Kevin Fenton

KEVIN FENTON

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Ambivalence Café

My favorite Rolling Stones album was never released. It is not precisely imaginary; the songs exist. But they were never compiled by the band into the soundtrack in my head: I did that.    

I like to think this personal soundtrack is a great album I’ve scavenged from lesser albums, but I can’t be sure about its greatness. My relationship to that music is too personal—it invokes the streets of Winona, Minnesota in the 1970s, as I walked under the warm smells of the pizzeria three blocks from my house; as I approached the patchouli-smelling record store by the railroad tracks; as I crossed the railroad tracks with their oil-soaked ties; as I traversed the modern Winona State campus and dreamed of whatever I thought college might give me; as I walked past Winona’s big trees and shabby student rentals; and as I trudged through the residual snow of February and March. 

I knew then, as I know now, that by the mid-seventies the Stones were no longer making great albums. You can make a close-to-irrefutable case that the Rolling Stones’ last great album was Exile on Main Street. There’s a similar consensus that the albums that followed Exile—Goat’s Head Soup, It’s Only Rock and Roll, and Black and Blue—were, let’s just say, a falling off. Reviews of Black and Blue toss around terms like “consumer fraud.” It’s hard to argue with these assessments. The band called its own greatest hits from the period Sucking in The Seventies. Yet this music occupies a place in my heart that feels a lot like the place where we store great music. 

Of course, that could just be nostalgia talking. These were the sounds of my teenage years. But the problem with nostalgia as an explanation for the power of this music is that my teenage years were not particularly happy times. Scorched and stunted by the death of my father; clueless about style, even by 1970s standards; and clueless about girls, even by adolescent boy standards, I was hardly living my best life. There was no golden age to summon.   

That said, nostalgia is powerful partly because it doesn’t just capture golden ages, it creates them. Nostalgia also makes artistic merit kind of beside the point. One of the unfortunate things about coming of age in the 70s is that England Dan and John Ford Coley songs can make you misty eyed.

The idea that my love for this music is essentially nostalgic troubles me. Nostalgia is in so many ways the opposite of whatever it is we seek from great art. Fun and harmless in small doses, it too easily stagnates into smugness, weakens into sentimentality, degrades into delusion, or weaponizes into tribalism. Its shrinks and separates and soothes. It's a small-souled emotion that feels large-souled. I distrust it.

But it’s too simple to say that nostalgia and art are opposites. Both art and nostalgia say, these things matter; both value emotion. Nostalgia is just disproportionate and narrow. It’s like anger in that it’s a potentially toxic emotion that helps us figure out what we value.

What I hear when I listen to songs such as “Winter” or “Memory Motel” is bigger than “those were the days.” What I hear feels a lot like greatness because great art is art which helps us construct a self. It feels like greatness because great art is art which we carry with us through decades. Those albums tincture my life and evoke my youth.

The core soundtrack includes five songs: “Dancing With Mr D” and “Winter” from Goat’s Head Soup, “Til The Next Time We Say Goodbye” and “Time Waits for No One” from It’s Only Rock and Roll, and “Memory Motel” from Black and Blue.

“Dancing with Mr D” acknowledges my teenage preoccupation with finding places that were a little more interesting and a little less innocent.  The song begins with a creeping-crawling guitar riff and Jagger’s breathy singing: “Down in the graveyard, where we have our tryst.” The effect is more evocative than scary, more David Lynch than Steven King; it’s mysterious, languid, and vivid. A later line mentions a Toussaint night. Toussaint is French for All Saints’, the holy day, morbid even by Catholic standards, adjacent to Halloween, when dead souls are celebrated. But, in the Stones’ world, it also meant Allan Toussaint, with his associations with New Orleans. 

The attraction of “Time Waits For No One” was not in the lyrics, although what teenager doesn’t like a good ode to decay. (It’s a nice shorthand for resonance.) Winona, Minnesota, where I spent my teenage years, was a river town, which made it a little more interesting than the prairie towns and quasi-suburbs to the west; Winona was a place of deshabille Victorians, river characters who made their living trapping and fishing, diners with jukeboxes at the booth, and neighborhood bars that smelled of malt. The resonant was all around me, and I was starting to notice it. 

The real attraction of “Time Waits For No One” was the music, which bore the fingerprint of Mick Taylor, the Stones guitarist at the time and an underrated influence on their sound. (He was replaced by Ronnie Wood on Black and Blue, who extended the brand but not the band.) “Time Waits For No One” feels more like water than like electricity: it’s all lead guitar, keyboards, and brushes, it’s music of streams, eddies, splashes, infusions, and murmurs. 

It’s sophisticated, which is a tricky compliment, because “sophistication” is often snobbism trying to sell itself as something more substantial. When I call “Time Waits For No One” “sophisticated,” I meant you need to be at least a little serene to appreciate it. The twitchy and trashy kid I was in junior high could only be soothed by strong hooks and simple noise. “Time Waits For No One” prepared the self which would love Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, and Miles Davis. It discarded the self that liked “Little Willy.” (Yes, that Little Willy. The one who won’t go home.) 

“Til the Next Time We Say Goodbye” and “Memory Motel” broached what was literally virgin territory—the romantic self. They suggested a life beyond a life of unrequited crushes, a romantic life that was as real as friendship, a life of conversations, places (“a coffee shop down on 52nd street”), and enthusiasms. The romance itself—“watching the snow swirl around your feet”—is muted. The couple in “Til The Next Time” has been together a while; the romances of “Memory Motel” are, as the title suggests, past. The women here are imperfect, with teeth that are “slightly curved,” and they have lives outside the singer; they drive pick-up trucks; they’re “singing in a bar.” If the Rolling Stones have things to teach you about how to view women, you’re clearly starting from a bad place. Well, I was. 

“Winter” feels like it’s about a very particular sub-season: late winter—which can run from Valentine’s Day into April in Minnesota. It’s a particularly exhausted version of winter — long gone are the sparkle of first snows, the charm of Christmas, the optimism of New Years’. It’s not spring—there’s too much filthy snow for that—but it lets you imagine spring. Jagger begins with a wordless semi-moan of dissatisfaction and desire. The first words are “it’s sure been a cold cold winter.” The guitar meanders intensely, like a teenager’s walk. I also now believe that these late winter weeks in 1975 were when I came out of the first, wordless, baffled stage of my grief for my father.  

These songs meant more to me because I was a teenager and because I was a particular kind of teenager. For my older sisters, rock and roll was a reason to dance. For me, it was something else (not necessarily something better.) For me, culture was a user’s manual, a Cliff Notes for existence, the food and water of the essential self—the self that answers William James’s question, which he says is at the heart of all spirituality: What are the secret demands of the universe? 

I spent a fair amount of time alone in those years, walking the streets of Winona, ruminating in my cluttered room. But it wasn’t entirely anti-social. My friends and I talked music. It helped us explore the Venn diagrams of friendship—where do we overlap? Where do we differ? “You love the Allman Brothers, Bob Dylan, and Howling Wolf. You love Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne. You love Queen, Yes, and ELP. Do I? How much?”  

I was also lonely in a more essential sense, a sense accentuated by my grief: I was busy with the self-pitying teenage enterprise of self definition. 

Music pointed to the world outside and the future ahead. At least in outstate towns in Minnesota in the 70s, teenagers were archeologists. We summoned the greater adult world from the fragments we heard and saw. When I heard Jagger sing about “a coffee shop down on 52nd street” Winona had no coffee shops. But I began to imagine them. With my friend Neal Nixon, who also lost a father, I began to discover literature as well as music. 

Winona itself felt adolescent: it felt on the verge of becoming more interesting. Or more precisely: it wanted to become more interesting but couldn’t quite figure out how. A few hippies would get it together sufficiently to open an almost vegetarian café for a few months. An independent bookstore appeared and then disappeared. We’d had a co-op which I remember for its dedication to carob.  

Winona became more interesting. It acquired coffee shops, and then a Shakespeare festival, and then a film festival and music festival. I grew up and moved away but I’m happy to come back occasionally. I discovered more music, some of which critiqued the music of the mid 70s—music which could feel exhausted and, at its worst, complacent and smug.  

The time of year Jagger sang about in “Winter” would take on special resonance for me. On a March day in my early thirties, I quit drinking. I had tried to stop and failed in late February, careening through my last binge with people cashing welfare checks on the first of the month. In those first grey days, I felt scraped, emptied, and, let’s just say, unphotogenic. As the weather struggled toward spring, with hisses of sub-zeros and sloppy melting, it provided a perfect objective correlative for what was happening inside of me. 

On my iTunes, I currently have a playlist that replicates the secret Stones album in my head. It includes the five songs I mentioned and a handful of others from that time (such as the Jamaican-influenced “Luxury”). It’s a bunch of really good songs, albeit songs in a more wistful and personal vein than the Stones earlier music. This imaginary album uniquely highlights the contributions of Mick Taylor; it nods to reggae, jazz fusion, and the best singer-songwriters; and it distinctly captures the zeitgeist of those deep seventies years when the hippies had been assimilated and the punks were still being incubated.

I labeled my playlist “Ambivalence Café.” It felt like a nice title for an imaginary album. And when I walk the streets of Saint Paul, Minnesota in February and March, past polluted snow, archipelagos of ice, and brown edges of lawn, that soundtrack starts to play.  

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kevin Fenton is the author of the novel Merit Badges, which won the AWP Prize for the Novel, and the memoir, Leaving Rollingstone.  His work has appeared in the Laurel Review, the Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. He has a JD and an MFA from the University of Minnesota and lives in Saint Paul with wife, Ellen, and their greyhound, Evie.

Emily St. James

EMILY ST. JAMES

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INSIDE VOICE

The cab let him out at the corner of Ocean and Atlantic, and he fished in his pocket for exact change, so as to prolong this moment a bit longer. He wanted to keep from having to unlock that door and step inside. That would be the moment of truth. It would either have died from the four months of neglect, or it would have grown stronger in his absence. That was the paradox. The longer he was away, the longer it clung to life, throwing itself forward, heedless.

The cabbie tried to give him the few dollars he intended as a tip back, and he shook his head. “You sure?” the cabbie asked, and he thought that an odd thing for someone to haggle over. Maybe everyone had stopped tipping while he was away. After a firm nod, the cabbie smirked. “Thanks, man. Happy Fourth.”

He loved the feeling of California in the summer dusk, the way it drifted over the skin and slid underneath everything else. Kids raced down the sidewalk toward the beach, which already receded behind him. By all rights, he should have headed down to the beach with them, to watch the gunpowder blooms be painted across the sky. Last year, a fog had rolled in, swallowing the fireworks, even as they struggled to burn through. They turned into dull, colorful glows, the warning of what was coming, the horizon not yet seen.

More than that, though, he loved sitting as the sun went down, waiting for the inevitable flame. As the dusk settled, kids would run around with sparklers and enthusiasts would send bottle rockets floating into the sky on impossible parabolas. Growing shadows would slip around him, and it would get cold, colder than he was used to at summer’s height. The sun would set over his right shoulder, though he was facing the ocean, because the Pacific here was to the south, not the west, an impossibility that seemed like a riddle designed to trick the unwitting in a fairy tale.

The beach was where he should go. The kids’ laughter receding behind him felt so wonderfully normal to him, a string tied around a finger so one wouldn’t forget something important. (Did anyone really do that?)

He couldn’t go down to the beach, though. He couldn’t watch the fireworks, even though by all accounts it was meant to be a clear night and one could see tiny explosions all up and down the coast from that beach. He wanted to. He hoped to. But he knew he had to go home. It couldn’t exist as both alive and dead in his head forever. He needed the answer.

He fished around in his pocket for his keys. The walk was only a few blocks, but he found himself taking his time. The lights in the Korean barbecue across the street were already dimmed, the owner having closed for the holiday evening when anyone with any sense would be down on the beach, feeling particularly American. The Jack in the Box up the street still glowed against the growing twilight, but the parking lot was deserted. Anyone who wanted jalapeno poppers had likely had them hours ago.

He was two blocks away. He’d know soon enough. He ducked inside Jack in the Box, ordering the usual.

He slid his suitcase in one side of a booth, then sucked in his breath and crammed himself into the other side. The table cut into his gut right against his belly button, and when he exhaled, he closed his eyes and winced. He didn’t make a sound. It was uncomfortable, but you got used to it. You got used to a lot of things living like he did. He exhaled very slowly.

Staring out at the city from here, holding a double bacon cheeseburger dripping grease, he could see his apartment. The lights were all off, but of course, they would be. He wondered if anyone had tried to break in, had actually managed the trick, only to be run off by its snuffling and scrabbling, by its insatiable need to just be near someone else, by the ache it opened up just from looking at it. It was revolting, but to look upon it was to be overwhelmed with pity, to know that you were on the hook for as long as you lived to make sure it lived, too, even though it never grew, never changed, just stayed, as it was.

He loved this city, but he hated it. Any excuse he could come up with to leave, he took. Any time he wanted to run away, he did. Alaska or the Maldives or Belgium or the oil fields of North Dakota, it didn’t matter. He went, and he took pictures, and he sent those pictures in, and then he dallied. He’d spent a whole week at a hunting lodge near the Canadian border because he had a little money, and the only way to keep from going home and having to sit near it all night, to hear it struggling for breath and opening and closing its many eyes while you tried to just fucking watch TV for two seconds, was to spend all of that money and stay far, far away and hope it died.

“Not going down to the beach tonight?” asked the teenager who’d been tasked with manning the counters. He appeared to be the only employee on duty.

“Nah,” he said. “You’ve seen one firework, you’ve seen ‘em all.” It struck him that was the sort of thing his father, who despised most things, would have said.

“You down there for the fog fireworks last year?” He nodded, and the teenager continued. “Man, that was fucked up.”

“You live around here?” he said, barely remembering the normal rules of human interaction. They had grown rusty after years of disuse.

“Yeah. Anaheim and Pine?” Rundown apartments. Maybe the kid was older than he took him for, had his own place.

The thought occurred to him in that moment that he could give his houseguest away, like it had been given to him. Someone that young, living alone, might want a pet, might want a friendly face to come home to. He could be rid of it. All he had to do was talk the kid into it. He just had to open his mouth and say the words: “Hey, would you like a cat?” Just get him to agree, sight unseen.

He couldn’t. He sat, mouth hanging open, burger halfway in, staring at the kid as he wiped down the counter, humming along with the radio. The kid looked up and laughed at the way he must look like someone playing an elaborate game of freeze tag. “You mind if I turn this up?” he asked, nodding toward the speakers. “Love this song.”

He could only nod. Music might be good. Somewhere, the fireworks began to thrum.

The kid reached under the counter, and the whole restaurant filled with a song he hadn’t heard in ages. Big Star. “You Get What You Deserve.” The kid was whistling along, doing a little dance with his rag, and in an instant, he understood that the kid was gay, that his parents weren’t okay with it, but that he was just fine, living alone in a shitty apartment but making a life of it and working at the Jack in the Box. Being around it had given him this sense about people sometimes, people who might be just lonely enough to let something else creep in and take over, slowly but surely. “Try to understand what I’m goin’ through,” the kid sang, and his voice was incredible, really, something not to be wasted. “But don’t blame me for what folks will do.”

He watched the kid dance and sing. The kid’s life was all in front of him. He couldn’t do this, couldn’t make the kid have such a burden when he’d already likely screamed his way out of his old life and into this one. But to be free…

Boom boom, said the fireworks somewhere, and there was a dim sense of muted applause carried on the breeze.

The song ended, and the kid hit a button somewhere, so it played over again. “You like Big Star?” the kid asked, in the way of teenagers who’ve just discovered a band everybody else knew about long ago, because life is long.

He crumpled up his detritus and put it in a wastebasket. “Love Big Star,” he said. “You like that, try Fountains of Wayne. Same idea, more modern.” It struck him that Fountains of Wayne was only modern if you counted the 2000s as modern, which the kid surely didn’t.

The kid nodded his thanks, and he took a deep breath. The kid’s eyes were so hopeful, so filled with something like joy, probably thinking back over all the things that led him here and finally feeling free, a mountain goat with a toehold who could see the rest of the way up the cliff. He would be killing all of that off.

“Would you like a cat?”

The words were out of his lips before he even knew what he was saying. It was like he had been seized by some future version of himself that was on top of that cliff and extending a hand down to him.

“Excuse me?” the kid said.

“Would you like a cat? I’ve got one I, uh, am looking to adopt out. And you seem nice. And if you live at Anaheim and Pine, you might want a friend. Sometimes.”

The kid grinned. “Thanks, sir,” and the whole world rushed into that moment, converging on the head of whatever he said next, “but I’m allergic.”

He was sure his eyes started to water with tears, but maybe that was behind the mask he wore to keep those tears from showing. Instead, he smiled, nodding. “Well, too bad. Maybe a dog.”

“Maybe!” the kid said, and he returned to his work, bumping the music even louder.

The wheels of the suitcase bumped along the sidewalk behind him. His steps became smaller, both because he was winded from the walk and from the giant hamburger and because he was trying like hell to not go back there. He wondered idly what would happen to it if he just dropped dead of a massive coronary right here, right now, like his father had. He was old, but he wasn’t that old, yet. He had a long, long life still ahead of him. Even if he opened that door and found it dead, some part of him understood it had been too long. It lived inside of him now, snuffling away, clawing at weaknesses in the wall.

The keys went into the lock easily enough, and he twisted the door open, putting on the light. He didn’t want to say anything, wanted to use his inside voice, in case it was just asleep, rather than dead. He set the suitcase just inside, looking at the massive pile of trash that covered the floor, the empty boxes and trash bags from aborted attempts to clean and discarded fast food containers and old magazines and newspapers he’d bought from days he thought important to remember with children he would never have. “Obama wins!” shrieked the L.A. Times from yellowed type across the room.

He was holding his breath. He had been from the second he set foot on this block, he realized, and he slowly, carefully exhaled. Breathed in again. Exhaled. Breathed in.

The house was eerily quiet. There was no noise, no sound. Just… him. Breathe in. Breathe out.

And then somewhere, one of those giant fireworks, the ones that simply flash once in the sky, a camera going off somewhere in the distance, let off a terrible, echoing boom. The building rattled, even this far away.

The sound settled into the walls, and once it was done ringing, he heard it. The soft sound of paws scrabbling against cardboard, trying to get across the oceans of trash to him, hearing him. He heard a watery meow, the soft snuffle of its constant cold. He felt the cheeseburger rise in his throat, but it couldn’t get past the mask, so he could just vomit and be done with this.

He saw it. It was just a kitten. It was just a kitten. Headed for him. The tiny little paws navigating the trash piles it had lived in for so long expertly, the calico coloring all up and down its body. From here, in the semi-darkness of the room, it looked so harmless.

He choked back a sob. It got to his shoe and rose up onto his pant leg and started to climb, mounting his body with surprising agility. Its meow still sounded like it was trapped at the bottom of the ocean, transmitting across the great void.

The closer it got, the more of its eyes it opened. First the two one would expect, but then another right next to the nose caked over with mucus, and then a much smaller one just below the bottom of its jaw and a large one in the middle of its forehead and another (just off-center enough to make one nauseous) where its cheek should have, might have been, and one in its left ear. And its mouth opened and inside was another eye, one you couldn’t see right away, but one he knew was there. It landed on his shoulder, and it nudged its head against his, and it was wet all over.

How long had he been weeping?

It perched there, riding, not falling, perfectly balancing, all the way to the couch, no matter how much garbage he had to kick out of the way. He realized with a start that he had left the door wide open, but everyone was at the beach. No one would be coming to visit or even take his things. He was trapped in here, alone. He turned on the TV, desperately looking for a movie, as it meowed and meowed right in his ear. It was hungry. It had been without food for four months now, and probably water, too.

Sullivan’s Travels was on. He removed the creature from his shoulder, setting it in his lap to pet it. It seemed to like that enough to purr, a purr that sounded vaguely of a ship’s anchor being hoisted.

Onscreen, Joel McCrea laughed at Looney Tunes. He reached down and covered the creature’s face with his hand, easily surrounding it. His hand closed, beginning to squeeze. He felt the skull give way, the blood squirt into his hands, the meowing end as tears spattered his face. He let out a roar he’d been holding in for 15 years, and he squeezed harder and harder, closing his other hand around the body and twisting, breaking its back.

He released the head. It opened all its eyes one by one, then climbed up his arm, toward his shoulder, its wet paws leaving little tracks. It was hungry.

He stood, the laughter from the TV mixing with the applause down on the beach. The fireworks show had ended, and Independence Day could be put in a box for another year. He set the creature down on the couch and went into the kitchen to find it something good to eat.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily St. James is the author of the upcoming novel Woodworking (out 2025). She is also the co-creator of the fiction podcast Arden and a television writer. Her non-fiction writing and criticism have appeared in Vox, The A.V. Club, The New York Times, and many other outlets. She lives in Los Angeles with her family and an ever-changing number of cats.

Rachel M. Hanson

RACHEL M. HANSON

Winner of the 2022 Walter Nathan Essay Award

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WEIGHTED

It was early enough yet that the morning still felt like night when my dog cornered a doe. The crashing sound of it all was terrible. She must have been picking at the best new grass at the corner of our eight-foot wooden fence, and when my dog came upon her so suddenly she’d little recourse, no momentum to speed her jump. She clamored over the wooden planks, my dog at her hind legs. I was angry for a split second, but this is my dog’s instinct and there’s no getting it out of her, or if there is, I wouldn’t know how to do it. I look beyond the fence for the deer, now standing in my neighbor’s yard looking right back at me. I feel ashamed for not thinking to inspect the yard before letting Blue out. My shame grows when I see the doe limp away. My partner comes outside, awakened by the racket, and I walk past him on our porch steps, through the kitchen, and to the living room window. The doe limps across the street and disappears into the woods not yet cleared to make way for another new, huge, and ghastly house, crammed between the older homes like mine—small and sturdy bungalows of the fifties. For now the magnolias and oaks, rhododendron, and the invasive kudzu with its long roping vines gone rampant here in Western North Carolina, live undisturbed. 

“She probably landed wrong. Like we do sometimes,” my partner says gently. “You know, like when we jump and come down just a little off and it hurts so bad you limp, but then it goes away. I bet it’s like that. She’ll walk it off.”

I acknowledge my partner with an agreement, though I don’t quite buy this comforting notion. Maybe it’s the pandemic and all the death, maybe it’s this southern land, maybe I’m still numb and unable to get optimism back after four years of Trump. 

When I talk to my friend, Lena, who is completing her clinicals in nursing school, there is a weariness in her voice I’ve never heard before. Not even during the worst river trips she and I guided, the longest and hottest summers spent dealing with difficult clients, have I heard her sound like this—and she’s only been in clinicals for a few weeks now. She tells me some people who lie in the emergency room dying wish they could go back and get vaccinated. 

“We all make bad choices sometimes,” she says, “It’s sad. People die knowing they made a really stupid choice.”

I get off the phone with Lena and walk to class where I teach behind a mask and look at my students in masks, and I know how much easier my job is compared to the medical workers trying to save the dying, the many dying, day after day. I try not to recall pre-pandemic times when I could read my students’ faces because it seems wrong to wish for something like that when I know my friend is watching people die on the regular. And still, I find myself unnerved at work. Like many universities, mine has not given me the choice of teaching in-person or not, and I find myself unable to muster much push-back to the administration. If I’ve learned anything about the value of human beings from higher education administration, it’s that while faculty may have traditionally been a prioritized amenity of the college experience, we have certainly become a low-end one, now more than ever. College stopped being about education a long time ago.  

*           *           *

My partner and I married out West because I couldn’t bring myself to do anything so important in the south where we live. I’d never wanted to come back to the south, having been a teen runaway from this region two decades ago. But I’ve learned a job is a job, and academics can’t be choosy. If I hadn’t come back here, I wouldn’t have met Jonathan. We were both first generation college students, both grew up poor—he in a nice family, me not so much. We both moved to Asheville for our first teaching jobs—both contingent when we began, though that is no longer the case. Part of me, the romantic part I suppose, is convinced that I came here to meet Jonathan. Though Asheville has become one of those dreamy places for tourists and destination weddings, I just couldn’t do it. I needed thin air. I needed the safety of the desert 

Before our courthouse ceremony in Santa Barbara, Jonathan saved up money so we could spend two days hiking on Santa Cruz Island. A place that feels more deserted than like a national park. Old farm equipment, fencing, oil pumps, and pipes are spread about the island, rusted and wrong. We hiked from one end of the island to the other, about thirteen miles, and met only two other hikers venturing out on the same route. Two lovely girls, celebrating one’s twenty-seventh birthday. We toasted her with whiskey before sneaking away to catch the sunset alone, almost newlyweds looking out on the Pacific Ocean until the pink and orange of the sunset gave way to night and the twinkling lights of sailboats and cargo ships. What a strange feeling it all gave me, sipping on poorly mixed hot chocolate and whiskey, leaning up against a man who loves me so much he’s taken to reading about desert lands and water rights in the southwest so he can understand more about the spaces I love. 

Both nights in camp, pygmy foxes roam around looking for food scraps. They aren’t just confident, but saucy, their fluffy tails bigger than their tiny gray bodies, their snouts delicate but ready to go sharp at any moment. We fall asleep watching them bounce about on the first night. Such quiet creatures, flitting through the night, coming alive with the cool of night, like Sacred Datura opening for the moon.

We spend our last morning on the more-populated side of the island where there are over thirty large campsites, unlike the four small ones in the backcountry, a fox waits his turn at the water pump. He wasn’t spritely as the other foxes had been, and it was strange to see an animal wait in line alongside us. One man started to cut the line and I asked him to wait, pointing to the fox who was clearly hurting, panting sickly, or maybe just old and ready to pass on. The man stopped short, seemingly annoyed, but let the fox have his turn all the same. I couldn’t look away from the fox’s little body as he drank from the puddle at the pump—his movements delicate without the sharpness of his fellow species. Jonathan took my hand in his and moved us to the dirt road. As we walked toward the ocean, toward the ferry that would take us back to Ventura, I said, more to myself than to him—

“Everyone dies.” 

I’d been saying that to myself for the last few weeks after having to put my cat, Fairbanks, down. It happened quick. One moment he was playing in the sunshine, rolling back and forth, and the next he was seizing. Having grown up in rust and violence, hungry for food and love, I know pain intimately, and I can still honestly say that nothing has ever hurt me so bad as having to put my animals down. During those last moments, Jonathan thanked Fairbanks for all the love he’d given to us. When the vet injected Fairbanks with the mercy drugs, I was on my knees so I could be face level with his as he lay on the exam table. I want to think he knew I was there with him, but I have my doubts.

*           *           *

I’ve been getting up in the quiet waiting for the light and the limp doe the last few days since Blue chased her over the fence. In the darkness, I’m pulled back in time to another morning waking at dawn in the back seat of my car. It was cold—the desert cold of early spring. I reached past the front seats and turn the key in the ignition, set the heat on full blast, nestled back under my sleeping bag. I waited until I was nearly too hot, then squirmed out of my covers, slipped into my flip-flops, opened the door and hastened to the trees just off the side of the road for the bathroom. As I was unfastening my pants, my fingertips going cold fast, I noticed a dead deer just to my right. I screamed—she’d taken me by surprise. Her pelt looked as though it had melted over her broken bones. I ran back to my car, hopped in the driver seat and drove towards town. 

I’d driven to Boulder, UT from Salt Lake City to re-certify my Wilderness First Responder, a requirement of the summer job I had as a river guide in the Grand Canyon. The timing of the course was bad. The timing for all things has always been too tight in my life—it’s my own doing. If I move fast enough, let myself be consumed in labor, then the past won’t be able to catch up and make me recall my Tennessee girlhood stuck in one drafty house or another, the bones of them aching from the wet air, my body feeling heavy with the density of it all. Lately though, I’ve grown tired, and find it difficult to jump from one thing to another. Lately, my memory isn’t letting me move forward, but pulls me backwards. I wake up from nightmares that I live in the south, and then I remember, pushing through all the confusion of sleep, that I do live in the south. The first time I had the nightmare I was unnerved, took a shower to shake it off, and then drove myself to work early. I saw the hills, the orange sunrise light peaking over the tips of the Blue Ridge just after I drove over the French Broad River. I took in a deep breath—it is beautiful, this place. And then I’m back sitting in one of the many yards of my childhood. I’m hiding behind an oak tree, leaning heavy and breathing deep, looking at the hills to know something good. And with that memory, I’ve burst into tears while driving down I-40, no longer telling myself I’m okay, instead asking aloud to no one, “How will I get out of here? How will I get out of here?”

On the first night in Boulder, Utah I slept in my tent near the community center, but there was something about the place that freaked me out. I woke up early and packed up my car. I drove to the outskirts of town where I could get a cell signal and called my friend, Danielle, for no reason other than to remind myself I wasn’t as isolated as I felt. I tell her about the vibe of the place, how I hadn’t expected to feel so weird here—I’ve always loved Southern Utah. 

“Something feels bad here.” 

“Come home. Just keep driving out of that town and come home.”

“I can’t. I have to recert the WFR or I won’t have a job this season.”

“Fuck the river. You can find other work.”

I’ve thought of quitting the river so many times, even back then I’d been contemplating what it would mean to give up the Canyon. I probably should have quit then, stopped pushing through things that made me feel bad—harassing men who withheld training, withheld decency. Even the good guys just made it that much worse to get stuck with the bad ones. I could go an entire trip and feel safe, happy even. But the bad trips seem even worse, every moment weighted down with the knowledge that I was stuck in the Canyon for seven to twelve days with unsafe men. Though I stopped guiding full-time years ago, only working a handful of trips each summer, it took me nineteen years to realize that no matter how much experience I had, no matter how many trips I led down the river, no matter how good I ran a rapid, I would never be safe from the misogyny plaguing the industry. Worse, I wouldn’t be able to protect the next generation of girls coming up. 

On my last trip of what would become my last season, the swamper, a young woman, not much older than I’d been when I started, approached me. She’d waited until the night’s work calmed and the other boatman had gone to bed, then she sat across from me on the back of my boat where I was sipping on a cocktail and listening to the current run fast. She took a few sips of beer and then looked at me directly, her eyes meeting and holding mine.  

“Do you know how you were talking about some of the stuff JP did when you started here. Being nice and everything and then going bad. The trying to touch you and bothering you, staring at you all the time, making you feel weird. Not letting you learn to drive because you wouldn’t let him touch you?”

I did remember saying that, even though I’d consumed far too much vodka that night before we launched as a way of calming myself after going off on all the bullshit I’d seen over the years—the way men got away with making the women feel small. 

“Yes. It was a hard time for me when I worked with him back then.”

“And he eventually apologized to you, said he was sorry and that he had learned how bad it was to be that way with you, that he would never do that kind of thing again—not to you or anyone else.”

I nodded, feeling sick to my stomach as it dawned on me just how stupid I’d been to believe him, to offer forgiveness. 

“Well, he’s been doing that stuff to me now, too.”

As this very smart, very impressive young person sat in front of me drinking a Bud Light and squirming as she recalled the moments where she’d been made to feel unsafe, I felt the incredible urge to scream. 

            “Fuck,” I rubbed my hand over my face, feeling the sweat and grime of the day, feeling the grime of the last nineteen years, “I can go with you, we can report this together, if you want?”

            “Not yet. Maybe soon, if I have to work with him again. I bet I can handle it, but if I can’t, if it’s bad maybe then...,” her voice trailed off. 

The reality is, reporting probably wouldn’t do much anyway. It’s not like the company is every really going to do anything about him. JP’s been here forever—practically grew up with the owners. They let him get away with all the drunk stuff he pulls all the time. What’s sexual harassment compared drunk driving a bunch of tourists down river? As I listened to my young friend, the river dancing along underneath us, I understood that I was finally finished with this job that had always given me a reason, given me the means, to spend the time I craved in the desert. I just couldn’t justify it anymore. 

I wasn’t even ten years into my river-career when I called Danielle that day on the side of the road outside Boulder, Utah. I wasn’t ready to let it all go, scared not to have work, scared to let go of a place I loved even though it came with so much bad. I wish I hadn’t been so scared. I wish I had driven away and let the WFR go, let the guiding go. But I didn’t. I drove back to town, to the community center, ready to spend the next three days learning wilderness medicine that was highly unlikely I’d ever put into practice in real life. 

It was an odd group of folks taking the class. I was the only woman there and I felt nervous about it. They were not the group of river runners and guides I’d been expecting. Mostly they were folks who seemed like they just wanted something to do. One man brought his daughter to the class. She looked to be about thirteen but dressed as if she were a pioneer, minus shoes. Her bare feet bothered me. It was too cold. Her father wore hiking boots and was bundled in thick flannels. She wore a light cotton jacket over her dress and clung to a cloth doll. She stuck near her father and barely spoke, smiled at the older woman who was cooking for the class. I assumed, given the area, that her father was a fundamentalist. The instructor of the class, who seemed to be a kind man, a safe man, was friendly to the child and made sure she knew there was enough breakfast to go around. I didn’t have to ask the girl what the instructor did—

“Is school on spring break?” 

I knew it wasn’t. Most likely her schooling would never be traditional, would never amount to much beyond keeping house and tending babies. Her role was to serve the men around her. As I glanced at the girl shyly spooning oatmeal into her mouth, it occurred to me that she might be rebelling against all the bullshit. Maybe she was causing trouble at home and that’s why her father had brought her along. It made me sad. Keeping women uneducated is just another way of setting them up for oppression. That I also knew without asking. My parents had had their own version of religious fundamentalism, and I’d also been kept from school and was told domesticity and childbearing was why God made me. There was no point in educating me, because my purpose in life didn’t call for it. 

I could have talked to the girl, though I imagine her father would not have approved, but I didn’t want to. It was too much, too close to a reality I’d left behind me in Tennessee nearly a decade ago. I didn’t want to know another girl whose life was likely to be one lived in oppression. I hadn’t been able to save my own sister, and this girl, well, there was nothing I could do about it. I left breakfast early, went out to my car and opened up my laptop. My thesis was coming due and we had another twenty minutes before the class started. I looked at the lines I needed to edit. The sun was coming down hot—that beautiful desert sun. I closed the computer and leaned back to feel the heat on my face, whispering to myself again and again—There’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing you can do.

*           *           *

We can live anywhere and we can die anywhere, but different places speak to different people. I think of what that means for my history, my memory, and my desire to be as far from this Southern region as possible—this is not my place, but it is the only place for others. And I think about what it means for the women I have known or at least known of, women connected to my life or my community in one capacity or another. Some of the women I find myself thinking about are those who have crossed my path peripherally. Like the girl back in Boulder, Utah. My thoughts have been preoccupied with these women lately. Maybe it’s all the bullshit in Texas—the republicans waging their never-ending battle against women and what they do with their bodies. How many women will be forced to bear children they never wanted? How many young girls, still children, will be forced to give birth because this country is full of men who are determined to write laws that break their bodies? Men and all their breaking, all their controlling, all their violence. Fathers, brothers, priests and preachers. And too the righteous woman sitting with righteous men on the highest court in the land. It does not bode well for most of us. 

That special kind of morality that allows one person to decide that their belief about what another person does or does not do with their body, is more important than the person making up that body, well—that shit is everywhere. It’s in Texas, the state of my birth and where I first learned of violence, in Tennessee where I grew up, and in Utah, the state that gave me home. And still, I’ve come to believe that place is everything. If I was pushed own some kind of belief, I’d say I believed in rivers and in dirt, in the desert. 

Kristen, who had been my freshman roommate, drove over a curb and popped her tire on the way to a party the year before I graduated. While we struggled with the flat, a complete stranger watched from his apartment window across the street. We must have looked silly trying to break the lug-nuts, taking turns steadying one another as one of us bounced on the x-shaped wrench jutting from one lug-nut than another. We managed to break two, but sat down on the curb to take a break before going after the others. Kristen, who rarely came out with me, was not pleased. She lit a cigarette and muttered something about fucking Salt City and its massive curbs, and something about me being bad luck. This was the second time we managed to have car issue that month. Comparatively, a flat was better than the tow we barely avoided the last time—the last of my paycheck covered half, but I still don’t know how Kristen came up with the rest of the money. She refused to call her parents, and I didn’t have any worth calling, but in the end, she had her car and her parents never knew how close she’d been to getting it impounded for parking it in the wrong zone. 

Mark Hacking was quiet when he came across the street to help with the flat tire. He said very little and seemed nice enough. He was a bit round, bald, maybe in his thirties. Later, when the story of his missing wife broke, he gave the performance of a loving husband, concerned for his pregnant wife, Lori, wanting her to come home. But he knew she would never come home. He’d shot her in the head with a rifle, wrapped her in the mattress, and threw her in the dumpster. She was found at the landfill days later. Why? Because she’d discovered him in a lie, in many lies. He’d told her he’d been accepted to medical school in North Carolina, though he’d never finished his undergraduate degree. He told her a lot of untrue things. She probably cried herself to sleep that night after telling him she was leaving him. And then he killed her. 

I called Kristen at her parents’ house to talk about the murder and that day the murderer changed her tire. We were both smoking, both sipping on sodas on either end of the phone call. Something about that sameness gave me some comfort. 

“Well, people are fucking assholes, even the nice ones, sometimes especially the nice ones. You just never fucking know.”

Kristen said fuck a lot, and I found that comforting too. 

“Um,” I started hesitantly, “do you think I could come to your parents tonight?”

“Yeah, you can stay the night. We can skim my romance novels for all the dirty parts.”

I sighed, grateful. “That sounds perfect.”

*           *           *

I’ve had many manual labor jobs, including the river, where the management let me know that most sexual harassment was just teasing and shouldn’t be taken seriously, but if I was being sexually harassed I needed to learn how to stand up for myself and make it stop. As I sit here writing these words the thought I’ve had so many times, said many times, stays with me—another refrain. Men hate women. Men hate women. 

I know that women hate women too. Perhaps it’s a learned disdain for how they are treated—if you don’t align yourself with other women, if you aren’t a feminist, then maybe men won’t hand you the same treatment they give all the other kinds of women. If you can convince men, and yourself in the process, that you are one of the boys, then maybe you’ll be as good as one. Maybe. 

When I was quite young, not so long after running away from home, a woman I looked up to told me that it was mean to make a man stop at a certain point when it came to sexual intimacy. 

“There comes a point where men can’t help themselves and trying to make them stop is just mean.” 

The man who raped me was eight or nine years older than me. I liked him. We hiked and drank beer, cuddled in his hammock. When we went to his room and started making out, I said I couldn’t. I said no. He stopped. Said okay, but didn’t stop. For everything in my body that knew what was happening to me was wrong, that led me to madly run down the street the second it was all over, I could hear that woman’s voice—

“Men can’t help themselves.” 

*           *           *

When I was little and living in Texas I had a neighbor. Her name was Annie, and when she died it was slow—years in the making. She’d damaged her brain when she tried to take her own life. Carbon Monoxide poisoning. The details of her attempted suicide are fuzzy. I wrote about Annie some years ago, an essay in which I considered her kindness, and the oppression she lived under day in and day out. I’ve been thinking about her again because I’ve been thinking about all the women I have known who have been stifled—a life without agency or life lost at the hands of violent men. 

When did it begin, my awareness of this violence? I think it was Annie. I was four when I knew her, a year or two older when she suffered carbon monoxide poisoning. I think I was ten or eleven when she finally died. Her husband, a preacher, was a brutal red-faced man. 

When I was fifteen living in Tennessee I worked on a small tobacco farm with my older brother, the farmer, and his nineteen-year-old son, and a nineteen-year-old man who dated the farmer’s daughter, Dana. They had a child together—she was seventeen. I’ve written about Dana in the past, too. Her boyfriend murdered her with a shotgun the first and only winter I worked shucking tobacco plants. At first the boyfriend ran, but quickly turned himself in. I saw a brief news clip. She was trying to leave him, wanted to move away for school and didn’t want him following her. He killed her while she sat in the driver seat of her car. He shot her from the outside, pressing the gun against the glass. She must have been trying to get away. At her funeral, I had the hopeful thought that maybe there had been mercy. Maybe she hadn’t seen it coming. Now I wonder what it was that made him feel so untouchable that he didn’t feel the need for restraint, that he helped himself to the life of a young woman who simply wanted to live away from him. 

*           *           *

When the whole country, the whole world, is being ransacked by sickness and death, it’s hard to avoid the thought of death and dying and loss and grief and the overwhelming sadness of it all. It brings things up for us—those of us waiting for the end of the pandemic. I take inventory of all the ways in which I’ve known violence, death, and grief when I’m walking my dog on the trail by my house, when I’m looking out the window before dawn has appeared. I wonder if thinking this way is also a condition of living back in the region I swore I’d never return to. This space, despite so much beauty, presses me down even though I work daily at not giving over to the heaviness I feel in here. I remind myself my early encounters with all this darkness started in the south, but it didn’t stop there. Everyone dies, and anyone can die anywhere.

After Annie died, after Dana was killed, after I fled home as a teenager, determined to escape the violence of my own family, I met a man who shot his wife to death on a calm street in Salt Lake, and two years before that, Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped and held in the foothills behind my apartment. 

*           *           *

The other night I saw a dead black bear on the side of the road. The second one I’d seen since living here. Deer, elk, antelope, racoons, opossums, coyotes, armadillos—those I’m used to seeing dead on the roadside. And each one bothers me—every time. The black bear though—I have no words. All this encroachment, the fast-paced movement on our dying planet. 

I hit an opossum once in the dark driving across Kansas. I cried. People think them ugly and horrible, but they are docile and gentle creatures, baring their teeth with a hiss when threatened, when afraid. Last year, I read about a man who took a golf club to a baby opossum and beat it for no reason. Just because he could. I’m writing about a wolf who was shot by a hunter for no reason, other than he could. I wonder how much violence would dissipate if men didn’t feel confident and assured in what they can do in the world.

*           *           *

This past summer, a young woman from Florida went missing. Her body was found weeks later. Her fiancé killed her. He could, you see, she was small and he wasn’t. Now people are talking about her death, and now, once again, everyone is talking about “Missing White Woman Syndrome.” When a white woman goes missing she becomes a national obsession. When murdered Indigenous women, Black women, Brown women, Asian women go missing, we rarely hear their names, the circumstance of their cases, on the news for even a short period of time. At least the conversation is happening, yes, but I worry it won’t last. When more women of color go missing will their disappearances get coverage, or will they be set aside until another white woman goes missing, again forcing the conversation about the obsessive coverage of those who are deemed to matter and those who matter less? It’s not an unfounded worry or an unfounded question—it’s a one people ask about their loved ones who garner no nation-wide coverage every day.

Of the hundreds of Indigenous women who have gone missing in the Utah adjacent Wyoming in the last few years, none of their names have garnered the attention and recognition that Smart’s had then and even now. When I think of who makes up the police force, who makes up the justice system, who sits on the courts, who matters and who doesn’t, who the media cares about and who they don’t, I find myself walking from one room to the other. I pace knowing that it’s not enough to feel bad, to go outside and close my eyes, feel the heat of the sun and tell myself there is nothing I can do. 

In a country built on a foundation of racism and the genocide of Indigenous peoples, it’s hard to be surprised that missing women of color, their stories, are represented less in the media. Violence against women is commonplace because women are just not the kind of people who matter enough. For all the learning and teaching and believing that somehow change is possible, we have not learned how to change fast enough. We move slow and pride ourselves on our snail-paced-progress that has always left and continues to leave so many people waiting for justice that never comes.

Ours has never been a country of kindness. 

*           *           *

I write about wildlife, rivers and desert lands, mountains and mud because that’s how I try to make sense of the world, and maybe that’s because the land has been gendered too, like the constant legislation of women’s bodies, our lands bridled again and again. There is a connection between the destruction of the planet and the bridling of women’s bodies. Our lands are dying, our water polluted, rivers dammed and broken—like the Colorado, every gallon claimed and taken before it can reach the ocean—leaving it a pathetic trickle in Mexico. Is it easy dismissal our dying planet because we are so used to seeing it exploited and strangled? And where is the root of such things? 

When the colonizers came to this country they already saw women in nature, had already gendered the land, but they certainly leaned into that way of seeing and being and thinking more so than ever. It’s not really such a surprise then that the land and the wildlife living upon it are so easily dismissed—and that, to me, is particularly weighted. What it tells me about women is that we’ve never mattered enough, and if women have been historically connected to the land through metaphorical language, then we may all just be doomed. Or maybe not. Polluted water, dammed rivers, wildlife and plants decimated by climate change could potentially force a reckoning because it’s not just women’s lives that will be affected, but everyone lives. Still, in these pandemic days riddled with illness and a significant portion of the population refusing life-saving vaccines, and with the near useless Senate, I’m having a hard time letting myself hope for much.   

Still, tomorrow I’ll sit down and plan another lesson. I’ll look at my students in their masks, and we will talk about literature and its various ways of representing life. I’ll ask if it matters, this representation. We will discuss and we will look for hope because it’s too horrible not to. After class, I’ll sit at my office desk and open another worthless email from the administration and read their surface level announcements about the progressiveness of our university. I’ll think about the banners flying above our library to symbolize our inclusivity and our acknowledgement that this campus is housed on the stolen land of Cherokee peoples. And what, beyond these banners of acknowledgement, real and truly tangible things have we done? 

I’ll think of the first student meeting I had after my first nonfiction workshop here at this school. We discussed revisions for the essay she was working on, an essay that detailed the terrible treatment she received by the Title IX office when she reported her assault. I read her pain and remembered how a white male colleague told me during my first month on the job, “Assault isn’t a thing on our campus.” He sits on the school’s faculty senate now. 

I’ll pack my bag for the day and go home to my partner who I know gets bogged down in the inhumanity he discovers in his own research—currently economic disparity and labor inequality in West Virginia. He will be making dinner, our animals bustling about the kitchen to eat up whatever mess makes its way to the floor. I’ll laugh at his terrible singing and feel grateful for our laughter, for the light in this world. I’ll feel a little bad, too, because I too often take for granted that I’m so lucky to have this light and this love.

In the morning, I’ll inspect the yard carefully for deer before I let my dog out.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel M. Hanson’s essays can be found in Creative Nonfiction, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Best of the Net, American Literary Review, and many other literary journals. Her poetry was selected for Best New Poets and has been published in The Minnesota Review, Juked, New Madrid, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship in Nonfiction at Colgate University, Rachel holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah, and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville.