Time, with the Canyon

            I’ve always lived on the edge of the world.

            I mean that I’ve always lived near the ocean: which for many people, for many millennia, was the boundary of the knowable world.  California, especially, was insulated: cupped between what we now call the Pacific, and what we now call the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

I’ve been thinking, lately, of a trip I took a few years ago, when Greg and I left our accustomed haunts on the western shoreline, heading east.  Heading east, into the great American deserts—where I drove faster and faster, because the speed limit was 75 and there were no other cars on the road.

            We started from Greg’s Orange County, taking a two-lane road through lifeless gravel-dunes.  And it wasn’t until now, years later, that I wondered if that was the Mojave Desert.

I mention it because so much of this post is about names.  “Mojave”, you see, was the name of the first (and practically only) eye-shadow I ever bought.  The eye shadow was a coppery bronze color.  The Mojave Desert (for so it was) was dry brown, with a suggestion of gray--the color of rotting telephone poles.  When Greg and I finally crossed into Arizona, how turquoise the Colorado River seemed: it was the only color of the rainbow I’d seen in the landscape for hours. 

The Arizona desert was much redder than the Mojave, craggier and alien and vast.  Most towns in the desert were ghost towns; we blew through them more quickly than we could say their names.  Chiriaco Summit.  Vidal.  Shinarump Drive (which kept making me think of a large lady rubbing a pink feather boa across her rear end…). 

As the desert widened around us, the Christian radio stations spread through the FM, until we were faced with a choice between sermons, mariachis, and one fuzzy classic rock station on which, through the brambles of static, occasionally emerged the haunting chords of an electric guitar.  It seemed to fit our surroundings—and we listened to it until we entered the mountains again.             

Just before Phoenix, we left Interstate 40 to head north again on Route 66, passing the town of Tusayan, which we later learned means “mountain lying down”. 

            In typical fashion, our first view of the canyon was utterly unintentional: we’d reached a cluster of cabins, but the GPS was going haywire trying to locate our specific lodge.  Bickering and stressed, I pulled the car uphill into a parking lot to turn around…and there it was, just beyond the Hondas and Chevrolets.  A slice out of the Earth, glowing in layers of orange, yellow, and red.  Immense.  Terrifying.  Intoxicatingly beautiful.

            “Whoa,” I said.

            Greg laughed.  “Yep.  That’s pretty grand.”

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The Hopi name for the Grand Canyon is “Ongtupqa.” 

            Greg’s favorite part was the snow.  A child of the Southern California urban deserts, he’d been waiting his whole life for the chance to interact with snow.

It was February, and the digger pine forests of the South Rim were heaped with the stuff.  There we were, on the lip of the wondrous abyss, and Greg had eyes only for the mounds of white powder.  He left the trail, giddy, sinking up to his thighs.  A young boy behind us wailed, “I want to go in the snow!” and his mother declared, glaring, “It’s not allowed!”

            Once we actually managed to find our lodge (and Greg had finished kicking the snowdrifts outside it), we asked a woman at the information desk for itinerary advice, given the limited duration of our stay.  She stared at us over the top of her glasses.  “It takes time to bond with the canyon.”

            “Well, tomorrow we’re driving to—”

            “Las Vegas?”  She smiled knowingly.  We managed, I think, to give her the impression of being squirrelly, one-dimensional kids.  The next day, I temporarily dislocated my right kneecap by trying to check the back of my jeans for mud.  Because Greg and I are, on occasion, a couple of squirrelly, one-dimensional kids, we watched Tool Academy on TV while the swelling went down.

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One of the most interesting structures on the South Rim was the Hopi House, in which Greg read Death in the Grand Canyon while I perused the feathered bracelets.  It had low, curving adobe and sandstone architecture—doors that even a short woman like me had to stoop to enter—a careful use of shadows and thick walls…but it was not built by the Hopi.

            It was designed by Mary Jane Colter, and has been open since 1910 as a concession stand of Indigenous American crafts. 

Native Americans inhabited the Grand Canyon, and its rims, for thousands of years.  The Pueblo people considered it a sacred site, and made pilgrimages to it, leaving some of their intricate cliff dwellings behind. 

We don’t know any of their names. 

We do know the name of the first European who visited the canyon: Garcia López de Cárdenas, a Spaniard, in 1540.  I haven’t read any account he wrote of the “discovery”.  I’m afraid that, whatever awe he might have felt on viewing Ongtupqa, his record would have been a narrative of conquest, rather than respect.

It would be wonderful to read an Ancient Pueblo woman’s account of Arizona.  But the Pueblo people didn’t write.  They took their history with them.

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To a person who thinks in terms of oceans and mountains, in terms (in other words) of California, a canyon is…well, new ideological territory.  A new world to stare into, gaping across.

            We could’ve ridden mules into the canyon—but we didn’t have the time. 

Our bus driver joked, “There’s never been a tour bus that went over the edge.  You guys ready to be the first?”—but he didn’t drive in. 

In traveling, as in affairs of love, the things you don’t do can take on a kind of rhythm of their own.  Greg and I only got to stare at the canyon.  The closest we came to entering was when he leaned over the edge on his stomach, taking a video that would later terrify his parents.  Even then, we couldn’t see the thin, blue river that we knew must be at the bottom.

I was only near the Grand Canyon for a day and a half—and then it was west to Las Vegas, driving too quickly, and on with the radio again.  Searching for that lonely electric guitar once more.

Spastic Fantastic

            This is a moseying blog post.  It keeps slipping away from its subject, hopping sideways, categorically refusing to tread a linear path.  My ostensible topic today is the difference between science fiction and fantasy.  I write them both—as well as poetry, straight-up literature and, as you can see, a screwball kind of memoir. 

I was thinking I’d start with an objective distinction: “Science fiction is such and such, whereas and thereat fantasy can only be this and that.”  Ha!  There’s a reason the two genres are stocked on the same shelves in most bookstores.  A number of great stories could easily be classified as both.

There are familiar tropes, of course: for fantasy, dragons and wizards and incognito heirs to the throne.  The most pop culture kind of fantasy (which is by no means, thank goodness, the only kind of fantasy) takes place in a faux-medieval society where magic operates as a kind of physics + chemistry + religion.  For science fiction, by contrast, the staples are aliens and galactic federations and time traveling cowboys.   

I’m tempted to say that science fiction is a more heady genre: slower and more speculative, bent on framing questions about human existence.  On the other hand, I’ve read plenty of speedy SF, and plenty of sedate fantasy to which questions of human existence are quite at home.   

I’m beginning, in fact, to despair of ever finding a system of classification.  Where’s Linnaeus when you need him?  I might as well talk of other things—of shoes and ships and ceiling wax and cabbages and rings of power and Grendel’s mother and “Use the Force, Luke!”…

Yikes.  What have I gotten myself into?

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Here’s something I can latch onto: I think I got a sizable chunk of my imagination from Jim Henson.

Thank goodness for all the supremely fantastic, supremely dark children’s movies of the eighties.  Thank goodness for Mrs. Brisby using a magic ruby to drag the sinking house with her trapped children out of the mud.  Thank goodness for that wine-drinking, riddle-clacking skeleton head in The Last Unicorn.  Thank goodness for the broken, dystopic Yellow Brick Road in Return to Oz (how cool was that!).  Thank goodness for the Bog of Eternal Stench, and David Bowie’s tight white pants.

            And thank goodness for my parents, who watched all those movies with me.

            It was a rich stew, to be sure.  A rich stew full of strange lumps, some delicious, some tasting of garlic and hard taffy and magic shoes.

            Fantasy, for me, is the stuff of dreams.  Death.  Unexpected love.  Existential decisions. 

Magic shoes.

            A few years ago, in fact, I did have a dream about magic shoes; I found them in Costco.  They were slippery and elfish, with silk skins, rather (now that I think about it) like the ballet slippers I wore as a child.  The special power of these shoes was that, whatever color they were currently painted, the wearer could find a refrigerator of matching color and use it as a portal to other worlds.

            Since I then found myself being chased by a pack of Velociraptors (thanks for that, Jurassic Park), it was quite lucky that Costco was, at that moment, having a blowout sale on refrigerators.  There were the usual black, white, and silver ones—which were utterly useless, since my shoes were currently pink.  Craning my head, I noticed a few more refrigerators on the second shelf.  I hopped onto a forklift and shimmied up to its roof.

            Having climbed onto the thin ledge of the higher shelf, I spotted what I was looking for: a refrigerator as pink as Elvis’s mother’s Cadillac.  I swung the door open and dove through. 

            Fittingly, the place I ended up was a very cold prison cell.  There was one window, which overlooked a square where a bride was about to get married.  The only other occupant of the cell was a mottled-brown falcon, who introduced himself as the Viscount of Silence.  

The Viscount of Silence was my loyal, enigmatic, and taciturn companion for the rest of my adventures, which would have been much longer if a crow outside my bedroom hadn’t woken me up, trying to gobble the cat food.

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            All right, then.  After that notable interlude, returning to the question at hand…

In reality, I don’t consider as many of my pieces SF as an average reader might.  To be counted in the genre, I require that the story integrates, in some manner, science.  An achievement of science, a conjecture of science, or the facts about science itself.  Science fiction, as I define it, is about a peculiarly rational process of inquiry, and its repercussions.

            Fantasy, on the other hand, doesn’t have to be so analytical.  Princess Umba, in her magical world, could meet her own double without ever questioning how this came about (though she might want to).  Fantasy, as I write it, is about myths, dreams, poetic language.  Uncertainties. 

Jokes.

My fantasy stories tend to move in circles, like this blog post, pivoting on an emotional reality rather than a tangible fact.  They tend to be the kind of stories that teach the reader to think in a different way: to imagine other perspectives and realities, to leap beyond the pale...

            For anyone who wants to write fantasy, I say: go for it.  You may end up thinking in extended metaphor, or carrying a falcon named the Viscount of Silence on your shoulder…but there are worse fates.

You may even look up one day and realize, with a great swoop of clarity, “Damn!  I’ve been writing the wrong thing all along!”  I’ve come to that conclusion, once or twice.

And then I smiled to myself, and kept going.

The Orangest Detective Around

I found two poems this week:

1) The original message, on a bathroom mirror in the UC Irvine library, was (or so I’ve extrapolated), “Thefts happen.  Please be aware of your personal belongings.”  Someone had chipped it to read:

            hefts happe

            Please     ware         person     longings.

2) From Wikipedia:

            Of the seven continents, only Antarctica is unable to produce pumpkins.

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It was just last week that I told Greg, in my usual impetuous manner, “I want to write something about pumpkins!”

            At the time, I was imagining it would be a story.  Fiction.  I already have one (currently being serviced for faulty pacing) where a woman on an alien moon escapes her colony by climbing a native vine into the unknown lands in the clouds.  I was thinking I could work pumpkins into that—until I realized it was an awful idea. 

This is much better.

The theme of pumpkins was suggested to me, not by a single source, but by a gradually accumulating conspiracy of sources.  I’ve not only been offered pumpkin pie, lately: oh no.  I’ve tasted pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin bagels, and pumpkin ice cream.  I’ve balanced a pumpkin on my head (see last post), and avoided the sad smashed remains of one in the street.  I was in Santa Barbara two weekends ago—sweet alma mater—for Halloween festivities, which didn’t just consist of gallivanting down the street in disguise.  No, there was also a pumpkin carving contest.

Like any true artist, Greg designs his Jack o’ lanterns to be a conversation between content and medium.  This means, of course, that (every year) he picks the sickest, most gnarly-looking pumpkin in the pumpkin patch, and carves it into a vomiting face.  The vomit is made of the pumpkin’s own seeds.  There’s something macabre about that.

And Greg always wins.

This year, I came in second: I decided to do a tribute to Humphrey Bogart.

Humphrey Pumpkin turned out quite well.  Hat tilted rakishly to the side, he looked up at me and said, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

Well, not really.  But he definitely had that stoic Bogart grimace, as if he were, at that very moment, having to choose between love and virtue.

I would have offered to help with the choice—if his lips weren’t pressed into such a thin line.

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Pumpkin: genus Cucurbita.  The word originates from the Greek pepon, which the French adapted to “pompon”, and the British to “pumpion”.  The American colonists changed it to “pumpkin”, and I for one want to say thank you, pilgrims, for giving us one of the cutest words in Webster’s diction.

As orange as a smoggy sunset, grooved and plump, pumpkins strike some kind of chord in my imagination.  They make me think of heedless, headless horsemen galloping through dark autumn nights.

Then there’s Peter: Peter Pumpkin Eater, who had a wife but couldn’t keep her. 

Isn’t that one of the eeriest sentences in all the nursery rhyme worlds?  At least with old women living in shoes, and blackbirds baked in a pie, you have a concrete image of what’s going on.  Mr. Pumpkin Eater (not to be confused with his cousin, Peter Piper who ate a peck of pickles) has a story that’s evocative, yet unspecific.  I am led to ask, why couldn’t he keep his wife?  Was she just jonesing for Old King Cole? 

Maybe Mr. Pumpkin Eater made his wife live in a pumpkin.  It’s possible: the largest pumpkin ever recorded was 1,810 pounds.  But heck, who wants to reside in a vegetable, even if it’s as big as a timeshare?  The walls would rot, and all your underwear would smell like cold soup…

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I apologize for writing about the spirit of Halloween (which, by the way, is an excellent name for a boat) at about the time I should be chanting “Remember, remember the fifth of November” and running around town in a Guy Fawkes mask.

I’m a late bloomer, in the pumpkin sphere: I’m just coming into an appreciation of them now, in my mid-twenties.  My family didn’t celebrate holidays for much of my childhood, and, even after that, we never made a big fuss over Halloween—so I hadn’t carved a single Jack o’ lantern until three years ago.

Last year, I got so mad at the pumpkin I was carving that I hurled it into the trash.

            I’m just not very good at Halloween.  Like Ebenezer Scrooge with Yuletide, I’ve never really understood the holiday—candy?  Zombies?  The existential choice between tricks and treats? 

Humbug!

Ebenezer was visited by three ghosts.  Logically, if ghosts come on Christmas, they wouldn’t appear on All Hallow’s Eve—they’d be too dang appropriate to make an impact.  What will I be visited by, then?  Three elves?  Three wise men?  Three kings?

There’s a fair chance I was visited by a ghost last Halloween, as a matter of fact.  I slept on my friends’ futon, and, every night at one o’clock, I heard the sound of a rolling suitcase on the sidewalk outside.  Back and forth, back and forth it rolled, the wheels tripping every few seconds on the division between squares. 

This wouldn’t be nearly so strange if my friends’ house wasn’t inside a gated community, which, during the course of Halloween weekend, was regularly patrolled by security guards.

I dubbed it the Rolly-Bag Ghost, and I’m waiting for it to strike again.

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Though the university is called UC Santa Barbara, most students live not in the larger city, but in the much smaller Isla Vista, a town adjacent to campus.  It’s a quirky place in the calmest of times—rather like a post-apocalyptic world where everyone over twenty five has disappeared, and giddy groups of drunks wander between impersonal gatherings all evening.  During Halloween time, Isla Vista’s natural characteristics are, let’s say, enhanced…

It’s a difficult scene to capture in a few decisive strokes.  Imagine a sea of costumes, ranging the gamut from the elaborate to the half-assed (I mean that literally).  Imagine a “sexy Elmo” being escorted by a man with nothing on but a carefully positioned box of Cap’n Crunch. 

Imagine all this nonsense crowded into one street: Del Playa Drive, the avenue by the sea.

Giant neon arches should be put on either end of Del Playa, flashing the words “Liminal Zone” to anyone who walks underneath.  A liminal zone is a place where uncharacteristic behavior is the norm.  I’ve had this theory for a while that cultures which repress the most (rights, diversity, desires) are usually the ones that produce the best ghost stories.  Very little is repressed in an Isla Vista Halloween, except, of course, common courtesy. 

When you’re wearing nothing but your person longings, etiquette lessons take backstage.

There is, however, a thorn in this lion’s paw: Imagine a battalion of cops wending through the costumes, some on horseback—reminding us that, however free we may think we are, this is more of an authoritarian state than ever.

But Humphrey Pumpkin wouldn’t be intimidated by that—so neither will I.

Canadian Times

Vancouver.  The rain brings out the gray in the roofs of houses.  Every house looks shabbier in the rain—more like a ship, lit against foul weather and riding the swelling hills.

            I’ve been to Vancouver four times: once for my brother’s wedding, twice for Christmas, and once (last week, in fact) to babysit my nephew.  Seeing as he’s about ten months old and becoming increasingly active, I kept my energy up primarily through frequent doses of espresso.  There was one night, however, where my brother and I relieved our stress by dancing to German electronic music from the 70s.  The band was called Kraftwerk, and the lyrics ranged the gamut from, “Fun fun fun on the Autobahn,” to, “We are showroom dummies,” to a wistful and lovelorn, “Computer…”

For most of the week, I could only snatch four-minute windows during the day to write anything.  On top of that, I received at least one short story rejection letter every single day of that trip, up until the day I left.  It is at these moments in life (when you feel sucker-punched by the universe) that it’s particularly wonderful to be surrounded by people who will jig with you to dorky German electronica, or sit in a circle with objects balanced on their heads (stuffed alligators, cookie tins, pumpkins) just to make the baby chuckle.

I also relieved my feelings of frustration by drumming on the toilet seat and singing “Hope that something better comes along” from The Muppet Movie.  I’ve got bruises under both my knees from crawling on the tiles.

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Vancouver: mountains disappearing, gradient by gradient, into the fog.  The nearest were coal black, the farthest only ghostly gray outlines. 

Perched between towering coastal mountains and the Pacific ocean, Vancouver might be my favorite city—and I say this despite the fact that I’ve only visited it in the wintertime, a season, undeniably, of heavy rain.

I’ve only read two books set in Vancouver.  In one of them, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling, British Columbia is the last area in North America where people are allowed to choose their own religion.  She says it’s because everyone is too exhausted, after fighting the rain, to care about enforcing dogma.

The other book I’ve read (or, more accurately, trilogy) that’s set in Vancouver is Tanya Huff’s Smoke series, which tells the story of a vampire detective whose sidekick works at a TV show about a vampire detective.  But that’s another story.

The Vancouver rain falls on conifer forests and coffee shops with “Go Canada!” displayed above their doors.  It falls on the dark skyscrapers.  It falls on a seemingly endless variety of Indian, Thai, and sushi restaurants.  It falls on the store Schlockbuster, which only rents out awful movies, and on a foot-ware chain called The House of Clogs.  It falls on the King George Highway.  It falls on the Cash Machines (ATMs, to us in the States), The Future Shop (a Canadian version of Radio Shack), and Stanley Park (an area of forest near the downtown where there reputedly resides a hobo named Stanley Park).  The rain falls on the Vancouver Art Museum, where I once saw a piece of framed toast.  It pummels down on the tiny island community (named, appropriately, Snug Cove) where my brother got married, and whose harbor is more littered with goose turds than any other place I’ve walked.

            I’ve always loved rain.  Storms are a way that nature invades even the most encapsulated worlds.  At one point in my visit, Brett explained to me that one of the reason he prefers Canada over the U.S. is that, in the snowy North Woods, there isn’t nearly as much pressure on the environment as in California.  That’s certainly true: I once gallivanted through a pine forest in one of the mountains above Vancouver.  Dusk gleamed red through the trees, and eerie white hillocks coated the ground.  No two snowflakes fell in the same direction: they flurried like gnats.

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            I left Vancouver last Thursday, via bus to the Seattle Airport (in order to avoid the inflated prices of an international flight).  Just above the U.S. border, a group of Korean tourists loaded themselves in; unfortunately, these people did not speak English or French, and didn’t understand that they were supposed to declare any perishable items they were bringing into the country.  “Food?” one woman repeated blankly at the customs official who was searching her bag.  This group had, between them, over ten suitcases—and food (mostly bread products) was squirreled away in various parts of each. 

            The upshot of that incident was that my bus was an hour late crossing the border.  On top of that, Seattle traffic was a nightmare—and the “Quick Shuttle” (Misnomer Alert!) didn’t arrive at the airport until five minutes after my plane left.

            Luckily, I made it onto another flight: the last one to Orange County that night.  This is all to explain why last week was bereft a blog post, for which I sincerely apologize.  When I finally dragged myself into anything resembling home, Thursday night, I felt utterly and honorably, defeated.

            In fact, being honorably defeated is the thread that weaves my whole week in Vancouver together.  Once, maneuvering my nephew’s stroller around a corner of the wet sidewalk, I was conscious of this: of feeling a piquant mixture of failure and triumph, success and defeat.  A pile of rejection letters is certainly a gloomy vision—but it is also evidence that I’m deeply enmeshed in the writing world, that I am (to be blunt) doing what I set out to do. 

            Cheers to that.