This week at Holden

"What we have in common is a love for the world so fierce it makes us edgy."

-Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

Camping sans tent, Miner's Ridge, September 15, 2012

This week at Holden, smoke from the Wenatchee forest fire enveloped the mountains. During the afternoon smoke made Buckskin Mountain and Martin Ridge look hazy, like a poorly developed picture.  At night, smoke made the moon seem foreboding, a glimmer of yellow light in a cloud-streaked sky.   Smoke made our throats scratchy and our sunsets spectacular.  Those who work outside all day wore masks, like dental hygienists, filtering the air through a thin layer of white paper. 

Last weekend, because of smoke and trail closures, I stayed in Holden Village instead of hiking.  I went to both early breakfast and regular breakfast, conversing with friends over coffee in the dining hall.  I went to Saturday text study.  I logged work hours at the school—wiping windows and desks and planning PE activities.  I read a fourth grade science text book and started designing ecology lessons for the upcoming weeks.  I listened to David James Duncan’s novel The River Why on audiobook while I did laundry, mopped my bedroom floor, and cleaned my bathroom.  I went to a “sexy Christmas” costume party for Holden staff’s September birthdays (think nine months prior to September and the theme makes sense) where I ate stuffed mushrooms and drank Fat Tire on the front porch of Chalet Three then danced till almost one am, spinning in circles in a tinsel-strung room where someone’s Macbook played songs spanning from Old Crow Medicine show’s “Wagon Wheel” to Rhianna’s “Umbrella.”

 ~

Fall is my favorite time of year.   Particularly at night.  The air seems dense, not humid-dense, but thick with change.  Cold winds follow warm winds and in between the air stills.  This is the time of year when I learned to love running, the time of year when I went on Chicago trips in college, the time of year when I fell in love with a blonde bearded boy on a camping trip in graduate school.  The trees begin to yellow in the first splinters of cold.  The air feels electric with the changing weather.   

In his memoir The Necessity of Empty Places, Paul Gruchow writes about birds and “migratory restlessness.”  Even in captivity, birds choose the south side of their cage in autumn and the north side in spring.  They eat more, molt, and pace more.  Without ever having migrated, domestic bird bodies know that the changing season means it’s time to move.

I believe in the progression and spontaneity but I also love the idea that we know and need ritual—that even the most transient human’s impulses root back to our bodies, our own version of “migratory restlessness.”  I like to imagine myself evolving every autumn.  I can trace back the person I was from year to year by the way I felt when the leaves first started to change.  

I think of a night spent dancing in the YMCA dining hall with my friend Amy to the Garden State soundtrack last October and my first drive to the Pacific coast last November.  I think of my trip to Warren Dunes two years ago and a drive I did during the earliest moments of autumn the same year, a Labor Day trek back to Michigan where I danced with strangers on Belle Isle in Detroit, ate perogies in Hamtramck, and stayed up all night talking with a writer I liked in Ann Arbor.  I think of sitting on my brother's porch in Valparaiso, bundled in blankets, listening to Sea Wolf while our breath froze in the November night air.  I think of my first fall in graduate school:  going to workshop and then out to the bar with friends who, like me, had just decided to commit three years of their life to writing.  I think of us drinking beer and talking about craft, writing, the West, Cormac McCarthy, Rick Bass, and Sherman Alexi during our first autumn together.

Autumn feels as grafted on my body as any instinct. For me, the compulsion to travel, the yearning to sleep outside, and the habit of sitting on the porch talking or reading late into the night, signify the shifting of seasons as much as pumpkin-spiced baked goods, bonfires, sweaters, or the start of school. My own "migratory restlessness" feels most focused in fall and I’ve learned to ritualize this restlessness with camping trips and road-trips, long walks, trail runs, and conversations with strangers. 

~

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about ritual.  I live in a place steeped in habit.  At Holden, tradition dictates our day:  breakfast at 8:30, coffee break at 10:00, lunch at noon, dinner at 5:00, vespers at 7:30.  We eat hard boiled eggs and sweet bread Sunday morning, pancakes on Tuesday morning, eggs on Thursday morning, and hot cereal every other day.  There's "Hunger Awareness" rice Thursday afternoon, fish and kale on Friday, and dessert on Sunday nights.  Before the Holden Mine remediation started the Village only served meat at Saturday dinner but now it's become a part of some of our daily soups, and a feature of the early breakfast served for the remediation workers every morning at 6:30. 

My two favorite Holden services are the same every week: “Vespers ‘86” and “Prayer around the Cross”, our Friday and Saturday services.  During “Prayer around the Cross” we gather in darkness, chant (hymns from Taize, a religious community in France), light candles, lay hands, sing, pray, and mediate.  During Vespers ’86, we sing a service written at Holden in the winter of ’86 when Marty Haugan served as village musician.  Despite the fact Haugan wrote Vespers ’86 only twenty-six years ago, the music and lyrics feel old, rooted in a liturgical tradition that valued simplicity and reflection.  There’s nothing flashy about the music but each week when I sing Haugan’s line, “Make us shine with gentle justice,” I feel the weight of each word, the way I savor my favorite novels and poems. 

I love the structure of my days here in Holden Village.  It leaves me with manageable spaces that I tend to fill with things like reading and writing, running and conversation because they’re time periods which lend themselves to short bursts of personal fulfillment and productivity—the two hours between when I wake and the start of school (when I often run or linger over long breakfast conversations), the thirty minutes between the end of my work day and dinner (when I read), the hour and a half between dinner and vespers, the three hours between vespers and bed.  Routine gives my day shape but I also appreciate the breaks in structure.  I loved backpacking to Miner’s Ridge two weekends ago and dancing till late into the night last Saturday.  I love conversations that expand beyond the expected small talk.  A week ago, when I got to dinner, instead of asking me about my day, someone at my table asked me: What's the most interesting thing you've ever done?, starting a table-wide conversation that lasted almost two hours.  We shared the best book we’d read in the past three months and the summer movies we’d seen.  We listed our top five films and talked about our favorite non-fiction texts.  We discussed about Junot Diaz and Jhumpa Lahiri, Naomi Klein and Malcom Gladwell, The Departed and Aladdin.  We lingered around our coffee cups and empty plates while the tables around us cleared.  I hated leaving the table that night, because I have no place built into my week for those kind of conversations, they spring up spontaneously and I don’t ever know when I’ll get to have another one.

~

That's how autumn is.  The changing of seasons catches me off guard, giving weight to things I might otherwise find ordinary.  In fall, I find myself not only going on camping trips at Warren Dunes or hiking five mile sand spits on the coast or driving to Michigan to meet a man whose writing I admire for a beer, but lingering in normal moments while they happen, taking the time to appreciate the conversations I have and the letters I receive and the way the sun streaks the mountains when I go running in the morning.  This week I find myself thinking: What details will I want to recall when I think back on the last week of my first month in Holden?

I'll want to remember the way the sun was last night: red against the smoke and the mountains, making the whole valley look volcanic.  I'll want to remember a conversation I had with my friend Ben during a run that became a walk and then a sit as we continued to talk about life and love and death and the inevitability of sorrow while dangling our feet above Railroad Creek.  I'll want to remember a care package I received from a family that I love which contained a poem written by their two children titled, "Orange things will take you far" and I'll want to remember watching three elementary school students I teach tromping around Chalet Hill barefoot, dressed in vests and rolled up jeans, holding sticks, playing "hobbits."  I'll want to remember breakfast discussion I had with a three year-old about who was more curious: me or him.  You can't be more curious than me, he kept saying, it's not possible.  I'll want to remember sitting on the porch of the Village Center, eating chocolate peanut butter ice cream and listening to a man with a guitar and long blonde hair singing "Garden Party" and "Christ for President."  

I'll want to remember that a friend of a friend called "Prayer Around the Cross," my favorite service at Holden, "Cry Around the T" and that when I heard him say it the ritual felt, not trivialized, but more important.  Sometimes we need to gather together in darkness with candles and song.  Sometimes we need to come forward, in sadness or happiness, regret or release, or even in joy and gratitude, to cry around the "t."  We need that kind of weight in our weeks.

My friend Sally, on an early fall hike to Upper Lyman Lake, September 2012

Miner's Ridge

“I have spent my life trying to understand why this rock and this ache go together, why a granite peak is more dramatic half dressed in clouds…why sunlight under fog is better than the sum of its parts, why my best days and my worst days are always the same day, why (often) leaving seems like the only solution to loving.”-Pam Houston, Contents May Have Shifted

Miner's Ridge lookout with Glacier Peak in the background, September 2012

In 2003 my family went skiing in Winter Park, Colorado.  I don’t remember the names of any of the runs where we skied.  I don’t remember a single meal we ate.  I couldn’t give you details about our accommodations.  What I remember is taking the lift up to the top of the mountain with my friend Eric and skiing off the lift to a place where nothing but the thick cover of clouds crested above us.  Instead of skiing down, Eric and I collapsed into a heap of powder, which felt soft around our bundled-up bodies.  Snow cradled my legs and shoulders.  Cold reddened my cheeks.  I spread my arms wide, snow-angel style.  Eric and I lay there for minutes, watching our breath swirl in clouds around our bodies before I leaned to look at him.  “Can’t we just live here?” I asked.  We silenced.  I tried to hold onto that moment.  That moment: of being buried in powder on the top of the mountain--wanting to stay--even as I knew that within the next five minutes we would start skiing down toward lower lifts, our families, and hot chocolate at the mountain’s base.

In one of my favorite Stuart Dybek stories, “Paper Lantern,” a man and a woman watch a building burn along a river in Chicago.  The man snaps a photo of the woman at the exact moment the flames burst forward, capturing the glow of the blaze on her face.  Later, when the woman remembers the photo, she says to the man, “[Most] of the moments in our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them.  It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives.  Those moments are our lives.  Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives of the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves.”  She tells the man if she hadn’t met him, she wouldn’t have been on a bridge watching a fire and notes, “Maybe that’s what falling in love means: the power to create for each other the moments by which we define ourselves.”

For me, the moment on the mountain with Eric was not a moment of falling in love with a person but a moment of falling in love with a landscape, one of many moments scattered throughout my childhood and adolescence when I knew I wanted to move west.  I grew up in Metro-Detroit and didn’t see my first mountain at until age ten in Missoula, Montana.  On the flight to Missoula I saw silhouettes of the Rockies but it wasn’t until morning when Dad opened the hotel mini-blinds that I first saw a mountain in full form: rising from the earth cloaked in prairie grass and fir trees, less pointy and snow-covered than the peaks I’d seen in pictures.  The same day, hiking up to the “M” shaped out of gravel in the foothills above the University of Missoula, I tripped and fell.  My parents had to ask the hotel we’d already check out of to let us use the pool shower to wash my scraped up arms and legs, and my skinned back, knees, and palms with soap and warm water.  Mom sprayed canned peroxide on the places on my back where rocks pocked the skin raw.  Even bloodied and battered, I knew I wanted to move back to a place like Missoula.  I pictured myself serving coffee in the diner where we ate breakfast or gardening in the bungalows that lined the neighborhoods near the university.  Later, when we drove north to stay at a ranch in the Mission Mountains, I imagined doing farm-work or baking bread for tourists.  I wanted to be a University of Missoula college student, a ranch hand, a cook, or a cowboy.

In August of 2011, during my first move to Washington, I stopped in Missoula.  I stayed at Hutchins Hostel: a backpackers’ boardinghouse owned by a man who studied environmental science at University of Missoula with a vegetable garden in front and chickens in back.  I placed my duffel on the bottom bunk of a cedar bed, slipped on sandals and a backpack and hiked toward the same “M”-marked foothill I’d fallen on as a child.  I hiked switchbacks in the August heat, sun beating down on my un-shaded body as I moved high above the city.  I crouched in the thistles and looked out at the river and the stadium, the library, and the city center.  I felt myself growing surer of my steps as I moved up and then down the trail.  When I reached the trail’s bottom, I picnicked on the university campus, eating tomatoes and goat cheese on whole wheat pita bread I’d made back in Michigan.  There I was: a foot taller and fifteen years older than I’d been my first trip to Missoula, my car packed with clothes and backpacking gear, mason jars, prayer flags, and paperback books, ready to move to a state cut by mountains, streaked by rivers, and bordered by Pacific Coast.

~

Missoula, Montana, Summer 2011

~

I saw Glacier Peak for the first time in June of 2011, on a hike to Cloudy Pass.  I was traveling with friends who knew Railroad Creek Valley well enough to find a path through snow which started at the Lyman Lake Switchbacks, four miles from the top of the trail.  We skidded out onto an ice-covered Lyman Lake and passed fir trees blanketed by ten foot snowdrifts.  At first we moved uphill in a line, testing the slipperiness of the snow, but as we neared the top, we scurried and slid, sledding on our snowshoes when the trail sloped down.  We picnicked at the pass, angling our bodies so we could see Glacier Peak, sprawling above the rest of the Cascades.  Unlike the other Cascade composite volcanoes you can’t see Glacier Peak from any major metropolitan area.  Despite the fact Glacier Peak lies only seventy miles northeast of Seattle, its smaller summit (at 10, 541 it’s still 4,000 feet shorter than Rainier) and its place in the center of the Cascades make it a mountain best seen from trails and valleys you can only hike to.  I’d never seen a mountain so sprawling and remote, and after I finished my sandwich I strapped my snowshoes back on to scramble up the trails above the pass for a better view.  Despite my wet socks and the glare of the sun beating on the mountain snow, I couldn’t sit still in the presence of that peak. 

Until this past weekend, I’d never hiked past the point in Cloudy Pass where we’d scrambled that day.  I’d never taken the hiker’s cutoff down the steep slopes behind Cloudy, crossing the county line into the Darrington ranger district.  I’d stuck to hikes I could do in a day and stayed in or above Railroad Creek Valley. 

~

Miner's Ridge fire watch tower, shortly after sunrise

~

We started our 38-mile (roundtrip) trek to Miner's Ridge last Saturday at 8:30 am.  Sally, Scott, Seth, and I met in front of the Holden Village Hike Haus and started on the trail toward Hart Lake, Lyman Lake, Cloudy Pass, and Image Lake.  We wrestled our packs onto our backs and re-adjusted our waist straps.  We joked about camping in the village or at the ball field right next to the wilderness area to spare our backs, shoulders, and hamstrings the (almost) forty miles of hiking with a pack.  It took us till lunch to reach Cloudy Pass where we ate sandwiches and oranges on boulders that overlooked Lyman Lake.  We whistled at marmots.  We chatted with hunters when they passed us dressed in blaze orange, hauling their backpacks and rifles. 

We descended down the hiker’s cut-off after eating, dropping hundreds of feet on a rocky trail which snaked between boulders square enough to roll your ankle or bruise your foot if you stepped wrong. We caught glimpses of new mountains, mountains whose names I didn't yet know, as we walked through sub-alpine forests which smelled crisper than lowland woods. After miles of curving through trees and moving up and down slopes, we came out in a field with full view of Glacier Peak. The openness of of the grassland punctuated the craggy cliffs and glacial fields above us.

"It’s so pretty,” I said, then stopped, “that’s not the right word.” 

Scott called it “sublime”--the kind of pretty that makes you terrified, a beauty which takes your breath away then makes you laugh.

When we hiked toward Image Lake and Miners Ridge, Sally, Scott, Seth, and I sometimes silenced.  Sometimes we laughed or swore or jumped up-and-down.  Once or twice, I sank to my knees, stooping to take in the land all around me.  I imagined how glaciers scraped the mountains into chiseled rock and snow rising above fields lush with late summer flowers.

As we pressed forward, we got nuzzled by horses that grazed in mountain grass.  We laughed as their noses brushed our cheeks and their necks jostled our backpacks.  Every corner I turned, I wanted to stay.  Sally and I wanted to sit, to roll down the hillside with our arms spread wide, to linger for photos and conversation and dinner but Scott, who had hiked to Miner’s Ridge before, pushed us forward, “It gets better.”

We picnicked by Image Lake, a small pool of clear water surrounded by mountain summits, eating homemade granola and peanut butter sandwiches and dark chocolate my friend Liz sent from Ashland, Oregon.  We watched the early evening sun streak the foothills gold and saw the first reflections of nightfall in the lake-water.

Miner’s Ridge is almost exactly a mile from Image Lake.  We hiked switchbacks that ended on a thin strip of land surrounded by mountains.  We dropped our backpacks and unrolled our sleeping bags below a historic fire lookout tower.  From where we set up camp we could see Glacier Peak’s snow-covered summit looming above the rest of the Cascades.  We could point out trails and lakes and landmarks as if we were standing on the top of a topography map. 

Sally, Scott, Seth, and I climbed the fire watch tower where we met a volunteer ranger named George, who slept in a room at the top of the tower with windowed walls and a wood-burning stove.  We took pictures from the tower’s balcony.  We made small talk with George about hiking and conservation and fire-watching while we stared at Glacier’s Peak’s glacial fields.  Later, we climbed the tower again to see the sun set.  We watched the sky go from blue to gold to pink as the sun dipped below the mountain.  The colors beamed off the rock and snow.  The winnowing light shadowed the valley.  I thought of a line from Pam Houston's memoir Contents May Have Shifted:  “If I die tonight it will be with every single thing unfinished (like, I suppose, any other night), and yet, what a gift to die on the verge of tears.”  That is what I thought, sitting on the Miner’s Ridge fire lookout watching the sun set on Glacier Peak.  That is what I thought, lying in my sleeping bag with scrubby mountain vegetation below me and stars blanketing the sky above me.  That is what I thought, the next morning when I woke at 5:15 to the first rays of sun kissing the cliff-tops.  What a gift.  What a gift. What a gift.

~

Miner's Ridge, September 2012

Holden Village

“This counting of steps. This counting of scars
in the bark: the warty burl bulging low
on the trunk, the black-scratchings left
by the bear learning to climb. This counting
 of sleeps between this country & the next country
we call home.”
-“Bell”, Cecily Parks (read in Orion magazine my first afternoon in Holden Village)

Holden:

I live in a village you cannot drive to--a village with no cell phone reception and one satellite phone used only for emergencies. A village with no grocery stores, no hospitals, no shopping malls, no restaurants, no liquor stores, no drug stores. A village that produces its own power using a hydroelectric plant. A village that receives its mail by boat. A village with one church, one school, one dining hall, one ice cream shop, one coffee cart, and one gift shop. A village edged by Cascade cliffs and wilderness areas so remote and well-preserved that the forestry service requires crews to clear trails using long saws rather than chain saws.

In Holden Village, you arrive by water. It’s a ritual: parking at Field’s Point landing, buying a ticket, boarding the boat. The first time I made the trip I camped in the parking lot with friends. We set up our tent on the asphalt and slept side-by-side on the pavement. We woke with oily skin and stiff backs and drove to the closest gas station we could find to buy donuts, granola bars, and individually packed bowls of cereal for breakfast. We washed our faces and brushed our teeth in the public restroom then funneled down to the dock with packs on our backs, duffels on our shoulders, and wheeled bags rolling behind us. We bought tickets at a booth set up beside the dock, tucking our ticket stubs into the safest pockets of our wallets. We snapped photos when we boarded the boat, climbed the ramp from the dock and then the stairs to the top deck. We sat in the open air, bundled in mittens and jackets and watched as the mountains went from sparse and scrappy to craggy and lush.

I arrived in Holden Village twelve days ago. I took a yellow school bus with the name “Honey” painted across the front up switchbacks for eleven miles from the boat landing at Lucerne. I sat next to a boy from Gabon who was headed to Holden Village as a guest singer in the gospel choir. We watched Lake Chelan disappear beneath switchbacks. We sat on green leather bus seats reading our respective novels until the bus stopped short of the village and the driver turned to give us details about the village.

Holden consists of a collection of lodges and chalets, a dining hall, a school, a library, and church. Some of the lodges serve dual purposes. For example: housing and laundry, housing and hike house, housing and nurse’s office. Each chalet has a flower box full of marigolds, a porch swing, and a flag.  From the place where the bus stopped I could see Chalet One’s Canadian flag, slumped in the still air.  My friend Ben sat on the Chalet One porch swing playing guitar with a pink-haired girl stooped beside him. The sun beamed off the mountain peaks behind Chalet Hill.  Villagers sat on the sloped grass near the Village Center waving.  Ron, a friend from last summer, greeted me with a button-shaped sign painted with the words “Rachael TA.” Later, when I arrived in my room I found a white card with the words “Welcome Back to Holden” written inside, propped on the desk beside my bed.

Hiking:

 Last year during my first few weeks in Washington, I kayaked the Puget Sound every night. I splashed through salt water, provoking the cove’s bio-luminescent phytoplankton to sparkle around the wake of my paddle. I paddled toward the mouth of Henderson Bay where moonlight-dappled Mount Rainier dominated the horizon. I waited for the water to still with my legs propped up on my kayak. I sat beneath the stars until my damp jeans sent me back shivering toward the dock. I climbed into my bed each night smelling of saltwater.

The view of Lower Lyman Lake, hiking down from Upper Lyman
Lake, 9/8/12

My first day in Holden Village I hiked twenty miles by myself. I woke at six, ate oatmeal in the dining hall, and bagged two sandwiches from the hiker bar. I carried a backpack with water, food, and field guides, and checked out at the village’s Hike House. I moved fast, covering the first five miles in less than an hour and a half.  I felt the swell of lactic acid rising in my calves. Sweat dampened my t-shirt. When I started up the switchbacks toward Lyman Lake and saw the shape and snow of Dumbbell Mountain come into clear view, I set down my pack and stopped to photograph the cliffs combing the blue sky. When I arrived at Lyman, I sat for a full twenty minutes, staring at the mountain lake’s Disney-blue water, before mounting the final miles to Cloudy Pass, switch-backing through wildflowers toward mountain ridges which traverse the Pacific Crest Trail at some of its prettiest points.  I listened to the screech of marmots, scrambled up rocky crests for views of Glacier Peak, and dropped to my stomach to photograph flowers recently sprung from the melt of high-country snow.

As my body tired, my mind cleared.  Mountain ridges rose on either side of the trail where I trekked. I thought, one day I will ache for this landscape¬Ache. The thought felt as defined as something I’d read in the book.

 ~

I’ve hiked over sixty miles during my first twelve days in Holden Village. That doesn’t count the miles I run in the morning before breakfast or the two mile jogs to the Glacier Peak Wilderness area my friend Ben and I (sometimes) do at night after he gets off work. It doesn’t count the miles I trek back and forth across the village when I run errands or the short nature hikes I take with children at the school where I work. Those sixty miles are weekend hiking miles, covered over three long treks--all-day trips which tested my legs and back. Next weekend, when I backpack to Image Lake with friends, I’ll add forty more miles onto my mountain tally. I like to think I’m getting stronger--that by the end of my year here, I’ll move through the Cascades with the mountain-goat ease some of my co-workers exhibit.

Martin Ridge, 9/1/12

“I don’t know why I like hiking so much,” a friend said, during a hike on my third day in Holden, as we stood with our palms on our knees, breathing thin air, downing gulps of water from the bottles we carried on our backs. “It’s something masochistic. It can’t be just the views; we live in an age where I could stream this stuff on Youtube.”

We hiked Martin Ridge that day, bush-whacking and scrambling over 7,000 feet above the valley.  We felt the hardness of the landscape in our weathered hands and aching muscles.  We walked narrow paths bordered by scree slides.  Rocks skittered beneath our feet, highlighting our height above the valley.  We arrived back at Holden Village thirteen hours after we began our hike with sore backs, swollen knees, and cotton-dry mouths.  When we got within a half mile of Holden we flicked off our headlamps and let the lights from the lodges light our way into the village, leading us back to glasses of orange juice and leftover pie in the dining hall.

School:

I’ve worked in the Holden Village School for five days. The entire village celebrated the first day of school with a parade that lasted most of the morning. A school bus with “La Paz” painted across the front picked up the school’s eleven students from their chalet homes that dot the hill less than a quarter mile from the building where they attend school. Villagers in costumes interrupted the bus with mock emergencies: A fire drill which required the students to exit the bus, a leaky toilet rigged to shoot water in the air while operations workers (men in their early twenties wearing jean shorts and tie-die) danced in circles around the road, and an ice cream shop blockade where employees in medieval costumes demanded students dance for milkshakes and free desert coupons. Our school staff—John, the high school teacher, Jeanne, the elementary school teacher, and me--blocked the bus with a “staff breakfast” of peanut butter sandwiches, coffee, and apples on a card table decorated with lavender in a vase and a checkered cloth. We feigned ignorance about school’s start before hitchhiking our way onto the school bus for a ride up to the second level of the Holden Mine. 

Operations workers (Tim and Taylor) interrupt the school bus
 with a plumbing disaster, tie-dye, and dance. 

I work with seven elementary school students and four high school students. I teach physical education and lead nature hikes. I organize writing activities (check out: my students' writing) and facilitate games. I teach first graders to write their numbers, lead songs, answer math questions and read out loud.  I see my students at meals and Vespers.  I nod at them from my porch swing and wave at them during my morning runs. Yesterday in the dining hall, a parent approached me, and asked about my weekend, “I haven’t seen you in a couple days,” she said. When I said I’d been camping and hiking, she shook her head, “I hear you run every morning before school, work all day, and every weekend you hike. I want your energy.”

I explain to her what my housemates already know: that the urge to hike and walk the valley comes not from a compulsion to move, exercise, or explore, but from the knowledge that soon the weather will make mountain travel impossible.  Two mornings ago, sparkles of snow sent my students barreling from their desks to the window, palming the pane glass while the first flakes fell. “One morning,” my housemate Jericho says, “You’ll wake up, and it’ll look like someone powdered the mountains with sugar.” Snow will cover the trails, making it difficult to move or navigate. We’ll trade our hiking boots for cross country skis and snowshoes, stoke our wood burning stoves and begin winter in the village.

Home:

My housemates and I “warmed” our house two days ago.  Kari made pastries, Cecilia swept the floor, Jericho cleaned the downstairs, I made lemonade and a playlist and brought a tray of glasses from the dining hall.  We moved into our chalet two Saturdays ago, and figured it was high time we had a party. Our chalet, (Chalet Four) came with yellow and orange marigolds in our flower box and a rainbow flag on our porch. We have four bedrooms, a basement, a sunny kitchen, a laundry room, two bathrooms, and a living room with a wood burning stove and a window bench with a heater beneath it. My room has wood floors and wood paneling. My ceiling slants with the slope of the roof and bookshelves and storage hooks line two of my walls. My scarves hang in the hallway leading to my room; my frame backpack hangs on the hook beside my bed. I brought only a couple boxes, so everything decorating my dresser and hanging on my wall has significance and a story: The postcard my former housemate Anna sent me from a writers’ conference in Chicago last year, the picture of Teddy Roosevelt my brother gave me, the prayer flags I purchased at the Ten Thousand Villages store in Ames, Iowa before moving out of the apartment I shared with Anna to go west for the first time, the earring rack my mother made for me when I went to college, the colored-pen etching of a big cedar tree my friend Lauren drew after our first trip to the Hoh Rainforest, and the calendar my father designed out of photos he’d taken on family vacation (September=Bryce Canyon, my high school senior spring break trip.)

At our housewarming party, people from Holden Village and Stehekin gathered in our living room, perching on our couches and chairs and benches with baked goods and drinks. Friends took shifts touring bedrooms.  They admired our bookshelves, our wall hangings, and the quilts we’d chosen from the Village laundry. Unlike a “normal” house-warming where someone might notice the structure of the house, our Holden guests noted how we’d changed a chalet they already knew, how we’d made the space our own: different from the Richardson family who lived in our chalet last year and the visiting teaching staff who’d occupied the house during the summer.

 ~ 

Here we know the names of the mountains—Buckskin, Copper, Dumbbell, Bonanza. Here every staff member has a Polaroid posted in the dining hall with his or her name and job written in pen underneath.  Here we hold parties: weather-themed dances, pool tournaments, karaoke nights, and housewarmings.  Here we break for meals, for morning cake and coffee, for bus arrivals and bus departures.  Here we watch the sun set and rise on Cascade cliffs, sit out on sunny afternoons, and wake to mountain frost.

Last weekend, my housemates and I joked about how difficult it is to explain Holden Village—recounting conversations we’d all had trying to explain the strange place where we live. “Where is it?” “You take a ferry from Chelan to get there.” “Is it on an island?” “No it’s in the mountains--there are just no roads that go there.” “How do you get there from the ferry?” “You take a road.” “I thought you said there were no roads.” “The road has two dead ends.”

We laughed: Cecilia, Jericho, Kari and me.  Here we were, Cecilia: a Grinnell College grad who worked in D.C before moving to Holden, Kari: a Pacific North-westerner who spent her post-college years cooking in an upscale restaurant outside Seattle, Jericho: a Minnesota-native who's backpacked across India, and me: a writer from Detroit--belly-laughing so hard it hurt--drinking beer and tea and wine, sitting in our mountain chalet in a place so remote and off-the grid that Jericho's college friends are still not entirely convinced she hasn't joined a cult.

It’s a good life here in Holden Village. Today, I ran switchbacks while I watched rising sun orange mountain peaks, I ate pancakes topped with berries for breakfast, I read Old Turtle and The Lorax out loud to first graders in a loft above the library, I led elementary school students in poetry-writing beside Railroad Creek, I ate borscht and fresh baked bread for dinner then soaked in a hot tub while I watched the sun dip beneath Buckskin Mountain.  Tonight I'll return to my room.  I'll see my brother's pictures and my dad's calender and my mom's earring rack.  I'll see the card on my bookshelf with "Welcome Back to Holden" inside.  I'll sleep with my window open and my prayer flags from Ames, Iowa fluttering in wind.

Travelogue

Return:  1. To come or go back to a place or person:

     Example: He returned to America in the late autumn

~

Dayton, Wyoming:

The windows behind the altar at San Benito Monastery look out on woods and creek.  The sisters wear socks or slippers on the chapel's wooden floor.  They sit on matching benches.  The service and music mirror the setting of the sun, in song and stretches of silence.  On Saturday at vespers, as we sung about day's ending, we watched the ravine behind the altar darken.  By the end of the service, shadows fell across the floorboards and we could no longer watch the sun through the windows.

I went to this same service last year on my way west.  When I pulled into the monastery this year, Annie, the sisters' dog, greeted me at the same point on the same gravel road.  The same nun led me to the same bedroom, furnished with a dresser, a chair, a twin bed, and a set of clean purple towels.  I placed my food in the same white almost-empty fridge.  Last year, I drove the same stretch from Ames, Iowa to Dayton, Wyoming, a fourteen hour trip. During the fourteen hours of Westward-driving I watched the landscape change from row crops to rolling hills to short grass prairie to Badlands to high desert to Black Hills to Big Horn Mountains.  I checked off landmarks I knew: the first Wall Drugs signs on the far east side of South Dakota, the corn palace in Mitchell, the Missouri River, Laura Ingalls Wilder's homestead in De Smet, the Wounded Knee museum in Wall, the Badlands rest stop that rents out interpretive headsets, the Wyoming state line, and the yellow detour lights that flash during the winter when mountain snow makes the road impassable.

~

This trip has been a series of returns. After almost a year of constant travel, I planned this year's route to Washington around places and people that feel like home. The day before I left, Mom invited family over for bagels and orange juice and I spent the afternoon on the back porch of my parents' house, sitting on their wicker furniture, drinking coffee with Aunts and Uncles who asked questions about my future but seemed to feel confident in my strength to find it. I hugged people I knew I wouldn't get a chance to hug again until Christmas, trying to remember the feel of all of them, garnering confidence from their presence. I ate dinner than night with my parents, my Nana, and my brother, and after we ate we sat on the benches in the backyard, watching the grass turn dusky with fireflies. When I woke the next morning I vacuumed my room one last time, flopping on the floor to check under my dresser and bed for anything I may have left. I made a mental list of thing I didn't want to forget: passport, purse, rain boots, sleeping bag, running shoes. I closed my bedroom door knowing I wouldn't open it again until December.

I've been on the road for eight days. A slower trip than I've taken before.  Last year when I drove to Washington I drove made the journey in three days: Detroit to Ames, Iowa, Ames, Iowa to Missoula, Montana, Missoula, Montana to Gig Harbor, Washington. I spent the week before I left making my car into the kind of habitat I could spend forty hours in--I vacuumed, loaded library books onto my ipod, toasted granola, and baked bread. I filled a fold-able cooler with sliced tomatoes and carrots, goat cheese and apples. I didn't stop for food once. I ate on the road or sitting in the sun on rest stop picnic tables.

~

Chicago, Illinois:

The first meal of this road trip took place in Chicago, on the back porch of the flat my friend Amanda shares with her sister.  We barbecued chicken, tofu, and vegetables on Amanda's Smoky-Joe.  We washed and seasoned the meat in the sink of Amanda's apartment, passing the chicken back-and-forth as we collaborated on the cooking process.  Neither of us barbecue much.  Neither of us eat much meat.  At one point, Amanda held the bird by its wings and pressed her face close to it's flesh.  "It smells weird.  Is it supposed to smell like that?"  She asked.  I drew my own nose near the chicken's bumpy skin, "It smells like death.  But that seems right.  It is dead so that makes sense."  We rinsed the bird again.  We rolled it in seasoning.  We poured charcoal into the metal basin.  We crumbled paper and created a flame.  We waited for the charcoal to burn red before placing small sections of seasoned meat onto the grill.  When the meat began to brown we filled the remaining space with green and red peppers and olive-oiled corn wrapped in tin foil.

The chicken tasted moist, grill-smoky, and garlicky--rich with backyard flavor.  We ate it on chairs gathered around the wooden table on Amanda's porch with peppers and grilled corn and Leinenkugel's.  From our second story porch-perch we could hear the hum of the highway and the jolt of the El.  We made s'mores, skewering marshmallows over the grill using forks, and talked about transitions, jobs, good and bad foods to eat on dates, books, boys, and the difficulty of being in our twenties when our lives seen so much less professionally, romantically, and spiritually definitive than the lives of our parents.  We stayed on the porch until dark shrouded the city and other apartment lights speckled the horizon.  

That night, I remembered a line from the Stuart Dybek poem Windy City: in a city like that one might sail through life led by a runaway hat.  I thought of the day I bought my first Stuart Dybek book, a collection of stories called The Coast of Chicago in a used bookstore, while wandering Chicago neighborhoods solo during another time of transition.  I read the whole book that afternoon, sitting on a sidewalk bench, underlining lines like:

Our plans for the future made us laugh and feel close, but those same plans somehow made anything more than temporary between us seem impossible. It was the first time I’d ever had the feeling of missing someone I was still with 

with the conviction that Dybek was writing about people like me: young transients who moved to moved to places like Chicago not for glamour but for old worldliness: delis and bakeries, weeded lots and hanging laundry.

~

Ames, Iowa:

In Iowa, ecology students burn the prairie. They section the grass with rakes and light the field on fire with small torches. When the prairie burns smoke rises into the treeless skyline. Soot covers the men and women who stand on the perimeter of the burn wearing Carharts and holding with rubber paddles to beat stray flames. The fire leaves the once lush landscape bare. But within weeks plants begin to re-sprout from the ashen soil, bright green snaps against the earth. The deep root structure of prairie plants saves them, knotting them to the Iowa earth so that only invasive species die in the fire.

What does it mean to place yourself in a landscape? On this trip, I visited Grinnell, Iowa before I went back to Ames, Iowa, where I'd lived for three years as a graduate student. I stayed with the family of one of my favorite former professors Dean and his wife Amanda. I helped Amos (age 4) and Lydia (age 7) build fairy houses from twigs and stones in the backyard. We braided strands of grass into fairy carpet and crafted tiny tables out of acorn tops. When an ant skittered over the bark where we worked Lydia asked if I thought ants could be pets for fairies. I said yes. She looked at me, searching my face, "Rachael do you believe in fairies?" I raised my head from the strands of grass I'd been thumbing, "Yes." She nodded. "Good." I imagined tiny beings, walking barefoot on our grass blankets and reclining on the smooth stones we collected. Sitting cross-legged in the lawn, with my back against a maple, I wished I could inhabit the structure Lydia built: that I could live in a shelter walled by tree-roots and lit by fireflies.

During my visit to Ames I walked two prairies: one at the Everett Casey Nature Reserve where I hiked with friends and former professors, one on my friend Becca's newly bought plot of property. It felt good to walk through grass that rose higher than my head with people whose lives I felt rooted to. I thought of a line from the Philip Levine poem Gospel, I did not come to a place like this for answers, I came to walk on the Earth. At the Everett Casey Nature Reserve, we followed my former Professor Steve, who swung a machete through the thick underbrush, hiking through brambles and nettles to reach the clear spaces on the property where we could look out at the expanse of prairie, river, and woodland. We hiked to Bluff Creek where we sat on river rocks for almost an hour, chasing tiny frogs with our palms, talking about the future and freckling in the sun. In Grinnell, I built fairy houses and read bedtime stories aloud, I talked to Dean and Amanda while Lydia stood behind me on a stool, pulling my hair into braids and buns, I ate pancakes cooked using a recipe in a children's book and drank carrot ginger juice Amanda pressed herself.  In Ames, I hiked and cooked, I ate out and drank coffee on the porches of my friends while we all perched over laptops and open books. In both places, I walked on ground that felt familiar.  I felt like a prairie plant, ready to spring from dirt.

Ames was the first place I planted flowers. Weeks after moving to my first duplex, I bought a bag of daffodil bulbs, which I patted into the ground in front of my porch. I knelt on the grass and sifted the Iowa dirt with my fingers. When yellow flowers peppered our yard next spring, the house felt more like mine. I'd planted part of myself there--bulbs which would still rise from the dirt years after I graduated and left Ames.  This trip, I didn't drive by either of the homes I lived in Ames, but I know next spring my daffodils will still be there, sprouting along the scraggly rental property lawn.

~

Dayton, Wyoming:

The word for Matins, the morning service at  San Benito Monastery, comes from Matuta, the Latin name for the Greek goddess Leucothae or Leucothea, the goddess of the morning.  It's an ancient ritual, one that dates back to the earliest days of the church.  The nuns spend most of the morning service in silence, with only rays of the rising sun to light the chapel. The morning I left three of us sat in a space quiet enough to here the hum of breathing and the gargle of unfed stomachs.  I settled my body into my circling thoughts.  I flexed my bare feet on the wooden floorboards and watched the sun speckle the altar.  I knew I had almost eleven hours of driving ahead of me.  I knew I had paperwork to finish and phone calls to make but for forty minutes I sat in quiet until Sister Gladys's alarm clock beeped, indicating it was time to sing in the day with hymns and psalms.  Before I left the chapel that day the sisters gathered around me, blessing the road and my travels upon it.

I jogged from the chapel to my room after matins, scattering the gravel under my sandals. I pressed my books and clothes back into duffel bags and backpacks. When I walked to the kitchen to gather the contents of my cooler from the fridge, a woman wearing a black-and-white dress approached me, offered me her hand and a cup of fair trade dark roast coffee brewed from beans she'd bought at the co-op before coming to San Benito. I accepted and we talked about our jobs and lives how we found the monastery. I told her about being a naturalist and a writer and an assistant teacher at Holden. "That's good work," she said. She told me she worked as a death penalty lawyer. "That's good work," I responded. I described my previous trip to the monastery and other occasions I'd stayed with Benedictines. She told me she'd come to San Benito to visit Sister Helen, an internationally known anti-death penalty advocate and author of the book Dead Man Walking, an activist I'd admired since age nineteen. "I'm going to bring her coffee now. I'll have her pop out and say 'hi' if she's awake." The woman disappeared with her french press and I paced the kitchen, wondering if I should wait to meet my college hero, pushing back my departure time. After a couple minutes of shifting my weight and checking my watch, I left a "thank-you" Post-It on the counter, took my coffee thermos in hand, and headed out the door.

When I looked in my rear-view mirror, I saw the woman and Sister Helen, running behind my car.  I pulled the Honda into brake, and ran toward them.  Sister Helen wore tortoise shell glasses and clogs.  She pulled me into a hug.  "I hear you're doing good work," she said.  "I'm a huge admirer of your work."  I bumbled back.  

When I pulled out of the monastery to continue on my way west, I felt the weight of Sister Helen's words and of my journey.  I like the slowness of car travel, even seven hours into a squirmy thirteen hour drive, I like watching the landscape flash by.  I like stopping at fruit stands and listening to audio-books and adjusting to the three-hour time difference one day at a time.  There's a slowness to monasteries, to prairies, to the building of fairy houses, to forging of relationships with children, learning to cook, or getting to know a city.  Some days I feel the only way to move forward is to cling to the ground beneath me and keep my car in gear.  Some days I roll down the window and sift the wind between my fingers, as if grasping at the landscape, trying to keep each passing panorama.

Running

As a graduate student, I wrote a short story about a boy who ran.  I made a runner my protagonist because I felt familiar with runners and their ways.  I'd run cross country and track in high school and college.  I'd woken early for predawn morning jogs and done mile repeats in the park, bending down with my hands on my knees to hear my heart pulse between each set.  I'd used "easy" and "sixteen miler" in the same sentence.    I'd qualified for the Boston Marathon.  I saw a strength in my runner self that I liked.   I knew the rush of lactic acid after the first mile of a 5K and I'd learned how to draft off other runners on the track, waiting like a predator for my competitors to weaken so that I could muster every bit of power in my body in the last lap of a race.  

When I described the running character in my story, an eighteen year old boy named Joseph, from a small town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula who woke every morning at five to run along Lake Michigan's north coast, listening to the sound of his feet and the rhythm of his breath, to Benjamin Percy, a professor and fiction writer I admire, Ben said, "Cool.  What's he running from?"  I had been sitting in the brown chair in his office, with my leg curled under me and my backpack on the floor.  

I leaned forward, "What is he running from?"  

"Yes, you have a character who runs, almost compulsively, he has to be running from something.  What is he trying to get away from?"

My nonfiction writer self stopped thinking about Joseph and started thinking about me.  What are you running from?  I asked myself.  I wondered what all my movement meant.

~

My brother Keith and I running in Michigan's Upper Pennisula, June 2005

In college, I could run a 5K (3.1 miles) in under eighteen minutes (5:44 per mile pace.)  I could run a 10K (6.2) miles in under thirty-eight minutes (6:05 pace.)  I ran over seventy miles a week, in addition to lifting weights, stretching, cross training.  I haunted track and field message boards and kept binders full of workouts and training tips.  I memorized NCAA qualifying times.  I'd seen teammates and former competitors become elite athletes.  I wanted the same.

When I ran hard, I wanted results, but I also ran to feel strong.  When you train that hard, the movement of running feels more effortless than walking.  On Sundays at the Indiana dunes with my teammates, I felt like a deer, moving fast and light-legged through the woods.  My first day running in Iowa, I saw a red fox, while training for my first marathon on the university's cross country course.  It dashed in front of me without consideration, looking up for only a moment.   We're kin.  I thought as I watched it disappear into the ferns, bushy tail bounding behind its sleek body.  

When I return to my hometown, my college, or the running shoe store I worked at while I competed in college, people ask me if I still run.  I run, several times a week.  I run, usually between three and six miles.  I occasionally will even go on a really long run, jogging ten to fifteen miles to remember the feel of distance.  My last year of graduate school I ran two half marathons.  But when someone asks me if I run, I shrug and answer, Not the way I used to.  Sometimes I talk about the hiking I do out west, or the rock climbing I've done in Michigan, sometimes I talk about the six to ten miles I walked everyday working as a naturalist at a kids camp.  But even with so much activity, I know that I lack the strength I used to have as a competitive runner.  My body is softer, my legs less lean, my capillaries less rich with oxygen.

~

In the past six years I've moved seven times.  Some of these moves have been packing a dorm room for the summer or Duffel-bagging my belonging to spend six months abroad.  Some of them have involved moving trucks and my housemates and I hoisting beds and bookshelves and couches through too-narrow doors in un-air-conditioned duplexes and apartments.  Some of them have been moves across the country, drives that took several days, in a car packed with coffee-cups, back-packs, and books.  I've learned what belongings make me feel settled.  I've learned how to make community.

Packing my college dorm room.   8/15/2006

In Ames, Iowa I attended graduate school with people from all over the country.  We created camaraderie over books and beer, coffee and conversation, pancakes and post-teaching decompression.  We all felt far from home so we learned to latch onto each other.  We cooked Indian food on Easter which we ate sitting cross-legged on the carpet of someone's apartment.  We celebrated each other's accomplishments with potlucks and champagne drank from Mason Jars.  We learned to be each other's faraway families.  

Ames was the place where I slowed all my running, where I allowed myself to stop pushing my strength long enough to slow down and stay, planting a garden and stocking a kitchen.  But Ames is a college town.  After graduation, I left.  And each time I return, more of my patchwork-graduate school family has graduated or moved, making the community we created impossible to enter in the same way.  

~

My friend who I texted about the title of my blog--"the ground underneath my feet" told me that Holden Village was a good place to ground myself but reminded me that I was entering a community that changed weekly, sometimes daily.  My students will stay the same but visitors and volunteers enter Holden every day, immersing themselves in the village for a couple days, a week, a couple months, before going back down the mountain to their more permanent lives elsewhere.  It's strange to think that next year I'll be the one staying-- the one being left, while people I meet keep moving, continuing on in their travels.

Last year while visiting Holden, I met a woman named Lindsey, a former librarian from Portland, who quit her job to spend a year visiting intentional communities all over the country.  When we met, she was several months into her time at Holden.  She'd already volunteered on two ships Irving Johnson and Exy Johnson through the Los Angeles Maritime Institute's TopSail Youth Program, visited a Zen Buddhist near the Tassajara hot springs, and worked on an organic homestead called "Little Farm."  She writes (beautifully) about her experiences as a twenty-first century pilgrim, searching for community in her blog: http://foreverarriving.blogspot.com.  

In one entry Lindsey writes the changing seasons at Holden, ending with this description:

"THERE'S a song called 'Rivers and Roads' that has been performed by a group of talented Holden musicians on several occasions. The first time I heard it, one of them introduced it as 'the most Holden song I've ever heard.'

A year from now we'll all be gone

All our friends will move away

And they're going to better places

But our friends will be gone away

It starts out quietly, voice and guitar, and the melody is calm, musing, detached.

Nothing is as it has been

And I miss your face like hell

And I guess it's just as well

But I miss your face like hell

But then the singer crescendos abruptly into a wail, and the piano crashes in, and finally you can feel the hurt behind the words:

Been talkin' 'bout the way things change

And my family lives in a different state

And if you don't know what to make of this

Then we will not relate

And then there's nothing left to sing but the chorus, vocals raw and haunting, harmonies building through repetition after repetition to a painful richness, the waltz-time rhythm lifting up and pounding down, moving you inexorably toward the song's end.

Rivers and roads

Rivers and roads

Rivers 'til I reach you

The song is by a band called The Head and the Heart, a group which has probably never heard of Holden Village. When I returned to the Land of Fast Internet and sought out their album recording of it, I was disappointed. It's nice, but... it's nice. I hear they're better live, and maybe even in the studio they really felt what they were singing about, but they don't make me feel it, not the way those people at Holden did, singing their hearts out in that firelit room."-Lindsey Hoffman

~

For me, becoming an adult has meant learning how to balance my running with the rest of my life, learning when to stay still and when to leave, learning how to both break my own heart and let it heal.  This spring, while trying to decide whether to keep my job in California or abandon it, knowing that there were places where I'd fit better, a friend asked me whether I was making decisions out of excitement or fear.  You can't keep yourself on a path because you're afraid to step off.  She said.  

Lately when I run, I'm less fast than I used to be.  I strap on old flats and put ipod ear buds in my ears.  I let my body sync into the rhythm of the path I'm on, breathe deeply, and try to remember to look up.

Roots

Dune hiking  10/23/11

Michigan is a peninsula, almost an island, surrounded by 3,200 miles of Great Lake coastline.  In my glacier-

carved state, you can never be more than six miles from a river or lake--a stark difference between the place I grew up and Iowa, where I spent three years as a graduate student.  My last year in graduate school, two friends and I decided we needed to be near big water, at least for a weekend, so we planned a last-minute beach-camping trip in late October.  We drove the seven hours from Ames, Iowa to Warren Dunes State Park in Michigan, pitched our tents in the dark, then walked by cell-phone light on a wooded path toward the Lake.  When the forest opened into dunes, we switched off our light, dropped to our butts, palms on the sand, faces toward the sky.  We took off our shoes and socks and walked barefoot on the empty beach.  The moon striped and shadowed the dunescape.  We thought about abandoning our tents, sleeping on the sand, and waking up dew-spattered to the sound of the lake lapping the shore but instead we stayed on the beach after midnight, drifting in and out of conversations about goodness and God, books and wilderness, history and the universe, before walking back to our campground in the dark. We raised questions which felt good to ask, and when we no longer knew what to say, we silenced and listened to waves swell against the beach.

~

 Lake Chelan School District offered me the job as para educator at the Holden Village School on July 17th, 2012 over the phone.  I received the phone call in the evening, in the parking lot of Grand Mere State Park, where I'd spent the day (my first real "day-off" of the summer) swimming in my underwear and a tank top in Lake Michigan with two friends and a former professor.  It had been almost a hundred degrees, sunny.  The sand burnt my feet.  Lake Michigan felt like bathwater. I'd interviewed that morning, via Skype, and spent the three hour drive west toward the beach retracing my words, wondering about every sentence I'd said.

When I got to the beach, I shimmied out of my jean shorts and slipped into Lake Michigan, weaving through the rocks until I reached sandy-bottomed water deep enough to cover me to my shoulders. I lay back in the lake and let the waves carry me so that my shirt puckered against my stomach and my hair drifted around me, mirroring the motion of the water.  The sun beamed against my pale skin.  My forehead freckled.  That day, all four of us tried to do the dead man's float. We did handstands in the shallow water.  We opened our eyes underwater to see the way the lake magnified our feet.  When we stopped playing, we found a spot shallow enough to stand, circled and talked.  I told them about my interview.  Two of the people I was with, my friend John, and my former professor Allison, knew Holden Village well. John's parents had met in Holden Village when they were both transient twenty-something volunteers, chopping wood and shoveling snow in return for room and board.  Allison visited Holden for a winter when she was fresh out of college, still trying to form her ideas about writing, reading, faith, and vocation.  We talked about my potential job while lifting our chin over Lake Michigan waves, wriggling our toes in the water-stacked sand.

~

Hiking to Hart Lake from Holden Village, 5/30/11

In 2011, when I volunteered as part of Holden Village's lawn and garden crew, I spent entire days weeding.   I knelt on an old kick-board in the shadow of Cascade peaks, wearing garden gloves and a cowboy hat and pulled dandelions and grass from rock beds of native flowers and herbs.  I learned to love roots:  The texture of tendrils in my palm, the way they laced around my fingers, the way something so fragile could hold a whole plant upright, delivering water and nutrients from the ground.  The roots I pulled from the garden reminded me of Mona Hatoum's artwork which I'd seen in 2009 at the Des Moines Art Center, grids she'd crafted from strands of human hair: delicate, unexpected, breathtakingly beautiful.  I scooped the roots into buckets to heap in the forest, because even torn, the roots possessed the potential to re-sprout life in our compost pile and we didn't want grass growing in the dirt we carefully sifted for flower boxes.

Earlier this summer, less than a year later, I felt torn from every place I'd ever planted myself.  I left Washington with most of my belongings loose in the back of my car, my floor-mats still sandy from trips to the coast, without closure or a clear idea of where I'd go next.  I'd taken a job teaching outdoor education to low income kids in California, a job I'd initially been excited about, but began to dread as the September start date approached.  I worried about beginning again in a place I knew no one.  I worried about not having housing. I tried to picture myself working three days a week at a camp, spending Mondays, Fridays and weekends WWOOFing at a farm, camping in a field for free, and living out of my car.  The freedom I thought I wanted left me feeling weeded from stability, from community, from the support of family, and the lifestyle that let me stand up straight and face sun-ward.  Halfway to Spokane, my first road-trip stop on the way back to Michigan, I dialed my boss and quit the job I said I'd take. My voice shook:  "I just can't do it".  In Spokane that night my friend Chef John, a man I'd met in Holden Village the year before, made me salad, cut me bread, and poured me a glass of wine.  He sat on the porch with me while I described the phone call I'd made earlier that day. He listened, pressing his face every time my voice quaked, keeping his tone calm as he reassured me, You did the right thing, you will be fine.  I drove the next seventeen hundred fifty-six miles knowing that I'd rendered myself jobless.  I spent a stretch of Montana throwing up, spewing cherries I'd purchased in Eastern Washington into pink piles on the side of the road, while prairie dogs skittered around my heaving body.

~

In early 2011, despite my impending graduation from Iowa State's MFA Program, I felt rooted.  I grounded myself in routine and community: In breakfast stir-fries cooked from seasonal vegetables savored every Friday morning at my friend Liz's apartment, in Saturday afternoons spent dirt-crusted and sweating, harvesting onions or rainbow chard at Mustard Seed Community Farm, in the lessons I planned for the environmental composition class I taught at the university, in dinners prepared nightly in my friend John's kitchen cooked with vegetables or fish we'd selected together at Wheatsfield Co-op, in cardboard box fort-building I did with my professor's kids, in back porch nights spent drinking Sierra Nevada and listening to the hum of freight trains with my housemate, in barefoot summer walks scattered with fireflies and conversation.  It was the longing to be grounded that kept drawing me back to Holden Village, even before I saw the Lake Chelan Public School job posting, I wanted to return to somewhere I'd already been and loved, to work with the same group of students all year, to settle my body and mind long enough to root myself in my environment.

The Lady of the Lake--the ferry from Chelan to Lucerne
3/27/12

The Holden Village School has thirteen students, grades kindergarten through twelve.  The students hike and snowshoe, influence curriculum and help each other learn.  The village hosts guests from all over the world and in the past students have met with marine biologists, exchange students from Afghanistan, students from Australia, scientists testing the health of the creek, singer-songwriter Josh Ritter, and a woman who worked with Christian Peacemaker Teams in Palestine as part of their curriculum.  When I visited Holden Village last spring, the school's lone senior presented a project she'd labored over for months, an extensive research paper on world religions.  I danced at her prom, which Holden Village hosted outside, under Christmas lights, aluminum stars, and Cascade peaks.  I attended her graduation which took place on a baseball field, to pay tribute to the softball season she missed in order to move to Holden Village as a boarding student.  Everyone wore caps and she threw the an opening pitch before giving her own graduation speech.

~

Lake Chelan Public Schools offered me a job on July 17th, 2012, after a day I'd spent swimming in Lake Michigan.  My friends and I had just returned from dinner at a fancy restaurant where we'd eaten escargot and drank wine, still wet and sandy from our day swimming at the lake.  The sun hadn't set yet but the horizon had started to pink.  When I got back to my car I had one missed call and one message.  Kelly from Lake Chelan Schools wanted me to call him back.  My phone flickered a low battery sign and I had to turn on my car and plug my phone into the dashboard charger to talk.  John, Allison, and Ellen waited outside my window.  When I gave them the thumbs up, Allison jumped a little.  John called his parents.

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Big water calms me.  To get to Holden, you take a ferry and travel fifty-five miles up Lake Chelan, the third deepest lake in the country (with a depth of 1,486 feet)--a fjord which, like my home-state of Michigan, still bears evidence to the slow scrape of ice-age glaciers--to Lucerne where a school bus takes you up another eleven miles.  When you finally exit the bus, everyone in the village waits for your arrival, clapping and holding signs, offering welcome even if you come to Holden as a stranger.  This week as I've packed, I've imagined myself making the journey, a trip I've always taken with friends, by myself.  I've imagined sitting with my face pressed to bus-glass, watching Lake Chelan disappear beneath the switchbacks, waiting for the bus to stop, anticipating my first steps into the mountains.