Stories, Memoirs, Essays, Poems and Art. Visit redwoods and rivers, gardens and graveyards. Follow natives and newcomers from vineyards to foggy beaches, into small towns, and across lonely distances. Saltwater, Sweetwater honors writer Suzanne Lipsett and environmentalist Judi Bari, women whose voices are still heard. This collection maps the real geography of the North Coast, its spirit and its places.
Night To Day by Suzanne Lipsett Most people, I think, would begin with the birds. The soft light filters in through the swaying white curtain, dawn yields to morning, I open my eyes without moving at all, lying still Tom already up and goneand listen to the birds. That's partly how it is this morning of tentative health, soft health, after the battering I've taken, but not completely. Most of the sounds of morning are dominated by the cows. They are anomalies, these cows in the side pasture behind my window. Far from placid and quiet, they are continuously working each other up into hysterical bellowing fits. One begins, honking through the trees and grasses like a noisemaker trumpet at a sporting event. After a string of repetitionshonk, honk, honka hint of surprise, then outrage, tinges the sounds, and then another restless bovine picks up the cry: hanukkah, hanukkah, hanukkahhh. I suppose that technically it is more a bellow than the trumpeting of a wind instrument, but bellow fails to convey the ascension up the scales. These become urgent sounds, echoed all around the pasture, with an undertone of lows as a kind of bass line. Through years of nights and mornings I have listened to the cows, and consider the explanation for their racket to be nothing more exotic than gross laziness. Down here by the house and under the swaying oaks, bay laurels, and buckeye trees, the cows cluster at the dry creek bed waiting and waiting for water. In winter, yes, the creek bed fills, and the ribbons of water add their burblings to the mass of interwoven sounds. But not now, not in May. There's been no water in Blue Jay Creek for months, and winter is so far in the future as to be unimaginable. Granted, the pond for drinking is far awayacross the flat back pasture that spreads behind our house and over the first hump of yellowing hills. But isn't it merely the work of cows to plod heavily through the grass, feeding, grinding, digesting in those famous swaying stomachs, and eventually reaching the pond where they can drink? These lazy cows: how I appreciate their loud complaints this morning. Finally, something to think about that has nothing to do with, is far outside, my body. I cannot lie: the subject is cancer. Overworked, overdone, oversentimentalized, overused as a metaphor for mortality in an era that secretly considers death to be a curable disease. I am so self-conscious about writing of cancermy cancer, another phrase that gags methat I actually feel a blush (me? blush?) when I see these very words on my computer screen. I'm alone in the house, but will somebody suddenly appear by chance and see that I'm writing about It? Barring one highly light-handed reference in a book, I have avoided writing about cancer as assiduously as I would about going to the bathroom. Wary, chary, fearful of reinforcing a reality that can, if forgotten, become ephemeral for long, blessed periods of time. I am accustomed to stepping around the horror that has resided within my body for nearly ten years. Ten years of intermittent crisis, each more fearsome than the ones before. No one would blame me, I know, for galloping away when ever I can. Everyone would understand the soothing consolation of denial. This time, though, I cannot shake it. I am stunned at the profundity of what I've just gone through. It began a couple of months ago with a growing awareness of encroachmentthat perhaps owing to the Africa-like landscape we live in, the beautiful Sonoma savannaI can only compare to the relentless trudge of a column of army ants. Remember the movie? Was it Elephant? The ants came through the countryside like a train through the grass, following the contours of all it encountered: up over a gully, down a hillside, across a wash, through a village, over a cow, rounding up over an elephant, and thenterrible!onto a man. It reduced everything to nothing, or to bone. It, a monstrous singular composed of millions and millions of entities, devoured everything in its path.
A perfect symbol of cancer. Inexorable. Unstoppable. Utterly, neutrally natural. Chemotherapy was unavoidable, inevitable, and my body's response to it more awful than I had anticipated over a decade of phobia. It's funny, almost a practical joke, that the administering of the chemical is almost pleasanta comfortable peridontist's type chair, a VCR if you remember to bring videos (I watched Cluelessperfect!), and plenty of good conversation with the nurses and a social worker who slowly revealed her deep Zen learnings to me. Then followed days of exhilaration, during which I felt high at having weathered something I'd feared for so longone can allow oneself to seem a little heroic for a second. Ha, ha, Ms. Triumphant. Not so fast. Three good days, and you're down. I retreated into a cellar I didn't know I had. There are dreams in which you suddenly discover rooms to your house that you hadn't ever seen. For me, with the ants on the trudge, chewing toward me, I found a cellar. My husband Tom came with me, and through this dark Dostoevskian cavern blew gales of pain and maniacal distress as cruel and indifferent to our presence as a cosmic storm one might imagine sweeping and howling through space. Tom hovered, and I guttered, like a candle flame dashed sideways and at risk of sizzling out in its own little pool of wax....