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Flyway: A Journal of Writing and Environment

Erica BloomRachael ButtonJeremiah ChamberlinTodd DavisKaren Bjork DischellRoberta FeinsRichard HolingerGabriel HouckLiana Jahan ImamJordan KauffmanCassandra KircherKelly LuceErik MoelleringBenjamin PercyKimberly L. RogersFernand RoqueplanMurzban F. ShroffChristine Stewart-NuñezKathryn SukalichToccoa SwitzerGrant Tracey

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Dear Reader,

We hope you enjoy the following excerpts from issue 12.3.

Please note that only the poetry is published in full. To read each of

these pieces, and more, in its entirety, please purchase a

subscription using the "Subscribe" link on our website. Your

support is what keeps us going.

Thank you for reading!

- The Flyway Staff

Friends of Flyway

Flyway Benefactor$100, includes one-year subscription, plus a signed copy of The Horizontal World, by Debra Marquart. Name will appear on an Honor Roll inside the back cover for two years.

Mrs. Loralyn Marie Kokes Mr. David Crain McCunn

Flyway Patron$35, includes a one-year subscription

Flyway SponsorsMichael Martone & Teresa PappasJavaunta WalkerZora Zimmerman

Special Thanks to:Ames SilversmithingFayette Creamery and Brunkow DairyThe Iowa State Creative Writing DepartmentIvon KatzDorothy LewisChristiana LangenbergIngrid LilligrenDebra MarquartJill ReeberConnie and Steve RingleeLinda ShenkTeresa Smiley

Cover artist Jordan Kauffman

Artist Biography Jordan Kauffman is a PhD student in history, theory, and criticism of architecture and art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He currently seeks to understand the philosophical assumptions of subjectivity that are inscribed within architectural practice by looking at techniques of architectural drawing. He holds a Master of Arts in history and theory of architecture from the Architectural Association, London.

Image: Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia, PAArtist’s NoteThe Eastern State Penitentiary was opened in the early 1800s as the first reform prison in the United States. Designed with the panoptic theories of Jeremy Bentham in mind, by the British architect John Haviland, the facility soon proved inadequate for its purpose. Numerous renovations and additions ensued before it was determined unfit for use in 1970. It is now left to decay and fall into ruin. Thinking concerning ruins reached its philosophical and aesthetic zenith in the 18th century, when ruins were seen as engaging the relationship between man and nature. Subsumed into discussion about the beautiful, the sublime, and the picturesque, ruins provided a ground from which to understand the extents of human subjectivity. Still today, in the fallout of this discussion, and even as transcendental subjectivity has given way to understandings of a more mediated human subject, ruins can still allude to these previous ways of thinking. While a complete, monumental building might stand for the permanence and strength of human endeavors, this former apex of design, ingenuity, and social theory, in the process of ruination, stands as a reminder of the inability of human creations, and indeed the human subject, to remain effective in the face of change and entropic natural tendencies.

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The terms “migration route” and “!yway” have in the past been used

more or less indiscriminately, but ... it seems desirable to designate as

migration routes the individual lanes of avian travel from breeding grounds

to winter quarters, and as !yways those broader areas into which certain

migration routes blend or come together ....

"F.H. Kortright, !e Ducks, Geese and Swans of North America

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Flyway: A Journal of Writing and Environment

Vol. 12.3

Fiction, non!ction, poetry, and requests for subscriptions and copies should be sent to the following address:

206 Ross Hall/Department of EnglishIowa State University/Ames, Iowa 50011-1201

Subscriptions: $24 for one year, $40 for two yearsIndividual copies: $10 Foreign subscriptions: add $3 postage charge

contents contents

!(notes from the !eld)First Place: Cassandra Kircher, On Not Marrying a RangerFinalist: Gabriel Houck, In television snow !"#$%&Christine Stewart-Nuñez, Honeymoon at Miguel’s Beach ParadiseFernand Roqueplan, Ten !ousand Shields & SpearsErik Moellering, Spring Comes Like a Mississippi Flood, !en the Co"ns Float!e Storehouse of the Belly

editor’s notecontributors

'($#%)'#*!Benjamin Percy

*%'$'(+,-"($#.$.

(home voices)First Place: Kathryn Sukalich, !is Is What I Remember, Honorable Mention: Kimberly L. Rogers, Arriving in Harare, !e Hard Truth about Cultural Exchange, Measurement: Tracking Hyenas and the MoonHonorable Mention: Rachael Bu!on, A Brief Natural History

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Flyway welcomes !nancial support in the form of donations, bequests, and planned gi"s. Additionally, please inquire about the Friends of Flyway Fund and

patron pages by contacting Sheryl Kamps at #yway@iastate.edu.

Flyway is published with support from the Iowa State University Department of English.

Copyright © 2010, Iowa State University Department of English. All Rights Reserved. ISSN 0032-1958. Printed in Canada.

contents

!Roberta Feins, Razor Clam Season at Ocean ShoresKelly Luce, Walking With JunTodd Davis, Spring Melt,Love Has Undone Me

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Erica Bloom, Point of ReferenceToccoa Switzer, !e Creek Bed

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Murzban F. Shross, Diwali StarJeremiah Chamberlin, DegreesRichard Holinger, Carp CreekGrant Tracey, What She Had to SayLiana Jahan Imam, With People Like Us

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Dear Reader,

As Flyway begins its 16th year, we re!ect on the meaning “environment” takes on for di"erent people. Traditionally, environmental writing refers to writing about nature, o#en as an advocate of the natural world. With this in mind, it’s easy to view the manmade world as less important and thus deny it a place within the environmental literature canon. However, environmental writing now includes urban and other manmade environments as legitimate components of modern human experience. $is issue of Flyway explores both human and nonhuman environments, because we shape the environment that shapes us. $is idea, that we are shaped by what we shape, highlights the importance of individual human experience within both human and nonhuman environments. In “On Marrying a Ranger,” this year’s Notes from the Field contest winner explores her love of and integration with the nonhuman world compared to her husband, for “whom camping will never come naturally.” Sometimes we don’t expect to fall in love with a place, or if we don’t fall in love, to have it become an integral part of us. Whether it is a %rst visit to Zimbabwe (“Arriving in Harare”), visiting the constantly changing shore of Lake Michigan (“Point of Reference,” “A Brief Natural History”), or discovering a sense of place&or the loss of it&in a more urban se'ing: a roller rink (“What She Had to Say”), Mumbai (“Diwali Star”), from within a Houston airport (“In Television Snow”), the discovery of how place shapes us becomes a story of how we, by the nature of being human, shape our environments and the experiences we carry with us.

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sta![Supervising Editor] Steve Pe"

[Managing Editor] Liz Cli# [Assistant Managing Editor] Brenna Dixon

[Non$ction Editor] Brenna Dixon

[Fiction Editor] Genevieve DuBois [Poetry Editor] Annie Binder

[Assistant Poetry Editor] Daniel Wise [Design Editor] Breanna Byers Kreimeyer [Web Editor] Breanna Byers Kreimeyer

[Technical Support] Sheryl Kamps

[Readers] Anna Keener Fred MacVaugh Abigail Ebelherr Angie Sebastian Kathryn Sukalich Dana Woolley Jimmy O’Brien

$e stories, essays, and poems in this issue of Flyway focus on the idea of trying to %nd, or to (re)create, a sense of place in a world that is constantly being reshaped. It is my hope that if you haven’t found your place in the world, or if your place has been reshaped, that you’ll continue working to %nd a spot to belong.

Sincerely,

Liz Cli#Managing Editor

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to acknowledge the old echoing wounds

forced to watch as the stubbled crabgrass sprouts again

decorates the winter-stamped earth and a face full of spring !ies spray wings from the forgo"en compost that digging worms aerated so well,

!ies like sequins on the sedimentary ru#ed dress of the now greening $elds.

All the buried winter-shrieks $nd voice in the slow-motion pornography of manured $elds,the not-quite-there-yellow-breath

of roaring dandelion herds. ____________ %is is the season of the buried face made visible

beneath the skin on the back of my hand the bulb of your lips barely undersoil parting slow as clouds within the mealy earth

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Some things dig so deep that we have no choice but to revisit them

to acknowledge the old echoing wounds

forced to watch as the stubbled crabgrass sprouts again

decorates the winter-stamped earth and a face full of spring !ies spray wings from the forgo"en compost that digging worms aerated so well,

!ies like sequins on the sedimentary ru#ed dress of the now greening $elds.

All the buried winter-shrieks $nd voice in the slow-motion pornography of manured $elds,the not-quite-there-yellow-breath

of roaring dandelion herds. ____________ %is is the season of the buried face made visible

beneath the skin on the back of my hand the bulb of your lips barely undersoil parting slow as clouds within the mealy earth

%is is the turbulent season when unpredictable weather breaks down on everything&cultivating the landscape’s Braille&

slicking the hands now busy in the act of wringing forth this visitation.

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#Last day of the year; four o’clocktwilight, low tide. Buckets and boots.Boots and slicker. Moon,

white-orange half-shell.!e clams are spade-shaped tubesdigging deep into wet sand,

foot a thick tongue speaking water’s quick language,precise diction of sand grains.

Dad rocks the shovel at an angle,digs deep, pulls hard.Six-month old Henry

with his bo"le, Great-Grandmain her lawn-chair, all take turnstwisting pulling. Te#on pan,

cornmeal ba"er. Dad wakeslater in the dark from a dreamof hiss and suck, the clam gun

pulling up the moon. Opensplasticized curtains$there she isstill in the sky, sieving the morning stars.

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Mom called last week. She told me that Grandpa no longer knows what to do with a spoon. !ere was a moment of silence. He forgets to eat, she said. He pokes around at the food, but doesn’t eat anything. I picture him si"ing at his kitchen table on a chair with an extra cushion. He’s wearing a bu"on-down plaid shirt and the faded blue jeans he’s owned for decades. !e ones that are too solidly medium blue to look like real denim. A belt holds them up because he’s go"en smaller with age. He’s wearing slippers. He doesn’t notice the decorative plates hung on the wall above him, or the sun coming in through the wooden blinds, lighting up specks of dust, or my grandma going through the mail next to him. He just looks at the spoon and…and what? Does he ponder the curves? !e metal? Does he wonder where it came from? I don’t know what it’s like. I don’t know what brain deterioration, what rogue beta-amyloid proteins and amyloid plaques, what advanced Alzheimer’s disease feels like. I don’t know what it thinks like. I imagine the edges of the world slowly ge"ing fuzzier, darker. As if memories are like bad vision, slowly ge"ing worse. I’ve had the image of that spoon, hovering purposelessly above a salad or soup or breakfast cereal, #oating in and out of my head ever since. I’m on a trip from Iowa to South Dakota with the other new graduate students, and I can’t quite get rid of it. I think about it as I look out the window of our $%een-passenger van on Wednesday a%ernoon, watching the scenery go by to the music of U2. If you focus on the rows, the corn $elds look like the thumbed pages of a book, #ipping by too quickly to make out the words. !e corn reminds me of the drive to visit my grandparents where they live outside of Milwaukee in Washington County. I remember the drive down Highway K where we would pass a rusted-out street car in the middle of a farm $eld. We always wondered how it got there, many miles from a big city, and many decades from an era of street cars. !e di&erence between those roads and these

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!"#$%&'( South Dakota ones is that these are still !at like Iowa. "e roads near Hartford, Wisconsin, are hilly. My grandfather used to put my cousins and me in his old, navy blue station wagon and drive us through the hills, asking us if we felt the bu#er!ies in our stomachs as we descended, riding over the rumble strips. “Ow-wa!” he would yell as the car shook. For years a$erward I thought rumble strips had something to do with bu#er!ies, the orange and black winged kind. "en Grandpa would look at the neighboring dairy farms and say, “Look! "e cows are si#ing down. It’s going to rain!”

Outside our van, somewhere in eastern South Dakota, %elds of sun!owers surprise me. I’ve never seen %elds of them before, and for some reason all of the !owers face east, uniformly waiting for the morning. I think of the movie version of Everything is Illuminated with Elijah Wood, when he stands out in the %eld of sun!owers, the vibrant yellow overwhelming the TV screen. In that scene he’s searching for evidence of his ancestors who were lost to World War II. In my scene, I’m headed west. I don’t know what I’m looking for.

***I wake on "ursday in Badlands National Park to

the sound of something scratching faintly against my tent. "is is my %rst time sleeping in a tent since I was a child, and my lack of camping knowledge&not to mention lack of a Leatherman and hiking boots&makes me feel sheepish. "e source of the scratching: a large, green grasshopper trapped in a bubble of moisture between the tent wall and the rain !y. It struggles to jump, but can only move its hind legs in slow motion, one at a time, %ghting a losing ba#le against the forces of fabric and water. A breeze rustles the tent walls, blowing the grasshopper back and forth. I wonder about the world from its perspective, paralyzed between green walls, and about its misfortune of landing in one of the few feet of humanity here when it had miles and miles of open space to land upon. I try to set it free from inside the tent, but it’s stuck. For a moment, I think of my grandfather, of the grasshoppers and crickets that populated the %elds near his house, and of the stories he used to tell about %re ants eating limbs. He doesn’t tell stories like that anymore.

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When I get up to search for food and co!ee the campground and the surrounding hills of the Badlands are still coated in mist. "e grasshopper is gone, perhaps freed by me rustling around in the tent. I feel more a part of the morning than I have in a long time. I feel more on the ground than I normally do, my feet more against the dirt. Maybe I’m just paying more a#ention. “Do you want instant co!ee?” one of our professors asks me. “De$nitely,” I say, pulling the hood of my sweatshirt up over my head and my sleeves down over my $sts. “It was cold in that tent.” Many of the other students have le% to go hiking before breakfast even though it’s barely six o’clock. "e rest of us sit around a picnic table. “Did you sleep okay?” I ask the two people across from me. “Not great. I’ve slept be#er,” one says, pulling a winter hat down over her eyebrows despite the fact that it’s only September. "e other student looks out across the campground. “"is fog is eerie,” she says. "e sun slowly burns o! the cold and mist, and by mid-morning I’m hiking through hills covered in tall grasses, $lled with luckier grasshoppers. "ey explode out of the grass like $recrackers, lit just before I step onto their patches of ground. Nowhere else would I have noticed this sea of insects, the di!erent varieties&green, brown, some types smaller than others&populating what appears at $rst glance from a car window to be a vacant, desolate land.

*** I stand at the edge of the these orange, rigid hills, this jagged canyon in the Badlands, as the other graduate students pile out of our van to take pictures of a group of bighorn sheep. From up top it looks like we’re standing at the edge of a wasteland. Nothing but rock and dirt. "e peaks and ridges feel threatening. "eir striations of color&tan, orange, red, brown&look alien, like something from the moon.

I picture that spoon.

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!"#$%&'( !e convolutions of the hills remind me of the convolutions of the brain, and I picture my twel"h grade psychology teacher#Mrs. Barkley-Jones#holding a brain in the cadaver lab at the medical college. !e class was on a $eld trip to the lab because we’d been studying the parts of the brain. Mrs. Barkley-Jones brought the brain out in a pan and walked it around the room. It looked cold, rubbery, like a Halloween decoration. She held it up in my direction. Do you want to touch it? She poked one of the ridges, grinning a bit madly. She looked like the Penguin from Batman: short, overweight, with %yaway black hair. My stomach turned over. I said nothing. I tried not to breathe the formaldehyde.

Two students walk out into the canyon as far as they can, standing on rocks that jut over the abyss. One student opens her arms wide, embracing the space. !e other student stands still at the edge, looking. I picture my grandfather standing out there at the edge, arms at his sides, or in the pockets of a cardigan sweater, about to fall into the oblivion. Could you fall into an oblivion of thought, lost forever in your own mind? !e hills erode. !ey wear down even though plants still grow around them and animals roam through them. !e brain erodes unnaturally even though blood is still pumping through it, the synapses slowly falling apart, the neurons withering. His isn’t soaked in formaldehyde. It still shouldn’t erode.

One student returns to the van and comments that it’s unusually hot for Labor Day weekend. She’s right. I try to imagine this orange land covered in snow. If it’s desolate now, it will certainly be desolate when frozen.

***

I have two childhood memories of my grandfather in winter. I’m not sure if either is true. !is is what I remember: In the $rst memory, my cousins and I are back in Grandpa’s station wagon. It’s Christmas Eve, and he drives us around Milwaukee to look at holiday lights while Santa stops by my Aunt Pa&y’s house. My cousin Christopher and I fought for the third row of seats and won. His brother David gets the second row. !e third row is the best because you get to sit backwards. !is must have been before I started ge&ing motion sick si&ing backwards in trains and busses. Grandpa’s radar detector beeps and lights up on

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the dashboard. !ere must be a cop nearby. It’s the early nineties, and radar detectors are still popular. “Look at that yard!” Grandpa yells, drawing our a"ention to a house displaying cutouts of Alvin and the Chipmunks singing carols. We press our faces up against the station wagon’s windows. “Why did we have to leave the house?” Christopher asks. “To see the lights, of course,” says Grandpa. “!e lights will still be here tomorrow.” “But they’re brightest on Christmas Eve, you know.” Grandpa looks at us in the rearview mirror and grins. !e windows get foggy from our breathing. !e second memory never felt very real. It may not have happened at all. My grandpa and I are the only ones in it. I’m still really young, maybe six or seven. It’s dark outside. He tells me we are going to see his sisters. He parks the station wagon in a cemetery. Years later I will see the cemetery on 76th Street just north of North Avenue and think it’s the same cemetery, but I don’t know if his sisters are actually buried there. We get out of the car and hike through the snow. We stand in front of two gravestones, each with red #owers placed on it as though someone else has just been to visit, too. “!ese are my sisters,” he says. “We have to remember them.” !e memory ends abruptly, like someone switching o$ a TV mid-commercial.

***Back in the van in South Dakota we see friendlier

hills, colors dripping down them like melting popsicles, reddish-pink to orange to yellow. I’m a person who always feels be"er when I’m moving, even if my destination is ambiguous. We drive out of the Badlands to a town called Wall, and eventually on towards the Black Hills. I’ve never been to South Dakota before, despite the fact that my family used to travel when I was a kid. My dad made it his goal to visit as many national parks as possible during my childhood, and so we went to Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Zion. Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Acadia, Arches, the Grand Tetons. !en we went to Mexico, Canada, Florida, Massachuse"s, Washington, Europe. It was

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!"#$%&'( important to see things. To be there. To expand your mind. I have this feeling of expansion as we drive west. I imagine my store of memories ge!ing larger, a stockpile building up in my cerebral cortex, my understanding of the world expanding outward.

My parents inherited this need to travel from their parents. My grandparents traveled all over the world when they were young. "e pyramids. "e Great Wall of China. Machu Picchu. My grandma traveled with chopsticks in her purse, and my grandpa showed o# his skills with them whenever we went to a Chinese restaurant. Grandpa liked to tell a story about how he ran in front of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. "e story always charmed people. In college, I took a former boyfriend to have dinner with my parents and grandparents, and I’d warned him about how my grandfather can be a cranky conservative. But a$er hearing his travel stories, the boyfriend concluded that Grandpa was “cute.”

I listen to an NPR podcast as we head towards the Black Hills. "e land is hillier, but it looks dry. Yellow and empty. "e voice of Jad Abumrad informs me that the topic of this week’s Radiolab is the a$erlife. But in a physical way, he says. What exactly happens to our bodies at the moment of death? When are we actually dead? "en what? He and his co-host Robert Krulwich discuss death through history. First a person was considered dead when breathing stopped. "en it was when the heart stopped. Now it’s when the brain stops. But then they interview a researcher who studied people in comas and vegetative states. If their brains were hooked up to some machinery and someone asked them to imagine playing tennis, the motor cortex would light up as if the person was running along the baseline and returning forehands. So what does that mean, they ask? So what does it mean if you are losing your grasp on your own brain, I wonder? What does being alive mean when your thoughts and memories and identity have le$ your brain? Are they still in there somewhere?

***On Friday we arrive at a ranch in South Dakota. A

ranch owned by a writer. She takes us up to the top of a hill on her property, a hill that overlooks miles and miles of hilly

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land. She tells us it’s located in the rain shadow, the area east of the Rocky Mountains that doesn’t get much rain. We sit in a circle on the rocky ground near a badger hole.

“!e only way an artist can fail is to quit,” she says. My pen hovers over my notebook.

It’s windy at the top. I like the feeling of movement, the way the breeze grabs at my hair. If you look closely, the cumulus clouds slowly expand like marshmallows in a microwave. Up higher and higher into the stratosphere, hovering over the pine-covered hills like a man-o-war "oating over the ocean. !e wind is out of the west, hot, dry air blowing through the prairie grasses. Shade doesn’t exist here. Just sun and grass and sky. !e sage is the color of mint and there are #elds of alfalfa. !e alfalfa "owers are purple, but di$erent shades. Lighter, darker, more and less vibrant. !e saturation turned up on some of them. Yellow bu%er"ies hover around the blossoms. I have that feeling of expansion again. Of being out on the edge of something, facing something new and unknown. It’s like we go outward from where we come from, seeing and exploring as much of the world as we can, and then decades later we end up back at our kitchen tables, all of this acquired knowledge fading away. It’s all circular. Now that my grandfather has go%en back to the beginning, to the place he came from, he’s forgo%en everywhere he’s been. I come out here to see. To experience. To breathe. But I’ll get to go back, and for now, take the images with me.

***On Saturday night we drive through winding

national park roads to a spot deep in the Black Hills. I get carsick. Bu$alo and elk pass through our headlights. We are going to listen to the elk bugle. On a normal day I would feel nervous about walking into the woods in the dark, only a small "ashlight in hand. I turn out the "ashlight, and we hike up a path through the trees. !e only light is from the full moon. At the top of a ridge, we sit down and look out over the mist-covered hills. !ey are just fuzzy, dark shapes, and my eyes can’t quite focus on anything speci#c. I feel like I’m not wearing my glasses. !e moon gives the scenery an eerie glow. Six of us sit in a row, waiting. Watching. We haven’t seen the Black Hills in the daylight yet. Earlier in the day I

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asked if the Black Hills are really black. Negative, I was told. !ey’re just covered in pines. Tonight we get to see the Black Hills when they’re actually black. !e minutes pass by. !is place feels so remote, so far away from my daily life. In the end we don’t hear the elk bugle, only the howls and cackles of coyotes.

We return to the Black Hills on Sunday, and spend the day climbing up Harney Peak. Most of the a"ernoon goes by as we hike to the top, past boulders and pine trees, over a dirt path sparkling with #akes of mica. Overhead the leaves of aspen trees rustle like confe$i in the sunlight. !e quiet of the forest is calming. My backpack sticks to my skin in the heat, and I envy the hikers going back down the path in shorts.

I stop at an overlook with four other students. We take turns snapping pictures of each other with a massive pine-covered hill behind us.

“Can you %t me and those trees in if you stand over there?” one of us asks. “What if I stand on this rock? Is that be$er?”

We each take o& our sunglasses and smile for the camera. We take a couple group shots. We take pictures of trees, distant hills, the path, though the camera #a$ens it out, making it look less steep. But we take them anyway. Maybe because pictures are tangible. We can take them home with us.

Up at the top, miles of hills lie before us. We’re up above everything. !e peak is rocky, and hikers sit out on ledges, looking west. Someone says if you look west you can see Wyoming. !ere’s a breeze that makes the heat bearable. I take a picture of a sign that says this is the highest peak between the Rockies and the Pyrenees in Europe. I climb up one of the rocks and stand at its highest point. From the top everything is di&erent. All of these people coming to this remote place. It’s like some sort of pilgrimage. !ere are even red, yellow, and white prayer #ags tied to the few pines managing to grow out of this granite.

Two blonde children'siblings'run past on the rocks. !e boy says, “!is was a long hike. I’ll never forget it.”

“Me neither,” says his younger sister, hurrying a"er him.

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When you are up here it seems like somehow the world will be di!erent when you go back down, but then you will get back down and it will be mostly the same. You’ll get back in your van, drive back to your dinner, your bed. But I can’t completely forget…I won’t. I still know what to do with a spoon.

*** My great-grandparents immigrated to America from Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. I found one of their names at Ellis Island when I visited last summer. Kuzma Knapek. Point of entry: New York, New York. "ey ended up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where my grandfather grew up. His two younger sisters died of ear infections as toddlers. I remember a black and white photograph of his mother kneeling next to their graves, looking like life had beaten her. In his early twenties, my grandpa joined the “service,” as he used to say, and spent time in the Philippines during World War II. He came home and married my grandmother. He worked at a company called Cutler-Hammer and got his engineering degree. My grandma worked in a bank. "ey had three children, Paul Jr., Patricia, and Robert, my dad, and moved to a house on 72nd Street. It’s still there. It’s the white one with green shu#ers and a basketball hoop above the garage. "e one with the big gardenia bush out front. I’m told my uncle Paul gave it to my grandma as a Mother’s Day gi$ decades ago.

My grandfather was Mr. Fix-It. He was always tinkering with things in the garage, and later with things in his boat house. No repairperson needed. He was the one who kept score at cards games. We used to play Golf, Hearts, and Poker with pennies. He almost always won. We always accused him of cheating since he was the scorekeeper, but he just chuckled. When we played Hearts he always “shot the moon,” ge#ing all the hearts and the queen of spades, and sticking each of us with %$y points. “I just make sure I have all the cards accounted for,” he’d say.

***My grandfather likes to tell a story. He and my

grandmother were traveling in Spain. "ey had been staying on the southern coast for a few weeks with some friends. My grandpa rented a piso near the water. A$er leaving the coast they traveled north. Eventually they made it to

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Pamplona, where the annual Running of the Bulls, la corrida de toros, takes place. It was the 6th of July, the !rst day of the festival of San Fermin. He describes the narrow, brick streets and the six-story buildings built one right next to the other. "e buildings painted slightly muted pinks and greens and oranges, the ones with the tiny metal balconies outside of every window. "en he moves on to how he ran through the streets of the city, past doorways and cafés and plazas. He pauses with raised eyebrows. He grins and says, “I ran in front of the bulls the day before the bulls ran. I was pre#y far in front of those bulls.” He chuckles to himself, straightens his glasses, and pats his pocket protector with the mechanical pencil in it for crosswords. "e bulls start running through the streets everyday for eight days…beginning on July 7th. My grandfather liked to tell a story.

Alzheimer’s doesn’t have respect for your memories or your stories. It doesn’t have respect for your relationships. It doesn’t have respect for your hobbies. Your favorite TV shows. Your opinions. Your dedication and hard work. It has no respect for your well-groomed lawn, your garden, your car. It doesn’t respect your privacy. It will take away yesterday’s newspaper, the plots and characters on your bookshelf. It will take away your self-su$ciency. Your handiness. Your ability to remember that you put the phone in your sweatshirt pocket. It will take your card games and your recipes and your political a$liation. "e names of your grandchildren. Your voice.

You become a child again. You are dependent on someone else to cook your meals, wash your clothes, give you your pills and vitamins. If le% on your own, you forget to turn o& the stove, you wear the same sweater every day, you forget to cut your !ngernails. Your body gets smaller. You have to drink nutrition shakes like Ensure to get enough calories.

***Grandpa sits in a rocking chair on a Sunday

a%ernoon, surrounded by his wife, his children, and their children. He looks at the co&ee table, not contributing to the conversation. He only responds when my grandma addresses him directly.

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“We had a good time, didn’t we Paul?”“Hmm?” he looks up, refocusing on the people

around him.“We had a good time at breakfast last week with

Mrs. Hamilton?”“Ah, yes. Good time.” He resumes his study of the

co!ee table, eyes blank. Grandma takes a deep breath and looks out the window.

She leans toward my mom and says, “I just hope the Lord takes us together. We need each other. It would be so lonesome.” Her voice is tight. She looks back out the window at the "nches on her bird feeder. I try to imagine how it feels when your spouse is no longer able to remember much of your sixty-plus years together.

“I asked him to pull the weeds out of the #ower boxes the other day. He started pulling up all my onions.”

***I sit in the last row of our "$een-passenger van

reading about pedagogy for the freshman composition course I teach. %e radio is turned up too loud, the host of a talk show yelling about the president. %e station is abruptly switched, and the sound of Native American drumming overwhelms the backseat. I have a round-trip ticket in this bumpy van, and it’s taking me back to central Iowa. Had he known he wouldn’t remember any of it, would my grandfather have bothered going? Would he have tried to climb up one of the pyramids and been yelled at by Egyptian guards? Would he have stood at the Great Wall, in awe that it still stands so many hundreds of years later? Would he have visited the Tower of London and seen the Crown Jewels? I think he would have. He doesn’t say much now, but I think he would say go. Go and see as much as you can. We can’t become stuck before we have to be. We can’t be like the grasshopper on my tent, fruitlessly struggling against forces too large. Maybe one day we will suddenly "nd ourselves trapped between two walls, unable to move outside of our shrunken world. But not yet. As Grandpa used to say, no ma&er what his cards were, “Ow-wa! I’m shooting the moon!” As the van heads east towards Minnesota I recall a moment from a day or two ago. I was si&ing on the front

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steps of the house we stayed at on the ranch, shucking corn. I pulled the green leaves o!. "en I pulled o! the silky, white strings covering each ear. "e air was calm, and I looked out over #elds where ca$le and pronghorns grazed. I remembered Saturdays in summer as a small child when we would go to my grandparents’ house. It was my job to shuck the corn. I remembered a home video #lmed circa 1990. In it my cousins and I, just toddlers and grade-schoolers, run around the house, bouncing in front of the camera. My Aunt Sue and Uncle Paul are there, and their three daughters. "ey haven’t moved to Ohio yet. My Aunt Pa$y and Uncle Chris are there. "ey’re still married. My parents are there, my dad holding the camera, my mom trying to stay out of the frame. Everyone looks younger, and many people have more hair. My grandpa dances around the living room with my brother and me, while I pretend to be a rabbit, jumping up and down. "ere are neighbors whose names I don’t know si$ing at the kitchen table, laughing with my grandma. Her brother is there, too. Someone is out front grilling on the newly built deck. It’s the middle of July in Wisconsin. Soon someone will go out to water ski or use the paddle boat.

I think about moments like this. Moments when it’s okay. People are together and at least for this moment everyone is happy. We’ll go outside and light #reworks o! the pier. "e kids will run around with sparklers. Maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s pre$y good. Despite the video camera, you can’t really freeze moments. We #nally reach the Iowa border a%er nine or ten hours in the van. I think about memories, about the way they slowly fade, and about how they take on new shapes as we relive them. I think about the way they sometimes deteriorate beyond repair, broken synapses in a broken brain. I picture being at the top of Harney Peak. "at feeling of being up at the top. I want to hang on to that memory until I’m forced to let go. I’ll write it down, just like I write my memories of my grandpa down. I want to remember. And I want to keep climbing.

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rlin] We are out on the ice at the edge of the shantytown

that resurrects itself here each winter. Vic is padlocking the door to his shanty. Like everyone else, he’s painted his name and town on the side as is required by law. But unlike everyone else, he’s added his street address, state, and zip code. And below that, in le!ers a foot high, he’s spray-painted earth! in bright red. “Let’s not forget exactly where we are,” he tells me and is prepared to tell anyone who might ask. But as far as I know, no one has. "e men out here have known Vic and me since we were kids. We grew up #shing on their fringes with our miniature tip-up rods and the dented buckets we carried out to sit on. Some of them even have grandsons who play basketball with Vic’s twelve-year-old boy. “Do you still want to get a beer at "e Grocery?” I ask him. "e Green Lake Grocery is the name of the only bar within #$een miles. In the old days this wouldn’t have been a question%we always got beers a$er #shing. But this season it’s taken Vic’s wife to get us out on the ice.

“Just go and #sh for once,” she told Vic. “Your dad could probably stand a night to himself.”

So we sat in Vic’s shanty%the size of an overgrown outhouse%with the hiss from the kerosene lamp burning above our heads. We felt good even though nothing was biting. We passed a chrome pocket &ask and stamped our feet to stay warm. Vic had given me the &ask as a wedding present #$een years ago; its luck seemed to be no be!er with #sh than with women.

Vic agrees to go but wants to swing by his house #rst for some money. It’s twice as far to go this way and I have more than enough money for us both, but out of politeness I don’t o'er. Vic’s place is around the bend from the rental co!age we moved his father into this fall. "e real reason we’re going this direction is to check whether his father’s porch light is on. If the old man remembers the porch !(

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light!which is always the last thing he does before going to sleep!Vic can rest assured he’s safe in bed.

Vic’s father grew forgetful almost overnight it seemed, within months of Vic’s mother’s death. One a"ernoon last spring, a"er teaching, we came by and found him disking the very #eld we’d help him plant the weekend before.

“Pop, what’re you doing?” Vic asked, jumping up on the tractor to stop it.

“What in the hell does it look like I’m doing?”“It looks like you’re disking the #eld we just

planted,” Vic answered.“Now why would I do that?” “Good damn question, Dad. Why would you?” Vic’s father turned and stared out over the landscape

of the #eld!neat furrows where the seed had been planted on one side, fresh broken earth on the other. His eyes $ickered behind his glasses.

On the drive home a"er, Vic sighed and shook his head. “%e old man’s ge&ing forgetful already,” he said to me.

“Maybe he should see a doctor,” I suggested. My own father died of pneumonia that had quietly progressed to meningitis. A simple dose of penicillin would have saved his life. I was still living in Texas when my mother called to tell me he was in a coma and by the time I’d made the thirty-six hour drive home he was dead. I still wish I’d $own.

Vic laughed at my suggestion. “An ophthalmologist maybe, but not a doctor. He’s just ge&ing old. I mean he’s damn near seventy.”

%at night, a"er Vic dropped me o', I drew the shades and scratched the needle across the same Bob Dylan album until I’d #nished a bo&le of Wild Turkey. Vic’s father may have been nearly seventy but that didn’t seem too far away. I was almost forty now and divorced. Being divorced had to count for something extra, I thought. Like dog years. Or wind chill.

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