Earlier I mentioned a Cocoa Beach webcam, which I visit on a daily basis so that I know how to feel. If it’s a gorgeous day with the waves gently caressing the beach, I quietly denounce Ginger and stare at the live little square for a few extra seconds. If it’s seaweedy or cloudy–or, even better, if there are actual drops on the camera lens– I shut down the window and am mightily smug.
I am doubtless blessed to have many homes of heart– but when I’m at once, I miss the others. Teleportation needs to happen NOW.
As you well know, there is OCD in these parts, and when the chemical equilibrium is upset, as it has been these past several weeks, it rather enjoys crashing the serotonin party. Sometimes the anxiety is general; sometimes it’s focused on one particular area of life, and sometimes, when life is particularly awesome, it lazers in on one totally humiliating, terrifying thing which clings and reappears like mildew, not matter how often it’s shot with bleach and left to die.
This one is particularly bad; just as when I was a teenager, the OCD has attacked my faith, which effectively removes that source of comfort from the equation. Many of you have read about how this works in “The Waltz” or The Book!, but just in case you’ve encountered neither, come along with me on a delightful gondola ride through baseless panic:
RINSE AND REPEAT: Bounce between #2 and #4 until alseep or drunk
In my many webtacular wanderings during Stop 3, I read many admonitions along the lines of “We won’t know the day or the hour” or “Well, just have faith and be prepared.” Right, okay– so the good children of God will go to heaven. But as the OCD sees it, the problem there is that if we’re facing the end times, it’s going to suck. Christ said it was going to suck. It’s like my surgery– I knew I’d come through it, but I was still dreading the absolute suckation in between.
Not to mention the positively terrifying messages surrounding a reported Marion apparition in Akita, Japan– apparently we’ve won ourselves fire falling from the sky, and “the survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead.” Well, ain’t that a holiday weekend. I am an English major. I am in no way equipped to survive a tribulation.
As the Church teaches that public Divine Revelation is done, Catholics are not compelled to believe in apparitions; if they’ve been approved, we are permitted to believe them, but the content isn’t part of the deposit of faith– all of which is a supremely tortured way of saying that it’s times like this in which I develop extreme jealousy for Protestant husband and the raft of Protestant in-laws he brought with him, who never seem to worry about these things.
I don’t blame the Church for this; it’s like blaming a gunshot victim in a driveby shooting. It was there, it was a live target, and the OCD aimed.
I’m 75% of the way through with my physical therapy, and today’s great reward was bouncing on a trampoline. It was one of those little ones, useful for jockeys, perhaps, or Jello mixing. Or balancing on a recently chopped-up leg while a physical therapist hurls playground balls in the general direction of the brainpan. But every time I completed a set, I was permitted to bounce with abandon, which the therapist patiently allowed because she knew full well that I’d last a grand total of seven seconds before wailing aloud, taking a rest, attacking the next round, and then bouncing again because maybe this time, my left menisci wouldn’t feel as if they were under attack by bees.
Then again, it’s more exercise than I’ve had in a month. Currently the only cardio I’m cleared for is water walking, which, when I first heard about it, forced an assumption that I was assigned a physical task which demanded not only two good knees, but, you know, divinity. Then I looked it up online and now I cram my hair up in a Speedo cap and take to the community center pool, where I grimly stride from wall to wall like a destroyer of worlds. At least no one’s hurling anything at me.
Behold, a bunch of Australians in the production of a British operetta:
(If you’re not familiar with The Pirates Of Penzance, at this point in the action, these pirates who suck as pirates are trying to sneak into a house, and while they’re doing so they’re singing very loudly about how awesome they are at being quiet. It’s quite possibly the greatest dynamics-related joke in all of opera.)
Okay, there are a few things going on here, not the least of which are purple tights. Then there’s the drum machine, the altered orchestrations, enough over-the-topness to generate an email from Richard Simmons announcing his outrage, the fact that the lyrics are practically indecipherable without the libretto, and a synthesizer with a Not Quite Gilbert and Sullivan setting.
But the reason you’ve heard me wailing for Percoset over the past week is that it’s gone far, far away, and I am left with an empty bottle and old, non-wondrous Percoset antidepressants that don’t quite cover the cutoff gap. It’s been awfully fun around here.
So you take amusement when it arrives from Netflix, and sometimes that comes in the form of pirate kicklines. Someone out there on some good non-prescription stuff second me on this.
You gotta lotta time to think with your knee jacked up over your heart, listening to the tendons heal.
How is it that a German Catholic from the West side of Cincinnati cannot abide beer?
Why does a person with a mathematical learning disability develop a lifelong obsession with the space program?
What’s going on when the child who actively prayed for her appendix to burst so that she may legally leave class becomes a teacher?
Why would a horribly pale woman who can’t stand bugs or humidity and who very nearly failed Spanish move to Florida for five years, and then mope in front of a Cocoa Beach webcam for minutes on end after moving out?
How come the same person who writes scathing essays about unrealistic female body image stands in front of the dressing room mirror with half a swimsuit on and bursts into tears?
Why did the the girl once voted “Most Likely Future Nun” graduate from the sister school of the flagship of Catholic higher education and then marry a person who currently has Martin Luther’s Bible Concordance bedside?
How can a person who was born on the coldest day in the history of Cincinnati dread winter so deeply that a cold window triggers a panic attack?
Why do babies, even paper babies in a magazine, make me cry, but the thought of producing one also triggers a panic attack?
Or, more literally: “It’s been another year of regrowth there in your valley, are there any pictures of what it’s beginning to look like now?”
Why, yes. Yes, there are. I found this, which seems to have been taken in the past couple weeks:
It’s the barest of improvements, but when its this vs. ash, I’ll take this.
Here’s an… interesting shot which was taken from a rock formation visible from the ranch:
That explains the slight greening we see in the first picture. This area was once pure forest. But although the trees are gone, life is returning to the former undergrowth in the form of grass and wildflowers.
The marked difference has, of course, raised the question I asked myself last year at this time: Do I want to go back? Ever? Or only in the winter, when snowy white lies will protect me from the truth of destruction and adulthood? Should I shield the childhood memories of a place which are perhaps even now glossed over by intense nostalgia? Or do I layer in new experiences in a real landscape which could alter or completely consume a well-worn mental escape? Are these questions I should have been asking myself even before the fire? Where is my Percoset?
Well, it’s not really an issue at this point; for our second wedding anniversary, Josh The Pilot and I have plenty of budget-directed choices: We can take a romantic stroll around the Wal-Mart parking lot, or we can plunge our heads into the bathtub in celebration of our deeply underwater mortgage. Even if I wanted to go back, I can’t. The issue is in the hands of… of… whatever the current name of our bank is.
It’s a convenient debt.
Some of the online photos I found create the illusion that from a few angles, it looks as though nothing has happened in Pike National Forest at all. But that, I know, is self-delusion of the most destructive kind. I still feel like I miss a place which doesn’t exist anymore, like I’m loving a dead person.
Then again, I expect heaven has sunrises much like these.
aren’t you glad you asked at: mbe@drinktothelasses.com
It’s a tradition here at Blonde Champagne to run the vintage post “The Last Week in June,” circa 2000-and-something, at the proper time. This year, a twist to the plot: The addition of its follow-up post, “Lost,” which first appeared in 2008.
The Last Week in June
This week was, in my childhood, what kept me alive throughout the other fifty-one. It is what pulled me to Colorado, horses and dust and pine trees and creeks of freezing mountain runoff. Even if I’ve been conducting my June unconsciously aware of the anniversary, I suddenly will feel a strong rugged pull as the Fourth of July approaches and look at the calendar and realize, “Oh. The Week.”
Although it’s now priced right out of this world, it wasn’t back in those days, and from the year I was six until the year I was thirteen, this was It. I have never known a place I was happier. College comes a close second, but four years are impossible to conduct without at least some semblance of tears and heartbreak. There were no tears in Lost Valley except for the following Sunday, when there was always near-hysteria. One year I sobbed as the plane departed from Colorado Springs at the thought of another twelve months of waiting in Cincinnati: Were we going to Ohio for a funeral? the woman sitting behind me wondered to my mother’s horrified humiliation.
A part of me is literally seared there, burned into the walls of the main dining room. Each family creates its own brand as it passes through, adding checkmarks each returning year. Our brand sits high on a far wall overlooking the mountains and the hummingbird feeders. The brand is a boot representing the brief fact that we all rode that first year, even my mother, who bravely lasted until Wednesday, when she gripped the saddle horn of Colt 45 so tightly that tendinitis followed. Our initial stands in the middle of the boot over wavy lines representing the Ohio River. As I was fully lame even at an early age, this was my civically proud suggestion.
When I grew up and went to stay with my then-boyfriend in Colorado Springs for a month, he drove me there along a narrow shelf road I thought wondrous at the time and now, returning as a driver myself, recognized as terrifying. On one side is a drop of many thousands of feet through trees and jagged scenery; on the other, pure mountain. When two cars meet going opposite directions, one driver has to back up, slowly and with much tense cursing.
“This place is kind of cheesy,” the ex announced as he got out of the car and looked upon cabins named “Jessie James” and “Diamond Lil.” And I knew then, somehow, although the end was yet months away and much sobbed over, that I could never, ever marry this person.
It is kind of cheesy, in a City Slickers sort of fashion, the way the wranglers greet the suburbanites at the cattle guard entrance on horseback and canter away in front of the car to guide these unleathery dudes to the check-in lodge, but when you are six and you are miserable, this is wondrous to behold. It announced horses to me, the very ones I write about today, and it brought seven days of the social acceptance I never found in the classroom. I heard God in the pines and I inhaled; this was where my soul has lived for so long. This was where the kid picked last for the kickball team won rodeo awards for booting her quarter horse around the barrels the fastest.
Terrible fires raged five years ago all aroundthis little green valley I have always thought of as cupped in God’s palm. The ranch was evacuated, the horses herded to safety. I was reunited via phone with one of the kiddie supervisors who cared for me twenty years ago and have exchanged Christmas cards with ever since (it is that kind of place) and she described to me what happened.
“The fire got to the cattle guard,” she told me, “and it split. Burned everything around it, but the ranch was untouched. The areas in the mountains where you rode as a child are scorched, I’m afraid.”
I would be scorched, too, if I returned right now. I know towering pines and thick tangles of wildflowers, and I prefer to keep them alive inside of me rather than replacing them with black and charred reality.
The regeneration has already begun, I am sure. It will be well underway a few years from now, when Jim the Small Child Nephew will be old enough to ride with a plastic cowboy hat on his head and a face full of sunblock. We will go, I think, the last week in June.
****
Lost
Even though we’re well past the last week in June, Colorado has been much in mind lately. Perhaps it’s because I applied to, and was promptly rejected for, a day job which would have made a great deal of financial trouble go far, far away, even leaving space in the budget for such absolute necessities of life as leather-fringed garments. Perhaps it’s because I’m doing some intensive aunting right now and had a very serious conversation with Jim The Small Child Nephew concerning horses, and whether or not one’s butt hurts after riding one.
For some reason, until this week, it never occurred to me to search YouTube for recent videos of Lost Valley, even though I’ve whiled away entire days thoroughly enjoying entertainment of this caliber. I suppose I’ve put a subconscious prohibition on the endeavor: There’s no way to get there from here, so why tighten the screws on the Wistful Writerly Yearning?
Then again, I’ve never subscribed to the “staring at it won’t help anything” school of thought. Ask my college freshman crush, poor soul, who always seemed to run into me at the library: “What, you’re into eighteenth century upholstery techniques too?” So I started typing and clicking and watching and… oh.
The perennial “Last Week In June” post mentions the 2002 Hayman forest fire. I knew it happened, I knew it was awful, I knew the areas where I rode as a child had been deeply affected. I knew the ranch itself escaped with only miraculous intervention–that the fire reached the property line, split for precisely the 500 acres of the spread, and continued with all proper furor on the other side of the valley. Blackened trees here and there, a few pockets of wasted vegitation: That is what I expected.
What I did not expect was Afghanistan.
.
O my people, this used to be all green. It was green.
The emerald splash along the lower gulch in the first picture– that was the entire landscape, everywhere, forever, and the quiet was alive with it, and the horses and the sun, they picked their ways through it– it was the kind of green you could smell. And this brown, it has its own stark loveliness, I suppose; Buzz Aldrin, as he stood upon the surface of the Moon, called it “magnificent desolation.” Even when nature has rendered nature barren, beauty quietly runs along the breaklines.
But not when your body has lived there, and your mind returns to it on a constant basis as a touchstone for peace and dreams fulfilled, the memories well-known but no less sharp for the constant returning.
I know this place. I know Lost Valley; I know it as mine.
But I don’t know this:
Where… is this place? Low Ridge, right, yes, I’ve been there. The caption on the video makes sense, it’s all very proper, but my eyes… don’t… register the land where these horses are cantering.
And then there’s this:
“You’ll have nightmares,” my mother warned, watching me watch it. I shook my head and stared the thing, all eight minutes, a hand at my mouth. I didn’t cry and I wasn’t in shock. Still haven’t, still aren’t. I was riveted by the truth, the mesmerizing cocktail of terrible danger visited on images which I usually turn to for motivation, nostalgia, comfort. It was so close. It was so close. At the 2:45 mark, a grinning firefighter holds aloft a charred metal “LOST VALLEY RANCH” sign, one attached to the cattle guard, one my family likely drove past for nine years in a row. The other half of the cattle guard isn’t shown, because, I am told, the other half was completely untouched.
That…sky, which I never fail to picture as rock-steady blue, to see it a flickering, furious orange– the same shades I pumped my fist at when pouring from the double tail of the solid rocket boosters. Those colors belong in Florida, shifting and gaudy and loud. They are not meant for the singing creeks, the humming birdsong of Colorado. A late-fall slide show looks odd, too–I was last at Lost Valley for a one-hour visit in the early spring of 2001, and the muddy remnants of a recent snow were melting down the silent mountainsides. Even though I’ve never seen the ranch in full winter finery, I prefer these images, prefer the cold and the fact that the swimming pool would be of absolutely no use. The landmarks are frosted and silent, not burnt, gone.
In the snow, the fire never happened.
Am I sorry that I went there? Have the memories been altered, the tiny slow ache which has been a part of me since I left it for the last time? I’m not, they aren’t, and the ache is lessened now, replaced with a hard, stubborn knot of denial. It’s good that I can’t afford to go there, because there… is not there. It’s better that I not see it like this, limiting myself only to returning when the place is frozen in temperature and time, safely covered with a blanket of white lies.
Pictures on the ranch’s official website are as verdant as the day I was first set in a saddle, and while the FAQ page gently addresses the fire, it ends on a cheerful note about refreshing rains and reappearing wildflowers. No doubt, no doubt there are some cacti and other hardies around, aspens rustling in the wind. I am quite sure that any person booking a trip to Lost Valley today would have a perfectly dudetacular time, and take little notice of the difference. They’d have no measure of comparison. But when I first heard that the ranch had been spared, that undergrowth was slowly returning, I very happily allowed it to guild the mental pictures I had already generated of a slightly crispy, but largely untouched, childhood. I want to be there, that Lost Valley, the one I know. The green one. The soil of memory does not provide for wastelands of needleless, stripped-down pines.
I have YouTubed myself into honesty.
In the ’80’s, the Lost Valley wranglers used to take us to ride in a pocket of Pike National Forest called “the burnout”; it, too, had suffered a forest fire. The wind was stronger there, and the scattered carcasses of whitish stumps and logs made for good jumping practice. A few new trees, little twigs in the ground, dotted the landscape. Every now and then, we’d see deer or birds or bugs. There were flowers. It was scarred, long ago scarred, and hugely different from the other places we rode, where the tangles of pine branches whipped in the faces of the rider behind if we didn’t hold them properly and the sun dappled down through the thin, wispy sky.
“The burnout,” I said to my father last night. “When was the fire that left the damage, do you know?”
“Counting back from the time we were there?” He thought for a moment. “Twenty years, I’d say.”
Perhaps I’ll one day I’ll conduct a very long conversation with myself, or just spread some jelly on slice of wheat some ordinary morning and settle into it all: It’s gone, the place I knew. It is gone.
I’ve seen devastation and pain on a far larger scale, seen New Orleans just months after Hurricane Katrina raged through. But I did not love New Orleans. I couldn’t have. I had never even seen New Orleans before that day, seen it as others knew it and lived it. I felt for New Orleans as a human being feels for another human being in the hospital, bare bones sticking out, tubes for every vital organ. You go for a wet washcloth and make soft noises of comfort, but you don’t let it interfere with the mechanisms of the inner soul. And I imagine that’s what 99.99% of you out there are experiencing at this moment: “Sucks. Really, that sucks, but… seriously, now. They’re trees.” Four dollars and seven cents for a gallon of gas, yes, and a The Pilot of my very own and a roof to call mine, and these… are trees. You don’t have to say it.
I know.
Jim The Small Child Nephew saw me staring out at air molecules today as he watched his daily dose of Curious George, thumb in his mouth. He offered me half his blankie.
“You hold it like this,” he instructed, gathering it in his fist.
Josh The Pilot and I saw a commercial for Transformers 2 some weeks ago, and he was very excited about the idea, and I was very excited about the idea of never seeing it, ever.
Then the production went and filmed on location at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum at Udvar-Hazy, where I do education work, which meant I had no choice but to watch the thing so I can answer every single fifth-grader’s question about each individual floor tile Shia LaBeouf set size-eleven shoe upon. (And yes, they’d know that too.)
There was a major physical challenge involved. Not only was I required to traverse a whole entire movie lobby on a post-op knee, I was also honor bound to avoid lumbering away to pee, lest I miss the five-minute Smithsonian scene, which would mean that I’d have to do the whole $8.00 thing over again. That was problematic, as our two matinee tickets came with a free small popcorn and drink, and.. what are you gonna do when free is involved. I watched the first 90 minutes with crossed legs.
So what have I learned? (Spoilers of LOUDNESS):
-Sometimes, alien robots have testicles. But only sometimes.
-When you die, you don’t see pearly gates or clouds or even God. No, you see a crowd of advancing Transformers.
-There are these really big speakers on, like, at least both sides of the Regal Fairfax Cineplex.
-In terms of raw rackage, I would do a WAY better job running away from a giant fireball than Megan Fox.
-Speaking of, I must get the name of her dry cleaner and ScotchGuarder. Her white slacks somehow come through a robot attack and building collapse in Egypt with nary a streak.
Many thanks to all you The Readers who asked after me in the wake of the Metro crash. The train line which parallels the Red Line is the one I take when I go downtown, and that was closed today. But Josh The Pilot and I were safely out of DC all day.
