Kelton Writes

These essays are now being published on shangrilogs.substack.com.

Simone Giertz is an inventor, and what she’s really good at inventing is solutions for small spaces. In the YouTube home series Never Too Small, Giertz points out bits and bobs, big-atures, and transforming pieces of furniture in her 630 sq ft home in Los Angeles. The space is charming. There’s a puzzle table that appears only after its plain top unfurls. Her desk chair has a wrapping staircase for her limping dog to climb into her lap. A stained glass window acts almost as a reverse trap door to a loft. The place oozes with both practical use and unexpected beauty.

It’s not Giertz’s first home (that would be a boathouse in her native Stockholm) but it is her darling, and she knows that quirk-to-quirk is a lineage easily lost in the housing market.

“I was like, whoever is selling this house is really going to care who it goes to. And I tried to make sure that I showed them that I would be a good custodian of the house.”

A custodian.

That was how we described ourselves to the man who built this house, Dick. We would be its custodians. We would care for the plants. We would keep the pecan cabinets. We would honor the logs and cherish the fireplace and tend to the mountain mint. We would be its keepers when its keeper left.

The night the house transferred hands — no keys to pass because there were none — the town held a party to salute Dick. He was 82 at the time, still spry and handsome. I helped him set up his cot in the town park, just down the hill from our house.

“You’re welcome to stay in the house, you know,” I offered.

“Eh, an old man’s gotta sleep under the stars as long as he can,” he said, rolling out his old sleeping bag. “Anyway, it’s yours now. You take good care of her.”

From then on, even though the house was ours in name and deed, it was still “Dick’s house”. We could locate ourselves in the region by summoning his name alone. More than one old-timer upon hearing which house we’d bought would chime in with their own participation in it: I built that stone wall or I built that chimney. If it wasn’t the house itself, it was Dick’s impact on their life, either: he kept me out of jail or he put me in it.

Over the years, we would continue to find objets de Dick, or as we called them, Dick-tritus. Many people asked cheekily if we’d found cocaine in the house yet. No, we’d laugh, but we did find an old sex toy, fake eyelashes, and bullets.

Every tweak we made, we considered Dick. Would he like this? Would he approve? We tried to have him come for coffee, come for dinner, but he only came once, a few months after we’d moved in. We had sanded the floors and cabinets, resealing everything to their original beauty. We had done a summer pruning and fertilizing, giving the plants a much needed boost. We had replaced the cracked black tile countertop with poured concrete. The house looked like itself, just showered and dressed.

You could see time in Dick’s eyes. He didn’t look at me as I talked, he just looked, mouth slightly agape, slightly upturned. The house itself was only 30 years old. Dick had built it in his 50s after helping to expand the small town past the avalanche field. He looked 50 again looking at the stone and log. And then, he looked relieved, resigned, a character at the end of a story.

“Well, I’ll get out of your hair.”

We couldn’t get him to stay, and we were never able to get him to come back. Friends of his would tell us it was too hard. It hurt too much to come back to this valley of snow and no longer belong to it. We were the custodians now. He had chosen us, and that was that. When I heard his son had passed, I sent him an envelope full of the mountain mint from the front steps.

I saw him once more, at a celebration in the big town over the ridge. A friend of his joked, “he really conned you into that house. All it does is snow and blow up there.” Dick laughed. “Oh, no, no. We don’t need her to go suing me now,” he laughed. He looked at me, “do you feel conned?”

“I feel lucky,” I said.

On Christmas Eve, Dick passed away, found dead on the floor on Christmas morning. Nothing drawn out, no missed hopes in hospice. 84 is a good age to live to, you’d think, but it surprised us. On the day we’d arrived, he was 82 with two beers in his pockets headed to the ski hill. And after all, this was his house. He couldn’t die.

A day or two after Christmas, our bedroom door started to creak. Not a small creak, but a Hollywood creak, long and drawn out. Spooky in a way hinges train to be in their old age.

“It’s Dick!” I called. To be visited by him now would still suit us. We want him to know this home he built is still a home — to dogs, to plants, to mischief. Every kitchen drawer I pull, he pulled before me. The stairs that ache beneath my feet, they learned it from him. The beams that hold us tight, they held him first. We are this home’s keepers, and whether we are keeping it for our son or keeping it for some other starry-eyed alpine junkies, our promise remains the same: keep the plants alive, keep the logs unpainted, and keep what makes it special.

Another neighbor laughed when I described some of the maintenance issues we were facing with faulty pipes and shabbily built chimney columns. “It was built by convicts,” he told us with a smile. And sure, some favors owed to the old defense attorney were paid in labor, but it was more than convicts: it was conviction. This was Dick’s dream — just one we happened to share. A place that required care, a home that took effort to live in.

When I look back at the photos we took when first seeing the home, I remember how many people called it a can of worms. But it’s sturdy, settled into the hillside with no wolf that could blow it down. The cracks are more like scars, more map than key. Pulling out the newspaper from between the logs to fill the space with caulk isn’t altering the house for any gain other than heat.

We make sure she stands tall, she makes sure we rest easy. That is the gift to the custodians.

We often expect things to serve us, a one-way street, rather than to also be in service in return. How many people do you know clean their washing machines once a month? Or take apart their own dishwashers to clean the filters? How many people do you know dry clean, or even buy clothes that require it? How many people do you know, when looking for a home, want one where they would be required to chop wood in order to keep it at a reasonable temperature? How many people do you know thrive on being inconvenienced?

That’s how culture has categorized it. Every hardship is something that could be made easier, more convenient. Convenience might not be in direct opposition to custodianship, but it certainly isn’t in service of it. When we say, “make this easier for me,” we are not also saying, “let me put my heart and soul into it.”

Even if we were to turn, in spirit and in agenda, toward flipping this house, it would still be made of logs. It would still be difficult to insure, difficult to insulate. It would still be inconvenient. You would be hard-tried to millennial-gray a house made entirely of wood.

People often move to the mountains, to cabins in the woods, for a slower life, not realizing life is slower because you can’t do things quickly. You can’t run this there, then drop this, then send this off, and finish that because you are still outside chopping wood for the storm you see down valley. You are still shoveling the drive. You are still scrapping together meals because you’re not going to the market for another three days. You are inconvenienced. Cold hands, sweat on the brow, wear on the muscles, and deeply, deeply inconvenienced.

The effort to care for this house built by convicts is greatly outweighed by its whimsy, its history, its very presence in this valley. The effort to care for a can of worms is nothing compared to the fish you catch with it.

When I look up from my perch in front of the fireplace, I see many of the plants Dick left us. He would only sell us the house if we promised to care for the plants. The epiphyllum, the asparagus, the hoya, the spider plant, the philodendron tree, the geraniums, the aloes, and the monster monstera. They knew Dick better than we did, and their foliage is a testament to the care he put into them. Every week, we go plant to plant to check the soil, to water, to fertilize, to care. We are their keepers, too. It takes an hour to water them all. There is no magical gray water system piped through the house. We fill the watering can, and go plant to plant to plant. Slowly, intentionally, as the minutes tick by, every week, every month, for every year to come.

That is what it means to care, and so that is what we do.

Does this make me a romantic?

I mean, I hope so. I hope this makes me someone who researches their native plants and painstakingly works to revive them. I hope this makes me someone whose pantry is deep with beans. I hope this makes me someone you would call for a ride from the airport. I hope this makes me the kind of person who would only sell my house to someone if I knew they loved plants, loved logs, loved feeling alive. I hope that convenience is something reserved to make life better for everyone, not just to make it more streamlined, more isolated, more idle. I hope that every inconvenience I have stays lined with the grit that I get to do it, that I can do it, that the doing is the good part. And I hope one day, when I’ve built a home and a reputation and seen that it’ll be well taken care of, that I die quickly, suddenly, collapsing to the floor. That I was a custodian to my own life, and all the things in it, to the very end.

This is edition 101 of Shangrilogs.

God September is a romance, huh? Will they, won’t they, the crisp breeze swinging into the party, only there long enough to lock eyes and leave. Just another night of humidity without reprieve. You’re in the unrelenting sun when it creeps up your spine like cool breath. “Fall is coming,” everyone says, blessed with the premonition of a cold morning. “I can feel it.” 

It’s such a relief when summer caves in on itself, when the expectations lower and the season of routine sets in. The season of When Harry Met Sally and Practical Magic, of notebooks and soup. Maybe it’s the old memories of it, of losing summer to the coming chill. No longer did you have to judge whether or not you were adequately tan or adequately fun. All the lives you weaseled in and out of burrowed back into the ground, another season’s ghosts. And in their absence, this uncanny version of yourself, same as ever but with so much potential — so much potential in fact it made me throw up every first morning of the new school year. Absolutely gagged with options.

Now, fall means I can sleep. The sun angle changes, slinking away from my bedroom to peer into someone else’s window. The air cools and the logs shrink, letting the tendrils of night reach into the gaps of my bedspread, searching for bare ankles to twist around and beckon to the floor. 

But not yet. 

September is merely the promise of fall. You can put on your sharpest sweater, play only Bon Iver and Joni Mitchell, and summer will still rule the party in a slip dress and an aperol spritz. Save your Meg Ryan and Manhattans for October. How can one even stomach pumpkin on a seventy degree day? If only to be dragged by the senses one month forward and countless years back to color-coded folders and the clank of lockers and corn stalks tied with twine to the porch. 

The sun is setting at dinner time, though, shutting the blinds on a full stomach. At least she gets it. No more 9pms on the asphalt, still warm under foot. She’s as eager for fall as we are — she’s got to bring spring somewhere else. Her absence makes space for brooding. The longer nights lead to longer longings. Summer loses her grip when the stars come out. She might have the blistering of the high sun, but the green of the leaves has lost its luster and fall sneaks in at night. You can stand in the creeping wind of the evening and wrap your arms a little tighter, shove your pockets a little deeper, and breathe. Summer’s not watching at night. You can embrace fall like a lover. 

The embrace is brief, though. Too risky to let it linger. You would find a way to leave summer behind, but she always leaves first. She packs her bags while you’re eyeing a farmstand of peaches and tomatoes. She gives it her all, sweat shimmering on her collarbone, but the party always turns on her — she’s never the It Girl for long. Every conversation diverts from backyard BBQs to back to school, sunscreen to sweatshirts, and she’s left standing there with an emptying glass while the menu changes behind her back. She’s meaner now, hot headed and cruel. Too many years of people buying too many things in an effort to drown her out. They love her, they adore her, they forget her. Fall never overstays their welcome, they don't know how. They take their cues from the leaves, gone before you had a chance to say how you felt.

But not yet. 

For now, fall’s lovers simply practice their speeches in the mirror, shoulders still bare, summer just out of ear shot. “I’ve been thinking about you,” they would say. Something where the heft is in the hands of the receiver, where they can always back down with, “as a friend, of course.” But fall knows. 

The hot drink on a hot day, sweater tied around the waist, a sudden interest in the occult. A crush on fall is obvious if you’re looking. And who hasn’t dreamed of what they can’t have. Summer has an ever dripping affair so long as you’ll land between her latitudes. And those who find themselves cunning enough to play winter’s games can spend all year in her bed. But fall never stays, you would merely chase them around the world, just another leaf on the wind. 

Their cool hands will graze your skin, wrapping you in blankets, lighting candles of sandalwood and musk, and they’ll curl up next to you to watch as the leaves begin to blush, embarrassed they were ever so green, and they’ll press a hand to your cheek as they do every year, if only to remind you that however brief, the romance was real. 

But not yet.

“There are some things though I know for certain: always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder, keep rosemary by your garden gate, plant lavender for luck, and fall in love whenever you can.” - Practical Magic

This is Edition #23 of Shangrilogs.

Every day, I wake up on the Western side of the house, tucked safely from the crawl of dawn. The valley to the west rolls down in elevation beneath me, still trapped in shadow. All I can hear is the heavy breathing of the dog and the thump of a kitten suddenly aware of the consequences of being caught on the counter. There is no house hum here, only the occasional dripping of the baseboard, set at a cool 65. My side of the bed has extra blankets. Worn linen sheets, a wool Pendleton just for me, the duvet, and then the tabby’s favorite blanket — an impossibly soft knit of burnt orange and white. Pre-dawn calls to me every day, a child too eager for presents to wait. Every day, during the last vestiges of the dark, I pad my feet down onto an animal skin older than I am, and I make my way to the kitchen. The dog doesn’t rustle, the floor boards don’t creak. When the wind isn’t calling to it, the house doesn’t make a noise.

The snow outside is illuminated under the soft light of the moon, the stars dutifully attending the party. Both cats circle my ankles. Maybe some milk? Maybe just a splash on a little plate? For us? This time of day, Finn’s purrs are guttural, overlapping like a record skipping, like he’s never  sure if I will wake up and can’t contain his relief when I do. He’s happier here. More playful, more curious, more relaxed. This time of day, I am still in my dreams. I pour the milk, I refill the kibble, I am unaware of mirrors, moving only through shadows. I know the edges in this house now. And in the glow of the night, I never check the time.

These few minutes, when I am nothing but a creature moving gently in the night, I am at ease, I am free. I open one of the shades and I look out at the ridgeline to the east. Dawn is only just beginning to leak into the sky, but the sun will not show itself until past 9am. I rest my hips against the counter, breathing in the moment. I feel something calling me, stirring in my belly and expanding between my vertebrae, but deep rest calls louder, and I close the shade. I nestle again into the covers as Finn settles back on his blanket between my legs, still licking the milk off his whiskers, locking us into reverie.

When the day really begins, that feeling lingers on my tongue like a dream, and I try to hold the taste as long as I can. It feels like an ethereal gateway to flow, to runner’s high, and to joy. By 8am, it has been diluted by emails from other timezones and drowned out by notifications for meetings about those emails. It is lost to the night, invisible in the bright sun of day, and I am tethered again.

A few years ago, I asked my therapist if she thought I was healed enough to try psychedelics. She laughed. “Your tether to reality is very thin. I wouldn’t recommend it.” One of my family members is on the other side of this reality. He and I, we’re not so different, talking to ourselves in the privacy of our rooms and the great wide opens we find ourselves in. The only difference is someone talks back to him. I am always the other side of my own dialogue.

It was hard to be this person in a city. I felt balled up and folded in. Many years ago now, when my mental health was on the verge of collapse, I fled New York for Colorado. The week before I left, I ran into a guy I had fallen for who had not fallen back on the subway. Maybe he asked how I was, maybe he asked what I was up to, whatever he asked, I practically sang to him that I was leaving. I can still summon the energy I felt in that interaction. It felt like leaning on the kitchen counter before dawn, before emails and meetings and anyone else, with the mountains standing guard around you. It felt warm and fluid and expansive.

Before we left LA, my mental health was the best it had been in decades. My therapist and I agreed I was ready to “graduate.” It had been years since I’d felt the remnants of depersonalization, the things that used to trigger my PTSD were only mild irritants, and panic attacks were limited to only the most extreme of scenarios. I felt like I was on the other side of the pendulum from that last week in New York. It’s one of those things about being human that at the depths of my pain and at the height of my clarity, I was called to the same place.

It’s often Finn that wakes me up in the quiet of night. He climbs onto my chest and purrs until I stir. After the kibble and the milk, when I’m looking at the sleeping giants outside, Finn asks to be picked up and we look out at the wilderness together, his whiskers pressing into my cheek. I wonder if he can feel that expanse in my body, if it’s like purring.

I am happier here. I miss my friends, but I can’t wait to show them my world here. In this world, there is space for my mind to build a stronger tether — not to reality, but to life.

We’ve had a few people tell us they wish they could live this life. They wish they could live in a cabin and spend their days chopping wood and exploring the terrain. I tell them I wish I could too. I am still beholden to a computer, to Zoom meetings, to accrued time-off and embarrassing corporate “benefits.” But at the very least, I have fully unearthed my compass, and I am following it as best I can.

What I wish for them is the same: that they find their North and have the courage and the support to right their ship. This particular life isn’t for everyone, but it is for me. And I can feel the pull of my compass getting stronger and stronger.

I wrote edition #23 of Shangrilogs while listening to Chinstrap Penguins by Jacob Shea & Jasha Klebe, Finder by Cyrus Reynolds & Folial, and Your Peace Will Make Us One by Audrey Assad & Urban Doxology (despite my lack of religion.)

This piece is edition #20 of Shangrilogs. Subscribe to the newsletter and pieces like this will just show up in your inbox.

If we’re ranking mental health salves, enchantment is as close to a natural benzodiazepine that I’ve found. I spent the first five months here talking to trees, sharing giggles with squirrels and apologizing to surprised porcupines like we bumped into each other coming and going from our local coffee haunt. Oop! Sorry, you go! No, no, you go! Ooh, oops, haha! We’re both going! Laughter paired with an embarrassment so mild it feels only like an unexpected warm breeze.

This connectivity kept me company, but the trees are, for the most part, napping. The squirrels and porcupines are only evidenced by their chaotic drawings across the snow fields from one pine well to another. Only a peppering of magpies remain at this elevation, save for the few songbird calls I can hear when I pause the unfathomably loud swishing of my snowpants against themselves. I sing back, but it falls flat against the snow and I am alone again.

It’s been six months since I moved here, and I am lonely.

There’s an inevitability to loneliness in moving. Like exercise brings sore muscles, it’s built in. And in a way, it’s required to become a member of a community. There needs to be a drive, a desperation to break in to a dance very much in progress, to show you are the kind of troupe mate who makes dancing weightless. I have not accrued enough desperation to try this dance, and I am more Darcy than Elizabeth in this regard — crippled by my fears and not yet sufficiently encouraged by my hopes to give in.

This has been a persistent issue for me. Multiple people at multiple company Christmas parties have said verbatim, “You’re way more fun than I thought you were,” like my whole personality has resting bitch face. The reality is much, much lamer: I’m scared. Like a street cat, it’s not that I’m incapable of being friendly, it’s more that I don’t trust other people to be friendly back, which often leaves me waiting for them to be friendly first, repeatedly, before I engage. But also, I still look like this:

A person who gets me some 4,600 miles away joked I should put an ad in the classifieds requesting friends, reminding me of the once heavily advertised but now suspiciously quiet Bumble BFF. The reviews of Bumble BFF are bad because making friends is awkward. When romance is involved, there’s always the good ole fall-back of “you’re not my person,” but with friends? It’s so much more brutal to be like, “you’re not one of the thousands of people I’ve connected with in all sorts of situations and places over the course of my whole life, and honestly, I have more deeply enjoyed conversations I was forced into with strangers on planes than I did doing something we agreed upon in advance with you.” I mean fuck.

I wish making friends was as easy as a Classified ad because I like thinking about what my “friend profile” would say. Sometimes I actually fantasize about what a dating profile would say now that I know myself so much better. I think I’ve narrowed my entire personality to this:

I take the stairs at the airport, I use my turn signal when no one’s there, and I always return my grocery cart.

To me this conveys I am annoying, I am paranoid, and I think convenience is a pretty word for the laziness that continues to disintegrate the community values so many of us are desperately craving. But also that I am annoying.

You don’t need classifieds here, though. You just need to go outside. In a city, if you don’t get someone’s number the first time you meet, you are relying either on FBI-level stalking or kismet to connect again. Here, all you have to do is quite literally go outside and you are contractually guaranteed by the Law of Small World Likelihood to run into that person again. In fact, it’s harder to not see someone than to see them. Which means if you’re having a bad day, you better cheer the fuck up or the next time they see you they’re gonna be like, “there’s the girl with resting bitch personality.”

If you’ve been reading since the beginning, you might recall a girl I encountered on the trail — an encounter that made me feel small and like I was somehow a traitorous snake without ever having met her before. Well, I ran into her again and I report with dishonor that she was incredibly nice. Maybe that day we met she was having a bad day. Maybe (harder to admit) I was the one having a bad day. But in a small town, you need to have grace for the people around you and plead they have the same for you.

I am lonely, but I should be. It’s winter in a cabin in a pandemic in a town of 180 people where I have lived for 6 months, most of which I spent sitting at a desk. And upon close inspection, friendship is probably only a few more months away. Since my avalanche class, I’ve run into three people from the course. Each one remembered me by name. They’re not my friends, but they could be! I ran into a neighbor I’ve been hoping to have dinner with for months, wondering why she hadn’t texted back — can you guess why? It starts with 2020 and ends with learning to make sourdough.

But there is a swirl, and it is pulling me.

Imagine LA or New York or London for the oceans they are, you know, the seas where your aunt says there are plenty of fish. And there are — there are fish fucking everywhere. Shitty fish, loud fish, secretive fish, fish that you’re like “that fish is bad news” while you put a worm on a hook as your friends say, “you’re literally allergic to that fish,” and you say “hm?” as you cast the line. But this is a pond, and somehow that is much scarier. No one notices you in an ocean! You’re just another dumb fish! But here, I’m a scared ass little fish who doesn’t smile and because I work from home and just moved here, I am under a rock, not even going out for food because my partner fish does that, so only a few other fish have even noticed I’m here. And they’re like, “the fuck is with that reclusive new fish?”

Even in the seas of a metropolis, there are those people you don’t technically know, but might be the first person you’d talk to if your subway car was trapped underground. You’d be like, “look we’ve been riding this train together for 3.5 years, and you’ve never done anything weird like huff glue or fondle your balls, so do you want to form an alliance in case shit gets weird?”

Those people still exist in small towns — the ones who share your paths and your routes and your elevators and your favorite Thai place. They’re called everyone. You see everyone over and over here, and you sniff them out because anyone who isn’t everyone is a tourist. That, or they’re also a weird fish hiding under a rock, too yet scared to dance.

We went to the vet the other day to take care of a cat injury. While waiting in the truck, a technician came out with an excited mid-sized black mutt, returning him to his dad. They made small talk and she headed back to the building, but as she opened the front door, she turned back to him.

“Hey, tell your wife that Brandy says hi!” She yelled through her mask, holding the door open with one hand and gesticulating with the other so the mask couldn’t be held responsible for obscuring her from his attention.

This is the siren call of the small town. If you don’t know me yet, someone you know does. There’s an occasional implicit so watch it but usually the only thing implied is I’ll be seeing you at the grocery. Every person comes with clues. Sometimes they’re easy, like:

“Oh you live on Spruce St? Do you know…”

But sometimes they’re small town chaos:

“Excuse me, is your dog’s name Cooper? I ran into a friend on the gondola the other day, and he was telling me his ex-wife Sarah — they’re still friends — was starting a new business over on Fur St with her best friend Liz, and that Liz had this woman helping her with her social who’d just moved to town and that she had this great dog, and he showed me a picture of it, and I think it’s this dog.”

This happens with Cooper and is not a stretch. People know Cooper, notably all the children in this tiny town. When it’s a nice day and Cooper is outside being a dog, I hear children I’ve never even seen before call his name to come play. Cooper has more friends than I do by what I would consider quite a large margin.

But the tides, the swirl, are pulling me from my rock. The Law of Small World Living and Likelihood will tickle the doorknobs of even the most reclusive, and you can’t help but peek out the door to see who’s there. Here are some examples:

Our neighbor’s little sister played high school soccer with Ben’s cousin.

That neighbor’s daughter goes to a school in Colorado where Ben’s uncle taught.

Ben’s closest friend in LA went to a wedding a month back where the best man at the wedding is actually building a house in this town — this town of 60 odd houses.

One of my best friends in Topanga, her ex-boyfriend (who moved from LA to the midwest) is now dating the butcher here, and they just moved to this tiny town, too. What brought him here? Well friends of his moved to this area four years ago, and he visits them. So do we — they were the ones who introduced us to our realtors. They were acquaintances in LA, but fast friends here. Not to mention the realtors they introduced us to now text about grabbing beers.

One of my other dear friends from Topanga, living in New Hampshire for the season, struck up a conversation with a friend of hers and our tiny town came up — that friend said, I know someone there! I know one of those 180 people! My friend texted to prompt an introduction, but you know who it was? The postponed-by-Covid dinner friend. I texted her immediately, house-to-house some hundred yards away, and she was already texting with her friend about it.

Not to mention the fellow LA bike scener who has a place on the other side of town (hi Kevin!) or the gal who also moved to this area in July and was forwarded this newsletter by a friend over the range saying, “this girl needs friends.” (Hi Dévon!)

Somewhat foolishly, Western culture all agreed that the most lifeless time of year was the best time to reinvent ourselves, to expand our horizons even as the actual horizon is only lit for a sad few hours a day. These dark days, built for hibernating and cocoa, they don’t exactly lend themselves well to expansion and growth. Even in sport, we’re cocooned into layers and backpacks and helmets and goggles. Meeting people isn’t easy. It’s never really easy, but it is somehow easier when everyone is in tank tops. But the swirl continues, even if slowly, and the tides are pulling me from my rock as the cold has slowed the dance enough that I can begin to see the steps.

So I’d like to contribute to the swirl. Here is my Be My Friend Profile so the Law of Small World can carry it on the wind. May it tickle every doorknob in a 30 mile range.

I am only softly and gently rad. I love memes. I love taking pictures and word puzzles and self-improvement challenges. I was a cat person until I met the right dog. I’m still a cat person, but that one dog made me love all of them. I am allergic to dandelions and bananas. I love glamour and if you want to dress up, I was hoping you would say so. I will say yes to running errands, going for walks, multi-day hikes, bike rides, skiing, coffee stops, animal shelter visits, physical labor including shoveling, mucking stalls, cleaning the house, stacking firewood, washing cars, raking leaves, and closet cleanouts. I like being useful to people. I mostly read non-fiction, but will always forsake it for ambitious and adventurous sci-fi, fantasy, and adventure. I love finding new music, and I love dancing to music so loud that you can get completely consumed by it and find yourself crying with release. I like friends who hold my hand and hug me even though I flinch at being touched. I am extremely passionate about workers’ rights and am not afraid to get fired for arguing about it. I will talk for hours about how stupid I think the 40-hr-work-week is, but I will help you with your resume and practice interviewing you. If I am alone, I am talking to myself. If I am at a party, I am with the pets who live there. If you ask me to sing, I will say no twice, but hope you ask the third time, because then I will, and I’ll feel so proud and full of joy. I hate vodka and love mezcal. Chicken tenders are still my favorite food. I genuinely think I look cool in my pick-up. If you ask, I will tell you. If you need help, I will come. I am at my worst when I feel trapped, and I am at my best when I feel like the whole world is in front of us.

Oh, and I take the stairs at the airport, I use my turn signal when no one’s there, and I always return my grocery cart.

May the swirl carry it far, and may my courage to dance swirl right along with it.

----

This is edition #19 of the Shangrilogs newsletter.

Shoveling out three bodies in under 12 minutes isn’t bad, but there’s room to improve. After all, shoveling has been the hobby du jour lately. And it’s almost entirely the wind’s fault. We’ll get to the bodies in a minute, but we have to start with the wind.

The wind has shown herself to be a worthy adversary, a trickster if I ever knew one, and she takes everything she can. The only time I remember being in the presence of wind with this kind of command was during Hurricane Ike in 2008. I was living in a shoddy hotel room at the resort I worked at on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. The western wall of my room was entirely glass, and the night that Category 4 hurricane made landfall, I crouched on the eastern side of my bed, away from the glass, knees pulled to my chest and head tucked. The glass patio doors shook violently in their metal cradles and the 450-mile-wide jet engine that was Ike bellowed through the night. That was the only time I feared wind until the other night.

I have to give credit where it’s due, and the wind jolted me out of the bed I was holding myself so tightly in as she smashed into the French doors in our bedroom, shoving them in and out of frame as she howled through. They were locked, holding hands like children spinning as fast as they can ‘til their grip gives out and they tumble into the grass. Snow swirled in like a devil searching for a body, phantom fingers curling in the air, and it was only then we noticed it was also snowing above our heads, soaking our headboard. I respect the wind outside. But I don’t appreciate unannounced guests even when I like them. The bedroom temperature dipped into the 40s.

Her battering ram didn’t work, but it’s not her only war strategy. If you cannot get in the castle, you trap and starve the people inside. We’ve had some four feet in the last week or so, with 15 more inches coming tomorrow. It is the medium with which the wind paints, her brush strokes severe and energetic; she has patterns that help you recognize her work, like the six foot snow drift in front of our latest main entry. I say “latest” because the wind is having a real laugh taking them one by one. You want to use the front door? Permanent 5-foot snow drift. Your French doors? Taped shut with Peel and Seal tape, just giant pieces of shiny silver tape gift wrapping every seam in the bedroom doors and window. Your garage door? A massive wall of wind-whipped layered snow, compressing and compacting by the hour so if you wait til the storm is over, it will be back-breaking. Get out there where I can see you so I can slither through every zipper you have and chill you to the bone.

But she does have a sense of humor. After filling the screened-in patio with two foot snow drifts, she left the path from the patio door down to the cars so perfectly clear you can see the ground. She has quite literally swept the path for us, like some kind of game. After all, she wants to see you desperately shovel out the other doors over and over, like a whole town of Sisyphean fools.

But the shoveling didn’t stop there. We’ve been shoveling out our driveways, shoveling out the truck bed, shoveling out the internet satellite, shoveling out the compost bin, shoveling out the cars — the cars! My and Ben’s egos remain strangled by a warm taunt offered before the snow came: “if you can’t make it up the hill, you can park at my house.” All generosity was wiped clean by the very idea that there would be something Ben and I couldn’t do. If we can’t make it up the hill? It was like insulting our competency, our capabilities, and our cars all at the same time. But lately, I’ve come to understand what he meant.

There are cars abandoned everywhere. I shouldn’t even say cars: 4-wheel drive trucks, Land Cruisers, Subarus, vehicles capable of wintering and presumably driven by people who should understand at least marginally better than us how snow driving works. Maybe everyone is lazier than us. Maybe snow tires are sitting in the garage waiting to prove their value and earn their space. But everywhere you go there’s just another car left in a snowbank, fallen into the creek, jammed between trees, or just abandoned and left to be plowed in. We’ve seen a minimum of ten cars sitting in piles of snowy shame and frustration. There’s only 180 people in this town! It seems like a town ritual to dig out cars. It would be practical to buy shovels to keep in both our vehicles, but thus far we’re too smugly driving up the icy, snow-whipped road in 2-wheel drive knowing we could switch to 4-wheel, and slipping into the driveway without it. Never mind that each vehicle looks like it had one too many when we pull in, swaying from side to side, because the driveway we shoveled out in the morning is, yet again, covered in snow.

But all this shoveling pales in comparison to the shoveling that matters.

On Monday, Ben and I went to our first avalanche rescue course. It was an all day course, 15°F with (you guessed it) wind gusts upwards of 40mph, but mostly just strong enough to be persistently annoying. It seems important to reality-set a little here: it’s very unlikely that just living here will ever put you in likely avalanche danger. There are often avalanches along the 2.5 mile road into town, but no one in modern history has ever died in one. You’re usually just driving over avalanche debris (assuming you haven’t lost control of the vehicle, which, we’ve seen how people drive here.) The massive avalanche field that splits the town into two sections threatens to annihilate only two houses, and typically conditions are easy enough to understand that those people can evacuate in advance if risk is high. In the last ten years or so, they’ve only stayed with friends once.

The most persistent avalanche risk is actually the one you seek out, and because backcountry skiing is now part of our “move your body” roster, we are seeking out that risk, even with all precautions in place. So we need to know how to protect ourselves and anyone else who might be out there. Death by trauma in an avalanche is possible, but plenty of people live through the slide — it’s how fast you get them out of that slide that determines whether they live past it. A person who is completely buried in an avalanche can live for about 15 minutes before incurring serious brain damage. Snow is porous, but victims are typically breathing their own exhaled air (if their airways aren’t clogged by snow), resulting in carbon dioxide poisoning, as well as their breath melting the snow around their mouth which can refreeze as ice (non-porous). Point being, you gotta dig them out, and you need to do it quick.

In the backcountry, you should be wearing a radio to communicate with your party (e.g., “clear, follow my line” or “dropping down in 3”), but everyone also needs to be wearing a beacon. The beacon is how you find someone trapped in the snow, or multiple someones. In the event of a burial in an avalanche, all parties not buried turn their beacons to Search. Once you get your beacon as close to the person trapped as you can, you use a ~10-foot probe (longer in regions with deeper snow) to try to locate the body beneath you. And once you jab into something that feels like a person or a backpack or a ski, you start digging for your life, or more accurately, theirs.

At the top of the class, our instructor started with a warning: “this class will simulate high stress scenarios. I know some of you know people who’ve died in avalanches. I can’t know how you will react, so please do what you need to to take care of yourself through the class.”

I don’t personally know any avalanche victims (probably “yet”), but it didn’t make the simulations any less serious. In the screaming winds, at the end of a day of skinning and digging and learning, we were set up with a scenario. They separated us into three groups far enough apart to not hear the instructions the other group were receiving, “you don’t know each other, you’re all out in the backcountry on separate trips, and there’s been an avalanche, you have no idea how many people might be buried — rescue all of them, now, or they’ll die.”

They taught us an acronym for avalanche safety: ALONE.

A: Any additional threat of avalanche? No? Assign a leader.  L: Look for clues. Do you see a pole or ski sticking up? Where was the last place you saw the people before the snow broke? O: Outside help. Use your Spot or Garmin and phone and call for help. Call it in over the radio, too.  N: Number of people you’re looking for, if you know. E: Everyone turns their beacons to search mode and begins the hunt.

We were disorganized. Each group assigned their own leader. We didn’t work together. The beacons don’t lead you in a straight line and we didn’t designate paths for each group to search. The wind reveled in the chaos as my beacon led us within 1.5m of a signal. We unearthed probes and shovels from our packs, ditching our skis and bags, probing into the snow until we made contact with something. And then, the shoveling began. You don’t think of shoveling your driveway or your stoop. You don’t think of shoveling out paths and cars. You only think of who you would be shoveling out. Of how many seconds it’s been since you began searching, of how many seconds that might mean their airways have been packed with snow, of how many seconds they have left.

We recovered the first body in three minutes, but we made a dumb mistake of not turning off the dummy’s beacon once we recovered them. We dug a hole only a meter away looking for the second body, our beacons all still alerting us someone was near. It was the beacon we hadn’t turned off, wasting time, wasting seconds of someone’s chance of survival if that had happened in a real slide. A few meters away, more of the search party located another body, and we stomped through the snow to dig them out, your top speed embarrassingly slow as you collapse through the snowpack. At the final shovel strike, we heard another member of our party, completely alone, call out across the slope some 25 meters away, “I’m 1 meter away from a signal!” A third body. My and my friend’s skis were, at this point, maybe 8 meters uphill, so we army-crawled with our shovels out across the snow as fast as we could, trying not to sink in, digging with fury at the site once we arrived. We found the legs, and like idiots, we started digging out the legs, then the belly, then the chest, instead of just trying to dig out the head first so the dummy could breathe.

But we recovered all three bodies in 12 minutes. A little too close for comfort. A little too comfortable for actual close calls. I kneeled in the snow panting, shovel in hand, finally released enough from the simulated disaster to notice how exhausted I was.

We made a lot of mistakes in the simulation. We should have designated a leader, assigned dedicated search paths, assigned probe and first shovel duties, turned off beacons on the dummies as soon as we found them, we should have kept our equipment closer in order to reach bodies faster and have better access to the tools at our disposal, and many, many more. But that’s why you take classes and courses, and you keep taking them because the reality is, these skills aren’t tested that often. And between the classes and the books and the videos and the practice drills, you shovel. You shovel all the drifts, over and over, even when she fills them before your eyes, even when she whips and taunts you, yelling through the night, because only then can you see the wind for what she is: a general, fraying and testing your nerve, preparing you for the day when shoveling isn’t in or out, but life or death.

This post was originally published on Shangrilogs Substack. Subscribe here.

Do you have a personal off-season? Can you?

My life here is supported by a resort town. There’s not a single amenity in our “town”, so we head into the actual town 25 minutes away for restaurants, stores, salons, etc. Those businesses all operate on a resort schedule, which is the closest American Industry gets to European. Beginning in late October through early December, hours are reduced and many places close up for a well-earned off-season. And I love every moment of minor inconvenience. Good for you, Siam Thai. Get out of here! No problem, ski shop. You go climb those mountains.

Unfortunately my own sanctioned off-season this time of year probably looks like yours: here are two days off — we know you’re likely spending them negotiating familial relationships, walking on Covid eggshells, trying to recover from years of getting hammered by 40-hr-work-weeks that are actually boundary-less tethers to tiny dinny nightmare sounds coming from your tracking device, all while cooking an actual feast you haven’t practiced in a year — but we hope you come back refreshed on Monday because Carl scheduled that 8am. (Carl thinks we should be back in the office because he’s a sycophant who believes the American Dream is real. Carl doesn’t give a shit what timezone you’re in.)

Corporate jobs don’t have off-seasons. And no, vacation days don’t count, because the point of shutting down the whole business is that there’s not 738 emails waiting to destroy your newly replenished zen when you get back. Which is why I believe in manufacturing your own off-seasons: breaks from fitness, upping the frequency of takeout meals, a pre-determined month of caring less when the house is a mess, a couple weeks’ work of “phoning it in” which I love and have loved since college when I realized it was possible to give a C performance and still get A- life results. And to be clear, despite years of professional work promoting it, I’m not talking about self-care. I am instead talking about self-reallocation-of-care. For me, the perfect off-season isn’t punctuated by massages and elaborate tea routines, it’s just doing a whole lot less of the bullshit and a whole lot more of the best shit.

But what is the best shit?

I have to give my brain a long enough break from the day-to-day to even figure out what a fulfilling day even is. A natural place to start here is to just think about what you’re grateful for. But when I’ve attempted gratitude journals in the past, it gets a little old writing “my legs, Finn, Ben, parents, the outdoors” over and over again. So instead, I like to think about what I regret. After all, when we sit around talking about what we’re grateful for, we’re just dancing around what we regret, or more often, what we’re attempting to not regret, e.g., ignoring your children, spending your life at a desk, never seeing Paris or whatever. Gratitude is a nostalgia-laced reverence, a practice of really nesting in the good things brought into our lives, where regret is that same nostalgia-driven awe, just this time with a big ole complicated layer of “whoops.”

I only have one serious regret — the rest all fall under the categories of “learning experiences” and “well what are ya gonna do.” (I guess the third category is “yes, I absolutely wouldn’t have gone to that restaurant that night” but that’s rewriting history — not choosing a better decision.) My biggest regret is when I had something really good and I let another person convince me it wasn’t. Or, in more explicit terms, I had a popular Tumblr from 2010-2013 that was optioned into a book and instead of converting that audience to a newsletter or different platform and continuing to write for myself, I just let it die because my Worst Boyfriend™ convinced me it (and I) were trash.

I used to resent him for that, but it was my choice. There will always be people who want to influence your decisions — usually not with any malice. But an off-season, a time when I let my brain get a full dose of introspection, allows me to pay closer attention to what’s bringing me real joy and flow immersion. When I can pay attention like this, and burrow into that feeling, I’m not so easily led astray in the woods.

Sort of like moving to this town in the first place.

“Isn’t that kind of far from a hospital?” “Aren’t you worried about avalanches?” “Do you even have snow tires?”

I had conviction around this decision. (To be fair, I also didn’t have any manipulative sacs of bitterness in my circle anymore.) Which brings me to the present, an off-season if I ever had one. Living somewhere without endless city entertainments, my job in transition with our budget slashed, friends to see in person at a near all-time low, and only six hours of actual sunshine — there’s not a lot to do but dedicate myself to figuring out what I want to do with myself.

At the tail-end of my last off-season, I and three other women set out to read Designing Your Life together. I was swimming with big ideas and bigger dreams, and I needed to shape the clay of them into something I could use, which is exactly what that book advertised it could help with. For the most part, I really enjoyed that book, but one exercise struck me as particularly futile. It asked for you to write down a thing you love, e.g., “the outdoors” or “making to-do lists”, and then make a word web in all directions under a time limit, and at the end, circle the words you wanted to be a bigger part of your life. I remember thinking this was so dumb. Then earlier this week, I came across all these old papers while unpacking. Here are the words I circled:

Home decor

Sharing

Community

Inspiration

Tropical

Rustic

Connection

Stories

Newsletter

*Gestures around at exactly what I’m doing right now, in a house I themed #tropicabin, sharing my stories and building a little community of people who care via a newsletter.*

Which brings me back to my big regret: abandoning the blog I worked tremendously hard to build. I knew when I was working on that blog that I was fulfilled. Is it ironic to do years of on-and-off soul-searching to come to the same conclusion that you did years ago? This is the plot of countless successful movies, after all. It took me a few years, and a couple very good off-seasons, but here I am, spinning my regret back in the gratitude direction.

So I want to say thank you for supporting this writing endeavor. I don’t wake up each day excited to log in to work, but I do wake up excited to work on this. And I still get questions that make me doubt myself.

“Are you doing it to just practice your writing?” “Do people actually read it?” “It seems a little aimless?”

But thanks to the right kind of rest, my conviction is happy to answer: no, yes, so?

Share Shangri-Logs

We have to give ourselves off-seasons. It wasn’t that long ago that humans knew a couple hundred people and read the paper and a few books. We have got to give ourselves a break because no one else is going to give it to us. Shut your kitchen down. Shut your social down. Put an out-of-office on your personal email. We need our own permission slips to care less about some things so we can care more about finding and funding and defending the things that light us up.

Here’s my recommendation for a little Sunday journaling in the afternoon sun: Use the past week of stirring up the pot of gratitude to see which regrets are adding that depth of flavor to the stew. Write down all the joy-giving things in your life, from things you do frequently to things you rarely get to do. Then, write down your regrets and what you would do differently. The reality is, we can always start “differently” right now. Be more honest, commit more deeply, love bigger, draw stronger boundaries, and so on. Finally, give yourself a time-constrained off-season. Put it on the calendar. “Do not spend time picking up the house.” Because it doesn’t matter how good your list of loves’n’loathes is if you don’t give your brain the space to figure out how to apply that to your life.

So when I’m re-shaping that ball of clay called life, I try to remember this:

Gratitude tells us what we’re getting right

Regret tells us what we could get right

And rest tells us how

It’s been almost a decade since I was this excited about my own ball of clay. It took one off-season to realize what I had, one to realize what I wanted, and this one to finally pursue it. Thank you being the ones to help me shape it.

The graves have a way of finding you here.

I took Cooper for a walk the other day, and I try to take a new trail every time. Trails branch off at random, sometimes old mining roads, sometimes game trails well-traveled enough to dupe a novice and tempt a regular. But this one branched past an old dilapidated cabin, windows smashed and guts covered in dust and leaves. Just past the rotten home, maybe 20 feet into the woods, there was a wooden post sticking some three feet up from the ground. It had the usual marks of man — straight, smooth, standing erect. I stepped through the deadfall to get a closer look. Every other piece of planed wood was either collapsing into the cabin or already ground-bound, rotting back to its mother. At the base of the stud were rocks piled in a pyramid of sorts, holding it in place, and beside the rocks, two moss covered statues the size of small rabbits. Beneath their soft, green blankets were two angels, kneeling by the post, one with their stone hands clasped looking up, the other with their hands on the ground, staring into it.

A marker read, “You were so much STRONGER and BRAVER and SWEETER than I will ever Be. I’ll miss you. Love Peter”

In lettering lost in time, you can just make out the name: Henrietta.

Just up the dirt road from our house is the cemetery, unfenced and unkept. There’s a swing strung between two old aspens, and you can kick your feet high above the handful of graves below. One gravestone shares two names — both children, laid to rest more than 100 years ago. In the center of their grave bed, a massive pine has splintered the stone with her roots made of bones and breath. Even with a cemetery in town, there are graves everywhere. Marked or forgotten, along the town’s edges, on the mountain, and in the mountain where men and burros were held hostage and held forever in the mines. There are two memorials right now in a town with fewer people than my graduating class in rural Ohio. One waves with prayer flags on a grassy knoll overlooking the old part of town. Beneath the flags, a photo of a girl my age, riding horseback through town. The other is in the cemetery, a mound dug and buried the day we moved in. As we unpacked our moving truck on a warm July day, cars with license plates from up and down the Rockies parked along our street to pay tribute. On the gravestone hangs the collar and tags of the man’s dog. He was 42.

I can’t walk by or even near Henrietta’s grave without talking to her, the peculiarity of which is heightened by the fact that it’s hard to tell if Henri was a girl or a dog. Either way, the conversations are the same:

“How’re the woods today? Any good visitors? Anything you’d like me to see?”

In the chance there’s some connective tissue between now and every then, I’m following the golden rule. I personally would like people to talk to me, to be curious, to be revenant. How fast do you think I could trip someone with a well-placed root if they were one of those people who carried speakers into the woods? How deeply could I infect their psyche if they defaced my resting place or hurt an animal?

Thus far, if Henrietta seems anything, it’s suspicious. Which is fine. I would be too. But she’s not the only one I’m talking to. In a deeper canyon, six miles by foot from the house, you can feel the enormity of time. A box canyon closing in on you with a swampy bottom, talus fields, waterfalls, and a scree climb to the ridge. Something that feels pulled from Land Before Time or referenced for some untouched world space saga. Alone on a misty trail run, I felt safe enough from the eyes of judgment that I knelt on the ground, my bare hands on the soil, and shared my intentions with the Earth: her kingdom is my gift to hold tenderly and her right to take quickly. I stayed on my knees until I forgot how it might look to someone coming, and I stayed a little longer after that until the connection loosened and I felt the dirt in my fingernails.

I dusted off my knees and my hands and carried on running. Around the next bush, I came to a quick halt — there in the middle of the path was a porcupine, as startled to see me as I was her. Nature, providing an offering and a test. Are you a good steward? Can you see this moment for what it is? I stepped back and spoke softly until the porcupine waddled deep into the brush. I carried on with that feeling of earned reverence in my heart, talking mostly to myself.

As we approach Halloween, the town has yet to unveil any inherent spookiness beyond the reality of death. Hard work and hard loss are etched in, but there’s no unease. And maybe there never will be if I keep talking to all the dead people and animals, the dying trees, the creatures long absorbed into the ground.

Several people asked me if I feel safe here, especially out in the wilderness on my own. Some people don’t know any better. They never learned the animals are mostly harmless. They never read the research that you’re much more likely to die at the hands of your partner than at those of a stranger. They never knew I already escaped those hands anyway. They never learned to read the sky and the mountain. Never learned to read me.

But whatever I am safe from here, I think more about what I am safe to be here: odd. Solitary. The kind of woman who kneels, palms in the soil, to feel time and purpose crawl up her spine vertebrae by vertebrae like a wooden roller coaster, hoping to stay in the moment long enough to feel the freefall of getting lost in time.

Whatever strange, backwoods habits this town enables, it also draws you in from the deathly calls of the winter wind with emails like this:

On Sunday, meet in the town square at 5pm in COSTUME for the parade, pizza, and the photo. Trick or treating starts at 6pm on the old side of town. Ryan will transport the kids to the other side of town and back at night. Add Town Hall to your trick or treating to meet the new Town Manager, John.

You want me to… wear a costume? To take a town photo? And meet the new town manager? Guys there are 150 people here. If you stand outside your house for longer than 5 minutes, you’ll meet the new town manager.

But that’s small town life. And I bought Halloween candy weeks ago to prepare for our first-ever trick’or’treaters. Hopefully after a few years of talking to ghosts in the pines, I won’t need a costume. The local kids will be scared enough as is.

------

How many times is a person meant to make new friends? When I moved into an apartment in DC with an absolutely iconic girl from Craigslist, I wrote in my journal, “you never know when you’ll meet your next bridesmaid.” Charmingly juvenile, as I was 24 years old. Ironic, as I never had any bridesmaids. And embarrassing, knowing I wrote something that’s surely been embroidered on a bachelorette party t-shirt by now. My point was: you can meet people you fall in love with anywhere, anytime, assuming your heart (and calendar) are open. Now my heart and calendar are open and I am one of Elizabeth Bennet’s sad sisters, cloying and desperate for attention while everyone at the ball ignores me. Meeting people here is unnerving and hapless and eye-clawingly vulnerable. My first new friend told me she was moving away in a few months. Do you invest deeply in hopes of another faraway friendship? Do you just go back to waving as you pass on the street? I like this girl! What an embarrassing thing to have to say to someone! Do you just invite people to every and anything like a lunatic? I can’t even remember to call the people I am forever-and-ever in cahoots with. I’m also deeply bound by what I’ll call the Movie Trap: say it’s 3pm during not-a-pandemic, and you get the urge to see a movie. You look at the showings, and there’s one you really want to see at 7:15. You think to yourself, “I should make an effort,” and you text a friend. “Hey, you wanna go see This Cool Movie at 7:15 tonight?” No one ever says yes. Don’t give me an example of when someone has, because it’s always one of these answers:

“Oooh, I’m actually seeing it with Kate tomorrow - wanna come?”

“Can we go to the 9pm showing? Stuck at work.”

“Yeah but let’s see Movie You’ll Fucking Hate instead.”

Now maybe I’m just lighting flares guiding you to the worst parts of my personality, but this drives me nuts. No, Liz, I don’t want to go tomorrow. I want to go tonight. At 7:15. So I can be in bed by 10. And you’d have to drag my dead body and prop open my eyes to get me to see something like Marriage Story in theaters. The Movie Trap is a big reason I usually hang out by myself, or I make plans weeks in advance. (Don't I sound like a blast.) Just the idea of being like, “I like you! Wanna hang out in October?” makes me want to collapse into a puddle of sad adulthood. Which is why on Friday at 4:30pm, when a girl I’d met a week prior asked if I wanted to grab a drink, I just said yes. I put on a pretty dress, did my makeup, put stuff in a purse, and drove the 25 minutes to town. It was really fun! And how novel to have new contacts in my phone like “Maggie blue house” and “Jess concert friend” — a throwback to the days of “Greg guy on L train” and “Devon ad party.” The very concept of not knowing someone’s last name or even needing it, and a year from now updating their contact info and smiling at your origin story. But for the most part, no one is in our phones. In terms of phone numbers collected, here is the list:

Two friends we knew prior who thank god you guys exist.

New friend who is moving away.

New friend who is game to drink tequila and ride mountain bikes.

Neighbor-not-yet-friend who I really fucking like and am not sure how to cross hang-out threshold with.

​Not to say there aren’t any other prospects or people I’m platonically gaga over, but I don’t have their phone numbers. There are honestly a lot of people like this because when you live in a small town (and you’re from the Midwest) you say “oop, sorry” to every person/object you bump into, and you say “hi :)” to every person you see. These are the rules. If I drive by you and don’t wave, it’s because I was so deep in a daydream I probably shouldn’t have been driving in the first place. This isn’t acceptable, because in our urgency to tattoo our vaccination status on our foreheads so we can make friends, it turns out just driving by someone can be a viable strategy. A few days ago, a man was driving by our kitchen window and then our driveway, and then he reversed back up to the kitchen window and started waving. Ben went outside — it was that kind of wave. The man had seen from his car a smokejumper emblem on the back of a truck in our driveway. “Hey, are you a smokejumper?” We aren’t. But my dad was, and he was in town visiting, accompanied by the emblem on the back of his truck. The guy said we should drink sometime. Numbers were not exchanged. We’ll call that a node, because it’s not quite a connection. And it’s mainly nodes, waiting to be connected, to have relevance. But first, no matter who you’re trying to befriend, you have to answer everyone else’s Do I Care Quiz. The quiz is employed by 93% of locals to determine how they feel about you existing within their personal 50-mile radius. The first question is non negotiable:

1) Are you visiting?

Variations on this question include “how long are you in town?” or “what brings y’all to town?” or my least favorite and most insulting, “did you just finish Jeeping?” I know I have blonde hair and say y’all, but how dare you. (Also, to be clear, you can own a Jeep, customize your Jeep, mod out your Jeep, and love your Jeep, but you’re not Jeeping until you drive too fast through a tiny town so you can hurl your Jeep over a mountain pass without ever getting out of it.) So the answer to “are you visiting” is “no, I live here.” Which brings us to the next question, my favorite for how loaded the gun, kneeling in the grass, scope on, target locked it is.

2) Are you part-time or full-time?

The first time I answered this question, I didn’t realize it was essentially like asking how someone voted in the 2020 election. The judgment was cocked and ready and the palpable relief/joy/or at the very least, tolerance, exuded by answering “full-time” was like when the sun comes out from behind the clouds on a 40 degree day. I was fine, but wow that does feel better. The third question though does not have a standard hoped-for answer. This is where nodes turn to connections turn to phone numbers.

3) What brings you here?

It seems like the best possible answer would be saying you work in town, and you’re going to begin construction on displaced-worker housing to ensure the people who run this town can actually live in it. We’d have everyone’s phone number. Saying you’re a writer who works remotely and bought a house from a legendary and beloved local who could no longer afford it is really something you keep to yourself. But in the interest of making friends, I just word vomit my entire history. We might as well find out at the onset if I make your eyes roll back into your skull. Not at all threatening that all it takes is a single social signal misinterpreted to be the absolute death knell of my ability to make friends in a town of some 1400 adults. In fact, I’ll share one such interaction. I was hiking with Cooper, about 5 miles by foot away from my house. I was on a trail, crossing a sloped meadow, and a group was traversing up the hillside to the trail. I said hi, where y’all coming from. One girl answered and we talked about the trail. She eyed me up and down. “Did you just move here?” “I did!” “I served your family last week,” she said. “Oh,” that phrasing. “Must have been my in-laws.” “Heard you bought Jack’s house. Such a bummer when locals like that are forced out.” “We didn’t even know about his house,” I said. “We were looking at another house and he asked his realtor if he could get us to come see his house. We just loved it, and him!” She had no emotional reaction to this. “You moved from California?” she asked. (Dangerous question.) “Yeah, got these sea level lungs, haha,” attempting to disarm with humor was a failure, “but couldn’t be happier to be out of California.” “It’s not like this all year. Winter’s really hard here, you’re in for a rude awakening.” “Well California’s the last place I lived, but I’m not from there. I’ve lived in brutal winters. At least Colorado gets sun!” I laugh with cloaked loathing. “It’s different when you live at altitude,” she said, like no human aside from her had ever been literally anywhere. “Are you trying to go around?” She indicated the path behind her. “No, y’all go ahead, just gonna wait to give you your space. I’m sure you’re faster than me.” “K, good luck making it to the lake." Maybe she was thirsty. Maybe she was hungover. Maybe she just has vicious delivery, but it felt like every blade of grass was leaning against the wind to listen. She was with four other people and not one of them said a word. I left that interaction not wanting to see another human ever again. But that interaction, and her intimate knowledge of exactly which house I lived in, made me want to decorate like we lived in a gingerbread house, all candy canes and plum drops, screaming to any passerby that we’re friendly. One of the mayor’s first questions to me was “what are you going to do to the house?” There are rules here about what your house can look like, and I kept emphasizing we bought the house because we loved it, not because we wanted to change everything about it. And now, instead of wanting to decorate the interior, I want to put up shades so we don’t contribute to light pollution, I want to hang a sign by the water spigot saying “grab some if you need” for hikers and mountain bikers, I want to paint a sign for the wild mint by our door that says, “I mint to tell you to take some,” because our neighbors were openly panicked they wouldn’t be able to just grab mint from the cabin’s garden anymore. Without question, COVID makes things harder. Dinner parties feel like dares. Dropping cookies off at someone’s house feels invasive. Grabbing a drink feels like the ultimate sign of trust. But at least we have nodes who can connect who can think to invite us and who can see that despite having lived in California, we’re not all that bad. In the meantime, I’ll be painting signs about water and mint, hoping to garner the benefit of the doubt from the so beautifully, earnestly, and waiting-to-see-if-you’re-worth-it doubtful.

“Well you’re definitely the first.” This past week, we screened-in the eastern facing porch on the side of the cabin. The porch slopes to the South, with the brick-on-dirt floor crumbling in that direction as well until it reaches uneven slabs of stone acting as steps down to the “yard” below. A mixed material retaining wall wraps beneath the steps to the south facing garage, holding up one corner of the narrow deck on the front of the house. The deck, in the heat of a high altitude summer, droops off the house like it’s daydreaming about the winter snow’s embrace. It’s safe to sit on, though I would not recommend leaning on the railing.

The side porch takes the brunt of the wind. Our wooden rocking chairs have been rocked some 20 feet into the yard more than once in the two months we lived here. In the myriad of threats we heard about the weather, most people included the wind. We all know how I feel about this ongoing weather intimidation tactic. I asked, “what speed are the gusts?” “Oh, they get up to 70 miles per hour on some days.” This was the first quantifiable piece of weather information someone had offered — an actual number we could react to with data and our historical personal experiences of various weather events. And our reaction was: uhhhh…. OK???? Look, I get it. No one’s preaching the skin benefits of -20 degree wind gusts at 70 mph, building snow drifts against your house in the span of minutes that Cooper could die in. I am not going to pretend that’s pleasant. But 70 mph? Any wind I’ve driven faster than does not intimidate me. I used to rally the horses at 12 years old in winds over 70mph to get them in the barn before the latest tornado whipped through. I helped shutter the resort in the BVI as the Category 5 hurricane rolled in. Even in Topanga, 70 mile per hour gusts were not uncommon in Santa Ana events. We had our single pane windows shatter more than once from debris in the wind. We taped cardboard up and went to sleep. That “70 mph” was all I needed to hear to confirm our next project: we were going to build a catio for these cats, and we were going to do it on the pre-existing porch structure to save time and money. We spent a week framing out the structure. We had to carve into the logs of the house to embed the wood supports for the framing.

And from there, every piece of wood was custom carved and cut to fit around the existing timber supports. The existing porch was so wildly uneven that there are gaps between each piece of old wood and the new framing. Our plan is to mix all the wood chips from the project with mortar/chinking and stuff the gaps — a good solution for the log cabin look. We built a plywood pony wall up to 28 inches from the interior of the porch, which gives a height of ~4-5ft from the exterior ground below. It’s capped with a 2x6” railing for even the fluffiest of cats to find a perch. The exterior will be wrapped with corrugated metal that we’ll quick-age to match the metal that wraps the bottom of the cabin. On the interior of the porch, we’ll use shiplap to hide the framing.

The screens themselves can withstand winds up to 120 mph, but to-be-determined if they can hold the weight of a growing maniac cat who has already tried to climb them. In the event the screens succumb to cat (or wind or snow or neighbor judgment) we’ll reinforce with metal mesh. We’re going to maintain this screen porch regardless of what the screen is. We had the pleasure of running into one of our more industrious neighbors the other day, and Ben asked him, “hey we’re building a screen porch. Is this a terrible idea?” He laughed. “Well you’re definitely the first.” But he liked it. Great way to diminish wind into the house. Simple way to regulate the temperature with massive south-facing windows. And indeed a practical outdoor safe haven for cats in predator territory. Just because you’re the first doesn’t mean you’re foolish — just foolhardy. There’s plenty of that here. This town has the typical mountain town’s truncated version of a colonizers’ history: “established 1881.” But it was plenty established prior to that by the Uncompahgre Band of the Ute Nation, removed by the U.S. Army on September 7, 1881, nearly 140 years ago. The government relocated the Uncompahgre Ute People to Utah, and one year after the Ute were forcibly removed from their ancestral land, San Miguel County split off from Ouray County and was made its own political subdivision in the newly-formed State of Colorado. In 1879, the ore-laden valley already had 50 people living in it, with a new narrow gauge railway only 2 miles away. By 1885, it was a town of 200 people. There was a hotel, a couple saloons, a pool hall. Winters were treacherous; the valley was and is prone to avalanches. But where there’s gold, there’s gumption. The power needed to run the stamp mill to process ore drove innovation. Timber was scarce at such high elevations, so a wood powered steam mill wouldn’t cut it. But the San Miguel River just a few miles down from the mine looked promising. Thus began the development and construction of the Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant. It was a hit. In fact, it was so successful that the Ames Plant led to the adoption of alternating currents at Niagara Falls and eventually to being adopted worldwide as a viable power solution. The plant remains, but the gold rush obviously didn’t. By 1940, the U.S. Census declared this little town I call home as tied for the lowest population in the country: 2 people. By 1960, it was one of four incorporated towns in the U.S. with no residents. But the joke was on the Census — the town’s single resident was just out of town the day the census came through. 1960 population: 1. By 1980 the population grew to 38, 69 in 1990, and about 180 now. (Plus 51 dogs according to the town’s website.) With modern amenities, it’s easier to be here. Studded snow tires, satellite internet, solar panels, instant coffee. No matter the hardships, there’s the reality of the present. In the 1880s, as the town boomed, the Ouray Times declared, “it will be at no distant day a far more pretentious town than it is now.” That day hasn’t exactly arrived, but I guess it depends on what you consider pretentious. I don’t think the town claims any airs of excellence beyond what’s true. In fact, the town hardly claims anything at all. There’s no sign indicating it’s even here. There’s just the old side and the new side. The new side, the Eastern half, was drawn out in the early 1990s, some 100 years later, and is separated from the Old Town by an avalanche zone—preserved open space for hiking in the summer, preserved open space for surviving in the winter. The town forbids short-term rentals, no one has a fence, dogs roam free, and all the houses have that cabin look to them. A boulder nests in a grove near a trailhead in the center of town with a plaque paying respect to the Utes who called this valley home. There’s no industry here. No businesses allowed. If you want a $7 latte, you can drive the 14 miles required to get it, assuming there’s not an avalanche blocking your path. You can, however, buy a pink lemonade in a

solo cup at the permanent lemonade stand run by the local feral child mafia. Crystals (rocks) can be purchased for an additional cost. We bought one, hoping to buy favor at the same time. The town plan has a few guiding principles, and it’s all in the name of preservation. We must preserve: 1 - the quiet atmosphere 2 - the rustic character 3 - the natural setting

And finally: 4 - protect the health and wellbeing of the people here No snowmobiles, no ATVs, no drones. In fact, the only sign of the outside world here are the passers-through. When you take the dirt road through town to the end, you enter National Forest, and you can hike over the pass saddle at nearly 12,000 feet before descending down the other side into Silverton. The pass road climbs rutted through an aspen forest before scaling across a scree field and then lurching over to the other side. Every day, it seems like 30 or so Texans and Arizonans in lifted and loud Jeeps with unused mods climb over this mountain in the comfort of their air conditioning, simply to drive down the other side. You could hike it, ride it, run it, and ski it, but they don’t. They rev their engines, kicking up dust in a town of feral children and roaming dogs, staring at us instead of waving. I’ve lived here for two months and look how salty I am. I’ll fit in yet. But today, there is a temperature that whispers of perfect trails and the dwindling of ogglers driving 35 in a 15. It’s already snowed in the mountains we see from our kitchen. Today, like a dedication to the Septembers of our youth, you can feel a chill in the air. A temperature akin to pencils and sweaters and reinventing yourself. A temperature that doesn’t exactly sing “screen porch” but could if you had the right slippers on. That’s what I did this morning: put my slippers on and sat there in the cool mountain morning air, thinking about the cemetery behind our house, about the Ute tribe, about the miners, about the mailman who died on Christmas in 1875 on the pass, about the 5 people who died in avalanches here just last year, about the people in their cars on their phones driving through, and all the people who’s very first question to us was, “so are you gonna live here part-time or full-time?” Maybe it will be a hard place to live. But at least we’ll have a screen porch.

“Yeah, I loved it, but she’d never move there.” It was something akin to that, at least. He didn’t mean any mischief, no deceit or planning. It was an honest take on what, at the time, was true. I saw the road into town on Google Maps, noted that it was closed during the winter, acknowledged the reality that a person can own a snowmobile, and I said, “we are not moving there.” But, all good truths are just dares in the making.

It’s easy to read this question and immediately leap to judgment. It’s very easy for the powerful and self-confident to read this and think, “how did you let this man come to define you so much? How did you lose sight of yourself to this degree? Just how?” But partners are not the only thing we define ourselves by. I have never been in a relationship like the one you’re describing, in which the only thing you want is that partner. But what I can empathize with is letting your life become so defined by something that could, at any point, change. To some extent, we all do this. A surgeon loses their steady hand. Best friends for life become different people. A dream job gets bought out and laid off. An accident changes everything.When our identities are rattled, what feels like a plush seat in first class reveals itself to be an illusion. The wind hits our skin with new intensity, and we see we were never so safe. Our reality is a mining cart on rusted rails: exposed and precarious, embarrassing even. What am I doing in a mining cart? My god, this can’t be how we do things. You are without a place, a category, a “purpose.” You swiftly exchange, “yes I’m in seat 2A, thank you” for “I have no fucking idea what’s happening.”That you don’t know what you want from this life is not only normal for when you are suffering from agonizing heartbreak and identity cracking, it is also normal to feel that way suddenly, without warning, when you are surrounded and supported by the people you love doing what you love. All I need to do is look at the stars for a moment too long to wonder what I want from this life. That’s our burden and the very thing that gives us the exquisite moments of fullness you and I both seek.So many of us are raised on mis-guided sentiments of pinnacles and planned paths. What one thing do you want to be when you grow up? Who will be the absolute love of your life? What one thing will you choose as your major? What is your dedicated five year plan to achieve that singular goal? What is your one true passion?These are unimaginative questions, if only because they exclude the realities of life. Interests change, people die, money runs out, money pours in, new careers are invented, old ways expire, incredible moments of dangerous and unpredictable serendipity purposefully wait until they can be their most dangerous and unpredictable selves. Ask anyone you’ve ever heard sigh very deeply.You used the words “purpose or passion” and I want you to do the work of untangling them. You allowed this man to become your passion. That may not have been the best plan, but it’s not shameful. So many humans draw themselves in the confines of what their relationship is. But he was not your purpose. I think you know that. You acknowledge that he was the center, and then move swiftly on to longing for something bigger than him. I think that’s partly because defining ourselves by one other human is not just coloring in the lines, it’s coloring within the corner of the page with one color. You were so narrowed in on this tiny vision of your life, so focused on keeping what you wanted, that you didn’t allow yourself to want anything else.That you don’t know what you want is beautiful. I know you’re worried about getting on a path while also healing, but finding that purpose or passion or driving force, whatever it is, that hunt is healing. That search will be the thing that pulls you from this grief. It will be the growth and the distraction that get you from Point Heartbreak to Point Full. That’s where you want to be: in a place of fullness. Your emptiness, of heart and of purpose, gives you the opportunity to build exactly what you want.While you recover, schedule one new thing a week. Could be attending a poetry reading, a cooking class, visiting a museum, renting a bike, taking a sketchbook to the park and drawing cartoon versions of the people you see. To find your joy, you need to try things. Those things can become your passions. They can color you in. They can color you so brightly and beautifully that instead wanting someone else, you begin to want yourself.It can feel like everyone already has their purpose and you’re behind, but that’s a distortion. People who have found their purpose often glow with it. And the ones who found it early have had a longtime to televise it to the world, to build platforms, to share it wide and far. You’re not behind, and you haven’t wasted any time. You just spent time learning. And now it’s time to learn something new.

This time, be the one you want. Healing is just a side effect of discovering who that *you* is. 

Ten years ago, my Zoloft prescription ran out the day I had a tumor sliced out of my neck. The surgery was on a Monday. I woke up with chest pain and nerve damage in my face. They kept me until Wednesday morning. I left the hospital with a drainage bag attached to my neck, pinned to the collar of my shirt. I couldn’t move the right side of my face. I emailed my boss.“The surgery was a little more intense than I anticipated. I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it in this week.”“Please be here on Friday.”I went to work on Friday. I couldn’t brush my hair because the pressure on my neck was too painful. The blood bag seeped occasionally on my shirt. I had the kind of sleep anyone has after their ear is partially sliced off to remove a tumor burrowing beneath it. Don’t worry — they sewed it back on. (The ear, not the tumor.)On Friday, because I didn’t understand how boundaries or rights worked, I walked across the National Institutes of Health campus toward my building looking more like a patient than an employee. My boss stared at me and then didn’t speak to me again. I wrote for four hours before I went into her office.“I need to go home.”“Have a nice weekend!” She beamed, actively looking everywhere that was not my blood bag.I smiled, sort of. The right side of my face was still temporarily paralyzed, so the left side of my mouth hoisted my cursory courtesy smile by itself.“Gonna work on my face,” I said pointing to my partially slack expression.“Sorry?”“Nerve damage. Gonna try to exercise it. Do some heavy lifting while I watch TV,” I said, my face contorting from the kind of stifled laughter usually reserved for broken ribs and strict teachers.“Ok!” She almost yelled, her own face contorting with discomfort.Over the next two weeks—tumor and medication free—I lost my mind. Stop me if you’ve heard this before. I gave away my percocet. I dyed my hair. I adopted a cat. I started a blog. And nine months later, I started a challenge called Bold Moves October. I started it because so much of my day-to-day life felt defined by inaction and complacency. Plus, the October prior is when the doctors had said, “we’re really not sure if it’s cancer or not.” Followed immediately by, “we can schedule you for surgery in three months.”It was a long three months. Death all of a sudden seemed like something that could happen. In my 23-year-old wisdom, this meant I should be more proactive. For better or worse, I primarily applied this proactivity to flirting.

We can’t all learn life’s great lessons on the first go.Anyway, that blog and that mini movement of boldness changed the trajectory of my life. One thing toppled into another. Over the next few years that blog and challenge would (directly and tangentially) get me a book deal, writing contracts, sport sponsorships, job offers, the friendship of my favorite author, the adoration of my husband, and a full-time job as an editor that would be the two best professional years of my life.The period I spent working on that blog was obviously good. It was also the most derided and insulted I would ever be. I lost friendships. I received hate mail and death threats (in 2011 no less, before every Twitter account with too many numbers in the screen name became an amateur fear monger.) I allowed people to send me anonymous messages because it was a way for people to share how they were struggling without revealing their identities. But that meant I couldn’t protect myself from anonymous and un-trackable threats. God only knows what my parents thought. (In this scenario, I am God. I know what they thought.)Courage often doesn’t feel good. The only courage that exists without anxiety is arrogance. There is not a life where you, a person who wrote anonymously to an all-but-dead Tumblr, live without the anxiety of others’ judgment. But there is also not a life where you, who—again—wrote asking for advice anonymously to an all-but-dead Tumblr, aren’t a person defined by desperate chances and hope. I apologize that you sent me that note months ago, but I assure you, it is because I too was flexing courage, letting it coarse through my veins and vanquish months of chronic nausea.Like you, I was fussing about in the woods of my life, looking for something that resembled a path. Not necessarily a path without sinkholes or poison leaves, but rather one worth them.Your path, the one it sounds like you’re trying to find, will be overgrown with the thorns of judgment and anxiety. But they’re just thorns. They’re on every path. They’re hurting you just as much on the wrong path as they will on the right one.Normally I give very ethereal advice that’s difficult to act on. It’s more like a song than an action item, but in this scenario, you don’t need to listen to someone else. You also don’t need to have a tumor spliced from your insides to remind you that at some point, our chances run out. All you need is to develop the skill of listening to yourself. For a couple of months, relax with the courage. Courage is just an instagram word for having a strong inner constitution. And that is something you can develop without framing it in the same terms we use to go to battle. 

To do the work, I recommend a few things. 

If you don’t already, move your body. I know how much people hate this advice. But if you can hike or run or cycle or even just briskly walk (without podcasts) for a minimum of 20 minutes a day, you should. Our gut, our intuition, our inner sense of self or whatever you want to call her, she’s not going to feel safe coming out when you’re in the mental thicket of other people’s narratives. Exercise is the closest humans have to Drano for the mind. 

Find a journaling exercise that feels like maybe it’s a little too much work. If it feels conquerable, it’s too easy. I go back to Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year. Doesn’t matter if it’s a new year. Time is a construct. 

Get the book Designing Your Life. You may not design an entirely new one, but it may help in making change feel conquerable, or just possible. If that book feels too “action item” oriented, try The Artist’s Way. It’s much more about knowing yourself than it is about art.

Make a list of the narratives that you feel other people are suffocating you with. Maybe dad wants you to be a doctor. Maybe girlfriend wants you to settle down a little. Maybe boss wants you to focus on the clerical side of your job. Maybe society wants you to buy an apartment you can’t afford. Whatever or whoever it is you feel is pressuring you, write it down. You need to know your demons to exercise them. You might even find, in time, that you even like some of these visions. They’re not the enemy. Pressure is. And pressure is only defeated by self. Isn’t that annoying?

Write to me again. Impress me. Give yourself a few challenges each week. Whether it’s applying for a class, trying something you’re bound to be bad at, getting up half an hour early to dance your heart out before work, I don’t care. Do some things that are for you. Not for others, not for profit, not for your future — just for you right now. And then use me for more than an anonymous submission on the internet. Use me as a deadline. Sometimes all it takes to get over the hurdle of pressure is a little validation. I’m here for that whenever you need me.  

I’m recommending these things because I just did them.

I gave myself a deadline to change my life. Not that it was bad, it just felt… well it felt exactly how it did ten years ago: full of inaction and complacency. I was on cruise control, taking few chances, taking really nothing at all. So the next thing I took was an exit. I wanted to see what life looked like when things weren’t all concrete and white lines. I quit my job. I camped around the west. I picked up a few new hobbies. I journaled more than I did all of 7th grade. My year-long bout of nausea went away. I started to dance again. I wrote songs again. I wrote in general again. And I dug around in my psyche for the truth about what I always liked doing, what the through-lines in all my good jobs have been. Very simply, the strongest through-line was the encouragement and empowerment of others.

Most of the writing I’m doing right now will be private until it isn’t. I’m writing a horror film and still working on my first novel. But I need a weekly way to interact with people via writing lest I lose my lonely mind, so I’m bringing back the one thing got me into writing in the first place: answering people’s questions.

After writing Anonymous Asked, I was too embarrassed to promote the book. I’ve never re-read it. I fell into the spiral of what other people thought: of me, of the work, of my ideas. But I’d rather be fulfilled and insulted than bored out of my mind and forgotten.

At 8:30am, my phone pinged. There are six of us on a text chain about local mountain lions, road closures, and which house we’re walking to for afternoon beers. This morning, there was an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway somewhere between Malibu and Santa Monica delaying commuters by a whopping two hours. I texted an old coworker with the details, knowing she would be caught in the traffic.

After all, that’s what I did: took a U-turn on my entire career. It’s been two months since my sayonara to Silicon Beach, two months since I set an alarm, two months since traffic mattered, two months since I’ve seen anyone I used to see every day. Two months is enough time to really change a life, to wreak havoc on built routines, to do such corporeal things as redecorate the house, write a screenplay, and travel at least some of the world. 

I have done none of that.

But I have slept deeply. I have slept on the couch with a book and a coffee and the best of unmet intentions, I have slept in the sun from one high tide to another, I have slept so still in my hammock birds have covered me in seed and feathers. And while my body recovers, my mind and my self concoct world after world in my dreams to see if I made the right decision. 

This self-imposed slowness has taken me to mental places I’m uncomfortable with. I’m standing at a train station just seeing the time-of-arrival tick later and later, more concerned with the timeline than the destination. At 2:30pm every day, I pace the house, unsure how to relax or what relaxing even is. Maybe it’s that I’m Type 3, or an ENFP, or a Capricorn, or just the daughter of people who processed problems by mowing the lawn and mucking the stalls. Problems were just periods of getting the chores done. 

When I did wake up and take myself somewhere, I went to the jungle of Belize outside of San Ignacio. I wanted to see some toucans and have some revelations. Saw five of the former, had none of the latter. One week in the jungle is a blip in the two months I’ve spent sleeping and pacing in the high chaparral of the southern California coast, exchanging one dense menagerie for a wetter one some 2800 miles southeast. What I’m saying is: it didn’t make a difference. I’m not alone in expecting a lot out of a vacation, but it should have been more obvious that waking up in an open-aired casita with no air-conditioning in Belize to see new birds is not all that different from waking up in an open-aired cabin with no air-conditioning in California to see the same old birds. 

There was one adventure in Belize though that stands out. Prior to the trip, I came down with a summer flu debilitating enough to make me question going at all. But in a fog of Xanax, NyQuil, and hand sanitizer, I wrapped my face with a scarf and got on an airplane because there was a cave I wanted to see: Actun Tunichil Muknal. I was on a lot of medication by the time I finally got to the cave. Several years ago now, cameras were banned from the cave. It’s an ancient Mayan cave, and you start the trip by fording three river crossings, pulling yourself across the current by ropes. When you finish hiking to the cave, you swim in to it. “Just make sure you stay to the right,” they say. You climb through crevices, watch night creatures flutter above and scurry past your feet, you step in to cool pools of water long underground, chin up, gently paddling to other rocks. And you keep going until you’re deep in the cave, deeper than feels natural, deeper than feels human. There’s no sunlight, the air feels wet and cold. You bend around immense boulders held in space and time, small and ancient voices in your head begging them not to crush you. The ceilings start to open and you can tell by the sound — your library voice, childlike and thoughtful of the reverence, all of a sudden emerging from the crawlspaces to a high ceiling you can’t see until you look straight up with your headlamp, with wonder, a room of absolute stone. And then you begin to climb.

A careful foot there, make sure to turn there, and now push yourself to here, and a few more thoughtful steps and hand-holds, and then, like emerging from underwater, like the first time you saw a building burn, like that moment you first brushed fingertips with that person you could never have, you enter a pitch-black cathedral of breathless awe, pillars of connected stalactites and stalagmites along the perimeter. You’re afraid to speak in the kingdom of what came before you. You’re afraid to step in their footsteps. You’re afraid and in love and overwhelmed in the damp and black night. And when you’re done being humbled by the vastness, the darkness, the times-before-us-ness, you look down to see who was there before you. Skeletons lay in tact on the floor, unaffected by centuries of changing fashions, modes of transportation, and parenting styles, only further calcified into crystals over time. This is when your guide (one of only 22 in the nation of Belize) puts on his painter’s cap. 

“Imagine that you truly believe this cave is the entrance to the underworld,” he begins. “You are knowingly entering the underworld, swimming into it with a torch held above your head. The water glows aqua, and you don’t have the science to know why. To you, it’s magic. You are not preceded by decades of archeologists. You don’t know the cave ends five miles in. You don’t sign any waivers. You just have faith. And you’ve probably taken hallucinogens. You’re probably hungry. And you’re a mile into crawling and swimming and climbing through this cave and come upon this natural cathedral in the underworld you pray to.”

And then, the guide moves his own torch — an industrial grade flash light — back and forth, pointing it at a rock feature jutting out. As he switches the light back and forth, the shadows behind the rock structure move and it’s unmistakable: the movement of the shadow is that of a crowned king plunging a spear into a man kneeling on the floor. For just that moment, you are Mayan, it hasn’t rained in months, your crops are dead, you’re deep in the underworld begging the gods for rain, and in your desperation asking what you can do for them, they paint you a picture of sacrifice against the wall with your own torch. You’re also on drugs. 

Revelations usually only come when we’re desperate for them. I didn’t have any in the cave that day, and I was mad about it. 

I thought of the Mayans, carefully crafting pots full of goods only to smash them on the floor in tribute to the gods. It didn’t work. So they brought bigger pots. They brought more goods. But whatever they broke, the drought didn’t. So they brought someone to sacrifice. And the skeletons say that maybe they broke the sacrifice’s spine first before potentially pulling their heart out, so the sacrifice could live just long enough to see the importance of what they’d offered. And then, time stamped in bone just a little bit later, there are the tiny femurs — the ultimate sacrifice as their people starved and prayed for rain. 

Like the keys always being the last place you looked, maybe rain will always follow the ultimate sacrifice, maybe revelations will always be easier to find in hotel rooms where desperation is high and familiarity is low, but it’s always just the weather, up there and in here, that dictates what happens. 

This was the summer of the shortest playlist I’ve made since 2009. Without the structure of work, New Music Friday and Discover Weekly became moments past. It feels embarrassingly capitalist to structure personal timestamps around Spotify playlists, but I can feel who I used to be when I listen to the playlists from each season. Fall 2012, all new friends. Spring 2014, crushing heartache. Winter 2015, redemption. Summer 2017, longing. Spring 2019, power. Without the hours spent sending emails on Monday and the hours spent reading documents on Friday, I didn’t have a church pew to celebrate new music. I was riding my bike for hours and hours to the sound of sports cars and scrub jays, forgoing music to try and hear the vibrations coming within, but I couldn’t hear anything. 

I woke up to that text at 8:30am because for the first time this summer, a marine layer clung to the canyon, dimming the light just enough to let me sleep as long as I liked. I opened the door to the deck to let the dampened air spill through the house, and when I felt the wetness on my skin, I felt Actun Tunichil Muknal in my bones. 

Two months of peace and quiet and sleep didn’t reveal anything to me. I slipped my laptop and my headphones into my bag, hopped into the truck, and drove to the cafe in Topanga town. I ordered a chai latte alongside a ham & cheese croissant, my favorite road-trip indulgences. It felt like I was in movement, and I wanted to intensify the feeling, buoy it. I pulled up Spotify and started a new playlist: Fall 2019. 

When we beg for revelations and rain, we’re never really asking for those things. No one wants rain that floods their fields, that drowns them in the river of too much. They want the rain that gives them a bountiful harvest. They’re not asking for a downpour, they’re asking for a well-fed family and a well-cared for future. We don’t ask for revelations for one sparkly, calcified thought. We ask for revelations because we want what comes after them: clarity and action. The revelations and the rain are just the symbols that, if we take care of our end of the bargain, we might get what we wanted all along.

This? This sleeping and waking and riding and sleeping again? This is the rain. I’m tending to my crop, knowing I have everything I need for the harvest ahead. 

All that's left to do now is the work. 

--- Subscribe to the newsletter at tinyletter.com/keltonwrites.

My father wrote me a book, and I haven’t read it. My father and I are as alike as any father and daughter have any right to be, in spirit, temperament, and assuredness of our capability. I tell you this because the book is about him, and thus, essentially about me, and that’s not the only reason I can’t read it. If I read the book, he will obviously die. If I don’t read the book, he will definitely, without question, also die, but a different death. Neither more sad nor terrible than the other, but different in their command over bad guilt or dumb grief. I will either feel like dying myself because I did not read it when he was alive, or I will be so adept at imagining him dead I will be weeping at his non-grave, sitting across from him at the table as he lowers the newspaper to look curiously at his weeping daughter. It is also with certainty that reading the book will kill me, either with love so deep it drowns me in profound agony, or in that I will see how light and fire and good personalities burn out into dusty pieces of ash, particles we breathe in and sneeze out on a bus while strangers glare passively in our general direction. We are all just piles of molecules, dead on arrival. What and why, etc. Reading the book will kill us both, and not reading it is killing us both, and being dead either way does not make approaching it any less dreadful. So instead I just hold the plastic three-ring binder from somewhere like Staples because he doesn’t know you can just find that kind of thing at Walgreens. And when all I have is that binder, he would be paper cuts and glue coming undone from photos with no jpegs or even negatives, just the one photo of the one thing that he stuck to a page for his daughter so she could be proud of him so one day she could cry so hard hoping so profoundly that he had been proud of her. So, I can’t read the book because I have to. I don’t have a choice. I bring this up because we’re both in good health and I am deeply superstitious, and sometimes I like to wave things in the face of my superstition to see what comes of them. Also, because one of the characters in the novel I am writing is based on my dad, and that character dies, so I’ve been crying a lot. This novel has been a long-time coming, in that the characters first came to me in 2014. Thus far they have been very patient with me, but I could feel them rumbling, packing their things or dying somewhere in my computer, and I knew I needed to act quickly. I booked a room up the California coast where no one could ask me, well, anything, and I started to write again. Kill your darlings doesn’t always mean slogging them off with machetes, but sometimes cutting their character information and pasting it into a document of Dead Darlings, ctrl+F’ing their name, and deleting—watching the word count fall with them. Sorry, Hannah. Sorry, Red. Once upon a time, I wrote frequently for free, and now I write infrequently for money. And that, as far as I can tell for myself, has not resulted in the kind of life I want. But this is a hard thing for me to parse. Some coworkers read this (hi! Please don’t tell me if you read this) and I would very much like to keep my well-paying job so I can continue to fantasize about buying a home so that one day I can do things like paint a wall yellow and then wonder if it was a bad idea. I also would like (for no reason I can discern other than growing up middle class in Ohio) to own a big truck with big wheels with a big engine so I can joyfully drive to the back of every parking lot because that’s the only place it will fit. And these things cost more money than I was making writing for free, as you can surmise by the word “free.” A year or so ago, I was taking the Yale course on Happiness through Coursera (of course not knowing when I was rejected from Yale as an insulted 17-year-old that I eventually could take all the interesting classes for free without ever doing the homework.)  It prompted me to take a happiness survey. I love quizzes about my personality (which any personality quiz will tell you about me right away — Type 7, ENFP.) When I went to create an account, it told me I could not. An account under that email already existed. I cocked my head like a dog at the computer to emphasize to myself my own confusion, and I turned immediately to the search bar of my email to get to the bottom of this. It turns out, I had taken the exact same quiz some 4 years prior. And the results were still in my account. The internet giveth. But, of course, the internet also taketh away: upon taking the quiz again, I was happier, but not by much. This didn’t make sense. In 2014, I had an emotionally abusive boyfriend, lived in a 150 sq ft room where I was not allowed to make noise (!), and often couldn’t leave work for spans of 30 hours at a time. But in the 2018 quiz, I was making significantly more money working fewer hours, I was in a happy and supportive relationship, I lived in a cool ass house with cool ass pets — where was my goddamned happiness? I took that quiz in November and assuming you’re currently experiencing time the same way that I am, it is now March, wait, no, it’s April, and I spent the last five months carefully examining what made me happy and what didn’t. And like any person who’s had to have the phrase “forest for the trees” explained to them multiple times, I couldn’t see what was painfully obvious to 97% of people who knew me: when I’m not writing, I’m not happy. And I’m not talking about tagline writing, or UX writing, or writing scripts for product features, or writing about bike rentals in Ventura, or any of the writing I was actually doing. I could still slip into flow on those things. I could still get excited and get lost in the rhythm, but upon completion, it felt like planning a trip with friends only for them all to have something come up, and the plan get pushed another indefinite year. At some point, you just have to take the trip yourself, and I thought that trip would be this newsletter, but I’ve struggled to write more newsletters because of two things: why buy the cow, etc., but also because it feels like there needs to be a point. And while I suspect those are beliefs I should investigate and dismantle, today I happen to have a point, so here it is: If doing something doesn’t feel right and you don’t need to do it to survive, you should probably do less of it. And if there is something you feel called to do, but feel you don’t have time to do it, you should probably take a long hard look at your calendar and (oh boy) your choices. It’s been five years since I sat down with these characters, and in the meantime, my dad sat down and transcribed his entire life pre-my-mom with photos. It’s page after page of wild parties, broke down cars, school dropouts, ski towns, jumping out of airplanes, fighting fire, and living in the wilderness all so his daughter could be like, “sorry Dad, I can’t book a ski trip 3 months in advance because there’s no way this tech company with 250 other employees could find a way to replace my somewhat vague skill-set for a Friday. Also I gave up on my dreams. Thanks for the book." Holding the three-ringed binder, looking at the printed title page he’d slipped under the plastic cover, feeling such pride and love it could distort the proportions of the room, I knew when I would be ready to read it: when I could send my dad my finished manuscript so he could read what he’d made of me while I read what he’d made of himself. So I'm in a cottage up the coast from where I live, away from the cat in my lap and the dog at my side, away from morning coffees and goodbye kisses, far far away from bosses and emails, and the farthest away from what doesn't feel right in order to get closer to what does. 

It was a Friday when we woke up at dawn, phones dying, plugged into walls that lost power sometime in the night, and we looked for plumes of smoke. On the west face of the mountain, we’re audience to every sunrise, blind to every sunset. The day was clear. We knew the fire was burning somewhere, but without power, we had no way to check. No way to call out. So I put on my cycling kit, and I prepared to descend the canyon to the coast. I kissed Ben, and I told him I would call him when I was able to get news at the bottom of the canyon. Topanga Canyon Boulevard was backed up with cars. It happens sometimes when there’s an accident on the Pacific Coast Highway where the road dumps out at a single stoplight, but drivers were being erratic and rude. People were turning around, pulling over, and I kept swerving to avoid their desperation. I heard a loud pop and knew I’d broken a spoke. I stopped, opening my brakes, and kept riding, the rear tire still rubbing against the brakes and forcing my effort. I would need to have it fixed in the city. When I reached the coast, the stoplight was out. Something was wrong. There was tumult at the gas station. Aggression was palpable. I turned left in the shadow of a car going the same way over the freeway, and then saw them: the cars pulled over, cameras pointing back toward me. I stopped and unclipped, looking over my shoulder to see what was worth getting out of your car on your morning commute to see.

The smoke was unbelievable, like the earth had mirrored itself in the sky. The smell was unmistakable, emerging from the notes of gasoline and exhaust to pronounce itself as nothing short of chaos. I pulled out my phone to call Ben, but there was no service. Power was out everywhere. There was no way to call him until I got further into the city. Malibu was on fire. We couldn’t see the plumes on our protected western face, but the fire was coming. It was unbelievable.

I passed hundreds of cars on my way into Santa Monica, traffic backed up for miles. The whir of my bicycle making music with the wind against the open spaces between the cars. I kept pulling out my phone to see no bars, No Service. All along the coast, phones pointed toward the horror behind me with jaws agape behind them.

I checked the news at stoplights, desperately looking for a fire map. Over 10,000 acres and spreading fast. Evacuations notices pouring in. Winds becoming increasingly erratic, fire raging through a range deeply dehydrated by drought. I needed to go home. I needed to be there. But I thought I had time. I took my bike to the shop to fix the spoke. 12,000 acres. I went to work, and I tried to call Ben.

“Hey, this is Ben. Leave a mes—”

All my calls, straight to voicemail. Without power, our WiFi calling didn’t work. He would charge his phone in his car, I knew he would. 15,000 acres. I dropped my bike off at the shop, walked to the office, and continued to check the fire news. The Santa Anas blew hard and fast, pushing the fire through the Santa Monica Mountains. People kept leaving work, talking of back alleys, throughways to home. Text messages came in emojiless and short.

“Are you in Topanga?” “Do you know if we’re in danger?” “Have you guys left?”

I tried to call Ben again. Nothing. I tried to call our landlord, Jerry. Nothing. I kept trying to call as more people kept trying to call me. Gchats from best friends. Slacks from coworkers. Emails from parents. And a text from a neighbor:

We can’t go home. Do you think Ben could get Sax from our house? I think the bedroom window is unlocked.

My phone rang. I was already holding it.

“Hello?” “Hi, this is Helen’s Santa Monica, your bike is ready.”

It was time to go home. I told work, I’m sorry, but I need to go, it’s fastest by bike anyway, yes I’ll let you know but it should be fine, just want to be sure. I walked at a clip to the shop, but news reached me faster than I could reach home: mandatory evacuation of Topanga, all zones, immediately.

The canyon is broken into 9 zones. There are 3 primary outlets. One that goes to the valley, one to the coast, one deeper into the mountains. All zones needed to get out, splitting between the valley and coast exits. We’d seen a few evacuations, but this was first time it was mandatory, for everyone. No recommended, no voluntary — mandatory. For everyone.

I tried to call Ben — straight to voicemail. I got to the shop, and the fire was on the TVs.

“Miss?” “Sorry, I’m here for my bike,” I said, staring at the news. “Last name?” I looked back at the woman. “Sorry, what?”

Red flames, red news banners, red retardant falling from the sky.

“Your last name. For the bike.” “Right, sorry, Wright. W, R, I, H, sorry, G, or G, H, T.”

...Woolsey Fire grows to 20,000 acres...

“Ma’am? Your bike?” “Sorry! I’m sorry, just, these fires.”

I couldn’t go home, he couldn’t get the news, and I couldn’t stop apologizing for being lost in the smoke. The fire was growing and I stood wide-eyed in the slow commotion of the bike shop. And then he called.

“Hel—” “Benny! Benny, are you evacuating?” “What? — Hi Kelton!” “Is that Jerry?” “Yeah, we’re just hanging out. Trying to find where in the house has reception. Power’s still out.” “It’s mandatory evacuation.” “Really?” “Yes, the whole canyon, it’s mandatory. Our zones go out through the coast, zones 1-6 to the valley.” “We can’t even see any smoke. Is the fire close?” “They’re worried about a windshift.”

A pause.

“Ben?” “Sorry, moved from my reception spot. OK, well, I’ll get our stuff together, is there anything you’d like me to pack?” “I actually need you to go get Sax from the neighbors’ house. They can’t get home.” “The cat?” “Yes, can you get their cat?” “I’ll try. I’ll pack up all the animals and our stuff and call you when I’m out of the canyon.”

A long time ago, I was prepared for this. My father was a smokejumper — he jumped out of airplanes to fight forest fires in the great American west. Photos of him in his gear, young and strapping and cash-strapped, hung around my childhood home. Next to each photo of him was a photo of my mother, rifle in hand, never to be out done by my father. When I moved to the West, I knew forest fires well. Because of them, I knew all disasters well. I knew all about go-bags and tennis shoes at your desk and extra supplies in your car. I grew up with handguns in center consoles and spare keys hidden in wheel wells, with gas tanks always full and cash never low. I grew up checking exits and the wind.

I was prepared, but I wasn’t there. And it made me mad. God, it made me mad. I could see myself in my house, my cabin, my stretch of cliff and dirt and wood, and I could see myself moving through it with the efficiency and grace of deep responsibility and care, knowing so completely in my heart the list of what mattered and what didn’t, and playing the perfect game of Tetris in my truck with all the perfect pieces of my life. But I wasn’t there and it wasn’t my call.

Four hours and 15,000 acres later, Ben pulled up to my office in my truck, his heavily modified Subaru WRX left in the driveway at home. And in the truck, three animals, the passports and wedding certificate and wills, my engagement ring and the necklace my grandfather left me, my first target practice with my dad, the checkbooks, the emergency litter box I had bought months ago, and a duffel bag of my clothes.

It was a Friday night, the fire was devouring the thirsty earth, we were taking refuge in a friend’s place, and I was going through the duffel of how my husband imagined I dress. He packed my favorite jeans, a pair of badly stained khakis, a sweater that didn’t go with either, another sweater that I wore every day on our honeymoon, a flannel I don’t wear, two technical t-shirts meant for riding bikes in the dirt, enough loungewear to clothe an elephant, only bras without underwire, and no shoes.

From the city, I could see he had time, but from where he was, all he could see was that I had called 15 times and he needed to break into the neighbors’ to save their cat after their other cat had gone missing in that canyon only a few months after moving in… and only a few months earlier. He packed some funny things, but he packed the right things.

Seven days later, we were able to go home. Topanga had been spared. Malibu had not. Paradise, much worse. I saw my father in the faces of those men on the news. I saw his friends. I saw their proximity to loss, the weight of what they saved on their shoulders, the permanence of what they couldn’t on their souls. And I saw my home in the ones that burned. When we walked in, our house smelled of cedar and fir and tobacco, as if the warmth of a home well-loved found a way to melt our candles, the fire miles and miles away. I stood in the doorway of the cool evening, holding Finn, looking at this strange rental I call my home. A painting of our first place together. A blanket I’ve never unfolded on the back of the couch. A pile of dismembered stuffed animals in the dog’s bin. Three homemade cookbooks. “One free massage” handwritten ticket. The Topanga Survival Guide sitting on the shelf. All the things that would have been gone forever, forgotten for years, etching themselves into a picture of what I would always remember as the home I didn’t want to lose.

One day, this canyon will burn again. But I know my exits. And my go-bag is pretty simple: it’s a cat, a dog, and a boy that leaves his sports car behind to save his girl’s truck.

I wrote this piece listening to City on Fire by Tyler Hilton, and My Day Will Come by James Francies & YEBBA.