Church of the Dog (6 page)

Sometimes I wonder now why I made it so difficult for myself. Why didn’t I just wear the same thing everyone else wore? Why didn’t I just grow my hair and slip under the radar? I had just lost my father. I really didn’t need any more heart-ache. I guess, in retrospect, I was angry—so angry that I didn’t know what to do. Maybe all that black and that spiky hair was the only way I could express my depression and anger without hurting other people. I don’t know. Maybe everyone’s teenage years are an era of temporary insanity.

That would explain why teaching high school requires acting more like a police officer, something I never had any desire to do. I hate this role. I feel boxed in. I spend the day wanting to scream, “I don’t want to be a public school teacher! I want to be the wild woman I truly am!” But I don’t scream.

I wait until after school, and find an old dirt road where motor vehicles are supposedly not allowed. As I get away from the main road, I lose my restrictive clothes and just enjoy feeling free. Nothing sexual about it. I just can’t wear my teacher costume for one more minute. And after a couple of miles I start to feel more like myself.

The next day when the students enter my class, I know from looking at their auras that something is not right. They look darker, and the more joyous colors, like the yellows and turquoises, are missing. Some have visible leaks where the rainbow spills out of the normal egg-shaped sphere.

I listen to their conversations carefully and put together that most had been watching the U.S. bomb Iraq on the TV in other classrooms. There is a chemical weapon storage facility nearby, and I can tell this weighs heavily on their minds. They speculate about whether or not Three Hills would be a target. They ask me lots of questions, most of which I don’t know the answer to, including one about the location of the bomb shelter. I just reply that personally I’d rather die than be locked in a basement with a couple hundred teenagers and no bathrooms.

I feel my energy drain, too. It’s almost like there’s this black hole created by fear that sucks all our spirits in, even those of us who do not believe we are in any danger at all. What people don’t understand is that thoughts have energetic reality. I watch their fearful thoughts come out of their heads, float around as black bubbles, and land on other people. Energetically, it’s like being in a room with twenty people puking on you. Everyone, including me, gets completely covered in negative thought-form vomit. I feel myself get weaker and weaker, and slide into a chair before I fall.

When class ends, I go into the little office part of my room, shut the door and the blinds, and lose it—or release it, depending on how you want to look at it. I’m rattled for so many reasons. Certainly the psychic pollution is a huge factor, but so is the sense that a scab had been picked in the part of the world where my father had fallen in combat. And it has something to do with being unexpectedly put into the position where I am asked to explain the very darkest acts of humankind. It has something to do with being asked what kind of a world we live in. Even though this picture of the world we live in as seen on CNN during bombing coverage is not the whole picture, in the moment it seemed like it, and I didn’t have an answer for them.

At first I’m reluctant to leave my office, knowing my emotions, so close to the surface, are obvious to anyone. But then I think to myself, I am a woman, and thank God for me. Why should I be ashamed that it hurts me to watch children in fear? I walk out of school with my eyes bloodshot, my skin blotchy, my nose red, and my head up. I am a woman. I care deeply about children. I will not apologize for that, and I will not hide it to make others more comfortable. I am a woman, and I have a different truth to broadcast.

I wonder when honoring our truth became a sign of weakness, and I feel for all the women before me who were patronized for broadcasting their emotional truth.

I go to the phone booth outside the front of the school and call Gram. “Hi,” I try to say cheerfully when she answers.

“You’ve been watching the news, haven’t you?” she asks accusingly yet compassionately. I never could fool her into thinking everything was okay when it was not. “You know better than to watch the news, honey.”

“Gram, just remind me about how everything is in divine order?”

“Everything is in divine order.”

“And how really there is no right or wrong?” I sound pathetic.

“There is no right or wrong. There is no good or bad. Everything simply is.”

“Thanks, Gram.”

That night Gram shows up in my dream at my house. “I thought maybe you could use a little vacation,” she explains. “How about tonight we go somewhere you want to go?”

The next thing I know, we are praying in a Nepalese Buddhist monastery. The monks look up and smile at us, and we smile back.

Another request. And this time he said please.

The first snow. The first snow of every year haunts me. I sit in front of the window at dusk and watch the heavy flakes float down. I remember how the thick flakes hit the windshield of my dad’s pickup and splattered in a way that reminded me of crocheted blankets the old women sold at church bazaars. It was one of my last thoughts before we all went over the edge.

I hate the first snow each year. I shake my head to break free from the memories in the window and go help myself to a drink of what was supposed to be spruce beer even though I swore I wouldn’t drink that shit.

Then, with my cup in hand, I surrender to the snow and walk into the night wishing that by virtue of the same weather I could cross the line to where my parents live.

The snow silences the town. That’s another reason I hate snow. Snow is so very silent. It doesn’t splash like water. I focus on the sound of my boots’ soles squeaking in the dry snow. The sound keeps me sane.

I make my way back to the house, grab Lavern, and take her in my room with me so I can listen to her breathe as I fall asleep.

A woman with long golden red hair, glowing white skin, and a sheer, short, white dress sits on the back of a white horse that has white feathers hanging in its long mane. “You really need to come home,” she says to me.

“What?” I say.

“You really need to come home,” she says again.

“Why?” I ask.

“Just do it.”

“I don’t want to go home,” I say.

“You really need to come home. Come on,” she says firmly.

I stand on my bed in my boxer shorts while the woman rides the horse alongside my bed. I hold on to her shoulder, slide a leg over the horse, and sit behind her. She turns the horse and begins to walk.

My eyes fly open, and I bolt upright out of a dead sleep. I sit up in bed for a minute, take a couple deep breaths, rub my eyes, and then lie down again, but I don’t sleep. I stare at the ceiling and think that maybe I really do need to go home.

From Valdez I drive up through Keystone Canyon. The dusting of snow we received last night melts off, revealing the autumn colors that dot the lush canyon. The canyon narrows as I continue to drive up. No matter how many times I drive through, I never get tired of all the waterfalls.

Everything opens up at the top of Thompson Pass. I pull over and stare at the endless mountaintops.

I cross the border and enter Canada. I stop in Haines Junction for the night and get a room in a cheap dive.

The next morning I gas up and continue on Highway 1 until it’s time to turn down the Cassiar Highway, notoriously narrow and windy and in a constant state of construction that leaves numerous twenty-mile stretches of dirt between here and there.

Bears, mostly blacks, like to graze on the side of the road where it’s open and easier to walk, and where food is plentiful. Occasionally I have to brake to avoid one in the road, but usually I just have to brake for RVs.

If I had a dollar for every time I drove over a rise to find a damned RV parked in the middle of the road watching a moose, I could take Minda, Paul, and Rob out for a good steak at The Pipeline.

RVs also suck up all the gas so that it’s not uncommon for the rest of us to pull into a town and find they’re out. If you never let your tank get below half, sometimes you can make it the next hundred and fifty miles to the next town with a gas station. Today I reach Dease Lake only to find that two of the three gas stations have signs saying they are out of gas, and the third has a sign saying they will be back in a half hour. Five hours later they return, and I finally get to fill up along with the others who have been waiting. I continue on, and I curse every RV on the road. Bastards.

I stay in Bell II my second night. It’s been turned into a luxurious heli-ski lodge since the last time I drove through.

On day three I reach Highway 97 at Prince George, and the road finally straightens out a little. I stay on it until I reach Kamloops, where I spend my third night. The land around me starts to feel more like home. Tumbleweeds float across the road in the wind.

Finally, on day four, I reach the U.S. border. I drive through Washington State all the way to the Columbia River Gorge. I cross the bridge by McNary Dam and enter Oregon. Finally, Highway 207 takes me all the way back to where I was born.

I feel like a salmon. Salmon swim to the sea when they are young, feed and grow for several years, and get fat. Then they stop eating and begin their journey up the freshwater to their inland birthplaces. They jump anything in their path, determined to go home. I wish I felt that level of determination, but I don’t. I just sat for three and a half days with my foot on the gas pedal. I guess that’s where the comparison ends.

Once salmon get home, they mate and die. The odds of me mating in Three Hills are slim to none. As for the dying, there is a part of me that feels like it’s dying as I return here. But I’m only staying for a week or so. And most of the time I feel ambivalent about my life anyway.

It’s like I’m watching a movie. I’m in the movie, but I’m just sort of a character I don’t care about in a movie I don’t care about. As I watch myself interact with other people in the movie, I don’t really feel anything. I don’t really feel anything at all.

In my dream I’m looking for someone, anyone, to teach me to waltz. I’m walking all over the downtown area of my hometown looking for assistance. I feel an urgency about learning. A song by the Innocence Mission, “My Waltzing Days Are Over,” follows me everywhere I go.

Two different people try to help—one a ranger I knew when I worked in the Olympic Rain Forest, and the other a woman I’ve never met.

Each leads me in an attempt to teach me, but they do not have enough clarity in the way they move to resolve the question nagging at me. Neither has a verbal answer when I articulate my waltz question, either. I continue to search for someone to dance with me.

See, I could be confused, but I have it in my mind that a waltz goes slow-slow-quick-quick, and each measure is supposed to start with a new foot. I have figured out, though, that if your second quick is a full step, your weight is on the foot that you are supposed to take your next slow with. Based on this, I figure waltzes are either truly slow-slow-quick-quick-quick, a triplet, or slow-slow-quick-pause. The question nags at me.

I take a moment and survey the ranch. The arena where I used to practice riding bulls in front of Grandpa and Whitey is all overgrown now. The window in the shed I knocked out with a baseball is still broken. A couple pieces of roofing are missing from the barn. Hopefully, Grandpa will get that woman he wrote about up there to fix it instead of me. God, how I hate heights. They remind me of the accident. Raspberry bushes completely cover the old outhouse that no one ever used in my lifetime. Grandma’s horse, Winter, nickers at me from the corral. Buck, the sadistic buckskin that used to charge me when I was a boy, is now gone from the herd.

Grandpa comes out to greet me, enthusiastically patting me on the back. “Welcome home,” he says, and something about the word
home
leaves me feeling heavy. I wish I could feel as happy to see Grandpa as he is to see me, and as happy to be home as he is happy to have me home, but I don’t.

“I see Buck’s gone,” I say to change the subject.

“Yeah. I knew you were going to miss him.” Grandpa laughs.

“About as much as I miss a bad cold,” I reply with a courtesy laugh.

“I think Buck launched you clear out of the Earth’s atmosphere that last time, didn’t he? You needed one of them space-suits for that launch.” He pats my shoulder. “Hey, Hank and Whitey are coming out the Saturday after next to help bring in the steers. You’re just in time. Mara will be riding, too.” He gestures over toward the building with the dog on it. “Though she claims to have an ethical conflict over it. She’s one of them vegetarians. You’ll meet her later. She’s at school now.”

I pause to look at her place. “Wow, that is really something.”

“Yeah, we call it the Church of the Dog. Get this. She paints a giant picture of a dog on the side, and then maybe two weeks later a real dog that looks just like it shows up at her door during a thunderstorm.” Grandpa makes Twilight Zone noises. “You’ll see him around. Zeus. He’s a good dog.”

“Huh. That must be the pet hog?” I gesture toward the pen.

“Yeah, the McDougal kid got a little hysterical at the county fair 4-H auction. Put an EAT BEEF sign on him. Since Mara’s one of them vegetarians, you can pretty much guess the rest of that story.”

I laugh. Grandpa really seems excited about all the new additions to the ranch.