Savage Innocence

It was a near desperation for most of my life.

When it began, the writing was driven by a need to record my movement through the world in exquisite and precise detail, to make my pen a camera. Even in the early years of my life I was precociously conscious of its brevity. The terror that I might forget the fragile grace of my grandmother’s skin, the percussion of my red rain boots as they burst through puddles, the bittersweet pine smell of the mountain trails we trekked so often, compelled me to preserve my small corner of the universe in words.

Some years later, but worse still, came the realization that I was insignificant and had made no real mark on the world – that were I to vanish, so too would any trace that I had ever lived and with me all that I had seen and known. So, I became a witness and preserved my testimony on the handwritten pages of journals. Not with the hope that I would be read, but because I wanted, deeply, to physically possess each fleeting moment, to capture them like butterflies in a net.

Writing became my comfort and my ritual, my method of cognizing experience. I saw the entire world through diction and word choice, through letters coalescing in my mind. The smell of a new journal, the way the black ink seeped into forms, the sound of a turning page, nourished me.

As the years passed, the writing became about more than preservation. I was painfully idealistic in my youth and filled with the enormous visions of a person who is bent on curing their world in some real and important way. I thought I could do it through words. I forgot, for a time, how insignificant I was.

I envisioned the future I would spend as a brilliant bohemian, sacrificing comforts for my art. I thought about the lives I might someday change with my words, the way my life had been changed by the great books that had raised me. I thought it was all very noble.

In the most naive manner, I fell acutely in love with the romantic persona I created for my future self: Kerouac-like, my ink-stained fingers kissing typewriter keys and the sound of them punctuating my solitude. The splendor of poetic insanity wed to a fierce quest for truth. I would become an angelic prophet fueled by desolation and jazz. I would strip naked the squalid underbelly of humanity and excavate meaning from its stench. Aloof. Ethereal. Surreal. Starving, hysterical, naked. I would chain smoke. I would maintain a drunk to ease the utter existential pain of it all. I would liberate my perception through unabashed experimentation with all forms of mind-altering substance. Naturally, like my literary heroes before me, I would die in some terribly tragic manner and far too soon.

The writing grew more earnest, then, and consumed me. No day passed devoid of words. I wrote until the words grew more poetic and more beautiful, until the stories behind them grew grand and actually terrible. I devoured literature and received a lofty education from the famed and prolific. I spent graduate school nights writing among poets and wordsmiths. I demolished my self-confidence and killed my darlings. And I wrote until there were days when the writing became more important than sleeping and more important than eating. Until writing itself was my sustenance. Until it broke me whole.

Because I was doing the thing that I loved most, I did not think much about the realities and logistics of my own life. I was too deeply enthralled with my subject matter. Nothing mattered as long as that unshakable creative illness held on.

When graduate school was over, I found an internship with a renowned magazine in the capitol. I contributed to stories, uncovered crucial research.  I watched the nation’s first African American president take office whilst working among the nation’s great political literary minds. (Who later turned out to be so very flawed.) I thought I had caught the wave. I thought, now I will give birth to revolution. Now my words will evolve into their own furious beast. I thought, now I will tame the cliches and use them all new.

Then, amidst the stark anonymity of a rural turnpike town in Western Pennsylvania, my desire made its quiet, broken retreat.

I had moved to Bedford in the dead of winter for a job as a writer on the humble local newspaper. It was the sort of town where the young get out quick and the old return to die in peace. I braved the bleak loneliness because I knew that I needed to earn my chops at the small newspaper. And because, despite the nostalgia and denial to which I clung, print journalism had begun its death rattle. (It still rattles.)

So, I wrote about the banjo shop that opened down the street, about the beloved village horse that had fallen ill. I wrote about the man who molested his foster child, about the local school board elections, about the woman lost in the forest and then found alive in the snow covered hills. I wrote the mundane and I did so without grace.

I wrote nothing beautiful and nothing brave and not because of the stories themselves. The writing became work. Prose became my albatross.

The joy had gone. It was as simple and quiet as that. Like a lover that packs his belongings and steals away in the night while dreams conceal his departure. I woke in the morning and felt the lack.

Until I didn’t anymore. (Until it was too late.)

In the early hours of the morning, when my mind is too full for rest, when there is nothing here but my own body and someone seated across from me studying, a dog asleep on the couch and too many things I should be doing. In these days when the fear and loathing of papers and exams have set in, when I have finished the glass of wine I should never have poured and I know that sleep will not come. When the quiet is so loud it engulfs me. This is what I know: 

The morning will come too soon and it will be vivid. The world outside of my own world will begin to move and pour its coffee. The days will go on like this until they do not. I will waste hours in thought, move slow and deliberate. The requirements of life will weigh on me. Every moment, still, filled with unending grace.

2007: University of Arizona, Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program

One hundred and fifteen million years ago: Continental plates collided beneath the earth’s surface and created the Georgia Depression off the coast of what became British Columbia, a province now characterized by rainfall, by snowcapped peaks, the cold expanse of Pacific beaches, tidalpool coasts, and rainforests that stretch up along its shores and north into vast wilderness. Glaciers advanced south and west, carved hills and valleys in their slow-moving, melting retreat, and created the Sunshine Coast on the southwestern Canadian mainland.

Within the Depression, the Strait of Georgia flows into Puget Sound between the mainland and Vancouver Island, south towards Seattle. Before Puget, if a fishing boat or one of the great ferries that traverse those waters turns northwest, it curls around the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island, through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and out into the Pacific. The archipelago of the pine-covered Gulf Islands rise out of the two hundred and twenty kilometers that confine the Strait’s turbulent waters, and so, they are difficult to navigate, known for brutal winds, riddled with foam-tipped white caps that signal oncoming storms. The Frasier River system feeds the Strait, carries silt and fresh water into salt and ocean. And every year, the salmon run.

I have memorized the smell of these waters and coasts, these islands – Texada, Galliano, Lasquetithat – that punctuate the horizon. The spray of sea salt that left its fine film on the skin of my face, then dried into white crust on my cheeks. The aromas of pine and fir and cyprus. Now that I have left, have not returned for years, I cannot escape the memory of that soil – the wet, moss-covered mud, the feel of my spade-shaped hands as they dug worms from beneath their cover.  The Coast Salish people have lived in the basin since the glaciers’ retreat. They call the region “Squa-lot-sis.” Homeland.

*

A fisherman who has spent his life on the Pacific Ocean in search of salmon knows something a bit more daunting about salmon than one who has fished the Atlantic. Each have felt how the salmon first strikes, then flees with incredible force, fights, runs beneath the boat, twists back and forth, tangles the lines that run down into the frigid waves beneath the hull. A salmon fisherman may fish for red snapper, for lingcod, or, in freshwaters, for bass, for trout. But there is nothing like the battle a salmon wages against its captor—nothing like the ferocity with which a salmon clings to its life.

Pacific salmon are survivors of the Ice Age. They have weathered the storms of nature and the movement of glaciers along the shores and coastlines of Washington, British Columbia, Alaska. The blue-green, black-spotted Chinook that often exceed thirty pounds. The Coho, its scales ever-changing from deep blue and silver to light pink to red. The red Sockeye. I have split minnows between their bulged and shining eyes with a hook and sunk my line deep into the black water, then waited for a sudden bend of the rod. I have hauled in my opponent at the end of the line. I have watched salmon splash against the water and tear their jaws against the metal within them. I have seen the slowing of their gills as they thrash within my net. I have turned away and waited for the awful thud of a club against the salmon’s skull, then turned back and watched their spines spasm and jerk even afterwards, even as they lay, stunned, in a shallow bucket of water.

The First Peoples of the Northwest—the Salish, the Haida, the Kwakiutl—built totems of the great fish and told their stories through those wooden statues. The totem poles scatter the Northwest Coast landscape. We used to happen upon them by chance, hidden among the pines—on Sunday hikes or as the boat puttered along the shore of an island, the scenery deep and haunting, full of shadowed, curved trees. We guessed at their meaning, the cultures that left them. We went to museums to study them. Afterwards, I knew even less that before.

We continued our rituals trips from our home in Vancouver to the Coast and fished for those God-fish, who are born in fresh water and travel to sea, who live in salt water and grow old before they journey home. Who remember the streams in which they were born and return to them—to the exact place on earth from which they emerged—with mysterious precision, equal to that of sailors equipped with navigational technology. On those flights, the salmon leap over any obstacles that block their way, brave dams and waterfalls, and hurl themselves out of the water. Most die of exhaustion. Others become easy prey for bears, fishermen.
Science has yet to explain the salmon’s desperate drive to return – why, in the face of such obstacles, they refuse to turn back to the vast and cold expanse they leave behind.

*

It began here. Or, it began with the sound of a car’s ignition or the guttural hum of a plane’s engine as my stomach sank when wheels disconnected from the ground. (How lift-off always lulls me into sleep—even now—and I wake in the air.) How the giant ferries churned the Pacific like cream and islands passed then shrunk. We moved forever towards new jobs, new cities, new continents. Now, I don’t know how to stop.

We were the embodiment of white-collar mobility. As soon as I put one foot down, in one place, at one time, the other rose from the ground. Everything felt temporary. Even if we stayed in one city, we moved from house to house. Or we traveled and left our houses behind. When they were professors, one parent or the other left on sabbatical for months – to China, to Japan, to Vietnam. And on the news, we watched the students in Tiananmen Square, while on the phone we pleaded with my father to return from China. Or my mother cooed over the beauty of Nepal. Nanny after nanny quit over my tears.

We took photographs and kept them in cheap plastic albums, and when the albums filled, we left those moments in their paper envelopes, often unopened and divided, like our lives, into categories. We kept packing up, kept moving on, until moving became the ritual by which we lived. We existed only in forward momentum. We made lives for ourselves, then left them behind.

*

Whenever I meet a new person at a bar. Whenever I make small talk. At the beginning of each new class in college and graduate school, when we circle around a table. The inevitable question: “Where are you from?”
I never know how to respond.

“I’m not really from anywhere.” Or, “I’m from everywhere.” My friends have taken to answering for me: “She’s from all over the damn place,” or, “It’s a long story,” and then they talk about themselves and I find relief. But more often, and if I’m alone, I face: “But where do you call home?” Or, “But where have you lived the longest?”

There are too many answers, so I choose Vancouver, always Vancouver, though I have not been since I was eight, except for visits, a few days at a time. And when I returned, strangers lived in our house. They have painted its white stucco grey, its blue shutters beige.

Vancouver – my Vancouver – is an imagined place, a memory that has faded and altered itself. I cannot see the Vancouver that goes on without me now or the Pender Harbor that has replaced the harbor that was mine, that we stopped fishing long ago when there were still so many salmon left to fish. I have only a place in my past, so tangible and real to me that I can feel it still, large and looming and more vivid in those Tolkien, childlike landscapes that I wandered than it could ever be upon my return.

It’s like an addiction, this desperate longing for a place that once was, in a time that has passed. If I stay still, it haunts me.

When I explain how often I’ve moved, people inevitably ask me if my family is military. I tell them something close to the truth: That my parents were professors, that they were successful enough. That eventually, the government offered my mother a well paying job in Washington. Until recently, I thought that we left the States soon after I was born because my father was “disillusioned,” because that was as much of an answer as he had ever given me. I had never had any real idea why we left Canada, no idea why we returned to the U.S., no idea why we could never settle down. Sometimes, because I thought it sounded mysterious and bohemian, I told people that I thought my parents were gypsies.

I want to fool myself into believing that were a family of free spirits, lost between academia and adventure, so when people tell me how lucky I am to have lived in so many places, to have traveled so much, I smile and tell them stories. I pretend it was all very exciting and marvelous. And some of it was.

But as I speak, I count the places I’ve lived. How convenient it is to leave out one place or another. Even as I describe them, I feel phony. How easy it is to write a new life for myself. My imagination tangles with memory and each word creates a new reality. I count up possible lives, former selves. How many ghosts of myself have I created and become? And then, my breath constricts, my chest tightens. When it gets bad, when I feel like I cannot possibly stay, my heart is a fist squeezing itself. And then, the urge to run once more.

“I was lucky,” I respond, when people tell me that I am. I imagine this is what they want to hear and it is true. “I’ve seen more of the world than most people ever will. I’ve had chances to start over.” Or, if I’ve had too much to drink, if I feel a little poetic, I say, “I am twenty-four and the world makes me dizzy.” It doesn’t matter where we are, who they are. We sip our cocktails at the bar, look back towards newspapers, move on to the next subject, walk away, leave each other behind. I don’t confess that the places I’ve left behind ache me like amputated limbs.

Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” But there is more than that.

If one is brave enough to call oneself a writer – and by that I mean a true writer and not an individual who, in the sphere of endless solipsism, spits their thoughts onto a page without care or concern for anything beyond the need to get them out and reach an audience – one must also be brave enough to be vulnerable amongst strangers. One must not only bleed – and bleed profusely. One must surrender, arms raised and naked in the hostile throng.

I confess this: I was once a writer. Writing was my love and I loved it deeply and so much that I cared very little about anything else. But then, very quietly and because I could no longer bear the excruciating pain of pulling apart the details of life with words, I stopped.

This is my white flag.