Riverine (24 page)

When she pressed for details, for evidence that would amount to my reply and publications that she could google on her government-issued laptop to confirm my claim, I listed for her the few publications I’d acquired over the past six months, feeling puny and ridiculous at the joy I had felt over them. They seemed insignificant under her scrutiny.

She typed away on the computer. “What do you write?” She seemed confident, sure of tripping me up with this question. “Look at me when you say it.”

I was glad she said that. To look at her, I mean. Disallowing anything but facts. Demanding an unflinching reply. She didn’t mean for it to help me. I know that. She only meant to determine whether I was lying. Whether I was a threat. But it was what I needed to be asked. She might as well have asked me, simply, “Who are you?”

“Oh, short stories, some essays. I’m writing a novel.” Spat out in a single sentence, nearly a year of work sounded in a minor key. Hundreds of pages shriveled in the hazy summer air between us. “I’m just starting out, really.”
I’m writing letters to a man I haven’t seen in fifteen years and putting them in a drawer instead of mailing them
.

The customs officer looked at me, then at my passport, then back at me.

I’d cut off all my hair and looked nothing like my picture. I smile when I’m nervous.

“Don’t smile,” she said. “Where is your work published?” She fixed her gaze on her computer.

I still hadn’t convinced her. Did she expect my name to pop up in a search? It wouldn’t. I started thinking about this woman as she worked, about who she was beneath the pepper spray and the nightstick. Beneath the black polyester. She was very short, but not slight. She wore a hard look on her face, but smile lines caught in the sunlight around her mouth and eyes. I named her Amanda.

“On the Internet, mostly. Some journals.” I shrugged, feeling smaller each time I spoke.

“
Where
on the Internet?”

At that point, I was pretty sure she wanted to humiliate me, the silly woman trying to wear sunglasses through customs who thought she was a writer and clearly had a self-confidence problem.

I rattled off the short list, my voice flat now, unemotional. I hoped she inferred my meaning: let’s stop the charade,
Amanda
. Amanda, who is a real person beneath the polyester who smiles and wears capri pants and flip-flops and takes selfies and likes baseball and probably snorts when she laughs.

“Mm hm. Mm hm,” she said, and cleared us for entrance to the United States with a stamp and a nod.

When we crossed back into the United States, I was still thinking of what else I could have said at the customs gate, vaguely unsettled by the ordeal.

My husband put on my sunglasses and pretended to toss his hair. “Uh, I’m a writer? Um …” He laughed at himself and gave my sunglasses back, rubbing my knee. “I’m kidding. But you’ll have to get better at saying that.”

We drove another ten miles without talking, the green intensifying the deeper we drove into the Vermont countryside. “What do you do for work?” he asked.

I looked at him. “Very funny.”

“No, really. You should practice.”

He convinced me to say it out loud as we rode down I-89 back to Burlington. “I’m a writer,” I said, only half-serious.

“Nope, not good enough.”

“I feel like I’m in therapy.”

“Just do it. When you fly a plane, half the challenge is confidence in your authority. If you don’t know you can do it, you can’t do it. If I was checking a pilot and asked him what altitude he should be at to turn off the seat belt sign and he said, ‘Um, 30,000 feet?’ what would that look like?”

He had a point. I repeated the statement until we felt it was believable, and we laughed about it. When we got home, it was night. Carrying my overnight bag up the stairs to our condo, I worried about my new writer self, still a dribbling baby gazing out the window in wonder, falling in love with melon for no apparent reason, my sentences circling back to the very place I had abandoned. I wondered about what remained in me of home. How new I could really be here.

In the morning I wrote home—an e-mail to my closest friends—to update them on life in the Northeast and told them I was writing and starting to publish some work. That I was writing a novel. That I felt I’d found my place in the world for perhaps the first time in my entire life. That sometimes, I was content. Of the six friends I contacted, two replied. Jen and Rachel, as expected. I was devastated because this was a huge transition for me. Didn’t they know this was a proclamation? Writing was hard, emotional. It was work, body and soul. It was fragile and I was only a writer-baby. Often, it undid me in ways both freeing and crippling. I remembered something I’d heard Julia Alvarez say at a reading: “When you’ve seen a thing, what, then, is the obligation?” That has stayed with me, helped me make sense of my writer eyes. Of my moving forward. Of my need to look back at what happened with Corey and figure it out—for me. It helped me stop waiting for the approval of friends or an understanding pat on the back from my parents for all my trying. It propelled me beyond the visioning—this lifelong collecting of images and moments—and enabled me to move more eloquently into that higher-ordered act, the writing itself. And beyond that: owning whoever I was, whatever whole looked like, wet and muddied roots and all.

Could I better understand the significance of the angle of a man’s bottom lip, of an illiterate man registering to vote, of rotten milk, because I am compelled to notice? I can, because the people are alive, because it is never too late to empower yourself, because milk becomes cheese. Time is change, more than a beginning and an end, but an ongoing expansion. One thing can become another—gradually, and then suddenly, as Ernest Hemingway once said. And cheese is part art and part nature. I have seen that and more. Writing is seeing. There is an obligation to complete the half-written letters, assemble the tales, stitch together the truths. Of that, I am certain.

W
e are lying on Robert Frost’s lawn. We cup our hands around clumps of grass to hold on to what’s left of the afternoon. We listen to the hermit thrushes and strain to hear the stream over their song. To do this, we must not speak. And anyway, we can’t, because then everyone would know what they are not supposed to know and what we ourselves do not even know for sure. They would hear it in the pauses, too luxurious for mere friends.

This is a school for adults who have too much to say. A grownup’s
rumspringa
. We left our families at home and are here for two weeks. We have divorced technology and shunned reality. We are thinking backward in iambic pentameter by threes. “Do not call home if at all possible,” we were told at orientation. “No one will understand.” And it’s true. My best self has grown here in Vermont. Only it is a wild self, one that knows it was never meant to root down into any ground. One that values freedom above all else. This revelation is an unexpected discovery, but Mike rolls with it and with me. He rearranges his work schedule, taking time off from his own travel so that I can attend writing conferences and get swept away by my intellectual connections with other men and women. I go, he stays. He goes, I stay. We are barely together, but it works out. He never bats an eye. He is an expert falconer, and I am his golden eagle. I fly and return to the nest.

John Elder, the resident Frost scholar and naturalist, stands in front of us. He begins a lecture on Frost’s Vermont, Frost’s trees, which surround us on all sides. It’s an incantation for the dead at this close range. The writers’ conference was started in 1926 by the poet, and Elder speaks of Frost as if he were an old friend. Like many of Frost’s poems, Elder’s lecture draws us into the landscape but doesn’t tell us what to make of it. Beyond Elder is a small cabin, one of two of Frost’s former Vermont homes. The lecture is part of the program—propping up our minds with speeches, dangling Frost’s house in front of us like candy. We’re not sure what’s edible and what isn’t. We stuff gray pebbles into our fleshy cheeks like gobstoppers, tip sunshiny daffodils to our mouths, pinkies up. We are gifted. We are here on exhibit. We are competing. We befriend one another but reserve a teaspoon each of jealousy as an antidote to failure.

The lecturer invites us further, quoting a Frost poem about a thrush wood bird and a tree as we listen and look: the very bird, the very tree. It is too much, too sacred, and on an acid trip of words, we draw nearer one another on the lawn in shrinking orbits, pairing off or grouping together in threes. Our real lives shift beneath us. The atmosphere is so enchanted that we willingly shift along with it. I almost believe I am one of them, the learned and graduate-programmed people on the lawn. I was not accepted the way they were—green-lighted by committee. I was wait-listed and sit on this lawn only because someone dropped out at the last minute. Everyone knows it, especially me. It is possible that in this world, people have mothers who read them Baudelaire at bedtime as children and fathers who quoted Keats during family meals made from scratch. It is possible for me to pretend I belong here or share their history. There is one thing we have in common: we are tired of explaining ourselves with words.

Elder limits his talk to our immediate surroundings. He says nothing of the state’s curated legacy beyond these trees, nothing of poetry beyond the context of Vermont. Intoxicating beauty is everywhere in Vermont. You hate to leave it behind, to cross the state line back into New York or Massachusetts. To board a plane at the Burlington airport. It is designed to have that effect on visitors—Vermont will send you into a rapturous stupor like the overoxygenated casinos of Las Vegas that make you forget what sleep is. You’ll come back and back again. You’ll remember it as a place where the locals have it all figured out. Vermont’s small towns aren’t failing; they are actually quite lovely. Vermont’s politics, if you’re even moderately liberal, are exemplary compared with those of many other states. But Vermont is more complex than this lawn, these trees. In the late 1800s, a collapsed agricultural economy resulted in a talent exodus. In the 1920s, the state countered this problem with two remedies. First, Vermont’s beauty would be systematically preserved in hopes of promoting a wealthy tourist culture that would create an influx of prosperity. Second, “voluntary” eugenics policies, aimed at curbing the reproductive capacity of the state’s so-called “degenerates,” would arrest growth of the wrong kind of public. This knowledge makes it hard to isolate my thoughts locally, to bind them within the tree line. At this diversely populated conference, Vermont’s overwhelmingly white population is suddenly very apparent.

On this lawn, I am ancient and newborn at once. The whole world pulses in my wrist. I watch my new friend’s face grow more familiar by the hour. Soon, I have loved him for five years, at least. I know the structure of his sentences (he favors semicolons, em dashes, and parenthetical asides). I know how he likes his coffee and when (black, mornings, and into the afternoon). I know that when he looks for me across the lawn, scanning the faces of poets, his bottom lip will collapse a little when he doesn’t see me amid the crowd. I won’t be there. I won’t be waiting for him. I’ll be far from the peloton, scraping the bark of an oak with my fingernail.

His face is a map of the fields he ran through as a child, gently creased from too much thinking. A picture to go with the story he tells me about the kite that flew too high and never came back down to the boy who cried and cried. Or maybe he is worried about this growing thing between us that won’t stay in my pocket no matter how I fold it up to size. Let us say it is the fields. I, too, ran in those fields. I see them still when I sleep. We’ll never really escape the landscapes we inhabited as our brains developed. For us, a cornfield will never be just a cornfield. We’ve been too close to the stalks. I’ll tell him now: it’s a farce. There is nothing in my pocket. My mother did not read Baudelaire at my bedside. She did not read at all, although she could. She sang Carly Simon in the dark. In my retelling of my mother, I fiction her a glowing cigarette at night, a father, too, for she did not smoke or have a father either. She had four fathers, and also none. It is complicated. I didn’t come from long lines of educators or artists or philosophers, like my friend did. I came from water. From fields. From a fabled land between those.

It is quiet here, in the mountains. A former professor of mine told me recently that uninterrupted natural sound is endangered. It is nearing extinction, he said, at least in the United States. At my hotel, where I was staying while I visited and spoke to his students at their private all-girls school in Connecticut, I searched online for the last quiet American locales, which had a certain illogic. I discovered a nonprofit project called One Square Inch that purports to represent the one place in America where you can truly find silence, which the organization defines as the absence of any human-made noise. This place, this square inch or more, is deep in the Hoh Rain Forest at Olympic National Park. In my online search for silence, I considered silence itself. It is a whole concept. Any intrusion of sound destroys the idea entirely. In yoga and meditation, practitioners silence the body and the mind in different ways. Night is a quieter time than day so that people can rest. I had silenced my body so that I could better hear the din of my mind. If there is power and force in silence, and One Square Inch suggests that indeed there is, then it’s logical that there is an equal power and force in its opposite—noise. As there is value in walking, there is value in standing still. Following Newton’s third law of motion, when one body exerts a force on another body, the second body exerts an equal and opposite force on the first body. The One Square Inch project uses the same theory to present its mission: “The logic is simple; if a loud noise, such as the passing of an aircraft, can impact many square miles, then a natural place, if maintained in a 100% noise-free condition, will also impact many square miles around it. It is predicted that protecting a single square inch of land from noise pollution will benefit large areas of the park.” So the silence, or the inherent purity of the silence, becomes greater than its square inch. It spreads outward, and affects everything within its range as noise affects the distance its wavelengths travel.