i'm so heavy tonight

So here we are, everyone, at the beginning of another decade. This seems bigger to me than many of you, I imagine, because this has only happened to me a couple of times.
I am twenty-seven years old. Now, people keep talking, at this time of year, about looking forward and looking back. They say, let's check in with what I thought a year ago, what I planned and promised and was. Let's check in with who I was ten years ago.

Ten years ago I was a frightened seventeen-year-old kid living in a small town, trapped and, above anything else, feeling utterly hopeless. I never planned on making it to twenty-seven. I didn't think I'd get the chance. So last night, as I lay there having a quiet evening in with my partner, I found myself wishing I could just...take a picture. Take a picture and send it to that kid, because I already have the postcard from teenage me. Just--listen. Kid. Hold on. Hold on.

I came out at seventeen, sort of. I came out as queer, anyway. I didn't know anything about trans issues, leave alone possibilities, beyond the occasional article about gender a long-distance friend sent me, which I read feverishly at four in the morning, terrified I would be found out. I would lock myself in the bathroom at two in the morning and stare into the mirror full of shame and disgust and fear and try to will myself to change. I knew one trans person, though I didn't know how to talk about it, and her very existence frightened me because something in me kept waking up and banging desperately on the walls of my skin and I had no idea how to respond. I couldn't connect right to the people around me, because I wasn't really there. I was isolated, and scared, and never, ever thought I would know any other way to be, and I bruised and burned myself trying to exorcise...hope, really. Trying to banish any inkling that there was another way to live, because I knew that once I acknowledged and trusted that truth, everything would fall apart, everything would burn. Hope was a danger, a false seducer that would lead me to destruction.
I was right. I lost almost everything I knew or was. My entire life came apart, not long after that. Thank every God Who was watching.

There is very little I have in common with that kid--we don't look the same, or know the same people, or do the same things, our plans for life are completely different, we live in different places with different families and different politics and different heroes and different dreams. We don't even have the same name. I have a future; that kid, or that idea of who I thought I would be, anyway, didn't. She ended up trying to dig for the truth, and ended up losing home, family, career, friends, with no guarantee that any of it would come back, nothing promising that she would be able to rebuild and make a new life, which seemed stupid at the time and now seems, to me, to be pretty brave. I wish I could send that kid a picture. Sit down and say, look, sweetheart, things are going to get ugly. You're going to watch the democratic process betrayed, you're going to see wars started and suffering people abandoned and cities underwater, your friends are going to jail and so are you and you know what, honey, the cops are not your friends and you will see things you can never unsee. You will see loved ones die. You will nearly die yourself, of violence, of sickness, of the brutal hazards of doing dangerous work out of desperation, leave alone being refused care and shelter. They will stop calling you "promising" and they will stop jabbering about your "potential." Your teachers will not believe in you and they will not give you gift baskets. The things you think are sure aren't and what you believe is safe is killing you. You won't be able to come home again, sweetheart, I want you to know that, and the people you think will stand by you through thick and thin, the friends so dear to your heart you don't even know, they'll go, too, and some of that will be entirely your fault. You will tear yourself apart at the cellular level, and reconstruct all of it from the ground up, you will learn your body in ways you can never at this time comprehend, you will discover alcohol and coffee and cigarettes and sex and gods know what else, and it will not make you into a bad person like you're scared of, but it won't make you interesting, either. You will find your love cracked and your body violated and everything you thought you could rely on, it will vanish like shower steam on the mirror and leave you still desperately looking at your own face for answers you just don't know. All the promises will be broken, and what survives will shock you. You will fight, and fight, and fight.
And you will grow up, sweetheart. You will become the kind of woman you never dared hope to be, a grown woman, an adult who takes her place in her community and behaves, through all the mistakes and missteps and foolish choices, with strength and integrity. You will make it. You will make it through pain you never imagined possible and you will find yourself not in a new world, but a new perspective on the old one. You will not find the place you magically fit in. You will not start belonging and you will not be whisked away to a different place where your special destiny redeems you. You will spit at destiny and make something new. You will hurt people, by accident and design, but in the end, you will have actually saved lives, and done work that you know is worthwhile. You will go farther than you knew the road extended. You will end this decade, with its wars and crushed cities and burning skies and shattered economies, with its dot-com whimper and stolen votes and constant, oppressive fear, knowing who you are, proud of your color and your love and your heritage, proud of your community, proud that you have made it, with comrades and friends whose fierceness and beauty your storybooks never predicted for you. You will end this decade without the family that raised you, with kind words from the family that chose you, instead. You will end this decade, my dear, in the arms of a woman you haven't met yet--not that girl you took to the prom, my dear, but someone far better for you, someone who surprises you every day, who helps you grow by the moment, who looks at you and likes what she sees. You will complain that she leaves tea bags in the sink because something has to distract you, now and then, from how ridiculously gorgeous she is. You will look in her eyes and be full to bursting with the wonder and awe you feel every time you remember that she actually said "yes."

It will not be easy, sweetheart, I wish I could say to that kid. But look. You know how nobody has those brick-sized cell phones except rich people and drug dealers, and computers take up a whole desk, and twenty years ago took up a whole room if you wanted them to really do impressive things? You will write this up on a laptop computer you can carry in one hand, and people will read it from all over the world, and you know what, they have computers like this in public libraries for everyone to use, I swear. The phone in your pocket has the computing power of the box you grew up with, and it was the cheapest, most basic one they had at the store, and it costs less than the kind that plugs into the wall and you will grumble that all it does is send your words out into space and into other people's phones instantaneously, plus being a clock, calculator, and e-mailer, like that is nothing. In ten years, the machines around you will become boring, slow, outdated, and orders of magnitude more advanced than anything you have ever seen and they will make Star Trek look clunky, I am not kidding about this. So if that's the case, please believe that the technology of your hope, of your basic humanity, will evolve and advance far more than you can think of. Your adulthood will be nothing like you imagined it. Nobody will come to rescue you. The music you are listening to right now, you will cringe at. And guess what:

You will be grateful, every moment, that your prayers will not have been answered. For the trials and struggles and losses. I won't pretend it won't hurt, kid, because it will tear you to pieces. But here you will be, and you will be okay, and you will be moving forward, and you have no idea what you want yet, or what you can truly have.

Now excuse me--I have an appointment with me from ten years from now, and I think she is going to school me in all the things I cannot imagine yet and will never in a thousand years predict. Go ahead and laugh now, because when she shows me a picture of the next world, I think my face will be priceless.

Sweetheart, hope is dangerous, and it is exactly what you need. Here. You can borrow a little of mine.

See you soon.

we are ready now

Brownfemipower, once again, speaks truth.

The Allied Media Conference is life-changing. I know because I was lucky enough to go last summer. I was able to go, in part, thanks to the generous help of a couple of you out there who thought it was important enough to help me out. The dividends of that kindness have echoed through my entire life like a shockwave of affirmation, strength, hope, and new community. I left Detroit last June with a new way of looking at the world, a new courage to engage, and new hope for the greatness and potential of letting radical love be at the center of everything.

I never got around to posting about AMC last year because I couldn't find the words. I couldn't describe what it was like to walk into a dynamic community of people who all had been willing to sacrifice in order to come together and hope--without the constraint of always, always having to go back to square one, without the exhaustion, for just a little while, of an oppressive world--who had brought their dearest families, their secret joys, their history-battered strengths in order to dedicate themselves to evolving a new way to go forward. I saw five generations holding hands and supporting each other, across differences, due to deep and mutual respect. I saw children light up with possibility and bravery and laughter. I saw teenagers, arm in arm, teaching everyone in the room what it means to learn. I saw elders in a place of honor, leading the way toward change. And rolling around Detroit, watching as a city forced to its knees by the betrayal of industry continues to provide incredible examples of growth and innovation and faith in the power of community to the rest of the world, I saw a new kind of community that I'd never had before. It was about making not what we're paid to make, not what we're told to make, but what we need, for each other.

At AMC I made connections I had never dreamed I could have--not just as an aspiring writer and media-maker (though I found those and then some) or as a radical activist (we got amazing work done and started projects that blow me away every day) but as a queer woman of color, a sister, a partner, moving through the world and trying to figure out where I fit in it. I went from quietly saying "I'm a woman of color" with my head hung awkwardly to standing up proud and saying "I'm a woman of color" in a clear voice full of certainty. It was the best reminder I could imagine of the idea that that identity is fundamentally about claiming yourself as part of a greater whole, of defining your own identity by your choice of solidarity with others. It's not a "my name is"--it's an "I belong to." It's not a "here's what I'm called"--it's a "here's who my family is." It says you've chosen to prioritize your connection to community, the shared struggle across different iterations of oppression, and the irresistible truth that together we are far more than any one of us.

The Allied Media Conference gave me new tools as a media activist, but it also reminded me where I belong, and to whom I am connected. The people I stood with, sat around a kitchen table with, traded stories and skills and dreams with, re-taught me not just how to do the work, but who I am. They gave me more to stand for, more to love, and more to value within myself. I could integrate all those identities--trans, queer, rural, brown, religious--and nobody tried to force me to take myself apart and just be parts of me. I came away more aware of myself and my context than ever before, ready to keep growing.

On the plane to Michigan, my bag lost, my flight delayed and rescheduled, sandwiched between a dental hygenist and a yuppie who wouldn't turn off his fancy phone, I told people I was on my way to a professional conference of media-makers, and that was true.
On the plane home to Oregon, weeping openly with the joy of discovery and the pangs of distance from a new world of wonders, I told people I'd been in Detroit visiting family, and that was true, too.

I'm ready for more of that. Are you?

search and seizure

Note: There's some issues I want to tease out, but in order to do so, I'll have to talk about work. In the effort to maintain both my anonymity and my job, I will be modifying details. I am employed as something of a jack-of-all-trades at a modestly-sized, liberally-aligned institution with various troubles and underbellies we will call, for the purposes of this entry, the Ministry of Space*, with attendant identifying details altered. While I tend to do everything from vehicle maintenance to emergency first aid to clerical and administrative work to plumbing in the course of my job as Girl Friday, my actual job description is pretty gendered, on the masculine end, and I am generally called on--as, ah, an Assistant Deck Chief at the, er, Ministry of Space--to wear a uniform that is not, shall we say, flattering to the figure. I end up pretty androgynized, with functionality presiding over form.

Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl**, makes an interesting observation about the mid-transition period when she notes that she got to a certain point where, minute-to-minute, people began making unpredictable, but different and definite, assumptions about her gender and sex and running with them. They didn't think, "Well, hmm, that there is an androgynous person." They immediately shuffled her as either "woman" or "man" and then from there assumed that she was androgynous-for-a-man or androgynous-for-a-woman until confirmed or given to understand otherwise; the notion of "other" almost never came up. It was never clear, in any given interaction, which way they'd go, but she observed that it really had nothing to do with changes in her clothing or mannerisms, day to day, hour to hour, second to second. People just sort of picked.

I quibbled with this for about a second, remembering the two? maybe three? friends who'd told me, after a while of knowing me, that they sort of registered me as genderless, as an "other." The more I thought about it, though, the more true it seemed. People had to have me stored one way or another in their heads, right away, with very few exceptions. Some people managed to switch back and forth, depending on what I was wearing on a given day, but for the most part even those people were either thinking of me as a woman-sometimes-crossdressed or a man-sometimes-crossdressed, This was even before I was on hormone treatment.

Now, much further along, I have wandered deep into the unpredictable territory Serano was talking about, and I find it fascinating. So I thought I'd illustrate, and chase a few trails it brings up for me.

The other day I got called up, at work, to deal with an emergency. A child had been hurt behind a locked door, and I was called on to get in there, get the door open, and make sure the kid was okay. Now, when I showed up and took care of the situation, the two women present on my arrival were full of thanks--and grateful phone reports to others--about the woman from the, ah, Deck Chiefs' office, who had come to help. She--that is, me--had been helpful, this, and we watched her do that and that. It was even more explicit with the one of them who used Spanish: ella, not el, and so on. A few minutes later, the kid's mother showed up, and was immediately talking, third-person wise, about the deck-crew guy who'd saved her kid, the man from the Ministry, he, him, and so on. When the paramedics arrived to help, they were, pronouns-wise, sort of split down the middle. Were people biased by whether I was rushing in to deal with a kid, or making official phone calls, from one minute to the next? Cooing at a crying child to calm her down, or offering medical advice? I don't know. Maybe.

Nobody asked, mind you. They all just guessed, and I had other priorities--like helping a hurt child--than correcting any of them. But it had been a pretty high-stress situation, so I went down to the corner store afterward for a cold drink. While I was in line, an older male contractor, salt-and-pepper-moustachioed and drawling and everything, sidled up to me, winked, and said, "They sure do hire good-lookin' folk down at the Ministry of Space, don't they."
I blinked: "Oh?"
"You're up there on the deck crew, right?"
At this point, apprehensive, I assented. He leaned in closer.
"Well, I remember when you came out to help me with that job up at the moon base, and I thought t'myself, well, that there's a good-lookin' gal, what's a pretty little lady like her doing workin' on a deck crew?"
I swallowed; it's always thin ice when you realize that a straight guy who doesn't know you has been harboring a crush, flattering with definite undercurrents of I-hope-he-doesn't-get-violent-if-he's-disabused-of-his-assumptions.
"Your boss came out the next day, and I asked 'im, where's that good-lookin' gal came out yesterday? Why didn't y'all send her? He said you needed a day off now and then. Guess I can't argue with that, but you're a pretty little gal." Another wink.
At this point, I just felt awkward: "I, well, uh...thanks. Guess I do need days off now and then."
"Well, you sure do hire nice-lookin' folks."
"Well, thanks, guess I'd better get back." I moved to extricate myself, and he leaned down and winked again:
"I'll see you around."
I waved and bolted as politely as I could.

Now, getting hit on in this way is always a strange situation. Advances like these are inappropriate--in the oily and infantilizing way he presented it, anyway--and in my head they go in the same category as catcalls and sketchy pickup lines in bars. On the one level, as they do with most women, they make me pretty uncomfortable. But on another level, they confirm that I'm being read as female--not only being read as female, but being read as female by people who're pretty concerned with making sure, for the sake of their machismo, that the person they're addressing is definitely female. I feel dirty for getting a bit of a warm feeling from something that I find objectionable. I feel both safer and more vulnerable, all at once. And there's always that specter: the safety of "passing" opens you up to the ever-present accusation of deception. The consequences of that "deception" can be pretty awful.

Case in point, another example, from a much more serious place: the airport. I flew out to visit my partner in California last weekend, and I was frankly terrified. I haven't flown since beginning transition. With a combination of basic nervousness for flying and airports coupled to the post-9/11 fear of travelling while young, alone, and brown with a Semitic nose and getting someone riled up enough to either make a scene or get security to put me in a little room, I was edgy enough before; but now I have legal documents that don't match up, and it takes real effort to look male like my passport and other paperwork say I am. That's bad when you're trying to convince armed people whose job it is to be suspicious that you're not in disguise, trying to pull something, or using someone else's ID.*** Add to that my very justifiable fear of law enforcement officials behind closed doors, and we have a winner. I was not looking forward to this trip.

So I did my best to dress down and not make waves. Jeans. Doc Martens. T-shirt, with a second button-up shirt to help cover up my sports-bra-compressed breasts. Hair pinned up in a tight bun. Stud earrings. No makeup. I walked up to the security gate with my bags, probably looking edgy as all get-out, and the TSA guy looked at me, no blinking, and said, matter-of-factly, "Ma'am, would you please step forward?" Well, I wasn't going to argue--and that's when my hairpins set off the metal detector, and I had to take them out, which brought my hair tumbling down past my shoulders. I got led to the little glass box where you wait for pat-downs, and there was a little commotion as they found a female officer to search me; then I got patted down, and told, "Miss, you can be on your way," and got my belt and shoes back on and headed for the boarding gate.

Now, a minute-to-minute shift in that context could have had terrible consequences--a humiliating public scene at best, with a "worst" end of the spectrum that was really too awful to contemplate thoroughly. I got lucky. Bureaucracy saved the day, and all I got was a faintly apologetic pat-down. That kind of thing is awkward at work, and often funny in my social world, but in the wrong situation--drunk guys on the street, tense law enforcement officials--it's a recipe for nightmares. This unpredictable middle ground--where in a half-hour at work I can be addressed as a butch man, a femme woman, a butch woman and a femme man by people standing right next to each other--is one thing in a world like my kitchen or my workplace, but it's entirely another in a place where I don't have any power. At the next flight, from another airport with me much more confident about my getting by, the man checking my ID peered at it for a long time, checked it from a couple of angles, stared. He blinked, said quietly--eyes level with the pushed-up breasts under my tight t-shirt****--"to your right, Sir," and waved me along. No scene, but he sure had the option. The next station was just interested in moving me through, and by then I was "ma'am" again. Once more, the potential was there for me to be in trouble--he could have called over an official to discuss the incongruity, any number of things could have happened--but I got lucky.

I'm not sure what the lesson is, here, but if I had any doubts about Whipping Girl's assertion that this happens, they're gone now. Liminal spaces are in short supply in people's heads, even people who're more likely to accept variant gender presentations. They still want you, in their heads, to be a variant male or a variant female, in my experience. I'm not sure what to do with that.

All I know is that tonight out at the barracks, while I was performing first aid, my patient decided not to even guess. I'm not sure whether or not she kept changing her mind or what, but it seemed like she was alternating pronouns sentence by sentence. Seriously, people. Just ask if you have to.


*Possibly only Mags is nerdy enough in the right ways to get all the layers of this joke.
**Which I'll be holding a large discussion of at Feministe next month! You should all come. Bonus points if we can get Dr. Serano to drop by and tell me I'm a moron; I hear she uses the inter-tubes on occasion.
***I've been searching like crazy for the couple-years-old news story I'm referring to, and I just can't find the reference. It regarded a TSA airport-security memo dictating a policy of carefully searching anyone who appeared to be cross-dressed, because Terrorists could be using it as a disguise so they could Do Evil. It was a ludicrous, transparently bigoted policy in its wording, and a lot of bloggers wrote about it incredulously, and now I just can't find any of those old entries. Anyone?
****Don't you judge me. I'm young, and I wanted to give my girlfriend something to look at before I left.

hit the road, jack

Spokane

I have a strange relationship with the highway.
I ache for it, sometimes, need desperately to get out on it, but I shudder at going too fast, and my shoulders tense up into stabbing pain, and I’m troubled by what the highway means. Still, opening out on the blacktop, stopping in random places and breathing them in before continuing, it’s a peculiar love affair and has more than a little to do with running away.
It’s almost as conflicted a relationship as I have with my country, which I love, which I’ve been considering with increasing seriousness fleeing for shelter somewhere else, somewhere, ironically enough, less dangerous, less exhausting, less likely to cause me to lose perspective and give in to despair. So it’s funny that I found myself on Interstate 90 at midday on Independence Day, fighting it out with the early July sun and all alone in a metal cocoon ready to hash it all out.
We used to call my car the Mighty Chariot, for the drag races I’d won as a teenager and certainly not for anything I’d done with young women in the passenger seat during those same years. It’s a station wagon, and it’s got a big dent in the side that’s my fault, and I pat the dashboard when it performs especially well. We’ve been close since I was sixteen, and though I’m notoriously nervous about machines, I sometimes forget, on long trips, that we’re separate. I used to hate driving. Moving that fast with my feet off the ground terrified me, and so did relying on machinery I couldn’t watch work, but familiarity breeds many things besides contempt.
The highway’s a weird non-place, all about being on the way to somewhere, never about being anywhere, and you start to see cars as people, not as vehicles with people in them. That Chevy over there did a thing, not the Chevy’s driver. That pickup over there is being a jerk. And there’s tribes.
I cannot leave behind my fear of the squad cars, as they dart in and out of traffic as great fish, as wolves dividing a herd. It is unreasonable, it is paranoid, but I still get shaken every time I see a police vehicle, even one I know for certain is helping people, even one I know is helping me. Ever since one bad night, I just freeze up, even when I know rationally I’ve got nothing to hide or worry about.
The highway’s a strange place, but I’m on it, at the northeast extremity of Washington State, headed westbound for friends who wait where the sun sets. Out here, I’m reminded of eastern Oregon, which is much alike and hard to distinguish if you put photos side-by-side, and I think, I could do this. I could come out here and wear sturdy jeans and drive a beat-up pickup, I could bale hay and be tough as my old tomboy days and find myself a cowboy hat to fit my outsized head. This out here, though I fled it for the city, this is familiar, this is standard. I could come out here, I could come stay by these ragged fenceposts, I could belong to this land if it weren’t for the people in it, who I know are good folk but who don’t know I am.
Highways like this, I used to run alongside, for hours and miles at a time, and I knew all of the ranches by sight, back there. I used to drive out with my camera and find old trees that cast interesting shadows. I quit piano lessons to learn to care for livestock, once, and that might be part of why I never became the musician my brothers did, and might, really, be part of why I carry a first-aid kit today.
Maybe, I think to myself, still wanting to pull over and buy a hat somewhere for no good reason, maybe I’m just going through my horse phase.

Somewhere near Sprague

The sun is blazing directly overhead in a vast and gauzy sky, and it’s dry enough to crisp the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The flat horizons on all sides just disappear into vagueness instead of going up the way I expect them to, unlike anything except my memories of driving out West in our minivan when I was six and staring out the window at endless expanses of Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa. That way, I think, that just keeps going till Canada. That way is the Columbia and then it keeps going, all the way to Utah. That way’s the Rockies, and that way’s the Cascades, too far to see. There is no way to appreciate how many shades of brown and yellow and gold and tan and buff and taupe there are until you’ve been out to the high desert, this part sectioned off into huge rectangles and occasionally irrigated. I let it all blend together, only stopping once to pull over and ask a couple changing the tire on their camper if they need a hand. They tell me no, and I stroll back along the shoulder to my car, grasshoppers the color of everything else swirling around my feet. There is a clunky old cell phone lying in the gravel by the edge of the pavement, and I give it a glance before leaving it face-up for the crows to enjoy.
Traffic slows to a crawl for something that involves multiple squad cars and an ambulance, and a bearded biker in his goggles and leathers waves traffic around it. On the back of his black leather vest is a yellow cross and the legend, TRIBE OF JUDAH JESUS CHRIST IS LORD. As I pass, I see the paramedics and police bent over a man prone, in biker clothes himself, and then it’s all moving again.
The radio in Eastern Washingston is something else. If it’s not country music with bad reception, it’s about God, and only one version of one God in particular. I listen to a sermon about how the best part of being a Christian is the gifts you get at the end, that really, it’s all about knowing for certain that in exchange for your—it’s left indistinct, but participation, at least—God has promised some nice things for the end, which is around the corner, fine things. I find myself wondering if this preacher has ever loved his God for anything but the Cracker Jack prize at the bottom of Creation, and the country song that comes on about how God will turn His face from us and give up if we don’t leave Him in the Pledge of Allegiance sets me wondering. Can’t we do better than this, I argue aloud with the radio, thinking of Rabi’a’s torch and bucket. Surely we can do better than this.
I tune in to another long sermon, holding with it for a while, enjoying the reverend’s gravelly voice. He goes on about how yes, when God promised Abraham a blessing on his seed, that was fulfilled through Christ’s act of mercy, but that’s not all, that’s surely not all. In Abraham’s children, in this man’s scripture, God’s blessing was also expressed in, as he says it, the tribe of Abram’s “military intervention” into the affairs of Sodom and Gomorrah, the “liberation” of its people. So do we, as heirs of Abraham, he says, have a responsibility to do the same. “The English-speaking people of the world,” he says, are the true and only heirs of Abraham, and to them falls blessing and burden. Christ’s grace is well and good, but how can we, as “the only nation in the world powerful enough to project freedom wherever we choose,” not intervene militarily as Abraham did, given the opportunity? I wonder about his phrasing, his citation of our power as evidence of our being the true heirs of the Hebrew legacy, about his choosing to say that we go where we choose, not where God chooses. I seek along the tuner band until I find another country station. Let’s roll, America, sings a man who no doubt wears a big hat, ‘cause God is on our side. And I think not of Rabi’a, but of Lincoln, who could not dare to make such a claim, who prayed that we would find it in ourselves to be on His side instead. On another station, the only woman I’ve heard all day prays that women all over the country will learn to be more loving to their husbands, be more obedient to the Word as it applies to serving a man “no matter the cost,” and I have to swallow, hard.
It becomes apparent that many of these radio men talk more about America than about their God, and I’m not sure what that means—about this nation, not the Kingdom of God, about our promised glories but not about the poor, or the sick, or the naked. One of them calls Social Gospel a blasphemy, but explains himself in kind tones, and I find myself at a loss.
They are all of the radio stations, this deep into the steppes and scrublands, and I continue to listen.

George

I pull off of I-90 into George, Washington, remarkable only for its too-cute name and the nearby Gorge Amphitheater, home to concerts that seat thousands and near nothing else at all. In central Washington, the farmland competes only with tawny hills, and this close to the river, those hills crumple the landscape and cradle little pull-offs like George not lovingly, but without rancor. Stopping my car in the lot of the shiny new gas station, directly across from the beat-up one with the case of ice for sale, I drag my red bandanna off my head and around my neck like a kerchief, ready to make it a dust mask. The taqueria I was hoping to hit has closed for the holiday. I have been at this intersection twice before in my life: once, on my way east the day before, to gas up my car and lift the hood to make sure that my CHECK ENGINE light didn’t mean anything in particular, just another pretty Latina on the way to somewhere else, not yet in today’s disguise, the wind tugging at a suede A-line the color of the landscape. Once, more than three years ago, in the middle of the night, returning from a concert at the amphitheater, my friends asleep in the back and too high to care, my girlfriend crumpled over her seat and looking serene despite the fight we’d been in before she dropped off. I had waited a while before I realized that I needed to pump my own gas in this strange state, and when I got out to operate the nozzle, there were two girls from my hometown in the next car, sweaty, tired, amused. Both times I used the beat-up gas station, and deliberately.
Today, I take a deep breath of the dusty wind and find that I cannot shake my desire to find a cowboy hat. The general store down the way looks promising, and I pull into its parking lot, walk in looking absurd, don’t find what I’m looking for amidst the work gloves and dry goods and packaged snacks. I say howdy to the bespectacled blonde woman at the register and pay for a tamarind soda and a Pepsi that was on sale, trying to be polite. GOD BLESS AMERICA, says her t-shirt, and her husband, a vast and ruddy fellow with a white beard and leather pate, wears one to match. It appears to be his picture on the donation can by the till, which proclaims that someone’s house burned down, and I hope it’s not these sweet folks, but that’s the way of things now and then. I wish her a happy Independence Day and wander out, stopping by the van in the parking lot to read their menu, all in Spanish. They serve lengua and cabeza, so they check out, and I surprise myself by not attempting any Spanish when I order. Perhaps it’s out of embarrassment; all the men ahead of me are old migrant workers, stocky and windworn, like all of the Mexican families in the dusty lot a few yards away, looking at tractors all lined up like it’s market day. There is no sales tax on my tacos, and I eat them quietly, in the closest thing there is to shade. Every other business on the block—which is to say, every other business here, since everything else in sight seems to be gas stations, tractors, or housing—is out of business, their spaces for rent, some still with Hallowe’en decorations up. Nowhere to go but the fields, which stretch unavoidable in all directions, dry and brown. Popping the cap on my soda with a multitool from my emergency kit and slamming the hatchback shut, I put my car into gear, put my sunglasses back on, and get back on the highway, jockeying for position with boat trailers and pickups, leaving George behind.
I had told myself no more stops, but I’m in no special hurry. and I take an exit where the sign tells me there’s a viewpoint. It’s a shelf of basalt out over the gorge, and below me is the Columbia, much nearer her source than I’m used to, impossibly blue between brown-gold banks and steep cliffs the color of tobacco and sunsets. A sere wind takes all the moisture out of my mouth and nostrils and I ponder just following the river back to its mouth where I came from, but the highway map doesn’t agree with that notion. I pour out water from my canteen and bow, but when I take a drink, it’s hot and bitter from two days in the car.
It’s time to get back on the road, time to keep moving and know that I’ll see this river later, at a less young place, where it’s fed by another river I love.
I refuse to turn off again when I see a sign for the petrified ginkgo forest, but I do leave the window down all the way to Yakima.

Iron Horse to Snoqualmie Pass

As the land shrugs and folds and finds itself a coat of pine, I can see the jagged teeth of the Cascades coming up ahead, and here in the foothills with one foot in the desert and one in the Ponderosas and volcanoes I find myself thinking, home. I was born on the Chesapeake Bay, thousands of miles away, but I have only one blurred memory of that place; I insist on thinking of this as the land the birthed me, that shaped me. These mountains, this indifferent sagebrush, this is my homeland. For all my railing, this is my homeland, this is where I come from. This is a place I understand.
No matter where I go in the world, no matter how many places adopt or astound me, I cannot escape that.

Snoqualmie to Seattle

Higher up in the pass I pull over into a ferny trailhead and call a friend for directions to his place, and the police pull up in a white SUV meantime, waiting for me to produce a recreational pass, break into a parked hiker’s car, or be on my way. I choose that third option after relieving myself courtesy the Forest Service, but when the turnoff finally comes up, I’m blocked by a semi and miss the exit.
There is nowhere to turn around, so I just keep going past all these places named by people who aren’t here any more. Sammamish. Issaquah. I only stop for gas before blazing across the Mercer Island bridge, level with a glittering lake, and into Seattle proper with daylight to spare. I find myself performing too much at dinner, not appreciating my friend, who I’ve missed, nearly enough. I’m itching for the road again, telling myself it’s just because I’m tired and sore and want to get back to my own bed, or get back in time to meet friends on the rugby field, or have my own radio stations back when I press the preset buttons on my console. So I excuse myself, and hug goodbye for now, and promise to come back soon.

Seattle to the river

As I pull away from Jess and her work friends and the brightly-colored house she’s taking care of, I light up a cigarette, put on the radio, become briefly lost in the north of Seattle before I finally muddle my way to I-5 and begin to glide the overpasses of downtown. The sunset is winding down, and fireworks begin to launch over the bay, and I get a long glimpse of the Space Needle, lit up and somehow kind for all its World’s Fair alienness, somehow warm, a flag flying from its point, dominating the skyline out my right-side window. The interstate takes me past the stadiums, lit up red, white, and blue; across the Sound I begin to see the flashes of distant combustions, and I begin to rethink my troubles with the rockets’ red glare.
After last year, standing in choking gunpowder smoke, fireworks a weapon against me as I tried to read a Declaration of Independence nobody seemed to recognize, I turned my back on fireworks. Portland’s display began behind me as I left a perfect viewpoint, walked across the Hawthorne Bridge shaking and near tears, and drove home to write bitterly about my grief for the nation. The flashes of light I had seen before, and now the wonder of it, the thirty seconds of ooh and ahh before they became repetitive, that had been taken, too: the bombs bursting in air, for me, had become just another glory in our ability to blow up other folk, a lightshow to celebrate hubris and distract citizens from their history and rights.
I don’t sit still for them, this year. I hit the road, south on I-5, thinking I’ll ignore them and take advantage of everyone else’s foolishness to make good time on the highway. As darkness falls, I begin to see them, to the left and to the right, multiple displays simultaneous as I pass through them, like the storm-chasing I used to do in the desert back home, heat-lightning making white whole sections of the sky. From backyard and city center, over wood and water, blossoms of color, silent, exuberant, behind hills and tucked in bays, cascade on all sides and sometimes directly above. As I listen to a radio report on the latest Nobel Peace Prize and grassroots activism in Kenya, every township sends up fountains of shivering light. There is no time to stare at any, as I barrel through the night at a mile a minute. Just pockets and showers and moments, pink cauliflower and hissing undulation and the knowledge that a thousand thousand towns out there in the dark are doing the same, and I forget, for a while, about nation, about this pride in a country, just seeing human beings tossing aloft tiny starscapes and saying, here I am, here I am, here I am. Tacoma. Olympia. Sleater-Kinney, Pe Ell, Kalama, Vancouver. As the darkness grows and the lights begin to fade, getting toward midnight, NPR becomes staticky and indistinct, and I push a tape into the player, turn it up to compensate for the age of the cassette.
Hold me closer, tiny dancer, croons Elton John, count the headlights on the highway, as I count the endless litany of truck stops and Food Next Right and Portland, 64 Miles.
Here I am.
Here I am.
Here I am.


Happy Fourth of July.