Hot Lava Monster
Friend-family nodes and the deserts between them
At night, there are loons. Stars and loons, and voices from the campfire. I fall asleep listening to my child breathe, my friends laugh, the loons cry or sing on the lake just like they do in the looped recording in the Northwest exhibit at the zoo. Only real.
This is an art collective camp out. We’ve gone to what E calls C’s birthing chambers, the Okanogan woods. C brought us here. The doctor that birthed him arrives and jokes about letting us shake the very hand that caught him. C’s parents come in and out. It’s fifty years this summer since they bought land with friends nearby. Some of their landmates drop through and talk about the good old days, and also, to keep it from being too rosy, the diapers that sat in their pail for a week, there being no running water. It’s all been a long time: it burned in ‘85 and most of the landmates moved off it. But over the weekend, several of them drift through. The sense of community is palpable. I’m living in my heart, C says, about being there with all of us, and I think I know what he means.
I came there, music blaring, up the long washboarded dirt road with my kid and our dog. Heat wave: 99 degrees in the valley, where we stood in the gas station parking lot eating gas station ice cream bars. My kid shared with the dog. Up in the woods it’s cooler, a little, and shady, and there’s the lake. It’s the first place in several hours of driving that strikes me as a sustaining place to be human. Driving the hot dry treeless land has made me twitchy, and I’m tired. But then we arrive, and right away things feel easier. There are hugs and snacks, and other kids, other dogs.
My brother observed once that I live my life with nodes of support rather than being focused on partnership. And I can feel it. How I’ve crossed through the hot alone land and am now sheltered in the node of these friends.
Sheltered. We all shelter each other. Does anyone have any cilantro? Someone has cilantro. Someone has extra stove fuel. Someone knows how to cook over the fire. Three hours of stirring potatoes over the flames and they are the best potatoes, the most appreciated potatoes.
Someone holds the dog’s leash while we swim. Someone sings about race cars to the toddler when his mom isn’t there. Someone lets the six year old chase him all around the camp. Guitars pass from hand to hand. Someone has an extra sleeping bag, someone else an extra tent, and the novice camper sleeps warm. He shares his spam and his water jugs. I find one, full, in my car before I leave.
Because, too soon, I do leave. We all leave. And the world down the mountain is even hotter and drier than two days before, and I’m hurtling through it alone, with spotty reception, and I can hardly stop the car it all gets so hot so fast.
That morning, I’d woken in cold fear, worried about the drive. I talked it through, mapped it out, but still felt scared. But what am I supposed to do? We’re headed to another node of friends, this one in Goldendale. There’s no way there but through. It’s like that game, Hot Lava Monster, E says, and I see my child self on the playground, running over the wood chips to the safety of the slide.
GPS takes me on the shortest, fastest route, up through the dryland wheat and the coulees, no reception, hardly another car, and hour after hour of heat and driving, and there are still three hours and several passes to go when I start crying. I don’t stop driving.
What’s wrong, asks A, from the back seat, and I don’t want to scare her. I don’t want her to know I feel we are somewhere beautiful, yes, but also desolate and scary. I want this to be a fun road trip, with good snacks and swimming breaks and Mama singing along to “Country Roads.” So I tell her it’s just that I feel so far away from everyone who loves us.
But I’m right here, she says, and reaches out to hold my hand.
Finally, we’re back to I90. At the gas station near the on ramp, I call S and it’s OK that I’m scared. He listens and makes jokes, and even when we keep driving, I can feel him with me. Also, now we have jelly beans, and Liquid Death, which is somewhere between bubbly water and soda. LIQUID DEAAAATH, we say in death metal voices as we pass the can back and forth.
We make the turn onto 82. Up over the passes, one than another. We’re almost down the last one, when my tire goes. I pull over on the side of the highway to look. It’s torn and smoking. Outside, it’s still 104 degrees. This is what I was afraid of. My little space pod failing. The lava monster catching me.
But I have reception and we didn’t die and before the tow guy can come help me with the spare (I know how to put on a spare, but just can’t, I just can’t), up comes a shirtless man in an HVAC van, offering to change it. He’s quick and kind though it’s a hot and uncomfortable job. He says he was raised by his mom and grandma and couldn’t just leave us there.
We sleep in a motel in Yakima, with showers and a pool. In the morning, we find a tire store across the parking lot. We swim while they put on a new tire, and then we turn towards home.
It’s only when I’m here, walking my dog in Seward Park, that I uncoil enough to cry.
And I’m left thinking about these nodes, and the spaces between them. How I can smell the smoking tire in my mind but also hear the loons. How in the end, because of the kindness of strangers, we were OK, which has been my general experience of the world. How my fear was prescient. How I don’t want to drive alone through that desolation and fear anymore, literally or metaphorically, even though I know I can. How I want to play, swinging from bar to bar, each close enough to grab before letting the last one go, the woodchips far below me.