Mass Exodus

fires and getting out of here

A few nights ago, down in the Umpqua, without cell service, on top of a medium-sized cliff which we had been swimming down below in the river just an hour before, we sat. We drew each other and the lines looked so sharp. One of us talked about chucking slugs, about how some slugs must just accept that is part of their lives. It’s time for me to be slung over the valley. This is just what happens, they might say midst gliding. What a view. 

They don’t know otherwise. I don’t think. 

I wrote down in A’s notebook, What is the human version of us moving bugs? Who moves and changes us without our knowing? The next morning, when I was not high, a friend said the question still held up. 

This was a week before we started to leave.

… 

Mass Exodus was a good idea when we were still in the place of pre-leaving. We were still in the land of marrionberries, blackberries on the way to the mailbox, 7 ducklings, the stool up to the big big bed, S sleeping in the damp basement, T carrying paintbrushes in a taped cardboard box to the desert. Oh man, I think. Everything was so good and I forgot to know it. Now I come back in my brain and it is magic.

That’s always how it is, so I’m not too concerned. It’s time for our Mass Exodus. 

My leaving, this time, and though it’s happened in a thousand other ways before today, is marked by grief and also a deep happiness from who knows where. The roof bag has everything I own in terms of things I can wear on my body. My plants—one of them which has already travelled in a friend’s car almost two years ago from east to west—guitar, dulcimer, bike in three pieces, are in the back of the car. A few days ago, while pulling buckets worth of thistle, A. pushed them in so tightly that when we dumped it out they took the form of the bucket. I imagine that once I get home my things will come out in car form.

I just finished Pam Houston’s book Deep Creek and I’ve been thinking so much about fire—as the McKinney fire threatens more and more land, closer to those I love. Pam wrote about choosing what to take in the midst of the largest fire in Southwestern Colorado. When a fire is threatening everything you love, there’s not many objects that seems worthy of saving. My mother said, when I called her last week, that when I have a fire on my end it starts a fire on her end. She didn’t say it was a bad thing, but I can’t imagine it’s easy to see those you love go through grief.

Gratitude for all those who have held me,

Jo