Dead Letter Department #38

(did you miss Dead Letter Department #37? read about garage sales & depleted reservoirs here!)

weather report

The night before I left the rental house in Rockaway, we made a fire on the beach. The wind had picked up tremendously, carrying gusts of fine sand in front of it as it hurried along, but some other enterprising beach-goer had conveniently dug something between a giant hole & a small pit so we arranged ourselves in there—twists of paper, the wood my friend had thrown down to the beach from above, & the makings for s'mores. It wasn’t quite pleasant enough for anyone else to want to stay out long, so after exactly the right amount of marshmallows & chocolate, they went sensibly inside & I stayed by myself for a long time, watching the coals burn down & the stars start to push through the blackness.

Every time I’m at the coast, I think, god, sunset & sunrise really are a bloody miracle, I should make more of an effort to appreciate the daily beauty of them, & then I absolutely do no such thing. But I did that night, watching the orange glow of other fires down along the curve of the beach, the occasional bobbing flashlights right along the waterline, little trios of night explorers, and mostly the great rushing of the sea, barely visible in the fading light. I made wishes, which I hadn’t done in some time, the bone deep, embarrassingly sincere kind you can’t tell anyone because then they won’t come true.

I should have looked at the map before I set off the next afternoon, but it was a day earlier than I’d expected so I didn’t have enough time to marshal my emotions & take leave of my friend. It’s always a pretty near miss in terms of weeping & rending of garments when we have to say goodbye because she lives nearly as far away as you can get from me while still clinging to the continental US & the plague has completely eradicated what was a pretty good visitation schedule in the years Before. All of which is to say I sort of blindly squidged my fingers around the screen until I had my destination entered & set off without reviewing the route, or filling up the car with gas, which means I was almost immediately in that somewhat tricky rural territory of trying to do the math of Gender Appearance Today + Visible Queerness x Miles Left divided by Danger (i.e., how conservative the various little towns I was passing through seemed to be).

They were very conservative. I did not get gas, & I also did not drink any water because I didn’t want to have to stop.

Fortunately, it was gorgeous, & because we had been lucky enough to be at the coast in the middle of the work week, the roads were very nearly empty. I passed through Hamlet & Mishawaka, Jewell & Vesper & the enticingly named Mist, deserted churches with chained shut doors standing in great swathes of clear cut forest, & idyllic farms tucked between tremendous green outcroppings like secret destinations. I crossed & recrossed the Nehalem River so many times it was starting to feel like a kind of ritual or esoteric geographical prank. I thought perhaps eventually the route would spit me out at the source of the river & I’d have to come up with some kind of appropriate sacrifice on the spot. I could only hope the river spirit appreciated beef jerky or colored pencils, both of which I had in abundance.

The speed limit shifts rapidly, little streaks of straightaways (a pleasant 55) suddenly transforming into whipping curves (all the way down to 25) as you pass through the state forests (Tillamook & then Clatsop, if you’re following along on the map), as you start to pass up and over the Coast Range. I listened to the new Beyonce, & Fiona Apple, & FKA Twigs, & also the entire end run of Glynn Washington’s Heaven’s Gate podcast. I thought about divas & cults & necessary isolation & what we end up believing in because we have to believe in something.

I didn’t turn the AC on—I kept thinking I’d be getting onto a faster highway soon & would need to roll the windows up (did I look at the map? again, no), plus I was still worried about the gas situation & had some vague memory that air conditioning uses more gas, although I couldn’t have told you how much. The only food in the front seat was beef jerky (sorry, river spirit) & Combos, so I was rolling along in the 95 degree heat eating, essentially, salt. By the time I got to Longview, with that ecstatically expansive view of the Columbia, I had entered into a bit of an altered state. That bridge over the river is enough to put you there anyway—the scale of it, like all the other rivers have just been playing at being a river, & this one has mastered the form—but in a state of a mild dehydration, it definitely put me over the edge.

That stretch of I-5 feels like my territory, so I was happy to merge into the unceasing stream of traffic, & lucky enough to hit the express lanes while they were running north, which I always love. It’s like driving your little car right through an enormous cement zipper, down into the guts of the city, an adult’s version of a secret passageway. It feels lucky to go anywhere these days, let alone three shining gold coin days on the beach, lucky to see my friends in person instead of through a screen.

August has always felt like one of the year’s crests to me—partially that’s the old  schedule that my brain ran on for all of my schooling years, but it’s also when the summer’s edge begins to appear, when the days start to shorten enough to notice. Fall’s not here yet, but you can feel her waiting in the wings, brushing off her raincoat. I am resolved to make the most of the rest of the season, although as yet my only specific goal is to heave myself bodily into the lake a couple of more times, & possibly eat some ice cream.

one good thing

I got a postcard from a lovely Dead Letter Department reader & family friend that was mailed from PARIS & my entire day felt significantly more exciting after just glancing at that airmail stamp on the back.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may you have the right offerings for whatever gods you encounter.