Lana

Working service stations are not always occupied. It is the dim-glow, shut-eye streetlight that stands guard through the night, highlighting the panicked nuances of roadside life: the curled lip, the clenched fist, the cocked gun. People come here on their own, sometimes. Lone occupants heed CAUTION at yellow sunrise, frost-breath and coffee breath fog-breathing the windows, dial switching with frost-fingers to melt the ice. They stop here to piss and to watch the heat rise. They are labeled cow-less and childless, and by most—wayfaring American blights. Others move in hoards, spirited and herd-like. They marvel at curdled clouds in stormy skies, and the river that runs red to their sides is an encouraging sight, a brave, American sight. These star-seeing tourists demand Lana’s time, speaking in tongues tinged with o’s and a’s and I’s. They remind her of her waning mind, of all of the dusty dollars she stored away in hopes of leaving to thrive. She reminds herself that these folks are the real dangerous kind—that these occupants carry no gun but awe, awe in what she hardly considers the sublime: the stagnant sagebrush, the desert dirt, the white icicles of lime. They huddle in circles, nagging and sneezing, warming themselves up in her space heater’s shine. But working service stations are not always occupied. She takes a break from the cash register and trudges outside, to mull at vehicle-streaks of red, yellow and light.

The Guldok

Seoul, Korea. My maternal grandfather, whose eyes mimicked the blackness and shine of stag beetles, would light a cigarette and take my brother and I out of the apartment complex he lived in. We'd walk, hand in hand in hand, into the shadowy streets of his neighborhood, where the streetlights flickered yellow, and stray cats creeped, and stopped to look at any roadway tunnel or storm drain that came across our way. "That," my grandfather would say, while taking a drag of his cigarette, "is where the guldok lives".

And because my grandfather never exactly explained what a guldok was, my brother and I would clasp our tiny hands together and shiver in pleasant fright. I imagined the guldok to be a large, worm-like creature, with beady, nocturnal eyes and a taste for small children. I especially mulled over its supposed existence on hot summer nights, while pressing myself against the cool linoleum of my bedroom floor, wondering if the guldok was making its way underground, and if it was waiting for the cool monsoon season with equal fervor.

There were other monsters, too (and unlike the guldok, these were established as urban legends and are survived mainly through preteen girls' slumber parties). Like stretched mouth*, the demon with a grotesquely wide smile. Legend has it: a few years ago, an agashi (young woman) asked a plastic surgeon to shrink her lips. While the doctor was performing the surgery, he became distracted and accidentally cut too far along the sides of her face. The doctor watched frantically as the young woman began to bleed to death, and in his panic, he haphazardly stitched up her face in order to save her.

But it was too late. The agashi passed away with a hideously stitched "smile" on her face. Nowadays, her corpse is said to stagger along the streets of Seoul at night. If you were to encounter her, she is said to ask, "do you think I'm pretty?" If you say "no," she'll devour you alive. If you say "yes," she'll widen her smile and ask, "how about now?" And if you dare reply "yes" again, she'll rip your mouth open with a knife to make it look just like hers.

And then there's Scissors**, an evil ghost who is said to stand on and take the breath of an unlucky person who chooses to sleep in the middle of a row of people. In order to prevent such an attack, one must sleep with a pair of steel scissors underneath their pillow. I know of one grown Korean woman who religiously follows this auspicious method, and proudly claims to have never been visited by Scissors, to this day.


* Originally Kuchisake-onna, a popular urban legend in Japan. The version of the story that I am retelling is the way my Korean friends would narrate it.

** I'm fairly certain that Scissors is an urban legend that is perpetuated by those who suffer from sleep paralysis.

Scotts Run

Over the past few weeks, in spite of the rain, I keep coming back to this spot. It exists among the grand suburban mansions of Great Falls, and is devoid of people on a good day. On days like this one, I hide my backpack and sandals in the surrounding duff and wade into the freshwater. I flatten my feet in a way so that the river-rock feels softer on my soles, and I spend ample time observing the minnows and water bugs.

I look out for eels, as well. They slither and slip through algae-covered cracks in the rocks. Sometimes they lay under the rocks and just rest for a long time, and with good reason -- the Anguilla rostrata that lives in this creek began their journey thousands of miles away in the Sargasso Sea. They were born there, and will eventually swim back to reproduce and die there. But in the meantime, they lie slick and still in the creek, and wait for students and college professors to feed them bits of wonder bread and chicken.

☀

I came here when it was cold, once, when the fiery leaves in the forest were embering to a more tepid brown, and when the stink of the sewage drains at the trail-head didn't vex oxygen. I remember feeling lost and sitting just as still, on the shoreline of the water, as I listened to a mourning dove coo gently into the autumn sky. And I wondered if it knew, in that moment, that it was the most important creature in the forest -- emitting the sweetest sighs of grace, to me.


Back in civilization I begin the questioning, what to do with life? What kind of life? In wilderness this ceases; the questions aren’t answered, they dissolve.

- Randy Morgenson 

A look into my first deep-water culture hydroponic system.

A Whippoorwill in the Woods by Amy Clampitt

Night after night, it was very nearly enough,
they said, to drive you crazy: a whippoorwill
in the woods repeating itself like the stuck groove
of an LP with a defect, and no way possible
    of turning the thing off.

And night after night, they said, in the insomniac
small hours the whipsawing voice of obsession
would have come in closer, the way a sick
thing does when it's done for – or maybe the reason
    was nothing more melodramatic

than a night-flying congregation of moths, lured in
in their turn by house-glow, the strange heat
of it – imagine the nebular dangerousness, if one
were a moth, the dark pockmarked with beaks, the great
    dim shapes, the bright extinction –

if moths are indeed, after all, what a whippoorwill
favors. Who knows? Anyhow, from one point of view
insects are to be seen as an ailment, moths above all:
the filmed-over, innumerable nodes of spun-out tissue
    untidying the trees, the larval

spew of such hairy hordes, one wonders what use
they can be other than as a guarantee no bird
goes hungry. We're like that. The webbiness,
the gregariousness of the many are what we can't abide.
    We single out for notice

above all what's distinct, the way birds are,
with their unhooked-up cheekily anarchic
dartings and flashings, their uncalled-for color –
the indelible look of the rose-breasted grosbeak
    an aunt of mine, a noticer

of such things before the noticing had or needed
a name, drew my five-year-old attention up to, in
the green deeps of a maple. She never married,
believed her cat had learned to leave birds alone,
    and for years, node after node,

by lingering degrees she made way within for
what wasn't so much a thing as it was a system,
a webwork of error that throve until it killed her.
What is health? We must all die sometime.
    Whatever it is, out there

in the woods, that begins to seem like
a species of madness, we survive as we can:
the hooked-up, the humdrum, the brief, tragic
wonder of being at all. The whippoorwill out in
    the woods, for me, brought back

as by a relay, from a place at such a distance
no recollection now in place could reach so far,
the memory of a memory she told me of once:
of how her father, my grandfather, by whatever
    now unfathomable happenstance,

carried her (she might have been five) into the breathing night.
"Listen!" she said he'd said. "Did you hear it?
That was a whippoorwill." And she (and I) never forgot.


The very poem that inspired the title of this blog. Special thanks to Leo Chase for believing in my ability to create.