Three Bodies of Water: Orcas Island

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Three Bodies of Water: Orcas Island

 

By Ellen Graham

 

Cascade Lake

For reasons I don’t quite understand, in June I need to sit and watch Cascade Lake wake up.

Foxglove and monkey flower and one lone red poppy. Breeze and wind and whispers of wind and barely wind and insect wing wind. Goose poop.  Still and hushed and breath holding. Low fog covers the lake. Crows and eagles and towhees and thrush. Sun peeping and warmth and daylight. No humans. The first laps of water. A pause.

Then one blue Ford bumping down the road, radio radio radio. Tires slapping.

An adolescent raven yelling What? What? What? Candy-colored kayaks (lime! cherry! lemon!)  A backpack and a bandanna and bare feet. Early morning arrivals to get the best picnic table. One family, one blanket, one cooler, then two then three then four. Thunk of groceries on the picnic tables. Chit chit of chickadees looking for scraps. Tables covered with soot and juice and beer. Dogs, suddenly, two then three then a pack–barking, throwing their furry selves into the water! Smack! The whirr of a Frisbee. More cars, more doors slamming, more radio.  Adolescent boys screaming What? What? What? Cigarettes dangling from their cherry mouths. Babies staggering like drunks into the shallows. Bleached towels, banana ice cream and coffee. The promise of summer. June.

 

The Salish Sea

We are smelly and we are sweaty and we are happy. We have arrived at North Beach Cottages high above the Salish Sea.  Our annual visit after three days of camping in Moran Park.

The Eagles Nest cottage is a tiny studio. And yes there are many eagles. An eagle carved into the fireplace, an eagle lamp, an eagle rug and an eagle placemat. A carved wooden eagle outside.  Eagle mugs and coasters, eagle salt and pepper shakers, eagle teapots and eagle tea containers. And yet completely charming.

There are rituals. I take out my red hots and my red tissue paper and my red candle. Every year these are placed on the windowsill.  I take the first shower. The smell of the campfire mixes with the steam and the verbena bodywash and with the lavender shampoo. Tiles in aqua and green shaped like seashells. And above me the citron-stained glass of an eagle.

Then the most important ritual. I grab my late mother’s binoculars and l go outside to the insanely big wooden deck to look at the Salish Sea. The Salish never disappoints. If I concentrate the water moves in every direction. Always the same and always different. The water is bluish gray with eggshell edges. I stand with my elbows on the deck railing watching. Brine and creosote and rot. The breeze is soft as if someone is breathing on me. Ducks floating and diving and floating. For the hour my husband takes to shower and shave and organize the fridge the water belongs solely to me. I can hear the prop planes from the tiny airport down the road. I’m wearing the same lemon colored dress I wear every year and that I only wear here. Here and nowhere else. It has a deep plunge in the back that lets in more sun.  A faint smell of geranium from a neglected pot. Scrub jays are demanding dinner and I fling peanuts on the roof. Sunflowers in an aqua bucket. The wood of the deck warms my bare feet. After a long winter of long pants and long sleeves and long raincoats I have forgotten I have skin.

Later we will have cocktails and dinner on the deck, balancing on the two rickety wicker chairs.  And later still we will be here looking at the water. Why look away or go inside? The water is so calm it appears to be glass, as if you could walk all the way to Sucia Island on it. The receding gray of the other islands: Patos and Matia. The chug of a red freighter inching along in the strait. A sunset to break your heart, coral and pink blooming from cerulean.

I grew up in an unpredictable house filled with anger and I live in an increasingly unpredictable world filled with anger. Once a year I need the permanence of the Salish. This is the cup I need to drink from all year long.

Smell the sea again. Smell the wood. The middle of July. Stop time.

 

My Tiny Pond

In my yard on Orcas Island I have a pond. A broken fountain ensures that it stays murky and full of mosquitoes. Circled by droopy ferns and holly berry and dying grass. And a decrepit chain link fence meant to curb the bird carnage wrought by our two cats. In August it is fascinating.

Because something changes every day. Something new yet expected. I have watched this pond three years in a row. I know what’s coming next but it’s still extraordinary. In the world I inhabit logic and science have become enemies of the people.  So I find it reassuring to watch science at work in my pond.

I have to look closely but even through the muck I can see them. Eggs bundled like tapioca.  The miracle of cell division in any egg. Simple and complex.  Unseen by me. They wiggle out of their protective jelly. Then tail fins. Gills.  I sit and I watch. Bloated black tadpoles. Swimming! Barely visible under the umber water.

Tadpoles are a wonder. Is there anything more magical? They gather closely, as a soccer team readying for a scrum. Tails forming. Tails receding. Tiny back legs appear, small as a bud on a tree.   They tuck their legs under, delicately, demure ladies closing their fans. What must it feel like? To suddenly sprout legs? And not just sprout them but know, when the first two appear, to tuck them under so you can still swim? I watch and I watch and I watch. Herons will eat some. Snakes will eat some. Some will eat each other.

The survivors seem to transform overnight. Frogs appear. Awkward in their new bodies like a tween at a dance. Then one day I go to my pond, and they are gone. Overnight they have disappeared into the trees. I can hear them rasping but I don’t see them again.

August miracles from a clouded backyard pond.

 

https://www.redwheelbarrowwriters.com/publications/

 

Moonlight On the Curve Of A Dolphin

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Moonlight On the Curve Of A Dolphin

BY ELLEN GRAHAM

 

I’m sorry that I drank so much I fell and hit the back of my head, cerise blooming on the floor and the bed and the flowery sheets. My nightshirt and the newspaper I slipped on.

I lied to the ER nurse and said I hadn’t been drinking but my sour breath, no time to brush my teeth or put on a bra.

Blood leaking everywhere, so many tiny vessels in the head. I’m sorry I made you late for work and you had to wash my side of the car. You probably wish I’d fallen face down and bashed my face and busted my teeth, my nose, my chin, my eye.

I’m sorry I staggered at the opera, for slurring when I met your parents, for tripping on the stairs.

I’m sorry I can’t remember what we watched last night.

I’m sorry I like that first taste of gin: how it makes me feel like I am looking over the water.

When we lived in St. Pete you’d match me drink for drink, it was our fun time, our cozy time, the time we waded into the Gulf in our underwear and swam during red tide and you said You are on the positive side of crazy and I said Let’s see how long we can float without using our arms and you said You’re nuts and we laughed at all the dead fish floating and I said, look the dolphins are swimming home and we got out and walked around and around and around the strip mall until we were sober then we went to the sushi bar and drank sake and vodka and had to walk home, humidity thick as a wall, smell of tar and palms, I’m sorry you’re not that guy anymore, moonlight on the curve of the dolphin.

Car Hike

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Car Hike

 

BY ELLEN GRAHAM

 

The last time I was in Bozeman there were mountains and I was cold and Cynthia and I ate peyote and experienced Death. We ate malted milk balls but they tasted like pizza. She had a little room with a trunk and wiry-haired dog and played music by Heartsfield and Poco. Her boyfriend—she always picked ones that were dumb—“if he drives a cement truck, well that’s about my speed”—but she was smart, she was a nurse. He worked in a slaughterhouse and once mailed her a bull’s dick and she laughed and laughed. Cynthia could do that. She seemed to walk above life. We grew up together and she taught me about car hikes. She would smoke pot and drive all through the silent stretches of Montana from Bozeman to Butte to Helena to Missoula. She would pull over and watch moose or a meteor shower or the light of the lake. I tried to be like her. I would try to drive through Utah to get as far as Provo—once, even, Wendover—but I turned around. Cynthia is my girlfriend, a “gal” as my dad would say. Not that I love her love her.  Those kinds of things scare me. They talk about our love, our world, and they tell me try it, try it once. But that is not this.

Cynthia picks me up at the airport in her VW bus. The snowy road shows through the floorboards. I know this doctor, says Cynthia, he’s OK. It won’t be hard. I mean it’s not as hard as you think. You spread your legs and it hurts and then it’s over and you eat some cookies and drink some juice. Then, she says, then you and I will go drink peppermint schnapps at the Frontier Lounge and watch the cowboys dance. Is this guy paying half?

Oh yes oh yes. He’d be here if he could, too. But he can’t be.

This of course is a lie. He doesn’t know I’m pregnant. He is ten years younger than me and I wooed him for what seemed like forever. I would watch him play pool. He moved around the pool table like a cat. Everything he wore was tight. We’d go dancing, he and his friends and me. He would do mannerly little dances and I would do my wild lady dances. He asked me if I had heard the latest Drake and I asked if he played with a boy band and his friends laughed. Maybe I shouldn’t be lurching around young men.

We drove to the graveyard later that night. I took off my shirt in my car and drove topless. He looked over from his car and smiled and looked away. We sat on headstones and talked. All I wanted was one real kiss. I had to ask him to kiss me and he did but it was like a grandma kiss and he made a sound like mwaa! I went home and lay in my bed and thought of kissing him—just that—and that put me to sleep like a valium.

Later I gave him coke and advice, because I’m older, and we did it, just once. Weird and wonderful, the way a first time is. I thought we were a good fit, lying next to each other. I haven’t seen him since.

Cynthia wipes her car window where it keeps fogging. Hey, she says, after we leave the Frontier Lounge we will go home and dance to Hugga Hugga Burnin’ Love and I will make my lemon cake and we’ll eat it. I love this old timber road. Boy there is nothing like a few peyote buttons and a car hike to make me feel better. Don’t you think?

I nod but I really don’t feel so good. I am cold through and through and when I look out the car window at the snow I see trees move when they do not. I am experiencing Death all around me and I cannot move.

You know sometimes I eat these buttons and I think: I see I see I see—so what?

Cynthia laughs then I do and soon we laugh so hard we have to pull over and we laugh in her car on the side of the road in the snow until it is silent.

I did try to go to him once. There was a party at his house but he wasn’t there. I waited politely in the kitchen and sliced cheese but he never came.

Look pal, says Cynthia, sometimes it just sucks the grand wazoo being a woman. Sometimes it just does, she says and I nod although I have never really felt so.

At her house I wake up in the night crying and Cynthia climbs out of bed and onto my sleeping bag on the floor. She puts her strong arms around me. I am not like you, I want to say. I get scared and sometimes like this I am scared for everything in the world.  I cannot throw my face back to the sky and forget. I cannot let go to the road. I cannot stand still by myself and watch things.

But I do not say anything and Cynthia holds me and lets me cry and I see nothing in the blackness outside.

In the morning when we go to the clinic I try to be brave. Cynthia says I am. She holds my hand and presses down on my stomach and then she leaves the room. After he’s done the doctor tells me it would have been a girl. I don’t know why he tells me this. But it fills me with such a big emptiness I think it will upend me.

 

https://epiphanyzine.com/features/2025/2/10/car-hike

Canyonlands, A Boy and A Hit of Acid

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Canyonlands, A Boy and A Hit of Acid 

by Ellen Graham

 

I was introduced to Canyonlands at 23 by a boy and a hit of acid.

In the ancient times of 1978 I lived in the Avenues in Salt Lake City. Before cell phones boys would simply come over and knock on your door and you would answer. Greg and his friend Steve come over on a Tuesday night, tell me to meet them in Canyonlands on Thursday morning, pet my cat Benny and leave.

So. It starts when I leave my apartment at 3am, armed with a thermos of coffee, a half a French dip and a bag of mixed nuts from the health food store. Somehow I thought that would be enough. I have on my best overalls. A long sleeve white shirt. Blonde hair to my waist. My best look.  At 5am I get to the tiny town of Monticello and there is light in the sky. I stop to pee and an Appaloosa clatters in front of my car. That happened. I am meeting Greg and going to a place that will change my life. Do you remember being 23? I have known Greg for years and always found myself following him.

We meet in the A campground. His sister Susie, with a katydid turn of the head, sizes me up. She is not pleased.

“Be careful.” she says.

Her friend Morgan has broken her nose and is already in Susie’s car. How can you get hurt in such a beautiful place?

“Morgan slid into a tree” says Susie. She and Greg look at each other and laugh. Just like grade school when kids whisper behind their hands. I’m not included. The secret belongs to them. I don’t know what is funny about this. They share the same straw hair and Mayan cheekbones. She palms something to him.

Do you remember boys at the age of 23? I met Greg at a conservation camp when we were teenagers. The funniest person I’d ever met. Lived to be outdoors. Iconoclast. Everyone wanted to be around his charisma. His magic. I know I did.

“Are you ready?”

He helps me put my pack on, which in those days was like strapping  on railroad ties.

“This is so light-did you just pack a hanky?”

He takes my hand and slips an orange barrel of LSD into it, shiny as candy. I take it. He grins, we begin.

Steve, Greg and Jeff have been camping together since grade school. The way they tell it: they decided to climb to the highest needle they could find. Chasing  a chuckwalla they ran down a canyon and saw the rock that looked like a kitchen table. Behold, the Kitchen. I wonder if this is boy myth. An embellished legend.

 

But an invitation to the Kitchen is the Holy Grail of invitations. The cool desert rat boys would come back from there dusty and tan and tired. Telling tales, laughing secret laughs. Stoner smiles. There is no map to the Kitchen. In order to get there you had to be invited. And until now I wasn’t the cool girl.  I have never been to The Kitchen and I have never dropped acid. In about an hour it will be impossible to tell which is which.

Salmon ridges, flesh colored stone, an azure sky with clouds from a cartoon. I trace my hands on the tiny lines running through the rocks like worm trails. The red rock is a grandmother’s hand, warm and smooth and worn. I watch his sinewy tan calves and smell his sunflower seed skin.

“It’s steep here. Be careful”

My second warning. But he is laughing.

“Do you feel it?” he asks

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be feeling. I want to say “at home” because I do. Feel at home. Which is crazy because I’ve never been here. So I don’t say that.

There are footholds carved into the stone and a steel cable handrail anchored to the rock. I’m amazed I don’t seem to need either. I feel like I’m barefoot. My face hurts from smiling.

The rocks under our feet are uniform, as if it were a man-made sidewalk.  Square stones, the color of bone with scallop edges, snake around the path. Behind us the mesa is a jarhead’s  crewcut, magenta and mud brown.  Down a dry wash with curved pink walls like a mouth. Through a bowl with a lone mountain mahogany. Inside a wind-carved hollow, sun glancing off the whalebone curve of the canyon wall.

“This we named the Searing Desert-can you see the heat waves?”

I can’t, but I tell him I can. So badly do I want to impress him. Remember… 23.

“On the left, the loaf shaped bluff? Camelback. We’re almost at Death Crack. You’ll have to jump that.”

I am timid physically. I don’t like the name of that.

“Richard Nixon rock on your left. Slate Canyon is next-there’s the Abajo Mountains, and over there the Manti La Salle range.”  It is March and the Manti La Salles still have snow. They are so far away but feel so close I think I can count the trees. I don’t mention this.

I feel like I have never been here and I feel like I have always been here. The way the land ripples over the horizon, the way the wind touches my face, the way I smell the acrid sand, the way I feel so small, the way I feel at home. It is already singing in my blood. I look at Greg, I look at this land, I look at this, this, this place and I want to freeze time.

The sidewalk of multicolored stone seems to shift underneath me with each step.

“This is Death Crack, this one we named for one of Porter Rockwell’s advance scouts, LaVar Heber Death.” Then we have to sit down and laugh for a while. I mean, a really long time spent on one side of Death Crack doing nothing but laughing. And, no, I don’t remember why we found that so funny. I drink from his canteen, because it didn’t occur to me to bring water. We finally stand. And here is a strange thing. I sail over Death Crack as though I am flying in slow motion and fast motion at the same time.

We follow the trails by the cookie crumb cryptogrammic soil, past the water pots, past the soft sand, past the curved stone and we are here. The Kitchen.

“I’ve always wanted to have sex in that soil. But it’s delicate.  Be careful you don’t step on it.”

For the next few minutes that is all I can think about.

We put down our packs and he shows me this place.

“You can’t get hurt if you trust it” he says. “Don’t think about it.”

Running after him, skipping from ledge to ledge. I feel the sun and sky and dirt and rock. I can hear a raven but I can’t see it. We are the only people on the planet. I can feel the rotation of the world. Time stops.

“Can we sit?” I need to stop feeling like I’m flying.  He sits by me and holds my hand. His feels like a baseball mitt, hard and soft at the same time. It is glorious and I am delirious. We sit silently. Watching and watching and watching.

“How many hours have we been sitting here?” I ask, and this makes us laugh again. For a long time. Again. And then we begin to walk again. It feels now like time is stretching and this day will be forever. He turns and takes my shoulders. Leans in.

Later we lay naked on the red rocks, their heat fading into our backs.  I look up. The moon rises and glides through the sky as a sailboat glides through the water, lighting the desert floor. The canyon walls rise and rise, from the earth into plateaus, large above me, rising and rising, ancient and familiar.  The rocks glow, coral fading into alabaster fading into citron fading into umber.  I dream and in the dream I am in the Anasazi petroglyphs that pattern the stars and I am in the stars and I am in the scarlet paintbrush and I am in the desert dust and I am naked and I am happy and I am laughing and I am of the canyon and I fall into the earth as I am.

The next morning he is quiet. No smiles today. He has to share his coffee because I didn’t bring any.

“Let’s climb Shiprock. Follow me.”

Shiprock is a massive red rock formation. It looms over and around me, blotting out the familiar Manti La Salle range. The cobalt sky from yesterday is now a pale gunmetal, vast and unforgiving. There are three tiny improbable blooms by my Keds. Claret cup cactus. On the way to the base I keep tripping and falling and tripping again. I can’t get my feet to behave. The land that was so magical yesterday feels hostile this morning.  We are at a steep, menacing incline and I have to crawl. Higher and higher still. I slip and put my face into the sand to stop. It is like an angry horse trying to twitch me off. I slip again, slide, slip, but I can’t get purchase, flailing, I can’t hang on, thrashing, panicking, clawing the air, sand falling into my mouth, my shirt, my eyes. Greg goes below me to make a step for my feet. He is furious. The clouds form above us in a dark military formation. I am tired and i am cold and I am scared. I don’t know if I can move.

Somehow I have failed a girl test. That night we sleep on opposite sides of The Kitchen.

I have to leave the next day. We walk out in silence. He stands away when I open my car door.

“Be careful.” he says. He hugs me. Awkwardly. Chin digging into my shoulder.

What I don’t know is that as I am leaving the parking lot his ex is driving into the parking lot. She is a dancer. I am not.  I lost a boy and a place all in a moment.

I’m sure I’m not the only girl in her 20’s to experience this.

But I never regretted it. I never did drugs again in Southern Utah but I always felt like I did. I discovered Zion, Bryce, Escalante, Capitol Reef and other out of the way places I won’t tell you about.  Sleeping by the Virgin River, hiking the East Rim, seeing spotted skunks in Capitol Reef, being surrounded by rabbits at Grosvenor’s Arch, getting lost in Goblin Valley and not caring, bald eagles circling in Bryce.

 

Though I never returned to the Kitchen, I remember odd things. The way his sister’s shoes looked. The feel of the canvas canteen. The smell of cedar bark. I ache for it, still after all these years. I dream of it.

 

Three Blue Dresses

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Three Blue Dresses

by Ellen Graham

 

Number One  1965

My first blue dress came all the way from DuQuoin, Illinois to Salt Lake City, Utah.  Grandma Lehn lives in DuQuoin and we don’t see her much. She is rich and she is distant. She sends things. The dress is the color of the asters in Mom’s garden. It has silk ribbons, lace, tiny buttons, ruffles, a bow at the neck, puffed sleeves, and starchy petticoats. It is frilly , girly, too tight across the back, stiff-skirted, and puffy.   I hate it. It hurts to put it on and it hurts to take it off. It pinches my chubby belly, just like my Girl Scout uniform. It has a matching plastic headband that is so tight I get a headache. Mom is mad I won’t wear it. Or the rabbit fur muff Grandma sent. I think grade school is hard enough without wearing that on the bus. It is like something a girl in the olden days would wear to skate to school. Mom takes me to the Cottonwood Mall to buy a shift the color of mustard. She tells the saleslady I have broad shoulders and it takes me a while to understand this isn’t a compliment.

Number Two  1985

Because it was a perfect dress, because it was a drop waist silk, because it was a perfect indigo, because it was a sleeveless, because it was scooped back and front, because I was young, because I was perfect then, because you touched my back with your perfect musician fingers, because your eyes were the color of smoke, because your knee pressed against mine, because I could smell the sweet peas, because we were together in the garden, because I saw a perfect full moon behind your perfect naked body, because your hair was thick, because I could hear the crickets, because your skin was perfect, because I can close my eyes and still you’re there, I will always love that dress.

Number Three Right Now

The dress I have on now is the exact milky blue of the Salish Sea when it laps the rocks at the inlet. It is as soft as a moth’s wing. Washed over and over and over again. It feels warm. Comforting. Comes to my knees. Short sleeved. Actually, it is technically a gown. Open in the front. The scalpel needs easy access. As I sit. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting in my blue dress.

https://www.ontherunfiction.com/stories/three-blue-dresses

Baby on a Highway

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How to Clear a Room

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Polygamist Cabin

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Coming Soon…

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Just wait and see…