inspo/setting

But the vast majority of our day was spent doing nothing. My mom talked about the importance of “hayloft time,” her term for idle reflection. Children needed to think, she was always saying. They needed to spend a lot of time alone. She believed that extended bouts of solitude would cultivate autonomy and independence of thought. I did hole up many afternoons atop the ziggurat of hay bales, reading, or sometimes just lying there in silence, watching the chaff fall from the rafters. I also spent a lot of time in the woods, which I called “exploring.” Behind the sheep pasture was a dirt road that led up the mountain to a network of abandoned logging trails that were, for all I could tell, limitless. I walked them every day and never saw another person. It wasn’t uncommon to stumble on a hidden wonder: a meadow, an overgrown pasture, tiered waterfalls that ran green over carpets of algae. In those moments I experienced life as early humans might have, in a condition not unlike the one idealized by the Romantics, my mind as empty and stark as the bars of sunlight crossing the forest floor. I walked until I was tired, or until the shadows grew long and the sun dipped below the mountains, and then I headed home.

I found myself very suddenly wide awake long before the dawn of Christmas Day. I left opening my stocking until my great-uncle and aunt would have woken, and I could open it on their bed, the quilt wrapped about my shoulders, while they received my tribute of delight in return for their generosity. Through my bedroom window the dark blue sky with its sprinkling of stars coaxed pale shades of silver from the snow-covered garden and surrounding houses. The snow on the garden was pristine, except for a dotted line that ran across the center from our house to the one opposite, like the perforations between two stamps seen from their white, shiny backs.

But heavy rain, and lightning too, does set down on our job site. The foreman comes out of the trailer and up onto the steel structure and he says, “Alright, everybody stop what you’re doing. Let’s go.”

We stream down the stairs, the rain slapping us. Taking two, three, four stairs at a time, sliding down the railings with our work gloves on, and boots slapping the grating, and calling each other pussies, and losers, and asswipes, and assholes, and loads, stiffs, dipshits, and fuckers. The thunder rumbling even louder than the hell of the unit we are leaving, and so earplugs ripped out and thrown onto the ground. The midday sky above is momentarily dark, shaded under gray clouds sometimes tinged with green or even purple—but then the same dark sky is suddenly full of white light. Lightning hitting something along the banks of the river. So laugh and hustle through the rain towards the trailer. Push each other, literally. Be cruel and continue to not give a shit about anything in the world, your life included, but get off the steel, because you’re not expected to work in a lightning storm. The wind picks up and the rain comes down harder. The chickens are long gone from the oak tree. They seek shelter too beneath the cars in the lot, the supervisor’s trailer, the trees on the wood line. And there are no ducks on Duck Island. Open the door of the trailer, pull off your wet shirts and say, “What the fuck is this life!” and put on a dry shirt, sit down and let the storm pass. Decks of cards come out. Magazines flop open. Boots are put up on empty chairs. Eyes are closed. The rain and wind beat against the trailer. All is well for a little while. The tree shakes. The unit hums. We hope it gets worse and worse and worse so we never have to go out there again.

[...] We set off with our sacks over our shoulders, in the cold of the night, pursued by cries of joy from the whole camp. Several of the worst inmates had come to embrace us as we left, and we had no heart to push them away. The frozen snow echoed sharply under our feet, and the stars receded in front of us. The night was huge and buoyant.

[...] Signs seasons abounded in Los Angeles and around, more subtle than the abundant death of leaves that so many seemed so in love with. The blooming of flowers and trees, the appearance of various birds. In the spring, the phainopepla appeared, the males showing off their white-patched wings. Purple finches in the fall. Santa Ana winds blowing hot through October. Rains in the winter. The sun there was bright, often too bright, somehow too close, and it was so that day, hammering on me as I drove.

In 1975 I was a baby; what happened was not my conscious experience. My memories, instead, are of growing up in Michigan, with a strong grandmother and a strong stepmother. The summers were short and the winters went on and on. Icicles lengthened from the eaves and fell like daggers into the snow. My sister and I knew the vague story about our mother in Viet Nam, but ours was a family that preferred silence over questions, especially when there were no simple answers. We lived in a mostly white community that wasn’t happy about a sudden influx of Vietnamese refugees, and our mode of safety was silence. No one talked about the war. It was better to look forward, not back. It was better not to ask and not to know.

The navy ship moved out toward sea slowly, waiting for mines to be removed from the mouth of the harbor. It was morning now, but the fog on the bay was so thick it sopped up the rays of the rising sun and cast a gloomy, opaque white light. As the ship moved out of the harbor, the mountains above Nicaro began to fade, purplish-gray apparitions dissolving in a sea of milk.

There was no red haze of nickel oxide, Everly realized, as she watched Nicaro recede. The chimneys were cold, the plant shut down. The town was clean of its usual coating of dust. The clouds weren’t stained and dirty. There was no fine silt on the surface of the water. It’s so nice, she thought sadly, without us.