oregon

Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey

/ wrightjessie / Leave a comment

Oregon
Suggested by: Goodreads
Traveled: June 4-23

I am coming up gasping for air, choking and gurgling, and at the same time feel myself floating on my back as water streams gently over my ears. That’s how it feels to finish reading Sometimes a Great Notion. I feel as though something enormous has just crashed down around my shoulders, but instead of thundering, I hear only empty calm. If you could inhabit that split second between a faucet plunging water into a filling bathtub, and the stillness and delicate drips that happen right after it’s turned off, that’s where you’d find me. (Or, perhaps more appropriately, the moment just after a mighty tree is felled to the ground… but I’ll stick to metaphors within my personal experience).

First off, this is a fantastic piece of writing. I wholeheartedly recommend this beast of a novel, and have been doing so to anyone who will listen during the last three weeks it has taken me to read it. Things have gone more quickly on previous road trip stops, but I had to take time with Kesey’s creation. As Charles Bowden describes the Oregon landscape in the book’s introduction, “everything is damp, lush and threatened.” This is richly descriptive not only of the setting Kesey has dreamed up, but even more so of his prose. He has woven a story with characters teeming with depth and weeds; I couldn’t help but stop and relish the smell and feel of them.

I’ve just spent three weeks in a fictional town called Wakonda, where the logging union is on strike, and the enormous Stamper family of stubborn characters continues to cut trees under a non-unionized contract. The town is roiling, the winter rains are coming, and the youngest Stamper son has returned after years back East, ready for love or revenge, or whatever can pull him out of a debilitating identity crisis.

There were moments while reading Sometimes a Great Notion when I felt like I was going crazy. The narrative style is that of weaving together first person accounts that change from one phrase to the next. Interior thoughts and spoken conversation sidle against one another for space in a sentence. I found myself slipping into a strange, halting speak-think rhythm, getting glimpses of the static that goes on in other people’s heads. Kesey makes an omelet of the book, scrambling everything to create a story that belongs together. My feeling of madness only helped me more meaningfully encounter this story of people and what they do when they’ve reached the edges and can go no further.

Read this book. Get caught up in the madness with me. And when it feels like it has gotten too loud for you to handle, Kesey will throw you a line or a moment or a corner of a moment that will settle you back into the resignation of floating.

 

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

/ wrightjessie / Leave a comment

California-Oregon-Washington
Suggested by: Natalie
Traveled: May 18-20

I had a drink after work last week with a new friend of mine. It was at an upscale cocktail bar with an “Old Western” atmosphere, the type of place where the bartenders pour you $15 shots of whiskey from behind handlebar mustaches and period-style suspenders. Somewhere in the middle of my second “Punch Drunk Buck,” my friend and I started talking about daydreams we like to have, the happy places we like to visit when things get stressful. I told him my favorite: I don’t even have to go into that much detail for you, because it’s essentially the plot of Cast Away. It is overwhelmingly tantalizing to me to be marooned alone on a desert island, charged only with the act of survival. I’d get to clear away the bullshit significance of emails to answer and flowers to plant, and just straight up succeed every day by finding new ways not to die.

Clearly, we were not good enough friends yet for this.

“3 years??” my friend choked on his drink. “That’s your ideal??” 

“Well, yeah,” I reasoned. “The first couple of months would be terrible, because I’d be figuring things out and starving and thirsty and thinking I’d be rescued. I want at least a couple years to get the hang of basic stuff, and then enjoy the daily victories of being alive.”

“I guess so,” he said, eyeing me skeptically. He didn’t get it at all.

Only a few days later, I opened Wild for the first time, and immediately found someone who does. Cheryl Strayed, in her compelling account of her journey hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone and generally completely unprepared, has an amazing story. With her life basically falling apart, completely off course, she decides to hike from Southern California to the Oregon-Washington border. Alone. 26 years old. And, oh yeah, she has never backpacked  before in her life. Somewhere in her, she knows that a journey of physical struggles and solitude will pull her out of the spiral she is in. She will be reborn. And she is! In between her toenails falling off and the rain-soaked days of trudging over rocks and bramble, she becomes firmly and gloriously rooted back into life.

Now, I’m about as far away as you can get from being a hippie. But dammit if there wasn’t something seriously soul-stirring, seriously compelling, seriously instinctual about a return to the wild. Where communing with nature doesn’t just mean a stroll in the park, but a down and dirty, desperate, raw, simple relationship with the world. Where you cannot help but recognize the beauty and pain around you and rediscover its reflection in yourself. Where the aches of your soul can be healed by new aches in your back, and the answers to some of your hardest questions are found as long as you take just one more step.

Cheryl reminded me that I am a creature. That I have a little flame of an animal inside of me. It’s the same little flame that yearns to be on an island somewhere, chewing on coconut rind and smelling fresh leaves ground between my fingers. It feels good to know that I have that little flame. I feel like going on a hike!