Life caught up with me last month. Between traveling back to Colorado, getting sick, starting a new job, traveling to Alaska and soon D.C. for said job, bumping between two different friends’ homes to get a break from camper life, and starting the search for a permanent home, well, my writing practice has fallen off a massive cliff.
Meanwhile, the news cycle has been a bit heavy. Between devastating climate news, devastating abortion news, devastating gun death news, and more devastating news I’m sure I didn’t even see, it’s been tough to do anything other than languish.
But this is the week I’m picking myself back up for no particular reason other than that it feels like it’s time. However, this week’s post is still something of a cop-out because rather than writing something original, I’d like to treat you to two excerpts of two of my essays that have recently been published.
Campfire Stories
First up is the new book Campfire Stories Volume II: Tales from America’s National Parks and Trails in which I have a featured essay about Olympic National Park and backpacking through the Hoh Rainforest in search of silence, which actually turns out to be the search for a particularly haunting, unknown sound.
I am published alongside writers like Lauret Savoy, Rae DelBianco, and Terry Tempest Williams, as well as Washington poet laureate, Rena Priest. And that feels utterly surreal. The publisher is Mountaineers Books and the collection will soon be available in bookstores, REIs, and other outdoor/book-ish places all over the country. But you can buy it online right now. And you can read a sample exceprt below from my essay.
One Square Inch
Sun glides between hemlocks and cedars while drops of rain condense onto enormous devil’s club leaves. Even on a dry morning like today, the Hoh Rainforest is filled with the sound of water tumbling down the layers of the canopy, searching for the earth. Just standing in the parking lot, the landscape feels thick and muffled—which is precisely what I’ve come for.
I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed with silence, so much as desperate for it. Before 8 am, I hear from my apartment in Bellingham, Washington a car engine revving so loudly that it sets off someone else’s car alarm parked directly beneath my bedroom. I hear an ambulance. A firetruck. A squealing car that needs a new timing belt. A woman on her phone shrieking, “You think you’ve got it all together, Becky, but you don’t!” An oil train that blares its horn exactly 11 times as it crisscrosses downtown. A lawnmower, a leaf blower, and finally a weed whacker—the holy noise trinity. Another train. The drag racers who have settled into a 2 am circuit that includes, by my best guess, at least three laps down North Forest Street.
These jolts of sound grind like coarse sand through my bones, leaving me hollowed. I tell my therapist the noise is breaking me. She tells me I need to find other ways to ground myself—and to invest in a white noise machine. A friend says to envision the sound of the street like the calming din of a river, and I try, laying on the floor one evening still as a carcass before a dog immediately breaks the spell. It barks for three straight hours. The sound clatters around my empty body.
I am a rattling shell when I stumble across the One Square Inch of Silence project—the fabled quietest place in the lower 48, deep in Olympic National Park—and I know I have to find it.
Read the rest in the new book!
Jabberwock Review
Second is an essay published in the literary magazine Jabberwock Review about quantum physics, being a daughter of divorce and remarriage, and family secrets.
(For those of you close to me, you’ll notice some names have been changed in this piece and I’d ask that if you leave public comments here or on social media about it, you respect that privacy as well.)
This piece feels more raw and vulnerable than other ones I’ve written and gave me many months of contemplation on how to write about family that you love dearly and who are still living and who (like all of us) are not perfect. I came to very few conclusions other than to ask for permission from those I love most before publication. And that sometimes our memories about events can be remembered differently from one person to the next, turning “truth” and “nonfiction” into a blurry line of garbled memories.
Quark Soup
I read a headline that says, “Physicists make ‘quark soup’ to study the early universe.” Later that day, my mother calls and says she makes soup when she’s sad. Just over the weekend, she’s concocted beef barley, tomato and a tangy coconut curry.
Making three soups in 48 hours is one of the least destructive ways to stare down your second divorce. When she says that this time she’s serious about ending things with her second husband, I’m tending to my own pot of simmering chicken broth.
I wish I’d known sooner that soup was a critical component of understanding the universe. I might have tried harder in algebra, though I did flirt with the idea of a physics career as a teenager. In the summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school, I made the abrupt decision to become a particle physicist. The idea sprang into my head while reading a thrift store copy of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons on the floor of my mother’s classroom. She was packing up for the end of the school year, and I stretched out on the carpeted school floor reading about a particle physicist discovering new forces in the universe. It was fantastical.
I can still remember how the main character recalled her childhood, looking up at the sky on a rainy day and noticing that, “everything falls.” I found that absolutely delightful. A kid like me—who scraped through every technical class—would never notice something so obvious, which I worried might be strike one against my newfound career. I decided to steal that story for myself.
When I told my mother later that night that I thought I’d like to become a particle physicist, she asked me where in the world I got that idea.
“Well you see,” I said to her, “I’ve been wondering for some time now why it is that everything falls. Haven’t you noticed?”
I explained how particle physicists were unlocking the mysteries of the universe. That they were all on the very verge of discovering something that would change humanity. My mother reminded me that last week my dream was to become a middle school art teacher and that I’d barely escaped tenth grade with a B- in trigonometry.
Regardless, by the following afternoon, I checked out a dozen books on Albert Einstein, electrons, and an introduction to chemistry from the downtown library. I was certain that as long as I read these books and memorized what they had to say, I’d be most of the way toward becoming a particle physicist by the end of the summer. I used the library computer to research MIT’s acceptance criteria.
I also make soup when I’m sad. Somewhere along the way, my mother and I discovered soup as a way to cope. It’s almost certainly learned behavior.
Similarly, I like to imagine particle physicists making quark soup when they’re sad. Where I toss onion ends and flabby carrots into a heavy pot of boiling water to create broth, physicists toss small protons at heavy nuclei to create the foundations of the universe. I discover a moment of solace nursing my broth, and they discover that for a few thousandths of a second after the Big Bang, the entire universe was just quark soup.
I abandoned physics halfway through my junior year of high school after too many failed exams, but I still find it reassuring to know there was a split second when all of everything in existence was just soup.
You can see the full collection here. This website is a little confusing though. You’ll need to head here to make the actual purchase and select “Current Issue” at checkout. For just $8, I’d call it a steal.
Next week, I promise to be back with some original writing. In the meantime, I hope you’ll consider picking up both of these publications. They’re well worth it, not just for my writing, but for all of the other fantastic writers alongside me.