My X-Files Life

The truth is out there.

 Fox Mulder of The X-Files made these words his mantra. Yet often he and his FBI investigative partner Dana Scully often had to settle for conjecture when rational explanations for the paranormal mysteries they tackled were nowhere to be found. Or when thoughtful inquiry was met with obfuscation and outright lies, sometimes from those they trusted most.

If I think of Mulder and Scully now it’s because so much about the last 12 months has gone beyond my understanding. What was it all supposed to mean? I don’t know and likely never will. All I can do is offer a metaphor to describe events and what they felt like. Last spring, Something stopped the car I was driving, pushed me into the backseat, locked the doors from the inside then took over the steering wheel and forced me on a high-speed detour where all I could do was watch the scenery fly past my eyes.

 A year later, that Something has finally ceded the wheel to me again, though It still rides with me, a possessive entity that won’t let go. But now the terrain has changed; the old road I was traveling is nowhere in sight. Adding to that anxiety are strange new restrictions should I decide to set foot outside this terrain exists. Some rest on legal slippery slopes observed by people who’ve slid down them: slopes like airport customs agents doing social media app checks on electronic devices or asking questions like where did you go and what did you do or what do you think of the current administration. Others have been born out of more practical concerns for safety of the kind that emerged when air traffic controllers were suddenly asked to leave their jobs and airplanes began crashing into runways and each other. Externals notwithstanding, my own life, small in the greater scheme of things, has gone back to a kind of normal in world where the only certainty is uncertainty.

Separating fact from fiction has also become problematic. Watch the news and you’ll get some idea of what’s out there. But key details may be missing. You have only to look at how recent protests involving millions of Americans have been reported. Mainstream media “disappeared” them from their headlines. A few mentioned that what protests there were happened because high profile members of the opposition paid protestors to march. Those same sources also reported that a legal US resident sent without due process to an American-funded prison camp in El Salvador because he was allegedly an ex-gang member. To that I say Auschwitz stood on Polish soil. Years of watching The X-Files wasn’t just simply a way of passing the time. It was an education in the idea that conspiracy theories…may not be theories at all.

 I stopped relying on mainstream American news six months ago, when everything became a barrage of bad. Desperate to know without feeling gutted by the mayhem, I went on YouTube in search of independent journalists and commentators able to offer intelligent insights with a minimum of vitriol. That helped; but the extremes they discussed in uncharted territory and no one could offer ideas what might come next. I wanted truth but also needed to find glimmers of hope in the midst of the irrational and off-the-rails insane. Hesitantly I began tuning in to channels where psychics, tarot card readers and astrologers—empaths, most of them—offered their take on current events. In the midst of the X-Files life into which I’d been abducted, I’d abandoned my Scully-esque rationality to become like Fox Mulder: open to all ways of apprehending truth even if some of the modalities I used were unconventional.

In these days of anything goes, anything is what I’ll do to get behind the mis- and disinformation my inner conspiracy theorist understands gets offered as news. The intuitives I listen to follow the news quite closely and are upfront that what they know is based on what they can sense or interpret rather than empirical fact. Most are also quite clear about their biases. What helps me discern which ones to spend time listening to comes down to perspective. Those who reference the Bible and claim the end is near lose my interest almost as quickly as those who are overly pessimistic (or optimistic, for that matter). There’s method in the madness of my choices: of course I’d like to hear that the upside down world I live in will be restored soon and all will be as it was; of course I want to hear there will be world peace, a healed earth and permanent freedom from the Thing that hijacked my life. But I know better because life is cyclic; balance will return, but only after the destruction set into motion has run its course.

What I do know is how much I don’t know. So when some of my YouTube intuitives talk about their ongoing contact with the dead or with extraterrestrials, I listen with interest. For someone raised on Star Trek, Star Wars and novelists like Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Ursula K. LeGuin, that’s not difficult. These same shows, movies and books prepared me to embrace The X-Files with enthusiasm. There’s freedom—and even joy—in secular imaginings about what’s possible beyond the mundane, especially when that mundane has become so compromised.

 Because in the end, I just want to believe again.

A Tale of Two Gardens

March greens: kale, salad, carrots and tomatoes.

I took to gardening when I moved into my house early during the COVID years.  A 5x11 plot planted with ornamentals I hated but mostly died the first winter after I moved in gave me the space to climb out of small pots and into the planters that now hold my greens, shrubs and trees. In the midst of so much chaos, I found peace in that work and in the solitude of lockdown that has since been hard to come by. It’s the quiet of that time I miss, the quiet beloved by the Trappist monk I imagine myself to have been lifetimes ago.

But if I look more closely, maybe I’m living a version of that old contemplative life in the latest iteration of the upheaval—this time political—that began in 2020. Trappists revere silence and contemplation, but also manual labor and their handiwork as gardeners. For them, working the earth is a spiritual act. The pleasure I took during a pandemic spent apart from the world coaxing life from seeds or from small spouts, like the one that grew the eight-foot tall pomegranate tree shading the smallest of my living room windows—was far more profound from the small satisfactions of keeping an apartment container garden. On my small plot, connection to the earth felt as solid and immediate as soil between my toes.

Most people welcomed the return to public spaces after the pandemic ended. I did not and chafed under directives to return to the cubicle life of a white collar worker.  My place was in the quiet of my home. Any time I could spend in or around my garden became sacred, especially those mornings or evenings when I would sit on my porch and refresh my senses with greenery I had nurtured over two years. Nodding their heads in the wind, those green-headed children of Gaia now brought me back into balance simply by existing.

Normalcy didn’t last; it couldn't. The virus had been a harbinger of change and a warning that old structures were at risk of even more damage from what was to come. Four years after I moved into my small refuge, a much greater threat emerged when political power changed hands and the people who rushed in started smashing whatever they could from the first day. Like everyone I reeled and wobbled until I could stand up straight enough to hold on to whatever my hands could grab. I didn’t want this, neither did most of the people I knew. Yet here we were. More and more I took to standing barefoot in my garden to let the earth steady me. That at least was solid.

Scarcity—or its possibility —was nothing new to me. The year before I’d lost my job and remained without work for almost six months. But what I was seeing felt totally different. Supply chains were at far greater risk of disruption than they had been before. As the people in power continued to destroy the mechanisms that had allowed me to live my old life, they had forced me to rethink how I might one day have to meet needs I never thought could possibly go unmet. Now the luxury of a patch of earth to grow what pleased began to look increasingly like a space of utility. It dawned on me that my skills as a gardener might one day be skills I might need to manage coming instability.

Garage hydroponics

But that patch of earth was small. And Texas summers had grown increasingly unforgiving. The tenderest garden greens would not likely not survive even with daily watering. So in late January, I created a second indoor garden in my garage with two hydroponic units I set up in an old wood planter neighbors had once complained was too ugly for the front yard. Dropping salad, herb and cherry tomato seeds into hydroponic sponge pods, I held my breath and waited. My gesture felt infinitely small against the forces of global bedlam. Some sponges became slick with algae and changing the water could make for slip-sloshy walks to and from the kitchen sink. But the system worked and seedlings soon appeared. There was no spiritual romance of earth and sky here; just the sober practicality of staying prepared for storms I could not yet see but knew were on the horizon.

 The seeds have grown quickly under the light of timed LED lamps. I’ve since planted my outdoor garden with the small cone-shaped plugs where the seeds germinate and even enjoyed a small harvest of arugula. At times I’ve chided myself for being overly reactive. But a few weeks ago I noticed that an entire section of prepackaged romaine salad had vanished. Oh, they just shorted us at the warehouse, a grocer told me. The packages did return in far fewer numbers while in the shade of my garage, my greens kept growing in their tubs of mineral-infused water.

The Farmer’s Almanac says summer 2025 will be hotter and drier than normal on the South Central Plains. Local weather says we may see our first 90-degree day before April. I’ll need to reconsider my outdoor growing strategies sooner rather than later: squash will do well in the heat and so will my tomatoes, but the greens will need to grow indoors. Oddly—or maybe not—I've found that planning out and caring for both my gardens has blotted out some of the overwhelm from externals. The problem has brought forward a solution that helps me move forward; but the truth is that it's bigger than that. A revolution in self-sufficiency and sustainability is coming fast enough that I can no longer dissociate enough to convince myself that gaps in my reality are just tricks of the eye: I could have sworn I saw those salad heads the last time I was here.


To B or Not to B...

In Act 3 Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the title character muses on two equally dark possibilities: committing suicide to escape despair or killing his uncle Claudius for murdering his own brother, Hamlet’s father:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question:/Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/Or to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,/No more; and by a sleep to say we end/The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wish'd.”

 As a choice, it’s unthinkable and extreme. A conundrum, just like the times in which we now find ourselves living.

I was reminded of this play recently because on November 6 of last year, someone I called in a fit of despair told me, perhaps as a way to show that I was not alone in my upset, about a movement called the 4B’s. That movement had nothing whatsoever to do with Hamlet’s soliloquy. Yet as I thought about it later, the two seemed linked not just by homonymic chance but also in how both represented responses to wrongs committed in the name of power.

The 4B’s emerged in South Korea around the mid-2010s as part of a fourth wave feminist reaction gender injustice and crimes against women. Like the worldwide 2006 #metoo movement, it began on social media and sought to empower women caught in the cross-hairs of the most toxic elements of patriarchy: social inequality on the one hand and harassment/violence on the other. The name—4B’s—derives from four Korean words, each of which start with the negative prefix “bi.” (1) Biyeonae: No dating men. (2) Bihon: No marrying men. (3) Bichulsan: No having children with men. (4) Bisekseu: No having sex with men.

It gained its greatest visibility in the wake of anti-feminist movements that emerged after the 2019 election of Yun Sook Yeul (who, coincidentally, was recently impeached for wrongfully imposing martial law in South Korea on December 3, 2024). Young American women have expressed interest in it since its inception, but especially in the days after the 2024 U.S. election, which occurred almost exactly one month before Yeul’s attempt to undermine South Korean democracy. On social media platforms like TikTok and X, these women encouraged peers to look to the 4B movement for inspiration.

To liberal (read: white, middle class, accommodationist second wave) feminists, the movement no doubt smacks of radical feminism, especially the branch of it that supports separatism and has traditionally been identified with lesbians. To me, a third wave “cat lady” who thinks and writes at the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality, it sounds like an ordinary day in the world of an independent woman who has chosen—and has the luxury to choose—to live life on her own terms.

I see no radicalism here; then again, I observe as one who believes in tolerance. Two millennial/fourth wave friends, both well-educated and in their late thirties, live some version of the 4B “credo.” One has chosen 4B-style independence because she wanted an end to relationship demands on her time and emotional resources. Another has chosen what I call a 2B path that involves childlessness and no marriage. They are not actively resisting tradition just to resist; rather, they are acting in alignment with what they’ve deemed as the most fulfilling way to lead their lives.

By contrast, the South Korean women who identify as 4B see it as necessary resistance against a controlling, misogynist society. Intimate partner violence in their country is real. According to a 2018 study, of those affected, 824 women died by the hand of male partners while 602 lived with a heightened risk of death. In the economic arena, men early 31.2% more than women, who, if married, bear full responsibility for home, family and child-care. And the social pressure on young women to have children is high. So high, in fact, that the government has mapped out the country by the population of women able to bear children. As of 2022, the South Korean birthrate has fallen to below 1 child/woman.

It’s abundantly clear that something is more than rotten in the state of Denmark; and that this rottenness, especially as it affects women, has everything to do with the Claudius-like autocratic lust for power and control blighting the democratic world. Like all minoritized people, women are especially vulnerable to the assaults of this toxicity through harassment, violence and other forms of social and political disempowerment. If South Korean women feel under siege, American women, whose rights to bodily autonomy are under attack, feel they are under increasing threat. As I write this, all of us live in the shadow of laws that, if enacted, would end bodily autonomy while curtailing access to affordable healthcare and the civil rights currently protect them in the workplace. I can’t say with any certainty what will happen. All I know is that we will find ways to resist what tries to hold us down and back, just as every other generation of women before us has.

Some might say that 4B’s is yet another example of the global disunity that has come to be the hallmark of the 2020s. They wouldn’t be wrong, of course. Still I see the hope in division. Yes, Hamlet correctly understood that fraught times offer no guarantees: only difficult choices of ways to engage with dilemma. But his inability to move beyond grief to find the alliances that could have saved him from devastation was his real downfall. Whatever else women do, our ability to seek community among ourselves, both locally and globally, will be what help us weather— and ultimately move beyond—these perilous times.

 

 



















Curmudgeonness

How a good day looks to a curmudgeonness

This month I turn 59. Technically that’s still considered middle-aged but I feel older than time. The one good thing about it is that I’m one year closer to laying claim to the curmudgeonhood I never realized I’d been gunning for my whole life. Age is coming close enough I can see the silvery-white of its hair roots because, dammit, those hair roots are mine.

I’ve felt old since at least 20, probably because 21 meant legal, can’t-get-out-of-it adulthood while anything after 25 or 30 seemed unimaginably Jurassic. Had I lived in nineteenth rather than the early twenty-first century, my perception of what constituted the beginning stages of decrepitude would have been more accurate than not: at that time, life expectancy in the U.S. and Europe was only around 40. From where I stand now, the decade of the great 4-0 strikes me as fabulously juvenile, the beginning of everything, minus cribs, playpens and parents. You’re on your own, baby: ready or not, here comes life.

Everything I’ve read online assures me I’ve got until at least 65 until society is allowed to call me old. However temporary, that’s a comfort and I’ll take it in lieu of the plastic surgery that’s turned 66-year-old pop star Madonna into an bona fide Area 51 alien. But some people out there insist on pushing boundaries and getting on my one last nerve, like that nice young hairdresser at the local Great Cuts. I love the cute pixie-punk haircuts she gives me; but the last few times I’ve seen her, she’s also insisted on giving me a senior discount. Because I’m still lucid enough to know that maintaining manners is desirable in a public place, I smile and keep my grumbling—along with the extra five bucks—to myself.

 Yes, I like saving money. Discounts are, in fact, the great promise of the cheerful red AARP card I carried for five years and never used. Now that I’ve dispensed with membership, I have just this to say: keep your discounts to Denny’s, Joe’s Crab Shack and other havens of the white-haired and infirm. Don’t age me into oblivion because I’m quite able to do that for myself, with a little help from the Neptune Society. I don’t know where they got my name; the AARP mailing list is a key suspect. For the last few years, the friendly people at Neptune have been sending me letters detailing the benefits of cremation when I didn’t even fucking ask.

 I suppose I can’t be too hard on AARP. They’ve been lobbying Congress for reforms to help older Americans since the 1960s, so yes, they mean well. It was their monthly magazine that really sent me over the edge (the ugly tote bags they offered with each new subscription didn’t help). Without fail, AARP magazine covers featured fit, good-looking individuals with newly graying hair, airbrushed for maximum presentability. Now to be fair, I’ve been known to use a filter or two on my own pictures. But dammit, where were all the truly old people, the ones with walkers, canes and oxygen machines who are on more meds than they can remember? I’m talking the real real here, not the still-in-middle age people like me. Brooke Shields and George Clooney don’t count.

The companions every curmudgeonness needs

Rather than call myself a curmudgeon, though, I’ve opted for another word: curmudgeonness. It doesn’t exist in any dictionary that I know of which makes it even more delightfully contrarian. A curmudgeon is that old man down the street whose home is more lair than castle. You know the one: the crusty cuss who yells at people to get off his damn lawn and refuses to give out candy on Halloween. From what I’ve been able to gather, the proper term for someone like me who identifies (more or less, depending on the day of the week) as female, is termagant. Since I don’t consider myself a nag, though, curmudgeon is a better fit, especially when tamed and claimed with the feminizing -ess ending.

I do like one of the possible etymologies of termagant, though, which the Google English dictionary suggests is a hybrid word that came from the merging of two Latin ones: tri (three) and vagant (wandering). The GED further speculates that these root words seem to refer to the idea of the moon wandering between heaven, earth and hell under the names of three Classical goddesses associated with it: Selene, Artemis and Persephone. That’s all lovely and poetic until you start wondering what the hell wandering moons have to do with being an unpleasant female. Unless it has to do with ancient taboos against menstruation and Hippocrates’ claim women were the weaker, more hysterical sex because their wombs were prone to wandering. But misogyny is a sneaky thing and anything vaguely associated with female are targets for negative cultural reframings.

 All this is to say that etymologists aren’t sure where termagant came from, any more than they know how curmudgeon—which some believe may partly derive from the Middle English “cur” (dog) came into usage. What is known is that termagant was once a gender neutral term. Linguistic evidence shows that before the 16th century, termagant was used to describe overbearing males. Of course, that doesn’t satisfy me. My dislike of the world termagant has nothing much to do with anything except my own quirks. The word reminds me of “termite,” that nasty little insect with a voracious appetite for wood. Anything that sees my house as its next meal gets no respect from me. I still prefer the anti-social grump down the street who yells at kids and delivery people. At least he’s mostly harmless when left alone in his native habitat.

W.C. Fields

 But can you blame curmudgeons—whatever their gender—for how they are? They’ve seen it all so nothing surprises them anymore. They’re too old to really care what anyone thinks of them or their habits. Curmudgeons may be prisoners of bodies that have seen better days. But they’ve lived through and survived enough that they can say and do what they want. Better still, curmudgeons get their very own holiday on January 29, which happens to be the birthday of W.C. Fields, the great Hollywood Gold Age comedian who allegedly hated dogs and babies. He did occasionally own a canine, enjoyed entertaining his friends’ children and doted on his first grandson. But that’s beside the point. Like all good grumps, he was cynical and proud and not afraid to show the world who he was. “A man’s got to believe in something,” he once quipped. “I believe I’ll have another drink.”

 

Cat Ladies Strike Back

An out-and-proud childless cat lady, I do not own a pussyhat to prove my allegiance to felines…or to other women. Not that it would be especially advisable to wear one in the Texas summer heat. But the political zeitgeist almost demands that I get one, if only to celebrate Kamala Harris’ brilliant takeover of the political limelight from the unhinged ex-president, current Republican presidential candidate and convicted felon known as #45.

Pussyhats first appeared in all their pink glory at the January 2017 Women’s March on Washington, a mass protest against #45 and everything he stood for including social regressivism and the curtailment of women’s rights. If I think of pussyhats now, it is because I, like millions of other cat ladies, have been hissing and spitting at the remark made by J.D. Vance, #45’s equally mad and unsavory VP pick. His too-loyal wife recently called it a mere “quip” meant to explain a larger point about political inclusion. We cat ladies beg to differ.

In 2021, Vance told former Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson, that America is run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they’ve made and '[now want to] make the rest of country miserable, too.” When that comment resurfaced at the end of last month, it unwittingly gave birth to what I call the Great American Cat Lady Moment.

To this particular cat lady, our moment seems an almost inevitable outcome of many things, not the least of which was the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. Not that the people at the March happened to be cat ladies (or even female for that matter). But if they were female, they all had one thing in common: a need to express years— centuries, even—of pent-up rage against continuing patriarchal injustice. The knitted, pointy-eared caps they wore were just a uniting symbol that, along with its feline connotations, also happened to be one that had a long association with femaleness and femininity.

January 20, 2018 - Downtown Austin

My first personal encounter with pussyhats came a year after they first appeared. On January 20, 2018, demonstrators in Austin staged a protest—one of many that had continued to take place all over the United States and world—against #45 and the ever-changing cast of shady characters that constituted his administration. Perhaps I had heard about the Austin protest; I don’t remember. What I do recall was that it was a Saturday, that I had errands to run and that when I got off the bus to do them, I was immediately caught in a massive swirl of people, noise and energy.

At the time and despite my profound distaste for #45, I still dared to call myself mostly apolitical. His female opponent, Hillary Clinton, had also alienated me. Yes, she was a woman and a feminist. But I wasn’t automatically with HER just because of these things. I well knew she had done more in her fifteen years as a politician than her (mostly male) colleagues had done in a lifetime. But a troubling trail of scandals dogged her, made me feel I just couldn’t trust HER enough to exercise my nineteenth amendment voting rights. The same ones I took for granted enough to ignore out of disgust with a two-party system that didn’t offer much beyond empty promises for working people and the middle class, political gridlock and entrenched neo-liberal corruption.

January 20, 2018 - Downtown Austin

But something in my attitude began to change that day. The people-swirl eventually pushed me toward large contingent of pussyhatted women carrying signs with slogans like stop regulating my body and women pay the price for decisions made by men. Suddenly, my errands—whatever they may have been—didn’t matter. An election had been stolen; rights were in jeopardy. Mesmerized by the colorful anarchy I saw around me and the unabashed fierceness of the female protestors, I cast off my complacency and followed the crowd from the 3rd Street bus stop to down to the waterfront, where I watched marchers make their towards Congress Street then up to the green mall of the Texas State Capitol.

Eventually the demonstrations stopped, not just in Austin, but around the country. Pussyhats got put away (though the anger festered) and a good, decent man defeated #45. But what the decent man couldn’t undo was the damage #45 had done to things like the Supreme Court, which eventually did the unthinkable and overturned more than 50 years of progress in laws protecting civil and reproductive freedoms. And damage to an already broken political system and to #45’s own party, which he transformed into a bastion of white supremacist, christo-fascist cult that deified him and worshipped the capitalist excesses he represented.

January 20, 2018 - Downtown Austin

Even now, as a presidential nominee, #45 continues his reign of chaos alongside a running mate who spews as much hateful and ill-considered rhetoric as he does. Where women are concerned, both seem unaware that women—and cat ladies—have long memories. And they will always find ways—like the pussyhat—to communicate their displeasure. The brainchild of two California women, pussyhats began as a project that was both practical and political. The pair wanted to help keep heads warm during the notorious cold of January inauguration. But they also wanted to use a traditional—and maligned—“feminine” color (pink) along with “feminine” crafts (knitting and crocheting) to make a statement about the power of collective female action.  

They were, in other words, doing far more than cat lady cos-play. Pussyhat protestors were putting the Usurper-in -Chief on cheerful pink notice: we know who you are, we know what you’ve done, and we won’t let you forget. The hats—which were as unique and individual as the thousands of women who made them—transformed them into avengers of female sexuality, while transforming the pussies #45 had once gloated were his to grab-because he was rich, because he was famous, because he was a man—into sites of public contestation.

It was a contemporary version of an old fight. Fifty years before, second wave feminists had done something similar when they followed the advice of the groundbreaking 1972 Boston Women’s Health Book Collective guide, Our Bodies, Ourselves, and used mirrors to inspect their own vulvas. If the book reminded women that you are your body and you are not obscene, pussyhats reminded the world them that female bodies deserved respect.

As hand-made symbols of women’s autonomy, pussyhats also served a secondary purpose of critiquing the hypermasculinist homogeneity implied by mass-produced MAGA hats. The pink of compassion contrasted with the red of violence, as much a component of the MAGA brand as post-truth lunatic idiocy. And the crude triangular ears of every pussyhat remembered cats, and whether consciously or not, the long history that bound women and felines together in companionship and even magic.

I like to think that pussyhats, though apparently “tame” in looks, also quietly channel an energy that is less domesticated cat and more untamed puma or panther. Millennial pop icon Taylor Swift, who was recently drawn into the cat lady controversy by virtue of being a single, cat-owning female and self-made billionaire, exemplifies that powerful independence. In 2023, and as Time magazine’s person of the year, she posed for a cover-shoot that featured her and one of her beloved felines. By celebrating who she was, she was also suggesting, through her black leotard and tights and a hand curved into something like a cat’s claw, that she was powerful. A cat lady who remembered the indomitable Cat Woman, a single female who owned and wielded her sexuality without fear or shame. And without apology for not choosing to have children.

Taylor Swift certainly does not exemplify any kind of “cat lady misery” that I can see. As an entertainer, she brings joy and optimism to a young global audience burdened by more than its fair share of pessimism about everything from politics and the economy to climate change. She has freely chosen and embraced her path as a single, childless person as have countless other females. Regardless of whether or not we have cats.

But if we do, so much the better. Felines tie us to so much, like memories of resistance and the magic collective action can spark. Unlike Taylor Swift, we cat ladies may be mostly invisible. But we are legion and wield far more influence on the collective female psyche than people realize. Uninformed—and frankly misbegotten—public figures may imply that our choices leave us without a stake in America’s future. What they forget that we have do have a stake. And that together, we have the power to drive that stake straight through the twisted hearts of those who try to oppress us. Because we have claws and we have teeth.

And we grab back.

Anatomy Lessons

Two female doctors remade my breasts—both of them—at the end of May; it was my first time attended by two surgeons but my second time on the operating table in six months. The first time was for elective surgery in November, four months after a dermatologist had identified the lump under my left shoulder blade as a benign fatty tissue growth. I’d felt its gradual spread with curious fingers, occasionally despairing at what the mirror showed me: a small, uncomfortable hill of flesh that made me feel like Quasimodo.

The second time was to remove a cancer tumor lodged north of my right nipple, a growth so small it had yet to make its presence known as a lump. The surgeon went over the procedure with me. One breast would be opened and cleared and the other reduced to match the mate that radiation would shrink. The result may not be exact, but we do our best. Then, on a diagram of the female torso, she showed me exactly where she and her colleague would make their incisions. Her pen traced an upside-down question mark on the right nipple that ended a short way up my chest and then a round keyhole attached via a thin curved line to an under-breast anchor on the left.

Later, on the day of surgery, she took a black marker and ruler and draw lines and circles on my chest that she would use to guide her, just as surgeon who removed the lipoma had taken his pen and gathered the tumor on my shoulder within the boundaries of a single oval I could not see.

Twice my body had been cut open, twice my flesh had temporarily become the canvas for a surgeon’s marker and knife. Back side first then front, the geometry of surgeons. In the span of six months, two separate pathologies had transformed my body into a living art project.

*****

The Broken Column (1944)

Painter Frida Kahlo knew what it was like to live in a healthy body until she contracted polio at age six. She recovered after spending almost one year in bed. But one leg, the right one, became thinner and shorter than the left and would cause her pain—and not a little embarrassment—for the rest of her life. Kahlo learned to hide the deformity under the long dresses and eventually, the colorful skirts that became her trademark.

Twelve years later, when Kahlo was 18 and preparing to study medicine, a trolley car rammed into the bus she was riding. A steel handrail impaled her through her hip, piercing her uterus and fracturing her spine and pelvis. Multiple surgeries followed; after that, Kahlo was forced to wear plaster corsets to support her back and keep her body straight for the rest of her life. She turned to drawing—an activity she had always loved— for solace and for a brief time considered becoming a medical illustrator.

Until she realized that art could help her express her feelings about the beautiful, broken body that surgeons would remake over and over again for the next thirty years.

*****

Health did not become a focus for me until a faulty endocrine system I’d tried to mask with hormone-balancing pills through part of my 20s and most of my 30s rejected them not once, but twice, the second time causing a clot in my right leg. The clot resolved in five months because I was young and otherwise healthy. But it took more than a decade for my swollen right leg to look more or less like the left and the pain to ease and sometimes, on good days, disappear long enough to temporarily forget any of that—the hospital visits, the blood thinners, the weekly blood draws—ever happened to me.

I could never take those pills again. When doctors told me five years later that the raging menstrual cycles the pills had once controlled had made me dangerously anemic, I had no choice but to go under the knife. This was my first surgery and one that would not leave scars. Not at first, anyway.

After midlife weight temporarily rounded out my belly, keloid tendrils, pink and unruly, blossomed out of my navel, surprising me. I tightened up my diet, lost most of the weight and the tendrils retreated but only a little. I asked a dermatologist to inject what remained with silicone to shrink the keloids and flatten them until they turned silvery-white.

They are fading, slowly, the scars. But sometimes, in full rebellion against ugliness, I contemplate getting a tattoo around my navel. Something elegant, floral and baroque.

*****

Flowers meant the world to Kahlo. Behind the walls of her Casa Azul studio in Mexico City, she grew all kinds: roses, marigolds, fuchsias, oleanders and more. Bougainvilleas were among her favorites. Very often, she created elaborate headpieces that, like her skirts, became a personal trademark. She did this not just because she loved flowers, bright colors and her Mexican heritage. But also because flowers represented the fertility a random accident had stolen from her. She wanted children; but she miscarried them or was forced to abort the embryos that could not grow inside a destroyed uterus. If she could not give birth, she would wear living things on her body, transforming grief into an occasion for the joy she refused to surrender to misfortune.

*****

Sometimes, my right leg still aches. When I am able to swim at our neighborhood pools or go long-distance bicycling or hiking, endorphins and the rush of moving blood through leg veins that have lost elasticity from clot damage make the pain disappear. These days I feel the ache more because I cannot swim, cannot sweat too hard from bicycling and hiking. Not yet, anyway, not with an upper body still tender from surgery.

Looking into a mirror, I see my silhouette is slimmer now, almost adolescent, as though the weight of adult womanhood has been lifted from me along with the cancer. There’s nothing maternal in those breasts. No roundness, no softness. Now they pair well with the empty space between my ovaries, created by the surgeon who put scar-flowers in my navel. When I am cleared to don my neon-colored sports clothes to swim and bike and hike and sweat again, I will feel a new lightness. Not quite a bird, I will glide through my days with fewer of the things that marked my body—my beautiful, imperfect body—as female.

*****

A failed bone graft surgery meant to correct spine issues caused gangrene to settled in Kahlo’s shorter, much-weakened right leg. Doctors amputated it and Kahlo wore a prosthetic leg she dressed in an embroidered red boot she designed herself. Kahlo died of a morphine overdose six months after this last surgery. But not before she made a pen-and-ink sketch of that lost leg and signed the image, not with her name, but with words every bit as defiant as her red boot.

“Pies para qué los quiero si tengo alas para volar - Feet, why would I want them when I have wings to fly.”

Sketch (1953)

 

 

 

 

Sisterhood of the Titanium Breast Clip

I am a marked woman. Inside my right breast is a titanium clip the size of a sesame seed that doctors deposited after a recent biopsy. It’s there to show doctors what area was tested after a mammogram came back showing a tiny speck that shouldn’t have been there. But I like to think of it as what links me to the many other women—and we are legion—who have had to go through the same procedure.

My body dislikes the clip. I am sensitive enough to feel something foreign and inorganic is there, taking up space, irritating soft tissue and causing phantom pain all around the breast and even into my armpit. And because it’s close to the surface, my fingertips can just detect it. But one day soon that clip will be removed along with the abnormality and the strange itchiness I feel will cease.

Then I will join another group of women who identify themselves with banners, badges, t-shirts and ribbons done in a color I detest almost as much as the clip. It’s one that reminds me of the impossibly proportioned Barbie and her disease-immune, nipple-free hard plastic breast cones rather than the power of collective female strength. Contrarian to the core, I am and will always be the big-boned blue-green girl, but one grateful to join forces with that sisterhood regardless of how it identifies itself.

The diagnosis I received that gained me entry into that group is one I never expected. I am a vegetarian who exercises regularly, doesn’t smoke, rarely drinks and goes to bed early as a monk. I’m prone to stress, but even that is something I constantly work to mitigate on a daily basis with meditation, occasional yoga and very physical activities like swimming, biking or hiking. Indeed, there’s no history of any other such diagnosis in my family: I am the unicorn.

What I do know I’ve always had—an eternal issue with estrogen dominance—is perhaps what caused the abnormality. Too much estrogen has caused other conditions, like the severe endometriosis that plagued me through most of my reproductive years. But I don’t think too much about that these days. A fellow sister of the Barbiehood warned me to not go tearing down rabbit holes for answers I’d never find. What I have can happen randomly. Which is part of why the condition in general causes so much fear. Unless there is a definite genetic connection—and in my case there was not— there will never be complete certainty why abnormalities happen, especially in otherwise healthy people.

There’s one small speculation I do allow myself. if I had not been as careful as I am, had not avoided processed foods and drinks, had not rid my diet of excess sugar a year-and-a-half ago—would the tiny bloom doctors saw on my mammograms have turned into something more insidious than the tiny in situ thing that it is? My suspicion is yes: the sugar I love but no longer eat in quantities larger than a few teaspoonfuls a day and only in its most natural forms, produces fat cells…which produce estrogen.

I try not to speculate. It’s much easier to just work on preparing my body for the journey ahead. Fortunately, there won’t be too many lifestyle changes I’ll have to make apart from those that are necessary for treatment…which, much as I don’t want it to, will simply take up time: first to heal from surgery, then to rest from any prophylactic therapy I receive. But from here forward, I’ll not have the luxury of thinking that 2 + 2 always equals 4 just because it always has.

The body has its own rhythms, its own logic, its own reasons. It will do as it will, even when we believe we are giving it the best care. Besides which my particular body is older. The vitality and vigor are still there most of the time. But this vessel of mine has long passed the age when I can simply leave it to its own devices and expect all will function well and without occasional intervention. Many—if not most—women who actually get the disease are over 55 and/or post-menopausal. Check and check.

A clean family medical history had lulled me into complacency. I almost decided to skip the mammogram that caught the abnormality, especially since my blood panel had come back cleaner than it had in years. I hated all the tests and wanted to run screaming from the radiologist after the biopsy. I am very wary of doctors and the medical profession in general, both of which tend to treat symptoms (the more drugs the merrier) rather than try holistic approaches (which take more time) first.

Sometimes, though…sometimes they actually get it right. And sometimes, they actually do care. When I didn’t immediately respond to the request for a follow-up—the denial was intense, this can’t be real, surely there must be some mistake—the radiology lab tracked me down like a target. With phone calls first, then letters. There was wrongness in my mammogram, a wrongness that took me almost two months and a distance of an out-of-town trip to finally acknowledge.

They saved me, not from the dark bloom in my breast but from my own damn self with the hard medicine of truth I didn’t want to swallow. Early detection means less demanding and life-disruptive treatments. I was marked, yes, and by a tiny dot of the unthinkable. But I will be able to get back to normal sooner and with less worry of recurrence than might otherwise have been the case…and live to tell the tale.

 

Mile High & Away

Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite, 1988

When I was still in college, a friend took me to Yosemite, a place he called "the cathedral.” He was an atheist so the phrase was an odd one for him to use. Yet seeing the park—the tall green conifers, cedars and sequoias, the rushing waterfalls and majestic granite cliffs—and walking some of its trails quickly made me realize why. The infinite and eternal had conspired to create Yosemite, endowing it with sacredness; and though I considered myself an atheist-leaning agnostic, the park still made me want to offer thanks at every turn to the forces that had created it, forces that I refused to equate with the God of organized religion for fear of tainting the cosmic immediacy of my experience.

My beliefs have not changed since then. I still go into nature to feel connected to something greater than myself and escape the chaos of the world. One recent getaway took me to Boulder, Colorado, my wishes were much simpler: what I wanted was to see snow. Not the accidental kind that sometimes falls in central Texas. But real high country snow that chilled your lungs, fogged your breath and made your muscles work and burn with every step you took.

View from the Bluebell-Baird Trail, Boulder, 2024

I’d never much cared for snow; yet the desire was powerful enough to upend plans for a spring trip. Maybe it was talk about an overheating planet with melting polar icecaps that compelled me to go in the dead of winter. Perhaps there would come a time when the kind of snow I wanted to see wouldn’t be there the way I wanted it: in soft heavy blankets that covered everything in glittering whiteness. Snow felt…precious. Necessary, somehow, even urgent.

I did not think to understand what else snow could actually mean: purification, a cleansing of soul and self: all things I knew at some level were as necessary as the physicality I craved to make up for hours of sitting cramped and colorless office cubicle. I wanted to go for long forest walks, breathe fresh air, test my strength against the bigness of the mountains, feel my body work against the resistance of snow.

I told friends that Colorado was my getaway, my escape. It was easier than telling them what it really represented: a spiritual retreat that I did not know would start with an act of grace. A snowstorm had settled over Denver by the time I left Austin: that was the risk you took flying into the Rockies during the winter. For almost two hours, my plane circled the city in the clear blue space above black storm clouds before air traffic control at Denver International cleared us to land. My Airbnb hosts, two hippie elders who’d found their way to Boulder from other places before finding each other in their late 60s, later remarked that I had been lucky. Hundreds of other flights had been cancelled or re-routed.

My hippie hosts lived in a home in the rural north of the city. They deliberately kept it unlocked because they were trusting and because they wanted nothing to do with the fear that characterized the locked-door lifestyles to which urbanites like me were accustomed. Their only demand was that I did not wear shoes inside their house. Designed and built to resemble a two-story ship, the house felt like a sanctuary and a metaphor. I was the voyager and Boulder the end and the beginning of a winter pilgrimage.

Off the Flatiron Vista Trail, Boulder, 2024

For the next three days, I did nothing else but wander the mesas, hills and mountains around the city in hiking boots I’d fitted with new steel ice cleats. My skull throbbed with an on-again, off-again altitude headache. When that dissipated, I found that higher elevation trails that took me into less oxygenated zones at times left me with the split-second feeling that my head had separated from a body I could not control.

No day was the same as the next. And though I’d determined in advance exactly which trails I would hike, nothing went to plan. The first day out, I took a Lyft to the to the easy-walking Marshall Mesa Trail and discovered the trailhead gate was locked. Not knowing that trail closures were routine after snowstorms, I asked the driver to take me to the nearby Flatiron Vista Trail. That too, was closed.

Frustrated, I hopped over the log fence behind the empty ranger’s shack and started hiking up a snow- and deer track-covered hill. The peace astonished me enough to dispense with the music headphones I used to help me forget the headache that raged in my skull. For a moment I imagined I’d come to the ends of the earth and that I was the last human alive. I only came back to reality at the Airbnb where I learned from Internet research—and with some satisfaction—that had my adventures on closed trails could have landed me in jail and left me one thousand dollars poorer.

My hosts delighted in the story of my law-breaking escapade and told me they would have gladly fed me during my days of incarceration. Nevertheless, they still suggested I try trails they knew were officially open. Try the one at Wonderland Lake—it’s just a mile from where we live. The next day I did exactly that. Though mostly flat, one section of the trail took hikers to increasingly higher elevations in lazy switchbacks that ended at a paragliding platform near the top. Snow still clung to the land, but only in patches. The higher I climbed, the browner and scrubbier the landscape became. My hosts had told me that this was the way of snow in the Rockies, that it vanished quickly in the warmth of sun that shown 300 days a year.

View from the Bluebell-Baird Trail, Boulder, 2024

The final day, I found myself chasing snow straight up shaded canyon trails that took me near the summits of Flatiron One/Two on Green Mountain. Everything was melting; I had barely begun to enjoy the snow I’d come to see. Some climbers I passed came dressed in parkas and winter leggings. But others, like the high school students who joked with each other about falling down icy slopes, had come in shorts and sneakers.

Cautiously tapping my way up icy trails and in ice cleats that sometimes gripped more mud than snow, I heard the students laugh. See you at the top, they said scrambling past me. Stopping, I remembered my collegiate self. The one who’d hiked Yosemite in old jeans and worn out tennis shoes with no tread and looked at safety warning signs posted on steep trails and also laughed. Listening to the chatter of the students, I smiled while my head lifted off my shoulders like a balloon. Snowstorms, snow melts, closures, headaches, changes of plan and all, my imperfect days of repose had been pure divinity.

 

 

Painted City

Tau Ceti (2018)

A decade ago, I arrived in Austin with the gratitude of a prison escapee. Dallas had almost crushed me with its fast-paced bigness and self-devouring culture of more, more, more. Low-rise and modest by comparison, Austin lured me southward with promises of an offbeat culture its musicians and artists had helped to create. The vibrant exuberance I found here intoxicated me like a drug. Sadly, that high didn’t last.

The tech boom that had preceded me by several years was quickly changing Austin. Within five years of my move to Central Texas, the musicians and artists who’d left their imprint on the city mostly fled. They had to: well-to-do legions who worked for the multi-billion dollar companies now in Austin had displaced them with money they didn’t have. The new downtown high rise buildings said it all: the sky’s the limit. What happened below—to the artists and people forced to find cheaper digs outside Austin, to the homeless people living on city benches—was another matter entirely.

Austintacious (1973)

But look closely and you’ll also see vestiges of the artist-friendly city Austin once was in that adorn everything from walls to utility boxes, softening the edges of what has since become a tech-inflected, quasi-Gilded Age wasteland. Most of the murals I first saw— like the wildly cheerful Austintacious—are located on the University of Texas campus. An early 1970s product of three daring UT art students, Austintacious went on to become the city’s first official mural, a whimsical snapshot of what now seems like a far simpler and more certain time. There’s no sign of tech anywhere; just quirky, fish-eyed renderings of everyday life in an eccentric Texas town.

Jeremiah the Innocent (1993)

Two blocks down from on a section of Guadalupe Street that students call “The Drag,” you’ll find another landmark mural, Jeremiah the Innocent. In it, a goggle-eyed frog looks out at passersby and offers a greeting: “Hi How Are You?” Austin musician Daniel Johnston painted this beloved image in 1993 to advertise his album of the same name. Even Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would wear a t-shirt emblazoned with the frog’s image as an homage to Johnston’s music. Building-mad developers spared the mural from the wrecking ball last year. But the message in that act of mercy was clear. No longer content to be and be weird like Jeremiah, Austin was becoming another beast entirely. One that thrived on self-commodification and would devour almost everything—including the musicians who made it into what it was—that stood in the way of its metamorphosis.

6th Street Austin mural (2012)

I thought about all of this the day I visited the now 12-year-old 6th Street Austin mural last December. Big and bold, it made an unequivocal statement of the city’s existence to all who drove past it on nearby I-35: 6th Street, Austin. Live Music Capital of the World. I posed in front of that wall—which marked the gateway to one of the city’s major tourist areas—chiding myself for every shot I took. My photos, and especially the ones I posted on social media, were free advertising for the city. Much as I hated to admit it, they were as much a part of the machine that helped to build the skyscrapers I detested as big tech.

Still, I snapped away. Weeks earlier, that same desire to interact with public art had drawn me to a 2nd Street parking structure and the rainbow glory of Tau Ceti. One hundred and three feet from bottom to top, this mural featured a single Isosceles triangle that, on days when the sun struck it in just the right way, seemed to glow from within. Named after a sun 12 light-years from earth, the mural reminded viewers about diversity; that white light contained every color that existed. But the mural spoke to me of other things, like the ambitions Austin had for itself. Once a laid-back college town, it now aimed to create a bigger, more exaggerated version of itself because this was Texas. And because it was a capital city that yearned for worldly attention.

The Beauty of Liberty and Equality (2020)

For all its hyper-capitalist aspirations, Austin is more complex than its painted surfaces suggest, especially where politics are concerned. A few blocks west of Tau Ceti is another mural, The Beauty of Liberty and Equality that celebrates, through the central image of a chain-breaking Wonder Woman, the 100th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage. Its eleven-story high idealism and liberality are as inspiring as they are devastating. Just two years after it was painted in early 2020, Roe v. Wade would be overturned, allowing Texas to step in with a near-total ban on abortion. Whenever I see that mural, the irony bites hard enough to make me weep. Austin remains a proud blue speck in a sea of red. But the mural meant to uplift now seems—at best—like the reminder of another loss and—at worst—a cruel joke.

If Beauty came into existence at the start of a year that would also mark the first of the pandemic, the Be Well murals—which cover 10,000 square feet of the Lamar Street underpass wall—came about as a direct response to COVID crisis. A local arts organization, Raasin in the Sun, curated the artwork, which was produced by several muralists who worked on it from the end of 2020 into 2021. They had been among the lucky few selected not just for their talent and interest in mental health and wellness. But for how much the pandemic had impacted them.

Detail from Lamar Street Underpass wellness murals (2021)

Strolling next to the walls the day after New Year’s, I let the bright messages about the importance of self-care wash over me. No one had escaped COVID; not even people like me who had never gotten sick. The outbreak still took a psychological toll on survivors: we could only stand by, powerless to do more than watch the destruction around us. Peace came from the stillness of rest. And these artists seemed to suggest, from the act of creating beauty and sharing it with others.

The space for artists in a city obsessed with money had shrunk; I wondered how much smaller that space might become. I looked at swirling designs again, this time against the backdrop of buildings that continued to rise and multiply. There really wasn’t any certainty anymore. Perhaps that had been as much an optical illusion as the rainbow triangle of Tau Ceti. Maybe all we could really count on was contradiction. And the consolations of art to help us walk the ever-shifting line between the chaos change and everything else we had ever known.

Different Shades of Brain

No two brains, not even those belonging to identical twins, are alike. Every single one follows a unique path of development because no two sets of embodied, in-the-world experiences are ever the same. Which is why, in 1998, Australian sociologist Judy Singer coined the word “neurodivergent” to call attention to differences in how brains form.

Singer’s term does, however, beg another, more complicated question: where does a “normal” brain end and an atypical one begin? My own experiences with brain difference began about 11 or 12 years ago when a friend quietly admitted in a Twitter post that an online test for autism showed him to be “within range.” It would be the first and last time he would ever say this. Social awkwardness that included an aversion to hugging, emotional outbursts and an obsession with details others found inconsequential told the rest of the story, but only to those who observed carefully enough.

As hard as it increasingly became to be around him—because the symptoms of autism (or Asperger’s, its milder form) became more pronounced as my friend grew older and because he never sought help for it—there was always a part of me that understood him. He was bright, very bright; just different. Someone who couldn’t fit in. That quirkiness, along with the terrible isolation he suffered (and for which I always felt the profoundest sympathy), were enough to keep me around for a very long time.

It took me many years to understand that friendship and the powerful bond we shared. If he was the irritable child who grew into an even more irritable bear, I was the anxious child who cried all the time and jumped out of her skin whenever someone tried to tickle her. As an adult, I learned to control my emotions, and to a more limited extent, my physical reactions to touch. No one knew what I was thinking and no one, except to the few who got close enough to me, knew my physical sensitivities. My friend was mostly like that, too, though the grouchiness did seem to worsen as he got older.

But my story was more complicated than that. My friend told me he had always been the odd one out. I, however, had had a gift, up until kindergarten, for making friends with children I didn’t know at the local beach. They could be cruel to me; but in the end, they accepted me. My mother told me that after I started school, after things between her and my father ended, I turned inward and dove headlong into books. That sounded about right. Unlike my parents—and especially my mother—they didn’t yell, scream, hit or threaten. They let me alone to breathe and just be.

Introversion followed and stuck because it, like solitude, felt like natural states. What wouldn’t know until I went into therapy as an adult is that the sensitivities that made me crave solitude were perhaps not all inborn; that some can develop in the aftermath of psychological, physical and/or emotional traumas. And that regardless of whether sensitivities are inherent or created by environmental factors, they can be indicative of neurodivergence. The one difference being that where an inherent sensitivity may be genetically wired into the brain, one acquired through trauma can change the brain by changing how it functions.

There was one other thing I wouldn’t know until curiosity pushed me to explore the topic. Eight years years before the lexical emergence of “neurodivergent,” psychologist Elaine A. Aron was starting her now-landmark study on high sensitivity in humans. Her work eventually led her to theorize that 15 to 20% of the population shared the ability to process external and internal stimuli, including sound, light, pain and hunger, at deeper levels than those without that trait. And that the ability itself arose out of a combination of genetic and environmental factors.

I first heard the term Aron used to refer to these individuals around 2016 while talking to a librarian friend. At that point I was at the last college where I would ever teach and being an adjunct had begun to feel overwhelming. I could not understand why; and the librarian heard more than an earful of my rants. One day she offered an insight that initially made me balk. Have you ever thought that maybe you’re an HSP: a highly sensitive person? She grabbed a book from her office shelf and handed it to me. It’s is a real, documented thing. I’m that way myself.

The book, Making Work Work for the Highly Sensitive Person, made me understand everything about her that had seemed peripheral, from the quiet, uncluttered office to the door she sometimes kept closed. What she had was what many HSPs not only prefer but need: a space apart, dedicated alone time and the ability to limit interaction with others. Too much stimulation and like turtles, we duck into our shells. She also did work that allowed her to help others and feel appreciated for her efforts. I loved teaching; but being a disposable cog in the higher education machine had drained the job of meaning.

Labels made me wary. But everything the book said made sense. I wasn’t just shy or someone who preferred my own company; I had a brain that processed the world around me in ways the majority of brains did not. The more reading and research I did, the more everything made sense, including the closeness I had once felt to my Aspergian friend. Like autism, high sensitivity existed on a spectrum that measured levels of intensity associated with emotional and sensory processing issues. Where autism was different—and more complex—was in how it also involved cognitive issues that did not usually affect HSPs.

Later, I took Aron’s HSPScale test and scored 21 out of 27 points, with 14 being the threshold for HSP. The test has been criticized as too general to be accurate; but by that point, the results had broken down the last of my resistance. I wasn’t just the one who secretly cried at sad movies. I was also the one who rarely left the house without sunglasses to filter out the glare that sometimes gave me headaches and a headset to block out street noises that could scrape across my nerves like nails across a chalkboard. It was good to have names—HSP, neurodivergent—to describe a temperament and brain that I knew were different. And to recognize what an old friendship had been trying to tell me about who I really was.

Call of an Ancient Inland Sea

As a child I dreamed of sea lions. Sometimes I saw them sunning on rocks or swimming off the Southern California coast. I wanted to be one, I think. They were the closest thing to the mythical half-human, half-fish mermaids who dwelt in the depths of the ocean. Living landlocked as I do now, there was once a time when I would remember those dreams and feel like a stranded mermaid. Sometimes, I still do.

Two white noise machines in my house, one in my bedroom, the other in my living room, are set to the sound of crashing waves. And an empty aquarium I never bothered to disconnect after the last fish died continues to drip water back into the tank from the filter uptake system. I listen to my white noise machines and my aquarium and can’t forget the sea; I don’t want to. So when I stumbled across online images—green, peaceful and utterly ancient—of the Hamilton Pool Preserve last May, I took it as a sign. I was being summoned back to water in the middle of Texas.

Located an hour west of Austin, the pool was formed millennia ago when a limestone land dome covering an underground river collapsed. In wet years a 50-foot waterfall tumbles from the top of a stalactite-filled grotto and into the pool. But the heat—its endlessness over two years and more—has taken a toll: what remains is a shimmering fringe of droplets. The sound is still hypnotic despite the lack of visual drama; ghostly, even, like the fading drumbeat of an era passing out of existence.

As it happened, though, I would have to wait five months to see the place. Advance reservations were necessary since the park only admitted 30 to 35 people per twice-daily three-hour visiting periods and almost all available slots had been booked from June to October. The habitat surrounding the pool was fragile. In the years before restrictions, too many people had overrun the place and destroyed the vegetation. Things were better now and the park wanted to keep it that way.

A rocky half-mile trail took me into the small canyon. Once at the pool, I hesitated to take my boots off. The shore was hard and pebbly—torture for bare feet. The water was chilly: 68 degrees, if not less. My inner mermaid didn’t care but I did. Twenty minutes would pass before I could stop cursing the cold and let the mermaid kick out for a swim. Apart from a few other bathers, the place was empty. A slow-moving brigade of catfish patrolled the pool as if to remind us we were their guests. Tottering up the rocky beach, I saw shells, hundreds of them. A park ranger watching over the pool told me they came from freshwater mussels. There are fossils here, too. I bent down and found a small piece of limestone imprinted with what looked like the fin of an ancient fish. Though reluctant at first, the ranger let me keep it along with a small handful of shells.

Holding the fossil in my hand, I closed my eyes and saw a wide blue expanse of water. My Pacific. My beautiful Pacific. Then I remembered something someone had told me about Texas having once been submerged under a prehistoric ocean. My eyes flew open. Was that what I had seen in my mind’s eye? When I returned home that night, I learned that hundreds of millions of years ago, a large body of water called the Western Interior Seaway had covered Texas and most of the Midwest. Bounded by the emergent Rocky Mountain chain to the west and the Appalachians to the east, the seaway stretched south from the Arctic Sea to what would later become the Gulf of Mexico.

It didn’t matter what ocean I had seen. I’d been near water: and that water had worked the calming magic I didn’t know I’d needed. It had been a year of too much. Too much in the world, too much in my own life. Heading down another trail that followed a small creek that branched west from the pool to the Perdernales River, I stabbed my trekking poles hard into the earth and cursed the jagged stones that made me trip and lose my balance. Sometimes I surprised myself by the sharpness and the rage that seeped out. That too much—the wars, the heat, the chaos, the sheer immensity of human evil and stupidity—all of it had taken residence within and battered me.

Halfway to the river, I heard a rustling sound. A pile of dead juniper branches and oak leaves moved nearby. Suddenly a small armadillo came into view and blinked. He didn’t see me because armadillos have notoriously poor vision. But I have no doubt he could detect my scent because armadillos could smell just as well as dogs. For as long as hunger drove him; and he could care less that a human had caught him rooting around the underbrush for beetles, grubs and cockroaches.

With his silver armor and clawed feet, he looked like he belonged to the same prehistoric era which gave rise to the Western Interior Seaway. Yet his strangeness also made feel close to him. The armadillo may not have come from the ocean or know it the way I did. But like all armadillos, he could swim and hold his breath underwater. Even walk on the bottom of creeks and rivers if the occasion demanded it. He was solitary, too, and I understood that, just as I understood his need to burrow in quiet places. We were fellow aliens, the armadillo and I: he with his anteater-like nose and armored body and I with my two legs and mermaid dreams of the sea.

And then I realized it. A creature of the ocean, I’d also grown invisible armadillo claws that kept me digging, digging, digging, rooting for answers to satiate a weary restlessness. A smile spread across my face. In the greenness of a small forest growing at the bottom of an ancient sea, I had eased the existential aches that gnawed from within by feeding the anxious restlessness in my soul.

Rockin' the Wall

A mathematician I knew used to scare his long-suffering girlfriend half to death whenever he announced was going rock climbing. Everything, he told her, was in preparation for Aconcagua. The man, who often climbed barefoot, didn’t think small. Straddling the border between Argentina and Chile, the mathematician's 22,837-foot mountain dream is the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere and one of the most challenging climbs in the world.

I remembered that man—and the girlfriend who married him despite her misgivings—when I found my way to pro climber Alex Honnold’s 2018 book, Alone on the Wall. He never finished the civil engineering degree he started at Berkeley because by the time he turned 19, rock climbing had become his full-time job. I must admit the lifestyle he described—dirtbagging it all around California and the West in a Ford Econoline E-150 van in search of the next great climb—sounded as über-cool as you could possibly get.

Honnold’s specialty is free-soloing, a form of climbing that uses no ropes, helmets or other protective gear except for hand chalk and the climbing shoes my mathematician friend rarely wore. It’s a stripped down extreme sport that requires both upper and lower body strength, flexibility, focus and endurance. A good dose of the crazy that helped Honnold scale the 3,000-foot vertical face of Yosemite’s El Capitan doesn’t hurt either. Bouldering, the more suburban version of free-soloing, involves scaling 15-25-foot walls that can be either manmade or naturally occurring. If you do it indoors, the walls will be set at different angles to the ground and outfitted with a variety of colorful toe and finger holds—which have their own unique names—meant to simulate the kind found on real rocks. Crash pads cushion climbers when they're ready to drop back to earth.

His name didn't immediately come to mind when I decided to go Saturday bouldering with a friend. After picking up a pair of soft-soled climbing shoes at the front desk, a gym monitor explained that each climb on the bright yellow walls around us had been graded using an 8-level animal system. The easiest climbs were tagged with sloth faces. Successively harder ones were marked with panda, koala, raccoon, squirrel, goat, bear or chimpanzee faces. The less appealing or "cute" the animal, the more difficult the climb. Let your arms hang slack at each hand hold and don’t try the bear or chimpanzee climbs just yet, our guide said with a wink.

Tess, a former novice-level trapeze aerialist, lost no time hopping up onto a koala climb staked out on a wall that bent in at a slightly acute angle. Soft, fuzzy and easy, I thought, eagerly awaiting my chance to climb to the top. Tess started to struggle halfway up and dropped to the cushion. Clinging to the hand grips with tensed arms that could not hold my body weight, I didn’t get past the first set of wall holds. Soft and fuzzy my ass. I tried again trying to keep my arms loose as our guide had suggested but fell back onto the crash pad where I let loose a torrent of expletives and rubbed at the sudden soreness in my upper arms. Tess gave me a mocking look. Remember there are children are here. Scowling, I sucked the curses under my breath then tried a panda climb that only infuriated me more. The children Tess had cautioned me about were shimmying up similar climbs powered only by giggles and instinct.

We resigned ourselves to seeking out sloth climbs which were more straightforward, almost like climbing a 90-degree ladder. I grinned and hooted like a maniac as soon as I reached the top. I dropped to the crash pad and Tess scrambled up even more quickly and took the accomplishment in the measured stride I had not. Reveling in the feeling of accomplishment, we went in search of other climbs.

An ungraded wall containing a chaotic assortment of climbing holds—called jugs if they offered a secure handhold, pinches if they offered shallow finger holds and crimps if they could only be used for fingertip gripping -- caught our attention. Even the most advanced climbers doing bear and monkey climbs seemed unwilling to try it. I quickly understood why: here there was no route to follow to the top. You decided which holds to use and when.

The old chess player in me smiled as I examined the wall more closely. Bouldering was physical but it was also about strategy. Wall angles tested physical strength while the placement of foot and handholds tested both flexibility and problem-solving skills. If I put my foot on one climbing hold, where (and what) would I need to grab to steady and/or reorient my body for the next step up? And would that step up put me in position to locate another hand—or finger—hold to continue up a route?

We ended our visit by trying another route marked out in giant round climbing holds—called slopers—that had rough surfaces but no edges to grip. This one was graded panda; but as far as my firend and I were concerned, it could have been graded bear or monkey. We turned in our shoes and the young man who had been our guide smiled at our frustration. That route had vexed many others as well. The secret, he said, was to wrap open palms on each sloper and hug the wall with the whole body. I raised my eyebrows. And you call that a panda climb? Tess just laughed.

As we picked up our gym bags and left for the day, something Alex Honnold said about his early climbing experiences surfaced from memory. His skills had been good but unremarkable; what transformed him had been grit, determination, an unadulterated love of the sport and years of practice. Still, I could not stop imagining what it might be like to suddenly be gifted with his Spiderman-like talents. If only I could find Peter Parker’s radioactive spider and get it to bite me, too…