On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

Nightwalking

 

“…  it is not the skill of the hand / That writes poetry, but water, trees, / And the sky which is clear to us even though it’s dark.

 — Czeslaw Milosz

 

“I think all of us have an ancestral line or ancestral helpers that all we have to do is ask.”

— Joy Harjo

 

 

I’ve always been a nightwalker. Sometimes it seems I spent my childhood walking at night, hiding in ditches, calming wandering dogs. Of course, that was only part of my childhood, the night half, the hidden half, the half my mother denies. “You never walked in ditches! You never walked at night! Don’t be foolish! Stop these cruel stories!”

My sister comforts her. “You know Kirie tends to exaggerate.”

 

*

 

Pulali Point, a peninsula jutting into Dabob Bay, Jackson Cove, and Hood Canal, sits pretty much in the middle of Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula. The cliffs date from the Eocene Era and are about forty million years old. For ten thousand of those years, people frequented the trails lacing these cliffs.

According to David Brownell, Executive Director of North Olympic History Center in Port Angeles, Washington, “The nəxʷsƛ̕áy̕əm̕ or S’Klallam (Strong People) are today comprised of three Tribes, the Jamestown S’Klallam, Port Gamble S’Klallam, and Lower Elwha Klallam. At the time of European arrival around 1790, the S’Klallam were one people whose territory stretched across the northern Olympic Peninsula and across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver Island. They continued to expand this range into the historic era, occupying Port Townsend and the lower (northern) reaches of Hood Canal and the new mill town of Port Gamble by the mid-1800s.”

Others include the Hoh, Skokomish, Suquamish, Squaxin Island, Quileute, and Makah. The Tulalip likely visited from far-flung parts of the Salish Sea.

As a child, from our log cabin tucked into the middle of these lands, I often walked the original people’s trails. My parents encouraged my research into the history of the cultures that lived here and taught me that we did not own but merely occupied what the county recorded as our land. In Port Townsend’s tiny public library and through interviewing original white homesteaders and other elders, I learned everything I could.

When I read that the original people could walk and see in the dark, that is what I set out to do, alone or leading younger siblings, six of us born in ten years, along the Pulali cliffs.

When our family moved to Des Moines, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, returning to Pulali weekends and summers, I continued nightwalking. From our tumbled-down Des Moines farmhouse on its five-acre mostly forested lot, I would walk to the shore a mile away, hiding in ditches when headlights showed. Or I’d follow a trail through the forest to arrive at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church, which I discovered at ten when I climbed its towering weeping willow, fell, and shattered my right arm and wrist.

My ever-pregnant mother rushed to the scene, and the priest lifted my body into the family jeep. Telling me not to cry because she wouldn’t be able to drive, my mother drove the hour to the ICU. I spent two weeks in pediatric intensive care and a year learning to use my writing hand again.

Mother considered my recovery a miracle, and she and my father admired the priest, Father Winn, pronouncing him an intellectual, my family’s highest praise. For the rest of my school years, my parents and their six kids walked single file through the forest to line the choir loft.

Father Winn taught the concept of Sanctuary, that the church had been and should always be a place people could hide and be safe. The doors were never locked, he said. As a pre-adolescent in a large chaotic family, I craved such a place. After everyone had gone to bed, I would climb out my window, shinny down a giant cedar, and walk through the forest to the church. I sat in the back pew meditating on the red perpetual candle suspended from the ceiling. After a time, I headed upstairs to Father Winn’s book-lined study. There, in those dark and silent hours, I skimmed his books and wrote in my journal, returning home just before the household awakened.

My night wanderings expanded to other realms. By early adolescence, I was embarrassed by my rag-tag arty family. I desperately wanted to be like other kids whose parents dropped them off at the Des Moines Theatre, returning to pick them up after the current horror film ended. If my family wasn’t headed to Pulali, on Friday nights I would again sneak out my window, shinny down the cedar, and walk the mile to the theatre to smoke in the bathroom with girls and make out in the back row with boys. When my parents refused to let me go to parties, I sneaked out anyway. Once someone must have heard me leave, because my father came looking for me and found me hiding in the ditch. I climbed into the car, and we drove home. He never said a word.

A recruiter from an all-girl’s school memorialized by writer Mary McCarthy noticed my family in the St. Columba’s choir loft. He offered my mother, a Northwestern graduate with degrees in journalism and history, a teaching position, and the three girls fellowships. Freed from deciding what to wear each day and the burden of boys, I thrived. The night before I was scheduled to take the SATs, my best friend from public school called. She’d dropped acid and was freaking out. Did Becky ask me to show up and rescue her, talk her down? Or did I volunteer to walk the fifteen miles from my house to hers? Either way, I immediately set out, first descending the mile to the Des Moines shoreline, and then walking the low tide to Burien, where Becky lived.

When I arrived near dawn, she was asleep. She didn’t remember calling. I wondered how I’d get home. Becky offered her three-speed bike, and I pedaled the busy streets, arriving just in time to pull on my plaid uniform and head off to school.

 

*

 

After I was assaulted in my second quarter at college, I hopped onto my own bicycle, rode far into the country, and camped in the forest. I filled two spiral notebooks in an attempt to weave myself back together again. I also started drinking. At twenty-three, I stopped. I also stopped throwing up every morning and swallowing medications prescribed for headaches, stomach pain and anxiety. My fear of people remained. When depression threatened to choke me again, I thought of returning to the anesthesia. Just a sip said the nasty little voices. You should be up, you should be writing, you should be cleaning that mess off your desk. I re-read seventh-grade scrapbooks of stories my father had saved. I wanted to live up to that child self no matter how many parts of me conspired to quell her: the little voices in my head that murmured Sylvia had the best way. Virginia had the best way. Follow them. In one of my seventh-grade stories, I wrote, “Sometimes I write odd words, I work myself up writing.”

“Own those voices,” my therapist said. “Admit it is you saying that to yourself.” I shrugged. “You must feel very angry.” I hated it when she said that. I couldn’t explain that the only times I felt complete were at my desk, fingers linking brain with keys, a hundred words a minute, and in the Pulali forests, where I returned after college to live and to walk myself sane. My earliest memories are of Pulali’s paths. It is the not walking, the not writing that drives one mad.

Sometimes when city people visit, they ask if I’m afraid to wander the trails alone. Walking is how I sew myself together, I say. I’m alert for bears, cougars, and Roosevelt elk herds that roam these wilds, but people scare me far more. Sometimes my guests turn back.

When I’m walking the Olympic shorelines and forests, I feel high, exultant. I breathe in petrichor that rises from newly damp earth. I talk with my mother and grandmother and aunties, and to the creatures in the underbrush and trees. I hear my mother’s voice teaching me as a toddler the names of plants and birds. I pass through groves that ripen from spring through autumn: salmon berry, thimble berry, blue and red huckleberry, and wild blackberry, sweet and tangy and low to the ground.  I like how I feel as my body moves through the green, lush, fragrant foliage. The trails are like tunnels blasted with light. In summer, the golden and ruby-crowned kinglets cluster at eye level. In autumn, they move to the higher canopy, their cries like tiny bells, and the winter wren is my companion. No matter how still I stand, I hear her vocalization, but she eludes my sight. The resident great blue heron, with its cackle and hiss, perches on the cedar. I shed my fears like so many old, false skins.