. But now she felt her own self without a home, struggling to digest the comfort and speed of Bay Area life. She couldn’t bring herself to give me much detail about the Sudan; the look on her face said that it was just too much to try and explain it to someone who had not experienced it. That it was far, far away and yet not at all. “It would take a long time to explain the mess I am in,” she said at the end of each attempt to tell her story. The she would look at her hands and fiddle with an expensive looking ring.

She tried to tell me the story several more times during the day. I came back from the Sudan and now I don’t know what I am doing. Each time she finished by fiddling with her ring. The second time she told me the story I had run into her by chance and the third time I had purposefully bumped into her because I wanted to hear what was so complicated. Again she said, “It would take a long time to explain this mess I am in.” 

So I gave her a piece of cardboard with my email address on it and said, “You should give it a try sometime.” 

She looked hard at the piece of cardboard and said, “I’ll do that.” But I never heard from her. 

wonder: a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable.

“Okay,” says the smiling woman, “We are going on a visit to a lake. We are going fishing and the day is blue and warm and the grass is green and everything is beautiful.”

The other five of us are locked in the room. Some of us cannot use the bathroom without supervision. We are all medicated; some of us are depressive and some of us are manic. I am not entirely sure I could find my way out of this room and back out to the streets of Portland, Oregon, even if there were no locks in the way. This little gathering is called Relaxation Class.

A mental hospital, or the mental health ward of a hospital—or for that matter, whichever gentle euphemism might be employed—is obviously a form of prison. It is a place where, legally, one can only be assigned by the powers that be for the purpose of protection from violence. Violence to oneself or to others which has been explicitly stated, implied, or inferred by others. It is a place with a locked door, locked windows. Though, in most cases, a patient cannot be held against their will for more than 48 hours. 

“Hey! I love fishing,” says Anne. “Who brought a frying pan? What about some corn meal? Are there trout?”

Visualization exercises with manics and schizophrenics are not tranquil affairs. They have no trouble visualizing. They have too many visuals. 

“I have a great recipe for frying up trout. I love trout! This is a great idea! I hope there aren't bugs.”

Anne bounces on the edge of her plastic chair, but in my mind's eye, in her mismatched Chuck Taylors, smashed teeth, and crooked glasses, she is skipping across expanses of meadow grass, frying pan and wicker creel in hand. She is dressed in stripes and a lot of purple, like a road-weary Deadhead en route to the next show. 

It is my usual habit to avoid mandatory therapy activities by feigning great fatigue. But this night, aware that the staff will soon tire of my ruse, I have decided to attend Relaxation Class after the smiling woman knocks on my door and announces the activity will begin in five minutes. 

Before commencing the meditation we bang on Suzuki chimes, describe places that make us happy, do simple breathing exercises. As we continue along into the narrative of our communal fishing trip, the depressives smile weakly, the others stare in catatonia, and Anne continues a running narration of the day that makes me wish we really are all out fishing together.

When the smiling woman asks us to describe places that make us happy, an older woman with her hands crossed in her lap says, “I am in my yard and I am putting seed in the bird feeder. And the rhododendrons are blooming. But the grass is overgrown and I need to cut it.” 

She starts crying and the smiling woman says, “You'll be home soon. And your family loves you, they'll take care of your yard.” 

“But I have to cut the grass!” 

I try to conjure some vision to spit out as the happy place exercise comes around to me. I settle on a limestone ridge along the spine of Bixby Mountain in Big Sur, overlooking the dark north side of Pico Blanco and the canyon of the Little Sur. But this image makes me sad and anxious. I am just sitting there alone and I should be able to say walking with my son's hand in mine or eating fresh corn in the backyard with my son and my wife. 

But no, I am just sitting there digging in like an oak root, while the sun traverses the Santa Lucia Range. An image of passive contentment; happy perhaps, but one with a somewhat smug sense of having the rest of the world at bay. Still, it is what I blurt out because I imagine it sounds acceptable to the smiling woman.

We never reach the lake with Anne and the smiling woman. Anne's interjections and ejaculations lead us off course and the time runs out. I don't mind; I'm not really interested in relaxation, in sitting on the shore admiring the water. It occurs to me I have a deficit of what Anne has in overabundance, a sense of wonder about every moment of the day. I'd rather follow her out into the endless brush than arrive again at my own shore.

I have many conversations with the manic woman whom I call Anne during the course of my stay in the Portland Seventh Day Adventist mental health ward. Each is marked by a wandering narrative, a preoccupation with details, and a propensity to blend one topic into another with free-form intensity. The kind of patter familiar to anyone who has used psychedelic drugs but with the crucial difference that Anne is not in control of when she will come down. An excess of wonderment at the simple details of her everyday life—the colors of the walls, the temperature of the room, the lost track of her children, each sensation fluttering through unbidden, unstoppable. 

One afternoon I watch as she starts to paint a brush stroke of bright red and before she can complete it her intentions change several times. She starts with a wave and then attempts a flower which becomes a full garden and in the end is a big red glistening blob of doodling loops. As she paints, she tells me how she came to lose custodianship of her children.

“We were in Vegas then, me and their father. My youngest was born and she was just so beautiful. We had an apartment and he had a job and I was going to get my teeth fixed. But then I started to get, you know. So I went to the judge and I told him, I said, 'I love this little girl but you're going to have to take her and give her to someone who can take care of her. Because I can't.'” There is no trace of sadness in her tale. When she is finished she says, “I think I'll try blue!” 

It is not so much that her attention wanders as that each new thought train comes barreling along and runs the others off the track. I am not one of those people who imagine personality disorders are only cultural definitions, western straight jackets to suppress the shamanic or revelatory, but I could not help but be a little curious at what it feels like to be overloaded with wonder, exasperated at each fluid unstable moment. If there is an excess of something in Anne's mind, that does not mean that something is inherently bad. Probably, the doctors who come every day to take notes on my own situation would say I have an excess of cogitation. But I would not listen if I was told thinking itself is my problem. 

These are some of the other people who come through the ward:

There is the Vietnamese woman ushered in in hushed tones who will not eat anything or leave her room until a relative comes with a container of aromatic noodle soup. I hear the staff whispering that she has tried to strangle her newborn baby. That she cannot be left alone to breastfeed the baby because she has said she will do it again. There is a solemn, glassy look in her eye, at least the few times she actually looks up from the floor.

There is a short man who circles the dining area for hours on end. At one point, I hear him saying to the staff, “Diazepam? No, I want more Haldol! They said I need more Haldol!”

There is a large, bird-like woman who rarely leaves her room. She finally has a bowel movement and both she and the staff are very excited about it. She comes to dinner and I giver her my ice cream cup. She examines it with evident satisfaction and thanks me several times. 

There is an older man named Hal who walks very slowly down the carpet past my room. One of the staff, a young smiling guy who talks too loud, says, “Woaahh now Hal! You're scaring me buddy. Let's get you pointed away from the walls, okay?” Hal stumbles on, his course corrected.

There is a Hawaiian guy named Howdy who is the unofficial greeter when I arrive. He is bald and muscled and laughs all the time. Several days after he is released, he is detained when he tries to break his way back onto the ward.

There is the orderly, the guy who talks too loud. After several interactions, I decide that he has become institutionalized the way inmates do; he appears evolved to a life spending his time amongst the heavily medicated and mentally incapacitated. I imagine him going home at night and instructing his wife on how to use her fork or shower without falling, in his too loud and too slow voice. When I am first brought on the ward, he gives me a very detailed talk on how to tie the drawstrings of my blue, standard issue pajama pants; this makes me want to walk around with them about my ankles so that he might have something to feel good about correcting.

About my arrival. I was escorted here by two congenial security guards in the back of a car with a grate between us. On the drive, one of them mentions he is going to the Wallowas to hunt elk. I give him a recommendation for a good café and tell him to take the cold October weather seriously.

“You're not much trouble,” he says, “we're going to let you walk through the hospital without hand restraints.” 

The first few days I am on the ward, I am not allowed to use the bathroom or shower by myself. I must first call a nurse who unlocks the door and stands outside until I am done. Not being trusted to use a toilet safely, I of course fixate on just how one might be used unsafely. I suppose I could try to drown myself in the bowl, or remove the tank cover and bash my head in with it, the way Arlo Guthrie imagines himself doing in Alice's Restaurant. I suppose I could do the same with a shower head or maybe try to slip on the wet tile and give myself a massive concussion. I could knot a bunch of towels into a rope and hang myself from a high place, but I have not confirmed whether there is a hook or bar to support my weight. 

I am not mad about not being able to use the bathroom, rather it is a matter that makes me ponder. When one finds one's bathroom locked, one naturally wonders just how he reached such a point.

On my second day in the ward, a psychiatrist whom I like immediately comes to discuss medication. He outlines various options in accordance with what he believes my diagnosis, Bipolar 2, to be. Bipolar 2, or bipolar disorder characterized by submania but not true mania, is a diagnosis on the rise at that time. A faddish diagnosis if you will, whose burgeoning popularity has something to do with the backwards logic of medication-centered mental care. Because a new generation of repurposed anti-seizure and anti-convulsive medications like Lamictal and Zyprexa are growing in popularity and the older selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac are on the decline, many borderline depression cases are being classified as bipolar. In other words, the diagnosis is increasing to meet the popularity of the drugs marketed to treat it.

In my case, the first several times I was treated with SSRIs or anti-depressants alone, I had curious, disassociative episodes. After taking Wellbutrin (which is not actually an ssri, but works on the brain chemicals dopamine and norepinephrine) for a few days, I left my house for a walk and felt like my mind was floating away from me. As if my consciousness were a balloon that was hovering just out of reach, on the verge of floating with the wind. The result of self-reporting these incidents is that, the handsome Indian doctor with the big stainless steel watch tells me, I have located myself within the flowchart of symptoms for manic depression rather than unipolar depression. “All this really means is that you should never be treated with only SSRIs or anti-depression meds. You probably won't become manic. On the other hand, I had a patient for many years with symptoms like yours. When she was in her forties, she suddenly became quite manic." He shakes his head and says no more, which makes me worry that she became a murderess of some kind.

The doctor encourages me not to become wrapped around the axle trying to understand or endorse a diagnosis. Rather he tells me I should treat it as a tool to work with and adjust if necessary. When I tell him that I have a hard time acepting the notion that my moods are merely the puppet of an unseen storm of chemicals pulling the strings, he says, “Your brain chemicals affect your mood, and your mood affects your brain chemicals. You can look at the interaction from wherever you like. But I'll tell you this; I don't think a lot of people in your situation get better without medication. You have to know that the longer you live in a state of depression, the more it is like brain damage, impossible to completely recover from.”

The doctor's words are sensible, reassuring in some way. But they really offer me no insight into anything beyond the chemistry of mental health treatment. Just an ever revolving hourglass of moods displacing chemicals and vice versa. But that is alright; being on the ward is a kind of institutional purgatory between danger and recovery, not a place of healing itself. A place of meals on trays, fluorescent lighting, of smiling nurses with large key rings. The day after my visit with the doctor, one such person deems me worthy to use my bathroom without supervision. With a small flourish and the click of the lock, she offers me about as much freedom as I have expected to re-obtain. It is time to go home.

Several days later, as I am about to be released, Anne tells me, “I might get moved to a permanent facility! Over in Wallowa. Do you know it there? They're gonna fix my teeth too.”

I tell her I do know Wallowa. The mountains there rise steep toward the south, the kind of place where one might walk through lush sedgy grasses to a lake beneath sprays of larch trees and stalk trout. Anne, of course, would be no closer to such an afternoon for living in a locked facility at the foot of the mountains than I might be free to roam the Portland streets. Or would she be?

I like to think of her there, in a room with a window view of the snow capped mountains to look out upon. The sky is blue, the air is warm, and everything is beautiful. Her teeth are straight and white and she is as much walking through the green grass toward the lake as I am.