SGBRSH

things the valley held

As is the case with many good stories, I very nearly did not attend the most pivotal experience of my life to date.

It was mid-2020 and the world had ground to a halt. I had been offered, despite my certainty otherwise, a six-month horse training internship on a bison ranch in South Dakota. It was to begin that October, and I was desperately anxious about it.

I did not know anything firsthand about bison, or ranches. I knew many things firsthand about horses, though even that seemed inadequate in this new setting. I wondered if instead I should go through with my other plan, which was to enroll in a Master’s program in Budapest, studying urban and environmental anthropology. Hungary would surely be doable; this internship, on the other hand, was a wild card.

I asked my mom if she’d ever made a choice that, looking back, directed much of the course of the rest of her life. She told me that she’d almost, very nearly, moved to Alaska when my sister was young to study wolves at university. Instead, she moved to Santa Cruz, where in several years she had acquired a Bachelor’s degree and a husband — my dad. I wondered if in a parallel universe I had been born a wolf biologist’s daughter; myself, but not exactly.

I asked my dad (who, though incredibly well-traveled, had only ever really lived in one place) if he’d ever thought about leaving Santa Cruz and living elsewhere. He said, why would he? Everything he loved was right here — family, friends, good surf, good mountains to ski just a few hours away. Then after a pause he said: I have this feeling that if you take this internship, it will change your life.

I took the internship.

wilder west

The squid boats stayed out in Monterey Bay for months that summer, their lights bobbing in the dark water as we drove home from work at the late-night farmer’s markets in the next city over. My days in those months smelled of strawberries, and gas stations, and the stale-cigarette-hot-engine scent of the old Ford work trucks I drove around town; at night the highway hum of my childhood punctuated my dreams. When the world ground to a halt it felt like everybody came home to Santa Cruz, and for a while in the beginning the quiet uncertain days had the golden haze of summer in high school: lazy, warm, filled with the proximity of lifelong friends and the familiar comfort of sunset walks up the street to stare at the ocean. For a short while I fell for a boy who’d grown up there too; I borrowed a wetsuit and a board and learned to surf; I napped on the back porch and usually had sand on my toes. Despite everything it felt good to be home.

For three weeks in July we had nothing but fog, unsurprising for summer on the Central Coast; when it lifted, the light had turned to autumn. That week at the farmer’s market the wind kicked up, chilly and strong, carrying leaves and the smell of barbecue and coffee and the baritone voice of the vendor across the way hawking fresh peaches.

a mostar dream

The other night I had a dream that went like this: I was in Bosnia, and I was trying to get to Mostar. In my dream, unlike in real life, Mostar was surrounded completely by water, as if the river that bisects the city had become a great moat, or a lake that turned Mostar to an island. To get to the city in my dream, I needed to take a boat. I was with an old friend, and we needed to go there so that I could show her the city. We boarded a small sailboat with several other people whose faces I can’t recall; a man stood at the helm to steer, feet planted wide on the wooden planks. I sat in the front of the boat as we moved quickly across the water. I could feel the wind – it was summertime warm – and I held on to the base of the sail so that I could lean out over the bow and drag my fingertips through the clear blue cool water. We made it across, and stepped out onto the dock with the other passengers beside other similar boats. We walked up from the dock, the landscape dry and hot, though with hints of lush green in the corner of my eye at the water’s edge. We made it to the street, and with a rush of giddiness I realized that I knew exactly where we were — just down the street from Stari Most, the Old Bridge, on the east side of the river. Like stepping into a tunnel of bowed branches in a forest in order to enter the fairy realm, I knew in my dream that to properly be in the city we needed to cross Stari Most from the west side to the east side. I could see the Old Bridge ahead of me, kept catching glimpses of it through the buildings and trees; I could feel the heat of the sun on my skin, could smell the dry air and the scents of the marketplace that I knew was just across the river, could feel the warmth of the street cobbles beneath my sandals. I was filled with the most buoyant joy to be there, and such an exciting anticipation and urgency to cross the Old Bridge again. Just before I woke up, I had started to run towards the west side of the city, into the marketplace and quiet neighborhoods that I knew were there, every step of the way familiar to me as if I had walked those streets yesterday instead of nearly two years ago. Ahead, I could feel Stari Most waiting.

When I woke, before I opened my eyes, I held Mostar in my mind for a few moments. I imagined that I was waking up in the hostel where I used to work; I imagined that I could hear the call of the muezzin echoing through the streets and drifting in through the window. I imagined getting up and lighting the stove in the tiny kitchen that doubled as hostel reception to boil a pot of eggs for the guests to have for breakfast like I had done each morning. I imagined, later in the day, walking through the streets, across Stari Most, into the marketplace, imagined, again, feeling the warmth of the cobbles beneath my sandals. I was comforted, more than anything, to find it so alive in my mind, so solid and bright and real after so many years.

from the notebook: summer 2020

Before I came home to California from Spain, I stopped for two weeks in Edinburgh to pack up the things I’d left there and to see friends I might not see again for a long time. I stayed with one of my best friends in her third-story studio apartment above the Royal Mile; every night we curled up to sleep under a heavy duvet, and woke to the sound of church bells from the cathedral outside the window. We sat in comfortable silence often; we listened to music, and made dinner, and invited more people over to help us eat it, and after we ate we sat on the carpet in a circle and talked about dreams.

One friend told the story of a dream he’d had about a tiger and a tower. The tower, standing in a meadow and made of stone, had no visible doors or stairs, so in his dream he scaled the wall and climbed in through the window. Inside the tower bookshelves covered every wall, filled with hundreds of identical unlabeled white books. At the center of the tower sat a tiger, dressed in a waistcoat and a judge’s wig, feverishly scribbling away, filling yet another unlabeled book. As he wrote, the tiger spoke, and he spoke about how he had to keep writing, but to be able to write he’d had to build the tower. So he built the tower around himself and wrote and wrote and wrote, filling book after book with words.

I’ve had vivid dreams my whole life, and I love hearing other people talk about theirs; there’s something about the unexpected images that the sleeping mind invents that is endlessly fascinating to me. This image — the waistcoat-clad tiger, building a stone tower around himself, spending his days trying to get the perfect words down — really struck me. I’d just spent two months in Spain, careening around both physically and emotionally; I was very much outside of my comfort zone, having been unwillingly removed from the life I’d built in Scotland (outside of my tower, if you will) and I’d written nothing more than scribbled notes in my phone and my notebook. Nothing that I considered to be of substance. But sometimes the things you need to hear come to you not in your own dreams, but in the dreams of others, because when I heard the story of the tiger and tower my first thought was: how can he write if he is not in the world?

I spend a lot of time trying to make sure my writing is perfect, and can never quite get there. Even now, months after coming home to California, I still have pages of notes from Spain that I’ve left untouched because I just don’t know what to do with them. So I decided to not do anything with them. They’re fine as they are. They’re true. They were written on planes and buses, late at night and early in the morning, while sitting in hostel common rooms and on stone walls on sunny hillsides and on friend’s couches. They’re far from everything, but they are some of the things I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget. Here they are — straight from the notebook.

bodies of writing

16 April 2020

“I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.”

— Mary Oliver, “Toad”

A few months ago (before the seeming end of the world) I was taking a shower in my hostel in Madrid, absentmindedly leaning against the button on the wall to prevent the hot water from shutting off mid-shampoo. I was looking down at my stomach, which was still in the fragile queasy stages of post-drinking recovery. It was late at night, and I felt very tired, and I had this thought: my body doesn’t need to be anything right now but alive. Everything else doesn’t really matter. Just alive is enough.

I don’t usually write about my body or body image in general, not because it’s something I don’t think about or talk about, but just because it’s a hand of cards that I prefer to play close to my chest. When I write, especially about my experiences while traveling, I find that like a magpie I tend to focus on colorful details, the small things I’ll want to remember in seventy years. The familiar tang of Heinz ketchup on my tongue that day I ate a whole plate of fries in a cafe in the rain in Mostar; the sweet bready smell of the breweries on a lightly frosted morning in Edinburgh; the soft coo of doves in the rafters and the way the sunlight reflected off the green pools to dapple the carved walls in Granada’s Alhambra. Sensory details. Details that I couldn’t have gathered without my body.

traveling hopefully into the unknown with a little information

9 November 2019

As I write this, I have twenty-one days remaining in Edinburgh, almost to the exact hour. On the twenty-third of November, I’ll catch a flight to Madrid, where I’ll stay for three months. I have very little in the way of concrete plans after I arrive; likely I will often wander aimlessly through the city, sit on many trains and buses through the countryside and urban neighborhoods, probably drink more red wine than I should, and hopefully learn a little Spanish and do a little writing. In my most romantic dreams it is all very Hemingway-esque.

In the meantime, however, I am in what I can only call a protracted state of leaving. I have been leaving Edinburgh for at least the last three months, if not longer; it is possible that I have been leaving since I arrived, something which I grudgingly admit is probably a good description of my general state of existence over the past several years.

I seem to always be leaving in the autumn. I left Queenstown in the autumn, which was also the season I first arrived; I left California for Scotland in the autumn, and now once again it is autumn and I’m leaving. Of course, the flip side to this coin is that autumn, for me, is a season of recurring arrival. In many ways this is incredibly fitting for what autumn represents in both nature and in culture: the departure of summer, the harvest, the arrival of winter; the dying of the light, but within that darkness the certainty of rebirth in the spring. Autumn — always my favorite anyways — is the most liminal time of the year; it is the airport terminal of the seasons, and, fittingly, that is where I usually seem to find myself when the leaves begin to turn.

prayer from a stranger

1 November 2019

For months, fifteen squares of Mallorcan sunshine sat patiently inside my camera, held delicately in the dark, waiting to be stabilized into positive image and paper. Time, in this way, was frozen: light transformed into traces on silver halides, and traces transformed into visible image through chemical alchemy until — on a cold day in late October — I held in my hands an object that was once a moment. Magic.

Mallorca itself was a revelation. To step off the plane from Edinburgh, cool and staid even in the summertime, into the sultry Mediterranean heat — overwhelming. I was blasted, drenched, baked by the sun as I haven’t been in God knows how long; I was heated to my core, in my bones, crisped and browned and sanded and watered and salted by the sea. On the very first day we wandered through the scorched sandstone alleyways of Palma, licking dripping gelato under draped fig trees. Much later — after a sweaty sardine-can bus ride, a twilight swim, a seafood dinner, and a dream interpretation — we tipped backwards into the still-warm sand under the evening sky to watch stars wheel across the horizon, the night air velvety and the same temperature as my skin.

notes from a winter in edinburgh

31 May 2019

One morning in the autumn — probably October — I woke up with the sunrise and looked out my window to a gilded sky. The rising sun hit the clouds at just the right angle, and for a few moments the entire world was golden light streaming in across my sheets, an echo of my first morning in Queenstown: waking in the darkness of a strange hostel room, peering out through the heavy curtains to a sky painted gold behind the still-dark mountains. These are moments of compressed time and space, like a face, displaced but familiar, glimpsed on a crowded street.

a light blue line

1 October 2018

There’s a canal that begins in the city right outside my flat; it’s called the Union Canal, and it runs for miles — if you wanted, you could follow it all the way out of the city and across to Falkirk. I knew about this canal long before I moved here. In the months when living in Edinburgh was still just something I imagined, I liked to “walk” through the city on Google Maps, following the street names that I knew in the city center and more often than not ending up following the light blue line of the canal, zooming in on the belt of green surrounding it, imagining what it looked like and smelled like and what kinds of people peered into its waters.

I took a run there tonight. It was warm and windy and still light out at half past seven, and walking downstairs to take the recycling out with my flatmates a gust blew up carrying the smell of wet foliage and it made me too restless to go back inside.

twenty ways to spend your first and last summer in berkeley

14 August 2018

1. Promise yourself that you’re going to have a mellow summer. Promptly sign up for three classes, two jobs, and one internship. Grumble at yourself about it for the next twelve weeks, but secretly enjoy being busy.

2. Drive over to Marin for a hike with a friend. Stop at the top of the trail for lunch and wander through the dried grasses and oak trees until you find a perfect spot protected from the cold ocean wind. Realize it’s not very protected at all when the wind kicks up for real and blasts pollen straight into your hay-fever prone face; spend the next three hours sneezing violently and feeling your eyes swell nearly shut from rubbing them so much. On the drive home, eyes successfully deflated, sit in the passenger seat and eat crumbling pancakes smeared with peanut butter that you carried along with you in a ziploc bag.

3. Head to work in hilly Oakland and come around a bend in the road and see the city and all its lights spread out below you. It’s beautiful. It kind of reminds you of Auckland. Catch your breath and let your eyes fill with tears, just for a moment.