I know you’ve been wondering when I would hurry up and write to you! though you probably didn’t think it would take this long…?!?
It’s been a strange time actually, these years, since leaving there and returning here, mostly good, but even that which wasn’t, was essential.
I think about you all the time. Although I rarely read the BCH, I stumble across it now and then and that’s how I found out that Lily got married! Oh my god. I would love to hear all about it. And Raven, too, of course. Hopefully you can fill me in on all your news before too long.
So, yes, I think about you, your girls, your wolves, that boyfriend you had for awhile, just all the stuff, and it makes me miss you. I wish we could have been closer.
I don’t think, though, that those mountains over there are conducive to fostering much love and intimacy between people at all, and women, I believe, seem to suffer more that way. Loneliness. And such awful isolation.
Do you remember the first time we ran into each other again, after I’d come back to Baker from Camp Pendleton? Well, it was at that gas station at the south end of town, a Chevron, I think, and I was working there, pumping gas, it was the job I got to get the water turned back on at my house though I ended up keeping it until February. You pulled in in your old Blazer with Bubba in the back and that other dog, a tall, lanky one, and maybe a third, I don’t remember. (I think the tall and lanky one was the same breed Pam Houston wrote about in “Sighthound.” I hope you’ve read it. If not, I will send it along).
You’d intended, some time before I left, to go visit the wolves in Idaho or Montana. Did you ever get to go? How are your wolves? I wonder how many you have still. There’d been a new one, I think, a few years ago not long after I left, and if I recall right, you’d brought him into town to live instead of up in the kennels.
I caught some news about Bella since Bill Clinton stopped by her place for coffee. Whatever news it was it was something about her getting fined by the city for drawing with chalk on the sidewalk in front of her store to advertise for Miners’ Jubilee. Lord. They pulled that crap on me all the time. They are such crazy fuckers.
Who do you know around town? I saw that the woman who taught pottery at the art center died. She was young! I taught her daughters piano for awhile. Nice girls. Lacy, I think one was named. Who was that other woman who taught there, she hung out at Goose Creek (a little too often) and she was talented and smart, had children, and had a husband who got arrested for videotaping their daughter unknowingly while she was doing all the things girls do in their bedrooms. I remember the day it happened – she came by and told me – and the way she found out was she stuck the tape in the player for the kids when they came home from school, not knowing what was on it until it started to play.
Do you know the Herizas? Well, you do because one of them (Claire?) was Raven’s doctor I think, but what about Kelly and Mae? They aren’t real Herizas actually, just married to them. I’d started making friends with Kelly before I left – and she left too, for Montana I think – and Mae had just bought a building downtown to start a bakery. Kelly’s amazing. She doesn’t even possess a weak spot. She couldn’t pass the Oregon bar so she shrugged it off and went elsewhere. I was teaching her guitar which is how we became friends. She was all hip to the Hobson family from being in the Heriza clan and it was always nice to be around people who didn’t need the whole story explained to understand. She brought me the Lucinda Williams cd one afternoon, the car wheels on a gravel road one, and I think the buena vista social club too.
It was you, though, who turned me onto to emmylou’s newest one, at least back then, with red dirt girl on it. I remember the day Raven asked you if that was a true story or not.
I saw also, that Mrs. Levinger died. I took care of her flower gardens for several years. She was really, really nice.
This will crack you up: I’m in a Neil Young Cover Band. NYCB for short. Right now it’s just three of us. We do all Neil Young songs. Sometimes it makes me think of you when I’m playing them because you and Tim (that boyfriend you had) went over to Boise to see him, and I remember you telling me how cool it was when he played Rockin’ in the Free World. I saw his Greendale tour a few years back which was one of the top five shows I’ve ever seen out of probably three hundred. I saw Lucinda too which didn’t impress me much but I also saw the Pretenders which impressed me a very great deal. Chrissy Hynde. She’s the best.
I don’t go out to see music much actually. Busy, broke. I just work, mainly. But I did see Steve Earle two of the three times he’s been here; the last one I didn’t go to because I was feeling sorry for myself. I’m thinking I’ll be up for the next one though.
Speaking of cowboys, you see Joe around? I used to call every few months and check in on his dad. Considering he was one of the most racist, misogynistic old men I’ve ever met I still sort of liked him. He lives up Auburn. I used to go up and visit him and sit with him in his basement den and watch the weather channel or the hunting channel or the rodeos. I kid you not. He’d cook me “brizgit” and canned corn and white bread with gravy on top. Real gravy he made himself in a cast iron skillet. It was so good. He bought a lot of flowers from me. He brought his geraniums inside, like I did, each fall, and some of them were like small trees. The last time I called over there, probably a year ago, he was laid up with the flu and the woman who answered said she was his wife, that they’d gotten married some months before. I was surprised because his girlfriend died not too long before that – she’d gotten sick with cancer right before I left. So he didn’t pussy-foot around being single very long. And his wife had died just a few months before he took up with the girlfriend so apparently Mr. Bullard does not like to be a man alone.
All of them, the Bullards, are from west Texas. One of the older boys got a job over in Haines or Union somewhere, working on a ranch, and moved his family up and the whole rest of the Bullards followed, Mr. and Mrs. before she died, and their four sons and families and daughter and her son. That’s a lot of people! I have to admit it was a rather perverse fascination I had with them; for the most part they freaked me out with their talk of niggers and beating their kids and drop kicking their dogs and back handing their wives. Maybe I thought it would be good material someday but I doubt now that that’s ever going to happen. All those Bastard Out of Carolina type stories have lost their appeal to me. Pretty much just makes me sick now.
I could tell you a story about a murder down there in west Texas that happened when they all still lived there. It involved a mixed up kid who snuck into someone’s trailer one night while she was at work, dressed up in her undies and then fell asleep on her bed. I think he was retarded, actually, and not just mixed up. But like I said, that sort of stuff makes me sick now so I won’t tell it except just this: nobody went to jail because, as the storytellers assured me: nobody deserved to. She shot him in self defense.
Anyway, that’s how I know Joe’s still alive which amazes me actually. Well, at least he was the last time I called Mr. Bullard. Cowboy Joe possessed a certain wily charm but man oh man is he nothing but trouble.
You always managed living over there much better than I and I was always awed by that. Such strength and self-sufficiency and grace. Well, you are a ballerina! I hope it’s still a good place for you. What are your plans? Will you stay over there even after Raven leaves? I can picture it, in a way, in your pretty little house; the town absorbed you easier than me, more sympathetic. Maybe that’s because you were more sympathetic to them, I don’t know. I tried! They’re all just such a handful. Did you ever know Louis? the guy who had the tomato farm down a few blocks from me? He’s the one who got me started in the nursery business. I worked for him one summer, mixing soil and transplanting. He showed me the holes in his gut where his first wife had shot him or stabbed him, I don’t know. Said he deserved it thoroughly. I mean, good lord! His present wife was Doris and she worked in his greenhouses too. He was mean to her, always spoke sharply, rough. She kept her head down, you know what I mean. They were both in their 70s then. One day he sent me into his house for something. Doris didn’t see me coming, and that’s how I accidentally caught her sitting on the couch crying. Just way too much sorrow over there for me. I guess that’s what it was.
I met Louis through Jamie, his granddaughter, who was my guitar student. She left Baker after high school, got married and moved to Portland and had a baby. She kept in touch for quite awhile. She was playing over here in some garage bands; I lost track of her when her phone number changed.
And I still keep up with Cassie Morrissey – she was the daughter of the Morrisseys out the Richland highway; her mom taught the Head Start program I think…? Her dad didn’t do a damn thing other than smoke pot every day for 40+ years. She had a twin brother – Collin. Were they in Lily’s class? Anyway, Cass took off to K. Falls after high school but was back in Baker all the time and stayed with me sometimes. So she married a guy and became a stepmom – he’s quite a bit older than her I think – and now she has a two year old and a baby as well. She was always good pals with Chris, two, three years older than him. I got an SOS email from her just awhile ago, she was having a meltdown over their finances, their mortgage, they run a small ISP business and I think it wasn’t doing very well, and she was telling me they just wanted to sell their house and move into their RV and pay off all their bills and start over again except her parents were freaking out telling her she was a loser and such. Bah. Crazy fuckers. I saw on her MySpace page a bit ago that she was rushing around packing so I guess they got it sold. Cassie was such a cool kid. I only taught her piano for a year before she was past anything I had any inkling about. But she still came by each week anyway, and later, more like every day. Her twin didn’t share much of her DNA though; in all those years of living there, without ever locking my doors (there never even was a key for the front one) leaving my nursery open all night, nothing was ever stolen except for ONE TIME when Collin Morrissey stole my Nirvana cd. Ticked me off.
I don’t tell many of these stories over here. First of all, Portlanders think Bend is eastern Oregon and if they’ve actually been, it’s generally passing through on the 84 or maybe a trip up to the Wallowas. Usually someone’s had a bad experience with some ignorant SOB at a gas station or restaurant along the way, or they know someone who has (which isn’t hard to believe at all) and that’s the extent of it. But it’s something more than that too; nobody really gets why somebody would leave here for there, and then stay. In your case it’d come across as even stranger, this tall gorgeous immensely gifted Jewish woman from Long Island throwing it all away by living there. It’s weird but it almost feels like it taints me, saying I lived there; it’s like people shake their heads and think I must be a little off.
Nobody would ever believe your stories, either, like when you drove Raven to California for her liver transplant and waited alone at the hospital until a donor was found while she kept getting sicker. I don’t remember the exact details, only the gist of it; like how you knew something was wrong with her even though your doctor husband said no, and how finally, when you couldn’t deny her skin was turning yellow, how you took her to another doctor anyway. Something like that. Something crazy.
I remember when you told me the story later, after I’d moved back from Eugene. And there was some part about how Lily lived while you were away, wasn’t she basically staying home alone, with people checking in now and then? Something along those lines. I remember stifling my impulse to say jesus Debbie wasn’t there anybody who could step in and help out? because that isn’t how things work there, and it’s not out of cruelty or neglect, it’s just because it takes all day to merely survive and people can only share a sliver of time and resources.
That incident, and others like it, marked me. I thought of it recently. I had to leave a place I’d been living, and I should have left earlier because it had gotten funky but I didn’t, I stayed, and when I finally couldn’t deal with it anymore I had to ask some friends for help and it was upsetting to them that I hadn’t said anything earlier. And on one level I see their point: it does get ridiculous to always take so much crap. But I was realizing the past few days while thinking about you and working on this letter, that that’s the kind of women we are, you and me, and all the rest. You just get up in the morning and do what you have to do. It’s always the kids. We’d be different without our children. And it made me realize also, that I have this very stubborn loyalty to the way I was, to the ways we had to live over there. We had to be rather fierce to make it, and don’t you think it’s almost a code of honor of sorts? I don’t know. No one ever really talked about things on that level. It’s as if we admitted to the depth of it, the enormous amount of energy and focus it took to live, we’d fall apart completely. I remember sensing it and feeling it when we’d meet each others’ eyes, as if the truth was just there below the surface. But nobody ever put it on the table. At least not that I ever heard.
But everybody has it, everybody who’s not truly crazy, or dead. Babette does. Even she’s got it. I got to know her because she shopped at Goose Creek, bought lots of flowers from me, and paintings, later, too. In fact she and Diana Brown were the first people to buy my paintings – I had them stacked in a corner in the greenhouse, trying to ignore what seemed at the time a nutty impulse to paint on old glass windows. It is true that the initial thing Babette will tell you is that she was the first Sports Illustrated swimsuit model. She is definitely a diva. Later she might tell you about dating Mick Jaggar, about her career as a model, about being discovered on a beach in Florida when she was a teenager, a recent immigrant from Germany. And then she has some other stories, pretty nasty dark ones, involving escapes and hiding and running and being followed and being scared that she may or may not tell, I don’t know. I’m thinking she doesn’t very often so I won’t repeat them here.
And then she’ll tell you how she owns Pine Valley Lodge and the rest of those buildings up in Halfway and if you go up and visit it’s fucking amazing what she’s done up there. It’s an incredible feat, all that renovation and decorating, the restaurant and the rooms to rent. And even though she finally married Dale and it’s true he’s a fine artist and hard worker himself, she’s the one whose vision got it done.
I went to her wedding, actually. It was up on a hill she owns outside of town where Dale was going to build her house. Then, though, she had teepees set up. There were maybe twenty of us there, all of whom had traipsed up the hill on foot in the near-dark to get to the top. She and Dale said their vows just as the full moon rose.
But after you’ve known Babette for awhile you start noticing things. Like the varicose veins on her legs that bulge out and cause her a lot of pain. But she’s still up each day before dawn and in her bakery working. And even though nowadays she has her cool, rich friends flying in from Florida (that’s where she met Dale – she was living in the swamp in a travel trailer after her escape and he lived on a houseboat and sold his cool art. Is that just so romantic or what?) to stay at her B&Bs, that first winter she and Dale were there they lived in the Love Shack, pre-renovation, on a dirt floor with only a woodstove to cook on. She had the same experience the rest of us do, falling in love with the country in summer and fall, only to realize the severity of our miscalculation after we’re already snowed in for the winter. So, Babette’s got it too, I think anyway, that fierceness that comes from living through a certain amount of danger and then, never really shaking it entirely, and, thereby, never being able to quite accurately calculate when you’re drifted too far from shore. (Dylan).
I loved those mountains though, and the desert, and the big fat bolts of lightning striking right in the middle of town. I loved the way the temperature could drop fifty degrees during one summer night so you’d need a blanket by morning and I loved even more when a Chinook blew in late winter in the middle of the night. Do you ever think, on nights like that, that absolutely everybody must be awake, stepping outside for a minute to feel how 32 degrees feels like t-shirt weather after eighteen below? I used to rouse my boys when the Chinook blew in. I’ll have to ask them one of these days if they remember that.
I had visions over there, and saw ghosts, and heard singing in languages unfamiliar. One night while sleeping I was visited by a buffalo woman. Another night I awoke and my room was packed with spirits of people who had died. Packed! with no elbow room left over! The city prompts other sorts of awakenings and now I’ll probably always stay, but I really did love that land. I’ll forever carry it around.
Presently, I’m living alone in a big old house, for the time being, and doing some painting, walls and trim, to earn my keep. It’s up for sale so I won’t be here long. After this, after Christmas, I’m moving into the upstairs of a house owned by a hip, sweet woman so I’ll probably stay there awhile. Before this I lived on a refuge for macaws (I thought of you often, on one of your trips up to Alaska with those damn birds of yours. Did you take both of your daughters that time or was Raven not even born yet? And how many dogs? Had you already brought your first wolf back? And didn’t you like meet some women along the way, at some roadside attraction, who offered to take care of the birds until you passed back through since they’d proven not the types to travel well? God Debbie. I hope you’re working on your book) where I was a caretaker. There’s something like eighty macaws living there in an outdoor flight. There were goats and chickens and a donkey and a horse, and dogs and cats and lizards. I was there for two years.
My days here aren’t much different than they were over there; I get up at six, work until eight or so at night and lately I’ve started watching Charlie Rose until nine, read for awhile, crash, get up and do it again. I still teach, guitar and piano, I house sit, dog sit and occasionally keep an eye on kids; I have one gig where I walk a dog each day, her name’s Lulu and she’s some sort of Aussie/Black Lab mix for which I get paid $13. Can you believe it? When I keep a dog overnight at my place it’s $20 and when I stay at theirs it’s $25. Hard to believe a person would get paid for that hunh?
But always, I write. I need to be finding myself a career, and I’m making a stab at one producing digital stories, but every minute of every day is about writing. I won’t even date, haven’t in over three years, because it’s pointless; I won’t get married again or ever settle down with someone and since dating really isn’t much fun, why bother. The only time I’m not working or writing is when I’m hanging with my family or playing music with the NYCB. It’s true, I worry about money and I worry that I’m a flake and I worry that I’ll look back someday and say good god why didn’t you have more fun but I think it’s such an integral part of my identity now, being a mother and a writer, that I wouldn’t want to live without those things, wouldn’t know how.
On the home front, my boys are so incredibly good. Both are married, and Chris and Amy have Jefry (no, I didn’t misspell it ;) age 3, and are living in Boise but moving to Portland when their house sells. Josh and Melissa moved last year from Los Angeles to Tacoma and are expecting their first baby on April 18th. We’re still thick as thieves and I see them a lot and talk to them several times a week. They’re all very hard workers and are loyal and kind. I can’t believe how lucky I am to have them; we all weathered the storms and came through better people.
I wasn’t sure until recently that I’d really stay here in Portland. When Chris and Amy told me a few weeks ago that they intend to move here once their house sells, that was the end of the limbo. It made me realize how tentatively I’d been living, kind of one foot in and one out, not able to fully commit to making a home here until I knew where the boys would finally settle. I’ll always live close by them.
I’m sending along a copy of one of my latest projects, a cd of some stories I wrote which I narrated over some songs that I also wrote. I’m sure you’ll recognize your influence on me, your spirit and heart, as much as you’ll recognize the women, the babies and the children, the crow and the cougar, the rocks and sage, the streets and bars and houses, but, most of all, the land.
Hope all is well. Here’s how to find me:
Love,
PS: K.D., the mother of all cow dogs, died a couple of weeks ago. Chris went along on the trip to take her up in the mountains. He said the coyotes were watching when they were leaving.