OUR BODIES, OUR SMOKE

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The Moon Lodge

My acupuncturist scribbles some final notes onto her clipboard and smiles at me. I’m seated under the vaulted ceilings of her immaculate office suite near Union Square in New York City. Next to us is a vinyl exam table, a single potted orchid, and a tall street-facing window. Beyond that are the gabled steeples of an old Episcopal Church whose steps I tripped over hurrying to this appointment a few minutes before.

“Let me see your tongue,” she says.

I try scraping it clean against my teeth.

She considers it, iguana-like, from across the room, and then asks me about my diet (“Red meat, yogurt, whole grains, leafy greens”), bowel movements (“Firm, I guess”), and tobacco intake (“About a pouch per week”).

“A pouch?”

“I roll my own,” I say. “That’s about fifty cigarettes.”

My acupuncturist is Chinese American with bright, pick-like eyes, and when I confess my daily coffee intake (“Five cups”), she raises her thin brows and says, “Impressive.”

I tell her that I’m looking to curb my habits—but even to my ears this sounds insincere. It’s the plea of a burnout, a middle-aged man. What habits? I become suddenly aware of the smoke smell rising from my wool coat, the circles under my eyes. Under the tepid winter light, my hair is brittle and dull. I think back to a week before, when my stepmother sent me an email: “Your references to smoking are making me want to steal your lungs in the middle of the night and adopt them out,” to which she’d attached a photograph of black lungs.

That wasn’t the reason I ended up at the acupuncturist’s, but it was that same night that I made the appointment. My life in New York had changed. I was in a weakened state. Many of my friends had moved away from the city, college was coming to a close, and all the energy I’d once gleaned from a vibrant social life I began drawing from tobacco. I smoked with abandon and spent much of my time writing and lighting up in solitude. On the phone with my friend Lily one night, I’d said, “I wonder when this smoking streak will end,” and she’d just laughed at me. In the meantime, I’d grown chronically fatigued. This bothered me because the West Coast dogma of my childhood demands that I feel healthy by default.

“It’s good you had a chance to go a little wild,” my acupuncturist says, gathering her papers. “That’s what college is about. Testing your limits.” She leaves the room. I listen to the lively click of her boots from behind the door and relax onto the table.

I consider what she said and begin to doubt that I or anyone has natural limits. It seems more accurate that life is about imposing constraints, rather than arriving at them. And yet, from my first self-destructive freedoms of early adulthood to the kitchen table pedagogy of my well-meaning parents, the hope persists that I, or anyone, will reach their instructive “limit.” Staring into the mood-lit gloom of the office, wooden flute music playing from a boom box nearby, I think about the roots of my tobacco gluttony.

When my acupuncturist returns, she says, “We’re going to get you back on track.” She approaches the table and gently locates points on my feet, shins, and arms. As the first redemptive needles break my skin, I realize that what I didn’t express to her or myself is that I adore smoking cigarettes, in spite of my West Coast piety, black lungs, and my own better judgment. There’s the obvious physical and mental stimulation, addictive chemicals and oral fixation, but that’s not what I—or probably anyone—am dwelling on when I light up. So what is it that’s so pleasurable about this time-tested vice?

It’s hard to say exactly. Each situation modifies the smoke. For one, a cigarette provides a visceral and cerebral pause that lasts as long as it burns. On the contrary, and for the same reason, it prolongs conversation. Deep silences between friends become communal. Communion is made with strangers. As a writer, smoking commits my focus to the piece I’m working on, or binds my attention to the story I’m reading, or focuses an ongoing conversation I’m having with myself. It is instant gratification in a life punctuated by activities with very long-game outcomes. In that way, the relationship between smoking and the solitary acts of thinking and art-making resembles a kind of prayer. For almost every American Indian nation, and especially for the Lakota community I grew up around, tobacco is smoked as a means to send prayers to ancestors and the Great Mystery. The smoke can literally travel to the spirit realm, to where it carries the intentions of the smoker. I can’t help but make the connection, when smoking is a part of the writing act, between these inclinations. It puts thoughts into a concrete form and sends them into the ether, and there is great comfort in that.

In a lot of First Nations origin stories, it’s a woman who brings tobacco to Earth—like the Sauk spirit who emerges from the mist, hungry for the venison that two young hunters are roasting, and who leaves them the plant in thanks for sharing their meal. Or the Iroquois’ Sky Woman, who falls through a hole in the clouds and populates Turtle Island, giving birth to a daughter who dies in middle age and from whose grave sprouts the “life-givers”: sweet grass, strawberry, and tobacco. For the Lakota, tobacco is the tangible presence of Wóh?pe, or “the Beautiful One”—the daughter of the sun and the moon, both.

Of course, white people changed all of that, mostly men. While the plant originated in the Americas, America is also where it sours. The Europeans loved it; they brought it home to cultivate themselves, and their methods turned it colors the natives had never seen: brown, gray, black. It became the only commodity to be exchanged cross the Atlantic both ways, and its addictive properties increased, a new organism altogether, which tribes of the north traveled great distances to obtain when they heard about new arrivals coming in from Holland, England, or Spain. And later on, it becomes the crop propagated by slavery in the American South, and later still, in the arm of conservative lobbyists, laced with irresistible poisons, it was brought back across the ocean to grow (as my father once put it to dissuade me) “in China next to nuclear plants that leak.”

When my acupuncturist finishes setting the needles, she puts a space blanket over me and turns out the lights. “You know,” she says, “the fact that you’re this attuned to your health in your early twenties is a good sign for the future.” Of course, she’s unaware of the compulsory health-conscious culture I’ve come from. She says she’ll be back in a half hour and shuts the door.

I arrived in New York in late August 2007, a week before my nineteenth birthday. I was newly enrolled in the Pratt Institute writing program, and the housing application I’d received a few weeks before allowed me to state several preferences, including smoking or non. On a whim, I selected the former, though I wasn’t a smoker.

It was midnight when I landed in LaGuardia, with everything in the arrivals terminal cast in dirty yellow light. Rain poured down while I waited for a cab. Barreling along the expressway to a family friend’s house in Park Slope, I watched the dark wastes of Queens go by, and the brief glimmer of skyline just before the exit. The next day I hauled my enormous suitcases through puddles across campus, having spent the whole flight imagining I’d escaped the perpetual dampness of the Pacific Northwest.

I spent that afternoon taping photographs to the cement walls of my freshman dorm and carefully hanging my dresses in the wardrobe. My new roommate sat Yogi-like on her bed puffing Camel No. 9s, whose packaging, that summer, had been reintroduced in an irresistible palette of turquoise and magenta.

“I don’t smoke,” I told her, wedged halfway into my closet.

She blew curlicues around her head and scratched at the shooting stars tattooed across her collarbone. “Then why did you choose a smoking dorm?”

At the time I just shrugged as though it might have been accidental, because I knew my reasons were dumb. I was drawn to smokers, or at least to the idea of smokers. There was an intensity, camaraderie, and frenetic brain activity I associated with them. I believed there were possibilities in the smoking dorms that didn’t exist elsewhere.

Later that day, walking around Fort Greene together, I bummed a cigarette off my roommate.

“I thought you didn’t smoke,” she said.

“Well, when it’s for a good cause,” I said.

“What’s the cause?”

“Saluting a new life.”

During the first week of class, there were frequent fire drills in the dorms due to the highly sensitive smoke alarms. Idling on the lawn during one of these evacuations, I picked out a pretty, spectacled girl from the crowd. She had a shaved head and dramatic Italian eyebrows, and she immediately lit a cigarette. Later that week, we had class together. To break the ice, the professor asked us to pen the worst prose we could think of and then read it out loud. When he asked Lily what made her piece bad, she said in a deep, eloquent voice, “It’s bad because no one should use the word ‘soul’ in a short story.” Sensing that she was as serious about writing as me, I approached her after class. Practically a cradle-smoker, Lily had recently started rolling her own cigarettes because of high New York prices. We spent our first long conversations crouched in the grass on campus, talking about Diane di Prima, Salinger, our estranged brothers. She rolled me smoke after smoke, laughing at my hesitant acceptances. Each drag sent me into sublime, primordial dizziness that prolonged our meeting until dusk.

I was calling my new hobby “celebratory smoking,” meaning that I only found myself with a cigarette when spirits were high. During parties, after shows, on the streets outside of bars, in the throes of a “New York adventure,” which, at the time, included everything from passing over the Brooklyn Bridge to crossing the street. I got a job at a health food store. Someone at school asked me how I reconciled smoking with my health-consciousness, and the best response I could come up with was, “Choose your poison.”

It wasn’t that every new friend I made was a smoker, but I was drawn to many. During lunch a month into the semester, I listened to some peers discussing a biweekly open reading that a few upperclassmen held at their apartment. “It’s crazy,” a boy said. “One of the guys writes these poems that are just words, like, ‘Refrigerator. Python. Front porch. Rectangle. Secular,’ and he just goes on and on.” This sounded like just the thing for me, and I decided, with a bravery I’ve never had since, to show up at the next one.

When I arrived, I buzzed to be let in. I watched a tall, whiskered boy in furry black boots come stumbling down the stairs. A second boy followed him. They overshot the doorway, visibly drunk, flying past me onto the sidewalk. The second boy was shirtless, his long wool coat open in the front. He had long dirty hair and a black beard, and he was smoking a rolled cigarette that he’d taken with him through the hallway. “I’m Sweeney,” he said, and held out his hand.

They led me through the crumbling white hallway into the crammed apartment where the reading was in process before a captive audience. I took a seat on the crowded floor, and someone passed me a Basic. Still an unseasoned smoker, I could barely see straight after each cigarette. I went up and read a poem I’d written earlier that day about my grandparents’ plums. And later Sweeney, the shirtless one, rolled around my feet on the floor like a worm, reciting “The Wasteland” at the top of his lungs. Then he disappeared for a month.

When he finally resurfaced, he’d sobered up some and was more able to court me. Too shy to ask me to a pre-Thanksgiving party, a friend of his arranged a bait-and-switch where I thought I’d be meeting him but instead found Sweeney waiting for me under the streetlamp in his ragged waistcoat and steel-toed boots. He was so nervous. He started telling me how he’d been reading East of Eden, and how Steinbeck says that “the triumph of man is his ability to believe that something is true, even after having been proved otherwise over and over again.” We got to a bank of elevators to go up to the party, and he couldn’t stop talking. “It’s crazy that he calls it man’s ‘triumph’ instead of man’s ‘plight’ or ‘pitfall.’” The elevator opened and I pushed him in, kissed him hard against the back as the doors slid shut. He tasted like tobacco, salt, and last night’s whiskey.

This is when I truly learned to smoke.

We were inseparable that winter. We took walks in the blinding cold, read entire novels out loud, cooked steaks at his house, went to the movies, stayed up smoking and talking until dawn with friends or in bed, what seemed like every single night. We woke up next to one another each blue New York morning until spring, and realized we were barely looking at anyone else.

In February, he took me to Westchester to meet his parents. His father, a lawyer and Marlboro man, said, “So are you two dating, betrothed, or what?” As I grew closer to his Irish Catholic family, I’d find myself at Easter dinners or graduation parties, smoking and talking on some porch with an uncle, an in-law, a sibling. These were moments when the distance between this culture and the one I’d come from echoed loudest. Had I come from WASPs, even though we weren’t religious? I found that the citizens of the East Coast were not as concerned about health, but with other things: stoops, efficiency, bawdy humor, success, loyalty, heavy coats.

We spent the rest of the school year driving back and forth along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Taconic State Parkway, I-95; to the Catskills, Connecticut, Baltimore, Savannah; talking and smoking endlessly out the window. I loved these drives. I learned to roll my own. I was gorging on diner burgers, drinking truck-stop coffee, sending carbon emissions into the atmosphere, and I realized I’d stopped identifying with the West Coast consciousness of my childhood. I didn’t even bother using public ashtrays anymore; I just stubbed the butts out in the street.

Sometimes I’d think back to the summer before I moved to New York. I’d spent a great deal of that rainy Portland August watching the entire Sex and the City series with my mom and my little sister Charlie. Carrie Bradshaw quit smoking during the second-to-last season, and that’s the last television character I could remember smoking who wasn’t a villain or acting in a period piece. In Brooklyn, I began noticing posters appearing all over subway stops, campaigning to incorporate smoking into the MPAA rating system. I found myself standing in contradiction not only to the place I came from, but to popular American culture, too. There was enough public consensus now to make the sensational PSAs I’d watched as a kid obsolete.

At the end of my first year at Pratt, Oregon outlawed its remaining smoking bars. Shortly thereafter, New York State put a moratorium on smoking dormitories (Pratt’s was the last in the city), eventually extending nonsmoking laws to all public places, including parks and areas with heavy foot traffic, like Times Square. I remember, just before this happened, hurrying across 42nd Street through a weekend mob, looking for someone with a light. I finally tapped a woman on the shoulder who, upon my asking, looked horrified. That summer, Sweeney and I flew out to see my family, and I remember my mother wincing when I reached for my pouch of Drum, as if the whole West Coast was pleading for me to stop.

I grew up in southeast Portland, at the top of a lawn-flanked hill populated by earth-toned turn-of-the-century bungalows. The local elementary school was close by, and parents frequently took turns walking us to class. Everyone composted, kept health-conscious menus, strict TV-watching limits, and respectable used cars. My best friend’s father, who worked for the Environmental Protection Agency, bicycled to work every morning. There was absolutely no smoking culture to speak of. I remember being six or seven and hearing a friend’s mother say, “I can’t think of a quicker way to kill yourself,” after passing some teenagers outside of the grocery store one day, and I remember being already privy to the slogans.

The era ushered in national antismoking efforts of its own, with the force of Nancy Regan’s DARE and the exposure of Joe Camel’s appeal to children. But Portland was perhaps riper than most places for the politically correct bandwagon on the road to better health. The parents in my community almost never drank around the kids and believed in the preservation of our bodies and our forests. These parents were also of the first generation to identify, on a large scale, the relationship between cigarette smoking and innumerable diseases. Collectively, they witnessed the slow, grueling deaths of peers and national icons that, for the first time in the twentieth century, every public medical and media source had concurred were preventable.

Fear of death by smoking was ingrained at an early age. Saturday morning cartoons were regularly interrupted by public service announcements: An adolescent sporting a neon baseball hat approaches his ne’er-do-well friends in the park to say that smoking “isn’t cool.” Another, tempted after a stressful night of studying, is stopped by a cartoon head that pops out of his textbook saying, “You’re Too Smart to Start.” A girl lights up at her mother’s makeup table and watches herself morph into a shriveled hag (“It’ll suck the life out of you”). And then there’s one I remember particularly well, wherein animated skeletons, spiders and pus oozing from their eye sockets, smoke cigarettes while flying menacingly around an underworld, finally reaching the earth’s surface only to force the cigarettes into the fingers of a teenage posse. “Don’t smoke. It’ll drag you down” is the tagline flashing across the scene as a skeleton reaches through the dirt and pulls one of the girls to Hell.

In the fifth grade, my school sponsored a series of sex ed seminars called FLASH wherein the perils of peer pressure, particularly in regards to smoking, were introduced in tandem with the marvels of menstruation. Sometime during those lectures, I remember watching the school nurse beam as promisingly and white as a flight attendant as she finished her demonstration by removing the Maxi pad’s tape and extending its wings. “Some of you may start your menses by the end of this year,” she said, somewhat excitedly. Supporting the pad’s flight with two manicured fingernails, she circled the room, presenting it to each girl before resuming her place behind the table of props: an open package of Always, a popped tampon, a beer bottle, and an empty pack of cigarettes, about which she’d said earlier, “As you get older, your friends will start to use peer pressure. Just say no. Statistically, one in ten of you will be addicted by the end of high school.”

In retrospect, it seems deeply problematic to freeze the two in collusion forever. Those first days of sex ed promised the end of all innocence. Ovulation was the gateway to addiction.

When we were finally excused, I looked to my friend in the seat next to me. She was white-faced. We lined up for a bathroom break and she said, “My greatest fear is that someone’s going to tie me down and force me to smoke, and then I’ll be addicted forever,” expressing a paranoia that echoed beyond elementary school hallways and into the PSA-riddled Northwest psyche of the 1990s.

But that it was especially horrifying for women to smoke—that’s old news. It was true then, true now, and true in 1929 when a cadre of early feminists volunteered after “the father of public relations” Ed Bernays and feminist Ruth Hale incited them to light their “Torches of Freedom” on a New York Easter Day Parade. But even Bernays was riding the coattails of a zeitgeist: As early as 1916, The Atlantic commented that for some women, cigarettes had become “the symbol of emancipation, the temporary substitute for the ballot,” and we saw the same rhetoric again in the 1970s campaigns of Virginia Slims, Eve, More, and others. Why does vice, especially smoking, look so powerful, political, and perhaps scary on women? If it’s death that’s so unbecoming, then it’s the same damn death men are subject to. The PSAs of my childhood really put the emphasis on how it might make girls ugly (“Who cares about a pretty face when you’ve got ugly breath?” croaks the narrator of one ad that depicts a pretty young teenager slowly turning into a troll, set to Pachelbel’s Canon), but also how uncool it was. It’s a hard message to sell for a product that, for so many decades, symbolized male social authority and savvy. I mean, of course a cigarette, whatever disgusting work it’s doing physiologically, suggests power, sophistication, autonomy, allure, and mystique, and it threatens all fantasy of what might be ladylike.

In general, though, in Portland, the quiet conviction was that no one but the very aged, deeply troubled, or otherwise trashy smoked. I never once felt the desire, nor experienced the pressure, that I was promised. Even now, the city seems to ring with a humorless mantra that one of Carrie Brownstein’s characters in the parody show Portlandia gives voice to. In a recurring skit, she plays a feminist bookstore clerk who, when her friend remarks that she’s “practically hooked” on a particular kind of herbal tea, peers sternly over her thick frames and says, “Addiction isn’t funny.”

Growing up, I knew only two adults who smoked, and, weirdly, they were my father and my stepfather Leo. But both were such exceptional cases, for different reasons, that they almost didn’t count in my mind. My father became an occasional smoker the year he started running with Lakota spiritual circles, and Leo was from the East Coast and had been a smoker his entire life. He grew up in a rough blue-collar neighborhood in Hartford and was always an exception to many of Portland’s niceties. He drank instant Folgers, swore a lot, and wore a black fedora. He was the only adult who’d buy me Cherry Coke and Dunkin’ Donuts outside of the context of a birthday party. He let me sit in the front seat of his truck, and I would listen to stories about Hartford that he repeated over and over again. He used the F-word a lot. He told me a story, multiple times, about being a teenager and taking his friend to a Dunkin’ Donuts after the guy had turned green from heroin. It was the only place open twenty-four hours: “The coffee saved him,” Leo said, nodding like a dashboard figurine each time he said it. Even as a kid, I knew he didn’t fit in in Portland.

Shortly after the unlikely marriage to my Northwest-native mother, he went back to school, and during that time he was my stay-at-home caretaker. On our way to grab lunch or a movie matinee, he’d pick up packs of Kools at the Clinton Street Market. He kept a toothbrush next to the front seat to keep his breath from stinking, and I could never tell what mood he might be in. There were days we’d get in fights—about my dirty room, back-talking my mother, not playing enough with my sister—or he’d just fall into a dark mood, and in response he’d spend the afternoon spraying down the sidewalk with our garden hose, biting a smoldering filter. When the ghostly traumas of his past came back to roost, he couldn’t find communion with anyone but Kool. It’s the one thing that bridges his past to his present, that reminds him of a life that nothing in Portland, Oregon, suggests is even possible.

Leo was born in Hartford in the early 1950s and spent the first part of his life in a housing project across the street from a foundry. Over the next two decades, white flight, middle-class flight, was in full effect, and East Coast cities were quickly plummeting in population as suburbs boomed. Hartford was nearly bankrupt. Leo, like a number of children in his project, got polio, and, with little access to thorough medical treatment, those who survived learned to walk again only by physical therapy methods implemented by their parents. Leo’s mother strapped his feet to a tricycle until his muscles came back. His father was unemployed for most of his childhood, and he was a heavy drinker, a hitter, and a screamer. Leo dropped out of the public school system in the fifth grade and dabbled in crime until he left home at fifteen.

He worked odd jobs, saw a thousand terrible things, quit drugs, and finally hitchhiked across the country to Portland, where, at twenty, he started a new life. He passed the GED, got married, became a dad, and started doing menial jobs at a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed kids. After earning his associate’s degree, he became a teaching assistant in my mother’s classroom around the time my parents divorced. He followed that line of work until he was forced into retirement ten years later as a result of debilitating muscular dystrophy from his childhood polio. I was halfway through high school at that point. He slept for what seemed like an entire year, then woke up bored to a drawer full of Social Security checks. Between spells of fatigue, he’d kill the pain by finding pipes and vents that needed fixing, hunting shoelaces and scrap rubber to remedy things around the house. These pastimes were strenuous, so he eventually took up drawing, too.

The first picture of his that my mother had framed was of a green pear, and she hung it above our kitchen table. Before putting it behind glass, Leo peeled the USDA Organic produce sticker off the picture’s model and affixed it to the picture as it had sat on the real fruit. For the next several months, whenever he found himself in the kitchen with somebody—anybody—he took the opportunity to talk about how hypocritical he found the sticker to be.

I remember him lurching into the kitchen one day while I was eating lunch. He banged his mug on the counter, a familiar signal that he was about to speak, and he stood admiring his labor out the window: He’d been cleaning the back deck for the past several hours with a piece of steel wool.

“That deck looks fuckin’ clean,” he said. I nodded but remained silent. “I mean, just look at it!”

When I still hadn’t responded, he spun around and fixed his gaze on the green pear, considering the drawing. I already knew what he was going to say.

“You know, they make such a big deal about the apple being organic,” he said. “But do you know what that sticker’s made out of? Petroleum.” As in times past, left uninterrupted, he continued on the horrors of petroleum. “You know what else they use petroleum for? That,” he said, pointing at my tennis shoes and polyester shirt. “And that.” He motioned to the Tupperware and then to his car in the driveway. Each new example made his knuckles white. For as long as I’d known Leo, since I was about five, this was how he dealt with whatever he was currently haunted by, a kind of emotional exorcism to which I was frequently the audience.

“I’m so ashamed of my generation,” he said. “I really am. Oil has really fucked up the world. I wake up some mornings and think about donating my car. I do.” Then, having made himself sick, he stepped out onto the spotless deck for a cigarette.

My father didn’t start smoking until he embarked on the Red Road. In his early forties, unable to shake a familiar low-grade depression, he sought shamanic healing. He took a series of “soul retrieval” workshops and quickly became interested in the movement’s Lakota-Sioux roots. After attending some sweat lodges held by communities around Portland, he left the workshop setting and was taken in by the Whitedeer family, a Lakota hoop—“hoop” being an imprecise word referring a small community or band, regional or tribal, organized around sacred principles and activities. Being a fair-haired, blue-eyed white dude, it was a shock both to my father and the hoop how naturally and powerfully he was able to sing traditional songs. Soon he was being called on to lead singing for various ceremonies. Traditionally the community offers gifts to the singers, and the most common token is a pouch of tobacco.

I was ten or eleven years old, and rather than having it explained to me, I simply watched him change. He pierced his ear, learned to build animal-skin drums, and started rolling his own cigarettes. He reserved them for ceremonies, though I occasionally caught him in the backyard after dinner in a wreath of smoke.

The summer before I turned sixteen, I agreed with some reluctance to accompany him to southern Oregon for a Sun Dance, a Lakota renewal-of-life ceremony where three dozen men and women carry out a commitment to fast, dance, and pray in a nearby arbor for four days. An additional three dozen people from the community, including my father and I, came to camp out and support the dancers.At the time, I was more or less restricted from doing anything after a recent confrontation about drinking and smoking pot.

During a record-breaking heat wave, we packed camping gear into my father’s camel-colored 1980 Mercedes and spent six hours making our way down I-5 without air-conditioning. I was in a foul mood. Whenever I uncrossed my legs, my skin stuck to the leather. I started to complain.

“Open the window,” he said.

“No,” I said. “It’ll mess up my hair.”

“Suit yourself.”

“What am I even gonna do there, anyway?”

“You didn’t have to come,” he said.

We drove on in sweltering silence. I felt isolated and doomed. At home, my brother Aaron was going slowly and conspicuously crazy, coming out of his bedroom only in the evenings to chain smoke on the back porch, a habit he’d picked up during basic training, from which he’d recently returned. I looked out at the arid valley walls and regretted coming.

When we arrived at the remote campground on Pilot Rock I was still in a foul mood. Then I was informed that menstruating women are believed to carry an energy that has a powerful effect on the ceremony, and as a result, they’d constructed a camp about a half mile into the woods where they could participate in their own way from afar. The next morning I started bleeding, and to my deep dismay, I was to be whisked away to the Moon Lodge.

A petite gray-haired woman in hiking boots and a long denim skirt came down from the mountain and met me by my father. I was white with irritation as I slung my backpack over my shoulder.

“No,” she said. “Let me. This is your time to rest.”

With the single savvy swoop of a pioneer woman, she hoisted my backpack, tent, pillow, and sleeping bag over her shoulders, then motioned for me to follow her up a steep wooded trail.

“This is going to be fun,” she said. “You’ll be their youngest one!”

At the end of the trail was a meadow where a handful of women of all ages had pitched tents. Next to the meadow was a dusty tree-shaded clearing where a few others wandered barefoot or gathered in a circle of camping chairs, smoking cigarettes under a lean-to. I crouched down to help the escort pitch my tent, but she held up a hand. “Please.” In the same mountaineering manner as before, she set up my camp in five minutes flat, then brushed off her hands and smiled at me. “You’re going to like it here,” she said. Then she hugged me, mashing my face against her neck, and left me alone in my patch of grass under the trees. I sat in my tent, crying at first, then I blew my nose and wrote in my notebook, all the while listening to the women talking outside, cigarette smoke wafting toward me.

Finally I emerged, grabbed a granola bar from the common cooler, and joined the circle. When I took a seat, a fleshy, freckled woman turned to me and said, “Oh, a child!” She handed me some beadwork to finish, and they continued the conversation they were all having about Depo-Provera and other rogue forms of birth control.

Over the week, women came up from the main camp three times a day to cook the Moon Lodge meals, deliver notes from friends and family, and generally make sure we were comfortable. Otherwise the women and I were left to do with our menstrual powers what we wished. I spent most of the time I was up there sitting in that circle, under the shade of scrub oaks, listening to the women talk about the trials of their lives. One was an anarchist living in an abandoned church in Brooklyn. Another was a stripper from Hawaii who was in the process of breaking up with her boyfriend. Another had spent four years in a correctional facility outside of Seattle. Another hailed from a Washington reservation, and her youngest daughter was about to have her second baby. Another was a Sioux woman from South Dakota who’d grown up on the Rosebud Reservation and served in Desert Storm, and whose husband committed suicide on Christmas morning, 1988. All of this was shared while they chain-smoked in that oak grove.

However, most of the women weren’t ordinarily smokers. In the same manner that a cigarette is enjoyed, its glorification can last only for an instant. Smoking tobacco was part of their ceremony, passing-of-the-peace style, but snaring cigarettes into your writerly or otherwise daily routine is dangerous. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t scare the hell out of me. After all, death’s dark threat bore on me heavily enough to compel a preventative visit to the acupuncturist, reducing my intake to three a day and causing me to make near-future plans to quit. Cancer has so many correlatives; everything is a carcinogen, so I often dismiss studies, but the rest is indisputable: emphysema, blood clots, brain aneurysms, heart attacks, cataracts, strokes, bad skin, shortened lifespans. But then there are people like Kurt Vonnegut, who smoked unfiltered Pall Malls his whole life as a decidedly “classy way to commit suicide,” but in a 2006 Rolling Stone interview threatened to sue Brown & Williamson Tobacco because, at eighty-three years old, their products hadn’t killed him as the packages promised.

When I came down from the mountain after the ceremony ended, my father met me at the trailhead and we smiled at each other. I felt lighter. In the evening around our campfire, we ate buffalo burgers and drank root beer in the dark, and he looked at me and said, “You’re a good girl.” It was a gesture of fondness or acceptance, but I didn’t like hearing it then—I felt like I was being rewarded for being dutiful, cooperative, a good sport. But I had just been cracked open. I’d sat on a thousand-foot slope in the shade rolling tobacco into prayer ties, on a rock face with a woman who listened to me talk about my brother’s recent arrival home from the military and about how no one was listening to me. Later, she stubbed out her cigarette and bemoaned that she’d picked up smoking because of “those late nights studying and writing in college,” and I pictured her hunched over a notebook in some seaside garret, and I thought that sounded just great.

Falling asleep that night back in the main camp, I thought of the women in the Moon Lodge, their sturdy grace, good advice, stained fingers. Being so young, I had not been invited to smoke, nor brave enough to ask. And anyway I hadn’t had any real desire to, really, save that smoking seemed to reinforce these otherwise impossible bonds. It certainly could have happened with some other substance, but it happened with cigarettes.

Long after I’ve moved away from home and years since my last Lakota ceremony, a service at my church in Providence, Rhode Island, has just ended. Everyone is eating cake and coffee, talking about their jobs, their week, the election, their mortgage, and some people are even talking about the service, but only to say how much they’d liked “the message,” which that week might have been about how we are all recovering idolaters, or how Christ meant for us to live as communities of worship. (And “worship,” a word that always seemed so strange for Christ to have ever used in relation to himself—but the thought is interrupted, and doesn’t return for a long time.) If I really want to talk about religion, to face the difficulty of its paradoxes, the moral ambiguity of what all the bright-faced congregants refer to as the “gospel-centered life,” I have to step outside, on the wheelchair ramp leading up to the front doors, where I will find Tamy. She’ll be standing there, tired, her long dark hair falling heavy down her back, smoking a Marlboro No. 27, talking about the recent adoption proceedings with one of her foster children. She’ll laugh, and her laugh is raspy, and it is the laugh, I understand, of someone who has really tested the limits of belief.