eaterprovocateur

Ten years ago, I wrote an essay about Featherville, Idaho.  In the essay, I mused whether Featherville, an old mining town small enough to be omitted from most maps, teetered on the verge of death like Rocky Bar, the nearby ghost of a gold-mining hotspot, or whether it would thrive like its eastern neighbors, Ketchum and Sun Valley. 

As it turned out, Featherville thrives.  Its population has proliferated in direct relation to the shrinkage of its wild spaces.   There is money again in its economy; there are fewer foxes, elk, wolves, mountain lions, and bears.  The cabin that my grandfather built in 1969 consumed a small portion of this same wild space whose loss renders me a bit tetchy; it is among the long list of Things For Which I Was Not Responsible But Still Feel Guilty About. But I can’t imagine the cabin not being there. Featherville is in my blood. 

Charlie Baker, grandfather to many of my Idaho friends, opened the area’s real estate in the late sixties with properties known as Baker’s Acres.  My grandfather, who worked as a physician at the Gooding Hospital in Gooding, Idaho, met Mr. Baker through shared friends.  Grandpa visited Featherville at Baker’s urging and was immediately enthralled with the area. He quickly purchased the cabin’s current plot at the edge of the wild from Baker.  My grandfather and Mr. Baker were close allies in the development of Featherville, as were grandpa’s descendants and Mr. Baker’s: the McCoys, the Browers, and the Lancasters.  

Grandpa built the log cabin with his second wife, Edith, at the outermost boundary of Featherville, on a plot of land that adjoins the National Forest Service.  There is a Forest Service turn-around point for vehicles just beyond the dividing line, and many campers have tried – some successfully, some unsuccessfully – to make the space an unofficial camping spot.  When I am at the cabin, I become almost pathologically vigilant about preserving the sanctity and serenity of the cabin, staring coldly towards the drivers of vehicles that stop at the pullout in front of the house. 

I feel proprietary of Featherville and of the cabin.  Featherville has been my family’s special place for over forty years.  I have seen the town’s general store move from one side of the road to the opposite side, then back and over again, and have seen several incarnations of it open and close. The problem with seeing all the changing hands of businesses as they begin and consequently end is that I know and remember all of the owners and all their spaces, but the new owners and spaces don’t remember me, because I am only at liberty to visit Featherville occasionally.  To them, I’m not an insider; I am an outsider.  The dichotomy is discomforting, compounded by the gradual loss of the older generations of families with whom my family shares a long history.  What right do I have to bulldog the open space in front of the cabin when I’m only visiting for a week?  And yet, feelings bubble to the surface: Get out of here!  Don’t you know you can’t camp there?  Do I want to see your face when I go out for my run first thing tomorrow morning?  I can’t seem to correct my attitude, though I know it is unfriendly, uncharitable, and ultimately beyond both my control and my right.

The cabin is a fixture in the Moris family – a place for retreat and meditation, for reunions and large communal meals.  Its history is important to me.  Edith frequently preached from the small wooden pulpit of the town’s Little Church in the Wildwood; every Sunday, I sat on one of its chilly wooden pews and admired the colorful decals of stained glass affixed to its windows.  I learned to fish down in the river with my aunt Pat.  As children, my siblings and I played countless games of Scrabble with the grown-ups at the large dining table, late into the night with moths and mosquitoes illuminated against the darkness through screened in windows.  Grandpa had an uncanny talent for scoring triple word points and deftly dispatching all of his letters at once with words that we dared not challenge.  (We would have been wrong.)  So many photos have been taken on the front porch – small children becoming, in each advancing shot and in various stages of dress and preference, the next generation of adults, bringing with them their small children. The porch is, incidentally, the perfect place to drink kettle-boiled coffee while looking for chipmunks, foxes, and deer in the crisp morning air as the sun rises over tall pine trees.

Sharing the traditions of the cabin with my children helps to settle my inner grizzly.  We sit on the planked steps of the front porch: our shoulders awash in sunlight, watermelon juice dribbling down chins and arms.  We scout for chipmunks.  We stand on an overhang above the river, which rushes fast, full, and freezing cold in green pools below us; we toss rocks into the deepest parts, hoping to scatter a bright red prism of kokanee salmon.  We read together.  At dinnertime, we gather at the big table and eat simple food: spaghetti with oniony tomato sauce; thickly sliced white bread with salty butter; chicken breasts marinated in balsalmic vinegar, oil, garlic, and fresh rosemary; whole cobs of sweet summer corn.  My daughter serenades us throughout meals with “DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love Again” (she is four and only knows the chorus, but she sings it with gusto). My son invents new jokes – primarily variations on the theme of ‘banana, banana, orange.’  We all vie to sit closest to the window so that we can watch the river as it rushes below.  The sound of water is a salve.

In a moment of insanity that struck just after my son was born, I thought I could forsake Featherville and the cabin.  Grandpa bequeathed his children and grandchildren equal stakes in the cabin, and we are all, more or less, collectively responsible for its maintenance and taxes.  My family – and fellow shareholders – urged me to wait a while before I relinquished my share. Thank God that they did. 

The cabin has no television.  The record player plays limited LPs crisply (my favorites are Swan Lake and The Sound of Music); it also receives limited radio transmission, but only during sunlight hours.  The phone receives incoming calls but dials out only locally. There is no such thing as Internet or cell phone reception.  Furnished as it is with items from the early 70s – lots of loud oranges and avocado greens – the cabin is a place where we cook, read, and talk.  We scale the steep bank just beside the cabin and go to the river to fish or play in sand for our entertainment. We hike frequently and are, as a family four generations strong, characterized by an irrepressible enthusiasm for spotting wildlife.

The first thing we do upon arrival at the cabin – after the obligatory opening of curtains and turning on the water heater – is set a pot of water on the stove to make ‘hummingbird juice,’ a sweet concoction of four parts water brought to a boil into which one part sugar is dissolved.  Several drops of red food dye are stirred in.  Once the mixture cools, we transfer it to a hummingbird feeder and place it at the corner of the porch, hanging about eight feet up so that we can watch it throughout the day whether we are indoors or out.  The hummingbirds are reticent at first, hesitant to be near us, but they quickly overcome any concerns.  I delight in watching Lilliputian feet pressed against downy soft abdomens as they whiz around the feeder, taking small sips and chasing one another away.  I have a particular soft spot for the copper-colored Rufous with the Napoleon complex.

On a recent visit, I observed two long-eared, black-tailed squirrels engage in an extended “conversation” regarding the triangulation of the coordinates for the stack of peanuts I stealthily placed on the porch in order to attract these very same creatures.  I vacated my seat on the porch for 15 minutes and every single peanut (there were about 30 in the stack) had disappeared.  My brother used to attract the smaller, striped chipmunks in this manner, eventually coaxing them to eat the peanuts directly from his open palm. 

The garden, a small allotment of land adjacent to the cabin, once grew strawberries and wildflowers.  I think it was Edith who nurtured that garden in the woods; she spent a lot of time by herself at the cabin and her love for the place was evident in her care of it.  Now the garden area is overgrown and thick with fallen dried pine needles, but I remember peering under the white strawberry blossoms and dainty green leaves to find those small red berries growing in their shade.  I think of Edith as I watch my daughter kneel in the dirt on the garden path, gathering sticks and rocks for one of her many archaeological ‘collections.’ 

Though grandpa remarried after Edith’s death in 1982, Edith is, technically, my grandmother, and I have gathered from family recollections that she was instrumental in bringing my mother and I from Africa into the United States when I was a year old.  She constitutes my first real memory, except that I am not sure whether it is a memory or a dream, because I was very young and, according to my mother’s journals, she died quickly after.  I can still see Edith entering my childhood bedroom at night with the lights off – her body a slight outline against the light from the hall, her bare scalp swathed in a polyester turban – sitting down on my faded Holly Hobby blanket and stroking my hair.  Hair stroking was the only consistent means to put my son, who was colicky for his first six months, back to sleep as I tip-toed out the door each morning to work.  I can’t seem to resist stroking my daughter’s hair, though the act probably soothes me more than it soothes her. 

Maybe the element of comfort is what binds me to the cabin, the familiarity of these ghosts of remembrance.  Maybe it is the repetition, the little, compelling indulgences of tradition.  As an adult, I understand why Edith so often surrendered herself to the cabin’s silent allure.  Grandpa chopped and stacked the firewood in the back of the house for her; Edith used the wood to keep the cabin warm during her extended stays, when snow packed itself halfway up the roof and everything was quiet and still except for a hot kettle singing on the stove.  She sometimes returned to Grandpa weeks later, bringing with her the tranquility of solitude, the joy of reunion, and the certitude of her return to the place she loved so well.

A = Asafoetida

Harold McGee writes that asafoetida is “the strangest and strongest of all spices,” bearing a “strong, sulfurous aroma reminiscent of human sweat and washed-rind cheese.”  Asafoetida is also referred to as stinking gum or devil’s dung, which gives an approximate idea of its odor prior to cooking, though I’m told it’s actually very nice when cooked.  In college, I worked in a market that sold herbs and spices by the ounce.  We kept the spices in Kerr jars with gleaming golden lids.  The market is no longer there, and, even though I really didn’t enjoy the aroma of refilling the asafoetida jar, I mourn its demise.

B = Blood

My son, Kai, is learning to read, and, as part of the process, I am relearning to read.  Kai reads the word blood as ‘blewd.’  This makes sense: ‘oo’ means ‘ooh.’  It fascinates me to watch him as his brain picks through the intricate web of the English language, which has so many different, conflicting rules governing simple combinations of letters.

C = Ciabatta and Chop Suey

The word ciabatta makes me want to kiss someone.  I admire the sound of the word as much as the bread itself; not many words produce a similar effect.  Ciabatta also awakens my irrepressible affinity for word play: Ciabatta incites in me a cacophony from the cockles of my heart to the core of my coccyx.  Never dangle enticing words in front of a word lover: terrible consonance results. 

Chop Suey is my favorite food to slander when my self-esteem draws low.  I say, “What am I, chicken chop suey?” and everyone laughs.  Except maybe me.

D = Decrashuns

Kai wrote his first story in kindergarten this year.  I was proud to the point of bursting.  Here is his story: “It was my dad’s birthday but my mom was sick so I went to the stor to by partey decrashuns and a cake.  My dad was so happy he gave me a big hug.”  This story is gloriously original and bears only two falsehoods: I am rarely sick and Kai cannot drive.

E = Effervescent

I am ebulliently and effusively effervescent. 

F = Fava Beans

Quick!  What’s the first thing you think of when you hear ‘fava beans’?  For me, it will forever be chianti.

G = Ginger 

Great rhizome, great dried spice, great color, great adverb.  Also, my favorite character on Gilligan’s Island. 

H = Hasenpfeffer

According to my dictionary, hasenpfeffer is “a stew of marinated rabbit meat garnished usually with sour cream.”  It comes from the German words: hare’s pepper.  I have never eaten hasenpfeffer, but I like to say the word.  It reminds me of that Loony Tunes episode where a heavily abused Yosemite Sam fails to procure hasenpfeffer for the angry king and Bugs Bunny uses his wiles to trick the king into thinking that carrots are hasenpfeffer.  The episode was called “Shishkabugs.”

I = Ibis

An ibis is a bird that has long, stick-like legs and a long curved beak; is indigenous to waterways; and was at one time revered as sacred.  The Ibis is also the name of the shop I worked in throughout college.  I started there as a barista, but found that I preferred working on the market side.  In addition to the herbs and spices we sold, the market offered fresh feta cheese and olives by the pound, bulk dried beans and rice, and various gourmet items with pretty French labels, which at the time I considered very exotic.  I didn’t appreciate those beautiful raw ingredients enough during my years working there.  Sulfurous asafoetida powder, dried juniper berries, lovely stars of anise, red lentils, adzuki beans, basmati rice… The market no longer exists; it has since been remodeled into a more profitable café venue.  Sometimes I feel like a jerk for not fully appreciating all the market had to offer.  See also Idiot.

J = Juniper

Juniper berries make me think of my ex-boyfriend Jeff – all the hard, spicy ways we fell apart.  He was a chef.  He looked at me like a starved wolf.  I should have known better. 

K = Kodachrome

I don’t care what anyone says about Paul Simon.  I am physically unable to prevent myself from singing the “Kodachrome” song when I hear it.  I hear this song and dance through grocery store aisles; I hear this song and have never felt happier to see English muffins and small white tubs of Greek yogurt.  What is wrong with expressing appreciation for nice, bright colors and the greens of summer, for thinking that all the world’s a sunny day?  What do I care if a musician writes a song that is actually – heaven forbid – financially profitable?  Why do people have to be such haters?

L = Libation

A shot glass delivers a Lilliputian libation.

M = Mother

At the Ibis, we kept olives brined in large gallon jars, which we stored in refrigerated cases, shielded from the sun.  The brines sometimes harbored strange substances on their surfaces.  When I brought these particulates to the attention of my boss, she shrugged and said, “Oh, that’s just the mother.”  I thought I misheard her.  I have sifted through many dictionaries and encyclopedias, learning nothing about mother except this possible connection: “noun: a stringy, mucilaginous substance consisting of various bacteria which forms on the surface of a fermenting liquid and causes fermentation when added to other liquids, as in changing wine or cider to vinegar.” Harold McGee says nothing about mother, but notes that olives are often fermented, requiring a “slow alcoholic fermentation that takes as long as a year.”  Since my former boss was – and is – a very knowledgeable person with epicurean savvy well ahead of her time, I readily accepted her diagnosis of the state of the store’s olives.  Now you know.  That weird-looking scum floating on top of the olive brine?  That’s mother.  “Mother” is also a kickass Danzig song.

N = Nicotine

The Science of Good Food reports: “Eggplant, one of the more benign members of the notorious nightshade family, is neither addictive nor poisonous like its relatives tobacco leaf and deadly nightshade…  Eggplant contains more nicotine than any other vegetable, about 0.01%, which is negligible compared to the amount inhaled through passive smoking.”  Now I understand my fondness for eggplant – it’s magically addictive.

O = Olives

Not to harp on olives, but did you know that olive trees can live for a thousand years?  The University of Arizona campus in Tucson, Arizona, is thick with well-established olive trees.  In the spring, small bright yellow flowers blossom on green branches. The exposed roots of the tree’s trunks are gnarled, welcoming seats for those in need of shade. 

P = Poppies

Morphine is derived from the opiates contained in poppies.  My husband, who recently experienced the intense pain of kidney stones, says that morphine is the greatest substance on earth; ergo, poppies are medicine’s greatest flower.  According to him, the morphine administered to him in the Emergency Room took his pain away in 30 seconds. 

We have a poppy patch in our backyard.  As summer approaches, the patch shoots out pale green, alien-like egg-shaped sacs on long spindly stems.  Everything is covered in dense fuzz.  On one special day in early summer, the luscious red flowers ‘pop’ open, revealing their black pollen in a glorious, fleeting display.  I imagine the effects of morphine on my husband were much like that ‘pop’: so lovely, so ephemeral.

Q = Qua

Here are five words you can play in Scrabble when you have a ‘q’ but you don’t have a ‘u’: qaid, qindar, qintar, qiviut, and qoph.  Qua is also a good word to play, but only if you have a ‘u.’

R = Rhubarb

Harold McGee writes that rhubarb is “a vegetable that often masquerades as a fruit.”  Olives, avocadoes, corn, okra, plantains, and tomatoes are fruits that masquerade as vegetables.  Mushrooms fall into neither category because technically they are fungi.

S = Salt

One adds salt to a sweet recipe because it intensifies the qualities of sweetness.  I add salt because it reminds me of living in St. Augustine, which has very nice beaches.  When my children were little, Kai chased sandpipers down the shore, and Rory and I knelt in shallow tidal pools, admiring minnows and hoping to see little crabs.  The sun warmed our backs.  Salt caked our skin. 

T = Teetotaler

I admire the temerity of anyone who tries to titillate a teetotaler.

U = Umami

Umami, the quality of savory deliciousness, was discovered in 1908 by a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda.  Ikeda used brown algae kombu to create the flavorful white powder, MSG, now commonly accepted as a source of the umami sensation.  Umami is also experienced through consumption of meats, mushrooms, certain cheeses, and broths. 

V = Vespers

Sometimes I pray out loud.  To what and to whom, I don’t really know; despite having been raised a relaxed Lutheran, I have yet to sort out my full feelings of organized religion, let alone declare one to follow.  I do, however, believe in prayer.  I believe it is important to take the time to say: “I am thankful for my family.  I am thankful for my health.  I am thankful to have so many memories.  I am thankful to be alive.” 

W = Won ton

There used to be a Chinese restaurant called Sam’s on the corner of Third Avenue and 29^th Street in Manhattan.  It was a bright, open place with several large windows overlooking the street.  A line of chefs flanked the southern wall, separated from the seating area by tall silver counters and cooktops. Ducks hung upside down in the kitchen; underneath them sat a wizened woman molding fresh dumplings in her small, smooth hands.  Sam’s made the greatest vegetable dumplings I have ever eaten.  They also made excellent won tons, which I consumed wantonly. 

Sam’s isn’t operating anymore; now it’s a bar/nightclub.  The windows are blackened, and the doorway is lettered in crimson on black.   Sam’s is a memory of love to which I can only return in my mind.

X = Ox

Ax, ox, xi, xu.  Commit these to memory and you will always be able to play your ‘x’ piece in Scrabble.

Y = Yucca Brevifolia

The yuccas of the Mojave have evolved to nurture sister species of the female moth that share their name: the yucca moths, tegeticula synthetica and tegeticula antithetica.  The moths lay their eggs in the yucca’s fruit; the fruit nourishes their larvae, which grow into moths and thereby propagate the yucca by perpetuating the cycle of pollination of its flowers.  Yuccas and their moths have coevolved to mutually benefit one another.  Without this relationship, both would perish.

Z = Zinfandel

One day, I will sip zinfandel in Zurich and remember how my father used to wiggle his white mustache mischievously and say, “Zizzer zazzer zuzz.” 

My mother and I were easy targets when we lived in Coney Island: we were *white* white, naïve outsiders relocating from the podunk state of Idaho to the only New York neighborhood my mom could afford.  Mom’s journals document the many police reports she filed: the mugging; the racial slurs that turned into unconcealed threats; the midnight banging on our doors; the prank caller(s) who whispered, “You’re dead”; the day a group of young men standing in the lobby of our apartment building threw a cherry bomb into the elevator my mom and I had just entered.  Assuming us Jewish, they yelled common terms of Jewish derision which need not be reprinted, seasoning their antagonism with the occasional interspersion of hateful terms for female genitalia and ‘Commie,’ ‘Rusky,’ and ‘Stupid White Bitch.’  Maybe it was merely adolescent trickery in a neighborhood where everyone had something to prove.  I was too young to remember much, but I remember the fear that pitted in my stomach.  I remember dodging the eggs and shaving cream bombs as they were hurled out of bus windows on Halloween; the following day, the sidewalks were caked in yellow goo, cracked shells, splotches of hardened white cream and razor blades, a sort of urban fossilization system.  Mom detested Halloween.

*

My mother was a child in the Ukraine in WWII.  The war rendered her father a casualty, killing him when mom was two.  This loss defined my mother in significant ways, as did the war itself.  It explained her habit of saving and reusing the most commonplace household items: string, wrapping paper, tin foil, buttons; her emphasis on squirrelling money into savings accounts at the expense of improving daily living conditions; and her manner of proclaiming everything in her life – clothes, food, furniture – as ‘the best,’ though she could have been easily contradicted, and occasionally was, by someone lacking a broader sense of empathy.  Losing her father meant she held tightly and fiercely to those she loved in life.  She certainly held fiercely to me. 

She also held tightly to defining all that she was not.  She was not a Communist (she believed more in Socialism).  She was not Jewish, and she bristled when people assumed she was, as they had assumed her father was and killed him for it.  I was never fully certain whether she was anti-Semitic at heart or whether her fervent denial of being Jewish was an act of self-preservation spurred by loss.

Mom’s journals testify to her abiding belief in a God who shows benevolence to those who are lost; everyday, she wore a necklace with a golden medallion of St. Christopher carrying a young child on his back.  We attended various churches throughout my youth: the Greek Orthodox church where I first tasted Jordan almonds and an ambrosial mixture of nuts, spices, and apples, diced together in individually portioned sandwich bags; the Catholic church where I fumbled with the correct liturgical responses.  I followed my father’s side of the family, Pastor Krey confirming me as a Lutheran at fourteen, though I have since lapsed into murkier spiritual water.

My mother and I held egg wars on Easter Sunday, abstaining from eggs during the week prior.  On Easter, mom hard-boiled a dozen eggs in a large pot, allowing them to dry and cool before placing them on the table, a blank tableau.  She set out crayons and markers between us.  We decorated six eggs each, naming them with our wittiest egg names. Facing each other, decorated eggs in hand, we smashed their narrow ends in battle to see whose eggs proved stronger.  Percy Bysshe Sheggley parried with Lord Alfred Teggnnyson; the Archangel Geggbriel defeated the Deggvil.  We ate all the spoils with generous sprinklings of salt and tall glasses of milk.  I see now the irreverence, but as a child I savored the tradition of egg wars on Easter.

*

When your right ear rings, someone speaks well of you – hold your head high.   Ringing in your left ear means trash talk, so be careful.  Pay attention not to get into a fight when your nose itches, a sure sign that someone wants to hit it.  Never leave an orphan in the egg box: better to eat the last egg with its last remaining partner.  These are the peculiar notions I use to sort through life.

Last week, my car was egged while parked at a friend’s house.  Three staunch yellow rivulets, caked with shattered shell, ran down the front passenger window, freezing against the glass through the long, cold night.  It took a great deal of scrubbing to remove the dried egg.  I usually love eggs.  I love how beautiful and orange a soft-set yolk appears in a nest of smooth, barely set white.  I love how eggs rise and puff gracefully in the oven, how tenderly they are scrambled.  But this instance, menacing in its unspecific origin, set too hard with me, instantly returning me to that ostracized child, walking briskly to school with her eyes cast downward and her hands fluttering nervously in her pockets.  Fight or flight: the timeworn evolutionary response.  But, unlike the girl thirty years ago who trembled on bird-like legs, the egg on my car made this bird want to fight.

Boulder hills of Navajo sandstone, home to small piñons, juniper, wiry grasses, and cacti, overlook the Muley Point rift and the San Juan River far below.  A cold wind blows; dust obscures Monument Valley in the distance.  My head swims, though I’m more than six feet away from the edge of the rift.  My pulse soars.  The familiar vertiginous bottoming-out sensation descends and my legs threaten to buckle.

“Dad, I’m gonna toss lunch if I don’t move back more,” I warn. My father chuckles, steps sideways, flourishing his arms as I pass, and continues to share his musings on macabre and sensational ways to die.  I scuttle awkwardly away from the edge, trying hard to control my movements, inch by inch, and don’t stop until I’ve gained about three more feet.  I inch further back each time I try to get a photograph, because the process of raising the camera and clicking shifts my sense of balance. 

The views are stunning, despite the dust: a striated red rock face, dropping to sharply incised gorges below.  I feel as if I’m standing at the edge of the world.

My father tells me that his mom suffered from an intense desire to throw herself from ledges, a compulsion she battled constantly throughout her adult life.  I experience the exact opposite: I suffer from an intense desire to throw myself onto the ground beneath my feet and, ideally, sprawl out bodily on a horizontal surface.  My most frequent recurring nightmare is that of plummeting.  But it wasn’t always this way.

*

I spent my summers in the West with my father and my grandparents; I lived in New York with my mom and sister for the long remainder of the year.  New York challenged me to revise my perception of place, tricking my mind to make canyons out of long stretches of skyscrapers, to cherish the small beams of sun that peeked through in-between spaces.  I took brisk walks along the piers of the East River, the smell of it cold, dirty.  I had Paddy Reilly’s around the corner, where I spent the nights, drinking and smoking and being jostled by inebriated, joyful, and sometimes vicious young Irish men, the sounds of Black ’47 deafening and thrilling in my ears.  The sand-colored walls of the Met buoyed me as I studied antiquities and the fine lines of art through the centuries: Rodin’s lovers, Picasso’s portraits of women with bodies like fingers clutching their organs. Outside the horse carriages clopped along, the air saturated with the smell of franks and hot pretzels from vendors, who rarely spoke English or spoke at all, just exchanged money for product and nodded.  Every year, the lights on the gigantic Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center overshadowed Prometheus’s golden perch above the ice skating rink, all bright lights and trumpeting white wire angels.  People with red noses, bundled in flimsy but fashionable coats, pressed along without making eye contact.

I loved New York but was not part of it.  I looked out my high-rise, barred windows at night, numbed by the brake lights of the traffic on Second Avenue, tamping down a rising sense of distress.  I loved the fact that a one-hour ride could deliver me to the Atlantic coast, where there were arcades, Italian sausages, grumbling Russian Mafioso.  But I dreaded the storms of winter, which stalled the trains for hours on end, and the men I met who made me feel pretty one day, worthless the next.  Fat rats sidled over the subway tracks, sidewinding with garbage trophies in their mouths.

I know I was not the only person to contemplate suicide in the black tunnels of the New York underworld, to imagine stepping off the tracks into the bright lights of an incoming train.  One day, having thought about making that quick fall one too many times, I shrank against the subway’s filthy columns, steadied my breath, and experienced the rare moment of perfect clarity that directed me to leave New York, rather than leave life itself.

Nothing changed the day I left.  New York City remained just as magnificent: the tall, wondrous skyscrapers hazy and ephemeral – a tall, opalescent fortress of distilled green poison, sweetened by a single, sickly, unrelenting cube of sugar.  

*

Memories shudder randomly into moments of realization. My father, who has brought me to Muley Point on this cold spring day, has always led me into the desert: together, we explored washes, rutted washboard dirt roads, back trails, and so many beautiful rocks, small to immense.  We picnicked amidst rounded orbs of sandstone, a warm heat emanating off the rocks, and with each summer I began to feel like a gecko, tiny and leopard-speckled, basking in the sun. 

As I stand on the sandstone with my father now – his wizened, bright blue eyes twinkling; white mustache twitching thoughtfully; outfitted in his standard attire of weatherworn wide-brimmed hat, plaid shirt, holes gaping in his faded pants, and dusty work shoes – I realize the force of place.  I felt powerful urges to leave New York, but every cell in my body sings to propel me into the desert.  My sense of displacement and distress dissolves in the desert’s fine dust; the sickly, nebulous green assumes the sharpness and clarity of sage and fragrant desert brush. 

In my teens, driving eastward from Mexican Hat into Bluff with my father on a leaden summer day, I caught sight of a lone sunbeam illuminating the warm, golden sandstone, the sky otherwise thickly and ominously gray.  The sight of it imprinted on me forever.