On Writing and Emptiness
By: Grace Powell
You want to be a writer but your mother’s friend from college, Janice, a successful author, says you need more life experience. So do this: Leave the farm where you spent much of your childhood – with something that feels like finality.
Drive yourself through the thick Pacific Northwest Fir forests, into Eastern Oregon where the sage brush squats low on the land. Drive through empty Nevada and on to red Utah dirt. Camp on the edge of the Salt Flat and at Donner Springs. Wonder about the Donner Party, about their loneliness. You bet it could fill up the night sky and then some. You’ve read everything you can about them. You don’t think cannibalism is what Janice meant by life experience, so you buy extra food at Trader Joe’s.
Drive on. Visit a man in Southern Utah you’ve been writing letters to for three years. He forages from the land and calls everything “The Mother”. You wonder if he is sexualizing the earth or respecting it. You want space. You’ve been vegan for four years so you kill 6 trout and try not to think about the Donner Party. Eat them with limes and lamb’s quarters that are beginning to bolt.
You read two books to fill the crushing nothingness. The second is a book of short stories about cowboys, sex and wide open skies. The cowboys make you hungry, the wide openness, the space on the pages of the book, sucks you up.
You sleep in your car, parked in a large canyon; the silent walls in their looming. You hope it doesn’t flood, in the quiet canyon. You’ve heard that outer space sucks sound up, or maybe you heard it is quiet because no one else is there. This terrifies you. Wedge yourself through slot canyons and jump off of sandstone cliffs with your ex lover and his partner. This terrifies and excites you too. Time to roll on.
Drive on to Colorado, to the steep valley of Telluride, where you run through groves of aspen and suck air at 12,000 feet. You taste the wealth in your mouth. You wonder how everyone here can be so clean. You wonder if they’ve ever killed a trout. Feel superior, says the former vegan, nevermind that.
You spend a week in Boulder and try psychedelic mushrooms. You puke in a rosebush and cut your leg climbing a 20 foot fence to go night swimming.
Drive to the headwaters of the Rio Grande, into the belly of a valley stacked with glittering aspens wavering on the steep slopes of the rockies. Hike until the first star is hinting, when the midsummer dusk is making shadows. Listen to the early frost crackle as it forms on the tent. As it crusts itself lovingly, protectively over your wet boots. Follow the Rio Grande downstream.
And now–– a month after you walked across the stage, which, in some frustrating way, was much more meaningful than you wanted it to be, you are settling into sage brush in Northern New Mexico tucked between the Rio and the Sangre de Cristos, the big river and the bloody mountains.
It feels like loneliness is sitting next to you, it’s hard on your thigh, teasing.
And that space is scary because you are wedged between Space and Loneliness on a futon couch on the floor, and they are both leaning closer. Is this it? My first threesome? Will it be a good life experience? The mind trepidatiously taking it all in, ass on the futon, wedged between loneliness and what ifs.
During the afternoon monsoon when it is too electric to venture outside, check your pockets:
a goji berry
a threesome
a slick blue river rock
apricots
The Donner Party
Spaces
Spread them out on the tiny table in the tiny red house and observe the data you have collected, all of the life experience. Perhaps you are not happy yet, but you are collecting information, sorting yourself closer to some semblance of a collection of shiny moments, filling your pockets with magic.
Photography by Hollie Bertram