5

Change Is Gonna Come
or
Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth

When we step out of the car, there’s a loud screeching of machinery—hrrrmmm hrrrrrmmm—and the smell of wood burning and smoke rising through the trees. The earth is wet and reddish brown, staining our shoes. I sit on a log and watch Billy Holder, a wizened man who’s called “the artist with the bulldozer,” drive straight at the trees and push them over. If a hemlock or fir bounces back, Billy digs out the soil around the bottom, loosens the roots, and down the tree goes. Two other workers strip off branches and throw them into a bonfire that’s ten feet tall and burns around the clock.

I’m visiting Nina Zimbelman in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. She’s bought, for her community, a mountainside of virgin land that looks as it did at the time of the Revolutionary War. She lets Billy decide where to carve out roads and clear sites for homes. Despite the smoke and noise, I can’t stay awake. I’m falling asleep sitting up, probably because I’m terrified of what I’ve come to North Carolina to do.

I stand and walk toward the dozer. Billy throws a chain around a stack of trunks and starts hauling them down to the county road. The trees have dark brown bark, but where they’ve been cut, they look exposed, white, raw. I turn to Nina. “How do you feel…cutting down living trees?”

“It’s for a purpose,” she says. “Before you can have a new experience, you have to clear out the old.”

I watch the trees being dragged behind the dozer, their branches breaking off with loud cracks.

“I identify with the trees.”

Nina laughs. “You’re in tear-down phase.”

Change! Tear it down! Start the revolution. Break the eggs to make omelets. When we were younger, we were breathless for change and expected it to keep rolling—a perfect wave in an endless summer. Change was carrying us in a direction we welcomed: participatory democracy, racial equality, more enlightened gender roles, and sexual freedom. Then we awakened to find that change can trigger a backlash and sweep you off to straits where you never intended to go. My first book was called Loose Change, and at the end, an activist who’d fought for a revolution that did not materialize said: “That’s the lesson of revolutions. They don’t turn out the way you expect.”

These days I brace for change. A new version of Windows? I’m fine with the old, it does everything I want so why do I have to install a more complicated program? One of my friends bought a TiVo, but it’s still in the box because he doesn’t have time to learn to use it. I hate it when a favorite restaurant closes or a company stops making the slippers I’ve worn for years. But this is the tip of the iceberg.

Change has a different meaning from when we were young—more serious because it often brings loss of what you love and ultimately loss of all. The Buddha said a noble truth to reflect on is: “Everything I hold dear will change and be taken from me.” In secular terms, Mike Nichols told his producer, after the colossal success of The Graduate: “We still have to die.”

How we deal with change is the deciding factor in whether we weep or laugh, suffer or have joy, in the years ahead. You can resist or roll with change, cling to the rocks and get thrashed by the current or let it carry you to the sea. When a business owner I know watched his product become obsolete, he said, half-joking, “Here it comes: another fucking opportunity for growth.”

The choice is between contracting or expanding, but it’s not so simple. I know it’s essential to let go, surrender, but how can I open my arms like the Indian on the horse at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when I’m frightened of losing what I love?

Reb Zalman

One of the first people I talked with about change was Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, called Reb Zalman. Friends and students view him as a model of how to be bold, warm, lively, and unpredictable at eighty-one. With smooth olive skin, white hair and beard, Reb Zalman wears suspenders and a knitted yarmulke. He’s been married four times, had ten children, taught at three universities, written hundreds of articles and books, and been a friend to religious leaders from Thomas Merton to the Dalai Lama. He founded the Jewish Renewal movement to infuse new meaning into Jewish traditions, drawing on the Hasidic rabbinical training he received in Eastern Europe along with teachings from Buddhists, Native Americans, and Catholic priests. My favorite image of him is at a Simchat Torah service I attended, a celebration of the Torah being given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Reb Zalman danced around the room carrying the scrolls in his arms as George Harrison sang “My Sweet Lord.”

When he was about to turn sixty, though, Reb Zalman had plunged into a depression that “no amount of busyness could dispel,” he says. “My career was going pretty good and didn’t justify the depression. But at night in unguarded moments, when I looked in the mirror, I saw I was changing—getting old. How would I deal with that? After age fifty, you’ve already procreated and done what you’ve done in the world. Why do we have to live? Salmon spawn and die. What are we needed for?”

He went off on a forty-day retreat in the mountains of New Mexico, living in a rustic cabin where he prayed, meditated, wrote, and took walks. When he came down from the mountain, he understood that a new vision was needed. The models that prevailed then for growing older were: the medical model, where it’s treated as a disease; the die-in-the-saddle model, where you keep working and expire slumped over at your desk; and the recreation model, where you say, “I’ve deferred my own gratification and now it’s my turn to play, dammit.” Reb Zalman founded the Spiritual Eldering Institute to offer a different approach. He says the decades after fifty are a time for “unparalleled learning,” making peace with the past, and becoming an elder who inspires younger people.

I don’t look forward to being called an “elder,” “senior,” or “crone.” An elder is respected in tribal cultures, but we don’t live in tribes, and I sense that people who make a point about “honoring elders” are merely being polite. Reb Zalman concedes that “we need to find a better word.” But Michael Meade, the poet and mythologist, says we can make “elder” work. “When I think of an elder, I see the tree,” Meade says. “An elder is vital and creative, an elder has courage, humor, and salt. An elder is weird—that’s a Welsh word that means you have a foot in two worlds, this one and the eternal. So the elder is truly weird.”

Reb Zalman, after founding the Spiritual Eldering Institute, designed a workshop in which participants can review their lives, analyze what they’ve learned, and prepare to pass that wisdom down the line. He wrote a book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, then turned over the running of the organization to others. His strength lies in coming up with a vision and gathering people to pursue it, then he’ll move on to create a fresh project.

At seventy-nine, he began studying Arabic. “If I don’t go into a new field, I’ll get stale,” he says. He thinks it’s also important to learn new motor skills. “I went bowling with my son. Oy, my arm hurt because the bowling ball was too heavy, but there was also the joy—the endorphins—of knocking pins down.” He laughs. When he was lecturing in Brazil, “they offered me a hang glider ride. Fifteen minutes later, I was in the air.”

Weren’t you scared? I ask.

“Of course I was scared! I was afraid my brake would fail and I’d fall, but that’s also the thrill of it,” Reb Zalman says. “You can be more reckless now than when you were younger. That’s why we need an Elder Corps to go into the trouble spots of the world and work for peace. People say, ‘You might get shot.’ Okay, that’s better than dying of a heart attack.”

Here Come the Masters

One of the best approaches to change, as Reb Zalman indicates, is to learn something, because it requires you to take the initiative and get out in front of the wave instead of letting it break on you. Becoming a beginner again is like traveling to an exotic country: All your senses start firing.

Some people go back to college. Aimee Liu, who’d published four books, including Cloud Mountain, applied for an MFA program in creative writing when her youngest child was also applying to college. “I felt beat up by the publishing business and needed a kick start,” Aimee says, “and the degree would enable me to teach.” She and her son wrote their essays at the same time. “It was kind of cute. We compared applications and watched the mailbox for acceptances.”

Barbara Weiss, a high school teacher in Washington, D.C., applied to the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at fifty-four. She figured that years of herding teenagers would serve her in dealing with heads of state. In Massachusetts, Tracy Kidder, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, enrolled in Italian classes at Smith College. “It’s a gorgeous language, though useless,” he says. “The undergraduates hated me because I’d memorize cantos from the Inferno.”

After moving to Colorado, I learned there was a masters ski racing program at the local resort, Eldora, and signed up. “Masters,” I discovered, is becoming the PC word for “older.” When I transferred my funds to a Boulder bank, they informed me they had a “masters account” with special rates for people over sixty. I like the concept of “mastery,” which is fortunate because masters programs are hatching everywhere: masters running, masters baseball, masters basketball, and masters swimming.

I’ve skied since I was nineteen but never raced, so on the first morning I show up for training, I find that everything I know and all the gear I own are wrong. There are ten men (the oldest is eighty-one), one woman, and two coaches setting up gates for a slalom course. I’m wearing a teal Jean-Claude Killy one-piece suit I bought on sale in Aspen, but the team members laugh at it, calling it “a green body bag.” They wear skintight racing suits with large spiderweb patterns, and over the suits they wear black shorts that are held up by suspenders, something like lederhosen, to keep their butts warm on the chairlift. They tell me my boots are inadequate—not high performance—and my skis are hopeless. The lone woman, Marcie, who’s in her sixties and would later fall on the snow and break her pelvis, offers to give me her old helmet—required equipment.

There’s no problem keeping up with the team when we ski down the mountain, but when we enter the slalom course, I start skidding and slowing down. For years I’ve been taught to stand up tall, be graceful, and expend minimal energy, “just put your weight on your big toe and you’ll turn.” But the racers assume an aggressive crouch, pushing hard to get their skis on edge and their bodies forward. We watch a video of Bode Miller, and his skis are almost vertical, cutting like knives across the snow. I have no idea how to get from my nearly flat stance to Bode’s edge.

I decide I don’t want to race in competitions and break my pelvis, I just want to learn to ski better and do this with a lively group. The coaches, Luther Tatge and Eliot Young, show me one thing at a time to change, and I make progress. At the end of the season, they talk me into entering a race, the Mountain Dew Vertical Challenge, being held at Eldora. Marcie says, “It’s fun, and lots of people in it have never raced before.” So I put on a bib with the number 69 and start to get nervous. This is a race, a test, and I don’t fail tests. You’re not allowed to take a practice run to check out the gates; you get one shot. I ski down the course more cautiously than I’d like, and the woman announcing the race says: “Sara Davidson from Eldora Masters Racing. Good time, Sara!” What is she talking about? I clock the slowest time—by six or eight seconds—of all my teammates. But at the awards ceremony I’m handed a gold medal. I came in first in my age group because I was the only woman in my age group.

Nevertheless, taking home the gold is like tasting blood. I’m now qualified to ski in the Mountain Dew finals and drive to Keystone, Colorado, for the event. They begin the race with the oldest women and work down to the youngest, then take the oldest men and work down to the youngest. Letting the older females go first gives us the advantage of skiing a course that’s not rutted and grooved. We like that. The first woman is eighty-three and moves so slowly she’s practically walking, poling around the gates as everybody cheers and says, “How cool is that?” One of my teammates, though, says it’s patronizing: “letting them go first and cheering because they’re moving at all.” When they call my class, there are a dozen women in my age group, and I come in last. But next season, my coaches tell me, “you’ve got a shot at making the podium.”

Two years have passed and I have not made the podium, but I’m constantly learning, and every morning when I train, flying downhill on freshly packed snow never fails to boost my mood. And there are other benefits. After my first season I took my two children and a few of their friends to Vail. I’d taught my son to ski when he was five, holding him between my legs as we coasted downhill, but by twelve he didn’t want to ski with me. He’d stand at the bottom of the lift looking frustrated and say, “What took you so long!”

At Vail, he strapped on a snowboard and on the first run I beat him to the chairlift. “Have you noticed anything different about my skiing?” I asked.

He nodded and said under his breath, “Remarkable.”

Because I’d been the worst on my team and could never close the gap, I’d assumed I was not improving much. My son announced he was going to ski the next day because skis are faster than boards, implying there was no way in hell I would beat him.

The next morning my son and I, both on skis, started at one end of the resort and worked our way up and down three mountains to the other end of Vail without stopping except to have lunch. I did not beat him, but he had to work hard to stay in front. He was pumped, cheeks flushed, when he drove our group home that night. “I hate to admit it,” he told the other kids, “but I really enjoyed skiing with Mom.”

Bebe Moore Campbell

There’s another way of tackling change that I call the judo approach: absorbing the force of the blow and flipping it to your advantage. I met with Bebe Moore Campbell, who managed to do this when unexpected events put an end to the plans she’d made. Bebe, author of bestselling books like Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, has been called “one of the most important African-American writers of the century” by The Washington Post. She’d expected that in her fifties she’d be freer of responsibilities and could spend more time with her husband, travel, and read. But her twenty-seven-year-old daughter, an aspiring actress, moved back home with her toddler just as Bebe’s eighty-two-year-old mother developed glaucoma and couldn’t walk well and a loved one was diagnosed with mental illness. Bebe took them all in. “I’ve got four generations in my house,” she says. “These are the most stressful years of my life.” She’s caring for them all while she works on a book and campaigns for better mental health care. She wrote her latest novel, 72 Hour Hold, while she was “mostly in my car, transporting this one to the hospital and that one to nursery school.”

Her granddaughter, Elisha, wearing pink overalls, watches cartoons as Bebe and I talk at the dining table of her home in Baldwin Hills, an upscale black neighborhood in Los Angeles. The house is elegant, with a granite kitchen, swimming pool, and three-car garage. All the rooms are filled with paintings, crafts, and sculpture of and by blacks.

Bebe, wearing purple lipstick and her hair straight to the shoulders, says she’s under pressure to complete her ninth book. “I was part of the Terry McMillan crowd. The publishers had ignored black writers and particularly black female writers. Suddenly we were hot and had to hustle to get the books out and make that list.” She says she’s looking around “for what I’ll do with the rest of life, because literature is a cruel business. You can work for years, and one savaging from critics and it’s all over.”

Elisha spills her juice and Bebe grabs a sponge to mop it up. Her book, 72 Hour Hold, is about a middle-class black family “coming to grips with their child’s mental illness,” she says. “Having a mentally ill child is worse than segregation because of the stigma, the guilt, and because you’re alone. With segregation you have a group.” She learned about this firsthand when she and seven other black women who had mentally ill relatives “had to go west—to the white part of town—to get some training. Then we came back to our community because the need and stigma here are greater.” She leads a weekly group for family members, where they discuss brain diseases, medications, and how to communicate with empathy. “We also have a group for the consumers….”

Who’re the consumers? I ask.

“The ones who consume the medications.” Her own relative is stable, she says, “but it wasn’t always like that—it was frightening.”

Bebe says one of her friends told her recently, “We’ve been stars. Now it’s our turn to be servants.”

Serving whom?

“Serving the household. Serving the community. Serving our loved ones.” Bebe says she’s learning to shift from achieving to nurturing. “I want to give more to the personal life and a lot less to the work. I never thought that before.”

She’s come to not just tolerate but savor having four generations in her home. “I grew up with my mother, my grandma, aunt, and cousin in the same house—that was a part of black culture until recently. It’s still part of Latino and immigrant culture.” Family members divide the labor. Bebe cooks, finds the right preschool, and drives Elisha there and back, correcting her grammar and teaching her manners. Bebe’s husband, a banker, plays with Elisha at night, and her daughter takes Elisha to movies and parks. “I don’t have to see Shrek,” Bebe says with a laugh. “When I’ve cooked a good meal and everyone’s sitting around the table, talking and laughing—that’s satisfying.”

I ask if her daughter and granddaughter might get a place of their own.

“No time soon,” Bebe says. “I like ’em under this roof right now. It works.” She has a ritual: The last thing she does at night is go into her mother’s room. Her mother, a social worker and lifelong “church lady,” never cooked, Bebe says. “My grandmother did that. But my mother sure can dispense the wisdom.” Talking with her mother before she sleeps makes Bebe feel calm. “She’s serene,” Bebe says. “I want her serenity.”

Two years after our talk, on November 27, 2006, Bebe Moore Campbell died at fifty-six, of brain cancer.

Paul Krassner

In my twenties, I was married to a man whose father had written hit songs and Broadway musicals in the thirties and forties. He couldn’t bear rock ’n’ roll and would say over dinner at Sardi’s, “Where’s the melody? There’s no melody. And I can’t understand the words.” I had little sympathy, but twenty years later I heard myself voice the same complaint about rap: “There’s no melody. And the lyrics are a horror.” Plato wrote in The Republic that any change in the culture’s music “is full of danger to the whole state.” He understood the power of music to dispossess one generation and raise up the next. For most people, it’s tough to love the music that replaces what you grew up with. On Match.com, the majority in the forty-five to sixty-five age group, when asked to list the kinds of music they like, respond: “Everything but rap.”

Not Paul Krassner, the satirist and comic who founded the Realist, one of the first underground papers. He’s been able to ride with changes, even in music, and he’s outlasted his friends who took their lives: Abbie Hoffman, Phil Ochs, Lenny Bruce, and Hunter Thompson. Last September, Paul called from his home in Desert Hot Springs, California, to tell me he was coming to Boulder to perform with a rap group, Guerilla Word Fare. He said he’d be doing a new stand-up routine, Geezerstock, about aging rock fans who gather for a redux of Woodstock. “I’m finally playing the age card,” Paul said. In the routine, he’s the announcer onstage at the festival who says to the crowd: “I’ve just been handed an announcement. Do NOT take the brown antacid.”

While most comics feed on darkness and rage, Paul, according to his editor at Playboy, is “the only Jew I know who doesn’t get angry.” Paul created the term yippies and still dresses like one, wearing T-shirts with political slogans and rumpled pants. He still smokes pot, still has lots of curly hair, and walks with a limp—teetering from side to side in a gait he calls “the Frankenstein walk.” He says the limp is the result of being beaten by police during the riots that broke out in San Francisco after the trial and lenient sentence given to the man convicted of murdering Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to public office.

On the Friday night Paul is supposed to perform at Trilogy, I can hear the rap music from two blocks away. At the door to the dance hall, I ask the man collecting tickets, “When is Paul Krassner going on?”

He shrugs, pointing to the only man in the hall with gray hair. “Ask him yourself.”

I make my way through the room, packed with twenty-somethings who’re dancing, drinking, and shouting to be heard above the assault on the eardrums that’s passing for music.

Paul is slumped in an armchair beside a speaker. I crouch down to say hello.

He looks at me with the eyes of a dog about to be put down. “I’m freaking out,” he says. “I can’t do my thing here.” He waves at the young crowd. “I can’t do Geezerstock.”

“Let’s go out where we can talk.”

We sit down in a booth in the Trilogy restaurant and Paul asks the waiter for soup, but they’ve run out. “This is a nightmare,” he says.

“How did you get involved?”

He says the leader of the rap group contacted him and asked if he would collaborate on a music/spoken-word event. “We e-mailed back and forth. I said I would do a bit about being a child prodigy, playing the violin at Carnegie Hall, and they could play violin music in the background. The guy said, ‘Yeah, great!’ But there’s no violin. There’s no collaboration. I was brought here on false pretenses!”

Paul says the band wasn’t at the airport to meet him, he had to track them down, and when they collected him an hour later, they asked, “Who were the yippies, anyway?” Paul hits his head. “It’s like they were asking, ‘Who were the Wobblies? Who was Boss Tweed?’”

They had told Paul they would pay for a room in a bed-and-breakfast, but on the drive to Boulder they said the inn was sold out. “They put me in their crash pad, in a room that has nothing but a mattress on the floor.”

“They put you in a crash pad? Jesus.”

“There’s a light switch on the wall but no light, and no radio or TV, and I’m a media junkie!”

We decide to leave and go somewhere else for dinner when one of the owners of Trilogy comes up to Paul. “They’re ready for you.”

I follow Paul back into the dance hall, where the band is still playing. Doing the Frankenstein walk, Paul climbs the steps to the stage and waits. It seems this song—if it can be called that—will never end and it doesn’t; they merely break off playing abruptly. The only black musician—the only black person in the room and possibly in Boulder—says, “Mr. Krassner,” and shoves the microphone at him.

Paul comes out shooting—making fun of George Bush, comparing him to Hitler—but the kids are talking and paying no attention. Paul imitates Donald Rumsfeld, announcing that the atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison were “abuse but not torture.” Paul says, “Not only does the emperor have no clothes, he has a hard-on!” There’s a raunchy cheer from the crowd, not for Paul but for the black musician who’s gyrating his hips and fondling a girl at the side of the stage. Paul walks over and shoves the mike back at him, saying, “Thanks for your attention.”

Then we’re outside again. “I’m exhausted,” Paul says as I drive him to the crash pad. “I’ve been up since five this morning.” The bandleader had said he’d leave a key under the mat, but Paul lifts the mat and…why are we not surprised? No key. There’s a torn-up upholstered chair on the porch and Paul gamely drops into it. The Boulder City Council recently passed a law that it’s illegal to have a couch on your front porch. Too many students had set fire to couches, but the council didn’t outlaw chairs. “I’ll just wait here,” Paul says.

“It’s one in the morning; they could stay out till three or four.”

“I’ll be fine,” Paul says. “It’s a nice night. Don’t worry, please. Thanks for the ride.”

I walk to my car, but when I look back at Paul, dwarfed in the beat-up chair, I can’t drive away. “You’re coming to my house.”

I settle him in my guest room, and the next morning I make scrambled eggs and bagels as Paul limps back and forth on the deck in the sunshine. “That gig was humiliating,” he says, “but you gotta laugh. I’ve never been introduced like that—the guy just throws me the microphone. The only worse introduction I ever got was at the Montreal Comedy Festival. I told the emcee I was a social and political satirist, so he introduces me as ‘Paul Krassner—a sociopath.’”

I laugh.

Paul deals with disaster, with all of life, by laughing. He explains how humor became “my religion. At age six, I was onstage at Carnegie Hall playing the Vivaldi Concerto in A Minor. My left leg started to itch, and it got more and more intense. So I stood on my left foot and scratched with the right, not missing a note. The audience laughed! It was like a symphony, with different tones and tempos, and I was hooked.”

Despite the fiasco at Trilogy, Paul still connects with young people who delight in his bashing of people in high places. He writes columns for the New York Press and for Adult Video News Online. “It’s a porn site. They said I could write anything as long as it has something to do with sex. So my column is called ‘One Hand Jerking.’”

When Paul does stand-up comedy, a third of his audience are young people and a third have “very old ponytails. Someone always asks if I ever think about death. I say, I can sum it up in three words: Every fucking day.”

Paul and his wife, Nancy, a video documentary artist (the pair remind me of the cartoonist and his wife in American Splendor), often joke about where they’ll spend their last years. Nancy says, “We’ll pass a trailer park and I’ll say, That could be our last resort.” Paul says there should be an old age home for humorists, “where there’re really good drugs and lots of laughs.”

Show me the way. I admire Paul’s resilience: He’s always lived on the margins, never compromised to fit the marketplace, but adapted on his own terms and maintained his humor. On the night he bombed at Trilogy, when he was in my guest room, tossing in bed, he told himself, “You’ll laugh at this in ten years. In one year. In one week! So why not now?”

Tim-ber

After watching Paul, Reb Zalman, and Bebe meet change with fortitude and humor, I fly to North Carolina to visit Nina Zimbelman, who skates through transitions with more willingness and trust than anyone I know. A tiny woman in her fifties with dark brown eyes that miss nothing, Nina had previously lived in Egypt, in a villa near the Great Sphinx of Giza, where she’d been doing metaphysical research. She left Cairo sooner than she’d planned because she received what she calls a “knowing” to move to Robbinsville, North Carolina, a small town in Appalachia where her ex-husband had purchased land. Nina didn’t want to leave Egypt and settle in hillbilly country; she thought she’d have nothing in common and no way to connect with people there. “It was like I was being put out to pasture,” Nina says. But she’d learned to follow inner promptings even when she couldn’t understand where they’d lead.

Nina had three students with her, but the knowing—which she hears as specifically as I get directions from MapQuest—was to buy a parcel of virgin forest, clear sites, and put up multiple houses. “It made no sense, because there were only four of us,” she says. “But the knowing was to build homes and a separate unit—a commissary—where a dozen people could cook and eat.” By the time I visited two years later, a community was growing and there were a dozen people eating together in the commissary.

Robbinsville is a conservative, red-voting community of about eight hundred with a median household income of $14,000. Houses are tucked in the hills on roads or “branches” where you’ll see barns with JESUS IS LORD painted on the side and notices of gospel singing and summer Bible school. No one, including Nina, could have predicted that she’d find people there who were eager to take classes with her or that she’d meet and collaborate with Patricia (Trish) Johnson, MD, head of the largest medical clinic in the county, the Tallulah Health Center. Trish, who’s as small as Nina, with blue eyes and curly blond hair, had studied qigong and was teaching it to her patients, calling it “Chinese exercise.” With a gentle laugh, she says, “If my patients can’t pronounce it, they won’t do it.” Nina and Trish, who privately refer to themselves as the “mighty midgets,” were seeing clients together, using Trish’s medical training and Nina’s intuitive skills to learn the source of people’s illness. They were having such success treating patients with severe chronic disease, including the town mayor, that word spread and they were booked with clients who’d never heard the word metaphysical. What they felt was Nina’s love, which softened the sting when she hit them with the truth about themselves they didn’t want to hear.

In previous years when I would visit Nina, I’d slip quickly into an unaccustomed state, where I’d feel at ease and safe and there was nothing under the sun to worry about. But that’s not happening on this trip. The night I arrive, I can’t sleep, heartsick and frightened that I’m alone with no direction home.

In the morning, Nina drives me to the land she’s developing in an area called England Branch. She introduces me to Billy, who had walked the property with Nina and told her to buy it. A thin man of sixty-seven, wearing a red cap and navy overalls that hang on him, Billy drives the dozer up the mountain, zigzagging back and forth, pushing over trees until the patch he’s working on is level. Sitting on a log, I lean back against a hemlock. Nina’s talking, but my eyelids keep falling shut. Billy stops the dozer, walks over, and shakes my shoulder. “Ya wanna ride?” He climbs back on and pats the yellow seat beside him. “Sit raaat here.”

I swing up beside him and we drive uphill, straight at a clump of firs and mountain ash that yield and crash before us. Dirt and leaves spray back in our faces. The machine tips and vibrates so violently I have to brace myself to avoid falling out the side and being caught in the wheels and gears. Billy reverses and we tilt downhill, which feels as if we’re going to fall right over forward. When he stops and I get down, no longer fighting sleep, Billy asks, “Think yull make a bulldozer girl?”

“I don’t know. How long does it take to learn?”

“Ya give me a twelve-year-old, and if he’s sharp, I can train him in no time,” Billy says. “But ya take a fifty-year-old man? He’s never gonna learn.”

“That lets me out.”

Billy grins. “Hell, you ain’t fifty.”

Nina and I drive into town to eat lunch at the lone restaurant, which has a cafeteria-style buffet with stainless-steel containers of ground beef, grits, bacon, biscuits, and French fries. By the time we return to England Branch, Billy has carved a flat pad out of the sloping forest. Two hours ago we could see only trees, but now we look out on a vista of emerald mountains, dotted with puffs of mist for which they were named “Smoky.”

“That was fast,” I say.

Nina smiles. “That’s how fast you can let go.”

Sunday morning, two days later, everyone in the community gathers at the commissary to make omelets. They tell me I look different. Katy Lynch, MD, a colleague of Trish at the clinic, says, “You looked so sad and worried when you got here.”

“I’m still filled with fear.”

“Of what?”

“The tearing down….”

“That’s because you can’t see what’s coming,” Nina says.

“That’s just it. I wish I could swing out over the chasm and check out the terrain before letting go of the rope.”

Nina laughs. “You don’t get to do that. You have to let go first, not knowing.”

Like skiing the racecourse, I think.

“What’s ahead can’t be more painful than what you’re holding on to,” Nina says.

Katy offers to work with me using a neuromuscular process. We go off by ourselves, and I have only a foggy memory of the procedure: It involves holding out my arms and Katy pushing on them as she asks questions, to see what my unconscious muscular response will be. If my arms drop, it means “no,” and if they stay in place, it’s “yes.” But I can’t help trying to figure out the answer and help my arms along. “Let’s try something else,” Katy says.

She asks me to give in to the fear, “go into it completely, let it swallow you.”

I start to hyperventilate.

“What’s the core fear,” she asks, “the one that lies at the bottom of everything?”

“I’ll be destroyed. I won’t exist.”

“Is there a part of you that’s not afraid?”

“No.”

She asks me to strip off the fear, wherever it is. “Pull it off the body….”

“I can’t—I can’t separate the fear from me. I’d have to kill the whole being.”

“Peel it off,” she says. “Rip off your skin, your muscles, your organs, whatever it takes.”

I imagine yanking off hunks of flesh, muscles, and blood vessels and throwing them into a pile. But fear is driving through my chest like a cold spike.

Katy tells me to pull out the spike.

I picture straining and struggling with the spike, and with a terrible sucking sound, it comes out.

She asks, Is there any fear left?

Yes.

Keep peeling, she says, and at length I’m nothing but bones: skull, ribs, pelvis, tibia. I think of the Dalí painting My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column, Sky and Architecture. Dalí’s wife sits with her back to us, her flesh soft and youthful and her dark hair falling to her shoulders. She’s staring at a version of herself that’s all stone. In place of her pelvis there’s a flight of stairs, and in place of her torso are three columns through which you can see the sky.

I’m contemplating myself as a stack of bones, and yet there’s something breathing, pulsing. No matter what’s ahead—no matter what I do or don’t do, no matter what comes to me or what’s taken away—I’m going to die anyway. So what is there to be afraid of? Why all this terror and clenching? Like the trees before the bulldozer, I’m going down. I might as well yield.