I love camping (and also hate it)

Last July, when Meredith and I had known each other only a month, I asked her on the spur of the moment to go camping in Rocky Mountain National Park with me and Mitike.  I didn’t ask, “Do you camp?” or “Do you like camping?”, as I assumed everyone my age loved to crawl into a nylon tent and sleep in the wilderness.  This assumption had been formed by: 1) my sometime blindness to experiences outside my own; 2) the unusually high percentage of time I have spent in a tent in the past 20 years; and 3) the fact that I love camping.

Meredith, on the other hand, had not been camping for ten years.  Meredith doesn’t love camping.  She loves five-star hotels and white sheets, long hot showers, soft supportive mattresses, innovative restaurant food. 

But she was falling in love with me.  “Do you want to camp with us tonight?” I asked, and she said, “Sure!” as if she camped all the time.  She had to drive five hours round-trip to retrieve her dusty camping gear from her parents’ garage, then meet us at the Moraine Park Campground site, working hard to appear nonchalant.  I did wonder why she struggled a little to set up her tent, but otherwise, she fooled me completely. 

A year later, securely in love and engaged, Meredith confessed to me that she really doesn’t love camping that much.  This was just before we were to depart for a four-day camping trip in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in Idaho. 

I responded gently:  It will be fun!  I’ll make it easy.  There are actually showers (true), flush toilets (true), the food will be great (sort of true) and the air mattress is incredibly comfortable (not really true, though it’s better than hard ground).

But I wanted to say:  HOW CAN YOU NOT LOVE CAMPING?

I didn’t grow up camping.  When I was a little girl, we headed west from Iowa to Colorado, where we spent a week in the Rockies in a cozy cabin with electricity and indoor plumbing, then drove back across Nebraska.  Once or twice, my family did camp in the sticky Iowa humidity in a nearby county park, and when I was in 9^th grade, my brave (and young, and also foolish) biology teacher Mr. French took our entire class camping for a night at Wildcat Den State Park.  But I didn’t actually begin to love camping until I was nineteen, working as a camp counselor in the Sangre de Cristos in Colorado.  It was then that I had a revelation:  for free, I could carry my house in a backpack, and live happily in the most pristine wilderness for days and days.  At age 24, I hiked the Colorado Trail from Durango to Copper Mountain, happily living in a tent for four weeks. 

For some reason, this was one of the first pieces of biographical information I chose to share with Meredith’s parents the first time I had dinner at their house.  Her dad’s eyes widened:  “So you didn’t shower for weeks?”  I quickly assured him that I shower regularly now.

But what is it about camping that still enamors me, all these years later?  It’s not easy.  It requires hours of organization and packing and set-up (and unpacking and re-organization).  It’s not always fun, especially when it’s raining, hailing, sleeting, or all of the above.  Even the most gourmet meals get cold, or get bits of dirt or pine needles in them.  Campground camping is a strange mix of solitude and too much company from RV owners, children on bikes, and your own tentmates.  Just one night of a lovely campfire perfumes your hair, skin and clothes for the rest of the camping trip.  After a circuit or two of the campground and a few hours reading a book in the hammock, it’s time to walk around the campground again.  The air mattress is not comfortable, and each morning, your back and neck ache, and your tongue sticks to the roof of your mouth and you get those little yellow crusties in the corners of your eyes.  At most camping sites, you either have to poop into an outhouse pit toilet filled with other people’s excrement or you have to dig a hole and poop like the black bears.  In the morning, making coffee requires warming up your fingers enough to flick on the lighter, which may or may not start the camping stove that may or not have enough fuel.  Add to all this a relatively new understanding of mine about camping:  family camping means no adult privacy ever, since an excited little girl in a purple sleeping bag is rolled up right beside you, with her brown eyes wide open.

Why do I still want to go camping?

Because I love staying up late under the brilliant stars, warming my hands at the campfire.  Because I love cooking on my little propane stove, and I love watching the light fade from the sky through the silhouettes of the pine trees.  Because I love having nothing at all to do in a day but hike and lounge in my hammock with a book.  Because I love being woken by birds and the light filtering through the nylon tent.  Because I love that I have everything I need right there in the wilderness:  kitchen and bedroom and living room.  Because I love making tinfoil dinners and tasting hot coffee on cold mornings and roasting marshmallows late at night.  Because I love the moment my feet get warm in my sleeping bag.  Because I love my daughter’s sense of freedom when we’re camping:  the way she plays in the woods, and feels important that it’s her job to fill the water bottles at the pump.  Because I love the simplicity of camping:  that our devices go dead after a day, that no one can call or text or email us, that we have to mull over a question together instead of look it up quickly on Google, that to-do lists and expectations and obligations cease to matter.  Because I love the quality of conversation that happens between people camping together, when there is time and space to reflect and discuss.  Because, even though a little girl and a dog are sleeping nearby, cuddling with my fiancé in a tent beneath layers of blankets and sleeping bags is sweet, and cold nights are a lovely excuse to cuddle closer.

As I set up our tent in the beautiful woods in the Sawtooths, and Meredith laid out the lunch food on the picnic table, I called over to her, “Isn’t this great?”  I so dearly wanted her to love camping the way I love it that I had hidden my long list of reasons I don’t like it.  She smiled at me across the campsite, a Wheat Thin layered with peppered salami and fresh mozzarella cheese in one hand.  “Yes,” she said, gazing up at our canopy of pine trees, and then over at our tent, “this is a beautiful place.”

One of the many reasons I love Meredith is that she’s open to adventure, even if it’s not what she would have chosen to do on her own.  We finished setting up the camp and then walked down the hill to the white-sand shore of Redfish Lake, where the Sawtooth Mountains rose in an impressive backdrop to the glittering blue water.  Mitike and our dog splashed around, and we lounged on the beach, our backs against an enormous fallen tree.  Later, after a dinner of hot dogs and steamed French green beans, we built a roaring fire and watched the stars emerge.  And still later, we crawled into our bed in the tent, cuddling close.  I closed my eyes and thought about the Milky Way above us, and I thought about how much I love camping.

And then, in the middle of the night, when the temperature had dropped to 35 degrees and my feet and nose were freezing, when my lower back hurt and Mitike was whimpering, “I’m cold, Mommy!” and the dog had curled himself into the smallest ball possible, I whispered into Meredith’s ear, “I actually hate camping, you know.” She burst out laughing, which sounded odd through her chattering teeth.  “You do?”  “Yes.  Let’s get a hotel room, with white sheets and a hot shower and room service.”  Instead, we pulled the blankets and sleeping bags closer around us, draped a sweater over the dog, and cinched TK’s sleeping bag around her head.    

Four days later, when we were actually enjoying hot showers and clean white sheets in a Provo, Utah, La Quinta Hotel, I admitted it again:  “I really don’t know if I love camping.”  Meredith grinned at me.  She’d just listed everything she’d loved about our trip to Idaho:  a hike on a dramatic ridge above the lake, kayaking, campfires, star-gazing, dinner on the beach, a lazy morning with scrambled eggs and coffee, our tree silhouette canopy, the ease of our togetherness and of being unplugged for awhile.  She pulled me into a full hug.  “I love you, you know.  And next time we go to Redfish Lake, we could stay in one of those cute cabins.”

We could, of course.  Almost everything I love about camping could be achieved through the kind of cabin experience I had in my childhood, and everything I dislike would be fixed by a comfortable bed, a flush toilet, a hot shower, and a little heat within four walls.  But.

What if the point of camping is to more fully appreciate a hot shower?  What if the point is to understand how lucky we are to have soft beds and clean sheets, restaurant food, and sweet-smelling hair?  (Meredith says she already appreciated these things). 

What if the point is to be a little uncomfortable, to shake ourselves out of the expected comfort of daily modern life?

Several days after our camping adventure in Idaho, Meredith showed me a little YouTube video advertisement for the Australian-made “Teardrop” camper.  I watched the video three times on my own.  In that dear little tow-along camper, one has a comfortable king-sized bed and a full kitchen. 

“If I had that, I’d never sleep in a tent again,” I said, in awe, and then clapped my hands over my mouth.  I had just betrayed tent-camping!  But maybe – just maybe – I’ve put in enough time on the ground.  Maybe it’s time to transition to something a little more comfortable in the wilderness. 

Maybe. 

Ask me next summer, when enough time has elapsed, and I’ll tell you I can’t wait to unroll the tent and shake out the sleeping bags.  I love camping, I’ll tell you.  It’s one of my favorite things to do.

We are the change we've been waiting for.

A little "art" I created in a Naropa class last week:  Anna
Dickinson, the 19th century Quaker abolitionist and
orator (and lesbian) observing 9-year-old (lesbian) me.

While Facebook friends and my classmates and professors at Naropa's Summer Writing Program celebrated the SCOTUS marriage-equality decision last Friday, I struggled with anger.  What were we celebrating, really?  The Supreme Court's decision that my fiancé and I deserve basic human rights?  I thought about the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education decision, and wondered if African American families felt celebratory or exhausted and angry when it was announced.  Of course my child should get to attend school with your child.  It's about time.  Or the 1919 passing of the 19th Amendment, which enfranchised women in the United States 143 years after Abigail Adams pleaded with her husband John to "remember the ladies" as he helped write the text of the U.S. Constitution.  I've seen the photographs of women celebrating the amendment, victoriously holding their placards aloft.  But surely they felt anger, too.  One hundred and forty-three years?   The fight was painful, vitriolic.  Opponents hurled insults at the suffragettes:  she's really a man, she neglects her children, she's a Sapphist. Many suffragettes did not live to see their dream of the vote realized.  When justice takes so long, how can we forgive the time frame and just celebrate?

I carried these brooding thoughts with me to a table at the Naropa Café, where my poet-friend Val was gesturing for me to join her.  Val is much older than I am:  short gray hair, life-worn, a poet shaman who wears bright scarves, believes her dreams, and talks openly of a difficult past she barely survived.  We're connected because we're both writers and we're both lesbians.

"I can't shake this anger I'm feeling today," I told her.  My bones felt heavy.  I told Val what I'd been thinking about Brown and Abigail and celebrations, and she nodded, agreeing, but I caught the glint of loving amusement in her eyes.  And suddenly, I heard how young I sounded.  I came out as a lesbian at age 28, in 2005, after famous people like Ellen had begun to come out (1997), after the last sodomy law was overturned in Texas (2003), after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage (2004).  I was born eight years after the Stonewall Riots (1969).  And I didn't feel like celebrating?  In the middle of my own sentence, I burst out laughing.

Val grinned.  "The world is changing," she said.  "It's our work to be midwives to all this change.  We've got to celebrate.  It's our work."

It's our work.  I celebrated the rest of the day without hesitation, cheering with all the rest when Anne Waldeman introduced our Friday colloquium with a joyful fist in the air and a "How about that Supreme Court decision?" I checked Facebook more often than usual, and felt only glad to see all the rainbows.  Meredith texted from the World Series of Poker in Vegas:  "Because of the Supreme Court decision today, I've already won!"  Determined to be a midwife for all this change, whenever it arrives, a friend and I toasted Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan and Breyer at dinner that night.  What does anger accomplish?  The change is happening.  People who struggled with police at Stonewall never thought they'd see this day.

This morning, I sit outside on the front porch with my coffee, the sprinklers nourishing the new plants in our garden, and contemplate change in my own life.  In four years, Mitike and I have moved three times:  Juneau to Fort Collins, Fort Collins to Boulder, and now to Denver. Four years ago, Ali died.  Only two years ago, I emerged from living all the time inside grief.  And now, in this past year and a half, as if something in me was finally prepared to midwife good, life-giving change:  I met Meredith, I got a few pieces published, I earned an MFA, I found a good high school English job, and I got engaged.  When the assistant principal at South High asked me why I was moving to Denver, I told her I was moving in with my fiancé, and that she lives just a few miles from the school.  It wasn't long ago that it was dangerous for a teacher to come out to an administrator.  The assistant principal just smiled and said, "Congratulations!  Will the kids have to get used to you having a new last name next year, then?"

This morning, I feel only joy.  Yes, these changes that seem obvious take too long.  Yes, we have a long way to go in this country to craft a safe and equal world for people of all races, backgrounds, sexual orientation, etc.  But this morning, I'm watching the sun glint off the droplets of water on my new yarrow and coneflower plants.  In a year, I'm hoping these plants fill this garden, but they're still new.  They're waiting for the soil to be right for their roots, for the sun and rain to nourish them just enough.  Then they'll grow tall and full.  For now, I'll stand nearby and write, a midwife for all this good change.

Light

Today feels heavy.  Dark clouds hang in the eastern sky, and the prediction is for rain and snow in Boulder over the next two days.  My students have been restless, edgy.  Spring break gave them a taste of freedom, and now they're back in these plastic chairs, trapped for hours in these square rooms, told to open their notebooks, get out their pencils, pay attention, engage now.  I stand in front of them and conduct a fun economics game that most of them seem to enjoy, but I keep drifting to the hours M. and TK and I spent driving through the red dust of the southwest, all that open space in my mind.

Today is heavy because eleven educators were convicted of racketeering in Atlanta and sent to prison.  They look familiar to me:  the stooped shoulders of people who work for too many hours for too little pay.  They've stood in classrooms in front of too many students.  What they did was wrong, of course.  But I recognize them as my colleagues.  And as victims of an enormous system that coerced at least 178 people into cheating.  The science fiction I'm writing doesn't seem too distant, if the testing culture is pushing entire school districts to these extremes.  Educators as criminals.  What's next?  Educators as superfluous?  I thought to look up a piece of satire I published as a 28-year-old grad student ten years ago -- "A Modest Proposal for Our Schools" -- and was shocked to find it's even more relevant today.

Today is heavy because Arkansas wants to pass similar "religious freedom" laws to the ones recently passed in Indiana.  In how many states will I -- and my family -- be declared unwelcome?

Today is heavy because I got the fifth rejection letter I've received in two days.  Yesterday, Room magazine wrote that they "regret to inform me" that they did not want my fiction or my creative non-fiction pieces.  And today, The Orlando Prize emailed that there was too much greatness in the submissions for spring; my essay and my flash fiction were "just not for them".  Fence thanked me for patiently waiting a year for their decision about their 2014 book prize, but I had not been chosen.

Sigh.  M. teases me when I write out "sigh", or when I say the word aloud to accompany the sound.  Thinking about that, and the way her eyes crinkle at the corners when she teases me, makes me smile.  And TK's excitement today about April Fool's made me smile.  And a few future possibilities I'm leaning toward.  And the way it felt to write all day yesterday at a coffee shop, acoustic guitar music in my ears.  And the plain M&Ms my friend Dede thinks to send me every single holiday because she knows they make me happy.  And the memory of Arches, that red-brown rock, the secret silences.  And the fact that it's Thursday tomorrow, and I know my students will love comparing Russian and American Cold War propaganda.  And the fact that I just beat M. at Scrabble.  And my niece and her round cheeks and the way she says "I don' know!", and my baby nephew with his voluminous wild hair and his fascination with his fingers. And my sister's laugh.  And the way TK murmurs in her sleep sometimes, like she did just now.  And my dad's happiness to be out on the trails again, stopping on a bridge to search for an American Dipper.  And the letters my mom and I write each other on Sundays now, like she and Gram used to do. And June, which I've always loved for its possibilities.

Days aren't heavy like they used to be.  I spent almost two years in the darkness, and now it's Easter, all deep plant roots and first crocus blooms and light breaking in, all the pagan fertility and whispered joy.  A light shines in the darkness.  NPR is playing the news about Israel and Palestine, and TK says, "Could you turn that off so we can be happy together?" and I do, because she's right.  I want to be responsible and learn as much as I can about the Iran nuclear negotiations and the ongoing search for fairness in Ferguson, but I also I want to make sure I keep a view of the light.

I'm here.  In Gram's green chair, with a view of the bright yellow happy wooden star that used to hang in a doorway at Gram's house.  My apartment is quiet; I've spent the evening reading The New Yorker; I'm about to write another chapter of my novel.  A sweet, smart, beautiful little girl is sleeping just down the hall.  Tomorrow, M. says, she'll be here after school, and she'll take care of dinner and hug me when I come home.  It might rain all day tomorrow, but we can have warm brownies and ice cream and watch Bette Midler's Hocus Pocus, and Fable the dog will stretch out beside us and close his eyes because his pack is all accounted for.

The message emerging in the science fiction novel I'm writing is this:  connect to humans. Turn off the devices; hold someone's hand; watch the clouds change in the sky. It won't fix everything, but it will make everything a little easier.  A little lighter.

Taking a stand as a teacher

I took twenty-four 7th and 8th graders on a bus to downtown Denver last Wednesday, to the First Unitarian Church, where a man named Arturo Hernandez has claimed sanctuary from the U.S. government and its immigration enforcement arm, ICE.  A local immigration lawyer set up the meeting and accompanied us as a translator of Spanish and of law.  For over an hour, we sat in a circle with Arturo and listened to his story.  We learned why he decided to overstay his tourist visa fifteen years ago, a baby in his wife's arms.  We learned that he's worked to build a contracting business and a good reputation in the community, and that he's done it all because he wants his two teenage daughters to have the opportunities he never had.

He cried as he spoke to us.  Es duro, he said.  It's hard.  But he says he would do it all again if he could.

My students were studying immigration from a variety of perspectives last week -- we visited the Boulder Carnegie Archives to find out about immigration history, we heard a panel of three immigrants who came to Boulder legally (one from Nepal in 1960, one from Japan in 1962, one from Tibet in 1991), we met with the warden of the Aurora ICE Processing Center, and we visited Arturo.  My intention was mainly to get my students to start asking questions and to start thinking more deeply about immigration in this country.

Three of my students were so moved by Arturo's story that they wrote a letter to the editor of the Boulder Daily Camera about it.  Another small group of students composed an email to Representative Jared Polis; a group wrote a heartfelt letter to Arturo; and other groups made PSAs about what they'd learned.  It was an powerful, effective week of teaching and learning.

Or was it?  The vitriol in the online comments on the Daily Camera's site since yesterday's publication of my students' letter have stunned me.  "Horizons staff should be ashamed" and "This is why I don't send my kids to public school."  They criticize our learning as "one-sided" and "propaganda".  One commenter expressed horror that we communicated that breaking the law is okay and that an "illegal alien" deserves sympathy.

At lunch yesterday, those comments still fresh in my mind, I sat at my desk alone for a long moment.  All my students were outside at recess, playing basketball, giggling in small groups, munching from bags of pretzels while their friends performed tricks on the swings.  I listened to them for a moment, and let myself breathe.  My heart was hammering.  Where is the line between exposing students to real injustice and encouraging and inspiring them to take action. . .and objectively presenting both sides?  Had I inappropriately biased my students toward immigration reform?  Isn't my job as a social studies teacher to foster critical thinking and the search for as many perspectives as possible?

A student ducked her head in the door.  "Thanks for today," she said.  "I felt like social studies mattered today."

I smiled at her and she disappeared.  We had spent her class discussing the die-in protests in Boulder over the weekend, working to understand the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, the Grand Jury decisions, and the reasons people are now protesting.  I didn't offer any opinions.  We read articles from The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Fox News, The New York Times, and Ebony.  I let them put together their own thinking about the cases.

At the end of the day, a student's parent stopped by my room to tell me she'd been trying to shield her son from the details of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, though she says she makes sure he "knows his 'isms'".  She seemed resigned when I told her what we'd done in class, sighing at her son's loss of innocence.  Again, I wondered:  what is my job here?  To shield kids from current reality?  The official Colorado state curriculum dictates that we teach about slavery, but we should give kids the impression that all race relations are now fixed?

I don't know.  I've never been good at separating my desire for justice in the world from my social studies teaching.  Howard Zinn is one of my heroes.  Today, we started a study of women's suffrage by looking through the lens of the current protests.  Everything's connected.  There are always more questions than answers.  The textbooks collecting dust beneath my desk only offer an edited version of a story, and not the whole truth, so help us, God.

I think about the people who don't get to choose to think about race or whether they grow up in a neighborhood where they feel safe, and I think about families who have come here seeking a better life (just like my German ancestors did), and I know that balanced objectivity is sometimes overrated in my profession.  I am on a side.  It's the human side.  I'm on the side that asks about the Sand Creek Massacre; the Lawrence, MA, strike; the force-feeding of suffragettes; the Jim Crow laws; nuclear programs; immigration law; Michael Brown.  I will present the primary sources that surround each event, and again and again I will ask my students:  What is just?  What would you have thought/felt in the same situation?

A few years ago, I decided to stop pretending like I didn't have an opinion about gay marriage.  When my students asked, I responded that it was a human rights issue, and that it is wrong to deny any adult the right to marry a person he/she loves.  I refused to speak objectively about it -- about my right as a lesbian -- any longer.

In the past two weeks, as I've led my students into an exploration of the immigration question and of current events, I've again taken a stance on the human side. It's not balanced.  Neither is our world.

The toaster joke.

At our monthly Lesbian HERstory Consciousness-Raising Group (yes, an unwieldly title), a fairly consistent group of 10-12 lesbians gathers to discuss a different lesbian and her life -- her ideas, her work, her influence.  The idea is to find some commonality with these lesbians who lived before us, to find our heritage in a world that still omits truths.  In my social studies class today, I answered a question about GLBT rights in 1800s America by talking about Susan B. Anthony.  "Susan B. Anthony was gay?" an 8th grade student asked, her eyes wide.  I nodded.  "I'm so glad to know that," the student murmured.  That's why we're doing the CR group.

We don't ask easy questions.  In August, our discussions about Adrienne Rich's poetry led us to explore the difficulty of coming out, the political aspects of being lesbian, the idea of compulsory heterosexuality.  In September, Audre Lorde's essays pushed us to consider race and class and the ways in which those categories of identity intersect and clash with sexual orientation.  In October, Virginia Woolf's Orlando challenged us to examine gender roles and assumptions (and even prompted us to discuss the pros and cons of purses for awhile).

Last weekend, at our November meeting, we decided to explore lighter topics by focusing our discussion on Ellen DeGeneres.  We watched the great comedian's stand-up routine from her 1986 appearance on the Johnny Carson show, and we watched the famous "Puppy Episode" from 1997, when Ellen announced she was gay.  Technically, I'm the facilitator/organizer of this group, but as we started to discuss Ellen, I realized how little I actually know about lesbian culture.  I came out in 2005 in Alaska, and I didn't move to the Lower 48 until 2011.  I'm like the German logger in Annie Dillard's novel The Living who worked for a year in a logging camp in Washington, was convinced he'd learned English from the other loggers, and sauntered into a Seattle bar to try it out. . .only to realize he'd learned Finnish in the camp, and could understand no one.

It's not that egregious, though.  I am a woman who loves women, after all, and I've read Jeanette Winterson and Sarah Waters, I've watched The L Word, I know Adrienne Rich's poetry.  But I didn't know the toaster joke until I watched the "Puppy Episode" preparing for the CR group.  I didn't know how many women dislike the word "lesbian" (Ellen told Time magazine in 1997 she hated the word, though she'd begun to get used to it).  I didn't know any of the stereotypes:  that lesbians can fix anything, that they mostly wear pants.  I'd never thought about purses before.  I know my 19th century history, but I'm ignorant of current culture.

And that's why we have this CR group, too.  Where were you in 1997? I asked everyone as the opening prompt on Sunday.  That was the year Ellen came out, of course.  As women took turns sharing their responses around the circle, I felt an increasing anxiety.  Where was I in 1997?  I was 19 years old that April, a college sophomore signing paperwork to study abroad in England for the next year.  I'd just broken up with a boyfriend and the world seemed vast and lonely.  In April 1997, I didn't know anyone who was gay (or I thought I didn't -- now I know I did), and the news about Ellen didn't even reach me.  It would be another eight years before I realized I was gay.

And I'm just learning the toaster joke now.  Does it matter?  I watched Ellen Degeneres talk to the Canadian actress Ellen Page about Page's recent coming-out announcement, and my eyes welled up with tears.  Even in a country that's slowly moving toward acceptance of gay marriage, it's hard to be different.  I'm proud to be who I am, and it's hard.  We need each other.  We need to know our history.  All of it, from Sappho to Susan B. to Audre to Ellen to me to beyond.

Sarah at Boulder Pride Fest tomorrow!

The Boulder Pride Fest is tomorrow!  I'll be in the Literary Tent in Central Park (look for us near Arapahoe and 13th Street) from 11-6 tomorrow -- and I'm reading for five minutes sometime between 3-3:30 pm (probably from my in-progress novel, which is a modernization of Twelfth Night).  I'll be right next to my Naropa MFA classmate and author of the upcoming amazing novel Fig, Sarah Elizabeth Schantz.  Other than promoting my little novella, The Beginning of Us, I plan to make gifts of re-purposed pages of Harlequin romance novels.  Come say hello, get a re-purposed romance page, and support Pride!

On another note, the Lesbian HERstory Group met again last Sunday, this time to read and discuss the ideas and words of Audre Lorde.  Our discussion made me think about power -- where our power as women and as lesbians comes from and can come from.  I've been thinking lately that maybe I diminish my own power when I fail to take care of myself or to honor my own work.  And I've been thinking that the mere existence of this Lesbian HERstory group in Boulder -- and the slowly increasing number of people who read this blog -- have made me feel more powerful, more connected, more capable of becoming what I'm supposed to become.

I think that's what Pride Fest is all about, too.  I'm so honored to be a part of it tomorrow.

The tools I could give my child. . .

Exactly six years ago, on August 22, 2008, I arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, set my duffle bag on a bed and then waited for the moment the shuttle bus would arrive to take us to the Care Center.  My daughter Mitike was there.  My daughter.  The seven other families in the guest house, all white, milled restlessly around the courtyard, the living room with its black leather couches.  Our children were waiting for us.  We'd received the emails, filed the proper paperwork, paid the required legal fees, allowed social workers to interview us and inspect our homes, and we'd waited and waited and waited.  Now, we'd arrived.  Ready.

I've written much elsewhere (see the blog I kept in those first few years) about what it was like to bring Mitike home and to learn to be a mama.  I've also written about skin color and being a white mother raising a little girl with different hair and a different awareness than I might ever understand.

But now that I have a seven-year-old -- a wise seven-year-old who asks poignant questions and notices everything -- the world is getting more complicated.  Mama, why was a teenage boy shot in Ferguson?  Mama, why did Dr. King have to tell people it was wrong to segregate everything?  Wasn't it obvious?  Mommy, why did the American doctor get medicine for ebola but they're not giving it to all the Africans?

I could turn off NPR while we're cooking dinner together.  But we have these important conversations over our soup or our hamburgers.  We talk about the world, and I say I'm not always sure why it is the way it is, but I know people can make it better.  I say this even when I'm not sure.  Even when I'm planning a social studies lesson on the decimation of the Native Americans in the 1800s and thinking about race riots in current-day Missouri.

What do I tell a seven-year-old?  My white privilege makes me blind sometimes.  I feel guilty when I think, thank goodness, she's a girl.  Gender connects us, I say, and we're so similar (we are).  But I forget to celebrate her difference.  I forget she needs that, because I don't always see it.

Two weeks ago, I sat on a couch in a beauty salon on East Colfax in Denver while a Nigerian woman braided Mitike's hair into tiny rows.  Mitike sat on a high black swivel chair beside a woman getting her twisties taken out and a woman getting extensions put in.  The other two hair stylists were from Mali, and they were all switching between English, French, and something else while they worked, commenting on a dramatic Nigerian soap opera on the TV screen beside my couch.  Mitike sat in the swivel chair for four whole hours, and the women doted on her, bringing her into a world I could only peer into.  They mostly ignored me and my New Yorker on the couch, and I was uncomfortable.  Except for the pain of tight braids, Mitike was completely at ease.

Six years.  I've been a single mother for half that time.  Next year, the majority of Mitike's life, she will have had a single lesbian mother, a family of only two.  It's time for me to start pushing us both out into the world a bit more.  It's time to make myself more uncomfortable more often.  More trips to Aurora and the Ethiopian community there, commitment to a heritage camp this summer, maybe a trip to D.C.  I know:  I could relax into her regular little girl concerns:  who her friends are, what she'll wear tomorrow, what she can put into her lunch now that she's making it herself.  I think she'd let me.  But the news on the radio each day challenges us both to do more.  We are not the same, she and I.  In a world still spewing judgment on skin color, my job as a mother is to help her find pride in all that she is.

I've been thinking about how Adrienne Rich said in "Compulsory Heterosexuality" that lesbians, because they live outside of the expected social structure of heterosexual marriage, begin to gain a new perspective on other aspects of life, too.  I do not know how it feels to be the only person of color in my neighborhood and my school every single day.  I do know how it feels to be different, to feel different.  I know I need to find my history.  I know to question those who judge me.  I know to share my pride in who I am with those around me.  These are gifts I can give my child in this seventh year of getting to be her mama.  Maybe, to allude to Audre Lorde, these could become tools she could use to dismantle the master's house. . .

Longs Peak essay in the Flatirons Literary Review

The Flatirons Literary Review published my Longs Peak essay (and my dad's beautiful photo of Longs from Chasm Lake) today.  Here's a link.  Feel free to leave a comment on the site -- they're eager to gain readers!

From "A Woman on Longs Peak"

An excerpt from a much longer essay I submitted to the Flatirons Literary Review today.  I'll post a link to the whole essay if they publish it.  

. . .The sky begins to lighten for an hour before we see the sun.  Now I can see the path switch-backing up through the tundra, the hump of Storm Peak to the right, the craggy triangle of Mount Lady Washington to the left.  Behind us, layers of purple peaks give way to the endless plains, a hazy horizon and clouds just beginning to pink.  The trail rises past the tranquil Peacock Pool and then:  Longs Peak.  I’ve been worrying about whether or not to write the name with its apostrophe, but now I see the mountain and know names matter not at all.  This mountain -- the cut granite of the diamond face, the rock formation we call the Beaver, the deceptively tranquil snowfield we call the Dove – has been uplifted, eroded, scoured by wind and weather for millions of years.  Any name a human gives it is a passing whisper.  I stand still in the trail and gaze up at the mountain.  Words are dust here.

The sun rises.  At this elevation, it is a sudden event, the world progressively lighter until There! the sun appears fuscia between two eastern peaks, and then rises with surprising speed, turning golden, warming the world.  Normally, I’d watch, but I only have eyes for Longs Peak.  The diamond face catches fire, turns golden.  Hardy columbine and yellow arnica nod in the wind, and wisps of gilded cloud move across the rounded top of the peak.  We hike onward, our eyes on the great rounded summit.  It is not holy, because holy is what people make things.  It just is, and we are here, and I am grateful.  Grateful even though I cannot feel my fingers in my thick gloves, even though my four layers of fleece and my windbreaker do not keep out the chill wind, even though we have hiked only half of our journey to the summit.

*

Many sources, including the popular book Longs Peak:  a Rocky Mountain Chronicle, by Stephen Trimble, claim that a woman named Anna Dickinson was the first to summit Longs when she stepped onto the summit in mid-September of 1873.  However, although Dickinson was only the third woman to successfully climb the peak (the Boulder County News reported a Miss Bartlett summited a few weeks after Addie Alexander), she was the most famous.  In 1873, the 31-year-old Dickinson was a well-known orator who had been an instrumental abolitionist and now was actively involved in the women’s movement.  She was also what we would call today a lesbian.  Through her study of their correspondence, historian Lillian Faderman documents Dickinson’s close, intimate relationship with Susan B. Anthony, as well as with other women.  This isn’t relevant to Dickinson’s ascent up Longs except that it is nearly always omitted from biographical accounts of her.  One thinks about many things in the long ascent of Longs.  It’s possible Dickinson was thinking about Anthony’s latest letter, her expressed wish to “snuggle. . .closer than ever,” her cheeky assertion that her bed was “big enough and good enough to take” Anna in (Faderman 26). 

Dickinson had already summited Pikes Peak, Mount Lincoln, Grays Peak, and Mount Elbert.  She’d ridden up these other 14ers on horseback or burro, and she’d rolled boulders from the top of Elbert just to delight in watching them fall.  She was a passionate mountain climber who had climbed New Hampshire’s Mount Washington over twenty-eight times.  Longs Peak would be another peak to add to her list, and, since she was with the famous Hayden survey party, she hoped the climb would help her career, which was floundering.

In The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies, Janet Robertson describes the morning of Dickinson’s ascent:  the party had a large breakfast at 4 a.m. on September 13 at their campsite in what is now known as Jim’s Grove, then rode up toward the Boulderfield.  To cries of scandal later when it was reported in the Boulder County News, Dickinson wore trousers.  Even more scandalous, she split the trousers on her descent.

*

I’ve climbed this mountain before.  When I was 14, my dad took me to the summit on a cloudless July day.  I remember my lungs ached, and that I didn’t want him to know I was tired.  I wore cut-off jean shorts, a red cotton sweatshirt, pink and turquoise hiking boots.  It was 1991.  We tried again four years later, when I was 18, but sleet that coated the rocks in the Boulderfield with ice turned us back.  Today, I’m thirty-seven, hiking the mountain with two of my cousins, both of whom first summited as teenagers, too.  It was the required rite of passage in our family.

Just below the Keyhole, the eponymous gap in the rock ridge at the top of the Boulderfield, the wind increases, the temperature drops.  Ominous grey clouds speed through the Keyhole and swirl across the Diamond face, then obscure it, then obscure everything.  My fingers ache because I’ve ripped open a package of hand-warmers and inserted them into my gloves, and my face is numb.  My cousin Anthony is wearing shorts, and my cousin Johanna has wrapped herself in all the clothes she’s brought.  The three of us look at each other.  We’ve all summited before, but we’ve also all turned back before.  This mountain creates its own weather, and it’s serious.  Dangerous.  When Anthony, who is 6’5”, climbs to the Keyhole to peer over the other side, the wind unbalances him.

We huddle in the stone hut just below the Keyhole.  The hut is a memorial to the climber Agnes Vaille, who died after a successful winter ascent of the East Face went awry in January 1925.  Ten hikers are already crammed into the tiny hut.  One of them is a shivering little boy of nine.  I close my eyes and think of the black and white photo I’ve seen of Agnes Vaille.  She wears a long, dark, loose dress, and she’s tied up her hair.  She’s leaning back with one hand on a boulder, the other on her lap.  She wears wire spectacles, but she looks young, and her neck is slender and lovely.  I love the way she looks not at the camera but into the distance, a half-smile on her lips.  She was in the Red Cross in France in WWI. 

When the rescue party found Vaille after her climbing partner, Walter Kiener, stumbled down the mountain for help, the extreme conditions – temperatures they recorded at 50 degrees below zero, 100 mile-per-hour winds – she had already died of fatigue and hypothermia.  One of the rescue party members also died.  Kiener lost fingers and toes to frostbite. 

Today, it is August 6.  The temperature outside is probably forty degrees, but inside the hut, we are all waiting for the mountain, knowing enough to respect its warnings.  It could clear, a man in bright orange yells from his perch at the Keyhole.  He waves a cellphone.  I got a signal for a moment, and the radar showed the front is moving through!  But cloud has obscured the Boulderfield below us, and we’re cold.  The nine-year-old’s teeth are chattering.  With every gust of wind, the windows in the tiny hut built for Agnes Vaille rattle.

*

Janet Robertson writes of Anna Dickinson in her later life:  “Although she had many suitors, she spurned them all and chose to remain single.”  Lillian Faderman documents the kind of single life Dickinson lived, in letters like this one she wrote to Susan B. Anthony:  “[I long] to hold your hand in mine, to hear your voice, in a word, I want you – I can’t have you?  Well, I will at least put down a little fragment of my foolish self and send it to look up at you” (26).

Whether her successful ascent of Longs on September 13, 1873, mattered to Dickinson is difficult to know.  In the autobiography she wrote several years later, she barely mentioned the ascent, since she had more to say about the part she’d played in American politics and in the social movements of her time.  Longs Peak was one more mountain she had climbed.  Her companions on Longs probably named Mount Lady Washington in her honor, giving her that nickname because of her love for the New Hampshire peak, but it’s difficult to discern whether Longs meant something special to Dickinson in the way it did to others.

Nine years later, in 1882, Dickinson performed as Hamlet on Broadway.  This is unrelated to her ascent of Longs Peak, except for the courage it took to do both.  And except that she was ridiculed for wearing trousers in both.   In 1891, her sister Susan had her incarcerated at the Danville State Hospital for the Insane.  Some sources say she was paranoid, some say she was alcoholic, some say she was wrongly accused.  When she emerged, she sued for her reputation and won, but then lived the last forty years of her life in quiet obscurity, unknown. 

*

I re-name the triangular Mt. Lady Washington Anna Peak.  In the Agnes Vaille Hut, Johanna shivers and says we need to make a decision, now.  Up or down.  I run up to the Keyhole edge and find clearing clouds.  The wind has lessened.  I suggest we go on, and so we do.

The route from the Keyhole to the summit of Longs is marked by bright yellow painted circles enclosed with red, the bullseyes hikers call the Fried Egg Trail.  It’s more perilous than I remember from twenty-three years ago, but the wind has calmed to a breeze and the sun emerges sometimes from the clouds to warm us.  The steep, slick granite western side of the great mountain drops 2,000 feet to turquoise alpine lakes.  On the other side of the deep canyon, jagged peaks snag the clouds as far west as I can see.  Two years ago, I hiked to the top of the gentle green Mount Audubon, just across the canyon, and I shuddered to see the vertiginous sides of Longs Peak.  I swore I never needed to climb it again, but here I am.

The fried eggs lead us along narrow ledges.  If we slipped, we’d die.  In June this summer, a Fort Collins man fell to his death from the Trough.  Last August, a Missouri man died falling from the Narrows.  The risk is real. The climbers with their ropes and helmets might be safer. . .

The question of woman (and lesbian).

I want to keep the discussion we ten lesbians held this afternoon at Boulder's new Lesbian HERstory C.R. group private, so I'll just share this general observation:  a lesbian-only space contains a different energy, its own power, its own cocoon of safety.  Except for Indigo Girls concerts and bars like Seattle's Wild Rose, I've never actually been in a lesbian-only space until today, and I still feel emotional about the experience.  In the past three years, I've been lonely so much of the time, and today I felt entirely connected.  Heard.  Understood.

My brother-in-law, who, other than my former husband, is the kindest man I know, asked me a couple of weeks ago why I wanted to organize a lesbian-only event.  I stuttered through an inadequate answer.  Tonight, I can explain clearly:  because even in a world that increases its acceptance of lesbians every day, we need space to be with just each other.  We breathe differently there.

Insisting on lesbian-only or women-only space hasn't always been a popular approach, as I've just read in Michelle Goldberg's essay "What is a Woman?" in this week's New Yorker (August 4, 2014).  Goldberg's summary and analysis of the battle that has raged since the 1970s between radical feminists and transgendered male-to-female people includes decades of challenge to women-only space.  Goldberg focuses on the Michigan Womyn's Fest, which has been severely criticized by the transgendered community because it admits only "womyn-born womyn".  Musical groups like the Indigo Girls have announced boycotts of the event until it becomes trans-inclusive.  Women (womyn) on the other side of the debate have argued they simply need a women-only space for awhile, to feel safe and unencumbered by societal oppression.  The trans community has reacted with anger to that, saying it implies trans male-to-female people are unsafe.  Consider, too:  in the summer of 2010, some of the people at the protest camp Camp Trans committed acts of vandalism that included the spray-painting of a six-foot penis and the words "Real Women Have Dicks" on the side of a kitchen tent (Goldberg 28).  That kind of violence is of a specific kind, and it is counter to what the majority of male-to-female people argue they want:  inclusion into the safety of women-only places.

In the weeks before today's C.R. group (and before I read Goldberg's article), two trans male-to-female people emailed me to ask if they could sign up for the lesbian HERstory group.  My answer:  yes!  If they identity as lesbians, they're welcome in the group.  To say otherwise -- to say, as some radical feminists do (Goldberg mentions Sheila Jeffrey), that a person who is biologically male still benefits from our society's male privilege and so cannot participate in meaningful feminist dialogue -- is to imitate what has so often been done to us as lesbians.  I think trans people in lesbian spaces deepen the kinds of conversation we can have.  Return to what Monique Wittig said in the early 1980s:  "I am not a woman, I am a lesbian."  If someone genuinely identifies as lesbian, we must open our arms and pull them in.  If we do not, we'll repeat the 1950s rejection of the butch lesbian, the 1960s separation from working women and women of color.

But what if a man emailed me to ask if he could join our lesbian-only group?  Our space today would have felt entirely different.  We wouldn't have talked the way we did.  In an era in which we are encouraged to include everyone so we offend no one, we lesbians still desperately need spaces where we can just be with other lesbians -- not with the bar scene pressure to date, but with a C.R. group ability to comfort, inspire and empower.

In "21 Love Poems," Adrienne Rich wrote, "No one has imagined us."  No one, that is, but each other.  I can think of no better reason to gather, just for awhile, in the same room with each other.

Writers every lesbian should read (a list).

I don't know why I've listed lesbian movies on this blog and not lesbian poetry, lesbian essays, lesbian novels.  I'll remedy that here with a list. . . please comment to add the ones I've forgotten!

Writers every lesbian should read (an incomplete list):

HERstory

Lillian Faderman (especially Surpassing the Love of Men, To Believe in Women, and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers)

The journal Sinister Wisdom (every lesbian should subscribe!)

Essayists

Rebecca Brown (especially Gifts of the Body and American Romances)

Audre Lorde (especially The Uses of the Erotic)

Adrienne Rich (especially On Lies, Secrets and Silence)

Minnie Bruce Pratt (Rebellion:  Essays 1980-1991)

Mab Segrest (My Mama's Dead Squirrel:  Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture)

Barrie Jean Borich (My Lesbian Husband:  Essays)

Dorothy Allison (Skin:  Talking about Sex, Class and Literature)

Joan Nestle (A Restricted Country)

Sarah Schulman (My American History:  Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years)

Novelists

Jeanette Winterson (especially Written on the Body, The Passion, The Powerbook, Stone Gods, Gut Symmetries)

Aimee and Jaguar, by Erica Fisher

Sarah Waters (especially Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith)

Virginia Woolf (especially Orlando)

Shamim Sarif (especially The World Unseen and all the movies she makes)

Rebecca Brown (especially Terrible Girls and Annie Oakley's Girl)

Classics you should probably read

Patience and Sarah, by Isabel Miller

The Price of Salt, by Patricia Highsmith

The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall (had to list it)

Rubyfruit Jungle, by Rita Mae Brown

Annie on my Mind, by Nancy Garden

lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s (it's so entertaining)

correspondence between lesbians from history

YA books

If You Could Be Mine, by Sara Farizan

Tea, by Stacey D'Erasmo

Kissing Kate, by Lauren Myracle

The Beginning of Us, by Sarah Brooks

Memoirs

Why Be Happy When You Can't Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison

Zami, by Audre Lorde

Stone Butch Blues, by Leslie Feinberg

Poets

Adrienne Rich

Audre Lorde

Mary Oliver

Eileen Myles

June Jordan

Margaret Randall

Marilyn Hacker

Akeilah Oliver

Robin Becker

Olga Broumas

Judy Grahn

Emily Dickinson (?)

Starting a HERstory CR group in Boulder. . .

I've started a MeetUp.com group:  "Lesbian HERstory C.R. Group".  We meet in Boulder at the Meadows Branch Library on Sunday, August 3, for the first time.  Thirty lesbians have joined the MeetUp and fifteen have RSVPed for the August 3 meeting.  What are we planning to do?  In the 1960s and 70s, women held "consciousness-raising" groups, or "CR" groups, in which they gathered in a circle to discuss various issues in a safe space and to build community together.  I've only recently learned about CR groups from the most recent issue of Sinister Wisdom.  In the 1970s, I was a zygote and then I was a baby.  However, the more I've researched and read, the more I've realized that lesbians (and possibly all women) need to revive the CR group model.  We talk about GLBT marriage and Pride parades, but we don't hold consistent space for ourselves to discuss other topics, like our history (or our "HERstory"), our relationships, our art, our identity and power as lesbians.  Thus, my MeetUp group.

I'm nervous.  I'm a little surprised that fifteen lesbians have signed up for the group, and I'm excited.  In my imagination, we create a group that meets monthly and that becomes a source of power for each other and for other lesbians.  I think it's possible.  To begin, I plan to talk about Adrienne Rich and to read "Song" and "Diving into the Wreck".  Then we'll talk.  What can happen in a circle of women who meet to share stories and investigate what history has erased or forgotten?  Maybe quite a bit. . .

Song
by Adrienne Rich

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawn's first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

Reaching for the Moon

I just watched the film "Reaching for the Moon" (2013), an important and beautifully constructed story about the poet Elizabeth Bishop and her fifteen-year relationship with the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares.  I'm still overcome by the tragedy (and complex sweetness) of the story.  Maybe Ms. Bishop's words are the only appropriate ones:

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)