We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. - T.S. Eliot
When my dad asks if I’ll drive him to his class reunion near our hometown Bend, Oregon because he’s having heart and sleep problems and needs help making the eleven hour drive, I think of my torn up basement, the main water pipeline the foundation workers accidentally injected with cement, the contractor who shows up at any time other than the time he says, the carpet that may never be installed since it's been weeks of living in exposed piping and cement–for a while without running water–the dishes stacked and spread out along the counter and in the sink like a rotten buffet, the laundry room like mounds of trash in a landfill ablaze with fire, the work emails piling up like piles of cow poop, I pause, watch my seven year old daughter yank her older sister’s hair until my oldest punches her sister back in the face, and it’s a yes: Yes, Dad, I’ll go anywhere away from here.
I haven’t lived in Oregon for sixteen years, which makes no sense, because I still feel like a kid younger than sixteen, though I am thirty four now raising three kids in central Utah where I came for college at eighteen, and where I have since stayed. I didn’t mean to be here in Utah this long, to raise kids here this long, to fight about where we live and how with my husband this long. It’s not that I don’t like Utah. I can see the mountains even now outside my glass doors slumbering like giant sleepy bodies who ate and drank too much, their bellies full and protruding. Protruding is the word the coroner used to describe my dead younger brother’s abdomen after he accidentally died of a prescription drug overdose a year and a half ago. The mountains of Utah are my brother’s big belly, many big bellies all over the eastern horizon.
After my brother died, I wondered if I belonged anywhere at all, let alone Utah. Greece? Finland where my mother’s side goes back over fourteen generations? I tried going to Finland this past Spring, to visit the graves and birthplaces of all my ancestors I printed out on sheets and sheets of paper, but was denied at the connecting airport because of secret European Union passport expiration dates that come before your actual passport expiration date. What about Bend? Please tell me I belong somewhere to someone. Yes, I’ll drive you to Bend, Dad.
Our torn up house, like the last decade of my life, feels merely like accidents, one after another without my consent. In a P.E. class of first graders playing parachute, I’m the parachute, yanked up and down, out and around, whoops, no one’s listening to teacher and the parachute might rip, we wouldn’t want that, class, would we? No one responds because no one’s listening. And so the timing of my dad’s request feels significant, symbolic, a divine hand reach, even though I don’t much believe in significance or symbolism or divine intervention these days. It’s just that I’ve been waking up early before the kids get up, writing about Bend, thinking about Bend, remembering Bend, longing for Bend or a more beautiful life, I can’t tell which.
My dad is the planned entertainment for his class reunion, so I drive his white rickety van stacked to the top with speakers and guitars and chords, his DJ logo with my maiden name Brock on it: “BrockSound Company.” After a few screeched tires and a few “Look 50 feet ahead!” from my dad, I worry I’m giving him more heart damage with my distracted brain driving. But we are talking and talking and I’m looking out the window, looking at the dried sage and dry land and remembering with my whole body a time and place before so much bad happened. The van, old and back heavy with equipment, is so slow, and I can’t figure out the cruise control until the last four hour stretch. We stop too often, and I wait for my dad’s slow walk that reminds me of his Texan dad, my grandpa who died while I was in college, every time we stop to fill up or go to the bathroom. Long after we’ve stopped, after I’ve gotten out to fill the tank, I wait for my dad to pull out his phone to mark the mileage, watch him reach back into his back pocket to get his wallet, a slow laborious movement like a backward arch of a whale. He wiggles his wallet until he grabs hold of his card, and we’re supposed to arrive in Boise for the night around 10:00pm not midnight, and I did not want to stay up this late because my fibromyalgia flares up when I do not sleep, my body so old now even though it’s not, and I hold in a scream. I watch him stroll into the restroom, his brown leather shoes with the thick black soles, shoes he’s been wearing since I can remember and will probably be buried in. His feet flare out when he walks, his back bends slightly forward, that familiar no rush feeling about him, which I love while writing now, but also absolutely can’t stand past midnight. I watch him at the register as he buys peanut butter M&Ms for the second, maybe third time. And after he lollygags back to the car, after he gets his wallet and recipts in order in his arching whalelike way, he pulls out the M&Ms and pours a few into my hand.
On the road, we realize we forgot again to reset the odometer because the gas gauge is broken, so we reset it a few miles too late. We also forgot to wipe the windshield at the gas station, which is a bummer, we remark, since the windshield wiper fluid pump is also broken and bug guts are splattered all over our view. Some butterflies and moths are dead too, entangled in the wipers. This is okay, though, no bigger than a shoulder shrug to my dad, though I find myself staring at one particular gut smear so hard I have to remind myself to look at the road and also fifty feet ahead so I don’t slam the brakes again. This is how it is with my dad, relaxed, whatever. His stories–my dad is a storyteller in the way he talks, not a question asker–take on this slow meandering with long pauses that make you think he’s finished when in fact, he is not.
After we get to the reunion, after my dad sets up the equipment, he starts to play his one man show. His high school band used to be the entertainment at these gatherings, but it’s just him this time. I look at him on the big outdoor stage with his silver hair tucked behind his ears, his thick black framed glasses and a black shirt. He plays under the dusk then night sky on various guitars, acoustic, electric, or bass, singing to background recordings he’s played and mixed beforehand. My best friend since childhood, Kenzie Heinrich now Healy, shows up–she’s traveled here from Portland. We met when we were seven at church and she reminds me later that weekend how I taught her my family’s phone number we had for years when we lived in Bend: 388-1010. Think of it this way, I told her: Our younger sisters are three. We’re almost eight. And my older brother is ten and your older brother is pretty much ten. 3-8-8-10-10. Simple. My cousin Laila, who I haven’t seen since her mother, my aunt, died less than a year ago from breast cancer, which my mom had but didn’t die of, which we both carry in our genes, shows up too with her dogs and her friend.
We all dance, throw our hands in the air and sway like willow trees or like breaking branches in a storm, whatever the music calls to us, we sway and we sway and release release release.
We help my dad take down after his last song, “Closing Time.” My dad’s speakers are newer, different from my childhood when he and my mom would get me and my five siblings to play music at reunions like this, church parties, talent shows, and other random gigs. I sang and played keyboard sometimes on the organ or synthesizer setting. My dad called us the Brock Family Rock ‘n Roll Ensemble, which was as funny then as it is now. We didn’t really want to play then either, but we did. We played oldies like “Green Onions” by Booker T and the M.G.’s, and “Ob‐La‐Di, Ob‐La‐Da” by the Beatles, and 90s hits like “All I Want” by Toad and the Wet Sprocket and “Torn” by Natalie Imbruglia. I used to blush out of embarrassment when my mom sang the lyrics “lying naked on the floor.”
There are cords all over the stage, black cords like black snakes, audio cords, light cords, power cords. How my dad memorizes a set up with cords like this all over and entwined is its own category of genius and evidence of thousands of gigs played with repetitious set ups and takedowns.
I teach my friend and her sister how to wrap the cords into circles or infinity signs depending, how to follow the grooves and dents in the cords while you wind them like my dad taught me a lifetime ago, and suddenly the cords are years of my life wrapping around and around my hands and wrists and elbows. I am tying years of my life into knots like bows, if only years were like cords, my hands and forearms holding the familiar weight and slip of the cords.
When we’re finished around midnight, Kenzie drives me to her parents’ home in Bend at my request. I want to stay with her and her parents at their home, the home on the outskirts of Bend, the home with the pond we used to catch frogs and swim in and ice skate on, the home on acres of desert wilderness which is probably worth over a million now, but not when we all first moved to Bend, a town of just over 20,000 people in the early nineties. It has since more than quadrupled in population and price. I once dreamt of their home years ago, walked into their kitchen with the windows facing the Juniper Trees and sagebrush, and I don’t remember anything else about the dream other than it felt like home. My parents have since left Bend and Oregon altogether after the real estate market crashed and they lost their home, savings, and retirement to the banks, so this is as close to home as a place that I can get.
I sleep in the upstairs room that used to be a shared room for Kenzie’s brothers. I set up my Cpap machine–I have sleep apnea now too, again, old, though I feel like I’m seven here again. I notice a painting hanging on the wall. Kenzie tells me the next morning her parents found the painting and hung it up for me. It’s a painting I don’t recognize as mine at first, not sure if it’s mine or Kenzie’s because sometimes we blend. The canvas is split between yellow and blue down the diagonal center, an orange sun with swirling red rays in the yellow portion and a yellow moon with orange stars in the blue portion. The division between yellow and blue, light and dark, is lazily defined, and I see the smear of paint that is speckled, not solid.
In the morning, I see the Three Sisters mountains out on the horizon in the morning sun perfectly illuminated and framed by the upstairs window. I never noticed how the window acted like a frame as a kid, but I notice now. When I go downstairs, Kenzie’s mother, Deidre who we call Dee Dee, gives us buttered scones and scrambled eggs and gingerbread tea, and I tell her how good it is to be here, to be in Bend, how it’s emotional to be back here too. I don’t tell her my whole life sometimes feels disjointed and unreal now, or that I’ve lost my mind and body too, or how it’s hard to see even them without thinking of my younger brother who is especially dead in Bend. He and I used to hang out here together, Kenzie’s brother was my brother’s best friend. I cry, and my friend’s mother I have known as long as my friend and only five years less than my own dead brother touches my hands.
The truth is I’ve been afraid to visit Bend. I’ve been afraid to visit this particular place with my body, my memory, my words. Perhaps to remember my past from the present is also to realize the ways in which I, my family, my hometown, my life no longer are and that is another confrontation with death.
Kenzie drives me to Shevlin Park.
When I open the door, I mean it when I say the moment I stepped out of the car and smelled the Ponderosa Pines and the Juniper Trees and the frosted white blue Juniper berries, which are actually fleshy cones, and the sagebrush growing along the Deschutes River, I received anything I longed for but could not name, can’t name even now, in a breath. I do not understand how I can live in Utah longer than I ever lived in Bend and still find that it is Bend that sprains and swells my own heart.
The city name Bend is short for “Farewell Bend,” a phrase white pioneers who traveled through here would say after getting up to leave the last bend in the river, at what is now called Mirror Pond, which still sits in Bend’s central park. Mirror Pond is a pool of still water come down from the Cascade mountains, glassy, reflective water like a pond, though it is actually a river. The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs were the original inhabitants of Bend until they ceded it in the Treaty of 1855 while retaining regular and customary hunting, fishing, and gathering rights. The Wana Łama (Warm Springs), Wasq’ú (Wasco) and Northern Paiute people inhabited Bend seasonally. Bend became a passing through place, a transition place, a place of temporary stay and yearning. Farewell Bend! Farewell, Bend! The phrase itself is romantic, longing.
I was four years old when we arrived in Bend from California’s Bay Area, where I was born in Hayward and where both my parents met, where, too, my mother was raised by a Finnish mother who immigrated to the U.S. in her mid-twenties, who worked graveyard shifts as a hospice nurse, and a father who was a renown chess player and clarinetist who loved Carl Jung, who some of us suspect had undiagnosed autism and an untreated mood or personality disorder. My dad, a native to Lakeview in southern Oregon, three hours south, was raised by a Mormon mother, who made crafts and hosted Bridge parties, a descendent of a long line of Mormon pioneers who worked dry wheat farms, and a non-Mormon father from Texas, a WWII Navy veteran and mechanic. My older brother tells the story of the time he sat by our dad’s dad and our mom’s mom and listened to them try to talk to each other. Our mom’s mom expressed something, probably worry over health or food. She lived in the U.S. longer than she ever lived in Finland and easily spoke and read in English, but always kept her thick Finnish accent and her anxiety from growing up in war-torn Finland. Our dad’s dad mumbled a sarcastic joke that our grandma most likely took literally. My brother sat by them translating– “English to English,” he says and we laugh.
My dad convinced my mom in the Spring of 1992 to leave California’s ocean air for the High Desert of Central Oregon. From its native days, Bend evolved into a logging town, then a tourism and retirement town, a ski and brewery town, a mix of travelers, skiers, rafters, rock climbers, retirees, and growing families. Bend, too, is a mix of the liberal, artsy folk from Western Oregon and the rugged cowboys from Eastern Oregon. Bend in a way represents our family too, a wild concoction of philosophy, art, music, and a whole lotta jokes and crass.
Kenzie and I walk along the river, see the chipmunks and the squirrels, the pinecones, pine needles, and dirt.
That dirt from my childhood in between my fingers, in my fingernails, dirt on my palms and heels. How can remembering dirt cut so deep to the center, the sternum, the same place I now get heartburn if I forget to take my Omeprazole? Not out of longing, not out of nostalgia, but out of simply remembering? As if–there, proof, I lived in this dirt once.
Bend dirt is unlike the burgundy dirt of Utah where I live now, the dirt I saw on a hike up Hobble Creek Canyon once when the rain poured so much that the trees flushed greener and the dirt, it bubbled and swelled like red velvet cake baking. No, the dirt from my childhood, the dirt of Bend is the color of a discarded cardboard box, and it was carried all over my body and it was loved.
I ask Kenzie to take me to the home I lived in when we first met. We sneak along the canal in the back, ignoring the private property signs. A woman stares at us from her garage and we avoid eye contact and whisper out of the corners of our mouths. This is Eastern Oregon influence coming through. We come to a small wooden bridge connecting a wilderness to a small home overlooking five acres of golden shrubbery. I recognize this place immediately in my pores and abdomen. In a writing class once, the teacher led a meditation for us. She introduced a writerly self and we were told to visualize who that self is. Mine is my seven year old self, the age when I lived here. My younger writer self greets me in the golden field at dusk, then takes my hand and leads me here to this bridge over gentle water. She wears a white dress. She leads me to the edge of the water. She picks up wet stones and puts them in my hand and nonchalantly, the same attitude my own girls possess all over their precious lives, says, “It’s okay.” No big deal, a shrug, like my dad’s. You lived and right here once. Write about it if you wanna.
If the sounds of your childhood influence your writing style, add the rhythm of gentle water here at the edge of desert. Add the beat of rocks turning over in water, rocks being thrown, both the kerplunk and the splash. Along with my dad’s rock music, along with my mom’s laugh and her feet marching down the hall, add Bible verses and Book of Mormon verses written in chiasmus, and a solitary basketball bouncing on pavement, but don’t forget the water and the way it carries on the wind especially near Ponderosa Pines.
We continue along the canal and I tell Kenzie there was a pond here, and we walk farther and I say, where is the frozen pond my older brother ran around naked on a dare, his skinny body and long legs white as the snow? Did the pond dry up? These stables, horses are new. Then we spot the pond hidden behind a new circling of trees. There it is like a revelation. This place is what I remember and also all the changes.
That night, after we explore other homes of mine, our schools, after we eat the biggest mud pie from Pine Tavern, still here and bigger than before, after we hot tub with Kenzie’s husband and older brother, and I watch them jump into the cold pond water, not joining–even though I’m Finnish–after we run back to the hot tub laughing, we hear Kenzie’s one-year-old crying. The baby hurt her wrist earlier in the day, and keeps waking. Kenzie investigates, then decides to take the baby to the ER in the middle of the night. I watch her carry her daughter out the door.
My earliest memory is of being carried. I leave a dark hallway and pass through a doorway of hanging beads, which brush my forehead as I gradually emerge into a room of yellow light. My mother confirms, says I slept in a closet-sized yellow room with a beaded doorway the first year of my life. Neuroscientists say memories of being one or two are not that reliable because experiences that occur before the frontal lobe matures most likely can’t be retrieved later. And yet. This memory comes to me again and again. That this memory is either a memory that defies scientific likelihood, or a creation of my own unconscious doing fascinates me. Perhaps it is the repetition of the experience, the countless comings and goings, the dippings in and out of the wooden beads, the light, then shadow, the shadow, then light, that allow me to retain this memory, which may not be one memory, but many. In a way, this first memory of memories feels like a poem.
In the morning, I’m told the baby broke her wrist. We are drinking Chai tea now out on a new upper deck overlooking the pond and open land. We remark on the tragedy of the wrist and the tragedy of a perfect day ending in pain and exhaustion, and can’t we end a day in rest? Junipers litter the land as far out as we can see. The Junipers hunch and sag like oldening women, their shredded trunks peeling downward like nylon stockings. Both native and invasive, Juniper Trees survive by rooting in places less likely to be touched by fires–rocky, steep, shallow surfaces. It’s not uncommon to see Juniper Trees growing through cracks in rock on a mountain side splintering out like broken bones. When white settlers came to the west, their cattle ate the native grasses, which prevented fires from flourishing and destroying the Junipers. With this, Junipers spread quickly beyond their rocky lands, their population dominating the entire Western landscape.
In mythology, the Juniper has sometimes been described as a protector tree. The tree who turns a dead boy’s bones into a bird with a beautiful song, then back to a boy again. The tree whose strong fragrance can hide hunted hares from hounds. The Juniper is also said in European folklore to be the tree that hides baby Jesus and his parents from King Herod on their way to Egypt, and the tree the prophet Elijah slept under during duress.
Juniper is also the tree that apparently doesn’t grow up. Its tiny needles never develop the scale-like leaves of other cypress trees in adulthood. Juniper, the Peter Pan tree. Though it may not grow up, it seems to live forever. Biologists say a seedling sprouting today could still be standing a thousand years from now, that some species have survived millennia.
Whatever the future holds for Bend and the whole West and for me, you can bet your bottom dollar Juniper Trees will still be here. These stubborn sons of bitches, these cowboys will survive in mythology and landscape. And it is these trees who helped raise me.
Before we drive home, my dad and I stay the night across town with his older brother, The Colonel, and my aunt who used to rub my back every Christmas Eve. She makes ratatouille with vegetables from her garden overlooking the river, and a rhubarb pie that can split the sky. I find the recipe in the kitchen written on an index card in cursive and snap a picture. My uncle and I stay up late talking about Vietnam, about the time he gave the kid sitting behind him a pencil, which saved his life from a gang in Texas ready to knife him, about the time he cried on the plane flying to his dad’s in Oregon from his mom’s in Oklahoma or Arkansas, I can’t remember which, then decided to never cry again. I receive these stories in awe, like water to a desert, and before I go to bed, my uncle gives me a stack of his writings, one of which is a poem he wrote about my brother before he died, when my brother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and taking Abilify. The poem is called, “Abilify Me,” and perhaps this is the solace and belonging I crave: to be held in tender empathy, to be remembered in detail like a prescription medicine.
In the car home, my dad falls asleep. The sun, which is a bright orange now from distant fires, rises higher and higher over the horizon in the late morning, light spreading far and wide like a reaching hand. I think of my first memory again that may be no memory at all, but a creation myth I both concoct and believe. I roll this memory into a glowing planet of dust, into what I can hold and poke and taste, a story:
I watch this memory now as if standing in the hallway, holding my breath, eager not to disturb. I watch a mother cup the nape of a baby’s neck, press her lips to the baby’s ear in a ready song. They pass through hanging wooden beads and the beads sway and fall upon them like a wash. The mother carries the baby into a room of sunlit walls, walls the color of sun cascading over High Desert land. See a mother and her baby triumphantly belong to each other? See a mother look up while carrying a child, see something pure and luminous and shining: It is so easy to look up because the eyelids are not too heavy yet, easy like waving a hand or brushing a tear from an eye.
Driving back to Utah, I know I can’t stay in Oregon, not even sure I’d want to if I could, but I also don’t know if I want to be where I am going, or here in the middle. My restless legs and hurting skin are killing me. I already know I won’t be able to make up the lack of sleep. And I think of my mother carrying me through dark hallways and beads:
How to hold your life, cradle it like a baby, this delicate, holy life? How to caress its neck even when it is not smiling, but wailing, flailing its arms like breaking branches in a storm, how to step one step at a time and still belong here, there, and everywhere in between? How to want it, your sacred life, each lollygagging step, each whale arching reach, to desire it like peanut butter M&Ms, like gentle water under a bridge in the desert, the way passersby crave the last bend of a river. How to hold a life like audio cords wrapped around and around your elbows and wrists, how to look it in the face with a ferocious and protective and forever Juniper love, how to let this life know that you, you are mine. You belong to me.
This reminds me of what Kurt Vonnegut said about home: "Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get there again."
Too add to the transformation of home, the elementary school you attended was surrounded by undeveloped land and anyone could easily walk through it's campus (this sounds like one of those stories you tell your kids that is unbelievable). Now, there's a 30 foot tall chain link fence that surrounds the campus keeping potential intruders at bay. I don't know about you, but I could not wait to leave what I once described an isolated desert hell-scape where nothing ever happened and there was nothing to do and vowed that I was never going to come back. Only to realize, much later, that I lived in one of the most beautiful places in the world and started feeling a sense of loss when visiting.
Home is a neighborhood filled with children riding bikes and a gaggle of blonde hair children bouncing a ball in their driveway. Bend feels even less like home now that the neighborhood of kings, once filled with middle class families, has more than a few houses that are worth a million dollars.