a northwest evening
Me and Tricia and Lisa meet in a parking lot in Hood River and pile into Lisa’s 1984 Benz wagon. It’s black and hearse-like and fucking cool in its oldness and classiness. We wind our way up a road to a ridgeline, park, pull on our hiking shoes, and cast out on a trail through the undergrowth. It’s almost dusk and the golden light is leaking through the bramble of trees and bushes from the west. Suddenly we emerge on a grassy ridgeline and a wall of warm wind blasts the hair off our damp foreheads and almost knocks us over. There’s something unsettling about the wind up here; it’s wild, relentless. Lisa, who lives down there below us on the valley floor, she says there're a lot of crazy people in Hood River, and maybe they didn’t start out crazy, but the wind is always blowing around here and maybe, you know, it just unwinds the screws after a while.
The drive back down through the orchards is heart-achingly beautiful with the salmon-pink sunset, but then some horrid clanging noise starts up beneath our feet, which, we discover, is the Benz’s muffler dragging along the pavement. There's no way to tie it back up and the only option is to forge ahead. With our ears covered, this is what we do. Back at Lisa’s lovely red farm house with the car parked safely in the driveway, Tricia makes mint juleps by crushing ice in the blender and pouring in a little bourbon, a little lime juice, some mint from the garden, and some club soda mixed with agave syrup. It tastes nothing like the sticky, electric green julep I had six years ago on Kentucky Derby day. It tastes like heaven.
Cold Wars
The dead of summer, if there is such a thing. I’m about to report about a tense situation at my house involving the Captain (as seen above): 3.5 months old, 3 pounds, black and white, enjoys peaches, mangos, and corn. And Cougar (as seen below): age 11, 13 pounds, angry and wistful, a cat who was once looking forward to an old age of napping combined with intermittent cleaning sessions and belly rubs, but who is now forced to contend with an alien being who stalks her from around corners and under tables, attacking in a playful furry of claws and tiny white teeth (her teeth being old and yellow—but still sharp, mind you) and never giving her any peace.
(she's so mad she won't even look at the camera for photos anymore)
You see, I adopted Captain as good company for Cougs, thinking she was lonely and could use some snuggling (who couldn’t?!). But as it turns out she hates his bewhiskered guts and refuses to be in the same room with him. She only comes inside to eat now, the rest of the time perching herself out front in the bark mulch under a bush—thinking often, I imagine, of the warmth and comfort she used to know on the other side of the front door. Of the years she spent secretly knowing that she, alone, was the sovereign of my household. She thinks of the apartment on 12th Street back in Colorado where she spent her kittenhood, the time she escaped through the window screen and first felt her whiskers touch an icy white blanket that was, she later found out, snow. She thinks of that house on Jasper Street in Encinitas where she’d follow me over to the parking lot at Beacons to watch the sun set and the surfers bob up and down on the water that’d become, with the dusk, a rolling glassy mirror. I’m sure she thinks of all the quiet nights at this house when the rain rattled the gutter and she’d lay there in the crook of my legs, not understanding why I’d toss and turn, not realizing she was pinning me down uncomfortably with my own sheets and making me feel claustrophobic.
(look at that little fucking beggar!)
Yeah Cougs thinks of all this stuff, I imagine, and wonders why I’d do such a thing to her, invite the uninvited, feed and nurture this little creature of evil—even seem fond of him at times. Sure, anyone else looking at her would only see a cat sitting in the garden, but I see it all in the hard squint of those little green eyes, and all I can say is Cougs, girl I’m sorry, I never meant to hurt you, but one day I know I’ll come home and you and the Captain will be spooning on a couch cushion and then, I won’t say it, but I’ll be thinking it: “I told you so.”
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Oh, and in other news, I almost lost this man to the wild Alaskan sea for four months but at the very last minute he came back to me and now every day from here on out is a gift. That’s all.
the chosen season
Independence Day … bah! I don’t buy into the “America’s Birthday” thing but I admit there’s something to the fourth of July, because I always look forward to it a little bit. I think because it’s a sort of celebration of summer. For one weekend everyone’s just unabashedly sun burnt and half drunk, with watermelon juice dripping down the fronts of their shirts, and it’s a beautiful thing. With that said, here are my ten favorite things about summer, in no particular order:
Thunderstorms
June peaches
Clear water swimming holes
Fresh guacamole
Backyard mini-ramps
Gardens, both the vegetable and flower variety
Steamy nights refreshed by cool golden mornings
Meals eaten outside on the deck
Tecate, with lime
Lying very still in front of the fan because it’s too hot to do anything else
Camping?
When I think of camping, I mostly think of quiet. Maybe the water lapping the lake's edge. maybe the roar of the river. I mean nature has noises but they're not really noisy, you know? The thing is, I shouldn't think like that, since camping is actually just the act of sleeping out of doors—or not even that, because campgrounds are packed with RVs hooked up to Direct TV, and I'm sure the owners told their families they were going camping before they left. What I'm trying to say is that we wanted to go sleep under the stars last week and instead learned about No Trespassing signs and "Full" campgrounds, where there actually was one tent spot left, near the dumpster, and it cost $27.50 for the night.
After much hardship and confusion, we set up camp just before dark down a long dirt road deep into the woods. We got the fire going and stabbed some dogs. And we were "camping." My favorite part was when I climbed out of the tent in the middle of the night to pee and holy shit, the sky was a vault of stars up there and the trees an inky black, the fire was still glowing a little bit, and there wasn't a single damn sound all around.
Kittens—they breaks a damn heart ...