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Susquehanna

Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, with grandson and slave, painted 1670

Cecil County [Maryland] is a redneck, white trash, beer guzzling chunk of small town USA. Rising Sun especially is known for their large KKK community…if you’re in the mood for any recreational drug use and/or prostitution, just head on down [to Elkton]...Hunting is also a big past time here, if you’re really a cool kid, you might even wear you’re camo gear to school. If you have a passion for good ole boy trucks with confederate flags on the back (if you’re lucky you can spot one with gun racks too), or just thoroughly enjoy being a hillbilly, Ceciltucky is the place for you. Move here at your own risk, most people who live here never leave…

—entry for “Cecil County” on urbandictionary.com

It is as if the Susquehanna were an endless sea and one would drop off the earth if one ventured too far from shore.

—The Washington Post, September 3, 1989

I will begin, as the colonists did, on Garrett Island. It rests in the mouth of the Susquehanna River, a truly mighty river which stretches all the way from upstate New York down to the head of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Down here it forms the boundary between Harford County to the west and Cecil County, where I grew up, to the east. Anyone who grew up near the river, as I did, knows Garrett Island, because it is enormous. Yet it is uninhabited and has been for much of its history. The only way there—the only way there has ever been there—is by boat. I have been there by boat many times, when I was little. There was a rope that my brother and I used to loop around our feet and swing from into the water. There are woods, but I was always too afraid to go into them, because there is something undeniably haunted about Garrett Island, something dark, something that makes you want to leave the moment you lower your feet onto the sand.

Once upon a time my grandfather and my grandmother took a boat to Garrett Island. My grandfather got angry about something and abandoned my grandmother there. She had to swim across the river, back to the riverbank in Perryville, to get home.

Once upon a time, I was once told, there was a coven of witches on Garrett Island.

Once upon a time, August of 1608, in fact, a man named John Smith sailed past Garrett Island. He had come all the way here, to the head of the Chesapeake Bay, from the English colony of Virginia. He sailed as far north on the river—only a few miles—as he could, but the rocks in the riverbed prevented him from going any further. He had come here based on a tip: a few days earlier he had been on a nearby river, the Sassafras, which now forms the southern boundary of Cecil County, and there had met a group from the Tockwogh tribe. “Many hatchets, knives, peeces of iron, and brasse, we saw amongst them, which they reported to have from the Sasquesahanocks,” he wrote in his journal. These people—the Susquehannock—were reported to be

a mightie people and mortall enemies with the Massawomeks. The Sasquesahanocks inhabit upon the chiefe Spring of these foure branches of the Bayes head, two dayes journey higher then our barge could passe for rocks, yet we prevailed with the Interpreter to take with him another Interpreter, to perswade the Sasquesahanocks to come visit us, for their language are different. Three or foure dayes we expected their returne, then sixtie of those gyant-like people came downe, with presents of Venison, Tobacco-pipes three foot in length, Baskets, Targets, Bowes and Arrowes.

So began the end of the Susquehannock.

***

When John Smith sailed up the Chesapeake Bay in 1608, there was no “Maryland.” There was Virginia, controlled by the English, to the south, and there was New Netherland, stretching from Delaware Bay to the Hudson River, controlled by the Dutch, to the east and north. But around the Chesapeake Bay there were only the indigenous tribes. On the Eastern Shore were the Nanticokes, and to the north, in present-day Cecil County, were the Lenape, who extended down from Pennsylvania. The Susquehanna River appears to have served as a border between the Lenape and, on the western bank, the Susquehannock. The Susquehannock were a powerful people, and over the following decades they would consolidate control of the region. In 1608 they inhabited several villages along the Susquehanna riverbank extending toward their main city, which was located in present-day Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It was upriver to that city that Smith’s interpreters presumably travelled while the captain and his men languished in the mouth of the mighty Susquehanna, which at that time of year would have been swelteringly hot and humid.

George Johnston, in his 1881 History of Cecil County, offers a vision of what Smith and his men may have seen. He tells of since-disappeared “primeval forests,” “large swamps and morasses.” As for the fauna:

Deer, bear, wolves, opossums, hares, squirrels, wild turkeys, pheasants, wild pigeons, and many other kinds of animals abounded in the forests, and the creeks and rivers were well stocked with beavers, otters, muskrats, and all kinds of water fowl.

Anyone willing to venture past the highway a few miles today will still sense the primeval, for not far from the roads are winding creeks overgrown with dense vegetation, cicadas screaming in the bushes, trees disintegrating in the muck beneath the surface. Not far at all from I-95—dedicated in Cecil County by President John F. Kennedy, who cut the ribbon just days before his assassination—is the wild, uninhabited Garrett Island, visible today from the bridges spanning the Susquehanna but which would have been spotted by John Smith in 1608 from the deck of his ship, the island a dark and ghost-like form slung between the banks of the mighty river.

I grew up here, and everything seems so natural now, the landscape, the buildings, the family stories, the whole society. And yet I have now reached an age where things are starting to look different and therefore impermanent, illusory. This place is of course the place where I grew up, but I can detect the shifts. The North East Grocer has a new owner. The town library is closing and relocating. The Nazarene Camp has been demolished. “Doesn’t that look weird?” my mom asks as we drive past it. It does look weird, and what also looks weird is the slab that my childhood home was built on, next to the Susquehanna River in Port Deposit. The house is gone and the foundation has been overtaken by vines and bushes. I can close my eyes and see us there, my brother and I in our uniforms on our first day of Catholic school, my brother leaning over the railing to catch rain on his tongue, my father catching me sneaking away from my naptime.

But the river remains. The river always remains. And in my imagination I begin to erase the other places, the other buildings, through time. The Wal-Marts go, then the chain restaurants. The Japanese restaurant and the Vietnamese restaurants go. The methadone clinics go. The strip malls go. The housing developments go. The hospital, where I was born, goes. The post offices go. I-95 goes, and John F. Kennedy goes in a poof. The navy base goes. The Civilian Conservation Corps roads go. The Jacob Tome Institute goes. The schools go. The old stores on Main Street go. The power lines go. The cars. The churches. The stars come back, and the forests. The animals come back. The plantations go. The colonial settlements go. Their ships go back down the Chesapeake Bay. And now the Lenape and the Susquehannock are here. And now there is a singular ship from Virginia on the horizon, disappearing backward away from the river.

That period—from 1608 until the establishment of the Maryland colony nearly three decades later—is the most unsettling time to think about. For during that time there may have still been the belief among the Susquehannock and the Lenape and the Nanticokes that things might go a different way, that the Dutch to the north and the English to the south would remain in place and present no threat to the sovereignty of the tribes around the Chesapeake. But that is not how empires work—

“Empire,” French, thirteenth or fourteenth century. From the Latin imperium. Command, order; power, authority, government; rule; military authority; the state; EMPIRE; Imperium Romanum, the ROMAN EMPIRE.

There is no stopping an empire. It will spread itself to the point of total exhaustion or collapse. It is a machine that has an infinite appetite and a bottomless need for resources. But how would the tribes have known?

And how could they have known that in the years after 1608, after John Smith had disappeared, an Englishman named George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, a Catholic, had set out from Virginia to Newfoundland to establish a Catholic colony there? How could they have known that the weather had been too harsh, that he had gone back to Virginia to seek a better parcel? How could they have known that the Virginians would reject his request and send him back to the court of King Charles in England? How could they have known that the king, in his splendor and glory, would consult the maps of the New World, rest his finger on the Chesapeake Bay, and write out a charter for Calvert’s colony to be established there, which would be named for the queen, Henrietta Maria—Terra Mariae, Maryland?

They could not have known. Nor could they have known that George Calvert would die, and the charter would instead be granted to his son, Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, in the year of Their Lord 1632. They could not have known the text of the charter drawn up by the king and his court, which granted to Cecil Calvert the authority to “transport by his own industry and expense a numerous colony of the English nation, to a certain region, hereinafter described, in a country hitherto uncultivated in the parts of America, and partly occupied by savages having no knowledge of the Divine Being.” They could not possibly have known that the Lord Baltimore would appoint his brother, Leonard, to lead two ships, the Ark and the Dove, across the Atlantic to carry out the mandate of the charter, which Leonard Calvert would oversee as governor. They could not have known that these ships would land on the western banks of the Chesapeake on March 25, 1634, and that on this day a Mass would be performed. “In this place,” Father Andrew Waite, a priest among the colonial party, wrote in his diary, the mysteries of the Mass were held, and the colonists “erected a crosse, and with devotion tooke solemne possession of the Country.”

Downriver they established a town called Saint Marie’s, where “our plantation is seated” and met with the leader of the Piscataway tribe, who informed the colonists that “they had warres [with] the Sasquasahannockes” and sought to form an alliance with the English against these formidable enemies. “Digitus dei est hic”—This is the finger of God—proclaimed Father Waite, “and some great good is meant toward this people.”

***

Cecil County today looks either like a godforsaken wasteland or a tidewater Eden, depending on where you are and how much money is around. Route 40 cuts through the middle of the county and is lined with strip malls, pawn shops, billboards advertising the best lawyers or the best crabcakes or the notion that life begins at conception, bail bondsmen, used car dealerships, the county jail, and fast food. Set back from Route 40 are the towns of Perryville, North East, Rising Sun, and Elkton, which are charming in some places and neglected and poverty-stricken in others. The opioid crisis hit Cecil County hard, and it shows. Though the situation has improved somewhat since the height of the crisis in, say, 2013, no matter where you go in Cecil County, you are bound to run into someone in the throes of what I can only describe, based on witnessing people close to me descend into opiate and heroin addiction, as a waking hell. As you get away from Route 40 you get into the farms and the woods, which are gorgeous, and as you approach the water you get into the money. Here are the estates and the mansions that my mom and I pass in her Nissan and say to each other, as a kind of mantra, “I wonder who lives there.” There isn't much to do in Cecil County. We don't have a movie theater and we don't have a lot “going on.” When I was a teenager, my friends and I would go to Newark, Delaware, home of the University of Delaware, for stimulation, but in Cecil County I mostly read books, went on walks, and, if I was really bored, went to Wal-Mart in the evening to people watch (“The freaks come out at night,” according to the Whodini song, and also my mother, who avoids Wal-Mart after dark). As night closes in, so does the darkness of the woods, woods that seem to fold in on themselves and remind us that we really are “out here,” lightyears away from the big city.

All I ever wanted—and all my friends ever wanted—was to get out of Cecil County. In high school and at the library and on TV we began to realize that there was so much more out there than this, so many other people, so many other ways of thinking and being. The plan was straightforward enough: get to Los Angeles, or to New York, and keep moving. But as it turned out, despite what we saw on TV, people don't just show up in those places anymore. And so we adjusted the plan: some would go to Vermont, some to Delaware, some to Baltimore. One actually did go to New York, and I believe someone did make it to Los Angeles eventually. But others landed back where they started, their feet stuck in one of Mr. Johnston’s morasses. Some died. Back then we felt different, and thus we were different. Or so we thought; our entire sense of identity revolved around this belief, and the faith that we would leave and never look back. The last thing we wanted was to be “Cecil County people.”

People from Cecil County have a certain way of talking to one another, a certain set of givens that I imagine any “small town” community might have. The description at the top of this essay is, I think, a fairly typical one that might be heard from a high school student: viciously self-aware and self-deprecating, and all of it rooted in truth. There was a foreboding awareness among everyone I grew up with that we may never leave, that the Susquehanna and the Sassafras may in fact be the beginning and the end of our shared universe forever, that we might grow up and, like our parents’ generation, spend the rest of our lives running into each other at Food Lion, or at Wal-Mart, or at the Legion bar, or at Little League games, or at work. We may divvy ourselves up, as our parents have, in terms of “North East people,” or Perryville people, or Elkton people, or Rising Sun people, and go to our deathbeds clinging to the belief that there is some meaningful difference between any of these categories, and should that prove untrue, then at least there would be that one, inescapable constant: Cecil County.

How do people from here talk, exactly? There is on the one hand nihilism, the belief that this place is rotten and that there is no way out. That idea, assisted by the rivers and the state line, creates a cocoon not only from the rest of the state but from Pennsylvania and Delaware as well. We may be surrounded by farms on all sides, but there is something particular about our farms, apparently. I have always suspected that the Cecil County pride, the affected glee—concealing insecurity—with which we call ourselves rednecks from “Ceciltucky,” has to do with our proximity to the suburbs. We are far enough from the Baltimore suburbs to the west and the Philadelphia suburbs to the north and east for these cities to seem distant and almost theoretical. We are truly the country. Wherever we are, we are floating in the middle, too far from any major population center to identify with it. We are something very much our own, and anyone born here must come to terms, as I have been trying to for years, with what that means.

Everyone from here is resigned to Cecil County and at the same time defensive of it. “I hate the word Ceciltucky,” my mom says. “There’s so much more than that here.” Her principal argument, as well as my grandmother’s, is to point to the horse ranches in Chesapeake City. “Those are duPont horses,” they’ll say. “Those horses compete in the Preakness, the Kentucky Derby…” Those horses on their exquisite pastures offer some link to “gentility,” some bridge away from the honky-tonks, the fights that break out in parking lots, the poverty, the drug busts, the truck stops, the good ol’ boys. “She’s a Cecil County girl,” my brother said recently. “You can tell because she’s got a cigarette hangin’ out of her mouth and every other word she says is ‘shit.’”

People from here can look “hard,” they can look “rough.” People here don’t extinguish their cigarettes until they are already halfway through the restaurant door. People here have court dates, prescriptions always in need of picking up. People here need WIC and they need methadone. They need Medicaid. They need hope, a commodity in short supply here, a fact that the snake oil salesmen in the Republican Party have long exploited, not only in Cecil County but in kindred communities around the country. “You’re wise to travel,” a nurse told me recently. “You get a whole different perspective than if you just stay in Cecil County.” And yet in leaving I have forsaken my claim of being “from” here, even though I spent my whole childhood here. I swam too far from the shore. Because I went away to New England for college, I was never fully woven into the social fabric. And so I do not see anyone I know at Wal-Mart, at Food Lion. I don’t know anyone here, really, except my family and the people they know, and as a result I barely even know Cecil County, my own home.

As I write this, I am aware that I am writing from a place of contempt and insecurity, a deep desire, and need, to distinguish myself from the “rednecks” and to prove myself as educated and upwardly mobile. I am also aware that I grew up during a time—the Bush years—when in the popular imagination wealth equalled dignity, period. Post-recession, post-Obama, post-2016, post-Bernie, post-Covid, that is no longer the case. The cracks in the economy have proven themselves to be chasms, into which even the most bright and hardworking may very well fall. The scorn for “white trash” has changed, now, to a desire to “capture the votes of the white working class.” We are talking about the same people here, but the imagery is different. “White trash” conjures the image of a trailer park, while “white working class” evokes a WPA mural. Calling someone “white trash” or “redneck” has evolved into a kind of slur, a kind of “classism.” Having in my own ancestry a line of hard-up people—people who lived on the side of a mountain in Virginia without plumbing or electricity—and having been on Medicaid, and having heard my fair share about court dates and methadone, and having spent the first eight years of my life in a trailer by the Susquehanna River—“the Palace by the Sea,” my mom called it, and all that is left now is that slab—I have complicated feelings about “classism.” On the one hand I think the government needs to take much more responsibility—i.e. put up the money for programs—to address the plight of the poor and the working class. Pay for their education, pay for their healthcare, and pay for it now. But when it comes to words like redneck and hillbilly, there is still the matter of Cecil County’s cardinal sin, committed by rich and poor alike, to consider: its racism. Paradoxically, I do understand what the “white working class” of Cecil County is going through, I really do, but it does not negate the hateful beliefs that I know many people here hold. I also know that not until those beliefs are stamped out will there be any hope of unified—and, by definition, diverse—progress for the working class. Part of the “Ceciltucky” identity—a large part—has to do with race. What distinguishes Cecil County from Baltimore and Philadelphia is not just distance, but the fact that it is eighty-nine percent white.

What I know—and what drove me out of here in the first place, along with lack of opportunity—is that there is an ugly undercurrent running through “Ceciltucky,” a hostility toward anyone “different.” What I know is that there are Confederate flags flying around this county and Confederate stickers on the backs of trucks. This flag is but one symptom of the racial animosity here, the wounds that stubbornly refuse to close.

The idea that there is, within Maryland, a place where the Confederate flag is still regularly spotted comes as a surprise to many people. Maryland was not a Confederate state during the Civil War, and today the state at-large is considered a Democratic fortress. But the Democratic stronghold is actually Baltimore, along with the liberal suburbs which surround Washington, D.C. Seven of Maryland’s eight congressional districts have been sufficiently gerrymandered so as to guarantee that they send Democrats to Washington, but District 1, which contains all of the Eastern Shore as well as Cecil County and much of Harford County, is deep, crimson red. Its representative in Congress, Dr. Andrew Harris, is a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus. Among his claims to fame is a 2014 designation by the Human Rights Campaign as being one of the country’s “most anti-equality members of Congress,” partially due to his support for a constitutional amendment which would ban same-sex marriage (same-sex marriage was legalized in Maryland in 2012, three years before the nationwide mandate). In the 2018 election, his Democratic opponent made some gains on the vote, but he was still stomped. The primacy of Republican politics is apparent in the names of the party apparatuses here in Cecil County. On the left we have the Democratic Club, and on the right we have the Republican Central Committee—which sounds more serious to you?

We used to send Democrats to the House of Delegates in Annapolis, the state capital. One of the most well-known names around here when I was growing up was that of Dave Rudolph, a former middle school principal who spent twenty years in the legislature. He is an enormous man with a baritone voice, and he used to command a lot of respect around here. But he, like the other country Democrats in Maryland, could not survive the wave of racialized hyperpartisanship that took hold of the whole country during the Obama years, and as all politics became national (Delegate David Rudolph of Perryville shouldered some responsibility for federal immigration policy, apparently), he lost his seat in Annapolis. So too did my high school friend’s mom, Mary-Dulany James, Democrat and member of the famous Dulany political dynasty of Maryland. Her authority and tenacity were assumed secure enough to land her a seat on the Appropriations Committee, but she, too, was forced to vacate her seat, after sixteen years in the legislature.

College friends who have visited Cecil County have left bewildered. “That is one of the most interesting places I have ever been,” said one. “Havre de Grace [nearby in Harford County] is so fucked up,” said another. “I felt like I was in Georgia or something,” said another. “I mean, it really felt like the South.”

Here is a clue to Cecil County: the question as to whether or not Maryland is part of “the South.” “For a displaced Yankee,” says a 1989 Washington Post travel piece,

the upper Chesapeake is the South, too, though I will concede that sons and daughters of the Old Confederacy may think otherwise. I use as a determining criterion for this the breakfast litmus test. Cecil County is the first place on the Eastern seaboard where a traveler heading south may be offered a choice of home fries or grits with breakfast.

(I was never offered grits with breakfast). Barbara Mills writes in her 2002 book “Got My Mind Set on Freedom” that “Maryland has always been a state in the middle—part southern, part northern—both in the way it has dealt with race issues, and in the way it is perceived.” (I agree).

Maryland is, technically speaking, the beginning of the South, for the Mason-Dixon Line, which forms the northern and eastern borders of the state, was once the official dividing line. I once saw a postcard declaring North East, my hometown, “the gateway to the South.” But you will never hear anyone here call themselves “Southern,” or a “Marylander,” for that matter. What they call themselves is a “Cecil county hillbilly,” though there are no hills. We are a border state and, as a result, something in between, something that only outsiders can objectively perceive. “The Yankees are here,” my great grandmother from Virginia would say when we visited. But in Vermont I was once asked, “Why don’t you have a southern accent like everyone else in your family?” I had never thought of their accent as southern, but the truth is that I coached myself out of the Maryland accent, to sound more northern. We never went north on family trips. New England may as well have been another planet. We only ever went “down”—to Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, places where the heat and the fireflies seemed more connected to Cecil County than anything past the “Old Line.”

Some people have a much different criterion than grits for determining where the South begins. “There were plantations there,” I have been told, twice. “There were slaves there,” I have been told, twice. “It’s the South.”

The question of political symbols, namely flags and statues, is as a result very interesting to me. During the Civil War, sympathy for the Confederacy was strong among the general population of Maryland. Riots occurred in Baltimore in 1861 when a train of Union soldiers arrived on their way to reinforce Washington. The state, I learned recently, was on the brink of seceding. John Wilkes Booth, who shot Abraham Lincoln, emancipator of the slaves, in the back of the head, was from Bel Air, in Harford County, just forty-five minutes from my house. The state song, “Maryland, My Maryland,” is an anti-Union song. “The despot’s heel is on thy shore,” it begins, referring to Washington, D.C., and later, referring to the 1861 riots, calls on us to:

Avenge the patriotic gore

That flecked the streets of Baltimore…

But the fact stands that this was not the Confederacy. The Confederate flag represents hate everywhere, of course, but in a state that was never loyal to Richmond and therefore cannot claim “Confederate heritage” at all, I think the hate stands in particularly bold relief.

There is an element of extreme danger here, something that anyone from Cecil County knows if they are not white or not straight, for to take pride in being a “hillbilly” or a “redneck” is to not-so-implicitly take pride in being white and straight, and to fly a Confederate flag is to find valor in the cause of a violent rogue state whose raison d’être was the preservation of slavery—a brutal regime of kidnapping, torture, rape, and general dehumanization. “The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna, are not very pure or true,” Sylvia Plath once told us. And in that vein I can sense something dark, something ominous and wrong, in what Father Waite wrote in 1634:

I will end therefore with the soyle, which is excellent so that we cannot sett downe a foot, but tread on Strawberries, raspires, fallen mulberrie vines, acchorns, walnutts, saxafras etc: and those in the wildest woods...It abounds with delicate springs which are our best drinke...the place abouunds not alone with profit, but also with pleasure.

***

Lord Baltimore’s inherited lust for the Chesapeake was complicated not only the local tribes, but by a man named William Claiborne. Claiborne, a Virginian statesman or “pirate,” depending on who you ask, had, prior to the arrival of Leonard Calvert and his settlers in 1634, established his own fur trading posts in the Chesapeake Bay. But inconveniently for Claiborne, the Maryland charter inked by King Charles included the territory where his trading posts were located. The largest of these was on Kent Island, but Claiborne had also, as early as 1627, established another on Garrett Island, then known as Palmer’s Island, thereby initiating white colonization of the land now called Cecil County.

Claiborne had also been a key figure in rejecting George Calvert’s petition for land in Virginia, which commenced decades of bad blood between him and the Calvert family, bad blood which would in time erupt into armed conflict on land and sea. When Leonard Calvert and his ships set out from England in 1634, at the top of his to-do list, in addition to dealing with the “savages,” was to deal with William Claiborne. This would be a delicate task considering the Calverts' fraught history with the Virginians. Lord Baltimore instructed his brother to find Claiborne immediately and to tell him that he could stay in the Chesapeake, provided that he recognize the sovereignty of Maryland. Claiborne declined to do so. Lord Baltimore was displeased, complaining in a September 1634 letter to English Secretary of State Francis Windebank of “Clayborne’s malicious behaviour to me and my plantation there” and seeking “encouragement in assisting me against Clayborne’s unlawfull proceedings there.” In 1638 an expedition departed from Saint Mary’s to Kent Island to seize Claiborne’s property on the grounds that he was “guilty of Piracy and murder.” Johnston reports that a similar seizure occurred on Palmer’s Island in 1637. Claiborne spent the rest of his life bickering with the Calverts and, on trips to England, challenging the validity of their charter, his cries falling on increasingly deaf ears.

The documents from this period, which over the centuries have been coated in a mollases-like sludge of reverence for the past, reverence for “conquest” and “heroism,” read, to contemporary eyes, as a staggering testament to greed, cruelty, and pettiness. The documents display neither humility nor restraint, but rather a single-minded, sociopathic thirst by all of the colonial parties for one thing: land. All of the smoke and mirrors about God, about the king, about charters and grievances, barely conceal the fact that this period of history was orchestrated in bad faith and in the spirit of shortsighted, ruthless ambition carried out by disease-addled white men whose teeth were rotting out of their faces. Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, never even set foot in Maryland; his administration was carried out—for forty-two years—from his estate in England. And yet in his name, under his black and yellow banner, one chapter in the saga of indigenous extermination would soon be carried out—swiftly—by a cabal of religious fanatics in the subtropical marshes and steaming forests of the Chesapeake region, where they had no legitimate business, excluding their own narcissism and greed, to be in the first place.

What to do with these “savages?” The English, allied with the Piscataway, could tolerate the Susquehannock for a time but decided after a few years that enough was enough. On September 13, 1642, in Saint Mary’s City, Governor Leonard Calvert, brother of Cecil, Lord Baltimore, declared war: “These are to publish & declare that the Sesquihanowes, Wicomeses, and Nantacoque Indians, are enemies of this Province, and as such are to be reputed & proceeded against by all persons.” The declaration was ostensibly a response to a Susquehannock attack on an Englishman which had occurred on Kent Island, but the true motive—as with the pursuit of Claiborne—was Calvert’s desire to seize control of the Eastern Shore. In short order an army and the requisite taxes were raised to send an “expedition” into the Susquehannocks’ territory to carry out Calvert’s orders. There would be three such expeditions in the following two years, each of them less successful than the last and each of them further undermining Governor Calvert’s faith in his soldiers. Though the provincial government was determined to annihilate the Susquehannock, according to one account, “the people generally did not relish at all the idea of measuring arms with them.” But the Calverts knew that theirs was a long game, and the third and final expeditionary force was dispatched in the winter of 1643.

It did not go well. In 1644 the Susquehannock vanquished the army of Lord Baltimore, took a number of prisoners, refused to ransom them, tortured them, and killed them. Agents of Governor Calvert instructed their soldiers to attempt to form a peace with the Susquehannock. This effort failed. And so for the next eight years the provincial government found itself in a state of constant defense against the Susquehannock, who continued raids against the English—the Marylanders—long after the botched 1643-44 expedition. Colonial records from this period show a government gripped by fear and chaos.

In fact it was not colonial might, but rather desperation on the part of the Susquehannock, which led them to seek an eventual treaty with the English in 1652. During the same period they were engaged in armed resistance against the colonists, the Susquehannock had also been battling the more powerful Iroquois tribes. But the Iroquois were closing in, and Susquehannock tribal leaders, in one of the many tragic ironies of the day, concluded that their only hope for survival rested with the English in Saint Mary’s. Delegations from both sides were dispatched to the banks of the Severn River, the present location of Annapolis, where a treaty was signed. The Susquehannock, having lost the upper hand, had no choice but to make extraordinary concessions to the colonists. Nearly all of the land they controlled on either bank of the Chesapeake was ceded to the government in Saint Mary’s, providing the Calverts the land they needed to lift the struggling Maryland out of complete obscurity and irrelevance and depriving the Susquehannock of their land—and therefore their means for survival. Though the treaty was written as a land-sharing agreement, it was clear who the new masters of the Chesapeake were. In time the Susquehannock would abandon the Chesapeake region altogether and cast their lot with the more powerful Five Nations tribes further north.

Modern-day Cecil County was among the spoils of the 1652 treaty. In the following years, the area would remain sparsely settled, either by the colonists or by the Susquehannock. The Susquehannock, for their part, had been severely weakened in 1652, paving the way for white domination of their land. In the upper Chesapeake, that domination began in earnest with the 1658 settlement of Carpenter’s Point, followed the next year by the arrival of a Bohemian aristocrat named Augustine Herrman. Herrman, who was born in Prague, had been aligned with the Dutch in Manhattan until a fallout with the Director General of New Netherland, Petrus Stuyvesant. Afterwards he went south and made a deal with the Calverts: in exchange for creating a detailed map of the Chesapeake Bay, he would be rewarded thousands of acres in modern-day Cecil County, a plantation that he would dub “Bohemia Manor,” a grandiose nod to his homeland.

Let us now briefly return to the Ark and the Dove, among whose passengers were two men of color believed to have boarded in Barbados, John Price and Mathis da Sousa, the latter of whom was the indentured servant of a certain Father Andrew Waite. In 1638, four years after the Ark and the Dove touched down, the first slaves arrived in Maryland, when a colonial official informed Governor Calvert that he had purchased “ten negroes...for your lordship’s use.” And let us move along to 1642, a busy year in the history of white supremacy in Terra Mariae, for this was the year that Governor Leonard Calvert “bargained” for twelve more slaves.

The slave trade was slow to take hold in Maryland. The colony was small and “procured her slaves in ones and twos from Virginia and the West Indies” at first, according to the historian Hugh Thomas. In 1664, Governor Charles Calvert, frustrated that the Royal Company of Adventurers in London wouldn’t sell him an “entire cargo” of slaves, wrote to Lord Baltimore that “I find we are not men of estates good enough to undertake such a business” but that “we are naturally inclined to love negroes, if our purses could take it.” That same year, the colonial government enshrined the ideology of white domination into the law with its passage of the Act Concerning Negroes and Other Slaves, which stated that “all blacks and other slaves either within the colony or thereafter imported into the colony, as well as their children, shall be slaves for life.” However it was not until 1685 that the slave trade kicked into full gear in Maryland, when the Royal African Company dispatched its ship Speedwell to the Gambia River, filled it with 200 people, and transported them to the Potomac River. Following a landowners’ revolt against the Calverts in 1689, plantations became more powerful throughout the colony, which caused the demand for slaves to increase dramatically. In 1698 it was reported by the governor in Saint Mary’s that 470 slaves were brought to Maryland in that year alone, and “importation” numbers ballooned from there. The Maryland Archives report that “while fewer than one thousand Africans arrived in Maryland between 1619 and 1697, nearly 100,000 disembarked during the three quarters of a century prior to the American Revolution.” One third of the population of Maryland was from Africa by 1755.

Slave records from the seventeenth century are fairly spotty, but it is clear that slaves were in Cecil County during this period. Augustine Herrman brought “servants” with him from New Amsterdam in 1659, and he certainly brought slaves too. By 1674—the year that Cecil County was founded—slaves were harvesting tobacco at Bohemia Manor, according to the Cecil Historical Journal. And according to the Cecil County Historical Society, in the 1600s there would have been slaves working as ferry operators and in the homes of other rich landowners throughout the county as well. In 1704 a Jesuit mission was also established at Bohemia Manor. The priests brought slaves with them. A 1712 census of the county listed two hundred eighty-five slaves within its borders that year. In 1722, according to a nineteenth-century account of Bohemia Manor, Augustine Herrman’s descendants were “enjoying the heritage of lands and slaves and other wealth which [their] ancestors had accumulated,” and by 1761 there were nearly one hundred slaves at Bohemia Manor alone.

Augstine Herrman had been, since his arrival to New Amsterdam in the 1640s, involved in the slave trade, trafficking slaves and moving goods in exchange for tobacco with the Virginians and acting as an intermediary between the Dutch and English markets in the New World. The historian Christian Koot suggests that Herrman had a pretty wink-nudge mentality toward both the Dutch and the English; imperial loyalty didn’t mean much to him as long as he was getting rich. According to Koot, Herrman, in a particularly Godfather-esque moment in 1659, during a trip to Saint Mary’s to pitch the establishment of an overland trade route between Bohemia Manor and Delaware, pulled Governor Calvert aside to assure him that the plan would enrich “not only his province in general, but himself personally.” Herrman got a lot cozier with the Calverts as he settled into his role as the master of Bohemia Manor and discovered that his slaves—the labor which netted his profits—could run away. To mitigate this possibility, he proposed that the Maryland government pay for the construction of a “Logg house Prison . . . for the Surety & Safe keeping of Runnawayes & ffugetives” at Bohemia Manor. The government acquiesced in 1669, providing Herrman ten thousand pounds of tobacco in exchange for him to build, on his property, a twenty-by-twenty foot jail to hold runaway slaves.

By 1790, there were 3,407 slaves among the population of Cecil County. Bohemia Manor was not the only plantation here. Another famous estate was the Mount Harmon Plantation, which is open for tours today. And luckily for the affianced, Mount Harmon, “one of the region’s most historic and beautiful plantations,” according to its website, is also available, with rates starting at fifteen hundred dollars, for weddings, which is good news “for those who love pastoral waterfront settings and old world grandeur.”

***

It is clear that from Day One the seeds of racial domination were sprouting in Cecil County, Maryland. How brutally they would grow is obviously far beyond the scope of anything I can say here. But in speaking to the present, I would like to address one aspect of that domination in particular, and that is the Klan.

The presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Rising Sun and Cecil County generally is one of the stories passed around most by people from here. It is difficult to find conclusive information online, but to illustrate the point, here are a few stories. A 1965 AP writeup in the New York Times tells of a rally in Rising Sun, where “a crowd of some 2,000 persons gathered in a cow pasture near this Cecil County community tonight for the first Ku Klux Klan rally in Maryland in more than 40 years.” But that was fifty years ago. A February 2018 editorial published in DelmarvaNow states that “the town of Rising Sun in Cecil County is the Maryland headquarters for the KKK,” but the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, does not have an entry for the Klan in Rising Sun (they do list the KKK as a statewide hate group, though).

In May of 2017, the Pennsylvania-based Patriot News reported on a cross burning scheduled to be held in Quarryville, Pennsylvania, and organized by the East Coast Knights of the True Invisible Empire: “The KKK chapter—based in Rising Sun Md.—posted about the event on Stormfront, an online forum for white nationalists and other extremists.” The planned event drew significant regional attention from the media, but it is unclear if the cross burning actually occurred. A user named “Klavalier,” who announced the event on Stormfront and who in a separate post states that they are from Cecil County, posted a few days later that “it was a great cross lighting with great speakers,” but that “after hearing that the media were gonna try to come we sent them to another part of the county away from us.” “I have not spoken to anyone who saw anything,” Quarryville Police Chief Kenneth Work told PhillyVoice. Chief Work had earlier acknowledged, though, that the event might take place on private land, out of sight.

What did occur, in public, on the record, with material evidence—including photographs, audio recordings, and paperwork filed with the County—was a December 2013 gathering of the Confederate Knights of the KKK at the Cecil County Administration Building in Elkton. The event was held by the group’s founder and “Imperial Wizard,” Richard Wilson Preston Jr., of Baltimore, who, according to the Baltimore Sun, “chose Cecil County for its conservative politics. The county has a long history with the KKK.” The Sun estimates that about fifty people attended the meeting, under heavy police “protection.” According to the Sun, two years later, Preston purchased a dilapidated house in Harford County to hold Klan meetings and cross burnings (a British film crew from ITV captured one such event on camera, as well as the initiation rites of a new recruit). And two years after that, on August 12, 2017, at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Preston took out a handgun and fired it at a black protester. He was subsequently arrested.

Obviously racism does not begin and end with white hoods, but I bring them up to show how ugly and how visible the racial hatred is in Cecil County. The state at large is deeply racist (see: Baltimore Police Department), but in my mind and in the public imagination of Maryland, Cecil County exists as a particularly foul province of that racism. I’m white, which means I’m not in a position to say whether things are getting better or worse, but I think the belligerent specter of the Ku Klux Klan is one indicator.

“This place is still so racist,” someone told me of Cecil County, on my most recent trip home. “It’s 2019,” he said, exasperated, and continued: “I was on the football team in high school, ten years ago, maybe, and we had a game at North East High School”—home of the Indians—“and the coach said to be careful, they don’t like your kind here.” I recall my mother telling me that the Klan marched down Main Street in North East in the 1980s. I recall an attack on Perryville High School, where vandals spray painted racist epithets, including “KKK,” on the building and sidewalks. I recall that Klan meeting at the County offices in December of 2013. At the time I emailed a county official to ask why this was allowed, and his response was that the group had filed the proper paperwork. I recall learning recently that Rising Sun was not long ago considered a “sundown town,” that is, a town where, if you were black, it was not safe to go out after sunset.

***

Three years ago, in the days following the Charlottesville riot, as the debate over Confederate statues raged throughout the South, the mayor of Baltimore, Catherine Pugh, quietly ordered work crews to remove four Confederate statues from the city under cover of night. “I heard all this noise at like four in the morning,” a resident of Baltimore told me recently, “and I looked out the window and saw them taking the statue away.”

Mayor Pugh provided no prior notice that the statues would be taken down. She had announced her intention to remove them earlier in the year, and her predecessor, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake—who did not seek reelection following the Freddie Gray uprising of 2015—also looked into the matter. But it was undoubtedly the Charlottesville riots which occurred just days earlier, and which had begun as a demonstration by neo-Nazis—including Baltimore Klansman Richard Wilson Preston Jr.—and other far-right groups to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in that city, that drove Pugh to act swiftly and quietly, in order to prevent a similar catastrophe in Baltimore. “If the mayor wants to protect, or feels she needs to protect, the public,” she said, sleep-deprived, at a press conference early the next morning, “she has the right to keep her community safe.”

“Get it done,” she said. And she did. Between the hours of midnight and five o’ clock A.M. on August 16, 2017, four Confederate statues—the Robert E. Lee monument, the Stonewall Jackson monument, the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument, and the Confederate Women monument—were unbolted from their pedestals, loaded onto flatbed trucks, and whisked away before the sun had risen over Baltimore City.

“Good riddance,” is what someone told a New York Times reporter.

Mayor Catherine Pugh, Baltimore, August 16, 2017

The pedestals, to this day, are empty. My friend happens to live in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore, where one of those pedestals sits. It is situated in an elegant park, lush with manicured bushes and trees and graced by marble collonades, fountains, bronze cherubs and nymphs. Rising dramatically from the center of the park is an enormous, phallic tower, atop which stands a statue of George Washington. The Baltimore City flag, in fact, features this monument, against the backdrop of the black-and-yellow Calvert banner. And the neighborhood itself is named after General Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation in Virginia.

That plantation, the Mount Vernon Estate, is owned and maintained by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and is open for tours. Literature from the Ladies’ Association indicates that Washington owned three hundred eighteen slaves, who resided on the plantation, at the time of the General’s death in 1799. “It was true that his will stipulated that his slaves should be freed upon his death,” says a book I got when I toured Mount Vernon as a kid, “but did this make him ‘democratic’ on the level of an Abraham Lincoln?”

No.

“In other countries,” said the journalist Angela Nagle during a panel discussion at the Guggenheim in 2018, “toppling statues is a sign of regime change. Americans think they can do this without recognizing its significance.” In other words, the statues may be gone, but polite society expects that life will go on as usual. I can’t decide if I agree with her. The empty pedestals are obviously significant, in that they represent a civic reconfiguration of space and memory in Baltimore, a city which is sixty-three percent African-American. But that reconfiguration is of course limited. There is bound to be more agreement on taking down Confederate statues—they lost the war after all, and besides that Maryland fought with the Union—than there would be if the Mayor of Baltimore determined that the Washington statue should come down. The Confederates threatened the Union, but the General—captor of three hundred eighteen innocent human beings—inaugurated it. And we accept that.

Clearly there is some unspoken rule that certain people are off limits. “George Washington was a slave owner,” said Donald Trump, at his chilling “both sides” press conference following Charlottesville. “Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we gonna take down—excuse me—are we gonna take down, are we gonna take down statues to George Washington?”

Sure, why not? But of course, as Trump knew, that was not going to happen. That would be a bridge too far, because it would undermine one of our chief national symbols. Symbol of what, exactly? And just as importantly, it would undermine the authority of Donald Trump himself, who, like every president, derives his legitimacy from the transition of power that has occurred every several years going all the way back to Washington.

The east coast is overflowing with these national symbols, grand statues and paintings and buildings that harken back to the early days. Maybe because I’ve been out of the country for a few years—and specifically because I was in Japan, which was largely leveled during World War II and which had to rebuild many of its major cities in the 1950s—I was especially sensitive to them on my most recent trip home. I found myself looking at them with fresh eyes and, for the first time in my life, really wanting to know about the colonial period. After doing this little bit of research, I walked away feeling like the colonial days must have been nightmarish and carnivalesque. The blood, stench, swampiness, murder, extermination, and misery of the colonies are bubbling just beneath the surface of the documents I’ve been reading, and it’s all bubbling in the old buildings, statues, and paintings around here too. One of the most disturbing items I came across is that horrific portrait at the top of this essay which depicts Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, handing Herrman’s map of the Chesapeake, overlaid with the Calvert seal, to his glowing white grandson as a young slave looks on. I was floored to learn—and see with my own eyes—that that creepy, racist painting is hanging in the lobby of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, where it lurks over patrons using the public computers as I write this. Why?

The ghosts of the past—and not just the Confederacy—are everywhere if you look closely, looming over all of us, but over some more than others. And that’s just…how it is? The argument can hardly be made that all of these artifacts display artistic merit that must be preserved. A lot of these paintings and statues and buildings, especially in D.C. and Baltimore, are notoriously tacky and overwrought. But preservation on the grounds of artistic merit isn’t the argument at all. The argument is that we keep them because they’re old, because they form a physical terrain of nationhood, not in the past, but right now. And what are they telling us, exactly?

“Look at the ceiling,” a guide said to my group on a tour of the United States Capitol last August. We were standing in the Rotunda beneath the dome (“You could fit the Statue of Liberty in here”), a room at once grand and claustrophobic. On the ceiling was a mural of angels, or at least that’s what I thought. “This mural is called The Apotheosis of Washington,” the guide continued. “Does anyone know what apotheosis means?” As I awaited her answer I stared at a huge painting on the other side of the room, The Baptism of Pocahontas, which shows the eponymous subject in a white gown, on her knees, surrounded by white colonists, receiving her Christian rites. “Apotheosis means ‘elevation to a god-like status.’ You can see George Washington there, wearing pink. In this painting, George Washington has been transformed into a god!”

Just beyond the Rotunda is the office of the Speaker of the House, and in that moment I suddenly thought of her, striding beneath the dome, her entourage in tow, cloaked in the splendor and glory of the American Speakership, splendor and glory attached—derived, even—from that massive Greco-Roman building, its sculptures and paintings, which she would pass and contemplate as her shoes tapped on the marble floor, her heart welling as she passed beneath the eyes of General-cum-President-cum-deity Washington and past the averted eyes of Pocahontas, on her way to execute her solemn duties to our Constitution and our nation.

“We have the ugliest money,” I once said to my coworker, Joe, in Japan. “That horrible green color. Other countries have colorful money and nature and shit like that on it. And women. Who even cares about George Washington anymore?”

“Yeah, and when I heard his teeth weren’t made of wood…”

“Really? What were they made of? Ivory?”

“No.” He paused for a moment and looked uncharacteristically grim. “They came from slaves.”

***

In school I barely heard a peep about the indigenous tribes or the slaves in Maryland. Why? Why is it that the entire basis of the colony is an off-limits subject? Bringing up either topic invites a kind of yeesh reaction, a “Move along, folks,” a tugging of the collar, before quickly changing the subject. Why is there a statue of a slaveholder gazing across a majority African-American city, a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess,” a “dangerous & filthy place,” a place where “no human being would want to live,” according to tweets composed by the President of the United States?

Clearly the symbols of history mean something in the present, telegraph something urgent from the past, because otherwise why would the Confederate statues have come down? I am reminded once more of Angela Nagle’s statement about regime change. There is change in the air, no doubt, but regime change? As statues continue to fall in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, we may soon find out the answer to that question. Whereas the statues that fell in 2017 seemed to be doing so in relative isolation, now they are falling in the context of a global revolt against racism and police brutality. But for now the symbols of the regime are still all around us—the Calvert flag, the Confederate flag, the Washington statues, the Washington mural in the Capitol, gazing down from within that “temple of democracy.” Temple for whom? I don’t claim to have a solution to any of this. Like all Americans I am engaged in the double-think of living in a democracy that is situated on blood-soaked land. And as a white American I am a direct beneficiary of not only the colonial conquest but the centuries of racist policy that followed it. But it would appear that since Minneapolis we are more engaged than ever with our own violent, racist history, and not just the history of the Confederacy. I believe this engagement is a crucial piece of this moment, considering that our politics and government derive their authority from that history and those people.

How far can this engagement go? Is it really possible to deprogram the warped, delusional mind of the white supremacist? I am not sure. It would be dramatic to say I am hopeless about Cecil County. There are plenty of good, reasonable people there. But the ideas about who we are, what we came from, and what is possible or not possible are deeply entrenched. Right now someone there is watching Channel 13 News—“Live from Television Hill in Baltimore, this is WJZ!”—which pumps a constant, racist, sensationalist feed of every shooting and every robbery that occurs in Baltimore City into the hinterland. Trump’s tweets about Baltimore were met primarily with shrugs in Cecil County, because if all you watch is Channel 13, nothing he said is untrue. Baltimore City is where you go to get shot, according to Channel 13, and it will be by a black man, and that man will look like the mugshots that are broadcast daily into the houses around the state. “Be careful,” is what I am often told before I head to the city, which might as well be a war zone according to many people, including the forty-fifth President of the United States. But now we are post-Minneapolis, post-uprising. Now everything is on the table.

***

Throughout Maryland are bronze historical markers, emblazoned with the state seal, which point out notable sites. One such marker is located along the Susquehanna River, near Route 222, in Port Deposit. Route 222 is one of Cecil County’s more “primeval” roads, a tunnel through densely-growing trees, the underbrush cut through by the asphalt, the waters of the Susquehanna spilling over the nearby rocks. This marker is for “Smith’s Falls”:

In 1608 Captain John Smith ascended the Susquehannah River until stopped by the rocks. On his map he calls this point “Smyths Fales” marking it by a [cross] which he explains as meaning “hath bin discovered what beyond is by relation”.

What is not marked is the site of the famous “Bald Friar” petroglyphs of the Susquehannock, which were carved into the rocks just north of the plaque. In 1926, prior to the construction of the Conowingo Dam, a team from the Maryland Academy of Sciences was dispatched to the Susquehanna, with dynamite, to blast the rocks out of the ground and scatter the petroglyphs around the state in order to “rescue” them, which in practice meant using them as decorations for various state and county buildings. The petroglyphs that were left behind in the river were swamped as the water rose behind the newly-constructed dam.

The historical markers which line the roads, often placed somewhere seemingly indistinct, some overgrown clutch of trees, some mound of rock and weeds, some embankment sloping toward some pool of muddy water or clutter of boulders, remind us that once upon a time the Great Seal of Maryland, with its cryptic Latin motto inherited from the Calverts—Fatti Maschii, Parole Femine (“Manly Deeds, Womanly Words”)—had no sovereign claim here. Once upon a time these trees and rocks and rivers belonged to the Susquehannock, and perhaps in the rapacious eyes of the colonial gangs dispatched by Leonard Calvert, they always would, for the victory of those colonists was by no means certain, as the Susquehannock defeat of the English in 1644 so clearly demonstrated. “The honor and safety of the English” were taken into account by the colonial government that year, during the failed peace talks. And during those same talks, medallions were presented to the Susquehannock which they were told would allow them to freely enter English territory upon their presentation:

The token which was given these Susquehannock Indians, as safe conduct, was a medal of copper, with a black and yellow ribbon attached...The Maryland troops, in a dastardly way, thirty years later, broke the faith signified by the medals, and shot down five defenseless Susquehannock chiefs, who came to treat with the medals in their hands. (Henry Frank Eshleman, 1909)

Such betrayals and sleights-of-hand abound in the colonial records, for the forces of Lord Baltimore were, to say the least, ill-equipped, requiring the government to lean on treachery rather than skill. The romanticized image of those days would have us picture a flurry of arrows flying toward the more technologically sophisticated invaders, but in fact it was Dutch guns and Dutch bullets obtained by the Susquehannock which defeated the soldiers of Lord Baltimore in 1644, in a land his men did not or could not comprehend except in terms of its capacity to produce tobacco.

In recent years a “maritime trail,” with markers up and down the Chesapeake, has been established to commemorate the voyage of John Smith, his “discovery” of this land for the English. It is worth repeating, of course, that this land was not discovered by John Smith at all but mapped by him, and these maps were probably indispensable to the English soldiers who battled the Susquehannock in the decade following the establishment of Terra Mariae—Mary Land, Maryland—for control of the places he documented. And of course we hear very little about the Susquehannock or the Lenape or the Nanticokes, except in a brief, salutatory manner acknowledging that, yes, people once lived here, people before John Smith. But for “our” purposes in 2020, centuries later, and for the purposes of maintaining faith in this nation, this state, this “former colony,” our understanding of the place must be rooted in reverence and thanks to Captain Smith and to the arrival of the Ark and the Dove to the city of Saint Mary’s in 1634, Digitus dei est hic, God Save the King. What and who were here in the “primeval forests” before those ships touched down is hard to say, we are told. The records are spotty or nonexistent, we are told, and anyway that was four hundred years ago.

I suspect that this information, like the information about the plantations which existed in this county and throughout this state, is obscured on the grounds that it would shake our faith in the institutions and symbols of the country and its constituent former colonies, the thirteen which, we are told, shook off the tyranny of the Crown to establish our glorious republic. If children were told that their history began not so much with the stroke of King Charles’ pen in England and the authority he thereby granted to Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, but with the bloodshed that followed that signature, the battles which occurred in the creeks and rivers and woods that they pass every day on their way to school, the disease which would eventually spread across those creeks to find the Susquehannock long after they had fled, the slave plantations that were erected on their land once they had gone, they may begin to ask themselves legitimate questions about authority and sovereignty. What good is the Great Seal or the flag of the Calverts, still flying over every state building today, other than their fraudulent claim to the land, land which was so clearly never the Calverts’ to begin with? How eternal can this government, or this nation, actually be, when not so long ago the very existence of this colony was considered purely theoretical and by no means guaranteed to be a success? And what right, in light of the shifting locations of sovereignty and power, does any of us truly have to speak of “our” nation, as juxtaposed to whatever or whomever happens to be the most convenient object of political scorn—“them”—at a given moment?

I suspect that young people’s understanding of this state and the country it would help form may be tested if they came to regard this county less as the imperial birthright of Cecil, Lord Baltimore—for whom the county is named—but as the former site of those primeval forests where the Susquehannock battled the English, those same forests through which, two hundred years later, Frederick Douglass would flee on the northbound train which took him from Baltimore to Wilmington, then on to Philadelphia. “The train was moving at a very high rate of speed for that time of railroad travel,” he tells us,

but to my anxious mind, it was moving far too slowly. Minutes were hours, and hours were days during this part of my flight. After Maryland I was to pass through Delaware—another slave State, where slave catchers generally awaited their prey, for it was not in the interior of the State, but on its borders, that these human hounds were most vigilant and active.

The train from Baltimore stopped in Havre de Grace, on the western banks of the Susquehanna, where Douglass boarded a ferry. That ferry sailed past Garrett Island and made landfall in Perryville, where the next train awaited. That train steamed through the fields and forests of Cecil County, just sixty miles north of Tuckahoe, Maryland, where Douglass was born into slavery. It crossed then into Delaware, and eventually onward to Philadelphia.

Today there is an additional flag flying over Cecil County. I can see it now, on my neighbor’s porch, from my bedroom window. It is red, white, blue, and emblazoned with those unmistakable letters, T-R-U-M-P, billowing in the late summer breeze. I cannot recall ever seeing an Obama flag, or a McCain flag, or a Bush flag, or a Kerry flag, or any flag with a politician’s name on it flying from someone’s porch. That is because flags symbolize movements, nations, armies—not people. And yet here I have my answer. The Trump flag, like the American flag, like the Confederate flag, like the Maryland flag, symbolizes something bigger, something psychological, something primeval. It symbolizes an idea that reaches so far beyond Trump the man, so much further back through history. It flies, as the Calvert flag did, to say that this is ours, not yours. These forests and morasses are still ours, as they have been since 1652, and do not forget that.

You know who you are.

At a marina in Havre de Grace there is a whole fleet of sailboats moored, the kind of image you’d see in a gift shop oil painting. They bob in the warm waters of the Susquehanna, waters that smell like my childhood, mossy and yet clean. They bob, and their masts sway back and forth against the cloudy August sky, and atop those masts, fluttering in the breeze, are the Trump flags, scores of them, the colors of this armada.

From the riverbank, I look toward the train departing Perryville. This train is heading toward Baltimore, Baltimore of the toppled statues, Baltimore of rainbow flags, Baltimore of museums, universities, artists, Elijah Cummings, Black Lives Matter, the NAACP. The train lurches south and crosses the old railroad bridge over the Susquehanna, passes Garrett Island, dark and, I suspect, cursed. The train moves over the sailboats and their Trump flags, the latest permutation of whatever primordial ugliness refuses to be exorcised from this place that I call home. The train picks up speed, and my belief is once again affirmed that the only way out of Cecil County—truly, spiritually out—is out.

—Maryland

Bibliography

Thank you to the staff of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, the Staff of the Cecil County Historical Society in Elkton, Professor Christian Koot at Towson University, and my cousin Madalyn.

0 notes

westboast · 5 years ago

Text

Quarantine

January 29, 2020

Quarantine—“ORIGIN mid 17th century : from Italian quarantina ‘forty days.’”

Confirmed cases of COVID-19 (“coronavirus”) in Seoul: 4.

Days sober: 5.

“Teachers, please wear masks at all times. Please check your temperature at the beginning of work every morning and record in the log in the lobby.”

Keep coming back.

“I don’t know if I love you or not.”

I’m doing this because I want to feel better, be better.

“I know you’re trying to be better, but I can’t really feel that.”

But I wanted to be better for you.

Keep coming back.

“Are you sure you want to delete Grindr? All data and messages will be lost.”

“How’s the new book coming?”

“This is the end of a chapter, not the end of a book.”

“Sometimes you have to walk alone for a while.”

Seoul to Chicago, one way, 575 dollars (U.S.).

“I wonder what you would look like if you lost weight.”

According to the New York Times, a face mask can cut the risk of spreading the virus by 85 percent.

“I wanted you to try to be more attractive for me.”

“I don’t want negative energy in my house. If I let strange people in, I know I’ll have to cleanse and burn sage.”

The blanket that you came on.

The towel that you dried off with.

The ice cream that we couldn’t finish.

“You’re taking this too seriously.”

Keep coming back.

“They found me in a ditch. I had swallowed my own tongue.”

“We aren’t alcoholics. It’s circumstances.”

[Subway doors open] If you are experiencing symptoms of upper respiratory infection... [Subway doors close].

I don’t know how seriously I should be taking this.

“I heard a conspiracy theory that the Chinese government made the virus and they were planning to unleash it on Hong Kong. But it got out of control.”

“Avoid bars and clubs when you’re starting.”

“You’re obsessed with one thing I said.”

“Teachers, please stay out of confined, crowded spaces this weekend.”

“Do you want to go to the club?”

Yes, I don’t want to be at home.

Keep coming back.

“It looks like the Apocalypse in here, everyone dancing in their masks.”

February 27, 2020, second day of Lent

Confirmed cases of COVID-19 (“coronavirus”) in Seoul: 55.

Days sober: 33.

2020 is not a fin de siècle, but it feels that way to me. Things have ended swiftly since January. For one thing there is the longing that has appeared throughout these posts since leaving Seattle, the idea that I need someone to complete me. I don’t, actually. For too long I have tried to be someone for someone else, many someones. But I don’t need to, actually. And really, I can’t.

Last weekend the confirmed cases of COVID-19, colloquially “the coronavirus,” skyrocketed in Korea. On February 27, the country was at around two thousand cases. This event has been attributed to the activities of a cult based in Daegu which had meetings in Wuhan. Its members contracted the virus and have been hiding from health authorities. Fingers are being pointed in many directions, mostly toward China, often toward President Moon Jae-in.

Several small countries have barred people from entering from Korea. Taiwan has instituted a 14-day quarantine for anyone entering from here. At present the United States has not yet implemented widespread quarantines for people traveling from East Asia, though plans are in place.

I’m writing this for the future self who reads it. I want him to remember what was going on in late winter. Things are going to change again soon, I think.

Classes were cancelled this week. My coworkers and I had to go in on Friday to prepare for the upcoming term, though it is unclear when that will begin. The mood at work was somber, morose. We wondered if we would have jobs a month from now. “I’ve never experienced something like this,” my coworker said.

The city does not feel right. There are fewer people on the streets. Many restaurants are closed. There are no symphonies, no dance classes. Movie theaters are empty. Airplanes are flying half-full. My coworkers and I went to Lotte World and it wasn’t empty. I liked the knockoff Space Mountain the best. It felt very good, almost defiant, to laugh that much.

The masks are everywhere. The mask itself has become a potent symbol of the last six months. The protesters in Hong Kong wore black masks to identify themselves to each other and obscure themselves from facial recognition software. Now there are lines around the block in Korea for people to buy the dwindling supplies of them. There aren’t enough.

The virus itself is a respiratory condition. It is only dangerous for the elderly, the very young, and those with compromised immune systems. But the panic it has sparked would suggest that it is unusually dangerous. The western media’s coverage of the virus bears all the hallmarks of a racist hysteria. It came from China, from an outdoor market. A place full of raw meat and seafood. It is a foreign, Asian disease. There is a rumor that it originated in a bat that someone ate, a baldly racist suggestion, mingling the vampiric and the Victorian with general cultural ignorance. The New York Times always shows pictures of the masks. Masks, masks, masks. People wear masks in Asia. People use hand sanitizer compulsively in the United States. The hygiene culture of one place looks strange from another.

Ling Ma already told the story of this disease in Severance. That book imagines an airborne fungus from China that spreads around the world and turns people into brain-dead walking corpses. The pandemic is a metaphor for xenophobia against Chinese immigrants. Now we experience the nausea of seeing that xenophobia unfold in real time, as it did during SARS several years ago. The same story will emerge again in another few years. It is socially permissible—totally logical—to fear a disease. It socially impermissible to admit fear of someone Asian. In the case of this disease, these phenomena are one in the same. The recurring story of the Chinese disease creates a pressure valve for people to release their racist fantasies into the public square.

They release those fantasies like steam, soothing, jasmine-scented steam. I am not like them, they think, looking at pictures of Asian cities full of people in masks—sick people, unsanitary people, open-air-market people. No, I am clean. Panic justifies fear justifies racism and intolerance. I’m not racist, I just don’t want your sickness. I’m not racist, I just don’t want you anywhere near me.

Vancouver, 2015:

A CBC report concludes that many new property purchases are being made by Chinese buyers, confirming the widespread belief that this has been the case for years. One catch: they’re mostly Chinese-Canadian.

Seattle, 2014:

“They’re going to be speaking Mandarin in the schools soon!” said a panicked mother at an Italian restaurant.

“Are they?” I said. I was sort of listening. Mostly I was looking at her husband’s third thumb. We had seafood for dinner. It didn’t smell fresh.

February 28, 2020, third day of Lent

Confirmed cases of COVID-19 (“coronavirus”) in Seoul: 74.

Days sober: 34.

“Why is your mask red?” said my friend James. We were standing on the mezzanine at Apgujeongrodeo Station, near Gangnam.

“It’s all they had left at E-Mart,” I said, as we boarded the escalator. “It’s red so when I start coughing up blood people don’t get upset.” At this point I began pantomiming a tubercular fit.

“You’re being that obnoxious white guy.”

“Oh, sorry.”

That one didn’t land.

I wanted Italian food but my credit card didn’t work. James bought me arrabbiata.

“Red is a good color on you,” he said, looking at the mask, “because you’re white.”

“Thank you. It really brings out my sunburn.”

He laughed. That one landed.

“Could you look over a work email for me?” he said. “I’m worried about my English.”

“Your English is fine.”

“I don’t want it to be fine. I want it to be good.”

“Okay, it’s good.”

“I want it to be great.”

“It’s great.”

“I want it to be more than great.”

“Fine, you’re Shakespeare. Jesus Christ.”

“I’m just forgetting a lot of words.”

“It’s normal. Even I forget words because I don’t hear English all the time.”

“Really?”

“Really. Me and my friends talk about it a lot. I’m forgetting Japanese too. I forgot the word for strawberry the other day.”

“In English?”

“No, Japanese. If I forgot the English word for strawberry that would be a serious problem.”

We finished eating and moved toward the escalator.

“I think there might be a recession,” I said, looking at my phone. “The stock market in the U.S. is tanking.”

“Yeah.”

“All because of what’s essentially a bad cold.”

“It makes no sense.”

“This is what happens when people panic.”

James and I get along well because we roast each other. We took the escalator to the main floor of the mall. The perfume department.

“Oh, they have Chanel,” I said. “I dated a guy who worked at Chanel once and he broke my heart. This used to be very triggering for me. Do they have...” I looked around for it: his cologne. “They do.”

Bleu de Chanel.

I approached the sacred vial and asked for a sample. The clerk sprayed a little card with it. James and I went out the front doors into the night. I began having a meltdown and rubbing the card all over my neck, contaminating myself with memory.

“BREAK MY HEART, BABY!” I yelled hysterically.

“You look really weird right now.”

“OH YEAH!”

“Oh my God, please stop,” he said, grabbing the card and throwing it in the trash.

“You know, the fact that I can joke about this is actually progress. A year ago I would have been destroyed.”

We left the mall in search of an ATM and cigarettes.

“Can we go to a coin noraebang?” I said.

“Sure.”

“Just for one song. There’s a song that I want to sing.”

If you lose your one and only,

There’s always room here for the lonely

To watch your broken dreams

Dance in and out of the beams

Of a neon moon.

“Fuck, they don’t have it,” I said, shaking the controller in the booth.

“You only have two minutes to choose.”

“Do people have sex in here?”

“I don’t think so. There’s CCTV.”

I think they do.

“Oh, I’ll do ‘Islands in the Stream’ instead.”

The song started and a disco ball turned on.

[three minutes later]

James: “Your voice is terrible.”

Me: “Fuck you.”

We went back outside.

“Maybe Korea isn’t your country,” he said.

“That’s abundantly clear to me.”

“What will you do tonight?”

“I don’t know. My friend lives around here but I don’t know where.”

“She’s probably going out.”

“Maybe.”

“This is the city of foreigners now. Koreans aren’t going outside because of the virus.”

“I have a flight tomorrow anyway.”

“They’re blaming us now,” he said. “They’re saying Korea is spreading the virus.”

“It’s not really anyone’s fault.”

“Exactly.”

Anyone attempting to find logic in all this will be sorely disappointed.

“Why don’t we have boyfriends?” he said later.

“You said you didn’t want one.”

“That’s true.”

“I might. I think I do. But it turns out you have to be emotionally stable to let someone into your life like that. Plot twist!”

“I can understand that. That’s why I’m not trying. I don’t want to burden someone with my problems.”

“You’re not a burden. You just have to find someone who accepts you. You don’t want someone relentlessly positive. ‘You should try to be happier.’ Yeah, thanks, I hadn’t thought of that. If you think about things, you’ll see that there’s actually a lot to be depressed about.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m tired of seeking people’s approval anyway. Who the fuck are you? I don’t even know who these people are, and they expect me to care about their opinions of me.”

“Exactly. Who the fuck are you?”

A few minutes later we were going back down into the train station. Apgujeongrodeo Station is outside of my emotional quarantine zone. It’s where a lot of memories, blissful, drunk, heart wrenching, have occurred. It’s where I began to realize things were not going to work out with one person. Its where I became friends with my coworkers. It’s where I became friends with James.

“You should change your singing voice,” James said, laughing on the escalator.

“Oh, that’s great. I’ll add that to the suggestion list I’ve gotten here. So I should change my voice, my body, my personality. Am I forgetting anything? Oh, my nationality.”

“Your nationality? What nationality did they want?”

“Australian, apparently, which is hilarious because everyone knows Australian guys are trash.”

“And racist.”

“Yeah.”

In January, around the time the virus appeared in Korea, I decided that things needed to change drastically. I was walking with my friend near Sungshin University Station, another emotionally contaminated point, one night.

“I’m just really hung up on the idea of the quarantine right now,” I said. “It’s like, there’s the literal quarantine with the virus. But then for me personally there is the quarantine from dating, from alcohol. I don’t want these guys, these—what’s the word? I keep forgetting English words...It’s a scientific word...Variables! I don’t want any more variables in my life right now. I wish I could disinfect my house and get the memories out, because they’re all I can see when I’m in that room. And now if I do wind up quarantined, literally quarantined, I’ll be trapped in the room with the memories, even though I’ve quarantined myself from dating.”

I suppose that is what a quarantine is: being trapped in a room with your own problem. The purpose of a quarantine isn’t so much to protect yourself as it is to protect others from you. Here is where my dating metaphor breaks apart. I’m not quarantining myself from anyone, actually, because there’s nothing wrong with me.

To another friend: “Love in the Time of Coronavirus.”

That one didn’t land.

The Catholic observance of Lent began on Wednesday. It is forty days of fasting. Lent is a time to reflect on desire, among other things. It is a season to eschew something that brings one pleasure, in order to more fully appreciate it once it’s returned. This year I’m not fasting, because I haven’t given up anything that I actually enjoy. How can one fast from something never savored? How can one give up what was never really there?

—Seoul

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westboast · 6 years ago

Text

San Clemente

Whenever I’m home for Christmas, I go to church with my grandmother on Christmas Eve. She has always gone. It’s our family church, Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, in Perryville, Maryland. A little town. It’s a white church plastered in stucco, surrounded by deciduous trees which go gray and leafless by December. My grandmother and I walk through the graveyard to see her brother’s grave. He died three years ago. Etched on the tombstone is the image of him and my aunt in a boat. I walk a few paces to the left and find myself on an empty rectangle of grass. Each corner is adorned with a little granite block. Etched on each of the blocks is the name AMATO. The Amato plot. I realize that if I suddenly die, this is where my body will go. I feel terrified and look to my grandmother, who recognizes my fear and waves for us to leave this place and enter the church.

On Christmas Eve in 1992, my cousin Mark, then twenty-eight, died as a result of AIDS. I was six months old at the time. My mother was nineteen years old. My grandmother and aunt went to church anyway that night. During the service, right after the Eucharist, the lights were dimmed, as they still are. Everyone turned on an electric candle, as they still do, and together they sang “Silent Night.”

The women in my family—my dad’s side—are not sentimental like the men are. My mother is sentimental, but she is from the Virginian, Lutheran side. Southerners are sappy, like molasses. The northerners are Anglican and tight-lipped. As far as my dad’s side goes, I have never seen my grandmother or aunt get emotional except during “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve at Saint Mark’s. Even then, tears form in their eyes, but they do not cry.

I think about Mark a lot, even though I was an infant when he died. He played tennis. I played tennis. He’s gay. I’m gay. He was the eldest cousin. I am the eldest cousin. He read alone on the beach while the boy cousins played in the water. Then he would return to the house to watch soap operas.

I have inherited my aunt’s and grandmother’s grief for him. This year, when “Silent Night” began and the lights dimmed, my aunt and grandmother looked dead ahead. I saw their lips moving to the lyrics. I gripped the pew in front of me and gasped. The only light in the room came from the little battery-powered candles. I forced myself not to cry, because I never even knew him and I thought it would be selfish to cry in front of the women who did. I was amazed that they were able to sing through their grief, because I could only get out every other word. I knew the words but I was choking on them in the dark. By candlelight I could see my aunt’s and grandmother’s tears and I forced out the words as best as I could, out of duty.

The next night, Christmas, at my aunt’s house, I felt a wave of jet-lag and asked if I could lie down somewhere. My aunt said yes.

“You can go rest in Mark’s room,” she says.

I walk up the hardwood stairs to his room. It is much the way it was when he died, I guess. The bed is made. His tennis rackets are there, and a Les Miserables poster. I lie on his bed and fall asleep clutching his pillow. I never knew him but I wish he was here. In my family I am walking along his path, but there is no one to lead me. I want him to lead me.

I wake up because my college-aged cousin is yelling downstairs. She has a booming voice, a commanding voice. She studies history at a college in southern Maryland. I have a feeling she’ll run for office one day.

“White privilege is a real, proven, indisputable fact!” she is shouting. “Where is David? He’ll back me up!”

At this point I am face down in Mark’s pillow, crying. This is where he slept. What? White privilege. Right. I remember being in college and having these kinds of arguments with family members. Back then I was more righteous. I was listening to my cousin and she was being mostly convincing. I didn’t want to bail her out because I thought she needed to struggle a bit. That’s part of it. Trying to argue the existence or relevance of white privilege in a place like Cecil County, Maryland, is very admirable. It’s like throwing a Tupperware party, except it’s not Tupperware but a loaded polio vaccine and the audience is Jenny McCarthy.

I come down the stairs and find my cousin, Caesar-like, commanding her Senate.

“Back me up, David!”

“One sec,” I say, giving her the thumbs up and exiting quickly. She has it under control. Mostly. She is impassioned, but she hasn’t realized that the trick is to let the other person yell themselves exhausted. At that point you swoop in with a reasoned argument once they’ve run out of steam. They’re too tired to fight back. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is quite good at this. Tammy Duckworth nailed it in her Senate campaign too, when her opponent made a racist comment about her family during a debate and she just took a drink of water as a response. Now she’s a senator and that guy isn’t.

Nice.

I make eye contact with my grandmother, wearing a tolerant half-smile that I’ve also inherited. I’m just here, it says. She is sprawled on the couch, listening. Sort of. She may or may not have her hearing aid turned on. I wonder if Mark was very political. He was probably too sick.

My aunt, in the kitchen, is wearing the same smile as my grandmother.

“Is there more mac ‘n’ cheese?” I say, bending over the counter.

“Yeah, Dave, help yourself.”

The only people who call me Dave are my family members and my best friend in Baltimore. I never ask people to call me Dave, because it sounds like a realtor’s name. But when they elect to do so themselves it makes me feel comfortable. My mom’s nickname for me is Detour Dave, after a traffic announcer on the Baltimore radio station 98 Rock. I get myself a scoop of mac ‘n’ cheese and put it in the microwave. I would vote for my cousin, I think as I lean on the counter and the food spins in the microwave. She’d be a good Democrat. I’m too neurotic and self-absorbed for something like that.

The microwave beeps.

The white privilege shout-off, featuring exclusively white people, concludes, and people start going home. I stick around with my mac ‘n’ cheese and sit down on the couches with my aunt and grandmother. They’re lovely couches, overstuffed with checkered red upholstery.

“There was a time when a family could have Republicans and Democrats in it and it wasn’t a big deal,” my grandmother says. “Not now.”

This time last year we were walking to dinner at a crabhouse, and she said to me, “David, I’ve never seen the country like this.” She was alive and aware in the sixties, bear in mind. And so I found this statement especially unsettling. What’s going to happen, I thought. Is anyone else worried that the whole thing is going to fall apart?

I am.

Later that night we were at dinner. I had crabcakes, of course. One of my relatives walked up behind me, his cane tapping on the floor. He’s a Republican. He leaned close to me.

“How do you like your new country, David?”

Come back.

My brother sits down with us on the red couches and does most of the talking. He’s the gregarious one. He lived on Edmondson Avenue in Baltimore in 2015 and from his porch watched the National Guard roll in during the Freddie Gray uprising. I can see him on that porch now, smoking with his housemates as the tanks passed, as the smoke rolled toward the sky from downtown. At the time I was at an elementary school in Anacortes, Washington, with YouTube open and my jaw on the floor.

Come back.

When it’s time to go home I crouch down at the front door to tie my shoes. My aunt and grandmother wait for me. They are standing over me, watching me.

I stand up and say, “I really hate Donald Trump.”

“No one here is going to argue with you,” my aunt says.

I look down at the floor and see a little knot of silver under the dessert table. I pick it up.

“What’s this?” I say.

“It’s my necklace,” my aunt says. “The knot is too tight. I’m going to take it to the jeweler to get it out.”

“Let me try,” I say.

I struggle for a few minutes. They are still watching me. I’m worried that I have set myself up for failure, so I really focus. I’ve bitten my nails down, so I have to softly tease the knot apart with my fingertips. Eventually I manage to get it out. It’s a fine, delicate silver chain.

“Thanks, Dave,” my aunt says. I hand it to her and kiss her goodbye.

My brother is outside smoking. He drives us home. We smoke Newports out the windows as we fly up Route 40. There is very little on that road. He speeds, I think. Who cares. It’s Maryland, so on the radio we toggle between country and hip hop. We pass billboards. We pass an Amazon facility that was built but never staffed. Imagine that kind of money, to build something but then leave it totally empty.

We pass American flags, at half-staff for the recently-deceased George H.W. Bush. He was the president when I was born. He was the president when Mark died.

My aunt, my grandmother, and I are staunch Democrats.

***

I feel like everything has already been said about Southern California. Even the future has been documented in Southern California. It’s been imagined many times. California on fire, or underwater, mega-urban, Bladerunner-style. Why does everyone fantasize about destroying Southern California? Maybe it’s because it shouldn’t have been settled like this. Of course it should not have been colonized, but after that even—why build a city where there should not, cannot, be a city? Did anyone stop and think of that? It’s a desert, but they tried to build Eden.

Even the word California is fantastical. It is believed to come from the sixteenth century Spanish novel Las Sergas de Esplandián, by García Rodríguez de Montalvo. The novel describes a mythical island called California, “on the right hand from the Indies…very close to a side of the Earthly Paradise; and it was populated by black women, without any man existing there, because they lived in the way of the Amazons.” Their queen was named Calafia.

When I arrive in Los Angeles I take the Amtrak Pacific Surfliner from Union Station to San Juan Capistrano. I almost miss the last train. I have to run to Platform 13 and nearly suffocate trying to board in time. I sit in a dark car and watch the darkness outside.

I am going to Heidi’s house—her mom’s house—in Orange County. Heidi and I met in Japan. She has to go to work in the mornings, so when she’s gone I shuffle downstairs and make coffee in her mom’s Keurig. I feel kind of evil every time I make coffee in that thing, because every coffee “pod” represents one more little tile in the mosaic of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But I don’t feel guilt. I’m not going to stop drinking it. Heidi and her mom don’t drink as much coffee as I do. I blow through those pods pretty fast. I think about offering to buy more, but I’m unsure of the etiquette involved. Guests get unlimited coffee, right? Like at car dealerships. I think that if I offer to buy more they will think I’m calling them cheap. But I also don’t want to seem like a mooch. I resolve to do nothing and keep drinking the coffee instead of seeking an appropriate solution.

I go outside to the patio. The sun is pouring over me. California forces you to be accurate. California looks nothing like the East Coast. On the East Coast and in Chicago the buildings look like tombstones. They are ashen fortifications against the harsh outdoors. But in California the houses are flat, adobe-inspired, stuccoed, surrounded by plants. Cacti and succulents. There are fruit trees. I remember Gretchen’s orange tree in Palo Alto, how amazing I thought it was that oranges could grow in someone’s backyard. Heidi’s patio has a palm tree in each corner, making it look like an Egyptian temple instead of a porch. The columnar trees spread their canopic fronds against the sun and the blue sky.

There is a drought in California. Heidi says not to leave the water running. There are signs in public parks which say not to drink water from the drinking fountains. Sometimes the faucet runs slow. I think twice before taking a shower and a third time before shaving.

Who will have the last drop in California?

Heidi’s mom comes downstairs. She is originally from Boston and has retained her Eastern shell, which I appreciate. One morning she makes me an omelette. In California it is standard to ask “Do you have any dietary restrictions?” before making food for someone or inviting them to dinner. Heidi’s mom asks me before she makes me the omelette. But I’ll eat anything. I am not picky. I’ll eat anything you want me to eat. The sky, the succulents.

She uses some goat cheese that Heidi and I picked up from Trader Joe’s. “This is Heidi’s cheese,” she says. “I would never buy it, but it’s great in omelettes.” She serves the omelette with buttered toast and blackberries on the side. I press my fork into the omelette but hesitate when I see her scoop hers up and place it on her toast. I follow suit, chopping mine in half and putting it on my toast.

“Remind me where you’re from one more time,” she says, biting into the omelette. “Chicago?”

“Maryland. But not Baltimore. The hillbilly part.”

She nods.

“So I guess you’ve got the travel bug like Heidi?”

“Sometimes. Right now I have the settle-down bug. But I still have seven months in Japan.”

“And you’re over it. Right? You’re over it.”

“I’m over it.”

“July’s not that far off,” she says. “You can hang in there.”

She’s right. I hope she’s right. She’s a therapist and I trust her. I have the feeling that she is reading my mind. I think all therapists are clairvoyant. Maybe she can divine the expression on my face like a fortune teller reading tea leaves. Maybe she can intuit how terrified I am of loneliness based on the shape of my mouth. Maybe she already knows everything about me. Maybe I am not as special as I think I am. Maybe I am just a predictable gumbo of neuroses.

There is no omelette the next morning. Heidi’s mom just says, “I already ate.” That’s it. It’s just a fact. I love that about people from the East Coast—their directness. I miss that. She sits down at her computer, a huge Mac desktop next to the sliding glass door. She types while I jostle the door open and shut all morning, unable to stay either inside or outside for too long.

I drink coffee and smoke on the patio. When noon hits I get to work on the box of Trader Joe’s cabernet that Heidi and I also bought. I spend the next several afternoons nursing it while Heidi is at work. Her brother and mom are either startled or impressed by this, watching this stranger sip boxed wine on their patio at noon on a weekday, day after day. They’re definitely confused. I feel kind of weird doing it, but I also feel detached enough from reality in Orange County to assume that it doesn’t matter. I don’t even know what day it is.

Heidi’s mom has two pugs. I can’t remember their names, so I just call them Grimes and Elon. She is in the kitchen doing dishes and I don’t want the smoke to bother her, so I decide to go out into the driveway. Grimes and Elon are sleeping peacefully in their little plush basket. I hope that Heidi’s mom doesn’t mind that I am leaving them unsupervised. Maybe one of them will do me the favor of eating my notebook and freeing me from the catalogue of my thoughts. I unlatch the gate and go out to the driveway that connects the houses to one another. The air is clean but looks a little bit fuzzy or sparkly. The houses all look the same, with stucco walls and red roofs. The trees are green but because of the drought the tips of the leaves are brown. They look burnt, singed. I imagine the palm fronds reaching too close to the burner on a gas stove.

One of the houses on the next block has an American flag hanging out front, obscured a little bit by the haze. Or my imagination. For some reason I think that the flag looks out of place in Orange County. I don’t know where the “real America” is, but I don’t think it’s here. It’s not in Cecil County either though. Where the hell is it?

I look around. I didn’t grow up in the suburbs, so places like this always seem exotic to me. I feel as though I suddenly understand pop punk—the entire genre. Also Ska. I can imagine how Gwen Stefani would have been considered “edgy” in a place like this. I wonder how many pills are on this block alone. Hundreds? Thousands? How many affairs are going on? How many lawyers and therapists does it take to keep this one little block chugging along?

I hear a garage door open. I turn to my left and see an old woman with black-dyed hair wearing a red silk pajama suit shuffling into the driveway. She looks ahead vacantly and says nothing as she slowly bends down to pick up the newspaper. She turns back around just as slowly and shuffles back into the garage. The door clicks and retracts back down, sealing her inside. How long has she lived there? Heidi knows none of her neighbors’ names and has no intention of changing that, so there is no use asking her about the ghostly woman in red. Heidi’s neighbors only ever see her when she begrudgingly takes Elon and Grimes for walks, or when she exhales plumes of vaporized THC from her bedroom window at night like a stoned Rapunzel.

This morning I ate an omelette and last night I made a fire in Heidi’s fireplace. The Boy Scouts taught me to breathe fire. A fire is heat, fuel, and oxygen. I am holding a fire in my fingers. No one should try to eat fire. I take it back: fire is what I cannot eat. My dietary restriction is fire, okay? I’ve Californized. The whole state is on fire. It was, anyway. I don’t know if it is now.

I put the match to the kindling that Heidi and I have gathered from the woods near her house. I crouch toward the fireplace and ignite the kindling with my breath.

“There’s someone lucky waiting for you,” says Heidi’s boyfriend.

Maybe, I think. As long as he can breathe fire.

One night we go to dinner with Heidi’s friends, a couple. They are talking about the first time they said “I love you” to one another. I’m two drinks into happy hour and decide I might as well tell someone that I love them. Maybe this will be my big moment! So I go to the bathroom and text “Whatever I love you” to someone who I know full well does not love me back. That’ll do it, I think. I won’t be hearing from him again. An ethereal sense of relief then floats up through the heartbreak. All I really wanted was to say it.

When my grandmother was dating my grandfather in the sixties, it was kind of naughty, because she was Episcopalian and he was Catholic. “I just love bad boys,” she once said to me. She and my grandfather lived in Cecil County but his cousins lived in Baltimore. The first Amato to disembark there was named Leonardo, I think. “I would go down to Baltimore to see Bobby’s cousins. They were Catholic and lived over [wherever they lived—not somewhere nice]. They would bring me to their room, and then they would go into the closet and pull out mink coats and gin and silver cigarette stems. They couldn’t afford them. We would put on the coats and smoke out the windows.”

The stories I was told as a child are revealing themselves to be more and more intricate as the years pass. They look like the golden altar of the Serra Chapel at San Juan Capistrano Mission, “the jewel of the Missions.” You could look at that altar forever. Like the jewels of the South the Missions are testimony to slaughter.

You can get married there.

Heidi says that winter sunsets are the most spectacular in California. I don’t know why. In Japan she always longed for the sunset. She found the closest approximation possible to a California sunset at a beach on the northern coast of Oita prefecture, where we lived together for two years. The beach was barricaded by a seawall and was not really inviting of swimmers.

In San Clemente we go to a spot overlooking the ocean and find dozens of other people longing for the sunset. Heidi is home, where she is meant to be, her context. I think of my own context, my own longing. My spot is on a granite wall in North East running along the graveyard of a church near my house. When I was a teenager I would sit at the end, dangling my feet over the murky river. I still do that whenever I go home. I watch the Canada geese as they float, bob, spread their wings, and take off in formation toward the leafless trees.

In the California afternoon I will sit on the beach and read. The most interesting stories are about people who could never figure out what they wanted. Heidi drops me off at North Beach in San Clemente. I walk the beach trail along the Pacific Ocean and listen to music. The waves curl enormously and crash in huge eruptions of surf. I see teenage couples holding hands on lifeguard stands. At sunset I sit down on the sand and watch the sun dissipate through the cloud bank. The sky turns pink and orange. I try to identify what I am feeling. It’s something close to contentment but not exactly. I want to laugh. The moment feels funny for some reason. Everything feels funny and pointless, and watching the waves crash I feel like I can stop worrying so much.

The next morning I return to the patio. I sit beneath the sun. The light dances along the leaves of the fruit trees. I drink the wine and lean back, feel myself warm and pretty. I close my eyes and pretend I am in Italy, among the mysterious groves of my ancestors.

—California

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westboast · 6 years ago

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Pas de Deux

And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father’s house. Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.

1 Samuel 18:1-18:4

I once went to a therapist in Seattle who spoke only in questions. I expected him to be like my college therapist: warm, compassionate, and empathetic. I was ready to be open with him. But all he did was ask questions, and I got so nervous that instead of establishing a rapport with him I simply confessed everything to him, every insecurity and every secret. I wanted him to pause and validate something, show empathy, but instead he just moved on to the next question, and the next. In a desperate attempt to make him pause on something, anything, and show he cared about what I was saying, I ratcheted up the intensity of what I was telling him. Finally, at the end of the session, I asked him why he only spoke in questions. Why did he make no declarative statements? He then snapped awake, his face flooded with life, to explain the methodology of his coursework. He said something about Lacan, and that name made me wilt. I wasn’t a person to him. I was data. He got me to tell him everything, all my secrets, things I have kept concealed for years, in forty-five minutes. Of course I never went back.

Lately, living overseas has been a little like that. I want to regurgitate everything and see what happens. I want people to know the “real me,” whatever that means. Japan is a tricky place to try this, because you won’t ever get a lot of pushback. People don’t say “No” in Japan. They say “It’s a little difficult…” No one will slam the door in your face. They’ll simply glide through it when you aren’t paying attention. It’s hard to express your feelings here, to be sad here. Feelings are intimate and precious, the holy of holies, guarded deep within. They are not meant to be exposed to the light.

Japan provokes questions but gives me few answers directly. I have to search for the answers myself. For me Japan has been a glass of water into which drops of food coloring are placed. Watch them swirl. Japan is Narcissus’s pool. In it I long to see myself, know myself. I get closer and closer to the surface, examining every contour of my face. I fall in, and no one is there to pull me out. Japan is a hotel. There is comfort but only for a while. At some point I will check out. Sometimes an entire day passes here and all I have done is talk about the weather, or clothing, or food. What are you interested in? What do you like? Surely I must know these things about myself, but often I cannot remember.

Japan is consistent. There is a man who walks by my apartment with his white dog every day at five o’clock. He has been doing this for two years. At the Family Mart down the street the same clerks have been there every morning. For two years. Japan is so quiet. In its silence I have vomited up every feeling in order to fill the space. Japan is zero gravity. I release water into the air to watch it split into drops and float around forever. It will never pool.

On the news the other day I saw that a singer had ended her own life. The news crew interviewed her neighbor, who said that “she was getting really sad.” One of my principals pulled me aside at a party once and told me that he was immensely lonely. He works alone in his office. He sleeps alone at home, separately from his wife. His father is already asleep when he comes home at night. We drank coffee in his office together once, maybe twice. We communed in loneliness.

I am alone yet seen. My neighbor keeps an eye on my trash and tells me when trash day is. My coworker tells me that a student saw me running the other morning. Which student? Where? On one of my worst days, my principal appeared behind me, said nothing, and placed a bag of my favorite snacks on my desk. He knew.

I took the Shinkansen from Fukuoka to Hiroshima a few weeks ago to visit R. It was a clear, blue-skied day. I looked out the window while listening to Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” as the landscape soared past. I had never been on a train that fast, and my forehead was sweating nervously. The buildings streaked past the window too quickly. It felt wrong. My friend said that riding the Shinkansen is like being on a plane that is always about to take off. I would add that it’s like watching a movie that has been sped up a little bit, just enough to unsettle you, make you grip the armrest a little tighter.

For a little while there my clothes smelled like Bulgari cologne.

I can no longer listen to an Indonesian song called “Jauh.”

The drama of the landscape. The mountains are undulating by. All of the houses settled in the valleys. The colorful diesel train cars chugging through the whole scene. The teenagers in their black and white uniforms moving in groups on bicycles. It’s gorgeous, but in a matter of minutes an earthquake could turn it all to tinder. The thing that is most likely to kill you in Japan is the landscape, though I imagine loneliness is up there.

Everything but the landscape is just so in Japan. Nothing is out of place. Everything is on time, predictable, safe. America looks like the Apocalypse from here. Chaos is reserved for the cities at night. One of the strangest things you will ever see in Japan is a young salaryman in a crisp black suit, surrounded by other young men dressed the same way, vomiting into a grate. Everyone drinks in Japan, but there are no alcoholics in Japan, only “people who drink every night.” No one says “You are wrong” in Japan. They just say “Maybe…” People work themselves to death in Japan, open the office window one clear day and walk out of it into the void. Everyone is at once happy and unhappy, but do not press this point in Japan.

Do not be greedy. Do not be bothersome. Do not tell anyone if you are having a bad day. Whatever you do, do not fall in love. Place your hand on the surface of the water, but do not reach in, because the fish will all scatter. Things are offered until eventually they are no longer. Conversations are started but never finished. They slowly dissolve.

Japan is the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Japan is one of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms. I turn to scrutinize the different reflections. Which is the most realistic me? The most convincing me? Who is buying any of this anyway? Probably no one.

Japan is none of these things. Japan is Japan. Japan is not a metaphor. Japan defies metaphor.

Japan does not exist for my pleasure. I understand that. I love Japan. It’s just that I don’t understand it a lot of the time. Being invited to live here is the most incredible thing that has ever happened to me. When things are going well, they go extremely well. But when they aren’t, I realize how far away I am from everyone and everything I know. It’s part of “the experience,” right?

Right?

Lately I’ve been thinking about the Adrienne Rich poem “Diving Into the Wreck,” about a diver exploring a shipwreck. The diver descends through the deep until finding it:

I came to explore the wreck.

The words are purposes.

The words are maps.

I came to see the damage that was done

and the treasures that prevail

I stroke the beam of my lamp

slowly along the flank

of something more permanent

than fish or weed

the thing I came for:

the wreck and not the story of the wreck

the thing itself and not the myth….

Japan for me is now the thing itself, or maybe I am. People go abroad to “find themselves,” don’t they? Yes, that’s it. How cliché. It’s me. The thing I came looking for. The thing to which curiosity brought me. The problem with being a curious person is that sometimes you learn things that you wish you hadn’t.

For a little while there my clothes smelled like Chanel cologne.

I can no longer listen to a Japanese song—my favorite Japanese song—called “Sukiyaki.”

The loneliest I have ever felt in Japan is standing on the roof of Oita Station at night one November, alone, watching the lights twinkle on all of the buildings. No, I’ve been much lonelier than that. Maybe it was at the hostel in Okinawa on Christmas Eve two years ago. Or in my apartment on any given Tuesday. Maybe it was at a party. Maybe it will be in an hour.

A Japanese phrase that I hear a lot: the nail that sticks up will be pounded down.

Another one that I like: a frog in a tank does not know the sea.

In Japan there is a tradition of women, called the ama, who wear goggles and plain white diving suits and dive to the seafloor to retrieve pearls. I keep a picture of them on my desk.

***

After partying all night in Fukuoka recently, my friends and I took the train to the suburbs for ramen. I listened to the pas de deux from The Nutcracker and watched the buildings pass, more slowly and more sadly than they did on the Shinkansen. I watched a salaryman as he looked out the window.

When we got to the restaurant, we all ordered ramen, but I couldn’t eat it. My stomach was still rolling from the night before. I was suddenly overwhelmed by the desire to go to Mass, and I got on a bus back into the city. My phone wasn’t working, so I had to try finding my way without it. I got so lost. I think that’s the loneliest I’ve felt recently: running through the streets of Fukuoka attempting to get to Mass.

The priest gave a homily on marriage. He said that we are not meant to be alone. I don’t know if we’re meant to be married, but I don’t believe we are meant to be alone.

Afterward I went out for drinks with some of the congregants. One of them said: “Michelangelo was probably gay, but who cares? If you’re good at something, it doesn’t matter.”

This irritated me. If you ask a Catholic what God looks like, there’s a good chance they’ll tell you he looks like Michelangelo’s image of him, in billowing pink, stretching out on a cloud toward Adam on the roof of the Sistine Chapel.

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Another way of looking at it is that Michelangelo’s gayness informed how beautiful his art was.”

When I went to Hiroshima, I didn’t buy any souvenirs. The only thing I did buy was a string of pink rosary beads made of glass, imported from Italy. The nun who sold them to me asked if they were a present. She smiled when I said no.

Japan is the most beautiful place I have ever been. There are the blue waters of Okinawa, the cliffs of Yamaguchi, Takachiho Gorge, Mount Aso, the rolling hills of Miyazaki…

Japan is a hallucination. It must be. The last two years cannot possibly have happened. How long have I been dreaming with my eyes open?

My friend says I should write about what it’s like to be gay and living in Japan, but I can’t. I just can’t. I don’t want to talk about it because it’s too sad. And also because if I talk about that, I have to talk about that night at the club in Beppu, and suddenly I hear the music and see the lights. I have to talk about the escalator in Bangkok, the flower garland from the street vendor. I have to talk about the beach party at Iki Island, the laughter and salt at the beach. I have to talk about that day in Hita, the cologne mixing with the onsen steam and evaporating into the leaves overhead.

Gone.

Cut to: Itsukushima Shrine, the tide in. Soundtrack: “O Soave Fanciulla,” sung by Placido Domingo and Montserrat Caballé. I’m there with R, and the knowledge that even though things ended we still care about each other so much. We ask a French couple to take a photo of the two of us with their Polaroid. We are both smiling widely, so clearly happy in spite of the circumstances. Itsukushima Shrine is built on a platform above a tidal plane. It appears to be floating in the sea. We pull each other close but in sadness, and the speed of the movie changes. All of the tourists seem to slow down. Everything that happened between us soars through the camera shutter as it is opened to the light—light bouncing off of the red torii gate, light bouncing off of my sunglasses, off of his smile, off of our torsos which are close but not touching.

I’m there with the knowledge that he’s safe. When we were together I couldn’t sleep at night because of what he told me about the political situation in his country, where people like him—people like us—are occasionally stoned to death. But that won’t happen to him now. Now my insomnia comes from somewhere else.

“Isn’t this song beautiful?” I ask him.

“It makes me want to kill myself,” he responds.

The record skips. Put on a new one.

Soundtrack: “Ave Maria,” by Schubert.

September 11, 2017: “In my mind there is a Baroque cathedral built to honor all of the things I want but cannot have.”

Running.

Where the fuck is the church? I don’t remember which side of the train station it’s on.

Why am I writing this? Why am I trying to write about something that is still so alive? I’m foolishly trying to write about something that presents itself anew each day…

Living in Japan is a gift.

Friday: I am waking up. Now the sun streams into my room. Now I am making coffee. Now I am running by the river, the water is flowing over the rocks, and white egrets are leaping from the riverbed. Now I am at school, where the students and I are still learning how to talk to each other. Now I am counting money. Now I am on a bus ascending the mountains and descending into Fukuoka. Now I am in the city, and there are lines of people waiting for ramen or ice cream. There are people everywhere. They are cast in neon light, they are holding hands, they are buying cigarettes. We are bumping into each other, we are descending into the subways, we are gathered at restaurants. Sumimasen. Now we are ascending to the sidewalk. Now we are drinking together, now we are stumbling to the club, now we are on an elevator pressed against one another, now we are all dancing. Now the sun is coming up, What’s your name? Now we’re jumping into taxis, now we’re awake, friends with arms wrapped around each other.

Friendship is a gift.

Love is a gift.

Everything is now seen from Japan, and I see the different parts of me, through time, which exist at once. There is the little boy at Catholic school who is always designated to say Catholic grace at family dinners. There is the seventeen-year-old me in Maryland, driving through a corn field, not seeing the stop sign soon enough, slamming on the brakes and suddenly realizing that the brake pads are worn down to nothing, and the car flies into the intersection anyway at sixty miles an hour. But there isn’t any traffic and I get to keep living. There is the twenty-year-old me in Vermont, in a snowstorm, with uncontrollable feelings about basically everything, so certain that my life and opinions are terribly important. There is the twenty-three-year-old me in Washington State, alone in a beautiful house on an island, realizing that nothing really added up and yet here I am, worried I’m coming apart. Now there is the twenty-six-year-old me, who puts on a tie in the morning and rides a bike through a Japanese lumber town to a school where I can’t understand most of what is being said around me, but I’m trying.

I went to a riverboat dinner event last year, and someone took a photo. In the background are illuminated lanterns. My friend Shantel is on my left and my friend Ryu is on my right, with his arm around me. It’s the kind of photo that is immediately nostalgic, as if it was already twenty years old the moment it was taken. It says, like all photographs do, that we were here, in this place, at this time. So far from home. I’m real to many people, but to others I’m just photographs. David who lives in Japan, smiling near a boat. In the photograph, I’m thinking that different parts of me exist through time, but different selves all exist now. David the teacher. David the friend. David the party person. David the quiet person. David the son. David the brother. David the boyfriend.

I’m thinking of the way that surfaces slide over one another, the way that things deceive. In Washington I lived for a year near Deception Pass, where the Admiralty Inlet meets the Salish Sea. The currents are extremely powerful and dangerous, but you wouldn’t know from looking, because when the waters move past one another they give the surface a glassy appearance, like a colonial window. It is some of the most fatal water in Washington though. The Deception Pass bridge is a marvel of engineering. It is also a favorite suicide spot in Washington. Every so often I would check the news and see that a car had been discovered near the bridge in the morning, and soon after the search would begin for the driver, presumed to be somewhere in the water.

People have sliding surfaces too, which is why it’s wise not to make assumptions about human beings. You think you understand someone but then the current changes. Your leg is sucked under. And me? I can deceive myself too. Queer people know this too well. You come out, and then suddenly you’re on an archaeological dig through your past, searching for clues among the self-deception. Ah, that makes sense. Ah, no wonder my friends were always girls. Ah, no wonder people talked to me like that. Behaved like that.

The current picks things up from the bottom and drops them on the shore. Like this: one of the students collapsed during a performance last year, and my first reaction was to clasp my hands and bow. Hail Mary, full of grace… Spare her, have mercy. Someone dies unexpectedly and it’s the same thing. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women… Receive her soul in heaven. How many pearls can I pull from the bottom? Enough to make a rosary?

Wait, do I believe in heaven?

Pray for us sinners.

Other questions: Is there really such a thing as a good person? Do people have souls? Why am I alive?

Catholics seek to reconcile apparently contradictory concepts. For example: God is omnipotent and omniscient, and yet human beings have free will. Also: the world is fundamentally mysterious, and yet we must have faith that everything happens as part of a larger design. Mystery is what I can’t stop thinking about. It’s unbearable. Why does anything happen? Catholics believe it is the will of God. Which is a way of saying: it’s a mystery. Things just happen. Things just are. Maybe there’s a why, but it’s too much to understand. It’s God.

Now and at the hour of our death.

What of my own mysteries? I touch my hand to the holy water as I enter the church. I think I know the real me now, the architecture which holds everything else up, but I’m not sure. Japan gave this understanding to me. Gayness is a sexual orientation, but for me it’s also a spiritual one. It’s the Catholicism which collapsed and was filled by Saint James Baldwin, Saint Freddy Mercury, Saint Marsha P. Johnson, Saint Beyoncé, so many saints. Gay people love to beatify. My favorite saint is Saint Madonna. She’s Catholic, you know. But in “Like a Virgin” performances in the early nineties she used a lot of “sacrilegious” sexual imagery, enough that, due to protests from the Vatican, she was forced to cancel her shows in Italy during her tour. She prayed before every show, hands clasped with her dancers.

I write my own prayers.

What’s your name?

And lead us not into temptation.

Should we go somewhere else?

But deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory.

I’m sorry, I’m nervous.

Forever and ever.

Amen.

—Japan

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westboast · 7 years ago

Text

Blood on the Walls

The same day there came certain of the Pharisees, saying unto him, Get thee out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill thee.

Luke 13:31

It was Holy Wednesday, and on a money changer's door in the district of San Andres, Manila, there was attached a bumper sticker which read: DUTERTE: Change is Coming. The words were wrapped around the image of a fist punching outward. Inside the shop my friend Heidi and I exchanged a few hundred dollars each and elbowed past each other out of the little room onto the street. It was scorching hot. On the corner two cops in powder blue uniforms exited a police box with a message posted on the outside:

Maging MAPAGMASID!

Mamamayan Ayaw sa Anomalya.

Mamamayan Ayaw sa ILLEGAL na DROGA.

Such signs were to be found throughout the Philippines, warning residents about the dangers of drugs and not to try them, ever, “not even once!” Across from the police box stood a shrine to the Virgin Mary, one of thousands throughout Manila. Holy Week was under way, and most of the city was about to shut down as its transplant residents packed buses and planes to head back to their home provinces ahead of Easter. In the neighborhoods near our accommodation people prepared crosses, draping them in purple cloth and adorning them with images of the stations of the cross. Under tents they painted shrines of the the Virgin Mary to be carried in processions on Good Friday. Streets were barricaded, totally shut down for the holiday.

God was in the air, and so was security. For every Virgin Mary there was a police officer. For every rosary there was a gun. Armed private security guards stood in the doorways of nearly every shop and restaurant, holding shotguns. They were all over Manila. You could distinguish them from the police because they normally wore white, with the name of their agency—usually something sinister, like Puritan, Bluebreed, Vigilant, Bulldog, Metallic, Monitor, Nemesis, Raven, Right Eye—embroidered on their left shirt pocket. In front of a bank in the financial district stood a large group of heavily armed security guards and police, checking the IDs of everyone who entered. A guard stood watch in front of the taxi stand at the airport, holding a black rifle. At the Greenbelt, an upscale mall, we walked out of a soap shop and into the courtyard to find a guard in sunglasses holding a polished silver model which glinted in the sunlight. Armored trucks, the kind that carry money, cruised the streets. At first I assumed they were bank vehicles, but on one block in Makati I watched a whole caravan of them drive by, not one of them marked, and began to wonder who was inside.

Change had indeed come to Manila since the election of Rodrigo Duterte as President of the Republic of the Philippines in 2016, after a campaign in which he pledged to eradicate the Philippines' drug problem. He stomped the competition in the election, securing about 16.6 million votes to the runner-up Mar Roxas’s roughly 10 million. Since then he has presided over a ruthless, violent campaign against drug addicts and dealers, drawing international scrutiny from human rights groups and the UN. Nevertheless, he remains wildly popular in the Philippines. A December 2017 poll conducted by the Philippine research agency Pulse Asia showed that 80 percent of respondents approved of the president’s job performance, with 13 percent undecided and only 7 percent disapproving.

In his previous position, as mayor of the southern city of Davao, Duterte is alleged to have been the puppet master of a notorious vigilante group called the Davao Death Squad, ordering the killings of low level criminals and eventually political adversaries in the region. In February 2017, a retired police officer named Arthur Lascañas told a news conference that he had been a leader in the Squad and that “we started the salvaging [execution] of people when Mayor Duterte first sat down as mayor in Davao City. The people we targeted are criminals and were into illegal drugs. We were implementing the personal orders of Duterte.” Months earlier, in September 2016, a man named Edgar Matobato told a Senate committee investigating the president’s tenure in Davao that Duterte had ordered hits indirectly, through the commander of the Death Squad. According to the New York Times, “He said it was clear to him that the commander was passing on an order from Mr. Duterte.” Leila de Lima, the senator leading the investigation, was imprisoned in February of 2017 on charges that she was involved in the drug trade at New Bilibid Prison during her tenure as secretary of the Department of Justice. Human rights groups including Amnesty International have denounced her imprisonment as politically motivated.

Human Rights Watch estimates that from June 2016, when Duterte assumed the presidency, until the beginning of 2018, around 12,000 people were killed by police and vigilante groups in the midst of the so-called “drug war.” Reuters estimates that police bullets have killed 4,100, with the remaining thousands killed by vigilantes. It has been widely reported that the targets of the killings, while occasionally high-profile drug dealers, are more often addicts and low-level dealers living in poor urban areas.

The circumstances of these killings have often been murky, involving claims of “self defense” from the police. On March 21, police in the province of Bulacan conducted a raid resulting in thirteen deaths. “Unfortunately,” said Bulacan police chief Romeo Caramat after the raid, “thirteen of the suspects were killed when our officers fired in self-defense shortly after the suspects who were armed with concealed guns sensed they were being entrapped and started firing.”

Many of the dead are children. On August 30, 2016, police in Guihulngan City shot suspect Aldrick Barbon in the midst of a buy-bust operation, and as he fled on motorcycle they shot him again from behind, in the process mortally wounding his four-year-old daughter Althea, who was with him on the motorcycle. She died two days after her father. The police chief stated that the officers were “not able to ascertain that someone was with the suspect because it was dark and that the father overshadowed the girl.”

Shortly after his election, Duterte spoke to a crowd in Manila about his impending drug war. “These sons of whores are destroying our children,” he said. “I warn you, don’t go into that, even if you’re a policeman, because I will really kill you.” He continued: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.”

Vigilantes have followed suit, often missing their presumed targets. In December 2016, masked men on motorcycles searching for a drug dealer in Caloocan City fired into a shanty where a dance party was taking place, killing 15-year-old Jonel Segovia, 16-year-old Sonny Espinosa, and 16-year-old Angelito Soriano. That same month, in Pasay City, a gunman fired through the plywood covering 44-year-old Domingo Mañosca’s window, striking his five-year-old son Francis in the forehead and killing him as he slept.

Duterte’s bombastic, often vulgar statements have earned him international infamy. One of his earliest came in September of 2016, when he declared that “Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now there is three million, there’s three million drug addicts. There are. I’d be happy to slaughter them.” While far from Holocaust levels, the situation in the Philippines has become so perilous that the International Criminal Court has opened an investigation into the actions of the Duterte Administration, prompting the president to issue a statement that the Philippines will withdraw from the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, “effective immediately,” on the grounds that the court is “being utilized as a political tool against the Philippines.” The declaration has in turn triggered a dispute over when the Philippines can legally withdraw from the court, whose rules stipulate that it takes one year for a signatory to leave. Duterte’s statement suggests a different interpretation: that the country is already out, per his orders. Either way, Philippine authorities are unlikely to cooperate with the ICC investigation.

The UN has also opened an inquiry into the drug war. The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Agnes Callamard, has been a special object of derision by the president. “Don’t fuck with me, girls,” he said on March 9.

***

Heidi and I spent three days in the north of the Philippines, and for the next portion of our trip we travelled to Cebu, in the south. We took motorized tricycles through the jungle across bumpy roads. We took a catamaran across perfectly blue waters to a remote island surrounded by miles of coral flats. We kept an eye out for the moon, which was nearly full. We laid in hammocks. Among the palm trees and the candlelight I overheard a woman and her uncle, recently back from the U.S., discussing the situation in the Philippines.

“We are infamous again,” she said.

“Yes,” he responded, “but there is power in infamy.” And, after a bourbon, “If you think the Philippines are corrupt, it’s nothing compared to the United States.”

In April of 2017, ten months into the Philippine drug war, the thirtieth summit of ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) was held in Manila. Thousands of soldiers and police were deployed, while work throughout the city was suspended by executive order. On the twenty-ninth, the final day of the summit, the President of the United States called Rodrigo Duterte. It was a clear, hot evening in Manila.

“Good evening,” said Duterte. “It’s night over here.”

“Okay, I hope it’s not too late,” said Trump. “It’s okay, isn’t it? Is it too late?”

“No, it’s okay. We are just having dinner with some of the members of ASEAN.”

“Oh, okay, good, because [I] know you don’t sleep much. You’re just like me. You are not a person who goes to bed at all, I know that, right?”

“Yes, you are right, Mr. President.”

“I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” said Trump. “Many countries have the problem, we have the problem, but what a great job you are doing, and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”

***

On Holy Wednesday the highway toward the Mall of Asia was crammed with cars and buses, in turn crammed with people pressed against the glass. They were leaving Manila. We were headed in the opposite direction, in a car toward the mall, to see the sun set over Manila Bay.

We had come to Manila during Holy Week not because of our Christian devotion but because that's when we found the cheapest flights. The city was emptying on Wednesday and nearly dead by the evening of Maundy Thursday. "You picked the wrong time to come," a stranger told us in a Chinatown 7-11, before giving us the scoop on which restaurants would still be open. But on Good Friday it wouldn't matter what was or wasn't happening in Manila, because we were heading north, to the city of San Fernando, to witness that city’s annual crucifixion.

It took an hour and a half by van to reach San Fernando. We left the urban density of Manila and entered wide, iridescent green fields. We stopped at a gas station where a group of police were seated under a tent, in one of the ubiquitous “police assistance desks” throughout the Philippines. We kept driving and finally got to San Fernando, a seemingly treeless city, where dust hung in the air and the sun beat down mercilessly.

As we drove through increasingly crowded streets, we saw a group of men walking single-file down the side of the road. They were shirtless, with black hoods over their heads, wearing crowns of flowers or leaves. They were flogging themselves. There was something on their backs that looked like a vest, but as we got closer I realized it was blood. Their backs were raw, with blood all over them, blood soaking through their pants as it ran down. I almost threw up.

We parked in a gravel lot and followed signs to Calbari, the site where the crucifixion would take place. Along the way we passed groups of people huddled in the shade of their porches. Every few minutes a new group of the self-flogging men would walk by, and everyone backed out of the way. They walked slowly, single file, rhythmically swinging the flogs back and forth against their backs. I got a closer look at one, which was made of a bundle of wooden sticks. The streets were narrow and crowded, and cars slowly passed the penitents and the spectators.

“I just noticed there’s blood splattered on the cars,” said Heidi. We both looked down at ourselves. There were flecks of blood on my pink shirt and on our legs. We wet a tissue and wiped it off as best we could. Children walked alongside some of the penitents, and as the flogs swung back and forth they sprayed blood onto them. One little boy got too close and was smacked across the back of the neck. We stopped at a little shop for a lunch of clams and octopus. “No meat on Good Friday,” said the owner, “only seafood.” In front of a nearby community center I watched a group get ready for their procession. One man laid in the dirt while the others flogged him with sticks, to prepare his back, as a woman sang over a loudspeaker. The man shook each time he was hit.

It was a half hour walk through the sun and the heat to Calbari. We arrived at about eleven o’clock. As we rounded the gate from the street we saw the three enormous black crosses on a dirt hill. It was breathtaking. Spectators under sun umbrellas milled about. An entrance booth was guarded heavily by police and soldiers. A black SWAT truck was parked nearby. Rows of tents had been provided by a Philippine cell phone company, Smart, but they were all full. Heidi and I found a tree providing a few patches of shade and took shelter. Most foreigners appeared to be corralled in a separate tent right next to the crosses, but we didn’t have a ticket to get in.

Calbari was the end of the penitents’ journey. Police officers and Philippine soldiers stationed at the cross gates swung them open for each group. They filed through the gates and slowly approached the three crosses, which were cordoned off with fences. They walked to the top and then knelt in prayer. They removed their crowns and added them to piles before the crosses. They laid down in the dirt.

One of the groups came to stand under the same trees as Heidi and I, laughing, talking, and smoking. We smiled at each other, but it didn't occur to me until later to ask them about their procession. I’m not sure what I would have asked them anyway, other than, Why are you doing this? But that seemed too direct. What I did notice is how young some of the participants were, maybe thirteen or fourteen years old, with no skin left on their backs. The oldest in the group was maybe twenty-five, with blood soaked through his white pants and sprayed all the way down to his ankles.

As the day drew closer to noon, the scheduled time of the crucifixion, we approached the crosses. The view was obscured by umbrellas hoisted against the sun and by the media platform, which was loaded with journalists and camera operators. A large screen had been erected to give the spectators a clear shot of what was happening, but the glare was so intense that it too was difficult to see. We waited in the crowd, chugging 20-peso bottles of water. Group after group of penitents made their way to the crosses, for hours. Finally, as the sun burned directly overhead, the crowd suddenly lurched toward the fences, pressing more and more tightly together. The umbrellas bobbed for a moment and then fell as the police threw open the gates. A horse charged up the hill, driven by a man in a gold helmet and a billowing red cape. A Roman soldier.

The crowd pushed further in. “I need to get out of here,” said Heidi. We moved back toward the entrance gates. As we did, more horses galloped in, more caped soldiers, a whole phalanx of Romans with golden spears raised. I could see a woman in blue. They made their way to the crosses. As they were gathering, one of the horses on the hill got spooked and began to thrash. Its handler, the first Roman soldier, mounted it and galloped back down the hill. The crowd parted as the police swung open the gates to make way. The Roman and the horse thundered away from Calbari, the soldier's red cape billowing, the horse's hooves kicking up dust as it passed through the crowd toward the road. The police swung the gates shut.

The crosses were lowered into the Romans’ outstretched hands. And then, a few minutes later, two of them were raised again, this time with people nailed to them. From beyond the gate and the crowd I could see a long section of lily white cloth being unfurled among the crosses, and through a part in the Romans I saw them wrapping it around the third of the crucified. They pushed nails into his palms and then pounded them the rest of the way into the wood. He was shirtless and they hoisted him toward the sun. It was so hot that day, and the air was filled with dust.

We were overheating and joined the crowd of people, umbrellas opened against the sun, heading out of the gates. I turned for one last look at the crucified, hoisted starkly against the dry blue sky. Soldiers and police ushered the crowd back toward the road. As we walked back to the car through the narrow streets of San Fernando, we stopped to look at the plaster walls of the stores, pale pinks, yellows, and blues. They were all splattered with droplets of blood, for miles.

“If they ask you about wrongdoing, do not answer,” said Rodrigo Duterte on March 1, referring to the UN investigation, during an address to police and military personnel at a firing range in Davao City. “And if they ask you why, tell them: we have a commander in chief.”

“We’ve had a great relationship,” said the President of the United States last November, seated alongside Duterte during the thirty-first ASEAN summit in Manila.

On Holy Wednesday, during our car ride to the mall, Heidi and I were discussing San Fernando and got to talking about it with the driver. “Do people volunteer to be crucified, or does the church choose them?” Heidi asked.

In the opposing lane a formation of police motorcycles sped down the avenue, sirens blaring, followed closely by two black SUVs.

“They volunteer,” said the driver, “because when they are crucified they can ask for a favor from God.”

—Manila

Bibliography

#philippines

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westboast · 7 years ago

Text

Snow

When I was a little boy and I couldn’t sleep, I imagined one of two scenarios. The first was that I was in the cabin of a ship, in bed, and the waves rocked the ship. I focused hard on what the room was like. Dark, of course, and the bed had low railings around it so I wouldn’t fall off. The water outside was choppy but not violent, so the ship swayed but didn’t lurch. It was a small room with a porthole, meaning I could see the stars dip and rise as the cabin moved. And then I would fall asleep.

The second scenario I wrote a poem about when I was a teenager. The last two lines were:

In my dreams, I close my eyes

And am buried by gently falling snow.

Incidentally, I had a dream about snow in 2016, a few months before I found out I was moving to Japan. In the dream, I’m in a forest in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. I’m all by myself in a winter jacket, it’s night time, and snow is falling softly all around me. It’s just me, and there isn’t any noise. Just the snow falling.

When I woke up from that dream I wondered if my application might be accepted, but I tried not to put a lot of thought into it. As it turns out I would be going to Japan, but not to Hokkaido. Instead I was sent to Kyushu, where it snowed today, two years after my dream.

It has been a cold, dark winter here in Japan. I seem to only live in places with brutal winters. As in Vermont and Washington, when winter comes to Japan the sun is down by four thirty. It is very hard to feel hopeful during this time of year. It’s easy to live inside your own mind, which is mostly where I’ve been. Also Korea, Thailand, and the United States. It has been easy for me to compare the way things are with the way they might have been, to dream of one place and wake up in another, to dream of one person and wake up without them.

There’s a new Joan Didion documentary on Netflix, and at one point the filmmaker, Griffin Dunne, Didion’s nephew, asks his aunt about her books The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. The books are about the deaths of her husband and daughter, respectively, within only a few years of one another. They are a departure from her earlier works in that they are deeply personal, though she conceived of them as works of journalism. The reason for this, according to her, is that “you used your material. You wrote what you had.”

I feel the need to use my material. I want to tell people about my time in Japan, but right now the material I have is that something happened, something ended, in September. Gay men are no strangers to violence, so when it is visited upon us it comes as little surprise. But I was surprised this time. I was surprised it was him.

***

I went home for three weeks in December and January, spent time with my family, and traveled around the United States and Canada with my friends. In Maryland I went to the Baltimore Museum of Art and saw a work by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. It’s a twenty foot beaded curtain, covered in blue and white plastic beads, called “Untitled” (Water). It is installed in a large doorway, so you can walk through it and feel the beads on your skin. And hear them brushing against each other. The plaque on the wall described Gonzalez-Torres’ intention with the curtain, which was simply to conjure images in the minds of the people who walk through it. When I saw the word Water and the blue beads swinging from the ceiling, the beads brushing against one another, I closed my eyes, and what I thought of was my grandmother, on the beach, wearing large sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, squirting sunblock onto her skin and mine and my brother’s, at Cape Henlopen, Delaware, as waves rolled in.

My grandmother is a lot like me. She is able to communicate with me with wisdom and love that is never overly sentimental. My mom is extremely emotional, but my grandmother is steady and firm. Swirled together their personalities explain mine, I think.

When I was in college I went through my first breakup. It was a few years after my grandparents separated and the same year that my Aunt Betsy and Uncle Scott broke up. I was completely devastated. My mom and grandmother came to Vermont to go on a birthday trip with me. We stayed in a hotel in Stowe. It’s a ski resort town, but we stayed there in July because that’s where the cheapest rooms were available.

I only remember a few things about Stowe. One was the swimming pool at the hotel, which was painted electric blue. The second was going on a walk with my grandmother along a weird path surrounded by Astroturf. She knew that I had gone through a breakup, but I wasn’t talking about it and didn’t want to.

She said, “Your relationship ended. Your Aunt Betsy’s marriage ended. My marriage ended. But you know what? I’m sixty-five years old, and I don’t need a man.”

I believed her.

***

I attend a Japanese class run by city volunteers in Hita. One of the teachers recently lent me a copy of The Book of Tea, which was written in 1906 by a scholar from Japan named Kakuzo Okakura as an introduction to Japanese culture aimed at Americans. The book is mostly about Japanese aesthetics. One of the most important concepts he discusses is flower arrangement:

When a tea-master has arranged a flower to his satisfaction he will place it on the tokonoma, the place of honour in a Japanese room. Nothing else will be placed near it which might interfere with its effect, not even a painting, unless there be some special aesthetic reason for the combination.

The flower itself, not the pot, not another object, not the room, is the focus of the room.

This, to me, was a new way of seeing. To focus on things as they are. Appreciate things simply because they are there. “Perfection is everywhere if we only choose to recognise it,” Okakura says. This is a very difficult concept for me to grasp, and has been, because I like to keep things. Papers, postcards, knick-knacks, photos, people. I like to stuff my house with things to look at. I also like to have things explained to me. I like to be told what to do. But since reading that book I’ve tried to just look at things, not analyze them. Just look and realize how wonderful they are. And then release them.

I decided to go to my favorite onsen earlier, because it was snowing. I’ve been going there for a year and a half now. There’s an old guy who works there and takes the tickets from patrons. He usually sits in the little booth near the entrance and watches TV. But today when I got there, he came outside in the snow. We haven’t ever really said much to each other, but today he came out and talked to me.

“It’s cold,” he said. “It’s getting colder. The snow is falling softly.”

I looked at the snow, and the trees, and all of the wooden buildings. I could hear the river behind them. He turned and went back inside.

I keep waiting for some conclusion to present itself, some explanation for the past several months. I want to sleep well at night. Intuitively I know that nothing fits together, things don’t add up the way you think they will. I keep hoping they might.

But at the onsen today I thought something else. I thought of The Book of Tea. I thought that maybe the only thing that ever mattered, or ever will matter, or currently does matter, was contained in what the old man said.

It’s cold. It’s getting colder. The snow is falling softly.

—Hita

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westboast · 7 years ago

Text

Seoul

November, 2017.

In the original Bladerunner, released in 1982, the signs and advertisements in Los Angeles are written in Japanese. Colin Marshall notes in the LA Review of Books that in the eighties, Hollywood’s vision of the future was Japan, as the country was experiencing an unprecedented, fleeting economic boom. In the new Bladerunner, he points out, we now see signs in Korean. When the director, Denis Villeneuve, looked into his crystal ball, it seems he saw Korea looking back.

I read that article before I went to Korea for the first time and was primed to look for visions of the future. The first clue is in the buildings and public works, which look as though they have just erupted from the earth. The asphalt and concrete look fresh, discordant with the landscape. The maglev line to the Seoul Incheon Airport sits above miles of empty fields, from the middle of which rises the enormous airport, like a spaceship. One of the train stops is at a place called Paradise City, which looks to be an unfinished entertainment complex, with skyscrapers full of empty rooms.

A metro line leads from the airport to Yongsan Station, near the National Museum of Korea, where I immediately notice Korean soldiers and sailors milling about the concourse in their fatigues. They are also on the train, on the sidewalks, checking their phones, holding hands with people not in uniform. They are all terribly young.

In the best sci-fi stories, the future isn’t uniformly sleek. There are always rough protrusions into an otherwise crisp vision. In Seoul the young soldiers are the first clue that a balancing act is at work. That feeling is compounded when I take a train to the museum and exit by the gates of an enormous military base, surrounded by concrete fences, traffic barricades, and barbed wire. These are everywhere throughout Seoul, because the future in Korea is plagued by the twentieth century, in the form of the world’s most vexing brutality: the North. This base is special. It is the Yongsan Garrison, the headquarters of the American military in South Korea.

At the museum I spend several hours looking at Korean national treasures, surrounded by teenagers taking selfies in front of gold crowns, ancient horse ornaments, and sculptures. Outside on the porch I sit near a young couple drinking red frappes, and she begins choking on her drink. She eventually catches her breath. She is fine, we’ve all been there. But this normal scene is interrupted by a thundering noise nearby. I can’t figure out what it is or where it’s coming from until I turn from her and see that it is an enormous black helicopter rising lazily from the base. It moves slowly upward against the skyline before tilting toward the skyscrapers and flying off.

The main thing I know about Seoul is that it’s full of plastic surgery clinics, which I somehow don’t notice. What I do notice is the way people act on the trains. In Japan it’s considered rude to eat, talk, or drink on public transportation. In Korea it’s not, which is refreshing. Whenever we enter a tunnel and the windows go black and reflective, I notice people using them as mirrors. They gently touch the corners of their eyes and mouths, move a few strands of hair into their right place and then back, adjust the folds of cloth on their shoulders, before we burst back into the light. Japan is fashionable, but Korea is another level. It reminds me of the first time I went to California and realized I was among The Beautiful People. In Seoul, there are floor length mirrors in the subway stations, just in case the adjustments on the train aren’t enough. In every bathroom men flock to the mirror to flick a little water into their hair, tousle it, take a step back, check out the whole situation, and leave. People on the street look good. Their hair is perfect, their clothes are perfect. It’s intimidating to someone who picks his outfits out of a pile in the bathroom.

Military service is compulsory for all men in South Korea. A friend who grew up in Korea said that when she was younger, in school, her class toured a base. “We couldn’t wear short skirts or anything like that, because it would tempt the soldiers,” she said. Cigarette drag, then, knowingly, “you know, all the guys in South Korea go to boot camp.”

***

My friend Heidi told me that there was a dress code on DMZ (demilitarized zone) tours, so I wear a tie. When we arrive at the USO station at Camp Kim in Seoul at 7:45 on Saturday morning, I am the only person who made that choice. It is a bright, cool autumn morning, and we’ve only slept for a few hours each. We get into a van which takes us to a tour bus in another part of the city.

The trip from Seoul to the DMZ is a little over an hour, mostly along a series of wide rivers fortified with barbed wire and lookouts. Where we are going is to the four-mile-wide zone used for rare diplomatic contact between the two countries. The letters D, M, and Z feel themselves harsh and clinical, and when I tell people about my trip they often confuse these letters with DMV. It’s fitting, in that both places share a quality of processing and management, of human forms moving through clean and unfriendly zones. A zone is not a place. It’s the end of a place, a non-place, the suggestion of a place. In the case of the DMZ, the suggested place is North Korea.

From the bus we see the forms of the soldiers along the fence line, near the river. It looks gray and cold outside. This grim landscape clashes with the atmosphere of the bus, which is comfortable and full of other foreign tourists. Our guide is a woman named Michelle, who is firm and informative.

Going to the DMZ evokes many feelings, but fear isn’t one of them. I have no idea, for example, that the DMZ is such a tourist trap. We stop at a “unification park,” which consists of a parking lot, a large bell, a small amusement park (complete with a swing ride), and a bunch of food stalls. Reunification, the idea that the two Koreas will once again be one, is the buzzword of the trip. It is a seemingly reverent concept but is tossed around on the DMZ tour like any other slogan, the way that “freedom” might be brought up at an NFL game before an American Idol contestant wails the national anthem. Michelle’s impartial remove slips when she mentions “kids learning about reunification or something” on the tours. Or something. Reunification, whatever. Blah, blah, blah.

She goes on, “People speaking the same language should be united,” but explains that the Koreas have not only totally different accents but also, at this point, different dialects. Korean spoken in the South is, like Japanese, peppered with foreign borrowed words, words which have basically been sealed off from the North for decades. She says that the younger generations now have no concept of a single Korea, as people did in the past. Instead it’s two completely separate countries. She says that when Northern spies infiltrate the South, which is often, they must first undergo years of language training in order to blend in.

The next stop on the bus tour is Tunnel Number Three, so named because it is the third tunnel bored from North Korea and discovered by the South, in the seventies. We learn that thirty thousand soldiers could have moved through the tunnel and begun an assault on Seoul. We learn that other undiscovered tunnels must exist. We get helmets and walk through the tunnel, until we encounter a barricade and an illuminated, flooded chamber, beyond which is North Korea. The most stressful portion of this excursion is discovering that we had to pay extra for the tram ride back to the surface.

We watch a video about the tunnel’s discovery. The finale of the video takes a strange turn, to images of wildlife. We are told about the pristine natural beauty of the DMZ, the abundant animal and plant life, to soaring music. The object is propaganda, but I can’t understand what the filmmakers are trying to communicate. In Japan and America we are told to be afraid of North Korea, and yet here we are just miles away from it, watching a video about birds. “There’s a crazy young leader in North Korea,” Michelle says on the bus, but, “if people panic, life cannot go on.”

Heidi makes a telling point: “This is all in English.”

On the bus we make the final approach to the viewing station, a few miles back from the border. There is a wooden cutout of a soldier outside that we can take pictures with. There is a real soldier smiling and taking pictures with tourists. We approach the edge of a balcony which looks over a green valley, and some of the trees are changing color. In the distance we see tiny buildings. Michelle points at one. “From here, do you see the small building on the hill? That is a North Korean guard post.”

There is music screeching. At first I think it’s ambient music for the overlook, but then I realize that its volume is not meant to be enjoyed up close. It’s meant to travel long distances. The South Korean army maintains enormous batteries of speakers from which it blasts K-pop toward North Korea, in an effort to tempt people across the line. I have to raise my arms over a huge crowd of tourists to get a video.

We make out the most famous structure on the North Korean side: a giant flag pole. The North Korean flag on it is twenty-five meters wide, and “on a day with good weather you can see it waving,” according to Michelle. But the weather isn’t good. The valley is choked in a thick haze, allegedly from China (in Japan and apparently Korea, haze is always blamed on China). I think of Kim Jong-Il’s famous directive to “envelop our environment in a dense fog” to confuse and delay foreign powers from discovering anything about the North. Heidi says it looks gross.

Back on the bus, we pass the Camp Greaves Youth Hostel, which used to be an army base but has been converted for overnight tours. Along the road I see a black and white songbird land on a shed. Its tail is long and black and bobs metronomically. It really is a beautiful bird.

***

Back in Seoul, we are staying with a friend at her place in the middle of the city. We spend that evening getting ready in the apartment, over wine and music. The scene is familiar. Her furniture is ratty and splendid. She crimps her hair with something she says will make it look like a mermaid’s, which it does. Sometimes my vision floats out and takes a look at what’s happening. Someone, twenty-five and gay, in Seoul, with his best friend, with a new friend, sprawled on old furniture in an apartment with peeling paint. She passes him eyeliner while she puts on her foundation.

We drift to the gay district, Homo Hill, which is ecstatic. Asia is slow to the uptake on gay rights. Taiwan just legalized gay marriage and the dominoes are going to fall very soon. All gay bars are oases, but in Japan and Korea they are especially so, because they are even more refuges than the ones at home. The smoke machine is on. Through the fog and the pink and blue lights you can see the joy and relief in people’s faces, the joy of being together, dancing together, leaving together. Back in the apartment, we talk about the DMZ, about how strange it was to be there and actually see North Korea. It actually exists. And it couldn’t be any more different than what’s happening here. A strange place to be, I say, looking—

Our friend holds the crimp aside, finishing my sentence: “—at an abyss of misery.”

It’s time to go out, and I can’t stop thinking about where we just were. And this: we barely hear about the twenty-five million people who live in North Korea. People who wake up, say good morning, ride trains, fall in love, have sex, eat, fight, cook, laugh, exist. Or are imprisoned. Tortured. Murdered. It’s horrible. It’s unnatural. And yet what can I do? I can take a tour, which helps no one, to the border. I can take photos of the mountains, the barbed wire, the young soldiers. I can walk to the overlook and hear the K-pop howling into the autumn abyss. Into Hell. And on the balcony all I can do, all there is to do, is look across the valley, look into the fog, look at the not-so-distant buildings and know, it must be so, that someone there is looking back at me.

—Seoul

#seoul #korea #north korea #dmz #gay

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westboast · 7 years ago

Text

The Floods

July 5, 2017.

The rain started in the morning, arriving in bursts from over the mountains. I watched it roll in beyond the classroom windows at my junior high school. The sky was a menacing gray. Before lunch the first sirens went off. Nobody seemed terribly concerned. But in the teachers’ room the weather was on TV, which is never good. The TV, in the teachers’ rooms and the Board of Education staff room, is basically never on, except in the cases of baseball games and dangerous weather.

The rain came violently and hard, but not steadily. After lunch there was a break and I decided to make a run for the Board office in the middle of town. When I left school it was drizzling. In the office the TV was on and the staff milled about nervously, working at their desks for a few minutes before jumping up to see what was happening on the weather. School had been cancelled the day before for a typhoon, which basically missed Hita, but it appeared that as the storm moved north a violent cell on the fringes of the whirl whipped unexpectedly inland. By three o’clock it was pouring steadily and the skies were dark. The first emergency alert jingled on our phones. There are different sounds for different types of weather. For heavy rain it’s a jingle, like a hand running through windchimes. The chimes rang all throughout the office. Outside, a voice spoke over the city PA system, warning of the incoming ooame, big rain. Evacuations began.

The power surged. I stood by the window and watched a gutter that ran by city hall. Hita is criss crossed with irrigation gutters and canals which whisk water to the rice fields throughout the city. This one is about three feet deep, and as the afternoon and the rain wore on it was almost overflowing. Which meant, I knew, that the other channels throughout the city would be nearly overflowing too. If the water didn’t run over, I figured things would be okay. If it did, trouble. Another warning went off on our phones. I had only ever heard the rain warning once before, but today it had gone off three times already.

At about four o’clock the channel by city hall overflowed, and water started gushing into a nearby intersection. I and the other English teachers went home. Another warning sounded on our phones, and more instructions wailed over the PA system. When I got home my neighbors were moving around more than usual. I went inside and waited for something to happen. The rain had let up a little bit since work, so I made dinner and watched TV.

Around six o’clock it started raining harder and more steadily. Summer storms usually have short, hard bursts of rain, but this was different. The rain pounded relentlessly, to the point that there was nowhere for the water to go. On my porch a bag of trash started floating around. The sirens continued blaring and warnings kept coming onto my phone. I opened my windows to watch my neighbors. If they evacuated, I was going with them.

At seven o’clock I looked out the window and saw the tops of umbrellas bobbing around beyond my neighbor’s yard. I grabbed mine and went out to see what was happening. Some of my students watched from their windows. My neighbors were all standing in the middle of the street, watching brown water rise slowly toward our block. In the distance I could see from where. The creek which intersects my neighborhood, Minatomachi, had breached, and water roared over its banks into a nearby park, spilling further into the streets nearby. Nobody said anything for a moment under their umbrellas. One guy just smoked. We looked at each other quietly. A woman nearby hiked up her pants and waded into the water, which, at its deepest, was up to her mid-thigh. I turned around and my other neighbors were suddenly in front of their houses piling up sandbags and boards. I went back inside and started putting everything up on shelves.

I went out thirty minutes later to find the street completely submerged. The rain wouldn’t stop. A rock, pushed by the force of the water, rolled by. A woman across the street waded toward me. Daijoubu? She said. Are you okay? Yes, I said, are you okay? Yes, we’re both okay. Our houses are up high.

In the morning the water was gone but the street was covered in a layer of mud. My block wasn’t damaged, but everything around it sits lower and was completely flooded. Houses, businesses. The smell of mold already filled the streets and got worse as the sun beat down. People moved their belongings, ruined, out of their homes and into the parking lot on our block. A mountain of furniture, vases, electronics, books, records—all destroyed.

At work, everyone had changed into their emergency uniforms, blue jumpsuits emblazoned with Hita City in orange on the backs. We watched TV. There had been landslides in the Ono section of Hita, in the mountains, killing three at least. The neighboring city of Asakura was hit the hardest. We watched NHK video of creeks turned into lethal, roaring rivers, carrying mud and trees, wiping out houses. And people. Over thirty in total.

The army moved in, and from our office we watched its helicopters—and medical helicopters, and news helicopters—flying west toward Ono and Asakura. They were airlifting the whole population of Ono to central Hita and searching for survivors in the wreckage. For the next few days the skies were filled with helicopters. Small news helicopters that zipped around. White medical helicopters that glided against the gray skies. Army helicopters, hulking, green, outfitted with heavy machinery, that leapt up beyond the treeline and plunged into the mountains.

The drama of the floods gave way to the misery of the aftermath. Death was everywhere. It was gray outside, and people’s lives were placed on the street to be picked up by garbage collectors. We heard about people who died, people we knew. The city smelled awful. The sun came out and dried the mud. Then the wind blew it around, a putrid dust. Asakura was the worst. The dust was everywhere, making it hard to see when driving. Empty, destroyed houses, cars moored in mud, humvees in the streets, soldiers in the riverbeds, uprooted, bare trees scattered around, the gashes of mudslides visible in the mountains, volunteers cleaning out buildings, old people hosing off the streets.

The last flood of this magnitude occurred five years ago, flooding a central area of Hita. In response, the river was fortified with levees, which nearly overtopped this time. The power of this year’s flood moving through the riverbed was astonishing. It knocked over the pylons of a train bridge, plunging the tracks into the floodwaters. Now, the track suddenly ends, jutting toward the river. Before the flood, the river itself was scrubby and rocky, with wild grasses growing from the rocks. Cranes swooped down and hid out in the grass to search for fish in the clear water. But the flood took out all the grass and heaped the rocks along the sides of the river. The water turned a murky blue-green.

Soon, though, it cleared up. In time the streets in Hita were clean, and shops were back open. The Prime Minister came. Messages of ganbatte—fight!—poured in from around Japan. People asked each other Were you okay? A few weeks later, the city held its annual Gion festival, a UNESCO-recognized treasure. Teams of men pushed dazzling floats—covered in painted waterfalls, gods, and trees—through the streets. Flute and drum music floated from within them. Thousands of people crowded into the city to see. At night the floats were adorned with lanterns and lined up on a bridge near my house, above the river that flooded. People cheered, drank, held hands, held up their kids to see. Lantern light sparkled in the water below.

—Hita, Oita prefecture, Japan

#japan #hita #asakura #JET Program

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westboast · 7 years ago

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The Strange Weather

Seattle, June, 2016.

Michael called. He said there wasn’t a point. I only had a month left in Seattle. My plane tickets were at home in a cream envelope embossed with the golden words Government of Japan. My hands were submerged in dishwater. Carlos, the cook, brought a pile of scorched pans into the pit. Bits of penne vodka still steamed on them and I scraped them into a clean bowl for myself. A lull in the dinner shift. The servers leaned against the dessert counter. I took out my phone and typed.

Two people can have something, even if it’s only for a month.

He didn’t understand that.

I went out to the dumpsters to smoke and a guy came up to me with a big plastic bag.

I’m a nurse at Swedish. We ran out of gas. Do you have five dollars.

No. I have water though.

He handed me the plastic bag.

Meet me around back in five minutes.

I moved Carlos’s pans aside and filled the bag in the sink. I hauled it, fifteen gallons, out to the back door, where the man waited. He took it away and didn’t say thanks. I went back inside and finished the dishes, mountains of them. It’s quiet in here, Carlos said. If you’re gonna be a dishwasher, you gotta get a radio. His shift was over. I swept the kitchen and pushed all of the dirty water and food scraps toward the drain. When I finished, Carlos was smoking weed by the back door. I said goodbye. At eleven I took the sixty-six bus to Wallingford. I fell asleep on Emma’s bed again. I only worked the dinner shift.

I woke up and wanted a shower. I got in and turned the knob to the right temperature. I’m leaving soon. I washed my hair. I was about to wash my face, but my hands stopped. I’m leaving soon. I couldn’t move them. I was having trouble catching my breath. I wanted to feel something that I knew was real. The shower walls are real, they must be. So I touched them. But it was hot in the shower and I didn’t want to be in it anymore. I got out and crouched down onto the floor. There was a red, shaggy rug. I knew it was real too, so I touched it for a long time. It was rough and damp. I touched it with my hands and forearms and pressed my torso against it until my breathing returned to normal. I put my clothes on and went to the living room. I sat on the couch until I fell asleep.

When I woke up I went to Volunteer Park with Cindy. We brought wine and bread to drink and eat behind the art museum. People walked their dogs and we realized we were having a picnic in a dog park. It didn’t matter. I think it will be peaceful in Japan, I said. I think I’ll just calm down. As weird as everything is right now, I think it’ll calm down just because of how it looks. We put our cigarette butts into the empty wine bottle. I didn’t want to say goodbye to her. Maybe I didn’t want to leave at all. I had my confirmation paperwork with me. I don’t know. Maybe I should just call the consulate and back out. What business do I have in Japan.

No, she said. That would be a mistake.

We went together to the consulate, in a skyscraper downtown. We exited the elevators and a gold chrysanthemum—the imperial seal—was affixed to the wall. A metal detector had appeared that wasn’t there a week before. A rent-a-cop slept next to it. I emptied my pockets but wondered if I actually needed to. The rent-a-cop said something to me but I just smiled and breezed through. I submitted the paperwork. A week later, when I came back, the metal detector and the rent-a-cop were both gone.

I needed a health check, so I went to an urgent care clinic in Queen Anne. I took the E-Line bus down Aurora Avenue and got out near some woods. I climbed through bushes and puddles and emerged, dirty, onto the tidy Queen Anne streets. The clinic was part of a chain that had only one doctor for the whole region—Dr. Fann. She seemed overworked. She measured me on a busted height chart.

Five-ten? Is that right?

According to my driver’s license I’m six-zero.

She erased her measurement and went with the state’s.

Says here you need a colorblindness test.

She googled “colorblindness test” and went with the first result. I’m not an optometrist. At the end of the test, the screen informed me that I was a mild protan, meaning I’m a little bit colorblind. For example, if dark purple and black are beside one another, I can’t tell the difference. She marked the chart. Maybe get that checked out? I don’t know. The screen blinked with an advertisement for color-corrective glasses, made by the same company that made the test.

One month passed. On my last night I went to Cindy’s house with her and Emma. Cindy’s mom made egg rolls. We ate as many as we could and took the rest back to Emma’s place. I put mine in the fridge, as usual. We all slept near each other in the living room, Cindy and I on the floor, Emma on the love seat. In the morning we took the train to the airport. Normally we took the forty-nine bus, but the stop was closed, covered in caution tape. When we arrived at the airport the other teachers were already gathered near the ticket counter. They watched impatiently as I hugged Emma and Cindy. I didn’t want to leave them. I said, I’m going to come back and be a better person. I don’t know why I said that. They both laughed. It couldn’t be delayed anymore. They went down the escalators. I couldn’t look, so I turned around.

The teachers took a photo. When we boarded the plane I stared out the window at the evergreens. I clutched the armrests as we ascended. I saw the Space Needle, and then clouds.

Ten hours later, we landed at Narita International Airport, on the outskirts of Tokyo. Beyond the jet bridge was customs, where immigration officers handed us our Japanese identification. I held the ID, turned it around a few times. I wasn’t smiling in the photo, taken at a drugstore five thousand miles away. My hair was greasy and I hadn’t shaved. Through the airport doors we spilled into a sun-drenched parking lot with masking-tape arrows on the ground. Every twenty feet or so someone stood smiling with a sign and our program’s name—JET—on it.

A fleet of buses. They brought us to Tokyo. The drive was green. It was July and the scenery was bursting. As we approached the city I could see the Sky Tree towering above everything below. The highway curved high above the buildings and was covered with all kinds of unfamiliar markings—blinking lights of different colors in the asphalt, thick white dashes on either side of the lane, Japanese words. We wound through the clean, organized, cavernous streets of Shinjuku and arrived at the front doors of the Keio Plaza Hotel for orientation. It was a grand, golden place where the hundreds of new teachers milled about under the chandeliers, staring at their feet, making small-talk near water fountains. I didn’t talk to most of them. I had been through this sort of thing before, at the beginning of college. I made my friends about a month after that. I don’t remember having seen them at meet-and-greets. Several presenters said that now was the time to network, that these bonds would be the beginning of enduring friendships that would last all throughout our time in Japan—and beyond.

I shared a room with two other Seattle hires. Our room overlooked Tokyo City Hall, a cyberpunk skyscraper emblazoned with Tokyo 2020 posters and topped with blooms of satellite dishes. I took the bed closest to the window. When the other two went to sleep I opened the curtains. In the morning I wanted the light to flow through from beyond City Hall and wake us up. I went outside to smoke but saw no one else doing that. I found a secluded area near the hotel. When I was finished I stamped the cigarette out onto the sidewalk and left it there. I went for a walk. An hour later I circled back, and it had disappeared. I learned that Japan has basically outlawed smoking in the streets. Most buildings had an airtight smoking room inside, choked with smoke, never big enough to be comfortable and never with chairs. At the Keio Plaza, ashtrays stood around the room and a vent overhead sucked out the putrid air in thick curls.

I went to bed. A few hours later, I woke up to loud voices. My roommates were having an argument about one of their snoring. I stared at the window and pretended I hadn’t heard anything, most convincingly when one of them apologized to me the next morning. The lights twinkled on Tokyo City Hall. One of them came over and snapped the curtains shut.

A few days later we were sorted into our prefectural groups. Mine was bound for Oita prefecture, in the south, near the ocean. I was told it would be hot. Everyone went to a reception in the hotel ballroom. All I could think about was The Shining, when Jack Torrance hallucinates the party in the Gold Room.

The plane touched down in Oita. There was ocean to the east and green forever to the west. My new coworkers and supervisors met me at baggage claim. We took a bus toward the interior, through the mountains. We were going to a city called Hita. All I knew about it was that it was a logging town. Oita prefecture is famous for hot springs, onsen in Japanese. We passed the city of Beppu, from which onsen steam rose and smelled of sulfur. We passed through tunnel after tunnel. The ocean was gone and now it was lush, steep mountains. We reached Hita, flat in the basin of the mountains. When the bus doors opened it was sweltering hot. This is the hottest city in Japan, one of my coworkers said. My sunglasses slid down. I pushed them back up the bridge of my nose.

I gave most of the money I had to my supervisor, so she could give it to my landlord. I got to my new apartment and opened all of the windows. The floors were wooden. There was a gas stove. I laid down on the futon that my predecessor had left behind. There were still whispers of him, and his predecessor too, in the house. A mug for Mexican hot chocolate, Japanese-English dictionaries, a rice cooker, dishes, shaving cream, hair clippers, shoes, shoe polish. A bicycle. I looked under the futon and it was covered in mold. That night I slept on it anyway.

The next day I got on the bike. Near my new apartment ran a river with concrete poured along its sides. Dragonflies buzzed and the warm water spilled over the rocks in the bottom. I rode into the basin and parked so I could walk along the rocks. Fishermen in highwater boots stood in the water and cast long lines. An announcement wailed over the city PA system. I didn’t know what it said, but I didn’t see anyone reacting to it. I moved along. The announcements happened periodically. If I didn’t see anyone running, I didn’t either. I think this is how language is acquired.

Hita sunsets are tangerine and pink. As the light fades the mountains turn from green to an ashen blue.

I rode home. I only had a little cash left. I rode to the twenty-four-hour grocery store. I didn’t know where anything was and spent about two hours looking for eggs and bread. I didn’t know what the words for egg or bread were. Even if I did, I couldn’t read any of the signs in the store. I finally found what I needed and rode home in the dark. It stormed later. Almost every night thunder shook the house. It was that loud. Violent summer storms, like in Maryland.

The first storm was the most alarming. I thought for a moment that the walls would fall down. The lightning lit up the bedroom and reminded me of two other storms. The first was in Vermont. I was eating at the co-op—since demolished—in Brattleboro, with my friend Jan. A crack of thunder and a flash of lightning. Every window on a nearby nineteenth-century industrial building turned gold in the light. Jan was from New York City. I wondered if it stormed like that there. The second was in Maryland. My grandmother was driving toward North East. The sky was dark gray, almost black. As the car moved all of the lights around us went out—the supermarket, the traffic lights. A brownout. We looked at each other. She leaned harder on the gas.

I went to work every day and came home. It was hot. That was it. I hadn’t been paid yet. At first I didn’t have internet. I had some Japanese textbooks and I began to study. Every Japanese word can be broken down into several repeating sounds, like Legos. Wa-ta-shi wa e-i-go no se-n-se-i de-su. I am an English teacher. Hi-ta ni su-n-de i-ma-su. I live in Hita. A-ma-to De-bid-do de-su. I’m David Amato. The first step is to learn the sounds and the written Japanese syllabaries, the hiragana and the katakana. I had heard of these, but learning them assumed new urgency when I walked down the street and had no idea what I was seeing.

It was still summer vacation for the students, and the teachers spent long, hot days at the education office in the center of town. From my desk I watched the Japanese flag—the maruhino—flapping outside. We fanned ourselves in the heat. One day on a lunch break we walked to the Ohara shrine, in the middle of town. There were archways (torii), koi, sculptures of elephants and lions, fountains. An enormous staircase led up to the main shrine, made of wood. In its forbidden interior were gold and fruit. Around back were graves and smaller shrines. One was for used butcher knives. The one next to it was for the animals they slaughtered. Around the corner was one for fallen police and fire fighters.

The clouds were dark. My family might say, that’s lookin’ wicked.

Every night, I rode my bike around the city, studying it. Some neighborhoods were old, filled with traditional architecture and gurgling streams which led to rice fields. The word Hita means sun field. Away from the city center were the more commercial areas—box stores, highway on-ramps, pachinko parlors exploding with neon. When I got paid I started going to the conbini at night. A conbini is a convenience store but better. It’s a fluorescent oasis, open twenty-four hours, a godsend in the countryside. It has everything: hot coffee, iced coffee, ice cream, sandwiches, sushi, noodles, juice, hardboiled eggs, candy, chips, glossy magazines, soda, soap and bath salts, manga, clean bathrooms with the good toilet seats—heated, and they play nature sounds when you flush. Cigarettes, wine, shochu, toys, outlets, clothes if you need them.

In Washington, at night, Cindy and I went to the pool at Gold’s Gym in Redmond. She had a membership and would sneak me in. We always went after midnight, when no one was around. They had an Olympic-sized pool. We laid on our backs and floated back and forth until two in the morning.

Classes started up in August. When I arrived for my first day of school I was drenched in sweat from the bike ride. I had my introduction to the teachers written down in my pocket, but I was nervous and bolted for my desk. One of the English teachers introduced me. Kids poked their heads in and out of the teachers’ room. They wore crisp uniforms. White shirts and gray pants for the boys, white shirts with an ascot and gray skirts for the girls. I went to the break room and chugged green tea.

The teacher led me to our classroom. The halls were wide, with hardwood floors. All of the windows were open and a warm breeze filled the halls. There were fresh-cut flowers in vases around the building. We passed the genkan, where the students took off their outdoor shoes and put them into cubbies. We entered the classroom. All eyes turned to me. I was terrified. The wind whipped the curtains. Dark clouds loomed beyond the mountains. The students slid the windows shut.

They rose and bowed. I had pictures with me. I told them about America, my America—the beaches in Maryland, the snow in Vermont, the geysers in Wyoming, the tulip fields in Washington. They told me about Japan, their Japan—the fireworks in summer, the fish in the river, udon and ramen, the shops at Hakata Station in Fukuoka. Their teacher said the students had made notecards about their summer vacations. They made a line and handed them to me one by one. I collected them and flipped through. I stopped on one:

Summer was hot.

Some days, a lot of thunder and lightning in Hita.

The strange weather.

#japan #seattle

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