A Curious Incident of things that go Bump! in the night

I spent the weekend at Capital Reef with my family camping. It was so fun, so cold, but fun. The camp ground is in an old pioneer orchard in the middle of huge red cliffs.

So the first night we got there and just unpacked the essentials and went straight to be because it was 40 degrees outside. We have always been so safe in the past when it comes to wildlife. The only animals that you see are deer and little quail. We figured the coolers would be safe since they are hard to open and we wouldn't have to lock up our food. . . .well.

I woke up in the middle of the night because it was so hot, so I turned down our heater and was just starting to drift back to sleep when I heard something moving outside. I thought it was just someone walking to the restroom. But then the movement came closer and it seemed like someone was standing right outside of the trailer on my side! Needless to say I was scared. Then I heard something being dragged across the ground, and I thought that if one of my cousins was playing a trick I was going to happily break every bone in their body.

Suddenly the air was rent with horrible growling sounds, howls and viscous spitting. I jumped out of bed, so did my mom, my dad was sound asleep. The fighting continued and I thought that there were no bears in Capital Reef, but what was out there??? Finally dad woke up and got a flashlight and shone it outside, by that time there was nothing there, so dad got up and went outside (in his garments) to check things out. He came back in to say that everything was okay. In the morning we discovered that raccoons had come to camp and tried to steal our cooler. They opened it and ate all of the turkey burger (my lunch) and all of the brownies straight from the pan (that I had made!). We all looked at each other and suddenly remembered the warning we had received that because of the snow in the high mountains the animals would all move down into the valley and campground. We had been warned, but we thought we were safe, and because of it we lost something that we really wanted.

Of course we sat down and wrote our own conference talk about it, then Sister Dibb told about the bridge workers who didn't put on their safety equipment and so were left "hanging" when the bridge collapsed. Nice huh?

Well the story continues. The next day we were very careful about food. That evening we carefully locked up our food in the truck. Dad took all the garbage bags to the dumpster and carefully latched their lids. We had done all we could do and hoped to have a peaceful night. Around three in the morning I was awakened by my father jumping out of bed putting on shoes, grabbing my mom's crutch and then flashlight and streaking out into the darkness (again in garments). He was going to save the day, we could rely on him, he took his job seriously.

Seconds later, dad re-entered the trailer, quietly put the crutch and his shoes away and climbed back into bed. My mom asked what had happened. Dad said that nothing was wrong. It wasn't raccoons. In the morning we discovered that the nightly visitor was my unsuspecting benign cousin Ryan getting something from his cooler. False alarm. So my dad quickly stepped back into the shadows, a trifle embarrassed. But the White Knight rides again.

Thunder Storm

Freewrite from Class:

Thunder--rolling thunder--I finally understand that phrase. This morning fierce booms and blasts of sound bounced violently off the mountainside in the East, shot across the valley and the lake, picking up volume and intensity and reverberated off the mountains to the west. It sounded almost fake, and in my minds' eye I saw a shabby gentleman covered in static dust waving on of those old sheets of tin used to produce thunder sounds for melodramas. What melodrama!

Then the rain came.

There were cracks and slashes of thunder followed by sluices of water charged with electric percussion. Terrific--literally. The sound raised the hair on my arms and the hinges of the door I passed through to get to the balcony hummed ominously. The damp air smelled of wet and hot asphalt and the dander of trees and woods in far off places.

I realized there was ozone in my nose and mouth right before the next cacophony of sound hit. It was a bit like eating dusty poprocks--the sound within my mouth and head, as if my taste buds had ears. To the south the air was clean and bright, halcyon playing off Mt. Nebo like Mt. Olympus. To the north the air, inky black, leaked into a sullen dark green on the horizon. The air shimmering with sound, moisture beaded on my hair--that would not be straight today. I opt of jeans and flip-flops instead of slacks and heals--something I do almost everyday, but today felt like I was being weather savy and wise.

"Words, Words, Words" Hamlet

Here are some words that have been meaningful today.

"I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most profitable explanation is that I was made for another world." CS Lewis

"Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." William Butler Yeats

"If you cannot read all your books, at any rate . . . peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them be your acquaintances." Winston Churchill

"The world does not need more Christian writers--it needs more good writers and composers who are Christians." CS Lewis

"When we have accepted the worst, we have nothing more to lose. And that automatically means we have everything to gain. " Dale Carnegie

Writing

Sometimes I wonder at my life. Here I am "in the middle way" as TS Eliot put it. I am a writer and a teacher--at a university. I still feel about 18. This what interests me. Why 18? Why not 23 or 7 or 2. My amazing roommate is a Marriage Family Therapist and we have these deep amazing conversations about regression and being blocked developmentally. When I think of that I wonder that I don't feel like I am two. I had trauma at that age and sometimes I wish I could walk up to people and say "I am tired, put me to bed. But first hold me and sing me a lullaby. But I am not 2. Nor do I feel two. Though strangely "Winnie the Pooh" holds all the keys to unlock my personality.

I feel 18. Why??

Then it came to me. At that age I made some very big decisions in my life about who I was and who I wanted to become. It was at that age that I decided to fight against the way I had always been. I am not a born optimist. My mother is, but I am not. At 18 I decided that I had had enough of always feeling anxious and upset about life and fearful. I wanted to be different. I wanted to throw off the nighted cloak of suffocation that was depression. I decided to choose joy. I have been choosing ever since. Sometimes I wonder if the last 11 years of my life has been a dream. Sometimes I still feel very young and very scared. Maybe that is the 18 in me. But I also realize that I chose very definitively that I was going to be a writer--for real.

Maybe that is it. I am actually doing it. There is a strange sense of duality--seeing life through my eyes at 18 and at 29. I am a very different person--but I still write. The following is an excerpt from Anne Lamott's amazing book about writing "Bird by Bird"

"Ever since I was a little kid, I've though that there was something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers. All my life I've felt that there was something magical about people who could get into other people's minds and skin, who could take people like me out of ourselves and then take us back to ourselves. And you know what? I still do.

"So now I teach. This just sort of happened. Someone offered me a gig teaching . . . and I've been teaching writing classes ever since. But you can't teach writing , people tell me. And I say 'Who the hell are you, God's dean of admissions?'

"If people show up in one of my classes and want to learn to write, or to write better, I can tell them everything that has helped me along the way and what it is like for me on a daily basis. I can teach them little things that may not be in any of the great books of writing. . . .

"Interviewers ask famous writers why they write, and it was (if I remember correctly) the poet John Ashebery who answered, "Because I want to." Flannery O'Connor answered "Because I am good at it," and when the occasional [person] asks me, I quote them both. Then I add that other than writing, I am completely unemployable. But secretly, when I'm not being smart-alecky, it's because I want to and I'm good at it. I always mention a scene from Chariots of Fire in which, as I remember it, the Scottish runner, Eric Liddell, who is the hero is walking along with his missionary sister on a gorgeous heathery hillside in Scotland. She is nagging him to give up training for the Olympics and to get back to doing his missionary work. . . .And he replies that he wants to go to China because he feels it is God's will for him, but that first he is going to train with all of his heart, because God also made him very, very fast.

So God made some of us fast in this area of working with words, and he gave us the gift of loving to read with the same kind of passion with which we love nature. My students at the writing workshops have this gift of loving to read, and some of them are really fast, really good with words, and some of them aren't really fast and don't write all that well, but they still love good writing, and they just want to write. And I say, "Hey! That is good enough for me. Come on down"(xxviii-xxix).

I over-quote this extensive passage to remind my 18 year old self that I am a writer and a teacher, and that I love them both. God made me fast using words, and fast in the ability to help others with words. I write because I want to, and because I am good at it. And I need to write. I love my students, even when they are not kind to me, or do not handle things very well. They can write, some good, some bad, but they are writing. Sometimes I write good and sometimes I write bad, and sometimes I feel good, and sometimes I feel bad. But I write. And I feel. "That is good enough for me."