A Kind of Quiet Most People Have Forgotten
PAM L. HOUSTON
It’s July, 2014. I am guest teaching in the Chatham University Low Residency MFA program in Pittsburgh, where I have been adopted for these ten days by a couple of smart, talented, and beautiful young women named Kyle and Maggie, and their handsome, entirely self-possessed mutt, Apacha. It happens everywhere I go these days, the coolest, hippest-dressed twenty-five-year-olds in any given program and their bandana-wearing dogs want to hang out with my sturdy, laugh-lined, fleece and skort-clad, fifty-two-year-old self. It’s both surprising and flattering, and makes for a very satisfying do-over from my teenaged years, during which the Kyle and Maggie equivalents would have rolled their eyes hard if I had taken one step in their direction. Or perhaps I am wrong about that. Perhaps there were no Kyle and Maggie equivalents in my teenhood, because along with being the coolest girls in the MFA program, Kyle and Maggie are almost preternaturally kind.
The girls and I have taken Apacha for a walk through the huge, half-wild and glorious Frick Park on Pittsburgh’s eastside, and now we are having a beer—well, they are having a beer—while we decide whether to stay where we are and eat vegetarian, or move on to BRGR for organic bison lettuce wraps. I am not drinking beer these days (or any other alcoholic beverage), nor am I drinking soda, coffee, or even green tea. I am not eating wheat, sugar, or anything packaged, processed, or inorganic, because when I went to the doctor for my yearly checkup a few months ago, I had the first high blood pressure reading of my life, along with a pre-cancer diagnosis in the form of HPV 16. The ecosystem that is me was quite clearly in trouble, and it was time, I decided, to clean up my act.
As the doctor was writing a prescription for the blood pressure meds, I asked her if I could have six months to right the ship. “No,” she said, without looking up, so then I asked her if I could have three. “I’m writing the prescription,” she said, “I won’t be there to see whether you take the pills or not.” Which I realized was true, and which I chose to interpret as permission.
Caffeine has always been my go-to antidepressant, and I’ve said for years that if I ever had to make the choice between giving up coffee or dying, I would choose death. But as it turned out, all death had to do to get me to quit caffeinated beverages cold turkey was to wave at me from the window of a bus at a distant intersection. To heal, I reasoned, my body needed sleep, and I had not slept properly in decades, if ever. Not if we define sleep as the state that, when you emerge from it, is like coming up from some deep oceany paradise of nothingness at the very bottom of the world.
Unsurprisingly, I spent my first ten non-caffeinated days wanting to kill myself.
And look just there, how I have used the phrase “wanting to kill myself” as a kind of mildly self-deprecating but good-humored figure of speech.
Surprising, one of my selves says to another. As I was likewise surprised when, a few weeks ago, I was standing behind a podium and in answer to a reader’s too-personal question, I heard myself saying, “There was a period of my life when I would have considered killing myself, but that period is over now.”
Is that so? That same self, the cynic, asked.
Yes, another answered (this one has a slightly imperious, almost British accent), I feel quite confident that’s where we are.
Two mostly wonderful things about life after fifty: I’m never sure what I am going to say until I hear myself saying it, and it’s hard to remember, with any real accuracy, feeling any way other than how I feel right now. But if a person’s books are any reliable record of her life, and in my case they certainly ought to be, there were periods in both my thirties and forties where—and here I want to be careful with the wording—the possibility of suicide came up a lot.
In my thirties I wrote a book called Waltzing the Cat, and that book contains a story call “Cataract,” about a river trip gone awry, and after the flip where both female characters nearly drown in one of the five largest runable falls in America, there is this moment of dialogue:
“Lucy,” Thea said, “if you were to kill yourself ever, what would it be over?”
“A man,” I said, though I didn’t have a face for him. “It would only be over a man. And you?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe something, not that.”
“What then?” I said. But she didn’t answer.
“If you are ever about to kill yourself over a man,” she said, “get yourself to my house. Knock on my door.”
“You do the same,” I said. “For any reason.”
“We’ll talk about what it was like being under the water,” she said, “what it was like when we popped out free.”
The only decade of my life in which I don’t remember having suicidal thoughts—until this one—was my twenties, possibly because I seemed to be trying so hard to kill myself in more socially acceptable ways. I rowed brutal Class V rapids during hundred-year floods in Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Montana (I actually followed the high water north as the season progressed). I jumped off snow cornices into near-vertical “couloirs,” with skis so long they look cartoonish by today’s standards. During my years of guiding hunters, I kept watch all night over the carcasses of Dahl sheep, deep in the heart of the Alaska Range’s grizzly bear country.
In those days, I seemed to gravitate toward natural disasters, riding out hurricane Gordon in the Atlantic ocean on a 52-foot sailboat built to cruise the Intercoastal Waterway (it was fat enough to hold a square dance in its main cabin), or trying to keep my skis on top of the leading edge of an avalanche in Colorado’s backcountry. I slogged hip-deep through a mud slide in my long underwear in the Brooks Range, and more than once found myself flat on my back after being bucked off any number of green-broke horses.
I called the suicide hotline only once during that decade, after a horse shattered both bones in my forearm. A surgeon spent nearly nine hours taking eighteen pieces of pulverized bone out of my ulna and replacing it with cadaver bone from the bone bank, and then sent me home with two eight-inch scars and a bag full of Darvocet.
When the guy picked up the phone, I told him that I knew I ought to be happy. The last thing the surgeon had said to me before the anesthesia kicked in was that I should prepare myself to wake up from surgery with my arm amputated at the elbow, and yet here it still was, hurting like a son of a bitch, but more or less intact.
“Are you taking anything?” he asked, and when I told him about the Darvocet he said, “Well for Chrissake, stop! Haven’t you ever heard of Advil?” Which turned out to be some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten in my life.
I spent a good portion of my forties writing a book called Contents May Have Shifted, and its working title, for all the years it lived in my laptop, was Suicide Note, or 144 Reasons Not To Kill Yourself.
Really? the cynic pipes up again. Really? If you were ever actually suicidal, you must not have been very good at it. And it’s hard to argue with her now over our daily lunch of hibiscus tea and kale superfood salad. It’s bad business to deny your past, the earnest self—the one who pays attention in therapy—tells her, and for now they (we) leave it at that.
Much was made of my working title in interviews I gave when Contents eventually came out, but I had never intended to call the published book Suicide Note. Too maudlin, too melodramatic, the contradiction within the longer version of the title dishonest, almost coy. The working title was simply a daily way to describe to myself what I was doing: prophylactically collecting and transliterating suicide prevention nuggets, gathering up all the things about this planet that made me want to stay on it, against some unknown future moment when I might feel it would be better not to. And, because I find myself here on the other side of fifty trying with all my might to stay alive, it seems reasonable to conclude that at least to some extent my strategy worked.
The waitress brings Kyle and Maggie their beers and me my Pellegrino with lime, and we are talking about favorite dogs or favorite bands, but Kyle is looking at me so intently with those sad, soulful eyes that the next thing I know I’m saying, “You know, there was a period of my life when I thought I might kill myself because a man I thought I loved didn’t love me back. It embarrasses me a little to say so, but there it is.”
Kyle’s face is a mixture of stunned and relieved, which I take as a sign to continue. “I’ve always measured my sense of well-being on airplanes, when we hit turbulence. You know, how much—or how little—do I care if this plane goes down?” They nod. They both do know.
“I can remember actually willing the plane to tumble from the sky a few times, because some Joe I probably could not pick out of a lineup, were he here tonight, didn’t call or went out with one of his four other girlfriends or lied about where he was last Saturday.”
The girls are quiet—even Apacha has stopped licking his balls. It flashes through my mind that I might be grossing them out, like in the way you don’t want your parents to mention the great sex they had over breakfast.
“You didn’t ask me to dinner, I know, so I would sit here and rattle on with my old lady advice,” I continue, “but I have been thinking a lot lately about how much power I used to give the men in my life to make me feel okay, or not okay. There are reasons for that—ugly childhood reasons—so I try to give myself a break. I’m not a regretter, exactly—I think all writers need something to push against, and maybe that was my thing to push against for a long time—and yet at fifty-two it seems absolutely mystifying to me that I would give men so much power. It’s power I don’t think most of them even really want.”
Now Kyle is looking at me like I have crawled inside her brain. We are all silent for a while. “Maggie’s got a good man,” is what she finally manages to say.
I nod. I don’t doubt it. Maggie’s grief for her mom is palpable, piercing, but it is not full of the shadows and confusion that come when a little girl is treated badly in a hundred different ways by fathers or father figures, that insidious, everlasting training.
“I don’t know anything about your past,” I say to Kyle, “and I’m not trying to tell you how to live. Somebody could have said all this to me when I was your age—I’m sure someone did—and it would have probably just made me double down. I had to do it as long as I had to do it, chase those nasty cowboys.” I smile and Kyle smiles, but her eyes never do. “I’m just saying, I guess, that there’s another version, after this version, to look forward to. Because of wisdom or hormones or just enough years going by. If you live long enough you quit chasing things that hurt you; you eventually learn to hear the sound of your own voice.”
Apacha groans, maybe signaling the end of the conversation, so I drain my Pellegrino and reach for the check, but Kyle stills my hand.
“What made it change,” she asks, “for you?”
There are so many possible answers, including thirty-thousand dollars worth of therapy; several new age healing ceremonies—one involving a man who set his chest on fire and another involving a dust buster; five published books and a pre-cancer diagnosis, but I say the thing that feels first, truest, and most long-term: “I realized I could make my own life,” I tell her. “I could have my own ranch. I finally realized that I could be the cowboy.”
But now it is a grey, late-November morning, and I’m here, a cowboy on her very own ranch—120 acres of hard dirt and ponderosa, of sixty-mile-per-hour winds and blizzards that drop five feet of snow in 24 hours; of floods and drought; and last summer, the second largest fire in Colorado history; of blue columbine and quaking aspen and twelve-thousand-foot peaks all around; of unspeakable beauty and a kind of quiet, on a winter morning, that most people on the planet have forgotten exists. I am here, in the middle of all that, and I am pretty damn sad anyhow.
I have two very elderly horses that may not make the winter, and I can’t decide if it is more humane to move them to a warmer place where everything would be unfamiliar, or try to heat the barn a few degrees with chicken lamps so they can live, or die, in the place they know. My ewes are in heat, and I can’t seem to build a fence the ram can’t tear down, and the wolfhound girl pup I got to cure my three-year-old hound’s loneliness since his running partner died last May has so far only caused him to look at me with exasperation, incomprehension, and a kind of deep betrayal in his eyes. The days seem impossibly short already, and yet we’ll lose daylight for another month before this planetary ship turns itself around.
Facebook has already made me cry four times this morning. First it was Ursula LeGuin reminding me that we don’t write for profit, we write for freedom; next it was the Unist’ot’en Indiginous Camp Resistence trying to stop the Keystone Pipeline; and then it was the state of Nevada electing a man to their house of representative who said that “simple-minded darkies” show “lack of gratitude” to whites. Honestly, who wouldn’t be sad waking up in this world? And then I clicked on The Prairie Fire Lady Choir singing a song my friend Annette wrote called “Not A Good Man”—a kind of Irving Berlin meets Laurie Anderson number, with all of them wearing lollipop-colored dresses and big hair and when that teared me up, I knew I might be in serious trouble.
Cry me a river, says the cynic. How about we make a short list of all things that could be wrong and are not. So I do. At this moment, none of my close friends are dying (except in as much as we are all dying). I have a job—I have several jobs—and at only one of them am I not respected. The man I love, who has been almost comatose with sadness for the better part of seven years, has decided, at last, to come back to life. I am not underwater on my mortgage. I have a barn full of hay and two cords of wood on the porch and a cabinet full of dark-chocolate-covered figs and almonds. My upstream neighbor has not gotten into bed with the frackers. My presence here means these 120 acres will not be subdivided, will not be paved over, will not be turned into dream homes for people who come here one week a year.
And still, this morning, that dark undertow, the feeling of looking up from the bottom of a dank, wet well . . .
Time to move. On this point, all selves are in agreement. Put the smart wool on, lace your boots, don your barn coat. Cut the apples, cut the carrots, feed the equines from your hands. Cut the string that holds the bale of grass hay together, two flakes for the mini-donkeys, six for the horses, everything that is left for the sheep. Top off the horse water, top off the sheep water, double check the heaters in the troughs. Listen to the reassuring thump of cold boot soles on frozen ground, the comforting crunch of equine teeth grinding hay, the otherworldy woosh of wing beats overhead—the bald eagle who winters upriver, back after his one-year hiatus.
The forecast is calling for wind and possibly snow tonight, but right now it is perfectly still and almost 20 degrees, too warm for my heavy barn coat. The creek at this time of year, with all the freezing and unfreezing, is an ice sculpture, the willows that line it pencil drawings, the mountaintop beyond it already feet deep in snow.
The puppy is charging and leaping to see above what’s left of the tall grass, while William, the three-year-old, patrols the perimeter. From here I can see Middle Creek Road, Lime Creek Road, and the state highway across the river, and though this represents some fairly large percentage of all the roads in Mineral County, for the hour we’ll be walking not one car will come by.
Out here, on this acreage, I’ve learned not only to hear my own voice, but to recognize what makes my heart leap up and then go toward it: the snowshoe hare—halfway through his biannual color change that William scares up along the back fence, his big white feet flashing as his still-tawny body gains distance. A coyote, sitting, dignified and still as a church 200 yards across the pasture watching us make our way to the wetland, and then the flash when William sees him, and he sees that William sees him, his total evaporation into thin air, like a ghost dog come from some other plane of being.
These are the things that have always healed me, it just took me half a lifetime to really trust them, to understand how infallible they are. Moving through space, preferably outdoor space, preferably outdoor space that maintains some semblance of nature—if not this nature, some other nature. When I’m happy, it’s a carnival out here, and when I am sad it is almost too beautiful to bear—but not quite—it is definitely too beautiful to contemplate leaving. I climb the hill where the homesteader Robert Pinkley—the first man to build a cabin on this land—is buried, and I know well that when I claimed this 120 acres it also claimed me. We are each other’s mutual saviors.
Toward the end of Contents May Have Shifted, I wrote the following lines: “I’m beginning to understand that when we want to kill ourselves, it is not because we are lonely, but because we are trying to break up with the world before the world breaks up with us.” Which represents some progress, I realize, from what I wrote in Waltzing the Cat.
But the world, I have finally allowed myself to believe, is not out to hurt me, but to heal me, and I will hold on to it with both hands for as long as I am able. This is what I try to explain to Kyle and Maggie over a second round of beers and Pellegrino in Pittsburg.
We decide that bison burgers sound better than falafel, so Maggie drives me to BRGR while Kyle runs home to drop off Apacha. Maggie and I talk about the eleven-month trip she and her boyfriend took four months after her mother’s death. “I was afraid I wouldn’t survive her absence if I stayed still,” she said, and I said, “Maybe you were collecting new things to love about the world.”
We wait for Kyle for thirty minutes and then an hour. Finally she calls to say she is on her way, so we order for her, but by the time she actually gets there, her food is stone cold and she barely eats a bite.
She’ll write me an email a few weeks later thanking me for the things I said to her, admitting that she had been driving around all that time we were waiting, sobbing, trying to pull herself together enough to come back out, but that I wasn’t to worry too much about her because since that night she had been working on her writing and spending quality time with Maggie and Apacha and feeling a whole lot better. I wrote back and told her that though I thought of her often, that I hadn’t, exactly, been worried. She sounded so solid, so grounded in her email, that I decided I didn’t need to say the other thing I was pretty sure of: that she had cried that night, not so much for the disappointing past, as for the dawning possibility of an unspeakably beautiful future. I was pretty sure she already knew.