The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld (31 page)

J
ust a few blocks from my house, there’s a business with a large red sign that reads Disaster Restoration.

And just beyond this is a yoga studio, where I meet a woman named Lisa Mae. She’s an instructor there, and totally beautiful—and as it turns out, also from New York City. We have a slow, healthy courtship, beginning with a trip to Portland’s new aerial tram, which we ride three times in a row, chatting about our families and gazing out on the blurry-bright city lights. She tells me about a recent yoga retreat she led down in Costa Rica, where she rekindled her interest in surfing. She originally learned to surf during school in San Diego; in fact, we’re surprised to learn we went to rival high schools at exactly the same time, although being something of a brainiac, she graduated early and went off at age seventeen to NYU, where she double-majored in religious studies and philosophy.

Our parallel trajectories across the country, from Southern California to New York City and back across to the Pacific Northwest, and the way we hit it off so well—and also the way her smile lights up her whole face—are all very intriguing. But after going for a drink at a pub, I drive her back home, giving her a hug and a gentlemanly goodnight kiss on the cheek. This is something I learned in recovery—how to actually date someone, without too much intensity, especially in the beginning.

In early March, a month or so after we first meet, Lisa Mae and I go cross-country skiing. We take her Subaru up to Trillium Lake, near my old snowboard camp on Mount Hood. There’s a book of Rumi poems on her dashboard; while she drives, I read one out loud.

“I’ve never had a guy read Rumi to me,” she says.

“I’ve never met a girl with a copy of Rumi on her dashboard.”

I choose Trillium Lake as a flat, easy trail for Lisa Mae, who’s never cross-countried before. What I didn’t anticipate, though, was that the main access road to Trillium would be closed in winter, so we have to ski down a steep hill to reach the lake trail. Lisa Mae ends up falling on her ass every hundred feet or so; she mostly laughs it off, but it’s apparent that she wonders if maybe I’m trying to kill her. And this being only our third or so date, I’m afraid I might have indeed killed my chances.

But she’s a good sport, especially once we reach the mellow lake trail, where she gets the hang of gliding along in the snow.

She does great until I pick up the pace, moving a couple meters ahead of her. As we bend south around the frozen lake, Mount Hood appears, a brilliant castle of frost. But then something catches my attention, a small dark shape on the snow, directly in Lisa Mae’s track. Moving in closer, I realize it’s some kind of
lizard
, lying right there in the snow.

I stop and poke at it with my pole, but it doesn’t move.

“Hey, Lisa Mae,” I shout back. “Watch out. There’s some kind of
snow gecko
in your path.”

But this doesn’t register, and by the time she spots the lizard thing she lets out a little shriek and tries to stop but instead sort of spazzes out and falls right on her ass again. I take my skis off to help her up.

“What
is
that thing?” she asks, laughing again.

“I guess it’s some sort of amphibian. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Back on our skis, we move in closer to investigate. The snow gecko is brown on the top, with a reddish underbelly. About the size of my palm. It remains totally motionless—half-frozen, it seems—even after I pick it up. Turning it upside down, I can see that it’s actually still breathing. After examining it closely, wondering how the hell it got here, I move it off the trail, out of harm’s way.

On the way home, Lisa Mae and I visit the Kennedy School—an old grade school in North Portland that’s been converted into a hotel with several restaurants, taverns, a movie theater, and a public soaking pool. The pool’s located in a hidden courtyard, surrounded by palm trees; it’s like a large hot tub, the entire underwater surface finished in terra cotta and dark blue mosaic tiles.

We sit there soaking our tired muscles—especially Lisa Mae, who has a very sore ass—and laughing about our odd encounter with the snow gecko. There are a few other soakers in the pool, including a fortyish guy in steamed-up glasses, sitting just across from us. He apologizes for eavesdropping and explains that he’s a wildlife biologist, that he’s curious to hear more about this
snow gecko
. Still curious myself, I describe it for him.

“What you saw was a rough-skinned newt,” he says. “They’re not uncommon in Oregon, although it’s rare to see one so early in the spring—probably a result of climate change. The interesting thing about rough-skinned newts is that they’re one of the most poisonous animals on the planet.”

“Come on,” Lisa Mae says, a little of her New York accent revealing itself. “You’re totally shitting us.”

He explains that one one-thousandth of the poison contained in the skin of these newts is enough to kill a grown man.

“Seriously,” Lisa Mae says. “You’re
serious?
”

“They don’t bite or anything. You’d have to actually swallow an entire newt for the poison to kick in. Either that or lick its skin.”

This freaks me out a little bit, as I recall handling the thing with my bare hands.

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” the biologist says, “as long as you washed your hands afterward.”

But I didn’t wash my hands, and then, just twenty minutes later, Lisa Mae and I had sat in her car eating a lunch consisting mostly of finger foods: baby carrots and celery with peanut butter and salad wraps.

We drive back to Lisa Mae’s house, where a quick internet search confirms the biologist’s identification and his claim about the rough-skinned newt. She reads me an online account of some yahoos down in Coos Bay, Oregon. During a drunken camping trip, they dared one of their buddies to swallow an entire newt.

So he did.

And died within ten minutes.

“Holy shit,” Lisa Mae says.

“Holy shit is right,” I say. “I totally handled that thing.”

“So I guess this is it for you?” she says, leading me over to the couch.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I say, playing along.

“This might be your last night on earth,” she says, smiling. “So what would you like to do?”

“Well …” I say, coyly, reaching over for her, tucking a dark ringlet of hair behind her ear.

“It’s okay,” she says, smiling, “I’m game.”

So I lean over and kiss her—my final request.

And although it might be my last night alive, we end up taking our time, because in reality there is no urgency between us, no sense of dire need—both of us having emerged whole from respective periods of darkness. Instead of raw lust there is a kind of playful attraction; in place of intensity there is an easy intimacy, made possible in part by our offbeat senses of humor, our shared bicoastal sensibilities, our synched-up spirituality.

More than anything, it feels like we have all the time in the world.

I
n May of 2010, while a hundred thousand gallons of oil bleed daily from an of shore well into the Gulf of Mexico, I spend a two-week writing residency at an art and ecology center off the central coast of Oregon. Surfers in particular have a gut-level reaction to offshore oil spills and beach contaminations. I feel sick about the news from the Gulf Coast, more so after hearing radio interviews with fishermen and tour guides, people whose entire lives and livelihoods are threatened by the spill. But at the same time, being here in Oregon, where the sea is clean and cold, and there are no offshore oil derricks, I feel somewhat removed from events unfolding in the south.

One evening after writing, I paddle my surfboard across the mouth of the Salmon River to a sandy spit that marks the confluence of river and sea. On the lee side of the grassy but formidable Cascade Head, and without an access road from the south, the beach is accessible only by river, and therefore deserted, nearly untouched.

It’s cloudy on the coast, the ocean like brushed cement. But on the edges, over the mountains, the sky’s gleaming.

After surfing the chaotic river-mouth break, I comb the beach, finding charred driftwood, barnacle-studded limpet shells, exquisitely preserved crab carapaces, sea felt, and a rare, twisted length of bull kelp. And also, tucked behind some rocks, two weatherworn plastic water bottles and the remnants of a Styrofoam drift net float. It’s not enough to make the beach feel egregiously polluted, but here they are, on what had seemed like the most pristine beach I’ve ever seen. It occurs to me here, seemingly for the first time, that plastic is a petroleum-based substance.

A fellow resident and sculptor points me toward the center’s library, to which the Surfrider Foundation donated a copy of a documentary called
Synthetic Seas
. The film shows an ocean map of areas seriously affected by plastic contamination—an expanse the size of the contiguous United States, Canada, and Alaska combined. Within the boundaries of this area are two concentrated garbage patches, or “gyres.”
¹
There’s some dispute over their dimensions—some say they’re only the size of Delaware; others claim they’re larger than Texas. Regardless of their actual magnitude, it’s just like Sadie told me: giant atolls of trash poisoning the sea.

Unlike crude oil, the plastic in these gyres and elsewhere doesn’t eventually absorb into the sea. Plastic never really goes away; according to the film, every piece of plastic ever made still exists somewhere on the earth or in our seas. And while they don’t fully reabsorb, ocean-bound plastics do slowly leach micron-sized particles into the water; these particles are then ingested by fish and birds, which are in turn ingested by larger mammals. To make matters worse, floating plastic waste absorbs and concentrates other harmful toxins like PCBs at 100,000 times the normal levels. These chemicals—most of which bind to estrogen receptors—move up the food chain, eventually reaching the humans who created them, where they can cause cancer and may harm female reproductive processes.

It’s a kind of semi-invisible “oil spill” taking place every day, in every ocean and on every beach in the world.

A
fter moving back west, I rediscover the writing of another Melville-obsessed Oregonian who used to live in New York. Barry Lopez was born in California, but after his mother remarried, his family relocated to Manhattan. Though he disliked New York at first, he ultimately benefited from his literary education in the city. He attended private school, where he was challenged academically, well beyond what he’d ever experienced back in California. He ended up reading
Moby-Dick
three times before college—a book that, as an eventual environmental writer, he found most akin to his own desire to “describe what happened, what I saw, when I went outside.” And while
Moby-Dick
is undeniably dark, Lopez also credits it as a major influence in his desire to contribute to what he calls the literature of hope.

His essay “The Whaleboat” orbits around his contemplation of a handcrafted model whaleboat on display in the study of his Oregon home—“it bore so well an elaborate and arcane history of human encounter with the wild.” He writes equally exquisite descriptions of the myriad woods and trees he can spy directly from his writing desk—red cedar, pine, spruce, his hardwood floor made from “ship-lapped Douglas fir.”

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what this richly complex essay is about—his work defies easy explanation or pigeonholing—but beyond wood and light, one continuous theme is a meditation on the difference between contemplation and action. He uses Melville’s Ishmael as a symbol of contemplation, and Ahab as one of action. What brought the
Pequod
down, according to Lopez, was Ahab’s ceaseless productivity, his relentless action and motion lust, combined with a total lack of contemplation. Lopez has some fairly pointed opinions about American culture’s general lack of contemplation:

But again, Lopez doesn’t come to any facile conclusions. He believes that both contemplation and action are necessary for a balanced world. He sympathizes with men in the historical whaling industry—ordinary men who, like Ishmael, were just trying to survive, provide for their families. Therein lies the paradox: the whaling industry, like so many modern corporations, was full of good, decent people just trying to make a living. I love the subtle wisdom of Lopez’s work, the acknowledgment of beauty and darkness in nature; reading him, I realize how dogmatic I’ve been in my revisionist critique of the whaling industry, in my attack on the contemporary oil industry. The truth is that the very keys I’m typing on now are made from petroleum; petroleum fueled all those trips from Brooklyn to Rockaway in my Toyota pickup, as it fuels ambulances, Meals on Wheels, the Buick that allows my elderly neighbor to drive herself to church every Sunday.