Author: jthomasstervenson

Hummed Around

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A group of us, as late high-school boys, once decided that we wanted an unmediated experience of nature. So we stripped our clothes off and ran naked through a field. We came to a muck pond in the field. The pond was unseasonably cold, and predictably mucky. One of us, a lithe boy with reddish hair who still climbed trees, jumped in. He stood up in the middle of the pond, the water at his knee, and in the space of a second sank at least a foot. When he did, he yelped. He staggered and tore through the pond. At the edge, shivering and dripping with muck, he said that he’d touched something that felt like an arm—something like skin.

Our group found it difficult to both be naked and to have a serious discussion about whether or not to explore the reddish-haired boy’s claim. The spirit of adventure hummed around us, and we did not even have clothes to keep it off. We waded into the water.

The body we discovered was between 6000 and 8000 years old according to the scientists. At the time we knew only that, after an hour of digging, we’d uncovered the body of a young girl. The scientists told us that she had been perhaps 16 years old at her death. Minor volcanic activity in the area had moved her body closer to the surface of the water.

When we got her free of the muck she did not float. We moved her like a stone to the pond’s edge. We sent a younger brother back to get our clothes. While we waited for him we admired her face, still fully articulate. We could not say whether or not it was beautiful, but we all felt a kind of wonder looking at it. We didn’t know how old she was, but it was clear to us that we were experiencing some kind of collapse of time. Unmediated access to complete difference, as though everything separating us from her had become as permeable as spider-web.

When the younger brother returned with our clothes, we wrapped her in our shirts.

Hummed Around

The Back Wall

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A friend came to me and expressed concern that a friend of his was going crazy. He said that at the friend’s apartment, while he was in the bathroom, he’d pulled back the curtain of the shower (a weird, old habit) and found writing on the back wall of the shower. The wall facing the shower head. He examined the writing and eventually took a picture of it with his phone. He read the following to me from the picture:

“I want the drinks in novels. Not the types of drinks that the characters drink. I don’t want to drink a Salty Dog because I heard about it in Swag by Elmore Leonard. I want to drink a actual Salty Dog from the novel. Because when I experience the language of the novel, the drink has become more efficacious and satisfying and bliss-inducing and wonderful than any drink could ever actually be. More than anything, I want to eat and drink everything the animals ate and drank in Redwall. Even more specifically, I want to eat and drink those things as I experienced them in my imagination at 8 years old.

I want drinks that can’t exist.”

When he finished he said, “Does he sound crazy?”

“He sounds like a Platonist, but not crazy,” I said. “I know what he means about the food in Redwall, though.”

A couple weeks later, the same friend was at my house again. He said that he’d been at his friend’s house again and had easily contrived to visit the bathroom again, had found a different piece of writing on the back wall of the shower, and had taken another picture. He read it to me from his phone:

“We exist because we’re given existence. God does not exist, in one sense—twisting Meister Eckhart—because he’s the source of all existence. It’s like looking at a carpenter and wondering how he’d take a walnut stain. Or looking at Paul McCartney and wondering if you can play him on guitar. Imagining that Paul McCartney himself has a melody, because he creates melodies.”

When he finished he said, “What do you think about that?”

“I think that’s an okay point,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that. It’s phrased a little bit awkwardly.”

My friend nodded and smiled.

Several weeks later, he updated me. Pulled up his phone and read the following, from a photo, he said:

“I went to set up my computer in the living room. I put my head near the back of the fan at the window as I was leaning forward plugging my power adapter. Because of the way the sound from the back of the fan reflects off the window, you hear the sound from the front of the fan and back of the fan as distinct, disintegrated from each other. Aurally, one fan becomes two fans.

Reality, even in its obedience to physical law, appears bent on demonstrating its contingency—betraying, through its weird adherence, that the laws don’t have to work the way that they do. It presses into places where it strains to maintain coherence. You don’t even have to go to the quantum in search of the space between threads in the fabric of being. You can experience it in moments where perception multiplies household objects.”

“Doesn’t do much for me,” I said. I shrugged.

My friend said nothing. He furrowed his brow, narrowed his eyes, and looked in various directions, not at me. He excused himself for the bathroom and left his phone on the table.

When he did, I had the sudden impulse to investigate the pictures on his phone and see if I could identify the friend’s house based only on a shot of the shower’s back wall. I turned on the phone and pulled up the camera roll. It contained nothing. I back out to his homescreen, which was bare. He had an icon for a notepad app, and one for his phone. I looked at my friend’s notepad app, briefly dipped into his email, and uncovered nothing. His voice had the cadence of reading, but I assume he was simply improvising those thoughts.

I’m put off by nothing in the thoughts so much as the method my friend used to convey them to me, by his various unnecessary subterfuges. By the masks he assumed for reasons I don’t understand.

When he came back from the bathroom, he found his phone on the table where he left it, and seemed not to notice that my feeling toward him had grown colder.

The Back Wall

Dim Light Radiating

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One morning last summer a resident of Sweetditch went to his neighbor, a man with whom he’d become close over a number of years, and described a recent experience which had troubled him. He said that he’d found himself suddenly awake at 3:30 three mornings previous. He’d gotten up and walked down the hall towards his living room. As he moved down the hallway he observed a dim light radiating from the living room. When he gained a full view of the living room he saw a glowing orb—less than four feet tall, about two feet wide—hovering above the middle cushion of the couch. The orb seemed to revolve to better perceive him, but the man could not discern eye-like organs, or distinguishing features of any kind. The orb persisted there, the man looking at it, for approximately two minutes. Then it flickered once or twice, and disappeared. Perplexed, the man sat up in the living room awaiting the reappearance of the orb. After thirty minutes of waiting, he went back to bed and slept soundly. The next morning he woke up unsure of the reality of his experience. He’d slept fitfully the next night, and was unsettled by his unsuccessful attempts to divine a meaning.

When the man finished his story, his neighbor attempted to brush the story off as a dream, some misfiring synapse, and so on. But the man persevered in his conviction. The neighbor, seeing his friend so sure of his experience, felt his expression soften and then surprised himself by saying, “The same thing happened to me three nights ago as well.”

The man and his neighbor took some time to talk over the details of their experience and found that they corresponded exactly. The men decided to share this strange coincidence with another neighbor. When they did, the neighbor at first attempted to dismiss their experience, and then at last confided that he’d seen the same thing.

The men went around their neighborhood, and eventually called an assembly of the city, and found that all the men had the same experience on the same night, but no one except the first man had felt moved to share, explore, or test his understanding of the experience.

The women of the city experienced nothing like this, and tended to view the phenomenon and any mention of it as a strange case of male solidarity—binding themselves together over an imagined event of dubious significance.

Amongst the men, the man who first broke the silence for a time enjoyed a privileged place in the company of his peers, but as the months have passed, the male community has begun to consider him obsessively concerned with understanding and assigning meaning to the experience. He now pursues these questions alone.

Dim Light Radiating

Prime Salt

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Hey, Bridgid. What? I thought you were saying something. I thought maybe you were wondering what this thing hanging on my cubicle divider was. I thought maybe you were about to ask what it is.

You weren’t wondering? I gotcha. Well, are you wondering what it is now? Thought so.

It’s a salt lick. Isn’t that insane?

Anyone can have a lick. Feel free to have a quick lick. To be honest, I thought it might make my cubicle more popular. It’d be fun to have more people dropping by to chat, and I thought this salt lick might play an instrumental part in making that happen. It’s like a water-cooler that makes you thirsty. It also replenishes hard-to-find minerals, like salt.

You should have a lick. No pressure. Here, I’ll have one, even though I’ve already had like a dozen licks today. I didn’t put it here just for me.

I think you’d like it. I think it’d be a good switch up from eating all those little chocolates at Andy’s desk.

I thought it would be good to balance things out a little bit. You can get a sugar buzz going over there, and then even out a little bit over here. Also, chocolate has sugar and dairy so it’s pretty fattening. Salt only encourages water weight gain. Water weight is easy to shed. You could probably drop a size or two in like a week if you cut out the salt. But who am I kidding? You only need to drop about maybe a single size. You can spare a lick.

I’m honestly surprised that you’re not having a lick and that you keep turning away like you’re going to walk away when I’m finished talking. I’m not saying that I did this for you, but it’s not like I did it for Teri or Jen, or either of the Steves. I don’t want Hayao having anything to do with the salt lick, but that’s mostly just because he needs payback for not covering his food in the microwave. Have you used the microwave after him? It’s like cleaning out the bottom of a bird cage.

Andy won’t want any. He’s got a real sweet-tooth. I don’t think he gets the whole artisan salt thing.

No, I get what you’re saying, but it depends on how you define artisan I guess.

It’s probably a good idea to hold off. Let the lick get worn in a bit more. Let everyone else wear the seams and edges off. Then you come in for the prime salt. I see how you’re working it. You’re smart.

Okay, okay. You might feel different about that tomorrow. Never say never, right, Bridgid?

Prime Salt

About Your Heart Beating

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When Mr. Pennant finished going over the class rules, he told us, “You guys are in fourth grade now. You’re all eight or nine years old. In previous times that’d be a large chunk of your lives on earth.”

He made a face at this, eyes big and corners of his mouth drawn down, to indicate something like ”Impressive.” We’d all gotten to know Mr. Pennant a little bit in previous years—he lead our daily assemblies—and were excited to be in his class. Older siblings told us he was fun.

“Nine years would be about one-quarter of your life. By the way, are you guys ready for fractions?” He smiled wide and jumped his eyebrows up and down. We laughed.

“In a previous age, most of you wouldn’t even be here. Not just at a decent private school. I mean alive. Most of you would be dead. You, Chris, you’d never have made it. Tiffany, there’s just no way. Life was hard and brutish and short and usually ended in your early childhood. Making it this far would have been an accomplishment.

“Your parents would have buried you. You’d be underground, still and silent, eyes closed, full of worms. And that is exactly where you’re headed. I just heard myself say that, and it sounds like a threat. It shouldn’t sound like a threat. I don’t mean it to sound that way at all. I’m headed the same way. You’re born, life is a struggle, and you die. We suffer our days away and then die, go back to the earth. Your bodies aren’t even at the height of their powers yet, but they’re still just looking for opportunities to fail you. Especially you, Chris.”

He went to the front of the classroom and wrote on the board.

“As for man, his days are as grass.
As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth.
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone,
and the place thereof shall know it no more.”

He wrote it and spoke it in that weird staccato pace your voice does to match your hand, like it’s running alongside of a horse.

“That’s the bible. Not only do you die, you will be forgotten. Put your hand on your heart. Not for the pledge of allegiance. I want you to feel your heart. 100,800 beats per day. Now think about your heart beating. All it has to do is stop. Why is it beating anyway? You don’t control it. You can’t talk it into continuing to beat. If it stops, it just stops. If you learn one thing this year, I want you to learn that. Death is a wave and it is rolling toward you even now. I want you to learn that. But you know what?”

He held one finger up. He smiled.

“Now it’s story time.”

We had a substitute the next day, and for the next two weeks, and then we had Ms. Cressler for the rest of the year.

About Your Heart Beating

The Priest in the Water Treatment Plant

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Thanks for honoring my Father with this commemorative plaque on the face of the Sweetditch water treatment plant.

As a child in 4th grade he was on a field-trip to the water treatment plant and fell in. He spent two hours in the primary treatment vat avoiding the automatic rakers and trying to climb out, but not before one of the rakers claimed a toe. Then he spent several hours lost in the inner-workings of the plant. It became a mythologically significant moment for him. He had descended into the lower parts of the earth and come back. He was Orpheus. His father had trained him in the Greek myths, relentlessly.

It was a small town. So in sixth grade they went back to the water-treatment plant. My father did not want to go. But his father believed it’d be good for him. His father had lost three fingers in his job as a carpenter. He was a carpenter for one month, and was fired for his own protection. But he hadn’t given up. And look where it had gotten him. He’d become a housepainter and been impaled twice at different job sites. He was once again fired for his own protection, and became an excavator.

At the water-treatment plant, my father did everything he could to stay away from the railing of the primary vat. He stood in the center of the walkway, out of the press of children, his elbows tucked and arms at his collarbones to make it harder for him to be pulled or snagged and to thus fall in the primary treatment vat. However, his arms grew fatigued in this position and, as the director of the treatment plant, Vance Strongenberry, asked for volunteers, he stretched. Mr. Strongenberry called on him to assist him in testing the current pH of the water. My father nearly succumbed to his fate and did as he was told, but at the last second started violently and pulled away, stumbled backwards (perhaps his missing toe was the cause of his unsteadiness), and fell into the primary treatment vat.

He was recovered quickly, but suffered a nasty scrape on his elbow which became infected, due to his exposure to sewage, and somewhat limited the mobility of his right arm.

He arrived home to discover that his father had suffered a third, and finally fatal instance of being backed over by a backhoe. He was crushed, and so was my father. However, the accident resulted in a massive settlement in favor of my father and his mother.

Instead of Orpheus, my father began to see himself as Job. But, given much opportunity for contemplation in his bereavement and convalescence from his elbow infection, he followed Job’s argument with God very thoroughly, and found his outlook braced by God’s answer to Job. He committed himself to religious study.

Raised in the Episcopal church, exempted from sports by virtue of the diminishment of his arm and the loss of his toe, buoyed by a comfortable living drawn from well-invested settlement money, my father pointed himself at the Anglican priesthood, and away from the water-treatment plant.

He did everything he could to not come back to Sweetditch. But after he attended seminary in Wisconsin he was ordained and appointed to minister as the priest of the church here. In fact, he’d pursued the post. He’d met my mother during one of his trips home. She was a student of veterinary dentistry, and committed to finishing her degree—another three years of schooling. My father was nervous.

In the first week of his post he did not find himself within a half mile of the water treatment plant. The second week, third, fourth—he avoided it successfully. Three months into his post, the week after he and my mother were married, duty summoned him. Vance Strongenberry, devout Anglican, suffered the proverbial (and actual) “massive” coronary. He was not expected to recover. My father stood in front of the door to the plant. He stood there for a while. Then he opened the door, barely registered the form he immediately tripped over as Vance himself, and went into the primary treatment vat.

Vance laughed at my father’s misfortune, and we all know that he made a full recovery and is present with us even today.

My mother says that at this point my father gave up. When he came home he emanated a divine light, she says.

He fell into various vats in the water treatment plant six more times.

He stopped thinking of himself as Orpheus or Job. He thought of himself as nothing. Someone destined to fall into vats of sewage. He became a conduit of joy.

When he died, I found that he’d asked for his memorial service be conducted here. Some of you may remember it.

It was a terrifying experience for me.

I carried the urn of his ashes here. Placed it on the stand erected for the purpose. I assumed I would drop the urn. We made it out fine.

When I got the urn home, I put it in its place above the mantle. I noticed a smudge. I took it down. I went into the bathroom. I turned on the sink faucet. I reached for a towel. I wetted the towel in the water. I applied the towel to the urn. The urn slipped from my grasp and emptied into the toilet. I lost my balance. I flushed the toilet.

I think this is what he would have wanted.

The Priest in the Water Treatment Plant

Trace and the Magic Weedeater

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Trace told us something weird. He was friends with the lady on the corner in the house next to the bank. He spent a lot of time talking with her about the history of Sweetditch, our town. No one else cared about the history of Sweetditch, except for Trace and this old lady. Trace knew the history because he collected newspapers. The old lady knew the history because she was old.

She really liked him. They’d talk about all the old tragedies and banalities of the town. The hardware store burned down four different times, which was a tragedy made banal through repetition. They talked about how someone took a shot at the mayor in the Halloween parade. Sweetditch is a town of 1700 residents.

One day he brought her mail in with him and found a letter of notice from the city. He asked her what it was about and she told him that the bank was complaining about her yard.

The yard wasn’t well-kept, but it contained only organic mess, grass going to seed. Trace asked her what they were going to do, and she said they were going to hire the city landscaping crew to deal with the lawn and bill it to her. Trace told her he could handle the yard and asked if she had any equipment. She said that maybe she did. Trace said he’d look around, and when he said that the old woman told him if he found anything in the attic to leave it there and not mess with it. She said, “Don’t even go up there.”

Then she died.

It turned out that she’d left the house to Trace. He was 20 years old when he inherited the house and its notices from the city. He didn’t move into the house immediately, so problems with the yard were easy to ignore. But then he stopped by to check the mail one day and found a letter marked “final notice” from the city. The notice included an itemized estimate of what the landscaping crew would cost him, and he began searching desperately for the tools to handle the yard.

The garage contained a number of greeting card display carousels and a desiccated squirrel husk. He went up into the attic.

He opened the door. The attic was empty, except for a weathered weed-eater. He grabbed the weedeater and went to work on the yard.

He barely noticed the work. The weedeater’s line did not wear out, nor did its fuel burn up. He started to wonder what kind of a weedeater this was. It had no identifying marks, brand, or even notes of instruction about flipping the switch to choke, then pressing the primer bubble slowly, and so on. In fact, as he thought about it, Trace couldn’t remember priming the machine or even pulling the cord to start it. He began to believe that he’d willed it on.

He’d done an impressive job. He looked at the trimming against the garden box, and did not find lash marks on the wood.

But there was a spot around one side of a tree that he’d missed somehow. A large clump of sow-thistle. He couldn’t believe he’d missed it. As he approached it, an enormous toad emerged from beneath it.

“Cut it down,” the toad said. We all laughed as Trace told this part.

“I will,” Trace said.

“Cut it down and I’ll give you a chunk of solid gold.”

The weedeater was going again. Trace cut down the weed. As the line slashed through the stalk, the toad’s head came flying off, hit Trace in the side of the head and startled him. He looked down at the toad’s body. He saw a gleam of gold. Actual gold. He pulled the gold from the body with some effort. He put the weedeater in the garage with the greeting card carousels, took the gold, cashed it, and then went and bought a lawn-mower.

The next week he mowed the lawn again. He finished with the mower and got the weedeater. He came around to the spot where he’d seen the toad. This time the sow-thistle was gone, and in its place was a huge clump of dandelions, knee-high and thick. The clump parted and a young goat came through.

“Cut it down,” the goat said, “and I’ll give you a handful of gold coins.”

Trace hesitated. But he didn’t know the goat. The weedeater started and he cut the dandelions down. The goat’s head came off, and stuck in the chest cavity Trace found the gold coins. He cashed the coins and went out and bought an electric hedge trimmer.

The next week, as he came to the same spot. This time he was shocked to find a tall tulip growing there.

From around the side of the tree stepped a beautiful girl.

“Cut it down,” she said, “and I’ll give you an entire sack of gold.”

Trace stared at the girl. He’s not a monster. He dropped the weedeater. He knew he was in love with the girl. He took her hand.

“And then I married her,” Trace said. He seemed to be finished with the story.

“So,” one of us said, “you’re married to her now. Where is she?”

Trace turned away, hands to his face.

He told us that while the tulip lived, she lived. At first he’d put one of those mini-greenhouses over the flower. A few days after he did, his wife developed an impressive glow. Trace began to worry about her, outside unprotected. One morning, while she was still drinking coffee and reading a book at the breakfast table he went outside and very carefully uprooted the flower. When he came inside, he found her floating slightly above the table still drinking coffee and reading. He scrambled for a pot, and once he had the flower replanted, and set on the kitchen sill, he stuck his head into the dining room and confirmed that she was seated again.

One morning though, as he walked around the yard, he felt the air change. He ran inside. He looked for the girl and found her still in bed. She was smaller, and had a sunken look. She woke and smiled.

The days grew colder and grayer, and the girl seemed to collapse into herself as brown spread over the flower. She asked him to move the pot into her room and by the bed. He did.

Finally, she’d grown so small that, when she asked him to, he picked her up and placed her in the pot. She touched the desiccated stalk of the flower with her hand. It shriveled and curled down, covering her. He said he still had the pot on the sill in his room.

None of us believed Trace, but none of us could deny that he deeply felt his story. We said we were sorry for his loss.

“She’ll be back,” he said.

Trace and the Magic Weedeater

Put Your Head in This Barrel

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We were sitting below them. They were up on the rocky outcropping that stuck out over our heads. The outcropping would have provided shade at some other point in the day. The sun was on its way down now, so we were like, “we don’t need any shade.” We didn’t say that, but it was true. Sometimes it’s good to tell nature what you do or don’t need from it. Nature can get a little cocky.

The spot drew sunset viewers to it. You had to walk a hundred yards from a nothing little turnout on the highway, and then hike a slight grade. It wasn’t a major investment or anything, but you had to do it. Nature invited us all to come check it out. Way off we saw a lightning strike. Nature was making a big deal about nature.

This is the kind of thing Lacey likes to do. Stop the car, stop forward progress, and experience nature. It’s also the kind of thing that I hate to do. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like to do things that Lacey likes to do. I like to do things that Lacey likes to do, even if I don’t like to do them. That’s the core of a relationship, deciding to let their complex of concerns influence and dictate yours.

From several hundred yards down the highway we could see the mesa or whatever it was. Lacey said, “Oh. We should pull in there and watch the sunset.”

“I’m going to pull in there for you,” I said, “if you really want to.”

Lacey looked directly at me. Her face wanted to let me know that she wasn’t annoyed but could be annoyed.

“I really want to,” she said.

“I’m just thinking about rattlesnakes,” I said.

Then this silver volvo zipped past us and pulled into the turnout before we got there and walked up the grade and got to the rocky outcropping first. We pulled in. I watched them hike up, holding hands, and I could tell that they both wanted to watch the sunset and avoid rattlesnakes, together.

Still way off in the distance I saw a couple lightning strikes and could hear just a slight rumble.

It made me want to not hold Lacey’s hand, because that suddenly felt dishonest. The couple in the Volvo was the image of a couple in harmony. Or not even harmony. They were like the same note at an octave. They got to be that picture and Lacey and I would have to be a different picture. So I decided not to hold Lacey’s hand, even though I love Lacey.

Several other cars stopped too. This mesa was a magnet for humans. It wanted us there.

The Volvo people ascended rocky outcropping, using these authentic looking mountain climbing moves, and sat up there. There was only room for two. We just hiked up and stood there. The sunset looked beautiful. I don’t have to describe it. That sounds like I’m being flippant about the transcendent experience of viewing a sunset. I’m not. They’re incredible. But I’m not going to waste your time not describing it in moving terms, not getting it right. That’s why they’re transcendent.

Other people accumulated on the shelf with us. A family with three kids. Several guys in Chacos. I put my arm around Lacey.

Lightning struck quarter mile away. I worried that it would bring the rattlesnakes out, but I didn’t tell Lacey.

And then lightning struck the rocky outcropping over our heads. Like the sunset it feels stupid to describe this. It was like I put my head inside an oil barrel, and then someone shot the oil barrel with a cannon at point-blank range. Rock debris scattered, and I felt a sting in the back of my neck. I put my hand back there and then looked at my fingers. Even a small amount of blood can be a surprising amount of blood. I was surprised.

Everyone had either ducked low, or been knocked down a bit. I stood up first and wheeled around. The couple on the rock outcropping were just dead.

The lightning stopped after that.

It wasn’t graphic, but it wasn’t a question. I boosted one of the Chaco guys up there. He knew CPR. But they were gone. They were holding hands, which is a sickly sweet detail to add, but a true one.

We waited until the first responders got there, and gave statements. When we were answering questions, that was when I thought about whether any of us had any thought about the situation being dangerous. Obviously not enough to act on. I didn’t feel like we should have done anything different, except for the fact that apparently we should have.

Then Lacey and I got in our car and drove away. We had turned off the highway, been present at the death of two people by lightning strike, and then driven away. What else were we supposed to do? Nature was being a real bastard.

I felt very in love with Lacey and I told her that, after we’d been driving for fifteen minutes.

Put Your Head in This Barrel

Very Excited

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Patricia tells me you just got back from abroad, huh? Very cool. Actually, my passport should be arriving tomorrow. No, I’m fine with my mineral water. No drinkin’ for me. I want to stay sharp, so I don’t make any mistakes tomorrow. No, I’m not leaving tomorrow. I just don’t want to make any mistakes tomorrow when they drop off my passport. Like sign my name wrong or spit on the postman. I can’t afford to make any mistakes. I need to stay On The Ball. I think that’ll be easy though—I’m operating at a heightened level and have been for the last couple weeks. That’s because I’m so psyched to be going to North Korea.

Woah. That drink must be stiff. Did it catch you in the soft-palate? Sometimes when I get a bit of whiskey up there, I’ll choke like that too. I think it’s because of a tonsil irregularity. You should get that checked out. To be honest, I’m so stoked about my trip to North Korea that I’ve been getting that gaggy, dry-heave feeling for the past three days.

Why would I want to go to North Korea? That’s a question I’ve had to answer for myself, and I guess it keeps coming back to the fact that I’m interested in seeing if our adaptation of their delicious North Korean Barbecue holds a candle to the real thing. I’m sure that’s like going to Chicago for deep-dish pizza, or Las Vegas for the hookers, or Montreal for tonsil surgery, and if that makes me a tourist, then I’m a tourist, three times over. Four times over after I’ve sampled a completely authentic national treasure that’s free to be everything it can be in the great nation of North Korea.

Say what? Nuclear exercises? Well, I hope they’ve been exercising, nuclear or otherwise, because if I had access to what I’m sure is a taste experience that totally defies our Western flavor vocabularies, I’d be eating my weight in that amazing North Korean Barbecue on the regs, and I’d need pul-enty of exercise. Thermo-nuclear the better, right? The-more-nuclear the better? Get it?

No, I’ve never used an internet.

Very Excited

Out of the Coffin Zone

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I knew a kid who saw another kid fall from a tree, thirty-five feet up.

He said a branch peeled off from the tree trunk under the kid’s foot.

He said that for a second it looked like the kid wouldn’t fall. He had a good grip with his hands. But then he did. There’s a lot to think about when climbing. You’ve got at least three different contact points at any moment, and you’re thinking about whether or not your grip is right, how to get a hold of the next branch, if your current branches will hold you. And the kid lost track or wasn’t paying attention in the first place.

I asked my friend if the kid lived.

“Yeah,” he said, “but he barely climbed anything ever again, barely even out of bed. That’s lucky. Forty feet up. Fifty feet is coffin zone. I read it in Reader’s Digest about professional tree climbers who use harnesses and stuff. You’re fifty feet up and you fall and it’s one hundred percent that you die.”

The next day I climbed fifty feet high up in a tree. I was eleven. I was curious to see if I would fall.

I paused several times, twenty feet, thirty feet, looked down and told myself a quick story about what happens if you place a hand wrong, or a foot wrong. You get thirty feet up and your palms sweat. Your brain releases this sweet sting into your blood, and electric pulses jab at your heart.

Every time you get a new hold it’s like you’re throwing out another handful of seeds. Only one of those seeds will take root. One seed is your hand slips. Another seed is the branch breaks. The best seed is a good grip on a strong branch. Then you throw out another handful of seeds.

Every new grip I asked myself why go higher? and the answer was always why tell a story of climbing two-thirds, four-fifths, ninety percent of the way? Every fraction you use is just a different way of saying that you didn’t do it.

In the branches at the top I felt like I could decide how much I weighed. Sixty-five pounds for that branch, seventy-three for that one, fifty-eight max, if I don’t want that one to break. If I didn’t believe that I could do that, I wouldn’t have kept climbing.

It does feel like you have that control when you distribute your weight on branches you know can’t hold you. You can feel that a little more pressure applied will peel away the branch’s hold on the tree, and your hold on the branch goes obsolete in an instant, and becomes a vestige of a previous belief system.

When that kid fell he must have looked back up on the previous version of himself, that primitive kid who believed that branches would hold him.

I got to the top. I felt like a weight stuck on top of a fishing-rod, because of the way the tree swayed underneath me. And then I climbed down, out of the coffin zone, and my palms stopped sweating, and my blood stopped stinging. I was happy not to have fallen, but still curious about falling.

Now I want to climb to the top of the tree, into the skinny branches, because I’ve learned that you don’t need to trust in branches, and keep climbing, even though there aren’t any branches.

Out of the Coffin Zone