The Saab broke down in Weed — yes, Weed, and Virginia and I sort of paced on the side of the road thinking, will he look in the rearview and notice we’re gone? Will this man drive all the way to Oregon? No bars on the little cell of a bitch. We weren’t scared, women like the two of us? That would not scare us. We’d have been excellent pioneers. Like Becky Boone.
But he did notice, because he’s that kind of guy, and within 20 minutes here came the U-Haul on the freeway coming our direction. Then we all had to cram in the weird front space of the U-Haul and pretend we didn’t have an infant stashed between the seats by the gearshift and cigarettes. Virginia and I sharing the passenger seat, our butts making sweat marks on the strange Burbury. We abandoned the Saab on the side of the road. Marking our exit like a scar.
When we got to Oregon Miles and I took a bath at a Holiday Inn. He lay against me, his back against my tits and stomach, his little monkey face smiling in between spit bubbles, and his arms and legs floating easily. I have a picture of us like that. My tits are as big as a human head, so it looks a little like a threeheaded creature for a second, until you see his facial features. Then I picked his little bucket of baby weight up and turned him around so we were face to face, and he raspberried me a good one, and smiled, and farted, and I laughed my ass off and held him close.
With his head against my heart I suddenly felt his lifeforce — not the lifeforce of babies-a lifeforce bigger than a night sky. It was almost like thunder coming through us, just like the night I went into labor during a thunder storm. It was the exact opposite of the heart implosion I felt the day my daughter was born and died. The two of us in the water, thunderhearted.
At some point that night I walked out onto our little Holiday Inn balcony and Virginia was smoking a cigarette on hers. I looked over at her. My god. This person I had watched go from young woman to warrior beauty. It took my breath away. I never told her this, but what I thought … daughter. I almost couldn’t breathe with the wonder.
“Those are death sticks, you know,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I love you, you know.”
“Yeah. I do. Me too.” Her eyes filling with tears across the distance.
We were driving to a house Andy had found and rented on the internet. Such a risky move — finding the next chapter of your life in cyberspace. But so gloriously risky. Because this was a hacker. A guy who had cybersquatted Bill Gates. When he was at the computer, whole geographies emerged you’d never thought of.
The house looked filled with light and space when I looked at the internet photos. I knew the value of light and space. And there were trees in the photos. Everywhere. The house was inside something called the Bull Run Wilderness near Sandy, Oregon. When I asked Andy “Why this house? Is it near my job?”
He said, “No, it’s not near your job. But it is sanctuary.” At the time, I didn’t know exactly what he meant. But something in my skin trusted him.
The road to the house off of I-84 wound around forests and snuck alongside the Sandy River. I saw a few people riding the river on inner tubes. I saw fly fishermen. Kayakers. I saw the land rise and fall like it does in Oregon wilderness. Alders. Oaks. Maples. Douglas Firs. Everything it seemed, evergreen. I thought briefly of my father — how he loved the Northwest. I thought how maybe that feeling he had was something yet good between us. Then the word father left altogether, since it was nothing about my future. Up we drove. When we arrived at the house I began crying. Gut wrenching crying. A crying that must have taken years, pulled up from the depths.
The house was made from two octagonals. The first octagonal had the main room and wooden stairs made by a master carpenter leading up to a sleeping loft. The sleeping loft had 360 degree windows so that if you were, say, in bed, all you saw was trees. The second octagonal had a kitchen with cabinets you’d pay a fortune for in the city — the deep cherry and blond wood like inside trees.
Outside the house there was nothing but forest. The Bull Run Wilderness hid elk and deer and bobcat. Wild pheasants and coyote and eagles and great blue herons. A freshwater creek trickled at the base of our property — water that ran for miles. To the side of the house, a giant warehouse loomed that the owner had been using as a woodworking studio. The owner made wooden marimbas as beautiful as music sounds. He showed them to us. They smelled like life. The owner had built the house. Crafted the woodwork with the passion of an artist. Inside the warehouse was an enormous woodstove. Inside the warehouse I felt something stirring in me. Something about a self. Something about the freedom to make. The feeling felt older than me. Inside the house, I felt safety. All those trees protecting us. A river curling around us. Something up until that point in my life I’d only felt in water.
When Andy and I and Virginia and Miles sat down in front of the house, butterflies and dragonflies and a hummingbird accompanied our distance. As if to say, you are home.
We were 25 minutes from the city I would work in. From people. We were 45 minutes from Portland. Culture and the socius. Virginia walked off a ways to have a cigarette. Then it was just me, Andy, and Miles. I said, “Andy, I can’t believe how beautiful it is here. It takes my breath away.” I turned away from him. I felt small. Maybe like a kid. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me,” he said, coming up behind me with Miles on his shoulder like a little second man. “It’s what’s next.” Andy has a weird way of making the impossible sound ordinary.
Our first days that ran into nights than ran back into days in that house in the forest were like what I understand Shakespeare to mean by the green world. Seriously. You know, where the action of a play starts out in normal world and then goes into green world where a magical metamorphosis takes place. Think A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I always wanted to wear that donkey head thing or run around naked in the woods. Actually, Northrup Frye came up with the phrase. Sorry. It’s the goddamn academic in me.
But my life with Andy and Miles in the green world really did magically change everything for me. For example. Christmas? At Christmastime we didn’t trudge up any godforsaken mountain hill in the shoulder high snow to get a goddamn tree. No one yelled their head off. No one cried their eyes out. We simply went to a tree lot and bought the biggest fucking Christmas tree they had, like a 12-footer, strapped it to the car, drove it to our sanctuary, and peed our pants with joy — the open space of the octagons filling with the smell of Douglas fir and glee.
And there was no architect’s office with smoke and anger pouring out late into the night while children hid in their bedrooms scared to sleep or dream. Miles slept in a bed 10 feet away from two giant writing desks Andy and I pushed together. So while the parents were writing, the child was sleeping, and art kept us well and space kept us well and trees watched over us so dreams could get born.
There was no mother you couldn’t find in the house because she was out selling real estate, or locked in the bathroom with a bottle.
I used to watch Miles fall asleep from drinking boob milk late into the night. I’m guessing all mothers do this. But I bet not all mothers were thinking of Shakespearean sentence structures when they watched their babies drunkenly drift into sleep. I know, watching your boy suck tit doesn’t seem very Shakespearian on the face of it. But when I watched Miles go from mother’s milk to burp to deep and frothy dream, his body heavy in my lap, the blue-black of night resting on us, I thought of Shakespearean chiasmus. A chiasmus in language is a crisscross structure. A doubling back sentence. A doubling of meaning. My favorite is “love’s fire heats water, water cools not love.”