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“Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
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The Beginning:
Blood, Beads, and Black Rock
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As a child, my mother reminded me constantly of where I came from. “You were born on Whidbey Island, off the coast of Seattle, Washington.” I know what time I was born, “6:21 p.m. on June 19th, 1972.” When I was 5, I told my classmates that I weighed precisely “seven pounds, two and three-quarter ounces.”
She would say, “And you grew inside of momma’s . . . ”
“Belly!” I would finish.
“And you came out of her . . .”
I would cover my mouth and giggle and say, “Pee-pee!”
“And when you came out you were ALLLLL . . . ”
“Bloody!” I would trumpet. Proudly.
I understood my birth and beginnings very well. My mother insisted I know myself and she never spared details. I was a girl who came from a girl and it was the only way it could be possible in nature. Birth belonged to nature, and I belonged to my mother by birth, and nature was truthful and brutal, like my mother, who was both of those things, and like nature was also beautiful.
We lived near Mount Baker, a gorgeous landscape that I relive through pictures. In all of the photos there is a low, eerie fog and extraordinary cliffs. Some of the rock faces are scathed open from landslides, the claw marks of sharp stone falling away, earth movement hopelessly clinging to the wall, leaving deep gouges of a strange orange-yellow tint. Many of those photographs also have orange-yellow scrapes at the corners which appear to be physical and not part of the original image. Some of these are from fading, the exposure to time that gives all photos from the seventies that slightly amber-brown tinge. Others have what looks like electric yellow lines dredged through them like little bolts of lightning. This is because my little sister, Racheal had a fondness for pulling photos from under their black, triangular tabs, putting them in her mouth, and dragging them through her newly forming teeth. Her way of tearing down the mountain. As for the mountain itself, those emergent colors are caused by the fumaroles – holes that emit mixtures of steam and other gases, even when no eruption is imminent. You could say the mountain breathes this way. It whispers a steamy, chemical, misty, spray paint and it uses the rock face as its canvas. If Crayola had invented a color, they would’ve called it, “fluorescent burnt ochre,” and if Bubblelicious made it into a flavor, perhaps “screaming meemy tangerinee” might have suited it. But in real, concrete geological terms, the mineral formation that occurs as a result is called hypersthene, which sounds like it should — accelerated and bright.
Mount Baker is a large stratovolcano that spewed large bombs many years ago. Rapid cooling of basalt lava and these erupting “bombs” forms a dark glassy rock. These were the older metamorphic and sedimentary rocks at its base and it was almost completely covered by glaciers — hence Mount Baker’s original Nooksack Indian name, “White Steep Mountain”. At the base of this great white climb were the lake beaches of my childhood and in contrast, they were paved to the water in those black pebbles.
Walking on the beach was noisy, like walking on a billion shiny black pennies. It was a metallic noise, constantly shifting, scraping, and clapping beneath your feet. I remember the sound of the black rocks clearly. It was a long, steep walk to the water with unsure footing, not like the warm give of sand dunes beneath your weight. The stones were constantly wet though they were the hot birth of fiery volcanoes. They creaked together, like a field of marbles from the biggest bag of “eyes” and “steelies” owned by God – the mightiest marble shooter of them all. Looking down at them mesmerized you, layer upon layer of watery darkness and dead, like shark eyes shifting under your weight, chubby, stony, brilliant and glazed.
The island was in a perpetual state of chronic rain. It’s no surprise the statistics say that folks in Seattle check out of life so early and in such impressive numbers. Rain makes you contemplative. Contemplation can yield creation. Like my mother, I loved the landscape and of course, it was also she who taught me to consider things deeply. She introduced me to most of the creative fire I have come to kindle as an adult. I grew fond of the natural capacity to be heavy-hearted under the weight of weather and thought. As a child, it was always the rain, the subsequent music, and the magic I found in melancholy.
Melancholy was a kind and accurate word to me; it sounded both like a musical term and a sickness; it meant to be versed in all things good and bad, joyful and sorrowful. It meant dancing with your past and having a pain for home. This tempered knowledge meant that you had lived and had a story to tell. In this way, I learned my stories from song and environment equally. To me, no one could sound as haunting, so full of ache, and so full of melancholy as Hank Williams Sr.
My mother played folk music for me on the guitar and we listened to the music of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, and Joni Mitchell. Folk music in my house always included the guitar and it meant, “music for folks.” It even implied the roots of Blue Grass and the lineage to her father, my grandfather, who I was named after and who played it constantly in his house in the Detroit suburbs when we went to visit every summer.
When I thought of Bluegrass, I thought of my grandfather playing “Orange Blossom Special” on the fiddle. I thought of high, blue mountain ridges and the state of Kentucky, both of which I had never seen. I thought of all the times I asked him to make the fiddle sound like the sawing, productive chug and whistle of an approaching train; like the whistle that hollered through the Pennsylvania coal mines he used to tell me about. He could play almost anything, burrowing into his tiny closet, behind shirts and shoes to retrieve a new instrument —- Hohner harmonica, guitar, or banjo. I remember those rich hours sitting on his bed that was too high for me and my sister, Racheal; how he sometimes had to lift us if we couldn’t bound and scrabble our way up.
Once in awhile my grandmother would come in and accompany him on the old organ, which had to be excavated from underneath songbooks and tapes and backstocked toilet paper. We sat there quietly, listening to them play with the sun melting in through the yellowed curtains. The room would grow hot with summer light, but inside, I was brought back to the cream colored comforter, a little sun-soaked, sandy island when he played “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” We ate endless bright colored popsicles from the little white fridge at the foot of the bed, just the right height for munchkin children. We saved the sticks so we could make jewelry boxes, crosses, soldiers, animals, fortresses and dreams. Those days and those dreams were the beginning seeds of my own music.
The first shoes on my feet coming home from the hospital were tiny moccasins. My mother had a love and deep reverence for the plight of the Native American Indians. There were many park forests and reservations near us and we spent considerable time wandering in both. One of my earliest memories was visiting a reservation near the island. By geography, it could very well have been the Nooksack tribe, but I was three and so much of my memory was like swatches of paint from an impressionist canvas. I remember the essentials of color, sound and smell. Feathers, beads and images were tanned into leather. Food drifted with the scent of spicy browns and yellows and greens. There was a heavy vibration accompanied by the rhythmic shimmer of bells. The land sounded ancient and knowing . . . because it was.
My mother had long black hair that swept the back of her thighs and when we walked the length of the beach, or up the slopes at the base of the mountain, the wind pulled it behind her like the dark scream of a horse’s mane. I had large, brown eyes as a child. I still do. Physically, we merged quite nicely among the native people. The most amazing forest surrounded, coddled and swallowed up dilapidated, poorly constructed buildings. Children like myself stared at me hauntingly from behind windows without pane glass. Roof thatches leaned together, clasped painfully like the gnarled fingers of an old man reluctantly at prayer. Dogs trotted past kicking up trails of dirt and dust. Their village was the slip-shod, spiritless creation of the white man. It was a lot like the hard life my grandfather described as the son of a coal miner; both a miner and soldier himself.
While we were there, my mother bought me a strand of beads that I refused to take off for quite a long time. I played in them, ate wearing them, and slept in those beads. They were finer than any pearl or stone because they had been pressed by the hands of a people my mother and I felt kinship with. My mother fitted herself and me with a pair of fawn-colored moccasins. My mother’s pair wore out over the years. As with everything else, I simply outgrew mine. Soon after, we left Washington State and moved in with my grandparents in Warren.
Once you leave the mountain and go to the city, the instincts weaken. You need to assimilate the knowledge of things to come; inorganic, cruel things. Sometimes they are hidden and you don’t see the things with teeth. Growing up means the complications of new ideas and it means the new sensations of being bitten and scratched. Sometimes, by things that don’t wear fur. Over the years and for my own benefit, my mother has managed to strip those white boards away from that proverbial ‘picket fence’ all little girls begin constructing as soon as they learn their first incorrect ideas about love and marriage.
She warned me about boys and occasionally, I even listened. She never couched her low-key feminist ideals in language; she simply understood what men stood for in her life at the time, specifically the monster that was my father, and she was plain and straightforward with me. While my mother never liked Gloria Steinem much, she still had some fancy ideas about being a liberal woman. It was okay to be free and feminine too. You could be strong and even put on a swatch of lipstick once in awhile. Because of this, she intended to pass down to me a level of imposed independence.
I was allowed every freedom to find out who I wanted to be when I grew up and I was asked what those intentions were at every step. I was encouraged to first, find it for myself, and then include a boy. I worked very hard as a child and young girl to prove to my mother that I understood what it meant to be wary and wise of people who intended to break your stride, gobble you up, or keep you as a shiny bauble. She made sure I was aware of the harmful impediments that might stop me from knowing myself. She was this adamant and insistent because all of this had happened to her.
I’ve come to realize that all maternal premonitions are correct. This is especially true for the first impression of a possible male suitor. The ill-fated endings of my relationships always came to fruition under my mother’s advice. This advice she let fly with deadly accuracy and lucky for me, without a single “I told you so.” She could always size them up before I saw them coming. I think this phenomenon occurs because mothers have a “mama bear” instinct about their daughters. This is the way blood works, even at a distance from the mountain. Mother knows the smell of wolf piss on his heels despite the diamond collar around his neck. She knows the crow’s beak that means to peck out her child’s eyesight so that she is no longer able to see him for what he truly is.
I used to swing on the swing set with my belly riding in the thick, black, plastic strap. My legs and arms would hang over like a cat draped over the carrying arm of a four year-old by its belly. I would drag my fingers lightly in the suburban sand and tell my friend Melissa with her freckles and chunky, square new teeth, too big for her eight-year old chipmunk face, that I would someday marry, like maybe around 19 and have babies no later than say, 22.
None of those things have come to pass, of course. And all because the women of my mother’s time began desiring more than a Kenmore washer and dryer set and fabulous matching tea cozies for entertaining ladies on Sundays and Tupperware to store all the leftovers away in. We never had tea cozies. No dignified ladies came by the house in the woods and none surfaced for a visit in the endless drone of cookie-cutter houses in the suburbs. We had a Rubbermaid dish rack and decent kitchen appliances. Nothing was proper in my house. There were no fine linens or china or cutlery. I often ate Cheerios out of plastic Tupperware cups with plastic tableware and it would all get washed and go in the plastic dish dryer and back into the plastic fork, spoon and knife shaped slots in the kitchen drawer. The white, olive-green flowered Corelle dishes, a familiar pattern in the 1970′s called “Spring Blossom – Crazy Daisy” came out for special occasions only, and there was rarely a call for occasion in my house.
This was a simple life. I was young and unfettered. I never came by an unhealthy awareness of things important to most, things like beauty and refinement. Perfection and polish. Powder press and sugarcane. Spice and everything nice. These were the trappings of the mirror and of money. Film and fashion. My mother and I knew neither of them well enough to imitate. I knew what I looked like and I knew what I thought and that was what everyone else would learn too.
There’s a great advantage to understanding the power a young girl can wield in the beauty of her youth. This is a most precious time. Time before complication. Soon enough the girl decides whether to wear ribbons and pigtails or dusty jeans and baseball caps, and she’s allowed to do both if it pleases her. The secrets I’ve learned is that these roles and constant variations can carry over into adulthood and depending on the occasion, swapped out accordingly. But indicators of personality and stance get trickier than mere body decoration; to be seen and not heard means, you’d better open your mouth, girl.
I began simply. Neutral and androgynous, I borrowed my dress from a plain people, but soon, it became more than beads and moccasins. My feet were no longer as close to the earth. I fell on concrete and it was painful. I had to learn how to walk with new shoes every year as school began. New, brown, tightly bound and painful. The eye holes, brassy and gaping, looking up at me unfeeling and unconscious, the laces stiff as they burned through my curled fingertips, the round hood sheltering my toes in an empty dome, like small children afraid in church; I could no longer feel the connection to the ground or what was above me, not until the heels wore down and my toes filled the tips. By then, it was September again.
The natural becomes unnatural when you get distance from it. I came from blood, I wore my beads, I walked on black rocks and then despite my natural, heady, formalistic training — I found boys.
