Kaleidoscope to the Road

And its playlist

I think it was Idaho, the first time I learned even shallow water can be precarious.

The lesson took my breath (and nearly swept my feet out from under me). But it also gave rise to an urge that swelled through me; even as I knew I should turn back, even as I did turn back, a part of me longed to measure my strength and agility against that stunning current.

A friend of my parents is there in that white light of sparkling river and bleached pebbles and endless sky. He’s on double duty: Fly-fishing. Watching us kids. Upstream aways, he’s all rubber waders, camel-colored overalls that hang loose on his long, thin frame, feathery flies glinting from his breast pockets. At this time, our two families’ lives are still strands that cross and flow and part to cross again, so he’s like a second dad.

Is it odd I have this memory of him seeing me? I don’t mean the shape of the skinny eldest girl child teetering, arms stretched akimbo, pressing knee-deep, though he did see that. I mean the fire licking my belly, urging me to see what I could see, what I could do. Is it odder still I think feeling seen like that made it easier to turn back?

It must have been a year or so on—it feels a little closer—that time I scrambled up sandstone and iron, all grace and stealth in my own mind.

I wonder now if my older cousin, a climber, knew I was tailing him, if the presence of his kid cousin just “out of sight” behind him was, for him, the price of a moment’s solace apart from the buzzing hive of a family gathering.

The piney breeze is sweet against my cheek, flushed with heat and exertion. My cousin, the climber, moves above me in silhouette. He pops into sight, all lanky, effortless movement; I make note of where he puts his feet and, when needed, his hands. He leaps from one boulder to the next; I ignore the flutter in my stomach.

He disappears behind a rock formation. I tuck out from shadow or juniper shrub, mimic what I saw of his ascent. And like that, we two, at once apart and connected, wind our way up into sky and sun.  

On our side of that rushing river lay a whole forest world.

There, a criss-cross maze of moss-covered fallen logs to run atop or crawl through or dig beetles from, rock outcroppings to scramble, groves for stretching in dappled light. Of my siblings and my parents’ friends’ kids, I was the oldest and the only girl among the “big kids”— me and four boys within a year or two behind me.

We five sail, my waterfall ponytail leading the way.

Here, the reel is warped, only bits of the film strip still containing the tiny crystals that reflect light as the shutter blade passes between frames. There’s the oldest of the boys showing us his pocket knife, handing it to me like a secret, both of us knowing I’ll be the only one to palm the handle, to open and close the blade with a flick of my thumb before passing it back with equal reverence. The screen ripples. The reel turns. We’re darting; I’m scanning for a place to hide.

A blip and now I’ve pulled myself up branches to the top of a fallen tree so massive I could stand inside its hollow parts. I edge to a spot where it meets another tree, this one still standing. Slipping into a groove the two have formed to accommodate each other, I disappear.

Or is it that, for a nanosecond, I become one with that sense we all have but don’t acknowledge that dogs and bears and birds and two trees holding a girl child in their nook know like an intimate? I see it all, the mini tent village across the forest—fire pit with still smoldering embers, coolers and chips and sliced melons and a pile of fish heads and bones and charred tinfoil on tables, littles playing nearby, babes on breasts. In the opposite direction, the jewel of a river beckons, its far shore unexplored.

Other images are further blurred, more like patterns reflected in mirrors facing each other at the end of a long tube.

A corn yellow field sails outside my window. My hand, a plane, glides atop it, as if its undulations, too, are pulled by drag force.

As the oldest, I surely claimed the prime spot on these summer road trips, window seat, legroom less cramped with sleeping bags and daypacks, maybe a pile of beach towels as barrier between me and my seat mate. But no specific seat appears in this image. No car. No destination. Just yellow waves, blue sky, and a small hand.

And then, the sudden break in the monotony—the blur of a silver trailer alone in the middle of nowhere. It fills my head with lightning. Strike! You can do that?! Strike! Now lit up, the outline of a man on a rocking chair, an older me in a sundress and locks to my hips, and a fat toddler flat-footing through flaxen fields.   

Turn of the cylinder.

A pewter island floating in turquoise. Gliding, stroke by stroke. The surprise, again and again, of my inability to close the gap.

Turn. 

Slipping into velvet under moonlight. The shock of water closing over my head. The quickening of my breath, not from cold but from the murkiness that holds me, how I can feel my legs sliding through it to keep me in place but see nothing. Here, I’m a bit older. I’m learning, I think, to navigate by starlight, by which I mean gut, by which I mean heart.

Nothing is left of the reel that contains the majority of that winding ascent by two.

Up went unwitting guide and shadow, no record to prove it. Nor can the descent be retraced.

Only the sigh of summiting remains, the view from atop the blush-colored ridge. 

I see everything. The swirl of family like ants below. Distant cliffs, layers of copper and cream and rust red, filling the landscape like abundance personified. The snake of a road we came in on. Turning, I see a valley that reaches for forever, dotted with monoliths and buttes, their shadows like secrets to discover.

And somewhere out there, I must see, don’t you think, an eye peering back through a cylinder from a desk in the belly of a van called Vivian. Sifting through reflections of a ruby-colored van, of empty silver roads like lace, of alien-blue ice fields and lime-purple light collisions dancing to the pull of Earth’s poles, of marmalade skies and saguaro, of an orange ball of fire dropping into ocean with a flash of green, of voice flowing into desert and campfire, songs like wine, of rivers forged.

And before all that, there is the image of a different kind of road, long and lonely.

There is so much precarity these days.

It takes my breath away.

So much to save.

I think of the stunning swiftness of the rage threatening to topple us.

I think of all the ways we’re connected, those connections seen or unseen, the way we guide or shadow each other, aware or not, are guided or shadowed, aware or not, how powerful tiny moments of seeing the shapes of each other’s deepest yearnings in just the right moments can be. How all these things are bridges. The ways I’ve stopped being a bridge.

I can’t think of an ending. I think that’s a good thing.

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Photo/video captions: 1. Overexposed sunset somewhere near Escalante, Utah, USA. 2. Rain on Vivian the van’s roof as heard through her roof fan north of Seattle, Washington, USA. 3. Overexposed shadow in a wash and Ruby the van in the background, south of Tucson, Arizona, USA. PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR.

The playlist for those who don’t have Spotify:

• “See Fernando,” Jenny Lewis

• “Folding Chair,” Regina Spektor

• “Long Way Home,” Tom Waits

• “Evolve,” Ani DiFranco

• “Ford Econoline,” Nanci Griffith

• “Long Lonely Road,” Valerie June

Thank you! Your likes and shares and restacks make me giddy. You’re like a kaleidoscope of wonder—bright, colorful, reflective— like a film strip covered in tiny crystals, holders of precious memories and story, like a bridge.

Thank you to new paid subscribers. Your support helps keep this desk rolling.

Thank you however you subscribe. Your reading and listening give my words a home.

A quick note for anyone paying attention (probably just me): I’m a week behind on my editorial calendar, thanks to someone (ahem, Vivian). “Sharks’ Mouths” will start next week.

For the comments, Do you, like me, feel a bit nostalgic for 35 mm reels and projectionists, when you think of them being nearly replaced by digital projections? What, for you, is summer (or winter, I’m looking at you, southern hemispherians)—be it routine, tradition, feeling, activity? What songs are laced into that summer thing you do?

Which brings me to ⬇️

For the ♥️ of Summer!

You may have already seen that Caravan Writers Collective is hosting our second community writing project. Check out fab the prompt by video!

We’d love to hear about your summertime (wintertime if that suits you better this time of year) rituals, tradition, memories, and the music those things bring to you. As with all prompts, let it serve as a guide to wherever paths it may lead.

Don’t miss the other Caravan instructors’ responses to the prompt! We have Matt Smythe’s wonderful meditative reflection on mowing and the lines of our lives, neat and tidy or otherwise, over at Glorious Mayhem. At Going Solo at the End of the World,

Marya Hornbacher

waxes poetic on sundresses and extra rooms, furniture and mysteriously missing china, and the importance of knowing the names of trees and birds. On deck next, the ever poetic Paul Corman-Roberts, who posts over at The Chapbook Whisperer.

If you’re inspired and want to join in, we’d be delighted. Write it. Post it. Tag us. We’ll send an “anthology” post guiding you to all the playlists and summer traditions soon.

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And last but not least, I wanted to show you a thing I made.

And also tell you there’re still spots left in “Why Not This?” Play Hard, Create Hard! A few of you will be there! Yay!!! Register to join us.

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