LANDSCAPE ANXIETY
Image designed by Bryan Castille, 2024.
John Gardner says there are two plots: man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town.
In Ellensburg, I’m doing both.
I took the job because I needed it. I needed something that answered who I was, not a Catholic school that made me feel like I was using up a man’s space, or a woman’s who has chosen not to have children, or a woman’s who had her children and raised them and then went back to work. I was thirty-six and had been mothering for so long—not so long as some, but the years had stretched and I was often alone with them; I was hungry to write and to teach poetry full time. (Also, we needed the money.) I called my job talk “How Can You Not Want Me,” after the opening lines of Melissa Kwasny’s poem “Tobacco,” but also I meant it, and if they didn’t (want me), I’d walk away and do something different, where they did (want me). I was sick of apologizing my way around a toxic workspace. I had, as the youths say, No Fucks Left to Give.
It was April, and windy, the breeze pollen-full, and I ran up the hill to “survey my new domain” the morning of my interview. Below me, the rodeo grounds and the town and the university, its enchanting brick buildings amid the new spring fruit trees, their white blossoms blossoming into the pinked air, and beyond, the windmills and hills, and the snow-crested Cascades beyond that. It was, in short, charming. I ran back to the dorm-style-hotel where they’d lodged me and wrote a poem about some antlers I’d seen poking from a tarp in the back of a truck bed. They were attached to a head, the corpse of an elk, under the tarp. They were on their way to be turned to taxidermy—I know because I asked the man, when he came back to his vehicle, at the truck stop. I thought taxidermy and tumbleweeds and sage and the rising moon the evening before the interview were all signs. This must be my new life. The pollen-air, not the taxidermy. I hoped.
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Sometimes when I’m out walking at night under the full moon, the air smelling of sugar-tart apricots, during “fruit set,” what they call the developmental stage between flower and fruit, and peach blossoms and the crabapple that swells the air in May, I like to steal people’s lilacs from their yards. I walk up, clip the stem just above a new branch-bud, and walk away, my arms bouquet-full. I know this makes me bad; I know my past is showing; I know it makes it seem I would take anything that smelled so sweet.
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Before I take the job, my husband writes to Brigit Pegeen Kelly. This will be the singular most thoughtful gift he ever attempts. He tells her he’d like to purchase a broadside for my new office wall. He tells her she’s my favorite poet. “I’m sorry,” she responds. “I actually don't have any autographed broadsides or posters. (I'm afraid I have succeeded in trying to be invisible most of the time!).”
To be invisible most of the time.
It’s how I felt for sixteen years. But his gesture is kind and almost-knowing. It’s one of the times in my marriage that I felt briefly understood. Then he says, to me, “How sad, to succeed in being invisible.”
And I know he does not understand at all.
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I first learned to love the desert through Byrd Baylor’s book for children, Everybody Needs a Rock. Peter Parnall’s images and Baylor’s words work together to tell us the rules. If you can, she says, go to a mountain made out of nothing but a hundred million small shiny beautiful roundish rocks. But the pictures show a person looking very closely at minute details on a very flat landscape.
It’s similar in The Desert is Theirs, and I’m in Charge of Celebrations. I like the latter because the narrator invents her own holidays—like one for double rainbow day; one for the first day she sees a wolf.
I keep a notebook/and I write the date / and then I write about/ the celebration, it says, right after saying it isn’t lonely, out here, in the deep ravines/ and the hawk nests/ in the cliffs, next to an image of a girl and her pen and the sparse grass, the cactus, the golden rock, and two large prints in the dust.
The landscape in the pictures picks up the myth of the story told so you can’t tell if the myth came from the land or the illustrations in these books came from the myth. I remember my mother reading them to me when I was a girl; I remember feeling like these books understood me, even if the author and illustrator were together in a very different place. Where I was, it was green—ferns, moss, ferns and moss on trees. Too thick to see far. You had to get to the beach or the field if you wanted a view. But the forest and moss were safe. And the creeks chunky and full of rocks.
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My husband doesn’t want to move to the small town (“just at first,” he says, “until we know whether or not you like it. No need to uproot us all for a job, when you can just commute”), so I commute. No one sees me do it. I succeed, for six hours a week, in being invisible. Like the land around me: sage brush and basalt scablands and the invisible hawks and coyotes who call it home.
I spend six hours a week in my car in the high desert, channeled Scablands, and several days a week in a town that’s something between—a wide, wide valley, with a few deciduous trees, surrounded in yellow hills, the mountains and ferns so far away.
It’s a delight, actually. To be invisible for a while, in a different way than how I have been. No one sees me, or needs me, but I see, and feel. Invisible out here, where I’m so exposed.
Things I see, commuting the 180 miles, like half a circle, across yellow land:
A really burly man in a flatbed truck driving down through the gorge with a lily pot next to him. In my head, I tell myself stories of where he’s going: to see his mother on her death bed. To visit his daughter in Montana. To surprise his loved one with something that would truly be a surprise.
Dogs. Hawks on poles and posts. Roadkill. Semis in ditches. Cars in ditches. Many, many patrol cars. The sky zipped to the land. The sky unzipped from the land. The sky gone light slate, like a dull painting. The scabbed lands yellowed, grayed, or all white. The feelings spread thin like cells across a glass plate, to examine under a microscope.
Things I feel on my drive:
Pulse-y.
Drifty.
Alone. Deliciously alone.
The small barn. My barn: at a specific mile post, where I know it’s coming, out there in the middle of all those feelings.
I learn to process things. I have time I haven’t known since childhood, time to feel and think and think and feel and process things. I begin to self-therapize during my drives, to dig out things I probably could have examined for years but never had time. I begin to look at things from my marriage, from recent years. Now I have my three hours each way. It’s like long distance running, but without the physical benefits or the exhaustion. It’s just open space, and open road. Driving it feels like being an early American. Or maybe a man.
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I begin to speak into my phone, taking notes. Later, some make sense, or I make sense of them, and I turn them into essays or poems. Others don’t:
In the middle of the night some of the birds are sleeping. I slept like a bird without your arms, without a nest, without a child. You can’t make a birth plan there is no such thing. You can’t make a life plan either the grasses can’t make a plan in the middle of their lives they are green by the end they are yellow which is more beautiful when the snow falls.
In the rows of wheat that are shapes and spirals—
—the farmer has shaped his own brain—
—he has driven down into the wheat and thought of himself as a mouse—
I don’t mean mouse like rodent the kind your mother screams and hits with the broom I mean the kind Leo Leone meant when he wrote about them and their wall and their colors and their paints and their imagining—
The telephone wires above me the trains to the right/ one yellow truck; I don’t know what my beloveds are doing right now/
Or I listen to writing podcasts, like Kaveh Akbar talking about resiliency and recovery and how his beloved lives in another place than where he lives.
On the way to the town where I have no beloveds, I see two silos; they might be water towers. I know what Hugo would say, full of chorus girls and grain, coarse girls and green, I know what James Wright would say—to tear them down—
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The first quarter I teach a poetry class, and things are going well, and then Trump is elected president, and Lucia Perillo dies, and Leonard Cohen dies, and Brigit Pegeen Kelly dies. I begin to wear black. That winter, away from my family for stretches too long to be away from my family, I become deeply, nearly inconsolably depressed. I dream the world is ending. I wake sweaty and worried my children are dead.
Later that spring, I stop sleeping. I develop an insomnia so intense it becomes an anxiety so intense that it manifests itself creatively and in manic spurts. To manage it, I run.
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For two years I drive back and forth, gathering the landscape in me like a new mother. All those cells that say open, empty, milky, or covered in white.
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Sometimes I take the bus, to ease the drive. Also, to face some of what I’ve been processing during my drive—all the things I never had time to process while getting a degree and teaching and getting another degree and teaching and nursing a baby and working and diapering and working and friending and working and wifing and wifing and wifing and cooking and teaching and writing and feeding
The bus swells like a wound about to open in me: I begin to experience recurring memories of the assault I experienced, on a Greyhound bus, the summer I turned seventeen. I begin to associate things to other things—to have trauma nightmares, some in which my loved ones replace the man, repeat new, un-experienced assaults. It gets worse.
Then I beg my husband to move there so I can stop. I say, it’s tearing me open into something un-fern-like. It’s un-mossing me.
He cannot, will not understand. “Our lives are great like this,” he says. “We love it here.”
I drive back and forth until the end of the academic year. Then I break. I stop functioning.
Luckily, it’s summer, the quarter is over, and I can rest. No one needs to know I am so tired. I can be invisible for a while. No one needs to know.
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I spend large chunks of that summer in a hammock under a tree, watching the leaves. The bees. We planted wood ferns there years ago, and they frond up, knowing.
We eat fruit and attend art happenings. It’s a way to go in public when I’m ready to go in public again.
We take our children to First Friday. One of the exhibits is a mutation show—based on cell growths in the body, it has a physical component, “mostly the colors of a valentine,” says the then-six-year-old, “sounding like a melon in an elevator,” he says. There’s audio of the inside of a body, too—like a heartbeat or moving blood, cycling through the chambers of the heart, ultrasound-ish.
They want to eat the suckers the lady is giving out. You can’t have that, I tell my son. It has Red #40 in it.
“Then I won’t eat it either,” says his sister.
Okay, I say. Just this once. And let’s see how your tummy feels before you get in the car. I don’t want you throwing up on the way home.
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After the mutation show my nine-year-old feels strange. She says the sound reminds her of something familiar she cannot quite remember, so it makes her feel empty.
In the car, I explain how, in the womb, you can hear your mother’s heartbeat. You know where you are, but you don’t. Your cells are floating around everywhere in her body. Your hair feces skin everything floating around, amniotic, then crossing the placenta, making her body a large dragon holding your small dragons.
So you might remember, I say. You might remember hearing my body from the inside.
“That makes sense,” she says. “And it makes me feel better.”
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Driving across the state again, I feel strange. I feel something unfamiliar and something I cannot quite remember. I begin to think about how the landscape has to do with my anxiety. I develop a theory about it, beyond the bifurcated, double-residence life. I think it’s the land out there.
I explain to a friend my theory of landscape anxiety—the drawing close we do when there are no trees. We make people into trees. We huddle, cleave, and cave. We get bunkered.
We seek our tree people, those we would go into the ground with, or fight off the apocalypse, or whatever people do when they have to face the end, and the world is too open. But in Ellensburg, I don’t have a people. So I just work a lot and run a lot and feel a little unhinged.
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When I was a girl, when we lived for a while in the farmhouse on 50 acres, my walls were patterned in crazy quilt paper I covered with posters of animals and pictures of animals from the magazines in the library free bin, hiding the wallpaper that was bright and wild, and once I developed a high fever and believed the animals in my posters were alive. I had figurines, too, everywhere, and I opened my eyes to see all the animals looking at me, furred, prowling. I couldn’t tell if I was prey or part of a pack and who was who and whether I was human. I felt strange and I felt myself become part of the posters and part of the paper. My body pulsed. My fever held for weeks.
It was near this time when puberty began, and in my memory, they happen together. I found when I laid on my stomach, my preferred sleeping position, my nipples hurt—I didn’t yet have breasts, but somehow, I could feel them coming, like dark bruises; I didn’t even do anything fun to make them badges of honor. I hadn’t climbed a dangerous tree or fallen down on a rock. I hadn’t thrown my body against a door to break it down so we could see what was on the other side. Instead, I dreamed boys from my class were drilling me with dodgeballs over and over, to the chest. I had to ask a lion to shred the tough rubber. A herd of impalas to trample their sandwiches, their stupid rich bikes.
When I woke up, I was a different person. I felt like a stranger inside my own body. I had to go back to school.
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In classics like The Odyssey, and Into the Wild, and other famous stories about men, a journey happens over several years, with violent catharses and character revelations, or a stranger comes and changes everything about the townspeople’s lives, creating a paradigm shift, or several. We expect sex and/or love, and something that feels like a monumental arrival. In my story, a woman—raised unconventionally, now parenting two small children, married to a man who doesn’t understand her—drives to another town, lives a solitary life of work and thought, and comes back every week, and nothing visible to the world really changes all at once. Her story is in the quiet, in between. She just keeps going. But she’s different inside from the parts of her she’s heard and seen and laid out on the landscape, and the parts that are like an animal, killed and carved out and stuffed, and then bloomed back alive. She blooms them back. She knows this. No one else does. No one else even notices she died and kept driving. Kept making dinner.
She thinks maybe the best she can do is to document as much as she can in her own voice and see what sings.
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Siri is Australian, and male, so he doesn’t always understand what I’m saying. Either way he’s a computer so he turns what I say into other language like we hope exquisite corpse or a whisper game or some Surrealist parlor tricks might. I say I drove through a blizzard and Siri writes I drove through Bliss. Bliss is actually very far from what I drove through that night it took me twice as long to get from Ellensburg to Spokane, to my children, safely. For a while I am in snow drifts a foot deep, my windshield iced over, my window down, my arm out to scrape off the building chunks so that I can see to keep going.
I pull off an exit ramp that hasn’t been driven on since the storm began; my car barely makes it off onto the shoulder where I click on my flashers and get out, my boots filling with snow from the top in. I’m ready, though. I have a shovel and a sleeping bag in the back. And I’m already a ghost.
I scrape the ice off the windshield wiper and get back on the road. I’ll crawl ten more miles and it will take nearly an hour. I’m almost to the last hill before the city. I see the blue glow coming up through night, follow the blur of the red lights ahead of me, and hope for both of us that they stay on the road.
I’m almost to the end of this week’s journey. I can hear my daughter rosin her violin bow in the warm room with the pinecones and jar of sticks we brought in from the river, smell the soup simmering on the stove, the basil and tomato. The recipe is the one their mom left when she went to work years ago, among those she wrote out so they’d know how to make the things she made. Who was she then? And who is she now?
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The latter, wrote Gardner, is the account of an invasion. It begins when the wanderer’s shadow first darkens the doorway.
Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of out takes/glove box, selected by Eduardo Corral as winner of the New American Poetry Prize; the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts; the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees; and the poetry collection Rust Fish. She is also co- author of Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, and co-editor of the anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses From the Gloomy Northwest. She is Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University and affiliate faculty in the Poetry and Nature Writing Programs for Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA.