Mom always said that her mother “didn’t raise us to become nice old ladies.” She speaks the truth. The list of adjectives seems endless: dogged, determined, resolute, resilient, strong, steadfast, tough, tenacious. We might add a few less fortunate byproducts that include obstinate and inflexible.
After returning from a holiday trip barely able to stand, she is out of the hospital and nearly finished at a rehabilitation center. I take her for a drive to look at a senior apartment. On the way back to the rehab facility, we stop for ice cream cones. Chocolate-vanilla swirl. As if on cue, two drizzling days give way to afternoon sun breaking through towers of cloud vapor tinged with apricot.
The heavens may have broken open, but her future remains uncertain. The wrenching pain of leaving her home of nearly 62 years, the rural place she embraced with chickens and goats and pigs and horses and big gardens, the place she shared with my father and four half-wild sons, is unfathomable to anyone who hasn’t had the seismic experience of having their deepest roots yanked up and laid bare to the weather.
Mom’s recent decline has transformed me. I have not been so emotionally and logistically challenged since my first year in graduate school, easily the worst year of my life. My existence is now a convoluted terrain of bureaucratic box canyons, knife-edge emotional ridges, and a river of daily chores that seems meandering and directionless except that it flows downhill.
In these uncertain days, sleep is a landscape of dark valleys that open into deserts of wakefulness stretching outward beyond a wavering horizon. Thoughts are traced and retraced, becoming bewildered circles thirsty for resolution. Consistent rest is a mirage, a dewy wildflower meadow meant for other people. I’m making progress though. I no longer care how long I’m awake, no longer care if my day begins at 4 a.m. when I’m still two hours shy of a decent night’s sleep, no longer care whether I can squeeze in a nap.
I negotiated those early days in grad school by blocking out time on a Sierra Club Pocket Calendar, and I have now returned from the digital world to the prosaic pages of a paper day planner. Finally, the lists and appointments and unscheduled time with Mom conspire such that I can escape for a day to the Johnny Gunter place. But the shackles of family needs are not easily shed. Texts, emails, and phone calls keep me pinned down until mid-morning. Exasperation simmers over. I turn to Kim and wonder aloud why I even bother. She nudges me gently but firmly out the door
The broad valley and suburbs of the small city where I spend most days relinquish to a convolution of needled ridges and wet alder canyons in the Coast Range. The pickup cab becomes a warm bubble of metal and glass. The rain has stopped. I crack open the window and let the smell of needle rot and rain-soak drift across my face and into my nostrils. Now a deep shoulder-rising breath. Adjust my stiff lower back into the seat. Allow tension to unravel and drift out the open window to join tendrils of fog caught on dark ridges.
The Johnny Gunter house carries its own To-Do List, but I don’t need a day planner to track it. The north wall that I’m rebuilding has sequential and obvious demands. Today the chores are literally and metaphorically concrete. I notch the 2 x 6 sill plate to accommodate metal brackets that will attach it to the cement footer.
The idea is to keep the rebuilt wall from dancing off the footer in an earthquake. This shudder and sway will happen; the house is only sixty miles inland from the Cascadia subduction zone. This is where the Explorer, Juan de Fuca, and Gorda plates, landmasses covered by churning gray saltwater with sperm whales and sea stars and strands of bullwhip kelp, slide inexorably beneath the North American Plate on which I now kneel and bust my ass applying pressure on a portable drill to make pilot holes for concrete screws. This tectonic kissy-kissy between landmasses will eventually be interrupted by a spasm that will knock their teeth together. The ensuing seismic lip bleed will be an insignificant faux pas compared to the monumental scope of everyday cosmic catastrophes that beset the larger universe. But for miles inland, the shudder will level inconsequential human endeavors like hot dog stands and houses and hotels. When this earthquake might happen remains utterly uncertain. It could be in the next ten minutes (in which case I will not be back to town in time for dinner). Or it might happen someday after the house and I have long since dissolved into the larger cycles of the forest. Despite these massive forces that will ultimately wipe out human affairs, this afternoon I use most of my arm strength and the charge on both power driver batteries to excavate two tiny holes in the cement. I’ll need a more powerful drill with an electrical cord and a better masonry bit. The colossal futility amuses the hell out of me.
The larger ebb and flow of the universe can be gentle, too. With winter Solstice only four weeks in our rearview mirror, late afternoon brings the tender nudge of nightfall. Clouds in the western sky crack briefly open and allow a long angle of sunlight to clear the northwest corner of the house. I squint into the brightness and pretend to be a conifer able to convert those last photons of the day into sugars and store them in my roots. Tools are collected and packed inside the house. The extension cord slides like a muddy yellow snake through my leather work gloves and coils onto the mudroom floor.
After the house is locked, I park my butt in the front porch chair without pen or planner. I’m searching with my ears, reaching beyond the high-pitched squeal of tinnitus for a Pacific chorus frog or western screech owl or snorting doe. There is nothing but the soft crush of winter nightfall and my breathing making space in this place I love.
Somewhere in the darkening silence an earthquake awaits.
My latest book, “Dancing with an Apocalypse” is available in Eugene, Oregon at J Michaels Books, and Tsunami Books, or online and for ordering through your local bookstore at Barnes and Noble.
What a title, what a read. What a treat, Tom. You need a couple weeks in the back-bush of Baja. The solar will recharge your batteries.
CW
In the midst of personal turmoil, you take time to share this gift with us in your usual eloquent way--your mother--her tenacity (love the photo). Somehow you manage to take us to the Cascadian Subduction and shoring up walls to withstand an earthquake as you experience your seismic shift--and it all works. Sending care. Thank you.