anti:freeze

This Christmas, Wendy sent me a strange, wonderful book inspired by two artists' journey through the Balkans on the eve of World War II. It's called The Road is Wider than Long: An Image Diary from the Balkans July - August 1938 by Roland Penrose (created for travel partner and muse Lee Miller), and it is part of a Surrealist poetry series.

Two pages seemed torn from this week's news:

I have tried to write about the tsunami and failed. So for now, I will let this poet speak, his 67-year-old words more resonant than anything I could write now.

Thank you, Wendy.

All this week, I have been working on a freelance writing project, leaving little time for my own work. So I scribbled down notes whenever I could - ideas for essays, images that moved me, memories, and clips from dreams. Here are some of those notes ...

Iowa, 1993. The Mississippi River seeped over its banks for 144 straight days, licking towns and cities, swallowing up chunks of earth. Rains and floodwaters uncovered the secrets of the Devonian Sea Floor. It rained and rained, and we began to lose faith it would ever stop. It was my last summer in Cedar Rapids, before moving to Iowa City for college.

That summer, I worked far across town, at the engraving counter inside Westdale Mall. I cut keys, engraved rings and cigarette lighters, and watched the relentless rain through glass double-doors. Someday, I knew a flash flood would separate me from home, that I would be trapped at the mall overnight - or worse. And I was right.

One night, my mother called in the middle of my shift. "Work schedule be damned," she said. "I am coming to pick you up."

Flash floods were projected throughout the night, and she wanted me home, safe. The mall was empty; no customers had visited my counter in over three hours - not since the sky swelled with clouds blacker than we had seen all summer. Flash floods could lift a car from the concrete and carry it away, smashing it into buildings and debris, drowning the passengers. Even worse were the sinkholes. Suddenly, the roads had mouths, gaping open wide, hungry for human sacrifices. Shopping simply was not worth the risk to life and limb. Neither was my minimum-wage job.

I called my manager and told her I had to leave.

She sighed. "No," she said. "What if someone needs a key cut tonight?"

Even as she spoke, I closed the register, totaled my sales, and grabbed my keys. I walked out and never looked back. Who the hell needs a key cut in the middle of a natural disaster? Who the hell needs a personalized cigarette ilghter?

My mother arrived with Aunt Joann, honking the car horn in a panic. The roads to Hiawatha had already been choked, so we drove to Aunt Joann's apartment downtown. Halfway there, the flood waters swirled around us, rising fast in an abandoned intersection. The car engine sputtered and stopped. We were trapped. Debris was sure to slam hard against the doors, denting metal and shattering glass. Our tires would lift from the ground - and then what?

"Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done ..." Aunt Joann folded her hands and prayed. And when she finished, she lay her head on the steering wheel and begged Jesus to start the car. She clicked the ignition, the engine came roaring to life, and her faith was reaffirmed. The car swam heavily, slowly through the water, and we were safe.

December 2004. Tsunamis have destroyed whole cities and countries across SE Asia. Two weeks after the disaster, miracles feature prominently on the evening news, and I can understand why. One report I have seen repeated several times: a man who saved every child in his orphanage.

When the tsunami roared onto his shore, he had no time to think. He screamed to the children to run for their tiny boat, and they listened. When everyone was on board, he screamed to the sea, "In the name of Jesus, I command you to stop." And the wave seemed to slow down, for a moment.

He pointed the boat directly into the waves and saved the orphans.

I am not a believer, but I believe.

More notes coming later today.

Today's Wall Street Journal tells the story of Smith Dharmasaroja, a Thai meteorologist who forecasted fierce water from the sea instead of the sky. After spending several years investigating the history of Pacific quakes, he discovered that every tsunami there started with a temblor of 7.4 or above on the Richter scale. Eventually, he concluded that some similar catastrophe could hatch off the coast of Thailand. In 1993, he wrote letters to local officials. Those letters were ignored.

Smith was officially the Cassandra of Thailand, a man whose predictions nobody wanted, destined to be ignored until it was too late.

So in 1998, Smith passed his prediction to the Thai people, and a panic erupted along the coast:

Villagers along the country's western coast thought the threat was imminent and ran into the hills, causing traffic accidents as they fled. Tourists checked out of their hotels.

Government officials, fearful of a washed-up tourist season, branded Mr. Smith a dangerous man with a screw loose. Authorities on the resort island of Phuket fastened loudspeakers to pickup trucks to broadcast a mollifying message to beachgoers, and warned Mr. Smith not to come to town."

(Barta, Patrick. "His Warning Ignored, Thai Meteorologist Now Plays Key Role." Wall Street Journal. 10 January 2005: A1)

Since the tsunamis last December, he has been lured out of retirement.

Against all common wisdom, this man foretold a disaster. His faith is a little like when my aunt Joann (mentioned in yesterday's post about the Iowa floods) believed her ignition would fire, or when the orphanage director (also mentioned yesterday) stared into the tsunami wave and commanded the water to stop.

Except nobody believes the darker, deadlier, mysterious messages we sometimes receive from who-knows-where.

We like our mysteries hatched over-easy.

Note: "earthquake hatching" is an allusion to images from The Road is Wider than Long by Roland Penrose, a book Wendy gave me this past Christmas, mentioned here.

I started a new thread this morning on my other online notebook, evidentiary:alchemy. The murder trial of Rabbi Fred Neulander has haunted me for years, and though I have written about it before (in essays and even poems), I cannot seem to shake it from my subconscious. It will make for a fascinating case study in objective correlative.

Freezing rain fell on Portland last week, tinkling and crackling as it landed on sidewalks, lodging deep in the teeth of exposed zippers, poking umbrellas. It glazed the sidewalks smoothly at first - like donuts. But the textures transformed as the freezing droplets continued to build up. One street corner was rippled like old glass - the kind that warped my Grandma Ashline's lawn as I stared out her living room window, the kind I always love in old Victorians or churches. Glass is liquid after all. I like to think ice is, too, since it is constantly on the verge of melting away - constantly becoming liquid in our minds. Which makes it so.

When I walked several blocks to the grocery store, my legs remembered twenty-five winters in Iowa. Winter muscles. Knees bent slightly. Quads tight. Core strong. And I was no longer walking, but shuffling. Snowshoed in my New Balance trail runners.

The best part is that it wasn't even cold. Right on the line between freezing and melting. Like glass.

There is also new writing on evidentiary: alchemy today.

Books currently buried under the pile of loose notes, newspaper clippings, magazines, essay drafts, and freelance work beside my bed:

Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means by William T. Vollmann (an abridged version of his 3,500-page, 7 volume masterpiece).

The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone by Seamus Heaney.

and

Beowulf, a new verse translation by Seamus Heaney.

I like to think of raking the papers away, like leaves. But for now, they keep fluttering down.

At Hiawatha Elementary, my friends always met at the parallel bars, where we flipped and twirled and groaned about being grounded all weekend. When some older kids planted their bookbags around the mats, patrolling the new border like MPs, we became recess refugees. And we stopped meeting.

That was the year we lost J. to who-knows-what terrors; she wandered the halls with glazed eyes and robot shoulders, straight-backed and serious as a totem. She never spoke a word to me again.

The year before that, A. told me she never lived anywhere long enough to see a place close. Or to lose someone.

What about the friends you leave behind? I asked, tugging at my hair, wishing she would say something desperate or sad or sweet.

Instead, she simply shrugged. I don't lose them, she said. They lose me. She kicked up some dirt with her Keds and watched the dust blow away in the wind. Poof!