DEN to SFO.

Flying over the Great Basin. It is the first time I have ever taken a plane west of Wyoming, across these giant arid spaces that bunch up and drop into the ocean.

The first time I came to the coast I was alone, packed into my old silver Honda and not sure what I was doing. I stopped to sleep in the dust in the middle of Utah, drank middle-of-nowhere coffee out of styrofoam, pissed on the side of the road in Nevada. I came down the Sierras in late afternoon, tasting the air thicken until, at a park outside Sacramento, I could swear I was in the cricket-humming Midwest of my childhood. Then I bought fruit from a stand in the hills and spent the night just short of the ocean, parked against a neighborhood curb.


When I woke, the dawn was pale. Roosters roamed the streets and a burro wandered the old Spanish plaza. San Juan Bautista. The only person awake was a baker girl, who sang loudly in her shop with the door open. I walked circles on the asphalt, watching the light rise.


It was raining as I got back into the car. I turned up the music and went to the ocean. For the first time, the Pacific stretched before me. I was nineteen years old, wearing ripped jeans, with long hair that curled at the ends.


I ran toward the break. It surged toward me. Suddenly soaked to the knee, laughing, sand whipping in the wind.  Fifteen hundred miles from my tiny dorm room, the ocean had taken care of the last three feet.



Grey surf. That whole trip it rained. I met Makendra at a horse farm outside Monterey and she pitched hay, patted mares. There was the smell of horse poop, rich and fresh. We slept on the floor of the house. Then we packed bags and went into Big Sur, down the jagged coast, where the rivers rose so high and brown that in the end we simply walked down the middle of them. We ate thai food in the dripping forest and read aloud to each other.

Flying over the Basin now, I can’t help but recall Ed Abbey’s journey to Australia. “Next time I’ll do it right,” he said:  a drive to the coast, a boat to the next continent. He hated the disorientation of stepping on a plane and somehow arriving, mere hours later, on a different part of the planet.  The transition mattered. I find myself aching the same way—for the elongated journey, where the air gets hot and sweet, or slowly fresh and cold; where the ground slowly gathers up into foothills, then peaks. Where you stumble into a Reno cafe to pee and discover belly-dancing night. Where the mind comes to take the same shape as the rutted-up land around it.

We fly over the Sierras now, tops thick with cream, the valleys sharp and glacial. In less than an hour we’ll hit the coast. Suddenly, California. And for an instant, I’ll taste a sharp longing for my old life: where a trip was a journey. Where the continent unfolded slowly, pulling me into it. Where it hardly mattered where I ended up at all.

Listen, jerks. It’s cold and quiet here too.

             Some people say Jackson isn’t part of Wyoming. I think that’s shit.

            It’s noon, and I’m driving back to town from the valley floor. The sage are buried so deep they’re barely visible, just tiny specks of black where an arm reaches up. Snow pours off the banks and sweeps across the road. The mountains are invisible. My wipers cake with ice.

For three hours I’ve been lying in front of a group of people, naked. They are artists. Here is how it goes:  beside a wood-pellet stove I bend and they draw me. I twist. I breathe. They dip brushes into ink wells, furrow their brows, and make magic.

Always, I fix my eyes on a point to hold the pose. The walls are covered in paintings, and I eat them as I wait: dark valleys.  An elk, half turned. Snow-encrusted spires in the desert. 

Once in a long while, I allow myself the luxury of peeking out the window. Today, a blizzard hissed outside. A cluster of aspens was quietly buried. The valley seemed more raw than ever.

Sometimes it’s people in Jackson who say it. These people are usually not from here. They don’t associate themselves with the metal lines of trailers, the endless high plains; they don’t venture into the dark bars, floors slick with snow. They don’t talk cows or gas rigs.  Jackson, they think, cannot truly be part of Wyoming.

            More often it’s the rest of the state disowning us:  our eco-friendly lodges, our sushi and wine bars, our boutique shops.  We have national parks. We make the covers of calendars. There’s not a Wal-Mart in sight.

            Still, when the snow closes in like this, the differences dull down. There is snow. There is wind, endless cold. There is the giant silence, leaning over us.

           

            Landscape painter Greg McHuron—who hosts the drawing group in his personal valley-floor studio—had a new canvas on his easel today. In the painting, the Tetons tilted over the floodplains at a startling angle. Cottonwoods flared orange. Rocky spines seemed to jar out of the canvas.

            At noon, as the other artists filed out the door with big pads of paper tucked into their armpits, I asked him about it.

            “This one new? Or are you still working on it?”

            “This fall,” Greg said. “I did that plein air.”  I nodded. “This part,” he pointed to where a sage berm twisted away into the distance, “this part I worked on inside a bit. But the rest of it was all outside.

            “I get an emotional response to what’s going on around me when I’m out there. Painting from a photograph, you worry about getting it down exactly as it looks.  Outside, you paint what you feel.”

            We talked about about the shadows in the painting. How he hollowed out the canyons with color. Greg shook his bald head. “People paint snow too sweet. It’s not actually white. It’s blue, or a hard purple.  Or then the sky opens up and it’s softer—yellow, maybe light orange, but almost never white.”

He looked hard at me. “If you’re going to be painting snow, you better be standing in it.”

This struck me as brilliant.

            I went out into the snow, holding the sketches I’d nabbed to my chest, so they wouldn’t get wet.  Fresh snow filled my tracks. When slush kicked up into my boot, I laughed.

            If you’re going to be writing about snow, you better be bathing in it. 

Gretel Ehrlich comes to mind:

…You should hear the way snow

sizzles and shrinks, hisses and rots away.

Overnight someone new steps into

those white thighs and drags herself downhill towards

the next season. A thunderstorm

unties the sky. It composes and decomposes darkness,

and forgives what it has gathered there

by letting it rain…

Ehrlich wrote the poem, “Other Seasons,” out of the center of Wyoming. But it was just as relevant here, during my first high mountain spring, when I was living in a one-room cabin five miles past the Hoback Junction. I read the poem daily as winter’s deep drifts shifted and cracked and slid into mud. The hills across the highway browned, then paled again. Then crept green in the late May rains.  Weather was the language that ordered my life. Erhlich understood it, and I drank her in.

            Driving back from Greg’s, I let my car slide a little as it goes around a bend. I know better than to fight the ice.

In Wyoming, weather is god.  The wind with razor teeth, the steaming river, the mud season. Snow year-round, and a sun that makes us brown.  Not a soul avoids it. It seeps into every corner of our lives: we live seasonally, we fight to remain, we sip on the tenuousness of an economy far from the city.  We dig out our cars and split wood for the stove. We make love watching icicles crawl down the windows.  We can’t help but know snow intimately: in Cheyenne and Ucross and Worland and LaBarge—and Jackson.

In the Hole, too, the god roars.

I've never really been cool anyway

The Blog Age is over, I hear. So passe. No one reads them. Twitter and Facebook have dulled our attention spans to a sentence or two.

So why start one now, long after the height?

It’s personal, of course. I created Girl Makes Fire with the intention of easing my own perfectionism. Anyone who knows me will agree that I’m hard on myself when it comes to writing. I don’t let a word out of its locked room until everything is in place. When I invite friends to be editors—and it happens with only a few—it’s deeply private and very vulnerable.

But to be perfectionistic about writing is to cut it off at the source. All too often, I let ideas slip away undeveloped because I don’t have the time or concentration to “do it right.” Opinions that—who knows?—could create change if distributed instead become rants in bars. At some point, it’s important to simply sit down and finish something—and to let someone read it.

Consider Girl Makes Fire my personal writing bootcamp.

This blog is personal. It’s also political. It’s an opportunity to publicly engage with my reactions to books, articles, and news stories. Oh yeah, and life.  The name of the blog, Girl Makes Fire, comes from my sense of myself as one who brings things together. By sharing, I aim to create engagement. By responding, I aim to synthesize experiences.  And whether or not blogs are uncool, anything that can be posted on facebook can drag people into a dialogue.

Flint. Tinder. I am the catalyst, the grated-against steel. Don’t all artists aim to hold these cold objects in their hands, and somehow make a magic flame?

Here I go, bending into the digital ghetto with a megaphone.