Earth to Mouth Resuscitation, Part 3: Of Ponytails, Orcas and Tangled Tape

A cool cloudy spring day, but the birds don't know the difference.  They sing just as exuberantly as they did two days ago, when it was sunny and warm.  I just walked up the road with my pockets full of devil's club shoots to put in a woodland quiche, along with watermelon berry sprouts, nettle tips, duck eggs (from our neighbor) and fireweed shoots.  Now if only I could find some fresh morels.  Below is the next installment of my Prince William Sound research trip narrative.  But first a couple photos from a cancer event on Cape Cod the other night, two luminaria, one for me and one for Bennett.  My stepson Lars, who's staying with my sister and family for the next couple weeks took part in the walk.  We're all "doing it," Bennett, me, Lauren, Cathleen, Paula, Helen, and my friend Nancy whom I ran into last night.  She was diagnosed with early breast cancer last year, shortly before I was.  Nancy's an elder, and she was "doing it" at a fundraiser for our non-profit gallery.  Lauren was "doing it" yesterday, getting her hair cut short in anticipation of it falling out, her daughter picking the style.  One week before it's gone, but who cares?  She's the one who told me that she became extremely adept at throwing up and continuing to do what she was doing last time around with breast cancer, namely talking on the phone, saying "excuse me a moment, missing a few beats to barf, then continuing on.  That's what I mean by "doing it."  Living life.  Last night, at the fundraising event, several people I hadn't seen came up to me and asked the "How are you doing now?" question.  It's losing it's charge for me.  Maybe that should be my answer:  "I'm doing it."  One woman told me she had a dream, right after I started chemo last summer, that I was standing in front of her, completely well, and that she felt like she was back in the dream at that moment, that it had come true.  She hugged me and quickly scooted away, teary-eyed.  Now it's time to start "doing it" again:  turning forest greens into quiche.  The literal version of earth to mouth resuscitation.

    

8 May


Evening.  A front’s moved in, and its first squall just enveloped us.  Rain drops bead up on the windows and the boat spins around the anchor.  It’s 9:30 pm and the light’s dim, and I’m hoping, actually, for a weather day tomorrow, a day to write and drink tea and read and don rain gear to kayak to the beach.  We started our day early, eating on the run.  We heard killer whales on the hydrophone first thing, recognized them as AE calls, and we found them not far from our anchorage.  They led us out Hinchinbrook Entrance toward the Gulf of Alaska.  There were twelve of them, including a calf born over the winter, the first calf in AE pod since 2006.  The little whale was sturdy, already sporting a saddle patch behind its dorsal fin.  The youngest calves we see don’t have saddles yet, and their eye patches and bellies are orange.  We threw around ideas for names, and settled, finally, on "Schnipper," after my oncologist and his wife.  After photographing the whales, it was time to take a biopsy.  This is an aspect of the research I dislike, and I made Craig spell out again the how’s and why’s of this year’s effort.  He explained that he and his collaborator Dave Herman, a chemist, wanted samples from one focal animal, an adult male, in each of five pods.  It would be sampled three times over the course of the summer.  From the chemistry of its blubber, the fatty acids and stable isotopes, Herman can describe how an individual whale’s diet changes over time.  I worried about taking biopsies from the same animal repeatedly in one season, concerned that it would begin to associate us with being hit by a dart.  This led to one of our frequent boat arguments, and eventually, it led to a deeper conversation. 

Craig told me that he was still coming to terms with a change in me over the last year, how I take stronger stands around what I do and don’t want to do.  We verbally pushed back and forth against one another until I finally put it into words.  I’m no longer willing to be passive in my life.  It’s not that I want to change or even challenge everything I do since breast cancer.  I just want to choose consciously, even if it means choosing to continue doing what I’ve done in the past.  My default mode, what seems almost an addiction (I’m thinking that word because I’m also, on this boat trip, battling my addiction to chocolate), is to do a complex math in my head when making plans or decisions.  If what I want is X and what other want is Y, and what I need to do to make a living is C, and what I choose in the end is Z, the normal equation is X + 10Y + 5C = Z.  I want to experiment with a new equation, perhaps 10X + 4Y + 4C = Z. 

We followed along with the whales as we had this very involved conversation, waiting for Nowell, the young male Craig had selected to be the “focal animal” for AE pod, to give us an opportunity to collect a sample.  He was busy fishing, surfacing erratically, diving for long periods at a time, and our attempts to predict where he might come up were unsuccessful.  So we hung back and watched and motored slowly south with the whales and talked.  And then, after three hours, we let them go, no sample “in the bag,” just photographs, and another layer of clay carved off the sculpture that is our lives post-cancer. 

Cancer treatment stopped my life as I knew it.  It’s staggering what happens when you stop your life.  It isn’t like pressing a pause button.  It doesn’t just resume when you press play.  In fact, just pressing play jams up the cassette tape, and the tape has to be pulled out in one tangled ribbon until you find the unmarred length.  Then the tangle has to be snipped off and parts worth saving spliced back together.  And then you have to listen to it again and again:  the song with the hole in it.  Until the hole becomes part of the music, until it’s essential.  Until you can’t imagine the song, the life, without that gap. 

And what to do with the tangled ribbon clipped off?  Throw it away?  Put it in a hope chest?  A scrap book?  Bury it?  Burn it?  Turn it into a collage, into art?  It’s like the shank of long hair I found in a drawer, the ponytail I had snipped off to send to Locks for Love a couple years ago, but never got around to sending.  I found it in a drawer when I got home from Boston.  I held it in my hands, stroked it, marveled at is colors and texture.  I had hair like that!  A part of me said:  “Send it.”  But I just couldn’t, not yet.  I put it in a cloth bag and hung it from the body cast my friend Deer made of my torso before the mastectomy.  The body cast sits on a low table in my writing room.  I imagine bringing it to the Sound and finding a place to leave it, the hair and the cast, in a hidden forest, perhaps under a moss-draped, massive boulder.  I know the perfect spot in Sanctuary Bay.  But I’m not ready to let go of it just yet.  The long, dark blonde hair, the form of my two-breasted body:  I’m still holding on.  I have to trust I’ll know when it’s right to let them go.   

Later in the day, after a walk on the beach through what I called “the forest primeval,” another of Montague Island shoreline old growth forests ... and here is a taste of the woods and muskeg on Montague (including some forest yoga and forest high fashion):

we’d returned to the boat and I was chopping veggies for a stir fry.  I looked up from the onion under my knife and suddenly felt disoriented.  On the left hand side of my peripheral vision, lights dappled, as though from a reflecting a pool of water.  A blur swam in front of my eyes.  My head ached in three places.  “Is something wrong?” Craig asked.   I described the phenomenon to him, then put down my chopping knife and lay down in the bunk.  And fear had me by the throat.  Was it my brain?  Had breast cancer metastasized there?  A tiny voice of reason peeped out “migraine,” but the louder voice drowned it out.  “Cancer,” it said.  “You’re going to die this way.”  So easily it had hold of me.  I got back up, and the dappled lights became an aurora borealis, a haze of bright and shifting colors which gradually faced.  I felt a familiar sick feeling in my stomach.  “Migraine,” the voice insisted.  I took two advil, but I was unnerved, and eating dinner, when the song “Fields of Gold” came on, sung by Eva Cassidy, who died of brain cancer “before anyone even knew who she was,” as Craig said, my eyes brimmed over with tears. 

I thought of my pre-cancer self as that figure running through a summer meadow, her long hair loose around her shoulders, the ground solid under her feet.  She’s the one who charged around the Sound on a small boat believing being a vegan would keep her safe.  Yeah, I remember her.  What was her name?

The boat swaying in a slight aftertaste of swell seemed to emphasize that fact that no such solid ground supported me now.  A leg cramp, a head ache, a lower back pain, indigestion, the usual aches and pains of a 47 year-old body are all it took to call up the fear djinn, a flaming dervish, which in those moments feels like all I have, like the substrate that’s replaced the solid earth beneath me.  Fire, not earth.  The fear is bottomless, sudden as a lightning strike, overwhelming as a tinder dry forest on fire.  But I know it isn’t so.  Beneath the fear is earth, solid as it’s ever been. 

I place my hands on the pile of rocks we’ve collected, and I remember the feeling I had in the forest earlier today, when I leaned into the trunk of an old growth hemlock tilting out over a cliff.  Its great roots held it in place, some of them dangling in thin air.  I pressed my chest against the bark of that tree, hundreds of hears old, and breathed in its scent, my nose buried in its mossy bark.  I stretched my arms around it.  The earth beneath my feet was solid, and the trunk against my body was solid.  Which leads me to something else solid, which are these words, written by Hester Hill-Schnipper.  They are part of her address at the recent annual “Celebration of Life” put on by Beth Israel hospital’s cancer center.  Fear, powerful as it is in the moment, is, like a forest fire, temporary.  It burns itself out.  It runs out of fuel.  It meets a river.  River douses fire.  Earth channels river.  The river is paper to fire’s rock.  Paper covers rock.  Love is the paper.  After fire, I find a piece of granite in my hand.  I find a piece of fish on my plate.  I find some words to live by:

“I think we are all learning how to live. This diagnosis, which none of us wanted, brings us a chance to change.  It brings a luminous perspective, a chance to pay attention, to learn how to be idle and blessed. It asks us what we plan to do with our “one wild and precious life.”  It permits us to loosen the yoke of unnecessary burdens or worries and wrap ourselves, instead, in a joyful cloak of many colors. I hope that your cloak, woven of all the experiences of your life, shelters and embraces you. I pray that each of us, surrounded by blessings, carried forward by love, will learn to live as lions of courage and does of grace. Jane Kenyon wrote: 'Let it come as it will and don’t be afraid. God doesn't leave us comfortless, so let evening come.' And remember, always, that we stand together and strong in that evening."

I pray for the courage to enter each day that forest primeval, habitat of my brown bear Hanuman, to place my feet on that moss-covered earth, to find that one solid thing, be it rock or human hand, to grab onto when, for fear’s sudden flaring, my feet lose contact with the ground.  To put my faith in earth, not flame.  To embrace what's here, to let go of what's gone.  The way the Sound itself responds to weather.  

The squall’s passed over now.  It’s 10:30 and the light’s dim, but the water’s still shimmering.  Craig just made me a bowl of yogurt with raspberry jam and mandarin oranges.  The dapples are gone from my eyes.  Let evening come. 

Mouth to Earth Resuscitation: Part 2, Healed and Whole Forever*

*Even with a messed-up fin.

Quote for the day:

If the animal

coming toward us so surely

from another direction

had our kind of consciousness

he'd drag us around in his sway.

But his being

is infinite to him

incomprehensible, and without

a sense of his condition

pure as his gaze.

And where we see the future

he sees everything

and himself in everything

healed and whole

forever.

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Eighth Elegy," from Duino Elegies, translated by David Young

6 May

A slow, ponderous swell lumbers into Hinchinbrook Entrance this morning.  The sky has cleared, but clouds still cling to the islands.  We spent yesterday in Montague Strait listening, scanning, counting the sea lions on the Needle, photographing two humpback whales (one named Freckles), then hiking a beach on Green Island.  As soon as we landed the kayaks we could see we’d be walking along the shore with our eyes glued to the ground.  The beach was covered in oblong, dark gray, palm-sized stones streaked with white quartz lines, each stone a Joan Miro painting, or an illustration for an obscure geometry problem.  What, for instance, one rock seems to say, is the mathematical relationship between the outer two rings of Saturn?  Another ringed in two perpendicular directions made me think of L.  I picked it up for her.  Its geometry seemed to illustrate the relationship between kale and Ativan.  Once, on the phone, talking the virtues of kale smoothies, and about what she needed to get through her recent breast cancer diagnosis, we concluded:  “There’s a time for kale, and there’s a time for Ativan.”  Overlapping circles drawn with a slightly unsteady thin-tipped paintbrush ringed many stones.  Others were marked with X’s or O’s or both, or spirals, or eyes.  I’m looking at a collection of those stones on the dinette table in the boat cabin.  

But in a minute I’ll go up onto the flying bridge to join Craig, to scan for whales and get my 20 minutes of sun on unprotected skin.

After our search up Montague Strait, we anchored up last night just outside a small lagoon in Rocky Bay, a tuck in massive Montague Island, a place where years past, herring spawned.  One year, I remember collecting kelp fronds plastered with roe, sautéing them for breakfast.  This year, no gulls congregated on the beach, no roe peppered the kelp beds.  The herring, still struggling decades after the oil spill, spawned to the north and east of here this year.  But the lagoon, evening and morning, was still alive with the secret life of Montague Island.  That island, which I think of being the backbone of Prince William Sound,  protecting it from the full brunt of Gulf of Alaska storms, is best known by most locals for its massive, moody brown bears and abundant deer.  I love it for that wildness, but as much for its quiet, intimate places, like the lagoon in Rocky Bay.  After we anchored the boat and ate dinner (rockfish stew with fresh-picked seaweed, coconut milk, Swiss chard, mushrooms, broccoli), we kayaked into the lagoon’s shallows.   With the dense cloud cover, it was dusky, but even so I scanned the forest edge for the shadows of brown bears.  Once, kayaking in a narrow channel along Montague, a brown bear emerged from the alders and just stood there, nonplussed, staring at us, not scared, not alarmed, not defiant.  Just taking our measure, like the old, mean farmer in my childhood neighborhood, shotgun slung over shoulder, staring down a couple of teenagers trespassing in his corn field.  But we spotted no bears that night, just a loon, two pairs of dusky Canada geese, a troupe of river otters, a sea otter, harbor seals, red-necked grebes, wandering tattlers, goldeneye ducks, mergansers, and one Sitka black-tailed doe standing stock-still, her tan hide nearly invisible against last year’s dead grass. 

Today reminds of one of the ways the Sound gradually takes you in, slows you down, wipes your mind clean.  Time loses meaning.  It can be maddening or exhilarating.  Endless hours rocking on the boat with the hydrophone down or crossing Hinchinbrook Entrance back and forth searching for whales induces, at worst, boredom, at best, passivity.  Let evening come.  Let the anchor drop.  Let me lower myself into the kayak, paddle into a lagoon and lose my brain for awhile.  Because the mind that invents boredom and passivity is the most boring thing of all.  Yesterday, lying on the Green Island beach after our walk, I turned onto my stomach and placed my cheek on the stones and noticed beach flies, dry little non-descript insects busy all over the rocks, a city of flies, industrious, and in that mindless state, I considered them for a long while.

Later.  We’re now heading into Zaikof Bay after our first killer whale encounter.  A strong current pushes the stern back and forth.  All day, a large tiderip agitated the water around Schooner Rock, and from a cliff above the beach this afternoon, we watched humpbacks feeding along the rip’s edge.  One humpback surfaced blowing loudly, harassed by a small pod of Dall’s porpoises.  A flock of green-winged teal landed in the cove below us, and foraged through the kelp beds a few feet from shore.  I climbed up into the woods, singing to the brown bears, whom I decided to call “Baba Hanuman,” after an Indian chant we listened to this morning.  Hanuman is the Hindu monkey God.  “Son of the wind, destroyer of demons, I bow to you,” goes the chant.  Drinking tea before pulling anchor, I played “Prayer for Hanuman” on my I-Pod.  I need a prayer for the Hanuman brown bears of Montague Island, a prayer of thanks and of permission.  During the final months of chemo, I visualized myself landing a kayak on a beach near here, where a brown bear on top of the storm berm.  Because of the brown bears, I both love and fear Montague Island.  Ancient Chugachmiut stories describe their ferocity, say they are all descendents of a wronged woman who transformed herself into a bear and killed her betrayers.  Friends who hunt deer on the island tell tales of being stalked or charged or robbed of their shot deer.  In the story I told myself, a brown bear tended to my red and white blood cells during chemo.  I felt I needed that kind of fierce, protective power.  Spring and early summer, we spend weeks anchored in Montague Island’s coves, because the killer whales frequent Hinchinbrook Entrance, and not the more protected inner Sound, with its smaller islands and less fearsome black bears.  So I’ve had to make my peace with the bears’ presence.  I make a lot of noise on the beaches and in the woods.  In my head I ask permission to land on their beach.  Especially when the sand we walk on is imprinted with tracks big enough to hold my boot and then some.  Now I called them “Hanuman.” 

A cold wind blows off the beach where we’re anchored.  The sun’s bright, and my eyes ache.  The killer whales traveled south, along the outer coast of Montague, headed for the ocean, and the late afternoon sun shone right in our eyes, made photographing their left sides challenging.  For some reason, I feel sad tonight.  Some of it is familiar, the cooped up feeling on the boat, the lack of autonomy and privacy.  I’m back in a place I’ve loved for 26 years – over half my life.  Perhaps there’s some grief I’m not acknowledging.  I’m back doing the familiar things, but I don’t feel the same.  I admit I’m preoccupied by breast cancer even out here.  Even Craig dreamed about it last night.  “Downloading some big files,” he said.  Reading The Emperor of All Maladies wasn’t exactly reassuring.  In fact, it was a bit like reading a book about brown bear attacks.  It recounts the history of breast cancer, how it’s been viewed and approached scientifically, what’s known and not known.  Most recently it’s been viewed as a genetic disease, caused by mutations.  It takes quite a few mutations over a long time, according to the author, to unleash breast cancer in the body.   The mutations give cancer supernatural powers, like being able to evade the body’s normal defense systems, like immortality (if left unchecked).  But for all its smarts, I still think it’s an ultimately stupid disease, which kills itself in the end.  It’s “a distorted version of our normal selves,” Mukherjee writes.  So I feel unnerved, and I think obsessively about mutagens past and present.  Maybe it’s another facet of facing my mortality.  My body’s pre-programmed to die.  My body’s vulnerable.  If the wind blows the wrong way, and I breathe some boat exhaust, can that cause a mutation?  Can the non-organic strawberries I ate today cause another? 

I pick up my binoculars and scan, in an absent-minded way, the ten mile-wide strait of water between us and Hinchinbrook Island.  Craig’s talking on the cell phone with Dan, a tour boat operator in Seward and member of our research group.  We’re about to launch the kayaks for a walk on the beach to check out that white thing lying on its side above tideline, an enormous wedge that might be a whale skull, but probably is a beached root-wad.  I’m staring through the binoculars and thinking about whether I’d rather have time alone on the boat or another walk, I’m filled with angst, when a thin black wedge rises and falls in my field of vision.  And then another.  It’s unmistakable, even though from this distance, it’s as thin as a sliver.  More killer whales.

In meditation retreats, bells ring.  These remind you to stay present in the moment, to not get lost in other worlds inside your head.  When those bells ring, or when I catch myself following a set of thought tracks through the woods in my brain, I take a breath that feels so deep it reaches down to my toes.  It’s like surfacing after a long dive.  It’s like looking up from writing, and staring the shoreline out the window, not thinking, not even looking in any concerted way, getting lost in what’s out there.  The killer whales are the bells today, the head-clearing breaths that wipe the slate clean of mutagens, of carcinogens, of speculations, the mouth-to-earth breaths of resuscitation.  They are one-syllable breaths, at the most two.  Air, water, life.  

Later.  We pulled anchor, headed back out into the cold wind and glaring sun.  This time, it was AE pod, the most resident of our resident orca pods.  This family rarely leaves Prince William Sound, and it has bit on an inbred look.  The adult males’ fins curl over at the tip or cant over to the side from their weight, or they wobble.  The trailing edge of their fins, seen from behind, isn’t straight but wavy.  One male, who died a few years ago, had a dorsal fin curled completely over so the tip touched his back, forming a question mark.  Sometimes, male fins deform this way with age or as a result of stress.  A few resident males’ fins fell over onto their backs after the oil spill.  A rough winter might lead to weakening of the cartilage holding the massive fin upright.  Whatever the cause, environmental or genetic, the tottering, wobbling fins of the males distinguish them from all other killer whales we know.  They wear their questions, their weakness, their injury, their mortality, on their backs, but those things don’t seem to slow them down.  They don't seem to notice.  They remind me of a favorite poetry book of mine, The Duino Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke.  The "Eighth Elegy" begins this way:

With its whole gaze

a creature

                        looks out at the open.

But our eyes

            are as though turned in

                        and they seem to set traps

all around it

            as if to prevent

                        its going free . . .

Free from death.

            Because we’re the ones

                        who see death.

The animal that’s free

            always has

                        its destruction behind it

and God ahead of it

            and when it moves

                        it moves forward

forever and ever

            like a flowing spring.

"Flowing spring" may be too graceful a description for those wobbly-finned AE killer whales.  But maybe there’s something I need to learn from them. 

Mouth to Earth Resuscitation: Part 1

I’m back from Prince William Sound, from our first research trip of the season.  Here’s the first installment from the field.  It’s a glorious spring day in Homer, laundry flapping in the afternoon sea breeze, trees showing the first signs of leafing out, crocuses in the messy rock garden, all the baby plants in the window flourishing.  A good day to be alive, despite having only 4 1/2 hours of sleep last night, after a string of good days to be alive.

4 May

Heading up Prince of Wales Passage against a tide that Craig says is “screaming out of here.”  So, to avoid the strongest current, we travel within a 100 yards of a long, cobble beach on Bainbridge Island.  On Evans Island, in protected pockets, the snow still mounds over the pillow basalts, covers the muskegs, almost to sea level.  On Bainbridge Island, the snow line’s higher.  It’s steeper, sheer alder-covered slopes scraped by avalanches.  Remnant slides leave white streaks down the russet-brown slopes, like enormous bones laid out.  Two sea otters on their backs feed beside a slender murre still in winter plumage, white streaked with black, like photographic negative of the mountains.  It’s been a very long trip across the Gulf of Alaska, against the current, wallowing in a storm’s after-lump, barely making seven knots.  We left Seward at 10:30 this morning in the rain, and it’s now 6:30 pm, and it's still raining, the Sound shrouded in gray, the water glistening gray.  White gulls stand out bright against it.  Everything but that white is muted, and I feel that old familiar after-seasickness, rainy weather pressure in my skull, the damped down feeling that brought to mind chemo during my wheel watch, when I sat there fending off nausea, watching the coast, and the line on the computer drawing our route across a nautical chart.  That line crept.  Because of the swell and my queasiness in it, the crossing from Cape Resurrection to Cape Elrington is almost always an unpleasant, recurring dream, despite the fact that every minute brings me closer to Prince William Sound, to Sanctuary Bay, where we’re headed for the night.  

Now a pot of lentil soup simmers on the stove.  Craig’s at the helm, bent over Mrs. Dalloway (he never gets seasick, in fact eats peanut butter with a spoon during the crossing), occasionally glancing up and out the window.  The autopilot steers the boat.  Rising up through and past the slight mind-fog and gut-sick the crossing’s left in my body is a deep inhale, is my head turning from one window to another.  I’m here.  In this place that’s mother, brother, friend, stranger, other, self, all in one, with its icy sheen of silver-black reflection of the islands on the water, the reflected snow like icicles descending down beneath the surface, like another world under the sea, frozen, timeless, still.  Here is the cluster of small islands south of Iktua Bay, where the whales I’ve studied for over twenty years hunt for seals.  I scan them through my binoculars.  There’s Fleming Island ahead, where a family lived 50 years ago, farming foxes.  I can’t see the high peaks of Knight Island above Sanctuary Bay, where we’re headed.  They’re hidden in clouds.

Perhaps appropriately, I finished The Emperor of All Maladies before we entered the Sound, when I was lying in the bunk.  I stuck the cancer tome at the back of an unused bunk to send to my stepson Lars, who wants to be a doctor.  But stashing the book isn’t truly symbolic of some complete letting go.  I come to the Sound carrying a hole, a missing breast, a lost season.  Can I stitch it up? 

I spot four gray bodies of seals deep inside a cove, plastered to a kelp-covered rock.  Spruce trees trail beards of lichen.   The passage constricts, then widens.  It’s always bigger than I remembered, the first day.  Before it grows intimate, before it closes around us.  Before it takes us in and changes us into a truer, pared down version of ourselves.

We pass within 50 yards of Iktua Rock, count seven harbor seals, two hauled out, the others eyeballing us from the shallows, wallowing like hippos.  My binoculars slide up the rock to the gull flock gathered there and land on a pair of Dusky Canada geese and three immature eagles.  It’s 7:30 pm now, and the gray just gets grayer.  Now I can see Knight Island up ahead, across Knight Island Passage, and there is an isosceles triangle of snow pointing down:  the snowfield above Sanctuary Bay, a snow arrowhead to mark where we’re going:  home here.    

8:09 pm.  Crossing Knight Island Passage filled up on lentil soup.  I scan with binoculars to the north, to the humped backs of the Pleiades, and think of myself 20 years ago, over and over again driving a small boat between the middle two islands searching for whales, breathing the blue exhaust of the outboard, how many times crossing this passage?  Hundreds?  I couldn’t have anticipated this other me crossing it now.  The one who wonders, after reading the cancer book, what mutated my genes, turned the mad cells on, kicked them into their insane, pitiless drive for life everlasting.  The gas spilled on my hands?  The wood smoke?  The soy milk and soy cheese and soy burger?  The oil on Disc Island beach in ’89?  The acetone?  The hexane?  The M&M’s, the Red Vines?  I’ve left her, that innocent, oblivious me who didn’t wear sunglasses because she didn’t want her vision of the Sound altered one iota, so much further in the past in one year.  I feel like if I trained my binoculars hard enough, I'd see that boat, and her.

8:32 pm and we’re almost across the Knight Island Passage, our final crossing.  As the boat heads straight toward Sanctuary Bay, Knight Island looms larger and larger.  Now I can make out individual spruce trees, the shapes of snow patches and cloud wisps. I can’t see the entrance to Sanctuary Bay, so it appears we intend to penetrate the island through some secret passageway.   Tonight, we’ll sleep within a cradle of the island, enclosed by it.  Time to put on my sweater and rain gear, to prepare to drop the anchor.  It’s raining steadily.  Transparent shreds of cloud catch on the island’s slopes.  The water turns green-black, streaked with pewter.  The water’s so glassy, it seems like we’re standing still, and the island is moving toward us.  The island is moving to take us in, to wrap itself around us.

5 May

We took our time leaving Sanctuary Bay this morning.  Now we’re slowly motoring toward Point Helen.  This has always been our search route.  Squire Point to Point Helen.  Point Helen to the Needle.  The Needle to Point Grace.  Point Grace to Evans Point.  Evans Point to Fleming Island. 

We’re trapped between two fronts, one leaving, one arriving.  The clouds are thick but broken in places.  Now a fine rain falls.  Layers and layers of clouds.  Some mountain tops revealed, some entire islands swallowed in a gray batting.  A north breeze.  The ocean silver soaked in milk.  I slept deeply, dreamed again of cancer.  Last night I dropped the kayak into the bay and paddled a circle around Sanctuary Bay.  I put my palm against the rock wall I imagined so many times last summer.  I believed I could experience it precisely, from 5000 miles away, the cold stone against my skin, but the real rock face was covered in barnacles.  It was low tide.  The barnacles were rough.  I’m ground-truthing those meditations that got me through chemo.  The place I “went” last summer was Sanctuary Bay but another version, a parallel place.   I’d forgotten the precise smells.  And it’s not just one, but many.  The pungent iodine smell of rock kelp.  The resin scent of spruce and hemlock forest.  The musk of moss.  The sharp smell of old snow.  A delicate, sweet perfume of the bay from the boat, all its separate ingredients combined.  Now the sun breaks through the cloud bank.  Sunlight spangles the water.  I’m grateful to my memory for allowing me to come to this place over and over last summer.  But the real place is so much better.

We stop and drop the hydrophone off the Point Helen.  A Coast Guard helicopter lands on the beach, and four guys in red mustang suits clamber out to service the navigational light marking the entrance to Knight Island Passage.  The copter pilot calls us to ask if we’ll relay a message to the Anchorage office, to convey that:  “everyone’s safe on deck, ops normal.”  When they leave, the pilot flies right over us, tilts the copter back and forth, calls on the radio to thank us again, to wish us a good day.  We watch it disappear into the cloud bank over Elrington Passage, on its way to Kodiak.  The encounter fills me with well-being.  Like oncologists, these are the people who’ll try to save your life if things go wrong, if your ship starts sinking beneath your feet.  And their message is what we all want to hear, each day:  “everyone’s safe on deck, ops normal.”

That’s surprisingly what it feels like to be here.  I didn’t fall to my knees sobbing with relief and joy like I imagined when our boat entered Sanctuary Bay.  I cried the new way I do sometimes, an artifact of the last year, sudden, violent sobs with no emotional prelude, no pricking of tears at my eyes, no thoughts.  One minute I’m standing on the flying bridge watching the bay widen in front of the boat, the next minute hot tears are running down my face, criss-crossing rain streaks, and sobs break out of my chest, as though I’ve been punched on the sternum.  It’s visceral.  My body’s reaction, not my brain’s.  My brain stands by as a befuddled witness. 

Last night, I beached the kayak at the bay’s head and dragged it up onto a thick bed of rock kelp, retrieved my thermos, and clambered up the angular, wet rocks to the stream.  It’s mountain snow runoff pouring down a cleft, spilling out of the forest onto the beach.  I held the thermos under a rivulet, filled it, drank, filled it, drank.  Water so cold my teeth ached, my muscles around my jawbone clenched.  Water that tastes like the bay smells, with that slight sweetness to the clarity.  I’d been so thirsty for it, what the mountain held in abeyance in its alpine for months, then released.  It partly filled the hole in me.  I left the thermos in the kayak, then walked along the forest edge, looking for an opening.  I ducked under into a dim world of moss covered ground, fallen trees, a steep slope, boulders, all dark green and alive with the sound of the stream’s roar and the buzzes of varied thrushes.  I lay face down on a moss ledge, placed one cheek, then the other, on the moss, pressed my chest into what I imagined last summer as earth’s bandage.  I pushed my whole face, nose-first, into the moss and breathed in what I imagined last summer as the exhalation of the earth, a respirator, an earth to mouth resuscitation.  It was ordinary, in a weird way, without drama.  Of course you’re back, the earth said.  Of course I’m still here.  How could it be otherwise?  You’re just one of the creatures that comes here, like the harlequin ducks, the sea otters, the harbor seals, the mergansers, the fish crows, the eagles, the new gulls.  Welcome home. 

Whales Don't Use the Internet

I forgot to say in my last post that if the weather allows we are leaving Seward tomorrow morning and heading for Prince William Sound on the Natoa.  Since whales, sea otters, sea lions, porpoises, seabirds, eagles, river otters, Sitka black-tailed deer, black bears, red-backed voles, king salmon, halibut, zooplankton, herring, kelp crabs and rockfish don't use the Internet, and I'll be an inhabitant of their realm, I won't be using it either.  So I won't be updating the blog until I get back to this world.

Interpreting the Onko Dream

I'm sitting on a church pew at a small table under a beautiful arched window decorated with a stained glass butterfly and mobiles made of driftwood, shells, beads and crystals. On the sill, four ceramic coffee cups -- indigo, cherry, orange, green -- sprout wheatgrass, a brighter green than the slope of spruce forest across the street.  Outside the wavery antique glass, the air is wavery with rain.  A front's moved in, erasing yesterday's blue sky overnight.  Craig and I are in Seward getting ready to head to Prince William Sound on our boat for the first research trip of the year.  When we went to sleep on the Natoa last night, that sky was still clear, with just a few bunched up clouds pushing up against the mountains.  In the wee hours, the forecasted rain began, a particular pattering I only hear when I'm snug in the Natoa's foc'sle, the bunk in the boat's bow, which is below waterline, so the other sound I hear down there is the lap of waves against the boat's sides, or on stormy nights at anchor, the anchor line rubbing against the chalk.  It would be womb-like if it wasn't so chilly.  It's still early spring, and even with yesterday's sun, the cold ocean water refrigerates the foc'sle.  I anticipate that, as in the past, I'll be collecting large stones when we get to the Sound, to warm in the oven during the day and slide between the sheets at night.

But right now I'm not on the boat.  I'm in Resurrect Art, my favorite Alaskan coffeeshop.  It was once a church, and it's still a church in a certain way, a quiet gathering place, Raylene's labor of love to promote community in this small, rough and tumble fishing and tourist-oriented (in the summer) town at the end of a highway.  In Seward in winter, the sun doesn't crest the mountains.  A strong wind blows up and down the inlet.  The tourists and seasonal workers depart.  The town hunkers in, and a certain segment of locals gathers each day at Resurrect Art.  The walls are covered in paintings by local artists; the shelves and glassed-in cases and baskets display local craft work, pottery, cards, prayer flags, jewelry, soaps, teas, books.   It's 10 am and quiet now.  The early morning regulars, a group of older men who peruse the newspapers and argue politics have left.  Our friend Mike, a boat skipper, even has a special mug hanging in a row of such mugs above the counter.  The handle of his mug is wound in waxed twine, his maritime handiwork.  He also wears a "monkey's fist," a small intricate ball of a knot he wove, on his jeans belt loop.  It's a miniature version of the fist-sized rope end used to give weight to a line so it can be thrown from ship to shore and caught more easily.  Mike's far away, in the Aleutians, on his boat.  He comes to Resurrect Art every single morning for a cup of drip coffee.  Sometimes he sits with one or two of his cronies, if they're not feuding over politics.  I miss hearing his loud laugh, often incredulous, over some particularly vexing bit of news.  I miss his bad jokes, even though I've heard them a dozen times.

Before we drove to Seward yesterday morning, I took a short walk to our neighbors' house.  The acoustic landscape of Homer is evolving by the day now, like a fugue in process of composition, with migrant birds returning to add another contrapuntal line.  The ground's still bare and brown, and it's still pretty cold, freezing hard at night, but the soundscape is filling in.  The calls of all these arriving birds fill me with an intense sense of well-being and also a longing.  They make me want to be even more present and awake than I am.  Spring is very fleeting here.  By June, the birds shut up, busy tending their clutches.  By early July, the baby green of alders and birches takes on a tougher, waxy sheen.  And then it's August, and the fireweed bloom, signaling summer's end.  And then it's winter.  I experience this joy every spring, but this time, it's even more acute.  Of course it's because I've returned now too after a year away.  I left last March before I heard the first spring bird.  It's another return, each time I recognize something I missed last year, a homing in.  And one of the most significant returns is the one just ahead of me:  the homecoming to Prince William Sound, to the whales.  To get there, there's an ocean crossing of six hours, sure to be lumpy and a bit nauseating after this weather system passes through, and it's the kind of place that seems to ask some kind of ferrying-over, some mini-odyssey, as payment for entrance.  Blank hours of rough seas.  And then the long smooth tongue of water pressed between islands that's Prince of Wales Passage; that's how the Sound takes us in.  Last year, I missed my first field season in the Sound in 24 years.

Robins showed up last week, and snipes, with their courtship dance, the males flying up above a field, circling, then diving down, creating a winnowing sound as the air rushes through their tail feathers.  I've never seen a snipe, though walking down the road yesterday, I head winnowing in each ear, one bird to my right, one bird to my left.  It's getting close to my birthday (Craig's too), and the other day he asked me what I wanted.  At first, I told him to just surprise me.  But it's not his way.  So I thought about it.  What do I need?  New running shoes.  A Stormy Seas jacket (for the boat).  But what if I asked for just this:  the mating wing-whoop of the snipe.  I don't even have to ask.  It's just given.  That, and robins.  The most common birds, but their song in Alaska, suddenly one April day, feels rare and exquisite.

As the weeks pass, I go longer and longer without thinking about last year, about cancer.  But now, it's in my dreams.  I don't remember details, just know when I wake, that I've visited Cancerland in sleep.  My psyche continues to process, to replay, to invent parables, to weave a deeper sense of things.  My friend David Grimes says our waking lives are dreams too, symbols to be found everywhere if we only look.  A day is a dream-tapestry, according to that theory.  Each bird (in Seward, the song sparrows that live along the harbor), each bud, spruce tree, human being I encounter is a part of the weave, and all together they tell a story.  If I only listen.  Our friend Flip Nicklin, photographer for National Geographic magazine, accompanied us on Natoa for two summers.  All day he took pictures.  Photography, like writing, requires an intense level of awake-ness, the ability to see what's easily missed and fleeting.  At night, Flip played a slide show set to music on his computer screen:  that day's images, a photographic journal, his tapestry of our lives.  They weren't only whale pictures, but photos of water, puffins, blueberry pies, fish Craig had caught, walks we took, kayak paddles.

Now in the coffeeshop, it's just me and a 30-something earnest dark-haired guy with a ponytail studying a tiny laptop through round-framed black glasses.  He's all in black.  Something's got his attention on that screen.  The barrista leans her cheek on her hand and reads.  A fan turns.  A certain song plays; I don't recognize it.  The guy and I sip from our coffee mugs at the same time.  A couple reads quietly in two easy chairs up in the choir loft, staring out the big church window.  What if this is our only house of worship?  What if this is all we get?  On days like this, the light never seems to change.  It's filtered through multiple cloud layers.  It's filtered through a fine continuous fall of rain.  It's filtered through this antique glass, and my 47 year-old eyes.  This is my dream today.  I look past all those filters to see what's being woven, what images I'll preserve.

I woke up very early with my limbs twitching, wanting so badly to run.  I'm thankful to my body, which needles and prods me to move, to do yoga or to put on my brand new running shoes.  I'm told regular aerobic exercise lessens the risk of breast cancer recurrence.  And weight-bearing on my arm prevents lymphadema.  I'm grateful my body knows this, and prods me when I slack off.  Craig and I drove to the high school pool so he could swim while I ran, but the pool was closed.  So I got out, stretched, and headed back toward town in the rain.  We planned to meet here, at Resurrect Art with our computers.  When I arrived, ready for warmth and coffee, Craig was nowhere to be seen.  I called him and he told me he was on the boat, had decided that he wanted to work there, not at the coffee shop.  I got annoyed.  He'd reneged on our plan.  He'd disappointed me.  Running back along the water, I caught myself rehearsing my complaint to him.  There I was, running, irritated.  Wow, Eva, I thought, is it that easy to return to life created not out of moments, but out of thoughts, of life lived inside your head?  It filled me with a kind of seasickness.  Like I'd left that gift I'd been given back in Boston, the "permission slip" of health, on a park bench.  The voice in my head was just noise, another filter, the kind that erases bird calls, that misses a river otter foraging in the harbor, that fails to see a raven rooting around in a barrel of strawberry plants, that makes me look past the important parts of my daily dream, to miss the best shots.  Somewhere along the way, I put it down, that irritation. Before I got back to the boat, I left it on the gravel in one of the alleys that runs between rows of houses in Seward.  When I saw Craig, I kissed him.

It happened yesterday too, but I didn't catch myself; someone else caught me.  On the drive to Seward I called my friend in Florida.  The trajectory of her life got recently utterly derailed when both of her parents were diagnosed with lung cancer at nearly the same time.  She dropped everything and moved there to tend to them.  Her father died several weeks ago.  She'd sent me an e-mail describing her life, and feeling guilty about "whining."  Her days are structured around her mother's chemo and doctor visits and keeping a house very clean to prevent infections, a life she couldn't have anticipated a year ago.  I called her.  I e-mailed her back with unasked-for advice.  And then I called her.  She was telling me about her mother's psychological struggles with with steroids, and I talked about mine, and she said, "But Eva, there's a big difference between yours and my mom's.  You knew that your treatment was temporary.  That one day it would be over and you'd be healthy again.  Your prognosis was good.  It's different for my mom."  Right.  There I was, being one of those irritating people who express a false "understanding" for another's cancer experience.  I don't know what it would be like to be going through chemo to buy a few month's more time, a few days of "more life," knowing that short of some miracle, health was not ahead for me.  I had to say, "You're right.  I have no idea what that's like."  I have no idea of how my friend weaves each day into meaning, or if she uses a loom or a pen or a phone call to her husband.   It was another thing, after I said goodbye to my friend, that I had to put down, to leave along the highway to Seward.

In The Emperor of All Maladies, Mukherjee deconstructs one of the most familiar of cancer prefixes, "onco."  It comes, he says, from the Greek "onkos."  He writes:  "The Greeks used an evocative word to describe tumors, onkos, meaning "mass" or "burden."  A few sentences later, he goes further:  "But if one looks back even further behind the Greek to the ancestral Indo-European language, the etymology of the word onkos changes.  Onkos arises from the ancient word nek.  And nek, unlike the static onkos, is the active form of the world load.  It means to carry, to move the burden from one place to the next, to bear something across a long distance and bring it to a new place."  In the dream-life of cancer, it's exactly this carrying I wish to do.  To come to that new place, reading the symbols and signs and interpreting the messages along the way.  I may think I put the burden of irritation or arrogance down by the side of the road, but I'm only moving it further along my way.  It's not the burden but the new place that matters.

What if this is a dream?  And my mistakes and mis-steps are simply threads, aspects of myself to weave and interpret, along with the stained glass window, the winnowing snipe, the cup of coffee I'm drinking this morning?  The beautiful things, the pleasing parts of the dream, woven with the ugly, the scary, the inept.  What if the important thing is that Craig's living his dream, even if it means letting me down?  And my friend in Florida is living her particular dream, with its mix of burdens and gifts, and no one else can interpret it, much less bear it or lessen it for her?  I can only work on brushing past the filters so I can listen better and talk less, both in my head and out of my mouth.  Daily, I'm practicing this resurrection.  So I can truly hear a song sparrow or a robin or a snipe or a friend.      

Cups of Kindness, Curry, Fire and Elephant Dung on May Day

I'm sitting in my upstairs office staring out the window into a tangle of birch branches.  The earth is still new-spring raw, the forest floor various shades of tan and brown and russet.  Only on lawns can you see a tinge of green.  The snow is gone, though, and crocuses bloom in the rock garden, and perennials nose up out of leaf duff.  May Dan, and it's the beginning of a new year for us.  Last night, a group of friends gathered at our house for a New Year's Eve dinner and ritual.  I cooked up an enormous kettle of spring curry with Sri Lankan spices:  cardamon, cinnamon, black mustard seeds, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, fenugreek, coriander seeds, all pan-toasted and ground with mortar and pestle.  From last year's garden:  cauliflower, potatoes, carrots.  From a farm far away:  snap peas, English peas, onions, garlic, fresh ginger, tomatoes, coconut milk.

Craig and I dreamed up this notion of New Year's Eve on April 30 about a month ago, when reflecting on the course of the last year.  It had been a tough weekend, and Craig said, "Can this year be over now?"  Still ahead of us was my trip to Boston for my first follow-up appointments and Craig's trip to southern California, to meet with his brothers to begin the process of selling their childhood home.  Our year had begun, we agreed, with Craig's mother's death, which preceded my breast cancer diagnosis by about a week.  So we decided that May 1, when we'd both returned to Alaska from those closing-the-circle trips, would be our new beginning.

Many of the breast cancer books suggest marking "the anniversary" in some way.  But what's the anniversary?  The day of diagnosis?  The day I found the lump?  The day I felt the ache?  The unknown birthday of the cancer itself?  Or the day, also unknown, its seed was planted?  The day I first ate a pesticide-sprayed apple?  Or the first day I worked picking Concord grapes dusted with poison, picking and eating until my fingers and mouth were raw?  The day I took my first birth control pill?  Ate my first soy cheese quesadilla?  Swabbed bottom paint on the hull of a boat?  Breathed diesel fumes?  It it the day I lost my breast?

May 1.  Not anniversary but birth day of a new year, May Day, Beltane.  I pause to look up the etymology of the name of the traditional Celtic festival between Equinox and Solstice.  It's from the Celtic for "fire," but also linked to Latvian and Lithuanian "balts," which means "white."  At Beltane, farm animals are brought out to the fields after a winter's cloister inside barns.  In Latvia, I visited a farm once, when blue-hued cows stepped into the light, and the farmer poured water on their backs to insure abundant milk and fertility.  In festivals marking Beltane, bonfires are lit, and people jump over them.  The word's also related to a Lithuanian Goddess of death.  I look out the window again.  Death-in-life is all apparent in the birch woods. Last years dead leaves still dangle from the limbs.  Last year's wild grass lies down across the earth.  But it's light out until 11 pm.  The light, and varied thrush and crane calls, and the saw-blade cry of a pheasant, and a fat moose kneeling on the lawn to nibble green grass say life.

Craig learned that his mother's dying had begun in earnest the day he landed on a riverbank.  He and Lars, his 20 year-old son, had been floating the Green River in Utah, a father-son canoe trip through the canyonlands.  He left the Green River and flew directly to Orange County, but in truth the river trip had just begun for both of us that day.  And yesterday we decided was the day we beached our battered canoe and stepped onto the bank to look around.  In preparation yesterday I raked the thick layer of mulch off the rock garden to give the emerging perennials, daffodils and tulips some more light and breathing room.  Then someone warned me that I'd made them vulnerable to snowshoe hares.  Death in life again.

Eleven friends and family members gathered last night, crowded around our kitchen table.  I followed a precise instinct.  No alcohol.  No meat.  Food served in a single bowl:  brown rice, curry.  One utensil:  a spoon.  Baked apples.  Candles.  Yellow flowers.  My friend Jo pointed out that May 1 marked the immaculate conception of Mary, so I got up from the table and took an image of her off my altar and leaned it against a candlestick.

Jo and I had the day before attended the memorial service for our friend Trudy, who died last week of lung cancer.  I sat down in a pew near the back next to Paula, an artist in her late 60's who for ten years now has lived with ovarian cancer.  Dr. Kelly, Trudy and Paula's oncologist, sat down the row.  He'd driven an hour and a half to attend the memorial service, which Trudy had planned herself.  She'd chosen the songs and prayers, asked particular friends, including Jo, to sing.  Judy, the minister, in her eulogy, spoke of the gratitude she felt that Trudy had shared her life -- but also her death -- with her community.  She'd attended the Episcopal church service last Sunday, died less than a week later.  Trudy's son, one of Lars' best friends, stood up and, with Herculean effort to hold himself together, talked about how much his mother had changed since her diagnosis, how  a new compassion had been born in her.  I thought of her arms opening out wider than they'd ever been.  I was one of the people encircled by that new periphery.  Another friend talked about the "old" Trudy, the woman she met years before, how formidable she'd been, how businesslike and brusque.  That's right.  She said "brusque."  She described her evolution, too.  There was not a word about "battling" cancer.  Cancer was there, like a tick mark on a timeline of her life, the X that marked the spot of her road bending another way.  The service shrank cancer down to size.  I've been reading The Emperor of All Maladies, which portrays cancer as that sly, formidable, awesome force.  There's an Empress to that malady.  Call her life, call her Mary, call her Trudy, call her mother moose, call her cottonwood bud, call her healing.  Jo says her Trudy's healing journey began after diagnosis.  Not because of cancer, which, along with its brutal treatments, does all it can to thwart healing.  Because of Trudy.  She got in her canoe and launched at the crossroads.   Healing and dying, the confluence of two rivers.  The journey eclipsed the "struggle with cancer."

After we ate and drank lemongrass tea Toby made in a wood-fired samovar on the deck, after baked apples and conversation and three year-old Asek, Toby and Indira's son, clambering up the spiral staircase and pushing over the rocking chair, I passed out strips of paper made out of elephant dung.  My step-daughter Elli brought the paper from South Africa.  I wanted it to be biodegradable.  I read the May 1 reading from the Book of Awakening out loud.  It begins this way:

"There is very little difference between burying and planting.  For often, we need to put dead things to rest, so that new life can grow.  And further, the thing put to rest -- whether it be a loved one, a dream, or a false way of seeing -- becomes fertilizer for the life about to form . . . One self carries us to the extent of its usefulness and dies.  we are then forced to put that once beloved skin to rest, to join it with the ground of spirit from which it came, so it may fertilize the next skin of self that will carry us into tomorrow . . . For every moment of joy sprouting, there is a new moment of struggle taking root.  We live, embrace, and put to rest our dearest things, including how we see ourselves, do so we can resurrect our lives anew."

With our slips of paper, in our socks, we stepped out onto the porch into the cold spring air.  I'd placed dirt in the bottom of a big pot, and we named the things we were shedding out loud, the things that had outlived their usefulness and we dropped them into the container that was both planter and grave.  I realized that on my slip, I hadn't written "cancer."  I scribbled it on the elephant dung as an afterthought, maybe a superstition.  As with Trudy, the healing and living and dying cast a spring evening's shadow across the crab and all its nasty business.  It wasn't the point, or the reason.  In that moment, it was nothing.  Then I poured dirt over our old skins to pot's brim and brought it inside to the living room, where all my starts are arranged on a table in a south-facing window.  I separated one tomato plant from the rest and planted it in the dirt as my friends sang Old Lang Syne, and then I watered it.  "We'll take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne" are some of the original words by poet Robert Burns, descendent of Celts.  Then we placed the potted plant on the floor and stood in a circle holding hands around it.  Except for Asek, who wove around us in a May Day dance, like we were the Maypole, and he was holding the ribbon and weaving it around our legs, binding together our resurrected selves.  Happy New Year.

P.S.  The "cup of kindness" calls to mind a song by Emmy Lou Harris, which brings us back to Mary again.  I listened to her song "Cup of Kindness" repeatedly before and during cancer treatment:  "And when Mother Mary finally comes to call, she can pass right through your heart, and leave no trace at all.  While you were waiting for the sacred and divine, she was standing right beside you all the time . . . The cup of kindness never will run dry."