Breadcrumb #624
GWEN VAN VELSOR
This place is not my home anymore but it once was. Kombucha is for sale at the newsstand and a white guy with greasy hair plays acoustic guitar in the airport. I wonder if he gets paid to play or if he does it just to turn people on. Native place names still exist here: Tacoma, Tualatin, Tenino, Willamette. Just names to many of us now but also remnants of who this place belongs to. Like finding an old cement foundation in a field where a house used to stand.
The freeway turns into dark highway turns into darker road with a yellow dotted line up the middle indicating freedom to pass a slow truck even in the rain with no street lights. The glow of deer eyes on the shoulder around every bend causes me to grip the wheel too tightly, repeating the mantra to drive through the deer if they decide to bound into my headlights, instead of slamming on the breaks.
The coffee pot perks its never-ending song all day at my sister’s house. We share marionberry pie and pass the new baby around from embrace to embrace. Salt air makes its way up to the second-floor bedroom where I go to sleep early under a homemade quilt. At 5 am my eyes won’t stay closed any longer and I get dressed and drive the seven minutes into town to find an open coffee shop.
“We share marionberry pie and pass the new baby around from embrace to embrace.”
The dark roads are illuminated by the Astoria Column, still lit up in holiday colors. I detour up the curvy road, guarded by endless deer, and park in the misty rain. This tourist overlook is home to a painted column for tourists to climb and admire the view. I trudge up to the old wooden door in an inadequate cotton jacket. Somehow, at 6 am, it’s open. I climb the metal spiral staircase, up and up, 164 steps to another wooden door leading to a small balcony overlooking the mouth of the great Columbia, where fresh becomes salt, the sea absorbing this massive river without effort. It’s dark now, nearly two hours until sunrise, but it’s easy to make out the swathes of land and water below, sprinkled with red and white light.
The Columbia was once a wild thing, waterfalls and rapids spilling over boulders and carved rock. But now it’s nearly placid, deep enough to support huge freight ships that twinkle in the dark of the early morning. The dams make this body of water a wide one, supporting electric life on either side. This river runs deeply inside my body, a cold aorta slowly carving canyons through my flesh. I am home. This is my place, although I’ve denied its memory. I see my reflection in the heavy clouds, my face in every drop of rain.
Later, under filtered daylight, my nephew and I squat in the backyard near a crumbling old stump covered in slippery black mushrooms and pale green moss, a fairy house. We find tiny purple flowers and thumbnail-sized pinecones, wrap them in alder leaves and place them near the door of the house as gifts, in reverence to this forest, the roots of these trees and to our own connection to this place we were born.
I dig into the loamy earth and find pieces of my fingernails, clumps of hair, groundwater tinted with my blood. All around me the ferns and colored mosses are remembrances of who I once was, the makeup of my bones.
Since I’ve been absorbed by the salt I’ve forgotten so much of this place. I don’t know if my soul remembers it, or longs for it. But my bones do. They know the rain, not as cold dampness, but as the source of my life. They know the land, as their own brothers and sisters.
Back at the airport, a man plays “Come Together,” on an electric xylophone. I sip a perfect foamy latte and breakfast on chia seeds and yogurt. I don’t long to come home here, but rather allow myself to be from here. Allow my bones to long for the soil from which they came. I don’t know how far I’m going, or if I’ll ever come home. But this is my place.
In the sunrise distance, aboard the plane, Mt. Hood comes alive. Stone covered in clean snow against milky clouds. The man beside me lets out a low gasp. Frozen waterfalls suspend their spill into the river at the foot of the mountain. I breathe a deep, warm breath, and remember.